Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe Redux, 1912-1952

This chapter takes advantage of two newly expanded big historical data sets to update an earlier article on this same topic in China Quarterly. This chapter describes three salient features of the Chinese academe during the Republic of China: highly internationally trained, with a large proportion of females relative to other developing and even some developed countries, and with a heavy emphasis on STEM subjects. It then concludes with a more detailed description of how the social and spatial origins of China’s university students and university faculty members changed from a national population of civil servant families to business and professional families largely from Jiangnan and the Pearl River Delta. This chapter makes use of newly expanded data sets, including the China University Student Dataset—Republic of China, and the China University Student Dataset—Overseas.