DISPOSICIÓN TRANSITORIA

The resistance from within the language and literacy education community has always been tenacious at the different stages of the development of the curriculum, so compromise or accord had to be reached depending on the changes and permutations of the CCP’s policies. The most noticeable resistance was evidenced in the debate over the relationship between Yuwen and politics from the late1950s to the early 1960s. Yuwen educationalists have not been happy with the relegation of Yuwen as a subsidiary of political education.

Always confined by the macro-political environment, in Mao’s regime the effort to claim and justify the independence and autonomy of Yuwen as a school subject had to be elaborated in the context of dominant Marxist and Maoist discourse. The1961 article “Opposing the transformation of the Yuwen class into a political education class” (Fandui ba Yuwenke jiaocheng zhengzhike, 反对把语文课教成政治课) by Luo Han, the pseudonym of the vice chief editor of the People’s Education Press, published in the journal People’s Education, is most representative. As the title of his article indicates, Luo Han was strongly against the practice of teaching text in the Yuwen class for the purpose of ideological inculcation. He cited a few cases where Yuwen teachers were concentrating on the context or background of the selected texts at the expense of training the basic reading or writing skills. He believed that this kind of practice was very prevalent at that time. For example, when teaching Stalin’s speech “On the Death of Lenin”, a translated version of which remained in the Yuwen

textbook until the 1980s, Luo observed that many teachers spent too much time recounting the biography of Lenin as well as the history of the Second International, leaving too little time for exploring the text itself. Luo went on to argue that Yuwen education cannot be equated with political education; instead, Yuwen should concentrate on the basic skills of reading and writing. Although Luo Han’s argument was straightforward and his voice firm, interestingly, his rationale was still based on the political guidance of the CCP. That is, although he challenged the practice of sidelining language and literacy skills in favour of

political education in the Yuwen course, his argument and his discourse were unable to step out of Marxism and Maoism’s restrictions. He conceded that every subject should serve the proletarian political agenda, Yuwen being no exception. However, to better serve the

proletarian political aims and better understand Marxism and Maoism, one must also acquire sufficient skills. For Yuwen, such reading and writing skills are essential. He also cited the words of a Marxist writer to endorse his argument to “go to basics” – a call for Yuwen to re- focus on the basic reading and writing skills.

The clash between Yuwen and political education is echoed in a less confrontational but more traditional discourse: the division of Wen (文 literacy or language) and Dao (道 moral, ethic, principium or value). The renewed debate over Wen and Dao was sparked by an article in 1959: “Wen and Dao – My opinion on the aims and tasks of Yuwen education” by a high school teacher Liu Peikun in Shanghai (Liu 1959). The article was published in the Wenhui Bao (Wenhui Daily), whose readership was mainly the intellectual circle. Citing the well- known essay On the Teacher (Shi shuo 师说) by Han Yu (768-824), the Tang Dynasty essayist, which identified the entangled Wen and Dao relationship, Liu argued that Dao in the new context is political and moral education, while Wen is literacy and literature cultivation. He believed that consequently Wen should provide the basic reading and writing skills and the nurture of literature that are the core content of Yuwen, and only after mastering these and acquiring literary attainment can political education and moral development be achieved more efficiently and effectively.

The debate over Wen and Dao is a reflection of the oscillation of the CCP’s education policy in the bigger political context. The call for a refocus on the quality of literacy education and rectification of the over-emphasis on the political and moral interpretation of texts can be understood as a concerted campaign to correct the implications of “the Great Leap Forward” (GLF). The CCP and Mao’s all-encompassing industrialisation campaign proved to be too ambitious and radical given China’s economic and technological level at the time. The GLF was also alleged to have caused the great famine in China during 1958-1961. The GLF had a great impact on education including Yuwen education. Li and Gu ((Li and Gu 2000) listed “four sins” of Yuwen education during the Great Leap Forward period:

 The text selections were manipulated to accord with the political tenets and GLF ethos;  Delivery of the texts became a political campaign and political education;

 The prevalent pompous and showy writing style echoed GLF’s ethos;  Failure of the anti-illiteracy campaign.

In 1958, the Ministry of Education submitted a report to the CCP’s central committee requesting it to pay attention and take action to address the decrease in the quality of language and literacy education in primary and secondary schools (Li & Gu, 2000, p. 302). The CCP’s education working conference held in 1959 specifically instructed the local education administrations to choose Yuwen as the key subject to enhance teaching quality. This is the macro-context of the “Going to basics or resuming quality of literacy” movement protesting against over-emphasis on political content in the literacy subject.

Liu Pei Kun’s article was accompanied by a newspaper editor’s commentary, with the direction of the debate channelled by the Wenhui Daily (Wenhui Bao,文汇报). Those who favoured Wen over Dao included influential intellectuals, the most significant being Chen Wangdao (陈望道), the first Chinese translator of the Communist Manifesto and the founder of modern Chinese rhetoric. At a seminar of Yuwen educationalists in Nanjing in 1961 Chen argued (Chen 1989) firmly that the CCP’s ethos is to seek truth based on the facts and reality and that we should follow Marxism and Leninism without always needing to cite Marx or Lenin’s words. According to Chen, Yuwen is Yuwen; the first priority of teaching Yuwen is to teach Wen, the language, and to acknowledge its alignment with Marxism and the CCP’s policy and ideological basis. The Vice Minister of Education Lin Liru also became involved in the debate in the form of an interview with the newspaper and expressed his “personal” point of view by criticising the trend of overemphasising the “political content” at the cost of language teaching (Gu & Li, 2000).

The debate over Wen and Dao was summarised in an official editorial commentary in 1961 that aimed to conclude another campaign initiated by the Wenhui Daily on how to improve or deliver quality literacy education. The impact of this article on the teaching and learning of Yuwen was far-reaching (Gu & Li 2000, p. 236). In this editorial, the author applied the strategy of self-protection by conceding that language and literacy is meant to serve a political aim. At the time of the writing, the ultimate aim of the CCP and China was to turn China into a modern socialist country. The author further argued that to realise this goal, the youth and the whole society are obliged to improve their literacy in order to be literate in science and technology. In this sense, according to the author, to deliver a quality class by a

Yuwen teacher is to contribute significantly to the “glorious” socialist project. In sum, enhancing the quality and re-focusing on basics (basic knowledge, basic language skills) were the central themes and thrust of the article and as well as of the newspaper.

The CCP’s political control and domination has been ubiquitous. The debate regarding political (ideological) education versus literacy quality, together with the call for going back to basics are reflections of the resistance of teachers, educationalist, and linguists involved in language and literacy education. An understanding of the resistance should be placed in the macro-context of China’s experience of educational re-adjustment in the wake of the failure of radical educational reform as well as the failure of the Yuwen pedagogical experiment during the Great Leap Forward movement starting from 1958. The debate also created a discursive space for syllabus and curriculum design, especially regarding the nature and aims of Yuwen and the relationship between Yuwen and the state’s dominant ideology and political agenda.