On the first day of my return to Beijing in the spring of 1979, two things in particular struck me. At the airport, as we left the plane for the terminal, there were portraits of the great authority figures of Communist China hanging over the entrance—monumental in scale, heroic in style: Mao Zedong and Hua Guofeng, and then the patriarchal figures of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin—the latter especially impressive in his Soviet marshal’s uniform. Today, many of these portraits have been removed, but the picture of Stalin, so long after he had been put out of sight elsewhere, remains, which typifies the reluctance of even a more “pragmatic” regime to scrap the authority structure on which it continued to depend.
The second spectacle was an opening-night performance, that same evening, of a celebrated play by Wu Han1 concerning the upright Mingdynasty official Hai Rui (1513–1587), who had challenged corruption in high places and risked death in the endeavor to rectify injustice and the abuse of power. The play Hai Rui Dismissed2 was being performed for the first time since its banning during the Cultural Revolution. Its revival was one step in exposing the crimes of the Gang of Four and rehabilitating those who had been persecuted by them. Thus, back to back that day, we had Hai Rui and Stalin as symbols of two contrasting sides of contemporary China.
When first performed in 1961, the play was widely interpreted as an indirect criticism of Mao and a defense of Peng Dehuai, who had spoken out against Mao’s policies during the so-called Great Leap Forward and had suffered martyrdom as a result. Whether this was Wu Han’s specific purpose or not, as a competent historian of the Ming period from his precommunist days, Wu Han had a strong predilection for historical figures who manifested a noble, self-sacrificing spirit in the service of the people. Among them he chose Hai Rui as the personification of human intelligence, courage, and unyielding determination in the righting of injustice.
Among the features of Hai Rui’s character and career as an official, Wu emphasized his rugged independence of mind; his clear insight into the shams and hypocrisy of bureaucratic officialdom; his intolerance of favoritism, bribery, and corruption; his condemnation of the illegal annexation of property by powerful officials and of the concentration of wealth in their hands; his exposing of the polite conventions by which officials acquiesced in or collaborated with wrongdoing; his positive efforts to rectify the system and make fundamental reforms to equalize landholding and taxation; and above all his personal conscientiousness and dedication, his uncompromising integrity in the struggle against abuses of power.
One aspect of Hai Rui’s life and thought that is not underscored by Wu Han is his Confucianism (or Neo-Confucianism, the later, mature form in which it reached Hai Rui). In the repressive atmosphere of his own time and given Mao’s powerful hostility to Confucianism, for Wu Han to have taken this up would have risked misunderstanding. Wu knew that he would be exposed to ideological attack for seeming to glorify a kind of humanistic reformism rather than emphasizing the need for class struggle. Such reformism, it would be charged, actually served to buttress the existing order of that time. It ignored the realities of class conflict and, by offering palliatives to ameliorate the old order, delayed its inevitable overthrow through revolutionary struggle. Another likely objection would be that Neo-Confucian reformism tended to glorify the role of the individual rather than the group or class. No doubt anticipating these objections, Wu gave particular emphasis to Hai Rui’s “progressive” stance: his close identification with the people, his contempt for bureaucratic officialdom, and his awareness of the need for fundamental changes in the economic and social system of his time.
Even so, from the controversy that broke out over Wu’s play in May 1964, the Confucian background of Hai Rui’s reformism could not be kept out of sight. Indeed, it may well have been one of the issues that precipitated the anti-Confucian campaign that became such a prominent feature of the Cultural Revolution. Over the course of this campaign, Confucian reformism was cast as the ideological bedfellow of bourgeois revisionism, which had its own historical associations in Mao’s mind with Western liberalism. As a proponent of revolutionary change, he no doubt saw in Confucianism the same traits of tolerance, moderation, and compromise that he attacked in his essay “Combat Liberalism” as impediments to ideological struggle and direct action.3 Moreover, Wu Han had had scholarly associations with Dr. Hu Shi, the American-trained philosopher widely regarded as the epitome of liberalism.
Yet if Mao saw liberalism and Confucianism as having something in common, it was because for him they both belonged to a discredited past, not because they shared anything of genuine value. And this in turn owed much to Western perceptions of China’s past that Mao received from Marx and Stalin—perceptions of traditional China as hopelessly retrograde and without any capacity of its own for renewal or fundamental reform.
That China had any such capability was widely doubted in the nineteenth-century West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a more optimistic view of China had prevailed in Europe, based in part on the favorable accounts of Jesuit missionaries and in part on the idealizations of China as governed by rational philosophes in the eyes of Enlightenment thinkers. In the nineteenth century, however, the West encountered limits to its own expansion in the East and some disenchantment over its expectations for enlightened government in China. In contrast to the West’s growing belief in human progress during the nineteenth century, China seemed resistant to change and improvement. Hegel and Marx expressed this pessimism in regard to the backwardness of Asian societies, and the liberal economists of Britain felt disappointment over the failure of India and China to measure up to the material progress of the West and its hopes for freedom of trade and intercourse. James and John Stuart Mill contributed to Marx’s view that Oriental despotisms—powerful, managerial bureaucracies—inhibited economic development and condemned the major agrarian civilizations of Asia to unending stagnation. Increasingly, the view became established that Confucianism too was an essentially reactionary force, an instrument of ideological control in the hands of a predatory dynastic state. In that view, there was no hope of reform from within or of an internal evolution that would bring China abreast of the modern world. Mao’s own experience of the disintegration of the old dynastic order, coupled with the exposure of his generation to revolutionary doctrines from the West, persuaded him that nothing short of violent revolution and the total exposing of Confucianism’s reactionary influence would suffice to break China out of the age-old pattern of repression and stagnation. Mere reformism would not do it. Many Western writers shared the same view.
Against the background of this earlier impatience with reformism and, by contrast, high hopes for revolution, one can more readily appreciate the significance of Wu Han’s work. Contrary to these earlier expectations for Mao’s revolution, it not only experienced failures of its own but proved highly resistant to criticism of them; hence the example of Hai Rui as an outspoken critic of those in power might still fit the repressive situation in which China found itself post-“liberation.” Wu Han, of course, was not the only one to notice despotic elements of a traditional kind in the new order. One line of such analysis in the West has been represented by scholars including K. A. Wittfogel and more recently Marvin Harris, who have noted the appearance in Mao’s China of a state communism that in Harris’s words “may actually be nothing more than a new and more highly developed form of managerial despotism”4 greatly restricting the options available for freedom of action and expression by either the individual or the group. Yet even within China under the new dispensation (post Mao) the persistence of repressive features from the past has been widely acknowledged. Whether these are described as “despotic,” “totalitarian,” or, in Stalinist/Maoist terms, “feudalistic,” the one-party dictatorship and its managerial bureaucracy present problems similar to earlier dynastic regimes. In fact, it is probably this resemblance to dynastic rule that leads people to characterize these features as “feudalistic,” even though old-style rule in the name of one family disappeared in the 1911 Revolution.
With Mao gone, a new approach is being tried, less militant, less intense and severe, and possibly less repressive. Nevertheless, contradictory signals have been given of alternate encouragement and repression of dissent. There are striking reports of outspoken criticism as well as well-publicized cases of dissenters being put on trial. As everyone knows, there has been a campaign to expose the alleged crimes of the so-called Gang of Four, in which many defects in Communist rule have been exposed that were previously well hidden, but there has been continuing repression of those critical of the system that allowed such crimes to occur.
Under these circumstances, we can sympathize with Arthur Miller’s frustration, recounted in his recent book Chinese Encounters,5 over the seeming passivity of the Chinese in the face of these admitted outrages and the lack of any apparent outcry against them. To the student of China, Miller’s reaction evokes the memory of nineteenth-century Western observers in China who were similarly struck by the apparent passivity of the Chinese and their “fatalistic” acceptance of such situations. From this we know that we are up against a perennial problem in the understanding of China. The reviewer of Miller’s book in the New York Times noted this in commenting on Miller’s perplexities:
In the end the answers to Miller’s questions suggest a fundamental difference between our two worlds, but Miller is never able to explain it. What his book lacks (understandably since Miller is not a student of China) is a sense of the unique confluence of history, culture and Western values which has flowed together with Maoist doctrine during the last 50 years to create the “New China.”
Perhaps if we could know more, for instance about the historical role of individualism or the notion of what it meant to be an intellectual in traditional Chinese culture, both we and Miller would end up less perplexed by what he encounters.6
In earlier essays, I have described something of the “historical role of individualism” and “what it meant to be an intellectual in traditional China.” Before attempting to relate this to the current scene, I should like to consider further the case of Hai Rui, since Wu Han himself saw it as especially pertinent to the present situation.
In his play, Wu Han focused on Hai’s principled conduct as an official who was willing to risk offending higher authorities by exposing the corruption in which they too were implicated. This role as official critic was a recognized one in traditional China, since the ruler had his own interest in seeing that his officials enforced the law in conformity with the higher interests of the state. In historical fact, however, Hai Rui’s criticism went much further than this: in a memorial to the throne, he directly censured the emperor himself for his delinquencies as a ruler: his extravagance and self-indulgence, his inordinate exactions from the people, his indulgence of sycophants, his terrorizing of worthy ministers, his neglect of his own sons, his inattention to affairs of state, his refusal to heed honest criticism, his acquiescence and complicity in the crimes of corrupt officials, and so on.
It was a long and relentless attack. In conclusion, Hai Rui expostulated that his sense of indignation over these outrages impelled him to speak out, even though he risked death for it. According to the official history,7 when the emperor finished reading the memorial, he flew into a rage and ordered Hai Rui to be put under house arrest. “Don’t let him escape,” he ordered. But a eunuch attendant responded: “When Hai Rui prepared the memorial he knew that he would have to atone with his own life for his insults and disobedience. He bade farewell to his family, prepared his own coffin, and now is awaiting punishment in the court. His servants have all scattered and he is left alone. Indeed he is making no attempt to escape.”
This gave the emperor pause. He remained silent for a long time. Visibly shaken, he could not come to a decision on what to do with Hai Rui. Though recognizing the essential truth of what Hai had said, he remained bitterly resentful toward him and later had him thrown in prison, where he almost died from tortures used to extract a confession that his memorial was all part of a plot against the emperor. When another court official dared to propose clemency for Hai, the emperor had him flogged with a hundred lashes of the heavy bamboo, thrown in prison, and interrogated under torture day and night to make him confess his being party to the plot. In the end, however, the emperor himself wasted away and died without having approved the sentence of death, which willing servitors in the Ministry of Justice had sent up to him. Hai Rui, by contrast, was released from prison by the new emperor, lived out a noble career as an official, and died a natural death in honest poverty. Here in one episode, you have the epitome of both Ming despotism and Ming Neo-Confucian heroism.
Wu Han knew all this but left it out of his play, no doubt as too directly provocative of the ruling power. Nevertheless, he knew too that he put much at risk in merely writing his play, and he must, in a sense, have had his own coffin ready and waiting. Attacked by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, he died in circumstances that have not, to my knowledge, been fully explained.
Among historians, the Ming dynasty has been known as perhaps the most despotic of all in its repression of opposition. Much of the basis for this view lies in the numerous cases of outspoken critics upon whom were visited official degradation, beatings, torture, imprisonment, death in prison, and summary executions. In the Ming for the first time officials were stripped naked and thrashed publicly at court. One of Hai Rui’s predecessors, Fang Xiaoru,8 was celebrated for his fearless opposition to the third Ming emperor. The latter not only had Fang executed for this but extended the punishment to his family by exterminating Fang’s kin to the tenth degree of relationship. In this period, eunuchs at court and their secret police raised repression to a new level of intensity and viciousness.
