The Datong Schools and Late Qing Sino-Japanese Cooperation

Abstract

The Chinese reformers who fled their country following the 1898 reforms turned to a number of new transnational strategies of education and propaganda once they arrived in Japan. This article analyzes the Datong Schools, a system of institutions created by Chinese reformers as the first step in a planned international network for education, and shows that early Asianist cooperation among the educated elites of China and Japan played an important role in this segment of China’s modernization just a few years after the First Sino-Japanese War. In a time of intense competition, these elites engaged in cooperation for nationalist, regionalist, religious, and strategic reasons, exerting within a short historical window a nonetheless enduring influence on China’s revolution and modernization.