ARTICLE The Chengda Teachers School and Modern China’s Frontier Politics: Ethnicity and Religion in the Implementation of Republican Law, 1925–49 Bin Chen School of Humanities and Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China Email: chenbin@cuhk.edu.cn Abstract The military victories of the Northern Expedition (1926–28) ended nearly two decades of political fragmen- tation and ushered in a newera of centralized government in China. A key concern of the Nationalist gov- ernment, based in Nanjing, was bringing the haphazard array of private schools that had emerged since the republic’s founding in 1911 in line with the Nationalists’ political agenda. The Nationalist leadership also hoped to use their educational reforms to bring the frontier regions, many of which were only tenuously allied with Nanjing, more formally under their control. Thus, the new regime set out to achieve the twin goals of regulating private schools and cultivating ties among the frontier region’s population. These two goals became entangled in an unexpected manner at the private Muslim Chengda Teachers School. Although the Nationalists banned private teachers schools in 1933, they deliberately exempted Chengda from such reg- ulations to further their frontier agenda. Later, when the central government’s frontier political calculations changed, the Nationalists rescinded such protection and forced Chengda to abide by the original regulations. Keywords: Chengda; frontier politics; Ma Fuxiang; Ma Hongkui; Nationalist government; teachers school During much of the early twentieth century, before the Nationalists or Guomindang (GMD) secured power in Nanjing, China was in political turmoil. The Nationalists were determined to build a unified and robust modern China. They nominally unified the country by 1929, but much remained to be done (Eastman 1986, 124). In eastern China, where the Nationalists’ presence was relatively strong, the GMD adopted a particularly crucial tactic to consolidate its power: the centralization of teachers schools. The Nationalists regarded the teachers school as an essential tool of state control rather than a mere educational institution. They believed that a centralized teachers school system was instrumental in enhancing their control of local societies (Cong 2007,3–17). In 1932, the Nationalist government moved to further regulate the teachers schools. The govern- ment’s first efforts to establish legal guidelines limiting the scope and reach of teachers schools began in late 1932 with the Teachers Schools Law (Shifan xuexiao fa) (Ministry of Education 1932). A further tightening of the guidelines occurred with the Teachers Schools Regulations (Shifan xuexiao guicheng) issued by the Ministry of Education a few months later (Ministry of Education 1933). At the heart of both revisions was an attempt to regulate who could establish and run teachers schools. The new rules stipulated with considerable precision that the establishment, conversion, and suspension of teachers schools had to be approved by the provincial, municipal, or county-level education administrative agencies. Furthermore, if a teachers school did not follow the prescribed procedures, the education administrative regulations clearly gave such agencies the authority to close any schools in breach of such guidelines (Ministry of Education 1933, 20). Thus, the letter of the law essentially outlawed private teachers schools, greatly strengthening GMD control over eastern Chinese society. Meanwhile, the GMD regime kept a close eye on China’s frontier regions. Anthropologist Stevan Harrell (1999, 137) argues that in the twentieth century, “no Chinese state has ever entertained the prospect of losing the periphery with anything but horror, and so inclusion of the periphery has © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2022 The Journal of Asian Studies (2022), 81, 323–340 doi:10.1017/S0021911821002242 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911821002242 Published online by Cambridge University Press