2 / History of Chinese Education among the Naxi in Lijiang
The Naxi and Mosuo people (all normally called Mosuo in Chinese literature before 1950 and all classified as Naxi since 1954) are descendants of the nomadic proto-Qiang people. During the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–C.E.221) they migrated southward to northwestern Yunnan from what is now the border region of Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai and probably reached the Lijiang plain later during the Tang dynasty (618–907) (McKhan 1995:54). After Qubilai Khan and his army defeated the kingdom of Dali (the successor of the Nanzhao kingdom, which in 835 had broken all connections with the Chinese empire) in 1253, the different Mosuo chiefdoms also came under central Mongol authority. During the Mongol Yuan dynasty the system of granting official status to local hereditary chiefs (known as tusi) was established. Later, during the Ming dynasty, the tusi family in Lijiang was given the Chinese name Mu, and, to further distinguish themselves from the commoners, the royal Mu family decided that commoners should adopt the family name He. Today the family names Mu and He are still common in Lijiang.
Until the 1950s, when a new road bypassed Lijiang, the town was located on the important trade route between south China and Tibet. Thriving trade—combined with the ruling Naxi Mu lineage’s openness toward Tibetan and especially Chinese craftsmen, artisans, monks, and scholars—helps to explain the Tibetan and Chinese Confucian influence in the area. In the early eighteenth century the Manchus sent armies to Tibet to fight Mongols who were trying to get a foothold in this buffer state between India and China. Lijiang’s strategic situation on the road between China and Tibet was probably one of the reasons why the Qing government in 1723 decided to transfer direct power from the native Mu tusi in Lijiang to its own representatives. This policy of replacing local hereditary chiefs with imperial bureaucrats (known as the system of gaitu guiliu) was part of the Qing policy to expand the empire and fully incorporate frontier regions into the Chinese state. Most Chinese publications on Naxi history and educational history regard the early implementation of gaitu guiliu in 1723 in Lijiang as a major historical reason for the relatively high level of education and so-called “cultural development” of the Naxi today.
The officially classified Naxi minzu (Naxizu) currently consists of 277,750 people.1 This includes the people living in the area of Lugu Lake and the Yongning basin who are called Mosuo or Yongning Naxi in Chinese, and Hli-khin or Na(re) in their own language, and who prefer to distinguish themselves from the Naxi.2 The majority of Naxi live to the west and south of the Jinsha River in the counties of Lijiang, Zhongdian, and Weixi. They call themselves Naxi, also transcribed “Na-khi” by Joseph Rock3 and “Naqxi” in the Naxi Latin script created in the 1950s. My investigation of education and ethnicity among the Naxi is based upon research conducted in Lijiang Naxi Autonomous County (Lijiang Naxizu Zizhi Xian) and through interviews with Naxi living in Kunming, the provincial capital. The Mosuo people of Yongning are not included here, nor do I consider education or ethnicity among Naxi in other counties. The majority of Naxi (192,448 in 1994) live in Lijiang Naxi Autonomous County, which was established in 1961. Today Lijiang County, together with the counties of Ninglang, Yongsheng, and Huaping make up Lijiang Prefecture (Lijiang Diqu). In 1994, 329,160 people lived in Lijiang County. The Naxi make up 58.4 percent of this population, the Han 17.7 percent, the Bai 11.4 percent, the Lisu 7.7 percent, and the Yi 2 percent. More than half of the population in the county (and prefectural) capital of Lijiang Town (or Dayan Zhen) are Naxi. The development of tourism (Chinese, Asian, and Western) in recent years has encouraged locals (not to mention the many incoming people, especially Bai and Han) to establish small businesses. There is very little industry in Lijiang, and the majority of the population is engaged in agriculture (or pastoralism) involving a range of crops grown at different altitudes. People in the highlands above three thousand meters—mostly Nuosu, Lisu, Miao, and Premi (officially classified as Pumi)—often produce only potatoes and turnips, and they are among the poorest inhabitants in Lijiang County.
The language of the Naxi is a Tibeto-Burman language that belongs to the Yi group of the Burman-Yi branch, and Chinese linguists normally distinguish between the Western and the Eastern dialects spoken by Naxi and Mosuo respectively. The Naxi have three written scripts: the most famous is the pictographic dongba script developed and used by Naxi ritual specialists (dongba) for recording rituals and legends. The dongba script has more than six thousand characters, most of which are pictographic symbols.4 The other Naxi script, usually called geba script, is a syllabic phonetic script that was never widely used. Both scripts were used exclusively among dongba, and neither was standardized. The third script is the Naxi Latin script, which Chinese linguists developed in the 1950s in cooperation with Naxi intellectuals. Because ordinary Naxi had never used the dongba script, they were chosen as one of the ten ethnic groups to be given a new script, but the Latin script never gained widespread use.
In Chinese descriptions the Naxi are commonly praised for their supposedly pragmatic attitude toward religion, which allows the coexistence of Daoism (Taoism), Chinese and Tibetan forms of Buddhism, and shamanistic and dongba rituals. The Naxi dongba were not organized in temples or monasteries, and usually they transmitted their ritual knowledge from father to son. Most dongba were farmers who practiced as ritual specialists in connection with events such as death and marriage and who made ritual sacrifices to heaven. The influence of the dongba rituals had already declined considerably in the 1940s, when Joseph Rock had difficulty finding practicing dongba. After 1949 the rituals were banned, and today only a few practicing dongba remain. About four hundred years after the Ming rulers complimented the Naxi Mu family for adapting to Confucian values, a publication based on the Chinese government’s large-scale fieldwork in the 1950s also concluded that the Naxi were an especially open-minded minzu interested in learning from “more advanced” groups:
It is characteristic that the Naxi of Lijiang County do not close themselves off to outsiders, do not blindly oppose everything foreign, and do not stick to their old ways. They actively try to make progress and are good at studying. Although the Lijiang Naxi have their own traditional culture, they are extremely eager to learn from other minzu’s advanced cultures. They are especially energetic in studying the Han people’s culture. (LNZG: 33)
Until the 1950s Chinese school education existed simultaneously with different forms of religious education among the Naxi in Lijiang. The dongba transmitted their knowledge of rituals through their own script (usually to one son), but never as formalized or institutionalized education. We still lack thorough knowledge of the influence of Tibetan culture and education in Lijiang.5 What kind of education took place in Buddhist monasteries in different periods? How widespread, or limited, was knowledge of Tibetan script and texts (of which the Mu lineage possessed a large collection)? These subjects lie outside the scope of this book, which concerns only institutionalized Chinese school education.
CONFUCIAN SCHOOLS
Chinese publications about education among the Naxi often accentuate the early establishment of Confucian education in Lijiang as a decisive explanation of the relatively high number of educated Naxi today.6 It is hardly possible to determine exactly how relevant and important the history of Confucian education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Lijiang is to the educational situation today. Certainly Han influence on the Lijiang plain increased during the Qing dynasty, and in addition to the sons of the Mu family, an increasing number of Naxi received education in charitable schools (yixue) or private Confucian schools (sishu). Only a few Naxi in the Lijiang area were educated in the three academies for classical learning (shuyuan).
According to historical records from Yunnan, private Confucian schools were already established in Lijiang Prefecture during the Yuan (1271–1368) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties.7 During the Ming, the local Naxi Mu chiefs expanded their contacts with imperial China and established Confucian private schools that were exclusively used for teaching male members of the Mu lineage. The Mu tusi owned a library containing Confucian classics and a large number of Tibetan books, and the Mu lineage invited Han scholars from China’s cultural center to come to Lijiang as teachers, painters, medical workers, and mining experts. Their private Confucian education was organized in family schools (zuxue), where a clan or lineage hired a teacher to tutor a very small class of boys from the same clan. These schools received no economic support or recognition from the government and had no regulations to follow concerning the content and form of education.8
Yang Qichang regards the early establishment by the Mu family of private Confucian education as the beginning of a long tradition of Han “advanced” (xianjin) influence on the Naxi and, more importantly, as a demonstration of how willing the Naxi have always been to learn from “more advanced cultures” (Yang Qichang 1987: 29). This view is very common among both Han and Naxi scholars in China writing Naxi history. It expresses a deep-rooted belief in the civilizing effect of Confucian education while establishing “Han culture” (Hanzu de wenhua) as the most developed and civilized form of culture in China. As early as the Ming dynasty, the members of the Mu lineage were praised in a chronicle for their ability to study and absorb Confucian ethics: “Of all hereditary chiefs in Yunnan, those from the Lijiang Mu lineage are the foremost in knowledge of The Book of Odes [Shi jing] and The Canon of History [Shi shu] and in observation of rites and ceremonies” (quoted in Zhang Daqun 1988c: 78). During the Ming it also became common practice for each tusi family in Yunnan to send one son to the Imperial Academy (Guozijian). In 1404 there were twenty-eight sons of Yunnan tusi studying and living in Beijing, the imperial capital (YMJFG 1992: 43).
