From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Asians imbued with ideas of self-government and self-determination had already developed close links with similarly motivated activists elsewhere. In the years following the First World War, transnational movements and co-operation between different nationalist groups would flourish in a world increasingly seen as interdependent; where, as the French poet and essayist Paul Valery wrote, ‘there are no more questions that can be settled by being settled at one point’.53 Pan-Islamism would connect the Dutch East Indies to North Africa as agents of the Soviet-established Comintern began to assist ‘bourgeois’ Chinese nationalists as well as communists in China, India, Iran and Turkey. Berlin (where the office of the Comintern was based) attracted thousands of anti-colonial activists from all over the world, including the first leaders of Asian communism: Tan Malaka from the Dutch East Indies and India’s M. N. Roy. In 1920, Indonesia’s influential communist party – Perserikatan Kommunist di India (PKI) – was established under the auspices of the Comintern; the next year its founders travelled to Shanghai to witness the official birth of the Chinese Communist Party, and moved on to Moscow for the First Congress of the Workers of the East. After 1925, Shanghai and Canton would become the Asian hubs of this transnational network; Ho Chi Minh would publish articles by Rashid Rida in his magazine Le Paria and travel to Moscow to meet with Russian, Chinese and Indian revolutionaries.

  THE DECLINE OF THE WEST?

  Liang Qichao himself was starting on another intellectual journey in 1919, back to his Confucian past; there would be no more dramatic detours until his death in 1929. Making Paris his base, Liang journeyed all over Western Europe, later publishing his impressions and reflections in a book titled Impressions of Travels in Europe. Melancholy and foreboding tinged everything as his trip progressed. The war, he would later write presciently, ‘is not yet the whole story of a new world history. It is but a mediating passage that connects the past and the future.’54 In cold, fogbound London, where he attended a garden party at Buckingham Palace, the sun was ‘like blood’.55 The whole continent cowered ‘beneath the leaden skies of autumn’.56 In Rheims, he saw the ruins of the great Gothic cathedral, bombed three times and half-destroyed by German artillery. In the Belgian town of Louvain, German troops had slaughtered hundreds of civilians and destroyed its famous university library.

  Liang was aware of the history of gratuitous Western vandalism in his own country and other parts of Asia. He knew that during the Boer War the British had brought the term ‘concentration camp’ into common parlance. But such atrocities had never seemed, as they did now, a prelude to barbarities on the European mainland. The question occurred to Liang, and to many other Asian intellectuals, whether, as Tagore put it, ‘the poison that civilized Europe had pushed down the gullet of such a great country like China has severely impaired its own forever’, and whether ‘the torch of European civilization was not meant for showing light, but to set fire’.57

  Five years before the war erupted, Aurobindo Ghose claimed that the civilization of ‘vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe’ was under ‘a sentence of death’, awaiting ‘annihilation’.58 ‘The scientific, rationalistic, industrial, pseudo-democratic civilisation of the West,’ he was now convinced, ‘is now in process of dissolution.’59 Muhammad Iqbal, who had spent three rewarding years as a student in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, now wrote of it in the satirical tradition of Illahabadi:

  The West develops wonderful new skills

  In this as in so many other fields

  Its submarines are crocodiles

  Its bombers rain destruction from the skies

  Its gasses so obscure the sky

  They blind the sun’s world-seeing eye.

  Dispatch this old fool to the West

  To learn the art of killing fast – and best.60

  On his previous trips to the West Liang, like Tagore and Iqbal, had been a qualified admirer. During this longest sojourn there, he began to develop grave doubts about the civilization that had so blithely thrown away the fruits of progress and rationalism and sunk into barbarism. The ‘materialist’ West had managed to subdue nature through science and technology and created a Darwinian universe of conflict between individuals, classes and nations. But to what effect? Its materialistic people, constantly desiring ever-new things and constantly being frustrated, were worn out by war, were afflicted with insecurity, and were as far from happiness as ever.

