Chapter 25 21. Mao's efforts to establish a new education system

The last decade of Mao's rule in China, like France in the 1790s, was full of chaos and surprises.In terms of scale and complexity, the "Cultural Revolution" certainly far surpassed the French Revolution.In any case, people will study the Cultural Revolution from various angles for a long time to come.In retrospect, the most notable feature of the "Cultural Revolution" may have been the devastating blow to knowledge and intellectuals, and China is a country that has always valued learning and invented the civil service examination system 1,300 years ago.But in reality, the two are intrinsically linked: knowledge is attacked in China because it is deeply rooted in established power structures.Under this historical condition, it is difficult for people to understand China's "Cultural Revolution" if they do not look at history.

Since the Chinese education system in the 20th century was similar to that of other developing countries, Jonathan Unger's book Education under Mao was originally only part of his research project.The project, sponsored by the British Development Institute, aims to "address the serious 'diploma disease' that exists in the education systems of many third world countries".Studying China's violent "Cultural Revolution" as a manifestation of diploma disease is tantamount to treating toxic shock as chickenpox.Never mind though, we've always funded China studies in the name of national defense needs.

Studying China as part of the Third World presumably satisfies all social scientists' need for comparative research, regardless of whether the comparison explains anything.At the beginning of her book "The Rivalry among Comrades", Susan Shek points out that Mao's political ethics is incompatible with Rousseau's and other revolutionary movements (Puritans, Fascism, Indian Gandhi's non-violent passive resistance and non-cooperation). Islam, Marxism) have much the same ethics, and all of these revolutionary movements advocate a "comprehensive ethical reform".Shek is a structural scientist. She said: "To understand people's behavior, it is best to start with the structural people caused by policies", rather than start with the psychological tendencies inherited through cultural traditions that people usually care about.One can't help but ask: So, what about the "policies caused by culture" behind the "structures caused by policies"?

Of course, for the social science studied by Shek, it cannot be regarded as an exception because of the different cultures in China caused by Chinese history.Therefore, Susan Shek pointed out that Mao's "ethics also originated from ancient Chinese traditions."Anger also seems to be well versed in history, pointing out in Appendix B that the intellectual world in China "has always been linked to the political world."Both authors worship history, but they prefer to study the contemporary situation, expanding in space, rather than going backward in time. According to their comparative and modern worldview, China should belong to the third world both by definition and by its own policy statements.If you look at the facts, you will find that China does belong to the third world, but it stands out from the crowd both in terms of size and history.Comparing China with Ghana is undoubtedly of theoretical value only.If China must be described as a "country bound by its own history" (as many people say), it can only show again: China experts are bound by their own China.But if we accept that making China an exception is parochial and anti-scientific, does that mean asking social scientists to try to ignore history?Does the method of behavioral research exclude the method of genetics?Neither the credential disease nor the third world countries can explain the brutal Maoist "class struggle" over the education system.

To understand the origins of the "Cultural Revolution," we must first understand the established institutions of power it attacked (not only those of the Party under Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, but also the bureaucratic bureaucracy that Mao saw reemerging within the Party. style) understand.This naturally goes back to the history of China's invention of bureaucracy during the Han Dynasty 2,000 years ago, and later the invention of paper, printing, and the civil service examination system.By the Song Dynasty 1,000 years ago, this imperial examination system had become an important part of the country.Until the system was abolished in 1905, the state used this system to recruit the feudal privileges it needed to rule the masses.Because managing farmers is the greatest specialty of China, the most stable empire in the world.

If it is said that the Han Dynasty ruled 45 million peasants, there were 300 million peasants in the Qing Dynasty one year ago.Today, Mao's successors rule more than 800 million peasants, more than the total number of peasants in America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union. This is why education is so important. After Mao came to power in 1949, it was necessary to formulate various systems for the country through a group of elites inspired by his ideas, and this group of people was just like those selected through the imperial examination system before 1905 (Mao was just 12 years old in 1905) .What he needed were men educated in orthodox theory of the state, men who could implement his new social order.Since party dictatorship had replaced dynastic rule as China's political system in the 1920s, the talents Mao needed had to be the Chinese Communist Party and its cadres, the "red elements" dedicated to his revolution.How to foster such activities through China's educational system has become a top priority.

