Four Sisters of Hofei : A History (9781439125878)

by Chin, Annping

  The benefactor, Chang Wu-ling, in his own foreword, refrained from offering any homilies. Instead, he told a story associated with the degree graduates of the eighth century:

  During the T’ang dynasty, the new graduates of the highest, metropolitan degree, after their night of feasting and celebration, always signed their names jointly on the Wild Goose Pavilion in the capital. This was a much-told tale. Until the early Ch’ing, whenever there was a provincial or a metropolitan examination, graduates of the same year would record and publish their names together. They called each other “classmates” [t’ung-nien], and formed close bonds. But most scholars of the past studied alone in their own homes. They met only occasionally, usually when they were taking examinations together. However, once they had a chance to know each other, they cherished the friendship, and not just for themselves. Often their families for generations would remain close and would not lose touch with each other. And when they began to work in related fields or in the same profession, it would be less likely for such friends to have rifts or misunderstandings. All of you today have a greater advantage than past scholars who called each other “classmates.” Ever since you came to this school, you have been in the same classes, sharing the same teachers. You learn in the same classrooms. You work and relax together; you refine each other and give each other encouragement. You know and understand each other intimately.

  There were only nineteen graduates that year. Wu-ling had no grand dreams and no exaggerated words for them. He merely wished that they would hold on to the world they found in Le-i and the feelings they had cultivated as classmates. That was enough. Later, friends and family would explain that Wu-ling poured so much money into Le-i because he was committed to women’s education. His own writings never made anything out of this. Like his first wife, he was a maker, a creator of worlds; he was a quiet man, not an advocate or an activist. The lyrics he wrote for the school song betray his deeper impulse: “Soochow is paradise, / civilized in early times / and suffused with glorious culture. / Long, long ago, T’ai-po and Yü-chung / brought their virtues here, / transforming local customs. / Our school, this hallowed ground, / rings with verse and music. / Scholars here are joyful and serene.”

  T’ai-po and Yü-chung were uncles of King Wen, the founder of the Chou state and the most glorious of all China’s ancient kings. Long ago they had come to settle in Wu, the ancient home of Soochow. According to the Han historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, after T’ai-po’s youngest brother, Chi-li, married T’ai-jen,1 a woman of the utmost refinement and decorum, and she bore him a son named Ch’ang, heavenly signs all point to Ch’ang as possessing the moral potentials of a sage king: “Knowing that their father wished to establish their younger brother, Chi-li, as his heir so that Chi-li’s own son Ch’ang could eventually succeed him, T’ai-po and Yü-chung ran away to the land of the barbarians. They tatooed their bodies and cut their hair short, in order to yield their right to rule to their younger brother.” Confucius, in the Analects, called T’ai-po a man of “supreme virtue”: “Three times he abdicated the right to rule over the empire. He also left behind nothing for which people could find praise.” In Confucius’ view, to yield and then to hide any trace of your accomplishment is the highest attainment of virtue. Yet even such a man could change the air, the customs, of a place merely by being there. T’ai-po civilized the land around Soochow long ago, and it was in Soochow that Wu-ling chose to place his own Le-i. He believed that from the strength of this “hallowed ground”—this plot he called “paradise” (le-t’u)—his students could find “compassion for others” (i-jen) and “contentment in themselves” (chang-le). This was his “optimism” (le-kuan) and his gloss on the meaning of le and i.

  When the school first opened in the autumn of 1921, it was in a rented house on Ch’i-ch’iao Lane. The place was temporary, too small for any ambitious plans, and, some said, it was haunted because there had been a murder in the house a few years back. In early 1923, Wu-ling moved Le-i to an open space next to the Soochow Garden. Soon after, he also moved his family there, next to the school, on Chiu-ju Lane. Wu-ling wanted his children to grow up next to a school, to be near the Le-i students and to be able to play on the basketball court on holidays and during the summer break. By this time, he had married again. His wife wanted a new beginning, and since she also worked at the school, the move was a convenience for her.

