THE ESTABLISHMENT OF these visible acknowledgements of Western scientific and medical superiority coincided with the beginning of the last great debate over how defensible all this Westernization was. As people in China had comprehended, everything that made the West so superior rested on modern science. Western readers may regard the many calls to adopt the sciences as the measure of all things in China as an obvious consequence of rejecting the relationist interpretation of nature, as expressed in the Yin-Yang and Five Phases doctrines, in favour of chemistry, physics, biology and so on. That was certainly how many Chinese people returning from universities in the U.S. and Europe regarded the matter. Yet more than a handful of the reformers saw that achieving this intellectual volte-face would hardly be as simple as it appeared on paper.
In fact it proved enormously difficult to part company with the relationist view of society and nature that had been held for 2,000 years. Just imagine how Western culture would have reacted if it had suddenly encountered some other civilization that, with a completely different view of the world, rendered obsolete all the knowledge and technological triumphs attained through physics and chemistry while giving rise to other, wondrous things that physicists and chemists were at a loss to explain. A centuries-long process of development linked with many famous names would suddenly become irrelevant. All the many great works these authors wrote, all their Nobel Prizes, would suddenly become so much waste paper and scrap metal. Inconceivable? Indeed!
Yet this was precisely the reality facing the inheritors of a 2,000-year-old doctrine of the systematic correspondence of all things. All at once, the many thousands of writings which they believed represented the pinnacles of scholarship seemed no longer to mean anything at all.76 For both conservatives and ‘modern people’, as Hu Shi called them, who decided that the natural sciences were indispensable, the approach that had slowly emerged in Europe through centuries of conflict with religion and speculation and which recognized only facts and objectively verifiable truths was completely alien.
The term for the new approach to interpreting and influencing the world was ke xue, which was probably coined in Japan and reached China from there. Ke means ‘field’ or ‘subject’. A ke xue is a ‘doctrinal structure divided into fields.’ Just how thin the concept was that arrived in China via this term is shown by the definition offered by Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936), a proponent of the ‘scientification’ of Chinese society.77 Scientific method, he wrote, is
nothing other than the ordering of all natural information into various classes and finding the order in which all these are arranged. After these have been arranged into classes and their order has been determined, we use the simplest and simultaneously clearest language to summarize everything, and can then call this a universal law of science.78
In discussions with Chinese people who believe that the use of Chinese medicine is still justified, one frequently hears the argument that this kind of medicine is thoroughly founded in ‘natural sciences’ – a contention that practically begs to be disputed. In his or her own language, a Chinese person would of course say something completely different. This medicine is very much a ‘doctrinal structure divided into departments’, ke xue, for example fu ke, er ke, shang ke, nei ke and so on, meaning the medicinal fields dealing with women, children, injuries and internal medicine, to name only a few. Hearing it described like this, one can only agree with the speaker. The term ke xue means very little. In fact, it will not be associated with the European idea of ‘science’ at all unless the person hearing it has had solid training in European intellectual history. And who had that in early twentieth-century China?
The spokesmen in the science debate included both Ding Wenjiang and Hu Shi, who advocated completely adopting Western science and culture, Zhang Junmai (1887–1969), also known as Carsun Chang, and Liang Shuming (1893–1988),79 who supported a more superficial appropriation of Western science. 80 For the latter group, holding on to traditional Chinese moral philosophy was essential, as the natural sciences, or ‘doctrinal structure divided into fields’ of the West, could never sufficiently explain the more sophisticated, metaphysical aspects of existence. Carsun Chang pointed out the contradictions between subjectivity, intuition, a relationist (or synthetic) view of the world, free will and the uniqueness of each person as characteristics of a life philosophy on the one hand, and believing the laws of causality and accepting the uniformity of all phenomena in the universe as the central concepts of natural science on the other. He declared that these two approaches were irreconcilable and that the natural sciences could never produce a philosophy of life.81
European philosophers engaged in a comparable discussion at the time. The protagonists of China’s science debate quoted Kant as well as importing the ideas of contemporary thinkers including John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Eucken and Hans Driesch to China.82 The dispute centred on the concepts ‘natural science’ vs ‘philosophy of life’ and matter vs mind and soul, and brought ideas from sceptical idealism, phenomenology, monism, pluralism and other European movements. Sometimes it became abrasive, for example when Ding Wenjiang condemned his opponents as ‘reincarnated ghosts of Western and Chinese metaphysics.’
Some conservatives favourably contrasted the philanthropic morals of the relationist world-view with the cold, analytical approach of Western science. Such morals were no use, responded advocates of scientism (comprehensive applicability of the natural sciences), pointing out that through the centuries and despite their allegedly philanthropic morality, the Chinese had continually slaughtered each other on a grand scale. ‘Zhang Xianzhong alone butchered more people in Sichuan than those killed in the World War, to say nothing of the atrocities of the Manchus in some southern provinces. We would do well to ask ourselves what all this intellectual civilization has cost us’, wrote Ding Wenjiang.83
The debate over the value of the more ‘intellectual civilization’ of the East compared with the West’s ‘materialist civilization’ continued for several years. It drew in nearly all of China’s notable intellectuals of the time before leaving most with the realization that there was no way to deny the centrality of the natural sciences. The evidence that scientific objectivity pro duced more than individualized intuition and speculation became more and more overwhelming.84
In addition, the efforts of some Chinese intellectuals that even today have not completely ended, known as ‘sciences with a regional character’ (difanxing kexue), which tried to at least relativize, if not to halt, the triumphant success of ‘Western’ science, remained only marginally significant. 85
Looking back, one is struck by the seriousness of all those who participated in this debate. It was about far more than a little modernization. It was about the fundamental question that a culture under pressure from another that is superior, at least technologically and militarily, must ask itself: how can we ward off the danger and return to our old greatness? Where did any comparable process take place among the non-European cultures that felt provoked by Western values and superiority? Responding to this superiority and to the waning influence of traditional values by resorting to terrorism and calling for collective hatred was never even considered in China.