2 - Reflections on the Continuity and Change of Sino-American Educational Exchange

This essay introduces our edited volume, From Missionary Education to Confucius Institutes: Historical Reflections on Sino-American Cultural Exchange (Routledge, 2024), as the first interdisciplinary effort to tell the stories of non-state actors who created innovative educational programs in the sphere of bilateral cultural ties. Considering that the Sino-American relationship will likely define the twenty-first-century geopolitics, it behooves scholars to examine bilateral educational encounters both historically and in its current forms. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw massive American investment in missionary education in China. Behind such activities was a one-way traffic in which Chinese traveled to America to learn, and Americans went to China to teach. The Communist Revolution (1949) and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950) suspended that directional exchange. With better bilateral relations in the 1980s, exchange opportunities expanded. In a reversal of the directionality of last two centuries’ interactions, China today has established a global network of Confucius Institutes aimed at improving its soft power. Yet, in the United States, the media attacks on the Confucius Institutes have shown that cross-cultural practice on the ground cannot be separated from ideological controversies and political rivalries. These longstanding circulatory networks of cultural institutions and resources that had shaped friendships and tensions among state and non-state actors of both sides often fluctuated in times of wars and revolutions, and are still subject to larger geopolitics today.