In the summer of 1937, Japanese troops occupied the campuses of
Beijing's two leading universities, Beida and Qinghua, and reduced
Nankai, in Tianjin, to rubble. These were China's leading
institutions of higher learning, run by men educated in the West
and committed to modern liberal education. The three universities
first moved to Changsha, 900 miles southwest of Beijing, where they
joined forces. But with the fall of Nanjing in mid-December, many
students left to fight the Japanese, who soon began bombing
Changsha.
In February 1938, the 800 remaining students and faculty made the
thousand-mile trek to Kunming, in China's remote, mountainous
southwest, where they formed the National Southwest Associated
University (Lianda). In makeshift quarters, subject to sporadic
bombing by the Japanese and shortages of food, books, and clothing,
students and professors did their best to conduct a modern
university. In the next eight years, many of China's most prominent
intellectuals taught or studied at Lianda. This book is the story
of their lives and work under extraordinary conditions.
Lianda's wartime saga crystallized the experience of a generation
of Chinese intellectuals, beginning with epic journeys, followed by
years of privation and endurance, and concluding with
politicization, polarization, and radicalization, as China moved
from a war of resistance against a foreign foe to a civil war
pitting brother against brother. The Lianda community, which had
entered the war fiercely loyal to the government of Chiang
Kai-shek, emerged in 1946 as a bastion of criticism of China's
ruling Guomindang party. Within three years, the majority of the
Lianda community, now returned to its north China campuses in
Beijing and Tianjin, was prepared to accept Communist rule.
In addition to struggling for physical survival, Lianda's faculty
and students spent the war years striving to uphold a model of
higher education in which modern universities, based in large part
on the American model, sought to preserve liberal education,
political autonomy, and academic freedom. Successful in the face of
wartime privations, enemy air raids, and Guomindang pressure,
Lianda's constituent universities eventually succumbed to Communist
control. By 1952, the Lianda ideal had been replaced with a
politicized and technocratic model borrowed from the Soviet Union.
General
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