Tag: Yan Xishan

The Unique Nature of Chinese Cosmopolitanism: Examining Similarities and Differences Between East and West

Yan Xishan’s pamphlet, “How to Prevent Warfare and Establish the Foundations of World Unity” is a fascinating document that discusses the ideology of Cosmopolitanism combined with Chinese concepts of Da-Tong (大同), and Socialist thought. An ideological system that can be succinctly described as Chinese Socialist Cosmopolitanism. [1]

In terms of time, the general intellectual trend was leaning towards Cosmopolitanism during this period. With the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, ideas of global governance and unity were being discussed. However, the place that this pamphlet arose from is surprising.

Despite, Western political and ideological concepts such as Republicanism, Democracy and Welfare introduced through Sun Yat-Sen’s (孫中山) declaration of the Three Peoples Principles in 1905, being well known and popular throughout China. These concepts were mostly constrained in a national context. To embrace, and indeed expound the concept of Cosmopolitanism as Datong was incredibly far-sighted on Yan Shixan’s part.

Several intellectual strains come to mind when considering Yan’s ideas. The first is that of Kantian Cosmopolitanism, especially his work ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’. This is in specific regard to the “Recognition of the equality of man without discrimination of race, colour, belief, country” as highlighted in the pamphlet. Yan invokes, whether with or without intent, Kant’s concept of ‘Cosmopolitan Law’ which suggests a universal law that incorporates states and individuals globally. [2] The concept of Datong has a similar concept to that of Kant’s Cosmopolitanism but instead utilizing a “right” based legalistic approach to Cosmopolitanism, emphasizes an ethical and moral social grounding for it. This points to the motivations for actions promoting global harmony and cooperation being grounded not in the rational thought of individuals forming society, but rather moral cultivation and development.

The second intellectual strain that Yan considers when elucidating his concept of Cosmopolitanism, is that of the Doctrine of the Golden Mean (also known as Aristotelian Virtue Ethics). This idea is derived from Western Philosophical traditions from Ancient Greek Philosophy. [3] Despite this, to view Yan’s understanding of the Golden Mean as one that was simply borrowed from Greek Philosophy would be to assume that similar concepts in Chinese philosophy do not exist. The concept of Zhongyong (中庸) taken from Neo-Confucian Scholars such as Zi Si (子思) is also commonly referred to as the Doctrine of the Mean. Indeed, Aristotle never really expanded his concept of the Golden mean to encapsulate ‘trespasses’ taken by one person against another. [4] His concept was more concerned with individual ethical behaviour with the fundamental basis of his theory being Ethical Egoism. Yan, on the other hand, seems to interpret ‘Unity of Contradiction’ as a Golden Mean between individuals, something that is more evocative of Zi Si’s understanding of the Golden Mean.

Considering the origin of intellectual ideas is incredibly important especially when discussing ideas originating from East Asian sources. Due to the vast majority of our educational upbringing, it is often assumed that the intellectual origins of ideas are taken from notable Western thinkers. Yan Xishan’s ideas on Cosmopolitanism highlights the similarities in intellectual ideas between Western and Eastern thought while allowing us to examine the differences at their core.

[1] Yan, Xishan. How to Prevent Warfare and Establish Foundation of World Unity, pamphlet, pp1-41

[2]Brown, Wallace Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Idea of Cosmopolitan Constitution, Book, 2009, pp31-54

[3]Hursthouse, Rosalind, Virtue Ethics, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/, 2016

[4] Boi, Peter K., Neo-Confucianism in History, Harvard University Asia Center, 2008

Kang Youwei’s One-World Philosophy: Why Germany Is A Bad Example

In 1884, Kang Youwei penned a book called Ta T’ung Shu in which he laid out his utopian vision of the ‘One-World’, in which ‘all the boundaries which created divisions […] have been abolished,’ and ‘causes of suffering’ have been eradicated.[1] This was a world characterised by compassion and moral fibre, in which ‘all creatures are happy’.[2] In Chapter II, Kang laid out a specific way to achieve this world:  the elimination of sovereign states and national boundaries. The ideal world would have ‘no states’ with ‘[t]he people […] united under one public government […]’.[3] Kang argued that the existence of national boundaries would corrupt even ‘the Good and Upright,’ as every individual would be devoted to increasing the power of their own state at the expense of other states.[4] Peace could not exist in such a system, with countries behaving ‘like a bunch of dogs rolling [on the ground in a fight, like savage beasts devouring one another […]’.[5] Thus, Kang argued for ‘disarmament’ which required ‘abolishing [sovereign] states’.[6]