  Having embraced Social Darwinism in his youth, Liang now rejected it violently, describing the ‘evil consequences’ – the worship of money and power, the rise of militarism and imperialism – of its application to the ‘study of human society’: ‘The great European war’, he wrote, ‘nearly wiped out human civilization; although its causes were very many, it must be said that the Darwinian theory had a very great influence.’61

  Liang was alert to the new post-war intellectual mood on the continent, which was one of severe self-questioning and scepticism about the great progress vaunted in the previous century. Europe suddenly appeared mortal to its greatest thinkers and artists. The works of Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Hermann Broch and Robert Musil expressed a suspicion that Europe’s nineteenth-century dynamism had turned malign and uncontrollable, a period of hectic global change suddenly unleashing a war no one knew how to end. Liberal democracy, long tainted in the East by association with Western imperialism, now looked feeble within the West itself, compromised by the rapacity and selfishness of ruling elites. Science appeared to have been complicit in the uncontrollable and mindless slaughter of the First World War, which mocked every notion of rationality and utilitarianism. The novels of Hermann Hesse seemed to say that attachment to science and technology was another aspect of the overly materialistic and soul-destroying worldview that Europe had evolved.

  As Liang wrote, ‘the European people have had a big dream about the omnipotence of science. Now they are talking about its bankruptcy. This is then a great turning point in the change of modern thought.’62 This was also the beginning of the profoundest self-appraisal Liang had undertaken so far. It was to bring him steadily back to a more traditionalist point of view, for after the disaster of the Great War, Confucius and Mencius, with their stress on a moral order, no longer seemed so inadequate before their Western peers. And the science that radicals of the New Culture movement advocated was no longer the omnipotent solution to problems of social welfare. Liang poured scorn over their naive hopes and uncritical admiration for the West:

  Those who praised the omnipotence of science had hoped previously that, as soon as science succeeded, the golden age would appear forthwith. Now science is successful indeed; material progress in the West in the last one hundred years had greatly surpassed the achievements of the three thousand years prior to this period. Yet we human beings have not secured happiness; on the contrary, science gives us catastrophes. We are like travellers losing their way in the desert. They see a big black shadow ahead and desperately run to it, thinking that it may lead them somewhere. But after running a long way, they no longer see the shadow and fall into the slough of despond. What is that shadow? It is this ‘Mr. Science’.63

  There was wisdom yet in the old learning, especially in the Confucian ideal of ren, which taught harmony and compromise and was superior to Western competitiveness. After all:

  Material life is merely a means for the maintenance of spiritual life; it should never be taken as a substitute for the object which it serves … In European nations today, the tendency is to regard life solely as material development with the result that, no matter how plausible the contrivances, the malady only becomes worse … Our problem is, under the conditions of this unprecedented scientific progress, how can the Confucian ideal of equilibrium be applied so that every man may live a balanced life.64

  As Liang asserted in his new defensive mood, ‘of the methods of relieving spiritual famine, I recognize the Eastern – Chinese and Indian – to be, in comparison, the best. Eastern learning has spirit as its depa
rture; Western learning has matter as its point of departure.’65 The Westerners were doomed to be slaves of the body; the greatest philosophy of the East – Buddhism – taught release. Indeed, in Liang’s view, the East had something to offer to the West: ‘On the far shore of this great ocean millions of people are bewailing the bankruptcy of material civilization and crying out most piteously for help, waiting for us to come to their salvation.’66 Liang may have identified the beginning, in the post-1918 period, of a Western obsession with poorly understood Eastern philosophies and religions. ‘The European’s current fondness for the study of Lao Tse,’ he claimed, ‘is in reaction to social Darwinism.’67

  ‘European imperialism, which does not disdain to raise the absurd cry of the Yellow Peril,’ Kakuzo Okakura had written in 1906, ‘fails to realize that Asia may also awaken to the cruel sense of the White Disaster.’68 In the wake of the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference, many thinkers and activists in the East began to reconsider their earlier captivation with Western political ideals. Modernization still seemed absolutely imperative, but it did not seem the same as Westernization, or to demand a comprehensive rejection of tradition or an equally complete imitation of the West. Freshly minted ideologies like revolutionary communism and Islamic fundamentalism, which promised to sweep away the debris of the past and initiate a fresh beginning, began to look attractive. And, most fatefully, liberal democracy did not seem necessary to national self-strengthening.

