THE TWO DECADES from the mid-1910s to the mid-1930s saw some progress and much frustration toward the realization of a stable, empowered state and society in China.
During the decade and a half after 1935, China would be wracked by invasion and civil war, but 1915 through 1935 were years of enormous intellectual vitality in which theories that could help people to understand and improve their world were subjected to passionate debate and rigorous analysis.
They were also years in which Western philosophies were interpreted and adopted with increasing sophistication. Numerous young people studied in and then returned from Western countries, and important American and European thinkers visited and lectured in China.In such a context, quanli discourse underwent important changes. It lost most of its explicit connections to the Confucian tradition, which itself came under sharp, though often simplistic, attack. The flip side of this increased distance from Confucian vocabulary and sources of authority was the increasingly direct and complete engagement of Chinese writers with themes from contemporary Western rights discourse. If the Confucian source of quanli discourse and the Western stimulus to that discourse were of approximately equal importance during the earlier period we have discussed, that dynamic changes in the 1910s. Western writings are no mere stimuli, but become full-fledged participants in the debates over quanli.
Confucian voices and themes are not completely absent from the debate, however. During the anti-foreign demonstrations that break out in May 1919, it is Liang Shuming - soon to become famous as a champion of Confucian values - who defends the civil rights of the Chinese officials accused by demonstrators of being traitors [Alitto 1979, p. 72]. Liang’s writings, in fact, offer an intriguing explanation for the partial convergence of views about the content and scope of rights that emerges in this period: In his Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies of 1921, he argues that Western culture is becoming “sinicized” in reaction to individualistic excesses.While I do not believe that Liang’s monolithic conceptions of Eastern and Western cultures can be sustained, it is true that many European and American authors did, in this period, advance theories of rights that were distinctly less individualistic and political than those of their predecessors.
It is difficult to discern Chinese influence on these thinkers, but it is not at all hard to see why Chinese philosophers, even those who explicitly condemned Confucianism, might find such Western writings attractive. I will explore these convergences later in this chapter by juxtaposing Chinese ideas with those of John Dewey, an influential Western thinker who came to be well known in China.In the previous chapter we saw certain commitments emerging as central to a shared conception of quanli, among them: (1) an ethical, rather than legal, grounding for quanli; (2) a positive content to quanli, in addition to negative restrictions; (3) a vision of personal and group quanli as harmonious with one another; and (4) a reciprocal relation between quanli and responsibilities. I will argue in this chapter that these commitments are retained by most participants in quanli discourse prior to 1949. My chief representatives of the period’s writings will be Chen Duxiu and Gao Yihan, both prolific authors who began treating the subject of quanli in the mid-1910s. To summarize what will follow, Chen and Gao believe that quanli are the powers and benefits that an individual or group must enjoy in order to reach its ultimate goal - a goal which they tend to describe as the fulfillment of its personality (renge).
From among the many authors who make constructive contributions to Chinese rights discourse in this period, I have chosen Chen and Gao because of their centrality, representativeness, and sophistication. There are other writers from within the mainstream they represent whom I could have chosen; Luo Longji (1896-1965), a leader of the 1929 “Human Rights” movement that I mention briefly later, is a good example. Nor are Chen and Gao representative of all facets of their period’s rights discourse; in particular, it will be important to contrast their views with those that conceive of rights as belonging only to adherents of certain ideologies, members of particular social classes, or followers of a given political party.
I will treat these ideas, albeit somewhat briefly, near the end of this chapter.Chen and Gao quite clearly do not sense any important conceptual difference between their ideas of quanli and the conceptions of rights employed by the Western writers with whom they are familiar. This might seem odd to someone versed in only one of the conceptions of rights popular at the end of the twentieth century: Several features of Chen’s and Gao’s conceptions differ substantially from what we might call the “Political Individualist” conception of rights, according to which rights are intrinsic features of all people but not of groups, and encompass only political, negative liberties. Chen and Gao, in contrast, see quanli primarily as means to further ends, and argue that they are as relevant to groups as they are to individuals. In addition, the scope of their quanli is significantly wider than that of Political Individualist rights, including economic and other benefits along with political powers such as the freedom to speak and participate in decision-making. I will nonetheless generally be content to translate their “quanli” as “rights” because, as we will see as this chapter develops, their usage corresponds quite closely to the ideas of rights held by many European and American writers in their day - and indeed, in our own, as I will discuss in Chapter 8. There are certainly multiple concepts that share the word “rights,” and given the usage of someone like Dewey, not to mention Hobhouse and Laski, it seems pedantic to deny Chen and Gao the word.
Though Chen and Gao began as close colleagues with quite similar views, the two men’s careers followed very different paths. Gao was a social liberal and an academic who remained as independent as he could from the day’s politics; Chen felt compelled to engage in politics, becoming one of the cofounders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. The rise of Marxism in China, signaled in part by the founding of the CCP, is a final issue with which this chapter will be concerned. Two themes can be detected in the writings of the era’s Marxists about quanli: a critique of quanli as class-based and a conception of quanli as appropriately belonging only to progressive revolutionary forces. This latter idea actually comes out even more strongly in the works of those committed to the Nationalist Party (Guomindang or GMD), which shared with the CCP roots in the Leninist vision of a vanguard, revolutionary party. The last section of this chapter will look at each of these ideas and at the contexts in which they arise, including a brief look at the ambiguous attitudes toward rights expressed by Karl Marx himself.