This interview is with Cécile Armand, who is guest editor of the January 2026 special issue of Twentieth-Century China entitled “Rethinking the Study Abroad Movement in Modern China, 1850s–1950s.” Dr. Armand is a Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) junior professor at the Lyons Institute of East Asian Studies, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
Before we start discussing this special issue, could you tell us a bit about your academic background?
I am a historian by training. I completed my PhD at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, with an affiliation with the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies in France. I worked under the co-supervision of Christian Henriot (Lyon University) and Carol Benedict (Georgetown University). My doctoral research examined the emergence of advertising as a profession and its impact on urban space and municipal governance in early twentieth-century Shanghai. This work led me to develop a strong interest in digital methods, and I created a digital platform, MADSpace, to organize and analyze my primary sources and data.
During my postdoctoral research—first at Stanford and later with the European Research Council–funded “Elites, Networks, and Power in Modern China” (ENP-China) project—I became increasingly interested in Chinese elites educated abroad. This interest both extended my doctoral findings—particularly the strong American influence on the training of Chinese advertising professionals—and aligned closely with ENP-China’s core assumption that education and educational change were key drivers of elite formation and social transformation in the late Qing and Republican periods.
Within ENP-China, we worked with large digitized corpora (such as newspapers, biographical dictionaries, who’s who directories) and collaborated closely with computer scientists to develop methods for extracting and analyzing historical data at scale. This interdisciplinary experience marked a step change in the kinds of questions I could address as a historian. It has profoundly reshaped my research practice and directly informed the intellectual framing of this special issue.
How did you come to guest edit this issue of Twentieth-Century China?
In October 2023, I organized a conference titled “Rethinking the Study Abroad Movement and Its Impact on Modern China (1850s–1950s)” at Aix-Marseille University. I invited colleagues whose research engaged with study abroad only indirectly, and I encouraged them to place it more deliberately at the center of their analysis. This refocusing generated conversations that were both historiographically productive and methodologically innovative. From the eight papers presented at the workshop, I worked with five contributors who were keen to develop their work further for publication.
As I began thinking about a publication venue for the papers, Twentieth-Century China seemed like a natural fit. Its editorial orientation aligned closely with the conference’s themes, and its openness to collective, collaborative, and innovative scholarship made it an ideal home for the project. I reached out to Margherita Zanasi, who was then editor of the journal, and both she and her successor, Anne Reinhardt, were immediately enthusiastic and supportive. I’m deeply grateful for their encouragement and for the professionalism and generosity of the Twentieth-Century China editorial team, which made the experience of guest editing both rewarding and intellectually stimulating.
Existing histories of the Chinese study abroad movement focus either on how foreign powers influenced China or China’s current soft power. How does this issue complicate the existing narrative?
Much of the existing literature on the Chinese study abroad movement has oscillated between two dominant interpretive frameworks. One approaches overseas education primarily as an instrument of foreign influence or cultural imperialism, while the other retrospectively reads it through the lens of China’s own cultural diplomacy and soft power. Although both perspectives have yielded important insights, they tend to flatten historical complexity by privileging state-centered, teleological, or ideologically driven explanations.
This special issue complicates these narratives by shifting the analytical focus away from abstract notions of influence, modernization, or state building and toward the concrete social conditions under which overseas education actually unfolded. By foregrounding factors such as financial constraints, family strategies, informal networks, and professional opportunities, the contributions reveal study abroad as a negotiated, contingent, and uneven process. Rather than appearing either as passive recipients of foreign agendas or as heroic agents of national modernization, foreign-educated Chinese emerge as historically situated actors navigating overlapping economic, institutional, and transnational structures. Because of that, the issue moves beyond linear or retrospective readings and recovers the uncertainty, pragmatism, and strategic calculation that shaped educational choices in practice.
What themes do you see connecting these articles? How do these themes expand our understanding of modern Chinese history?
