Chapter III A Historical Review of the Fulbright Program in Taiwan
I. 1908-1947: U.S.-China Educational Exchanges before the Fulbright Program
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I. 1908-1947: U.S.-China Educational Exchanges before the Fulbright Program
According to documents of the U.S. State Department, the first governmental involvement in educational exchange between U.S. and China was started in early-1900s, as a result of Boxer Rebellion Indemnity. This also marked the first U.S. governmental engagement with the East on educational exchange (O'Neill, 1972, p. 2). In 1900, a failed uprising of Chinese (aka Boxers) rebelled against foreigners and killed a German ambassador and a large number of foreigners in Peking (aka Beijing) due to their resentment towards the constant interference of European powers in the affairs of their country. At that time, the United States joined Russia, England, Germany, France, Japan, and other countries in order to suppress the Boxer Rebellion. Fourteen involved countries imposed upon the Chinese government a punitive indemnity of $330,000,000 to compensate families of the deceased and to offer indemnities to those nations, including approximately $24 million to the United States. (Kaniuka, 2019, p.
150) The U.S. government found the settlement of the Boxer Indemnity Fund “greatly in excess of the losses actually incurred.” That was an “exorbitant” amount, O’Neill wrote in an investigative report “A Brief History of Department of State Involvement in International Exchange” at the U.S. State Department. (MC 468, Box 103, folder 12) So instead of
returning the money back to the Chinese government, the U.S. proposed to apply those funds toward sending selected Chinese students and scholars to the United States. President
Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) said, in 1907, to the Congress:
This nation should help in every practicable way in the education of the Chinese people, so that the vast and populous Empire of China may gradually adapt itself to modern conditions. One way of doing this is by promoting the coming of Chinese students to this country and making it attractive to them to take courses at our universities and higher education institutions. (Kaniuka, 2019, p. 150)
Though he did not connect the two subjects in that address, President Roosevelt also discussed measures the U.S. could take to facilitate China’s efforts to educate its people. In 1907, President Roosevelt proposed that the Congress return to China that portion of the indemnity that exceeded the amount of actual damage and injury; and later Congress authorized the President to remit one half of the U.S. portion of the indemnity, and the Chinese foreign office subsequently announced its intention to use these funds to educate Chinese students in the U.S. and in certain educational institutions in China. (Colligan, 1958)
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The remission of the Boxer indemnities to China stimulated an impressive interchange of scholars and students with China which lasted for many years. In 1908, the U.S. Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to modify the Boxer indemnity so that balance would be returned to China and be used for Chinese students’ education in the United Sates. In turn, the Chinese authority set up the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program in 1909. A
preparatory school was established in Peking in 1911 for the Chinese graduates pursuing further studies at American universities, the first eighteen American teachers arrived in Beijing in that year, and about fifty or more students annually were sent to the U.S. for higher educational in the following years. (Hanson, 1944, p. 8; Xu, 2019, p. 263)
In 1924, a second remission to the Chinese Government established the China Foundation, which would in turn fund the China Institute in New York City in 1926 (Xu, 2019), to control the remitted funds. With the communist takeover of the Mainland in 1949, the China Foundation was transferred to Taiwan. Up until 1944, the Boxer Indemnity and the
Foundation’s funding financed dozens of educational and cultural projects and provided education in the United States for more than 2,000 Chinese students. (Hanson, 1944, p. 8) Later in 1942, as the U.S. was entering into the war, a ‘China Program’ of the Division of Cultural Relations of U.S. State Department was approved with the funds from the Emergency Fund for the [U.S.] President. An initial allotment of $150,000 was allocated from January to June 1942, and another $200,000 was allocated for the fiscal year 1942-43.
However, this was termed ‘cultural assistance’, designed primarily to bolster morale and secondarily to assist China in many different ways in which American scientific, technical, social, educational, industrial and other experience might be of use to China. (Fairbank, 1976, pp. 13-15) According to a U.S. State Department’s report, this program was designed to facilitate ‘military objectives.’ For example, the U.S. provided moral support and encouragement to China’s resistance to the Japanese by dispatching specialists in many different fields to counsel Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Chungking, by inviting Chinese leaders to visit the Unites States, and by assisting 1,700 young Chinese stranded in the Unites States to complete their education. (O'Neill, 1972, p. 6)
To be clear, during the WWII, the U.S. government implemented several programs to inform allied and neutral nations about developments in war-time America and to promote
international cooperation in defeating the Axis powers. During that time period, the U.S.
