By Luo Zhitian
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun
Reviewed by Theodore D. Huters
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)
Luo Zhitian, Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Xvi + 425 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-35055-7 (hardbound) ISBN 978-90-04-35056-4 (e-book)
Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by the prolific historian Luo Zhitian 罗志田 and admirably translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, was originally published in Chinese in 2014 as Quanshi zhuanyi: jindai Zhongguo de sixiang yu shehui (权势转移: 近代中国的思想与社会). With one exception, this important book consists of an assemblage of nine separate articles that appeared over almost twenty years in academic journals between the late 1990s and the date of its Beijing publication as a monograph. The titles of the chapters and their original publication dates are as follows: (1) The Worship of the New: A Shift of Power in Modern Chinese Thought under the Impact of the Western Tide (1999-2000); (2) The Abolition of the Examination System and the Disintegration of the Four-Class Society: Modern Social Change in the Eyes of an Inland Member of the Gentry (1997); 3) The Impact of the Abolition of the Examination System on Rural Society (2006); (4) Shifts of Social Power in Modern China: The Marginalization of Intellectuals and the Rise of the Marginal Intellectual (1999); (5) The Worries and Responsibilities of Educated Chinese in the Age of Transition (2009); (6) The Monolithicization of Chinese Tradition: The Development of Anti-Traditional Trends in the Late Qing and Early Republic (2003); (7) The Divided West: The International Storm and the Development of Chinese Thought in the May Fourth Era (1999); (8) Reflections on the Uniqueness of Modern Chinese Nationalism (2003); and (9) The State Advances, the People Retreat: The Rise of a Trend in the Late Qing (no date).
One of the consequences of this form of compilation is that there is inevitably a good deal of repetition and overlap among the chapters (for which the author duly apologizes), but it is not a serious drawback. There are, however, a number of leitmotifs that continually resurface in each of the chapters, rendering it difficult to discuss any particular chapter in isolation. Toward the end of the fourth chapter, however, the author concisely sums up the core issues around which the work as a whole pivots:
For China to survive, for the nation and the national essence to be preserved, to use the words of contemporaries, China had to study the secrets that lay behind the power of the West. Once China accepted the idea that the power of the West lay not only in its science and technology, but more importantly in its institutions and ideologies, all the changes they sought were oriented towards the West. Changes then had to be “change beyond tradition.” This type of change, however, removed the foundation of China’s national essence. (p. 194)
The legacy of the radical reform-minded thinking associated with the 1919 May Fourth Movement is plain in this summary formulation, and these key concepts are, needless to say, hardly original to this work, in fact being the themes of innumerable books and articles in various languages over much of the past century The strengths—and weaknesses—of the work at hand, however, lie in the detail, wealth of material, and conclusions Luo brings to bear to support the various subthemes that emerge from working through his major premises. The major theme of the book, as reflected in its title, is the shift brought about by the upheaval concomitant with the impact of the West in social and intellectual power and influence away from the scholar-gentry who had traditionally exercised it via the mediation of the centuries-old examination system and the diffusion of that power to other groups in society. It is noteworthy, however, that Luo nowhere in the book attempts to define the nettlesome term “national essence” (国粹), which would seem particularly important given the work’s categorical thesis that the change brought upon by the Western entry “removed the foundation of China’s national essence,” a notion that the various discourses cited in the book at times support and at other times undermine. The notion thus becomes a key point of tension within the text, and it is understandable that it is no more resolved in the book than within the entirety of modern Chinese culture and society. In general, while the work as a whole offers substantial insights that are both illuminating and hold up to scrutiny, there are a number of significant points where both the reasoning and the assumptions drawn from it do not, not to mention quite a few other claims in the book that stand in apparent contradiction to one another.
