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The imperial government's focus on education for the purpose of training servants of the state left a vacuum that was swiftly filled by the private efforts of the Jiangnan elite. Zhang Baixi declared that the Imperial University needed to have a vibrant translation bureau. Many of the officials Zhang hired and upon whom he relied for advice—Shen Zhaozhi, Li Xisheng, Zhang Heling, Zeng Guangquan, and Zhao Congfan—were closely aligned with Wang Kangnian, one of the leading reformers of 1898. The transitional character of the university's culture is addressed. The Qing government faced a delicate and challenging situation—a large-scale, patriotic, and highly emotional student movement spreading across the country, in direct violation of the state's ban on student interference in politics. Zhang Zhidong's reorganization and domestication of the university is then discussed. It was Zhang had secured a grant of two million taels that permitted its further development.

Western learning is an omnibus term, used to refer to academic subjects studied in Europe, the United States, and, more recently, Japan. Sun Jia'nai implied that educational reform itself required a reorganization of China's approach to systems of knowledge. In his plan, it was understood that the university would be oriented toward the production of talent for official use and that its students would go to work for the government upon graduation. Liang Qichao proposed that Chinese and Western learning be stressed equally and that Western learning be a portion of what the Imperial University students study, but not the whole. Liang's plan suggested the prospect of a new conceptualization of modernity, one that differed from the dominant Western model then sweeping the globe. The politics and the opening of the Jingshi daxuetang are elaborated. Conservative officials still managed to find fault with the Jingshi daxuetang.

This chapter discusses how the Japanese viewed the outside world after the victory of America and its allies in World War I. It reports that the war “to make the world safe for democracy” had toppled the autocratic regimes such as imperial Germany, which Meiji leaders had sought as models, and had thrust the United States to the front of the world stage. The chapter points out that America had become a cultural, economic, and diplomatic force which had to be reckoned with as never before, and notes that it was no accident that in 1918, the year the war ended, the first professorial chair in American studies was established at Tokyo Imperial University. It observes that although naive notions of America as a republic of virtue had faded, the political values associated with American democracy—individualism, equality, freedom, public debate, and fair play—still attracted intellectuals across a wide spectrum.

This chapter examines the formation and development of Japanese universities in the nineteenth century and their role in the creation of a national literature. It also analyzes the novel, Sanshirō (1908), by Natsume Sōseki, who was one of Japan's earliest novelists who studied at the Tokyo Imperial University, the setting of the novel. Sanshirō serves as an analysis of the historical necessity for national literature to thrive during a time of rapid modernization. The chapter argues that one of the characters of the novel, Professor Hirota, embodies the futility of pursuing Western scholarship in the Japanese language, and that this futility is imposed by the historical dynamics of modernity, manifesting itself in the linguistic asymmetry. What Sōseki avoided was repeating the ideas of Western teachers in Japanese, thus acting as a mere conduit to Japanese nationalism.