Pengpu Junior Middle School: the new village's first middle school, and a house number never changed

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.

September 1963: one building at the edge of a wheat field

In September 1963 Pengpu Middle School opened.

"Middle school" was in the name, but there was only a junior division, and the scale was tiny; the whole school was one teaching building. When the first pupils walked through the gate, that building had only just been completed.

Chen Yinsheng, who entered in 1963 and later became a professor and doctoral supervisor at Donghua University, recalled the campus of those days:

A new village just built, a building just finished, a ring of bamboo fence, a graveyard to the north and a wheat field to the south. That was the entire stock of Pengpu Xincun's first middle school.

To understand why this school had to exist, one has first to see how the new village around it came about.

In 1958, to serve the Pengpu Industrial Zone, 56 workers' dormitory blocks went up north of Changzhong Road, east of Gonghexin Road, west of Pingshun Road and on both sides of Wenxi Road, with a floor area of 169,000 square metres; more than 1,200 households of workers moved in (see the piece on Pengpu Xincun Sub-district).

The village came, and the children came with it. So schools were built to follow the village, one after another:

Three primary schools and only one middle school. The history of Pengpu Junior Middle School begins with filling a gap.

Dormitories above the classrooms

In its first year the school's conditions were "extremely rough".

Logistics could not keep up, and boarders arriving at the school had nowhere to sleep. So:

Nor were the beds beds — at first four desks or chairs pushed together. Only a term later were steel-framed bunk beds installed.

A year after that a four-storey dormitory block was put up in the north-east corner of the school, on the site of the old Pengpu Xincun Primary School building, and the pupils moved into shared rooms sleeping eight to a room.

Lessons first, sleep afterwards; desks pushed together first, beds frame by frame. That was the usual order of things for a new school in those years.

The first year without a principal

At the start the school had no principal; for a long stretch work was led by the deputy director of academic affairs, He Yunfu.

The teachers were drawn from schools in many places to help out. The first names the school recorded are these:

The day's rhythm was built on bugle calls:

The rules were hard too: you rose at the appointed time, and you "absolutely did not huddle under the quilt and stay in bed"; the teacher on duty inspected the rooms and posted the results as a ranking.

On winter mornings He Yunfu and the teachers who lived at the school rose earlier than the pupils and stood on the playground. A school without a principal relied on a few people who got up earlier than the pupils.

1978: from Baoshan to Zhabei

Pengpu Xincun belonged at first to Baoshan County. In 1978 it was formally transferred to Zhabei District, and the school's administrative affiliation passed to the Zhabei District Education Bureau with it.

By that year the village no longer looked as it had:

But the look of a place where town met country was still there. Outside the housing estates you could see small private plots, one beside another; turn round and there were pigsties and chicken coops. By day, cocks crowing and cicadas; by night, dogs barking and frogs. "Town and country jumbled together, factories and fields interleaved, footpaths criss-crossing" — that was the scenery of Pengpu Xincun for a long time, and the surroundings of this school for just as long.

Broken, broke, disorderly, poor

In the autumn of 1982 Liu Youmin was transferred in as deputy principal. In his second month the principal and party secretary, Huang Shiliang, went on long sick leave, and Liu Youmin took over the running of the school at its worst moment — and stayed eleven years.

The school he took over he summed up himself in eight characters: broken, broke, disorderly, poor.

Broken, broke, disorderly and poor caused one another. Mending the gate, replacing the glass and fixing the playground all needed money; money needed income first. So the school set up its own enterprises:

On the strength of this "one factory and two shops" the school had 2 million yuan a year to spend. Once the money was there, the dangerous wall, the glass and the playground were made good one by one; once the police and the school acted together, idlers were stopped from coming in; and the working style of the cadres, the teaching style of the teachers and the study habits of the pupils were turned round one item at a time.

At the same time the school looked far and wide for talent, bringing in good teachers such as Zhang Binghe and Zhu Zhenglin from outside. These people not only taught well but were good at management, and their influence spread among their colleagues.

In 1993 the school was judged a district key middle school: its junior division stood at the front of the district, and the rate of progression to senior middle school was 78 per cent. From 4.5 per cent to 78 per cent took eleven years.

1996: one school becomes two

In September 1996, in line with the district government's requirement that "key middle schools abolish the junior division and separate junior and senior schooling", Pengpu Middle School divided into two:

The one that stayed on the original site took its pupils from Zhabei District Pengpu Experimental Primary School.