As is implicit in the title, the essays within the work walk an often uncertain line between intellectual and social history, with definitions that would seem pertinent to one sphere used to characterize the other. Commentary on the conditions pertaining to state and society, for instance, is almost never based on any statistical rendering or hard data but rather on essentially anecdotal observations produced by intellectuals writing about current events to which they bore direct witness, reflections which are often a bit haphazard and in a number of important instances voice quite different views from one another. The vast collection of quotations from participants in the Chinese intellectual arena poses another problem: as the author notes toward the end of the book, “Chinese scholars have always had the tendency to exaggerate” (pp. 333-334). While this tendency is certainly not restricted to Chinese scholars, there are any number of instances in the book that clearly fit with this characterization (one case in point: Kang Youwei 康有为 in 1919: “What will allow us to stand on our own and protect ourselves? The army. What is the kind of civilization that garners true respect? It is militaristic. What will allow us to conquer territory, capture their people, bind them up, and make them our slaves? What will make other countries kowtow to us and praise us? Our army.” [p. 311]), while others are downright satirical; Luo, however, makes no serious attempt to distinguish gross exaggeration and satire from more measured judgments, taking most of the utterances he quotes essentially at face value.
In general, the author seems to center his analyses around a view of late Qing and early Republican society quite close to that to which Fu Sinian gave voice around 1919: “‘The old order in society has died, [and] there is no central force with the core capacity to maintain society’” (p. 382). The details of this view are most fully set forth in the first chapter, with its focus on the transformation brought about by the “Western Tide,” most prominently among scholars (an unavoidably narrow translation of the more encompassing social category of shiren 士人). Luo sets the scene in this manner: “One of the most important and unavoidable themes in modern China is how Chinese scholars responded to the Western tide. The culture war [cultural competition] between China and the West is key to understanding the contradictions between them. The West was prepared for this culture war, but Chinese scholars only gradually learned of the importance of what contemporaries called the ‘thought war,’ a delay during which the West unconsciously changed Chinese ways of thinking” (p. 1). The translation here is more than a bit misleading, affixing the more incendiary label of “culture war” to what should be appropriately translated as “cultural competition” (文化竞争). Luo goes on to claim that “The [cultural competition] was begun by a self-consciously aggressive West against a defensive China, but Chinese scholars only became aware of the war after the West had already launched a series of offensives” (p. 6), a statement that does lend a certain credibility to the translators’ choice of the term “culture war.” This concept of cultural competition appears repeatedly in the chapter, although without any serious delineation of who the agents were who set it in motion or what its specific goals might have been. We are eventually led to believe, however, quite properly, that the Western players in this competition were principally the missionaries who were attempting to convert China to Christianity, who through trial and error eventually settled on whatever means they found expedient, most prominently the introduction of Western science.
The record of the missionary effort is complicated, although Luo at times tends to simplify it, at one point claiming, for instance, that Timothy Richard “was representative of a new type of missionary who, to put it simply, wanted to build a Western society in China” (p. 16). (It should be noted that the Chinese original has no mention of “a new type of missionary,” merely saying “these missionaries” (这些传教士). Luo also goes so far as to claim that “Missionaries believed that a foreign culture had to be completely rejected or accepted, there is no middle ground. . . . For Chinese scholars, then, to learn from the West was to embark down a path of no return” (p. 30). The authority Luo claims for this is the British journalist/“Old China Hand” Alexander Michie, less than an unimpeachable source, given his extremely critical opinion of the Western missionary enterprise in China and what he regarded as its dire consequences.[1] The question here, however, ultimately devolves into one of whether the Chinese culture the missionaries encountered was perceived by them to be an insuperable impediment to the Christianization of the country, or that Christianization could be fit into the existing Confucian-based epistemic structure.
