A History of Jingde Middle School (1943-2003)
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Originally published around 2004 on the official website of Jingde Middle School, and later collected and organized by Zhu Anfeng, alumnus of the 1999 graduating class.
Jingde Middle School of Anhui Province was founded in August 1943. By 2003, it had reached its full sixtieth year. In the span of six decades, the school grew from its birth through hardship and development into a school of real scale.
1. The County Junior Middle School Before Liberation (August 1943 - March 1949)
As early as 1942, people in Jingde who cared about education, distressed by how underdeveloped local schooling was, proposed the founding of a county junior middle school. In November of that year, the Preparatory Committee for Jingde County Junior Middle School was established. Wang Xihan, a graduate of National Wuchang Normal University, served as chair. During the preparatory period, the county government allocated funds for operations and construction, while prominent local families were mobilized to donate land and money. In total, around 1,300 mu of land was gathered and used as school property through rent collection.
In early August 1943, Jingde County Junior Middle School was formally established, with Wang Xihan as its first principal. The campus was located in the premises of Jingyang Primary School at the lower east gate of the county seat. In September, the school admitted its first two classes of first-year junior students, while one second-year class transferred in from elsewhere. By the following year, a four-year simplified teacher-training class was also opened, and the school had grown to six classes with about 260 students.
In 1946, Wang Xihan resigned and Jiang Pijun succeeded him as principal. The school continued to operate with both regular junior-middle classes and teacher-training classes. The establishment of the county junior middle school ended Jingde's long history of having no secondary education at all and opened a new chapter for education in this mountainous county.
2. Steady Growth After Liberation (April 1949 - August 1958)
In April 1949, Jingde was liberated, and the newly established people's government took over the school. In September of that year, the school was renamed Jingde Junior Middle School of Southern Anhui District. The new government also implemented student financial aid, helping students from poor families continue their education and giving concrete form to the principle of opening education to workers and peasants.
In the early 1950s, the school underwent multiple institutional adjustments. The teacher-training classes were reduced and merged, government funding replaced the older land-based income system, and the school gradually stabilized under public management. Principals and vice principals changed several times, but the school continued to expand, and by the late 1950s it had grown to six teaching classes, around 345 students, and more than thirty staff members.
During this period, the school also experienced the broader political movements of the era, including ideological rectification and anti-rightist campaigns. Even so, teaching conditions and staffing improved gradually, and these years formed the stage of steady post-liberation development.
3. The Difficult Early Years as a Complete Middle School (August 1958 - December 1978)
In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, the school expanded to eight classes and admitted its first high-school students. It also formally adopted the name it still uses today: Jingde Middle School of Anhui Province. From that point, it became a complete middle school rather than only a junior middle school. Its campus also moved from the east gate area to Wangci outside the west gate.
Those years were highly turbulent. While expanding, the school had to respond to campaigns such as steel production, agricultural support work, and repeated non-teaching mobilizations, all of which badly disrupted education. In the early 1960s, after county-level administrative changes and periods of economic hardship, the number of students and teachers fluctuated sharply. High-school admissions were at times suspended. At other times the school briefly recovered and even maintained active extracurricular life, including sports meets, student performances, and public productions.
The Cultural Revolution brought the normal teaching order to a near standstill. School leadership shifted repeatedly, revolutionary committees replaced ordinary administration, and many teachers were reassigned or sent elsewhere. Students were affected by political movements, labor mobilization, and the new social order of the time. Even so, the school did continue in altered form, and major physical foundations of the present campus were laid during these years, including land requisition for what became the current teaching area and sports field.
The school also maintained productive labor bases, workshops, farms, and school-run enterprises during this period, reflecting the educational model of that era. By the time the Cultural Revolution ended, the school had grown to nineteen classes, more than one thousand students, and nearly sixty staff members.
4. Reform and Renewal (1978 - 1993)
After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, the school entered a new era. Wrongful cases from past political campaigns were gradually corrected, veteran teachers returned, new younger teachers were brought in, and the staff began teaching again with renewed spirit.
Between the late 1970s and early 1990s, the school saw frequent changes in leadership, but development accelerated. It expanded its organizational structure, strengthened moral education, and improved school management. In 1982, the school was approved as one of Anhui's first six-year restructured complete middle schools. By the mid-1980s, the school had grown to twenty-four classes, around 1,200 students, and more than 110 teachers and staff, a scale that basically remained stable thereafter.
During these years, the school placed strong emphasis on political education, democratic school management, and teaching quality. It also achieved remarkable results in exams, competitions, and awards. From the resumption of the college entrance examination through the early 1990s, hundreds of high-school graduates were admitted to universities, junior colleges, and technical schools, while the school also earned honors in subject competitions, campus governance, sports, arts, and vocational-support activities.
The physical campus also changed dramatically. New lecture buildings, classroom buildings, dormitories, office buildings, canteens, gates, and road systems were built. The school introduced early computer teaching, modern printing technologies, and broader audiovisual facilities. In 1993, the staff congress formally adopted the school motto Du Zhi, Ming Si, together with the school song and the emblem for the fiftieth anniversary. The rebuilt main gate, with the characters written by Zhou Erfu, gave the school a new academic dignity.
5. Ten Years of Achievement and Glory (1994 - 2003)
Following the fiftieth anniversary and driven by the goal of building a first-class school, Jingde Middle School entered a decade of rapid development. With support from county leaders and education authorities, it pursued the creation of a model complete middle school and a recognized civilized institution.
In these years, the school expanded its Party organization, union structure, and management system. At the same time, junior and senior secondary education were eventually separated administratively, and the school grew beyond its earlier twenty-four-class structure. By 2003, it had forty-two regular classes plus review classes, with around 2,500 students and about 135 staff members.
The transformation of the campus was especially striking. Between 2000 and 2003 alone, investment reached sixteen million yuan, and the campus area expanded from 47 mu to 148 mu. New teaching buildings, offices, a science hall, a library, a standard sports ground, teachers' housing, and modern student apartments were added. The school also built multimedia classrooms, campus broadcasting and telephone systems, and broad information infrastructure, while continuing to expand its library and educational equipment.
During the same period, the school strengthened its teaching staff and produced increasingly strong college-entrance results. Many students were admitted to leading universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, USTC, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Southeast University, East China Normal University, and others. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the school repeatedly ranked at the top of the city in overall performance and established itself as one of the strongest high schools in the region.
Students also performed impressively in academic competitions, and teachers earned recognition through publications, awards, and professional advancement. The school won multiple provincial titles in civilization-building and youth-league work, and its laboratories, archives, information systems, and educational management all reached high standards.
Looking back over these sixty years, Jingde Middle School moved from hardship to renewal, from modest beginnings to real distinction. Standing beside the Huishui River, with Zishan to the east and the river to the west, it came to resemble a bright pearl in Jingde. Across six decades, the school educated countless students and made major contributions to local education, spiritual life, and social development. Looking ahead, the school would continue to renew itself and to light the path by which generations of children could grow into talent.