Author: 己

Scholarly reaction to Jiang Qing has been mixed, which is to be expected considering his work appears to transcend an academic analysis of the role of ancient Confucian thought in modern-day China. Instead he makes sweeping proposals for the creation of new political structures that would revolutionise Chinese governance after decades under Mao. This article approaches the reception of his work and finds that his proposed political structures have incited an interesting reaction from those who seemingly stand against the homogenisation of governance along western liberal democratic lines.[1]

What Jiang Qing proposed was a wholesale reanalysis of the nature of governmental power in China and cited a Confucian idea of The Way of Humane Authority as a foundation for these changes. Under this new order, power would be divided equally between three parliamentary houses. The house of Confucian tradition, dealing with the matter of sacred legitimacy; the house of the people, dealing with the matter of popular legitimacy; and the house of the nation, dealing with the matter of cultural and historical legitimacy. At the core of this system was the rejection of the western political principle of the sovereignty of the people – in favour of a system in which the balance between the three aforementioned forms of legitimacy is strictly maintained.[2]

Reception to these ideas has been mixed, and those who see it in a positive light cite the uniqueness of the Chinese context and the care that must be given to avoid the wrongful application of western democracy to a strictly eastern context. Daniel A. Bell has taken this view and expounds the importance of incorporating cultural resources into the governance of China.[3] Both Daniel Bell and Ruiping Fan go as far as to suggest that such a movement toward a trilateral parliament has the potential to gain support in the future, should the right provisions and adaptations take place. It would seem that support for Jiang Qing rests on the assertion that the alternative, a western style liberal democracy founded on the sovereignty of the people, would not respect the cultural and religious heritage of the state of China. To follow in the footsteps of Japan and Korea in adopting a westernised system of separated powers would be to support the supremacy of a political philosophy that neither originated, nor holds sway, in China.

Opposition to Jiang Qing appears to be ideological in nature, and surrounds debates about Jiang’s interpretation of Confucianism. An example of such opposition is that of Li Minghui, who strikes down Jiang’s ideas as utopian. Li claims that in creating a dichotomy between mainland and Taiwanese Confucianism, Jiang is ignorant to the political aspects of the latter.[4] Far less lofty than those who support him, Jiang’s opposition seems to be less concerned with the practicality of his conception, and rather with how he has interpreted China’s ancient frameworks of politics and spirituality. Li goes on to claim that Jiang puts far too much emphasis on the political aspects of Confucianism and is ignorant to matters of morality and the mind.

As stated, the scholarly reaction to the work of Jiang Qing has been mixed, but I would argue that they largely miss the mark in terms of the impact and significance of what Jiang was at least attempting to achieve. Following decades of Maoist rule, China looked to the future and sought new mechanisms of government to redefine their position in the modern world. Jiang’s vision of a trilateral parliament that looked to China’s ancient heritage for legitimacy and foundation was one that presented an interesting and ironically forward-thinking solution to the problem of governance. Opposition centred around Jiang’s individual interpretation of Confucianism failed to grasp the significance of Jiang’s stand against ideas of western democracy that were creeping in. Standing against the homogeneity of political ideology along western lines was, at the very least, a fresh vision for China’s future.

 

[1] Jiang Qing, “From mind Confucianism to political Confucianism”, The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China, (Dordrecht, 2011), p.17.

[2] Jiang Qing, A Constitutional World Order, ed. Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan (Princeton, 2015), p.29.

[3] Daniel A. Bell, “Jiang Qing’s Political Confucianism”, in Ruiping Fan (ed.), The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China, (Dordrecht, 2011), p.139.

[4] Li Minghui, “I disagree with the phrase “mainland new Confucianism””, Contemporary Chinese Thought 49:2, (2018), pp.100-112.

Tanabe Hajime, and the Kyoto School more widely, hit their apogee at a time when Japan sought to drastically expand its overseas territorial possessions, and in their work we can see an attempt at justifying the existence of imperial governments in a time when Europe’s empires began to wane. In his work, The Logic of Species, Tanabe extrapolates the Linnaean categorisation of species and genus and applies it to the organisation and self-identification of humanity, the bottom line being that, for a nation-state (Genus) to exist, it must be multi-ethnic (multi-specific).[1] This assertion underlines the Japanese idea of an empire encompassing multiple ethnicities gaining their national identity by contributing to the state. Tanabe Hajime joined a long list of intellectuals whose work was used by imperial governments to justify their incursion into foreign, often indigenous land. Where he differs however is in the use of logical thought processes and metaphysical analysis, where similar European examples used religious or legal arguments.

Expansion of Japan’s empire was swift and ruthless. Within the decade preceding the outbreak of the second world war in the pacific, Japan brought Manchuria, areas of Northern China, and numerous islands in the pacific under their control. During the war, European colonies in south-East Asia and American colonies in the Pacific Ocean faced a similar fate. It was then the case that the Japanese empire not only covered vast swathes of mainland and Oceanic Asia, but incorporated countless ethnicities ranging from Han Chinese to indigenous pacific islanders. When Tanabe writes, it is important to note that it is against a backdrop of a growing need to establish an intellectual foundation of Japan’s expanding and increasingly multi-ethnic empire.

Tanabe Hajime’s Logic of Species, as discussed, is a philosophical response to the question of identity in human society. Utilising zoological theory, it unites ideas of species and genus with those of ethnic and national identity. To summarise briefly, as this format lacks neither the time nor space to fully analyse this complex work, Tanabe argues that for an ethnic identity to exist and be recognisable, it must be negated. In that it only exists in contrast to other ethnic identities. The role of the state in this context is to be the forum in which multiple ethnicities exist under the same national identity.[2] Taking the nation-state’s existence as fact, the only way for it to exist is to incorporate multiple ethnic identities. The species, (ethnicity) is a personal trait that connects one to a network of cultural markers of identity. However, the genus (the nation-state) is a necessary construction that plays a direct role in the operation of society.

Understanding how and why this work was vital to the intellectual foundation of Japan’s empire allows us to analyse more widely the justifications for imperialism worldwide. We have already discussed the need for intellectual justification for their imperial ambitions, and this isn’t an issue experienced only by Japan. Early forays into empire by European powers required justification, although what was produced was of a different genre and form. Spanish incursions into South America was justified by a series of papal bulls expounding the belief that it was the role of Christians to spread Christianity. Similar justifications on religious grounds were common between the European powers in the early days of their colonial expansion into the Americas. The British empire, as it began to rapidly expand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sought legal grounds on which to found their colonial possessions. They settled on the principle of res nullius, a pillar of Roman law in which an ‘unowned’ piece of property can be claimed by those who put it to economic use.[3]

The point of analysing these different approaches to the difficult question of imperial hegemony is not to justify the ends they helped to incur, but to establish a common thread that appears across temporal and geographical contexts. Conquest is rarely given as justification for rule, and it is clear that throughout numerous examples of empire in the modern age, it is rarely enough to cite one’s comparative economic or military power as a reason for their subjugation. Tanabe Hajime, in his work of metaphysical philosophy, contributes to this history of justification, and joins such intellectuals as John Locke and Jules Ferry in their attempts to give reason for the expansion of the English and French empires respectively.

[1] Viren Murthy; Fabian Schafer; Max Ward, Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy, (Leiden, 2017), p.172.

[2] Naoki Sakai, “Subject and Substrata: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism”, in Cultural Studies, 14:3, (09/11/2010), p.462.

[3] Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the world: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c.1500 – c.1800, (Newhaven, 1995), p.45.

It certainly wouldn’t be unreasonable to point out the similarities between K’ang Yu-wei’s ‘Ta t’ung Shu’ and the writings of Karl Marx. Both take the reality of their time and attempt to present a way forward that eliminates suffering, both push for a wholesale shift in the way society is organised, and both found themselves in opposition to their contemporaries. It seems as though, however, a work of social idealism can rarely exist in its own right without a comparison to Marx being drawn. This article attempts to navigate tricky waters and approach the comparison between these two monumental works of social philosophy and establish whether or not it is appropriate for such a comparison to be drawn.

It is clear that K’ang was aware of communist theory, he devotes a small passage to it in Ta t’ung Shu.[1] His sceptism is equally clear however, as he doubts how realistic its aims actually are. Whether or not K’ang was aware of actual Marxist theory is up for debate, after all his mentions of communism are sparing and only seem to analyse it in the frame of ‘what not to do’ rather than as a valid theoretical framework. Laurence Thompson would certainly argue that whilst K’ang had a cursory knowledge of what communism entailed, his knowledge of Marxist theory more widely was non-existent.[2] The question of Karl Marx’s awareness of Ta t’ung Shu certainly is not up for debate, he had died before the work was written, let alone translated into a language he would understand.

A brief discussion ought to be given to the differences between these two individuals as thinkers. Hierarchy was, to Marx, the root of suffering among humans; K’ang was a proponent of the emperor, albeit in a ceremonial sense not unlike the monarchs of the United Kingdom.[3] Hierarchy under K’ang’s One World philosophy was almost ritualistic and was greatly influenced by the maintenance of the emperor as a spiritual figure. There is no question that this would have been an unsurpassable point of contention for Marx, monarchy represents, in the Marxist perspective, all that they sought to dismantle.

I was struck by the difference in scale of these two works, and an analysis of scale brings with it the analysis of the philosophies themselves. It may be argued for example that, as a work of philosophy, Ta t’ung Shu represents a more comprehensive, all-encompassing work that seeks to analyse suffering as a phenomenon with multiple roots, not simply class. K’ang Yu-wei delves into human nature, and concurs with traditional Chinese thought, such as that expressed by Mencius, that man is innately compassionate, and bad deeds are a result of negative stimuli in one’s environment.[4] He specifically cites economic hardship as the root of such deeds as robbery, taking away responsibility from the individual and placing it in the environment in which the individual exists, effectively laying the groundwork for his One World postulation founded on economic equality. Marx, by contrast, made fewer sweeping statements on the nature of humanity, and instead cited the historical precedent of class segregation and class struggle. Where Marx’s utopia comes about following revolution and the abolition of wealth as material possession, K’ang Yu-wei’s ideal is a spiritual exercise wherein the efforts of man are put into the cultivation of a healthy environment and the promotion of things that bring pleasure.

