In 1913, Spanish professor Caroline H. Ober wrote the University of Washington Board of Regents about developing preparatory programs for Chinese students in the United States. In attempting to establish such programs, Ober explained the significance of international education, including specialized institutions for Chinese. She noted that at every school she had visited during her travels to Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton), she found “the same intense desire for ‘The Western Learning’—our learning.” The US, however, competed with other countries for educational influence. “The country [China] will have the modern education eventually; if we do not respond, other nations will improve the opportunity to establish their influence there, but just at present there is no nation as admirable as the United States in the eyes of China.” Ober continued, tying education to the development of positive diplomatic relations and trade: “We never had a better chance—we never can have—than this present one for influence, influencing a mighty nation already well disposed in our favor for the great things of International Peace, Education, Trade [emphasis in the original].”Footnote 1
Turn-of-the-century promoters of international education such as Ober claimed recruiting foreign students, especially Chinese, to American colleges and universities was integral to the expansion of American influence overseas. The US, however, initially failed to recognize the colonial possibilities of international education. Other countries first established programs in China, creating relationships among educated elites that, in turn, facilitated political, social, and economic power. Japan, which created a scholarship program in 1898 as part of its reparations for the Sino-Japanese War, recruited the largest numbers of Chinese students by the beginning of the twentieth century. Physical proximity, especially in comparison to travel to the US and Western Europe, also made studying in Japan easier for students. At the same time, Western European nations, which had carved up China's coastline, actively recruited students to attend their undergraduate and graduate programs, using their institutional prestige to entice the Chinese.Footnote 2 Throughout the world, boosters of international education recognized the expertise of European-trained scholars, especially in the sciences, and hoped that such knowledge would facilitate China's modernization under the auspices of European colonialism.Footnote 3
Competing with well-established programs in Japan and Western Europe, American educators and their supporters demanded an “open door” to develop international education programs in China.Footnote 4 They believed that student and faculty interactions promoted intercultural understanding and, by extension, positive international relations. The rhetoric of racial uplift, which they hoped would shape China into a modern nation, also justified overseas recruitment.Footnote 5 Even American manufacturers argued that training students with American products and equipment would promote international trade relations. Unfortunately, unlike other nations, supporters of international education in the US faced immigration policies that required Chinese students to navigate rigorous regulations to enter the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and subsequent amendments did not ban students outright; however, students had to prove to federal authorities that their desire to attend schools in the US was not a ploy to evade American immigration laws. No other group of international students faced such stringent restrictions at the time. Ironically, American colonial aspirations and anti-Chinese immigration policies, while emerging from the same racist ideology, undercut each other when it came to promoting international education.
A handful of scholars have analyzed the experiences of Chinese students in American higher education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These students, many of whom were brought to the US by missionaries, received a Western education along with the theological teachings of their respective Christian sponsors. For example, Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university, came from a poor family, but traveled to the US and graduated from Yale College. Others, who participated in government-funded programs, came from elite families that expected their sons (and a few daughters) to become future leaders in China's modernization. American nativism and exclusionary law, however, soured their experiences, leading to criticisms of American immigration policies and society in general. Nevertheless, many returned home and strove to promote the ideas and practices they had learned overseas, including new technologies, economic policies, government structures, social roles, and Protestant Christianity. In the US, students were one of the few exempted classes under the Chinese Exclusion Act, making overseas recruitment a possibility. Educators and their supporters, however, struggled to reconcile immigrant regulations that adversely targeted Chinese seeking educational opportunities. The combination of ideas and practices found in international education, particularly for Chinese students, in the early twentieth century generated what historians Paul Kramer and Liping Bu have argued as a particular form of American imperialism.Footnote 6
Despite the wealth of historical literature on elite Chinese students, none focus on the handful of American educators who established preparatory schools geared toward younger, less affluent students in the early twentieth century.Footnote 7 These institutions recruited students who were underprepared to attend American schools, offering them English-language training and other foundational skills to help them succeed in American education. After a year of instruction, students then transferred to public or private schools or applied to college. Supporters believed Chinese preparatory schools expanded opportunities for Chinese who might not otherwise have access to an education. Like their more well-to-do peers, these students were also expected to return home and assist in China's modernization and build a more positive relationship between China and the US.Footnote 8
Preparatory schools had an additional significance: they allowed families to circumvent the Chinese exclusion laws and send children—who were otherwise banned—to the United States. Because of the bias language that immigrant inspectors used, it is often difficult to tease out the intentions of school organizers, parents, and students, almost all of whom portions of the public and the federal government viewed as frauds. Based on Immigration Bureau reports, families gave recruiters large amounts of money to obtain student visas for these programs, often paying additional monies for preparatory classes in China. The majority of children then attended preparatory programs in the US for only a short period of time before leaving to find relatives. A few never arrived at preparatory schools and presumably went directly to their families once admitted into the country. Based on limited correspondence, some students clearly wanted an education, but none spoke of returning to China and assisting in its modernization. Like “paper” sons and daughters who entered the country on falsified documents, these children planned to stay and pursue opportunities in the US.Footnote 9
The arrival of large numbers of children to attend preparatory schools alarmed the Immigration Bureau, which oversaw implementing the Chinese exclusion laws. For program organizers, Seattle operated as the preferred port of entry, usually avoiding the more infamous Angel Island, which had gained notoriety for its screening process. The Pacific Northwest, as Kornel Chang argues in Pacific Connections, was also central to the development of American colonial endeavors in East Asia, in part because of its connection to the Canadian border and, by extension, the British Empire. To meet their political and economic goals, white merchants, both Canadian and American, had to work with Chinese American elites to hire laborers for the local economy and open overseas markets for American goods. These mediators, however, also promoted their own agendas, including finding ways to undermine the Chinese Exclusion Act.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, immigration officials in Seattle inspected programs and investigated personnel and families. Charges of possible profiteering soon emerged, with authorities believing that large amounts of money were being exchanged. Because most students did not complete the programs, the federal government also presumed the children were laborers and sought to deport them. Ultimately, preparatory schools lost their standing to sponsor Chinese students because of the murkiness of their purposes.Footnote 11
This essay explores the discourse surrounding the establishment of Chinese preparatory schools in the US and the diverse partners who participated in the endeavor. While the stated goals of these institutions were to expand educational opportunities and promote racial uplift, they also facilitated the migration of children whose families already lived in the US and might have different priorities. With American laws banning most forms of Chinese immigration, families understood they had to carefully navigate federal officials to legally enter the country, often turning to European American advocates for assistance. Of course, consular and immigration authorities questioned every aspect of these preparatory schools and made them difficult to sustain. The ambiguity of student participation in preparatory schools only compounded the problems of supporting an educational institution while wrestling with consular and immigration officials’ expectations. Ultimately, these interactions between immigration officials, international education boosters, and Chinese students were integral to the development of preparatory schools for international students in the US in the early twentieth century.
