Educating China: Knowledge, Society, and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902-1937 by Peter Zarrow (review)

Peter Zarrow's Educating China explores the role of language, self-cultivation, history, and geography textbooks in the construction of civic consciousness in modern China. At a time of profound political instability, textbooks conveyed knowledge, skills, and norms that reflected and spread the values of the reformist intellectuals who frequently served as their authors and publishers. Most crucially, they offered narratives—ranging from brief moral fables to sweeping accounts of the Chinese past—that allowed readers to construct individual and collective identities as citizens of the Chinese nation-state. In this way, textbooks provide Zarrow with a fascinating and productive means through which to trace "the subtle interplay of ideas and social forces in the making of modern Chinese political culture" (6).

A brief introduction carefully demarcates the argumentative scope of Zarrow's otherwise expansive survey of late Qing, early republican, and Nationalist-era textbooks. Although the author devotes chapter 1 to legal and administrative changes to the modern Chinese school system, the book is not a history of pedagogical institutions; nor is it a study of "student culture," which Zarrow acknowledges was just as much a product of teachers, parents, and popular culture as it was the textbooks that made up the formal curriculum. Rather, Zarrow aims to read textbooks as a field of "textual and cultural production" (6), in order to better understand the animating themes of modern Chinese politics, particularly nationalism, citizenship, and social Darwinism. Textbooks that do not speak directly to these issues, such as science textbooks, are consequently neglected despite their increased prominence in Chinese classrooms.

The remaining chapters provide close readings of several genres of textbooks, divided by subject area. Chapter 2 focuses on language readers, which not only taught students to read and write but also conveyed political lessons. Zarrow notes that even as textbook authors sought to replace classical language and the Confucian values it communicated, Chinese language readers "did not sever the link between literature and morality" (47). Rather, literacy primers used stories to convey new values, from lessons on frugality and liberty to valorizations of physical labor.

The modern morals conveyed in reading primers were reinforced by specialized self-cultivation and civics textbooks, which constitute the focus of chapters 3 and 4. Zarrow argues convincingly that self-cultivation textbooks marked one of the primary avenues through which reformist intellectuals defined the boundaries of Chinese citizenship, often in ways that subtly challenged official orthodoxy. Just as late Qing morality textbooks began to emphasize patriotism over loyalty to the emperor, civics texts of the 1920s sought to equip students with the "citizenship knowledge" (公民知識 gongmin zhishi) necessary to reform China's political institutions (101). At the same time, Zarrow's analysis reveals that "the citizen as imagined in textbooks was not defined as an autonomous individual but as a member of the national community" (78), even before the conservative curriculum reforms undertaken by the Nationalist Party in 1932.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on history textbooks, which presented their subject less as a mirror on the idealized past and more as a model for how to build the nation moving forward. Late Qing texts retold the origin myth of the Yellow Emperor as a way of defining [End Page E-3] Chinese identity in racial and geographic terms. Nationalist-era textbooks recast the late imperial period as a story of resistance against foreign invaders, whether Mongol, Manchu, or Japanese, even as they continued to insist on the "unity of the five races" (189) within China. Zarrow's final chapter explores how the genre of geography textbooks heightened and reinforced themes of race and territorial integrity to strengthen calls for national unity.

Portions of the chapters on civics and history textbooks have appeared in previous edited volumes, and Zarrow's arguments here complement, rather than revise, earlier work by historians Robert Culp, Tze-ki Hon, and Wang Jianjun.¹ What, then, is the value of bringing all of this analysis...