China Quest for Modernity

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Chinas quest for modernity:

a critical review of its philosophical and cultural backgrounds in the early twentieth century (1905-1919)

Vernica Noelia Flores

ABSTRACT

Over the last twenty years the question on Chinese modernity has raised an extended scholar debate which has deepen itsdefinition and thought over its analytical strength to study Chinas intellectual changes during the early twentieth century. In a

first stage, this study reviews this recent historiografical trends as they have contributed to revise and overcome the classic Euro-

centric perspectives upon this subject and have enriched and problematized our understanding of Chinas quest for modernity

from an approach that emphasize a more dynamic East-West cultural communication. Based on this scope, in a second stage ourfocus is narrowed down to analyze the discursive practices and political pronouncements of two generations of representative

Chinese intellectuals as Zhang Binglin, Liang Qichao, Liang Shuming and Hu Shi during the late years of Qing dynasty and the

first decade of the Republican era. Our research problem consists on demonstrating how a common theoretical framework to

define modernity was built during these years, through an array of representations, cognitive understandings and heterogeneousdiscursive practices that shaped an intellectual community rather than individual singularities. Since this process involved creating,

undermining, affirming or re-composing new and traditional- specific categories, our final purpose in this instance is to clarifythe cultural identity and philosophical stances underlying those actions to better comprehend their conceptions of modernity, as

autonomous responses to Chinas integration to the world but also as divergent pathways of concrete social and politicalmobilization in the veering early years of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:Modernity, discursive practices, intellectual community, cultural interaction.

I. TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF CHINESE MODERNITYa) The interpretive problem of defining modernity

In recent decades, driven by scholar debate on economic globalization, the question on how East Asian

countries are currently conducting a fast and dynamic modernization has sparked worldwide academicinterventions. Although increasing attention has been paid to the economic and politic resultants, there are

diverging opinions about the origins, outcomes and implications of both philosophical and cultural roots

of this phenomenon, as well as valuable debates about the historical and ontological framework in which

they should be analyzed (Duara, 1995; Liu, 2003, Rocca, 2006, Yue Dong, 2006).

In 1997 a lively debate took place among intellectuals in the Peoples Republic of China, basically

between the liberals (or neoliberals) and the so-called New Left especially from the publication of the

literary scholar and intellectual historian Wang Huis article Contemporary Chinese thought and the

question of Modernity. In many respects the debate was between liberal thought, especially classical

liberalism, and socialist thought in the contexts of Chinas transition to a global market economy and of

the social and economic inequalities spawned by the economic reforms. The debate is on-going, whichreminds us of the cultural and intellectual controversies of the pre-communist period. There are

similarities between intellectuals of the early twentieth century and contemporary ones (He, 2001; Fung,

2010). They grappled with the question of whither China, using a similar language of critical inquiry to

University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ministry of Foreign Affairs "Taiwan Scholarship" Visiting Scholar. Research project conducted with thesupport of National Taiwan University, Department of History and National Central Library, Center for Chinese Studies.


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explore issues some of which stretch back many decades. That leads us to believe that the search for a

genealogy of Chinese modernity and modernization date back to the late Qing-early Republican era.

The academic exploration on the concepts of modernity and modernization in East Asia, and specifically

in China, has been addressed by scholars and theorists from different perspectives. The persistence ofthese debates in the 1990s shows how problematic has been any effort to re -think, for the bottom up, the

foundation of the modern Chinese state and indeed of modernity itself, partly because of the divergence

in retaining conventional concepts which have traditionally organized modern Western euro-centric

societies.

Modernity has been a subject of considerable interest and a shift of attention among scholars to review its

definition, rethink its analytical strength to study differential patterns of modern historical experience in

non-Western societies, as well as to study its own actual validity facing the postmodernist claim that

modernity is dead. However, to launch a critique aimed at problematizing and enriching our understanding

of Chinese modernity, primary it is necessary to define the complex concept of modernityitself.

As a broad philosophy, modernity has been historically identified with the European Enlightenment and

its faith in reason, in progress and in unbounded human capacity for pursuing material benefits without

religious constraints. Accordingly, the core beliefs of the Enlightenment philosophy in Western countries

include secularism, perfectibility and the application of science, technology and rational governing

principles to solve problems both in human and natural worlds.

