Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities 1557291705, 9781557291707

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Notes to this edition This is an electronic edition of the printed book. Minor corrections may have been made within the text; new information and any errata appear on the current page only. China Research Monograph 73 Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh, editors ISBN-13: 978-1-55729-173-8 (electronic) ISBN-13: 978-1-55729-170-7 (print) ISBN-10: 1-55729-170-5 (print)

Please visit the IEAS Publications website at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/ for more information and to see our catalogue. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 1995 University Avenue, Suite 510H Berkeley, CA 94704-2318 USA [email protected]

September 2016

Knowledge Acts in Modern China

CHINA RESEARCH MONOGRAPH 73 CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities

Edited by Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh

A publication of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Although the institute is responsible for the selection and acceptance of manuscripts in this series, responsibility for the opinions expressed and for the accuracy of statements rests with their authors. The China Research Monograph series is one of several publication series sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies in conjunction with its constituent units. The others include the Japan Research Monograph series, the Korea ­Research Monograph series, Research Papers and Policy Studies, and the Transnational Korea series. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 1995 University Avenue, Suite 510H Berkeley, CA 94704 USA [email protected] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Culp, Robert Joseph, 1966– | U, Eddy. | Yeh, Wen-hsin. Title: Knowledge acts in modern China : ideas, institutions, and identities / co‑editors, Robert Culp, Eddy U, and Wen-hsin Yeh. Series: China research monograph ; 73 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015046070| ISBN 9781557291707 (alkaline paper) | ISBN 1557291705 (alkaline paper) Subjects: LCSH: China—Intellectual life—1912-1949. | Knowledge, Sociology of— History—20th century. | Learning and scholarship—China—History—20th century. | Education—Curricula—China—History—20th century. | China—Politics and government—1912-1949. | Politics and culture—China—History—20th century. | Political parties—China—History—20th century. | Nationalism—China—History—20th century. | Group identity—China—History—20th century. | Social change—China— History—20th century. Classification: LCC DS775.2 .K59 2016 | DDC 306.4/2095109041—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046070 Copyright © 2016 by the Regents of the University of California. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. This volume appears as part of the “New Perspectives in Chinese Culture and Society” series, which is made possible by a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange to the American Council of Learned Societies. Cover images (clockwise from top right): the Commercial Press building in Shanghai, ca. 1920; Zhu Kezhen in middle age; defense lawyers for the National Salvation Association, Shanghai, 1937; the Zhejiang University Math Department welcoming Su Buqing (center, front), ca. 1931; teachers and students at the Lu Xun Academy of Art, Yan’an, 1940 Cover design by Mindy Chen.

Contents

Contributors vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Knowledge Systems, Knowledge Producers, and China’s Distinctive Modernity 1 Robert Culp and Eddy U PART I. NEW SYSTEMS OF ACADEMIC LEARNING 27 1. Coming to Terms with Global Competition: The Rise of Historical Geography in Early Twentieth-Century China Tze-ki Hon 2. Drawing Boundaries in Sand: Anthropology in Republican China Clayton D. Brown

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PART II. TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE PROFESSIONS 87 3. From Literati to Legal Professionals: The First-Generation Chinese Law School Graduates and Their Career Patterns 89 Huei-min Sun 4. The Chinese Judge: From Literatus to Cadre, 1906–1949 114 Glenn D. Tiffert 5. The Making of the Civil Engineer in China: Knowledge Transfer, Institution Building, and the Rise of a Profession 148 Elisabeth Köll

PART III. MEDIA AND THE MARKET 175 6. Economics with Chinese Characteristics: The Production of Economic Knowledge in Early Republican Shanghai Bryna Goodman 7. Mass Production of Knowledge and the Industrialization of Mental Labor: The Rise of the Petty Intellectual Robert Culp 8. Journalism as a Field of Knowledge in Republican China: Ideas, Institutions, and Politics Timothy B. Weston

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PART IV. PARTY CONTROL AND CONSTRUCTION 273 9. Looking toward the Future: State Standardization and Professionalization of Science in Wartime China J. Megan Greene 10. Making Maoism: Ideology and Organization in the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1942–1944 Timothy Cheek 11. The Formation of “Intellectuals” in Yan’an Eddy U Afterword. Rethinking Modern China: The Question of Knowledge Wen-hsin Yeh

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304 328

355

Index 369

Contributors

Clayton D. Brown is Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies at Utah State University. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and research fellow at Academia Sinica, he investigated issues related to archaeology and ethnic conflict in modern China. His work has appeared in Orientations, The China Journal, Education about Asia, Shucheng, Gujin lunheng (published by the Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology), and the Routledge Research in Education series, among others. He is currently preparing a full-length study of Sino-American collaboration in archaeology and cultural heritage management. Timothy Cheek is Professor and Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research at the Institute of Asian Research and the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. His research, teaching, and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. His most recent book is The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (2015).  Robert Culp is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. He is the author of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912– 1940. He is currently completing a book on intellectuals’ cultural activities in China’s publishing industry during the twentieth century. Bryna Goodman is Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Oregon. Her publications include Twentieth-Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World;  Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China; and Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai. Her current areas of research include twentieth-century Chinese newspaper culture, gender and the early Chinese republic, and early understandings of finance capitalism.

viiiContributors J. Megan Greene is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas. She works on the history of Republican China both in China and on Taiwan, focusing in particular on nation- and state-building projects in the areas of science, the economy, and academia. She is currently working on a project on scientific and technical modernization in inland China during the Sino-Japanese War. Tze-ki Hon is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Geneseo. He is the author of four books: The Yijing and Chinese Politics (2005), Revolution as Restoration (2013), Teaching the I Ching (Book of Changes) (2014; with Geoffrey Redmond), and The Allure of the Nation (2015). Currently, he is studying Chinese views of the twentieth-century global system. Elisabeth Köll is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her work focuses on business institutions and practices in the context of China’s evolving modern state and economy. She has published From Cotton Mill to Business Enterprise: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (2003), as well as various articles, book chapters, and case studies. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript titled “Railroads and the Making of Modern China,” an institutional analysis of how railroads as technology and infrastructure contributed to China’s socioeconomic transformation in the twentieth century. Sun Huei-min is an associate research fellow in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica.  Her research ranges across legal history, social-cultural history, and the history of education in nineteenth- and ­twentieth-century China. She is the author of Zhidu yizhi: Minchu Shanghai de Zhongguo lüshi, 1912–1937 (Institutional transplantation: Chinese lawyers in Shanghai, 1912–1937). Glenn D. Tiffert is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests center on late Republican and early PRC legal history. His recent publications include a study of the drafting of the 1954 PRC Constitution, and a study of the development of the Republican court system. His current book project looks at the birth of the PRC judicial system through the lens of revolutionary Beijing.  Eddy U is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He is working on a book on the intellectual as a classification of individuals under Chinese Communism. His recent works on the social

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construction of the intellectual, petty-bourgeoisie, and Marxist classes under Chinese Communist rule have been published in The China Journal, Modern China, the British Journal of Sociology, and the European Journal of Sociology. Timothy B. Weston is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is currently working on a book on journalists and journalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Among his recent publications are “Taiwanese Newspapers and Politics in China’s Shadow,” in Mobile Horizons: Dynamics across the Taiwan Strait (2013), and  China in and beyond the Headlines  (2012), coedited with  Lionel M. Jensen. Wen-hsin Yeh  is Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair Professor in History at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was formerly director of the Institute of East Asian Studies. She is Senior China Adviser to Chancellor Nicholas Dirks. Her current project concerns the history of reading and publishing Chinese classics in China’s twentieth century.

Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume came from a conference held at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, on October 16 and 17, 2009. The conference was titled “Intellectuals, Professions, and Knowledge Production in Twentieth-Century China.” That conference was supported by a “New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society” grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and a separate conference grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. We are grateful to both foundations for their generous funding of this conference and the resulting volume. The objective of the conference was to explore anew knowledge production and its related experiences in the long twentieth century in China. We are extremely fortunate that a stellar cast of scholars accepted our invitations to serve as speakers and discussants. We wish to thank Susan Mann, Mingcheng Lo, Liu Xin, Thomas Mullaney, Xiaomei Chen, Andrew Jones, Matthew Sommer, and Nicholas Tackett for their insights and encouragement. Their participation turned the conference into an inspiring and memorable event. In addition to the contributors of this volume, several outstanding scholars shared their research during the conference as well as acted as discussants in the productive debate. We thank Li Zhang, Klaus Muhlhahn, Peter Zarrow, Zhihong Chen, Dan Shao, Bridie Andrews, Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Ling Shiao, and David Luesink for their participation. We also thank Melissa Dale, Elinor Levine, and their staff at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkeley who provided impeccable support. A follow-up conference was held in Shanghai from November 4 to 6, 2010, after we learned that Professor Xiong Yuezhi, then vice president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), wanted to foster a crosscultural dialogue on the topic of knowledge production in China. The conference, titled “Organized Knowledge in Action: Intellectuals, Professions, and Social Change in Twentieth-Century China,” was jointly sponsored

xiiAcknowledgments by SASS and the Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkeley. The meeting enabled us to share our findings with scholars in the Shanghai area and to learn about their research on similar topics. Prior to the conference, the focus of our volume had been revised to knowledge production from the late Qing through the Republican period. The exchange during the conference provided another refreshing round of dialogue and debate that greatly improved the quality of our research. We thank SASS for making possible this scholarly exchange. We are grateful for the participation of an outstanding group of Shanghai-based scholars, who greatly deepened our understanding of knowledge production and elite professionalization during the first half of the twentieth century. Hong Kong–based Lee Puitak (Li Peide), as well as Zhihong Chen, Ling Shiao, and David Luesink, who are based in North America, also kindly shared their research again during the conference. We wish to thank Kate Lawn Chouta, our editor at the Institute of East Asian Studies Publications at Berkeley, for her support of this volume and meticulous coordination of the editing process. Her excellent vision and guidance improved the chapters in invaluable ways. We are very grateful for her commitment in finding capable peer reviewers. The latter provided comments, suggestions, and encouragement that helped us improve the manuscript greatly, for which we are grateful.

INTRODUCTION

Knowledge Systems, Knowledge Producers, and China’s Distinctive Modernity

ROBERT CULP AND EDDY U

In the fall of 1918, Zhu Kezhen 竺可楨 (1890–1974) returned to China from the United States after an eight-year sojourn in which he had studied first in the School of Agriculture at the University of Illinois and then meteorology in the Earth Studies Department (Dixuexi) at Harvard University.1 After his return Zhu, a bright young talent, initially taught meteorology and geography at Wuchang Higher Normal School. In 1920 he moved to Nanjing Higher Normal School, which later became Southeastern University. There he chaired the newly formed Earth Studies Department and helped shape the fields of meteorology and geography by training a cohort of young scholars.2 In 1925 Zhu left academia to join Shanghai’s leading publisher, Commercial Press, where he became an editor and compiler of the Chinese version of Encyclopedia Britannica and worked in the History and Geography Division of the Editing Department. Zhu joined Commercial For biographies of Zhu Kezhen, see Xu Youchun 徐友春, Minguo renwu dacidian 民國人物 大辭典 [Biographical dictionary of Republican China] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1991), 489; Hu Huanyong 胡煥庸, “Zhu Kezhen xiansheng yu Shangwu yinshuguan” 竺可楨先生與商務印書館 [Mr. Zhu Kezhen and the Commercial Press], in Shangwu yinshuguan jiushinian, 1897–1987: Wo he Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館九十年, 1897–1987: 我和商 務印書館 [Ninety years of the Commercial Press, 1897–1987: Me and the Commercial Press], ed. Shangwu yinshuguan (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1987); “Zhu Kezhen shengping yu gongxian” 竺可楨生平與貢獻 [The life and contributions of Zhu Kezhen], in Zhu Kezhen wenji 竺可楨文集 [The collected writings of Zhu Kezhen] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1979), v–viii; “Qianyan” 前言 [Foreword], in Zhu Kezhen quanji 竺可楨全集 [The complete works of Zhu Kezhen], vol. 1, ed. Fan Hongye 樊洪業 et al. (Shanghai: Shanghai keji jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004): 21–23. 2  The development of the geography field and the activities of this cohort of scholars are explored more fully by Tze-ki Hon in chapter 1 of this book. 1 

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Press at a time when it was mobilizing some of China’s leading foreigntrained scholars to develop publications that covered all major academic disciplines and systems of knowledge, transforming the press into an academic center that rivaled the growing university system.3 When Germantrained scholar and former chancellor of the flagship Peking University Cai Yuanpei organized the national research institute Academia Sinica under the auspices of the nascent Nationalist government in 1927, he persuaded Zhu to establish and direct the Institute for Meteorological Studies there. In 1936, Zhu returned home to Zhejiang Province to become president of the state-sponsored Zhejiang University (Zheda), which was located in the provincial capital Hangzhou and poised to become one of China’s foremost institutions of higher learning. He remained in this university post for the next decade, but the university itself did not stay put. With the Japanese invasion and occupation of Hangzhou in 1937, Zhu led Zheda on a wartime odyssey that went deep into the hinterlands of Guangxi and Guizhou, finally returning to Hangzhou in 1946.4 During the crisis created by the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Civil War (1946–1949) between the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Zhu also assumed a series of high-profile political, administrative, and consultative positions under Nationalist Party auspices, including participation in the Academic Review Committee of the Ministry of Education and the party’s Central Executive Committee. In addition, he became an inspector and later a Central Executive Committee member of the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps, a group that some Nationalist Party members initiated in 1937 to extend political influence and control into higher education.5 Yet Zhu’s cooperation with the Nationalist Party seems not to have tainted him (at least initially) in the eyes of the CCP, for in September 1949 he was invited to the first session of the Preparatory Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.6 In October of that 3  See Gao Zheyi 高哲一 [Robert Culp], “Wei putong duzhe qunti chuangzuo ‘zhishi shijie’: Shangwu yinshuguan yu Zhongguo xueshu jingying de hezuo” 為普通讀者群體創造“智識 世界”: 商務印書館與中國學術精英的合作 [A world of knowledge for the circle of common readers: Commercial Press’s partnership with China’s academic elite], Shilin 史林 3 (2014): 92–108. 4  For the wartime sojourn of many of China’s leading universities to the southwest, see John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 5  For the development of the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps, see Jianli Huang, The Politics of Depoliticization in Republican China: Guomindang Policy towards Student Political Activism, 1927–1949 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996). 6  Sponsored by the CCP, the conference formally approved the structure of the Central People’s Government.

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year, Zhu became a member of the Culture and Education Committee of the Central People’s Government and a member of the state-sponsored Academy of Science. Zhu Kezhen’s peripatetic and colorful life, in capsule form, traverses much of the ground we cover in this book: an investigation of modern ideas, institutions, and identities in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Zhu’s geographical and institutional mobility, along with his intellectual and political engagement, paralleled that of many educated people of his generation. As a Western-trained scholar, he took responsibility for introducing new systems of knowledge—meteorology, geology, and the scientific study of geography—to China after official abandonment of Confucian learning and the fall of the imperial state. To establish and spread these new systems of knowledge, he operated across a range of institutions, including universities, a modern publishing company, and a state-sponsored research institute. These institutions provided him with income, social and symbolic capital, and bully pulpits for promotion of his academic disciplines. The rapid pace of these intellectual and institutional changes, along with the fluidity with which Zhu assumed and abandoned professional identities—socially recognized roles that incorporated capacities for certain kinds of expression and action—all characterized the modern experience of China’s literate men and women. Zhu’s intellectual project was further transformed by the Sino-Japanese War, which not only disrupted the institutions at which he was based but also created a crisis of national survival that imposed new demands for political involvement. During wartime conditions Zhu, the scientist and scholar, assumed positions within the academic oversight and administrative committees of both the Nationalist and Communist parties, where academic projects became subordinated to political ones. Zhu’s life and those of many other figures portrayed in this book illustrate how modern systems of thought gave life to social institutions and generated new social roles and identities in China’s tumultuous transition during the first half of the twentieth century. With such a focus, this book joins an ongoing discussion about Chinese experiences of modernity as a social and material process, in addition to encompassing a mindset and new systems of ideas. Wen-hsin Yeh’s book Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond played a pivotal role in reorienting the discussion of Chinese modernity by considering how a broader range of cultural actors participated in the enlightenment project of the New Culture Movement, and how their actions found practical expression in publications, advertisements, civic organizations, economic planning, and the like.7 More 7 

Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: Univer-

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recent studies have continued to explore discursive or conceptual aspects and material or practical dimensions of China’s modern experience during the first half of the twentieth century. Some scholars still focus primarily on the ideational dimensions of Chinese modernity. Edmund Fung, for example, provides a detailed account of dominant political thought as situated between the Nationalist and the Communist ideologies, all of which combined Chinese and Western elements.8 Yet others, such as Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein, as well as Frank Dikötter, assess transformations of material culture and daily social practice in modern Chinese life.9 In Creating Chinese Modernity, Peter Zarrow and his colleagues explore both material and ideational dimensions through analyzing new political, legal, literary, and commercial discourses and the embedding of ideas into governance, commerce, leisure, and other everyday activities.10 This book extends this inquiry to consider how the interplay among ideas, institutions, and identities has characterized and shaped Chinese modernity. Like Fung and others, we explore the introduction of new systems of knowledge in China during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, we track the formation of academic and professional disciplines that have symbolized across national boundaries scientific rationality, technical regulation, impersonality, and intellectual enlightenment, all thought to be constitutive as well as indicative of modernity. Many of these systems of thought (for example, engineering, law, anthropology, and geography) took root and even blossomed during the Republican era but under conditions quite different from those that had originally nurtured such knowledge, disciplines, or professions in Western Europe or the United States. Foreign influence, colonial occupation, revolutionary movements, widespread political violence, wars, and accelerated economic modernization were simultaneously stimulants and obstacles. The production and dissemination of new systems of thought, in turn, altered the individual consciousness, social relations, government organization, and numerous other aspects of life, not unlike experimentation with political thought, space, language, leisure, or foreign goods. Yet, research has seldom investigated how new academic and professional disciplines appeared and how they (as organized social forces) shaped “the social sity of California Press, 2000). 8  Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 9  Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China (London: C.  Hurst and Company, 2007); Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein, eds., Everyday Modernity in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 10  Peter Zarrow, ed., Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).

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formation of modernity.”11 This book addresses this central puzzle in the history of modern China. Specifically, we argue that dynamic interaction among ideas, institutions, and identities was the decisive and distinctive factor in the formation of Chinese modernity. We can get a sense of the distinctiveness of this interplay in the Chinese context by briefly surveying the process of professionalization in Europe and North America.12 In these places, formation of professions was an extended process that spanned the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, reflecting broader economic, social, and political transformations. In fields like medicine, law, architecture, accounting, engineering, and even specific academic fields outside the liberal arts, the professionalization process included elaboration of specialized fields of knowledge and technique, consolidation of that knowledge in educational institutions, credentialing and licensing, formation of professional associations, and at times legal protections for approved practitioners. The growth of competitive markets for all kinds of goods and services as a result of industrial capitalism drove efforts by emergent professionals to define their fields and status positions. In the Anglo-American cases, especially, professionalization was an organic outgrowth of processes of market competition within particular nations, with the state performing critical supportive, regulative, and legitimizing functions.13 Historical conditions in early twentieth-century China that supported formation of modern professions and systems of knowledge were quite different. Most importantly, the collapse of the imperial state, which for centuries had shaped key features of legitimate knowledge, institutions of learning, and elite identities, triggered a simultaneous crisis in all these areas. At the same time, China’s forced opening to the global economy due to foreign imperialism led to rapid exposure of the coastal areas that were homes of many literate elite to the full force of industrial production and competitive markets. Chinese elites consequently confronted within the space of a generation the decline of the absolutist state and the growth of market forces that in Europe and North America had unfolded over Ming-Cheng Lo, “The Professions: Prodigal Daughters of Modernity,” in Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, ed. Julia Adams et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 381. 12  Synthetic overviews of elite professionalization in Europe and North America are presented in both Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Note that these processes also took distinctive forms in different national contexts in the West. This limited summary is meant to point to several common features. 13  Larson, The Rise of Professionalism, 14–15. 11 

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generations or even centuries. Modern professions and systems of knowledge did not develop autochthonously in China; rather, fully elaborated models of technical and academic fields based on Euro-American patterns and experiences were rapidly introduced, challenging Chinese elites to consider whether to adopt and how to adapt them. This sudden introduction of foreign-derived institutions and systems of knowledge meant that those few elites with specialized knowledge and technical capacities had an advantage in the competitive marketplace, allowing fluid movement among institutions and identities rather than balkanization in narrowly delimited fields. Over this whole process hovered the specter of the late imperial state, which despite its rapid collapse left the elites with a tradition, if not also a model, of governance in which the state defines legitimate knowledge and sanctions related institutions and social identities, preparing the way for greater state involvement than had characterized Great Britain or the United States. In reconstructing how Chinese elites crafted new forms of knowledge and institutions in this distinctive context, the book models an approach valuable for understanding modernity as both an intellectual venture and a lived experience in other areas characterized by “late development.”14 We argue that a mutually constitutive interaction among ideas, institutions, and identities decisively shaped the Chinese elite response to the crisis triggered by the collapse of the imperial state, exposure to global capitalism, and influx of new systems of knowledge. New academic disciplines and forms of professional knowledge took shape through adoption of and adaptation to foreign standards and modes of organization and the creative efforts of new kinds of knowledge producers. The systems of thought drove the reorganization of politics, culture, and society and gave meaning to parties, organizations, and people. New social identities were consolidated by mastering technical or academic knowledge (or both) and occupying positions in emergent institutions. Indeed, the interaction among ideas, institutions, and identities critically influenced the trajectory of China’s development. 14  Our historical method bears certain affinities with the Comaroffs’ approach, which views the process of becoming modern as dialectical. Thus, we perceive “a process of reciprocal determinations; a process of material, social, and cultural articulation—involving sentient human beings rather than abstract forces or structures—whose interdependent destinies cannot be assumed to follow a straightforward, linear path. And whose outcome cannot, as a result, be stipulated a priori” (John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 of Of Revelation and Revolution [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], 28). This approach takes seriously the structural inequalities and power asymmetry involved in the introduction of new forms of culture and thought through colonial or semicolonial processes. But it also views culturally specific dialectics of modernity to have been inflected by distinct historical legacies and processes.

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These processes were certainly influenced by foreign models of knowledge production, institution building, and processes of professionalization. Some chapters in this book describe the formation of professions that resemble those in the West, such as lawyers, judges, and engineers. But these chapters also reveal that the definition of these fields, the process of professionalization, and their sociopolitical positioning were inflected in key ways by the Chinese historical context. It is also clear that some new positions for knowledge production (such as staff editors at major publishing companies and political cadres) did not experience professionalization in any way analogous to Euro-American professions. Each of the chapters adopts what can be broadly regarded as a ­cultural-institutional approach to illustrate the rise of new systems of knowledge and their consequences for state, society, and the individual. Three main lines of investigation span the volume. First, the chapters identify the multiplicity of actors (such as states, political parties, enterprises, networks, and individuals) that took part in introducing, organizing, legitimizing, and propagating new systems of knowledge as well as the ideas, interests, tactics, and forms of power brought to bear on the process. This a­ ctor-centered approach is complemented by a second, equally necessary institutional analysis. Some of the chapters delve into the mechanisms (for example, state-sponsored policies and fieldwork, systems of recruitment, technical training, scientific publications, and discursive logics) that served to embed the new systems of knowledge into projects, objects, and texts, on the one hand, and work and occupation, on the other. These chapters thus illustrate concretely the roles of various types of organizations—ranging from universities, research institutes, study societies, publishing companies, and railroad enterprises to state offices and rural political movements—in establishing new systems of thought and how their increasing influence transformed everyday life. A third line of inquiry focuses on the subject positions, or identities, associated with knowledge production, such as geographers, journalists, engineers, lawyers, and other relatively educated sections of the population. Some of the chapters consider changes in social status and identity as these knowledge actors worked with new ideas in diverse contexts; others document role changes for these people in the cultural or political realm as well as changes in their personal outlooks, values, and habits. What emerges is a rich portrait of reconfigurations of symbols and representations, power relations and legitimate authority, organizational structures and resource distribution, and public life and personal identities. To be sure, after the demise of the imperial state, knowledge production flourished, too, outside professional and academic circles and institutions—for example, in consumer and corporate culture, rumor mills

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(xiaodao xiaoxi 小道消息), social movements, public spectacle, and literati art and culture communities—as research has shown.15 These ways of formulating thought and circulating knowledge, to different extents influenced by and influencing systems of professional knowledge, form an important counterpoint to the more formalized institutions and practices we highlight here. Nonetheless, by spotlighting how formalization and institutionalization served to legitimize knowledge and authorize knowledge producers, this book demonstrates that the creation of modern disciplines and professional knowledge is vital to understanding the formation of Chinese modernity. To contextualize the discussion in the chapters that follow, we turn now to the broad social and historical forces that influenced China’s knowledge production and conditioned its distinctive experience of modernity. Macro-Historical Forces of Change The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the overall collapse of China’s imperial sociopolitical order. The end of the imperial civil service examinations and establishment of a new Western-style school system broke apart the hermetic relationship between the imperial state, a hierarchical social order, and Confucian learning that had persisted throughout the late imperial period (1368–1911).16 Through articulation with the emperor, that imbricated structure of power, status, and scholarship had provided an absolute basis for evaluating knowledge claims.17 When the system was pried apart, knowledge no longer had an absolute ground, familiar claims of status and authority were questioned, and the foundation of existing social and political institutions was undermined.18 Drawing on a range of intellectual and institutional models, literate people experimented with new systems of thought and promoted and applied them in different contexts. Their efforts were intrinsically diverse and multifarious, both reflecting and affecting the changing constellation of power relations For example, Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 16  See Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 17  Donald J. Munro, Images of Human Nature: A Sung Portrait (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 18  Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890–1911 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). 15 

Introduction

9

and institutions as well as intellectual life and everyday culture. Four macro-historical forces that gained momentum during the late Qing and early Republic were particularly important in shaping the formation of new systems of knowledge: the importation of new academic and professional disciplines, the development of industrial capitalism, the building of a modern state, and the growth of nationalist consciousness. We briefly outline those forces here. The influx of foreign ideas offered many alternatives for organizing new bodies of thought, assessing claims of legitimacy, and institutionalizing modern academic and professional disciplines. Starting in the late nineteenth century, translation, study abroad, and academic exchange— sparked by a national sense of crisis due to military defeats and economic incursions—gave Chinese scholars access to a variety of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities as they were organized abroad.19 Geopolitical imperatives drove the introduction and adoption of new systems of thought, but the diversity of continually evolving disciplinary configurations, methods, and approaches developed in Euro-American and Japanese academic and cultural spheres offered Chinese thinkers a full menu of intellectual choices. Late imperial scholarly traditions served as frameworks through which the literate population interpreted, articulated, and applied foreign systems of thought in complex ways.20 At the same time, the ongoing systematization of ideas in the Euro-American world through universities, research institutes, and professional associations, often refracted through Japanese higher education and professional circles, provided practical models for literate Chinese to organize socially new systems of thought.21 E.g., Michael Lackner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz, New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之, Xixue dongjian yu wan Qing shehui 西學東漸與晚清社會 [The dissemination of Western learning and late Qing society] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1995). 20  The seminal account of this process is Benjamin Schwartz’s study of Yan Fu. See Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). For a more recent example, see Shana Brown’s analysis of the relationship between early twentieth-century Chinese archaeology and archiving and late imperial traditions of antiquarianism and epigraphy: Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). 21  For examples of the institutionalization of modern academic disciplines in Europe and the United States, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987). For the development of particular academic disciplines in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, see Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19 

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The mass market and industrial development created new opportunities for the circulation of knowledge and provided new fields of action for literate men and women. Commercial competition and state sponsorship of development drove pursuit of technical knowledge and management know-how.22 Markets themselves became objects of knowledge for emergent fields of economics and business, and market-oriented vocational education and business training became a new focus of education.23 Expansion of modern, Western-style education further created a large and growing market for Western knowledge. In response, print capitalism rose to generate new circuits through which knowledge and ideas of all kinds were disseminated broadly at relatively low costs.24 Like the establishment of schools, universities, and academic disciplines, this “marketization” of intellectual, professional, and cultural life created new fields of action for the literate (in editorial departments, press rooms, and peer organizations) and new opportunities for the promotion and application of knowledge through a range of textual genres. Market forces and the profit motive influenced formations of knowledge and intellectual culture in another critical way. Their development stimulated literate people’s entrepreneurial activity, creating opportunities for some to reinvent themselves in new roles (as journalists, editors, and authors, for example) while challenging forms of cultural authority traditionally associated with official government position and academic achievement.25 The dynamic state-building project of the early twentieth century had complex implications for the formation and institutionalization of new systems of thought. The New Policies reforms (1901–1911) of the Qing court, which promoted modern education among other things, presaged 1993); J. Victor Koschmann, ed., International Perspectives on Yanagita Kunio and Japanese Folklore Studies (Ithaca, NY: China-Japan Program, Cornell University, 1985); Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885–1895 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); Andrew Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 22  William C. Kirby, “Engineering in China: Birth of the Developmental State, 1928–1937,” in Yeh, Becoming Chinese, 137–160. 23  For the influx of systems of economic knowledge, see Bryna Goodman’s discussion in chapter 6 of this book. For the growing importance of business education and training, see Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, chap. 2. 24  Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). 25  Robert Culp, “New Literati and the Reproduction of Antiquity: Contextualizing Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei,” in Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Chinese Culture, ed. Chia-ling Yang and Roderick Whitfield (London: Saffron, 2013); Gao Zheyi, “Wei putong duzhe qunti chuangzuo ‘zhishi shijie’”; Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland, eds., Circuits of Cultural Entrepreneurship in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–1965 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015).

Introduction

11

a tutelary state that was undermined by the 1911 Revolution.26 The subsequent disorder generated by competition among militarists for state power opened up new spaces of discourse, exchange, and institutional innovation. Yet the model inherited from the late imperial era of the state as an arbiter of legitimate knowledge and a sponsor of thought and culture remained influential. Further, the very disarray of central authority sparked yearning among literate elites for an organized state, so much so that some who identified themselves as “liberals” would espouse largescale official recruitment of experts into officialdom, government support for academic institutions, and state oversight of emergent professions.27 From the mid-1920s onward, the emergence of Leninist political regimes that privileged the organizational role of the party-state fed efforts by state and political actors to establish themselves as the ultimate arbiters of truth.28 The Nationalist government intervened in the production and circulation of knowledge, through construction of academic and research institutions, examination and licensing of professional elites, and censorship and political control of the media.29 Even before the rise of Maoism, revolutionary dynamics, hierarchical authority, and political ideology shaped the use of knowledge and the validity of all truth claims within the Chinese Communist Movement.30 However, we also see notable cases of local communities or state actors using the support of knowledge producers to offer alternative visions of development or to resist state or political centralization.31 26  Janet Y. Chen, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900–1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 27  Jerome B. Grieder, Intellectuals and the State in Modern China: A Narrative History (New York: Free Press, 1981), 343–347. 28  John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 29  Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Margherita Zanasi, “Chen Gongbo and the Construction of a Modern Nation in 1930s China,” in Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities, ed. Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, chap. 5. 30  Michael Luk, The Origins of Chinese Bolshevism: An Ideology in the Making, 1920–1928 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990), 211–212; Stephen Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Areas (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 31  Local agents claiming authority over knowledge production happened most in the late Qing and early Republic. See, for instance, Qin Shao’s account of Zhang Jian’s reforms in Nantong from the late Qing into the 1920s: Qin Shao, Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). See, too, the example of Xiamen University in the 1920s. Contesting central government projects of knowledge production as a way to resist centralization is illustrated by Clayton Brown in chapter 2 of this book.

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The fourth macro-historical force was the powerful discourse of nationalism and orientation toward the national community.32 A palpable sense of national crisis associated with perceived limitations of the Confucian intellectual tradition and the collapse of the late imperial state framed and pervaded much scholarly discourse and cultural production at the turn of the twentieth century.33 European, American, and Japanese geopolitical dominance, coupled with the influx of Western-derived systems of thought, inspired a long-term process of cultural and intellectual borrowing with the goal of national revival. The conditioning power of nationalism intensified markedly during the 1930s and 1940s as Japanese imperialism posed a real and immediate existential threat to China as a political community. Nationalist sentiments drove and inflected literate Chinese citizens’ search for order and meaning, influencing their interaction with one another and their relations with state and political movements. As a result, nationalism had dramatic implications for both the focus and the autonomy of intellectual life, thereby influencing the development of institutions, culture, and configurations of knowledge during the first half of the twentieth century. A New World of Knowledge This book is divided into four parts, each organized around particular processes of knowledge production, institution building, and cultural elite self-definition. Part I focuses on the introduction of Western-style academic disciplines (exemplified by geography, anthropology, and archaeology), processes the authors suggest were variably influenced by commercialized publishing, capitalist development under the Nationalist Party, patterns of elite networking, rising nationalist sentiments, state formation, and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Part II assesses engineering, law, and the judiciary as seminal modern professions vital to both commercial and state interests as well as the systems of technical knowledge, training, and recruitment established within them. Part III explores how newspapers and commercial publishers circulated knowledge of variable credibility and cultural legitimacy while also providing opportunities for literate men, and some women, to assume new professional and occupational roles. Part IV demonstrates how discourse, practice, and institution 32  Hao Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Fitzgerald, Awakening China. 33  Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis; Tze-ki Hon and Robert Culp, The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Introduction

13

building each provided mechanisms for the Nationalist state and the Chinese Communist Party to determine definitions of legitimate knowledge in the contexts of state building, war, and revolution. Each part has thematic integrity, focusing in turn on academic knowledge, technical professions, commercial media, and party-state influence. We also see dynamic interplay among the macro-historical forces across the book’s four parts and eleven chapters. The relative absence, presence, or balance of these forces generated a fluid field of opportunities and constraints; literate men and women operated in these rapidly changing conditions to establish and spread new fields of learning and craft new positions for themselves in relation to the state, market, and national crisis. At one extreme, minimal state interference in the face of dynamic market forces led to situations in which the production and circulation of new ideas was largely market driven. This commercialization of knowledge comes through most clearly in the fields of publishing and journalism during the early Republican period, which is the focus of part III. In chapter 7, Robert Culp’s presentation of commercial publishing companies demonstrates that the broad dissemination of new, Western-derived systems of knowledge in Republican China depended largely on the publishers’ ability to make money through the production of series, textbooks, reference books, and journals. To produce these texts profitably, the publishing houses increasingly mobilized young graduates of high schools and colleges to serve as staff editors in their editorial departments and on largescale reference-book projects. This market-driven dynamic in knowledge production and circulation receives even greater play in chapter 6 in Bryna Goodman’s discussion of modern economic thought in Shanghai during the early 1920s. She observes that business newspapers—by promoting commercial, industrial, and stock market news as well as advertising for newly established stock exchanges and trust companies—created an unprecedented demand for economic information that fueled speculative investment. Rampant speculation, in turn, created a need for professional and scholarly economic analyses—exemplified by Ma Yinchu’s writings, which both integrated and adapted foreign frameworks—as well as new types of institutions to deal with modern commerce and finance. Both these chapters portray how market demand for print commodities created opportunities for lower-ranking literate people without specialized knowledge or professional backgrounds to produce and circulate knowledge. In chapter 8, Timothy B. Weston demonstrates how the dramatic commercial expansion of the newspaper industry after 1911 provided the material basis and impetus to systematize journalistic norms and institutionalize journalism education, drawing primarily on American models. In all these cases, market dynamics were fundamental to institutional

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developments and formation of new work identities in the publishing sector. At the other extreme, powerful political actors set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of legitimate knowledge. Part IV captures a progressive expansion of the capacity of Leninist political regimes to oversee, institutionalize, and define systems of knowledge, an ability that the successive crises of the Sino-Japanese War and the Civil War served to enhance during the late 1930s and 1940s. Here we focus more on the state as a knowledge actor than as an object of new systems of knowledge, as it was in new fields like political science and criminology during the first half of the twentieth century.34 The ongoing penchant of Republican states to intervene actively in intellectual life structurally paralleled some activities of the late imperial state, which had set school curricula by establishing examination standards, had selected a state elite through those examinations, and had patronized a generous array of academic, cultural, and artistic projects. In chapter 9, J. Megan Greene illustrates the Nationalist Party’s wartime efforts to promote scientific and technical education at universities and research institutions based on what the regime had identified as priorities for postwar reconstruction. Though uneven, state interventions—in terms of funding, curriculum design, student recruitment, and mass propaganda—produced specific patterns of research, development, and institutions reminiscent of late imperial influence on knowledge production. Within Yan’an, the headquarters of the expanding Chinese Communist Movement, the CCP judged knowledge and cultural production strictly according to their contributions to the revolutionary project, as defined by a small, vanguard party elite. In chapter 10, Timothy Cheek analyzes the development of a revolutionary conceptual field that set discursive parameters on propaganda, organization, and security as well as on the relations between the self and the party. In chapter 11, Eddy U observes that the Mao leadership successfully redefined a diversity of literate people as members of a stigmatized category referred to as intellectuals (zhishifenzi 知識分子), while elevating the leaders themselves to virtually unchallengeable statuses. The development not only had personal consequences but also redefined the value of art, science, education, and other disciplines. By illuminating the dynamics of discourse and practice that governed cadres, Cheek and U suggest how the party began to develop its own category of knowledge workers.

