Chinese History and Culture

Seventeenth Century Through Twentieth Century

Ying-shih Yü, Josephine Chiu-Duke, Michael Duke

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542005
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

The recipient of the Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and the Tang Prize for "revolutionary research" in Sinology, Ying-shih Yü is a premier scholar of Chinese studies. Chinese History and Culture volumes 1 and 2 bring his extraordinary oeuvre to English-speaking readers. Spanning two thousand years of social, intellectual, and political change, the essays in these volumes investigate two central questions through all aspects of Chinese life: what core values sustained this ancient civilization through centuries of upheaval, and in what ways did these values survive in modern times?

From Ying-shih Yü's perspective, the Dao, or the Way, constitutes the inner core of Chinese civilization. His work explores the unique dynamics between Chinese intellectuals' discourse on the Dao, or moral principles for a symbolized ideal world order, and their criticism of contemporary reality throughout Chinese history. Volume 2 of Chinese History and Culture completes Ying-shih Yü's systematic reconstruction and exploration of Chinese thought over two millennia and its impact on Chinese identity. Essays address the rise of Qing Confucianism, the development of the Dai Zhen and Zhu Xi traditions, and the response of the historian Zhang Xuecheng to the Dai Zhen approach. They take stock of the thematic importance of Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century masterpiece Honglou meng ( Dream of the Red Chamber ) and the influence of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People, as well as the radicalization of China in the twentieth century and the fundamental upheavals of modernization and revolution. Ying-shih Yü also discusses the decline of elite culture in modern China, the relationships among democracy, human rights, and Confucianism, and changing conceptions of national history. He reflects on the Chinese approach to history in general and the larger political and cultural function of chronological biographies. By situating China's modern encounter with the West in a wider historical frame, this second volume of Chinese History and Culture clarifies its more curious turns and contemplates the importance of a renewed interest in the traditional Chinese values recognizing common humanity and human dignity.

1. Some Preliminary Observations on the Rise of Qing Confucian Intellectualism

This is a thoroughly revised and much expanded version of a paper first drafted in 1971. Since it was originally intended to serve as an introduction to my book-length study, tentatively entitled The Rise of Confucian Intellectualism in the Qing, with it, I tried to cover rather than dig the ground. In rewriting this paper, I have still followed my original plan by avoiding, as much as possible, factual details. The central task I set for myself was to formulate certain conceptual schemes in light of which the internal development of Neo-Confucianism from the Song to the Qing may be looked at anew and, it is hoped, with fruitfulness. Some of the points of view suggested here have been more fully developed in several separate studies of mine that deal with various specific aspects of the intellectual history of this period. However, I now wish to present my preliminary observations on this vast and complicated subject with the hope that criticisms and comments from colleagues will help my whole projected study reach its final form sooner.

THE PROBLEM

In the West, there has been a deep-rooted conflict between faith and reason. In the Christian tradition, the conflict has centered more specifically around a faith versus learning controversy. The New Testament actually presents Jesus in two different images. On the one hand, Jesus sees learning as an obstacle to Christian piety. Later, this became the source of the stream of anti-intellectualism within the Church. On the other hand, Jesus also appears in the New Testament as a man of profound learning, that is, a scholar of the Scriptures, on the basis of which scholarship has been justified as a Christian calling by those who have sought to combine faith with reason.¹ Generally speaking, however, until the so-called Revival of Learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, faith far outweighed reason on the Christian scale. In its extreme form, Christian anti-intellectualism may be found in the well-known denunciation of classical pagan culture by Tertullian (ca. 190–240), who said: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the Academy with the Church? We have no need for curiosity since the Evangel.”²

Historically, the conflict between faith and reason in medieval Christianity may be taken, to a large extent, to be a result of the struggle for domination between the Hebraic-Christian religious tradition on the one hand and the Greco-Roman classical culture on the other hand. Several centuries elapsed before the terrain between revealed truth and secular learning reached a state of compromise. In the persons of St. Jerome (347?–420) and St. Augustine (354–430), we first see the two prototypes of the Christian scholar: the former was a great scholar who was a Christian, whereas the latter was a great Christian who left an indelible mark on scholarship.³ Thus, the love of learning and the desire for God, to borrow the well-known title of Jean Leclerq’s monograph, became two basic elements in medieval monastic culture. How to reconcile these two apparently conflicting values therefore posed a perplexing dilemma for every monk. As Leclercq neatly puts it:

And if there is a problem, it is because the difficulty takes the shape of a tension between two elements whose reconciliation is always precarious and between which an equilibrium must be constantly established. There is always the risk of weighting the balance too heavily on one side or the other. These two elements are the two constants of Western monastic culture: on the one hand, the study of letters, on the other, the exclusive search for God, the love of eternal life and the consequent detachment from all else, including the study of letters…. There is no ideal synthesis which can be expressed in a speculative formula, as there might be if the solution were of the intellectual order; the conflict can be transcended only by raising it to spiritual order.⁴