  The new campus covered three acres. In addition to fourteen buildings, each two stories high, and thirty-two rooms linked by verandas, it had a playing field, a thatched pavilion, and a profusion of winter plum trees. Originally the three acres included a mulberry grove and an old burial ground. The school was built on top of the abandoned graves. When it first opened, some mounds were still visible; occasionally an ancient skull would surface. The landscape changed over time. On one occasion, Wu-ling bought a garden just so that he could have its plum flowers moved to Le-i. The construction and landscaping cost over 20,000 silver dollars.2

  Every year the school recruited students through the Shanghai and Soochow newspapers. It asked that all first-year, first-semester applicants submit their elementary school diplomas, and that transfer students submit transcripts from their previous schools. Admissions also required students to take examinations in Chinese, mathematics, the natural sciences, history, geography, politics, and English. Only the first-year, first-semester students were exempted from the English test. Students from outside Soochow assembled the day before the examination, and they stayed overnight at the school dormitory, taking their meals there. The charge for the examination was half a silver dollar. For the academic year 1932 to 1933, there were fifty spaces for the first-year students and thirty-five for transfers. (When the class of 1932 started Le-i in 1929, there were forty-four of them, but by the next year, the number had dropped to twenty-five; as the yearbook noted, “usually it was special circumstances that forced these students to leave.”)

  Le-i gave its students a broad, liberal education. Readings in vernacular and translated works were balanced with studies in poetics and traditional literature. The students also had physical education every day, and most of them participated in some form of intramural sports—track and field, soccer, or basketball. Le-i students were also one of the first groups of young women in Soochow to have their hair cut in a bob.

  Le-i’s tuition in 1932 was 20 silver dollars per semester; in addition, a room was 6 dollars, full board was 28, and there was a charge of 4 dollars for library, athletics, and miscellaneous fees. A full boarder paid a total of 116 silver dollars a year for her education—a bargain for private education in those days. The school reserved ten spots for scholarship students, four based on academic merit and six on financial need. The school’s annual income from tuition was less than 3,500 dollars a year, while its expense for payroll alone was over 9,000 dollars. Wu-ling was the one who made up the difference. Before each academic year began, there was always a period when his own children were not sure if they would be returning to their schools; they all understood that Le-i’s budget had priority over their tuitions.

  The teachers in Le-i were adequately paid—about half a silver dollar an hour or around 40 dollars a month, which in the late 1920s was the average income of an urban middle school teacher.3 The 1932 yearbook lists sixteen faculty members. Two of them were Communist Party members. In the 1920s, there had been many more. In fact, not only was the first meeting of the Soochow Communist Party branch held in Le-i Middle School in 1925, but the organizer, Hou Shao-ch’iu, was at the time the dean of the school.

  When Wu-ling hired Mr. Hou away from his position as dean at another girls’ school, in Sung-chiang, a town just west of Shanghai, he probably did not know the details of Hou’s Communist affiliations or anything about his political ambitions. Perhaps Wu-ling was naïve, or perhaps he was thinking only about finding a smart and able person to fill the position of dean. Mr. Hou had impressive credentials. In 1923 and 1924, he had helped two private schools in the Shanghai a
rea to stay afloat without government subsidies. This alone would have satisfied many principals and school trustees who were looking for administrators at the time. In its first six years, Le-i had six different deans, which meant that Wu-ling could not afford to worry too much about a candidate’s background beyond the relevant experience in education. Besides, people’s political affiliations changed swiftly and dramatically during the 1920s and 1930s. Chou Fo-hai, who was head of the board of education in Kiangsu in the early 1930s and wrote the honorific inscription in Le-i’s 1932 yearbook, was a good example. He was a delegate to the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921; by the late 1920s he was a political theorist and a leading propaganda official for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party; then, in 1939, he joined Wang Ching-wei’s collaborationist government and worked with the Japanese.

