a9 inveighed against 'the disorder-fomenting policy of "people's rights".
Where Liang Qichao fought uninhibitedly on behalf of the new, Zhang foresaw the turning of the tide and struggled to prevent the erosion of the old.
Despite differences of emphasis, proponents of educational reform had several arguments in common. Loyal to their heritage, they sought from
the Three Dynasties a prototype school system. The beneficial effects of schooling on the Western model were proven through
reference to the power and prosperity brought by reform to Japan (a favour ite example after the Sino-Japanese War), Prussia, France, or Britain. For many, the introduction of a school system was a panacea, a talisman which would transform weakness into strength. They retained a Confucian faith
in the government's need for talented men, but were eager for their wider ingathering and more specific training. The common complaint that scholars learned what they couldn't apply and applied what they hadn't learnt
reflects dissatisfaction with officials' lack of training either in admini-
47. Ibid., 203 : 13a, 137303. 48. Ibid., 203 : 3a-b, 137253. 49. Ibid., Xu, 2a, 137023.
strative skills or the broader fields of government, history, and current affairs. Advocacy of practicality combined with appreciation of those Western sciences and techniques absent in China led them to applaud educ ational specialization as they understood it to be practiced in the West, in which, in the words of Liang Qichao, ’farmers have scholars in farming, craftsmen have scholars in craft, merchants have scholars in commerce, and soldiers have scholars in soldiery’, a s distinct from the old con ception which confined scholarship to one walk of life, that of the scholar- gentry, and to preparation for one career, that of an official. The
question of a future over-supply of educated men did not arise - a country could never have too much talent. China’s current difficulties stemmed not from having too many educated men, but from their being educated to no purpose. The new schools would ensure the unfettered growth of talent in fields of use to the country. The fact that their output of graduates
might be higher than that of the old examination system would be no problem, since all would have occupations to go to.
Advocates of reform used the axiom that the wealth and power of Western countries lay not in guns and soldiers but in schools to attack Chinese ills. But the deeper such beliefs penetrated into the Chinese social fabric, the more remote they were from first-hand experience. Wang Tao and Huang Zunxian had both seen foreign institutions operating in situy and Zheng Guanying was familiar with them in the colonial context. Until the overthrow of their reforms, however, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao had never been out of China, nor did Zhang Zhidong ever travel abroad. Carried along by current Western ideas, Kang and Liang and their followers accepted a world-view of inexorable historical progression from a lower to higher stage, the latter represented by the ’civilized’ institutions originating in the West and adopted by Japan. Mackenzie's History of the Nineteenth
Century, 'a crude glorification of progress in the nineteenth century'
became very popular in the mid-nineties: Liang Qichao recommended it as 'an
50. Liang Qichao, ’Lun xuexiao: zonglun’, Shiwu hao, V (1896), C2731. 51. See Philip C. Huang, Liang C h ’i-ch'ao and M o d e m Chinese Liberalism
excellent book* in his bibliography on Western learning, and included it in the reading list for the Shiwu Xuetang, a progressive llunanese
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school. Some justice must be allowed in the accusation of one of T.iang’s opponents: 'As Mr Liang admits to never having travelled in tlie West himself, how does he know about the virtues of their laws and the thoroughness of their testing of officials? He has simply been moved by the exaggerated claims of the Western books he read, and thus taken up the thesis that pedants are the ruin of the empire and examination essays the ruin of China'.
The second-hand nature of the reformers' experience and the limit ations of the medium through which they received it led in many cases to a simplistic and one-dimensional view of the operation of Western society. The Shengshi weiyan and the reform press did not raise such questions as whether mass literacy was the cause, accompaniment, or product of industriali
zation, nor did they analyse the presumed relationship between productivity and enlightenment. Western institutions were taken at their face value, and flaws in nineteenth-century industrialization - such as child labour in British factories - were merely unfortunate accidents.^ Missionary persuasion reinforced Confucian tradition in attributing to education transforming powers. Reformers believed not that education itself had failed China, but that she had suffered from the wrong kind of education. Once the examinations were reformed and new schools set up, her ills would right themselves. It would perhaps be anachronistic to expect a more critical attitude; questioning of the role of education has been fairly recent in the West.
The untried optimism of the reform party led them to underestimate
52. Quoted in Chen Clvi-yun, 'Liang Ch'i-ch'ao's "Missionary Education", p. 112.
53. See Shu (ed.), Shiliao, Vol. I, p. 52.
54. Ye Dehui, 'Fei youxue tongyi', in Su Yu (ed.), Yigiao congbian, 4 : 72a
f 317 71.
what was involved in the transfer of institutions. They could be said to have grasped the message but not the medium; they had no concept of the problems or changes which would spring from the importation into China of institutions tailored to the mores of industrial capitalism. Once again, it was conservatives who sounded the alarm, either rejecting Westerniz ation as proposed by Liang and Kang on the grounds that it would 'level
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monarch and subject, and reverse the roles of male and female’, or fight ing a rearguard action, as did Zhang Zhidong, to maintain the benefits of reform and guard against its attendant ills. In the event, change was to prove less predictable but more far-reaching than either party foresaw.
The Hundred Days Reform of 1898 saw a three-tiered school system decreed and a party of officials sent to examine Japanese education. ^ The new system existed on paper only; most existing schools either provided specialized training at an indeterminate level or offered a melange of courses determined by their founder. Though the theory justifying a school system was by now full-blown, the scale on which new schools were founded was so minuscule that the Empress Dowager's rescinding of the reform edicts on education was a sanction of rather than a reversion to the status quo.
The inertia of established practice might have preserved indigenous institutions, with modifications, into the twentieth century, had not the powers continued their encroachment on China's rights and soil. The defeat of the Boxers and the occupation of Peking by foreign troops meant that reform policies were once again heeded. The long heralded school system was adopted in principle in 1901 and embodied in regulations drawn up by the Official in Charge of Education Q uanxue Dachen % ^ zt, IjL ), Zhang Boxi, in 1902. Under Zhang's regulations, the new system exhibited the distinguishing organizational features of its Western and Japanese models: the division of learning into different stages was institutionalized in
56. Wen Ti, memorial impeaching Kang Youwei, in Su Yu, Yij'iao congbian, 2 : 8b, C84J.
primary, secondary, and tertiary education (with advanced colleges as a bridging stage to university, as in Japan), the curriculum was set out in subject divisions, and the state controlled the upper levels of schooling directly and the lower indirectly. As in France, educational admini stration was to be carried out through the school hierarchy: for example, all elementary schools had to make an annual report to the government-run county primary school. The apex of the system was the university at
Peking.
The Japanese influence presaged by the tour of inspection made by officials in 1898 grew rapidly during the early years of the century. Wu Rulun, head of Lianchi Academy in Zhili and subsequently dean of studies of Peking University, records in diary entries for 1901 and 1902
58
conversations on education with Japanese visitors. He noted Ito's
warning that China should not concentrate on intellectual education at the expense of moral and physical education. (This trilogy, originating in Herbert Spenser's Education3 Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1860), had become acclimatized in Japan. Transferred thence to China, it was to be a staple of educational discussion for several decades.) Wu's reply, that knowledge of virtue presupposed intellectual comprehension of its teachings, revealed a Confucian conviction that intellectual and moral knowledge were inseparable.
Wu made a tour of inspection of Japanese education in mid-1902.
Several provinces sent independent delegations for the same purpose. These appear to have been numerous but not necessarily useful; a report in a student paper in Japan criticized prefects and circuit intendants who
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