THE CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO
This document of May 1950 was worked out by the founding group of the Three-Self Movement in consultation with Premier Zhou Enlai.
Protestant Christianity has been introduced to China for more than 140 years. During this period it has made a not unworthy contribution to Chinese society. Nevertheless—and this was most unfortunate—not long after Christianity’s coming to China, imperialism started its activities here; and since the principal groups of missionaries who brought Christianity to China all came themselves from these imperialistic countries, Christianity consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, became related with imperialism. Now that the Chinese revolution has achieved victory, these imperialistic countries will not rest passively content in [the] face of this unprecedented historical fact in China. They . . . may also make use of Christianity to forward their plot of stirring up internal dissension and creating reactionary forces in this country. It is our purpose in publishing the following statement to heighten our vigilance against imperialism, to make known the clear political stand of Christians in New China, to hasten the building of a Chinese church whose affairs are managed by the Chinese themselves, and to indicate the responsibilities that should be taken up by Christians throughout the whole country in national reconstruction in New China.
[Adapted from Merwin, Three-Self Movement, p. 19—JC]
WANG MINGDAO
Wang Mingdao (1900–1991) came from a working-class family and attended a primary school run by the London Missionary Society, becoming a Christian in his teens. He taught afterward in a Presbyterian school with the hope that the church would support his college and seminary education. However, conviction grew in him that baptism by sprinkling was inadequate, so in 1920 he got a second baptism by immersion. For this reason, and for his strong declarations of his religious views, he was discharged from his teaching duties at the Presbyterian school.
Thereafter, Wang studied the Bible incessantly, led Bible study groups, and decided in 1937 to set up his own ministry, with no overseas links, which he called the Christian Tabernacle. For the following decade, he also traveled throughout the country as a preacher, giving a mainly fundamentalist message about faith and the Bible. He was interrogated and cajoled by the Japanese invaders for refusing to join a pro-Japanese association of Christians and publish their political slogans in his periodical. Subsequently he took an uncompromising attitude to the Chinese Communist government and the Three-Self Movement that started in the early 1950s under Wu Yaozong’s leadership. For this, he was the object of attack at a denunciation meeting called by the movement and was arrested as a counterrevolutionary in 1955 when he published a statement to explain his reasons for not joining the Three-Self Movement. Imprisoned in 1957, he was not released until 1979, when he was already seventy-nine years old. Eventually Ding Guangxun (K. H. Ting), who took over the Three-Self Movement and the China Christian Council after Wu Yaozong’s death, acknowledged that Wang, who had no foreign ties and whose movement was independent of foreign support, had committed no crime deserving a long imprisonment.
WE, BECAUSE OF FAITH
Wang Mingdao openly fought the Three-Self Movement. His opposition was based not on any political or social motive but purely on the fundamentalist-modernist conflict, since most of the Three-Self leaders were modernists. This pamphlet, “We, Because of Faith,” was published in Beijing in June 1955. Shortly after, on August 8, the author was arrested and put in prison.
During the past thirty years the churches of China, like other churches throughout the world, have had within them a conflict of faith between fundamentalists and modernists. Fundamentalists believe in the fundamental doctrines: The Bible is the revelation of God; Christ . . . was born of a virgin; He performed many miracles; . . . He gave His life . . . for all Mankind; . . . after three days He rose bodily from death; . . . forty days later He was received into Heaven where He sits at the right hand of God; in the future He will come again to earth; . . . He will give [His disciples] transformed, spiritual, and immortal bodies; . . . He will exercise judgment on earth and finally set up His Heavenly kingdom.
But modernists evidently do not believe these essential doctrines. They do not come out into the open and deny the doctrines; they simply interpret them in a hazy and ambiguous way; they say that they believe but only express the truth in a different way from the fundamentalists. . . .
For thirty years I have constantly spoken and written against modernism. . . .
We will not unite in any way with these unbelievers, nor will we join any of their organizations. And even with true believers and faithful servants of God we can enjoy only a spiritual union. There should not be any kind of formal, organizational union, because we cannot find any teaching in the Bible to support it. . . . For our loyalty to God we are ready to pay any cost that is required. We shall shrink from no sacrifice. Misrepresentation and slander can never intimidate us.
Everyone has a mouth with which he can say what he pleases. But facts are facts forever. God sees them clearly and God’s people see them clearly, no matter how others may twist them or malign us. We take our stand on Christian doctrine.
[Adapted from Merwin, Three-Self Movement, pp. 99–114—JC]
WU JINGXIONG: CHRISTIANITY AND CHINESE TRADITION
Wu Jingxiong (1899–1986) was a native of Ningbo, Zhejiang, and the son of a little-educated father who rose out of poverty to a relatively comfortable position as a local banker. Starting his studies at age six with a private tutor and transferring to a primary school two years later, he eventually attended Baptist College in Shanghai and then transferred to law in 1916, first at Beiyang University in Tianjin and then at Methodist Comparative Law School in Shanghai. A brilliant student, he graduated in 1920, having also become a Methodist, and pursued further studies in law at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and later in international law at Paris and in Berlin. While in the United States, he developed a lifelong friendship with Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Back in Shanghai, Wu Jingxiong taught for a while, was made a judge in 1927, traveled to the United States to give lectures at Northwestern Law School and to do research at Harvard, and then returned home in 1930 to start a law practice in Shanghai. In 1937, at the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War, he became a Catholic, the fruit of his readings—of the scriptures and of John Henry Newman, William James, and others—and of his friendship with a Chinese Catholic family in Shanghai. He himself became the inspiration for some of his friends to convert to Catholicism, and he earned greater respect for the religion among intellectuals. After some time in Hong Kong, he escaped from Japanese occupation to go to Guilin and Chongqing, where, with encouragement from Chiang Kai-shek, he translated the Psalms and the New Testament into Chinese. In 1947 he was named the Chinese ambassador to the Vatican and delighted Pius XII with his brilliance and his family of twelve children. With the Communist takeover in 1949, Wu Jingxiong accepted a position as professor of Chinese philosophy at the University of Hawaii, and later he taught law at Seton Hall University. In 1966 he returned to Taiwan, and twenty years later, at age eighty-seven, he died.