Writing early on in his long career in China, the German missionary/educator Ernst Faber strongly suggested the impediment perspective, lending credence to Michie’s observations: “I repeat once more, the pride of the Chinese rests in their writing and literature. Take these away and the decayed edifice of eastern civilization tumbles in ruins.”[2] On the other hand, for Young J. Allen, while certainly holding to the view that Christianity was needed to save China, the Chinese language magazine he edited, the Jiaohui xinbao (敎会新报), “was remarkable in also publishing tolerant essays making intelligent comparisons between Christianity, on the one hand, and the religions of China, on the other. A primary concern was to show the similarities between Christianity and Confucianism.”[3] And in the introductory essay entitled “The Awakening of China” to his The Lore of Cathay, the redoubtable W.A.P. Martin praised the flexibility of Chinese civilization thus: “The germs of their civilization, like those of any civilization worth preserving, are not precious stones to be kept in a casket, but seeds to be cultivated and improved.”[4] Writing a few years later, however, sometime after the post-Boxer reforms had been put in place, Martin expressed himself in a significantly more aggressive vein: “But when I see them [the Chinese] as they are today, united in a firm resolve to break with the past, and to seek new life by adopting the essentials of Western civilisation, I feel that my hopes for the future are more than half realised.”[5] For his part, in his long reminiscence of his life in China, Forty-five Years in China, while mentioning in passing that he had studied Legge’s translations of the Confucian Classics, Timothy Richard passes no judgment at all on the merits or sustainability of the core of Chinese civilization even as he makes it clear that he is a steadfast supporter of radical reform.
In other words, while the missionaries seem to have shared a pessimistic view of the dismal state of China in the late Qing dynasty, the question of whether or not they were determined to “build a Western society” there seems moot. It may well have been that Allen’s willingness to publish positive comparisons between Confucianism and Christianity was a mere stalking-horse camouflaging his actual disdain for the former in order to assure potential converts of his benign motives, but the record seems unclear. Martin’s high-minded regard for the potential of the indigenous tradition around 1900 seems to give way to outright cheerleading for complete Westernization once the situation seems to him to have progressed sufficiently to have made him sense that such a transformation was possible, which suggests either that he was being disingenuous in his earlier utterance or that his views on the need for complete Westernization may have depended on circumstance, even if there was an underlying conviction that such Westernization was the desirable outcome. Outright advocacy for such radical change as expressed in Faber’s letter, however, seems rare, if only because it would have been regarded as impolitic. Faber’s letter, for instance, was apparently never published and appears only in missionary archives. For Chinese scholars to have “only gradually learned of the importance of what contemporaries called the ‘thought war’” is only natural, then, as the missionaries themselves were chary of framing their advocacy in such terms, leaving the question of whether they were actually engaged in prosecuting a “cultural competition” murky, perhaps even to themselves, but certainly to their Chinese interlocuters. The “competition” may seem in retrospect to have been clear cut to Luo, but it probably did not seem so obvious to most of those on the scene at the time.
The wavering in the opinions of Chinese intellectuals facing this cultural confrontation is represented starkly by a May Fourth-period statement by Wu Mi 吴宓 that Luo cites as demonstrating that “the extent to which [the ‘cultural preservationists’] were enveloped by the Western tide is further evidence of China’s defeat in the [cultural competition] between China and the West” (p. xviii). A look at what Wu actually says, however, makes this assumption of Wu having been completely engulfed by the Western tides a good deal more ambiguous: “‘It can certainly be said that I have indirectly inherited Western orthodoxy and absorbed its central spirit. I brought back the little I received, which helped me to understand the advantages of Chinese culture and the greatness and rightness of Confucius’” (p. xvii, n. 12). Luo concludes such thinking is in accord with the notion that “the first step in identifying with the West in the late Qing was to locate elements in China’s cultural traditions that were equivalent with Western cultural values.” As I have argued elsewhere in the case of Yan Fu 严复, however, such laborious attempts to equilibrate Western and Chinese ideas might alternatively be regarded as seeking compatibility between Western and Chinese ideas rather than simply “identifying with the West.”[6] Beginning with his painstaking attempts to find linguistic roots in China for the concepts he was translating from English, Yan was at all times preoccupied with a kind of cultural “making all things equal” (齐物论, a concept from Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi). In concluding these prefatory remarks, Luo allows that “In studying China, we should always remember that ‘the West’ is simply one historical variable (this is often ignored by historians in China” (p. xxi), which, while certainly true, would seem to run against the claims for an all-conquering Western thought set forth earlier in the preface and much harped upon in the pages that follow. Professor Luo would have done well to heed his own advice.
