Displaced Intellectuals in Twentieth Century China 9789814376563

The twofold purpose of this paper is to survey the factors affecting intellectual displacement in China during the twent

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Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
I. INTRODUCTION
II. INTELLECTUALS AND SOCIAL CHANGE
III. A VIEW OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN CHINA
Tables
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Displaced Intellectuals in Twentieth Century China
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The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Established as an autonomous corporation in May, 1968. the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies is a regionaJ research centre for scholars and other specialists concerned with modern Southeast Asia . The Institute's research interests are focussed on the many-faceted problems of Modernization and Development and Political and Social Change in Southeast Asia . The Institute is governed by a 24-member Board of Trustees on which are represented the University of Singapore and Nanyang University, appointees from the Government, a~ well as representatives f~:om a broad range of professional and civic organizations and groups. A ten-man Executive Committee oversees day-to-day operations; it is ex officio chaired by the Director. the Institute's chief academic and administrative officer.

"Copyright subsists in this publication under the United Kingdom Copyright Act. 1911 and the Singapore Copyright Act tCap. 187). No person shall reproduce a copy of this publication. or extracts therefrom, without the written permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore."

Dis plac ed Int elle ctu als in Twe ntie th Cen tury Chi na

by

I. W. Mab bett

Occ asio nal Pap er No. 26 Ins titu te of Sou thea st Asi an Stu dies Pri ce:

S$4 .00

This is a preliminary invest~gation of modern Ch1nese social history, particularly "the factors affecting intellectual displacement" and the role of displaced intellectuals in social change in China during the present century. Let's hope Dr. Ian Mabbett's 'passage to China' would be both smooth and successful. In the meantime, whilst w1shing Dr. Mabbett and h1s paper all the best, it is clearly understood that responsibility for facts and oplnions expressed ~n the work that follows rests exclusively with Dr. Mabbett, and his interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of the Institute itaelf or its supporters.

14 Apr11 1975

Kernial Singh Sandhu Director

CONTENTS Page Forewo rd

i

Acknow ledgem ents I

Introd uction

1

II

Intell ectual s and Social Change

8

III

A View of Social Change in China

36

Tables : 1

Educa tional Enrolm ent Nation al Totals , 1912-2 8

47

2

Educat 1onal Entry, Enrolm ent and Gradua tion Nation al Totals , from 1948-4 9 to 1964-6 5

48

3

Numbe rs Withdr awing from Differ ent Levels of Educa tion

so

4

Net Domes tic Produc t and State Budget

51

Acknowledgements The author would like to record his gratitude to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies for the facilities provided during the preparation of this paper, and to all those individuals associated with the work of the Institute from whose comments and suggestions it has benefited.

I

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is twofold. In the first p l ace, it is to survey what is known about the factors affecting i ntel l ectual displacement in China during the present century. In the second, it is to suggest speculatively a scheme of analysis of social change in modern China into which the ro l e of displaced intellectuals fits as an important, but not as an omnipotent, element. The relationship between these two undertakings, and the limits of each, need to be made clear in general· terms at the outset . · By a convention to be adopted more or less arbitrarily here, an intellectual is anyboqy who has received, or is in the latter stages of receiving, sufficient education . to direct his expectations of life away from manual t .oil and towards positions enjoying a degree of respect and influence . In China, such positions have in the past been largely identified with public service, and accordingly it is largely with th~ prospects of entering officialdom that we shall be concerned. An intellectual is displaced if his expectations are disappointed. Clearly, by this criterion, the class of displaced intellectuals can in principle include everybody from a barely literate peasant in a local society of illiterates to a highly qualified academic who, though highly placed, feels that he is in the wrong job. Different ranks or concentric circles of displaced intellectuals may be identified by distinguishing different levels of education at each of which tfumners: of people stick and fail to rise higher. In practice, however, the most important criterion is the ~ dEHirtiitation -, of those who receive several years of secondary education but fail to get any sort of official position, and have to satisfy themselves with wholly or partly ·manual employment o It will be helpful to enterta.in three abstract propositions. The first is that people's behaviour is profoundly affected by knowledge which they never realize they possess or never spell out clearly to themselves, knowledge which filters from person to person and group to group, embodied in questions, in assumptions, in implicit judgements at least as much as in anything that is made explicit, colouring the atmosphere - of thought, shaping the cultural climate, determining which problems people recognize and _which tl)ey ignore. This of course is a psychological proposition, and

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psychological contributions to the sort of study undertaken here have not always been happy. It is not so very long since we were invited to believe in the importance to the fate of Russia of ..the circumstance that Mr. Khrushchev as a baby was tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes ~ But it may not overstrain credulity to propose that the prospects facing young educated people have an effect, in this way, upon the mood of schoolboys, upon how intellectuals think about the world, upon the judgements made by officials and perhaps upon the reliability of soldiers and policemen. Any particular event, such as the inauguration of the Great Leap, is of course to be analysed by examining such things as the fate of the co-operative programme, fact ional politics, and so forth which are totally excluded from consideration here. Any trend of events . over a period, however, even a short period, is likely to be profoundly affected by the climate of opinion in the country, a climate which may be affected by the diffusion of certain ways of thought. One policy may be preferred to another, in the short run, because it is proposed- by a man wth more factional support in the higher counsels of the Party; in the long run, the distribution of factional support may change because of a change in the questions people are asking in the very lowest counsels, questions to which people higher up may respond, even quite unconsciously, by shifting their alignments. The second proposition is that a view of Chinese social change will be most hopeful if it attempts, not only to predicate things of particular groups of people, but also to give reasons for regarding these particular groups as important rather than others which subdivide or overlap, and for predicting when these groups will merge and re-form, when continue to act in character. A student confronting the analysis of a society is gravely tempted by the fallacy of platonizing, of crediting any expression he happens to use, such as 'el1te', or 'cadre', or 'arrnyman', or 'old guard' with the property of indicating some particular thing in reality with a unique and consistent character. In fact it is very difficult to know whether any individual Chinese will, in any circumstances, behave as a cadre, as a middle-aged one, as a man with secondary education, as a native of a particular province, as a supporter of_ a supporter of Chou En-lai, or as something else, when he is all of these things simultaneously ·; the problem for the student is to know which are important in any

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context. 1 To have an expression, however rigorously it is defined, with however much scientific precision it is quantified, is not necessarily to have a reality. Part of the problem is that vocabulary tempts us to think of the society we seek to portray as a sort 'Mechanism' , 'model' , 'input' (it is a of machine. sausage machine}, 'trigger', all encourage the same way Of course it is legitimate to use a machine of thought. as a metaphor for some purposes; it is not legitimate to regard it as a machine that works on principles that We can be analysed by reference to a system of parts. but may think of China as a machine gun, if we will; we should not suppose that somewhere in i t there is the equivalent of the barrel locking nut retainer plunger. In reality, the p i cture that we have to paint is of people and their behaviour; they behave according to the pictures they have of their world; so it is rather as if the artists had to paint a picture of artists And the artists in the picture are liable painting. to cast as i de the i r canvases and start anew in response It is possible to no obvious change in the scenery. that a change in the atmosphere, such as that brought about by a change 1n the fortunes of educated men, may have a significant effect upon them. The th i rd proposition is that young intellectuals in Ch1na, despi te the absence of a clear occupational definition of them, sometimes show some of the features of a strategic group 1n the sense employed by H. Evers, He writing about modern1zation in Southeast Asia. who, 1dent1fies as a strategic group a set of people originally a perhaps occupationally defined group with little in common, a 'quasi group', come to recogn1ze a common interest, and argues that, as society changes, a new class can come into be1ng through the coal1tion of perhaps originally antagonistic strategic groups when they pool their resources, exchange personnel, or share membership of organizations, and so forth . 2

l

F C. Te i wes, "P r ov i nc i al Politi c s in China: Themes and Variations," in J.M. H. Lindbe ck, ed . , China: Management of a Rev o Lutionary Soaiety ( Seat t l e , 1 971), pp. 116-189, analyses stat i stically a number of i nterest i ng possible co r relations.

2

H. Evers, "Group Conflict and Class Formation in Southeast Asia" in H. Evers, ed . , Mbdernizat ion in Sou ~ heast Asia (Kuala Lumpur, 1973), pp . 103-1 31 .

- 4 An important condition for strategic group

formation seems to be a sudden increase in the membership of a quasi group. An increase in size (not the absolute size as such)will put pressure on members to seek an appropriate share of wealth and power available in a society. (A sudden reduction in the available wealth might have a similar impact). This will eventually always result in a conflict situation with other groups who either are on their way to increasing their share of scarce resources or are defending their old position . 3 This way of regarding them entitles us to regard intellectuals, or at least those with unsatisfied ambitions, as a strategic group seeking class partners, and succeeding o r failing according to the ecology of society as a whole. The application of these three principles may be briefly anticipated here . In the first place, i t is plausible that, if the circumstances are right, the experience of a class of people can i nfect the atmosphere of popular culture and produce a change in the political climate. Thus, an increase in the number of frustrated intellectuals can produce a mood of disillusionment, disgruntlement and cynicism.·· that spreads through society. It must be emphasized that this is only . an example. Intellectuals are an important group, but they are not the on.ly group, whose experience may be expected to operate in this way. Once the infection is under way, many others who are neither frustrated in their own ambitions nor, necessarily, intellect uals may emerge as protagonists of dissidence; and some of these may become widely known as leaders. Thus we should not expect to find that all known leading dissidents are displaced intellectuals. What we should expect to find is that the existence of a substantial class of displaced intellectuals, numerous at the intermediate levels of any movements there may be., will make the emergence of such movements possible . In the second place, a change in the ~olitical climate produces a change in the way people identify themselves and behave. For example, frustrated ·

3

Ibid. , pp . ll4f ,

- 5 -

intellectuals may cease to regard themselves as members of a class containing the government and begin to regard themselves as members of a class containing the destitute. In the third place, the new situation created by a change in the po1i tical climat.e may produce new alignment.s of important groups from which new .classes develop o The: · shared interest and activity of poor peasant leaders and intellectuals, or of army officers and men of business, may in the course of time promote the emergence of a class. In such an analysis, not only displaced intellectuals but also frustrated adventurers (army commanders and men of affairs ) constitute elements, and--twentieth century social and political changes in China can be accommodated in the scheme " These, then 1 are the lineaments of the thes .i s Certain points must be made about them if they are not to be misunderstood.

below ~

Firstly, it must be emphasized that social changes in China are not to be attributed solely to the efficacy of changes in the numbers of displaced intellectuals. To be properly substantiated, the views about the social change offered at the end, below, would have to be derived from the close study of a number of groups, among which intellectuals wquld be - only one. Intellectual.s bulk large in t .his study simply because it is a study of iP,tellectuals. The purpose of the concluding general discussion of social change in China is not to draw warranted conclusions from the study; it is to show how the warrant.ed conclusions could play a part in a scheme of broader scope, a scheme which must remain speculative until it is attached to the conclusions from other studies besides " Secondlyf a point that was touched on above, the displaced intellectuals whose fate is t .o be charted are not necessarily to be sought among those in China whose biographies are written . Of the commanders, warlords and leaders of political parties, some are good examples of displaced intellectuals or other significant groups and others are not. tlha:b matters is not the identity of the leaders and their senior henchmen, which is really neither here nor there; it is the existence of a pool of discontented nameless men, who, in the case of the rise of the Communist Party for example, have been active in villages and countries with organization and propaganda . The climate c reated partly by the existence of such people attracts

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6 -

to their cause leaders who may or may not be of their number. Therefore the use of biographical sources would not be to the point here . Thirdly, it needs to be understood that the principles of analysis emp~oyed in the interpretation of ChLnese social changes need not be identified as specifically universal, specifically Chinese, or specifically western , The principles offered above are not intended as un1versal laws; however probable it is that they have some application elsewhere, at least in Asiaf they are empirically derived from the study of China, and they do not depend for their validity upon phenomena anywhere else. On the other hand, there is no suggest~on that they distil the essence of a uniquely Chinese trad~tion resurgent in new forms in our own century . This is not a part of the argument . The argument is that the prLnciples seem actually to apply , and it does no~ immediately matter whether they are Chinese pr~nciples, Asian principles or universal principles .It is less easy to deny that they are western ones in disguise . Social historians, espec~ally perhaps in the field of Southeast Asia,4 have long been acutely aware of the subtle ways in which the pre.jud~ce of "Europocentricity" can v1.tiate a student's interpretation of Asian phenomena . It is however possible to ~dentify two featur~s of the interpretation to be offered here which conflict w~th the supposition that it ~s merely a misapplication to China of principles which only really apply in the west . One of these features is that the ~nterpretation proceeds on the assumption that a web of patron-client relations ~s important in organ~zing society o Thls is not a distinctively western phenomenon . The other feature is that it treats the Great Trad~tion of official culture, formal institutions and centralized organization as a thin crust concealing a veritable minestrone of jostling little trad~tions. Though the point is no~ clear from superficial history, there ~s in fact something Asian about this .

