Returned Boxer Rebellion reparations paid for the founding of Tsinghua University
After foreign armies crushed the Boxer uprising, China owed the United States a US$30 million indemnity, which Secretary of State John Hay considered excessive. In 1909 Congress cut the bill by US$10.8 million on condition the money fund Chinese students in America. That fund built Tsinghua, which opened in 1911 as a preparatory school.
Theodore Roosevelt won congressional approval for the reduction after long talks with the Qing envoy Liang Cheng. Tsinghua College opened on 29 April 1911 on a former royal garden in northwest Beijing, preparing students for study in the United States. American science teachers were recruited through the YMCA, and graduates transferred straight into American colleges as third-year students. Its motto, Self-Discipline and Social Commitment, comes from a 1914 speech in which the scholar Liang Qichao quoted the I Ching on the ideal gentleman.
The school launched its own four-year degree in 1925 and became National Tsinghua University in 1928. When Japan invaded in 1937, it merged with Peking and Nankai universities, first in Changsha and then in Kunming, returning to Beijing after the war. In 1949 its president Mei Yiqi and many professors left for Taiwan, where they eventually founded a separate National Tsing Hua University. At home, the 1952 reorganisation along Soviet lines turned Tsinghua into an engineering-focused polytechnic, and in 1966 its researchers helped China move from vacuum-tube to fully transistorised computers.
The Cultural Revolution shut the campus entirely as students joined the Red Guards and teachers were persecuted; it resumed admissions only in 1978. From the 1980s it rebuilt a broad multidisciplinary university, adding law, economics, life sciences and humanities schools, and in 1998 it offered China's first master of laws programme in American law, jointly with Temple University.
Its alumni include Xi Jinping, who studied chemical engineering, Hu Jintao, a hydraulic engineering graduate, and physics Nobel laureate Yang Chen-Ning. In 2016 Steven Schwarzman endowed a scholars programme with almost US$400 million, bringing 100 to 200 international students a year for a funded master's degree. Among reforms launched in 2015, undergraduates must now show they can swim before graduating.
Source: Tsinghua University
