SARAH SCHNEEWIND. Community Schools and the State in Ming China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 298. $55.00

Abstract

In this meticulously researched and eloquently written book, Sarah Schneewind unravels the myths concerning the institution of the Chinese community school (shexue) launched in the first decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). According to an imperial edict issued in 1375, every village in the empire was to build a school that any boy might attend to acquire basic literacy and moral improvement. The emperor responsible for the decree was the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang, considered by both contemporaries and later historians a despot, but also known as “an effective architect of state and society.” It is this latter portrayal that the author convincingly demonstrates could not be “more questionable” (p. 8). Using a wide range of local gazetteers, documentary collections, and writings by Ming scholar officials, Schneewind lays bare “the shaky foundations” of Zhu's directive, exposing the tensions between the power of central government and the authority of local society. She shows clearly that the original mandate was ineffective, and that it was really Zhu's successors on the throne who realized an empire-wide education system regulated by state-deputized attendants. In the course of time these schools became an asset of local society, centers of Neo-Confucianism that barred the influences of Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religion. By the mid-sixteenth century, the community school also became a site for social advancement where boys gained basic reading and writing skills, and knowledge of Confucian ethics and ritual, all essential to those wanting to enter the civil service examination track. In turn, their teachers, gentry patrons, and some ambitious officials with the aim of transforming local society, earned social capital for their support of this institution. The high point of community school establishment came during the reign of the Jiajing emperor (1522–1566) when some 183 schools were founded, out of a total number of 551 for the entire dynasty (p. 52). The Neo-Confucian “activist” administrators responsible for this burst of school-building were bent on controlling the local populace as well as promoting their own political and philosophical positions. By the final decades of the dynasty, however, the “localist initiative” to create community schools surpassed efforts by central government representatives. With the aim of bolstering the prestige of their native regions, local gentry backed by ordinary people (merchants, rich landowners, and so on) took the lead to erect schools, an enterprise that the author argues is indicative of a general late Ming movement by commoners to involve themselves in local projects such as community granaries or mutual security groups.