This dataset is derived from the Whoʻs Who of American Returned Students 遊美同學錄 [Youmei Tongxue Lu] published in Peking [Beijing] in 1917, compiled by the Returned Students’ Information Bureau (Liumei xuesheng tongxunchu 留美學生通訊處) established at Tsinghua School in 1915. This book is crucial for documenting the early liumei's experiences during the transitional period between the late Qing dynasty and the early years of the Republic (1911-). The dataset records all the institutions to which the students were affiliated in the course of their lives, including the educational institutions in which they studied in China, the United States, and other countries; the public or private organizations in which they were employed; as well as their memberships in clubs and associations. The names of organizations were retrieved automatically using named entity recognition (SpaCy model), then manually cleaned, classified, and validated by the author. The attached file contains three tabs for (1) the list of affiliations (data), (2) the classification of institutions (class); (3) the description of variables (key). The dataset records a total of 3,431 affiliations, linking 401 unique individuals to 1,305 unique institutions, distributed as followed: category_main n education 535 association 255 media 108 administration 92 business 85 facility 47 executive 43 railway 39 production 33 banking 15 other 15 event 13 military 13 judiciary 8 legislative 4

This research has been funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (Project n° RG004-U-21).