Confucian Cultures of Authority

Intellectual and Political Controversies over Authority in China: 1898–1922

Intellectual and Political Controversies over Authority in China: 1898–1922 Lawrence R. Sullivan “We do not live by virtue of the monarch.” Wu Yu, 1919 The problem of transforming political authority in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China was intimately related to the quest for a new state form and political order. As the “moral administrative reformism” of Qing “practical statesmanship” (qingshi) of the late nineteenth century proved increasingly inadequate to the country’s mounting political and economic problems, attention shifted to reorganizing the political system and legitimizing it with different principles.1 But replacing the imperial autocracy and bureaucratic state with alternative institutional arrangements based on new concepts of authority proved enormously complicated and politically divisive. From the late 1890s onward, Chinese intellectuals and politicians clashed over the country’s political future, yet with little agreement on the basic principles and structures of authority. Political Authority: A Definition Altering political structures in China reflected the inherent difficulties of consciously transforming something so fundamental and deepseated as political authority. In this article, authority is defined as an imperative command binding people to unifying common action.2 Authority is the core of the political order, a set of absolute principles compelling uniformity that both precedes power and imbues it with morality. Authority makes possible the effective exercise of power, augmenting it from a mere act of will to legitimate action. Power without authority is reduced to pure coercion with no overarching moral obligation to sanction it.3 Authority is “not an external force commanding an individual against his will,” but an accepted dependence and obedience 171 172 Lawrence R. Sullivan in which men retain a sense of personal freedom without resort to fear and coercion.4 This willful compliance is not a mere response, however, to reasoned discourse or a “rational demonstration” of the authoritative act. Neither enlightenment nor empirical verification constitutes necessary prerequisites of authority. The authoritative judgment is instead a “substitute for objectivity” bringing about united action when two (or more) equally rational and possible options exist for achieving the “common good.”5 As Hannah Arendt notes: “The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize . . .”6 The strength of a secure authority for any political order is that it draws on innermost preferences that are stamped on the human character over generations and largely accepted as self-evident.7 Authority in this sense is the constitutive element of any society and reflects an accepted standard of “right” against which the exercise of power can be evaluated and checked.8 Specifically, authority is grounded in historical traditions, community values, and/or religious-scientific definitions of “the truth” that form the basic consensual framework for the concrete application of the authoritative act. As one commentator notes: “All authority is rightful authority” with community, tradition, religion, and/or science serving as the “higher source” of values validating political acts and structures.9 “The most essential function of authority is the issuance and carrying out of rules expressing the requirements of the common good materially determined.”10 The creation of a new authority involves much more, therefore, than just the establishment of new political organizations and the appointment of new officeholders to command the state. As the preexisting authority weakens, the very foundation of community and individual identity are critically examined as conditions once accepted as an intrinsic part of the perceived “natural order” undergo radical alteration. Fundamental values of culture, historical tradition, and epistemology are redefined and reconceptualized, often through intense debate and civil conflict. Nothing is indeed more provocative of uncompromising , internecine struggle than competing and fundamentally contradictory visions of political authority. Redefining Political Authority in China The problem of transforming political authority in China during the modern era was compounded by the country’s two thousand years of Intellectual and Political Controversies 173 unbroken monarchical absolutism. The “mandate of heaven” (tianming) was an expression of a universal moral order: eternal, immutable, and beyond human affect. According to the Chinese historian Hao Chang: “The principle of kingship remained an unchanging fixture of Chinese political tradition” with heaven “always upheld as the ultimate source of legitimation, and kingship as the only institutional...