Sources of Chinese Tradition: Volume 2: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, Second Edition

For all its strident iconoclasm, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution did not spring from any clear consensus on values or political direction. Indeed, the power struggles and factional infighting that marked the campaign betrayed great ideological confusion.

“Confucianism,” though a prime target of attack, had long since been eclipsed educationally and politically—largely replaced by Western-style learning in the first decades of the century and then, post-1949, by a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology and curriculum in the schools. Except among a few remnants of the older generation, Confucianism was perceived negatively through the anti-Confucian diatribes of the New Culture and May 4 Movements. Thus, paradoxically, the ghost of Confucius had to be conjured up anew by the propagandists of the Cultural Revolution, and Confucian texts, long out of print, had to be reproduced so that they could be criticized.

In the meantime, however, at home an inchoate popular Confucianism barely survived attacks on the family system, while abroad some serious study and reinterpretation of Confucianism was going on—especially in Hong Kong and Taiwan but also in Japan and, by now, in the West. On the mainland itself two threads of continuity persisted, though intangibly. Some survivors of the Maoist onslaught had, simply as leaders identified with moderate policies, begun to think of a return to Confucian ideas of “harmony,” civility, and forbearance as an antidote to the violence of Maoist “class struggle” (meaning, really, political and ideological struggle). Theirs was a view born more out of hard experience, common sense, and practicality than out of any philosophical theory or deep knowledge of Confucianism. Contemporaneously, however, a few Confucian thinkers who lived into the Mao years held independent views that differentiated them from either pragmatists or their Communist fellow travelers.

One of these was the influential thinker and teacher Xiong Shili (1885–1968), who inspired a whole philosophical movement known as the New Confucians. Basing his teaching on the Classic of Changes (Yijing), but incorporating elements of Buddhist idealistic philosophy and Daoism, he considered himself a latter-day exponent of Wang Yangming’s Neo-Confucian teachings centering on the “humaneness that forms one body (substance) with Heaven-Earth-and-all-things.” This original substance he also explained in terms of the Changes’ concept of the Way as unceasing creativity ("production and reproduction"), the original mind in Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, and Wang Yangming’s doctrine of the unity of substance and function. Making no concessions to Marxism and Mao, he lived and worked quietly in the early years of the People’s Republic, but his greatest influence was on thinkers who carried on as refugees in Hong Kong and Taiwan (represented herein by the Manifesto of 1957, pp. 551–558).

Another of these Confucians was the aforementioned Liang Shuming (1893–1988), whose independent version of Neo-Confucianism synthesized elements of Bergson, Buddhism, Daoism, and a homegrown communitarian tradition linked to the community compacts of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. Courted early by the Mao regime and made a member of the People’s Republic Political Consultative Conference, he showed his independence as early as 1953 (when most people believed Mao could no do wrong) by criticizing the harshness of the CCP’S agricultural policies and treatment of the rural areas. For this outspokenness he was subjected to repeated attacks by Mao and others, but he refused to compromise on his principles and later came to be respected in the Deng years as a thinker and teacher of genuine integrity.

A third but somewhat different case is represented by Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-lan, 1895–1990). Well known in the West for his History of Chinese Philosophy, Feng returned to Beijing after getting his doctorate at Columbia University under John Dewey and developed what he called the “New Rationalism” or the “New Philosophy of Reason or Principle” (xinlixue), linked more closely to Zhu Xi’s school of Neo-Confucianism than to Wang Yangming’s. He, too, remained in Beijing after 1949, but with the avowed purpose of synthesizing Confucianism with Marx-Leninism and the “new socialist reality,” an effort at adaptation and compromise that proved highly problematical. Feng thought of his mission as showing the continued relevance of Confucianism to the modern scene, but his repeated attempts at Communist-style self-criticism eventually lost credibility, while his personal associations with people like Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, later discredited along with the Gang of Four, left Feng looking like an opportunist to some and a tragic figure to others. His apologia appears later in this chapter.

It cannot be said that any of these latter-day exponents of Confucianism have had great influence on contemporary Chinese thought on the mainland. Many younger Chinese, especially those once active in the Cultural Revolution, remain imbued with earlier forms of anti-Confucian “liberationism,” and even critics of the Deng regime in the 1980s, whose dissent culminated in the Tiananmen demonstration of June 4, 1989, continued to see Confucianism as a reactionary ideology now appropriated by a repressive regime, rather than as a form of liberal humanism. They have not been much edified, least of all inspired, by the official movement to revive Confucianism as represented here in the final reading. To what extent the present regime will tolerate a more liberal reading of Confucianism, or rather keep its revival well within conservative bounds, remains unclear.

1. In discussing the “original substance,” philosophers in general regard it as a thing separable from our heart-and-minds. They believe that, through rational means, it can be obtained from the outside. As a result, philosophers, through cogitation, depict a multiplicity of imagined [objective] realms and construct their theories of the “original substance” accordingly. Whether the materialist/ idealist or the non-materialist/non-idealist version, it is, in essence, a reflection of the attitude of searching for something outside by guessing, each falsely trying to settle on a kind of substance. This is of course mistaken. Moreover, there are philosophers who deny “original substance” altogether and focus their attention exclusively on epistemology. This position can be said to have departed from philosophy. For the reason that philosophy can still maintain itself is precisely because ontology cannot be occupied by science. The purpose of epistemological inquiry is to help us to bear witness to substance; if we are determined not to recognize that there is original substance and spend all our energy working through epistemology, there can be no result to this kind of inquiry. How can this not be said to have departed from the philosophical position? This kind of falsehood is not different from what the worthies of old characterize as “the Way is near but we search for it from the difficult.” This kind of mistake lies in our inability to recognize the original heart-and-mind through self-reflectivity. To put it simply, the mistake arises from our failure to understand the unity of the original source of all things and our true nature. (The so-called true nature here refers to the true heart-and-mind. Since it is the principle of our life, it is called true nature; since it is in command of the body, it is called original heart-and-mind.) It is because we falsely imagine that the original substance of the cosmos exists outside, independent of our heart-and-minds, that we try to search for it through our quantitative intelligence. . . .

2. The “original substance” of all things in mysterious learning is so vast that there is nothing outside of it (this vastness is not contrasted with smallness); it is void (the so-called void does not mean “empty"; it is not meaningless, for, as lasting existence, it does not have visible traces), all-encompassing, complete, in possession of the tiniest and absolutely inexhaustible functions. In Confucian philosophy, the original substance of all things is referred to as the Great Change, which has no visible forms or traces. (The so-called Great Change is originally changeless, but it entails transformations and changes; since the changeless is seen through transformations and changes, it is called the Great Change.) If we say that the tiniest is a real thing and that since it is the tiniest it is the original source of everything (such as the heterodox teaching of “following the world” in India), then we only acknowledge matter as real; there is nothing that can be called the original substance. Many materialists claim that what we refer to as substance is a mystic idea, but it is not mystic. Truth presents itself in front of us. If there is some blockage in our heart-and-minds, we will not be able to recognize it. Some also criticize us as departing from the objective, independent real world in order to construct through random imagination a lofty, wondrous original substance, like the floating clouds in aerospace. Actually, while what we call original substance is not like the mundane real world clung to by false consciousness, we do not mean to say that the original substance is outside of all things. If it is indeed outside of all things, how can it be the original substance of all things? It should be noted that all things are manifestations of the original substance. It should not be perceived as a thing. Analogously, the waves are all manifestations of the ocean. We should not perceive waves separately as if they are discretely isolated waves. If we understand this, we can know that we and all things are intertwined inseparably into an undifferentiated whole. How can we draw a major rupture between our inner heart- and-minds and the outside realms? The materialists, without any basis, imagine an objective independent material world. This is a form of self-deception. I should note, however, that I am in full agreement with the Mahayana’s successful critique of the theory of the tiniest matter. In summary, I deny the existence of the outer realm departing from the heart-and-mind. This is not to deny the existence of [objective] realms. Indeed, the heart-and-mind is manifest through encountering the [objective] realm. As soon as we refer to the heart- and-mind, we already posit the existence of an [objective] realm. If the [objective] realm is absent, the name of the heart-and-mind will not exist. Actually, the heart-and-mind and the [objective] realm is a developing totality laden with internal contradictions. From the perspective of mysterious learning, the totality in itself is not real, it is merely the manifestation of absolute functions.

3. The reason that the “original substance” is so constituted, in short, entails the following meanings: (1) The original substance provides myriad principles, contains myriad virtues, initiates myriad transformations, and is itself dharma- like pure and originally so. (The term dharma-like connotes the idea of self-completion without dependence; pure means no defilement, which suggests that evil is totally absent. Originally so means it is original and as such. It should be noted that the original substance is not that which originally did not exist and has come into being now and that, more emphatically, it is not put into a proper place out of conjecture. This is the reason that it is referred to as original. Since it can never be altered, it is depicted in such terms.) (2) The original substance is absolute. If it were dependent, it would not be named as the original substance of all phases of existence. (3) The original substance is imperceptible, formless, which means it is not spatial. (4) The original substance is everlasting, beginningless, and endless, which means it is not temporal. (The term everlasting does not carry temporal significance; we reluctantly employ the word everlasting.) (5) The original substance is complete, fully complacent without deficiency, and indivisible. (6) When we say that the original substance is changeless, the implication is that it entails transformations and changes; when we say that the original substance is changing and transforming, the implication is that it is changeless. It is extremely difficult to describe the original substance. Since the original substance manifests itself in immeasurable and boundless functions, which means that it is all phases of existence, it is changing. However, even though the original substance manifests itself in a multiplicity of functions or all phases of existence, its own nature is, in the last analysis, never altered. Its nature is always pure, steadfast, enduring; therefore it is said that it is changeless.

Someone may ask, What meanings does the original substance entail? The answer is, In short, there are four meanings: (1) The original substance is the source of myriad principles, the beginning of myriad virtues, and the initiator of myriad transformations. (Initiator means the root.) (2) The original substance is without opposites and, at the same time, with opposites; it is with opposites and, at the same time, without opposites. (3) The original substance is beginningless and endless. (4) The original substance manifests itself in limitless and inexhaustible great functions, thus it should be noted as changing. Yet, since the flowing of the great functions ultimately does not alter in the slightest the vitality, steadfastness, and other qualities of the original substance, it should be said to be changeless.

