Beijing University and Chinese political culture, 1898-1920

The collapse of the imperial system in the early twentieth century fundamentally altered the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese state. Confucian scholars enjoyed a privileged status in late imperial society, but in order to reap the benefits of their position they had to accept the limitations on their independence imposed by the imperial state. Thus when the Qing Dynasty was overthrown intellectuals faced both a loss and an opportunity. This dissertation focuses on the history of Beijing University (or "Beida") during the decades before and after the 1911 Revolution in order to study how the literati elite reacted to the cataclysmic shift in its relationship with the Chinese state.;Beida was China's first national university and by far and away the most important in the country until the early 1920s. From the beginning the university occupied a unique and prestigious place at the intersection of Chinese political and cultural life; it was politically significant owing to its elite status and its close ties to the central government, and it was also significant culturally because its faculty was at the forefront of a vitally important state-sponsored effort to achieve a new balance between Chinese and Western learning. This combination of political and cultural centrality assured that educational and intellectual matters at the university would have political repercussions, and that debates there over cultural issues would reflect struggles for political power.;For intellectuals who desired to gain a highly visible platform from which to influence the nation's political and cultural development after the 1911 Revolution Beijing University represented a natural target. However, in order for Beida to serve as leader of reform it had to be re-fashioned into a more modern-style university, and it had to achieve a greater degree of autonomy from the state. This dissertation is a study of that re-fashioning process, and of the attempt on the part of a community of politically moderate intellectuals to re-define their social position and their role in the public life of the nation.