The Cultural Politics of Local Education in Early Twentieth-Century China

STEPHEN C. AVERILL 4 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF LOCAL EDUCATION IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA STEPHEN C. AVERILL, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY The tight connection between Confucian learning, government service, and social standing fostered and reinforced by China’s imperial order meant that the abolition of this order early in the twentieth century profoundly affected educational attitudes and institutions. It also transformed China’s political, social, and cultural landscape generally. Some of these effects, such as the evolution of formal educational institutions , the incubation of innovative cultural attitudes and activities in the nation’s modern schools, and their intimate interaction with the New Culture and May Fourth movements of the 1910s and 1920s, have been well studied. However, other important aspects and implications of the educational transition from empire to republic either are much less well known or are misunderstood. One relatively unexplored topic is the impact of abolition of the examination system and its replacement by a new network of Western-influenced schools on the cultural politics of the late Qing reforms. A related question is how late Qing educationrelated cultural and political conflicts affected the later and better-known New Culture-May Fourth era struggles. A common assumption is that the deeply iconoclastic New Culture and May Fourth movements, and the school-centered activities so closely associated with them, were largely de novo creations of the late 1910s and 1920s. But this perspective fails to recognize the existence and subsequent impact of an earlier wave of school-centered cultural conflict surrounding the introduction and expansion of the late Qing school system, some aspects of which are captured in this symposium’s papers by Steven B. Miles and Elizabeth VanderVen. The focus on the urban iconoclasm of the May Fourth era has also led to the relative neglect of research on the social, cultural, and political impact of educational change (both before and especially after 1919) on the lives of hundreds of thousands of rural elites in what was still an overwhelmingly agrarian society. With these issues in mind, this article explores aspects of the cultural politics of China’s post-civil service examination educational system as it evolved during the first third of the twentieth century. The first half of the essay examines aspects of the introduction and early evolution of the new school system during the last decade of Qing rule to demonstrate both the resilience of the examination system and the Qin Shao and Robert Culp edited the final version of this essay, which had to be shortened somewhat from its original form. We have tried, as much as possible, to leave the original prose and argument intact. We apologize for any errors or inconsistencies that might have resulted from the editing process. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for Twentieth-Century China, who provided valuable suggestions for polishing the final version of this essay. We also acknowledge Christopher A. Reed for his commitment to including Steve’s voice in this issue dedicated to commemorating his work. Volume 32, No. 2 TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 5 concrete impact of new schools on the reconfiguration of social groups and cultural models. It emphasizes the often-divergent aims and expectations regarding the new system that were held by the Qing court, reformist elites, and other groups, and highlights the challenges and compromises in the process of educational reform. It focuses on the struggle of the literate elites, including those in rural China, who had been deeply enmeshed in and partly defined by the civil service examination system, to adapt to the new system and reinvent themselves in part through the use of educational institutions. The intense politicization of the new “educational circles (教育界 jiaoyu jie)” in the late Qing, as indicated by widespread student protest and informal organizational activity, represented an organic growth of political activism from the transition in the school system and student identity. This part of the essay thus illustrates that broader patterns of social change and political conflict brought about by the introduction of the new system—characterized by campus unrest, cultural debates, associational development, critical publications, and political participation—were already underway before the May Fourth era began. The second half of the essay shifts chronologically...