Author ｜
Wen-Huei Cheng, Wei-Yun Chiu
Abstract ｜
The formation and establishment of modern nation state have been developed within the cultural framework formed by globalization as a result of the collision and cohesion of modern value systems with political-economic institutions. Modern China has transplanted, transformed and re-constituted Western traditions and value systems in a short time due to the great pressure of Imperialism and globalisation, which resulted in the fundamental transformation of the traditional Chinese society. The formation of the concepts of “nation” and ”education” play an important role in establishing a modern nation during the process of modernisation in China. The intellectuals of pro-constitutional monarchism led by Liang Qichao had noticed the importance of education and its relationship to the formation of nation. Therefore, this paper applies the latest digital technology and statistical calculations to analysis the materials correlated to the concepts of nation and education from Xin Min Cong Bao《新民叢報》(1902-1907). As the key publication of the pro-constitution reformists, Xin Min Cong Bao contained more than 5 million words. The objective of this research is to draw the discursive development of the concepts of “nation”and “education”. In addition to the appropriation, transplantation and reconceptualization of the thoughts of Western and Japanese intellectuals into Chinese culture, this research also discloses the interplay between events, actions, discourses and concepts, and aims to further unfold how the notion of “nation” was formed by the discursive interplay between“nation” and “education” in Xin Min Cong Bao. This research first calculates the occurring frequency of the term “nation” in Xin Min Cong Bao in every year. By using PAT-Tree technology, it processes the data of Xin Ming Cong Bao according to natural language laws and then manually selects the keywords that are collocated with “nation”. The result shows that “education” is the most frequently occurring keyword collocated with “nation”. According to this result, it then repeats the selecting process and finds out a series of so called “umbrella keywords” which are collocated with both “nation” and “education” with higher frequency. These keywords are: doctrine（主義）, individual（ 個人）, nationalism（ 國家主義）, business（ 事業）, ideological education（主義教育）, administration（行政）, society（社會）, purpose（ 目的）, school（ 學校）, national education（ 國家教育）, idea（ 思想）, progressive（ 進步）, people（ 人民）, etc. In order to better realise the clustering of concepts presented by the frequency of the collocating keywords of “nation” and “education”, this paper also adopts cumulative proportion chart over period (CUSUM) to show the occurring frequency of these collocating concepts in every year. Through the investigation of concept clustering, this research intends to examine why the occurring frequency of certain group of keywords would increase dramatically in different periods and further unfold the issues involved. The discussion is conducted five fold: the validation and popularisation of national education-the double structure of global framework and children’s narrative, the national education under social Darwinism-the transformation of national mentality and character, the nature and function of national education-the morphology of political entity and the value of social activity, the development and purpose of national education-the justification and education of nationalism, the establishment of discipline and national power- the engineering of national education and the bureaucratisation and stratification of education system.
keywords ｜
Xin Min Cong Bao, Nation, Education, Concept, Concept Clustering, Digital Humanities