Behind the Gate

Inventing Students in Beijing

Fabio Lanza

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780231526289
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

On May 4, 1919, thousands of students protested the Versailles treaty in Beijing. Seventy years later, another generation demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. Climbing the Monument of the People's Heroes, these protestors stood against a relief of their predecessors, merging with their own mythology while consciously deploying their activism. Through an investigation of twentieth-century Chinese student protest, Fabio Lanza considers the marriage of the cultural and the political, the intellectual and the quotidian, that occurred during the May Fourth movement, along with its rearticulation in subsequent protest. He ultimately explores the political category of the "student" and its making in the twentieth century.

Lanza returns to the May Fourth period (1917-1923) and the rise of student activism in and around Beijing University. He revisits reform in pedagogical and learning routines, changes in daily campus life, the fluid relationship between the city and its residents, and the actions of allegedly cultural student organizations. Through a careful analysis of everyday life and urban space, Lanza radically reconceptualizes the emergence of political subjectivities (categories such as "worker," "activist," and "student") and how they anchor and inform political action. He accounts for the elements that drew students to Tiananmen and the formation of the student as an enduring political category. His research underscores how, during a time of crisis, the lived realities of university and student became unsettled in Beijing, and how political militancy in China arose only when the boundaries of identification were challenged.

THROUGH THE WALLS

EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE UNIVERSITY

Beida is invincible, what is never defeated is her foundation. Beida is invincible, what can never be destroyed is her spirit. Beida is invincible, what makes people proud is that one young generation after another creates a present that exceeds legends.

—Meng Zhaoqiang, Lu Qing, Tang Han, eds.,
Beida bu bai (Beida is invincible)

CHEST THUMPING AND THE PARADOX OF MEMORY

Russell Baker once remarked in the New York Times how “patting yourself on the back once in a blue moon is forgivable, but constantly thumping your chest about how wonderful you are soon makes you an embarrassment to friends and neighbors.”¹ In the case of Beijing University (Beida), it is indeed difficult not to find utterly embarrassing such excessive (and, one could say, borderline comical) displays of pride as the one quoted in the epigraph. The slim volume Beida bu bai (Beida is invincible)² is the most glaringly and unabashedly laudatory example in the flood of commemorative publications put into motion by Beijing University’s centennial celebrations in 1998. A small-scale nostalgia industry found expression in a well-edited collection of sources, photographic essays, biographies, and a veritable tidal wave of memories and personal recollections, retracing, often with unashamed and self-congratulatory pride, the glories of Beida’s century. Ten years later, the flow does not seem to have stopped or even slowed down significantly.

Rescuing and recollecting the memories of student and faculty of the first half of the twentieth century, these nostalgic publications shape the legacy bequeathed to today’s Beida by its Qing and especially Republican incarnations. The core of this legacy (and of the “Old Beida” pride) lies in the somewhat uncanny capacity of the university to generate a particular brand of intellectuals: an ever-reproducing community of individuals, the “Beida students,” able to act decisively in crucial times of crisis, to take the lead in saving the nation, and to shape the destiny of the state. In addition, this capacity is situated, in the sense that the position of the school is considered to be essential in order to endow the “Beida students” with the prestige and the charismatic power of the legacy.

This position refers to an intellectual, institutional, and social placement (the most prestigious school in the country, the first public university, which was labeled “National” in 1912) but also to a physical location; the recurrent refrain of the transformative power of the campus is too insistent and pervasive in memoirs and essays to be just the fond recollections of aging alumni.³ The image conveyed by the name Beijing Daxue in these nostalgic commemorations is then one of institutional continuity and consistency, a rock in a stormy sea; the school that has provided shelter and nurtured a group of people unfailingly endowed with political sensitivity and organizational genius. Plodding through this commemorative literature, the impression one derives is that, since its founding in 1898, the identification of this place as China’s first university somehow almost automatically—miraculously, one could say—produced an organized community of “university students.”

However, an analysis of everyday life inside and around Beida in the years 1917 through 1923, which I will provide in this chapter, illustrates how not only the mythological elements of this memory but also the very categories of this legacy needs to be reopened and rediscussed. Ironically, “Beida” (as the place, its social standing, its physical borders) and “Beida students” (the community, its identity, its mythology) were produced in a period—the May Fourth years—in which the university seemingly reached its maximum institutional inconsistency and its community appeared radically fragmented and uncommunitarian.

