By Timothy B. Weston
Through the 20th century, Beijing collage (or Beida) has been on the middle of China's maximum political and cultural upheavals--from the could Fourth flow of 1919 to the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties to the tragic occasions in Tiananmen sq. in 1989. Why this could be--how Beida's old significance has come to go beyond that of a trifling establishment of upper learning--is a question on the middle of this publication. A learn of intellectuals and political tradition in the past century's tumultuous early a long time, The strength of place is the 1st to target Beida, China's oldest and best-known nationwide university.
Timothy B. Weston portrays the college as a key locus utilized by intellectuals to extend their impact in society. Weston analyzes the hyperlinks among intellectuals' political and cultural commitments and their particular demeanour of residing. He additionally compares Beijing's highbrow tradition with that of the emerging city of Shanghai. What emerges is a remarkably nuanced and complicated photograph of existence at China's prime college, particularly within the a long time top as much as the could Fourth move.
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Additional resources for The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929 (Berkeley Series in Interdisciplinary Studies of China)
Sample text
Liang Qichao’s draft curriculum was overwhelmingly concentrated on Western subjects in spite of his politically sensitive claim that Chinese and Western learning would receive equal attention. In their first three years all students would be required to master a number of core subjects: classics (jingxue); neo-Confucianism (lixue); Chinese and foreign historical documents (zhong wai zhangguxue); the ancient noncanonical philosophers (zhuzixue); elementary mathematics (chuji suanxue); elementary government studies (chuji zhengzhixue); elementary geography (chuji dilixue); literature (wenxue); and physical education (ticao xue).
Later, when the court lifted its ban on them, academies proliferated rapidly, so that some two thousand existed, at various times, over the remainder of the Manchu period. Academies with the best reputations generally owed their renown to the fact that their graduates performed well on the civil service examinations. 23 Even if students were highly careerist, the requirement that they master the Neo-Confucian curriculum to succeed on the examinations assured that they would internalize at least the letter, if not the spirit, of that curriculum’s “civilizing” norms as they pursued their own benefit.
Though the intellectuals who lobbied for the new university decried the corrupt culture of official Beijing, they nevertheless believed it important that the Jingshi daxuetang be a capital undertaking. This reflected their commitment to the idea of a politically and culturally centralized dynastic state and their belief that the Qing Court could be persuaded to cease divorcing educational creativity from the political center. The reformers pointed out that the Western powers and Japan had universities in their capital cities and that China would send an important message to the world regarding its openness to new ideas if it followed suit.