Other qualities are often associated with modernity as well: an ever-increasing pace and physical extent of

change; globalization and the shrinking of distances; urbanism, industrialization, consumerism, and other

facets of socioeconomic modernization; iconoclasm and contempt for the past; the image of universals in

linear progressive time (the nation, the truths of sciences, the claims of social theories) and the uniformity

of time and space.1

Modernity also involves a set of cognitive and stresses the overall rationalization of social life that has led

to what Max Weber called the iron cage of economic compulsion and bureaucratic domination. In this

sense, two interrelated features widely associated with the essence of modernity since Weber were

secularity and rationality (instrumental, formal and bureaucratic). Anthony Giddens also follows this

interpretive line when he defines the concept as a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial

civilization, associated with a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to

transformation, by human intervention; a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial

production and a market economy; a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and

mass democracy (Giddens, 1998: 97). Modernity, Giddens adds, refers to modes of social life or

organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which

subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence.2

This dualism has evoked different responses from contemporary social thinkers. The postmodernist Jean-

Francois Lyotard has challenged the underlying legitimation of the grand narratives of modernity and

1 Francis Ching Wah Yip, Towards a critic of Capitalism as Quasi-religion: a study of Paul Tillichs critical interpretation of Capitalism andModernity, ThPd. Thesis, Harvard University, 2004, p. 5.

2See Anthony Giddens, The consequences of Modernity(Stanford, Calif.: Standford University Press , 1990), 1.


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has pronounced modernitys end. 3 Jungen Habermas, however, defended it as an unfinished,

redeemable project. 4 Giddens has argued also that rather than entering a period of postmodernity,

contemporary societies are moving into one in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more

radicalized and universalized than before.5

If we move to Michel Foucault, we can also see how rationality in modern times spread in the forms of

disciplines of power. The advanced nation-state achieved unprecedented capacity for coercion and access

to wealth, and as colonial power, it maintained or coordinated a widespread network of bureaucratically-

organized administrators, armies, plantations, factories and schools. Moreover, in creating citizens and

colonial subjects, it developed new techniques of internalizing values and disciplines in the individual.

The very process of achieving individuation as a political subject took and takes place complicit with

disciplinary institutions.

Modernity then, as it seems there is a consensus in reckoning, is a multifarious and complex phenomenon.

It is both an epochal concept, the new age, as Friedrich Hegel conceptualized, and an attitude, as

Foucault also maintains. By attitude, Foucault, echoing Kant, means a mode of relating to

contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people: to an end, a way of thinking and feeling;a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and at the same time marks relation of belonging and

presents itself as a task6. What is important to Foucault is a type of philosophical interrogation, one

that simultaneously problematizes mans relation to the present, mans historical mode of being, and the

constitution of the self as an autonomous subject, coupled with a philosophical ethos that could be

described as permanent critique of our historical era.

In other words, modernity, intellectually, is an attitude of questioning the past and the present and linking

them with the future. It questions everything and, Weber would say, measures everything against a unitary

principle of rationality. It is this spirit of critique that is the most valued legacy of the Enlightenment, even

though today, the Enlightenment is viewed by postmodernist, postcolonial and post structural theorists as

an historical anomaly.

Therefore, as an attitude of questioning the past and the present, modernity entails a criticism of modernity

itself. Habermas has affirmed that the assumptions of progress and of t he superiority of the new age

respect to the past need to be justified and that self-reflection is inherent to the very nature of modernist

culture.7 As Habermas tells us modernity is internally complex and contains many paradoxes, tensions

and contradictions.

Reach to this point, we need to face the other complex issue of how Chinese modernity has been defined

by historiographical trends, how they posed the question on this issue and from which social and historical

interpretive.

3Jean Francois Lyotard, The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota, 1984).4Habermas, Jrgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987.

5Giddens, The consequences of Modernity, 3.

6Michael Foucault, What is Enlightment, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 39.

7Andrew Edgar, The philosophy of Habermas(Chesham: Acumen Publishing, 2005), 191-2.


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b) Modernity in non-Western historical experiences. The question on Chinese modernity by recent

historiographical trends

In recent years, historians of China have renewed their attention to the first half of the twentieth century.

This interest has been fueled by various factors, including new access to archives since the late 1970s, the

advent of new social science theories and new perspectives on looking at Chinese nationalism and state

building. From a modest start in the 1970s, with a relative small number of researchers working on a

limited range of topics, the field has grown exponentially over the past two decades, bringing to the field a

diversity of perspectives.