4

See, e ,. g . , J _R. W. Sma1.l, "On c:he Possibility of an Autonomous History of Southeast. Asia," Jou:r-na'i of Sout-heast Asi an His-cory 3 vol o 2 (1961), pp 72-102 .

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7 -

It could be argued that the principles of interpretation employed here are "Europocentric" because they attribute behaviour to the self-interest of groups, a western style of life, while in China people ~ beha.w~ less selfishly and are governed by autonomous ideas. Since th1s is not evidently so, however, at least for the first half of the century if not more, the onus lies entirely upon anyone who would assert this to prove it. It 1s true that under the present regime earnest and diligent endeavours have been made to engender an ethic of selflessness. It is not to be denied that they have had any effect. In the 1950s, however, they were often clumsy and count.erproductive. The success they might or m1ght not have had since then de s erves attention; the present study, however, closes w1th the early 1960s and is therefore not obliged to concern itself with the question. A fourth and last point to stress is that no unique authority is claimed for the interpretative power of the thesis. The contention to be offered is, essentially, that political and social changes in China may be better understood by reference to the pattern of patronage distribution . This is not to say that patronage distribution is the only principle to which any historian has any right to appeal, and it is therefore not necessary to defend the principle of patronage distribution by discred1ting all others. The sorts of changes that have occurred in Ch1na have often been attributed to various causes: poverty, rising expectations, oppression, national1sm and the infection of ne'\'! ideas, for example. Such explanations may have their place, and so may patronage d1stribution . To the defence of any one, 1t does not matter that there is evidence 1n particular cases for some other. There is no reason why a hundred flowers should not bloom.

- 8 II

INTELLECTUALS AND SOCIAL CHANGE

The man who drinks, dangerously, only a little at the fountain of learning and becomes b1tter and iconoclastic when his earlier hopes are dashed is a phenomenon by no means confined to Europe or to the twentieth century. He 1s a universal archetype, homo fPustratus . The purpose 1n what follows is to offer some tent~tive remarks about h1s importance 1n twentieth century China. There is of course a substantial scholarly literature on modern Ch1nese soc1ety, but in a way 1t 1s curiously lli-balanced. There have been stud1es of Chinese society such as those by 0. Lang and M. Levy, l essays 1n lntellectual h1story such as Chow Tse-tsung's on the May 4th Movement,2 numerous anthropologically 1nspired studies such as C.K . Yang 1 s,3 and a vast corpus of wr1tings by polit1cal sc1ent1sts ranging from general character1zat1ons of Chinese culture like L. Pye•s4 or R. Solomon•s5 to the increasingly mlcroscopic analyses of trends and events in contemporary China which we are reading all the t1me. Yet nearly all these can be divided into three classes wh1ch between them faii to cover the whole of the ground v.~aiting to be covered. The first class consistsof synchronic stud1es by sociologists and political scientists who take snapshots or cut crosssections at particular points in Chinese society. The second cons1sts of diachronic studies of social change at the village level in particular localit1es. The third consists of diachronic studies of change ln China generally, which proceed by analysing the components of 'tradition' and 'modernity' in China. With a number of s1gnificant but 1solated exceptions,6 the studies which have been made of

1

0. Lang, Chinese FamiLy and Socier;y (Hamden, Conn . .. l968); M. J . Le vy , The Family RevoZ. ution -z.n Moderrn Ch-z.na (Cambr~dge, Hass., 1949).

May Fourth Movement {Cambridge, Mass . , 1960).

2

Chow Tse-tsung,

3

C. K . Yang, Chinese Comrrrunist Society: (C.s.mbridge, Hass., 1966) .

4

L.W.

5

R.H . Sol.omon, Mao 's Revolution and the Chinese Political CuUure (Berkel~y, 1971).

6

the Family and the VilLage

Pye, The Spirit ofChinesePolitics (Cambndge, Mass . , 1968) ..

E . g . , G . W. Skinner, "Marketing and Social Struct:.ure in Rural China,"

JoiAr>nal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 24 (1965). pp . 3-43, 195-228, 363-399,

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9 -

changes in Chinese society as a whole have been governed by this single dimension of analysis, the tradition-modern ity axis, and the important events in social history have been interpreted chiefly as movements, or as gestures disguising a failure to move, backwards or (chiefly) forwards along the path from a notional static 'traditional' China which existed in the nineteenth century to a 'modern',probably industrialized, state which This dimension may or may not now be coming into existence. of analysis may supply a sociologist or political scientist with the framework which he needs; but, from the point of view of social history , i t is no more than an a pr io r i first approximation to the ordering of a pullulating universe of changes, a working hypothesis for the initial stages of an enquiry that is bound to yield complex and In the previously unsuspected patterns of social change. notions be to out turn may 'modernity' and end, 'tradition' than inhibiting more vision tunnel of engendering a species that say to fair therefore is It helpful to the enquiry. the social history of twentieth century China is in its infancy, and that there is therefore room for such general and tentative propositions as are to be advanced here. In a recent article,? P. Uberoi has aptly discussed the dominance of this tradition-modern ity axis, showing how the theories subject to it fall between two poles, one being represented by an explanation which affirms the continuity of a traditional culture and hence must deny that there has been a revolution, claiming that beneath superficial changes the old Chinese institutions are resurgent, and the other being represented by an explanation which affirms revolution and hence denies Intermediate theories such as R. Solomon's continuity. postulate a tradition-bound mass and a revolutionary elite of men under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung who have become alienated from their own traditional culture and are thus Mrs. Uberoi able to act on it, as i t were, from outside. points to difficulties in this type of analysis such as Mao Tse-tung's 'nativism' and to the ambivalence, heterogeneity and complexity of Chinese tradition, w~ich 8 may in a sense be capable of accommodating a revolut1on.

7

P. Uberoi, "Culture, Personality and the Explanation of Revolutionary Change," China Report, vol. 9, no . 5 (1973), pp. 72-81.

8

Ibid.,

pp.

78ff.

- 10 -

Certainly, our stereotypes of a monolithic tradition are set with snares when we undertake, through them, to lay bare the impulsions of behaviour in modern China . Some pitfalls are readily avoided: it is easy to recognize for what i~ is the myth of the large extended family as the common coin of village domesticity. But we have to dig a little further to expose the myth of a frozen social order that never changed beneath the traffic of dynastic strife. And the China of submissive conformity turns out similarly to be a false -sprite. There can be no better proof of the scarcity of any commodity in a community than that the community should prize it dearly. Hence, in an individualistic, atomized and ohnB mioh society such as China's the myth of dependence, system, authority, hierarchy and harmony is sedulously cherished by successive generations, and therefore faithfully reproduced by the computer analysis of interviews and psychological tests It may be useful rather to seek new terms in the pursuit of a better understanding of what has been going on in China in the last few decades. The displaced intellectual is one of a number of protagonists who must be recognized; and it may be best to consider him without feeling any need to label him either as distinctively traditional or as distinctively modern; he is probably bcth. Educated Chinese have in the past commonly valued official positions most highly and manual labour with most cordial aetcs·t ation .Official positions have been more readilv available at some times than at others. \\le need not - doubt that, as in our , O\·m ·day, in periods ~..,hen the prospects of the most valued forms of advancement were bleak, students still at their tutors' feet would respond instinctively to these prospects, however obliquely the knowledge of them might be diffused, and feel a kinship in disillusionment and cynicism with the class of unemployed or degr~tvemployed whom they expected presently to join. It is therefore appropriate to adopt here a convention that the displaced intellectuals to be studied include\ ·turbulent students as well as disappointed former students. The working hypothesis to be adopted here is that there is a real relationship between the prospects of official employment and the intellectual and cultural climate in the country, however absurd it would be to suppose that this hypothesis could yield an omnicompetent theory of social change . · There were turbulent students on and off through imperial history ,, There are examples from various

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dynasties of students and officials incurring execution after controversy involving government and eunuchs, of Imperial College students petitioning the Emperor to execute high officials, of violent conflic~between students and imperial employees inducing a change of policy towards invading barbarians. 9 In the nineteenth century, as is well known, the prospects facing candidates for the official examination s worsened. The Tai-p'ing movement, however multiform the grievances which actuated its component groups, was inspired by an often-faile d examinee who, in his disappointm ent, lapsed into frenzied fits and periods of illness in which he had delirious visions. Under the imperial examination system there were three degrees for which candidates sat: the hsiu-tsai _, Towards the chu- je n ., and the highly esteemed chin-shih. the end of the century, about two million candidates were examined each year, and it has been variously estimated that some twenty to sixty thousand passed.10 The discrepancy between candidature and conferment is not as bad as it seems: many of those who failed each year would make other attempts and eventually pass, some could buy themselves into office, and others could find contentment in teaching, though this was always a pis alleP; but it was still bad. It is important to realize, though, that, bad as the outlook might haw been for the intellectua l at the end of the nineteenth century, it became devastating early in the The abolition of the examination system in twentieth. 1905-06 did not, in one blow, discredit the entire parapherna lia of Confucian-s tyle education; it was rather a belated recognition than the origin of a discreditin g that had long begun and now hastened to its end; but it infallibly represented the futility of aspiring high from a foundation of purely classical education. The revolution of 1911 supervened before any new system could become entrenched, and amid the uncertain politics of the republic no regular form of recruitment to office Chow Tse-tsung refers to a proposal was established . made in 1919 that an examination should at once be instituted to provide a doorway for all students, a 9

Chow Tse-tsung, Mby Fourth

10

V. Purcell, P~blems of Chinese Education (London, 1936), p. 36; L.K. Tao, "Unemployment among Intellectual Workers in China," Chinese Political and SooiaZ Science Review, vol. 13 (1929), pp. 251-261.

MOvement~

p. 11.

- 12 -

proposal which the government in Peking welcomed although it was not in fact carried out.ll He remarks that this scheme, though naive as a manoeuvre to appease d i ss1dents, responded to a real need since the absence of normal channels of recruitment was an anomaly while "to enter government office remained the ideal of their lives, as tradit i on dictated." True though this is, ideally speaking, i t is interest1ng that by the late twenties a questionnaire among students elicited a low 'offieial' was accorded estimate of government office: the penultimate ranking in social value, lower even than 'soldier' and higher only than 'pastor•.l2 This contrast We may suppose that those points to a real ambivalence. students and those parents with ambitions for their children who saw a real hope of official employment following completed educat1on were prepared to work for i t: those who did not turned against it - The Kuomintang, when it assumed the respons i b1l1ties of national government, similarly depended upon largely informal methods of recruitment to public office which left many with good educational qualif1cations outside the race. Indeed, there was an examination yuan charged With recruitment by examination ·, but, as the government handbook for the war years said, "as the number of persons selected through examinations is st1ll small, many public functionaries rece i ve employment through their qualif i cations of having graduated from schools, served in public organs for a certain number of years, or won mer1t in the course of the revolution."l3 From 1931 to 1944, only 97,000 people passed exam1nations for elective posts and 38,000 for government appointment.l4 At all events, the traditional respect for government office appears to have been re-established in the 1950s, though the viciss i tudes of a cadre's life have since made many wary of the honour, and as in the past it has been the arnb1tion of every parent to see his children in office.

11

Chow Tse-tsung, May Fourrth Movement, p . 14 7 .

