“Possibilities” explores contingency in history by following Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino athletes and physical educators on their parallel journeys to Springfield College in the 1920s. Over the course of the decade, some of the leading figures in athletics from the Philippines and China, such as Regino Ylanan and John Mo, studied at the famous center for physical education research in the United States. When they returned to their respective home countries, they moved into positions of power and influence in their respective fields, serving at leading universities and publishing articles and monographs on athletics and kinesiology. They also continued to engage with the Far Eastern Championship Games, serving as coaches and organizers. This chapter shows how Filipino and Chinese educators sought to expand their expertise and help lead their respective nations toward a more prosperous future. In so doing, it hints at the possibility that existed for deeper and longer-lasting collaborations between people from the two polities. This chapter heightens the drama of the final chapter, which traces the moment when many Springfield Alumni gathered in Manila in 1934 to coach teams for the tenth and final Far Eastern Championship Games and to decide the fate of future competitions.

“Seeking Salvation and a Chinese Nation” follows similar themes as the previous chapter, tracing parallel efforts by Chinese in the Philippines to invest in and protect the Chinese nation. Shifting to equally prominent community leaders and China Banking Corporation founders Albino Z. Sycip and Guillermo Cu Unjieng, as well as another outside ally, Filipino politician Manuel L. Quezon, this chapter explores how these prominent individuals used their connections to influence Chinese politics and expand their business opportunities. Wealthy Chinese from the Philippines created and expanded fictive families, building a network of support that they could call on in times of need. Manuel Quezon, a leading Filipino politician, working with Chinese allies in the Philippines, met with the leading political figure in Republican China, Chiang Kai-shek, which lent him a type of legitimacy as a spokesperson for his still colonized country. This chapter concludes by examining how the national exigency of Japan’s invasion led the founders of the China Banking Corporation to place concomitant efforts to construct Hokkien nationalism on hold and work toward greater Chinese liberation.

“Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese” situates the sojourning communities in their respective cities. This chapter highlights the precarious but important position Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai found themselves in, contrasting their lives with those of privileged colonizers, like the British, French, and Japanese in Shanghai; sub-imperial agents, like Sikh and Vietnamese police across the British and French Empires; and Asian settler colonists, like Japanese and Chinese migrants in Hawai’i. The first section explores Filipino contributions to the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, comparing their willingness to defend the city with Chinese participation in Philippine revolutionary moments. The second section follows the steamships that linked the two cities and sojourning communities to explore how Chinese people supported one another and navigated exclusionist policies to establish themselves in Manila. Both sections dive into the demographics of the communities, examining how skewed gender ratios and mixed marriages impacted families and individuals. This chapter pioneers the bilateral model that centers Chinese and Filipino actors in the history of Asia that ensuing chapters adopt.

“Achieving Modernity by Studying the Philippines” follows Chinese educators who conducted study tours of the Philippines to learn and borrow from Philippine advancements in education. High-profile Chinese educators who commented on the Philippine system, like Huang Yanpei, Kuo Ping-Wen, and Cai Yuanpei, praised girls’ education, physical education, and vocational education – all areas in which the Philippines excelled. The Chinese fact-finding tours also established many long-lasting relationships as educators from the Philippines, like Gan Bun Cho and Camilo Osias, conducted reciprocal tours of China to support Huang Yanpei’s educational endeavors. After establishing the depth and significance of Sino–Philippine educational exchanges, this chapter argues for a new historiographical understanding of Chinese borrowing in the early twentieth century. It argues that Chinese people viewed the Philippines as a model of modernity not just worthy but demanding of attention. Pivoting to the next chapter, it also argues that, while wealthier people or those with access to scholarships from China began sending their children to the United States instead of Europe after World War I, less-connected Chinese families began sending their children to the Philippines to study instead of Japan after this same crucial turning point.

The introduction leverages the insights and interventions of world, global, and transnational histories to bring a rich world of interaction between China and the Philippines in the early twentieth century to life. After overviewing the layered connections that formed the Sino–Philippine link, which is the subject of the book, the introduction turns toward methodological approaches that best expose and explore the depths of those connections. It starts this endeavor by highlighting some limitations of world, global, and transnational history, such as their tendency to be prescriptive rather than responsive, their tendency to privilege actors and institutions from the Global North, and the high cost of entry for new scholars to the field. It argues that, while these limitations are important to recognize, transnational, global, and world histories still have much to offer if they can become more accessible, flexible, and representative. Finally, the introduction outlines the approach of the book, which adopts an interdisciplinary, decolonial, connected approach to world history that pays attention to disintegration as well as creation, implements selective silences, centers cultural and discursive flows between peoples of the Global South, and explores unencumbered articulations of race, modernity, and gender.