The first and more extended trend considers Chinas modernity as a phenomenon that occurred with the

consequences of Chinese contact with the West since the period of the Opium War. According to this

narrative which emphasizes Chinese modernity as a response to the West , the influence of the core

values of philosophical heritage of the Enlightenment directly affected the outlook of the educated elite on

the possibilities of continuity of the imperial regime, but also point out new ways of conceiving the

political community. This particular process enabled the conception of national state building, as a modern

political project par excellence (Loewe, 1966; Bernstein, 1981; De Bary, 2001, Gernet, 2005)8. This

prospect considers the emergence of the modern nation state and the nationalist discourse that supports it,as inner conditions of modernity. Accordingly, China would achieve its modernization as a practical

correlate of modernity- only through its cultural change and adoption of western cultural and political

references. Hence, the project of "modernization" became the inner practice for building "modernity",

through concrete reform programs not only in politics but also in culture, art and education fields.

The advent of post-colonial studies during the last two decades and their concept of alternative

modernities, have broaden the definition from an exclusively denoting concept of Western European

culture centered in nation-state building to a plural condition whose key processes and dynamics unfold

within specific cultures (Chatterjee,1993; Chakrabarty, 2000; Eisenstadt, 2003; Delanty, 2007). Certain

modern categories may not existper se, although similar social processes and reciprocal dynamics can

and may effectively exist under different forms. Therefore, from this transnational and transculturalprospect, modernity in China not only took multiple forms but also had multiple meanings (Mazlish,

2002). The potentiality of the concept lies in the fact that it can be understood to express a wider range of

possibilities for institutional settings, sociopolitical orders and value-systems (Sachsenmaier, 2002).

Madelaine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein have pointed out that arguments for deconstructing or

pluralizing modernity into a range of alternative modernities leave the impression that there is still some

original modernity that began in the West and that all other instances are somehow derivated copies that

resemble Western modernity but have a Chinese, Japanese or other non-Western flavor. Goldstein adds

that this position underwrites the assumption that were the term modernity appears unmarked, it must, by

default, mean Western. As Partha Chatterjee plainly put it, if we persist in viewing modernity as a

modular form originating in the West and borrowed by the Other, then history, it would seem, hasdecreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. 9

8Many of these terms, however, have gradually entered into the Chinese language, initially thanks to a marginal group of Chinese intellectuals

who worked and studied in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, during the social, political and economic aggiornamientoof the Meiji Era.

For a critical analysis of the translation and translocation of modern Western concepts into Chinese see Lidia Liu, Translingual Practice:

Literature, National Culture, and the Translated Modernity - China 1900-1930, Stanford University Press, 1995.9Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories,Oxford University Press, 1995, 5.


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A somewhat more effective approach has been to attack the Western-equals-Modern equation by showing

that the key conceptual and systemic bulwarks of modernity were born not in Europe but in the colonial

periphery10. Yet despite scholarly efforts, the conflation Western equals modern remains almost automatic.

The West, more than being an arbitrary term for a geographical zone, is a pliant, resilient, and

ideologically loaded concept that does much of our mapping for us, incessantly returning to rationalize

and locate historical and political differences in a system of unequal power relations.

Despite the intransigence of this conceptual coupling, the critique goes on, and not, one hopes,

unproductively. Many of the most lucid and poetic descriptions, as well as the most trenchant critiques of

modernity have taken as their focus everyday practice and experience (Yeh, 2000, Yue Dong & Goldstein,

2006; Zarrow, 2006). A proliferation of things found in everyday life, were seen in terms of distinctively

modern formulations of science, commerce, nation and even of self-identities constructions. The

phenomenon of modernity, according to this perspective, certainly implies a break from the past, yet not a

wrenching loss. If the break with the tradition, the civilizational form of Confucianized bureaucratic-

monarchy haunted some in the early twentieth century, this break was more a creative than an imitative

act, or better, new regime of practices. The West and Japan provided models, not blueprints. Chinese ideas

about modernity were a product of rapidly changing global and domestic circumstances. At the same time,

precisely because the drive for enlightenment was imbricated with everyday life and informed by it, a

unique Chinese modernity emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. Chinese modernity was thus

located among and pursed by, numerous groups that shared a roughly common set of practices: acceptable

behaviors, norms, discourses and institutions.

Although these approaches constitute a remarkable advance in the studies on early modern Chinese

history, the main historical conceptual frame remains being the western frame of modernity and its

concepts of civil-society, nation-state and nationalism. Due to the permanence of this conflicting

assessment in contemporary historiography, our project will carefully review the connection between

Chinas quest for modernity and the emergence of the nation state, rethinking its philosophical, historical

and cultural background, as it has been the main connection established by these persistent lines of

inquires. The purpose of this project is to try and move away from conventional categorizations which

interpret developments in China through pre-existing cognitive and theoretical filters and instead, shift

towards a study of Chinese modernity,in terms of its relations to the past and its changed sense of time.