But, looked at another way, for each instance of repression there had to be someone willing to resist the abuse of power, someone ready to stand in opposition regardless of the personal consequences. It is true that many of these were acts of lonely heroism—exceptions to the rule—yet, on the other hand, it cannot be said that they were wholly unique or unprecedented. Indeed, we have enough successive instances to constitute a virtual tradition of principled dissent.
Though not expressive of an organized political movement or systematic opposition, neither were they, on the other hand, simply cases of idiosyncratic nonconformism. Custodians of Confucian tradition and historians of thought have placed Hai Rui (and the earlier martyr Fang Xiaoru, who defied the third Ming emperor) squarely in the line of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. They were indeed “squares” (the Chinese too refer to rectitude in this rectangular way), and they were conscious of upholding a tradition of resistance to despotism which was central to Neo-Confucianism. It is significant that the lives and works of both Fang Xiao-ru and Hai Rui are recorded in orthodox Neo-Confucian compilations.9 At the same time, lest one perhaps think of them as representing solely the high or elite tradition, they are remembered as living legends in popular literature.
In the memorial of Hai Rui cited before, he associated himself with a tradition of outspoken Neo-Confucian scholars who as mentors to the throne counseled the emperor against ill-considered and improper actions. Even Hai Rui’s sovereign acknowledged this (according to the official history) when he likened Hai Rui to a virtuous minister in ancient times who had tried to warn the wicked last emperor of the Shang dynasty against his own follies. The further implication of this analogy, that he himself resembled that vicious and depraved ruler of ancient times, the Ming emperor rejected. It is probably to this that Hai owes the sparing of his life: the emperor did not wish to lend credibility to such a tyrannical image of himself among the Confucian keepers of the historical record.
The emperor Shizong’s consciousness of these historical analogies arose from a tradition of scholarly discussion that had come to be incorporated in the formal instruction of heirs apparent and in the lectures and discussions held at court on the significance of the classical humanistic texts for the conduct of rulership. The “lectures from the classics mat,” as we have observed earlier, established the principle that such criticism should not only be protected but encouraged. It may sound paradoxical that this sanctuary of free criticism could have managed to become established in the heart of the imperial institution precisely in those periods, the Song and the Ming, when the power and control of the ruler had grown to unprecedented proportions. Such was indeed the case, however, thanks to the unremitting efforts of distinguished Neo-Confucian scholars who asserted the need for this function to be served at court. Indeed, the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Yuan periods is inseparable from the rise of this type of reformism.
One such institution could not have been effective without others supportive of it. Another important restraining influence was the institution of court historian, entrusted with the function of keeping impartial records of proceedings at court. To this we owe the full text of Hai Rui’s memorial and detailed observations on the emperor’s reaction to it, which give us much insight into the human factors operating in this situation. This, in turn, we owe to the traditions of impartiality and inviolability, which had become established around this official historiographical function.
The skeptic today might still question how effective such institutions could be in restraining imperial despotism as long as the emperor held unchallenged final authority. Yet the exercise of such authority, whether in traditional dynasties or modern totalitarian states, is never absolute. It is always modified in some degree by the human instruments through which it must work, just as those instruments themselves are modified in their effectiveness by the total systemic environment in which they operate. Thus, a pertinent question to ask here is whether in the case of Wu Han anything similar to these Ming institutions acted to protect Wu’s exercise of even implied criticism (much less the direct criticism of a Hai Rui). We do not know the answer to this because the record is not available to us, and it is possible that we shall never know. There is no longer any independent office of court historian, and there is not even any lip service paid to the idea.
