This chapter focuses on the academic community and its institutional achievements in the first half of the twentieth century. It discusses the unexplored story with three main facets. First, China's intellectual history has outpaced her institutional history, and as known more about the late Ch'ing schools of Neo-Confucian thought, the Sung and Han learning, New Text and Old Text scholarship, even the T'ung-ch'eng school, than one does about the network of academies, libraries, printing shops and patrons that sustained Confucian scholarship. Second, in China's relations with Japan, politics has thus far eclipsed the academic story. Most of the thousands of Chinese students who went to Tokyo returned to careers of service in their homeland; not all by any means became revolutionaries. Third, the educational influences streaming into China from Europe and America constitute a vast terrain of unimaginable variety and unexplored proportions. Nearly all the nations and all the disciplines were involved in this largest of all cultural migrations.

The modern transformations of China and Japan were inextricably interrelated. As the urgency of modernization became apparent, Japan's modernized institutions became the objects of study, and Japan itself a breeding ground for revolution in China. Since China and Japan interacted so importantly in their respective modern histories, it is useful to look at both sides of the relationship. China's contribution to the modernization of Japan provides an appropriate beginning for this discussion. Its dimensions were several. Meiji Japan held a very special place in the minds of the Confucian reformers of late Ch'ing times. Japan served to strengthen the students' consciousness of nationality in many ways. Japan made a more positive contribution to Chinese nationalism through example. To the intellectual and educational impact there was added a direct personal and political contact between Japan and the Chinese revolutionary movement. It is a contact that has been a good deal more noted in Western and Japanese scholarship than in Chinese studies.