Rethinking the World in East Asia 1850s-1990s

“Both history and our present reality tell us that only socialism can save China—and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China. This is the conclusion of history, the choice of our people.”- Xi Jinping, “Some Questions on Maintaining and Developing Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, 2013

      It is impossible to understand contemporary Chinese politics without first looking at the developments of the early 20^th century in China, nor is it possible, as Rana Mitter points out, to pick up a newspaper and read about China without heavy references to its history. China’s politicians of today are acutely aware of the past, constantly drawing lessons from it.[1] From the rise of linear historiography during the late Qing era and the May Fourth Movement at the beginning of the 20^th century in response to the exigent threats that China was facing to its survival to Xi Jinping’s 2013 speech giving the first inklings of his ideological platform, history, and various politically influential groups’ interpretation of it, is an essential tool that has been utilized as a weapon over the years and provides an exceedingly important component of the answer to the question of “Whither China?” posed by historians and social scientists.[2] An understanding of early 20^th century Chinese revolutionary thought, then, is essential, with anarchism playing a key role in its development.

     Witnessing the peak of its popularity between 1907-1930, anarchism reached into the various ideologies of other radical groups and became a key fixture of political discourse.[3] As tepid members of Sun Yat-Sen’s Revolutionary Alliance, a partnership born from a common struggle against the despotic Qing Dynasty in spite of distinct philosophical differences regarding their conceptions of social revolution, anarchism had an outsized impact on revolutionary discourse, with Sun remarking on one occasion that anarchism was “the ultimate goal of his Three Peopple’s Principles”, a sentiment shared by many Guomindang officials in the 1920’s.[4] It also had a distinct impact on the nascent communist movement that emerged between 1920-21. By 1920, anarchist literature available in Chinese was unmatched in both scope and comprehensiveness by any other social and political philosophy of European origin.[5] Far from being restricted to simply being of use to revolutionaries, however, conservatives also put its tenants to use in the late 1920’s, as seen in the example of the Guomindang. This contradiction is what inherently lies at the heart of the difficulties in explaining anarchism’s impact on Chinese revolutionary thought, and it is for precisely this reason Dirlik argues that anarchism’s contribution to Chinese social revolutionary thought should not be measured in terms of how consistently they were able to live up to their ideals in practice, nor in the “ideological[ly] schizophreni[c]” use of its ideas, but how consistently anarchists propagated their ideology from their bases in Paris and Tokyo.[6] The circulation of its ideas in journals such as Xin Shiji, and the opportunity that they provided for influential revolutionaries such as Liu Shifu during his time in prison, which strengthened his commitment to anarchism as a political ideology and ultimately carried him to his vision of a great human community based on the universalistic principles of science and rationalism.[7] In a similar vein, given the path that contemporary Chinese politics has taken on the Mainland, early 20^th century Chinese anarchism’s impact can most saliently be observed in the legacy that it left behind on the Chinese Communist Party.

     In spite of the fact that Chinese anarchism fell into a steep and uninterrupted decline in favor of Leninist Marxism, its impact on the leaders of the Communist movement in China and Maoism was profound, which has lead Dirlik to argue not only for the importance of understanding the anarchist background of many of China’s early communist leaders, but also that Chinese Marxism has retained anarchist principles in a way that European revolutionary movements have not.[8] Clear links can be made between anarchism and the events of the Cultural Revolution, and, as such, it was heavily implicated in the crisis socialism faced in China after Mao’s death in 1976, at which point Mao’s Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution failed and was thoroughly repudiated.[9] The lessons that the bureaucratic clique, lead by Deng Xiaoping, took away from the horrors of this this time period was to crack down on those who followed “Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and their ilk and rose to power through rebelling”, the anarchistic elements that had emerged during this ten year period who’d been “infected with a factional mentality”. To the leaders of China today, it is Deng’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics developed in response to this that will guide China forward in the 21^st century, not any of the other ideological frameworks that were prevalent in China at the beginning of the 20^th century, and it is one that Xi expects the next generation to carry forward.[10]

[1] Mitter, Rana. “Preface.” Preface. In A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World, x-xii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

[2]Luke S. K. Kwong. “The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China c. 1860-1911.” Past & Present, no. 173 (2001): 157–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600843.; Greer, Tanner. “Xi Jinping in Translation: China’s Guiding Ideology.” Palladium, May 31, 2019. https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guiding-ideology/.; Walton, Keith. “WHITHER CHINA?” New Zealand International Review 25, no. 6 (2000): 19–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45234974.