When Charles Bettelheim, the director of studies of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, resigned in 1977 as president of the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association, he complained that those who had seized power and ousted the Gang of Four never offered a plausible account of the ideological issues at stake nor a fair statement of the case against the Maoists for their alleged crimes.10 Without that, he said the campaign against the Gang of Four could not be seen as anything but a cynical self-justification for a coup d’etat carried out by unprincipled revisionists. On the basis of the record as we have so far been given it, one could not dispute that view, yet exactly the same could be said of the so-called radicals who dealt even less generously with their enemies; certainly they provided no impartial forum, court, or record for the charges made against their enemies: Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Wu Han, and so on.
In this brief discussion, I have dwelt on just two institutions at the center of dynastic power that helped to protect freedom of discussion—the discussions of the classics and the work of the court historian. With more time, I could extend the analysis to other institutions, such as the censorate, whose function was to investigate and report on abuses of official authority or violations of the law by those in power. Their function was, quite literally, to “speak out,” and Hai Rui was just such a censor who spoke out. Then too there were the schools, in the form of local academies, which supported independent, critical thought. Their growth and spread in the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, as we have seen earlier, paralleled the rise of the Neo-Confucian movement, for it was through these schools that the teaching was disseminated when it was banned as heretical by the court. Among other things, these academies served as libraries where the historical, philosophical, and literary record could be preserved beyond the direct control of the state.
By some it might be argued that these forms of dissent or opposition were flawed or limited by their class character; that is, they reflected the interests and concerns of a relatively small elite of educated scholar-officials. It might also be claimed that the heroic ideal of this movement expressed a kind of individualism akin to the middle-class individualism of the West and therefore could not ultimately serve the interests of the people as a whole. Moreover, these spectacular acts of individual heroism might be seen by skeptics as at best accomplishing little more than their own martyrdom.
Such assertions would not be without some basis in fact, and indeed there was a reaction to this moralistic idealism in later centuries. Even by Hai Rui’s time, there were scholars who had come to believe that this brand of Neo-Confucianism made inordinate and unrealistic demands on the individual for the total sacrifice of self to duty and principle. From this there gradually developed a trend of more realistic Neo-Confucian thought, which recognized the limited power of the individual to affect the course of events in the absence of more fundamental institutional reforms. In Waiting for the Dawn, I offered Huang Zongxi as an example of this trend. Thus Neo-Confucians had already come to an awareness of how importantly individual actions like Hai’s were conditioned by the institutional or systemic environment in which they operated. In other words, the supposed class background and individualistic tendency of the Neo-Confucians did not prevent them from recognizing the limits of individualism in that historical situation.
Not surprisingly, Huang’s critique of dynastic institutions was suppressed by the Manchus and only reappeared in the late nineteenth century, when reformers and some revolutionaries hailed Huang as a native apostle of democracy. Westerners tended to be skeptical. They were not impressed by the claim that Huang was “China’s Rousseau,” nor were they able to appreciate the liberal Confucian tradition upon which Huang drew and for which he spoke. To them he was at best a freak, a will-o’-the-wisp in the bogs of Chinese despotism, and, to increasing numbers of alienated young Chinese in the twentieth century, the messianic appeal of Western revolutionaries was far more alluring than the seasoned wisdom of a Huang Zongxi expressed in a classical language many of them could no longer understand. Yet as I have listened to Chinese scholars in mainland universities describe the tyranny of the Gang of Four and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, I could not help but think of what Huang had said about the need for the protections of law, for the decentralization of power, and for the independence of schools.
At the same time, it should not be overlooked that Mao, in his own way, was trying to cope with some of the most persistent realities of Chinese political life. Proverbially, it was said of China’s conquerors that they might win the empire on horseback but could not rule it from horseback; that is, they had to recognize that China could only be administered by a civil bureaucracy. Mao himself had waged a revolution to destroy the old order only to find that a massive, intractable bureaucracy reappeared under the aegis of the dictatorship of the Party. Unable to reconcile himself to this, he fought this nemesis from the past through the Cultural Revolution, resorting to the tactics he was most experienced in: mass mobilization for the conduct of protracted guerrilla warfare. Now it was in the form of “guerrilla politics” as practiced by the militant Red Guards, whom he threw against his own illegitimate offspring in the state and party bureaucracy.