At this point, if modernity cannot be reduced to a simple integrated system, neither tradition can be. To

illuminate the process, it is worthy to address broader questions on underlying issues that cannot be

analyzed by applying binary explanatory categories. Following Benjamin Schwartzs idea of the limits of

tradition vs modernitynotion, to better-understand the dialogic and inclusive relationship between these

terms, it will be valuable to distinguish in those intellectual disquisitions, internal factors that led to

simultaneous dialogue and confrontation between Western liberal heritage and classic Chinese heritage(Schwartz, 1993; Duara, 1995). As Edmund Fung convincingly remarks, modern Chinese thought is

marked by a plurality of compelling ideas. Unraveling their complexity, interrelatedness, interactions and

10Benedict Anderson,Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism and Particularism, Verso, 1991.


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dialectical relationship is the key to understand Chinese modernity in its intellectual, cultural and political

configurations11.

2) THE QUESTION ON MODERNITY IN LATE QING -EARLY REPUBLICAN PERIOD

Taking account those different approaches to modernitys definition, what can we said then about Chinese

conception on modernity? How its theoretical frame of references was conceived by Chinese intellectuals?

To approach to an answer to these questions, we need to briefly contextualize the period of time in with

their discourses took place.During the first decades of twentieth century, Chinas self perception, its

cultural ideology and its vision of its relation to the outside world have significantly changed. It is our aim

to trace the course of this ideological change and to study how Chinese intellectuals discoursed on

modernity.

What makes these decades particularly fascinating and complex is that they can be read under neither the

sign of the imperial system nor that of the nation-state, but must be seen in the light of both. The early

1900s are, in Chakrabartys words, a time that insists on being viewed as irreducibly not -one. It is

precisely because these decades inhabit two overlapping and often incompatible systems, two different

and contending cosmologies, that are drawn inexorably into questions of discourse.

To understand how modernity was imagined, discourse and pursued by the Chinese intellectuals in the

early twentieth century, we need a clear insight into the historicity of Modern Chinese thought its origins

and changes in specific cultural and political circumstances. During the first decades of twentieth century,

under intense pressure from Western and Japanese imperialism, China began in earnest its transition from

empire to nation-state, yet this transition was far from universally embraced or certain of completion.

Our study is focus in the period between 1905 and 1919, considering focal-points the post-Boxers period

of Qings Reforms, the 1911 Revolution and the May 4 thMovement. As Peter Zarrow describes it, this is

transitional and foundational period12. Transitional, because it marked the end of a sociopolitical system

and the beginning of another. An empire ruled by a dynastic house became a nation with a constitution,

even if the organs of the nation-state remained weak. It was a time of hard generational struggles, but

ameliorated by commonly held assumptions and solidarities. Foundational, because with the advantage of

hindsight, we can see that much of what would mark China in the twentieth century was built in this

period.

Historical studies have long recognized that the roots of many of the features of the urban Chinese society

in the early decades of twentieth century can be traced back to the nineteenth century, and that the

Communist Revolution of 1949 did not bring them to an end in the interest of creating a new society.

The importance of the late Qing to Chinese modernity has been repeatedly confirmed over the last

generation of scholarship. The limitations of the 1911 Revolution have long been clear; since the 1980s,

the May Fourth narrative has also come under challenge. Historians and literary scholars have made

11Fung Edmund S. K., The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era , Cambridge

University Press, 2010, p.36.

12 Peter Zarrow (ed), Creating Chinese modernity. Knowledge and everyday life, 1900-1940, P. Lang Publising, 2006, p. 6.


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clear that many of the features once attributed to the May Fourth era can in fact be found in the last

decades of the Qing.

The second half of the nineteenth century presented nearly insurmountable challenges for the Qing

dynasty. But these decades also saw the emergence of unprecedented social and economic developments,

particularly in Chinas coastal areas and treaty ports: the rapid growth of newspapers and printed massmedia, especially in Shanghai; a gradual increase in the number of Chinese studying overseas; and the

expansion of new technologies such as railroads, roads, electricity and telegraphs.

Nonetheless, Qing ruling elites proved to be incapable of the far-reaching and systematic reforms

necessary to strengthen the state in the newly competitive international nation-state system. The balance of

power among central, provincial and local elites was fundamentally altered by reform programs. Even if

the late Qing court attempted to create a more efficient bureaucracy and tax regime with the New Policy

(Xn zhng)reforms of 1902, it provoked greater opposition. In terms of traditional political ideology, the

Qing had lost its Mandate to rule; in terms of new political ideas, the nation should be welded by active

and educated citizens.