[3] Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. https://doi-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/10.1525/9780520913738

 

[4] Dirlik. Ibid. 80.

[5] Dirlik, Ibid. 2; 82.

[6] Dirlik, Ibid. 80-81.

[7] Krebs, Edward S. “1. ‘Daring to Die’: A Life of Shifu.” Essay. In Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism, 1–14. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998. https://www.vlebooks.com/Vleweb/Product/Index/336439?page=0.

[8] Dirlik, Ibid. 3.

[9] Dirlik, Ibid. 5.; Jisheng, Yang. “Preface: The Road, the Theory, and the System.” Essay. In World Turned Upside down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, xxi-xxxii. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021. https://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Revolution-ebook/dp/B088DQPQCN/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1635113828&sr=8-1.;  Mittler, Barbara. “POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION CULTURE: THEORY, PRACTICE, AND EXPERIENCE.” In A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, 1st ed., 343:3–32. Harvard University Asia Center, 2012. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1x07z47.5.

[10] Greer, ibid.

In the first two chapters of his book Anarchy in the Purse Land, Justin Ritzinger conducts a thorough investigation into the teachings and philosophies of Taixu, a renowned twentieth century Buddhist thinker¹. Primarily, he focuses on Taixu’s early anarchist origins and explores how they influence his later work as a transnational Buddhist revivalist². This blog post will briefly investigate the consequences of this contextual influence, along with others, for Taixu’s work toward the transnationalisation of Buddhism, ultimately concluding that Taixu’s Chinese cultural background in both anarchism and Chinese Buddhist thought is heavily influential in his later teachings outside of China.

Ritzinger’s assessment of Taixu’s anarchist influences conflicts with the generally accepted scholarship about the topic, which usually minimizes these origins as inconsequential in Taixu’s later works. Ritzinger points out that Taixu’s own autobiography, in accordance with this general consensus, implies that his early anarchist and revolutionary experiences were little more than “youthful indescretions,” which Ritzinger works to refute in his chapters². Anarchism, Ritzinger stipulates, largely contributes to Taixu’s later Buddhist works, in which he condemns economic inequality and seeks to revolutionise with the ultimate hope of forming a utopian society².

This portrayal of Taixu, as someone who was very much molded and guided by the context in which he developed his ideas, is crucial to consider as we understand the influence he had as a transnational Buddhist outside of China. Elise DeVido specifically explores Taixu’s influence on the Buddhist revival in Vietnam³.

Leaders and followers of Confucianism and Buddhism have, over the course of several centuries — if not millennia — contributed substantially to cultural amalgamation and assimilation in East and Southeast Asia. Taixu’s work as a transnational Buddhist demonstrates another example of this phenomenon, with DeVido arguing that the revival of Buddhism in Vietnam would not have occurred to the same extent without his crucial participation². She refutes the idea that a general trend of “Chinese cultural influence” in Vietnam allowed it to reflect developments in Chinese Buddhism, asserting instead that Taixu’s reforms, writing, and visits to Vietnam were necessary for the revivalist movement to occur².

The Chinese influence on Taixu’s teachings in Vietnam was strong, as DeVido points out that the thinker “expected that China would become the leader of the Buddhist nations in Asia,” and thus worked to proliferate Chinese Buddhist texts, reforms, and teachings throughout other countries². Taixu’s revivalist goals, notably influenced by his anarchist background, were profoundly impactful in Vietnam. One of Taixu’s widely read writings there, “How to establish Buddhism for this world” heavily stressed his utopian views, encouraging his audience to follow his teachings to “make this world into the Pure Land”².

Taixu’s movement and methodology was formulaic for modern Vietnam, as DeVido explains that many influential generations of monastics were engendered during Taixu’s revival.

Ultimately, Taixu’s widespread impact in transnational makes Ritzinger’s conclusions about Taixu’s prominent anarchist influences all the more interesting and consequential. The Vietnam example shows not only the significance of Taixu’s role in the Buddhist revivalist movement that occurred there, but clearly reflects the anarchist ideological undertones that Ritzinger identifies in Taixu’s teachings.

