Yung Wing Research Articles

Contesting Chinese Contract Labor: Yung Wing's Reports and the Qing Mission to Peru

Abstract In 1874, government officials in Qing China sent a Yale-educated special envoy named Yung Wing to Peru to survey the conditions of Chinese contract workers on plantations. A parallel mission to the better-known Qing survey of Chinese in Cuba, Yung Wing's trip to Peru has received almost no scholarly attention. Drawing on new archival evidence, this essay provides a historical analysis of the Qing mission to Peru and its official findings, as rendered in the original, 1874 English-language translation, “Yung Wing's Reports.” I argue that Yung Wing elaborated a multivocal, cross-cultural, and transimperial condemnation of Chinese indenture in Peru. Yung Wing served as a crucial broker across political and cultural systems. He strategically mobilized testimonies from American, Chilean, and Chinese informants and deployed abolitionist discourse to equate Chinese contract labor with African slavery. Denouncing Western failures to guarantee liberal principles for Chinese people, he pressured Qing authorities to protect Chinese subjects by opening formal legations in Latin America. Chinese workers in Peru had a different perspective, and their testimonies often diverged from Yung Wing's core argument. Chinese informants never equated contract labor with chattel slavery. Instead, they denounced employer failure to fulfill existing contract terms. Moreover, they provided evidence of successful collective efforts and alliances between Chinese and non-Chinese people that pressured Peruvian authorities to defend Chinese workers. Taken as a whole, “Yung Wing Reports” both elaborates a powerful Chinese denunciation of contract labor and demonstrates Chinese ability to negotiate its terms.

Lessons Learned from Building Lessons: “Teach It” and the Development of Digital Primary-Source Classroom Activities

Lessons Learned from Building Lessons: “Teach It” and the Development of Digital Primary-Source Classroom Activities

Curtain Up

Curtain Up

Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da

Reviewed by: Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da Hsuan L. Hsu Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange. Nan Z. Da. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $75.00 (cloth); $74.99 (eBook). A Chinese translation of "Rip Van Winkle." A speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson honoring the Burlingame-Seward treaty. A translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" inscribed on a Mandarin fan. The autobiography and poetry of Yale's first Chinese graduate, who founded a school for Chinese exchange students in Hartford. Judging by the stature of the figures and institutions involved, we might expect that the archive of nineteenth-century literary encounters between China and the United States would have generated lasting networks of influence. However, as Nan Z. Da demonstrates in Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, these transnational, cross-cultural events were characterized not by cross-pollination but by intransitivity: they were "simultaneously momentous and superficial," exchanges in which nothing is exchanged (2). Although this quality of intransitivity, wherein the content of communication "slides like water off a duck's back," might appear to minimize the value of these Sino-U.S. encounters, Da makes [End Page 587] the persuasive, counterintuitive argument that the very "formality" of these occasions enables us to understand the distinctive way in which literature mediated Sino-U.S. communication (28, 1). Writing against a core assumption of many transnational literary scholars, Da argues that foreign literature was mobilized not for the transmission of new ideas but "as a conceptual shortcut that eased social projects and political enunciation" (3). Rather than take at face value the multitude of diplomatic, historical, and literary historical celebrations of moments of cultural transmission, Da argues that we should attend to the lightness and ephemerality of cross-cultural contact. By closely analyzing the formality and intransitivity inherent in some of the nineteenth century's most frequently cited episodes of transpacific literary encounter, Da models an empirical approach to the study of literary exchange—one that is sensitized to the myriad ways in which other people's literature was mobilized without any investment in transpacific cultural or political transmission (whether in the form of lasting literary influence, cultural assimilation, or political reform). Intransitive Encounter develops a historicized method of reading that blends "surface reading"—with its close attention to material and linguistic surfaces rather than a search for deeper hidden meanings—with clearly articulated insights drawn from sociologists of communication such as Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Bruno Latour. Each of the book's six chapters considers a fascinating and carefully curated instance of Sino-U.S. literary encounter. Drawing on an impressive knowledge base that spans theory, sociology, China studies, American studies, Asian American studies, and book history—as well as her unusual (for an Americanist) capacity to rigorously interpret texts as they flow between English and Chinese translations—Da provides compelling accounts of the historical context and theoretical stakes underpinning each of these encounters. Drawing on China's role as a site of intransitivity in Western historiography, Washington Irving's writings about China, and an unattributed Chinese translation of "Rip Van Winkle," chapter one reframes Irving's tale of historical insularity as a staging of unsociability set in a counterfactual "Chinese-Dutch America." Chapter two coins the term "reformality" to resolve the apparent contradiction between the late Emerson's disassociation from political reform and his appearances as a speaker uttering "rote niceties" at public events dedicated to rehearsing Sino-U.S. formalities (64). Da articulates the theorization of influence as an ephemeral transfer of energy that shaped Emerson's thinking about both literary influence and reform (63). Continuing to examine the idea of "mutually reinforcing reform projects" energized by Sino-U.S. encounter, chapter three turns to the figure of Yung Wing: at once "the first Chinese to make a career out of Sino-U.S. relations and institutionalized cultural exchange" and a writer who "had surprisingly little to say about the cultural exchange [he] actually enjoyed" (102). Reading Yung's autobiography alongside his Chinese-language poems, Da offers a nuanced corrective...

Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 by Emma Jinhua Teng (review)

Reviewed by: Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 by Emma Jinhua Teng Alison Marshall Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 By Emma Jinhua Teng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Emma Jinhua Teng is T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations, and MacVicar Faculty Fellow, at MIT. The Harvard University–trained professor’s first book, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese colonial travel writing and pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), was based on her doctoral dissertation on colonial history and narratives of the China-Taiwan relationship. Professor Teng’s new work, Eurasian: Mixed identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943, adopts customary historical methods and approaches to explain and translate written accounts of mixed race cultures and experiences. In the Prelude, Teng self-identifies as the “child of Chinese-English” intermarriage, and through this and other auto-ethnographic threads, in addition to some life story research and fieldwork, she ventures beyond conventional narratives, and shines a light on mixed race Eastern and Western experiences and terrains. Eurasian begins in 1842, a year that marked the conclusion of the First Opium War, and the beginning of large scale Christian mission work in China and Hong Kong as well as mid-century Chinese migration to the West. In the 1880s the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enacted racist legislation limiting Chinese immigration. Eurasian ends in 1943, the year of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion act and the end of the Exclusion Era (1882–1943) in the United States. Chinese marriages to Europeans during this era are well documented and understood. Intermarriage, though reviled by many Europeans and Chinese, was a vehicle for inching oneself closer to Whiteness and the modern global standard of colonial Christian acceptability. Divided into three parts, and eight chapters with individual prologues, Eurasian has an innovative transpacific focus that develops out of John Kuo Wei Tchen’s, Mary Lui’s and Henry Yu’s foundational work on Asian identity and interracial marriage in the United States. It seeks to complicate and trouble assumptions about the colour line, focusing on hybridity that “holds the promise of moving us beyond the old identity politics of white and black, colonizer and colonized, toward a boundary-less future where indeterminacy, in-betweenness, and ambivalence reign supreme” (254-255). Part One, “Debating Intermarriage,” sets the scene. In this primary section Teng focuses on multiple and sometimes surprising reactions to and/or acceptance of early high-society Chinese-Western intermarriage. Here, we learn about the fairytale union of Yale University–educated missionary and naturalized citizen Yung Wing and New England society’s Mary Louise Kellogg in 1875. Part Two, “Debating Hybridity,” counters the romantic and celebratory narrative of the Yung-Kellogg union, foregrounding the story of George Washington Appo, a pickpocket in 1890s New York with Chinese and Irish heritage. This “Eurasian as Problem” section offers a compelling example of the “ambivalence [that] made the Eurasian a locus of anxiety and desire in an age of increasing global interpenetration and migration” (88). Chapter Four moves the reader’s gaze out of elite North American society across the Pacific Ocean and into similarly privileged though Chinese realms during the late Qing dynasty and the later Republican era. In China, Hong Kong and the United States, Eurasians usually went to the best schools, spoke English and were Christians. Here scholarship by writers such as Tang Caichang, Kang Youwei, Wu Tingfang, Zhang Jingsheng and Yi Nai demonstrated that while Chinese cleaved to various Western, Chinese nationalistic and/or Neo-Confucian miscegenation discourse and thereby rejected mixed race offspring, others favoured the Eurasian as the “eugenic ideal” (130). Teng adds: “Perhaps the hybrid’s very ambiguity is one reason the figure of the Eurasian has remained compelling for certain Chinese intellectuals… as a Westernized Chinese or as a Sinicized Euro-American” (133). In this chapter, and throughout the book, I questioned the merits of an approach that sought to blur the colour line by focussing on the binary unions of mostly English-speaking Christian Europeans and wealthy educated Chinese. Speaking personally...

