Chinese Educational Development in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

'one culture'. However, the many cultures and linguistically divided elements which have swayed this way and that over 'The Central Land' (as the Chinese call their territory) have shared a common consciousness of their distinct civilisation. This had taken on its unique characteristics by the time when the cities of ancient Greece were laying the foundations of our Western world-and the Chinese civilisation has maintained its unique ways of life with literary and philosophical continuity down the millennia in which the empires and languages of Europe have faded and gone. That continuity has often been chequered, and now revolution has established a 'New China'; but many essentials have remained in recognisable and cherished forms. Every modern Chinese is conscious of the past, and proud of it as the base on which the future is being built. Westerners do well, when admiring the artistic and ingenious creations of China bequeathed from the past, to take account of the Chinese time-scale. When the ancestors of many of us were still roving in the great forests and plains of Europe, the Chinese were a settled people engaged in cultural and commercial exchange with the civilisations of the Near East. When Augustine came to Canterbury to convert the barbarian Angles, Nestorian Christians were received at court in the Chinese capital, Xi'an; the record of their mission on beautifully executed stone tablets in the calligraphy of the day can be read by specialists now. The distinctive Chinese form of writing has of course evolved down the centuries; but it has united the present with the past, and still transcends the varied dialects and mutually unintelligible languages of China with a common understanding through reading. Likewise, Confucius (551-479 Bc) pronounced doctrines and disciplines still argued about for contemporary relevance-just as they were used to support (or refute) modernisation proposals in the late nineteenth century and the rise of republicanism after 1911. Despite the fact that some 93% of the country's inhabitants are Han Chinese, while the minorities mostly inhabit the sparsely populated vastness of the North and West which makes up more than half the national territory, the distinctiveness of some regions and local cultures