| Sumario: | In 1901, the Qing court accelerated the implementation of the transformation of education. Vast numbers of lower-class scholars lost their livelihoods due to the shuttering of the classical academies, while also drifting on the outskirts of the new-style schools; different regions universally regarded their appeasement as an important government matter, creating a state of competition between new and old education and strife between new and old scholars. Zhang Jian, Sun Yirang and other elite gentry of Jiangsu and Zhejiang strove to promote the cause of "public" culture and education within the emerging public sphere by relying on "official power," but officials were far from prepared for the advent of the age of "nationalization" of education, and in fact did not have the power to discharge important functions for school administration such as fundraising either. The new-style schools became the center of a storm of conflict, clashes, antagonism and disputes. Examining the actual process of the transformation of education within the context of the rise of the "state" in the late Qing Dynasty, while integrating groups and individual cases and considering both the central and the local, elite and lower-class scholars, can provide a microcosmic perspective for observation of the collapse of the society of the four social classes and the chaos and disorder in local society during that era.
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