Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Educational development and the Chinese experience
- Part I The republican era: origins of radical education reform
- 2 Development dilemmas in the republican era: the League of Nations report
- 3 The inheritance
- 4 The modern school system
- 5 The critical backlash
- 6 Early communist alternatives: Jiangxi and Yan'an
- Part II Learning from the Soviet Union
- Part III Cultural revolution and radical education reform
- Appendix: the Hong Kong interviews
- Select bibliography
- Index
5 - The critical backlash
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Educational development and the Chinese experience
- Part I The republican era: origins of radical education reform
- 2 Development dilemmas in the republican era: the League of Nations report
- 3 The inheritance
- 4 The modern school system
- 5 The critical backlash
- 6 Early communist alternatives: Jiangxi and Yan'an
- Part II Learning from the Soviet Union
- Part III Cultural revolution and radical education reform
- Appendix: the Hong Kong interviews
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Three characters from Lu Xun's short stories stand out as symbols of China's educational modernization in the early republican era. One was the pathetic remains of a traditional scholar; the second was a satirical caricature of the new; and third was Ah Q, the most famous of all Lu Xun's characters. The old scholar, Kong Yiji, was a failed shengyuan who died in direst poverty unable to abandon his scholarly airs or put his out-of-date learning to any use whatever. His successor was the “returned student,” whose pretensions derived from half a year's study in Japan. He was immortalized as the “false foreign devil,” a title bestowed upon him by Ah Q, in the role of illiterate Chinese Everyman. The returned student kept Ah Q from joining the 1911 revolution when it finally reached their village. And it was a coalition of such partly old, partly new officials and scholars – the revolutionaries – who finally brought about Ah OJs downfall.
These characters were created some two decades after the shift to Western learning, and reflect the self-critical backlash that began to quicken against it around 1920. In real life, Ah Q was doubtless trading jibes with returned students long before then, but he could not have become a hero in that role until after 4 May 1919.
The reassessment sprang from diverse origins, including the firmly rooted strains of conservative dissent and modern liberal criticism. Guo Bingwen's The Chinese System of Public Education, completed as a doctoral dissertation in 1914, helps illustrate both the conservative and the liberal views of that time. It also serves as a standard against which to compare the critical changing mood of the 1920s.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Radicalism and Education Reform in 20th-Century ChinaThe Search for an Ideal Development Model, pp. 86 - 117Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996