A County of Culture: Twentieth-Century China Seen from the Village Schools of Zouping, Shandong 047211283X, 978-0472112838

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A County of Culture

A County of Culture Twentieth-Century China Seen from the Village Schools of Zouping, Shandong

STIG TH!Z)GERSEN

ANN ARBOR

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright© by the University of Michigan 2002 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @ Printed on acid-free paper 2005

2004

2003

2002

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, \vi th out the written permission of the publisher.

A CJP catalog record for this book is avai/abl,e.from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Th0gersen, Stig. A county of culture: twentieth-century China seen from the village schools of Zouping, Shandong I by Stig Th0gersen. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11283-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Education-China-Zouping Xian-History-20th century. I. Title. IA1131 .T455

2002

370'.951'14-dc21

2002002789

An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as "Reconstructing Society: Liang Sh urning and the Rural Reconstruction Movement in Shandong," in Reconstructing Twentieth-C,entury China: State Control, Civil Society, and National Identity, ed. Kjeld Erik Br0dsgaard and David Strand (Oxford University Press, 1998). It is used here by pennission of Oxford University Press.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Liu Yu'an from Shandong University, who helped me arrange my fieldwork in Zouping in the first place, and to Ni Anru, from the same university, who went with me on all three trips to Zouping. His expertise on Chinese education and rural society, his personal experience from growing up in a Shandong village, as well as his remarkable patience during our trips was of invaluable help to me. I am happy to count these two people as my friends. In Zouping I received great support from the county's Foreign Affairs Office and Education Bureau, whose staff received me with an open and friendly attitude. I am particularly grateful, of course, to my informants, who spent long hours with me trying to reconstruct events that had often taken place several decades earlier. The Danish Research Council for the Humanities, the Danish Social Science Research Council, the Aarhus University Research Foundation, and the Aarhus UniversityJubilee Fund funded my fieldwork and made it possible forme to take one year's leave in i994-g5. Together with my family, I spent a wonderful year in Canberra, at the Contemporary China Centre of the Australian National University, where Jon Unger and Anita Chan soon made all four of us feel at home. I have had the opportunity to present parts of my research on Zouping at seminars at the University of Chicago and the University of Washington, and I am grateful to Guy Alitto and Steve Harrell for their hospitality and advice on these occasions. Anita Chan, Soren Clausen, Prasenjit Duara, Mette Halskov Hansen, Glen Peterson, and Jon Unger have read parts or all of the manuscript in earlier or later versions, and they, as well as two anonymous readers from the University of Michigan Press, have given me many useful comments and much encouragement.

Contents

1.

Introduction

2. Traditional Education

1 19

3· Training Loyal Subjects: The Introduction of Modern Schools in Late Qing

39

4- For Nation and Progress: Modern Education Takes Off, 19ll-1931

57

5· Creating a New Society through Education: The Rural Reconstruction Movement, 1931-193 7

91

6. Back to the Basics: Schools under Japanese Occupation and Civil War, t 93 7-1948

ll8

7. Education in the Service of the New Party-State, 1948-1957

139

8. Training Revolutionary Successors? The Radical Era, 1957-1976

166

9. Education in the Service of Economic Reforms: The Post-Mao Era

202

Conclusion

240

Appendix Notes List of Chinese Characters References Index

25t 26t 281 285 299

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Map of Zouping County

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Map of prcnt-da\' Zouping. The old Tsoup'ing county approximat~I) CO\'Crcd Zouping town together with Handian, Sun1hen, Llbatian, Qingyang, and ~lingji townships. The for· mer C~an~han ~ounl} con:sponded 10 present-day Chang· •han,J1aoq1ao, Yuancheng, l•san, Haosheng, Xidong,

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and Llncbi 10..mbips. together "ith Zhoucun and an area

east of this town. The fonner Qidong county corresponded to

J•uhu, \\'eiqiao, Tai7i, and Matou 10"11ships ru1d some areas nonh of lhe prcscn 1border.

