In January 1922, Xueheng magazine was founded, and the editorial board members included Mei Guangdi, Hu Xianhua, Liu Boming, Wu Mi, Liu Yizheng and others, and the contributors were most of the members of the Nanshe, Guozhi, Changzhou Cipai, Tongcheng, and Tongguang factions, who were called Xueheng factions. The picture shows Liu Yizheng's family (1936). (Infographic/Figure)
In January 1922, xueheng magazine was founded at National Southeast University. The "Harvard Gang" is the backbone of the school, following "New Youth" to interpret and disseminate the new culture. At that time, "New Youth" stood in the center of the stage of the times, and the "Mr. De" and "Mr. Sai" and literary reforms it marked had a great impact on China's intellectual youth.
Wu Mi and other Xueheng sect fans have another focus. They put the social revolution aside, sneaked into the study, interpreted the changes that had not occurred in a hundred years, and were evaluated by later generations as conservatism. The Xueheng school teaches the West, mainly humanism, especially the new humanism flaunted by Bai Bide. At that time, the trend of the world was modernism and nationalism, and the school of balance seemed to be out of line with the trend.
When Wu Mi studied in the United States, she was worried about the situation in China and the danger of the nation. After returning to China, he presided over Xueheng for ten years, collecting fees and coordinating editing. Very few people supported Wu Mi, the anti-Xueheng faction belittled him, and the Xueheng faction was very alienated. But Wu Mi refused to give up, almost single-handedly supported, saying to himself that "give half a life of energy, in the "Xueheng". In the ten years since its existence, Xueheng has issued a total of 79 issues, which can be called "longevity" compared with new publications such as "New Youth" and "Yusi", but the average sales of each issue are only a few hundred copies.
In 1922, Lu Xun published an article criticizing Xueheng under the pseudonym "Wind Sound": "The so-called "Xueheng" is really nothing more than the fake light of a few fake antiques gathered near the left of the 'Gate of Jubao'; although he calls himself 'Heng', his own star has not yet been nailed, let alone the weight of his weight. [......]‘ Heng's meal, only 'heng' out of their own baht two, in the new culture is harmless, yu guozhi is also far behind. ”
In fact, Lu Xun advocated striving forward, while the Xueheng school should "study scholarship and expound the truth", they cared about the West as a whole, including Dewey, Plato, Homer, Matthew Arnold and other figures, hoping to achieve the goal of "Changming national essence and melting new knowledge" through evidence, translation, and scholarship.
The school flourished at a time when modern disciplines were in full swing in China. Many people in the School of Learning have both national ambitions and academic spirit. Wu Mi was worried about "how to express Western ideas in Chinese characters, and how to use all my old tools to use the new materials that have been obtained from others", which is an anxiety of the Xueheng school of translation and research. In order to dispel this anxiety, the Xueheng school not only did not oppose "Mr. Sai" (science) and "Mr. De" (democracy), but also took into account the "Mu Girl" (morality), and left its mark on many modern disciplines such as history, philosophy, classical literature, botany, comparative literature, Chinese culture, and exegesis.
Xueheng's legacy remains. In 2014, the Xueheng Interdisciplinary Research Center of Nanjing University was established, and in 2016, it was renamed Xueheng Research Institute. Inheriting the xueheng school's concept of "Changming national essence, melting new knowledge", Xueheng Research Institute has carried out cross-linguistic, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research on conceptual history, collective memory, and social history. In April 2022, the Centennial Symposium will be held.
Professor Sun Jiang, Dean of Xueheng Research Institute, has dabbled in social history, conceptual history, intellectual history, memory research, regional studies and other fields. Conceptual history is the focus of Sun Jiang's current academic research. The history of chinese conceptual history research is less than twenty years old, and he is one of the initiators.
"Concepts themselves are history, and there are ideas, politics, and games in each concept." In January 2022, Sun Jiang said in an exclusive interview with Southern Weekend.
