End Date :
The Heyman Center for the Humanities,
Komoda Room
ICLS Graduate Student Colloquium presentation by
Yurou Zhong (EALAC and ICLS)
Open to the ICLS community, the ICLS Graduate Student Colloquium provides an opportunity for our graduate students to present selections from their dissertations-in-progress and receive feedback from students and faculty. Please see the ‘program’ section below for a description of Ms. Zhong’s topic. For more information or to schedule to present in our spring colloquium, please contact the ICLS offices.
During the Great War and between 1916 and 1918, approximately 200,000 Chinese labor workers were recruited by the Allies and sent to France and Britain. To assist the only Chinese “troops” in the First World War, the YMCA dispatched a group of Chinese volunteers to Europe, most of whom were overseas students in the United States. Between the largely illiterate laborers and the enlightened new elites, there emerged the first modern Chinese anti-illiteracy movement, preluding a large-scale Chinese language and script reform as well as an international movement of mass education and rural reconstruction in the twentieth century. This talk traces the history of the Chinese script reform to its transnational provenance. By revisiting a by-now obscure episode in history, it strives to highlight the historical connections between the Great War, its immediate aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, the first modern Chinese literacy program in France, and the ensuing Chinese language and script reform. Ms. Zhong begins with an examination of the conditions of China’s entry into the Great War. Through a close reading of the contracts that brought the Chinese laborers to Europe, she assesses the central role of literacy in wartime communication and mass mobilization. Archival materials on James Yen (Yan Yangchu), one of the Chinese volunteers in France who started the literacy program for the laborers and later a leading figure in the international mass education movement, allow her to probe the anti-illiteracy program in detail and explore the dynamics between the masses and the elites. She closes with a discussion of the writings produced during the literacy movement in light of the debate between wenyan and baihua, and ponders how the written word was reconfigured not only as a technology for wartime communication, but also a vehicle for national enlightenment and solidarity.
