Читать книгу China’s Revolutions in the Modern World - Rebecca E. Karl - Страница 12

What is the foundation of contemporary Europe lying so brilliantly before us? It is the gift of revolutions. The term revolution [geming] in Europe means change from the old to the new, which differs fundamentally from what we call the change of dynasties.

—Chen Duxiu, “On the Literary Revolution” (February 1917)¹

What happens after Nora walks out? … What did Nora take with her apart from her awakened mind? … Dreams are fine, but otherwise money is essential … economic rights seem to be the most important factor in present-day society.

—Lu Xun, “What Happens after Nora Walks Out” (1923)²

With disappointment rife about the political mess left in the wake of the 1911 Revolution, many intellectuals turned their attention to what they deemed the deeper substratum of Chinese social life: its culture. Critique moved from considerations of politics as state form—now a sphere condemned as endlessly corrupt and ineffectual—to an unsparing critique of the culture that underpinned the structures of everyday social hierarchy. The major target of this critique from the New Culture through the May Fourth period (1915–1925) was Confucianism—or the realm of what was called “man-eating ritual” (chiren lijiao / )—which was imputed as the mode of the social reproduction of hierarchy in elevated and everyday behavior alike. The basic social relations and bonds that this supposed all-encompassing Confucianism (ruxue or rujiao, ) prescribed as the definition of a well-ordered state—the subordination of young to old, of sons to fathers, of women to men, of wives to husbands, of students to teachers, of ruled to ruler, and so on—were now exposed as the building blocks of Chinese “slavishness” and offered as reasons for the supposed inability of the Chinese to adapt to the modern world.³ Soon enough, these were gathered into the catchall negative designation “feudal” (fengjian / ) culture, which was said to be marked by blind obedience to and respect for authority. The feudal infestation had to be overcome.

From the mid 1910s into the 1920s, the claims made for culture (wenhua or wenming, ) were totalistic. Everything was said to have a cultural root, and that cultural root was said to be not gently sinological nor quaintly traditional nor harmoniously uniting, but rather entirely rotten, toxic even. Cultural rot became an explanation for all manner of vice and ill and social problem—from the high-level corruption of officials through to the everyday gendered practices that sacrificed women’s individuality (renge / ) and men’s freedom (ziyou / ) to family honor on the altar of marriage. Indeed, the proliferation of what were identified as “social problems” (shehui wenti / ) went hand in hand with what were understood to be the devolutionary properties of Chinese culture, where the insufficiencies of the latter were now said to subtend all failures of China’s modern historical passage. This radical critique and condemnation of culture and of China not only characterized but animated the New Culture / May Fourth movement, an extended period of existential crisis in “Chinese-ness” that constituted the first of several cultural revolutions in China’s twentieth century.

The New Culture / May Fourth movement has been called China’s “Renaissance.” Or, more frequently, its “Enlightenment.” In these designations, the period is defined as the exclusive historical possession of intellectuals. This is a paradigm of modernity that reinforces an elitist ideological bias, rooted in a version of historical narrative where popular mass movements are understood to be radically disruptive of the more “rational” social transformation pursued by the educated and the already empowered. Such a paradigmatic containment privileges the liberal over the revolutionary momentums behind the period’s upheavals and has guided much research on the period in Euro-American and Chinese Nationalist (Taiwan) scholarship.⁴ An alternative paradigm of the New Culture / May Fourth—purveyed until very recently in PRC scholarship—holds that this period led teleologically to the introduction of Marxism and the formation of the Communist Party (1921), which is the true revolutionary successor to this (petty) bourgeois phase of culture critique. Highlighting the role of the Communist Party in organizing and leading progressive historical initiatives, this PRC narrative turns the New Culture / May Fourth into a mere transmission belt for Marxism; it thus forecloses the more radical aspects of the culture critique (its anarchistic tendencies, for example), consigns to historical oblivion the competing liberal contribution (slated for inevitable historical obsolescence), and emphasizes to the exclusion of much else the coming-into-being of the Bolshevik-Communist nexus of political-cultural social relations and knowledge production. In this party-centered narrative, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 propels history into motion in a linear unbroken line traced from Russia to China to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.⁵ Each of these narratives contains elements of truth. But none of them covers the complexity of the historical questions raised (and never answered) at the time about modernity, Chinese-ness, and China’s modern revolutionary histories.