After its defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War (1895) and the foreign invasion occasioned by the Boxer

uprising (1900), the Qing imperial state burdened by enormous indemnities and a feeble international

reputationbegan instituting an unprecedented series of modernizing reforms: abolishing the civil service

exam, modernizing military and police forces, supporting female education and banning foot binding,

initiating provincial and constitutional assemblies, and more. As potentially radical as many of these

reforms were, they served mainly to further weaken the imperial courts hold on centralized power, and in

1911 a series of provincial secessionist revolts brought the collapse of the Qing empire and the

establishment of the Republic of China a republic that within a few short years spiraled into chaos and

civil war that did not let up until the late 1920s.

In any case, modernity is not a moment but a process. The late Qing and the Republican period as a whole

mark the origin of modern Chinese discourses. Many of these discourses found positive elements in what

was increasingly reified as the tradition. Trends beginning in the late Qing took several generations to

unfold.

The fall of the Qing state in 1911 left an institutional vacuum that was filled only slowly and with fitful

and violent effort. Imperialist pressures and civil wars, first between warlord governments and later

between the GMD center and its rivals, shaped an era characterized by fragmented state-power power

that on the local level could be authoritarian and overbearing but on the national level was often feeble

and ineffectual. The Revolution of 1911 was a moment in this process. It did not resemble the French

Revolution in marking for its participants, victims and observers a clear break with the past. In spite of thechanges in ritual, behavior and the vast political changes, few Chinese probably subjectively felt 1911 as a

new beginning. Even when the notion of revolution (Gmng) was understood as the overthrow of an

entire political system, the term originally simply referred to replacing the mandate of one dynasty that of

another and it undoubtedly still carried the flavor of the dynastic cycle. The events of 1911 could be

understood in the old story of dynastic cycle as easily as with the new notion of revolution. A certain

sense of temporality was not, for the vast majority of people, immediately changed by 1911. Many factors

meant that the past remained a part of daily life.


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Some of the most influential historical work on the republican period wrestles with this failure to create an

effective central government. Typically, Chinas failure to develop a stronger nation -state is interpreted as

confirmation of the assumption that republican-era Chinese modernity was somehow incomplete, that

China somehow fell short of being truly modern. This line of thought has in fact produced some excellent

scholarship. The 1980s debate over whether or not republican China developed a public sphere based onideas of civil society and individual autonomy in part reflected this assumption (equating modernity and

national identity). This equation remains the guiding framework for studies of that era.But as invaluable

as many of these studies are, they still explicitly assume that modern identities and the discursive practices

which support them must be nation centered, unified, and individual in the classically liberal

Enlightenment sense.

We consider, however, that the period of the last Qing and the early Republic was a time of a great

pluralism of ideas. Often contradictory, often overlapping, they included populism, democracy, feminism,

liberalism, anarchism, socialism, communism, iconoclasm, parliamentarism, new-Confucianism, peoples

livelihood, conservatism, radicalism, freedom, restorationism, and so forth. All these ideas and currents of

thought were expressed in material discursive practices that were shaped through often striving for unityand coherence, but that were often multiple, contradictory, and in tensions with one another. These

practices announced the epochal change of modernity and at the same time revealed a new vivid attitude

of self-question on Chinese intellectuals and a strong sense of criticism towards their own historical

circumstances.

3.THE EMERGENT DISCOURSE OF CHINESE INTELLECTUALS ON MODERNITY:

The intellectuals in our study belonged to two generations. The first generation consisted on those born

between 1865 and 1880, such as Zhang Binglin (1868-1936), Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei. They were

classical scholars with varying degrees of knowledge of the West and the modern world. This was atransitional generation, from the late Qing to the early Republic and from literati to modern intellectuals.

The second was the New Culture/May Fourth generation, comprising those born between 1880 and 1895,

such as Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Liang Shuming and Lu Xun, who no longer followed the same career path as

the literati of old but instead developed new ones in their respective fields. Initially trained in Chinese

classical studies, most of them received further education overseas (in Japan, Europe and the United

States), completing their educational their intellectual transition to the modern world. This generation

explored new thought and new possibilities with boldness never seen before.

This intellectual community is not reducible to one single, distinct category. They were critical

intellectualscritical not only regarding cultural issues but also of the prevailing sociopolitical order. Due

to they grappled with specific issues about the nation and its future, their role as both individuals andmembers of groups involved in various forms of political action is in the forefront.

Therefore, understanding modernity as both an epoch and an attitude of questioning the past and the

present is important to this study.

a) Chinas enlightenment project, separating past time from the present and future, was inevitably both

top-down and bottom-up. The concept of the age defines the way we understand the relationships among


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different schools of thought because underscores the relationships among Chinese liberal, conservative

and socialist thought. It relates to the responses to the crisis of modernization and is linked to the

different modes of integrating China into the world.

Late Qing intellectuals opened Chinas modernity project insofar as they were beginning to explore

cosmologies that were distinct from the traditional ones and insofar as they were focusing their interest ongenuinely new social, political, and institutional arrangements. 13 Charlotte Furth showed how the

intellectual generation of the 1880s turned to an evolutionary and culturally relativistic- worldview,

admired much of the Wests institutional arrangements, and began to rethink ontological and

epistemological questions.

Much of the Republican Chinese literature in culture and politics has its roots in an attempt to analyze the

conditions governing the changes that must take place in the nation. Few intellectuals were detached from

the social and political realities. Such issues as imperialism, underdevelopment and capitalism impinged

on their consciousness and had a definite influence on their thought and action.

At the same time, society was undergoing rapid modernization as lifestyles in the full sense of the wordbegan to change. Early twentieth-century China experienced rationalization of administration, coming of

consumer culture, industrial projects, and the deliberate presentation of the new. And many Chinese, of

course, subjectively experienced themselves as modern or deliberately sought to become modern.

Modernity was simultaneously Western at least at origins- and universal, open to all, at least in theory.

Chinese modernity was thus located among and pursed by, numerous groups that shared a roughly

common set of practices: acceptable behaviors, norms, discourses and institutions.

This is not to say, however, that the past or tradition must be or even could be entirely repudiated. The

particular and local cannot be placed outside the boundaries of modernity. Nor does it suggest that

Chinese modernity is best understood in terms of Western definitions, though clearly the influence or

impact of Western ideas, the various effects produced by Western imperialism, and certain post-colonialconditions cannot be ignored. Rather, Chinese ideas about modernity were a product of rapidly changing

global and domestic circumstances. It naturally contained many traditional features but reworked and

evolving in new syntheses.

b) In terms of attitude, a spirit of reflection, critique and self-consciousness pervaded the intellectual

discourse of this period.

Wang Hui puts it in an historical perspective: The basic characteristics of Chinese though on modernity

are doubt and critique. As a result, at the heart of the search for Chinese modernity in Chinese thinking

and in some of Chinas most important intellectuals stands a huge paradox.14In the quest for modernity,

Chinese intellectuals critiqued it not only because of its very nature but also and especially because ofChinas different culture and recent history. They reflected on Chinas past and present, on imperialist

expansion and on the social inequities of capitalism in the West all at once. They believed that it was

important to consider how modernization could avoid or remedy the political and social problems that

13This might be distinguished from, though perhaps encompassing, the modernization project more narrowly focused on economic standards as

developed by Walt Rostow among others in the 1950s, as again promoted by Chinese leaders today, and, for that matter, similar in some respects

to the self-strengtheningreforms of the 1860s.14

Wang Hui, Contemporary Chinese thought , 150.


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would inevitably arise in the wake of liberal democracy, capitalist development and the advance of

modern science and technology.

First, we intended to look for what Benjamin Schwartz calls a framework of common concepts of the

age to comprehend the intricate relationships among different schools of thought. Schwartz pointed out

that the three entities arose at roughly the same time and that they all operated within a framework of

common concepts15.

The common concepts were nationalism, progress, change, organic growth, science and democracy, which

provided a shared central ground on which the themes of national survival, state building, capitalist

development, social and political reform, liberty, equally and social justice were thrashed out. This

common frame of reference underscores what Wang Hui has called the identity of attitudes, of the May

Fourth intellectuals, despite their diverse thought.16

Wang means that, although there was no unified

epistemology or common methodology in thinking about Chinas problems, a belief in being modern was

shared across the intellectual spectrum. Understanding of modernity varied from person to person and

from group to group. But each made his or her own judgment and cultural selection through a process of

critical reflection, using the same keywords and raising the same or similar questions, even if the answerswere different.

Liberal, conservative and socialist thought on organic growth, reform and gradual change drew so close as

to be almost indistinguishable (Fung, 2010). Mainstream Chinese thought rejected political violence but

not social engineering, which sought to eradicate such problems as poverty, illiteracy and corruption and

promote education and industrial development.17The intellectual boundaries were not demarcated. Many

educated Chinese were liberal in one respect, conservative in another and socialist in a third, each

representing a modern response to Chinas sociopolitical crisis. They debated about fundamental

difference between Chinese and Western cultures, about Westernization, about the future of China and

about capitalism and socialism. Yet all were interested in achieving a modern society that was liberal,

democratic, just and still Chinese. Although some would sometimes think in terms of opposites, manymore were disposed towards reconciling East and West, modern and traditional, liberal and conservative,

liberty and equality, reason and emotions, value and history and so forth. It was clear to them that

modernity and modernization, meant progress, liberty and national wealth and power, and that it entailed a

reevaluation of Chinese traditions against Western values. But they thought the West should be criticized,

too, where appropriate. Therefore, Chinese modernity was defined by both Chinese and Western historical

experiences and by reflections on both the past and the present.

