Mr. Hu Hanmin has recently said that not a single good thing has been done by the government during the past two years. His statement is both overdrawn and inadequate. It is overdrawn because the government did do some good things, but they were of no avail and probably did not outweigh the bad things it had done. The statement is inadequate because the situation described applies not only to the government in the past two years but to the government in the past twenty years. Actually, while China did not have a very good government in the past twenty years, there was no extremely evil government either. Extremely good or extremely bad governments existed at the local level, but not at the national. For even if the central government had intended to do something good, it did not have the capacity to do anything very good. Similarly, even if it had intended to do something bad, it did not have the capacity to do anything bad. This is generally true with the past twenty years during which groups and individuals of various kinds, including Yuan Shikai and Chiang Kai-shek, assumed control of the government. In my opinion, even northern warlords such as Yuan Shikai, Duan Qirui, Wu Peifu, and Zhang Zuolin were all desirous of doing good, but no good results come out of them. This is because all their energy was spent in dealing with their political enemies. When engaged in dealing with their enemies, they had to sacrifice reconstruction to maintain an army and resort to any dubious means in order to win. The problem is therefore not that of personality but that of circumstances. Given the circumstances, no one could achieve good results. The basic situation of China may be summarized in one sentence: Without a unified political power, there can be no good government. . . .
Viewed from the standpoint of history, this phenomenon is quite natural, and no nation is an exception to it. Advanced Western countries such as England, France, and Russia resembled China in their early stages of development when there was only internal order but not revolution. In England the Wars of the Roses raged in the fifteenth century, but no results were achieved. It was toward the end of the fifteenth century that Henry VII unified England and began a century of absolutism under the name of the Tudor dynasty. During these hundred years the British people had a good rest and rehabilitation; as a result, the national state was formed. The seventeenth century saw the culmination of political conflicts in a genuine revolution. Historians are agreed that had there been no Tudor autocracy in the sixteenth century there could not have been any revolution in the seventeenth century. . . . [Jiang goes on to cite the Bourbons and the French Revolution, the Romanovs and the Russian Revolution as illustrations of the same point.]
The present situation in China is similar to that of England before the Tudor absolutism, or that of France before the Bourbon absolutism, or that of Russia before the Romanov absolutism. The Chinese, too, can have only internal disturbance but not genuine revolution. Although we had several thousand years of absolute government, unfortunately our absolute monarchs, because of environmental peculiarities, did not fulfill their historic duty. The heritage left to the republic by the Manchu dynasty was too poor to be revolutionary capital. In the first place, our state is still a dynastic state, not a national one. Chinese citizens are generally loyal to individuals, families, or localities rather than to the state. Second, our absolute monarchs did not leave us a class that could serve as the nucleus of a new regime. In fact, the historic task of the Chinese monarchies was to destroy all the classes and institutions outside the royal family that could possibly become the center of political power. As a result, when the royal family was overthrown, the nation became a “heap of loose sand.” Third, under the absolutist regime our material civilization lagged far behind. Consequently, when the foreigners took advantage of our trouble after the outbreak of the revolution, we were unable to offer any effective resistance.
In sum, the political history of all countries is divided into two phases: first, the building of a state, and second, the promotion of national welfare by means of the state. Since we have not completed the first phase, it is idle to talk of the second. As a Western saying goes, “The better is often the enemy of the good.” The so-called revolution of China today is a great obstacle to our national reconstruction. The Chinese people should adopt an objective attitude and view the civil war as a historical process, just as physicians study physiology. We should foster the unifying force, because it is the vital power of our state organism. We should eliminate the anti-unification force, because it is the virus in our state organism. Our present problem is the existence of our state, not what type of state we should have.
[“Kaiming yu zhuanzhi,” pp. 2–5—CT]
HU SHI: “NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION AND ABSOLUTISM”
A direct rejoinder to Jiang Tingfu’s defense of Nationalist party tutelage came from one of the intellectual leaders of republican China, Hu Shi (1891–1962). Like Luo and Jiang, he had been educated in the United States (Cornell University and Columbia University) and became a thoroughgoing exponent of Westernization or modernization in many fields. As such he was often critical of the Nationalists and of attitudes expressed by Sun Yat-sen or Chiang Kai-shek. Nevertheless, his personal standing as a scholar and thinker was so high both in China and in the West that the Nationalist government entrusted important diplomatic and educational assignments to him and later in Taiwan awarded him the presidency of its top academic institution, the Academia Sinica.
1. Is Absolutism a Necessary Stage for National Reconstruction?
In regard to this problem, there is a basic difference between Mr. Jiang Tingfu’s views and mine. As I see it, the history of England, France, and Russia as cited by Mr. Jiang is only the history of national reconstruction in the three countries. But the scope of national reconstruction is very broad, and the factors involved are complex. We cannot single out “absolutism” as the only cause or condition. We may say that the three dynasties (the Tudors of England, the Bourbons of France, and the Romanovs of Russia) were the periods during which their respective states were built, but we cannot prove that the formation of the state in these three countries was due to absolute rule. . . . The birth and propagation of the new English language and literature, the circulation of the English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the influence of Oxford and Cambridge universities, the impact of London as England’s political, economic, and cultural center, the rapid development of the textile industry, the rise of the middle class—all of these were important factors in the formation of the English national state. Most of these factors did not first appear under the Tudor dynasty; their origins may be traced to the time before the Tudors, although their development was particularly rapid in that century of unity and peace.
