Over at the invaluable Danwei,  Julian Smisek’s “Hu Shi, missionaries, and women’s rights” (July 15, 2010) does a valuable service in translating Hu’s 1930 essay, “Congratulations to the YWCA,”  which pays tribute to Christian missionaries for helping Chinese women.

Hu, a Columbia University PhD, won a poll in the early 1920s as the most admired “returned student” in China. But his surprising words of praise for the YWCA need to be balanced against his views on Christianity’s future in China. He elsewhere disdained the run of Christian missionaries as uneducated and narrow. They came to China because they could live well for little money, he said, and mission boards were far less careful in selecting China missionaries than Standard Oil was in selecting China salesmen and executives.

Hu’s “China and Christianity” was the lead piece in the July 1927 issue of the North American journal, The Forum. That year saw Chiang Kai-shek purge the Communists and Mao Zedong take to the countryside, setting off a generation of civil war, but the editor introduces Hu as “the leader of an intellectual movement that is permeating the youth of China and is interested chiefly in the things of the mind.” Like the “ancient sages of the East,” Hu “stands outside the current political conflict.”

Here’s the editorial in its entirety:

The future of Christianity in China is a question which should be considered apart from the question of the past services rendered to China by the Christian missionaries. The part played by the missionaries in the modernization of China will long be remembered by the Chinese, even though no Christian church may be left there. They were the pioneers of the new China. They helped the Chinese to fight for the suppression of opium which the pirate-traders brought to us. They agitated against footbinding, which eight centuries of esoteric philosophizing in native China failed to recognize as an inhuman institution. And they brought to us the first rudiments of European science. The early Jesuits gave us the pre-Newtonian astronomy, and the later Protestant missionaries introduced modern hospitals and schools. They taught us to know that there was a new world and a new civilization behind the pirate-traders and gunboats.

Many of the Protestant missionaries worked hard to awaken China and bring about a modern nation. China is now awakened and determined to modernize herself. There is not the slightest doubt that a new and modem China is emerging out of chaos. But this new China does not seem to promise much bright future to the propagation of the Christian faith. On the contrary, Christianity is facing opposition everywhere. The dream of a “Christian occupation of China” seems to be fast vanishing, – probably forever. And the explanation is not far to seek.

It is true that there is much cheap argument in the narrow nationalistic attack which sees in the Christian missionary an agent of imperialist aggression. But we must realize that it is nationalism, – the self-consciousness of a nation with no mean cultural past,– that once killed Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Manicheism in China. It is the same nationalism which four times persecuted Buddhism and finally killed it after over a thousand years of complete Buddhistic conquest of China. And it is the same national consciousness which is now resisting the essentially alien religion of Christianity.

And more formidable than nationalism, there is the rise of rationalism. We must not forget that Chinese philosophy began two thousand five hundred years ago with Lao Tse who taught a naturalistic conception of the universe end a Confucius who was frankly an agnostic. This rationalistic and humanistic tradition has always played the part of a liberator in every age when the nation seemed to be under the influence of a superstitious or fanatic religion. This cultural background of indigenous China is now revived with the new reinforcement of the methods and conclusions of modern science and becomes a truly formidable safeguard of the intellectual class against the imposition of any religious system whose fundamental dogmas, despite all efforts of its apologists, do not always stand the test of reason and science.

And after all, Christianity itself is fighting its last battle, even in the so-called Christendoms. To us born heathens, it is a strange sight indeed to see Billy Sunday and Aimée McPherson hailed and patronized in an age whose acknowledge prophets are Darwin and Pasteur. The religion of Elmer Gantry and Sharon Falconer must sooner or later make all thinking people feel ashamed to call themselves “Christians”. And then they will realize that Young China was not far wrong in offering some opposition to a religion which in its glorious days fought religious wars and persecuted science, and which, in the broad daylight of the twentieth century prayed for the victory of the belligerent nations in the World War and is still persecuting the teaching of science in certain quarters of Christendom.

It’s impressive both that The Forum published a critical piece from an intellectual in China and that Hu kept up with the latest stateside scandals and the novels of Sinclair Lewis. At a time when anti-imperialist tempers ran high, Hu coolly uses cosmopolitan liberal standards which stand above particular nations. His criteria apply to China and the US as well. But perhaps Hu should have known better than to think that rationality could combine with nationalism to save China.

