The “Spirit” of Confucian Education in Contemporary China: Songyang Academy and Zhengzhou University

Songyang Academy as a Site of Cultural Heritage Tourism

Originally a Buddhist temple and later a Daoist abbey, this site in the foothills of Mount Song, one of the five sacred peaks, first became a center of Confucian scholarship during the Northern Song (Gong, 2014: 4–8). Songyang Academy virtually disappeared under the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan, but reemerged in the Ming. It was destroyed in the Ming-Qing transition, and restored again in the early Qing (Gong, 2014: 9–12). At the end of the Qing, the academy was transformed into a Western-style school during the educational reforms of 1905. During the revolutionary years of the mid-twentieth century it became a cadre training base, a school to train teachers, and finally a worker-peasant-soldier school during the Cultural Revolution. Beginning in the early 1980s, oversight of Songyang Academy was gradually transferred to the Dengfeng Cultural Relics Bureau, which undertook renovations at the site (Gong, 2014: 13–18; Zhang, 2012). These efforts were funded by the Henan Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau, and in 1989 the Henan Provincial People’s Government proclaimed Songyang Academy a “key conservation domain” 重点保护范围 (Gong, 2014: 18). Restoration work continued in the 1990s, and in 2001 Songyang Academy was named a “National Cultural Relic Conservation Unit” 国家文物保护单位 (Zhang, 2012: 25).

Although the architectural layout of the restored academy retains the original form with rows of courtyards along a central axis behind the main gate (see Figure 1), the oldest remaining structures date to no earlier than the Qing period (Zhang, 2012: 23). Despite this, in 2010 Songyang Academy achieved World Heritage Site status as one of eleven “Historical Monuments of Dengfeng in the Centre of Heaven and Earth” approved by UNESCO (“Historic monuments of Dengfeng at the centre of heaven and earth,” n.d.). ² Because of its location on a tourist route comprising former capitals (Zhengzhou-Luoyang-Xi’an), Songyang Academy attracts tourists from as far away as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, and domestic tourism has steadily increased (Zhang, 2012: 25). Plans for the promotion of tourism here include organizing travel around architectural features, a culture festival for tourists to experience Confucian sacrifices and teaching activities, educational lectures geared to the Confucian classics, and souvenirs that provide material representations of historical figures and events (Zhang, 2012: 25–26). Dengfeng county is a relatively poor area and could derive economic benefit from increased tourism at the site; but the investment in Songyang Academy by Zhengzhou University, a major provincial educational institution, promises to be at least as rewarding as the development of tourism—albeit not in a commercially profitable way.

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Figure 1.

Entrance to Songyang Academy. http://www.syshuyuan.com/move.html.

Higher Education, Confucianism, and National Studies

In addition to the growth of cultural heritage tourism, the revival of Songyang Academy and the forging of its partnership with Zhengzhou University in the first decade of the twenty-first century are related to three other developments ongoing since the last decade of the twentieth: the dramatic expansion and “massification” of higher education, an upsurge of both academic and popular interest in Confucianism, and the national studies movement.

Zhengzhou University was first established as a comprehensive university in 1956 (“Zhengzhou University,” n.d.). Forty years later, in 1996, it was designated by the National Education Commission (later the Ministry of Education) as one of the Project 211 (21st century/100 universities) schools, a group of more than a hundred Chinese universities that were identified as leading institutions of higher education and research (Li, 2004: 17). In order to be included, universities must meet scientific, technological, and human resource standards, as well as offer a set of advanced degree programs. Zhengzhou University is the only Project 211 school in Henan, and as such it receives dedicated funding from the national government to support research and the development of both graduate and undergraduate education. In addition to Project 211, a higher education reform plan was adopted in 1999 to expand and further improve the quality and global competitiveness of higher education by reorganizing and rationalizing both content and delivery (Wang, 2014). As part of these reforms, in 2000, Zhengzhou University was merged with two other institutions: Zhengzhou University of Technology and Henan Medical University (“Zhengzhou University,” n.d.). As at universities elsewhere in China and beyond, science and technology absorb the bulk of funding and receive the most accolades. However, considerable attention is still devoted to undergraduate “citizen” education in the humanities. Increasingly, the content of this education has been defined by the pedagogical ideals of national studies, which incorporates Confucianism as one of the cornerstones of national culture. ³

Scholarly engagement with “New Confucianism” 新儒学 has been ongoing since the “culture fever” 文化热 of the 1980s turned attention to culture as a key element in public discourse (Song, 2003; Ai, 2008; Makeham, 2008; Billioud, 2007; Chen, 2012). A number of new organizations appeared in the 1980s, most prominently the Academy of Confucian Culture and the China Confucius Foundation, and international conferences were hosted to raise the visibility of Confucianism to a global scholarly audience. By the 1990s, debates about the role of Confucianism in contemporary Chinese political and social life, as well as its relationship to Marxism, engaged intellectuals in the public realm and were encouraged by political authorities (Ai, 2008; Makeham, 2008; Wu 2014). Like other complex bodies of thought with extensive canonical texts, Confucianism has been, and continues to be, subject to a vast range of interpretations and uses, including its embrace as part of national studies.

