Problems of Education in the Chinese and Vietnamese Revolutions

Abstract

FEW HISTORIANS would be surprised by the fact that educationand debates over different forms of education-have constituted a centrally important battleground for revolutionary politicians in China and in Vietnam for much of the twentieth century. Politics and education, after all, intermingled far more intimately in Chinese and Vietnamese history than they did in most pre-modern Western history, sometimes producing an artful, self-conscious bureaucratic stability. However much we may disdain the intellectual narrowness of the Confucian civil service examination systems which helped to choose ruling elites in China and Vietnam for more than eight centuries, we must admit that no ruling class in any medieval or early modern Western state ever owed its exalted position to its educational achievements as conspicuously as did the old Chinese and Vietnamese scholar-gentry, for whom the possession of landed wealth was normally necessary but insufficient in itself as a means of gaining political power. On the other hand, this interpenetration sometimes generated savage conflicts: the elitist citadel of Confucian education might be surrounded and besieged by the lower classes whom it had directly or indirectly excommunicated. Thus Chang Hsien-chung, the seventeenth-century Chinese peasant terrorist who briefly established a government at Wuhan in i643, embarked upon his bloody rebellion after having been expelled from a Shensi village school for having beaten a schoolmate to death; Li Wen-ch'eng, the White Lotus religious rebel whose fierce assault upon the Peking palaces in i8i3 left still visible marks upon their gates, also presaged his revolt by being expelled from schooi, and took his revenge by theatrically sacking Honanese Confucian academies. In the uncertain terrain between these two poles of stability and conflict, Confucian societies recognized the existence of an important tradition of the poor, idealistic backwoods scholar-teacher who