The recent Chinese past brought into sharp relief foreign intrusions, imperialism, the demise of the

imperial system , military ascendancy, political instability, incessant civil strife and state and nation

building, among other things. This history is very different from the grand narrative of the European

Enlightenment. Yet the Western experience was important for an understanding of how the West hadblazed a trail to modernity and what lessons it had for China.

15Benjamin Schwartz, Notes on conservatism in general and in China in particular: the case of Chinese intellectuals in China and other

matters,ed. By Benjamin Schwartz, 1-21. Harvard University Press, 1996.16

Wang Hui, Yuyan yu lishi (shang pian): Zhongguo xiandai lishi zhong de wusi qimeng yundong, Wenxue pinglun 3, 1989, 18-20.17

On social engineering, see Tung Chen Chiang, Social engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919-1949 , Cambridge University Press ,2001.


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It is unnecessary to view Chinese modernity as an alternative modernity that breaks with universal truths

where modernization is undertaken with local particularities. To do so is to acknowledge the existence of a

universal modernity that has been called into question. It is more useful to think about Chinese modernity

as a discourse that underscores the universality-particularity nexus. Drawing on the contemporary notion

of global modernity, Chinese modernity can be seen as having both global and local aspects that interact

and are negotiableit is possible to embed one in the other. Chinese intellectuals have reason to think thatthe West has quite as much to learn from China as they from the West. While they deal with local issues,

they also do it with questions concerning all humankind and those about Chinas place in the world.

Historically, the rise of Chinese modernity, the crisis it faced as it evolved and its internal dynamics were

all embedded in the process of East-West cultural communication. Writing in contemporary context,

Wang Hui argues that questions about Chinese modernity and its pathologies should not be considered

merely issues within Chinese society or as simply the results of the transplant of foreign cultures into

Chinese soil; more importantly, they should be considered as issues of cultural interactions using common

language of being modern. It is important to recognize the cultural autonomy of Chinese modernity as it

evolves, taking into consideration Chinas historical narrative. The study of Chinese modernity, in essence,

involves a kind of cultural communicative action18.

The belief in the possibility of the construction of crucial aspects of social, cultural and natural orders by

conscious human activities became a central premise of modernity. This view of the possibility of

transformation of socio-cultural orders and their continuous exploration of, and potential mastery over

them is bizarre to traditional ideology such as Confucian philosophy. The idea of progress and through

such historical progress utopian views inherent in revolution and modernity take root. Modernity is

therefore linked to the idea that is possible to realize some of the utopian visions in social life. The idea of

modernity carries the transformation of the premises of the preceding traditions. Among these was the

change of the perception of the place of God/supreme ruler in the construction of the cosmos, and of man,

and of belief in God or in some metaphysical principles. Man and nature tended to be perceived not as

directly regulated by these, but as autonomous entities regulated by some internal laws which could be

fully explained and grasped by human reason and inquiry (Eisenstadt, 1962). Hence, closely related to the

idea of modernity was the transformation of the basic orientations to tradition and authority. The authority

of the past as the major symbolic regulator of social, political and cultural change and innovation gave

way to the acceptance of innovation as a cultural orientation and a possible component of the legitimation

of authority.

The traditional notion of self-identity and the desire to insist on this identity was hard to abandon. Cultural

changes and adjustment were therefore particularly sensitive and difficult.

Chinas quest for modernity as the deconstruction of the natural was a difficult path. The unnatural

arrangement of modernity implies the deconstruction of the natural artifice.

19

It brought the destructionof tradition, including many beliefs, convictions, certainties, morals, religions and ways of life. It means a

radical rearrangement of forms of human co-operation and the mechanism of problem-solving. What is

natural to the pre-modern conceptions is no longer natural to the modern. Modernity begins to appear

when and where the natural appears as artificial (He Ping: 2002, 5).

18Wang Hui, Weibo yu Zhongguo de xiangdaixing wenti, in Wang Hui, Wang Hui zixuanji, Nanning: Guanxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997, 35.19He Ping, Chinas search for modernity. Cultural discourse in the late 20 thcentury, Palmgrave, 2002.