_1_

Introduction

On a black marble pedestal in the center of a bus) road junction in the COWll) town of Zou ping in Shandong pro,ince to"ers a giant stame of the area's mo Zhoucun and moved the school there under the name of Guangbei Middle &hool.63 The B\tS was in the vanguard also in rhe field of female education. \1 a mis.•ionary conference in Qingzhou in 1893 several participanlS argued forcefull)•for the education of g irls. They saw schooling as girls' 11;11111 CULTURF

~~~~~-'"'--'--'~

ac1ivi1 ies Han Ftti u bsucd an arrest order against Zhang in 1931. whid1 lo1ccd him to nee lo Beijing.66 lo cases in which local modem graduates and officials forffied an all iance against 1nore co11serv·J1 ivc n1e1nbers uflfic

traditional elite. In one such incident a university student and May Fourth acti,ist named Cao Demin from a small Qidong t0\>1l returnc.'lishment of modern schools, together with the continued existence of many traditional ones, had raised the school attendance rate to 40 percent for the age group between twenty and twenty-five, and 47 percent for the teenagers (thirteen to nineteen). 79 Many in the last group had probably been enrolled during the RRM's education drive, so progress before 1931 had been visible but not overwhelming. Compared with the official statistics for school attendance in the first twenty years of the Republic, the sunrey data sho\v a considerable over-reporting in the official data. As mentioned earlier, the building of schools during the first hvo decades of the Republic, particularly above the lower primary level, was concentrated in the county seat. The effects of this policy were clearly reflected in the survey figures on educational levels in the fourteen districts of Tsoup'ing county. By 1935, 11 percent of Tsoup'ing's total

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FOR NATION AND PROGRESS

male population had attended lower primary school, while 2 percent had gone to the higher section. 80 In the county seat, however, the satne ratios \Vere 19 and 6 percent, respectively, while Qingyang, as one of the poorest districts in the county, came last, \vi th only 6 and i percent. As mentioned in chapter 2, Qingyang was also at the bottom of the list of sishu attendance, but the difference between the center and the more remote villages was larger for attendance to 1nodern schools than for sishu, with the county seat having eleven percentage points n1ore lower and higher primary school students than the county average, compared to six percentage points more sishu attendees. Modern education was apparently distributing opport11nities for ed11cation less evenly th~n the traditional system had do11e. "\\hlie edi:icational opportunities were generally better in the county seat, local initiative could also play a significar1t role, as can be seen from the.fact that District 11 (Wangwu) and District 12 (Huilizhuang) had the highest modern school attenda11ce rates outside the county seat. As previously mentioned, the Changbai Cominunity School \Vas established in VVangwuzhuang in the 1910s on gentry initiative, and a primary school was set up in H11ilizh11ang already in 1909 and renovated through major local donations in 1929. The effects of these local efforts were visible not only in primary education, where the two districts had male attendance rates of 16 and 17 percent, but even up to the senior middle school level, where Wangwu had nine and Huil81 izhuang eight graduates, compared to just six in the county seat. Inside each district there were also significant differences bel:\veen 1illages. Qingyang district generally had very low educational standai-cfs, \vith only i 6 percent of the males having received any schooling at all. In Hanjiazhuang, however, one of the district's seventeen natural villages, the attendance rate was up to 35 percent, "\vith 23 percent having received modem schooling, compared to only 7 percent in the district as a whole.s 2 The reason for this was that a 1ne1nber of the local gentry and former holder of one of the twenty prestigious county-level 8 stipends ( linsheng) had set up a modern school there in the 1910s. " Six out of the eight women in Qingyang district who had finished lower prin1ary school came from Hanjiazhuang, as did the only two women who had finished higher primary school. 8 4 There seems, in fact, to be a general tendency for educated \vomen to be concentrated in a fe,v locations, as in the First District, where almost l1alf of the wo1nen who had received education can1e from just two of the twenty-three natural villages. In the many villages in which no woman had ever gone to school

_g, _

A COUNTY OF CULTURE

it seems to have been difficult for anyone to break the ice. 85 Again we see the significant role of local initiative for educational development during thfs period. ·· Turning to the quality of Tsoup'ing schools and the teaching going on inside them, one of the few contemporary sources-'is a report from 1931, \vhen the Shandong provincial education department sent out supervisors to the counties. In January one of these provincial envoys, Wang Xuxing, visited Tsoup'ing, Qidong, and Changshan, and his general impression was favorable. 