In the year 1700 a Han scholar from Shandong (who claimed to be one of Confucius’s descendants) was sent to Lijiang Prefecture as a vice-magistrate. He started Lijiang Prefectural School (Lijiang Fuxue) while forcing the Mu tusi to “voluntarily” pay for the establishment of a charitable school (Yang Qichang 1987:29). Yang Qichang emphasizes this event as the first break in the Mu monopoly on Confucian education. According to all Chinese sources, it was, however, the introduction of the system of gaitu guiliu in Lijiang in 1723 that increased the number of Confucian schools and facilitated the spread (although still very limited) of knowledge of the Confucian classics and Chinese characters. More generally, the local hereditary chiefs’ loss of official power to Qing bureaucrats is believed to have had a positive effect on the development of education and the cultural level (wenhua shuiping) of the Naxi. Gaitu guiliu is praised for having contributed directly to the modern project of creating a Chinese state encompassing territories along the periphery of the empire and for facilitating successful “unification of the nationalities.”9
The newly appointed Qing officials gradually took measures to establish charitable schools and promote the training of teachers for them. Dismissal of local hereditary chiefs was commonly followed by establishment of a prefectural school where natives could participate in Confucian education together with Han students.10 Guan Xuexuan, an official and scholar from Jiangxi, was especially influential in expanding Confucian education in Lijiang. During the first years of the Qianlong period (1736–95) he established education of teachers for charitable schools in Lijiang Prefecture’s three academies (in Xueshan, Yuhe, and Tianji) and secured economic support for teachers’ salaries. Within a few years he had initiated seventeen charitable schools in Lijiang. Furthermore, he issued a decree warning officials that they would be punished if they did not send their sons to Chinese schools and see to it that commoners did the same (Yang Qichang 1987: 29).
Due to the shortage of schools and lack of central political control, this kind of edict was hardly possible to enforce, as Yang points out (Yang Qichang 1987: 29–30). After the hereditary chiefs lost their monopoly on political control, participation in Confucian education and local exams became increasingly relevant for upward social mobility at the local level, and the respect for Confucian education that was common among the Han (even when it did not lead to higher positions in society) seems to have been gradually taken over by the local Naxi elite. The Mu family, who were already familiar with Confucian learning and who dressed, married, and buried their dead in accordance with Han custom, became increasingly concerned with their male offspring’s level of Confucian education. Most sent their sons to private Confucian schools, which remained the most important centers for elementary Confucian learning in Lijiang until the twentieth century.
The new charitable schools constituted the first attempt to include commoners in Lijiang in the world of Confucian learning, but, as in the rest of empire at the time, participation was most likely extremely low. There were still very few schools, and it would have been difficult for the educators to reach the majority of Naxi peasants in the eighteenth century and convince them that their sons needed knowledge of Chinese characters and Confucian ethics. Furthermore, local bureaucrats and officials were not necessarily very enthusiastic or dedicated in their attempts to spread education to commoners. Between the time of gaitu guiliu in 1723 and the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, seven people from Lijiang passed the highest imperial examination, the jinshi; more than sixty took the degree of juren by passing the provincial examination; and more than 140 passed the preliminary examinations.11
One of the most well-known Qing advocates of charitable schools was Chen Hongmou, who initiated seven hundred in Yunnan alone between 1733 and 1737 in order to provide education in rural and peripheral areas (YMJFG 1992: 46). In Lijiang Prefecture there were twenty-two charitable schools in 1736 and thirty-one in 1895 (CLNAC 1995:5). They were funded by renting out land owned by the schools, and although the schools in principle were free, students provided economic support for the teachers. The basic aim of the education itself was, in William Rowe’s words, to “bring about the understanding of moral principles through familiarization with Chinese characters” (Rowe 1994: 435). Literacy was promoted first of all for its presumed capacity to transform culture rather than for its practical values. The basic primer in the curriculum designed by Chen Hongmou himself for charitable schools was Elementary Learning (Xiao xue) by the Song Neo-Confucianist Zhu Xi. However, in Lijiang the charitable-school students apparently studied the same primers as students in the private Confucian schools, namely The Trimetrical Classic (Sanzijing), The Hundred Family Names (Baijiaxing), and The Thousand Character Text (Qianziwen) for beginners. These were the most common primers in elementary education all over China from the thirteenth to the twentieth century; for their basic education, children were expected to memorize the approximately two thousand characters in these primers (Woodside and Elman 1994: 553).12
The most common form of basic Confucian education in Lijiang was conducted in private Confucian schools, most of which were found among the Naxi in the town of Lijiang and the surrounding villages. I have not heard of private Confucian schools among other ethnic groups in Lijiang, and to my knowledge all sishu teachers in Lijiang were Naxi. These schools were normally started by a prestigious, and often poor, learned local in his own home or in a local temple. Although private Confucian education generally was weakened during the Republican period (1911–49), at least four or five sishu in Lijiang Town continued into the early 1950s. In the town of Lijiang only one former sishu teacher (a Naxi) is still alive. He is now ninety years old and recalled,
I started as a teacher when I was twenty-four [in 1929]. I started a sishu in our own house, where my father had also taught. I had many students, perhaps eighty, but after six years the headmaster of the public primary school in Lijiang asked me to become a teacher there instead. Then I closed down my sishu and the students went elsewhere to study. It was easier to be a teacher in a public school. I had to teach fewer hours and taught fewer students in a day.
In Teacher Yang’s sishu, students were boys between the ages of ten and twenty, and he usually had between fifty and seventy students at a time. They learned the reading primers by heart and recited them in class. Some studied for less than a year, whereas others continued as long as ten years. According to my interviews, all sishu teachers were local Naxi scholars who used Naxi language when explaining things to their students, and recited texts in the local Chinese dialect (mostly called “Hanhua” by interviewees). There were no courses in mathematics or other nonliterary subjects. However, Teacher Yang recalls how he, on his own initiative, started to teach texts written in the modern vernacular written language (baihua) in addition to the common primers and classics. During the Republican period, with the increase in public schools, it became harder to make a living as a sishu teacher. Teacher Yang had the advantage of having learned classical Chinese as well as vernacular in a public school, and therefore his school became very popular.
A sixty-nine-year-old Naxi retired teacher, who was a student in two different sishu in the 1930s, recalled,
After two years [in 1935], my parents moved me to Teacher Yang’s sishu because Teacher Yang taught the “new learning” [xin xue]. They thought it was useful. There were between fifty and sixty students, and we learned vernacular as well as classical Chinese [guwen]. On the top floor those at the highest level studied classical Chinese. Downstairs we studied the new books: “Man, a man, a man sings. . . .” All students were boys, and the wages for the teacher came from fixed presents we had to give at festivals. When we gave the presents we had to bow [koutou] to the teacher and his wife. Afterwards we always got something to eat. For the Dragon Boat Festival [Duanwujie] we had to give two silver yuan. It was really a lot of money—just imagine, you could buy four chickens for that kind of money.
Even though we lack exact information about the number of schools functioning in different periods during Qing, as well as the number of students and teachers, there is no doubt that Confucian education was well represented in Lijiang compared to most other non-Han areas of Yunnan (the Bai region of Dali, bordering Lijiang Prefecture, being one exception). However, Alexander Woodside reminds us that the number of schools, as reported in local gazetteers, is not necessarily a useful parameter for measuring the influence of Confucian education: most charitable schools existed only for a short time, they often lacked funds, and, although they often were free, most parents had no incentive to send their children there. In addition, many Qing officials were against the spread of education to lower strata of society, fearing that literacy might produce local status ambitions and shake the legitimacy of the bureaucratic class (Woodside 1992: 30). Local support for the schools was in no way comparable, for example, to that for Islamic or Buddhist schools in surroundings where they were part of a local, traditional, religious pattern. The education of boys in the Buddhist monasteries of Sipsong Panna is one example of religiously founded education with great popular support.
