This collection of writings traces the evolution and revolution of Chinese modern education in the early twentieth century initiated by Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), the first Minister of Education of the Republic of China, President of Peking University (1916-1927) and the founder of Academia Sinica. This volume illustrates Cai Yuanpei’s educational thoughts, one of which is known as “freedom of thought and academic inclusiveness”(思想自由,兼容並包), through his own words from his political, social, and academic endeavors. Cai navigated the landscape of Chinese education at the time, bridging the gap between tradition and revolution, East and West, and setting the cornerstone of the Chinese modern education system. His innovative ideology remains significant in the context of Chinese education reforms in the 21st century.

Unlike previous studies that have examined the late Qing utopian imagination as an ahistorical motif, a literary theme, and a translation phenomenon, in this book Shuk Man Leung considers utopian fiction as a knowledge apparatus that helped develop Chinese nationalism and modernity. Based on untapped primary sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese, her research reveals how utopian imagination, blooming after Liang Qichao’s publication of The Future of New China, served as a tool of knowledge formation and dissemination that transformed China’s public sphere and catalysed historical change. Embracing interdisciplinary approach from genre studies, studies on modern Chinese newspapers and intellectual history, this book provides an analysis of the development of utopian literary practices, epistemic meanings, and fictional narratives and the interactions between traditional and imported knowledge that helped shape the discourse in early 20th century China.

This set of reissued books examines education in Asia from a variety of different angles. From the westernisation of early twentieth century Chinese education, to the impact of the Communist revolution, to education and society in Korea, to Asian women’s experiences of education – this set collects some key texts by a range of original thinkers.

This reissue (1996) provides an in-depth analysis of the development of the Chinese university during the twentieth century – a period of momentous social, economic, cultural and political change. It brings together reflections on the Chinese university and its role in the two great experiments of modern China: Nationalist efforts to create a modern state as part of capitalist modernisation, and the Communist project of socialist construction under Soviet tutelage. In addition to these two frames of discourse, other models and patterns are examined: for instance, the persistence of cultural patterns, or Maoist revolutionary thought.

Selected Essays on China’s Education: Research and Review (4 volumes) consists of 22 most influential theses on the history and tradition of Chinese Education. These essays explore important educational and cultural issues in China with a transcultural perspective.

Questions of national identity have long dominated China’s political, social, and cultural horizons. So in the early 1900s, when diverse groups in China began to covet foreign science in the name of new technology and modernization, questions of nationhood came to the fore. In Unearthing the Nation, Grace Yen Shen uses the development of modern geology to explore this complex relationship between science and nationalism in Republican China. Shen shows that Chinese geologists—in battling growing Western and Japanese encroachment of Chinese sovereignty—faced two ongoing challenges: how to develop objective, internationally recognized scientific authority without effacing native identity, and how to serve China when China was still searching for a stable national form. Shen argues that Chinese geologists overcame these obstacles by experimenting with different ways to associate the subjects of their scientific study, the land and its features, with the object of their political and cultural loyalties. This, in turn, led them to link national survival with the establishment of scientific authority in Chinese society. The first major history of modern Chinese geology, Unearthing the Nation introduces the key figures in the rise of the field, as well as several key organizations, such as the Geological Society of China, and explains how they helped bring Chinese geology onto the world stage.

This book conveys an understanding of China’s educational development from within and provides unique insights into Chinese society. It does so through portraits of eleven influential educators whose ideas have shaped the educational reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. The book makes Chinese civilization concrete through the drama of the real lives of educators and provides glimpses into the educational context of China’s recent move onto the world stage.