The Rise of Modern Chinese Conservatism

Whereas conservatism in Europe was born in reaction to the French Revolution of 1789, modern conservatism in China rose in reaction to the radicalism of the New Culture/May Fourth Movement, not to the Revolution of 1911—there being no Chinese equivalents of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821).Footnote ² This is not to suggest that there was no Chinese conservatism before then. One does not forget the late Qing reformer Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) and such noted conservatives as Kang Youwei (1858–1927), Zhang Binglin (1869–1935), Liu Shipei (1884–1919) and others of the National Essence (guocui) School. Nor is it suggested that the vibrant cultural life during the first years of twentieth-century China that marked a watershed between the conservative old regime and the ostensibly iconoclastic New Culture can be ignored.Footnote ³ What is suggested, however, is that Chinese conservatism in its modern form evolved at a particular point, making it part of the discourse of modernity, not part of a world-wide current of anti-modernisation thought (fanxiandaihua sixiang, Alitto's Chinese) as Guy Alitto would have it.Footnote ⁴ It is also suggested that just as conservatism in Europe had emerged as a counter-movement in response to the ‘crisis of modernization’ in the nineteenth century, so modern conservatism in China rose a century later as a counter-movement to the ‘crisis of modernity’ represented by New Culture/May Fourth radicalism.

Although the conservative reaction to the radical anti-traditionalism of the May Fourth period was internally driven, it had a fitting European context as well. For a century prior to World War I, some European thinkers, notably Rousseau (1712–1778), Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and Nietzsche (1844–1900) had already critiqued Enlightenment's overweening belief in scientific rationality and progress. More recently, anxiety about progress in the West was expressed by the German historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) in his bestseller The Decline of the West (1918). In this morphology of world history written in large part before the outbreak of World War I, Spengler put forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations, which he likened to living organisms that all evolved through stages of birth, growth, prosperity, decay and eventual death. Spengler saw seven of the world's eight major civilizations—Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Mexican—as dead and Western civilization as already in the senescent period of its cycle. Questioning the Enlightenment view of history, he expressed doubts about the future of Western culture and drew attention to some non-Western societies that could offer some food for thought.Footnote ⁵

World War I was exactly the kind of thing that the Enlightenment was invented to prevent, but it happened and turned out to be a horror for liberals everywhere. The savagery of the war heightened the disillusionment with modern Western civilization that some European men of letters had felt before the war. China had participated in the war in 1917, by which time hundreds of thousands of Europeans had died and been injured, causing some educated Chinese to question what ‘wealth and power’ really meant to humankind. As the war came to an end, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), the influential thinker and reformer now retired from politics but standing as an elder statesman, highlighted its horrors and made its impact felt on his fellow intellectuals at home, after his tour of Europe in 1918–1919 as an unofficial member of the Chinese delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference.Footnote ⁶

The Great War and the rise of Bolshevism in Russia prompted Chinese intellectuals to re-think the West. Feelings were mixed, as the West was seen as both a mentor and an oppressor. Some remained enamoured of it; others were critical but still found it a source of inspiration; still others converted to Marxism as the Russian revolution unfolded. It was in this climate that the conservatives took renewed pride in their cultural heritage. Liang Qichao especially felt that China had a responsibility to make a contribution to the creation of a new world culture.Footnote ⁷ He was encouraged by the visit in 1920 by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) at his invitation. During and after his visit, Russell recommended Chinese civilization as an antidote to European ills.Footnote ⁸

Post-war irrationalism in Europe also contributed to the rise of Chinese conservative thought. The Vitalism and intuitionist philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), then the leading French philosopher, was introduced to China early in the 1920s. Following on the heels of Bergson's thought was the spiritual philosophy of the 1908 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Rudolph Eucken (1846–1926), a German idealist and professor of philosophy, who was invited to visit China in 1922 but was unable to make the trip. His disciple Hans Driesch (1867–1941) came instead, staying from October 1922 to July 1923. Driesch's advice on the need to hold fast to the humanistic values of China's Buddhist-Confucian heritage strengthened the Chinese conservative stand against the overweening belief in the omnipotence of science.Footnote ⁹ All in all, the philosophy of irrationalism particularly appealed to those who were searching for the answer to the question about the meaning of life in the material world.

In addition to these European influences was New Humanism, which emerged as a modern literary and moral movement in the United States initiated by the Harvard literary professor and cultural thinker Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). Babbitt had a number of Chinese students. Notable among them were Wu Mi, Mei Guangdi, Hu Xiansu, Liu Boming and Tang Yongtong, who returned to China to launch the conservative journal Critical Review (Xueheng 1922–1933), based in Nanjing,Footnote ¹⁰ and became known as the Critical Review Group (Xuehengpai).

Modern Chinese conservatism evolved as an intellectual attitude rather than an ideology, and as such had no fixed, invariable, unchangeable and substantive ideals.Footnote ¹¹ It was by no means a unified school of thought; actually it contained different strands and tensions. Moreover, some conservative views and concerns were strikingly similar to those of the liberal elements. As China found itself threatened by colonialism and imperialism, what might be described as conservative in Chinese terms often had different nuances than in a hegemonic society. Thus Schwartz tells us that conservatism in China did not mean the defence in Burkean fashion of the existing socio-political order as a whole. Nor did it mean, one might add, ‘a minimal state, a strong but unobtrusive government, laissez-faire in most matters . . . decentralization, localism, and a preference for tradition and experience over rationalist planning, and withal an unconquerable prejudice against redistributive measures’, as in traditional America.Footnote ¹² Nor did modern Chinese conservatism denote political extremes of right or left seeking fundamental change in the structure of society. Instead, it expressed a belief in a strong state and a powerful government living up to the task of state building, which entailed political change but not social revolution and cultural iconoclasm.

In general terms, modern Chinese conservatism was marked by a faith in traditional values that could be revitalised and harnessed to the purposes of modernisation and by a view of society as organic in its articulation of rights and duties and in its institutions and interrelationship of functions. It did not derive its category of thought from the nation's cultural heritage to the neglect of Western ideas. Nor did it reject industrialism and material progress based on the application of science and rational technologies. Rather, it held a synthetic view on the cultures of the East and the West, and saw national traditions as the bases for claims to an alternative future that was progressive, raising the idea of what contemporary scholars call ‘alternative modernities’, seen as progressive in our day. Economically, modern Chinese conservatism recognised the modern state as capitalistic and industrialised but rejected that as the only possible modernity. It believed in agrarian self-sufficiency, was wary about the effects of foreign manufactures on the national economy, and advocated a mixed economy.

