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Communist Ethics and Chinese Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

David S. Nivison
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This paper is an analysis of certain aspects of recent Communist thought in China. By “recent” thought is meant that of the last two decades, and in fact this study is concerned essentially with developments from 1937 to 1949. The study is not based on an appraisal of the whole body of Chinese Communist writing in this period, nor even on a representative selection of it, but it does bring together for analysis some very interesting examples of Chinese Communist treatment of problems germane to the Confucian ethical tradition. The analysis thus, perhaps, indicates ways in which the Peking regime in the future may relate its ideology to the great corpus of traditional Chinese thought. My assumption has been that writers of the new regime, at least some of them, show a tendency, in developing the new thought, to incorporate into it, and synthesize with it wherever possible, native Chinese intellectual traditions and doctrines. This traditional intellectual background is often of extraordinary antiquity; but while writers such as Liu Shao-ch'i quote the words of Confucius because this has been the idiom of Chinese philosophy, there has nonetheless been a sophisticated effort to mesh a new Communist ethic with those aspects of Confucian thought which are especially characteristic of the last three or four centuries, and to present Communism as in effect the latest stage of this thought. This has been done deliberately and as part of a well-understood world-wide tactic in Communism to strike local roots and to fit Communist “theory” to national situations.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , November 1956, pp. 51 - 74
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1956

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References

1 This situation has been well discussed in Compton, Boyd, Mao's China: Party Reform Documents, 1942–44 (Seattle, 1952), pp. xv–lii.Google Scholar

In this article, the following abbreviations are used: SCT for Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Wright, Arthur F. (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar; JTK for Jen-hsing tang-hsing ko-hsing [Human Nature, Party Nature, Individual Nature], by Ch'en Po-ta et al. (Ch'ao-hsi she, 1947)Google Scholar; LTKJ for Lun tang yü ko-jen [On the Party and the Individual], by Ch'en Po-ta et al. (Hongkong reprint, 1948)Google Scholar; SHCN for Ssu-hsiang chih-nan [A Guide to Thought], by Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-ch'i et al. (Hongkong: Pei-fang Press, 1949).Google Scholar

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4 Compton, , pp. 260–261Google Scholar, in Liu's essay, “The Liquidation of Menshevik Thought in the Party.” See also Shao-ch'i, Liu, How to Be a Good Communist (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1951), pp. 18–21Google Scholar. (The book is translated from a 1949 edition of Liu's Lun kung-ch'an tang-yüan ti hsiu-yang, consisting of “a series of lectures delivered by Liu Shao-ch'i in July 1939, at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Yenan”.)

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9 Tse-tung, Mao, China's New Democracy, 3rd ed. (Bombay: People's Publishing House, 1950), pp. 40–41Google Scholar (a trans, of Mao's Hsin min-chu-chu-i lun).

10 For a fuller analysis of this development in Chinese thought, see my article, “The Problem of ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Action’ in Chinese Thought since Wang Yang-ming,” SCT, pp. 112–145.Google Scholar

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14 Ibid, pp. 12–13.

15 Cf. Wright, Arthur F., “The Chinese Language and Foreign Ideas,” SCT, p. 300.Google Scholar

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45 Ibid, 2.24b.

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51 A favorite characterization, indifferently of any of the “isms,” is another phrase of this sort—hua erh pu shih, “mere display but no substance,” or, more literally, “flower but not fruit”; e.g., LTKJ, pp. 68, 73.Google Scholar

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54 Ibid, 5.7b.

55 JTK, pp. 1–9Google Scholar. Liu Shao-ch'i has a short essay entitled “The Class Character of Man,” on which Ch'en's essay appears to be in part based. Liu's essay is printed in English translation as an Appendix (pp. 113–122) to How to Be a Good Communist.

56 For an example, see the anonymous essay “Li Tzu-ch'eng ti chiao-hsün (li-shih hsiaoshuo)” [“The Moral of Li Tzu-ch'eng (A Story from History)”], SHCN, pp. 121–124.Google Scholar

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59 Ming-ts'ao, , “Lun shen-tu,” LTKJ, pp. 55–57.Google Scholar

60 Ibid, p. 55.

61 Ibid, p. 56.

62 Ibid, p. 56.

63 Ibid, p. 57.

64 Ibid, p. 57.

65 Lo P'o, “Tsai lun shen-tu” [“Further Remarks on ‘Watching Oneself When Alone’”], LTKJ, pp. 58–62.Google Scholar

66 Ibid, p. 61.

67 Ibid, p. 60.