Yung Ming and the Chinese Educational Mission

In 1854 Yung Wing sponsored by Samuel Robbins Brown graduated from Yale University with a bachelor degree and became the first Chinese to graduate from an American college. After Wing graduated from the University, he eventually went back to China and found employment with the Chinese government with Viceroy Tseng Kuo-Fan, and was commissioned to purchase machinery in the United States which contributed to China’s first modern arsenal.

Yung Wing

Wing also helped propose a Chinese Educational Mission in 1871 for four consecutive years, a total of 120 young Chinese students will have a chance to study abroad in the United States or New England for fifteen years where they will be later sent back to China and then serve for their own country. They will be younger than thirty years of age and will be able at that age to represent their own culture as well as their country. This mission expressed more of a military interest than education after the fifteen years have passed through this quota:

“As the young students grow up, those who are qualified should be sent to West Point and the Naval Academy as cadets and midshipmen for their advanced training.”

The reasons that I feel military interests are more expressed is that as young minds are developing they can expand on their knowledge and be able to learn and present yet they cannot do much as a young person. By mid twenties they will be able to know everything and have the mentality and physicality to be able to serve the country’s need.

In 1877 The Chinese Educational Mission named a building in Hartford, to be used as a center for learning Chinese classics. There were classrooms and rooms for about 75 students to take in the extracurricular learning’s of classics, poetry, calligraphy and composition while advancing and remembering their ethnical background. They didn’t want the Chinese students to lose contact with their Chinese background while living in the United States or New England.

Chinese Educational Center

In 1881, the Chinese Educational Mission was disbanded because the United States refused to issue visas for the Chinese students who wanted to enter the Naval academy which violated the 1868 Burlingame Treaty that issued that the Chinese can have the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions in the residency in the United states but due to China’s interest of having the Chinese students enter a Naval academy to prepare for the service that they would eventually have to do, violated that treaty.

Though this mission lasted awhile and was under the ideas of expressing education through the young youths and such, it made education ideal to students now in China and still does through this day.

posted by Jackie Huynh