From Culturalist Nationalism to Conservatism

Origins and Diversification of Conservative Ideas in Republican China

Aymeric Xu

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110740264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

What does it mean to be a conservative in Republican China? Challenging the widely held view that Chinese conservatism set out to preserve traditional culture and was mainly a cultural movement, this book proposes a new framework with which to analyze modern Chinese conservatism. It identifies late Qing culturalist nationalism, which incorporates traditional culture into concrete political reforms inspired by modern Western politics, as the origin of conservatism in the Republican era. During the May Fourth period, New Culture activists belittled any attempts to reintegrate traditional culture with modern politics as conservative. What conservatives in Republican China stood for was essentially this late Qing culturalist nationalism that rejected squarely the museumification of traditional culture. Adopting a typological approach in order to distinguish different types of conservatism by differentiating various political implications of traditional culture, this book divides the Chinese conservatism of the Republican era into four typologies: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarian conservatism. As such, this book captures – for the first time – how Chinese conservatism was in constant evolution, while also showing how its emblematic figures reacted differently to historical circumstances.

1 Conservatism: An Idea Rooted in the Present

If understood simply as a mental disposition inherent in customary and contingent human nature, rather than a political ideology, conservatism risks becoming a sour language of fear towards changes, while traditions dear to conservatism risk being regarded as obsolete. As a consequence, the term conservatism suffers from identity issues that require some scrutiny. Indeed, conservatism is often mistaken for other political notions, movements or doctrines that are radically different from it, yet considered to be its synonyms, namely traditionalism, reactionaryism, royalism, and loyalism.

In different spatial and historical contexts, these seemingly related political labels have all been self-proclaimed or attributed, with fundamentally different political connotations. “Loyalism,” for instance, is a telling case in point. In 1902, Zhang Taiyan organized the “Zhina wangguo erbai sishi’er nian jinianhui” (Commemoration ceremony for the two hundred and forty-second anniversary of the destruction of China) in Tokyo. He initially wished to hold the ceremony on the same day the last emperor of the Ming dynasty, Chongzhen (1611‒1644), hung himself on Coal Hill to avoid capture, when Li Zicheng (1606‒1645) and his army seized the Forbidden City.¹ Li was a rebel leader who only ruled over Northern China briefly, before the Manchu forces captured Beijing in 1644 and proclaimed to have received the Mandate of Heaven to rule China. The death of Chongzhen marked the end of the last Han Chinese regime. When the Japanese police arrived at the scene to interrupt the event and asked Zhang which province of the Qing he came from, he responded that he was not a subject of the Qing dynasty but was Chinese (Zhina ren) and a loyalist (yimin) – one of the “left over persons” of the Ming period. Loyalism here refers to the revolutionaries’ allegiance towards the overthrown Chinese government and harbors a defiant attitude towards the Manchu dynasty. After the foundation of the Republic in 1912, loyalism became a synonym for reactionaryism and royalism, the adherents of which refused – at least for a relatively long time – to cut their Manchu queue and continued to press for Puyi’s restoration. During the New Culture Movement, loyalism, with this pejorative connotation, was foisted upon conservatives by some New Culturalists to silence their intellectual opponents.²

The erroneous equivocations that bear upon the notion of conservatism do not constitute a phenomenon peculiar to China. In France, the heritage of the French Revolution is so inscribed in the political process that French conservatism is usually considered to assimilate the reaction rooted in the counterrevolution, reactionaryism, immobilism, and traditionalism of which Joseph de Maistre (1753‒1821) and Louis de Bonald (1754‒1840) are often regarded as architypes. ³ The history of modern Chinese conservatism is also somewhat unique in the sense that conservatism, as a neologism at the turn of the twentieth century, was rarely evoked as a political ideology in late Qing and Republican China. This does not mean that conservatism as a political movement did not exist at that period. Rather, the term itself was stigmatized by accusatory abuse in an era that venerated newness and progress; even conservatives did not seek to ascribe to this political label and strived to be involved in the mainstream intellectual sphere that sullied the use of this term. Hence, if conservatism is not dedemonized and theoretically and empirically differentiated from its seemingly related but in fact distinct concepts, conservatism will be condemned to remain an intellectual current and political movement, the existence of which is commonly believed to be obvious, while also being associated with confusion.

Another problem that arises from the term conservatism is its relationship with its most directly opposed political view. In every political contest, conservatism is usually believed to denote an irreconcilably opposed worldview of radicalism. The former emerges in terms of oppositional politics that attempts to preserve deeply rooted historical connections under threat from modernity and only salutes incremental change, while the latter seeks an overarching transformation blueprint for social and political lives. The political languages of conservatism and radicalism in interwar Europe and Latin America are, however, far from being incommensurable. Francoist Spain is an interesting example. In Brian Tsui’s study of the KMT’s “conservative revolution,” from the victory of the Northern Expedition to the CCP’s seizing of mainland China, he highlights various contradictions in the KMT’s project: participating in the United States-led international order, while claiming to confront Western colonialism; holding on to the goal of universal harmony yet insisting upon the maintenance of traditional hierarchical relations, or relying on spontaneous, individual self-discipline as a means of reinvigorating society but featuring mass organizations in its revolutionary strategy.⁴ To the author, conservative revolutionaries were certainly not models of consistency.⁵

