Weston, Timothy B.  The Power of Position:  Beijing University, intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004.

In The Power of Position, Weston contends that during the Republic the founding and growth of Beijing University as an intellectual center for China created the mouthpiece for Chinese intellectuals to make a case for themselves as the proper leadership for China in the modern era.  After making this point in his introduction, the second and third chapters discuss the founding of Beijing University in the end of the Qing Dynasty as the Jingshi daxuetang and then follow the University through China’s 1911 revolution and its aftermath in Beijing.  Weston’s primary goal in the fourth chapter is to show the University’s ability to position itself as new, but the inheritor of the intellectual tradition in China. In the fifth, titled “The Insistent Pull of Politics” he asserts that intellectuals saw themselves as the proper leaders of society, in the Confucian style, and sought to use Beijing University as their mouthpiece and as a place to train their students to think in terms of service to the larger nation of China.  In chapter six, Weston sees this process of moving from Imperial University to “Beida”, the modern hotbed of intellectual discovery and political activism, as having reached its peak in the May 4^th Movement of 1919.  Chapter seven discusses a crossroads after the 1920’s during which the University seemed to be trying to choose between political activism and academic professionalism, where the problems of modern society could be thought out in a quiet, careful, critical way.   Westons conclusion is that Beijing University was uniquely positioned to accomplish the task of mediating the modern and traditional through an essential conservatism that came with the territory of being an intellectual in China, whatever the subject of study.  Rather than seeing Beijing University as a revolutionary place, then, Weston sees it as essentially a liberal institution, rooted in the Republic, and dedicated to the values of intellectual social leadership, individual self-reflection, critical thinking, and service to society as a whole.