How did this poison fill the entire world? It can be traced to the doctrines of Ban Zhao of the Eastern Han. These have been taken as the last word on the subject ever since then, though they are completely ridiculous. An examination of her Admonitions for Women [chapter 23] shows that first of all she emphasizes the ignoble and weak nature of women. She says women are inferiors and should be humble and yielding as well as respectful and deferential. They should place others before themselves and must accept all insults and hardships, as if ever kneeling in fear.
Ban Zhao also said that if a wife did not serve her husband proper order would collapse and that the female principle of yin found its function in gentleness while women found their beauty in weakness. Women were prohibited from insulting their husbands, while virtue lay in their being pure and quiet. Alas! Once this doctrine was propagated women were subjected to men by a set of rules. This was called the doctrine of propriety, but it is nothing but humiliation! It was called “proper order” but is nothing but shamelessness! Isn’t this [actually] the Way of the concubine? . . .
This traitor Ban was herself a woman, but she was deluded by the false notions of Confucianism. . . . The reason why women’s rights never developed lay in the fact that everybody was reciting the books of the traitor Ban. People followed what was already written and the writings of the traitor Ban closely followed the Confucian books, also following what was already written. Thus the crime of the traitor Ban in fact originated in Confucianism.
Therefore, since this doctrine has been propagated by the Confucians, not only have men enjoyed and followed it but also women have sincerely believed in it. Not only has it harmed scholarship but it has also harmed the law. Look at recent laws. If a woman kills her husband, she is put to death by slow torture. If a woman is promised in marriage and betrothal gifts are received, but later the family changes its mind, they are flogged fifty times. The laws are based on the doctrine that men are superior while women are base. The law was thus based on scholarship while scholarship was based on Confucian writings. If we do not utterly abolish the false doctrines of the Confucian writings, the truth will never again be heard.
[He, “Nuzi fuzhou lun,” pp. 7–23—PZ]
HAN YI: “DESTROYING THE FAMILY”
This essay, published in 1907 under the pseudonym Han Yi (“a member of the Han race”), was possibly written by Liu Shipei, who favored a Han Chinese revolution against the Manchu oppressors. It reflects a view radical for the time, but one already anticipated by Kang Youwei’s as yet unpublished Grand Commonality (Datong shu), which was equally critical of the family system, proposed one-year marriage contracts, and advocated public nurseries for the raising of children. Liu here attacks the family as the source of partiality, which he implicitly contrasts to the ideal of the public good.
All of society’s accomplishments depend on people to achieve, while the multiplication of the human race depends on men and women. Thus if we want to pursue a social revolution, we must start with a sexual revolution—just as if we want to reestablish the Chinese nation, expelling the Manchus is the first step to the accomplishment of other tasks. . . . Yet, whenever we speak of the sexual revolution, the masses doubt and obstruct us, which gives rise to problems. In bringing up this matter then we absolutely must make a plan that gets to the root of the problem. What is this plan? It is to destroy the family.
The family is the origin of all evil. Because of the family, people become selfish. Because of the family, women are increasingly controlled by men. Because of the family, everything useless and harmful occurs (people now often say they are embroiled in family responsibilities while in fact they are all just making trouble for themselves, and so if there were no families, these trivial matters would instantly disappear). Because of the family, children—who belong to the world as a whole—are made the responsibility of a single woman (children should be raised publicly since they belong to the whole society, but with families the men always force the women to raise their children and use them to continue the ancestral sacrifices). These examples constitute irrefutable proof of the evils of the family. . . .
Moreover, from now on in a universal commonwealth, everyone will act freely, never again will they live and die without contact with one another as in olden times. The doctrine of human equality allows for neither forcing women to maintain the family nor having servants to maintain it. The difficulties of life are rooted in the family. When land belongs to everyone and the borders between here and there are eradicated, then there will be no doubt that the “family” itself definitely should be abolished. As long as the family exists, then debauched men will imprison women in cages and force them to become their concubines and service their lust, or they will take the sons of others to be their own successors. If we abolish the family now, then such men will disappear. The destruction of the family will thus lead to the creation of public-minded people in place of selfish people, and men will have no way to oppress women. Therefore, to open the curtain on the social revolution, we must start with the destruction of the family.
[Han Yi [pseud.], “Huaijia lun”—PZ]
1. Referring to Analects 1: 11.
2.Record of Rites 9: 24.
3.Ibid.
4.Ibid. 1: 24.
5.Ibid. 9: 24.
6.Ibid. 1: 24.
7.Ibid. 10: 12.
8.Ibid. 10: 51.
9.Ibid. 27: 17.
10.Ibid. 27: 20.
11.Ibid. 10: 12.
12.Ibid. 9: 24.
13.I-li, ch. 2; Steele, 1: 39.
14.Record of Rites 41: 6.
15.Ibid. 10: 3.
16.Ibid. 10: 12.
17.Ibid. 10: 13.
18.Ibid. 10: 12.
19.Mencius 6A: 15.
20.Author of Ershi nian mu du zhi guai xianzhuang (Strange Phenomena Seen in Two Decades).
