Chinese Officers Prepared at American Military Colleges, 1904-37 Author(S): John Wands Sacca Source: the Journal of Military History, Vol

Like Strangers in a Foreign Land: Chinese Officers Prepared at American Military Colleges, 1904-37 Author(s): John Wands Sacca Source: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Jul., 2006), pp. 703-742 Published by: Society for Military History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138121 Accessed: 05/10/2009 17:30 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=smh. 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Society for Military History is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Military History. http://www.jstor.org Like Strangers in a Foreign Land: Chinese Officers Prepared at American Military Colleges, 1904-37" John Wands Sacca Abstract The lives of Chinese "returnedstudents" who had studied military science in the United States between 1904 and 1937 straddled the end of the Qing dynasty and the creation of the Chinese Republic- a turbulentera of foreign hegemony and almost constant civil war. National and provincial militaryestablishments held unique posi- tions in the fragmented republic, yet commissions and postings were limitedby alumniassociation membership.Tainted by their foreign education and distrusted for their lack of membership in domi- nant alumni cliques, they were denied significant roles in the line and staff of the NationalistArmy. Forced by circumstances to rely on one another, most would eventually abandon its ranks. AMERICANviews of China evoke the metaphor of a pendulum swing- ing between admiration and sympathy, on one extreme, and fear and rejection at the other. Harold R. Isaacs has characterized the years 1905-37 as an "Era of Benevolence" when Americans became paternal- * The author is obliged to the following archivists: Diane B. Jacob and Mary Laura Kludy, Preston Library,Virginia Military Institute; Jacqueline S. Painter, Henry Prescott Chaplin Memorial Library, and Krista Ainsworth, Mack Librarian for Special Collections, Kreitzberg Library, Norwich University; Judith A. Sibley and Alan C. Aimone, Special Collections and Archives, United States Military Academy Library; and Jane Yates, Director, The Citadel Archives and Museum. The perceptive critiques of three anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Journal of Military History informed the final revision of this article. John Wands Sacca ([email protected]) earned a Ph.D. from the University at Albany and is currently an adjunct faculty member in the M.A.T. Program at Rus- sell Sage College, Troy, New York. The Journal of Military History 70 (July 2006): 703-42 @ Society for Military History * 703 JOHNWANDS SACCA istic toward China.1 During this period, a succession of Chinese govern- ments were given encouragement to send students to the United States to pursue a college education at a time when China was stagnating in the shadow of a modernizing Japan. As a consequence, hundreds of men and women would be sent to study in America. On returning home, these so- called "returned students" helped to modernize academia and the pro- fessions during an era of revolution, brigandage, foreign invasion, and almost constant civil war. The returned students' experiences would be remarkably similar. Neither fish nor fowl politically, many found themselves strangers in a country evolving from a conservative Confucian state into a Westernized, albeit chaotic, modern nation state. And in attempting to become agents of change through their American education, they became suspect in the eyes of their countrymen.2 The character of an officer corps is formed, to a large degree, by its educational preparation. Little has been written in English concerning Chinese nationals educated at American military colleges. Between 1904 and 1937, on the eve of China's War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45), ninety-three Chinese cadets attended the four most prestigious military colleges in the United States: Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Lexington, Virginia; Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont; The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina; and the United States Military Academy (USMA), West Point, New York (see Table I). With the excep- tion of the federal academy at West Point, these colleges were state-sponsored institutions. About a third of these young men also studied or took degrees at American civilian colleges and universities (see Table II). But their American military education would prove more of a hin- drance than a benefit to their chosen careers. The liberal education received at military colleges in the United States set them apart from both peers and superiors who were educated at military academies in China, Japan, and even Europe. Ever the odd men out in their own national and provincial military establishments due to their lack of membership in the prestigious military academy alumni associations that dominated the Chinese officer corps, they spent the 1920s and 1930s building personal and professional relationships with other American-educated officers. Of necessity, they associated themselves in traditional Confucian patterns based on school tie (tongban tongxue) and interpersonal ties (guanxi), exploiting opportunities for employment wherever they could be found. 1. Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (New York:Harper and Row, 1958), 71. 2. Two recent studies of the overseas students are Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900-1927 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Stacey Bieler, "Patriots" or "Traitors"?:A His- tory of American-Educated Chinese Students (Armonk, N.Y.:M. E. Sharpe, 2004). 704 * THE JOURNAL OF Like Strangers in a Foreign Land A number of the returned students would play significant roles after the United States entered the war against Japan, especially in the China- Burma-India Theater (CBI) under the command of General Joseph W. Stilwell. Yet, the careers of many of these men would end in despair. After the defeat of the Japanese Imperial Army in 1945, units trained and equipped by the Americans would be squandered in a disastrous civil war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The general disaf- fection of these American-educated officers with, and their eventual abandonment of, the Nationalist regime shed light on the political disas- ter that followed and is one measure of the failure of both Nationalist and American policies. Their story might well provide a cautionary tale during a turbulent twenty-first century. China was unable to sinicize European "barbarians" as had been the case with successive waves of Asian invaders over the centuries. Euro- pean military establishments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were complex cultural institutions. Composed largely of literate citizens who had been educated in state-sponsored primary and sec- ondary and technically trained in military service schools, each Western army was led by a professional officer corps under the unified command of a general staff. Indeed, the sine qua non of a modern military estab- lishment lies in a professional officer corps. After a half century of foreign incursion and domestic rebellion, a reluctant Manchu court permitted provincial Chinese governors to establish Western-style military academies. Evoking the classical rubric of "self-strengthening" (ziqiang), Li Hongzhang (1823-1901), then governor of Jiangsu, established the first officer academy in 1885 at Tianjin on the recommendation of British General Charles George "Chinese" Gordon, only to see it destroyed during the Boxer Rising (1898-1901). In 1887, Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909), then governor-general of the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, set up an academy at Canton that would become the Whampoa Military Acad- emy thirty-seven years later. A military academy that would survive until 1923 was established at Baoding, southwest of Beijing, in 1902 by Yuan Shikai (1859-1916), then governor-general of Zhili.3 3. Ralph L. Powell, The Rise of Chinese Military Power, 1895-1912 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 41, 235-36; David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 122-25, 135-38; John A. Lynn, "Clio in Arms: The Role of the Military Vari- able in Shaping History," Journal of Military History 55 (January 1991): 84, 93; Knight Biggerstaff,The Earliest Modern Government Schools in China (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,

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