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166 pages

English

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Focusing on four key Chinese intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, Abolishing Boundaries offers new perspectives on modern Chinese political thought. These four intellectuals—Kang Youwei, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi—were deeply familiar with the Confucian and Buddhist classical texts, while also interested in the West's utopian literature of the late nineteenth century as well as Kant and the neo-Kantians, Marxists, and John Dewey and new liberalism, respectively. Although none of these four intellectuals can simply be labeled utopian thinkers, this book highlights how their thinking was intertwined with utopian ideals to produce theories of secular transcendence, liberalism, and communism, and how, in explicit and implicit ways, their ideas required some utopian impulse in order to escape the boundaries they identified as imprisoning the Chinese people and all humanity. To abolish these boundaries was to imagine alternatives to the unbearable present. This was not a matter of armchair philosophizing but of thinking through new ways to commit to action. These men did not hold a totalistic picture of some perfect society, but in distinctly different ways they all displayed a utopian impulse that fueled radical visions of change. Their work reveals much about the underlying forces shaping modern thought in China—and the world. Reacting to China's problems, they sought a better future for all humanity.
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Ways to Conceptualize Utopianism: An Introduction

2. Cosmopolitanism and Equality: Kang Youwei

3. Aesthetics and Transcendence: Cai Yuanpei

4. Democracy and the Community: Chen Duxiu

5. Experimentalism, Process, and Progress: Hu Shi

Conclusion

Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

China

History of Asia

20th century

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	01 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438482842
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	11 Mo

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Abolishing Boundaries
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
Abolishing Boundaries
Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940
PETER ZARROW
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zarrow, Peter Gue, author.
Title: Abolishing boundaries : global utopias in the formation of modern Chinese political thought, 1880–1940 / Peter Zarrow.
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2021. | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020039949 (print) | LCCN 2020039950 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438482835 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438482842 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science—China—Philosophy—History—19th century. | Political science—China—Philosophy—History—20th century. | Utopias—Philosophy. | Kang, Youwei, 1858–1927. | Cai, Yuanpei, 1868–1940. | Chen, Duxiu, 1879–1942. | Hu, Shi, 1891–1962.
Classification: LCC JA84.C6 Z37 2021 (print) | LCC JA84.C6 (ebook) | DDC 320.0951/09041—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039949
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039950
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Shan-chih, for all the support over all the years, and for all the years
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Ways to Conceptualize Utopianism: An Introduction
2. Cosmopolitanism and Equality: Kang Youwei
3. Aesthetics and Transcendence: Cai Yuanpei
4. Democracy and the Community: Chen Duxiu
5. Experimentalism, Process, and Progress: Hu Shi
Conclusion
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Much scholarship on modern China rightly focuses on the rise of nationalism, state-building, and statism over the course of the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth century. Nationalism spoke then, and often still speaks now, to the needs of liberation from oppression. Still, the “exclusionism” of nationalism is not just potentially destructive, but inherently so. Nationalism is premised on the existence of nationals, and therefore the existence of aliens who lack the qualifications to be deemed nationals. Defined in ethnic, linguistic, racial, religious, or some other ultimately arbitrary (though always useful) distinction between “us” and “them,” national groups must be exclusionary or they are nothing. Modern Chinese thinkers have almost all been nationalists, for reasons that are more than understandable. Without nationalism, China would not have survived. It goes without saying, I believe, that the demise of China would have been an incalculable loss to the world. Scholarship on modern Chinese thought has rightly focused on intellectuals who devoted their lives to changing China so that it would survive. Yet many of these same people also sought to change the world. The world is richer for them.
I understand “statism” to constitute an ideology that overlaps with nationalism. It proclaims that nationals are citizens: members of the political community with rights and duties (however amorphous), but that ultimately the needs of the state (self-defined as the general community) trump those of the citizen. All citizens have the duty to be willing to die (and kill) for the defense (or interests) of the state. Nationalism cannot exist without the state. States, conceived as the general category of political organization ranging from city-states to kingdoms and empires, do not necessarily need nations, though the modern form of the state is of course intertwined with the nation. Modern statism, of which fascism is the paradigmatic example, depends on ramping up nationalist sentiment.
Since much of modern warfare and genocide have been justified on the basis of nationalism, antinationalist movements have naturally arisen. Human rights movements are dedicated at least in part to tempering nationalistic excesses. Scholars have also asked whether certain nonsovereign state forms can temper nationalism. See: United Nations, European Union, to some extent international economic organizations, and, again, the human rights movement. After the ravages of twentieth-century nationalism it is understandable that a certain nostalgia for empire has emerged. Supposedly, early modern empires such as the Ottoman, Qing, and Austro-Hungarian adopted a kind of pluralistic tolerance for the various national populations under their control, or at least some of those nations, even granting them a degree of self-governance. This very rose-tinted view, however, conveniently forgets the violent systems of oppression at the heart of the state formations of empires.
Modern nationalism, with its notion of the equality of citizens whether or not sovereignty allegedly derives from the people, arose in reaction against empires and their monarchies. In this process, in its innumerable variations across time and space, the link beween nation and sovereign state was forged. A person’s national identity defined a new subjectivity. Various national identities were rooted in historical narratives and origin stories: King Arthur, the sun goddess Amaterasu, the founding fathers, the Third Rome, the Yellow Emperor. These narratives determined who belonged and who was outsider. Yet as intellectuals and political leaders forged these historical narratives, counternarratives also emerged. It is these counternarratives—imagined alternatives to the dominant stories of our modern subjectivities—that we call utopias.
Such is a very simplified premise of this book. This book, however, is not actually about modern Chinese utopianism as a discrete “ism” or as a movement. Rather, it is about fractured and partial utopian counternarratives and how four particular Chinese intellectuals made use of their glimpses of utopia to construct theories of the path that the Chinese people should take to build a better future. This book is constructed on a series of case studies to show how, in various fashions, orthodox narratives of nation-building mixed with counternarratives based on universal principles to shape Chinese ideas about modernity.

