SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940

Peter Zarrow

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438482842
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Honorable Mention, 2022 Sharon Harris Book Award presented by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Focusing on four key Chinese intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, Abolishing Boundaries offers new perspectives on modern Chinese political thought. These four intellectuals—Kang Youwei, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi—were deeply familiar with the Confucian and Buddhist classical texts, while also interested in the West's utopian literature of the late nineteenth century as well as Kant and the neo-Kantians, Marxists, and John Dewey and new liberalism, respectively. Although none of these four intellectuals can simply be labeled utopian thinkers, this book highlights how their thinking was intertwined with utopian ideals to produce theories of secular transcendence, liberalism, and communism, and how, in explicit and implicit ways, their ideas required some utopian impulse in order to escape the boundaries they identified as imprisoning the Chinese people and all humanity. To abolish these boundaries was to imagine alternatives to the unbearable present. This was not a matter of armchair philosophizing but of thinking through new ways to commit to action. These men did not hold a totalistic picture of some perfect society, but in distinctly different ways they all displayed a utopian impulse that fueled radical visions of change. Their work reveals much about the underlying forces shaping modern thought in China—and the world. Reacting to China's problems, they sought a better future for all humanity.

1

Ways to Conceptualize Utopianism

An Introduction

The new society of the new era that is our ideal is honest, progressive, positive, free, equal, creative, beautiful, good, and peaceful, and it is marked by loving mutual aid, joyful labor, and benefits for the whole society. We hope everything that is hypocritical, conservative, passive, restrictive, privileged, conventional, ugly, and detestable, and is marked by war, conflict, inertia, depression, and benefits for the few will gradually shrink and disappear.

We youth of the new society naturally respect labor, but labor should match the individual’s talents and interests, and become free, joyful, artistic, and beautiful. A sacred thing should not be made into a requirement for sheer survival. … Although we do not hold a superstitious faith that politics is omnipotent, we acknowledge that politics is an important form of our common life, and we believe true democracy certainly means that political power is distributed among the whole people.

—New Youth, 1919

All in all, utopianism did not survive the twentieth century in good shape. The great slaughters and prison-houses of the twentieth century are associated with the utopian promises of Stalinism and Maoism to make omelets by breaking eggs. Even fascists promised a utopia of sorts, at least for the obedient and racially pure. As soon as the Berlin Wall was torn down, certain forward-looking writers promised a utopia of capitalism and liberal democracy, even the end of history: a promise that in fact was already beginning to look illusory by the end of the century. It is also worth noting that from the second half of the twentieth century and at an accelerating pace through the first decades of the twenty-first century, dystopias began to vastly outnumber utopias in novels, films, and TV shows.1 Nonetheless, utopian thinking has hardly disappeared, and plans to radically reform existing conditions are ubiquitous. Indeed, it is hard to find people who entirely lack at least some kind of utopian dream—a peaceful world without war, or a prosperous world without poverty, a spiritual world devoted to the true faith, or a democratic world based on the principle of equality—even if they cannot envision how this world might come into existence. Defenders of utopianism note that it provides a salutary critique of the status quo. Utopias denaturalize existing conditions that might otherwise simply be taken for granted. They show that this world is not necessarily the only possible world. And at times of crisis, utopianism provides emotional escape and even an approximately practical guide to action. It is hard to imagine historical progress without at least some people holding up a utopian vision of what progress can attain.

The twentieth century cannot be understood outside of the utopianism of intellectual elites and popular movements. It has proved difficult to gain historical perspective of this phenomenon. On the one hand, the social sciences in general and Marxism in particular both proclaimed their scientific nature and thus denied their own utopian nature. This tends to make aspects of utopianism invisible. On the other hand, the glib practice of drawing a straight line from the utopianisms of the century to its disasters tends to equate ideology with utopianism and proclaims its dangerous omnipresence. We are all moderns now, perhaps, and live in a world of scientific progress, which is to say rationality. Religious and transcendent experiences are bracketed off. The rational, however, is blind to its own elements of utopianism. Cornelius Castoriadis:

The modern world presents itself, on the surface, as that which has pushed, and tends to push, rationalization to its limit, and because of this, it allows itself to despise—or to consider with respectful curiosity—the bizarre customs, inventions and imaginary representations of previous societies. Paradoxically, however, despite or rather due to this extreme “rationalization,” the life of the modern world is just as dependent on the imaginary as any archaic or historical culture.2

Granted that the utopian is difficult to pin down, we can determine its appeals, effects, and limits through historical analysis. In the case of China, utopianism was a major theme in early-twentieth-century thought from the late Qing period through the Communist Revolution and, arguably, even the ideology of the postrevolutionary state capitalism of our own age. The period from about 1900 into the 1920s might be called China’s moment of “peak utopianism.” This period was marked by enormous social, cultural, economic, and political change and ferment. The Qing dynasty was overthrown in 1911. In the wake of the political chaos that ensued, the “New Culture movement” emerged—a kind of cultural self-critique and a more systematic exploration of the notions of democracy, science, and equality than had been possible in the late Qing period.3 In 1919 the “May Fourth” protests brought thousands into the streets and led to the embryonic political organizations that were to take over the country in just over a few decades.

