Liang Shuming and the Populist Alternative in China by Catherine Lynch (review)

Liang Shuming (梁漱溟) (1893–1988) has remained an enigmatic figure on the modern Chinese intellectual scene. Exposed to a Westernized education in his youth, Liang was later derided as a cultural conservative in the iconoclastic atmosphere of the early twentieth century. Best known for Dongxi wenhua jiqi zhexue (東西文化及其哲學, Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, 1999), a monumental work of cultural philosophy, Liang has been heralded as a forerunner in the modern Neo-Confucianism (also referred to as Modern Confucianism), followed by Xiong Shili (熊十力, 1885–1968), Zhang Junmai (張君勱, 1887–1969), Feng Youlan (馮友蘭, 1895–1990), and later generations of scholars. As a foremost modern Chinese intellectual, Liang Shuming has never ceased to attract and baffle scholars. A proliferation of book-length studies have emerged in the post-Mao era on Liang Shuming and his philosophical thoughts, including Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shuming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (1986); Cao Yueming, Liang Shuming sixiang yanjiu (A Study of Liang Shuming's Thoughts, 1995); Guo Qiyong and Gong Jianping, Liang Shuming zhexue sixiang (The Philosophical Thoughts of Liang Shuming, 1996); Gu Hongliang, Rujia shenghuo shijie (The Confucian Life-World, 2008); and Thierry Meynard, The Religious Philosophy of Liang Shuming: The Hidden Buddhist (2011). In part due to the complexities that characterize his thought system, Liang has been portrayed variously as a traditional Confucian scholar with either modern or antimodern sentiments, as a Neo-Confucian philosopher who nonetheless embodied traditional Confucian ethos (this view is predominant in both Chinese and English-language scholarship), or as an adamant Buddhist whose philosophical inclinations were more Buddhist than Confucian. In the English-speaking world, some of the best known works that set the tone for debate include Alitto's The Last Confucian and Meynard's The Religious Philosophy of Liang Shuming.

Published in 2018, Catherine Lynch's Liang Shuming and the Populist Alternative in China promises to bring an alternative understanding to Liang's intellectual thought by offering a new interpretive framework for analyzing his ideas. It is the first book in the English-speaking world to discuss Liang's populist thought, but not the first to focus on his populism as such. Significantly, in the composition of this book, the author relied heavily, as she claims, on lengthy interviews with Liang and the people associated with him, in addition to Liang's own original writings. In Liang Shuming and the Populist Alternative in China, the modern New Confucian scholar is characterized as a key representative within the populist intellectual trend in twentieth-century China, with populism—or more precisely, populism with Chinese characteristics—highlighted as an important constitutive element of modern Chinese intellectual thought that has "played a major role in the course of Chinese history" (p. 225). Interestingly, despite its proclaimed focus on Liang's populism, this book can be read as an intellectual biography of Liang Shuming as much as a study on his populism.

Preoccupied with the West and the intellectual elites in his youth, Liang turned wholeheartedly to the Chinese village and the peasantry in his 30s. One might claim that Liang had been an elitist before he turned populist. The intricacies of intellectual history lie in the continued evolution of intellectual thought, characterized oftentimes by turning points, transitions as well as continuities. Liang's shift from what Lynch terms "anti-populism" to "populism" is located at around 1927, the year when he experienced an "awakening" and embarked upon the road of rural reconstruction. Rural reconstruction, however, constitutes an important part of Liang's activities upon which his Confucian philosophies are centered, and as such, represents a continuation of Liang's Confucian endeavor. In his Introduction to the book, Gu Hongliang (顧紅亮) disputes with Lynch with regard to her emphasis on a dramatic "shift" in Liang's thought. Gu calls attention to continuities in Liang's thought that are believed to be more important than what Lynch terms as the "shift." To be sure, insofar as Liang realized the importance of...