The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China
264
The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China
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Overview
In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226383309 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
The Rural Modern
Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China
By Kate Merkel-Hess
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-38330-9
CHAPTER 1
Writing for New Literates in the Chinese Countryside
In the spring of 1927, the Mass Education Movement (MEM), an organization devoted to teaching the Chinese masses to read, published a textbook written for rural illiterates, The Farmer's Thousand-Character Reader (Nongmin qianzi ke). The textbook culminated in a three-part lesson on the "model village." Perhaps inspired by the neat, industrious New England towns they had glimpsed during studies abroad, in the accompanying illustrations the textbook's authors placed at the center of the little hamlet a clock tower (not a sight common to rural China but one that did evoke the urban modernity of, for instance, the famous Customs House clock tower on Shanghai's Bund), "according to which the townspeople know the time to conduct [their] affairs." In the model village, the lesson declared, everyone had a job, officials were elected by popular vote, the young people had organized a militia to protect the village, and besides managing the home, women could "all spin, weave cloth, knit socks, and do needlework." No one drank, gambled, or smoked, but instead found entertainment in the village's gymnasium and museum. Additional components of life in the model village included a public park, sports fields, hospital, and public health council. This utopian vision of an orderly rural society remade for prosperity and stability placed education at its center, for it hosted "a forest of schools": a kindergarten, a middle and high school, a People's School (for adults), and a worker's school, as well as a library, a newspaper reading room, and help stations where those learning to read or who wanted laws or texts explained could stop for assistance.
The centrality of education to the model village — a reform vision of a modernized countryside — reflected the view of the MEM, like many other prominent reformers who emerged in the mid-1920s, that literacy education was the initial mechanism for educating rural people as citizens and as modern people. MEM Director Yan Yangchu wrote that literacy was "the foundation for all other lines of improvement, for with an illiterate people very little headway can be made." In the mid-1920s, many rural reform advocates like the MEM were still based in cities, but on the pages of their many publications, they constructed a coherent idea of a remade countryside, like that sketched in the Farmer's Reader. The lessons on the model village, and the ones that preceded it, outlined a new swath of activities and knowledge — from how to write and mail a letter to how to celebrate National Day (October 10) — that the authors believed rural people should be familiar with. This vision of rural modernity adopted the markers of urban modernity, among them literacy, participatory governance, and gender equality, but situated them in a rural context and rural geography, emphasizing particularly their roles and responsibilities within their villages. Above all, it placed the focus of reform on rural people, and particularly their abilities to reform themselves and their communities. Reformers didn't just believe that rural areas were as capable of being modern as urban ones — they went a step further and insisted that a modernized countryside was the basis of the Chinese nation.
The MEM in particular was strongly committed to the connection between literacy and citizenship. The organization was founded in 1923 to further mass literacy, and was initially engaged in urban campaigns to teach city people to read. A 1922 literacy campaign held in Changsha by Yan's first literacy organization, the forerunner to the MEM, sported banners that made clear the organization's belief about the connection between national strength and literacy. "An illiterate nation a weak nation," one read, while another offered a solution: "China's salvation? Popular education." In order to address the broad illiteracy that MEM leaders argued was a national failing, the organization almost immediately began to publish a literature — of textbooks, short stories, and educational pamphlets — for new literates, which would over the next decade and a half grow to a catalogue of hundreds of books, pamphlets and newspapers distributed to millions of readers in China and abroad. By 1927 when The Farmer's Thousand-Character Reader was published, the MEM had found a base for its experiments in rural literacy outreach. At the invitation of self-governance activist Mi Digang, whose family had been involved in local reform efforts in their home county since the first decade of the twentieth century, the MEM began work in Dingxian (Ding County) in southwestern Hebei in 1926. Mi was active in national political movements (he belonged to the GMD and participated in the Zhili Provincial Assembly, among other activities), but remained invested in the future of his home village. Inspired by Mi's ideas that "instead of writing beautiful essays and paper plans," intellectuals should undertake rural reforms "in a practical way," the MEM decided in 1929 to relocate their headquarters from Beiping to Dingxian. There, Yan wrote, "we want in every way possible to merge our life with the village life." Setting up shop in the county seat's exam hall, the MEM established a famous and closely watched model county that its founders and funders, who eventually included the Rockefeller Foundation, hoped would become a national and perhaps even international model of reform.
