Rachel Scollon
In his In Search of Wealth
and Power, Benjamin Schwartz searches the work of Yan Fu for clues to the
preoccupations of a Confucian gentleman on the edge of the modern world. Yan
is, Schwartz finds, "seeking . . . a clear and all-embracing vision of
reality" (p. 111) that can show him how China can achieve wealth and power
akin to that of Britain. It is Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism that
"fills [Yan's] most deeply felt intellectual needs" (p. 111). But in
Yan Fu's "rapturous embrace of Spencer" (p. 52) he does not accept
Spencer's ideas precisely as originally articulated; they are filtered through
those intellectual needs and come out imbued with the flavor of his
preoccupations.
Yan takes the conception of societies
as organisms engaged in an evolutionary struggle for survival, of the state as
the nervous system of society, beyond the point where Spencer's commitment to
the individual required him to stop, into a vision of the development of those
state organs as the ultimate evolutionary goal. This carries him, too, beyond
Spencer's determinism to a conviction that it is possible for the brain of a
society to perceive the factors impelling its own evolution and take action to
influence its evolutionary course.
The proportion of mid-twentieth
century American scholars of China who read Schwartz's book on Yan Fu probably
nears equivalence with the proportion of early twentieth-century Chinese
intellectuals who read Yan Fu's own work. It is not surprising, therefore
(although I do not here posit a unidirectional movement of ideas outward from
the mind of Benjamin Schwartz to the minds of other scholars) that this book is
densely packed with ideas that are also to be found sprinkled liberally
throughout the other output of the field. An organic metaphor of society, an
emphasis on psychology, a basic identity between individual, societal, and
state interests, and what Mary Wright terms "a kind of 'great leap'
psychology" (Wright 1968, p. 62) turn up again and again, in assorted
combinations, in the works of this period.
Certain combinations of these
themes appear more often than others, however. It is possible to identify in
Schwartz the confluence of two streams of thought that are related, but have
their sources in two different intellectual environments. The first is an
analytical orientation, a psychoanalytical approach to the study of society.
This is associated with an implicit organic metaphor of Chinese society, but
while it finds affinities with elements in the thought of Chinese thinkers, its
source is in mid-century American habits of thought.
The other stream, which flows
through findings rather than methods, consists of commentary on a Chinese
belief in the capacity of human beings to alter their material and social
environment. That such commentary can be found, with some differences of
treatment, across the work of scholars taking a variety of psychological,
materialist, self-consciously scientific and objective approaches suggests that
its Chinese source is substantial and significant, but also that American
scholars of various persuasions shared a certain sensitivity to the role of
consciousness, and that the apparently neat match between the preoccupations of
Chinese intellectuals and the American intellectuals who study them may lead to
certain distortions of emphasis.
An early example of the first
of the two intellectual currents outlined above is Joseph Levenson's Liang
Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China. Levenson's focus in this book is
the impossibility of separating ideas from the psychological needs of their
originators. He traces the question, "how can a Chinese be reconciled to
the observable dissipation of his cultural inheritance -- or how can a China in
full process of westernization feel itself equivalent to the West?" (p. 5)
through Liang's lifetime literary output, examining in detail the intellectual
outcomes of a psychological need to resolve the contradiction between the
requirements of membership in China's culture and the demands of the modern
world.
In her The Last Stand of
Chinese Conservatism, published four years later in 1957, Mary Wright
focuses more than Levenson does on practical policy. She describes the
administrative and diplomatic efforts of Tongzhi Restoration officials to
reverse the decline of the Qing dynasty's fortunes, giving them high marks for
intelligence, resourcefulness, practicality and effort. She finds, however,
that in the long run their attempts were a failure. Her explanation for that
failure reduces to psychology, but the psychology of a society more than that
of an individual. Confucian society, she says, was unable to adapt to the
requirements of the modern world, primarily because of a basic inability to
conceive of economic growth as desirable.
Both Levenson and Wright seem
to be working within an organic metaphor of society; China is a large, sentient
organism, and one that is sick and dying. Levenson refers to a dying tradition
(p.47) and moribund ideas (p. 86), and asks, "would an infusion of Western
civilization cure China or kill it?" (p. 198). He is ostensibly
paraphrasing one side of Liang's conflicted psyche, but it seems from his
evident despair at the futility of Liang's synthetic efforts that he himself
believes traditional China to have died. The "mind of modern China"
that he refers to in his title must be the mind of a saprophyte living on
traditional China's rotting remains, for if he regards Liang's search for
continuity between the old China and the new to be deluded the new, modern
China has to be a different organism altogether.
Wright, too, sees Confucian
China as an organically unified whole. It is impossible to make any significant
changes in the parts without bringing about the demise of the entire organism,
and "there is no way in which a effective modern state can be grafted onto
a Confucian society" (p. 300). She does not define her "Confucian
society," but it is its mental rigidity that brings it down in the end.
Also implicit in her argument about the inability of the society to adjust to
the demands of modernization is an evolutionary view in which China, as a
weaker social organism, succumbs in the face of competition from the fit,
surviving Western powers.