The house number was always No. 150 Pengpu Xincun, unchanged from 1963 to the present. That is not common among the schools in this book — most have moved, and each move adds another paragraph to a school's history beginning "the original site was at...".

The grounds did change: in 1985 and again in 1995 a staff residential block and a commercial-residential block went up on the north side, and the campus shrank to 18 mu; after additional storeys were built, the floor area reached 8,159 square metres.

The campus shrinking, the buildings growing taller. That is a curve common to schools in the central districts.

A wind band, and the people who walked out of the gate

At the end of 1998 the school joined hands with the Shanghai Wind Instrument Factory to set up the "Bailing Youth Wind Band". It was one of the earlier fully constituted student ensembles in Shanghai's primary and middle schools at the time. The arts ensemble had under it a wind band, a Chinese instrument band, an accordion and electronic band, a dance troupe and a choir; once a year it gave a performance for the whole school, the teachers and the parents, and it also played at the Shanghai Concert Hall, the Armed Police Command School, the Pengpu Xincun home for the elderly and the plaza by the east wing of the No. 1 Department Store.

"Art education" and "mental-health education" later became the school's two specialities.

Of the people who walked out of this gate the school remembers a few names:

A middle school built to go with a new village turned out the head of the railway system, the head of the health system and the vice-president of a college. That is probably the best return on the business of building schools to follow a village.

Connections

• Sub-district：Pengpu Xincun Subdistrict
• See also：Pengpu Xincun Subdistrict, Pengpu Town, Qingyun Middle School

Sources: the founding of Pengpu Middle School in September 1963, its site at No. 150 Pengpu Xincun, the state of the school at its founding ("the only teaching building just completed, a hedge fence to the east separating it from the workers' children's primary school, a small stream to the north with the graves of Guangzhao Villa on the far bank, a wheat field outside the gate to the south, bamboo fencing all round"), boarders lodged in empty classrooms on the third and fourth floors with beds made of desks pushed together, the four-storey dormitory block with eight to a room built a year later, the absence of a principal at the start with the deputy director of academic affairs He Yunfu in charge, the teachers Gong Feng (politics, a demobilised soldier), Zha Hailong (Russian), Yin Yu (Chinese) and Bai Xinhua (mathematics), the recollections of Chen Yinsheng, who entered in 1963, the daily timetable (wake-up call, flag-raising, radio calisthenics, four periods in the morning and three in the afternoon, evening study 18:30–20:30, lights out at 21:00), and the school's being listed during the Cultural Revolution as a receiving unit for foreign guests in Pengpu Xincun, are based on A Good School at the Doorstep of Ordinary People — Shanghai Pengpu Junior Middle School, the official WeChat account of the school (Grade B, oral history and archives within the school); the 56 workers' dormitory blocks of Pengpu Xincun in 1958, the 169,000 square metres and the more than 1,200 households, and the sequence of schools — Xingfu Primary School in 1958, the Pengpu Xincun Joint Workers' Children's Primary School in 1959, Haiying Primary School in 1961 and Pengpu Middle School in 1963 — are based on the same piece (Grade B); the transfer of Pengpu Xincun from Baoshan to Zhabei in 1978, and the 397 residential blocks, 420,000 square metres, more than 6,000 households and more than 23,000 people, are based on the same piece and on the piece on Pengpu Xincun Sub-district (Grade B); Liu Youmin's arrival in 1982 and eleven years in charge, the particulars of "broken, broke, disorderly, poor", the 2 million yuan a year from the school-run "one factory and two shops", the recruitment of Zhang Binghe and Zhu Zhenglin, and the school being judged a district key school in 1993 with a 78 per cent rate of progression to senior middle school, are based on the same piece (Grade B); the separation of junior and senior divisions in September 1996, the renaming of the junior division as Linfen Middle School and then in August 1997 as Pengpu Junior Middle School, and the link with Pengpu Experimental Primary School, are based on the same piece and on entries reproduced from one source by several education platforms (Grade B / Grade C); the staff residential block and commercial-residential block built on the north side in 1985 and 1995, the reduction of the site to 18 mu and the floor area of 8,159 square metres are based on the same piece (Grade B); the founding of the "Bailing Youth Wind Band" with the Shanghai Wind Instrument Factory at the end of 1998, and the ensembles under the arts group and the places where it performed, are based on the same piece and on the Youxiao.com entry "Pengpu Junior Middle School" (Grade B / Grade C); the alumni Lu Dongfu, Xu Jianguang and Wan Feng are based on the same piece (Grade B). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.