The Dialogue Between Two Revolutions: 1789 and 1911

The Dialogue Between Two Revolutions: 1789 and 1911 by Lung-kee Sun The Chinese created their Republic, the very first in Asia, in 1912. Its strong presidency was akin to that of the united States, while its cabi~et, based on the parliamentary majority, followed the British model. The political reality of China, however, was otherwise. President Yuan Shikai had the first majority leader, a would-be premier, murdered in 1913, and made known his intention to restore the monarchy. T~is Bonapartist farce ushered in a long period of internal instability, rendering China vulnerable to the menace of Japan. with their dreams of nation-building dashed, the modern-minded Chinese intelligentsia began questioning the very essence of their own culture and character. After 1917, this iconoclasm, assuming the form 'of an enlightenment or "new culture" movement, was intensified by a group of teachers and students at the National Beijing university (~). The New Culture ferment was amplified by the patriotic demonstrations which began on May 4, 1919, occasioned by China's humiliation at the hands of the Western Powers and Japan at the Paris Peace Conference. In Russia, the October Revolution had occurred in 1917. By 1921, a Chinese communist Party, headed by former New Culture leaders Chen Ouxiu and Li Dazhao, emerged under the aegis of the Comintern. This train of events led Mao Zedong to declare, in January 1940, that the May Fourth Movement came into being at the call of "the Russian Revolution and of Lenin."l Mao's authoritative voice notwithstanding, the "revolution" that May Fourth intellectuals found relevant to their own experience was more likely to be the French, not the Russian. In fact, Chinese information about the October Revolution and its aftermath was scanty, if not distorted by unsympathetic western sources. In 1920, the Beijing Morning Post (Chen Bao) found it necessary to send a correspondent through war-torn Siberia to Moscow to learn firsthand about the Revolution. Undoubtedly, in the May Fourth era, the French Revolution was far better known than the Russian. The French Revolution also had a deeper historical perspective, which could be brought to bear on the Chinese experience of their own republican revolution. Gustave Le Bon and the French Third Republic Actually, the "French Revolution'"known to the early-republican Chinese intellectuals was an image refracted through the prism of the Third Republic of France. Under the Third Republic, views on the French Revolution were polarized into radical and conservative positions. It was the latter perspective, represented by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), which had the greater impact in China, even among the May Fourth radicals. The failure of the Chinese Revolution might have helped to focus Chinese attention on similarly negative aspects in the French counterpart. Furthermore, Le Bon cloaked his ideological statements about the French Revolution in the guise of the "scientific" discipline of social psychology. Le Bon was one of those conservative French intellectuals of the Third Republic who harbored a very negative view of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, and deplored the rise of mass politics in the fin-de-siecle era. 2- His unflattering view of the masses was summed up in his Psychologie des Foules (1895). According to him, crowd behavior was characterized by like-mindedness, irrationality, and credulity, formed through mental contagion, and highly susceptible to the hypnotic "suggestion" of agitators posing as leaders. A collective milieu often reduced a sane individual to the level of animality. In La Revolution Francaise et la Psychologie des Reyolutions (1912), Le Bon, in fact, described the outburst of bestiality of the crowd, during the French Revolution, in terms of criminal psychology.3 In Lois Psychologigues de l'Eyolution des Peuples (1894), Le Bon used the French national character to account for their defeat by the Prussians in 1870. The notion of a resilient national character was an argument against revolution. For Le Bon, the Latin peoples, whose national spirits were less well-formed, had made a mockery of revolutionary changes: Was there much difference in reality between the centralised , dictatorial and despotic regime of our strict Jacobins and the centralised, dictatorial and despotic regime to which fifteen centuries of monarchy had ac- ,customed the...