Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953

Introduction: Evolve or Perish

Introduction Evolve or Perish Confronted with foreign aggression and internal chaos, in 1915 China’s young urban intellectuals launched a vociferous attack on traditional Chinese culture. Their radical reevaluation of China’s political and cultural institutions, a reevaluation later known as the New Culture Movement, lasted eight years and addressed almost every aspect of Chinese society. Blaming traditional institutions for China’s perilous circumstances, these young radicals proposed a number of Western-inspired reforms. Of these, one of the most important was family reform. In place of arranged marriage and patriarchal control, they promoted free marriage choice, companionate marriage, and economic and emotional independence from the family. In the following decades this debate expanded to include reformers and revolutionaries of all political stripes in a discussion that was ultimately as much about the nation as it was about the family. The New Culture Movement exploded with a force that made it seem unprecedented but, in fact, the groundwork for such iconoclasm was laid decades before. It is, perhaps, impossible to point to a single day, or even year, as the definitive moment that sends a nation in a new direction, but surely something like that may be said of the early days of 1895. Before pursuing this study of New Culture family reform and its legacy, let us turn to a moment some twenty years earlier when another generation of Chinese intellectuals also agonized over how to save the nation. One afternoon in January 1895, Japanese troops seized the defensive forts at the Shandong port of Weihaiwei. Using captured Chinese can1 non from land and their own torpedo boats from sea, they proceeded to destroy half of the northern Chinese navy’s modern fleet. The battle not only sank China’s best ships, but also its last hopes of maintaining what many Chinese believed to be China’s unique cultural essence in the face of the capitalist imperialist onslaught that had begun with the Opium War almost sixty years before. Up to this point, China had pursued a policy of developing Western technology while maintaining its own values , culture, and social and political organization. The humiliating defeat at the hands of a people the Chinese liked to dismiss as “midget pirates ” (wakÖ) caused a crisis of confidence among many of China’s intellectuals. Some wondered whether Chinese culture was intrinsically ill-suited for modernity. Perhaps, they suggested, China could not successfully adopt Western technology without also adopting some elements of Western culture. In the same year, Yan Fu (1853–1921), one of China’s intellectual lights, began translating Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics. His work, a combination of translation and commentary that promoted the views of the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, appeared as Tianyan lun (On evolution) in 1898. It electrified young intellectuals, who felt that Social Darwinism explained why China found itself at the mercy of invading forces after centuries of political and cultural preeminence and that it starkly illuminated China’s alternatives—evolve or perish.1 This confluence of political events and social theory, or empirical fact and discourse , if you will, shaped China’s future. China’s best and brightest resolved to take the future into their own hands and map their country’s road to survival. To equip themselves for the evolutionary struggle, they borrowed from the social, cultural, and political systems of their wouldbe conquerors—Japan, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and the United States. For the next twenty years, Chinese reformers focused their efforts on China’s political, educational, and military bureaucracies. They also began to broach reform for women, especially with regard to education and physical fitness. A generation later, China’s intellectuals could only conclude that the situation in China had worsened. The Qing had collapsed in 1911, ending millennia of imperial rule, but the democratic republic that replaced it in 1912 was already dying. The former Qing general Yuan Shikai, to whom Sun Yatsen had relinquished the presidency, had quickly squelched China’s nascent democratic institutions and in the fall and winter of 1915 tried to revive the imperial institution and install himself as emperor. In the spring of 1916 he died a disappointed man, but the presidents who 2 Introduction succeeded him could not control the military strongmen who had ensconced themselves in jealously guarded strongholds throughout China. In 1917 China collapsed into a welter of warlord territories and would remain divided until Communist...