ABSTRACT
The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission was housed in a compound of buildings, some dating from before 1949 and some from the late 1970s and 1980s. In the grounds there was also a Jewish synagogue, founded in the 1920s by Russian Jews, which supported a German Jewish refugee community during the Second World War. The Commission worked closely with East China Normal University (ECNU), particularly since the university became more dependent on local rather than central government funding. Each visit I made to Shanghai in connection with a British Council-funded link with ECNU included meetings with Education Commission colleagues and in 2000 one of my visitors to the UK was the head of the Commission’s Pre-school and Special Education section.
