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Abstract
This study uses the career of a leading twentieth century Chinese educator, Huang Yanpei, to examine the rise and fall of a generation of urban literati who bridged the gap between China's traditional gentry-merchant elite and China's modern intellectual elite. Huang Yanpei remained steeped in traditional Confucian ethics and lived the lifestyle of China's traditional literati. But unlike his forbearers, Huang had a strong sense of nationalism and was a firm believer in social-Darwinism and unilinear progress. These beliefs led Huang to dedicate his life to educating new citizens able to enrich the nation and to defend it against foreign aggression.
After the 1911 Revolution Huang Yanpei became convinced that economic development was the real source of national power and social stability. Hereafter Huang dedicated himself to creating an educational system which would teach China's citizens the new cultural values and technical skills they would need in a modern world. Huang adopted pragmatic education and vocational education as the means to this end.
After 1916 Huang led a movement to incorporate a pragmatic philosophy of education and vocational education into China's educational system. During the 1910's Huang's traditional values and literati lifestyle enabled Huang to use his position on semi-official educational associations to maintain unity in the educational community, to develop educational facilities and to reform China's educational system.
In the early 1920's Huang's initial successes proved to be ephemeral. Vocational education proved to be poorly suited to China's socio-economic environment. Huang's positivist approach to morality offended China's more conservative educators. Moreover, Huang's traditional code of politics left him financially dependent on unreliable militarists, and poorly equipped to respond to the new ideology and politics of mass mobilization used by the Nationalist and Communist parties. Thus in 1927, when the Nationalists took power, Huang fled into exile and the dominance of China's reform efforts by the bridge generation of urban literati came to an end.
