To write the biography of a school is to discuss its birth, adolescence and maturation, and the factors that helped determine its fate. Liyan Liu has written a biography of the Hunan First Normal School, at least through the 1910s. However, she has another target, as her title indicates: to trace the connection between what went on in this particular school and the high number of founders of the Communist Party that it produced. The most famous of these was of course Mao Zedong, but Liu points to several others as well. Of these others, Cai Hesen stands out, and Liu offers the most thorough discussion of his turn to Marxism in English that I know of. However, without a full-scale prosopographical analysis, it is not clear exactly how many early CCP members came from First Normal or whether other schools may have produced a similar share.
Whether or not First Normal was “unique,” it was a hothouse of new ideas and ambitious students. Liu combines intellectual and institutional history to show that during the New Culture/May Fourth period its teachers and students pursued learning and practice – often with incredible intensity – shaped by a kind of patriotic and moralistic liberalism and infused with faith in the power of education to change China. Anarchism remained a more important a doctrine than Marxism in this period, but doctrine was less important than an ongoing process of working through classical Chinese philosophy (Cai Hesen, for one, particularly admired Mozi) and history and studying Western political thought. Liu devotes an entire chapter to the First Normal (later Peking University) teacher Yang Changji, a neo-Kantian Confucian who influenced a generation of First Normal students through his teaching, the moral example he set, and not least his ability to tie favourite students – like Mao and Cai – into the New Culture movement's national networks. Again, this is the most extensive treatment of Yang's life in English that I know.
Briefer discussions of a handful of other important teachers at First Normal outline the larger institutional context. Liu further argues that First Normal cannot be understood outside the particular traditions of Hunanese radicalism going back at least to the 1890s, when the forerunners of the school were founded. Having said that, though, Liu's portrait of First Normal makes it seem in many ways typical of the secondary schools founded in major cities and provincial capitals across China in the early years of the 20th century. Like other normal schools, First Normal attracted poorer students who passed rigorous entrance exams to take advantage of its free tuition. Like other secondary schools, First Normal fostered a mix of New Culture ideals, patriotism and updated Confucian thinking that fuelled student activism of various kinds. Mao and Cai, for example, went on trips to survey social conditions and toughen their bodies, as Liu points out, but they were scarcely the only students to do so. And First Normal's fairly exclusive student association Xinmin xuehui had its counterparts elsewhere.
As Liu argues, a generation of students was trying out new theories at a dizzying pace. But she seems to imply that this was bound to lead a majority to Marxism, which seems a dubiously teleological conclusion to me. So many contingent events brought Cai and just a few others to this specific ideological commitment that references to radicalization, much less the First Normal influence, seem too deterministic. Liu rightly points to the case of Xiao Zisheng, a leading member of the Xinmin xuehui and close friend of Mao's, who has been largely written out of history because he rejected Marxism and became a Nationalist official.
Liu takes us to one spot in the vast world of intellectual work and social change beyond Beijing and Shanghai, thus highlighting the linkages as well as the differences between China's two great cultural centres and the provinces. This monograph would have benefitted from tighter editing and a bit more distance from hagiographical sources (were Yang Changji and Cai Hesen really so all-around perfect?). But it adds significantly to our knowledge of the neglected history of education, as well to our still inadequate knowledge of early Communists. Liu's work tends to confirm the view that most early Communists were not leading intellectuals but rather “provincials,” but it also highlights the key role that intellectual networks centred on Peking University played in the careers of these provincials. Cai Yuanpei, Li Shizeng and Zhang Shizhao thus have a place in this story, if largely behind the scenes. Liu shows that without full consideration of the new institutions of the national school system, it is difficult to grasp how new ideas and practices (such as social surveys and student organizations) could have spread as rapidly and deeply as they did.