4. I firmly believe that the cosmos is a cosmos of life. We should not say that the cosmos is just a bundle of matter. Human life is a life force. We should not say that life and heart-and-mind are derived from matter. Matter and life are the two natures of the same originality. Life guides and moves matter; matter contains and supports life. However, matter as a thing is originally light, tiny and fluid. When it becomes crystallized into each real thing, it is often coarse and gigantic to the extreme, such as the immeasurable heavenly bodies in aerospace. The development of matter is extremely easy, extremely coarse and gigantic, clearly visible. It contains the qualities of consolidation and enclosure. This is the reason that although the great life force silently moves in the midst of all material universes, it does not easily reveal itself. Furthermore, we should know that it is necessary for the emergence of the great life force to transform matter into organism and to give rise to biological realities. Only then can life guide and move [its own dynamism] in the biological organisms so that it can express its superbly lofty and rich virtue. There is, however, something we cannot afford to ignore. We cannot measure and determine how many of the immeasurable material universes that fill aerospace, such as the countless heavenly bodies, seen from its various internal degrees of heat and the multifarious external relations, can provide the wholesome conditions for the birth and flourishing of biological beings. The most critical factors are the temperance of heat and weather and the production of nutrients. All these are difficult to obtain—the biological beings on earth that lead to the development of the highest human species. Must we search for such a marvelous thing in other heavenly bodies and discover beings that are comparable to the human species of the great earth? I emphatically will not lightly doubt that there is absolutely no chance of finding a comparable species elsewhere, but I do not feel the need to fantasize that we will find many cases of comparable species. If we search for the conditions necessary for biological beings among the countless heavenly bodies of the aerospace, they are probably difficult to find. Yet the question of a life force hidden in matter without visibly revealing itself belongs to a different domain. The countless heavenly bodies in aerospace are definitely not separate and isolated entities. Rather, they are interconnected into a great complete whole. Our great earth, among them, is ultimately the home of the great life force, which is vastly sufficient and real, dynamic and vital; it can also break through the consolidated and enclosed matter, shake the great void, radiate its light, enable numerous material universes to transform themselves into life universes with overflowing vitality, ceaseless self-renewal, and inexhaustible great beings. It is indeed wondrously beautiful!

This manifesto, a reaffirmation of the enduring values of Chinese culture in a time of extreme trial for the Chinese people, was the joint work of four leading intellectuals who went into exile in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and America in advance of the Communist takeover of the mainland. It was produced, on the initiative of Dr. Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang) (see chapter 33), on the basis of an initial draft by Tang Junyi (known as T’ang Chün-i), dean of New Asia College in Hong Kong, and revised in consultation with the other subscribers to it, including Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan, as well as Zhang and Tang.

The manifesto begins with a strong rejoinder to certain Western critiques of Chinese civilization (here referred to as “Sinology") and proceeds to defend a Chinese spirituality embracing elements of Daoism and Buddhism along with a Confucian core, which have enabled the Chinese people to survive repeated challenges and catastrophes of the kind they were experiencing when the manifesto was drawn up in the 1950s. The statement gives an analysis of the weaknesses of modern Western civilization, including its obsession with rapid progress and unlimited expansion. Rejecting Mao’s communism as un-Chinese, it proposes as an alternative and as a remedy for the excesses of the West, the perennial values of Chinese tradition.

Reproduced below is a much abridged version of this lengthy manifesto as rendered in English and published under the name of Carsun Chang.

Why have China’s history and culture endured? It cannot be explained away by Spengler’s hypothesis that they have become stagnant since the Han dynasty. The fact is that they did not stop progressing. Some say it is due chiefly to the people’s emphasis on the maintenance of the concrete daily life, and not like the West, devoting much time to idealism and utopias. Others attribute it to conservatism, the performance of activities in accordance with habitual procedures so that the national vitality is preserved on account of frugality. Yet others have the opinion that the reason may be found in the importance traditionally attached to having a large number of offspring, because of which the nation survived numerous catastrophes. These explanations, and many others, cannot, no doubt, be dismissed as entirely trivial. Yet, holding that a nation’s culture is the expression of its spiritual life, we believe that the answer is to be sought for in its ideologies.

The aspiration for the eternal took shape very early in Chinese thought. In ancient religious teaching there was the saying that the “decree of heaven is not immovable”—in other words, that heaven, or God, is impartial, the decree falling on the virtuous. The Duke of Zhou understood this impermanencefrom the examples of Xia (1818–1766 B.C.E.) and Yin (1751–1111 B.C.E.),¹ and hence incessantly admonished the people to preserve and prolong its sociopolitical heritage. For this very reason, the Zhou dynasty lasted for some eight hundred years, the longest in Chinese history. The philosophical presentation of this concept is first found in the Classic of Changes, the Mean, and the writings of Laozi. These might have been compiled during the period of the Warring States, when social and political conditions were most unstable. The later dynasties of Han, Tang, and Song all lasted for centuries because of this desire to attain permanence, which also explains why China’s entire civilization has endured. Briefly speaking, this concept of seeking the permanent, as expounded in Daoism, is utilitarian, or “advancing by retreating.” As Laozi put it, “That Heaven and Earth are lasting is because they do not last for themselves.” Also, “The sage keeps himself behind and yet is in front; he forgets himself, and yet is preserved.” It enjoins one to rise above subjective prejudices and extraneous exertions so as to preserve one’s vitality in order to attain longevity. It also urges one to abate selfishness and desires, to embrace what is simple and natural, to attain the idea of the “void” so as to be quiescent, and to keep one’s energy within limits in order to be able to come back to oneself constantly. This is the way to attain the origin of the vitality of life and at the same time to help preserve one’s natural strength.

Confucians also taught man to control this vitality. However, in this case the motive is initially the establishment of li (rites) between man and man. Following [the Rites of] Zhou’s “Li Regulations,” they compared the virtues of a superior man with the qualities of jade. The characteristics of jade are its polished appearance and its firmness and solidity inside. With moral strength, one can accumulate all the vital energy of life. This is similar to what the Mean (Zhongyong) called the “strength of the South,” which stressed “forbearance and gentleness in teaching others and even not to recompense for trespasses,” thus preserving the vitality. Both of these point to the moral virtuousness a man should possess. This kind of virtuousness is able not only to preserve man’s vitality within himself but also to manifest itself by penetrating through his body. That is, this virtuousness has also the function of keeping one in good health; as the saying goes, “Virtue nurtures the body.” In Western ethical studies, discussion of morality is usually devoted to consideration of the regulations of human behavior, or the social or religious values of moral codes. Few writers have particularly stressed this thorough transformation of man’s natural life by moral practices, so that his attitudes and manners manifest his inner virtues and enrich and illuminate this life. On the other hand, it is precisely what traditional Confucianism has greatly emphasized.

With regard to the conservation of China’s national life, the emphasis on having many offspring should not be interpreted as a mere instinct of race preservation. Even during the Zhou dynasty, this emphasis was on self-consciousness motivated by the desire to perpetuate the ancestral lineage—a motivation that had religious, moral, and political connotations as well. Psychologically, this natural instinct is limited to the love between husband and wife and between parents and children. People need to rise above this natural tendency in order to acquire respect for parents and ancestors from whom they receive their life, and with it the fear that they might not receive ceremonial worship should they have no issue. This gave rise to the desire to perpetuate one’s life down to thousands of generations, and also to the saying that “There are three unfilial things; of them the worst is lack of posterity.” The explanation is to be sought in the pervading conception that in its unfathomable vastness xin (mind-and-heart) ought to reach up to thousands of epochs that had passed and down to myriads of generations to come.

Similarly, the desire of the Chinese people to preserve their civilization should not be understood as mere conservatism. In early Confucian thought, it was already considered unrighteous to destroy another state or to terminate another man’s ancestral lineage. Confucians worked not only to keep intact the culture handed down by the Duke of Zhou but also to safeguard the varied traditions of the Xia and Yin dynasties. The dictum in the Spring and Autumn Annals, “to revive the perished state and restore the broken family,” applied to all states, and not only to Lu, the native land of Confucius. At the same time, the purpose of the sage’s extensive travels was clearly that the entire world might embrace the ways of Dao. Such is certainly neither provincial nor merely conservative. . . .

It is now clear why we can never accept the explanation of the Chinese emphasis on the preservation of their culture by means of racial instinct or conservatism. The real reason behind the discrimination against the barbarian tribes was simply that objectively China’s culture was more advanced than theirs. For the same reason, the cream of the cultures of other nations has always been received and preserved by the Chinese. This is corroborated by their persistence in affirming the value of Buddhism, Christianity, and other Western doctrines despite the Communist denial. . . .

According to our understanding, the direction of progress to be taken should extend the attainment of moral self-realization to the fields of politics, of knowledge and of technology. In other words, China needs a genuine democratic reconstruction and scientific and technological skills. For this reason, China must embrace the civilization of the world; for this will enable her national character to reach higher planes of perfection and her spiritual life to achieve a more comprehensive development. . . .

The scientific spirit of the West originated in the Greek dictum of “knowledge for the sake of knowledge.” This demands the suspension, at least temporarily, of all practical or moral activities, transcending evaluations and moral judgments to permit the intellect on the one hand to observe each phenomenon objectively and on the other to pursue rational inferences by means of which it may illuminate the laws of the universe and its categories of thought and logic. Such a spirit is precisely what was lacking in China’s ancient philosophy so that theoretical science could not evolve, and the progress of her arts and technology was arrested. The privation of such a scientific spirit was the result chiefly of the obsession with the fulfillment of moral principles, which prevented any objective assessment of the world. There was no theoretical scientific knowledge to link together the inner moral cultivation, the “establishing of virtues,” and the outward practical activities of tailoring nature to enrich life. . . .

The Chinese people must therefore endeavor to achieve self-realization as intellectuals, as well as moral beings. As we have demonstrated, this requires the temporary suspension of their moral consciousness in favor and in support of intellectual activities. . . . At the same time, it is necessary to have a proper balance between the two elements. It is precisely this harmony between morality and intellect that is the supreme function of man.

Apart from the aristocratic feudalism of the pre-Qin period (ended 222 B.C.E.), the sole form of government in China was monarchy, until 1911. In such a system the ultimate political powers lay in the ruler rather than the people, and because of this there arose many unsolved problems, such as the order of succession to the throne, the interim between two dynasties, and the status of the ministers. . . . In order to break through this situation the only way is to establish a democratic government.

That China should have as yet failed to do so does not mean that her political development does not tend toward democracy or that there is not the germ of democracy in the culture. Chinese monarchy was quite different from its Western counterpart, for Chinese political thought early identified popular will with the decree of Heaven. Whoever proclaimed himself ordained by Heaven to be the ruler must also respect and seriously consider the desires of the people. Accordingly, it was provided that he should carefully weigh the admonitions of his ministers, high or low, and the petitions of his subjects. [Reference is here made to institutions such as the court historian, censorate, examination system, etc.] . . . These all serve to offset the monarch’s power and to bridge the gap between the central government and the populace, although their effectiveness depended ultimately solely on the personal integrity of the monarch, since there was no fundamental law or constitution to check him. It is therefore clear that the limitations on the powers of the ruler must be transferred from the ministers to the people outside the governmental structure if they are to be effectual. . . .

It then follows that a constitution must be drawn up, in accordance with the popular will, to be the basis of the exercise by the people of their political rights. Only thus may the people all attain moral self-realization, since self-realization demands, politically, the freedom both to ascend to and to retire from official positions.

That constitutional democracy has not been realized despite the aspirations of the people has its sociological and ideological reasons. . . . Although they had inklings of the notions of rights and sovereignty of the people, most of the Chinese, having no clear idea of what democracy meant, regarded the establishment of the new Republic [in 1911] as just another dynastic changeover. Furthermore, there were few religious, economic, cultural, or scientific organizations and no class opposition. Unlike their Western counterparts, the early members of the parliament were largely intellectuals who had little social experience and who hardly represented the interests of any organization or class. . . .

Communism did not originate in China. Introduced into the country by intellectuals who dwelled in attics in the various foreign settlements, it has spread so widely only because China did suffer greatly from the imperialism and capitalism of the West. Communist premises were never accepted or demanded by the spiritual life of the people. . . .

There are five fundamental reasons why communism as a guiding principle of Chinese culture and politics cannot last. (1) Marx-Leninism denies the possibility of individualized human nature except insofar as it is determined by economics. In this attempt to annihilate all institutions of religion, art, literature, and morality, it is violating the common principles of all the world’s higher civilizations. (2) It denies the individuality and rights of each human being. (3) The natural course of Chinese cultural history points toward humanity’s political, intellectual, and technological, as well as moral, self-realization. . . . That is, freedom of thought and academic pursuit must be affirmed without qualification. (4) In striving for political self-realization, the Chinese cannot tolerate party dictatorship, just as they could not tolerate absolute monarchy. (5) In the Communist totalitarian system, there is no rule governing succession of leadership, so that on the death of a leader there are inevitably life-and-death struggles between the aspirants. . . . To avoid such an unpleasant situation the only means is popular election in accordance with a fundamental constitution, making for peaceful transfer of political power.

In view of these reasons, Communist totalitarianism is doomed, despite various temporary industrial and technological achievements. After all, Marxist-Leninism has no positive basis in Chinese culture. . . .

The future development of Chinese politics cannot be precisely predicted, but it is certain that Marxist-Leninism will be discarded eventually and the spiritual life of the nation will press forward toward the establishment of a democratic government.

It is clear that the formation of a world civilization is contingent upon cooperation on a high plane among the various cultures of the world. . . .

The strength of the West’s cultural spirit lies in its ability to push ahead indefinitely. However, there is no secure foundation underlying this feverish pursuit of progress. Along with this pursuit of progress there is a feeling of discontentment and of emptiness. In order to fill this emptiness, the individual and the nation constantly find new ways for progress and expansion. At the same time external obstructions and an internal exhaustion of energy cause the collapse of the individual and the nation. . . . Chinese thought has always regarded “retreat” as more fundamental than “advance.” Complementing the characteristically Western push for progress, this will provide a solid and secure foundation for Western civilization. . . .

The second element the West can learn from the East is all-round and all-embracing understanding or wisdom. . . . In Western science or philosophy, principles and universals are attained by intellect and are sharply enunciated and defined. They are abstract and cannot be applied to what is concrete, because the characteristics that are peculiar to each class and that are inexhaustible have been eliminated. Wisdom is needed to comprehend and to deal with all the unprecedented changes of life. This wisdom does not operate by adhering to universals, but by submerging universals in order to observe the changing conditions and peculiarities. . . .

The Western world is in great need of this wisdom if it intends to understand the nature of the different cultures and to have an authentic communication with them. In addition to their knowledge, technology, ideals, and God, they must above all search deeper for the source of life, the depth of personality, and the common origin of human culture in order to arrive at a true unity with mankind.

The third point that the West can learn from the East is a feeling of mildness and compassion. The Westerner’s loyalty to ideals, his spirit of social service, and his warmth and love for others are indeed precious virtues, to which Eastern counterparts cannot measure up. However, the highest affection between men is not zeal or love, for with these emotions is often mingled the will to power and its acquisitive instinct. . . . Compassion, on the other hand, is the sympathetic consonance between the life-spirit of one’s own and another’s authentic being. Here there is also natural interflowing of true sympathy, which is partly directed outward and partly inward. The emotional flowback makes it possible to purge any desire to dominate or possess. . . .

Fourth, the West can obtain from the East the wisdom of how to perpetuate its culture. Contemporary Western culture is, it is true, at its height of brilliance, yet many observers have been concerned with its future, whether it will perish like ancient Greece and Rome. Culture is the expression of a people’s spiritual life, and by the laws of nature all expression drains the energy of life. If this energy is exhausted, perishing is inevitable. To preserve its spiritual life, humanity needs a depth formed by a historical awareness that reaches both into the past and into the future, and this depth connects with the lifegiving source of the cosmos. . . . From this point of view, the West’s chief concern with speed and efficiency constitutes a great problem. While the former easygoing attitude of the Chinese is not a suitable remedy in many aspects, yet the maximum rate of progress with which the West leads the world is not conducive to durability. . . . The West needs to develop a historical awareness with which to tap the lifegiving source. It will then come to appreciate the value of conservation of life-energy and the meaning of filial piety, and learn to fulfill the ancestral will in order to preserve and prolong its culture.

The fifth point the West can learn from the East is the attitude that “the whole world is like one family.” Though there are many nations now, mankind will eventually become one and undivided. Chinese thought has emphasized this attitude. . . .

While the West can certainly learn from the East, we have also a few remarks to make concerning the intellectual development of China and of the world.

1. The expansion of Western civilization has brought the peoples into close contact and unfortunately has also produced much friction. What needs to be done now is for each nation crucially to reexamine and reevaluate its own culture, taking into consideration the future of mankind as a whole. In order to achieve coexistence of the various cultures and world peace, one must first, through a transcendental feeling that goes beyond philosophical and scientific research, attain an attitude of respect and sympathy toward other cultures and thereby acquire genuine compassion and commiseration toward mankind in adversity. . . .

2. In cultivating this feeling, it is evident that objective and scientific learning is inadequate. Man needs a different kind of learning, one that treats himself as a conscious, existential being. It is not theology; it cannot be the merely phenomenological study of ethics or mental hygiene. Rather it is a learning that applies understanding to conduct, by which one may transcend existence to attain spiritual enlightenment. . . .

3. The human existence as formed by “establishing Man as the Ultimate” is that of a moral being that, at the same time, attains a higher spiritual enlightenment; for this reason, it can truly embrace God, thereby attaining “harmony in virtue with Heaven.” Hence, this human existence is simultaneously moral and religious existence. Such a man is, in politics, the genuine citizen of democracy; in epistemology, one who stands over and above the physical world. Not being bound by his concepts, his intellectual knowledge does not contradict his spiritual apprehension. . . . Such should be the direction of the new movement.

Mou Zongsan (Tsung-san) (1909–1995) is considered one of the premier Confucian scholars of his generation instrumental in founding the international movement called New Confucianism. He studied philosophy at Beijing University under Xiong Shili and later became known as the most creative systematic philosopher among the New Confucians. Along with Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang), Tang Junyi, and Xu Fuguan, he was a cosigner of the 1957 Manifesto for a Reappraisal of Sinology and the Reconstruction of Chinese Culture.

Despite the complexity of his system, Mou succeeded in creating a new vision of the mainline of Confucian thought stretching from Confucius and Mencius to Cheng Hao of the Northern Song and down to Liu Zongzhou, the great Ming martyr to Confucian loyalty and perseverance.

Mou conceived of his own philosophic development in three stages. First, he began as a student of Western philosophy and logic with a special love for the thought of Kant and the other philosophers of the German Enlightenment. Next, he turned his attention to political philosophy and the philosophy of history, including provocative studies of Daoism. Third, Mou returned to a discussion of human nature, the moral mind-heart and the rise and development of Neo-Confucian thought from the Northern Song to the fall of the Ming dynasty. Mou also wrote studies of Western philosophy, Buddhism, and ethics.

Throughout his career Mou wrote about Chinese thought in the context of world philosophy, ranging from modern European phenomenology to a re-evaluation of the history of Chinese Buddhist thought. He believed that Confucian thought had been correctly based on the intellectual intuition of the patterns and dynamics of the cosmos and that it was the task of modern Confucian intellectuals to disclose the logical and epistemological rationales for these claims in light of modern Western critiques of Chinese thought. Moreover, Mou affirmed the profound religious dimension of the Confucian search for sageliness as a form of spiritual self-cultivation. What he ultimately sought to create was a moral metaphysics.

In the following excerpt from chapter 5 of a series of public lectures on the nature of Chinese thought, titled The Uniqueness of Chinese Philosophy, Mou addresses the central Confucian ideal of humaneness, or ren. Set within his larger discussion of the connection of human nature and the Heavenly Way, Mou defines humaneness as sensitivity and steadfastness and as the ultimate human manifestation of creativity itself, the very core of the dynamic process of the Way of Heaven and earth.