"New Youth" and "Xueheng" are all new cultures
Southern Weekend: When talking about the New Culture Movement during may fourth, people mainly adopted a progressive stance, while the Xueheng faction belonged to conservatism. How should we view the choices and positions of the School of Balances today?
Sun Jiang: "The palms of your hands and the backs of your hands are all meat." Whether it is a fan of "New Youth" or a fan of "Xueheng", they are all Chinese. Looking back at modern history on this premise, "New Youth" and "Xueheng" have something in common, that is, they are both worried about the country and the people, and they love the country and the people; they are all in favor of transcending the old culture and establishing a new culture. It's just that there are contradictions in opinions and differences in methods. "New Youth" grew radicalism, and "Xueheng" gathered conservatism. Even so, these did not affect the personal relationships between many of the parties.
The persistence of the Xueheng school is looked back a hundred years later and is an important cultural heritage. Some time ago, we were brewing a "century-old Xueheng documentary", and there was an episode involving the actions of the Xueheng faction figures in the War of Resistance Against Japan, whether in the occupied areas or in the turbulent displacement, the integrity of the Xueheng faction figures was remarkable, and there was not a single traitor who surrendered to the enemy!
To understand the Xueheng school, we must look at its four proverbs: "On the study of scholarship and the exposition of truth" is the pursuit of the Xueheng school, which has produced two results, one is "The Essence of Changming Country" and the other is "melting new knowledge". Eric Hobsbawm talked about the "dualrevolution", and I thought that the essence of the state and the new knowledge were the "dual purposes" of the xueheng school, which was like two wheels, indispensable, and together supported the scholars to discuss scholarship and expound the truth.
National essence should be the manifestation of the "authenticity" of culture. It is right to criticize the "patriarchy" and the "feudal autocracy" during the May Fourth period. But the denigration of home is very biased and rare in the process of modernization. Home is the origin of Chinese culture, how can Chinese not have a home? Looking back a hundred years later, the cultural propositions of the Xueheng school are not only correct, but also very correct.
New knowledge about melting. The Xueheng school believed that the new knowledge that was popular at that time was not really new knowledge, and scholars should consider how to absorb the essence of the West into the national essence of China. A hundred years later, there is no objection to this idea. Now there is only one debatable thing left: the vernacular. Personally, I think the vernacular is very good, but it should not belittle the text; nor can we deny the traditional character because of the convenience of simplified characters. Regarding the vernacular text, Mei Guangdi and Hu Shi's opinions are squabbled and seem to be exaggerated. Among the sons of Xueheng, except for Hu Xianhua and Liu Yizheng, there were few people who criticized the vernacular. Wang Maozu's article "To < New Youth > Magazine Reporter" stated that what Xueheng's sons opposed was not a vernacular language, but a vernacular language with rude words. Wang Maozu hoped that since "New Youth" advocates new literature, it should not instill in young people terms such as demons and demons, and cannot use "demons and ugly types" and "sleeping skins and eating meat", which is a legacy of the barbaric era of ancient times.
Southern Weekend: The historical period in which the Xueheng school is located is the end of "learning from the west and gradually learning from the east" and "learning from the east into the middle", how should we understand this history?
Sun Jiang: "Learning from the West and Gradually Learning from the East" began with the Jesuits in the 16th century and followed by the Western Chinese in the 19th century. The collision of Eastern and Western knowledge and local knowledge has resulted in "deconstruction" and "dis", reshaping the Chinese's "self-other" understanding and opening up the process of China's construction of a modern country.
This process of knowledge reproduction also has the intermediary role of the immediate neighbor. After the Sino-Japanese War, Chinese intellectuals were shocked by the success of the Meiji Restoration, and they crossed the east in a big way and transplanted the Knowledge of Western Studies that were Japaneseized, which can be described as "learning from the East into the Middle". In the late Qing Dynasty, there was no shortage of officials and scholars who resisted the entry of Dongxue into the Middle School, but most of them were drowned in the tide of "Eastern Learning".
