Reshaping Universities: A Research-oriented Turn in the Allocation of Funds in the National Universities of the Early Republic of China

The national universities of the early Republic of China were evolved from the higher education institutions in the late Qing Dynasty. There were many problems in terms of the quality and orientation of education in these universities. In 1917, at the urge of Cai Yuanpei and others, the Ministry of Education revised the "University Statute" to establish the legal basis for the reform of the universities. At the same time, Cai YuanPei imitated the development model of German universities and carried out the reform at the National Peking University, trying to reshape the internal administrative structure of the university through academic research, and then to promote the establishment and regulation of the internal funding allocation mechanism of the university, so as to make it more research-oriented and provide basic material and institutional guarantee for the positioning and development of academic research at the university. The construction of the administrative system and funding allocation mechanism with academic overtones provided a strong institutional guarantee for the further development of the national universities, and even for the construction of an independent academic community to serve the whole nation with academic research. National universities were thus reshaped.