One of the problems with the book is its failure to clearly distinguish between changes in the disposition of Chinese intellectuals over time, with the first chapter seeming to presume that the “Western tide” was an overwhelming presence from the late Qing on. Luo does at one point mention that “Before tradition had been smashed, and a polarity had been created between the old and the new, . . . [a]lthough both Kang [Youwei] and Zhang [Taiyan 章太炎] used many Western ideas, . . . they were still searching for resources in tradition, which dramatically marks them off from the people during the May Fourth period who relied exclusively on Western democracy and science as their weaponry” (p. 40). This is a valid and exceedingly important point, which, however, only surfaces this one time and is never subjected to serious analysis, particularly regarding the profound differences between the late Qing and May Fourth intellectual environment. This brief discussion of Kang and Zhang brings up another important problem within the book as a whole: there is throughout a general lack of consideration for the possible differences between Chinese thinkers being engaged in what might be nothing more than tactical manipulation of Western ideas and being completely engulfed within a Western epistemic framework.
Luo continues in this vein of claiming the submission of Chinese thinkers to Western values as early as the late Qing: “Since China had been repeatedly defeated in battle, it must have an inferior culture. . . . When Chinese began believing that defeat signaled inferiority, their values had become Western. The West had achieved a fundamental victory in changing Chinese ways of thinking.” He quotes a Huang Yuanyong 黄远庸 essay from 1914 as to how Chinese thinkers were “all headed towards the West, at faster and faster speeds,” Huang writing that “‘One after another, renowned ministers and conservative gentry parrot [Western] superficialities to be pleasing and acceptable’” (p. 26). This statement of Huang’s is clearly critical and all but satirical of what he appears to regard as the superficial acceptance of superficial ideas, strongly suggesting that serious thinkers (including he himself) did not follow this bent. The contradiction between facile adoption of the new and adherence to an older essence is perhaps best expressed in Fu Sinian’s 傅斯年 1929 confession to Hu Shi 胡适: “Our thoughts are new and our beliefs are new. We’re completely Western in our thoughts, but in how we settle ourselves and establish our destinies, we’re still traditional Chinese” (p. 37). Luo also notes a similar disposition on the part of Hu Shi: “[His] use of terms like ‘one family’ and ‘Great Unity’ show us that he was still clinging to Chinese concepts. Like many educated Chinese in the twentieth century, he longed for the self-cultivated transcendent worldview of the traditional Chinese scholar” (p. 306). Luo concludes from utterances like those of Hu Shi that “Although Chinese scholars began to take the West as their model, it was more their intention than a reality. Chinese society did not Westernize, which means that Chinese intellectuals could not think outside their social reality, no matter how strong their desire. Even the most Western-leaning Chinese intellectuals did not truly Westernize” (p. 37). There would seem to be a slippage between this conclusion and earlier statements, such as how the West “had achieved a fundamental victory in changing Chinese ways of thinking.” If it is the case—and I would agree that it is—that Westernization was more “intention than a reality,” there is a bedeviling contradiction between the two notions that Luo brings up from time to time but fails to explore in needed detail.
