SI
A visiting lectureships, and similar arrangements were more partial in their effect and would not achieve the continuous intimacy of a university. scheme of scholarships for Chinese students to United Kingdom universities would, if intended for undergraduates, expose them to too completely an alien atmosphere before they could fully understand or profit from it. ever valuable some of such developments might be as complementary to a university at Hong Kong they were not substitutes for it.
How-
13. Since this purpose had been proclaimed as one of the original aims of the existing Hong Kong University, the Committee inquired to what extent it had served it and whether its experience disclosed reasons for its
The University has contributed use- inability to do so more completely. fully to Anglo-Chinese relations; in the period 1928-38, approximately 30 per cent. of its students came from China; the standard of its profession- al training, particularly of doctors, teachers of English, and engineers,
Nevertheless the Committee, on the evidence was highly respected in China. before it, concluded that it had not succeeded in its broad purpose for three main reasons its poverty, its isolation and competition from
The Committee in analysing these features of the Chinese universities. past, tried to assess how far they would prevent the fulfilment of the broad purpose in the future.
14.
Without doubt the inadequate financing of the University was the
It experienced a succession of financial chief cause of its weakness. crises, could not plan boldly for its long-term and balanced development,
With a staff over-burdened with teaching and was chronically understaffed. duties and with insufficient resources, it could not become a centre of research, worthily representing university standards and attracting students
In its poverty, it could not and scholars to it as a centre of learning. provide a system of scholarships to enable students from China to come to Hong Kong or to meet the higher costs of living inevitably involved in its
Apart from an endowment contribution in being part of a different economy. its earliest days from Canton and for a short time scholarships from certain other Provinces of China nearly the full burden of financial support fell on
At the instance of the British Government the local government resources. University received £260,000 out of the Boxer Indemnity Fund and partial endowment of three medical chairs from the Rockefeller Foundation, these two together making almost the whole of its capital endowment. authorities of the territories from which nearly two-thirds of its students
It is clearly wrong to attempt cam contributed no grants for its support.
The
to achieve an Imperial purpose and leave the full financial responsibility to one small Colony. If the University is to serve as an instrument for
The mutual understanding between the British and Chinese peoples, the major part of the financial responsibility must fall on Imperial funds. Colonial revenues, especially in this period of the rehabilitation of Hong Kong, are even less appropriate now than before the war as the source of support for a University which would only indirectly serve some of its needs. A university fulfilling the broad purpose envisaged by the Commi1! would be serving the interests of the Commonwealth and not merely the Uniteu Kingdom; the Committee hopes therefore that consideration, in due course, may be given to the possibility of enlisting financial help from the Dominions as well as from Great Britain.
It was,
15. The University suffered from isolation in various ways. (a) Chinese nationalist feeling reached full tide at the time of the "Second Revolution", i.e. the collapse of the reactionary "war-lords" and the establishment of the new central regime in Nanking under the auspices of the Kuomintang.
in essence, an inevitable movement of insurgen against the accumulated humiliations and restrictions which had marked
The establishment of China's international relations in the preceding era. the Nanking regime was in itself the first step towards more normal con- ditions, and the process received an immediate and momentous encouragement in H.M.G.'s declaration, in December, 1926, of confidence in and sympathy
Since then with the new regime and the national aspirations it expressed. the shackles and anomalies associated with the epoch of the "unequal
The Committee would not venture treaties" have been gradually cleared away.
to prophesy how Chinese feeling towards us and other countries may develop But at last it can be mid Mis fateful century. luring the remainder oˆ