34  See, for instance, Frederic Wakeman’s seminal studies of scientific approaches to policing and criminology: “Policing Modern Shanghai,” China Quarterly 115 (September 1988): 408–440; Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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15

In most instances, however, neither the state nor the market was clearly dominant in the formation of knowledge, professions, or disciplines. The chapters in the first two parts of this book show that literate Chinese negotiated among forces that were in an unstable, contingent, or dynamic balance in which both state and market had a variable presence. To borrow from Pierre Bourdieu, in this context legitimate knowledge became a function of various forms of capital (political, economic, symbolic, and cultural) that literate people used to support the circulation and legitimacy of their ideas. At the same time, those ideas articulated within “the structure of the social space,” that is, according to the authority and interests of political regimes, economic actors, academic institutes, elite networks, and other influential agents.35 Part I assesses how Chinese scholars, including Zhu Kezhen, introduced and demarcated a range of modern academic disciplines—geography, historical geography, anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology. Although intellectual appropriation, amalgamation, and contestation were means through which disciplinary boundaries were drawn and redrawn, ongoing social, economic, and political change greatly affected such “boundary work.”36 In chapter 1, Tze-ki Hon reveals the vital roles of European influence, commercial publishing, political networking, and institution building in the rise of modern historical geography as an academic discipline during the late Qing and early Republic. The discipline, however, underwent critical change as a result of political centralization and academic professionalization under the Nationalist Party. By the late 1920s, modern historical geography had evolved into a highly specialized, scientistic discipline in service to the state while the practitioners, with their enviable overseas training and diplomas, had become part of “the state nobility.” In chapter 2, Clayton D. Brown demonstrates that anthropology took shape as a discipline under state sponsorship through academic entrepreneurs building research institutes and university departments and assigning positions. For the most part such institution building was a central government prerogative, but Brown demonstrates how local states and non-state actors during the Republican period could resist and contest the center’s monopoly on the tools and objects of knowledge. Further, anthropology’s legitimacy, as illustrated in the case of archaeology, remained fragile before the Sino-Japanese War. Methodological debates divided foreign-trained scholars, even as they competed with domestic Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 41. 36  Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries in Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 35 

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scholars and political entities at various levels to control scholarly resources and academic discourse. In the development of the technical professions—law, the judiciary, and engineering—discussed in part II we also see literate Chinese operating in relation to both state and market. In chapter 5 Elisabeth Köll recounts how the technical demands of the railroad industry drove international corporations to train civil engineers with Western methods to run the business. But the Chinese state’s bid to nationalize railways after the founding of the Republic correspondingly led it to establish higher-education institutions, like Jiaotong University, to train engineers with new forms of technical knowledge borrowed strategically from the West. In chapters 3 and 4, Huei-min Sun and Glenn D. Tiffert demonstrate that the late Qing and Republican states also played active roles in developing China’s modern judiciary and legal system, introducing foreign systems of legal knowledge and building institutions. Yet in tracing the development of legal education in the late Qing and early Republican periods, Sun’s chapter reveals that popular demand for more diverse and comprehensive programs in law and politics (fazheng 法政), which originated in Japan, shaped Chinese definitions of legal knowledge. Chinese elites with generalist “law and politics” degrees became practicing lawyers only in response to early Republican markets for intellectual labor, when they had no guaranteed access to career paths in government and education. Despite this specialization, Chinese lawyers continued to think and act like literati, especially in their social and intellectual lives away from the courtroom, pointing to a disjunction between their technical knowledge and cultural practice. China’s judicial profession, the focus of Tiffert’s chapter, built on the foundation of the legal education described by Sun. Republican states institutionalized the judiciary and transformed lawyers into judges through the development of specialized training programs and certification protocols. The Nationalist Party took this institutionalization one step further, seeking to “partify” (danghua) the judiciary by integrating party ideology into legal knowledge and striving to create a generation of judges who were party members. State and market forces that affected knowledge, professions, and disciplines shifted dramatically as the sense of national crisis heightened during the 1930s and 1940s. Under conditions of total war, the overarching imperative of national survival threatened to impose a common standard of relevance and validity on all systems of knowledge. Knowledge claims came increasingly to be framed in terms of their relevance to national interest, security, and salvation. Within geography, demarcation of national boundaries for sovereignty and military defense purposes became a primary research focus (chapter 1). A branch of anthropology, archaeology

Introduction

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was pressured by the state to research, establish, and promote positive moral and spiritual links between Tang culture and the nation in crisis, whereas ethnology developed an emphasis on “frontier” studies that aimed at clarifying China’s territory and facilitating the integration, education, and administration of minority people (chapter 2). Journalists found their stories to be evaluated in light of nationalist imperatives (chapter 8). The pressing nature of the wartime crises strengthened the roles of the Nationalist and Communist parties in setting themselves up as arbiters of knowledge. War creates a “state of exception” in which routine procedures of evaluating knowledge claims and regulating institutions could be suspended by powerful political agents acting on behalf of a nation perceived to be struggling for survival.37 Part IV attributes the parties’ ability to define and distribute legitimate knowledge, at least in part, to the Sino-­Japanese War. For example, in chapter 9, Greene observes that the National Defense Science Movement promoted by the state in the 1940s extended to the county and city levels and served to incorporate expanding numbers of students into science education, including vocational training. In chapter 11, U shows that the war, which attracted and, to some extent, trapped large numbers of literate men and women in Yan’an, presented the Communists with an opportunity to redefine the intellectual within the revolutionary movement. Similarly, in chapter 4, Tiffert demonstrates that Nationalist Party efforts to partify the judiciary gained leverage only during the wartime crisis. A key feature of the analysis that runs throughout this book is the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of thought and the material and social world. In tracking this interplay, we build on but go beyond the two approaches that have dominated the study of modern Chinese intellectual history: the history of ideas and the sociology of knowledge.38 The history of ideas has focused on the transfer of complex systems of ideas (for example, evolution, democracy, and socialism) from the West, with great attention to continuities and discontinuities with late imperial intellectual traditions and the transformation or distortion of those ideas 37  The editors thank Klaus Muhlhan for his insightful discussion of Carl Schmitt’s characterization of the state of exception and its political implications in a paper for the University of California, Berkeley, conference in 2009. Muhlhan’s formulation informs our analysis here. 38  For seminal studies in the history of ideas and sociology of knowledge, see Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–37 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Laurence A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-kang and China’s New History: Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May 4th Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

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in China. The sociology of knowledge has tended to situate these intellectual projects in relation to dominant political movements of the early twentieth century and measure how the intellectual environment has been shaped by political regimes. While both frameworks are important, this book takes up equally valuable technical, institutional, and cultural issues that shaped the introduction and institutionalization of an array of influential academic, professional, and political knowledge. It also illustrates the profound implications of such knowledge for cultural values, social hierarchies, institutional development, occupational structures, material life, social roles and identities, and other facets of everyday life. On the one hand, we illustrate the ways new ideas sparked the production of cultural commodities and formation of new institutions. Modern systems of knowledge, such as geography, anthropology, engineering, law, and journalism, inspired construction of research institutes and university departments and led to new patterns of training, recruitment, compensation, and appointment that reconstituted social life. The proliferation of new ideas helped drive the explosion of the publishing industry from the early twentieth century onward. For commercial publishers, the increasing differentiation of the field of knowledge justified investment in a diversity of series, textbooks, journals, and reference books that covered each discipline, method, and position (chapter 7). Within individual disciplines, experimentation with and institutionalization of foreign-derived systems of thought correspondingly justified publication of distinct newspapers, journals, and textbooks (chapters 1, 5, 6). Ideas coalesced, leading to intellectual networks connected to the state, market, or both (chapters 1 and 2). Introduction of new ideas, in short, altered social landscapes and reshaped daily life, especially in terms of institution building, print culture, and the practice of intellectual labor. On the other hand, we explore how the resulting institutions served to validate and legitimize systems of knowledge and professional and academic fields. The establishment of formal organizations and informal networks, changes in work cultures and social practices, and materialization of ideas in texts underpinned the elaboration and circulation of new ideas, giving them a meaningful social presence. For instance, chapters 1 through 4 and 8 indicate that nothing legitimized an academic or professional field in the same way as the establishment of a school, a training program, a research institute at the Academia Sinica, or a department at a national university, even though individuals within the discipline were not necessarily well trained or there was disagreement about its intellectual boundaries. Chapters 5 and 9 show that standardization, infrastructure building, and national construction promoted by the state elevated the academic status of fields such as engineering along with various other

Introduction

19

kinds of scientific and technical education. Further, publication of a journal, dictionary, series, or lexicon could serve to substantiate a discipline (chapter 1) or a system of practical knowledge (chapter 6). More generally, the book demonstrates that the introduction and institutionalization of new systems of knowledge depended on the development of a whole social infrastructure. From One to Many One of the most powerful and lasting effects of the institutionalization of new systems of knowledge was the creation of new social roles in the form of professional identities and/or subject positions from which the validity and legitimacy of knowledge could be established. Thus, at the most general level, this book portrays a decisive phase in the dissolution of the common, coherent position of the scholar-official in late imperial Chinese society and the crystallization of new formations of knowledge actors during the initial period of Chinese modernity. From a long-range perspective, this transformation represents the culmination of the late imperial literati’s process of academic and technical specialization that gathered momentum from the late Ming through the Qing periods.39 The final decoupling of the Confucian knowledge structure from the imperial institution, along with the proliferation of new forms of knowledge and institutional structures, led to a qualitatively new phase in the redefinition of the literati identity. The speed of this transformation in the first half of the twentieth century drove literate people to actively construct new professional identities for themselves. Consequently, this book is populated by few generalist literati but a diverse spectrum of specialists: historians, geographers, anthropologists, journalists, editors, engineers, lawyers, and judges, along with party cadres. From one kind of knowledge actor we get many, as knowledge structures proliferated and took social form in various ways. From the chapters we see a number of different dynamics that drove the process of specialization and differentiation. First, the modern education system, especially at the tertiary level, rapidly integrated modern Western academic disciplines, leading to a proliferation of the academic and technical roles that scholars could embody.40 Parts I and II capture some sense 39  Bejamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Philip Kuhn and Susan Mann Jones, “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 40  For accounts of the development of academic fields in China’s universities, see Xiaoqing

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of this diversity. At the same time, the complexity of modern disciplinary methods demanded specialization. The depth of learning required to master anthropology, geography, law, or engineering, for instance, made it difficult to acquire expertise in multiple fields and transcend more delimited specialization. More importantly, the debates and tensions elaborated in this book, both within and across fields, meant there was no commonly accepted core of knowledge that could provide the basis for educated generalists, as Confucian learning and literary mastery had provided during the late imperial period. Ming and Qing specialists had built their distinctive skill sets on the firm base of the examination curriculum.41 From the 1910s onward (if not earlier), learning meant specialization. One sign of this transformation is that Confucian learning itself became a specialized field as something akin to a Chinese version of classical studies as national learning (guoxue 國學). Further, competition among intellectuals with different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, which partly reflected diverse sources of training, generated ever-finer distinctions in the form of subdisciplines and subfields. In chapter 1, Hon elaborates this process with regard to fields related to geography, as the study of the earth (dixue 地學) of the early twentieth century fractured into fields and subfields of meteorology, physical geography, human geography, historical geography, and so forth, sometimes in competition against one another. In chapter 2, Brown tracks similar proliferation of disciplinary distinctions in relation to ethnology, anthropology, and archaeology. The race to institutionalize modern academic fields associated with particular methodologies and kinds of knowledge in turn fostered the proliferation of professional identities and roles.42 Social and cultural dynamics related to intellectual life under modernization further contributed to differentiation among knowledge workers. One key process was the increasing division of mental labor, which undoubtedly had started during the late imperial period but increased in speed and currency with industrialization during the early twentieth Diana Lin, Peking University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1898–1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Yeh, The Alienated Academy. 41  Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power; G. William Skinner, “Mobility Strategies in Late Imperial China: A Regional Systems Analysis,” in Regional Analysis, vol. 1, ed. Carol Smith (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 327–364. 42  Brian Moloughney and Peter Zarrow, eds., Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2011).

Introduction

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century.43 In chapters 7 and 8, for instance, Culp and Weston describe proliferation of specialized tasks related to cultural production—reporting, compiling, editing, and proofreading—at book and newspaper publishers. Similarly, in chapter 5, Köll describes the various forms of technical work required to run modern railroads. Here, the demands of production and management anchored literate people in delimited work roles that came to define their social identities. In fact, this very identification of individuals by role in the industrial labor process, rather than by, for example, examination status or family membership, marks a transformation in the definition of the literate elite. This is not to say that symbolic capital associated with education, genealogy, state, or class was not important to the proliferation of new social roles and identities. Rather, as the field of knowledge expanded, complex negotiations over social status occurred with intricate articulations between the late imperial habitus of literati culture, on the one hand, and new forms of training, vocation, and politics, on the other. For example, in chapter 7, Culp shows that the Confucian legacy remained significant in commercial publishing houses, as low-level staff editors relied on their ability to work with their pens to differentiate themselves from the working class. Sun, in chapter 3, demonstrates that Republican-era lawyers continued to cultivate Qing-era hobbies of writing, painting, and leisure gatherings to distinguish themselves from members of the technical professions. Hon, Brown, Goodman, Köll, and Sun all demonstrate that symbolic capital associated with achievement in the new educational system, especially overseas training, became a key measure of cultural status, sometimes even overshadowing the possession of functional skills (chapters 1–3, 5, 6). Likewise, association with nation building in those tumultuous decades, whether through state service, military resistance, or revolutionary practice, could generate symbolic value for making status and material claims. In the first two chapters, Brown and Hon show that anthropologists and geographers could easily align themselves with the state and receive support for pursuing their research interests. In another vein, U suggests, in chapter 11, that within the CCP headquarters during the Sino-Japanese War, cultivation of daily habits associated with the lauded peasantry helped educated people to acquire the status of revolutionary. In short, literate people in the late Qing and Republican periods operated in a diverse and flexible symbolic landscape in which For prior examples of role differentiation in elite cultural production, see Elman, From Philosophy to Philology; R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Qianlong Era, Harvard East Asian Monograph 129 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987). 43 

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they created a wide range of subject positions and cultural identities for themselves. In delineating the discrete positions and identities associated with these dynamics of differentiation, this book contributes to a growing literature on the history of professions and the intellectual in modern China.44 Köll, Tiffert, Sun, and Weston in particular show us processes of licensing and government approval, as well as formation of professional organizations (chapters 3–5, 8). Yet by considering how a wide array of new cultural elites emerged contemporaneously at the start of the twentieth century, we also emphasize the competitive process by which they claimed vis-àvis one another social status and cultural authority, an approach informed by Andrew Abbott’s innovative work on the sociology of professions, The System of Professions.45 This book’s comparative approach makes such analysis possible. Reading in juxtaposition the chapters by Hon and Brown in part I, for instance, allows us to see how debates over methodology— fieldwork or archaeology versus historical and textual analysis—served as the basis for delineating particular fields or subfields—geography versus historical geography, anthropology versus ethnology. But the book also invites broader comparisons, considering, for instance, how technical fields like law and engineering competed for status, recognition, and resources with academic disciplines in the natural and social sciences. Here the very definition, organization, and deployment of knowledge, beyond administrative procedures of licensing and social processes of voluntary association, were central to establishing relative status in China’s professional circles. Distinctive Modernity, Historical Legacies The quandary of defining what kind of knowledge is valid and legitimate, as well as the dissemination and institutionalization of that knowledge, has been a shared part of the modern experience. In the Euro-American cultural sphere this quandary has been the common condition of the 44  E.g., Xiaoping Cong, Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897–1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Zhu Ying 朱英 and Wei Wenxiang 魏文享, eds., Jindai Zhongguo ziyou zhiyezhe qunti yu shehui bianqian 近代中國自由職業者群體與社會變遷 [Modern China’s free profession groups and social change] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2009) and the many volumes on discrete professional groups collected in the Shanghai chengshi shehui shenghuo shi congshu 上海城市社會生活史叢書 series coordinated by the Shanghai Academy of Social Science History Institute, under the direction of Xiong Yuezhi. 45  Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Introduction

23

post-Cartesian moment, the end of divinely authorized monarchy, the rise of the nation-state, and the onset of industrial capitalism, through which “all that is solid melts into air.”46 Starting from the first half of the twentieth century, China has shared the global modern predicament. However, the Chinese search for valid and legitimate knowledge, along with the formation of new professional identities, developed in distinctive ways because of China’s particular historical dynamics. As a whole, the chapters of this book point to three processes that distinguished the modern Chinese experience of intellectual specialization and knowledge production: the heightened use of symbolic capital by literate people to claim status and establish cultural authority; their fluid movement across academic institutions, commercial publishing, state service, and revolutionary struggles; and state intervention in the arbitration of knowledge because of late imperial precedents and the wartime state of exception. In emphasizing historically contingent jurisdictional competition as the central force driving the formation of modern professions, Abbott notes the impact of tradition and culture on these struggles, but he does not highlight mobilization of symbolic capital by those involved.47 The Chinese cases gathered in this book reveal that such mobilization was critical to the introduction and institutionalization of academic and professional disciplines and the formation of professional identities and new subject positions.48 Two historical dynamics promoted use of symbolic capital in China’s disciplinary struggles. First, during the late imperial period examination success and cultural literacy provided symbolic resources that underwrote meaningful status distinctions, apart from generating wealth or providing access to official position. In chapters 3 and 7, Sun and Culp reveal how inherited symbolic and value structures continued to inform strategies of social differentiation during the early twentieth century. Further, new systems of knowledge and cultural practice from Europe, North America, and Japan had highly charged symbolic value because of their association with power and modernity. In the first three parts, nearly every chapter suggests one or both of the following ideas: (1) Cultural capital derived from mastery and deployment of modern forms of academic or professional knowledge; (2) Personal association with foreign institutions For a thoughtful synthetic characterization of the experience of modernity in global context, see Stuart Hall et al., eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 47  Abbott, The System of Professions, 2, 8–9, 184–195. 48  This emphasis on the cultural value associated with cultural and academic practices draws inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu. See, for instance, his Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988) and The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 46 

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and cultural practices had great value in competitions for cultural authority, status, and prestige. These historical dynamics made symbolic resources as important a factor in jurisdictional struggles over the definition of new fields and identities as the control over skills and knowledge that Abbott emphasizes. This importance of symbolic capital is revealed fully in the last two chapters of the book. The CCP leadership’s efforts to turn educated people into revolutionaries entailed a complete revaluation and, to a great extent, devaluation of their classical training as well as modern Western learning. Equally distinctive in the formation of new knowledge structures in early twentieth-century China was the traffic of literate people across sectors. The rapid and simultaneous development of the modern state, industrial capitalism, and academic institutions created a variety of contexts in which the relatively small population of men and women with specialized learning could operate. Across the chapters we find knowledge producers moving fluidly between officialdom, academic positions, and commercial publishing without noticeable loss of prestige or wealth. The ability to leverage opportunities in one domain against those in another might have allowed literate Chinese to optimize both status and income. Although participation in the Communist Movement caused most literate men and women to lose status and income, the revolutionary struggle was yet another channel through which the educated could put their knowledge and skills to use. This marked institutional and spatial mobility was exemplified by the life of Zhu Kezhen as described at the start of this introduction. It also characterized the life experiences of radical intellectuals like Mao Zedong, who had run a bookstore, taught school, published journals, and worked as a librarian at Peking University before becoming a full-time revolutionary.49 This occupational and spatial mobility contrasts markedly with the experience of professionalization and elaboration of new systems of knowledge elsewhere. In other modern contexts, specialization has tended to box knowledge producers into fields and roles determined through methodological and technical mastery, occupational credentialing, and progressive labor market segmentation.50 Institutional mobility has required adopting a generalist perspective and engaging a middlebrow audience that has, in many instances, entailed a significant loss of status and authority.51 China’s relative dearth of individuals with Jonathan D. Spence, Mao Zedong (New York: Viking, 1999). Eliot Friedson, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Larson, The Rise of Professionalism. 51  For a thoughtful assessment of the costs involved in transcending specialized fields and moving out of academic institutions, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 49  50 

Introduction

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specialized learning at the same time that the state, academy, and market all demanded their expertise created distinctive conditions that allowed knowledge producers to move fluidly among institutions. Equally distinctive was increasing political intervention in the formation of knowledge structures. The book shows that by the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Nationalist state and Communist Party had successfully restricted the intellectual autonomy and movements of literate populations through political campaigns, resource allocation, and hierarchical organizations that privileged some domains of knowledge over others. Read together, the chapters cast doubt on the idea of a seamless transition from the quasi-intellectual monopoly of the late imperial state to that of the Nationalist and then the Communist authoritarian states. Certainly, centuries of state-imposed orthodoxy through the civil service examination system predisposed modern Chinese cultural elites to view the state as a key agent in differentiating among competing knowledge claims. However, as the chapters show, the end of the civil service examination system, the New Culture Movement, and the fragmentation of political authority during the early Republican era weakened the state’s claim to intellectual authority, at the same time that intellectual space expanded and scholarly practices multiplied. From the late 1930s onward, the Nationalist state and the Communist Party took advantage of the state of exception created by total war to cement their authority to adjudicate knowledge and influence its production on grounds of national survival and revolution. Thus, although the ability of the Leninist regimes to arbitrate claims of legitimate knowledge structurally paralleled that of the late imperial state, they did not directly and automatically inherit the mantle of legitimating authority. Rather, after decades of political weakness and intellectual experimentation at the start of the twentieth century, China’s wartime crisis created new conditions under which Leninist regimes could assert their cultural and intellectual authority, through new institutional mechanisms. These three processes, then, differentiated the formation of new systems of knowledge and knowledge producers in China from that in the European and North American contexts, which are often taken to be normative and quintessentially modern. These dynamics point to areas that future scholars should consider when analyzing the formation of knowledge structures, professions, and elite identities in contexts outside the Euro-American one. Specifically, our work suggests that the cultural value associated with competing forms of indigenous and imported knowledge invariably had implications for hierarchies of knowledge systems, academic institutions, and knowledge producers as they took shape in contexts of economic and political development. The pace, timing, and interrelations among state formation, academic institution building, and

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industrial development were important factors that shaped opportunities for literate elites. In addition, the dynamics of anticolonial struggle and decolonization specific to each world context can be seen to have shaped the involvement of literate elites in knowledge production in critical ways, not least their adoption of foreign models for nationalist purposes. In comparative terms, the historical analysis in this book points to the need for greater attention to these developments in other cultural and historical contexts to allow us to move toward a more global understanding of the modern experience through which new systems of valid knowledge and knowledge producers were created. In sum, the chapters of this book explore in unprecedented ways the horizontal competition among knowledge systems and institutions as well as the vertical interplay between new models of thought and action, on the one hand, and late imperial China’s rich heritage of learning, culture, and state formation, on the other. Tracking along these two axes will bring a new level of coherence and significance to the lived experience and activities of a quintessentially modern Chinese intellectual like Zhu Kezhen, whose biography opened this introduction. Our approach helps make comprehensible Zhu’s shifting commitments to particular disciplines, subdisciplines, and methodologies. It explains his fluid movement in and out of academic institutions and private publishing companies as well as his growing involvement with Leninist party-states. And it allows us to assess the value of his foreign academic credentials and institutional affiliations in comparison to other forms of symbolic capital. This book makes legible in new ways China’s modern thought and intellectual life as a social process.

Part I New Systems of Academic Learning

Late Qing and Republican China saw the emergence of a variety of academic disciplines based on European and American models as well as Japanese adaptations. The rise of these disciplines redefined China’s intellectual and institutional landscape. In the opening chapters of this book, Tze-ki Hon and Clayton D. Brown describe the formation of two such disciplines, historical geography and anthropology, both shaped by the realization that China was no longer a world of its own but existed in an international system of nation-states and had to survive its internal competition. In chapter 1, Hon observes that the emerging discipline of historical geography witnessed a quick transition from a vocal field of knowledge dominated by former literati who sought to address national concerns to a specialized profession within higher education that nevertheless aimed to influence political decisions. In chapter 2, Brown acknowledges that politics was a driving force in the development of anthropology but focuses on the multifaceted struggle to introduce, define, and practice anthropology in Republican China. The state played a critical role in the rise of both disciplines. For Hon, the literati-turned-geographers consistently had the state as their audience in mind. They considered knowledge of borders, resources, and landscapes key to developing national capabilities against foreign aggression, or defining the boundaries of China. Government officials, in turn, allocated funds to the geographers for their professional association and research. Close ties developed between the Nationalist government and Western-trained geographers. The latter promoted their science-based knowledge to a state eager to exploit it for political legitimacy and development reasons. Brown indicates that state action was crucial to the development of anthropology. The notable Cai Yuanpei and his junior colleagues acted as academic entrepreneurs and promoted what they considered an essential branch of knowledge to the Republican government and, in turn, received official appointment as well as financial, political,

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and even military support for their projects, the price of which was a constant negotiation and positioning within a state framework to develop the discipline. Both chapters highlight the changing conception of the discipline. Hon offers a narrative of displacement. Even though former literati took advantage of their social standing to promote historical geography, their efforts were eventually eclipsed by overseas-trained academic specialists who helped to develop modern higher education and occupied key positions within this institution. The specialists, nevertheless, had to grapple with the type of academic enterprise they wanted, from its core philosophy to the adoption and modification of foreign institutional models. Brown probes the competition to define anthropology. Not only did differences exist between “traditionalists” and returned specialists. The latter were trained under different academic systems and thus sought to demarcate the discipline differently, even though they saw themselves as practicing a modern scientific discipline. Using the example of archaeology, Brown shows that even though anthropological research received endorsement and support from the Nationalist government, the practitioners’ authority was challenged in the field because, among other things, the right of the Nationalists to rule was itself questioned. At the same time, foreign practitioners familiar with archaeological study in China questioned the practices of their new Chinese colleagues, some of whom had been their own students.

CHAPTER 1

Coming to Terms with Global Competition: The Rise of Historical Geography in Early Twentieth-Century China

TZE-KI HON The cosmos is the fusion of time and space. There is no beginning and end in time; Nor are there marked boundaries in space. In their continuous mixing and interaction, We have episodes in history and manifestations in geography. —Liu Yizheng, Shixue yu dixue, 1926

It is well known that after the Opium War (1839–1842), Chinese intellectuals took an avid interest in geographical studies in order to understand the world and the global system of nation-states. This interest—first marked by the publication of Wei Yuan’s 魏源 Haiguo tuzhi 海國圖誌 (1842) and Xu Jiyu’s 徐繼畬 Yinghuan zhilüe 瀛寰志略 (1848)—was a driving force in the rise of geography as a system of knowledge. It was also an impetus for the growth of professional associations and publication networks that energized China’s print capitalism centered in Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. More important, the interest ignited a drastic change in the intellectual landscape that would put a premium on empirical knowledge of the globe.1 Wang Yong 王勇, Zhongguo dilixue shi 中國地理學史 [A history of geographical studies in China] (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan, 1986 [1938]), 217–262; Guo Shuanglin 郭双林, Xichao jidang xia de wanqing dilixue 西潮激蕩下的晚清地理學 [Late Qing geographical studies amid Western influence] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2000), 160–342; Zou Zhenhuan 鄒振環, Wanqing Xifang dilixue zai Zhongguo: Yi 1815 nian zhi 1911 nian Xifang dilixue yizhu de chuanbo yu yingxiang wei zhongxin 晚清西方地理學在中國: 以1815年至1911年西方地理學譯著 1 

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In early twentieth-century China, geographical studies were referred to in a variety of ways, including dixue 地學 (study of the earth), dili 地 理 (principles of the earth), diwen 地文 (patterns of the earth), renwen dili 人文地理 (human geography), shidi 史地 (history and geography), and lishi dili 歷史地理 (historical geography). These terms, sometimes overlapping and sometimes discrete, reflect changes in the understanding of the imported system of geographical knowledge. The terms also indicate scholars’ struggles in reconciling geographical studies as a mixture of natural sciences (for example, geology, meteorology, and mineralogy) and social sciences (for example, economics, political science, and population studies). The ambiguity in the discipline’s boundaries troubled China’s scholars as they followed in the footsteps of Europeans in building a professional and academic system of geographical knowledge. Despite ambiguity in the discipline’s boundaries, the goal of modern Chinese geographical studies had always been the same: understanding the fusion of time and space. As shown in the epigraph that opens this chapter, understanding this fusion of temporality and spatiality requires a creative mixture of two types of knowledge: the knowledge of the unfolding of events in human societies and the knowledge of extracting and appropriating natural resources from the environment.2 For many Chinese in the early twentieth century, understanding the fusion of temporality and spatiality was not an idle, narcissistic exercise of an armchair professor. Rather, it was a practical, effective measure to save China from being obliterated by the hostile competitions among nation-states.3 Having witnessed China’s continuous defeats by foreigners and the failure of the 1911 Revolution in building a unified, stable country, many Chinese were keenly aware of the dangers of their times and the poverty and backwardness of their country. For them, “time” and “space” had specific meanings. Time referred to the early twentieth century when Western powers dominated the global system of nation-states; space denoted the territorial boundaries of China that were frequently challenged and savagely infringed upon.4 During the early twentieth century, studying the fusion 的傳播與影響為中心 [Western geographical studies in late Qing: Translations of Western geographical works from 1815 to 1911] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 158–352. 2  Liu Yizheng 柳詒徴, “Bianyan” 弁言 [Foreword], Shixue yu dixue 史學與地學 [History and geography] 1, no. 1 (1926): 1. 3  Liu Yizheng’s quoted paragraph is followed by sentences that disclose a clear nationalistic tone: “Nation is also a fusion of time and space: we divide time into different periods and carve out space to form different regions; we write history when thinking diachronically and we study geography when thinking synchronically.” 4  Tze-ki Hon, “From a Hierarchy of Time to a Hierarchy of Space: The Meanings of SinoBabylonianism in Early Twentieth Century China,” Modern China 36, no. 2 (2009): 139–169; Han Ziqi 韓子奇, “Jinru shijie de cuozhe yu ziyou: Ershi shijiechu de Dixue zazhi” 進入世

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of time and space was tantamount to a call to arms to defend China’s sovereignty in the global competition for wealth and power. Two Groups of Historical Geographers This chapter examines the rise of historical geography (shidi or lishi dili) as a new system of knowledge. Here, historical geography broadly means a combination of natural sciences and social sciences that served China’s quest for a place in the global system of nation-states. It is an abbreviation for the study of the “fusion of time and space” that highlights both the interaction and interdependence among nation-states, and the dangers and opportunities that China faced in global competition. I argue that founding this new system of knowledge reflected a momentous change in the Chinese view of the world, a result of Chinese acceptance of the Eurocentric world order that was based on a global network of communication and distribution, a fierce competition for land and resources, and a rapid mobilization of capital and labor for industrial production and military adventures. Reflecting and reinforcing these “modern” priorities, the founding of historical geography was part of the Chinese attempt to create a nation-state, a market economy, and a cultural elite to serve the state and the market. To highlight this momentous change in the Chinese view of the world, I compare the work of two groups of historical geographers. In the first part of the chapter, I focus on former literati who, in the wake of the abolition of civil service examinations, reinvented themselves as educators in the national school system and writers in the print market. Represented by the Chinese Geographical Society (Zhongguo dixue hui 中國地學會) in Beijing, this group of historical geographers wrote for Dixue zazhi 地學 雜誌 (Geographic journal, 1910–1937), the first academic journal devoted to geography, geology, meteorology, mineralogy, and population studies. Led by Zhang Xiangwen 張湘文 (1867–1933), the journal was broad in scope in order to reflect an indiscriminate interest in the global system of nation-states. At the same time, the journal had highly specialized contents, especially with regard to promoting historical geography as a system of knowledge about the modern world.

界的挫折與自由: 二十世界初的“地學雜誌” [The trials and tribulations of joining the global system: Dixue zazhi of early twentieth-century China], Xin shixue 新史學 19, no. 2 (2008): 151–179; Han Ziqi, “Huang Jie Huangshi zhong de shijie tuxiang” 黃節“黃史”中的世界圖像 [The images of the globe in Wang Jie’s History of the Yellow], in Shibian zhongde shixue 世變 中的史學 [Historical learning in times of drastic changes], ed. Li Jinqiang 李金强 (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2010), 3–22.

