Vocational Education and Career in Modern Shanghai: An Oral History-Based Study

During the 1930s, the professional class in Shanghai, modern China’s economic center, already included as many as one million people, a number second only to industrial workers. However, with regard to their lives and education, little research has been done, and only a limited amount of historical information has been gathered or put into order. In light of this, this paper, based on oral historical research supplemented with archival evidence, examines the relationship among the family backgrounds, professional careers, and education of Shanghai’s technical, nursing, and business professionals during the Republic era. A distinctive feature of this class was that most of its members were born to middle-class families of moderate economic wealth. That is, there was some surplus beyond expenditures on basic necessities. All basi¬cally had cultural and professional experience beyond the elementary school level, and all had more or less established a cultural and professional spirit belonging to their own class and profession. However, they were also influenced to varying degrees by the social movements of their time. The vast majority of them had well-developed personal drive, but they were also limited by socioeconomic conditions. This essay proposes that the decisive factor in the social status of the professional class had noth¬ing to do with their numbers but rather relied on their economic strength, level of organization, level of specialization, education level, cultural influence, and other factors.