Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing 9780231526289

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
PART 1
1. THROUGH THE WALLS
2. UNTRAINED BODIES AND FRUGAL HABITS
PART 2
3. THE DISPLACEMENT OF LEARNING
PART 3
4. LEARNING POLITICS
5. IMPROPER PLACES
PART 4
6. BETWEEN STREETS AND MONUMENTS
7. THE PEDAGOGY OF THE CITY
EPILOGUE
8. THE END OF STUDENTS?
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
SELECTED TITLES

Citation preview

S T U D I E S O F T H E W E AT H E R H E A D E A S T A S I A N I N S T I T U T E

Columbia University The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is Columbia University’s center for research, publication, and teaching on modern and contemporary East Asian regions. The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

INV ENT ING

ST UDENTS

I N

BE I JI NG

FA BIO L AN Z A

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lanza, Fabio, 1967– Behind the gate : inventing students in Beijing / Fabio Lanza. p. cm.—(Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-15238-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52628-9 (e-book) 1. Beijing da xue—Students—Political activity. 2. Beijing da xue—History— 20th century. 3. Higher education and state—China—History— 20th century.

I. Title.

II. Series.

LG51.P28.L36 2010 378.51'156—dc22 2010000346

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Th is book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my parents, who wondered many times what the hell I was doing. Well, here it is.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction

ix

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xi |

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xv

1

PA R T I : L I V E D S PAC E

1. Through the Walls: Everyday Life in the University 2. Untrained Bodies and Frugal Habits

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51

PA R T I I : I N T E L L E C T UA L S PAC E

3. The Displacement of Learning

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73

PA R T I I I : P O L I T I C A L S PAC E

4. Learning Politics 5. Improper Places

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101 122

PA R T I V : S O C I A L S PAC E

6. Between Streets and Monuments 7. The Pedagogy of the City

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EPILOGUE

8. The End of Students? Notes

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217

Bibliography

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Index

291

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273

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180

203

149

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23

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

FIGURE 0.1.

The May Fourth Movement, propaganda poster, 1976

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2

FIGURE 1.1.

Central Beijing around 1917

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43

FIGURE 5.1.

Cartoon published in the newspaper Yishibao, February 5, 1920 FIGURE 6.1.

Path of the student march on May 4, 1919

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174

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139

ACKNOWLED GMEN TS

Several readers of this manuscript, in the various forms it took over the years, called it a piece of “revisionist history.” I was always puzzled by this definition: all history is “revisionist,” and when I started this project (many, many years ago), I had no concept of revisionism, or a clear sense of my own position vis-à-vis the historiography. Now that the time comes to thank all those who made this book possible, I will wear that badge with pride and be willfully revisionist. I will start by thanking the most important person, who has shared with me the daily labor of writing, waiting, and revising. My partner Melissa Fitch has read every single word of this book, carefully edited it, ironed out awkward sentences, and smoothed out the “Italianisms” that still creep into my English. She did all this while being a fantastic scholar and teacher herself. She can make me laugh and help me think at the same time, and if I were half the writer she is maybe I could find the right words to express how grateful and proud I am of her. The least I can do is to mention her first. Th is book would not have been possible without the supports of various institutions that provided funding at various stages of this project for travel, research, and writing. I am thankful to the Columbia University Travelling Fellowship, the Whiting Foundation, the Heyman Center at Columbia

xii | ACK N OW L E D GM E N T S

University, and the Social and Behavioral Science Research Institute at the University of Arizona. I had the time and the resources to revise this manuscript thanks to an An Wang Fellowship at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. My two departments (History and East Asian Studies) at the University of Arizona provided financial support but also, and more importantly, a friendly and truly collegial environment that I think is rare in academia. Special thanks to Daniel Rivero at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Anne Routon at Columbia University Press. Th is book is based on my PhD dissertation. Madeleine Zelin has been an exemplar advisor, and she has guided me through the intellectual and practical issues of graduate school and beyond. Rebecca Karl has been the most demanding critic of this work, and it is only thanks to her prodding, questioning, and encouragement that this project has evolved from its larval stage. She is a model as a scholar and a very good friend. I am thankful to the six scholars who were so kind to convene in one snowy winter day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss an earlier draft of this book. Henrietta Harrison, Qin Shao, Robert Culp, David Strand, and Zhao Dingxin offered invaluable insights and suggestions, which I strove to incorporate. The two anonymous readers for Columbia University Press provided very useful and constructive criticism. Alessandro Russo and Claudia Pozzana have followed the evolution this book since its inception; they have been an inspiration not only for their scholarly commitment but also for their personal and intellectual integrity. It is a privilege to call them friends. Other friends and colleagues have read portions of this manuscript and have helped more than they realize. This whole intellectual journey started under the guidance of Massimo Raveri. I am thankful to Eugenia Lean, Carol Gluck, Georgia Mickey, David Wang, Jeff rey Wasserstrom, Robert Hymes, Hai Ren, Terry Woronov, Shakar Rahav, Vera Schwarcz, Tak Watanabe, Margherita Zanasi, and the late Wu Pei-yi. Ian Miller and Joy Kim deserve a special mention, as they often showed me how it is done. At the University of Arizona, Susan Crane has been the perfect senior colleague and cherished friend. Jesse Dudley and Janet Ng shared books, friendship, and good food. I want to thank Mara Guglielmi, who was a source of strength while I struggled through graduate school and I will never forget that. My brother Mauro can always make me smile. The fact that he was always rushing to meet his own deadlines made the long process of writing this book feel almost “normal” and unhurried in comparison. I presented an earlier version of chapter 6 at the Modern China Seminar at Columbia University, and I am grateful to all the participants for their comments and suggestions and in par ticu lar to Richard Belsky for being such an

xiii | AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

attentive and critical reader. Susan Naquin at Princeton was extremely kind and devoted time and energy to sift through chapters 6 and 7; I hope this revised version gives justice to all her work. The epilogue was presented, in a slightly different form, at the conference “Is the History of the Cultural Revolution Possible” (University of Washington, Simpson Center). Tani Barlow was the wonderful host and organizer. Parts of chapter 1 appeared as “Politics of the Unbound: ‘Students’ and the Everyday of Beijing University,” positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 569– 99. I am thankful to Duke University Press for the permission to quote from this article. In China, the librarians at the Beijing Municipal Archive and the Beijing University Archive were helpful and extremely patient. Guo Jianrong and Wang Shiru at Beijing University steered me through the archival material and the growing pile of publications on the subject. For many months, Sara Marchetta gave me a home in Beijing. She was and is my family there, and I cannot thank her and Edo enough for all they have done. Finally, the cats purred, meowed, and scratched, and by doing so, they made everything better.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

BDRK

BDSL I

BDSL II

BDXSZK CYQJ

WSSQST

Beijing Daxue rikan (Beijing University daily). Beijing: Renmin chubanshe; Xianggang: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1981. Beijing Daxue shiliao: Diyi juan 1898–1911 (Historical materials concerning Beijing University: Part 1, 1898–1911). Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1993. Wang Xuezhen and Guo Jianrong, eds. Beijing Daxue shiliao: Di’er juan 1912–1937 (Historical materials concerning Beijing University: Part 2, 1912–1937). 3 vols. Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 2000. Beijing Daxue xuesheng zhoukan (Beijing University students’ weekly). Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980. Gao Pingshu, ed., Cai Yuanpei quanji (Complete works of Cai Yuanpei). 7 vols. Beijing: Beijing Zhonghua shuju, 1984. Zhang Yunhou et. al., eds., Wusi shiqi shetuan (Associations of the May Fourth period). 4 vols. Beijing: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1979.

INTRODUCTION

AN IMAGE

There were 12 minutes and 28 seconds remaining. I had never bid on eBay. It takes too much energy, too much attention to follow the vagaries of an online auction. And there never seems to be anything I want that badly. But I wanted that propaganda poster—a reproduction of an oil painting, mid-1970s—depicting, with the imagination and rhetorical power possible only in socialist realism, the May Fourth movement of 1919 (see fig. 0.1). In the painting, the sky is clearing and clouds are dissipating behind the imposing presence of Tiananmen, which dominates the scene. The students, young men and women, are marching at the center, their facial expressions ranging from outrage to stern determination. They wear either the scholar’s long gown or Western-style suits; both kinds of attire identify them as belonging to the social group of “modern” students. And the fact that they indeed embody the forces of modernity, of progress against an essentialized tradition, is made very evident by the painter. One of their signs reads, “Down with the store of Confucius and Co.” while the notable presence of female

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students marching prominently in the forefront epitomizes the stance on gender equality. 11 minutes 15 seconds. I wanted it. I repressed the creeping sense of unease, took out my credit card, and placed a bid. 9 minutes 20 seconds. “You have been outbid.” Somebody else wants it? But who? And why? Who could want that? I tried to resist the urge, tried not to get sucked into this perverse poker-like game of raising the stakes. I am an intellectual, a historian; I am above the petty antiquarian lust for ownership, for artifacts. I trace trends, ideas, and lives. Right.

FIGURE 0.1.

The May Fourth Movement, propaganda poster, 1976. Source: Part of the IISH Stefan R. Landsberger Collection available at http:// chineseposters.net.

8 minutes 35 seconds. All true. But I am specifically a cultural historian. I work with materiality, I study representation, I analyze images. Why shouldn’t I own my subject matter? I looked at the image again. Around the marching students, people converge toward the demonstration: they are workers, common citizens awakened by the words of students, words they literally clasp in their hands, in the forms of the leaflets students have distributed. The signs the protestors carry—“Give us back Qingdao,” “Abolish the unequal treaties”— alert  the people of the imminent danger to the territorial integrity of China: the Treaty of Versailles had just assigned to Japan the German colonies in Shandong Province. It was then the pull of nationalism

3 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

that  drew the students out of their schools and connected them to the people. 7 minutes 22 seconds. “You are now the highest bidder.” My opponent seemed to have given up. Reassured, I started fantasizing, imagining the poster in my office, or better, in my living room. I had seen that image before, many times. I reached for a copy of Vera Schwarcz’s The Chinese Enlightenment, and there it was, on the cover. Schwarcz never talks about that painting, and, for some reason, until this time I had never paid much attention to it either. But now, I was becoming obsessed with owning it. 4 minutes 10 seconds. Still the highest bidder. It is a powerful image, and it synthesizes perfectly the multiple legacies of the May Fourth movement, a moment that, in different but converging histories, has been made to coincide with the birth of Chinese modernity, the emergence of a national consciousness, the birth cry of an infant class struggle. But the painting clearly suggests a precise historical interpretation; in the official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mythology, the events of May Fourth mark the fi rst encounter between the students and the people. Yet in the picture the students still march alone (and one wonders whether the promises of that encounter will ever be truly and completely fulfi lled). They march under their own banners; they bring awareness to the people, thus making evident that their new political consciousness has matured apart from the people, inside a closed community, and implicitly because of that very isolation. The political awareness of the students is then almost a natural byproduct of their status. But how can it be that this particu lar category is always assumed to be “naturally” political? 3 minutes 19 seconds. Still the highest bidder. The monumental outline of Tiananmen (the Gate of Heavenly Peace) looms in the center of the scene. It marks more than a simple location; it is the central point in the map of student activism throughout the following century. Tiananmen stands as the symbol of continuity of the nation-state, the embodiment of power, authority, and national unity. Th rough the gate an uneasy suture is achieved between the public space of protest, the modern state, and an ahistorical national past (the cyclical recurring of China’s five thousand years). By implicitly linking May Fourth’s student nationalism to the imperial officers’ concern for the dynasty, the gate suggests a continuous reference to the long history of the relation between the state and intellectuals, for which “students” are the modern embodiment. Students are therefore always already political because they inherit a par tic u lar place in relationship with the state (imperial or national); they are always already standing in front of Tiananmen, waiting to be heard by (or curry the favor of) who is inside. Differences in time and space are erased in this

4 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

perspective, and every instance of student activism becomes just the recrafting of an old tradition. 1 minute and 20 seconds. “You have been outbid!” Damn! Too late to place another bid, too late to recover the lost image. I am left with doubt (who stole it from me?), remorse (why didn’t I bid more?), and this digital reproduction. Now that I had lost the chance of owning it, I looked at it again. Maybe, if we just shift our perspective a bit, the image lends itself to other readings, to completely different interpretations. Maybe Tiananmen is not as central and dominating as it looked at first glance. Rather, it might be seen as emerging among the dissipating clouds, suddenly revealed, its contours becoming more precise. It looks almost like a nascent symbol, summoned into life by what was happening in the streets. But if we can challenge the stability of the gate, then maybe none of the other elements in this picture will be fi xed and determined either, including the “students” themselves. What will we find if we look behind the gate?

QUESTIONING A SIGNIFIER

Nowhere is the history of the modern nation-state as intimately connected with student politics as it is in China. From 1919 on, almost all the cardinal moments in the twentieth century have been signaled by an upsurge in student political activities: May 30, 1925; December 9, 1935; the crucial initial years of the Cultural Revolution (1966– 68); and the beginning and ending stages of the Deng era (1979 and, of course, 1989). Despite the macroscopic disparities in historical circumstances and political meanings among these events, the list illustrates the lingering legacy of what Charles Tilly calls a “repertoire” of contention: a historically constituted array of gestures, places, and signs, prominently among them the signifier “student” itself. In no other case was this repertoire deployed more consciously than during the last instance of Chinese student political activism in spring 1989. On May 4, 1989, when students marched to Tiananmen Square and stood on top of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, where a relief depicts their predecessors from seventy years earlier, they literally posed on the background of their own mythology—never anticipating that, in a month, their movement would culminate in a much bloodier ending. While the influential presence of politically active students in China throughout the twentieth century has been widely studied, the confines and the very existence of the category of “students” have been largely taken for granted. Students, it has been assumed, simply materialize as soon as there

5 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

are people who go to (modern) schools. The long history of Chinese student activism, then, becomes just the continuous reemergence of an unwieldy sociological group, constantly reproduced in a set of par ticu lar institutions and made political precisely by an ahistorical tradition of activism. There are, however, at least two major problems with this approach. First, there is something politically and historically incongruent in portraying categories (such as “students”), places (such as “university”), or even communities as always already established. While a sociological concept of “students” might come into existence as soon as people attending schools get to be counted and accounted for (that is, by virtue of a simple statistical operation), this cannot be true of “students” as a political category. Second, if these categories and institutions are understood as always already fi xed, the political action that they can produce (in this case, student activism) is always limited to presenting their communitarian or institutional needs to the only authority that can guarantee their established position (or more fundamentally, their existence), which is to say, the state. Students, in this perspective, can only parade as “students” claiming to be better counted and recognized by the state. But politics, following Alain Badiou, can only come to existence by putting the state at a distance—that is, by making evident and challenging (in practice) the classificatory order of classes, groups, collective identities that the state imposes. No true politics can then rest on an established social category of “students.” Thus, unless we want to dismiss student activism as always nonpolitical, we need to begin from a different set of assumptions. First, locations cannot be presumed in advance of activism and struggle. Politics is about making history but also changing space; therefore, political locations and political subjectivities are constituted through the struggles that are supposedly fi xed in them. If we accept this premise, then— and this is my central argument— before the fi rst instance of modern student activism on May 4, 1919, “students” did not come into being as a stable and circumscribed position to be occupied but were instead produced both because of and through the practices and the struggles of those years. Only after and as a consequence of the events of 1919 could “students” become fi xed inside a (new) tradition and become connected to specific places (Beijing University, Tiananmen). To put it simply, while there had always been people who studied (sociological “students”), the political category of “students” emerged only as the result of a specific political struggle that was located precisely around the definition of “student.” Much like the working class for E. P. Thomson, Chinese students were present at their own making. The process of politicization of individual students around May 4, 1919, overlapped (but did not fully coincide) with the process that led to the invention of the political category that, since

then, identified them and their brand of political action (“students” as a signifier). The study of the development of these two processes is the subject of this volume.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

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6

A S PAC E F O R AC T I V I S M

How do people, and in par ticu lar young people, become political? Or, in this case, what led those specific students (as individuals and as a group) to Tiananmen on May 4, 1919? As mentioned earlier, we cannot ascribe the politicization of those historical students to an “always already there” category of “students,” because that would ultimately deny any independent political meaning to activism. This, however, is precisely the outcome of those analyses based on either “structure” or “position.” The former explains student movements as an epiphenomenon of socioeconomic transformations or structural crises: students are constituted as a new social group (as soon as they can be counted), continuously reproduced in a succession of “generations,” and spurned to action by the contradictions of the social structure. The explanations based on the power of position emphasize instead cultural and social continuities. Here, the assumption is that Chinese students— or at least certain students, in specific schools— are endowed with a status, a place in relation to the state, a place bequeathed to them by the historical precedents of scholar-officials, which has been reinterpreted in a modern context. In both these perspectives, “students” come to be already “in place”; they exist politically because they exist sociologically. Other analyses of the May Fourth case and of student protests in general have depicted politicization as a reflection of changes in the world of ideas, thus making activism directly dependent on large abstract categories such as “enlightenment,” “nationalism,” “revolution,” or “liberalism.” This approach has produced descriptions skewed in two different ways. It often resulted, especially in the May Fourth case, in a simplistic causal explanation: students read new books (in sheltered rooms, one guesses), became politically conscious, and took to the streets. However, while the emergence of political subjectivities clearly implies the personal engagement with ideas, ideas (or ideologies) are never abstract, nor do they exist outside of practices, in which they are embodied and by which they are defined. Ideas, considered apart from practices and abstracted from historical contingencies, might seem unchangeable over time; this has produced the view of one student identity continuously resurfacing throughout the century because of the persistent power of vague concepts such as “enlightenment.” In this perspective, radically different instances (despite the formal continuity of the

7 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

repertoire), from 1919 to the Cultural Revolution, are connected and justified in the name of a consistent vision of the nation, an iconoclastic attitude allegedly connatural in “students,” or an always incomplete “enlightenment.”  It is precisely with the intent of moving away from the assumption of any fi xed location—be it the category of students, the power of place, the stability of certain ideal constructs—and of incorporating practices, that I have framed my analysis under the notion of space. Th is concept of space, largely derived from Henri Lefevbre’s extensive corpus of writing, does not deny the overdetermination of fi xed, planned space—architecture, monumentality, symbolic and ideological representations, the state, and the forces of capitalism and economic transformation—but considers that space is always also “lived” and therefore continuously transformed by the minute practices of the everyday. Space—be it the physical structure of classrooms and streets, the intellectual framework of curricula and courses, or the movement of students in the city—is never fi xed, never stable, and always produced in the struggles of the quotidian. Politics is not a function of place, social categories, or abstract concepts, but it lies rather in the ability to produce a space in which a new everyday can be experienced, new relationships formed, and alternative lives can be lived. Space is not simply the stage of events but truly the stake of political struggles. Only by claiming a space of its own, only by producing a new everyday, can a group express and realize its politics. Only by looking at the production of space can we then analyze the political meanings of “students” and student activism. Space, for Lefebvre, is also always produced within the irreducible tension that exists between, on the one hand, “capitalism’s economic and political system—what might be called the ‘monologue of the state’ ”—and, on the other, the lived practices of its subjects. I argue in this volume that student activism in the May Fourth era was predicated on the separation of politics from the state through an invention of new forms of lived practice. I see this separation as the necessary condition that allowed for the creation of truly political organizations and actions, but also one that was never final and had to be reaffi rmed and reinvented as the state continuously attempted to reabsorb the challenge of “students.” The relationship of activism with the state was therefore a problem always present, always to be solved, even more so when the students were shaping their new everyday inside a public (i.e., state) university. Student activism did not solve the contradictions and the tensions produced by postulating a space for politics at a distance from the state; rather, activism was expressed and realized within those tensions. Th is relates to a second and more complex theoretical issue. The May Fourth movement has been considered for long time as constitutive of the modern nation-state, and student activism, as mentioned earlier, has seemed

8 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

to be intertwined with China’s modern history. To argue, as I do, that the category of “students” was instead produced “at a distance” from the state implicitly requires at the minimum a delinking of the two constitutive elements of the nation-state and possibly a reassessment of the very meaning of nationalism. May Fourth student activists undoubtedly expressed a concern for the salvation of China (conceived as a people and a bounded territory) and yet were able to advance radical criticism to nationalism narrowly conceived. While an in-depth analysis of student nationalism exceeds the scope of this book, I strive to keep open the theoretical complexity of the students’ multilayered concept of the “nation.” There seems to be a degree of intellectual dissonance between those students’ activities that expressed a critique of cultural essentialism in the name of radical internationalism and their initiatives predicated under the more evident sign of patriotism, such as the campaign to promote national goods. Again, rather than attempting to reconcile this tension, I choose instead to stress the different ways in which May Fourth students negotiated and reinterpreted the nation in the effort to produce a space of politics whose potential horizon was not a state form and that was not foreclosed by Chinese boundaries. Th is is another reason why it is crucial to put the everyday at the center of the study of May Fourth student activism. Henri Lefebvre saw the space of everydayness as central in his analysis of capitalist modernization: everydayness identifies “a specific experience lived and represented in industrializing cities” all over the world “but also a category of historical explanation that enlarged the perspective from which we can explore the contradictions of capitalist modernity.”  The space of the everyday is where people negotiate “between the rhythms and routines reproduced everywhere capitalism spread and the lived or local and contingent experiences mediating them.”  By locating their political struggles in the search for a different everyday (inside a modernizing city and around one of the quintessential global modern institutions, the research university), students in the May Fourth years were intervening within this tense articulation between the local (or the Chinese or national) and the global. They were therefore producing, from the specific condition of early-twentieth-century China, a critique of modernity that, however tentative and incomplete, necessarily exceeded the confines of a simplistic and univocal definition of the nation.

REDEFINING THE PLACE

In this volume, I examine the locus of student activism par excellence, Beijing University (Beida), the fi rst public university in China, whose students

9 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

were in the forefront of demonstrations from 1919 to 1989. Memoirs, exhibitions, university histories, and celebratory materials all agree in exalting Beida as the place, a light in dark times, never failing to endlessly produce scholarly talent and political consciousness among its students precisely as a result of its position—meaning its prominent place among state institutions, its connection with power and tradition, and even its physical location. Beida has been described as the hotbed of modern nationalism but also the direct descendent of the tradition of the literati’s concern for the state, and both aspects are often depicted as being inscribed in the physical and institutional environment of the school. Beida students are purportedly always already political because of the magical power of the place they inhabit. However, if we look at the founding moment of this Beida lore, the May Fourth years, contrary to the idea that the university was a settled reality— endowed with power and position, a rock of prestige to which any project could be anchored—what is striking is the very incoherence and fragility of Beida’s setting, on various levels. In the years 1917 to 1923, Beida’s position as a state institution, the unity of its physical setting, and the definition of its students were being heavily and continually challenged. The modern university stands in a par ticu lar relationship to the state, society, and the order of learning; Beida therefore lay institutionally at the intersection of these different realms and could not but be affected by their crises, which, in the fi rst years of the Republic, had become painfully evident. About a decade had passed since the elimination of the imperial examination system (keju), but both an educational routine and an order of learning (what was to be studied, how, and why) appropriate for China were far from being established. Meanwhile, Beijing University stood as the symbol of this failure to identify a viable alternative to the keju. Even if Beida was China’s fi rst and only state university, the “highest school” in the country, its reputation was tarnished by past and present corruption, heavy bureaucratic involvement, careerism, and poor academic achievement. It was not a prestigious place; in many ways it was more infamous than famous. Additionally, the economic and social transformations of the turn of the century were increasingly visible in Beijing. While newspapers and a flourishing publishing industry had opened possibilities for new kinds of intellectual engagement, the position of intellectuals, and consequently of students, had been irremediably shaken by the severing of learning from state ser vice. The reasons one should study (career, profession, status) remained very much an open question. In the fi rst years of the Republic, the institutional coherence of Beijing University seemed to be guaranteed only by the disciplining mission entrusted to it by a weak state. However, in 1917, the reforms introduced under

10 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

Cai Yuanpei’s presidency were premised precisely on the subversion and the refusal of this very mission; Cai’s reforms outlined an idea of a university that abdicated any government-related functions and withdrew its activities from the scope of the state. Th is was the first step in a series of processes by which the institutional precariousness of the school was accepted and embraced; openness became the defining trait of May Fourth’s Beida. The university curriculum was reshaped by merging the borders of disciplines and allowing freedom of choice for research and teaching; a place of learning fi rmly inside the scope of the state apparatus was opened into a space of knowledge, theoretically infinite. The boundaries between the school and the city became increasingly porous, thanks also to the physical structure of the university, with buildings scattered around the Imperial City and without a central campus. And while students went out into the city, unofficial auditors—drop-ins who unlawfully used the resources of Beida— crowded into the school. They constituted the majority using the classrooms and shared dorms, athletic fields, and other resources of the university, making it extremely difficult to defi ne who was a student and who was not. The lack of communal rituals, which became a defi ning trait of May Fourth’s Beida—there was no end-of-the-year ceremony, no fl ag raising, and no commencement— also stood in the way of the establishment of a closely knit community or a well-defi ned identity. Students extended this disdain for rites to their daily interactions, in classrooms and dorms, where rules of courtesy and esprit de corps were consciously shunned.  After 1917, Beida, as an institution, placed itself in a precarious position: (ideally) separated from the state, its gates open, and its community fragmented and largely undefi ned. If there was no settled “student” identity or “university community,” student politics in the years of May Fourth cannot be restricted to the realm of what we recognize as political movements, protests, and demonstrations— the simple representation of a group in public space. Rather, we can reconceptualize student activism by considering how it was precisely by challenging the distinctions between the cultural and the political, the intellectual and the quotidian, that student activists struggled over what a “student” and a “university” could be. Student politics developed in the gap opened by separating the school from the state, which had left the definition of the university and the sociological status of its students open to contention. Students widened the gap by searching for and experimenting with alternative models of organizations, through which crucial issues could be questioned and solutions attempted. Th is led to an extraordinary flourishing of student associations that explored cultural and intellectual issues, created unconventional forms of commercial

11 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

ventures, initiated pedagogical enterprises, and experimented with forms of communal life. Juxtaposed to this organizational effort, the staunch, idiosyncratic refusal of communitarian rites by Beida students in their daily interaction assumes a clearer value; it can be seen as part of a larger attempt to redefine, through the refashioning of the everyday space of the school, the relations between studying and living, manual work and intellectual work, individual and authority. In this perspective, the case of Beida shows how transforming everyday life was the true goal of politics, and politics can thus be best viewed as displaced into seemingly minor aspects of the quotidian. Against the assumption that a well-defined community is necessarily the foundation of activism, this case illustrates instead how political militancy is possible only when the boundaries of identification become unsettled. Finally, the challenge to the sociological definition of students and university was mirrored in the physical presence of Beida students and students in general in the city. In May 1919, students moved out of the school (May Fourth was a movement in that sense as well) and into the streets of Beijing in an organized way. They left both the place (the school) and the task (studying) allotted to them in order to appeal to the people of Beijing. Students, to paraphrase Kristin Ross, ceased to function as students and by doing so made any attempt at fi xing the sociological distinction of “students” moot. If classifications, following Bourdieu, are always a site of struggle, students made this struggle spatially evident. By moving into areas of the cities where they were not supposed to be—the streets in general, but specifically neighborhoods farther away from the school—students were also dislocating politics. Government repression of student activism tried to negate this dislocation and put students back in their proper place by restating sociological and spatial classifications. Th is occurred physically, through the violent repression of the movement and the transformation of the school into a prison in early June 1919, but also with a series of government orders that tried to redefine the confines of the category “students” and its place inside the sociological order. In this effort, the concept of “youth” was deployed as a way to deny any political meaning to student actions, which were reduced to generational, adolescent effervescence. The government repression showed that reducing political categories to their sociological determinants (youth, generation, and students) will always minimize or neutralize political meaning. It was only after and as a consequence of the events of May and June 1919 that, through a process to which students took active part, a tradition of student activism was shaped and fi xed in places, gestures, and symbols. Before 1919, not even Tiananmen, a symbol set in stone, conveyed meaning in the same way. The gate itself can be considered a modern invention, its association

to the nation-state largely contingent to the mass movement, not a condition preexisting and determining it.  Political events create their own mythology, but that mythology cannot be used to explain those very events.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

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12

NEW STUDENTS?

Th is volume argues that a political category of “students” was born out of the struggles of the May Fourth years, which obviously does not mean that there were no students before 1919 nor people who studied centuries before that time. And often, these people also staged protests and demonstrations and became involved in politics. Distinctions are therefore needed. First, we can state a radical difference between “students” and people who studied before the wide diff usion of modern schools in China. Sang Bing, in his exhaustive study of the late Qing xuetang (schools),  argues precisely that students could emerge only when a large number of (young) people had access modern schooling as the only path to achieve recognized educational credentials—in other words, when students became numerous enough to be apportioned in a sociological category. And that happened, in his analysis, not when modern schools were introduced in the late nineteenth century but only after the abolition of the civil examination system in 1905, which erased the identity of “exam candidate” and made “students” the only people who legitimately studied. While cultural attitudes lingered, we cannot discount the radical change in institutional forms and practices. Although we can trace back some political practices and behaviors of “modern students” to people in the traditional academies (shuyuan), those practices assumed a very different meaning when placed outside of the context in which the imperial examination system was a viable and well trodden path. However, even if we focus only on the early twentieth century, students did make their existence visible in the public arena prior to the May Fourth movement. According to Sang Bing, between 1902 and 1911 there were 502 protest activities in schools in twenty provinces and the capital. The May Fourth activists employed an array of means and tactics in their protests and thus provided the model for future student actions, but the 1919 demonstrators did not invent these tactics out of thin air. Strikes (bake) became common after 1905, replacing the practice of dropping out of school in mass (tuixue), used in the previous years. The first political association of students was formed in 1903, while mass demonstrations and occupations of public space appeared in 1910 and 1911. Late Qing students organized boycotts of U.S. goods (because of anti-Chinese immigration laws), “wrote big-character

13 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

posters, spoke from street corners, and staged mass demonstration (sometimes including costumed characters) to dramatize their concern.”  In what sense, then, were the protests of May Fourth different and as such foundational for a new political category of students? At the level of means, tactics, and forms of protest, there is nothing unusual in the fact that people invent out of the set of models at hand. As the late Qing students borrowed models from other types of performances and from foreign examples, so did the May Fourth protestors shape a repertoire out of what was available to them. In this sense, the May Fourth years might be viewed as the intensification and conclusion of a process started probably around 1895, through which a student identity crystallized in the public arena and a repertoire of student actions coalesced. And it was in the forms inscribed in the model of “the May Fourth students” that this repertoire was bequeathed to, and employed in, later instances of activism. In this sense, May Fourth works as a hinge between two phases: it is both the climax of a process of consolidation of tactics, practices, and ideas, and the beginning of a new history predicated under the political signifier “students.” But the May Fourth activism—and the case of Beida specifically—were originary of a student identity in a more profound way. The late Qing students existed within a specific and bureaucratically defined relationship with the state, and it was in large part on this relationship that their protests were predicated. The 1905 abolition of the civil examination system led to a skyrocketing increase in the number of public schools at all levels precisely because these institutions came to represent the only avenue towards employment and status. The bureaucratic relationship sanctioned by the keju was transferred to the school system; significantly, exam degree titles were granted to those who completed different levels of schooling (and often passed a national examination). Over time, without the seamless connection inscribed in the keju, the relationship between the schools and the state became looser and more contested, but the idea that the school system, and especially its higher level, the university, still had the bureaucratic function of producing talent for the nation-state lingered on until the first years of the Republic. Up until the early 1910s, there still seemed to be a certain confidence in what the institutional, political, and social identity of the people who studied should be, an identity still largely defined by their connection with the state. Accordingly, late Qing student protests were state centered: they presented petitions to the state, dealt with issues of state rights, and, finally, as Sang Bing argues, were crucial in directly affecting the form of the state, as students contributed to the anti-Qing republican forces. Late Qing student politics was largely defined and consumed by its concern with the state.

14 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

The almost immediate failure of the republican state and the miserable spectacle provided by state institutions after 1912 not only made state control more difficult to digest and to exercise  but also—in combination with social, cultural, and economic transformations— definitively shattered those identities, such as students, that still relied on a bureaucratic definition. In the specific case of Beijing University, it is only thanks to the opportunity presented by a weakening government in the second half of the 1910s that Beida had the freedom to seriously explore the contradictory possibilities that the model of the modern research university offered and to redefine its relationship with the state. And by doing so, the modern university stated it was radically different from the xuetang. In the larger crisis of functionality that was part of the experience of Chinese modernity, the novelty for May Fourth students was the possibility to define what a student should be and especially to do so autonomously, at a distance from the state. As such, student politics did not rest on any stable definition of students, nor was it exhausted by state concerns. Rather, the students fought precisely over the ability to define what a student could be, and, particularly in 1919, they strove to stake the right to a kind of politics that could not be subsumed under the signifier “student,” nor any other sociological name. The category of “students” was then invented in the May Fourth years in two different ways. First, as an identitarian sign, summarizing a repertoire of tactics, gestures, and places. And even if single traits of this repertoire can be traced back decades before, and its process of formation was more of accumulation than invention, it was on May Fourth that this repertoire was inscribed as the historical precedent of a tradition of activism. In that, May Fourth was indeed eventful. It was then by reemploying the repertoire established in 1919 that students could claim their legitimacy as political subjects throughout the twentieth century. Second, and to me more significant, what was invented on May Fourth was the notion of students as a sign of radical unsettlement, the refusal of imposed definitions, and the disruption of communitarian boundaries. What was invented under the name of “students” was a new (and always renewed) political subjectivity of self-definition. In that sense, in later instances of student activism in the May Fourth mold, “students” could signify a politics that exceeds and challenges the sociological order in the name of a potential equality in identifying political subjects. Th is was the case, for example, in the Cultural Revolution, when student organizations addressed the relationship between the party-state, class, and politics. In this view, then, “students” is not a closed category but an interpretational space, always polysemic, always problematic. And in that, every reutilization and replaying of the May

Fourth repertoire of student activism has always had the potential to be not a replica but a reinvention.

O N L O C AT I O N , T I M E , A N D S O U R C E S L O C AT I O N

15 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

Clearly, these two legacies of the May Fourth “students” are tightly entangled, as the analysis of Tiananmen in chapter 6 will show. But this is precisely one of the reasons why the case of Beijing University is particularly relevant, because probably in no other school in China is the mythology of student activism so closely interwoven with the minute practices of historical students. Beida is itself part of the symbolic repertoire that took shape in the May Fourth years, and the place of the university in this legacy has been continuously celebrated to the point of being inscribed in city space: the avenue running past one of the main buildings of May Fourth’s Beida was renamed May Fourth Avenue (Wusi Dajie) during the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, throughout the twentieth century, Beida students have been often considered to be metonymic of Chinese “students” tout court; this was particularly evident in the spring of 1989, when, thanks probably to students’ self-promotion and the observers’ need to identify a chain of leadership, Beijing University students were often and largely erroneously portrayed as directing the movement. Th is case lies precisely at the intersection of the historical event of the fi rst modern student demonstration in China and the mythology of the signifier “student.” It is therefore significant because it offers a glimpse of how people become political (the process of politicization), how they express and realize their politics, and how categories come to influence and reframe both later political movements and our historical understanding of them. However, aside from its centrality in the mythology and the repertoire, Beijing University is crucial to the analysis of May Fourth politics because it illustrates how this politics was expressed in an (always problematic) disjuncture from the state. National Beijing University enjoyed physical, economic, and structural proximity to the state; yet it is precisely in this environment that through anticommunitarian practices, independent organizations, and curricular reform, students explored the possibility of experimenting with political identities and collective actions autonomously from the state. It is, as such, the place, real and perceived, of Beida inside the bureaucratic educational apparatus of the time that allows us to see more clearly what was at stake in May Fourth student politics. Some of the practices and organizational forms that I describe in the following chapters were not exclusive to Beida, and with these in mind, we can

16 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

speak of a more general May Fourth mode of politics. But Beida occupied a very unique position and this case should not be taken as representative of student activism in general or even of the “multiple May Fourths” all over China. I have tried to be careful when switching from “Beida students” to “students” in general, but a certain amount of overlap and confusion is unavoidable, especially when the two merged practically and symbolically, as in the actions of May and June 1919. In addition, both “students” and “Beida students” are already generalizations. “Students” subsumes a series of economic, geographic, and social realities to which I cannot here give justice; even in the case of May Fourth Beijing, there were major distinctions on the bases of school, gender, socioeconomic status, regional provenance, and so on. What this volume traces is the emergence of the political category under which these different realities came to be inscribed and were able to recognize themselves. Similarly, I am aware of the overextension implicit in writing about the  political activism of “Beida students.” It is extremely difficult—if not impossible—to ascertain how many students were directly engaged in organizational activism at Beijing University, especially before May 4, 1919 (when a large number of Beida undergraduates did take to the streets). The politically active students were also those more likely to contribute essays to newspapers and magazines, to join associations, to have their names listed or remembered, and to write memoirs. There is obviously the danger of overestimating the feverish activism of a small minority vis-à-vis the day-to-day routine of a majority and assume the former as the defining trait of a whole group. But that is precisely what happened in this case: the process of politicization—with certain characteristics and specific forms— of a possibly limited but growing number of Beida students merged into the development of a political category of activism which came to recognized precisely through those characteristics and forms. Th is multilayered meaning of “Beida students” then points to one of the central issues in this volume.

GENDER

As will become clear in the following pages (through my repeated use of the personal pronoun he), there are virtually no women in this story. While Beida is heralded as one of the pioneers of coeducation in China, there were no female students until February 1920, when three women were admitted as auditors. The numbers, however, remained small, and in 1923 there were just over thirty female students at Beida. Their stories do not figure prominently (or they do not figure at all) in the sources for the period and the topics I analyze. To write the story of May Fourth female activism, one should

explore other locations, in par ticu lar women’s schools. But that is an analysis I cannot provide here. In this volume, I pay attention to issues of masculinity and femininity and gendered representations of students and try to highlight when female students appear in the sources. Yet I cannot but recognize the prevalence of male pronouns throughout the pages and the ghostly absence of female protagonists. I could have looked at different sources, materials, topics, but that would have meant a different book. 17 |

For a book framed around space, time here figures prominently: first and foremost, in the most canonical form of the chronological window stated in the title. The years 1917 and 1923 are not eventful dates; rather, they bracket the events of 1919. In the history of Beida, the first date is connected with the beginning of Cai Yuanpei’s presidency, but also with a major increase in student admissions and the inclusion of leading members of the New Culture community in the faculty. While I don’t subscribe to the view that sees 1917 as a radical rupture, by 1917 enough factors had coalesced at and around Beida to shape the physical, intellectual, and political environment associated with the May Fourth years. Nothing really “notable” happened in 1923, but we can trace to that date both the defi nitive emergence of “students” as a par ticu lar signifier in the public opinion and the exhaustion of some student initiatives, such as the lecture groups, that had defined May Fourth student politics. While some of these activities continued in the following years, in general they became largely separated from “students.”  The choice of this chronological bracket suggests also a vision of May Fourth politicization—the emergence of the political subjectivities we identify as “students”— as a process that came to realization during those years, which does not mean that there was no event “May Fourth” but that we have to reframe its significance. The presence of students in the streets of Beijing and in front of Tiananmen on May 4, 1919, was eventful in so much as it brought to the fore new meanings, new strategies, and new symbols (among them “students”) and thus made evident the existence of new possibilities for the conduct of political activism.

SOURCES

To document the connections between activism, the everyday, and urban space, I use memoirs, biographical descriptions, university administration

I N T RO D U C T I O N

CHRONOLOGY

18 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

archives, essays and short stories, photographs, newspapers, and city guides. In retracing the minute practices of the quotidian inside the school, memoirs are an indispensable yet extremely problematic source. Some of these recollections were written many years later, reminiscing and idealizing a youthful period in the midst of political crisis, war, or exile. Many, if not all, were used as weapons in the bitter power struggle to define the legacy of the May Fourth movement. As such, they present all the pitfalls (and some of the strengths) of oral history sources. First, they are “not fully reliable in point of fact.”  In most cases, factual details provided in memoirs can be confi rmed (or disproved) through other, usually less obviously biased sources—like school documents and newspaper reports. But in some cases and especially for those practices and details ignored in other, more institutional material but that are crucial for my analysis, there is little evidence outside memoirs and biographies. In some instances, comparing different memoirs against one another might be fruitful: this is the case, for example, of different versions of the events of May Fourth. But again, this tactic is limited usually to factual discrepancies and does not help much in ascertaining those details that are essential to this project: the everyday of Beida students, their choices of fashions, their habits, the general ethos of campus life. Memoirs embody the entangled relationship between the historical activities and the mythology of May Fourth, between students’ daily practices and their inscription in a repertoire of “students.” Even when we have different authors all “remembering” a specific trait of May Fourth campus life or student activism, there remains the doubt that their agreement can be at least partially attributed to their participation in the construction of a collective memory, a shared mythology of Beida. In that, however, these sources have also a fundamental value, typical of oral history: they tell us less about events than about their meaning, they allow to see which details are endowed with significance and which ones are set aside in the recollections. In the case of May Fourth “students,” it is through memoirs that we can trace the process by which the category itself emerged with certain characteristics, a process located at the intersection of historical events, historiography, and myth. This clearly does not solve the issue of factual validation, and I have made efforts to be as careful as possible. When a specific habit of Beida students (their disregard for classroom attendance, for example) is reported in several memoirs, I take it not necessarily as a generalized description of all students but rather as part of a set of behaviors deployed by the activists among them to intervene in the daily life at their institution and that, in some cases, came to be constitutive of the May Fourth invention of the category of “students.”

O R G A N I Z AT I O N O F T H E V O L U M E

19 | I N T RO D U C T I O N

The volume is organized in four parts, each investigating a different kind of space. In part 1, “Lived Space,” I describe everyday life within Beijing University’s classrooms and dorms. During the May Fourth years, students challenged any kind of disciplining rituals or rules of interaction: they attacked exams, dorm regulations, and school hours and also willfully shunned elementary rites of courtesy. I show how this anticommunitarian attitude was a way to identify the space of everyday interactions as one of political struggle and to shape the quotidian practices into radical critiques of any imposed communitarian definition. Chapter 2 shifts the attention more closely to the bodily practices of Beida students, to their resistance to physical and martial training, to their bohemian choice of attire—students reveled in the shabbiness of their gowns— and to their devotion to frugality. All these seemingly unrelated practices prefigures a par ticu lar position vis-à-vis the impositions of a modernizing state and an integrated capitalist economy. Part 2 focuses on “Intellectual Space.” Beijing University, under Cai Yuanpei’s presidency (1917– 26), underwent radical reforms aimed at the abdication of any governmental function and the withdrawal of university activities from the scope of the state. This rather idealistic project had practical implications, first and foremost in the organization of the curriculum and the practice of teaching and learning. By making the pursuit of universal scientific truths the only goal of the university’s mission, the academic reforms displaced the position of intellectuals and scholars, freeing them, at least in theory, from any national and state-based definition of knowledge. In short, the reforms configured a modern university that was not and could not be (expect geographically) a Chinese one. In part 3, “Political Space,” I examine the student demonstration of May and June 1919 as part of a struggle over political boundaries. The apolitical stance that had infused the university reform, far from being a retreat into the antipolitical, made it possible instead for students to formulate a redefinition of the political itself. Inside the university, the new administration system, and even admission exams configured different political experiences for students. The various study associations provided an experiment in alternative organizational practices, one based on self-discipline and subjective will, which theoretically and practically exceeded the boundaries of the university and of “students.” Chapter 5 analyzes the repression of the 1919 movement as an attempt to enforce (physically and legally) a separation between school and society, students and people, political discussion and political practice.

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Part 4, “Social Space,” uses two different but related perspectives to examine the relationship between students and the social space of the Chinese capital. Chapter 6 reverses the view of the influence of abstract, monumental space on political actions by showing how students actively contributed to mapping out a new hierarchy of urban spaces, including the main symbol of student protest in the twentieth century, Tiananmen. Despite the unavoidable presence of imperial remains in the university area, the process of politicization for Beida students was more closely related to those urban transformations brought by capitalism and modernity. Chapter 7 follows the progressive expansion of student organized actions in the city: from the university, to the neighborhood, to the city, and, finally, outside the gates. The end of the May Fourth mode of activism is marked precisely by a retreat of students’ organized activities back inside the university proper. The conclusion looks at the double legacy inscribed in the category of “students” and its exhaustion at the end of the twentieth century.

B A C K TO T H E G AT E

Months later I return to eBay. A quick search for “May Fourth movement” and there it is. The same poster, this time with an option “buy it now.” Sixty dollars, plus shipping from Hong Kong. I get up and get my wallet. I hesitate, plastic in hand. I still want it. I have used that image for years without ever owning it in any form. I have unpacked, vivisected, and analyzed every aspect of that icon in classrooms and in talks. I put the card back in my wallet. Maybe it is time to move beyond this image and look behind the gate.

LIVED PA R T I

SPACE

1

THROUGH THE WALLS E V E R Y D AY L I F E I N T H E U N I V E R S I T Y

Beida is invincible, what is never defeated is her foundation. Beida is invincible, what can never be destroyed is her spirit. Beida is invincible, what makes people proud is that one young generation after another creates a present that exceeds legends. —Meng Zhaoqiang, Lu Qing, Tang Han, eds., Beida bu bai (Beida is invincible)

C H E S T T H U M P I N G A N D T H E PA R A D OX O F M E M O RY

Russell Baker once remarked in the New York Times how “patting yourself on the back once in a blue moon is forgivable, but constantly thumping your chest about how wonderful you are soon makes you an embarrassment to friends and neighbors.”  In the case of Beijing University (Beida), it is indeed difficult not to find utterly embarrassing such excessive (and, one could say, borderline comical) displays of pride as the one quoted in the epigraph. The slim volume Beida bu bai (Beida is invincible) is the most glaringly and unabashedly laudatory example in the flood of commemorative publications put into motion by Beijing University’s centennial celebrations in 1998. A smallscale nostalgia industry found expression in a well-edited collection of sources, photographic essays, biographies, and a veritable tidal wave of memories and personal recollections, retracing, often with unashamed and self-congratulatory pride, the glories of Beida’s century. Ten years later, the flow does not seem to have stopped or even slowed down significantly. Rescuing and recollecting the memories of student and faculty of the fi rst half of the twentieth century, these nostalgic publications shape the legacy bequeathed to today’s Beida by its Qing and especially Republican

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incarnations. The core of this legacy (and of the “Old Beida” pride) lies in the somewhat uncanny capacity of the university to generate a par ticu lar brand of intellectuals: an ever-reproducing community of individuals, the “Beida students,” able to act decisively in crucial times of crisis, to take the lead in saving the nation, and to shape the destiny of the state. In addition, this capacity is situated, in the sense that the position of the school is considered to be essential in order to endow the “Beida students” with the prestige and the charismatic power of the legacy. Th is position refers to an intellectual, institutional, and social placement (the most prestigious school in the country, the fi rst public university, which was labeled “National” in 1912) but also to a physical location; the recurrent refrain of the transformative power of the campus is too insistent and pervasive in memoirs and essays to be just the fond recollections of aging alumni. The image conveyed by the name Beijing Daxue in these nostalgic commemorations is then one of institutional continuity and consistency, a rock in a stormy sea; the school that has provided shelter and nurtured a group of people unfailingly endowed with political sensitivity and organizational genius. Plodding through this commemorative literature, the impression one derives is that, since its founding in 1898, the identification of this place as China’s first university somehow almost automatically—miraculously, one could say—produced an organized community of “university students.” However, an analysis of everyday life inside and around Beida in the years 1917 through 1923, which I will provide in this chapter, illustrates how not only the mythological elements of this memory but also the very categories of this legacy needs to be reopened and rediscussed. Ironically, “Beida” (as the place, its social standing, its physical borders) and “Beida students” (the community, its identity, its mythology) were produced in a period—the May Fourth years—in which the university seemingly reached its maximum institutional inconsistency and its community appeared radically fragmented and uncommunitarian. A description of life in dorms, classrooms, and meeting places during those years shows how difficult, if not impossible, it is to isolate a space of the “university proper” and separate the inside from the outside. The “old Beida” literature often celebrates the myth of the university’s exceptionality, its splendid isolation in the urban landscape. But Beida was not isolated; in fact, one of its distinctive characteristics was the porousness of its borders. The very notion of campus did not apply in the case of Beida, as it was fractured into three distinct locations, and, for this reason, “the boundary between the campus and the city was by no means clearly drawn.”  Beijing University borders were porous in both directions: students moved out into the city, but nonstudents also entered the university. The overwhelming presence during

convocation at the start of the school year, no graduation at the end. . . . Beida isolated students. . . . The Beida undergraduate might be an eccentric

WA L L S

community in this setting—no daily flag rising, no morning exercises, no

T H E

[At Beida] there were few ceremonial occasions to create a sense of

T H RO U G H

Memoirs of old Beida construct a romantic and nostalgic but also paradoxical portrait. According to the legendary lore, Beida students could be nonconformist, independent, careless in attire and posture, sometimes genial, often lazy and inconsistent, and always original. But they were also almost pathologically incapable of adhering to general rules or even an informal esprit de corps. The unifying characteristic of the Beida community through the twentieth century, shaped and bequeathed by its early Republican incarnation (and restated in the commemorative literature), is that it had no unity. John Israel incisively summarizes the split nature of the Beida tradition:

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BOHEMIAN MYTHOLOGIES

25

the May Fourth years of unofficial auditors, people who participated in the life of Beida without being “of Beida,” is a defining trait of the university and signals how the very definition of “student” was open to contention. The indeterminate character of Beida “students” suggests a more general inconsistency or “incoherence” of the university as an institution and a community. The fragility of its physical borders stands as the counterpart to the lack of identifying rituals and symbols: ceremonies, both at an institutional and personal level, were shunned at Beida. Rituals identify a community and mark a place. I argue that by refusing to adhere to even minimal rites of courtesy and belonging, the students at Beida were struggling through everyday practice to defy the possibility that any bond (institutional or ritual) could enclose the space of politics and knowledge. In this sense, political and cultural positions were realized through a space of transformed everydayness, in which the reframing of lived spaces and pedagogical routines was as much an expression of activism as public demonstrations were. From this perspective, then, the myth of a community and a place was only the aftereffect of a political sequence (the May Fourth period) produced precisely by the inventive destruction of a communitarian bond and by an institutional unsettling. Significantly, it is the celebratory “old Beida” literature that provides glimpses into this process and its exhaustion. Th is memorial literature extols the permanence and continuity of a place and a community while at the same time offering evidence (obliquely, but sometimes directly) that neither the place nor the community did indeed exist.

prodigy who chose subjects according to his interests, cut classes freely, and thought nothing of staying up all night to sing Beijing opera arias. Beida students had little use for synthesized texts but read widely and passionately in books of their own choosing. They wore the faded, patched long gown, and their calories were more likely to come from impulsive visits to snack shops than from regular meals. Except during protest movepolitical activity, their life was free, bohemian, and idiosyncratic. 

L I V E D

S PAC E

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ments, when Beida students demonstrated a positive genius for organized

The vision of a community that defines itself, takes pride in, and still claims an uninterrupted legacy out of the institutional and individual refusal of any communal symbolic bonds seems indeed quite paradoxical. But this paradox is never directly addressed in the nostalgia literature, which repeats endlessly the mantra of this great Beida spirit, sometimes with humorous effects. In a recent collection of anecdotes, one author notes that Beida still lacks a school anthem. The alleged reason is that Beida’s tradition is guaranteed precisely by the very resistance to unifying symbols, by the resilience of the university spirit of individualism and fragmentation. “The fact that Beida does not have an anthem is probably for the best,” he concludes, for “isn’t the ‘Nameless lake’ famous anyway [even if it does not have a name]?”  Th is anticommunitarian spirit is then identified as the hallmark that, for most of the twentieth century, distinguished Beida from other schools in the country, and the foremost sign of its uniqueness. Beida students literally wore their exceptionality: their careless and shabby attire was in stark contrast with the tidy uniforms of the Americanized Shanghai schools. They looked lazy, slow, unkempt, and were clearly less apt at athletics than their counterparts in other Beijing schools or the students in missionary universities in the rest of the country (more in chapter 2). The most striking contrast is usually drawn with Qinghua University, which, crafted on the example of American universities, offered a model of cohesiveness and respect for the rules. “Unlike the undisciplined life of Beida students, Qinghua undergraduates lived in an orderly, well-regulated community.”  They “did better in their studies and spoke fluent English. They were socially active and well dressed, but they did not know as much about Chinese affairs and did not take much interest in politics.”  Even if they are wearing a simple blue gown, it is perfectly ironed; each one of them is smiling and glistening, all over the limitless green fields. One doesn’t see here those brooding and sighing expressions, the lack of youthful vigor that one often witnesses at Beida. As soon as class is dismissed, they move from their engineering course on one side of the campus

to the chemistry or geology course on the other side, traversing it diagonally, and they do not slow down even when they are riding a bicycle. It is like a continuous stream of people coming and going, and you never see anything like the measured, careless and relaxed walking style of Beida students.

T H RO U G H T H E WA L L S

The everyday life of students at Beida during the May Fourth years offers a striking picture. Chen Pingyuan, one of the most attentive surveyors of the lore of old Beida, has challenged the existence of a unified community in this period and has stressed repeatedly how the very idea of a “Beida clique” is more or less a fabrication. Echoing a famous observation by Lu Xun, Chen has contested the fact that students were organized and united in something akin to an old-boy network. In the early Republican period, he writes, Beida was in fact affected by an incurable “unbridled freedom” (ziyou sanman), which the students jealously preserved and protected against attempts at “unification” and “regulation” by the administration. The general attitude was summarized by a motto: “I don’t care about you, you don’t care about me, we don’t mess with each other.”  It was a place where “nobody would reject you when you arrived, but nobody would run after you when you decided to leave.” 

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UNBRIDLED FREEDOM

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The image of the isolated Beida student as a bohemian genius, with his long patchy gown and rimmed spectacles, shifting between self-imposed isolation and never-ending debates on culture and literature, is clearly part of a constructed tradition that has been rehearsed and reproduced through the years. However, looking beyond and inside this tradition, we discover that most of the attitudes and features that characterized the image of Beida students did emerge and coalesce at a particu lar moment in the history of the university, the May Fourth years, when the students embodied (quite literally) a critical position vis-à-vis political and social issues. It is my contention that in this period the individualistic and anticommunitarian attitudes—the bohemian style— of “Beida students” took shape as ways— at least for the more active among them—to express and realize political and cultural stances relevant to the specific historical situation. It was only after and as a consequence of May Fourth that the connotation of eccentricity and individualism was inscribed as a defining trait of Beida old-school pride, and solipsistic bohemians became the paradoxical symbols of a communitarian story. But by that time, the political effectiveness of those symbols had been largely exhausted or appropriated.

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Th is laissez-faire atmosphere made the university the perfect breeding place for those anecdotes of asociality that were to become such an essential part of the Beida tradition. Contemporaries who described May Fourth Beida ranged in tone, but not in substance, from “a place for weirdos”  to a “multifarious, extremely variegated environment, in which everybody can do his own thing.” Even after the unifying rally of 1919, students continued to hold to their “strongly developed” and independent personalities. In the late 1910s, Beida students were not simply free; they seemed to have grown refractory to any general rule or symbolic ritual of community, and ultimately to unity as a value in itself. Over and again this became a liability to student initiatives. For example, an umbrella organization of all Beijing University students was created only after May Fourth 1919, when the call for nurturing a spirit of “individual freedom and common action” became more insistent. Even when it was finally formed, the association did not last for long, and sources report recurring failed attempts to “unify the feelings” of the Beida community and to constitute an overall organization not based on intellectual interest or local ties. While it seems that attitudes of laissez-faire and eccentric individualism intensified and became a more dominant trait at Beijing University by the late 1910s, the question for scholars has been how to explain the coincidence of these phenomena with the more general changes that took place in the school in the same period. After 1917, under the presidency of Cai Yuanpei, Beida had undergone a radical institutional restructuring that affected the curricular and administrative organization of the school. The correlation between these two aspects is usually framed under the logic of individualism and tolerance, tenets that Cai had allegedly borrowed from Western models. In this perspective, the undisciplined freedom was just an appropriation by youth of the academic spirit of tolerance that the school reform had fostered. Th is explanation, however, operates under an unacceptable double reduction. First, it interprets social and lived experience simply as a reflection of shifts in intellectual posture or in ideology (narrowly conceived), thus drawing us back again to one the main misperceptions of past May Fourth scholarship. Second, it restricts the significance both of the reforms and of the students’ everyday practice to a narrow form of “liberal” respect for individual inclinations, in which “academic freedom” becomes an empty codeword faintly echoing our contemporary academe. I suggest instead that Beida students’ staunch attachment to radical individualism and solipsism (even when it became a problem for organizational efforts) can be better understood as part of a deeper and more complex relation between lifestyles inside and around the school and the political process of the May Fourth years. The 1917 reforms at Beida were grounded, at least

tics as on the level of their daily life: in concrete problems of work, leisure, housing, sexuality and family and neighborhood relations. 

Space is, for Lefebvre and Ross, something totalizing that comprehends and exceeds both the subjective individual biographies and the institutional objective structures. A “revolutionary” movement must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, language, and collective practices. Politics, therefore, can best be seen as deployed in the everyday, fragmented in the gestures and movements of individuals and their interaction and production

WA L L S

perceptible, in other words, not so much on the level of governmental poli-

T H E

and social ambiences. The insurgents’ brief mastery of their own history is

T H RO U G H

day life—the organization of space and time, changes in lived rhythms

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in its displacement of the political onto seemingly peripheral areas of every-

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ideally, in a withdrawal from the representation of the political community, the state. At the same time, student life took forms that were clearly and sometimes excessively anticommunitarian, and they moved away from those communal rituals whose connection with the state was more evident. The radical solipsistic spirit of Beida students embodied precisely an attempt to express and realize in the everyday a radical critique of any imposed communitarian definition of university and students, because such definition could only revert to the state. So Beida students’ laissez-faire postures can be construed as an escape from (state) politics into the realm of the individual, but should not be reduced exclusively to that. For at least a certain number of Beida students, these attitudes were also a means to present a claim for a politics that was not based on an inscribed sociological or institutional identity. Everyday life already contains and constitutes a critique of detached political life, one concentrated in isolated moments (elections), established organizations (parties), and institutional settings (the state). Then the students’ claim could only be expressed in the practice of the quotidian. Any social movement, as Henri Lefebvre has pointed out, must produce a space in order to exist: “any ‘social existence’ aspiring or claiming to be ‘real,’ but failing to produce its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction, unable to escape from the ideological or even the ‘cultural’ realm.”  Space, which for Lefebvre was a way of recoding his initial concept of everyday life, is “at once result and cause, product and producer; it is also a stake, the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies, and hence also the object of wagers on the future.”  It is therefore always political and strategic. In her analysis of the social space of the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross makes a similar argument. The significance of the Commune is most evident in its “working existence,”

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of structures. Th is approach is particularly enlightening in the case of May Fourth, which was the first movement in modern Chinese history that may, with real justification, be described as a “universal movement.” It was universal not only in geographical and social scope, but also in its intellectual scope, “in that its concerns covered everything from questions of ideas to social and political questions, and extended from the problems of economic change, social reorganization, and political transformation.”  It was universal, in short, because it promised a total change in politics, culture, literature, habits, gestures, and life. “New life” (xin shenghuo) was a ubiquitous term during the May Fourth period, especially among students. The Beijing University Students’ Weekly published at least a dozen essays between 1917 and 1923 that outlined proposals and ideas for what “student life” should be, with details ranging from very practical norms of hygiene to abstract ethical obligations. Work-study groups experimented with alternative arrangements of communal life. Finally, Xin shenghuo was the title of the periodical in which the lectures and announcements of the Beida Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education were collected. Accordingly, most of the student debates about life (shenghuo) at Beijing University shift seamlessly from the broad “institutional” framework (curricula, administration) to the “personal” and “lived” (pedagogy, housing, clothes). After 1919, when the call for the reform of school rules and regulations intensified, proposals for structural changes (abolition of the president or of governing bodies) were often combined with reforms that altered daily, nonacademic practices (for example, dorm regulations.) The language made reference to personal emotions, feelings, and a whole set of relationships between the place and its inhabitants. The declared goal of these proposals was to shake the “ancient prison-like and inhuman school system” and help “create one free and happy school campus, and a training ground for a pure and complete personality.”  For at least some students, then, the lived space of the university, down to its most mundane and physical details, was essential as administrative or intellectual reforms in order to realize political change.

WHO WAS A STUDENT?

One of the defining characteristics of the physical space of Beijing University was its openness. Th is was in part because the fragmentation of the school buildings over an extended area of the city, which assumed the ethos of a “university district,” posed an obstacle to the formation of an enclosed campus. These architectural conditions were duplicated at a different level when, under Cai Yuanpei’s leadership, the symbols and rules that maintained the

separation of the university from its surroundings were removed. As Cai himself reminded his students in 1918: In the past, outsiders were forbidden to enter this place, but now everybody can. Previously, just outside the Beijing University building at Mashenmiao, there was a sign shaped like the head of a tiger. Everyone who saw it knew that this was a school and that entry was forbidden. People considered it the highest educational institution in China and only stu-

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dents and professors could get in. Th is opinion was common especially

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among the people who lived near the university. Now, we have gotten rid

T H RO U G H

of that sign.

official students who had gotten in by examination; auditors who had not taken examinations but had signed up to audit courses; and drop-in students who came freely to listen though they had not obtained any formal permission. Some people rented rooms near Beijing University and settled in as long-term drop-in students.

Beida regulations did indeed include provisions for auditors and “temporary” students, although the official statutes give the impression that the situation was rather fluid. According to a survey published in the newspaper Shenbao in 1918, the requirements to become a Beida xuankesheng (“elective student”) were graduation from another university or specialty school and

WA L L S

We used to say that Beijing University had three kinds of students: the

T H E

The permeability of the borders not only defined the life inside the university, but also the somewhat ambiguous status of Beida students. Beida’s library and cafeteria were open to the public; the shower rooms were also open to the public until nightfall; the gym and athletic field were used more by outsiders than by Beida students; and athletic accessories could be freely borrowed. Even dorm beds were sublet to nonstudents. More importantly, classrooms and lectures were accessible to all. “The four gates stood wide open,” Feng Youlan recalled, “so at the sound of the bell anyone could come to audit lectures. Anyone could ask at the door for a copy of the day’s lecture notes, then go in and listen to the lecture. The people who passed out the lecture notes did not care who you were. They passed them out to all comers until they were gone. Sometimes people who were supposed to attend the class did not get lecture notes, and those who were not supposed to would get the last of them.”  Thus, the extent of who was included under the definition “Beijing University student” must be considerably broadened. Feng Youlan again explains:

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an interview with the department chair. The president personally granted the final approval. Auditors could attend any class they liked and were granted a certificate for each; they even received a kind of diploma at the end. They had the chance to take part in the admission exams and become regular undergraduates. The pantingsheng (auditors) were not issued diplomas or certificates but they could take part in the exams and, if their grades were high enough, be granted the president’s permission to become xuankesheng. The distinction between the two levels looks quite murky, but the situation was amended and simplified in 1919, when the name xuankesheng was abolished (to avoid confusion with the new elective course system, the xuankezhi) and auditors were addressed as pantingsheng. After having proven their qualifications and compiled a “letter of intent,” they could attend classes but had to pay fees. However, a pantingsheng could not claim to be a “Beida student”; he had to refer to himself as a “Beida auditor.” There are serious doubts as to whether this last prohibition was in fact respected or how it could have been enforced. As of 1919, auditors still had an inside track to become regular undergraduates, provided they had successfully completed the required classes in the preparatory courses. By 1920 this possibility was eliminated. However, as Chen Pingyuan observed, these distinctions and the increasingly strict rules were not really relevant; fi rst, because it is doubtful that they were enforced by a faculty whose carelessness in this respect was well known, and, more importantly, because they did not affect the larger component of the “irregular” student body, young people who simply showed up for class. These drop-ins were a typical Beida phenomenon: they were addressed with a negative nickname toutingsheng, literally “eavesdropping students,” but there was very little that was secretive about them. Their presence was widely recognized and accepted and they went around Beida “with their chins up.”  Allegedly, none of the “legitimate” students or faculty would have ever thought of enquiring whether one was a “real” student or not. The presence of these students was possible in large part because of the relaxed atmosphere and the almost complete and willful disdain of academic rituals that marked the institutional space of Beida. Some auditors came from the larger student community of Beijing and were attracted by the fame of this or that professor. Two founding members of the Work Study Mutual Aid Corps were auditors at Beida: He Mengxiong, who came to Beijing from Hunan to stay with his uncle, a member of Parliament, and Fu Binran, who chose courses in philosophy, education, ethics, psychology, and English. Other auditors had failed the first attempt at the admission exams and decided to stay around, waiting for a chance to get in as regular undergraduate. Th is was the case of Yang Lianggong who arrived in Beijing too late to take

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part in the 1915 admission exams. He entered the Specialty School of Engineering instead, but eventually dropped out to be an auditor at Beida. The  following year, he successfully gained admission to the preparatory courses. The community of “vagrant,” unaffiliated scholars (liulang) elected the neighborhood around the university as their temporary lodging place. These “uninvited guests” shared the resources of Beida with the regular students, apparently without any animosity, and with a certain degree of confusion about who was what. Professors not only did not seem to care about these unsanctioned students, but they had a vested interest in their presence. “Eavesdroppers” were reportedly more diligent in attending classes and they often made up the large majority of the audience. The phenomenon became even more widespread during the late 1910s and into the early 1920s. When Liang Shuming taught his course on “Confucian thought” in 1923, two hundred students came to attend and he was forced to move the class to a larger room. However, only the ninety “official” undergraduates took the final exam. The overwhelming presence of auditors counterbalanced the often desultory attendance of the regular students. Before 1917, many students skipped classes to patronize the “eight big alleys,” Beijing’s pleasure quarters. After Cai’s arrival, the situation seems to have significantly improved, but “certain people went on as before.”  Philanderers and gamblers probably made for only a minority of absentee students; the large majority simply attended selectively, making full use of the freedom that the reforms had officially and unofficially instituted. “Nobody decided for you which classes you were or were not to attend; nobody decided for you whether you were to attend classes at all. As long as you went to take examinations at the proper time, it was all right. If you didn’t intend to get a diploma, you didn’t even have to take the examinations: it was up to you.”  So, most students who were attending classes were not really students, or at least were challenging the meaning of institutional affi liation. In contrast, many if not most official students were not behaving according to a script, and were spending most of their time outside the classroom in individual pursuits: they could be found in the library, studying on their own, or attending an elective class, following a different, personal path. They were stretching to the utmost the possibility of individual choice that the new curriculum had presented them. To be sure, while the university gates stood open and the walls were indeed porous, this does not mean that boundaries ceased completely to exist. The very fact that eavesdroppers are recalled so vividly in memoirs (and seen as a problem by the administration) points to the repressed desire or the failed imposition of distinctions. Boundaries (between students and nonstudents,

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city and schools, etc.) existed precisely as a site of classificatory tension, one that was engaged both theoretically and practically. The issue of what a university student was and what he should be was in fact not debated in the abstract, but struggled with in the everyday of classroom life. Even the strange incidents, the haphazard behaviors of faculty and students marked “extreme moments” in the ongoing rethinking of a modern pedagogy, part of a larger attempt to unhinge the lived practice of learning in the university from the rituals of educational routine. In this perspective, classroom life, radically altered in all these different ways, was where the political possibilities of alternative education were displaced.