May Fourth is here and one of the things that makes the 21st century great is that if you want to read some May Fourth writers you don’t have to go to your local research library, you just have to google. With no effort at all I found Chen Duxiu‘s 1916 essay 袁世凯复活 “Yuan Shikai Resurected” or maybe “Zombie Yuan Shikai”. I was struck by how different May 4th and modern calls for democracy are.¹

Chen begins by quoting an essay by Cai Yuanpei, in which Cai points out that while Generalissimo Yuan is still dead in a technical sense, he has returned to life in the sense that all of his backward feudal attributes are being carried on by the rest of the Chinese people. The bulk of the brief essay is a catalog of ways in which the Chinese people (or at least the bad ones, bureaucrats, scholars and gentry) are backward and ends with a call for the good elite (the military and the youth) to rise up and purge China of poisons and lead it out of darkness and into the light. To some extent this essay seems old because some of the concerns seem old (superstition) and some of the rhetorical forms (taking Europe as a model) are not common in China today. The most important difference, however, is a fundimentally different view of China’s problems.

I have not read ever single modern Chinese dissident, but the targets of May 4th are a lot different from modern ones despite the common interest in democracy. For all their talk of going to the people May 4thers were staggeringly elitist by modern standards, or to put it another way they were not yet quite to the modern concept of universal citizenship. May 4th was also explicitly culturalist. What needed to be fixed were the Chinese people and Chinese culture. Vile politicians like Yuan were just the surface froth of a sick society. Modern Chinese dissidents like the Charter 08 group shy away from blanket condemnations of the Chinese people in part because they would be unpopular² and in part because they don’t see the Chinese people as a problem. China is going great, the problem is with its authoritarian government. (You can see this concern pretty clearly in the brief history of China at the beginning of the Charter.) I think the reason May 4thers get more lip service than long quotes from modern democracy activists is that they really are a part of the past that does not connect well to present concerns. Historians may like to draw connections between May 4th and 6/4, or Charter 08, or whatever, and there are lots of interesting comparisons. If you are a China democracy activist looking for good quotes or a useable past, however, you may find less than you had hoped in the May 4thers.

1. Chen was one of the major May 4th figures, and Yuan was the first president of the Chinese republic, who betrayed the Revolution by making himself dictator and then, briefly, emperor.
2. The Chinese people already have plenty of national consiousness, so if you say anything that may offend them they will fill your inbox. It is a very different world than 1919

There is a very interesting review of Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book, and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (sold in America as The Man Who Loved China) in the LRB. I have not read the book, but it does not really matter, because the reviewer ignores the final 300-odd pages of the book that deal with Needham’s time in and relationship with China, instead focusing on his life as part of the ‘red science’ of Cambridge in the 1930′s and how this led him to China. Given that the reviewer is Eric Hobsbawm he can fill in a lot of blanks about Needham and his background, and I think almost anyone interested in China should read the review.

Hobsbawm:

Needham’s ambition as a researcher had long been to create a biochemical embryology that would meld the reductionism of the chemists with the inevitable concern of biologists for organisms and processes as a whole. An anti-mechanistic (he preferred the term ‘organic’) view of science had an obvious appeal for developmental biologists… It pioneered the concept of living things organised in hierarchical levels, classically set out in Needham’s Order and Life (1936). The whole organism, he argued, could not be fully grasped at any one of the lower levels of increasing size and complexity – the molecular, macromolecular, cells, tissues etc – and new modes of behaviour emerged at each level which could not be interpreted adequately in terms of those below or at all, except in their relations. As he wrote in Order and Life, ‘The hierarchy of relations from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and the ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.’ Process, hierarchy and interaction were the key to a reality that could be understood only as a complex whole. And – though one would not discover this from Winchester’s book – this view drew him towards the country and civilisation to which he devoted the rest of his life.

Hobsbawm is not a scholar of Chinese science,¹ so he goes a bit too far in the “holistic China” direction for me, but the review is an excellent addition to the book. If anyone ever writes a dissertation on Needham not as a scholar of China but as a link between the intellectual concerns of the English and the Chinese (maybe Waley would fit here as well) this would be a good staring point.

1. neither am I

Sam at Useless Tree draws our attention to a really interesting website called 新法家(in English the New Legalist) I’m not quite sure who these people are, but the website is out of Beijing and quite impressive. Sam does not much care for them, seeing them as “nationalists who are appropriating ancient Legalist texts, together with some Taoist volumes, to fashion a neo-traditionalist legitimation for a contemporary Chinese assertion of power globally” That sounds about right to me.