State Department initiated two emergency programs of educational exchange in the Eastern
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Hemisphere, by means of allocations from the emergency fund of the President. The first of these was a program with China in order to strengthen Chinese scientific and cultural activities during the period of national resistance and therefore bring closer understanding between China and the United States. This program included sending of American technical experts requested by the Chinese Government, the exchange of professors, awarding grants to Chinese students in the United States, and the sending in microfilm of technical and scholarly journals requested by Chinese Universities. The second program was a ‘modest’ one with countries of the Near East and Africa. Both of these emergency programs were stopped after war. Thus, the war was directly responsible for the initiation of officially sponsored cultural relations with China and the Near East, which were financed from an emergency fund of the U.S. President. (ACE/S, 1955, p. 6; Colligan, 1958)
After war and the Communists took over the Chinese mainland, which not only closed the door to the relations with the U.S. government but also cut off the financial support to the Chinese students and scholars who were in the U.S. The U.S. government prompted the establishment of a Chinese Emergency Aid Program for students and scholars, which was financed from funds of the Economic Cooperation Administration and funds made available under the foreign aid act of 1949 (P.L. 327, 81st Congress, 1949) and the China Area Aid Act of 1950 (title II of P.L. 535, 81st Congress, 1950). These funds enabled the U.S. State
Department to offer assistance to needy Chinese students and some scholars stranded in the U.S. by the catastrophe in their homeland and to bring here for short periods of research a few students and scholars from various areas of the Far East. (Colligan, 1958, pp. 8-9) II. 1947-1957: From Inception to Reactivation of the Fulbright China Program
A. The Establishment of the First Fulbright Program in the World: Making Use of War Surplus for Educational Exchange
Following the end of WWII, U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright proposed an amendment to the 1944 Surplus Properties Act which permitted the U.S. Government to use a portion of her foreign currency, accumulated from the sale of U.S. military equipment which stood idle in warehouses all over the world, to finance educational interchange. Known as the Fulbright Act, the said amendment was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on August 1, 1946. In the same month, the USA and ROC reached agreement on the sale of war surplus and signed the Surplus War Property Sales Agreement on August 30, 1946. In that
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agreement, the ROC Government also agrees to establish a fund equivalent to
US$20,000,000 for promoting research, cultural, and educational exchange with the United States. Finally, on November 10, 1947, the USA-ROC signed the world’s first Fulbright binational executive agreement, and stated their “desiring to promote further mutual understanding between the two peoples.” (Agreement of 1947)
It was the desire of U.S. State Department to make China the first signatory nation of Fulbright program. A letter of the U.S. Acting Secretary of State to the ROC Ambassador Wellington Koo on April 5, 1947 stated that “in view of the traditional friendship between our two countries, and particularly in view of the long history of intellectual association between the people of our countries, this government has expressed a desire that China be the first nation, with which it will seek to negotiate an agreement for the execution of such a program.” (Fairbank, 1976, p. 155)
Nevertheless, the negotiation for an educational exchange program did not move as quickly as the prelude agreement on war surplus sale. It took about sixteen months to reach
agreement on the program of educational exchanges. A former officer at the U.S. State Department, Wilma Fairbank asserted the delay of negotiation can only be traced from the other (ROC) end. She suggested, first of all, the reference to the Boxer Indemnity scholarship had caused a ‘considerable confusion’ and ‘misconception’ in the minds of high officials in the ROC government. Then, the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) stepped into the negotiation and raised an issue of ‘national dignity.’ In her book entitled America's Cultural Experiment in China: 1942-1949, part of U.S. State Department’s publications on Cultural Relations Programs, Fairbank noted the two disputes during the negotiation, as follows:
(Fairbank, 1976, pp. 155-157):
1. Both sides claimed a sole authority over the fund. The ROC’s Vice Minister of Education said the entire fund would be ‘completely under Chinese control’ while U.S. State Department re-iterated that the funds were U.S. credits to be spent primarily to benefit U.S. citizens.
2. The two ‘national dignity’ issues were indicated: first, the name of the Foundation does not reflect an equal footing; second, the Board was entirely control by
Americans.
