Tao Xingzhi and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, part 3: œconomic divergence

Tao Xingzhi’s Yucai School in Chongqing (t),
and the Iraqi University of Mosul (b)

One of the great distinctions I am finding between the thought of Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 and that of Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî ساطع الحصري has to do with the approaches of these two men to œconomic problems. Both men were, of course, primarily educators of their respective nations – and both men taught with an eye to a gaining a degree of collective self-determination for their respective peoples. For both men, national self-determination was of overriding concern. Neither Tao Xingzhi nor Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî proclaimed the superiority of his society over others – and this is a point on which both men proved more humane than their Western teachers. However, both men were adamant that the Chinese and Arab nations, respectively, deserved unity, deserved justice, deserved political strength and deserved a seat at the international table that had hitherto been denied them by the Western imperial powers. But whereas this led Tao Xingzhi to a deeper appreciation of and attention to the œconomic plight of the Chinese peasantry – which made him a champion of coöperative societies and peasant self-organisation at the village level – from the limited reading I have done so far, there does not seem to have been any corresponding development in the thought of al-Ḥuṣrî, whose engagement with œconomic thinking seems to have been shaped and somewhat limited by his historiographical interests and his objections to the determinism and teleological orientations of Marxist historical discourse.

There are, I think, good reasons for this divergence on œconomic issues. The first reason, I believe, is that the problem of political unity in China wasn’t nearly so acute. As Wang Hui 汪暉 has pointed out repeatedly, one of the minor miracles of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 was that the Qing polity didn’t simply fragment into a half-dozen smaller squabbling nationalist ethno-states or end up carved up by opportunistic imperial powers. (And a good deal of Wang Hui’s academic work is oriented to trying to explain why and how that happened.) Despite having similar political climates and even similar internal relations between the ruling minority group and the larger but subordinate ethnic majority, both things happened to the Ottoman Empire. Bulgaria and Romania peeled away in nationalist revolt; so did Serbia and Greece. And the careful relationship the Turkic Ottomans maintained with their Arab subjects began to deteriorate as well, to the point that the Arabs were willing to revolt. At the end of the First World War, the victorious allied powers carved up the Ottoman Empire like, well, a Thanksgiving… turkey.

As a result, the good Ottoman subject Sâti‘ bey found himself in the position of having to advocate for a polity which did not exist yet. In his view, the œconomic woes of the Arab fallâhîn, so apparent and so pressing to Salâma Mûsâ (and, ironically, so evident in their similarity to the Chinese), were downstream from politics (in the sense that Arabs could not advocate for themselves as long as they were divided between artificial statelets and European dependencies), which in turn was downstream from culture. Once a rigorous nationalist curriculum buttressing a unified Arab culture could be established in countries like Iraq and Ægypt and Syria, the political divisions among Arabs could be overcome, and the œconomic problems of rural privation and exploitation would resolve themselves. Sâti‘ was first and only ever an educational activist and a cultural nationalist; although he was sympathetic to socialism in its non-internationalist manifestations, he did not see it primarily as his job to resolve class disputes.

Tao Xingzhi, on the other hand, could not help but be affected by class; and what’s more, he could not help being engaged on behalf of one class: the rural peasantry. The political problem of the Qing-Republican transition was essentially a fait accompli by the time he had reached majority. If he ever felt the kinds of political compunctions against the new Republic that drove Liang Juchuan 梁巨川 to drown himself in protest, those compunctions would surface only later. China under the early Republic and the warlords was, it is true, politically weak and its internal institutions remarkably unstable. But culturally, it was unified to an extent that the Ottoman Empire never really had been. The Manchus were already assimilating when they received the Mandate of Heaven. Their policy of official ethnic and religious toleration also managed to bring the Mongols and the Tibetans (who espoused the same form of Vajrayāna Buddhism) and even the Muslim Uighurs into the fold.

In short, for twenty years there was no real, concerted political threat to the external integrity of the Chinese Republic, the way there was to the external unity of the Arabs for Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, until the Japanese invasion in 1931. However, when Tao Xingzhi returned from his studies at Columbia University in 1914, he found the threats of illiteracy, usury, famine, banditry and disease to be the true existential enemies of Chinese life. Putting aside that ‘Western thinking’ he found least useful, and taking up with zeal a dynamic amalgamation of Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 conservative Confucianism, Social Gospel Christianity and John Dewey’s American pragmatism, Tao Xingzhi threw himself into both the Mass Education Movement and the Rural Reconstruction Movement alongside Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 and Jimmy Yen 晏陽初.

Both Tao Xingzhi and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, intriguingly enough, see mass literacy as one of the primary means of achieving cultural-national self-respect and self-determination. However, they take opposite tacks. Al-Ḥuṣrî is convinced that all Arabs must be compelled to learn classical Arabic and to use the language of the Qur’an and that all-important pædagogue ibn Khaldûn as their primary mode of written communication. Dialect is an obstacle to political unification, and plays into the hands of the imperialists. In his view, that could bridge the gulf not only between rich Arabs and poor Arabs, and achieve a worthwhile degree of dignity and self-respect for the latter, but also between the various regional variations on Arabic speech. Not only that, al-Ḥuṣrî is surprisingly constant on this aspect of his national curriculum in Iraq.

Tao Xingzhi, on the other hand, varies his approach. At first, he endorses and champions Jimmy Yen’s Thousand-Word Primer, the instrument by which he taught northeastern Chinese ‘volunteers’ in the trenches of WWI to write letters home. But later he finds Jimmy Yen’s Thousand-Word Primer to be still too restricting and slow-paced in bringing about the mass literacy he seeks. He briefly, but fervently, becomes an advocate of Ladinghua 拉丁化: the replacement of Chinese characters with Romanised pinyin. (Interesting historical tidbit: Tao Xingzhi was one of the people instrumental in designing Sin Wenz, and thus also the modern mainland Chinese schema for Pinyin!) Later in his career, however, it seems Tao Xingzhi grows frustrated with the practical limitations of pinyin. Even though he continues to advocate for phonetics in education, by the time he begins making plans to establish and fund the Yucai School 育才學校 in Chongqing, his enthusiasm for Romanisation cools, and he considers it simply another tool in the toolbox of achieving mass literacy in Chinese.

Tao Xingzhi’s idea of education is not nearly as linear as Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî’s. Because he is constantly faced in his pædagogical experimentation with the realities of class exploitation and deprivation, he finds he constantly has to revise his methodologies. Faced with a lack of facilities, he advocates open-air classrooms. Faced with shortages of supplies, he teaches writing with wet chopsticks on a kitchen table. Faced with the cultural conservatism of young Chinese women reluctant to learn from adult male teachers, and the desire of elderly men and women both to learn, Tao Xingzhi does not impose on either one, but instead crafts a novel solution: the ‘little teacher’ and the ‘relay teacher’. Kindergarteners and young schoolchildren become educational assistants who can enter women’s rooms and assist their grandparents to teach them writing, science and mathematics. ‘Relay teachers’ – essentially, adult student assistants – become popular among ‘circuit’ teachers who are overburdened with large class sizes and lack of materials.

The subject matter, too, expands. Through learning how to write, and through direct contact with the problems of the peasantry, Tao Xingzhi begins to experience something like a populist awakening. He becomes a harsh critic of usury and warlordism, and a particularly voluble critic of Guomindang œconomic policy and corruption. He begins to encourage the organisation and growth of rural purchase, marketing and credit coöperatives in order to beat out the gaolidai 高利貸, and also to encourage physical conditioning and rigorous training in traditional martial arts so that beleaguered villagers can beat out the warlords by themselves. He advocates learning in practical subjects and sciences, and excoriates the ‘bookish weaklings’ who are encouraged to copy Western educational fads. Although his programme for collective self-help is, at first, quite Confucian, conservative-traditionalist and not explicitly socialist (nor, indeed, was Jimmy Yen’s), by the end of his life no lesser a figure in the Communist Party than Zhou Enlai 周恩來 is comfortable referring to him as a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’: a term of high praise.

The œconomic-activist dimension of Tao Xingzhi’s pædagogy contrasts rather starkly with the cultural-activist pædagogy of Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, and this is not surprising given the political backdrop behind each educator. Tao had a friendly and unified culture at his back against a hostile republican government; al-Ḥuṣrî had a series of friendly kings at his back against a divided and often (but not consistently) hostile culture. The historical shadows left by the Qing and the Ottoman empires, respectively, were quite long, and created contradictions that were left to their inheritors to deal with. In the Arab world, it is unfair to say that Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî did nothing to connect the drive for political unity with that for œconomic equity and justice; it is simply that the circumstances were very different. Much of that job would be left to later men: Michel ‘Aflaq, Constantine Zurayq and, of course, Jamâl ‘Abd an-Nasr.