Sam is much bothered by their attempts to tie together Legalism and Daoism, but to me it just sounds like Huang-Lao stuff, as there were lots of links between Legalism and Daoism right from the start. I am also not that surprised to find people looking back to the Legalists themselves, as this was a big item in the early 20th century as people began going through the Chinese tradition looking for the genealogy of a modern nation in the Chinese past. The New Legalists may seem weird, but they have a long way to go before they can match up with Kang Youwei.

Of course these people are looking into the past to find something different than the Chinese thinkers of a century ago. They are finding environmentalism and anti-globalization ideas, along with lots of occasions for nationalist chest-thumping. As Sam points out it is pretty bizarre to see Han Fei as a Green. Still they do seem to be drawing on a pretty wide range of classical thought. According to their mission statement

The Chinese people have built up a unique and comprehensive thought system covering medicine, economics and politics. This system aims at a dynamic balance between different parts of the human body, between different groupings of people within a society, and between human society and nature. All its subsystems follow the principle of “guiding changes towards balance” (from The Yellow Emperor’s Four Cannon ) economically, arranging production and consumption in accord with the change of seasons and with nature’s productive capabilities at the time; and politically, allocating limited resources among people according to their respective contributions to the society¹

This actually does sound bit like a lot of the Warring States-Han stuff you would find in Mark Edward Lewis’s work. For me the most interesting part is the twisted Marx quote at the end. A lot of the site has an anti-capitalist feel, or at least a feel that China is best off if it does not totally adapt American culture. Part it seems to be vaguely Maoist egalitarianism and concern for the workers, “end capital’s hegemony in the name of liberty” and part of it an even more vague utopianism that owes something to Mao and also a lot various bits of traditional Chinese thought.

1. 中国人还在这一伟大哲学的基础上建立起了独特的医学、政治、经济体系——她追求人体内部、社会与自然、社会内部各阶层之间 的动态平衡，她的医学、政治、经济都按“应化之道、平衡而止”（《黄帝四经·道法》）的原则构建——经济上，她按照自然时序与产出能力进行生产和消费；政 治上，她按一个人对社会贡献的大小对有限的资源进行配置

As today is Darwin Day I thought I would post something on China’s reception of Darwin’s work. He tended to be confused with Spencer at first, and Elman gives some examples of how his work continued to be misunderstood for a very long time. Still, it is not surprising that Chinese tended to see Darwin through Spencer. Spencer was big in the West, and for those obsessed with the survival of nations rather than the survival of species Spencer would seem more to the point. Yan Fu‘s On Strength first appeared in 1895 and was the first serious account of Darwin published in China.

Darwin is an English biologist. Heir to his family’s scholarly traditions, he traveled around the world as a young man, amassing a rich collection of rare and curious plants and animals. After several decades’ exhaustive and subtle reflection upon them, he wrote The Origin of Species. Since the publication of this book, of which nearly every household in Europe and America now has a copy, there has been a tremendous change in the scholarship, politics, and religion of the West. The claim that the revolution in outlook and intellectual orientation occasioned by Darwin‘s book exceeds that of Newtonian astronomy is hardly an empty one.

His book says that for all their diversity, the species originated from a single source and that their differences developed slowly, for the most part in connec­tion with changes in the environment and an abiding biological tendency to­ward incremental differentiation. Eventually divergence from the remote source led to vast and irreversible differences, but these were brought about by natural processes in later ages and were not inherent in life at its origins.

Two chapters of the book are particularly noteworthy. . . . One is called “Competition” and the other, “Natural Selection.” “Competition” refers to the struggle of things to survive, and “Natural Selection” is the retention of the fit. The idea is that people and things exist in profusion, surviving on what the natural environment provides, but when they encounter others, peoples and things struggle over the means of survival. At first species struggled with species, and when they advanced somewhat, one group (jun) struggled with another.