PEDAGOGY

The somewhat haphazard attendance was both the product of and one of the factors behind the peculiar teaching and learning atmosphere at Beida. The general attitude of faculty contributed to this situation. The institutional and intellectual context of Chinese education at the time was one in which a new intellectual routine had yet to be formed from the ruins of traditional education. Especially in higher education, there was no recognized practice telling the professors what to do nor the students what to expect. Beida’s curricular reforms, in par ticu lar the elective system (introduced in 1919) embraced this pedagogical opening and gave the instructors an unprecedented flexibility in deciding what to teach. Following the basic, “modern” principle of integrating teaching and research, professors “were no longer dragged in to lecture on predetermined topics and were allowed to hold classes on their own topics of research.”  However, as with students, this flexibility opened the way to a more totalizing reshaping of classroom teaching, which seems to have often replicated the productive disorder of other aspects of the life in the school. Tian Jiongjin, who came to Beida in 1917 from the very strict environment of Nankai High School, was astonished by the laxity and disregard for rules with which faculty and students behaved. Nobody was rushing to classes, which started and finished well after the bell had rung. Some professors, he remarked, lectured for weeks without even getting to the real topic of the class. Classroom notes distributed at the beginning of the course were often ignored and then substituted with updated ones. Th is “casual” approach to teaching formalities did not necessarily translate into sloppiness or disregard for the learning process, however. Prospective students who came to take the admissions exams, as well as the numerous vagrant scholars, were attracted by the quality of teaching and by the possibility to learn through frequent interactions with professors famous for their

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scholarship (and sometimes for their quirky personalities). Many faculty and students took seriously the idea of “autonomous research” that was at the foundation of the 1917 reform, and this shaped their attitude toward classroom teaching. Lu Xun, to cite one notable example, taught the class “History of the Chinese Novel” every single year, regularly changing the content and topics in relation to his scholarly and social interests. When his lecture notes were finally published in book form as A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, he simply told his students on the first day of class that, as the book was available for them to read on their own, he was going to move on and discuss something else. Another example of eccentricity and learning was Chen Fuchen, a professor of Chinese philosophy. Since he spoke with a thick and utterly incomprehensible Wenzhou accent, in class he decided not to speak at all. Instead, he distributed lecture notes and wrote long explanations on the blackboard. Feng Youlan recalls with surprise how the scribbled notes on the board did not replicate in any way the printed material, but complemented it beautifully. Students, for their part, were not tolerant of any lack of scholarly preparation. Feng Youlan narrates an episode when an incompetent substitute teacher was chased from the school in shame by his students. Students challenged the degree of scholarship of the instructor by adding twelve pages of critique and comments to his three-page lecture handout and by confronting him in class with in-depth questions. A similar incident is reported in the biography of Fu Sinian, who found faults in one professor’s reading of the Wenxin Diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons),  and spent a whole evening combing through the lecture notes. Fu discovered at least “three dozen errors of a philological, phonological and factual nature.” He presented his findings to Cai Yuanpei and the professor was eventually asked to leave the position. In contrast, students looked fondly upon some of their teachers’ oddities, especially when these were accompanied by intellectual excellence. Not only liberal, permissive professors lectured to full classrooms. Old-style, strict instructors, whose behavior was in many ways at odds with the laissez-faire attitude of Beida, also had a following of avid listeners. Gu Hongming, who taught English literature and Latin, was a Qing loyalist who still wore a queue; he came to class escorted by a servant, who filled his pipe and poured tea while Gu lectured, sitting back in his chair, smoking. Huang Kan (Huang Jigang) was another classical scholar who was famous both for his severity and erratic behavior. When one student, who had dragged himself to class despite being sick, held his head with his hands during the lecture, Huang allegedly threw him out of the classroom. Huang was also a very unorthodox teacher. Once, in order to explain something, he went into a kind of “theatrical performance,”

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suddenly blurting out, “it seems the building is falling down,” and grabbed his bag and bolted out of the room. The students ran after him and tried to elbow their way out the door. Many could not reach the exit and instead jumped out of the windows. In another notorious instance, while Qian Xuantong, one of the culturally progressive faculty members, was teaching, he heard Huang Kan lecturing in the adjacent room. The topic of Huang’s talk was a critique of Qian’s positions on literature; Qian then quickly switched the focus and started lecturing “against” Huang, in a sort of unscripted dialogue that lasted until the bell rang. Huang Kan and Gu Hongming are also remembered among the few who required students to adhere to some form of bodily ritual. Huang berated his students for not kowtowing in front of him on his birthday (they had to bow three times), mentioning that he had to kowtow to his teacher, Zhang Taiyan. Gu, on the first day of class, announced three rules: “First, when I enter the classroom you must stand up; at the end of the class, I leave first and only then you can leave. Second, when I talk to you and when you talk to me, you always have to stand up. Th ird, the books I tell you to learn by heart, you will have to memorize. If, when asked, you do not remember, you will not be allowed to sit down.”  Students considered the bowing and standing up a peculiar novelty, a rarity to which they were ready to oblige out of respect for an otherwise valid teacher. The tone of these recollections is one of surprise and the incidents are quoted because they were in many ways exceptional in the general climate of the school. Memorization was a different issue altogether and, even if in this par ticu lar case, students probably did not dare to object to Gu’s imposition, this practice was at the center of the school debate on the process of learning.  These instances of “abnormal” behavior, of eccentricities on the part of faculty and students, are obviously difficult to verify in terms of the authenticity of each single incident. But the sheer amount of these episodes, even if embellished or tinged by memory, gives the sense of a par ticu lar climate, one of uncertainty, openness, and experimentation in the daily practice of pedagogy and classroom life. Other sources corroborate the impression that the years around May Fourth witnessed a complete reevaluation of the procedures of teaching and learning, which increasingly took the shape of a radical critique of the existing educational system. The university reforms had focused on the goals and methods of university education and had put into motion a redefinition of the general system of teaching. Practical factors, like the overwhelming presence of auditors, further complicated issues related to the status of students and the role of the school. Students then made a concerted effort to push the debate on academics, exams, and pedagogy deeper into the realm of daily practice and interaction.

ACADEMIC RULES

aware. Nobody should be willing to undergo this inhuman treatment! Let’s oppose exams with one voice. My friends, let the exam brush fall!

Jiang Menglin (then deputy president of the university) replied to Zhu’s proclamation with a short comment, stating that it was legitimate for any students not to take part in exams, but without grades, no graduation certificate

WA L L S

Why don’t you show clearly your opposition? I thought you were all self-

T H E

about you, my self-aware friends? How can you be willing to be “weighed”?

T H RO U G H

I will not put myself though any other “chicken-weighing” exam. What

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I, Zhu Qianzhi, after having achieved this kind of awareness, now declare

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Th is debate intensified, especially after the May Fourth movement, and many students called for the elimination of the few remaining trappings of academic ceremony that life at Beida remained anchored to. Exams were the first and most conspicuous target. They were one of the few moments in which the community had to come together and perform according to scripted rules: assigned seats were reclaimed by the legitimate but absentee students, a division between outsiders and insiders was enforced, a more restricted definition of what was to be learned and how became once again effective. Clearly, the history of criticism of exams in China is as long as the history of the institution of the civil ser vice examinations itself. Similarly, student protests in the late-Qing schools were often sparked by attacks on the strictness of the exams. In the case of May Fourth’s Beida, however, participants in the debate over exams (which focused on the very radical measure of abolishing them) framed it as the kernel of a larger, global discussion of the relationship between subjective will, knowledge, and the institutional discipline of the modern university. The most celebrated moment in the debate on the abolition of exams came in March 1920, when Zhu Qianzhi, a twenty-year old undergraduate, posted a dazibao (big-character poster) proclaiming and arguing for his refusal to take part in any kind of examination. The text, reprinted in the Beijing University Students’ Weekly, started with a long quote from one of the famed foreign scholars who had recently visited the university, John Dewey. To describe contemporary educational methods, Dewey used the metaphor of an “American poultry farmer,” who force-feeds his chickens by funneling food down their throats. Filling the minds of students with memorization is like force-feeding chickens, while exams, which test the ability to spit out ready-made knowledge, are nothing more than the act of weighing the bird to check if it is full enough. A declaration of intent followed the long quote:

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would be issued. Th is was both a very factual reply, which brought the issue back to its bureaucratic essentiality (no exams equals no degree), but also an indirect legitimization of Zhu’s position (which was, in many ways, damaging both for Zhu and the school’s functioning) against bureaucratic formalism. Jiang did not challenge the core of Zhu’s argument and seems to have accepted the statement that there was no logical relationship between learning, knowledge, and the disciplinary ceremonial of exams. The terms of the confrontation between school administration and radical students on the topic of exams was to become increasingly harsher in the following months. Zhu Qianzhi was not an isolated case. In January 1920, the Beijing University Daily published a long essay by Yang Baoling, a Beijing student, who highlighted some of the hidden “power issues” behind the existence of exams. Exams, he said, are a way by which professors maintain their authority, keeping students constrained in a limited set of topics (thus avoiding the chance they might venture into subjects unfamiliar to the docent) and “in their place” within the educational system. During its short existence, the Beijing University Students’ Weekly mounted a series of attacks on the various forms in which the disciplining of the learning process was expressed. Exams were unfair, elicited dangerous competitiveness, and led to either arrogance or depression. They produced intellectual subordination and even class division: as soon as one’s name was listed at the top of a class, argued one writer, one started to look down on his fellow students, he became lazy and did not pursue further research. His classmates, on the other hand, looked up to him, as if he had become some sacred figure, and were willing to be used by him. He would rise to be “a big man in a small society.”  One of the crucial tenets of the positions expressed in the Weekly was the centrality of the subjective will to learn, which the exams, far from fostering, tended to crush. Exams could not generate interest for a topic, but they could stultify the mind and weaken the body through numbing memorization and repetition. Looking closely, the only difference between the imperial examination system and the university exams was the content to be memorized: modern textbooks had replaced the Th irteen Classics. The substitution of Confucian codes with theoretically “neutral” modern science—these students argued—had not affected the disciplining effects inherent in the transmission of knowledge. In their harsh criticism of exams and of all procedures that produced subordination (of one person to another), some Beida students affi rmed the necessity of radical equality vis-à-vis learning; that is, they came to see equality, as Jacques Rancière wrote, not as the goal but (also) as presupposition of the educational process. “There is no natural distinction between intelligent and stupid,” one student, Liebei, stated, “the only differ-

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ence is in the attitude toward a subject.” By measuring and grading this attitude (and only this attitude), exams create the categories of intelligent and stupid, and therefore cannot but produce injustice, both inside the school and in society at large, where this distinction is reflected in class differences. More passive methods of instruction, infusion (zhuru), and enlightenment (qifa), Liebei continued, had a legitimate role in elementary and middle schools, but after that, schools should just have students do research on their own. These Beida students were pushing Cai Yuanpei’s definition of the university as the place for research to its extreme consequences and outlining a thorough critique of any educational method that prescribed mediations between the will to learn and the object of knowledge. It is not too surprising that within this framework, the role of professors was, like Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster, not to explain but only “to ask questions,” to see whether the student had searched, whether one’s will had moved one’s intelligence. At Beida where many students had, legitimately or not, grown used to working on their own, the contrast between research (as an effort guided by personal will) and the exams (as ritual of conformity) grew increasingly stark. It is somewhat surprising that such an “insider” issue found a loud echo in the press, and not only those publications devoted to educational topics. In the majority of cases, the media reports were limited to a factual recounting of the progress of the so-called movement for the abolition of exams ( feikao yundong) at Beida—what the students’ requests were, what the administration answered. But journalists sometimes expressed opinions, and they were not necessarily what one would expect. For example, in June 1920 the Tianjin Yishibao (Social Welfare Daily) published a few articles reporting on the students’ request to abolish exams and substitute them with puxi gongke (extra coursework or homework). The response of the administration this time was more articulated than in the case of Zhu Qianzhi cited earlier. Cai Yuanpei denied the request mostly on practical and administrative grounds. But he also criticized the petitioners, saying that these were the same students who had lost precious time during the “patriotic movement” and now wanted some extra leisure and no exams. The newspaper reported on Cai’s final decision, but the following day, it published a nuanced opinion piece that was very critical of Cai’s justifications. While conceding that there were indeed reasons of opportunity for keeping the exams at the time, the essay supported the theoretical and practical argument for the abolition and criticized Cai for his disparaging comments that linked patriotism with laziness: joining a political movement, the author concluded, is not like playing truancy. Writing about other students in a different place and time, Luisa Passerini highlighted how the critique of the exam as a form of evaluation “reveals attention to the everyday aspects of the learning relationship.”  Accordingly,

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Beida students’ criticisms went beyond exams and extended to every aspect of the teaching routine. In the end, they argued, even if the “what” of education had changed since the fall of the Qing, the “how” (the process of teaching and learning) remained the central issue. The system was understood to ultimately prevent an individual subjective approach to learning, and therefore a real equality vis-à-vis knowledge. First memorization and repetition, intimately connected with exams, were attacked. In the Beida Rikan, Professor Liang Shuming expressed a (mild) defense of the practice of learning by heart. Liang tried to dissociate memorization from exams: memorization is part of a learning process, he wrote, so we should memorize because we need to, not because we are asked to. Exams, on the other hand, should test assimilation and personal reelaboration of learning, not simply the “repetition of dead notions.”  Liang’s argument was vigorously (although a bit unfairly) rebutted by a student, Shengbai, in the same newspaper. He recalled the wasted energy spent as a child learning all the poems in the Shijing (Book of Songs) by heart— a reminder of how memorization was intimately connected with the legacy of the civil ser vice exams. Memorization is useless, Shengbai continued, unless it comes naturally, that is, when we use over and over what we are trying to learn. A pedagogy based on these methods (repetition, practice, exercise) would make exams useless. Exams are merely a very convenient shortcut for lazy teachers who can ignore the students all year long and focus only on a few questions, like those people who “when things are all right do not burn incense, but in bad times rush to hug the Buddha’s feet.”  At the same time that all the minute rules that regulated the classroom life of Beida were largely circumvented in daily practice, they came to be challenged theoretically. Students argued that assigned seats and roll call should be canceled, along with permission slips and justifications for absences. The only reason compelling a student to be in a class should be his subjective interest; everything else is simply an invitation to lie. The time spent in the classroom itself should be drastically reduced. The ringing of the bells, in an incessant flow of classes, one after the other, is a constraint both for the teachers, who are tied to an imposed curriculum and trapped in a numbing teaching routine, and for students, who do not have time to study on their own outside the classroom. In the end, the ringing of the bell is the major obstacle to a real search for learning. The stultifying character of school discipline was decried in another essay in the Students’ Weekly when the administration tightened the rules on mandatory attendance and roll calls. In general, students believe that this is about getting higher or lower grades, and cannot but obey this decree, thus progressively becoming mechanized students [ jixiexing de xuesheng]. As for whether they achieve some

kind of knowledge, or they understand anything of their classes, let’s not even talk about that. They just have to go to class every day, according to a schedule, very much like being in prison. They sit quietly for a few hours, and then they brag about being diligent students and educated men. And for working so hard in this fashion, they get to be considered heroes of learning.

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The comparison between school and prison appeared again when the ultimate symbol of the educational process itself, the degree, came to be questioned. In the Weekly students stated repeatedly that diplomas and degrees do not prove anything, are no warranty of real ability, and contribute instead to maintaining differences in society. Also, they insisted, through degrees a separation is enforced between the school and the rest of the world. “Today’s school,” one student argued, “is a prison-like school, once you enter, you are separated from society, like when you get a long-term jail sentence.”  Other students chimed in this comparison with the prison (the other disciplining institution): the time in the school is marked by a degree, as the conclusion of one’s prison sentence is proven by another legal certificate. Th is sweeping critique of any symbol of separation between school and society reflected the lived experience at Beida, an open environment populated by people whose presence was neither officially nor symbolically sanctioned. It seems almost unnecessary to note how the connection between school and prison, which would be played out publicly in June 1919 (see chapter 5), echoes Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary technology, centered precisely on such apparatuses as the modern prison and the exam. Foucault examines examples mainly from nineteenth-century Europe and locates this technology in coincidence with the emergence of modernity. Taking a page from Foucault, Timothy Mitchell argues that these disciplinary models were tested and reframed in the colonies as methods to control and organize the knowledge of the colonized, as well as to impose a system of self-discipline. It is then interesting that the generation of Chinese intellectuals considered to be heralds of Westernization produced a radical critique of disciplinary techniques of Western provenance through what was considered a shared discourse of education, learning, and knowledge. Th is criticism points to a more contradictory and layered view of May Fourth’s approach to Western modernity than a simple and unwavering faith in Westernization. Rather, the most creative of the pedagogical and organizational experiments at Beida originated in the productive tension between the liberation from existing disciplines that Western ideas promised and the challenge to the new disciplinary modes they introduced; between the individual and subjective approach to knowledge that they seemed to guarantee

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and the new hierarchy of learning they shaped; between new discourses of subordination and the political practices that challenged them. The students did not solve these contradictions, but lived them fully. We will see them at play in the students’ pedagogical initiatives (chapter 7), in the participation to study societies (chapter 5), and in the reform of the curriculum (chapter 3).

FRAGMENTED LIVES, CROWDED ROOMS

Students do not spend their lives in classrooms, and this was especially true at Beijing University. The redefinition of the university environment included living areas, which were ancillary to the teaching-learning issue, but which many students considered equally fundamental in the rethinking and producing of “new attitudes” toward life and politics. Beida was not closed off from the rest of the city. “The university was the dominant presence in a unique ‘sphere of influence’ (shili fanwei) that reached Han Garden [Hanhuayuan] to the east, Jing Hill (Jingshan) to the west, Th ree Bridges (Sandao qiao) to the north and Dongan Gate (Dongan men) to the south. City buildings were interspersed with university buildings, and students daily traversed public streets to go from one part of the university to another. The boundary between the campus and the city was by no means clearly drawn.”  The very notion of “campus,” “an enclosed space of central planning and stylistic coherence,” was not applicable in the case of Beida. The lack of a clear-cut, central architectural core was due to the historical evolution of the university, which had developed through amalgamation, expansion, and accretion. The 1898 Jingshi Daxuetang (Imperial University), the late Qing predecessor of Beida, set its address at Mashenmiao in an old imperial building, originally the residence of the Qianlong emperor’s fourth daughter (Sigongzhu). In 1902, the original Tongwen Guan (College of Foreign Languages) at Donghuamen was merged with the Imperial University. In 1917, when Cai Yuanpei took charge as president, the schools of Science and Humanities were located in the Mashenmiao compound, just east of Jingshan, while the School of Law was east of Donghuamen, bordering Beiheyan on the site of the old Yixue Guan (Translators’ College). Construction work had been on going for the preceding two years, and in 1918 the most relevant addition in the early architectural history of Beida took place, when a red-brick, Western-style building was inaugurated at Han Huayuan (see fig. 1.1). The famed Honglou (Red Building) was originally supposed to resolve the chronic problem of lack of dorm rooms for the ever-

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increasing student body. In 1916, the school authorities had borrowed money from a Belgian bank, and dorm fees were to provide the sum needed to repay the debt (a yearly payment of twenty-two thousand yuan for twenty years). In March 1918, however, when the building was finally completed, the school administration decided to use it for a different purpose and moved the School of Humanities, the graduate schools, the library, and the main administrative offices to the new space. To cover the debt, the administration asked the Ministry of Education to increase the fund for “regular expenditures” of the university by twenty-two thousand yuan per year.

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FIGURE 1.1.

Central Beijing around 1917: (1) Beida School of Sciences; (2) Beida School of Humanities; (3) Beida School of Law (formerly the location of the Yixue Guan); (4) Dong’an Market; (5) Central Park; (6) Legation Quarter. Source: Adapted from Cook’s skeleton map of Beijing, 1920.

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DORMS

Even with the addition of the Honglou, Beida continued to suffer from a chronic lack of space, which was in part related to an increase in admissions after 1917, when an unprecedented number of students passed the entrance exams. In addition, as student groups multiplied at a frantic pace during the New Culture years, so did the requests for rooms for meetings, talks, administration, and general activities. The impression is that the limited space of Beida proper (the three main compounds) quickly became completely saturated. By 1921, the General Affairs Committee was forced to turn down repeated requests from various student associations looking for rooms. By the end of the year, the committee approved a proposal to conduct a survey in order to check whether the various student organizations were actually using their allotted rooms, and, if necessary, to proceed with a redistribution. As physical space for daily activities was rapidly exhausted, so was lodging. According to a 1922 description, only one-third of the three thousand Beijing University students lived in the three dormitory buildings. The remaining two thousand found accommodation in more than one hundred gongyu (apartment houses) in the university neighborhood. The dorms, as the rest of the university, were fragmented, dense, and unruly spaces. They were overcrowded but largely unregulated: many undergraduates were unable to get a bed in the coveted dorm rooms, which were often sublet or allocated through back-door channels to “eavesdroppers” or outsiders. Dorm residents were quite vocal and prone to loud protests when fees were raised or dorm proctors tried to impose some kind of order. In December 1918, because of mounting disciplinary problems and the resignations of several dorm proctors, Cai Yuanpei had to intervene personally with a decree in which he once again tried to back up the authority of the dorm managers. The fragmentation of the university was reflected in the three dorms that, in time, each developed an ethos of its own. Xizhai (West Dorm) housed mostly science students, Dongzhai (East Dorm) housed mostly humanities students, and the third dorm at Beiheyan housed mostly law undergraduates. In the late 1920s, a saying epitomized differences among the three areas: “At Xizhai, there are a lot of bookworms, at Dongzhai a lot of pampered well-to-dos, in the third dorm a lot of social activists.”  Getting a dorm room was not easy, and getting a decent one was extremely difficult. Yang Zhongjian, who was admitted as a preparatory science student in 1917, recalls his peregrination around Beida in search of better lodging accommodations: I entered the fi fth dorm (the old Ancestral Temple of the Eight Banners) and picked the middle room in a set of three, two students per room. We

did not even have a proper window, and used a portion of the door as a window. There was only one tiny table. After one year, I moved to the other dorm at Beichizi: it was not only better but also closer to classrooms. After yet another year, I moved to Xizhai. There were three students per room, and I was in front of the door. It did not close well, so during the winter it was easy to catch a cold.

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There were notable differences among the three main dorms. Rooms at Sanyuan (Th ird Hall), which was mainly for fi rst-year students, were originally classrooms and could accommodate more than ten persons each. More typical were Xizhai and Dongzhai, with sparsely furnished two- or threeperson rooms. The room at Dongzhai were notorious for being extremely tiny: with two beds facing each other, bookshelves, and one table, there was barely enough room for one person to stand. A little stove provided a minimum of heat in the cold Beijing winters. Overall, hygienic conditions were not good. The buildings were in large part a legacy of the old Imperial University: pipes were rusty and crumbling and there was no hot water. “Whatever was lacking in material culture was compensated for by a generous supply of human labor. There was an abundance of servants hired by the university at the students’ disposal, though hot water had to be boiled and carried in and out of the rooms.”  The situation partially improved when a fourth dorm building, with modern sanitary facilities, was inaugurated in 1935. Despite conditions that were far from ideal, however, dorm rooms remained a mirage for those students who had to rent rooms in the Beida neighborhood (the majority in any given period). In January 1918, the school alerted the Ministry of Education to the situation of students who were forced to rent from private landlords. The apartments were small, overcrowded, and unhealthy, the high rent was a financial liability for students, and such an unregulated environment was thought to have a corrupting influence on the young men’s behavior. The response from the ministry was an elaborate plan to regulate private lodgings around the university. The school had to intervene directly—first by renting lodging houses, then by registering, surveying, and regulating the private apartments leased by students. All private lodgers had to be registered with the school and the police. The university was in charge of imposing the same kind of regulations that were enforced in the university dorms on private apartments. Every building where students leased rooms had to post a sign identifying it as a “lodging house affi liated to the university” or a “private lodging of university students,” and school administration had to play a role in planning students’ expenses in order to avoid financial troubles. In the following years, the school’s Housing Office (Zhaiwu Ke) tried to regulate some of the apartment houses but in the end recognized that it

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could only act as an “institutional support” for students who entered into private contractual agreements and had complaints about their accommodations. The problems of students living outside university buildings lingered on into the following decades: the apartments were cold and prone to fires in the winter, hot in the summer, and noisy, expensive, and unhealthy all year long. A student recounts how he found refuge from Beijing’s bleak winters in the heated rooms of the library. He dashed out of the warm quilts in the early morning, ran to the library, and spent the whole day studying, meeting friends, and eating lunch, only going back to his freezing room (and quilts) at nightfall, when the library closed.

RI T UA L S O F B ELO N G I N G

The lodging situations at Beida might have not been perfect, but there were characteristics that made the environment special (and, in many instances, seem to have endeared it to students.) First of all, life in the dorm, like life in the classrooms, was subject to few disciplinary regulations. Movement inside the dorms was extremely free and few restrictions were imposed on students by “good-for-nothing managers.”  The fact that occupancy was not limited to official students was an indication of the degree of laxity in rule enforcement. The disregard of general school regulations in the living quarters was reflected at the level of personal interaction by a certain degree of dissolution in the discipline of human relationship and by the asocial and anticommunitarian spirit students showed in their daily lives. In general, the student community at Beida was composite and divided in its interests and approaches to learning, culture, and politics. The intensifying of the “culture fever” in the May Fourth years seems to have made these differences sharper and the dorm rooms a wildly idiosyncratic space. There were people under the light or by the window with their noses deep in the Wenxuan reading the small-character annotations by Li Shan, while at the same time there were people outside the window loudly reciting Byron’s poems. In one corner of one room, there was somebody who, while nodding his head, was reading aloud in a cadence some old text of the Tongcheng school, while in another corner there were people discussing what kind of life Nora had after she left the “Doll’s House.” . . . In addition to mocking each other in arguments and attacking each other in writing, in class or while working they treated each other like enemies and it was clear that they were unable to coexist.

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Luo Jialun’s description of the dorm room of his friend and colleague Fu Sinian reinforces this pattern of internal divisions and confl ictual cohabitations. Fu’s room was a meeting place for the leading group of the Xin chao (New Tide) society. Luo, Yu Pingpo, and Wang Jinxi spent hours there discussing cultural and literary reforms (and, one hopes, also less elevated topics). Meanwhile Di Junwu, one of Fu’s roommates, was deeply involved in his study of kunqu operas and was writing short essays under a pseudonym. Fu and his comrades kept ganging up on him, making fun of him for his mindless pursuit. Making a pun of the character di (composed by the radical for “dog” and the character for “fire”) they nicknamed him “Lord Red Dog.”  The fragmentation of the student community not only involved division along lines of interest and intellectual proclivity, but was also expressed through what was in large part a redefinition of rules of courtesy and communality as well as rudimentary attempts at redesigning physical space. The large rooms of the Sanyuan dorms were split into tiny individual spaces by hanging bed sheets on wires or rearranging beds and bookshelves. These were not seniors or long-term dorm dwellers that were tired of the communal life in the buildings, but fi rst- or second-year students. And if the need for privacy was understandable in the large, open space of Sanyuan, the situation in the much smaller rooms at Dongzhai and Xizhai was not different. Cramped rooms where there was not enough space for two occupants to stand at the same time were made into even narrower corridors by making walls out of shelves and tables. Th is fragmentation cannot be dismissed simply as an obsession with privacy; rather, it was part of a larger rewriting of the rituals of interaction. As a counterpart to this physical division, students started to develop the habit of not speaking to each other, not even when sitting side by side at a desk in the classrooms or even when sharing the same dorm room. Greetings to colleagues or roommates entering or leaving reportedly became a rarity. Some of the behaviors of Beida students (and faculty) echoed the attitude of people in imperial academies (shuyuan) more than the disciplined atmosphere of Westernized modern schools, but dismissing this unruly space as a reflection of “traditional” models would be an oversimplification (and does not take us further in terms of analysis). Rather, the issue here is how behaviors drawn from an existing set of practices were used and resignified in a different context. To be sure, there is a risk of overstating the solipsism of Beida students and making a general characteristic out of an attitude possibly limited to a set number of exceptional cases, which, in the mind of the memoirs’ authors, stuck out as the epitome of the school atmosphere. But the evidence of such

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behaviors, however anecdotal, is significant and, more importantly, these attitudes resonate with other, better-documented aspects of life at Beida (campus structure, instances of unrest in the dorms, proposals for reform). Even if only a limited amount of students indulged in the most extreme postures described above, these behaviors were in sync with the general climate and the intellectual debate at May Fourth Beida. The disregard for courteous interaction mirrored the refusal of school ceremonials, and marked, even at the level of interpersonal relations, the rejection of communitarian discipline.

REFORMING LIFE

The logical preeminence some scholars of May Fourth have assigned to ideas does not find a correspondence in the attitude of many Beida students. The reform of mindset that New Culture promised was located as much in daily practice as it was in abstract concepts. In this sense, students had a very clear understanding of how ideas, culture, and ideology are inscribed in materiality, bodily practices, and seemingly harmless rituals. The environment of the classrooms and the dorms described in this chapter was not simply a given for students, nor was the obvious result of free-flowing individualism or the ingrained repetition of past legacies. More importantly, students did not combine “the orphaned fervor of denouncing the system with the disenchanted certitude of its perpetuity,”  but, increasingly over the months and years, they took over the task of producing, maintaining, and strengthening the space for a transformed everyday. In the same way and at the same time they moved against rules concerning the transmission of learning, classroom attendance, and exams, many Beida students took their daily experience in the dorms as the basis from which to propose a wider redefinition of student life. And this was not consequent, but rather complementary in both abstract and practical terms, to the reform of the content and the forms of education. For example, proposals were made to abolish both the banzhang (class monitor), a student who was selected to act as the liaison between class and teacher, and the shezhang, dorm proctors chosen among dorm residents. Some of the students went so far as to ask for more radical forms of self-management of the dorms. Not only should decisions and controls be handed to students, but also the daily tasks of housekeeping. In March 1920, in an article published in a Guangzhou newspaper, the author took issue with a proposal by Beida student Liebei to radically alter the administrative system in the school, arguing that students are in school to study and research, not to get involved with menial chores such as cooking and sweeping. Liebei replied in the Students’ Weekly, challenging the very distinction between intellectual pursuit

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and daily tasks. The autonomy that is needed for the pursuit of learning, he said, cannot be cultivated in the classroom or in the scholar’s study, but is an attitude toward life and work in general, inscribed in gestures and movements of the body. When elementary school students are obliged to repeat mindless exercises as the only form of physical activity, they are being trained to an attitude of laziness and obedience, and deprived of any capacity for autonomy. Therefore, yes, university students should spend time sweeping and cooking, because everything inside the school is for the students to manage. If time spent in the classroom is reduced, then students will be able to devote themselves to personal research as well as to the management of their living environments. Liebei argued that both aspects are equally crucial to the development not only of an autonomous personality but also of a new pattern of life. In the end, as another student essayist remarked, raising the issue of reforming the curricula and the course system without radically reshaping the management of dormitories, libraries, and free time was a huge mistake, because these were the spaces more directly connected with students’ everyday life. “No matter how well the curriculum and teaching system is designed, if libraries, dorms, and common rooms are poorly managed, the dignity of the school will soon be lost.”  In an appreciative response to this essay, another student made clear how transforming everyday life was inseparable not only from the reform of teaching and learning, but also from the political activities that had emerged from the university space. Self-government of student environments, in this view, reflected the same attitude that students had showed one year earlier, when in the demonstration of May 1919, in the lecture groups, and in the organization of boycotts and strikes they had taken crucial political and organizational decisions. Experience in organized political activities fueled a reflection on daily life inside the school; in turn, these activities were based on the lived practice, associational patterns, and intellectual positions in the reformed university. Therefore, we should not take the haphazard and sometimes peculiar postures of Beida students or their asocial eccentricities simply as a consequence or an effect of shifts in their intellectual positions. Nor were the routine practices of the quotidian inside Beida the social and organizational roots propaedeutic to the “true outward political activities. Rather, at Beida, the intellectual and the political permeated everyday life with an unprecedented intensity: there were announcements and posters in every corner and discussions in dorm rooms, and life itself in those spaces embodied a partic u lar approach to politics. In daily life in the open, porous space of May Fourth Beida, students explored new manners of encountering, meeting, and organizing that were both the product and the instrument of transformed

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behavior. It is in this connection that we should read the eccentric attitude of Beida students in their refusal to follow any bureaucratic rule, and, ultimately, any rule at all, unless it was self-imposed. Th is radical stance was not without contradiction, first and foremost because it took place within a group of people and an institution that were in many ways privileged and separated. But we should nonetheless recognize that for those Beida students the rituals of daily life, including the requirements of courtesy, were the site of a struggle, and their negation was an attempt to express political and intellectual positions through lived experience. Rituals identify communities, but they also mark closed boundaries and hierarchies between those communities. The lack of rituals and the staunch refusal of ceremonies therefore signaled an opening and a productive, potentially equalitarian dissolution of bonds and prescribed roles. Th is dissolution opened the possibility for each student, and, potentially, for each citizen, to define oneself as an independent political subject.

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UNTRAINED BODIES AND FRUGAL HABITS

At the center of all descriptions of daily life at Beida in the May Fourth years lies a puzzling conundrum, an almost schizophrenic split. The anticommunitarian spirit described in the previous chapter seems to have become the defi ning trait of the university precisely at the time when Beida students showed what was probably the highest degree of organizational ability in the school’s history. The uniform and reiterated picture of a largely atomized environment of almost asocial individuals is, at fi rst sight, very difficult to reconcile with the collective organizing roles that many of these same individuals played during the May Fourth movement. The contradiction is, however, only on the surface. We can and should look at these two aspects as not only complementary, but also truly interdependent in the framing of student activism. If taken at face value, the eccentric behaviors of Beida students might indeed look as meaningless individual idiosyncrasies, and the refusal to partake in daily ceremonies as a juvenile and rather unproductive form of resistance. There is nothing inherently political (or even purposeful) in the various behaviors displayed at Beida and it is quite possible that, for many students, enjoying the school atmosphere of “unbridled freedom” was just, well, pleasurable. However, in this chapter I argue that, at least for some of the students, these attitudes did have political

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import. Their significance is better revealed when we juxtapose them with the practice of May Fourth student organizations, in par ticu lar those organizations that found their political goals in the search for new forms of communal life and were striving to produce new lived practices in and around the university. The lazy individualist and the active member of an association were two facets of the same endeavor—to redefine a lived space. In this perspective, it is revealing that by the mid-1920s, when solipsism, individualism, and eccentricity were definitively inscribed as the qualities and symbols of a traditionalized “Beida spirit,” those forms of organized rethinking of the everyday had largely withered away. Once the repertoire of the “May Fourth student” had been defined and its locations settled, the political activities that were based on the struggle over those locations (students, university)— and that were also expressed in idiosyncratic behaviors— exhausted part of their original significance. The lazy individualist did not have much political relevance once he became separated from the activist. Here, I will focus on those associations and communal experiments that searched for and practiced alternative forms of organized living (organized political efforts by Beida students centered around the xuehui [study societies] will be discussed in part 3). If students’ antiritualistic behavior and the radical critique of pedagogical rites made explicit the dissolution of the communitarian bond, these associations constituted a search for the possibility of different kinds of collectives, specifically ones not based on a sociological identity. Most of these associations crossed borders: they displayed associational models that were in theory opened to a much larger constituent than the one enclosed by the social category of “students.” While organized by students, they strove to blur distinctions between manual and intellectual labor, or between different institutional tasks (e.g., education and commerce). They strove and they failed. Their failure has been largely interpreted teleologically, in light of the future participation of many of their members to more direct political ventures (membership in the Chinese Communist Party above all). But, as Shakhar Rahav suggests, failure should not be our only criterion for judging, and the story of these organizations should not be so narrowly viewed inside a prescribed teleology. The very fact that this associational model attracted not only many followers all over China but also the attention of the contemporary media points to the fact that they should be evaluated as experiences per se, in the specific historical context. The students, activists, and journalists who participated in or followed with interest the evolution of these associations were pondering about the value of this experiment, they were interrogating its reasons, and, yes, questioning its failures. One should then ask what these ephemeral experiences represented politically at the time.

derly men. Tao-ching disliked this outfit, which made him look old before his time. —Yang Mo, The Song of Youth

The attempt to redefine daily practices, described in chapter 1, was carried out through the bodies of the students. The reshaping of accommodations,

H A B I T S

brimmed hat, and thick, boat-like boots of the kind usually worn by el-

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pers; in winter, a padded silk gown under one of plain blue cloth, a broad-

A N D

summer he wore a silk or glazed cotton gown and thick-soled cloth slip-

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interest in old books he preferred a more “national style” of dress. In the

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Yung-tse had previously worn a student’s uniform, but since cultivating an

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The central operating term of these associations was that of frugality, which I take to signify a par ticu lar relationship with modern forms of production and consumption. Those forms (the Modern) came to the fore together with a new practice of the everyday (the Quotidian). “Everyday life”— Harry Harootunian argues, following Lefebvre—“refers to the experience of the lived reality that marks the appearance and expansion of industrial capitalism and its propensity to install similar conditions everywhere it is established.”  Thus, “frugal” associations constituted part of a truly transnational experiment, specifically thought to deal with the globalizing force of capitalist modernity (whose impact on urban life was as visible in Beijing as it was in Paris, Tokyo, or Cairo) by shaping new forms of living, producing, and consuming. As such an experiment acted against and through those modern forces that had globally altered the lived everyday, it could only find expression in a different practice of the quotidian. Frugality also had a more visible manifestation—Beida students became recognized for their dirty, patched gowns. This sartorial choice has great symbolic relevance in the Beida mythology. It offers a chance to reexamine and rethink the tendency to analyze May Fourth student politics as encased in the always resurgent literati identity, defined by the always already established categories of activism or consumed by concern for the nation-state. Challenging this tendency, I argue that the choice of the gown, far from being a mere symbol of bohemian laxity, might also present a complex statement of independence: both from global trends of consumption and production (through frugality), as well as from a (state-endorsed) project that called on students and youth to embody a national idea of fitness and strength. It is therefore with the students’ bodies that we should start.

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living conditions, and rules of behaviors to express cultural and political positions through a transformed everyday obviously had an indirect connection to the physicality of the students, who experienced the space of the university through their bodies and senses. Spending days in a cramped, overpopulated, but porous space or not having to stand in the disciplined performance of a commencement ceremony are experiences in which the intellectual and the political always seep into the physical. As ritual disciplines the body to shape behavior, so does the lack of it. But the body was also directly affected by and subject to outside scrutiny, so attire and physical activities mediated the negotiation with the modernizing state and capitalism. A crafty reutilization of a common garment, the gown, charged an ostensibly bohemian statement with political implications. Since the beginning of the century, posture, fitness, appearance, and knowledge of the body had been used and recognized as symbols of the privileged status of students in missionary or elite schools, who allegedly excelled in sports and physical training. Alumni of one of the most prestigious universities in Shanghai recalled how “people were able to ‘spot’ a St. John’s student by the way he walked and by the way in which he carried himself when walking.”  And Qinghua students, as mentioned earlier, appeared to be moving quickly but always with ease. Walking styles, as Susan Brownell has observed, are not trivial and automatic symptoms, rather they are expression of cultural differences, of an entire orientation to the world. “Th is orientation is simultaneously trained into the body with conscious intent . . . acquired through the necessity of daily practice . . . and organized by an underlying symbolic logic that is often unconscious.”  One should then wonder what kind of logic, intent, and daily practices were at play in the radically different way of moving with which Beida students came to be identified in the same period—their walking style was recorded as unhurried and leisurely, displaying a lack of vigor and a certain lazy feebleness. Like their colleagues at St. John’s and Qinghua, Beida students in the late 1910s could easily be identified in a crowded Beijing street, and not only by their walking gait. Unlike students in missionary colleges, they wore long blue gowns (changpao) that were usually dirty, discolored, and worn out, almost as a reminder of a willful neglect of exterior appearances. Allegedly, nobody wore Western suits. The long gown fit Beida’s reputation for physical weakness well. Despite an obsession with hygiene, sports, and physical health that took over not only national newspapers and periodicals but also several university publications, reflecting the concern for the “weak body of the nation,”  Beida students seemed willing to perpetuate a tradition of physical “laziness.” Qinghua and Yenching students sneered at their Beida counterparts. The university

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and its students came to be identified with the attribute lao, meaning both “old” and “looking old,” in reference to the school’s chronological preeminence and the laggardness of its inhabitants. Curiously, the double-edged motto “Beida lao” (Beida is old) returns continuously as a proud refrain in several memoirs and commemorative essays to this day. The gown also had a par ticu lar connection with representations of gender that were being reshaped at the time, in part through a reconceptualization of the body and a revision of fashion. For the Qing literati, the gown, as well as the round-shouldered posture, was a mark of status and masculinity. With the emergence in the late Qing and early Republic of a martial and sportive model of scholar and student, the gown assumed more feminine implications, clearly at odds with the discourse of the healthy and disciplined body of the Republican citizen. Th is discourse, which was very much influenced by the Western gaze, had fi xed on the Chinese vestimentary regime since the nineteenth century. The gown is therefore metonymic of the larger mythology surrounding “old Beida,” and as such, it has been widely viewed as the symbolic evidence of an embodied connection both with the past (of imperial literati) and the future (the formation of a nationalist category of “students”). I agree that the attire, so common among Beida students, definitely meant something. Yet I do not believe we can reduce its significance either to a carryover of imperial times or the mimicry of Western attitudes of elitism and gentility. The quote at the beginning of this section comes from the fictional and largely mythologized depiction of student activism in the 1930s written from the vantage point of the early 1960s. Clearly, in the general perspective in both the 1930s and the 1960s, the gown had indeed become the attire of the politically impotent scholar— one described as physically, and possibly sexually, weak—aspiring to a position in the intellectual elite. In the novel, Yongze (Yung-tse), wears the gown as a nostalgic “remembrance of activism past” and as such the gown represents the acceptance of feebleness and is an antipolitical statement (“what can pale-faced scholars with bare hands accomplish?” he asks). Another character refers to Yongze as “old” because the long gown he wore “made him look like an elderly pedant.”  The mockery surrounding Yongze’s 1930s gown suggests that we have to try and understand the significance of the May Fourth attire inside the specific timeframe and circumscribed location in which it was employed. It might help therefore to inscribe this attire in the par ticu lar historical situation, and especially to view it in relation to changes in the general discourse and practice connecting bodies, education, nation, and state. When we consider these historical circumstances, another possible interpretation of the gown emerges: Beida students employed it to make a political statement concerning the identity of “students” and their relationship to the state.

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Clearly, the meanings of a symbol as ubiquitous as the gown (which already embodied very different statements in imperial China) cannot be completely owned or controlled, nor do I believe Beida students were actually trying to control it. What they did was to open up possibilities for alternative significations of this vaunted symbol of the past in the modern historical context, without completely erasing the past from the symbol. The “past” was to be reassociated with the gown in the 1930s when, as we have seen, a traditionalist and conservative signification was connected with the attire. But by then, in materiality and perception, this would be a different gown. Despite its long history and lasting resilience (until after 1949), “the changpao was not a timeless garment at all.”  What follows are mainly suggestions for what I think should be a different and more fitting interpretation of the body culture of Beida students during the May Fourth period, as shown in par ticular through their choice of attire. The evidence of a debate on the “gown” (before its inscription in the “Beida mythology” in the 1920s) is too fl imsy to articulate definitive conclusions with regard to its use, and we can only speculate on the reasons for this sartorial choice. Nor is the specific interpretation I am proposing aimed at reducing the gown to a univocal meaning, shared by and evident to all those who wore it. But I believe that a series of contingencies, coincidences, and circumstances support the opportunity of reading this particular attire in relation to a historical phase in the emergence of a state-endorsed physical discipline. The widespread use of the gown at Beida was limited to a very short period, a period in which the discourse of physical discipline had not yet been completely and rigidly fi xed, and the state did not have the power to impose it. It should also be noted that the choice of apparel cannot be considered as unrelated to those activities that, as shown in chapter 1, affected other seemingly irrelevant aspects of daily life and charged them with a political significance. The general resistance to fitness and the tendency toward indolence among Beida students was exceptional in the intellectual and educational panorama of the time. Since the late Qing, it had been accepted that modern physical culture was “the truest indicator of national strength”  and the “all embracing ‘body cultivation’ that tiyu (physical education) offered the Chinese was a key concept in plans to transform the hoary Chinese imperium into a modern and fit nation-state.”  Andrew Morris describes how this new culture of the athletic body was celebrated publicly (for example, in the rapidly proliferating athletics and sport meetings) and, as in the case of St. John’s University, exceptionality in physical attitude became a visible sign of distinction, the internalized self-discipline of the body a mark of public recognition. Educators considered choices of attire, posture, and the actual displaying of the body of young students (almost entirely male) as evidence of progress

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Coherent with its modern mission, the administration of Beijing University made several attempts to make students more physically fit. Martial education had been one of the tenets of Cai Yuanpei’s pedagogical plan since at least 1912. In 1917 he supported the creation of a Beijing University Association

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in their transformative campaign. The YMCA had a vanguard role in this “culturing effort,”  and they identified success precisely in terms of clothing and bareness, that is, making the youth “doff the long gown and don in its place” short pants and short shirts, so to finally shed the “effeminate” influence of imperial society. Beyond the vision of a strong nation, a civilizing aesthetic is clearly at play here, a conception of the muscular, healthy body as beautiful, and therefore worthy of being exhibited in public. However, we should keep in mind that there is nothing “natural” or obvious in this conception. Rather, the emphasis on the culture of muscularity and the exhibition of masculine bodies (and their association with modernity, power, and the West) implied the mirror image of an essentialized “Chinese body culture,” a one-sided tradition privileging frailty. Th is duality obviously legitimized not only the colonizing effort but also the narrative of the modern state in its radical departure from a “traditional” culture of femininity and weakness. Shigehisa Kuriyama explores a similar vision in the Hippocratic opposition between the sinewy, beautiful body of the Greeks and the inarticulate, flabby, gross, moist body of the “barbarians.” I do not think it is possible to trace any linear development from Hippocrates and Galen to modern Chinese and “civilized” concepts of the strong and healthy body of the nation. However, Kuriyama’s exploration of the historical construction of different visions of the body illuminates what is at stake in a culture of muscularity. As in the modern world of sport competitions and physical culture, bodily differences in ancient Greece supported legitimacy for conquest and superiority. For the Hippocratic authors, Asians resembled each other, their bodies lacked articulation and their spirit wanted endurance. In contrast, “the taut, lean bodies of Europe were the bodies of hardy conquerors. The individualized, articulated physique embodied European identity.”  Opposite to the brave, manly European, the flabby, pusillanimous Asiatic barbarian would gradually assume effeminate tracts: he would do women’s work, talk like a woman, look like a woman. And maybe, one can assume, he would don feminine clothes, or clothes that looked “effeminate” in the eye of the Western (or Westernized) muscular beholder.

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for Physical Education (Beijing Daxue Tiyuhui). The proclamation of the founding of the new society had a somber tone: it lamented the state of physical education in the university, which was plagued by a lack of funds, expertise, apparel, and, most of all, participation. At least now, the author concluded, even if they lack equipment, they have an organization. Th is did not make much of a difference, it seems, for in 1920 Jiang Menglin had to respond to some students who were complaining about the state of physical education at Beida. Jiang explained how they were still looking for a physical education specialist to hire and summarized the troubled history of the previous years. The Beijing Daxue Tiyuhui had been disbanded in 1919 and the responsibilities had passed on to the physical education branch of the Student Association. Th is arrangement had failed to produce results so the new plan was to place physical education back into the school’s hands. Success was elusive, but over the course of the 1920s at least a portion of Beida students seemed to have overcome their refractoriness to sports. An article in the Peking Morning Post (Chenbao) celebrated the “gradual advancement” of Beida students’ physical education: they had just won a soccer match against Jiaotong University five to three. It is precisely in the mid-1920s that we witness a drastic shift in Beida’s attitude toward martial physicality, a shift that was again made manifest in the students’ wardrobe choices. In 1919, just before May Fourth, the school administration had tried to introduce stricter regulations on school uniforms, probably in order to define identity markings for the community of “students.” Even under new rules, requirements for undergraduates were minimal; they were asked only to wear a hat and the school pin, and it is doubtful that even these minor prescriptions were followed. However, when in 1924 Cai Yuanpei spearheaded the creation of the Student Military Corps at Beida, it seems that this move toward regimentation was more warmly welcomed. And by the mid-1920s, at least half of the students had apparently abandoned the long gown for a blue and gray military-style uniform. Th is quite radical change in the Beida students’ attire coincided with what was, according to Andrew Morris, a shift in the very idea of physical culture, which in the mid-1920s assumed the character of a precise and nationalistic technology of control of the body. Tiyu was increasingly defi ned as a modern, scientific discipline and there was a forceful drive to establish, publish, and make known a set of standards according to which the tiyu teacher (and the individual practitioner) could measure the performance and progress of the body. While the world of physical culture shifted to a more scientific form of exercise, the “tiyu-minded individual was forced to commit to more and more intense forms of self-discipline and self-understanding.” Th is self-disciplining was now clearly branded with the name of the nation,

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as Chinese educators tried to rescue physical culture and sports from the influence of foreigners (for example, the YMCA) while making it a more direct vehicle and expression of nationalist and antiimperialistic sentiments. “Modern times seemed to call for strong, often explicitly masculine, nationalist forms.”  It is worth noting that in the same years (the mid-1920s), there was also a larger shift in sartorial choices among the urban elite. The female gown (qipao) became a dominant trend for fashionable women, who moved away from the “standard dress among young women around the time of the May Fourth Movement,” a two-piece ensemble of a jacket or blouse with trousers or a gathered skirt. Contextually, “cosmopolitan, forward-looking” young men shifted their preferences, at least temporarily, to the Western suit. In the light of the uniform’s replacement of the gown at Beida and of this larger shift in the attitudes in physical culture and fashion, it is possible to reevaluate the significance of Beida students’ May Fourth attire. The attachment to that par ticu lar sartorial choice has been viewed as yet another sign of the elite character of “intellectuals,” of their clinging, consciously or not, to a traditional role through the use of an “old-style dressing code.” By exploiting the association of the gown with the imperial literati, this argument goes, Beida students could claim the legacy of an elite status even in radically different historical circumstances. There are at least two sets of problems with this interpretation, however. First, on a practical side, the student gown did not look, feel, or function as its predecessor, worn by imperial literati. The traditional elite gown was made of silk, and its long sleeves covered the hands, showing distance and disdain from manual labor. The student gown was usually made of dark cotton and had shorter sleeves, leaving hands free to move. It was cheap, resistant to wear and tear, and provided ample space underneath for bundling up in the long winters: the man who wore the gown wore “what was comfortable, convenient, and common.”  A gown is a gown is a gown, but a general similarity of form does not exhaust the meanings of fashion changes. Second, and more importantly, the assimilation of the student gown to a traditional attire leads to underestimating precisely the changes in the historical situation, the different claims modernity placed on the body, thus missing how an old technique was recycled and recreated in the context of modern daily life and in an altered relationship with state power. The student attire, while it resembled and reproduced in its basic shape the imperial gown of the recent past, was also a bohemian statement that reflected a much longer history of literati self-fashioning dating back at least to the Ming dynasty. Both for the May Fourth students and their Ming predecessors, fashion choices made visible a distancing from the present. In the case of students, this

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was done by recuperating and reinventing the legacy of the literati attire but placing it in a different context. It was possibly a gesture toward a past tradition, but surely toward a present situation. And in the very short “present” in which this par ticu lar form of gown was of common use at Beida, physical education (tiyu), as we have seen, increasingly fi xed its penetrating gaze on the bodies of the Chinese youth. We should then look at how the gown covered and encased the physical body, ideally sheltering it from the insistent prodding of trainers and educators. Because, in a very concrete sense, wearing a gown made you unfit for running and physical exercise: not much martial aptitude is expected from someone in a long dress. Tiyu was conceived as a means of somatically imprinting an awareness of the nation on the minds of citizens, a “body cultivation” by means of which the dissemination of knowledge, values, and skills, and discipline could be achieved. The goal, as a Western advocate of physical education put it, was “to take the body every man has and make it an efficient ser viceable machine which is capable of standing the wear and tear of his ordinary life.”  The imprinting physical education promised was supposed to be produced by a conscious educational effort and a reshaping of institutional culture, but it would become visible in the ordinary and often unconscious acts of the everyday (like walking, as we have seen). In this perspective, then, the student gown can be seen precisely also as a response to this kind of bodily discipline, a response that had to be displayed in everyday gestures. The gown prevented physical movements and protected the body from being drilled, exercised, and trained. It could thus serve as an indirect claim to the right to laziness and independent movement, a refusal to be molded by the state. It is in this perspective that the connection with imperial attire becomes problematic: while there was no obligation for the imperial examination candidate to be martial, the solidity of the modern state was supposed to be reflected in the body and physical health of the nation’s youth. Not only that, but the bodily discipline of physical education was eminently modern and connected with a historical form of state power. Following Foucault, Susan Brownell argues that “physical education came into existence with the rise of European nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to meet the needs of a more diff use, legalistic kind of state power— a power that was to be exercised uniformly and efficiently.”  If we reduce Beida students’ famed laziness, laggardness, and physical ineptitude (all well represented by the temporary sartorial choice of the gown) simply to a continuation of a traditional form of elitism, we end up reinforcing a binary alternative. According to this view, the students in the 1910s could only choose between harking back to the model of imperial literati (the gown) or accepting a par-

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The other characteristic of the Beida student gown inscribed in the May Fourth mythology is its shabbiness. Students wore their gowns faded and patched. They reveled in an image of poverty, or at least carelessness. The icon of the “poor scholar in Chinese gown” was, according to Wen-hsin Yeh,

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ticularly invasive bodily discipline connected to the modern state (the uniform). I have shown instead how, in their daily life and through a refusal of disciplinary restriction and communitarian identities, students formulated political positions potentially alternative to and independent from outside disciplinary intervention. Positions that were not less modern because they went against the modernizing state, but that will remain obscure if we frame our discussion only in terms of opposition between motion (Western and modern) and stillness (Chinese and traditional). In their gowns, Beida students were not still; rather, they were trying to express a different kind of action, an independent “movement.” In this sense, I find Bourdieu’s argument on sports (which Susan Brownell comments upon) particularly relevant to the case of Beida. Bourdieu plays on the French expression “esprit de corps,” which is, as we have seen, something that was lacking among Beijing University students. If, as Bourdieu argues, sports are a means “of obtaining from the body (corps) an adherence that the spirit (esprit) could refuse,”  then there is indeed an integral connection between the productive fragmentation of the communitarian bond of Beida “students” and their resistance to physical education in the May Fourth era. They both framed the claim for independent positions (or rather, movements) versus an imposed discipline. The student gown in the May Fourth years was not a settled mark of identity. It carried a multifaceted legacy, a certain symbolic instability, and there were many practical, economic, and intellectual reasons for its diff usion. I am arguing here that, within its complexity, the gown could also have embodied the effort to unsettle the position of students vis-à-vis the disciplining state, to subtract their bodies from a regimen of training and a regimen of discursive appropriation. This was possible, however, under the particu lar contingencies of weak state power and “liberal” educational practice of the 1910s. By the mid-1920s, and in large part as a consequence of May Fourth, the position of the students became (at least temporarily) fi xed and the pressure of a scientific, national physical culture overwhelming. Only then did the gown (soon to be abandoned by most Beida students in everyday use) clearly come to be identified as the nostalgic symbol of a “tradition.”

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the epitome of the Beida style, and marked the connection between Beijing University students and two different traditions of “genteel poverty”: on one side, the free-flowing imperial academies, and on the other, the pure devotion to the modern intellectual mission. Beida students’ alleged sloppiness and untidiness has thus been viewed as an element in the self-portrait of the detached, pure, concerned scholar, something that supposedly added the symbolic weight of qingyi (pure righteous critique) to their statements. While keeping in mind the power of the qingyi ideal, I suggest that we shift the perspective and, as in the case of the untrained body, we analyze this “poor look” within the modern situation of changing social relationships and especially as part of a larger endeavor to redefine everyday life in a rapidly transforming city. To some extent, the evaluation of this statement of “genteel poverty” lies in our assumptions about the relative wealth of students, the idea that “all students were members of a privileged elite.”  That being so, we should start by reexamining the financial situation of the students. Beida was the most expensive public school in the country—fees were set at about sixty yuan per year in 1917 and remained stable for the large part of the 1920s. However, life in Beijing was quite inexpensive, and you could manage to get by on one hundred to 180 yuan per year. Altogether, students at Beida needed about three hundred yuan per year, barring incidents like hospital bills or exceptional book expenses. Not a huge sum, but one that stands in marked contrast with, for example, the average monthly salary of a primary school teacher (between twenty-four and thirty-two yuan) or an ordinary worker (4.5 to 6.5 yuan). However, even if we accept that “all students were members of a privileged elite,”  there were sharp differences among the students themselves. Gu Jiegang recalls the presence of a handful of students who could spend up to five thousand yuan per year, and many others who disposed of at least one thousand yuan. They lived in luxurious accommodations outside the university and hired servants and cooks. People like him, he concluded, whose family could provide no more than two to three hundred yuan, had no real status at Beida. So, while Beida students generally had to be considered financially well off, especially compared with the rest of the city population, they did not belong to a uniformly wealthy social group. Rather, over the late 1910s, students seemed to have grown ner vous and restless precisely in connection with their finances. There is a large record of student protest against rising school expenses, including tuition and dorm fees. Unless one is willing to always ascribe the unrest to the “over-excited adolescent spirit” and to the innate rebellious temper of Beida students, it probably signals that their economic situation was not so rosy after all. Or, at least, that economic worries

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were not negligible in students’ minds. Strictly speaking, future prospects for university graduates did not necessarily look bright. In particular, after 1911 expectations of secure state employment for students in the country’s top schools had dropped drastically. The break between intellectuals and the state was consummated first and foremost at a very basic economic level. The possibility of an elite status comparable to the literati of old could then be object of nostalgia, because it had irremediably ceased to exist in practice. Seen in this light, the ethos of Beida during the May Fourth years might represent the willful acceptance of this distancing and a positive reevaluation and expansion of its significance: the expression of a separation from the state by Beida students and intellectuals also reflected and was made possible by their perceived relation to state employment. One of the consequences of the progressive restriction of a direct channel of bureaucratic employment was that students and intellectuals came to depend more heavily on shifts in the growing economy of cultural products. Scholars were not separated from this ever-changing market, in which their degrees, their learning and scholarship, and also their “values” became a commodity to be exchanged. Th is shift has been described as an increasing turn to the professionalization of intellectuals, which took a more definitive shape in the 1920s and 1930s, with the affirmation of professional associations, the development of journalism, the multiplication of publishing houses, and the expansion of the publishing market.  But Beida students were immersed in the changing cultural marketplace in a much more pervasive sense; their daily livelihood was affected by changes in the national economy, changes that came more and more to be connected to worldwide economic and social processes. Modernity tied the par ticu lar experience of Beijing students in the late 1910s to global capitalist development, which was penetrating and altering urban daily life. Even more so given the position of Beida in the city, as it was located next to an area of Beijing whose commercial and social life had been deeply transformed by the insertion of the city in a global market of commodities (see part 4). The global influences that affected livelihood and the everyday were, in this sense, probably more relevant to the shaping of this political subjectivity (students) than the individual socioeconomic situation. Given the pervasiveness of this process, Beida students’ alleged “aloofness” from material concerns, their refuge into the purity of learning (which often took seemingly “traditional” forms, like the patched gown) was not simply as an escape from the corruption of the marketplace. Rather, students’ bohemian attitudes can also be viewed as part of a larger attempt to negotiate a different subjective position vis-à-vis the global overdetermination of the economy—not simply to find refuge from it. Th is negotiation was realized through radical experiments at reframing everyday life, experiments

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that, like the modern everyday itself, recruited elements from the old and the new, the global and the local.  Students were confronted with patterns of change that affected the streets around the school (where ordinary crafts had become “traditional” and had been inserted in a global flow of commodities), the composition of urban society (with growing social confl ict), and their own livelihood. To this, some students reacted not simply by harking back to the old or exalting the new, but by exploring and constructing possible models of modern life, mainly centered on the idea of frugality. And it is in combination with the idea of frugality that the “poor look” of Beida students takes on different implications. Frugality was one way in which a discourse and a practice of reforming life, in its economic, social, and political aspects was couched. Frugality, meant as a radical reform of daily practices, was the solution to all evils, at the level of the individual, the school, the nation, and the world. Extravagance was at the root of the disarray of politics, the decline of morals, the shallowness of culture.  The call for restraint in the name of virtue (frugality) resonated with Confucian (puritanical) overtones. And indeed, much has been written on the connection between utopian experiments and the traditional leanings of Chinese intellectuals at the beginning of the century. At Beida, the discourse of frugality was articulated with strong ethical tones, as in the list of prohibitions of the Jindehui (Society for the Promotion of Virtue). Timothy Weston incisively highlights how the argument Cai Yuanpei made for the establishment of the Association for the Promotion of Virtue, full of references to the most celebrated instances of qingyilike heroic protest, outlined an “act with political implication” and a critique of the failure of the Republican state.  However, these echoes from the past should not make us forget that this argument was inserted in a larger spectrum of experiences that did not simply express disillusionment with state policies but also presented alternative— albeit utopian—ways of living in a community. The discourse of frugality was practically experienced within organizations that promoted work-study, communal life, and mutual aid. For example, the Tongxue Jianxuehui (Frugal Study Society), a case that Weston analyzes briefly,  was founded in 1917 with the goal of “developing the ability for autonomy, foster frugality and take pleasure in studying.”  Members were required to live in university dorms, which they would have to manage independently, without proctors or servants. Members were supposed to share the burden of daily chores as well as help each other in studying and dealing with problems. Experiments in frugality were then also a way of framing solutions to economic and social changes that prescinded from and obliterated social and economic differences: by taking a reformed and shared everyday life as the locus of politics,

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students could avoid the emerging discourse of class and class struggle.  Reducing expenses by being frugal was the fi rst necessary step in articulating a response to global trends of commodification, in which everything, including students themselves, was on the market. The experiments with frugality of Beida students were then part and parcel of a global discourse, in which a response to modernity (the time and modes of capitalism) was partially articulated through a focus on the everyday. Precisely because the everyday “calls attention to the structure of temporal immanence it shares with other societies even as we concentrate on local experience.”  Some associations at Beida went beyond the “restraint of expenses” and expanded the meaning of frugality onto a direct intervention in the realm of production and consumption. The Student Savings Bank (Xuesheng Chuxu Yinhang) and the Consumers’ Society (Xiaofei Gongshe), both founded at Beida at the end of 1917, moved from a concern with the growing economic difficulties that marked student life and proposed a model of alternative commercial and financial enterprises. The fi rst provided loans and management of students’ savings, while the other tried to offer a solution to the increasing price of commodities. As in the previous cases, frugality and ethics were central concerns of these two projects (students had still to exercise control and parsimony), but here the rationale was crafted more clearly in terms of a global cotemporality and world trends. These two enterprises loomed surprisingly large in the speeches delivered at the celebration of Beida’s twentieth anniversary in 1918. Two of the keynote speakers, Hu Qianzhi and Dean Wang Jianzhu, focused on the need, in the changing economic global conditions, to establish cooperative organizations. Wang listed the various types of cooperative societies (in Chinese), providing the Japanese and English equivalent of each term, and reminding how, in the rest of the world “these kinds of organizations were fi rst created at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the goal of eliminating the obstacles between producers and consumers,” as well as reducing class competition. Co-ops were both a common response to the global advance of capitalist competition and a way out of the social issues of class division. These speakers then described the economic plight of Chinese consumers as part of a more general evolution, a process in which the everyday life of a student in the capital of China, for example, was merged with the global time of economic changes. Anarchism, mutual aid, and the work-study movement at the beginning of the century provided the vocabulary and the models to integrate localized experiences of frugal life and co-ops into a more general rethinking of capitalism and a more productive response to its discontent. According to Paul Bailey, one of the declared aims of the work-study groups was to mitigate

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the elitism of intellectuals by providing a new fashion of communal life. Th rough the fi rst decades of the twentieth century, most students at all levels had already become accustomed to think in economic terms and had been trained through a truly international sampling of exemplary cases of industry and labor. The “traditional” attitude of the moral upright gentleman unsullied by outside change was by then clearly impossible to recover, as “outside changes” directly affected the life of students. Thus, the negation of the value of profit, for example, was not simply a relic of intellectuals’ disdain for commercial enterprise but assumed a new meaning when placed within the rising awareness of global economic trends. Hence, the same organization that attempted to refashion daily life in downtown Beijing could be exported to Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris in an indication of the overall unifying power of modern life. The Diligent Work and Frugal Study Society connected, in the same communal life experiments, the students at Beida with Chinese students in France. Similarly, “New Village” communes were created or proposed in rural Japan, in the provincial city of Changsha, and in urban Beijing. All of these experiments ultimately failed, in some cases precisely because their participants were incapable of exceeding in practice the “student” character of these organizations and because they did not provide any alternative to a market economy (they just took part in it). But in their often brief existence, they articulated in practice, through the ephemeral conquest and control of a restricted lived space, the hope of liberating a vast space, the world. Going back to the tattered gown of Beida student, changes in economic conditions, fashion, and power had already altered the old literati attire into a cheaper, everyday form. It was this new form that the students chose and used as a symbol of the possibility of a different kind of relationship with modern everyday. The discourse of the everyday mobilized old and new and reshaped them both.

T H E O R G A N I Z AT I O N A N D T H E I N D I V I D U A L

In the first two chapters I have shown how we can and should reconcile the often exaggerated attempt on the part of individual students to disengage their behavior from educational and ceremonial routines, with the effort to organize a more truly communal form of interaction. Before I move on to a different set of issues in part 2, it might be worth highlighting once again the theoretical stakes implicit in the complex relationship with the state, modern capitalism, and the very idea of community.

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Despite the well-documented sense of pride of belonging to “the highest school in the country” and to the general (albeit still undefined) condition of “university student,” the existence of a closed and tight community at Beida was challenged, as we have seen, in everyday practice. Many students resisted imposed discipline, and in a sense they refused to be contained in a single sociological definition. In this period, the definition and the role of student and of university started to become a site of struggle, and their relationship to learning and to the nation-state an issue to be negotiated. On the other hand, while the idea of an imposed community was questioned, groups continued to be formed on the basis of projects and of political initiatives. As I will show in part 3, both the individualistic anticommunitarian spirit and organizational efforts were based on the radical assumption that no communitarian identity but only subjective choices can be the foundation of militancy. In this sense, the work-study organizations, despite their failures, can be seen as the practical search for a possibility of transcending, through a change in lifestyle, the confines of the social inscription as “students,” the expression of the will to cross the borders of a prescribed social identity. Only a subjective effort, a personal will, could produce a political project reflected in a communal organization. That’s why I insist that we examine the “frugal organizations” at Beida in the larger perspective of the phenomena illustrated in this chapter—the redefinition of classroom ceremonials and daily rituals of interaction and the blurring of bureaucratic and physical boundaries, fashion and bodily postures. We can then see how these apparently incongruent factors contributed to a multifaceted attempt to reform the life in and around the school as the foundation of general change. These micropractices were what produced the university as a lived space, one in which a vision of politics was diff used and experienced in the everyday. Th is does not imply a dissolution (or rather, a dilution) of politics in each and every act of daily experience, following the concept that “everything is political.” Th is would be rather something akin to the tortuous paths of de Certeau’s city walker, for whom every unexpected twist and turn, each diversion up a side alley, represents a statement of political resistance vis-à-vis a controlling designer. And, if considered in isolation, much of the idiosyncratic behavior of Beida students might appear to be a perfect embodiment of an escapist vision, a refuge in a single and individual act of meaningless resistance. But, in the case of Beida, these actions were not isolated, and they were combined with a search of new ways of communal living in organized associations. The solipsistic attitude of Beida students was part and parcel of the active pursuit of a different lived space and not simply a resistance, a reaction,

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vis-à-vis the conditioning of abstract definitions—in this case the state project of disciplined citizenry and the oppression of economic changes. Only later on, when the significance of May Fourth politics and the effectiveness of May Fourth–style organizations had withered, the lingering of “old Beida” behavior, with students replicating a rehearsed tradition of individualistic attitudes, became at best an escape into solipsism, and at worst an indulgence in narcissistic nostalgia amid political irrelevance. Yongze, the first love of the heroine in Song of Youth, is described as having “previously worn a student’s uniform,” but in the 1930s, “since cultivating an interest in old books he preferred a more ‘national style’ of dress.” This attire, now truly twice rescued from the May Fourth era (Yongze is a fictional disciple of Hu Shi), fits a character that is more interested in his scholarly status than political struggle. In the eyes of the novelist, the gown—no longer dirty, patched, or made of cotton—is a symbol both of the May Fourth activism and of its nostalgic withering. During the core years of the May Fourth era, the sometimes ambiguous and haphazard combination of gestures, practices, and organizational forms contributed to produce a “transformed everydayness.” That is to say, an “everydayness fused with politics as the place where the divisions caused by alienation can be repaired, where the slow and profound rupture between the everyday and the nonquotidian, between the public and the private, between militant life and ordinary life, is lived as abolished.”  Kristin Ross’s analysis of the quotidian experience of May ’68 in France fits the case of Beida, if not in the overall practice, in its aspirations: the aspirations of combining intellectual and manual labor, erasing distinction inside the dorms, subverting general conditions of sociality, and mobilizing old postures as an alternative to new discipline. In this frame, “political activity no longer appears as a distinct and separate sphere isolated from social life: each person may, there where he or she lives and works, prepare the birth of another future.”  Engaging with the fabric of everyday life was therefore more than a reflection of political concern: political concerns were configured as part of lived space, and solutions or alternatives were proposed through a transformation of everyday practices. It becomes then somewhat less important how many students were directly involved in political organizations. The general idea of a transformed environment was the one that circulated both in contemporary sources and in memoirs and colored the experience and the recollection of students who remained at the margins of political involvement. It was in the participation in this environment that, for many students, political experience was framed. The sense of newness, of a radical difference reaching even the seemingly most inconsequential things echoes in the recollection of students, many of whom took a minor part or no part at all in active organizational

life. The influence on the university did not lie so much in the fact that it was, as Chuan Dao recalls, “the hotbed of pure learning,” but rather in that “everything the eyes saw and the ears heard was new, different.” And, he concludes, “I felt happy. If I can draw an analogy, it was like a man who, bound with tight ropes and suffocating in an iron room, is untied to go outside for the first time. There, he reaches a great garden full of light, full of fresh air and the spring breeze, and his whole body feels invigorated.”  69 | U N T R A I N E D B O D I E S A N D F R U G A L H A B I T S

INTELLECTUAL PA R T I I

SPACE

3

THE DISPLACEMENT OF LEARNING

PRACTICES OF THE ACADEMIC DISEASE

The research university is a quintessentially modern creation. And, like many modern inventions, it seems to be have been affected since birth by a psychological unbalance, a specifically “modern” disease. In this par ticu lar case, it is something that looks very much like clinical schizophrenia. William Clark, in his masterful Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, investigates how the university (in the form we all are very familiar with and that some of us have the luxury of inhabiting) became part and parcel of the modern order, one in which “the visible and the rational triumphed over the oral and the traditional.”  This shift, Clark shows, first took place in the German universities between the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, in large part through direct intervention by the state and its ministries. They submitted the schools, the professors, and the students to expanding controls, exercised primarily through an always increasing and ever more detailed production of paperwork. In a word, bureaucratization. However— and here lies the seed of academic schizophrenia— at least one major feature of the new institution was spared rationalization: the faculty—and, to an extent, graduate students—were and still are appointed, promoted, and judged in

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large part on the basis of fame, genius, and charisma. Flimsy, fleeting, and intangible qualities that the German ministries (like the modern academic managers) were willing to recognize and reward, but could not manufacture— nor, it seems, successfully and completely inscribe in a system of bureaucratic tables and grades. The modern academic is therefore, like many modern subjects, always split, divided, and in contradiction with him or herself. Or, as in the title of Anthony Grafton’s review of Clark’s work, just “nutty.”  Clark’s investigation, besides being eye-opening and somewhat unsettling reading for anybody involved in academia, has direct relevance in the case of Beijing University, for both method and content. Methodologically, it is through the analysis of the “little tools of knowledge”—reports, tables, dossiers, and so on—that Clark throws light on the changing nature of the university. These “tools” are revealed to be crucial in the emergence or the transformations of certain practices and procedures—like the lecture, the seminar, the exam—that in turn informed and engendered much deeper changes, affecting the scope of learning, the role and function of professors, and, in par ticu lar, the relationship of the school and the state. Clark argues that the bureaucratization of the university was realized through the control not so much of content (of what is taught) but of the method of grading and testing, that is, through tables and report cards. “These techniques emerged as the authorized means for formation of future civil and academic servant of the German state. The report, table, and grade internalized the discipline that the rod, like policing, had tried so clumsily to impose externally.”  A similar approach then can be applied to the case of Beida in order to rethink and reframe the relationship between ideas and politicization. While it is obviously possible and useful to trace the evolution of disciplines such as history or law as purely intellectual endeavors, the risk of drawing a simplified line of derivation from ideas to political positions is always looming dangerously. Only if we instead shift the attention to how academic practices embodied, expressed, and negotiated the disciplinary shifts, the epistemic changes, and the political framework for learning and teaching, we will be able to avoid the mistake of framing what happened in and around May Fourth’s Beida simply as a reflection of a change in the realms of ideas. Th is does not mean that ideas were unimportant, but they were not purely abstract and were expressed and lived in shifting practices. Matter, as Althusser, channeling Aristotle, reminded us, is discussed in many senses, it exists in different modalities. In chapter 1 we have already analyzed how political positions were expressed precisely via a critique or a reinvention of some modern academic practices (examining, classroom teaching, etc.); in the following pages I will instead interrogate the intellectual and political meanings inscribed in the organization of courses, curricula, and disciplines.

