History & Values
Joseph R. Levenson, known as a "Mozart-like historian" in the field of Chinese studies in the United States, has unearthed a series of far-reaching propositions in his analysis of the fate of Confucian China in modern times, the most famous of which is the dichotomy between "history" and "value" -- modern Chinese thinkers treat tradition with a complex entanglement of emotion and reason, and what emotion is nostalgic for must be abandoned by reason.
列文森（Joseph R. Levenson）
In Levinson's view, this dilemma has been pervasive among modern Chinese thinkers, rooted in the failure of nationalism to provide a final refuge in the search for a creed that would bring special and universal needs into the same trajectory of thought, and to maintain an irrefutable position in the face of fierce struggles, because nationalism was itself restless because it sought to maintain the declining authority of Confucianism and launched a successful attack on it. Perhaps, Levinson's Jewishness gave him a deeper understanding of the entanglement between state and culture: if culturally dependent entities are always in flux, how will the cultural identity of individuals be placed?
In order to get out of this predicament, modern Chinese thinkers have to systematically clean up their past: the monarchy, which assumed the symbolic integration function of the state in traditional China, was replaced by a democratic republic, the imperial examination system, which was an important channel for social mobility in traditional China, was replaced by a new-style school, Confucianism, which undertook the integration of traditional Chinese ideology, was replaced by scientism, and all the family and patriarchal traditions related to Confucianism were criticized. In short, it is only by excluding values from history that Confucian China can be transformed into a modern state. This universal, linear view of evolution has dominated intellectual circles in modern China, so much so that anyone who takes a reflective and critical stance on it is likely to be seen as a stigmatized "conservative." Therefore, when the political system and value system on which scholarship relies have undergone fundamental changes, it has naturally become the general trend of modern Chinese academic transformation that traditional Chinese scholarship is gradually detached from the real world and increasingly disciplinary.
The question is, if history and values can really be completely dichotomy, and traditional culture is excluded from the state, will modern China automatically establish a Western-style political order? How will the cultural foundation for maintaining national integration be found? Can the glory of traditional China always haunt the hearts of nationalists, who can feel at ease that China has been placed in an unequal international system dominated by the West, and still cannot free China from the fate of being dominated by foreign powers?
In fact, the so-called radicals and conservatives in modern China, despite their heated debates about the fate of Confucian China in modern times, share an unstated nationalist goal: how in the modern world, China can stand on its own feet among the world's nations and create a new civilization. How to achieve this goal is debated by modern Chinese intellectuals. It is precisely in this fierce debate that traditional Chinese scholarship has also undergone tempering and finally gained a new life.
From "Chinese Studies" to "Historiography"
Today, how to construct an independent knowledge system based on China's history and reality has gradually become the pursuit of more Chinese scholars, but if we want to ask: When did modern Chinese scholars generally become "unconfident" in traditional culture? The answer may not be earlier than the defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. For example, Mr. Zhang Hao believes that the two decades after 1895 were a breakthrough period for the transformation of modern Chinese thought, during which Chinese intellectuals faced a political and cultural crisis: politically, the intellectual elite began to doubt the political legitimacy of the Qing government and turned their back on the Qing government, which prompted the basic system of the traditional political order, "universal imperial power", to collapse from wavering, and China fell into an unprecedented "political disintegration" In the midst of the crisis; culturally, Confucianism, which represents the basic public beliefs and values of traditional Chinese, has gradually shaken and disintegrated, which has brought about an unprecedented deep cultural crisis. When intellectuals begin to debate the usefulness of traditional Chinese scholarship, it essentially means that they have developed deep doubts about the political system on which culture depends.
"State and Academics: The Ideological Debate on "Chinese Studies" in the Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China", Life, Reading, and New Knowledge, 2023 edition
The famous historian Mr. Luo Zhitian's classic work "State and Academics: The Ideological Debate on "Chinese Studies" in the Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China" focuses on the controversy between Chinese intellectuals on the complex relationship between academia and the state at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and shows readers in detail how modern Chinese traditional scholarship faced the strong impact of the West, from preserving the quintessence of the country to sorting out the quintessence of the country, and then to not recognizing the difficult transformation of Chinese studies as "learning". Although the contents of these debates are complex and diverse, the core of these debates is mainly in three aspects: what is Chinese culture, whether Chinese culture is useful, and the position of Chinese culture in the modern world.