Not bad, in my opinion, although I think he may overestimate Darwin’s sales figures a bit. At the end of this reading he is already leaving Darwin’s interest in species to look at the competition among “groups.” Here he is pretty clearly influenced by Spencer

In its constitution, the structure and function of a social body are no different from those of an animal’s body; despite the difference in size, there is a coordination of the faculties, so that if we understand how life is maintained in our bodies we can understand how societies can exist; if we understand longevity in individuals, we can understand how the vitality of a state can en­dure. Within the individual, body and spirit support each other. Within a so­ciety, power and virtue complement each other. The individual values his free­dom, the state values its autonomy. The similarity of life-forms to societies consists precisely in the fact that both are conscious organisms. Thus all learn­ing converges on sociology and only when sociology is understood can political order and chaos, prosperity and debility, be understood, and personal cultiva­tion, the regulation of society, the governance of the state, and the ordering of the world be effective. …

The conclusions he draws from this are not too surprising for a Confucian. What modern science teaches him is that the success of the West is based on what might be called ‘managed competition’ creating a society were all are in competition and gaining its advantages without destroying society. The Westerners

They both use and dispense with regulations, and in both ways they excel us. With respect to their liberty and equality, they reject taboos, discard onerous obligations, and eliminate cover-ups. People pursue their aims and speak their minds. There is no great gulf between the power of rulers and ruled; monarchs are not overly honored nor are the people too lowly. Rather, they are linked as in one body. This is how they excel by dispensing with regulations. But from the standpoint of clear and complete rules regarding officials, workmen, soldiers, and mer­chants, everyone knows his job and does it without monitoring, and the most minute tasks are all completed according to the proper sequence. Orders issued from far or near are acted upon within the day, and no one finds it oppressive. This is how they excel in using regulations. . . .

In all their affairs they rely on learning, and all their learning is based on direct consideration of the facts, building up layer on layer of knowledge to develop the best-considered and most-extensive course of action. Hence there is no matter in which their theories cannot be put into practice. The reason is that they take freedom as the essential principle and democracy as its applica­tion. The peoples of one continent have spread over seven or eight, vying with each other as they advance together, honing each other’s skills, beginning as adversaries but ending in mutual development, each employing his intelligence to the fullest, so that one’s daily progress is matched by another’s monthly innovations. Thus they can use regulations without being hampered by their defects. This is what is awe-inspiring.

From De Barry Sources of Chinese Tradition

How does one attain this state of unity? “Three principles: promote the people’s strength, expand their knowledge, and revive their virtue”i.e good old fashioned Investigation of Things and moral reform.

A nice article in Modern China on Mao’s teacher Yang Changji. The article draws on Yeh Wen-Hsin’s work on the provincial background of many of the second group of Communist leaders. The early years of the party were dominated by “an urban radicalism; in contrast, the later, revolutionary communism was an outgrowth of conservative, Confucian-bound rural China.” Liu demonstrates this by looking at the ideas and activities of Yang Changji, who might have been just another provincial schoolteacher had one of his students not been Chairman Mao.

The article is not too Mao-centered and Liu provides a nice picture of a provincial intellectual. Two things struck me. One is the description of Yang as an intellectual celebrity

within two months everyone who attended Mr. Yang’s lectures admired and respected him. Although he did not talk much in class, each short statement meant a great deal. Within a year, the entire school accepted him and he became the “Confucius of First Normal.” Other schools in Changsha invited him and he conducted classes [in schools] as far [away] as the high school at the foot of Yuelu Mountain. Soon he was known to the students throughout the city as “Confucius”

The perfect modern version of the Confucian pendant, complete with gnomic lectures and a personal following. In the old days students would have come from distant places to hear him rather than him having to trek out into the boonies to talk to them. Yang taught a lot of foreign stuff (he studied in Japan) but he always claimed that a New China had to be built on native foundations. Liu gives the following quote as an example of Yang’s interest in western-style individualism

In the physical world, the center is my body; in the spiritual/mental realm, the center is my mind. In short, among the ten thousand things in the universe, I am the essence. The emperor is my emperor; the father is my father; the teacher is my teacher; the wealth is my wealth; heaven and earth are my heaven and earth…Mencius said: “All things in the world are complete in me”…Everything in the universe is also my responsibility.

This is not, to my mind, individualism, in a western sense. Wikipedia is not very strong here but it lists a lot of the Western thinkers who have used the term. Yang seems to be revamping the old Confucian cosmology by putting himself at the center of it rather than a (usually hypothetical) sage king. Obviously this fits in well with Mao’s later ideas about himself and his role.

