Utopia and Modernity in China

Contradictions in Transition

David Margolies, Qing Cao, David Margolies, Qing Cao

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781786808356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Economics

The contradictions of modernisation run through the whole of modern Chinese history. The abundance of manufactured goods being sold in the west attests to China's industrial revolution, but this capitalist vision of 'utopia' sits uneasily with traditional Chinese values. It is also in conflict with the socialism that has been the bedrock of Chinese society since the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949.

Utopia and Modernity in China examines the conflicts inherent in China's attempt to achieve a 'utopia' by advancing production and technology. Through the lenses of literature, arts, law, the press and the environment, the contributors interrogate the contradictions of modernisation in Chinese society and its fundamental challenges.

By unpicking both China's vision of utopia and its realities and the increasing tension between traditional Chinese values and those of the west, this book offers a unique insight into the cultural forces that are part of reshaping today's China.

1

The Lure of Utopia: Reinterpreting Liang Qichao’s Xinmin Shuo, 1902–1906

Qing Cao

Liang Qichao (1873–1927) was a central actor in the wave of radicalism that swept China in the first decades of the twentieth century.^* In this period, when China changed from an imperial dynasty to a modern republic, he was arguably the most influential cultural leader. As a scholar, journalist, and newspaper editor, and a political reformer and polemist, Liang articulated the feelings of many of the educated class and helped shape the intellectual foundations of modern China. However, Liang remains a controversial figure. Although his advocacy of Western values is seen as positive, in China he was also regarded as a reactionary for his support for a constitutional monarchy and fierce opposition to political revolution.

In most previous studies,¹ Liang’s contributions are assessed according to a normative paradigm of ‘progress’, which assumes an inevitable human path towards modernity, a destined end irrespective of cultural diversities. This chapter moves away from this dominant perspective. Instead, I examine the way in which Liang’s writings were subversive, undermining traditional Chinese social attitudes with a utopian view of the West and a negative vision of late Qing society. I argue that Liang’s intellectual radicalism stems from a romanticised view of the West and I will use his influential text Xinmin Shuo 新民说 (On New People, 1902–1906) as a case study. Xinmin Shuo is a series of twenty articles published in Liang’s own newspaper Xinmin Congbao 新民丛报 (New People Newspaper). Written a few years before the 1911 Xinhai Revolution – a military uprising that brought the 2,132-year Chinese empire to an end – these articles detailed a roadmap to transforming traditional China into a Western-style nation-state. As a discourse on the creation of a ‘new people’ out of China’s traditional peasantry, Xinmin Shuo became deeply destabilising to China’s established cultural order in its fundamental negation of Chinese sociocultural norms. It produced a masterplan to ‘save China’ by trying to alter the way people thought and behaved through an intellectual campaign of social engineering. Ultimately, the campaign aimed at instilling the alien sense of ‘nation’ into the popular consciousness, because Liang believed the transformation into a modern nation-state was the only way to free China from its dire predicament.

The year 1895 is a watershed moment in China’s modern history. The signing of Shimonoseki Treaty on 23 March 1895 as a settlement of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) shook China to the core. The victory of Japan, traditionally seen as a cultural disciple of China for over a millennium, symbolised to many elites that there were fundamental flaws in Chinese culture, and it was inadequate in meeting modern challenges. Whilst the Sino-British Opium War of 1839–1842 was treated largely as a nuisance caused by far-flung barbarians, the 1895 debacle triggered a psychological earthquake. The literati class became concerned not with the loss of Taiwan and the Liaodong peninsula, nor the two-hundred-million-silver-tael war indemnity, nor the opening of trading ports of Shashi, Chongqing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, but with the demise of Chinese order (wang tianxia 亡天下). They came to see the Western challenge as a cultural and political issue, rather than a military and technical issue. It was at this point that the political and intellectual elites recognised the failure of the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1895) that aimed at adopting Western technology, especially military technology, to build a modern navy and national defence.

