The Imperial Style of Inquiry in Twentieth-Century China: The Emergence of New Approaches (review)

On November 25, 1979, the offshore oil drilling platform Bohai No. 2 capsized off China's northeastern coast, killing seventy-two and destroying a decade of investment in the petroleum industry. Despite technicians' warnings, the Ministry of Petroleum had ordered the Bohai team to "learn from Daqing" and move the platform in four days, rather than the fifteen that were needed. In his self-criticism after being dismissed from his post, Minister Song Zhenming waxed philosophical: "subjective will had replaced objective reality. . . . [R]espect for science and objective laws [had been dismissed] as 'fearing difficulty'" (p. 69). Instead of "seeking truth from facts," the Ministry allowed a model of revealed truth—in this case, the legendary rapid development of the Daqing oil fields in Heilongjiang—to override the facts.

The Bohai disaster provides one telling example of Donald Munro's thesis that an "imperial," or top-down Confucian, method of problem-solving persists in contemporary China, in spite of efforts to the contrary. In this work of synthesis toward the end of his academic career, Professor Munro presents a mix of intellectual history and comparative philosophy, offering illustrations taken from twentieth-century Chinese thinkers, as well as from politics and popular culture. His analysis is strongest when showing practical examples of styles of inquiry, as in the case of the Bohai oil platform. Though dense at points, the book is admirably concise: with 108 pages of text and fifteen of endnotes, the reader never feels overwhelmed. Typographical errors are rare and far between. Those who, like myself, are conversant in Chinese but less than expert in philosophy might prefer more Chinese terms to be presented in the text in order to clarify difficult concepts—a small defect that a well-selected glossary goes a long way to correct.

The historical portions of the book are well presented, but break little new ground. Despite their revolutionary claims, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong all reverted to imperial-style authoritarianism when it suited their political purposes. Their reductionist political philosophies reflected this: Sun's "acting is easy, knowing is difficult" (xingyi zhinan) was redacted by Chiang to "practice" (lixing), which really says only that "acting is easy." "Cultivate good intentions and both knowledge and action are assured" (p. 39). Such tendencies were supported in a more developed form by the major non Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century, Xiong Shili and He Lin.

Mao began on stronger empirical footing, contributing to his armies' victory over Chiang's Nationalists. But after seizing power, he began to rely more heavily on the "Yan'an model" and the Soviet Union, and ultimately on the paranoid cult of his own personality. Mao's personal excesses, however, were based on premises that continue to be "those of the elite in general, shared by his non-Communist predecessors and enduring after his death even among reform-minded dissidents" (p. 9). As his subtitle indicates, Munro is optimistic about the ability of Chinese culture to absorb alternate approaches to scientific research and political decision making. In a time when political elites continue to rely on outdated models of control to crush the Falun Gong sect or the China Democracy Party, however, the evidence of an "imperial style" remains pervasive.

The Imperial Style of Inquiry draws convincing links between twentieth-century politics and the "principle" (li) and "mind" (si) schools of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism, as exemplified in the works of Zhu Xi (1125-1200) and Wang Yangming (1472-1529). According to Zhu and Wang, the primary characteristic of wisdom is moral intuitiveness, or a "rectified mind." For those of us who are not so morally advanced, there are models to emulate: Zhu and Wang, naturally, and in modern times Lei Feng the honest soldier, or even those...