LAUSR

The only lasting policy change implemented by the education minister of the newly established Chinese Republic in 1912 was an official commitment to “aesthetic education” (meiyu): Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940) appropriated Kantian and Schillerian aesthetics to serve Republican China’s needs. This article offers a new reading of Cai’s 1917 proposal to “replace religion with aesthetic education.” By reading Cai’s proposal in light of his long-standing interest in religion, as well as the debate about religion taking place in the pages of the avant-garde journal New Youth at the time, I demonstrate that he avoided the rhetoric of “national salvation” projects and instead outlined a more individually focused vision for the place of aesthetic education. I trace Cai’s conception of aesthetic education to its roots in his policy proposals as education minister (1912), which elucidate a vision of education based on a Schillerian conception of aesthetic experience as occupying a parapolitical space.