The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality (review)

Sun Lung-kee, author of the highly controversial Chinese-language book The Deep Structure of Chinese Culture [Zhongguo wenhua de shenceng jiegou (Xiang-gang: Yishan Chubanshe, 1983)] continues his original thinking in this most unusual of historical monographs on twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history. While the term "national character" usually evokes thoughts of essentialized or racist texts on the psychological makeup of the Chinese à la Smith's Chinese Characteristics (1899) or Cockburn's John Chinaman (1896), this is a work of another hue. It is at once an amalgamation of many of Sun's previously published ideas and an original and multidisciplinary interrogation of a cacophony of competing and complementary discourses tangentially related to the subject of "national character." While national character is the surface of Sun's study, its substructure is the intellectual traffic of ideas from the West to China.

Sun corrals a disparate group of discourses on national character by structurally understanding them as a "cluster of sites devoted to the same discussion on a world-wide-web" (p. xvii). Deploying this metaphor highlights the interconnectedness of six seemingly unrelated discussions on nationhood: the group mind, Orientalness, corporeality, regionality, individuality, and concluding somewhat apocalyptically with postnational individuation. Overall, despite its structural originality, it remains a fairly conventional intellectual history beginning with Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, progressing through the May Fourth scholars and Lu Xun, and concluding with Pan Guangdan, Zhang Junjun, and a host of American commentators on the Chinese national character.

Sun's project, breathing life into many stale historical debates by giving a fresh reading to many well-known texts, begins by reopening the always popular question of the decline of the Confucian ecumenist worldview and the rise of the nationhood project.

The death knell of Confucian ecumenism, he argues, paves the way for the rise of racialist thinking, initially pan-Asianist in flavor, which becomes the incubator for conceptions of the nation. Sun next explores a variety of discourses promoting the idea of "national psychology" for defining a nonbiological nation-state. Heavily influenced by French and German concepts of national malaise, Chinese intellectuals sought to understand the quintessence of China through a negative appraisal of a "group mind" or "national soul."

In chapter 3, Sun argues that the national-character debates were "transcending" the nationhood project. May Fourth intellectuals sought to explain it under the rubric of a confrontation between Eastern and Western civilizations. They either defended or denigrated the Chinese character depending on their interpretation of China's position along a universalist evolutionary track. Sun also posits biologism at the forefront of these scientistic debates as the sway of fin-de-siècle currents became dominant. The fin-de-siècle penchant for degeneration theories, Sun believes, made its way to the May Fourth scholars in tandem with positive eugenic theories, thus demonstrating how "[corporeal] degenerescence became the standard idiom in May Fourth discussions of national character" (p. 104). This May Fourth fascination with biologism, Sun contentiously argues, should summarily force a "revision of the culturalist interpretation of May Fourth iconoclasm" (p. 97).

In chapter 4, Sun attempts to upset the Lu Xun-as-national-salvationist applecart. Looking at his Western source of inspiration, Nietzsche, Sun argues that he was actually an individualist who consistently derided the stupidity of the "Chinese Herd" for stultifying individualism and the Superman. Sun's interpretation relies on a rereading of the "seminal statements of [Lu Xun's] lifelong philosophy" that were written under Nietzsche's influence during 1907-1908 (p. 118). It was only a postmortem Lu Xun who was "pressganged" into service as a national salvationist. Despite his intense criticism of the Chinese people, Sun explains, Lu became a national icon because of their "penchant for self-denigration since the dawn of the national character discourse" (p. 131). Of course, almost all early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals were critics of their compatriots...