<em>Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish</em>: A Play in Three Acts

192 John Whittier Treat Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish: A Play in Three Acts Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not a tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvre china every day?” —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting” I begin with the intuition that the Western penchant for collecting things, and occasionally people, from Asia is related to the erotics of acquisition and especially the potential of those erotics to encode and even embody illicit sexualities hardly expressible without recourse to a particular geohistorical imaginary (e.g., the “Orient”). I hope to prove this intuition via a tour of our modern libraries, our simultaneous celebration and medicalization of bibliophilia, and the international wanderings of first a German Jew (e.g., an “Oriental”) and last a collection of miniature, often risqué, Japanese figurines. My aim is to open the notion of collecting, the theme of this issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, to further considerations of the Orientalism and queer insights already implicit in the heightened critical attention we now pay bibliophilia , all the way from an appreciation of the elite connoisseurship of classic editions at one end to the latest fashionably psychosexual malady of “hoarding disorder” at the other. The workings of the fetish that unites both these ends maps an “Asia” equally material and immaterial, its ultimate borders decided only by libidinal desires equally frustrated and fulfilled. Orientalia, Bibliophilia, Fetish 193 Peter X. Zhou’s (2010) edited volume of essays on North American East Asian libraries, Collecting Asia: East Asian Libraries in North America , 1868–2008, tells readers that many East Asia library collections in North American universities began through the efforts of a single person gifted with exceptional drive and dedication, and, occasionally, a fortune. In Yale’s case, for instance, that man was Yung Wing, Yale class of 1854 and the first Chinese to graduate from an American college. In 1874, he donated his personal collection of 1,280 Chinese volumes to his alma mater, where they formed the early nucleus of today’s collection. Yale historian Asakawa Kan’ichi, the first Japanese to teach at an American college or university, augmented the collection in the early decades of the twentieth century many times over with funds from his university and the Library of Congress. In some cases, though, the early benefactors of East Asia collections were not expatriate Asians but instead evident Caucasians who, through a variety of personal or professional encounters with the East, brokered contributions of East Asian materials to schools in the New World. For example, James A. Thomas’s gift in the late 1920s founded the East Asia collection at Duke University. Thomas was the managing director of the British-American Tobacco Company in China from 1905 to 1922 and a friend, fortuitously for the university that now bears their patronym, of James and Benjamin Duke. Another of the best-known patrons of East Asia collections in North America was Horace Walpole Carpentier, a man born in New York State in 1824, the son of a cobbler (the family name was “Carpenter”—Horace would add the i in adulthood to appear less common) who, after graduating from Columbia, struck it rich in the California gold rush, not by prospecting but by provisioning those who did. He eventually established the Bank of California in San Francisco and became the first mayor of Oakland when he persuaded the new state legislature to incorporate the settlement as a municipality in 1852, though he was quickly ousted from his post after the electorate discovered he had reserved all development rights to the city’s waterfront for himself. In time he endowed East Asian studies at both the University of California, Berkeley and, even more generously, Columbia. He acquired the moniker “General” when he was appointed to the rank of major general in the California State Militia in 1854. Carpentier returned to New York, by 1888, a wealthy man, with homes in both the city and his upstate birthplace of Galway. He...