Indeed, conservatism has long had two faces – its ideological foundations and its practice. This is not to say that conservatives are hypocritical or oblivious to the contradiction. When conservatives became radicals during the interwar period, historical complexity attempted to explain the strange entente between conservatism and radicalism. However, it should be emphasized that without establishing ideas in the political and cultural spectrum, “conservatism” and “radicalism” are both too vague and elusive to enable a rigorous analysis when applied to empirical cases. The American Socialist Daniel Bell once self-identified as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture.”⁶ While I disagree with Charlotte Furth’s view that late Qing revolutionaries were politically radical and culturally conservative for the reasons stated in the introductory chapter, her words hint that intellectuals of late Qing and Republican China can be described in a similar way using a variety of combinations. Without relating conservatives to other intellectual and political currents or movements to which they responded or in which they positioned themselves, building up a history of conservatism risks being ahistorical. It is therefore necessary to explore how conservative and radical political-cultural lenses shaped views about important issues and how they shaped the views of one another.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is probably the most “meaningful” utterance of the conservative standpoint, since conservatism, after all, is about retaining what is valuable and useful in tradition. However, when the preservation of tradition becomes a stiff doctrine of traditionalism, it departs from the conservative political value of belief during the piecemeal change through the time-honored wisdom of the past. Jean-Philippe Vincent distinguishes traditionalism from conservatism with these words:

Traditionalism is a nostalgy, more or less structured, by the past. Conservatism does not constitute in any case a nostalgy, because it is deeply rooted in the present and one of its intellectual fortes is to perpetuate the best of the tradition by imposing reforms. Besides, conservatism attaches an essential importance to the History, but not to a past idealized or painted in a holy way. Especially, it is the relation to tradition that separates conservatism from traditionalism. For the latter, tradition is usually rigid: it is stopped, or fixed in whichever moment of the History according to traditionalists’ preferences. For conservatives, tradition is a living thing: it constitutes a way to live in the present, which contributes to the enrichment of tradition in constant formation.⁷

While it may not be totally plausible that conservatism does not encapsulate a nostalgic feeling towards tradition at all, conservatism does not embody an overall rejection of change, neither does it mean re-invention so much as rediscovery: a return to the sources may be necessary, with fresh consideration as to how they might be applied to current problems. “Present” is indeed the keyword to understanding conservative political and moral thinking.⁸ Vincent’s argument echoes Karl Mannheim’s classic studies on conservatism. Mannheim found in traditionalism a universal psychological attitude in most people for most of the time, which translates into an instinctive reliance on the past and a revulsion towards change that constitute a purely reactive act.⁹ In this regard, Mannheim’s traditionalism resembles the conservative mindset theorized by Michael Oakeshott. Conservatism, by contrast, is an articulation of the past that provides meaningful orientation in a specific situation and designates “a continuity that… appears in a very precise sociological or historical situation, [which] develops with what is historically vibrant in an immediate solidary way.”¹⁰ While traditionalists may not be self-conscious of their reactive mentality, conservatism is a mental structure endowed with an objective existence, as compared with “the lived experience hic et nunc of a particular individual.”¹¹ Although this mental structure cannot be regarded as independent of the individuals who initiated it, since its development is entirely dependent on the fate and the spontaneity of the latter, this structure can never be produced by a single and isolated individual.¹² It follows that conservative politics admits and accepts diverse objective realities and is constantly transforming itself to suit the world. To this end, tradition and historical experiences are subjected to scrutiny, reflection, and selection.¹³

Conservatism is context-specific. It is not likely to be replicated in its exact form under other political, social, and temporal circumstances. In contrast, the traditionalist reaction to the new is perfectly predictable.¹⁴ Mannheim gave an interesting example that can be fully related to Chinese traditionalism during the last few decades of the Qing dynasty: the traditionalist reaction to the introduction of the railway. While scientific writing and technological innovation were not absent in ancient China, when the Qing dynasty was forced to initiate a series of open policies to foreign countries from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, Western technologies and especially machineries introduced to China terrified Chinese civilians and provoked significant opposition amongst traditionalist officials. In 1863 – three years after the establishment of the First Convention of Peking (Beijing tiaoyue) was concluded between China and Britain, France, and Russia – the consulates-general of the United States, France, and Britain in Shanghai requested the permission of the Beijing government to build a railway between Shanghai and Suzhou in order to facilitate transportation. The request was refused by the Qing high official, Li Hongzhang (1823‒1901). Western countries made several subsequent requests during the following year without success, because the Qing government suspected that the railway network across China would allow foreigners to penetrate areas other than the treaty ports.¹⁵ In 1865, an English businessman constructed a railway of approximately half a kilometer to exhibit in Beijing. The train was pushed forward by manpower, which, however, resulted in a great panic.¹⁶ According to the records of Qing official Li Yuerui (1862‒1927), “The train ran at the railway like flying. People in Beijing had never been frightened by such a thing that they were convinced… had been made by a demon. The whole country was in such a panic that the scene went almost out of control.”¹⁷ The Infantry Commander ordered an immediate destruction of the railway to appease the ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Romanization
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Conservatism: An Idea Rooted in the Present
• 2 Culturalist Nationalism from the 1890s to the 1900s
• 3 From Culturalist Nationalism to Nationalist Conservatism
• 4 Liberal Conservatism and Anti-modern Conservatism (mid-1910s‒1930s)
• 5 Philosophical and Authoritarian Conservatism (1920s‒1940s)
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects