¹ For a description of this process in the case of China's early nationalistic revolution, see Wright, Mary C., The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press; 1957), pp. 300–312.Google Scholar

² Lu, Ting-yi, “Education Must Be Combined with Productive Labour,” Red Flag, July 1, 1958.Google Scholar Quoted in Bowie, and Fairbank, , eds., Communist China, 1955–1959 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 440, 449.Google Scholar

³ Theodore, Hsi-en Chen: “Red Education in Communist China,” Current History, 07 1950Google Scholar “New China: New Texts,” December 1950; “New Schools for China,” June 1952; “Education for the Chinese Revolution,” January 1957; “Education and Indoctrination in Red China,” ibid. September 1961; “Elementary Education in Communist China,” The China Quarterly, No. 10, 04–06 1962; C. T. Hu, “Communist Education: Theory and Practice,” I. C. Y. Hsu, “The Reorganisation of Higher Education in Communist China, 1949–61Google Scholar” No. 19, July–September, 1964.

⁴ Why use stories from children's grammar school texts as an aid to understanding the complexities of cultural change? David McClelland, who has used readers as the basis for cross-cultural analysis of national “motive” patterns, suggests several reasons: The texts are relatively standardised cultural products, and thus facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, or, as in the present case, the analysis of change over time in a given culture. “The stories are ‘projective’ and tend to reflect the motives and values of the culture in the way they are told or in their themes or plots. [They] are also less subtle, more direct in their ‘message’ than many other forms of literature.” McClelland, David C., The Achieving Society (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961), p. 71. While we would not look to the readers for a detailed view of a culture, they do seem useful for revealing a distilled image of the values, motives and points of view which are perceived by the educational elite as being most important for training the younger generation. Their value lies more in the insights they may give into the mind and value-system of the contemporary social leadership than for predicting the future behaviour of the younger generation.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ A major problem facing analysts of culture or “national character” is the absence of a commonly accepted set of categories for the analysis of empirical materials—categories which are related to a general theoretical conception of human behaviour. Thus, to some extent, each analyst has to go it alone, making the best use he can of his own wits and a variety of unintegrated theoretical conceptions. This is true in the present case, although the following analysis bears the particular influence of the writings of David, McClelland, and Florence, Kluckhohn, “Dominant and Varient Value Orientations,” in Kluckhohn, , Murray, and Schneider, , eds., Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture (New York: Knopt, 1956), pp. 342–357.Google Scholar

McClelland's detailed study, The Achieving Society, provides not only a useful summary of what many Western sociologists have had to say about the relation of motives, values and perceptions to economic and social change, but it also is a major theoretical and methodological statement in its own right. The insights discussed in The Achieving Society were useful in interpreting the themes that the first part of the present analysis disclosed in the Chinese children's readers, although the analysis itself was carried out in an open, unstructured manner, not bound to any preconceived set of analytical categories.Google Scholar

The second part of the analysis, in contrast, makes direct use of McClelland's methods for scoring need or motive themes in imaginative cultural materials or individual written protocols, and interprets the scoring of the readers in the light of his large-sample analysis of the relation of psychological motives to economic development and cultural change.Google Scholar

⁶ David, Riesman, et al., The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), especially pp. 9–25.Google Scholar

⁷ See McClelland, op. cit, pp. 399–400.Google Scholar

⁸ For a full description of the development and technique of these scoring categories, see: Atkinson, J. W., ed., Motives in Fantasy, Action, and Society (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1958).Google Scholar

⁹ The procedure is based on a content analysis scoring system with three basic coding categories: expressed concern with meeting culturally defined standards of excellence; concern with development of a successful occupation; and expressed desire to make some useful social or scientific innovation.Google Scholar

¹⁰ For a full description of McClelland's analysis of the relation of need achievement to economic growth, see: McClelland, op. cit., Ch. 3.Google Scholar

¹¹ ibid. p. 102.

¹² I am indebted to Mrs. Ai-li, Chin for selecting and translating the sets of stories upon which this analysis is based, and to Dr. McClelland for carrying through to completion the very rough scoring of the stories which I first attempted. He has reported the results of his scoring in an article, “Motivational Patterns in Southeast Asia, with special reference to the Chinese case” The Journal of Social Issues, 1963.Google Scholar

¹³ A further intriguing problem, one which can only receive speculative consideration here, is whether the Party has also sought to provide a child-rearing environment likely to produce ambitious and creative individuals who will bear the future burdens of social leadership. Emphasis on active social roles for women, a decline in the authority of the family and father implied in the transfer of loyalty to the Party and Mao, and the emphasis on high standards, as revealed in the readers, suggests that the Communists have at least tried to meet key elements of McClelland's model of the achievement-orientation producing social environment.Google Scholar

But has the warm and encouraging family been destroyed in China, as so many Western accounts of the “People's Commune” system have stressed? A recent psychiatric investigation of a small number of Chinese children by a Canadian doctor, during a visit to the mainland, suggests that at least in certain locations in the late 1950s the family remained an effective socialising unit. See: Dr. Denis, Lazure, M.D., “The Family and Youth in New China: Psychiatric Observations,” Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, January 27, 1962, pp. 179–183. Dr. Lazure notes that while the Communist leaders “have effectively accomplished the revolution of transferring the emotional investment formerly reserved for the family to society as a whole and to the role which the individual will play in building his society,” they have not destroyed the family, just reduced its importance. Through systematic use of “persuasion,” they have “managed to present Party leaders not as obstacles between the child and his parents, but rather as infinitely wise and generous beings who stand above the family and who only naturally must take precedence in the child's mind.” He found that although “liberation” of the mother from the home for productive labour had reduced the frequency of parental contact, “now that she is freed from the tasks of cooking meals and running the house, the mother is able to devote her time entirely to her children when she arrives home from work.”Google Scholar

In sum, then, it seems likely that ambitious and creative individuals will not be found lacking among future generations of Chinese. The significant questions for further research, however, are how large a segment of the population will be highly motivated to participate in achievement oriented activities, what the most highly valued achievement activities will be, and the political relations between the most highly motivated segment of the population and the larger numbers who are followers, not leaders.Google Scholar

¹⁴ See McClelland, op. cit., pp. 167–170.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For a particularly provocative analysis of this problem see: Lucian W. Pye, “The Dynamics of Hostility and Hate in Chinese Political Culture,” MIT, Center for International Studies, C/64–23, 06, 1964.Google Scholar

¹⁶ See Roderick, MacFarquhar, The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals (New York: Praeger, 1960), p. 134, and passim Ch. 8.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid. p. 173.