By Di Luo
Reviewed by Frederik H. Green
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)
Di Luo, Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xviii + 282 pp. ISBN 9789004524736 (Hardback) | ISBN 9789004524743 (eBook).
Di Luo’s highly engaging monograph Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, explores the intricate relationship between literacy and the rise of the nation state in Republican-period China. Luo does not focus on the means through which gains in literacy were achieved or the tangible and intangible benefits improved literacy rates presented to the newly educated citizens or the nation state. Rather, Luo’s interest lies in the question of how the practice of literacy training in itself shaped the relationship between the state and the various actors involved in literacy training, including administrators, policy makers, local cadres, teachers, and students. Literacy training remained high on the agenda of both the GMD (KMT) and the CCP throughout the first part of the twentieth century, yet there existed distinct differences in each party’s respective discourse regarding the form and purpose of literacy training as well as in the ways each party named and presented illiteracy. Luo’s intention is not to demonstrate whether the GMD’s or the CCP’s strategies for literacy training were more successful. Instead, she illustrates through a number of fascinating case studies how the various actors involved perceived the role and value of those efforts and what differences existed in the way success was recorded, measured, and presented differently by the GMD and CCP. By putting the training process at the center of her analysis, as the reader is informed in the introduction, Luo highlights the “agentive role of historical actors and their participatory experience in meaning-making, rather than literacy per se” (18). To Luo, literacy training is a social process the importance of which to the making of modern China does not rest on the practice of learning alone, but equally “on the practices of sponsoring, managing, teaching, and representing” (20). In order to document this social process and the multi-dimensional practices the GMD and CCP engaged in, Luo carefully studied government and other official records in over a dozen major libraries and archives in China and the US. The result is an eye-opening study that captivates its reader through both its depths and breath and that spans from the late Qing until the first years of the People’s Republic.
Luo begins her study by broadly sketching out competing perspectives regarding literacy. In chapter 1, entitled “Mapping Literacy and Illiteracy in the Early Twentieth Century,” she first turns to the biases embedded in the nation-building programs of early reformers. In order to underscore the new emphasis late Qing and the early Republican period reformers started to place on the connection between literacy and citizenship, Luo first cites a number of instances recorded in the Shenbao newspaper that are testimony to the opposite—namely, cases in which illiterate victims of fraud were accredited with moral superiority over literates who had cheated them. This view, that illiteracy did not always deprive individuals of agency, Luo continues, was gradually obliterated by modern reformers who depicted illiteracy “as equivalent to ignorance and barbarity” (40), effectively erasing “diverse, vigorous, and multidimensional ways of viewing and practicing literacy and illiteracy” (43). As a result, a “moral binary between citizens who were patriotic, public minded, and literate and those who were selfish, unworthy and illiterate” (47) took shape over time as the literacy rate among modern nation states came to be seen as an index of a country’s civilization level. Chapter 1 further explores the creation of new social categories for illiterate individuals, such as “School-Age Children” (學齡兒童) versus “Unschooled Elders” (年長失學), as well as the complexities of institutionalizing schooling and defining literacy, and the contesting perspectives around language reform. Luo concludes her opening chapter by pointing out that despite the many successes and lasting effects of late-Qing reforms that sought to popularize literacy, a major obstacle remained: The positive value and function of reading and writing were socially situated and first needed to be cultivated among illiterate citizens. Only then could the notion that the acquisition of basic reading and writing skills “directly and immediately repositioned a person’s place in daily interactions” emerge (64).