Nevertheless, comparisons are drawn, and for many it would appear as though these two works of social theory produce the same end: a society free of suffering and devoid of class, where an individual works for the good of society and can subsequently expect all that they require in return. To me, however, such a comparison is largely unfounded and is based upon the mere fact that both offer a socialist utopic vision for the future of humanity. Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto offer a materialist view of the development of human society up to the 18^th century and posit a future wherein class struggle necessitates a revolution. Ta t’ung Shu is a work not only of political theory and materialist philosophy, but moral and existential philosophy that borrows ideas from classical Chinese thought and will go on to lend ideas to Maoist communism. The works may be comparable in their end goals, but in their substance, there lacks a sustained thread of similar thought.

[1] Laurence Thompson, K’ang Yu Wei, Ta T’ung Shu and the One World philosophy of K’ang Yu-Wei, (London, 2005). p.51.

[2] Ibid. p.52.

[3] Federico Brusadelli, ‘A tale of two utopias: Kang Youwei’s communism, Mao Zedong’s classicism and the “Accommodating look” of the Marxist Li Zehou’, Asian Studies, 103:5, (2017). p.104.

[4] Thompson, K’ang Yu Wei, p.47.

 

Communist revolutionaries faced an interesting problem following their acquisition of power. Weaponizing the very real class debate won them the civil war, but family and marriage would, like it so often has in Chinese history, get in the way of their vision of progress.

Susan Glosser in her successful work “Chinese Visions of Family and State” provides a unifying narrative that illuminates a common thread running through successive Chinese policy thinkers and makers. Balancing a changing nation in an increasingly globalised world with internal pressures grasping onto tradition would prove difficult for most post-imperial attempts at governance.[1]

The New Culture Movement was perhaps the first attempt at family reform following the collapse of imperial power. What was an ambitious movement seemingly overestimated its support, as a series of surveys revealed the reluctance of the youth population to adopt reforms that would threaten the centralised family model.[2] In fact, 72% of respondents voiced their desire to maintain the family model that ties to them to their parents. Surveys are of course to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it wouldn’t be farfetched if these views were held, as we see opposition to reform crop up in subsequent contexts. Veneration for one’s elders is a matter of morality in this case, as Alan Chan argues.[3]

CCP attempts at family reform faced similar obstacles, revealing a level of continuity and persistence of traditional standpoints. Rural communities, which it ought to be pointed out constituted over 95% of China’s population, appeared to pose a consistent threat to any hopes of family reform. The result of this unwillingness to adopt the entirety of what revolution truly meant had very real impacts on the direction of communist policy in China. Kay Ann Johnson notes the reluctance of the CCP in pushing their family reform agenda in rural communities, and how this reluctance even birthed a system of penalties for those who attempted to raise such issues in these areas.[4] Even a revolutionary movement, hellbent on uprooting much of what China had formed itself around for millennia, seemed to cower away from the prospect of challenging one of the most fundamental structures in society.

This persistence of thought among much of Chinese society throughout a politically turbulent time illuminates a key aspect of Chinese intellectual history. The separation of family and state as matters of different historical fields, or at least as themes that can be discussed independently, would come relatively easily in western historiography. The same cannot be said for the Chinese example, and it is here where the idea of a revolution at the mercy of tradition, I would argue, can be seen. Maurice Freedman notes the importance of filial relationships in their position as a foundation for public and state relationships, specifically in their establishment of the duty of a man.[5] Reading this within the framework given to us in Glosser’s work, we see an interesting conflict between how emerging forms of state view themselves and how the public view them. Paradoxically, regimes with an interest in dismantling family structures face off against an often rural population that believes their existing family situation is necessary to the existence of the state.

Utilising the examples of the New Culture Movement and the CCP, we have outlined a society that is both exposed to the prospect of revolutionary change, yet inherently tied to the Confucian traditions on which its built. Infiltrating this bastion of tradition, the family, is an ongoing battle, and ground has only been won when private spheres are continuously intruded upon. A common thread running through early attempts at reform in early to mid-century China, despite the stark ideological differences, was the inability to completely reform the family.

[1] Susan Glosser, ‘Chinese visions of family and state, 1915-1953’, (California, 2003), p.167.

[2] Ibid. p.59.

[3] Alan Chan, Sor-Hoon Tan, Filial piety in Chinese thought and history’, Psychology Press, (London, 2004), pp.1-11.

[4] Kay Ann Johnson, ‘Women, the family, and peasant revolution in China’, (Chicago, 1983), p.63.

[5] Maurice Freedman, The Family in China, Past and Present’, Pacific Affairs, 34:4, (1962) p.324.