Geographical Education in Higher Institutions in China: a Personal Viewpoint

Editor's Note The following article was written by Chun-fen Lee, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Geography in the East China Normal University, Shanghai, during his tenure as a Fulbright scholar in the United States in 1980. Minor editing was done by Marie Sanderson, University of Windsor. Professor Lee has a special tie with Canada. He was a student of Griffith Taylor's, with whom he is shown in Figure 1, and in 1943 received the first PhD in geography awarded by the University of Toronto. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, geographical education in universities and colleges has made a great deal of progress: in the establishment of specialized geography departments, in the training of teachers and geographical workers (some 40,000 in all), and in the publication of geographical textbooks. These were the main accomplishments of Chinese geographers during this period 1949–81, but we also experienced setbacks and traversed a tortuous road. Long before liberation in 1949, the first department of geoscience in China was founded in 1919 in the Higher Normal College of Nanking (now the University of Nanking) with Dr Co-ching Chu, a climatologist from Harvard, president of the Geographical Society of China and vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as the head. There were then three sections in the department, of which geography was one. In the 1920s and 1930s several more geography departments were established. Until liberation, however, the departments were few and small, generally with a full-time faculty of fewer than 10 and an enrollment of some 20–50 students. Most of the graduates became teachers in the middle (or secondary) schools. After liberation, China entered a new stage of development in socialist revolution and socialist construction. By 1952 economic restoration was nearing completion and the first five-year plan was about to begin. In order to adapt to the needs of national construction, higher educational institutions underwent a nation-wide adjustment. Geography departments were classified into two categories: those in the comprehensive universities which concentrate on the training of specialized workers, and those in the normal colleges and normal universities, where teachers for the middle schools are trained. Only the geography departments of the two major normal universities (Peking Normal and East China Normal) do not fit this pattern. They might be regarded as an intermediate type of institution in which the functions of the comprehensive university and the normal college are combined. There are now about 35 departments of geography in China, most of them of a size that would have been undreamed of in the pre-liberation period. In each department there are about 100 to 300 geography majors and a faculty of 30 to 100, though most of the faculty members are assistants and instructors; there are rarely more than 20 professors and associate professors in a department. A number of the better equipped and stronger departments are now offering graduate programmes as well. Generally, it takes two to three years for the master's degree; the first one and a half to two years for course studies, including a foreign language, and the third for thesis work. Upon graduation, the more promising students are selected to proceed into doctoral programmes.