Centennial Commemoration: Cultural 1840-1945 Visual Archive

Author: Liao Damao, Yang Huiguo (editors)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: This series introduces modern history by thematic categories, collecting over a thousand precious images to transform the rigid appearance of traditional history books and vividly record the hundred-year history of China. This book is the Cultural Volume: What changes occurred in traditional education, medicine, sports, thought, and literary arts during the late Qing Dynasty and Republican period? How was the orthodox status of Confucianism ended? Do you know the history of Christianity, Buddhism, and Taoism in modern Chinese history? How did religious believers make their choices during the War of Resistance? What was the lifestyle of people in the late Qing Dynasty and Republican period? After the Opium War, Western learning had a profound impact on traditional Chinese thought, ending the orthodox status of Confucianism and establishing the core positions of democracy and science, laying the foundation for the spread of Marxism. Modern literary and artistic trends also underwent profound changes, giving rise to many new art forms and schools, producing a generation of masters. Since the Political Volume touches on thought, and the scope of literary and arts is broad, diverse, and complex, coupled with the limitations of the layout, it does not aim to cover everything comprehensively but instead selects representative aspects for brief introductions.
2. The Decline of Feudal Education
Before the Opium War, the Qing Dynasty had already begun to decline, and education still maintained the old feudal system, becoming increasingly empty and corrupt. While the educational system formally followed the Qing era, it had a relatively complete school system, most official schools were merely in name and rarely conducted teaching activities. The imperial examination system also became increasingly corrupt, rife with abuses. Most questions from the "Four Books" had been exhausted, so some "fragmented questions" and "stifling questions" were created to torment candidates. The examination format strictly required the use of the eight-legged essay style, and the handwriting had to be in small regular script. During the exams, various forms of cheating, with diverse and elaborate methods, including "bribing officials," "impersonation," smuggling answers, and swapping examination numbers. In the Qing era, the prevention and suppression of examination fraud were still quite strict, but by the late Qing, various forms of cheating re-emerged and worsened. The corruption of the imperial examination system made school education even more decadent and declining.
Men of vision called for the revitalization of education. The thinker Gong Zizhen pointed out that the main problems with education at the time were threefold:
First, the content was outdated and empty.
Second, learning was not applied, and application was not learning. Students studied classical studies but faced practical matters like military, criminal, finance, and grain after becoming officials, leaving their knowledge useless.
Third, the people trained lacked ambition. Most people pursued education to gain official positions and status. After enduring the arduous struggles of the imperial examinations, they became officials only to find themselves past their prime and physically worn out. Moreover, promotions in the officialdom were often based on seniority, so officials often settled for the status quo and lacked ambition, merely seeking to follow the system.
In his "Discussions on the Ninth of the Year E and B," he lamented that the era was already declining, and the entire society failed to cultivate usable talents, resulting in "no capable ministers on the left, no capable historians on the right, no capable generals at home, no capable scholars in schools, no capable farmers in the fields, no capable artisans in the markets, no capable merchants in the streets, and even no slightly talented 'thieves' in the alleys!" The intellectual level of the entire society was extremely low.
Thus, he passionately urged: "I advise the heavens to shake and drop talents without discrimination." He demanded the cultivation of reform-minded talents to transform the corrupt and declining era into a vibrant and well-governed one.
After the Opium War, the emptiness and uselessness of traditional learning and education became exposed, and calls for educational reform grew louder. Wei Yuan proposed the idea of "learning from the strengths of the barbarians to restrain them," becoming the ideological pioneer of modern educational reform. Western missionary schools appeared in the southeastern coastal areas of China and gradually spread inland, stimulating China's education.
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