Creating the Chinese Masses: Education and Nation in the Republic

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

With the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, Chinese reformers renewed a commitment to educating previously marginalized populations, such as women and the rural poor, to facilitate their entry into an imagined community of citizens. Intellectuals advocated for the expansion of “mass education,” a broad-ranging experiment that continued through the 1930s and 1940s and would later become the basis for mass education efforts in the People’s Republic of China after its founding. Given the political urgency, Nationalist reformers often struggled to implement cutting-edge pedagogical techniques on a mass level in ways that reflected their evolving understanding of power relationships. To engage with these concerns, Republican-era educators reimagined “the masses” as political subjects in popular literacy primers (Smith), founded rural libraries as an effort to spark rural self-cultivation and education (Merkel-Hess), constructed demonstration centers of mass education in order to create replicable models for education and outreach (Tillman), and even revolutionized the Chinese script at a critical moment of national survival (Zhong). Panelists Zhong and Smith address cultural production, and Merkel-Hess and Tillman issues of accessibility; in all the papers, these practical matters illuminate competing conceptualizations of the nation and its people. Although often framed as concerns over curricula and access, education policy debates spoke directly to ongoing questions about the capacities of the Republican state and the nature of Chinese citizenship. Advocates of mass education thus engaged in critical negotiations that connected individual, community, and nation as they sought to bring into being a modern Chinese nation.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Zach Smith, University of Central Arkansas

Chair

• Janet Chen, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• Reading Class Out of the Masses: The Rebranding of Popular Education in the Nanjing Decade - Zach Smith, University of Central Arkansas

• Rural Libraries, Mass Education, and the Individual in Republican China - Kate Merkel-Hess, Pennsylvania State University

• Models for Mass Education: Postwar Demonstration Centers and Funding from the United Service to China - Margaret Mih Tillman, Purdue University

• The Chinese Latinization Movement and the New Mass Education Movement during the Second Sino-Japanese War - Yurou Zhong, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Xiaoping Cong, University of Houston