The term guoxue (national studies) has a long and complex history from the early twentieth century, beginning with its importation from Japan, where it had been used to refer to intellectual nativism (Dirlik, 2011: 7). Its adoption in early twentieth-century China similarly referred to scholarly studies of the historic roots of what was Chinese, not foreign, and was closely related to reassessments of the national past (Hon, 2003; Gan, 2009; Liu, 2011). The 1990s revival of national studies in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Incident reached a much broader, popular audience, facilitated and commodified by both media and the market (Makeham, 2011: 14). Suppression of the explosive demonstrations of 1989 required more than military force. Accordingly, the government enlisted the aid of cultural authorities to promote public identification with unifying cultural symbols in the form of national studies. Like Confucianism, national studies has continued to be the subject of debate as to both its content and its uses (Schneider, 2001; Liu, 2009; Liu, 2011; Xie, 2011).

Patriotic Education and Cultural Heritage

In tandem with the revival of national studies in the 1990s, and in part a response to the Tiananmen Incident, the government launched a new “patriotic education” campaign to educate not just students but all Chinese people about the past in order to cultivate patriotism and strengthen national identity (Zhao, 1998; Wang, 2008). Although this campaign had been preceded by directives calling for the strengthening of patriotic education in the early 1980s (Perry, 2013: 11–12), the need for patriotic education intensified in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident. The key document that made this campaign official in 1991 was the Central Committee’s “Notice about Conducting Education of Patriotism and Revolutionary Tradition by Exploiting Intensively Cultural Relics” (Wang, 2008: 794). Highlighting the use of “cultural relics” as a tool of patriotic education, the document focused on revolutionary artifacts and sites that were testimonials either to national humiliation (and therefore designed to fire up feelings of national pride and patriotism) or to heroic struggles against enemies within and without. Nonetheless, the term “cultural relics” also encompassed prerevolutionary artifacts and sites such as the Great Wall (Waldron, 1994).

The full-scale implementation of the campaign came in 1994 with the issuing of the “Outline on Implementing Patriotic Education,” aimed especially at youth, although it recognized that education in patriotism should be for everyone (Wang, 2008: 794; Zhao, 1998: 293). As spelled out in this document, one of the most important aspects of the campaign was the requirement that local governments at all levels establish “patriotic education bases” (Wang, 2008: 794). Schools in particular were expected to conduct educational activities at these sites and to incorporate such activities into the school’s curriculum for moral education (Wang, 2008: 795). Tourist sites of all kinds (museums, historical and scenic sites, memorials, etc.) were also ordered to highlight their patriotic identities (Zhao, 1998: 295). A decade later, in 2004, a follow-up document announced “strengthening and improving the work of patriotic education bases” (Wang, 2008: 796). Although the focus of attention was “red tourism,” connected to revolutionary history, patriotic education also included cultural relics of the prerevolutionary past, such as academies (Wang, 2012). Songyang Academy, for example, was named a Provincial Patriotic Education Site 省级爱国主义教育基地 in 1999 (Zhang, 2012: 25; Gong, 2001: 12).

Beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the party-state leadership also displayed heightened interest in the concept of cultural heritage (Ai, 2012: 129; Perry, 2013). The earlier codification of “cultural heritage” in the 1982 Law on the Protection of Cultural Heritage of the People’s Republic of China created a new term for material culture, replacing “relic” 文物 with the neologism “heritage” 遗产 (Shepherd, 2013: 4). This law explicitly linked heritage preservation to the goals of nationalism and revolutionary socialism (Sofield and Li, 1998: 370–71), and described “cultural heritage” 文物遗产 in very broad terms, hazily equating it with “Chinese civilization.” An amorphous Confucianism—and by extension institutions associated with it—was regarded by policy makers as a cornerstone of Chinese civilization and therefore a key component of China’s cultural heritage.

The restoration of Songyang and other academies fits neatly into the chronology of an evolving concept of cultural heritage in the late twentieth century (Blumenfield and Silverman, 2013). Academies as sites of domestic tourism are also a manifestation of the Confucian “renaissance” (Chen, 2012; Kang, 2012) aimed at a popular audience. Renewed interest in Confucian ideas and practices at a grassroots level began in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Billioud, 2010, 2011; Dutournier and Ji, 2009), when academies also began to be seen as tourist destinations. Popular engagement with Confucianism through lineage organizations, ancestral worship, and educational activities grew, initially either ignored by, or tacitly approved by, party-state authorities (Svensson, 2006; Payette, 2016). For the latter, some features of Confucianism could even be deemed politically useful—and therefore to be supported—because of their potential value for promoting harmony in an increasingly fractious society through moral education (Dutournier and Ji, 2009; Payette, 2015, 2016). The orchestrated promotion of Confucianism in campaigns such as “Countryside Confucianism” 乡村儒学 correlated with the dramatic expansion of domestic tourism, one aspect of which was “culture tourism” (Payette, 2015; Wu, Zhu, and Xu, 2000; Yan and Bramwell, 2008), like that proposed for Songyang Academy (Zhang, 2012: 25–26).

