Foreign Ink: Student Mobility, Overseas Training and Chinese Geography, 1912–1952

During China’s Republican period Chinese students, supported by public and private scholarships, gathered at the University of Liverpool and Clark University for geographical training. Upon their return these students revolutionized traditional Chinese geography with the introduction of regional geography and fieldwork. The returning students and ‘native geographers’ – who had very limited professional overseas training – split into factions that competed for control of the Geographic Society of China and other resources. However, the Chinese Communist regime’s programme of thought reform changed the trajectory of these returning geographers, resulting in the decline of human geography and the rise of historical geography. The story of these returning Chinese students is valuable for understanding the modernization of geography as a discipline in China and academic mobility as both an intellectual venture and a lived experience.