12

J . Israe l , Student Nat i onatism in China, 192?-193? (Stanford 1 1966), p . 40, n , 122.

13

China Handbook, 193?-1944 (Chungking, 1944), p . 56 .

14

Ibid . , p . S 7.

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A soc1g1 gap quickly appeared between cadres and the rest,l a gap regarded with dismay by those leaders who saw in it a portent of a government style they wished to consign to the history books. Paradoxically, perhaps, the Communist Party, in drawing up new rules for a game which people could understand and operate for their advancement, was facilitating the revival of the old game of bureaucratic The old rules, rat-race which it sought to destroy. repealed in 1905; were education, governed by Confucian thought of as was what by provisional rules, governed could be that modern education, were the only ones was no there although recognized from then until 1949 an Certainly, them. assurance of success in using 1ntellectual of essential task that confronts the study frustration 1s to chart the growth in the numbers receiv i ng modern education . Table 1 presents a number of figures from various sources representing enrolment in primary, Like other figures secondary and higher education. der1ved from Chinese statistics, including those from the last twenty-five years, they are not particularly rel1able, and there is some conflict between the calculat1ons of different students. But for the present purpose ~t is enough to let them express the general trend. Any graph which curves more and more steeply upwards will serve to present the general trend from The numbers of people receiving education 1911 to 1949. have doubled or more in each decade. This is a rate which,of course,the resources of war-torn governments to provide employment could not A But it is not a recipe for revolution. match. doubl~ng or a quadrupling of disgruntled graduates and fearful students need have no social consequence Modern when the nwnber multiplied is only a handful. education started almost from scratch; the running was long made by miss1on institutions in a few port cities, and in 1912 there were less than 500 students in government By 1923, even if we 1nsti~ut1ons of h1gher education.l6

15

See A.D. Barnet~. "Social Stratification and Aspects of Pe raonne 1 Managemen~ in the Chinese Coumunist Bureaucrac y •" 8-39 at p " 10 . c.h~a Qu~erly. no. 28 (1966). pp

16

See F.L.H . Pelt• "Modern Education." in H. F . MacNair. ed . • China (Berkeley and Lo1 Angeles. 1946). pp . 421-440.

use some optimistic official enrolment figures, the primary school population constituted about 1~% of the population , Of every thousand people, a quarter of a person was going to secondary school and a twelfth of a person was receiving higher education. In one sense, such proportions are not really very important; about 3,00 0 students were involved on May 4th, 1919, and these with a few thousand more contrived by their activities to bring about a widespread Japanese boycott movement and influence government policy " But they remind us how puny was the intellectual component in society o Generations of frustrated graduates had to build up before they could flex their muscles and try their strength on the pillars of the edifice. After 1949H for the first time in the century, there was a fairly stable government with considerable control over taxation and an earnest commitment to advance public education . In the 1950s many education statistics were published and these have been closely analysed by students, some of whose calculations are represented in Table 2. Since the Great Leap, there has been darkness: there have been official figures, but, following the mushrooming of various forms of adult, part-time, spare time and faute de mi eux education in the Great Leap period and the convulsions and convalescence of education during and since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it is difficult to know what such figures represent. Even the figures for the 1950s are misleading and often contradictory, but we may follow L.A . Orleans in the view that something can be extracted from them.l7 Table 2 shows that, even if Kuomintang and Communist Party figures are ~vrong - by a substantial margin, in whichever directions and for whatever reasons, the dramatic increase in enrolment in the first half of the century was sustained or surpass·ed under the new regime in the 1950s o The rise was not entirely smooth, but it was inexorable ~ It does not seem likely to have continued since, however. In 1958 many new part-time schools were introduced in the countryside; it was said that by 1959-60 three million had been enrolled in part-work part.- study schools in the communes, and a renewed effort was made,

17

L . A. Orleans, Professional Manpower and Educazion ~n Communist China (Washington , 1961), Preface, pp , v-vL

-

}.5

18 after the lean period around 1960, in 1964-65 . Ill1teracy campaigns, 'red and expert universitie s' and spare time courses at various levels were instituted in communes and factories, but in most cases they offered emergency education not leading to qualificatio ns clearly comparable with those of pupils from regular The stat1stics from this period are therefore schools . confusing, and they represent a big effort and confused population which, particularly educated the swell to 1959-61, probably could not years cr1sis the follow1ng The revolution in education time. some for be surpassed 1960s there was a more early the in Thus wa1t. had to be seen in the central perhaps can wh1ch policy, caut1ous of 1961 and Ch'en Yi's programme wr1ting mater1al teach1ng to favour and specialists restoring year that of speech and politics.l9 work between balance proper a of speak1ng primary sixties, the in that, considers L . A. Orleans figure 1960 the from decl1ned have ffi1~t schoo.!.. enrolment something 1960, around were, There m1ll1on.20 90 of about so there age, school primary of ch1ldren l1ke lOO m1llion enrolment. in increases dramatic for left was l1ttle scope There have been two periods in which the educated populat1on has 1ncluded a large but dwindling number of people whose educat1on was considered outmoded and inappropr1a te to the t1mes, and who therefore lived under the early republican 9eriod, when a permanent cloud: there were many with classical education, and the early commun1st period, when there have been many whose formative years were not governed by the orthodox creed. It 1s 1nterest1ng to see how, in each period, the absolute number of 1ntellectua ls has totalled. In 1929, L.K. Tao made an attempt to calculate the number of unemployed intellectua ls, and estimated that there were then about 140,000 classically educated men between forty and s1xty years old, many of them not in

18

SeE: L.A , Orleans, "Communist China's Education: Pol1c.iE:s, Problems and Prospects," in JPRS, Eoonomio Profi l6 of Main ~an d Ch-z_na (Washington, 1967), p , 508 ,

19

See ImmanueJ. C.Y . Hsu, "The Reorganizat1o n of Higher Edu:::..aticn 1n Communist: China, 1949-1961," China Quar-terly, no . 19 (1964), pp " 128-160 at p. 155; and Communist China Yearbook 1962 (Hong Kong, 1963), pp . 428ff .

20

Orleans, "Coumunist China's Education," p , 507 ,

- 16 -

intellectual employment. To this number he added 780,000 people with modern secondary or tertiary education, and, after including returned students from Japan and the west and allowing for privately tutored people and other categories, calculated that there were about a million and a half intellectuals. Of these, he considered that only 400,000 were absorbed by government employment, and a similar number by teaching. The professions seemed between them quite unable to account for the remaining 700,000. He referred to the need that arose to offer free transport back to their native districts to 1,100 families of government functionaries stranded in Peking when the capital was shifted as an index of the difficulty found by intellectuals, often ill-educated and scarcely qualified for anything at all, in finding employment . 21 In the early 1950s the situation was very different, for there was a stable government able to offer official or semi-official positions to school-leavers and graduates for as long as i t took to efface the old order. Writing in 1960, L.A. Orleans was interested not so much in intellectual unemployment as in the shortage of educated manpower for the tasks of development. He calculated that there were very roughly 700,000 people who had completed secondary education by 1949 and 2.6 million from 1949-59.22 These figures could be more than doubled if we included those who had completed junior but not senior secondary education. There were official positions of some sort available for most of these, since in the 1950s, with its unprecedented degree of control over the country's resources, the government could expand the official establishment as no other regime had ever done . According to figures collected by V. Funnell, there were 720,000 state cadres in 1949, 2.75 million in late 1952 (3 . 31 million according to a later claim in China Youth News), 5.27 million in 1955, and 7.92 million in 1958.23 State cadres include officially employed people from the clerical level upwards, technicians in i ndustry, agriculture and public health, teachers, translators

21

L . K. Tao, "Unemployment among Intellectual Workers."

22

Orleans, Professiona~ Manpower~ p. 142.

23

V. C. Funnell, "Bureauc racy and the Chinese Communist Party,"

Current Scene, vol. 9, no . 5 (May 7, 1971), pp . 1-14 .

-

17 -

and so forth; they do not include people engaged in production or the army or mass organizatio ns. As V. Funnell points out, one person in seven hundred was a cadre in 1949, and one in eighty in 1958.24 This does not mean that all educated people became cadres; nor does it mean that those who failed to rise from junior to senior middle school or from senior to university qualificatio ns did not experience frustration even if they were cadres. These are .. matters which can be But it does mean that there was separately considered. probably no crisis of intellectua l displacemen t through It is another question whether the government the 1950s. could continue to satisfy the ambitions of educated youth in the 1960s without a dramatic increase in the revenueproducing power of the economy. If we are to draw conclusions about intellectua l displacemen t, it is important to remember that we are Following the conventions dealing with nebulous categories. a displaced intellectua l n, Introductio adopted above in the in a society of education can be a peasant with primary he is in the feels who illiterates , or a senior academic China has extreme, first However, as for the wrong job. not for same time been a society of illiterates , though they are doubtless much more numerous than official (About a third of the males in a sample figures imply. of agrarian communities around 1930 were described as literate, though this figure seems very high, and i t would be desirable to have a clear criterion of literacy).25 As for the second, stories from the 1950s about graduates in physics being employed as Russian translators and so forth are quite familiar, and there is no doubt that many Still, graduates were frustrated by their assignments ~ these frustration s arose from too much or too little planning, depending how one regards it, rather than from any chronic graduate unemploymen t, and we need not seek in them, rather than in any general frustration with the style of Communist-d ominated government, the springs of widespread dissidence.

pp. 6£.

24

Ibid.~

25

See J . L. Buck, Land Vti~iaation in China (Shangha~, 1937), p. 373, Table 10. But there were almost completely illiterate provinces See D. G. Gillin, Warlord: at the beginning of the century. Yen Hsi-shan in Shansi Province~ 1911-1949 (Princeton, 1967), pp. 59ft.

-

1'8 -

It is at the intermediate levels that we may find the important degrees of unhappiness - among youngsters keeping co-nperative accounts who completed junior secondary schooling but were denied the chance to go on to senior and qualify for a city job (or their juniors still at school who knew that the same fate waited for them) , and among clerks in factories with secondary education who were denied the chance to become engineers, for example o Naturally, these unhappy people cannot be identified and enumerated simply by calculating the numbers who reached one level of education and failed to proceed to the next . This would be a fatuous supposition. What the figures yielded by such calculations do suggest, though, is that when they rise, the quantum of unhappiness (whatever it may be) rises, and when they fall, it fals. J , C. Kun drew up a table comparing the numbers leaving senior middle school with those entering higher education from 1952 to 1959.26 It is reproduced here as columns (a) and (b) of Table 3, which may be compared. Interestingly, until 1956 there were more entrants than leavers. This is because the government was anxious to promote higher education as a high priority for economic development, and many entrants were school-leavers from years before who had not had a chance of a tertiary education under the old regime. It is possible to deduce from certain calculations of L " A" Orleans,27 some figures for junior middle schoolleavers, and from these to subtract the numbers of senior middle school-leavers three years later ~ Columns (c) and (d) in Table 3 embody the results of this subtraction, the f1gure for each year representing those who left junior middle school three years ago and failed to leave senior this year. (The two columns are based on two disparate series of figures for senior middle school-leavers) ~ Each figure represents two sorts of people: those whose education ended at the junior middle level, and those who entered senior but dropped out . Both might well include frustrated youths . Of course each figure should be larger to compensate for an unknown number of senior entrants who had left junior more than three years before - there were many over-aged : pu~i . lsin the 1950s- but, whatever ·

26

J . C. Kun , "Higher Education: Some Problems of Selection and Enro lmenc," Chi na Quarter l y~ no . 8 (1961), pp . 135-148 at p . 138.

27

Orleans, Profe ssi onal

Manpower~

Tables 3, 4,pp . 35, 38 .