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In the second part of the chapter, I turn my attention to professional academics who worked in state-supported universities such as Central University (Zhongyang daxue 中央大學, formerly Southeastern University, Dongnan daxue 東南大學). Represented by the Historical and Geographical Society of China (Zhongguo shidi xuehui 中國史地學會) in Nanjing, this group of professional academicians wrote for Shixue yu dixue 史 學與地學 (History and geography, 1926–1928). Led by Zhu Kezhen 竺可楨 (1890–1974) and Zhang Qiyun 張其昀 (1901–1985), the journal was aimed at legitimizing historical geography as a specialized academic discipline worthy of being funded by the state. The journal emphasized the scientific nature of historical geography, its pedagogical value in training citizens, and its modernity in being a fast-growing academic subject around the world. Although sharing an interest in defining China’s role in the world through a study of geography, the two groups of historical geographers differed in age, educational background, location, and work. These differences reflected the transition of the old literati (shidafu 士大夫) to the new intellectuals (zhishi jieji 知識階級) that characterized the social and cultural contours of early twentieth-century China.5 However, their work and concerns demonstrate that the transition was not as clear-cut as some scholars suggest.6 Despite their differences, the two groups of historical geographers were equally effective and eloquent in analyzing the global system of nation-states. More importantly, they were united by a commitment to protect Chinese territorial sovereignty against foreign aggressions. This mission of safeguarding the country’s territory made historical geography a fast-growing system of knowledge in early twentieth-­century China. I refer to intellectuals as zhishi jieji 知識階級 rather than zhishifenzi知識分子 to acknowledge the politics of classifying the educated elite in Mao’s China, where zhishifenzi carried a specific meaning in the system of class labels. For a discussion of zhishifenzi as a “ranked position in the system of class status” in Mao’s China, see Tani Barlow, “Zhishifenzi (Chinese Intellectuals) and Power,” Dialectical Anthropology 16, nos. 3–4 (1991): 209–232. In using the term zhishi jieji, I accept Barlow’s argument that the term refers to intellectuals before 1927. However, I do not accept her separation between zhishi jieji 知識階級 (1905–1919) and qiming xuezhe 啓蒙學者 (scholars promoting enlightenment; 1919–1927). As shown in this chapter, some zhishi jieji were qiming xuezhe even though they wrote in classical Chinese and did not support the cultural agenda of the May Fourth New Culture Movement. For further discussion of zhishifenzi, please see chapter 11. 6  Current scholarship emphasizes the abolition of the civil service examination system in 1905 as the pivotal transition from the literati to the intellectuals. See Xu Jilin 許紀霖, Ershi shiji Zhongguo zhishifenzi shilun 二十世紀中國知識份子史論 [A study of twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals] (Beijing: Xinxing chubanshe, 2005), 1–4; Luo Zhitian 羅志田, Quanshi zhuanyi: Jindai Zhongguo de sixiang, shehui, yu xueshu 權勢轉移: 近代中國的思想,社會,與學術 [Paradigm shift: Changes in modern Chinese thought, society, and culture] (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999), 1–17, 161–241. 5 

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In studying the two groups of Chinese historical geographers, this chapter demonstrates that the founding of their discipline was more than a triumph of academic modernization.7 Certainly academic modernization was an important factor in the growth of modern geography. Without academic modernization, modern geography would not have appeared, let alone gained academic and political legitimacy. Yet, the rise of historical geography reflected China’s integration into the twentieth-century world order, which was characterized by cut-throat competition among nations, fervent claims of sovereign rights, and the empirical marking of territorial boundaries. It was also critically shaped by political centralization under Guomindang rule, the advent of print capitalism, and the broader reconstitution of the cultural field. Historical Geographers as Teachers Of the two journals examined in this chapter, Dixue zazhi was the older one. Founded in 1910, a year before the end of the Qing dynasty, the journal was the flagship publication of the first Chinese professional association of historical geographers—the Chinese Geographical Society. Although this society was the biggest and the longest lasting professional association of historical geographers in pre-1949 China, none of its early members was professionally trained as a historian or geographer. During its ­early years, the society recruited members mainly from the old literati who struggled to adapt to the collapse of the imperial system.8 Lacking modern academic credentials or experience in overseas training, most members of the society found employment teaching in secondary schools, vocational schools, Contemporary Chinese scholars focus on Gu Jiegang and his Yugong banyuekan 禹貢半 月刊 as the “turning point” in the founding of historical geography, when modern methods were introduced in studying geography. While it is undeniable that Yugong banyuekan represents an important stage in the development of historical geography, the view privileges Gu and his three students (Tan Qixiang 譚其驤, Shi Nianhai 史念海, and Hou Renzhi 侯仁之) over historical geographers who were not associated with Yugong banyuekan. For the current view of Chinese historical geography, see Tan Qixiang, Changshui ji 長水集 [Selected writings on the unfolding river] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1987), 1–10; Shi Nianhai, Heshan ji 河山集 [Collected writings on rivers and mountains] (Xi’an: Shaanxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1999), 1–13, 570–587; Ge Jianxiong 葛劍雄, “Shijian yu kongjian zhijian de qiusuo” 時間 與空間之間的求索 [In search of the relationship between time and space], in Qiusuo shikong 求索時空 [In search of time and space], ed. Tan Qixiang (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1999), 1–10. 8  Early leaders of the Chinese Geographical Society included Zhang Xiangwen, Bai Yayu 白雅雨, Tao Maoli 陶懋立, and Han Huaili 韓懷禮. For the list of early members of the society, see Zhang Xinglang 張星烺, ed., “Siyang Zhang Dungu jushi nianpu” 泗陽張沌谷居士年譜 [The chronicle of the Buddhist layman Zhang Dungu (Zhang Xiangwen) from Siyang], Dixue zazhi 地學雜誌 1933, no. 2: 13–25. 7 

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and girls’ schools, all of which were deemed less prestigious jobs compared with teaching at universities or working at publishing houses. Yet, armed with classical training and a deep knowledge of world events by reading newspapers, magazines, and foreign books, many members of the society became accomplished historical geographers who produced groundbreaking work, introducing new geographical concepts, locating natural resources within China, and explaining the losses and benefits in fierce global competition. Through hard work and persistent practice, they established the professional image of historical geographers as astute scholars deeply involved in current affairs and international events. Take, for instance, “An Announcement from the Chinese Geographical Society” (“Zhongguo dixuehui qi” 中國地學會啓) published in the first issue of Dixue zazhi in 1910. In this article, the leaders of the Chinese Geographical Society described what they considered the rules of the game of global competition: Human beings have to work the land to obtain food, and to form groups to survive. Nevertheless, owing to fierce competition in natural selection, human beings must go outside of their territories to invade others. As a result, the size of a group’s territory is relative to the rise and fall of the group’s power. It is up to the people of each group to decide whether they want to expand their territory by a hundred li per day, or to lose a hundred li per day. As for the cause [of the rise and fall of power], it is due to the level of geographical knowledge of each group. Thus, the level of geographical knowledge has a direct impact upon a country, and it can cause havoc to a race. It is indeed [a manifestation of] the natural law of selection based on competition.9

The leaders of the Chinese Geographical Society, seemingly unconcerned with the safety of their own country, discussed the “natural law of selection” that rewarded strong nations and punished weak nations. The leaders suggested that China, being a weak nation, had to accept the loss of its land for its backwardness and tardiness in global competition. To a 1910 reader, the fluctuation in the size of a nation might not have been as ominous as it appears to many Chinese today. It was true that for more than half a century since the Opium War, late Qing China had been defeated repeatedly by foreign powers and subsequently had lost land. However, since the natural law of selection should always be fair and just, China might lose land now because it was weak, but would gain back land “Zhongguo dixuehui qi” 中國地學會啓 [An announcement from the Chinese Geographical Society], Dixue zazhi 1910, no. 1: 1. The announcement was published without identifying who the author was. It is likely that Zhang Xiangwen (the founder of the Chinese Geographical Society) wrote this announcement. 9 

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when it became strong and powerful. China’s loss of land was not understood to be permanent. What was considered permanent was the natural law of selection that rewards winners and punishes losers. In the early 1910s, Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) described the “natural law of selection” in his translation of Edward Jenks’s History of Politics. For him, the scientific law of selection states that in terms of political institution, all human communities develop from tribal alliances through feudal empires to nation-states; in terms of economic structure, all human communities develop from hunting and gathering through agriculture to industrial production; in terms of social system, all human communities develop from tribes through patrilineal families to professional classes. As Yan Fu points out, Europeans might have been slow in the earlier stages of social evolution, but they subsequently became more advanced than other peoples because they mastered the skills of building a nation-state, an industrial economy, and an equal and mobile society. As a result, Europeans were destined to be leaders in modern times because they possessed advanced science and technology. By comparison, China had clearly been “fast [in social evolution] in the beginning but slow at the end” (shizhou er zhongchi 始驟而終遲).10 China entered the age of feudalism quite early on by practicing large-scale farming and adopting the patrilineal family structure. Yet, it had been stuck in the “dark ages” from the Qin (221–204 bce) to the Qing (1644–1911 ce). As a result, by the 1910s, China was considered to be at least four hundred years behind Europe.11 The leaders of the Chinese Geographical Society shared such an evolutionary view. They deliberately linked territorial fluctuations to nations’ levels of “civilization.” The leaders argued that the power of a nation was directly related to its mastery of geographical knowledge. There was no better way to build a strong China than by providing its citizens with the best geographical knowledge, a function that the society could fulfill. In an announcement, the leaders of the Chinese Geographical Society attempted to reach out to members of the educated elite. They wrote: Following the custom abroad, we invite esteemed scholars across the country to join the Chinese Geographical Society. Willing to share ideas, we will engage in a dialogue to expand our horizons. We believe that [through a dialogue] we will be able to provide information about where Yan Fu, Shehui tongquan 社會通詮 [Principles of society] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1981 [1904]), x. 11  For a discussion of the time gap between post-Enlightenment Europe and Qing China, see Deng Shi 鄧實, “Guxue fuxing lun” 古學復興論 [On reviving the ancient learning], Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 9 (1905), “xueshuo” 學説: 1b. For the significance of this time gap in modern Chinese intellectual history, see Hon, “Hierarchy of Time,” 149–159. 10 

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Tze-ki Hon to build fortresses at strategic locations on mountains and rivers, how to improve the irrigation system, how to use wetlands and soil [for agriculture], how to protect the borderlands, how to use resources in a timely fashion, and how to improve the transportation system. By undertaking focused and intensive studies, we will provide plans to develop our country and to compete abroad. Indeed, our work will bring great benefit to scholars and political leaders alike.12

The leaders of the society urged their readers—government officials, landed gentry, local leaders, and school masters—to invest resources in improving the “level of geographical knowledge” in China. At a time when the late Qing government was building a national school system and giving local elites power to manage local affairs, the leaders of the society created an image of historical geographers as effective teachers and informed experts in national policy. To promote the role of historical geographers in the expanding educational system, the Chinese Geographical Society enthusiastically supported the educational reforms of the late Qing government, and later the restructuring of the national school system led by the Guomindang. Zhang Xiangwen, the founder of the society, had made a reputation by writing popular geography textbooks such as A Textbook for Chinese ­Geography Classes in Primary School (Mengxue zhongguo dili jiaokeshu 蒙學 中國地理教科書, 1902), A Textbook for Geography Classes in Secondary School (Zhongxue diwen xue jiao keshu 中學地文學教科書, 1905), and A Textbook for Geology (Dizhi xuejiao keshu 地質學教科書, 1905). Zhang sold thousands of copies of his textbooks, which were approved by the Qing government, to students in the newly established national schools. As an accomplished teacher, he also wrote manuals for teaching geography. His lesson plans for geography classes at Nanyang Academy (Nanyang gongxue 南洋公 學; 1898–1904) and Peking University (1917–1920) were circulated among teachers at primary and secondary schools.13 Similarly, Dixue zazhi published large numbers of articles aimed at schoolteachers with no prior training in geography. The articles were related to cartography, geology, mineralogy, physical geography, urban planning, water control and irrigation, and other branches of geographical knowledge.14 To reflect the “Zhongguo dixuehui qi,” Dixue zazhi 1910, no. 1: 1. For Zhang Xiangwen’s geographical writings, see Zhang Xinglang, “Siyang Zhang Dungu,” 13–19. 14  For a discussion of geology, mineralogy, and seismology, see Zhang Hongzhao 章鴻釗, “Zhonghua dizhi diaocha siyi” 中華地質調查私議 [My view on Chinese geological studies], Dixue zazhi 1912, no. 1: 1–15; [Yao] Cun Wu 存吾, “Dizheng zhi yanjiu” 地震之研究 [The study of earthquakes], Dixue zazhi 1921, no. 4: 1–23. For a discussion of physical and human geography, see Sheng Jugong 盛聚功, “Dili zai renlei lishi zhong de qianshili” 地理在人類歷 12  13 

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changing meaning of dixue, some articles provided updated information on how European and American scholars divided the various branches of geography and how they built their geography departments in major universities.15 To make the articles clear and accessible, the editors devoted considerable space to visual aids. For instance, the editors printed a geological diagram of the Beijing area in the first issue of 1910 to show the abundance of mineral resources in northern China. They published a map of the Americas in the seventh issue of 1910 to illustrate the importance of the Panama Canal (which was still under construction) for global trade and the shipping industry. Besides portraying historical geographers as dedicated educators, the editors of Dixue zazhi also presented historical geographers as publicminded intellectuals. Among the journal’s contributors, Bai Meichu 白眉 初 (also known as Bai Yueheng 白月恆, 1876–1940) actively participated in public debates. In 1912, Bai injected himself into the debate on revamping the administrative divisions of the new Republican government.16 In the following year, he joined the debate on where to build the new capital of the Republic of China.17 During the 1920s and 1930s, Bai was even more active, taking part in the debate on rebuilding the nation after the Northern Expedition (1926–1927). To make his voice known, Bai wrote a commentary on Sun Yat-sen’s plans for rebuilding China (Jianguo dagang 建國 大綱);18 he suggested that the Guomindang leaders build the new capital in Beijing;19 and he gave an account of the lands that the Chinese had lost to foreigners in the previous centuries.20 Although most contributors to Dixue zazhi were not as active as Bai in political and civic affairs, on two occasions recent events spurred the editors and the writers to protest what they perceived as injustice against 史中的潛勢力 [The importance of geography on human history], Dixue zazhi 1923, nos. 3–4: 1–23. 15  See [Yao] Cun Wu 存吾, “Jindai dili zhi qiyuan” 近代地理之起源 [The origins of modern geography], Dixue zazhi 1921, no. 3: 1–8; Yao Cunwu 姚存吾, “Dili xue zhi jieshi” 地理學之解 釋 [Explaining geography], Dixue zazhi 1922, no. 1: 1–14. 16  “Liding xinzheng quyu beikao” 釐定行政區域備考 [Suggestions on reorganizing the administrative districts], Dixue zazhi 1912, nos. 7–8: 1a–14b, and 1912, nos. 9–10: 8b–15b. 17  “Guodu wenti zhi yanjiu” 國都問題之研究 [On the question of the national capital], Dixue zazhi 1913, no. 4: 1a–4b. 18  Zuijin wuzhi jianshe jingjie 最新物質建設精解 [The newest explanation of material construction] (Beijing: Jianshe tushuguan, 1931). 19  “Luoyang yu Chang’an” 洛陽與長安 [Luoyang and Chang’an], Dixue zazhi 1933, no. 1: 1–9. 20  “Bianjiang shidi shilüe” 邊疆失地史略 [A brief history of China’s lost border territories], Dixue zazhi 1932, no. 1: 55–68. See also Wai Meng shimu jiyao 外蒙始末紀要 [An account of Outer Mongolia] (Beijing: Jianshe tushuju, 1930); Xizang shimo jieyao 西藏始末紀要 [An account of Tibet] (Beijing: Jianshe tushuju, 1930).

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China. The first occasion was the Versailles Settlement of 1919 in which the Allied Powers, without consulting the Chinese government, let the Japanese take over German colonies in Shandong Province. Sharing the view of the student protesters on May Fourth in Beijing, Dixue zazhi had large numbers of articles urging the Beiyang government to reclaim Qing­ dao (the major seaside city in Shandong) and prevent the expansion of Japanese influence in Shandong Province.21 The other occasion was the return of Lüshun (Port Arthur) and Dalian in 1923. Deeply disturbed by the Japanese attempt to stop the return of the two port cities to China when the Russian lease expired, Dixue zazhi published “An Emergency Announcement from the Chinese Geographical Society” (“Benhui jinyao qishi” 本會緊要啓事) in the combined third and fourth issue of 1923. In the announcement, the editors called on readers to follow closely the event and make sure that the government would take the necessary measures to reclaim the two strategically located ports. To highlight the urgency of the matter, the editors broke the rules of the journal by printing a fullpage “Editors’ Advertisement” (“Bianji guanggao” 編輯廣告). In the advertisement, the editors told readers “not to forget March 26, 1923, the day when the Russian lease expired and we should claim back Lüshun and Dalian.”22 In the following issue, the editors continued to mobilize public opinion by publishing excerpts of news reports and announcements around the country that demanded the return of the two ports.23 Protectors of the Land As shown in the spirited responses to the Versailles Settlement and the return of Lüshun and Dalian, Dixue zazhi contributors firmly believed that their writings could shape political leaders’ views and public opinion. This belief was not groundless. From the late Qing through the Beiyang government to the Nanjing era, top government officials supported the journal financially. The support came in different forms, ranging from private donations to government funds and research grants. The biggest amount came in 1923 when sitting ROC President Li Yuanhong 黎元洪 “Qingdao zuijin guancha” 青島最近觀察 [Recent observations on Qingdao], Dixue zazhi 1919, nos. 9–10: 9a–10b; Tong Yi 通一, “Shandong zhi haohuan” 山東之後患 [The lingering problems in Shandong], Dixue zazhi 1920, no. 7: 12–18; “Riben jingying Shandong neidi zhi diaocha” 日本經營山東内地之調查 [An investigation of Japanese investment in the interior of Shandong], Dixue zazhi 1921, nos. 6–7: 67–89; “Zuijin Qingdao Riren zhuanglüe” 最近青 島日人狀略 [A report on recent Japanese activities in Qingdao], Dixue zazhi 1921, nos. 6–7: 89–91. 22  “Bianji guanggao,” Dixue zazhi 1923, nos. 3–4: back cover. 23  “Lü Da shouhui shengzhong zhi dianwen zhailu” 旅大收囘聲中之電文摘錄 [Selected writings and cable messages for the return of Lüshun and Dalian], Dixue zazhi 1923, nos. 5–6. 21 

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and the General of Jiangsu Province Li Xieyuan 李燮元 gave money to the Chinese Geographical Society to buy land in Beijing’s Beihai area to build the society’s new headquarters.24 The size of the land was doubled when the head of the Beijing army allowed the society to use an adjacent plot of public land. Thus, based on their former literati status, friendship network, and good relationships with national and local leaders, the writers believed that they had the ears of political leaders in national debates. In addition to receiving support from government officials, the journal made money by selling copies nationwide through readers’ subscriptions and a sprawling network of circulation. For example, in 1928, after a fouryear hiatus due to lack of funding, copies of the resumed journal were sold at $2.8 Mexican silver coins for an annual subscription and $0.7 Mexican silver coins for each individual issue. There is no record of the number of subscribers. But it is clear that as late as 1936—a year before the termination of the journal due to the imminent Japanese occupation of Beijing— the editors still saw subscriptions as a major source of income, charging $2.0 Mexican silver coins for an annual subscription, and $0.5 Mexican silver coins for one issue. Besides subscriptions, copies of the journal were sold in bookstores in many major Chinese cities. In 1924, for instance, a reader could purchase a copy of the journal in Beijing, Chengdu, Kaifeng, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Wuchang. At his or her pleasure, a reader could pick up a copy at a bookstore (for example, Commercial Press, Zhonghua Bookstore, Wenhua Bookstore) or at an academic institution (for example, Peking University Press, Chengdu Special School for National Learning).25 With this nationwide circulation network, Dixue zazhi reached a large audience and had far-reaching influence across the nation.26 Dixue zazhi’s close connection with political leaders and its nationwide distribution networks gave its writers the confidence to speak publicly in political debates. As specialists, they believed they had useful advice for the government. As scholars, they believed they could offer objective analyses. As teachers, they believed they could provide training and instruction to turn Chinese citizens into productive and engaged members of the nation. These elements of the self-identity of Dixue zazhi writers led them to assume the role of “protectors of the land” whenever there was news of the loss of the nation’s territorial sovereignty. Zhang Xinglang, “Siyang Zhang Dungu,” 40. See the back cover pages of Dixue zazhi, 1924, no. 1; 1928, no. 1; 1936, no. 3. Due to financial problems, only one issue of Dixue zazhi was published in 1924. 26  For the sprawling network of circulation of Commercial Press, see Li Jiaju 李家駒, Shangwu yinshu guan yu jindai zhishi wenhua de chuanbo商務印書館與近代知識文化的傳播 [Commercial Press and the spread of modern knowledge and culture] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), 199–220. 24  25 

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Among the journal’s writers, Bai Meichu was most successful in projecting the image of “protectors of the land.” Serialized from 1928 to 1930, his long essay “A Study of Pian Ma” chronicled British attempts to occupy an unmarked patch of land between Burma and Yunnan. What provoked Bai to write the article was the British decision in 1922 to officially claim Pian Ma as part of British-controlled Burma. To mark their sovereignty over Pian Ma, the British set up a military outpost on Mount Savages (Yeren shan 野人山), and for six years they refused to discuss the disputed area with the Chinese government.27 Although few Chinese had heard of Pian Ma or Mount Savages, Bai regarded the British move as an overt aggression, violating the territorial sovereignty of the young Chinese Republic. For this reason, Bai wrote the long article urging his readers to put pressure on the Nanjing government to reclaim Pian Ma, so that “the weaknesses of our citizens will not be exposed in front of the world.”28 What is striking is Bai’s recommendation for resolving the Pian Ma controversy. In contrast to the 1910 “Announcement from the Chinese Geographical Society” mentioned earlier, Bai no longer saw the British action as an expression of the “natural law of selection.” He also did not consider the Nanjing government’s lackadaisical response appropriate, even though the British Empire was clearly more powerful than the nascent Chinese Republic. Fully knowing China’s slight odds in standing up against the mighty British Empire, Bai recommended the use of force to drive the British out of Pian Ma: “In negotiating with a tiger for its skin, the tiger will bite us if we take a peaceful measure. It is better to ask hunters to catch the tiger with arrows and spikes. In asking a thief to return the stolen goods, we will be killed if we pursue peaceful negotiation. It is better to ask soldiers to take up arms to catch the thief. Thus, we must wage a war to take back our Mount Savages in Pian Ma.”29 The two metaphors Bai used—negotiating with a tiger for its skin and asking a thief to return the stolen goods—underscored the uselessness of negotiating with aggressors. For Bai, aggressors only know aggression, and their goal is to get what they want at all costs. In the face of aggression, the only way to save one’s life and property is to use violence against violence. Bai’s belligerence revealed a view of the global system of nation-states different from that expressed in the inaugural issue of Dixue zazhi. Here the global system of nation-states is no longer fair or open to accepting worthy members based on a set of stringent requirements known as “the 27  See “Pian Ma weijing guoji zhengshi huading zhi jieshi” 片馬未經國際正式劃定之解釋 [Explaining the reasons for Pian Ma not being officially marked by international community], Dixue zazhi 1929, no. 1: 5–28. 28  Bai Meichu, “Pian Ma kao” 片馬考 [A study of Pian Ma], Dixue zazhi 1929, no. 2: 153. 29  Bai Meichu, “Pian Ma kao,” 167–168.

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standard of civilization.”30 Instead, the global system is monopolized by a small group of ruthless aggressors who employ treacherous measures— secret alliances, closed-door negotiations, legal tricks, and naked force— to keep their power and prevent others from competing with them. Late modernizers (such as China) would always be the targets of predators, unless the latecomers were to subvert the system by challenging the established powers.31 A number of factors contributed to the rise of such a somber view of the world. First, the introduction of Marxism and Leninism into China in the late 1910s and the early 1920s—particularly Lenin’s argument about imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism—provided a theoretical explanation for conflict and domination across nations.32 Second, the British police’s brutal suppression of labor protests in Shanghai in 1925 offered a fresh reminder of the hypocrisy of “civilizing missions” in foreign settlements and colonies. Third, the continuing attempts by the Japanese to expand their spheres of influence in Manchuria and the North China Plain suggested to the Chinese that their country had become a site of the interstate competition for land and wealth. Above all, by the mid-1920s China’s historical geographers had learned a great deal about subterranean resources across the nation. Areas once thought uninhabitable, remote, or unproductive had become valuable assets awaiting excavation of hidden wealth. The vast Chinese territory, once regarded as a liability For a summary of this late nineteenth-century view of international relations, see Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 3–23. For a study of the impact of this view on Chinese thinkers and diplomats, see Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–77. 31  Xu Guoqi traces the change of Chinese view of the international relations to the Versailles Settlement, and describes the change of view as the end of “an age of innocence.” See China and the Great War, 1–18, 273–281. For a historical discussion of the changes in the global capitalistic system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994), 1–26. 32  For a theoretical discussion of the differences between laissez-faire capitalism of the late nineteenth century and state capitalism of the early twentieth century, see Frederick Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” in Critical Theory and Society, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Mackay Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 95–118. For the significance of the transition from laissez-faire capitalism to state capitalism, see Jerry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 127–172; Ronald Findley and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 365–428. For a discussion of how the emergence of monopolistic state capitalism led to a change in non-Westerners’ view of the world order, see Cemil Aydin, The Politics of AntiWesternization in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 71–92. 30 

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for national defense and racial harmony, was now seen as a repository of precious commodities, the discovery of which would fuel China’s rise.33 While we do not know which factors contributed to Bai Meichu’s belligerence, it is clear that he based his argument squarely on a new understanding of land. In recommending that his compatriots take up arms against the British, he reminded his readers of China’s vast territory and its large population: China has one tenth of the world’s land and one fourth of its population. The Chinese are clever, prudent, and hard working. . . . Thus, readers should not be afraid of the current powerful countries such as Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Considering the recent rapid expansion [in our country’s industry and infrastructure], it is hard to predict what our country will look like in hundreds of years. We should not underestimate our country’s potential in saying that we will not be the rulers of the world.34

To be sure, Bai knew that China then could not match Britain in economic and military power. He also knew that political leaders in Nanjing would not wage a war against Britain for a small patch of land in the far corner of the country’s southwestern borders. However, he saw the Pian Ma controversy as another example of imperialist aggressions against China. Pian Ma might not be worth defending, yet a line had to be drawn in stopping foreign aggressions. Given so much potential and real value in land, Bai suggested that the Chinese people take immediate action to protect the nation. Bai’s bellicose view, although popular among young Chinese, was not shared by other members of the Chinese Geographical Society. For example, Zhang Xiangwen still held fast to the earlier view that China, being a latecomer to global modernity, had to humbly and patiently learn from advanced nations to improve its level of civilization. For Zhang, China’s loss of territory to foreign powers was a price that the country would have to pay to survive in a highly competitive world. China’s rise to power would come after decades of hard work and unwavering national determination. For a sample of discussion of the untapped natural resources in China in Dili zazhi, see the following articles: Peng Chengwan 彭程萬 and Yin Ruli 殷汝驪, “Qiongya zhi kuangchan” 瓊崖之礦產 [The mines in Hainan Island], Dixue zazhi 1921, no. 8: 45–53; Yao Cunwu, “Hewei dili huanjing? Dili huanjing yu renlei shenghuo you ruohe zhi guanxi?” 何 謂地理環境? 地理環境與人類生活有若何之關係 [What is geographical environment? What are the relationships between geographical environment and human life?], Dixue zazhi 1922, no. 3: 1–17; Jinshang Xizhizhu 井上禧之助, Chen Jie 陳捷, trans., “Ouzhou guojie bianqian ji yu kuangwu zhi yinxiang” 歐洲國界變遷及於礦物之影響 [The changed national boundaries in Europe and their impact on mines], Dixue zazhi 1923, nos. 3–4: 1–6. 34  Bai Meichu, “Pian Ma kao,” 167–168. 33 

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Zhang regarded any premature attempt of aggressive resistance against the imperialists as counterproductive, if not suicidal.35 In 1928, the same year Bai began to publish “A Study of Pian Ma” in Dixue zazhi, Zhang found out that his view was fiercely rejected by students. At his friend’s invitation, Zhang agreed to give a lecture at a secondary school in Huaiyin County of Jiangsu Province. He candidly criticized those who erected “Down with the Imperialists” posters in the school for not knowing international politics. He stated that aggressive resistance would result in atrocities when imperialist powers took action against a weak China. Shortly after he finished his speech, angry students climbed up on the stage to attack him, loudly condemning him as “a counterrevolutionary.” The shouting quickly developed into a melee. Zhang was detained by the police and then sent to Nanjing for further questioning. He was investigated for the alleged antirevolutionary act of supporting imperialism and foreign aggressions, until his old friend Cai Yuanpei stepped in and verified his political reliability.36 Zhang’s embarrassing experience was a potent example of how drastically the Chinese perception of the global system of nation-states had changed in the early twentieth century. A major leader of geographical studies in the 1900s and 1910s, he found himself shunned and ignored by young people who were eager to take up arms against foreign aggressors. His experience showed that the young Chinese no longer saw the system of nation-states as open and just, based on fair competition according to the natural law of selection. Instead, they saw the system as being dictated by laws of intrigue and violence and as rewarding nations that devised plans to dominate the world and produced effective means of massive destruction. Driven by anti-imperialist nationalism, the young Chinese of the late 1920s regarded military prowess (wuli 武力), rather than civilization (wenhua 文化, wenming 文明), as the new law of nature in international politics.37 As shown in Bai’s “Study of Pian Ma,” this new perception of the global system of nation-states changed the focus of historical geography.

Zhang Xiangwen was frustrated by government corruption after the 1911 Revolution, and he lost money in his investment in developing the northwest. Both instances suggested to him that China had a long way to catch up with Western powers. See Zhang Xinglang, “Siyang Zhang Dungu,” 25–26, 28–29. 36  Zhang Xinglang, “Siyang Zhang Dungu,” 46. For a discussion of Cai Yuanpei, see chapter 2. 37  For a clear example of this martial view of international relations, see Xiao Mingnai 蕭鳴籟, Preface to “Lü Da shouhui shengzhong zhi dianwen zhailu,” 2. In the preface, Xiao deliberately juxtaposes “military prowess” with “the natural law,” arguing that a nation could not protect its territory by following “the natural law” alone. 35 

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Historical Geographers as Scientists Compared with Dixue zazhi, Shixue yu dixue was short-lived. In less than two years (December 1926 to October 1928), only four issues were published. Shixue yu dixue is significant for our analytical purposes for three reasons. First, like its predecessor, Shidi xuebao 史地學報 (Journal of the Historical and Geographical Society, 1921–1926), Shixue yu dixue was the flagship publication of the Historical and Geographical Society of China. Similar to its predecessor, Shixue yu dixue was a forum for historians and geographers based in Nanjing, especially faculty and students of Central University (formerly Southeastern University). Hence, Shixue yu dixue represented the view of a group of intellectuals associated with the venerable historian Liu Yizheng, who, as discussed earlier, defined historical ­geography as the study of “the fusion of time and space.” More importantly, the journal was considered a mouthpiece of the Critical Review Group (Xueheng pai 學衡派), which championed a creative mixture of indigenous and foreign learning as opposed to the call for total Westernization made by May Fourth cultural iconoclasts.38 And yet, unlike its short-lived predecessor, Shixue yu dixue was much more balanced and theoretically informed in discussing the fusion of time and space. Rather than centering on history and treating geographical studies as supplements to history, contributors to this journal tried to create a new system of knowledge that combined history and geography.39 Second, unlike Dixue zazhi writers, who were mainly amateurs or schoolteachers, Shixue yu dixue contributors were professional educators in academia. Western-trained and professionally licensed, they were scientists or social scientists who had received rigorous training in the theories and methods of geographical studies. This level of professionalism was particularly evident in Zhu Kezhen, one of the journal’s advisers and contributors. A Harvard-trained meteorologist, he established the Institute for Meteorological Studies (Qixiang yanjiu suo 氣象研究所) in Nanjing in 1927, thereby breaking Europeans’ monopoly of meteorological forecasts in China. Zhu was an internationally renowned expert in the patterns of typhoons in East Asia and a member of the Science Society of China (Zhongguo kexue she 中國科學社), and his articles frequently appeared in the society’s journal Kexue 科學 (Science).40 Shixue yu dixue was 38  Peng Minghui 彭明輝, Lishi dili yu xiandai Zhongguo shixue 歷史地理與現代中國史學 [Historical geography and modern Chinese historiography] (Taipei: Dongda tushu gongsi, 1995), 1–35. Peng regards the Nanjing historical geographers as “the Southern school” in opposition to “the Northern school” of Gu Jiegang and others in Beijing. 39  Tze-ki Hon, “Cultural Identity and Local Self-Government: Liu Yizheng’s History of Chinese Culture,” Modern China 30, no. 4 (2004): 506–542. 40  See “Zhu Kezhen shengping yu gongxian” 竺可楨生平與貢獻 [The life and contri-

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clearly intended for professional scholars—scientists and social scientists as well as college teachers, administrators, and students. The journal’s contributors assumed an aura of professionalism that made them acutely sensitive to the clarity of the terms, categories, and classifications they deployed. Being scientists and social scientists, they were the first group of specialists to give a clear definition to historical geography. Third, Shixue yu dixue was published in Nanjing when it became the nation’s new capital. The journal’s proximity to the center of power gave its writers both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the writers had access to and direct influence on powerful officials. They were particularly successful in cultivating close ties with officials on the Ministry of Education (Jiaoyu bu 教育部), which supervised the national school system and approved the curriculum and textbooks. Two writers, Zhu Kezhen and Zhang Qiyun, were particularly successful in developing close relationships with the Ministry of Education. From the late 1920s to the mid1930s, the two were frequently invited to serve on committees to design the curriculum of the national school system. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the two became top administrators of National Zhejiang University and were responsible for relocating the university to southwest China.41 On the other hand, being in the same city with top Guomindang leaders, Shixue yu dixue writers were constantly under strict political scrutiny. They had to be careful in expressing their views in public because the Guomindang was determined to use the educational system for political indoctrination. As a result, whereas the Dixue zazhi writers had been assertive in expressing their views on public affairs, Shixue yu dixue contributors generally served as cautious and circumspect academicians. Due to professional and political influence, Shixue yu dixue contributors often wrote in a detached, empirical, and unadorned style. Focusing on academic research, they avoided politically sensitive issues and did not comment on current affairs. For example, in the founding issue of the journal in 1926, Zhu Kezhen defined what he called human geography (rensheng dili 人生地理) in technical and analytical terms: Although there are different kinds of geographical studies, they can be broadly divided into two groups. One group is ziran dilixue [physical butions of Zhu Kezhen], in Zhu Kezhen wenji 竺可楨文集 [The collected writings of Zhu Kezhen] (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1979), vi. See also “Qianyan” 前言 [Foreword], in Zhu Kezhen quanji 竺可楨全集 [The complete works of Zhu Kezhen], vol. 1 (Shanghai: Shanghai keji jiaoyu chubanshe, 2004), 21–22. 41  Song Xi 宋晞, “Zhuanlüe” 傳略 [A brief biography], in Zhang Qiyun xiansheng wenji 張 其昀先生文集 [Collected writings of Mr. Zhang Qiyun] (Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua daxue, 1988), 8–15.

