The Chinese Liberal Spirit

Selected Ethical and Political Writings

Fuguan Xu, David Elstein

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438487182
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religioni asiatiche

Xu Fuguan (1903–1982) was one of the most important Confucian scholars of the twentieth century. A key figure in the Nationalist Party, Xu was involved in the Chinese civil war after World War II and in the early years of the Nationalist government in Taiwan. He never ceased to believe that democracy was the way forward for the Chinese nation. Making his ethical and political thought accessible to English-speaking readers for the first time, these essays analyze the source of morality and how morality must be realized in democratic government; they also provide a sharp contrast to the claim that democracy is not suitable for China—or that Confucian government should be meritocracy, not democracy. They also share the reflections of a man who lived through the Chinese revolution and remained strongly critical of the governments in both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan.

Part One

Autographical Essays

Chapter 1

My Life of Study

Translator’s introduction: Xu’s writings include a number of autobiographical pieces such as this, in which he describes his educational background. It was relatively unconventional even for his day. After initially studying to be a teacher, he decided to join the army for a better chance at making a living. Then he went to Japan, first to study economics and then to officers’ training school. His early education was very traditional, focusing on classical Chinese works. He had little contact with the new subjects imported from the West until he joined the army. Not many people in his time had the chance to get graduate education, but Xu didn’t even finish college. He was largely self-taught.

The influence of Xiong Shili on Xu’s scholarship is clear. He first met Xiong during the war, after Xiong had earned quite a bit of fame for New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness. Xu credits Xiong with restoring his interest in traditional Chinese culture and scholarship, which he maintained for the rest of his life. His description of Xiong’s severe criticism of his reading method is particularly vivid, and it obviously made a strong impact on his approach to research for the rest of his academic career. As Xu describes elsewhere, he believes the purpose of learning is building character more than accumulating knowledge. He is briefly but intensely critical of Hu Shi, who strongly favored a more empirical approach to humanistic study—Xu refers to him as a fake. Yet he did not reject Western knowledge, feeling that it might contribute to understanding Chinese literature, history, and thought. Although his own research was always focused on China, he read Western works extensively as well.

Ever since I learned to read at age eight I could not go two or three days without opening a book, even in the midst of serving in the army during wartime.¹ However, one could still say that I never read or understood a single book until I was forty-seven or forty-eight. Because my life of study is so contradictory, perhaps writing it down can serve to provide lessons from my mistakes for many youth with aspirations to study.

The reason I always read was because of an interest in reading. But now I understand that interest in reading without adding a purpose will not bring any results. Reading for forty-odd years, naturally I browsed very broadly. However, now I understand that merely reading quickly and extensively without reading thoroughly and becoming familiar with several sizable volumes of classical works will not provide any basis for scholarship. This is the lesson I draw when looking back on my experience.

My father’s life was a life of taking examinations, but he never attained any rank. The reason my father wanted me to read was to attain some rank by examination. This never failed to arouse my distaste, and influenced my education when I was young tremendously. As soon as I learned to read, it was new and old together. By “new” I mean textbooks, starting with volume one and reading through to volume eight. Then it was A Model for Argument and Speech. Then The Gate of Ink.² This book is a collection of essays by successful examinees and jinshi holders.³ On top of that, I also read essays by Tan Yankai.⁴

As for the “old,” starting with the Analects I read through the Four Books and Five Classics.⁵ Additionally, I read Broad Debates of Donglai, Ancient Writing Styles in One Hundred Chapters, Zenith of Ancient Writings, Annals Easy to Understand, and later switched to Imperial Comments on the Comprehensive Mirror [of the Past], Edited for Perusing.⁶ Other than the last two, I had to recite these from memory. After reciting, I would have to explain a chapter.

This study of new and old materials went on for a while, until I was about thirteen. During this period, I loved reading poetry, but my father wouldn’t allow it. At that point, the civil service exam had already been abolished,⁷ but my father apparently thought it would be brought back. The final civil service exam had only tested essay writing, not poems and rhapsodies. I found a color printing of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.⁸ While I was devouring it eagerly, my father found out and tore the book up and burned the pieces. When I started high elementary school⁹ and got out from under my father’s thumb, I spent those three precious years entirely in reading old works of fiction. One could say it was an emotional reaction.