In 1917, Chen Duxiu, later one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but at this point still just a professor at Beijing University with a reputation for radicalism, wrote a rallying call to the youth of China to cast off the old and create something new. The youth—a category of Chinese social life just emerging into relevance, as elders had hitherto been venerated to the exclusion of others—were, according to Chen, still relatively unsullied by blind adherence to tradition and thus the only ones capable of challenging commitments to hierarchy so as to produce new social values. Chen’s argument proceeded as a call for a literary revolution, where revolution is named—as cited at the opening of this chapter—the tide of modern times. His exhortation is comprised of three positions. The first is encapsulated in the slogan “Down with the ornate, obsequious literature of the aristocrats; up with the plain, expressive literature of the people!”: a wholesale attack on what he considered the formulaic, dead classical mode of writing characteristic of ancient Chinese texts, with a concomitant call for a writing style and system closer to the everyday lives of living human beings. The former type of writing, in his estimation, perpetuated the reproduction of a social hierarchy of the classically educated and the elders, whereas the latter would be productive of new values ideally rooted in “the people.” Second and relatedly, Chen called for an end to “the stale, ostentatious literature of the classics; up with the fresh, sincere literature of realism!” Realism, at that time in China and Japan, as well as in Euro-American literature, was understood to be an advanced form of literary expression: it was unadorned, clean, socially useful, and devoid of the show-offy and imitative flourishes required of “good” classical writing. Realism was imbued not with timelessness but with the timeliness and dynamism of rapidly changing social life itself. Chen’s third position was expressed as: “Down with the pedantic, obscure literature of the recluse; up with the clear, popular literature of society!” In juxtaposing the recluse to popular society, Chen indicated that literature could not be created by and for individuals insulated from society, but rather had to be a politically and socially democratic creative act.⁶

Chen’s focus on the literary/cultural sphere signaled a retreat from politics in its state form. However, in its invocation of “the people” and its totalistic critique of the hitherto-accepted intertwined reproductive relation of textual practice and social hierarchy, Chen’s call exhibits the elements of the conjunctural moment of New Culture in China, when the arrival of the working class and social division, along with the emergence of the intelligentsia, became a potential social and political alliance that could transform China.⁷ This is when socialism—as well as anarchism, syndicalism, feminism, nationalism, and patriotism, among others—became visibly and viscerally relevant to social life, as well as an urgent matter of intellectual investigation and practice. The realm of the cultural, from this time forward, became a primary sphere in which many “isms” were battled into shape and debated into everyday parlance.

In a less radical mode than Chen Duxiu, the philosopher and literary scholar Hu Shi—educated at Cornell and then under John Dewey at Columbia University, and newly returned to China in the mid 1910s—wrote of his own “modest” sense that literature should be reformed. In an early 1917 essay on the topic, Hu’s proposals revolved around linguistic matters: What language should be used for literary writing? For him, the problem was shaped by the extreme imitative formalism characterizing Chinese writing, an imitative ideal inimical to a creative style or timely content. For Hu, the turn to the vernacular—a written language that in one way or the other would reflect, create, and give literary form to a spoken language—was necessary and yet also fraught with the threat of vulgarity. Neither politically revolutionary nor imbued with any sentimental notion of the “the people,” Hu understood that the trend toward vernacularization, begun already in the late Qing and now gaining traction with the growth of urban literacy and the increase in popular writing for profit-seeking journals and publishing houses, required careful management by elite intellectuals, lest such writing become so debased that the vernacular itself would have to be abandoned as a “high” literary proposition. In Hu’s proposal, safeguarding the vernacular for the literary required it to be properly regulated and channeled, by and through the intellectual elite. In pursuit of this endeavor, Hu chose to praise earlier vernacular writers, such as the authors of the Dream of the Red Chamber or Water Margin, who “faithfully write about the contemporary situation,” thus entering the halls of “true literature”⁸ rather than the far bawdier (and actually more popular) narratives of the Ming-Qing marketplace, such as Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus). Hu’s call for the vernacular as a literary language sparked enormous backlash, with conservatives, including the prolific translator Lin Shu, accusing the foreign-educated Hu of having lost his Chinese-ness and been enslaved by foreign thinking, and with radicals accusing him of snobbish elitism. (No one at this point culturally defended the wildly popular and profitable “lowbrow” novels classified as “mandarin duck and butterfly” literature.)