T H E D I S P L AC E M E N T O F L E A R N I N G

Th is book takes 1917 as its starting point, and therefore places an emphasis on Cai Yuanpei’s tenure as president of Beijing University. While I do not mean to fall back to an apologetic reduction of the transformation of Beida to the work of a genial reformer, Cai’s presidency is important precisely because it was under his leadership that a series of academic practices took shape and came to define May Fourth’s Beida. Many transformations, as we will describe later, had started before Cai’s arrival, and were independent from his actions. The year 1917 was thus not the bearer of a radical break

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TWO SPEECHES

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Besides providing a methodological example, Clark’s observations are crucial also because of what he describes to be the oxymoronic nature of the research university. The lingering presence of charisma, institutionalized in the practice of the research seminar, “condemned” students and faculty “to a domain of autonomy,”  a certain degree of freedom. The process of bureaucratic control was therefore always incomplete, or at least there was always a core of academic life that was firmly inserted into a bureaucratic structure, yet remained impenetrable to determination by the state. It was by virtue of this core that Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, at the same time he was leading from the ministry a state-mandated reform of the Prussian university, could in good faith continue to claim freedom as the indispensable condition for academic knowledge. And, while this autonomy might be considered largely illusory, it is by definition an inalienable element in the model of the modern university. Th is was the model that was adopted worldwide, “the vehicle for spreading European science and academics globally . . . the final and the most insidious phase of European colonialism.”  Moreover, in the case of Beida, the reforms introduced under Cai Yuanpei were also directly and declaredly framed on the German example of the Humboldtian university (more on that later). If we take seriously the argument that there is an irreducible (or at least, unsolved) contradiction at the core of the model that Beida adopted, then we can see how a large part of the educational experiments of May Fourth were framed inside this very modern conundrum, one that perturbs the very nature of the university. We should therefore take the reforms at Beida precisely as a way in which students and professors explored the limits, contradictions, and possibilities of the modern university, and in par ticu lar the promise to constitute an intellectual space (defined by academic practices) autonomous from any state and ultimately any national definition of learning. In short, the reforms attempted to configure a modern university that was not and could not be a Chinese one.

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or  an “eventful” year—but this is not to say that it was a date without significance. Let’s start then from the fi rst public statement Cai Yuanpei made in his newly acquired position. Again, this is not to highlight the transformative power of words or the magic influence of a charismatic personality, but rather to outline the grounding of the intellectual practice of May Fourth’s Beida. Cai addressed the students and the faculty for the fi rst time on January 4. In this famous speech, he argued how the university in its very nature was different from any other kind of institution of higher education: while specialist schools trained students for a practical career, the only concern for university students should be high-level research. Unfortunately, Cai decried, the influence of the Qing system, in which education was intimately connected to and justified by a bureaucratic career, lingered in the Republican university. The failure of the 1911 revolution to get rid of bad customs and corrupt leaders was exemplified in the current situation of the university which was— even if Cai did not say it in so many words—more famous for the brothel-hopping and gambling habits of its students than for the scholarship it produced. The first duty of university students, Cai maintained, was to take research as their only and definite goal. He associated this unswerving scholarly pursuit with personal morality: pure interest in research untainted by career concerns was the natural complement to ethical behavior and attention to personal integrity, moral as well as physical. Finally, Cai argued, a spirit of mutual assistance, respect, and collaboration had to be fostered, not only among students and teachers, but toward school personnel as well. Cai concluded by summarizing the core of his project at Beida: to help each student and teacher to study on his or her own and pursue research independently. Scholars have argued how very little, if anything, was new or unprecedented in Cai’s address and they have traced the genealogy of the ideas about university, learning, and morality that he conveyed to the students. While novelty of ideas, at least in this case, is not the point (how these statements were reflected and expressed in lived practices seems to me a more relevant question), the issue is clearly not unimportant. A striking example is offered by the comparison with another notable speech, that of Liang Qichao in his address to Beida students in 1912. The special goal of the university, stated Liang, “is to study the high and profound scientific theories, developing the culture of our country so that it can contribute to the culture of the world. . . . The goal of the specialty school is to form people skilled in technology while the goal of the university is to form scholars.” In the second part of his speech, as Cai would do four years later, Liang exhorted students to repel the influences of the Qing educational system, to focus on learning and to be moral models for the country’s intellectuals.

also have a strong and widespread influence on the society and the state.

Liang stressed how students should not only obey faculty and administrators but also that younger students should follow the orders of their senior colleagues; in a republic, “universal freedom,” Liang concluded, meant primarily that everybody was free to obey.

L E A R N I N G

complete their courses and education will not have any effect, but this will

O F

yond description. If the students speak of freedom, not only will they not

D I S P L AC E M E N T

an army, but the order will also be disrupted. Then the danger will be be-

T H E

freedom, not only the military will collapse and it will impossible to form

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Soldiers and students cannot speak of freedom. If the soldiers speak of

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However, the differences between the speeches are as striking as the similarities. First, Liang Qichao stresses over and over again the connection between the university and the nation-state. Beida is “the highest school in the country,” a student’s responsibility is ultimately toward his country, and the task of the school is to advance “the culture of China.” Liang delivered his address in an atmosphere heavily tinted by national symbolism, with Republican fl ags hanging throughout the hall, the visual frame matching and reinforcing the emphasis of his words. The university, concluded Liang, “not only is the highest organization in a nation’s higher education, but it also is the place where a nation’s intellectual life lies and can be regarded as the nation of learning (xuewen zhi guojia).”  In contrast, Cai Yuanpei’s 1917 speech mentioned a connection with the nationstate only in a somewhat ambiguous context, when he obliquely addressed the corruption of political leaders. While Liang directly incorporated the university within the project of nation and state building, Cai placed any state-related justification for the existence of the school and the task of its students at a certain distance. The responsibility of the students was, he argued, fi rst and foremost toward themselves and their search for learning. Part of the explanation for this difference rests on the historical conditions in which the two addresses were pronounced: Liang spoke when the hopes for the newborn Republic were largely intact but, by 1917, the faith that a par tic u lar state form would bring radical change had largely dissipated. However, Liang and Cai also had fundamentally different beliefs in what a school is, what its relationship to state and nation should be, and what practices should inhabit it. The distance between the two arguments becomes clearer when we reach the second part of Liang’s address, where he deals with the issue of the students’ behavior. Liang’s fi rst recommendation to the students is to practice “obedience,” their position being comparable to that of soldiers.

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school, commanded with severity, and their subjects could only obey, there was no such thing as freedom of thought, or ability to discern right from

I N T E L L E C T U A L

The ruler of the country, the pater familias, the teacher in the private

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Without discounting the historical gap separating these two positions, it is extremely difficult to conciliate Liang’s concept of “freedom as obedience” with the emphasis on independent research, administrative self-rule, and individual autonomy which Cai hinted at in 1917. For a starker contrast, compare Liang’s statements with this passage from another speech by Cai, a few months later, in May 1917:

What they consider correct is correct for the whole school, what they deem

wrong . . . now this kind of attitude still exists among school presidents. wrong is wrong for the whole school. Thus, the school atmosphere becomes corrupted, and so does the national attitude; then the thought in the country is not free.

And even after 1919, when the issue of student behavior took on national importance, obedience was approached at Beida in a very different fashion from what Liang Qichao had proposed. In a series of addresses between 1919 and 1920, Cai emphasized the concept of zizhi (“self-rule” or “autonomy”). Management and control of the self, he stressed, cannot be delegated to others, cannot be imposed from outside, but must come from within the individual. Students cannot “be ruled” (beizhi), otherwise the separation between rulers and ruled perpetuates: when these students becomes teachers, they will reproduce the same (evil) ruler-ruled relationship not only in the school but also in society at large. Here, the concept of zizhi articulates an ambivalent but open relationship between the disciplinary authority and the individual. On the one hand, it stands for the internalization of discipline, the self-regulation of each individual that characterizes modern sovereignty, and as such, it could be viewed as a form of internalized obedience, a more sophisticated version of Liang’s argument. On the other hand, however, the stress on zizhi affi rms the existence of a perturbing element in the disciplinary order of the university (and of society in general), which we should not dismiss as simply illusory, unless we accept that ideological control is total and absolute. And this latter perspective is a far cry from Liang’s equation of students with soldiers. Finally, while Cai (as Liang) accepts the crucial connection between school and society, he does not endow students with a “special status”: what the school atmosphere and the national (which I would take to mean here “social,” and not “state”) attitude share is a principle of autonomy, one that applies to all individuals and not just students. Students already are citizens,

T H E D I S P L AC E M E N T O F L E A R N I N G

As Steve Owen has aptly remarked, the excessive emphasis on novelty in the literature on May Fourth is related to the particular nature of the New Culture movement in which the “performative utterance”  of radical change (presenting oneself as radically “new”) was part and parcel of change itself. That led to a proliferation of works and statements in which “unprecedented innovations” were ascribed to the years around 1919. In the case of Beida, recent historiographical contributions have questioned the groundbreaking character of Cai Yuanpei’s presidency, extolled in a large part of the earlier literature on May Fourth. Some contributions have stressed preexisting conditions (progressive professors had been hired before 1917), while others have highlighted theoretical precedents (reforms by previous presidents and educators). Th is is all true. But precedents and preexisting conditions do not necessarily detract from the extent of change both perceived and realized in a historical location. This applies to the different aspects analyzed in this volume. Scholars who fashioned political statements though bohemian attitudes preexisted the student behaviors described in part 1 (and the word bohemian itself). Monuments and symbols connected to the May Fourth movement, like Tiananmen (see chapter 6), stood there long before students used them as a backdrop for their actions. And people had studied way before they could

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W H AT ’ S N E W ?

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and as such they are not subjected to special disciplinary limitations, nor granted par ticu lar exemptions or prescriptions. We will see how this argument played a central role on May 4, 1919. In 1912, then, Liang Qichao placed Beijing University squarely inside the scope and the functioning of the nation-state and tied its working and the life of its members to duties prescribed by the government—to the extent of reducing the school to the most violent and disciplinary expression of the state apparatus, the military. In 1917, Cai was instead articulating the premises for a double displacement of the university, which I will describe in the following pages. First, the university should withdraw from the state and abdicate any state-related functions. Second, it should distance itself from any “national” or “cultural” (i.e., Chinese) defi nition of learning. The place of the university (its institutional status, its history, its position) was thus relocated into a space of knowledge that was theoretically infinite and open to individual research. Th is displacement was not simply “enunciated,” rather it would emerge out of the curriculum and teaching structure of the reformed Beida and in academic practices that explored and further unsettled the contradictory core of the model of the modern university.

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be framed as “modern students.” But for each of these aspects, a radical change was indeed produced in the May Fourth period, practically and symbolically: old practices, locations, and strategies were rescued and merged with new ones, thus producing new meaning through the antiritual environment of the school, the resignification of ancient monuments, and the emergence of the modern political category of students. In the same vein, then, the existence of precedents and favorable conditions for university reform should be seen as the framework on which a complex experiment in academic practice was (temporarily) built. In practice, Cai’s approach was precisely to identify which possibilities were at play in that par ticu lar set of historical contingencies (including precedents), to determine what organizational effort was feasible based on of these possibilities, and to experiment and test the limits of the modern academic tools in this context. First of all, despite Cai’s very critical appraisal of the situation at Beijing University, he recognized the existence of the positive factors inside the school, specifically professors who had been trying to introduce new attitudes during the previous years. He was well aware that “old professors like Shen Yinmo, Shen Jiantu and Qian Xuantong had already made attempts at reform.”  Outside the school, the presence of Fan Yuanlian, an old colleague and friend of Cai who was generally sympathetic to the “progressive” cause, as minister of education suggested a nonhostile attitude from the financial sponsor of the university. On a different level, the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916 had apparently opened new opportunities, if not so much for government politics per se, then at least for social and intellectual life: “He represented in himself the three evils of the old society—bureaucracy, pedantry and necromancy. . . . He worshipped the emperor in the Temple of Heaven, advocated the study of the Classics in elementary school, the restoration of imperial clothing and the practice of kowtow; that’s why he was the personification of old pedantry. . . . With Mr. Yuan removed, isn’t it possible that these social poisons will disappear as well?”  The parliamentary institutions and the university shared a history of hopes and disillusionment. In 1917, the political vacuum opened by Yuan Shikai’s death and the crumbling of government control paradoxically seemed to have offered a chance to move the school away from the wreckage of the state. A few weeks after Cai’s arrival in Beijing, in a letter to Wang Jingwei, he expressed the feeling that there was among politicians a certain degree of sympathy or at least an attitude of laissez-faire toward the new university policies. A weak state presented an opening for an attempt at truly experimenting with the research university framework, contradictions and all.

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And experiment they did. If we look at Cai’s writings between 1917 and 1920, as well as the documents concerning Beijing University intellectuals and organizational reshaping, we cannot but notice how, far from presenting an a priori plan progressively implemented, they show a continuing adaptation to the changing contingencies. Th is was not the reflection of a lack of planning or of misunderstood examples, rather the experiential and practical dimension was crucial because the reforms were as a process of negotiation, through which the modern concept of the university itself was tested within the possibilities presented by the historical situation. So it is not surprising that in 1920, on the eve of his first prolonged absence from Beida, Cai Yuanpei looked back at the recent history of the school under the Republic and epitomized it as an “experimental” period.  Th is was even more the case for the years immediately after 1917, when the university structure, its administration, and its personnel were traversed by a flow of reforms, often overlapping. For a short but hectic time, Beida seemed to be in a state of perpetual change. As for the situation at the end if 1916, we have to partly discount the gloomy picture presented by those accounts that celebrate Cai’s presidency as a miraculous break with the past. Instead, Zou Shuwen and Wang Daoyuan describe how the curriculum had already moved away from classical learning (associated with the examination system) and toward a more scientific orientation by the last few years of the Qing dynasty. After the founding of the Republic, the school became a hotbed for the disciples of Zhang Taiyan, and some of the protagonists of New Culture were already teaching at Beida before Cai’s arrival. Similarly, Tao Xisheng writes in extremely appreciative terms about Xu Chongqin’s reorganization of the preparatory courses (yuke), which apparently were a model of efficiency and rigor and acquired an almost total independence from the school, de facto constituting a yuke daxue. In terms of organization, in 1916 Beijing University consisted of five schools or colleges (ke): Humanities, Sciences, Engineering, Economics, and Law. The School of Humanities included four departments: Western philosophy, Chinese philosophy, English, and Chinese. Probably one of the most striking features of this organizational layout was how the Chinese philosophy curriculum was modeled verbatim on its Western counterpart, down to courses like “Psychology” and “History of Ner vous Diseases.” According to Feng Youlan, the Western philosophy department existed only on paper: in 1915 it consisted of one professor, who died soon after. The School of Sciences had five departments (mathematics, theoretical physics, chemistry, zoology, and botany). For both schools, three years of courses were required for an undergraduate degree.

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Besides the undergraduate program, Beida offered preparatory classes (yuke) in order to make up for the perceived deficient preparation of high school graduates. As mentioned earlier, this three-year preparatory program apparently enjoyed a great level of independence and, under the presidency of Xu Chongqin, even tried to establish itself as a separate body. Both the classrooms and the dorms for yuke were located in separate buildings from those of the undergraduates and the ethos of the students seemed to be much different from the carelessness and corruption that the public opinion of the time attributed to Beida “regular” students. Accordingly, the yuke students allegedly looked down upon their undergraduate seniors.

A BOUNDLESS CURRICULUM

Th is, in short, was the structure of Beida’s curriculum at the time of Cai’s nomination. What appeared objectionable to the new president was, fi rst of all, the coexistence of “practical” or “professional” disciplines with pure, “academic” ones. The critique was two-pronged: fi rst, the professional disciplines of law and business were seamlessly tied with the pursuit of a career and therefore their practitioners were more naturally prone to indulge in the evil attitude of shenguan facai (“to ascend to an official position and get rich.”) By placing professional discipline and pure sciences under one roof, Cai commented, “the venom of keju and interest for officialdom that run deep in our countrymen can spread quickly, [and] then the students of humanities and science will be soiled by the evil customs of law and business.”  The two sets of disciplines were also to be kept apart because of their intrinsic difference. Learning (xueshu) consisted of xue, sciences, and shu, practical knowledge. The first was devoted to investigating theoretical principles; the second to providing practical applications for these theories. The difference in nature had to be reflected in a difference in places and names: daxue (universities) were the places for xue, gaodeng zhuanmen xuexiao (specialty schools) were the places for shu. In the summer of 1917 the announcement for the annual Beida entrance examinations stated that applications were no longer accepted for the schools of engineering and economics. The School of Engineering, which in 1917 consisted of only two departments (civil and metallurgy) and was very poorly equipped, was eliminated and its students and faculty merged with those at Beiyang University in Tianjin. The School of Economics, equally underdeveloped, was dismantled in June 1917 and a course on economics was introduced in the law school curriculum. Of the shu disciplines, only law, which was more closely tied with the pursuit of an official career (and more bureau-

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cratically powerful), held its spot at Beida. But compared to economics and engineering, in 1917 law was in a much more solid position, being the most popu lar choice among prospective students and the largest department in the university. The merging of the engineering faculty with that of at Beiyang University was counterbalanced by the elimination of the law faculty in Tianjin, whose students subsequently enrolled at Beida. Apparently, Cai, during his tenure, attempted to sever the School of Law from the main body of Beida, thus creating an independent college, but he was unsuccessful. The structure of the preparatory courses was radically reshaped as well. By June 1917, a Ministry of Education decree set the duration of the preparatory courses to two years and the undergraduate degree to four years (the previous ratio was three to three.) This was the first move aimed at undermining the independence the yuke had acquired in the fi rst years of the Republic and at placing them back in a position subordinate to the regular courses. According to the Education Gazette, before 1917 the yuke were only nominally “preparatory” to the undergraduate courses. The process of steady differentiation had reached a point where the curricula were so diverse as to be incompatible, thus strengthening the claim of the yuke’s informal independence from Beida. In 1917, the position of yuke president was abolished and the courses reorganized into three schools (Humanities, Science, and Law), each under the control of the three deans of the corresponding undergraduate courses. Accordingly, the yuke curriculum was rearranged and made to complement the first-year undergraduate courses. The function of the preparatory courses was also rethought in the following years. The issue was the extremely uneven level of high school graduates coming from different areas of China, whose preparation was not considered to be fit for the kind of scholarly pursuit the new university embodied. By 1919 the course structure of the preparatory classes (at least for humanities and sciences) was simplified and geared toward a general introduction to scientific and philosophical principles. A set of mandatory classes was designed in order to impart a basic preparation (purposely nonspecific) to all yuke students: it included language skills (written Chinese and two foreign languages) and courses designed as an introduction to scholarly research (e.g., “principles of ethics,” “philosophical concepts”). Other classes were split into two groups, one for science and one for the humanities and the social sciences, and students could pick the group of their choosing. At the other extreme of the university curriculum, Cai Yuanpei is credited with the creation of graduate schools (yanjiusuo). Again, this has been considered a somewhat false attribution of merit. Graduate schools had been part of the university project since at least 1902, when the charter drafted by Zhang Zhidong prospected the creation of tongruyuan. However, it seems

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that it remained nothing more than a plan and, even after 1912, when the tongruyuan were fi rst renamed daxueyuan, I could not find traces of any graduate student, seminar, or activity. Once again, 1917 was a turning point not so much in educational discourse but mostly in pedagogical practice. The new statute in November 1917 outlined principles for graduate schools that were in many ways similar to the ones in contemporary German universities: an emphasis on individual research, professors as tutors and guides, and a free selection of research topics. Common discussion and, at least after 1920, “seminars” were methods suggested in the yanjiusuo regulations. The graduate schools were also open to Beida seniors, and the scholarly journal Beijing University Monthly (Beijing Daxue yuekan) was founded explicitly to publish the results of graduate research. With the elimination of the schools of business and engineering, the humanities and the sciences became the focus both of the pedagogical reform and the intellectual ferment. The change affected the curricula of the two schools at a progressively increasing pace. Some of the earlier reforms, like the extension of the undergraduate degree to four years, obviously took time to be fully implemented and students enrolled under the old system lived together with younger colleagues who were following the new one. Beyond practical obstacles, it actually seems that the reforms truly proceeded step by step, with every change deemed successful fueling a further development. The courses available to humanities students in 1916 and 1917 remained very similar, but two major changes in the curriculum are extremely significant. An independent History Department was added, which separated it from literature. “Western” and “Chinese” philosophies were also combined into one general Philosophy Department. A similar restructuring took place in the sciences, where botany and zoology courses were merged into the Geology Department. However, the course structure remained fi xed and all the classes were mandatory until, in October 1918, a system of elective classes (xuankezhi) was first introduced. The reform fi rst affected the Philosophy Department: next to a set of mandatory courses, a list of electives was introduced, including not only typical humanities subjects, but also courses in physics, economics, and the “history of the development of chemistry.”  Th is opened the way to a more radical reorganization that shaped Beida more clearly as a wenli daxue (“humanities-science university”). In October 1919, the schools of humanities, science, and law were abolished along with the position of dean. The undergraduate courses were reorganized in eleven departments (xi) and decisions concerning the curriculum and the pedagogical directions of the university were taken out of the hands of the deans of each school and entrusted to a collegial body at the university level (the jiaowuchu). By 1920, first-year undergraduates had five mandatory

phy. In the past, psychology was considered to be part of philosophy, while now it uses the experimental method and thus has become a science. Education and aesthetics both make extensive use of the experimental method and are therefore moving in the same direction. The anthropological and linguistic aspects of geography belong to the humanities, while geology and physical geography belong to the sciences.

The organization of the university into eleven departments and the introduction of the xuankezhi (elective classes) shaped university learning as the

L E A R N I N G

mental principles; likewise, scientific theories ultimately concern philoso-

O F

the humanities, philosophy must look at the natural sciences for its funda-

D I S P L AC E M E N T

I believe that the humanities and science are inseparable. For example, in

T H E

At Beida, the process of reorganizing the courses after 1917 produced an idea of learning that was both integrated and “undisciplined” in at least two ways. First, the attempt to collapse the boundaries of disciplines, the continuous emphasis on relativity of divisions and academic separation, the construction of an integrated curriculum of wen and li, reveals a concept of modern learning as an epistemic whole.

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B U R E A U C R AT I Z AT I O N A N D T H E A U TO N O M O U S S C H O L A R

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classes: two foreign languages plus the “Outline of the history of philosophy,” “Introduction to science,” and “General principles of sociology.” Students could complete the required credits by choosing among a large list of electives organized into five thematic groups. The idea was that they could try a set of related disciplines inside one group before entering a specific department in their second year. Even then, the system allowed for a certain number of credits to be fulfilled with courses outside the department and outside the thematic group. In this way, the curricular barrier separating disciplines and especially the two major areas of science and humanities was, if not completely torn down, reduced to the minimum. The system was tinkered with in the following years, but the main structures remained stable. In 1923, there were fourteen departments and three major groups (science, literature, and social sciences, including law). This structure is reminiscent of von Humboldt’s plan for the University of Berlin almost a hundred years earlier: the German minister had argued that the new institution had to include all the traditional disciplines and objected to any division of the faculties into specialized schools. The university was precisely the means by which to bind all relevant academic schools and institutes in Berlin into “an organic whole.” 

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space of xue viewed as an integrated yet specific architecture. Th is space was crafted in a way that the individual academic (student or professor) required a subjective effort, an active approach to navigate through it. Xue was a set of contents that demanded a unique method, that is, scientific research. “Those who deal with [the humanities and the sciences] have as their goal the search for truths, and devote their lives to it . . . they never leave the boundaries of science.”  Scientific research was what separated the intellectual pursuit in a university from any other kind of approach to learning; it was this practice that truly defined the new institution, not teaching or professional preparation. As Cai Yuanpei summarized, “The best thing would be obviously for a university to carry on at the same time classroom teaching and specialized research; however, if this is not possible, rather than establishing an organization devoted to classroom teaching it is better to create a structure dedicated solely to specialized research; the costs are smaller and results much greater.”  It was therefore quite logical for Cai in 1922 to praise the pedagogical experiment of a group of teachers in Changsha (Hunan Province)— among them a young Mao Zedong—who had just established a self-study university. Following the principle that the most important thing in order to “search for truth” was “to read by oneself, think by oneself,” the new school had no courses or curriculum and offered simply a “place” (difang) and an “organization” (zuzhi) where autonomous research could be conducted. The self-study university presented itself as a balanced evaluation of new and traditional learning experiences: while it took the content from the modern “Western-style” school, the emphasis on informal, direct relationship between teachers (here as tutors) and learners was identified as the legacy of the shuyuan, the neoConfucian academies. The fact that Cai Yuanpei extolled this experiment as a model to be followed in the whole country retrospectively highlights how the experience at Beida had reinforced his faith that the essential character of the university was to allow for a subjective effort toward research in a reformed, less regulated environment. The curricular structure at Beida espoused and embodied the principle that the university was defined by its dedication to xue and research, and this had important theoretical and practical consequences. Research required intellectual autonomy, so placing research at the center of the university project meant that those who pursued it were completely autonomous intellectual subjects; intellectual freedom was therefore the only possible organizing principle of the university. In Cai’s own words: The Liji and Zhongyong say: “The ten thousand beings grow together without harming each other, doctrines progress without going against each

other.” This accurately describes the university. . . . In universities in every country, materialism and idealism in philosophy, realism and abstractism in literature and art, interventionism and lassez-faire schools in economics, utilitarianism and vitalism, pessimism and optimism in cosmology, can stand next to each other. This is the principle of freedom of thought and the reason why [the] university is considered great.

you will gain true knowledge.

L E A R N I N G

hand, on professors’ lectures, and, on the other, on individual research. Then

O F

rely on autonomous study. The printed lecture notes [ jiangyi] are just outlines; as for details and profound meanings you should rely, on the one

D I S P L AC E M E N T

you cannot just wait for the professors to teach you everything; you should

T H E

research, and this is completely different from what you did in high school:

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We must reform the manuals. You are now engaged in high-level scholarly

87

Additionally, research was by definition an open-ended pursuit. Learning was always incomplete and always a task to be rethought when new truths were discovered; in this view no intellectual position could claim “absolute” value. “I have always believed,” argued Cai, “that all scientific trends are relative and not absolute. Therefore, as for the professors in every field, even if they have different opinions, given that they all make reasonable and wellgrounded statements, we have to let them coexist, so that students can enjoy freedom of choice.”  Truths were always to be found, the order of learning was always on the verge of being disrupted and rebuilt, ideas were always relative; no orthodoxy or disciplinary constraint could be imposed, not even by the state, which had no legitimacy to declare some true and others false. The mind of the individual was then potentially autonomous. Autonomy in research was part and parcel of the larger concept of zizhi (self-government), which was considered the guiding principle for student life in general. After the organized protests of 1919, Cai praised the students for their zizhi and reconnected the practical everyday discipline with research: “If you can maintain this capacity for self-rule inside the school, there won’t be any more problem of management. If you develop this spirit of autonomy in research, all you will need are prepared professors to guide you when necessary and a sufficient numbers of tools and books for analysis and research.”  The attention devoted to these tools was a logical corollary to the reform of the curriculum. In the years after 1917, there was a school-wide discussion and experimentation concerning the use of jiangyi, course packets or manuals, which professors used to compile and distribute to students at the beginning of the year. Cai Yuanpei addressed the issue in his first speech at Beida in January 1917:

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In December 1917, the Pingyihui (Evaluating Committee) deliberated on a decree aimed at reducing the use of course manuals. The issue was not easily solved: in 1921 the Ministry of Education pointed out the fact that many of the manuals still in use at the university ran against the principle of “eliciting autonomy” in the students. The problem was vital because the reliance on jiangyi was identified with the transmission of “ready-made knowledge,” with a teaching method based on “spoon-feeding.” Manuals “monopolized the capacity of thought of the students, and indirectly prevented students from reading the material available for consultation.”  If students were to be free to choose their direction in the renovated curriculum, they could not be asked to stick to memorization of texts as they had under the keju system. It was this critique that was appropriated and radicalized by students themselves in the following years. Complementary to the issue of textbooks was a renovation and expansion of the library (and, to a more limited extent, of the scientific laboratories and facilities). A policy of steady acquisitions was implemented, giving par ticu lar attention to publications in foreign languages. When in 1918 the library was moved to the newly built Honglou, larger reading rooms were added and the collection of periodicals made fully available. In a sense, students were supposed to spend more time in these new facilities than in the classroom: accordingly, suggestions were made by various faculty members to reduce either the course load or the length of class lectures in order to allow more room for independent research. The situation in the sciences, however, remained quite bleak. There was only one laboratory for physics “and some students reportedly spent several years at the university without doing a single experiment. Chemistry was worse.” There was no biology course at all until 1925, and it is therefore not surprising that in 1922 only a handful of students graduated in chemistry, compared to fifty-seven in law. The lack of financial support and scholarly expertise clearly hindered the development of a curriculum and research facilities for the hard sciences. The emphasis on research obviously required a different role for the faculty. The hiring policy during Cai’s presidency was focused not only (and not so much) on scholarship but also on the ability of prospective teacher to guide the autonomous research of the students: “We should not simply look for someone of great learning, we should make sure they have great interest for research as well, so that they can inspire the same interest in the students.”  Without making an equation between age and passion for research, it is still relevant to note that, after 1917, the average age of Beida faculty was just over thirty.

S TAT I N G A D I S TA N C E

academic knowledge (Wissenschaft), and to bring it forth, [and] thus de-

that which one can discover in and through oneself: insight into pure academic knowledge. For this act of self, freedom is necessary, and solitude helpful.

However, the fact that Beida was consciously framed as a “research university,” the local embodiment of a quintessentially modern institution, does not mean that it emerged simply as a replica of Berlin or Leipzig (or any other school). We should see the model of the university more as a basis for a transnational dialogue (in which the terms had been indeed set by colonial and imperial expansion, but a dialogue nonetheless) precisely on the practices of learning, studying, researching, and teaching. A dialogue in which Beida participated not so much from the position of a Chinese difference, but by fully accepting the challenges that the framework of the new institutions provided. First and foremost, Beida did this by facing the contradiction between the university as a state institution and the autonomy of the researcher. For example, the staunch refusal to include anything technical or practical among the disciplines in the university embodied the necessity of separating the space of knowledge from the state. Shu disciplines, in Cai Yuanpei’s perspective, had a direct and immediate relevance for the project of state building: the state recruited its servants among their practitioners, therefore it could (and should) impose standards upon them. The separation between the space for xue and the place of shu was indispensable in order to define the boundaries of autonomy of the university. Th is, however, does not imply

L E A R N I N G

such is a creation, even if a subordinate one . . . to the university is reserved

O F

mands creative powers. . . . For an insight into academic knowledge as

D I S P L AC E M E N T

Education at the university puts one in a position to grasp the unity of

T H E

ger the taught; the latter rather researches and the professor guides it. . . .

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The university instructor is no longer the teacher, and the student no lon-

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The most important thing the university could teach was, in the end, to study by oneself, to develop one’s own abilities and, ultimately, to discipline oneself for this pursuit. As no authority could control the mind of the individual, nor govern the directions or the outcomes of university research, no disciplinary entity could ultimately impose obedience to the scholars besides the scholars themselves. Here we find once again echoes of the Humboldtian model that Cai had personally experienced in Leipzig. The Prussian minister had expressed similar concerns:

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that the university completely dismissed any social relevance in the name of “a non-utilitarian culture that avoided the biased political focus on material prosperity and other more tangible results.” Th is university system suffered from “a failure to define a meaningful relationship between the university and society”  only if we define this relationship in a very narrow way—that is, as the training of professionals (psychologists, lawyers, etc.). Rather, as we will see in chapter 7, Beida during the May Fourth era devoted continuous attention to social needs and was more integrated with its immediate social environment than its highly idealistic stand might lead us to imagine. But this was shown in the direct social initiatives of students and teachers and the attention to the tools and practices of modern pedagogy rather than in the schooling of professionals. Th is was not so much because of a resilience of “traditional” attitudes, but because Beida assumed the role, functions, and characteristics of the modern research university, including the tension inherent in the connection/disjunction with the state. Practical learning was always there to be imparted, and the state had a stake in its administration and its distribution inside society. Truths, on the contrary, were always to be found. Neglecting shu, the university was not renouncing social relevance; rather, it was stating that its concerns were not identifiable with those of the state. Here, we see how Beida in this period embodied not simply an adoption but a practical exploration of the contradictions of the university model. In the German case, idealists such as Fichte and von Humboldt (both of whom were often cited by Cai) “contrasted the pernicious special interests of civil society with the necessary solitude that should be guaranteed by the state to the university.”  They relied on the state to separate the university from civil society and sanctioned a de facto communality of interests between state and university. Bureaucratization was welcomed precisely because it guaranteed limited freedom and solitude. As Clark argues, its rapid takeover of the university should be seen as a sign of the singular success of the Humboldtian reforms, not of their failure. Which meant that in the end, “the academic politics of both the German Enlightenment and Romanticism— as well as of Idealism and neohumanism—ultimately concerned training civil servants.”  May Fourth’s Beida, instead, never completely relinquished its connection to society— a connection that was physically embodied by its porous borders— and held steadily to its disdain for bureaucracy and for state service. While even Immanuel Kant saw his role of university professor as involving all the constraints of civil ser vice, few of the professors at Beida would have viewed their role as “bureaucratic.” In accepting the presidency, even Cai himself indulged in the illusion that this position, conferred directly by state mandate, was temporarily freed from its bureaucratic constraints

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because the weakness of the central government shielded it from direct control. Th is statement of dissociation from the state, while perhaps idealistic and naïve, was framed precisely under the new conditions of possibility that the modern research university offered. And it clearly had intellectual and political corollaries. The reforms at Beida rested on the assumption of the possibility, within the state policies on education, to formulate a practice of learning as well as organizations that transcended these policies. An emblematic case is the transfer of the Bureau of National History, previously under direct state administration, to Beijing University’s School of Humanities, in 1917. The bureau was to superintend a cardinal state function, clearly reminiscent in forms and goals of dynastic predecessors. Once at Beida, however, the operations and focus of the bureau seem to have shifted toward questioning what a “national history” can be and rethinking available modes of history writing. “Old history” became identified with political history, centered on the state and based on the “sole authority of one source.”  The bureau was in charge of the collection of documents and the compilation of both the Qing and Republican histories. The project of a history of the Qing came already ordered according to the structures of the dynastic histories, and was organized along the same topical divisions, thus providing scholars with limited space to maneuver. However, even with such limited leeway, the new bureau tried to modify the model. A separation was proposed between political history (which followed the standard organization of the dynastic histories) and cultural history (or rather, the history of civilization, wenming shi), which was arranged according to a “modern” disciplinary framework and divided into economics, customs, religion, science, philosophy, literature, and art. But it was in the task of writing a Republican history that the bureau historians showed more initiative. They clearly stated their dissatisfaction with a model of history focused on government, “verbose but empty of content.”  Republican history should be “a new-style work that employs scientific methods”  and is “centered on people.”  Accordingly, the Collection Section of the bureau demonstrated an understanding of the wider scope of materials available for historians, including newspapers, statistics, writing of private individuals, and documents of organizations. The “May Fourth approach to historiography” has been described as one focusing on the goal of nation building through the means of the scientific method, one that constructed a historical narrative of the “nation-state” on the base of a methodology that inserted it in a transnational discourse. Which is quite true, but not surprisingly so, as one could apply the same exact definition to large portions (the majority?) of the modern historiography of France, Italy, and Germany. Besides, this description does not provide much help in

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solving the articulation of nation, state (not simply nation-state), and history. The par ticu lar case of the Bureau of National History shows instead that this was precisely the issue at stake in the brief experience at Beida. History as a modern discipline, employing a scientific method, could produce a narrative of the nation—which is, as history, a global phenomenon—without flattening it onto the shifts in state functioning. A national history could therefore be written, at least in theory, not as a history of the state. In the same way that scientific research justified the dissociation of the university from the state, the new disciplinary configuration of history justified the freeing (at least theoretical) of history from the state narrative. This new history was supposed to be centered on “the people,” which here means something completely eccentric to the orbit of the state. “People” is a vague term, but as we will see in the next chapter, it was precisely thorough the articulation and the interplay of “people” and “state” that students defined political positions in the May Fourth period out of an apparently apolitical stance. The bureau was closely integrated within the department of history and with teaching and learning activities. Professors functioned in the double role of researchers and teachers and students were involved in the collection and compilation effort. A Lecture Association on General History was formed (mainly by students and members of the bureau) with the goal of debating the task of writing history in a different way. Th rough this initiative, students lived in their learning and research practice the increasingly marked dissociation between the institutional position of the university, charged with a state function and project, and a vision of knowledge that exceeded and in part demystified that project. It is not surprising that in August 1919, the Bureau of National History was moved out of the university and back into a less contentious location at the National Assembly.

N AT I O N A L L E A R N I N G

The disconnection of a “nation-centered” and a “state-centered” perspective in the historiographical approach at Beida leads us directly to another critical disjuncture. The reformed curriculum placed “Western” and “Chinese” learning in parallel, while being shaped mainly by modern (i.e., Western) categories. The disciplinary order, accordingly, while legitimizing the existence of “China” as a field of knowledge, was shaped by non-Chinese categories and principles. Th is issue, which goes beyond the organization of the university, has been central to the historiography of modern China— since, well, “modern China”— and clearly exceeds the scope and the main focus of this work. I will therefore deal with it only insofar as the intellectual life and academic

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practice at May Fourth Beida is concerned, but two major preemptive clarifications are needed. First, while we cannot be oblivious of issues of power and authority embedded in the colonizers’ discourse, framing analyses simply around the opposition between Western and Chinese ends up confining “the Chinese” to the role of servile (almost speechless) borrowers of the language of the other. Any claim for their original contribution to a global dialogue or dialectic is then simply a priori denied. As a consequence, the “nationalist historians” Q. Edward Wang studies are condemned to “imitate” the scientific method in order to find a coherent identity in the past; similarly, Diana Lin justifies the adoption of the German model of education at Beida on the basis of Cai Yuanpei’s “zealous nationalism.”  Models, disciplines, and intellectual postures can be adopted and used to achieve goals of cultural rescuing, national formation, and identity definition inside China, but no contribution is made to the overarching transnational structure. Moreover, and this leads to the second point, this overwhelming preoccupation with past, nation, and culture seems to be unique to the Chinese, particularly in the case of many of Beida’s intellectuals. The attribute of “nationalist” could be employed in describing, for example, the French intellectuals of the post-1870 period (who tried to rescue “France” after the defeat against Prussia, which was seen as much as an intellectual and pedagogical loss as it was military) but we would not limit our evaluation of the founding of the Revue Historique simply to an obsession with the French past and its “nationalist” character. As Rebecca Karl has argued, albeit with reference to a different period, we seem overly concerned either with the absorption of certain forms into programs for transforming China or with confrontation with China’s past forms; but, as she concludes, “it seems unreasonable to assume that Chinese were any more imprisoned by their past than any other people might be.”  In this specific case, I propose instead to take the reformed academic practices at Beida seriously, looking at what they were intended to (and did or did not) contribute to the concept of the research university, the position of the intellectuals, and the understanding of modern learning. A brief epistolary exchange between Fu Sinian (at that time an undergraduate student) and Cai Yuanpei exemplifies how students and professors dealt with the challenges and the possibilities that modern epistemic order opened for different organizations of learning. In October 1918, Fu voiced the displeasure of some of his colleagues and complained to the president about the decision to keep philosophy in the division of humanities (wenke). Building his argument on vast array of Western texts, while making clear his discontent with “Chinese literature” as a whole, Fu cautioned against the danger of mixing literature and philosophy, as China had done for ages. Philosophy should be a part of

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The people who do literature despise science and they do not know that all

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science, he concluded, and finally escape the “hollow palace” of the humanities. Fu Sinian was outlining, in a crude form, the opposition between the universal value of science and the objectified particularity of Chinese tradition. Cai’s reply presented a more complex position: while he agreed with Fu on the intimate connections between science and philosophy, he overcame the student’s critique by hinting at a more general theory of intertwining relationships between sciences and humanities. In a later essay, Cai summarized his concept of a totalizing order of learning:

one country, they absolutely do not get involved with other countries, not

modern literature is based on science. Those who work on the literature of knowing that comparison is beneficial to the progress of literature. Those who are engaged in natural sciences, they stick to one discipline, and do not dare to get even a little bit involved in philosophy, not knowing that philosophy is like the final destiny for science, and some of its disciplines like natural philosophy are what the scientists need. Those who do philosophy, they are satisfied with being able to read old books; they have no patience to do experiments with science. They do not know that the foundations of philosophy do not lie outside science, and that even the most transcendental metaphysics must have some relationship with science.

If, as Tani Barlow argues, the zhishifenzi (modern Chinese intellectual) positioned himself between the two “others”—the internalized other of Chinese tradition and the external other of Western learning— Cai was staking his ground in a location at a critical distance from both. That this critical distance could be maintained by using the very methods of Western learning was made conceptually possible only through a par ticu lar vision of the modern episteme that was both self-critical and open-ended. This was the vision that the Beida curriculum expressed. The so-called university, it is not only a group of students who go to class at fi xed time until they get the qualifications for a degree. We have to consider this as an organization where we research knowledge together. Research does not mean only to import Western scholarship, but also to have further development inside Western scholarship. It does not mean to preserve the cultural heritage, but it is to use the scientific method to unmask the nature of cultural heritage.

The claim for the universality of truth that informed the curriculum at Beida was not simply the symptom of the emotional attachment of colonized intel-

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lectuals attempting to salvage the ruin of their culture; nor was it solely or simply the result of a mechanism of legitimization of intellectuals’ aspirations to a social and political role. Rather, it expressed an understanding of the modern process of education and of modern knowledge: pure scientific research was the logical foundation of an interrelated, ever-expanding learning, the only guarantee of the possibilities of the individual subject to approach this learning. It was also the basis on which the intellectual could cross disciplinary and cultural divisions, and place himself in a critical position vis-à-vis each and every culture. It was not so much that truths and “value” had to be found everywhere, in China as in the West, but they could only be continuously “searched” and “found” anew. Research was a style of interrogating modern knowledge as nothing specifically Western or national, as a nonlocalized space. I am not discounting the difficult balance this position was trying to strike: an act of faith in the possibilities opened by a modern approach to knowledge did not solve the contradictions and the power issues that were implicit in accepting the colonizers’ learning. However, as hinted earlier, the curriculum at Beida was informed by this idea, which was reflected in the space of knowledge and in the lived space in which May Fourth student politics was formed and expressed. Th is space of knowledge was thus subtracted, at least theoretically, from the national boundaries and placed in the global flow of knowledge: the idea that university should change according to the “progress and stagnancy of learning”  was not only a defensive strategy; it was an active framing of classroom teaching and learning practices. At Beida, individual intellectuals were thus practically (dis)located in the space of critical distance from cultures, theirs and others’. If we asked academics today whether there is any specificity of content (what we study, the methods of research, etc.) that makes our universities American, French, or Italian, the answer would probably be negative (with a few caveats). And this is precisely the logic of the modern research university. Accordingly, one of the founding principles of the recrafted curriculum at Beida was the possibility of treating China like any other place, that is, to eliminate the possibility of a “Chinese difference” in the field of learning. In the modern organization of learning, “China” was fragmented into a variety of disciplines; modern science was therefore needed in order to give coherence to these various aspects of the Chinese past, while at the same time unveiling more and more the empty core that lay at the origin of its alleged consistency. The merging of foreign and Chinese philosophy into one single department of (nonlocalized) “philosophy” and the creation of a unified department of (world) history in 1917 addressed the precarious existence of a “Chinese”

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history and “philosophy” as separated from their disciplinary justification in the modern order of learning. The only division that firmly maintained a connection with “China” was literature, where the distinction between schools of Chinese, English, French literature could only be based on language. However, in that par tic u lar historical conjuncture, even language did not seem to offer a solid foundation: the baihua (vernacular Chinese) movement challenged the assumption of the linearity of a Chinese language inherited from the past and continuing into the future. One of the first tasks that the Chinese literature graduate school undertook was to defi ne a standard grammar and a standard pronunciation of the Chinese language. Qian Xuantong, one of the most radical advocates of language reform, publicly upheld the abolition of Chinese characters while teaching a course on the history of the Chinese written form. In this sense, when conservative scholars attacked the project of scholarly reform at Beida as a wholesale negation of what “China” stood for, they were not completely off target. Lin Qinnan (Lin Shu) in his famous epistolary exchange with Cai Yuanpei, sneered at the pretense of using baihua as a scholarly language: “If we examine the language of those who pull carts or sell drinks in the capital, there is grammar. . . . On this basis, all the peddlers in Beijing and Tianjin can be employed as professors.”  Lin Shu was obliquely pointing at how the reliance on imported criterion such as modern grammar dangerously fractured the unity of Chinese language and the continuity with Chinese literary past. It is quite symptomatic that when Cai Yuanpei defended Beida from culturally conservative attacks he framed his rebuttal in a form that probably did not sound reassuring to his addressees: When people heard that our school has a course in modern literature dealing with novels and quben written after the Song and Yuan, they then thought that we were discarding the ancient literature, not knowing that there are courses also on Zhou, Qin, and Han literature as well as on Six Dynasties, Tang, and Song literature. When they heard that in our school the course on ethics introduces Western doctrines, they then thought we were discarding the cultural heritage, not knowing that in the department of philosophy, people do specialized research on the various masters of the Zhou and Qin periods and on the Song and Yuan Daoxue [Neo-Confucianism]. When they heard that our school hired somebody to teach Buddhism, they then thought that we were advocating the Buddhist religion, not knowing that Buddhism is also a branch of Indian philosophy. We used it to supplement psychology and logic, and we never had anything to do with religion. We respected the principle of freedom of thought.

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The concern expressed by Lin Shu and other critics was not only and not simply for the more blatant attacks on “tradition” but for the very invention of this “tradition” and the possibility of an intellectual distance from it through a set of (imported) disciplines and methods. It was a concern for the fact that a unified meaning of “China” was being daily challenged and its received difference radically questioned. To this concern, Cai’s stress on research as the core of university was indeed no consolation. As he stated himself, research meant also to “use scientific methods to unmask the nature of cultural heritage.”  Chen Duxiu, the dean of humanities at Beida, pushed this approach to its logical and extreme conclusion, making a pun on the concept of “national essence” (guocui). “When we speak about learning,” Chen wrote, “we can only argue if it is right or not, not if it is old or not; we can only argue if it is pure or not [qi cui bu cui], not to what country it belongs [qi guo bu guo].”  Guocui was a contradiction in terms, as it was impossible to define an “essence” on the basis of a geographical and cultural location: a lack of reverence for the nation, Chen concluded, was one of the essential prerequisites for learning. Many academics today would probably agree with Chen’s last point on the nonnational character of any approach to learning. Yet, in my limited disciplinary confines, colleagues in U.S. history complain when their numbers do not disproportionately overwhelm those of any other geographical specialization; similarly and in reverse, in Italian academia European history is minutely studied in a myriad different courses, while there is usually one lonely professor who specializes in the United States. We teach in American, Italian, and French universities, and yet we assume we are all part of a truly global modern institutional invention. As I showed, Beida during the May Fourth period consciously framed itself as a modern research university and its curricular innovations embodied and pushed to the limits the contradictions that this structure carried. Th is meant fi rst and foremost that the space of knowledge, learning, and teaching produced in the place called “national university” was autonomous and separate from the state as well as being independent of any national definition of learning. In this sense, National Beijing University was not meant to be a Chinese university. Because, if we take the idea seriously (and we should assume people at Beida did), there is no such thing. Tensions were inherent in the very model of the research university, and the particular historical conditions at Beida allowed for these contradictions to be productively explored and to temporarily produce a particular set of practices, described in this and previous chapters. What these practices allowed, besides an experiment on the very model of the research university, was also the development of political and intellectual positions among students and faculty. If, as Rancière argues, “political subjectivation,” the manifestation of political

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subjectivity, is located “first and foremost in an experience of disidentification or declassification, and not in an experience of shared community,”  then, at all levels (quotidian, intellectual, practical) May Fourth Beida was configured as such an experience of dissociation—dissociation from the state, from any national definition of learning, from the community of students itself. In the next two sections, we will explore how similar processes of dislocation (in the city) and disidentification (of students) framed the political meaning of May Fourth student activism.

POLITICAL PA R T I I I

SPACE

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LEARNING POLITICS

In the last year we have devoted ourselves to initiatives for the public good outside the school— such as democratic lectures, selling national goods, etc.— and we have done it with bravery and commitment: when one of us fell, the next one took his place. Yet if we fail to care about the thing that has more to do with our own benefit—the management of dorms—it will be difficult to avoid being mocked as “the eye that can see a thousand miles but cannot see its own eyelashes.” —Jinggan, “Fei shejian zhi” (Abolish the dormitory supervisor system)

APOLITICAL OR ANTIPOLITICAL

May Fourth is stubbornly political. Notwithstanding the attempts to separate cultural reform from political activism and to depict the latter as an anomaly or an aberration, the question of politics lies at the core of our understanding of the May Fourth movement. In the most obvious sense, the whole period before and after 1919 is subsumed under the date of an unequivocally political event—people do not get more directly and overtly political than when they are marching in the streets. Protagonists of the events then and scholars up until today have discussed whether “May Fourth” (the political event) should indeed be taken as a synecdoche for the whole New Culture period— or even of a longer transformation— and they have successfully called for more complexity in our depiction. Yet, as it should be clear from the previous chapters, I argue that the par ticu lar case of Beida “students” must be studied and understood also, and perhaps primarily, under the sign of the political. As mentioned earlier, the displacement of the political into the everyday life of the university should not be reduced in any way to the vacuous statement that “everything is political.” Rather, it should be seen as a radical

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criticism of “politics” conceived as a separate sphere of activity— something pertaining exclusively to the state, government, and politicians, or to specifically earmarked moments, such as elections. This is the sense of the quote at the beginning. Behind the heroic and self-celebratory language—the image of one valiant student falling only to be replaced by another evokes barricades and violent confrontations, both of which were absent in the May Fourth movement—it calls to the seamless connection between the outside of marches, lectures, and boycotts and the inside of minute practices of teaching, learning, and living. The young writer’s tone of dissatisfaction is a reminder of how the ultimate but most difficult task of politics is to change culture and life. It becomes then extremely problematic, and possibly counterproductive, to propose a clear distinction between politics and culture in the case of Beida during the May Fourth era. Clearly, we cannot still cling to the simplistic description of a staunchly nonpolitical community that becomes unnaturally politicized around 1919 because of outside forces like government corruption, imperialism, and so on. But even the more elaborate vision of May Fourth offered in the 1980s in Chinese and Western scholarship ends up reducing complexities, rather than explaining them. In this perspective, two movements, not one, animated the intellectual world of the late 1910s. One pursued cultural reform using cultural methods and considered “enlightenment” (qimeng) as its goal. The other, political and patriotic, searched for a way to save the nation ( jiuwang) through direct activist intervention. “New Culture” and “May Fourth” were therefore separate phenomena. The two movements collaborated and proceeded together until the point where jiuwang submerged qimeng and the search for political dominance cut short the project of cultural enlightenment, which remained forever incomplete. In the 1980s, when China was trying to renegotiate—or rather deny—its Maoist heritage, the overcoming of cultural qimeng by political jiuwang was probably a useful historical analogy for the current predicament, a way to explain (or explain away) in one fell swoop everything from 1919 to 1976. However, in the case of May Fourth such an approach leads one to ignore how political subjectivities were constituted in the experience of purportedly cultural organizations and how politics was deployed in the transformation of quotidian practices and structures. But it also produces a radical negation of the political value of those organizations and practices, because it reduces politics to something strictly connected to the nation-state, parties, and ultimately to what was seen as the folly of (later) mass movements. It is therefore inherently antipolitical. At Beida, the issue of politics is further complicated by the clear apolitical stance that informed Cai Yuanpei’s presidency. In a famous 1912 essay, Cai

saluted the new Republican government as heralding a new era, in which education could finally separate itself from the scope of government policies: There are two fundamental types of education, one that is subordinate to politics and one that transcends it. In the age of despotism (including the constitutional—but nonetheless despotic—form), educators set the standards of education following the directions of the government and, in

P O L I T I C S

When Cai arrived at Beida he brought this idea with him and, in the words of Laurence Schneider, “the retreat from politics that had characterized the intellectuals after the collapse of the Republic became institutionalized at Peking University under Ts’ai Yüan-p’ei [Cai Yuanpei] dispensation.”  One could therefore argue that Beida became political despite Cai’s effort to the contrary: the unresolved nature of Cai’s position, oscillating between the idea of a school as “the shining city on the hill,” separated from society, and his elitist-populist notion of a university as a social institution, “provided a crucial opening for professors and students who felt less ambivalent than he did about interpreting Beida’s educational mission in an explicitly political fashion.”  Cai Yuanpei’s relation to the politicization of his students during the late 1910s is not without contradiction and needs to be explored, but first we have to be clear on the fact that his 1912 “apolitical” statement was not antipolitical. Rather, it hinted at and opened the way to the process of the redefinition of the political itself that took place in the May Fourth years. The New Culture movement, as Arif Dirlik suggested, marked a radical redefinition of the nexus of politics and the intellectual pursuit. While this was the first generation to celebrate intellectual activity as a career independent from government ser vice, its members never lost a sense of the public obligations of the intellectual. Public ser vice, however, could no longer be identified with service to the state, but was to be pursued in the realm of society. “The New Culture break with politics, therefore, did not signify obliviousness to politics and political problems, but rather a new attitude that intellectuals could best influence politics from outside formal political institutions.”  The crux of the issue is ultimately what was meant by politics. According to Alessandro Russo, in Cai Yuanpei’s 1912 statement—modern education’s transcending politics by adopting the point of view of the people—we should read “politics” as “an activity centered on the state” and “people” as “something essentially heterogeneous to it.”  In less theoretical terms, Luo Jialun

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for education so that there can be an education that transcends politics.

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general, education is completely subordinated to politics. In the Republi-

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summarized Cai’s influence at Beida by stating that the students and professors moved from “envying the bureaucrats to disdaining them.”  Bureaucracy here is one of the kinds of politics that Cai called to transcend in his 1912 address. The withdrawal from state-related functions at the core of Beida reforms was the precondition for a repositioning of the university that, on the one hand, was meant to protect the school from outside interferences while, on the other hand, was meant to open a space of knowledge in which theoretically infinite trajectories could be explored through scientific research. Parallel to this epistemological break, the apolitical stance adopted by Cai denied any connection with the state activities but allowed for the production of alternative political positions, as we have seen in part I. Politicization at Beida proceeded through a series of displacements, which in turn produced a space for political action and organization that quickly exceeded the confines of the university. The experiments in frugality, the challenges to rituals, and the disciplinary intolerance described in part I configured a deployment of politics into a transformed everydayness, down to the most minor details of fashion and body posture. The reform of the university curriculum and teaching structure, while largely framed as an intellectual endeavor, realized a political statement of distance between the state and the school, by theoretically displacing the university from its position as part and parcel of the ideological state apparatuses. However, this position could not be completely relinquished: Beida ultimately owed its precarious existence to the availability of state support and its status inside the state educational system. The production of a political and intellectual space that was founded on the disidentification from the state and from any national definition of knowledge took place in a national state university. Therefore, the experience of Beida was political also because it explored the limits of this contradiction and was marked by the tensions and the struggles it engendered. Th is chapter and the next examine precisely a series of experiences centered on this tension between two different kind of “politics”: politics as a privileged activity of the state (or centered in the state) and the space of politics (produced in and around the university) in which each and every subject had the autonomy to create multiple and collective expressions of activism. It is difficult (and probably moot) in the intensely political space of Beida to identify “purely political” moments or forms. I will focus here on those administrative structures, associations, and organizations that were created programmatically “at a distance from the state” and those activities (including the protest of 1919) that challenged and displaced the boundaries of social and political categories, including that of “students.” This chapter looks inside the university, starting with the exams that were taken to be granted admission to the school. In these tests, students were

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asked to rethink their assumptions about what a university was and what their individual role was; they were presented with a new epistemic structure and the possibilities for a kind of education and learning not identified with a state mandate. Once admitted, the uncommunitarian environment of the school potentially constituted a political experience for students who came to Beida simply to follow a predetermined curriculum. But there were also aspects of the school structure that more directly incorporated a political aspect. The university administration was repeatedly reformed after 1917 with the intent of constituting a truly democratic government (or rather self-government) that would also reduce the possibility of state interference. While students did not participate directly in the school administration, many took a strong interest in it, expressed their opinions about it in the school newspaper, and had their say on various reform proposals. They learned from it. They learned even more from the multiplicity of the study societies (xuehui) that they created at Beida. These, I argue, configured an alternative form of political organization, one in which participation was based on subjective will, on self-imposed discipline, and the assumption of the theoretical equality of all members vis-à-vis issues. It was the participation in these organizations that gave full meaning to the antiritualistic behavior of many students and that shaped the university as a “political space.” A space that, as chapter 5 illustrates, quickly expanded beyond the walls of the university and exceeded the scope foregrounded for it by the state. Students explored possibilities for political actions outside the school, both in the dimension of localized social activism, and finally in the arena of national politics in 1919. Over time, the confrontation with state power became inevitable. Instances of this antagonism provide some of the clearest statements of the political positions that had emerged before and during May Fourth. The government identified the most dangerous characteristic of student activism in their willingness to cross social boundaries and act outside of their sociologically defined role. The perceived threat was in the displacement of students outside their role as students, a displacement that took place through the dislocation of politics in the streets, in a public space distant from the sphere of the state and party structures. The government counteracted by trying forcefully to separate the school from the rest of the city and relocate the students to their proper place. An official orthodoxy about what is proper and what is not could be clearly defined only after transgressive acts (the crossing of boundaries) had revealed the unspoken assumptions hidden in apparently “natural,” always existing categories (such as students). The confrontation with the state had an impact on the institution, when, in the years immediately following May Fourth, the students radicalized their position vis-à-vis the university itself while the school became less tolerant of

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students’ activities. The political experience of students outside the campus led to a rethinking of the political structure inside the school and of those insular experiments that remained constrained within the boundaries of the university. In 1919, by stating that students were citizens, activists refused to frame their protests as the outcome of a specific social group; if students were, in fact, citizens, it was similarly impossible to claim that the school be exempt from the political criticism addressed to the society at large.

EXAMINING AND THINKING

Personal responsibility and subjective autonomous effort lay at the foundation of the new curricular and (as we will see in the next section) administrative structure of the school; these were the qualities required of every member of Beijing University, faculty or students. Since the first days of the reform, it had been made clear that students could no longer consider the school as simply a place where one can “mature into a degree” and then proceed seamlessly to official ser vice. Students were now asked to demonstrate a subjectively involved, critical approach toward the relationship of the school with knowledge, truth, and, ultimately, politics. The admission exams after 1917 offer a glimpse of the intellectual posture that was required from prospective students. The exams were obviously aimed at verifying the general preparation of candidates, to ascertain whether they possessed the basic skills upon which to ground scientific research. However, besides testing the ability to understand English, solve a mathematical problem, and write in elegant Chinese, some of the test sections attempted to elicit from the students a personal rethinking of larger issues of historical change, contemporary world politics, and the organization of learning. The archives preserve the questions, not the answers, but the questions suffice to give us a sense of their authors’ goals. They did not prescribe univocal solutions, but instead were open—what they presupposed was a critical attitude on the part of the students vis-à-vis school learning. They were testing not just a will to learn, but also a will to think independently; they subjectively engaged the open possibilities that the fields of knowledge offer. In 1917 the admission exams for both the preparatory and the undergraduate classes were held only in Beijing, in two sessions, one in August and one in early September. In 1918, following changes that integrated more closely the preparatory courses ( yuke) within the undergraduate curriculum, the exams for the undergraduate courses (benke) were suspended and admissions were granted only to the yuke. Starting the same year, exams were also held

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in Shanghai. An ad hoc committee, chaired by the president, was formed to take charge of organizing and administering the admission exams. All the exams had a section on Chinese (which tested not only linguistic abilities but familiarity with Chinese literary and cultural references), the English language (or another foreign language of choice), plus sections on mathematics, geography, and history (the latter was usually, but not always, divided between Chinese and Western or foreign). Students were also tested in physics, chemistry, and other natural sciences. According to the 1918 statute, Chinese (guowen) and foreign languages were the main topics for students in the humanities, while foreign language and mathematics were considered essential for those in the sciences. The exam questions in the history, Chinese, and foreign-language sections addressed directly or indirectly issues that were relevant to the historical conjuncture in which China found itself, its relationship with a larger world— which meant international politics as well as the global flows of ideas— and the position of the school and the individual in this world. The prospective student could not get away with reproducing a memorized lesson. Some concrete examples help to illustrate this process. Between 1917 and 1922 history questions showed a recurrent focus on moments of change, on instances of radical reform and revolution: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution were among the topics in 1918, 1919, 1920, and 1922. In 1921 the students were asked to identify the nations and the historical characters responsible for initiating each of the three “reforms” (gaige) in modern Western history (i.e., religious, political, and social). A similar question was asked the following year, but this time the world “revolution” (geming) was used. The unavoidable pressure of colonialism and the relationship of China with the world powers made their appearance in 1917 and in 1920. In 1917, students were asked to explain how different nations such as Poland, India, and Vietnam all literally “disappeared” and were absorbed into the Russian, British, and French empires. In 1920, topics included the Sino-Russian Treaty of 1689 and the Sino-French Treaty of 1885. In 1922, the Japanese occupation of Korea was featured. History was clearly not seen as dealing with something solidly in the past: in 1918, the Western history section questioned students about the situation at the end of World War I, something that was evolving at that very moment, with enormous consequence for China. As Robert Culp has suggested, calling attention to possible threats to national integrity was an indirect encouragement to imagine a “nation of horizontally connected citizens.” The emphasis on historical moments of change, then, implied the possibility for each of these citizens, including the students, to act, and for the people to be constituted precisely through political action.

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Even the texts to be translated for the foreign-language exams seem to have been chosen with an eye to issues of intellectual or political urgency. In 1918 and 1919, the translation passages dealt with freedom, consisting of a famous quote from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and a short paragraph on the basic freedoms enjoyed by people in a democratic state. In September 1919, just when the Versailles peace conference had made evident the debacle of the international policy promoted by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, the text for the English grammar exam was a harsh critique of Wilson’s lack of practical sense. “The simple faith of Mr. Wilson in his Fourteen Points was due, I believe, to the invincible abstractness (chouxiangxing) of his mind. For him railroad cars are not railroad cars but an abstract (chouxiang) thing called Transportation ( jiaotong). People are not men and women but humanity (rendao).”  Admission exams focused also on a series of issues at the center of the current intellectual debate concerning education and the meaning of the university. At the second session of the 1919 exam students were invited to reflect on their own subjective positions as students starting college: “People’s characters are different: there are those who once they have an official salary do not care about the world; there are those because of a little bit of money, end up losing their reputation. Now you are preparing to enter the university, you have to combine strength of character with attitude for research. Please state your opinion.” In 1918 students were asked to comment on the statement “general knowledge was the foundation of research.” In 1920, the title for guowen composition was “the advantages and disadvantages of the civil service examinations.”  In 1921, the English text to be translated presented basic questions on the goal and means of school instruction: “Why do so many people go to school? What do they hope to achieve from their years of effort? What is it that we who teach them are trying to do for them?”  In 1922, the Chinese-English translation passage touched directly on one of the most contested issues among students in general and at Beida in particular—the existence of exams and the possibility of alternative methods of selection and evaluation. Students sitting for an exam found themselves dealing with statements that challenged the very process they were submitting themselves to. 1. Exams are a competition, like running a race. 2. In a race only one person gets first place. Does this mean that the others should not be willing to run? 3. If 1,500 people take the university entrance exams and only three hundred are accepted, should the others even try to pass the exam? 4. There are people who say that exams are bad. What method do you think we should use instead of exams?

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Admission questions were thus closely integrated with the major debates and activities going on in and around the school, testing the abilities of prospective students or, at a bare minimum, inviting them to think of themselves as active participants in those debates and activities. After 1919, when Beijing students had engaged directly in social and political action, the exam questions started addressing the implications of activism. In historical perspective, a question in 1919 dealt with the “Daxue” (or rather Taixue) in the Eastern Han dynasty as the birthplace of political criticism by men of integrity. Under the guise of an apparently innocuous historical analysis, this pointed to an issue that was to become, after May Fourth, indicative of a split in the Beida community: embracing or refusing the institutional legacy of the Taixue often implied a completely different opinion on what the goal and position of a modern university (daxue) and its students should be. In 1922, examinees were asked to put forth their opinions on the main event in students’ lives at the time, which many had probably witnessed or had been a part of as high-schoolers. The title for the guowen exercise was “The lesson young people can draw from the May Fourth Movement.”  Cheng Houzhi, who passed the admission exam in the 1922 session and entered the science preparatory courses, cites a different title for the guowen composition. In his recollection, the theme “Do not neglect studying to save the nation” ( jiuguo mo wang dushu) had been selected by Hu Shi himself as a way to present a direct criticism of outright political activism by students in the previous three years. The discrepancy between the official archive and Cheng’s personal memory might be ascribed to a material gap (only one session is reported for the 1922 exam) or, more likely, to the lacunae and embellishments inherent in the process of remembering. But if the title of the question in Cheng’s exam was truly the largely neutral question on the “lesson” of May Fourth reported in the archive, then the substitution in Cheng’s recollection points at the shift in the relationship between school administration and student activism that had taken place after 1919, a shift that was particularly evident precisely in the case of Hu Shi. In general, the exams aimed at testing and perhaps stimulating an attitude of openness by focusing their attention on instances of historical change and by placing China in a wider international context: students were asked to think and respond to issues of international politics, often colored by a sense of urgency. During the exams, they were required to engage only at an intellectual level, but it is difficult to imagine that, once at Beida, such subjective concerns could be strictly limited inside an academic practice. The exams also encouraged a process of self-reflection, by making education, university, and the students themselves into problems to be researched, rethought, and possibly solved. Th rough historical comparison and contemporary examples,

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students were presented with a critique, or at least the possibility of a critique, of the role of the university as a place for the formation of bureaucrats, a part of the state apparatus for the production of talent and learning. They were also asked to think about what should constitute the new university and its members in that historical situation and particular configuration of knowledge. Finally, they were invited to imagine how education should be different, which ultimately involved prefiguring an alternative pedagogical practice and making proposals about educational policy at large. Many students at Beida took this challenge seriously.

