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2. Teaching Revolution: The Strike of 1922
- University of California Press
- Chapter
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46 Despite an accumulation of excellent scholarship on the Chinese Communist revolution, we are still hard-pressed to offer a compelling answer to a question that goes to the heart of explaining the revolution’s success: How did the intellectuals who founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manage to cultivate a large and loyal following among illiterate and impoverished peasants and workers, a stratum of the populace so distant from themselves? One might ask a similar question of many revolutions, of course, in light of the leadership role that intellectuals have typically played in nationalist and Communist movements around the world.1 It seems especially perplexing in the case of China, however, where Confucian precepts had long fostered a stark distinction between mental and manual labor. The superior status of the literati, celebrated in Mencius’s dictum that “those who labor with their brains rule over those who labor with their brawn,” contributed to a huge social and political distance between the “cultured” and “uncultured.” Moreover, although the iconoclastic New Culture Movement of the early twentieth century inspired many progressive Chinese intellectuals, Mao Zedong among them, to repudiate Confucianism in favor first of anarchism and then of Marxism-Leninism, among ordinary workers and peasants these radical new ideas had made few inroads. Nationalism (as opposed to xenophobia) was also initially an ideology largely confined to the educated elite.2 For most Chinese, both the nation-state and the social classes that supposedly comprised it were still unfamiliar concepts. As we saw in the case of the failed Ping-Liu-Li Uprising (chapter 1), an alliance between would-be revolutionaries and their purported followers was far from a foregone conclusion. Fertile ground as Anyuan 2 Teaching Revolution The Strike of 1922 Teaching Revolution / 47 was for collective protest, preexisting solidarities and mentalities were not easily converted to alternative political purposes. Furthermore, the Communists were determined from the start to introduce new modes of grassroots organization. The founding resolution of the Chinese Communist Party, adopted in Shanghai in July 1921, began as follows: “The basic mission of this party is to establish industrial unions.”3 The resolution went on to explain the means by which this mission was to be accomplished, stressing the key role of education: “Because workers’ schools are a stage in the process of organizing industrial unions, these sorts of schools must be established in every industrial sector. . . . The main task of the workers’ schools is to raise workers’ consciousness, so that they recognize the need to establish a union.”4 In emphasizing proletarian education, CCP policy drew both upon the precedent of the Russian Revolution (where schooling for workers was an element of Bolshevik strategy) and upon contemporary experiments within China.5 At the time, Y.C. James Yen’s Mass Education Movement, Huang Yanpei’s Vocational Education Campaign, and Liang Shumin’s Rural Reconstruction Movement were part of a growing number of highpro file initiatives, intended to foster popular literacy and provide practical training, which had captured the imaginations of many concerned young Chinese intellectuals, including a number of future Communists.6 Equally significant for the ultimate success of the Chinese Communists’ pedagogical effort was the central place that education had long occupied in Chinese popular and political culture. A belief in the educability of all human beings, and an attendant obligation on the part of the intelligentsia to provide moral instruction to those with less education, were deeply ingrained precepts of both ancient and modern Chinese thought.7 In the late imperial period, the civil service examination system, which rewarded outstanding scholars with official government position as well as responsibility for the moral cultivation of those living under their rule, was the institutionalized expression of this philosophy.8 Seen as the surest path to political and economic success for families who could afford it, education for centuries had been highly prized as a means of upward mobility.9 In this particular context, “teaching revolution” would prove to be an unusually persuasive mode of popular mobilization. When Communist study groups first formed in Beijing and Shanghai in the wake of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, their members dedicated themselves to the project of educating workers. More than a year before the formal founding of the CCP in July of 1921, Communist students from Beijing had already established a school for workers at Changxindian, a 48 / Teaching Revolution terminus along the Jing-Han Railway. Within a few months, the railroad worker-students organized a labor union...