Chinese engineering students in Japan:
The elucidation of a connection between the past and the future
of Asia
XU Subin
It is my very pleasure and great honor to receive the 18th
Academic Research Fund from the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Foundation.
I will say gratitude deeply.
As I began my history research in graduate school, I was a graduate in engineering
(architecture). I obtained my doctor's degree by doing a comparative research
of architectural history in Japan and China. Shortly after that, I was given
the opportunity to continue my research at the Institute of Industrial Science
in the University of Tokyo as a research fellow of the Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science, as well as in the QingHua University (China), the Oriental
Cultural Studies Center of the University of Tokyo and the International Research
Center for Japanese Studies.
The "Ten thousand foreign students acceptance plan" which the Ministry
of Culture and Science of Japan has been promoting, has achieved its target last
year, that is 20 years after its enforcement. Chinese foreign students represent
70 percent of these foreign students, which accounts for 70,814 persons. This
figure has come to exceed that of the 64,757 Chinese students studying in the
U.S.A. Moreover, studying abroad has become more and more popular in China and
it is predicted that the number of candidates to Japan will also increase.
Of course, Chinese students have not started studying abroad only in recent
years, and many youths were studying in Japan already in pre-war days. Although
such
conditions have achieved fixed success in the research of the history of Japan-China
exchanges, research focusing on engineering students studying abroad has so far
remained unprecedented.
On the other hand, Chinese students who studied in Japan before 1945 were widely
covering engineering domains such as railroad, machinery, engineering works,
architecture, applied chemistry or cotton spinning. They therefore played an
important role in the construction of modern China. This research aims at performing
a historical evaluation, through interviews of those persons concerned as well
as the collection of bibliographical research and documents. Moreover, being
myself in the position of a foreign engineering student in Japan, I share with
my fellow engineering students the great task of choosing directions for life
while learning about engineering technology in Japan. This research will thus
be an attempt to discover and reveal the future through the research of engineering
students in pre-war days. |
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