Through my interviews in Lijiang, I tried to obtain an impression of how widespread Confucian education was before 1949 and, in particular, what status Confucian education had among the Naxi. Not surprisingly, the differences between the town of Lijiang and the rest of Lijiang County were immense. In the countryside, peasants were not very motivated to send their children to school. Still, the Naxi peasants living on the Lijiang plain had several yixue and sishu, unlike other minorities such as Lisu, Nuosu, Tuo’en, Miao, and Premi, who lived higher up in the mountains. According to interviews with older Naxi from the town of Lijiang and the countryside, Chinese Confucian education had a high status among the Naxi. Although most people did not send their children to school, either because it was too expensive or because they simply preferred that their sons work at home, the families who did have a son attending a Confucian school were highly esteemed by the other villagers. Of course, this was especially so in the town of Lijiang, where the influence of Han language and Confucian culture was most pervasive. One retired Naxi headmaster, who had himself been to public middle school while attending a sishu in the evenings and on holidays, told about the status of Confucian education among the Naxi in the town of Lijiang:
Oh, it was really a burden for a family to have a son in school. But the Naxi wanted at least one son to go to school, even if the family was poor. When a Naxi couple got a boy, the mother would carry him on her back when he was one month old, to go to the market square [in Lijiang Town] to buy him a book, a pen, and some ink. This was kept until the child was old enough to start in school. It was an expression of the parents’ hope that their son would study.
Almost all of my Naxi interviewees above the age of sixty-five agreed that when they were young, it was prestigious to participate in Confucian education. Many recalled their parents’ and grandparents’ respect for local Confucian scholars. At the same time, since most of them came from families with a tradition of sending at least one son to school, it is possible that they exaggerated the commoners’ respect for Confucian schools and students—an exaggeration that might have been further reinforced by the tendency of Naxi today to present “love of learning” (ai xuexi) as a significant Naxi characteristic.
The relatively few Naxi who underwent Confucian education were familiarized with Confucian family virtues, which were based upon strictly hierarchic patriarchal power, and they received instruction in rituals concerning burial, weddings, ancestor worship, and so forth. Their instructors were teachers who were themselves scholarly trained Naxi enjoying prestige among the formerly royal Mu family and who were respected by the Han imperial representatives in Lijiang. It is impossible today to determine the precise influence that Confucian education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had on the Naxi and on their relationship to the Han. Even though such education probably played an important role in spreading Confucian values concerning burial, filial piety, and ancestor worship, it is clear that the Naxi also continued to worship their own spirits, speak their own language, and support their dongba. However, to the Naxi in the town of Lijiang in particular, and to a much lesser degree in the remoter parts of Lijiang, Confucian education gradually became synonymous with prestigious learning, even when it did not (as in most cases) provide any political or economic power.
THE FIRST MODERN SCHOOLS
Education in the frontier regions of the Qing empire came into focus in the early twentieth century when the government tried to strengthen its control in response to various uprisings and to British attempts to expand into Yunnan and Tibet through Burma and India. In Yunnan, where at least one third of the population was estimated to be non-Han, the Bureau of Education in Border Regions, the first such administrative unit ever, was set up in 1909 (Liu Guangzhi 1993: 68). One of the purposes of this department was to promote new schools in the border regions of Yunnan in order to facilitate integration of these areas into the empire, and therefore 128 new, free “native simple literacy schools” were established there by the end of the Qing dynasty.
Lijiang Prefecture had no such schools, probably because they were considered unnecessary: first, Lijiang did not border the most politically sensitive areas of British Burma, and second, Chinese education was already relatively well-developed in Lijiang.13 After the founding of the Republic, between 1912 and 1915, the government quickly changed the “native simple literacy schools” into normal lower elementary schools. Generally, the late and weakening Qing empire left the task of promoting education on the periphery of Yunnan to local administrators and educators. Therefore local development of Chinese education depended upon local elites to create non-Confucian Chinese schools. In Lijiang such an elite existed, and the course of educational development, including the problems during the late Qing, resembled to a large extent the situation in many Han areas.
All Chinese sources agree that the real break with traditional Confucian education in Lijiang followed the reforms of 1903 and the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905. At this time the three former academies in Lijiang Prefecture were changed into primary and higher primary schools (xiaoxuetang), and many charitable schools became lower primary schools. However, only more thorough research will reveal to what degree these transformations were of content and form as well as name. We know that the former Xueshan Academy changed in 1905 into Xueshan Primary School. The teachers stayed, and by 1907 the school had eighty-six boy students and six teachers who had received additional training in modern subjects such as history, geography, and drawing (CLNAC 1995: 6). In 1907 the local government also started the first two lower primary schools for girls (nüzi chu xiaoxuetang) and twenty village primary schools offering five years of study. Some of the schools were started in Buddhist lamaseries (Fuguo, Zhiyun, and Wenfeng temples) with the lamas as students.
From 1905 the government decided that each prefecture should set up a middle school, but due to problems of finance this was impossible in many poor minority areas. However, in Lijiang Town the prefecture’s first middle school, Lijiang Prefecture Middle School (Lijiang Fu Zhongxuetang) was started in 1905 under the Han magistrate Peng Jizhi from Hunan, in cooperation with He Gengji, a Naxi who had passed a high imperial civil service examination and became the first head of the school. Money for opening the new school came from fines, mainly imposed on the lamas from Dongzhulin Lamasery (near Weixi) after they had instigated a riot in 1903 against a nearby Catholic missionary station.14 Tax revenues from a new annual horse and mule market provided the income for continuing expenses of the school. The size of the middle school at this time was small compared to the vast area it covered. In the beginning the school had two classes: a middle school class for male students recruited from counties throughout the prefecture15 (five years of study) and a class for primary school teachers (four years of study). Most of the students were sons of Han officials, leading merchant families, and officials from the Naxi royal Mu family. The objective of the school was to provide a regular secondary education based on Chinese and Western knowledge—an education that would enable the most qualified to continue studies in higher education and the rest to fill jobs as teachers, local administrators, and so forth (Li Shizong 1988: 65). Curriculum was arranged according to national regulations, including a vocational course in mining technique and courses in psychology and education for the primary school teachers. There were no special courses on the Chinese classics, or on composition of the traditional eight-part essays so crucial in the former civil-service examinations. Thus, the curriculum was profoundly different from that of the Confucian academies. Teachers and administrators connected to the school actively promoted modern and national ideas. In 1907 some of them started the first newspaper in Yunnan published in the vernacular language, which reformers promoted as essential for the emergence of a population with modern scientific knowledge. The new Lijiang Vernacular Newspaper (Lijiang baihua bao) contained articles about reform, science, and national policy.
In conjunction with Lijiang’s first middle school, the government also started Lijiang Prefecture Higher Primary School (Lijiang Fu Gaodeng Xiaoxuetang). According to He Rugong, only a few “enlightened” (kaiming) parents from the township of Lijiang sent their sons to this school voluntarily. He Rugong recalls the period after the school was started, when the government required that rural districts send a few boys to the school according to the number of families. The local population strongly resisted this regulation, fearing that children at the school would be “pulled away by the Han” (He Rugong 1988: 97). Furthermore, many Naxi regarded it as most improper and indecent that children in the school would sit while the teacher was standing. To make the school more attractive, the administration decided to provide pupils with three free meals a day and a set of clothes for each season.
The local Naxi’s reactions to the modern schools were similar to those of many Han in rural areas, who also were not easily convinced of the utility of modern learning and continued to prefer the well-established sishu.16 Still, it is somewhat surprising that Naxi in Lijiang expressed fear that their sons would be absorbed by the Han in the higher primary school when they were already used to education based on Chinese language, Chinese classics, and Confucian ethics. One major reason for the objection may have been that villagers for the first time were compelled to send boys to the school. Furthermore, the Confucian schools at this time were apparently to a large degree considered to be “the Naxi people’s own schools,” where high-status knowledge was transmitted by highly respected local Naxi teachers who instructed in Naxi and recited primers and Chinese classics in the local Chinese dialect. In the newly established modern-style schools, many teachers were Han from outside, all lessons were taught in Chinese, and some of the subjects taught were incomprehensible to most of the population.