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Tze-ki Hon geography], a scientific study of the earth, including geology and mathematical geography (or celestial geography). The other group is rensheng dilixue (or renwen dilixue) [human geography], a scientific study of the relationship between land and people (or physical beings), including political geography and economic geography. Thus, there are two essential elements in human geography: the geographical environment and the activities of human and nonhuman beings on earth. In short, human geography examines the relationship between land and people.42

Despite the detached language and use of the new term “human geography,” Zhu Kezhen, in effect, repeated Liu Yizheng’s understanding of historical geography as stated in the epigraph that opened this chapter. The focus of human geography is the relationship between the unfolding of events in human communities and the geographical conditions in which those events take place. Whether it is “the fusion of time and space” (as in Liu Yizheng) or “the relationship between land and people” (as in Zhu Kezhen), historical/human geography is concerned with the relation between physical environment and human ingenuity. The other purpose of Zhu’s article was to connect the “natural science” aspects with the “social science” aspects of geographical studies. As a system of knowledge aimed at giving a comprehensive understanding of land and people, geographical studies could be classified in academia as a natural science, a social science, or both. The ambiguity created tensions and anxiety among academics who had to deal with resource allocation, professional certification, and academic specialization. The ambiguity led to disputes over jurisdictional boundaries within the emerging profession of geographers. For Zhu, the ambiguity of the nature of geographical studies had to be resolved in order to ensure that the discipline would find an institutional home in the newly reconstituted national school system under the Guomindang. Thus, to define the institutional identity of modern geography, Zhu compared three models of geographical studies in the West. First was the British model, which was taken from the geological perspective and preferred physical geography over human geography. Second was the French model, which emphasized the humanistic perspective and privileged human geography over physical geography. Third was the American model, which combined and housed physical geography and human geography under the same roof. Throughout the article, Zhu emphasized that all three models were based on the scientific methods of “objective observation, causal relationship, empirical

Zhu Kezhen, “Hewei dilixue” 何謂地理學? [What is geography?], Shixue yu dixue 1926 no. 1: 1–4. 42 

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measurement, and careful classification.”43 Yet, occasionally he hinted that the American model was probably more creative and flexible, “opening a new chapter” in geographical studies.44 Zhu’s 1926 article was substantially different from his previous writings. When he returned from Harvard in 1919, he had published ­highly political and polemical essays in Shidi xuebo, Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern miscellany), and Kexue. He had used his geographical expertise to comment on current affairs, such as the rise of nationalism after the Versailles Settlement and the return of Qingdao in 1922.45 During the early 1920s, he was as much an advocate of “anti-imperialistic nationalism” as Bai Meichu, and shared the mainstream view that the recovery of Chinese sovereign rights should be the top priority of the Chinese government. In the 1926 article, however, he was scholastic in spirit and subdued in tone. He assumed the voice of a professional scientist whose main interest was to produce objective, apolitical, and empirically based knowledge. Even though he clearly had a preference for the American model of geographical studies, he avoided stating his position explicitly. To a great extent, this change of style reflected a change in Zhu’s social status. By the mid-1920s, he was no longer a young scholar who had recently returned from abroad, but an internationally renowned scientist working at a prestigious university. Rather than trying to make a name in the publishing market, he was now a well-known scientist who had the power to shape the direction of the nation’s research and teaching. The aloof prose notwithstanding, there are hints of a nationalistic message in Zhu’s 1926 essay. For instance, when comparing the three foreign models of geographical studies, he showed that in theory, methodology, institutional organization, and research facilities, China was behind its foreign counterparts. He urged Chinese geographers to be creative and bold in their work and to compete with geographers in other countries. Without stating his case bluntly, he suggested that China’s scholars would have to move fast in learning the most advanced knowledge and skills 43  For Zhu Kezhen, both physical geography and human geography are scientific because of their methodology. By “scientific methods,” he means observation, causality, comparison, and classification. See Zhu, “Hewei dilixue,” 4. 44  In a later article, Zhu made clear his preference for the American model. See Zhu Kezhen, “Zhongyang daxue dilixue zhi qiantu” 中央大學地理學之前途 [The future of geography at Central University], Dili zazhi 地理雜誌 [Journal of geography] 1, no. 1 (1928): 3–5. 45  Zhu Kezhen, “Ouzhou zhi xianshi yu jianglai zhi weiji” 歐洲之現勢與將來之危機 [The current situation in Europe and its future dangers], Dongfang zazhi 18, no. 9 (1921): 7–19; “Ouzhou zhanzheng hou zhi xin xingshi” 歐洲戰爭後之新形勢 [New developments from World War I], Shidi xuebao 1, no. 1 (1921); “Qingdao jieshou zhi qingkuang” 青島接收之情況 [A report of the return of Qingdao], Shidi xuebao 1923, no. 2: 85–90.

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from abroad, and developing theories and methods in their specialized fields, to catch up with foreign scientists.46 Zhu’s nationalistic message is even more obvious in other essays. For instance, in his 1927 essay “Eliminating Academic Inequality,” he explicitly linked academic inequality to political inequality. He suggested that while the Chinese, driven by “anti-imperialistic nationalism,” concentrated on reclaiming lost territories and rights from foreign powers, they should also pay attention to the growing gap between China and the West in scientific research. The recovery of lost land and rights was important, but closing the gap in scientific research was even more important, because science was the main pillar of “modern civilization.”47 This theme of eliminating academic inequality is also found in Zhu’s account of Japan’s recent achievements in meteorological studies.48 On the surface, the essay appears to be a factual account of those achievements. But Zhu contrasted the sophistication of Japanese scientists in conducting research with the slow, hesitant growth of geographical studies in China. In short, in advocating elimination of academic inequality, Zhu used his professional status to advance his nationalistic cause. As an academic in the nation’s new capital, he assumed the role of a professional scientist who had a fixed state salary and research funding from national foundations. In exchange for his professional status and financial stability, he withdrew from participation in public debates in popular media. Instead of being a critic of the government (as he had been as a young scholar during the early 1920s), he became part of the academic establishment, which required him to give tacit, if not public, support to government policies. In hindsight, it is hard to fully discern what Zhu gained and lost as a professional scientist. Whereas Bai Meichu could quickly draw public attention by addressing current issues such as the return of Lüshun or the loss of Pian Ma, Zhu’s academic prose and seemingly arcane topics of research would not easily gain public attention. However, whereas Bai was able to briefly mobilize mass opinion to influence the government decisions on sensitive issues, Zhu was well placed institutionally and politically to make a lasting impact on the cultural field by shaping the direction of scientific research and the curriculum of the national school education. At the height of anti-imperialistic nationalism, Zhu Kezhen shared Zhang Xiangwen’s view on China’s inability to compete with foreign powers. Despite their different backgrounds and training, Zhu and Zhang held the late nineteenth-century view of using “civilization” as the yardstick for measuring global progress. 47  Zhu Kezhen, “Quxiao xueshu shang de bu pingdeng” 取消學術上的不平等 [Eliminating the academic inequalities], Xiandai pinglun 現代評論 5, no. 120 (1927): 307–310. 48  Zhu Kezhen, “Riben qixiangxue fada zhi gaikuang” 日本氣象學發達之概況 [The recent developments of Japanese meteorology], Kexue 12, no. 4 (1927): 481–495. 46 

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The Specialists in Historical Geography Similar to Zhu Kezhen, the young scholar Zhang Qiyun was called to study historical geography by the hope of changing China through research and education. Ten years younger than Zhu, Zhang graduated from Southeastern University in 1923 with a major in history and geography. Trained by Liu Yizheng and Zhu Kezhen, he was one of the first generation of college students who specialized in a new discipline known as shidi 史地 (literally, history and geography) that employed historical methods and historical data to study geographical changes. In 1927, after a stint as an editor at Commercial Press, Zhang was appointed lecturer at National Central University, beginning his long career in the educational field.49 In the one and one-half years that Shixue yu dixue was published, he was the journal’s main contact to whom manuscripts, queries, and correspondence were sent. One of Zhang’s contributions to the new discipline of shidi was his long essay “The Attitude and Method for Studying Human Geography,” published in the first and second issues of Shixue yu dixue. In the essay, Zhang creatively combined ideas from his two teachers. He followed Zhu Kezhen’s argument that historical/human geography differs from physical geography both in scope and emphasis. He invoked Liu Yizheng’s notion of the study of “the fusion of time and space” to highlight the uniqueness of historical/human geography. He wrote: Physical geography (including geology, meteorology, botanical geography, and biological geography) focuses on natural phenomena. It may include discussions of human affairs, but they are peripheral to the main focus of the study. [In contrast,] human geography gives equal attention to land and people, emphasizing their relationship and their equal importance. It offers a comprehensive and integrated perspective on all elements of geographical studies. Thus, [it rests on] the notion of the fusion of time and space.50

By emphasizing the interdependence between geographical environment and human activities, he presented historical/human geography as a comprehensive discipline—a discipline of all disciplines—that offers a holistic, integrative, and multidimensional perspective on geographical phenomena. Zhu Kezhen and Zhang Qiyun, in their respective writings, c­ onsciously tried to define the jurisdictional boundaries of historical geographers Song Xi, “Zhuanlüe,” 8–9. Zhang Qiyun, “Rensheng dili zhi taidu yu fangfa” 人生地理之態度與方法 [The attitude and method for studying human geography], Shixue yu dixue 2, no. 1 (1927): 6–7. 49  50 

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within the professional academy. By stressing the scientific method and the holistic perspective of historical geography, Zhu and Zhang promoted an image of historical geographers as professional scientists who knew their jurisdiction vis-à-vis other disciplines. In 1933, the two geographers joined the geologist Weng Wenhao 翁文灝 (1889–1971) in announcing the founding of a new association for historical geographers: the Chinese Geographical Association (Zhongguo dilixue hui 中國地理學會). In the announcement, the three scholars insisted that there was a dire need for establishing a new organization to reflect the professional status of historical geographers. The recent trend in the academy has been professionalism. In the past, when people spoke of dixue, they meant broadly meteorological, terrestrial, and human realms. Today, each of these three realms is studied by specialists who compete with one another for higher academic standards. [To achieve higher academic standards,] the meteorologists established the Chinese Meteorological Society, the geologists the Chinese Geological Society. Thus, the geographers who examine human activities in relation to the natural environment must have their own professional organization as well. This is our primary goal that in concert with the Chinese Meteorological Society and the Chinese Geological Association, our association will bear responsibility for developing the Chinese [threefold] studies of dixue.51

Pointedly, the three authors contrasted the old concept of dixue with the new concept of dili. Whereas the former was broad and all-encompassing, the latter was refined and specific. The difference between the two concepts, the authors argued, was a result of the specialization in geographical studies, subdividing the discipline into meteorology, geology, and historical geography. In effect, the three authors acknowledged the intense competition within the professional academy and the need for drawing jurisdictional boundaries among competing disciplines. In the past, anything that had to do with the earth could be absorbed into dixue; now, meteorologists, geologists, and historical geographers developed their own discrete disciplines within academia. Implicit in this comparison of dixue and dili was a challenge to the authority of Zhang Xiangwen and his older Chinese Geographical Society. By describing dixue as old and imprecise, the three authors called for a new understanding of geographical studies at a time of academic professionalization. The newly founded Chinese Geographical Association 51  Weng Wenhao, Zhu Kezhen, and Zhang Qiyun, “Zhongguo dili xuehui faqi zhiqu shu” 中國地理學會發起旨趣書 [Explaining the purpose of founding the Chinese Geographical Association], Fangzhi yuekan 方志月刊 6, no. 4 (1933): 62.

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was not just another association for historical geographers; it was the first professional association that would represent the interests of historical geographers as specialized academics. To symbolize the professionalism of historical geographers, the authors suggested that the Chinese Geographical Association had to be located in Nanjing rather than in Beiping (the name of Beijing at the time). “Beiping,” they said, had been “an ancient capital for hundreds of years.”52 As the nation’s new capital, Nanjing was full of new cultural facilities, trained experts, and international scholars. With one city in decline and the other in ascent, the authors concluded, it was necessary to have the new geographical association in Nanjing—the shining city of hope, creativity, and professional vitality.53 Although the authors insisted that there would be friendly cooperation between the old and the new associations, it is clear that, for them, the founding of their own association represented a changing of the guard in geographical studies. In their mind, the age of amateurism and improvisation was over. Geographical studies (however they were defined) were now part of the state apparatus and were practiced in schools, universities, and research institutes. Geographers (whether focusing on physical or human phenomena) had to be scientifically trained and professionally licensed specialists. Geographers had to focus their attention on their own profession and the work embedded in the division of academic labor. By adopting dili (rather than dixue) in naming their new association, Zhu and Zhang were making not wordplay but a crucial move in defining the jurisdictional boundaries of geographical studies. Nation, Profession, and Sovereignty The bellicosity of Bai Meichu and the professionalism of Zhu Kezhen and Zhang Qiyun remind us of the familiar story of early twentieth-century Chinese nationalism. As John Fitzgerald has pointed out, the history of Chinese nationalism is a process of narrowing the horizons: reducing “one world” to “one China,” “one China” to “one state,” “one state” to “one party,” “one party” to “one leader.”54 To a great extent, the development of historical geography in early twentieth-century China fits Fitzgerald’s description, particularly with respect to reducing “one world” to “one China,” and “one China” to “one state.” As discussed earlier, historical geography began as an all-inclusive “study of the earth” (dixue) to fathom the geographical characteristics of Weng Wenhao, “Zhongguo dili.” Weng Wenhao, “Zhongguo dili.” 54  John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–22. 52  53 

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the globe, the global networks of migration and encounters, and the global system of nation-states. In the early years, the study of the earth reflected the openness and optimism of laissez-faire capitalism where no boundary is fixed and no winner can take all. The relatively free and spontaneous atmosphere of Zhang Xiangwen’s Chinese Geographical Society exemplified this spirit of openness and optimism. The society grew in influence in public affairs and academic debates as the fledging print market allowed writers—professionally trained or not—to reach large numbers of readers across the nation. After World War I, however, two factors gradually rendered amateurism and improvisation less possible among historical geographers than before. First, the tightening of the political system put power in the hands of one political party, the Guomindang. Resources previously available at the municipal, provincial, and local levels were transferred to the central government, making it harder for the geographers to acquire resources through personal friendship, scholarly networks, lineage connections, and provincial ties. Second, professionalization of the academy became part of political centralization under Guomindang rule. As a result, the cultural field gradually came under tighter control by the central government, and part of the educated elite became a state nobility that supported the government in return for financial and professional security. Even though print capitalism continued to flourish in major cities such as Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Tianjin, it was increasingly controlled and contained within the structure of the nation-state.55 To a great extent, the rise of the Nanjing historical geographers during the late 1920s signified the dominance of academics over amateurs, state nobles over unlicensed intellectuals. Writers could still write whatever they wanted in the public arena as long as they could sell their writings. But they were excluded from the academic arena, which admitted only the professionally licensed and specially trained. As state nobles, academics had their own audience and their particular networks of circulation. They made their impact through the school system, research institutes, and academic journals. They lived, worked, and excelled in the ivory towers—a cloistered area that was supported by but subservient to the state.56 For a discussion of how the Guomindang controlled the cultural field, see Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 257–279; Wen-hsin Yeh, Alienated Academy Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 167–182. 56  For the concept of state nobility and power relations between state and school graduates, see Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 261–339. Professional academics are “state nobles” because they are licensed by the state to take charge of educating young people. Although they are 55 

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To bolster their new roles, the Nanjing academics claimed authority through foreign degrees and university diplomas as well as the emerging “hegemonic power of science.”57 They identified themselves as scientists and provided objective knowledge based on empirical study, careful research, and numerical data. In this context, the scope of historical geography shrank from studying everything under the sun in dixue to a circumscribed body of knowledge known as dili. Due to the intense competition for resources among various disciplines in academia, historical geographers had to give up their claim to geology, meteorology, and other branches of natural science.58 The shrinking in the scope of their discipline notwithstanding, Chinese historical geographers continued to keep their eyes on the global scene. From their writings on the global system of commerce and competition in Dixue zazhi to their elevation of scientism in Shixue yu dixue, historical geographers directly or indirectly linked China to the world. The narrowing of the horizons that Fitzgerald describes in regard to the development of Chinese nationalism, while instructive for understanding historical geography in the early twentieth century, does not capture the discipline’s continuous emphasis on understanding the world. To be sure, the focus of historical geography shrank from the globe to China’s geo-body within three decades; the primary goal of historical geography, however, had remained the same: understanding the fusion of time and space. Whether for understanding the earth or for science, historical geographers sought to understand the global system of nation-states. By fusing the study of temporality and spatiality, the geographers attempted to create a system of professional knowledge that could, at once, describe the world and define China’s role in it.

not aristocrats by birth, they become a privileged category after receiving certification from the state. 57  For a discussion of the hegemonic power of science in modern China, see Wang Hui, Xian­dai Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi 現代中國思想的興起 [The rise of modern Chinese thought], vol. 2, part 2 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2004), 1107–1205. 58  Another force that shrank the scope of historical geography was the geopolitics of the 1930s. As China’s geo-body was threatened, scholars on the borderlands took up historical geography to fight against imperialism. For a study of how historical geography was transformed into a study of borderlands, see Hon,“ Hierarchy of Time,” 159–162.

CHAPTER 2

Drawing Boundaries in Sand: Anthropology in Republican China

CLAYTON D. BROWN

China’s early Republic saw an efflorescence of new professional fields. This proliferation occurred with the collapse of a highly centralized imperial state and its foundational neo-Confucian orthodoxy, which left men of letters adrift in the search for new sources and structures of authority.1 The tenuous and short-lived independence of academics from state power created a moment of genuine pluralism and innovation that would persist even when foreign threats precipitated the reassertion of centralized control. Against this backdrop, anthropology developed from neologism to curriculum to institution, as the Chinese confronted a constellation of models of the discipline. In the United States, anthropology encompasses four subfields: cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. In Europe, each of these is regarded as an independent field. Ethnology is the equivalent of American cultural anthropology, and with archaeology, a “long transatlantic estrangement” produced “two disciplines separated by the same subject.”2 Furthermore, within the same country, the discipline of anthropology differed from institution to institution. Chinese scholars seeking to establish the same field hence often found themselves at odds, each promoting standards and methodologies coincident with their own particular training. At stake were not only careers and the power to shape the discipline; anthropology also offered a modern, scientific means of defining China, for while archaeology searched for Chinese origins, physical and cultural anthropology (or ethnology) defined the Chinese people. Due to a tradition of Confucian patriarchy, the first-generation anthropologists did not, so far as I know, include any women. 2  Michael Shott, “Two Cultures: Thought and Practice in British and North American Archaeology,” World Archaeology 37, no. 1 (2005): 1–10. 1 

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Rather than presenting a linear narrative of the development of anthropological fields in China, this chapter focuses on appreciating the challenges and variables that intellectual pioneers faced in establishing what have become “naturalized” disciplines.3 As in the West, no prescribed path existed. Instead, knowledge actors struggled to negotiate anthropology’s relationship to the state, distinguish the discipline from other fields, and set it apart from past practices (thereby substantiating its “modernity”). These actors also sought to establish standards for practitioners and for credibility as a science, reconcile anthropology’s domestic agenda with its foreign derivation (or the dilemma of how to be a Chinese practitioner of a Western discipline), and bring to bear on the discipline one’s own training and vision. The lines thus drawn—between disciplines as well as between state and academia, professional and amateur, modernity and tradition, objectivity and subjectivity, and nationalism and universalism—were never precise or fixed but dynamic and fluid. Yet their putative authenticity became grounds for contests of power, which shaped the institutional framework and practices now existing in China, and in the case of anthropology shaped how the Chinese view themselves. This chapter focuses on three pioneers of Chinese anthropology—Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), Ling Chunsheng 凌純聲 (1902–1981), and Li Ji 李濟 (1896–1979)—each of whom negotiated a place for the discipline in modern China and for himself as its anointed agent. Key to their success was the decision to court state patronage.4 Whereas this choice represents a recoupling of state and academics (an approach that left Cai deeply conflicted), their experiences also illustrate that intellectuals exploited the power of the state as much as it exploited them. Cai used his positions to guide the New Culture Movement and to introduce greater academic autonomy into the developing modern education system. Although this former member of the state-sponsored Hanlin Academy (Hanlin xueshiyuan 翰林學士院) created a similar academy—the Academia Sinica—for the new authoritarian regime under Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887–1975), For an account of the history of the discipline, see Gregory Guldin, The Saga of Anthropology in China: From Malinowski to Moscow to Mao (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). On Chinese archaeology, see Chen Xingcan 陳星燦, Zhongguo shiqian kaoguxueshi yanjiu 中國史 前考古學史研究 [The history of prehistoric archaeology in China] (Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1997). On ethnology in China, see Wang Jianmin 王建民, Zhongguo minzuxue shi 中國民族學史 [The history of ethnology in China] (Kunming: Yunnan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997). 4  As other chapters demonstrate, the state was not the only route to establishing new disciplines. Chapter 1, for instance, emphasizes the value of the publishing sector and professional associations for establishing geography as a field. In chapter 5, association with foreign enterprises as well as government agencies contributed to the early development of engineering. 3 

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he not only oversaw the institutionalization of anthropological fields but also mobilized direct opposition to Chiang’s authority and, when pushed to the wall, affirmed his agency by resigning his posts. To staff the Academia Sinica, Cai recruited social scientists like Ling and Li to pioneer ethnology and archaeology, respectively. At a time when requisite credentials were still undefined, official sanctioning of their advanced Western degrees and fieldwork experiences helped establish new standards. But Ling’s and Li’s visions of anthropology differed dramatically. Trained in France, Ling Chunsheng worked to establish ethnology separate from anthropology, and at times he clashed with Li and others from the Anglo-American tradition. Eventually Ling’s service to the state in a time of national crisis won a niche for himself and his discipline when he established the still extant Institute of Ethnology. Trained in the American four-fields tradition, Li Ji viewed ethnology and archaeology as related anthropological sciences, and he became a leader in both fields. His struggle to assert his authority in Chinese archaeology pitted him against competitors at every level, from tomb raiders to local authorities to international rivals. Having convinced both the American and Chinese governments that he held requisite credentials in archaeology, he then secured state patronage for museums as a means of popularizing the sciences and fostering national identity. The reversion to authoritarianism under the Nationalist regime that began with the Northern Expedition (1926–1927) and culminated with the Japanese invasion of 1937 created a reunion of state and academia that would continue after the Civil War (1946–1949). The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) are progeny born of the same ancient imperial as well as modern Leninist parentage. Both saw political and academic authority united in one. Even so, the individuals discussed here illustrate the power that modern intellectuals exercised in negotiating with their colleagues and the state to further their chosen fields and their individual agendas. Cai Yuanpei on the Highwire: Balancing Academic Freedom and State Sponsorship If post-imperial China was characterized by the conflicting impulses of a democratic experiment and the attraction of a familiar monolithic authoritarianism, Cai Yuanpei was an embodiment of those tensions. Often honored as the “father” of many modern disciplines, including anthropology,5 5  For Cai’s contributions to China’s education system, see William J. Duiker, Ts’ai YuanP’ei: Educator of Modern China (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977). For his role as “father” of anthropology, see Guldin, Anthropology in China, 30.

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he held a prominent position in academics and politics that captured intellectuals’ ambivalence toward the state. Cai was a tireless advocate of democracy and academic freedom who wittingly created an official anthropology within an authoritarian dictatorship that he later abandoned in an act of defiance. Tensions between intellectual freedom and state service marked Cai’s career from early on. In 1895, at twenty-seven years old, he was a newly minted jinshi 進士 degree holder and a member of the prestigious Hanlin Academy, an elite corps of academicians who constituted the emperor’s inner circle of advisers.6 China’s landmark defeat by Japan that year convinced him that traditional education was both “pedantic” and “a waste,” a conclusion that turned him to Western learning.7 Following the failure of the Hundred Days Reform three years later, he resigned from the civil service and eventually moved to Shanghai where he formed the seditious Restoration Society (Guangfuhui 光復會), which merged in the following year with Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui 同 盟會).8 Sun appointed Cai head of the alliance’s Shanghai branch, thus beginning a decades-long collaboration between the two revolutionaries and a precedent of resistance against an overbearing state. Cai’s day job was as a schoolteacher and administrator dedicated to achieving social change through educational reform. He published his first book On School Curriculum9 and founded the Chinese Educational Association (Zhongguo jiaoyuhui 中國教育會) to advocate for education “beyond political control.”10 Following the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, he joined the Guomin­ dang and accepted an appointment to serve as inaugural Minister of Education for the Republic of China. Within weeks, the former Qing general Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859–1916) assumed the presidency and transformed a fledgling democracy into an autocracy, leading Cai to flee the country.11 Cai returned to China four years later, after Yuan’s death, to accept an appointment as the chancellor of Peking University, where he became the dean of the New Culture Movement.

Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培, Jiemin zishu 孑民自述 [My memoir] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1999), 11. 7  Gao Pingshu 高平叔, ed., Cai Yuanpei quanji 蔡元培全集 [The complete works of Cai Yuanpei], vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonghua Press, 1984), 139. 8  Cai, Jiemin zishu, 43–47. 9  Cai Yuanpei, Xuetang jiaoke lun 學堂教科論 [On school curriculum] (Shanghai: Putong xushushi, 1901). 10  Gao, Cai Yuanpei quanji, vol. 2, 130–131. 11  He Liankui 何联奎, ed., Cai Yuanpei minzuxue lunzhu 蔡元培民族學論著 [On Cai Yuanpei’s ethnology] (Taipei: Taiwan zhonghua shuju, 1967), 5. 6 

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As head of China’s leading academic institution, Cai shifted its focus from training government officials to promoting academic freedom and diversity as testified by his recruitment of such New Culture Movement luminaries as Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) and Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879–1942), a future founder of the Chinese Communist Party. But with the May Fourth incident in 1919, Cai’s liberal ideals again brought him into direct conflict with the state. When officials arrested and assaulted protesting students and forced the closure of his campus, Cai resigned as chancellor.12 He went abroad again to the United States and Europe to survey Western higher education. While attending a 1924 conference on Native Americans, he accepted an invitation by Professor T. W. Danzel (1886–1954) to devote a year to ethnological studies at the University of Hamburg.13 This marked a turning point in Cai’s intellectual life. He had spent many years acquiring, organizing, and transmitting new learning, but now, in his fifties, he came to specialize in ethnology.14 The field, still obscure to many, seemed to represent everything China needed—science, diversity, and global perspective. Cai had first met Danzel and encountered ethnology in 1906 at Leipzig University, where he perused the ethnology museum, attended lectures, and elucidated Chinese cultural objects for the museum collection.15 Cai later undertook cursory study of ethnology in Europe and, after returning to China, offered courses to Peking University students as chancellor.16 Following his return from Hamburg in 1926, he published “On Ethnology.”17 In this foundational article, he translated, defined, and etymologized key Western terms that would become the standard language of Chinese scholarship; he also explicated ethnology’s relationship to such fields as archaeology, geography, history, sociology, and psychology.18 His overview traced the roots of ethnology to both Western social science and Cai, Jiemin zishu, 134–146, 167. Cai Yuanpei, Cai Yuanpei xueshu wenhua suibi 蔡元培學術文化隨筆 [Cai Yuanpei’s academic and cultural essays] (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1996), 87. 14  Cai, Cai Yuanpei xueshu wenhua suibi, 11–12. 15  Cai, Cai Yuanpei xueshu wenhua suibi, 53–55. 16  He, Cai Yuanpei minzuxue lunzhu, 5. 17  Cai Yuanpei, “Shuo minzuxue” 說民族學 [On ethnology], Yiban 一般 [Common] 1, no. 4 (1926). Due to the rarity of the original publication, for citation purposes I have relied on a reprint in He, Cai Yuanpei minzuxue lunzhu. 18  A bewildering array of related terms without precise meanings or translations had entered China’s lexicon by this point, including renleixue 人類學, renzhongxue 人種學, and minzuxue 民族學. He explained them all, but his training in Germany led him to favor minzuxue as the proper Chinese equivalent to ethnology. Although he differentiated “ethnography” (jilu de minzuxue 記錄的民族學) from “ethnology” (bijiao de minzuxue 比較的民族 學), today these are rendered minzuzhi 民族志 and minzuxue 民族學, respectively. 12  13 

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native tradition. Cai cited the Shanhaijing 山海經 (Classic of mountains and seas) as China’s ethnographic prototype and thereby rendered ethnology palatable to his compatriots. Yet he also explained that none of China’s venerable texts constitutes what one would consider a “scientific record.” He argued that facts come from actual observations, and stressed the need to transcend traditional reliance on textual sources by using one’s own senses to understand different races and cultures. According to Cai, a new type of intellectual with this mode of inquiry “­deeply penetrates natural ethnic tribes, experiences extremely bitter travels, risks great dangers and, following this, often sacrifices even his own life to achieve the worthy goal of obtaining a detailed and true report.” Specialized training, interpreters, and modern technology (such as cameras) would be essential for fieldwork, since “without studying their languages, knowing their customs, or having intimate contact, there is no spying out [kui 窺] the real situation.”19 Given Cai’s condemnation of “pedantic” and “wasteful” Confucian education and his search for utilitarian Western learning, he naturally saw practical value in risking lives in such “spying”; ethnology could help strengthen and unite China. After all, the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology had studied Native American tribes for decades; in Europe, “relying on government funds, [ethnologists] establish exploratory parties and conduct large-scale purchases and explorations.”20 In China, state-directed ethnographic studies had precedent, too. The Qing court had sponsored ethnographic and cartographic surveys of the frontier as a means of facilitating administration.21 Two years after the publication of “An Introduction to Ethnology,” Cai oversaw the institutionalization of ethnology and other anthropological disciplines within the Nationalist government. Although he was sanguine about the outcome of this intellectual and institutional development, the frustrations with balancing state patronage against academic freedom that he had experienced earlier and repeatedly would worsen as Chiang’s regime devolved into dictatorship. In a final act of defiance against overweening government control, Cai would once again abandon the regime and seek refuge abroad.

He, Cai Yuanpei minzuxue lunzhu, 3–4. See also He’s introduction, p. 17. He, Cai Yuanpei minzuxue lunzhu, 4. 21  Laura Hostetler, “Qing Connections to the Early Modern World: Ethnography and Cartography in Eighteenth-Century China,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 650. 19  20 

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Pro Patria: Creating Centralized, State-Directed Anthropological Sciences Following President Yuan’s death in 1916 and the dissolution of the Republican government, political authority fragmented and warlords proliferated. In the summer of 1926, Chiang Kai-shek initiated the Northern Expedition to reunify China through military force. The success enabled the Guomindang to establish an institutional framework for governing what would soon be a reunited nation centered on the new capital of Nanjing. At the Central Political Meeting of the ROC in April 1927, Cai Yuanpei and others proposed, in lieu of the Ministry of Education heretofore under the Executive Yuan, the establishment of an Academic Yuan (Daxue yuan 大學 院) on a par with the Executive Yuan, Legislative Yuan, and other primary branches of government. Following the French model, the Academic Yuan would encompass two sections: National Central Research Academy (Guoli Zhongyang yanjiuyuan 國立中央研究院, later the Academia Sinica) to oversee research and advise on policy, and National Central University (Guoli zhongyang daxue 國立中央大學)22 to preside over education, with each university president supervising education policy within his district. Primary, secondary, and tertiary education and academic research would henceforth come under the aegis of the central government.23 In October of that year, Chiang appointed Cai head of the Academic Yuan. The Academic Yuan turned out to be short-lived, as was the union of education and research. The leaders of the ROC turned, instead, to its dual heritage in imperial China and the Soviet Union for inspiration. Since Peter the Great, top researchers from across Czarist Russia had been drawn together in an Imperial Academy of Sciences; the tradition continued under Lenin, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences was instrumental to state building. Likewise, under the Qing, the Hanlin Academy had assisted the emperor in formulating policy, which had set that academy structurally and functionally apart from both the bureaucracy headed by ministers of the various boards as well as the Imperial Academy (Guozijian 國子監), which supervised education. In 1928 a reconstituted Ministry of Education assumed management of all teaching institutions, including the supervisory National Central University, while the Academia Sinica became a special bureau under the central government’s Executive Yuan. Functioning essentially as part of the president’s cabinet, the ROC president thereafter appointed the president of the Academia Sinica as he would National Central University served as the state’s foremost university until 1949 when the Chinese Communists renamed it Nanjing University. 23  As part of this process, the state planned to centralize museums under the National Central Museum (Zhongyang bowuyuan 中央博物院) discussed later. 22 

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other government ministers,24 although this institution again remained independent of the bureaucracy.25 In essence, the Academia Sinica,26 like its predecessors the Hanlin Academy and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, recruited the most accomplished scholars to serve not as educators, but as official arbiters of knowledge, and to constitute an advisory board to the state in the formulation of policy. Cai divided the Academia Sinica into a number of research institutes (yanjiusuo 研究所), with each institute further subdivided into sections (zu 組). The Social Science Institute (Shehui kexue yanjiusuo 社會科學研究所) included four sections—law, economics, sociology, and ethnology—all numbered in that order so that ethnology was referred to as the Fourth Section (Disizu 第四組).27 Cai served concurrently as the president of the Academia Sinica and director of this section.28 Although he would relinquish the latter position to Ling Chunsheng in the following year, as Academia Sinica president he maintained a singular dedication to developing ethnology by recruiting foreign-trained specialists and sponsoring fieldwork, which for him constituted the hallmarks of modern social sciences.29 Academia Sinica in the Field Although Cai Yuanpei deservedly received credit for introducing and institutionalizing ethnology in China, he was by his own admission a theorist and administrator, not a fieldworker. In 1929 Cai invited Ling Chunsheng to take the reins of the Ethnology Section and supervise the development of ethnology. A student of French sociologists Marcel Mauss and Marcel Granet, Ling had just received his doctorate from the University of Paris for a dissertation on the Yao minority of China’s southwest. Influenced by Cai, Ling undertook a study of the Tungusic Hezhe 赫哲 people of China’s volatile northeast, where the Japanese and Soviets had stationed troops to protect their railroad rights, and where border clashes had erupted during the summer. The expedition was therefore of immediate strategic interest. This is still the case today. At that time, Chiang was not technically president but chairman of the State Council. 25  Cai, Jiemin zishu, 177–178. 26  Latin for “Chinese Academy,” but Zhongyang yanjiuyuan 中央研究院 (literally, Central Research Academy) in Chinese. 27  Cai, Jiemin zishu, 157. 28  He, Cai Yuanpei minzuxue lunzhu, 16–17. 29  Cai also lent critical endorsement to these scholars, their research, and their nascent fields when he wrote introductions to the inaugural issues of the Academia Sinica’s pioneering journals Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology (Guoli zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 國立中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊) and Anyang Excavation Reports (Anyang fajue baogao 安陽發掘報告). 24 

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However, it has been remembered as “the first scientific field investigation in Chinese ethnology” and an important milestone in the discipline’s development.30 In 1934 the Academia Sinica published Songhuajiang xiayou de Hezhezu 松花江下游的赫哲族 (The Hezhe people of the lower Songhua River) based on this fieldwork. According to Li Yiyuan 李亦園 (b. 1931), one of Ling’s students and his successor as head of the Institute of Ethnology, this lengthy multivolume work “became the first Chinese scientific ethnography.”31 Although Cai viewed the Shanhaijing as “the oldest volume on ethnogeography of the ancient Celestial Empire,”32 he too distinguished ancient prototypes from modern “scientific” ethnographies like that on the Hezhe. Citing this study as the moment of transition, however, speaks more to the privileging of a particular type of training and experience than to the unique nature of Ling’s work. In 1928, following the establishment of the Ethnology Section but a year before Ling’s appointment, Cai dispatched teams into the periphery to conduct pioneering ethnological fieldwork. Unlike Ling, most of these researchers had no formal training, which has led to conflicting accounts of the origins of Chinese ethnology. For instance, although Cai studied ethnology with well-known specialists, he had no field experience and never produced an ethnography. By contrast, Yang Chengzhi 楊成志 (1902–1991) of Zhongshan University, a Cai appointee, lived among the Yi 遺 people for nearly two years, an experience viewed by some as China’s first ethnographic fieldwork even though it was undertaken by a fieldworker without any formal academic training.33 Wang Ming-ke 王明珂 has contended that ethnological fieldwork for the Academia Sinica began with a pair of initiates who were not associated with the Ethnology Section at all. In the summer of 1928, Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896–1950), then head of the preparatory office of the Institute of History and Philology (IHP, Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo 歷史語言研究所) of the Academic Yuan, ordered an investigation into western Sichuan near the border with Tibet.34 As with Ling’s expedition to the northeast, the threat of foreign imperialism (in this case, the Li Yiyuan 李亦園, “Ling Chunsheng xiansheng dui Zhongguo minzuxue zhi gong­xian” 凌純聲先生對中國民族學之貢獻 [Mr. Ling Chunsheng’s contributions to Chinese ethnology], Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology 29 (1970): 1–2. 31  Li Yiyuan, “Ling Chunsheng,” 2. 32  He, Cai Yuanpei minzuxue lunzhu, 13. 33  See the entry “Yang Chengzhi 楊成志,” in Zhongguo dabaike quanshu: Minzu 中國大百 科全書: 民族 [China encyclopedia: Nationalities] (Beijing: China Encyclopedia Press, 1986), 488–489; Guldin, Anthropology in China, 52. 34  Fu Sinian was a lifelong friend and colleague of Cai Yuanpei. A freshman at Peking University when Cai arrived as chancellor, Fu gained notoriety as editor and contributor to New Tide magazine and marshal of the May Fourth demonstrations. See Wang Fansen, Fu Ssu-nien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 30 

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British in Tibet) prompted both exploration of this frontier and the gathering of data on the native inhabitants.35 Fu recruited Li Guangming 黎光明 (1901–1946), who had recently graduated from Zhongshan University in history, and Wang Yuanhui 王元輝 (1901–1946), a recent graduate of the Central Military Academy (Zhongyang junxiao 中央軍校), both of whom hailed from Sichuan. Their stated purpose was “to cultivate the land and civilize the people.”36 Li hoped that their record would serve “as a reference for those who will govern Sichuan in the future.”37 The driving force behind the expedition was presumably to develop, integrate, and govern the periphery. Although their report was not published and the expedition was subsequently forgotten, Wang Ming-ke argues that they nevertheless were “founding researchers” of the Academia Sinica and the field of cultural studies in China.38 Given the many actors and their roles, the question of how to apportion credit in the development of Chinese ethnology invites biases. In the PRC version of events, Yang Chengzhi is often accorded the first ethnological fieldwork; in Taiwan, Wang Yuanhui and Li Guangming are regarded as China’s first field ethnologists and Ling Chunsheng as first to undertake “scientific” ethnological investigations and reports. After all, the latter three worked for the Academia Sinica, which relocated to Taiwan after the Civil War, whereas Yang remained in mainland China at Zhongshan University. But the dispute over “firsts” also reveals disagreement over requisite qualifications and, in particular, whether one must have epistemological links with the West to be considered a true ethnologist, a controversy not confined to the field of ethnology.