For Zhengzhou University, however, rather than being simply a site of “culture tourism,” Songyang Academy provides a physical space that simultaneously reminds students of their cultural heritage and embodies Confucian ideals of learning for pedagogical purposes. The formal partnership between Zhengzhou University (hereafter Zhengda) and Songyang Academy was initiated in 1999 when Zhengda established a University Student Cultural Quality Education Site 大学生文化素质教育基地 at the academy, the same year Songyang Academy was named a Provincial-Level Patriotic Education Site (Song and Jiang, 2010: foreword 2; and see above). Over the next decade Zhengda helped support the renovation of the academy as a supplemental campus for national studies and Confucian values education. ⁴

Songyang Academy and National Studies at Zhengda

Today the main gate of the university bears the name of Songyang Academy along with Zhengzhou University (Figure 2), suggesting to the observer that they are one and the same and attesting to the important educational role Zhengda envisioned for the academy. The name is inscribed in the calligraphy of the provincial party secretary, Xu Guangchun, lending official authority to the partnership in a manner that recalls the use of imperial script on name plaques for academies in the past. When the ceremony to unveil the name plaque was held in September 2009, the local newspaper quoted officials from Zhengda and Songyang who described joint plans for the development of national studies teaching and research, as well as a center for research on Central Plain culture (“Zhengzhou daxue Songyang shuyuan guapai,” 2009).

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Figure 2.

Sign on Zhengda’s main gate: “Zhengzhou University, Songyang Academy.” http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2009-09-03/082316233745s.shtml.

In building a national studies curriculum in 2009, Zhengda was competing with two other major institutions that already had such programs: Renmin (since 2005) and Wuhan (since 2002) Universities. Like these other programs, cultivation of familiarity with the classics and related learning was the core of Zhengda’s national studies curriculum, which also had the stated goal of improving “quality” 素质 (“Guoxueban peiyang fang’an,” 2012). The term suzhi 素质 (quality) has a complex political and etymological genealogy in reform-era China. By this time (2009), it had a well-established meaning in the context of higher education, referring to the educational goal of instilling the values of patriotic citizenship in students (Kipnis, 2006; Jacka, 2009). This was precisely what the Zhengda national studies curriculum was designed to accomplish through a core curriculum of history, literature, and philosophy that would encourage students to identify with the cultural patrimony of the nation and thus cultivate the quality of suzhi.

Along with curriculum development and other institutional goals, regional aspirations also provided context for Zhengda’s investment in Songyang Academy as a showcase for its commitment to the transmission of China’s cultural heritage. Zhengda-Songyang was the product of collaboration between the university and the Henan Provincial Party Committee, Zhengzhou municipal authorities and Dengfeng county. At the opening ceremony in October 2009 for the inaugural national studies class, provincial party secretary Xu was named honorary head of Zhengda-Songyang and delivered an address on the relationship between Henan provincial and Chinese national history (“Shengwei shuji Xu Guangchun . . .,” 2009). His speech placed Henan culture in a continuum with Central Plain culture and national culture, suggesting that Henan was the core of Central Plain culture, which in turn was the heartland of Chinese culture. The National Studies Institute at Zhengda was to build on the “spirit” 精神 of the ancient academy, expressing the special characteristics of Central Plain culture, while incorporating the concept of the contemporary university to foster academic research and the nurturing of human talents, service to society, and cultural tradition (“Zhengzhou daxue Songyang shuyuan,” n.d.). Songyang Academy thus operated as a kind of national studies college for Zhengda, which in 2011 appointed professors from the Henan Academy of Sciences and the Zhengda History, Literature, and Public Administration Colleges to act as tutors to undergraduate students (“Woxiao Songyang shuyuan pinren shoupi benkesheng daoshi,” 2011).

The pedagogical function of Songyang Academy extended not just to students who majored in national studies, but also to students in other humanities majors, in particular those in the History College. Convocations for History College freshmen students began to be held regularly at the academy. In September 2012, for example, approximately 135 students from the History College were bussed from the main campus to the academy, where they listened to a series of formal speeches presented by university officials (including the chief party official attached to the university) and professors, exhorting them to follow Confucian principles and study hard (see Figure 3). After the opening speeches, a traditional scholar’s desk was brought out and a professor from the college lectured on Confucianism. Then the students had a short time to explore the academy, taking lots of photos, before being hustled off to lunch and then another local historic site, a Mongol-era observatory that was damaged by Japanese bombs during the Sino-Japanese War. ⁵ This added another layer of—in this case modern—history to the academic excursion, precisely in the way that the framers of the patriotic education campaign intended. In bringing the students to Songyang for this ceremony, university administrators displayed confidence in experiential learning as a way to inculcate values: experiencing the academy is regarded as at least as powerful as hearing lectures or reading books. ⁶

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Figure 3.

Zhengda History College freshmen listening to a lecture at Songyang Academy’s opening convocation, September 2012. Photo by the author.

