Education and Culture

Interest in Dewey's visit to China from May 1919 to July 1921 has grown in the last decade. Professor Wang's book is among the most important contributions to this effort to uncover Dewey's experience in China. The great merit of her book is the detailed empirical evidence she provides about Dewey's lectures, meetings, and travels as well as the people he met there and contemporary reactions to his visit. The subtitle of her book, "To Teach and To Learn" sums up well her conclusions on the impact that Dewey had on China and, equally important, what Dewey learned from the Chinese.

She divides her study into six parts: Dewey and the May 4^th Movement, Dewey as teacher, Dewey's reception in China, Dewey as learner, China's impact on Dewey's social and political philosophy, and a final set of suggestions for future research. Her major conclusion is that, despite its difficulties, Dewey's sojourn in China marked an important turning point in his evolving sense of what philosophy should do. Dewey landed in China at the height of the May 4^th Movement, which began as a student-led protest sparked by the treatment of China at the Versailles Peace Conference, but quickly spread to become a vast modernization movement to be carried out through social and intellectual means. In the end, the movement was at best only a partial success, but it did give Dewey a sense of the latent vitality in China's youth and especially the power of culture to effect radical social change.

As a teacher Dewey labored under a serious handicap: He was without firsthand experience of Chinese culture. While he tried to make up for this by [End Page 60] reading English-language newspapers and taking courses in Chinese, he was left with his own direct encounter with this ancient, varied, sprawling, and richly layered culture. His talent as an observer became obvious as his trip progressed and he gained a better handle on what he experienced in this vast and novel landscape. His inability to speak Chinese left him at the mercy of his interpreters who—especially in the case of Hu Shih, his primary interlocutor—were not reluctant to shape Dewey's lectures and remarks to bolster their own positions on political, social, and cultural affairs. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence to indicate that Dewey's primary philosophical message got through: that the scientific method of experimentation had broken open old and tired philosophical methodologies. He was also able to yoke this idea with ever-deepening expositions of democracy as the best form of human self-ordering. So successful was his effort to clarify, deepen, and adapt this double message that he was called "Mr. Science" and "Mr. Democracy."

Dewey was not entirely at ease with the way his message was revised and even co-opted by various Chinese intellectuals to bolster their own particular political and social agendas. Nevertheless, it can safely be said that Dewey's time in China served to introduce a new way of thinking and looking at political authority, economic growth, and cultural norms. At a time when China was crying out for new ways to "modernize" its culture, Dewey's extensive lecturing and intensive encounters with leading Chinese intellectuals and future political leaders laid a foundation that can still be felt in recent protests against autocratic Communist institutions.

Dewey did more than introduce Chinese students and academics to experimentation as a way of thinking and developing new ways of life. Nor were his lectures on democracy his single contribution to China's cultural worldview. Dewey, as Professor Wang points out, also learned much from his Chinese sojourn. He was commissioned by the New Republic to write reports and observations on what he encountered. These reports back home were among the first descriptions Americans had of what at the time continued to be called "the mysterious...