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In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty implemented a nationwide schoolsystem as part of a series of institutional reforms to shore up itspower.

A School in Every Village recounts how villagersand local state officials in Haicheng County enacted orders toestablish rural primary schools from 1904 to 1931. Although theCommunists, contemporary observers, and more recent scholarship haveall depicted rural society as feudal and backward and the educationalreforms of the early twentieth century a failure, Elizabeth VanderVendraws on untapped archival materials to reveal that villagers capablyintegrated foreign ideas and models into a system that was at oncetraditional and modern, Chinese and Western. Her portrait of educationreform not only challenges received notions about themodernity-tradition binary in Chinese history, it also addresses topicscentral to scholarly debates on modern China, including state making,gender, and the impact of global ideas on local society.