Modern China current issue

Prometheus of the Revolution: Rural Teachers in Republican China

Chang Liu, — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

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.

Reification of the Chinese Intellectual: On the Origins of the CCP Concept of Zhishifenzi

U, E. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

Research has largely overlooked the reification of the intellectual (zhishifenzi) after the 1949 Communist revolution. Studying this major feature of Chinese socialism can illuminate the workings of the Chinese Communist Party, state-society relations, and the experience of so-called intellectuals. This article explores the social and ideological contexts that first nurtured the party’s concept of intellectuals. It focuses on the debate about the intellectual class ( zhishi jieji) in political and literary circles from the late 1910s to the mid-1920s. During the May Fourth era, socialists, anarchists, and other activists regarded the intellectual class as a distinct social category with internal cleavages based on age and political consciousness. Under the influence of the Comintern, the Chinese Communists recast the intellectual class as the primary ideological enemy. The debate about the intellectual class profoundly affected the party’s understanding of the intellectual. The article concludes by suggesting new directions for research on the reification of the intellectual.

Revolutionizing Ritual Interaction in the Classroom: Constructing the Chinese Renaissance of the Twenty-First Century

Carmel Sargent, T. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

Over the past decade, educational leaders in China have maintained that the pattern of social interactions in Chinese classrooms is not conducive to the cultivation of innovativeness and creativity and that this lack of creativity is a major barrier to China’s global competitiveness. One key response has been the implementation of the 2001 New Curriculum reforms in basic education. This article draws on qualitative classroom observation and in-depth interview data, as well as quantitative survey data, from Gansu province to investigate the extent to which classroom interactions differ substantially in Chinese primary school classrooms that are implementing the New Curriculum reforms compared with those that are not. To the extent that individuals are constructed by the interactions in which they participate, changes in classrooms could have far-reaching implications for contemporary youth socialized differently than those of previous generations, and for the future social, cultural, and political order of China.

Union Power in China Source, Operation, and Constraints

Feng Chen, — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

Why are the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and its regional branches, or union bureaucracies, able to play an active role in labor legislation, unionization, and labor dispute settlements, while their grassroots organizations, or workplace unions, remain haplessly impotent and incapable of representing workers? This article argues that union bureaucracies’ power and its operation are decisively reliant upon their formal government status. While a government status constrains union bureaucracies’ autonomy, it also paradoxically accounts for their influence in areas in which their active role is permitted and expected by the government. However, workplace unions’ subordination to management leaves them no power whatsoever. Union bureaucracies’ governmental status prevents them from operating through mobilizing grassroots labor support or exerting their influence by empowering their grassroots branches. Thus, their legislative and other efforts have had a limited impact on the balance of power between labor and capital in the workplace.