While modern schools slowly gained ground in Lijiang, sishu education continued to play a role until the 1950s, as in many Han areas. While gradually (especially since the Republic) more and more pupils began attending public schools, many (especially those of learned families) continued to attend a sishu in the evenings and on holidays. One former student from a sishu recalled being moved by his parents to a public school because his uncle was a teacher there: “The other pupils stayed in the sishu. Many people still thought that the only real scholarship [xuewei] was classical studies. The ‘new learning’ was not really considered worth anything.” Before the Republican period, institutionalized education still reached only a small part of the multiethnic population of Lijiang Prefecture. In spite of the decrees ordering that charitable schools be replaced by modern-style elementary schools, many schools were unable to modernize; teachers were not trained and funds were scarce. The local population was either not motivated to release sons from duties at home (there was no question of girls attending school) or preferred the familiar and highly valued schools for classical learning. Since statistics concerning population and school enrollment in this period are uncertain, it is impossible to determine the percentage of school-aged boys who attended school. A rough estimate, based upon population statistics from 1911 and the recorded number of pupils in primary schools, is that approximately one-third of school-aged boys attended school. Considering that the majority of pupils were in Lijiang Town and only a small minority in the surrounding rural areas, this figure is rather high. I conclude that by the end of the Qing dynasty, Lijiang already resembled many Han areas with respect to the number of schools and students. However, since many boys attended school for only a short period of time, this does not necessarily indicate a high level of literacy.17
Christian missionary schools have been described as the first modern schools in China (e.g., Cleverley 1991). There were quite a few of these in Yunnan, but they were never very important among the Naxi in Lijiang (or among the Tai in Sipsong Panna).18 Missionaries had stations in Lijiang Prefecture, but according to Peter Goullart, they did not play a major role among the Naxi. Goullart met a missionary couple in the early 1930s who considered the Naxi (and Tibetans) to be a hindrance to their missionary efforts. Most of their converts were Lisu, but in Lijiang Town they were mostly Han from Sichuan (Goullart 1955: 81). There was a missionary primary school (run primarily by Dutch missionaries) in Lijiang Town during the 1930s and 1940s. I met only one Naxi who had attended this school as a child. He remembered how all students (mainly Bai and Naxi) were taught exclusively in English according to The Goldfinch Story Book and that several of the pupils studied in the local sishu during holidays.
REPUBLICAN EDUCATION: THE NATIONAL MESSAGE AND THE CONCERN FOR EDUCATION IN BORDER REGIONS
By the twentieth century the Naxi had adopted Confucian education as part of their own culture and daily life. Educational change in Lijiang had largely followed the changes in the more central parts of the Chinese empire and, later, the Republic, and locally was the result of interventions by Naxi (rather than Han) intellectuals, scholars, and bureaucrats. Confucian schools became the focus of attention for parents who wanted (and could afford) an education for one or several sons. Thus, the Naxi accepted to a large extent that education was equivalent to the study of Confucian texts in Chinese and training in Confucian morality, behavior, and rituals. This may explain why it was relatively easy for the Naxi to later accept the dominance of new forms of education based on Chinese language, history, and culture.
Primary and Secondary Schools in Lijiang
The keypoint secondary school in Lijiang today, Lijiang Prefecture Secondary School (Lijiang Diqu Zhongxue), traces its history back to 1905, when it was started as the first secondary school in Lijiang Prefecture.19 This school underwent tumultuous changes, especially during the Republic, and was at times divided into several schools. Although changes of administration, funding, and name occurred, these did not necessarily influence curriculum. A new teacher education program, initially financed by the provincial government, was started in Lijiang in 1913 to train primary school teachers for all counties formerly under Lijiang Prefecture. The program taught two classes of students: one for five years (as recommended in the 1912 education plan) and one for six years.20 As Li Shizong points out, graduates from this school could hardly fill all of the teaching positions in the primary schools within the immense area of the former Lijiang Prefecture. Consequently, despite this central teacher education, teaching in many countryside primary schools continued to be based on memorizing Confucian texts (Li Shizong 1988: 65). Therefore, the government added a special one-year teachers training course, to which all the counties were expected to send graduates from higher primary schools. Since the provincial government financed the new teachers school, county governments decided to use their surplus revenues for new primary schools in the major townships in Lijiang and for a new boarding school: the Cooperative Secondary School of the Six Counties Lijiang, Heqing, Jianchuan, Zhongdian, Weixi, and Lanping (Liu Xian Lianhe Zhongxue), which replaced Lijiang Prefecture Secondary School. As the name suggests, the secondary school covered a huge area, and although for a time it coexisted with teacher education, short-lived vocational education, and another secondary school established in 1917, education beyond primary school level was still rare in Lijiang during the Republican period.
In its beginning, the Cooperative Secondary School was connected to the teachers school in Lijiang, and, resources being scarce, the school offered only one four-year class in secondary school education. The head of the school was educated in Japan, and the curriculum followed the national plan emphasizing military exercise. All students paid a school fee, and most in the secondary school still were from relatively wealthy merchant or government families. The age of the students was quite high, between fifteen and twenty-six, comparable to that of some of the teachers (Yang Shangzhi 1988: 80; Liang Jiaji 1988: 83).
He Rugong was one of the few Naxi who attended the Cooperative Secondary School. From his descriptions we learn that students and parents primarily regarded the secondary school as a step (an expensive one) toward a prestigious—but, for most, unattainable—university degree: “[Students] thought that it was more difficult to attend a higher school than to reach the sky, and if you could not go to a university, what would then be the use of learning English, mathematics, physics, and chemistry?” (He Rugong 1988: 100). Regulations of school life and behavior at the Cooperative Secondary School were to a large degree modeled on Japanese and European conventions. This was a result of the education and experiences of the people involved in developing education in Lijiang rather than of any firm control by the central government.21 Reflecting the Japanese educational system, all students participated in military exercises, each with a rusty rifle (most of which were defective, as He dryly remarks). He Rugong recalls that the school had fixed rules about how and where to place everything: blankets had to be folded “like pieces of doufu [bean curd],” dormitories were inspected every day, traditional long fingernails were not allowed, and students were not to leave the school (He Rugong 1988: 99). In his matter-of-fact style, He also describes how all students were obliged to speak Chinese and were fined for each sentence spoken in Naxi or Bai.22
The Cooperative Secondary School functioned until 1925, when administrative changes put a stop to the funding of the school by revenues from the local mule and horse market. Fighting between warlords in Yunnan also resulted in increased military expenditures, causing many schools to close down. The last class of the Cooperative Secondary School managed to graduate on private funds before the school finally closed in 1926 and transferred all of its equipment to the Third Secondary School of Yunnan Province (Yunnan Sheng Li Di San Zhongxue).23 In the beginning, the Third Secondary School enrolled one new class a year in a four-year course. A national education conference held in Kunming in 1922 decided to change the four-year secondary school system to three years of junior and three years of senior secondary school, and in 1931 the school added senior secondary school education (Li Shizong 1988: 70).
Funding of secondary school education in Lijiang was unstable due to tumultuous political and military conditions. After a complete stop of provincial financial support for the school in 1928, mainly due to the fighting among warlords, the provincial education department decided in 1929 to spend revenues from tobacco tax on education. Between 1931 and 1940 the government ensured a separate and fixed budget for education relying on the tobacco tax revenues (YMJFG 1992: 8). The Third Secondary School in Lijiang benefited from this, as did other provincial schools, when general investment in education rose. This situation changed again when tobacco tax revenues were transferred to the budget of the central government. From that time on, Yunnan relied on support from the central government for education. Several provincial secondary and primary schools were closed or transferred to the county level, and special economic support for students from border areas was canceled (YMJFG 1992:13). Furthermore, runaway inflation, bombing in the Yunnan-Vietnam and Yunnan-Burma border areas after the Japanese occupation of Vietnam in 1940, and the invasion of Yunnan in 1942 caused most schools in these areas to close down.24
Before that happened, the central government had established three state-run teachers schools (guo li shifan xuexiao) in Yunnan—in Zhaotong in 1939, Dali in 1941, and Lijiang in 1942. These schools recruited mainly minority students, and graduates were distributed as teachers in Yunnan, Sichuan, (the former province of) Xikang, and Guizhou border areas. A new County Secondary School (Xian Li Zhongxue) had been started in Lijiang in the late 1930s, as well as special adult classes and higher primary classes in several districts. Moreover, the central government financed elementary schools in the lower administrative units of bao (Yang Qichang 1987: 31).
During the 1920s the ideas of the May Fourth Movement on modern science and democracy increasingly influenced the secondary school in Lijiang. Though Lijiang was quite isolated from central China, several newly recruited teachers were Naxi who had studied in Beijing and participated in the May Fourth Movement.25 These young teachers advocated exclusive use of the vernacular in school, introduced students to modern Chinese writers, and encouraged some of them to start a study group on modern literature, the New Lijiang Study Society (Xin Lijiang Dushu Hui).26 The Society explicitly aimed at spreading modern literature and science in the border regions of Yunnan, and the young members (mostly Naxi) painted, wrote, and gave theatre performances in the schools in Lijiang Town (Li Shizong 1988: 69).