Returning to the Middle Kingdom: Yung Wing and the recalled students of the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States

AbstractThis article re-examines the frustrated Westernizing efforts of Yung Wing and the recalled students of the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States (1872–1881). It does so in response to recent scholarship (in both the Chinese and the English languages) which affirms the ‘transformative role’ of the returnees in late Qing reform and modernization. On the basis of a variety of sources, this article suggests, instead, that for those patriotic students returning to the Middle Kingdom, eager to bring about a fundamental change in its political system and rejuvenation of its civilization, disillusionment was often inevitable, and the choice—short of revolution—became one of either marginalization or co-option by the autocratic state. Despite all their achievements, China's earliest students of the West ultimately failed to set the country upon a new modernizing course—a failure that pointed, beyond itself, to an emerging (and subsequently persistent) pattern in the troubled relationship between the new, Westernized elite and the state in modern China.

Returneess Influences on China: A Business Perspective (1850s to 1940s)

Since the first Chinese student, Yung Wing, studied abroad in 1847, large waves of Chinese have followed his lead, aiming to study advanced technology and ideologies, with the mission to save their backward country. This paper discusses the benefits and changes of this overseas experience for the students, and reviews the important role played by the returnees in the nation’s industrialization between 1850s and 1940s. By analyzing the cases of a number of representative returnees in various industries, we summarize their features and the contributions they have made to the advancement of modern business in China, such as the application of new technologies to boost productivity, the focus on R&D and the training of employees, and the implementation of modern management systems.

In The Shadow Of Yung Wing

The Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) was one of the �rst efforts at "self-strengthening," China's late nineteenth-century attempt at modernization. Beginning in 1872, the Qing government sent 120 boys to live and study in New England for extended periods. The mission was the brainchild of Yung Wing (1828-1912), known as a pioneering Chinese in America. This article contends that Zeng Laishun (ca. 1826-1895), the CEM's original interpreter, was no less a pioneer. It examines Zeng's education in Singapore, New Jersey, and New York; his early career as, successively, a missionary assistant, a businessman, and a teacher at a naval school in China; his concurrent roles as the English translator for the CEM in the United States and (with his family) as a cultural interpreter of China to New England's elite; and brie�y, following his return to China in 1874, his association with Li Hongzhang as his chief English secretary.

Early Chinese American Autobiography: Reconsidering the Works of Yan Phou Lee and Yung Wing

(2003). Early Chinese American Autobiography: Reconsidering the Works of Yan Phou Lee and Yung Wing. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 45-61.

Seeking Modernity in the United States, 1900-1927 (review)

