Three characters from Lu Xun's short stories stand out as symbols of China's educational modernization in the early republican era. One was the pathetic remains of a traditional scholar; the second was a satirical caricature of the new; and third was Ah Q, the most famous of all Lu Xun's characters. The old scholar, Kong Yiji, was a failed shengyuan who died in direst poverty unable to abandon his scholarly airs or put his out-of-date learning to any use whatever. His successor was the “returned student,” whose pretensions derived from half a year's study in Japan. He was immortalized as the “false foreign devil,” a title bestowed upon him by Ah Q, in the role of illiterate Chinese Everyman. The returned student kept Ah Q from joining the 1911 revolution when it finally reached their village. And it was a coalition of such partly old, partly new officials and scholars – the revolutionaries – who finally brought about Ah OJs downfall.

These characters were created some two decades after the shift to Western learning, and reflect the self-critical backlash that began to quicken against it around 1920. In real life, Ah Q was doubtless trading jibes with returned students long before then, but he could not have become a hero in that role until after 4 May 1919.

The reassessment sprang from diverse origins, including the firmly rooted strains of conservative dissent and modern liberal criticism. Guo Bingwen's The Chinese System of Public Education, completed as a doctoral dissertation in 1914, helps illustrate both the conservative and the liberal views of that time. It also serves as a standard against which to compare the critical changing mood of the 1920s.