Rural Reconstruction
An even more interesting aspect of the mass-education movement is its connection with rural reconstruction. In this field much is owed to Dr. James Y. C. Yen, a graduate of Yale and Princeton who began his work with the Chinese labor corps in France during the 1914-18 war. The war-time work of the correlated mass education and rural reconstruction movement was summarized by Dr. Yen himself:
The most hopeful factor in the whole China situation is that her greatest and most valuable resource, the three hundred and fifty million farmers, has not yet been tapped for the upbuilding of the nation. The Chinese farmer has had a measure of freedom and responsibility, of dignity and independence. He is thrifty and industrious, intelligent and an expert in intensive farming. A great number of our national leaders are sons and daughters of our farmers. The fathers of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek were farmers.
These nearly three years of terrible war have proved beyond doubt that our faith in the Chinese farmer has not been misplaced. It has revealed his greatness. Our nation is rediscovering the "forgotten man," the tiller of the soil. Most of our soldiers come from the farm. To a remarkable extent he has also financed the war. He is the real hero of this war.
The Chinese Mass Education Movement was organized in 1923 to explore the potentialities of the rural masses and find a way of drawing out the best in them. Since the first publication of the "thousand character test," it has been estimated that some thirty million illiterate people have been taught to read during the past five years.
Beginning with 1929 the point of emphasis of the Movement shifted from extensive promotion of literacy to intensive study of the life of the farmers in the rural districts. As a living social laboratory in which to do our research and to work out principles and techniques, we selected Tinghsien, a district of four hundred thousand people, one-thousandth of the total population of China, in Hopei Province. This was the first time in our history that an organized group of Chinese intellectuals went deliberately to the country to live among the rural people to study their life and find out how to develop their latent possibilities. The Movement has evolved what is known as the "Tinghsien Four-fold Reconstruction Education" including the cultural, economic, health, and the political.
Several other experimental hsien,—Hengshan in Hunan, Central China, and Hsintu in Szechwan, West China, were established in cooperation with the provincial governments. One of our special emphases in these experimental hsien has been the reform of the hsien government, i.e. the local government.
The Tinghsien Experiment with its "laboratory approach" to social and political problems and with its correlated program of rural reconstruction as demonstrated in the district attracted attention from all over China and inspired similar experiments in various parts of the country. As a result the movement for rural reconstruction gained great momentum in China.
Since the outbreak of hostilities the Mass Education Movement has thrown itself unreservedly into the task of assisting the Central and Provincial governments in strengthening the nation's struggle against the enemy. It was most gratifying that at this hour of China's supreme struggle we have been able to help the government to revitalize the hsien government, to train civil service personnel and to mobilize the farmers. Extensive application of the new system as developed in the experimental hsien was made to an entire province such as we did in Hunan—a rich province with a population of thirty million.
In order to insure that the new political machinery should function effectively a School of Public Administration to train administrative and technical personnel from the magistrate down to the village elders was established with the senior members of our Movement taking full charge. Altogether the School trained about 4,000 higher officials for the local government and some 35,000 of the village elders. Since Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek assumed concurrently the governorship of Szechwan, a new system of hsien government (chiefly modelled after the experimental hsien of the country) with the object of releasing the new life of the rural masses has been promulgated. Under his order the same is taking place in neighboring provinces.
Unless serious and painstaking study of rural reconstruction is made by scientists and scholars on the one hand, and administrative and technical personnel are systematically trained and imbued with a spirit of service to the rural masses on the other, the movement for rural reconstruction may dwindle away as so many other movements have done in the past.
It is most heartening to state that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek has given his public approval and backing to the new National Institute of Rural Reconstruction which he considers to be of fundamental importance to China's post-war reconstruction. The inspiration of the Institute has already helped to mould the principal rural reconstruction groups in the country into one national force. The rural reconstruction movement has achieved a united front unparalleled in its history. Today it is a great unifying force, an outstanding national platform upon which all Chinese can agree. It will meet the needs of China today and lay the foundation for the China of tomorrow.[3]
This program possesses obvious merit. Lacking a foundation of dogma, it requires no implementation through terrorism. The politically innocuous character of the movement is attested by the frequent demands by provincial officials for personnel from the Mass Education training centers. Since the purpose is to improve the entire community without revolutionizing its class structure, the enlightened landlords are as favorable as the peasants themselves. Unfortunately, enlightened landlords are not always prevalent. Despite the modesty of the program, it finds stumbling blocks in actual corruption, extortion, and illegality. Many hsien are under local machines which permit wealthy conservatives to evade tax payments, steal government funds, and repress genuine farmer organization. The consequence has been that the movement succeeds only when it has the immediate backing of a provincial or central authority; its progress has been slow. Many critics, both Chinese and Western, have become disgusted with the slowness of social reform on the land, and despair of anything save reconstruction through implicit class war.[4]
The present period of resistance and reconstruction opens a very promising period in rural modernization. In the first place, war-time stress puts great power in the Generalissimo's hands. Ubiquitous armies can, on short notice, enforce orders from Chungking. The shift of troops among provinces makes the central government an outside power now physically present in tens of thousands of communities. Devolution of watchfulness by the Commander-in-Chief and his staff results in slow but irreversible accumulation of governmental authority.
Secondly, the proclamation of manifold programs has the effect, obviously, of drawing attention to each of them. The Kuomintang, anxious to retain its paramountcy, promotes new local government changes. These face frustration by mass illiteracy. Mass education is impeded by local economic injustices. The Whampoa and Erh Ch'ên groups in the Kuomintang, while they have landlord connections, are interested—even assuming a strong economic-class interest—in the maintenance of government. Action is appearing, slow and haphazard by Western standards, but indisputably present. The minimum of good government in China is a very low minimum, but it is rising in the face of the Communist and Japanese pressure. One may be sure that the National Government will not pass below that minimum if the state's existence is in danger.
Thirdly, there is a very genuine boom condition in Western China. The movement of the government to the West, and lightening of intolerable but long-endured tuchün exactions, would in itself have led to sudden prosperity. To this are added more than twenty millions of new population, a growing network of communications, a sharp but controlled inflation. These further stimulate speculation and construction and development. The most important factors in a new prosperity have been, however, the reappearance of handicraft-type industry as a consequence of blockade, and governmental advocacy of every conceivable development. The author beheld, during the summer of 1940, conditions of prosperity in Szechwan which he had not expected to find in China within the space of one lifetime. Narcotics were eradicated. The working population was commanding high wages, but suffering from high prices; the prices were somewhat ahead of the wages, but not so far that social morale was troubled. Skilled labor was in a superb bargaining position; chauffeurs, electricians, good carpenters, etc. were in considerable demand. The salaried classes were suffering at all levels, a factor which was patently wholesome in stimulating working-class morale. The clerical class, which had held itself aloof from manual labor with a persistence which boded ill for China, was placed more nearly on a par with its American equivalent. While poverty was still universal by Western standards, the pathological squalor endemic to the coast was nowhere visible.