Zhengda’s role in ongoing debates about national studies in higher education was prominently displayed when it hosted the second national Higher Education National Studies Academy Heads joint conference and National Studies Education Forum in October 2013 (Wang Shaopei, 2013). Thirty heads and assistant heads of national studies institutes from all over China, including Hong Kong, as well as Taiwan, attended. After the presentation of a status report on plans for the reconstruction of Songyang Academy, a commentator for a Shenzhen newspaper described the academy’s restoration as a reflection in miniature of “national studies fever” 国学热 (Wang Shaopei, 2013). Citing various speakers at the conference, the report in the Shenzhen paper paints a portrait of prevalent uncertainty about exactly what national studies is. This uncertainty is rooted in concern about the appropriate role of Western learning, as well as the relationship between past (“tradition”) and present (contemporary society). The report returns at the end to Songyang Academy, drawing attention to the “academy tradition” in general. As a representative from Renmin University’s National Studies Institute elaborated:

Since academies were established, they have played a great role in cultivating human talent in ancient society and in academic culture. [Our] National Studies Institute takes traditional learning as its base, but doesn’t reject the best features of Western theory; based on Chinese spirit, study the past! In his “The Condition of Ancient Chinese Academies,” Liang Qichao pointed out that the establishment of Tsinghua’s National Studies Institute [in the early twentieth century] ought to take ancient academies as a model. (Wang Shaopei, 2013)

Conflicting interpretations, questions, and doubts about national studies as a project itself were not new. In 2009, the prominent historian Liu Zehua had criticized national studies, arguing not only that the identification of national studies with Confucianism was problematic for a number of reasons, but also that this vision of traditional Chinese culture was antithetical to the needs of a modern China, according to Marxian laws of historical materialism (Liu, 2013 [2009]). Liu attacked the former president of Renmin University, Ji Baocheng, who had supported national studies as a way to promote the sinicization of Marxism (Liu, 2013 [2009]: 139; Ji, 2008), an unsurprising view coming from a prominent figure associated with one of the first universities to establish a national studies institute (2005).

In contrast to this report from a national forum of educational leaders, a student perspective on national studies in higher education in connection with Songyang Academy appeared in a recent microblog entitled “My Songyang Story: Record of a Major Event at Songyang Academy.” The anonymous student described his (her?) decision to major in national studies at Zhengda-Songyang and the reactions to it:

With the idea that “I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond [lit., “would rather be a chicken’s head than a phoenix’s tail”],” I went to Zhengda. . . . I signed up for national studies. Naively not having thought about future prospects, I felt that I more or less liked it, so I signed up. Just as my parents opposed my studying humanities at all, they similarly opposed my majoring in national studies. But their opposition wasn’t strong, so I persevered and they finally acquiesced to my choice. . . . So I started on my path to doing national studies, without having thought about how far I would go on this path or where it would lead. In August 2012 . . . I began my life of study at Songyang Academy. (“Wode Songyang gushi,” 2015)

The narrator goes on to relate that, when asked what his/her major is, the response elicits further questions about exactly what national studies is. Inability to answer the question leads the student to ruminate on the nature of national studies as an academic major and to try to explain its meaning. It reaches a point where, when asked what he/she is studying, the student simply says “history” or “literature,” to avoid extended discussions or even arguments.

In discussing various efforts to promote national studies in higher education, the narrator mentions universities’ use of ancient academies to bolster their position, naming Hunan University’s Yuelu Academy and Jiangxi Normal University’s White Deer Grotto Academy. In the case of his/her own institution, the student asks, “Exactly what is ‘Zhengzhou University–Songyang Academy?” To answer this, the author recounts a portion of a speech by an official at the Eleventh Henan Provincial People’s Congress in January 2008:

[Because] Mount Song culture is a treasure of Chinese culture, we should move forward to protect it, and Songyang Academy is a representative of Mount Song culture, so we should pay even more attention to it. Zhengzhou University is a national “211 Project” key university, and Songyang Academy is very famous, so if the two are joined together as “Zhengzhou University–Songyang Academy,” it will not only expand the reputation of Zhengda, [it will also] have great benefit for advancing the conservation of Mount Song culture and promoting the development of Mount Song tourism, and Mount Song sites will have a new name card! (“Wode Songyang gushi,” 2015)

As if fulfilling this mandate, in 2013 and 2014 Henan provincial, Zhengzhou municipal, and Dengfeng county stakeholders in the reconstruction of Songyang Academy met periodically at Zhengda to review and consult on the project (“Woxiao zhaokai Songyang shuyuan zongti guihua lunzhenghui,” 2013), and ultimately in early 2014 to approve its completion (“Woxiao zhaokai Songyang shuyuan zongti guihua zhuanjia zixunhui,” 2014). In September 2014, the annual opening convocation of the History College was held as had become customary at Songyang Academy. On this occasion, however, a new global stage in the restoration of the academy was marked by references to it as a World Cultural Heritage Site, following the inscription of Mount Song in the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2010 (“Lishi xueyuan zai Dengfeng shijie wenhua yichandi juxing 2014ji kaixue dianli,” 2014). The convocation was combined with a symposium on the theme of “Clarify Teaching, Enrich the Self” 喻教润身, phrases drawn from classical texts. ⁷ The “Zhengzhou University–Songyang Academy National Studies Symposium” was led by a History College professor, who explicated the classical phrases in the title: yujiao 喻教 = enlighten the student’s inner soul; runshen 润身 = perfect the innate moral character. Placing these classical references to character building—and therefore by extension to the concept of suzhi—in a contemporary context, the head of the History College and deputy head of Songyang Academy exhorted students to study zealously in order to build the “China Dream of the Chinese people’s great renaissance.” A field trip to the oldest extant brick pagoda at nearby Songyue Temple and the Yuan period observatory (see above) was designed to enhance students’ appreciation of their cultural heritage.