A series of questions that originated after the defeat of the First Sino-Japanese War about whether Chinese culture was useful, what was it useful and what was useful directly affected the scholars after the Battle of Gengzi. Although the discussion of Sinology after the Battle of Gengzi continued the discussion of related issues during the Wuxu Restoration, the history has entered the twentieth century, the expansion of scholarly ideological resources, the enhancement of Japanese influence, and the emergence of a large number of magazines have brought about a significant increase in the number of terms used to express ideas in this period The key reason is that the state is in a weak position in international competition, which is a problem that the nationalists who are concerned about the relationship between the state and academia must face.
Therefore, in the face of this dilemma, modern Chinese intellectuals had to rebuild Chinese studies. Scholars represented by Zhang Taiyan emphasized that Chinese tradition was indeed useful in the early stage of tradition, but because some factors gradually became useless in a specific period, the problem lies in the factors that make the tradition "useless" rather than the tradition itself.
Zhang Tai Flame
It can be seen that in the face of the practical predicament of modern China, it is difficult for modern Chinese intellectuals to completely reject Western studies. After Gengzi, the scholars mostly thought that the government was not enough to save the country, the government and the opposition were politically opposed, but culturally they both had the desire to preserve the quintessence of the country and specific efforts, and they all had different degrees of orientation towards the reconciliation of China and the West, and adopted an inclusive attitude towards "Europeanization" rather than blindly rejecting it. The quintessence of the school, which emphasizes that the quintessence of the country does not hinder Europeanization, has in common that it follows the orientation of reviewing the past and learning the new or "reciprocal from the new", hoping to find a path of having both fish and bear's paws, but the two are quite different in the specific orientation of preserving the quintessence of the country, so there are many controversies.
In the last few years of the Qing Dynasty, with the introduction of Western nationalist thought, the status of language and writing, which had not been valued much before, gradually rose and was regarded as one of the elements of the "quintessence of the country". The "Dongying style" and the new terms that constitute an important feature of this style have become more and more popular, and boycotting this style has become a unanimous concept of the government and the opposition. Compared with the impact of the "Dongying style", the impact of ideas such as simplifying the Chinese script, recreating the new Chinese script in pinyin, or even abandoning the Chinese Chinese language and adopting the "new language of all countries" is more obvious, because language is the essence of the country, and even revolutionaries such as Zhang Taiyan, who are deeply influenced by anarchism, cannot tolerate this radical proposition, so the result is various debates among the revolutionaries.
After the Xinhai Revolution, the once fierce struggle between the quintessence of the country and Europeanization weakened, and the "New Culture Movement", which was known for its anti-tradition, launched a fierce attack on the "Confucian Family", and soon turned to the relatively positive attitude towards the tradition of "sorting out the national history", but the new school lacked sufficient understanding, and in 1923-1924 began a debate on the integration of the concept of sorting out the national history, the fuse of which was Hu Shi and Liang Qichao's bibliography of Chinese studies for Tsinghua students. This controversy is at odds with the controversy over science and outlook on life, with both sides of the debate aiding with science. For example, Wu Zhihui and Kang Youwei, who are quite different in terms of political and cultural positions, emphasized that what China particularly needed at this time was the material level of science, while several young students with different perceptions of Chinese culture paid more attention to the integrity of science, so they put forward the slogan of "scientific Chinese studies".
In fact, within the new school of scholars, there has also been a great change in their understanding of "sorting out the national history", they basically did not have the intention of overthrowing the old culture at first, but their attitude changed dramatically in the years before and after the Northern Expedition, linking the sorting out of the national history with the destructive "ghost fighting". Regarding this change, if we look at it from the level of internal rationality, the new school of scholars has a way of thinking from the beginning, that is, from the perspective of pathology, to look at "sorting out the national history", believing that through the sorting out can prevent and treat China's inherent diseases, and it is also a natural development to start from this rational path to "fight ghosts" and give up "sorting out the national history". From the perspective of social concepts, the new school scholars were obviously influenced by the social atmosphere of rising nationalism after the "Northern Expedition", and many of them embarked on the road of opposing their earlier ideas in order to draw a clear line with the old school based on the overall cognition of "the old and the new are not separated".