One of the key concepts of the book is contained in the title of the second chapter: “The Disintegration of the Four-Class Society” of scholars (士), farmers, artisans, and merchants. Whenever this notion is brought up, however, the only class really discussed is the first, the scholars, and it is the decline of their status that is the real focus of this “disintegration.” Luo even goes so far as to say that: “When old-style scholars found it difficult to find a livelihood, and new scholars could no longer be created because of the abolition of the civil service examinations, scholars became a historical category” (p. 85). He does, however, allow that “the traditional four-class social structure was already [by the late Qing] in the midst of its own crisis” (p. 63) and “Before the arrival of the tides from the West, these subtle social changes had already been taking place for several hundred years” (p. 67), even though he fails to deal with the fungibility between shi status and wealthy merchants (商) that had been going on all that time. While there certainly was a new instability of the status of the educated elite in the final years of the Qing, partly consequent upon the changes to the examination topics and the eventual abolition of the system as a whole in 1905, the attacks on the new urban culture that emanated from the reform intellectuals gathered around Peking University in the May Fourth period suggests that the shi, now reconfigured as modern “intellectuals” did not really disappear, or were least engaged in a fierce rearguard struggle to maintain their social position and intellectual authority.[7]
In line with this thesis concerning the decomposition of the traditional literati, the second chapter contains an extended account and analysis of the diary of a juren from semi-rural Shanxi, one Liu Dapeng 刘大鹏 (1857-1942), who left an illuminating record covering most of the years between 1890 and 1942. The differences between scholars from the hinterland and those from the metropolitan areas and treaty ports are one of Liu’s constant themes, and his sense of disorientation vis a vis the new order that is struggling to be born becomes extremely clear within his text. While Liu’s laments are certainly heartfelt and the crisis was very real, his complaints nonetheless have a rather generic tone to them. For instance, such judgments as “Recently, the atmosphere in my village has become worse and worse, peasants look down on scholarship and look up to commerce. Talented and refined young men leave home to become merchants while the number attending school is very few” (p. 69) and, particularly, that “Liu’s diary is filled with lamentations over scholars who only studied examination essays rather than the classics, histories, philosophers, and anthologies” (p.72), which Luo admits had become something of a cliché, but it could have been uttered by any number of frustrated middle degree-holders from the late Ming on, and is not to be strictly applicable to late Qing conditions. On the disparity between hinterland scholars like Liu and the fewer in the major urban areas, who seemed to have been favored by the new examination regime, Luo sums it up thus: “I think it is helpful for our understanding of modern China to put the capital and treaty ports and areas under their influence on one side and the massive inland areas on another side” (p. 78n.47).
While this conclusion might fairly summarize Liu’s feelings on the matter, it leaves unaddressed the perceptions of certain elite thinkers on the actual quality of the intellectual capital extant in the metropolitan zone. Yan Fu, for instance, held a highly jaundiced view of those introduced to Western education in the treaty ports: “In the trading cities on the coast, where missionary instruction has taken place, one meets constantly with those who can speak and write Western languages. But finding anyone capable of serving as science teachers is all but impossible—there are almost none. . . . Such is the poverty of pedagogical technique.”[8] If anything, writing in 1907, the young Wang Guowei 王国维 was even more acidulous in his judgment of his age-group cohort:
[Among] current translators (referring to those who translate Japanese books), there are not one or two out of ten who are able to understand Japanese, and not three or four out of ten who have a grounding in Chinese learning. And those who can also understand a Western language and have a deep understanding of a particular discipline, based on my narrow experience, I have yet to see a single one. Their works and translations, simply are of no benefit even in the short run: the capacity to transmit knowledge is something they innately lack, so their writings are all crude and jumbled, with awkward and unreadable diction.[9]
There was a real sense, then, that the achievements of those pursuing Western learning in the treaty ports were not in the end so distinctly superior to their rural brethren, as Luo’s interpretation of Liu’s diary would have us believe. As for the complete separation of thinkers between what Paul Cohen called the littoral and the hinterland, Ma Junwu 马君武, an indisputable product of the hinterland from rural Guangxi, was able to learn enough foreign language to produce quite acceptable translations of Western works, and to become a thoroughly cosmopolitan associate of first Kang Youwei and later Liang Qichao 梁启超, after the young Ma had managed to study in Japan.[10] In other words, social circulation in the late Qing may have been more fluid than the conventional wisdom concerning the littoral/hinterland split would have it.
The third chapter shifts into a detailed discussion of the consequences of the abolition of the examination system and how the introduction of the new school system and curricula affected the social order. This chapter is full of useful and well-supported insights and does illuminate one of the real shifts in Chinese society that began in the late Qing. Luo adduces considerable detail about how the new schools ended up being much more expensive than the traditional education system, and notes how many people were unwilling to send their children to the schools. He follows Yu Ying-shih 余英时 in noting that the examination system, with its universal reach had served a “mediating and connective function in China’s social structure” (p. 100). Luo, however, seems a bit naïve about the actual openness of the system. While he allows that “the number of people who received official rank through the civil service examinations was extremely small,” he still maintains that “the openness of the institution put an official career within the reach of every student. Most importantly, the investment required to study for the examination system was extremely low” (p. 103). This rosy view of universal access to the traditional examination route to success completely overlooks the opportunity cost of withdrawing boys from the workforce to allow them to study sufficiently to pass even the most elementary of the exams, something that effectively denied the vast majority of the rural population true access to the “ladder of success.”