The following chapters essentially explore this very problem—namely, how the GMD and CCP articulated and depicted their respective efforts at mass literacy and to what degree their respective programs succeeded, not necessarily at attaining literacy goals but at infusing any of the various actors involved with a sense of participatory agency or purpose. Chapter 2, entitled “Identity in Morphing: Revolutionaries’ Mass Literacy Programs in 1924-1926,” first looks at GMD-sponsored literacy training programs in Shanghai before pivoting to Guangzhou where the GMD, starting in 1925, increasingly asserted its national leadership aims. By way of these two case studies, Luo illustrates the ways in which “party authorities adjusted their approaches to literacy training in accordance with their positions in local and national polity” (71). The GMD’s Shanghai literacy training program was characterized by appearing deliberately popular and apolitical. Political indoctrination, Luo points out, was not a priority when the CCP and GMD started to collaborate on mass education, and the literacy programs supported by the Nationalist Party Shanghai Executive Committee (SEC) largely modeled themselves or piggy-backed on the popular Mass Education Movement that was rolled out under the auspices of Yan Yangchu 晏陽初 (a.k.a. Y. C. James Yen). The perspective of mass education as a universal value, Luo argues, gave the SEC confidence that sponsoring adult literacy training was the best way to gain broad support for its political agenda. Meanwhile, the GMD’s larger political agenda was advanced “by building personal ties between Nationalist revolutionaries and other participants in literacy training” (75) and by “foster[ing] friendship with the working class,” both of which are examples of the kind of multidimensional relationships Luo identifies as crucial within the context of literacy training. The central party leaders in Guangzhou only began to emphasize political indoctrination through literacy training in September 1926, after the initial victories of the Northern Expedition. While its early endeavors in Guangzhou had been characterized by a localized approach, by focusing on vernacular Cantonese and by targeting a younger population, the GMD from then on increasingly rearticulated its literacy programs toward the entire illiterate population of China, labeled in party documents as “pingmin” (平民), here referring to “the masses without basic skills in reading and writing” (98). Associating pingmin with the lack of literacy, Luo then argues, “helped to define the leadership of the GMD in a national revolution” (98), placing pingmin in an “unidirectional relationship with the GMD, in which the GMD claimed to represent the interests of the pingmin” (99).
This exploration of a deliberate aligning of literacy to the teleology of the nation state continues in chapter 3, entitled “Monopolizing the Brand: Party-States’ Competition over Adult Literacy Education, 1928-1936.” By focusing on the competition between the GMD and CCP in sponsoring mass education during the Nanjing decade, Luo illustrates the different approaches the respective parties took in adopting a distinctive narrative about the importance of literacy. As the GMD consolidated its political control over all of China, the party continued to make use of literacy training and its discourses to legitimize constitutionalism and nation-state building. And while Luo provides plenty of fascinating examples of the various literacy training programs carried out and the practical debates that accompanied them, such as the introduction of the phonetic systems Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) and Sin Wenz (新文字), promoted by the GMD and CCP respectively (108), her main interest lies in the discursive significance of the campaigns. According to Luo, the GMD increasingly understood mass literacy as a mechanism for becoming “responsible citizens in a future constitutional polity” and hence echoed a nation-building/modernization belief in literacy “that projected the literate as enlightened, capable, productive, and patriotic” (111-112). Illiteracy, by contrast, was framed as an impairment and a personal failure that needed to be remedied in order to gain “full-fledged personhood as part of an economically productive, politically engaged, and patriotic citizenry” (ibid). Hence, the state sponsored ambitious large-scale and short-term literacy training programs and attempted to capture their success statistically, although in reality the goal of mass literacy remained elusive. For Luo, the political power of the GMD’s literacy rhetoric often “resided outside the classroom and among the educated, who had already invested in the value of language reform and learning” (107). The resulting interactions among administrators, teachers, and students, according to Luo, nevertheless introduced meaningful “multivalent notions of the self in distinction to others” (111).
The importance the CCP placed on literacy in the Jiangxi soviets in the early 1930s, however, “was construed more in relation to fellow villagers than in membership in an imagined national community” (161). Following the GMD-CCP split in 1927, the CCP’s focus shifted from the urban proletariat to the rural peasantry. Although their early efforts at literacy training at first suffered from a moderate “level of enthusiasm among the masses” and from “the absence of a unified system across the entire soviet” (136), their narrative ultimately worked effectively because “they placed a premium on the act of literacy learning, rather than on the result of being literate” (160). Not only did their literacy primers foreground “occupational based identities—peasant, worker, and landlord” and “focused on teaching numbers and units of measurements” (154), but by reframing illiteracy as a result of class exploitation instead of an impairment, participation in literacy training provided villagers “with a sense of self-empowerment” (161).
The final two chapters, entitled “Beyond Nationalism: Mass Education in Wartime Chongqing, 1937-1945” and “Beyond Class and Nation: Identity in Motion during Literacy Training in Northwestern Shanxi, 1937-1945,” respectively explore ways in which the two parties promoted, carried out, recorded, and portrayed literary education during the years of war against Japan. Although the onset of war elevated the importance of literary training in the GMD-controlled hinterland, especially when tied to patriotic education, Luo observes a lack of cohesive and systematic implementation and a failure to “create the circumstances for novel perspectives of literacy related to the daily lives of less educated people” (180). Instead, considerable resources were mobilized to “turn the teachers into trustworthy agents of the state through teacher training” and to make them champions of patriotism and loyalty to the Nationalist state (182). The GMD hence defined what literacy training meant to administrators and teachers and thus was able to create meaningful multidimensional relations with the literate class, though it ultimately fell short, according to Luo, in devising “a way to align those participatory experiences with the state agenda for training patriotic citizens.” Eager to meet ambitious policy goals, Nationalist administrators and teachers, Luo writes, “interpreted the value of literacy training through enrollment and the composition of class attendees” (194). Since Luo draws her conclusion on the basis of government and teacher records, the question arises whether there might not have been additional intentional or unintentional participatory experiences for students that eluded the record keepers, simply because their record sheets did not ask for them.
In the wake of the outbreak of war with Japan, the CCP’s literacy program in the Northwestern Shanxi Base Area at first embraced a similar approach that sought to cultivate “patriotic citizens determined to fight the Japanese” (198). Yet, when it became clear that “imbuing nationalist consciousness initially failed to produce satisfactory results in the eyes of communist leaders” (200), constant adjustments to their literacy training were undertaken; over time, these adjustments succeeded, according to party records cited by Luo, to produce “attitudinal and behavioral changes in villagers that had been caused by literacy training” (200). These adjustments included changes to curriculum, pedagogy, and learning outcomes, which in turn affected who was qualified to become involved as a teacher and how students reflected on their experience. They also led to villagers actively fostering multiple types of personhood. When, for example, communist leaders in 1940 revised the number of characters required to be mastered down to fifty, it enabled “the most dedicated students to convert their actions [i.e. mastery of these 50 字] into local prestige” (232). The promotion in the literacy curriculum of one particular (party-coined) new social identity—that of “laboring people 勞動群眾”—in 1944 meanwhile made it easier for villagers to relate their own lives to a collective identity than to the national or the class-oriented identities of earlier years (Ibid). Luo stresses that villagers’ increased interest in literacy acquisition “was never simply about becoming modern citizens” but about “redefin[ing] their relationship with fellow community members with whom they interacted on a daily basis” (233).
The book’s greatest strength—namely, its seemingly inexhaustible amount of detail and information regarding the various literacy campaigns, shifting directives, local variations, or unexpected outcomes—at times makes it a little difficult to remain focused on the book’s main premise. However, the wealth of information and Luo’s careful analysis greatly reward the reader by illustrating just how fraught and complex the question of literacy training remained throughout the first part of the twentieth century and beyond. As a scholar of literature, I marvel at Luo’s meticulous evaluation of troves of government data. I also appreciate her comparative approach that not only juxtaposed GMD and CCP literacy training, but also placed China in the context of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation states that embarked on mass literacy movements, such as Meiji Japan and the Soviet Union.
One aspect this reviewer would have liked to see addressed in more detail, especially given that the book is less concerned with actual outcomes and more with the way each party framed its narrative about literacy training, is the way writers and intellectuals of the time responded to the two parties’ endeavors. Although in chapter 1 she mentions late-Qing figures such as Kang Youwei 康有為, Yan Fu 嚴復, and Liang Qichao 梁啟超, and in chapter 2 briefly touches on Hu Shi 胡適 and the May Fourth generation’s paradoxical embrace of both elitism and populism, it might have been insightful to include examples of how later Republican-period writers and intellectuals on either side of the political spectrum who were equally invested in China’s modernization engaged with literary training in their writing. Ye Shengtao 葉聖陶, Mao Dun 茅盾, or Ding Ling 丁玲 are just some of the more well-known figures that come to mind. But maybe this is an area where this rich and well-researched monograph will inspire students and scholars in adjacent fields to continue to advance the interdisciplinary dialogue that Luo so elegantly opens up in her important monograph.
Frederik H. Green
San Francisco State University