When I was fifteen, I entered Wuchang First Normal School, still mixed up. At that time, our level in Chinese was probably much higher than that of Chinese department university students today. Our Chinese teacher was a man from Anlu¹⁰ named Mr. Chen Zhongfu. His skill in Tongcheng school writing was especially deep,¹¹ and he taught extremely well. The man who corrected our homework was Mr. Li Xizhe from Wuchang.¹² His scholarship was based on the masters of the Zhou and Qin periods, and his achievements were also very high. The homework he assigned always inspired one to do real study. We did an essay every two weeks: he would give the assignment on Saturday afternoon and we would hand in our roll of paper on Monday of the week after, giving students enough time to plan out their compositions. He always returned our essays in order from good to bad. At that time, I didn’t care about my other work; I only took writing seriously, and I was quite full of myself about my ability. But every time, he handed back my paper second or third from last. I would think that Mr. Li probably didn’t understand my essay. But when I would get a look at the essays of my classmates next to me, they really were better. How could this be? Often I would cry secretly, unable to understand it.

I spotted a copy of Xunzi on a classmate’s desk once and opened it up. The line I had read in my textbook, “Blue dye comes from the indigo plant and yet it is bluer than the indigo,” came from here!¹³ My curiosity aroused, I borrowed it and read it straight through without pausing, finding it tremendously interesting. From this I learned of the pre-Qin masters, which opened up a new world of reading for me and I read them from morning until night. Because my interest in Zhuangzi was very high, and moreover he is not easy to understand, I would get five or six annotated editions from the library and compare them. Once I’d read the various masters, my choices in books were naturally not the same as before. What I had thought was good before now I found wasn’t worth a cent. Books I’d felt no interest in previously I now found myself wanting to read. From that point on, I didn’t pay much attention to writing and only focused on reading. That same frame of mind I’d had for fiction I now applied to reading Liang Qichao, Liang Shuming, and Wang Xinggong (apparently he was talking about the scientific method), as well as works by Hu Shi and others on scholarship.¹⁴

Once, in my third year, Mr. Li suddenly handed back my essay first, and from that point on I was usually first or second. Furthermore, I found out that the principal Liu Fengzhang and some of the teachers had begun to praise me behind my back. Slowly I came to understand that the quality of an essay is not only a matter of open and shut, free-flowing technique, but requires content. For a typical essay, there is only content when there is thought. Thought has to be inspired and nurtured from classical works with value, and moreover come to fruition in the atmosphere of the period. By the time I was twelve or thirteen I already had a grasp of the rhythm of old writings, but thinking back on it, this probably did me more harm than good.

My common sense about thread-bound books was obtained from five years as a normal school student.¹⁵ After that, although I was a student for three years at the [Wuchang] Academy for Chinese Studies, I had already lost the feeling of novelty for reading and so I did not improve much. There were two peculiar things about that entire long period of study. The first is that until November 1926, one could say that I read nothing on the contemporary political situation. I didn’t have the slightest impression of this ism or that party. The way I began to have some connection with political thought was in December 1926 when I was stationed in Huangpi¹⁶ and Mr. Tao Ziqin was my brigade commander.¹⁷ I was a secretary at a battalion headquarters and he asked if I had read Sun Zhongshan’s doctrine, the Three Principles of the People.¹⁸ I said that I hadn’t, and he felt that this was very odd. Then he gave me a copy of The Three Principles of the People, wanting me to read it. This is how I began to have some connection with political thought.

The other peculiar thing is that although I had read a lot of thread-bound books by this time, when I think back I had not obtained the key to studying. This is because although many teachers had been very good to me, not one of them really guided me when it came to how to study. Add in my own personality of leaving things up to fate and going along, and it meant that I had no goal I was trying to achieve by study, nor did I have a particular direction or foundation. I was like a wanderer who spends money as soon as it comes into his hand. Even if the amount of money that passes through his hands is not small, at the end of things his hands are still empty.

