The Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship Program

The Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship Program was a unique educational initiative that emerged from the Boxer Protocol of 1901, in which China was required to pay an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver to the eight foreign powers that had suppressed the Boxer Rebellion. Several of these powers, including Britain and the United States, agreed to remit portions of the Chinese indemnity payments and to use the funds to establish scholarship programs for Chinese students to study abroad. The programs became one of the most significant educational exchanges of the early twentieth century and helped to develop the modern Chinese educational elite.

The remissions of the Boxer Indemnity, in the judgment of the historian William Kirby in China and the World (2017), “represented a quiet revolution in the way the foreign powers conducted their relations with China.” The British and American decision to use the indemnity for education rather than for further extraction was, in Kirby’s view, “the most significant cultural gesture of the long imperial period in China,” and it produced an educational elite that would, in the twentieth century, be among the founders of modern China.

The Boxer Protocol and the Indemnity

The Boxer Protocol of 7 September 1901 imposed on the Qing government a punitive indemnity of 450 million taels — approximately £67 million at the time — payable over 39 years at 4 percent interest. The distribution reflected the size of each power’s contribution to the suppression of the rebellion: Russia received the largest share at 30 percent, Germany 20 percent, France 15.75 percent, Britain 11.25 percent, and so on, with the United States, Japan, and Italy also receiving shares. The indemnities became a constant source of resentment among Chinese nationalists and a symbol of the “unequal treaties” that constrained Chinese sovereignty.

The American Remission and the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program

The most important of the indemnity remission schemes was the American one. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt proposed that the United States return a portion of the indemnity (Secretary of State John Hay, who had first raised the idea, had died in July 1905). The U.S. Congress passed the Boxer Indemnity Remission Act in May 1908, and the remitted funds were used to establish a scholarship program. By the time the program ended in 1943, the United States had returned a total of about $26 million of the original $54 million American share. The program funded roughly 1,300 Chinese students to attend American universities, including many who became leaders of modern China.

The American Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, administered jointly by the U.S. State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Education, was the principal channel for Chinese students to study in the United States in the period 1909–1949. Among the most prominent Chinese scholars funded by the program was Hu Shih, the philosopher, literary reformer, and later Chinese ambassador to the United States; Y. R. Chao, the linguist and musicologist; and Bing Xin, the poet and essayist. By the time the program wound down in the 1940s, roughly 1,300 Chinese students had attended American universities under its auspices, forming a substantial part of the Republican-era Chinese academic and professional elite.

The British Remission

The British government moved more slowly. A Joint Committee on the Boxer Indemnity examined the use of the funds in the 1920s. In 1922, the British government agreed to remit the remaining balance of the British indemnity. The remission was negotiated by Sir Austen Chamberlain and the Chinese Minister in London. The British Council, founded in 1934, was partly charged with administering the resulting educational exchange.

The British program was smaller in scale than the American, but it funded important figures in modern Sino-British relations, including the architect and scholar Liang Sicheng. The program was a form of “soft power” that complemented British commercial and political interests in China.

Tsinghua University and the American Program

The American Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program was closely associated with Tsinghua University, which was established in 1911 in Beijing as “Tsinghua Xuetang” (Tsinghua Preparatory School) to prepare Chinese students for study in the United States. The university, located on the site of a former royal garden, became one of the leading universities of Republican China. Many of its graduates went on to further study in the United States, and the institution’s ties to American higher education continued throughout the twentieth century.

The Other Powers

The other foreign powers followed suit, in various ways and at various times. The French government, which had been one of the largest beneficiaries of the indemnity, remitted a portion for the use of French-language education in China. The Belgian government, which had a smaller share, agreed to use its share for railway and mining education. The Soviet Union, which inherited the Russian share after 1917, agreed to renounce the Russian share in the 1920s as part of the early Sino-Soviet rapprochement.

The Legacy of the Scholarship Programs

The Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Programs had a substantial long-term impact on Chinese educational and intellectual life. The students who went abroad brought back to China the ideas and methods of Western universities, and they formed much of the academic and professional elite of Republican and early Communist China. The program was also a model for subsequent educational exchanges, including the Sino-British and Sino-American programs of the post-1949 period. For the United States in particular, the program helped build the network of personal and institutional ties that would shape post-war Sino-American relations and the early decades of the Cold War.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Programs was, for a long time, dominated by the work of the American scholars — Mary Bullock’s An American Transplant (1980) and the more recent writing of William Kirby and the contributors to the China Review International. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to China’s World (2017), is over how far the scholarship programs should be treated as acts of cultural philanthropy and how far they should be read as instruments of American and British cultural diplomacy in the long twentieth century.

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