That he could succeed in this without destroying China was a dream more vain than those of the Neo-Confucian idealists. Bureaucracy and technology are here to stay, and the question for the Chinese, as for us, is what ends they should serve and what ethos should guide them. On this score Mao was not wrong in sensing the threat that a purely technocratic education and pragmatic policy offered to the kind of revolutionary egalitarianism he had sought to propagate. Yet revolutionary violence having failed, gradualism and reformism acquired a new relevance as the only practicable alternatives. The violent revolutions in 1911, 1927, 1948–1949, and more recently the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution have only intensified, not altered, the basic syndrome.
Thus after thirty years of revolutionary change, the new regime finds itself, ironically enough, talking about the need to reform and modernize. It is sending groups, delegations, and numbers of students abroad to catch up with the latest Western methods. It is inviting innumerable experts from abroad to share their expertise in many fields. All this testifies to the continuing need of the Chinese state for an educated leadership class, a need that in the traditional society had created the functional base for the Confucian scholar. And if we are to look today for some institutional base in which more liberal attitudes and values could become established, it is in this same area, especially in educational and legal institutions, that the crucial issues will most likely be faced.11
Allowing for the built-in resistance to change of both Communist and traditional Chinese regimes, one cannot be optimistic about the long-term prospects for liberalization, but neither need we be wholly pessimistic. Even without a strong economic or social base for a more pluralistic political order in China, the common experience of the Chinese people under the terror of the Cultural Revolution aroused a widespread desire for the protections of law, a feeling not confined to the masses but shared by many among the leadership who suffered at the hands of the Gang of Four.
Unfortunately, in the absence of even a court historian today, we have no adequate account of the individual or collegial stands that must have been taken among the leadership in order to bring the revolutionary terror to a halt and achieve the limited liberalization that has taken place. Yet if authorities in Beijing thought it worth resurrecting the case of Hai Rui and the play of Wu Han, it must have been because Hai’s personal example spoke to their own experience of life, no matter how many years or how many “revolutionary” changes had intervened, and because it was still more natural for them to turn to native models than to remote Western ones. The play would never have been written had not Wu Han been able to identify himself with this sixteenth-century Neo-Confucian scholar-official and find in his courageous example the inspiration for his own daring protest. And Hai Rui, we know, looked to similar models in his own past, while his effective advocacy at court depended on institutions built up over the centuries to protect honest criticism as a form of loyal opposition.
This may be a tenuous thread, one too precarious to be called a “tradition” of liberal thought, but we recall that the succession to the way (daotong) was itself a precarious, “sometime thing,” yet, if only people had access to books and plays, the ideas in them could still have vital effect, even in circumstances quite different from those of their original creation.
Today in China, there is strong interest in both the outside world and China’s own past. Since much of that past was off-limits during the Cultural Revolution, retrieving it today offers some of the thrill of a new discovery, even for the Chinese, and also for them some of the satisfaction of reclaiming their natural inheritance.
In this process, historians and philosophers are reexamining many matters that were previously tabooed or were subject to such rigid ideological interpretation as to preclude serious study of the facts. Now the slogan is “to seek truth through facts” (shi shi qiu shi), a motto that itself goes back to seventeenth-century Confucian scholarship.12 And the subjects being reexamined in a more open spirit include both Neo-Confucianism and the first stirrings of modern liberal thought in the May 4th and New Culture movements, which arose in the late 1910s and 1920s of the twentieth century.