The qian section of the Classic of Changes says, “The great man is someone whose virtue is consonant with Heaven and earth, his brightness with the sun and moon, his consistency with the four seasons and his prognostications of the auspicious and inauspicious with the workings of gods and spirits.”² In order to become a “great person,” one must join personal virtue with Heaven and earth, which is to say, the life-values of the individual must respond to the life-values of the universe in order to obtain a fundamental, unbreakable melding (or, we can say, a conciliation). What was cited in the first lecture as the virtue of Heaven and earth is certainly “the Heavenly Will mysteriously, unceasingly active” as representing the essence of endless creativity. The uniting virtue of the great person, Heaven and earth joined together have the unceasing essence of creativity. In modern terms, if one truly sees the life-value of the self, one has already embraced nonmaterial life-values; these nonmaterial life-values then become true life-values such that the person manifests the special characteristic of life. This true life-value is definitely a spiritual life-value and is not a worldly life-value and hence is somewhat analogous to what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The great person must also conjoin action with the spirits of auspicious and inauspicious fortune in a fashion that explains clearly how the life-values of the great person respond to both the dark and the light sides of the cosmos, both of which become mutually active in the world. In other words, it is necessary for the dark and light sides of humankind and the light and dark sides of the cosmos to be mutually interpenetrating and reconciled. The light and dark sides of the cosmos are commonly known by humankind; for example, the spirits, night and day, spring and summer are all recognized as the bright side of the cosmos, while demons, blackest night, fall and winter are all recognized as the dark side of the cosmos. Human life is like the cosmos because it has its dark and bright sides, as when we say that birth is bright and death is dark. In order to comprehend the totality of the idea of the cosmos, we must look at both the light and the dark sides of the cosmos; just as, in order to understand the idea of humaneness, we must also observe the life and the death of human beings. The “great person” must include the totality of the life-value of humaneness with the life-values in the cosmos in order to create unity. The essential natures of humaneness, wisdom, and sageliness are not disparate but are mutually connected with the Heavenly Will and the Heavenly Way.

Another question follows the explication of the function of humaneness, wisdom, and sageliness—what causes humaneness, wisdom, and sageliness to be capable of being mutually connected with the Heavenly Will and the Heavenly Way? That is, in what fashion can it create unity with the cosmos? The answer requires an explanation of the idea of the concept of humaneness. According to the general idea of the perspective on humaneness found in the Analects, we know how an individual person can become one who is humane or a sage and we can also learn why one who is humane and a sage can become unified with the cosmos. According to the interpretation of this lecturer, Confucius’s idea of humaneness has two main characteristics:

1. Sensitivity. This is not the awareness of the senses or sense perception, but rather the sensitivity of sorrow, what the Analects says is the feeling of “unease,” and what Mencius called the sorrowful mind-heart or the unbearable mind-heart. Having this sensitivity, then, a person can also have the four seeds of the mind-heart, but without that awareness, then one can speak of a numbness, as the Chinese saying has it, “numb and not humane,” which points out the special characteristic of humaneness as being aware and not being numbed. A person can have a great knowledge of or sensitivity to affairs of money, wealth, and possessions, but can also be very insensitive and numb, even though he has an extremely brilliant talent and understanding. This is because the point of sensitivity is the moral mind-heart, and whoever has this sensitivity can perceive the four seeds of the moral mind-heart.

2. Steadfastness. This is the notion of steadfastness in the Classic of Changes wherein there is “steadfastly acting without tiring.” The Changes says, “Heaven acts steadfastly, and the Noble Person, by his own strength, does not tire.” “Heaven acts steadfastly” is a statement of the manifestation of the Heavenly Will, “mysteriously without ceasing.” The Noble Person seeks the steadfast, endless action of Heaven-and-earth and understands that they also must emulate the steadfast, unceasing action of the Heavenly Way. This manifests our life-values as a responsive, penetrating sensitivity to demonstrate steadfastness, or in other words, to be one with Heaven, to manifest the creative nature, because the essential virtue of Heaven is the essence of creativity. The inclusive meaning of the word steadfast does not mean the persistence of muscular strength in physical cultivation, but rather is the pure spiritual strength of unceasing creativity.

To extrapolate from the explanation of these two points, we can explain the true nature of “humaneness [ren]” stating that “humaneness takes feeling to be human nature and benefiting as its function.” Feeling as penetration is the greatly enhanced life-value (the spiritual side), and the process of this enlargement is without cessation, and therefore, this sensitive penetration must unite with all the other things in the cosmos. This is also to state that this is the ultimate extension of “[the great person] whose virtue is consonant with Heaven and earth, his brightness with the sun and moon, his consistency with the four seasons, and his prognostications of the auspicious and inauspicious with the workings of gods and spirits.” The process of benefiting things by sensitive penetration acts in favor of humaneness by means of a warm empathy that can encourage and elicit the life-values of other people. This enriching function is quite like the sweet dew that moistens the plants. The function of humaneness is this very profound deepening; we must say that humaneness represents real life; and this real life must then be our real substance and this real substance must then also be our real subject; and the real substance must be our real self. Therefore, the idea and value of humaneness are already proclaimed. Confucius established the connection of humaneness’s inner root to the Heavenly Way so that human nature and the Heavenly Way were not the subject of empty and idle chatter. If humaneness was empty and idle chatter without any internal content, the Heavenly Way would be high and far away, eternally unreachable by humankind. The humaneness of Confucius is really a verification of the Heavenly Will and the Heavenly Way.

Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-lan, 1895–1990), along with Hu Shi (see chapters 32 and 33) one of two leading students of John Dewey, became known as a dominant figure in the study of Chinese philosophy from the 1930s on. His two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy in both Chinese and English was long regarded in China and abroad as the standard work on the subject. In 1949, when many other intellectuals went into exile abroad, he chose to remain in Beijing and endure the same experience under communism as his fellow countrymen, hoping to develop his own philosophy in a synthesis with the new form of Chinese Marxism. Despite repeated efforts to adapt, as well as successive attempts at self-criticism, he found it difficult to resolve his problems and complete his own work, but he continued to believe that traditional Chinese thought would form the basis of a modernized China.

Feng’s lifetime work, summed up in his posthumous Selected Philosophical Writings of 1991, included studies in English reiterating his earlier views with relatively little modification. The following excerpts are taken from the concluding essay in the volume, as he summed up a life of “conflict and contradiction” on the occasion of his receiving an honorary degree from Columbia University in 1982. The final note recalls a passage from the Classic of Odes [here called the Book of Poetry]: “Although Zhou is an old nation, it has a new mission”—which is Professor Feng’s understanding of the passage rendered in chapter 2: “Zhou is an old people, but its charge is new.”

Although Feng’s philosophical stance and his role contrast with that of the authors’ of the manifesto reproduced above, who firmly rejected communism as un-Chinese, Feng’s own survival strategy and persistence in reasserting Chinese values as the basis of the new mission of modernization exemplify the same spirit of determination and endurance as is expressed in the manifesto. In the end, his rejection of Maoist class struggle and strong reaffirmation of Confucian humanism and harmonious relations were such that the final volume of his Collected Works had to be published in Taiwan and Hong Kong, not on the mainland.

Speech of Response Delivered at the Convocation of September 10, 1982, at Columbia University

I live in a period of conflict and contradiction between different cultures. My problem is how to understand the nature of this conflict and contradiction, how to deal with it, and how to adjust myself within this conflict and contradiction.

I first came to America at the end of what is known as the May 4 Movement, which was a climax to the conflict and contradiction of different cultures at that time. I came with these problems and I began to deal with them seriously. As I did so, my thought developed in three stages. In the first stage, I interpreted the difference of cultures in terms of geographical areas—that is to say, the difference of cultures is the difference between the East and the West. In the second stage, I interpreted the difference of cultures in terms of historical epochs—that is to say, the difference of cultures is the difference between the ancient and the modern. In the third stage, I interpreted the difference of cultures in terms of social development—that is to say, the difference of cultures is the difference between types of society.

In 1922 I presented a paper to the conference of the philosophy department, titled “Why China Has No Science.” Later it was published in the International Journal of Ethics. In this paper I maintained that the difference between cultures is the difference between the East and the West. This in fact was the prevailing opinion at that time. However, as I further studied the history of philosophy, I found this prevailing opinion to be incorrect. I discovered that what is considered to be the philosophy of the East has existed in the history of philosophy of the West as well, and vice versa. I discovered that mankind has the same essential nature with the same problems of life. . . . My thesis, published in 1924 under the title A Comparative Study of Life Ideals, denied the then current interpretation of the conflict and contradiction between different cultures, [but] it did not provide a new interpretation in its place. Such a new interpretation, however, appeared implicitly in my later work A History of Chinese Philosophy. The book asserted that, strictly speaking, there had been no modern philosophy in China, but as soon as China would become modernized there would be a modern Chinese philosophy. This assertion implicitly suggests that what is called the difference between the cultures of the East and the West is, in fact, the difference between the medieval and the modern.

But what are the contents of these words medieval and modern? Later on I began to realize that the difference between the medieval and the modern is, in fact, a difference between types of society. In the Western countries, the transformation from one type of society into another took place one step earlier than in the Eastern countries. The key to the transformation has been the industrial revolution. Before the industrial revolution, the family was the basic unit of production. After the revolution, because of the introduction of machinery, production became enlarged in scope—that is, it was performed by large groups of people, not by separate families. In the forties, I wrote six books, one of them titled China’s Way to Freedom, in which I proposed that this way consists of modernization and that the main content of modernization is an industrial revolution.

The intellectuals, encouraged by the victory of the revolution, made efforts to help build a new socialist society. My own effort was to revise my book A History of Chinese Philosophy. Only the first two volumes of the revised edition of this early work were published before I found the revision unsatisfactory to myself. I set out to revise the revision, but before it went to press I found that this newly revised edition needed to be done over again. . . . The source of my hesitation and vacillation is really a question of how to adjust to conflict and contradiction between different cultures. This question manifested itself in the further questions of how to inherit the spiritual heritage of the past. In the early fifties, I raised this question, the discussion of which was rather warm for a time.

The simplest way to make the adjustment is just to declare that the philosophy of the past was all for the sake of the exploiting classes. Thus there is nothing worthy to be inherited. The present should disregard the past and consider it nonexistent. The present should start from zero and build everything anew. . . . People holding this view do not understand that the present is a continuation and development of the past. The higher type of society supersedes the lower just as a steamship supersedes a rowboat. The steamship replaces the rowboat, but it is built and operated on the same general principles that apply to all ships, including the rowboat. The experience and the experiment of the rowboat are the bases of the steamship. In this sense the steamship is the development of the rowboat, and this is the real meaning of the word development. The process of the development is a dialectical movement. To use Hegelian terms, there are affirmation, negation, and negation of negation. In other words, there are thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Such synthesis embraces all of the best in the thesis and antithesis. In this sense, the present should embrace all the best of the past. This is the natural way of adjustment of different cultures. . . .