Chinese Exclusion and the Definition of a “Student”
A series of exclusionary laws and regulations at the turn of the twentieth century allowed the Immigration Bureau to control all aspects of Chinese immigration, including the entrance of students. And—unlike other international students—only Chinese had to navigate a series of bureaucratic hurdles to prove they were not entering the US under false pretenses. The initial Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred laborers from entering the country for ten years, did not mention students. Students continued to hold an exempt status from the 1880 Angell Treaty, which listed students among a handful of other groups that could “go and come of their own free will and accord, and shall be accorded all the rights, privileges, immunities, and exemptions which are accorded to the citizens and subjects of the most favored nation.”Footnote 12 Later amendments to the Chinese Exclusion Act affirmed the exempt status of students under the ban; however, they did not protect students from scrutiny. American immigration law required that students obtain a Section 6 certificate, a document signed by an American consulate officer verifying their status. Upon arrival in the U.S, custom officials and, later, immigration authorities screened all students attempting legal entry at designated ports, reviewing their certificates for fraud.Footnote 13 This elaborate system, federal authorities believed, would mitigate the immigration of unwanted individuals.
Even with a Section 6 certificate, immigration authorities might not admit a student. Laws or treaties provided no definition of a student, and it was left to individual inspectors to determine whom to admit. At times, the anti-Chinese movement drove the inspector's decision-making process. In At America's Gates, Erika Lee documents an 1885 incident in which San Francisco's custom collector tried to bar two Chinese students from entering the country because of threats of violence. The Department of Treasury ordered its San Francisco office to permit the students into the country.Footnote 14
Other students had fewer problems with legal entry. In 1895, the Chicago Tribune reported extensively on the arrival of four students at the University of Michigan, the first Chinese to attend the school. Immigration authorities quickly admitted them with their missionary sponsors, even though the two male students required preparatory work and language training.Footnote 15 A year later, Huie Kin, a well-known Chinese American Presbyterian minister in New York City, recruited a group of teenagers to attend a private academy in Metuchen, New Jersey. The program, paid for by their parents, prepared the young men to pursue higher education in the US.Footnote 16 In at least these two instances, the pursuit of college- or university-level education was not required for student status under the Chinese Exclusion Act; however, assistance from missionaries made it difficult for authorities to deny legal entry.
By the end of the nineteenth century, immigration authorities finally defined who could obtain student status under the Chinese Exclusion Act, with clear class limitations. In United States v. Chu Chee (1899), the federal government argued that the children of laborers, even those legally domiciled in the US, were not students under the law. In the mid-1890s, two boys were permitted to enter the country and lived with their father, a laundryman, in Eugene, Oregon. Although they attended school, they did not have Section 6 certificates. Rather, they possessed documents from the US consulate at Hong Kong stating, “They are going to the United States in response to a call, as alleged, of their father, a resident of Eugene, Oregon, for the purpose of acquiring an English education.”Footnote 17 After a couple of years of living in Oregon, immigration officials arrested the teenagers because they never obtained Section 6 certificates. US District Court Judge Charles B. Bellinger ruled in favor of the boys in 1898: as long as they attended school, then they could remain, even without proper documentation. In contrast to women who, by the principle of couverture, assumed the status of their husbands, Bellinger believed that the status of these children as students “does not depend upon ancestry or family relation,” including their father's occupation as a laborer.Footnote 18 Immigration officials, concerned about the legal precedent this ruling might generate, appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit, where Judge William W. Morrow overturned Bellinger's decision.Footnote 19
The same year that the US Court of Appeals ruled in United States v. Chu Chee (1899), the Immigration Bureau issued its first student regulations, greatly curtailing who could enter. The three main components stipulated that students (1) must be under twenty-one years of age, (2) have previously attended school, and (3) must submit the name of the school they planned to attend in the US.Footnote 20 A year later, the Treasury Department introduced further regulations curtailing the entry of Chinese students. Although the new regulations had no age limitations, it included the following language:
A person (1) who intends to pursue some of the higher branches of study, or who seeks to be fitted for some particular profession or occupation (2) for which facilities of study are not afforded in his own country; (3) for whose support and maintenance in this country, as a student, provision has been made, and (4) who, upon completion of his studies, expects to return to China.Footnote 21
By 1900, only students from wealthy families, pursuing a degree not offered in China, and planning to return home, could study in the US.
The new definition led to a surge of criticisms about American immigration policy from both sides of the Pacific Ocean. The bulk of anger about immigration restrictions, however, targeted the efforts of the Immigration Bureau, then under a commissioner who represented white labor interests, to keep out all Chinese. Newspapers, for example, reported extensively on the hardships of two students, Kong Xiangxi (K'ung Hsiang-hsi) and Fei Qihe (Fei Chi Ho), who had protected Americans during the anti-Western violence of the Boxer Uprisings and subsequently applied to attend Oberlin College. Even with help from missionaries and Oberlin's president, Kong and Fei had to fight the flimsy evidence that the Bureau used to bar them from legal entry for a year and a half.Footnote 22
The debates on renewing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1902 and subsequent discussions about the law infuriated those who supported Chinese students and were demanding change. During the Committee on Immigration's hearings in the US Senate, individuals spoke against the new regulations and requested that the US Congress amend current laws to permit more students to come to the US. Clarence Cary of the American China Development Company testified about a conversation with an American educator in Shanghai, who had told Cary that, although he wanted to send graduates from his institution to the US, he decided to refer them to British schools where there were no restrictions.Footnote 23 Edmund J. James, the president of the University of Illinois, wrote the administration of Theodore Roosevelt on several occasions about the importance of developing international education programs in China to raise the reputation of his institution and American higher education generally. He, along with other college and university administrators, called for extending the US's Open Door Policy to education, not only to facilitate recruitment efforts throughout China but also to enable their legal entry with limited federal intervention.Footnote 24
Chinese also openly condemned the stringent enforcement of American immigration laws that made it impossible even for exempted individuals to enter the US. In response to years of humiliating treatment by American immigration officials, who frequently refused to recognize their documentation, students and merchants in China organized boycotts in 1905 of American goods and businesses. The New York Times reported that six hundred students from twenty-six different colleges met in Tientsin to approve the boycott, with the goal of “secur[ing] the repeal of the more oppressive provisions of our anti-Chinese laws and fair fulfillment of the terms of the treaty with China.”Footnote 25
Strained diplomatic relations, embarrassment in the press, lobbying efforts from educators and their supporters, and the boycott forced President Roosevelt to change the way the Immigration Bureau operated. In a June 1905 letter, Roosevelt told Victor Metcalf, the secretary of commerce and labor, to “issue specific and rigid instructions to the officials of the Immigration Bureau that we will [not] tolerate discourtesy or hard treatment in connection with the Chinese merchant, traveler, or student.”Footnote 26 By December, Roosevelt admitted in a speech to Congress that American regulations had caused the boycott and that a “grave injustice and wrong have been done by this Nation to the people of China.”Footnote 27 Roosevelt asked Congress to pass legislation to improve the treatment of Chinese merchants and students.