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In this process of self-reflection and in the rethinking of possible educational policies, the organizational practices developed in the university after 1917 helped and influenced the students. Those who passed the entrance exams and were admitted to Beida found an administrative system that, even if it involved them only marginally or indirectly, provided a model of institutional organization and constituted an experiment in alternative democratic practices. After 1917, the reform of the curriculum and the courses at Beida was accompanied by a rethinking of the university’s administrative structure. Already in 1912, Cai Yuanpei, newly appointed minister of education, had issued the University Decree, in which he called for a pingyihui (evaluation committee) and a jiaoshouhui (faculty assembly) to be established as the leading legislative bodies in the university. With the debacle of the Republican government, the decree remained unheeded. In 1915 the Beida pingyihui was finally founded but apparently never acted upon its mandate. In April 1917 a new election was held and the pingyihui assumed its role as the highest deliberative organism in the school. All legislative proceedings, decrees, and regulations had to be approved by the assembly; it decided on the structuring of classes and departments and examined and verified credentials of faculty members as well as the academic results and behavior of students.  Initially, members of the pingyihui were the president, the chairs of each of the departments in the undergraduate (fenke) and preparatory programs ( yuke), and four elected members, two from the yuke and two from the fenke. In December 1917 faculty assemblies ( jiaoshouhui) were created with the task of directing the educational work in each school (ke). In 1919 a more radical reform to the governing structure of the university was implemented, in conformity with the new organization of the curriculum and departments (from ke to xi). Responsibilities were distributed among four bodies. The xingzhenghui (administrative assembly) was the executive branch

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of school government while the pingyihui remained the legislative organ. The jiaowuhuiyi (educational affairs committee) was in charge of all the educational affairs and elected the members of the Office of the Dean ( jiaowuchu). The zongwuhuiyi (General Affairs Committee) dealt with the daily management of the university. Ad hoc committees (weiyuanhui) were in charge of specific tasks like publications, admissions, and so on. This system was supposed to be a synthesis of indigenous and foreign examples of school administration: the jiaowuhuiyi was allegedly modeled on the European university system and the zongwuhuiyi on the U.S. system, while pingyihui and xingzhenghui were Beida’s own inventions. Even in such a potentially dry document as a “provisional statute,” the drafter made a point to stress how Beida was not simply copying foreign examples but creating something new and original, a system that could, in turn, become a model for the rest of the world: “European universities have democracy but lack efficacy, while American universities are just the opposite. Beida merges the structure of the European and American universities, making democracy and effectiveness coexist, thus becoming the newest organization among world universities.”  However, the most important and radical reform was the introduction of a more inclusive system starting in 1919: one pingyihui member was elected for every five professors, with tenure of only one year. Th is provided the possibility for almost everybody in the faculty to participate at some time in the school government. The implementation of the new system restructured the responsibilities inside the school, but was also explicitly intended to affect the relationship of the university with the state. The distribution of authority among elective assemblies was a corrective to the possible authoritarianism of a single person, and the “professors’ government” fenced off the influence the state administration could exert on the school through the only figure it nominated directly, the president. Th is system of “faculty control” was supposed to work without the president. And it did. Or at least, the pingyihui asserted its own authority more clearly in the various occasions when Cai Yuanpei resigned from his post in remonstration against political events. In March 1923, when Cai vacated his position for the last time, the pingyihui allegedly not only kept the school running efficiently (in collaboration with the dean and the chair of the executive committee) but also managed to stand up to pressure from the government. To a presidential decree that called on the faculty to elect a new assembly, the pingyihui responded, with the support of students and professors, restating its authority inside the school, rebutting any meddling from the government, and refusing the imposition by the government of a different chancellor. In a long survey article published in Shaonian shijie (Young world), the attitude of Beida faculty and students in moments of crisis was

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described as that of a headless locust that starts to jump madly around. After Cai’s resignation in May 1919, the writer continued, the pingyihui and jiaoshouhui (which he describes as only half-functioning in normal times) managed to successfully take over. Even (usually unruly) autonomous student organizations created executive committees and everybody was working together, without any problem. Despite the clear reference to a “division of powers,” this structure configured something different from a small-scale model of parliamentary electoral democracy, a reprise in an enclosed area of the failed republican project. The scale of the electoral ratio (one to five) granted the largest extent of representation, participation, and shared responsibility. The system aimed at using and developing the contribution of each individual member and embodied a conception of “democracy” meant as the collective adoption of binding decisions. In the same way that individual subjective effort was essential for scholarly research and organizational activity, the proactive participation of each individual professor was required for the very functioning of the school. In this structure, students did not have a role in the school governing bodies and did not take direct part in decision-making. In the 1919 statute there are provisions for the formation of a Student Self-Government Committee (Xuesheng Zizhi Weiyuanhui), whose task was to help the president develop the students’ ability for self-rule, but which is never mentioned again. Th is was the only organ of the administration that contemplated student representatives. Students were, however, invited to put forward issues and suggestions directly to the administration. To facilitate this exchange, the imperial method, according to which students could only submit petitions to the president and wait for a response to be posted, was abolished and a direct channel for written communication was established. The foundation of the Beijing Daxue rikan (Beijing University daily) in 1917 provided a forum where both the administration and the students could publish statements and make their initiatives public. Students were also invited to develop forms of autonomous associations and for this the system of professors’ self-government provided, if not a model, at least a favorable environment, and showed in action the possibilities of a different kind of organization. Moses Finley described the Greek polis as a “face-to-face society,” referring to the continuing contact and participation of every member of the community with public life. In the polis, Finley says, “there was a larger element of political education in the process of growing up than in most other societies before or since.”  Beida was, in this sense, a face-to-face society: the direct participation of every faculty member in the management of the school, their involvement in each phase of academic and administrative life, and the continuous possibil-

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ity of interaction with this life provided a first, and not marginal, element in the “political education” of students as well. The reforms therefore outlined a system of shared governance, of continuous political discussion, and one that— as the various instances of resignations by the president clearly show— did not tolerate any meddling from outside authorities, particularly the state. It was, however, impossible, and, in a very practical sense, undesirable, to completely cut off what still was the fi rst and most famous public university. Economic dependence was one decisive factor, of course, as Beida’s budget relied almost entirely on government funds. And Beida was not cheap; it was by far the most expensive school in the state education budget as of 1921, its monthly expenses double those of Beijing Higher Normal School. But the connection between state and university existed also on a deeper level, as we have seen in the previous chapters. Beida in the 1910s proclaimed itself free of the state-related functions that were inscribed in its foundation during the late Qing—to produce talent and “to assist the state in performing its role as custodian and classifier of knowledge.”  However, even while distancing itself from the state mission, Beida intellectuals could never deny the necessity for a modern nation-state to have a modern university, nor completely ignore the implications of state sponsorship for schools. Th is obviously generated tension focused on the office that was the liaison between the state and the university—that of the president, who was appointed by the government but claimed to have a responsibility only toward the freedom of academia. Cai Yuanpei summarized the contradictions of the position when he stated the reasons why he initially refused to go back to Beida after his resignation in May 1919. First, the work of a university president “appointed by the government” remained “half-bureaucratic in nature,” (ban guanliao xingzhi). Every change in the school, no matter how big or small, required the approval of the pedantic and formalist officers at the Ministry of Education, who sometimes sent “half-witted inspectors” to check on the situation, just to come up with new rules and regulations. Second, Beida was still not a free university, not even compared to the universities of an autocracy like the German empire, let alone those of France and the United States. Even the changes introduced in the previous two years were merely risible corrections to this sorry state of affairs. However, Cai complained, there were people who, seeing these “half-new things, called it ‘a flood, a beastly invasion.’ Then, not capable of discussing this issue according to the rules, they availed themselves of the state authorities and mingled with us. So the Ministry of Education interfered, the Ministry of Interior interfered, even the Parliament interfered. Is there another university as free as this in the world?” 

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The delicately balanced position that Cai had tried to achieve during the first few years of his tenure became more and more untenable after 1919, when the emergence of “students” as a political group tilted the equilibrium and the government tried to call back the national university to its role as part of the state apparatuses. The figure of the president became even more the focus of contention, and to be in that role “in those days was really more than a headache,” as Jiang Menglin recalled. Besides the chronic lack of funds, he had to deal with a government that “desired order and discipline” while “students demanded more freedom of action.”  It’s not surprising then that the more radical among the students directly called for the elimination of the very position that embodied the relationship of the school with the state. In 1920 the Beida Student Weekly asked for the abolition of the “president system” precisely because he was like an “emperor or a president in a republic.” He was put in place by the government, therefore he could not but be to a certain extent a bureaucrat and could not help producing to a certain extent a slavish mentality in the students who received this kind of education. In this light, Cai’s earlier cited complaint, far from being just the outcry of a well-intentioned but disillusioned state employee, underlined the contradiction that lies at the heart of Beida’s reform. Cai had already identified the crucial issue when he sponsored the formation, in January 1918, of the “Association for the promotion of virtue,” (Jindehui) on the model of a shortlived, anarchist-inspired association. The Jindehui, whose goal was the tempering of the moral climate of the Beida community, bound its members to a series of prohibitions: do not gamble, do not visit prostitutes, do not take concubines; do not serve as an officer or member of government assemblies; do not drink alcohol, smoke, or eat meat. Official ser vice was regarded with extreme suspicion and was placed just a step above gambling, concubinage, and prostitution. In contrast, according to the statute of the association, service in educational or cultural institutions as well as in self-government associations or vocational education unions was allowed. So, a distinction was traced between a kind of politics at the ser vice of the state and one that placed itself outside of it and operated through independent groups and educational enterprises. Within this distinction, Beijing University and its president staked their claim to the second kind of politics but were nonetheless placed at an uneasy juncture within state policies. May Fourth student activism grew up in this gap between politics and the state, between the place of Beida as an institution inside the state apparatus and its opening to another space of politics—not pertaining to it as a state institution. This space of politics, whose existence was questioned during the admission exams and partly outlined in the structure of the university administration, was articulated

inside the university through experiments in different kinds of organizations and alternative associational modes.

O R G A N I Z AT I O N A L F O R M S

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Arif Dirlik, in pointing out a possible direction for a “non-symptomatic understanding” of the May Fourth period, argued that we cannot describe the movement merely as one “of ideas,” just because the question of culture came to the foreground in Chinese thinking in these years. “Everywhere in China, the movement for New Culture . . . was accompanied by organizational activity that was informed by new social visions which sought to create new individuals attuned in their culture to a new China in a new world.”  The effectiveness and power of the 1919 demonstrations rested on the existence of the student organizations, the associational habits they formed, and the whole range of social and political practices that inhabited them. It is to these practices that we should turn to find what “politics” meant for students at Beida. Students did not limit themselves to thinking, writing, and looking from a distance to the model of professors’ government: they translated the selfreflection on their school and their position in society into the exploration of new associational forms. The main loci of this organizational practice were study societies (xuehui or xueshe). Despite the existence of similar patterns of intellectual group formation since at least the late Qing, the emergence of the study society as the main organizational mode in the years 1917 through 1919 was a typical phenomenon of the May Fourth years, both in kind and scale. By the end of 1919 thousands of these societies existed in Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities. At Beida, the multiplication of xuehui was clearly helped by the attitude of the school administration; Cai Yuanpei believed that the students should cultivate “not just new ideas, but new habits of association.”  Some of the larger (and more durable) societies were inspired by the president himself or created in large part through a direct effort of the school and the personal involvement of faculty members. The Jindehui (Association for the Promotion of Virtue), for example, soon became a school-wide organization, which the large majority of the students and faculty joined. Notably, the management of the association was shared among students, faculty, and nonteaching personnel, with the students, who constituted the majority of members, electing the largest portion of the governing bodies. Some associations, such as the Painting Research Society (Huafa Yanjiuhui, founded in 1918), the Music Research Society (Yinyue Yanjiuhui, 1918),

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and the Journalism Research Society (Xinwenxue Yanjiuhui, 1918) supplied courses that were not available in the standard Beida curriculum and were open both to Beida students and to outsiders. Others, like the Consumers’ Society (Xiaofei Gongshe) and the Student Savings Bank (Xuesheng Chuxu Yinhang), both described in chapter 2, were created as alternative forms of commercial enterprise, with the goal of giving students real-life experience in management while helping them cope with the necessities of daily life. All these associations were supported by the school, which actively participated in their foundation. Nevertheless they all aimed at being more or less financially self-reliant and independently managed. But the large majority of associations were created by students and faculty, apparently with no intervention by the school administration. Most were located inside the university, although they almost always dealt with issues that were clearly not restricted to the school or to Beida students and professors. They were open also in the sense that they admitted students of other schools and also nonstudents as members. In both senses, they made students connect their place inside the highest school in the country within a wider social and intellectual reality. Some of these groups were large and organized enough to publish their own journals and engage in the cultural (and gradually more directly political) debates: New Tide (Xin chao), The Citizen (Guomin), Young China (Shaonian Zhongguo), and National Heritage (Guogu) achieved nationwide name recognition. Others survived long enough or were structured enough to leave some documentary proof of their existence. The flourishing of associational life was quickly noticed outside the school in educational circles at large. In May 1918, for example, the Education Gazette (Jiaoyu zazhi) reported on the active and lively spirit that students were showing in establishing new associations: among those mentioned were the painting, music and calligraphy research societies, but also the Eloquence Society (Xiongbianhui, founded 1917), the Association for Physical Education (Beijing Daxue Tiyuhui, 1917), and the Meditation Society (Jingzuohui, 1918). The Beijing University Daily hosted a continuous flurry of announcements and proposals, but after a while it seems that the organizational frenzy exhausted the paper’s descriptive capability: In dormitory screens and walls, and occasionally on playbills and reports, there was somebody publishing an appeal and there was always somebody responding; there was somebody calling a meeting, and there were always people showing up. As for the meeting place, for the larger meetings it was usually the canteen. When somebody wanted to speak, he would just stand on a stool and start speaking. Even in the bathrooms they started some “bathroom journals” in which they carried on debates. 

In the years 1917 through 1919, there was a multiplication of formal and informal locations for encounter and discussion, in which some of the distinctions between students and faculty, insiders and outsiders seemed to have been temporarily overcome: it was here that the principle of the equality of individuals vis-à-vis problems was practiced and tested. Luo Jialun vividly described the atmosphere at some of these meetings:

there was no barrier between the professors and the students, no standing on ceremony; whoever showed up jumped into the debate, everybody with people every day after three o’clock in the afternoon.

To be sure, despite the enthusiastic tone of Luo’s recollection, we are not speaking of large numbers. Li Dazhao’s office, preserved in the restored Honglou, comprised two small rooms, and it is difficult to think of large crowds of students gathering there. Associationism at Beida was a matter of extremely intense activity of small groups, of individual students and professors constituting and reconstituting microforums for discussion and organized action. This degree of organized activity at the level of individuals or small groups contrasts with the absence of a school-wide student organization— despite the existence of similar association at the national level, the Beijing Daxue Xueshenghui (Beijing University Student Association) was founded only at the end of 1919, when the May Fourth demonstrations had already forced the Beijing students to constitute citywide and nationwide networks and made evident the need to “nurture a spirit of common action.”  And even if the “barriers” between students and nonstudents, Beida people and outsiders might have been blurred in this intense associational activity, they probably lingered on in the day-to-day practice. During his brief stay at Beida, Mao Zedong recalls being snubbed as an outsider without real status by Luo Jialun and Fu Sinian. However, the fact that these distinctions were officially erased in statutes and regulations of many associations was nonetheless significant. There is obviously the issue of how many among Beida students did indeed participate to this intense organizational fervor, and whether this was just the product of a frenetically active minority under the detached eyes of a passive or neutral majority. The unbalance in the sources—memoirs are heavily biased toward the activities to which the author contributed directly and omit other less intense periods— does not help in redressing the problem

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raised points and everybody had to face criticism. Those two rooms fi lled

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office of the librarian (Li Dazhao) on the fi rst floor. In those two places

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second floor at the fi rst institute of Hanhuayuan, . . . the other was the

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We also gathered in two other places: one was the faculty lounge on the

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of the “silent” students at Beida. A notable exception is Zheng Tianting, who was admitted in 1917 directly to the undergraduate classes and gives a very different picture of his first year at Beida. Because he was young (barely eighteen) and comparatively unprepared, he bonded with a cohort of students who “buried their heads in books” and did practically nothing else. He almost never even looked at a newspaper and certainly never took part in the frenzy going on around him (although he was aware of it). Among his friends, participation in extracurricular activities was actually frowned upon: one of them submitted an article to Guogu and was ridiculed by the others who “considered themselves aloof and above politics, and believed that to submit an essay was being a show-off.” But even Zheng, who reminds us of the presence of bookish and nonpolitical students, in describing the atmosphere outside his cohort, follows the pattern of a lively, almost feverish organizational activity, a series of seemingly unlimited combinations of small groups of individuals. And this activity he too joined after May 4, 1919. Finally, not all these organizational experiments succeeded; many of these associations, even some of the larger ones, were short-lived. Sometimes members convened only for a foundational meeting, drafted a statute, and went off to other enterprises. The same Zheng Tianting recalls the example of a Social Reformation Study Society founded in the spring of 1920 by a group of Beida students from Fujian (with fellow provincials in other Beijing schools): “We all wanted to study together some new things and some new trends in social reform, but because the summer holidays were approaching and many members graduated and left the school the society virtually disintegrated. Th is association was never formally organized, there was no one in charge, just a list of names written in English.”  Other groups, especially after the high tide of May Fourth, showed a decline in the collective spirit and in members’ participation. The Beida Students’ Weekly highlighted and censured this phenomenon. Now every time students form an association [tuanti], they must set up some leaders, choose somebody to be in charge, they add hat over hat, making it rigidly stratified. Therefore, the sense of responsibility of each individual toward the association decreases continuously. Besides the leaders or the persons in charge, all the other members are like “loose members”; if by any chance the spirit of responsibility of the manager or the leader weakens, then the association truly becomes like loose grains of sand.

Scholars have highlighted the fact that many associations had goals and missions that were vague and, in some cases, utopian, especially if the aspirations of each organization were to be measured against its limited scope of

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action. The Music Research Society aimed at “molding individual character,”  the Eloquence Society wanted to “develop thought by renovating language,”  while the Association for the Translation of New Knowledge stated that its goal was to “research knowledge, propagate trends of thought, exert ourselves for the cultural movement, and plan for radical reform of the world.”  Pronounced from the standpoint of small organizations of young students in Beijing (for example, the Eloquence Society had about sixty active members in 1919), these statements might indeed sound like the utopian daydreams of a generation of idealistic reformers. But that’s not how we should read them. Rather, what was affirmed in these statutes was the possibility, for each and every single individual, to study anything, to deal with any possible issue, on one’s own terms: it was the “privileged relationship of each person to the truth, that one that puts him on his path, on his orbit as a seeker.”  If we take Jacques Rancière’s definition of learning as an act of individual will based on the condition of equality vis-à-vis truth, the xuehui, which were, in general, open associations, framed precisely the practice through which the equality of intelligence could be verified and realized. The xuehui was the organizational form that students and professors gave to this practice. For the large majority of the xuehui (especially those formed independently by students), membership was not restricted according to preparation, qualifications, or seniority—most accepted as members any Beida student. Participation in a xuehui was based solely on the willingness of the individual to learn and research; it was therefore an assertion of each man’s power to know, and to make his thinking understood to others, equally intelligent. “Intelligence is not a power of understanding based on comparing knowledge with his object. It is the power to make oneself understood through another’s verification. And only an equal understands an equal.”  The xuehui were therefore utopian, only if “utopian” means believing that each person (and any other person) can exercise the prerogatives of intelligence and that, in relation to truth, “I can’t” is not the recognition of reality, but a sentence of self-forgetfulness, the demise of one’s own desire and ability to know. As a counterbalance for their supposedly utopian character, one must focus on the level of organizational effort (and relative success) that these associations demonstrated: in the three cases quoted in this chapter—and, in general, in each and every xuehui’s statute—the lofty goals were followed by detailed regulations concerning the structure of the association, its procedures, and its administration. Th is focus on the working of the organization took the form of a continuous production of documents that almost obsessively stated, redefined, and made public the minute practices of these associations. It was then the combination of ideal passion and the painstaking attention for organizational details that made the xuehui into a political

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experience: they represented an attempt to think and act about issues, usually involving society at large, through the practice of an organized and selfdisciplined group. It is here that the xuehui that shows how May Fourth activities embodied what Alain Badiou highlights as the main character of the twentieth century: “the passion for the real, for what is immediately practicable, here and now.”  A famous text, published in the Beijing University Daily in September 1919, summarized the organizational approach beyond the idea of xuehui. Mao Zedong, at the time a young progressive teacher and journalist in Changsha, Hunan, sent the “Statute of the Problem Study Society” to his friend Deng Zhongxia, who in turn had it published in the university daily. The statute is nothing more that a list of about one hundred “problems” to be investigated with the support of a dozen “theories.” Problems were “all things and principles, whether essential or nonessential to contemporary human life, that have not been solved yet influence the progress of contemporary human life.”  In short, “problems were anything that could be problematized,” anything that could be considered an issue in contemporary life. The society was obviously never operational and did not exist beyond this text. But, as Alessandro Russo pointed out, “this list was nothing but the matrix for the creation of a practically unlimited number of study societies. . . . It was the demonstration that it was possible to constitute every kind of Study Society, that is to say every kind of location, to research, democratically and problematically, what was there to be known in every field.”  The list of problems, which started, and not by chance, with “educational problems,” is surprising for the attention given to contemporary events, details, and issues broadly ranging in geographic and thematic scope. Therefore, while this text embodies the “boundlessness of project”  of May Fourth activism— everything can and should be studied—it also listed the essential organizational means to pursue this project—the infinite multiplicity of study societies. Despite the rapid diff usion and multiplication of xuehui throughout the country in the May Fourth years, I am not suggesting here that this process can be explained as a modular replication of a successful pattern along the lines of Anderson’s nationalism. Mao’s text and the variety of associational forms collected under the name “study society” show that the xuehui was not an artifact to be transplanted and copied but rather represented the possibility of a collective, organized, and open-ended approach to issues. The May Fourth xuehui was neither a fi xed nor a flexible organizational model, rather it was the name given to a new collective practice of organizing to deal with issues through inventive research. If “a political rupture is always a combination of a subjective capacity and an organization—totally independent of state—of the consequences of that capacity,”  then the May Fourth xuehui configured a

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political phenomenon, in that they organized the subjective capacity to think, study, and deal with problems, in locations that declared themselves to be totally separated (intellectually as well as practically) from the state. It was precisely because of this last characteristic that May Fourth associations were not reproductions of the model of late Qing xuehui. A 1919 essay summarized the novelty of the xuehui, by stigmatizing how previously there had never been associations “devoted exclusively to research,” meaning that previous examples suffered from a close relationship to the state. In fact, the outburst in associational activity between 1894 and 1898 is comparable to that of the May Fourth years, but the organization formed by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, for example, shared a political horizon in which the state still occupied the central place and government reform was the ultimate goal. Instead, in the case of May Fourth, politics was the result of a distancing of organizational activity from the “proper” horizon of politics. The xuehui, as all political locations, came to life because politics must come to life in the form of a “previously unknown collective discipline” — the obsession with rules, with statutes, and with the daily working of the association was then evidence of this practical discipline, which could not be imposed (by an outside authority) but was adopted subjectively and independently. In that, the xuehui mirrored the self-organized discipline in daily life—management of dorms, learning practices—that Beida students called for as complementary to their refusal of imposed rituals. Discipline could and had to be a subjective choice. The question is how long such a practice can exist and develop before it invades the space of state management, and, in turn, faces confrontation and repression. The year 1919 marked not only the simple expansion of student activities in the area of public politics, but more significantly, through the repression by the state of student actions, a redefinition of the subjectivities involved, including the one category that became the focus of the confrontation, that of “students.”

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IMPROPER PLACES

The polisemic character of the word politics, which plays such a large part in our understanding of May Fourth, was also crucial in framing student activities inside Beijing University and defining them in the eyes of both the school administration and the government. Cai Yuanpei’s stated vision of politics as an activity centered on the state was meant also to shelter (at least in theory) the university from any involvement with and any intervention by political powers. In this narrow perspective, politics was thus reduced to service in official posts and participation in political parties—both activities were either prohibited or shunned at Beida. The consequent assumption was that politics could exist in the university solely in the abstract, as a topic of discussion and theoretical investigation. In this sense, after 1917 Beida operated under the pretense that, because students and professors were not getting involved in the functioning of government, they were not dealing with politics, and that, even when the associations and their journals tackled direct political issues, they were just discussing politics, as they would any other field of knowledge. In reality, however, students and faculty were doing more than discussing politics: they were thinking about issues of contemporary urgency and experimenting with organizational forms specifically created to deal with those

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May 4, 1919, was not the first case of Beijing students expressing a direct position in a matter of national politics. On May 21, 1918, about two thousand Beijing students from four schools (Beijing University, Higher Normal School, Specialty School of Law and Politics, and Higher School of Engineering) marched to the office of the president of the Republic to protest the Sino-Japanese Military Mutual Assistance Convention. May 1918 has been viewed as a dress rehearsal of May Fourth,  but the more striking features of Beijing students’ fi rst organized foray into the streets of the capital are precisely those elements that differentiate it from the more famous event one year later. In 1918 it seems that the students congregated directly in front of the presidential palace and staged a long, albeit peaceful, standoff outside the

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issues. An alternative meaning of politics was embodied in the very functioning of the school and especially in the organizational practice of the xuehui (study societies). It was unavoidable that, at a certain point, students had to face the existence of state policies and measure their political inventions visà-vis state prescription. Then the creative paradox of a space of politics emerging inside a state university became more apparent and more precarious. This confrontation took place in part through the process by which the xuehui expanded their social activities outside the school, but came completely to the fore in a moment of national crisis— generated by the failure of state policies at an international level—when the very issue of national survival seemed to be at stake. The contradictions inherent in the multiple understanding of politics and in the fiction of the university’s apolitical character became evident during the events of 1919, in which both student actions and government repression focused on the category of students and its place in relations to politics. In May and June 1919, students left the school and moved into the streets, and by so doing they made apparent that politics itself had been displaced, dislocated from its supposedly proper places. By moving outside the school, students also refused to be contained by the narrow meaning of “students,” and claimed politics as a form of collective action that exceeds sociological definition. They crossed borders physically, socially, and politically. The state repression of the movement negated this claim and, curiously, tried to bring the situation back to the fiction of the apolitical positioning of the school in an attempt to put the students in their proper place, back in the university— seen as the proper location for theoretical and detached discussion.

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building. After negotiations, thirteen student delegates (six of them from Beida) were received by President Feng Guozhang; they asked that the texts of the secret agreement be made public and the agreement annulled. The president dismissed the students’ worries and reassured them that the agreement concerned solely the consequences of the German defeat and there was no talk of loans or of “selling China to Japan.” He blamed the media, who were causing people to worry about a supposed national crisis only because the terms of the agreements had not been announced yet. Feng reassured the student representatives that neither he nor Prime Minister Duan Qirui was a “traitor of the nation”; neither of them would do anything that could damage the country. According to the report in the press, it was largely a monologue, concluding with the president’s paternalistic exhortation: “You should never again engage in this kind of unlawful activity. . . . You’d better go back to your school and be very diligent, in order to fulfi ll the hopes I have for you.”  The representatives conveyed the message to the demonstrators and they seem to have decided to peacefully return to the four schools, all the way announcing loudly how they had met the president and what he had said. Some students took off their hats and clapped, shouting, “Long live the Republic” (minguo wansui). There are a few similarities between May 21, 1918 and May 4, 1919: the sizeable number of students involved, the fact that the Beijing action sparked similar protests in other cities, and the role of Beida as the organizational center. But the differences are more numerous and more salient. For example, the 1918 protest was spearheaded by returned students from Japan, who came to Beijing with the explicit intention of initiating the remonstration. But the crucial distinction is that students in 1918 did not make their concern public but addressed only the government: during the marching and the standoff in front of the palace, as Zhang Guotao recalls, “there were no speakers, no banners, and no slogan-shouting. The citizens of Peking had no way of knowing what the students were up to, for it was truly a silent petition.”  The protest was framed as a dialogue between the students and the government, with no involvement of other parts and no communication directed to a larger political audience. In many ways, it is difficult to consider it a “street” demonstration as it neither took place in the streets of Beijing nor claimed a public space, except for the occupation of the area outside the presidential palace on that very day. Students maintained an extremely respectful attitude, almost replicating the role of the petitioning literati. Zhang Guotao complained that “the petition was mildly worded, . . . and was similar to the petition that K’ang Yuwei tendered to Emperor Kuang-hsü. Four student delegates, bearing the

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petition with traditional demonstrations of respect, sought an audience with President Hsu Shih-ch’ang.”  But while in 1918 the president was able to placate the protestors with a paternalistic admonishment, a year later the government would adopt a much stronger tone to no effect. The quiet development of this demonstration probably reflected the students’ ambivalence about getting involved in a direct action of political protest, and much of this reluctance was epitomized in the apolitical stance that Beida had adopted since 1917. Cai Yuanpei made an appeal to that stance when he tried to stop the students from marching. As always, he offered to be the conveyor of their message to the authorities and admonished that, if they decided to march, that had to carry “the shame of getting involved in politics.”  Students marched nonetheless but were clearly conscious of the danger to which a breach in their separation from the state exposed the school. When, in the aftermath of the protest, Cai Yuanpei made the gesture of resigning, some Beida students went to talk to him and reassured him that it had been only an isolated, ad hoc intervention in response to a moment of national crisis, and that the safety and integrity of the school came fi rst in their consideration. Afterward, students were keen to point out the decorum of their actions: they had marched quietly and in well-ordered ranks to Xinhuamen, presented their remonstrance, and, in the same dignified manner, had gone back to their schools. No disruption had been caused inside or outside the school. The ambivalence of the students’ attitude can be explained in light of the potential danger for the school’s independence, but also, in this case, by the par ticu lar form of the protest— a direct interpellation of government authorities, which brought students inside precisely the kind of “politics” (state activity) from which the university had distanced itself. A year later, when the student protests had a completely different character, there was much less or no ambivalence among Beida students, who strenuously defended their actions, precisely because they pertained to a different kind of politics. 1918 can be best seen as a moment of transition in the redefi nition of the sense of politics by student activism. If in 1917 Cai Yuanpei’s position could be productively “apolitical,” because it allowed the formation of alternative— albeit sheltered— organizational experiments, by 1919 the explosion of student politics had placed him, to a certain extent, in an “antipolitical” field. Between 1918 and 1919, the organizations inside Beida multiplied, increasing the intensity of student political activism, as new groups with a more direct social mission were formed. At the national level, the creation of an All-China Student Patriotic Association just after the 1918 demonstration opened a general forum for debate and action. On the international level, the

failure of Chinese foreign policy at the Versailles conference and the March First student movement in Korea provided different but complementary stimuli to a direct confrontation with the state.

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WHY A STUDENT IS NOT A CITIZEN

The organization of the 1919 demonstration (i.e., the actual event of May Fourth) relied heavily on the student associations that had been created in the previous two years. The people in charge of the May 3 meeting belonged to associations (members of Guomin and Xin chao were particularly prominent). The money for the banners was borrowed from the Student Savings Bank while members of the calligraphy and painting study societies were in charge of actually making the signs. Above all, the level of organization Beijing students demonstrated in May and June would have been unthinkable without long experience in small and large groups inside the school. Even an outside spectator like John Dewey, in a letter dated June 20, recorded his surprise at the kind of preparation kids “from fourteen on” had shown. Student demonstrations elicited a supportive response from various social groups, but the reactions of authorities both inside and outside the school were decidedly negative. These reactions argued a problematic distinction between the sociological category of “students” and other people and tried to reduce the ambiguous meaning of politics by restricting it to a specialized state activity; in that, they were revealing of what was at stake in student activism. Cai Yuanpei, who once again tried to stop the students in the morning of May 4, famously resigned the presidency after the demonstrations. In a letter to his students, he traced a line of separation between his personal feelings and his institutional role vis-à-vis the student movement: “I truly believe that your actions on May 4 were inspired only by patriotic spirit. As a citizen, how can I not be satisfied with you? But once in a school one speaks for the school; as the president of a national university, I obviously attracted criticism and had to resign.”  To intervene directly in politics by publicly presenting a political request was respectable, and even probably laudable, for citizens, but it was problematic for students. As student activities intensified in the following months, Cai hardened his view of the separation between the concerns of general citizens and students, between school and politics. On May 13, 1919, the Chenbao (Peking Morning Post) published an article reporting an alleged conversation between Cai Yuanpei, who had just resigned and was moving from Tianjin to the south, and an unnamed friend. When asked whether he could guarantee that the student movement was over, Cai replied:

The demonstration of patriotism by the students on May Fourth is complete and it cannot be repeated. Now they can calmly go back and concentrate on their studies, leaving it to the citizens to carry on this task. If among the students there are those who feel compelled to act by sincere patriotic feelings, they can freely participate outside the school as citizens, but they absolutely cannot use anymore the name of “students”, nor they can use the school as a meeting place. 127 | I M P RO P E R P L AC E S

Cai was claiming a distinction that was, at that point, extremely problematic. He was overlooking the fact that students’ attitudes, their heightened social responsibility, and especially their organizations had been fostered in the reformed Beida. An alternative vision of politics had been discussed, experimented with, and, to a limited extent, practiced in the school. It was now difficult to maintain that there was something in the very definition of students that prevented them to act politically in a wider context. Later in the year, Cai tried to articulate what differentiated students in terms of a division of tasks. “World evolution,” he wrote to the student assembly, “comes from the division of labor, and in order to accomplish something one must be prepared.” University students are a small elite group, a limited number of people who, because of a fortunate environment, have had a chance to pursue “pure science.” They were the ones who could make the new culture of the country grow and have it join the world’s learning. “Your responsibility is so great and yet now, by participating in a national political movement, you have completely sacrificed this responsibility.”  Students, argued Cai, had managed to provide a momentary awakening to their fellow countrymen, but they could not continue. Otherwise, this would become a lifelong “awakening” that cannot be achieved without profound knowledge, noble aspirations, and high moral stand. Cai encouraged students to pursue instead “social-minded” activities such as the popu lar education lecture groups, the night schools, or even the Boy Scouts. These were, however, the very activities through which students had first expanded the scope of their organization efforts outside the school. It was not by chance that the lecture groups played a central role in the summer of 1919 and were one of the main targets of government repression. Cai’s distinction between social concern, which these associations dutifully expressed, and political involvement was therefore untenable. In the end, Cai argued, politics was a complicated affair that required study, research, and the fair evaluation of several facets of each and every issue; students had instead rushed to action, basically unprepared. Now students had to go back to their role and perform their task—students, Cai implied, had to be students. Over time, Cai drew closer to the position

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expressed by Liang Qichao in 1912, calling for a separate and regulated status for “students.”  It is not that Cai assumed a repressive or reactionary position toward the student movement. He declared and proved over and again that he was mainly trying to salvage the institutional freedom of the university and the wellbeing of its students. He was always the first to protest anytime students were arrested or beaten or when the government attempted to intervene against some of the post–May Fourth associations. In the conversation reported by the Chenbao, he claimed that one of the reasons for his resignation was that, with him gone, the government might be appeased by this gesture and leave the school alone. He was not unaware that the line of demarcation he was trying to establish between students and citizens, social activity around the university and political action, was truly subtle. After May 1919 students intensified their activities, clearly refusing Cai’s call to reenter an apolitical category of “students,” a category that the very experience at Beida had made extremely difficult even to define. Cai Yuanpei and the administration of the university hardened their positions accordingly. In 1920, in the midst of another wave of agitation sparked by the Shandong issue, Beida tried to enforce stricter rules concerning class attendance. The new rules introduced more rigid controls over students’ schedule. Now professors were required to take a roll call at the beginning of each lecture and sanctions for those missing classes were imposed, an absolute novelty given the lax class discipline for which Beida was famous. However, it seems that—at least in the School of Humanities— only a couple of professors implemented these rules and that students found many different ways to escape the newly imposed controls. In October 1922 Cai Yuanpei returned to Beida after yet another resignation—this time connected with the financial crisis of public schools— that had been accompanied by another period of student protests. Cai delivered a speech in front of the faculty and the students, in which he gave a much harder assessment of student activism. He made reference to his past as a radical school organizer and revolutionary at the very end of the Qing and his role in the foundation of the Patriotic Academy. Student activism at that time, he remarked, was moved by the conviction that politics and society were corrupt, so students (and professors) elected schools as an experimental ground (shiyan chang). Cai claimed a separation between the nationstate (guojia) and school (xuexiao), which had to be reflected by a separation between people (renmin) and students. The state, he argued, is produced by the people; the school is not produced by the students. People have a continuous relationship with their country while students are at school only temporarily. So people can get involved with politics (they are often better

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The May Fourth mode of activism was one in which “students” claimed a right for politics not as representatives of a community or sociological location (that is, not as “students”), but rather after they had challenged the very existence of a category of “students” and its enclosure in specific places (the schools). Th is form of activism elicited repression. As seen in the case of Cai Yuanpei, the government, and in general, critics of the student movement in 1919 and 1920, justified the containment and repression of the student initiative by a strategy of separation: separation of students from citizens; of the youth—and therefore “ignorant,” “not fully developed”—from the adult generation; and of a place for learning and “discussing politics” from the space of politics as organized thought and action. Some of the basic points of this strategy were outlined, and rebutted, in an essay published in the official organ of the Beida Student Association in February 1920.  The article recounted a perhaps fictional conversation between the author and an “old bureaucrat.”  The official accused the students of wasting precious time—which should have been devoted to books—in the pursuit of politics, going out in the streets to lecture and distribute leaflets. The fictional official highlighted the students’ young age and lack of knowledge: ignorant teenagers were probably confronting the police and risking injuries just because they had been misled by some agitators. And how is it that only the world of education was involved in this movement? Are students the only ones who understand patriotism? The writer’s response pointed out how, in the face of a grave political issue, creating a distinction between students and the rest of society was moot. Students did not have a better or worse understanding of the political crisis. Rather, “ignorant teenagers” had mobilized because the risk of colonialism

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than those in the government) while students are less “advanced” than professors and cannot mingle in school policies.  By 1922 Cai was stating explicitly that “students” were not “people” and could not be involved in national politics; but also, in an implicit retreat from his own reforms, he was arguing for a subordinate role of students overall, outside and inside the school, which was clearly not “theirs.” These statements express a contradiction, a tension that lingered and intensified after 1919: that between the idea of national citizenship expressed and realized in common civic participation (the people as constituted through political action) and the always latent, subversive, and dangerous character that political participation of actual people, and especially students, entailed.

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was so blatant that it had become evident even to them. As there was no difference in students’ understanding of events, in their intelligence, there was also no special task that only they were able or entitled to shoulder. The only quality that set students apart was a very practical one: students did not yet have family or professional bonds. It was only their specific position in society that allowed them to be less afraid, less constrained, and therefore more ready to speak out. True, the students were sacrificing their studies, but, looking at the international situation, in colonized nations like “Vietnam and Korea students today cannot pursue higher knowledge. So we cannot but sacrifice for the sake of this patriotic movement.” Ultimately the idea that students “cannot understand anything but book learning” is wrong. “Isn’t a student just another member of the citizenry (guomin)?”  Thus, students, and in par ticu lar Beijing University students, who came from the experience of the open environment of the xuehui, and from struggling over practices that were programmatically uncommunitarian, did not define the political involvement in terms of “students.” Rather, they framed their political pronouncement as universal, and universality cannot be presented under the aspect of particularity. In the two statements drafted (both by Beida students) on the occasion of the May Fourth rally, the word students was mentioned only once. “The Manifesto of All the Students of Peking,” penned by Luo Jialun in vernacular Chinese, spoke from the “we” of the students but called for every other group in the country “to strive to secure our sovereignty in foreign affairs.” Thus, the “we” of the students merged with the “our” of the people. The second longer, more elaborate statement, drafted by Xu Deheng, never mentioned the word students and framed the fight for China’s territorial integrity inside a worldwide struggle (the French, the Italians, and the Koreans figured notably). And if the people (min) of China could not join this struggle by uniting to save their country (guo), they were not worthy to be part of humanity (renlei). So, not only did the declaration, which was circulated countrywide after the demonstration, not name students as a category of politics, but it also integrated the patriotism of citizens (guomin) within a subject (renlei) that was theoretically universal. Thus, the tension that I have outlined in chapter 3 between a national university declaring any “national” definition of learning impossible was partly reproduced in the 1919 students’ statement. They refused to reduce the patriotic movement merely to one of students, or to one strictly defined and enclosed by Chinese nationalism. The fi rst issue of the Beijing University Students’ Weekly stated a position against “pure patriotism,” calling for a struggle against Japanese imperialists but reaffi rming a profound connection with the people of Japan. “China is a part of the world, so it cannot but move at

uphold the truth. When we read the statutes of political parties, we once

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world. When we read Wilson’s declarations, we once believed that he could

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months, we gained awareness of ourselves, obtained knowledge about the

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the same pace with the world tide. We are a part of the humanity, therefore we must clearly declare that what benefits one nation and does not benefit the whole world does not work.”  We hear here an echo not only of the anarchist influences among the Weekly’s contributors but also of voices familiar to Beida students. In 1915 Chen Duxiu had warned against “patriotism,” which was in the end just blind loyalty to an undeserving state. Nationalism and patriotism could be recovered in 1919 only as one of the elements in the construction of an identity as “citizens” or “people,” in the sense of a national collective subject of political action. It is then essential to remember how the student movement that marks the rebirth of Chinese nationalism was in such a large part defined by a refusal to be reduced to both the category of student and a narrow form of nationalism. To subsume May Fourth under the rubric of a “patriotic movement”— a strategy employed by the CCP and the KMT alike in their attempt to reclaim “students” for the party-state—is therefore a simplistic and inadequate reduction of a much more complex stance with regard to the nation. In practice, May Fourth was not simply a student movement: other sectors of society, including merchants, workers, and city dwellers, responded to the students’ initiative and often took the lead in political demonstrations. In this sense, this was the fi rst major instance in which student organizations in China joined society at large in a political effort. Merchants and workers rallied with the students and David Strand has illustrated how the student demonstrations sparked organizational initiatives in other sectors of society: the notion of moral equality of all citizens, which was possibly “ambiguously felt” but clearly stated by the May Fourth students, was appropriated by Beijing residents. May Fourth was therefore a learning experience in several respects: students put to the test the organizational abilities they had developed inside the school, they faced in practice the possibilities of the ideals and goals they had been discussing, and above all, they crossed in an organized fashion the artificial line of demarcation between school and the rest of society. At the end of 1919, Beida students welcomed back Cai Yuanpei with a somber but proud evaluation of the previous four turbulent months. This period was presented as part of the same process of learning that Cai had initiated at Beida; the experience of May Fourth had shattered deep-seated beliefs.

believed they could make the country rich and the people prosper. When we studied the principles of law and politics, we once believed that the rules and decrees of the militarists were just to protect the country and avoid violence. We devoted ourselves to learning day after day, believing that we could go out and deal with the world. We strove to temper our moral fiber, believing it would have been beneficial when facing adversiers and merchants had no knowledge, and we mistakenly believed them.

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ties. We also heard rumors that our countrymen had no culture, that work-

The practical experience of street politics had crushed any residual faith in the value of boundaries separating the school and the students from society; “to observe and criticize the contemporary situation of the nation and its society”  from inside a classroom was obviously not enough, not even as a learning tool. Students’ claim to be “citizens,” while denied by the repression (as we will see), was heeded in the public opinion, and newspapers were flooded with reports sympathetic to the students, and more importantly to their right to act politically, as “people.” On October 19, 1919, the Yishibao reported on the debate raging in the country over student involvement in patriotic movements, which took the forms largely of a discussion on the confines of the category itself (what makes a student a student). The commentator responded by taking almost verbatim many of the students’ arguments and articulating a defense largely by declassifying students and subsuming them under “citizens” or “people.” He called to look at the category of student itself (xuesheng benshen). What is a student? A student suffers from the loss of his country like anybody else. “A student is a man and a man cannot but be aware whether his country lives or dies. A student is a citizen and a citizen cannot but have a relationship of commonality [gongtong zhi guanxi] with his country. Then, given this awareness and this commonality, if we ask a man not to help his country, aren’t we asking him to forget his consciousness and cut his relationship? And this is no different from asking students to just study and not get involved in saving the country.”  In her discussion of May ’68 in France, Kristin Ross argued that May was a series of “political experiments in declassification.” What has come to be called “the events of May” consisted mainly in students ceasing to function as students, workers as workers, farmers as farmers. May was a crisis in functionalism. . . . It consisted of displacements that took the students outside the university, meetings that brought farmers and workers together, or students in the countryside. . . . And in that physical dislocation lay a dislocation in the very idea of politics—moving

out of its place, its proper place, which was for the left at that time the Communist Party.

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A similar displacement was experienced and realized by Beijing students moving out of their schools in the midst of social unrest in 1919. According to Ross, not only is it impossible to interpret student participation in May ’68 under the category of students, but the very process of politicization was one of breaking communitarian identifications. Similarly, for Beida students in 1919, marching into the street was the conclusive stage of a process of politicization, based precisely on the separation from the proper locus of politics— the state—and the fragmentation of any communitarian bond. Ross shows how the repression of May ’68, both by the police and the sociological disciplining of the media, attempted to negate the displacement and keep everything in its proper place: “Let students study, workers work, teachers teach, and France be French.”  In sociological terms, this took the form of an attempt to attribute ’68 to a revolt of the social category of youth. Th is allowed critics to frame the movement as nothing more than a generational ferment— emotional, natural, and passing. In the same tone, Luisa Passerini recalls how the Turin newspaper La Stampa gave space to articles by teachers and journalists who attempted to explain the 1968 upheaval with an analysis of “youthful angst.”  Reactions to May Fourth had a very similar tone. Jiang Menglin, who arrived at Beida largely because of the May Fourth unrest, located the reason for the incessant political activity of students in the “psychological unrest of the youth. Once they were aroused to act, it tended to express itself; to repress emotions that ran so high would have been difficult.”  Clearly, ignoring the personal political discipline many of these students had embraced, Jiang blamed their youthful emotional instability for their feral behavior. “They were intoxicated with power; their selfishness ran wild. The mere word ‘discipline’ found them with rolling eyes, lips curled, and teeth bared, ready to fall upon you in packs.”  Similarly, the only legacy of May ’68 that was salvaged in France is that of a “cultural movement:” May was an unprecedented moment of “cultural” change, with no political bearings at all. In this version of the story, which complements the generational tale of “youthful revolution,” everything happened culturally, nothing happened politically. In comparison, the standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interpretation of the May Fourth movement has extolled the political value of the 1919 demonstration—the fi rst “popular anti-imperialist front” of intellectuals, workers, and merchants—but CCP historiography has constantly limited the meaning of the “political” in the years 1917 through 1921. The experience of the study societies and journals has been defined mainly as a “cultural” reform, the breaking of old mindsets,

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and possibly a liberation of the soul; all good, but ultimately a process that could only be propaedeutic to the political change to come after 1921 and thus always incomplete in itself. In this view, the politics of May Fourth existed only teleologically, in the postponed establishment of parties (or rather, the party). Those who identified student politics with “youthful unrest” attempted to place it in a sociological category that negated the possibility of any political value, while at the same time restating and relegitimizing the existence of proper places for politics—state bureaucracy, political parties, and so on. Th is was an attitude shared in many ways by the Communist Party itself, especially in the French but also the Chinese cases, even if the CCP could not but recognize the event of 1919 as foundational of the state and the party. The uneasiness (if not the outright hostility, as in May ’68) with which the communist parties dealt with student movements had to do with the fact that these movements—implicitly or explicitly— challenged both the foundation of class-based politics and the party as the proper place for political action. Students were not a class, and before any cultural value could be historically rescued from student activism, its political sense had to be sociologically dispersed or recontained. In 1919 and 1920, the strategy of separation was at work, physically, in the government repression of student activities and in the justification of this repression. Students were to remain students. The government, in reaction, stated more and more rigidly a demarcation of what were the tasks, the responsibilities, and, above all, the limits (both in an abstract and practical, physical sense) of students’ actions. They tried to define what students could do inside of the school (in their proper place) and what they could not do outside. The presidential decree of May 8, 1919, combined the idea of students’ lack of maturity with the state claim on the mission of the school. “The reason why we establish schools is to train talent that the state can use in the future; the students in school are still young and their character is not yet fully formed, so they must devote themselves only to studying. How can they get involved with politics and even disturb the public peace?”  Students who had trespassed this line on May Fourth and had been arrested therefore had to be judged according to the law and sent to court. In a similar vein, a later decree cited the constitutional prohibition for students to join the political assemblies or political parties and argued that the students’ strength was barely enough to sustain them through the toil of studying. In the months after May Fourth, the arguments of the government became more precise. The duty of students and professors toward their country was limited to the transmission of learning, and even their relationship to

major events could only be fi ltered through a “scholarly” approach—that is, learned discussion. The basis of the fundamental progress of a country lies in the moral character and the knowledge of its citizens. The moral character should be strong enough to sustain the spiritual life of the country, while knowledge should be strong enough to develop the country so that it is capable of

country, they can only discuss them inside the school, and exchange opinions with fellow countrymen. If they get involved into practical actions, compel them to be in the frontline; they will exceed their function and miss school.

Social and political issues could thus exist inside the school either as a topic of discussion, or as a recreation for instructional purpose. By this means, the school could maintain its separation while producing an ideal and perfectly functioning model, a set of idealized experiences that might, one day, be implemented. Political societies are just one part of society in general, political enterprises are just a way of looking at social enterprises. It is therefore extremely difficult to look for a good government in an evil society, or for a new government in an old society. So, instead of harboring the ideal of reform on the political level, you should devote yourself to creating in practice a new society. You really could take the school as the model for molding society and use your learning to create the material for this model. Work at it during the day, let it rest at night, and create the real substance of society. Of all the conditions of life there isn’t one that is not molded in school. Then, if the pivot of society can rest on this, there is reason to hope that, in the future, a radical political reform might have some hope of succeeding. 

Th is statement of the Ministry of Education echoed in part the positions expressed, a few months before May Fourth, in the first issue of Xin jiaoyu (New Education): politics in school could exist only as “discussion of politics,” as “the debate of current events in the classroom to produce well-informed citizens.” The school should be used as “an ideal environment in which to

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even if they are modest and just stay in the middle, the environment will

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of learning and cultivation. Even if there are some important events in the

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country of those who give and receive education do not exceed the scope

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facing the world. It is for this reason that the responsibilities toward the

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develop the habits of popu lar government, with regional self-government the eventual extension of this training.”  That this separation between discussing and practicing politics was problematic is glaringly evident in the decree of September 1919, cited earlier. Th is decree forbade students’ political activities on the basis that they lacked the experience of “researching political issues,” but then identified one of their crimes precisely in “discussing politics.”  Th is argument was not, to be sure, a move back to Cai Yuanpei’s 1912 position of an “education beyond politics,” which became the basis for a practical rethinking of educational policies. It was also a far cry from the activities of many study societies, which dealt with social and political issues and experimented with political solutions and organizational forms to tackle them. By identifying politics in the school as only “learning about politics,” the state and some intellectuals proposed a separation of the two realms, which, in the end, could only result in renouncing any concrete project of political transformation. The school had to be remade back into a “place of learning,” in which students could acquire the knowledge to deal, in an undetermined and always postponed future, with the possibility of change. Robert Culp has eloquently argued how in the 1920s, the post–May Fourth “student self-government frenzy” was in part harnessed by the school administrations and, later, by the Nationalist government precisely under the terms of a pedagogical disciplinary training for “future citizens.” Th rough this idea of “education for citizenship,” the state also reaffirmed the directionality of the political: change could only happen top-down, never bottom-up. Change or progress could also only happen within and through the existing social structure, of which the state was the custodian and guarantor, never by subverting the order or crossing the sociological borders. However, the persistence of student unrest into the Nationalist decade shows that the state’s success in confining (and neutralizing) student politics was always incomplete.

JUNE STORM

It had not rained in Beijing for a while. On June 4 the weather suddenly changed, and the beautiful city plunged into a world of darkness. A lot of dust rose and amid the flying sands and rolling stones, I saw many students out on the streets, lecturing to the passersby. In the fl ashes of lightning, I could barely make out twenty tents surrounding the Beijing University Law School. That was the situation on the evening when Beida was transformed into a student prison. On the morning of June 4, from Donghua Gate all the way to the Dong’an Market, the fi rst battalion of the ninth

infantry division as well as the fifteenth regiment were lining up tents, forming a line along Beiheyan, all the way to the gate of the law school: they looked as if they were lining up for battle against an approaching enemy. The traffic through Donghua Gate was completely blocked. The law school was next to Beiheyan, and on the two sides, among poplars and willows, there were twenty tents; ten on the left and ten on the right of the law school’s main gate.

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While clouds were gathering over the capital, the episode that best illustrates, in a practical and localized fashion, the central issues at stake both in the May Fourth political dislocation and in the government’s strategy of separation and relocation was taking place. The report from the Meizhou pinglun quoted here is one of the most vivid description of how the Beijing police and the army encircled one of the Beida campuses and closed it off from the rest of the city. The day before, on June 3, students had gone out en masse to lecture the people of Beijing about the international political situation. The move had been decided following the arrest of seven students who were selling national goods (i.e., Chinese made) at the Dong’an Market in Beijing. According to student sources, more than a hundred lecturers came out of Beida and, together with more from other schools, over two thousands people went out lecturing in the streets throughout Beijing. The reaction of the police and the army, who had been instructed to uphold the government’s decree ordering the students to go back to their classes, was swift. They fi rst advised the students against lecturing, then disbanded the listeners, and finally started to arrest the lecturers. The troops took in 176 people, too many for the capacity of the city jails, so the soldiers seized the buildings of Beida Law School and placed the arrested students there. A sign, “Student Prison Number 1,” was pasted on the main gate. On the following day, despite the worsening weather, an even larger number of students went out to lecture; seven to eight hundred of them were arrested. At six in the morning, the law school had been formally surrounded and by noon the School of Sciences had also been cordoned off and renamed “Student Prison Number 2.”  The reasons for such harsh repression are not apparent. The mass arrest of students was in the end counterproductive for the government, since it resulted in a more widespread popu lar sympathy for the “patriotic victims.” The students orchestrated the demonstrations clearly with an eye for political theater and described them vividly in the publications they managed: they crafted them both as a shared experience for protestors and as a performance

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under the oppression of the police and the army)

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—“Junjing yabo zhong de xuesheng yundong” (The student movement

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for the Beijing population. One year after the events, the rhetorical thrust was still vivid in the recollection published in the Beida Students’ Weekly. On June 3, the article recalled, the protestors were ready to be taken into prison, so when they were in fact arrested, “there was not the slightest hint of fear; on the way to the jail they kept inciting people to buy national products, and bystanders applauded and cheered.” On June 5, the third day of the lecture movement, five to six thousand students (again, according to the very sympathetic Weekly) went out. Beida students took the east section of the city. “They went around followed by a big carriage that carried their beddings and their clothes: they were showing that they were prepared to be imprisoned.”  Th is time, however, the soldiers did not arrest anybody but just stood by and dispersed the listeners. Students then marched to the law school where their shouts were joined by those of the imprisoned students “in earth-shattering noise.”  Clearly, the repression unwillingly provided legitimacy to the student protests and endless instances for their epic of activism. What the students were doing with the “democratic lectures” was different from previous forms of protests. They had ceased to address the government for a solution to a national crisis. There was no petition, no demand to officials. By going out and making the situation known to people, they were appealing to a different and more profound source of political authority. By physically crossing the border between the school and a wider space of political action (and eventually merging with a larger social upheaval), they were making spatially clear how the category of students could not be restricted to a generational and sociolog ical defi nition. But more importantly, by marking (through their presence in the streets) the existence of an alternative space for the political manifestation of the organized will of people (and students as people), these students were stating the possibility for a different kind of citizenship from the one being called for by the state. That of a national (and not nationalist) people, in which, at least theoretically, major differences—for example, between literate and illiterate— could be dissolved. The mass arrests violently affi rmed the opposite position. By arresting lecturers and enclosing them in a separate place— a school converted into a prison— and finally by besieging the school itself, cutting it off from the surrounding city, the soldiers were enforcing the division between the students and the rest of society, between their assigned task and politics, between the school as a place of learning and the political space of activism. Moreover, the transformation of a school into a prison had an evident symbolic aspect. By means of force, the state was claiming absolute control of the institution and its inhabitants. It was, in the most brutally evident way, calling the school

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FIGURE 5.1.

Cartoon published in the newspaper Yishibao, February 5, 1920. The young man (a student) is shown as carrying the burden of “saving the nation.” The two characters under his feet read “China.” The inscription at the bottom reads, “The country is vast, the population large, and yet only one young man shoulders the heavy burden.” The curious thing is how the artist played with the character “guo” (country, nation), by substituting the center portion of the character with the character “min” (people).

back to its post in the state system of learning and relocating the students in their proper place inside it. In the end, the strategy of separation did not work, or at least not in the way intended. As in the case of the lectures, the students showed a surprising ability to manipulate events into political statements and used the arrest and

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the siege as a stage upon which to make their positions more visible. The experience of the siege was retold as a harrowing, identity-defining trial: food and water was scarce or nonexistent, and only at the end of the second day did the authorities allow for gruel and flatbread to be delivered. The anomaly of a school turned into a prison as well as the students’ self-depiction managed to swing the public opinion to their side. The Shibao, for example published a report on the “tragic situation” of the students at Beida, which oozed sympathy for the protesters and scorn for the soldiers. The newspaper recounted an episode (and, for the purposes of political efficacy, truthfulness here is irrelevant) concerning the army general Wang Huaiqing, who was insulted by two students outside the makeshift prison. The students were surrounded and arrested, but before being taken away one of them gave an impromptu deathdefying and antigovernment speech. The journalist dutifully remarked the excessive use of force by the soldiers, describing them as “lions” and “wolves”; he concluded stressing the dire situation of imprisoned students and indirectly calling merchants and workers to rise in their support. By June 5 the government started to realize that the violent repression of the movement was failing and, at the end of the day, the police let the arrested students know they were free and lifted the siege of the two campuses. A decree by the Ministry of Education on the following day made the decision official. The soldiers stationed at the schools of law and sciences started to disband. “They cut the tents with knives but did not dare to enter the school. The students collected what they left behind as a proof.” It looked, the Students’ Weekly concluded poignantly, “like the landscape of a lost battle.”  The arrested students, however, were not yet ready to put an end to the confrontation. They demanded that the government restore freedom of speech and publication and asked for a formal declaration on whether or not their arrest had been legal. In the meantime, they vowed not to leave the school. According to one source, 827 students remained “self-imprisoned” in the two campuses. On the previous days, they had formed an “Alliance of the imprisoned students.” Now they established “imprisoned student guards” to keep order, apparently with remarkable success. “Inside the prison, sleeping and rising, eating and resting, exercise, all was regulated according to a precise schedule. Not even under perfect-working school administration or in overregulated military camps, was there ever such a well-ordered environment.”  Despite such an organization, the occupation of the school did not last long. For a series of reasons, the arrested students decided against continuing this form of protest, and, on June 8, exited the gates of their former prisons. The short-lived occupation was far from a failure, however; students managed to make the end of the occupation an occasion for political theater, marching from Beida to the various schools whose students were among those

of the prison, to enter the research institute. This is the highest and most noble life. Only the civilization that comes out of these two places is the true civilization, a civilization that has life and value.

When the government took the university and turned it into a prison, it made the “two sources of world civilization” overlap and coincide. By occupying the school, the students drew the attention of the public to this coincidence. Moreover, if the school and the prison were both essential to producing “civilization,” the lived experience of the students, which culminated in the uncanny combination of the school and the prison in one place, was an affirmation of the impossibility of separating the place of research and the space of politics. If the government had tried to separate the school and its members from politics by making the school into a secluded and controlled place, the students’ occupation reaffi rmed their control both of the university and of the political space they had produced. However, between May and June 1919, we can also witness the acceleration of the different but related process by which the category of “students” came to assume characteristics that had little to do with a sociological, generational, or professional group. Th is process, which produced “students” as a repertoire and an identitarian sign, overlapped with instances of student activism that were, as we have seen, programmatically exceeding “students.” While, for example, the imprisoned, “victimized” students of June 3 were articulating the right to a political subjectivity that went beyond their status

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determined: once out of the research institute, to enter the prison; once out

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(yanjiushi) and the other is the prison. The youth of our country must be

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There are two sources of world civilization: one is the research institute

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imprisoned. The event, according to student descriptions, was well choreographed. Representatives from the various schools of Beijing gathered in front of the Beida Law School carry ing white banners with signs celebrating the students’ heroism. The students formerly imprisoned in the School of Sciences also joined in, each wearing a red flower. At noon, the students exited the school among deafening shouts (“Long live the Republic of China, long live the students, long live Beida”). Along Beiheyan tens of thousands of students and city residents were lined up to cheer the former prisoners who paraded through the crowds, cherishing what in today’s vocabulary we would define as a successful media event. On a more theoretical level, the occupation of the school represented a reaction to the state strategy of separation and to the affi rmation of state control over the university. In a comment on the June demonstration, Chen Duxiu voiced the inseparability of research and political protest:

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as students, the press seized on the image of students as “victims,” almost a synecdoche of the victimization (and possible resurgence) of the whole nation. Soon, students (and, in par ticu lar, Beida students) embraced the image themselves, finding it extremely useful to legitimate and amplify a political stance. The beginning of this process is already evident, for example, in the first meeting of Beida Student Association, in October 1919. The staging of the meeting—with the rostrum shaped as the letter U (for university), flower arrangements spelling “Beida,” and national fl ags everywhere—revealed a new awareness of the connection between students and the nation-state. As the association’s president reminded the convened member, since May Fourth, student activities had been at the center of the world’s attention. Because Beida occupied such an important position, its students had to prepare to shoulder even greater responsibilities in the future. Increasingly in the months after May Fourth, students moved from their claim to politics as “people” to the assumption of an identity of “students” as legitimate signalers of a political crisis.

RETHINKING

In the months and years following May Fourth, as student activities moved farther and farther away from their allotted place, the central government increasingly began to intervene in what was going on inside the school and requested more insistently the cooperation of school authorities. Government pressure bore directly or indirectly on the university, which was called to its duty as a state agency and asked to keep students in check. In January 1920, the Ministry of Education required schools to intervene against students who allegedly took part in the boycott and destruction of Japanese merchandise in Beijing and Tianjin. A few months later the ministry issued another order addressed to Beida, this time directly chastising the official organ of the Beida Student Association, accusing its editors of extremist positions. The ministry made the case that “discussion” and “learning” had to be set up as the defining characteristic of what was and was not allowed to school members. “From now on the editors of the Student Weekly must debate learning and express opinions only after the proper consideration. There cannot be any more of these extremist opinions, otherwise they will be dealt with according to the law.”  In 1922, the commander of the Beijing garrison ordered Beida to check on and repress a biweekly publication, The Pioneer, allegedly published inside the school walls, which it accused of spreading dangerous doctrines like socialism and communism. The school replied that The Pioneer was not among Beida’s publications, they did not know who was involved with it, and, more

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important, that “what students did outside classes, was the students’ responsibilities only and had no relationship at all with the school.”  By that time, however, it was clear that “student politics” could not be kept inside specific boundaries and that the only way to save the university from direct involvement was to impose much stricter control on what students were doing inside the school and separate it clearly from whatever activities they were involved with outside. In March 1921 the Committee for Student Enterprises was formed and entrusted with the task of helping the university president provide some order to the various student groups. All new student organizations had to submit statements listing their goals, methods, and the names of members to the committee. The groups already established had to be inspected by the committee. Ultimate authority to allow any new organization to be established rested with the president. The committee practiced a strict distinction between “pure student enterprises” and groups formed by the school: only the latter could use the name Beijing Daxue. The enforcement of old and new rules by the administration after May Fourth came at a time when students were starting to ask themselves how they could go back to “reading books” and sitting in a classroom every time the bell rang. What use was there, in such a situation, in reading books? For many Beida students, the experience of a political and social space outside the school affected their view of the institution itself and radicalized their attitude toward the school administration. Beida students brought to an extreme some of the premises that were implied in the school reorganization of the previous years and put forward requests that they considered to be the logical fulfi llment of the reform process. These requests addressed such issues as student government, direct participation in administration, and discipline, and configured a radical rethinking of the school organization. Some of the issues that were addressed in this debate could be considered of “minor concern,” but they acquired a larger relevance because they were framed in the light of the political experience of the larger movement. For example, In January 1920, as mentioned earlier, a student put forth a proposal to abolish the system of dormitory supervisors and substitute school-appointed personnel with student self-government. Among the reasons given for the change was the new consciousness of a fully developed organizational ability on the part of the students. Students should now take the initiative to research and experiment to see what was the right way of managing the dorms. Students “cannot be blindly passive and be the machines of others.”  Later the same year, Beida students asked twice to abolish the banzhang (class monitor) system; the administration agreed to replace it with a system of ten elected representatives for each class. Similar requests were advanced for the elimination of every kind of structure that imposed discipline “from

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the outside,” thus dwarfing the individual student’s responsibility and capacity for self-regulation. Similarly, class attendance and exams were among the most widely debated issues. The radicalization of student critique and its extension to all the aspects of the school organization seem to be a direct consequence of the political experience outside the university. In the end, this critique touched the very structure and operational logic of Beida. First, in the administration, the role of the students and student associations could no longer be ancillary to those of the faculty; student self-government could no longer be reduced to another learning experience through the organizational practice of student groups, carefully guided by professors. Self-government was taken as an opportunity for students to unite in order to let each individual manage himself, not to study the methods by which each individual can manage himself—the promises of selfgovernment cannot be exhausted simply by “studying self-government.”  A school was not made only of professors and personnel, and the students’ autonomy could not be placed under the ultimate authority (masked as “guidance” or “participation”) of the faculty administration. The logic of the professors’ government, which was one of the “progressive” reforms introduced in 1917, was challenged. The argument against it was based on a comparison with the national system at large. The school administration and its president were the counterpart of the “bureaucratic” class in national government. The solution was, once again, self-government, with full participation of the students in the governing assemblies. It was evident that just as previous to 1919 students were producing a space for alternative politics through the experience of organizations inside the school, now the political criticism of students could not separate the state from the school administration, and issues of national concern were reflected in the debate on university politics. In a special issue on “educational revolution,” the Beida Students’ Weekly published an essay on how to reform school life. The article started from a general critique of the electoral system. Elections were the expansion and amplification of autocracy, their evil nature more hidden than tyranny and therefore more difficult to eliminate. Contrary to the general idea that the electoral system was suited for “developed” countries, elections worked best in “half-backward” places, where people were not knowledgeable enough to discern the treachery hidden in the apparent fairness of the system. If the educational level of the people is high enough, “they will free themselves, have self awareness, autonomy and selfgovernment, they will be self-educated and capable of planning their lives with no need of representatives.”  This argument affected the school, because at Beida the administration as well as the student associations were based on the same evil electoral system. By the time a student graduated, he

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had received a daily indoctrination just by partaking in the school election rituals. His faith in the system is then completely ingrained and he can only reproduce the same attitude in society and national politics. The electoral system in the school therefore had to be abolished in all its forms and at each level; the same thing had to happen in the country. Looking closely, this was a very different position from the one taken by those who, in the same period, advocated an “ideal society,” a miniature democracy in the school to prepare good citizens for future political change. In this case, a radical political prescription, a challenge to the very meaning of democracy, was made to the state and the school at the same time. School politics had merged with politics tout court.

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SOCIAL PA R T I V

SPACE

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BETWEEN STREETS AND MONUMENTS

Beijing! Beijing is a piece of barren desert: there are no mountains, no water, no flowers. . . . In this state of unbearable fi lth I see the four thousand years’ doom of our ancient country. . . . When I walk alone in the deserted barren streets . . . I dream of the prosperity of Paris, the grandeur of Berlin, the skyscrapers and speedy cars of London. —Tong Yiping, “Chun chou” (Spring sorrows)

A N E W S C H O O L I N T H E O L D C A P I TA L ?