When I study modern history, I am concerned with the central issue of China's modernity or modernity. "Modern", taking its greatest common divisor, refers to the process of time, space, crowd and order from "impurity" to "homogenization". In his book Cheese and Maggots, Ginsburg, a microhistory historian, talks about a heretical event that occurred at the end of the 16th century that could not be classified by previous standards. It turned out that with the spread of new knowledge brought about by gutenberg printing, the old and new knowledge in the mind of the heretic Menocchio became discredited, and he attacked the church, saying that loving one's neighbor was more important than loving God. Ginsburg reveals the opportunity for the emergence of modern European knowledge from chaos and clarity, which after about a hundred years of fermentation, its outline became clear around 1800. Koserek, a pioneer in the study of conceptual history, named it the beginning of the Sattelzeit .com era. More than a hundred years later than Europe, China and East Asia in the 19th century experienced an unprecedented change of times under the immersion of European winds and rains, and the inherent knowledge could not correspond to the new era, and the new era abandoned the previous knowledge system.
The concept itself is history
Southern Weekend: History is full of twists and turns, but knowledge and concepts have their own real origins and interpretations. The Centennial Commemoration also involves the game of concept and history, can you give a specific example?
Sun Jiang: I recently completed a small book, "Races", which will be included in the "Xueheng erya Library" series of books that I edited. The concept of ethnography is a product of modern scientific racism, and examining the concept of race/race begins with identifying its place in the genealogy of enlightenment ideas. Whether it is Voltaire, who advocates racial pluralism, Kant, who advocates monism, and ethnographers represented by Linnaeus and Brumenbach, they all believe that Europeans are at the top of civilization, and other ethnic groups are signs of degradation, thus constructing a visual and unequal racial hierarchy represented by white, yellow, and black. How did this concept of human beings being divided into classes spread to East Asia, and how did it reverberate in China and Japan? This is both a history of word and translation of concepts, as well as a history of conceptual politicization and pan-politicization. In conclusion, the "Yellow Peril Theory" as a rhetoric of imperialism actually declares the bankruptcy of the superiority of the white race, and to the surprise of many people, the Chinese revolution has also played a certain role in the process of realizing equal rights for blacks today. You see, concepts themselves are history, and there are ideas, politics, and games in each concept.
Southern Weekend: From 2015 to 2021, the Oxford English Dictionary's annual hot words are: vax, Black Lives Matter, climate emergency, toxic, youthquake, post-truth, and laughing and crying expressions. These seven words represent a concept and reflect the current state of different regions, generations, and groups. China also has an endless stream of Internet buzzwords. Why is there such a conceptual explosion today?
Sun Jiang: As a scholar living in this era, I can empathize with these questions and give my own observations and judgments, but I can't provide standard answers. From a macroscopic point of view, we are in a period of cultural transformation, and the whole world is experiencing a change in cultural paradigms, one of the important manifestations is that the printing culture is getting weaker and weaker, and the network culture is thriving. Times have changed radically, and people basically stop reading newspapers and read books on screens most of the time. To borrow the words of the British sociologist Andrew Hoskins, this is an era of "connective turn". People can "travel" to ancient times with the push of a button. Now the teacher is facing a great challenge in lecturing. Students can "traverse" and instantly search the source of the teacher's lecture notes through the Internet. Teachers rely on memory and accumulated knowledge over the years, and students can break through with a mobile phone. But at the same time, the knowledge that students grasp with their mobile phones is external knowledge and does not enter the heart.
Plato tells a story of the invention of writing in the Phaedros. The ancient Egyptian god Theus invented writing, which he dedicated to the king. When the king saw it, he said that the words are good, but from then on they will sow the seeds of oblivion in the hearts of men. Mobile phones and computers have really sown oblivion for the new generation - there may be no trace in the heart, but it is extracted when needed. In this way, our perception of knowledge is instantaneous, instantaneous. My judgment is that new terms and concepts of personalization and immediacy will continue to be reproduced, and become a hot spot through the network; they will also disperse and float in the corners of no one's attention.