Kang’s ideas were echoed in a text published in the middle of the following century by Yan Xishan, titled ‘How to Prevent Warfare and Establish Foundation of World Unity.’ Yan argued that ‘[F]rom the lessons of world history, we learn that countries tend to grow in size and shrink in number. China combined several countries into one. Small nations have less chance of survival, and tend to form into federations’.[7] Because nations are destined to gradually subsume into one another, and one world would form from the many, ‘It is perfectly natural for us to adopt Cosmopolitanism today’.[8]

Instead of China, Kang used the example of Germany as a state that had successfully annexed other states to form a larger, more powerful entity. He wrote:

‘The parts becoming joined thus being due to natural selection, the swallowing up by the strong and large and the extermination of the weak and small may then be considered to presage One World. But [the way in which] Germany and America have established large states through [uniting their small] federated states is a better method of uniting states. [They have] caused all these small and weak states to forget that they have been destroyed [to form the united states]. […] This will hasten the world along the road to One World’.[9]

There are many issues with Kang using Germany as a model example as his account is not completely accurate. While Germany was formed out of a union of Prussia and smaller southern states like Bavaria and Baden to become the German Empire in 1871, Clark argued that it was not a ‘one-way process in which Prussians swarmed on to the commanding heights of the new German state. It would be truer to say Prussian and German national institutions grew together, intertwining their branches’.[10] Kang’s assertion that the smaller states were ‘destroyed’ in favour of the larger state was therefore incorrect. Clark went on to give an example, stating that ‘[i]t became increasingly common […] for non-Prussians to serve as imperial officials and even as Prussian ministers’.[11] This is not to say that Prussia did not enjoy hegemony in the newly formed German state, but hegemony did not come about, as Kang believed, through the strong swallowing the weak.

Next, Kang moved into discussing what political form the One World would take.

‘Therefore, within this next hundred years all the weak and small states will certainly be annihilated, all monarchical and autocratic forms [of government] will certainly be completely swept away, republican constitutions will certainly be enacted everywhere, democracy and equality will be burning brightly. […] Complete Peace-and-Equality throughout the world is like the rushing of water through a gully: nothing can check it’.[12]

With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Kang’s centennial prediction did not come true. Not only were the ‘small states’, such as ‘Sweden [and] Denmark’,[13] still in existence but Kang’s reasoning that a ‘republican constitution’ would follow logically from the formation of one unified state was mistaken. Using his example of Germany, the ‘highly artificial product’[14] of a unified Deutschland left ‘a patchwork quilt of types of local governments that needed cleaning up’.[15] The German government suffered from ‘an unsettling sense that what had so swiftly been put together could also be undone’.[16] This combined with the need for a broad ‘Germanization’ to ‘consolidate’ the patchwork quilt of the ‘German Reich’ drove German ‘Iron’ Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to ‘respond with extreme measures’.[17] Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Bismarck waged his campaign against segments of the population he deemed not German enough, namely the Catholics and the Poles.[18] By 1876, all Prussian bishops were either in custody or in exile.[19] Bismarck also embarked upon a comprehensive project to root out the Poles, advocating expulsion of Poles who have no claims to citizenship as well as a language of government act in 1886 that would ban the use of minority languages in local government affairs, thus excluding monolingual Poles from governmental participation.[20]

The German example is evidence that a world formed through the annexation of ‘weak and small states’ to more powerful ones would not be, as Kang argued, the flame to the torch of ‘democracy and equality’. ‘Complete Peace-and-Equality’ is a far more difficult project that would require more types of unification than merely that of the political and geographic variety.

[1] Kang Yu-wei, Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei, trans. and. ed. Laurence G. Thompson (London, 2005), p. 37.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 106.

[4] Ibid, 82.

[5] Ibid, 83.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Yen Hsi-shan, How to Prevent Warfare and Establish Foundation of World Unity (n.p., 1952), p. 40.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Kang, Ta T’ung, p. 85.

[10] Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (London, 2007), p. 559.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Kang, Ta T’ung, p. 89.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Clark, Iron, p. 570.

[15] Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford, 2012), p. 335.

[16] Clark, Iron, p. 570.

[17] Steinberg, Bismarck, p. 335.

[18] Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany Vol. 2: The Period of Consolidation, 1871-1880 (Princeton, 1990), p. 209.

[19] Steinberg, Bismarck, p. 333.

[20] Pflanze, Bismarck and, p. 205.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Kang, Yu-wei, Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei, trans. and. ed. Laurence G. Thompson (London, 2005).    

Yen, Hsi-shan, How to Prevent Warfare and Establish Foundation of World Unity (n.p., 1952).

Secondary Sources

Clark, Christopher, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (London, 2007).

Pflanze, Otto, Bismarck and the Development of Germany Vol. 2: The Period of Consolidation, 1871-1880 (Princeton, 1990).

Steinberg, Jonathan, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford, 2012).