In the meantime, the Immigration Bureau liberalized its understanding of what it meant to be a student. Frank P. Sargent, commissioner of immigration, wrote a memorandum for the secretary of commerce and labor explaining the history of Chinese students and American immigration law. Most importantly, he noted that the Bureau's definition did not match popularly held beliefs that students included children of all ages, educational levels, and incomes. Even prior to Roosevelt's request, the Bureau had attempted to remove key phrases in its regulations to allow more Chinese students to enter the country; however, these revisions were never published.Footnote 28
A query about regulations from the consulate office at Guangzhou added additional pressure to the Bureau. Three boys who planned to live with a family in Battle Creek, Michigan, and attend school there had applied for Section 6 certificates. Their grandfather, a retired teacher, hoped the boys would obtain a better education in the US and eventually go to college. The consulate felt their application was legitimate but wanted approval from the Immigration Bureau before responding to their request.Footnote 29 Sargent, facing pressure from Roosevelt and the consulate office in Guangzhou to liberalize regulations, published a new definition that not only included the 1905 revisions but opened up the possibility of preparatory and primary-level education “if undertaken in good faith.”Footnote 30 Poorer, less educated families could now send their children to school in the US.
Over a twenty-year period, the US grappled with what it meant to be a student under American immigration law, with the legal debates around Chinese students central to its definition. Some officials, who believed laborers used student status to undermine the Chinese exclusion laws, wanted to limit the ability of Chinese students to study in the US. A handful of European Americans, however, recognized education as a means of promoting diplomatic relations and international trade, especially as they competed with Japanese and Europeans for influence in China. Chinese at home and in the US were also agents of change, forcing Roosevelt to take action. By 1907, immigration authorities generated a new definition that aligned itself with more popular notions of who is a student, expanding Chinese educational opportunities and laying the foundation for other international students.
Preparatory Schools and Ida K. Greenlee
The inclusion of preparatory education in the 1907 definition of a student had the potential of radically altering the demographics of Chinese obtaining Section 6 certificates. Few individual families, however, took advantage of the opportunity. In part, families found it difficult to provide evidence that they had the required money to support their children's schooling.Footnote 31 Consulates in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, which feared possible subterfuge among applicants, also evaluated students to ensure that families were not using the new regulations to avoid exclusion. Additionally, immigration authorities had the power to either deport students or require them to pay a bond to ensure they maintained their student status and did not work. Because of these hurdles, it was possibly easier for families to have children enter the country as “paper” sons or daughters, falsely claiming them to be the son or daughter of a merchant or an American citizen.Footnote 32
The issues surrounding these new regulations, however, did not stop educational entrepreneurs, the majority of whom were European Americans. With support from Chinese American communities, whites found ways to use the new regulations to recruit males between the ages of eleven and twenty to attend US programs, with the goal of preparing them to enter mainstream American schools. They argued that these programs would facilitate modernization at a rate much faster than in China. Recruiters also recognized the profitability of a large-scale program, charging prospective families hundreds of dollars for legal entry in addition to educating, feeding, and housing them. Furthermore, the social and cultural position of whites involved in these preparatory schools mitigated many of the criticisms from the Immigration Bureau. The racialized arguments used to increase security measures to control Chinese immigration did not apply to European Americans.
The first and most long-lasting of these programs began in 1909 and was organized by Ng Niehong and his rhetoric professor, Ida K. Greenlee. Ng (accompanied by wife, Yin Moy Wong) came from southern China as a student to attend the University of Washington and later went on to study at Harvard University.Footnote 33 Greenlee, born in Defiance, Ohio, in 1866, became an English teacher, first working in Midwestern schools before settling in Seattle around 1900 to teach high school.Footnote 34 In 1905, the University of Washington hired her as an assistant professor in the English Department.Footnote 35
Based on voluminous correspondence with the Immigration Bureau, soon after the regulations changed, Ng proposed to Greenlee the idea of establishing a preparatory school in the US for Chinese students. Greenlee, who had visited China in 1907, went to the Board of Regents at the University of Washington to request a leave of absence to develop a program. The University fully supported the endeavor, which aligned with other colonial projects in the region. The dean of liberal arts wrote: “The University is in entire sympathy with Mr. Neihong's [sic] plan and wishes to commend it and lend it all possible support, believing that it will do much to cement the friendship between the Chinese people and the people of the United States.”Footnote 36 In the summer of 1909, Ng and Greenlee, funded by local Chinese American merchants, traveled to southern China and, with help from Ng's family working as intermediaries, recruited prospective children and teens.Footnote 37 They found fifty potential students from villages in Guangdong Province, all of whom had family working in the US.Footnote 38
Figure 1. Portrait of Ida K. Greenlee ca. 1916. Emergency Passport Applications: China, #3765, Passport Applications for Travel to China, 1906–1925; Volume 14, Immigration and Naturalization Service Files.