Fu called the mission minwuxue diaocha 民物學調查 (investigating people and things). The region under investigation was then known as Chuankang 川康, an abbreviation of Si­ chuan 四川 and Kangding 康定, located near the border with Tibet. See Archives of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiu suo dang’an 中央研究院歷史語言研究所檔案 (hereafter IHP) 元 115-20-1. 36  IHP 元 115-20-1, 4–5. “Cultivate” appears as kenzhi 懇殖 but it seems the characters were likely miswritten. “Civilize” appears in the original as (kaihua 開化). 37  IHP 元 115-20-1, 5. 38  The final report to IHP, titled “Chuankang minsu diaocha baogao” 川康民俗調查報 告 (Report on an investigation into the customs of western Sichuan), was not published until 2004 as Li Guangming and Wang Yuanhui, Chuankang minsu diaocha jilu, 1929 川康民 俗調查記錄, 1929 (Taipei: Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology, 2004). Wang’s preface provides biographical information on the researchers and discusses the expedition’s significance. 35 

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Antiquarianism versus Archaeology When Cai Yuanpei formed the Academic Yuan, he and Fu Sinian created within the IHP a third section for archaeology.39 This indicates not only unprecedented state interest in the discipline but also their adherence to the European model for the social sciences, which viewed ethnology and archaeology as distinct enterprises (whereas in America the two fall under a broad rubric of “anthropology”). As with the formation of the Ethnology Section, state institutionalization of archaeology helped to demarcate archaeologists, who wield legitimate authority, from others (whether antiquarians, amateurs, collectors, or looters) who lack such authority. This distinction had profound intellectual and political implications, for at stake were proprietary claims to interpret the material record of Chinese civilization. Drawing this line, however, has been fraught with semantic and historical complexities so that even the word for “archaeology” remains problematic. In Chinese, “archaeology” is typically rendered kaoguxue 考古學. The Chinese word kaogu (investigating the ancient) originated with scholars in the Song dynasty long before the advent of archaeology in the West.40 The phrase migrated to Japan where, in the nineteenth century, these same characters became the equivalent of the English word “archaeology.” The phrase was reintroduced into the Chinese lexicon, and thereafter scholars were confounded by the question of whether kaogu represented something old or something new.41 It was, in fact, both, which made the question unanswerable in absolute terms, but this only encouraged debate. In 1957 L. Carrington Goodrich, in his presidential address at the ninth annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, reviewed uses of the term “archaeology” by leading sinologists of the early twentieth century, including the likes of Richard C. Rudolph, Berthold Laufer, and Joseph Needham, as well as Wang Guowei and Liang Qichao. He suggested that their frequent use of the term to describe the activities of premodern scholars was anachronous. He observed, “The Chinese in dynastic times were in numerous cases first-class antiquarians, first-class epigraphists, and they exercised scrupulous care in estimating the age of any object found.” He then asked, “But is this all there is to archaeology? I prefer to think The Archaeology Section was known as the Third Section (Disan zu 第三組). Similar debates exist with regard to the inception of Western archaeology. According to Glyn Daniel, archaeology grew out of antiquarianism only in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe following the development of geology, fieldwork, and evolutionary theory. See Glyn Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 41  Xia Nai 夏鼐, “Shenma shi kaoguxue?” 什麼是考古學? [What is archaeology?], Kaogu 考 古 10 (1984): 931–935. 39  40 

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not.” Citing a former curator of the British Museum, Goodrich explained that archaeology is a science that excavates remains, conserves and restores them, and publishes the information gathered. He pinpointed the moment that archaeology began in China—with an excavation undertaken by the Peking Historical Museum in 1920.42 In other words, Goodrich drew a clear line between the antiquarianism of Song scholars and modern scientific archaeology in much the same way that Cai Yuanpei and Li Yiyuan viewed Ling Chunsheng’s account of the Hezhe as the advent of Chinese ethnology. In a rebuttal titled “Preliminary Notes on Sung Archaeology,” R. C. Rudolph, then Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of California at Los Angeles, presented evidence that archaeology in the Song dynasty entailed fieldwork, collecting, connoisseurship, and publication. He noted Song parallels to modern salvage archaeology: the comparison of physical evidence to secondary historical accounts, records of field surveys and maps of tomb complexes, the preservation of rubbings of inscriptions, published catalogues of bronzes resembling modern archaeological reports, and the classification and terminology for bronze implements established by Song scholars and still employed by modern archaeologists. He conceded that excavation was the “one serious defect in Sung archaeology,” but dismissed this as a fault no greater than those inherent in contemporary archaeology.43 Unlike Goodrich, Rudolph saw continuity from premodern to modern archaeology rather than a sharp distinction between traditional antiquarianism and scientific archaeology. While the debate over how to define Chinese archaeology attracted the interest of foreign sinologists, the Chinese were far more invested in this quandary. Those who aspired to distinction as bona fide archaeologists had to grapple with the question of whether one lacking Western training can still practice archaeology or whether this by definition constitutes antiquarianism. The answer typically corresponded with one’s training. Like the debate over “firsts” in ethnology, the competing narratives of the history of Chinese archaeology tend to trace an epistemic genealogy that ultimately confirms the author’s credentials as a legitimate practitioner of the discipline while seldom, if ever, undermining those credentials.

L. Carrington Goodrich, “Archaeology in China: The First Decades,” Journal of Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (1957): 5–15. 43  R. C. Rudolph, “Preliminary Notes on Sung Archaeology,” Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 2 (1963): 169–177. 42 

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Distinguishing Antiquarianism from Archaeology: Ma Heng and Li Ji In 1899, in a now famous (and perhaps apocryphal) episode in the development of Chinese archaeology, a connoisseur of ancient antiquities and inscriptions fell ill in Beijing and, in the course of seeking a remedy, coincidentally purchased from an apothecary medication that he found contained bits of bone bearing strange markings. Supposedly from this event came the discovery of so-called oracle bones—inscribed turtle plastron and ox scapulae used anciently for divination—which are now recognized as the earliest surviving form of Chinese writing. Among those who made a career of collecting and studying these specimen were Luo Zhenyu 羅 振玉 (1866–1940) and his acolyte Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927), who not only pioneered Shang dynasty studies but subsequently transformed a preoccupation with inscriptions and recorded history into a broader study of the artifacts themselves, which, as Shana Brown has argued, laid the foundation for modern archaeology.44 Although the tendency has been to dismiss their methods as traditional and their work as mere antiquarianism, Brown’s study challenges the accepted, sharply defined distinctions between antiquarianism and archaeology. As it turns out, those same ambiguities persisted even after the official advent of archaeology. In 1928, having sent a team to conduct ethnological fieldwork in Si­ chuan on behalf of the fledgling IHP, Fu Sinian also sent Dong Zuobin 董作賓 (1895–1963), a specialist in epigraphy, to the town of Anyang in Henan Province to initiate fieldwork of a different kind. For years antiquarians had traced oracle bones to this area of the Yellow River Plain. Fu wanted a preliminary survey to assess the area’s potential as an excavation site. With encouragement from Cai Yuanpei, Fu planned to establish an Archaeology Section within the IHP, but the two administrators had yet to select an archaeologist to serve as director. As with selection of the head of the Ethnology Section, the appointment would designate the state’s representative for that field, which entailed not only official endorsement of a particular school or methodology but the power to shape future policy with regard to excavation, preservation, museum exhibition, and cultural property laws. They narrowed the list of candidates to two—Ma Heng 馬 衡 (1881–1955) and Li Ji. Ma was a former imperial scholar and current professor of history at Peking University as well as head of the archaeology research program within the Chinese studies department and chair of the Archaeology Society, with experience in museum curatorship. It was Ma who suggested to Fu the advisability of focusing on Anyang and then recommended Dong Zuobin, his former pupil at Peking University, Shana J. Brown, Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). 44 

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to undertake the proposed excavation.45 By contrast, Li was a newly minted professor of anthropology who possessed only rudimentary training in archaeology and classical Chinese studies. The surprising selection of thirty-three-year-old Li over forty-eight-year-old Ma underscores a new valuation of both credentials and authority. Ma Heng had passed the xiucai 秀才 examination at eighteen years of age, but due to the waning value of a traditional degree, he decided to pursue higher education at the modern-style Nanyang Public School in Shanghai.46 Ma studied there for fewer than two years and did not receive a degree, and remained in Shanghai running the family business for some sixteen years. In 1917 Ma’s elder brother, who was head of the classical literature department at Peking University, arranged for Ma’s appointment within the newly formed national archives (then housed at Peking University under Cai Yuanpei’s oversight). In this capacity, Ma’s aptitude for ancient inscriptions led to an appointment teaching jinshixue 金石學 (epigraphy)47 for the history department beginning in 1920, a subject he would teach for the next thirteen years. When the Chinese studies department (Guoxuemen 國學門) was created as part of the university’s research institute in 1921, one of the department’s five research offices was dedicated to kaoguxue. Ma’s biographers note that as chair of the kaoguxueshi 考古學室 (archaeology room), Ma spearheaded China’s first organization dedicated to archaeology (and, indeed, the first in East Asia).48 In 1922 Ma received appointments both as head of the Department of Ancient Objects and Art at the Peking University Library (Beida tushuguan guwumeishubu 北大圖書館古物美術部) and with the Ministry of Education organizing material for the Peking Historical Museum (Beijing lishi bowuguan 北京 歷史博物館). With his promotion to professor in the history department in the following year, Ma formed and chaired the Archaeology Society (Kaoguxuehui 考古學會), which began mounting exhibitions at the Peking University campus.49 In 1925 both Ma Heng and Li Ji received appointments as lecturers at Tsinghua University’s newly formed National Studies Research Institute (Guoxue yanjiuyuan 國學研究院). While Ma lectured on jinshixue, Li taught courses on kaoguxue. Their different approaches to studying China’s material past came to distinguish archaeology from antiquarianism. 45  Yu Jianwei 俞建偉 and Chen Songping 沈松平, Ma Heng zhuan 馬衡傳 [Biography of Ma Heng] (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2007), 51. 46  Yu, Ma Heng zhuan, 6. 47  Literally, “the study of metal and stone [inscriptions].” 48  Yu, Ma Heng zhuan, 30–38. 49  Yu, Ma Heng zhuan, 40–42. Although the original name of the society was Guwu guji diaochahui 古物古跡調查會, in 1924 it became Kaoguxuehui.

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Like Ma Heng, Li Ji began his early education with immersion in the Confucian classics, but cessation of the civil service examinations in 1905 forced Li and those of his generation to become pioneers. In 1912 Li joined the first class of Tsinghua Academy (Qinghua xuetang 清華學堂), a school established through U.S. remittance of Boxer Indemnity funds for the purpose of preparing Chinese students for study in the United States. There his American instructors schooled him in new branches of learning, including the social sciences. Upon graduation in 1918, Li, now proficient in English, traveled to the United States, where he earned degrees in psychology and sociology from Clark University and then China’s first PhD in anthropology from Harvard, specializing in physical anthropology. He then returned to China to take up a position at Nankai University in Tianjin where, as a lecturer in sociology, Li began teaching courses in anthropology. Up to this point, Li had expressed little interest in archaeology. In 1925, however, he was invited to join both the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art as a field archaeologist and Tsinghua University’s National Studies Research Institute as a specially appointed lecturer in anthropology. In the latter capacity, he offered courses on physical anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology, thus establishing an eclectic anthropology curriculum reflective of his American training.50 During that winter, Tsinghua University and the Freer Gallery jointly dispatched Li to Shanxi Province where he discovered and excavated a Neolithic Yangshao 仰韶 site, part of the painted pottery culture made famous by J. G. Andersson a few years earlier. The university granted Li use of a room to display the unearthed artifacts,51 which achieved for Li the reputation of being China’s first “modern” and “scientific” archaeologist.52 His findings were published in Chinese and English by Tsinghua University and the Freer Gallery.53 Li has subsequently been dubbed the “father of Chinese archaeology”54 due less to training in the discipline and more to his general education in the 50  Archives of Tsinghua University, Beijing, Guoxue yanjiu yuan jiaowu huiyi jilu 國學研究 院教務會議記錄 [Record of the National Studies Research Institute meetings; hereafter ATU], 1925. 51  ATU, 1925. 52  Li Chi, Anyang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), 58; Li Guangmo, Li Ji juan 李濟卷 [Li Ji biography] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 2; Zhang Guangzhi 張光直, Kaogu renleixue suibi 考古人類學隨筆 [Essays on archaeology and anthropology] (Beijing: Sanlian shuju, 1999), 8–9. 53  Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), 11–12. 54  See Zhang, Kaogu renlei xue suibi, 8–9; Li Guangmo, Li Ji juan, 2; Liu Wensuo 劉文鎖, “Lun Li Ji” 論李濟 [A discussion of Li Ji], Kaogu 考古 3 (2005): 86–94; Clayton D. Brown, “Li Ji: Father of Chinese Archaeology,” Orientations 39, no. 3 (2008): 61–66; Clayton D. Brown, “Li

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Western social sciences, a successful field experience that established him in the eyes of both Chinese and Western scholarship—and to fortunate timing. See figures 2.1 and 2.2. Some scholars contend that Ma Heng pioneered China’s first archaeology courses and fieldwork.55 Others have suggested that Ma’s credentials and contributions, while significant, resembled antiquarianism. For those who trace their intellectual genealogy to Li Ji, his appointment as head of the Archaeology Section has become the moment when kaoguxue—modern, scientific archaeology—supplanted traditional antiquarianism.56 It seems clear that for Cai Yuanpei and Fu Sinian (both of whom had studied broadly at various European universities without receiving degrees), Li Ji was favored over Ma Heng for the same reason Cai later relinquished the chair of the Ethnology Section to Ling Chunsheng; that is, although young and less established in traditional circles, both Li and Ling possessed substantial field experience and advanced degrees from prominent Western institutions. The idea that political authority derives from an academic degree is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (Han Wudi 漢武帝) is credited with establishing Confucianism as the official state ideology in 124 bce when he formed Taixue 太學, forerunner of the Imperial Academy, which initially admitted fifty students who then took China’s first imperial examinations.57 Positions within the imperial bureaucracy thereafter were generally contingent on having passed an exam commensurate with one’s position within the hierarchy. Because the exams tested one’s mastery of the Confucian canon, a bureaucrat was considered, above all else, to be a scholar whose political authority derived from an academic degree. The conferral of imperial degrees ceased with discontinuation of civil service exams in 1905. When the last emperor Ji heyi chengwei kaoguxue zhi fu” 李濟何以成為考古學之父 [How Li Ji became the father of Chinese archaeology], Shucheng 書城 (June 2010): 45–52. 55  Guldin, Anthropology in China, 27; Xia Nai, “Wusi yundong he Zhongguo jindai kao­ guxue de xingqi” 五四運動和中國近代考古學的興起 [The May Fourth Movement and the rise of modern Chinese archaeology], Kaogu 考古 3 (1979): 195. 56  The selection of Li over Ma is related by two of Li’s former students, Xia Nai and K. C. Chang, the former of which called the move “prescient.” See Xia, “Wusi yundong,” 195–196; K. C. Chang, “Li Chi: 1896–1979,” Asian Perspectives 23, no. 2 (1980): 319. For details on Li’s role as mentor to these two preeminent archaeologists, see Liu Wensuo 劉文鎖 and Clayton D. Brown 博思源, “Xia Nai yu Li Ji” 夏鼐與李濟 [Xia Nai and Li Ji], Gujin lunheng 古今論衡 [Disquisitions on the past and present] 20 (December 2009): 61–74; Brown, “Li Ji: Father of Chinese Archaeology,” 66. 57  Robert P. Kramers, “The Development of the Confucian Schools,” in Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe: The Qin and Han Empires (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 756.

A sartorial representation of the transformation of the Chinese intellectual. Figure 2.1 shows Li Ji seated far left, beside (left to right) Wang Guowei, Liang Qichao, and Zhao Yuanren, all faculty at Tsinghua University in 1925 (note the traditional-style gowns complete with hands in sleeves). Figure 2.2 shows Li embarking for an excavation in the lower Feng River Valley in spring 1926. Fieldwork necessitated not only a new mindset but a new wardrobe. Figure 2.1 courtesy of the Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology and 2.2 courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

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abdicated in 1912, imperial degrees became largely obsolete. However, they did not immediately lose their cachet, as demonstrated in the cases of Cai Yuanpei and Ma Heng. Over time, new university degrees, especially those from foreign institutions, won the approbation and esteem once afforded by imperial degrees. In the interim, the recognition of legitimate political and intellectual authority often remained ambiguous—a situation that bred contestations, disappointments, and, for some, singular opportunities. Professionals and Amateurs In October 1928, Dong Zuobin conducted his preliminary dig at Anyang on behalf of the IHP to confirm the site’s historical value. The next month Li Ji visited Fu Sinian, who invited Li to head the Archaeology Section and take over as director of the excavation on behalf of the Nationalist government. After visiting Dong at the site, Li wrote to Carl Whiting Bishop (1881–1942), his erstwhile supervisor at the Smithsonian Institution, to announce that “I have just returned from a two week trip to Henan and am now in the position to give the best of news that can be given in the field of archaeology in China.”58 Li related the discovery of the “Ruins of Yin,” capital of the ancient Shang dynasty (c. 1500–1045 bce), with its royal tombs, spectacular bronze ritual vessels, and rich cache of oracle bones. Although classical histories referenced Shang kings, the excavation of Anyang, like Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of Troy, established the historicity of a dynasty skeptics had relegated to myth.59 There is no denying the importance of the Anyang discovery. For many scholars, Li’s appointment and the excavation represent China’s transition to modern, scientific archaeology. In his account of the excavations, however, Li credited Dong with this feat, explaining that “[Dong’s] report after the first official trip not only concluded the antiquarian period of armchair studies of old curiosities, but, what is more important, paved the way for systematic excavation of these ruins.”60 This assessment was offered in retrospect. At the time, Li had complained to colleagues that “not being a trained archaeologist, he [Dong] worked in a rather haphazard manner. . . . [T]here was no planning whatsoever; stratification was not at all observed. It is obvious that his digging was in no 58  Li Ji to Carl Whiting Bishop, December 21, 1928. Archives of the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (hereafter FGA), Bishop files. 59  Millard Rogers of the Seattle Art Museum first made the comparison to Troy in his preface to Li Chi, The Beginnings of Chinese Civilization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1957). Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 and members of the Yigupai 疑古派 (Doubting antiquity school) insisted that conventional accounts of China’s prehistory lacked authenticity. 60  Li, Anyang, 53.

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way different from the curio dealers’ except that it was backed up by the government.”61 With this reproach, Li justified his replacement of Dong as excavation director. Dong had employed surprisingly similar language in a report to Fu Sinian, complaining that the “foolish” local villagers were responsible for indiscriminate digging at the site in their reckless search for “treasures.”62 Likewise, foreign archaeologists visiting Anyang were quite condescending when appraising Li’s work. James Mellon Menzies (1885–1957), a Presbyterian missionary who collected oracle bones, visited Anyang in 1931 and blithely dismissed Li’s methods as “exploratory digging rather than true excavation.”63 Bishop speculated that Li refused to publish ­English-language reports on Anyang for fear of criticism from seasoned scholars. Not one of these individuals—Menzies, Bishop, Li, or Dong—held a degree in archaeology, which suggests why the business of distinguishing the work of professionals from amateurs in this period is as thorny an issue today as it was then.64 Answers tend to reveal national, epistemological, or class proclivities. As Li’s judgment of Dong suggests, the appraisals also changed over time. Official and Unofficial Archaeology Although Dong Zuobin and Li Ji began working as a team while Carl Whiting Bishop ensured that the Smithsonian covered half the expenses for the Anyang excavation, within a year tensions would erupt into a contest over authority to excavate, exhibit, and interpret the results, not only at Anyang but of archaeological materials across China. Problems began when Fu first sent notification to the provincial authorities informing them that Dong would be conducting “national business” on behalf of the new central government,65 a dispatch that the Henan provincial government publicly acknowledged.66 Upon reaching the site, Dong discovered Li Ji to Bishop, November 28, 1928. FGA, Bishop files. IHP 元 23-41-7. 63  Bishop to Lodge, May 8, 1931. Smithsonian Institution Central Archives, Washington, DC, accession 03-018 box 3. 64  Although Li and Bishop had studied archaeological methods as part of their anthropology training, their degrees were not in archaeology. As field archaeologist for the Freer Gallery, Bishop was sometimes referred to as “Dr. Bishop,” but he did not complete the PhD program at Columbia University or the University of Pennsylvania. Menzies held a degree in civil engineering from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Divinity from Knox College; yet, he taught archaeology at Cheeloo University (Jilu daxue 齊魯大學) from 1932 to 1936. He is recognized as “the first non-Chinese archaeologist of China” (Linfu Dong, Cross Culture and Faith: The Life and Work of James Mellon Menzies [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005], 14, 25, 33). 65  IHP 元 130-2b, 25-3. 66  IHP 元 151-1b. 61  62 

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that the area was crawling with “bandits” and requested that Fu secure the area with troops and telegram the local authorities to order the cessation of looting.67 When the official document arrived, Dong posted it on the gate of the compound and later reported that the warning had succeeded as a deterrent.68 But once he began unearthing the oracle bones, He Rizhang 何日章 (1893–1979), head of the provincial library and curator of the Henan Provincial Museum in Kaifeng, cabled the Ministry of Education to insist that his museum receive the finds. The Academia Sinica authorities assured He that some, but not all, would remain in Henan.69 Dong then retired for the season, intending to return with Li in the spring. In preparing to head out to Anyang following the Chinese New Year, Li confessed that “the only factor that I feel uncertain about is the political situation for which I am as unprepared and helpless as before an earthquake.”70 Bandits aside, much of northern China remained under the control of Feng Yuxiang 馮玉祥 (1882–1948), a regional warlord, whose allegiance to the Nationalist government remained dubious. Moreover, Dong was a native of the province. Hailing from Hubei, Li would be viewed as an outsider. His fears turned out to be well placed. When the Archaeology Section team began unearthing enormous and elaborate bronze vessels, ceramics, and stone and bronze implements, the Henan Provincial Museum sent two representatives to observe the excavations, and word began to spread that the museum intended to take over the dig. In contrast to the bandits and looters, who had no claims to the law or expertise, Li viewed the museum as “the worst enemy of Academia Sinica” because it constituted a genuine rival.71 Li’s fears were realized a few days later when He Rizhang appeared at the site with some eighty workers and official authorization from the provincial government to proceed with his own excavation. Whereas Li viewed He as a mere librarian and his expedition as part of the “old treasure hunting tradition,”72 He clearly felt that his actions were literally within his province. After all, for much of the past decade the Guomindang’s authority had been limited to the Canton region, and Chiang Kai-shek resembled one warlord among many. The idea that an outsider representing a recently asserted and only nominal national government had been digging up treasures within the IHP 元 23-1. IHP 元 154-7b. 69  IHP 元 148-3b. 70  Li Ji to Bishop, December 21, 1928. FGA, Bishop files. 71  IHP 元 152-1. 72  Li, Anyang, 63. After graduating from the English department of Beijing Higher Normal School, He Rizhang worked as a librarian at a number of institutions including Lanzhou University and, after the Nationalist exodus, National Chengchi University in Taiwan. 67  68 

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province and shipping them off to IHP headquarters in Beijing was an outrage, whatever Li’s purported credentials. A provincial newspaper gave voice to, or perhaps incited, local antipathy by accusing Li of smuggling relics out of the province, even calling him an “evil person” and a “thief.”73 Following a confrontation of the rival parties, the provincial government issued an order for Li to halt his excavation, stipulating that He and the Henan Provincial Museum had the sole right to excavate.74 Astonished to find himself accused of smuggling, Li retorted, “The fact is, our section was established by the central government as part of the National Research Institute,”75 and therefore “we are sent by the central government and not working secretly.” Li admitted that he had shipped items to the IHP office in Beijing for analysis because the field office lacked proper equipment, but noted that the greater portion of the relics sat in the local school, which served as an ad hoc warehouse. He explained that he planned to establish a local museum to house the artifacts where they could be “publicly presented to the national citizens.” Contrasting his own work to the infamous looting then occurring at the site of one of China’s ancient capitals nearby, he asked, “If this is smuggling, can the tomb raiders of Luoyang be called legitimate? Why does the provincial government follow us around instead of investigating them?” He then concluded that “the Henan government doesn’t care about thirty years of tomb robbing, but they also don’t support academic work and our public excavation as scientific study.”76 The real problem, Li observed, came down to a question not of academic but of political authority. Lamenting the enduring parochialism and general lack of vision of a greater Chinese nation, he complained that “local authorities disregard the central authority.”77 To his superiors at the Academia Sinica, Li explained, “This problem is not limited to Henan; wherever we go, we will have this problem of dealing with local governments. They will react the same way, and there is nowhere we can work. I alone cannot convince them of the central government’s intent to promote scholarship and overcome parochialism. I cannot stand by and watch a few unscientific people ruin the work, so I ask to be relieved of this responsibility.”78 In response to his frustrated (and likely disingenuous) threat of resignation, the central government cabled and encouraged Li to continue Li refers to this in IHP 元 141-2b. IHP 元 148-4. 75  IHP 考 23-1. 76  IHP 元 141-2b. 77  IHP 考 23-1. 78  IHP 元 141-2b. 73  74 

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work,79 which he agreed to do on condition that the government order the provincial and local authorities to lend support to his Archaeology Section. Li demanded that the Ministry of Internal Affairs form a National Antiquities Protection Committee (Zhongyang guwu baoguan weiyuanhui 中央古物保管委員會) and that he, as head of the Archaeology Section, be given command of seventy-eight soldiers and eighteen officers funded by the government to protect the site and the artifacts.80 The Executive Yuan of the ROC, under Chiang Kai-shek’s direct authority, issued an official regulation granting Li’s requests.81 After commenting that it was “strange” for a provincial authority to issue orders to the Academia Sinica, an organ of the central government, the missive ordered the provincial government to stop He’s unofficial excavation and shift support to Li.82 It would take months before the rivalry dissipated; in the meantime accusations of thievery proliferated on both sides. Today, whereas archaeology in the PRC is governed by the Institute of Archaeology (Kaogu yanjiusuo 考古研究所) within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan 中國社會科學院), it is the State Bureau of Cultural Relics (SBCR, Guojia wenwuju 國家文 物局) within the Ministry of Culture (Wenhuabu 文化部) that oversees the administration of antiquities and national museums, with provincial and county-level branches of the SBCR responsible for museums within their jurisdiction. This division of labor between archaeology and museums, or excavation and preservation, did not exist at the time of the Anyang excavation, nor did any clear hierarchy of political or academic authority. Li’s struggle to assert his authority in archaeology required new legislation and even force of arms. Threats to this authority came from not only Li’s compatriots but foreigners as well. European explorers and adventurers had been raiding the Silk Road of ancient artifacts for decades, their activities corresponding inversely with China’s political strength and therefore reaching a “golden age” in the chaotic warlord era. Due to domestic and international competition over archaeological rights, Li advocated for an Antiquities Protection Law (Guwu baocun fa 古物保存法) that, after passing the Legislative Yuan on June 7, 1930, converted China’s antiquities into “national treasures.”83 Article 2 stipulated that the National Antiquities Protection Committee, IHP 考 23-7. IHP 考 23-3. 81  IHP 元 145-5b, 145-6b, 151-33b. 82  IHP 考 31-5-8. 83  Other sources record that the law passed the Legislative Yuan on May 24, 1930. See the Chinese portion of Ignatius T. P. Pao 包遵彭, Guwu baocunfa 古物保存法 [Artifact preservation law] (Taipei: National History Museum, 1966), 7. For Li’s role, see Li, Anyang, 63. 79  80 

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Figure 2.3 The banner proclaims, “Fieldwork of the Archaeology Section of the Nationalist Government’s Central Research Institute [Academia Sinica].” Li Ji is seated at the center, with soldiers on the left and the IHP excavation team on the right, including Dong Zuobin standing hatless. Courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica.

endorsed by and including Li as a founding member, “was charged to preserve, research, and excavate all the ancient objects of the nation and was put directly under the Executive Yuan.”84 With promulgation of this law, the excavation, preservation, and exhibition of artifacts became a national project under the sole auspices of the state. The first official license to excavate was issued to the Archaeology Section for fieldwork at Anyang.85 As head of the central government’s Archaeology Section, Li and his team were then free to monopolize the archaeological fieldwork, at least until the Japanese invasion of 1937 forced an evacuation of the site. See figure 2.3. War of Resistance (Against the Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek) Historically China’s academicians, although steeped in the same ideology, represented differing agendas that at times conflicted with one another or even with that of the emperor. Given their unique relationship to the throne, they were among the few who could candidly remonstrate 84  85 

Pao, Guwu baocunfa, 14. Li, Anyang, 63.

