BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

newly created central Ministry of Education revamped the educational system to include at least
theoretical equality of male and female education. The term for school, xueding, was changed to
xuexiao, which “signifies a democratic turn in the conception of education” and stressed the
importance the new government placed on basic public primary education. 160 They divided the
educational system into 18 years containing four years of lower primary, three years of higher
primary, four years of middle school, and six years of college. Students began school at age six
or seven, and those graduating from college were 26 or 27 years of age. According to national
education statistics for China, between 1907 and 1918-19 the number of girls in elementary
schools rose from 11,936 to 215,626. Still, in 1918-19 girls comprised only 5.4 percent of all
students in elementary schools. 161 By 1923, the percentage of all female students in non-mission
schools was only 6.3 percent, an increase from .07 percent in 1906. 162
In 1912, the Ministry of Education passed the University Act, which standardized a four-
year medical curriculum and established provincial medical schools in Beijing and Hangzhou the
same year, with two more the following year in Suzhou and Wuzhang. These Medical Special
Colleges (for men only) were staffed mainly by Chinese graduates of Japanese four-year second-
grade medical colleges. 163 The Ministry of Education standardized their curriculum in 1912 and
included obstetrics and gynecology, with practical obstetrical training using manikins. 164 The
Medical Special Colleges came under attack in the 1920s by League of Nations Health
Organization advisers, Chinese medical leaders, and Nationalist government administrators
160 Shou Shang Hsu, Hsiao Lan Ou Yang, and Yoehngoo Tsohsan Wu Lew, "Education of Women in China," in
Education in China: Papers Contributed by the Members of Committees of the Society for the Study of International
Education, ed. T.Y. Teng and T.T. Lew (Peking: Society for the Study of International Education, 1923).
161 Tang, "Woman's Education in China," 6. The 1907 number is for girls in “elementary school.” The 1918-19
number includes girls in “lower primary” and “higher primary” schools, a distinction created in 1912.
162 Chinese National Association for the Advancement of Education, "Statistical Summaries of Chinese Education,"
Bulletins on Chinese Education 16.2 (1923): 4-5.
163 Lucas, Chinese Medical Modernization, 45.
164 Rockefeller Foundation, Medicine in China, 11, 103.
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