Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2

by Wm. Theodore de Bary

  His book says that for all their diversity, the species originated from a single source and that their differences developed slowly, for the most part in connection with changes in the environment and an abiding biological tendency toward incremental differentiation. Eventually divergence from the remote source led to vast and irreversible differences, but these were brought about by natural processes in later ages and were not inherent in life at its origins.

  Two chapters of the book are particularly noteworthy. . . . One is called “Competition” and the other, “Natural Selection.” “Competition” refers to the struggle of things to survive, and “Natural Selection” is the retention of the fit. The idea is that people and things exist in profusion, surviving on what the natural environment provides, but when they encounter others, peoples and things struggle over the means of survival. At first species struggled with species, and when they advanced somewhat, one group (jun) struggled with another. The weaker regularly became the prey of the stronger, and the more stupid were dominated by the more intelligent. Those who survived to perpetuate their kind were inevitably the strong and ruthless, the quick and clever, as well as those best adapted to the times and the natural human circumstances. This kind of struggle is not necessarily a matter of slaughter by fang and claw. Those accustomed to repose when forced to labor, or those familiar with mountains when forced to dwell in a marsh will, in competition with those accustomed to labor in marshes, die out in a few generations. Such is the competition among things. . . .

  So it is with animals and plants and likewise with humans. Humankind is indeed a kind of animal. Encompassing all living things, this is the general idea of Darwin’s thesis. . . .

  Spencer, likewise an Englishman, is a contemporary of Darwin, and his book, which appeared earlier than Darwin’s Origin of Species, adopts the evolutionary methodology to give a general account of morality and politics. He calls his field of study “sociology.” It is the ability to form societies, in terms of which Xunzi explains the superiority of man to animals, that gives rise to the term sociology. The various ways in which people contribute to each other’s lives and nourishment, easing their tasks and coordinating their efforts, ultimately developing into the major institutions of law, government, rites, and music, all arise from this ability to form societies. And now, the latest principles and techniques of science are employed further to develop personal cultivation, the regulation of society, the governance of the state, and the ordering of the world. His command of [scholarship on] the peoples of the five continents, from savages in their wilderness to respectable civilized states, gives him a masterful and exhaustive comparative perspective, and as the causes of the prosperity or debility, strength and weakness of particular states, and the reasons for the health or disarray of the people’s morale, he addresses these questions over and over. . . . His thesis is fully presented in his first book, called First Principles, in which he scrutinizes all the life-forms in the universe to uncover the principles that encompass them all, from their beginnings in primordial matter to all their manifold manifestations. He then takes up the principles of biology and psychology to join them in the study of society. It is truly a masterpiece. . . .

  In its constitution, the structure and functions of a social body are no different from those of an animal’s body; despite the difference in size, there is a coordination of the faculties, so that if we understand how life is maintained in our bodies we can understand how societies can exist; if we understand longevity in individuals, we can understand how the vitality of a state can endure. Within the individual, body and spirit support each other. Within a society, power and virtue complement each other. The individual values his freedom, the state values its autonomy. The similarity of life-forms to societies consists precisely in the fact that both are conscious organisms. Thus all learning converges on sociology and only when sociology is understood can political order and chaos, prosperity and debility, be understood, and personal cultivation, the regulation of society, the governance of the state, and the ordering of the world be effective. . . .

  Now there are three essential elements in sustaining the life of the people, and their vigor and survival depend on them. The first is vitality and physical strength, the second, intellectual capacities, the third, virtue and ethics. Hence Western students of history and government always evaluate races in terms of the people’s strength, intelligence, and virtue. Without all three, the people’s livelihood will not be abundant, and without all three, a country will not be able to assert itself. To the contrary, if a people is dispirited and stupid, each pursuing private ends, then the society will disintegrate, and when a society in disintegration encounters an aggressive, intelligent, patriotic people, it will be dominated at best, and at worst, exterminated, and not necessarily by force of arms and slaughter. . . . Hence Western students of culture and government recognize that self-preservation is the individual organism’s highest priority, and preservation of the species the second, but hold that when the two are compared, the individual life should be sacrificed for the preservation of the species. He who follows this path is regarded as a martyr and a hero. And in the realm of laws and decrees, Western students’ overall criterion is the people’s strength, intelligence, and virtue. Everything that promotes these three is vigorously implemented, and everything that diminishes them is to be abolished. . . .

  Months and years slip by, and with rapacious neighbors all around, I fear that we will be too late, that we will follow upon Poland and India, providing an example of Darwin’s [elimination] before we have been able to implement Spencer’s methods. . . . Alas, our individual lives are not worth the worry, but what of our descendants, and the 400,000,000 of our race? . . .

