The Plan of Intellectualizing Political System Reform in Modern China: A Historical Observation Based on the “Citizen Readers” in the Late Qing and the Early Republic of China

Abstract

Placing various citizen readers compiled under the framework of “public education” in the late Qing period and the early Republic of China back in their original historical trajectories, this paper examines how the ideas of modern political system reform were converted to knowledge and popularized. The different purposes of political system reform in the late Qing period were reflected in public education plans that aimed to educate modern Chinese citizens. The citizen readers compiled respectively by county, provincial, and national governments had their different contexts, resulting in different approaches to intellectualizing the plans of modern political system reform. Some emphasized political identity, whereas others stressed the practical common sense indispensable to participation in common political life. In terms of the development of political system reform and national education from the late Qing period to the early Republic of China, the intellectualization of the modern political system reform evolved in the contexts of either state leadership or social participation. It was popularized and specialized in the framework of the new three-tiered modern school system, percolated or spread as common knowledge in the framework of the social educating and lecturing system, and the printing tradition of daily-use encyclopedias. Evidently, the rise of political science in China took a different path from that in the modern West and the Meiji era in Japan, where it was dominated by the modern university system as well as academic associations and journals. This historical trajectory constitutes the distinctively indigenous context for the emergence and development of the political science discipline in China.

Keywords

history of knowledge / intellectualization / popularization / history of political science / citizen readers

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Higher Education Press