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The cultural discourse for modernity in the first half of the century was a rivalry between the contentions

of different claims and alternatives for modernization. Many of the newly emerging Chinese intellectuals

came to assure that the problem was, fundamentally, a culture one. The Chinese cultural discourse was

affected by both international and domestic events as well as by the different actors with contentious

ideological commitments and class interests.

Young-tsu Wong showed that Zhang Binglin also both appreciated the new knowledge he could acquire

from the West (via Japan) and was critical of much he learned about Western civilization. He followed the

German idealists whom he read in Japanese translation, and ontologizes some of the key oppositions of

capitalism in thought. He draws on this ontology to cultivate the subjective conditions for a revolutionary

anti-Manchu nationalism, but unlike the German idealists, Zhang did not merely endorse such ontology.

Rather, he used Buddhist categories and the theory of nothingness to negate the basic structure of capital

in ontological form. Such a negation was extremely important since it enabled Zhang to be critical of

many concepts, such as evolutionary history and statism, which became increasingly hegemonic in the

years to come. Zhang thought that Western modernity was not the same as modernity itself. It was his

critique of certain features of the modern West that caused him to be labeled a cultural conservative

along the lines of a Liang Shuming. 20However, it was his concern for the common people that led Zhangto skepticism about copying the West.

Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming were also radical intellectuals who critically wanted to preserve

Chinese cultural characteristics. They frequently evaluated modernization from a perspective

characterized by a suspicion of the results of the industrialization, modern urban life and individual

material self-interest. They valued the non utilitarian aspects of human existence. The main thrust of their

critique of modernization was an emphasis on the limits of pure rationalism in solving all the problems of

the human condition.

In early 1919, Liang Qichao expressed strong disillusionment with Western modernity. He believed that

the present situation in Europe had proved that Modern West was not so perfect. Chinese culture, which

contained humanistic ideals, might help correct the defects. His main argument was that rationalism had

destroyed all spiritual values by reducing man to material mechanism. Liang Shuming shared common

themes and approaches with Liang Qichao in his anti-positivist leanings, in his search of the core

significance of Chinese culture under the encrustment of traditions, and his distaste for the Western

modernity21. Liang Shumings philosophical discourse emanated from the idea that culture is essentially

characterized by the way the will attempts to deal with environmental obstacles. Liang suggested that

Western cultures in response to their basic problems of survival take a normal or forward direction and

choose to conquer the environment and satisfy their primal desires. All the characteristic and products of

Western culture, such as science, democracy and power over nature, have developed naturally from this

direction of the will. Chinese culture, on the other hand, is characterized by harmonizing demands of thewill itself and the environment, thus this cultural type achieves greater inner contentment.

Modernist intellectuals, such as Hu Shi, on the other hand saw tension between the values of Chinese

culture and the rationalization of social and economic organization towards modernization. In his view,

20See Guy Alitto, The last confucian Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese dilemma of modernity , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

21Liang Shuming, Civilization and Philosophy of the Orient and the Occident, 1921.


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the preservation of Chinese ways and the acquisition of power-producing modernity could not coexist.

Hence, the Chinese had no choice than abandon their past. This radical anti-traditionalist stance can be

partly attributed to Chinas specific situation at the time (the 1910s to the 1920s). It also originated from a

different value orientation and was shaped by a different mental model about culture. Westernization

theorists had an overwhelming preference for modernity. They also had a far more flexible approach to

cultural tradition. Hu Shi, for whom culture meant only a pattern of adaptation to the environment,articulated this most explicitly. Thus, there was nothing that could not be changed and no culture from

which China could not borrow. In the debate between Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi and Liang Shuming who

insisted that China could and should rely on some, or the essencial parts of its traditions in its future

development, modernization was coined as neutral term describing the process of acquiring those

universal characteristics of modern Western societies.

These discursive practices were significant because they exemplify how Chinese intellectuals, through the

deconstruction of the natural constantly tried to find resources to create an alternative to western

capitalism. Modernity therefore, was as a discursive representation of a change of epoch, embodied in the

critical attitudes of Chinese intellectuals during this period. They were determined to seek Chinas own

integration to the world, as much as they were concern to define their own concrete ways of social andpolitical mobilization to get it.

Modernity, as an epoch concept and a self-critical attitude, was expressed through the discourses and

political pronouncements of this critical intellectual community that, as today, beyond the evident

difference of thought among its individuals was also involved in the new social and political context of the

early twentieth century, in the quest for its own independent voice and autonomous position.

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