Several interrelated themes connect the five articles, despite their differing chronologies and source bases. First, all foreground the centrality of financial considerations (costs, funding mechanisms, philanthropy, and private investment) in shaping who could study abroad, where they went, and what they studied. By taking money seriously, the articles challenge the implicit assumption that overseas education was either uniformly state-sponsored or accessible only to a narrow elite. Instead, they reveal a more differentiated landscape in which financial arrangements structured opportunity, choice, and constraint.
Second, several articles underscore the decisive role of nonstate actors and informal networks, including families, philanthropic foundations, advisory committees, and professional circles. Outcomes often attributed to state policy instead emerge from negotiations among multiple actors operating across borders. This emphasis on nonstate actors is made possible by the authors’ deliberate engagement with primary sources from multiple sites, institutional settings, and languages, drawing not only on Chinese materials but also on US, British, and Japanese archives or published materials.
Finally, the articles shift attention from isolated episodes of departure or return to long-term career trajectories, tracing how overseas education translated into individual professionalization, academic or bureaucratic recruitment, and social mobility over time. This longitudinal perspective offers a more complex and nuanced account of individual lives, moving beyond broad categorizations and celebratory success stories to show how personal trajectories and careers intersected with the profound social and political transformations of the period.
This issue combines computational and quantitative methodologies with traditional archival research. How do these methodologies interact to give a more complete picture of the study abroad movement?
One of the central ambitions of this issue is to demonstrate that computational and quantitative methods are not substitutes for archival research but rather powerful complements to it. Large-scale datasets and computational tools allow us to detect patterns of cost structures, kinship ties, career trajectories, or institutional clustering that would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify through close reading alone.
At the same time, these patterns only become historically meaningful when grounded in the close reading of qualitative sources, such as diaries, correspondence, personal records, and institutional archives. Several contributions move back and forth between scales of analysis, using quantitative findings to generate new questions and archival materials to interpret and contextualize those findings. This iterative process produces a more layered and empirically grounded account of the study abroad movement, one that combines structural analysis with attention to individual stories.
How did the articles in the special issue change your thinking about the study abroad movement as a whole?
My own research has focused primarily on Chinese students educated in the United States, but the contributions in this issue pushed me to think more comparatively and relationally. They underscore the importance of situating any single group of overseas students within a broader transnational landscape, while also attending to the diversity within each group, in order to better understand what makes these experiences distinctive.
Taken together, the articles show that overseas education was highly stratified. Educational choices and opportunities were shaped by social and geographical origins, by generation, and by specific political contexts. Students educated in Japan, for example, generally came from more modest socioeconomic backgrounds than those who studied in Western countries, while clear patterns of disciplinary specialization also emerge, such as the prominence of US-trained economists under the Nationalist regime and of Japan-educated elites in the bureaucracy and military, especially during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In this sense, rather than a single study abroad movement, the issue reveals multiple, overlapping movements.
At the same time, the papers point to connections across regions of education, including shared institutions and possible networks linking students trained in different countries, as exemplified by the Sino-British Boxer Indemnity Commission. These circulations, and the constraints on them, deserve further study. Overall, this issue convinced me that US-educated students can hardly be studied in isolation, and that a comparative and connected approach is essential, even if methodologically demanding. Collaborative projects such as this special issue provide one productive way of putting this approach into practice.
How would you relate the broader conclusions of this issue to other fields? How does the history of the study abroad movement in China complicate global history?
This special issue speaks directly to broader debates in global history by insisting on grounding global processes in lived, historically situated experiences. Global history is often articulated at a high level of abstraction, through flows, systems, or structures. By contrast, the case studies brought together here show how global connections actually unfolded in practice, how they were navigated, interpreted, and instrumentalized by historical actors, both individual and collective. Chinese students abroad make visible the fact that China was not outside global history or merely acted upon by it, but actively participated in its making.
The study abroad movement also complicates dominant ways of situating China in global history. Much of the literature has relied on two main lenses. One emphasizes imperialism, especially from the late Qing through the Republican era, and tends to frame China primarily through the “century of humiliation,” as an underdeveloped country subordinated to foreign powers. The other, prominent in migration and diaspora studies, focuses largely on labor or merchant migration, often centering questions of marginalization, racial discrimination, and more or less successful integration. In both cases, China and Chinese historical actors tend to appear mainly as victims of globalization.