Throughout Chinese history, after a great dynasty had unified the country and established a strong central government and after people of different nationalities were living together harmoniously, there usually appeared a new and very comprehensive philosophy. Such a philosophy, with its interpretations of nature, society, and man, reflected the unity of the country and, at the same time, served as a theoretical foundation for the structure of the society of the time and its spiritual content. Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism were such philosophies, and China today needs such a comprehensive philosophy to embrace all aspects of the new civilization and to be her guide.

Generally speaking, we in China today have Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought. Marxism will become Chinese Marxism, Mao Zedong Thought will further develop. . . . Mao Zedong Thought is defined as the unity of the universal principles of Marxism with the practice of the Chinese Revolution. . . . In the early stages of the revolution, the unity was well carried out. The theories by which the proletariat led the peasants in military insurrection and by which the village besieged the city are examples of this unity, and also of Chinese Marxism. Strategies based on these theories led the revolution to victory. In later stages, however, when the unity was not so well carried out and it was then further distorted by the intrigues of the “Gang of Four,” there appeared the extreme leftist policy known as the Cultural Revolution, the results of which are well known. . . .

A system of philosophy is not a patchwork. Philosophy is a living thing. You can patch together ready-made parts to produce a machine but not a living thing, even such a living thing as a tiny insect or a blade of grass. You can only furnish nourishment to the living thing and let it absorb the nourishment itself. Under present circumstances, I feel I have a new task with the revised edition of my book A History of Chinese Philosophy. It should be not only a narration of the story of the past but also a nourishment for the philosophy of the future. . . .

I always recall one line that appears in the Book of Poetry of the Confucian classics. It reads, “Although Zhou is an old nation, it has a new mission.” At the present time, China is an ancient nation that has a new mission, and that mission is modernization. My effort is to preserve the identity and individuality of the ancient nation, yet, at the same time, to promote the fulfillment of the new mission. People on the left appreciate my efforts to promote the fulfillment of the new mission but blame my effort to preserve the identity and individuality of the ancient nation. I understand their reasons and accept the applause as well as the blame. Applause and blame may cancel each other out. I shall go on according to my own judgment.

In the 1980s debate over Chinese culture broke out once more in greater China. With the rise of the East Asian economies attributed to Confucian influences, and the widespread decline of morale and sense of anomie that followed the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, some intellectuals began to advocate the revival of Chinese culture. The first hints appeared in the works of such prominent fiction writers as Wang Anyi, Han Shaogong, and Ah Cheng. In what came to be known as “Chinese Culture Fever,” issues related to culture were debated in the prominent journal Reading (Dushu), as well as in other forums. However, many intellectuals, influenced by the sweeping attacks on Chinese culture that had been made in the May 4 Movement, still saw in Chinese culture the reasons why China, in their eyes, remained backward despite the massive changes of the twentieth century. Just as the failure of the early Chinese republic had contributed to the May 4 Movement, the perceived failure of the People’s Republic aroused further questioning as to the persistent debilitating effects of Chinese culture. Of the writers below, Bo Yang (Guo Yidong) is from Taiwan (though born and raised on the mainland), Sun Longji from Hong Kong, and Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang from the mainland. All try to show how tradition has stood in the way of new ideas from abroad.

Both Sun Longji’s The Deep Structure of Chinese Culture and Bo Yang’s The Ugly Chinaman had become well known to mainland intellectuals by the mid-1980s. An edited mainland version of The Ugly Chinaman circulated briefly before it was banned. Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang’s “River Elegy” was not a book but a television documentary. By the summer of 1988, when the documentary was aired, about 90 percent of the Chinese people had access to television, and thus the documentary and the ideas contained in it reached an unprecedentedly large audience. Eventually, however, the documentary was criticized by powerful Chinese Communist Party figures like Wang Zhen and finally banned.

Although this debate took place during a brief, relatively open period in the PRC, the CCP’S rejection of a critique of traditional Chinese culture is significant. By 1988 the Party, like the Nationalists in the late twenties, was already moving away from its earlier condemnation of Chinese culture and instead looking for traditional values that would be supportive of its rule. This had become especially vital in the wake of the collapse of Marxist values and a growing perception of a moral vacuum in Chinese society. Yet this attempted return to tradition did little to enhance the popularity of the existing regime among intellectuals already disenchanted with both it and tradition.

The sharply negative tone of the following essay reflects a sense of alienation and despair in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, as well as a feeling that age-old weaknesses have persisted through revolutionary change. Underlying this is the widespread presumption of the revolutionary ideology itself, much reinforced by Marxism, that traditional China had been marked by unrelieved stagnation and was ripe for total revolution. This expectation set the stage for later disillusionment over the failure of the revolution to fulfill its promises, followed in this case by a sense of resignation to more modest limited goals.

[Concerning China] No other nation on earth has such a long history or such a well-preserved cultural tradition, a tradition that has in the past given rise to an extremely advanced civilization. Neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians of today bear any relationship to their ancient forebears, while the Chinese people of today are the direct descendants of the ancient Chinese. How is it possible for such a great people to have degenerated to such a state of ugliness? Not only have we been bullied around by foreigners; even worse, for centuries we’ve been bullied around by our own kind—from tyrannical emperors to despotic officials and ruthless mobs. . . .

. . . I’ve asked a number of people from the mainland why they ended up in prison. The answer was invariably “I spoke the truth.” And that’s the way it is. But why does speaking the truth lead to such unfortunate consequences? My answer is that this is not a problem of any particular individual but rather of Chinese culture as a whole.

One of the qualities for which the Chinese people are notorious is a propensity for quarreling among themselves. . . . They squabble among themselves no matter where they are. Their bodies seem to lack those cells that enable most human beings to cooperate.

The Chinese people’s inability to cooperate and their predilection for bickering among themselves are deep-rooted, harmful traits. These behavior patterns do not stem from an inherent weakness in the moral fiber of the Chinese people but rather from a “neurotic virus” that infects Chinese culture, making it impossible for us not to act in certain ways in given situations. We may be entirely aware of the fact that we quarrel among ourselves, yet it is beyond our control to stop it. “If the pot breaks, no one can have anything to eat; but if the sky falls there’ll always be someone tall enough to prevent it from falling on me.” This tendency toward internecine struggle is associated with a terrible reluctance to admit mistakes. . . .

Chinese people find it hard to admit their mistakes and produce myriad reasons to cover up for them. There’s an old adage: “Contemplate errors behind closed doors.” Whose errors? The guy next door’s, of course! . . . Chinese people expend a great deal of effort in covering up their mistakes, and in so doing make additional ones. Thus it is often said that Chinese are addicted to bragging, boasting, lying, equivocating, and malicious slandering. For years people have been going on about the supreme greatness of the Han Chinese people and boasting endlessly that Chinese traditional culture should be promulgated throughout the world. But the reason why such dreams will never be realized is because they’re pure braggadocio. I need not cite any further examples of boasting and lying, but Chinese verbal brutality deserves special mention. . . . And in matters of politics and money, or in power struggles of any kind, the viciousness can be out of all proportion. This raises the additional question: What makes Chinese people so cruel and base? . . .

Narrow-mindedness and a lack of altruism can produce an unbalanced personality that constantly wavers between two extremes: a chronic feeling of inferiority and extreme arrogance. In his inferiority, a Chinese person is a slave; in his arrogance, he is a tyrant. Rarely does he or she have a healthy sense of self-respect. In the inferiority mode, everyone else is better than he is, and the closer he gets to people with influence, the wider his smile becomes. Similarly, in the arrogant mode, no other human being on earth is worth the time of day. The result of these extremes is a strange animal with a split personality.

What makes the Chinese people so prone to self-inflation? Consider the saying: A small vessel is easily filled. Because of the Chinese people’s inveterate narrow-mindedness and arrogance, even the slightest success is overwhelming. It is all right if a few people behave in this manner, but if it’s the entire population or a majority—particularly in China—it spells national disaster. Since it seems as if the Chinese people have never had a healthy sense of self-respect, it is immensely difficult for them to treat others as equals: if you aren’t my master, then you’re my slave. People who think this way can only be narrow-minded in their attitude toward the world and reluctant to admit their mistakes.

With so many loathsome qualities, only the Chinese people can reform themselves. Foreigners have a duty to help us, not in the realm of economics but through culture. The Chinese ship of state is so large and overcrowded that if it sinks many non-Chinese will be drowned as well.

One last point: China is seriously overpopulated. China’s more than one billion mouths can easily devour the Himalayas. This should remind us that China’s difficulties are complex and call for awareness on the part of each and every Chinese person. Each one of us must become a discriminating judge and use our powers to examine and appraise ourselves, our friends, and our country’s leaders. This, I believe, is the only way out for the Chinese people.

In the last four thousand years, China has produced only one great thinker: Confucius. In the two and one-half millennia since his death, China’s literati did little more than add footnotes to the theories propounded by Confucius and his disciples, rarely contributing any independent opinions, simply because the traditional culture did not permit it. The minds of the literati were stuck at the bottom of an intellectual stagnant pond, the soy-sauce vat of Chinese culture. As the contents of this vat began to putrefy, the resultant stench was absorbed by the Chinese people. Since the numerous problems in this bottomless vat could not be solved by individuals’ exercising their own intelligence, the literati had to make do with following others’ ways of thinking. If one were to place a fresh peach in a soy-sauce vat full of putrescent brine, it would eventually turn into a dry turd. China has its own particular way of transforming foreign things and ideas that enter within its borders. You say you’ve got democracy; well, we have democracy too. But the Chinese form of democracy is: You’re the demos (people), but I’ve got the kratos (power). You’ve got a legal system; we’ve got one too. You’ve got freedom; so have we. Whatever you have, we have too. You’ve got pedestrian crossings painted on the street; we have too, but ours are there to make it easier for cars to run pedestrians over.

The only way to improve the situation of the Ugly Chinaman is for each of us to cultivate our own personal taste and judgment. . . . I have my freedom and rights, whether the government gives them to me or not. If we had the capacity to make proper judgments, we would demand elections and be rigorous in our selection of candidates. But without this capacity, we’ll never be able to distinguish a beautiful woman from a pockmarked hag.

The following critique of Chinese culture is dressed in voguish psychological terms (supposedly Western) and reflects “modernist” attitudes dismissive of traditional culture. However, it shows little actual familiarity with traditional Confucian values or discourse and seems unaware that much the same critique could be made of current attitudes from a Confucian standpoint.

Pervading this, as in the preceding and following pieces, is a strong sense of despair over China’s decadence, most directly attributable to the failure of revolutionary expectations in the twentieth century, following the violent upheavals and relapses of 1911, 1949, and the Cultural Revolution. Also reflected here, however, are other ideological factors, both indigenous and foreign.