After the news of the Japanese invasion of northeast China reached Lijiang in 1931, military exercise and patriotic education of students were given even higher priority: teachers supported students who wished to go to the front, military training was intensified, traditional Naxi and Bai songs were rewritten into anti-Japanese songs, and students were organized to perform anti-Japanese plays in villages and at the mule and horse market (Li Shizong 1988: 71). According to Li Shizong, this period was the zenith in the early history of the secondary school, partly due to the teachers’ and students’ common interest in uniting against an intruding enemy. Li also points to the high educational level of the staff, which included several Han scholars invited from other provinces. Considering its geographic siting in a non-Han area, the school had a high number of qualified graduates when in 1941 twenty students out of thirty managed to pass the examination for higher education, with two even allowed into a preparatory class for students going abroad (Li Shizong 1988: 73). Li gives special credit to the strict discipline of the school for its scholarly success. His comments, together with a few former students’ accounts and memories of the school, illustrate how discipline was enforced: every evening the names of all the students were called out so that instructors could comment on each student’s performance, and corporal punishment in the form of thrashing or whipping was liberally inflicted. In 1936 the school had introduced a new uniform fit not only for studying but for working in the fields or raising pigs as well. The short jacket and trousers reflected the ideology of an education significantly different from the traditional Confucian one—an education that ideally would produce citizens capable of transferring their scholarly knowledge into a productive society.
During the Republic the number of schools and students in Lijiang increased steadily. Although written sources tell us very little about how primary schools in Lijiang changed during this period, many older Naxi have memories of their time in the “citizen schools” (guomin xuexiao).27 At the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the county reported thirty-seven primary schools in Lijiang with more than a thousand students. In 1937 this figure had increased to 230 schools (CLNAC 1995: 6 and 10). Most of these were lower primary schools spread throughout the villages on the plateaus, and there were few schools and students among the peoples living in the mountains. As mentioned before, figures suggest that school enrollment at the beginning of the Republic was at least as high as in many Han counties. Very few girls attended school in Lijiang at this time. In 1923 the government once again emphasized that four years of primary school education should be compulsory. However, there was no basis in Lijiang for accomplishing this, and all older interviewees (and written sources) agreed that primary school attendance was still limited, not the least because extremely few girls ever started school. When male interviewees were asked about school enrollment in their village at the time when they themselves went to school, most replied that almost all children attended school for a few years. However, when asked if this included girls, the answer was always that no or very few girls went to school. It seems that the only reason for a couple to send a daughter to school was a lack of sons: “Almost all children went to school . . . except the girls, of course. There were two in my class. Parents considered the boys most important, and they sent the girls out to marry quite early. Only a family without sons would consider sending a daughter to school” (Naxi man, about sixty years old). The national education plan of 1912 had for the first time permitted coeducation of boys and girls in lower primary schools, while requiring the establishment of middle, vocational, and teachers schools for girls.28 In 1913 the Lijiang government started the first elementary schools for girls, together with a special girls’ class at the teachers school. Still, very few girls had the chance to attend these classes. Education among my female interviewees in Lijiang above the age of fifty-five was limited to a few who had attended short courses for eradicating illiteracy during the Republic or after 1949.
Most public primary schools possessed land that provided an income for the normal annual expenses, and in the countryside most parents gave presents to the teacher in lieu of wages. It was an economic burden to have a son at school, because parents had to pay while losing manpower in the fields. Moreover, because few pupils could continue on to higher primary school, not to mention secondary school, many parents considered education a waste of money. From 1914 onward the government outlined the curriculum in primary schools in Lijiang, and by 1931 standardized teaching materials had been published.29 However, since most people in Lijiang were poor, students could often not afford books. The economic burden was one reason why private schools continued to exist in Lijiang as well as in Han areas all over China: they were more flexible with regard to length and time of study, and they offered a possibility of continued studies for those who had not passed the public examination. The sishu also offered supplementary education since public school teachers seldom taught the classical Chinese texts, although they had received some classical training (CLNAC 1995: 19).
In 1930, following the regulations laid down by the provincial government, the Lijiang Bureau of Education again tried to promote four years of compulsory education and order all primary schools to start a “common people’s school” (minzhong xuexiao) for adult illiterates (CLNAC 1995: 40). All illiterates between sixteen and forty years of age were obliged to study from half an hour to two hours a day for at least six months. The most important subjects, apart from Chinese language, were mathematics and the study of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People for the salvation and unity of the Chinese nation: nationalism, democracy, and livelihood. Many people apparently participated in the literacy classes, but how much they actually learned (and remembered) is uncertain. In one Naxi village twelve kilometers from Lijiang Town, in 1934 the people started a common people’s evening school where adults learned to read and write Chinese; some older villagers today proudly claim that their village has had no illiterates ever since. However, many older Naxi, particularly women, told me that although they had attended evening schools, they had quickly forgotten to read and write, simply because they never used these skills in daily life.
Generally speaking, school education in Lijiang was not very stable during the Republic. Many schools temporarily closed down or existed for only a short period. During the war of resistance against Japan, the government had less money to spend on education, and, due to the lack of grain, schools were no longer free to rent out land. After the defeat of Japan in 1945, the government suggested a new three-year plan for developing border area education, and a short-lived attempt was made to restart former provincial schools in border areas. However, some estimated 1945 statistics, based on Yunnan archives, indicate the continued limitation of Republican Chinese education in these areas. Lijiang’s estimated school attendance of 73 percent was higher than the provincial average (YMJFG 1992: 52), as compared to 1940, with 60 percent attendance in Lijiang (CLNAC 1995: 11). Both figures seem exaggerated, especially considering the low school participation of girls and the fact that school attendance for children in all of China in 1949 has been estimated at 25 percent (Cleverley 1991: 69). As for the number of Naxi students and literates, Peter Goullart reported that during the 1940s, although most Naxi in Lijiang Town spoke a bit of Chinese, he and his staff had problems finding assistants who could write Chinese. Goullart was puzzled that some teachers who were highly esteemed in the secondary school, as well as many local government officials and secretaries, could write only reports and letters “hardly worthy of comparison with a Chinese schoolboy’s essays” (Goullart 1955: 23). According to a 1931 census from Lijiang, 3.6 percent of the male population and 0.2 percent of the female population in Lijiang County were literate (Rock 1947: 173).
Nationalist/Assimilationist Education
In 1913, following the Central Education Conference in 1912, the Lijiang government instructed teachers to teach exclusively in the “national language” (Mandarin;guoyu) and to try to reform and change the use of local languages. However, interviews show that this policy was often circumvented. Most interviewees who had been students in primary schools during the Republic recalled that teachers taught mostly in Naxi or at least used Naxi for explanations. Thanks to the education of local primary school teachers since the late Qing and the fact that many local teachers in Confucian schools had received extra training before their transfer into modern schools, most teachers in lower primary schools in the Republican period were Naxi.
Most interviewees remembered teachers instructing in Naxi during at least the first four years of primary school. However, the few Naxi who continued into higher primary school recalled being fined for speaking Naxi in class. In 1922 Lijiang’s three first full primary schools were started, one of them in the village of Baisha. By the mid-1940s this school had grown to seventeen teachers and more than three hundred pupils. Students came from twelve nearby villages to the higher primary school. A former student estimated that about one-third of the graduates from his village school continued on to this higher primary school. Although all of the pupils and teachers were Naxi, only the Chinese language was allowed in school: “From fifth grade on we were taught only in the national language. We called Chinese [Hanyu] the ‘national language’ [guoyu] at that time. The teachers asked questions in Chinese, and if you answered in Naxi, or if the teacher just heard you speaking Naxi in the school, he would fine you. You would have to pay five fen.” Former students from Yunnan Provincial Lijiang Secondary School during the 1930s and 1940s also recalled how all personal conversation among students (as well as in class) had to be conducted in Chinese. Yang Shangzhi remembered a sign hanging in the dormitory when he started as a fifteen-year-old student in 1930 saying, “Native language forbidden” (Jinzhi tuyu) (Yang Shangzhi 1988: 80). Zhao Lu, one of the few Bai students in Lijiang Secondary School, also recalled how students were punished for speaking Naxi. In principle the Bai were not allowed to speak their own language either, but since there were so few of them, two students were permitted to speak Bai together (Zhao Lu 1988: 90). Other rules clearly displayed the intention of erasing cultural and linguistic differences among the students while forcing assimilation with the Han. Li Ruoyu reported that in his own time as a student, the various ethnic groups at the school were instructed to dismantle previous prejudices against one another and live harmoniously together (Li Ruoyu 1988). Apart from insisting that students speak the language of the Han, the rule of the “three sames” (san tong) demanded that students “eat the same, live in the same way, and study the same.” What to eat, how to live, and what to study were taken for granted in a context where modern education and way of life were seen as the property of a civilizing center represented by the Han race. By means of a proper education, the Han would ultimately improve the customs of the non-Han peoples, assimilate, and thereby civilize them. In this sense, early modern Chinese education continued the traditional Confucian belief in the modeling/civilizing effects of education, even though it broke with the traditional teaching of Confucian ethics.
