| In the early twentieth century, the Qing government replaced the centuries-old civil service examination system with a new education system, based partly on foreign models. This study draws primarily on previously untapped county archives to examine how the new system was implemented in village communities across Haicheng County, Fengtian Province from 1905–1931. It focuses on three overlapping areas of interest: the organization of Haicheng's village schools, the relationship of the schools to local society, and the interaction between local educational reform and national debates and regulations.; Past works criticize the new school system for being too foreign for China's largely rural populace or, conversely, for being too mired in Confucianism to have any significant impact on rural society. This study argues that these critics have overlooked the significant efforts of central reformers, local government officials, and villagers to create viable institutions by blending old and new, traditional and modern, and Western and Chinese characteristics. In Haicheng's villages, hundreds of new “modern” schools combined a new curriculum, calendar, and teaching methods with old practices, in particular, an emphasis on the Confucian Classics. When resources were scarce, villages reformed old schools called sishu. Sishu retained many of their former ways while offering new classes and teaching methods. The result was a two-tiered system that accommodated a broad spectrum of society.; This research also challenges past scholarship that maintains that early twentieth-century Chinese statebuilding engendered a hostile relationship between state and society when reforms were introduced to the village. This may have been the case in extractive areas like taxation, but in the area of education, where both state and village stood to benefit, a cooperative relationship developed. The state provided supervision, organizational guidance, and occasional subsidies. Village communities responded energetically to state demands to build schools. Although burdened financially, they exhibited creativity and ingenuity, combining different sources of funding and initiating partnerships with other villages to implement educational reform, thereby playing a key role in China's early twentieth-century modernization. |