The liberalization of regulations related to students led to many issues for consulates, which now had to determine whether student applications for a Section 6 certificate were in “good faith.” For L. A. Bergholz, the consul at Guangzhou, Greenlee and Ng's plans appeared to be a scam. Previous applicants under the new guidelines had already misled Bergholz about their intentions, only later discovered to be laborers. In an attempt to weed out fraudulent cases, Bergholz instituted a reading and writing test based on the Five Chinese Classics, a process that the US Congress had been debating since the late 1890s as a possible way to limit European immigration. Those children who failed Bergholz's test were denied a Section 6 certificate. As a result of this test, only twenty-three students, less than half of those recruited, obtained certificates.Footnote 39
The examination outraged Greenlee, who used personal connections to force Bergholz to admit her students. She immediately contacted the Department of Commerce and Labor and members of the US Congress to advocate on her behalf. Secretary of State Philander C. Knox believed Bergholz was “over-cautious” because of the problems he had faced in the past, and agreed that Bergholz's examination was beyond what the law allowed.Footnote 40 Benjamin Cable, acting secretary of commerce and labor, admitted that Bergholz had no specific instructions to follow when discerning if a student's application was in “good faith.” Each application “would necessarily vary almost incalculably in each case.”Footnote 41
These complications did not stop Greenlee and Ng's goal to establish a school in the US, with plans to return to China to recruit more students. In December 1909, they arrived in Seattle with twenty-three students and, not far from the University of Washington, organized the Ng-Lee School. Greenlee and two other teachers, one of whom taught Chinese, worked with students while Ng returned to China to recruit more children. In June 1910, Ng arrived with additional students, including some whom Bergholz had initially refused.Footnote 42
Another professor, Caroline Ober, assisted Ng with the second round of recruitment. Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, a year after the Civil War ended, Ober graduated in 1889 from the Massachusetts Normal School in Salem (now Salem State University) and moved to Argentina, where she was regent and vice-directress of the Government Normal Schools for several years. In 1897, the University of Washington appointed her to the faculty, where she established and chaired the Department of Romantic Languages.Footnote 43 As part of the region's interest in East Asia, Ober had also traveled to China to develop possible affiliations with local colleges and universities and establish international exchanges for the University of Washington.Footnote 44
Figure 2. Portrait of Caroline H. Ober in the 1900 University of Washington Yearbook. (The Tyee, University of Washington, Seattle, 27, Digital Collections, University of Washington, http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/uwdocs/id/22580/rec/4)
Something went wrong after Ng and Ober arrived with a new crop of students. Within a few weeks, Greenlee disbanded the school, reportedly because the children “did not want to fraternize” with each other. Greenlee later wrote to immigration authorities that conflict arose because the first group came from a more rural part of Guangdong Province, while the second was from the British colony of Hong Kong. Greenlee gave each a letter of dismissal and sent them off to wherever their family lived in the US.Footnote 45
Later correspondence speaks to other problems among the school's organizers. Rev. Mark A. Matthews, a Presbyterian minister in Seattle who orchestrated a later iteration of the school, wrote of a conflict between Greenlee and Ober that caused them to part ways.Footnote 46 Ng also left Seattle in the fall of 1910 to attend Harvard University, abandoning the project.Footnote 47 Finally, the president of the University of Washington, Thomas F. Kane, charged Greenlee with academic dishonesty. She had misreported her publications and degree in her application for promotion and pressured the registrar to falsify a certificate for one of her students. Kane allowed Greenlee to retire rather than face the embarrassment of termination.Footnote 48 Perhaps aware of Greenlee's questionable conduct, Ng and Ober distanced themselves from her.
Although the intentions of organizers involved in the Ng-Lee School seemed questionable, some students clearly wanted to come to the US for an education. After the Ng-Lee School closed, a handful of students wrote Ober about continuing their studies. Wong Sam Yuen and his brother, Yen Yuen, attended a private school in Lowell, Massachusetts, and hoped to transfer to public school.Footnote 49 Louis Chun Lam wrote that he and his brother attended a public school in Oakland, California.Footnote 50 Another Ng-Lee School student, who moved to San Francisco, wrote: “I arrived here savely [sic] yesterday. I thank you for your kindness brought me to this country for school. I will go to school pretty soon.”Footnote 51 Although the Ng-Lee School experiment ended abruptly, students appreciated the educational opportunity, along with the possibility of living with family in the US. For these students, pursuit of an education and family reunification were not necessarily separate goals.
Greenlee's Bay Area Ng-Lee School
Closing the Ng-Lee School and being forced to retire from the University of Washington did not stop Greenlee from returning to China to recruit more students. Her new preparatory program, however, was structured much differently. To address the federal government's concerns, Greenlee first established a school in Hong Kong and hired a handful of interpreters to work for her. All prospective students had to train at the new school before going to the US. During this time, Greenlee also monitored their academic progress and investigated their families’ backgrounds before deciding to assist them in applying for Section 6 certificates. “Under her plan her boys must come from parents abundantly able to support them while at school in the United States and must give other evidence of their good faith as well as their educational promise.”Footnote 52 This new system, Greenlee believed, solved the problems with the previous iteration of the Ng-Lee School.
Like Greenlee's Ng-Lee School, institutions for international education were still in development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and often involved considerable pedagogical experimentation. Coordinators not only grappled with logistical issues (such as room and board, transportation, course offerings, and immigration regulations) but also had to ensure that incoming students could meet the challenges of pursuing an education in another country. For example, Edward J. M. Rhoads in Stepping Forth into the World lays out the ways in which Yung Wing recruited and trained students for the Chinese Educational Mission (1872–1881) before sending them to live with host families in Connecticut and Massachusetts. With few exceptions, almost all students had limited English-language skills, and had to go through an intensive preparatory program in both China and the US. Once the Chinese Educational Mission coordinators deemed a student proficient, he was allowed to attend schools near his host family's home.Footnote 53 As more programs appeared in the twentieth century, it became clear to educators that students needed additional training before entering American schools. Academic aptitude was only one part of the recruitment process; linguistic and cultural competencies also needed to be met to ensure a positive experience.Footnote 54
As part of Greenlee's Ng-Lee School in Hong Kong, she primarily targeted families from the mainland who had fled the violence associated with the 1911 Xinhai Revolution. The Revolution upended every aspect of Chinese society, often placing families in dire economic circumstances as the country fought to become a republic. Colonialism only compounded problems, with Japan, the US, and Western Europe jockeying for control over the country. Educational reform—with overseas support—was central to founding the new nation; however, limited resources and a lack of teachers meant families had to be creative if they wished to maintain or improve their social position and ensure economic opportunities for their sons in a changing political landscape. Obtaining an education and working for family in the US was a promising strategy.Footnote 55
Like other educators and missionaries, Greenlee recognized the opportunity to advance US influence in a new educational vacuum in southern China, but American regulatory concerns compromised her plans. State Department officials questioned every aspect of her new preparatory program. Under normal circumstances, Chinese had to reside in Hong Kong for at least a year before requesting travel papers from the consulate there. Bergholz, who still viewed Greenlee contemptuously, had already warned officials in Washington, DC, “that the bringing of these boys in America is not altogether of so philanthropic a character.”Footnote 56 The State Department recommended that Hong Kong's consul, George Anderson, use an abundance of caution when examining Greenlee's requests. Anderson, however, found no problems with Greenlee's applicants and gave them Section 6 certificates.