To do this is not as easy as one might imagine. Before 1905, those who hoped to rise to the top had attended private schools at home or in the village, preparing for the old government examinations.The selected elite also attended thousands of semi-official schools, sort of Chinese boarding schools or universities.The structure of this examination system is multi-level and multi-channel, which forms a kind of "examination psychology" among those who want to seek worldly fame.It is not a public education system, nor is it aimed at universal education.It rewarded literary talent, orthodoxy, and conservative (perhaps stubborn) ethics, but gave no opportunity for technical expertise.However, from 1911 to 1949, that is, during the blank period of central power from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the Chinese Communist Party's takeover of power, Chinese education was reconstructed according to modern principles. The liberal American way started the university.

The product of this modern education is the Chinese intellectuals educated in science, technology, and humanities in the 20th century. They are generally regarded as the successors of the traditional intellectuals in the old imperial examination system in name and sometimes in spirit.But this is only a superficial phenomenon. After 1905, China's intelligentsia actually grew rapidly, forming a new intellectual class including journalists, writers, teachers, doctors, engineers, and other professionals.They are no longer what they used to be: after falling out, most of them become local gentlemen; when the country selects them, they become civil servants.They are no longer of one mind, nor are they fully committed to promoting the ideology of the country and its benevolent governance.They are experts, people with modern thinking. After 1949, leaders Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping hoped to recruit these experts to help them modernize China.

In conclusion, one can say that it is not these modern specialists who inherit the function of the examiner under the old examination system, but those new, red party cadres, because they are selected eminent persons, morally Loyal to the nation's leaders and their egalitarian revolutionary ideals.For hundreds of years, the Chinese government relied on cadres who thought like the government.They were not made in the Soviet Union, but many of them think they were made in the Soviet Union.Although they now oppose Confucius' Confucianism, this does not change their role in the government.In some respects, modern Chinese intellectuals of all kinds are more enthusiastic about pursuing new ideas than party cadres.This set the stage for the "class struggle" of "red" against "specialist".From a historical perspective, the occurrence of the "Cultural Revolution" was not just due to the frustration of an old man.It represents an inevitable contradiction between the new ruler's customary need for the intellectual allegiance of his people and the modernizer's need for expertise.Mao was a person who paid great attention to tradition, and he regarded education as ideological indoctrination.He even regrets the adoption of the Soviet model by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s, because doing so allowed experts to become independent and possibly deviant, at least in their respective disciplines.But given the slowness of the Chinese revolution to involve the peasant masses in politics, the problem Mao faced was that school exams still favored children of intellectual origin and that few of the specialists who worked to modernize China's technology were of peasant origin .

Mao inherited the peasants' mistrust of the intelligentsia from ancient times, seeing them as remnants of bureaucrats and local dignitaries, from Wang Anshi (1021-1086) in the Song Dynasty to Gu Yanwu (1613-1682) in the Qing Dynasty, Inherited the Five Elements Theory, which criticized the old imperial examination system in China.Chinese education has a long and complicated history, and some of its viewpoints and views are still influential today, such as the natural separation of mental and physical power; learning should serve society through the state; orthodoxy is the key to maintaining order, and so on.This can't help but make people wonder whether China's diploma disease is a common disease in the third world, or is it a thousand-year-old examination disease in China?