In the fi rst decades of the twentieth century, “new” intellectuals who resided in or traveled to Beijing came to adopt and employ an increasingly uniform palette of colors, a shared set of adjectives, and a common array of metaphors when they described the capital in novels, memoirs, and essays. The Beijing of literature was an old, stuff y, and corrupt place. Beijing, especially in comparison to Shanghai, and China’s port cities in general, was a backwater in which the self-described forces of the new felt they were in constant danger of drowning. The persistence of a long tradition of official habits seemed to be physically embodied in Beijing’s monuments, palaces, walls, and residences, which were a forceful reminder of the connection of the city with the imperial system, now discredited. The air, fi lled with the dust of unpaved roads, was a living metaphor for the political and moral atmosphere of the capital. “The city,” as David Strand noted, “exuded what others more prosaically termed a ‘bureaucratic odor.’ ”  To many modern intellectuals, the same objects and costumes that, in the eyes of the conservative scholar and the antiquarian, were cherished treasures of the past, looked like contaminated relics, miasmatic rotten carcasses. Literally in the midst of all this, in the

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area marked by the physical resilience of the past, in the old Imperial City, stood the very symbol of the new, the citadel of modern learning, Beijing University. Th is sharp contrast between the supposedly fossilized city and the new school also informs a large part of Beida’s celebratory literature and of the historiography of the May Fourth period, mainly in Chinese, but also in English. The new university often stands as a foil to old Beijing, which besieges and dominates the former with its monumental landmarks, and from whose influence the modernity of the school can only be closely sheltered. In this perspective, Beida and its intellectuals appear to be paralyzed in a double bind in their relation with the city and its people. On the one hand, due to the constraints both of intellectual elitism and urban spatial division, New Culture intellectuals, despite their increasing awareness of and declared interest in the plight of the people (and of the urban population in particu lar) are depicted as incapable of achieving any contact or connection with them. On the other hand, while Beida intellectuals failed to overcome their division with urban residents, they also failed to clearly separate themselves from the basest element of city life, to set themselves apart from the corrupt customs of the capital and truly be the morally upright “shining citadel on the hill” in the center of urban decadence. Students at Beijing University allegedly continued (well into the 1920s) to indulge in the temptations the capital had to offer, in the sense both of expensive or dubious entertainment and of connections to officialdom and bureaucracy. In these narratives, the city is understood either as a source of danger or as unexplored territory, something from which the university either should be separated or cannot help but remain estranged. In previous chapters I have argued how, during the May Fourth era, the idea of a clear-cut separation between Beida and the urban space of Beijing not only is untenable but also replicates the very argument the government used in its repression of student activism. In the following pages I will show how the relationship of Beijing University students with the urban space of Beijing before, during, and immediately after the May Fourth movement was not one of estrangement. Rather, urban space was a central factor in the political evolution of Beijing University student activists in that student politics was framed and shaped by the interaction with the physical, social, and economic structure of the city. A city, it must be noted, that was not at all “old,” unchanging, or fossilized. In his seminal study of city politics in Beijing, David Strand aptly criticized those descriptions in which “the city itself appears as so much masonry to be marched through and around, and ancient prop employed to deepen through contrast the colors of modern politics or to blend in with the atavism

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of those intent on reestablishing the monarchy.”  Nor, I would add, can the entangled relationship between activism and the space of the capital be reduced to the unidirectional influence of the city on the students: activists used urban space, expressed their politics through it, but, in doing so, they also produced changes in how the urban space was lived in and represented. Student marches and protests traced and defined a new map for radical politics in the streets of Beijing, a map that survived and was followed at least until 1989. The activists’ struggles truly prefigured “the social and political inscription of the geography of the city, through which urban space comes to represent and define the meaning of these struggles.”  Student activism changed the way the space of Beijing signified, in other words, how and what its buildings, streets, and monuments meant. This particu lar case therefore also points to a larger theoretical argument concerning how we describe and analyze urban space in general. We often tend to focus on the specificities of time and think of space as an “abstract, metaphysical concept, as a container for our lives rather than the structures we help to create.”  In such a perspective, then, space seems to imply and, in a sense, guarantee passivity, stasis, neutrality. Accounts of the history of Beijing and Beijing University that center on the simple new-old opposition precisely reduce the question of space to one of chronology and limit the issue of interactions and production of spaces to a question of modernity versus tradition. Students, intellectuals, and people in general appear to be more or less powerless vis-à-vis the city, its atmosphere, and the overwhelming historical weight of its monumental symbols. Monuments, unchanging fi xed signs, overpower them intellectually, politically, and physically. In these accounts, the city, which here is understood as the product not so much of an ever-controlling architect (as in other more “modern” cases) but of the unabated forces of culture and tradition, is the only true actor. People, no matter if they are marching, protesting, studying, or working, are without power to change the space they live in, and ultimately can only conform to this space and their position in it. However, when we describe the inhabitants of space as always passive and the architects of space as always active, we are not simply misrepresenting agencies in the city. By abstracting power to an elusive but omnipresent level, we are negating any political value to urban practices and denying agency to people to live in and make the city. Doing so, we are thus reproducing and reinforcing a conception that is part and parcel of an ideological belief, the power of abstract space. I propose instead to start from the position that space is not simply the abstract space of planners and architects, or the map of the city, or the symbolic representation of its monuments and palaces, but it is also lived space. Space is a “social process, an ‘ever changing geometry of power and

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signification’— constantly produced and transformed through everyday practices.”  Or, in a slightly different formulation, “spatial structures, like other sorts of structures, are durable and constraining but they also are subject to transformation as a consequence of the very social action that they shape.”  Nothing in a city, not even monuments, and especially not monuments, can be assumed either to remain unchanged (even when physically untouched) or to produce meanings coherently, continuously, and by themselves. Rather, urban space is continuously recycled, remade, and rewritten by social practices and especially by political interventions. Urban (lived) space is the terrain of political practices. The first aspect I consider is the urban environment of Beijing in relation to the university and its location. Reflecting its institutional status in its physical setting, Beida was indeed placed next to the symbolic centers of the imperial landscape. But it soon found itself very close also to those areas that were more clearly being marked by colonial domination and global capitalism. These spatial relationships were enacted and used when students marched through the city streets in May 1919. Students congregated in front of a symbol of the imperial legacy (Tiananmen) and moved towards the center of colonial presence, the Legation Quarter. By rethinking the significance of this path, I challenge established notions on how power and history are embodied in monuments and buildings. Finally, May 4, 1919, was also literally a “movement,” a march that led students into the city en masse. In that, it was also the moment in which a particular kind of activism became public, and it did so by the students physically being in the city streets, interacting with the spatial hierarchy of Beijing, by occupying “a space.” It was only through this overt taking over of public space and through the symbolic inscription of specific areas of the city that the political category of “students” found its place.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MONUMENTS

In April 1917 an article in Eastern Miscellany (Dong fang zazhi) warned the new university president about the corruption that had allegedly seeped deep into Beida, and did so by pointing explicitly to the social and physical environment in which the University was settled: I just want to say one word of advice to Cai Yuanpei: the reason why the state established the university is to produce the pillars of the state (guojia). These so-called pillars of the state were not supposed to rush out and get employed in the administration or pursue a bureaucratic career. Initially the state meant to use the university to train talent that could be at

the core of the country’s strength. At Beijing University, because of its position in the city, bureaucratic thought has already penetrated deeply among scholars and cannot be eliminated. Besides, many Beida professors are holding (or are incumbent of ) official posts, and because of this, they cannot but cultivate social relationships.

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In 1898, the new Imperial University had been strategically placed in a largely secluded section of the city in a building that had a direct connection with the imperial house. The university was located inside the Imperial City, a symbolically and physically restricted area, at that time still enclosed by walls. The closest access point through the walls was Donghuamen immediately southeast of the school and it is difficult to imagine that any close integration with city life and people—such as we see in the May Fourth period— could have taken place under such spatial constraints. Despite attempts to move the university outside the city walls to a less cramped and newer location, the university managed only to expand in the same neighborhood, where, during the early Republic, new centers of power were located. The physical persistence of new institutions in old imperial or official buildings seemed to imply the persistence of traditional attitudes and to signal continuity between the imperial and republican states. Zhang Guotao recalls the atmosphere that enveloped Beijing and the university neighborhood in 1916: “The President’s office, the Premier’s office, Parliament, and other buildings bearing the Republic of China insignia were scattered about the city, all retaining the aura of official residences of past dynasties. They displayed nothing new. Th is applied also to Peking University, which retained much of the atmosphere of the old Imperial Capital Academy.”  By 1918 the three main buildings that made up Beijing University all lay at a short walking distance from the red walls and yellow roofs of the Forbidden City. The first question is whether this physical proximity to what remained an enduring symbol of culture and power did or did not constitute a major influence in the political conscience of students and teachers at Beida. In the late Qing, the significance of placing the Imperial University (Jingshi Daxue Tang), the predecessor of Beida, next to the center of dynastic authority was not lost on the teachers and students. On several occasions they expressed their conviction that the university was a direct descendant of the imperial schools and, like the Taixue and the Guozijian, had a special relationship with the state. The legacy of these long-gone predecessors was reclaimed again in the late 1940s; in a speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Beijing University, then president Hu Shi identified the origins of a “national university” in the creation of the Taixue under the Han emperor Wudi in 124 a.d., making Beida de facto the oldest university in the world.

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But frames of comparisons that were viable and current before and long after the May Fourth period were not necessarily appropriate in the 1910s. Rather, by the early Republic, the imperial legacy had lost most of its prestige and, by 1917, the “special relationship” of Beijing University with the state was in contention as well. As shown in part II, a university whose main tenet was the withdrawal from state functions could not so easily call upon the heritage of the Taixue. In speeches, essays, and memoirs of the May Fourth years, there are almost no references connecting Beida to an imperial history of “state” institutions: comparisons were usually made with Western examples, and the brief life of the modern university in China was pitted against longer-lasting models in Europe and the United States. As for the supposed influence exuding from the imperial walls, in memoirs from the 1920s or early 1930s concerning May Fourth Beida, there is almost no indication of the Forbidden City as a relevant presence for student life in the neighborhood. The first time the Forbidden City is mentioned as a central feature in students’ recollection is in a memoir by Zhu Haitao, who received his diploma from the Beida graduate school in 1935; he claims that it was under the imperial influence of the Forbidden City that “the people of Beida were molded.”  Zhu’s memoir, however, was written in the 1940s (close to the time of Hu Shi’s statement on the Taixue), when Japanese troops had occupied Beijing and used Beida’s Honglou building as a lodging for the soldiers. Under such conditions and in the climate of war time national crisis, it is quite understandable that a former student might have given centrality in his remembrances to one of the most important cultural symbols of national continuity and pride. One could indeed interpret these silences (regarding the Forbidden City) psychoanalytically, as part of a subconscious removal, as speaking of a (now forbidden or denied) nostalgia for the past legacy. However, the fact that the nostalgia is voiced and the legacy is claimed before and after the May Fourth period makes the omission of any reference to the imperial legacy significant, and one that echoes the students’ actions described in the previous chapters. More fundamentally, despite the seemingly overbearing presence of the Forbidden City and the symbols of imperial power in Beijing’s urban texture, we cannot take monuments as exercising an unchanging and almost irresistible influence over an environment and its inhabitants. That is, we cannot just assume that the formal continuity established by the imposing presence of monuments is an unequivocal sign of unchanged significance. While we are more ready to accept multiple possibilities of interpretation in the case of texts, buildings and monuments seem to have their symbolism sculpted in stone. However, as Lewis Mumford famously argued, stone “gives a false sense of continuity, a deceptive assurance of life.”  A building is probably

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more complex than a text, not less. Some of the “Beida people” are described as “reading” (yuedu) the Forbidden City, like spectators or mesmerized tourists. But monuments, as parts of urban space, are not like texts that can be simply “read,” nor is architecture just a language. From the very moment of their ideation, buildings, unlike texts, evolve through a series of transpositions, from paper, to stone, to inhabited space, “with meaning in each transposition shaped by the logic of the genre or medium in which it is located.”  They continue to evolve after completion, because buildings are also “lived,” their historical relevance and significance changing over time in relation to different people. The meanings of an edifice (and monument) change as it is planned, built, inhabited, and interpreted. “The meanings of place are created through practice.”  Following Henri Lefebvre, a monument is a “specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore by means of—and for the sake of—a particular action.”  The production of space owes as much to those who consume it as it does to those who create it. And as such, it can be understood only in its changing context. Clearly, “monument” here means something different from the paralyzing weight of stone and mortar that, in Nietzsche’s famous attack on German historicism, oppressed and almost literally crushed new life and history. Rather, monuments are lived buildings, whose meaning can and does change according to the practices taking place in and around them. If we really want to employ the metaphor of buildings as texts, then we have to assume that, as with books, “the ‘reading’ of people acting in space is also a kind of ‘writing’ as new meanings are formed. The consumption of place becomes the production of place.”  Th is is clearly nothing new nor exclusive to the twentieth-century city. Susan Naquin has cautioned against the idea of an “eternal Peking,” producing a single, unified, and controllable response among its residents and its visitors. Rather than inferring that, faced with the impressive arrays of walls and gates, “all responded like the idealized tributary, overawed by the Son of Heaven,” we must assume that “Peking was many things to many people.”  And if this is a safe assumption in general, it is probably even more so in the midst of the transformations that affected Beijing since the last years of the Qing. Therefore, any consideration of the role of monuments in Beijing and the evolving political consciousness of its inhabitants must deal first with the physical but mainly with the social, economical, and cultural changes in the city. The urban spatial hierarchy of Qing Beijing, with its sequence of gates, buildings, walls, and streets, represented “powerful testimony and physical proof of the imperial order.”  And it was indeed the case that, in imperial

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times, “proximity to the emperor was a sign of rank: as a general rule, the closer a residence lay to the center of the city, the more privileged it was.”  But with the decline and end of dynastic power, and the radical change this brought in the cultural and political sphere, we cannot assume that this urban hierarchy stayed the same. Rather, change in the cultural symbolism became evident and was in turn reinforced by the structural transformation of the city through public works in the early years of the Republic.

LIFE IN A CHANGING NEIGHBORHOOD

The permanence of monuments in their allotted place can obscure how the fabric of the city was transformed around them and especially how activities flourished in other, less visible places, how the cultural and social structure of the city developed often on the backdrop of this monumental landscape. Richard Belsky has illustrated how, despite the physical permanence of the structure of the Ming cityscape during the 260 years of Qing rule, the social (and cultural) space of Beijing was dramatically reshaped following the MingQing transition. The changes were clearly no less radical when the imperial system itself ceased to exist. So while the Forbidden City and other physical remnants of the imperial past continued to occupy their fi xed positions in the university neighborhood, other factors were also at play in redefining urban space and, in particular, the central area in which Beida was located. From both students’ recollections and actions, it is evident that these spatial transformations had a much closer relationship with, and relevance to, student life and politics than the “unmovable signs of tradition” had. These transformations, in turn, further contribute to alter the significance of the monumental legacy of the city. If the city can indeed be viewed as a palimpsest, as David Strand suggests, it is always a defective one, in which the newly inscribed texts insert themselves in the older layers, radically altering preexisting meanings. For example, by the end of the nineteenth century, the imperial palace was no longer the unchallenged center of power in Beijing. After the second Opium War in 1860, foreign legations were established in Beijing. These Western-style buildings stood out in the imperial architecture of downtown Beijing, a noticeable reminder of a competing hierarchy of power. They were concentrated in the southeast corner of the Imperial City, not far from Qianmen and just south of what is now Chang’an Avenue, in the area that became known as the Legation Quarter. Western travelers to Beijing described their anticlimactic surprise when the fi rst thing they saw of the Chinese capital after descending from the train was a modern European street with European houses.

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The history of the Legation Quarter has been told elsewhere, but some details are relevant here. The choice of this par ticu lar location for the foreign diplomatic corps in the Chinese capital did not please the Qing government, who offered first the old Summer Palace and later a tract of land outside the west wall as alternative sites. But the symbolic effect of a position close to the imperial palace did not escape the Western negotiators who insisted on this area, which had been previously host to delegations from Asian “tributary” states and Russia. The Legation Quarter, however, did not exist as such until after the Boxer siege, which provided the residents with an epic of resistance versus the Chinese outside and made the idea of an enclosed and protected foreign enclave palatable. The Boxer uprising also marked an expansion of the foreign presence into buildings closely connected with the Qing imperial house, like the Hanlin College and the Imperial Carriage Park, which became part of the British Legation after 1900, thus making even more evident the symbolic shift of power in the physical landscape. Also, in many ways, a process of remaking of the city according to a concept of hygienic modernity started in concurrence with the acceptance of a Western presence within the walls and in par ticu lar with the restructuring following the Boxer Rebellion and the year-long occupation of the city by foreign troops. “The cleansing fires [of the Boxer Rebellion], so cruel to the individual, benefited the city as a whole. The repulsive sights and vile odours disappeared and a higher ideal of municipal cleanliness began.”  In this process of urban cleansing, the well-lit, organized, clean streets of the Legation Quarter were meant to play the role of a beacon and model for the whole city. At the same time, changes affected the old imperial compound directly. Already in 1860 the barriers of invisibility that protected the Forbidden City had been raised, when Prince Gong, “anxious to propitiate foreigners,”  gave them (and commoners) permission to walk or ride horses on the inner city walls and peer (from afar) into the imperial compound. Th is can be viewed as the fi rst step of a process that transformed the imperial palace from a closed but lived “city”— one with a social structure, population, and economy—into a true monument, a memorial of its past glory. In 1912, while the deposed emperor was allowed to occupy the inner part of the palace, the outer quarter was taken over and destined to public use. At the end of 1924, with the expulsion of the imperial family from the palace, the transformation was complete: the Forbidden City became the Palace Museum, and the rear palaces were opened for the fi rst time to the public in October 1925. The May Fourth movement took place during this process of “monumentalization” (or museification), and, as we will see, had a profound effect on it.

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The articulation of the walls, gates, avenues, and hutong (alleyways) of Beijing’s Inner City survived in almost “pristine imperial conditions” up until the communist reorganization in 1949 (or even, one could argue, until the capitalistic cataclysm of the last two decades) but the transformations that affected the city structure during the late Qing and Republican period were not insignificant. The transportation projects in the early twentieth century redefined Beijing’s spatial order (including the old Imperial City), with thoroughfares replacing walls in defining the city structure. The unity of imperial walls was broken and city gates torn down in order to allow for avenues to run unobstructed along the main north-south and east-west axes. Beyond these rather massive interventions in the central area of Beijing also lies a radical shift in the perception and discourse of urban structure— the city was no longer organized around monuments but instead along streets and avenues. Already in 1910, Qing officials had proposed to remove the walls and substitute them with streetcars,  thus showing that, at least for some “modern-minded” Chinese, the organizing principles of the city were open to contention. It is in such moments of tumultuous change that, according to Henri Lefebvre, monuments lose prestige, the old weave of the city unravels, and the aspects of life that take place at street level assume a new relevance.  While political life was not absolutely restricted within the Forbidden City during the Qing, it was supposed to have the palace as its ultimate horizon. The discussion of politics outside the few formally empowered to this task was widely discouraged, if not outright prohibited; the great majority of people were encouraged not to care.  The separation of the political was made evident in the few occasions in which the emperor moved inside the city: he was sheltered and hidden, as the significance of his political power rested also in his separation from common urban life. Th is invisibility, protected by massive walls and literally enshrined in monumentality, was replicated at a more quotidian level in the relationship of the populace of Beijing with the government at large: there were very few possibilities of direct interaction with the many officials in the city, who were usually seen passing by in sedan chairs and palanquins, hidden from the gaze of the city dwellers.  When students demonstrated in May and June 1919, they chose the streets as the newly available locus of political intervention. They addressed people at street level and conducted political activities on the streets (whether promoting national products, marching, or lecturing). Students marched on the newly enlarged roads that connected different sections of the city. In contrast, the government, to prevent the students’ movement, used other elements in the city structure, such as walls and gates, which were part of the organization of the imperial capital.

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Judging from these few examples, it is clearly difficult if not impossible to speak of an eternal, unchanging Beijing. Rather, nostalgic views of “old Beijing” emerged only after the demise of the imperial system and the changes in the Republican era, changes in large part due to the insertion in a worldwide capitalist market and a modern state, something that affected both the physical shape of the city and its representations. Republican Beijing was a modern city, “especially if modernity is understood . . . to be a condition of existence structured by large-scale capitalist industrial production in an integrated world characterized by bureaucratic nation-states and a people’s consciousness of, and actions to, define their position in this integrated world.”  From this modernity, the nostalgia for the customs of the past, for “old Beijing,” provided refuge. Tradition, as it always does, emerged out of modernity. Likewise, the university and its inhabitants did not sit like a modern alien body inside a hostile, alluring, or distant old city. Rather, the university was integrated with the surrounding city through a flow of people who took advantage of the lack of physical barriers between campus and community, and interacted with the space of this par ticu lar modern city, a space that combined the characteristics of the locale (the “tradition”) and the overarching influence of an integrated world. From Beida students’ recollections, it seems that, at least until 1919, they concentrated their forays to the immediate neighborhood of the university, an area where they found accommodation, cheap food, as well as, as we will see, all kinds of entertainment and modern public spaces. The university neighborhood, however limited, was remarkable not only for the presence of the imperial monuments but because it had been heavily affected by the impact of capitalist economy on the socioeconomic equilibrium of the capital city. Despite the fact that for many Beijing still seemed incapable of projecting the image of a modern city, by the Republican period it was very much inserted in the world economy. The problem was rather how Beijing participated in this economic network: the city had never been an industrial center and the impact of the capitalist economy was subtle but no less profound. Local production in the city was limited to an artisan or preindustrial market, which barely sustained the city population.  With the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the production of high-end luxury goods dropped and the introduction of more fashionable Western merchandise changed the local equilibrium of commerce in the downtown area. In general, Beijing found itself at the receiving end of the market for commodities, which were mostly imported from outside. Wangfujing in the east and Xidan in the west emerged as the new modern shopping centers and quickly rivaled the century-old shopping districts of Qianmen and Dazhalan. Wangfujing developed into the most famous

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commercial street in Beijing during the early twentieth century, in part as an after-effect of the devastation brought by the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and a subsequent major restoration in 1906. Modern urban streets, as Peter Carroll has illustrated in the case of Suzhou, were much more than transport vectors, rather “they functioned as the premier instrument and site of modern urban life.”  Street construction was viewed by state actors and planners as the favored instrument to enact political, cultural, and social change, but the streets (and the people in the streets) also embodied a larger significance in the international context, standing as synecdoche for Chinese national civilization. For these reasons, “the modern macadam road was the defining artifact of Chinese modernity.”  In Beijing, Wangfujing was the quintessential modern road. Wangfujing was just a few minutes’ walk from the Beida buildings. Along the street, fashionable stores specialized in imported commodities and catered to the tastes of the residents of the Legation Quarter nearby, as well as to those of more prosperous Chinese customers. “Here, among other things, are treasures we will hesitate to afford—watches made in Europe, gorgeously enameled, wreathed in pearls, studded in diamonds, tiny timepieces set in thumb rings, larger ones such as Chinese princes delighted to hang from their belts in days when belts fitted loosely over satin robes.”  Th is description of a curio shop in Wangfujing in 1922 is followed by the author’s complaints on the quite exorbitant prices and by her fond recollection of the times around the turn of the century, when, before the full-blown expansion of the Legation Quarter, everything was much more affordable. Western-style and foreign-owned boutiques did not exhaust the array of attractions of Wangfujing, whose inherent hybrid character was epitomized by one of the most famous and diversified shopping locations in the whole city, the Dong’an Indoor Market. The market was originally built in 1903 when Wangfujing was undergoing renovation (it was being paved, thus becoming a modern “horse-road” or malu) and the various open-air stalls were transferred to a new location indoors. Among the characteristics that made Dong’an unique was precisely the fact that it was “covered”: rebuilt in 1912, it was one of the first examples of modern architecture in Beijing, noticeable for its use of glass, steel, and iron. This set it apart from “traditional” markets, usually held in the open on temple grounds. Also, unlike temple markets, Dong’an was managed by the police. Dong’an was also different from the bazaars that would later open in Beijing (which sold exclusively Chinese products), as it not only sold upscale luxury goods and rare objects, but also household items. Its stalls ranged from the stylish to the shabby

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and included entertainment (martial arts, art exhibits, magic shows), restaurants, and shops. It was truly an eclectic, exciting place, dazzling to the eyes, ears, and probably the nose: “shops selling almost every imaginable article, toys, jewelry, furniture, furs, clothing, books, pictures, candles, cakes, are on each side of the big passageway, while in the center are tables of stalls on which are spread out brassware, notions [sic], tongue scrapers, combs, chopsticks, fruit, candies. All of the tables are cleared every night, the unsold goods being carried away in big baskets.”  It included restaurants, specializing both in regional Chinese and Western cuisine, an active billiard club, famous bookstores, tea houses, and laoziguan (Northern-style cabaret or tea house). The Jixiang Theater, in the northern side of the market, could seat over a thousand spectators and hosted some of Beijing’s most famous performers (including opera star Mei Lanfang). The area reserved for acrobats was over a thousand square meters (about nine thousand square feet). A 1933 survey lists 925 stores in the market, 267 with permanent stand and a storefront as well as 658 carts. The clientele was as diverse as the merchandise on sale: Dong’an “was a place where scholars in long robes would mingle with coarsely jacketed workers along the market’s narrow passageways and rub shoulders with dandy flaneurs, busy housekeepers and curious foreigners.”  While I would not go as far as to describe it as a “true place of democratic encounter,”  the Dong’an Market, in its modern yet not strictly rational organization, in its diverse customer base, in its geographical and typological variety of products, did embody the unprecedented and multifaceted transformations that had affected the locale of downtown Beijing through the intervention of the global (in the form of capitalist modernity). For many Chinese citizens, a trip to Wangfujing, if not “a journey to an exotic land,” was at least an encounter with the effects of modernity in city space. It provided the rare opportunity to see foreigners, to admire the latest in international fashion and shopping facilities, and “to become familiar with the tastes and the lifestyles of the modern world.”  To Beijingers of all classes, Wangfujing offered a chance to experience modern urbanity, not simply as they knew it existed in Europe, but in the specific forms it had taken in their own city. Beijing University students figured conspicuously among the visitors to the new shopping areas—they lived just a few blocks away. Deng Xihua recalls the impressions the varied street life left on a young student from rural Sichuan: “With my countrymen I wandered along the quiet alleys and through the mad business streets of Peking— streets echoing with bells and

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shouting and a-gleam with golden signs. Streets where the penetrating noise of tambourines burst from the doors of smelly theaters; streets with stores dressed upon and lacquered like brides on their wedding day.”  Similarly, Beida students seemed to have grown fond of another modern space born out of the transformations in central Beijing. The first public park in Beijing, Central Park (Zhongyang Gongyuan), was inaugurated in 1914 on the site of the Altar of Earth and Grain, one of the most restricted imperial altars and part of the Forbidden City complex, to provide the capital with what was perceived to be an essential attribute of a modern city, a public green space for leisure, health, and education. Despite the drab and desolate conditions in which it allegedly remained for a large part of this period, Central Park was extremely popular among students and Beijing residents in general. An admission fee was charged at the park gate and this automatically excluded the poor majority of Beijing residents. However, an American missionary survey conducted in 1918 through 1919 concluded that “in spite of the admission fee, four thousand to five thousand people a day went to the Park during the summer, and a hundred or two in the winter. When there were festivals or special occasions, admission to the park was usually free, and on these days 10,000 people would fi ll the park’s sixty acres.”  Indeed the park population seems to have been quite inclusive, ranging from petty merchants and peddlers to prostitutes and concubines. As Deng Xihua recalled: I wandered with my friends in Central Park. . . . We laughed importantly and joked in a business-like manner. We shot bold glances at passers-by— at the shy daughters of merchants, fat and rosy-cheeked, who wore blue trousers and gold bracelets; at the plain-looking, bobbed-haired girl students in short, foreign–style skirts, and at the prostitutes with their exquisite stone-like faces and perfect bangs. The latter went past us without looking. Neither our robes nor eye-glasses could hide from their experienced eye the thinness of our pocket-books.

Other students and teachers had less pleasant memories of the atmosphere of the park, precisely because this strange mixture of professions, tastes, and social strata highlighted the still “uncivilized” character of Chinese population. However, these recollections all seem to point to the fact that, at least in public parks and similar modern areas, the level of segregation between intellectuals and the rest of the people was low. Shi Mingzheng, in his essay on Republican Beijing’s parks, defines them as “public spaces,” caught in a tension between state control and possible utilization by varied sectors of society. Parks were indeed public spaces—not unlike the Dong’an Market—in the sense that they presented a chance to interact with an ample selection of

which play I should attend that afternoon. There were comparatively few to get an excuse. During the two years or more in which I was enamored sonal habits and that my scholarly standing was very poor.

If Gu Jiegang managed to turn his youthful passion for theater into a more respectable devotion to the study of popular culture as a foundation for the historical profession, for most of his colleagues, theater was a kind of entertainment that ranked almost at the same level as prostitution and gambling, and in which they continued to indulge even after the moral reforms introduced by Cai Yuanpei in 1917. This was not high theater. While there probably was a small group of Beijing University students who had a more intellectual approach toward theater, went to expensive venues, and were undoubtedly capable of writing reviews and literary analysis, the large majority went to second- or third-level performances, “often sitting in unhygienic boxes and stalls, yelling to this or that actor.” Then, once home, they took their huqin and start singing the arias. Theaters of this kind were not expensive: according to Sidney Gamble’s 1919 survey of Beijing, a first-class box in a theater (possibly a decent establishment) was about four hundred coppers ($2.90) while one could obtain the cheapest available ticket for about one-twentieth of that. It was definitively affordable for “poor” university students as well for a large section of Beijing population, probably not unlike movie theaters today. From this brief description of the immediate Beida neighborhood, we get a picture of an area that was not at all dominated by vestiges of the past, but was rather vibrant in entertainment (low and high) and marked by the everchanging spectacle of an evolving modern urban culture, in which students took evident pleasure in partaking. Students enjoyed an in-between position

M O N U M E N T S

with the theater, it goes without saying that I became careless in my per-

A N D

classes in session in the afternoon, and when there were, I never bothered

S T R E E T S

our school was located) to look at the announcements and determine

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from the old Translation Bureau (where the Preparatory Department of

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I made a practice, during the ten minute recess between classes, to walk

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the changing Beijing society and gain a fi rst-hand knowledge of its transformations. Significantly, on the eve of the May Fourth demonstrations, one of the New Culture leaders, Li Dazhao, called for a lifting of the admission fees to all Beijing parks, with the goal of making them truly “public” and inclusive. The passion of university students for theater is also quite (in)famous. Theaters were one of the main attractions of Beijing, and the great historian Gu Jiegang figures as probably the most notable theater fanatic in the university history.

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in the city. Beyond their individual class and economic status (which varied widely, from extremely rich to relatively poor), finding “the standard of dress and deportment no major impediment,”  they could move freely between Western-style boutiques and the eclectic Dong’an Market, allegedly modern public parks, and supposedly traditional theaters. In this area, then, students were taking on another identity: they were consumers and were probably viewed as such by shopkeepers and vendors. Except maybe for those involved in frugal experiments, students seemed to be consuming voraciously and with pleasure. Students’ consumption was not a political, or particularly modern, act. Nonetheless, it was in their role as consumers that students gained knowledge about areas of the city where the impact of the capitalist economy and state project of modernization was the greatest. And while it is undeniable that Beida students did not have much interaction with the majority of the population, which was too poor to partake in the city’s amenities, it was relying on their experience with this par ticu lar urban space that students were able to expand their activities beyond the university neighborhood. On the one hand, the interaction with these areas made students feel part of a consumerist, open commercial culture that must have appeared (at the time) equalitarian and liberating: equality in front of the commodity masked the extension and inscription of social differences in city space. On the other hand, the fact that these areas were affected by economic changes singled them out for student political actions during and after 1919. Boycotts, lectures, and demonstrations explicitly targeted these places. Wangfujing became one of the main stages for the Popular Education Lectures aimed both at foreigners and common citizens. Soon after May Fourth, Beijing University students were caught distributing leaflets to the soldiers who frequented Central Park. It is in relation to these places, rather than the imperial palace—still largely inaccessible—that the May Fourth demonstrations should be understood.

PROTECTING THE SANCTUARY

The university administration was not pleased with the degree with which students participated in the life of the area around the school: with some ambivalence, some of Beida’s “new” intellectuals saw the city as a “corrupting influence” and were concerned with the effects that students’ individual forays into this world might have. This was a concern, we will see, that extended from the students’ souls to their bodies. In 1918, stricter and more direct regulations were proposed, addressing the very issue of the place of the university in the city. In January, the Evaluating Committee (Pingyihui) passed a proposal that called for the formation of a University Club (Daxue Julebu), a

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University Quarter (Daxue Qu), and the enforcement of a dress code for students. The three initiatives shared a double goal of enhancing the specificity of the university environment while increasing the control of its inhabitants. The University Club was thought of as a general meeting place for students and faculty that could provide possibilities for exchange and “wholesome” entertainment. All student associations were supposed to move their activities in the club. In the intention of the supporters of the proposal, this would have helped overcome the divisions along the lines of regional provenance or intellectual proclivities, thus shaping a unique “Beida atmosphere.” A market, where healthy, good-quality food and groceries could be bought at reasonable prices, as well as various forms of entertainment were to be housed in the club. The aim was to “foster the autonomous spirit of the students,”  but it is obvious that the club also represented an attempt to channel this spirit and keep student activities inside the university by reducing possible pretexts to venture into the streets of Beijing. The proposal for the creation of an officially marked University Quarter pushed this concept a step further by postulating a clear-cut division between the school and the city. The area around Beida—no specific borders were indicated in the proposal—was to be placed under the sole and direct administration of the university. The university would have been in charge of landscaping, transportation, an intradistrict phone ser vice, and even public order. Firefighter squads were to be composed of student volunteers. The city police was supposed to have an office in the quarter, but students could not be arrested inside the University Quarter and even in the city (if wearing the uniform) other than for serious felonies. The students would have been at the same time sheltered from the authority of the state and separated from urban society. Parks, a hospital, and a stadium were to be part of the project. The University Quarter was meant to provide a “good atmosphere for student activities, thus developing in them a noble spirit”; to foster a spirit of mutual exchange and feelings of community by having faculty, students, and employees live close to each other; and to function as a model for other areas of the city. In this project, a large part of the authority would have resided with the university president: he was, in a sense, in charge of not simply the university area but also, almost literally, the body of each and every single student. He had to consent before any student could be arrested, and he had the power of intervening whenever something menaced the physical health (diseases, lack of hygiene, etc.) or the moral sanity (bad customs) of the student body. In these cases, he could ask the police to act (or at least discuss with them the appropriate measures). The space of the quarter would have been marked by the mandatory use of uniforms, which were described in painstaking detail. Because the uniform

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had to fit people young and old, be comfortable in winter and summer, and accommodate those not used to Western clothes, it was decided to adopt a black “cap and gown.” Both the brimless hat and the gown carried markers— a tassel for the hat, different length of sleeves and pockets for the gown— signaling the hierarchy of students, professors, and president. The proposal suggested that uniforms be worn for all activities inside the university quarter, between 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. (with the exception of physical education classes and sport activities, which required a different kind of dress code). Nonteaching employees did not have a uniform. Th is project reproduced in a smaller scale (an institution and its neighborhood instead of a city) the modernist project of urban change, that is, “to transform the conditions in which people ordered their everyday lives, by reaching into the realms of their daily practices, right down to the level of hygiene and patterns of entertainment.”  By taking control of the whole university area, down to the minimal details, the proponents of the university district aimed to free the students from pernicious habits, shelter them from physically and morally bad influences, thus allowing a full, unencumbered development. We see here at play the same dual logic of emancipation and discipline that Michael Tsin has identified as crucial in modern urban reform. The attention paid to food, clothes, and the physical environment recalls Haussmann’s obsession with salubrity, the idea of a city as a medicalizable object, translated into the modern Chinese with the term weisheng, a hygienic modernity according to which people’s bodies and minds can be improved if we change the way they dress, eat, clean, walk, and interact. However, even if the project constituted an attempt “to transform the university into a model community, a sanctuary for upright scholars pursuing the higher things in life,”  it never went beyond the stage of ideation. The proposal never amounted to anything more than a document approved by the administration and had little or no relevance in the general evolution of the university. The club and the quarter were not further debated and, as for the uniforms, it was finally decided in April 1919 to keep the dress code to the strict minimum: a six-person committee agreed that only students in the preparatory courses had to wear a uniform (from an army store) while undergraduates were only to wear a hat and a pin. It was a step back not only from the grandiose project of just a year earlier but also from the dress code imposed upon unruly university students in the late Qing. It is difficult to ascertain what became of this 1918 proposal, whether its realization was ever attempted and, if implementation was envisioned, what obstacles stood in its way. But one can guess that, while it was consonant with the Chinese and global discourse of urban modernity, this proposal went against too many practical interests and social-cultural trends. First, the uni-

A N D M O N U M E N T S

The demonstrations of May Fourth have been seen as a turning point in the history of Chinese nationalism, the overwhelming of culture by politics, or a spectacular example of political theater. In many of the recollections of the

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—Robert Musil

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There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

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FA C I N G A G AT E ( B A C K WA R D )

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versity did not have the economic means to sustain such a project. It depended fully upon the state for its finances, and it is difficult to imagine a scenario where the city government would abdicate control of a part of its central area while financing the university to take care of it. In the same way, how could the state have tolerated (and subsidized) the existence of a public institution and its community in an area that was sheltered from its own authority? The proposal of a disciplined, secluded university district also ran against the Beida student ethos of undisciplined, antiritual behavior, which, by 1919, had already taken ground and had become one of the salient characteristics of the school. Finally, the project went against the general transformation of the city, which, by the Republican period, was moving toward an increasing integration in transportation and ease of communication. If anything, this project is striking for how much it was at odds with the openness that stood as one of the defining traits of Beijing University. The proposal looks like a late reaction to the increasingly disproportionate number of auditors that populated the campus, its porous borders, and the expansion of student activities outside the university. This proposal also clearly illustrated the ambivalence in the university administration’s evaluation of the relationship between students and the city. While the faculty and the academic leadership remained fearful of student involvement in the “lowest level” of city life, they were otherwise supportive of the student initiatives that took them (usually in an organized fashion) outside the school. The streets then (as now) embodied both the bright side of social commitment and learning, and the dark areas of the unethical, the base, the dirty. The project of the quarter thus highlights a contradiction that lay at the foundation of Beida and of many urban universities: it was born out of a particular relationship with state power and local society, its space carved out of the urban space, and while separated by a task that was beyond the scope of the locale, its life—both in the sense of livelihood and of intellectual and political vivacity—relied on a connection with the streets of the city itself. This contradiction was to be explored and exploded on May 4, 1919.

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Beijing University students of 1919, May Fourth was described fi rst and foremost as a process of learning, a movement toward the city and its people that radically affected the consciousness of the demonstrators. But the movement of students in the streets of Beijing also acted on the city itself. The path of the demonstration and the actions of the students targeted monuments and specific areas, thus earmarking and retracing an emerging hierarchy of urban spaces. Moreover, students further transformed the meanings of these places by locating them on a new map of radicalism that would be followed for the rest of the twentieth century. The “May Fourth” events—the developments at the Versailles Peace Conference, the meeting at Beida on May 3, the hasty preparations throughout the night, and the Beijing demonstration itself—are well known. Yet, a few moments of that day still remain open to contention. Many of the intellectuals and students who joined together in the May Fourth demonstrations split a few years later along differing political lines, giving rise to a series of contrasting claims as to who did what during the peak period of activism in May and June. Many of these contested points are minor, and it is easy to dismiss the overall narrative of Zhang Guotao or Luo Jialun, to give two notable examples, each of whom portrays himself as deus ex machina not only with regard to the May Fourth events but also in a broader political story. In other cases, details are both more complicated and more relevant to the development and the significance of the student movement. For example, how the plan of the protest, its route, and its aim were decided— an element crucial to understanding the relationship of the demonstration to urban space—remains largely an open issue. The May Fourth protest was hastily planned: Beijing students were trying to get organized for May 7, National Humiliation Day, commemorating the fourth anniversary of the “twentyone demands” in a citywide protest against Japa nese imperialism. The sudden acceleration of the plan was due to news coming from the Versailles Peace Conference, whose final decision was to transfer German territories in Shandong to Japan. In light of these developments, student representatives convened at the Beida School of Law at Beiheyan on the evening of May 3 and decided to hold the demonstration the following day. They sent telegrams both to the Chinese representative in Paris and to students and associations in other provinces calling for a nationwide protest on May 7. No mention of the route was apparently made in the resolutions of the May 3. Preparations were feverish during the night to craft leaflets and letters addressing both the city residents and the representatives of the foreign powers, who—students thought—could influence the outcome of the Versailles negotiations. The route was further discussed

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in the morning of May 4 when student representatives from thirteen schools gathered once again at Beida School of Law—they agreed to march from Tiananmen to the Legation Quarter and then to the commercial district of Hatamen (Chongwenmen), further east. When, in the early afternoon of that same day, thousands of students convened in front of Tiananmen, they declared that they intended “to march and demonstrate in order to let our fellow countrymen know what the situation is. Then,” they continued, “we will march to the English, American, French, Italian embassies and all the other embassies at the Legation Quarter to make clear our intent. Finally, we will reconvene here and discuss what to do next.”  The students reassured the Beijing infantry garrison commander of this “peaceful” plan and were allowed to go on with their demonstration. The first question that the process of students in urban space poses is, “Why start there?” Tiananmen had been historically a point of communication between the imperial authority and (at least some of) its subjects. Used by the emperor himself only in the rare occasions when he left the Imperial City to participate in sacrifices, wars, or tours, it was however the place where imperial edicts were announced, “when a new emperor was enthroned or a royal heir was born.”  It is unclear whether the emperor himself was present at these occasions. It was also the entrance to the Imperial City traditionally used by petitioning officials. Focusing on this last use, Rudolph Wagner argues that by choosing this par ticu lar location for the start of their fi rst massive public action, students arrogated the right to “speak for the people” as petitioning officials representing the whole nation. By centering their effort around the adjacent symbol of power, they made (or remade) the imperial palace the center of the nation. Wagner is right on the last point. By placing themselves against the background of the vermillion walls and yellow roofs of the imperial palace, the May Fourth students did indeed make Tiananmen the central symbol of national politics. But this process had very little or nothing to do with the legacy of imperial power. Or, at least, not until the sun set on the day of May 4, 1919. Nobody can dispute that Tiananmen had a long association with power and authority—although, as we will see, its symbolic relevance increased exponentially in the twentieth century. Nor will I go so far as to argue that the students picked the place at random. But I do believe that, on May 4, 1919, Tiananmen had been largely unhinged from any stable set of references, its meaning largely unsettled and open to challenges. In a sense, Tiananmen did not signify what it does now (nor did it convey meaning in the same way), because it was only the demonstration of May Fourth that started the process of resignification that gave the Gate its modern symbolic power. We cannot

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assume continuity of meaning in monumentality either forward or backward in time: in 1919 the gate did not embody the power of either the past emperors or of Mao Zedong. In the 1910s, Tiananmen does not seem to have been either important or particularly noticeable. It is not mentioned in most guidebooks, even those that provide lavish details and explanations for other magnificent imperial gates, Qianmen in par ticular. Tiananmen was almost “lost” between the Imperial City and the Forbidden City. In 1922, it was the last gate open before those gates that gave access to the Forbidden City, at the time still the residence of the dethroned emperor. The relative position of the gate in Beijing urban and symbolic space had been gradually transformed during the fi rst few years of the Republic. Before the revolution, Tiananmen and the space in front of it were part of the Forbidden City, which was surrounded by walls and completely off limits to the majority of the people in Beijing. In 1912, the emperor issued the last edict from Tiananmen, his abdication, and the “dethronement of the emperor jarred political authority loose from the symbolic design of the city’s walls and palaces.”  Then, from a gate, part of the complex system of gates and walls that constituted the imperial compound, Tiananmen became progressively more connected to the city. At the same time, it remained also more isolated from its original architectural system. In 1914, Central Park was created just west of the gate, further altering the old imperial order and separating Tiananmen from what lay behind it. In 1917, the walls of the Imperial City started to be demolished and Tiananmen lost its identity as a city gate. Or rather, by becoming increasingly accessible, it gained a new identity, apart from the walls. As for what lay in front of the gate, it was in a state of flux as well. Despite any claim of symbolic continuity between imperial and communist Tiananmen, the space in front of it did not have any independent identity before the twentieth century. In 1919, Tiananmen Square was decades away from being created and the T-shaped open area just south of the gate functioned and looked more like a portion of a street than what we think of as a “square.” Nowhere in the students’ statements or in newspaper articles is this area identified as a (guang)chang— through the 1920s it was referred to as the “empty space outside Tian’anmen.”  It is reasonable to think that the location of the area, if not the size, played a role in the students’ decision. The Tiananmen area was in fact close to some of the places we have identified as being more drastically influenced by the modernization of the city and by a burgeoning consumer culture. Central Park lay just north of the gate on the west side. It opened onto Chang’an Avenue, one of the major thoroughfares that shaped the new transportation network of the Republican city. For Beida students, Tiananmen was defi ni-

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tively not just a distant symbol of authority; one could easily argue that it was also very much a feature that figured into students’ excursions in the area around the university. In particular, the proximity to the new public (or at least partially public) space of Central Park is significant. The park had already been the location of organized mass rallies in the previous years and had thus been identified as a place for political expression. In 1915, “a rally was held in Central Park to protest against the Twenty-one Demands of the Japanese and the compromise by the Beiyang government” and over three hundred thousand Beijing citizens gathered in the park on one day. In 1918 (on November 15 and 16) another rally was held in front of Tiananmen and in Central Park to celebrate the Allies’ victory in the First World War, one that was enthusiastically attended by students and foreign dignitaries. Cai Yuanpei delivered two speeches, in which he optimistically interpreted the victory of the Allies as foreseeing the triumph of Mutual Aid, the worldwide diff usion of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the success of Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination. Therefore, when the students gathered in front of Tiananmen, they convened in an area of the city that had already been earmarked for political gatherings, not so much because of its connection with past imperial power but for the presence of modern public spaces, like Central Park. And it should not be overlooked that the students chose the area just in front of Tiananmen and not the gate itself. The palace and gate functioned only as a backdrop and were virtually ignored in that students literally turned their backs on them. Moreover, choice of location notwithstanding, protesting students were essentially different from petitioning imperial officers of the Qing. The messages they read and the signs they carried were not addressed to a failing government; nor were the centers of official political power, the presidential palace and the Parliament, included in the route of the protests. Both literally and figuratively, students were looking neither upward (to rulers standing on top of the gate) nor backward (to the imperial legacy), but forward to the streets ahead of them. As in Robert Musil’s famous statement, for the protestors in 1919 the monument behind them was largely invisible, conspicuously inconspicuous. If “insurgents produce space above all by changing the meanings and strategic uses of their environments,”  then it was only after and because of the May Fourth protests that this space in front of Tiananamen— and, as a reflection, the gate itself—assumed its modern symbolic significance, its identity defined not so much by a past legacy but by “the public demonstrations and political opinions manifested there.”  The May Fourth process literally produced public space, to use Lefebvre’s terms, by appropriating a representation of space (a monumental area) largely void of meaning and transforming

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it through use into a representational space, lived space, truly public space. “Public space is thus socially produced through its use as public space.”  Moreover, it is only by claiming a space as public that social groups, in this case, “students,” can become public. It was only by claiming the area in front of Tiananmen, by producing it as space for political gatherings, by making it the place of the May Fourth student protests, that students could claim their existence as a political category in modern China. There were no students before 1919, also because no public space for student activism had yet been appropriated. It is only after the creation of this space that Tiananmen—the gate itself— assumed its distinctive feature, that is, to stand between a public space and a symbol of authority and to lend authority to a new public space. It is only during the Republican era, and specifically because of a process started in 1919, that Tiananmen took the place of the Imperial Palace as a symbol of unity, authority, and power. However, unlike the palace in the imperial era, Tiananmen was a much more complex, contested, and polysemic sign: while it remained connected (physically and abstractly) to the imperial structure, it was also the center of a public space of a different order. If the desire for the monumental is always a search for origins, then Tiananmen, from 1919, configures an incomplete and contradictory synthesis of a double search of origins. It signals at once a mythical, almost ahistorical origin inscribed in the successions of imperial dynasties (the gate as metonymic of the palace, a symbol of the continuity of Chinese history) and the historical origins of the modern state, deriving legitimacy from mass movements. We can describe the process of resignification of Tiananmen as one by which a monument—intimately connected with a discredited state—morphed into a site of memory. In Pierre Nora’s famous formulation, lieux de mémoire, even when sites are institutionalized, dominated, and sanctified by the state, remain “hybrid places,” “mutants,” and as such always open to carry alternative significations. “For although it is true that the fundamental purpose of a lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to inhibit forgetting,” Nora writes, “it is also clear that lieux de mémoire thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meaning and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections (that is what makes them exciting).”  Hence the polysemy that inhabits a site like Tiananmen since May 4, 1919, and that has never been fully harnessed by the Republican or the Communist state. The connection with the imperial tradition of power was rehearsed over and over again when state authorities spoke from the top of the gate—for the proclamation of the People’s Republic or for Mao’s and Deng’s official celebrations—but the space in the shadow of Tiananmen continued to be occupied by people staging a street-level challenge to those standing at the top of the gate. And in many

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cases, as in 1919, protesters spoke from the streets to the people in the streets. At Tiananmen, the sociological distinction between place-appropriate social behavior (to be violated by contentious movement) and place-based symbolism (to adhere to) is always murky and contradictory. The symbolic layering of this space legitimizes people to stand in front of the Gate both when summoned in rituals of belonging by the state authority and when protesting (sometimes the same state authority). Most of the movements that traversed Beijing in the twentieth century, from the 1930s to the Cultural Revolution and 1989, played with the symbolic contradiction inscribed in the Gate and the urban space in front of it. A contradiction that exists precisely because both Tiananmen as a modern symbol and the public space of protests were created at the same time, in 1919, as the result of the same event.

S T R E E T S M O N U M E N T S

In the late morning of May 4, Beijing University students from various departments convened at the Honglou and waited in the courtyard in the back of the building. Just as they were starting off toward Tiananmen, Cai Yuanpei, and then envoys from the military and the Ministry of Education, came and tried to convince them to call off the protest. These negotiations took some time, but finally Beida students were able to go out along what is now May Fourth Avenue and head south along Beichizi toward Tiananmen. That was why Beida students were the last to arrive at the meeting point, despite the proximity of the school to the gate. For about an hour, students demonstrated in front of the gate, a message to citizens was read aloud and thousands of leaflets with the text were distributed. After further negotiations with military and civil authorities, students began to march. The plan of the demonstrators was very simple. From Tiananmen they moved south, in the direction of Zhonghuamen, then east, where they stopped in front of the entrance to the United States Embassy (see figure 6.1). Students had prepared letters that they planned to hand directly to the representatives of the various Western nations, asking for support in the struggle for national rights over territory. The Chinese police force guarding the Legation Quarter, however, blocked the students; they needed a permit from the government or from the legation authorities to let the students march inside the quarter. Apparently phone calls were made to the presidential palace and the legation authorities asking for directives but, after two hours, no permit was obtained. Meanwhile, students were waiting outside the Legation Quarter under the scorching sun. May 4 had started as a cloudy spring day, but by the time the students from thirteen different schools arrived at their meeting

A N D

MAPPING THE CITY

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point around noon, the weather had cleared up. Students were hot, probably tired, and definitely angry. Finally, a group of representatives led by Beida’s Luo Jialun was allowed into the U.S. Embassy only to discover that since May 4 was a Sunday, the embassy was officially closed, the ambassador was not there, and the same was probably true for the other foreign missions. The U.S. functionary who received the student delegation accepted the letter and promised to convey the message to the ambassador. The letter made reference to China’s role in the war and called upon the Americans to uphold and respect the principles of national self-determination and human rights for which the war had been fought. A Japanese presence in Shandong, they

FIGURE 6.1.

Path of the student march on May 4, 1919: (1) Tiananmen; (2) U.S. Embassy; (3) Dongdan; (4) Mishi Avenue; (5) Cao Rulin’s house. Source: Adapted from Cook’s skeleton map of Beijing, 1920.

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suggested, prophetically enough, was a continuing menace for Asia and world peace. The stalemate at the Legation Quarter was the turning point in the demonstration, and one in which the interaction with the city space was a fundamental factor. Students waited, became increasingly impatient, and when access was denied, it was probably easy for the more “radical” elements to direct students to express their rage against the “traitors.”  When they were denied entrance in the Legation Quarter, students encountered— or rather, collided with— a portion of urban space that was closed, separated, and “forbidden.”  The idea that foreign embassies are interdicted to the general public and enjoy a form of extraterritoriality is logical and not surprising. However, in this case, an entire neighborhood in the very center of the city had been carved out and transformed into a secluded, exclusive foreign enclave, where Chinese were forbidden to reside and own property. It had its own police force, its own electric lights. It had been rebuilt —ironically enough, mostly with the money from the Boxer indemnity—into “Ghetto-like fortresses,” “a fortified stronghold with glacis and walls,”  in which the diplomats and foreign residents could “live in a manner compatible with their own civilization.”  The foreign presence, as Beida students knew very well, had in turn affected the whole neighborhood, with commercial venues catering mainly to foreign customers. The Legation Quarter thus stood as a “city within the city,” a physical remainder of the dispossession and the colonization of the city space. If there is a symbolic aspect in the progress of the student protest, it should be identified not so much with its starting point (Tiananmen and the Forbidden City), but with its fi rst destination, a more recently forbidden area, symbolically and practically connected to the global transformations that had affected the neighborhood and city at large. The relationship with foreigners and the colonized urban space during the May Fourth demonstration was not exhausted by the interplay of hope, confrontation, and delusion in the standoff at the Legation Quarter. First, foreigners, both the official and unofficial representatives of Western countries, were among the intended recipients of the students’ remonstrations. The original plan for the protest consisted of two parts, each addressed to a specific audience. In front of Tiananmen and while marching on their way to the Legation Quarter, their banners, slogans, and leaflets spoke directly to the people of Beijing, whom they met at street level. Then, through the foreign embassies, students tried to address a world audience by employing the rhetoric of principled internationalism and self-determination. What made this demonstration radically different from earlier (and some later) examples was the lack of any appeal to the Chinese state.

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Students were extremely aware of the presence of foreigners in the section of the city they traversed that afternoon. Memoirs stress how the demonstration, at least in its early part, was extremely well-ordered and organized, and how “all the Westerners who witnessed this praised it and approved.”  A British correspondent reported that even when they moved to the residence of Cao Rulin, the minister of communications—considered to be proJapanese—students marched “in an orderly procession, quite worthy of the students of an enlightened nation.”  Similar reactions were recorded later in the day, when, after the violence and the fi re at Cao Rulin’s house, arrested students were being dragged to the police station. Westerners in passing cars who encountered them applauded and cheered the students, and they applauded back. In general, demonstrating students were trying to present an orderly spectacle, disciplined and organized especially for foreign eyes. They were stressing through a disciplined action the fact that they were part of the same international community of rights and reason, and the sympathy of Westerners was duly noted as indirect proof of the righteousness of the students’ claim. Second, the seclusion of the colonized space of the Legation Quarter stood as an obstacle and a symbol of dispossession but, like the case of the concessions in Shanghai, the foreign presence also provided alternative possibilities for political action. In the immediate aftermath of the incidents, Cao Rulin allegedly tried to prevent the spread of the movement by ordering all post offices in the city to refuse telegrams from students. However, the students had already circumvented this obstacle by using the foreign post office. The path that the students followed after the stalemate at the Legation Quarter, however, and the reasons why they did so, is still a point of contention. In par ticu lar, it is unclear whether the final destination of the protest, the house of Cao Rulin, one of the “three traitors of the country,” was part of the original plan. Students ransacked and set fi re to the house, while sending Zhang Zongxiang (one of the other “traitors”) and his Japanese guest to the hospital. The violent escalation of the May Fourth protests looks like an understandable but incongruous act in a demonstration that was planned as a civic and civil spectacle for both the Chinese people, via the population of Beijing, and the world, via Beijing’s embassies and foreign residents. Some of the recollections point to one or more “radical groups” among the students that were supposedly responsible for inciting the protestors and moving them toward Dongdan and Cao’s house. Luo Zhanglong mentions a small group of Hunan students who had secretly planned the attack and had even scouted out the location and the possible entrances in advance. Cai Xiaozhou and Yang Lianggong recall instead another meeting at Beida on the very morning of

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May Fourth in which they decided to go find Cao Rulin and “list the crimes of the traitors of the country.”  Other sources highlight the figure of Kuan Husheng, a student from Beijing Higher Normal School, who is blamed for both breaking into the house and starting the fi re. While most of these reconstructions sound farfetched and seem to be part of the process of ex-post appropriation of the merits and value of radicalism, they are not completely implausible. A portion of the students might have decided, from the beginning or in medias res, to redirect the demonstration and shift its goals, taking advantage of the general disillusionment, fatigue, and anger generated by the long hours waiting outside the Legation Quarter. However, a violent assault does not seem to have been the shared goal of the protest. On a side note, while it might apparently be difficult to reconcile the image of a well-ordered, “rational” march with the fire and the brutal beating of two dignitaries, this kind of event should remind us how emotions play a crucial role in determining the involvement and the personal commitment of each participant to collective action. Rational behavior is easier to document, describe, and analyze, but political rationality does not necessarily stand in contradiction with, nor can it be completely separated from, emotions. Disgruntled students left the Legation Quarter probably around 4:00 p.m., retraced their steps back north along Hubu Road, and turned east on Chang’an Avenue. They walked past the Dong’an intersection, walked north on Mishi Avenue, and finally entered the Shidaren hutong, a small alley where Cao Rulin’s residence was located and where the three pro-Japan ministers of the Chinese government were rumored to be holding a meeting. Here, following the assault on Cao’s house, the organized movement of disciplined protesters ended and from here students either went back to the school individually or in small groups, or they were brought to police offices and army garrisons. Th is area of the Inner City was still not served by the majority of public transportation and was unfamiliar to most students, especially those who were newcomers to Beijing. While close to the commercial area of Dongdan, the area was a residential district, typically structured as a maze of narrow alleys or hutong. Yang Zhongjian, one of the protesters from Beida, recalls how he got lost while running away after the assault on Cao’s house. “Even though I had spent more than a year in Beijing, I was not familiar with those streets, and there was nobody I knew to go with. So I headed north on a north-south street, until I got to the neighborhood of the Dongsi archway, and only then turned west to get to the school.”  In his memoir, Yang describes the demonstration as his first political experience and a drastic turning point in his activism. From this perspective, the image of a protesting

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student lost in the streets of Beijing stands as a poignant metaphor for the changes May Fourth brought. Not only did it present for many students the first direct contact with associations and collective activity, but it was also a direct experience of the city: students began in well-known areas (the Tiananmen and Qianmen neighborhoods), collided with the newly imprinted markers of colonization and imperialist authority, and finally moved to less frequented, almost alien sectors of urban space. In this sense, May Fourth epitomizes the shifts and expansion of student activities in the city in the following months and it identifies clearly the most radical and dangerous characteristics of student activism, the capacity to cross borders. On May Fourth, students were, both physically and figuratively, in places where they should not have been. May Fourth also mirrors the evolution of the political actions of following months in that it was the first movement toward, through, and ultimately with the residents of Beijing. It reshaped the connection among the large majority of the schools in the capital. Such a coordination of efforts among the various schools had never been attempted, and students were brought out of the confines of their classmates’ circles. The lecture groups, in par ticu lar, were a Beida initiative that, in large part as a consequence of the protests of May and June, soon expanded to the larger community of Beijing students. Th is community comprised students from both universities (Zhongguo Daxue, Yanjing Daxue, Minguo Daxue, etc.) and specialty schools, with a wide range of ages and geographical provenance. The position of Beida in this community was central, not simply for the prestige of the school—it was still the only “national university”—but also for the sheer number of its students, who constituted by far the most sizeable contingent during the activities of May Fourth and the following months. When the students directly addressed the city people, these apparently responded wholeheartedly and supported the demonstrators, at least according to the students’ own recollections. And this was, for the vast majority of the students, one of the fi rst experiences of action involving sectors of the population other than themselves. This characteristic was identified as crucial both by the supporters and enemies of the movement. When Cai Yuanpei and Beida became the main target of government attacks in the aftermath of May Fourth, many saw in this a very subversive attempt to reduce “a movement of tens of thousands people” to the efforts of one school and one man. In a similar vein, the Shanghai newspaper Shibao, which had been supportive of the demonstration, criticized the waves of school strikes conducted by the students in May and June: they were actions whose impact remained strictly inside the school environment and whose significance failed to be understood by people outside the narrow student group.

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Thus May Fourth represented an interaction with, and ultimately an intervention in, Beijing’s spatial hierarchy. Students moved from Tiananmen to the Legation Quarter, marking and making visible the shifts in colonized and monumental space, and ventured in a first exploration of the possibilities for social interaction and political action that these shifts had opened. In doing so, students—and in particular Beida students—added another dimension to the political life they had been producing in the university: student politics was brought outside and immediately became “public.”  Students themselves became visible as a category of public opinion and political activism.

B E T W E E N S T R E E T S A N D M O N U M E N T S

7

THE PEDAGOGY OF THE CITY

LECTURING AND TEACHING

Students did not go into the city only as individual consumers, spectators, or political protestors. Just around the time of the May Fourth demonstrations, Beijing University students created organizations precisely with the purpose of approaching the urban space and the social realities of the capital. Th is chapter examines three of these associations (the Night School for University Personnel, the Night School for Commoners, and the Lecture Groups for Popular Education), which were crucial in shaping the particular development of the relationship between students and city residents, and which epitomized the evolution (and involution) of student politics as deployed in urban space. In the years 1918 through 1920, the scope of student organized action expanded within the city, and these three associations mark the successive steps of this process: from inside the school to the university neighborhood, then to the city at large, and fi nally venturing into the surrounding countryside. This mirrored a shift in the students’ positions vis-à-vis Beijing residents, an increasing refinement in their ability to approach them and address their needs. While the first experiences of those engaged in these projects were marked by a patronizing attitude tempered only by an awareness of the

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pedagogical issues involved, popu lar education evolved more and more into a learning experience, through which students improved their knowledge of the city and of the people living in it. Th is process was not smooth. Rather, it was marred by disillusionment, mistakes, contradictions, and inconclusiveness. The issue here is not whether these associations produced significant results (which would be as difficult to define as to measure). Rather it is to examine how, through these experiences, students grew more skilled in negotiating with the various forces and agents at work in the modernizing city and how their interaction in city space and with city residents reframed their political outlook, revealing both the extent of the social issues and the limits of student activism in dealing with them. In the end, as the case of the lecture groups illustrates, post–May Fourth student activism moved (physically and ideologically) back inside the university, thus marking an implicit recognition of the exhaustion of the organizational mode of the previous years. In a sense, then, the expansion of student activities from the school into the city, briefly outside the city borders, and back to the school, traces in space the extent of the possibilities of student politics, its overreaching and its ultimate retreat. By following the history of these associations, this chapter illustrates the attempt by student activists to formulate an organized political intervention among city people that exceeded the physical and sociological boundaries of “student” politics. It describes their use of urban space in shaping this political action and the influence that an increasing frequentation with this space had on the forms and contents of activism. Finally, it shows the ultimate limitations of the organizational means of May Fourth politics (the xuehui or student groups), culminating in the withdrawal (of most students) back inside the school and in the newly enshrined category of “students.” These three associations were not the only examples of organizations created inside the university to reach out to the residents of Beijing. For example, the Painting Society held public exhibitions and the Music Research Society, in April 1919, borrowed the Youth Society Great Hall (Qingnianhui dalitang) in the Dongcheng district and staged what, according to the Morning Post (Chenbao), was an extremely successful concert, with rickshaws lining up at the entrance and a standing-room-only crowd inside. But the night schools and lecture groups stand out because they were an attempt at a longterm, sustained intervention in society and they were “pedagogical” initiatives, constituted around some of the crucial issues that students had been discussing and experimenting with inside the university. These associations were practical grounds where ideas about pedagogy, teaching, learning, and the social role of the school were tested and transformed. Students did not simply and seamlessly migrate into the role of “teachers of the people” that past

examples allegedly bequeathed to them. Rather they struggled with what to teach and how to teach it, with the possibilities of education as a political tool, and ultimately with the very definition of student and teacher.

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P O P U L A R E D U C AT I O N I N S I D E T H E S C H O O L

The Night School for University Personnel (Xiaoyi Yeban) was sponsored and created by the university administration and was therefore not the direct outcome of student initiative, even though university students taught all the classes and were in charge of pedagogy and management. The inspiration for the creation of elementary classes for university personnel came in the form of a letter addressed to Cai Yuanpei by students requesting a scholarship for a worker in the fi rst dorm, whose pursuit of learning had been interrupted by family circumstances. In his reply, published in the Beijing University Daily, Cai stressed how work and study should not be thought of as incompatible: he cited the case of American university students waiting tables at night and of Japanese college boys delivering mail or pulling rickshaws on the side. He stressed that university employees, be they faculty or workers, all ultimately do “labor,” and criticized the “Eastern” prejudice of equating professorship with a government office. Finally, he mentioned that a night school for university workers was being planned and invited the petitioning students to serve as professors. The official announcement of the opening of the school came two months later on March 18. Ten classes were created for about 230 employees of the university, with six at Mashenmiao (School of Humanities) and four at Beiheyan (School of Law), divided into two levels. Attendance was mandatory for all personnel. The long-term plan was to extend the operation of the school so that it could accept adult learners from outside the university. Classes were to meet three times a week and six teachers were needed for each course; students were repeatedly invited to volunteer for the teaching positions. Courses were offered in the Chinese language (guowen), foreign languages, arithmetic, science, and moral cultivation (xiushen). Rules were fi xed on how students and teachers should address each other and their peers. The emphasis on personal ethics loomed large in the declarations that accompanied the founding of the school. The school statute set the main goal as “developing the moral sense and increasing everyday knowledge of its students” (yinqi qi daode guannian zengjin qi shenghuo changshi). What is meant here by personal morality, however, must be broadly read: “If you know a little the principles of ethics,” Cai stated in his opening address, “then you will understand the meaning of honest and upright behavior as well as the rules of hygiene, and

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you will be able to put them into practice. Then you will not behave dishonestly, nor go after excessive wealth, and you will never have a ner vous breakdown over having a worse fortune than others.”  There was an obviously patronizing attitude in Cai Yuanpei’s approach to the project. As a reason for this initiative, he stressed the organic character of society, the almost osmotic sharing of joys and sorrows among its members. The benefits for the student-workers were summed up as the possibility of improving their socioeconomic position and moving to a better work situation. But, as the quote above shows, there was neither any calling for sudden social improvement nor any hint of a (class) struggle toward equality. The message was: improve yourself while being satisfied with your lot. Given that a large part of the prospective student population had little to no familiarity with the written language, the level of the courses had to be low and the standard of teaching was “not to exceed that of elementary school.”  At the fi rst faculty meeting it was decided to reduce to a minimum the reliance on written material: textbooks were not to be used either for the Chinese language or the personal ethics courses. Teaching methods and teaching materials soon emerged, however, as a central focus of concern for the young teachers. After an animated discussion, the guowen faculty (all Beida students) initially divided the students into six levels, according to age and proficiency. The process of selection gave them a unique chance to test and measure, albeit on a small scale, the effects of the recent changes in Chinese elementary education and to debate possible solutions. The fact that the most proficient students were also the youngest led to a somber reflection on the state of Chinese education: “In the last twenty years, our nation’s education has barely seen the first light of dawn. If in all the Western and Eastern nations the progress of education moves at a thousand li a day, then, in comparison to that, I am afraid that the speed of our progress in education is zero.”  The very few students (eight in total) who had some experience using “modern textbooks” (instead of the old “pedagogical Classics” like the Three-Character Classic) were in the top three levels, showing that “even though the new textbooks are not that good, with them you still obtain twice the results with half the effort. Th is clearly illustrates why we should get rid of the textbooks used in the old society.”  In the following months, while the success of the whole initiative remained elusive, the discussions and collective reflections on how and what to teach intensified. The need for new texts grew stronger. As the guowen teachers discovered, the manuals adopted in elementary schools at the time were of no use: designed for children, they were too simple and boring to engage the attention of adult learners. In addition, the banality of the content was

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compounded by the abstruseness of form, as most of the textbooks were still compiled in literary language (wenyan). While acknowledging that the Ministry of Education was trying to address the issue at the national level, the night school faculty decided to take things in its own hands and establish a department in charge of compiling and publishing new texts in vernacular Chinese. This project was never implemented. The next report on the operation of the school came about one year later, in April 1920, and it was an admission of defeat: the night school had been closed because of a series of chronic problems. Attendance had faltered during the first year of operations, and the continuity of teaching had been endangered by participation (of the studentsturned-teachers) in the 1919 protests. Moreover, the creation by the Beida Student Association (Beijing Daxue Xueshenghui) of a similar institution— the Pingmin Yexiao, this one completely managed by students and opened to the public—had drained human resources away from the Xiaoyi Yeban. In a sense, the school failed not despite but because of its limited character and its dependence on school administration, as opposed to student initiative. Students moved to more ambitious enterprises in which they had direct control. Despite its failure, the Night School for University Personnel represents a first, timid attempt on the side of university students to rethink problems of pedagogy on a different level in relation to the needs, situations, and positions of working adults. Juxtaposed onto the discussion on university learning and education within Beida, the participation in this initiative forced students to a practical reconsideration of the pedagogical tools at different levels and the constraints of the educational means available.

