7.1 CHEN DUXIU

After a thorough classical education, Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) went on to be a pioneering reform writer and activist, leader of the New Culture movement, dean of arts and sciences at Beijing University, and cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party.

One of the categories into which Chen is most often placed is radical anti-traditionalism [Lin 1979]. It is certainly true that Chen spent more of his time attacking various aspects of Confucianism¹ than did many of his contemporaries, such as Gao Yihan, who virtually ignored it. Be this as it may, Chen’s immense knowledge of the tradition stayed with him throughout his life. He was a friend of Liu Shipei, and though he fol­lowed a very different path from Liu (who, it will be recalled, became increasingly conservative), it is plausible to think that Chen’s interest in rights may have grown from roots similar to Liu’s.^{[184] [185]}

Like many of his day, Chen began his public career immensely con­cerned over the fate of his nation. In an early article called “The Loss of the Nation,” published between 1904 and 1905, Chen divided the nation’s plight into three categories: loss of territory, loss of economic control (liquan^[186]), and loss of sovereignty.

The charge that Chinese people neglect their nation both echoes the diagnoses of many of Chen’s contemporaries (most famously, Liang’s On the New People, discussed earlier) and foreshadows the complex analysis of individual and nation that Chen will develop in coming years. Even at this early stage, we can already see the two considerations that he will be at pains to harmonize. On the one hand, individuals need to be devoted to their nations. He believes this only natural, since true nations are made up of a people sharing a race, history, and culture: Citizens of a single nation are in a real sense all related to one another [Chen 1984a, p. 40]. In the constitution to the Anhui Patriotic Society, which Chen helped to establish in 1903, it was declared that individual freedom that “interfered with national welfare” was not to be permitted [Chen 1993 (1903), pp. 17-19]. On the other hand, in a 1904 article Chen praises the educational methods of the Ming-dynasty Confucian Wang Yangming for enabling the “free development of one’s faculties,” which alone leads to “an individual’s true development” [Chen 1984c (1904), p.

In the decade following these early articles, Chen was involved with other students of the “national essence” like Liu Shipei and Zhang Binglin, spent two years in Japan, spent two brief stints in the revolu­tionary government of Anhui province, and helped to found Anhui Uni­versity [Feigon 1983, pp. 74-95]. He entered the next stage of his career with essays he contributed first to the Tiger Magazine and then, starting in 1915, to the magazine he founded and edited, New Youth. Chen’s famous essays in New Youth set the tone and much of the agenda for the New Culture movement.

In the opening article of New Youth's first issue, “A Call to Youth,” Chen writes that society is like a body: If allowed to grow old, it will wither; it needs the freshness of youth. Specifically, Chen enjoins the day’s youth to take up the following charges: (1) Be self-masters rather than slaves. (2) Be progressive rather than conservative. (3) Be aggres­sive rather than withdrawing. (4) Be cosmopolitan rather than isola­tionist. (5) Be pragmatic rather than empty and abstract. (6) Be scientific rather than naively idealistic. The crucial section for my purposes is the first. It opens: “All people have the power to be self-masters (zizhu zhi quan), completely lack the right (quanli) to make others their slaves, and also completely lack the responsibility (yiwu) to become slaves them­selves.” In various ways this involves liberating ourselves: politically, reli­giously, and economically, as well as from patriarchy [Chen 1984d (1915), pp.

Although uniting with one’s fellows and promoting the cause of one’s nation receive little attention in this essay, we will see in a moment that they are never far from Chen’s concerns, even if his thinking on this score has matured. It also is important to note that amidst all this talk of being liberated from various restrictions - all subsumed under the symbol of the slave - are hints of a positive ideal toward which Chen believes we should be moving. The passages just quoted contain three suggestions of a positive flavor. First, the word “completing (wan)” - in “completing one’s... personality” - implies that there is an outline, an ideal, which we should be striving to complete. This meshes nicely with the second clue, namely the word “personality (renge),” which has a long history in European and particularly Hegelian thought of association with positive ideals. Of course Confucianism, too, emphasizes a positive personality ideal, though not by means of the word “renge,” which is a Japanese neol­ogism imported into China. We have already seen that renge played a role in Liang Qichao’s understanding of quanli; from the beginning of the twentieth century, in fact, the term is quite widely associated with quanli [Svensson 1996, ch. 5]. The third point worth recognizing in this regard is that self-mastery has often, in both European and Confucian contexts, been used to explain how certain (higher) aspects of the self rule over other less significant parts. Self-mastery, that is, can be a key to either license or cultivation and control, depending on how it is interpreted.^[188]

Let us now look at one way in which Chen fleshed out the personal­ity ideal, albeit in a somewhat one-sided fashion. In “The Differences in the Fundamental Thought of Eastern and Western Peoples,” Chen writes that there are two main races in the world, in two basic geographical groupings: the white in the West and the yellow in the East.

Putting primary emphasis on the rule of law and pragmatic consid­erations cannot but lead to mutual dislike born of harshness and scant empathy. However, the result will be that every individual in the society will rely on no one but him or herself, be ready to wage war, make independent calculations of benefit, achieve an indepen­dent personality (renge), each preserving his or her own, none inter­fering with another. [1984f, p. 100]

Chen sums this up as “starting with petty people, but ending with gen­tlemen,” the exact opposite from what comes of the Eastern penchant for superficial politeness.^[189]

While this essay paints a more extreme picture of individualism than Chen’s other writings of the time, he is committed to the idea that self­interest is an important and appropriate concern for individuals.