Reviewed by: Seeking Modernity in the United States, 1900-1927 Huping Ling (bio) Weili Ye. Seeking Modernity in the United States, 1900-1927. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xii, 330 pp. Hardcover $49.50, ISBN 0-8047-3696-0. Since Yung Wing, the first Chinese male student to graduate from an American University (Yale, in 1854), the flow of Chinese students studying in the United States has never ceased. Following a brief interruption during the Cultural Revolution, the study-abroad movement reached a new high in 1979, after the normalization of relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States, which resulted in the largest wave of students coming to America from China. The increasing visibility of Chinese students in America has attracted the attention of scholars, many of whom are themselves Chinese who came here as students and who have since chosen the topic of Chinese students in the United States for their doctoral dissertations. Weili Ye's "Crossing the Cultures: The Experience of Chinese Students in the U.S.A. 1900-1925" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1989) and Jesse Chain Chou's "A Survey of Chinese Students in the United States, 1979-1987" (Ed.D. diss., Columbia University Teachers College, 1989), for [End Page 588] instance, are two good examples of a number of dissertations on Chinese students in the United States. Ye's Seeking Modernity in the United States, 1900-1927, based on her earlier dissertation work, is an important addition to the scholarship on this topic, after, for instance, Rose Hum Lee's "The Stranded Chinese in the United States" (Phylon, Summer 1958), Y. C. Wang's Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), and Leo A. Orleans' Chinese Students in America: Politics, Issues, and Numbers (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988). Ye's book is divided into six topical chapters. Chapter ., "Student Associational Life and Chinese Nationalism," briefly discusses the establishment of Chinese student organizations—giving special attention to the Chinese Students' Alliance, the largest and most influential of all the Chinese student organizations in the United States at the time—and how they relate to the search by Chinese students for a modern identity. Initially, there was great enthusiasm among the members of these student organizations; however, this gradually faded as they became "disheartened spectators" at the failure of the constitutional movement in China to bring about constitutional government (p. 40). Chapter 2, "The Professionals: Predicaments and Promises," examines the professional lives of students and the contributions they made to China's modernization. In line with China's eager pursuit of industrialization, most Chinese students looked to the promise of technology, majoring in subjects such as engineering, the result being the education of the first generation of modern Chinese professionals. Meanwhile, American-educated sociologists also established sociology as an academic discipline in China. Chapter 3, "The Question of Race," deals with that issue in relation to Chinese students. It is noteworthy that the author here attempts to interweave the story of Chinese students into the complex fabric of Chinese immigration to the United States in general. There are unfortunate elitist overtones, however, in its treatment of Chinese laborers. Chapter 4, "The Women's Story, 1880s-1920s," discusses Chinese female students, whom Ye divides into three distinct generational groups. The first group consisted of only a tiny band of women studying to become doctors; the second largely entered the field of teaching; and the third broadened their career outlook to include professional fields traditionally perceived as "masculine." Ye's inclusion of female students in this study indicates her sensitivity to the importance of gender and how it affected the lives of the students. Chapter 5, "Between Morality and Romance," looks at the emotional world of the students. The issues of gender relationships, love, sexuality, and interracial marriage are examined in the context of the conflict between Chinese concepts of morality and Western attitudes toward romance. [End Page 589] Chapter 6, "The Seriousness of Recreation," examines two extracurricular activities of Chinese students: athletics and theater. Participation in sports, Ye believes, served to help Chinese students develop an appreciation for physical...

Yung Wing and the Americanization of China

Yung Wing and the Americanization of China

Yung Wing in America

States and its revocation have been described by previous writers.1 No one has, however, attempted a study of what Yung Wing learned from America and of his attachment to this country-a study which should be of special interest to students of modern Chinese history as a case of American influence upon the Oriental student or resident. Yung Wing truly bestrode two worlds. As it happened, he spent almost exactly half of his eighty-three years in this country-as student, co-commissioner of the Chinese Education Mission, diplomatic representative of the Ch'ing government, and ordinary American citizen (a status which in 1898 was annuled by the American authorities). There is little doubt that Yung Wing regarded China with great affection and that he wanted to serve the country of his birth. Returning to China after Yale, he abandoned business pursuits for a minor position in the government, and worked persistently toward the realization of a Chinese educational mission in the United States, which he headed between 1872 and 1881. As the deputy minister of China to this country, 1878-1881, he was an ardent advocate for the Chinese laborer in America against discriminatory legislation. In the late 1890's, he returned to China and was such an active participant in the nascent reform and revolutionary movements that a reward was put on his head by the Ch'ing government in 1901, due to his implication in an ill-fated revolt staged by a group of reformers.