A jurist as well as a comparative philosopher, he single-handedly drafted the first constitution of the Republic of China and the Chinese version of the United Nations charter. Although the course of political events prevented him from making an even larger contribution to his fellow countrymen, in his later years he pursued wide-ranging intellectual and religious interests and wrote about many aspects of both Western and Chinese culture, including Confucianism, Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and Tang poetry.
Blessed with a happy temperament, Wu usually saw the positive side of things, so that a sense of optimism pervades his writings and what he has to say about his own life.
BEYOND EAST AND WEST
What a wonderful privilege it is to have been born in China in my generation! I was brought up as a child entirely in the atmosphere of the old tradition. To be
steeped in the old tradition and later to come into contact with the spirit of Christianity makes one feel like a contemporary of the first Disciples of Christ, who had more or less fully lived their lives under the dominion of Law and were suddenly introduced into the Reign of Grace. Far be it from me to assert that my cultural and spiritual heritage was on a par with the Old Testament. What I do assert is that, in an analogical way, the three religions of China served as my tutors, bringing me to Christ so that I might find justification in faith (Gal. 3: 24). Of course, every conversion is due to the grace of God; but there is no denying that in my case God used parts of the teachings of Confucius, Laozi, and Buddha as instruments to open my eyes to the Light of the world.
To begin with, to have lived under the moral tradition of old China has proved to me the absolute necessity of sanctifying and actual grace in order to live up, even imperfectly, to the lofty ideals of life. Speaking of the Mosaic Law, Saint Paul said, “Is the Law sin? By no means! Yet I did not know sin save through the Law. For I had not known lust unless the Law had said, ‘Thou shalt not lust.’ But sin, having found an occasion, worked in me by means of the commandment all manner of lust, for without the Law sin was dead” (Rom. 7: 7–8). Now this was exactly what happened to me when I had read some of the moral books current in my childhood. They warned young folks against doing this and doing that. I do not know how they worked on others; as for me, they only served to stir up my curiosity and my passions, with the result that the more resolutions I made, the more often I broke them. I honestly believe that few persons are as bad as I am by nature; but speaking for myself, the Confessional has proved to me the only effective channel of medicinal grace, so effective as many a time to surprise myself. I am no longer surprised, knowing as I do the absolute veracity and power of the Divine Physician, Who said, “It is not the healthy who need a physician, but they who are sick” (Matt. 9: 13).
[Wu, Beyond East and West, pp. 150–151—JC]
THE LOTUS AND THE MUD
The much-mooted question of idealism and materialism I have solved with some satisfaction to my own mind. Ideals, like lotus flowers, can only grow from the mud of matter. A sculptor cannot dispense with the plastic material. Without it no bust can be made, whether that of Xishi or that of her ugly mimicker, Dongshi. On the other hand, I believe with equal conviction that matter alone does not constitute beauty. Otherwise all busts or even living persons would be equally beautiful—which, unfortunately, does not seem to be true. Only through a fit arrangement of material things can ideals be created, or at least be made to emerge. Even justice depends upon a harmonious distribution of material wealth.
Similar to this problem of idealism and materialism, but more fundamental still, is the problem of worldliness and otherworldliness. Is life a dream? Or is it real and earnest, as Longfellow would have it? Formerly I used to swing like a pendulum between the two extremes as most of my countrymen seem to do. But now I have gradually come to realize that life is a dream, but that something real and earnest may come out from a dream. And I have learned this from experience. It is thanks to my intensive participation in practical life that although I am by nature a stargazer, yet I seldom fall into wells. For life, especially in politics, is like tightrope walking. You have always to maintain your balance. A little slip may cause you to fall. Your superiors, your subordinates, your colleagues, your friends, and finally job seekers are all to be dealt with tactfully and yet with sincerity: with such tactfulness as to satisfy them, and with such sincerity as to satisfy yourself. You will often find yourself between the devil and the deep sea.
[Wu, Beyond East and West, pp. 190–191—JC]
1. Mencius 5A: 5.
2. [Original note of Ma Xiangbo: ] Fang Xiaoru lived during the early part of the Ming dynasty. Because he opposed Ming Chengzu in his action of usurping the throne from his nephew Jian Wendi, he was put to death. At the same time all of his direct family, and all of his relatives, including ten different clans, were put to death. “Orthodox scholarship” refers to the Song Neo-Confucian scholarship of Zhu Xi.
3. Hu Shih, “On the Chinese Renaissance,” Bulletins on Chinese Education, p. 35.
Chapter 39
REOPENING THE DEBATE ON CHINESE TRADITION
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.
THE NEW CONFUCIANS
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.
XIONG SHILI
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. . . .
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