Secondary Source

“The Chinese Educational Mission (1872–1881) . . . was the first international education program in the US, and many of its participants went on to spearhead major aspects of China’s industrial and financial modernization and foreign relations with the US. American missionaries and higher education leaders viewed educating the Chinese as a benevolent, cheap, and effective way to exert US influence in China, an approach that the Department of State began coopting in the 1930s. Contradicting the racism of Chinese exclusion (1882–1943), Chinese students were welcomed and recruited to university and college campuses, enjoying dedicated scholarships and the support of foreign student services seeking to ensure they had positive experiences in the US to bring back to influence fellow Chinese. When the Institute for International Education started tracking foreign students in 1923, Chinese were always among the top three most numerous international student populations, and they remain the largest group today.”

- Madeline Y. Hsu, Historian, “How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority,” 2023