The MEM was not the only group to place education at the center of a vision of rural revitalization. A few years after the MEM started their rural education efforts in Dingxian, the prominent intellectual Liang Shuming founded the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute at the invitation of General Han Fuju, who governed the province. Liang's vision of the countryside was also grounded in education, proposing that village schools be the organizing institution for the countryside. For Liang, profound social change would result from the "schoolification of society." Other reformers, discussed in the chapters that follow, also founded schools in rural areas throughout China that became, or attempted to become, the centers of model communities. In drawing connections between literacy and citizenship, Liang, Yan, and their compatriots were in the company of nationalists the world over. Building on Enlightenment ideals that linked literacy and social progress, in places as diverse as India and Russia, early twentieth-century mass literacy advocates argued that education would civilize new citizens, inculcating people with the values of the nation. Indeed, as social science researchers turned their attention to the psychological effects of education, they argued that literates and illiterates differed from one another. For instance, 1930s Soviet researchers concluded that illiterates "had a 'graphic-functional' way of thinking," describing the world around them largely in terms of the possessions and activities that populated their own lives, whereas literates were capable of envisioning a world beyond their own experiences. Literacy, in this view, was a crucial marker of modernity, citizenship, and the right to participate in the nation, and while critics have since questioned the casual connection made between literacy and good citizenship, it was a powerful belief at the time. As the shifts that the MEM underwent in the 1920s illustrate, during that decade Chinese reformers increasingly came to feel that literacy was critical to China's future and that meant educating the majority rural population.
This chapter examines the vision of a remade countryside that was created on the pages of the MEM's publications for new literates, the ways that their rural literacy efforts sought to incorporate previously marginal groups into the vision of the Chinese polity (not just rural people generally but also, for instance, rural women), and the way the MEM's didactic literature, and its vision of an inclusive and remade rural society, became the basis for its propagation of a model for rural modernization and a future for the Chinese nation. The MEM's slogan was "eliminate illiteracy and make new citizens for China," a project intended to turn the rural denizen, as Yan wrote, into an "intelligent and progressive citizen of the Chinese Republic." As reformers affiliated with projects like the MEM taught rural people to read, they also imparted a vision of a remade rural, a vision in which literacy was at the core. This vision had implications for existing rural communities and power structures. In 1933, after the MEM's arrival, the local gentry organized a protest in which hundreds paraded through the streets, shouting "Down with the Mass Education Movement!" Literacy education was, as historian Harvey Graff has written, "the medium and the carrier of the elements of the hegemonic culture," and in the case of 1920s China, that meant a focus on the role rural people might play in the nation but also a profound shift in local power structures as national elites and the state began to meddle in and manage village affairs that had previously been left to local powerholders. Local elites, like those who organized the 1933 protest in Dingxian, thus often had the most to lose in such arrangements, and the MEM would bump up against them again and again. The MEM, for its part, insisted that through education they were freeing rural people from the exploitation by local powerholders that illiteracy made them vulnerable to, such as being cheated in financial matters, so they might better manage and sustain their villages.
Yet it wasn't just local powerholders who objected to the MEM's sharp focus on literacy education. Dingxian, some critics asserted, was on a railway line and had a higher standard of living than the average Chinese county. Solutions generated there might not work in poorer regions. Others complained that the MEM was "completely influenced by American capitalism," a charge that stuck. Most of the upper echelons of its leadership had advanced degrees from American universities, the program's ideology was strongly influenced by an American progressive agenda, and by the mid-1930s, its largest funding sources were American. But the most repeated critique was the charge that the MEM was myopically focused on literacy, overlooking systemic rural troubles. In 1934, one regular observer of rural reconstruction efforts asked rhetorically, "How can the Thousand-Character Reader solve all the countryside's problems?" (His answer: It could not.) He eviscerated the MEM's plan for the countryside for having a lot of "flair" but no substance. That same year, a leftist study group that visited Dingxian for one week critiqued the MEM for starting with education rather than undertaking systemic reform. The MEM, they wrote, shortsightedly critiqued the peasants' "ignorance" rather than the feudalism and imperialism that these observers believed had created rural poverty.
They were right that the MEM believed that educating rural people could change China. The influence of the MEM's program for reform and its vast body of publications for new literates demonstrates that despite the critiques, the MEM's vision was nevertheless a popular and compelling one for many reform minded elites who attempted to persuade rural people to remake themselves through education — and to do so without a revolution or a complete dismantling of existing institutions. In this, they continued a role that Chinese elites had taken for themselves for centuries as moral and social exemplars. Yet the effect of such efforts was also that literacy — not just learning to read but also learning to read modernity — sought to normalize rural people into the contemporary values and mores of modernity and the nation, becoming a vehicle for propagating a new vision of the countryside as a possible site of China's future.