A similar convocation was held in September 2015 (“Lishi xueyuan zai Dengfeng shijie wenhua yichandi juxing 2015ji kaixue dianli,” 2015). The theme of the accompanying symposium, as in the preceding year, was captured in two classical phrases: “grasp sincerity” 持敬 and “take pleasure in learning” 乐学. ⁸ This time the lectures centered on cultivating in the students an appreciation of the importance of Central Plain culture as the origin of Chinese culture. A philosophy professor’s lecture claimed that Central Plain culture had “suffered abuse” 诟病 and that this was equally an attack on the Chinese people, evoking a trope that has been widely commented on (x “hurts the Chinese people’s feelings”). The revival of Central Plain culture is seen here as a key to the renaissance of Chinese culture and the Chinese people. The report on this convocation-symposium concludes again with the statement about “building together the China Dream.”

Earlier that year, in May, a competition for national studies students on knowledge of their major field was held for the fifth time (“Zhengzhou daxue Songyang shuyuan, Lishi xueyuan juxing guoxue zhishi jingsai ji guoxueban shoushu yishi,” 2015). Over 300 faculty from various colleges and 453 students from 28 schools participated. The theme of the competition was drawn from the Ministry of Education’s campaign “Read the traditional classics and sample the literary life—respect China’s excellent traditional culture,” designed to encourage students to carry on and promote China’s traditional culture. Eighteen finalists competed in the last stage, answering questions on dynastic history, historical personages, religion, philosophy, and poetry. Winners received collections of the Annotated Analects and Notes on the Four Books as prizes.

A report on this competition on the Zhengda website referred to Xi Jinping’s repeated emphasis on the importance of traditional Chinese culture as a key element in China’s “soft power,” and that “renewing the excellent traditional Chinese culture will depend on renewing human talents, and renewing human talents will depend on renewing ‘quality education’ [素质教育].” One of the speakers at the competition awards ceremony referred to Zhengda-Songyang’s institutional ties with Beijing University’s National Studies Institute as well as with Hunan University’s Yuelu Academy and Jiangxi Normal University’s White Deer Grotto Academy. During the same month, Jiangxi Normal University’s affiliate Jiujiang College hosted an exchange activity for the Zhengda national studies group described as the “White Deer–Songyang Academy Culture Tour” (“Guoxueban juban . . .,” 2015).

Other institutional ties were cemented in 2015 with the signing of a partnership agreement between Zhengda-Songyang and the recently established Confucian Academy (Kongxuetang) in Guiyang (“Zhengzhou daxue Songyang shuyuan ruzhu Guiyang Kongxuetang qianyue yishi juxing,” 2015). The collaboration agreement followed similar ones between the Confucian Academy and Beijing, Zhejiang, Fudan, and other universities, but this was the first one in which an academy was the basis for joining the Confucian Academy’s Chinese Culture and International Research Unit. According to the party secretary of the Confucian Academy Cultural Communications Center, the purpose of the Guiyang Confucian Academy was to combine the promotion of Chinese traditional culture with the cultivation of the core values of socialism. ⁹ Although only a few years old, the Guiyang Confucian Academy is evidently well funded, and has a significant publishing presence through a journal that included articles in its first issue in 2014 by the American scholar Tu Wei-ming and the Taiwan Buddhist Master Hsing Yun as well as by European scholars. The academy also sponsors a host of public Confucian activities that attract large numbers of viewers and participants. Zhengda-Songyang was apparently an eager partner in this enterprise, which extends its Henan provincial base to a national center of Confucian proselytization.

“Encountering Songyang”: Zhengda-Songyang and “Academy Spirit”

Beyond formal agreements for institutional collaboration, meetings of administrative stakeholders, and annual convocation ceremonies, how was the Zhengda-Songyang partnership viewed by students and faculty? What did Songyang Academy mean to them? A collection of writings about Songyang Academy by Zhengda faculty and students offers rare access to their views, although the political process that produced the collection complicates how we read them. In May 2008, more than a year before the 2009 formal inauguration of Zhengda-Songyang, the university launched a series of political campaigns under the slogan “Songyang Academy, Central Plain Culture, Zhengda Spirit” 嵩阳书院、中华文化、郑大精神 (Song and Jiang, 2010: preface 1). One of the main activities associated with the campaigns was a competition for writings on this tripartite theme. From about 200 entries submitted over a period of 3 months, 60 were selected to be published in a collection entitled Encountering Songyang, which includes essays, poetry, and other literary reflections on the meaning of the academy (Song and Jiang, 2010).

As participants in a competition with a political agenda, both students and faculty obviously designed their submissions to respond to the campaign’s political message and thus appeal to the judges. Nonetheless, the writings offer valuable insight into student and faculty perspectives on higher education, Confucianism, and national studies through their focus on the Zhengda-Songyang partnership. The essays show how individual students and faculty draw on conceptions of Chinese history and cultural tradition to position their understanding of Songyang Academy, revealing a consistent and coherent—though not necessarily historically accurate—view of an educational legacy they find relevant to the present. While the first and last chapters consist mainly of literary and poetic essays, the remaining five chapters are substantive essays that relate Songyang Academy’s history to its current relationship with Zhengda, describing the influence of the academy and “academy spirit” on contemporary university education and campus life. ¹⁰ These form the core textual source for the summary and analysis that follows.

