The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel: Essays on Political Philosophy in Our Modern Era of Interacting Cultures

2. The Problem of Factual and Normative Continuity with the Confucian Tradition in Modern Chinese Thought

Chapter II h The Problem of Factual and Normative Continuity with the Confucian Tradition in Modern Chinese Thought 1. The Challenge to the Original Fairbankian Paradigm1 It is a great honor for me to return to my alma mater to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a research institute that has been so central to one of the great chapters of American intellectual history and global sinology, namely the development at Harvard, brought about especially by John K. Fairbank and the equally incomparable L. S. Yang, of a new and fruitful approach to the study of China. Having had the privilege of being a student of Chinese history at Harvard in the 1960s after this development was already under way, I once counted up in my mind thirteen Harvard faculty members who had helped and inspired me, not to mention an impressive number of gifted graduate students, including my colleague on this panel, Tu Wei-ming. I do, however, have to point to a glaring deficiency of his paper today on the post-Mao revival of interest in the Confucian tradition as a source of values for the shaping of Chinese modernity. As Professor Tu well knows, this revival was an uphill struggle in the 1980s, impeded by not only the continuing great influence of May Fourth iconoclasm but also the contemptuous way that the work of the Hong Kong-based, anti-Marxist New Confucians was treated by Li Ze-hou, whose neoMarxism was extremely influential especially in the 1980s. How, then, did it come about that, by the 1990s, scholarly publications in China on the New Confucians had become a major industry, and what can broadly be called “modern Confucian humanism” had become a major part of the post-Mao ideological marketplace? 226 The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel Professor Tu fails to note one major cause for this development , his own many publications, interviews, and lectures in China going back to the late 1970s.2 The importance of Tu’s influence can be seen in the glowing praise heaped on his scholarship by Professor Guo Qi-yong of Wuhan University, one of China’s most astute, intellectually honest, and respected students of modern Chinese thought, when Guo edited the five-volume collection of Tu’s writings, published in 2002.3 Besides trying to have a little fun at the expense of Professor Tu’s modesty, I should say that when Dr. Ronald Suleski asked me to join in a discussion about the evolution in recent decades of scholarship on modern Chinese intellectual history, I immediately thought of W. Somerset Maugham’s magnificent novel Cakes and Ale, in which Ashenden, a writer, describes his effort to understand the art of fiction: “I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr. Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr. E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr. E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr. Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.”4 Quite similarly, readers of this paper of mine will learn something only if they happen to agree with my take on modern Chinese intellectual history, namely, that the central problem in this field is how to address the question raised by the debate especially between the sociologist Alex Inkeles, who sees a global tendency toward convergence in the social structures and values of modernizing societies, and the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who emphasizes the continuing divergences between modern cultures.5 That is to say, in the intellectual changes of modern China, what was the relation between any “inner logic” continuous with the Confucian tradition and diverging from Western modernity, and ideas converging with the latter and discontinuous with the Confucian tradition? Granted, some China historians have been arguing that whether the meaning of one historical utterance is continuous with that of an earlier one or that of another, contemporaneous one is somehow not an important or even interesting question. They seem to believe that a historian should be interested only in what particularly was said and happened at any one time. This view 2. Factual and Normative Continuity 227 may stem either from a contingency theory of history as a series of atomistic occurrences or from a rear-guard...