The scholar Sun Jiang, who once wrote modern poetry and loved rock and roll, quoted the Japanese critic Tsutomu Tsutomu in the circle of friends as saying that "(thought) is usually in rock and roll". (Photo/Photo courtesy of the interviewee)
Learn about the origin of modern Chinese knowledge
Southern Weekend: Chinese conceptual historians have different opportunities to discover and develop conceptual history. It seems that around 2010, many scholars began to do conceptual history. Is there any opportunity? What was the previous preparation?
Sun Jiang: In 2008, I edited the second volume of the New Historiography Collection, Concepts, Texts, and Methods. In the same year, I published a short article entitled "The Urgent Need for "Archaeology" in Modern Knowledge: Why I Advocate the Study of Conceptual History." In the article, I said: "I believe that the continuation of one concept after another, and the reading of one text after another, will help us understand the origin of modern Chinese knowledge." History is full of positive and negative paradoxes: Napoleon's greatness lies in the fact that he promulgated the immortal Napoleonic Code, but napoleon in people's hearts is a heroic image entangled with the defeat of Waterloo. "It can be said that I was ambitious and impulsive in doing conceptual history research at that time.
At that time, there were very few scholars in China who consciously conducted conceptual history research, and as a research field or research method, conceptual history was lonely and silent and unresponsive. In 2008, I searched for any conceptual history research in China, whether it was the three words "conceptual history" or the word "concept", all that popped out was "new concept English". New Concept English was one of the most popular English textbooks of the 1980s.
I came into contact with conceptual history research by accident. In 1999, I learned from a reading club at Waseda University about Richter's Studies in the History of Political and Social Concepts, which now has Chinese translation. After I flipped through this book, Mao Sai suddenly opened up, and the crowd looked for him for thousands of degrees, isn't this exactly the research method I need? At that time, I had just finished writing my doctoral dissertation, and one of the biggest dilemmas I faced in writing was that although there were many relevant academic works in China, there were very few things that could really be used and that people could safely cite. Recently, Professor Li Bozhong wrote an article saying that foreign socio-economic historians no longer look at the papers of Chinese scholars, except for a few scholars. I can say that this book was an opportunity for me to devote myself to the history of concepts.
In 2008, I introduced the history of concepts, which caused a slight wave in the academic community. Soon there were more studies called conceptual history. If the study of social history does not have a clear concept, it may get a piece of money; if the study of intellectual history is not supported by history, it is the individual thinking activity of a small elite.
Southern Weekend: Chinese academic circles have many opinions on conceptual history, so what is conceptual history?
Sun Jiang: What is the history of concepts? I don't want to make an assertion before I come up with a sample that everyone agrees on. According to my understanding, the so-called conceptual history is not the history of terms, nor the history of ideas, but the history of conceptual society, the history of conceptual politics.
In my opinion, the meaning of conceptual history has changed at least four times. To understand what conceptual history is, one must first return to Germany, its birthplace. The conceptual history before World War II is a method of compiling a philosophical dictionary. The most recent change in conceptual history comes from the study of conceptual history in East Asian countries and regions, which is the "Asian turn" of conceptual history research. At present, the conceptual history of East Asia is also obsessed with the study of concepts related to the formation of modern states, such as the concept of nationality, the concept of discipline, the concept of society-culture, and the concept of "ism".
Southern Weekend: Conceptual history is related to the disciplines of history, philology, and world history. With the rise of new liberal arts, major social sciences, and regional studies, can conceptual history become the foundation of all disciplines?
Sun Jiang: Each discipline has its own conceptual history, and it basically does not become a problem in The British, German, French, Japanese and other academic circles. They have done a lot of research on "discourse", "concept", "keywords", "translation language", etc., and similar work has probably ended. Research in China has only just begun.
Why does conceptual history form the basis of each discipline? The basic concepts of various disciplines in China today are almost all translation concepts, mostly from Europe, some of which have been transited through Japanese or have the color of the Soviet Revolution. Since it is a concept of translation, it has two directions, one to the self and one to the other. In other words, we use these concepts to understand the "other" and also to understand the self. When Western classical or modern works are translated into Chinese, how do Chinese concepts correspond to Western concepts? This question may seem simple, but it is actually very complicated, and sometimes it cannot even be corresponded to.
