Educational Reform and Social Revolution: The Tide and the Wave

GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE 2 EDUCATIONAL REFORM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION: THE TIDE AND THE WAVE 1 The late Stephen C. Averill’s multi-vectored work on the Jinggangshan base area situates the Chinese Communist Revolution in distinctive ways. It captures the strange process by which privileged young intellectuals and down-country elites stumbled into muddy market towns in highland rural backwaters where they were forced by circumstances to try to survive in challenging new environs while engineering radical social change. His writing also transmits the stark revelation—as surprising, perhaps, to the Western scholar of China as to the revolutionaries themselves—that each of those market towns was a node in a complex system experiencing long-term processes of change. Through a focus on this encounter between the revolutionary and the dynamic communities of the highland periphery, topics that previously seemed only marginally relevant to the history of the revolution , such as local elite networks, the definition of ethnic communities, and lineage systems, now appear central to it. Moreover, “the revolution” now emerges as the final act in an epic drama whose beginning stretches back into the nineteenth century. In his later work, Averill concentrated on analyzing the role of one kind of social institution—schools and educational circles (jiaoyu jie)—in the revolutionary process. The articles gathered here in celebration of his life and work focus on educational reform and school-based revolutionary politics—themes and issues that were central to that intellectual interest. As a group, they address the important question of how the transition from the late-imperial civil-service examination to a modern school system conditioned and facilitated the Chinese Revolution. In doing so, they build on key insights in Averill’s work on educational reform during the late Qing and early Republic. On one hand, new schools, by their very presence, altered many aspects of the environments of local communities in which revolution was to occur. On the other, they provided organizational platforms for self-conscious projects of revolutionary action. The challenge for the scholar of modern Chinese education and revolution is to try to track at once the tidal movements of long-term socio-political transformation and the building wave of the Chinese Communist revolution. In combination, the essays in this issue are an experiment in bringing the two sides of this process—tide and wave—into a common frame. The articles by Steven B. Miles and Elizabeth VanderVen analyze two different dimensions of the longterm trajectories of educational change during the late Qing period. Miles demonstrates how locally prominent classical academies offered elites an institutional resource for status reproduction through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. VanderVen portrays late Qing modern schools as sites for negotiation over 1 I thank Christopher A. Reed and the editorial board of Twentieth-Century China for inviting me to edit this special issue. I am honored to have been given the responsibility. I also thank the contributors for their dedicated work on the articles that compose it. Finally, I am grateful to Sherman Cochran, Elizabeth Perry, and Christopher Reed for their comments on this introduction. Volume 32, No. 2 TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 3 new modes of social practice, such as modern forms of clock and calendrical time. The articles by Liyan Liu, Elizabeth J. Perry, and Xiaoping Cong offer three distinct examples of how schools of various kinds became lively centers of revolutionary politics from the 1910s through the 1930s. Stephen Averill’s own contribution to the special issue links the two sets of articles . His essay demonstrates how the end of the examination system and the introduction of modern schools into rural communities transformed the conditions of elite status reproduction and political engagement, even as those schools served to introduce new forms of culture and learning into local communities. He then analyzes how New Culture social activism and revolutionary politics in rural Jiangxi played out in the contentious institutional environment created through earlier cycles of reform. His article introduces a well-developed working hypothesis to explain how the rural schools formed in the late Qing became prime sites for revolutionary politics a generation later. Together, these articles, which discuss Guangdong in the far south and...