In the late twenties of the last century, with the decline of the "sorting out the national history" movement, after the Western subject classification was established in the Chinese education system, many scholars expressed middle schools according to the Western classification, and the Chinese culture must be effectively connected with the Western academic system to establish legitimacy. At that time, there were two main types of representative concepts about the discipline of Chinese studies: one was that the sorted national history should be included in the new classification of philosophy, literature, history, and other disciplines, and the other was that Chinese studies was not a study at all, but the latter emphasized the qualifications of Chinese studies and excluded all kinds of unqualified scholars from the field of Chinese studies. In short, with the transformation of the modern state, traditional Chinese scholarship has gradually detached itself from the entity on which it depends and has been replaced by the modern discipline system, gradually moving from the center to the periphery.
Interestingly, the Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China were an era when traditional Chinese scholarship was becoming more and more detached from the reality of China, and it was also an era in which masters of Chinese studies emerged who were happy to be talked about by later generations. For example, Hu Shih, who is the protagonist of the "Sorting out the National History" movement, has been praised by the famous literary historian Xia Zhiqing as "an important milestone in the study of Chinese culture". In fact, behind these complex controversies, what is more important is that those scholars who are in the midst of great changes in academic transformation have left exemplary modern academic works for future generations, which may be the true meaning of the unprecedented refinement and rebirth of traditional Chinese scholarship.
Transformation, where to turn?
The mission of historians is to "seek truth", but it is actually difficult to completely separate "truth-seeking" from value judgment, and the changes in modern China itself are "great transformations", and the subsequent question is: where does the transformation turn?
Could it be that Sinology has gradually become a marginal discipline that has nothing to do with reality, and to put it more ugly, it has become an "exhibit in a museum", and to put it more ugly, it has actually become a "mummy", which is the inescapable ending and fate of traditional Chinese scholarship in the modern world?
In fact, there are many controversies among modern scholars around the state and scholarship, first of all, the contradiction between the emphasis on wholeness in traditional Chinese scholarship and the emphasis on specialization in modern Western scholarship.
If we compare the academic transformation of modern China with the paradigm shift of Western sinology research, we will find an interesting phenomenon: European Sinology, which is mainly represented by Paul Pelliot of France, which has meticulously examined Chinese culture and classics, has gradually been replaced by "area studies" represented by John Fairbank of the United States, which focuses on the study of China with modern social science methods. From a longer-term perspective, the practice of "snatching the center of sinology back to Beijing" is contrary to the academic trend of the 20th century in which Western history and Chinese studies turned to the social sciences.
How to deal with the relationship between the two research paradigms is a major problem that the United States will inevitably face in the development of China studies. In the 60s of the last century, the Journal of Asian Studies, an important Western journal at that time, held a special discussion on how to deal with the relationship between Chinese studies and social sciences, and a number of important scholars in the field of Chinese studies in the United States, such as Levinson, Mary Wright, G. William Skinner and other scholars participated. At the end of the discussion, the journal invited Mr. Xiao Gongquan, who occupies an important position in both Chinese and Western academic traditions, to make a summary.
In Xiao Gongquan's view, whether it is old or new, academic research should focus on wholeness. He believes that it is of course academic progress for Western Chinese studies to get out of the isolated old-style Sinology, but because the old-fashioned Sinology is not bound by the discipline norms of the modern division of labor, it follows a similar method of discipline integration. Of course, in the modern landscape, a scholar must identify with an established discipline, and there is no "jack of all trades" in the academic world, but the identification with a particular discipline does not prevent attempts to take a holistic approach, and the integrity of Chinese studies is premised on an interdisciplinary approach to research. In his view, scholars should certainly make full use of the special expertise provided by their own discipline to analyze problems, but at the same time, they should keep an open mind and exchange ideas with researchers from other disciplines; at the same time, it is very beneficial to academic development to carry out collaborative research with people from different disciplines and concentrate their many skills in collaborative research undertakings; in addition to this, researchers can borrow methods and concepts from other disciplines to develop their own discipline, and although it is risky to wade in an unfamiliar field, it is more likely to get closer to the integrity of Chinese studies than to gain a foothold in China。 In short, Hsiao argues that cautious interdisciplinary risk-taking would be a counter to the ills of academic "solipsism," which is often caused by overconfidence in the efficacy of a single-disciplinary approach.