For example, Plato speaks of "arete" in the Meno. When the young Meno came to Athens, he asked Socrates: "What is virtue"? Socrates enlightened Meno in his peculiar language, and in a Chinese translation it reads: "I have heard some people who understand the truth of religion..." The word "religion" is derived from the Latin religio. If you compare it to the original text, it is not difficult to find that this should be "things divine" (gods). This translation question is about our understanding of others. Translation is a dialogue between two languages and two contexts, not simply by side. Translation is creation, the use of concepts is also creation, and when concepts are used, the meaning of concepts will be transposed or even mutated. Today we all know that republic corresponds to "republic" and democracy corresponds to "democracy", but the original understanding in the 19th century was completely opposite. There are many similar examples, Chinese the culture and social sciences to have a great development, the sorting out of basic concepts is indispensable.
Writers of history answer all the time
Southern Weekend: Back to the historical scene of a hundred years ago, when the Xueheng school was founded, the May Fourth new culture had swept the country. The School of Learning, on the other hand, moves against the current, takes the conservative line, advocates new humanism, and seems to have become an unfinished business. Today, 100 years later, how to continue this business?
Sun Jiang: The figures of the Xueheng school all praised the "new culture" and criticized the "theory of extremism" (Hu Xianhua). Xueheng emphasizes the interconnection between the local national essence and the foreign new knowledge, while the New Youth sees the two as opposing relations.
Wu Mi said that young students mistakenly oppose the essence of the country and Europeanization, "if you read more books with an open mind and go deep into the shadows, you will know the true culture of the West, and the essence of our country will invent and benefit each other, and even if you can be eclectic and complementary." Looking back at the propositions and practices of the Xueheng school a hundred years later, what needs to be inherited is the four proverbs mentioned at the beginning, in which I condense the essence of the Changming state and the melting of new knowledge into a modern expression: global localization. It is necessary to have both a global perspective and local practice. Mei Guangdi said it well: "Truth has its own value, and it does not depend on the likes and dislikes of all people as right and wrong." ”
Southern Weekend: Global nationalism and populism are still on the rise, in 2021 you opened a course on "The Genealogy of Nationalism Theory", how do you see nationalism and populism at present?
Sun Jiang: In the modern academic context, nationalism has become a derogatory term. In my observation, after the end of the Cold War, academic circles inverted the relationship between "ethnic groups" and "nation" and emphasized the importance of ethnic groups. We often hear About African-Americans, Asian-Americans, but we can hardly hear European-Americans, why? In the past, European-Americans were self-explanatory, and immigrants from Asia and slaves trafficked from Africa were vulnerable, even if they became American nationals. With the change of the times, the rights and interests of these American citizens have slowly been valued. The fundamental reason for this turn is that the academic community believes that the device of the nation has the characteristics of strong homogenization, and overemphasizes the importance of the collective singular, and the ethnic things may be blocked.
Now that foreigners study China, they are more concerned about ethnic issues within the Chinese nation, and it is in this context that the new Qing history has arisen and become a hot topic. However, I believe that the framework of the modern nation-state remains unchanged, and nationalism will always be the dominant concept. And no matter how much emphasis is placed on the meaning of ethnicity, since the concept of nationality first appeared as a political concept, in the modern state, ethnic groups must be subordinated to the dominant needs of the nation.
Southern Weekend: In 2020 you wrote an essay saying that young people should become a critical and responsible generation. Why do you value responsibility so much?
Sun Jiang: The literal translation of the word "responsibility" is the ability to respond. The writers of history answer all the time. Who is answered? The first is the past. To borrow Carr's words in What is History, history is the interaction of the past and the present, the never-ending dialogue between historians and facts. Moreover, it is impossible for the author not to care about the present, about the present. Without the self-consciousness of contemporary history, it is difficult to become a good scholar. Responses that face the past are also oriented to the present.
Southern Weekend contributed to the aftermath