The Self-Strengthening Movement was premised on the superiority of a Chinese civilisation that only needed to adopt modern technology. The 1895 defeat demolished the premise. Against this backdrop, a new generation of intellectuals came of age, demanding radical political reforms. Taking centre stage were the young Liang Qichao and his mentor Kang Youwei (1858–1927), who organised public petitions by hundreds of scholars to the Guangxu emperor (1871– 1908). For the first time in Chinese history, scholars were intervening in court politics, not through high offices within the system, but through direct appeal to the emperor as members of the public. In late 1898, at the age of twenty-five, Liang became an advisor to the emperor during the brief Hundred Days’ Reform that made swift and sweeping changes in the modernisation of the government and its institutions. The disastrous failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform, due to a coup by Cixi the Dowager (1835–1908), aborted the political reform. But it spawned an intellectual campaign that shifted the focus to the remaking of society in the image of Europe. It aimed at engineering a ‘new people’ with strong collective characters capable of organising themselves into a modern nation-state.

Exiled to Japan immediately after his botched political career in late 1898, Liang became the leading light of this intellectual campaign through the newly emergent press. Launching an unapologetic crusade against China’s longstanding traditions and popularising Western learning, Liang inaugurated a bottom-up approach to creating a modern nation-state. With the help of his powerful pen and refreshing polemical style, Liang galvanised public opinion in the depths of China’s crisis. Exploiting the modern press to the full, he launched his own newspapers, first Qingyi Bao 清议报 (1898–1901) and then Xinmin Congbao (1902–1907). In pre-1911 China, it was primarily the press that made knowledge about Western social and political ideas available to the public. They captured the intense interest of the young, aspirant educated class. Thanks to Liang and other similarly minded intellectuals, the trickle of Western learning since the 1839–1842 Opium War turned into a torrent that inundated the post-1898 intellectual scene as people intensified their search for a solution to China’s crisis. Liang became a crucial agent behind the tidal wave of radicalism that swept across early-twentieth-century China.

LIANG’S INTELLECTUAL CAMPAIGN AND THE DOUBLE SHIFT OF UTOPIA

At the root of Liang’s radical campaign lay a fundamental shift in epistemology. This was reflected in part in a double reversal of utopia, in terms of time and location. That is, there was a temporal swing – people no longer sought the sociopolitical ideal in the past but in an envisaged future. There was also a spatial shift from a Chinese source to the West. The word ‘utopia’ in this chapter is used in both Thomas More’s and Karl Mannheim’s sense of the term.² It refers to an ideal society as in More’s Utopia, as well as a state of mind that is incongruent with the state of reality. For the first time in China’s history, the utopian imagining of social ideals was projected outside China to an outlying Europe – a novel land of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Unlike the European utopia located in a spatial ‘nowhere’, traditional China maintained a cardinal boundary between a superior huaxia 华夏 (China) and inferior manyi 蛮夷 (barbarians). Utopia, if it ever existed, would be found in China, the centre of the known world. Traditionally, in China’s three-millennia history, when sociopolitical conditions had badly deteriorated, the scholar-gentry class would look back to the golden age of the sandai 三代 (the three dynasties) for guidance and inspiration. The term sandai refers to ancient Chinese history before China’s unification in 221 BCE. It includes the three dynasties of Xia 夏(2100–1600 BCE), Shang 商(1600–1066 BCE), and Zhou 周(1066–221 BCE). These dynasties became known collectively as the sandai – a revered term symbolising the perfect sociopolitical order that was believed to have existed during these times. It was thought that during the sandai sage kings ruled with wisdom, kindness, and compassion in a society of great harmony. The sandai as a model of a perfect society arose as early as the Eastern Zhou 东周 (770–256 BCE, the second phase of the Zhou Dynasty). Six exemplary kings of the sandai– Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu (尧舜禹 汤文武) – became venerated as legendary sages. Crucially, the sandai was admired by Confucius (551–479 BCE) who saw his own lifelong career merely as shu er bu zuo 述而不作 – explicating ancient wisdoms rather than creating new knowledge.