21. An expression of Chen’s for esoteric literature.
22. Shiji, ch. 61.
23. John Dewey, Creative Intelligence (New York: Henry Holt, 1917), pp. 8–9.
24.Changes, Xizi 1, ch. 5; Legge, Yi King, p. 356.
25.Ibid. 2, ch. 1; Legge, Yi King, p. 381.
26.Analects 17: 19.
27.Mean ch. 1.
28.Mencius 73: 15.
29. Book of Odes, Da ya, Wen wang 7.
Chapter 34
THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
On the surface, Chinese Communism would seem to have little to do with Chinese tradition. From the outset—from the party’s founding in 1921 under the leadership of the iconoclast Chen Duxiu—it was blatantly hostile to Confucian tradition and unashamedly committed to violent overthrow of the old order. Mao Zedong, too, though he recognized a kind of native tradition in the peasant rebellions and popular “revolutionary” literature of earlier dynasties, did not thereby acknowledge any debt to the past. For him, recurrent rebellions showed only how the Chinese masses had suffered and protested. They did not show a way out of the historical impasse: the constant reestablishment of dynasticism and warlordism after futile outbursts of popular discontent.
For such an abortive revolutionary tradition Mao could feel pity, but if any lesson was to be learned—and this was Mao’s real point—it was the uniqueness of Marxism-Leninism and of the victory that the Communist Party alone was able to achieve over such an oppressive past. Whereas earlier failures demonstrated only the need for something totally new to break a deadlock that had spelled frustration and stagnation for centuries, the ideology and organization of Communism had for the first time given China a revolution worthy of the name.
Yet if, in Communist eyes, the successful Chinese revolution has been so peculiarly a product of superior Marxist science and leadership, Chinese Communism has been also, in the perspective of history, an unmistakable product of the Chinese revolution. For almost a century this revolution had been in the making—perhaps even for longer, if it is taken as part of a much older process, as the latest issue from the ancient womb of dy
nastic change. But conjoined to the familiar processes of dynastic decay, which might have led to a rebellion typical of the past, was a world revolution of which Communism itself must be considered only one manifestation.
It is not our purpose here to assess the forces and factors that contributed to the triumph of Communism in China. The circumstances in which the party took its rise, however, have a bearing on the relation between Communism and the Chinese tradition. By 1921 the course of revolutionary change was already well advanced. Not only had the Manchu dynasty fallen, but every attempt to restore the old monarchical and dynastic system had met with insuperable resistance. If, therefore, the republican era still looked much like earlier periods of warlordism and disorder, the possibility had nevertheless vanished of this phase’s yielding inexorably to another period of dynastic rule.
With it, however, had not vanished the need for a government strong enough to cope with the enormous problems of China’s adjustment to the modern world. In the answers to that need proposed by Sun Yat-sen, anti-Marxist though he was, it is not difficult to discern tendencies with a close affinity to Communism. Whatever Dr. Sun’s own intentions, the popularity of his People’s Principles (which went almost unchallenged from either left or right long after his death) helped create an atmosphere conducive to the acceptance of Communist aims: the people’s livelihood or socialism, of a state-controlled economy; the freedom of the nation” (rather than of the individual) and party tutelage as Sun interpreted it, of rule by a party elite under a strong leader; and nationalism as adapted by Sun to the Leninist struggle against imperialism and colonialism, of resistance to, and hostility toward, the West.
While republican politics floundered in a sea of warlordism and economic dislocation, the estrangement of Chinese intellectuals from traditional ideals and institutions deepened. This process, which began with concessions to Westernization by even would-be defenders of Confucianism, had reached a climax well before the republican revolution with the abandonment of the traditional curriculum for the civil service, long the institutional stronghold of Confucian ideology. If a new political elite were ever to regain the power of the old centralized bureaucracy, it would be as unlikely to consist of Confucian scholar-officials as the regime itself would be to take the form of monarchy. Instead now of intellectuals serving as defenders of tradition, they had become its most implacable critics. Thus Confucianism had lost not only its bureaucratic function but even the basis of its intellectual life in the school.
As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the dominant trend of thought in the New Culture Movement was toward Westernization. This was expressed in certain general attitudes that won increasing acceptance among the educated and especially among the younger generation: (1) positivism, as a belief in the value and universal applicability of methods of inquiry developed for the natural sciences; (2) pragmatism, in the sense that the validity of an idea was to be judged primarily by its effectiveness; and (3) materialism, especially as a denial of traditional religious and ethical systems. While each of these attitudes might be held by as liberal a scholar and as eloquent an anti-Communist as Hu Shi, for many others they represented transitional stages on a road that led naturally and easily to Communism—to an acceptance of Marxism as the science of society, of Leninism as the effective method for achieving social revolution, and of dialectical materialism as a philosophy of life.
More than any such intellectual trends, however, what created a receptivity to revolutionary change among the Chinese people as a whole was attitudes of a more general and pervasive character. First among these was the desire for and expectation of a better life, which the material progress of the West had seemed to bring within hope of realization. Second was a new view of history as dominated by forces that would either crush those who fell behind or guarantee a bright future to those who understood and utilized them. Third was the prevailing frustration over China’s failure to keep pace with these forces and to fulfill the high expectations of her modern political prophets.