  Among others, Liang’s old mentor Yan Fu, the promoter of liberal individualism, began to think that the struggle for national wealth and power had profound moral consequences too. ‘As I have grown older … I have come to feel that Western progress during the last three hundred years has only led to selfishness, slaughter, corruption and shamelessness.’69 Putting the learning of the past in the service of China’s nascent modernity, the neo-traditionalists were encouraged by such disillusioned Western philosophers as Bertrand Russell, who, after a wildly successful lecture tour of China in the post May-Fourth era, asserted: ‘The distinctive merit of our civilization, I should say, is the scientific method; the distinctive merit of the Chinese is a just conception of life.’70 Russell was appalled by both Soviet communism and Europe’s destructive war. Beguiled by traditional China, he claimed that ‘those who value wisdom or beauty, or even the simple enjoyment of life, will find more of these things in China than in the distraught and turbulent West’.71

  Even Sun Yat-sen, disenchanted by lack of support from the West, had begun to speak out against Western materialism and economic imperialism, upholding Chinese tradition as a basis for nationalism. Reformulating the Three People’s principles, the basic text of the Nationalists, in Japan in 1924, Sun deplored the young men ‘wholly intoxicated’ by the New Culture, and insisted on the ‘traditional virtues’: ‘loyalty and filial piety, then humanity and love, faithfulness and duty, harmony and peace’.72 Upholding the ‘Kingly Way’ of the East, Sun denounced the Western civilization of ‘scientific materialism’:

  Such a civilization, when applied to society, will mean the cult of force, with aeroplanes, bombs, and cannons as its outstanding features … Therefore, European civilization is nothing but the rule of Might. The rule of Might has always been looked down upon by the Orient. There is another kind of civilization superior to the rule of Might. The fundamental characteristics of this civilization are benevolence, justice and morality: This civilization makes people respect, not fear, it. Such a civilization is, in the language of the Ancients, the rule of Right or the Kingly Way. One may say, therefore, that Oriental civilization is one of the rules of Right. Since the development of European materialistic civilization and the cult of Might, the morality of the world has been on the decline. Even in Asia, morality in several countries has degenerated.73

  Liang Shuming (1893 – 1988), a scholar educated at Western-style schools and a specialist on Indian philosophy, published Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (1921) which dissected the material civilization of the West as severely as Liang Qichao had, upholding Buddhism and then Confucianism. According to Liang Shuming, the West had achieved economic growth by successfully conquering nature, but it had also cut itself off from a wider conception of humanity that Confucianism still vouchsafed. It was essential that Westerners embrace a social ethic and a higher notion of spirituality. Here, China, despite its material backwardness, could still offer a great deal to the world. As he put it, ‘the fundamental spirit of Chinese culture is the harmony and moderation of ideas and desires’.74

  Liang Shuming’s book became very popular, inviting the scorn of the radical writers. Lu Xun may have been responding to it in his short story ‘Kong Yiji’, in which Kong (Confucius’s surname), a failed scholar, petty thief and scrounger, considers himself to be a civilized gentleman. In Lu Xun’s more famous ‘The True Story of Ah Q’, the eponymous character, another no-hoper, regards every beating he receives as a personal spiritual triumph. Undeterred by such mockery, Liang Shuming went on to set up a utopian rural community along Confucian lines in Shandong, where in 1937 he met and exchanged ideas with Mao Zedong.