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The negotiations were able to move on only after MOFA dropped off its two concerns regarding national dignity. That meant, an interruption by MOFA did not make any change from U.S. side, but prolong the process.
In addition, timing was not good for both sides, Fairbank suggests. This was a difficult time in China. Right after WWII, China dived into a civil war under an already devastated
economy and society. A program focus on education surely was not a top priority for Chinese government. Nor was it easy for the U.S. government because there was a concern of how to secure the fund under conditions of financial uncertainty.
Table 3.1
List of the First Board of Directors and Advisers of USEF/C
Name Title Note
Board of Directors (Americans)
J. Leighton Stuart Ambassador Chairman of the Board of Directors
Frederick Schultheis Attaché of the Embassy George L. Harris Chief cultural officer of the
Embassy Executive Director of
the USEF/C Robert B. Watson Far East representative of the
Rockefeller Foundation George H. Greene National City Bank of New
York at Shanghai Advisers to the
Board (Chinese)
Hu, Shih (胡適) President of Peiping National
University Chairman of Advisory
Board Sah, Pen-tung Executive Secretary of
Academia Sinica
Wu, Yi-fang President of Ginling College for Women
Han, Ching-lien Director of the Department of Cultural Relations of the Ministry of Education
Note: Sourced from The Fulbright Act in Operation, by I. Maurer, 1949, p.105.
Finally, on November 10, 1947, a binational agreement between U.S.-ROC was made and inked in Nanking, the capital city of then ROC Government, by the U.S. Ambassador J.
Leighton Stuart and ROC Foreign Minister WANG Shih-chieh. The historical event marked the first Fulbright program in the world and moved the Fulbright Act toward realization. The Board of Directors and Advisors were soon appointed and gathered for its first meeting on December 16-17, 1947 (Fairbank, 1976, p. 168). A complete list of the first Board of Directors and Advisers to the Board of the United States Educational Foundation in China (USEF/C) are shown in Table 3.1. All the Board members are Americans. This is the only Fulbright Board of Directors in host country without a local presentation on the Board of the
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‘binational’ commission. The early Fulbright programs in Burma, Philippines, and New Zealand, all have local citizen(s) on the Board of Directors of their commissions. (Maurer, 1949)
The next step was to staff up the Foundation and to appoint an executive chief to run the exchange program. By January 10, 1948, the U.S. Embassy had staffed three Americans as local employees. But, it was not until October 1948 that the State Department appointed George Harris, the Cultural Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Nanking as the Executive Officer (now known as Executive Director). By this time, the Fulbright Foundation in China seemed ready to go into action; and, the official exchange program was set up.
But the program had been in operation for only one year before it was ‘interrupted’ in 1949 when the Chinese Communists overran mainland China. (USEF/ROC, 1967, p. 8) China was later divided in a restless civil war. The Nationalist Government moved to Taiwan on
December 8, 1949 and declared Taipei new capital of the ROC. The mainland was ruled by the Communist, which established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949 and set its capital in Beijing. While the fund was exhausted, the Foundation was not able to acquire more from the Nationalist Government, nor were the Communists showing a willingness in continuation of the program in China. After having one year of operation, the first Fulbright Foundation was doomed to closure or ‘suspension’ on August 31, 1949. (Fairbank, 1976, p.
198)
B. The Re-activation in Taiwan of the First Fulbright Program
The first Fulbright Program in the world and its administrative organization as the ‘United States Educational Foundation in China’ came to alive again, under a new name of ‘United States Educational Foundation in the Republic of China’ on November 30, 1957. The two Governments of USA and ROC agreed, adding a new source of funds, to also use the sale of Surplus of Agricultural Commodities for the purpose of their Agreement of November 10, 1947. Accordingly, an amendment of the 1947 Agreement was signed and took into effect to
‘re-activate’, with New Taiwan Dollars, the Fulbright program, administered by the
Foundation renamed to the ‘United States Educational Foundation in the Republic of China’.
The Surplus Agricultural Commodities Agreement between the United State and the Republic of China was signed on August 14, 1956. In the agreement, two Governments
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agreed the New Taiwan Dollars accruing thereunder would be made available for international educational exchange activities. With a reference to the 1947 Fulbright agreement signed in Nanking, in his letter, Ambassador Rankin expressed the desire of the U.S. Government to use a portion of such funds for the purpose of the said agreement.