After Anger and Shek began their research work, they conducted many interviews in Hong Kong.There, they were able to cross-check the many detailed materials provided by their collaborators.Jonathan Angle focuses on the implementation of state policies and movements in Guangzhou.In addition to reading newspapers and documents in Guangzhou, he conducted 191 interviews with 43 Chinese immigrants between 1975 and 1976.From these interviews, he compiled a picture of each person's class at the school, because the students in each class had been classmates for several years, so they knew each other very well.Susan Shek started interviewing in Hong Kong in 1969, especially in 1971 and 1978-1979, she conducted in-depth interviews in Mandarin with 31 students and three teachers who fled to Hong Kong from middle schools in Chinese cities.The methodology appendix at the end of her book amply demonstrates that she uses an in-depth rather than broad and detailed approach. The effect of this proficient interview technique is in stark contrast to Robert Taylor's research result - "The Dilemma of Chinese Intellectuals".Taylor's research was based entirely on library material and his self-righteous judgment of what Mao was doing.In addition to common books, newspapers and translations, Taylor also listed 33 Chinese newspapers and periodicals.Based on his exhaustive reading of these publications, he describes the relationship between the resourceful Liu Shaoqi's insatiable interest in "functional specificity" (which tends to revive individualism) and "Mao's idea of ​​a proletarian intellectual" struggle.Robert Taylor attaches great importance to history, so he summarizes the history at the beginning of the book, and then describes the conditions candidates should have and the preparations to be done, university admissions work, selection institutions, the structure between talents and the masses, etc.However, the more he got to the back, the more what he wrote seemed to be lacking in facts and untenable.The evidence he selected all involved ideological goals and aspirations, rules and regulations and their theoretical basis, fragmentary materials and estimates, and condemnation of evil deeds. .His understanding of the Cultural Revolution through modern Chinese newspapers and periodicals is no different from what people learn about the American economy from speeches at bankers' conferences.Taylor, apparently carried away by the Maoist mania of the late 1960s, described in detail how Mao hoped to create "proletarian intellectuals" by "putting politics in command" and "realizing the integration of education and society." In 1958, Mao hoped that the educational institution would no longer be an independent entity, but be merged with the amateur educational institution and be integrated with the society...By 1965, Mao Zedong and his supporters clearly saw that it was necessary to prevent Liu ( Shaoqi) to destroy the party's educational purpose, the only way is to close colleges and universities, and at the same time destroy the education system at that time... By 1970, there were three ways to realize the integration of education and society through production: (1) Workers participate in university management; (2) Teachers participate in production; (3) Students participate in labor... The combination of education and society will be realized through the exchange of roles among teachers, students and workers. These practices are notoriously confusing.Just as Mao did not understand economics (he admitted in 1959, "I do not understand industrial planning at all"), this puzzling passage fully demonstrates that he did not understand science and technology either.According to Chinese tradition, any new ruler must bring a national consensus on orthodoxy to support his revolutionary regime.This led Mao to elevate the peasantry above the academic (the proletariat above the bourgeoisie) and plunged him into a struggle against modern knowledge. The struggle did not come about instantly.In the 1950s, the old pre-liberation system still existed.Students compete in four levels of schools from low to high: elementary school (6 years), middle school (3 years), high school (3 years), and university (4 years).The Chinese believe, as ever, that a degree is the measure of one's success. Government examinations before 1905 were divided into counties, regions, provinces, capitals, and courts.Now, the revolution once again puts ideology first.In the past, the way to ensure that ideology was put first was that candidates must be proficient in the classics of Confucianism, but Confucianism has been abandoned in 20th-century liberal curricula. In order to re-establish the orthodoxy in support of the revolutionary government, the Chinese Communist Party delineated the different class composition very early on.Although the Chinese Communist Party used Marxist terms when announcing these class divisions, the divisions were actually imposed by the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty.The emperor was a great organizer. Like the previous emperors, after 1368, all peasant families, handicraft families, military families and official families were registered, and the son inherited his father's composition.The emperor declared: "The first task of the government is to bring about transformation through education." He also ordered: "States, counties, counties, and prefectures shall establish schools, each of which shall be funded by the state for its teachers, pupils, and staff." (Excerpted from Charles O. "The Origins of the Ming Dynasty and the Evolution of Its Institutions" written by Harker in 1978) Socialist China in the 1950s could only do this.The Chinese Communist Party uses three criteria to measure applicants: family class composition, political performance and academic performance.There are three types of class composition: good (revolutionaries, soldiers, workers, and peasants of the Chinese Communist Party), middle (middle peasants and urban employees in the past), and poor (capitalists, rich peasants, landlords, and "rightists").In each region, the schools with the highest level of teachers and the best equipment are the key schools, specially enrolling the children of CCP officials from good families and the children of moderate intellectuals (those who have acquired their academic talents from their parents) .Young people from working families can only enter the worst secondary schools or vocational schools of another level, and then go directly to factories. The purpose of emphasizing class origin and political expression is to prevent the children of intellectuals with liberal ideas from continuing to manage the new China.The CCP also