The MEM's Rural Turn
The transition from Beiping to Dingxian was a challenging one for the MEM, as staffers came to grips with the significance of their move and the realities of rural life. Located on a rail line 120 miles southwest of Beiping, Dingxian was a flat county, situated on the coastal plain that ran toward Tianjin and the sea. The soil was mainly sand and loess, the weather dry most of the year, other than the wet months of June to September when 84 percent of annual precipitation fell. Plentiful wells kept drought at bay, but the county had a dusty feel to it, with spindly trees dotting the landscape. One photo from the MEM's early years shows camels lolling in a dusty courtyard beneath the famous pagoda that still stands today in the center of town. The county's population of 400,000 was scattered in its 450 villages and towns, the vast majority making a living primarily from farming.
Remembering his introduction to Dingxian, Survey Department Head Li Jinghan (Franklin C. H. Lee), who held an MA in sociology from Columbia and was one of the Chinese pioneers in conducting social research among the lower classes, recalled his sleepless first night in the county. Afflicted by unbearable but inexplicable itching he gave up on sleeping in his bed and instead tried to sleep on a table. He had never encountered bedbugs before. The move to the countryside meant personal sacrifice and confronting the unfamiliar in ways that would eventually become part of the MEM myth, anchoring funding reports and magazine stories for decades to come. For instance, Feng Rui, a Cornell PhD who worked for the agriculture division, would later tell a visitor that "he had studied agriculture in China and abroad for more than nine years," but until the move to Dingxian "had never seen a Chinese farmer," an assertion that seems hard to believe. Initially, just a handful of MEM staff members and their families moved to the county, a number that eventually grew to more than 100 — varying reports indicate that by the mid-1930s there were between 150 and 200 MEM staffers in Dingxian. This was an elastic number that included all levels of expertise and experience, from the dozen or so internationally educated national elites who headlined the project down to local high school graduates. Many staff members who moved to the county were accompanied by their wives, children, and sometimes parents as well.
Moving to the county made staffers aware of the need for whole-scale social reform: it was hard to educate students who missed class because of illness or suffered from trachoma (which can lead to blindness) or to convince parents who needed children's labor at home to send them away for part of the day to learn to read. As a result, the Dingxian work rapidly extended beyond education to public health, agriculture, popular culture, and local political reform. The MEM established a robust village health program, overseen by graduates from the Rockefeller Foundation–funded Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), that, among other activities, built a network of central and village clinics, attempted to retrain local midwives in sanitary practices, undertook widespread vaccination campaigns, taught villagers to build sanitary latrines, experimented with birth control education, and headed up a fly-elimination campaign. The MEM's agricultural outreach efforts included a concerted attempt to introduce the Poland China boar to the local farmers, encouraged healthier designs for chicken coops, established agricultural cooperatives, celebrated Arbor Day to encourage tree planting, and held a county fair that was attended by as many as thirty thousand villagers. MEM employees and numerous researchers used Dingxian as a basis for social surveys, producing studies of its local operas, folk songs, architecture, health practices, and so on. American Sidney Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune, first went to China with the YMCA, but found his way in the late 1920s to Dingxian. He would write three books based on extensive research there, and though he was not a fan of village fare ("Breakfast," he wrote in a letter to friends, "was millet gruel and eggs so I usually had mine out of a can"), he thought it had been "a privilege" to participate in the social survey work in Dingxian. The organization cultivated a cohort of local graduates of its adult "People's Schools," as well as local health workers and agriculture specialists, all of whom helped the organization make inroads into insular villages. One visitor to Dingxian in 1934 reported that local People's School alumni said, "Before, it was the MEM that was active and the rural people were passive. Now actually it is the rural people who are active." They reported that, as a result, the problems the institution faced were growing pains — securing enough funds and teachers — not trying to convince intractable peasants to participate in their programs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rural Modern by Kate Merkel-Hess. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
A Note on RomanizationList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Writing for New Literates in the Chinese Countryside
2 To the Countryside
3 Organizing the Village
4 Village Contestations
5 A Movement Made and Lost
Conclusion
Archives
Notes
Glossary of Chinese Terms
Bibliography
Index