Education in wartime Beijing: 1937-1945.

Abstract

This study focuses on a group of public and private schools, from elementary to post-secondary level, in the city of Beijing under Japanese occupation during the second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945). The schools under discussion define a place where an array of the needs and aspirations of Beijing's wartime society and authorities fused with, collided against, or ignored each other. The occupation generated necessary adjustment to and serious questioning of some prewar notions about education, society, and nation. The occupation also fostered renewed interest in and heightened appreciation of other prewar notions about education, society, and nation. Moreover, the war and occupation did not halt Republican China's ongoing attempt to clarify the purpose and the place of education in a society and nation, both in the throes of redefinition. Findings in this study also illustrate some of the complexities and contradictions long hidden behind a series of familiar but shopworn poses depicting the occupation as a time when omnipotent Japanese, with their Chinese collaborators, viciously oppressed the Chinese masses. Wartime Beijing and Beijing National universities offered bona fide professional training for some and opportunity for others who would not have been academically qualified to attend these institutions in the prewar years. The Japanese imprint on these two wartime campuses was not conspicuous. The war and occupation accentuated the distinctive features of Beijing's two missionary universities, Yanjing and Furen. Each enjoyed increased enrollment, but neither was exactly the island of autonomy portrayed in many postwar accounts. The city's public primary and secondary schools were given the responsibility of teaching youngsters basic skills and proper ethics. Despite repeated government pronouncements about textbook revisions in order to disseminate to young students the new official ideology, analysis shows that the revisions were anything but thoroughgoing. Ending more often in failure than success, the attempts by Beijing's wartime authorities to transform education are not particularly notable, but the rationale and means used to implement these attempts contributed to the more dramatic transformation of Chinese education, society, and nation after 1945.