Special guests recall ancestors

TANG Shaoming, great-grandnephew of Tang Guo’an and former executive vice president of the National Library of China; and Liang Zanxun, a grandson of Liang Puzhao and former secretary general of the China Aviation Industry Corp Science & Technology Commission, were special guests.
As one of the 120 CEM students, Tang Guo’an became a major overseas education initiator in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China. In 1907, US President Theodore Roosevelt adopted a resolution remitting to China much of the American Share of the Boxer Indemnity in the form of scholarships for Chinese students. Tang sent 180 students to study in the US under the project in three detachments and founded Tsinghua School for students-to-study-in-US training.
“Tang Guo’an was not only a man of action who made great contribution to initiating overseas study under the Boxer Indemnity project, he was also a thinker who gave running comments and made speeches,” Tang Shaoming explained. In the first ten years of the 20th century, Tang Guo’an was the editorial writer of three English newspapers in Shanghai, having impressed his readers with his viewpoints of cultivating new people who were able to remodel the society and save China, in the spirit of the situation and for future of the nation.
Tang’s attitude toward western education is to learn, respect, blend into and coexist. It is also an essential principle he had followed in viewing and treating the relationship between Chinese and western cultures, Tang Shaoming explained. It is no doubt the foundation of Chinese overseas education, he had said.
A Chinese overseas student must bring a fusion agent when stepping upon the land abroad. “It is tolerance, or compatibility,” Liang Zanxun said. He came to the symposium with nothing but an ear for continuity of spirit.
Liang Puzhao studied with other returned students at a Kaiping Coal Mine school upon being summoned back. He later became a mining and metallurgy engineer and then a shipment manager at Jardine, Matheson ＆ Co Ltd.
Liang Zanxun graduated from the Central University Aviation Department -- the earliest of its kind in China. Like his forefathers, he rendered industrial patriotic concepts. He asserted the spiritual heritage of CEM students as “pioneering, patriotic, practical and tolerant,” thus leaving priceless legacies of the CEM students.
The Chinese students had to confront an alien environment, different language, ways of thinking and modes of expression in a foreign country.
They had to “live in Rome as the Romans do.” This required tolerance and adaptation to a different culture and social life, Liang said.
The students had to be open-minded to learning, selective about the merits of different cultures and advanced science and technology while carrying on their own Chinese cultural heritage. They eventually had to be innovative and productive in their own ways. The spirit of tolerance accompanied them throughout their life abroad, Liang commented.