1. Ritzinger, Justin. Anarchy in the Purse Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism. (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017), Ch. 1-2. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
3. DeVido, Elise. “The Influence of Chinese Master Taixu on Buddhism in Vietnam” in Journal of Global Buddhism 10, (Directory of Open Access Journals, 2009), pp. 413-458. [↩]

During the early twentieth century, Chinese suffragists notably – Tang Qunying campaigned for woman’s suffrage. These revolutionary women used violent methods to garner the attention of their male counterparts. The decision to use such aggressive tactics came at cost; these woman’s roles within the family changed. Whether they wished for this or not, their actions removed them from the domestic sphere and forcibly placed them in the same political realm as men. A quote from David Strand accurately represents this change, ‘The shift from the individual as a social self-embedded in family or family-like networks to the individual as a social self who is an integral part of an organisation like a political party.’[1] This article will consider this idea and how it links to what was lost and what was gained from the use of violent methods by early Chinese suffragists. It is important to note that though Chinese men may have viewed Chinese woman differently due to their acts, fundamentally their role as caretaker did not change for years to come. Universal suffrage was only granted in 1949.

 The likes of Tang Qunying being skilled in bomb-making and battlefield tactics, and the violence that broke out during suffragist protests leads to the question of why these groups chose such destructive methods. Chinese women in society at the time were viewed as objects that were to be stared at. This perception angered the suffragist movement and so they used it to their advantage by being hostile and emulating male behaviour. They would smoke cigarettes, wield weapons, and even physically assault men.[2] Though their actions were greatly looked down upon by men and women, ultimately it would prove effective to their cause. As it forced male politicians to acknowledge the suffrage movement. President Sun Yat-sen pleaded that they be patient as universal suffrage would eventually come.[3] This was met with more backlash as it was seen as a passive, easy way out for politicians who did not want to directly go against the forceful suffrage movements.

Their decision to use violent tactics was simultaneously influenced by their role within the family, while eventually changing how these roles were viewed. A Chinese woman’s role in the domestic sphere was so great that the suffrage movement believed they deserved responsibility beyond the confines of the home. Their citizenship had to exist in the public realm as well if they were going to do so much as caretakers. However,since men believed that if women gained more rights they would abandon their domestic duties, a role they believed to be the ‘foundation of the nation’, they continuously refused to grant them the vote.[4]Therefore, because of the mere wish of being viewed as a citizen outside the home was too much of a request for men to grant, the women in some suffrage movements believed using violent, ‘manly’ tactics was the way forward. They had to directly confront society’s notions of gender roles by clashing with them.

Unfortunately, this affected their roles within the home as the women that chose to act this way were viewed as having ‘unrestricted private morality’ and said to support ‘anti-husbandism’.[5] This meant they lost a lot of respect and power that already existed for them in the domestic sphere. This was not their aim; they did not wish to forget about their roles in the home, they just wanted to be acknowledged by wider society in political terms. By choosing to use such aggressive means to gain this acknowledgment, these suffragists were advocating that, ‘natural rights trumps social stability.’[6] In the end, they truly believed the right to vote was something every human being should have and so were willing to do anything to gain this – even if it meant losing the social status they had within the home.

[1] David Strand, An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p.22

[2] Ibid. p.18

[3] Ibid. p.18

[4] Ibid. p.19

[5] Ibid. p.19

[6] Ibid. p.19

 

Susan Glosser highlights an intriguing and seemingly ironic circumstance in, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953, when she explains that despite the fanfare and propaganda that Communists (CCP) made regarding the rights of women and the need to smash old traditions, the new Marriage Law of 1950 made it harder, rather than easier for women to obtain a divorce than under the earlier 1931 marriage code promulgated by the Nationalist government (GMD). While both laws allowed divorce if each party consented, the 1931 code provided ten specific circumstances where either the husband or wife could sue for divorce.¹ On the other hand, the 1950 Law required that couples seeking a divorce undergo meditation before the local government and if the mediation failed, the contested divorce could be heard in the county or municipal court where the court’s primary interest was also to reconcile the couple.² This system seems to be in stark contrast to propaganda used by the Communists to promote their marriage law, “This lawfully expresses the spirit of the Central People’s Government toward the equality of men and women. The fundamental spirit lies in enthusiastically actualizing the uplifting of women and the destruction of the evil remnants of feudal society.”³ Allowing women to escape abuse or abandonment would seem to be in line with the rhetoric of the law, but not the reality. Moreover, at first, it seems odd that the GMD would provide more options for women than the CCP in the realm of divorce. This restriction on divorce appears to be an important lens through which to understand the limitations on women’s rights under the regimes established by the CCP versus the GMD.