The ways in which utopianism fueled a range of ideology-making during this period form the core of this book. Utopian thinking in a variety of ideological spheres—particularly anarchism, socialism, and liberalism—shaped the formation of those “isms.” Utopian thinking continued through the 1930s and informed Maoism. This book thus concludes with a brief comment on the hegemonic form utopianism took in the Maoist period from the 1950s and the counterutopianism of the Dengist period to today. In the 1980s, the catastrophes of Maoism as well as the implosion of Marxism-in-practice left many in China in a distinctly anti-utopian mood. However, some of the orthodoxies of the post-Maoist period, such as the promise of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the glorification of economic development, suggest that certain strands in contemporary Chinese thought are better conceived as counterutopian than anti-utopianism; that is, utopianism that denies its own utopian nature. True, utopianism no longer forms the core of Chinese political mentality, which is marked equally by grim determination and by cynicism. Still, the twinned visions of prosperity for the Chinese people (xiaokang) and “wealth and power” for the Chinese state—the chief goal of state-building since the nineteenth century—have after a century been encapsulated in official slogan of “the China dream.”

However, official political discourse such as the Chinese dream is highly nationalistic and thus does not meet the definition of utopianism as I understand it for the purposes of this book. Utopianism in the sense I use it here is an optimistic form of egalitarian and cosmopolitan humanism. It is a product of the Enlightenment and modernity. By “humanism” I simply mean an abiding concern with the well-being of humankind as a whole: a sense that all individuals matter and possess dignity and agency.4 By describing the humanism of modern Chinese thinkers as “cosmopolitan” I do not merely mean to heighten their humanism but also to highlight their engagement with the world: their search for universal truths in a newly interconnected world. At the same time, the Chinese thinkers considered in this book remained deeply commited to the regeneration of China. Indeed, they helped create modern Chinese nationalism. A certain tension arises between cosmopolitan engagement with the world and commitment to nationalism. Yet as Joachim Kurtz notes, “At the same time, this engagement, in line with global trends, became enmeshed with a decidedly nationalist agenda.”5 Utopian thinkers could reconcile these tensions by looking toward a future where the mutual enmity of nations gave way to a moral world order. Cosmopolitanism thus involved both engagement in the present and a vision of a borderless future.

I also take “utopianism” to refer to a secular belief in the perfectibility (or near-perfectibility) of the world based on respect for human dignity and communitas. I acknowledge that there is much that is arbitrary about this definition.6 Utopianism in this sense is not concerned firstly with individuals: it is a social vision. Furthermore, the utopian social vision is not mere belief that things can get better but a leap of faith that all the evils of this world can be abolished. Utopianism is thus distinguished from ordinary optimism or, for that matter, mere reformism by its conviction that the ideal future is not only achievable but is close to inevitable and pretty much around the corner. Optimism is an attitude; reformism is a project; utopianism is a faith or a vision.

The following pages will focus on a great deal of this kind of utopianism—visions of the future. But utopianism is also here and now. Terms such as vision, future, and faith make utopianism sound like a fiction (which it is). However, utopianism can also be seen as immanent in the individual and society. Individuals who engage in utopia-making (as fictions) are already practicing utopianism (within themselves). This is so, not merely in the sense that in some psychological, imaginative mode of experience they are living in utopia, but in the sense that they participate in an ongoing tradition of utopianism. Societies are already utopian in the sense they already possess the seeds of utopia in various forms of nonexploitative and voluntary association. Whether this utopian potential can be fully realized in the revolutionary transformation of society is another question.7

Utopianism

“Utopianism” is variously regarded as ancient and universal, or, more precisely dated to a particular time and place: Renaissance Europe. It is possible to regard the “utopian propensity” as well-nigh universal.8 There are various ways to classify utopian thinking. It is possible to project utopias into the past, the future, or the present elsewhere, or some combination of those temporal-spatial alternatives. Plato’s Atlantis was distant from Athens in both place and time. Religious visions of Heaven may be contemporaneous as well as potential future states, and may even (less commonly) be regarded as here rather than some kind of there. And poets and philosophers played with utopias every so often. But it was with the Renaissance that utopianism became just that: an “ism”—a way of thinking about society systematically, even scientifically. This modern utopianism rested on the assumption that society could be reconstructed on rational grounds.9 More’s Utopia had its playful and probably self-satiric side, and we cannot know how seriously More himself ever took his own exploration of communism. But it inaugurated a form of literary expression that soon migrated into political treatises. Thus “utopianism” refers both to a literary genre and to a style of political thought associated with Rousseau, Marx, and other revolutionaries and reformers.

