Becoming China by Jeanne-Marie Gescher

Author:Jeanne-Marie Gescher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408887257
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Back up in the north-east lands around Hebei’s Ding Xian, the shifting fortunes of the Communists, the Guomindang and the warlords had been having an impact of their own. As Chiang Kai-shek’s White Terror raged with the support of the northern warlords, the foundations of the MEM had been rocked – with many of Peking University’s volunteering students, if not active Party members then at least sympathetic spirits. And then, Chiang Kai-shek had decided that it would be better to leave the north in the hands of allied warlords rather than try to hold it himself, and the remnants of a central government had been swept out of Beijing and off to the Nanjing south. The lands of the north were edging further into chaos, but James Yen and the MEM did their best to hold on to their belief in the possibilities of snow in summer, and work with whatever possibilities they could find.

Ding Xian’s future was now a little cloudier, but it had already conjured up a lot of magic, and it continued to work. In 1927, the MEM acquired the additional novelty of a new-fangled ‘social surveyor’. Fascinated by the relationship between labour and society, the social surveyor was the son of an American soap-maker who had partnered with a candle-maker to create an industrial fortune: the candle-maker’s name was Proctor, and the social surveyor was Sidney Gamble. Gamble had first travelled to China with his parents in 1908. In 1918, he had returned to Beijing with the YMCA, of which he was a devoted member, to apply the new science of social surveys in China’s challenging world. By 1925, early surveys around Beijing were being disrupted by the warlords. Gamble, now a friend of James Yen, suggested a study for Ding Xian: Who were the peasants? How did they live? What did they think? And, apart from tilling the fields, what sort of crafting labours did they do? When the survey was completed, the results pointed to a host of practical steps with which the peasants could be imagined into a people. Within a few years, Ding Xian had acquired four hundred People’s Schools with classes grounded not on city textbooks but actual village life; fifteen thousand students and a number of alumni villager-students trained to teach; household associations; a youth group; even an association for the very young. Despite the upheavels of the White Terror, the Northern Expedition and the shift of the remaining central government to Nanjing, Ding Xian found a conversation with the county’s leaders, and even their support.

The route to the future began to look a little brighter. Friends, relations and alumni pooled their labours, and roads and bridges appeared. Village elders who had lost their way were replaced by younger representatives – not just chosen, but elected, by the village at large. A radio station appeared, full of local news. A Farmers’ Weekly magazine followed: printed on a single big sheet of paper so that it could be conveniently pasted on to a wall for all to read.

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