Politically, conservatism in China was opposed to communism and armed insurrection. It also had reservations about liberal democracy. Some conservatives, such as the Critical Review Group, defended a form of neo-authoritarianism. The leader of the group Wu Mi (1894–1978) dismissed as irrational Rousseau's notion of ‘the general will’ and political populism, following his mentor Babbitt's view that ‘in the long run democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision’.Footnote ¹³ Fellow group member Hu Xiansu, a botanist, thought true democracy was not ‘extreme democratic politics’ but part of the historical process that was slow, gradual and organic ‘in accord with the inherent human nature and the process of social development’. Acknowledging that democracy was the correct kind of politics, Hu insisted that there were preconditions for it. When the time was ripe, democracy could be very productive, as in the American War of Independence. When the time was not ripe, democracy could be a terrible thing, as in France following the Revolution of 1789 when the new republic degenerated into Jacobin dictatorship. Hu did not think the time was ripe in China.Footnote ¹⁴ And Liu Boming, a scientist, acknowledged that republicanism was a good form of government and a corrective to autocracy, but he also defended traditional autocracy on the grounds of administrative efficiency, thinking that traditional autocracy complemented by democracy would lead to a win-win situation of ‘efficiency and justice’.Footnote ¹⁵

Not all of these characteristics of modern conservatism were its alone. Chinese liberals, too, had a conception of society as organic with its emphasis on the balance of rights and duties and on the social good. Some, such as the British-trained and most Europeanised geologist Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936) and the American-educated diplomatic historian Jiang Tingfu (1895–1965), would, early in the 1930s, support a new-style dictatorship under Nationalist rule as a means of national unification and economic modernisation.Footnote ¹⁶ They, too, were opposed to class struggle and social revolution. Both liberals and conservatives expressed anxiety about the national crisis, and both were modernisers, despite their different attitudes towards Westernisation. But it was the conservatives who represented the politics of national culture and traditions as a way of saving the nation.

Nationalism, Modernity and Politico-Cultural Nationalism

Nationalism, Elie Kedourie tells us, is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Not a natural sentiment, nationalism was a historical development and, at the time of invention, little more than an error made by a few Romantic scribblers, rather than a response to economic and social needs. Kedourie sees it not as a universal, natural human trait but as an extremely powerful, if sometimes destructive, force.Footnote ¹⁷

Interestingly, Ernest Gellner turns Kedourie on his head, arguing that it is the need of modern societies for cultural homogeneity that creates nationalism.Footnote ¹⁸ Gellner rejects the commonplace view that nationalism is a barbarous relic of tribal life whose persistence in modern societies is a lamentable anomaly. He refuses to follow Hayek, Popper and others in treating national consciousness as no more than an expression of atavism. Instead, Gellner contends that nationalism is a sociologically necessary phenomenon of the industrial epoch, emerging in the process of modernisation, and that nations are expressions of a literate, school-transmitted ‘high culture’ supported by specialists and by a mass, compulsory, public education system.Footnote ¹⁹ In his last word on the subject, Gellner argues that national cultures are responses to the mobility and anonymity of modern societies. Far from being a movement of retreat from the modern world, nationalism is a solution to some of its most distinctive problems. On the other hand, he cautiously anticipates the possibility of its decline after the atrocities and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the 1990s.Footnote ²⁰

Taking an instrumentalist approach, some scholars conceive of nationalism as a product of elite manipulation and contend that nations can be fabricated. According to Hobsbawn, nations owe much to ‘invented traditions’, which are products of social engineering designed to serve the interests of the ruling elite by channelling the energies of the newly enfranchised masses.Footnote ²¹ Other scholars, such as Clifford Geertz, adopt a primordialist approach.Footnote ²² Anthony Smith questions the modernist theory of nationalism and puts forth an ‘ethno-symbolic’ paradigm aimed at overcoming the distinction between instrumentalism and primordialism. He rejects suggestions that nationalism is purely a product of elite manipulation and that nations may be ipso facto invented.Footnote ²³ Meanwhile, Benedict Anderson views nations as ‘imagined communities’.Footnote ²⁴ Such subjective views are objectionable to other theorists who argue instead that nations cannot just be ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’, because objective conditions must exist.Footnote ²⁵

In any event, nationalism is malleable and related to modernity. It takes a different form in each society where it finds expression; each has a special and specific character. Liah Greenfeld's study of nationalism in sixteenth-century England, in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, in nineteenth-century Germany and Russia and in the American War of Independence, demonstrates that with local differences the five cases represent ‘five roads to modernity’. She concludes that once adopted as the way forward, nationalism ‘accelerated the process of change, channeled it into a certain direction, limited the possibilities of future development, and became a major factor in it. It thus both acknowledged and accomplished the grand social transformation from the old order to modernity’.Footnote ²⁶

Although the modernist view of nationalism has been contested, it remains true that nationalism blends respect for the modern with a yearning to retain some essence of traditional cultures. Nationalism, writes Tom Nairn, is the modern Janus standing in an ambiguous relationship with both the Enlightenment project and the very processes of modernity.Footnote ²⁷ The link between nationalism and modernity is tangible, if ambiguous. Thus, writes another scholar, ‘Nationalism is both modern and anti-modern, it combines elements of Enlightenment and modernity with appeals to tradition . . .’Footnote ²⁸

The nation-state has been one of the central pillars of modernity in the age of ideology. It has offered societies and national entities a cultural and political identity, a single economic unit (the national market), and political sovereignty. The notion of the nation-state underpinned Chinese nationalism. State building was essentially a modern project that had no parallel in Chinese history before 1912. It represented an effort to make the transition from empire to nation (or nation-state), involving a search for a new national identity and invoking ideas of citizenship—the idea of an active subject that holds both rights and duties and that can be mobilised to participate in politics. State building meant political sovereignty and a national people including the non-Han ethnic minorities. It entailed institutional change—political, social and legal—and economic development. It underscored the challenges facing China in the twentieth century and it was a matter of national survival.

The connections between nationalism, modernity and conservatism in Republican China were stronger than the earlier scholarship on Chinese nationalism has demonstrated.Footnote ²⁹ What deserves more attention is politico-cultural nationalism with which politico-cultural conservatism was identified.

To explain the term ‘politico-cultural nationalism’, it is helpful to turn briefly to historian John Hutchinson's study of cultural nationalism. Hutchinson has argued that there are two distinctive and sometimes competing types of nationalism: ‘a political nationalism that has as its aim autonomous state institutions; and a cultural nationalism that seeks a moral regeneration of the community’.Footnote ³⁰ The latter may look backward, but it is not regressive; rather, Hutchison continues,

Acknowledging that the two nationalisms often converge in movements of new secular groups that are subversive of the traditional order, Hutchinson insists on their distinctive conceptions, which often find expression in quite different organisations and political strategies.Footnote ³² Cultural nationalism tends to develop into a political movement and may eventually give way to state-oriented movements because the alternative models of progress can only be implemented through the state. Cultural nationalists tend to be, at least initially, historical scholars and artists, who form academic and cultural societies designed to evoke a love of the cultural heritage in the members of the nation, and thereby shape the future according to the ‘national spirit’ derived from the past. They promote a cultural revival and national renaissance, recreating the idea of the nation as ‘the animating force in the lives of the people’.Footnote ³³ Hutchinson challenges the assumption that nationalism is statist, insisting, as does Anthony Smith, that nationalism places the nation as the centre of its concerns.Footnote ³⁴

So the nation may be pitted against the state. But unlike contemporary China's cultural nationalists in Yingjie Guo's study,Footnote ³⁵ those of the Republican period did not pit the nation against the state, or tradition against modernity; rather, they stood for both. They combined in their person the attributes of the two nationalisms that Hutchinson describes. They were ‘moral innovators’ attempting to sap an uncritical dependence on the West on the part of the zealous modernists and seeking to carry out a movement at a time of social and political crisis. Their aim was to provide models for cultural and political change that guided their modernising strategies different from those proposed by the zealous modernists and cultural radicals. What they demonstrated was that their conservatism was as political as it was cultural and that nation and state were inseparable and negotiable.