Possibly to avoid additional problems after closing the Ng-Lee School in Seattle, Greenlee decided to move her program to the San Francisco Bay Area. Although San Francisco had a large and vibrant Chinese American community, the city was also home to Angel Island, the most notorious immigration processing center in the country. Thus, despite their preparatory training and Section 6 certificates, when these students arrived at Angel Island in June 1912, immigration authorities viewed them through the lens of criminality, conflating their Chinese identity with immigration fraud. Lauritz Lorenzen, the Chinese inspector in charge, generated a lengthy report for Samuel Backus, the commissioner of immigration in San Francisco, that ridiculed Greenlee's recruitment process. Based on their appearance, “the applicants, at least in the majority of cases, are not of the class which would be coming to the United Sates for the purpose of studying for professions, but are the sons or relatives of Chinese laborers or others in the United States.”Footnote 57 Rumors had also circulated about the intentions of the students and their families, some of whom had reportedly already been deported.
In her interview with immigration authorities, Greenlee laid out her plan to guarantee her students remained in complete alignment with government regulations. To ensure the children did not work, Greenlee required families to sign contracts guaranteeing their financial support and to provide $500 bank drafts in the name of each student. In return, she agreed to be the students’ guardian and teacher for up to five years, at the cost of $500 per year per student. After several months of preparation, she supposedly selected the best students to travel to the US. During the examination with the consul, each student signed an agreement that he would recognize Greenlee's guardianship, presumably trumping familial responsibilities and expectations among relatives in the US.
Additionally, Greenlee explained that she had hired two teachers—Evelyn M. Burlingame and a Miss McCauley—to run the San Francisco school while she recruited more students abroad. Although not a certified teacher, Burlingame had worked as a missionary in southern China and was fluent in Chinese. McCauley, a friend of Greenlee's from Seattle, was a public schoolteacher. After their initial orientation at the school, the students were to be sent out to live with white Christian families selected by Greenlee's friend Reverend Matthews.Footnote 58 The families, she affirmed, could not use the students as servants, which violated the law; their room and board would be paid with funds from Greenlee. She told immigration authorities that the students would go to college or bible school before returning to China to “spread the gospel.”Footnote 59
For Matthews, Greenlee's embracement of white, middle-class respectability and promotion of Protestant Christianity overseas positioned her preparatory academy above the criticism of immigration authorities. He repeatedly wrote Backus about the Ng-Lee School. In his letters, Matthews emphasized the religious nature of her work and asserted that authorities should “show her every courtesy and every advantage possible.” He went on to describe Greenlee as “working under the best Christian auspices and … working unselfishly for the good of the boys and for the establishment of closer relationships between our beloved country and the Chinese Republic.”Footnote 60 In a later letter justifying her activities to the newly appointed secretary of labor, Matthews argued that Greenlee's work was “clean, free from criticism and above suspicion.”Footnote 61
Greenlee fought criticisms with complaints of her own, especially about the conditions at Angel Island. Oral histories, government documents, and poems carved and painted on the walls give voice to the misery endured at the immigration station.Footnote 62 Greenlee's initial complaints to Backus vilified his employees as a mechanism to accelerate her students’ legal entry.Footnote 63 In another letter to the Department of Commerce and Labor, Greenlee voiced concerns about the treatment she received from staff, claiming that she was addressed with the “greatest discourtesy” and “in an unjust manner.” She also expressed outrage at the handling of her students. At length, Greenlee described the “despair” students felt during their interactions with guards and interrogators, as the students had been “imbued with the highest ideals concerning the United States government” before their arrival.Footnote 64 To ensure she did not coach students to give certain answers, inspectors had refused to allow her to speak to students before interrogations.
Frustrated that Greenlee had not mentioned any of these problems upon their earlier meeting, Backus requested his staff report on the allegations. Charles Mehan, an inspector at Angel Island, wrote a lengthy letter dismissing her statement. He retorted that officers did not use “drawing-room language to be sure but neither was it that of the Bowery.” He felt “Miss Greenlee's complaint is wholly without justification; the conditions were exactly the contrary to those claimed by her.” Although other visitors and immigrants affirmed the harsh conditions at Angel Island, Mehan felt that Greenlee wanted “all rules and regulations laid aside in favor of her seventy-seven Chinese wards.”Footnote 65 Greenlee's students were admitted, and Backus and his staff ignored her complaints.Footnote 66
Officials in Washington, DC, responded to the second iteration of Greenlee's Chinese preparatory school and behavior toward immigration authorities with a call for vigilance. The commissioner-general, in a letter to the acting secretary of commerce and labor, concluded:
The framers of the law certainly never intended that Chinese should be brought into this country wholesale in the guise of students and then be distributed to relatives throughout the land, with whom they can live and for whom they can work while intermittently attending our public schools, maintained at the expense of the taxpayers of the United States.Footnote 67
He went on:
“The word ‘student’ as used in the treaty and laws was intended to carry a much higher and more restricted meaning.”Footnote 68
While the commissioner-general agreed that some supporters were well intentioned, he also believed that Greenlee manipulated regulations for her own purposes.
Although Greenlee promoted a positive image of her school, her staff documented their own frustrations in keeping the program in line with the expectations of immigration authorities. In a letter to Matthews, Burlingame wrote that when the school relocated to East Oakland, six children refused to move, even after school officials threatened them with deportation. Two other students left for Boston to live with their uncles. Another, who was sick, remained with family in San Francisco. Burlingame noted, “If we let them go free I am afraid we shall have trouble with others.”Footnote 69 Matthews replied that Burlingame should go directly to Backus and have “these boys arrested and deported.” He continued, “If they are not going to study they must be sent back to China at once. No boy can come to this country under our moral protection and abuse the confidence we have imposed in him or that the government has imposed in us.”Footnote 70 Families requested the school intercede on their children's behalf; however, Matthews and Burlingame refused. Matthews later remarked, “I have promised the government that we would be as strict as they are and I believe the government will say they are now dealing with honest men and women, who are sincerely and unselfishly trying to educate the Chinese and Japanese boys and make Christians of them.”Footnote 71 In the end, the courts allowed the boys to stay if they attended school and procured a bond.Footnote 72
Figure 3. Ng-Lee School portrait somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area (ca. 1912). File 53-440-48, Box 1521, RG 85, Immigration and Nationalization Files.