Ever since, the battle over what constitutes “the vernacular” (baihua / ) has been continuously waged. As China has a huge number of spoken languages, often corresponding to very specific locations, the question of which of the major languages was to constitute the “standard” spoken vernacular to be reflected and refined in “high” literary form was a cause for much debate. The issue is still not completely solved, although the imposition by strong states after 1949 of a “national language”—in Taiwan called guoyu (, language of the state), and in the PRC called putong hua (, common speech)—foreclosed some possibilities, while leaving the door open for others. In post-1949 Nationalist-ruled Taiwan and Communist-ruled PRC alike, the national language ultimately was modeled on the Northern Chinese dialect that had become the spoken language of the dynastic bureaucracy (“Mandarin”); and yet, most people in China did/do not speak this language as a matter of daily life, or at all. Thus, while various geographical-linguistic forms were offered as possible contenders for literariness (Cantonese, Fujianese, Shanghainese, etc.), until recently, they were excluded a priori. With the rise of regional media empires, however, these languages have staged somewhat of a comeback. The problem of language in today’s China is still part of a struggle over how to be Chinese. The question was systematically raised for the first time in the mid 1910s.

The most ambitious of the language revolutionaries of the New Culture / May Fourth period, Qu Qiubai, advocated not the endorsement of a particular regional language but rather the creation of an entirely new language, to be pieced together from the ongoing and contemporary comingling of the multilingual, rural-derived proletariats working in urban factories.⁹ Instead of what he called the “mule language” (neither horse nor donkey) of a Europeanized Chinese / Mandarin vernacular that conformed to foreign-educated elites and their lifestyles in the treaty ports but was not spoken by regular folks, Qu’s proposed language was to be based in the very daily practice of the proletariat that came closest to the ways that ordinary people from different language groups found to speak to one another. In Qu’s theory, language was to be a class attribute rather than a national one. Ultimately Qu’s radically democratic advocacies were dropped from discussion.

With the successive arrival of radio, recordings, talkie cinema, popular music, and other modes of sound reproducibility, the question of language and form continually (re)imposed itself as a political, social, and market problem. It also became completely intertwined with the intractable issue of the written form itself, the hanzi (, characters) that were distinctive to China’s historic expressive system. European language experts, who, through the nineteenth century, had come up with immutable (colonial) taxonomies of world languages, had long since decided that China was hampered by the hanzi form of writing, and that this “pictographic” or “ideographic” form could never be flexible enough to express modern thinking or conceptual matters properly. On this view, Chinese were imprisoned in and by nonalphabetic backwardness. After considering and discarding Esperanto as a possible solution, Chinese language experts in part accepted European theories and tried over many decades to find an adequate linguistic logic for the transformation and/or simplification of hanzi: using alphabetic equivalents, inventing new pronunciation symbols and guides, and ultimately reducing the number of strokes required for the writing of any given character (the 1950s PRC solution to the problem). With the telegraph and then the advent of computers, the issue was rejoined from yet other angles.¹⁰

The difficulty of writing/reading in the process of learning redounded immediately to the sphere of education and textbooks. The explosive expansion of schools and literacy helped to redefine the purpose of education. From a tool of gentility, good breeding, or male access to state power, education for boys and girls became, on the one hand, a form of training for individual fulfillment and/or creating activists to lead the fight for social justice; on the other hand, as education came under the control of agents of a would-be state and the conservative forces of textbook publishing, it became a way to produce citizens as patriots and servants of a putative (still nonexistent) national state. Grammar texts became one key to producing whatever sense of citizenry could be wrought from the disunified territorial whole. Meanwhile, emulating Germany and Japan, physical education was incorporated into the new-style schools, based on the conviction that the old separation of effete scholarship (wen / ) from brawny military pursuits (wu / ) was outmoded and inimical to an all-round ideal militarized citizen of the nation. Even the young Mao Zedong was captivated by the practice of physical exercise, although he was hugely critical of the mechanical, rote way in which it was taught in schools.¹¹

Thus it was that from the earliest phases of the New Culture movement’s calls for a radical transformation in language, literary form, and the social purpose of culture, the issues raised went to the core of how “Chinese” or “Chinese-ness” was to be practiced, inculcated, experienced, and understood in modern terms. Over the course of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, these issues were repeatedly debated and re-raised, in ever-deeper and ever more expanded form. They remain at issue today.