Different decrees issued by the provincial government of Yunnan during the 1930s supported the national educational strategies of nationalism and assimilation. Each area still governed by a local hereditary chief was obliged to send two of his relatives to study at the expense of the government in Kunming. Increased efforts were to be made to recruit “barbarian” (yi)30 children and adults for elementary schools through short courses, and specific quotas were set for the admission of non-Han students into schools in minority regions. In principle, the government granted financial aid to parents who agreed to send their children to school, but in most cases the money never reached peasant families. Teaching of the Han language was crucial, and the decree emphasized that local language was allowed in schools only when absolutely indispensable to helping children understand lessons in the first year of schooling.31
A decree from the provincial government in 1931 advocated the establishment of special primary schools for non-Han peoples in border regions, basic local teachers schools, and short-term vocational training. Four counties, one of them Lijiang, established two-year teacher-training courses, and between 1931 and 1940 these institutions educated some two hundred teachers (most non-Han) for primary schools in border and mountain areas (YMJFG 1992: 8).32 Unlike other students, the future border teachers in Lijiang were completely subsidized by the government. Their curriculum was slightly moderated so that, for instance, they had no English lessons but instead a few lessons in the Tibetan script that would be more useful when, after graduation, they started new schools in border and mountain villages (Li Shizong 1988: 70). The central government in Nanjing, led by Chiang Kai-shek, adopted a highly politicized educational program with the purpose of strengthening border regions and incorporating them into the Republic of China. From 1942 primary schools strongly emphasized military training, and all former students during the Republic whom I interviewed remembered military training and the civics class (gongmin ke), focusing on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People as important parts of the curriculum.
EDUCATION AFTER 1949
The Chinese Communist Party was active in Lijiang beginning in the mid-1940s. Based in Lijiang Secondary School, it provided students with weapons and started a Communist study group (Li Shizong 1988: 76). Li Shizong, an active Communist recruited at the school, recalled a mass meeting in Lijiang on 1 May 1949 of more than fifteen thousand people. Afterward all classes stopped, and about one hundred students from the secondary school were organized to participate in armed conflict against Nationalists who had fled into border areas, including Lijiang and Weixi. The CCP also prepared peasants for armed struggle and created several peasant literacy classes on basic Chinese and propagating Communist policy in villages (LNZG 1986: 21). When the Communists took charge in Lijiang in 1949, the new government wanted to restart primary and secondary schools. In August the two secondary schools and the teachers school were combined into one secondary school: Lijiang People’s Secondary School (Lijiang Renmin Zhongxue), with about seven hundred students from all counties in former Lijiang Prefecture, and eighty employees. The school was renamed Lijiang Secondary School (Lijiang Zhongxue) in 1950 and remained the only full regular secondary school in Lijiang until 1970. It was reported in 1949 that Lijiang County had 39 full primary schools and 294 lower primary schools. There were 440 teachers and more than 13,800 students, virtually all from the Lijiang plain and almost none from villages in the mountains (Yang Qichang 1987: 31; and CLNAC 1995: 16).
In connection with the project of creating new scripts for scriptless minority minzu (promoted since the First National Conference on Minority Education in 1951), the Naxi were selected to receive a romanized script, since Naxi commoners did not use the dongba script (which had never been used for recording spoken Naxi). After a research team created a new script, some simple teaching material was compiled for eradicating illiteracy among adult Naxi. The script never gained widespread popularity, and today it is difficult to find any Naxi who know it.33 It was taught only in Naxi villages considered very backward in terms of education and therefore not in Lijiang Town. Furthermore, Chinese culture and language had high status among many Naxi, and Naxi parents who wanted their children to get an education knew that upward social mobility was bound strictly to learning Chinese. Today another reason for the lack of interest in the romanized Naxi script is the revival of the dongba script and culture since the 1980s.
Thus, despite the creation of the new Naxi script, most schools in Lijiang in the 1950s continued to use Naxi spoken language only in the lower classes, Chinese in the higher classes, and Chinese script as the only written language. Many Naxi emphasized in interviews that although it was not official policy during the early 1950s, the teachers beyond lower primary school level continued to prohibit the use of the Naxi language in class. The main change of curriculum was that civics classes and military training were replaced with political lessons on Communist policy. Like the Nationalists, the new government was determined to use education to propagate nationalism, and in 1955 the Yunnan Bureau of Culture and Education issued a report that stressed the special need for “patriotic education” in Yunnan. The report pointed out that, living in border regions, many minority children lacked a “sense of the motherland” (zuguo guannian) and did not even know that they were Chinese (Zhongguoren).34 Later, in 1963, the Ministry of Education informed the leaders of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan Education Bureaus of the urgent need to stress patriotic minority education, especially along the Burmese border, where “American spies wearing religious garments are operating secretly.”35
During the 1950s a number of Naxi had been selected to receive short-term cadre training, preparing them for working in the new Communist local administration in what was later (in 1961) to become Lijiang Naxi Autonomous County. Mr. Zhang had graduated from the lower secondary school in Lijiang Town in 1942, and as a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, he was recruited for further minority cadre training in Sichuan:
We learned mostly about the development of society, about Engels’s and Morgan’s theories of human evolution. This was useful, because we had to prepare and participate in land reform work in minority regions. I was the only Mosuo at the school . . . they did not call us Naxi at that time . . . and almost all of the other students were Han. They used to really look down upon us, so I was a bit embarrassed to be Mosuo. But I quickly realized that the cultural level of many Han was even lower than mine. Some of them would say in great surprise, “Oh, a minority [shaoshu minzu] who already knows this or that.”
In 1953 Lijiang County established a special “literacy office” in Lijiang Town offering short-term (often only two-week) Chinese courses for local township cadres. Many local teachers in Lijiang also received brief training in CCP policy in order to adapt school education to the needs and ideology of the new government and to qualify them to participate in land reform and “improve the thoughts” (sixiang gaizao) of the people. Several teachers were sent to the new minority institutes and Kunming Teachers College during the 1950s and 1960s to be trained as local cadres. The minority cadres were the first (though definitely not the last) in Lijiang to learn about scientifically demonstrated ethnic differences; names of groups were consolidated in the practically irreversible naming of minzu, among which the Han were the clear majority, with more than 90 percent of the population. Moreover, students learned about Engels’s and Morgan’s theories of evolution applied to the minzu of China. The newly trained minority cadres returned as teachers, educators, and administrators all over Lijiang to spread this message of cultural and economic differences among minzu in combination with propagation of the national policy of uniting minzu and granting them equal rights in the new society. The differences among them were perceived as scientifically explainable, historically determined facts and not based on prejudice. Communists and Han Chinese were obliged and supposedly prepared to help the minorities eradicate these differences.
In 1957, just before the launching of the Great Leap Forward, Lijiang County reported a total of 285 primary schools.36 Non-Han students made up 92.6 percent, of which 76 percent were Naxi, whereas 79.8 percent of teachers were non-Han, of which 68.5 percent were Naxi (Zhang Daqun 1988a: 61). Because education was relatively well established in Lijiang before 1949, the government was able to train and send out local, especially Naxi, teachers and secondary school graduates to start new schools in mountain areas. Although the number of Naxi attending secondary school was very low—only 0.51 percent between 1953 and 1956—this was second only to the Hui among minority groups (YMJFG 1992: 162). One of the few students who went to the secondary school in this period recalled that of the fifty students in his class, only two were girls.
Graduates from Han areas were continuously sent to Lijiang—and to other non-Han regions—to start schools, participate in setting up the government, and represent the CCP. Most of these were Han who regarded themselves as the vanguard of a civilizing movement and who for a variety of personal or political reasons wanted to work in a poor minority area. Some of those who stayed in Lijiang have now advanced to become headmasters, government officials, and Party leaders. One of them was Mr. Yang:37
When Mr. Yang Came to Lijiang
When I arrived here in 1958, this place [Lijiang Town] was very poor. There were no roads. There was electricity but no lights in the school or the houses. We teachers made fires ourselves and lived two or three together in a very small room. Still, compared to other minority areas, this place was quite good. I was a graduate of a teachers college, and not many minority areas had teachers with such an education. When we started here, we were twelve teachers—two or three locals, but most of us Han from the outside. The students were peasant children from this village [the outskirts of Lijiang Town] or children of county and prefectural cadres.
I came here with twenty others, and only three are still here. At that time it was most glorious to go to the poorest areas. You gained status by doing so. I wanted to go to Ludian, which was poorer than Lijiang, but they did not let me. Of course, we also had another way of thinking: “If there is no lion in the mountains, the monkey is the emperor”! And the more bitterness you ate, the higher the position you would get as a cadre or leader. Most of the people who came in the 1950s became teachers or higher cadres in the county or prefectural government. Now we have fostered so many minority cadres and teachers here that very few need to come from the outside.
