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Prometheus of the Revolution

Rural Teachers in Republican China

East China Normal University

The development of modern education beginning in the late nineteenth century created a new type of educator—the public school teacher—in rural China. This article examines why rural school teachers turned out to be the vanguard of the Chinese communist revolution in the countryside. Most rural teachers, it shows, were young men in their twenties from humble farming families. Their age and background made them energetic and critical, and their training and profession made them the modern intellectual elite in rural villages and towns. But their poor living and working conditions did not live up to either their education or their expectations. This situation caused the radical and revolutionary ideas sowed in their minds during their professional training to take root. A large number of them thus joined the Communist Party and carried the torch of the urban-born communist movement into the countryside.

Key Words: modern education • rural teachers • normal schools • early communist revolution

This version was published on November 1, 2009

Modern China, Vol. 35, No. 6, 567-603 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0097700409337249


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