It would of course be possible
to make too much of the occasional outcropping of an organic metaphor. The idea
of the body politic was, after all, the basis of medieval European political
theory, and old metaphors to which everyone is accustomed fade slowly.
Furthermore, people have the habit in everyday speech of attributing sentience
to cars and refrigerators, so perhaps to speak of a society as
"dying" is of no tremendous import. There are, however, a multitude
of other possible ways of conceiving of society -- a web, a machine, a gas, a
pile of sand. The combination of organic metaphors with a sense of irreversible
decline and references to the beliefs of a society must be held to bear some
significance.
In Benjamin Schwartz's work on
Yan Fu, American psychologism and Chinese voluntarism come closest to achieving
seamless unity. Schwartz, like Levenson with Liang Qichao, undertakes to
interpret Yan Fu's work out of a conviction that ideas are important. He is not
greatly concerned with Yan's personality for its own sake, devoting little
space to elaborating upon his personal characteristics, but he gives
psychological motives great weight in shaping Yan's thinking and the ordering
of his intellectual priorities. He makes little, for example, of Yan's opium
habit, giving it only a single paragraph, but his treatment takes mental
predisposition as the most crucial factor in individual action. He suggests
that opium smoking was an expression of an existing "quietist mystical
strain in [Yan Fu's] outlook" (p. 31), rather than a habit the development
of which radically altered the course of his career. Yan Fu was, Schwartz
suspects, more of a thinker than a man of action, disgruntlement at the
government's perennial failure to make use of his talents notwithstanding.
Schwartz is concerned primarily
with Yan's ideas as articulated in his essays, translations and commentaries,
and takes a psychological tack in explaining the divergences of Yan Fu's ideas
from the literal meanings of his original Western sources. As noted above,
Schwartz believes that Yan had a intellectual (read psychological) need to find
a system of thought that accounted for everything, and within that to find a
way for China to survive in the modern world.
Spencer and the Enlightenment
political philosophers provided Yan with that system. The idea of social
evolution might at first glance suggest that China was on the brink of
extinction. Yan drew hope, however, from the possibility that release of energy
at the individual or cellular level, guided by the nervous system of the social
body, could give China the strength to emerge triumphant from the evolutionary
battle.
Schwartz does not, of course,
come out in wholehearted support of Spencerian social Darwinism. He refers to
the "obsolescence and mediocrity of his thought" (p. 47) and gives
little sign of identifying so fully with his subject as to want to revive
Spencer. But somehow Yan Fu's discovery of this second, individual level of
evolution, with its potential to reverse the prognosis on China, cheers
Schwartz as well, so that he leaves the conceptualization of China as an
organic entity to Yan himself, and declines to join in Levenson and Wright's
gloom.
The psychological approach, in
this new, relatively optimistic form, was continued by Leo Ou-fan Lee in his The
Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers. Lee is much more explicitly
psychoanalytical than his predecessors, applying Freudian and Eriksonian
methods, as well as Henry A. Murray's Icarus syndrome, to the autobiographical
works of his selected authors in an effort to elucidate the nature of the
cultural environment of the 1920s. Lee, drawing directly upon Schwartz's work
on Yan Fu, sees his protagonists as seeking to lead their individual lives in
such a way as to release the energy needed to set their society on a good
evolutionary path.
This psychoanalytical trend in
mid-century American scholarship on China can to a great extent be explained by
a general fascination with psychology that permeated both academic and popular
culture during that period. In the 1950s and 1960s, academics in fields from
literature to anthropology, and from across the political spectrum, sought to
apply the insights of psychology to the study of human society.
To Ssu-yu Teng and John
Fairbank, Freudian analysis was an antidote to "the pre-Freudian, rationalistic
economics and sociology of Marx and Lenin" (Teng and Fairbank, p. 275). In
the Postface to China's Response to the West, they advocate a
"psycho-ideological approach" as one of the two "lines which
seem likely to penetrate most deeply and broadly the terra incognita" of a
largely unexplored field (p. 274). But the use of a psychoanalytical approach
in the China field cannot be said to have followed from Fairbank's advocacy.
Levenson's book, for instance, was published the year before Teng and Fairbanks'.
The various scholars taking this approach were in all likelihood responding
independently, and perhaps not always consciously, to the general intellectual
atmosphere of the time.
There would, of course, also be
a certain personal element to the choice of approach. Joseph Levenson's
treatment of Liang Qichao, for instance, leads one to suspect that Levenson
himself was preoccupied with the role of the intellectual in society, and
possibly himself tormented by some form of the conflict between "history"
and "value" (allegiance to and membership in the culture of one's
birth vs. intellectual commitment to a position) which he imputes to Liang.
The other major factor
contributing to this type of approach was the nature of the sources then
available. Limited to published materials, historians found it easiest to
concentrate on intellectual history through the analysis of the bodies of work
produced by key individuals. But the sources only limited the approaches that
were possible; they could not in themselves impel their users towards
psychoanalysis.