took many expedient measures in an effort to train graduates of workers, peasants and soldiers. These measures included establishing amateur private schools, shortening the school system, simplifying textbooks, and lowering teaching requirements.Another reform measure is to reduce rote memorization (according to Anger, the reason why rote memorization is promoted is because of the peculiarities of Chinese writing, the Chinese believe in model essays and the Chinese have the ability to promote moral behavior by learning classic ethical sayings Tradition).Teachers believe that "there is only one truth that needs to be taught to students, that is, the 'correct line'," and they often test students.To counter this tendency, key schools and universities have experimented with open-book exams.Ang also mentioned rural semi-agricultural schools and plans to shorten the 12-year schooling period to 10 years, as in the Soviet Union.Both were gradually withdrawn by 1965, "returning to the standard set by the examinations of the higher schools, and to the normal curriculum of instruction, as this curriculum and its examination system dictated the considered an orthodox educational system". Is it not?Is anyone denying that this examination system (which Shek calls a "merit education") is the standard by which the contemporary Chinese public is measured?Anger doesn't touch on this issue, but if we study a little more history, he can tell us that China's meritocracy precedes Western Christianity in time, and that China's examination system has a longer history than the British jury trial system .This examination system is the main way for the Chinese to gain fame, which has been proved by the experience of the Chinese.In China, people who are as famous as our folk heroes such as Rochinvale and Liju Abner are generally candidates for this kind of examination. (Huck Fang was, of course, an inept scholar.) Before Caesar or Christ was born, Chinese emperors were already examining candidates recommended by senior officials.Long before the establishment of the Charlemagne Empire, China's examination system had been firmly established: officials recommended candidates; the Ministry of Rites fairly assessed the candidates and ranked them, and then the Ministry of Households appointed officials.Selection and appointment are separate. Procedures and precautions for examinations, degrees of all kinds (including those that can be purchased with money or by general recommendation), strife over the content and changes of policy, the distribution of degrees among the districts, and the successive "aging of examinations" of officials. ", etc., are extremely complex, and they can form a thick material by themselves.For hundreds of years, thousands of people competed in the capitals of major provinces every 3 years (now, this kind of examination is held every year.) The elite selected in this way is less than 2% of the total population. It is equivalent to the percentage of Chinese university graduates now.Mao's revolution was a tragedy because, while he worked to undo this horrible practice of meritocracy, he was also deeply anti-intellectual. Angle and Shek invoke a number of first-person accounts.As the number of students increased in the 1960s, competition intensified.At the same time, tensions grew between political activists (mainly from the Communist Youth League) and academics (mainly from non-proletarian families).Susan Shek compared the relationship between them to the relationship between moral education and intellectual education.Ambitious students must choose between the two.Activism pushes people into politics, and potentially even empowers them, but it also alienates people from each other and eventually even out of politics.This is because the measures of politically correct behavior are vague, subjective, and highly variable; each person is measured against his peers; climb up. Shek concluded that in moral education, "instead of cooperating with each other, people competed fiercely with each other academically and politically. Students neither admired nor trusted political activists, but avoided them. Government Political demands placed on people increase friendships between people, not the other way around. To protect friends, students just go through the motions when they criticize publicly, criticizing each other is only superficial.... Moral education... produces not Mao The 'revolutionary successors' I hope for are those who are cautious and adapt to the wind."Finally, during the Cultural Revolution, "politics permeated every aspect of social and economic life, undermining mutual trust among people and trust in leadership." The failure of moral agency (“politics in command”) in schools culminated in violent struggles among students during the Cultural Revolution.Jonathan Angle provides a graph of the relationship between the people he interviewed and their classmates when they were Red Guards, which shows that "partisanship equals class struggle".In Guangzhou, the Red Guards of the "Dongfeng" sect loyal to Mao were mainly students from good families, while the Red Guards of their opposing "Red Flag" faction were mostly from families with middle or poor class status.Unger's work covers a wider range than Schek's.In his book, Unger describes Mao's reforms to education in China after he quelled student violence in 1967 by sending Red Guards to the countryside.In the reform, key schools and entrance examinations were abolished and replaced by a recommendation system (which is the traditional practice of replacing examinations); universities set up branch campuses in rural areas so that students could participate in field labor; courses were reduced; Achievements are thwarted. After Mao's death in 1976, these practices were reversed.Liu Shaoqi was rehabilitated.Exams resumed.Education is making steady progress.Still, Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was an almost unbelievably upheaval.This upheaval may have an appealing purpose, but its details are appalling and destructive, and we don’t know enough about it yet.There are still 800 million farmers in rural China. How can these people be educated to adapt to modern life? This review is of Education Under Mao: Classrooms and Struggles in Canton Schools, 1960-1980, by Jonathan Unger (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982); Susan L. Shek Comrade Rivalry: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982); Robert Taylor's The Dilemma of Chinese Intellectuals: Politics and College Admissions, 1949-1978 Years" (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 1981), New York Review of Books, December 2, 1982, entitled "Red" or "Special"?".