ABSTRACT

Although traditional Chinese education was characterized more by holistic than subject-based learning, only in the last century has the Western philosophy and practice of liberal education become familiar in Chinese higher education circles. With increasing contacts between China and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, American concepts of general and liberal education became popular in China. Colleges and universities founded by foreigners were especially likely to implement Western – often American-style – liberal arts curricula. For more than two decades after the creation of the People's Republic of China, however, the government followed a model of higher education that emphasized rigid subject-based knowledge plus moral-political studies.