A majority of the contributions in the collection are by students from various colleges, with the remainder contributed by faculty from the History College. Among the student writings, the History College is well represented, but so are the Public Administration and Journalism and Media Colleges. An exemplary essay, “From Academy Tradition to University Spirit,” briefly describes the historical origins of academies beginning in the Tang (Song and Jiang, 2010: 56–63). The author, from the Journalism and Media College, then offers a personal view of what the ancient tradition of academies meant in terms of Confucian ideals of learning: the promotion of self-cultivation and ethical training; freedom of academic research; teaching and learning as a collaborative enterprise with mutual respect between teachers and students; the collection and printing of books; and the interdependence of teaching and learning (Song and Jiang, 2010: 57–59). Taking up the topic of “university spirit,” he (?) quotes the nineteenth-century Catholic theologian Cardinal Newman on the concept of the university and attributes the decline of “university spirit” over time to the dramatic transformations of modern society. ¹¹ He argues that the university has not been able to avoid the influence of commercialization and the marketplace, also blaming utilitarianism and pragmatism for the erosion of general education and “university spirit.” He then raises the possibility of drawing on models to restore “university spirit” from America or Europe, which produced the modern university. But he rejects “internationalization” as too facile a solution, preferring instead to seek answers in Chinese cultural tradition, which offers the educational model of the academy. He advocates using Confucian principles of moral education to nurture a sense of social responsibility and build a “humanistic spirit” 人文精神 so that the university can play a bigger role in the rapidly changing society of today.

The second—and potentially more politically sensitive—point he makes is that an “atmosphere of liberation, freedom, and truth-seeking is a precondition for the development of science,” and therefore academic freedom should be a basic standard for the modern university. He says that this was already implemented in ancient academies, where students sought out teachers and different schools of thought were created, in the spirit of “a hundred schools contending.” Accordingly, for this author the “spirit of academic freedom” 学术自由精神 is the most important goal, drawing out students’ criticism, questioning of other views, and ultimately their ability to fashion their own opinions (Song and Jiang, 2010: 61–62). The idealized representation of educational culture at Songyang Academy promotes the cultivation of intellectual independence and free inquiry as necessary to the development of science, but perhaps even more importantly, to the nurturing of human character and intellectual creativity, or “humanistic education.” ¹²

The essay equates “academy spirit” with both “university spirit” and “humanistic spirit.” “Academy spirit,” however, is the most frequently used term, reflecting current trends in scholarship as well as in the contributions to the collection. ¹³ One of the earliest uses of this term was by Hu Shi in a lecture he gave in Nanjing in 1924 (Chen and Deng, 1998: 2593–97). He claimed that it is possible to determine the “spirit of the age” 时代精神 through the shrines at academies because they reveal whom the people of the time revered, and thus what beliefs and values they held. Hu Shi also believed that because lectures were held at academies, they were places where discussions of politics, as well as self-cultivation and research, took place (Chen and Deng, 1998: 2596–97). All these features created what he called “academy spirit.” Hu Shi was not alone at the time in speaking urgently for a psychological (or spiritual) transformation of society as well as a material one (Shepherd, 2013: 55). This was as true of Sun Yat-sen and the Guomindang in their era as it was later of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Sun Yat-sen’s Republic, the Guomindang’s New Life Movement, and the “spiritual civilization” campaigns of the CCP in the late twentieth century could all be said to have shared a Confucian belief in moral education and individual transformation in the service of society and the political order (Shepherd, 2013: 67; Yuan, 2001).

Although he did not explicitly use the term “academy spirit,” a young Mao Zedong had already brought up the topic of academies in his “Manifesto on the Founding of the Hunan Self-Study University” in 1921 (Ding, 1996: 236–37). In explaining his own ideas about education, Mao compared the academy with modern schools, citing positive aspects of academy education: “The relationship between students and teachers was close and intimate. . . . There was no practice of academic governance by professors, but there was a spirit of mutual intercourse between teachers and students, and all had the freedom to pursue their own research” (Ding 1996: 237; Schram, 1994: 89; Pepper 1996: 98). These very qualities are the characteristics of “academy spirit” cited by a number of the essayists in the Zhengda competition.

One of the lengthiest and most substantive essays in the collection makes reference to both Hu Shi and Mao in its discussion of “academy spirit” (Song and Jiang, 2010: 150). The author, a Law College student, views Songyang Academy as representative of an idealized educational system in which teaching and research are carried out simultaneously, schools of thought openly debate their differences, teachers and students harmoniously interact, and learning encompasses moral conduct as well as intellectual development. This is what he would define as “academy spirit,” echoing the young Mao’s description of academy education. He then turns his attention to summarizing the historical characteristics of Central Plain culture before addressing the main theme of his essay: the creation of “university humanistic spirit” 大学人文精神. He prefaces his manifesto for creating the “university spirit” that Zhengda should have with an analysis of the inadequacies of contemporary “university spirit,” attributing these to political influence on the university and slavish imitation of foreign models—from America, Europe, Japan, and Russia. Because of these influences, Chinese universities are uncertain about what they should be and therefore need guidance from models found in the Chinese past: academies. He even quotes Hu Shi’s famous statement about the demise of academies being a misfortune for China (Song and Jiang, 2010: 155). As crucial components of “university spirit,” he identifies a “spirit of freedom” 自由精神, “moral spirit” 道德精神, “empiricist spirit” 求实精神, “spirit of renewal” 创新精神, “spirit of the age,” and finally, “humanistic spirit” (Song and Jiang, 2010: 159). What he means by “spirit of the age” (a term also used by Hu Shi) is that the university ideally should be both a mirror and a critic of society.

