Occupational Choice of Returned Students in Late Qing Dynasty and Early Republic of China and the Social Transformation of Modern China

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a talk by Xiaoqin Liu.

Speaker: Xiaoqin Liu, Visiting Scholar, Center for Chinese Studies

**This lecture will be conducted in Chinese.

As the social and cultural elites, returned Chinese students in Modern China are indispensable forces of social transformation. The situation of returned students’ occupational choice not only reflected their value orientation and plight when they made their choice of careers, but also reflected the extent of social acceptance in Modern China to them, especially when they were faced with the disintegration of traditional social structures (Simin, i.e.Four Occupations, Shi, Nong, Gong, Shang.) in the early of the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, after they returned to their homeland, lots of students lived and worked in the metropolitans, especially the Capital, the provincial capitals and the major economic central cities.

The talk is based upon a recent study on the Northern China cities——Beijing and Tianjin, in Early Republic of China. And research materials contain five parts:

A. Government ministries officials and staff records in the late Qing Dynasty and the Beiyang Government stored in the First Historical Archives, the Second Historical Archives of China;

B. Archives of all industries in Beijing Archives and Tianjin Archives;

C. "(Beijing) Eastern Western members record (北京)东西洋会员录"，published in 1916. This member’s record contained information about 1,055 members of returned students in Beijing. Lots of the members worked in government ministries, and majority of them were technical bureaucracies. The rest of the members mainly worked in institutions of education, railway, bank, newspaper office, publication house, hospital, custom, etc.

D. Universities history, newspapers, periodicals, etc.

E. Chinese students’ information during studying abroad.
Making use of the information noted above, I will carefully analysis returned students’ occupational situation and they suffered restrictions in Beijing-Tianjin area around the 1910s. I will observe how did their birthplaces, countries studying abroad, professions and cities’ difference impact upon their occupational choices. I also noticed that social conditions in Modern China also restricted the students’ choices.