Sociology and Anthropology in Twentieth-Century China: Between Universalism and Indigenism

5. Cultural Policy and Culture under the Guomindang

Chapter 5 Cultural Policy and Culture under the Guomindang: Huang Wenshan and “Culturology” Guannan Li Preface In 1921, a young Chinese student from Peking University named Huang Wenshan 黃文山 boarded a cross-Siberian train to Moscow. While the train was winding its way through the Ural Mountains, Huang sighted a stone stele that marked the border between Asia and Europe. Inspired, Huang was suddenly struck by a question—what were the fundamental differences between Eastern and Western cultures? Eager to find the answer, upon getting back to China in the spring of 1922, Huang delivered this question to Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988), a prominent philosopher in the New Culture Movement. Huang left no record of Liang’s answer, but later in bustling uptown Manhattan, Huang read Liang’s newly published book entitled Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Dongxi wenhua jiqi zhexue 東西文化及其哲學). As a graduate student newly admitted into Columbia University, Huang was overjoyed to discover that Liang’s book provided the answers to the question that had puzzled him for a long time. In this book, which was influential among the Chinese intelligentsia, Liang Shuming established a Hegelian type of history of philosophy in order to explain the cultural evolution of three major world civilizations, namely the European, Chinese, and Indian. Liang’s conclusion was that Chinese civilization was at a more culturally advanced stage than its Western counterpart. However, Huang’s state of enlightenment did not last very long. Under the guidance of Franz Boas (1858–1942), a leading German-American anthropologist at Columbia, Huang became fascinated with American anthropology and sociology. Now designating Liang’s philosophy as “metaphysics” (xuanxue 玄學), Huang claimed that he was proceeding from “metaphysical speculation” into scientific research.1 110 · Guannan Li Huang’s intellectual journey exemplifies a methodological shift that occurred with most Chinese social scientists after the New Culture Movement . In the post-May Fourth era, Chinese social scientists (particularly sociologists) turned away from grand theoretical and historical generalizations to a strikingly uniform tendency toward empirical research. Believing in the value of “applied social sciences,” their goal was to apply social theories to resolve practical problems and formulate policies to achieve social reforms.2 As Huang Wenshan put it, rather than theoretically speculating about the past, they chose to concentrate on scientific research. Through direct inspections and field work, they embraced the Western notion of social engineering and the idea of the conscious direction of social change. The scholarship on the history of the maturation of Chinese social sciences provides some convincing reasons for this methodological redirection . For instance, in his recent examination of the development of social sciences in modern China, Yung-chen Chiang argues that the formation of Chinese sociology at Yanjing University shows a distinctive convergence of ideas and aspirations at two different levels. “First, the convergence of the traditional Chinese ideal of governing society through knowledge and the modern Western notion of social engineering; and second, the convergence of Chinese social scientists’ aspirations as regards social engineering and the Rockefeller Foundation’s ambition to guide China’s modernization.”3 Supported by a very well-formulated research agenda and rich archival evidence, Chiang’s study is extremely informative. However, due to his rather unbalanced emphasis on outside influences, what remains unexplored or blurred in the account are the political and ideological motivations for this methodological shift, particularly the dynamics between disciplinary construction in academia and nation-state building in the political context of 1930s China. This paper deals with the political and ideological implications of the establishment of “culturology” (wenhuaxue 文化學), a new social science discipline that attempted to combine cultural sociology, cultural anthropology , and cultural history into the study of culture. Huang Wenshan was its prophet and practitioner in the 1930s. By exploring Huang’s intellectual involvement with this project, it aims to answer the questions of how the sociological and anthropological definition of culture fulfilled the ideological goals of nation-state building, how and why a group of prominent Chinese social scientists developed an ideologically intimate relationship with the GMD (Guomindang 國民黨) government, and how Cultural Policy and Culture under the Guomindang · 111 disciplinary construction was often bound up with implied national politics and certain notions of Chinese modernity. By scrutinizing Huang’s intellectual input into the maturation of Chinese social sciences and his vision of Chinese modernity, this paper attempts to bring this unexamined story to the center of the development of Chinese social sciences in...