Two Scholars＇ Dedication to Cultural Undertakings

Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940) and Zhang Yuanji (1867-1959) were two outstanding scholars who introduced western knowl-edge to China and promoted education as an effective way to resuscitate the ancient central kingdom

The two scholars had a lot in common They were both natives of Zhejiang They passed important career examinations in the same years and they served as court officials for four years from 1894 to 1898 Though they grew up as traditional schol-ars of Chinese classic learning， both were eager to embrace new thoughts that were surging in from the outside world

China lost the war with Japan in 1894 and signed a humiliating treaty This plunged China into a crisis The Chinese scholars of vision believed the ancient country must start catching up and saving itself by introducing western knowledge， starting new education， and enlightening people

Zhang Yuanji founded Tongyi School in 1896 and started learning English He educated himself on western schools， railway and law In the autumn of 1894， Cai Yuanpei took a one-year-long leave and started a crash course at home to read western books translated from Japanese In August 1898， Cai founded Dongwen Society and started learning Japanese This way， he read western books translated into Japanese His diary shows that in six years from 1894 to 1899， he read more than 100 western books

Cai and Zhang made similar assessment of the failure of the One-Hundred-Day Re-form in 1898 Cai attributed the failure to a wrong strategy The reformers made no ef-forts to cultivate new political forces They tried to bring about a top-to-bottom reform through the emperor and drive away the conservatives They were doomed to fail-ure Zhang summed up the failure this way: A political reform that was imposed upon the mass that was indifferent， uninterested， and ignorant was doomed to failure

As a top-to-bottom reform proved impossible， Chinese intellectuals began to seek ways to change people’s minds at grassroots level in the hope that funda-mental changes would finally bring about changes at the state level After dismissed forever from the government after the failure of the One-Hundred-Day Reform in 1898， Zhang came to Shanghai， a city where new-type schools were mush-rooming He worked as the president of Translation Department at Nanyang Public School In 1901， he became the principal of the school In the same year， Cai Yuanpei came to work as the Director-Teacher of the Special Class of Nanyang Public School In October 1901， the two jointly founded “Diplomacy”， a newspaper that focused on foreign countries China policy and international affairs The newspaper also criticized the bad diplomatic moves of the Qing Dynasty

In the spring of 1902， Zhang Yuanji resigned from Nanyang Public School and worked as the director of the translation at Commercial Press Under his watch， the press published western classics and promoted series of books on politics， busi-ness and war The best-known translations included “The Wealth of Nations” and “Evolution and Ethics”

In the autumn of 1902， Cai Yuanpei resigned from Nanyang Public School after his involvement in a student protest In the winter of 1906， he went abroad for further studies with the approval of the government He spent four years in Ger-many， studying philosophy， psychology， aesthetics， history of culture and history of civilizations， ethnology at Berlin Uni-versity and Leipzig University

When he learned the success of the 1911 Revolution， he was so happy that he was sleepless He arrived in Shanghai in November 1911 On January 4， 1912， he took the post of education minister of the provisional government of the Republic of China In the following 180 days， he repealed the old education policy and adopted a five-point new education guideline He established a new educa-tion system， which re-moved Confucian clas-sics and morality， and promoted coeducation

Cai Yuanpei resigned on July 4， 1912 after Yuan put China under his rule From 1913 to 1916， he spent three years studying in France He came back to China in 1916 and served as the president of Peking University What he accomplished during his tenure earned him the everlast-ing fame as the father of Peking University He recruited famous thinkers regardless of their political affiliations and religious faith and regardless of their defects During his tenure， the university boasted a large group of leaders who later started the New Culture movement that totally shaped 20th-century China Some of these radical teaches in-clude the future Communist Party leaders such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao On the other hand， the university also boasted a group of teachers with conservative lean-ings The university became the hotbed of new thoughts Marxism was promoted and spread through the university

Zhang Yuanji contributed to the new culture of China through the books he published and talents he discovered and cultivated In 1902， Zhang Yuanji and Cai Yuanpei worked together to publish a series of textbooks for new schools By 1911， Commercial Press had published 375 titles of textbooks in 801 books for all grades and all subjects Altogether 100 million copies were printed and distributed that year Up to 1949 when New China came into being， Commercial Press accounted for sixty per-cent of the national textbooks market

With Zhang at the helm of the publishing house， Commercial Press published a series dictionaries and periodicals that exerted strong influences over the society It also published a series of ancient classics

Many young men working at the Com-mercial Press later became influential writers and scholars with the appreciation and assistance of Zhang In 1914， Zhang Yuanji read an essay by the 14-year-old Hu Yuzhi Zhang recruited the junior school boy to work as a trainee at the translation department A year later， Zhang promoted him to be an associate editor at “Orient”， a literary periodical Zhang later sent him to study at Paris University and appointed him editor-in-chief of “Orient” In 1916， Shen Yanbing， a trainee at English Department of the Commercial Press， wrote Zhang Yuanji a brief letter talking about Ci Yuan， a newly published dictionary of words and phrases Zhang appreciated the young man and appointed him an editor at Chinese Language Department and later appointed him editor-in-chief of “Monthly Report on Short Stories” Shen later became a famous realist novelist under the penname of Mao Dun After the founding of the New China， he worked as Minister of Culture

The Commercial Press under Zhang’s leadership became China’s number one cultural institution where a large galaxy of talented scholars used to work Many of them later became leaders in their specific academic fields Over of the fifty years， the Commercial Press morphed from a printing workshop into the largest publisher in the Far East □