At the end of January this year I went to the Art & History Museum in Brussels where I had the privilege to visit the archives of the Institut belge des hautes études chinoises and got access to copies of Chinese student dossiers. The dossiers in question were produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, around the time that the Boxer Indemnities scholarship program was formally established between China and Belgium.(1) The files are mostly forms filled in by Chinese students who were residing in Belgium at the time or had just arrived. The documents are either part of the application for the Boxer scholarship or part of registration upon arrival.
After carefully sorting the photo copies, I came to a unique total of 183 Chinese student dossiers. Even though the archival material does not cover all students in the 1930s, the collection of forms is still very informative for two main things:
1) The documents provide information on Chinese students who are poorly documented in my dataset, especially those who came to Belgium in the mid-1920s without any governmental papertrail and a few Chinese born into transnational families.
2) The forms capture the beginning stage of organizing the Boxer Indemnities scholarship program. Let me explain: Some of the questions that I care about in my research on Chinese student migration to Belgium are: What drives educational exchanges that cross borders? Who organizes them? Who moves to participate in them? And, what does it mean to participate in these exchanges, at the time and in the long run? The Sino-Belgian Boxer scholarship program is a good case to explore these questions, and what the forms in the archives can potentially offer is 1/giving clues about what the transnational organisations of the scholarship program assume and value in a Chinese candidate over the course of at least the first years (i.e. through the questions formulated in the form of different years) and 2/ providing data for analyzing the typical profile of who got accepted into the program and (more interesting) the profile of who didn't. Of course, the last potential area of using the material is uncertain because archives are still the remains of the past, they are not there to present the whole story, which means that there is no guarantee that these dossiers are complete or representative enough to enable a meaningful analysis without too much contextual skewing or distortion.
In sum, the visit of the Institut belge des hautes études chinoises has been very fruitful in terms of materials and ideas, and, I hope this post gives an idea about what my working process is like at the early stage of the project.
Thank you for taking the time and write you soon.
Nora
(1) I dedicate a post to this topic one day.