China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Robert J. Culp, Cornell University
Discussant: Paul J. Bailey, University of Edinburgh
From the earliest attempts at nation-building during the late Qing, education has been seen as a central mechanism for constructing national identities, producing new citizens, and renovating Chinese society. Thinkers with wildly different ideological agendas have all seized upon schools as central institutions for experimenting with reform programs and constructing a Chinese nation-state.
This panel will explore some of the diverse ways that schools became sites for negotiations over very different visions of national reform. Our papers will show how a variety of actors, both inside and outside of the state, and ranging from policy makers to textbook authors, principals, and teachers, have developed and carried out their programs for social and political change in the field of education. The different focus of each paper will also show how different dimensions of education—from curriculum formulation and the dissemination of textbooks to formal school practice and extra-curricular activities—have been used to promote ideologies. Our papers will also show how these attempts to build national identities have often been rejected, resisted, or reconstituted by the students they were intended to transform.
Further, this panel spans the entire twentieth century, reaching from Zhang Boling’s late Qing reforms to military training in contemporary Taiwan. This suggests that the ideological contestation represented in each of our papers is characteristic of education in a modern nation-state and not an aberration of a particular regime, historical moment, or constellation of social forces in China’s modern development.
Sarah Coles McElroy, Yale University
From the first decade of the twentieth century onward, educational reformers in China conceived of Western-style schools as institutions for training a new kind of citizen who would help to revitalize the Chinese nation. Committed to this vision of education, prominent educator Zhang Boling, founder and principal of Nankai Middle School, set out to train a group of "new youth" who would help to rebuild China and transform its social customs.
In Zhang Boling’s view, China’s new schools must forge "complete personalities" by providing academic, physical, and moral training. Under his leadership, Nankai Middle School offered a comprehensive academic curriculum, a competitive athletics program, and a purposeful plan of moral instruction. Determined to instill patriotism and social awareness in his students, Zhang often spoke to them about their responsibilities. His lectures on self-cultivation revealed a deep commitment to overcoming the influences of the traditional family system and to fostering a new national consciousness.
Extracurricular activities at Nankai proved to be an innovative way of forging future patriots and reformers. With Zhang Boling’s encouragement Nankai students published newspapers, founded schools for the poor, and, most interesting of all, produced Western-style dramas aimed at spreading the message of social reform. The scripts of these plays provide evidence of Zhang’s and his students’ efforts to transform prevailing attitudes. Extracurricular opportunities at Nankai helped to produce a socially aware student body. Some Nankai graduates subsequently made important contributions to China’s nation-building effort, although not always as Zhang Boling would have envisioned.
Perri Strawn, Yale University
This paper explores the connection between military training in Taiwan high schools and the construction of national identity among students since martial law’s end. A central goal of ROC education since early this century has been to teach students the importance of tuanjie, or group harmony. The idea of a "national tuanjie" continues to be part of KMT rhetoric, as seen in slogans that decorate school gateways: "Harmony and self-strength will save the country," and in President Lee’s calls for ethnic harmony. How this ideology of harmony became so important will be discussed through a critical look at the role of military training in Taiwan high schools. Key aspects of military training textbooks will be compared over time to show how changes relate to larger shifts in the KMT master narrative. Material collected through observation and interviews of military training instructors in schools from 1993–1995 will illustrate changes in their roles since martial law’s end. Data collected from student surveys, observation, and interviews will provide student perspectives.
Taiwan’s mandatory military training has been a significant arena for the mediation of the practices and structures which shape national identity. Recent confusion surrounding military training’s purpose reflects Taiwan’s larger struggle to hammer out an identity. This paper rejects the possibility of a unified, coherent "national identity" for Taiwan, suggesting instead that the conflict and contradiction people in Taiwan are experiencing is at the heart of how individuals constitute and are constitutive of culture and nations.
Hongming Liang, Washington University
During the republican period, the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) believed education was indispensable to inculcate nationalism in the Chinese people. Consensus and disagreement within the party over education policies reflect debates over the meaning of Chinese nationalism. Arguments about education policies within the party are also windows on a wider, ongoing national discourse about Chinese nationalism. Therefore, I will examine the education policies of the Kuomintang from 1925 to 1950.
Drawing on published, re-printed, and archival sources from China and Taiwan, I will argue that this complex political party agreed that education was indispensable to achieving nationalism. The notion that national education policies ought to be formulated by this self-styled Leninist party and implemented by the central government was also rarely challenged by party members.
In contrast, a consensus was not achieved regarding the content of education. For example, heated debates within the party persisted concerning how women should be educated. Some argued for equal access to education by women so that they would participate fully in the economy of the republic. Others argued that women ought to attend schools designed to teach only skills of "modern motherhood." These debates conjure up radically different visions of nationalism, with the former groups envisioning national revival requiring educated professional women, and the latter group envisioning national salvation based upon women’s contributions as mothers. Disagreements such as this over the content of education are indicative of the ambivalence, contradictions, disagreements, and conflicts within the party over the meaning of Chinese nationalism.
Robert J. Culp, Cornell University
During the Republican period school textbooks served as primary vehicles for the dissemination of new ideas about state, society, and self to a new generation of China’s citizens. This paper will compare middle school civics texts published after the May Fourth movement with corresponding textbooks published under Nationalist government guidelines during the early 1930s in order to analyze how those texts re-articulated social roles, institutions, and ethics to fit competing visions of the modern nation-state.
1920s civics texts introduced students to a wide range of "modern" social roles and a discourse of freedoms and rights associated with citizenship in a democratic nation. Individuals and social groups were portrayed pursuing their interests in a free marketplace of ideas in dynamics reminiscent of civil society in Europe and the United States. Citizens’ pursuit and defense of their rights was to yield a modern liberal society with greater equality between social classes, replacement of the "feudal" lineage or extended family by small, conjugal families, and more freedom and self-determination for women and the young.
Nationalist decade "party doctrine" (dangyi) or civics (gongmin) texts described a national society with similarly modern institutions, but simultaneously sought to reduce expectations for equality and self-determination for women, workers, and other disenfranchised groups. Rationalized and re-invented Neo-Confucian ethics were presented as central elements of civic training. In addition, these texts presented the party-state as the ultimate arbiter of rights claims made by different social groups; state corporatism replaced civil society as the ideal model for national society.