Overseas students, ideology, and the fall of dynastic China

This paper examines the catalysis of an epochal institutional change by the contributions of a foreign-educated elite, effectively ending dynastic China. We show how the Qing government’s attempt to build a modern nation-state by sending the country’s best talent to study in Japan inadvertently heightened the students’ nationalist desire for social and political changes, culminating in the fall of the Qing dynasty. Specifically, each additional overseas student in a county led to significantly greater participation in political parties by the people of that county (41.5%), greater representation of its elite in the provincial assembly (11.4%), and a greater likelihood of that county declaring independence (11.5%) during the 1911 Revolution. To identify causality, we leverage the influence of the network of Zhang Zhidong – the father of overseas study – on the spatial variation of overseas students from each county. To ensure that the networks thus formed are plausibly exogenous, we exploit pre-existing connections – specifically those that Zhang formed with local officials before their randomized (re-)appointment to a (different) county – and the instrumented results hold. Last, we show that schools and newspapers were the primary channels through which the people were mobilized.