UC San Diego

My dissertation is a case study of the county-level education system in the Mao era from 1949 to 1976. My dissertation initiates with the investigation into the financial feasibility of Mao era’s expansion in education. To illuminate this issue, my research examines the county-level fiscal system. Exploring the county-level fiscal system in the political and social context distinguishes my dissertation from the existing scholarship.

The overarching argument of the whole dissertation is that the education expansion, the state’s heavy extraction, and political campaigns formed a mutually beneficial triad, which exacerbated both the urban-rural divide and gender inequality. This overarching argument consists of two sub-arguments: the first sub-argument, elaborated in chapters 1 and 2, argues that education expansion, intensive extraction, and political campaigns not only coexisted but also benefited each other. The other sub-argument, presented in chapter 3 and 4, contends that this mutually beneficial relationship intensified the urban-rural divide and amplified gender inequality. Chapter 3 focuses on the reappearance of traditional private schools in rural areas during the early 1960s, a phenomenon resulting from the state's abandonment of villages. Chapter 4 investigates 99 sexual assault cases in elementary schools in one county during the Mao era. In the 99 cases, 99 elementary school teachers sexually assaulted at least 331 students. The chapter argues that the punishment for sexual assault in elementary schools was highly politicized, which was not necessarily bad for victims, but could separate their sufferings from the sentencing process. The politicization not only means coincidence with the campaigns, but also a close relationship between the punishments and political campaigns. My field work on the urban-rural divide and the research on the sexual assault throughout the Mao era fill out the blanks in the existing scholarship. Chapter 5 examines how political campaigns, resource extraction, education policies, the urban-rural divide, gender, and other local factors influenced the personal experiences of minban teachers.