I therefore use the term ‘politico-cultural nationalism’ to underline the political dynamics of modern Chinese conservatism in which the two nationalisms converged. The cultural conservatives sought a moral regeneration of the nation by attempting to transform creatively the valued heritage that could be used to promote social, political and economic development, and thereby enable China to survive and compete in the modern world dominated by the West. Their conservatism was not a part of a state- or regime-sponsored nationalism. Unlike Hutchinson's cultural nationalists, they were sometimes anti- and sometimes pro-state, depending on the political situation; they stood in an ambiguous relationship with the existing political order and the party-state. To illustrate, I revisit below the thoughts of two noted cultural conservatives, Liang Shuming (1893–1988), leader of the Rural Reconstruction Group, and Zhang Junmai (1887–1969), leader of the State Socialist Party.

The Politico-Cultural Thoughts of Liang Shuming and Zhang Junmai

Liang and Zhang were two very different personalities. The former was home-grown and self-taught in philosophy; the latter, initially trained as a classical scholar, received a foreign education in Japan and Germany. While Liang felt a great deal of sympathy for Chinese traditions, Zhang was more interested in East–West cultural blending. Liang had established himself as a philosopher by the 1920s. Zhang did not shift his interest from social science to philosophy until he came under the influence of Bergson and Eucken. Where Liang was interested in village self-government, Zhang was interested in constitutionalism at national level. The two also differed over Western learning but were united by a common concern about the problems and future of China and by an abiding interest in Confucianism. Each has been the subject of several monographic studies.Footnote ³⁶ The details of their cultural thought need not detain us here. Instead, I focus on the politics of their cultural conservatism.

Both men were ‘moral innovators’ spreading a message of national rebirth and renewal as a way of saving the nation and achieving modernity. Spreading such a message was not, paradoxically, conservative unless one takes nationalism to be conservative, which would be ahistorical. Politico-cultural nationalism in China was a historical contingency. To be conservative was to be nationalistic, but not necessarily vice versa. The Communists, too, were nationalistic despite their internationalism, and so were the liberals despite their cosmopolitanism. Radical Westernisation advocates found no difficulties in defending their relentless assaults on the old culture on patriotic grounds.Footnote ³⁷

In a climate of anti-imperialism following the May Fourth incident of 1919, Liang Shuming worried about the foreign threat. Not only was the nation bullied and insulted, but worse it was under growing pressure from economic imperialism, which threatened to keep the Chinese people in perpetual thraldom with no chance of ever throwing off the foreign yoke. This aggravated the internal problems caused by the rapacious acts of the warlords that had resulted in huge losses of lives and extensive destruction of property.Footnote ³⁸ China must save itself.

Indeed, central to Liang's cultural conservatism was the idea of national self-salvation (minzu zijiu), articulated in his book The Final Awakening of the Chinese National Self-salvation Movement (1931). Since the publication of his first major work Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921), which catapulted him to national fame, Liang had undergone a rethinking of the Western way. In 1921, Liang had completely accepted Western culture in terms of science and democracy, while urging his fellow Chinese to ‘critically reappraise and bring forth anew China's original attitude [culture]’.Footnote ³⁹ Now he believed that ‘Europeanization is not necessarily good and Europeans are not worthy of emulation.’Footnote ⁴⁰ His ‘final awakening’ was a step backward, but it was also an attempt to build national confidence at a time when educated Chinese seemed to be suffering from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis Westerners. Out of frustration he blamed China's inability to save itself on Western learning—‘all those Western tricks’ (yice de xifang baxi) that allegedly undermined the spirit of Chinese culture.Footnote ⁴¹ Instead, he sought salvation in self-help—in ‘our own spirit . . . in our own way’. He stated:

Liang had ‘discovered’ that neither European democracy nor the Soviet Russian system was a ‘through road’ for China and that the only ‘through road’ was rural reconstruction, not a foreign model.Footnote ⁴³ Owing to cultural differences, many aspects of Western democracy ran afoul of Chinese traditions. Chinese, Liang continued, were not ready for democracy, because they believed in social harmony, in not going to the extreme, in humility and modesty, in mutual trust and in human innate goodness. Their self-contentment and peace-loving nature were ill suited to the competitive elections of the West. Neither was the Soviet system a ‘through road,’ because Chinese society was not class-based and therefore lacked the basis for social revolution. China remained an agrarian society with a weak bourgeoisie. Industrial workers were few in numbers yet better off than the peasants. Liang concluded that the only way to save the nation was to go down the path of rural reconstruction.

Liang was not, however, entirely anti-Western. He recognised four great strengths of Western life: its corporate spirit and organisations, the participation of members of organisations in corporate life, respect for the individual, and the ‘socialization of property’ (by which he meant moderate socialism). All these strengths should be learned and combined with the five relationships in Chinese ethics.Footnote ⁴⁴ Liang did not fail to appreciate that the modern state was industrialised but rejected that as the only possible modernity. Instead, he viewed agricultural development as the prerequisite to industrial growth on the grounds that the vast majority of the population were peasants.Footnote ⁴⁵

Liang's theory of rural reconstruction rests on two assumptions. One is that Chinese society was hierarchical and ethics-based. The other is that Chinese society was occupationally differentiated rather than class-based because the means of production was not monopolised. Land was freely bought and sold, the whole estate of an intestate was customarily divided among the children, and mechanisation was non-existent. He concluded that monopoly of land was by no means phenomenal, that most peasants owned a little bit of land, and that capital formation was not monopolised. These assumptions have been questioned.Footnote ⁴⁶

Guy Alitto has characterised rural reconstruction as ‘Confucian modernization’.Footnote ⁴⁷ But it was more than that, for it was also a national self-salvation movement involving the political awakening of the peasants. Although Liang had ideas that resonated with Mao Zedong's anti-urbanism and anti-consumerism, he wanted to eliminate the Communist movement because of its violent land reform programme. Liang explained:

Liang always tried to explain China's problems from a cultural point of view and always wanted to solve the cultural crisis first.Footnote ⁴⁹ But that was the easy part. The difficult part was finding a political solution to those problems. Thus he wrote:

Rural reconstruction was a political solution to the agrarian problem of China. It looked to an alterative modernity reflecting the country's conditions in the 1930s. Although Liang never contemplated a seizure of power from the Nationalist government, rural reconstruction was not a ‘nonpolitical solution to China's modern crisis’ as Alitto has argued.Footnote ⁵¹

To Liang's way of thinking, China was a peculiar country. Not only was Chinese society ethics-based and occupationally differentiated, politically it lacked a notion of the state owing to a traditional fixation with the concept of tianxia (all under Heaven). He did not think constitutionalism was suited to Chinese conditions because of a lack of social basis for it. Moreover, constitutionalism was incongruous with the national spirit, which did not manifest itself in struggles for civil, political and individual rights.Footnote ⁵²

Apparently, Liang was ambiguous towards the prevailing socio-political order. In January 1938, he visited Yanan to see for himself what the Communists were doing there. He met with Mao Zedong and others, coming away with a good impression of them. In July, he attended the wartime People's Political Council in Hankou, convened by the Nationalists. In 1941, he was instrumental, along with Zhang Junmai and others, in founding the Democratic League in a ‘third force’ movement.Footnote ⁵³

Now let me turn to Zhang Junmai, who shared Liang's idea of national self-salvation but articulated it with a nuance. Like Europe's cultural nationalists, Zhang stressed that there was a spirit of the nation seeking cultural and political expression. He encouraged that expression by concentrating on a national renaissance (minzu fuxing) movement and became its chief exponent in the 1930s. A vocal critic of the Nationalist party-state, Zhang was kidnapped in June 1929 by Nationalist secret agents in Shanghai, where he had been teaching at Zhixing College in the International Settlement. After his release, Zhang went to Germany for a third time, returning in August 1931 to take up a position at Beijing's Yanjing University teaching the philosophy of Hegel. There, over the next few years, he watched with great concern Japanese aggression in Manchuria and north China. His persistent criticism of Nanjing's weak-kneed policy towards the Japanese angered the government, forcing him to resign from Yanjing early in 1933. In the following year, Zhang travelled to Shanxi and Guangdong, where he taught at Zhongshan University for six months before returning to Beijing.Footnote ⁵⁴ During all that time and in the ensuing years, he managed to find time to write three important books, The Academic Basis of National Renaissance (1935), Chinese Culture Tomorrow (1936) and The Way to Build the State (1938), which provided clear insights into the politics of his cultural conservatism. These books, however, have received little attention from his American biographer.Footnote ⁵⁵

The first book was a series of lectures given on various occasions in the first half of the 1930s, covering a broad range of topics from Chinese philosophy to comparative East–West thought. Zhang vainly likened it to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's (1762–1814) celebrated Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation), a series of lectures given in French-occupied Berlin in the winter of 1807–1808 designed to inflame appeals to German nationalism. Stirred by Napoleon's defeat of Prussia, Fichte pointed to the need to bring together the high culture of German life with the power that could make it effective in the world. Addresses to the German Nation later obtained a place of dubious honour as founding documents in the history of German nationalism. It was recognised by grateful compatriots as the ‘bible of nationalism’, ‘one of the “spiritual sponsors” of the new Germanness’ and ‘one of the most precious products of the German spirit’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Fichte's initial concern was with education and the question of national identity, particularly the relationship between language and nationality. But he quickly turned his treatment of education into a treatment of what had gone wrong with German life, which led to the national disaster. Like fellow Prussian Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Fichte stressed the idea of the national spirit but took it a stage further by cutting it off from the Enlightenment notion of universalism that underpinned the French Revolution. Exposing nationalism's uneasy relationship with the Enlightenment, Fichte invented German nationalism at a particular time for a particular purpose. His was an exclusive nationalism underpinned by a national spirit that had a mysterious inbred quality to be present in the heart of every member of the German nation.Footnote ⁵⁷

Zhang Junmai was stirred by the imperialism of the Western powers and more recently by Japanese aggression in Manchuria and north China. He pointed to the need to save China by unifying the nation and by taking pride in its past achievements. In 1932, Zhang translated Addresses to the German Nation into Chinese and published it in serialised form in his party organ Zaisheng (‘National Renaissance’) (The translation was later published in book form.) Lauding Fichte as the most outstanding figure in the German nationalist movement, Zhang found in him a spirit of the self capable of differentiating between disgrace and glory—a spontaneous spirit that expressed itself in personal conduct and behaviour with a sense of duty to the nation.Footnote ⁵⁸

Zhang placed the nation at the centre of his conservative thought. He became a nationalist partly from sentiment or sentimentality, but more through genuine, objective, practical necessity, that is, national survival and modernisation. Zhang sought to transform the existing order into a modern legal-rational society and a constitutional state. To that end, he and his close associate Zhang Dongsun surreptitiously founded the National Socialist Party (Guojia shehui dang) in 1932, which became public in 1934 at its First Party Congress. Realising the implications of links with the German Nazis, the party organ Zaisheng after the first couple of issues switched to translating the name as State Socialist Party. The party stood for a strong unified state with a powerful and efficient government capable of restoring domestic order and resisting foreign imperialism.

Zhang attached great importance to the role of the state in Hegelian fashion.Footnote ⁵⁹ He spoke of the ‘greater freedom of the nation’ that offered the best protection of individual liberty in a time of crisis. Gravely worried about the Japanese aggression, Zhang considered a war of resistance unavoidable and necessary after the Tanggu Truce of May 1933 failed to stop the Japanese advance. He advocated ‘total war’, translated the German general Erich Ludendorff's (1865–1937) Der Totale Krieg (1935) into Chinese, and published it through Shanghai's Commercial Press early in 1937.Footnote ⁶⁰

As a cultural nationalist, Zhang was a moderniser and moral innovator. He evoked what T. S. Eliot called ‘the usable past’ to promote a national culture and to revive a Chinese historicist vision of the nation in order to reconcile the traditionalists and the modernists so that they could be united in the project of constructing a new culture capable of competing in the modern world. Zhang used the cultural heritage selectively and sought to transform it in the process. He began the process with national self-reproach, asking the question: What had gone wrong with the Chinese nation, once a great civilization with a history of five thousand years? His answer was:

The challenge then was ‘to educate the people, so that the 390,000,000 [uneducated] can recognise that they are the Chinese nation’.Footnote ⁶² Following Fichte, Zhang linked education with nationalism.

At the core of Zhang's national consciousness was a distinctive belief in ‘national will’ (minzu yizhi), the very thing that had driven the Germans under Bismarck and the Italians under Cavour to unify their respective countries in the nineteenth century. National will was the engine of change, a force transcending class, party and political lines, and a source of strength to fight Japanese aggression. Zhang sought to instil in the Chinese mind a proper pride in nationhood and a willingness to sacrifice self-interest to the state in a time of national crisis.Footnote ⁶³

State building required the support of a self-assured and self-confident national people. What troubled Zhang Junmai were not only the relentless assaults on Chinese traditions but also the inferiority complex of the cultural iconoclasts vis-a-vis Westerners. That complex must be eradicated, for it was a rare modern state that did not have a national people confident in themselves. It is not hard to understand why Zhang reacted sharply to the May Fourth veteran Hu Shi's (1891–1962) derogatory remarks on the Chinese race and his extreme views on Westernisation. What other nations could so, so could the Chinese, Zhang insisted. A nation lacking in self-confidence was not qualified for state building, and self-confidence entailed reverence for the nation's history, culture and traditions—a cultural revival and reaffirmation. To revere Chinese history, culture and traditions was not, however, a flight from modernity or a reaffirmation of all things Chinese. China needed to change its political institutions and research culture by learning from the West. But Western learning should not be allowed to undermine the autonomy of thought. It appeared to Zhang that Hu Shi and others of his persuasion had wittingly become slaves to foreign ideas. Autonomy of thought was important because it promoted cultural diversity and national distinctiveness. Only a nation with a distinctive character and an independent spirit could be proud of itself, and only then could it make a contribution to a new world culture.Footnote ⁶⁴

In Chinese Culture Tomorrow (1936), Zhang Junmai first wrote about Indian culture and then about European culture. He was more interested in the latter because of what China could learn from it politically and intellectually. He identified four characteristic features of Western developments since the Renaissance. The first was the formation of nation-states, which Zhang regarded as more significant than the revival of literature and art and the advance of science. The second was the development of democracy, which he considered good for all humankind, despite problems with some Western governments. The third was the thirst for knowledge, pursued through exploration and scientific research. And the fourth was the change in notions of morality, as a consequence of the influence of Kant, Hegel and other Idealists. Zhang admired the democratic traditions of the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as recognised the contributions of Christianity.Footnote ⁶⁵

From these developments Zhang saw several lessons for China. The formation of the Chinese nation-state had only just begun, not helped by internal disunity and foreign imperialism. Politically, China under Nationalist rule had yet to democratise. Intellectually, China's knowledge base had to be broadened by the extensive use of scientific methods. Morally and philosophically, Chinese needed to cherish such Western values as individual autonomy and self-dignity, love for the nation and mutual cooperation. In particular, Zhang commended Kant's philosophy that every man should be treated as an end in himself, not a means to an end.Footnote ⁶⁶

In an overview of the past three thousand years, Zhang divided the cultural history of China into three distinct periods based on what he called the ‘prosperity and decline of the nation’, (minzu zhi shengshuai) or ‘national energies’ (minzu huoli). The first and ancient period was prior to the Qin and Han dynasties. The second period was from the Wei and Jin dynasties through the Tang to the Song. The third was from the Yuan to the Qing. Each period had its own characteristics. It is not my concern whether Zhang's narrative is accurate. What is worth noting is his revisionism. Zhang departed from the traditional historiography that used the Qin as the dividing line between ancient and imperial China. He praised the first Qin Emperor, traditionally condemned as a tyrant, for unifying the country. He thought the expansion of national energies during the Sui and the Tang was the result of ethnic assimilation over the previous three hundred years. And he posited a correlation between culture and national energies: a culture waxed when national energies were in abundance and waned when in short supply. A streak of Han chauvinism in Zhang cannot be missed, for he despised the Mongols and the Manchus whose rule was ‘really a national disgrace.’Footnote ⁶⁷

In a reflective mood, though, Zhang identified flaws in Chinese culture. First, the autocratic imperial system left no room for individual freedom and instead led to court intrigues, political conflicts, usurpation of power and eunuch interference in politics. Second, the family system not only compounded the individual's sense of dependence but also fostered a culture of hypocrisy in which outward harmony disguised the reality of family feuds. Third, the scholastic tradition suffered from an arcane written language and a lack of orientation towards cognitive study of theories; it failed to nurture men of creative talent and to develop great systems of thought because of a preoccupation with empirical research. And finally, Chinese culture was lacking in ‘a spirit of martyrdom’; men of integrity were rare, with the exceptions of the Neo-Confucians of the Song period. Zhang found satisfaction only in Chinese art, literature, aesthetics, history compilation and Neo-Confucianism.Footnote ⁶⁸

National renaissance, therefore, was a movement not to revive old art, literature and aesthetics but to renew creatively Chinese thought and cultural symbols. Zhang was impressed with modern Germany and Britain. The Germans had made great strides in science and philosophy yet they still respected Luther, Goethe and Bismarck. The British were untiring in their efforts at creative renewal, making them a great nation, yet their reverence for Milton, Shakespeare, Hume and Mill was undiminished. Zhang concluded: ‘In the midst of renewal the old is conserved. That is, creative renewal inherits the past and develops the future, both emerging from the same path.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Where Fichte was silent on political forms, Zhang was loud and clear. In his third book, The Way to Build the State, published after the outbreak of the War of Resistance, Zhang provided a blueprint for democratic socialism in China. Among other things, he revisited the question of national self-confidence, reaffirming the importance of national will, resolution and self-esteem.Footnote ⁷⁰ His ‘revisionist democracy’ represented a third way between liberal capitalism and the Soviet system. Unlike Liang Shuming, Zhang was a committed constitutionalist. He rejected the Nationalist programme of political tutelage but would be prepared to cooperate with the government if constitutional change was effected. In November 1946, he attended the National Assembly, which was boycotted by the Democratic League and the Communists, and which adopted in December the constitution he had drafted for the government.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1949, he sought asylum overseas while Liang chose to remain in the People's Republic.

The Politics of China-Based Cultural Reconstruction

Around the middle of the 1930s, a wave of neo-traditionalism swept across the territory under Nationalist control. In 1934, Chiang Kai-shek staged the New Life movement in Nanchang (Jiangxi) to inculcate old virtues and to improve personal hygiene and conduct. It was followed by the Respect Confucius and Study the Classics movement launched by the pro-government military strongmen He Jian and Chen Jitang in Guangdong. The government went on to restore Confucius to sagehood and resumed official observance of his birthday (August 27). In the meantime, a fascist movement spearheaded by the Whampoa Clique within the Nationalist Party got underway to make Chiang Kai-shek a dictator. Ideologically driven, these movements were aimed at countering the growing influence of Marxism on one hand and defending the party-state against corrosion by liberalism on the other.

Critics discredited the New Life movement and derided the propaganda behind it for its insincerity and irrelevance to the pressing needs of the people. However, Arif Dirlik has long argued that the ideology of the New Life movement was ‘not a traditional but a modern response to a modern problem’.Footnote ⁷² Hans van de Ven, too, points out that the movement advocated a ‘secular and rational Confucianism’, which ‘constituted a uniquely Chinese “spirit” compatible with modernity and shared by all Chinese’.Footnote ⁷³ Just as Nazism and Italian fascism made claims to modernity, participating in scientific and technological progress, despite their rejection of ‘bourgeois’ values, such as democracy, capitalism and ideas of secular, rational progress, so did Chiang Kai-shek in his foray into fascism.

The Nationalist party-state had a dual character. On one hand, it was conservative to a fault, corrupt, bureaucratic, and incompetent. On the other hand, it had the most modern government that China had ever seen, claiming many well-educated officials, some of them with Western degrees. Nationalist visions of modernity were not lacking. The party functionary and ideologue Chen Lifu outlined his vision in his philosophical work Vitalism (Weishenglun). Terry Bodenhorn has found in Vitalism many of the key intangibles that Western social scientists, such as Gellner, Giddens and Charles Taylor, have equated with modernity, noting Chen's belief in human rationality, progress, social discipline, orderliness and efficiency, as well as in trust and confidence.Footnote ⁷⁴

Unsurprisingly, some conservatives were supportive of the Nationalist government. Most notable among them were ten professors who issued a joint ‘Declaration of Cultural Construction on a Chinese Base’ on January 10, 1935.Footnote ⁷⁵ The declaration began by deploring ‘the loss of China in the cultural domain and of Chinese characteristics in its political style, its social organizations, and its thought in both content and form’. It proclaimed that the modernisation of China needed to be achieved through a selective syncretism of the best elements of Western and Chinese cultures. To that end, ‘[we] must adopt a critical attitude and the scientific method, review China's past and grasp its present’. China would always have its peculiarities reflecting its history and circumstances. It was unhelpful either to glorify or to condemn ancient Chinese thought and institutions. What China needed was a new culture capable of ‘meeting its needs at the present time and in the present circumstances’. Accordingly, it was important to re-evaluate all Chinese thought and institutions with a view to sifting out the good from the bad, and to absorb Euro-American culture, but not totally and uncritically. The declaration stressed the need for creative transformation through questioning of the old without completely discarding it. The ten professors were sanguine that once a creative Chinese culture was constructed, it would be as good as any other and make a valuable contribution to the future world culture.

Not unexpectedly, they were ridiculed as willing tools and the mouthpiece of the government, subjected to considerable scorn and recriminations and accused of taking a dichotomous view of Chinese culture as spiritual and Western culture as materialistic. Hu Shi blasted them for hiding their conservative intentions ‘under the smoke-screen of compromise’, and dismissed them as reactionary defenders of the cultural status quo and the declaration as a modern version of ti–yong (essence–function) thought. He further criticised that the declaration lacked clarity and specifics on China's needs ‘at the present time and in the present circumstances’.Footnote ⁷⁶

What the critics failed to appreciate was that the declaration underscored the connection between cultural conservatism and nationalism. Coming at a time when the American-trained sociologist Chen Xujing (1903–1967) was stridently advocating ‘wholesale Westernisation’ following the publication of his book The Future of Chinese Culture (1934),Footnote ⁷⁷ the declaration had a whiff of national consciousness. It echoed the anxiety of Liang Shuming and Zhang Junmai, with whom the ten professors were not associated, over national self-confidence in facing the present and the future. They insisted that they were not stubbornly adhering to the past, only seeking to distil the good from the bad with ‘a critical attitude’ and ‘self-cognition’ and to harmonise East and West with the scientific method. They were piously hoping that a reconstructed Chinese culture, ‘purged of its past errors’, would bring China ‘light and energy’ and find a new place in the world. None of this was atavistic language, even though practicing what they preached was not going to be easy. Clearly, they were not hostile to the appropriation of Western ideas and values, only to indiscriminate borrowing. Their position on selective assimilation was no different in principle from Hu Shi's idea that modern culture should be absorbed in such a way as to make the inherent culture of China congruous with it and develop harmoniously. Uncritical acceptance of the West was unscientific and contrary to the modernist philosophy that all values are subject to re-evaluation. The ten professors were able to hoist the advocates of ‘wholesale Westernisation’ with their own petard.

Responding to criticisms, they defended their position and specified China's current needs as the improvement of the livelihood of the people, the development of the national economy and the struggle for national survival.Footnote ⁷⁸ They echoed Sun Yat-sen's ideology, less his principle of democracy, suggesting that they accepted the political tutelage of the Nationalist regime as a historical contingency. This had much to do with the fact that for all its faults Nanjing was a modernising regime that deserved support in 1935 when the nation was confronted with a late imperialism in Japanese aggression. War seemed inevitable. Cultural conservatism was linked to anti-imperialist nationalism.

Particularly notable among them was Tao Xisheng (1899–1988), probably the most nationalistic of the ten. An economic and intellectual historian at Beijing University, the case of Tao illustrates the complexity of the conservative outlook. A graduate of Beijing University, Tao first made his mark on the intellectual scene in the mid-1920s as a Marxist historian, but following the collapse of the Nationalist–Communist united front, he parted company with fellow Marxists over class struggle and social revolution. In 1929–1930, Tao had participated in the social history controversy, arguing that feudalism had long disintegrated in China after the Age of the Warring States (473–221 BC), displaced by a commercial capitalism that emerged in the late Zhou and continued to grow in the imperial period that followed, despite the domination of the gentry class.Footnote ⁷⁹

As a Nationalist intellectual, Tao had made a contribution to the government's theory of ‘integrative revolution’. According to Arif Dirlik, Tao was always ‘a proponent of change’, but his idea of change did not entail ‘a total break with the past or the violent revolutionary transformation of Chinese society structure’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Change was desirable, but it must be under control, accord with the historical conditions of Chinese society, and meet its particular needs. China's social and political upheavals must be arrested, for a social revolution could only make things worse. Not only did Tao reject the notion of class struggle, but he also objected to New Culture demands for radical change. His conservatism was more socio-political than cultural.

For Tao, the 1935 declaration was an attempt to liberate China from Western cultural domination. He asked Hu Shi rhetorically: ‘Should we Chinese of a semi-colony not discover ourselves? Should we not consciously move forward?’Footnote ⁸¹ He went on to provide his own answer:

In a supplement, Tao lectured Hu Shi, many years his senior:

This personal attack was unwarranted, but it did reflect Tao's strong nationalist sentiment.

Wartime Politico-Cultural Nationalism

During the War of Resistance (1937–1945), burgeoning nationalism stressed the particularities of the Chinese nation. Again, politico-cultural conservatism was identified with politico-cultural nationalism. Taking pride in the motherland and in its distinctive culture was morally uplifting.