  What Wu-ling did not realize at the time, however, was that Hou was a born radical, a firebrand—someone who was simply too hot to handle—and that his presence would have serious consequences for the school. The men Hou Shao-ch’iu admired most as a child were the nationalist heroes from the Sung dynasty, Yüeh Fei and Wen T’ien-hsiang. By the time Hou was in middle school, he was distributing, on his own, anti-imperialist propaganda on the street. And when he entered Nanyang Public College, his activism became more varied. He organized student strikes in Shanghai in the wake of the 1919 May Fourth demonstrations in Peking and was a chief coordinator of the Shanghai Student Union. He started his own journal and was often seen on the streets of Shanghai, delivering emotional speeches on the evils of the Japanese imperialists and the importance of having nationalist awareness. And for a while, he was so influenced by Bakunin’s writings that he contemplated terrorist acts against Shanghai industrialists.

  Hou Shao-ch’iu was also a famed radical on the campus of his school, Nanyang College (later called Communications University). Established in 1896 by the Ch’ing government at the suggestion of Li Hung-chang’s protégé, Sheng Hsüan-huai, the college had goals that were clear from the start: it was to be a technical university designed to teach students science and engineering. While its curriculum concentrated on Western learning, the school’s entire funding came from Peking, so its educational policies reflected those of the Ch’ing court, which at that time was stubbornly holding on to the position that China was morally superior to the West. Consequently the students at Nanyang received a technical education along with a stiff dose of Confucian moral philosophy. The more perceptive and better-informed scholars and officials knew that this approach toward Western learning could not do much to solve China’s problems. As Chang Shu-sheng wrote in his last memorial, Westerners had “attained wealth and power” because they had “a command of both the substance and function” of their learning: “China has abandoned the substance of Western learning, concentrating only on its function. So even if we move in great haste, we can never catch up.”

  Even after a revolution had dispensed with the Ch’ing court, Nanyang College remained cautious about any challenge to its conservative views of Chinese culture. The school maintained that it was still possible to implement the late ninteenth-century formula of letting “Chinese learning be the moral foundation of education and Western learning be its practical application.” So as teachers of science and engineering were using more English in their classrooms, teachers of ethics were encouraging their students to write about the perils of aping someone else’s steps and manners while forgetting one’s own. When Hou Shao-ch’iu was a student at Nanyang, the president, T’ang Wei-chih, delivered weekly lectures on such subjects as the metaphysics of sincerity and how to guard one’s inborn nature from corruption. The students were tested on the content of these lectures. Twice a month, T’ang also led the entire school in a formal ceremony to pay respect to Confucius’ spirit tablet, and each year enforced a ritual celebration of Confucius’ birthday. T’ang’s crusade against the threat of moral debilitation and cultural contamination was not unlike the Purist movement of the 1880s, only lonelier, and by 1920 it also seemed more absurd. Sometime that year, Hou Shao-ch’iu and a group of classmates were expelled from Nanyang College for smashing Confucius’ spirit tablet and suggesting through the student council that the school authorities abolish the celebration of Confucius’ birthday. The school charged that Hou’s “conduct had been extreme” and that “he did not set his heart on learning.” Hou’s Communist biographers claimed that he was in excellent academic standing at the time of his expulsion. Hou’s own response is more telling. He said of the school authorities, “How could they change what I set my heart on?”

  The project that was closest to Hou Shao-ch’iu’s heart in 1919 and 1920 was the initiative he took to educate urban laborers and to raise their political awareness. In the summer immediately following the May Fourth demonstrations, he and three classmates established the first “free school” in Shanghai for workers and peasants, attracting nearly 50 adult students in the first year. By 1922, there were 113 students: 49 industrial workers, 12 handicraft workers, 16 shop clerks and apprentices, 24 school janitors, 5 peasants, 6 grammar school students, and 1 unemployed laborer. Working with their teachers in the evenings, between 7:30 and 9:00, in classrooms borrowed from a middle school, these students learned to read and write, and they were introduced to topics in history, science, and current events. The faculty compiled their own teaching materials, drawing articles from newpapers, magazines, and progressive journals. The students published a weekly journal, the contents of which reflect the influence of socialist thought. In a 1924 issue, a worker-trainee wrote, “The capitalists only knew to sponge the grease off other people, using it for their own enjoyment.”