The traditional view of Chinese history tended to follow repeated cycles of dynastic rise and decline; thus in Huang Zongxi’s analysis of China’s troubles, his preface to Waiting for the Dawn (in 1662) cites Mencius’s view that periods of order alternate with periods of disorder and then adds: “How is it that since the Three Dynasties there has been no order but only disorder?”

From the West, at the turn of the century, came views of human progress and evolution, but with these also strongly negative views, especially marked in Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx, of traditional China as stagnant and unprogressive, caught in an endless degenerative process. Indeed, it became a fundamental “Marxist” assumption of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party that only a radical, violent upheaval could lift China out of this historical rut. The writers who follow here struggle to get their footing in the backwash of such crosscurrents and erosive tides.

Stagnation in China may be explained in terms of the deep structure of Chinese culture. China has been “ultrastable” for thousands of years, and even now it is a country that still seems to be insensitive and slow in responding to the outside world. Throughout the twentieth century and especially since the establishment of the People’s Republic, Marxism has provided the dynamic [that has been] traditionally absent from Chinese culture. Nevertheless, the success of the Communist movement has largely depended on the fact that it developed during a period of transition, at a particular point in the cycle of order and disorder. After the Cultural Revolution, that Marxist-inspired motivation for action would appear to have died away. The Four Modernizations are no longer adequate to mobilize the hearts-and-minds of the people. In contrast, “stability and unity” are emphasized.

This tendency toward stagnation is also evident in the personality of every Chinese individual. A Chinese is programmed by his culture to be “Chinese.” In other words, inbred cultural predispositions make the Chinese what they are and prevent them from being full-blown individuals. Dynamic human growth is an alien concept to the Chinese. Growth is seen as just a physical process. Maturity is to know how to play a proper role in bilateral social relationships. Normally, physical growth is accompanied by mental development, but the Chinese are held back by their own culture, and they generally exhibit serious tendencies toward oral fixation. In short, the Chinese do not fully experience the various stages of personality development. . . .

Disorganization of the self easily leads to a weakening of the will. In similar fashion, the rule of law is difficult to achieve in China because the Chinese do not enact appropriate legislation. They are too easily influenced by personal relationships or power. Today in the mainland when “the Party looks after everything for the individual,” the disorganization of the self has reached a critical stage. At home, at school, at work, a man cannot organize things for himself. He is forever looked after by an overprotective mother.

Some people think that the present Chinese policy of one child per family will result in a highly individualistic generation. In fact, the opposite may happen. Chinese parents tend to encourage dependence in their children, and if they concentrate all their attention and concern on one child, the Chinese may become even more lacking in personal organization in the future. A man must be fully developed before his life can be a dynamic process; only then can he attain self-actualization in body and mind, can he organize and control his life, his work, his future, his thoughts, his conscience, his interpersonal relationships, and so on. Only to such a man are human rights important.

The majority of the Chinese are unsure of their own rights. They submit meekly to oppression and allow others to encroach on their rights. The meekness of the Chinese people makes them particularly receptive to authoritarianism.

“River Elegy” is predicated on the imaginative notion that early China once partook of a seafaring Pacific civilization (identified with the sea and the blue sky), adventurous and open to the world like the civilization of Columbus and Magellan. In China, however, this was overtaken and hemmed in by a land-oriented continental culture (identified with the silt of the Yellow River delta), blocking access to the open sea and intercourse with the larger world. China thus became constricted, stagnant, and monolithic, in contrast to the dynamic, pluralistic West. Ironically, the reference herein to Adam Smith’s analysis of the China problem reminds us of Smith’s influence on Karl Marx’s view that the stagnancy of Oriental civilization differentiated it from the dynamic development pattern of Western civilization. Thus an early Marxist (and very Eurocentric) perspective still dominates this critique by intellectuals of post-Maoist China. Not surprisingly, then, it concludes with an exhortation to revive the sweeping May 4 attack on Chinese tradition—the only rhetoric readily available for challenge to the status quo.

The ocean was originally the cradle of life. In all the Earth’s traumatic changes and upheavals, it was the sea that once protected the lives of our ancestors. Later on, when human beings returned to the land, they could not adapt. In the process of forcing themselves to adapt to the continental environment, humankind created civilization.

The sphinxlike stone statues on Easter Island tell us that as far back as ten thousand years ago, there was an ancient and vital maritime civilization on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The maritime tools that appear today [to be] so simple and primitive were the ones that brought humankind back to the sea from the land once again. What is the conviction that supported those primitive people in their attempt to cross this great ocean that even today’s people find forbidding? Can we not hear the grand melody of the destiny of humanity echoing in the maritime, seafaring activities of these primitive people, as well as in the great voyages of Columbus and Magellan, which established new ages of human history?

It is precisely because of the continuous and unflagging existence of maritime life that human civilization came to be separated into two major elements—or continental civilization and the maritime civilization.

This country stands on the rim of the western Pacific Ocean. At the same time, it stands astride, mightily, the eastern part of the great Euro-Asian land mass. Its body is yellow, and the great river running through it like a spinal column is also yellow.

As we look at this ancient wooden boat, excavated from the Hemudu archaeological site, it is as if we can see that faraway fountainhead of Chinese civilization glimmering with the light of azure waves.

Yet as far back as the periods of prehistory that were still shrouded in myth, the inland civilization that came from the loess region of the middle stretches of the Yellow River was already continuously overcoming the lower stretches and the coastal areas. Even today we can hear the deep, muffled voices of the history of this period, in the sounds of the stories of the great battles of the Yellow Emperor with the Red Emperor and Chiyou.

Eventually, the Zhou people’s conquest of the Shang people proved that this force that came from the heartland was an irresistible one. The epic battles in the late Warring States period, in which the state of Qin defeated and conquered the state of Chu, represent and symbolize how the yellow civilization that fed on wheat, fought with chariots, and was influenced by the nomadic tribes and by the culture of Persia eventually overcame and defeated the azure civilization that fed on rice, fought with ships on the water, and was influenced by the cultures of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. . . .

The recession of the azure laid down a destiny for the nation and the civilization. . . .

The unending azure waves of the Pacific Ocean have always beckoned this ancient nation that slept on the continent. Occasionally they might stir up for a while and send sailing ships to venture out on their waters, even as far as the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula. Yet, in the end, the attraction of the azure ocean would prove to be much weaker, after all, than the magnetism of the yellow earth.

The mysterious power that provided this yellow civilization with an amazing and tremendous centripetal force was the fact that the Confucian culture gradually attained supremacy on this land.

Confucian thought, as a whole system, expressed the ideals and boundaries of the life of a continental, inland civilization. In the heyday of the oriental feudal society of the Orient, this system had the clear advantage of rationality. Its unitarian ideology, however, also weakened the possibility for the development of pluralism. The elements of the maritime civilization that had been rich and abundant in ancient life deteriorated into a few feeble streams . . . that disappeared instantly.

Nonetheless, while the continental civilization was flourishing in the land of China, another azure civilization of the sea was cropping up, a bit more quietly perhaps, along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

Back in the time of ancient Greece, at the same time that Athens’ sea power emerged, so too did its democratic ideas, and thus maritime power led to a democratic revolution.

The Western bourgeois revolution in modern times was also predicated, socially, on the opening of the sea lanes of the European nations. The galleons that navigated between sea and sky starting in the fifteenth century not only raised the curtain on world trade and colonial activity, they also conveyed the hopes of science and democracy. With these ships, puny as they were, the color azure symbolized the destiny of the modern world.

The vast markets of the Orient, and of the “New World” of the Americas, made Europe rich almost overnight.

To cross the great oceans, large, sturdy, yet carefully and intricately constructed ships were required. Mathematics and physics were needed for the building of these ships, and technological sciences were also needed. In 1636 Galileo published his work Dialogue on the New Science. It was in a shipbuilding factory that this “dialogue” took place.

Britain was the first to obtain great profit from overseas trade, which promoted the primitive accumulation of capital as well as the popularization of the ideas of freedom. It was in Britain that the first bourgeois revolution, led by Oliver Cromwell, took place. In 1651 Cromwell’s government, in turn, promulgated the Navigation Act; in 1690 John Locke published his Two Treatises on Government. The theory of free trade became the slogan of, and the principle to serve, the bourgeoisie.

Capitalism, churning the wheels of the industrial revolution and free trade, began to bring about tremendous leaps in history, and so began the dual historical chorus of science and democracy.

When Magellan was sailing around the globe, the Jiajing emperor of the Ming dynasty formally “closed” China to the outside world because of a quarrel with a Japanese tribute-bearer.

In 1776 Adam Smith published his famous book The Wealth of Nations. In this book he declared that China’s history and civilization had stagnated. He said: “The stagnation is due to China’s disregard for overseas trade; to close up the country is bound to lead to national suicide.”

Unfortunately, not a single Chinese ear heard these ominous words in time. . . .

Even today, in the 1980s, in the great debate over “the craze for Chinese culture,” people still seem to be caught in this century-old and unresolved controversy over the relative strengths of Chinese and Western cultures. Whether people seem to hold illusions of “wholesale Westernization” or whether they one-sidedly wish for the appearance of “the third age of the flowering of Confucian civilization,” everything seems to still be marking time in the same spot; nothing seems to have really changed. No wonder younger scholars today lament: A tremendous cultural heritage has become nothing but a tremendous cultural burden; a great sense of cultural superiority has turned into a great sense of cultural guilt. This must be considered a major psychological obstacle in the course of China’s modern cultural progress.

The difficulty of reform and change lies perhaps in the fact that we are constantly worrying over “whether the Chinese will remain Chinese.” We do not seem to have realized that in the last two or three centuries in the West, having gone through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, the Western Europeans have not worried about whether after these reforms they would remain Italians or Germans or Frenchmen. It is only in China that this has always been the greatest concern.

Perhaps this is precisely the deepest aspect of this yellow civilization, and also its shallowest aspect. . . .

It may well be that Confucian culture had all sorts of ancient “marvels,” but for thousands of years now it has failed to produce a national spirit or enterprise, or an order based on the rule of law, or even a mechanism for cultural self-renewal. Instead, it has been moving constantly toward decline; it has formed a horrible suicidal mechanism that continues to destroy its own finest people, kill off its own inner vital elements, and stifle this nation’s best and brightest year after year, generation after generation. Even if it did possess those ancient wonders, they can no longer save it from going down in today’s flames.