- 19 -

the number may be, it is the same as that by which the total number of frustrate d intellect uals is reduced by the absorptio n of over-aged pupils into senior schools . If, which certainly need One number cancels the other. not be expected mechanic ally, the number of f.rustrate d intellect uals has anything to do with the cultural atmosphe re in the country, we can expect a lag of a year or two before the truncatio n of a generatio n's education has an impact. However, the figure for each year 1ncorpor ates a suitable lag, since it refers to people who failed to enter senior middle school three Obllglng ly, years ago or dropped out one or two years ago. as a drawn f1gures. though perhaps fortuitou sly, our of year a 1958, graph, would show a sharp peak in Fortultou sly, because gene.ral trends over turbulenc e , a period are more convincin g than the politlcs of part1cul ar years . A slightly longer series can be obtained by subtracti ng from the number of senior middle schoolleavers 1n a given year the number of graduates four Four 1s a very rough average for the years later. Column varying lengths of h1gher education courses . column (f) and on, te) in Table 3 embodies this calculati year from each embod1es the subtracti on of graduate s for ons instituti the numbers who entered higher education (e) column 1n four years before. The negative figures years in reflect the matricul ation of o..ver-:-age d students when secondary schools could not supply the required The negat1ve figures in column Cf) reflect the 1ntake statistic al confusion and the shortenin g of courses attend~ng the turmoil of the Great Leap period; the high f1gures following them, though, whatever the quality of the educat1on which the people invo l ved received or failed to receive, are in l1ne Wlth the general trend, and fortify us in the bel1ef that, in the run-up to the Great Proletari an Cultural. Revolut1o n, 1n stark contrast to the earlier 1950s, more and more young people were be1ng deposited upon the profess1o nal rr~rket with 1nadequa te or unusable education , llttle prospect of advancem ent, and little emot1ona l resource for adjustme nt to a l1fe of manual toll In this sort of context, statist1c s are at best suggestlv e and must be suppleme nted by less quantifia ble things. In the first place, although education has grown fast during the present century, there are certain brakes which we might expect to find upon the increase in intellect ual frustrati on which this growth engender s.

- 20 -

One is that, as education grows, the proportion of females receiving education grows; and we might expect that, at least until the last decade or so, women have been much less likely material than men for movements of Certainly, among the educated dissidence and revolution. rural people sampled in J.L. Buck's study in the 1930s, only 2% of the women had received schooling and 1% was literate.28 Among tertiary students, according to different sources women constituted about 2.5% in 1923,29 and 22%-25% in 1932;30 among graduates from the Kuomintang period in the 1950s, they were about 18% and by 1958 they were about 23% of tertiary students.31 Among middle school students, girls were around 3% in 1923,32 19% in 193933 and 20% in 1946.34 Thus the increase in the proportion of females in the twenties and thirties did not have a big impact on the rise in the absolute number of male secondary students, but it may well have held down the increase in the number of male tertiary students. One other thing that might have mi t .igated the consequences of intellectual displacement since 1949 is quite imponderable: the systematic efforts made by the government to wean educated Chinese away from their Since hsia fang inherited distaste for manual work. became a gospel in the late 1950s, hundreds of thousands of desk workers and students have been 'sent down' for short or long periods to the lower levels, brought face to face with the earthiness of village life and often set to work for weeRs, months or years in the fields, and one of the several professed aims of this has been Some of to re-acquaint them with the glories of toil. them composed little ditties to commemorate the spiritual benefit which they received. Others complained about the unhygienic squalor of country life,homesickness, the brutishness of local leaders, poverty of transport and

28

Buck, Land Utilization, p. 373.

29

Purcell, Problems of Chinese Education,pp. 68£.

30

Israel, Student Nationalism, p. S o

31

See Orleans, Professional Manpower.

32

Purcel l , Loc. ci t .

33

Orleans , loc. cit .

34

Ibid.

-

21 -

35 Stude nts, young the diffic ulty of gettin g wives. gradua tes and junior offici als assign ed to villag es have often not been popula r with local people , who have regard ed them as a burden on the resour ces of their host In those circum commu nes and as incom petent farmer s. become have stance s, people 'sent down' may often er exten t whatev To embit tered rather than inspir ed. hsia fang has succee ded in recon ciling intell ectua ls to manua l work, i t has been a brake on intell ectua l To whatev er extent it has failed , it has frustr ation. been an accele rator. Indeed there are severa l factor s not eviden t from enrolm ent statis tics which can be expect ed to exacer bate the frustr ations of pupils , studen ts and gradua tes and consig n them to disapp ointme nt in their search for the sort of employ ment they want. The first of these is, quite simply , poor teachi ng. Ill-ed ucated schoo l-leav ers are prime mater ial for There have been three period s when unemp loymen t. educa tion has been condu cted under great pressu re to satisf y the demand s of as many as possib le, or more than possib le, in the face of an inexor able shorta ge of The first was the early years of the repub lic resour ces. and the time of the warlo rds, when modern educa tion was The second was the both a novelt y and an urgent need. Japane se war, when money, books and equipm ent were The third was from the Great Leap appall ingly scarce . onwar ds, when the hectic expan sion of school s and colleg es and local instit ution s of variou s sorts had outstr ipped These period s so the supply of compe tent teache rs. tional develo pment , educa y orderl that er nearly run togeth matchi ng qualit y and quant ity, has enjoye d only brief spells . As for the first period , the qualit y of what passed as modern educa tion in poor villag es may be imagin ed from the state of China 's resour ces at the time of the 1911 revolu tion and is attest ed by many studie s. In many cases the only "moder n" thing about the primar y schoo l is the sign-b oard over the front gate, while within the school an old-tim e

35

a Study of See J . R. Townsen d, "Revol utioniz ing Chinese Youth: Chung-k uo Ch'ing -nien," in A.D. Barnet t, ed , Chinese Corrununist PoLi~ias in Aa~ion (Seattl e, 1969), pp. 447-476 .

- 22 -

unscientific pedagogue is teaching the oldtime classics in the old-time unscientific way. In other schools, half-baked boys from nearly Grammar Schools have essayed the role of village pedagogue, to the disgust of the patrons, who have been seeking to restore the old system, under which a gentleman with whom everyone 1n the village was acquainted, and who was universally respected, dealt out the time-honoured platitudes, and at least did no harm even if he didn't do much good . 36 This was Shansi in 1914. Here, the 'model governor', Yen Hsi-shan, set earnestly to work to build an educated citizenry e Partly as a result, there was by the 1920s a generation of tertiary lecturers who were scarcely qualified to dispense the learn1ng that their charges sought . We are told in the same source of university geologists who could not recognize quartz, civil engineers without sufficient mathematics to survey a small lake in less than a semester, an engineer who used a catalyst containing sulphur in a costly furnace and fused ore, catalyst and furnace into a solid mass, and ira_'1.r.tongers and cobblers lecturing in the language school under a demented pr1nciple. For various reasons, "by 1930 Shansi University was little more than a vast resort, pres1ded over by professors who supplemented their inadequate wages by gambling with their pupils, and attended by students so indifferent to learning that the library closed its doors for want of pat.ronage. "3 7 Only two years later, the Japanese attacked Shanghai. Apart from the destruction suffered by ten colleges, there were indirect repercussions affecting education in northern China . Many thousands of refugees sought education 1n other cities; many were unable even to seek education because their parents could not afford it, bus1nessmen whose trade suffered from the occupation of Manchur1a and smuggling of cheap goods.38 Thousands dropped out of school and college. ~Vhen the occupation was carried to China proper, 77 higher education institut1ons moved 1nland, there to carry on their work

36

Ctted fr c m a !etter by Gillin,

3i

I b id . ~

38

S~e

pp

Warlord~

76f .

Israel, Student

Nationalism~

p

88.

p . 67 ,

- 23 -

In the Japanese in circumsta nces of desperate shortage. zones, it has been estimated that a third of the middle schools ceased functioni ng, and about 6 million primary pupils were affected. 39 L.W. Pye remarks that, after the war, many who had remained and completed their education under Japanese occupatio n were apprehen sive about their fate, fearing discrimin ation against them by those who returned from the interior. 40 Progress ively through the fifties, greater strain was placed upon the ability of the country to supply · teachers of all sorts. Towards the end of the decade, this strain was increased as the governme nt sought to Unable to finance multiply the avenues of education . schooling for everybody ;, it sought from 1956 onwards to foster what have often been called private schools, lowbudget local schools offering a rudiment ary education . In 1958 it was said that 30.5% of Kweichow 's primary pupils were in private schools: Hopei and Liaoning claimed over 19% of their secondary pupils to be pr·1.vate. 41 Agricult ural middle schools, in which pupils spent a great part of their time in organized manual work, seemed to offer a gratifyin g combinat ion of advantag es: they cost much less than regular schools, they contribu ted to agricultu ral and workshop productio n, and they fostered the manual toil ethic. About 3 million pupils entered them Cand other vocation al middle schools) in 1959,42 about three-sev enths of the middle school l.ntake and three-thi rteenths of the children aged Spare time education was vigorous ly promoted thirteen. in the same period: communes and factories institute d special courses for their inmates whi·l e schools were assigning their pupils to part-time work in factories 'Red and expert universi ties' sprang up, and communes . where dons who were often farmers with incomple te primary

39

Po~~.

"Modern Education, " p . 438.

40

L . W. Pye, "Mass Participat ion in Communist China: i-cs Limitation s and ~he Continuity of Culture," in J.M . H. Lindbeck, ed . , China: Management of a RevoLution Society (Seattle, 1971), pp . 3-33 at p " 16 ..

41

Orleans, Profession al

42

See Orleans, "CoDJDunist China's Education, " p . 508; R. D. Barendsen, "The Agricultur al Middle School in Counnunist China," China Quarterly~ no. 8 (1961), pp . 106-134, p. 111.

Manpower~

p. 22 .

-

24 -

educat1on but who were said to possess superior political c onsciousnes s taught practical subjects like advanced farming methods . Such methods of education, difficult to c onduct with success even in periods of plenty, lost vigour in 1960-61, but there appears to have been some renewed drive behind half-time commune schools in 1964-65 . 43 In circumstanc es of hectic expansion, when quantity was, perhaps quite properly, pursued with vigour while quality _ languished, the competence of teachers was bound to suffer. Numerous are the evidences of primary school pupils being taught by youths whose junior secondary educat1on was incomplete, junior secondary pupils under the mentorship of teachers without a whiff of tertiary teacher training and perhaps with little at the senior middle level, and so on up the ladder. The t .eacher training education stream received below-avera ge students and was not highly regarded, for students preferred to set their sights on less uninspiring professions , and understanda bly teachers' morale was very low . In universitie s, more and more courses were compressed into less and less time; political discussions c laimed much of the time otherwise available for private study; tutors were youths with little idea of h.Otl' to dotheir jobs or men with a precarious grasp, if any, upon the subject matter they were supposed to teach, which they frequently did by reading out notes at high speed in order to cover the syllabus.44 Where education was of low standard and success went only to the most capable and persistent students, it lS proper to consider the social background of students as another factor of frustration . The reason l S that student.s from worker or peasant households were much less likely than others to have the resources upon which incompetent teaching was bound to throw them. Therefore an increase in the proportion of worker and peasant students was likely to be matched by an increase in fa1lure and dropping out .

43

Or l eans. "Communist China's Edu c ation," p .

44

See

508 .

e g . , Chu Wen-p~n, "T..fuy are Un i versity Students Tense?" Ch iao Yu , no " 11 ( t 956) , t rans la Led by JPRS i n Educat i on "Z-n Comrrruni st China (Washing t: on, 196 3) < ~n J en Mi n

- 25" -

Before 1949, the simple need to pay school fees dictated that very nearly all who got as far as universitie s had a background of moderate prosperity and, to whatever extent that entailed, of culture; but in the following years, although school fees could not be abolished and economic selection continued to operate, strenuous efforts were made to increase the proportion Accord1ng of students from worker and peasant families. to the Peking Review it was 29% 1n 1955-56, 34% in 1956-57, and 36% in 1957-58.45 In the autumn of 1965, claims var1ed from about 50% to 6 7%.46 It ~,.Till be remembered that, in the Cultural Revolution, many of the gr1evances vo1ced were by students of poor background aga1nst those with prosperous background, and by those who couldn't cope against these who could. Once, there was reported "What need do we have of intelligence ? the slogan: Our heads are full of the thoughts of Cha1rman Mao." These consideratio ns make i t clear how important it is to recognize premature withdrawal from school or un1versity as an important aspect of intellectua l Impressive enrolment displacemen t 1n its own right. statistics may be misleading; we do not know how many of the wide-eyed children going into class will be weed1ng padd1es or tending vegetables in a year's time. even if Large withdrawal rates have long been common: fees are the (p~r- impossibile ) the teaching is good and where a nothing, the poverty of the Chinese village, every bit of practical help in the home or fields releases more lucrative adult labour, and the pecul1ar arduousness attending the learning of Chinese, an arduousness which many of us attest, load the dice heavily against the child's prospects. J.L. Buck's rural survey in the 1930s revealed that, among the males who had received education, the average length of schooling was 4.1 years.47 This average, which represents a far -from complete primary education, is derived from a population including some few who had gone It is also interesting to notice on to secondary school. that, in the same sample, 45% of the males had received some education but 69% were illiterate.4 8 These f1gures 45

Peking Review (May 1958), p . 16.