During the first and the second year here, the local teachers often had to explain in Naxi. I taught in the higher grades and never spoke Naxi. [After thirty-seven years in Lijiang, Mr. Yang still is not able to speak or understand Naxi.] As a rule, we spoke as much Chinese as possible. If you do not teach in Chinese, it is no good. After about 1962 teachers never spoke Naxi. By then school education here was more developed, so it was no longer necessary. More and more Han people came to Lijiang, so more and more Naxi spoke Chinese. They do not have a script, so we could not offer bilingual education anyway. We always had two ways of thinking about this question and sometimes one was stronger than the other. The first is that in school, children should basically learn Chinese. The other is that we have to maintain the minority languages and scripts, but since the Naxi do not have a script this question is not so important here. Of course we also have to maintain minority traditions and festivals, but learning Chinese is still number one—otherwise no communication is possible. If the Tai learn only Tai, how can they communicate? If you leave Lijiang, or Yunnan, you have to learn Chinese—otherwise, what will you do? Language is a tool and if you do not know how to use this tool, you have no means of communication.
Mr. Yang arrived in Lijiang during the Great Leap Forward, when education was regarded not as an autonomous social sector, but as an integral part of the continuing revolution. At this time the government aimed at decentralizing schools and advocated the establishment of lower primary education in all villages. Though many villages in Lijiang were unable to establish primary schools, the number of small, local, minban (people-run) schools (often with only one teacher) increased.
After 1949 primary school education consisted of six years, divided into four years of lower and two years of higher primary school. Between 1953 and 1954, and again between 1961 and 1963, some primary schools in Lijiang were five-year schools. After 1969 all primary school education in Lijiang was five-year, and in 1979 the six-year system (four plus two) returned (CLNAC 1995: 14). In 1956 primary school education was divided into four years of lower and two years of higher primary school, following guidelines from the Ministry of Education in 1955. To my knowledge, all minban schools in Lijiang at that time were lower primary schools. Due to the shortage of educated teachers, most new teachers in the villages were minban teachers—that is, they had no proper teacher education and most were graduates of lower secondary schools, though some had attended higher secondary school and others only higher primary school. The teachers in the twenty-two new agricultural secondary schools, which were started in the countryside of Lijiang in 1958, were mainly primary school teachers who had received a few months of extra training. Agricultural work occupied approximately half of the time in school, and political studies were prominent. Following the Great Leap’s demand for industrial development, the government also started a vocational lower secondary school in Lijiang Town. Here students worked in factories half of the day (for which they received a small amount of subsistence money) and studied the other half.
As in the rest of China, most of Lijiang’s peasants were organized into communes, and by September 1958 the 235 cooperatives had been combined into twenty-five People’s Communes (LNZG 1986: 75). Interviewees from some of the poorest Nuosu, Lisu, Miao, and Tuo’en villages recalled that this did not have much bearing on their lives, because they were extremely poor. Even when schools were established in these villages, teachers had almost no students and had to work full-time in the fields to support themselves. According to reports, the number of lower primary classes had increased from 371 in 1951 to 630 in 1959. The number of higher primary school classes had increased from 42 to 179 during the same period. However, the total number of primary schools had increased only from 354 to 366. The officially reported number of students in primary schools had increased from 16,198 in 1951 to 26,156 in 1959 (CLNAC 1995: 16). According to interviews, the vast majority of pupils were still boys, though more girls were attending school for at least a few years.
Ideologically, the period of the Great Leap Forward and related campaigns did not leave much room for expressions of or tolerance of ethnic diversity. Chae-jin Lee has shown how the Rectification Campaign, focusing on “national unity and political centralization” rather than on “social diversity and ethnic autonomy,” was carried out among Koreans in Yanbian. Textbooks in Korean were criticized and abolished for spreading local nationalism, and many Korean intellectuals and cadres were reproached for being chauvinist toward the Han (Lee 1986). The campaign against “local nationalism” was launched in 1957 and reached Lijiang by the end of 1959, when several minority cadres were severely reproached for promoting “local nationalism” and harming the “unity of the minzu.” Local teachers were criticized for promoting “local nationalism” via excessive use of local languages in education. Furthermore, many Naxi recalled how local festivals such as the important celebration of Sanduo (the Naxi guardian spirit) and other religious activities in the local temples were abolished. Others, such as a dongba from a small village in Lijiang County, recalled that “superstitious activities” such as dongba rituals already had been forbidden by work teams immediately after the Communist takeover. During the early 1960s, when the government faced the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, policies concerning the education of minorities again became more open toward the use of minority languages. At the same time, the government called for a renewed standardization of education. In Lijiang, as in many other places, this resulted in the closing down of many minban schools, most of which were located in the poorest minority villages.
Education for Assimilation during the Cultural Revolution
In 1966 a new Cultural Revolution Work Team (Wenge Gongzuo Dui) in Lijiang gathered employees of secondary schools to carry out the Cultural Revolution. Many local students actively participated in this early phase of the Cultural Revolution, whereas others returned to their villages to participate in labor. A few months later, after the CCP’s Tenth Plenum had outlined goals for the Cultural Revolution in sixteen points, several hundred students in Lijiang organized themselves as Red Guards. Most went to Beijing to see Chairman Mao, and when they returned, they divided into factions. Together with Red Guards who had come to Lijiang from other places in China, they struggled against teachers, school and government cadres, and, eventually, against one another.
At a mass meeting in Beijing in 1966, Lin Biao had launched a mass movement to attack the “four old” elements in Chinese society: old ideas, culture, customs, and habits. In Lijiang, as elsewhere, this triggered the Red Guards’ destruction of temples, burning of dongba scriptures, smashing of old wall paintings and traditional instruments, and attacks on monks, dongba, and everybody else engaged in “feudal superstitious activities.” Due to the government’s relatively open attitude toward the minorities’ cultural characteristics and practices in the early period after 1949, these now became obvious targets. In many minority areas, such as Sipsong Panna, people regarded the assaults on their cultural practices as crude expressions of Han suppression. In Lijiang, which was well integrated into the state, some people clearly shared this view, whereas many others believed that excessive left-wing policy in general, not Han chauvinism as such, was responsible for the misery. As one Naxi woman remarked, “So many of the youngsters who came here to smash my wooden carvings were Naxi. It would have been easier to bear if they had all been Han from outside Lijiang.”
In the high tide of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1969, secondary schools in Lijiang hardly functioned. No new students were recruited, and remaining students were busy participating in the revolution. Most teachers were sent to the countryside to work in the fields, or to Lijiang Town to work in the few factories. However, in 1970 primary and secondary schools entered a boom period all over Lijiang, and the Lijiang Normal School (Lijiang Shifan Xuexiao) as well as the regular secondary school started to enroll new students. The former dual system of regular and vocational/agricultural secondary schools had been criticized, so the majority of new secondary schools were junior secondary classes “attached” to primary schools in production brigades. Each commune also started classes for senior secondary education, which recruited students recommended by the brigades.38 The thirty-six secondary school classes (in three schools) reported in 1968 had increased to 121 classes (in twenty-five schools) by 1973, and the number of students in secondary schools in the communes was up by more than 100 percent.39 The number of primary schools in Lijiang increased by almost 40 percent in four years, from 467 schools in 1969 (a figure similar to that of 1965) to 669 in 1973, and the number of students increased by 22 percent. This sudden increase in the number of schools required many new teachers, and since there were not nearly enough educated teachers, the number of minban teachers almost tripled in this period. The majority of minban teachers in Lijiang today were recruited during this period. Many of them were happy to become teachers during the Cultural Revolution, because they did not have to work as hard as the peasants in the fields to achieve the same amount of work points.40
Most interviewees with experiences from the Cultural Revolution remembered that primary school attendance became much more common because most pupils did not have to walk far to attend school (because it was in the production brigade), schooling was completely free, and, above all, children did not earn work points (each family received a fixed amount of grain per child), so parents had nothing to lose economically by sending their children to school. When directly asked about their own educational experiences during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, most interviewees paraphrased the present official judgment of these periods as a time when education was “excessively left-wing,” “too focused on quantity,” and “wasting time on physical labor.” Yet some put forward a comparison with present-day schooling, arguing that at that time it was at least free and easily accessible.