  Another thinker who sided with Liang Qichao’s critique of modern civilization was Zhang Junmai (1886 – 1969). Zhang had accompanied Liang to Europe in 1919, and stayed on to study at Jena University in Germany. He returned to China in 1923 to give a stern lecture at Tsinghua against the blind belief in science. As Zhang saw it, science could not determine the rules for a moral or just life which Confucius had made his primary task.

  A furious debate erupted between Liang Qichao and like-minded intellectuals and the New Culture radicals who were already convinced that Marxism was the answer to both the crisis of the West and the disorder of China. Like Liang, the more overtly Confucian and Buddhist thinkers remained faithful to the imperative of China’s survival in the modern world, and tried to make their quasi-religious ideals useful to progressives and conservatives alike. For instance, the reformist monk Tanxu (1890 – 1947) tried to give to Chinese Buddhism a this-worldly orientation by making monasteries, schools and lay societies sensitive to the poor and uneducated in China.

  But this was not enough for the radicals of the New Culture. The debate made it clear that no Chinese thinker could any more conceive of a domestic order, in the way Kang Youwei could in 1895, without conceiving of China in a global order, and without entering very large and fraught debates about past and present ideologies offering salvation to humanity.

  Writing on behalf of the New Culture, the Columbia-educated Hu Shi, a disciple of the educationist John Dewey and one of the more liberal of the ‘total Westernizers’, mocked as nonsense the notion that a weak and passive China, which was in thrall to its physical and political environment, could ever satisfy the spiritual cravings of its people. Chen Duxiu, secretary-general of the newly founded Chinese Communist Party, was equally contemptuous. But the science v. metaphysics controversy, which was part of a larger uncertainty about the place of China in the world, was only the prelude to the storm provoked when on 12 April 1924 Rabindranath Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour of China arranged by Liang Qichao and Zhang Junmai. Tagore’s journey to both China and Japan would presage, too, other, more violent storms yet to come – those that would for ever alter the map of Asia.

  FIVE: RABINDRANATH TAGORE IN EAST ASIA, THE MAN FROM THE LOST COUNTRY

  Our old brother [India], ‘affectionate and missing’ for more than a thousand years is now coming to call on his little brother [China]. We, the two brothers, have both gone through so many miseries that our hair has gone grey and when we gaze at each other after drying our tears we still seem to be sleeping and dreaming. The sight of our old brother suddenly brings to our minds all the bitterness we have gone through for all these years.

  Liang Qichao, welcoming Tagore to China in 1924

  I read his [Tagore’s] essay on the Soviet Union in which he described himself as ‘I am an Indian under the British rule’; he knew hi
mself well. Perhaps, if our poets and others had not made him a living fairy he would not have been so confused, and the [Chinese] youths would not have been so alienated. What bad luck now!

  Lu Xun remembering Tagore’s visit in 1933

  For many Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, India was the prototypical ‘lost’ country, one whose internal weakness, exploited by foreign invaders, had forced it into a state of subjugation that was morally and psychologically shameful, as well as politically and economically catastrophic. For ordinary Chinese, there were visible symbols of this Indian self-subjection in their own midst: Parsi businessmen from Bombay who acted as middlemen in the British opium trade with China; Indian soldiers who helped the British quell the Boxer Rising; and Sikh policemen in treaty ports like Shanghai, whom their British masters periodically unleashed on Chinese crowds. In 1904, a popular Tokyo-based Chinese journal Jiangsu published a short story describing a dreamlike journey into the future by a feckless Chinese literatus named Huang Shibiao (literally, ‘Representative of Yellow Elites’) and a mythical old man. Walking down the streets of Shanghai, they see a group of marching people led by a white man.

  Shibiao looked closely at these people, and they all had faces black as coal. They were wearing a piece of red cloth around their heads like a tall hat; around their waists, they wore a belt holding wood clubs. Shibiao asked the old man: are these Indians? The old man said, yes, the English use them as police … Shibiao asked, why do they not use an Indian as the chief of police? The old man answered: who ever heard of that! Indians are people of a lost country; they are no more than slaves.1