Mental Infrastructure: Picking Up the Unfinished Work of a Century of Reformers
【Humanities China (人文中国): In 2025, what was the question related to “the humanities” that you thought about most?Answer: The moral and civic education of ordinary people.
Humanities China (人文中国): Why has this question held your attention and kept you thinking about it?Answer: Mainly because I was inspired by the book The Nordic Secret (《北欧秘诀》), translated by my old friend Mai Ke (麦客). The book focuses on how the Nordic countries, for at least 150 years, even before the great waves of industrialization and urbanization broke over them, used institutions such as folk high schools to lay down in advance the public infrastructure for the production of meaning. Through these institutions they carried out a systematic development of the minds of ordinary people—a process later known as the “Nordic enlightenment” (北欧教化). The result was a fundamental upgrade of the “operating system of the mind” among people at the bottom of society, which in turn produced the well-known Nordic miracle: not only high economic development, but a multidimensional flourishing marked by social cohesion, environmental sustainability, and a strong sense of well-being. This path of “lifting from the bottom” holds more than a little relevance for China today.
Humanities China (人文中国): Around this question, is there anything you have seen, read, or come to understand that you would like to share with the readers, advisors, and authors of Humanities China (《人文中国》)?Answer: On this question, let me answer with a short essay.】
心智基建：接续百年改良先辈的未竟之路
Xiao Shu (笑蜀)
I. A Dual Track in History: Radical and Reformist Paths to Modernization
China’s modernization has unfolded like a railroad laid on two tracks. On one track runs the revolutionary train of Sun Yat-sen (孙中山), rushing forward with thunderous momentum in an attempt to crush every old structure in its path. On the other track moves the slower reformist train of Zhang Jian (张謇), Lu Zuofu (卢作孚), Yan Yangchu (晏阳初), Liang Shuming (梁漱溟), and others, seeping patiently into the fabric of society like water. The choice between these two paths grew out of sharply different diagnoses and prescriptions regarding one fundamental constraint on modernization: the quality of the citizenry.
Confronted with the reality of a “generally ignorant” population, Sun Yat-sen put forward his famous theory of “political tutelage” (训政). In his view, the Chinese people were like “newborn infants,” while the revolutionaries were like “the mother that has given birth to this infant.” A period of tutelage—of “nurture and education”—was therefore indispensable before constitutional government could be implemented. This line of thought contained a built-in paradox: to train people for democracy by undemocratic means, to cultivate freedom through coercion. The revolutionary camp believed that the power of the state could mold national character as if it were clay, that top-down institutional design and political mobilization could bring about a leap in the quality of the citizenry. But history shows that such grand projects of transformation may rapidly remake surface structures, yet still fail to reach the deep layers of culture and psychology.
At the same time, another group of intellectual elites chose a completely different road. Zhang Jian’s integrated practice of “industry–education–charity” in Nantong (南通), Lu Zuofu’s rural construction experiment in Beibei (北碚), Yan Yangchu’s Mass Education Movement in Ding County (定县), and Liang Shuming’s rural self-government reforms in Zouping (邹平)—these scattered sparks of reform across China all shared a common core idea: social development depends on a crucial “threshold of mind.” Unless a significant share of citizens reach a level of mental complexity that allows for “self-creation,” any transplanted institution will fail to take root. Almost in unison, they shifted their gaze from grand narratives of the nation to the micro-process of individual growth, from political revolution to a revolution of the mind.
The tension between these two paths has defined the basic pattern of China’s search for modernization. The revolutionaries sought one sweeping solution that would “settle everything in one stroke.” The reformists believed instead in “advancing one step a day” through gradual accumulation. The former insisted that institutions must come before civic character; the latter insisted that civic character must come before institutions. The revolutionaries pinned their hopes on the coercive power of the state; the reformists trusted in the organic growth of society. This debate over China’s fundamental path to modernization has never really ended; it simply keeps returning in new forms.
