Negotiating for Modern Education: The Politics behind the Curriculum and Admissions Reforms at the Tongwen Guan

ABSTRACT:In 1862 the Qing government established the Tongwen Guan 同文館 (School of Combined Learning), a foreign language school in Beijing. This well-financed school adopted a series of admissions reforms to recruit intellectually promising students. It also developed a comprehensive curriculum, which included language study and modern science. Despite these efforts, it failed to supply specialists in either foreign affairs or science and engineering for China's modernization. Scholarship has attributed the failure of the school to the hostility of Chinese literati toward the West and their contempt for science and technology, but an in-depth discussion of the structure and actual operation of the school is lacking, meaning that other possible causes for its failure have not been adequately investigated. This article therefore takes an institutionalist view to uncover the internal factors leading to the school's failure and argues that the promising effect of the educational reforms was largely constrained by the school's institutional weakness.