The LMRG Visiting Predoctoral Fellow Sally Chengji Xing presents her paper "Teaching Applied Sciences or Research Pure Sciences?" which studies the contested debates, conversations, and dialogues that occurred in Beijing surrounding the establishment of the China Foundation in 1924, a non-governmental organization that administered the second American remission of Boxer Indemnity funds to China. It revisits the robust debate within the China Foundation back in 1924, by Paul Monroe and Roger Sherman Greene, about whether to sponsor “pure” or “applied” science for the sake of China’s modernization. In so doing, it demonstrates how and why Paul Monroe’s ideas, though being very predominant and influential at the time, were consequently challenged and did not become endorsed in the funding priorities of the China Foundation. Following that, the speaker proposes a follow-up research agenda to examine the grounds shared between Indian and Chinese scientists in the early half of the twentieth century, when they endeavored to do pioneering research in science, but only applied sciences were the agendas expected from them.