II. The Threshold of Mind: Civic Complexity Behind Democratic Institutions
The idea of a “threshold of mind” functions like an invisible doorway, separating the formal shell of institutions from their substantive workings. In his experiments in Ding County, Hebei (河北定县), Yan Yangchu discovered that in a countryside where illiteracy reached 80 percent, people lacked not only modern production skills but also basic civic qualities. He distilled the “four great maladies” of the Chinese countryside as ignorance, poverty, weakness, and selfishness (“愚、贫、弱、私”). His “fourfold education” (文艺、生计、卫生、公民) was not mere philanthropy but a systematic craft of remaking minds and lives. Through literacy classes, cooperatives, public-health networks, and civic training, he tried to turn scattered, passive peasants into embryonic modern citizens with self-organizing capacity and a sense of the public.
In The Theory of Rural Reconstruction (《乡村建设理论》), Liang Shuming argued that China’s problems “must be approached from rural self-government,” and that the precondition for such self-government was the “awakening of the farmers’ self-awareness.” He sought to combine Confucian ethics with modern self-government. Through a system of “village schools” and “township schools” (村学—乡学), he tried to transform abstract “ritual norms and customs” (礼俗) into practical, auditable routines of daily governance, and to rebuild habits of rational deliberation at the level of the community.
Zhang Jian and Lu Zuofu entered from industry and urban governance. In Nantong, Zhang Jian created not only an industrial system but also a regional incubator of modern civilization built on the trinity of “industry, education, and public welfare” (“实业—教育—公益”). Lu Zuofu’s experiment in Beibei carried even more symbolic weight. He explicitly refused to “oppose for the sake of opposition” or “destroy for the sake of destruction.” Instead, he argued that “constructive power should be the vanguard of destruction,” and he acted accordingly: founding schools, libraries, and museums; building parks, sports grounds, and hospitals; and even creating China’s first private academy of sciences, the China West Academy of Sciences (中国西部科学院). For Lu Zuofu, modernization was not just a matter of factory smokestacks and railways. It was, above all, “the modernization of human beings”:
“In China today, we lack nothing except people—except trained people. So the root task is first to solve the problem of the person, of training the person.”
But training a human being takes a hundred years; it cannot be rushed. That is why he stressed what he called a “microbe revolution” (微生物革命): social progress should be seen as the accumulation of countless tiny improvements. This idea resonates with Karl Popper’s “piecemeal social engineering” and strangely mirrors the Nordic tradition of enlightenment. Both approaches rest on the belief that real social transformation must begin with a change in the structure of people’s minds and in their everyday habits of behavior.
The reformists shared a common logic: economic development and mental development have to move forward together; improvements in the material base must be accompanied by an upgrading of personality and cognition. In their eyes, modernization was not a storm that could be forced upon a country, but a kind of farming that required careful cultivation—a patient nurturing of every seed in the soil. Thus twentieth-century China saw a race between two paths. One came in like a violent storm, aiming for rapid, wholesale change. The other fell like a gentle rain, quietly devoted to incremental, microscopic accumulation. The two paths ran in parallel and intertwined on the historical stage of twentieth-century China—and in the end, each met a kind of tragic convergence.
III. Unfinished Tillage: Why the Reformist Path Was Buried by the Storm of the Times
To be fair, the moderate reformists were not utopians. In their own local contexts, they created achievements that were nothing short of astonishing. In just ten years, Ding County built a network of popular education and social reconstruction that reached hundreds of thousands of people. The experiment in rural self-government in Zouping demonstrated a distinctive resilience in cultural reconstruction. Nantong and Beibei became widely celebrated as a “model county” and a “model town.” These successes proved that through systematic and patient “social craftsmanship,” it is indeed possible to upgrade people’s minds and build a modern civilization.
Yet their path was eventually cut off by the storms of their age. At root, this was because the historical environment they inhabited was utterly unlike the relatively permissive settings of the Nordic countries, where society was allowed to evolve slowly and autonomously.
First, they lacked time. In the first half of the twentieth century, China was mired in a comprehensive crisis: imperial collapse, warlord fragmentation, foreign invasion. The urgency of national survival overshadowed everything else. “Enlightenment” requires an atmosphere of leisure and calm, but history handed China one “last chance” after another. Yan Yangchu and his peers needed several generations of continuous effort. What they actually faced, however, was an immediate question of life or death for the nation. In the face of a “to be or not to be” dilemma, meticulous social embroidery had to give way to rough political surgery.