History has proven that if we were to carry out the construction of modernization according to the model of governance of a continental culture, even if we were able to absorb some of the fruits of modern technology—and indeed it should be possible for us to launch a few satellites and test a few atom bombs—we would nonetheless still be unable to endow this nation fundamentally with some powerful and new cultural vitality. . . .

It was back in 1919 that for the first time in Chinese history the May 4 Movement unfurled the banners of Science and Democracy, and did so in a thorough and uncompromising spirit. Since then, Western culture and ideology, including Marxism, have been widely propagated in China. Yet this radical cultural current failed to wash away the sedimentation of feudalism in politics, or in the economy, or even in the Chinese people’s character. In the last several decades, sometimes this sedimentation would rise to the top, and at other times there has simply been a frozen sheet of ice.

It seems that many things in China need to begin again, with the May 4 Movement as the starting point. . . .

The character of an autocratic government lies in its mysteriousness, its despotism, and its arbitrariness. On the other hand, it should be the character of a democratic government to be transparent, to honor the people’s opinions and to be scientific.

We are now moving from murkiness to transparency. We have already moved from being closed to openness.

[Adapted from Xie Xuanjun and Yuan Zhiming, trans., “Heshang” ("River Elegy"), pp. 78–88—RL]

A prominent contributor to the debate over Chinese tradition in the 1980s was Li Zehou (b. 1930), a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who took a less dim view of Chinese culture than the authors of “River Elegy” and believed that Confucius himself could be exonerated from the misappropriation of his teaching in later Chinese history. Thus while he, like most other heirs of the New Culture and the May 4 Movement, concurred in their condemnation of the later tradition, he nevertheless saw in Confucius’s teaching itself elements of a perennial humanism that could be sifted out of the later dross and adapted to modern needs.

In explaining the historical contexts in which Confucianism was embedded, Li originally spoke of it in terms of the pseudo-Marxist, unilinear path of historical development—from primitive communalism to slave and feudal and on to capitalist and socialist societies—which became the orthodox view after 1949, and one rarely questioned by those educated in the Stalinist ideology installed by Mao. Subsequently Li backed away from these references to slave and feudal society, but he still held to the idea that some of the values of primitive communal society survived in Confucianism.

Though its roots thus lay in an ancient social system, still, as a “cultural-psychological” construct shaped by Confucius, the tradition, according to Li, has outlasted the monarchial system and endured as the essential ingredient of Chinese culture, still applicable to China’s situation today.

A way of understanding Confucius in a more or less correct perspective might be based upon the view that the Spring and Autumn period marked a social transition. The present writer thinks that Confucius’s philosophy is the epitome of the nature of the clans-tribes living in these periods of change and that it is a cultural-psychological structure, which, by virtue of its relatively stable and independent features, has since persisted and continued to develop down to the present day.

No one can deny that Confucius did all he could throughout his life to uphold and defend the Zhou dynasty ethical code. In the Analects Confucius repeatedly expounds rites and rules of human conduct—evidence that he was grieved by the violation of the traditional rites and rules of human conduct; he urged the people to restore and observe in every way possible the Zhou dynasty ethical code.

It is generally accepted that the Zhou dynasty ethical code was a set of decrees, institutions, regulations, rules of etiquette, and the like promulgated in the early years of the Zhou dynasty. On the one hand, the code clearly and strictly stipulated orders and positions of the rulers and the ruled, of the elite and the lowly, of seniors and juniors. However, the rites and rules of human conduct that had been shared by many clan members had by now become a monopoly serving the interests of a few nobles. On the other hand, the base of the social structure continued to be characterized by clans and primitive collectives, so those rites and rules of human conduct retained certain features of primordial democracy of a humanitarian nature. It is clear that filial piety and brotherhood presupposed reverence for elders. I subscribe to the idea of Yang Kuan, that “the wine-drinking ceremony was not merely a banquet in honor of elders but partook of the nature of a patriarchal council that had an important political position and function in its own right in ancient China."³ It was exactly via such primitive ceremonial activities that the ancient clans and tribes were able to gradually organize and unite themselves for living purposes and productive efforts according to generally accepted modes, creating a regular social order so that their society could exist and their life could endure. They were equal in importance to the laws that followed in later periods. The rites were many and of various categories, but they all originated from and centered around ancestor worship.

The so-called Zhou dynasty ethical code was characterized by the primitive rites of worship of ancestors, which were gradually reformed, systematized, and amplified so that they eventually crystallized into a set of unwritten laws (a system of rites). The backbone of such unwritten laws was a hierarchy based upon the sanguinity of patriarchy. And enfeoffment, hereditary rights, the “nine-square” [well-field] land system, the patriarchal clan-rule institution, and other political and economic systems were the extension and continuation of such laws.

However, Confucius lived in an age in which the rites and the ceremonies had begun to lose their vitality and were decaying. A social ideology coupled with a political theory—as advocated by scholars of the Legalist school—gained ascendancy, openly defending oppression and exploitation. In this period of turbulent changes Confucius stood unswervingly on the conservative side. Politically he upheld the ruling order of rites as against law and punishment, and economically he tried to preserve the old social and economic order, preferring a society with all people being equally poor to a society tending to polarization of rich and poor, which was a threat to the existence of the communal system and the old ruling order.

Confucius defended the Zhou dynasty ethical code—he was being conservative and was going against the tide of history. But he was against ruthless oppression and exploitation and championed the cause of ancient clan rule with its comparative moderation, showing the democratic and plebeian side of his thinking. It was on this contradictory and complex foundation that he built up his philosophy of humaneness (ren).

Most scholars in China agree that the main idea of Confucius is humaneness, not rites. Confucius was the first to use humaneness as indicative of the nucleus of his system of thinking. What, then, is “humaneness"?

The four factors that constitute the ideological pattern and the structure of humaneness are (1) the basis in consanguinity, (2) the psychological principle, (3) humanism, (4) individuality, and practical rationalism as the overall feature.

1. Whenever Confucius talked about humaneness he was interpreting rites; and so humaneness, as it is understood by posterity, is closely associated with his defense of rites. Rites, as previously stated, are based on consanguinity and characterized by the clan hierarchy, which it is the ultimate goal of humaneness to safeguard.

2. “Ceremonies come from without.” Rites were originally a whole set of unwritten laws, ceremonies, proprieties, and shamanistic practices bearing upon the people. At the same time, the rites were subjected to new interpretations from various standpoints—for instance, the rites should not be formalities to be blindly obeyed; they should contain in themselves justifiable features. The rites as a political-social order are based on human nature, which consists in the senses of taste, color, sound, and likes and dislikes. Government has very much to do with the senses and the emotions. If that is the case, then the question arises: What is human nature?

In conformity with the spirit of reinterpreting and redefining the rites, Confucius ascribed the traditional three years of mourning to human love between parents and children, basing his observation on human psychology. Thus, he also correlated consanguinity and filial piety and fraternity and traced filial piety to love between parents and children. He was all the while trying to transform the rites and ceremonies, which were external restraining forces, into an internal aspiration of humans, trying to promote what was rigid and compulsory to the level of what would be a conscious ideal in the people’s daily life.

What is most worthy of notice is that Confucius never did attempt to lead internal human emotions toward external objects of worship or to direct them toward mysticism. Instead, he boiled human relationships down to love between parents and children as the core of all human emotions. He integrated what would have been three elements of religion—conception, emotion, ceremony—into secular ethics and common psychology, thus dispensing with the necessity of setting up an edifice of theology. This fact makes it possible for us to say that Confucianism, though it is not a religion, has religious functions—a nonreligion playing the role of a religion, a unique phenomenon in the history of world culture.

Confucianism integrates ideas, emotions, and ceremonies with the ethical-psychological system, which in itself is based on the normal aspirations of normal men.

3. Associated as it was with the psychological principle, humaneness was externally colored by certain democratic traces and humanitarian ideas dating back to the primitive clan system.

Humaneness was closely related to the interests of the whole of society based on the clan-tribe system. This factor imposed social obligations upon the individual taking the relationship and social intercourse between man and man as the essence of human nature and the criterion of humaneness.

4. Extrinsically, humaneness was associated with, and restricted by, humanism. Intrinsically, humaneness brought into relief individuality with its initiative and independence.

The rites lost their mysterious and authoritative functions. The rites ceased to be the privilege of clan oligarchs such as witches, kings, prime ministers, princes, and historians, but became a historical responsibility or a paramount duty for every member of the clan. This was a great step forward in boosting individual personality and inducing personal initiative, independence, and the sense of historical responsibility.

Perfection of personality presupposes learning and education and acquisition of historical and practical knowledge.

The practical rationalism of Confucianism ruled out mysticism or fanaticism and instead adopted a realistic and reasonable attitude toward explaining and treating traditional institutions, at the same time one full of emotion and feeling; it disapproved of asceticism or hedonism and instead sought to guide, satisfy, and regulate human sentiments and desires; it rejected nihilism or egoism and instead strove for a balance between the pursuit of humanism and the cultivation of individuality.

This rationalism is characterized by an emphasis on practice. In other words, Confucianism does not lay store by speculative theorizing for its own sake. Polemics and rhetoric do not solve philosophical problems. Speculative or abstract thinking or debating seldom avails anything. What is important for humans is how to live their life in a practical and reasonable way.

Consanguinity, psychology, humanism, and individuality combine to form an organic whole of an ideological pattern characterized by practical rationalism. This pattern is an organic whole in the sense that its factors are mutually restricting, mutually balanced, and internally sufficient to produce adjustment and development.

In Confucianism we find an active and positive attitude toward living, a conformity with rationalism, a preference for practicality over polemics, a dominance of human affairs over references to gods and ghosts. Confucianism harmonizes human groups, allows for a reasonable and moderate satisfaction of the desires and passions, avoids fanaticism and blind submission, thereby forming an unconscious collective prototype phenomenon of a national cultural-psychological structure. Confucianism is almost synonymous with Chinese culture.

Although cultural phenomena like material advance, spiritual progress, language, and so on may bear a certain kind of nonclass nature, none of them is separable from society and history, and each must be a historical product, though not necessarily a product of a certain class or class struggle. Often enough, in matters of cultural inheritance, class nature is not the only, and not even the principal, determining factor.