The politics of cultural conservatism found expression in the Sinicisation (Zhongguohua) movement, which highlighted the specificities of Chinese history, culture and politics. The historian Qian Mu (1894–1990), who had taught at Yanqing, Beijing, and Qinghua universities, exemplifies this in his book A General History of China (1940), which attempted ‘to show the true face of China's national culture and to spread its spirit, thereby illustrating the true historical processes it had undergone, explaining the present, and pointing directions to the future’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The book was a work of macro history. Writing this kind of history, wrote Qian, required first a real understanding of where the developmental character of that country's culture lay and, second, a grasp of its specific environment and enterprise. His concern was with the reform of China and how history could be used to help determine where China was headed. Historically, China had had its fair share of problems. But reminiscent of Spengler, Qian maintained that all cultures had undergone cycles of prosperity and decline. Chinese culture was not dead; it would flourish again. It was a mistake to negate the past in its totality. Rather than blaming all the current problems on traditions and the ancients, it was important to diagnose the malaise and find out the root causes; only then could there be a basis for reform. History, therefore, is relevant to the present and provides a useful guide to the future. Its function is to serve the purposes of reform and state building.Footnote ⁸⁵

Nationalist sentiment led Qian to make some dubious claims about Chinese history. Since the Qin and Han dynasties, he wrote, the literati had enjoyed the right of political participation and the imperial system was not devoid of ‘democracy’—it was neither ‘dark’ nor ‘autocratic’. China had gone from a feudal state to a unified state, and seen a gradual opening up of the political system, a meritocracy marked by the civil service exams, recruitment of talents by recommendation and a board of officials. Qian argued that China's political institutions did not develop in Western fashion because its scale of state building and evolutionary path were different. Imperial China was neither ‘feudal’ nor ‘bourgeois’ but in a class of its own. Core Chinese values were adhered to by every section of the population; not even the emperor and his ministers could ignore them. Qian followed in the tradition of National Essence historiography in portraying the Chinese nation as the historical bearer of universal moral values.

A General History of China was a bestseller during the wartime. It won the applause of the Nationalist government. Chiang Kai-shek apparently took his cue from it when he wrote China's Destiny in 1943 (reportedly ghost-written by Tao Xisheng), which was itself an apology for Chinese conservatism.

In the Communist-controlled border regions, the imperatives of war and mobilisation also drove the Communists to launch their own Sinicisation movement. Mao Zedong was full of praise for the history of ‘this great country’, with its many thinkers, scientists, inventors, politicians, military strategists, literary figures and artists, as well as its rich cultural works. He glorified the essence of Chinese culture while condemning its ‘feudal trash’, and gave voice to the ‘soul of China’ in literature and art. Everything came to acquire a Chinese flavour. A ‘national defence literature’ and a ‘national revolutionary war literature of the masses’ were promoted. Art for art's sake was replaced with art for the masses, harnessed to the purposes of prosecuting the war. Literature was expunged of its bourgeois complexion. A new form of popular literature (critics would say vulgar) with themes on the labouring classes and the countryside came into vogue. A rural-based mass culture was privileged over elitist urban culture.Footnote ⁸⁶ Mao's well-known 1942 talk at the Yan'an Forum on literature and art combined a brand of populism with a pride in the ‘revolutionary tradition’ of the masses. What's more, he adapted Marxism to Chinese conditions, developing his own thought into a template for the Chinese revolution.

The Sinicisation movement was not as anti-modern and anti-Western as is often thought. The contemporary historian Feng Chongyi has asserted that Sinicisation represented ‘a tragic return’ to conservatism, a testimony to the failure of the May Fourth project, succeeding only in reviving the traditionalism dormant in the Chinese mind.Footnote ⁸⁷ A different interpretation, I submit, is that Sinicisation represented a form of cultural nationalism contingently appropriate to China's social, political and intellectual conditions during the war, keeping alive the link between the exogenous and the indigenous. The wartime sociologist Ji Wenfu would not have it either as ‘cultural anti-foreignism’ or as ‘a reinvention of the ti–yong dichotomy’. He approved of it as a process of assimilating the best of all possible worlds, digesting foreign borrowings and giving them a Chinese flavour. Sinicisation represented ‘a third kind of culture’ in which Chineseness was embedded in cosmopolitanism.Footnote ⁸⁸

For the purpose of this article, even more significant than the Sinicisation movement was the emergence of a current of conservative thought that was deeply political and nationalistic. It was associated with a group of professors at the Southwest University in Kuming who founded in 1940 the journal Zhanguoce (named after the Annals of the Warring States) and in the following year a ‘Warring States’ supplement to Chongqing's influential newspaper Dagongbao (‘L'Impartial’). This group, which has received little attention in Western scholarship, comprised a diversity of patriotic elements united by a concern about the war and the future of China.

There were three important themes in Zhanguoce thought. First was the link between cultural reconstruction and national power. In this theme, the purpose of cultural reconstruction was to reform the feeble character of the nation by reviving the ancient culture of the Warring States in the first instance. Leading Zhanguoce writers took a morphological approach to Chinese history and civilization, following Splenger and, more recently, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). Splenger's study of culture as a living organism that went through a course of birth, growth, maturity and decay, and Toynbee's categorisation of historical growth and decay, bore a striking resemblance to the Chinese ‘dynastic cycle’. Thus the political scientist Lin Tongji (1906–1980), a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, held that all world civilizations had undergone three phases: feudalism, contending states and grand unity. Each phase had its own ethos, but the age of contending states had been the brightest, the tensest, the most active and the most creative. All civilizations would ultimately perish like those of Egypt, Greece and Rome. For the present, modern Europe was still in the heyday of the age of contending states. As for Chinese civilization, it had long passed the Age of the Warring States and had also experienced grand unity over the past two thousand years. It was not dead yet. But if China was to survive the international conflicts of the present age, it needed to go back two thousand years to reconstruct the Warring States consciousness. This was to transform the culture of great unity back into a culture of war in order to root out the self-content, laziness, inertia, cowardice and feebleness of the Chinese character; only then could the nation be revitalised and become strong and powerful. Lin Tongji called this transformative process ‘a repeat of the Age of the Warring States’.Footnote ⁸⁹ While following Spengler's morphology of world history, Lin was imbued, if somewhat paradoxically, with Chinese nationalism.

His colleague, historian Lei Haizong (1902–1962), who earned a Ph.D. in medieval European history at the University of Chicago, put forth a unique theory of ‘two cycles of Chinese civilization’, which departed from Splenger's view that Chinese history had ended long ago. The first cycle, from the dim beginnings to 383 AD was that of classical China, during which the race remained comparatively pure and its culture indigenous. The second cycle, from 383 AD to the present (the 1940s) was that of Tartar-Buddhist China, characterised by repeated conquests of the country by the barbarians (hu) from the north and by the gradual transformation by Buddhism of the classical civilization into a new synthesis, which, though still essentially Chinese, displayed much of an alien culture. This second cycle had continued into the post-1839 era.Footnote ⁹⁰ But it was drawing to a close, with the War of Resistance paving the way for a third cycle, the hallmark of which was national power. Chinese history had not come to an end.