46

Orleans, "Communise China's Education," p . 504

47

Buc:k, Land

48

Ibid.~

Utilization~

p. 373, Table 10.

p.

374.

-

26 -

emphas1ze how enrolment figures need not represent much 1n the way of education. Much later, following the Great Leap, it has happened again that many optimistic clalms for spare time education and literacy campaigns ~unless a cler1cal error superven~d, it was once asserted that by a particular method of teaching a man could learn 2,000 characters in twelve hours) have been belied by the relapsing of ex-students who simply have not reached the po1nt where they can consolidate their literacy by constant reading. These people are not disgruntled intellectuals, but the thousands whose secondary and tertiary education was d1srupted by the Japanese invasion were. So were those who found themselves abruptly translated from school, univers1ty and office to the fields in the hs i a fang movement . The schooling of hundreds of thousands of urban youths was cut short; in 1966 i t was said that, since 1962, more than a million educated young people had been sent to the country - many frommidillB . schools, some from higher education institutions in subjects that were regarded as 1nessential.49 All in all, there were from time to time many reasons why a pupil's or student's education might end prematurely: slow progress, high fees, agricultural need, poor teach1ng, lack of sufficient cultural background, war and c1vil commotion, and hsia fang , Those who cleared all hurdles to the first year of university often found that, in the face of incomprehensible lectures, i t was ~mpossible to prepare for the examinations. Of course it was not only an over-supply of the half educated and ill qualified that blighted the prospects of successive generations of would-be officials and cadres: it was also an under-demand for the services even of the well qualified. In part, low demand for recruits must be seen as a product of generational rhythm, an idea of vital importance to the understanding of trends in Chinese intellectual employment. If a government and all its servants are removed, there is instantly a great demand for the serv1ces of young people untainted by association with the old order; further, if the new government commands a more general loyalty, it is likely to have a more effic1ent control over the administration of revenue and hence to deploy greater resources for the employment of servants . A young generation is enlisted in the

49

Ori eans, "Commu nl.St:: China's Educat::ion," p. 516 .

- 27 -

service of politics : but, since turnover through death and retireme nt instantly dwindles to almost nothing, quite speedily those school-le avers and graduate s who come behind find that the avenues of advancem ent are so clogged with jostling throngs that their own progress is slow. Over the years, the clogging becomes more Those behind shout ' .Forward 1 and those in front extreme. become . nervous and insecure , and (like the mice in experime nts where more and more of them are placed in It may turn out in the mazes) begin to bite each other. servants are expelled its and nt governme end that another of opportun ity. deprived n generatio young by another circle. vicious a become can The cycle The logic of this cycle may find only very imperfec t applicati on in reality, perhaps only among a small circle. It applied very imperfec tly after 1911: i t applied 1mperfec tly after the northern expeditio n; it applied very much better after 1949. To take the leading counsels of the Communis t Party as a paradigm - they serve to typify what was true also of the ages of people througho ut the organiza tion - i t is clear that, after the Kiangsi period, the openings for newcomer s to the top ranks of the Party diminishe d because the top ranks were not very In the Kiangsi old, and did not experienc e fast turnover . Central Committe e, people had mostly been born between 1805 and 1909 and the average age was thirty-fo ur; in New recruits were a bit younger, 1956 it was fifty-thr ee. but still middle-a ged.50 In the 1950s, though there was initial difficult y people for jobs, there was increasin g finding in Between 1949 in finding jobs for people. y difficult was said to cadres civil of number total the 1952, and many former But .51 2,750,000 to 720,000 from increase disappoi nted were education of shred a without guerrilla s education little a acquired who Many of official rank. 1 Liberatio n s People the of ranks the a nd more ambition in Korean ~var; the after life civilian Army were deposited in

50

See D.J . Waller, "The Evolution of the Chinese Communist Political Elite, 1931-1956, " in R.A . Scalapino, ed., Elites in the People's Republia of China (Seattle, 1972), pp. 41-66.

51

An Tzu-wen, Chunghua jenmin kunghokuo aan-nien-l ai ti kanpu kungtao

(Peking, 1952), cited by H.F . Schurmann in Ideology and Organizati on in Communist China (Berkeley, 1968), p, 168. The figures Qn expansion during the decade collected by V. Funnell were noticed above.

- 28

-

about 4~ mill1on were demobilized 1n 1954-55. Many obtained cadre positions in the co-operative s and, later, the communes. In such c i rcumstances it is not surprising that an acute awareness of seniority by length of service spread through the Party and the public service. Party members of long standing were classified according to their length of membership, and several generations were recognized according as individuals had joined in or before the Long March period, in Yenan, in 1938, in the anti-Japanes e war or in the civil war. The earlier, the more senior.5~ Early 1960s cadres in the provinces, according to one study, were similarly ranked according to appointment before 1949, in the land reform campaign, during collectiviza tion, after demobilizati on from the army, after leaving secondary school, during hsia fang, from among local notables, or retired.53 The same study poin~s to large numbers of local notables recruited inthe mid-fift1es and early sixties, distinguishe s between government organs such as trade and education, employing young educated cadres, and political and coercive organs, employing other -and less educated cadres, and shows how markedly between the fifties and sixties senior cadres grew older, and younger were more junior.54 It is therefore obvious enough that cadre advancement slowed down after the earlier years. It remained markedly better for members of the Party and the Young Communist League.55 Would-be party members became suspicious of the party establishme nt, which was suspected of secret machinations (mi mi ju ~ang) to get its members' friends and relatives co-opted . 56 Access to the highest positions in hsien administrati on, in at least some areas, came to be monopolized by soldiers

52

Barnett , "So ci al Stratificat:ion ," pp .

53

M Oksenberg, "Lo c al Leaders in Rural China, 1962-1965," in Barnett, Chine se CommAnis~ Poli~ i as, pp _ 155-215.

54

I bid.

55

Barnett, "So ci al St:rat1fication · "

56

A D. Barne n , Cadres , Bureaucracy and Polit;ical Power in Ch in a {New York, 196i), p. 27.

See pp .

8-39 at p. 15 .

181, 205.

See pp.

20-26 . Communis~

- 29 and commissars; 57 in big city administration, if Wuhan is typical, about half of the leading officials had higher education, and after 1957 vertical mobility slowed down and the staffing of senior positions became stable. 58 Intellectual unemployment had long been widely recognized, not simply as a problem for intellectuals, but as a problem for governments. We noticed above the link seen in 1919 between student dissidence and the absence of regular modes of civil service recruitment~ In the 1920s, it was recorded that, in Shansi, the warlord Yen Hsi-shan feared that his government would topple if jobs could not be found for his graduates.59 As we saw before, thousands of petty functionaries with a precarious hold on the lower rungs of official employment had their careers disrupted by the shift in capital to Nanking, and a private charity had to step in to transport them, In the thirties, vast numbers of to their homes . inadequately employed intellectuals flocked to Yenan. After the war, some young members of the Democratic League were unemployed, and were attracted to Communist Party areas by offers of positions for whatever members registered and made the journey.6° Discontent among those who might otherwise have supported the Kuomintang was augmented by the fact that real income of government servants fell by 90% between 1937 and 1943, and 21,000 were laid off in 1945 for reasons of economy.61 The ability of the government to educate the young and employ cadres was of course limited by the sources In the first few years of of revenue 1t could command . Communist dom1nance the san-wu-fan campaigns and assertion of control over the countryside provided a rapid increase in revenue, but in the long run upper lim1ts had to be imposed by the economic resources of Few the country - primarily agricultural resources.

58

See Kau Ying-mao, "The Urban Bureaucratic Elite in Communist China: a Case Study of Wuhan, 1949-1965," in Barnett, Chinese Communist Pol£t£aa~ pp. 216-267.

59

Gi11in, Warlord, p . 127.

60

See L.P . van Slyke, Enemies and Friends: the United Front ~n Chinese Communist History (Stanford, 1967), p. 197 .

61

Chang Kia-ngau, The Inflationary Spiral: the Experienae in China 1939-1950 (New York, 1958), pp. 63f, 131.

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30 -

topics are so beset by uncertainty as the interpretation of statistics for the country's het domestic product . Table 4 compares official figures for 1952-65 with est i mates by T . C. Liu . The latter represent per capita out put in yu an ranging from 126 in 1952 to 166 in 1958, a figure followed by a decline at the beginning of the sixties and not equalled even in 1965 (150 yuan) . 62 Table 4 also gives some figures for the state budget. Of this , education, which had taken only 1% in 1948, was given about 7% in the fifties, rising to nearly 10% in 1957.63 Such an increase could cope with demand to some extent in the 1950s; it could not be prolonged into the sixties, though educational demand continued to rise. Numbers of children reaching school age increased remorselessly: in 1953 there were between 75 and 90 million aged seven to twelve and between 145 and 175 aged seven to eighteen; in 1965 these figures rose to 110-140 million and 200-250 million . 64 The inevitable result was that in the sixties, for all the reasons reviewed above, rapidly increasing numbers of young educated people had to be disappointed in their expectations of official and professional careers. As M. Oksenberg has said, 1n the sixties a choice had to be made, in the face of a decrease in resources, between redistribution and the interests of the bureaucracy. The choice that was made led to conflict and to a new style of politics marked by the currency of personality, survival, ideology and trust.65 Interestingly, this style is composed to the flavour of 'traditional' China. There is no reason why the cycle described above should not have recurred many a time in the imperial past. As recruitment to positions of influence and respect in the government service becomes increasingly closed, alternatives become more important. The class of

62

See F.H . H. King, A Concise Econonria His-r.ory of Modern China~ 1840 -1 96 1 (New York/London, 1968), ·p . 181, Table 11.

63

See Orleans, Professional Manpower, p . 14; D.J o Munro, "Egalitarian Ideal and Educational Fact," in Lindbeck, China~ PP . 256- 301

64

Economic Pr-o f i l e of Mainland

65

M. Oksenberg, "Policy-making under Mao, 1949-1968: ~n Lindbeck, China~ pp. 79-115.

China~

pp.

367, 368. an Overview,"

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31 -

altern atives most worth consid ering here is consti tuted by positi ons in govern ment organ izatio ns which confer So long presti ge and influe nce but little or no salary . educat ed young as the govern ment itself comma nds respec t, izatio ns. organ people are willin g to seek satisf action in such Most govern ments that believ ed themse lves to enjoy any measu re of popula r suppo rt attemp ted from time to time to recru it the energi es of youth in movem ents design ed to make govern ment more effect ive by public iz1ng its social objec tives, foster ing the cultur al values cheris hed by the leader s, and exposi ng crime and corrup tion among offici als and others suspec ted of obstru cting govern ment There were variou s such organ izatio ns even progra mmes. under warlor d govern ment, such as the Justic e Force in Shans1 , which compe ted with the Commu nists in promo ting socia l reform .66 The Kuomi ntang itself of course const ituted such a movem ent from its Canton days on; when it came to embody nat1on al govern ment it became increa singly decen tral1z ed, consis ting of compe ting factio ns presid ed over by Chiang Kai-sh ek, who mainta ined his positi on partly by ruling over variou s overla pping forces and movem ents, Worth notice here as an milita ry, polit1 cal and social . for all tempe ramen ts, not though arena forthe ambit ious, to create an inner ring 1932 in is the Blue Shirts , formed obedie nt to Chiang dly of dedica ted nat1o nalist s, devote and equipp ed with an auster e gospe l of servic e. They were oppose d to what they saw as decade nce in wester n cultur e, includ ing broth els, dancin g, cosme tics and Gangs of youths who would enter dance halls fash1o ns. and pour acid over people dresse d 1n wester n styles may not have been Blue Shirts , but were with them in spirit . The organ izatio n had 10,000 membe rs in 1935, many receiv ing politi cal train1 ng, and many act1ve 1n the New Life movem ent. It faded away dur1ng the war, but remain ed strong ly assoc iated with the infamo us Tai L1 and his Speci al Servic es, which manage d a widely feared spy networ k with 1,700 agents by 1935 and as many as forty Dr fifty thousa nd by 1945.6 7 When we turn to the period of Commu nist Party domin ance, 1t is obviou s that the Young Commu nist League has had an pp. l52ff .