By 1913, the Ng-Lee School had confronted too many problems to sustain itself. It could no longer afford the building in East Oakland and needed a new physical home. To help with costs, Matthews and Greenlee hoped to house students with families instead of the school building; they never found white families to host them. Additionally, the Immigration Bureau demanded Greenlee locate all of her former students. Administrators in Washington wanted to investigate each one for possibly becoming a laborer. Finally, paroling her last group of students was the ultimate “injustice.” In spring 1913, the Immigration Bureau redistributed Circular 220 to all ports of entry, reminding inspectors that they could require students to submit a $2,000 bond if they were suspected laborers.Footnote 73 Greenlee and Matthews were unable to pay for bonds and negotiated with authorities to have students placed in their custody. A year later, the Immigration Bureau relieved Greenlee and Matthews of their legal responsibilities, and almost all of the students went to live with their families around the US.Footnote 74
With the closing of the Ng-Lee School in East Oakland, controversy continued to swirl around Greenlee and her students. Immigration officials closely monitored them and threatened deportation; Greenlee also faced scrutiny. In a letter from Matthews to the Immigration Bureau, he argued that Greenlee “has been fair and honest with the government.” Someone in the Immigration Bureau underlined this phrase and wrote a question mark.Footnote 75 In summer 1913, Greenlee traveled again to recruit Chinese students. She told an immigration inspector in Seattle about her plan to transport five hundred children and then return them home to “form the nucleus of a movement for much good.”Footnote 76 For reasons unstated, Greenlee never returned to the US with students. It is possible that—as someone committed to giving Chinese students a Western education—she might have found it easier to remain in China than continue to negotiate American immigration laws. Immigration authorities had made it clear that they did not embrace Greenlee's conception of a preparatory education. By 1916, she was teaching at Canton Christian College in Hong Kong.Footnote 77
Other Preparatory Schools
Despite the debacle with Greenlee's Ng-Lee Schools, other European Americans embraced the model and recruited potential students in a similar fashion in the early 1910s. The rhetoric of modernization and uplift continued to be invoked to justify such programs and foster positive attitudes. Like Greenlee, they reached out to families with limited educational opportunities in China who might be seeking an immigration pathway. The Pacific Northwest, with its colonial interests, was the preferred port of entry and location for most programs. And, unsurprisingly, federal authorities persisted in questioning preparatory schools as a way to circumventing the law and bring otherwise barred children into the country. Their criticisms, however, began to shift to the amounts of money that were exchanged in support of these preparatory schools, tarnishing the reputation of white entrepreneurs and confirming supposed Chinese criminality. Money was a problem that all programs faced, combined with the federal government's skepticism, that facilitated their demise.
Greenlee's attempts at educating young Chinese men became the model for three other preparatory schools (and at least one failed iteration) established in the years preceding World War I. In 1911, one hundred Chinese students attended a special preparatory school at Adelphia College, a Swedish Baptist institution in Seattle. Mark Ging and Paul Lewis, two former Chinese American students, first proposed the idea to Claude E. Stevens, a local attorney and head of the school's Commercial Department. Adelphia College, which desperately needed money, agreed to house and educate the students during the 1911–1912 academic year. The students lived in the women's dormitory and a large private residence nearby. Stevens, whose parents were reportedly missionaries in China, headed the school's newly established Chinese Department and hired Chinese American alums to teach. The curriculum included both Chinese- and English-language components.Footnote 78
Problems, however, quickly emerged with Adelphia's students, reflecting once again the ways in which the federal government and educational institutions struggled to work together. Despite receiving Section 6 certificates from consular officials, immigration authorities at Angel Island questioned their documentation, especially the “inadequacy of the maintenance arrangements.”Footnote 79 Inspectors admitted forty students, but required a $2,000 bond for each one to guarantee their student status. Another fifty-six arrived at Seattle, where authorities voiced similar concerns before admitting them under bond.Footnote 80 Stevens concluded that the bonds were “unreasonable” and “unnecessary,” noting that the bonding process humiliated students. He maintained that “affidavits and facts in the hands [of the] Seattle immigration office show students complied with laws; attending college regularly; progressing rapidly; deportment above reproach; status above question.”Footnote 81
Stevens's claims of student participation and success, however, did not align with the reality of Adelphia's preparatory school. Students insisted their parents had paid large sums of money to cover expenses, but upon arrival, school officials demanded additional payments for room and board. As a result, students quickly left the institution to live with family. At the end of the year, twenty-one of the initial ninety-six students remained, and Stevens closed down the program.Footnote 82
After the program closed, federal authorities questioned Stevens's financial interests in the preparatory school at Adelphia. A letter to US Senator Wesley L. Jones mentioned that Stevens had received $10,000 to bring the proposed hundred Chinese students to the US.Footnote 83 During a congressional hearing on human smuggling a few years later, members of Congress questioned Stevens about the monies he had personally received, including payments for his and his wife's travels to China, along with the costs associated with temporarily suspending his law practice. His success in bringing students to the US was also rewarded monetarily. Stevens, however, refused to state the exact amount he received, and no charges were filed against him.Footnote 84
At least one preparatory school was established along the Eastern Seaboard. Sarah A. Hing, a European American woman who had married a Chinese national and had taught English for a few years in Guangzhou, championed the project. In spring 1911, she contacted Hervey S. Cowell, principal at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, about admitting a group of students. Cushing Academy had recently offered English-language classes to Chinese college students, including some sponsored by the US government, and supported international education. Cowell agreed, and Hing sent a bank draft to cover their first quarter at Cushing Academy.
Upon Hing's and her students’ arrival in Seattle, immigration officers questioned the legitimacy of her program. In lieu of acceptance letters, Hing had asked Cowell to send a receipt for her initial payment to the commissioner of immigration in Seattle, trying to legitimize her plans with federal authorities; however, officials held her students for over a month, and they did not reach Massachusetts until November. Cowell had no place to house the students and had to find host families in the community. The program was further jeopardized when he realized the students—with one exception—spoke no English, even though Hing had said that she had taught them English in preparation for their studies before leaving China. Rev. J. J. Miller, a pastor at a local congregational church, organized English-language classes for the students.Footnote 85
Student attendance—as with Adelphia—quickly became an issue, with only three of the original twenty students returning after winter break. Their abandonment of Cushing Academy did not mean that these students were uninterested in an education. A handful of students wrote Cowell, stating that “they could get along cheaper and go into public schools where their relatives lived.”Footnote 86 Four other boys asked the principal at the Jones Public School in Chicago to write letters on their behalf affirming their transfer.Footnote 87 Nevertheless, federal authorities viewed them as another group of Chinese breaking American immigration laws. The acting secretary of commerce and labor, Benjamin S. Cable, complained to Senator Miles Poindexter that not only had the students left the program but the family members who had claimed to finance their education were also “creatures of imagination only.”Footnote 88 The students apparently lacked the financial support they had professed to federal authorities that they had.