A description of life in dorms, classrooms, and meeting places during those years shows how difficult, if not impossible, it is to isolate a space of the “university proper” and separate the inside from the outside. The “old Beida” literature often celebrates the myth of the university’s exceptionality, its splendid isolation in the urban landscape. But Beida was not isolated; in fact, one of its distinctive characteristics was the porousness of its borders. The very notion of campus did not apply in the case of Beida, as it was fractured into three distinct locations, and, for this reason, “the boundary between the campus and the city was by no means clearly drawn.”⁴ Beijing University borders were porous in both directions: students moved out into the city, but nonstudents also entered the university. The overwhelming presence during the May Fourth years of unofficial auditors, people who participated in the life of Beida without being “of Beida,” is a defining trait of the university and signals how the very definition of “student” was open to contention.

The indeterminate character of Beida “students” suggests a more general inconsistency or “incoherence” of the university as an institution and a community. The fragility of its physical borders stands as the counterpart to the lack of identifying rituals and symbols: ceremonies, both at an institutional and personal level, were shunned at Beida. Rituals identify a community and mark a place. I argue that by refusing to adhere to even minimal rites of courtesy and belonging, the students at Beida were struggling through everyday practice to defy the possibility that any bond (institutional or ritual) could enclose the space of politics and knowledge. In this sense, political and cultural positions were realized through a space of transformed everydayness, in which the reframing of lived spaces and pedagogical routines was as much an expression of activism as public demonstrations were.

From this perspective, then, the myth of a community and a place was only the aftereffect of a political sequence (the May Fourth period) produced precisely by the inventive destruction of a communitarian bond and by an institutional unsettling. Significantly, it is the celebratory “old Beida” literature that provides glimpses into this process and its exhaustion. This memorial literature extols the permanence and continuity of a place and a community while at the same time offering evidence (obliquely, but sometimes directly) that neither the place nor the community did indeed exist.

BOHEMIAN MYTHOLOGIES

Memoirs of old Beida construct a romantic and nostalgic but also paradoxical portrait. According to the legendary lore, Beida students could be nonconformist, independent, careless in attire and posture, sometimes genial, often lazy and inconsistent, and always original. But they were also almost pathologically incapable of adhering to general rules or even an informal esprit de corps. The unifying characteristic of the Beida community through the twentieth century, shaped and bequeathed by its early Republican incarnation (and restated in the commemorative literature), is that it had no unity. John Israel incisively summarizes the split nature of the Beida tradition:

[At Beida] there were few ceremonial occasions to create a sense of community in this setting—no daily flag rising, no morning exercises, no convocation at the start of the school year, no graduation at the end…. Beida isolated students…. The Beida undergraduate might be an eccentric prodigy who chose subjects according to his interests, cut classes freely, and thought nothing of staying up all night to sing Beijing opera arias. Beida students had little use for synthesized texts but read widely and passionately in books of their own choosing. They wore the faded, patched long gown, and their calories were more likely to come from impulsive visits to snack shops than from regular meals. Except during protest movements, when Beida students demonstrated a positive genius for organized political activity, their life was free, bohemian, and idiosyncratic.⁵

The vision of a community that defines itself, takes pride in, and still claims an uninterrupted legacy out of the institutional and individual refusal of any communal symbolic bonds seems indeed quite paradoxical. But this paradox is never directly addressed in the nostalgia literature, which repeats endlessly the mantra of this great Beida spirit, sometimes with humorous effects. In a recent collection of anecdotes, one author notes that Beida still lacks a school anthem. The alleged reason is that Beida’s tradition is guaranteed precisely by the very resistance to unifying symbols, by the resilience of the university spirit of individualism and fragmentation. “The fact that Beida does not have an anthem is probably for the best,” he concludes, for “isn’t the ‘Nameless lake’ famous anyway [even if it does not have a name]?”⁶

This anticommunitarian spirit is then identified as the hallmark that, for most of the twentieth century, distinguished Beida from other schools in the country, and the foremost sign of its uniqueness. Beida students literally wore their exceptionality: their careless and shabby attire was in stark contrast with the tidy uniforms of the Americanized Shanghai schools. They looked lazy, slow, unkempt, and were clearly less apt at athletics than their counterparts in other Beijing schools or the students in missionary universities in the rest of the country (more in chapter 2).⁷