In late 1917, the Russian Revolution did not wash across Chinese radical circles in a wave of clarity. In the immediate aftermath, the October Revolution was understood as a “victory of anarcho-communism.”¹² Indeed, through the 1910s and well into the 1920s, the major language of radicalism in China was that of anarchism: Peter Kropotkin’s mutual aid, Leo Tolstoy’s agrarian utopianism, Mikhail Bakhunin’s laborism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s collectivism, Emma Goldman’s radical feminism, Daoist eremetism, and of course, with even less theoretical rigor, various advocacies for assassination and nihilism. There was little to distinguish Bolshevism or Marxism from anarchism as an anti-state and pro-labor form of socialism.¹³ It was only in late 1918 through 1919 that the various “isms” started to get separated out and elaborated more clearly in relation to one another. Yet even as the intellectual scene was muddled, Chinese state agents and foreign authorities were not confused about the potential dangers of the revolutionary appeal of Russia; large numbers of journals, whether merely liberal or more radical, were shut down while what was called “Bolshevist” activity was sought so as to be rooted out of foreign concession areas. Most of the captured activists were in fact anti-Bolshevist anarchists, but that mattered to no one in power.

By late 1918, Li Dazhao, a professor at Beijing University and soon to be one of the founders of the CCP along with Chen Duxiu, was lauding the victory of Bolshevism in Russia in the pages of the quintessential journal of the time, New Youth (Xin Qingnian / ); by 1919 he was writing more about Marx and Marxism than Bolshevism. Meanwhile, Qu Qiubai, temporarily sidetracked from politics by a love of the Russian language and nineteenth-century Russian literature, was called upon to translate Russian political tracts and to participate in the new Beijing University–based Marxist Research Society reading groups. In these groups, basic tenets of Marxism and Bolshevism were discussed with reference to a meager number of translated texts. By early 1920, Qu was sent by the Beijing Morning Post to Moscow to report directly on the Russian revolution and its messy aftermath. His travelogue, History of the Heart in the Red Capital (Chi du xin shi / ), published in 1922, was rigorous in its reflections on the promise and problems in postrevolutionary Russia; for its honesty, it has been called “one of the most influential pieces of ‘red propaganda’ ever written.”¹⁴

When confronted from an anarchist perspective, several of the difficult aspects of an acceptance of Bolshevism/Marxism included the prominence accorded by Bolshevism to a centralized disciplined party in the organization and leadership of political and ideological activity, as well as the centrality given in Marxism to the inevitability of class struggle and the victory of the proletariat in the era of industrial capitalism. On the latter issue, anarchists tended to see things in the binary terms of authority/non-authority, where authority was embedded not merely in state / society or class antagonisms, but also in families, the cultural realm, everyday routines, labor regimes of all varieties, gender relations, and so on. Thus, unlike liberals, who believed China’s social structure did not have class conflict but was merely backward (as compared to Euro-America-Japan), anarchists saw class, but could not accept it as the primary way through which people lived their social subordination. Moreover, anarchists could not accept that an authoritarian institution such as the party or the state could be used to transform social relations in an equitable direction. The mismatch between ends (social justice) and means (state or party authority) was too great. This, then, led them to suspect that the discipline of a centralized Bolshevist party, whose role was to coordinate activity and police acceptable ideological parameters of political understanding, would lead to the imposition of the party over social and political life more generally. In their refusal to accept these premises, anarchists, through the 1920s, became anathema to the CCP, and the party—once formed—diligently purged them from the ranks, as had Lenin in postrevolutionary Russia.