Village-State Cooperation

Abstract

This article draws on archival sources from Haicheng county, Fengtian province, to examine how rural communities responded to early-twentieth-century state orders to establish modern primary schools adhering to a set of uniform standards. Past scholarship has denied China’s rural communities an important role in early-twentieth-century modernization, arguing either that the mandate to establish primary schools at the local level engendered hostile relations between state and society or that the introduction of modern schools led to community dissolution. This article highlights the contribution in Haicheng county of rural communities, mostly villages, to China’s early-twentieth-century modernization. It argues that villages were willing participants in state-guided educational reform, pursuing creative and cooperative strategies that enabled them to set up hundreds of modern primary schools and simultaneously mark their identification with both the nation-state and their own local communities.