Major modifications were made in the amendment, through exchange of diplomatic notes, as follows:
1. The source of funds: In the preamble of the Agreement, it was modified by adding a further paragraph stating a new source of funds will be from the sale of Agricultural Surplus. It reads:
considering that funds provided for under the present agreement, from the sale of War Surplus, have not been made available for continuance of such
educational program. And, two Governments desire to reactivate certain educational activities with New Taiwan Dollars that became available for expenditure by the United States for such purposes. As in the present 1947 Agreement, the “Chinese national currency” was a sole currency to be
deposited for the disposal of the Foundation. A new source of fund was added to the agreement with a new currency available. In fact, the old currency was no more in use.
2. The name of the binational foundation: In Article 1, as amended, the foundation established to facilitate the administration of exchange program was renamed to the
‘United States Educational Foundation in the Republic of China’ (the Foundation), replacing the name of the United States Educational Foundation in China as it was first commissioned in 1947, in Nanking. The renaming of the Foundation had political implication, which not only reflected the fact of a divided China but also implied the official recognition of the ROC government by the USA.
3. The responsibility for available funds: In this Article 1, the party responsible for making available of funds was designated to be the U.S. Government ‘from currency of China’ held or available for expenditures by the U.S. for such purpose. It was modified from the 1947 Agreement which stated that the ROC Government shall make available an equivalent of US$20 million for research instruction, and other educational activities. Switching responsible party for the Foundation’s finance, from ROC to USA, allowed the U.S. Government to use the appropriations of the new Smith-Mundt Act and to allocate other currencies sources available for funds.
4. The legal status of the Foundation: In Article 1, a sentence regarding the legal status of the Foundation and its property was added: “The funds and property which may be
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acquired with the funds in furtherance of the purposes of the agreement shall be regarded in the Republic of China as property of a foreign Government, insofar as taxation and kindred matters are concerned.” This statement was in accordance with the change of finance responsibility to the U.S.
5. The Board of Directors: In the 1947 Agreement, the Foundation’s Board of Directors consisted of five Directors, all Americans; but, the ‘Chinese Government’ shall appoint a number of Advisers to the Board not to exceed five. The Advisers may attend all the meetings of the Board and participate in its discussions; however, “[t]he Advisers shall have no vote but their opinion shall be given due consideration by the Board at all its deliberations.” In the amendment, the Board was enlarged to eight members, four of whom shall be citizens from each nation. “In addition, the principal officer in charge of the Diplomatic Mission of the United States of America to China shall be Honorary Chairman of the Board. He shall cast the deciding vote in the event of a tie vote by the Board.”
As amended, an inequal representation of the Foundation’s decision body had been corrected toward the ROC’s favor in the amendment of 1957. Yet, it was still not equal, as a binational commission is supposed to be. Till now, the mechanism of a sole Honorary Chairman only from the USA, with a deciding power is unique among the current 49 binational commissions’ charters. Comparatively, some Fulbright Commissions have dual Honorary Chairmen or co-Chairs from both nations and some rotates between the two nations.
6. The scale of the funds: In 1957, the two Governments agreed to an aggregate amount of NT$18,585,000 acquired by the U.S. Government pursuant to the Surplus
Agricultural Commodities Agreement and to be used for the Fulbright program. The amendment was made by an ‘insertion’ of a new paragraph to the Article 11, and left in the original clause which required the ROC Government to be responsible for depositing funds to the foundation from sale of war surplus. This insertion echoed the new source of funding added in the preamble of the agreement. By adding a clause, both in the preamble and Article 11, to bring in a new source of funds for the
program, the amendment also left a footprint for the current Foundation for Scholarly Exchange to retrace its legitimacy as the world’s first Fulbright Program.
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Noticing that the amendment did not touch Article 8 which required “the principal office shall be in the capital city of China,” I wondered, without finding evidence, whether if that had been left out intentionally or was just a blind spot? Perhaps this was a subtle claim by the
Noticing that the amendment did not touch Article 8 which required “the principal office shall be in the capital city of China,” I wondered, without finding evidence, whether if that had been left out intentionally or was just a blind spot? Perhaps this was a subtle claim by the