The final substantive chapter is devoted to essays by History College faculty, beginning with one by Han Guohe 韩国河, vice-director of Zhengda-Songyang and a professor of history. Entitled “Songyang Academy from the Perspective of Cultural Heritage,” the essay presents a historical discussion of the place of Songyang Academy in Central Plain culture, first identifying the main characteristics of Central Plain culture. The historic role of Songyang Academy as a place that fostered the development of Neo-Confucianism and also a site that represented the interaction among Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, according to Han, is related in the present day to the revival of national studies research (Song and Jiang 2010: 230). Following up on this theme, Han ties the development and use of Songyang Academy as cultural heritage to the goal of utilizing Henan’s cultural resources to strengthen the position of the province in national cultural production, with accompanying economic and social benefits (Song and Jiang, 2010: 237).

The essays in Encountering Songyang exhibit a range of approaches and ideas about the role of the academy in past and present, but they cluster around a few core points. They idealize academy education as encouraging self-cultivation, fostering the expression of different ideas, and promoting free inquiry, (ironically) also identified by Mao Zedong in 1921 as positive features of academy student life. In these essays, free inquiry is sometimes presented as important because it is a prerequisite for science, but the more urgent concern seems to be with the development of humanistic education and the cultivation of moral values among university students in the present day. There is an automatic, unquestioned assumption of the equation of nation and culture in the contributions that Songyang Academy can make as the base for a national studies institute (Song and Jiang, 2010: 237–38). At the same time, regional identity emerges as a powerful theme in the emphasis on Central Plain culture. What is special about Henan is its ancient historic role in cultural development on the Central Plain, and Songyang Academy is a more recent representation of the centrality of the region in the formation of the Chinese people’s national identity. Its place in the transmission and transformation of Confucianism is highlighted as a distinctive regional, and even local (Dengfeng county), contribution to nation, culture, and people (Li, 2013).

National Studies, Confucianism, and “Academy Spirit” in Higher Education

Continuing debates on the precise content of national studies have not diminished the interest of the party-state in promoting elements of Chinese cultural tradition that foster patriotism. By cultivating pride in the Chinese nation, the heir of that tradition and the bearer of a common cultural identity, political leaders strengthen their own authority as representatives of the nation. One widely agreed-upon component of Chinese cultural tradition is Confucianism, open to as many interpretations as the concept of national studies. But it is possible to isolate and adapt aspects of Confucianism that have particular appeal to higher education authorities in the wake of both Tiananmen-era student resistance and later social, economic, and cultural liberalization: a set of moral values that encourage disciplined study and selfless service to the nation. Confucianism can also be viewed as a source of “Chinese characteristics” that distinguish Chinese higher education from its global competitors (Onsman, 2012: 182).

Along with national studies “fever,” the term “academy fever” has appeared in recent writings to refer both to the founding of private schools that teach Confucian classics using traditional pedagogies such as chanting and rote memorization of texts, and to the revival of “ancient” academies such as Yuelu and Songyang. Wang Jie, a philosophy professor responsible for national studies education in the Central Party School, was quoted at length in an interview regarding “academy fever” (“Wang Jie,” 2016). Using the language of religion to address the need for national studies to reach a popular audience, he ascribed to academies the role of “giving the common people a ‘spiritual baptism’ 精神洗礼.” “Academy fever” reaches well beyond the Central Party School. A Wuhan University philosophy professor, Guo Qiyong, recently wrote an essay for a Taiwan publication, Guowen tiandi, in which he discussed “academy fever” in the contemporary mainland (Guo, 2016). In an interview for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publication Yuan dao in 2015, Zhu Hanmin, head of Yuelu Academy Research Institute, offered the opinion that modern universities should continue the “spiritual culture” 精神文化 as well as the “structural culture” 制度文化 of ancient academies in order to ensure that universities have a clear “Chinese style” 中国气派 (Zhu, 2015). ¹⁴

The authors of the essays in Encountering Songyang, however, do not always view “academic spirit” as higher education leaders or other political authorities might wish. For many, “academy spirit” suggests ideas and practices more closely associated with Euro-American traditions of open inquiry, debate, and freedom of expression (Liao, 2013: 127). Probing more deeply into the recent Chinese past, such ideas were also associated positively with academy education by Mao, Hu Shi, and others (including Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei) (Ding, 1996: 228–29). Like the many other uses of the word “spirit,” “academy spirit” is a malleable term that can be adapted to multiple and sometimes conflicting purposes. The reconstructed Confucian academy tradition itself is the product of an imagined past that can be drawn on to support differing visions of education, its goals, and its purposes. Political authorities may invoke the academy tradition as a material representation of the Confucianism they desire to promote, while other interpreters of this tradition (many authors of essays in Encountering Songyang, for example) see the academy—with no greater historical foundation—as a space for open debate and the free exchange of ideas.