In any event, a balanced interpretation of Chen’s ideas must take his somewhat extreme statements of individualism into account, but also cannot ignore the numerous more socially oriented assertions with which they are often juxtaposed. The claim that “from birth, humans are self­regarding,” for instance, is made in the context of arguing that people must nonetheless move beyond the relatively narrow confines of politi­cal parties, and devote themselves to “citizens’ movements” [Chen 1984g (1916), p. 103]. Political parties in the mid-1910s were for the most part corrupt and powerless factions in a parliamentary system that was largely a sham. The New Culture movement in which Chen played a leading role was broadly anti-political. Chen argues that only inclusive citizens’ movements are capable of large-scale social transformations, as evidence of which he cites the French and American revolutions and the Japan­ese Meiji Restoration. This idea that the people must unite in order to move the nation forward is given more explicit discussion in “The Direc­tion of Contemporary Education.” One of the directions in which Chen argues Chinese education must direct people is toward “populism (weimin zhuyi).” He explains that in feudal times, China (like other coun­tries) lacked “group thought,” since each person was individually under the command of the ruler. Gradually group thought developed, first in families, then in localities, then ultimately in nations - a stage which Chen says China has not yet reached. “Nationalism (guojia zhuyi),” though, can lead to an overconcentration of power in the hands of the rulers, and so to the invasion of the quanli of the people. Hence populism is born, wherein the people have sovereignty, whether or not there is a monarch [Chen 1984e (1915), p. 87].

Chen goes on to emphasize that he does not worship nationalism; in advanced countries, its defects have already been discovered. Still, he sees no route forward without first establishing a true nation. A true nation is devoted to the well-being of the whole collective, and “sacri­fices a part of the quanli of individuals, in order to protect the quanli of the whole citizenry” [ibid., p. 87]. I believe that the framework here articulated helps us to understand how Chen’s various remarks about individuals and the nation fit together, and should lay to rest some of the unprofitable debate about whether Chen is “nationalist” or “cosmopolitan.”

We can sum up as follows. Chen sees that collectives like nations are formed of individuals, and the strength of the collective rests primarily on the strength and determination of the individuals. As he puts it in one place, “When people have come together to form a nation, if the per­sonality of the individuals is elevated, then the personality of the nation will be likewise. If the power of the individuals is consolidated, then the power of the nation will be likewise” [Chen 1984g (1916), p. 103]. It thus makes sense for Chen to put so much stress on the need for indepen­dent individuals with lofty personalities, even while he also recognizes that nation-building will, at times, demand sacrifices of these same indi­viduals. It remains in the individual’s best interest to devote himself or herself to collective action because only when a nation has been estab­lished - with all the characteristics Chen has assigned to nations for years, including territorial integrity and economic control - will there be a stable enough entity to articulate and defend a constitution and legal system, both of which are necessary for the success of “populism.”

I said “articulate and defend” because it is clear that Chen does not believe we have any rights outside of or prior to their social articulation, this despite his (somewhat idiosyncratic, by the standards of his day) fre­quent use of “renquan” which is often translated as “human rights.” That is, Chen does not believe that we have “natural rights”; rights are things we gain in society. This does not mean that rights are simply granted by the state, though, nor that rights simply derive from law - the view often called “positivism” which we looked at in connection with Jhering in Chapter 6. Chen writes that “Law is for preserving current civilization, while the freedom of speech is for creating future civilization. Current civilization and law were produced by the criticism of earlier laws and civilization by the freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is the parent; laws and civilization, the child” [Chen 1984i (1919), p. 440]. Clearly current laws cannot justify our right to free speech; it is precisely against such laws that the right must be exercised. What, then, grounds our speaking out? I pointed out earlier that in one essay he says explicitly that the point of freedom of speech is to “develop individuality,” and later in the same article he stresses the need to establish one’s person­ality [Chen 1984f (1915), pp. 98,100]. I conclude that quanli are not, for Chen, ours simply because they are natural, intrinsic goods, but rather because they are essential means to further ends that we value. We will see this understanding of quanli elaborated later in the writings of Gao Yihan.

Before I turn to Gao, I need to deal with one final aspect of Chen’s thinking on quanli, namely its relation to his conversion to Marxism. Chen came increasingly to believe that social and especially economic constraints lay behind the failure of most Chinese to reach his ideal of an independent personality. In a 1919 article discussing John Dewey’s conception of democracy (on which see more later), Chen notes that the aspect of Dewey’s theory which directly seeks the equality of human per­sonalities is “social democracy,” which aims to do away with unequal class distinctions. Economic democracy, another element of Dewey’s theory, similarly aims to equalize the rich and poor. Chen emphasizes that social democracy is his true goal, writing that while the other aspects of Dewey’s vision - economic, political, and civil democracies - are important, they are ultimately “no more than tools for achieving our goal” [Chen 1984j (1919), pp. 429-30].

The following year he made the centrality of economic and social matters even more clear in a manner which recalls his statement from 1916 that economic independence is more fundamental than moral independence. He wrote that the enlightenment of the world’s workers will come in two stages. First comes demanding better treatment, like shorter working hours; second comes demanding the rights to manage politics, production, and military affairs. The first stage “is still no more than begging for food. Only when individuals have their own food - and oil and salt and wood and rice and... so on - in their own hands, will the workers’ rights finally be secure” [Chen 1984k (1920), p. 520]. Coupled with the evidence we have seen earlier, this statement helps to confirm the opinion of some contemporary scholars who have argued that a large part of Chen’s interest in Marxism was his belief that inde­pendent personalities could be better developed and protected under Marxism.^[191]

Once Chen openly committed himself to Marxism in 1921, he gave up talk of workers’ rights: What was needed, he now believed, was a workers’ revolution, after which rights would no longer be necessary, since all interests would be harmonized together in the workers’ state that followed [Chen 1984l (1921)]. In making this assertion, Chen was following the lead of Marx himself, who believed that rights would be superfluous in a communist state, as I will discuss further in the final section of this chapter.