86 He found Tsoup'ing to be "rather developed compared to other counties in North Shandong" and praised the young newly appointed head of the education department, Han Shiyi, because he had gained control over local educational funds and considerably expanded primary school enrollment. He even suggested that Han should be given a casl1 reward for his achievements. Wang was also pleased with the teachers \Vhose classes he attended in the county-run schools, but in Qingyangdian, the only school on his list outside the county to\vn, he found that, although the teachers \Vere academically co1npetent, their method of instruction was of inferior standard. A s1nall school in the county town made an even worse impression: This school is situated near the western gate of the county town and has twelve students. V\Then I inspected it the teacher was not present, but a ruler for beating students \\-·as placed on his desk. This is most inappropriate as [this method of punishment] has already been abolished. \ple's daily lives, and special teaching materials should be developed for women; the method of instruction should be lively, and demands should not be too high; the local elite, or at least its "progressive" elements, should be asked for support and donations. In all these aspects the winter school movement was solidly rooted in the tradition of rural mass education that had emerged since the i g2os.46 The winter schools continued during the civil war and formed the foundation for the literacy campaigns of the i 95os. In i 946 base area schools for adults in Changshan enrolled almost 3,000 students, while there were only around 250 who attended in Tsoup'ing.47 In the spring of '944 new signals came from Yan'an calling for revised priorities in the education sector, and the Shandong leadership

BACK TO THE BASICS

reacted later the same year with a directive that should make the education system better reflect the demands of the war situation. The CCP now felt that too many resources had been spent on making base area primary schools live up to the old-fashioned and inflexible standards of prewar Nationalist China:48 Cadre training is more important than mass education; the upgrading of the present cadres is more important than the training of future cadres; adult education is more important than the education of children; education in skills and knowledge related to war and production is more important than ordinary cultural education.49

The aim was that all village-level cadres within a year should attend some sort of higher primary education, while cadres at higher levels should attend courses at the middle school level.5° Unfortunately, there are no data on the extent of this type of training in the Zouping area.

SCHOOLS IN AREAS CONTROLLED BY THE NATIONALISTS

The Nationalist provincial government withdrew from Shandong in late 193 7, but it soon returned, and through the war years its educational department tried to function from different towns and counties under Nationalist control.5 1 The provincial level administration, however, had little direct impact on local education, and most surviving schools were left to their own devices. At the same time, local educational funds dried out as social and political disorder made it impossible to collect the surcharges that had been the main revenue for county-level education. The combined educational budgets of Tsoup'ing and Qidong counties dropped from about eighty-six thousand yuan in the prewar years to sixty-one thousand yuan in 1940. 52 Most schools outside the larger, Japanese-controlled towns, followed the Republican educational system and used pre-193 7 textbooks. The general collapse of schooling in 193 7-38 had partly been overcome by 1939, when more than a hundred Tsoup'ing primary schools had been reopened, while members of the local gentry had established four new private schools.53 The situation was still very unstable, however, and schools tended to open and close unpredictably over the following years.

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A C0t:NTY Ot· CUL'T\,RE' - - - - --

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Fig. 4. Fo1 111er students of the an1i:Japanese school in Xi\\otuo in 1he lale 1930s. 1l1ey all lalcr played cnicial role> in Zouping education, although lheir political de•tin) "~ 1ni.xcd.

Anrl:Japanese schools wer(' also established in area. conuollcd bv Nationali>l military cornmandE"rs. TI1c mosl fan1ous one was 1he Chang· baishan Anti:Japanesc Primary School in Xiwo1uo, Qingyang 1ownship. Thi• •chool was established in 1 9h01c-lived, ho,,•cvcr, and only graduatLrict japanc"' control. formalh, most other schools in the three counties wert' al'° under the Japanese authorities, but the occupiers could not poss1bl) super\'ise daily teaching. and most of these schools appart•l for the continued use of Chinese teaching materials.&8 The Japanese were even active in tl1e field of secondary education, in which they escablished junior mid dle schools in Tso11p' i11g in 1912 and in Qidong in 19_13. each with seven teachers ;u1d 1110rc than a hu~·1drecl students. Both schools were closed after thnal relations to their students than had u-aclitionall~ been the- ca.'IC. lite' "ere no" e'pected to care for (gua11xrn) the children. mend their doth~, Leach them to wash their face when the' c.unc 10 school dirty, and giYe food and medicine 10 the most needy. One informant remem· bered '"'l clear!) how his 1eacher had oner put him on hi< bir\'cle and taken him 10 the local clinic when he wa.• bleecling after a rough game in the ~hoolyard. All this was becoming part of being a model teacher witl1 "good rcla1ion to the masses." 16 When infom1anrs who had gone to school in the 1951milar to "hat had been expected from a good sullu teacher, the tlurd ""' more in line "itli the ideas of the RR.\!, and could funhcnnore he 1nfuehveen school and village, ag-.iin rlH1rh in 1inc \Vith Zhang Zongli n '> ideas.

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A COUNTY OF CULTURE