In the hands of different Confucian scholars serving the interests of their respective classes or political ideologies, Confucianism often went off at a tangent. The Confucius that the May 4 movement in 1919 destroyed was just the Confucius that Confucians from the Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty had identified with monarchy. This is just as Li Dazhao said: “We are launching an attack not upon Confucius himself but upon the Confucius whom the past successive emperors have molded into a political idol and authority—not upon Confucius himself but upon the Confucius whom the emperors have invested with a tyrannical soul."⁴

This Confucius who represented the traditional superstructure and ideology through the advocacy of despotic monarchy, asceticism, and a rigid hierarchy naturally became the target of the bourgeois democratic revolution. In this connection we may refer to Lu Xun, who pointed out certain defects in the Chinese national character and sharply criticized them. In The True Story of Ah Q 3,⁵ he exposed and denounced his hero’s insensitivity to pain and suffering, narrow-mindedness, reconciliation with oppression, slavish mentality, contentment with poverty, conservatism, and so-called moral self-salvation and spiritual civilization. These characteristics do not come from the class nature of a particular ruling class. In essence, they are problems about the cultural-psychological structure. Though they cannot be directly or completely attributed to Confucius, they are related to Confucianism. That is why Lu Xun frequently aimed his attacks at Confucius.

Apart from the weak points of the cultural-psychological structure, we come now to the strong points of this structure. Where does the strength of the Chinese nation lie? The strength that has for thousands of years enabled the Chinese nation to survive all external aggression and internal disasters and yet to preserve, to develop, and to glorify the Chinese nation? Among them are the constituents of what is best in the Chinese legacy. The humanistic spirit and the personality ideal that originated from the democratic system in the clans, the rational attitude that emphasized the realities of human life, the optimistic and active spirit—these have all helped to affect, educate, and mold numberless men and women into eminent figures with lofty ideals and heroic deeds.

Nevertheless, the weak points of the Confucian structure of humaneness, as against its strong points, must be quickly eliminated—especially the effects of small-scale production and the vestiges of autocracy—so that China will get rid of her present poverty and backwardness. Only then can China, with the good aspects of the tradition of humaneness, refined and practiced by a large population, hope to make her contributions to mankind.

A major aim of Li’s three-volume Essays on the History of Chinese Thought is to trace Mao Zedong’s thought back to currents in traditional Chinese philosophy and to show that not only Mao but most progressive Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century were still to a great extent influenced by traditional, antimodern ideas and values. Li’s thesis is that Maoism has little to do with Marx and much more with tradition. These traditional elements impede China’s modernization by putting up obstacles against capitalism, democracy, the rule of law, and large-scale industrialization based upon science and technology. Mao’s brand of voluntarism, according to Li, compounds the fundamental fallacies of traditional Chinese thought, which encouraged him to launch ill-conceived and destructive mass campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This “voluntarism” he identifies with long-standing Chinese misconceptions about the unlimited power of the ruler’s purified moral will to transform the environment directly and instantaneously, without the support of a technological infrastructure. This tendency toward voluntarism and subjectivism culminated in Wang Yangming’s activist brand of Neo-Confucianism, which, in Li’s view, inspired Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, Mao, and other twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals.

Furthermore, Li argues, Confucianism shared a fundamental stress on “asceticism” and frugality with the outlook of Mohism, which emphasized limited consumption and egalitarian distribution. In this respect, Mao’s vision of the New Society accorded with traditional egalitarian ideals about the simple life in the unspoiled ancestral village. Moreover, Mao’s call for the intense pursuit of moral and ideological purity as a precondition for the realization of the ideal society had a certain resemblance to Confucian ideas of how the sage can draw as if on cosmic power to transform the whole of reality immediately, by the pure strength of his moral will.

The thought of the young Mao, Li argues, still moved within the orbit of a traditional Chinese holism, although the moving force of the cosmos, in Mao’s view, was not the harmonious complementarity of opposites but “motion” and “conflict,” accomplished by means of convulsive mobilizational campaigns aimed at changing people’s ideology (by molding the strength and direction of their willpower) rather than by science, technology, democracy, and the rule of law. This was combined with ideas current in Wang Yangming’s school of Neo-Confucianism, according to which both knowledge of external reality and action aimed at changing external reality were spontaneous and unmediated: since man can know the essential principles of the universe merely by introspection, knowledge is a matter of intuition, unmediated by practice, and action that is inspired by the good force of the cosmos does not need technology, as its effect is instantaneous. In Li’s view, Chinese holism contributed to an exaggerated belief in the divine powers of the sage ruler to control the universe solely by means of moral willpower. Thus Mao himself succeeded in taking the place in popular imagination traditionally occupied by the shaman and his reincarnations (the Chinese emperor and the moral hero), who are able to summon the good power of the cosmos by the force of their purified moral will, spreading its blessings over the entire community.

Through his teacher and later father-in-law Yang Changji, Mao was introduced to the philosophy of Wang Yangming, and Mao’s early writings, according to Li, are clearly influenced by Wang’s subjectivism and voluntarism.

Characteristic of the school of Wang Yangming is the great stress on the dynamic nature of subjective practice (moral behavior), i.e., the unity of knowledge and action. “Knowledge that is true and genuine is action, action that is conscious and discriminating is knowledge.” This means that ethics is entirely reduced to the self-conscious action of the individual. “Knowledge” is necessarily “action"; “innate knowledge” automatically becomes action, and conscious action is identical to knowledge. That is to say, man’s true existence lies in the “innate knowledge” [expressed in] activity and only in this activity can man achieve his noumenal existence. . . . [48]

In Wang Yangming’s doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action, there is not much place left for epistemology; in a certain sense, it can even be said that epistemological questions have been eliminated. The so-called extension of knowledge is not about knowledge at all but is about moral feeling.

From the beginning, starting with Lu Xiangshan, there had been a strong emphasis on “being one’s own master,” “self-reliance and self-respect,” the doubting of canonical authority and the opposition to blind obedience . . . and this characteristic became even more important and significant with Wang Yangming and his followers. . . .

[This] emphasis on subjectivity and willpower influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, many men of strong purpose and lofty ideals in later generations, such as Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, the young Mao Zedong, and Guo Moruo, who used it as a spiritual weapon or support in their battle against the old society, the old order, and the old customs. The . . . aspect of individual moral cultivation, the steeling of the will, and the spirit of militancy . . . became a factor of real significance. [48]

Although Liu Shaoqi’s How to Be a Good Communist and Neo-Confucianism are diametrically opposed to each other, are they really dissimilar in the way in which they establish the subjective will and a sense of moral responsibility? . . . Is there really no continuity here in regard to national tradition? . . . Is it unrelated to the Chinese nation’s establishment of a subjective volitional structure in terms of a high regard for moral courage and character, the desire to control the feelings by means of principle, self-restraint, and firm determination? . . . In his youth, Mao Zedong earnestly studied Neo-Confucianism with his teacher Yang Changji and even spoke approvingly of Zeng Guofan. . . . He paid attention to self-improvement, the steeling of the will, and attached great importance to ideals, spiritual values, and moral achievements. Could all this have had no influence upon his later activities and ideology? [51–52]

In October 1989, not long after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square earlier in June, an elaborate celebration of the 2540th anniversary of Confucius’s birthday was held in Beijing by the Confucius Foundation, which had been set up in 1983 with the support of the Deng regime. Among the dignitaries present was the president of the People’s Republic and general secretary of the Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, who spent two hours recollecting his own Confucian upbringing at home and giving his blessing to what was said by Gu Mu, a prime architect of Deng’s economic modernization program who served as the honorary chairman of the foundation and of this event.

In his keynote speech Gu Mu claimed the time-honored Confucius as China’s own and characterized Chinese culture as quintessentially Confucian (skipping over the Party’s earlier anti-Confucian stance and the virulent attacks on Confucius during the Cultural Revolution). By relying on the Confucian values of harmony and social discipline as the criteria for excluding decadent libertarian influences from the West, Gu would have China screen out the spiritual pollution that was responsible for the alleged unbridled disorders of Tiananmen Square. Understood as a call for compliance with direction from above, such harmony and discipline would yield the stability needed for economic progress. Nothing was said about the “harmony without conformity” spoken of by Confucius, much less the kind of political remonstrance advocated by Mencius.

By this time an established regime, Deng’s government no longer invoked Marxist revolutionary morality and class struggle (as in the Cultural Revolution) to guard the gates against Western liberal decadence, but instead leaned toward a conservative brand of Confucianism to buttress the status quo—yet not without a bow to such progressive trends from the West as environmentalism and ecology!

Subsequently an International Confucius Foundation was set up, which has joined in sponsoring meetings both in China and abroad (Singapore) along the lines proposed in this speech, usually participated in by officials and businessmen along with scholars.

The following excerpts are taken from the official English text of Gu’s speech:

The Chinese nation has had a long history and brilliant ancient culture. For a long period of time in human history, the Chinese culture, with the Confucian school of thought as the mainstream, glittered with colorful splendor. . . .

Culture serves both as the emblem of the level of civilization of a nation or a country and the guidance for its political and economic life. To promote prosperity and peace for a nation and for mankind in general, it is necessary to develop a compatible culture. In this regard, a proper attitude toward the traditional national culture is very important. It is inadvisable either to be complacent about the past or to discard the past and the tradition. The correct attitude is to inherit the essence and discard the dross.

The Chinese people are working hard to build socialist modernization and a prosperous and strong socialist country. In order to reach this goal, we must develop and improve our new culture, which, we believe, should be national, patriotic, scientific, and democratic. This calls for inheriting and reforming the traditional culture of our nation and parallel efforts to courageously and yet selectively assimilate the advanced cultures of the outside world, merging the two into an integral whole.

As for the attitude toward the traditional culture and foreign cultures, there is no doubt that the traditional culture should be kept as the mainstay. . . .

As is known to all, the idea of harmony is an important component of the Chinese traditional culture. As early as the last years of the West Zhou dynasty three thousand years ago, ancient scholars elucidated the brilliant idea of “harmony making for prosperity.” Later Confucius and the Confucian school put forward the proposition of “harmony above all” and established theories on the coordination of interpersonal relations, the protection of the natural environment, and the maintenance of ecological balance. These thoughts not only made positive contributions to the prosperity of ancient Chinese society but also have profound practical significance for the survival and development of mankind today.

[Keynote speech, 2540th Anniversary of Confucius’s Birthday, Beijing, October 1989]

1. Current estimates date Yin (Shang) from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-eleventh century, and Xia prior to the mid-sixteenth century. See vol. 1, ch. 1.