Liu Liyan “The Man Who Molded Mao: Yang Changji and the First Generation of Chinese Communists”Modern China32.4 October 2006

One scholar who has had a lot of influence on my teaching on Early China is Mark Edward Lewis. I sometimes assign Sanctioned Violence in Early China, and if I had the courage I would assign Writing and Authority. The thing I like about his work is that not only does he know literally everything about everything, his work centers around figuring out what the categories of early Chinese thought were. It is a commonplace that the Han dynasty distinctions between the 100 schools of philosophy are to some extent false divisions forced on a much more complex history. Lewis takes this further and tries to uncover what the categories of thought were in Han and pre-Han China. Part of this, particularly in Writing and Authority, is the importance of patterns. There are patterns that govern the changes in the universe, human affairs and the body, and understanding and adjusting and adjusting to these patterns is what knowledge is all about. (Lewis explains all this a lot better than I do.)

One aspect of this is the sage, the person who has learned to be a master of patterns. There are lots of different aspects of this, one of which is medicine. One’s body is of course governed by the same patterns as everything else and thus being a doctor, preserving one’s health and attaining immortality through alchemy and ruling the empire all involve the same sort of knowledge. Those with a proper knowledge of patterns can avoid all sorts of nasty things and can also draw power from the universe. A good example of this is sex, as explained in the 素女經 (Sunu jing) The Classic of the White Girl.¹

Huangdi asks Sunu “I am feeling a lack of energy and a disharmony in my body. I am sad and apprehensive. What shall I do about this?”

Sunu replies: “Men are likely to make a mistake during lovemaking. Women conquer men as water conquers fire. Those who know the art of lovemaking are like those who know how to mix the five flavors in a cooking pot to produce a good meal, and like those who know the way of yin and yang and enjoy the five pleasures. Those who are ignorant of this are die young, without enjoying the pleasures of life…. A man must know how to control his emissions and also take medicine. He cannot enjoy life if he is ignorant of the art of love. Men and women are like Heaven and Earth, whose eternal nature lies in their unity…Those who understand the principle of yin and yang will experience immortality.”

A nice equation of different forms of knowledge of patterns. Sex, medicine, and cooking. If you ever wondered why so many famous Chinese writers and statesmen were good cooks, this is why.

Huangdi asks: “What will happen if one abstains from sex?”

Sunu replies: “That is absolutely out of the question. Yin and yang have their alternations as does everything in nature. Human beings should follow the rhythms of yin and yang just as they follow the rhythms of the seasons…”

Again the patterns of the universe and the body are the same. Also, one can’t really absent oneself from the world.

Huangdi asks: “What are the essential elements that bring about a harmonious union of yin and yang?”

Sunu replies: “For a man, the essential element is to avoid weakening his strength: for a woman what is important is orgasm. Those who do not follow this method will decline into weakness. The function of female sexual sensibility is to keep the balance of one’s energies, to calm one’s heart, to strengthen one’s will, and finally to clarify one’s mind”

“The person concerned should experience a deep sense of well-being, without feeling heat and cold, hunger and satiety, thus the body enjoys is pleasure in peace. The aim of this method is orgasm for the woman, and preservation of energies for the man.”

‘preservation of energies’ means not giving up your yang essense. The woman does have an orgasm, and thus does give up yin essence. It’s really a creepy sort of sexual vampirism. The educated man can get energy out of the universe. In this case it is out of another person, which makes it exploitative.

Huangdi asks: “Lately even when I have a strong desire for sex, my ‘jade stalk’ does not rise. I am so embarrassed that my face is covered with shame and beads of sweat. Yet my desire is so strong, I have no choice but to seek the assistance of my hand. How should I do it?”

Sunu replies: “Your question is a common one. When a man wishes to have a sexual relationship, he must observe traditional preliminaries. First the breathing needs to be harmonized, and then the ‘jade stalk’ is aroused according to the principle of ‘five consistencies’, while sensations flow through the nine parts. As for a woman, the five colors are to be noted. Upon the change of color, the man collects saliva from the woman’s mouth, which it turn in transformed and fills marrow of his bones as well the internal organs of is body. The man must obey the ‘seven deficiencies’ follow the ‘eight benefits’ and observe the ‘five constancies.’ In doing so, the disorder will be cured as energy strengthens the body. When his internal organs are harmonized his face will shine. Should desire come, the ‘jade stalk’ that has been strengthened becomes erect. Where then is the shame? ”

Huangdi asks “How can one tell if a woman is experiencing orgasm?”

There is a long section on how to tell if a woman is having an orgasm, but frankly the modern method (asking her) is a lot easier. But being able to read the signs properly is how you can tell how the exchange of energy between you and the universe is going. It’s a nice little reading that I think I will use in my Early China class next fall.

¹ Translation from Robin R. Wang Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture Hackett, 2003

A Chinese Peasant