Each of these attitudes contributed to a climate of opinion that called for wholesale change and in which nothing that was not “revolutionary” could hope to arouse popular enthusiasm. Of this, the revolutionary aims of the Nationalists themselves are an eloquent example. We have already seen how quick Western-educated and “liberal-minded” Chinese were to find fault with the Nationalist regime for its failure to exemplify liberal principles and establish political democracy. Yet toward the Communists, whose political aims were still more authoritarian and totalitarian, these same “liberals” sometimes showed far more indulgence. In the revolutionary context of the times it was not difficult for the Communists to gain acceptance as fellow “progressives”—a little extreme, perhaps, but nonetheless devoted to the cause of social and economic revolution, to science and technological progress, and above all to the fulfillment of the millennial ideal.
Westernized intellectuals like Hu Shi had joined hands with Chen Duxiu in the attack on traditional values, but nothing pragmatism had to offer in the way of scientific analyses or solutions to the specific problems of modern Chinese society proved intelligible or acceptable to the great masses of Chinese as a substitute for the old value system. Thus as the weakening of traditional ethics left a vacuum to be filled, Communist ideology appealed to many as a comprehensive and systematic answer to China’s urgent problems.
In the selections that follow, the presentation of these aims and principles is guided by two basic criteria. First, this is not intended as a documentary history of Chinese Communism, and questions of primarily historical significance are not emphasized. Questions of strategy and tactics, though of fundamental importance to an understanding of the Communists’ actual rise to power, cannot properly be evaluated except through a more detailed analysis of historical factors than is possible within the scope of these readings. Second, this chapter centers upon the most important pronouncements of Mao Zedong, as the chief exponent of Chinese Communism in his day.
Within these limits, the readings attempt to answer three main questions:
1. In what intellectual and historical context did the Chinese Communist movement arise?
2. How did Mao Zedong analyze the problems of the revolution, especially the role of the Communist Party in relation to the Chinese peasantry, the new role of the “people” in the modern age, and the stages by which Mao’s economic and political goals might be attained?
3. How did Mao and his lieutenants carry out the indoctrination and training of the party cadres for the class struggle that was seen as the heart of the revolutionary movement, and how did Mao deal with intellectuals whose cooperation was needed to pursue the regime’s economic and social aims?
THE SEEDBED OF THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION: THE PEASANTRY AND THE ANARCHO-COMMUNIST MOVEMENT
A significant forerunner of the Communist revolution was the anarchist movement that appeared in the early 1900s, a part of the radicalism that contributed to the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The first generation of anarchists were exiles who published extensively in Paris and Tokyo, especially between 1907 and 1910. They shared a great many assumptions with the other revolutionaries and reformers of their day: they were not an intellectually isolated fringe, though critics felt they were too idealistic. Men like Wu Zhihui (1865–1953), Liu Shipei (1884–1919), and Li Shizeng (1881–1973) offered a critique of authority and especially of imperial pretensions, a condemnation of China’s cultural tradition (including Confucianism and the family), support for feminism, and a radical interpretation of liberty and equality. Although later Chinese anarchists specifically attacked Marxist notions of class struggle and proletarian hegemony, the first generation of anarchists were among those who introduced Marxism to China. Furthermore, they were the first to explore the possibility of a class-based revolution. Thus, although they tended to envision the whole of society rising up against the state and capitalism, in contrast to the elitism of most early twentieth-century Chinese r
evolutionaries, anarchists such as Liu Shipei analyzed the capacity of “oppressed” people to make revolution. He thought workers and peasants need not simply play supporting roles but could themselves lead and define the revolution.1
Anarchist interest in workers and peasants owed less to Marxism, however, than to Russian populism and European anarchism, which had been in vogue during the late nineteenth century. In retrospect, the anarchist appreciation of the peasants’ capacity to support a revolution that would change the entire sociopolitical system, not just rebel against specific injustices, seems prescient. The following essay was probably written by Liu Shipei or by Liu together with his wife, He Zhen.
LIU SHIPEI: “ANARCHIST REVOLUTION AND PEASANT REVOLUTION”
Liu Shipei’s essay reflects the intermingling of anarchist and communist ideas in the early revolutionary movement, as well as the importance of the peasantry as the main proletarian force in China, drawing on the peasants’ capacity for broad cooperative organization.
What methods can those who want to spread anarchist revolution in China really adopt? This is truly the biggest question of the day. We can try to analyze it by noting that if Chinese peasants really revolt, this will accomplish anarchist revolution. Therefore, the anarchist revolution must start with peasant revolution. “Peasant revolution” is simply a matter of resistance to taxes and opposition to the government and landlords. Let us list its causes below.
1. Landlords comprise the majority of China’s big capitalists. When the landlord system is overthrown, the majority of the capitalist class will have been overthrown, and so resistance to the landlords constitutes resistance to most of the capitalists.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 60