Xuexi: Education among Workers and Students in Wartime France and China

The work-study program or “diligent-work frugal-study” first established in France during the 1910s played an important role in the radicalization of a generation of Chinese youth among whom were later Chinese Communist Revolution leaders Cai Hesen, Xiang Jingyu and Zhou Enlai. While historians have noted the political significance of the program, few efforts have been made to uncover the work-study program as an education program and its far-reaching influence on how study (xuexi) became a necessary component in the later praxis of the Chinese Revolution.

This paper examines the historical meanings and contexts of xuexi or study at the initial moment of Chinese social revolution among the overseas Chinese workers and student activists who were recruited in the soybean factory Li Shizheng opened to the north of Paris in 1908. Li who had gained a graduate degree in chemistry and biology established the first Chinese labor-study program in this factory. Li believed in the French anarchist Peter Kropkin’s proposal of equitable social institutions over social Darwinism and particularly in the alliances between mental and manual labor as means of liberation. Workers and students in Li’s factory were expected to learn from each other and collaboratively produce knowledge. They gathered and conversed, and various strategies of social revolutions were proposed and discussed. I argue that the factory and work-study program was a social and educational space where xuexi or collaborative learning among students and workers took place and revolutionary worldview and everyday knowledge emerged against the context of WWI. Xuexi had deep influence on worker and student activists in the French work-study program who later joined the Chinese Revolution. Xuexi and the fomentation of social consciousness also became controversial when class actions were needed at time of exigency.