Reform the People is an intellectual history of the early years of popular education in China and an account of how the new ideas were put into practice. Paul Bailey draws on a wide variety of sources -- in particular contemporary Chinese educational journals not available in the West -- and describes how the educators promoted literacy by establishing day-schools, vocational schools, and public libraries and encouraged a hard-working, disciplined and public-spirited citizenry.

Paul J. Bailey's profile page

Paul Bailey is a lecturer in Chinese and Japanese History at the University of Edinburgh and author of Twentieth Century China (Basil Blackwell, 1988).

This is such a superbly written intellectual history that I risk sounding trite by stating that it makes a genuine contribution to the study of education in modern China. ... This book is a must for any university library and for the personal library of anyone who is interested in the intellectual history of education in modern China. - Judith Liu, Comparative Education Review Paul Bailey shows how the traditional view of cultivating "human talent" to staff the bureaucracy gave way to the goal of educating all the people to be responsible citizens. Bailey takes "popular education" to include both formal schooling in the primary and vocational spheres and informal education such as literacy campaigns and efforts to reform "backward" customs. An excellent work of sinology, this book yields much detail from its notes, which can be read themselves as a continuous text. Reform the People is a first class example of western scholarship on China. Admirers of Paul Bailey's Twentieth Century China, a miracle of compression and balance, will welcome the publication of Reform the People. Those who have not read these works should do so soon. - Brian L. Evans, University of Alberta