Definitions of “utopia” are numerous and various. They often begin with the ambiguity of More’s Latin pun on ou-topia (no place) versus eu-topia (good place), which establishes the paradoxical nature of the concept. And of course your utopia may be my dystopia.10 It is fun but less important that utopias have often predicted later developments both general, such as steps toward gender equality, polyamory, the elimination of slavery, and the like, and specific, such as the newspaper, public garbage collection, the telephone, the flush toilet, and the like. More importantly, utopias highlight the limits of our social imagination. They denaturalize conscious and unconscious assumptions. To imagine alternatives to the existing state of affairs, allegedly founded on cosmic laws or the image of God or some other higher force, is to engage in utopianism.

If utopianism is a universal predilection, it is more noticeable at certain times. Roughly speaking, there have been two great periods of utopian writing in the West: the sixteenth century beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, and the nineteenth century of Bellamy, Morris, and Wells, as well as Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Owen, and Marx. (The “Sixties” might count as a third period, though a briefer one sandwiched between Marcuse and LeGuin.) Rich fictional accounts and finely argued political theory often appeared roughly at the same time. Arguably, this was true for China at the end of the Qing dynasty; however, as the twentieth century proceeded, political theory retained a strong utopian flavor while literary utopias disappeared.

Relatively little Chinese writing can be labeled full-fledged utopian screeds or “speaking picture” utopias—that is, detailed visions of perfect societies set on distant isles or sometime in the future.11 Even fewer Chinese writers can be called full-fledged utopians. The Great Commonweal, written around 1900 by Kang Youwei, is the single exception to this generalization before the twenty-first century. I discuss Kang’s work in the next chapter, but it is worth noting here that Kang himself maintained an extremely ambiguous attitude toward the utopian project. Kang held that his utopian knowledge was so dangerous that most of it could be revealed only to trusted disciples, and only parts of it could be made public until after his death.

Nonetheless, Kang was not the only utopian writer of the last decade of the Qing. This, the first decade of the twentieth century, saw a surge of “political novels,” many of which were utopian to one degree or another.12 If utopian novels had found an enormous readership in the West in the last half of the nineteenth century, offering a critique of Victorian capitalism and industrialization while reflecting an optimism buoyed by economic growth, novels in other parts of the world soon emerged to criticize colonialism and show how oppressed peoples might become citizens of their own countries.13 Chinese utopian short stories and novels published in the last decade of the Qing included Cai Yuanpei’s “New Year’s Dream” (Xinnian meng, 1904), Wu Jianren’s science fiction novel New Story of the Stone (Xin shitou ji, 1908), as well as Liang Qichao’s unfinished novel The Future of New China (Xin Zhongguo weilai ji, 1902), and many other literary representations of the “new” and of the future.14 Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy, and Suehiro Tetchō were all known to Chinese readers. Many aspects of ideal societies, not to mention visions of a strong China, were expressed in late Qing fiction. As Catherine Yeh has shown, the political novel in China taught readers about linear progressive time and about China’s place in the larger world. With their protagonists traveling across various continents as they wrestled with solutions to the problems of the present day, novels helped envision a China that “began consciously to join a translingual and transcultural universality of ideas, ideals, conflicts, and controversies.”15

Strangely, literary utopias disappeared after the fall of the Qing. However, utopian thought flourished. In this book, I focus on political treatises rather than fiction. Fiction retains a certain ambiguity and multilayered-ness (unreliable narrators, for example) that political treatises ideally abjure. The utopian fictions of the Renaissance were set in distant places inspired by the New World. The utopian fictions of the Industrial Revolution were set in the future. Both imagined something that the author presented as a perfect society—or perhaps as satire in some cases and escapism in others. But utopianism is not only a literary genre. Another type of utopian writing is directly political; that is, it takes the form of theorizing. It does not primarily focus on the details of a perfect society but rather constructs an argument about how to perfect society: process as much as state. This type of utopian thought was central to Chinese political writing in the twentieth century.

To return to the utopianism of the earliest years of the twentieth century, some of that explosion can be explained in terms of the institutions of rapidly growing global capitalism. Western imperialism required states to provide administrative regulation domestically precisely to foster the interpenetration of national economies through the exchange of goods. Unlike earlier and non-Western imperialism, this process required relatively large civil and military bureaucracies; of course, it was profoundly unequal and depended on violence. The role of the state in protecting so-called private property, investing in infrastru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Ways to Conceptualize Utopianism: An Introduction
• 2. Cosmopolitanism and Equality: Kang Youwei
• 3. Aesthetics and Transcendence: Cai Yuanpei
• 4. Democracy and the Community: Chen Duxiu
• 5. Experimentalism, Process, and Progress: Hu Shi
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover