User:EdyClKaEnL/sandbox

Link to the article that I have changed: History of education in China

Changes made are in bold: Republican era

The New Culture Movement of 1919 was a reaction against the Chinese government's emphasis on technical knowledge, and resulted in a new enthusiasm for theoretical knowledge, but with a focus on Western philosophy rather than Confucianism. Education was mostly decentralized in this period, since China was politically disunited, with Chinese warlords and foreign imperialists, especially the Japanese, occupying significant chunks of Chinese territory.

Internal Migration in Communist China was almost nonexistent due to policies put in place by the previous communist government pre 1978. Those pressing policies limited the amount of education that was limited to citizens due to lack of funding, specifically women as mentioned previously, and the type of employment that was available to them, which in most cases indicated factory work that only offered harsh working environments with little pay and to add to the negativity, the salary that the employees were receiving was not even close to being able to afford medical expenses and many of the “popular” organizations did not offer any type of health care for their employees. Regardless of the difficulties China met, several universities were recognized for keeping academic and education excellence during this time period. The so-called Famous four universities were especially well documented during war period, namely the National Central University, the Wuhan University, the Zhejiang University, and the National Southwestern Associated University.^[3]

People's Republic

After the 1949 Chinese civil war, the Communist authorities condemned excessive study of the humanities and social sciences, considering them wasteful and deleterious to China's industrialization. The Chinese Academy of Sciences was set up the year the Communists came into power. Education was reformed following the Soviet model, and small engineering departments were amalgamated into giant polytechnic institutes such as Tsinghua University and Tianjin University. Education became highly specialized, with students studying subjects like "railway bridge construction."^[2]

Since the 1990s the Soviet model has been largely abolished in China, with many universities expanding or merging with others to provide more comprehensive education in parallel with specialized technical training.^[37][38]

Communist moral education versus informal career education was another struggle within its self. Due to such communist control, continued government education wasn’t an option for most. That also includes females. “Most of factory girls believed they were so poorly educated that taking a class wouldn’t help.”[39] With that being said, many still decided to take night schooling along with working in factories to help better themselves. Eventually it started to become more common between workers to start changing work schedules between one another to help make the extra time needed for education. However, creating the personal time needed for such independent success was not easy. “The post socialist state has further controlled workers’ self-organization and, consequently, wages to facilitate low-cost exports.”[40]. Migrant workers were also highly important to this operation making up over 75%. When an American typically thinks about a foreign company based in China, he or she would think a small or medium sized shop making one or two things. Foxconn is the largest company in China exceeding Dell and Nokia with a total revenue right around $62 billion dollars. This was a government that squeezed the maximum amount of work out of its citizens and was new to the concept of personal advancement.

Work Cited in changed document.

Chang, Leslie T. Factory girls: from village to city in a changing China. New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2009.

Moore, Malcolm. "'Mass suicide' protest at Apple manufacturer Foxconn factory." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 11 Jan. 2012. Web