The Paradox of State-Building: Tuition-Free Teachers' Schools and Communist Revolution in Republican China
Keywords:
state building, teachers’ school, Chinese Communist PartyAbstract
States often deploy public education to instill official ideology and advance state-building. Yet schooling can also enlighten and empower; when it reaches disadvantaged groups, it may nurture challengers to the state. This paper examines this paradox in the context of the Nationalist government’s 1930s expansion of tuition-free secondary teachers’ schools. Using a panel dataset covering 1,697 counties, we show that counties with more teachers’ schools were more likely to establish Chinese Communist Party (CCP) county committees from March 1938 onward, when the CCP resumed mass recruitment and readmitted intellectuals. Two mechanisms account for this pattern. First, tuition-free teachers’ schools created a pool of educated youth from non-elite backgrounds who, given their origins, were especially receptive to CCP appeals. Second, following the 1927 KMT–CCP split, many CCP intellectuals fled to the countryside and taught covertly, giving students at rural teachers’ schools greater exposure to communism.
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