Observations on the Education of China by Zhu Yongxin (review)

The author of this volume is a major Chinese commentator on the educational situation of his country, as well as a leading advocate of reform. His list of titles includes deputy secretary of the standing committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, known by its bulky CPPCC initials; chairman of the China Association for Promoting Democracy (CAPD), a democratic party composed mainly of educators; vice president of the Chinese Society of Education (CSE); and professor at Suzhou University. In these capacities, Zhu travels endlessly around the PRC inspecting schools, interviewing teachers and administrators, attending conferences, and giving speeches. His book is actually a travelogue, obviously based on detailed diary entries, recounting his trips to struggling schools in distant rural areas where he advocates his ideas of educational reform as a panacea to their problems. Really, this volume is just as much about what a magnificent guy its author is as about how to fix China’s school system: we read dozens of times how its author got up before 7 a.m. to give a speech at 8, for example. Nonetheless, Zhu makes significant remarks about the current state of Chinese educational thinking, especially about the government’s support for private schools, even if it still hampers them in many ways.

Zhu’s narrative starts in 2000 with a trip to northern Shaanxi Province, the first of many remote places with underserved schools that he visits; others are in Gansu, Guizhou, Heilongjiang, and similarly suffering outposts. Each episode of school inspection by him and his CAPD colleagues includes exhaustive statistics on the history of the school; the number of students and how far away they live; the number of teachers and staff, plus their qualifications; the area of the school in square meters, including how much is classroom space; the size of the library; the budget and how it is allocated; and the local socioeconomic situation. It is clear from all this data that Zhu takes extensive notes, although he is no doubt furnished with official documents listing much of his information. Zhu tries to return to areas he has inspected after some years have elapsed, so many of his entries contain “revisited” appendixes telling of the progress these schools have made by taking his advice.

Schools are not the only places Zhu inspects, however; he also finds time to investigate local economic enterprises, as well as historic sites. One surprising one, given Zhu’s strident Party nationalism, is Stone Gateway in Yunnan Province, where in 1905 the English missionary Samuel Pollard built a church, school, and hospital for the Miao minority, who had always lived in servitude to the Yi minority and Chinese landowners. Pollard’s coeducational school set a precedent for girls’ education in China, and he encouraged the Miao to become literate to defend themselves from exploitation. He invented the first Miao written language to make them bilingual, and sent bright Miao students to study in cities; many returned to help their native area. Pollard became beloved of the Miao by living like one of them and enduring severe hardship until his death from typhoid in 1915. Zhu extols him as “a Bethune for the education sector of China and a Bethune for the Miao territory” (pp. 120–123). His conflation of a missionary with a Red Army doctor is revealing, mainly because it assumes that all foreigners who give their lives for China are serving the Party.

The most revealing thing about this book, however, is Zhu’s stance on private education as essential to educational reform and the overall development of the country. This lesson was absorbed some time ago by the Chinese government, but there have always been obstacles to growth in the private education sector, as documented by Jing Lin and Spring Su, both of whose books I have reviewed in this journal. Zhu is even more adamant about the need to...