The fourth chapter tackles the knotty issue of the decline of the old social structure, the transformation of “scholars” into “intellectuals,” and the consequent marginalization of the latter: “The disintegration of the four-class society allowed previously marginalized social groups (like merchants and soldiers) to gradually move into the center of society and gave rise to marginal intellectuals” (p. 139). Again, the focus here is on the loss of status of the those who had been the dominant group in traditional times, and the phrasing “gradually move into the center of society” would perhaps have been more accurately stated as “gradually move to the apex of society.” Aside from being denied a clear path to political leadership through success in the examination system, Luo claims one of the principal distinctions between the two categories was that “Modern intellectuals could discuss politics, but rarely participated in them; some turned away from politics altogether” (p. 152). And even more strongly: “Now that scholars and officials had been divided, the former became professional intellectuals who discussed governance but refused to participate in government” (p. 158). He mentions that “Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培, and some other scholars pursuing the new strongly advocated that educated Chinese should not discuss officials or discuss government,” although immediately adding a qualifier that calls this basic judgment into question: “[Cai] himself discussed governance and served in the government” (p. 153). We are then told that, even as Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 was urging Liang Qichao to “develop his scholarship” rather than “discuss politics,” “Ding was himself directly participating in the government” (pp. 154-155). Luo concludes this discussion with the important point that “educated Chinese in the late Qing and early Republic had more thoroughly experienced the transition from scholar to intellectual in a sociological sense than in a mental one” (p. 155), amply demonstrated by the plain contradiction between the words and actions of Cai and Ding. In other words, while their position in society may have changed, their attitudinal orientation toward their role in society had not, which to a substantial degree calls into question one of the pillars upon which Luo based his conclusion of the difference between the two categories.
Luo goes on the describe another new group that arose out of the reform of the educational system, one he calls the “marginal intellectual,” “who occupied the space between the educated elite and the illiterate” (p. 167). He basically enlarges upon Yan Fu’s and Wang Guowei’s characterization of such men by defining them as “neither Chinese nor Western; they were not old nor new. Their training in Chinese learning, Western learning, new learning, and old learning was unsystematic. At best, they were superficially conversant with writing and could read a newspaper. . . . They resided between the new cities and the old villages, the elite and the masses. They were irrelevant and could not identify with either end of the spectrum. Actually, they wanted to identify with the cities and the elites, but were rejected by both” (p. 171). Luo further characterizes them with the astute observation that “As the true followers of the Western-oriented intellectual elites, marginal intellectuals aiming for ‘the upper echelon’ represented an imaginary audience that had replaced the masses in front of the intellectual elites” (p. 182). While I am not convinced by his dismissal of this group as being merely “superficially conversant with writing and [able] to read a newspaper,” his description of them as contributors to social discord is convincing. One might ask, however, just how they differed sociologically from the mass of “expectant officials” (候补官) with no real prospects of ever gaining a substantial post who had become such a problem no later than in the final century of the Qing. Further, Luo never provides a clean definition of just who this group consisted of, at one point remarking in passing that “Hu Shi was still a marginal intellectual” (p. 175). Since Hu early on transcended this “marginal” status, one can only conclude that a good portion of this group consisted of students, many of whom would fairly quickly go on to become part of the very intellectual elite they had at one time been so censorious of. Luo’s failure to differentiate between students and some ill-defined perduring “intellectual proletariat” who had little prospect of advancement renders this category too ambiguous to be of analytical value.