I use the Hanyu pinyin romanization system for Chinese terms and names, except for the customary (non-Mandarin) spelling of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Chinese and Japanese names are given surname first, except in citations of persons writing in English.
Acknowledgments
This book, which involved my writing about topics outside of my research specialization, is indebted to many people who gave me guidance and correction. None of them, of course, should be held responsible for my opinions, much less remaining errors and omissions. This book has benefited from discussions with Marianne Bastid, Pablo Blitstein, Anne Cheng, Joshua Fogel, Thomas Fröhlich, Béatrice L’Haridon, Max Ke-wu Huang ( 黃克武 ), Joan Judge, Joyce C. H. Liu ( 劉紀蕙 ), Liu Qing ( 刘擎 ), Mark McConaghy, Alexus McLeod Achim Mittag, Axel Schneider, Sarah Schneewind, Rudolph Wagner, Xu Jilin ( 许纪霖 ), and Wen Yu ( 于文 ). I am grateful to Yan Geng ( 耿焱 ) for first suggesting that I might be interested in taking a look at Cai Yuanpei. I am grateful to Thomas M. Alexander and Gu Hongliang ( 顾红亮 ) for helping me understand Dewey and Dewey in China; to Selena Orly and Pan Kuang-che ( 潘光哲 ) for helping me understand Hu Shi; and to John Troyer for helping me understand Cai’s understanding of Kant. Also, three anonymous press readers forced me to sharpen my arguments.
The list above unfortunately leaves out many of the people who gave me useful suggestions and challenges as I presented earlier versions of what went into this book at conferences and talks at Academia Sinica; the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg; Tel Aviv University; the Northeast [U.S.] Conference on Chinese Thought; the Association of Asian Studies annual conference; the Critical China Studies Reading Group, York University–University of Toronto; the Karl Jaspers Center, University of Heidelberg; the Fairbank Center, Harvard University; Harvard-Yenching Institute; the Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, East China Normal University; the Neo-Confucian Seminar, Columbia University; the University of Connecticut Political Theory Workshop; and the Seminar on Intellectual History of China, Collège de France.
1

Ways to Conceptualize Utopianism
An Introduction
The new society of the new era that is our ideal is honest, progressive, positive, free, equal, creative, beautiful, good, and peaceful, and it is marked by loving mutual aid, joyful labor, and benefits for the whole society. We hope everything that is hypocritical, conservative, passive, restrictive, privileged, conventional, ugly, and detestable, and is marked by war, conflict, inertia, depression, and benef