Between admiration and transformation : paths of Western education into early twentieth century China

Abstract

Current research on 'educational borrowing' has not only led to a growing awareness of local agency but has also revealed the flexibility of educational models and concepts and their inbuilt capacity for change. It took comparative educationists some time to acknowledge that attempts to copy educational models were futile endeavours, even if copying was the original intention of the actors involved. Earlier studies on educational transfer were still based on the assumption that models could be transplanted from one context to another, interpreting unexpected results as deviations, deformations, or even failures. Since transfer in education was closely linked to educational policy making, unintended outcomes were seen as resulting from insufficient policy design or lax implementation procedures. As Gita Steiner-Khamsi critically remarks in her study on educational vouchers in Mongolia, 'the remedy would be to improve the design of policy;' processes of local reinterpretation and adaptation were largely ignored. More recent research on the emergence of an educational 'world culture' admits that many transfer processes do not lead to sameness but create 'differences'. However, according to this neo-institutionalist approach, these differences are seen as 'variation in local educational practices' rather than representing new cultural forms in their own right. While Francisco O. Ramirez does use the term 'creolisation' to describe the processes at the local level, it is worth asking what is meant by the term. In practice, many researchers who argue along the 'world culture' line treat creoles as variations of underlying commonalities. Thus, the outcome of educational transfer is simply regarded as the original model in some kind of 'cultural disguise'. However, 'creolisation' can be used more radically, as Ulf Hannerz and others have shown convincingly. This more radical usage reveals the transformative power of transfer or interaction. It means that the act of perceiving, selecting, and transferring a model occurs in a setting that not merely influences but transforms and thus recreates both the agents and objects of transfer. Furthermore, these agents and objects, even at the beginning of the transfer process under study, represent by no means unified, homogeneous cultural wholes but have themselves to be seen as the outcomes of previous processes of educational, or more broadly, cultural transfer. In this contribution, I will look at these agents and objects of educational transfer in the virtual space of 'China and the world', which began to emerge among Chinese elites towards