The most striking contrast is usually drawn with Qinghua University, which, crafted on the example of American universities, offered a model of cohesiveness and respect for the rules. “Unlike the undisciplined life of Beida students, Qinghua undergraduates lived in an orderly, well-regulated community.”⁸ They “did better in their studies and spoke fluent English. They were socially active and well dressed, but they did not know as much about Chinese affairs and did not take much interest in politics.”⁹

Even if they are wearing a simple blue gown, it is perfectly ironed; each one of them is smiling and glistening, all over the limitless green fields. One doesn’t see here those brooding and sighing expressions, the lack of youthful vigor that one often witnesses at Beida. As soon as class is dismissed, they move from their engineering course on one side of the campus to the chemistry or geology course on the other side, traversing it diagonally, and they do not slow down even when they are riding a bicycle. It is like a continuous stream of people coming and going, and you never see anything like the measured, careless and relaxed walking style of Beida students.¹⁰

The image of the isolated Beida student as a bohemian genius, with his long patchy gown and rimmed spectacles, shifting between self-imposed isolation and never-ending debates on culture and literature, is clearly part of a constructed tradition that has been rehearsed and reproduced through the years.

However, looking beyond and inside this tradition, we discover that most of the attitudes and features that characterized the image of Beida students did emerge and coalesce at a particular moment in the history of the university, the May Fourth years, when the students embodied (quite literally) a critical position vis-à-vis political and social issues. It is my contention that in this period the individualistic and anticommunitarian attitudes—the bohemian style—of “Beida students” took shape as ways—at least for the more active among them—to express and realize political and cultural stances relevant to the specific historical situation. It was only after and as a consequence of May Fourth that the connotation of eccentricity and individualism was inscribed as a defining trait of Beida old-school pride, and solipsistic bohemians became the paradoxical symbols of a communitarian story. But by that time, the political effectiveness of those symbols had been largely exhausted or appropriated.

UNBRIDLED FREEDOM

The everyday life of students at Beida during the May Fourth years offers a striking picture. Chen Pingyuan, one of the most attentive surveyors of the lore of old Beida, has challenged the existence of a unified community in this period and has stressed repeatedly how the very idea of a “Beida clique” is more or less a fabrication. Echoing a famous observation by Lu Xun,¹¹ Chen has contested the fact that students were organized and united in something akin to an old-boy network. In the early Republican period, he writes, Beida was in fact affected by an incurable “unbridled freedom” (ziyou sanman), which the students jealously preserved and protected against attempts at “unification” and “regulation” by the administration.¹² The general attitude was summarized by a motto: “I don’t care about you, you don’t care about me, we don’t mess with each other.”¹³ It was a place where “nobody would reject you when you arrived, but nobody would run after you when you decided to leave.”¹⁴ This laissez-faire atmosphere made the university the perfect breeding place for those anecdotes of asociality that were to become such an essential part of the Beida tradition. Contemporaries who described May Fourth Beida ranged in tone, but not in substance, from “a place for weirdos”¹⁵ to a “multifarious, extremely variegated environment, in which everybody can do his own thing.” Even after the unifying rally of 1919, students continued to hold to their “strongly developed” and independent personalities.¹⁶

In the late 1910s, Beida students were not simply free; they seemed to have grown refractory to any general rule or symbolic ritual of community, and ultimately to unity as a value in itself. Over and again this became a liability to student initiatives. For example, an umbrella organization of all Beijing University students was created only after May Fourth 1919, when the call for nurturing a spirit of “individual freedom and common action” became more insistent. Even when it was finally formed, the association did not last for long, and sources report recurring failed attempts to “unify the feelings” of the Beida community and to constitute an overall organization not based on intellectual interest or local ties.¹⁷

While it seems that attitudes of laissez-faire and eccentric individualism intensified and became a more dominant trait at Beijing University by the late 1910s, the question for scholars has been how to explain the coincidence of these phenomena with the more general changes that took place in the school in the same period. After 1917, under the presidency of Cai Yuanpei, Beida had undergone a radical institutional restructuring that affected the curr...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Studies of The Weatherhead East Asian Institute
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Lived Space
• PART II: Intellectual Space
• PART III: Political Space
• PART IV: Social Space
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Selected Titles