Representing the Past of Chinese Language Education

Résumé du livre

Part Two investigates the period before World War Two, which forms the background to which participants in the current revival repeatedly refer. A regional context imagined as the Nanyang (Eng: South Seas) was critical to Chinese schools in the Dutch Indies. At the same time, a trans-border social world centered on schools emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as educators, administrators and students moved among them. The last chapter looks at Kwee Tek Hoay, a Chinese writing in Malay. He challenged what he saw as China-centered geography of Nanyang and sought to "localize" Chinese communities by writing about a dream school called the "Nanyang Institute" and composing a Java-centered history of Chinese language education. By treating the historical periods in reverse chronological sequence, the two parts of this dissertation show the variety of ways in which social agents craft and use representations of the past. In the process, the dissertation argues for a new approach to ethnic, regional, and nationalist historiography.