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with the Son of Heaven (although, as history bears out, even this was not without perils). Likewise, as we have seen, academicians of the Republic were part of the Executive Yuan but did not always agree with Chiang Kai-shek or one another. The strain of the Japanese invasion intensified these divisions. In 1927, Chiang seemed to enjoy an amicable relationship with China’s learned community—he had appointed Cai head of the Academia Sinica and, a few months later, Cai presided over Chiang’s marriage to Song Meiling 宋美齡 (1898–2003).86 Five years later, however, Cai, along with Hu Shi, Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936), Chiang’s sister-in-law Song Qing­ ling 宋慶齡 (1893–1981), and other prominent intellectuals, formed the Chinese League for the Protection of Human Rights (Zhongguo minquan baozhang tongmeng 中國民權保障同盟), which gained international renown for criticizing Chiang’s censorship and despotic repression. In reprisal, Chiang ordered the assassination of Yang Xingfo 楊杏佛 (1893–1933), secretary general of both the Academia Sinica and the league.87 Although this move was calculated to cow China’s learned community, the incident galvanized growing opposition to Chiang’s heavy-handedness. In a now familiar coda, Cai resigned his official positions and retired indefinitely to the British colony of Hong Kong, where he lived beyond Chiang’s reach until his death in 1940. But most members of the learned community chose subtle means of resisting the slide towards authoritarianism. While Chiang and his government hunkered down in Chongqing deep in the Sichuan basin, most academic institutions regrouped in distant Kunming in Yunnan Province,88 which afforded a degree of insulation from the Japanese as well as Chiang. Not long after Yang’s assassination, Chiang published China’s Destiny, an official view of Chinese history. Three months later, as chair of the Military Affairs Council, he sent a letter to Fu Sinian, head of the IHP, addressing the institute’s research agenda directly.89 He first acknowledged that “for the past several years the institute has devoted itself to the study of the national history and languages, as well as ethnology and anthropology,” and expressed his “deep gratification” with the institute’s successful Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 362. Frederick Wakeman, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 175–176. 88  The IHP and most of the Academia Sinica congregated here, as well as Peking, Tsing­ hua, and Nankai universities, which temporarily merged into National Southwest Associated University (Xinan lianhe daxue 西南聯合大學). See John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 89  Like China’s Destiny, the letter may not have been personally composed by Chiang, but it bears his name and official seal and certainly his endorsement. 86  87 

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results. “However,” he admonished, “research on this nation’s history should both illuminate the culture of the minzu 民族 [nation] and foster its spirit.” He explained that “for the sake of current needs, considering the relationship between academia and social morals, research on Tang culture is most important” because “the mores of both scholars and the common people [of the Tang dynasty] served as a model for later generations. I hope that from now on your institute will focus on the system of belief and politics, scholarship, society, and arts of this period.” He recommended that all IHP researchers, be they historians, linguists, or anthropologists, focus on some aspect of the Tang dynasty as a specialty and publish their results “in order to change [current] social trends by working to glorify the nation’s history.”90 Chiang wished to buoy morale in the nadir of national history by revisiting its zenith. Fu’s reply to Chiang referred to the communication as an “order.” He assured Chiang that the institute would comply, and enumerated ways that it had been meeting Chiang’s demands.91 The following issue of the IHP’s flagship journal, the Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishiyuyan yanjiusuo jikan 中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊), indeed saw a surge in Tang studies. It would be tempting to conclude that Chiang had controlled the IHP’s agenda. He had expected that every IHP scholar would focus on the Tang dynasty. However, all of the articles on the Tang featured in the issue of the Bulletin were contributed by a single author who happened to be a Tang specialist.92 Although the IHP colleagues certainly shared Chiang’s earnest anxiety over the survival of the Chinese nation and the threat posed by Japan, none altered their agenda to suit his. However, they were often able to exploit their relationships with the state to promote their disciplines and further their own careers. Negotiating a Place for Ethnology During the years when Li Ji searched for Chinese roots in the Yellow River Plain, Ling Chunsheng spent his time on the periphery in pursuit of China’s “others.” He studied the Miao 苗 in Hunan Province and the She 畲 in Zhejiang and Fujian. In 1934 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruited Ling to join its Border Survey Commission (Waijiaobu kanjie weiyuanhui 外交部勘界委員會). The project aimed to “survey the undefined southern IHP 李 64-1. IHP 李 64-2. 92  The following issue, volume 9, was not published until 1947 due to the war. Of the twelve articles, nine were authored by Cen Zhongmian 岑仲勉 (1885–1961), an IHP researcher and a Tang specialist. 90  91 

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border between Yunnan and Burma,” or, more accurately, the border between China and Southeast Asia.93 The invitation coincided with the decision by the Academia Sinica leadership to dissolve Ling’s Ethnology Section and transfer him to the newly formed Fourth Section of the IHP where, after the History, Philology, and Archaeology sections, it became the new Anthropology Section (Renleixue zu 人類學組). Under Director Wu Dingliang 吴定良 (1893–1969), who had received a doctorate in physical anthropology in Britain, the new section focused on somatometry (tizhi celiang 體質測量), gathering measurements on biological variation among China’s races.94 This change in terminology, research emphasis, and institutional structure reflected the influence of Wu and Li, both specialists in physical anthropology. Because of his American education, Li viewed ethnology or cultural anthropology as part of the anthropology rubric. The marginalization of ethnology and therefore Ling’s own work caused hard feelings that eventually prompted his departure from the Academia Sinica, which, for him, fortuitously coincided with rising state interest in his field. Following Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in September 1931, many disciplines, including history, archaeology, and geography, came to serve the cause of national security. In rebuttal to Japanese claims that Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet were not Chinese, the IHP published Fu Sinian’s hastily composed Outline History of Northeastern China (Dongbei shigang 東北史 綱) in an effort to prove that Manchuria was politically and culturally an integral part of China since prehistoric times. The volume was abridged and translated into English by Li for the Lytton Commission.95 But it was Ling who proved the utility of his discipline to the state during the war. The Japanese occupation affected a transition from often nebulous minzu studies, which focused on ethnic groups or the nation, to an explosion of research dedicated to the frontier (bianjiang 邊疆) and frontier administration (bianzheng 邊政).96 In 1941, for instance, the former Minzuxue yanjiu jikan 民族學研究集刊 (Ethnology research periodical) became Bianzheng gonglun 邊政公論 (Frontier administration forum), the most prominent IHP 元 176-3b. Du Zhengsheng 杜正勝, “Shiyusuo de guoqu, xianzai yu weilai” 史語所的過去, 現在與 未來 [The past, present, and future of the IHP], in Xueshushi yu fangfaxue de shengsi 學術史 與方法學的省思 [Reflections on academic history and methodology] (Taipei: IHP, 2000), 6. 95  Fu Sinian 傅斯年, Dongbei shigang 東北史綱 [An outline history of northeastern China] (Beijing: Institute of History and Philology, 1932); Li Chi, Manchuria in History: A Summary (Beijing: Peking Union Bookstore, 1932). 96  These studies included such titles as Bianzheng gonglun 邊政公論 (Frontier administration forum), Bianjiang tongxun 邊疆通訊 (Frontier report), Zhongguo bianjiang 中國邊疆 (China frontier), and Bianjiang yanjiu luncong 邊疆研究論叢 (Frontier studies forum). 93  94 

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periodical in this genre with contributions from Ling and other leading ethnologists. Ling’s own historiography makes this transition apparent. Before the Japanese invasion from Manchukuo into China proper in 1937, his publications on Yunnan had focused on identifying and categorizing the various “tribes” within what he viewed as the most culturally diverse region in China.97 In his 1938 article “The Importance of Developing the Southwest Border,” he argued that “the southwest holds just as important a position as the northeast in the war of resistance and establishing the nation.” Ling suggested that the southwest “is the primary grounds for reviving the nation,” and “dutifully establishing the frontier will increase the strength of the battle of resistance while also accomplishing the mission of establishing the nation.”98 Throughout the war, Ling explored historical precedents for border administration in such articles as “The Manchu System of Administering China’s Borders” and “The Role of Hereditary Chieftainship in Borderland Administration.”99 As an ethnologist, he had a professional interest in China’s periphery. When a foreign enemy had seized part of the frontier and used it as a staging ground for invasion, the periphery became a matter of national interest. On February 23, 1943, Ling received a telegram informing him that ­Chiang Kai-shek had approved his appointment as both Xinjiang provincial party officer and director of the department’s research division, where his training and experience would come in handy working with the local Muslim population in China’s vast and undeveloped westernmost “new territory.”100 Although he declined the offer citing health reasons, the following year he accepted the position of director of the Department of Frontier Education (Bianjiang jiaoyusi sizhang 邊疆教育司司長) within the Ministry of Education.101 As envisioned by Ling, ethnology served the state not only in defining, administering, and developing the periphery, but also in uniting and strengthening the nation. His training in ethnology and education (including a degree in education from National Dongnan University) did assist the state in transforming marginalized ethnic groups into Chinese citizens. During the war of resistance, the central “Yunnan minzu de dili fenbu” 雲南民族的地理分部 [Geographic division of Yunnan’s ethnic groups], reprinted in Ling Chunsheng, Zhongguo bianjiang minzu yu huantaipingyang wenhua 中國邊疆民族與環太平洋文化 [Studies of Chinese minorities and circum-Pacific culture], vol. 1 (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1979), 191–204. 98  Ling Chunsheng 凌純聲, “Jianshe xinan bianjiang de zhongyao” 建設西南邊疆的重要 [The importance of developing the southwest border], reprinted in Ling, Zhongguo bianjiang minzu, 67. 99  See reprints in Ling, Zhongguo bianjiang minzu. 100  IHP 李 13-4-2. 101  IHP 李 13-4-25. 97 

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government moved to make education standardized, centralized, and compulsory.102 According to official publications, wartime border education targeted “all frontier regions” to provide education in “citizenship training” and Han language, with special emphasis on instilling “a clear understanding of the Chinese race and nation.”103 Textbooks and courses incorporated Sun Yat-sen’s teachings on the nation to keep citizens on the fringes aware of “national affairs.”104 In short, war was a national crisis that demanded unity, which would be achieved through uniformity. This propaganda endeavor continued after the war as the Ministry of Education appointed Ling director of the National Frontier Culture Education Committee (Guoli bianjiang wenhua jiaoyuguan guanzhang 國立 邊疆文化教育館館長), where he worked with a number of well-known ethnologists to oversee the production of textbooks for primary schools.105 June Dreyer accuses this institution of serving as the Nationalist government’s “chief vehicle of assimilation.”106 But such a Machiavellian view gives the government far too much credit. When Ling assumed the directorship of the Department of Frontier Education, he wrote to Fu Sinian complaining that frontier education existed in name only. Ling was unaccustomed to spending his entire day writing reports. He explained that his predecessor accomplished little other than creating many organizations and superfluous positions with overlapping responsibilities. In exasperation, he exclaimed that the department’s bureaucratization “exceeds anything seen in China or abroad from ancient times to the present.” According to Ling, what the department had done was to offer general education to those near the border areas. Ling claimed that he would have to start from scratch in building a foundation for frontier education by cutting and reorganizing, and “all hopes for this lie with me.”107 Despite Ling’s frustrations, this application of ethnology provided him with new leverage for pursuing a longstanding dream—that is, creating an independent ethnology institute.108 He confessed to Fu that he had grieved for the nine years since Ethnology and Physical Anthropology had merged into one section, as the two “differ in every way.” Part of this problem stemmed from differing visions for ethnology. Li Ji, who had replaced Fu as acting IHP director during the war, had received training at Harvard China Handbook, 1937–45 (Chongqing: Chinese Ministry of Information, 1945), 324, 332. China Handbook, 341. 104  China Handbook, 327, 342. 105  Zhonghua minguo jiaoyubu baogao 中華民國教育部報告 [Report of the ROC Ministry of Education] 18, no. 3 (1946): 4. 106  June Dreyer, China’s Forty Millions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 18. 107  IHP 李 13-4-25. 108  IHP 李 13-4-27, 13-4-29. 102  103 

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in the four-field approach to anthropology. Li remained oriented toward physical anthropology and archaeology in particular, whereas Ling, due to his French training, wished to align ethnology more closely with geography and sociology. After noting to Fu that the physical anthropology lab had recently petitioned for its own institute, Ling argued that ethnology could finally develop into an institute. The war had helped Ling’s argument, proving the usefulness of this recent and obscure discipline and catapulting him to new heights in academics and politics. Ling observed that “recently more and more Chinese citizens see the importance of ethnology. Likewise, two years prior the government had planned to establish a Frontier Culture Research Institute within the IHP. The charter for this institute stipulated that the greater part of the research work would fall within the scope of an ethnology institute.” He also pointed out that Cai Yuanpei had promoted ethnology with the idea that it would house its own institute in the Academia Sinica, given adequate funding. Ling argued that setting up the institute would realize Cai’s wish and serve his memory.109 That year Ling became director of the Anthropology Section in the IHP. When he was denied an independent ethnology institute, he resigned to chair the previously mentioned National Frontier Culture Education Committee.110 Within a year, he assisted the section in following Chiang in the exodus to Taiwan, where after a period of turmoil it settled with the rest of the Academia Sinica in Taipei’s eastern suburbs. In 1965, Ling finally established an Institute of Ethnology, which today sits beside the IHP on the Academia Sinica campus. Ling served as the inaugural director of the Institute of Ethnology, while Rui Yifu 芮逸夫 (1899–1991), who had begun his career in ethnology as Ling’s assistant, headed IHP’s Anthropology Section, a division between ethnology and anthropology that exists to date.111 The schism played out in mainland China as well, where the term “anthropology” (renleixue) prevails in the south at institutions like Xiamen University and Zhongshan University (which had close ties to the Guomindang and Academia Sinica), while minzuxue (ethnology or “nationality” studies) is typically favored at institutions that placed archaeology within history rather than anthropology departments.112

IHP李 13-4-27. IHP 雜 23-15-22. 111  Li Yiyuan, “Ling Chunsheng,” 1. 112  In 2002 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS; Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan 中國社會科學院) Institute of Ethnology, as a nationwide organization, attempted to become more neutral and inclusive by adding the term “anthropology” to its title, making it the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. CASS also has a separate Institute of Archaeology. 109  110 

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A Practical Application for Archaeology: Museums, Science, and Modern Public Education Just as Ling Chunsheng successfully negotiated a place for ethnology by demonstrating its relationship to China’s wartime exigencies, Li Ji ensured continued support for archaeology by tailoring it to the nation’s needs. In both cases, their expertise facilitated a move from research to public education. When the Japanese invasion forced the Archaeology Section to abandon the rich cultural treasures of the Central Plain and relocate to peripheral Kunming, Li shifted his focus from fieldwork and recovery of objects to the objects themselves. Because of his expertise in archaeology, Li had accepted an appointment by the Ministry of Education to serve as head of a preparatory committee for the National Central Museum (Zhongyang bowuyuan 中央博物院), which would display the Anyang objects in Nanjing. In September 1935, the National Antiquities Protection Committee that Li had proposed held its inaugural meeting, with Li appointed a member of the board and Ma Heng, then head of the Palace Museum, as director. During the war the Ministry of Education broadcasted a speech of Li’s in his capacity as a pioneer in cultural heritage preservation in which he explained the role of museums within modern knowledge systems. The heart of modern education, he argued, is not the humanities of the classical age, but the sciences. Echoing Cai’s earlier calls for empirical evidence, fieldwork, and utilitarianism, he suggested that while books offer necessary theoretical knowledge, one must rely on concrete objects for what he termed “practical education.” He explained that there are libraries to preserve books and librarians to assist the public in accessing written records, but there are also specialists who “select, collect, preserve, classify, catalog, and display” objects in museums, which “are places of academic research and the heart of education, of equal value with libraries and research institutions.” Noting the recent rapid proliferation of museums in the West, he envisioned the establishment of a museum in each urban center throughout China but lamented that, as yet, “this new type of knowledge still has not penetrated the hearts of our countrymen.”113 In the hope that this attitude would change, during the occupation he supervised the transportation of the relics recovered at Anyang and assisted Ma Heng in coordinating the epic cross-country odyssey of the Palace Museum collection.114 After the war, the collections 113  Published as Li Ji, “Bowuguan yu kexue jiaoyu” 博物館與科學教育 [Museums and scientific education], preface to Suo Yuming 索予明, Gugong wenwu qianshuo 故宮文物淺說 [Guide to the collection of the Palace Museum] (Taipei: Zhengzhong Book, 1959). 114  The IHP archive holds letters that passed between these two men tracking the inventories of these collections.

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of the National Central Museum and the Palace Museum were combined and the best objects were selected to follow the Nationalist government across the Taiwan Strait.115 While Li assisted in this undertaking, Ma Heng remained behind to head what remained of the Palace Museum in Beijing. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, Li helped with the work of assembling and cataloguing what became the Palace Museum collection in Taipei.116 Like Ling, Li exploited his expertise and his relationship to the state to stake out new professional territory. When the ROC government acquired Taiwan at the conclusion of the war, the repatriation of Japanese nationals left open Taihoku Imperial University (Taibei diguo daxue 臺北帝國大學) in Taipei, and Fu Sinian, who accepted an appointment as president of the university (renamed National Taiwan University or NTU) recruited to that institution many Academia Sinica researchers who served simultaneously as NTU professors, a tradition that continues today. Within the university Fu commissioned Li to create a Department of Archaeology and Anthropology (now all subsumed under anthropology), where Li, in establishing an anthropology curriculum, employed the four-fields “Harvard model.”117 This department became the first Chinese institution to offer a degree in archaeology. Although Li built his professional career in the field of archaeology, he taught physical anthropology and anthropometry, subjects he had specialized in as a graduate student and in which he retained a primary interest. Legacy Whereas Li Ji, Ling Chunsheng, and others of China’s founding generation of anthropologists followed the Nationalists across the Taiwan Strait, many of their students and colleagues stayed behind. Pioneering sociologist Wu Wenzao 吴文藻 (1901–1985) and his students Fei Xiaotong 費孝 通 (1910–2005) and Lin Yaohua 林耀華 (1910–2000) took the reins of ethnic studies in the PRC and continued their research on “minority nationalities.” Liang Siyong 梁思永 (1904–1954), Guo Baojun 郭寶鈞 (1893–1971), and Xia Nai (1910–1985) stayed in the mainland to guide archaeology while Ma Heng remained head of the Palace Museum in Beijing. Mao’s government reorganized what remained of the Academia Sinica into the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, Zhongguo kexueyuan 中國科學院), See the foreword in Suo, Gugong wenwu qianshuo, and Chiang Fu-tsung, “The Transfer of the National Palace Museum Collection to Taiwan and Its Subsequent Installation,” National Palace Museum Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1979): 1–16, 37–43. 116  “A Brief History of the National Palace Museum,” National Palace Museum Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1966): 29–32, 85–89. 117  Li, Anyang, 142. 115 

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which today falls under the purview of the State Council (Guowuyuan 國務院).118 Like the Executive Yuan in the ROC, the council is headed by the premier of the PRC (or, in the ROC, by the president), who oversees the equivalent of a cabinet encompassing ministries and national institutions—including the parallel institutions of the CAS in the PRC and the Academia Sinica in the ROC. Twentieth-century China began with the separation of academics from the state, which led to a traumatic collapse of longstanding absolutist authority. Men of letters were compelled to explore and develop alternative, modern, and supposedly universally shared bases of knowledge and authority. Their search led to a cultural renaissance known as the New Culture Movement and the emergence of academic fields such as ethnology and archaeology, which, in turn, enabled the imagining of a modern Chinese nation. The Northern Expedition and threats from Japan facilitated the reemergence of authoritarianism and an attempted recoupling of state and academia. Whether China’s new men of letters chose to align with the state was determined in part on how the alignment would benefit their discipline and themselves. Although the Civil War split the academic world into two opposing ideological camps, with the PRC and ROC overseeing anthropology through the highest research and teaching institutions, the ruling regimes apparently did not have complete control over anthropologists, much less their individual agendas. Since the passing of Mao and Chiang, there has been a gradual but marked realization of those May Fourth values of intellectual freedom and plurality that Cai Yuanpei championed a century ago. The imperial literatus (xueshi 學士) balanced intellectual creativity against state control. With the passing of the ancien régime, intellectuals faced the influx of foreign ideas, the rise of industrialism, the mass market, nationalist consciousness, and other unprecedented factors. This chapter has highlighted how they grappled with the pressures, conflicts, and uncertainties as they sought to provide intellectual, if not political, order to a complex and ever-changing world. Rather than reconcile the many disagreements and inconsistencies that characterized this process, this chapter has illustrated the role the negotiations and their resolutions played in shaping the development of anthropology and, by extension, how that role has defined and redefined China.

In 1977 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences became independent of CAS, which now exclusively involves the natural sciences. 118 

Part II Technical Knowledge and the Professions

Parallel to the formation of the academic fields discussed in part I, late Qing and Republican China also witnessed the development of technical professions such as law and engineering, which are the focus of part II. As chapters 3 and 5 show, schools and training programs initiated and run by foreigners played a vital role in introducing these new fields, especially during the late Qing period. Law and politics (fazheng 法政) programs at Japanese universities first introduced Chinese literati to constitutional principles and a whole range of legal subfields, whereas foreign firms and governments operating railways in China established programs to train the engineers needed to build and run those systems. Chinese governments, however, rapidly seized the initiative by establishing their own schools for law and politics, judicial training programs, and courses to teach engineering at state-run universities. As they did so, Chinese scholars and government officials played an active role in configuring these fields of knowledge and shaping the institutions that taught them in China. We see this most clearly in the cases of law and the judiciary. In chapter 3, Huei-min Sun demonstrates that late Qing literati strongly preferred courses of study that included politics, economics, and international relations over narrow, specialized training in law. This preference reflected a Confucian orientation toward more general moral and political concerns versus narrow, technical ones. Consequently, China’s own law and politics schools tended to replicate the diverse, more general curriculum common in Japan rather than focus on specialized legal training. Similarly, in chapter 4, Glenn Tiffert portrays a growing politicization of judicial training during the 1930s and 1940s, through the process of partification (danghua 黨化), which reflected both Leninist approaches to law and Chinese proclivities to viewing law as a tool for political projects rather than an independent field insulated from politics. With engineering, by contrast, as Elisabeth Köll shows in chapter 5, a steady stream of Chinese scholars pursued higher degrees in the United States and Europe

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and returned to institutionalize those fields of learning by teaching in Chinese universities, leading to a more direct process of knowledge transfer. However these fields were configured, the vagaries of late Qing and Republican job markets for those with specialized training had a decisive impact on elite professionalization. Each chapter illustrates a distinctive process. Sun demonstrates that declining opportunities for government and academic positions, which late Qing literati valued culturally, forced law and politics school graduates, somewhat reluctantly, into becoming licensed, practicing lawyers during the early Republic, leading to what she calls “unintentional professionalization” in what many of them considered a narrow, technical field. Tiffert shows that those eligible for judicial training in the early Republic often aimed instead at more prestigious positions in the government bureaucracy or, ironically enough, lucrative private legal practice. Together, these two chapters reveal a hierarchy of prestige and profit ranging from government posts and educational positions, which provided both, to law practice (lucrative) to judicial appointments (prestigious). By contrast, Elisabeth Köll suggests that limited railway expansion during the Republic left capable civil engineers with few outlets to practice their craft, so they turned instead to positions in the government bureaucracy or higher education, becoming, in effect, specialists unable to practice their profession. Most importantly, in none of these cases do we see a neat, linear process of professionalization running parallel to foreign examples. Moreover, in each of these chapters, late imperial cultural frameworks inflected the mindsets and practices of these emergent lawyers, judges, and engineers. Köll, for instance, describes initial resistance by late Qing engineering students to hands-on field research and study. Sun relates that Republican lawyers actively practiced literati pastimes of poetry, painting, and classical scholarship to maintain their cultural prestige, even as they became legal technicians. Moreover, Tiffert argues that “judges were expected to be something more than adept technicians; they also were supposed to reach for the personal rectitude and cultured sagacity of traditional scholar-officials.” Even as more specialized groups of technical professionals emerged during the early twentieth century, late imperial expectations of what it meant to be a scholar shaped the identities and practices of late Qing and Republican intellectuals in ways that differed markedly from their counterparts in the West.

CHAPTER 3

From Literati to Legal Professionals: The First-Generation Chinese Law School Graduates and Their Career Patterns

HUEI-MIN SUN In 1874, Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909), then educational commissioner of Sichuan Province, published a wide-ranging reading list titled Shumu dawen 書目答問 (Bibliographical questions answered). Of the more than two thousand books listed, only eight were about judicial knowledge. Twenty-four years later, in another influential book, Quanxue pian 勸 學篇 (An exhortation to learning), Zhang highly praised Western criminal law and business law, but he still did not emphasize the importance of legal knowledge in the education scheme that he was proposing for future literati.1 Zhang’s opinion about legal education came from a long-standing intellectual tradition that considered law a technical skill and thus a secondary form of knowledge compared with Confucian learning. During the Qing dynasty, there were no formal institutions for legal education; it was assumed that well-educated scholar-officials could learn how to deal with judicial matters by self-study and on-the-job training, but most officials in charge of judicial matters had to rely on the assistance of private legal secretaries trained through apprenticeship.2 This basic assumption also applied to Western legal knowledge. For example, in 1877, Li Hongzhang 1  Zhao Dexin 趙德馨, Wu Jianjie 吳劍杰, and Feng Tianyu 馮天瑜, eds., Zhang Zhidong quanji 張之洞全集 [The complete works of Zhang Zhidong], vol. 12 (Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 2008), 169–172, 176, 184, 268. 2  For more information about traditional Chinese legal education, see Wejen Chang, “Legal Education in Ch’ing China,” in Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 292–339.

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李鴻章 (1823–1901) wrote that scholar-officials could understand Western law by reading Chinese translations.3 Nonetheless, until 1900 most of the translators and their patrons did not give a high priority to Western law books, with the exception of books about international law.4 Significant changes began by 1900 because the Qing government launched a long-term legal Westernization movement. Many scholars have demonstrated the expansion of legal education,5 the increasing number of law books,6 and the mediating role of Japan during the late Qing and early Republic.7 Less attention has been paid to the literati and scholar-officials who flocked to foreign or native law schools. Cheng Liaoyuan is one of the first scholars to conduct extensive and systematic research on Chinese law students in the late Qing dynasty. He investigated who the students of the various law schools were, how they were educated, and what they did after graduation. Cheng’s path-breaking work is unique because he uses the term fazheng 法政 (literally, law and politics) to define the scope of his research. Recently, influenced by historians with legal training, Chinese scholars have tended to use the terms falü jiaoyu 法律教育 and faxue jiaoyu 法學教育 to refer to late-Qing legal education. Cheng has criticized such an approach for misstating the intellectual context of the late Qing, because late Qing literati believed that law, politics, and economics constituted a single new discipline called fazhengxue 法政學 or fazheng zi xue 法 政之學. Since the boundaries of the three disciplines were vague, most of the graduates of the fazheng schools did not confine themselves to the legal 3  Li Hongzhang, “Qingyong Wu Tingfang” 請用伍廷芳 [A recommendation for Wu Tingfang], in Li Wenzhong gong quanji 李文忠公全集 [The complete works of Li Hongzhang], vol. 5 (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1965), juan 7, 21b. 4  A catalogue of translated foreign books published in 1902 listed forty-two law books, twenty-three of which dealt with international law. See Xu Weize 徐維則 and Gu Xieguang 顧燮光, Zengban donxixue shulu 增版東西學書錄 [An enlarged catalogue of books on Japanese and Western knowledge], in Jindai yishu mu 近代譯書目 [Catalogues of translated foreign books in modern China] (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 2003), 71–79, 87–94. 5  Ye Longyan 葉龍彥, “Qingmo minchu (1905–1919) zhi fazheng xuetang” 清末民初 (1905–1919) 之法政學堂 [The fazheng schools in the late Qing and early Republican eras, 1905–1919] (PhD dissertation, Chinese Culture University, 1974); Wang Jian 王健, Zhongguo jindai falü jiaoyu 中國近代法律教育 [Legal education in modern China] (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2001). 6  Tian Tao 田濤 and Li Zhuhuan 李祝環, “Qingmo fanyi waiguo faxue shuji pingshu” 清 末翻譯外國法學書籍評述 [A commentary on the translations of foreign law books], Zhongwai faxue 中外法學 [Peking University law journal] 12, no. 3 (2000): 355–371; Yu Jiang 俞江, “Qingmo faxue shumu beikao” 清末法學書目備考 [A list of law books in late Qing for reference], in Falü wenhuashi yanjiu 法律文化史研究 [Studies on the history of legal culture], vol. 2, ed. He Qinhua 何勤華 (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), 450–481. 7  Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1993), 179–192.

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profession. Cheng rightly indicated the existence of the idea of fazhengxue in the early twentieth century, but his focus on the links between law and politics led him to neglect the equally important trend of the creation of a distinct discipline of law and the formation of a specialized legal profession, despite the predominance of a hybrid form of legal education.8 This chapter explores the unintentional professionalization process started by the introduction of fazheng education. It begins by demonstrating that the curriculum of fazheng schools, originally designed by Japanese legal scholars, consisted mainly of law courses. Chinese promoters and recipients of fazheng education felt unsatisfied with the law-centered curriculum. They were eager to modernize China and make it wealthy and strong through political reform and economic development. However, they could not repudiate the Japanese model without a better and easily replicable alternative. The chapter then probes how the pressure of unemployment drove the intellectually specialized literati to create and pursue professional careers practicing law. The first-generation law school graduates considered legal knowledge, especially of constitutional law, a necessary foundation for managing a modern state. They dreamed of replacing late imperial scholar-officials with their new knowledge and degrees, but the reality was that they could hardly squeeze into the existing government departments. Inspired by their new knowledge, these graduates urged the government to establish an independent judiciary system and legalize the private practice of law. They thereby created new career paths for themselves. The final section of the chapter discusses how a distinctive professionalization process shaped the social status and cultural features of this emergent group of legal professionals in the Republic. Name and Reality: Fazheng as a Discipline An old term, fazheng had first appeared in the text of an ancient book, the Guanzi 管子, but it was not widely used until the late Qing. The traditional usage of fazheng referred to laws and policies issued by the rulers. In the late Qing, it became a general designation for a field of learning concerned with legislation, law enforcement, policy making, governmental administration, and so on.9 The first fazheng school for Chinese students was founded in Japan in 1904. In 1903, Konoe Atsumaro 近衛篤麿 (1863–1904) Cheng Liaoyuan, Qingmo fazhengren de shijie 清末法政人的世界 [Lawyers and political men in the late Qing] (Beijing: Falü cubanshe, 2003), esp. “Yinlun” 引論 [Introduction], 1–3. 9  “Mingfa jie” 明法解 [Commentary on the “Mingfa” chapter], in Guanzi (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1965), juan 21, 123. By consulting the Scripta Sinica (Hanji dianzi wenxian ziliaoku 漢籍電子文獻資料庫, available at http://hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw), we find that the term fazheng seldom appeared in pre-Qing books. 8 

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and Nakaoka Moriyoshi 長岡護美 (1842–1906), representatives of the East Asia Common Culture Society (Toa dobunkai 東亞同文會), which aimed at improving cultural exchange as well as economic and trade relations between China and Japan, began to negotiate with Wang Daxie 汪大燮 (1860–1929), the administrator of Chinese students in Japan. The goal was to establish an accelerated academy of legal and political learning (sucheng fazheng xueyuan 速成法政學院) for Chinese officials and literati. The initial plan was suspended because of Wang’s resignation and Konoe’s sudden death early in 1904.10 In March 1904, two Chinese students, Fan Yuanlian 范源濂 (1876–1927) and Cao Rulin 曹汝霖 (1877–1966), who had studied in Japan for several years, initiated a new project. Collaborating in May 1904 with the president of Hosei University (Hosei daigaku 法政大學), Wume Kenjiro 梅謙次郎 (1860–1910), they started the Accelerated Course of Legal and Political Learning (Fazheng suchengke 法政速成科, hereafter ACLPL). According to Cao’s memoir, he and Fan were in charge of drafting regulations and organizing translators; Hosei University provided classrooms, designed the curriculum, appointed professors, and registered the program with the Japanese and Chinese governments.11 Hosei University was originally a professional law school, and Wume Kenjiro was one of the most famous scholars of civil law in the Meiji era of Japan, so it was no wonder that the ACLPL centered on legal studies. The courses included an introduction to jurisprudence, civil law, commercial law, constitutional law (staatsrecht), administrative law, criminal law, international public law, international private law, and court organization law, as well as civil and criminal procedure law. In addition to these extensive legal courses, some general courses were offered. Initially, the ACLPL planned to offer economics, finance, and prison studies only. Two months later it added history of the West, political geography, politics, and police studies. Apparently, such an adjustment was made in order to meet Chinese expectations about the kind of education necessary for 10  “Chushi Riben dachen Yang Shu qing fangxiao Riben she fazheng shuchengke zhe” 出 使日本大臣楊樞請倣效日本設法政速成科摺 [Memorial of the Chinese ambassador in Japan, Yang Shu, suggesting the establishment of an accelerated course of legal and political learning after Japanese model], in Guoli Beiping gugong bowuyuan 國立北平故宮博物院,ed., Qing guanxuchao ZhongRi jiaoshe shiliao 清光緒朝中日交涉史料 [Historical materials on SinoJapanese relations in the Guangxu reign] (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1970), juan 68, 34. For the China-related activities of the East Asia Common Culture Society, see Huang Fu-ch’ing 黃 福慶, “Dongya tongwen hui—Riben zaihua wenjiao huodong yanjiu zhi yi 東亞同文會—日 本在華文教活動研究之一 [Toa dobun kai: A study of Japan’s educational and cultural activities in China, part 1], Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 中央研究院近代史研究 所集刊 [Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History Academia Sinica] 5 (June 1976): 337–368. 11  Cao Rulin, Cao Rulin yisheng zhi huiyi 曹汝霖一生之回憶 [A memoir of Cao Rulin’s life] (Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1970), 19–20.

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future scholar-officials. As Douglas R. Reynolds has pointed out, most of the lecturers in the ACLPL were eminent and promising Japanese legal experts. The lectures were translated into Chinese in the classroom. Hosei University began to publish lecture notes twice a month, starting in February 1905, with the intention of extending its influence to Chinese and Korean students in Japan.12 The Chinese ambassador at the time, Yang Shu 楊樞 (1844–1917), who had promised to help the well-trained ACLPL graduates render service to the Qing government,13 highly praised the “wide-ranging” curriculum offered by the school. He reported to the Qing court that the ACLPL curriculum could be grouped into four categories of equal importance, namely, law, politics, economics, and foreign affairs. Yang did notice the ACLPL’s emphasis on law, but he explained that this was because Western laws were multifarious and complex. In the eyes of Yang, Western laws were merely regulations for managing such foreign-related matters as railroads, mines, trademarks, banks, and so on. In other words, law was just one form of knowledge about methods of governing (zhifa 治法).14 With the support of the Chinese government and the assistance of senior Chinese students in Japan, the ACLPL powerfully attracted young Chinese officials and literati. From 1904 to 1908, it admitted 1,885 Chinese students, 1,215 of whom graduated. This number was very large; by comparison, only 1,485 Japanese students graduated from Hosei University in the years 1880 to 1909.15 It is difficult to assess the influence of the law-centered curriculum on the Chinese students, but we do find that those who were in Japan at the 12  Hosei daigaku 法政大学, Hosei daigaku hajijunenshi 法政大学八十年史 [Eighty-year history of Hosei University] (Tokyo: Hosei daigaku, 1961), 227–231; Hosei daigaku hyakunenshi hensan iinkai 法政大学百年史編纂委員会, Hosei daigaku hyakunenshi 法政大学百年史 [Hundred-year history of Hosei University] (Tokyo: Hosei daigaku, 1980), 171–173; Reynolds, China, 1898–1912, 55–56. 13  “Sinkoku koshi Yo Shu shi no ensetsu” 清国公使楊樞氏の演説 [Speech of the Chinese ambassador Yang Shu], in Kindai Nihon no Ajia kyoiku ninshiki, shiryohen—Meiji goki kyoiku zasshi shoshu Chugoku, Kankoku, Taiwan kankei kiji 近代日本のアジア教育認識‧資料編—明治 後期教育雑誌所収中国‧韓国‧台湾関係記事 [Modern Japanese understanding of Asian education, a collection of materials: Articles related to China, Korea, and Taiwan in the educational journals of the late Meiji period], ed. Kindai Ajia kyoikushi kenkyukai 近代アジア教育 史研究会, vol. 15 (Tokyo: Ryukei shousha, 2002), 16. 14  Guoli Beiping gugong bowuyuan, Qing guanxuchao ZhongRi jiaoshe shiliao, juan 68, 34–35. 15  He Yaofu 賀耀夫, “Qingmo shidaifu liuxue Riben re toushi: Lun fazheng daxue Zhongguo liuxuesheng suchengke” 清末士大夫留學日本熱透視: 論法政大學中國留學生速成科 [An observation of the craze of the late Qing scholar-officials for studying in Japan: On the accelerated course of Hosei University for Chinese students], Jindaishi yanjiu 近代史研究 [Modern history studies] 1 (1993): 43–45.

