Educational Reform and the Paradigm of State-Society Conflict in Republican China

Educational Reform and the Paradigm of StateSociety Conflict in Republican China by Thomas D. Curran For a number of years scholars have striven to develop an understanding of political change in Republican China that focuses upon the efforts of contenders for supreme power to expand their control over the growing public sphere of political action that emerged during the late imperial period. Serious attention has been directed toward the general problem of state-building since at least the mid1970s ,land much interest was generated recently by the publication of Prasenjit Duara's prize-winning book, Culture, Power, and the State, in which Duara argues that first the Qing and then the regimes of Yuan Shikai, the warlords and the Nationalists launched processes of state-building that involved the extension of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state more deeply into the local environment than ever before.2 Another recent addition to the dialogue is an essay in the Journal ofAsian Studies in which John Fitzgerald claims that the best way to understand the failure of Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Revolution of the 1920s is to view the movement as a state-building project that ran afoul of China's diverse sectional interests. Sun Yat-sen's revolution was, he argues, a "political revolution to create a united and sovereign Chinese nationII based upon an ideology that authorized the state, as the political embodiment of the national will, to rise above society and subordinate the interests of its component parts on behalf ~f the greater good of the nation as a whole.3 An important by-product of the effort to study the interaction between centralizing state-builders and local communities has been an enhanced appreciation for the many dimensions upon which such interaction took place. Duara in his study of north Chinese villages under Japanese occupation highlights the diversity of local organizational systems (e.g., markets, lineages, crop watching networks, religious and charitable associations, patron-client networks, etc.) that shaped the exercise of power in the Chinese countryside, and he attributes the apparent cohesion of traditional Chinese society to the role that Chinese culture itself played in integrating its multifarious components.4 As Lloyd Eastman has pointed out, Duara's "cultural nexus" is an elusive concept which may not be able to bear the load Duara has given it.s Yet, Duara's intention was apparently to counter the "moral economy" interpretation of rural society that he and others claim exaggerates the clos¢ or corporate character of peasant communities. To do so he 'has demonstrated that the villages he studied were integrated into a total social system that makes village autarky unlikely; and his assertion that there were "myriad organizational and interpersonal ties" that reached beyond the borders of single communities, linking villagers and villages to outsiders, is both a welcome contribution to the debate on the supposedly communal nature of rural society and a reminder that to ignore the complexity of rural economic, social and political systems is to misunderstand the richness and diversity of peasant life.6 Others who have studied the impact of statebuilding on local political systems have been led to acknowledge the complexity of Chinese social systems. From the perspective of politics under the Nationalist regime, Bradley Geisert has argued that the most accurate representation of Chinese politics is a pluralistic model which acknowledges both the presence of multiple "decision-making nodes" within the regime and a general lack of cohesion among the many interest groups with whom the state had to deal.? Similarly, Vivienne Shue in her study of state-society relations in contemporary China describes a socio-political structure that is characterized by a more or less perpetual state of tension between diverse groups joined by a complex matrix of relationships for which she has coined the term "social intertexture. ,,8 Duara, Geisert, and Shue are all concerned with the issue of state-building and the degree to which the emerging state attempted to penetrate traditional socio-political systems. They are responding to a paradigm of interpretation that views the state as an organism that seeks to grow at the expense of local communities by seizing for itself a measure of influence over...