Planting the Seeds for the Rural Revolution: Local Teachers' Schools and the Reemergence of Chinese Communism in the 1930s

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 135 PLANTING THE SEEDS FOR THE RURAL REVOLUTION: LOCAL TEACHERS’ SCHOOLS AND THE REEMERGENCE OF CHINESE COMMUNISM IN THE 1930S XIAOPING CONG, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON A remarkable success story, the Nationalist educational reforms of the Nanjing decade (1927–1937) provided numerous children and youths with the chance to attend modern schools. The special policy of the Nationalist (GMD) government on developing teachers’ schools expanded secondary education in rural areas, and the free-tuition policy of teachers’ schools attracted a huge number of village teenagers from families of relatively moderate means. The appearance of rural youths in modern educational institutions led to an increase in the numbers of pettyintellectuals ,1 who became a new force on the political stage of 1930s’ China. The emergence of this group redrew the political map in China and led to the reemergence of Chinese Communist ideals and organizations after their downturn in the Long March from 1934-5. This article examines the role of teachers’ schools in the Chinese Communist revolution of the 1930s in Hebei and Shandong. It shows a link between the Communist-led student movements of the 1930s and the village-based guerrilla warfare against Japanese invasion, a link that has been assumed but remains lightly documented and analyzed by previous studies of the anti-imperialist student movements . This article suggests that in the 1930s the Nationalist policy in developing local teachers’ schools2 extended secondary education into rural areas and that the This article is based on chapter six of my book Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Chinese Nation-State, 1897-1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007). I am very grateful that UBC Press has given me permission to publish it. In the process of writing this article I have received many invaluable comments from professors Liu Chang, Mary Kay Vaughan, Elizabeth Littell-Lamb, Meng Yue, Christopher A. Reed, Robert Culp, and many other colleagues. Two anonymous reviewers of this article also offered very helpful suggestions. I would like to express my gratitude to them here. 1 Under the educational circumstance in the 1930s, those who received only secondary education were regarded as “well-educated” or “intellectuals,” especially in rural areas. See David S. G. Goodman, Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China: The Taihang Base Area in the War of Resistance to Japan, 1937-1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 27. Although the term “petty-intellectual” might be considered Communist jargon, it serves well to differentiate this group of educated youth from those who received higher education and worked as professionals in an urban environment. 2 The term “local teachers’ schools” refers to those public educational institutions at the secondary level located in inland provincial capitals as well as in rural county seats and village towns. The April 2007 XIAOPING CONG 136 free-tuition policy of teachers’ schools attracted a large number of village teenagers from the families of moderate means. At the same time, the first generation of Communists took refuge in rural schools after 1927 and made local teachers’ schools the hotbed of rural revolution. These schools linked the Communist movement that originated in urban areas to the peasant revolution in the 1930s, paving the way for the resurgence of the Communist Party (CCP) during the Anti-Japanese War (19371945 ). The students in local teachers’ schools, with their rural backgrounds, became the key bridge in transforming revolutionary policy and nationalist ideology to the peasantry and the main force in organizing resistance. It was their work that laid the foundation for the CCP to win final victory in 1949. The article consists of four parts. The first part reviews existing scholarship on urban student movements and Communist mobilization of the masses in the 1930s, arguing that they are not sufficient to explain how an urban intellectual movement was transformed into a rural revolution. The second part documents educational development during the Nanjing Decade (1927-37) and the Nationalist government’s special policy on local teachers’ schools. The third part examines how local teachers’ schools opened educational opportunities to youth from less well-off rural families and became the chief way for them to advance socially. Given the particular circumstances of the...