Recent Educational Policy in China

A FTER its armies took over the major urban centers of China in late 1948 and I949, the Chinese Communist Party was confronted with the problem of evolving a satisfactory policy towards, and an effective means of control over, the national educational system-its curricula, administration, teachers and students. Since the schools, and particularly the colleges and universities, are concentrated for the most part in these recently-occupied urban centers, the Communists possessed relatively little experience to guide them in dealing with these complex issues. In the older Liberated Areas, starting virtually from scratch, they had created their own schools and universities. The problems now presented by long established institutions with diverse and deep-rooted traditions of their own, embracing private as well as public schools, mission-administered as well as secular, foreign-controlled as well as wholly Chinese establishments, were quite different. Aside from the specific policies followed by the Communists in dealing with these schools, which have generally been calculated to arouse a minimum of resentment toward the new government and to discourage unnecessary interruptions in established routine, there have been special features in the situation that have unquestionably favored cooperation between the schools and the authorities in this period of transition. For one thing, numerous prominent Communists are themselves graduates or former students of the leading universities, including many of the Christian institutions, and are therefore acquainted with their teaching and administrative personnel. Such acquaintance has certainly made it easier for the latter to establish working arrangements with the new authorities than might otherwise have been the case, and has in all likelihood also made the authorities aware of the spirit and traditions of the different institutions with which they have now to deal. Then, too, a probable majority of the students and a substantial proportion of the teaching staffs in the colleges, universities and normal schools were, at the time of the change-over, sympathetic to the Communists in degrees ranging from enthusiastic support to passive

China · Political science · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Law