66

See Gillin,

67

See Lloyd E. Eastman , "Fascis m in Kuomin tang China: Shirts, " China Quarterly~ vol . 49 (i972), pp . l-31 .

Warlord~

the Blue

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'32 -

important role as an apprentice shop for ambitious young people . It was able to absorb large numbers of po lit ically or socially minded youth: from 3 million in 1950 its membership rose to 20 million in 1956 (about 17% of the age group ) 68 and 25 million in 1959. By 1964 i t may have been about 33 or 37 million . Inclusion or exclusion meant a great deal to the individual·; only from the League could he reasonably hope to gain entrance to the Party, and League officials in schools, factories and offices kept records of their colleagues' behaviour which could vitally affect their careers. One study of a schoolboy caught up in the Cultural Revolution, for example, shows how at this individual's school the League office-holders were consulted about the boys in their classes,and their judgements could become part of these boys' permanent secret record in later years . 69 League membership, then was a low rung on a ladder that really led somewhere. It is therefore all the more significant that, as v . c . Funnell's study shows, it became more and more difficult to rise in the League hierarchy. Though there was an upper age limit of twenty-four, many of the cadres were cover-aged (perhaps 11% in 1956) , and stayed where they were, blocking mobility. Further, the ratio of cadres to members diminished: 1:188 in 1950; 1:250 in 1956 . 70 As a second best to full-time official service ( the League relied heavily on part-t~me cadres subsidized by local organizations), membership in the organization was subject to the same deterioration in prospects as was the scramble outside. The Party itself, even more obviously, constituted a route to responsibility and authority more important in a way than official employment. Everywhere, in government offices as in factories, business of all sorts, schools and collectives or communes, i t was the local· Party members who occupied the most important official positions, and, even when they did not, got things done. (It may be noted, for example, that there appears to be a

68

See V, C" Funnel l , "The Chinese Communist Youth Movement, 1949-1966,"

China Quarterly, vol " 42 (1970), pp o 105-130.

69

R. N. Montaperto, "From Revolutionary Successors to Revolutionaries: Chinese St u dents in the Early Stages of the Cultural Revolution," in Scalapino, Elites in the People's Republia of China~ pp .. 575-605 .

70

Funnell, loa . ai t.

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.J l -

connectio n between density of party membersh ip and numbers of higher level co-opera tives formed in 1955-56).7 1 Even more than in the League in schools, the Party in adult life made judgemen ts about its colleague s that could spell apotheos is or bane. Membersh ip of the Party grew from 3 million in 1948 to 5 in 1950, 8 in 1954, 9 in 1955, 13 in 1957, 14 in 1959 and 17 in 1961.72 These 17 million were not all occupying The majority were peasants positions of responsi bil1ty. and workers with little hope of being anything else or of wielding more than petty authority .73 Eighty percent of them had joined since 1949, were largely employed 1n the communes , and were available to bear much of the blame for what went wrong after the Great These facts may well have much to do with the Leap. nemesis that awaited the Party in the mid-sixt ies c J . W. Lewis has pointed to signs of a growing rift between old guard and younger communis ts further down the hierarchy , suggesti9~ that the hsia fang movement fits into this A Re d Flag editoria l in 1964 spoke of the pattern . average age of many leadersh ip groups througho ut the organiza tion being over forty, and raised the question what would happen when these people retired; it suggested : that adding new blood was an importan t priority. 75 These men in their forties were not the old guard; they were the whole generatio n of young recruits from the early 1950s, now squatting in all the higher offices and thwarting Here, surely, we the advancem ent of those who came after. , with the conflict n generatio a of can see the makings frustrate d with ents grandpar fond 'old guard' all1ed like ats that bureaucr of n generatio the to youth in oppositio n early Party's the of sanctity the was too young to share society. re-make to want to old too days of tr1bulati on, Themes and Variations ,''

71

F . C. Te:Lwes, "Provincia l Politics in China: in Lindbeck, Ch~na~ pp. 116-189.

72

Schurmann, I deoLo(JJI and Organiaar;ion~ p . 129.

73

Ibid. ~

74

J . W. Lewis, "Revolutio nary Struggle and the Second Generation in Communist China," China QuaPterLy~ vol . 21 (1965), pp . 126-14 7 •

75

Hung Chi

pp

132£ .

See also ibi d. (14 July 1964) , p . 36. IdsoLogy and Organizati on, PP - 545£. 1

and Schurmann,

-

3'4 -

There existed one route to authority that was less lucrat i ve and satisfactory than Party membership and official employment alike, but sttll in some degree a step up from the l ao pa~ ha~ng, the undifferentiated mass . This was office in local agrarian organization: peasants' associat1ons , co-operatives, and eventually communes. As we saw above, demobilized soldiers often took leadership positions in co-operatives. The proliferation of communes, particularly when they-grew in number from 24 , 000 to 74,000, created many new positions: in 1963 there were perhaps more than 20 million commune cadres . 76 Commune government involved a pyramidal system of congresses at each level ( team, brigade, commune) elect1ng committees with considerable formal responsibilities. In pract~ce, when commune elections were held existing cadres tended to be re-elected, and the Party dominated responsible posit i ons , J . R. Townsend cites the case of Ch'i L1 Ying commune, whose very charter declared that certain party off1cials ought by right to bo 1n the management commit~ee . 77 We need not think that being a commune cadre was especially gratifying to intellectual amb1~ions . Intellectuals did not necessarily become cadres, of course; if they did, they found themselves credited With some work points for their administrative duties but obliged to work much or most of the time in the fields to keep body and soul together, especially when there was pressure from above to decentra l ize commune government; they were urged to learn from old peasants, to promote production, to supervize brigades and teams persona l ly, to avoid all manner of contrary heresies; and they were a l ways liable ( as in 1960-6ll to be purged as dead wood, probably to the glee of those previously under their authority, and replaced by peasants of more suitably destitute background . 78 In the end, there could be no way of annulling the hunger of the educated for respectab i lity, responsibility and author1ty short of a

76

Dai ly_ ~u l y 1963). See V" Funne11, review of J.W. LeWi.·s, Leadershi p i n Communi st China, in China Qu~erly, vo1 o 16

Pe op ~ e' s

(1963 ) , pp . 15 7fL

77 78

J " R" Townsend .

"Demo crati c Management in the Rural Communes," 16 (1963), pp . 137- l SO .

Chin a QuarterLy, v-o L

See G" Dut t , " Some Problems of China's Rural Communes," vo l ~ 16 (1963) , pp " 112-136 ..

China Qua:r-cerly,

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39 -

measure of social engineeri ng or 'indoctri nation' which hsia fang was more likely to invert than to engender , and which even the Great Proletari an Cultural Revolutio n and the endeavou rs that have since been put All that forth are ·perhaps not very likely to achieve. the of policies the how shows then, before, has gone needs the for been have may they though 1950s, adequate of mountain a up pile to combined of the time, disconte nt which was all too likely to turn out as a vo·lee.no.

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III

36 -

A VIEW OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN CHINA

It is easy to conclude that displaced intellectuals must have been important in Chinese society during the present century; it is not easy to see how their i mportance is to be defined or accommodated to a general view of Chinese social changes. It is time to spell out the implications of the discussion, to consider which interpretations are legitimate and which are not. What follows is largely speculation. It is intended, it must be emphasized, not to demonstrate the correctness of a particular way of looking at Chinese social changes, but to show that it is possible to fit our conclusions about displaced intellectuals into a scheme of wider scope; however tentative and speculative the scheme, its value here is in showing how in principle the phenomenon of intellectual frustration may be related to a larger whole. First of all, the sort of hypothesis that is implied throughout the previous discussion must be recalled. The hypothesis is that, at any rate where China is concerned comparative theory is here left on one side - changes in the relationship between the supply of educated or halfeducated people and the demand for them in positions of authority cause changes in the political climate. When there is a shortage of educated talent, there is little challenge to the institutions of government however much factional strife there may be within it. When there is a surplus, a . mood of disillusionment spreads through society, the threat to stability grows, and revolution threatens o This hypothesis is likely to encounter two objections. The first objection is philosophical. It is that Lhe hypothesis is too deterministic, reducing the springs of idealism, social conscience and revolutionary enthusiasm to a column of statistics . The answer is that, 1n the mind of any individual, it may be proper to seek an explanation of idealism, conscience, enthusiasm or anything else chiefly in the nature of his personality and of the world he sees, frustrated ambition constituting only a small part of the explanation. Among thousands of indlviduals, however, a great change in the amount of frustrated ambition may have a very significant effect on the amount, even the quality, of the idealism, conscience and enthusiasm embodied in individuals and permeating culture. Nothing would be more absurd, of course, than to suppose that the numbers in a column precisely denote the individuals who can be expected to behave in a certain way.

37 -

The other objection is that so simple a thing as the number of displaced intellect uals cannot possibly determine major social developm ents which must have Certainly , this is quite true, but i t complex causes. may well play a part, a part whose importanc e has not commonly been well enough recognize d, in combinat ion with That is why it is now desirable to consider other things. speculat1 vely what sort of other things there may be. There is no reason why the attitudes of dissiden t young people, rather than the attitudes of some other group, should necessar ily saturate the cultural Before this can atmosphe re in the way described above . be a sufficien tly should happen, it is necessary that there thing, and that one for large accumula tion of such people, that of other by their 1nfluence should not be surpassed The analysis therefore requires groups, for another. There are that account should be taken of other groups. rough present many of these, but for the purposes of the the outside sketch 1t will be most useful to look right s tendencie orthodox social framework and identify the of people who off1ciall y have not existed . The orthodox social framework inherited by the twentieth century is the 'system' familiar to us all, Its componen ts are cliches of of Chinese 'tradition'~ the gentry, the examinat ion systemf the our thought: madar1na te theoretic ally open to all and in practice partly so, the Son of Heaven and his mandate, Confucia nism, ancestor worship, filial piety, obedienc e to the Emperor. There 1s nothing wrong with this, but it is incomple te. It tempts us to talk of 'the old system' because i t portrays an orderly society composed of clearly identifia ble This orderly parts w1~h well-def ined tasks to perform. bright, clear, reality of half one only was society a shadow n, i y a also was There , yang the fact firm, in it it: of fear in went madar1ns All , zone of soc1ety the to threat dark a posed lives, loomed over the1r It was nothing so precise as an enemy in war empire. or a rebel army; 1t was the formless power that lurked in corners and never showed a face, i t was the regiment of ambivale nt men w1thout roots who did not quite fit This shadow zone always played an importan t anywhere . part, and it would be timely to recognize it . In part i t correspon ded It was not homogene ous. yu min, migrant workers, the to the rootless men called , many of them the vagrants boatmen, seasonal labourer s, It is significa nt of. made material that bandits were those without typically was it of agrarian values that

-

3:8

-

l and who were lumped together in this opprobrious way. So l diers, of whatever rank, were felt to belong to this class too - often quoted is the saying that you do not use good iron to make nails, or a good man to make a soldier - and in the old China soldiers were commonly 1ndistinguishable from bandits. Actors, execut1oners, yamer. torturers, to some extent barbers, priests, na1l cutters, scavengers, Cantonese riverdwe l lers and the children and grandchildren of all these were considered unfit to sit for the imperial examinations. Organized religion, particularly Buddhism, though consistently tolerated, was always suspect as a source of universal values and doctrines potentially in competition with Confucianism and an incubator of revolt. Buddhist temples were thought to be the sites of illic1t amorous dalliance, of secret rites and dark plots. Thus there was a whole underworld or anti-society to which the dispossessed or the starving or the over-ambitious might g i ve their allegiance, the world where secret societies were bredl and from which they were often able to dominate the commerce and politics of towns and whole tracts of countryside. But i t was not easy to tell when a man stepped over the threshold into this shadow zone; he might not know himself. A thin line div1ded a bandit from a soldier in the imperial service, a loyal m1lit1a from a rebel army, a racketeer from a ph1lanthropic town notable, a vagabond from a businessman, a corrupt official from a criminal. It is significant for the study of the problems of industrializat1on and 'modernization' that merchants hovered on the grey verges of these shadows . In China, merchants were grouped with actors ~ prostitutes, soldiers and so forth; a merchant needed to buy his respectability directly, by acquiring land, and vicariously, by having his son educated. This sort of categorization may initially str1ke us as a picturesque symbol of inappropriate agrarian values, as an ostrich-like 'rectification of names', but it is important to remember that in the sauve q ~ i peut urban world of imperial China merchants had to live by buying security from officials, who took bribes for court decis ion s, licence fees, protection, silent partnersh1ps and so on . 2 They had to enter into relationships l

See J. Chesneaux, Sea~t Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1971).