Does a similar problem exist in Chinese intellectual history? The answer is yes, but with important qualifications. In contrast to the West, no such sharp opposition between faith and reason can be found in the Chinese case. As William de Bary has aptly remarked, “Confucian rationalism does not involve a conscious exaltation of reason as opposed to faith or intuitions (none of the early masters seems to have acknowledged such an explicit dichotomy).”⁵ Nevertheless, in early Confucianism, a central polarity can be discerned—the polarity between learning and speculative thinking.⁶ Confucius once discussed the relationship between xue 學 (learning) and si 思 (thinking) in the following way: “Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.”⁷ Here learning and thinking are obviously taken as mutually complementary, neither functioning properly without the other. Sometimes, however, Confucius placed more emphasis on learning than on thinking: “I have been the whole day without eating, and the whole night without sleeping—occupied with thinking. It was of no use. The better plan is to learn.”⁸ These two statements taken together seem to mean that by learning Confucius meant to study in order to attain knowledge of things and by thinking he meant to speculate about things.⁹ Both learning and thinking involve the exercise of the mind, but the mind operates at two different levels. In learning, the mind operates at the concrete or factual level, and the result is knowledge of things as they are. In speculative thinking, the mind operates at the abstract or theoretical level, and theorizing enables one to grasp the significance of things. Learning and thinking are necessarily of two different orders because in Confucius’s scheme of things, the former must precede the latter. It is by no means an accident that in terms of priority, “extensive learning” (boxue 博學) is placed before “careful thinking” (shensi 慎思) in the “Zhongyong” (Doctrine of the Mean).¹⁰ Pure speculation is perilous because it lacks basis in factual knowledge in the first place. Nor would receptive learning always be fruitful, however. It is “labor lost” for the obvious reason that sheer erudition gets nowhere.

There were times when Confucius talked as if he were among Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs, who “relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.”¹¹ A conversation Confucius had with his disciple Zigong 子貢 (Duanmu Ci 端木賜) illustrates this point: “The Master said, ‘Ci, you think, I suppose, that I am one who learns many things and keeps them in memory?’ Zigong replied: ‘Yes,—but perhaps it is not so?’ ‘No’ was the answer; ‘I seek a unity all-pervading.’ ”¹²

Here the emphasis is shifted to thinking. For the “all-pervading unity” (yiguan 一貫) can result only from speculative thinking or theorizing. In still another context, the Master also defined the polarity in terms of bo 博 (erudition) and yue 約 (essentialism): “By extensively studying the literature and getting to its essence in the light of li 禮 (rites), one may thus likewise not err from what is right.”¹³

It is important to note that the term “essentialism,” expressed this way in the context of li, carries heavy moral connotations. And Confucius’s “all-pervading unity” must also be understood in this moral light. It is not systematic thinking or theorizing in the ordinary sense. It is, in fact, moralizing. Thus, in the final analysis, the Confucian polarity proves to be knowledge versus morality. This should occasion no surprise because in the Confucian frame of reference, knowledge should always serve a higher moral purpose.

From the point of view of intellectual history, this polarity produced a lasting influence on the shaping of the Confucian tradition. Insofar as Confucius stressed extensive learning or erudition, he created the image of a scholar, and insofar as he emphasized the “all-pervading unity” or “essentialism,” he created the image of a thinker or philosopher. After Confucius, although learning and thinking were generally taken as two inseparably complementary aspects of the Confucian teaching, the individual emphasis of each Confucian often varied. Thus, Mencius, who more closely fits the mold of a Confucian thinker, stressed “essentialism” (yue) rather than “erudition” (bo).¹⁴ On the other hand, Xunzi, being more a scholar, attached a greater importance to learning than to thinking.¹⁵

With the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song, the polarity became more clearly than ever before one between knowledge and morality. This polarization manifested itself in a variety of ways, old and new. Between the two major schools of Zhu Xi and Lu Xiangshan, it was seen as a controversy, respectively, over dao wenxue 道問學 (following the path of inquiry and study) and zun dexing 尊德性 (honoring the moral nature). Zhu Xi once confessed that he had overstressed t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Author’s Preface
• Editorial Note
• List of Abbreviations
• Chronology of Dynasties
• 1. Some Preliminary Observations on the Rise of Qing Confucian Intellectualism
• 2. Dai Zhen and the Zhu Xi Tradition
• 3. Dai Zhen’s Choice Between Philosophy and Philology
• 4. Zhang Xuecheng Versus Dai Zhen: A Study in Intellectual Challenge and Response in Eighteenth-Century China
• 5. Qing Confucianism
• 6. The Two Worlds of Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber)
• 7. Sun Yat-sen’s Doctrine and Traditional Chinese Culture
• 8. The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century
• 9. Neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment: A Historian’s Reflections on the May Fourth Movement
• 10. Modernization Versus Fetishism of Revolution in Twentieth-Century China
• 11. The Idea of Democracy and the Twilight of the Elite Culture in Modern China
• 12. China’s New Wave of Nationalism
• 13. Democracy, Human Rights, and Confucian Culture
• 14. Changing Conceptions of National History in Twentieth-Century China
• 15. Reflections on Chinese Historical Thinking
• 16. Modern Chronological Biography and the Conception of Historical Scholarship
• 17. The Study of Chinese History: Retrospect and Prospect
• 18. Confucianism and China’s Encounter with the West in Historical Perspective
• 19. Clio’s New Cultural Turn and the Rediscovery of Tradition in Asia
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Address of Professor Yü Ying-shih on the Occasion of Receiving the John W. Kluge Prize at the Library of Congress and Acceptance Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Tang Prize for Sinology
• Index