Politicized Education: Girls, Teens, and University Students in Twentieth Century Chinese Schools

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Our panel focuses on the intersection of Chinese education and politics across the twentieth century. Despite changing political leadership, all regimes attempted to instill their own ideologies in students through textbooks, propaganda and political campaigns. The process of ideological inscription, however, was in no way smooth, as students were not content to be passive tools in the hands of missionaries, nationalists, revolutionaries, or bureaucrats. We therefore examine both the attempts of authorities to shape education according to their own political agendas and how students received, contested, and resisted these orders from above.

Our papers address politicized education in sequential periods of twentieth century China. Jennifer Bond’s paper explores how mission school girls in 1920-40’s Zhejiang skillfully combined nationalism, Christianity and feminism to defend their school from attack and transcend the conservative gender boundaries prescribed by both the government and Christian educators. Steven Pieragastini’s paper argues that the thought reform campaign of the early 1950s, meant to render universities ideological reliable, backfired in Shanghai and left a legacy of mutual suspicion between the Party and students. Yidi Wu’s paper studies college students during the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957, and authorities’ mechanisms for and manipulations of the classification of students’ political reliability. Kyle David’s paper argues that the post-Mao Zedong leadership of the late 1970s reoriented childhood away from politics and towards the business of childhood, that is, play, study, and development into an economically productive citizens.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Yidi Wu, University of California, Irvine

Chair

• Yoshiki Enatsu, Hitotsubashi University

Individual Presentations

• Foreign Puppets, Christian Mothers or Revolutionary Martyrs? The Multiple Identities of Missionary School Students in Zhejiang, 1923-1949 - Jennifer Bond, SOAS, University of London

• Reform and Closing Up: Shanghai’s Universities in the First Years of the People’s Republic - Steven Pieragastini, Brandeis University

• Stand in Line: Classification of College Students in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, 1957 - Yidi Wu, University of California, Irvine

• From the Business of Revolution to the Business of Childhood: Shifts in Age Consciousness in the Wake of the Cultural Revolution, 1973-1979 - Kyle David, University of California, Irvine

Discussant

• Jishun Zhang, East China Normal University