The US Congress questioned Hing about the profits made from bringing students to the US. During a congressional hearing in Seattle, she testified before a Senate panel that she only brought students as a “favor” and received no financial compensation. Families paid for transportation and $25 for tuition and room and board.Footnote 89 Senators, however, deemed her untruthful. Their primary concern was Hing's marriage to someone of Chinese ancestry, whom they suspected of being in the country illegally. Hing admitted she had very little education but argued that she was still a capable teacher. She had previously claimed that the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Young Women's Christian Association supported her work, but no one at those organizations recognized her name. When testifying before the Senate, Cowell commented that Hing did not write or speak English well and he would “not have wanted her as a teacher of English in our school.” Cowell also found her to wear “considerable jewelry” and her attire “tawdry.”Footnote 90 In the mind of the congressional panel, Hing compromised white, middle-class respectability, not only by her commitment of miscegenation but also by smuggling Chinese into the US for profit.
Ober—who had already traveled once to China to recruit students for the Ng-Lee School—faced similar hurdles on her second and third ventures. Once again, immigration authorities used funding issues to question her intentions and accuse students of illegally entering the US. Additional problems with consular officials, who complained about Ober's neglect of diplomatic protocols, only compounded the problems surrounding the possible establishment of a successful preparatory school for Chinese students. Even collaboration with Chinese officials—with the hope of creating a program immigration and diplomatic authorities would deem legitimate—did not buffer her from criticisms.
In spring 1912, a group of Chinese Americans in Seattle petitioned the University of Washington's Board of Regents to permit Ober to recruit upwards of a hundred students to attend schools in the region. The Board of Regents agreed to give her a yearlong sabbatical and a letter of introduction to officials at the Educational Bureau in Guangdong Province.Footnote 91 Unlike other recruiters, Ober worked with Chinese officials to identify students whose families had the necessary financial means to send their children to the US.Footnote 92 By working with the Chinese government, she was supposedly able to obtain scholarship funds for each student, $960 per student for each year they attended school.Footnote 93 Ober's preparatory school—although not sanctioned by the American government—appeared to be much more in line with the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, which had been established with funds remaining from the reparations paid to the US after the Boxer Uprising. Despite overpayment, the Roosevelt administration refused to return the money to China outright and instead established Tsinghua College to give students an American education, with the possibility of sending them to the US for further postsecondary studies. The Boxer program, like its Japanese counterpart, became another way for the US to expand its influence in China.Footnote 94
Ober's collaboration with Chinese officials, however, potentially marginalized the American government's authority over international education. W. K. Chung, commissioner of education in Guangdong, promoted Western educational models in China and spoke positively about Ober's work. To support his reforms, Chung similarly turned to Chinese American and European American merchants and white Protestant missionaries for possible funds, not the American government.Footnote 95 In a letter to the president of the University of Washington, Chung wrote:
No doubt, the bringing of knowledge from abroad is a great factor for the elevation of China's educational standard; but equally important is the helping of students to go abroad, whereby, besides the attainment of school knowledge and study of great theories from books, they are offered greater sphere of observation and investigation.Footnote 96
He ended his letter simultaneously playing to early twentieth-century racial attitudes among whites and pointing to more positive US and China relations. “I have no doubt that America will continue to lead her sister republic by the hand until she can walk safely alone. I hope the day is not far off when China and America will understand each other better and prove each other friends as friends have never been.”Footnote 97 Like other Chinese and Chinese American intermediaries, Chung manipulated racial attitudes embedded in American colonialism to forward his own agenda.
Unfortunately, even with support from the Chinese government, money problems soon appeared within Ober's preparatory program. Before she left for China, Ober obtained an agreement to house and educate students at Vashon College in Burton, Washington. Founded in 1892, Vashon College was a semipublic institution that, by 1904, included a military school and seminary. A devastating fire destroyed the college's main building in 1910, and the school temporarily closed.Footnote 98 W. G. Parkes, president of Vashon College—who embraced both the role of American education in Chinese uplift and the potential of monetary gain by establishing such programs—was eager to use his institution for preparatory purposes. His plans included a rigorous education with many of the attributes of a private school: uniforms for all the students, domestic services, and policies for leaves and pocket money.Footnote 99
Within months of establishing the program, Parkes wrote to Ober, documenting numerous financial issues, starting with the federal government's bonding requirements. He also lacked the tuition funding necessary to properly run the school, as Ober had recruited fewer than the proposed hundred students but had not increased tuition for those who did attend. Parkes, however, still needed to pay teachers and staff and have funds for supplies. In a letter to Ober, he explained the direness of the situation:
I cannot feed the boys any longer unless I receive some money. And I must admit to myself that I cannot guarantee teachers or light and heat after this week, so if my threat to starve the boys does not bring some action I do not at this writing know what I shall be doing next.Footnote 100
The school limped along for another few months, but was $1,500 in debt by spring. Additional problems arose that hurt Parkes's ability to maintain a successful program. One student had to be sent to a sanatorium and remained under a doctor's care for over a month.Footnote 101 In April, a student named Tam Wye died while visiting Seattle with classmates. His father, who lived in San Diego, sent funds to bury him in Seattle.Footnote 102 After Tam's funeral, several boys refused to return. Parkes mentioned in his letters that he had no punishment other than the threat of deportation.Footnote 103
Parkes contacted Ober multiple times about funding before finally asking students to write their families about the school's financial situation. Their families had apparently paid Ober a significant amount of money and did not understand why it was not enough to support the school. Parkes managed to keep the school afloat until the end of the school year. By May, he fired the school's janitor and engineer and was doing their work himself. Additionally, Parkes, his cook, and the students had to cut firewood to heat the buildings and cook.Footnote 104 The school finally closed and the students went to live with family. In an undated letter, a school official reported that two students were ready to attend high school, while the rest were prepared for sixth grade.Footnote 105
Questions surrounding Ober's recruitment activities led to additional accusations by both the American and, later, Chinese governments. Authorities, again, fixated on the sums of money given to Ober and her associates to bring Chinese students to the US. Additionally, because she chose to work directly with Chinese authorities, complaints emerged around diplomatic etiquette. Upon her arrival in Guangzhou, Ober did not work with Consul-General F. D. Cheshire's office but met directly with Chinese government officials. Cheshire informed Ober that she needed to consult with the State Department when making arrangements with a foreign government; however, she ignored him, even after Cheshire warned that she was breaking the law.Footnote 106 Once in southern China, American and Chinese officials accused Ober and her affiliates of unethical financial practices in taking large bank drafts from families. Chinese officials also notified the consul-general's office that Ober required an additional $25 fee per student be paid directly to her.Footnote 107
Accusations eventually followed Ober back home. The Seattle Times ran several articles accusing a small number of white residents, including unnamed faculty from the University of Washington, of smuggling Chinese into the country under the pretense of attaining an education.Footnote 108 Over a week later, University of Washington president Thomas Kane, wrote the Commissioner of Immigration in Washington, DC, about Ober and Greenlee and whether “these teachers were helping the Chinese to evade the immigration laws.”Footnote 109 The University's Board of Regents demanded that Ober explain her actions in writing, and the Washington state legislature reportedly established a committee to investigate her conduct.Footnote 110
Ober—like many other whites who brought Chinese students to the US—expressed outrage at the damage such accusations caused her reputation. “Nothing could ever be more remote from my intention than to bring any discredit upon my university and—as for myself—is it necessary to say that I would never knowingly do a dishonest action or one against the laws of any country?” To prove her honesty, she emphasized her refusal of funds from Chinese American merchants in Seattle, while simultaneously ignoring accusations from federal authorities, the press, and Vashon College. “All expenses have been paid out of my own—or my brother's—funds. I could not do otherwise and remain free to act unhampered.”Footnote 111 It is unknown whether Ober was censured or not; however, by fall 1913, she had returned to the Spanish Department, abandoning her preparatory program completely.
