UNIVERSITY OF HAW/-I,j' LIBRARY CONFUCIAN CULTURAL EDUCATION ON THE CHINESE PERIPHERY: HONG KONG'S NEW ASIA COLLEGE, 1949-1976 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY DECEMBER 2003 By Grace Ai-Ling Chou Dissertation Committee: Daniel W.Y. Kwok, Chairperson Edward Davis Peter H. Hoffenberg Sharon A. Minichiello Ming-Bao Yue iii This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, for bearing patiently innumerable delays and failures to show up at family gatherings, and especially for loving me enough to hang onto me but believing in me enough to let me go- and in memory of my three grandparents who departed during the course of dissertation production, especially my mama, whose last clear questions to me were about the progress of my research, and my yeye, whose last clear smiles at me were over the future fun of calling me "Dr. Chou"- this dissertation is for them. iv Acknowledgments The intellectual, material, and personal debts incurred in the writing of a dissertation are too numerous to count and too complex to unweave. Those listed below are but some of those to whom thanks are due. I wish to thank first my dissertation committee members, without whom this project could not reach fruition: Edward Davis, Peter Hoffenberg, Sharon Minichiello, and Ming-bao Yue. Special thanks are due to my committee chai~person Daniel W.Y. Kwok, who willingly disturbed the peace of his retirement to lead me through this exhausting but exciting process. I also thank the many people who gave their invaluable comments at various stages of the research process; these include Roger Ames, Shi Mingzheng, Timothy Weston, Glenn Shive, Kathryn Mohrman, Philip Yuen-sang Leung, Waikeung Chan, and my father Henry Chou. Particular thanks are due to Michael Kurihara, who read the dissertation in its entirety and gave his insightful feedback. lowe special thanks to the very able and helpful staff of the archives I visited: in particular, Bill Mossa of Manuscripts and Archives at Sterling Library, Yale University; Edward Baker and Ron Suleski of the Harvard- v Yenching Institute; Jonathan Green at the Ford Foundation in New York; and Carol Leadenham of Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford. I also thank the staff of the Yale- China Association, particularly Nancy Chapman, Judith Collins, Heather Brooke, and Hong Kong representative Julia Travers, for their invaluable aid in locating and interpreting relevant materials. At The Asia Foundation, David Kim and Nicola Burt of the San Francisco head office and Allen Choate of the Hong Kong office provided me access to and information on the Foundation's archival collection. The library staff of New Asia College and the New Asia Research Institute, particularly Mrs. Li, deserves special gratitude for their repeated help. Professor Kwok-keung Lau of The Chinese University of Hong Kong gave me invaluable help throughout my stay in Hong Kong, without which both process and product of my work would have had considerably less color and feeling. During my dissertation work, I was aided by funds from fellowships awarded through the University of Hawaii, including the John F. Kennedy Dissertation Research Scholarship in History and the Huang Graduate Scholarship,. but especially by the very generous four-year support of the Hung Family Fellowship for Chinese Intellectual History. vi Abstract Confucian Cultural Education on the Chinese Periphery: Hong Kong's New Asia College, 1949-1976 In 1949, a group of anti-communist Confucian intellectuals left mainland China and established a New Asia College in Hong Kong. This school was to represent a re-creation of the traditional Chinese academy, the shuyuan of Sung and Ming times. The founders believed that, by actualizing the curricular content, structural form, and educational principles of the Confucian shuyuan, the core of Chinese culture could be effectively promoted and preserved. Preservation was of paramount importance, for they believed that the eventual revival of Chinese culture on the Chinese mainland depended upon their keeping it alive in the Hong Kong periphery during the tenure of communist control in China. The purity of the Confucian shuyuan vision, however, proved difficult to maintain, for the requirements of the British colonial government's educational policies, the anti-communist orientation of American funding organizations, and the market needs of the industrializing port of Hong Kong combined to make the Confucian character vii of New Asia ever more complex and ambiguous. This matrix of contending interests meant that increasingly New Asia, which was itself established as a living cultural symbol, became a site of contesting symbolic representations and interpretations of the meaning of Confucian educational values for modern Chinese people. Face with such contestation, New Asia's determined fidelity to the shuyuan ideal ended in an ironic competition over conceptions of Chinese culture that would transform the New Asia dream into both much more and much less than its founders originally envisioned. This dissertation examines New Asia College as a case study in cultural education. By tracing the history of the college from its founding in 1949 to its incorporation into The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1963, this study analyzes how New Asia sought to enact its mission and educational philosophy. The ultimate subsuming of New Asia's program in 1976 under the University's centralization scheme, and the broader notions Chinese education that implied, reveals not only the cultural predicament of New Asia's founders but the complexity of the Hong Kong environment in which they sought they revive and promote Chinese culture. viii Table of Contents Dedication iii Acknowledgments i v Abstract vi Introduction 1 Part A. The Center of New Asia 24 Chapter 1. Cultural Education at New Asia College 30 a. The Philosophy of Cultural Education 30 b. The General Curriculum ; 41 c. Departmental Structure and Values 52 d. Curricular Structure and Worldview 65 Chapter 2. Expanding the New Asia Community 82 a. Student Initiatives and Activities 82 b. The Research Institute 96 c. The Cultural Open Forum 115 Part B. Contextual Contentions 137 Chapter 3. American Non-Governmental Support for New Asia 140 a. The Communist Threat to Education 141 b. The Site of Hong Kong 152 c. Cultural Education and Spiritual Renewal 160 Chapter 4. Chinese Education under British Colonialism 183 a. Chinese-medium Higher Education 184 b. Chinese Education in a Colonial University 197 c. The Question of a Chinese University 207 d. A New Un-i versity 227 Part C. The Clash of Expectations 233 Chapter 5. The University Dream Turned on its Head 238 a. Cultural Symbolism and University Control 238 b. The Struggle Over Curriculum 250 c. The Last Show-down 270 Conclusion 293 Bibliography 305 1 Introduction On an evening in October of 1949, about thirty students sat in a small assembly room on the third floor of a high school in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The students, all strangers to each other, sat waiting quietly in a circle. The circle was open at one point with empty seats, seats awaiting the entrance of the teachers. The students, in their silence, felt somewhat ill at ease: most were only recently arrived from mainland China, some forced to flee in haste, others having greater luxury of time to choose their actions and their destinations. But all felt the tumult of the age which had brought them together - the success of communism in China, and the strange refuge that was the British colony of Hong Kong, so close to yet so distant from their Chinese homeland. All had worried and wondered how, faced with such uncertainty and chaos, they would continue their own education and in what manner. And all had been drawn to this small room by the reputation and ideals of a few men, men whom they had come to acknowledge as teachers and to whom they would trust 2 their minds and persons as students for as much future as they could foresee. 1 The teachers, when they entered, collectively posed quite a formidable picture, particularly against the unimpressive backdrop of a dark and narrow schoolroom. They included the famed historian Qian Mu f~t~, then aged 54. He had taught Chinese history at Peking University :ft;j(A~ in the 1930's until the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) necessitated flight, and his Chinese History course, the notes of which would become the textbook An Outline of Chinese History BWJt;t~, had roused much interest and controversy. 2 Also present was the German-educated economist Zhang Peijie 5*~1t, the political scientist Cui Shuqin --mi5~, Chinese literature specialist Liu Shangyi :XI] Mj ~. Unable to attend that day but very much part of this group was also the forty-year-old philosopher Tang Junyi m tl~)t. Educated at Central University 9=';R:A~ in Nanjing, he 1 Tang Duanzheng mfilfflIE, "Yazhou wenshang xueyuan de huiyi SIIZ.¥fHjCfllj'7~B<J@] 'tz," [Recollections of the Asia School of Humanities and Commerce], Xinya xuebao /~jf~j' [New Asia Journal] 1 (1952): 18. For the first year of New Asia's existence, it was called the Asia School of Humanities and Commerce. In the Fall of 1950, upon moving to better quarters, it was renamed New Asia College Ji\lTSIIZ.~~. 2 Bresciani, Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement (Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute for Chinese Studies, 2001), 244. 3 had returned to teach there and head its Philosophy Department in the post-war years. 3 Many of these teachers knew each other or had worked together previously. Particularly, the two who would become the leaders of the new college through its £ormative period, Qian Mu (1895-1990) and Tang Junyi (1909-1978), already had considerable professional experience together.