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. . . .
This great yellow earth cannot teach us what a scientific spirit really is.
The ruthless Yellow River cannot teach us a true awareness of democracy. . . .
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]
LI ZEHOU: “A REEVALUATION OF CONFUCIANISM”
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.
Characteristics of Rites
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.
What, then, is 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).
The Structure of Humaneness
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.
Weak and Strong Points of Confucianism
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 de
velop, 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.
[From Zhongguo shehui kexue 1: 2 (1980); trans. Liu Qizhong]
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.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 86