Higher Primary School With more students finishing lower primary school the pressure on years five and six increased, and higher primary education became the most quickly expanding type of schooling in Zouping in the 1950s. In 1949 there were only twelve complete primary schools in the three counties, which meant that most village kids who wanted to advance through the education system had to move at least as far as to the nearest market town after grade 4 and only returned to their families on Sundays. Such an arrangement considerably increased the cost of schooling for rural families, so more and more schools were allowed to add a higher primary section in the following years. By 19_5 7 their number had risen to seventy-nine, one for every ten village schools, so that many more students now lived within walking distance of a complete 18 primary school. In i952 and i953 experiments were carried out with a unitary five-year primary school system modeled upon the Soviet Union, and larger lower primary schools like the one in Zhongxingcun added an extra class. The Ministry of Education soon realized, however, that with only one or two teachers in many schools conditions were not yet ripe for such a move, and the 4 + 2 system was soon reintroduced. 1 9 Access to higher primary vvas decided through exams in Chinese and math, and it was quite competitive. In Zhongxingcun only two or three boys made it from lower .to higher primary each year during the early 20 1950s. At this time each higher primary arranged its own entrance examination, but from 1956 a unified exam was arranged by the 21 county. The main emphasis \Vas on the academic results of the applicants, but the share of bad class students was restricted, and on this account many rich peasant and landlord families had to give up the hope of seeing their children advance through the socialist school system. Students who failed at the entrance examination sometimes chose to repeat grade 4 and try again the following year, so many primary school graduates were sixteen or older. In higher primary school history, geography, and nature were added to the list of subjects, and teachers specialized in one subject rather than teaching all lessons to one class. Among the higher primary schools a hierarchy was soon established. In Tsoup'ing the Chengli Primary was considered to have the highest academic level, and in 1956 it was appointed county "keypoint school" (zhongdian xuexiao) and was given new buildings and equipment." The appointment was the result of long traditions: the Chengli Primary was the direct heir of the Experimental School, the flagship of the RRM,

EDUCATION IN THE SERVICE OF THE NEW PARTY-STATE

which could trace its roots right back to the Liangzou Academy of imperial times. In Qidong county the Mijia Primary gained keypoint school status already in 1950 and was systematically built up to become a local model. By 1957 it had 580 students and a staff of 39, and it had all the equipment needed for teaching natural sciences, sports, etc. Keypoint schools had two main functions: they arranged model lectures in which the most competent teachers performed their art in front of their village school colleagues; and they trained the cream oflocal children who had the ambition to continue to middle school, where the competition for entrance was already becoming quite fierce. 2 3 In Qingyang township the only complete primary school in 1950 was found in Qingyang town. Two more were established in 1953, but one of them had to close after just two years of operation. The number of students in grade 6 in the whole township was only about 50 each year between 1951 and 1954· It jumped to 154 in 1955 because of the two complete primary schools that opened in 1953, but dropped to 104 in 1957. It was thus still at most one out of four Qingyang children who finished the full six-year primary school course during this period, and the real share was probably lower because averaged children who had been unable to go to school during the war took up many of the places. '4 Higher primary school students were old enough to be mobilized in the successive campaigns sweeping through the villages in the 1950s. They took part in meetings in which former landlords were condemned and cheered when these "enemies of the people" were later paraded through the streets. They learned about the "three-anti" (sanfan) and "five-anti" (wufan) movements and spread the current political slogans in rural society through exhibitions and theatrical performances. '5 Their role thus resembled that of the higher primary and secondary school students of Republican times, but there was at least one fundamental difference: while mobilization for anti:Japanese demonstrations and boycotts and other manifestations of nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s was often carried out by groups of students and teachers in spite of the discontent and even opposition of school leaders and fellow students of other political persuasions, students' political activities in the PRC were mandatory, and students were organized to take part in them by their teachers who again had been instructed by Party cadres. The relative student autonomy of the Republican period did not survive the Communist revolution, and the general political initiative in rural areas shifted from school circles to organizations led by the Party.

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A COUNTY OF CULTURE