The Nationalist and Communist views of divorce seem contradictory to what one would think of their political philosophy and the marketing or rhetoric that goes along with it. Indeed, the Communists’ practices regarding the granting of divorce seem antithetical to their propaganda of equality of the sexes. Moreover, an important element of Communist propaganda and philosophy was to raise the conditions of women in the new state, and initially, it appears that divorces increased under Communist rule, particularly amongst peasant women, but then the numbers rapidly decreased.⁴ It has been argued that the initial increase in the divorce rate led to difficulties for the Communists because it was negatively impacting peasant families (or more likely male peasants) and that, in turn, hindered support for the CCP’s land restructuring efforts.⁵ Thereafter, perhaps to no surprise, the ability to obtain a divorce was made much more difficult.⁵ In addition, it was until 1980 that the marriage law was revised to allow for a divorce if mediation did not result in the couple reconciling.⁵ On the other hand, one might have expected the Nationalists to be more conservative and less willing to grant divorces to women, given their philosophy expressed by Sun Yatsen, that “‘devotion to one’s own family would expand into devotion to one’s national family.’”⁶ However, the Nationalists’ marriage code specifically provided for near-equal rights to both genders to be granted a divorce and removed previously abusive practices that allowed men to obtain what was referred to as “arbitrary” divorces.⁷The GMD code thus seems to support women’s interests notwithstanding the nationalist philosophy that the strength of the family unit is crucial to state success, without which the Nationalist regime would suffer great strains. However, despite this apparent support for women and the fact that the GMD code did seem to provide more options for divorce and less state control over exiting a marriage than the CCP’s Marriage Law, it did not necessarily mean that divorce would be freely obtainable. Nonetheless, the GMD code did seem to provide women with a much greater degree of control over their lives in the realm of divorce than the CCP.⁴

The Nationalist and Communist policy on divorce might reveal the CCP’s greater need to pander to the peasant’s more conservative views on marriage, at least initially, as well as the CCP’s more effective efforts to engrain state control over all elements of family life. It has been claimed that Mao, when faced with losing support from his predominantly peasant soldiers or promoting women’s rights, stuck with his soldier.⁸ However, this does not explain why divorce remained extremely difficult long after Mao and the CCP were victorious. In fact, it seems that a critical factor at play was the CCP’s successful implementation of his philosophy that the state must be held above the individual that explains the CCP’s restriction on divorce.⁴The limitations placed on the ability to obtain a divorce without explicit state sanction and after extraordinary measures to reconcile couples demonstrate that the Communist’s interest in women’s rights was substantially subordinated to the state’s interest in maintaining control over the family unit. Unfortunately, such a stance dooms abused women to remain tethered to their abusers and clearly does not serve to establish real equality between the genders.

1. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953, (University of California Press, 2003), p. 172.
   [↩]
2. Ibid.
   [↩]
3. Ibid. at 175.
   [↩]
4. Ibid. at 173. [↩] [↩] [↩]
5. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩]
6. Ibid. at 98. [↩]
7. Ibid. at 111. [↩]
8. Ibid. at 168. [↩]

The Cultural Revolution’s internal strife, conflict and ideology is notable, and well studied, but one aspect of it that is rarely considered, according to Julia Lovell, is the overall international impact and view of the event. In her forward to her 2016 article, The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective, Lovell gives a short overview of the histography surrounding the international impacts of the Cultural Revolution¹. Discussing the works of Richard Wolin, Roberto
Niccolai and Robert Alexander, Lovell sums them as looking at the international impacts of the Cultural Revolution in a piecemeal manner – looking at individual regions and nations, not considering overall trends – so while these works may be useful, there is not a comprehensive overview of the trends of the international impacts of the Cultural Revolution – a void that Lovell intends to fill². One such impact demonstrated by Lovell is the way the iconography of the Cultural Revolution impacted a whole range of revolutionary and anti-establishment movements.

The focus of a great deal of Lovell’s work is on how the presentation and conception of the Cultural Revolution abroad stimulated discontented youth across varying nations and social boundaries  – from the African American civil rights movement of the United States to radical student movements in West Germany³. And while a large part of the groups discussed by Lovell are politically left wing, one of the more interesting elements discussed by Lovell is how the revolutionary iconography of the the Cultural Revolution was coopted by many anti-establishment groups, regardless of their political disposition. Lovell discusses how even Italian Neo-Fascists used Maoist slogans and language, while among the more radical arms of the African American liberation movements of the United States, Mao’s Little Red Book was seen in explicitly racial terms,  and the Revolutionary Action Movement used terms like ‘Black Guard’⁴.

