In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The New Learning and Coming of Age 7 N THE MEANTIME, changes and confrontations were also occurring in China. The death in 1917 of President Yuan Shih-kai, at the head of a Republic in a country uneasily united, was the overture to a new period ofdisruption in which warlordism overtook China. It also brought an intellectual revolution whose aim was to make the final break with the forms of China's past; its roots were in the new patterns of education which had discarded the traditional syllabuses and examinations; its creed was the total acceptance of the Western forms of scientific method, expressed in a whole arsenal of published translations of Western scientific argumentation and conclusions. In parallel appeared a mass oftranslations ofother forms ofWestern writings. Wenli, the old formal language assigned to the writing of literary, historical, and philosophical works, was deficient and inappropriate for this purpose. Among the most active exponents of the New Learning in the National University of Peking in Igl 7-19 were the leaders of a literary reform movement seeking to substitute, for the ancient forms of writing used as the literary vehicle by the old-style Hanlin scholars, a plain speech or PaihuaJ and to replace all the vernacular tongues found through China with a common national tongue, the form of Mandarin called Kuoyii. At their head were Hu Shih, who became one of the University's firmest friends when it was forming and staffing its new department of Chinese and developing Chinese studies over the next decade!, and Ch'ien Hsiian-t'ung and Dean Ch'en Tu-hsiu, who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 192 I . New developments were taking place also in China's university system. In 1917 the Japanese-pattern preparatory course of three years followed by three of university was reduced, and the basic university curriculum increased by one year to permit a reorganization, into a college plan of the American four-year 1 An honorary degree was conferred on him in 1935. The New Learning and Coming ofAge liberal arts type. The new college plan permitted the introduction of a general educational system cast in the American mould: that is, six years of elementary school followed by three each in junior and senior middle or high schools. This entailed a lengthening of the shortened preparatory course again, with the final effect of raising the level of the whole university edifice by one year; and at the same time an extra year was added to the law and medical curricula. The American unit-credit system was also adopted. The first of the universities to introduce the new usage was StJohn's University at Shanghai, the oldest of the missionary institutions, empowered in 1906 to grant degrees by legislation enacted in Washington, D.C. The same set of regulations that laid down the new pattern also provided that an institution might call itself a university only when it embraced two or more ofsix branches of learning: literature, science, law, commerce, agriculture, engIneenng. The National University of Peking remained until 1921 the sole national institution ofuniversity level, and was still very small. Women had been admitted to it for the first time in 1920, one year ahead of the University of Hong Kong. By 1925, its colleges of law and engineering having been transferred earlier to amalgamate in the Peiyang University at Tientsin, it had still no more than 300 students enrolled. Other than the national University of Peking there had been only the private universities, such as StJohn's, Shanghai University, Nankai at Tientsin, Tsinghua and Yenching at Peking, West China Union at Chengtu, and Lingnan at Canton. The second National University was formed in 1921 out of the former Nanking Teachers' College as the national South-eastern University, later called the National Central University; this was followed by the University of Kwangtung which Dr Sun Yat-sen established at Canton in 19241, later re-named the National Sun Yat-sen University and its name later still changed to Chungshan University; and the status of the Higher Normal School of Wuchang was raised to a National University of Wuchang, a name later changed to the National Wuhan University. Many ofthese institutions were later to give refuge to Hong Kong's own university students in their exile during the Japanese Occupation; and it was from among the refugee professors of these and other universities that the post-secondary colleges in Hong Kong drew their staff in the 1950s...

Share