4 - Civics Lessons

Summary

This chapter examines children’s magazines, history and civics textbooks, vernacular Mandarin readers and other pedagogical tools produced by the Commercial Press, the Guomindang’s Minzhi Book Company and other players in the republic’s burgeoning schoolbook industry. Constituting part of the larger nation-building project, the lessons provided by many schoolbooks were closely aligned with the aims of the social survey movement. As this chapter shows, writers and editors in reformist publications distinguished between acts of disaster alleviation, validating some, discrediting others, while overlooking still others entirely. In their treatments of rural life in times of crisis, certain actors and practices were given center stage while others disappeared from view, resulting in a convergence of ideas on what rural Chinese communities were capable of, and not. In the representational framework presented collectively by May Fourth disaster surveys and publications over the 1920s, mentions of natural disaster assumed a different message: China’s failure was a moral one. To a generation of Chinese schooled in the 1920s, the country’s social field was flattened into one of enlightened and backward aspects, action and impasse, slumber and wakefulness, even good and evil. It was a field ripe for the interventions of the party program.