| In the progress of shaping modern China, the experience and dissemination of other cultures by the returned overseas students in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China was part of the whole picture of "introducing Western learning to China." Those returned students had been playing dual roles in imaging their motherland and the strange lands they studied on, switching parts in different cultures. The cross-cultural quality of their situation inevitably placed them within the horizon of imagological studies. In the imaginary narrative of the time, these returned students appear as images of "social imagination", replacing the absent foreign archetypes, which indicate the existence of retrospection in observing and imagining foreign cultures as "the other". The memories and their representations are allegorical, demonstrating various social, cultural, and ideological paradigms, and closely associated with issues like identity, nationalism and hegemony.A survey of the literary works in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China will only find that there are not any uniform stereotypes of the returned overseas students, neither in their self-representations nor in the representations by others. The diversity renders it inadequate or even impossible to classify or generalize these images in the effort of discovering regularity or commonality among them. Moreover, their appearance and growth did not accord with the logical progression as the intellectual history did; thus it is Herculean task to clear up their course of development. The diversity stemmed from the fact that studying overseas was a common cultural phenomenon, representing the social tendencies of the time. The sophistication of the phenomenon itself denied simplistic relegation of the returned overseas students to some reduced images, controversial social opinions exerted considerable influence on the imaging of the returned overseas students in aspects such as values, and literature had its own voice in the already clamourous historical narrative.Nevertheless, despite the diversiform images of the returned overseas students, it is worth noting that the negative representation of them in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China was great in both scale and abundance. Many literary texts take the vantage point of morality in denouncing the returned overseas students as being ignorant, corrupt and eccentric. Consequently, the returned overseas students depicted in these literary texts generally suffer from depression and despair. Especially around the May 4th Movement, the in-depth self-representation by the overseas students of themselves flourished with a vengeance, in which they appear sentimental and beaten, feeling a strong sense of loss. So far, a rift is revealed between the literary representation and the representation of the historical grand narrative of the returned overseas students, with the latter hailing them as "the most dynamic force of a nation". Then what prompted the negative representation of the returned overseas students in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China? The approaches to the question are diverse, or even infinite.In the first place, the definition of morality relies highly on the perspective and expectations of the observer. The political anxiety generated by nationalism often aroused "a sense of disappointment" in the returned overseas students. The nationalist awareness of modern state rather than "the kingdom" was nurtured by Western learning introduced to China. The historical paradox was that China’s loss of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894-1895 brought a surge of studying in Japan, and the students, who got acquainted with modern nationalism in Japan, introduced the structure of nation-state into China, the very concept of which would induce antipathy against Japanese. With the nationalist discourse, the students returned from Japan depicted their personal distress as the embodiment of national calamity, sinking from the peak of pride to the abyss of self-contempt. In the "representation" of the texts, revolutionary overseas students replace their modern nation-state discourse with the Sino-barbarian dichotomy, in pursuit of a national identity; thus the context of national calamity created incompatibility between academic work and patriotic action, and the returned overseas students were compelled to make a distinction between "learning for practical purposes" and "learning for leaning’s sake".On the other hand, large-scale studying abroad was originated from the conception of wholly westernization. The negative representation of the returned overseas students, to a large extent, resulted from the impact of westernization on the traditional Chinese intellectuals. The forceful interposition of the Western learning and new knowledge dragged the traditional Chinese intellectuals into serious identity crisis. Facing the upsurge of the returned overseas students, they failed to fit them into any ready places. Instead, they raised condemning voices against them.The "Western style" of the returned overseas students is often highlighted in the literary texts in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China. They are usually described as "civilized people in Western uniforms". However, the "Western style" depicted is often a result of misreading. Not only their experience on a strange land but also their introduction of Western learning, more or less, neglected the construction of "the West" and the multidimensionality of Western thought, such as their interpretation of Christianity and their elaboration of concepts like "liberty". Also, the admiration for the Western learning and new knowledge bestowed extra value on the academic credentials earned in foreign countries. A network of cultural hegemony was constructed, and in this hierarchical elitist network centering on modern learning, the specific country in which the returned overseas student had studied in would greatly influence his discourse power in his motherland.Finally, at the point where the ancient China stepped into the modern world, the images of the returned overseas students embodied the subtle relations between the "traditional" and the "modern". In the series of contextual change and identity switching, they were often disoriented in the maze of the relations between the West and the East. For instance, their conceptions about the female gender and their discourse about love reveal the influence of Chinese traditional culture on them, and the traditional conceptions of gender work ambiguously in the portrayal of female returned overseas students. However, "China and the West", "the traditional and the modern", are only set dichotomies. In the process of introducing Western learning to China, the normal situation was the coexistence of the old and the new, the national and the foreign, within a single entity. The tradition is not fictional, but it is constructed. The overseas students depicted in the literary texts are destined to be tortured in conflicts and fail to realize their dream of applying the Western learning to China’s modernization, for they fail to notice the innate logic of development of each culture, taking a unitarian approach to cross-cultural issues.In a word, as images of social imagination, the images of the returned overseas students in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China remain products of historical imagination and political unconsciousness. Although literature is different from historical texts, it reveals a new phase of studying overseas in modern Chinese history, presenting a stylized reality to the world. In this sense, though New Historicism defines "history" as the "rhetorical imaginative activity" of the text, literary narrative does more in communicating personal experience and unconscious scenes, capable of reaching various memories buried in grand historical narratives. |
PDF Full Text Request