Program Schedule

Lunch Break 12.30 p.m.–2 p.m.

Keynote Speech 

The Career Trajectories of American Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program (ABISP) Alumni and the Early Modernization of China 

by Prof. Liang Chen (Nanjing University) 

With the aid of digital technology, this research established a comprehensive database tracking the career data of American Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program (ABISP) Alumni during the Republic of China era. Analysis of the career information at various stages in the database reveals that the careers of ABISP Alumni were mainly concentrated in the fields of education and industry. By promoting China’s modernization through fostering new talent and developing industries, these students were able to bridge the gap between education and industry, embodying the concept of "integration of production and education." Furthermore, the return of these alumni significantly helped China’s higher education and industries gradually reduce their reliance on foreign expertise. After relying on foreign resources to train domestic talent, the country made efforts to achieve a modernization process led by its own people. Finally, due to the influence of the political climate, the career development of ABISP Alumni returnees became increasingly embedded in the national system and heavily influenced by the government, which might be the fundamental reason why early Chinese modernization efforts did not succeed.

Lunch Break 12.30 p.m.–2 p.m.

Keynote Speech  (via Zoom: https://fau.zoom-x.de/j/68695602457)

The School as Site of Knowledge Production: A Question of Space and Scales 

by Dr. Fu Chia-chien (Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica)

What makes a school a school? And what purpose does a school typically serve? A common response to these questions might unfold as follows: A school is a place of learning, for educating children, but not necessarily just children. It is a place whose primary actors are students and teachers and where edification should be foremost. And its purpose ranges from moral instruction to civic education. This characterization of what counts as a school and the purposes a school serves will likely fall apart once one begins testing its limits with specific examples, but the general sentiment and stereotype feels true enough. We see this characterization in histories of education, in contemporary debates about public versus private school education, and even more recently with the advance of AI and how its apparently changing schools and school life. But if schools are understood as sites for the generation of quantitative data, which could be analyzed and used for policymaking and which also became perceived and accepted by the broader public as knowledge, how does the specificity of the school as place make a difference to the production of such data and knowledge? To answer this question, I will foreground one particular scholastic insight derived from the so-called “spatial turn” in the history of science and adopt space as my analytic category in order to show a school as a school matters in manifold ways to the production of such data and knowledge. How did the school shape the knowledge that was produced in them? How were they occupied by human agents, and what relationship did the school sustain between physical and social space? Were there particular “hallmarks of experimenting” associated with the school? And in what ways did the school materialize identities for the people and practices they housed, and how did such materializations shape knowledge production? To tackles these questions I will draw on psychological investigations from the 1930s, both using questionnaires and conducted at schools in China, as source material.