TA K I N G T H E I N I T I AT I V E

The Night School for Commoners (Pingmin Yexiao), which was inaugurated in January 1920, differed from its predecessor. While it received the kudos of the school administration, it was not initiated by the university and was in no way “institutional.” It was a direct offshoot of the Beida Student Association (Beijing Daxue Xueshenghui) and therefore the result of a full-fledged student initiative. Funding for the school depended solely on the Xueshenghui, which had to ask for contributions and donations from both professors and fellow students. Another major difference from the Night School for University Personnel is that the Night School for Commoners was open to people not connected to the university. While it was aimed in particu lar at the children and youth living in the university neighborhood, it looked to the city at large, with the

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stated hope its model would spread and students in the Beida neighborhood would encourage friends and relatives in other parts of the city to participate in similar initiatives. At the inaugural ceremony for the school opening, Cai Yuanpei was once again the keynote speaker, and he described the new initiative as a natural evolution of the Night School for University Personnel. Cai spoke in emotional terms, lingering on the compassion and the sadness that had moved Beida students to try and provide some education to their fellow citizens. In this, Cai’s speech echoed themes common to other May Fourth pedagogical initiatives, thus clearly inserting it in a larger landscape of associational and educational activities. Here, a comparison might help to understand how, far from being just a rhetorical disguise for paternalism, the reference to emotions pointed to the pedagogical issues at stake. For example, in 1917 a group of young normal school students in Changsha (Hunan) opened an Evening School for Workers. A young Mao Zedong kept the school records for the first few months. Both Cai and Mao pointed to “compassion” as one of the reasons for teaching workers and commoners. In both cases, the metaphor of “hunger” was prominent: at Changsha, prospective students were described as “infants, crying to be fed,” while Cai spoke of a “hunger of the brains,” parallel to the one of the stomach. Metaphors aside, this could still be dismissed as expression of the “populist beliefs and paternalistic elitism”  of the New Culture intellectuals. But both texts took a further step by addressing the separation between society and school as the crucial issue that respective initiatives meant to address. The Changsha journal contains a more refined elaboration of this argument: school and society were separated, so the reason why the people did not send their children to school was mainly because they did not know about it, because there was no communication between the two spheres. The Evening School was thus the first step in a process that was not, however, structured simply as an “awakening” of society by the school, but a transformation, a learning experience for both school and society. That it was truly a process of change for the school itself is evident in the journal kept by these young teachers documenting successes, failures, and the painstaking search for more effective teaching methods and for a better understanding of the society around them. In the end, they foresaw, “one part of schooling will be the small schools one attends for a while, and the whole of society will be the big school one attends forever.”  In a similar vein, for Cai Yuanpei the founding of the Night School stood as the cardinal moment in which the university finally fulfi lled the promise to be open and integrated with the city outside. In this case, the somewhat corny metaphors and the emphasis on emotion should be taken seriously.

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School and society were connected through the combination of two complementary wills: the will of the Beida students to teach and the will of the city people to learn. That is, it was only the emotional recognition of a need (to learn) and a desire (to teach) that could take the form of a collective will, a commitment to organize. The student-teachers at the Pingmin Yexiao put much more effort into this “student initiative” than they or their colleagues had done for the Night School for University Personnel. For the first time, there was also a female teacher as well as several female students. The young faculty, faced with the school’s growing economic problems, searched for new ways to raise funds. On April 13, 1920, they organized a student fundraising recital at the main hall of Beida Law School, which, according to the local press, was well attended. The recital showed a clever integration of themes and means to attract the support of the audience; patriotic rhetoric (which had emerged as a strong selling point for student activities after May Fourth) was coupled with modern-style performances and educational messages. Both male and female student choirs performed and an eleven-year-old student gave a speech on “the true meaning of patriotism.” Finally, a modern play on the “disgusting teacher in the old-style private schools” was staged. The singing of the national anthem opened and closed the day. Students attending the Pingmin Yexiao were, on average, much younger than the university workers of the Xiaoyi Yeban, and teaching them therefore presented slightly different problems. However, the same obsessive attention to questions of pedagogy shines through the details of reports and documents, even in relation with apparently irrelevant aspects. For example, the Second Night School (which opened in February 1920), in an excess of classificatory frenzy, listed their students not only by age but also by height. On more serious issues, the Pingmin Yexiao started two programs directly concerning pedagogy and the preparation of teachers: Jiang Menglin was in charge of a course on “Principles of Education and Rules of Teaching” (meeting for two hours every week) and a Research Association on Phonetic Transcription was formed, with the goal of exploring new ways of dealing with the old problem of written-language learning. The nitty-gritty of the teaching routine received even more attention. Writing exercises, for instance, were carefully scrutinized by the faculty committees. The topics assigned had to be broad, not abstruse or obscure, so as not to stifle the imagination and interest of students. Teachers had to be as objective as possible in evaluating the exercise, no matter if they agreed or not with the arguments exposed. Corrections were to simply point out the mistake and never involved a rewriting (of students’ statements and opinions); when handing the papers back, teachers were to provide explanations.

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Teachers’ comments were to be clear and straightforward: clichés, hints, and a “pedantic and shallow attitude” had to be avoided. Textbooks were once again an issue, and the faculty lamented the poor quality of the available manuals. They decided to adopt manuals both in the literary language (wenyan) and in the vernacular (baihua), but were careful to give suggestions on how to use both. In choosing wenyan texts it was suggested that one should pay attention to the kind of ideology they convey, and pick “new” manuals with modern punctuation and line breaks. As for the baihua texts, they had to be “terse and forceful.”  Again, this was considered to be a temporary solution while an appositely formed publishing group (bianshuzu) was compiling new manuals. Th is task was envisioned as a radical rethinking of the teaching practice; committees were formed in charge of collecting, examining, and choosing available textbooks as well as teaching materials. Again, a comparison with the journal of the evening school in Changsha is revealing of the similarities in the approach toward the practical details of learning. The young teachers in Hunan faced similar problems to those of their colleagues in Beijing: insufficient or unreliable manuals, excessive dependence on the written word, and a practice of modern pedagogy still in its infant stage. Language and punctuation, but also the menial aspects of classroom organization, were common issues both in Changsha and at Beida. These similarities reflected the widespread circulation of some of the main themes of the New Culture movement (the crisis of educational routine, the problem of vernacular) as well as a shared understanding that each pedagogical project was experimental and, as such, required attention to detail (and the recording of every step.) At Beida, through the practice of teaching in the night schools, university students faced, in a very practical way, issues that had been at the center of the educational debate in the school in the previous years. Manuals and lecture notes, we have seen, were some of the first targets of the reform; language learning and in par ticu lar the utility and status of Chinese characters was one of the central topics for a university that was striving to be modern while rethinking what it meant to be “Chinese.” Students’ theoretical positions on these issues were tested when confronted with the reality of cultural and social stratification. These experiences provided the first organized interaction with city residents beyond the ephemeral contact along the streets of consumer society, as well as a fundamental step in the students’ realization of the connection between pedagogical theory and social practice. Beyond the simple idea that there was a society in need of enlightenment, the night schools proved to students they needed a revised educational approach as well as a deeper and more complex understanding of society itself. Even if one assumes that the Beida students’ social initiatives were initially motivated solely by a spirit of patronizing elitism

(which I do not, as discussed earlier), the evolution of the organizations they formed, the pedagogical debates these generated, and the practical changes they engendered must be connected to a emerging political awareness inscribed in the social reality of the city.

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N E G OT I AT I N G T H E C I T Y

Despite the establishment of the two night schools, the activities of students remained confined inside more or less precise borders. Physically, both initiatives were located inside the school and made use of school facilities and a teaching staff composed of Beida students. While they looked toward a much larger horizon, their range of activity was still limited. The project of night schools for commoners, while dealing with issues of social change and pointing clearly at the connection between university learning and society in general, remained inside a debate on pedagogy and education narrowly construed (how and what to teach in a classroom). It was with the activities of the Lecture Groups for Popular Education (Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan) that students more clearly and consciously broke out of these confines. Students went to lecture in the streets of Beijing and, by moving to places with which they had little direct familiarity, they developed a new awareness of the social and spatial distinction displayed in the urban structure. They were forced to learn how to frame their message and adapt them to these differences, as well as make use of other forces and agents that were at work in the city. The lecture groups escaped the format of a formal classroom while remaining a declaredly pedagogical initiative. The fusion of a (sometimes very explicit) political message with a general educational format brought to light the hidden connections between the two realms and led to a rethinking of their relationship. Because the lecture groups were also a more direct political initiative and more closely inserted into city space, they offer an insight into how the protests of 1919 had transformed student politics. An initial clarification is needed: I am not following the “official” explanation of the evolution of student politics and its morphing into communist party activism through the increased contact with the “working classes.”  Urban space here does not stand as a more “trendy” substitute for the “workers” of the official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narrative. Rather, through the expansion of student activities in the city, I illustrate how a kind of student activism in the May Fourth mode (that is, based on a still unsettled category, on its capacity of crossing borders and displacing politics) was deployed and partly exhausted in the months after May 1919. What remained afterward, either an activism now completely subsumed under a temporarily

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stable political symbol—“students”—or various kinds of party politics, despite the continuity in people and physical locations, should be considered as something of a completely different nature. The lecture groups were formed in March 1919 with the stated goal of “increasing common people’s knowledge and eliciting their self-awareness.”  According to the founding charter, there were two kinds of education, each presupposing a different “movement.” In “school education” people move toward education, but only a limited group can enjoy the benefit of this kind of learning. For everybody else and to remedy the unbalance produced by a restricted access to schooling, there was the second kind, popu lar education (education that goes toward people), consisting of newspapers, public lectures, and everything that reached where the school did not. Popu lar education, which is truly equalitarian, lay at the foundation of both the Republic and the university. The Republic, without a generalized education, would eventually collapse, as the educational gap was one of the reason for socioeconomic differences. As for Beijing University, it followed the model of a “popu lar university” (or “democratic university,” pingminzhuyi zhi daxue) and therefore practiced popu lar education. Rallying the state and the university in support of the student initiative might be a self-serving statement. However, if taken seriously, the founders of the lecture groups called for an alternative raison d’être for both the young Republic and the university—that is, the radical reduction of inequality, both economic and intellectual. Implicitly, they also called for a different kind of connection between the state and school, one based not on bureaucratic service or national pride, but on shared egalitarian premises and social goals. It should be noted that, almost at the same time, the journal Pingmin jiaoyu (Popu lar education) criticized school education for its reliance on exams (which encouraged students to “hanker after empty glory”) and for discriminating against the poor. Clearly, the lecture groups were echoing a more general debate taking place inside Beida (the criticism of exams and the separation of school and society were hot topics, as we have seen earlier) and in the educational world in general. Given that the education level of Chinese commoners was low and most of the population could not read, popu lar education could not rely on the written word. Thus, the groups chose to devote themselves to public lectures. As we will see, renouncing texts was one of the hardest challenges these university students had to face. The groups welcomed members from outside the university and grew quite rapidly: they had thirty members by mid-March and over forty by the end of the month. By springtime, they decided they were ready to start lecturing. Th is was the first time a student association was starting an activity

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that led them to operate systematically and in an organized way outside the university neighborhood. How to interact, use, and intervene in the city space was one of the issues the lecture groups had to face over and again. Shifts in this interaction also corresponded to the changes and the pivotal moments of the student movement as a whole. At first, the groups simply notified the police that they were going to hold lectures “in appropriate places in central Beijing.”  City space, in the students’ view, was there for them to appropriate. The first two “public events” were both held in April in enclosed areas. A three-day “lecture marathon” took place at the Pantao Palace (Pantao Gong) near Dongbian Men, on the east side of the Outer City. The students proved to be savvy in their use of the Beijing calendar of temple fairs by scheduling the lectures at exactly the time of the temple’s main event, the three-day festivities celebrating the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu). Apparently, this was well planned: despite coinciding with one of Beijing’s spring dust storms, the audience at the lectures was enthusiastic and started to wane only on the third day, when the festival was ending. The second lecture series was held on a Sunday, later in the same month, at the Huguo Si (Temple for the Protection of the Dynasty) in the northwest part of the Inner City. The themes of the lectures show a still uncertain balance between a strictly pedagogical mission (“the nations of the world,” “everyday knowledge,” “the benefits of plants”) and a more political agenda of social improvement (“female education,” “superstition,” “reforming the family”). Interestingly, students appeared to have been aware of the irony of holding meetings with modern content in venues whose origins and functions were rooted in “tradition” and, as they saw it, superstition. One of the talks at the Pantao Gong was entitled, “Are you visiting a temple or listening to a lecture?”—which was a very appropriate question given that the listeners had probably come to the temple specifically for the festival. Holding lectures in temples was, however, not a novelty; there was a long tradition for the use of temple space—one that was in between the state and the private sphere—for collective activities. “Temples,” as Susan Naquin has convincingly demonstrated, “were overwhelmingly the most important component of public space in Chinese cities in the late imperial era.”  The Republican state had followed suit and attempted on several occasions to convert rural temples into modern schools, usually provoking indignant reactions of local residents. However, the changes in the socioeconomic structure of Beijing urban space during the early Republic had affected temples and temple fairs. With the emergence of new commercial venues for the rich, most temples fairs were relegated to the lower end of the market and the poorer Beijing residents.

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Temples were also not new to “Popu lar Education” meetings. Public lectures to popu larize basic knowledge and build civic attitudes had quite a long, though desultory, history and the Beida Lecture Groups shared models, themes, and resources with other state- or city-sponsored organizations. In Beijing, the Capital Education Department funded and controlled an Office for Popu lar Education Lectures (Tongsu Jiaoyu Jiangyan Suo). The department was established in 1915 and represented a fi rst step in integrating different institutions and groups in the capital: it originally included members from the Beijing police bureau, the ministry, as well as schools like Beijing University, Beijing Women’s Normal School, and the Beijing Higher Industrial School. The Beijing Office for Popu lar Education Lectures was established in October 1915 to serve as a model for the entire country. Already in 1916, the office had organized a day of lectures in the Qisheng Temple, in an area outside the city walls near Chaoyang Gate. It was through the collaboration with the Capital Office for Popu lar Education that the Beida groups managed to obtain stable venues for their activities. Just before May Fourth they struck a deal with the Capital Department for Education that allowed the groups to use four lecture halls in the city for two hours every Sunday afternoon, between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. The four halls were located in densely populated areas: two of them were close to the new market neighbourhoods (Dong’an and Xidan) and one was near the traditional commercial district of Qianmen. In relation to the university, at least two were fairly close to the Beida neighborhood, but the others were located in areas with which the students were probably less familiar. The agreement again shows the ability of the students to negotiate with city authorities and make use of other agents in the urban space. This was made possible also by the cachet that came with the name and support of the university. For example, in March 1920, the Beida administration directly contacted the Popu lar Education Office to make sure that the municipal government, after the crisis of 1919, was still going to honor the agreement and let the students use the four halls. Clearly, the fame and the institutional position of the university played a central role in insuring an advantage that no other “independent” group could enjoy. The availability of these venues preceded the May Fourth events by just a few days, so it was only in the fall that students managed to formulate a schedule for the lecture halls. In October 1919 they split the lecture groups into four sections and assigned one to each of the four halls. The sections were to rotate venues counterclockwise every month, probably in order to vary the experience of audiences in each area as well as to provide lecturers with the chance of interacting with diverse sectors of the populace. Students were free to join whatever group they wanted, but could not switch from

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one to the other. Each meeting had to be attended by a group secretary who was in charge of the organizational details. In May 1920, the Municipal Education Department made available a newly built lecture hall in the southern quarter of the Outer City at Tiger Lane Bridge (Hufangqiao, not far from Liulichang and Dazhalan). The new hall had about four hundred seats and the Beida groups were granted use of it twice a week for one hour each time.

FROM STREETS TO VILLAGES AND BACK

Using the halls was only part of what the lecture groups accomplished. It was their activities outside of the lecture hall that distinguished the groups and constituted their primary involvement with Beijing urban space. The Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square portrays a student, dressed in a typical cotton gown, addressing the people of Beijing in the streets. It is difficult to say whether street lectures were a part of the original plan of the groups, but it is evident that the May Fourth demonstration and the experience of interaction between students and city residents played a crucial role. Following the events of May Fourth, students went on strike, first to protest the arrest of their fellow classmates and then to ask for the return of Beida’s president, Cai Yuanpei, who had resigned few days after the protest. It did not require any unified decision for the members of the lecture groups to move their operations into the space where politics was being produced and enacted, the streets of Beijing. “After May 19, in every street, every alley, every park of the city you could see people lecturing and selling national products.”  Students had turned to the promotion of native goods, instead of an outright boycott of Japanese imports, for reasons of political strategy. In large part, one can imagine, relying on the direct knowledge they had acquired as consumers in the new marketplace, they conducted a survey of marketing and production in the city and compiled a list of local manufacturers who could produce goods to substitute for Japanese imports. The lecture and native goods movement also marked the true opening of the activities of the Beida groups into the larger community of Beijing students. Th is was a result of political necessity. By the end of May, a relatively small group of Beida students had been out lecturing for five or six days and had suffered the heaviest repression, with several arrests. The lecture movement was on the verge of collapsing out of sheer exhaustion when an appeal was made to the other schools in Beijing and a citywide revamping of street lectures was decided for June 2,  leading to the events of June 3 and the successful standoff with the city police.

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With the lecture movement, students gradually seemed to be gaining an ability to use the streets, learning about the restrictions and the possibilities of urban structure. In this respect, the central location and the tradition of openness of Beida was an advantage. For example, when the city government imposed new restrictions to prevent students from lecturing, it shut the city down (Beijing was still, in large part, a city of walls and gates) to keep students from the suburban campuses from entering walled Beijing. Qinghua students tried to circumvent the walls and gates by using modern transportation and traveled to Qianmen by train; there, however, they were stopped and sent back. They thus resigned themselves to lecturing outside the city walls. Over time, students adopted inventive ways to deal with the restrictions on their activities. As policemen were arresting anybody with banners, they did not carry any signs and went into the streets as individuals rather than in small groups.  Students also combined lecturing and the promotion of national products. Students stood in the streets to promote national products but took every chance they had to lecture customers, sometimes giving out leaflets with the merchandise.  Promoting national products was an activity that the students were trying, with a certain amount of success, to protect from government interference. In July 1919, in response to accusations of xenophobia and to a government prohibition to advocate the boycott of Japanese products, the Beijing students published a letter in the Peking Morning Post (Chenbao), pointing out the difference between the promotion of national products (tichang guohuo), a boycott (dizhi rihuo), and xenophobia (paichi wairen). They flatly denied having anything to do with the latter; rather, they charged the government for providing fodder to Japanese slanderous attacks on the students, who were being compared to the Boxers or political extremists. As for the boycott of Japanese goods, while the students considered it as an autonomous response coming directly from the citizens (guomin zhi zidong) with which the government should not interfere, they were keen to remark that activists were only promoting national products, an absolutely legal (and, in many ways, meritorious) activity. If that ended up influencing the market for Japanese goods, that was to be considered an indirect (if not unrelated) effect. There is an apparent contradiction between students’ familiarity with the foreign stores and their fascination with the exotic character of the new shopping districts on the one hand, and their promotion of national products on the other. However, as mentioned earlier, the students’ knowledge of the commercial areas also proved to be an asset: in the dual attempt to boycott Japanese imports and promote native goods, students targeted the merchants and the markets they were familiar with and handed them the lists of local providers, probably compiled with the background of fi rst-hand knowledge

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of the merchandise. The first arrests of lecturing students on June 2 were conducted at the Dong’an Market, where students were promoting native products. In June, a series of decrees by the Beijing government stated once again that it was mandatory for students to attend classes, thus making their very presence on the streets illegal.  Th is order gave Beijing police the authority to arrest students if they were not in class, no matter what they were doing. It was the very presence of the students in the streets that was perceived as danger; the simple superimposition of the category of “students” in a space not explicitly designed for them caused a political short circuit. The propriety of place had to be restored. In the following months, even after the student unrest had calmed down, Beijing police continued to keep an extremely vigilant eye on student activities outside the university and on lecturing in par ticu lar. For example, the fi rst meeting of the lecture groups in the new lecture hall, an event coordinated with the municipal government and with a schedule of largely nonpolitical topics, was interrupted by the police, who occupied the stage and disbanded the meeting. According to the students’ report, the audience expressed support for the lecturers. The intensified interaction with the people at street level and the repression of student activities seemed to have also created, in the eyes of the students, a closer connection with Beijing residents and organized groups of workers, shopkeepers, and so on. In early June 1919, at the height of the lecture movement, students were offered support and food by worker associations, restaurants, and shops. At the meeting of the Beida Lecture Groups in October 1919, Chen Bao’e related the address by a worker delivered at the meeting of the National Student Association: “Before May Fourth,” he quoted, “students were always looking up, above their heads. Only after this event, they came and look at us, people without learning.”  Despite the somewhat paternalistic or self-patronizing tone of this quote, this description of the shift in students’ attitudes contains a crucial observation: it was only when students moved into the streets that the people of Beijing could actually see and meet them, and vice versa. Th is shift of gaze mirrors the one that became evident on May 4, 1919: it went from looking up at Tiananmen and the Imperial City to looking out to the streets in front of it. Th is encounter did not dissipate the “civilizing” attitude of intellectuals toward “uncivilized” people, but it was nonetheless significant. First, such an encounter was recognized as a discovery by both sides, and it was a discovery that could have occurred only in the transformed environment of urban space. Second, it was in large part during this encounter that the representation and self-representation of students assumed a political significance that

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was to last for the rest of the century. That is, it was only by walking in the streets of the city that students came to be recognized as occupying a political space as “students.” Until 1919, students’ experience of the streets of Beijing had been limited. They traversed the university neighborhood, frequented shops, restaurants, and parks but, in many ways, their relationship with the city residents remained mainly one mediated by consumer culture. In order to be effective in their lecturing, students had to learn how to communicate to a variety of city residents with whom they had had only a spectators’ awareness. In December 1919, the lecture groups recognized that in the previous few months, and despite the May Fourth wave and the general support of the city residents, the lectures were neither well attended nor very successful. To people, the students’ lectures were obscure in two ways: students had “their mouths full of new words” and they seemed incapable of dropping this habit even when talking in public. Additionally, many of the lecturers (and many Beida students in general) came from outside Beijing and their thick regional accents sometimes constituted an insurmountable barrier for Beijing listeners. The initial solutions were tentative at best: for example, it was suggested to distribute drafts of the talks in advance, but one wonders what benefit this would have brought to an audience supposedly made of mostly illiterate or semiliterate people. In the following months, however, a redefinition of the communication strategy as well as a deeper understanding of the real situation of the audiences seems to have emerged. The lecture groups asked the lecturers to be more “practical” and avoid abstract and obscure references. They repeatedly called for new members fluent in the Beijing dialect ( jingyu) to join. In 1921, the groups added a gramophone and several records to their arsenal, and the reason stated for this purchase was “to cater to the sentiments of the common people in all society, to elicit the interest of the audience, so as to reach our goal of reforming society.”  Apparently, after the introduction of the gramophone, the attendance grew manifold. In the months following May Fourth, the activity of the lecture groups became more intense and was accompanied by a perfecting of rhetorical techniques: aspects of form and content were explored and discussed in meetings and reports were fi led on the outcome of lecture sessions. They added to all lecture series an open question-and-answer section, which was an immediate success, as well as a section on language (characters and pronunciation), thus unifying pedagogy of “basic knowledge” with a political mission. They repeated how it was indispensable that the audience was in some way familiar with the topic they were addressing, inviting lecturers to choose themes fit to the par ticu lar set of listeners. The attention devoted to the reception of

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lectures and to the interaction between speakers and listeners became keener. In a 1922 analysis of the first weeks of operation of a new lecture hall created inside the university proper, the Morning Post (Chenbao) outlined the fluctuations in attendance and noted how they were mainly related to the weather and the accent of the speakers. Southerners did not fare well, and neither did women. The families in the neighborhood (or rather, the male heads of the families) requested that seats in the lecture hall be separated according to gender, so it is not a surprise that nobody attended a lecture by a female Beida student. After several attempts with the wives of several university employees and professors as lecturers, they gave up. The shifts in method went hand in hand with an increased attention to expanding the scope of the groups’ activities into different areas. In June 1920, on the eve of the summer break, the lecture groups announced a project for “summer lectures” and asked all the members who were going back home for the break to continue their work in their native places. Despite the success of their initiative activities were limited to Beijing, but, as the groups lamented, “isn’t every place in dark China in need of reform?” In an effort to address this issue, members, when returning to their provinces, counties, and villages, were told to try and bring some “light” to those places, thus inspiring a “Beida-fication.”  Wen-hsin Yeh has noted a similar attitude in the May Fourth– era students in Hangzhou when faced with the prospect of getting back to their hometowns; the perception was that of a stark ruralurban divide, and of a countryside seen as old and dangerous, a land of uncertain changes, rife with bandits and superstitions. However, in the groups’ announcement, behind the general tone of “bringing light into the dark core of China,” there is once again a renewed attention to the details of this transmission, an acknowledgement of the need for a strategy of contact and communication. Lecturers were advised to make use of what was available in situ, working, in a sense, within the system, for example, by creating alliances with local gentry and local students. The themes suggested for the lectures are similarly indicative of an awareness of the possibilities and limits of the local situations: topics ranged from basics of hygiene and science to major national and international events, and from the meaning of a democratic state to economic organizations. Significantly, in the association documents, students were invited to avoid “empty words” such as “patriotism” or “saving the country.” The general goal was to make people aware of the existence of the method of popu lar education (pingmin jiaoyu zhuyi). In the end, the summer lectures were framed as yet another learning experience: no matter how successful (or unsuccessful) the students considered these experiences to have been, they were asked to write reports about

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the “real situation” of their native places, reports that could be used as reading materials for other members. Just a few months earlier, students from the groups had tried their hand at lecturing in the rural suburbs just outside Beijing, with trips to three different villages. Despite contrasting reports, the experience seems to have been a failure. According to Madeleine Dong, in the Republican period there was a radical change in Beijing’s relationship to the countryside. During imperial times, the borders marked by the walls were transcended thanks to the power the imperial site had on its surroundings and by the fact that Beijing was split into a series of administrative regions, which included urban and rural space. With the Republic, Beijing became a self-contained unit and was cut off from its surroundings. The countryside students faced in 1920 was not a faraway godforsaken place, but an area just a few miles outside the city walls, which had been part of one of Beijing’s county administrations just a few years earlier and was a short train ride from the Beijing railway station. However, the experience of students on this trip showed the width of the division that had emerged between the urban and the rural. The lectures at Changxindian (about twenty-five miles southwest of Beijing) for example, were a complete disaster. Nobody came to attend. In other locations, students managed to attract a little crowd of kids, women, and old men by playing a flute and the gramophone. When the time came for lecturing, however, students found the audience much less receptive: “Even if we spoke only about basic knowledge, they did not understand half of it; it had no relationship with their life so they had no interest in it.”  Students’ reports of their trips illustrate their disdain and surprise over the situation of the local schools (sishu), with unflattering descriptions of local teachers. At the “National Elementary School” at Qilizhuang, a village three li (about one mile) from the train station, “the classroom was also the kitchen, the library functioned as teahouse; the atmosphere was suffocating, and dark as a mouse hole. Every student had a copy of the Thousand-character Classic, the Three-character Classic and the Analects.”  At Dajing, the teacher of the local school is described has having “three long things: a long queue, a long pipe, and a long ruler (for beating pupils).” In reaction to the intruding presence of “modern students,” the teacher commented that “their sishu had undergone reform as well, but the students did not want to study that ‘flowers and grass’ so we went back to the old ways.”  The teacher’s response summarized the failure of a national educational reform that changed contents— for example, emphasizing science (“flowers and grass”), without radically altering the forms of transmission. Beida students were clearly familiar with the problem of the resilience of educational routine: they had been debating

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similar issues in the case of university learning—the continuing reliance on exams, to cite one case—but they obviously had no way to confront it when it presented to them in such a pervasive and extensive way. The young lecturers also seem, in their own description, completely out of their depth in facing the situation of the countryside. While in the city, they had achieved a small measure of success in becoming attuned to local needs and to the requirements of different people and diverse spaces, but outside the walls of Beijing, the learning curve was clearly steeper and slower. At Qilizhuang, their first lecture was entitled “A comparison between Beida Night School for Commoners and your village National School.”  While there was certainly a need to state the novelty of the students’ enterprise, the idea of lecturing about a situation of which they had really no previous knowledge (they had just visited the local school for the first time) reveals an inability and maybe unwillingness to adapt to such a different environment. At Changxindian, they quickly found out they had picked the wrong day: it was a Sunday and all the workers at the local factories were in Beijing for their day off while the “good men and women” had gone to church for service. It is not surprising how students reported that the only successful experience of the whole trip took place when they lectured and distributed publications in the railway station, a location directly connected with modern urban space. In the end, the students abandoned the project; it survived under a different and more radical form merging into the early communist activity of workers’ education. Students gave reasons for discontinuing the village lectures: rural people had no interest in them and the lectures had no relevance to their daily life. The lectures remained a sporadic, haphazard event with no real effects, a drop in the sea of China’s countryside. In a sense, the village lectures mark the physical and political limits of both the lecture groups and May Fourth student activism at large. They reflect the emerging awareness that different means, and a different political strategy, was needed to deal with the larger issue of social change outside the city. In the early 1920s we see two parallel and complementary processes. Politically, student activism, at least in its May Fourth form— crossing sociological, physical, and political boundaries—was losing momentum. Initiatives like the village lectures continued under the auspices of party organizers but they became separated from their “student” origins and, while students did not disappear entirely from the political scene, their activism became increasingly limited to what was “proper” to the newly settled category of “students.” At the same time, physically, Beida students, and the lecture groups in par ticu lar, moved back inside the university. A new lecture hall, specifically for the use of the Beida Popu lar Education Lecture Groups, was opened

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in 1921 at Mashenmiao and in the following years became the real center of all the activities of the association. Arif Dirlik has suggested that the years after May Fourth saw “the intensification in perception that social transformation must be extended beyond questions of individual liberation to encompass questions of social and economic equality, as well as questions of popu lar participation in social and political process.”  The evolution of the lecture groups indicated how this perception evolved not simply through abstract philosophy but through an interaction with city space and the lived experience of urban social structure. At the same time, the final retreat of the groups inside the school and away from this larger space signaled the limits and the exhaustion of the possibilities of the May Fourth mode of student politics. Exhaustion does not necessarily mean failure or defeat. Rather, students learned from the difficulties and the experiences of those years, but the lessons they drew were not univocal. Some moved to purely academic pursuits or strictly “student-related” political concerns, others went back as party organizers and activists to the countryside or into the city at large. Neither group, however, could pursue their goals within the same associations, the same organizational framework, and even the same category of “students” that had been active during the May Fourth years.

EPILOGUE

8

THE END OF STUDENTS?

WRITING AFTER THE END

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault famously argued that “man,” far from being a timeless concern, came into being only when a modern space of inquiry was traced by the intersecting fields of the human sciences. “Man” was the disciplinary horizon that coalesced out of a radical redefinition of the epistemic structure in the late eighteenth century; a horizon, he concluded, that in the late 1960s, seemed on the verge of disappearance. Foucault was writing at the liminality of the death of man, at the time of the impending dissolution of the epistemic order that allowed his existence. Th is, he implied, was the very condition that made it possible to see “man” as a particular and finite historical development and to outline the evolution of that epistemic order. It seems then that a category of thought must be dead, dying, or on the verge of disappearance before we can question its seemingly naturalness and inquire into what made its existence possible in the fi rst place and in those specific forms. Without incurring a crime of lèse-majesté, I wonder whether we can apply the same reasoning to the much simpler and limited analysis produced in the previous pages. Indeed, while there are an unprecedented number of students

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in today’s China, most observers would agree that there is no political category of “students” at work and that the parable of twentieth-century student activism did not extend into the new millennium. When, then, did “students” end? And why? These are questions that are not directly relevant to the purported goal of this volume (which dealt mostly with beginnings, not ends) but, if we accept Foucault’s perspective, these questions outline the very conditions that made this book possible. I feel therefore obliged to try and suggest some tentative and provisional answers. I start by adding another question: what ended? In the previous chapters, I discussed how the category of “students” carries a double legacy: it marks, on the one hand, the signifier of radical unsettlement and the possibility of a politics of subjective self-definition, and, on the other, the continuity of a repertoire, a symbolic identitarian bond. The latter, as we have seen, ironically emerged at the same time that students were articulating political positions that exceeded their status as “students.” In this sense, the process by which a repertoire of “students” took shape started immediately on May 4, 1919. It developed through the interplay between students, the people, the media, and the government. Images of students as victims or as legitimate representatives of true national interests were deployed both by the media and by students themselves as very effective tactical measures. The state contributed at first indirectly, by earmarking students as privileged target of government repression, and later directly, in its nationalist and communist forms, by recognizing student actions as having “a certain ambiguous legitimacy.”  As McAdam and Sewell have argued for the French Revolution, the invention of the modern concept of “students” involved the coding of an episode of transgression and limited violence (May Fourth) “as an act of sovereign will, and hence a legitimate basis for a new form of government.”  Th is student identity was maintained throughout the century, despite the sociological and political instability of historical students, through the continuous reference to a set of institutions (like universities) and its inscription in the teleology of the nation, the state, and the parties. In ritual commemorations and history writing, both the Nationalists (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) replayed the heroism of 1919, but tried to defuse it by calling students to build the party and the nation. The state tried to harness activism by either depoliticizing it—for example, channeling it into limited forms of self-government and associational practices— or incorporating it into the successful mythology leading to the present form of the state itself. However, these attempts were incomplete and never wholly successful, and the celebration of student activism as foundational also potentially legitimized “students” to repossess that repertoire again and use it with other, confrontational effects.

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Th is was the case in the spring of 1989, when students took over state ritual occasions—Hu Yaobang’s funeral, Gorbachev’s historic visit, and the commemoration of May Fourth’s seventieth anniversary—and brought them to completely different outcomes. This case also provides the first obvious answer, barren in the brutal evidence of violence, to our question about the end of “students.” If “students” appeared when real, live students gathered in front of Tiananmen and took to the streets of the capital, then the evacuation of Tiananmen Square on the dawn on June 4, 1989, the massacre of citizens by soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army on Chang’an Avenue, and the many arrests that followed all bloodily configure an ending moment. The literal disappearance of “students” was made evident by the physical hunting of actual students who hid, escaped, or were imprisoned, and violently inscribed by the massacre of their supporters in the night. Symbols do not come in starker relief than this. The massacre of June 4 signaled the violent end of “students” as a category— and not only that of a specific episode of activism—precisely because the legacy and the position of “students” (in relation to the state, history, and nation) were at the core of the protests of the spring 1989. The student demonstrations laid claims to the legacy bequeathed by 1919 and saw a calculated deployment of the repertoire evolved since May Fourth. Others have analyzed in detail the connections between 1989 and 1919, visible in the use of specific keywords (science and democracy), the appropriation of meaningful places (the Monument of the People’s Heroes and Tiananmen Square in general), and the centrality of the date of May 4, when a massive student demonstration ended in the square. It is evident that, despite the macroscopic differences with 1919, students in 1989 willfully stated a direct connection with their predecessors seventy years earlier. In par ticu lar, they fully embraced the symbolical and historical connection between “students” and the nation-state, the references to the May Fourth legacy legitimizing the right of the contemporary students to be heard and respected. In this perspective, students in 1989 protested mainly to be better represented as “students”: much of the discontent of students and intellectuals in the years before the movement concerned the disparity between their depressed economic conditions and the crucial role they perceived to have played in China’s modernization. Harking back to the celebrated role of students in the history of the nation-state was therefore also a way to assert the need to recognize the importance of their contemporary counterparts. The repression acted precisely on the symbolic bond with the nationstate, which was, as we have seen, always unstable. Violence removed any ambiguity and affi rmed that “students” could exist only inside the past mythology of the Chinese nation, making them de facto historical. After June

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4, 1989, the repertoire of student activism was made practically and symbolically unavailable. Th is dissolution is made evident in the space of Tiananmen Square. William Sewell argues that the 1989 protests acted on the square fi rst by desacralizing a place for state rituals (through unlawful occupation), then by resacralizing it (making it into a place for different rituals). The massacre finally and completely desacralized the square, which, not surprisingly, in the years that followed ceased to be used for ceremonial purposes and was turned into a more commercial and tourist destination. I remember vividly the first time I saw Tiananmen in September 1990: Beijing was hosting the Asian Games and the huge scale of the square was dwarfed by balloons, signs, flowers and enormous inflatable reproductions of the games’ mascots. It was a garish display that made that iconic place almost unrecognizable and whose only purpose seemed to be preventing the possibility of even thinking about what had happened only one year earlier. In 1989, while demonstrators were claiming to be the legitimate inheritors of the tradition initiated in 1919, they were also very forcefully trying to distance themselves from other students in the past, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. To a government that defined the 1989 protests as dongluan (“disorder,” “turmoil”), a term closely associated with the last decade of Maoism, the students responded by emphasizing legitimacy, order, concern for the state, and the need of a dialogue. They vehemently disassociated themselves from the students of 1966, which represented an obstacle they had to “jump over” in order to recover the legacy of 1919. The Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution were, in this sense, an aberration outside the true history of “students” (and, possibly, history tout court). They were not alone in this judgment. In his analysis of the evolution of the student repertoire in the twentieth century, Jeff rey Wasserstrom argues that “because of their general rejection and hatred of Western culture as well as foreign imperialism, their anti-intellectualism, and their intense personal loyalty to Mao Zedong, the Red Guards need to be placed outside the May 4th tradition.”  But that depends on how we define the “May Fourth tradition.” May Fourth invented “students” as a repertoire, but also as the name of the possibility of political action and organization programmatically outside any state-defi ned bond, one that challenged and unsettled the boundaries of the politically proper. In the second part of this epilogue, I would like to suggest (once again, provisionally and as a provocation to further analysis) that we should consider the first phase of the Cultural Revolution precisely as the last manifestation of this second legacy of the signifier “students.” I am obviously not trying to make the Red Guards into a replica of May Fourth activists, which would be absurd. What I am suggesting is that, if we look

closely, the fi rst few years of the Cultural Revolution saw students attempting, for the last time in the century, to stage autonomous political positions precisely by challenging, in their specific historical conditions, the consistency of sociological categories, including “students.”

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Th is volume has been framed under the premise of Alain Badiou’s argument that true politics can only exist by placing the state at a distance. Politics makes evident the classificatory order of classes, groups, and collective identities that the state imposes, and by revealing and challenging sociological categories, politics puts a measure to the excessive power of the state. The Cultural Revolution, in this perspective, represents the extreme example of politics in that it radically (and definitively) questioned and laid bare the ordering of the socialist state, down to its very foundational categories, such as worker, class, and party. To borrow another one of Badiou’s suggestions, the Cultural Revolution opened a gaping hole in the political, meant as the communitarian tie (class and social status) and its representation in a form of authority (the party-state). Surprisingly, the fi rst phase of the Cultural Revolution was dominated by a category that was not properly socialist, that of “students.” In 1966, students came to the political fore unexpected and unannounced: they intervened in politics from an eccentric and largely problematic position in the socialist sociological order, from a location that had been central yet paradoxical for the socialist system (and for the revolution as a whole) since its inception. In this, the Cultural Revolution also disrupted the communitarian bond of “students,” both by exploding its contradictory position vis-à-vis the partystate and its history, and by dissolving, in very practical terms, the illusion of a unified status of students. Students split into adversarial groups and fought against each other, to the point that the issue of student activism in the Cultural Revolution became subsumed under the codeword of factionalism. The first question we should ask is once again a historically situated one: what made these students political? As in the case of May Fourth, we have first to dispel the assumption that the politicization of students in 1966 was just a byproduct of other social determinants and that student political organizations simply reflected more general differences of class and status. Recent research has revealed that student factions were formed according to many different and often contradictory patterns and has shown how it is impossible to define factionalism on the basis of general social determinants. Which is not to say that class, status, and so on did not play a crucial role. Rather, as Joel

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Andreas has suggested, while the Cultural Revolution was probably not a conflict between classes, it was about class, about the persistence of class and other state-sponsored classifications that continued to organize and divide socialist society. Student activism was also a rethinking and a (failed) attempt to resolve the issue of this persistence, as it was this persistence that made the category of students the locus of political contradictions. I propose then that we take the very category of “students” as constitutive and essential in the expression and formation of radical politics during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, “students” epitomized a particu lar historical legacy, an intellectual position, a set of physical locations, and weakly defined social condition, in which the contradictions of the sociological order were particularly glaring and could be more easily exposed. The figure of “students” stood at the intersection and was framed by the unresolved tension between the state project of disciplined reproduction of the existent and the promise of political and intellectual independence. A similar tension had been at play, as we have seen, in and around 1919 when Mao Zedong himself took his first political steps as a student, teacher, and educational organizer. Interestingly, he continued, before and during the Cultural Revolution, to make reference to that period. While his insistence on initiatives and experiences so far removed from the situation of a socialist society might sound surprising, it signaled that “students” and schools continued to materialize long-standing issues in the connection between state and politics that the Communist Party still found troublesome. More specifically, “students”—in the light of the modern history of this category—referred to the equality of each subject vis-à-vis thought and knowledge; to the inequality that schools produced as a result and fostered as a practice (authority, teaching, disciplining); and finally to the uneasy coincidence of the infinite possibilities of creative thinking and political organization under a name that was always necessarily connected with state-imposed bonds. It was this position that allowed the students to define a politics that exceeded the established order of the socialist state; but also it was in large part through these activities that the category of “students” itself was exhausted.

AN UNREFORMABLE SYSTEM

In education, maybe more so than in any other fields, the socialist state seemed to be confronting the same problems of any other state; problems that were metonymic of larger policy contradictions at the national level and that invested the very existence of the party-state. Since 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a dual purpose in its educational policy.

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On the one hand there was popularization and literacy, on the other, the production of experts to satisfy the need of economic development, bureaucratic administration, and technological modernization. Neither of these goals signaled a major delinking from the assumptions of progress and development that had informed the previous experience of the Chinese state and, in general, any modern state. Even in 1956, when the so-called achievement of socialism marked the radical shift in property ownership, the educational system continued to produce largely presocialist distinctions. As Wang Shaoguang observed: “The state might be able to socialize private ownership of the means of production, but it could not socialize the human capital possessed by the old elites.”  Educational qualifications remained a mechanism of class differentiation in the socialist society and, far from chafing under the fetter of socialism, educated elites had a stake in maintaining the social order that was taking shape under communist rule. The perturbing factor of equality, which in the case of the PRC is subsumed under the name “Maoism,” however, continued to disrupt this evolution. In the ten years before the Cultural Revolution, schools and students were the objects of a series of experiments and reforms. The Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement, the various xiafang campaigns, all incorporated attempts to solve the problems that seemed endemic to the system of education, even in its socialist declination. In each and every instance, however, the issue of institutional continuity, the state need for intellectual and political reproduction, as well as production, presented an unsolvable impasse. Each time there were various reasons why these “revolutionary” attempts were defeated and the educational system returned to its regular functioning, which Hinton describes as “more a caricature than a copy of bourgeois education.”  But for the purpose of this discussion, it is important to note how it always reverted to a seemingly “natural” conception of schools and students, fi xed in their relationship with the state and national development. The educational system always seemed capable of restoring a pedagogical routine, the discipline of learning, the established roles of authority and the ongoing reproduction of class and other social hierarchies. The Great Leap Forward reforms were criticized particularly by professors and university presidents for “lowering the quality of academic life.” Lu Ping, the newly chosen president of Beida, summarized the renewed focus of the school in 1959: “The university must avoid and overcome the impetuous greediness for quantity and size and impatience for success, as well as the tendency toward unwillingness to bear hardships, to act realistically, and to do concrete work.” Lofty goals and ambitions “must be combined with the good academic tradition of learning with realism and perseverance.”  But the “good academic tradition of

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learning” and the “quality of academic life” had been configured not simply as a means of excluding some groups but also as a stultifying disciplining of roles. The bureaucratic restoration of the early 1960s decried that in the past “there was too much revolution and teaching was placed in a passive position,” with the result that the university did not look like a university at all. Th is implies, obviously, that there is only one way that a university might look. Mao, for his part, hinted continuously at alternative ways in which students and schools could be construed, and he did it largely via direct or indirect references to ideas fi rst expressed during the May Fourth period. In the dominant perspective of education as reproduction and transmission of learning, Mao’s suggestions sound quite strange. He encouraged students to copy and to talk to other students during exams: copying was just another way of learning. He told them they should sleep if lectures were boring; at least “sleeping may help one to recover from fatigue. Students should be given the choice not to listen to monotonous lectures.” Not only did he criticize exams as mindless routine, detrimental to talented men, women and children, but also he stated that exams were “designed for dealing with the enemy” (duifu diren de banfa) as “they poison people to death”(haisi ren). Exams, then the backbone of the school system in communist China, were part of the “repressive apparatus,” a dictatorial method designed for the enemy, not the people. Th is was clearly not a marginal note on minor problems of the educational system; rather, as in the May Fourth period, Mao was addressing the central issue of the relationship between the discipline of learning and the search for knowledge. Before the Cultural Revolution, Mao had stressed how the brilliant poets and writers of the past (Han Yu, Pu Songling, Du Fu) had generally performed poorly on the civil ser vice exams, and that degrees had no relationship with talent. Later, in 1968 he questioned whether the school could actually teach you to write a novel, create a painting, or produce art. From these haphazard comments, we can extrapolate a radical critique of whether schools— any school—could foster thinking, creation, invention, and whether there was any room for individual subjective positions among “students.” The issues Mao posed were even more urgent and crucial because schools not only had to produce technicians and managers, but also, for lack of a better term, politically mature people. In the words of the time, they had to train “revolutionary successors.” While, in Mao’s view, revolutionaries could only be shaped by participation in revolutionary politics—in the actual organizing, thinking, and living—students were instead asked to be zealous, to study hard. Politics was to be learned from the example of history, by bringing revolutionary experience inside the school as a subject of learning. The yiku (recalling bitterness) sections reminded the students of the possibility

T H E E N D O F S T U D E N T S ?

In 1966, Chinese students took the lead of the Cultural Revolution precisely because of the eccentric, yet central, location of “students.” It was as “students” that they lived and were able to identify the issues of socialist inequality: the crisis of the category of class, the continuous reproduction of difference down to everyday gestures, the inscription of the sociological order in the physical space. Psychological and sociological issues were indeed at work but they needed to be taken seriously, which is to say, politically. If class is the organizing principle of the communist state, students are not a class. Yet, as individuals they belong to classes and bear the burden of specific class backgrounds. The persistence of the problem of equality of access and result, which took the form of exams, marked the continuity of the issue of class in a socialist society. But it was an issue of politics, not simply of sociology. And surely there was a psychological side in being continuously reminded of the greatness of revolutionary activism (some of which referred directly to the name of

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and the historical achievements of political participation but postponed indefinitely its fulfi llment. Students were paradoxically supposed to learn how to be “revolutionary successors” through a system that required them to study, memorize, and be tested on “revolution” as an objective subject of learning. We see here an exacerbation of the contradiction, the ambiguity that resided in the name of “students” since its emergence on May 4, 1919. “Students” could be reminded of their collective role in the history of the revolution and could be rallied in the name of their patriotic predecessors, but always inside the bond that connected the historical-political category of “students,” the state, the nation, and a par ticu lar notion of modernity. As “students” existed only inside this particular connection, academic performance expressed through the repressive apparatus of exams became the measure of everything: everyone is equal before grades. As a former student at Qinghua recalled, “The idea of a politically reliable person was a person with an average of eighty or above.”  Politics for students was reduced to the fulfi llment of their sociological mission. In the mid-1960s therefore, the category of “students” was traversed by complex issues related to class, status, and family background; it was framed by an educational routine that seemed impossible to reform; and it was perturbed by the contradiction between the exaltation of the revolutionary history of “students” and a practice that condemned students to a strictly subservient role and to an always deferred political activity.

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“students”) while being trapped in a status that was defined by discipline and repression. In contrast, this psychological malaise pointed directly to the failure of a socialist system of education to work differently from the ideological apparatus in any modern state. It makes then sense that students’ actions in the fi rst months of the Cultural Revolution were aimed precisely at interrupting the institutional consistency of the schools and disrupting what guaranteed the continuity of the state classificatory order (including the category of “students”). An analysis of students’ actions and their significance would require a volume of its own; here, I will just offer some general examples. The emergence of student organizations in the late summer and autumn of 1966 signaled the first time that “all students, regardless of their family origins, were given the freedom to set up political groups in schools.”  While many of these organizations remained based on class and were formed in loyalty to the party, the very possibility of creating mass organizations not subject to direct control of the political hierarchy marks a radical break from the constrictions lived in the Chinese schools. Beyond this, their activism took the form of a radical disruption of the physical, sociological, and intellectual borders that the status of “students” signified. In contrast to a system dominated by regimented production of exam papers, split into classes, and rigidly supervised, students launched into a veritable deluge of writing and reading, a sort of massive public debate to which the city took part. The very mechanism by which this debate was conducted, the dazibao (big-character poster) stood as a glaring contrast to the party media in that it was accessible to everyone and carried an extraordinary amount of diversity in terms of content, authorship, and readership. But it was also the antithesis of the students’ production as “students”— essays or answers waiting to be evaluated, formulaic, and strictly limited to the inside of the classroom and the university. In the fi rst days of the Cultural Revolution, when the party conservatives tried to limit the Wu Han controversy  to a “purely academic debate,” the dazibao laid bare the impossibility in the state school system, traversed by class and political contradictions, to claim the fiction of academic or professional purity. Student organizations also broke the vertical segmentation of the danwei (work unit) by forming cross-unit alliances. Students literally moved first between schools, then in the city and finally through the country. Even this movement was a radical innovation, especially if compared with the isolation of many campuses in China, and particularly in Beijing. As two sympathetic observers recall: “How many times had we urged our students to seek out the museums and parks of Peking on a Sunday and how many times had they

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decided against venturing out of the school gates? Many of them had turned the walls of their universities into new villages.”  With all these activities, students were attempting to reframe the very category of “students” by no longer acting according to the framework imposed by their status, by dissolving the physical and institutional confines of the schools, and by ceasing to behave as “students.” They recognized the separated status and the par ticu lar bond inscribed in the category and expressed, in practice, the need to “negate oneself ” (fouding ziji). Once again, as in the case of May Fourth, it is the strategy of containment and repression that better highlight the unsettling character of Cultural Revolution student politics. Many of the work teams sent to the main Beijing campuses in the early summer of 1966 tried fi rst and foremost to establish borders: they closed off the schools and limited criticism to academic debates in classrooms and course papers. In short, they tried to keep the students inside of what was proper for “students.” On June 13, 1966, at Qinghua, the work team ordered the students to return to the classrooms to conduct self and mutual criticism. Ye Lin, the work team leader, “forbade any contact among students of different classes, different departments, and different campuses. To insure the latter he ordered the campus gate locked: no one could go out or come in without special permission.”  The work teams imposed “news black-outs” in the effort to isolate each group of students from the others. They compartmentalized each academic class, department, school, and confined the dazibao to the boundaries of each campus. “The school gate was strictly guarded, and inspection teams patrolled day and night.”  The Beijing Party Committee instructions forbade the posting of dazibao in the streets, at rallies, parades, or the encirclement of residences; they enforced the distinction between the inside and the outside. A circular called in October 17 to restrict revolutionary alliances “on the basis of trade, profession, and class.”  These were direct attempts to contain activism in spaces that were physically and logically traced by the party-state. Even from these few examples it is clear that student organizations were pointing the finger precisely at those bonds that articulated authority (the party-state) in connection with the structure of society, a sociological determination of groups, and places, tasks, and status. Th is criticism, as mentioned earlier, was expressed fi rst and foremost through the opening, the breaking-up of the category of “students” itself. Official educational activity had been interrupted when classes were called off in 1966 to allow students to carry on the revolution. But without the institutional functioning, the physical and logical boundaries of schools, was there any meaning left to be ascribed to “student”? The fact that the Red Guards, in name and possibly in

reality, increasingly responded to the logic and rhetoric of military organizations seems to provide a negative answer to this question.

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DISSOLUTION

To sum up, in the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, students attacked and refused their status as students. By ceasing to be “students” they produced, by a position outside the state, a larger disentanglement of the bonds that connected politics, party, and state. But “the fact that this provoked at the same time the anarchy of factions signaled an essential political question for times to come: what gives unity to a politics, if it is not guaranteed by the formal unity of the state?”  And in fact, the factional strife into which student organization devolved by 1967 and 1968 seemed to have as the only objective the control of the local branches of the state, which constituted a surrender to the hypothesis of reducing political initiative to the control of state power. This is why the government intervention that put an end to the Red Guards in 1968 and 1969 also sanctioned the exhaustion of “students” as a sign of radical unsettlement and of the possibility of a politics outside the state. Students were either dispersed into the countryside or called back into schools to wage revolutions in their classrooms, a proposition that the very first months of the Cultural Revolution had made absurd. That does not mean that significant reforms did not take place in the years 1969 through 1976; in the field of rural education, in particular, successes were obtained. But the educational reforms were possible only after two major issues, crucial in the student activism of the Cultural Revolution, had been resolved. First, the dissolution of the Red Guards coincided with a reimposition of a rigid class-line, which came to be largely accepted as unproblematic, at least at the top. In the spring of 1968, the Liberation Army Daily quoted Mao describing the Cultural Revolution as a “political revolution under the conditions of socialism made by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes,” a continuation of the prolonged struggle between the CCP and the Nationalists. This statement brought the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution back into the historical framework of class struggle and the leadership of the party-state. Educational policies after 1969 were accordingly based on the radical imposition of class line, harsh controls of both political and intellectual elites, and a leveling of the hierarchy of middle schools in urban areas. The second prerequisite for these reforms was precisely the dissolution of “students,” at least in the urban context. That means not simply that workers, peasants, and soldiers were admitted into the major universities, but also that

215 | T H E E N D O F S T U D E N T S ?

the introduction of pedagogical reforms followed the literal dispersal of the majority of each class into the countryside. The destruction of the elite character of many of the major schools and universities became possible only when the number of students in the schools was drastically reduced. True politics undermines the illusion of the bond. In the May Fourth years, students faced a weak state and expressed—through organizations, everyday practice, overt demonstrations, and the productive crossing of borders— the claim to a political subjectivity always open and always self-defined. This was an often dormant part of the legacy inscribed in the category of students. In 1966, students, by stating the existence of politics outside the party-state and its organization of society, disrupted the illusion of the communitarian bond marked by “class,” “party,” and even “students.” The disruption came violently, however, and the fracture of the communitarian ties ended up producing a situation of radical instability and violence, as well as the consequent need for repression and reordering. After the Cultural Revolution, factionalism appeared to be the inevitable end product of student politics, thus making it impossible for “students” to continue to be the name of a productive radical unsettlement and the sign of a politics that exceeded sociological boundaries. Students obviously continued to exist in the Deng era; the universities were fi lled again, teacher authority was restored, exams were back in vogue, and so was discipline. In many ways, it is not difficult to see post-Mao education as a mirrored and inverted image of the Cultural Revolution critique, where acceptance and celebration of what could not be changed—down to the disciplinary function of the educational state apparatus—had replaced the stubborn will to try to change it. As for the category of students, it did survive the Cultural Revolution, but in a reduced, mutilated version. In the 1980s, students embraced their position as “students,” its relationship to the state, nation, and history, and waged actions that were dependent on and justified by that position. In 1989, the struggle was not whether students could be the name of a political subject, but who owned that name, its legacy and its authority. I end where I began, at Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. In August 1966, millions of Red Guards gathered in Tiananmen Square, each of them waving a copy of the Little Red Book. Unlike the students of 1919, they were looking up, waiting for Mao Zedong to appear. But after he took his place, something happened that twisted once more the symbolic relationship between the gate, activism, and the state. Mao climbed down from the gate and joined the students at street level. It was a small gesture, usually subsumed under the paradigm of the cult of personality. However, through this gesture a separation was enacted between the gate, symbol of the state, and the space of protest. Students could stop looking up, they could revert their gaze to

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street level. The gate became uninteresting. The cult of personality provided Mao with an authority that was independent from the party-state and by moving down to the students’ level, Mao transferred part of that authority to them, outside the state. What this gesture sanctioned was precisely the possibility for politics and political organization to subsist outside the state. Politics can exist only by leaving the gate behind.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.

The painting is by Liang Yulong (Changsha, Hunan, 1922–), who is still an ac-

2.

Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May

tive painter. See www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/sheji/sj-lyl.html. Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 3.

Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978), and The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986).

4.

On the use of this repertoire in 1989, see Joseph W. Esherick and Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom, “Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China,” in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, ed. Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 32– 69. Jeff rey Wasserstrom provides a thorough analysis of the performative aspects of student protests through the twentieth century in his Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

5.

On May 4, 1989, a statement entitled “The New May Fourth Manifesto” was read publicly by Wang Dan, a Beijing University student. See Han Minzhu and

Sheng Hua, eds., Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 136. See also Craig C. Calhoun, “Science, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity,” in Wasserstrom and Perry, Popular Protest, 93–124. 6.

I borrow the distinction between “categories” and “concepts” from Sylvain Lazarus. See his L’Anthropologie du nom (Paris: Seuil, 1996). See also Alain Badiou’s analysis of Lazarus’s work in his Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso,

I N T RO D U C T I O N

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218

2005), 26–57. 7.

Badiou, Metapolitics, 144–52. Here I make reference only to a small (albeit crucial) portion of Badiou’s analysis of politics, i.e., its relations to the state and the state of the situation.

8.

Steve Pile, “Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance,” in Geographies of Resistance, ed. Steve Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 28.

9.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage

10.

Th is is, in part, the underlying assumption behind analyses focused on the emer-

Books, 1963). gence of “civil society,” of which activism becomes an expression. Th is approach has been applied in par ticu lar to the case of 1989. See Lawrence R. Sullivan, “The Emergence of Civil Society in China, Spring 1989,” in China, the Crisis of 1989: Origins and Implications, ed. Roger V. Des Forges, Luo Ning, and Wu Yen-bo (Buffalo: State University of New York at Buffalo, 1990), 285– 300. 11.

See, for example, Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Weston pays attention to the everyday at Beida, but this aspect is not fully integrated in his argument, which is grounded precisely on the power of position. See also Craig J. Calhoun, Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

12.

Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment; Li Zehou, “Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou” (The coupled variations of enlightenment and national salvation), in Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1987), 7–49.

13.

Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment; Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun.

14.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, Introduction, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2000); Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman, and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

15.

Kristin Ross, “Streetwise: The French Invention of Everyday Life,” Parallax 2 (1996): 73.

16.

Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 5.

17.

Ibid., 56.

18.

Founded in 1898 as the Jingshi Daxue Tang (Imperial University), it was renamed Guoli Beijing Daxue (National Peking University) in 1912. A visit to the Beijing University History Hall (Beijing Daxue Xiaoshi Guan) on

nese businessmen, for a total of 270 million Japanese yen (roughly equivalent, as of 1999, to 2.2 million USD). It hosts an exhibition hall that narrates, in glossy detail, the history of the university, from its founding in 1898 to the “successes” of the reform era and, on the ground floor, a shop that sells university paraphernalia. Obviously, the role of Beida students during the Cultural Revolution or the 1989 movement is not recorded. The whole period of 1966 through 1976 is almost completely omitted, leaving a curious and telling gap in this otherwise glorious narrative. 20.

See chapter 3.

21.

See chapter 1.

22.

See chapter 1.

23.

Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 25.

24.

Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 157.

25.

See part 3.

26.

In this sense, it is revealing that in the 1980s, the term generation resurfaced as part of a larger attempt to negate the validity and the importance of politics inside the May Fourth movement. See Li Zehou and Vera Schwarcz, “Six Generations of Modern Chinese Intellectuals,” Chinese Studies in History 17, no. 2 (Winter 1983–1984): 42–56.

27.

See chapter 6.

28.

Sang Bing, Wan Qing xuetang xuesheng yu shehui bianqian (Students in late Qing

29.

The number of students in China grew from about one million in 1907 to

xuetang and social change) (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1995). thirty-one million in 1909. See Qian Manqing and Jin Linxiang, eds., Zhongguo jindai xuezhi bijiao yanjiu (Comparative studies on the modern Chinese school system) (Guangdong: Guangdong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 125. 30.

Sang, Wan Qing xuetang, 5.

31.

Ibid., 10.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

augurated on September 1, 2001, was entirely financed by contributions of Japa-

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the Haidian campus will show this vision of Beida. The new hall, officially in-

219

19.

32.

Wasserstrom and Esherick, “Acting Out Democracy,” 49. See also Edward J. M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwang-tung, 1895–1913 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 85–86 and 95– 96.

33.

The construction of this repertoire and its use of preexisting forms of activism are explored in detail in Wasserstrom, Student Protests, chap. 3.

34.

Sang, Wan Qing xuetang, 144. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press,

220

2000), 613. In 1911, the imperial government announced that university gradu-

I N T RO D U C T I O N

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ates (at the Imperial University) were no longer to receive government positions. They would still be awarded the title of jinshi, however. Xiaoching Diana Lin, Peking University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1898–1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 30. 35.

Liang Qichao’s speech delivered at Beida in 1912 (discussed in chapter 3) is an example of this view of the university. See also Ma Xiangbo’s acceptance speech as acting president of the Beida in 1912, which echoes some of the themes Liang developed a week later (BDSL II 1:236).

36. 37.

See Lin, Peking University, 41. I owe this phrasing to Robert Culp. Even in this second aspect, May Fourth students obviously benefited from the long process of detachment from the state and redefi nition of school functions that took place in the preceding decades.

38.

The only school banner clearly visible in Liang Yulong’s painting is the one bearing the name “Guoli Beijing Daxue.”

39.

Several hutong were widened in preparation for the construction of the National Art Museum in December 1958 and given new names. During Beijing’s place-name rectification campaign (1965) the street was given a single name, Hanhuayuan Dajie. The name was then changed to Wusi Dajie during the Cultural Revolution. See Wang Bin and Xu Xiuli, eds., Beijing diming dian (Beijing place-name dictionary) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2001), 73– 74; Beijing Shi Dongchengqu diming zhi (Place names of the Eastern District of Beijing) (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1990), 186–87. I am thankful to Ed Lanfranco and Andrew Field for the bibliographic help.

40.

Zhao Dingxin, The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Bei-

41.

Ruth Hayhoe, “Towards the Forging of a Chinese University Ethos: Zhendan

jing Student Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 251–52. and Fudan, 1903–1919,” China Quarterly, no. 94 (June 1983): 323–41. Liu Liyan, “The Man Who Molded Mao: Yang Changji and the First Generation of Chinese Communists,” Modern China 32, no. 4 (October 2006): 483–512. 42.

Weston, The Power of Position, 200.

43.

For a vivid fi rst-person description by a female student, see Lu Yunzhang, “Wusi yundong zhong de Beijing nüxuesheng” (A Beijing female student dur-

ing the May Fourth movement), in Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi quanguo weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Wusi yundong qinli ji (Personal memories of the May Fourth movement) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1999), 124– 29. 44.

For the shift between student organizations and party-related activities, see Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Hans J. Van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the 1991). I deal briefly with the waning of student activities at the end of chapter 7.

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Alessandro Portelli, “The Death of Luigi Trastulli,” in The Death of Luigi

1 .

Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State

T H RO U G H

45.

University of New York Press, 1991), 2. 46.

221

Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 67.

T H E

A slightly different version of this chapter has been published as “Politics of the Unbound: ‘Students’ and the Everyday of Beijing University,” positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 569– 99. Copyright 2008, Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. 1.

Russell Baker, “Another Big Bluster,” New York Times, June 21, 1986, quoted in John Trumpbour, ed., How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Ser vice of Empire (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 3.

2.

Meng Zhaoqiang, Lu Qing, Tang Han, eds., Beida bu bai, (Beida is invincible) (Haikou: Nanhai chuban gongsi, 1998), 1. The title of the volume makes direct reference to Hafo bu bai (Harvard is invincible), a book presenting the richest university in the world as a model of “success” for the new China. Yu Hong and Lu Yuan, Hafo bu bai: Zai Hafo li nian de bi’an (Harvard is invincible: The other shore seen from Harvard) (Beijing: Minzhu yu jianshe chubanshe, 1996).

3.

See Guan Chenghua, ed., Beijing Daxue xiaoyuan wenhua (Beijing University campus culture), 2nd ed. (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 2004). Again, the often misty-eyed recollections of alumni celebrating the stones, the walls, and air of Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge come to mind.

4.

Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 219.

5.

John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford, CA:

6.

Wang Yiqiu, “Xianhua ‘Beida tese’ ” (Idle words on the ‘characteristics of Beida’),

Stanford University Press, 1998), 120. in Beida gushi: Mingren yanzhong de lao Beida (Old tales of Beida: Beida in the eyes of famous people), ed. Mu Zhou and Mu Xiao (Beijing: Zhongguo wujia

WA L L S

 . T H R O U G H T H E WA L L S : E V E R Y DAY L I F E I N T H E U N I V E R S I T Y

chubanshe, 1998), iii. The Nameless Lake (Weiming Hu) is the picturesque, small lake on the campus of today’s Beida, which was originally the site of Yenching University, designed by the American architect Henry K. Murphy. 7.

See Yeh, The Alienated Academy, in par ticu lar chapter 2 on St. John’s University in Shanghai.

8.

Israel, Lianda, 121.

9.

Feng Youlan, The Hall of Three Pines: An Account of My Life, trans. Denis C. Zhu Haitao (Zhu Wenchang), “Beida yu Beidaren” (Beida and its people), Dong fang zazhi 39, nos. 12–13; 40, nos. 3, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 40 (1943–44),

WA L L S

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222

Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 61. 10.

reprinted in Beida jiushi (Old facts about Beida), ed. Chen Pingyuan and Xia

T H E

Xiaohong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 357. See also Chen Pingyuan, Lao

T H RO U G H

Beida de gushi (Stories from old Beida) (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1998), 23. For a parallel history of the two schools, see Liu Kexuan and Fang Mingdong, eds., Beida yu Qinghua (Beida and Qinghua), 2 vols. (Beijing: Guo-

1 .

jia xingzheng xueyuan chubanshe, 1998). 11.

Lu Xun, “Wo guan Beida” (How I look at Beida), Beida xueshenghui zhoukan (Beijing University student association weekly) (December 17, 1925), reprinted in Wo yu Beida: ‘Lao Beida’ hua Beida, (Beida and Me: Former Students Talk about Beida), ed. Wang Shiru and Wen Di (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 91–92.

12.

Chen Pingyuan, “Lao Beida de gushi (dai xu)” (Stories from old Beida: Introduction), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 15–16.

13.

Zhang Zhongxin, “Honglou diandi” (Fragments of the Honglou), in Chen and

14.

Chen Pingyuan, “Lao Beida de gushi,” 16.

Xia, Beida jiushi, 434. 15.

Ibid., 19– 20.

16.

Miu Jinyuan, “Beijing Daxue de xuesheng shenghuo” (Student life at Beijing University), Xuesheng zazhi (The student), no. 7 (July 1922): 1.

17.

“Zuzhi Beida Tongxuehui yuanqi shu” (Statement for the creation of Beijing University alumni association), (October 20, 1922) BDSL II 3:2533– 34.

18.

Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2000), 1:92.

19.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 53.

20.

Ibid., 142–43.

21.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune

22.

Arif Dirlik, “Ideology and Organization in the May Fourth Movement: Some

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 33. Problems in the Intellectual Historiography of the May Fourth Period,” Republican China 12, no. 1 (November 1986), 4. 23.

I will briefly discuss some of these communal initiatives in chapter 2. For an analysis of these associations, see Paul Bailey, Reform the People: Changing

Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-Century China, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 227–48; and Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 87– 94. A more recent investigation of one of the work-study groups, which moves from an innovative and nonteleological perspective is Shakhar Rahav, “A May Fourth ‘Peach Blossom Garden’: The Number One Work Study Mutual Aid Corps in Beijing,” Twentieth-Century China 33, no. 3 (November 2007): 81–103. sity, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University

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of California Press, 2004), 190– 91.

1 .