The history of overseas Chinese students and of intellectual exchanges between China and the wider world tells a different, more complex story. It highlights the agency of Chinese elites who critically reflected on their own educational and intellectual traditions and deliberately sought alternative forms of knowledge abroad. These returned students brought back not only new bodies of knowledge but also new forms of cultural capital and pathways of social mobility—developments that profoundly reshaped elite formation in China and generated new hierarchies and inequalities within Chinese society, some of which persist to this day.
Your article in the issue focuses on how private and public monies funded Chinese students at American institutions. Can you give us a bit of background for your article? Is it part of a wider research project?
This article forms part of a broader research agenda that seeks to reassess the roles and historical significance of US-educated Chinese elites (liumei) in modern China and in Sino–American relations since the mid-nineteenth century. My broader aim is to move beyond well-known figures and address previously overlooked questions such as: how US education reshaped Chinese meritocratic ideals after the abolition of the civil service examinations; how these foreign-educated elites established legitimacy in a context marked by rising nationalism and anti-imperialism; and what happened to them after 1949, notably how their cultural capital survived or failed to survive across generations and eventually reemerged after the Mao era.
Methodologically, this research takes advantage of the growing availability of digitized sources, such as student journals, who’s who directories, newspapers, and online biographies. I combine computational tools with more traditional archival research, which allows me to scale up questions that were previously addressed only through individual life stories. The article published in this issue focuses on a single dataset and is best understood as a proof of concept: it demonstrates what becomes possible when we move beyond anecdotal evidence and isolated biographies to more systematic, data-driven approaches.
More broadly, the article represents a first step toward the construction of a comprehensive database of US-returned Chinese students, a prototype of which is already accessible (LMBD). Such a database is indispensable for reconstructing this population as fully as possible and for collecting standardized information on social backgrounds, educational trajectories, careers, and networks. This relational database enables multidimensional analyses that move the research beyond hagiographies of famous intellectuals to encompass lesser-known individuals and larger social groups, (such as women, professional cohorts, or native-place peers) that can be rigorously contextualized within the broader population.
Finally, I aim to complement this prosopographical work with a critical analysis of the narratives surrounding foreign-educated students themselves. By combining computational text analysis with qualitative discourse analysis applied to sources such as newspapers, memoirs, and official hagiographies, I examine how, by whom, and under what historical conditions these actors were consistently (re)framed as modernizers, bridge-builders, and agents of cultural or soft power.
In what ways would you like your research to change the field of Chinese history as a whole?
First, I hope this issue contributes to a stronger and more genuinely transnational approach to Chinese history. Too often, modern China is still approached primarily through the prisms of nationalism and imperialism. This is not to deny the importance of nation building or the persistence of territorial boundaries and power relations between nation-states but rather to invite a shift in perspective. Instead of starting from abstract political concepts, I propose looking from the vantage point of individual and collective actors and examining more systematically how they navigated, in their daily lives, these contested notions.
Foreign-educated Chinese elites offer an especially productive lens for such a shift because of their liminal positions and cross-border trajectories. Their experiences provide an embodied and more complex perspective on how Chinese society actively or reactively engaged with the globalized world. When we examine history at the level of how people actually lived, we arrive at narratives that differ markedly from dominant portrayals of China as a semi-colonial victim of foreign domination, a nation belatedly struggling to “catch up,” or merely a site of negotiation between tradition and modernity.
I also hope this issue contributes to the normalization of data-driven research and computational methods within mainstream Chinese historiography, not as a separate “digital” subfield but as part of the standard analytical toolkit of the historian. Such approaches are becoming indispensable not only because an expanding body of historical sources is being digitized—and will increasingly be born digital—but also because they compel greater transparency regarding methodological choices and the selection of evidence used to support historical narratives.
Where do you see your research going in the future?