Despite the hurdles white entrepreneurs faced, they still brought young men—who otherwise did not have the opportunity—to the US for a preparatory education in the early 1910s. To facilitate legal entry, European Americans used their social and cultural capital, justifying these programs as a form of racial uplift and modernization that expanded American influence overseas. Other evidence suggests that many families wanted an American education for their children but found it to be more affordable to educate their children while living with family after legally entering the country through one of these programs. Ultimately, immigration authorities believed such schools undermined the law, and they were determined to curtail them. Expenses, including a desire for profits among organizers and exorbitant federal bonding requirements, made programs unaffordable. Attacks on people's reputations only compounded matters. The American government—while supporting international education—wanted more control over the process to ensure its influence over the functioning of international education programs in China and the US.
Conclusion
By summer 1913, a variety of developments led to the decline of preparatory schools for Chinese students in the US. The federal government firmly established an elaborate process of evaluation and observation to deter possible preparatory schools and non-government-sponsored students. To stop their immigration, the federal government also worked tirelessly to justify refusing Section 6 certificates, make entry cost prohibitive, and monitor movements to establish cause for deportation. At the same time, immigration authorities tried to round up and deport former preparatory students already in the country. Ng Lan Pun, who entered the US with Greenlee, was working in a restaurant in La Grande, Oregon, when immigration inspectors arrested him. He had already lived in the US for six years, three years beyond the period when authorities could deport an immigrant who had legally entered the country. The Immigration Bureau grudgingly permitted him to stay, but cancelled his Section 6 certificate.Footnote 112
Despite the moralistic and educational rhetoric found in the correspondence of American educators, the lack of profits from establishing preparatory programs for Chinese students also deterred white entrepreneurs. The costs in China had become particularly prohibitive, where intermediaries demanded a cut of the profits, refusing to provide free services to well-paid European Americans. For example, Morrison Reid traveled to southern China in 1913 to recruit students for a new preparatory school hosted by the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Chinese American merchants paid for his and his wife's travels and gave him $2,000 in gold. After his interpreters demanded $200 per student successfully engaged, Reid quit the project and went on a tour of northern China. The US consul-general in Guangzhou wrote that it was “not known whether Mr. Reid returned any of the $2,000, gold, furnished him or not, but it is presumed that he used the money on his tour of the Orient.”Footnote 113 Unscrupulous entrepreneurs like Reid did not help programs find success.
Turmoil in China also contributed to the end of preparatory schools, as national leaders struggled to create a republic. Recruitment in southern China had become dangerous. In a letter to the secretary of the University of Washington's Board of Regents, Ober explained, “All business in this province is now at a standstill, so it may be that all these educational plans will have to be left unfinished.” Soon afterward, she evacuated Guangzhou, which she described as a “firing zone.”Footnote 114 In a report for the secretary of state, Guangzhou's consulate office believed Ober would not travel to China again because of the nation's political climate and increasing violence. “She confessed that her last venture was a complete failure [emphasis in the original].”Footnote 115 With war also raging in Europe, large-scale recruitment of students ceased by January 1915.Footnote 116
The attitudes and behaviors tied to recruiting large numbers of less educated and poorer students to attend preparatory schools speak to the limits of early twentieth-century immigration policy and the mission among some European Americans to internationalize education. Although the 1907 regulations liberalized the Immigration Bureau's definition of a student, authorities had not anticipated the establishment of preparatory schools and, with them, the arrival of the children of laborers. In response, they used every possible resource to legally deter admitting those they perceived as less than desirable. Internal problems and conflicting agendas did not help the image of preparatory schools and instead affirmed the belief among federal authorities that European Americans, with support from Chinese and Chinese Americans, broke immigration law for monetary purposes. An article in the Seattle Times went so far as to assert such programs were smuggling rings run by “a syndicate of wealthy but unscrupulous Chinese and American citizens.”Footnote 117 Ultimately, the questionable nature of preparatory schools not only hurt their relationship with immigration officials but also speaks to the larger difficulties of balancing the promotion of international education with immigration regulations that targeted a specific nation.
Despite the disappearance of preparatory schools, Chinese students continued to be important to the debates surrounding American immigration restrictions and international education in the early twentieth century. Ironically, the number of Chinese college students increased after World War I, with affluent and well-connected families sending their sons and a small number of daughters to the US. For the most part, federal authorities encouraged such educational opportunities, such as the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, which they believed to be an important part of American colonial power. And, despite expressing positive attitudes, immigration authorities still closely monitored Chinese students throughout this period to ensure that they did not become laborers.Footnote 118
The tension between American immigration regulations and educational opportunities for Chinese and, by extension, all international students is an ongoing problem even today.