  [Against those who argue that China has survived conquest by alien races before,] the Manchus, Mongols, and Han today are all of the yellow race. . . . Hence China since antiquity has been under rulers of one race and has never fallen under the domination of another. . . . [Moreover, such a view] misunderstands the two reasons for the comparative strengths of races: there is expansive, aggressive strength, and there is the strength of virtue, intellect, and skill. . . . Those who excelled in raw power were herdsmen and hunters. The rulers and people of those countries were close as members of a family, sharing their abundance and facing peril together. Their rules of communal life were few and simple, they rode and shot from horseback, gathering and dispersing . . .thus the people were fond of war and scorned death. If a strong man organized and led them, their power could dominate the world, but although dominant, they could not go on to change it. . . . A country that excels in civilization plants, weaves, and dwells in cities. It governs with rituals, music, and penalties, and has a learning promoted by examinations and schools. . . . Hence the people delight in life and respect regulations. Those who govern by using this way correctly can easily maintain peace and order; if they fail to do so, they can easily fall into corruption. Hence the culmination of this process often leads to domination by those who excel in raw power. . . .

  As for today’s Westerners, they are altogether different. How so? They both use and dispense with regulations, and in both ways they excel us. With respect to their liberty and equality, they reject taboos, discard onerous obligations, and eliminate cover-ups. People pursue their aims and speak their minds. There is no great gulf between the power of rulers and ruled; monarchs are not overly honored nor are the people too lowly. Rather, they are linked as in one body. This is how they excel by dispensing with regulations. But from the standpoint of clear and complete rules regarding officials, workmen, soldiers, and merchants, everyone knows his job and does it without monitoring, and the most minute tasks are all completed according to the proper sequence. Orders issued from far or near are acted upon within the day, and no one finds it oppressive. This is how they excel in using regulations. . . .

  In all their affairs they rely on learning, and all their learning is based on direct consideration of the facts, buildi
ng up layer on layer of knowledge to develop the best-considered and most-extensive course of action. Hence there is no matter in which their theories cannot be put into practice. The reason is that they take freedom as the essential principle and democracy as its application. The peoples of one continent have spread over seven or eight, vying with each other as they advance together, honing each other’s skills, beginning as adversaries but ending in mutual development, each employing his intelligence to the fullest, so that one’s daily progress is matched by another’s monthly innovations. Thus they can use regulations without being hampered by their defects. This is what is awe-inspiring. . . .

  Thus the strength, prosperity, and stability of a country reflects its people’s strength, wisdom, and virtue. Only after all three are established will its politics and law follow. . . . Were one to say, “. . . Our plan today is simply to pursue wealth and power. The West is truly wealthy and powerful, therefore in today’s policies we can have no other teacher than the West, so within the government we must establish democracy and true ministerial government, and in the country at large, build railways, open mines, train a national army, create a navy with hundreds of ships,” this would be but an unsuccessful approximation of the idea of strengthening. . . .

  In essence, wealth and power mean benefiting the people. But policies to benefit people must start with the people’s ability each to benefit himself, and the ability to benefit oneself starts with each one’s enjoyment of freedom. If each is to have freedom, this must begin with the ability of each to control himself. Otherwise there is chaos. And those who can control themselves in freedom are those whose strength, wisdom, and virtue are truly superior. Hence the essential policies today are summed up in three principles: promote the people’s strength, expand their knowledge, and revive their virtue.

  [Shiwen, in Yan Fu yi, ed. Wang Ji, 1: 15–32—DP]

  KANG YOUWEI AND THE REFORM MOVEMENT

  More even than by such ideas as evolution, progress, and liberty—radically new though these were and certain to stir intellectual ferment—this generation was disturbed, and profoundly so, just by the shock of events, especially the defeat by Japan in 1894–1895. Not only the handful of active reformers but officialdom in general found its pride and self-confidence shaken. This loss of poise and self-assurance may have helped to provide the rare, if momentary, opportunity that innovators seized upon in the famous Hundred Days of Reform in 1898. Yet it also created a deeply felt need among educated Chinese somehow to be reassured that China’s cultural identity would not be wholly lost amid these changes—a need that the reformers themselves felt more acutely even than those who opposed them.

  Kang Youwei (1858–1927), the dominant figure of the reform movement, was born near Guangzhou (Canton) into a world of crisis. The Taiping Rebellion raised up by Kang’s fellow provincial was still agonizing the empire from within, while from without the British and French, who had moved again into Guangzhou only the year before, were pressing a campaign that would lead to the occupation of Beijing itself in 1860.

  As the scion of a distinguished scholar-official family, Kang was provided with an education along traditional lines, but at the age of fifteen he made known his distaste for the business of mastering the eight-legged essay so indispensable to success in the civil service examinations. Two years later he was reading about Western geography and in time became a voracious reader of Chinese books on the history and geography of the West. Probably the chief influence on Kang in these early years was exerted by a teacher of the old school, who aroused in him a passion for classical scholarship and a sense of complete dedication to the Confucian ideals of personal virtue and service to society. An episode recounted in Kang’s Life Chronology shows, nevertheless, that his independence and iconoclasm were already quite marked:

  My Master praised highly the writings of Han Yu and so I read and studied the collected works of Han [Yu] and Liu [Zongyuan], emulating him in this as well. By this time I had read the books of the philosophers and had learned [that] the [various] methods of [seeking] the Way were shallow, and that in searching for concrete substance in the writings of all the great names in scholarship down through the Song, Ming and the present dynasty, [I had found that] they were all empty and lacking in substance. I ventured to say that when one spoke of the Way, it should be like Zhuangzi or Xunzi; when one spoke of governing, it should be like Guanzi or Hanfeizi; while as regards medicine, the Su wen would constitute a separate subject. But as to Han Yu, he was no more than a literary craftsman skilled in the undulation of broad and sweeping cadences that, while they appealed to the ear, had nothing to do with the Way. Thus his Essentials of the Moral Way (Yuandao) was extremely superficial. . . . The Master, who was usually correct and stern, in this case laughingly chided me for being wrongheaded. From the time he had first seen me he had often cautioned me about my undue feelings of superiority, and after this I was [more] humble, but nevertheless my fellow students came to be shocked at my intractability.

  With the arrival of autumn and winter, I had learned in their broad outlines the general meaning of the important books in the four divisions [of literature]. My intelligence and comprehension became confused, for every day I was buried amid piles of old papers, and I developed a revulsion for them. Then one day I had a new idea. I thought: scholars engaged in textual research, such as Dai Zhen, filled their homes with the books that they had written, but in the end what was the use of all this? Thus I gave it up and in my own heart I fancied seeking a place where I might pacify my mind and decide my destiny. Suddenly I abandoned my studies, discarded my books, shut my door, withdrew from my friends, and sat in contemplation, nurturing my mind. My schoolmates thought me very queer, for there had been no one who had done this, inasmuch as the Master upheld the individual’s actual practice [of the Confucian virtues] and detested the study of Chan [Buddhism]. While I was sitting in contemplation, all of a sudden I perceived that Heaven, earth, and the myriad things were all of one substance with myself, and in a great release of enlightenment I beheld myself a sage and laughed for joy; then suddenly I thought of the sufferings and hardships of all living beings, and I wept in melancholy; abruptly I thought: why should I be studying here and neglecting my parent? and that I should pack up immediately and go back to the thatched hut over my grandfather’s grave. The students, observing that I sang and wept for no apparent reason, believed that I had gone mad and was diseased in mind.3

  This experience of Kang’s was not unusual in the Neo-Confucian tradition. Others, like Wang Yangming before him, had suddenly found themselves suffocated and overburdened by the kind of broad learning Zhu Xi had encouraged—scholarship that often exhausted one’s mind and spirit before one began to exhaust the sources. Still others, like Wang Gen (see chapter 24), had had a kind of mystical experience in which they felt themselves, in their very “humanity,” to be of “one substance with Heaven, earth, and all things,” an experience that inspired them with a sense of a heroic vocation to save all mankind.

  After Kang spent a few months in lonely isolation and reflection, this sense of a special destiny to save mankind through active involvement in the affairs of the world took command of him. Subsequent visits to Hong Kong and Shanghai impressed him with the orderliness and prosperity of Western civilization. Intensifying his pursuit of Western learning, he also became involved in efforts toward practical reform, like his movement to abolish foot binding. Meanwhile, the young reformer had by no means abandoned classical Confucian studies but had begun to identify himself with the so-called New Text school of textual criticism. The purpose of this, for Kang, was not so much to determine by critical methods what must have been the original teaching of Confucius but, whether consciously or not, to justify his new view of the sage as essentially a reformer and to discredit all else that passed for Confucianism.

  By the mid-1880s Kang, still only twenty-seven, had already formulated in his mind the ideas that became the basis of his two most famous works, the
Grand Commonality (Datong shu) and Confucius As a Reformer (Kongzi gaizhi kao). By 1887 he had succeeded, after an earlier failure, in winning the second degree in the civil service examinations, and by 1895, the highest regular (jinshi) degree. He had also begun to attract talented students, who helped in the revising and publishing of his works and later in the organizing of reformist societies that spread his ideas and made him the center of violent controversy. Japan, whose defeat of China created an atmosphere of crisis and imminent catastrophe in the late 1890s, now became Kang’s model of reform. He urged the court to follow the example of Meiji Japan and openly advocated a basic change from absolute monarchy to constitutional rule. Finally an opportunity to put his ideas into effect came when the Guangxu emperor asked him to take charge of the government in June 1898.

  During Kang’s few months of tenure a stream of edicts issued forth from the court, aimed at transforming China into a modern state. The old bureaucracy was to be thoroughly revamped. Education and recruitment would be based on Western studies as well as Chinese; bureaucratic functions would be reorganized to serve modern needs. There would be a public school system and a public press. These, together with popularly elected local assemblies, would prepare the people to take part in eventual parliamentary government. In the economic sphere, too, Kang had ambitious plans. Bureaus were set up to promote commerce, industry, modern banking, mining, and agricultural development. Last, and most important, Kang attempted to reorganize and strengthen the armed forces. Here, however, he ran into serious difficulty trying to bring under central control armies that for decades had been virtually autonomous units loyal to their own commanders.