Among the contradictory qualities of this marginal intellectual is Luo’s view of their social function. Although having disdain for their intellectual bona fides, Luo places a high valence on their social role: “As the value of intellectuals to guide society continued to decline, they were forced to cede their position to marginal intellectuals, who were engaged in taking action” (p. 189). To the considerable extent to which this observation may be valid, it perhaps reflects the rapidity of intellectual change in the early twentieth-century, something that Luo had astutely pointed out earlier in the book: “A direct result of the worship of the new was a constant search for something newer” (p. 57). This constant churning of ideas in favor of “something newer” can be illustrated by the example of Hu Shi, among the leaders of the avant garde at the end of the 1910s, but who by 1936 would ruefully admit to Zhou Zuoren 周作人 that over the past decade “‘most of the youth does not stand by my side because I am not willing to ride the wave of fashion, not willing to lie, and not willing to supply them with “vulgar interests’” (p. 57). Thus, once the marginal intellectuals (that is to say, those among them who were students) stepped into positions of some authority, they were inevitably obliged to make certain compromises with the existing order, thereby incurring the scorn of those feeling that the society with which they were so discontented could only be ameliorated by constant resort to newer and more radical nostrums and a radical severance from those holding political power.
The question of the actual strength of both the Chinese traditional order and the power of the encroaching West is another focal point of the book. While much of the exposition would seem to accept that both forces were of considerable strength, later in the book Luo seems to hedge on these assumptions. For instance, on p. 240, Luo claims that “the weight of tradition was usually, and to a considerable extent, imaginary, but New Culture personalities perceived it was ‘real,’” an assertion presented without any supporting evidence, and which stands at painful odds with the extended written record of such sensitive channelers of the disposition of the times as Lu Xun 鲁迅. Similarly, on pp. 251-252 we are told that “In the late Qing, the greatness [meihao 美好, a term most often associated with aesthetic superiority] of the ‘West’ and its institutions was often imaginary.” While this may to a certain extent be true, the conclusion fails to analyze the distinction between the perception of the West’s “meihao” and its geopolitical strength, which could by no means be considered imaginary, especially since late Qing underestimation of that strength had so often redounded to China’s severe disadvantage. And as Luo affirms throughout, the West and its ways remained objects of emulation throughout the period he is discussing, so a conflation between power and aesthetic desirability was only natural under the circumstances.
Chapter 7 moves on to consider tide of disillusionment with the West that the awareness of the carnage of the first World War brought to many in China and led to “‘the West’ that had occupied Chinese hearts and minds was no longer [seen as] a monolithic ‘pristine New World,’ but [was] constituted of both good and bad elements,” although Luo immediately qualifies that by stating that “of course, the West remained the model for most Chinese scholars” (p. 252). This new awareness of Western flaws was accompanied by a resurgence of an interest in socialism, which constituted an ideal combination of the cachet of the West with a sharp critique of the flaws in the very place from which the ideas originated. Luo concludes that “The focus on socialism among both new and old political forces, and among all intellectual schools, suggests a remarkable consistency in everyone’s concerns and thoughts” (p. 261). It may also have suggested a desire to continue to see an intellectually unified West, with socialism being regarded as the ineluctable vehicle of the social Darwinism that had so dominated Chinese consciousness following Yan Fu’s translation of T. H. Huxley in the final years of the nineteenth century. If the West now was seen as an amalgam of the good and bad, socialism represented the good and it thus became the new avatar of the meihao. In other words, “Forced to learn from the West, [Chinese scholars] always chose the isms that had the least nationalist connotations, such as anarchism, cosmopolitanism, socialism, and so on. This not only helped them avoid being identified with a ‘weak China,’ but also allowed them to avoid identifying with a ‘strong West.’ In a single stroke, educated Chinese intentionally annulled their own identity and denied themselves a Western cultural identity” (p. 303). They remained, however, transfixed by a Western idea widely seen as the only viable vehicle of history’s forward progress.
Finally, there are two areas of which there are numerous examples that mar the effect of the book. One is plain contradiction, of which in the interest of brevity I will only supply two examples: (1) On p. 116, we are told that “The desire for education among the villagers actually declined (as previously mentioned, many families, refused to send their children to school even if it was free), as the costs of education rose.” This is not clear, and perhaps refers to the overall social costs of the new educational system, but is misleading concerning the costs of sending any individual child to school; at a minimum some clarification should have been provided. (2) On p. 177: “Perry Link has shown that it was the ‘common people’ who read the classical fiction of the Shanghai-based mandarin ducks-and-butterfly school.” But, on the next page (178) we have: “The vernacular fiction that was originally intended for those who ‘pull carts and sell starch’ was only read by elite intellectuals and the marginal intellectuals.” These two statements plainly contradict one another, although the contradiction itself raises an interesting and enduring problem for literary history.