Starting in 1927, through Sun Zhongshan’s writings I started coming to know about Marx, Engels, materialism, and so on. Later, when I went to Japan,¹⁹ if it weren’t that sort of book I had no interest in reading it. While at the army officers’ school in Japan I organized a Society for the Group That Doesn’t Read especially to read this kind of book. This lasted until about the time Deborin was subject to criticism.²⁰ It included philosophy, economics, political science, and so on. Even the Japanese translation of the Soviet periodical Under the Banner of Marxism—we didn’t miss a single issue. After I returned to China and served in the army, I neither spoke nor wrote of these matters, but in truth they filled my spiritual space between youth and maturity, until about 1940. Probably from 1942 to 1948, I filled the spiritual space formerly occupied by Marx-Engels thought with the simpleminded idea of “saving China through saving the GMD.” After I returned from Japan, for more than ten years of precious time I read a lot of books related to military work out of a competitive mindset. Now when I think back to that period, I still feel distracted.

It was in 1942 that the military command sent me to Yan’an as a liaison officer [to the CCP].²¹ There I read Clausewitz’s work on war theory while living in a cave for six months, but I also gave up on it then.²² Unless one understands the Seven Years’ War as well as the French wars from the Revolution to the Napoleonic wars, and in addition has a background in German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, it is impossible to understand this book completely. It was my third time reading it in Yan’an. That time I happened to understand the course of thought that shaped the structure of his book and grasped his conclusion. Then I truly understood that he wasn’t telling us some formulas for fighting a war, but teaching us a method for understanding and grasping war. Almost all great books give their readers a method for reaching a conclusion, and so give their readers some training in thought. After reading this book, when I went back to look at what Yang Jie had said, it really was “the words of a small child pretending to explain things.”²³ I had already taken copious notes at that time and had planned to write a book when I returned to Chongqing,²⁴ however, due to procrastination and indolence, my interests shifted and more than ten years of effort on military theory all came to naught. It is really a matter for regret. However, one can learn from this that unless one grasps the most essential things in a certain field of study, one will be a layman for his whole life.

The courage to resolve to knock²⁵ on the door of study was inspired by Xiong Shili.²⁶ My shift from twenty years of a mindset of rejecting Chinese culture to having a greater understanding of it was also due to Mr. Xiong’s inspiration. I wore my army uniform on my first visit to see him at Mianren Academy in Jingangbei town, Beibei, in Chongqing. I asked for instruction about what books to read. He told me to read Wang Fuzhi’s Assessment after Reading the Comprehensive Mirror.²⁷ I said that I had read it years ago. Displeased, he answered, “You didn’t understand it. You should read it again.” After a while, I went to see him again and said I had finished reading it again. He asked, “What did you get out of it?”

Then I told him about all the places where I didn’t agree with it. Not letting me finish, he angrily scolded me. “How can you read anything, you idiot! The content of any book has some good parts and some bad parts. Why don’t you find the good in what he wrote first, instead of picking out the bad? Reading your way, you can read a hundred, even a thousand books, and what benefit will you get from them? First you should understand the good in a book and then criticize the bad. It’s like eating: through the process of digestion you absorb the nutritious part. For example, in the Assessment, such and such part has such significance, and in this other part, his understanding is quite profound. Do you remember? Do you understand? Your way of reading has no promise!”

He scolded and scolded until this army general was dumbfounded. My mind was spinning. This gentleman could scold so fiercely! He read so thoroughly! So in reading, one first had to understand the meaning of each book! This was a cursing that brought me back from the jaws of death. I fear it would be a cursing that would bring back from the jaws of death any youth, grownup, or elder who were full of themselves but had not entered the gate of real study! In recent years, whenever I meet someone who believes there are no books worth reading, I know that they are someone who puts off life with small cleverness.

Afterward, every time I would meet with Mr. Xiong and discuss a particular cultural question, he would listen to my opinion...