I increasingly envision my future research from a longer-term and more expansive perspective. In particular, I would like to trace the trajectories of liumei well beyond the 1949 divide and even beyond the 1980s. Their lives did not end with the Communist Revolution: they continued in the People’s Republic of China, in Taiwan, or across various diasporic settings. Restricting our analysis to the Republican period, or to any rigid political boundary, ultimately obscures the full scope of their experiences. Moreover, many of these individuals had children, and often grandchildren, who themselves studied abroad, sometimes consciously following in the footsteps of earlier generations. Study abroad constitutes a multigenerational phenomenon. To understand how it has been reproduced, transformed, and re-signified across different historical contexts and with shifting motivations, we need to follow this thread up to the present day. Not only does the past give depth to the present, but the present, in turn, deepens our understanding of the past. The relationship works in both directions.
Such a chronological and conceptual expansion necessarily entails engaging with a broader and more heterogeneous body of sources. These include not only personal memoirs, oral history interviews, and official or semi-official hagiographies but also online encyclopedias and digital exhibitions, which have proliferated over the past decades. While some of these sources must be approached with caution because of their explicit or implicit biases, they are nonetheless extraordinarily rich when read critically. For historians, such critical hermeneutics lies at the core of the craft, and these materials offer valuable insights into processes of self-representation, memory-making, and the political appropriation of individual life stories.
Methodologically, my work will remain firmly committed to integrating computational approaches into historical research, and I intend to keep pace, as much as possible, with the rapid technological transformations currently underway. In particular, I am concerned with more fully and reflexively incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into our scholarly practice. I see large language models not merely as tools for scaling up research but also as instruments that can enhance analytical depth and precision when working with massive digitized archives. They make it possible to compare sources across languages, trace connections over long time spans, and detect patterns that might otherwise remain invisible, thereby enabling historians to formulate questions that were previously beyond reach. This is not to suggest that AI will replace historians and their craft; rather, these tools can meaningfully augment our work and open new perspectives, provided we understand how they function and employ them with methodological rigor and critical awareness.
What historiography shaped your project? For further reading beyond this special issue, what historiography would you recommend?
First, I take Chinese scholarship as a central point of departure. As I discuss in my introductory essay, research on study abroad in China has expanded exponentially over the past decade and is remarkably dynamic and diverse. Scholars working in China often enjoy more direct and sustained access to sources than researchers based in Europe or the United States, and this profoundly shapes the questions they ask and the materials they mobilize. While their work is sometimes constrained by ideological pressures, censorship, or self-censorship, it reflects not only different historical practices but also contemporary debates and anxieties in China surrounding education, social inequality, and state policies. Today, this body of scholarship constitutes the dominant center of knowledge production on Chinese history. For scholars working outside China, it should be a primary source of inspiration and a crucial interlocutor.
Second, I deliberately read beyond the boundaries of my own discipline, particularly in the social sciences. In tracing the trajectories of liumei, I found some of my most productive inspiration in sociology and life-course studies, including both classical authors such as Pierre Bourdieu and Andrew Abbott and more recent work on professionalization and social networks. As a historian, of course, I remain deeply committed to narrating the singularity and contingency of individual experiences. Yet although we can never fully model the past, at the same time, I believe historians must be more explicit and rigorous in how we construct our corpora, select our cases, and justify our analytical choices. Without this effort, we risk falling into anecdotalism: becoming lost in detail, diluting the significance of our stories, and failing to connect micro historical narratives to the macro mechanisms of social change (to paraphrase my close colleague and friend Marylin Levine, a historian whose work I greatly admire).
Finally, I draw methodological inspiration from the computational humanities. New approaches to reading large corpora of archival texts (and increasingly images) have often developed outside Chinese studies, particularly in European and American social history and political science. I have learned a great deal from colleagues working with digitized newspapers, who are opening new paths for more robust cultural analysis, for instance by tracing how discourses around nationalism, imperialism, gender, or modernity emerged and evolved in contemporary media. While models developed for English-language sources cannot be applied uncritically to historical Chinese materials, advances in this field are rapid. We, China historians, need to invest in this domain if we want both to adapt these tools to our sources and to counter the techno-cultural biases embedded in existing algorithms.
Do you have any closing comments for our readers?
I hope you enjoy reading this special issue and find inspiration in it!