Many of the liberal tendencies of which I have spoken had lapsed or become obscured by then. (How and why this happened is a complex historical problem beyond my scope here.) In any case, these liberal tendencies stand in obvious contrast to the view of Neo-Confucianism as a repressive, reactionary system held by many young Chinese of the May 4th generation. Proponents of the New Culture movement in the 1920s, whose newly Westernized education had made a sharp break with classical Confucian learning, were often left ignorant of the thinkers and works cited above. Nevertheless, their own thought processes may well have remained unconsciously subject to lingering Neo-Confucian influences. As members of what was still a privileged intellectual elite, they easily identified Western-style liberalism with the autonomy of the self, which had already been a value in the earlier literati culture. The new trend from the West promised to expand a freedom they knew something of, whereas the implicit Western accompaniment of that freedom—some concept of laws and rights guaranteeing those freedoms on a wider basis—was more foreign to their thinking. The result among many young Chinese in the late 1910s and 1920s was a heady mixture of radical individualism, often romantically linked to an anarchist philosophy, which then turned on Neo-Confucianism as a social system standing in the way of progress—an incubus burdening the individual with old-fashioned ideas about social responsibilities, which his new education did not dispose him to accept or equip him to fulfill.13
Yet this was only part of the new picture. Sun Yat-sen saw China’s problem not as a lack of individualism but as an excess of it. To him, as a would-be nation builder, China seemed to be a “heap of loose sand” and the Chinese a people whose individualistic ways proved the despair of anyone trying to construct modern democratic institutions.14 Whether Sun would have thought to attribute this inveterate weakness to Neo-Confucianism is doubtful. It is even less likely that he would have known of the criticisms that had already been made of Neo-Confucian individualism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—not obviously with nation building in mind but on the ground that its radical assertion of the autonomy of the mind would undermine any basis for political authority or social order.15
At the present moment, brakes are being put on the so-called liberalization process, but my own reading of the situation is that this spells caution in—and not a complete reversal of—current trends toward greater openness of inquiry and discussion. In the longer run, I would see both tendencies—liberalization and repression—continuing to be engaged in mutual struggle, as was the case, I believe, in traditional China. One type of “realism” in China today will stress the threat of anarchy if liberalization gets out of hand and individualism runs rampant. Some will identify this danger with alien influences from the West, perhaps as a way of banishing ideas they would prefer not to recognize as natural and indigenous. On the other hand, another type of “realism” or “pragmatism” will point to the high costs of repression in destroying people’s motivations for work and to the danger of intellectual stagnation in handicapping the Chinese ability to fulfill the goals of “modernization.”
Realism here may require us to take another look at certain stubborn problems of China’s past and present. Education, for instance, may be seen as an area of crucial importance, then and now. Yet for all the optimism earlier in this century about the renovation and democratization of education in China, today higher education, even of a quality that leaves much to be desired, is still limited to a small percent of China’s high school graduates and is still essentially geared to producing a technically qualified elite to serve the interests of the state. Would not the present system, then, still be exposed to the kinds of criticism leveled at traditional dynasties by Chen Xianzhang and Huang Zongxi? Are we not compelled to reckon both with the persistence of such features of Chinese life (at least on the mainland of China) and perhaps the continuing relevance of earlier critiques?
In addressing such questions, we have an opportunity, as scholars today reappraise Neo-Confucian reformism along with the reform movements out of which the new China was born, to reexamine some of our own assumptions about liberalism and liberal education. For Westerners to adopt too narrow or culture-bound a definition of “liberalism” will be as self-defeating as was the attempt in China to limit Neo-Confucian orthodoxy to one particular school of thought. To see liberalism as having roots only in a Western past means confining and condemning it to an increasingly attenuated future. For Chinese, on the other hand, to see it as a foreign body, inassimilable to their own lives and culture, may likewise inhibit a natural growth from their own roots or by the process of cultural hybridization that today is the natural outgrowth of living together in the modern world. It is better to look at this the way Confucius would—as an opportunity to learn from one another’s strengths and weaknesses, hoping to enhance the one and remedy the other. Or perhaps even as the Neo-Confucians would—finding the Way in oneself, corroborating it in discussion with others, and accepting the responsibility for sharing it with a larger world.