Why was it Maoist iconography that took such a root in revolutionary and anti-establishment groups across the world, and why only by the mid 60s with the onset of the Cultural Revolution? According to Lovell, it was the specific aspects of the Cultural Revolution – the focus on grassroots political participation and the idea of the mass line⁵. But how was the Cultural Revolution ‘marketed’ and presented outside of China. While Lovell does mention that the Cultural Revolution both internally and externally took on meanings probably unintended by it’s creators, the way the Cultural Revolution was presented internationally does not seem to be something that she focuses on, nor does it seem to be a common area of study⁶. This seems to be somewhat of a blindspot to me, and a missing piece of the puzzle of the spread of Maoist ideas throughout the later half of the 20th century.

Bibliography

• Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” The China Quarterly 227 (September 2016): 632–52.

1. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” The China Quarterly 227 (September 2016): 632–52, PG633-634. [↩]
2. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG634-635. [↩]
3. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG637. [↩]
4. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG637-638. [↩]
5. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG640. [↩]
6. Lovell, Julia. “The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective.” PG633-634. [↩]

The Korean peninsula, throughout the Juseon dynasty, finds itself entangled in Chinese and Japanese spheres of influence. In fact, Kirk Larsen argues that Korean history in the 19th and 20th centuries is a story of “competing imperialisms,” with China, Japan, and even Tsarist Russia vying for influence and control on the peninsula¹ Although these two centuries see more overt measures taken by China and Japan to exert control over Korea, their attempts to execute their own national agendas in the region were far from unprecedented. By the beginning of the 19th century, Korea has already been a cultural battleground for several hundred years.

Similarly to the way that China heavily influenced Korean culture through the proliferation of Neo-Confucianism throughout the beginning of the Joseon dynasty, the Meiji government leveraged the spread of Japanese Buddhism at the end of the same dynasty, looking to strengthen their cultural and political control in Korea before seizing control of the country in 1910.

During this pre-colonial period at the end of the 19th century, Buddhism was thriving in Japan. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim describes a distinct disparity between the welfare of Buddhism in Japan and the welfare of Buddhism in Korea through a historical anecdote dating to 1893.² Yun Ch’iho, a Korean intellectual figure, attended that year’s World’s Parliament of Religion and recorded his interaction with two Japanese Buddhists who spoke very highly of their religion and argued for its spread elsewhere. He quotes one of the men, a Jōdoshinshū priest, as saying: “In Japan, everybody is a Buddhist. There is no field uncultivated. Hence we must occupy new lands.” Yun, on the other hand, thought of Buddhism as a “dying religion that had failed Eastern civilization.”

Yun’s opinion, that Buddhism was a “dying religion,” was not unfounded in Korea, as the religion’s popularity was on the decline, and it was looked down upon by the upper class — Korean monks were not allowed to speak to yangban, nor were they permitted through the gates of Seoul. Because the state of Buddhism in Korea is so poor, Japanese Buddhists turn to Korea for a the “foreign propagation” that they had been hoping for, with their final goal being the establishment of their sect of Buddhism as Korea’s state religion. Kim notes that this effort “took place parallel to Japan’s drive to gradually dominate Korea politically.”

Although not all missionary efforts were fueled by the Meiji government’s desire for influence on the Korean peninsula, most of them behaved in strict accordance with Japan’s political agenda. Christopher Ives explains that the Japanese Buddhist sectarian competition in Korea led to each sect consistently stressing their adherence to imperial orthodoxy in order to stay in the favor of the Japanese emperor and “maintain institutional privileges.”³

In the years before the implementation of Japanese colonial rule, the spread of Japanese Buddhism in Korea played an important role in solidifying Japan’s presence on the peninsula. Kim argues that Buddhism acted as “rich doctrinal, symbolic capital” within Korea that the Meiji government used to “mollify the anxiety of Koreans regarding Japan’s intentions.”²

Whether or not it was the goal of the individual Japense Buddhists involved in the late 19th century’s mass missionary activity in Korea, the movement significantly increased Japanese influence in the region and helped them gain a foothold that, at least marginally, catalyzed their colonial takeover in 1910.

1. Larsen, Kirk W. “Competing Imperialisms in Korea” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History, (Routledge, 2016), pp. 27-37. [↩]
2. Kim, Hwansoo Ilmee. Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Ch 3 Japanese Buddhist Missions to Korea pp. 107-150. [↩] [↩]
3. Ives, Christopher. “The Mobilization of Doctrine: Buddhist Contributions to Imperial Ideology in Modern Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 26, no. 1/2 (1999), pp. 83–106. [↩]