  Around the time he was getting his “free school” off the ground, Hou Shao-ch’iu was also trying to save Ching-hsien, the girls’ school in Sung-chiang, from total collapse. By 1923, Hou’s activities were becoming more and more political. He joined Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party in May and the Chinese Communist Party in July. It was possible to do this in 1923 because leaders of both parties in that year decided to combine forces in an effort to reclaim China from the warlords and the foreign imperialists. As part of the stipulation of the “united front,” members of one party could join the other and still retain their original membership.

  Very soon after he became a Communist Party member, Hou Shao-ch’iu began to use the Ching-hsien Girls’ School as a base for his secret meetings. At this school, members of the Communist Party developed strategies for expanding their influence in Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces. According to later Communist historians, Hou “personally cultivated a group of students and faculty for the Communist Youth League and encouraged the most outstanding ones to become Communist Party members.” We know that in 1924 Hou accompanied Mao Tse-tung and the Communist Party secretary on an extended visit to Sung-chiang. Thus it is possible that Mao attended one of those meetings.

  So when Hou accepted Wu-ling’s offer to come to Le-i in 1925, it was probably not because he found the job particularly appealing. He had plenty to do in Sung-chiang and in Shanghai. He was dean of two schools, Ching-hsien and a large middle school attached to Shanghai University. He was fund-raising for Shanghai University and was steeped in the city’s labor movement. There must have been some other business that took him to Soochow in 1925.

  The Fourth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party convened in Shanghai during January of that year. The meetings produced a revised constitution, which made it easier for applicants to qualify for membership. Party members were also encouraged to go out on their own, to set up branch units, which they could then use to recruit new members. Before, they had concentrated on indoctrinating industrial laborers, who, they soon learned, were not necessarily interested in proletarian politics. So in 1925, the Communist leaders decided to absorb more categories of people—not just workers, peasants, and students, but all “class-conscious elements”—into their party. As soon as Hou Shao-ch’iu assumed his duties at Le-i in
September 1925, he founded a Soochow branch of the Communist Party.

  Hou brought three Communist Party members and five Youth League members with him to Soochow. The two women from the Youth League had been teachers at Ching-hsien Girls’ School. They all joined the Le-i faculty at Hou’s “invitation.” The revised constitution from the Fourth Party Congress stated that in order to establish a branch unit, there had to be at least three party members. Hou had three, not counting himself, plus the five from the Youth League, who were on a trial run and on the verge of becoming full-fledged. This group held meetings at least once a week in the school. Wu-ling must have known about it, but he let them be.

  The alliance between the Kuomintang and the Communists lasted until April 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek staged a violent purge of his party’s left-wing elements in Shanghai with the muscles and guns of the criminal syndicate and with the help of the police in the foreign concessions. But even before the purge, some members of the Kuomintang—mainly the hostile right wing—found the presence of Communists in their party deeply unsettling. They distrusted their partners’ motives and were jealous of their success in moving into leadership positions within the Kuomintang power structure. They accused the Communists of using a nationalist movement to prepare peasants and urban laborers for a socialist revolution. In Soochow, the local authorities pressured Wu-ling to dismiss Hou Shao-ch’iu in January 1926, only four months after Hou had assumed his responsibilities as dean. They said that Hou’s covert operations were a menace to society. They also forced Wu-ling to shut down Le-i’s senior high division and threatened further action if he did not comply. Wu-ling had no choice but to let Hou go.