Educational Reform In Early Twentieth Century China

Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere's important study on the work of Zhang Jian and the educational reforms in the last years of the Qing dynasty, 1901-1912

A comprehensive collection on twentieth-century educational practices in China

The first comprehensive book to cover the whole sweep of twentieth-century Chinese education.

This book studies the Chinese government's focus on changing education as it transitioned from an imperial monarchy to a republic at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty implemented a nationwide school system to buttress its power. Although the Communists, contemporary observers, and more recent scholarship have all depicted rural society as feudal and these educational reforms a failure, Elizabeth VanderVen draws on untapped archival materials to show that villagers and local officials capably integrated foreign ideas and models into a system that was at once traditional and modern, Chinese and Western. Her portrait of education reform both challenges received notions about the modernity-tradition binary in Chinese history, and addresses topics central to debates on modern China, including state making and the impact of global ideas on local society.

Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere's important study on the work of Zhang Jian and the educational reforms in the last years of the Qing dynasty, 1901-1912

This is a comparative study of the Christian Yates Academy, the Buddhist Wuchang Academy, and the Muslim Chengda Teachers Academy. All three were typical in that they successfully served local societies as modern secondary schools. The Chinese state issued numerous regulations regarding education and religion from the late nineteenth century onwards, but these regulations did not have a significant impact on the establishment and development of religious academies. As this study shows, all of the three academies were established by religious institutions mainly according to their understandings of the problems and demands of local Chinese societies rather than according to the states expectations of the modern religion. The Chinese state did not treat different religious academies equally. For Christian schools, the state issued relatively more regulations to curtail their influence. For Buddhist schools, the state showed more tolerance but did not offer much direct support. For Muslim schools, the state would provide financial assistance. However, as this dissertation reveals, ultimately, the success of the three academies depended on their relationships with local societies. This situation for religious academies only started to change after the establishment of the Nationalist regime in Nanjing.