First Advisor

Linda A. Walton

Term of Graduation

Summer 1991

Date of Publication

7-24-1991

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in History

Department

History

Language

English

Subjects

Education -- China -- History -- To 1912, China -- History -- Qing dynasty (1644-1912)

DOI

10.15760/etd.6009

Physical Description

1 online resource (2, iv, 151 pages)

Abstract

Historical consensus has labeled the educational reform efforts of China's scholar-officials in the second half of the nineteenth century as merely reactions to external circumstances and therefore has concluded that these reforms were "failures". The youthful revolt against Chinese cultural traditions, which culminated in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, has frequently been cited as a clear demonstration that previous educational reforms had failed. However, when viewed as the intellectual phase of the revolutionary process, reform activities among members of China's bureaucratic and scholarly elite in the four and one half decades from the 1860s to the early 1900s can be seen as limited, but definite, successes, initiated from within the traditional society and assisted by the introduction of Western secular knowledge by Protestant missionaries.

There were actually two phases to educational reform. The first period, 1860 to 1890, was dominated by individual efforts, which were loosely connected by a shared belief in the need for China to strengthen itself through the selective adaptation of Western technologies. The second began in the 1890s and was characterized by the development of a general intellectual climate for educational reform, which included not only the adoption of Western technologies but also the investigation of Western philosophies and political theories. The 1902 Imperial edicts, establishing the first truly public system of education in China, represented an official acknowledgment that a fundamental shift had already occurred in Chinese intellectual foundations. This shift represents the first, intellectual, phase of the Chinese revolution and was critical to the development of the following stages of the process - the political revolution begun in 1911, and the sociocultural transformation initiated in 1915. Political solutions proposed for the problem of China's national survival in the twentieth century and sociocultural debates over the relevance of the Chinese tradition to a modem nation-state must be considered as indications that a fundamental shift had already occurred in the intellectual foundation by the beginning of the twentieth century. This shift represented a successful result of educational reform efforts in late Ch'ing China.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this dissertation or thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to pdxscholar@pdx.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/23739

Download

Share

COinS