| Zhong Jingwen | |
| Discipline: | Folklorist |
| Birth Date: | 2 March 1903 |
| Workplaces: | Sun Yat-sen University, Beijing Normal University |
| Era: | 1920s–1980s |
| Death Place: | Beijing, China |
| Birth Place: | Haifeng County, Guangdong, China |
| Native Name: | 钟敬文 |
Zhong Jingwen (March 20, 1903 – January 10, 2002) was a Chinese folklorist. Sometimes called the "father of Chinese folklore studies", Zhong pioneered folklore studies from the 1920s to 1980s. In 1927, he co-founded the Folklore Society of Sun Yat-sen University alongside a number of other prominent professors at the university. Several decades later, after academia and folkloristics were greatly disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, Zhong played a key role in the refoundation of folklore studies in China, serving as the first president of the China Folklore Society and the head of China's first folklore doctoral program during the early 1980s.
On March 20, 1903, Zhong Jingwen was born in Haifeng County, Guangdong. In 1926, he began work and study at Lingnan University in Guangzhou. The following year, on recommendation from Gu Jiegang, he became an assistant at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU).[1]
During the 1920s, he founded a weekly folklore journal titled Minjian Wenyi (Folk Literature and Arts) alongside Yang Chengzhi and He Sijing. In 1927, Zhong joined with other literature and history faculty (including Gu Jiegang, Rong Zhaozu, and Dong Zuobin) of SYSU in Guangzhou to found the Folklore Society of SYSU, the first such folkloristics society in China. The Folklore Society took control of Folk Literature and Arts, renaming the journal to simply Minsu (Folklore). Zhong wrote a monograph entitled Studies of Folk Literature and Arts, which was published by the society. Inspired by these efforts, other folklore societies were established at ten other Chinese universities. SYSU began offering a variety of folk literature and art classes; during the late 1920s, Zhong taught a course named "Introduction to Ballads". From 1934 to 1936, he served as a visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
In 1949, Zhong attended the First Congress of Literary and Art Workers in Beijing. Later that year, he accepted a professorship at Beijing Normal University by Li Jinxi. Concurrently, Zhong instructed at Peking University and Fu Jen Catholic University.
The Cultural Revolution put a halt to nearly all higher education in mainland China. Folklore studies in particular took a heavy blow, as it was regarded as a continuation of feudal culture. Coinciding with the return of folklore classes at universities in 1978, Zhong drafted a petition to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to re-establish folklore study and research institutions. The petition was joined by six other folklorists, including his old colleagues Gu Jiegang, Yang Chengzhi, and Rong Zhaozu. This led to the foundation of the China Folklore Society in May 1983, with Zhong as its first president. During the early 1980s, Zhong headed the folklore doctoral program at Beijing Normal University, which was the only such program in China for more than a decade. Zhong's centrality to the establishment of folklore studies in China has led to him being styled the "father of Chinese folklore studies".
Beginning in 1984, Zhong and Zhou Weizhi served as chief vice-editors of the Three Collections of Chinese Folk Literature project, headed by Zhou Yang. Zhong began work on the six-volume History of Chinese Folklore, which was completed and published by his student Fang Xiao in 2008. Zhong died in Beijing on January 10, 2002.