Music education in Shanghai from 1895 to 1945: the cultural politics of singing

Abstract

This article discusses the development of music education in China and the integration of cultural politics and nationalism, using Shanghai, twentieth-century China's most developed city, as a case study; it examines the historical and political processes in Shanghai's music education to show what is cultural about politics and what is political about the culture of singing. Significant internal and external events both have contributed to contemporary Chinese national identity and music education. The former include the 1911 end of the Qing dynasty and establishment of the Republic of China, the 1919 May Fourth Movement and the 1925 May Thirtieth Movement; the latter include the 1842 Sino-British Opium War, the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War and the 1937–1945 Sino-Japanese War. By means of historical review and analysis, this article traces the development of music education in Shanghai and examines the political and cultural forces that have, for many years, informed the integration of collective singing and political (anti-imperialist and nationalist) activities. This article argues that singing (in particular the singing of songs that express popular anti-imperialist attitudes) has played a critical role in mobilising Chinese nationalism in school music education, which has, in turn, reinforced national identity in the face of foreign aggression and fostered nation-building. Chinese intellectuals and musicians were the dominant forces in arousing patriotic sentiments through music education from the late Qing dynasty to the 1910s, whilst Chinese social activists and Communist revolutionaries were powerful promoters of patriotic and revolutionary songs from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Keywords:

• music education
• cultural politics
• singing
• Shanghai

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges with gratitude the generous support of the Hong Kong Baptist University for a Faculty Research Grant.

Notes

1. Kang Youwei was a renowned Chinese calligrapher, political thinker and reformer, and one of China's most prominent and committed monarchists during the late Qing dynasty. He was greatly impressed by Japan's rapid modernisation following the Meiji Restoration, which maintained its traditional culture and monarchy. His best known and most controversial work was Da Tong Shu (The Book of Great Unity), the title of which is derived from the name of a utopian society imagined by Confucius.

2. Liang Qichao was a Chinese intellectual, political reformer and philosopher, and one of the most influential supporters of Western ideas in modern China. He was unhappy with the Qing Government and became an advocate of constitutional monarchy. Liang published a widely circulated biweekly journal named New Citizen (Xinmin Xongbao), which was first published in Yokohama, Japan on 8 February 1902. In the late 1920s, Liang retired from politics and taught at the Tungnan University in Shanghai and the Tsinghua Research Institute in Peking.

3. Cai Yuanpei served as the president of Peking University in 1917. He advocated the New Culture Movement as a way to promote academic freedom of opinion and expression and to support students’ patriotic activities in the May Fourth movement. After the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Cai moved to Hong Kong, where he died in 1940. His last words were ‘save the country with science, and save the nation with aesthetic education’.

4. To mark the 70th anniversary of his death, a bronze statue of Xiao Youmei was erected at the Beijing Concert Hall by the Central Conservatory of Music, China National Symphony Orchestra and China Symphony Development Foundation.

5. Long before the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident in China, Shanghai students had been at the centre of many similar mass movements and political upheavals. Wasserstrom (1991) discusses a half-century of student protest in Shanghai, analysing their tactics, organisation, language and ritual, from the 1919 May Fourth Movement to the dramatic events of 1989.

6. The Paris Peace Conference was convened at Versailles, just outside Paris, in January 1919 to negotiate a permanent peace treaty following the end of the First World War. Although attended by diplomats from more than 30 countries, the proceedings were effectively dominated by representatives of the ‘Big Four’ nations (Great Britain, France, the USA and Italy).

7. ‘The Internationale’, originally written in French by Eugene Pottier after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871 and set to music by Pierre Degeyter, is the international song of both Marxist and non-Marxist socialist parties. It has been translated into many languages and is widely used around the world as a song of resistance to oppression. The official Chinese version was translated from the Russian version on 15 June 1923, by Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), a leader of the CCP in the late 1920s and an important influence on Mao Zedong's thought.