Paper short abstract:

Romanticism in the European tradition was a response to the rise of "modernity" marked by anxieties about man's place in nature. A comparable phenomenon is happening in China now as youth there turn to nature to justify normative claims. How can the two sets of events mutually inform each other?

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in a Chinese high school in 2021. I begin with the gaokao, the university entrance exam, discussing its role in the imagined life trajectories of my informants. I contrast this "exam of a lifetime" with another aim of education that I observed, one that did not depend on academic success but focussed on what might be vaguely called "character" education. I give a historical discussion of the dynastic era examination system, the keju, in the twilight of the Qing Dynasty. In doing so, I contrast the pre-modern keju with the modern gaokao and elaborate on how the transition in the aims of education mirrored the transition into modernity for China. I defend the classical understanding of "modernity" as the separation of "fact" and "value" theoretically, historically, and most importantly, ethnographically. During the economic reform stage of Chinese modernity, I argue that the aims of education had become subordinated to the goals of nation-building. However, I also observed that some of my informants have been dissatisfied with the trajectory of nation building during the reform era. Turning to the "class meeting," which I believe to be the site of moral education in my field site, I argue that there has been a conscious "Romantic" attempt to re-join and fact and value in the Xi era. In the absence of any grand scheme like Confucianism and Marxism, I argue that my informants are increasingly relying on "Chineseness" as a natural normative identity.