Cost: A Key Factor Influencing Chinese Study Abroad in Japan and the United States, 1900–1937

Abstract: How did cost influence Chinese students’ patterns of study abroad in Japan and the United States between 1900 and 1937? Drawing on archival sources including student memoirs, institutional reports, and official funding records, this article estimates typical annual expenses and traces how these expenses affected both government-sponsored and privately funded students. While government policy and international relations were the most important factors shaping overseas study trends in the first two decades of the twentieth century, declining government support and rising costs made financial considerations increasingly decisive in the 1920s and 1930s. Students studying in the United States received far more government support than those in Japan. The article analyzes the socioeconomic backgrounds of privately funded students to demonstrate that by the 1920s and 1930s only the wealthiest classes of Chinese society could fund study abroad without government support. This study shows cost to have been a critical and previously underappreciated factor in the dynamics of China’s overseas education movement in the early twentieth century.