From this perspective, an important advantage of traditional Chinese scholarship is its emphasis on holisticality. This is obviously different from the later emphasis on division of labor and specialization in modern disciplinary methods, the latter of course has its necessity, but the obvious problem brought about by the excessive emphasis on specialization is that it is difficult to achieve in-depth communication between different disciplines, which will actually hinder the innovative development of disciplines in the long run, and the traditional Chinese academic focus on the integrity of this characteristic has a certain corrective effect on excessive discipline.
The more important reason for the many controversies surrounding the state and scholarship in modern times has to do with the treatment of cultural traditions and nationalism in the process of modern state building. In this regard, we might as well compare it with the state-building of modern Japan.
Modern Japan has focused on the important integration function of cultural traditions and nationalism, but Japan's political integration eventually moved towards the path of militaristic expansion. In the view of the famous Japanese political scientist Maruyama Mao, in order to become a "nation", the members must demand this common attribute, that is, the kind of thing that wants to become a "nation", or at least must be a desire to be realized, and this consciousness of elevating one's own existence to the level of politics and urgently demanding the formation of a national community will be condensed into a political consciousness of unity, and it is undoubtedly the national consciousness in this sense that bears the responsibility of the modern nation-state. If the idea of national unity and national independence, which grew up against the background of this national consciousness, is called nationalism in a broad sense, then nationalism is precisely the indispensable spiritual driving force for the existence of the modern state as a modern state. At the same time, Maruyama instructively points out that nationalism often arises from some external stimulus, and through a more or less conscious transformation of the environment on which it previously depended, it elevates itself to a political "nation", and the external stimulus that plays a decisive role in this transformation is usually a foreign power. In short, nationalism plays an important integrating role in the construction of modern states, and the formation of nationalism naturally involves how the state treats its own cultural traditions.
In this regard, the most typical manifestation is the creation and institutionalization of the concept of "national system", which occupies an important position in the history of Japanese law and politics.
The concept of "kokuki" was introduced in 1825 in the Shinkan Treatise published in 1825 by Aizawa Masasai, a scholar of the Mito Domain, who was a scholar of the late Tokugawa shogunate. In view of the fact that Japan was in a deep national crisis due to the infiltration of Western powers at that time, he expounded the ethical and cultural meaning of the term "national system" from ancient Chinese classics with the help of materials such as the myth of the founding of Japan, and tried to shape Japan's spiritual unity.
In Aizawa's view, the strong "unity" of the Western powers was due to the unifying and cohesive power of Christianity, and he believed that there was also "oneness" in ancient Japan, that is, the historical tradition created and passed down by the Japanese god Amaterasu and existing in the form of "political and sacrificial unity", which is what he interprets as "national system". Aizawa's theory of the state system aims to "replace the coercive domination of those in power with the spontaneous obedience of the whole people" in order to unify the power of the state by uniting the "will of the people." The "state system" expounded by Aizawa is only spiritual, and does not involve the construction of political organization and legal system.
It was Ito Hirobumi who really had a profound impact on the political organization and legal system of modern Japan. In Japan's modern history, the dignitaries who had a direct influence on the formulation of the Meiji Constitution, such as Iwakura Gushi, Ito Hirobumi, and Inoue Takeshi, were all nationalists with strong nationalist tendencies, and the most influential was Ito Hirobumi, the main designer of the Meiji Constitution. Hirobumi Ito's first consideration was to determine Japan's "base axis of the state", and he saw the emperor of Japan as "the 'spiritual substitute' of Christianity that has played the role of a 'base axis' in the thousand-year history of European culture", through which the "base axis of the state" was realized, and the final form of the state established by Japan's Meiji constitution was "a Prussian-type constitutional monarchy embedded in the framework of the 'state system'", and the first chapter of the country, entitled "The Emperor", clearly stipulates in Article 1: " The Empire of Japan was ruled by an emperor of the eternal line". Although this clause does not directly adopt the concept of "state system", it is reflected in the semantic context of the constitutional clause. After the promulgation of the Constitution, various books on the interpretation of the Constitution were published one after another, among which Ito Hirobumi's book "Interpretation of the Constitution of the Imperial Japan" was the most authoritative.
If we start from the perspective of the differences in the treatment of cultural traditions between modern China and Japan in the process of state construction, the excessive political integration in the process of modern state construction in Japan and the final path of militaristic expansion, and the obvious lack of political integration in the construction of Chinese state in the Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, which brought about political turmoil, form a clear contrast, and the ensuing question is: in the process of modern state construction, how does the state treat cultural traditions in order to truly build a benign political order?