Second, they were constrained by structure. Most reform experiments tried to sidestep the core issue of land ownership. In both Ding County and Zouping, efforts at cooperative organization quickly ran into the wall of a deeply entrenched tenancy system. Liang Shuming himself understood very clearly that without touching land rights, any program of rural reconstruction was building a tower on sand. But a thoroughgoing land reform risked triggering a fierce social revolution—the very outcome they hoped to avoid through gradual reform. They found themselves trapped in a paradox: without transforming deep economic structures, enlightenment could not put down roots; yet transforming those structures could easily ignite exactly the kind of radical revolution they feared. The reformist path was thus locked in a structural dilemma.
Third, there was the weakness of the state—and later, its overgrowth. In the late Qing and early Republican periods, the state was too feeble to offer institutional protection or resources for civil experiments. That weakness gave reformers room to explore, but it also meant extreme vulnerability. When the war of resistance against Japan broke out, experimental zones collapsed almost overnight. The new regime that later unified China had formidable powers of social mobilization and integration. Its model of “construction” was highly centralized and explicitly “politics in command.” The existing networks of civil society, experiments in self-government, and the logic of gradual reform were all branded as outdated, or even subversive. They were absorbed, transformed, or dissolved into state-led grand narratives.
In the end, the disappearance of the moderate reformists was not the failure of an idea, but the outcome of a particular historical configuration. In a moment of “total crisis,” society was desperate for a “solution” that could quickly gather strength and achieve a minimal degree of integration. Radical revolution, with its clear goals, uncompromising methods, and tight organization, supplied such a solution. Nuanced, plural, and gradual social reform, by contrast, seemed too slow and too local to compete in a race of life and death. This was not so much a battle of concepts as a selection carried out by the conditions of the age.
IV. The Circular Delusion: The Costs of the Radical Path and the Unresolved Dilemma
Yet even if reform failed, radical revolution did not truly succeed either. History did not grant revolutionary leaders, once they came to power, a one-way ticket to modernity. The “political tutelage” envisioned by Sun Yat-sen often mutated in practice into new and more sophisticated forms of authoritarianism. More profoundly, there is a deep tension between the absolutist mindset of “destroy the old, build the new” and the inclusiveness, experimentalism, and patience required for long-term social, cultural, and mental transformation.
Violent revolution can smash the hardware of an old order. It cannot quickly install and run the software of a new one—least of all the underlying operating system of the national mind. The state can mobilize enormous resources to drive out illiteracy, but it cannot so easily cultivate habits of rational critique. It can pour new ideological content into people’s heads, but it struggles to engender a stable, internalized sense of rights and responsibilities. Once the halo of revolution fades, many ancient ghosts return in new guises: despotism, bureaucracy, privilege, and a social world still ruled by personal ties. Grand schemes of “overall solutions” may, precisely because they sever the organic threads of social evolution, create new ruptures of their own.
After a century of spiral movement, we seem once again to have arrived at a kind of “starting point.” Economic takeoff is obvious to all. But the quality of the citizenry—especially the lack of public rationality, respect for the rule of law, scientific literacy, and moral bottom lines—still forms the most stubborn “soft resistance” in the modernization process. The irrational clamor of the online world, the pervasive deficit of trust in public affairs, and the barren soil for an innovation culture all point back to the same problem that once deeply troubled Yan Yangchu and Liang Shuming: the “threshold of mind.” We have erected magnificent buildings, but has the mental soil beneath them evolved in tandem, and on solid ground?
Clearly, the road of violent revolution is neither possible nor desirable today. The enormous social costs and historical traumas it inflicted, and the damage it did to slowly accumulated elements of civilization, have left deep scars. But does that mean we are trapped in a historical cul-de-sac? If the radical road has revealed its dangers, and the reformist path was repeatedly interrupted, where exactly is the way out for this country and its people?
V. Picking Up the Flame: Asking About “Mental Infrastructure” in a New Era
It is precisely against this backdrop of deadlock and reflection that the interrupted reform tradition—and the Nordic experience of enlightenment far away—begin to glow with renewed meaning. Together they point to a long-neglected truth: the modernization of a state is, at its root, the modernization of human beings. And the modernization of human beings cannot be accomplished solely through top-down revolution or political tutelage. It depends on a long-term project of “mental infrastructure” (心智基建), a project that works from the bottom up, from the inside out, as quietly and gently as a soaking rain—in Lu Zuofu’s words, a “microbe revolution.”
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nordic countries—Denmark, Sweden, and others—used folk high schools, cooperative movements, adult education, and civic associations during their peaceful transitions to lift the general level of rationality, organizational ability, and cooperative spirit among their citizens. In this way they laid a deep foundation of civil society for the later welfare state and stable democracy. They did not tear everything down and start over. Instead, they carried out a long and self-conscious “national enlightenment movement,” whose essence was to let knowledge, skills, and a sense of civic rights spread like capillaries into each individual life. This experience resonates deeply with Zhang Jian’s insistence on giving equal weight to industry and education, with Yan Yangchu’s interlocking “fourfold education,” and with Lu Zuofu’s principle that “modernization and the remaking of the person must advance together.”
Today, to pick up this unfinished task and launch a new era of “mental infrastructure” is a question we can no longer evade. This does not mean a simple return to the outward forms of Republican-era social construction. Rather, it means retrieving the core spirit of that tradition under new historical and technological conditions.
First, we must shift from “grand narratives” back to “micro-practice.” Mental growth happens in concrete, tangible worlds of lived experience. It requires more Ding County-style experiments and Beibei-style models—“micro public spheres” in communities, schools, enterprises, and online spaces, where people can learn to hold rational conversations, deliberate public issues, and solve problems together. The focus here is not on slogans but on repeatable, auditable procedures of cooperation (as in Robert’s Rules of Order (《罗伯特议事规则》)), so that citizens learn what rights and responsibilities mean while handling shared affairs.
Second, we must turn from “political indoctrination” toward “education of the whole person.” Mental infrastructure in a new era has to go beyond narrowly utilitarian skills training and move toward a “whole-person education” that embraces scientific rationality, humanistic literacy, ethical self-awareness, and aesthetic capacity. It should make what Liang Qichao (梁启超) called the “New People” (新民), what Yan Yangchu called “citizens” (公民), and what Lu Zuofu called the “public ideal” (公共理想) into real guiding aims of education and social cultivation—forming sound individuals who can handle complexity, who are honest, empathetic, and willing to shoulder responsibility.
Third, we must move from “state domination” to “social co-education.” Government certainly bears an unavoidable duty, but the real vitality of mental infrastructure must come from the broader social field. Enterprises, media, non-profit organizations, cultural institutions, and online platforms should all become nurseries of civic qualities. We should encourage social innovations such as Century Vocational School (百年职校), which is devoted to developing the minds and skills of young people from the bottom of society. We should support science communication and media projects aimed at enhancing scientific literacy and critical thinking, and let society itself rediscover its educational power.
Finally, we must embrace technology while defending human subjectivity. Digital technology offers unprecedented tools for large-scale, personalized learning and connection. Yet we must remain alert to the ways technology can alienate people and flatten thought. Mental construction in a new era should make good use of technology to extend the reach and efficiency of enlightenment, but its fundamental purpose has to stay anchored in human rationality, dignity, and creativity.
History has not ended; it has merely changed examination rooms. The oil lamps once held by Zhang Jian, Lu Zuofu, Yan Yangchu, and Liang Shuming may have gone out in the storm, but the road they lit—the road of shoring up the foundations of civilization through patient, meticulous, and person-respecting social reform—now stands out more clearly than ever. To rebuild “mental infrastructure” is not nostalgia; it is an imperative for the future. It calls on us to reconnect the broken threads, to scatter the sparks of reason across an even wider field of minds. This may prove to be a longer and harder journey than economic rise itself, but it is also the compulsory course for any great civilization on its way to maturity.
On this road there are no shortcuts in the form of howling winds and driving rain. There is only the work of gentle, soaking rain—unyielding, ceaseless tilling that goes on and on.
(The Nordic Secret (《北欧秘诀》), by Lene Rachel Andersen (雷娜·瑞秋·安徒生), translated by Mai Ke (麦客), The Commercial Press (商务印书馆), May 2025 edition.)