The use of a psychological
approach to history in the China field persisted at least from Levenson's 1953
book to Leo Lee's, published 1973. Over the course of this period, however,
there was a shift from Joseph Levenson and Mary Wright's early conviction of a
sharp break between traditional and modern China, an end followed by a new
beginning, to an idea that the old and new China were in fact joined by a
period of transition, through which some continuity was maintained. This change
of outlook may indicate an adjustment to the reality of Communist rule. In the
years just after 1949 scholars were suffering from shock and surprise, and were
inclined to explain this sudden transformation by supposing the old order to
have collapsed altogether and been replaced by something entirely new. When
they had had time to reflect further, as well as generate a new body of
research stimulated by the need to explain the Communist rise to power, they
began to see how that rise followed from social developments of the preceding
period.
In her introduction to China
in Revolution Mary Wright moves, with her discussion of "'great leap'
psychology," from one stream of the China field's preoccupation with mind
and consciousness to the other. Wright speaks of "a conviction that by
superhuman effort of an indoctrinated elite, China could bypass the usual
stages and achieve its own kind of good society though sheer application of
human energy and willpower" (p. 62). She is drawing upon a collection of
papers that while it, for the most part, still focuses largely on elites,
presents findings reached by the methods of political and social history rather
than the psychological, intellectual biography approach. But these papers
(particularly, one suspects, Mary Rankin's on revolutionaries in Zhejiang and
P'eng-yuan Chang and John Finchers' papers on the politics of the provincial
assemblies) suggest, although perhaps more strongly to the suggestible mind, a
prominent role for mind, will, and consciousness in the history of early
twentieth-century China.
Wright's use of the word
"psychology" flags the possibility of confusion arising from an
assumption of a unity between American academics' and Chinese leaders'
conceptions of the mind and its relationship to social change. It seems
possible that at least some scholars have lost track of this distinction and
identified the Chinese phenomenon of a stress on the role of will and
consciousness with the Durkheimian notions of a collective psyche that were in
vogue during the middle part of the century.
There seems little doubt that
the phenomenon of Chinese voluntarism, with an emphasis on the role of thought,
which has drawn the attention of psychologically-minded historians and social
scientists does exist in some form. The scholars discussed above were drawn to
it, and others of different methodological orientations found it significant as
well.
To William Hinton, the admiring
foreign observer of land reform, a thorough transformation of consciousness is
what ensures that the reforms carried out during his months in Shanxi will
endure. Hinton is a materialist. His primary focus is on practical politics and
the tangible markers of social change: the movement of a storage jar from one
household to another, the fate of a padded jacket. Repeatedly, however, in the
course of his observations, the importance of thought and the mind to the
success of the land reform process impresses itself upon him.
Ezra Vogel, a man of a
different political stripe, working on a different part of China, and reporting
from newspapers and interviews rather than firsthand experience, records a very
similar "effort to reform the most basic patterns of thought" (p.
83), which he facilely traces to a Confucian concern with moral rectitude.
Knowing that an emphasis on
thought and the mind does exist in the twentieth-century Chinese intellectual
tradition, what do historians between 1953 and 1974 do with that knowledge?
They do not seem to examine the phenomenon carefully on its own terms. Do they
absorb it into preexisting ideas of the psychological nature of humans and
society? I cannot now answer the question definitively, but I can voice a
suspicion.
In his introduction to Chairman
Mao Talks to the People, Stuart Schram introduces the theme of release of
individual energy to maximize social progress.
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[L]ike those late nineteenth-century Chinese thinkers who first taught [Mao Zedong] how Western liberalism could be made to serve China's resurgence, he is persuaded that the energy of the people as a whole can be maximized only by releasing the initiative of every individual (pp. 17-18). |
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This passage, although
unfootnoted, clearly draws upon Benjamin Schwartz, identifying Mao as the mind
of the social organism. What is Schram's purpose in drawing such a parallel? A
straightforward interpretation would be that he is merely pointing out that
Mao's thought is not formed in isolation, but, in Levensonian terms, seeks to
answer the same general questions that hold the attention of other members of
society.
It may not be as simple as
that. In bringing Schwartz to bear on Mao, Schram calls up a host of
associations. In making such a glancing reference, Schram sets no limits to the
interpretive schemes in which he is inviting the reader to place Mao and his
thought. Would Schram be comfortable with the idea of Mao as the mind of China,
and with the analysis of Mao's thought as the psychoanalysis of the country?
Perhaps. If so, it would be an evil consequence of the confusion between the
psychoanalytic approach to the study of society and a practically oriented,
mass-mobilization approach to social change. If not, the field could at least
have benefited from some clarification of principles.
References
Hinton, William. Fanshen: A
Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. New York: Vintage Books,
1966.
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. The
Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1973.
Levenson, Joseph R. Liang
Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1953.
Schram, Stuart, ed., Chairman
Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956-1971. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1974.
Schwartz, Benjamin. In
Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1964.
Teng, Ssu-yu and John K.
Fairbank. China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey 1839-1923.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954.
Vogel, Ezra F. Canton under
Communism: Programs and Politics in a Provincial Capital, 1949-1968.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Wright, Mary Clabaugh. The
Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-Chih Restoration, 1862-1874.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.
Wright, Mary Clabaugh, ed., China
in Revolution: The First Phase 1900-1913. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1968.
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