What Mr. Jiang probably means to say is that a unified political power is indispensable to the building of the state. However, his use of the term absolutism to describe the unity of political power easily leads the people to think of a dictatorship with unlimited power. The reign of Henry VIII was the period in which parliamentary power began to rise: members of Parliament were secure from arrest, and the king established the new church upon the support of Parliament. Therefore, instead of asserting that absolutism is an indispensable stage for the building of the state, we had better say that unity of political power is the condition. And unity of political power does not depend on completely following the dictatorship of the Romanov dynasty.
2. Why Did Centuries of Absolute Government Fail to Create a National State in China?
Concerning this question, my views are again different from those of Mr. Jiang. Generally speaking, China had long since become a national state. What we now find defective is that the solidarity and unity of the Chinese national state have proved inadequate for a modern national state. In national consciousness, in unity of language, in unity of history and culture, in unity and continuity of governmental system (including examination, civil service, law, etc.)—in all these, China in the past two thousand years was qualified to be a national state. It is true that there were periods of foreign rule, but during those periods na
tional consciousness became more vigorous and enduring so that eventually there arose national heroes such as Liu Yu, Zhu Yuanzhang, Hong Xiuquan, and Sun Yat-sen, who led the national revolutions. Indeed, all of the capital for national reconstruction that we have today is the national consciousness passed on to us by our forebears through two thousand years. . . .
As to the three defects pointed out by Mr. Jiang, they prove only the evil consequences of the former social and political order, but not the lack of a national state in China. First, Mr. Jiang said, “Chinese citizens are generally loyal to individuals, families, or localities rather than to the state.” This is because in the old days the power of the state did not extend directly to the people. When “the emperor was as remote as the sky [from the people],” how could anyone bypass his family, which exerts an immediate influence on his life, and profess loyalty to the state in the abstract, unless he was highly educated? The famous Burke of eighteenth-century England said, “In order that the people love the state, the state must first be lovable.” Can we then say that England in the eighteenth century had not become a national state? The reason the masses of the people today do not love the nation is partly that they are inadequately educated and therefore unable to imagine a state and partly that the state has not bestowed any benefits upon the people.
[Jiang, “Jianguo yu zhuanzhi,” pp. 3–5—CT]
CHIANG KAI-SHEK: NATIONALISM AND TRADITIONALISM
Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi, 1887–1975), who took over leadership after Sun Yat-sen’s death, was a devoted follower and admirer of Dr. Sun. He was also a very different man from his mentor. For one thing, Chiang had virtually no Western education and, knowing no foreign language well, was dependent upon others to interpret the West for him. Consequently, his ideas were formed much more within the Chinese tradition and found their most typical expression in the language and formulas of the past. His experience of foreign lands was also much more limited. The net effect even of his relatively brief travel and study in Japan and later in Soviet Russia was only to increase his consciousness of being a Confucian Chinese. Throughout life this consciousness deepened as a result of intensive and prolonged study of Chinese classical literature.
Understandably, then, it was the first of Sun’s Three Principles, nationalism, which had the most significance for Chiang. Others of his contemporaries, however, no less intensely nationalistic than he and no less limited in their experience of the outside world, still showed by their eager acceptance of Western standards that the new nationalism could be quite divorced from any strong attachment to the values of the past. The contact zone of East and West, in which such a cultural hybrid as Dr. Sun had been produced just a generation before, had moved from Honolulu, Hong Kong, Macao, and Yokohama into the very classrooms of provincial China, where Western-style education now prevailed. Chiang himself, in a certain sense, had moved with it. He had, for instance, become a devout Methodist, married a Wellesley-educated woman, attempted to learn English, adopted Western standards of personal hygiene, and made considerable use of Western advisers. All this notwithstanding, his own philosophy of life drew more and more upon Chinese sources of inspiration, and in offering it to the Chinese people as a national way of life, he cut across the Westernizing trend of the times.
What Chiang found so essential in Chinese tradition—Confucian ethics—actually represented an important link between him and Dr. Sun. The latter, in his long struggle to organize and lead a national revolution, had come to a new appreciation of the traditional Confucian virtues for which earlier he had found little use. They could serve as a means of achieving social discipline and national cohesion among a people who were otherwise just a “heap of loose sand.” Chiang himself had no less reason, politically, to adopt the same view. He confronted all the same problems of leadership as Sun had and felt the same need for disciplined loyalty among his followers. Moreover, as a man who had received military training in Japan, he no doubt had a keener sense than most men of the importance of discipline.
With Chiang, however, it was more than a question of simply exploiting traditional attitudes that could serve present purposes. It had become a deep personal conviction of his (as it never seems to have been of Sun’s) that moral values were the ultimate basis of human life. His own experience seems to have taught him the value of self-discipline to the individual, as much as the importance of social discipline to the nation.