To return to the theme of “cultural governance” described by Elizabeth Perry (2013), the relationship between Zhengda and Songyang illustrates the strategic deployment of cultural symbols by higher education authorities in collaboration with government officials to cultivate patriotism and cultural nationalism. Like recent government efforts—such as the one dubbed “Countryside Confucianism”—to exert control over Confucian-inspired popular practices and local institutions (Payette, 2016; Svensson, 2006), the development of a Confucian-based national studies curriculum through partnering with Songyang Academy supports Zhengda’s promotion of its regional (and even national) position in higher education. As succinctly stated on the Zhengda website in 2011:

Zhengzhou University–Songyang Academy continues the cultural origins of Songyang Academy in order to unearth and research Central Plain culture, train national studies talents, and create the “Songyang Academy” cultural trademark 品牌 . . . using the Henan “Build Culture to Strengthen the Province” strategy as a guide . . . to serve reform and opening and the construction of modernization in Henan province. (“Woxiao Songyang shuyuan pinren shoupi benkesheng daoshi,” 2011)

By joining together with Henan provincial and Zhengzhou municipal authorities, along with local Dengfeng county agencies, in the reconstruction of Songyang Academy, Zhengda has asserted its pivotal role in higher education for the province. The origins and timeline of the Zhengda-Songyang partnership follow those of the resurgence of Confucianism and national studies in the 1990s and 2000s.

Zhengda’s aspirations for its relationship with Songyang extend beyond pedagogy. A March 2013 article in the Hong Kong–based newspaper Wenweipo 文汇报 profiled the partnership between Zhengda and Songyang Academy in connection with the university’s strategy to become a regional “think tank” 智库. ¹⁵ In an interview about Zhengda’s role in provincial economic development plans, National People’s Congress delegate and Zhengda party committee secretary Zheng Yongkou linked the Zhengda–Songyang Academy alliance to the campaign to “Continue the ‘Bloodstream of Culture,’ Promote National Studies” 赓续文脉, 弘扬国学. The partnership was geared to projecting a distinctive regional identity for both Henan and Central Plain culture that would attract international partners (“Fahui zhiku zuoyong zhuli zhongyuan jueqi,” 2013). Zheng presented cultural transmission, regionally and nationally, along with the nurturing of cultural pride by investment in Songyang Academy, as strategies to pursue international exchanges that incorporate the global promotion of Chinese language and culture as well as collaboration with foreign scholars, universities, and research institutes.

Although Zhengda-Songyang has forged ties with Hunan’s Yuelu and Jiangxi’s White Deer Grotto Academies, both of which are also closely tied to institutions of higher education, these relationships have much deeper historical roots and different purposes than those of Zhengda-Songyang. Collaboration with the Confucian Academy in Guiyang serves a less obvious purpose than ties with Yuelu and White Deer Grotto Academies. Formal affiliation with the Guiyang Confucian Academy may be intended simply to broadcast to a wider audience Zhengda-Songyang’s commitment to Confucianism as central to national studies. The Zhengda-Songyang partnership exemplifies state-directed management of cultural resources, both in the realm of higher education and at the popular level. Like the Confucian Academy, where research and publication projects have been conducted in tandem with public rituals for mass consumption, Songyang Academy is at once a public space for cultural tourism and a classroom for Zhengda’s national studies curriculum, positioning Zhengda on a national stage, and potentially—with the World Heritage Site designation of Mount Song—on a global stage.

Through close reading of a key text, this article has focused on one of the main audiences for the restored Songyang Academy: students and faculty at Zhengda. As a site of cultural heritage tourism, there is also a public audience of visitors to the academy whose reception and experience remain to be assessed and analyzed. What expectations do tourists have? What assumptions and knowledge do they bring with them, and do these change after they visit the academy? Do tourists regard Songyang Academy merely as part of a nexus of sites at Mount Song that they visit, or does the academy have a particular appeal that draws them to that site? These are all questions that require systematic assessment through carefully calibrated visitor surveys that can provide data for interpretation. An increase in foreign tourists likely with the assignment of World Heritage Site status will complicate the analysis of visitor reception, but such analysis is essential to capture the full range of audience reception as it expands beyond domestic tourism and the institutional audience of Zhengda students and faculty.

The deployment of cultural symbols by the party-state operates now in a global as well as a domestic arena, and Songyang Academy (like White Deer Grotto Academy at the Mount Lu World Heritage Site) has an unrealized potential role as a cultural symbol of Confucianism for a global audience. It remains to be seen whether “cultural governance” at regional, national, and even international levels can continue to be an effective strategy for the party-state to build support. Views of the academy as a historical model for the free expression of ideas, such as those found in many of the Encountering Songyang essays, prompt us to consider responses to “cultural governance” to be as important as the policies themselves. The competition selection process did not weed out essays that referred to academies as centers for the free expression of ideas because these views were both typical and grounded in a shared vision of the past, even though it is easy enough to see how they might challenge intellectual restrictions on contemporary academic life in Chinese universities. The authors’ intellectual appropriation of institutions and symbols of “cultural governance”—in this case, the academy tradition—can be seen as a way of resisting party-state authority, even as those institutions and symbols are tools for the exercise of that authority (Payette, 2015, 2016).