See, for example, the eleventh (March 7, 1920) and thirteenth (March 28, 1920)

T H RO U G H

25.

On Xin shenghuo, see Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing Univer-

issues of the Beijing Daxue xuesheng zhoukan. 26.

Suiting, “Fei shejian zhi” (Abolish the system of dormitory supervisors), BDX-

dents attacked the disciplining rules that still governed life in the school. Cai Yuanpei, “Beida Pingmin yexiao kaixue ri yanshuoci” (Speech at the opening of the Beida Night School for commoners), January 18, 1918, CYQ J 3:380. 28.

Mu and Mu, Beida gushi, 31.

29.

Feng Youlan, Hall of Three Pines, 328.

30.

Ibid.

31.

Rules for the xuankesheng were originally set in April 1916.

32.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue zhi neirong” (Inside Beijing University), Shenbao (December 29, 1918), reprinted in BDSL II 3:3154.

33.

“Xiuzheng xuankesheng ji pantingsheng zhangcheng” (Amendments to the statute governing the elective students and the auditors), BDRK, August 23, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 2:924. The auditor fee was two yuan for each course unit.

34.

“Xiuzheng pantingsheng zhangcheng” (Amendments to the statute for auditors), BDRK, May 28, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 2:925.

35.

Chen, Lao Beida de gushi, 25.

36.

Ibid.

37.

As Zhang Zhongxing, who was at Beida in the early 1930s, ironically recalls, these were like people who “wanted to pay the second-class price while sitting in a fi rst-class wagon.” Zhang, “Honglou diandi,” 429.

38.

Rahav, “A May Fourth ‘Peach Blossom Garden,’ ” 95. Fu Binran states clearly that he had never intended to get a degree and cites his dislike for the boring teaching style in the courses he audited as a reason to find a way to study on his own.

39.

Yang Lianggong, “Wunian daxue shenghuo” (Five years of university life), Zhuanji wenxue 4, no. 1 (1964), reprinted in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 269.

WA L L S

But it was by expanding on this relaxed and antiritualistic attitude that stu-

T H E

SZK, no. 3 (January 18, 1920): 8. As we will see, “prison-like” is clearly a hyperbole: the atmosphere at Beida is usually described as free flowing and carefree.

27.

223

24.

40.

A famous example of the scholarly community gravitating around Beida was, in the thirties, Shen Shousheng, a frequent contributor to Hu Shi’s Independent Review. He was neither on the faculty nor a student: “The only claim to Beida affi liation was his long-term residence in the apartments near the university.” Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 222.

41.

Liang Shuming, “Wusi yundong qianhou de Beijing Daxue” (Beijing University at the time of the May Fourth movement), Yi wangtan jiu lu (Zhong-

224

guo wenshi chubanshe, 1987), reprinted in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 214. to lectures. 42.

T H RO U G H 1 .

On the “eight big alleys” see Li Jinlong, Huangcheng gudao: Beijing Qianmen Dajie (Ancient streets of the Imperial City: Beijing’s Qianmen Avenue) (Bei-

T H E

WA L L S

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Liang recalls the case of a couple of middle-aged officers who came to listen

jing: Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe, 2000). 43.

Feng Youlan, Hall of Three Pines, 328.

44.

Ibid.

45.

Ibid., 327.

46.

Tian Jiongjin, “Beida liunian suoyi” (Trivial memories of six years at Beida), Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 228.

47.

Ibid., 228– 29.

48.

Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi lue (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1990); A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1976). The book grew out of his lectures at Beida between 1920 and 1924. It was originally published in the years 1923 and 1924.

49.

Feng Zhi, “Xiaotan huwei jiyouxin,” quoted in Mu and Mu, Beida gushi, 197.

50.

Feng Youlan, Hall of Three Pines, 317–18.

51.

On the Wenxin diaolong by Liu Xie (ca. 465– ca. 521), the most important work of literary criticism in ancient China, see Zong-qi Cai, ed., A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin diaolong (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

52.

The episode, originally recounted by Luo Jialun, is reported in Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 26– 27.

53.

Luo Jialun, “Huiyi Gu Hongming xiansheng” (Remembering Gu Hongming), reprinted in Mu and Mu, Beida gushi, 183.

54.

Xiao Lao, “Liushinian qian wo zai Beida de jidian huiyi” (A few memories from when I was at Beida sixty years ago), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 491– 92.

55.

Tian, “Beida liunian suoyi,” 235.

56.

Wang Kunlun, “Cai Yuanpei xiansheng er san shi” (Two or three things on Cai Yuanpei), Guangming ribao, March 4, 1980, reprinted in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 360.

57.

Xiao Lao, “Liushinian qian wo zai Beida,” 491– 92. Zhang Taiyan (also known as Zhang Binglin, 1868–1936) was a philologist, essayist, and anti-Manchu na-

tionalist. See Shimada Kenji, Pioneer of the Chinese Revolution: Zhang Binglin and Confucianism, trans. by Joshua A. Fogel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Young-tsu Wong, Search for Modern Nationalism: Zhang Binglin and revolutionary China, 1869–1936 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 58. 59.

Luo Jialun, “Huiyi Gu Hongming xiansheng,” 182–83. The fact that a political and cultural conservative like Gu Hongming was allowed to teach at Beida in the New Culture period is usually heralded as a sign (broad-minded tolerance). However, it must be noted that Gu was part of the

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faculty before Cai’s arrival in 1917 and that Cai ultimately fi red him, allegedly

1 .

because of carelessness in his teaching.

T H RO U G H

60.

Zhu Qianzhi later gained fame as a proponent of nihilist anarchism. He combined diverse philosophical influences, ranging from Max Stirner, George

230– 31. 61.

Zhu Qianzhi, “Fankang kaoshi de xuanyan” (Proclamation against the exams),

62.

See Liang Shuming, “Wusi yundong qianhou de Beijing Daxue,” 214; Tian

BDXSZK, no. 13 (March 28, 1920): 5– 6. Jiongjin, “Beida liunian suoyi,” 235. Yan Baoling, “Women duiyu Feizhi xianzai xuexiao kaoshi zhidu de yijian” (Our ideas on abolishing the existing examination system in the schools), BDRK, January 23– 31, 1920. Yan’s essay was introduced by a short statement by Cai Yuanpei who called for suggestions and opinions from people at Beida. In March, Yang Erhe published another essay partly on the same topic, “Xianxing xuezhi genben gaige de yijian” (Opinion on completely reforming the current educational system), BDRK, March 3, 1920. The Beijing Daxue xuesheng zhoukan published a series of essays on the abolition of exams, and one mentioned how Yan’s article had started the debate and called for the foundation of a research association on the abolition of exams. See Fusheng, “Daxue feikao wenti” (The issue of the abolition of university exams), BDXSZK, no. 15 (May 9, 1920): 8– 9. 64.

Wei Ming, “Feichi xuexiao de kaoshi zhidu” (Abolish the examination system in schools), BDXSZK, no. 4 (January 25, 1920): 1– 2.

65.

Liebei, “Xuesheng jiefang wenti” (The issue of student liberation), BDXSZK, no. 2 (January 11, 1920): 6– 7.

66.

Ibid. On the thirteen classics see Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), chapter 4.

67.

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

68.

Liebei, “Xuesheng jiefang wenti,” 7. A similar point is made by Wei Ming, “Feichi xuexiao de kaoshi zhidu.”

WA L L S

Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 210–11,

T H E

Sorel, and Zhang Binglin. On Zhu Qianzhi, see Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and

63.

225

of the actual implementation of Cai Yuanpei’s principle of jianrong bingbao

69.

Founded in 1915, the Yishibao was published by the Catholic Church in Tianjin. See Wang Guilin and Zhu Hanguo, eds., Zhongguo baokan cidian 1815–1949 (Dictionary of Chinese newspapers and periodicals, 1815–1949) (Taiyuan: Shuhai chubanshe, 1992), 70. See also Chow, Ts’e-tsung (Zhou Cezong), The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 124.

70.

1920, 3.

226 | WA L L S T H E T H RO U G H 1 .

“Beijing Daxue jinwen” (Recent news from Beijing University), Yishibao, June 5,

71.

“Beida feikao wenti zongjie” (Final resolution of the issue of the abolition of exams at Beida), Yishibao, June 6, 1920, 3.

72. 73.

Jingyi, “Feikao wenti,” Yishibao, June 7, 1920, 2. Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 66.

74.

Liang Shuming, “Beisong ji kaoshi de biyao” (The need for memorization and exams), BDRK, April 9, 1914, 3.

75.

Shengbai, “Beisong ji kaoshi mei you cunzai de biyao” (Memorization and exams have no need to exist), BDRK, April 12, 1920, 3.

76.

Liu Bing, “Feizhi xuexiao yiqie buliang de zhidu” (Abolish all the bad systems in the school), BDXSZK, no. 11 (March 4, 1920): 8– 9.

77.

Dabai, “Xuexiao de shenghuo ruhe gaige” (How to reform school life), BDXSZK, no. 15 (May 9, 1920): 6–8.

78.

Shaonan, “Fei dianming de shangque” (Discussion on the abolition of the roll call), BDXSZK, no. 15 (May 9, 1920): 13. Emphasis mine.

79.

See Liebei, “Xuesheng jiefang wenti” (The issue of student liberation), BDXSZK, no. 2 (January 11, 1920): 5– 7 and Zheng Yanghe, “Zhen jiaoyu yu wei jiaoyu” (True education and false education), BDXSZK, no. 15 (May 9, 1920): 2–6.

80.

Liebei, “Xuesheng jiefang wenti,” 6. The issue of the separation of school from

81.

Yang Erhe “Xianxing xuezhi genben gaige de yijian.”

society is discussed in chapter 4. 82.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

83.

Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

84.

Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 219.

85.

Ibid.

86. Jingshi Daxuetang can be translated as either “Imperial University” or “Imperial Academy.” I have chosen to use the former, except when quoting from different translators. 87. The Tongwen Guan was founded in 1861 to serve as college for training diplomatic interpreters and translators. In 1867, the curriculum was expanded to include a large array of scientific disciplines. See Weston, The Power of Position, 15–17.

88. See Hao Ping, Beijing Daxue chuangban shishi kaoyuan (Sources on the history of the founding of Beijing University) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998); see also Zou Shuwen, “Beijing Daxue zui zaoqi de huiyi” (The earliest memories of Beijing University), 3–10, and Chen Zhixian, “Ji Yixue Guan” (Remembering the Yixue Guan), 28–32, both in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi. 89. Yang Hui, “Wusi yundong yu Beida” (The May Fourth movement and Beida), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 50. The Yixue Guan adjoined the Imperial

BDRK, November 25, 1921, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2085–86. 94. “Shuwu weiyuanhui baogao shu” (Report of the general affairs committee), BDRK, November 26, 1921, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2086–87. 95. Miu Jinyuan, “Beijing Daxue de xuesheng shenghuo,” 1. 96. BDRK, December 14, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 1:621– 22. 97. Cheng Houzhi, “Huiyi wo zai Beida de yiduan xuesheng shenghuo” (Remembering my life as a student an Beida), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 257. Cheng was admitted to Beida in 1922. 98. Yang Zhongjian, “Liunian Beida xuesheng shenghuo de huiyi” (Memories of six years of life as a Beida student), in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 374. 99. Mao Dun, “Beijing Daxue yuke diyilei de sannian” (Th ree years in the first class at Beida preparatory courses), in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 207. See also Zhu Haitao, “Beida yu Beidaren,” 372. 100. Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 216. 101. Ibid. 102. “Cheng Jiaoyubu niding xuesheng zilin she banfa wen” (Letter to the Ministry of Education concerning a method to regulate the apartments rented privately by students), BDRK, January 11, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2104. 103. “Jiaoyubu xunling di 110 hao” (Decree of the Ministry of Education no. 110), BDRK, March 11, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2106– 7. 104. “Guoli Beijing daxue renke xiaowai jisushe jianzhang” (Statute regulating outside housing at National Beijing University), BDRK, September 21, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2107. 105. “Zhaiwuke tonggao” (Notice of the Housing office), BDRK, January 27, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2107–8.

WA L L S

93. “Shuwu weiyuanhui baogao shu” (Report of the general affairs committee),

T H E

Yundong Jinian Guan), which opened to the public on May 1, 2001. 92. Yang Hui, “Wusi yundong yu Beida,” 50.

T H RO U G H

the Beijing New Culture Movement Memorial Hall (Beijing Xin Wenhua

1 .

1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2077. The Honglou was recently transformed into

|

1898–1949) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1988), 43. 91. “Xin zhaishe zhi yongtu” (Utilization of the new building), BDRK, March 12,

227

University. 90. Xiao Chaoran, Beijing Daxue xiaoshi 1898–1949 (History of Beijing University,

106. Zhu Haitao, “Beida yu Beidaren,” 371– 72. 107. Miu Jinyuan, “Beijing daxue de xuesheng shenghuo,” 1. 108. Li Shan was a Tang scholar (?-689) who was famous for his expertise on the Wenxuan, on which he published six volumes of comments. 109. Yang Zhensheng, “Huiyi ‘Wusi’ ” (Remembering May Fourth), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 61. The Tongcheng school was the most famous literary school

1 .

T H RO U G H

T H E

WA L L S

|

228

of the Qing period. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen was translated into Chinese by Hu Shi in 1918 and was staged many times, sparking a wide intellectual debate. In 1923, Lu Xun delivered a famous speech at the Beijing Women’s Normal College titled “What happens after Nora leaves?” (Nala zouhou zenyang?). 110. Vera Schwarcz takes the New Tide group as the main focus of her work, The Chinese Enlightenment. 111. Yu Pingbo (1900–1990) was to become a famous poet and literary scholar while Wang Jingxi (1893–1968), devoted himself to psychology and went on to study and later teach in the United States. 112. Luo Jialun, “Beijing daxue yu Wusi yundong,” (Beijing University and the May Fourth Movement), in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 307. The third roommate was a Buddhist monk, Zhou Lieya. On this episode, see also Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 217–18. 113. Tao Xisheng, “Beijing Daxue yuke” (Beijing University preparatory courses), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 188. Tao entered Beida in 1915 but apparently this attitude continued on into the following decades. According to Zhu Haitao, the same practices continued unchanged through the early thirties. Zhu Haitao, “Beida yu Beidaren.” See also Mao Dun, “Daxue yuke diyilei de san nian.” 114. Tian Jiongjin, “Beida liunian suoyi,” 236. 115. I am thankful to Henrietta Harrison for pointing out the similarities between the behaviors of Beida students and the early twentieth-century shuyuan in Shanxi. 116. Révoltes logiques collective, L’Empire du sociologie (Paris, 1984), 7, quoted in Kristin Ross, “Introduction,” in J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, x. 117. Liu Bing, “Feizhi xuexiao yiqie buliang de zhidu,” 8– 9. 118. The article by Liang Kangping published in Canton’s Rensheng zhoukan took issue with Liebei’s “Xuesheng jiefang wenti,” published in BDXSZK, no. 2. 119. Liebei, “ ‘Xuesheng jiefang wenti de shangque’ zhi shangque” (A discussion on “A discussion of the problem of student liberation”), BDXSZK, no. 13 (March 28, 1920): 8– 9. 120. Suiting, “Fei shejian zhi,” 7. 121. In other cases, such an approach has been extremely useful, for example to explain the 1989 student mobilization in terms of campus ecology. Zhao Dingxin, The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); see also Jeff rey N.

Wasserstrom and Liu Xinyong, “Student Associations and Mass Movements,” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China, ed. Deborah S. Davis et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 362– 93. 122. Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 42. 123. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3. 229 |

. UNTR AINED BODIES AND FRUGAL HABITS

2 .

Work Study Mutual Aid Corps in Beijing,” Twentieth-Century China 33, no. 3 (November 2007): 81–103. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 24. 3. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the

Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley, CA: University of California

People’s Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10. 6. See chapter 1. 7. Beida students’ choices of accessories seemed to fit with the long gown and their bookish look: most of the students went around carry ing a Western-bound book under their arm. Most students took notes with a pencil, but there were still those who carried brush, ink, and stone to the classroom. Chuan Dao, “Wusi zayi” (Various memories from May Fourth), in Beida jiushi (Old facts about Beida), ed. Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 246–47. 8. A notable example is the publication in Xin Qingnian (April 1917) of a long essay by the young Mao Zedong, “A Study of Physical Education.” Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992) 1:113– 27. 9.

On the issue of China’s weakness as a reflection of the habits, bodies, and postures of the Chinese people, see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), in par ticu lar chapter 3. See also Morris, Marrow of the Nation.

10.

Despite the sneering and the generally perceived attitude of ineptitude in sports, in 1922 the Beida soccer team participated in a Beijing school tournament and never lost a match, beating everybody but Qinghua (they tied, two all). See Xuesheng zazhi, no. 2 (1922): 68.

H A B I T S

Press, 2004), 18. 5. Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the

F R U G A L

4. Quoted in Andrew F. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and

A N D

Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 54.

B O D I E S

2. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch

U N T R A I N E D

1. Shakhar Rahav, “A May Fourth ‘Peach Blossom Garden’: The Number One

11.

Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 80.

12.

Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New

13.

Yang Mo, The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge), trans. Nan Ying (Beijing: Foreign

York: Columbia University Press, 2007), particularly chapters 2 and 4. Languages Press, 1978), 118. 14.

Ibid., 166. See Antonia Finnane’s analysis of the clothes in Yang Mo’s novel

15.

Finnane, Changing Clothes, 177.

16.

Morris, Marrow of the Nation, 5.

17.

Ibid., 3.

18.

On the general history of the YMCA in China, see Xing Jun, Baptized in the

2 .

U N T R A I N E D

B O D I E S

A N D

FR U G A L

H A B I T S

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230

(Finnane, Changing Clothes, 184–85).

Fire of Revolution: The American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919–1937 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1996). 19. 20.

Quoted in Morris, Marrow of the Nation, 21. Dorothy Ko offers examples of changing attitudes toward femininity and the modern (functionalist) discourse imposed over female bodies in her wonderful Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

21.

Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 142.

22.

“Tiyuhui jishi yishu” (A report on the activities of the Association for Physical Education), BDRK, December 13, 1917, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2165– 66.

23.

“Jiang Menglin qishi” (Notice by Jiang Menglin), BDRK, October 16, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2169.

24.

“Beida xuesheng tiyu zhi jianjin” (The gradual advancement of physical education among Beida students), Chenbao, December 10, 1921, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2186–87.

25.

BDRK, April 21, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 2:2097– 98. On the uniforms, see chapter 7.

26.

Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 223.

27.

Morris, Marrow of the Nation, chapters 3 and 4.

28.

Ibid., 78. Robert Culp has carefully explored the connection between “tempered bodies” and citizenship in Nationalist China in his Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), chapter 5.

29.

Finnane, Changing Clothes, 139. See also Eileen Chang, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” trans. Andrew F. Jones, positions 11, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 427–41 and Peter Carroll, “Refashioning Suzhou: Dress, Commodification, and Modernity,” positions 11, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 443– 78.

30.

Finnane, Changing Clothes, 179.

31.

Brownell, Training the Body, 39; Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 222– 26.

32.

Finnane, Changing Clothes, 178.

33.

Ibid., 14.

34.

Quoted in Morris, Marrow of the Nation, 49.

35.

Brownell, Training the Body, 156.

36.

The late Qing reformer and martyr Tan Sitong articulated a distinction between 231

the West, whose central connotation was that of motion (dong), and China, which instead was characterized by stillness ( jing). Brownell, Training the Body, 57.

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37.

Quoted in Brownell, Training the Body, 12.

2 .

38.

John S. Alter, “Foreword,” in Morris, Marrow of the Nation, xvii.

U N T R A I N E D

39.

Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 218.

40.

John Israel, “Reflection on the Modern Chinese Student Movement,” Daedalus cal Perspective, ed. Alexander DeConde (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

Tao Xisheng, “Cai xiansheng ren Beida xiaozhang dui jindai Zhongguo fasheng de juda yingxiang” (The great influence Cai Yuanpei had on modern China See also Li Shuhua, “Qinian Beida” (Seven years at Beida), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 98– 99.

43. 44.

Miu Jinyuan, “Beijing Daxue de xuesheng shenghuo.” Sidney Gamble, Peking: A Social Survey (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921), 133.

45.

Israel, “Reflection on the Modern Chinese Student Movement,” 177.

46.

Gu Jiegang, “Cai Yuanpei xiansheng yu Wusi yundong,” reprinted in Beida gushi: Mingren yanzhong de lao Beida (Old tales of Beida: Beida in the eyes of famous people), ed. Mu Zhou and Mu Xiao (Beijing: Zhongguo wujia chubanshe, 1998), 11–12.

47.

Gamble, Peking, 268 ff.

48.

Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 113, and Chen Pingyuan, “Yulun: She yiyuan yu kai xuetang” (Afterword: Creating a parliament and opening an academy), in Chumo lishi: Wusi renwu yu xiandai Zhongguo (Touching history: The protagonists of May Fourth and modern China), ed. Chen Pingyuan, Xia Xiaohong (Guangzhou: Guangzhou chubanshe, 1999), 339–40.

49.

I am not assuming intellectuals were ever completely separated from the market, even in imperial China. But a different, more profound degree of commercialization is an integral part of what we call modernity.

H A B I T S

when he assumed the presidency of Beida), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 46.

F R U G A L

42.

Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 196.

A N D

1971), 177. 41.

B O D I E S

97, no. 1 (Winter 1968), reprinted in Student Activism: Town and Gown in Histori-

50.

See Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 165– 66 and 204– 5.

51.

Harootunian, History’s Disquiet.

52.

“Beijing Daxue tongxue jianxuehui qi” (Notice of the Beijing University students frugal society), Xin Qingnian, June 1, 1917, reprinted in BDSL II

53.

H A B I T S

54.

On the Jindehui, see Weston, Power of Position: 143–46.

55.

Ibid., 145. Ibid., 134– 35.

57.

“Beijing Daxue tongxue jianxuehui qi.”

58.

In the very same years, Beida student associations were also the place where a fi rst understanding and definition of class politics was formulated in a complex relationship of competition and collaboration with the frugal movement. The Beijing University Association for the Study of Marxism (Beijing Daxue Makesi Xueshuo Yanjiuhui), founded in March 1920, is commonly identified as one of the precursors of organized Marxism in China.

59.

Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 69. See also Joshua Goldstein, “Introduction” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Gold-

2 .

U N T R A I N E D

A N D

56.

B O D I E S

FR U G A L

See Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

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232

3:2599– 2600.

stein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 1– 21. 60.

Ruth Hayhoe describes similar initiatives at Fudan University in Shanghai (“Towards the Forging of a Chinese University Ethos: Zhendan and Fudan, 1903–1919,” China Quarterly, no. 94 [June 1983]: 338).

61.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue ershi zhou nian ji’nian ze” (Commemorative volume for the twentieth anniversary of Beijing University), reprinted in Guoli Beijing Daxue jinian kan (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1971).

62.

Paul Bailey, Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth- Century China, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 227.

63.

Ibid., 210.

64.

Weston, Power of Position, 144.

65.

Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 168– 70.

66.

Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 50. See also Mao Zedong, “The Works of the Students,” in Schram, Mao’s Road to Power, 1:450–56.

67.

Rahav, “A May Fourth ‘Peach Blossom Garden,’ ” 103.

68.

Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 72.

69.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For a very interesting critique of de Certeau’s view of space, see Kristin Ross, “Streetwise: The French Invention of Everyday Life,” Parallax 2 (1996): 67– 75.

70.

In the Nanjing decade, the gown became a symbol of cultural identity. In the 1930s, Qinghua students pointed precisely at the popularity of the gown on campus to signal how the university was a Chinese institution, not a “mere 233

American cultural colony.” Yeh, The Alienated Academy, 226. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: Chicago University Press,

|

2002), 145.

3 .

72.

Ibid., 145–46.

73.

Chow Ts’e-tsung estimates that only twenty percent of the students were in-

T H E

71.

Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 96– 97. See also Weston, Power of Position. 74.

See for example, Zheng Tianting, “Wo zai Beida de sinian” (My four years at

banshe, 1998), 265– 68. 75.

Chuan Dao, “Wusi zayi,” 244–45.

. THE DISPLACEMENT OF LEAR NING

1.

William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.

2.

Ibid., 14.

3.

Anthony Grafton, “The Nutty Professors: The History of Academic Charisma,” New Yorker, October 23, 2006.

4.

See also Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

5.

Clark, Academic Charisma, 124.

6.

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards and Investigation),” in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 40.

7.

Clark, Academic Charisma, 172.

8.

Ibid., 29.

9.

One of the oft-cited sayings about Beida was that the clients of the Beijing pleasure quarters came from the “two halls and one university,” with reference to the two houses of Parliament and the Imperial University, the predecessor of Beida. See Liang Zhu, Cai Yuanpei yu Beijing Daxue (Cai Yuanpei and Beijing University) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue Chubanshe, 1996), 196.

L E A R N I N G

Talk about Beida), ed. Wang Shiru and Wen Di (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chu-

O F

Beida) in Wo yu Beida: ‘Lao Beida’ hua Beida, (Beida and Me: Former Students

D I S P L AC E M E N T

volved in and affected by the New Culture movement. Chow, The May Fourth

10.

Cai Yuanpei, “Jiuren Beijing Daxue xiaozhang zhi yanshuo” (First address as

11.

Liang Qichao, “Li Beijing Daxue xiao huanying hui yanshuo ci” (Address at a

president of Beijing University), CYQJ 3:5– 7. reception in his honor at Beijing University) (October 31, 1912), in Liang Qichao wenxuan (Collected writings of Liang Qichao), vol. 2 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying shi chubanshe, 1992): 385–86. Partly translated in Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political CulLiang Qichao, “Li Beijing Daxue xiao,” 40.

13.

Ibid., 386.

14.

Cai Yuanpei, “Zai Nankai Xuexiao quanxiao huanyinghui shang de yanshuoci” (Speech at the welcome meeting at Nankai School), May 23, 1917, CYQJ 3:47.

15.

Cai Yuanpei, “Zai Beijing Gaodeng Shifan Xuexiao xuesheng zizhihui yanshuoci” (Address at the meeting of the self-government association of Beijing Higher Normal School), October 1920, CYQJ 3:463– 65. See also Cai Yuanpei, “Beida di’ershisan nian kaixueri yanshuoci” (Speech at the beginning of the twenty-third academic year of Beijing University), CYQJ 3:443–44.

16.

Stephen Owen, “The End of the Past: Rewriting Chinese Literary History in the Early Republic,” in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth

3 .

T H E

D I S P L AC E M E N T

O F

L E A R N I N G

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234

ture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 89– 90. 12.

Project, ed. M. Dolezalová-Velingerová and O. Král (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 170. 17.

Vera Schwarcz argues that ideas similar to those expressed by Cai in 1917 were presented (albeit with a less successful outcome) by Yan Fu, president of the university in 1912. Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 47. Timothy Weston illustrates how Zhang Zhidong’s 1904 plan for the Imperial University, which contained provisions for the constitution of graduate schools specifically focused on research, was “rooted in an understanding that the boundaries of knowledge were always expanding.” In the same vein, Sun Jia’nai, first president of the Imperial University (1898–1900) seems to have anticipated by more than a decade another of Cai’s tenets, the unity of all branches of knowledge. Sun, in a reaction against a “technical” interpretation of the kind of knowledge schools were supposed to transmit, stressed the necessity of integrating practical learning with Western theoretical thinking. Already in 1898 Sun was implying “a new way of thinking about knowledge and learning,” one that “united the various Western disciplines within a single intellectual framework rather than dividing them from one another into hermetically isolated intellectual subspaces.” Timothy B. Weston, “The Founding of the Imperial University and the Emergence of Chinese Modernity,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, ed. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 118, 107.

18.

Cai Yuanpei, “Wo zai jioayujie de jingyan” (My experience in the world of edu-

19.

According to Andrew Nathan, the Ministry of Education was one of the “tech-

cation), CYQJ 7:199. nical positions” in the cabinet, usually left to somebody coming from the education bureaucracy. See Nathan, Peking Politics, 1918–1923: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 67. Fan Yuanlian had been the vice-minister of education under Cai Yuanpei in the Cai Yuanpei, “Duiyu songjiu yingxin er tu zhi ganxiang” (My feelings about

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the two images of saying goodbye to the old and welcoming the new), CYQJ

3 .

2:468– 69. Partly translated in William J. Duiker, Ts’ai Yüan- p’ei: Educator

T H E

1977), 51. Cai Yuanpei, “Zhi Wang Zhaoming han” (Letter to Wang Jingwei), March 15, 1917, CYQJ 3:26. 22.

Cai Yuanpei, “Zai Beida huabie hui yanshuoci” (Speech at the farewell recepZou Shuwen, “Beijing Daxue zui zaoqi de huiyi” and Wang Huachu, “Ji youji shifanguan” (Remembering the excellent normal institute), in Beida jiushi (Old facts about Beida), ed. Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 11–14.

24.

See Chen Pingyuan, “Lao Beida de gushi (dai xu)” (Stories from old Beida: Introduction), in Beida jiushi, ed. Chen and Xia, 15–16; Weston, The Power of Position, especially chapter 3; and Timothy B. Weston, “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community, 1913–1917,”  Modern China 24, no. 3 (July 1998): 255–84.

25.

Tao Xisheng, “Beijing Daxue yuke,” in Beida jiushi, ed. Chen and Xia, 188– 95. Xu Chongqing was the director of preparatory courses until 1917.

26.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue fenke guicheng: Wenke, like” (Rules of the undergraduate courses at Beijing National University: Humanities and Sciences), April 1916, Beijing University Archives.

27.

Feng Youlan, The Hall of Three Pines: An Account of My Life, trans. Denis C. Mair (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 207.

28.

A word of caution—most of the memoirs that extol the yuke’s high reputation before Cai’s presidency are written by people who had a stake in the fame (like Xu Chongqin himself) or who clearly maintained an emotional attachment to the pre-1918 preparatory courses (like Tao Xisheng, a former student).

29.

Tao Xisheng, “Beijing Daxue yuke.”

30.

Cai Yuanpei, “Du Zhou Chunyu jun ‘Daxue gaizhi zhi shangque’ ” (Reading

31.

Ibid., 149.

Zhou Chunyu ‘A Discussion of University Reform’), May 15, 1918, CYQJ 3:150.

L E A R N I N G

23.

O F

tion at Beijing University), October 20, 1920, CYQJ 3:450.

D I S P L AC E M E N T

of   Modern China (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 21.

235

fi rst Republican government in 1912. 20.

32.

“Beijing Daxue zhaoshou xinsheng” (Beiing University admits new students),

33.

Cai Yuanpei, “Daxue gaizhi zhi shishi ji liyou” (The facts and reasons of univer-

Xuesheng zazhi, no. 7 (July 1917): 38– 39. sity reform), January 1918, CYQJ 3:131. Beida resisted an attempt to reintegrate the School of Engineering in May 1920; see BDSL II 1:68– 69. 34.

In 1917, the School of Law had more than eight hundred students (almost equally split between preparatory and undergraduate courses), and was by far

236

the largest school at Beida. The School of Humanities had 379 students alto-

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gether, Sciences had 416 (105 undergraduates and 311 in the preparatory courses)

L E A R N I N G

and Engineering only eighty. See “Guoli Beijing Daxue ershi zhou nian jinian ze” (Commemorative volume for the twentieth anniversary of Beijing University), repr. in Guoli Beijing Daxue jinian kan (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chuban-

3 .

T H E

D I S P L AC E M E N T

O F

she, 1971). 35.

Cai Yuanpei, “Wo zai Beijing Daxue de jingli,” January 1, 1934, CYQJ 6:352; Cai, “Daxue gaizhi zhi shishi,” 132.

36.

“Beijing daxue zhi gaige” (The reform of Beijing university), Jiaoyu zazhi, September 5, 1917, repr. in BDSL II 1:65.

37.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue xueke kecheng yilan” (Overview of the classes at Beijing University), BDSL II 2:1078– 79.

38.

“In 1918 the three schools of law, humanities and sciences established graduate schools, each with its own publishing office.” Xiao Chaoran, Beijing Daxue Xiaoshi 1898–1949 (History of Beijing University, 1898–1949) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1988), 62.

39.

See BDSL I: 128.

40.

Cai Yuanpei, “Daxueling,” October 24, 1912, CYQJ 2:283–85. See also Xiao Chaoran, Beijing Daxue xiaoshi, 44.

41.

See BDSL II 2:1331– 36.

42.

See “ ‘Beijing Daxue yuekan’ fakanci” (The inaugural issue of the ‘Beijing university monthly’), CYQJ 3:210–12; “Yanjiusuo tongze” (General regulations of the graduate schools), BDRK, November 16, 1917, reprinted in BDSL II 1:1332.

43.

For the 1916 curriculum, see “Guoli Beijing Daxue fenke guicheng: Wenke, like”; the 1917 course lists are in “Guoli Beijing Daxue ershi zhou nian jinian ze,” 1:169– 70.

44.

Wang Xuezheng et al., eds., Beijing Daxue jishi (1898–1997) (Beijing University chronicle) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 1:52.

45.

“Wenbenke ben xuenian gemen kecheng biao,” (Schedule of undergraduate courses of all the humanities department for the current year), BDRK, September 26, 1918, 2.

46.

Wenli daxue is sometimes translated as “liberal arts college” because of the focus on humanities and “abstract” scientific disciplines. The main difference is the heavy emphasis on research that was central in the restructuring of Beijing

University and that has no part in liberal arts schools, whose goal is generally a broad and inclusive “basic” preparation. 47.

It is not by chance that the major restructuring of the curricula and, as we will see, of the administration, took place just after the wave of May Fourth student activism had subsided; in the months after May, students and faculty had shown a extraordinary organizational ability that could be channeled into the new phase of university reform. See Cai Yuanpei, “Huiren Beida xiaozhang zai his honor in front of all the Beida students welcoming him back as university

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president), CYQJ 3:341–42.

3 .

“Beijing Daxue zhi zuijin xuezhi” (The most recent course organization at Bei-

T H E

48.

50.

On the foundation of the Jiaowuchu, see BDSL II 1:188–89. “Xuexiao diaocha—Beijing Daxue” (School survey—Beijing University), Shaonian shijie 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1920), reprinted in BDSL II 3:3156– 70.

51.

Guoli Beijing Daxue gailüe (An outline of Beijing University), Beijing University Clark, Academic Charisma, 445–46.

53.

Cai Yuanpei, “Wo zai Beijing Daxue de jingli,” 352.

54.

Cai Yuanpei, “Du Zhou Chunyu jun,” 150. Emphasis mine.

55.

Cai Yuanpei, “Hunan zixiu daxue jieshao yu shuoming” (An introduction to the Hunan self-study university), August 1922, CYQJ 4:244–47.

56.

Mao Zedong, “Hunan zixiu daxue chuangli xuanyan” (Statement on the founding of Hunan self-study university), Dong fang zazhi 20, no. 6 (August 1921): 125– 28. Trans. in Stuart Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 2:88– 92.

57.

Cai Yuanpei, “ ‘Beijing Daxue yuekan’ fakanci,” 211.

58.

Cai Yuanpei, “Wo zai Beijing Daxue,” 351.

59.

Cai Yuanpei, “Huiren Beida xiaozhang,” 342.

60.

Cai Yuanpei, “Jiuren Beijing Daxue,” 7. The use of the manuals was connected with an attitude that privileged study for the examinations over actual research.

61.

BDRK, December 11, 1917, repr. in BDSL II 2:1179.

62.

“Yan Shutang, Wang Shijie xiansheng zhi jiaowuzhang han” (Yan Shutang and Wang Shijie’s letter to the Dean), BDRK, November 5, 1921, repr. in BDSL II 2:1184.

63.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue ershi zhou nian jinian ze,” 1:247. In 1917 the library collection was composed of 137,260 volumes in Chinese, 1,580 in other Asian languages, and 8,350 in Western languages, for a total of 147,190. In 1920 there were 142,115 volumes in Chinese, 17,485 in Western languages, 2,431 in Japanese, plus over 370 periodicals (including more than 170 in foreign languages.) See BDSL II 2:1963.

L E A R N I N G

52.

O F

library, 1923.

D I S P L AC E M E N T

jing University), Shenbao, October 11, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 2:66– 68. 49.

237

quanti xuesheng huanyinghui shang de yanshuoci” (Address at the reception in

64.

See Cai Yuanpei, “Beida di’ershisan nian kaixueri yanshoci” (Speech at the opening of the twenty-third academic year at Beida), September 16, 1920, CYQJ 3:443– 44, and “Zhexuexi Zhang Jingsheng jiaoshou zhi benxiao jiaoyuan xuesheng han” (Letter to the students and the faculty from professor Zhang Jingsheng of the philosophy department), BDRK, November 22, 1921, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1184.

65.

James Reardon-Anderson, The Study of Change: Chemistry in China, 1840–1949

66.

L E A R N I N G O F D I S P L AC E M E N T T H E 3 .

Cai Yuanpei, “Beida di’ershier nian kaixueshi yanshuoci” (Speech at the opening of the twenty-second academic year of Beijing University), September 20,

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238

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 115.

1919, CYQJ 3:344. 67.

Xiao, Beijing Daxue xiaoshi, 60. In 1917 the average age was around thirty-

68.

From Der Königsberger und der Litauische Schulplan, cited in Clark, Academic

seven; see “Guoli Beijing Daxue ershi zhou nian jinian ze,” 2:309– 34. Charisma, 445. 69.

See Cai’s comments on Zhou Chunyu’s proposal to establish universities with the wider possible range of disciplines. “Du Zhou Chunyu jun,” 148–51.

70.

Xiaoching Diana Lin, Peking University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1898–1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 139.

71.

Clark, Academic Charisma, 446.

72.

Ibid.

73.

“Xunling” (Decree), June 28, 1917, BDSL II 2:1505.

74.

“Minguoshi bianzuan lüeli” (Rules for the compilation of the Republican History), BDRK November 16, 1917, BDSL II 2:1507.

75.

“Guoshi bianzuanchu zuanjigu bianzuan lüeli” (Compilation rules for the compilation section of the Bureau of National History), BDRK, November 16, 1917, BDSL II 2:1506– 7.

76. 77.

Ibid. “Guoshi bianzuan chu jishi” (Report on the Bureau for National History), BDRK, January 17, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1513–14.

78.

Cai Yuanpei, “Cheng Jiaoyubu qing jiang Qing neike dang’an bogui benxiao” (Letter to the Ministry of Education asking to have the Qing government archive moved back to the school), May 12, 1922, BDSL II 2:1517.

79.

“Guoshi zhengjihui kaihui jishi” (Report of the meeting of the National History Collection Committee” (Guoshi zhengjihui kaihui jishi), BDRK, December 10, 1918, BDSL II 2:1511–12.

80.

Ibid. Two subsections had been created in the bureau, one devoted to the collection of materials and sources, the second to the actual compilation.

81.

Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany: State University of New York, 2001), 13. One could argue whether, in this and many other cases, the label “May Fourth” makes any sense when it includes authors ranging from Liang Qichao to He Bingsong and

texts dating from the late Qing to the 1930s. Clearly, “May Fourth” here does not have any intellectual, political, and organizational function, and can only provide the name for a problematic chronology. 82.

“Guoshi bianzuan chu jishi.”

83.

“Jiaoyubu xunling” (Ministry of Education decree), August 27, 1919, BDSL II

84.

Wang, Inventing China.

2:1516. Lin, Peking University, 47. Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth

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Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 8.

3 .

Fu Sinian, “Fu Sinian zhi Cai Yuanpei han” (Fu Sinian’s letter to Cai Yuanpei),

T H E

87.

On “science” as the overarching criterium for validity, see Wang Hui, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 80–120. See also Wang Hui, “The Fate of

Cai Yuanpei, “Dui Fu Sinian lai han de anyu” (Remarks in reply to Fu Sinian’s

90.

Cai Yuanpei, “Beijing Daxue yuekan,” 211.

letter), October 8, 1918, CYQJ 3:194. 91.

Tani Barlow, “Zhishifenzi [Chinese intellectuals] and power,” in Dialectical Anthropology 16, nos. 3–4 (September 1991): 209– 32.

92.

Ibid., 210.

93.

I owe this formulation to Claudia Pozzana.

94.

“Zhiling” (Decree), Jiaoyu gongbao, December 20, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 1:82.

95.

See “Guowenxue yanjiusuo kaihui jishi” (Record of the meeting of the graduate school of Chinese literature), BDRK, October 18, 1919. In that meeting a plan to edit a dictionary and grammar of the Chinese language was set out. The direction of the project was entrusted to Shen Jianshi. See also Ma Yue, ed., Beijing Daxue Zhongwenxi jianshi 1910–1998 (Short history of the Chinese literature department), (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 8– 9.

96. Ma Yue, Beijing Daxue Zhongwenxi, 12. 97. Lin Qinnan, “Lin Qinnan zhi Cai Yuanpei han” (Letter to Cai Yuanpei), May 3, 1918, CYQJ 3:274. Emphasis mine. 98. Cai Yuanpei, “Beijing Daxue yuekan,” 211–12. 99. Ibid., 210. 100. Chen Duxiu, “Xueshu yu guocui” (Learning and national essence), Xin Qingnian 4, no. 4 (April 15, 1918), repr. in Chen Duxiu jiaoyu lunzhu xuan (Chen Duxiu’s collected essays on education), (Beijing: Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994), 149.

L E A R N I N G

Chinese Thought,” positions: east asia studies critique 3, no. 1 (1995): 1– 68. 89.

O F

‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern

D I S P L AC E M E N T

August 9, 1918, CYQJ 3:194– 97. 88.

239

85. 86.

101. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 56–57. See also Jacques Rancière, “La cause de l’autre,” in Aux bords du politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 1998), 148– 64, trans. David Macey as “The Cause of the Other,” Parallax 4, no. 2 (1998): 25– 33. In the French case, the event that initiated this process was the massacre of Paris Algerians on October 17, 1961, in which the French police savagely repressed a mass demonstration, threw the

240

bodies of the murdered in the Seine, and then tried to cover up the facts.

1. See for example the essays in M. Dolezalová-Velingerová and O. Král, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 2. Jinggan, “Fei shejian zhi” (Abolish the dormitory supervisor system), BDXSZK, no. 3 (January 18, 1920): 7. 3. Li Zehou formulated this idea, which gained popularity both in China and abroad. See Li Zehou, “Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou” (The coupled variations of enlightenment and national salvation), in Zhongguo xiandai

T H E

D I S P L AC E M E N T

O F

L E A R N I N G

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. LEARNING POLITICS

3 .

sixiang shilun (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1987), 7–49. The analytical framework of Vera Schwarcz’s The Chinese Enlightenment is explicitly based on Li Zehou’s approach. The issue of incompleteness is at the center of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s “Incomplete Modernity: Rethinking the May Fourth Intellectual Project,” in Dolezalová-Velingerová and Král, The Appropriation of Cultural Capital, 31–65. 4. A more recent example of a similar connection (with, in my opinion, antipolitical implications) is Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle With the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5. Cai Yuanpei, “Duiyu xin jiaoyu zhi yijian” (My opinions on the new education), February 11, 1912, CYQJ 2:130. 6. Laurence A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 26. 7.

Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 146. See also chapter 5.

8.

Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University

9.

Alessandro Russo, Le Rovine del Mandato: La modernizzazione politica

Press, 1989), 59. dell’educazione e della cultura cinesi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985), 74. 10.

Luo Jialun, “Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong” (Beijing University and the May Fourth Movement), in Wo yu Beida: ‘Lao Beida’ hua Beida (Beida and me: For-

mer students talk about Beida), ed. Wang Shiru and Wen Di (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 310. 11.

In 1912, the name of the university was set as “Beijing Daxue”; by 1915, the two characters “Guoli” (“national,” also meaning “state-run” or “state-maintained”) were added. See “Guoli Beijing Daxue zhi” bian zuan chu, Guoli Beijing Daxue xiaoshi lüe (Short history of National Beijing University), (Beijing: Guoli Beijing Daxue zhi bian zuan chu, 1933).

Cai Yuanpei, “Jiuren Beijing Daxue” (First address as president of Beijing Uni-

4 .

versity), CYQJ 3:5– 7.

L E A R N I N G

14.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 10.

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13.

Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression

“Guoli Beijing Daxue guanggao” (Announcement from National Beijing University), Zhengdu gongbao, April 27, 1917, reprinted in BDSL II 2:865. “Benxiao zhaokao jianzheng” (Brief statute of this school’s admission exams), BDRK, June 5, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:867– 69. Exams were held at the Mashenmiao campus in Beijing and at the Gongye Zhuanmen Xuexiao (formerly Nanyang Gongxue) in Shanghai.

16.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue neibu zuzhi shixing zhangcheng” (Provisional statute of the internal organization of National Beijing University), BDRK, December 6, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 1:77.

17.

In 1917, for example, the section is labeled “Zhongxi lishi.” Beijing Daxue yuke ruxue shiti 1917–1922 (Topics for the admission exams to Beijing University preparatory courses, 1917–1922), Beijing University Archive, 4. The division between Western and Chinese history (and geography) was a question that lingered in the educational (and political) world through the 1920s and 1930s. Robert Culp shows how despite the 1923 educational reform that encouraged an integration of instruction, these fields remained separate in textbooks devoted either to Western or Chinese history. During the Nanjing decade, “in an effort to present China’s history as an autochthonous process,” a new separation was practiced. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 41.

18.

I will not analyze here the questions for the scientific disciplines, in large part because of my lack of expertise in any of these subjects. However, looking just at the math section, the tests look fairly challenging, and they would defi nitively constitute a hurdle for most U.S. college applicants.

19.

Beijing Daxue yuke ruxue shiti. The Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 settled the border disputes between Qing China and Tzarist Russia. The Treaty of 1885 was signed at the end of the Sino-French War (1884–85) and gave France control over Tonkin (north Vietnam).

P O L I T I C S

15.

241

12.

20.

On the Japanese colonization of Korea see Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

21.

Culp, Articulating Citizenship, 57 and 96.

22.

The Chinese text (to be translated into English) was: “The people in a democratic nation enjoy three kinds of inalienable freedoms: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of publication. Why are these freedoms in-

242

alienable? Because the progress of one nation depends on the development of publication are not free, then new thought cannot circulate.” Beijing Daxue yuke ruxue shiti, 6, 16. Beijing Daxue yuke ruxue shiti, 15. The question was in the second session of the

L E A R N I N G

23.

1919 Beijing exam. The original quote is by Walter E. Weyl and was from his

4 .

P O L I T I C S

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thought. If thought is not free, then new thought cannot emerge. If speech and

and Arthur M. Schlesinger, eds., The Faces of Five Decades: Selections From Fifty

essay on the failure of Wilson’s international policy at Versailles, “Prophet and Politician,” New Republic 19, no. 240 (June 7, 1919): 173– 78. See Robert B. Luce Years of the New Republic, 1914–1964 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964). 24.

Beijing Daxue yuke ruxue shiti.

25.

Ibid., 32.

26.

Ibid., 43.

27.

On the comparisons between the modern university and the Taixue see chapter 6.

28. 29.

Beijing Daxue yuke ruxue shiti, 42. Cheng Houzhi, “Huiyi wo zai Beida de yiduan xuesheng shenghuo” (Remembering my life as a student an Beida), in Beida jiushi (Old facts about Beida), ed. Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 256.

30. 31.

See chapter 6. “Daxue ling” (University Decree), October 24, 1912, CYQJ 2:283–86. The idea of a system that substituted for the sole authority of the president a series of collegial electives bodies was inspired by the German university model following von Humboldt’s reform. Cai held a degree in aesthetics from Leipzig University and had first-hand knowledge of the system of “faculty government” that von Humboldt had introduced in the German academia. He recalled the influence of the German model in a 1919 speech to the student body, see Cai Yuanpei, “Huiren Beida xiaozhang zai quanti xuesheng huanyinghui shang de yanshuoci” (Address at the reception in his honor in front of all the Beida students welcoming him back as university president), CYQJ 3:341. On the German universities, see Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

32.

Liang Zhu, “Lun Cai Yuanpei zai Beijing Daxue de gexin” (Cai Yuanpei’s reform at Beijing University), Jiaoyu yanjiu, no. 8 (1984): 53– 60. The task of check-

ing on students’ behavior was removed from the pingyihui statute in 1920. See “Pingyihui guize xiuzheng an” (Amended statute of the pingyihui), BDRK, April 15, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 1:139–40. 33.

“Zhiling Beijing Daxue gaixiao pingyihui jiangzhang ji huiyuan fuli zhunbei anwen” (Texts of the statute of the Beijing University pingyihui and curricula of its members), Jiaoyu gongbao 4, no. 8 (June 1917), reprinted in BDSL II 1:132– 33. See Wang Xuezheng et al., eds., Beijing Daxue jishi (1898–1997) (Beijing Uni-

243

34.

versity chronicle) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 1:41–42.

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35.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue neibu zuzhi shixing zhangcheng,” 78.

4 .

36.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue neibu zuzhi shixing zhangcheng,” 81.

L E A R N I N G

37.

Ibid., 82.

38.

Ibid. See Shen Yinmo, “Wo he Beida” (Beida and I), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 173– 76. See also, Gu Mengyu, “Yi Cai Jiemin xiansheng” (Remembering Cai Yuanpei), Zhongyang ribao, March 24, 1940, reprinted in Zhongguo Cai Yuanpei yanjuhui, ed., Cai Yuanpei jinian ji (Commemorative essays on Cai Yuanpei) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 157–58.

40.

“Beida fouren zuzhi pingyihui zhiling” (Beida refuses to recognize the order to form the evaluation committee), Shenbao, March 8, 1923, reprinted in BDSL II 1:143; “Pingyihui bugao” (Report of the Evaluation Committee), March 5, 1923, BDSL II 1:142.

41.

Xu Yanzhi, “School survey: Beijing Daxue,” Shaonian shijie, January 1, 1920,

42.

I owe this formulation to Alessandro Russo.

43.

“Guoli Beijing Daxue neibu zuzhi shixing zhangcheng,” December 6, 1919.

reprinted in BDSL II 3:3162.

Students figured prominently in the leading bodies of school-wide organizations, such as the Jindehui. 44.

The fi rst issue of the Beijing University Daily was published on November 16, 1917.

45.

Moses Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 28. Finley is not oblivious to the fact that membership in the polis was limited to a minority, as slaves and women were notably excluded. For his take on this issue, see his introduction to the volume.

46.

“Guanyu jiaoyu jingfei zhi xiangue diaocha” (Detailed survey of educational expenses), Chenbao, March 30, 1921, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1890. Beida’s provisional budget for 1921 was 707,800 yuan. Tuition only contributed 71,500 yuan per year while salaries constituted more than half of the annual expenses (496,435 yuan). See “Ben niandu xiaonei yusuan biao” (Provisional school budget for the current year), BDRK, December 17, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1885.

P O L I T I C S

39.

47.

Timothy B. Weston, “The Founding of the Imperial University and the Emergence of Chinese Modernity,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, ed. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 110.

48.

On Cai’s 1919 resignation, see Chow T’se-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 132– 39. For a more “conspiratorial” account see Shen Yinmo, “Wo “Bu ken zai ren Beida xiaozhang de xuanyan” (I cannot be Beida’s president

50.

Chiang Monlin (Jiang Menglin), Tides from the West: A Chinese Autobiography

51.

Liebei, “Xuesheng jiefang wenti” (The issue of student liberation), BDXSZK,

anymore), CYQJ 3 (June 5, 1919): 298. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), 135. no. 2 (January 11, 1920). 52.

Cai Yuanpei, “Beijing Daxue zhi Jindehui” (The Association for the Promotion of Virtue at Beijing University), BDRK, January 19, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II

4 .

L E A R N I N G

P O L I T I C S

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244

he Beida,” 176– 77. 49.

3:2566– 67. 53.

“Jindehui qishi disihao” (Notice number 4 of the Association for the Promotion of Virtue), BDRK, July 6, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2574– 75.

54.

Arif Dirlik, “Ideology and Organization in the May Fourth Movement: Some Problems in the Intellectual Historiography of the May Fourth Period,” Republican China 12, no. 1 (November 1986): 11.

55. 56.

Ibid. “Jindehui tongzhi ji mingce” (Notice of the Association for the Promotion of Virtue and list of members), BDSL II 3:2568.

57.

A young Mao Zedong attended courses and received a diploma from the Journalism Study Society. He also joined the Study Society on Philosophy. He was at Beida for the fi rst time in the fi rst months of 1919, worked as an assistant librarian in the periodicals reading room of Beida Library and participated in the activities of the Xinwenxue yanjiuhui. See Li Rui, Mao Zedong de chuqi geming huodong (The early revolutionary activities of Mao Zedong) (Changsha: Hunan Renmin Chubanshe, 1980); Li Jui (Li Rui), The Early Revolutionary Activities of Comrade Mao Tse-Tung (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1977). See also Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 152.

58.

“Beijing Daxue jinzhuang,” Jiaoyu Zazhi 10, no. 5 (May 1918): 30– 31. A very incomplete list of some of the associations established at Beida includes: Association for Martial Arts (Beijing Daxue Jijihui, founded in 1917), the Periodical and the Book Reading Society (Yueshubao She, 1918), the Strengthening Society (Jianshenhui, 1919), the Frugal Study Society (Tongxue Jianxuehui, 1917), the Debate Society (Bianlunhui, 1919), the Esperanto Study Society (Beida Shijieyu Xuehui, 1919), the Association for the Translation of New Knowledge

(Xinzhi Bianyi She, 1919), the Work-study Mutual Aid Group (Gongdu Huzhu Tuan, 1919), and the Association for the Study of Hygiene (Beijing Daxue Weisheng Xuehui, 1919). 59.

Yang Hui, “Wusi yundong yu Beijing Daxue” (The May Fourth movement and Beida), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 51.

60.

Luo Jialun, “Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong” (Beijing University and the May Fourth Movement), in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 306. of the deliberative assembly of the student association), BDRK, October 29,

|

1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2408. The quote is from Zhang Guotao’s speech.

4 .

On the Xueshenghui see BDSL II 3:2381–411.

L E A R N I N G

62.

“Benxiao xueshenghui pingyibu kaichenghui jishi” (Report on the fi rst meeting

Zheng Tianting, “Wo zai Beida de sinian” (My four years at Beida) in Wo yu Beida, in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 265– 66. Zheng Tianting profited from Beida and Nankai.

63.

Ibid., 267.

64.

Liu Yizhen, “Xuesheng de nulixing” (The slave mentality of students) in BDXSZK, no. 5 (February 1, 1920), 11. The essayist attributed the fragmentation of associations to the “slavish mentality” of students that the reforms had not succeeded in breaking. Associations were quickly formed and disbanded before May Fourth, but he seems to imply that this phenomenon became more widespread when the demonstrations of 1919 (and their aftermath) proved the exhaustion of the organizational model vis-à-vis larger social and political issues. “Beijing Daxue yinyue hui jianzhang” (Statute of the Music Society of Beijing University), BDRK, February 3, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2642.

66.

“Beijing Daxue xiongbian hui zongzhang” (Statute of the Eloquence Society of Beijing University), BDSL II 3:2685.

67.

“Xinshi bianyi she chenli ji” (Report of the foundation of the Association for the Translation of New Knowledge), BDRK, October 2, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2728.

68.

Jacques Rancière, Th e Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 57.

69.

Many Beida associations accepted new members from outside the school, usually through a simple process of introduction by existing members. Clearly, the principle of equality was practiced inside a restricted group of students, but, as a model of organizational practice, the xuehui was nonetheless conceived as potentially and equally open.

70.

Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 57.

71.

Ibid.

72.

Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 58.

P O L I T I C S

all his studying—he became a professor of history and Chinese literature at

65.

245

61.

73.

“Wenti yanjiuhui zhangcheng,” BDRK, October 23, 1919. Translated in Stuart R. Schram, ed., Mao’s Road to Power, 1:407–13. The English version translates the title as a plural, “Statutes,” but I think this misses the fact that this society was thought to be a matrix of multiple societies. It was a list of problems, not associations.

74.

Schram, Mao’s Road to Power, 1:407.

75.

Alessandro Russo, “Introduzione” in Mao Zedong, Inventare una scuola: Scritti

246

giovanili sull’educazione (To invent a school: Early writings on education), ed. 76.

Ibid.

77.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). For an interesting critique of Anderson, see Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

78.

Alain Badiou, “The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics,” in

79.

Mao Zedong, “The Founding and the Progress of the ‘Strengthen Learning

Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 289.

4 .

L E A R N I N G

P O L I T I C S

|

Fabio Lanza and Alessandro Russo (Rome: ManifestoLibri, 1996), 17.

Society,’ ” in Schram, Mao’s Road to Power, 1:369– 76. 80.

See Chen Jingpan, Zhongguo jindai jiaoyu shi (History of Modern Chinese

81.

Th is clearly does not detract from the revolutionary novelty of the 1898 enter-

Education) (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1979), chapter 4. prise. For an interesting analysis of the connection between the Hundred Days and the imperial state, see Peter Zarrow, “The Reform Movement, the Monarchy, and Political Modernity,” in Karl and Zarrow, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period, 17–47. 82.

Badiou, “The Paris Commune,” 289.

83.

One of the articles published in the Students’ Weekly calling for student selfmanagement of their living quarters used the word discipline in English, almost as if to stress the novelty of this concept vis-à-vis preexisting cases. Suiting, “Fei shejian zhi” (Abolish the system of dormitory supervisors), BDXSZK, no. 3 (January 18, 1920): 8.

. IMPROPER PLACES

1.

The convention, which was negotiated from March to May with the Duan Qirui government, granted the Japanese, among other rights, a military presence in north Manchuria and Mongolia. The contents of the convention were kept secret, but rumors fi ltered to the newspapers. See Chow T’se-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 79. For a detailed description of the historical circumstances of the 1918 movement see Zhang Huizhi. “Wusi” qianxi di Zhong-

guo xuesheng yundong (The Chinese student movement on the eve of “May Fourth”) (Taiyuan: Shanxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996). 2.

Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 155.

3.

Beijing xuesheng jie juyue zhi fengchao” (The movement by the students of Beijing to repeal the convention) in Jiaoyu zazhi 10, no. 6 (June 1918): 44–45,

|

any kind of spontaneous political expression. David Strand, Rickshaw Bei-

5 .

jing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California

I M P RO P E R

Press, 1989), 92. 4.

Ibid. Chang Kuo-t’ao (Zhang Guotao), The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921– 1927, vol. 1, The Autobiography of Chang Kuo-t’ao (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971), 48.

6.

Ibid. Zhang Guotao’s memory fails him on two details. First, the number of  student delegates: they were thirteen altogether, five of whom were from Beida. Originally the students had planned to send three representatives from each school. Second, Xu Shichang was elected president only in September; in May the position was occupied by Feng Guozhang. See Li Chien-nung, The Political History of China, 1840–1928 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1956), 384.

7.

“Benxiao quanti xuesheng wangfu qingyuan xiaozhang quanzu wuxiao” (The student body at Beida petitioned the palace; the attempt of the president to dissuade the students had no effect), BDRK, May 22, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2799.

8.

Luo Jialun, “Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong” (Beijing University and the May Fourth Movement), in Wo yu Beida: ‘Lao Beida’ hua Beida (Beida and Me: Former Students Talk about Beida), ed. Wang Shiru and Wen Di (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 309. Cai did not actually resign.

9. 10. 11.

“Benxiao quanti xuesheng wangfu qingyuan xiaozhang quanzu wuxiao.” See chapter 7. On the March First movement in Korea, see Frank P. Baldwin, “The March First Movement: Korean Challenge and Japanese Response” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1972). See also Michael E. Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in  Colonial Korea, 1920–1925 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988); Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

P L AC E S

5.

247

reprinted in BDSL II 3:2800. One should note that the protests were illegal, as the 1914 “Special police Laws for the preservation of Order” prohibited

12.

The two “manifestos” that the students adopted and distributed to the people of Beijing were drafted by Luo Jialun of the New Tide society and by Xu Deheng of The Citizen.

13.

Luo Jialun, “Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong,” 310.

14.

John and Alice Chipman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), quoted in Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 102.

15.

Cai Yuanpei, “Wo zai Beijing Daxue de jingli” (My experience at Beijing Uni-

16.

“Gao Beida tongxue zhujun” (To Beida students), May 10, 1919, CYQJ 3:295– 96.

17.

“Cai Yuanpei ciqu xiaozhang zhi zhenyin” (The real reason why Cai Yuanpei

5 .

I M P RO P E R

P L AC E S

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248

versity), CYQJ 6:353.

resigned), Chenbao, May 13, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 1:296. 18.

“Gao Beida xuesheng ji quanguo xuesheng shu” (Letter to the students of Beida and the whole country), July 23, 1919, CYQJ 3:313.

19.

Ibid.

20.

See chapter 3.

21.

“Beijing tongxin: Beida jinkuang tan” (News from Beijing: A discussion on the recent situation at Beida), Shenbao, March 12, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2839.

22.

Ibid.

23.

On the Aiguo Xueshe see Mary B. Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

24.

“Cai Yuanpei fuzhi hou zao Beida zhi yanshuo” (Speech by Cai Yuanpei at Beida in reassuming his position), Chenbao, October 26, 1922, reprinted in BDSL II 1:250–51.

25.

Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), in par ticu lar the introduction and chapter 3.

26.

The first issue of Beijing Daxue xuesheng zhoukan (Beijing University Student Weekly) was published on January 4, 1920. The fi rst editorial stated that the Weekly adopted the principle of jianrong bingbao (broad-minded tolerance) but pointed at “mutual aid” and a spirit of “struggle” (fendou) as the two major characteristics that emerged from the student demonstrations of May Fourth. The stated goal of the founders of the Weekly was the complete renewal of morals, economy, literature, and education and the building of a happy and complete society. To reach this goal, the chosen method was a “popular movement.” On the whole, the Weekly was more “radical” than other student publications and showed more marked anarchist and socialist leanings. The May 1 issue was completely devoted to the celebration of Labor Day while the seventeenth was a special issue on the “Pioneers of Socialism.” This was the last published issue: the newspaper was closed because of government pressure at the end of May 1920.

27.

Luisa Passerini, in her beautiful memoir and analysis of 1968, reports a similar imaginary dialogue with “conformists.” See her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 74.

28.

Zhishui, “Yu yige jiu guanliao tanhua” (A conversation with an old bureaucrat), BDXSZK, no. 8, (February 20, 1920): 7–8. Alain Badiou, Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 190.

30.

Chow, The May Fourth Movement: 106– 7.

31.

“Bejing xueshengjie xuanyan” (Manifesto of all the Students of Beijing), Shi-

249

29.

bao, May 6, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2801. Chow, The May Fourth Movement:

|

107–8.

5 .

32.

“Women de zhiqu” (Our goal), BDXSZK, no. 1:2.

33.

In June 1919, Chen reflected on the May Fourth movement and asked in an es-

I M P RO P E R

say, “Should We Be Patriotic After All?” Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: versity of California Press, 1986), 23 and 38. See also Maurice Meisner, Li Tachao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 21– 26. 34.

Xu Jilin has called for a rethinking of the meaning of patriotism in the May Fourth period and for a reevaluation of its connection to cosmopolitanism. See Xu Jilin, “Historical Memories of May Fourth: Patriotism, but of what Kind?” trans. Duncan M. Campbell, China Heritage Quarterly, no. 17 (March 2009).

35.

David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 177.

36.

Xuesheng huanying Cai xiaozhang huixiao zhi ci” (Message of the students welcoming President Cai back to school), BDRK, September 20, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 1:303.

37.

Ibid.

38.

Zuozhi, “Xuesheng jiuguo” (Students saving the country), Yishibao, October 19, 1919, 2.

39.

Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 25.

40.

Ibid., 57.

41.

Ibid., 60.

42.

Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, 73.

43.

Chiang Monlin, Tides from the West: A Chinese Autobiography (New Haven, CT:

44.

Ibid., 129

Yale University Press, 1947), 131. 45.

Ross, May ’68, 15.

46.

See, for example, Xiao Chaoran, Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong (Beijing University and the May Fourth movement) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe,

P L AC E S

Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: Uni-

1995); Peng Ming, Wusi yundong shi (History of the May Fourth Movement) (Beijing: Renmin chuban she, 1984). 47.

“Dazongtong yanjin xuesheng ganzheng bing jiang beibu xuesheng songjiao fating ling” (Presidential decree forbidding students to get involved in politics and committing the arrested students to legal court), May 8, 1919, Wusi aiguo yundong dang’an ziliao (Archive materials on the May Fourth patriotic movement), (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1980), 187– 88, reprinted in

250

BDSL II 3:2808. A (slightly different) English translation of the decree was

5 .

I M P RO P E R

P L AC E S

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published in The North China Herald, Shanghai, May 10, 1919 and is reproduced in Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 134. 48.

“Jiaoyu bu xunling” (Decree of the Ministry of Education), BDRK, September 13, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2828.

49.

“Jiaoyubu xunjie jingneiwai xuesheng” (The minister of education admonishes students in and outside Beijing), September 20, 1919, Jiaoyu zazhi 11, no. 9, reprinted in BDSL II 1:676.

50.

Ibid.

51.

Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 70. Keenan makes reference to an essay by Jiang Menglin published in the fi rst issue of the journal, entitled “Jiaoyu yu zhengzhi” (Education and politics), Xin Jiaoyu 1, no. 1 (February 1919): 1– 2.

52.

“Jiaoyu bu xunling.”

53.

Alessandro Russo, Le Rovine del Mandato: La modernizzazione politica

54.

In a completely different situation (the debate on school reform in France dur-

dell’educazione e della cultura cinesi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985), 83–84. ing the early 1980s), Jean-Claude Milner provided a scathing critique of the belief that school should act as an ideal community, a “microcosm” whose excellence would, in the end, further a change in the macrocosm of society. See Jean-Claude Milner, De l’école (Paris: Seuil, 1984), in par ticu lar 64– 67. 55.

Culp, Articulating Citizenship, chapter 3. See also Huang Jianli, The Politics of Depoliticization in Republican China (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996).

56.

“Junjing yabo zhong de xuesheng yundong—Jundui baowei Beijing Daxue de qingxing” (The student movement under the oppression of the police and the army—The situation at Beida besieged by the army), Meizhou Pinglun 25 (June 8, 1919), reprinted in BDSL II 3:2819– 20.

57.

“Yi nian zhi huigu— er” (Looking back at last year—part 2), BDXSZK, no. 4, (January 25, 1920): 10–12.

58.

Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 148.

59.

“Yi nian zhi huigu— er.” See also “Yu nao yu da zhi xuejie fengchao” (The unrest in the world of education grows larger and fiercer), Chenbao, June 5, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2821– 22.

60.

Ibid.

61.

John and Alice Dewey reported that students were carry ing “tooth brushes and towels in their pockets.” John and Alice Chipman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan, 209–11. Quoted in Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 150.

62. 63.

“Yi nian zhi huigu— er,” 12. This move also interrogates the distinction between the state apparatus of repression (the prison) and the state ideological apparatus (the school) to which Althe latter through ideology. What does it mean when the state uses violence to

|

put students back into the school? Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State

5 .

Apparatuses,” in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 1– 60.

I M P RO P E R

64.

Yinian zhi huigu— er,” 12; see also Ma Xulun, “Cong ‘Wusi yundong’ dao ‘Liusan suoxin’ ” (From the May Fourth movement to the June Th ird wage protest)

Wang Huaiqing had been appointed to that position on May 21 to replace Li Changtai, who was suspected of being sympathetic to the students. See Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 146.

66.

“Beijing Daxue tang zhi canzhuang” (The miserable situation of the students at  Beijing University), Shibao, June 7, 1919, 2. See also Chenbao, June 5, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2820– 21, which documents the support of large part of the educational world.

67.

“Yinian zhi huigu— san” (Looking back at last year—part 3), BDXSZK, no. 10 (March 7, 1920): 12.

68.

“Jiaoyubu ling,” BDSL II 3:2822. Apparently, another reason for the decision to lift the siege and free the students was the general strike by Shanghai merchants against the government foreign policy, indirectly supporting the students’ fight. See “Yinian zhi huigu— san;” Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 151–58.

69.

“Yinian zhi huigu— er,” 12.

70.

“Yinian zhi huigu— san.” See also “Zuori Beijing Daxue zhi suojian” (What I saw yesterday at Beijing university), Chenbao, June 7, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2822– 23. The fervor of the imprisoned students is both revealing and a bit comical. The celebration of the organizational skills of these students is obviously excessive if measured against how short the takeover of the school was. In contrast, this is a clear instance of the importance students attributed to the voluntary self-discipline of independent organization.

71.

The alleged reason for lifting the occupation was that Beijing students had planned a general demonstration asking the president for the removal of Cao Rulin, who was just coming back to the capital. With Beida occupied, the organization of the demonstration would have been much more complicated, if not

P L AC E S

in Beida jiushi (Old facts about Beida), ed. Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 222– 23. 65.

251

thusser made reference. The former, argued Althusser, works through violence,

impossible. Reportedly, they were also worried about the hygienic situation inside the school. See “Yinian zhi huigu— san.” 72.

“Yanjiushi yu jianyu” (The research institute and the prison), Meizhou pinglun 25 (June 8, 1919), reprinted in Chen Duxiu zhu zuo xuan (Chen Duxiu’s Selected Works), vol. 2, ed. Ren jianshu, Zhang Tongmo, and Wu Xinzhong (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1993).