2

See M. J Levy, "The So c ial Background of Modern Business Development in China" in Chesneaux and Shih Kuo-heng, eds., The Rise of the Mbdern Chinese Business Class (New York, 1949), p . 7 .

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39 -

with secret societies 1 they smuggled1 they intimidat ed. "The power of the merchants was M. J. Levy has written: power of the individua ls who the to roughly analogous in American cities in the early vice controlle d organized 3 The status of soldiers century." part of the twentieth It may be zone. shadow the to also consigned an army soldiers -file rank-and of world the to possible to apply applied been has that logic same the of some and off1cers class The . officials and students of world above to the that is uals intellect d frustrate of that equivalen t to of frustrate d bravoes or adventur ers. Too little recognize d is the importanc e of this class, which was represent ed in practica lly every village as late as the Communis t land reform campaign , and probably since.4 It conA1sted of young men, often but not necessar ily from L:J. i rly large or well-to-d o families, who found too little to occupy their time and turned naturally to gambling , casual business activity, and particula rly Their affairs bordered on the milit1a organiza tion. , merchant s and bandits. societies territori es of secret literatur e as village modern in figure They frequentl y If there . policemen became they s Sometime bullies. army, or the in officers as ent was scope for advancem became they not, If it. take would 1n an army, they shared be might style and outlook Their disconten ted. in ated incorpor been had units by bandit chiefs whose from promoted officers by or army someth1ng called an the ranks or self-proc la1rned officers taking advantage of perenn1a lly troubled times. The sort of tentative scheme into which frustrate d intellect uals fit can be described by reference to this shadow zone and the weighting of its constitue nts at any t1me . In the f1rst place, the zone may be large or small What makes it increase in relation to the governme nt. of the country, poverty or is, not the absolute wealth nt to soak governme the of but a decrease 1n the ability in ce subs1sten over up a large part of the surplus its support to it with and taxation and by other means any for occur might decrease a Such own establish ment. an is decrease zone the What makes of many reasons. increase in the governme nt's ability to soak up the

3

Ib t. d. • p . 5 .

4

See W. Kin~on, Fanshen (New York. 1966). passim.

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40 -

su rp l u s . The reason for this is that the i nhabitants of t h e shadow zone eke out their existence , whether as beggar s, band its or bus i nessmen, from the available surp l us . As the government grows richer, they have fewer r ecrui ts; as the government "grows poorer in relati o n to a v ailable wea l th, they f i nd more pickings. In the second place, it is useful t o appreciate t h a t the compet i tion in a vertical dimension, between legitimate government and shadow zone, i s compounded by another compet i tion, sometimes latent, in a horizontal dimension, between two opposite would-be leading groups at the two extremes of the shadow zone. At one extreme is the class of displaced i ntellectuals. In times regarded as normal, such people would give their loy alty to the class of officials ( and free professionals, when these are sufficient ly developed) ; in t i mes regarded as abnormal, when frustrations have mounted and disappointed men a r e numerous, such people begi.n to feel themselves a part of the shadow zone, which they seek to lead. As a movement, such people have many of the values of the official world which they once hoped to enter and wh i ch they now condemn. Li ke the official world, they value orthodoxy, right thought, civilian government benevolently exercised, and universal acceptance of the authority of a centrally controlled pub l ic service. They find natural all i es in some of the enemies of the national government and seek their new orthodoxy beyond the country's borders and among such enemies. At the other extreme i s the class of frustrated bravoes or adventurers . In times regarded as normal , s u ch people would give their loyalty to local men of wea l th and note and to the army commanders appointed by ·t. h e central government; in times regarded as abnormal, whe n t hey f1nd their expected avenues of advancement b l o c k ed, such people begin to feel themselves part of t he shadow zone, which they seek to lead . As a movement , such people have values opposite to th ose of the disp l aced intellectuals with whom they may tempo r arily find t hemselves in concert . They have little i nte r est 1 n countryw ide order and integration, since t h e s e are the cond i tions most impedi. ng t he i r prospects of p ower and the exercise of their talents . They 1ns t in c tivel y seek allies among groups i nside and outside the coun try abl e t o engage w1th them i n mutually beneficial d e a l s. Their te n den cies are essentially centrifugal.

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So long as the legitimate government retains power, the shadow zone is politically homogeneous, its constituents united by . a shared interest. When the legitimate government weakens or falls, there soon is waged a tug-o'-war for leadership between guns and thought , The outcome is determined, in the short run, by all manner of continent circumstances of the Cleopatra's nose type; in the long run, the numbers of men in the opposite camps cannot be without influence. In the world of patron-client relationships , cliques and factions, the alliance between guns and money is natural enough; and so is that between thought and poverty. Candidates for new leadership can be described as those who sought to participate in the official patronage system but failed, on the one hand, and those who participate· · in an unofficial one, on the other.. The first wish to create a new system by creating a new legitimate government; the second wish. to make their system official by legitimizing private armdes and the traditionally despised business system. We might expect, other things being equal, that one of bravoes and businessmen will be followed by another of frustrated intellectuals, since the concentration of wealth that pays for armies and trade in the first will pay for the education of the second. The effect is not 1nevitahle, since a continued concentration of wealth under bravo leadership may foster the growth of the new c l ass formed by an alliance of moneyed and military groups faster than that of Lhe displaced intellectuals. But the pover~y of the country forbids that this concentration should con~inue indefinitely o genera~ion

It 1s possible ~o predict the att1tude of each wing of the one-t1me shadow zone to its former allies. FrustraLed bravoes,if they win, will be highly suspicious of learning, orthodoxy, centralization and integration, and anything that looks like a mass movement or an attempt to create a new patronage system by the indigen~. Revolutionaries, vagrants and bandits of the starv1ng kind are cons1gned to ~he shadow zone once more. Displaced intellectuals, if they win, will be highly suspicious of wealth and of anything that looks like village bully (or 'commandist') behaviour. People displaying either in excess are liable to be consigned to the new shadow zone; they do no~ belong to 'the people'. If a generation of younger officials shows signs of forming a de facto alliance with money or decentralized power groupings, it will be condemned as the dupe of agent$ of the now discredited order. Even if the ring of sinister agents is imaginary, the

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political instinct is sound: money and segmentation were precisely the characteristics of the old order. It is not difficult to accommodate the trends of twentieth century China to this sort of analysis. The fall of the Ch'ings came about because they had failed to absorb, for the employment of their servants, sufficient of the resources of the country to offset the growth of a shadow zone which made them increasingly insignificant. The government was less and less able to cater to the demands of more and more ambitious men, who finally took power into their own hands . The ambitious men included displaced intellectuals as well as officers and new business interests, and it seemed to many that a stable order with a new orthodoxy could be created. However, there were not enough displaced intellectuals to win the tug-o'-war. Despite the hundreds of returned students with often patchy modern education returning annually from the west, the thousands from Japan, the mission schools, the beginnings of modern education under government auspices, and the regiment of classically educated misfits, the numbers were only puny until years later, when it was too late. For, like Achilles outpacing the tortoise, there was all the time a rapid growth in the numbers of people benefiting, directly or indirectly, from the patronage being distributed at the other end of the shadow zone. It seems proper to regard western and Japanese commercial activity as the chief source of such patronage. In theory, the Ch'ing Government could benefit by taxation from this new source; but treaties ensured that imperial coffers got little, and local merchants much, of what money flowed in. And the revenue the government derived was mortgaged to pay indernnities for past wars, support armies, and pay for scholarships. The soldiers and the scholars were boomarangs; the mandarins were Cinderellas in this arrangement and, as a group, turned increasingly to the new local powerholders, officers and men of affairs, for alliance. By contrast, western trade and investment fuelled the unofficial patronage systems ever faster. Significant, for example, ~s the fact that one picul of tea, long a major commodity in the China trade, fetched Mexican $1.50 in Anhwei, where much was produced, and $14 in Shanghai. Between grower and exporter it passed through the hands

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43 -

5 Many of these middlemen probably paid of ten middlemen . dues or protectio n money to secret societies , spent substant1 al sums on the goods .a nd services provided by urban traders, coolies and craftsmen , helped to keep prostitut es and opium peddlers in business, gave small sums to off1cials in order to avoid giving larger sums to the governme nt, and engaged teachers for their sons .

Meanwh1l e, fore1gn 1nvestme nt was increasin g; holdings 1n the hands of foreigner s were worth US$503 1n 1902, Chinese $1,084 1n 1914, and $2,532 million in 1931 .mill1on £32 i882-86~ 1n m1ll1on exports were worth £19 twenties the In . 1917-21 1n million £146 1n 1902-06, and to helped warlords to loans But there was a decl1ne.6 has west The , patronage of 1on transm1ss l.ubr1cate the often been accorded the respons1b 11ity for the collapse of tr.e 1mper1al order in destroyin g trad1t1on ai hand1cra fc markets and creating poverty. or in dom1nat1n g the economy and thwart1ng nat1ve 1n1t1at1v e, or 1n confront1 ng Ch1na with a new culture wh1ch 1t could not absorb . Perhaps, however, 1t would be more appropria te to trace any western resp 8 ns1b1l1ty there may be to the funding of an unoff1c~d l network of patronage . Hence the May 4th Movement represen ts the emergence of a pol1t1ca lly consc1ous 1ntellect ual generatio n large enough to make 1ts c1a1m on soc1ety, but too small to challenge a powerful array of fact1ons that were engaged, at least 1n the early twenties, 1n ~ethal confl1ct, but recogn~zed that they all depended upon the eff1cacy of a segmented pcl1ty of money and guns. a pol1ty to which no To ga1n power, fundamen tal challenge could be tolerated . Between the Kuom1ntan g 1nev1tabl y pract1sed th1s pol1ty . 1931 and 1945 a subtle change occurred , a change whose nature 1s keeniy debated, 7 but whose results are clear: the Kuom1nta ng's forces crumbled away, wh1le those of the If the present speculat~ons Commun1s t Party rap1dly grew. are r~ght, 1t was contr1bu ted to by two suppLeme ntary

1orga&heff , China aB a T€:a Produ.cfi:r· \Shanghal,

1.926), p . 80 .

5

BP

6

G. C Al.t:m ar.d A. G. Donnithorn o, Wear.err-1 Enterprise Eccn.ormc Ut '.J€:~opment (London, 1954), Appendix. 10 .

7

See ~ g • c A . Johnson, P€:aaant National~am and Communist Power ( Stanford, 196_jq D. G Gill~n,' ' 'Peasant Nat~Gnal.ism' u1 the h~r.tory of Chint:Ose Communism, " Jountal oj' Asian Studies, vol.. 23 (1964}, pp 269-289 .