Secondary Schools The fast-growing popular demand for more and better education did not stop with the higher primary schools. Even in rural areas a higher primary diploma did not give automatic access to a job outside agriculture, and the CCP was soon facing the same dilemma between education for social mobility and education for rural development that Liang Shuming had addressed before the Japanese occupation. Already in 1950 Shandong Education, mouthpiece of the provincial educational administration, voiced concerns over the increasing popular pressure for establishing more middle schools. According to the authorities, it \Vas "extremely good" that more primary school graduates could now enter middle school, but there was still only room for one out of five graduates, and middle schools would never be able to satisfy the full demand. The purpose of secondary schooling, it was stressed, was to train "revolutionary intellectuals," while primary school was for everyone and should not be geared to the needs of those who continued up through the school system. The CCP wanted the large majority to "happily ... become activists in industrial and agricultural production," but, to the regret of the Party, students often saw things differently: Today [students] in our primary schools have received quite a lot of labor education, but some unpleasant phenomena have occurred; many primary school graduates are unwilling to go home and take part in production. They want to become cadres and accomplish great things (which in itself, of course, is acceptable), or at least, if there is no better alternative, take up a position as a "trainee teacher." V\lhat kind of ideology is this? 2 6 The idea that the main function of schools was to prepare people for taking part in "production" was obviously just as controversial under the CCP as it had been in Liang Shuming's days. Although the Tsoup'ing county government tried to convince students of the opposite, and even invited China's first female tractor driver, model worker Dong Lisheng to give a public speech on the glories of manual labor, most people still saw schooling as a way out of the villages, and if six years of education were not enough many families were more than willing to make an additional investment in three years of secondary education. 2 7 In 1952, after a break of seven years, secondary schooling again became available in Tsoup 'ing, Qidong, and Changshan when each

EDUCATION IN THE SERVICE OF THE NEW PARTY-STATE

county was allowed to establish a three-year junior middle school. The intake in 1952 was modest, about two hundred students in each school divided into four classes, and it remained stable until 1958, so secondary education remained a highly exclusive affair. 28 Entrance exams to the new middle schools lasted two days, and hopeful students came from all over the county to take part in them. Chances were obviously better for graduates from high-quality primary schools. A graduate, for example, from Mazhuang, one of the better complete primaries close to the county seat, recalled that about 20 percent of his classmates made it into Tsoup'ing Middle School in 1954. 2 9 In Guozhuang conditions were not so favorable, and before 1949 there were only two boys, one from each of the families later classified as landlords, who had managed to enter a secondary school. Now the maximum share of middle school students with bad class background \\'as set at 5 percent, and students from poorer families started to gain entrance. In i954 a graduate from Qingyang Complete Primary who was the youngest son of an illiterate peasant became Guozhuang's first post-1949 middle school student, while all other applicants from Guozhuang and several surrounding villages failed. The further career of this man illustrates the significance attached to secondary education in the 1950s. He only follo\ved classes at Tsoup'ing Middle School for three semesters before his father died and he had to return to his native village. When he came back the Party selected him for a secretarial position ( wenshu) in the township government, and after the establishment of the Qingyang People's Commune in 1958 he took up a similar position in the new administrative structure, which implied that he did most of the paper work in the commune office. He had to retire after a few years because of illness, but back in his village he became its first practitioner of Western medicine through self-studies, and he later functioned as village head through most of the i 98os. Although formally just a middle school dropout, this man was a local "talent" who had done better academically than any other politically reliable student of his age, and his family's investment in his schooling was definitely not wasted.3° The new middle schools tried to set their academic standards high and to become as "regular" as possible. During its first year of existence Tsoup'ing Middle had to make do with some rooms in a local primary school, but in i954 it moved into brand new buildings at the former site of the Research Departtnent of Liang Shuming's Rural Reconstruction Institute. Construction funds came directly from the national

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a A COUNTY OF CULTURE

Ministry of Education, but some of the work was performed by students as part of their "labor education" ( laod'1ngke). The teachers were well qualified, some of them graduates of mission schools, and the daily hfe of the students was highly structured. There were two lessons before lunch and four lessons in the afternoon. After class it was possible to make use of the school's sports ground and library, and in the evening there were two hours of mandatory self-studies supervised by a teacher. ~i\lmost all students lived in the school dormitory, even those who came from the county town, and schoolwork took up practically all of their time. There were a few girls among the students and some female teachers, but the male dominance was still massive.3 1 The only alternative at the level of secondary education to the general middle schools was teachers' training, for which there existed a solid pre-1949 tradition in Zouping, but little happened in this field between '949 and i958. In i952 a short-course teachers' training school was established in Qidong, but it was turned into a general middle school after just ten months of operation.3 2 In Tsoup'ing the first teachers' training school was set up in a building complex confiscated from a landlord family in a village in Lisan township in i 956, when it enrolled two hundred higher primary and junior middle school graduates in a three-year course .33 Before that time future teachers were trained