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time developed a law-centered idea of fazheng. In 1906, a group of Chinese students from the ACLPL organized the Society for Legal and Political Knowledge Exchange (Fazhengxue jiaotongshe 法政學交通社) in Tokyo and published its journal, Fazhengxue jiaotongshe zazhi 法政學交通社雜誌 (Journal of the society for legal and political knowledge exchange). In the journal’s foreword, Xu Gongmian 徐公勉 (also known as Xu Fosu 徐佛 蘇, 1879–1943), a graduate of Tokyo Normal School, defined fazheng as the fundamental laws of the state, which limited the power of the ruler, established the rights of the ruled, reconciled the contradictions between different races, and arranged all kinds of administrative work. Xu claimed that fazheng was the only learning that could save China from subjugation.16 In his constitutionalist interpretation of fazheng, Xu successfully argued that laws were not just administrative regulations but the very principles of governing. However, Xu confined his recognition of the importance of legal studies to constitutionalism, which lay at the intersection of legal and political studies. Such a view became more and more widespread as Chinese constitutional reform progressed during the last decade of the Qing dynasty. The heyday of the ACLPL came after the empress dowager Cixi 慈禧 (1835–1908) declared the start of a constitutional reform process on September 1, 1906.17 At this time the number of Chinese students who were interested in the ACLPL program doubled. However, voices criticizing the short-term and superficial training became much louder too. The length of the ACLPL was at first one year and soon extended to eighteen months while the length of ordinary Japanese law schools was three years.18 In 1904, Yomiuri shimbun 讀賣新聞 (Yomiuri daily news) published an editorial stating that the Japanese private colleges should enable the Chinese students to receive an ordinary education, as did Japanese students. If the colleges continued to offer accelerated education for Chinese students, they should at least enhance the graduation requirements in order to maintain the standards of Japanese colleges as well as the Japanese state.19 Xu Gongmian, “Fazhengxue jiaotongshe zazhi fakanci” 法政學交通社雜誌發刊詞 [Foreword to the Journal of the Society for legal and political knowledge exchange], Fazhengxue jiaotongshe zazhi 法政學交通社雜誌 [Journal of the Society for legal and political knowledge exchange] 1 (1906): 1–2. 17  Xia Xinhua 夏新華 et al., eds., Jindai Zhongguo xianzheng licheng: Shiliao huicui 近代中國憲 政歷程: 史料薈萃 [The constitutional movements in modern China: A collection of historical materials] (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2004), 51–52. 18  “Shinkoku ryugakusei hosei sokusei ka kisoku” 清国留学生法政速成科規則 [The regulations of the APLCL] and “Hosei sokusei ka kisoku gyu kaisei” 法政速成科規則中改正 [The revised regulations of the ACLPL], in Kindai Ajia kyoikushi kenkyukai, Kindai Nihon no Ajia kyoiku ninshiki, vol. 15, 36, 100. 19  “Shina gakusei kyoikusha ni nozomu” 支那学生教育者に望む [Expectations for the 16 

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In 1906, Dalu 大陸 (The continent), a magazine managed by Ji Yihui 戢翼 翬 (1878–1909), one of the first students sent to Japan by the Qing government, labeled the ACLPL a “diploma mill” because students could hardly receive sufficient training in such a short term.20 In responding to the criticism, Wume Kenjiro claimed that the ACLPL was not for profit,21 and he highly praised the qualifications and the performance of the Chinese students. Nonetheless, he admitted that the accelerated legal and political education was an interim measure for the training of Chinese students; in the future, he maintained, Chinese students should learn Japanese first and follow the regular procedures to complete their education in Japan.22 Wume Kenjiro’s hope was soon realized. At the end of 1905, the Japanese government issued a specific regulation to strengthen the administration of foreign students, which unexpectedly sparked a massive strike among the Chinese students in Japan.23 Public opinion in Japan attributed the agitation to the accelerated education programs having recruited a great many badly behaved Chinese students. The Chinese government also perceived the disadvantages of accelerated education and ceased to support the short-term study abroad programs.24 Wume Kenjiro visited China and reached an agreement with Zhang Zhidong and Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859–1916) that the ACLPL would no longer recruit new students after the winter of 1906.25 Thereafter, Chinese students who intended to study law and politics in Japan had to enroll in three-year universities. Moreover, modeled on the Japanese departmental academic system, the ACLPL divided the new students enrolled in the winter of 1906 into two courses of study: a legal course and a political course. Both courses required that students take forty-eight semester credit hours to obtain a educators of Chinese students], Yomiuri shimbun, December 10, 1904. 20  “Fazheng sucheng ke” 法政速成科 [The APLCL], Dalu 2, no. 4 (1906): 23. 21  The income provided by the ACLPL was vital for Hosei University because it covered an accumulated financial deficit. See Abe Hiroshi 阿部洋, Chugoku no kindai kyoiku to Meiji Nihon 中国の近代教育と明治日本 [Chinese modern education and Meiji Japan] (Tokyo: Fukumura shuppan kabushikigaisha, 1990), 85. 22  Wume Kenjiro, “Hosei sokusei ka no en wo sosogu” 法政速成科ノ冤ヲ雪グ [Defending the accelerated course of legal and political learning], in Kindai Ajia kyoikushi kenkyukai, Kindai Nihon no Ajia kyoiku ninshiki, vol. 15, 88–96. 23  Recent studies indicate that one of the major causes of this massive strike was that Chinese students misread and misunderstood the content and goals of the regulation. See Li Xisuo 李喜所 and Li Lairong 李來容, “Qingmo liuRi xuesheng qudi guize shijian zaijiedu” 清 末留日學生取締規則事件再解讀 [A reinterpretation of the “Chinese Students’ Regulations” incident in Japan in 1905], Jindaishi yanjiu 近代史研究 6 (2009): 20–30. 24  Saneto Keishu 実藤恵秀, Chugokujin Nihon ryugakushi 中国人日本留学史 [A history of the Chinese students in Japan] (Tokyo: Kuroshio shuppan, 1960), 85–87; Abe Hiroshi, Chukoku no kindai kyoiku, 117–128. 25  Saneto, Chugokujin Nihon ryugakushi, 71.

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diploma, and law classes used more than half the hours. Students of the legal course specialized more exclusively in legal studies than before. They had to take forty-four credit hours of legal classes out of forty-eight total. The only two required general classes were economics and prison studies. By contrast, students of the political course had to take only thirty credit hours of law classes. The remaining time was allotted to various general classes. Besides the existing general classes, students of the political course had to study modern political history and local administration.26 The specialized legal course satisfied the Japanese critics who demanded that the ACLPL offer advanced learning. The broadened political course catered to the Chinese students who were eager for a comprehensive introduction to managing a modern state. Significantly, more students enrolled in the political course than the legal course, and the rate of graduation from the political course was higher than the rate of the legal course. These trends reveal the attraction of the political course to the Chinese students.27 The ideas raised through ACLPL reform soon influenced Chinese fazheng schools. The Peking Fazheng School (Jingshi fazheng xuetang 京 師法政學堂), established in 1907, designed a three-year regular program with two divisions of law and politics. However, being a program aimed at educating “comprehensive generalists with legal and political training,” it recruited graduates of the preparatory program only and at first included hardly any qualified students. Most of the earliest students enrolled in a three-year special program without further division.28 In 1910, the school revised its educational purpose to be the cultivation of “specialists in law and politics” and extended the length of schooling for the regular program to four years. Nonetheless, the drafters of the regulations admitted that it was unrealistic to adopt the Japanese departmental academic system when the enrollment was so small.29 During the first decade of the twentieth century, most fazheng schools in China did not separate their students into different departments for law and politics. However, taking the ACLPL model, the curricula of native fazheng schools were lawcentered with a rich variety of general classes. Therefore, in practice, students at the native fazheng schools were specializing in law. “Hosei sokusei ka kisoku gyu kaisei,” 99–101. He Yaofu, “Qingmo shidaifu liuxue Riben re toushi,” 43. 28  “Zouding Jingshi fazheng xuetang zhangcheng zhe” 奏定京師法政學堂章程摺 [Report on the regulations of the Peking fazheng school], in Kindai Chugoku kyoikushi shiryo, shin­matsu­ hen 近代中國教育史資料‧清末編 [Historical materials on modern Chinese education, late Qing volume], ed. Taga Akigoro 多賀秋五郎 (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1976), 450. 29  “Xuebu zou gaiding fazheng xuetang zhangcheng zhe” 學部奏改訂法政學堂章程摺 [Report on revising the regulations of the Peking fazheng school], in Kingdai Chugoku kyoikushi shiryo shinmatsuhen, 657. 26 

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Law or Politics: The Chinese Students’ Choice of Major In order to strengthen the administration of Chinese students in Japan, the Qing government established a supervision department in the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo in 1906.30 The regulations of the Ministry of Education stipulated that the Chinese graduates of Japanese schools needed to have their degrees or diplomas authenticated by the supervision department before they left Japan.31 According to the lists of authenticated Chinese graduates compiled by the supervision department starting in 1908,32 the Qing government issued 1,826 certificates between 1909 and 1911. Due to a publisher’s error, we can find only 1,801 records in the lists. In these records, I found that 842 certificates were issued to graduates who majored in legal or political studies. Most of the holders received one certificate only, although thirty-two received two certificates. Of the 842 certificates, 544 were issued to graduates who majored in law. Thus it seems, at first glance, that legal studies were more attractive than political studies to the Chinese students. In fact, the students’ selection of major seems to have correlated highly with their selection of school. More than 80 percent of the 842 holders graduated from Waseda, Meiji, and Hosei universities, and the number of Waseda graduates was the largest (253). All three universities provided a law program as well as a politics program. However, only 15.4 percent of Waseda graduates majored in law whereas 88 percent of Meiji graduates and 79 percent of Hosei graduates chose law as their major.33 These statistics demonstrate interesting features of the Chinese study of law and politics in Japan during the last years of the Qing. What the statistics do not tell is how and why these features emerged. Due to the efforts of Saneto Keishu 実藤恵秀, we can explore the selection of major and school by Chinese students in Japan by consulting the diary of Huang Zunsan 黃尊三 (1883–?). Huang attained a shengyuan 生員 degree before he went to Japan funded by the government in 1905. On April 17, 1906, Huang wrote that economics, politics, and law were the “Xuebu zoushe guanli youxuesheng jianduchu zhe” 學部奏設管理游學生監督處摺 [Report on the establishment of the supervision department for students’ study abroad], Guanbao 官報 [Official report] 1 (Twelfth [lunar] month 1906): 4–5. 31  “Zouding guanli youxue Riben xuesheng zhangcheng zhe” 奏定管理游學日本學生章程 摺 [Report on the regulations of supervising the Chinese students in Japan], in Kindai chugoku kyoikushi shiryo, 441–442. 32  “Zisong xuebu gaikan xuesheng biye zhengmingshu shiyang wen” 咨送學部改刊學生 畢業證明書式樣文 [Report to the Ministry of Education on revising the form of authenticated diploma certificate], Guanbao 22 (Ninth [lunar] month 1908): 5–6. 33  Qingmo gesheng guanfei zifei liuRi xuesheng xingming biao 清末各省官費自費留日學生姓 名表 [List of the names of Chinese students in Japan in the late Qing] (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1978), 93–243. 30 

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most important forms of knowledge for governing a country and were the disciplines he wanted to pursue in his major.34 It is notable that Huang placed economics and politics before law. Such an idea probably came from Waseda University, the earliest institution to establish a department of politics and economics in Japan.35 To qualify for the entrance examination of the Department of Politics and Economics at Waseda University, Chinese students had to take the elementary preparatory course for a year, then the special preparatory course for half a year, and finally a higher preparatory course for one and a half years. Huang enrolled in the elementary preparatory course in August 1906. He was a diligent student, but he failed the graduate examination for the higher preparatory course because of poor English.36 Tired of the “basic” training necessary to enter Waseda, Huang changed his goals. Huang’s best friends advised him that the Department of Law at Meiji University (hereafter LMU) was a better choice, though he originally preferred the Department of Liberal Arts at Rikkyo University. The most persuasive recommendation came from Luo Baicang 羅百倉, then a student at LMU. Luo told Huang that Rikkyo University was established for preaching Christianity, and graduates of the Department of Liberal Arts had a hard time finding jobs and rendering service to their country. By contrast, LMU graduates could not only introduce current knowledge to guide China but also participate in political activities to reform the nation. Huang was convinced, and he passed the LMU entrance examination in September 1909.37 As a law student, Huang took almost all the required courses in the sequence regulated by the school except nationality law and moot court. The LMU curriculum focused on current Japanese laws, especially civil, criminal, and commercial law. However, in Huang’s view, the most important courses would have been constitutional law, administrative law, and international law, which he believed were the keys to saving China. According to LMU regulations, constitutional law was a course for sophomores and international law was for seniors. Yet, Huang took constitutional law in his first year and studied international law in his second. These choices

Huang Zunsan, Sinkokunin Nihon ryugaku niki, 1905–1912 清国人日本留学日記, 1905– 1912 [Diary of a Chinese student in Japan, 1905–1912), trans. Saneto Keishu and Sato Saburo 佐藤三郎 (Tokyo: Toho shoten, 1986), 87. 35  Waseda daigaku daigakushi henshujo 早稻田大學大學史編集所, Waseda daigaku hyakunenshi 早稻田大學百年史 [A hundred-year history of Waseda University] (Tokyo: Waseda University, 1982), 493–495. 36  Huang Zunsan, Sinkokunin Nihon ryugaku niki, 106–110, 128–129, 134–135, 144, 162. 37  Huang Zunsan, Sinkokunin Nihon ryugaku niki, 176, 191. 34 

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reflect Huang’s eagerness to pursue knowledge that he believed could help save his country.38 At one point Huang considered transferring to the Department of Politics, but he decided against it. He stayed with LMU because all courses of the Department of Politics, except kokuhogaku 国法学39 and statistics, were required or elective courses of LMU. The Department of Politics was, in effect, a miniature version of the Department of Law at Meiji University. In July 1912, Huang graduated from LMU and ended his nine-year period of study in Japan. During the following years, he remained highly concerned about the political and socioeconomic problems of China, but he was mainly a law professor and occasional political commentator, passing on Japanese legal knowledge, especially with regard to constitutional, administrative, and international law.40 He had become, by virtue of his education, a legal specialist. Huang’s case indicates the great influence Meiji-era higher education had in turning Chinese literati into specialists. It also reveals the limited agency that Chinese students had in reacting to the Japanese academic system. Huang and his fellow Chinese students had to choose a major when they decided to receive higher education in Japan. Huang chose law as his major after he found that he could not qualify to enroll in the Department of Politics at Waseda University, but he never gave up his preference for political studies. By adjusting the sequence of learning and cultivating the ability for self-study, Huang satisfied his thirst for political knowledge with the law-centered curriculum provided by LMU. Huang and many other Chinese graduates of Japanese law schools did not automatically become law practitioners like their Japanese classmates. Instead, they were unintentional specialists.

38  Huang Zunsan, Sinkokunin Nihon ryugaku niki, 213–214, 226–227, 240, 307; “Meiji daigaku gakusoku” 明治大学学則 [The regulations of Meiji University], in Meiji daigaku hyakunenshi, shiryohen 明治大學百年史‧史料編 [A hundred-year history of Meiji University, the historical materials], ed. Meiji daigaku hyakunenshi hensan iinkai 明治大學百年史編纂 委員會, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Meiji daigaku, 1986), 574–575. 39  Kokuhogaku is a term translated from the German Staatsrecht, a study of various laws related to the formation, morphology, organization, and functions of states. For the legal scholars in Meiji Japan, the scope of kokuhogaku was broader than the study of constitutional law. It contained, at least, constitutional law, administrative law, international law, criminal law, and procedural law. See Hozumi Yatsuka 穂積八束, Kokuhogaku 国法学 [Staatsrecht] (Tokyo: Yigirisu horitsu gakuko, 1889), 1–10. 40  Huang Zunsan, Sinkokunin Nihon ryugaku niki, 250, 315; Meiji daigaku hyakunenshi hensan iinkai, Meiji daigaku hyakunenshi, 574–575.

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Employment of Fazheng Graduates during the Late Qing Dynasty According to Chung-li Chang, during the Qing dynasty, fewer than three hundred literati could earn the jinshi 進士 degree, and about fifteen hundred literati could earn the juren 舉人 degree, every three years. Almost all jinshi received official posts, but only 30 percent of juren became government employees.41 Based on Chang’s statistics, the Qing government recruited, through civil service examinations held every three years, no more than eight hundred literati to serve as officials. As a result, there were many more educated men and men with official degrees than there were government positions. The situation worsened during the late Qing and early Republic because the rapidly increasing number of fazheng graduates outpaced government vacancies. More than one thousand Chinese students graduated from the ACLPL between 1904 and 1908. Between 1908 and 1911, 1,242 Chinese students graduated from Japanese law schools authenticated by the Qing government, and 794 of them passed the certificate examination held by the Ministry of Education to examine their learning and confer the qualifications for public office.42 Meanwhile, 12,282 students studying in the native fazheng schools were due to graduate by 1912.43 An employment crisis for fazheng graduates was looming. Many early ACLPL graduates were active in the field of modern education. He Yaofu counted 115 graduates of the ACLPL who had earned the jinshi degree before they went abroad. With both the highest traditional degree and a modern degree, the most fortunate graduates became presidents of the government schools founded in each province during the New Policies reform period (1901–1911).44 For example, Xia Tonghe 夏 同龢 (1869–1925), who was first in the 1898 civil service examination and graduated from the ACLPL in 1905, became the president of the Guangdong fazheng school in 1906.45 Shao Zhang 邵章 (1872/74–1953) received his jinshi degree in 1903 and became the president of Zhejiang Normal School in 1906. Shao’s successor, Shen Junru 沈鈞儒 (1875–1963), also an ACLPL graduate, had earned his jinshi degree in 1904.46 Chung-li Chang, The Chinese Gentry: Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society (Seattle: University of Washington, 1955), 117–126, table 27. 42  Huang Fuching, Qingmo liuRi xuesheng 清末留日學生 [Students studying in Japan in the late Qing] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1975), 75. 43  Diyici Zhongguo jiaoyu nianjian 第一次中國教育年鑑 [The first Chinese educational yearbook], vol. 2 (1934; repr., Taipei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1971), 467–468. 44  He Yaofu, “Qingmo shidaifu liuxue Riben re toushi,” 57–62. 45  Kindai Ajia kyoikushi kenkyukai, Kindai Nihon no Ajia kyoiku ninshiki, vol. 15, part 2, 88, 126. 46  Lü Shunchang 呂順長, Qingmo Zhejiang yu Riben 清末浙江與日本 [Zhejiang and Japan in 41 

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Even ACLPL graduates without a jinshi degree were in demand for high-level educational posts by 1908. After the empress dowager Cixi declared that the government was starting to prepare for constitutional reform in 1906, governors and governor generals all over China quickly established provincial fazheng schools at each provincial capital. By 1908, all provinces except Gansu had founded at least one school.47 The earliest ACLPL graduates constituted the faculties of the newly founded provincial fazheng schools. For example, Xu Ren 許壬 (1882?–1924) was hired by the Zhejiang fazheng school as soon as he returned to China in 1906. He in turn recommended his former schoolmate Ruan Xingcun 阮性存 (1874–1928), who had missed the graduate examination due to his father’s funeral in 1906, to teach criminal law in the same school.48 Before 1909, all fazheng schools in China were government schools. Thus, the administrators and teachers were all government employees and had the potential to receive official ranks or posts if they rendered good service to their schools. At the same time, as provincial elites with “modern” legal and political training, fifty-four ACLPL graduates became members of provincial assemblies, and thirteen of them became chiefs or vice chiefs of their provincial assemblies in the 1909 election.49 For the earliest law school graduates, teaching in government schools seems to have been a springboard for success in politics. The three-year Japanese law school graduates who returned to China from 1908 to 1911 seemed to have had even better opportunities to become members of the bureaucracy than did ACLPL graduates. According to Cheng Liaoyuan, nearly eight hundred three-year Japanese law school graduates received a juren or jinshi degree by passing the certificate examination.50 That is, about 70 percent of the three-year Japanese law school graduates were qualified to sit for the final imperial examination (tingshi 廷試) and obtain an official post. Only 485 Japanese law school graduates succeeded in the final imperial examination. Most of the successful examinees were assigned to various departments in the central government, especially departments that dealt with foreign issues and the new departments founded during the New Policies reform era, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Law, the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and the Ministry of Education. The less fortunate successful the late Qing] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001), 111–113. 47  Cheng Liaoyuan, Qingmo fazhengren de shijie, 85–99. 48  Ruan Yicheng 阮毅成, “Xianjun Xunbo gong nianpu” 先君荀伯公年譜 [A chronicle of Ruan Xingcun’s life], in Ruan Xunbo xiansheng yiji 阮荀伯先生遺集 [The collected works of Ruan Xingcun] (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1970), 11. 49  He Yaofu, “Qingmo shidaifu liuxue Riben re toushi,” 55. 50  Cheng Liaoyuan, Qingmo fazhengren de shijie, 135–141.

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examinees were appointed as expectant county magistrates in various provinces.51 They were in fact unemployed. Those who served in the central government might have been luckier in terms of getting an official position. But Xie Jian 謝健, a graduate of Nihon University who was assigned to the Supreme Court, recalled that he requested a leave soon after he reported for duty because the salary was too low.52 Teaching remained a good opportunity for many three-year Japanese law school graduates, but by the last years of the Qing, ACLPL graduates had filled most of the vacancies in the existing fazheng schools. Fortunately for the three-year graduates, in 1908 the Qing court promulgated its schedule to prepare for constitutional reform, which stipulated that provincial governments had to establish Western-style law courts by the end of 1910. Many governors and governor generals consequently became enthusiastic about expanding the scale of the government fazheng schools. The Zhejiang government’s fazheng school, for example, expanded its faculty from seven to twenty-two teachers at the end of 1910. All of the new law teachers had graduated from three-year Japanese law schools.53 In order to create more teaching jobs, the Japanese law school graduates began to ask the government to lift the ban on private schools providing legal education. In 1909 two Japanese law school graduates teaching at Tongyi Middle School (Tongyi zhongxuetang 通藝中學堂) successfully persuaded the government to approve the conversion of the school to the Shaoxing Fazheng School (Shaoxing Fazheng xuetang 紹興法政學堂).54 Yet, in the same year, the government turned down the project of establishing a private fazheng school in Wuchang proposed by the recently returned Japanese law school graduate Xie Jian, even though Xie was supported by the current chief of the provincial assembly, Tang Hualong 湯化 龍 (1874–1918), a jinshi and an ACLPL graduate. The project was revived the next year when Xie Jian received his juren degree and became an onleave official of the Supreme Court. This example suggests that although the jinshi or juren degree conferred by the Chinese government on law school graduates was no longer necessarily a free pass to the ladder of

Cheng Liaoyuan, Qingmo fazhengren de shijie, 141–152. Xie Jian, Xie Zhuchen huiyilu 謝鑄陳回憶錄 [Memoir of Xie Jian] (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1973), 29–30. 53  Lü Shunchang, Qingmo Zhejiang yu Riben, 118–120. 54  “Zi Zhejiang xunfu houxuandao Tao Junxuan bin gai Tongyi zhongxuetang wei Shao­xing fazheng xuetang zi ying zhaozhun wen” 咨浙江巡撫候選道陶濬宣稟改通藝中學堂為紹興法 政學堂自應照准文 [Reply to the governor of Zhejiang for approving the conversion of the Tongyi middle school to the Shaoxing fazheng school proposed by Tao Junxuan], Xuebu guanbao 學部官報 [Gazette of the Ministry of Education] 117 (Third [lunar] month, 11, 1910): 12. 51  52 

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success of official positions, it was still a symbol of status, which eased negotiations with the government.55 In 1909 Shandong governor Yuan Shuxun 袁樹勛 (1847–1915) observed that young officials and literati had become conscious of the employment crisis of the native fazheng schools. As a result, promising officials and well-educated literati were reluctant to study in the native fazheng schools. However, for those who were too late to receive the traditional degree and unable to study abroad, the native fazheng schools seemed to offer an alternative route to success.56 The judge and procurator qualifying examination held in 1910 gave new hope to law school graduates, especially those who had graduated from native fazheng schools. According to the plan for constitutional reform issued in 1908, the Qing government was to set up a Western-style provincial court in each provincial capital by the end of 1910 and a district court in each county by the end of 1911.57 In order to select the best talents for the courts, the Ministry of Justice held the first nationwide qualifying examination in the autumn of 1910. The Ministry of Justice estimated that the establishment of provincial courts would produce about six hundred vacancies, but more than three thousand people took the examination.58 Only 561 examinees successfully passed the examination.59 Cross-checking the lists of the 83 most excellent examinees and the 193 excellent examinees provided by Li Qicheng 李啟成60 with the lists of authenticated Japanese law school graduates (1908–1911), I found that only twelve of these successful examinees were authenticated Japanese law school graduates. Further checking the 1910 graduate lists of some native law schools, I found that fifteen successful examinees had graduated from the Peking Falü School (Jingshi falü xuetang 京師法律學堂), ten from the

Xie Jian, Xie Zhuchen huiyilu, 30–31. “Yifu Shandong xunfu Yuan Shuxun zou Dongsheng fazheng xuetang tongchou huayi banfa zhe” 議覆山東巡撫袁樹勛奏東省法政學堂通籌畫一辦法摺 [Reply to the governor of Shandong for devising a plan to manage the fazheng schools in Shandong], Xuebu guanbao 112 (First [lunar] month, 21, 1909): 10–11. 57  “Zhunian choubei shiyi qingdan” 逐年籌備事宜清單 [List of annual tasks for constitutional reform], in Qingmo choubei lixian dang’an shiliao 清末籌備立憲檔案史料 [Archival materials on constitutional movement in the late Qing], ed. Gugong bowuyuan mingqing dang’anbu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 62–63. 58  “Zouding kaoshi faguan quzhong yuane” 奏定考試法官取中員額 [Report on setting the maximum number of qualified judges and procurators by the 1910 examination], Guofeng bao 國風報 [National news] 1, no. 24 (1910): 101–102. 59  Cheng Liaoyuan, Qingmo fazhengren de shijie, 228. 60  Li Qicheng, “Xuantong ernian de faguan kaoshi” 宣統二年的法官考試 [The 1910 examination for judgeship], Fazhishi yanjiu 法制史研究 [Legal history studies] 3 (2002): 221–222. 55  56 

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Peking Fazheng School, and nine from the Guangdong Fazheng School.61 These figures suggest that many of the successful examinees may have been native law school graduates. The new hope proved to be illusory because the Qing dynasty collapsed when the successful examinees were still on probation. Yet neither the Qing nor the Republican governments could afford the cost of establishing and maintaining a new court system.62 The law school graduates realized that seeking new job opportunities for themselves had become urgent. The Professionalized Literati By the time the 1911 Revolution broke out, judicial reformers had put the establishment of a system for the training and employment of Chinese lawyers at the top of their to-do list.63 In addition to addressing the demands of political and judicial modernization, as the Republic’s first minister of justice, Wang Chonghui 王寵惠 (1881–1958), noted in May 1912, to legalize private law practice was also a solution to the unemployment crisis that resulted from the government being unable to directly employ the ever-growing numbers of law school graduates.64 This crisis became urgent when Wang’s successor, Xu Shiying 許世英 (1873–1964), declared in August 1912 that the judges and procurators who had attended law school for less than three years would be dismissed because they were undertrained.65 The policy opened many vacancies for the newly produced

61  “Huikao dachen huitong xuebu zou kaoshi falü xuetang biye xueyuan shijun zhe” 會考 大臣會同學部奏考試法律學堂畢業學員事竣摺 [Report on examining the Jingshi falü school graduates by the examiners and the Ministry of Education], Xuebu guanbao 114 (Second [lunar] month, 11, 1910): 1–3; “Zou fuhe Guangdong Sichuan fazheng bieke biye shijuan zhuoding dengdi qingjiang zhebingdan” 奏覆核廣東四川法政別科畢業試卷酌定等第請獎摺 併單 [Memorial on reviewing the achievement of the law school graduates in Guangdong and Sichuan, with a list], Xuebu guanbao 135 (The ninth [lunar] month, 11, 1910): 2–10; “Zou kaoshi Jingshi falü xuetang yiban biye ji jiaban bushi xueyuan qing xiangei chushen ze” 奏考試京師法律學堂乙班畢業及甲班補習學員請先給出身摺併單 [Report on the graduation examination and the degree matters of the Jingshi falü school], Xuebu guanbao 148 (Third [lunar] month, 1, 1911): 7–12. 62  Li Qicheng, WanQing geji shenpanting yanjiu 晚清各級審判廳研究 [Research on the Western-style courts in the late Qing] (Beijing: Beijing daxue cubanshe, 2004), 185–188. 63  Sun Huei-min 孫慧敏, Zhidu yizhi: Minchu Shanghai de Zhongguo lüshi (1912–1937) 制度 移植: 民初上海的中國律師 (1912–1937) (Institutional transplantation: The Chinese lawyers in Republican Shanghai [1912–1937]) (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2012), 51–78. 64  “Fulu” 附錄 [Appendix], Zhengfu gongbao 政府公報 [Government gazette] (May 1912): 449. 65  Zhengfu gongbao, September 1912, 247; Sifa gongbao 司法公報 [Gazette of the Ministry of Justice] 1, no. 2 (November 15, 1912): 39.

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three-year law school graduates seeking employment.66 Nonetheless, how to pacify those who suddenly lost their jobs was an administrative and political problem. On September 16, 1912, the government promulgated the Provisional Regulation on Lawyers after the model of Japanese Lawyers’ Law (Bengoshi hou 辯護士法). For the government, legalizing private law practice was the most convenient and economical way to solve the unemployment crisis. According to the Provisional Regulations on Lawyers, three-year law school graduates, law teachers who had taught for more than three years, as well as ACLPL graduates who had served as judges, prosecutors, law teachers, and even police officers were exempted from the bar examination. By the end of June 1913, the Ministry of Justice certified 1,515 lawyers; of these, 1,128 had graduated from native law schools, and 362 were lawyers who had studied in Japan.67 During the Republican era, a diploma from a three-year law school was a ticket to a lawyer’s certificate, and no extra qualifying examination was needed. It was common for law school graduates to apply for lawyer’s certificates while seeking official employment, but they did not enter private legal practice unless they failed to become civil servants or lost their official posts. For example, Sun Guanqi 孫觀圻, a graduate of Chuo University (Chuo daigaku 中央大学) in Tokyo, who won his jinshi degree in the last imperial examination for returning students in 1911, obtained his lawyer’s certificate in February 1912, and became one of the first eightyfour certified lawyers in Jiangsu. But Sun was appointed a judge on the Jiangsu High Court in March 1913, and he served in various courts over the following thirteen years.68 Some serving officials, such as Ma Shouhua 馬壽華 (1893–1977), applied for lawyer’s certificates as well. Ma was appointed to be a prosecutor in the Kaifeng District Prosecutor’s Office shortly after he graduated from the Henan Fazheng School in 1912. For unknown reasons, Ma applied for a lawyer’s certificate in 1913, though he continued to be a judicial official until 1926.69 Both Sun and Ma resigned from judicial office with the collapse of the Peking government. Sun chose to practice law in Tianjin, where he had previously been a chief judge. Ma 66  According to statistics made by Li Qicheng based on the personnel reports of fourteen provincial courts, in 1910–1911, 163 out of 397 judges and procurators were law school graduates (Li Qicheng, Wanqing geji shenpanting yanjiu, 188–189, 248). 67  For the legislative process and an analysis of the stipulations of the Provisional Regulation on Lawyers, see Sun Huei-min, Zhidu yizhi, 121–168. 68  Sun Guanqi, “Zishu” 自述 [Autobiography], in Sun Guanqi, Jinrishengzhai jiaji 今日生齋 甲集 [A collection of works by Sun Guanqi, part 1] (Shanghai: privately printed, 1932), 16–17. 69  Ma Shouhua, Fuwu sifajie liushiyi nian 服務司法界六十一年 [Sixty-one years in the legal profession] (Taipei: Mashi sishang shuwu, 1988), 20–25.

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practiced law in Shanghai after he resigned from an administrative office in the Nationalist government in 1932.70 In short, private legal practice provided employment flexibility for the new law school graduates and former officials with law school diplomas. Still, the Republican government did not let the number of lawyers in private practice go unchecked. Soon after the government legalized private law practice, it prohibited lawyers from practicing outside the jurisdiction of modern courts. It also decreed that each lawyer could practice in no more than two district courts within the jurisdiction of a selected high court.71 Meanwhile, for financial reasons, the government dissolved many district courts and primary courts established immediately after the 1911 Revolution. Official statistics published in October 1912 indicated that there were fifty-three district courts in Jiangsu Province,72 but according to a list of district courts and prosecutors’ offices made by the Ministry of Justice and published in 1915, only the district courts in Nanjing and Shanghai remained. The latter source showed that by 1915 the total number of district courts in China decreased to thirty-seven.73 The ­abruptly shrinking market of functioning court jurisdictions was apparently a handicap for the emergent Chinese legal profession. Supported by the government, the earliest law school graduates created a small but exclusive realm for themselves during the Republic. They dominated the central government’s judicial departments as well as the modern courts scattered in the provinces.74 Even when the Nationalist government put forward the policy of partifying the judiciary (danghua sifa 黨化司法), three-year law school training remained the basic requirement for judges and prosecutors.75

Sun Guanqi, “Zishu,” 17; Ma Shouhua, Fuwu sifajie, 55–65. “Sifa bu xunling di 41 hao” 司法部訓令第41號 [The No. 41 instruction issued by the Ministry of Justice], Zhengfu gongbao (Feb. 1913): 114 ; “Sifa bu buling di 36 hao” 司法部部令第 36號 [The No. 36 decree issued by the Ministry of Justice], Zhengfu gongbao (March 1913): 246. 72  “Zhisheng yi ni she geji shenpanting yilanbiao” 直省已擬設各級審判檢察廳一覽表 [Table of the number of courts and prosecution offices in every province], Zhengfu gongbao (Oct. 1912): 653–655. 73  “Cheng ni qing chi zhu gesheng difang shenjianting yinxin wen bing pi ling” 呈擬請 飭鑄各省地方審檢廳印信文並批令 [Memorial for making official seals of district courts and prosecution offices], Sifa gongbao 30 (March 1915): 94–95. 74  Huang Yuansheng 黃源盛, Minchu falü bianqian yu caipan 民初法律變遷與裁判 [Legal reform and justice in early Republican China] (Taipei: Zhengzhi daxue, 2000), 35–64; Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1901–1937 [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008], 197–201. 75  With regard to the politicization of the judiciary in the Nanjing decade (1927–1937), see chapter 4 in this book and Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity, 85–91. 70  71 

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Huang Yuansheng 黃源盛 has observed that, in the early Republic, judicial department staff were generally underpaid, and lawyers with the best educational backgrounds were unwilling to serve in them.76 This point is confirmed by Sun Guanqi’s memoirs. Sun recalled that the government could not pay his salary regularly when he served as a judge on the Supreme Court; therefore, he had to depend on part-time teaching jobs in several private law schools.77 Sun’s case also demonstrates that even though judicial officials were indeed underpaid, they could nonetheless derive sufficient extra income from their position, scholarship, and experience. Whether serving as a judge, prosecutor, law drafter, or private practitioner, professionalized literati had to pay more and more attention to the legal problems of the people, which correspondingly led to increasing specialization of their legal knowledge and practice. The trend of increasing specialization is illustrated by the newly published diary of Zhang Yaozeng 張耀曾 (1885–1938). Zhang graduated from the law program of Tokyo Imperial University in 1914. Before receiving his law degree, he had been elected senator and helped write the first constitution of the Republic of China. After graduating, he became a professor in the Law Department of Peking University. He remained active in politics and established a party, the Zhengxue hui 政學會. However, because he was regarded as a specialist, he did not assume any offices except for those in the Ministry of Justice and other posts related to legal reform.78 Like most of his contemporaries, Zhang had specialized in constitutional law since his school days. He kept his eye on the new trend of constitutionalism in the world even after he lost his political influence in 1924, when repeated coup d’états left the central government in Beijing in chaos. For example, the first record of his diary on September 26, 1927, was an abstract of a Japanese book on Germany’s new constitutional law. More than ten days later, he finished reading another Japanese book on Soviet Russia’s constitutional law.79 As a member of the Office of Legal Revision and Compilation (Xiuding falü guan 修訂法律館), Zhang was commissioned to research the law of obligation. He felt frustrated with this responsibility, and in his diary entry for May 21, 1928, Zhang even showed contempt for learning civil law:

Huang Yuansheng, Minchu falü bianqian, 61–64. Sun Guanqi, “Zishu,” 17. 78  Yang Hu 楊琥, “Zhang Yaozeng xiansheng zhuan” 張耀曾先生傳 [Biography of Mr. Zhang Yaozeng], in Xianzheng jiuguo zhi meng: Zhang Yaozeng xiansheng wencun 憲政救國之 夢: 張耀曾先生文存 [Dream of saving China by constitutionalism: A collection of works by Mr. Zhang Yaozeng] (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 2004), 1–13. 79  Yang Hu, Xianzheng jiuguo zhi meng, 201, 206–207. 76  77 

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Huei-min Sun The learning of civil law is meticulous. It contains nothing more than the details of everyday life of the people. It has no relation to change in the universe. It makes researchers concentrate on more and more detailed things, and narrows their capacity for greatness. I consider learning as a creation of the human beings that are just dust in the universe. By studying civil law, we will find what kind of senses human beings have, how the senses are expressed, and to what extent the senses are expressed. I do not think it is prestigious nor do I believe it contains any great theories.80

Two months later, however, when Zhang decided to become a lawyer in private practice, he admitted that he knew too little about the civil law on obligations, property, and succession; his knowledge about criminal and procedural law was also not enough for him to practice. In order to make himself a capable lawyer, he studied not only these facets of the law but also the newly promulgated company law and judicial precedents. After Zhang started to practice law in Shanghai in the spring of 1929, he quickly became a famous lawyer specializing in civil cases. That summer, he was hired by the Shanghai Fazheng University (Shanghai Fazheng daxue 上海 法政大學) and Shanghai Law College (Shanghai faxueyuan 上海法學院) as a professor of civil law.81 Zhang’s case indicates the impact of specialized legal work on the formation of law graduates’ legal knowledge. After law school graduates plunged into various kinds of legal work, they immediately found the deficiency of their inclusive and politically oriented constitutional knowledge and began to focus on more specialized, practical, and even technical knowledge of the law. Nonetheless, what they most valued was still theoretical learning, that is, the legislative spirit of each law, the explanations of each stipulation, and the art of legal reasoning. Preserving Culture and Social Status Whereas the first generation of law school graduates became more specialized, practical, and technical in their professional lives, many of them, especially those who had received better traditional educations, preserved many aspects of literati culture. They kept lifelong reading habits and did not confine their reading to law. They liked to express their feelings using old-style poetry, and they were interested in painting and calligraphy. These cultural activities manifested their identities as literati and sustained their close connections with cultural elites outside the legal profession. 80  81 

Yang Hu, Xianzheng jiuguo zhi meng, 236. Yang Hu, Xianzheng jiuguo zhi meng, 243, 266, 273, 286.