73. 252

1920, Beijing Municipal Archive. Beijing University administration replied to the indictment on February 2 stating that Beida students had not been involved

| P L AC E S I M P RO P E R 5 .

“Jiaoyubu decree di sanliu hao” (Ministry of Education Decree no. 36), January

in boycott activities. 74.

“Jiaoyubu xunling di yibajiu hao” (Ministry of Education Decree no. 189), April 14, 1920, Beijing Municipal Archive. Apparently, the case of the Student Weekly had been pointed out to the ministry by the Tianjin police. Emphasis mine.

75.

“Jingji weishu zong siling” (Order of the Beijing garrison commander), February 27, 1922, Beijing Municipal Archive.

76.

“Zhi Jiaoyubu,” March 4, 1922, Beijing Municipal Archive.

77.

“Xiaozhang bugao” (Notice of the university president), BDRK, March 28, 1921, reprinted in BDSL II 1:624.

78.

Huang Jue, “Suigan lu” (Expressing my feelings), BDXSZK, no. 7, (February 15, 1920): 3.

79.

Suiting, “Fei shejian zhi” (Abolish the system of dormitory supervisors), BDX-

80.

Jinggan, “Fei shejian zhi” (Abolish the dormitory supervisor system), BDX-

81.

See “Dishijiu zi zongwu weiyuanhuiyi jishi” (Report on the nineteenth meet-

SZK, no. 3 (January 18, 1920): 7. SZK, no. 3 (January 18, 1920): 8. ing of the general affairs committee), BDRK, December 10, 1920 and “Di’ershi zi zongwu weiyuanhuiyi” (Twentieth meeting of the general affairs committee), BDRK, December 24, 1920, both reprinted in BDSL II 1:622– 23. 82.

Tian Jiongjin, who was a student at Beida during May Fourth, attributes the movement for the abolition of the exam more to the severity of exams than to the political upheaval of 1919. See “Beida liunian suoyi.”

83.

Miu Jinyuan, “Du Tao Zhixing xiansheng de ‘Xuesheng zizhi wenti zhi yanjiu’ ” (A review of Tao Zhixing’s ‘Study of the issue of student self-government’), BDXSZK, no. 6 (February 8, 1920): 4– 6.

84.

Cai Yuanpei, “Beida shiyue ershiwuri dahui yanshuoci” (Speech at the Beida general meeting on October 25), CYQJ 4:272– 74. See also “Cai Yuanpei fuzhi hou zai Beida zhi yanshuo” (Cai’s speech at Beida after resuming his post), Chenbao, October 26, 1922), reprinted in BDSL II 1:250–51.

85.

Da Bai, “Xuexiao de shenghuo dang ruhe gaige” (How school life should be reformed), BDXSZK, no. 15, (May 9, 1920): 6–8.

86.

Ibid., 7.

. BET WEEN STREETS AND MONUMENTS

1.

Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), in par ticu lar chapter 9. Epigraph quote from Dong, Republican Beijing, 271– 72.

2.

Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 686. University of California Press, 1989), 12. The expression was used in Yishibao,

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April 22, 1920, 7.

6 .

Strand reminds us that in the late 1920s the Nationalists similarly harbored a

B E T W E E N

4.

David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley:

profound dislike for Beijing, a city they saw as completely corrupted by a mix of Manchu, militarist, and Communist influences, “and expressed concern lest (Rickshaw Beijing, 10). One should also keep in mind, however, that a massive in terms that, when not straightforwardly nostalgic, were clearly more apprebined to inflect the twentieth-century city with both a heightened sense of its imperial past and a manifest affection for its local culture” (Peking, 687). The ambiguity of the literary Beijing between cherished celebration and social criticism is best embodied in the work of Lao She. Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 202. See also Feng Liping, “Democracy and Elitism: The May Fourth Ideal of Literature,” Modern China 22, no. 2 (April 1996): 170– 96. 6.

See for example, Tao Xisheng, “Cai xiansheng ren Beida xiaozhang dui jindai Zhongguo fasheng de juda yingxiang” (The great influence Cai Yuanpei had on modern China when he assumed the presidency of Beida), in Beida jiushi (Old facts about Beida), ed. Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 46; Cheng Houzhi, “Huiyi wo zai Beida de Yiduan xuesheng shenghuo” (Remembering a part of my life as a student at Beida), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 256– 69. See also Weston, The Power of Position, 201–5, 209–14; Chow T’se-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 49–50.

7.

Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, xiii.

8.

Neil Smith, “Homeless/global: scaling places” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird (London: Routledge, 1993), 93. Cited in Steve Pile and Michael Keith, Geographies of Resistance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 13.

9.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 8.

M O N U M E N T S

ciative. Over time, as Susan Naquin notes, the new literature on Beijing “com-

A N D

literary production on “old Beijing” developed after the 1920s, depicting the city

S T R E E T S

their own movement become contaminated by contact with the old capital”

5.

253

3.

10.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 41.

11.

Anne-Marie Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing (London: Routledge, 2004), 8 .

12.

William H. Sewell Jr., “Space in Contentious Politics,” in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, Ronald R. Aminzade et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55.

13.

“Beijing Daxuexiao zhi yange” (The reform of Beijing University), Dong fang

14.

The Huangcheng walls were initially breached (to open thoroughfares) in 1916 and were completely demolished by 1927.

15.

Weston, The Power of Position, 45.

16.

Chang Kuo-t’ao, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1927 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971), 1:39

17.

Chen Pingyuan, “Lao Beida de Gushi (dai xu)” (Stories from old Beida: Introduction), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 12. Chen argues that this proximity was indeed crucial.

18.

B E T W E E N

S T R E E T S

A N D

M O N U M E N T S

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254

zazhi (April 1917), reprinted in BDSL II 3:3153. Emphasis mine.

In 1903, students protested and submitted a petition to the throne, making explicit reference to the heroism of Northern Song students. See Weston, Th e Power of Position, 62; Xiao Chaoran, Beijing Daxue xiaoshi 1898–1949 (History

6 .

of Beijing University, 1898–1949) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1988), 29– 30. 19.

Guoli Beijing Daxue wushi zhou nian yilan (An overview of the fi ftieth anniversary of National Beijing University), (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanbu, 1948), reprinted in Wo yu Beida: ‘Lao Beida’ hua Beida, (Beida and me: Former students talk about Beida), ed. Wang Shiru and Wen Di (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), 550–52.

20.

See, for example, the speeches delivered at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary, in Guoli Beijing Daxue ershi zhou nian jinian ze. Students and teachers did make reference to the educational experience of the recent past (e.g., to the model of the shuyuan) and to an ancient tradition of student or intellectual activism and independence (the Northern Song protests or the qingliu streak in literati thought), but not to any institutional or organic relationship with the state.

21.

Ibid., 18. In his famous interview with Edgar Snow, Mao Zedong mentions strolling through Beihai admiring the spring blossoms during his brief stay at Beida in 1918. Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 152.

22.

Ibid., 12 and Zhu Haitao, “Beida yu Beidaren” (Beida and its people), Dong fang Zazhi 39, nos. 12–13; 40, nos. 3, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 40 (1943–44), reprinted in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 361.

23.

Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1938), 434.

24.

Chen, “Lao Beida de Gushi (dai xu),” 12.

25.

William White, “How do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture,” History and Theory 45 (May 2006), 155.

26.

Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out Of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 17. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 222. White, “How Do Buildings Mean,” 167.

29.

Friedrich Nietz sche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (New

255

27. 28.

York: Macmillan, 1985), 14–17.

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30.

Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 165.

6 .

31.

Naquin, Peking, 7–8 and xxxi.

B E T W E E N

32.

Shi Mingzheng, “Beijing Transforms: Urban Infrastructure, Public Works, and Social Change in the Chinese Capital, 1900–1928” (PhD diss., Columbia

34.

Naquin, Peking, 622.

35.

Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in

36.

Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 7.

37.

Dong. Republican Beijing, 31.

38.

On the Legation Quarter see Chen Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong, eds., Chumo Lishi: Wusi renwu yu xiandai Zhongguo (Touching history: The protagonists of May Fourth and modern China) (Guangdong: Guangzhou chubanshe, 1999), 31– 32.

39.

Michael J. Moser and Yvonne Wei- Chih, Foreigners Within the Gates: Th e Legations at Peking, (Chicago: Serindia, 2007), 29. Henri Borel, The New China: A Traveller’s Impressions, trans. C. Th ieme (London: Adelphi Terrace, 1912), 31.

40.

In par ticu lar see the beautifully illustrated volume by Moser and Wei-Chih, Foreigners Within the Gates.

41.

Juliet Bredon, Peking: A Historical and Intimate Description of Its Chief Places of Interest, 2nd ed. (London: T.W. Laurie, 1924), 40. Originally, Chinese-owned residences separated the various legations.

42. 43.

Ibid., 44. Moser and Wei-Chih, Foreigners Within the Gates, 140. Government and private offices dealing with urban issues were created between 1860 and 1900. Naquin, Peking, 667.

44.

Bredon, Peking, 14.

45.

Ibid., 18.

46.

Chen and Xia, Chumo Lishi, 30. “City walls” here refers to the Inner City walls, not those of the Forbidden or Imperial City. See Naquin, Peking, 492– 93.

M O N U M E N T S

Late  Imperial Beijing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), chapter 4.

A N D

Ibid., 394.

S T R E E T S

University, 1993), 177. 33.

47.

See Geremie Barmé, The Forbidden City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). It is worth noting that the plan to make a museum out of the imperial palace was originally formulated by Cai Yuanpei in 1912, at the time minister of education.

48.

Wu Hung implies that it was only with the advent of the PRC that the city structure was radically (and irremediably) altered. See his Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (London: Reaktion Books,

256

2005). In 1949, Beijing, he argues, still retained nearly all its traditional charac-

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ter and splendor. But I believe this assessment depends in large part on his

M O N U M E N T S

limited focus on Tiananmen. Shi Mingzheng instead maintains that, precisely with the exclusion of the area of Tiananmen, Beijing at the end of the Maoist period was not much different from 1930s Beiping. Shi, “Beijing Transforms,” (with the significant exception of the city wall and the Tiananmen Square area) did not take place before the 1980s. See for example Wang Jun, Chengji (An account of the walled city) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2003). 49.

6 .

B E T W E E N

S T R E E T S

A N D

22. Other authors contend that the radical destruction of the city structure

In this respect, it is interesting that one of the fi rst Qing maps, in 1723, only provided names for buildings, not streets, because it was only for use by the imperial household. Naquin, Peking, 456. We have to wait for the mid-nineteenth century for new kinds of city guides to come along.

50.

Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 4.

51.

See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 222.

52.

Naquin, Peking, 623. See also her reference to a prohibition against discussing politics in Beijing tea houses at the turn of the century Ibid., 674.

53.

Takashi Fujitani has discussed a similar approach to the representation of political power in modern Japan, showing how the par ticu lar relationship of invisibility with authority was not just “traditional.” See his Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

54.

Naquin, Peking, 357–59.

55.

See the following section. David Strand describes how modernity was articulated precisely through new social figures at street level (rickshaw pullers and policemen). Rickshaw Beijing, chapters 3 and 4.

56.

Dong, Republican Beijing, 297.

57.

Naquin, Peking, 701.

58.

Incidentally, this is the case for other cities besides Beijing. Liping Wang makes a similar argument for Hangzhou’s “tradition,” which took shape when the city, deprived of other means of development, had to rely on its “antiquity.” Tradition and modernity were constructed or invented simultaneously. Liping Wang, “Tourism and Spatial Change in Hangzhou, 1911–1927,” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick

(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 107– 20. See also Peter Carroll, Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 59.

A similar process took place in the financial markets. The activity of large foreign banks in Beijing was limited almost exclusively to loans to government or state agencies and had no relationship with the business of the city. Banks therefore did not bring Beijing’s local businesses into the new system of circulaIbid., 106. Descriptions of Beijing after the establishment of the PRC point

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insistently on the lack of “productive activity” in Beijing, which is described as

6 .

a “consumer city” (xiaofei chengshi). Planners in the early 1950s (guided by So-

B E T W E E N

viet experts) were entrusted with the task to transform Beijing into a “productive city,” the largest industrial center of the country. See Wang Jun, Chengji, guihua (Documents on the rebuilding of Beijing after 1949, vol. 1, City planJiang Weitang, “Qibai nian lai Wangfujing” (Seven hundred years of Wangfuon Wangfujing), both in Wangfujing, ed. Beijing shi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui et al. (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1993), 27 and 61. The development of Wangfujing into a modern shopping area does not imply that there was a dearth of commercial life in the Inner City during the Qing. Despite the prohibition for non-bannermen to reside there, by 1851 there were over fi fteen thousand shopkeepers in the Inner City. Naquin, Peking, 398. 62.

Carroll, Between Heaven and Modernity, 72.

63.

Ibid., 77.

64.

Ibid., 24.

65.

Lillian M. Li, Alison J. Dray-Novey, and Haili Kong, Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 149.

66.

Bredon, Peking, 413.

67.

Dong Shanyuan, Chen Bokang, and Ma Xiangyu, “Shuohua Dong’an Shichang” (Speaking of the Dong’an Market) in Wangfujing, 104. On the modern value of “horse roads,” see Carroll, Between Heaven and Modernity, part I.

68.

Broudehoux, The Making and Selling, 103.

69.

Temple markets survived into the twentieth century but their place in the city had changed. Compared to Dong’an and the new department stores, they “sold more handicrafts and Chinese goods and now seemed old-fashioned.” Naquin, Peking, 632.

70.

Li, Dray-Novey, and Kong, Beijing, 149.

71.

Broudehoux, The Making and Selling, 103.

72.

Dong, Republican Beijing, 148–50 and 152.

M O N U M E N T S

jing) and Wu Yimin and Mi Yongyi, “Wangfujing zaji” (Miscellaneous notes

A N D

ning) (Beijing: Beijing jianshe shi shu bianji weiyuanhui bianjibu, 1987).

S T R E E T S

68– 69. See also Jianguo yilai de Beijing chengshi jianshe ziliao, di 1 juan, Chengshi

61.

257

tion. See Dong, Republican Beijing, 125– 29. 60.

73.

Gamble, Peking, 213.

74.

The theater, originally called a “tea house” (Jixiang Chayuan), was renamed Jixiang Xiyuan in 1949. See Wang Zhihong and Yao Deren, Wang fujing (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2005), 50. Broudehoux, The Making and Selling, 104.

77.

Ibid.

78.

The market survived, albeit with much less glamour, until 1993 when it was demolished to make room for the new Sun Dong An Market, at the time the

M O N U M E N T S

largest shopping center in Beijing. Financed by a Hong Kong developer, it claims to integrate elements of the local architecture with a modern international style. It is, as others have noted, just a gigantic mall, which pays perfunctory and superficial homage to the history of the urban environment of Wangfujing.

A N D S T R E E T S B E T W E E N 6 .

Dong, Chen, and Ma, “Shuohua Dong’an Shichang,” 107–18.

76.

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258

75.

See Broudehoux, The Making and Selling, 112–17. 79.

Ibid., 101.

80.

Sergei M. Tretiakov, A Chinese Testament: The Autobiography of Tan Shih-hua, As Told to S. Tretiakov (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), 240.

81.

Shi, “Beijing Transforms,” chapter 3 on the organization and management of the park, as a private-public enterprise.

82.

Ibid., 208.

83.

Ibid., 241.

84.

See Dong, Republican Beijing, 269.

85.

Shi Mingzheng, “From Imperial Gardens to Public Parks: The Transformation of Urban Space in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing,” Modern China 24, no. 3 (1998): 219–54.

86.

Li Dazaho, “Beijing shimin yinggai yaoqiu de xinsheng hui,” (The new life Beijing residents should ask for), Xin Shenghuo, May 1919: 15–16.

87.

Gu Jiegang, The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian: Being the Preface to a Symposium on Ancient Chinese History (Ku shih pien), trans. Arthur W. Hummel (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1931), 31.

88.

Miu Jinyuan, “Beijing Daxue de xuesheng shenghuo” (Student Life at Beijing University), Xuesheng zazhi, no. 7 (July 1922): 2. Huqin is a generic term for a family of Chinese musical instruments. They usually have two strings and are played with a bow.

89. Gamble, Peking, 225–26. To give a point of comparison, a family of four was considered “very poor” if their yearly income was below $100. This sector of the population was obviously cut off even from the cheapest kind of entertainment. 90. Dong, Republican Beijing, 157. 91. During the Qing, exam candidates and officers enjoyed the city also as a place of consumption: they ate, shopped, and enjoyed the entertainment the capital had to offer. See Belsky, Localities at the Center.

92. Dong, Republican Beijing, 157. 93. “Jiaoyu bu xunling” (Decree of the Ministry of Education), BDRK, June 16, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2824. 94. No location is proposed for the club. “Niqing zuzhi daxue julebu, huafen daxue quyu, zhiding jiaoyuan xuesheng zhifu an” (Proposal to create a university club, form a university quarter, and set student and faculty uniforms), BDRK, January 16–17, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 1:215–16. The proposal was supported,

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and Chen Duxiu. See Weston, The Power of Position, 142–43.

259

among others, by Shen Yinmo, Qian Xuantong, Zhou Zuoren, Tao Menghe, 95. Ibid., 216–17.

6 .

96. Ibid., 218.

B E T W E E N

97. Michael Tsin, “Canton Remapped,” in Esherick, Remaking the Chinese City, 24.

Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 101. Weston, The Power of Position, 142. 102. “Xiaozhang bugao”(President’s notice), BDRK, April 21, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 2: 2097– 98. 103. Weston, The Power of Position, 59 and 73. 104. For detailed descriptions of the events of May Fourth, see Chow, The May Fourth Movement; Chen and Xia, Chumo lishi; Cai Xiaozhou and Yang Lianggong, Wusi (May Fourth) (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1982 [1919]). 105. Luo, “Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong” (Beijing University and the May Fourth Movement), in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida; Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party. 106. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 99–103. 107. Xiao, Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong, 174. 108. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 105. Besides being a commercial district, Hatamen was also the place where the monument to slain German ambassador Von Ketteler had been placed (under pressure of foreign powers) after the Boxer Rebellion. The monument had been removed in November 1918 at the end of WWI. “Ketteler Monument Being Removed,” New York Times, November 18, 1918. On the building of the monument see James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 245–46, 309– 311. 109. Chenbao, May 5, 1919, quoted in Chen and Xia, eds., Chumo lishi, 17–18. 110. Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing, 59.

M O N U M E N T S

Chinese City, 30– 31. See also her Hygienic Modernity: Meaning of Health and

A N D

Routledge, 2003), in par ticu lar chapter 1. 100. Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity in Tianjin,” in Esherick, Remaking the

S T R E E T S

98. Ibid. 99. On Haussmann, see David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York:

111. Wu Hung holds that the emperor was not present (Remaking Beijing, 59) while Shi Mingzheng quotes Jeff rey Meyer who argues he was (“Beijing Transforms,” 111). 112. See Chen and Xia, Chumo lishi, 25– 26; Rudolph G. Wagner, “The Canonization of May Fourth,” in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, ed. M. Dolezalová-Velingerová and O. Král (Cambridge, MA: Har-

6 .

B E T W E E N

S T R E E T S

A N D

M O N U M E N T S

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260

vard University Press, 2001), 93– 94. 113. See Nelson K. Lee, “How Is a Political Public Space Made?—The Birth of Tiananmen Square and the May Fourth Movement,” Political Geography 28 (2009): 32–43. 114. Wagner, “The Canonization of May Fourth,” 93– 94. 115. Shi, “Beijing Transforms,” 111. 116. Bredon, Peking, 122. 117. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 8. 118. Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing, 60. 119. Ibid., 18. 120. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 172. 121. Shi, “Beijing Transforms,” 202 122. Ibid. 123. See Weston, Th e Power of Position, 161– 62. Cai’s speeches are in CYQJ 3:215– 19. Th is was not in any way a student demonstration, or at least not one organized and planned by students. The event was carefully prepared and announcements were printed to invite students to participate, but also to explain the desired form of their participation. The announcement on November 14, 1918, instructed participants about which slogans to shout: “Beijing Hurrah, We-Wa! Beijing Hurrah, We-Wa! Beijing Daxue, Rea!” Beijing University archive. 124. Robert Musil, “Monuments”, in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1987), 61. 125. Sewell, “Space in Contentious Politics,” 56. 126. Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing, 62. 127. Don Mitchell, The Right to The City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 129. 128. Ibid., 129. 129. Chen and Xia, Chumo lishi, 18. 130. Ibid., 18. 131. Denis Hollier, quoted in Andreas Huyssen, “Monumental Seduction,” New German Critique, no. 69 (Autumn 1996): 191– 92. 132. The famed Beijing scholar Hou Renzhi points out that the reason why Mao proclaimed the founding of the PRC from the top of Tiananmen was related to the history of activism in the area, and specifically to the May Fourth Move-

ment (and not to any claim to the imperial legacy). Hou Renzhi “The Transformation of the Old City of Beijing, China,” in World Patterns of Modern Urban Change, ed. Michael Conzen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 234. 133. Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History” in The Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1998), 1:17. 134. Deborah G. Martin and Byron Miller, “Space and Contentious Politics,” Mo261

bilization: An International Journal 8, no. 2 (2003): 148. 135. Xiao Chaoran, Beijing Daxue yu Wusi yundong (Beijing University and the May

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Fourth movement) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1995), 174– 75. The precise

6 .

number and provenance of students involved in the May Fourth incident are dif-

B E T W E E N

ficult to ascertain. See Chow, The May Fourth Movement, appendices B and C. 136. Beida’s location in downtown Bejing stands in contrast to Qinghua’s suburban did not take part to the May Fourth protests. Its position proved to be a liability prevent Qinghua students from entering the city walls. vernacular Chinese. A second, longer text was prepared by Xu Deheng and appeared in the press during the following days. Th is was written in literary Chinese and charged with much more violent rhetoric. Both texts are translated in Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 106–8. 138. The student route to the Legation Quarter was not obvious. They could have taken a much more direct path (east on Chang’an Avenue and then south). Lacking any evidence to justify this choice, I can only suggest that students opted to march toward Qianmen for a couple of reasons. First, the structure of the T-shaped space in front of the gate formed something like a wide corridor that would have “channeled” the students; second, this space opened to Chessboard Street, which was full of stores, and probably more crowded and lively than any alternative path. I am thankful to Richard Belsky for pointing out this issue. 139. Cai and Yang, Wusi, 17–18. 140. Wilson’s speech at Versailles Peace Conference had a direct effect on Korea’s March First movement in the same year. Korean protestors called on the principle of self-determination upheld by Wilson. Wilson’s position in international relations (however misinterpreted by the Chinese or the Koreans) was probably one of the reasons why the U.S. legation was chosen by the May Fourth students. 141. Cai and Yang, Wusi, 18. The letter is reprinted in Xiao, Beijing Daxue yu Wusi Yundong, 178. 142. For a description of the movement from the legations to Cao Rulin’s house, see Yang Hui, “Wusi yundong yu Beida” (The May Fourth Movement and Beida), in Chen and Xia, Beida jiushi, 55–58.

M O N U M E N T S

137. “The Manifesto of All the Students of Peking” was written by Luo Jialun in

A N D

in the following months as well, when the police managed on a few occasions to

S T R E E T S

character. Qinghua, mainly because of its position on the outskirts of the city,

143. Xu Deheng, “Huiyi Wusi yundong” (Memories of the May Fourth Movement), in Wusi yundong qinli ji (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1999), 29. 144. Bredon, Peking, 16. 145. Borel, The New China, 40. 146. Bredon, Peking, 16. 147. Chen and Xia, Chumo lishi, 30– 31.

6 .

B E T W E E N

S T R E E T S

A N D

M O N U M E N T S

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262

148. Cai and Yang, Wusi, 16. 149. Quoted in Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 111. 150. Chenbao, May 8, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2807. 151. Cai and Yang, Wusi, 23. Chow Ts’e-tsung reports a similar episode taking place in the city of Tianjin. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 124. 152. Cao Rulin was minister of communications, Zhang Zongxiang had been minister to Japan since 1916, and Lu Zongyu was the director general of the Currency Reform Bureau, chairman of the Bank of Communications, and Chinese director of the Chinese-Japanese Exchange Bank. See Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 103–4. 153. See Luo Zhanglong, Chunyuan zaiji (Memories of the Chun garden) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1984), 41–42. He describes the activities of xingdong xiaozu (action group) of the Hunan Student Association in Beijing, which had a secret plan to turn the May Fourth demonstration to a violent outcome. On May Fourth they allegedly managed to redirect the students to Cao Rulin’s house and started the attack. Luo claims that nobody outside the xiaozu knew what the secret plan was. 154. Cai and Yang, Wusi, 15. 155. On this topic, see Ron Aminzade and Doug McAdam, “Emotions and Contentious Politics,” in Silence and Voice, Aminzade et al., 14–50. 156. Cao’s house was in the eastern section of the Inner City, in Zhaojialou hutong. 157. Th irty-two students were arrested (twenty of them from Beida) and taken either to the police headquarters or the army garrison. The second group apparently fared much worse. Chen and Xia, Chumo lishi, 42–43. 158. Yang Zhongjian. “Liunian Beida xuesheng shenghuo de huiyi” (Recollections of six years of student life at Beida), in Wang and Wen, Wo yu Beida, 377. Cao Rulin’s house was really not that far from Beida but apparently at least some students had a knowledge of the city that was strictly limited to the university’s immediate neighborhood. 159. It is difficult to gauge how many among the students at Beida participated in associations of different kinds, especially those based on regional provenance (huiguan and tongxianghui). 160. Cai and Yang, Wusi, 29. 161. Ibid., 116–17. 162. See Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 42.

. T H E P E DAG O G Y O F T H E C I T Y

1. Or as part of other networks in which their “student” identity was less relevant, like native-place associations. 2. Chenbao, April 20, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2647. According to the newspaper, about one thousand people attended the concert, which was meant to have an “educational” aspect. The article concluded: “I believe that this kind of event have concerts from time to time, it would benefit the people’s ability to appreci-

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ate beauty and foster a noble spirit.”

7 .

Dolezalová-Velingerová and O. Král (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 66–120.

reprinted in BDSL II 2:1231. Classrooms were located in two university buildings at Jingshan and Beiheyan. 6. The students were to call the professors xiansheng while the students were to call each other xuetu. “Xiaoyi Yeban jianzhang” (Concise regulations of the Night School for University Personnel), BDRK, April 9, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1233. 7. Ibid., 1232. 8. Cai Yuanpei, “Beida Xiaoyi Yeban kaixue shi yanshuo ci” (Speech at the opening ceremony of the Beida Night School for University Personnel), CYQJ 3:146–47. 9. Cai Yuanpei, “Beida Xiaoyi Yeban kaixue shi yanshuo ci.” 10. “Xiaoyi Yeban jianzhang,” 1232. 11. The guowen class was to stress baihua, while the ethics course was to rely on lectures and not on reading. “Xiaoyi Yeban jioayuanhui jishi” (Report of the faculty meeting of the Night School for University Personnel), BDRK, March 29, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1231. “Xiaoyi Yeban guowen jiaoshouhui baogao” (Notice of the Chinese language faculty meeting of the Night School for University Personnel), BDRK, April 20, 1918, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1235. 13.

Ibid., 1236.

14.

“Xiaoyi Yeban guowen jiaoshouhui baogao shu” (Notice of the Chinese language faculty meeting of the Night School for University Personnel), BDRK, May 1, 1919, BDSL II 2:1237– 38.

15.

Ibid.

C I T Y

opening of the Night School for University Personnel), BDRK, March 18, 1918,

T H E

5. “Wei kaishe Xiaoyi Yeban xiaozhang gaobai” (Notice of the president about the

O F

4. BDRK, January 26, 1918, reprinted in CYQJ 3:128– 29.

P E DAG O G Y

in  The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, ed. M.

T H E

3. See, for example, Rudolph G. Wagner, “The Canonization of May Fourth,”

12.

263

is truly unprecedented in the muddy society of Beijing, and if only we could

16.

“Xiaoyi Yeban jiaoshouhui/jiaowuchu baogao” (Notice of the faculty assembly and the office of the dean of the Night School for University Personnel), BDRK, April 9, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1241–42. The school had been plagued by personnel problems from the beginning, and various appeals for volunteer teachers had been published in the University Daily.

17.

“Pingmin Yexiao mujuan qishi” (Announcement of the Night School for Commoners soliciting donations) BDRK, March 3, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II

19.

Cai Yuanpei, “Beida Pingmin Yexiao kaixue ri yanshuoci.” Cai Yuanpei, “Beida Pingmin Yexiao kaixue ri yanshuoci” and Mao Zedong, “Evening School Journal, Volume 1,” in Stuart Schram, Mao’s Road to Power:

T H E

C I T Y

|

264

2:1240–41. 18.

O F P E DAG O G Y

Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 1:153. 20. 21.

Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 151. The journal of the Changsha Evening School is striking for the accurate recordings of all the minute details that could have influenced not only the learn-

T H E

ing process but also attendance and participation of students. Attention was

7 .

paid not just to textbooks and the content of each class, but also to lighting, accessibility of the school bulding, and weather conditions. Mao, “Evening School Journal.” 22.

Ibid., 146.

23.

Timothy Weston points at this initiative as one in which the confi nes between “educational concerns and political ones” started to become increasingly difficult to defi ne. The Power of Position, 151. I would go a step further by thinking of this initiative explicitly in political terms, as a collectively organized form of intervention in response to a social need and with the intent to produce social change.

24.

“Ji Beida zhi Pingmin Yexiao” (On Beida’s Night School for Commoners), Shenbao, June 24, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1242–43. It is unclear whether this female teacher was a Beida student or not. In February 1920, the fi rst three female auditors were admitted.

25.

Ibid.

26.

“Pingmin Yexiao qishi” (Notice of the Night School for Commoners), BDRK, February 6, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1240.

27.

“Pingmin Yexiao guowen jiaoshouhui jishi” (Report of the Chinese language faculty assembly at the Night School for Commoners), BDRK, July 15, 1920, reprinted in BDSL II 2:1244.

28.

Ibid.

29.

Mao Zedong, “Evening School Journal,” 156.

30.

For a very succinct example of this narrative, see the introduction to the section on the Lecture Groups in WSSQST 2:134.

31.

“Pingmin jiaoyu jiangyan tuan zhengji huiyuan” (The Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education are calling for members,” BDRK, March 7, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2601.

32.

Ibid.

33.

Paul Bailey, Reform the People: Changing Attitudes Towards Popular Education in Early Twentieth-Century China (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 198. start lecturing after spring break and have notified the police), BDRK, March

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27, 1919, reprinted in WSSQST 2:138.

7 .

The Pantao Gong had been built under the Ming. Its restoration in 1662 was

T H E

35.

“Jiangyantuan chunjiahou kaijiang yi han gao jingting” (The lecture groups will

days of the third month of the lunar calendar. Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),

Both places were relatively far from Beijing University.

38.

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan jishi. Zai Huguo Si kai jianyanhui” (Report of the Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education. Lecture meeting at Huguo Si), BDRK, April 29, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2606.

39.

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan jishi. Zai Pantao Gong,” 2605. The lecturer was

40.

Naquin, Peking, xxx–xxxi.

Xu Deheng. 41.

On the effects of the modernizing state on temples and village life in general, see Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

42.

Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley:

43.

Bailey, Reform the People, 198– 99.

University of California Press, 2003), chap. 5. Naquin, Peking, 632. 44.

Ibid., 187.

45.

Beijing Municipal Archive, J4 1–139:12–13, May 31, 1916. More than one hundred people attended. Some of the themes in this meeting were very similar to those of the Beida groups, like the insistence on the reform of local sishu. Some of the techniques were similar as well, like the combination of lectures and distribution of leaflets.

46.

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan zhi tuanyuan han” (Letter from the Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education to their members), BDRK, April 28, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2605– 6. The office managed ten lecture halls in total.

47.

Beijing Municipal Archive, J4 1–198:6–8, March 1920.

C I T Y

Pantao Palace), BDRK, April 11, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2604–5. 37.

T H E

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan jishi. Zai Pantao Gong lian jiang sanri” (Report of the Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education. Th ree days lecturing at

O F

426– 27.

P E DAG O G Y

sponsored by a Manchu, Wudali. The festivities took place on the fi rst three

36.

265

34.

48.

“Jiangyantuan kai dierci dahui bing huansong hui jishi” (Report on the second general meeting of the lecture groups and farewell meeting), BDRK, October 14–15, 1919, reprinted in WSSQST 2:154–55.

49.

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan tonggao” (Notice of the Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education), BDRK, May 11, 1920, reprinted in WSSQST 2:174– 75.

50.

Cai Xiaozhou and Yang Lianggong, Wusi (May Fourth) (Taipei:  Zhuanji

51. 52.

Tian Jiongjin, “Wusi de huiyi” (Recollections of May Fourth), in Guoli Beijing

T H E

Cai and Yang, Wusi, 48.

54.

Ibid., 42.

55.

Ibid., 42–43.

56.

On the larger movement for the promotion of national goods, see Karl Gerth,

7 .

T H E

53.

O F

Daxue (Taipei: Nanjing chuban youxian gongsi, 1981), 55.

P E DAG O G Y

C I T Y

See Chow T’se-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 147–48.

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266

wenxue chubanshe, 1982 [1919]), 40.

China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 57.

“Beijing Xuesheng Lianhehui shang zhengfu wang qing xuanbu san shi” (Th ree things from the Beijing Student Association in response to the government decree), Chenbao, July 11, 1919, reprinted in BDSL II 3:2826. In 1920, Cai Yuanpei responded to a government inquiry on students’ boycott adamantly defending Beida students from any involvement in such actions. Beijing Municipal Archive, J24–1-15 (February 2, 1920).

58.

Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 148.

59.

The prohibition was nothing new, the “Special Police Laws for the Preservation of Order” in 1914 had “made virtually all forms of spontaneous political expression illegal.” David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 92. Clearly, the 1914 law had been violated or ignored many times over the years. Political gatherings had been illegal under the Ming and Qing as well.

60. 61.

Cai and Yang, Wusi, 43. “Jiangyan baogao” (Report of a lecture), BDRK, June 22, 1920, reprinted in WSSQST 2:184–85.

62.

Cai and Yang, Wusi, 48–49.

63.

“Jiangyantuan kai dierci dahui,” 155–56.

64.

“Success” here is purely subjective and based only on students’ expectations and considerations. In most cases, a large attendance was considered the synonym of success, but more often students tried to gauge the reactions of the crowd (people who left or looked bored, applause, questions, etc.) Still, “success” remains a very relative term.

65.

“Yinshua jiangyan gao qishi” (Announcement on publishing the texts of lectures), BDRK, December 11, 1919, reprinted in WSSQST 2:158.

66.

On the evolution of communication techniques employed by student activists in the years and decades after May Fourth, see Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 206–14.

67.

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan tonggao” (Notice of the Lecture Groups for “Jiangyan baogao” (Lecture notice), BDRK, December 13, 1921, WSSQST

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2:204–5.

7 .

A similar use of songs, plays, artwork, and so on to rally support is documented

T H E

69.

sota, 1997), 20; quoted in Ronald R. Aminzade and Doug McAdam, “Emotions

nial modernity and its relationship with post–May Fourth intellectual assessment of popu lar entertainment, see Andrew Jones, Yellow Music, Media Culture, and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Unfortunately, there is no record of what kind of music the lecture groups bought and used. 70.

See the reports of the lectures published in BDRK on March 27, April 24, and

71.

“Jiangyan baogao” (Lecture notice), BDRK, May 9, 1922, reprinted in WSSQST

72.

Xiaopo, “Beida Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan changnian dahui” (Annual

May 9, 1922, reprinted in WSSQST 2:214–17. 2:217. meeting of the Beida Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education), Chenbao, March 24, 1922, reprinted in WSSQST 2:213–14. “Fadong shuqi jiangyan tonggao” (Notice about initiating summer lectures), BDRK, June 17, 1920, reprinted in WSSQST 2:182–83. 74.

Yeh, Wen-hsin, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 101– 3.

75.

“Fadong shuqi jiangyan tonggao.”

76.

Dong, Republican Beijing, 52–53.

77.

“Changxindian jiangyan zuzhi de baogao” (Report of the lecture groups in Changxindian), BDRK, April 13, 1920, reprinted in WSSQST 2:167– 68.

78.

Zhu Wushan, “Beida Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan zai ‘Wusi’ qianhou suoqi de zuoyong” (The role of the Beida Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education during May Fourth), WSSQST 2:253

C I T Y

42. On the par ticu lar role of phonographic technology in the definition of colo-

T H E

Ronald R. Aminzade et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),

O F

and Contentious Politics,” in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics,

P E DAG O G Y

in the case of student activists in Bangladesh. Afroza Anwary, “The Dynamics of the Language Movement of East Bengal” (PhD diss., University of Minne-

73.

267

Popu lar Education), BDRK, May 20, 1920, reprinted in WSSQST 2:176. 68.

79.

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan baogao” (Notice of the Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education), BDRK, April 27– 28, 1920, reprinted as “Fengtai jiangyan zu huodong de xiangxi baogao” (Detailed report of the activities of the lecture groups in Fengtai), WSSQST 2:165.

80.

Ibid. The long queue was a symbol of conservatism, meaning continued alle-

81.

Ibid., 165

82.

area. See “Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan he laodong buxi xuexiao” (The Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education and the continuation school for workers), WSSQST 2:256– 66. 84.

After the fi rst unsuccessful experience in 1920, Changxindian later became famous as one of the centers of the labor movement and the location of a successful workers’ school. Deng Zhongxia and Zhang Guotao were especially active in the area. See Daniel Y. K. Kwan, Marxist Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor

T H E

P E DAG O G Y

T H E

83.

O F

C I T Y

“Changxindian jiangyan zuzhi de baogao.” The document mentions a chapel or gospel hall (fuyintang), which implies a certain population of Christians in the

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268

giance to the Qing dynasty.

7 .

Movement: A Study of Deng Zhongxia, 1894–1933 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). See also Hans J. Van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 85.

“Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan qishi” (Announcement of the Lecture Groups for Popu lar Education), BDRK, January 27, 1921, reprinted in WSSQST 2:195.

86.

Arif Dirlik, “Ideology and Organization in the May Fourth Movement: Some Problems in the Intellectual Historiography of the May Fourth Period,” Republican China 12, no. 1 (November 1986): 13.

. THE END OF STUDENTS?

1.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 386–87.

2.

Obviously, we cannot foresee the future and a student protest might again shake China while this book is in print. But an explosion of activism organized under the twentieth-century category of students would truly be a surprise to anybody familiar with today’s China.

3.

William H. Sewell Jr., “Space in Contentious Politics,” in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, Ronald R. Aminzade et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79.

4.

Doug McAdam and William H. Sewell Jr., “It’s About Time: Temporality in the Study of Social Movements and Revolutions,” in Aminzade, Silence and Voice, 103.

5.

Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: Th e View

6.

Joseph W. Esherick and Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom, “Acting Out Democracy: Po-

from Shanghai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 87. litical Theater in Modern China,” in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, ed. Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 5. 7.

See Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics 2007); Jianli Huang, The Politics of Depoliticization in Republican China (Bern:

|

Peter Lang, 1996).

8 .

Dingxin Zhao, The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989

T H E

8.

beth Perry, “Casting a Chinese ‘Democracy’ Movement: The Roles of Students,

CO: Westview Press, 1994), 74– 92; Craig C. Calhoun, “Science Democracy, and the Politics of Identity,” ibid.: 93–124. A manifesto of the self-image of intellectuals in the 1980s is offered in the famous TV series Heshang. See Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, Deathsong of the River. A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series Heshang, trans. and intro. Richard W. Bodman and Pin P. Wan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Papers, 1991). See also, Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 10.

I think it is possible to see the insistent request that autonomous student unions be officially recognized as part of this effort to stake a practical ground for “students” that matched their perceived centrality.

11.

Sewell, “Space in Contentious Politics,” 66. See also Craig Calhoun, Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

12.

Wasserstrom, Student Protests, 296.

13.

Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 143.

14.

Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985).

15.

See for example Andrew G. Walder, “Beijing Red Guard Factionalism: Social Interpretation Reconsidered,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (2002): 437– 71; Joel Andreas, “Battling Over Political and Cultural Power During the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Theory and Society 31 (2002): 463–519; Hong Yong Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Xiaowei Zheng, “Passion, Reflection, and Survival: Political Choices of Red Guards at Qinghua University, June 1966–July 1968” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew G. Walder (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006): 29– 63.

S T U D E N T S ?

China, ed. Jeff rey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, 2nd ed. (Boulder,

O F

Workers, and Entrepreneurs,” in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern

E N D

Beijing Student Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Eliza-

9.

269

in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

16. 17.

Andreas, “Battling Over Political and Cultural Power,” 506. See Arif Dirlik, “The Politics of the Cultural Revolution in Historical Perspective” in Kam-yee Law, ed., The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 158–83.

18.

Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Ox-

19.

Andreas, “Battling Over Political and Cultural Power,” 464.

20.

William Hinton, Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 23.

21. 22.

Ibid., 34. Emphasis mine.

23.

Mao Zedong, “Guanyu jiaoyu geming de tanhua” (Talk about the revolution in

E N D

education) (February 13, 1964), in Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), 11:26. 24.

“Zhaojian shoudu hong dai hui fuzeren de tanhua” (Talk with responsible persons of the conference of the Red Guards of the capital), Mao Zedong Sixiang

8 .

T H E

Victor Nee, The Cultural Revolution at Peking University, with Don Layman (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 28.

O F

S T U D E N T S ?

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270

ford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 43.

wansui (n.p.), 687– 716. See also Alessandro Russo, “The Conclusive Scene: Mao and the Red Guards in July 1968,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 535– 72. 25. 26.

Hinton, Hundred Day War, 40. Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 84.

27.

Wang Shaoguang, “Between Destruction and Construction: The First Year of the Cultural Revolution,” in Law, The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered, 38.

28.

David and Nancy Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside: Years in Revolutionary China, 1964–1969 (New York: Pantheon, 1976): 148–49. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Shoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 67.

29.

Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 45.

30.

On the campaign against Wu Han, see MacFarquhar and Shoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 15–19.

31.

Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 23.

32.

Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 159.

33.

Andreas, “Battling Over Political and Cultural Power,” 499.

34.

MacFarquhar and Shoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 71– 75.

35.

Hinton, Hundred Day War, 45.

36.

“Li Hsüe-feng Is the Executioner Suppressing the CR in Peking Municipality,” Supplement to Survey of China Mainland Press 162 (February 14, 1967), quoted in Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 37.

37.

Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 40.

38.

Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma, 177.

39.

Alain Badiou, “The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?” positions: east

40.

“The Working Class Leading Struggle-Criticism-Transformation in All

asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 484. Spheres of the Superstructure is Fine,” quoted in Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside, 315. Badiou, Metapolitics, 77.

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Andreas, “Battling Over Political and Cultural Power,” 507.

271

41. 42.

8 . T H E E N D O F S T U D E N T S ?

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INDEX

Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Clark), 73–75

Badiou, Alain, 5, 120, 207 baihua. See vernacular language

academies. See shuyuan

Bailey, Paul, 65

administrative assembly (xingzhenghui),

bake. See strikes

110–11

Baker, Russell, 23

Althusser, Louis, 74, 251n63

banzhang. See class monitors

Analects, The, 197

Barlow, Tani, 94

Anderson, Benedict, 120

Beichizi, 45, 173

Andreas, Joel, 208

Beida bu bai (Beida is invincible), 23

apartment houses (gongyu), 44–46

Beida. See Beijing University

Aristotle, 74

Beiheyan, 42, 44, 137, 141, 168, 182,

Association for the Promotion of Virtue

263n5

(Jindehui), 64, 114–15, 243n43

Beijing: descriptions of: 149, 153, 155,

Association for the Translation of New

253n4; position of Beijing

Knowledge (Xinzhi Bianyi She),

University in, 42, 63, 153–54,

119, 244n58

261n136; theaters, 163–64; urban

auditors, 16, 33, 36, 167; regulations for admission of, 31–32; unofficial drop-ins (toutingsheng) 10, 25, 31–33, 44

change, 156–60, 170, 256n48, 257n60 Beijing Daxue rikan. See Beijing University Daily

Beijing daxue tiyuhui. See Beijing University Association for

Physical Education (Beijing daxue

Physical Education

tiyuhui), 57–58, 116

Beijing Daxue Xuesheng Zhoukan. See Beijing University Students’ Weekly Beijing Daxue xueshenghui. See Beijing

|

292

University Student Association

I N D E X

Beijing University Association for

Beijing Daxue yuekan. See Beijing University Monthly Beijing Higher Industrial School, 191 Beijing Higher Normal School, 113, 123, 177 Beijing New Culture Movement Memorial Hall (Beijing Xin Wenhua Yundong Jinian Guan), 227n91 Beijing Specialty School for Engineering, 33 Beijing University: admission exams at, 19, 32–33, 44, 104–10, 114, 241n15,

Beijing University Association for the Study of Marxism, 232n58 Beijing University Daily (Beijing Daxue rikan), 38, 40, 112, 116, 120, 127, 182, 243n44 Beijing University History Hall (Beijing Daxue Xiaoshi Guan), 219n19 Beijing University Lecture Groups for Popular Education (Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan), 17, 30, 49, 127, 164, 178, 180, 181, 188–99 Beijing University Monthly (Beijing Daxue yuekan), 84 Beijing University Student Association (Beijing Daxue xueshenghui), 58, 117, 129, 142, 184 Beijing University Students’ Weekly

241n18; anti-ritualistic ethos at,

(Beijing Daxue Xuesheng Zhoukan),

10, 25, 28, 32, 50, 52, 104, 121;

30, 37–38, 40–41, 48, 114, 118,

anticommunitarian spirit at, 15,

130–31, 138, 140, 142, 144, 248n26,

19, 26–27, 29, 48–51, 67, 104–5,

252n74

130; budget, 113, 243n46; campus,

Beijing Women’s Normal School, 191

18, 24, 30, 42, 48, 159, 167;

Beiyang government, 171

classroom attendance at, 18,

Beiyang University, 82, 83

33–34, 40, 48–49, 128, 144;

Belsky, Richard, 156

curriculum, 10, 34, 42, 49, 79,

Berlin, 89, 149

104–5; dormitories, 19, 24, 30–31

Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 61

42, 44–49, 62, 64, 68, 82, 101;

Boxer Rebellion, 157, 160, 175, 193,

Geology Department, 84;

259n108

graduate school, 83–84, 96, 154;

Boy Scouts, 127

History Department, 84, 95;

boycott: 49, 102, 164; of Japanese

housing office, 45; laboratories, 88; library, 33, 43, 46, 88, 237n63,

products, 142, 192–93, 252n73, 266n57; of U.S goods, 12

244n57; Philosophy Department,

Brownell, Susan, 54, 60–61

81, 84, 95; position in the city, 42,

Bureau of National History, 91, 92

63, 153–54, 261n136; students’

Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 46

financial situation at, 62; uniforms, 164–65; xuankezhi

Cairo, 53

(elective system), 32, 34, 84–85

Cai Xiaozhou, 176

Cai Yuanpei: 93, 110, 171, 242n31, 256n47; 1917 inaugural speech at Beida, 76–79; and discipline at Beida, 44; on exams, 39, 225n63; exchange with Lin Qinnan, 96–97; and idea

coeducation, 16 College of Foreign Languages (Tongwen Guan), 42, 226n87 Communist Party (Chinese), 3, 52, 131, 133, 134, 188, 204, 208, 214 Communist Party (French), 133–34

93–94; Jindehui, 64, 114; on

Confucius, 1

manuals, 87, 237n60; on martial

Consumers’ Society (Xiaofei Gongshe), 65, 116 Culp, Robert, 107, 136, 220n37, 241n17

136; and night schools, 182–83, 185;

Cultural Revolution, 4, 7, 14–15, 173,

presidency at Beida, 10, 17, 19, 28,

202–16

30–31, 33, 35, 42, 75, 79, 80–81, 83, 88, 102, 114–15, 152, 163, 225n59;

Dajing, 197

resignations, 111–13, 125–26,

danwei, 212

128, 192, 247n8; and student

Dazhalan, 159, 192

demonstrations, 125–29, 131, 173,

de Certeau, Michel, 67

178, 266n57

Deng Xiaoping, 4, 172, 215

Calligraphy Research Society, 116, 126

Deng Xihua, 161, 162

Cao Rulin, 174, 176–77, 251n71, 262n152

Deng Zhongxia, 120, 268n84

Capital Education Department, 191

Dewey, John, 37, 126, 251n61

Carroll, Peter, 160

Di Junwu, 47

Central Park (Zhongyang Gongyuan),

Diligent Work and Frugal Study

43, 162, 164, 170, 171

Society, 66

Chang’an Avenue, 156, 170, 177, 205

Dirlik, Arif, 103, 115, 199

Changsha, 185, 187, 264n21

Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 46, 228n109

Changxindian, 197–98, 268n84

Dong, Madeleine Yue, 197

Chaoyang Men (Chaoyang Gate), 191

Dong’an, 177, 191

Chenbao. See Peking Morning Post

Dong’an Market, 43, 136–37, 160–62,

Chen Bao’e, 194

164, 194, 257n69, 258n78

Chen Duxiu, 97, 131, 141, 249n33, 259n94

Dongbian men (Dongbian Gate), 190

Chen Fuchen, 35

Dongdan, 174, 176–77

Cheng Houzhi, 109

Dong fang Zazhi. See Eastern Miscellany

Chen Pingyuan, 27, 32

Donghuamen (Donghua Gate), 42,

Chinese Enlightenment, The (Schwarcz), 3

136–37, 153

Chuan Dao, 69

dorm proctors (shezhang), 46, 48, 64, 143

Citizen, The (Guomin), 116, 126, 248n12

Duan Qirui, 124, 246n1

citizenship: and education, 136, 145; and student activism, 78, 106–7,

Eastern Miscellany (Dong fang Zazhi), 152

126–32, 138

Education Gazette ( Jiaoyu zazhi), 83, 116

Clark, William, 73–75, 90 class monitors (banzhang), 48, 143

Educational Affairs committee ( jiaowuhuiyi), 111

I N D E X

the new education,” 103–4, 122,

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education, 57–58; “My opinions on

293

of university, 39, 82, 86–87, 89–90,

eight big alleys, 33

Gate of Heavenly Peace. See Tiananmen

Eloquence Society (Xiongbianhui),

General Affairs Committee (zongwuhuiyi), 44, 111

enlightenment (qimeng), 3, 6, 7, 102

Germany, 75, 91, 113

Evaluating Committee (pingyihui): and

Gong Prince, 157 gongyu. See apartment houses

110–11; and students’ behavior, 164,

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 205

242n32

gown: female (qipao), 59; male, 59;

|

manuals, 88; establishment of,

Evening School for Workers, 185, 187,

I N D E X

294

116, 119

everyday: as global experience, 53,

264n21

student, 1, 19, 26–27, 53–58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 192, 229n7, 233n70 Grafton, Anthony, 74

63–66; as location of political

Great Leap Forward, 209

struggles, 7–8, 10–11, 17, 19, 25, 29,

Guangxu (Kuang-hsü) emperor, 124

34, 48–49, 53–54, 60, 66–68, 101,

Gu Hongming, 35–36, 225n59

104, 211

Gu Jiegang, 62, 163

exams: criticism of, 19, 36–40, 48, 144,

Guogu. See National Heritage

189, 225n63, 252n82; and the

Guomin. See Citizen, The

Cultural Revolution, 210–11, 215

Guomindang (nationalist party), 131, 136, 204, 214, 253n4

faculty assemblies ( jiaoshouhui), 110, 112

guowen. See national language

Fan Yuanlian, 80, 235n19

Guozijian, 153

femininity, 17, 55, 57, 230n20 Feng Guozhang, 124

Han dynasty, 109

Feng Youlan, 31, 35, 81

Hangzhou, 196, 256n58

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 90

Hanhuayuan (Han Garden), 42, 117

Finley, Moses, 112, 243n45

Hanlin College, 157

Forbidden City, 153–58, 162, 170,

Harootunian, Harry, 53

175, 255n46

Hatamen (Chongwenmen) 169, 259n108

Foucault, Michel, 41, 60, 203–4

Haussmann, Georges Eugène, 166

France, 66, 68, 91, 93, 113, 132–33

He Mengxiong, 32

French Revolution, 107, 171, 204

Hinton, William, 209

frugality, 19, 53, 61, 64–65, 104

Hippocrates, 57

Frugal Study Society (Tongxue

Honglou, 42, 44, 88, 117, 154, 173, 227n91

Jianxuehui), 64, 244n58 Fu Binran, 32, 223n38 Fujian, 118

Hou Renzhi, 260n132 Huafa Yanjiuhui. See Painting Research Society

Fujitani Takashi, 256n53

Huang Kan (Huang Jigang), 35–36

Fu Sinian, 35, 47, 93–94, 117

Hubu road, 177 Huguo Si (Temple for the Protection of

Galen, 57 Gamble, Sidney, 163

the Dynasty), 190 Hunan, 32, 86, 120, 176, 185, 187

Hunan Student Association, 262n153

KMT. See Guomindang

Hu Qianzhi, 65

Ko, Dorothy, 230n20

Hu Shi, 68, 109, 153–54, 228n109

Korea, 107, 126, 130, 247n11, 261n140

hutong, 158, 177, 220n39

Kuan Husheng, 177

Hu Yaobang, 205

Kunqu opera, 47 Kuriyama Shigehisa, 57

Imperial Carriage Park, 157

daxuetang India, 107 Inner City, 157–58, 177, 190, 255n46, 257n61

Lecture Association on General History, 92 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 8, 29, 53, 155, 158, 171 Legation Quarter, 43, 152, 156, 157, 160, 169, 173, 175–77, 179, 261n138 Leipzig, 89

internationalism, 8, 175

Leipzig University, 89, 242n31

Italy, 91

Liang Qichao, 76–79, 121, 128, 220n35, 238n81

Japan, 2, 66, 124, 130, 168, 177, 256n53, 262n152 Jiang Menglin, 37–38, 58, 114, 133, 186, 250n51

Liang Shuming, 33, 40 Liberation Army Daily, 214 Li Dazhao, 117, 163 Liebei, 38–39, 48–49

Jiaotong University, 58

Lin Diana Xiaoqing, 93

Jiaowuchu. See Office of the Dean

Lin Qinnan (Lin Shu) 96–97

Jiaoyu zazhi. See Education Gazette

Lin Shu. See Lin Qinnan

Jindehui. See Association for the

Li Shan, 46, 228n108

Promotion of Virtue

Liulichang, 192

Jingshan (Jing Hill), 42, 263n5

Li Zehou, 219n26, 240n3

Jingshi daxuetang (Imperial University),

Luo Jialun, 47, 103, 117, 130, 168, 174,

42, 45, 153, 219n18, 220n34, 226n86, 233n9, 234n17

248n12, 261n137 Luo Zhanglong, 176, 262n153

Jingzuohui. See Meditation Society

Lu Ping, 209

Jixiang Theatre, 161, 258n74

Lu Xun, 27, 35, 228n109

Journalism Research Society (Xinwenxue Yanjiuhui), 116, 244n57

manuals: at Beida, 87, 88, 237n60; at the night schools, 183, 187

Kang Youwei (K’ang Yu-wei), 121, 124 Kant, Immanuel, 90 Karl, Rebecca, 93 keju (imperial examination system or

Mao Zedong, 86, 117, 120, 170, 172, 185, 206, 208, 210, 214, 216, 244n57, 254n21, 260n132 March First Movement, 126, 261n140

civil service exams), 9, 12–13, 37,

masculinity, 17, 55, 57, 59

40, 60, 81–82, 88, 210

Mashenmiao, 31, 42, 182, 199, 241n15

I N D E X

Imperial University. See Jingshi

Lazarus, Sylvain, 218n6

|

170, 177, 255n46

295

Imperial City, 10, 150, 153, 156, 158, 169,

May ‘68, 68, 132–34 May Fourth Avenue (Wusi Dajie), 15, 220n39 May Fourth Movement: demonstrations

I N D E X

|

296

of May 4, 1919, 173–75, 262n157–

national language (guowen), 107–9, 182–83, 263n11 national products: promotion of, 8, 101, 137–38, 158, 192–94 New Culture, 17, 44, 48, 56, 79, 81, 93,

158; historiography of, 3, 6, 102,

101, 103, 115, 127, 130, 150, 163, 185,

133–34; organization of, 126, 168;

187

path of the demonstrations, 168,

New Education (Xin jiaoyu), 135

173, 177–78, 261n138

New Tide (Xin chao), 47, 116, 126, 228,

McAdam, Doug, 204

248n12

Meditation Society (Jingzuohui), 116

New Village Movement, 66

Mei Lanfang, 161

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 155, 190

Meizhou pinglun (Weekly Review), 137

Night School for Commoners (Pingmin

Mill, John Stuart, 108 Milner, Jean-Claude, 250n54 Minguo Daxue, 178 Ministry of Education, 43, 45, 83, 88, 113, 135, 140, 142, 173, 184, 235n19

yexiao), 180, 184–88, 198 Night School for University Personnel (Xiaoyi yeban), 180, 182–84, 186 1911 Revolution, 76 Nora, Pierre, 172

Mitchell, Timothy, 41 Monument to the People’s Heroes, 4, 192, 205

Office for Popular Education Lectures (Tongsu Jiaoyu Jiangyan Suo), 191

Morris, Andrew, 56, 58

Office of the Dean ( jiaowuchu), 84, 111

Mumford, Lewis, 154

Order of Things, The (Foucault), 203

Music Research Society (Yinyue

Outer City, 190, 192

yanjiuhui), 115–16, 119, 181

Owen, Steve, 79

Musil, Robert, 167, 171 “My opinions on the new education” (Cai Yuanpei), 103–4, 122, 136

Painting Research Society (Huafa Yanjiuhui), 115–16, 126, 181 Palace Museum, 157, 256n47

Nameless Lake (Weiming Hu), 26, 222n6

Pantao Palace (Pantao Gong), 190, 265n35

Nankai high school, 34

Paris Commune, 29

Naquin, Susan, 155, 190

Paris, 53, 66, 149, 168, 240n101

national essence (guocui), 97

Passerini, Luisa, 39, 133, 249n27

National Heritage (Guogu), 116, 118

Patriotic Academy (Aiguo Xueshe), 128

nationalism: 120, 138, 167; Benedict

patriotism, 8, 39, 127, 129–130, 186, 196

Anderson on, 120; and Cai Yuanpei, 93; Chen Duxiu on, 131;

Peking Morning Post (Chenbao), 58, 126, 128, 181, 193, 196

and May Fourth Movement, 2, 6,

People’s Liberation Army, 205

9, 130, 131; and physical education,

People’s Republic of China (PRC), 172,

59; and students, 6, 8, 55

208, 209

physical education (tiyu), 56, 58, 60

School of Economics, 81–83

Pingmin Jiaoyu Jiangyan Tuan. See

School of Engineering, 81–83, 236n33–34

Beijing University Lecture Groups for Popular Education Pingmin Jiaoyu. See Popular education Pingmin yexiao. See Night School for Commoners

93, 97, 128, 182, 236n34 School of Law, 42, 81, 83, 136, 137, 138, 141, 168–69, 182, 186, 236n34 School of Sciences, 42–43, 81, 137, 140–41, 236n34

Poland, 107

self-government (zizhi), 49, 78, 87, 105,

Popular education (journal) (Pingmin Jiaoyu), 189

112, 114, 136, 143, 144, 204 Self-study University, 86

Pozzana, Claudia, 239n93

Sewell, William, 204, 206

preparatory courses (yuke), 81, 82, 83,

Shandong, 2, 128, 168, 174

106, 110, 235n28

Shanghai, 26, 54, 66, 107, 115, 149, 176, 178, 241n15

Qianlong emperor, 42

Shaonian shijie. See Young World

Qianmen, 156, 159, 170, 178, 191, 193,

Shaonian Zhongguo. See Young China

261n138

Shengbai, 40

Qian Xuantong, 36, 80, 96, 259n94

Shen Jiantu, 80

Qilizhuang, 197–98

Shen Shousheng, 224n40

qimeng. See enlightenment

Shen Yinmo, 80, 259n94

Qinghua University, 26, 54, 193, 211, 213,

shezhang. See dorm proctors

229n10, 233n70, 261n136

Shibao, 140, 178

qingyi (pure criticism), 62, 64

Shidaren hutong, 177

Qisheng Temple, 191

Shi Mingzheng, 162, 256n48, 260n111 shuyuan, 12, 47, 62, 86, 228n115, 254n20

Rahav, Shakhar, 52

Sichuan, 161

Rancière, Jacques, 38–9, 97, 119

Sino-French Treaty, 107, 241n19

Red Guards, 206, 213–15

Sino-Japanese Military Mutual

Reformation, the, 107

Assistance Convention, 123, 246n1

Renaissance, the, 107

Sino-Russian Treaty, 107, 241n19

Research Association for Phonetic

Social Welfare Daily (Yishibao), 39, 132,

Transcription, 186

139, 226n69, 253n3

Revue Historique, 93

Socialist Education Movement, 209

Ross, Kristin, 11, 29, 68, 132, 133

Song of Youth, The (Yang Mo) 53, 55–56,

Russo, Alessandro, 103, 120, 243n42

68 Stampa, La, 133

Sang Bing, 12–13 Sanzijing. See Th ree-Character Classic Schneider, Laurence, 103

“Statute of the Problem Study Society” (Mao Zedong), 120–21 St. John’s University, 54, 56

I N D E X

Schwarcz, Vera, 3, 234n17, 240n3

|

Pioneer, The, 142

297

Pingyihui. See Evaluating Committee

School of Humanities, 42–43, 81, 83, 91,

Strand, David, 131, 149–50, 156, 256n55 strikes: by students (bake), 12, 49, 178, 192; by merchants, 251n68

I N D E X

|

298

student activism: during the Cultural

Tianjin, 82–83, 96, 126, 142, 252n74, 262n151 Tilly, Charles, 4 tiyu. See physical education

Revolution, 14, 211–14; June 1919,

Tokyo, 53, 66

136–42, 251n70–71; in the late Qing

Tongcheng school, 46, 228n109

period, 12–14; May 1918 protests,

Tongsu Jiaoyu Jiangyan Suo. See Office

123–26; 1903 protests, 254n18; 1989 demonstrations, 4, 9, 15, 151, 173, 205–6. See also March First Movement; May Fourth Movement Student Military Corps, 58 Student Savings Bank (Xuesheng Chuxu Yinhang), 65, 116, 126 Student Self-Government Committee (Xuesheng Zizhi Weiyuanhui), 112 study societies (xuehui), 42, 52, 105, 115,

for Popular Education Lectures Tongwen Guan. See College of Foreign Languages Tongxue Jianxuehui. See Frugal Study Society toutingsheng. See auditors Translators’ College (Yixue Guan), 42–43, 163, 227n89 Tsin, Michael, 166 Twenty-one Demands, 171

119–21, 123, 130, 181, 245n69 Study Society on Philosophy, 244n57 Sun Jia’nai, 234n17 Suzhou, 160

United States of America, 97, 113, 154, 173 University Club, 164–65 University of Berlin, 85

Taixue, 109, 153, 154

University Quarter, 165–67

Tan Sitong, 231n36 Tao Menghe, 259n94 Tao Xisheng, 81, 235n28 Th irteen Classics, 38 Thompson, E.P., 5

vernacular language (baihua), 96, 130, 184, 187, 263n11 Versailles: Peace Conference, 108, 126, 168, 242n23, 261n140; Treaty, 2

Thousand-Character Classic, 197

Vietnam, 107, 130, 241n19

Three-Character Classic (Sanzijing),

von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 75, 85, 90,

183, 197

242n31

Tian Jiongjin, 34, 252n82 Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace), 1,

Wagner, Rudolph, 169

3–6, 15, 174, 194; change in

Wang, Edward Q., 93

meaning of, 11, 20, 79, 169, 171–73;

Wang Daoyuan, 81

and Mao Zedong, 215, 260n132;

Wangfujing, 159–61, 164, 257n61

and 1989, 4, 173; under the Qing,

Wang Huaiqing, 140, 251n65

169, 256n48, 260n111; and student

Wang Jianzhu, 65

demonstrations, 3–4, 6, 17, 152, 169,

Wang Jingwei, 80

173, 175, 178–79, 205

Wang Jinxi, 47, 228n111

Tiananmen Square, 4, 170, 192, 205–6, 215, 256n48

Wang Liping, 256n58 Wang Shaoguang, 209

Wasserstrom, Jeff rey, 206

Yan Fu, 234n17

Weiming Hu. See Nameless Lake

Yang Baoling, 38

wenli daxue, 84, 236n46

Yangjing daxue. See Yenching

Wenxin diaolong, 35

University

wenyan (literary Chinese), 184, 187

Yang Zhongjian, 44, 177

westernization, 41

Yeh, Wen-hsin, 61, 196

Weston, Timothy, 64, 218n11, 234n17

Ye Lin, 213

Wilson, Woodrow, 108, 131, 171, 242n23,

Yenching University (Yangjing daxue), 54, 178, 222n6 yiku (recalling bitterness), 210

work-study movement, 30, 64–65, 67,

Yinyue yanjiuhui. See Music Research

223n23

Society

Wudi, 153

Yishibao. See Social Welfare Daily

Wu Han, 212

Yixue Guan. See Translators’ College

Wu Hung, 256n48, 260n111

YMCA, 57, 59

Wusi dajie. See May Fourth Avenue

Yongze, 53, 55, 68 Young China (Shaonian Zhongguo),

Xiaofei Gongshe. See Consumers’ Society Xiaoyi yeban. See Night School for University Personnel Xidan, 159, 191

116 Young world (Shaonian shijie), 111 Yuan Shikai, 80 yuke. See preparatory courses Yu Pingbo, 47, 228n111

Xin chao. See New Tide Xinhuamen (Xinhua Gate), 125

Zhang Binglin. See Zhang Taiyan

Xin jiaoyu. See New Education

Zhang Guotao, 124, 153, 168, 245n61,

Xin shenghuo, 30 Xinwenxue Yanjiuhui. See Journalism Research Society

268n84 Zhang Taiyan (Zhang Binglin), 36, 81, 224n57

Xiongbianhui. See Eloquence Society

Zhang Zhidong, 83, 234n17

Xu Chongqin, 81–82, 235n25, 235n28

Zhang Zongxiang, 176, 262n152

Xu Deheng, 130, 248n12, 261n137,

Zheng Tianting, 118

265n39

Zhongguo daxue, 178

xuehui. See study societies

Zhonghuamen (Zhonghua Gate), 173

Xuesheng Chuxu Yinhang. See Student

Zhongyang Gongyuan. See Central

Savings Bank Xuesheng Zizhi Weiyuanhui. See Student Self-Government Committee

Park Zhu Haitao (Zhu Wenchang), 154, 228n113 Zhu Qianzhi, 37–39, 225n60

xuetang, 12, 14

Zhu Wenchang. See Zhu Haitao

Xu Jilin, 249n34

zizhi. See self-government

Xu Shichang (Hsu Shih-ch’ang), 125

Zou Shuwen, 81

I N D E X

261n140 work study mutual aid corps, 32

|

Yang Lianggong, 32, 176

299

Wenxuan, 46

SELECTED TITLES

S T U D I E S O F T H E W E AT H E R H E A D E A S T A S I A N I N S T I T U T E

Columbia University (Complete list at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/weatherhead-studies.html) The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, by Alan Tansman. University of California Press, 2009. The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan, by Scott O’Bryan. University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States, by Christopher Hill. Duke University Press, 2008. Leprosy in China: A History, by Angela Ki Che Leung. Columbia University Press, 2008. Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, by Kim Brandt. Duke University Press, 2007. Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production, by Alexander Des Forges. University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan, by Andrew Bernstein. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. The Making of the “Rape of Nanjing”: The History and Memory of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, China, and the United States, by Takashi Yoshida. Oxford University Press, 2006.

Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan, 1895– 1945, by David Ambaras. University of California Press, 2005. Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573– 1912, by Sarah Thal. University of Chicago Press, 2005. The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China, by Madeleine Zelin. Columbia University Press, 2005. Science and the Building of a Modern Japan, by Morris Low. Palgrave Macmillan, Ltd., 2005. Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China, by Myron L. Cohen. Stanford University Press, 2005. Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937, by James ReardonAnderson. Stanford University Press, 2005. Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West, by Richard Calichman. Cornell East Asia Program, 2004. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937, by Christopher A. Reed. UBC Press, 2004. Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power, by Alexis Dudden. University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender, and the State, 1600–2000, by Harald Fuess. Stanford University Press 2004. Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War with China, 1895–1938, by Barbara Brooks. University of Hawai’i Press, 2000. Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer, by Simon Partner. University of California Press 1999. Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, by Gerald Figal. Duke University Press, 1999. Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife, by Robin LeBlanc. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States, Japan, and Korea, by Victor Cha. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Japan’s Foreign Policy After the Cold War: Coping with Change, by Gerald L. Curtis, ed. M. E. Sharpe, 1993.