As I said some years ago, in the early days of the Cultural Revolution:
The Chinese have thought of the Way (or Dao) as a growing process and an expanding force. At the same time, following Mencius, they have felt that this Way could not be real or genuine for them unless somehow they could find it within themselves, as something not external or foreign to their own essential nature. The unfortunate aspect of their modern experience has been the frustrating of that healthy instinct, through a temporary loss of their own self-respect and a denial of their right to assimilate new experience by a process of reintegration with the old. To have seen all value as coming solely from the West or as extending only into the future, and not also as growing out of their own past, has hindered them in recent years from finding that Way or Dao within themselves. The consequences of that alienation and its violent backlash are only too evident in the Cultural Revolution. We may be sure, however, that the process of growth is only hidden, not stopped, and that the new experience of the Chinese people will eventually be seen in significant part as a growth emerging from within and not simply as a revolution inspired from without.16
I believe that what is said above accords with the spirit expressed by Professor Qian Mu himself, in his introductory lectures at New Asia College, when he called for a larger, continuing dialogue on the meaning of Chinese history and culture in relation to the contemporary world. Professor Qian insisted that each people had the first responsibility for understanding and preserving its own culture, and the first task in accomplishing this was to characterize Chinese culture in its own terms, without superimposing Western categories on it. Thus the basic Chinese approach to life should be distinguished from the Western. The latter, he said, was marked by a tendency to differentiate, to analyze and separate things out. Hence the West became particularistic and individualistic. The Chinese way, by contrast, sought to see things whole, to achieve harmony, accommodation, consensus, and unity. It prized collective action, family solidarity, and continuity with the past above the “heroic” achievements of single individuals.
In my own discussion of Neo-Confucian individualism, I have made similar observations about differences between it and the modern Western variety. Indeed, since I only saw Professor Qian’s published lectures after I had finished my own, it seemed uncanny how often we touched on the same points. Nevertheless, his emphasis and mine have been different in some predictable, and also some unexpected, ways. Professor Qian, in affirming continuity with the past, presents a somewhat conservative view of Chinese tradition and differentiates it from the Western emphasis on innovation and individuality. By contrast, I have pointed out what was new and liberal in Neo-Confucianism and how importantly the heroic individual figured in it. The contrast, no doubt, is more apparent than real; each of us recognizes what the other talks about as part of the total picture. But Professor Qian’s great contribution has been to defend the integrity of the Chinese vision against an aggressive invasion of Western influences. For my part, in furthering the dialogue he has begun, I have tried to point out certain common values in Chinese and Western traditions underlying the cultural differences.
There is something ironic in this seeming reversal of roles. Professor Qian has said that the Western way is to differentiate, while the Chinese way is to seek the underlying unity and continuity, yet here he is sharply differentiating China from the West, and here I am looking for common ground between the two. It seems as if he has adopted the Western mentality and I the Chinese.
If Lu Xun were here, he might be tempted in his sardonic way to say that one of us is putting on Western airs and the other Chinese. But in the end, I think Professor Qian himself points the way to a resolution of this dilemma. After identifying such concepts as “individual freedom” (geren ziyou) and “human rights” (renquan) as typically Western,17 he says we should set these aside and try to describe the Chinese experience objectively in its own terms. That being done, each of us can then make his own subjective evaluation of the phenomenon so characterized. “I do not oppose,” he says, “each individual’s bringing his own viewpoint to bear in evaluating what is right and wrong, good and bad; this is the individual’s own free choice (zhe shi geren de ziyou).”18
If I have made my point above, the terms Professor Qian speaks in are not simply “Western” but have become “second nature” for the Chinese as well, precisely because they were not so alien in the first place. Today, with increasing contact and convergence among peoples, the seeming reversal of roles between us is a natural consequence of the effort to understand one another. In that process we discover not only the distinctive qualities in one another but also something of our common humanity.