Secondly, the author is inclined to make sweeping judgments about which little or no evidence is supplied. Again, I will supply only two instances: (1) pp 144-145: “Although the new schools trained a number of ‘new personalities,’ they did not cultivate many ‘new scholars.’ The matriculation of students who did not have any learning is one of the most important reasons for the later social decline of scholars.” This is a pretty serious charge against the efficacy of the new school system, and one that would require something more than a mere obiter dictum to be convincing. (2) p. 162: “meetings were like the civil service examinations, they were a ‘shortcut to success,’ a new channel for upward social mobility representative of a changing society.” While Luo admits the source text for this was engaging in satire, he still seems to accept the claim as a measured judgment.
The translation is generally accurate, although there are a number of slip-ups, inevitable in a work of this size and scope. For instance, the title of chapter 6 is translated as “The Monolithicization of Chinese Tradition: The Development of Anti-Traditional Trends in the Late Qing and Early Republic,” while it should have been rendered as “The Negative Monolithicization of Chinese Tradition: The Evolution (演化) of Anti-Traditional Trends in the Late Qing and Early Republic,” the important qualifier fumian (负面) or “negative” having been omitted from the translation, something that certainly affects the impact of the title. On p. 18 n. 37 “Zhou Xirui 周锡瑞” (Joseph Esherick’s Chinese name) is listed as translator rather than as author of The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. The key term weixin (维新) is translated first on pp. 89-90 as “restorationist,” but becomes “reformist” on p. 92. The title of chapter 7 is only partially translated as “The International Storm and the Development of Chinese Thought in the May Fourth Era,” instead of the complete title: “The Splitting of the West: The International Storm and the Development of Chinese Thought in the May Fourth Era” (西方的分裂：国际风云与五四前后中国思想的演变). These errors are in the end quibbles, but as with all translations, the careful reader who can read both languages is well advised to compare both versions when dealing with key terms and passages.
Theodore D. Huters
UCLA
NOTES:
[1] For a thumbnail account of Michie and his views, see Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), p. 64. Michie’s negative appraisal of the missionary effort was, significantly, the subject of Yan Fu’s first translation from English into Chinese.
[2] Ernst Faber quoted in Theodore Huters, Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2022), p. 95.
[3] Adrian A. Bennett, Missionary Journalist in China: Young J. Allen and his Magazines, 1860-1883 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 114.
[4] W.A.P. Martin, The Lore of Cathay (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrer, 1901), p. 15.
[5] W.A.P. Martin, The Awakening of China (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910), p. vi.
[6] See Huters, Taking China to the World, pp. 125-164. At one point, Luo cites a statement of Yan’s to try to show how even he had given up on a Chinese “essence”: “By 1895, Yan Fu firmly believed that because Chinese scholarship could not produce wealth or save China from destruction, it should be described as ‘useless’ and be temporarily ‘put away on a high shelf.’ (Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power, p. 87). In short, Chinese learning was no longer essence” (p. 31). The crucial problem here is that Luo fails to distinguish between Yan merely talking about the inadequacies of contemporary scholarship and his thoughts on the culture as a whole.
[7] On these attacks, see chapter 5 of Taking China to the World, particularly pp. 175-189.
[8] Quoted in Taking China to the World, pp. 154-155.
[9] Wang Guowei 王国维, “Lun xin xueyu zhi shuru” 论新学语之输入(On the introduction of a new academic language), in Zhou Xishan 周锡山, ed., Wang Guowei wenxue meixue lunzhu ji 王国维文学美学论著集 (A collection of Wang Guowei’s Work on literature and aesthetics), (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2018), p. 134.
[10] On Paul Cohen’s famous distinction, see his Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Qing China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 244-276. For a brief account of Ma Junwu, see Taking China to the World, pp. 132-133.