in schools at the district (diqu) level. The teachers' training schools charged no tuition and even offered free board and lodging, so, just like during the Republican period, they were popular among students from poor families with no other options, while a regular academic middle school was the first choice of almost anyone who could afford it.34 Learning from the Soviet Union While there were many obvious continuities from the Republican to the PRC school system, the i 95os also saw a new foreign input, this time from the Soviet Union, China's "older brother" and principal model for socialist development. The Soviet presence was felt most strongly at the higher levels of education, but it was evident even in rural primary and secondary schools. The personification of Soviet influence was I. A. Kairov, whose i 939 textbook Pedagogics was translated into Chinese.35 Kairov represented a phase in Soviet educational theory when revolutionary experiments had been replaced by a highly structured and centralized approach. He emphasized the systematic transmission of academic knowledge to all

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EDUCATION IN THE SERVICE OF THE NEW PARTY-STATE

students according to detailed curriculum guidelines and teaching plans. The teacher should be in full control of all classroom activities, and pedagogical research should constantly refine the content and methods of teaching. Moral and political education and polytechnic training should further guarantee that students would become useful and compliant citizens. Kairov had formulated his ideas in direct opposition to John Dewey and contemporary international trends toward child-centered education and project-oriented teaching methods. In the Chinese context Kairov's viewpoints reinforced the inclination toward regularization and formalization that was so evident in Republican education, while those alternative ideas on learning that had been introduced by people such as Tao Xingzhi, and in Tsoup'ing by Zhang Zongling and Yang Xiaochun, were nipped in the bud. The same ideas of child-centered education, students' interests, motivation, initiative, and creativity that many younger teachers during the i92os and 1930s started to see as the "progressive" alternative to the "feudal" or "traditional" traits in Chinese education, were now defined as a "bourgeois" trap that could be avoided only by following what was now the "progressive" line: the Soviet pedagogues and their "scientific" approach to teaching. One of the reasons why Soviet didactic theory could gain such a dominant position was that the infrastructure for state propaganda and control over schools was rapidly developing in the early 195os. Already from 1950 the Soviet methods were introduced to teachers on a massive scale through magazines and newspapers, and Shandong Education regularly published articles with guidelines for the study of Kairov's Pedagogics as well as reports on Soviet experiences.3 6 In addition to such publications Tso up 'ing teachers were also introduced to the Soviet model by cadres from the Education Bureau (between 1950 and 1956 called the Bureau of Culture and Education), who regularly visited village schools, and from inspectors who were responsible for a limited number of schools within a certain district.37 In 1956 an Office for Educational Research was established under the Tsoup'ing Education Bureau with the task of spreading new teaching methods to local primary schools, and the three model teachers who staffed the new department studied Kairov's works for a half-year before they started in their new jobs. They then went on bike from village to village and monitored classes. When they found a teacher whose methodology came close to the new ideals they developed him into a local model and 38 invited teachers from neighboring villages over to learn from him. Through all these channels schoolteachers even in rather remote cor-

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l.j

llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllAllclollulNITllYlollFlcllulLITlullRIEllllllll~

~~-1 ners of the county were repeatedly confronted with the dominant trends in CCP educational theory. The main factor behind Kairov's success in China, however, was probably that his ideas reconfirmed an already dominant practice of tea.ching a state-defined curriculum in a way that left very little room to improvisation, or to students' independent work and thinking. A former school inspector who had given numerous lectures on Kairov in the early 1950s admitted that he had never really understood what was so unique about Kairov's writings: "We had to study Kairov, but I never i1nderstood any of it. The inspectors who came from the county did not understand it either, but they quoted him all the time, and so did I when I gave lectures to the teachers." Just like exhibitions in marketplaces at this time showed Zouping villagers how people in the Soviet Union gave birth without pain and ho'v they became strong and healthy by eating bread and drinking milk, so were Kairov's teaching methods presented as an important ingredient in the almost miraculous success and prosperity of the Soviet people.39 Protest_-.emed all of tl1em with pride. Thi') felt that their principles of com· bin ing education with productive work had been reasonably consisLclH tl1roughout Lhc wholt' period. B• Nothing indicate> that the succes. stants as a model. Slogans such as

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9·1-

1

fig. 6. Yang Binhai, 1he cllief drfring force behind 1he Nanbeisi School. in front of che g-ate of the olde would be sati>fied. TI1is was clone in many and subtle ways thaL deserve a full study.t»• buL let me briefty swnmari1e some of my impresi.ions from \'hits to Zouping ~hoot 1here, in 1his situation symbolized by 1hl