Qingyun Middle School: A School Paid For by Public Subscription

Basic facts

This section is about a school, not a sight. The school does not receive visitors; please do not linger or take photographs at the school gate.

1957: a school built by "passing the hat round"

Qingyun Middle School's birth certificate is the most unusual of the seven schools in this part.

In 1957 three parties sat down together:

The three jointly prepared a private middle school. Where did the money come from? — donations from the industrial and commercial figures Lu Ziru and Dai Bingyi, and the patriotic overseas Chinese Shen Ying, and others.

That year the school-age children of Zhabei were growing in number. In Shanghai of the 1950s workers' villages went up one after another (see the piece on Pengpu Xincun Sub-district in Part Two), children moved in with them, and schools could not be built fast enough. Public schools could not keep up for the moment, and so there were "private" schools — not a private boss running a school, but society pooling funds to run one. A middle school was thus passed the hat round for by three parties and a batch of people.

The very combination of the three is itself a piece of source material: people's deputies, a trade union, a federation of industry and commerce — three forces within one district, for the same end: that children might have a school to go to.

The name is taken from Qingyun Road

The school is called "Qingyun" because it stood on Qingyun Road.

Qingyun Road has appeared many times in this book, and every time it has carried weight:

On the same road, in 1922 a group of people who wanted to remake China gathered, and in 1957 a middle school opened. A gap of thirty-five years, landing on the same stretch of road.

Qingyun Middle School went on running in this area for a long time, and only moved to No. 389 Zhiyuan Road in 2008. So the sentence in this book's piece on the former site of Shanghai University, "there is still a Qingyun Middle School in the Qingyun Road area today", has to be read by year: the school name has always been there; the school site was only there for fifty-one years.

1961–1962: two years as "the Finance and Trade Middle School"

Between 1961 and 1962 the school was renamed Zhabei District Finance and Trade Middle School.

Why should a middle school founded in 1957 be called "finance and trade" midway? Because the school ran finance-and-trade classes attached to it at the time — in that era a school's name often followed "the trade" directly; when the direction of the school changed, the name changed with it.

This line is not alone in this part. Set the former names of several schools side by side and see:

School names are like strata. In the same compound, every change of name means a change in the direction of the school.

Three mergers, one turn

The history of Qingyun Middle School can almost be written out in the two words "merged in":

The step in 1979 is the most crucial: in the same year that Shijian Middle School merged in, the school turned from private to public. A school passed the hat round for by three parties and a batch of donors ran for twenty-two years, and was handed over to the state. This went in the same direction as Shibei Middle School's road in 1937 — a private school, at a certain point, often does not close but carries on under a new owner.

No. 389 Zhiyuan Road: this compound has been running a school since 1906

Shanghai No. 17 Middle School, which merged in in 2008, goes back further than Qingyun Middle School:

• its predecessor was Minli Girls' Middle School, founded in 1906;
• in 1967 it was renamed Shanghai No. 17 Middle School;
• in 2008 it merged into Qingyun Middle School, and its original site, No. 389 Zhiyuan Road, became Qingyun Middle School's present site — the school's source notes that this house number was originally No. 520 Qingyun Road.

That is to say, this compound has been running a school since 1906, without a break in between — first a girls' middle school, later a middle school, and after 2008 Qingyun Middle School. Among the seven schools in this book, this is the only site that is fifty-one years older than the school now on it.

Strong in foreign languages, and a table-tennis table

From 1985 onwards the school carried out teaching reform with foreign-language teaching as its lead, and afterwards became a school experimenting with the first and second rounds of Shanghai's curriculum reform.

It ran ahead of the junior middle schools of its time in foreign-language teaching, leaving a few concrete traces:

• it was the first in the city to put forward the teaching-reform idea of "learning in order to apply it";
• it formed an integrated teaching system of "classroom teaching, activity teaching, environment teaching";
• it formed the classroom teaching style of "much information, high density, fast pace, frequent feedback";
• in 2011 it was awarded the title "national demonstration school for foreign-language teaching research in primary and middle schools";
• its foreign-language group was repeatedly judged "a Shanghai model-worker collective" and "a Shanghai woman pacesetter post".

The second speciality is table tennis. The school is among the first batch of national model schools for school sports (with a table-tennis speciality), and the "Qingyun Middle School Cup" of the Shanghai Municipal People's Sports League was also held here.

The remaining years:

Lineage table

Sources: the founding in 1957 of the private Qingyun Middle School, jointly prepared by the No. 12 Deputies' Group of the 12th Zhabei District People's Congress, the Hardware and Machinery Trade Union of Huangpu District and the Zhabei District Federation of Industry and Commerce, with donations from the industrial and commercial figures Lu Ziru and Dai Bingyi and the patriotic overseas Chinese Shen Ying; the merger of the private Nanshan Middle School in 1958; the renaming as Zhabei District Finance and Trade Middle School between 1961 and 1962; the merger of Shijian Middle School and the change to public status in 1979; the merger of the junior division of Shanghai No. 60 Middle School in 1985, the school being defined as a junior middle school; and the merger of Shanghai No. 17 Middle School in 2008 and the school's move to No. 389 Zhiyuan Road, are based on School Profile on the official website of Shanghai Qingyun Middle School (Grade B) and on the "Shanghai Qingyun Middle School" entries of several education platforms such as Youxiao.com, Xiaoxuntong and Hi School (Grade B / Grade C, reproductions of the same source); the motto "yearning for the azure sky, aiming high", the ethos "sharpening the will to reach the blue clouds" and "cultivate virtue and practise earnestly, delight in learning and innovate", the "five sharpenings" curriculum system and the "dynamic classroom", the foreign-language teaching-reform idea of "learning in order to apply it", the integrated teaching system of "classroom teaching, activity teaching, environment teaching" and the classroom speciality of "much information, high density, fast pace, frequent feedback", the awarding in 2011 of the title "national demonstration school for foreign-language teaching research in primary and middle schools", the foreign-language group's "Shanghai model-worker collective" and "Shanghai woman pacesetter post", table tennis as the school's sports speciality, and its being repeatedly judged a Shanghai civilised unit for more than 20 years, are based on the same page on the school's official website (Grade B); the completion of the Yao Zongxia Library in 1988 is based on the "Shanghai Qingyun Middle School" entries of platforms such as Kaoshiba / Xiaoxuntong (Grade C); that the predecessor of Shanghai No. 17 Middle School was Minli Girls' Middle School, founded in 1906, that it was renamed Shanghai No. 17 Middle School in 1967, and that it merged into Qingyun Middle School in 2008 with its original site, No. 389 Zhiyuan Road, becoming Qingyun Middle School's present site, are based on Toutiao's Shanghai No. 17 Middle School (Now Merged Away) and the Youxiao.com entry "Shanghai Qingyun Middle School" (Grade C); the Kaonaqu entry "Shanghai Qingyun Middle School" notes that the school's present site, No. 389 Zhiyuan Road, was originally No. 520 Qingyun Road, and points out that the "No. 550 Jiangning Road" account in its database is wrong; this book adopts the account "No. 389 Zhiyuan Road (originally No. 520 Qingyun Road)" (Grade C, to be used with caution). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.