Throughout history, the romanticised sandai remained an archetypical model in the Confucian tradition: an eternal utopia in antiquity for all emperors to emulate. Using it as a standard, Confucian elites held the ruling dynasty accountable by comparing them to the sage kings of the sandai in the traditional daotong 道统 (tradition of the great Dao) – a Confucian moral order of which scholar-officials saw themselves as guardians. For the vast majority of Chinese society, this imagined classical perfection underpinned sociopolitical stability and the continuation of Chinese civilisation. In troubled times, the sandai acted as a beacon for court mandarins, guiding ruling dynasties through mishaps and hardships. The sandai is part of China’s unique convention of ‘revering antiquity’ (zun gu 尊古) – a tradition of worshiping the classical age (pre-221 BCE) and its achievements. These achievements include the intellectual flourishing during the pivotal Spring and Autumn (770–476 BCE) and Warring States (475–221 BCE) periods when ‘a hundred schools of thoughts contended’ (baijia zhengming 百家争鸣), including Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism. The sandai model is encapsulated in datong 大同 (great harmony) as a perfect society – an enduring utopia detailed in the Confucian classic Liji 礼记 (the Book of Rites) of the Warring States era. It envisages a world where dadao 大道 (the Great Way) prevails – everyone works for the collective; all are cared for, especially the weak; the moral and able rise to positions to govern; and trust and harmony triumph.

As China looked to its past for a perfect society, it also entertained a spatial utopian fantasy in the miniature world of ‘shiwai taoyuan’ 世外桃源. Shiwai taoyuan was a pristine enclave of Confucian society set against an era of failed politics in the wider world. The hidden contemporaneous utopia compensated in the Chinese mind for the lost ideal of bygone days. The fantasy was created by the poet and scholar-official Tao Yuanming 陶渊明 (352–427 CE) in his celebrated Taohuayuan Ji 桃花源记 (An Account of Peach Flower Land). The poem describes the adventure of a fisherman who stumbles upon an idyllic village. Enchanted by the mesmerising beauty of a river valley, his curiosity takes him to a mountain cave that leads him to a hidden community – an unspoiled Confucian society cut off from the war-torn world for five centuries. As a primeval community of perfect harmony buried happily in history,³ the shiwai taoyuan utopia met the same cultural ideal of social harmony and welfare for all. It is significant that the mythical dreamland is tucked away in the heart of the Chinese world (the story took place in what today is Hunan province). Taoyuan refers to a land of peach flowers; shiwai means ‘hidden from the world’. It functioned as a criticism of the politics of the day and affirmed an ultimate faith in Confucian values that offer solutions to all social malaises. Its aspirations lay not in an exotic sociopolitical order in a fantasised foreign land like Thomas More’s Utopia, but in an idealisation of a mundane, harmonious social life of the past.

This indigenous temporo-spatial utopia was maintained right up to the Self-Strengthening Movement that firmly upheld the cardinal ‘hua–yi’ (Chinese vs barbarian) divide under the mantra of ‘defeating the barbarians by learning from the barbarians’ and ‘Western learning as instruments and Chinese learning as essence’. It was not until 1895 that the Confucian dreamland began to crumble, when intellectual elites cast doubts on traditional values. For radical scholars like Liang, the 1895 reckoning swung their ideals swiftly to the counterworld of the West. Similarly, the temporal utopia reversed its direction – the backward-looking utopia turned to a forward-looking one. The future, however, points not only t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: David Margolies and Qing Cao
• 1. The Lure of Utopia: Reinterpreting Liang Qichao’s Xinmin Shuo, 1902–1906
• 2. Utopian Future in Chinese Poetry: Bian Zhilin in Republican China
• 3. The China Dream: Harmonious Dialectics and International Law
• 4. Nostalgic Utopia in Chinese Aesthetic Modernity: The Case of the Film Fang Hua (Youth)
• 5. American Dreams in China: The Case of Zhongguo Hehuoren
• 6. Between Reality and Utopia: Chinese Underclass Literature since the 1990s
• 7. Eco-humanism and the Construction of Eco-aesthetics in China
• Notes on Contributors
• Index