Speculations on the Social Experience of Chinese Intellectuals and Its Influence on May Fourth Intellectualism

SPECULATIONS ON THE SOCIAL EXPERIENCE OF CHINESE INTELLECTUALS AND ITS INFLUENCE ON MAY FOURTH INTELLECTUALISM by Jerome B. Grieder My subject here is not really "intellectuals" in the May Fourth era. I do want to say something about "intellectualism" as a characteristic of the May Fourth-New Culture phenomenon in China, and as an attribute of the collective personality of the Chinese intelligentsia. I will then offer some general and very tentative speculations that may help to account for this character, drawing a comparison between the Russian intelligentsia and its Chinese counterpart. By •the Chinese intelligentsia" I mean the Chinese intellectual elite that emerged in the 1890s and attained its greatest confidence in its historical importance at the height of the New Culture era some two decades later. We are thus dealing here with two or three generations of radical thinkers who are, collectively, responsible for framing a critique of Chinese social, cultural and political life that is both untraditional and antitraditional in many of its categories, assumptions and value judgements. I will not discuss here individual contributors or contributions to this critique. Nor do I propose to analyze, in any substantive way, the terms of its argument. These are familiar subjects to any student of modern Chinese intellectual history -- indeed, they dominate the field, in its present stage of development. It is the general character of this critique that concerns me here -- and the reasons for it. It is neither original nor particularly contentious to suggest that the Chinese intelligentsia in its emergent generations was overwhelmingly preoccupied with issues of intellectual and cultural autonomy; and, as a corollary, that issues of social and/or political freedom were, in this context, of secondary concern at best. In his book on "the crisis of Chinese consciousness," Lin Yu-sheng describes this "cultural-intellectualistic" approach as a "simplistic" "presupposition about the way to approach problems of social and political change that stresses the necessary priority of intellectual and cultural change." My intention here is not to challenge this conventional characterization, but to try to account for it. Professor Lin's analysis turns almost entirely upon an understanding of the effect upon 20th-century intellectuals of traditional Chinese philosophical arguments and cultural predispositions. While by no means discounting the clear importance of such influences, I have come increasingly to the view that the conspicuous prejudices of China's 15 emergent intelligentsia may be due in larger part to the social experience of the literati culture of old China and to the manner in which China's "new-style• intellectuals interpreted the experience of their Confucian predecessors. One must, of course, begin by distinguishing between "the intellectual class" as a whole, and "the intelligentsia" as a subgroup of that whole. This is, in part, the distinction between those whose claim to attention or employment derives from the master of intellectual skills, and the ability to manipulate abstract symbols authoritatively, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, those whose sense of personal or social or historical significance derives from a particular kind of intellectual concern. This is the distinction drawn by Edward Shils between "functional intellectuals ... trained for the performance of rational-empirical tasks," and intellectuals whose allegiance is to the (older) traditions of literary-philosophical concern, and who are animated by an "interior need to penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience." Or again, it is the distinction that Hannah Arendt draws (inversely) between the 18th-century hommes des lettres and the intellectual service class spawned by the increasingly aesoteric• (i.e., professional and technically specialized) skills demanded by the burgeoning bureaucratic apparatus of the modernizing state. Up to a point, it is thus a distinction easily recognized in the different context of the traditional Chinese state-and-culture. Most products of the Confucian curriculum and the imperial bureaucratic recruit.ment system were "functional intellectuals," trained scribblers, neither disposed to be nor educated to become speculative or critical thinkers. Yet in every Confucian generation there were men of the latter kind: pensive, conscientious, skeptical, and ill at ease. Confucian China provides no exception to the rule laid down by Martin Malia: "In any society, individuals who take thought serious-l-y...