FIVE

Danghua: Under the Guidance of the Party

The abrupt end of University in April 1927 ushered in a new decade in the political environment of higher education. Ear­ lier, as the Nationalist Army moved north from Guangdong, the reading public followed reports of its progress in great suspense. 1 Few colleges and universities were unaffected by the rise of the new regime. When a bullet from looting soldiers killed Dr. John Wil­ liams on the campus of Jinling College in Nanjing, a shock wave reverberated throughout missionary colleges in China. The admin­ istration of St. John's chose to close down the university for a whole year simply to wait out the political uncertainty. In: Shanghai, after the Nationalists entered the city, the Provincial Educa­ tional Association was dissolved and banned from all future activi­ ties. In Nanjing, National Southeastern University, which had close ties with the Jiangsu Educational Association and with the Liang Qichao clique, was closed down at the same time. Political pressure was mounting, closing in from all corners upon liberals, ultra-na­ tionalists, Communists, and followers of the former gentry reform party of Liang Qichao, who had all found a political haven in the Shanghai of earlier days. The liberal President of China College, Hu Shi, came under sharply worded attack in Guomindang publica­ tions for his criticism of aspects of Sun Yat-sen Thought. The ultra­ nationalist Zeng Qi was arrested as a Communist. It mattered little that Zeng Qi was in fact politically even more conservative than many of his Nationalist opponents. Communism had been declared 168 Danghua a crime against the Republic once the Purification Campaigns were launched, and the accusation of being a Communist served as a convenient blanket charge. The Nationalists, meanwhile, busily set up Sun Yat-sen Univer­ sities everywhere their military might reached. For a brief period in 1927, the original Sun Yat-sen University in was re­ named Number One Sun Yat-sen University, so that Number Two and Number Three could be set up in Hangzhou and Nanjing. 2 One educational faction-that of , Wu Zhihui, and , veterans of Revolutionary Alliance days-prevailed ini­ tially within the Guomindang. A number of "university districts" (daxue qu) sprang up between 1927 and 1928 in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and eventually in Beijing, displacing the former provincial bureaus of education and placing administrative authority over all levels of schools--elementary, secondary, as well as collegiate-in the hands of the president of the designated leading state university of the district. Under this system, prestigious Beijing University was to merge with 9 other professional, technical, and business colleges in the Beijing area (renamed Beiping from 1927 to 1949) to form a new National Beiping University. Its president would then serve as the head of the university district of Hebei region. The shuffling of academic resources and personnel that the university-district system required generated massive student protests which disrupted aca­ demic work, especially at the venerable Beijing University. This was predictably followed by intense factional rivalry and political intrigue as various cliques jockeyed to control the dispensation of university-based patronage. While Luo Jialun-a student leader of Beida during the May Fourth period and a personal secretary of Chiang Kai-shek in 1927-took over the presidency of Qinghua University without much difficulty, the controversy surrounding the Nationalists' appointment of Li Shuhua to the presidency of Beijing University raged on for months until the university-district system itself was finally abandoned. Former chief administrators of Sun Yat-sen University in Guang­ zhou, meanwhile, moved up into important government positions in Nanjing and began a systematic overhaul of the nation's system of higher education. Dai Jitao (1891-1949), President of Zhong-