These convictions manifested themselves early in Chiang’s public career, and he never abandoned them. In 1924, as superintendent of the Nationalist (Guomindang) military academy at Whampoa, where Soviet influence was strong and the revolutionary fever ran high, Chiang did not hesitate to base military indoctrination on a text compiled from the moral teachings of the nineteenth-century Neo-Confucian and Restoration hero Zeng Guofan. Thus, in contrast to Sun’s glorification of the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan as a national revolutionary figure, Chiang acclaimed the very suppressor of the Taipings as the finest exemplar of national tradition. In this way the cultivation of personal virtue and nobility of character was stressed over revolutionary fervor. [For this, Western liberals criticized Chiang as a reactionary, but later in the eighties and nineties, under the Deng and Jiang regimes, Zeng came back into official favor, on terms similar to Chiang Kai-shek’s estimation of him.]
Ten years later, when Chiang launched his New Life Movement as a program for the strengthening of national morale, the Confucian virtues of decorum, rightness, integrity, and a sense of shame provided the chief catchwords and main content of this campaign of mass education. Significantly, the first of these virtues, li, implied an acceptance of social discipline, of law and authority, in opposition to the trend from the West toward unfettered individualism. Again, in 1943 when Chiang published his China’s Destiny to serve as a primer for the party and its Youth Corps, he declared that, with the approaching end of foreign rule and exploitation in China, the great task would be one of internal reconstruction through moral rearmament, Confucian-style. Then in the 1950s, after the retreat to Taiwan, courses in Confucian ethical philosophy became compulsory for all students under the Nationalist regime.
It would be a distortion of Chiang’s social philosophy and program to sum it up in terms only of nationalism and Neo-Confucian ethics. He remained committed to Dr. Sun’s Three Principles, including a large measure of economic planning as well as eventual political democratization. And if he did not pursue with equal vigor these other aspects of Sun’s original program, his justification for the delay in achieving the objectives of People’s Rule and People’s Livelihood was one provided by Sun himself in the doctrine of political tutelage. Military unification had to come first.
It must be allowed that Chiang’s traditionalism was more than a personal idiosyncrasy, a quixotic gesture. As we will see, there were other Chinese at this time—including erstwhile advocates of Westernization, now disillusioned—who joined him in attacking Western individualism and materialism as a threat to the spiritual and moral values of Chinese civilization. Indeed, subsequent developments in the People’s Republic under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin confirm this as a broad, long-term trend of Chinese politics.
Nor was this a purely Chinese phenomenon. Nationalists in India and Japan often shared a revulsion for those aspects of Western life that Chiang found so distasteful in treaty ports like Shanghai. Commercialism, cynicism, soft-living, and self-indulgence seemed to typify the bourgeois culture of the West as transplanted to the soil of Asia. Was this all the West had to offer in place of the traditional values it was destroying? On this point, Chiang’s rejection of Western moral decadence linked him in spirit with an Indian nationalist like Gandhi, while his Essentials of the New Life Movement (from which excerpts are given below) showed at the same time some close kinship with the authors of Fundamentals of Japan’s National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), the official credo of Japanese nationalists in the 1930s, who decried as he did the individualism and class antagonisms of the West, whi
le extolling the social virtues of Confucianism.5
Chiang’s traditionalism, it is true, was never conceived as a total opposition to Westernization. The Three People’s Principles—nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood—were basically Western in inspiration, and however much he or Dr. Sun adapted them to their own tastes, the use of such slogans constituted a recognition on their part that certain Western ideals had an irresistible attraction for twentieth-century Asia.
Moreover, this attraction to Western ways, far from being a passing fancy, has proved a long-term trend in East Asia throughout the twentieth century. Yet, no less persistent are reactions to it similar to Chiang’s. As the last chapter shows, even in a China long subjected to the anti-Confucian polemics of a Communist regime, there have more recently been conscious and concerted efforts by official organs to resurrect Confucian morality as an antidote to the “spiritual pollution” and “rampant individualism” charged once again to the cultural influence of the modern West. Thus, to dismiss Chiang Kai-shek’s type of moral rearmament as merely the passing predilection of a reactionary generalissimo would be to underestimate the problem. Underlying this phenomenon are deep-seated issues of cultural conflict and identity that persist through political upheavals and revolutionary change.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK: ESSENTIALS OF THE NEW LIFE MOVEMENT
The New Life Movement was inaugurated by Chiang in a speech at Nanchang in September 1934. Its immediate purpose was to rally the Chinese people for a campaign against the Communists in that region, but a more general aim was to tighten discipline and build up morale in the Nationalist regime and the nation as a whole. Laxity in public life, official corruption, lack of discipline in the ranks of party and army, and apathy among the people were among the weaknesses Chiang tried to overcome by a great moral reformation emphasizing Confucian self-cultivation, a life of frugality, and dedication to the nation. There were also exhortations on behalf of personal hygiene and physical training, as well as injunctions against smoking tobacco and opium, dancing, spitting on the floor, and leaving coats unbuttoned. In these respects, however, Chiang thought of himself as promoting progress—cleaning up and dressing up China in answer to the type of Westerner who complained about its untidiness and lack of sanitation.
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