As for curriculum during the Cultural Revolution, primary schools and junior secondary schools taught mainly “Chairman Mao thought,” mathematics, basic agriculture, revolutionary art, and military training. Normally, “poor and middle peasants” administered the schools, and it was common for an old and poor peasant or sometimes a soldier to come weekly to tell the pupils about the harsh times before Liberation in 1949. In the climate of disregard for minority languages, Chinese language was promoted for its ability to transmit the thoughts of Mao and, thus, promote socialist development in minority areas. Nevertheless, many interviewed Naxi teachers said that their method of teaching was to first read a text aloud in Chinese and then translate it into Naxi.
In senior secondary school, students all over the country were supposed to study the same theoretical essays by Mao: “On Practice,” “On Contradiction,” “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” and “Speech at the National Conference of the Communist Party on Propaganda.” One student who attended junior secondary school from 1969 to 1971 remembered that one of the textbooks was edited in Yunnan and concerned Yunnan geography and basic agricultural knowledge based specifically on conditions in Yunnan. Agricultural work was an integrated part of education, and most graduates from junior and senior classes in the communes and brigades returned to work in the fields or to work and teach in the primary and junior secondary schools. To spread agricultural education and promote the slogan “Everybody should be able to go to college,” Lijiang opened an agricultural college (Nongye Daxue) in 1976. The school had 150 students who studied for two years. They were chosen from among senior secondary school students in the communes, to which all were expected to return after graduation. After only four years, the school was closed down in 1980, when the Cultural Revolution had come to an end.
Zhongguo minzu tongji 1992.
For recent studies of the Mosuo, see Knödel 1995 and Shih Chuankang 1993. Another brand-new publication is Cai Hua 1997.
The most well-known and comprehensive Western study of the Naxi people is published in the works of the famous Austrian botanist Joseph F. Rock, who lived on and off for twenty-five years in Lijiang between 1922 and 1949. He studied historical Chinese gazetteers; wrote about Naxi (Na-khi) history, society, and religion; and collected and translated Naxi manuscripts written by ritual specialists, dongba. Rock’s works are widely acknowledged as pioneering. Recently one of his major sources for the study of Lijiang history, Lijiang Fu zhi lüe (1743) was reprinted and published by Lijiang County. Rock’s studies have inspired Western researchers such as Anthony Jackson (1979) and Gernot Prunner (1969) to further explore the history and the manuscripts of the Naxi. Silvia Sutton has written an entertaining biography about his life (Sutton 1974). In contrast to Rock’s style, Peter Goullart, who also left Lijiang in 1949 after living there for almost nine years, wrote a very personal and romantic book about his life there, Forgotten Kingdom (1955), which has recently been translated into Chinese and is popular among many Naxi in Lijiang. None of these books is concerned with education in Lijiang, but they contribute to the understanding of the culture and history of the Naxi before 1949.
Especially since James Bacot’s 1913 publication about the Mosuo, the pictographic dongba script has caught the interest of many Western researchers, and many manuscripts in dongba script belong to Western collections and museums. Since 1980 researchers in China, many of them Naxi, have published articles and books containing new translations of dongba texts, discussions of the script, and descriptions of dongba rituals. There is a massive interest in dongba culture as a research subject and as a focus for tourism in Lijiang.
Apart from He Shaoying 1995, few publications have focused on the impact of Tibetan culture in Lijiang.
E.g., Yang Qichang 1987; YMJFG 1992; Zhang Daqun 1988b.
See, e.g., Yang Qichang 1987 and LNZG. The amount of published material concerning education among the Naxi is limited compared to that concerning the Tai. This partly reflects the fact that Naxi are not considered to have specific problems regarding education. The Naxi in Lijiang have a long history of Han influence, established Chinese education, and a good record of educational attainment. Therefore most of the published material about education of the Naxi in Lijiang deals with historical development.
See also Borthwick 1983: 1–38 for a description of the different kinds of premodern schools in China.
See, e.g., Yang Qichang 1987; LNZG 1986; and Zhang Daqun 1988b.
See, e.g., Liu Guangzhi 1993: 36.
Only the jinshi examination, which was taken in Beijing, made one eligible for a higher office in the imperial administration. See, e.g., Zhu Weizheng 1992 on the imperial examination system.
See also Rawski 1979.
Schools were started in Yongchang (today’s Baoshan), Dehong, Yongde, Lianma, Puer, and Lancang Districts. Sipsong Panna was still on the extreme periphery of the empire and beyond the Qing administration’s practical control. The government started only a few literacy schools there.
According to Chinese historical sources, the lamas had accused the local Christians and officials of oppressing Buddhism and supporting foreign religion. This caused a popular uprising by the local population, and the government responded by sending armed forces to suppress the rebels. Finally, the magistrate of Lijiang Prefecture, Peng Jizhi, investigated the case and concluded that the government had handled it improperly. He ordered a withdrawal of government forces but nevertheless fined the lamas (see Li Shizong 1988: 65).
At this time Lijiang Prefecture comprised Heqing, Jianchuan, Zhongdian, Weixi, and Lijiang Counties.
See, e.g., Thoegersen 1994: 38–40.
Evelyn Rawski (1979) has made the most comprehensive study of popular literacy in China during the Qing dynasty. She refers to significant variations in literacy not only between rural and urban areas, but also among rural areas. See also Thoegersen 1994 on school attendance during the Qing and the Republic in the Han Zouping County.
See, e.g., Enwall 1994 and Diamond 1996 on the importance of missionary education among the Miao.
Today Lijiang Prefecture includes Lijiang, Ninglang, Huaping, and Yongsheng Counties, from all of which the school accepts students.
I have not been able to trace the reason for this difference in length of schooling. It is possible that it lies in variations in the students’ level of primary school education.
Contacts between the central government and Yunnan were very weak when Yunnan was ruled by Tang Zhiyao between 1911 and 1928, and central interference into Yunnan’s political, military, and economic affairs increased only gradually (with resistance from the provincial government under Long Yun) after 1939 (see Solinger 1977; and Dreyer 1976: 29–30).
This kind of direct suppression of minority languages in schools was also common all over Europe, in the United States, and in the various colonies where nondominant ethnic groups (often majorities in their own areas) were involved in education. For example, in Taiwan, Mandarin, or Standard Chinese, was the only accepted language in schools until 1988, and in Turkey teaching Kurdish is still prohibited.
This name was changed in 1934 to Yunnan Provincial Lijiang Secondary School (Yunnan Sheng Li Lijiang Zhongxue), seemingly without administrative consequences.
This included the teachers schools in Jinghong (Cheli) and Menghai (Fohai) in Sipsong Panna, which closed in 1943.
These Naxi teachers included Fang Guoyu and the He brothers, He Zhijian and He Zhijun, both of whom later became heads of the school.
The name was later changed to the Border Bell Study Society (Bian Duo Dushu Hui). The bell (duo) was a kind used in ancient times for official proclamations and in modern times in other May 4 contexts (e.g., the journal Women’s Bell).
In 1923, in accordance with national policy, citizen schools were changed into lower primary schools (chuji xiaoxue) and higher primary schools (gaoji xiaoxue). The length of study was supposed to be four plus two years, but in Lijiang until 1938 the higher primary school offered three years of study. This first extra year of higher primary was meant to prepare students for the real higher primary study. Beginning in 1940 full primary schools in townships were called zhongxin xuexiao and lower primary schools in villages were baoguomin xuexiao.
See also Borthwick 1983: 114–18 on education of girls in China before 1912, and Hayhoe 1992 for comments on female participation in education during the Republic.
More details on curriculum are found in CLNAC 1995: 14. See also Rawski 1979: 173–80 on the general curriculum.
In this decree the term yi was used to describe all peoples living in the border areas of Yunnan who were not Han.
Documents reprinted in YMFG 1992: 259–76.
The other counties that established special schools were Zhaotong, Puer, and Yongchang.
The majority of the Naxi I interviewed below the age of twenty-five did not even know this script existed.
“Report about Minority Education Work in the Coming Five Years in Yunnan,” reprinted in YMFG 1992: 288–307.
Letter to heads of the Bureaus of Education of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan from the Ministry of Education, 13 April 1963, reprinted in YMFG 1992: 307–10.
Of the 285, 240 were lower primary schools and forty higher; six classes for junior secondary education and twenty for senior.
This is a pseudonym, as are the names of other interviewees.
Although every production team was supposed to establish a primary school during this time, 2,081 production teams within twenty-seven border counties in Yunnan did not do so (YMFG 1992: 73). Interviews suggest that the reasons were that the villages in these production teams were too poor, lacked teachers, and were so isolated that they were less touched by the policies of the Cultural Revolution.
All figures here are from CLNAC 1995: 17.
Regular teachers during the Cultural Revolution were normally paid by the government and were not dependent on work points.