Writing for New Literates in the Chinese Countryside

In the spring of 1927, the Mass Education Movement (MEM), an organization devoted to teaching the Chinese masses to read, published a textbook written for rural illiterates, The Farmer's Thousand-Character Reader (Nongmin qianzi ke). The textbook culminated in a three-part lesson on the "model village." Perhaps inspired by the neat, industrious New England towns they had glimpsed during studies abroad, in the accompanying illustrations the textbook's authors placed at the center of the little hamlet a clock tower (not a sight common to rural China but one that did evoke the urban modernity of, for instance, the famous Customs House clock tower on Shanghai's Bund), "according to which the townspeople know the time to conduct [their] affairs." In the model village, the lesson declared, everyone had a job, officials were elected by popular vote, the young people had organized a militia to protect the village, and besides managing the home, women could "all spin, weave cloth, knit socks, and do needlework." No one drank, gambled, or smoked, but instead found entertainment in the village's gymnasium and museum. Additional components of life in the model village included a public park, sports fields, hospital, and public health council. This utopian vision of an orderly rural society remade for prosperity and stability placed education at its center, for it hosted "a forest of schools": a kindergarten, a middle and high school, a People's School (for adults), and a worker's school, as well as a library, a newspaper reading room, and help stations where those learning to read or who wanted laws or texts explained could stop for assistance.

The centrality of education to the model village — a reform vision of a modernized countryside — reflected the view of the MEM, like many other prominent reformers who emerged in the mid-1920s, that literacy education was the initial mechanism for educating rural people as citizens and as modern people. MEM Director Yan Yangchu wrote that literacy was "the foundation for all other lines of improvement, for with an illiterate people very little headway can be made." In the mid-1920s, many rural reform advocates like the MEM were still based in cities, but on the pages of their many publications, they constructed a coherent idea of a remade countryside, like that sketched in the Farmer's Reader. The lessons on the model village, and the ones that preceded it, outlined a new swath of activities and knowledge — from how to write and mail a letter to how to celebrate National Day (October 10) — that the authors believed rural people should be familiar with. This vision of rural modernity adopted the markers of urban modernity, among them literacy, participatory governance, and gender equality, but situated them in a rural context and rural geography, emphasizing particularly their roles and responsibilities within their villages. Above all, it placed the focus of reform on rural people, and particularly their abilities to reform themselves and their communities. Reformers didn't just believe that rural areas were as capable of being modern as urban ones — they went a step further and insisted that a modernized countryside was the basis of the Chinese nation.

The MEM in particular was strongly committed to the connection between literacy and citizenship. The organization was founded in 1923 to further mass literacy, and was initially engaged in urban campaigns to teach city people to read. A 1922 literacy campaign held in Changsha by Yan's first literacy organization, the forerunner to the MEM, sported banners that made clear the organization's belief about the connection between national strength and literacy. "An illiterate nation a weak nation," one read, while another offered a solution: "China's salvation? Popular education." In order to address the broad illiteracy that MEM leaders argued was a national failing, the organization almost immediately began to publish a literature — of textbooks, short stories, and educational pamphlets — for new literates, which would over the next decade and a half grow to a catalogue of hundreds of books, pamphlets and newspapers distributed to millions of readers in China and abroad. By 1927 when The Farmer's Thousand-Character Reader was published, the MEM had found a base for its experiments in rural literacy outreach. At the invitation of self-governance activist Mi Digang, whose family had been involved in local reform efforts in their home county since the first decade of the twentieth century, the MEM began work in Dingxian (Ding County) in southwestern Hebei in 1926. Mi was active in national political movements (he belonged to the GMD and participated in the Zhili Provincial Assembly, among other activities), but remained invested in the future of his home village. Inspired by Mi's ideas that "instead of writing beautiful essays and paper plans," intellectuals should undertake rural reforms "in a practical way," the MEM decided in 1929 to relocate their headquarters from Beiping to Dingxian. There, Yan wrote, "we want in every way possible to merge our life with the village life." Setting up shop in the county seat's exam hall, the MEM established a famous and closely watched model county that its founders and funders, who eventually included the Rockefeller Foundation, hoped would become a national and perhaps even international model of reform.

The MEM was not the only group to place education at the center of a vision of rural revitalization. A few years after the MEM started their rural education efforts in Dingxian, the prominent intellectual Liang Shuming founded the Shandong Rural Reconstruction Institute at the invitation of General Han Fuju, who governed the province. Liang's vision of the countryside was also grounded in education, proposing that village schools be the organizing institution for the countryside. For Liang, profound social change would result from the "schoolification of society." Other reformers, discussed in the chapters that follow, also founded schools in rural areas throughout China that became, or attempted to become, the centers of model communities. In drawing connections between literacy and citizenship, Liang, Yan, and their compatriots were in the company of nationalists the world over. Building on Enlightenment ideals that linked literacy and social progress, in places as diverse as India and Russia, early twentieth-century mass literacy advocates argued that education would civilize new citizens, inculcating people with the values of the nation. Indeed, as social science researchers turned their attention to the psychological effects of education, they argued that literates and illiterates differed from one another. For instance, 1930s Soviet researchers concluded that illiterates "had a 'graphic-functional' way of thinking," describing the world around them largely in...