On The Relation Between Overseas Education And The Idea Of Constitutional Government System Advocated By Chinese Intellectuals At The Beginning Of The20^th Century

Being affected by the Boxer Uprising and the Box Indemnity, the authority of Qing Dynasty had to reform their original system at the beginning of the20th century, thus speed up in adopting some western practice. Among the examples followed by the Qing authority who was busy reforming the corrupted old system, Japan was a focus. Therefore, many students and politicians went to Japan and came back with them the fresh ideas on modern politics. These students and politicians are named the New Intellectuals who played a key role in the movement.The mainstream of this ever-prosperous overseas study boom was the learning of law and politics which is symbolized by the Crash Course education in Hosei University. Many famous intellectuals had attended that course. Among them, there were successful scholars from both the circle of old educational system and the field of newly-adopted educational system, including Xia Tonghe, Liu chunlin,Yang du,Tang hualong,Tang shouqian, Zhang zhiben,Chen tianhua, Wang jingwei, Hu hanmin, Zhu zhixin, Song jiaoren, Gu yingfen, Shen junru, exc. Viewed politically, the advocators of both Constitutional Monarchy and Constitutional Democracy are all included in the list. After a reading of their articles on the political reform and the research on the idea of constitutional government, we may notice that these articles were written shortly after their learning in the Crash Course. That means the idea harbored in these elites was closely related to the education they received in Japan. Thanks to the famous and learned professors who taught for the Crash Course, the Chinese overseas students could learn better the western political system and modern politics thus offer a brand new think tank for Chinese political reform then.Despite their shared educational background abroad, the political tendencies of these intellectuals differ in accordance with their respective family background, age and experience. Some were for Constitutional Monarchy and the others were for Constitutional Democracy. This reflects the Japanese model of developing the useful and discarding the useless in learning from the west, which can be easily notified in the Crash Course education.