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For example, Yu Shaosong 余紹宋 (1882–1949), a shengyuan degree holder and a graduate of Hosei University, continued to study the Shuo­wen 說 文, Zhuangzi 莊子, Mozi 墨子, and other classical texts almost every night when he served in the Ministry of Justice. Moreover, according to Yu’s diary, learning Chinese-style painting became fashionable in judicial officials’ circles in Beijing during the early decades of the twentieth century, so Yu and his colleagues organized a Chinese painting club named Xuan­ nan huashe 宣南畫社 to exchange knowledge and painting skills.82 As one of the first painting clubs in Republican Beijing, it soon attracted many members outside the legal profession. Though most of the members were legal professionals, it is more accurate to describe the Xuannan huashe as a club of scholar-painters rather than a painting club of legal professionals because of the common literati background and taste of the members.83 The literati culture preserved in this way not only enriched the leisure time and cultural lives of the legal professionals but also influenced their research on law. Dong Kang 董康 (1867–1942), who earned his jinshi degree in 1890, received both traditional and modern legal training in the Board of Punishment and studied law in Japan from 1911 to 1913, and became one of the most famous jurists in early modern China. He had even taken charge of the Supreme Court and the Ministry of Justice several times before he entered private legal practice in Shanghai in 1924.84 In addition to doing his professional work, Dong was a passionate collector, researcher, and publisher of Chinese rare books. Many leading scholars of this period, such as Fu Zengxiang 傅增湘 (1872–1950) and Hu Shi 胡 適 (1891–1962), recognized his accomplishments in the study of Chinese bibliography. With such an academic background, Dong was able to carry forward the legal research tradition handed down by Qing scholars such as Sun Xingyan 孫星衍 (1753–1818), Xue Yunsheng 薛允升 (1820–1901), and Shen Jiaben 沈家本 (1840–1913).85 He emended and republished

82  Yu Shaosong 余紹宋, Yu Shaosong riji 余紹宋日記 [Diary of Yu Shaosong], vol. 1 (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan, 2003), 1–188; Yu Zian 余子安, “Yu Shaosong xiansheng shengping jianjie” 余紹宋先生生平簡介 [Brief introduction of the life of Mr. Yu Shaosong], Yu Shaosong riji 10 (2003): 4–9. 83  For the influence of Xuannan huashe, see Wan Qingli 萬青力, “Nanfeng beijian: Minguo chunian nanfang huajia zhudao de Beijing huatan (shang)” 南風北漸: 民國初年南方畫家主導 的北京畫壇(上) [Influenced by the Southern style: The Beijing painting circles dominated by southern painters], Meishu yanjiu 美術研究 [Art research] 100 (2000): 44–52. 84  Hua Yougen 華友根, Zhongguo xiandai lifa dajia: Dong Kang de fazhi huodong yu sixiang 中 國現代立法大家: 董康的法制活動與思想 [A great legislator in modern China: The legislative activities and legal thought of Dong Kang] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2011), 18–24. 85  Gong Tao 鞏濤 (Jérôme Bourgon), “Xifang falü yinjin zhi qian de Zhongguo faxue” 西

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several important statute books from ancient China and laid a foundation for the research of Chinese legal history.86 Compared with judicial officials and law teachers, lawyers in private practice encountered much trouble defining and improving their social status. After information about Western lawyers spread into China, Chinese people learned that privately practicing lawyers in the West belonged to a special category of occupations called “profession.” In the mid-nineteenth century, when James Legge (1815–1897) translated Graduated Reading: Comprising a Circle of Knowledge, in 200 Lessons by Charles Baker (1803–1874) into Chinese, he created the term siwen shengye 斯文 生業 to translate the word “profession”; according to Baker’s definition: “Those occupations that require a good education and much knowledge, are called professions.”87 For Chinese readers, the term siwen shengye meant that people who followed such occupations were well educated and honorable. Yet it was also natural for Chinese people to regard lawyers in private practice as an analogue of the litigation masters who flourished in the late imperial period and were proscribed by the government.88 Therefore, during the late Qing and Republican periods, distinguishing “­Western-style” Chinese lawyers from “traditional” litigation masters became a difficult problem for the advocates of an adversarial judicial process and private practitioners of law. By analyzing the advertisements placed by the earliest Chinese lawyers, one discovers immediately that a modern degree, a government-­ conferred license, and official experience were the basic elements in shaping a lawyer’s status, drawing a clear distinction between “modern” lawyers and “traditional” litigation masters. The advertisement placed by Xu Ren when he set up a private law practice in 1913 was typical. Xu declared at the beginning of the advertisement that he had graduated from Hosei University (in fact, the ACLPL), taught in various law schools, been chief judge of the First District Court of Zhejiang, and obtained a license from the Ministry of Justice.89 The modern degree established the education level and the Western origin of the lawyer’s knowledge. The license 方法律引進之前的中國法學 [The Chinese law before the introduction of Western law], trans. Lin Huie 林惠娥, in Faguo Hanxue 法國漢學 [French Sinology] 8 (2003): 220–249. 86  For Dong’s achievements in Chinese legal history, see Hua Yougen, Zhongguo xiandai lifa dajia, 355–522. 87  Charles Baker, Graduated Reading: Comprising a Circle of Knowledge in 200 Lessons, trans. James Legge (Hong Kong: London Missionary Society Press, 1864), 35. 88  For the proscription of litigation masters in late imperial China, see Melissa Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18–58. 89  “Xu Ren dalüshi shiwusuo guanggao” 許壬大律師事務所廣告 [Advertisement of Xu Ren, attorney at law], Minli bao 民立報 (March 9, 1913): 1.

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demonstrated the authorization from the government. The official experience manifested the political networks and influence of the lawyer. Of the three basic elements, only the official experience was not a common qualification for being a lawyer, so it became a criterion for making internal distinctions between lawyers. Cao Rulin, who obtained the first law license in 1912 and then practiced in Beijing, recalled that he drew the attention of his potential clients much more easily than others because he had been a vice minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, Cao emphasized that work performance remained the key to winning respect and confidence from his clients.90 For the earliest Chinese lawyers with literati backgrounds to distinguish themselves from businesspeople was also a tactic to differentiate themselves from the litigation masters. The earliest bar associations invented a new term, gongfei 公費 (public fees), for the service fee charged by lawyers. The term stressed that the expense referred to lawyers’ services and the amount was set or regulated by the public. In addition to gongfei, the bar associations invented another revenue item, xiejin 謝金 (gratuities), paid by clients to express their gratitude to the lawyers.91 Both gongfei and xiejin manifested a distinctive mode of transaction by which the lawyers tried to construct their superiority to businesspeople and various nonprofessionals. The public service and nonprofit ideal emphasized by the lawyers was not a direct transplant of Western professionalism; rather, it reflected a heritage of Chinese literati. During the Republican era, the government, public opinion, and even the lawyers themselves continued to condemn those lawyers who regarded law as a tool for making a profit. However, for those who lost their official or teaching jobs, making a living in the legal profession was vital. Zhang Yaozeng recorded an unpleasant experience in his diary, which presented a dilemma faced by a lawyer who was going to be a private practitioner in Shanghai. On December 18, 1928, Zhang visited the manager of the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company and one of the legal counselors of the company. The manager seemed to be a dishonest person and had an air of importance that Zhang disliked very much. Zhang was disgusted at the legal counselor, who boasted of his legal skill to seek profits. However, Zhang visited the manager and his company because they were profitable potential clients. After the meeting, Zhang was told that the company would like to hire him as one of its Cao Rulin, Cao Rulin yisheng zhi huiyi, 99–108. Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13, 111; Sun Huei-min, Zhidu yizhi, 262–264. 90  91 

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legal counselors, but the news did not make him happy. “What a low status lawyers have,” he sighed, for he was going to be one of them.92 Since the Chinese government legalized private law practice, bar associations devoted a great deal of effort to making their occupation an honorable profession,93 but it remained nothing more than a noble dream until the Communist government eradicated the entire legal system and the legal profession developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Conclusion This chapter has examined how some of the Chinese literati transformed themselves into legal professionals through a circuitous and unanticipated process during the early twentieth century. The process consisted of three parts: the formation of the discipline of law in the higher education system, the independence of judicial power and the emphasis on the level of legal knowledge in selecting various judicial workers, and the improvement of lawyers’ social status. The formation of the discipline of law started with the rise of fazheng education because it centered on legal knowledge from the very beginning. The Chinese initiators of fazheng programs agreed with the Japanese curriculum designers that Western legal knowledge was necessary for future Chinese officials. However, the Chinese understanding of law characterized it as a part of the knowledge needed for governance, whereas the Japanese emphasized that law is the origin of political legitimacy and every governmental action or decision should be based on and regulated by law. The ACLPL therefore extended its curriculum repeatedly, and the Chinese students studying under the Japanese academic system continued to seek more courses on governance. Reflecting the process described in chapters 1 and 2 with regard to the adoption of Western systems of knowledge by Chinese scholars, the subjectivity of Chinese students, too, shaped how they approached modern legal education. Like legislative bureaucrats in Meiji Japan, the first generation of Chinese law school graduates dreamed of becoming a powerful force that would help turn China into a modern society. Because of political and financial problems, only a small proportion of the graduates became government employees, and many of them served in judicial departments. Lack of governmental employment opportunities impelled the law school graduates to create new career paths in the private sector. One of their important achievements was successfully urging the government to legalize Yang Hu, Xianzheng jiuguo zhi meng, 246. Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State, 223–241; Sun Huei-min, Zhidu yizhi, 261–371. 92  93 

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the private practice of law, which became one of their main areas of employment. Although the government seldom limited the number of law licenses issued, limits to where lawyers could practice legally, and anxieties aroused by inherited literati virtues and transplanted professional ethics, restrained the private practice of law. The influence of the first generation of law school graduates on Republic politics was usually limited to special domains, such as law drafting, law enforcement, and foreign affairs. Some lawyers in private practice remained enthusiastic politicians and continued to pay attention to the legal problems of the state and constitutional matters, but most of them practiced or taught other areas of law because they had to pay more attention to the specific legal problems of the people. This focus gave them a more specialized professional profile. Their legal research, opinions, and advice gave impetus to the improvement of the Chinese legal system. Still, compared with the experiences of civil engineers and staff editors discussed in chapters 5 and 7, legal professionals found it easier to attain prestigious status in Republican society. They did so by claiming government posts, preserving literati culture, and practicing each day a highly specialized form of mental work that was rooted in foreign learning. Further, their existing connections with the state and newly formed professional organizations helped the first-generation legal professionals to utilize the power of the state and market to develop new career patterns for themselves and later generations.

CHAPTER 4

The Chinese Judge: From Literatus to Cadre, 1906–1949

GLENN D. TIFFERT Since the late Qing dynasty, arguably no phrase has seized the imagination of legal reformers in China more than “rule the country by law” (yifa zhiguo 以法治國), and no group has occupied a more central place in their designs than the judiciary. Yet, the judiciary registers only weakly in the voluminous literature on courts and judicial practice in China. Little is known about its origins and evolution and the intellectual capital it possessed. As long as we assume these lacunae away, we overlook critical dimensions of the judicial system’s formation and operation, neglect historical insights into its present condition, and risk misconstruing important facets of a century of Chinese modernization. This chapter explores the dynamics of judicial recruitment, selection, and training in the late Qing, Beiyang, and Nationalist governments, and how these processes shaped the legal system in Republican China. For historians, it illuminates the rise of a novel professional community that spearheaded the pursuit of modernization, and the concomitant reconstitution of the state, learned elites, and knowledge and power. For legal scholars, it furnishes a background against which to read the challenges, policies, debates, and values that animate judicial reform today, particularly with respect to the relationship among authoritarianism, the rule of law, professionalization, and the soaring technical sophistication of the Chinese judiciary. Another objective of this chapter is to contribute to the historiographical reformulation of contemporary China’s connection to the past by retexturing our image of the Republican era and its role in forming the People’s Republic of China. Revolutionary ardor notwithstanding, the PRC judicial system’s architects inherited from Republican China a refractory imprint of what judges, law, and the institutions that supported them should look like and do, and a repertoire of concrete lessons about pursuing judicial modernity under authoritarianism that seems to grow more salient by the

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year. These legacies demonstrate how permeable the tranches—­imperial, Republican, PRC—into which we have conventionally segmented Chinese history actually are, and how defiantly the people who inhabited them resist easy categorization. A few points of clarification are in order. First, this chapter is not concerned with ordinary legal education, jurisprudence, or judicial practice. Other studies have begun to explore these important subjects, which involve different institutions and sources. Second, I use the term “law school” to refer only to those undergraduate-level programs of legal education (regardless of their designations in Chinese) that met the demanding regulatory requirements to qualify graduates to sit for the state judicial examination. By definition, these programs amounted to China’s most selective and sophisticated suppliers of legal education. Third, though there were many categories of judicial official (sifaguan 司法官) that one could translate as “judge,” I use the term to refer exclusively to that rarefied stratum known by the title tuishi 推事.1 They alone presided over the regular courts (fayuan 法院). In a nutshell, the judiciary was a bellwether of modern China, and sprouted directly from the existential crisis attending the demise of the imperial state and the social, political, and cultural orders it validated. By cutting a path out of the crumbling traditional universe of imperial rule toward the modern, secular sciences of government and administration, the judiciary pioneered new forms of status and authority and the disciplines, institutions, social roles, vocabularies, and outlets through which to express them. Uniquely of the state but ostensibly insulated from it by the principle of judicial independence, Republican judges enjoyed a more empowered, differentiated, and emancipated existence than both their imperial and PRC counterparts. As time wore on, however, the insistent ideological and political intrusions of the aggrandizing Guomindang eroded this fragile arrangement and prefigured its PRC collapse.

The Republican legal system swelled with people one could call “judges” by virtue of their state-authorized power to adjudicate disputes. Each class had its own corresponding bureaucratic and regulatory regime governing qualifications, selection, training, examination, and advancement. There were, for example, administrative law judges (pingshi 評事), military judges (junfa 軍法), county magistrates (xianzhang 縣長), and trial officers (shenpanguan/chengshenyuan 審判官/承審員). By the end of the Republican period, there were three ranks of tuishi, subdivided into twenty grades. See Liu Zhongyue 劉鍾岳, Fayuan zuzhi fa 法院組織法 [Law on court organization] (Shanghai: Zhengzhong shuju, 1948), 59. The title tuishi originally described an office that dated to the Song dynasty in the prestigious imperial Court of Revision (Dalisi 大理寺). 1 

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Late Qing and Beiyang Foundations (1906–1928) Judicial modernization figured prominently among the New Policies (1901–1911) formulated to end extraterritoriality and revive the enfeebled Qing state in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.2 In 1905, the imperial Board of Punishment dispatched two secretaries, Dong Kang 董康 (1867– 1947) and Wang Shouxun 王守恂 (1865–1936), to Japan on a fact-finding tour to learn about Meiji reforms to the Japanese court and prison systems. Their influential 1907 report described the structure of the Japanese court system in detail, including the qualifications, recruitment, and training of its judges, the Japanese judicial examination regime, and the subjects covered by that examination.3 Concurrently, the Qing government undertook an unprecedented reorganization of the legal system.4 A 1906 edict premised on Western theories of judicial independence separated judicial administration from adjudication, vesting the former in the imperial Board of Punishment (Xingbu 刑部), which it renamed the Ministry of Law (Fabu 法部), and the latter in the Court of Judicial Review (Dalisi 大 理寺), which it renamed the Supreme Court (Daliyuan 大理院). An accompanying Law on Supreme Court Organization (Daliyuan shenpan bianzhi fa 大理院審判編制法) reorganized the imperial judiciary into a four-level, three-trial system modeled on Japan’s. In theory, these measures shifted judicial power out of the traditional magistracy into a new, separate hierarchy of specialized courts. Specialized courts required jurisprudence and a corresponding cadre of judges trained to apply it. Traditional sources might have supplied these had reformers not concurrently made them obsolete by undertaking farreaching revisions to Qing law and terminating the imperial examination system. Thus, on the cusp of a thorough reorganization of the courts, the state also assumed the concomitant burdens of creating new law, a new corps of judges, and new content and standards for educating, recruiting, and credentialing them. This was nothing short of a Big Bang in the universe of Chinese law, exceeding even the 1949 Revolution in its enormity. The entire infrastructure of legal education and judicial training had to be

2  Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1901–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 3  Dong Kang 董康, “Diaocha Riben caipan jianyu baogaoshu” 調查日本裁判監獄報告書 [Report on the survey of Japanese judges and prisons], in Dong Kang faxue wenji 董康法學文 集 [Selected legal writings of Dong Kang], ed. He Qinhua 何勤華 (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2005), 643–651. 4  Zhao Yuhuan 趙玉環, “Qingmo sifa gaige de qishi” 清末司法改革的啓示 [The revelation of late Qing judicial reform], Shandong shehui kexue 山東社會科學 [Shandong social science] 8 (2009): 142–144.

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built on the fly while the courts and the law took shape around them, and all took on a decidedly Japanese-mediated, Western bent. Pursuant to the Qing Law on Supreme Court Organization, the first modern-style courts in China opened in 1907, in Tianjin (March) and Beijing (December). As other courts opened, the Ministry of Law quickly confronted a shortage of candidates trained sufficiently in modern law to staff them. At first, it recruited judges from a variety of other backgrounds.5 However, the 1910 Law on Court Organization (Fayuan bianzhi fa 法院編制 法) closed this window by fixing what would become the basic framework for judicial appointment for the entire Republican period.6 Under this law, which was deeply influenced by Japanese precedents, all prospective judges were required to pass two judicial examinations, the details of which were stipulated in related regulations.7 Article 107 specified that to sit for the first examination one needed a degree from a three-year or longer course of study in a school of law and politics (fazheng 法政) or a law (falü 法律) school. In essence, this requirement excluded the vast majority of China’s law school graduates at the time, most of whom had matriculated in shorter, generalist programs, as described by Sun Huei-min in chapter 3 of this book. Significant exceptions and exemptions temporarily expanded the examination pool in 1910, but from that moment onward the basic identity of the Republican judiciary as a hyper-elite, specialist institution was sealed.8 The government soon followed with the pertinent regulations, and the first modern judicial examination in China, modeled on those given in Meiji Japan, was held in Beijing in the Ministry of Education’s Examination Hall, and in the distant northwest and southwest, from September to October 1910.9 In general, candidates were chosen at the provincial level and sent to Beijing. The authorities took great care in vetting them because, they argued, independent judges required an especially Li Qicheng 李啟成, “Xuantong ernian de faguan kaoshi” 宣統二年的法官考試 [The judicial examination in the second year of the Xuantong reign], Fazhi shi yanjiu 法制史研究 [Studies in legal history] 3 (2002): 224. 6  Zhang Congrong 張從容, “Xi 1910nian ‘Fayuan bianzhi fa’” 析1910年 ‘法院編制法’ [Analyzing the 1910 “Law on Court Organization”], Ji’nan xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue) 濟南學報 (哲學社會科學) [Journal of Ji’nan university (Philosophy and social science edition)] 25, no. 1 (2003): 24–30. 7  Japan established its modern judicial examination regime in 1890, which provided for two examinations separated by a three-year court practicum. 8  Leng Xia 冷霞, “Jindai Zhongguo de sifa kaoshi zhidu” 近代中國的司法考試制度 [The modern Chinese judicial examination system], in 20shiji waiguo sifa zhidu de gaige 20世紀外國 司法制度的改革 [The reform of twentieth-century foreign judicial systems], ed. He Qinhua 何勤華 (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 2003), 353. 9  Li Qicheng, “Xuantong ernian de faguan kaoshi,” 201. 5 

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high degree of rectitude to perform their offices responsibly. One candidate, for instance, had his credentials to sit for the exam revoked when it was discovered that he had concealed the fact that he was still within the traditional mourning period.10 The examination covered the draft Qing constitution, the revised criminal law, international law, and topics from the civil, commercial, criminal, and procedural laws of various nations.11 Between 3,500 and 3,600 people sat for the written examination, which recalled the atmosphere of the imperial civil service examinations. Jurists published reference books of collected laws and regulations, as well as practice exams with model answers to help examinees prepare.12 Those who passed the written examination took an oral examination, which produced a final pool of successful probationary judges and procurators numbering around 655, most of whom were then sent to courts in their home provinces for practicums.13 A planned 1912 examination never materialized because the Qing dynasty fell. After the 1911 Revolution, several years passed before the postimperial judicial qualification regime settled. In 1912, Minister of Justice Xu Shiying 許世英 (1873–1964) abruptly purged the judiciary of judges who lacked a modern three-year legal education, among them successful candidates from the 1910 Qing judicial examination.14 To replace them, the government defined Standards for the Selection of Judicial Personnel (Zhenba sifa renyuan zhunze 甄拔司法人員準則) the following year, pursuant to which a special selection examination (xuanba shiyan 選拔試驗) was held in 1914. More than 1,100 people took this exam, and the 171 successful candidates were assigned to courts for practicums. In 1915, a formal Decree on the Examination for Judicial Officials (Sifaguan kaoshi ling 司法官考試令) followed, which prepared the way for the first regular judicial examination in Republican China, in Beijing on June 12, 1916. The basic qualification for admission to the exam was a degree from a three-year program in law at an approved foreign or domestic university or polytechnic (zhuanke 專科) school. Law and politics degrees no longer sufficed. Additionally, on this occasion there were no more exemptions from the exam, the exceptions Li Qicheng, “Xuantong ernian de faguan kaoshi,” 204. Li Jun李俊, “Qingmo xinshi sifa rencai de peiyang yu renyong shulun” 清末新式司法 人才的培養與任用述論 [The training and appointment of new-style judicial talent in the late Qing], Qiushi 求實 [Truth seeking] 10 (2008): 58–61. 12  Li Qicheng, “Xuantong ernian de faguan kaoshi,” 207. 13  Li Qicheng, “Xuantong ernian de faguan kaoshi,” 223. 14  Li Zaiquan 李在全, “Minguo chunian de sifaguan zhidu biange he renyuan gaizu” 民 國初年的司法官制度變革和人員改組 [The transformation of the judicial officials system and the reshuffling of personnel in the early years of the Republic], Fujian shifan daxue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban) 福建師範大學學報 (哲學社會科學版) [Journal of Fujian normal university (Philosophy and social science edition)] 5 (2008): 113–119. 10  11 

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changed, and those who lacked a specialized modern law degree had first to take a preliminary screening examination (zhenlu kaoshi 甄錄考試) administered by the Ministry of Justice to demonstrate knowledge equivalent to three years of legal study.15 The subsidiary paths to eligibility changed frequently for later exams, but one fact remained constant: they restricted the pool of potential judicial candidates to a fraction of those who actually studied law. Judges were an elite refined from a stratum of other learned elites who sat atop the broader community of those exposed to a modern legal education. In 1916, the regular exam was divided into four parts, three of them written and the final oral. It blended elements of the traditional imperial examinations with the imperatives of an urgently modernizing nation eager for foreign approbation. Alongside questions on criminal, civil, constitutional, commercial, and procedural law—which required examinees to cite legal provisions and principles in detail from memory—the exam tested philosophical, political, and historical knowledge, including one section on the Chinese Classics (see table 4.1). In 1917, regulations added further requirements for a court practicum followed by an advanced examination (zaishi 再試), an arrangement that would endure, at least formally, for the remainder of the Republican period. Beiyang governments (1912–1928) administered the regular judicial examination sequence five times, and the standalone special selection examination once, advancing a total of 789 judicial officials, that is, judges and procurators.16 Originally, the preparatory regime for the modern judiciary did not include a centralized course of advanced judicial training, but the architects of the judicial system instantly recognized that a gulf divided the pool of potential judges. On one side were seasoned Qing magistrates and their legal advisers (xingmu 刑幕), who were comfortable with traditional law, and experienced in the sorts of disputes common in Chinese society and the practicalities of resolving them. Unfortunately, most of these had classical educations and no formal schooling in the modern legal principles around which the new judicial system was coalescing. On the other side stood recent law school graduates, a fair number of whom had impressive academic credentials, including degrees from the imperial civil service examinations and from Japanese or domestic law schools, but little to no practical experience with administration or dispute resolution to complement their book learning. “Guanyu sifaguan kaoshi ling disantiao zhenlu guize” 關於司法官考試令第三條甄錄 規則 [Regulations on the screening examination pursuant to Article 3 of the Decree on the Examination for Judicial Officials], Sifa gongbao 司法公報 [Judicial gazette] 42 (1915): 22–23. 16  Leng Xia, “Jindai Zhongguo de sifa kaoshi zhidu,” 351. 15 

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Table 4.1: Regular Judicial Examination (1916) Parts of the Regular Exam

Subjects Tested

First Written

Chinese Classics, History, General Legal Theory

Second Written

Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Civil Law, Commercial Law

Third Written

Mandatory: Criminal Procedure, Civil Procedure, the Law on Court Organization One of the following, chosen by test administrators: Administrative Regulations, Public International Law, Private International Law, Penology, Key Points in the Legal Systems of Past Dynasties

Oral

Questions from any of the topics tested in the above written parts

Source: Guoshiguan 國史館 (Academia Historica), ed., Zhonghua minguo shi falü zhi (chugao) 中華民國史法律志 (初稿) [History of the Republic of China, law gazette (preliminary draft)] (Taipei: Guoshiguan, 1994), 530.

Accordingly, in 1915 the Ministry of Justice opened a Judicial Education Institute (Sifa jiangxi suo 司法講習所) with an eighteen-month course of study modeled on Japanese fast-track judicial training programs. It combined a uniform academic curriculum with court-based practicums under the direction of serving judicial officials, which aimed to standardize judicial knowledge, skills, practice, and administration across China. The entering class had 124 students taught by twelve faculty members drawn from Beijing law schools and the senior ranks of the judiciary.17 Initially, three types of students were eligible for admission by competitive examination: (1) those who had passed the judicial exam but had not yet been assigned to a court; (2) those recommended by the Ministry of Justice who had passed a special selection exam (zhenba kaoshi 甄拔考試) and acquired experience as a judge, procurator, clerk, or principal secretary (zhushi 主 事) or commissioner (qianshi 僉事) in the ministry; and (3) regular judicial officials serving in courts or procuratorates below the high-court level. A written and oral entrance exam was given in June 1915, and 74 of the Li Qicheng 李啟成, “Sifa jiangxisuo kaolun—Zhongguo jindai sifaguan peixun zhidu de chansheng” 司法講習所考論—中國近代司法官培訓制度的產生 [The Judicial Education Institute—The emergence of China’s modern judicial officials’ training system], Bijiaofa yanjiu 比 較法研究 [Journal of comparative law] 2 (2007): 32. 17 

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116 students who took it passed, followed in August by a second, ad hoc entrance exam to fill 50 remaining seats. The exams covered current decrees and criminal, civil, commercial, and procedural laws, and works on judicial administration. The quick arrangement of the ad hoc exam indicates that the institute had difficulty attracting qualified students. The prestige of judicial appointment simply could not lure enough eligible law school graduates away from the easier and more lucrative paths of legal practice or other government service. To compensate, the institute proposed to expand eligibility for the second exam to those who had passed the 1910 Qing judicial examination, as well as judicial personnel with three or more years’ experience, including police officials and traditional legal advisers. But an outcry against this lowering of standards led the institute to bar the police officials and raise the experiential and quality requirements for legal advisers considerably.18 Later, Nationalist government reforms established formal parity between the salaries of judicial and administrative officials. Still, for all the attention judicial reformers lavished on eligibility standards and rigorous training, recruitment and retention of qualified judges remained problematic throughout the Republican period. At first, the eighteen-month program of study at the Judicial Education Institute was divided into three semesters punctuated by monthly and semester exams and capped at the end by a thesis on judicial administration and a comprehensive graduation exam that covered both academic content and practical work. Those who did not pass would not receive judicial appointments. When the institute opened in 1915, the curriculum closely resembled Beijing University’s, which was unsurprising given the overlap in faculty between the two institutions. After 1918, however, foreign law at the institute increasingly took a back seat to China’s emerging jurisprudence, especially domestic enactments and the accumulating decisions and judicial interpretations of the young Supreme Court. Beijing University, by contrast, taught most of its core substantive and procedural law courses by juxtaposing China against England, France, and Germany. The institute further distinguished itself by teaching practice-oriented courses in psychology, forensic medicine, and judicial and prison statistics, rarities in Chinese legal education at the time. See table 4.2 for a comparison of the curricula. Aspirants to the judiciary and procuracy were taught together at the institute during the first two semesters and then divided into civil/criminal, or criminal prosecution, tracks for the third. With the assistance of the Japanese Foreign Ministry and Japanese Embassy, the institute recruited 18 

Li Qicheng, “Sifa jiangxisuo kaolun,” 33.

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Table 4.2: Curricula of Beijing University Law School and Judicial Education Institute (1919–1920) Beijing University Law School Undergraduate Law Program 北京大學法科本科教授科目 (1919–1920) First Year: Roman Law; Constitutional Law; Civil Law (General Provisions); English Civil Law; French Civil Law; German Civil Law; Criminal Law; Economics; Latin; Second Foreign Language; Political Science, or Japanese (choose one) Second Year: Civil Obligations (General Provisions); Property; English Civil Law; French Civil Law; German Civil Law; Civil Procedure; English Civil Procedure; French Civil Procedure; German Civil Procedure; Criminal Law Theory; English Criminal Law; French Criminal Law; German Criminal Law; International Laws of War; Second Foreign Language; Finance, or Japanese (choose one) Third Year: Theory of Civil Obligations; Family Law; Commercial Law; English Commercial Law; French Commercial Law; German Commercial Law; Criminal Procedure; English Criminal Procedure; French Criminal Procedure; German Criminal Procedure; Jurisprudence; Bankruptcy; Administrative Law; Chinese Legal History; International Laws of War; Sociology, or Second Foreign Language (choose one) Fourth Year: Commercial Law; Inheritance; Administrative Law; Chinese Legal History; Private International Law; Litigation Practicum

Judicial Education Institute Civil/Criminal Course 司法講習所民刑事班講授科目 (1919) Civil Trial Practice (plus Compulsory Enforcement, Non-contentious Matters, and Personal Status); Bankruptcy Case Practice Compiled Regulations and Decisions on: Civil Matters (General); Family Law; Inheritance; Obligations (General); Obligations (Specific); Property; Merchant’s Usage; Companies Ordinance; Commerce; Negotiable Instruments; Maritime Commerce Essentials of Comparative Commercial Law Criminal Trial Practice Compiled Criminal Laws in Force and Decisions (General); Compiled Criminal Laws in Force and Decisions (Specific); Essentials of Comparative Criminal Law; Special Criminal Regulations and Decisions; Criminal Policy Regulations and Decisions on Civil Procedure (plus Personal Status); Regulations and Decisions on Criminal Procedure; Evidence; Trial Psychology; Court Administration and Practice, Registration, and Notarization; Official Documents; Model Cases; Drafting Civil Verdicts; Drafting Criminal Verdicts

Source: Li Qicheng, “Sifa jiangxisuo kaolun,” 34, 36.

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two experienced Japanese professors to anchor the faculty, Iwata Ichirō 岩田一郎 (1868–1923), an expert in civil law, and Itakura Matsutarō 板倉 松太郎 (1862–1924), a specialist in criminal law. Through translators, they gave lectures on judicial practice, compiled judicial decisions, and set benchmarks for the various skills and knowledge students were expected to master. All other faculty were Chinese and used Chinese texts and decisions in their courses. In 1918, the institute lengthened the course of study to two years. Finally, to generate income, the Judicial Education Institute published its lectures, and many courts and other legal institutions bought them to stay abreast of jurisprudential developments. On December 6, 1921, the institute was suddenly informed that it would be closed at the end of the month, when its fourth class graduated—a casualty of escalating warlord strife, foreign loan obligations, and collapsing government finances. The incoming class of more than a hundred students was diverted instead to courts for training, and the subsidized salaries they were to have received were terminated. Between 1915 and 1921, the institute trained more than a thousand personnel, and its four graduating classes counted 61, 60, 138, and 178 students, respectively, for a total of 437.19 Many of the students were in their thirties, and the vast majority became judges or procurators. For the next five years, China held no judicial examinations and supported no central school of advanced judicial training. Naturally, this change had a measurable impact on the staffing of the courts. Of the 995 judicial officials serving in November 1925, only eleven percent had joined in the preceding five years. Sixty percent had joined between 1910 and 1915, which meant that after an initial brief surge when the modern court system debuted, recruitment declined precipitously. See table 4.3. Finally, at the end of 1926, following a judicial inspection tour by the Commission on Extraterritoriality, the Beiyang government chartered a School for Cultivating Judicial Talent (Sifa chucai guan 司法儲才館) and administered a judicial examination to fill it.20 Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) was named president of the school, which counted eighteen 19  “Sifa jiangxisuo biye xueyuan minglu” 司法講習所畢業學員名錄 [Directory of Judicial Education Institute graduates], in Jiangxisuo biye xueyuan mingce 講習所畢業學員名冊 [Register of Judicial Education Institute graduates] 1921, Beijing Municipal Archive, Folio J194-001-00027. 20  Sources conflict as to the exact number of successful examinees. Wang Yongbin cites 135, whereas Yu Jiang gives 220, and then surmises as many as several dozen successful examinees may not actually have enrolled at the school, presumably because they obtained employment outside of the judiciary. Yu lists 135 as the number of graduates from this class at the school. See Yu Jiang 俞江, “Sifa chucaiguan chukao” 司法儲才館初考 [Preliminary study of the School for Cultivating Judicial Talent], Qinghua faxue 清華法學 (Tsinghua law review) 1 (2004): 166; Wang Yongbin 王用賓, “Ershiwu nian lai zhi sifa xingzheng” 二十五年來之司法

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Table 4.3: Number of Judicial Officials and Years of Service (November 1925) Total Number of Judicial Officials

995

Graduates of Foreign Law Schools

211

Graduates of Chinese Law Schools

770

Graduates of the Mongolia School for Cultivating Judicial Officials

14

Served >10 yrs.

15 (2%)

Served >10 yrs.

597 (60%)

Served >5 yrs.

271 (27%)

Served