1,n

Far Eastern

- 44 trends: the piling up of more generations of underemployed intellectua ls and would-be intellectua ls, and the wartime curtailment of the sources of patronage which fed the aspirations of officers and dealers. Their prospects were dimmed, and the younger ones found their way up blocked much as had their student coevals for decades. A realignment took place: the discontente d began to ident1fy themselves more with the shadow zone than with the government. This analysis does not entail that we should identify the new order in 19.49 as a cerebrocrac y. Its leaders certainly valued the pen and despised the sword, when i t was in others' hands, or insisted that it should be under civilian domination,w hen it was in theirs. But, especially among the middle and lower levels of organizatio n, as well as to a marked ext.ent among the leadership, many of them were men who failed to rise high in the academic world; they preferred action to words; they were suspicious of anything that looked like a comfortable , easy way up, a way that had been closed to them and which they associated with glibness and immaturity. These things meant that they wanted orthodoxy rather than cleverness to reign, and were equivocal in their attitude to 'expertise' . Within a few years, these people came increasingl y to be confronted by the problem of generationa l rhythm. Many jobs could be found for young supporters, but this meant that natural turnover would be very slow to create vacancies in future. For amovement founded on the appeal to those without patronage, to the displaced, the danger was not so much from students, its natural allies, as from those with patronage (> from younger officials o£ all sorts who might develop shadow zone sympathies. This meant tendencies to behave like village bullies, black ma:r'keteers or miniature warlords. Many of the major government policies undertaken from the mid fifties on, however disparate the needs and purposes from which they arose, could serve if only incidentall y to check such tendenc1es. Collectives could strengthen village control over ignorant and wayward peasant association officials and party members; decentraliz ation could strengthen provinc1al party control over local civil servants; rectif1catio n and hs i a fang could strengthen the sway of orthodoxy over the thinking of selfish and ambitious officials; communes could bolster popular enthusiasm at the expense of defeatist and cynical local leaders; the army, if once it was purified, could check the corruption of other agencies; idealistic youths could root out the individualis m and arrogance of the Party. The task o£

- 45 resis ting the tende ncy of midd le and lowe r leve ls of offic ialdo m to lose mora le, grow cyni cal and turn to bravo and spiv beha viour enta iled more and more viole nt camp aigns ; the Grea t Prol etari an Cult ural Revo lutio n was a culm inati ng parox ysm. To desc ribe thing s in this way, as if the Chin ese light Gove rnme nt had cons isten tly seen matt ers in this over an is ly, rding acco n actio and chose n cours es of many suit to ted selec were ies Polic simp lific ation . estio ns inter ests and serve vario us purp oses, and the sugg made here do not seek to supe rsede any part of the ct discu ssion of these inter ests and purp oses. The effe ials of the incre ase in the numb er of frust rated offic polic ies which in ht thoug of ate clim the was to influ ence es chanc were chose n and, in the long run, to incre ase the the end, In of part1 cula r types of polic ies being chose n. rs; orde two een betw sion colli e scal it came to a falland peop le chose the1r sides for all sorts of reaso ns, s every body decla red for legit imac y, so that the issue could not be clea r. We shou ld not expe ct the issue s to be clea r, or the prota goni sts to be easil y iden tifia ble, wher e two chang es are gove rned by the shif ts that occu r in In one, the shado w zone grow s diffe rent dime nsion s. the large r or smal ler in relat ion to the gove rnme nt; innture rs othe r, d1sp laced intel lectu als and frust rated adve Betw een becom e more or fewe r in relat ion to each othe r. hues these axes , the poli tical clim ate can assum e many in this while indiv 1dua ls find thei r alleg ianc es slidi ng unde rstan d. direc tion or that for reaso ns they can scarc elythe indiv idua ls If we seek like prec ision engin eers to thru st to the into the slots of a stab le syste m, we do viole nce or ral, There is not one syste m; there are seve truth . ity. clar Prec ision , for us, is the enemy of there is none . It 1s not likel y, thoug h we are not here conc erned much less with earl ier cent uries , that impe rial Chin a was for these subj ect 't o the vicis situd es of soci al chan ge, the een chang es do not ar1se from any uniqu e cont act betwshif ts They arise from 'mod ern' and the 'trad ition al'. men that must alway s of t ymen emplo and in tbe pros pects ation , have been occu rring at the behe st of weat her, migr It is ls. idua conq uest, trade and the comp etenc e of indiv been has doxy quite true that, with 'mod ernit y', an ortho gone impo rted that is diffe rent in kind from any that have the on much as befo re, but 1ts effe ct on Chin a may depen d e Ther ext. fact that it is an ortho doxy as on its cont nts by may well have been often enoug h in the past gove rnme

-

46 -

new men who stood for centraliz ation and offered new orthodox ies, governme nts by adventur ers who exercise d hegemony over competin g armies by distribu ting patronag e derived from loot or prospero us areas, governme nts of routine business with few thwarted men of ambition to fear, and governme nts occupyin g every position between these points. Therefor e, to say that twentieth century Chinese social history ~ mav be in a sense 'traditio nal' is precisely to say that lt is discontin uous.

Table 1:

47 -

Educationa l Enrolment National Totals, 1912-48 (Thousands)

Year

Primary

2. 7sol

1912 1919 1920 1921-22 1922-23 1927-28 1928-29 1 929-30 19 30-31 19 31-32 1932-33 19 33-34 1934-35 19 35-36 19 36-3 7 1937-38 1938-39 19 39-40 1940-41 1941-42 19'+2-43 1943-44 1944-45 1945-46 1946-4 7 1947-48 Sour ces:

Secondary

Tertiary 0.481 2

4,8165

6,ooos 6,4565 8,ooo~s

11,000

5

11, 5oo 5

623 17,72.1.' 3

3 6 1 , 002 • 1,876

1

F .L H. Pott, "Modern Education, " in H.F. MacNair, China (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1946), pp . 427-440 .

2

Ib~d.~

3

J.

4

I . C. Y. Hsu, "The Reorganiza tion of Higher Education in Conununist China, 1949-1961 1 " China Quarterly, vol. 19 (1964), pp . 128-160 .

S

V. Purcel1

6

China Handbook (Chungking , 1944) .

7

J. Israel. St;udent Nat;ionali sm i n China, 192?-193?

figure for government institution s only

Chester Cheng, "The Educationa l System in Modern and Contempora ry China," in E. St uart Ki rby, ed. , Con t;errrporary Ch~na (Hong Kong, 1960). pp . 181-199.

1

Problems of Chi nese Education (London, 1936).

(Stanford, 1966).

- 48 Table 2:

Educational Entry, Enrolment and Graduation National Totals, from 1948-49 t o 1964-65 I

Year

Primary Enro l. 1

Junior Middle Enrol .

-2

Junior Middle Le avers 3

Senior Middle EnroL 4

Senior Middle Le avers Sa

5b

Total Se condary Enrolment 6a

Higher Educati on Entrants 6b

1948-49

24,000

1949-50

29,000

832

250

207

46

1, 039

1,270

1950-51

43,000

1,067

240

238

44

1,305

1,567

1951-52

51,000

1,384

186

184

35

36

1, 568

1952-53

52,000

2,231

396

260

58

55

1953-54

51 ,ooo

2,572

572

360

·n

1954-55

60,000

3,109

863

478

• 1955-56

61,000

3,320

783

1956-57

64,000

3,830

195 7-5 8

84,000

4,340

1958-59

92,000

7,340

1959-60 1960-61

7a

7b

Higher Educati on Enrolment 8a

8b

Higher Educati on Graduates

--

9

21 117

18

35

139

19

1,964

35

156

32

2,491

3,145

65

66

191

194

48

70

2,932

3,629

71

72

212

216

47

106

(86)

3,587

4,245

94

90

253

258

55

582

156

156

3,902

4,707

96

90

288

400

63

1,096

366

203

180

4,196

5,900

165

164

408

401

56

1,091

780

222

(220)

5,120

6,280

107

107

435

442

72

1,180

242

(350)

8,520

9,880

152

148

660

717

70

15,000

270

250

810

790

135 162

280

178

1961-62 1962-63

: (T)1ousanas) '

..

820

200

1963-64

200

1964-65

170

Sources: Column 1

J . Chester Cheng, "The Educational System in Modern and Contemporary China," pp. 181-199.

Colunm 2

L.A. Orleans, Professional Manpower and Education in Communist China (Washington, 1961), p. 35, Table 3.

Column 3

Calculation from ibid., pp. 35, 38, Tables 3, 4.

Column 4

Ibid., p, 35, Table 3.

NCNA source).

He questions the plausibility of the 1956-57 figure (from a For 1958-59: UNESCO, World Survey, vol. 4, p. 339, Table 2.

Column Sa

Ibid., p. 38, Table 4 and n. 3.

Column 5b

J . C. Kun, "Higher Education:

no. 8 (1961), pp. 135-148.

Some Problems of Selection and Enrolment," China Quarterly,

Column 6a

Addition of columns 2 and 4.

Column 6b

Cheng, op.ait., Table E.

Column 7a

Orleans, op.ait., p. 61, Table 1.

Column 7b

Kun, op. ait.

Column 8a

Orleans, op.cit., pp. 68f, Table 3; World Survey, vol. 4, p. 340, Table 3; D.J. Munro, "Egalitarian Ideal and Educational Fact in Communist China," in J.M.H. Lindbeck, ed., China: Management of a Revolutionary Society (Seattle, 1971), pp. 256-301.

Column 8b

Cheng, op.cit., Table E.

Column 9

L. A. Orleans, "Communist China's Education: Policies, Problems and Prospects," in JPRS, Economic Profile of Mainland China (Washington, 1967), p. 508 .

- so Table 3:

Numbers Withdrawing from Different Levels of Education (Tho\}S ands) Section 2

Section 1

-

Year

(a)

(b)

1952 1953 19S4 19S5 19S6 1957 1958 19S9 1960

36

66

70 (86) lSO 180 (220) (3SO)

90 90 164 107 148 2SO 280

ss

72

1950-S3 19Sl-54 19S2-SS 19S3-S6 19S4-57 19SS-S8 19S6-S9

(c)

(d)

192 168 80 240 369 641 S41

19S 170 lOO 240 392 643 433

Section 3 (e)

19S4 19SS 19S6 19S7 19S8 19S9 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964

- 1 -11 -28 2 0 36 21 41 43 42

(f)

3 16 18 20 29

-ss -30 so

80

Section 1 Column (a) reproduces column 5b in Table 2 and numbers senior middle school leavers. Column (b) reproduces column 7b in Table 2 and numbers higher education entrants. Section 2 Columns (c) and (d) represent the subtract ion of senior middle school leavers in the later year from junior middle school leavers in the earlier year, three years before . Column (c) is based on columns 3 and Sa in Table 2; column (d) is based on columns 3 and Sb. Section 3 Column (e) represents the subtraction of higher le avers four years before (columns 9 Column (f) represents the subtraction of higher four years before (columns 9 and 7b,

education graduates each year from senior middle school and Sa, Table 2). education graduates each year from higher education entrants Table 2).

-

Table 4:

51 -

Net Domestic Product and

~~~~udget

------------------------------------------------------'~·~(~M~i~.l·~l~iQns, of 1952-Y~~) Year

Official Figures

T.C. Liu & K.C. Yeh

State Budget

1950

6,800

1951

11,900

1952

68,600

71,400

16,800

1953

73,300

75,300

21,500

1954

77,800

79,300

24,600

1955

83,300

82,300

26,900

1956

96,400

92 '100

30,600

1957

104,200

95,300

29,000

1958

145,000

108,000

41,000

1959

176,800

104,400

1960

155,900

59,900

1961

127,500

92,200

1962

99,500

94,000

1963

107,400

98,100

1964

117,300

104,200

1965

126,200

108,100

Sources:

Reconstructed official figures and Liu & Yeh estimates: Liu Ta·Chung,'"'Tile Tempo of ,Economic Development of the Chinese Mainland, 1949-1965," in Economic Profile of Mainland China, pp. 45-75 at p. SO, Table 1; State Budget: L.A. Orleans, Professional Manpower~ p. 10.

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THE AUTHOR Dr. I. W. Mabbett is a Senior Lecturer in History at Monash University, Australia, and until recently was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.