Institutions of learning not only educate oncoming generations but also create, import and disseminate culture and technology. By performing such vital functions, a modern nation's schools and colleges, libraries and laboratories become of central importance to the state as well as to the society in general. In the Chinese case, moreover, education had from early times been a principal concern of government, and so it would become, eventually, a central focus of the Chinese revolution after 1949. Meanwhile during the first half of the twentieth century, education proliferated in China in the most varied forms and with many kinds of foreign influence and participation. The voluminous record is widely scattered and just beginning to be studied. For example, new work suggests that functional literacy among the common people was more widespread than was formerly assumed. Many important aspects of twentieth-century education need attention – the inheritance of social style and pedagogic method from the thousands of academies (shu-yuan) that had functioned in late imperial China, the growth of a modern school system and of urban public education through the press, the formal education of women, the rise of publishing houses like the Commercial Press (Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, founded at Shanghai in 1896, a great publisher of journals as well as textbooks), and the founding of educational associations and new schools as seedbeds of reform and revolution. Within this broad terrain, the focus of this chapter is limited to higher education. This fact in itself testifies to the scholarly neglect thus far of the vital story of elementary and secondary education in Republican China.