Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China

It is hereby decided that starting in the fall of this year, all first- and second-year classes in lower primary schools (literally “citizens’ schools [國民學校 guomin xuexiao]”) should change first from using standard written Chinese (國文 guowen)¹ to the written vernacular (語體文 yutiwen) in hopes of obtaining the results of integrating the spoken and written languages.

—Ministry of Education decree, 12 January 1920²

The Ministry of Education’s 1920 declarations calling for introduction of vernacular language textbooks at the primary level are often cited as a threshold moment in the movement for vernacular language.³ In fact, educators and publishers responded to this decree with rapid publication of full sets of primary and secondary textbooks in a range of disciplines that used the syntax, styles, and lexicon of China’s emergent vernacular language. These textbooks, as we will see, contributed significantly to the spread and standardization of the written vernacular (白話 baihua). However, the project of creating and teaching China’s modern vernacular was more extended and decentralized than this state-centered account suggests, and textbooks played varied roles at different stages of this complex process.

In this article I explore three distinct ways in which primary and secondary textbooks contributed to the production and spread of baihua. First, I build on the impressive existing literature on lexical change in the nineteenth century to establish that between 1900 and 1920—that is, during the twenty years before the Ministry of Education’s pronouncement on the language of textbooks—textbook publishing helped to consolidate the modern vernacular vocabulary. ⁴ Popular readers and content textbooks of the 1900s and 1910s introduced and defined many of the elements of the compound modern vocabulary of loan words and return loan words from Japanese and European languages that became fundamental elements of China’s modern vernacular.

Second, I demonstrate that textbooks produced by the main commercial publishers during the 1920s and 1930s came to incorporate and spread to two generations of primary and secondary students New Culture forms of vernacular language. Because of the size of the national student body in comparison with other reading communities, incorporation of modern baihua into textbooks was a decisive step in making it a vernacular national language (國語 guoyu). New Culture movement-inspired baihua can be seen as a hybrid product that integrated late imperial styles of vernacular writing with ongoing lexical changes influenced by Europe and Japan and also stylistic and grammatical approaches based on both spoken language and European and Japanese models.⁵ During the 1920s and 1930s, when this language was still under construction, textbooks, which were variously written by publishers’ editorial staff, educators, and intellectuals, played a vital role in defining and disseminating baihua by providing large numbers of students with approved models of vernacular prose writing. In a preliminary effort to characterize these models, I differentiate between two registers of vernacular writing that textbooks offered students: colloquial baihua, which was based primarily on conventions of everyday speech; and professionalized baihua, which followed highly Europeanized, academic patterns of vocabulary and style.

Third, collection of vernacular fiction, poetry, and expository prose in secondary- level national language textbooks of the 1920s and 1930s contributed to marking certain authors and works as models of modern Chinese literature. As May Fourth intellectuals, such as Hu Shi (胡適 1891–1962) and Ye Shengtao (葉聖陶 1894–1988), drafted curricula or signed on with commercial publishers to compile vernacular language readers for secondary schools during the 1920s and 1930s, they included their own works and those of their colleagues. The result was that new literature advocates began to canonize those authors and works as representative examples of modern Chinese literature before or in step with the formal collection of May Fourth literature during the mid-1930s. Commercial textbook publishing thus provided a potent mechanism for proponents of the new literature to claim centrality and status for themselves and their works in ways similar to how literary scholar Michel Hockx describes different groups positioning themselves in the literary field through organization of societies and publication of journals.^6...