Lei reappraised Chinese civilization from a military perspective, seeking to rebuild China on ‘a culture of the soldier’ (bing de wenhua) in order to revive national power. In his view, the aristocratic knights of the Spring and Autumn Period (744–481 BC) were good citizens who cherished both civil (wen) and military (wu) values and took responsibility for the security of the state. Unfortunately, after the Qin dynasty, men of standing disdained soldiering, valued only wen, and shirked their responsibility for the country's defence, reducing Chinese culture to an a-military culture, with no real soldiers, no real citizens and no political life. The exaltation of civil virtues had been politically debilitating. Lei's ideal nation was one in which both wen and wu were valued. He found the source of national power in the ancient culture of the Warring States.Footnote ⁹¹ His ideas resonated with Lin Tongji's that ancient China's ‘knights’ (dafushi) had long become the literati (shidafu) of the imperial period and that what China needed now was a revival of the spirit of the knights.Footnote ⁹²

This led to the second important theme in Zhanguoce thought—an emphasis on war, on the will to power, and on hero worship. Lin Tongji put forth in an article ‘On Power’ (li) a worldview in which power is seen as the manifestation of all lives—‘Power is life, life is power, and life without power is death.’ In this view, life, power and movement (dong) constitute the trinity of the universe. To Lin, Chinese were cowards who dared not challenge others but were always willing to yield and compromise. He urged his fellow countrymen not to be afraid of going to war. Life was not Buddhist/Daoist escapism or seeking temporary peace or tolerating the intolerable. War was necessary, unavoidable and the raison d'etre for the modern state. Apparently, Lin was cognisant that in nineteenth-century Europe the modern state had been made for war. The era of wars was far from over. Lin told his readers that to fight the War of Resistance was to be a man, to appreciate the true meaning of being a man. Chinese must be their own masters, not slaves to other nations.Footnote ⁹³

The emphasis on war and power reflects the influence of Nietzsche, whose idea of ‘der Wille zur Macht’, or ‘the Will to Power’, was greatly appreciated. Nietzsche did not abhor wars. Actually, he welcomed them, prophesising with a certain glee an era of great wars and held that victors in war, and their descendants, were usually biologically superior to the vanquished. Thus the German-educated playwright and literary critic Chen Quan (1905–1969) asserted that the strong always conquered the weak. Holding up Nietzsche's ‘morality of the master’ as an alternative to China's own traditional ‘morality of the slave’, Chen viewed war as progressive and necessary rather than as a moral question. He rejected Schopenhauer's pessimism in favour of Nietzsche's optimism and enterprising spirit. His belief in ‘hero worship’ underlined Nietzsche's concept of the übermensch (‘superman’), which is intrinsically connected to the will to power. From this Chen derived the idea that it took strong leadership and collectivist consciousness to correct the inertia and mediocrity of the Chinese nation, to reform the ‘bungled and botched’ (Nietzsche's phrase) and to promote national unity.Footnote ⁹⁴

Another Zhanguoce writer, the Hegelian philosopher and New Confucian He Lin (1902–1992), defended Chen Quan, who was attacked for his ‘fascist’ views. He clarified for Chen that ‘hero worship’ meant admiration and respect for outstanding people, recognising their great achievements, following them and looking to them for inspiration. There were great men and women in every field of human endeavours. To worship them did not mean believing in tyranny or militarism. He Lin invoked the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), whose works had been popular in China for decades, and who worshipped Napoleon for his military and political talents. He argued that ‘hero worship’ was not antithetical to, but a condition for, democracy because if people worshipped only themselves, there would be no mutual respect. ‘Hero worship’ was not to be confused with absolute obedience to the leader.Footnote ⁹⁵

Unlike Nietzsche, who was neither a nationalist nor a worshipper of the State, Zhanguoce writers stood for the nation and state power. Locating China in an age of nationalism, Chen Quan launched a ‘nationalist literature’ movement that, he insisted, was not atavistic, not anti-foreign, and not sloganeering, but sought to promote the ancient martial spirit of China and national consciousness. Using Chinese themes and contents, ‘nationalist literature’ was aimed at a Chinese readership; it would be ‘special’ and ‘creative’, departing from the New Culture Movement, which had privileged individualism over nationalism. Chen thought every epoch had a literature reflecting its ethos and the nation.Footnote ⁹⁶ Looking to the future, he regarded ‘nationalist literature’ as the literature of a prosperous age rather than a dying age.Footnote ⁹⁷

The third important theme in Zhanguoce thought concerned the supremacy of the nation and the state. China was in a ‘great era’ (dashidai); its problems were political, not ethical. There was no room for filial piety because loyalty ought to be due to the nation and the state, not to the family. In an age of contending states, every citizen must be part of an organic state with an emphasis on the public (gong) rather than the private (si).Footnote ⁹⁸

Zhanguoce writers acknowledged the contributions of the May Fourth Movement to the liberation of the individual from the religion of rituals (lijiao) and from other repressive authorities but faulted it on three counts. First, although May Fourth had begun as an expression of Chinese nationalism, it quickly reoriented towards international peace, producing a pacifism not suited to the real world. Consequently, a weak and pacifist China invited escalating foreign aggression. Second, May Fourth intellectuals had misread the political tide of the twentieth century by putting individualism ahead of collectivism instead of seeking national freedom before individual liberty. And third, they had overemphasised reason and worshipped science, to the neglect of the emotions, intuition and irrationalism. Chen Quan compared May Fourth unfavourably with the German romantic movement of the nineteenth century to drive home the point that May Fourth had not gone far enough to reconstruct Chinese culture on a basis of national power.Footnote ⁹⁹ The May Fourth spirit was therefore unsuited to the present time. What Chen desired to see was the Faustian spirit in Goethe's plays that Chinese appeared to lack.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Zhanguoce conservatism harked back to antiquity, not to the Neo-Confucian tradition. In emphasising war, nationalism and hero worship, it went farther to the right than the conservatism of Liang Shuming, Zhang Junmai and the ‘ten professors’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Yet its vision of a Chinese state in an age of international conflicts was modern in its day, providing an alternative to the May Fourth ideals of science and democracy and, more recently, to the advocacy of ‘wholesale Westernisation’.

It was the Communists who gave Zhanguoce thought the publicity it wanted by attacking its writers for their ‘rightist’ views, ‘fascist’ tendencies and pro-Nationalist attitude. Recent scholarship in China, however, has challenged the Communist accusations, pointing out that Zhangguoce writers were not entirely anti-liberal, that they were no advocates of dictatorship and the superior race, and that their hero worship emphasised only the exemplary role and contribution of the great man and hardly mentioned fascism and Chiang Kai-shek.Footnote ¹⁰² Moreover, criticism of the Nationalist government was not lacking. Lin Tongji loathed the bureaucratic tradition in which the Nationalist government followed, attacking the leadership for failing to deal with official and political corruption.Footnote ¹⁰³ On the other hand, Zhanguoce writers did want the government to lead, to unite the nation and to fight the Japanese to the bitter end, thereby unwittingly providing justifications for the Nationalist dictatorship. None wanted to overthrow the government for the Communists.

After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the political scene in China was dominated by the renewed civil war. Conservative thought was soon swept away by the storm of the Communist revolution.