Teaching guomin: Meanings of citizenship and (un)popular education in late Qing China

Following the Qing government's decision to abolish the civil-service examination system in 1905, education reformers writing for Jiaoyu zazhi [The Chinese Educational Review] set about establishing a new system of public education under the banner of educating "citizens," or guomin. This essay looks critically at various reform proposals expressed in Jiaoyu zazhi during its first year of publication (1909) in an effort to better characterize the possibilities and tensions inherent in late Qing notions of guomin. While almost all of the contributors professed the need to popularize education for guomin, this shared vocabulary obscures key differences among the visions of citizenship each reformer espoused, as well as among potential students targeted by reform. These differences indicate that while notions of citizenship would become more uniform throughout the Republican period, the final years of the Qing dynasty were a time in which multiple meanings of citizenship were still possible.