Page 61 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

XIAO Ximing / The interaction between Library Science Education and the society in China over the past century 061

3.2 The contribution of LSE to society from 1950 to 1977

From 1950 to 1977, the departments of Library Science of Peking University and Wuhan University
had cultivated about 2,000 undergraduates. In addition, more than 200 students had been trained in
the diploma courses and seminars on Library Science and museum science, which were opened by
other educational institutions, such as University of Science and Technology of China, Jilin Normal
University, Beijing Cultural Institute, and the College of Education at Southwest University. Over
1250 in-service staff members in libraries, who had graduated from the correspondence courses at
Peking University and Wuhan University, there were 3500 professionals cultivated in total (W.C.
Wu, 2003 ). In the 1950s and 1960s, the library undertakings developed rapidly in China. Since
talents majoring in Library Sciences were rather rare at that time, these professionals then became the
backbone in developing library undertakings. In the 1980s and 1990s, a considerable number of these
professionals played leading roles in the library community and the LSE circle. Some of them served
as the directors of the provincial and municipal public libraries and college libraries, while others
became famous professors and scholars in the library educational institutions. All of them had made
significant contributions to the development of the library undertakings.
Reviewing the development of the interaction between LSE and society during the 1950-1977
period, it can be summarized that, compared with the Republican period, the social environment
underwent radical changes, providing favorable conditions for the development of LSE. The
number of the talents cultivated by LSE in this period far exceeded that in the Republican period.
However, on the whole, the development of LSE in this period was still relatively slow. In 1949,
the government of New China took over the LSE institutions of Peking University and Wuhan
University, which remained until 1977. This was incompatible with the development of the state’s
economy, science, education and culture at that time, and also fell behind the development of
library undertakings during the same period. The deeper problem laid in the improper interference
of politics, which made LSE violate the law of professional education, not only abandoning the
good traditions formed by the forerunners, but also breaking away from the major developing
trend of global Library Science. This had made China fell far behind those developed countries in
LSE in the late 1970s. Therefore, the opinion that this period is the second flourishing period (Z.Z.
Wang, 2009) of China’s LSE is worth critical discussion. In fact, the positive interaction between
LSE and society had not yet formed in this given period.

4 The interaction between LSE and the society from 1978 to 2016

4.1 The change of social environment and development of LSE from 1978 to 2016

In 1978, China started the great journey of reform and opening-up and entered a new historical
period. In this period, the social environment of LSE underwent radical changes. In terms