In recent years, there has been a re-evaluation of Chinese conservatism of the Republican era. The work of Maggie Clinton and Brian Tsui, published respectively in 2017 and 2018, approach the political characteristics and the discursive construction of national strengthening from the Kuomintang's conservative narratives.Footnote 1 While Clinton's work concentrates mainly on the CC and Blue Shirt cliques, and the violence engendered by the Kuomintang's fascist-like rule, Tsui focuses on the framework of the party's ideology and its political formation, at both the domestic and international levels. Du Chunmei's 2019 monograph on Gu Hongming 辜鴻銘 (1857–1928) brings our attention to Qing loyalists.Footnote 2 Du depicts this famous figure's challenge of modern Western civilization and defense of the traditional politico-social order and practices by tracing his unique intellectual trajectory and inner mental conflicts and tensions. In sum, Chinese conservatism is no longer portrayed as a peripheral movement, which failed to mobilize the population and produced deleterious effects with regard to the “progressive” May Fourth project. Instead, it was imbued with diverse intellectual wellsprings, personal motivations, and political implications.
However, despite these recent insightful works on very specific conservative movements and figures, the full picture of the Chinese conservative movement of the Republican era remains obscured. The question of what it meant to be a conservative of this period is still to be explored. In other words, we have yet to define what we understand by conservatism. To answer this question, the origin and the typologies of Chinese conservatism of the Republican era need to be traced, and this is the aim of this article.
It is often assumed that conservatism defies definition and tends to be particularistic and context-specific. In the West, conservative particularistic skepticism rests on the mistrust of political rationalism concerning attempts to recreate society from abstract ideals. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) remarked that prejudice, which relied on tradition instead of rational arrangements and general blueprints, constituted the basis of conservative virtue.Footnote 3 Hence, giving a categorical definition of conservatism risks countering the very principle of conservative particularism. While defining conservatism is beset with difficulties, students of conservatism cannot avoid the “awkward” question that Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) posed in 1844 to his own party: “What will you conserve?”Footnote 4
In the Chinese context, this question seems to have already been answered by Benjamin Schwartz in The Limits of Change, published in 1976. Schwartz defines modern Chinese conservatism as a cultural conservatism, insofar as Chinese conservatives were mainly preoccupied with the preservation of traditional culture rather than the sociopolitical status quo.Footnote 5 In the same collection of essays, Laurence Schneider highlights the abolition of the Imperial examination as the symbolic moment wherein the political order and cultural order disintegrated.Footnote 6 For Charlotte Furth, this decoupling between political demands and cultural sphere allowed revolutionary intellectuals to become politically radical in their implication in the anti-Manchu revolution and culturally conservative in their defense of traditional culture; examples include the Southern Society (Nanshe 南社, founded in 1909 in Suzhou) and of the Association for the Preservation of National Learning (Guoxue baocunhui 國學保存會, founded in 1904 in Shanghai), whose members were collectively known as the National Essence School (Guocui pai 國粹派).Footnote 7
While there is some truth to this reading, it is misleading to draw such a clear line between culture and politics. Lin Chih-hung's study clearly shows that culture was effectively used by Qing loyalists as a pretext for restoration in the 1910s; for them, democracy and republicanism could not be adopted in China because they countered her traditional political culture.Footnote 8 Another problem with this thesis lies in its tendency to regard all attempts to preserve traditional culture as conservative. As Theodore Huters rightfully points out, culture constitutes an integral part of the edification of nation, with Chinese intellectuals at the time aware of the importance of this cultural imperative in their pursuit of nation-building.Footnote 9 In this regard, should endeavors to preserve the nation's cultural tradition be viewed in light of conservatism or nationalism?
Certainly, conservatism and nationalism are not mutually exclusive. The differentiation between them lies in the way in which the constitutive cultural elements of nation translate into politics. For example, the cultural elements constituting the German nation, from the Romantic age to the period of the radical right, were mobilized to refute liberalism and democracy. In this case, nationalism and conservatism overlapped. However, this was not always the case in late Qing China. While Furth suggests that revolutionary intellectuals perceived culture and politics as two distinct spheres after the monarchy—the symbol of the political-cultural unity—began to collapse, allowing them to be culturally conservative and politically radical, it should be underlined that traditional cultural elements were often reinterpreted in a radical way to legitimate sociopolitical changes inspired by the West.Footnote 10 Peter Zarrow underlines that the “national essence” promoted by revolutionaries such as Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1869–1936) was politically revolutionary and aimed to overthrow the monarchy and reform Chinese society, taking into account Western political theories and Chinese cultural tradition.Footnote 11 Therefore, a clear distinction should be made between the preservation of cultural heritage and the defense of a political order through the defense of culture.
The key question here is what political order the preservation of a certain cultural element entails. Yves Chevrier reminds us, in this regard, that the incompatibility between Chinese cultural tradition and democracy is a myth created by the May Fourth iconoclasts and did not exist during the 1890s and 1900s:
The invention of modernity makes culture an option that is critical and open towards the past in service of the formation of the nation. Prior to the Republic's institutional failure, the politics of modernity allows its thinkers to find this balance. Chinese culture was considered, at the time, neither sterile and suffocating …, nor flexible or apt to be modernized by the outside, but rich in endogenous resources to put China on an equal footing with the modern world, provided the complementary process of political change and intellectual criticism were effectuated.Footnote 12
Chevrier refers to revolutionary intellectuals as “culturalist revolutionaries,” since their preservation of traditional culture, which has proven to be an audacious remodeling of traditional culture, does not rest upon a conservative disposition, but rather upon a political choice that nurtures their nationalism. However, most of these culturalist revolutionary intellectuals, including those of the National Essence School and the Southern Society, were perceived as conservative after the foundation of the Republic. In this regard, the origin of Chinese conservatism of the Republican era is to be found in the late Qing revolutionaries’ culturalist nationalism. In the remainder of this article, I will first address the elaboration of culturalist nationalism in the 1890s and 1900s. The intellectual and social context in which this type of nationalism became conservative will then be analyzed. I next look into the evolution of this culturalist nationalism which diversified the conservative movement of the Republican era. In the conclusion, I discuss the perplexing problem that arises from the vagueness of the term conservatism and summarize different conservative trends, so as to stimulate a complete understanding of the origin and typologies of the Chinese conservative movement of the Republican era.
The Concept of Nation in the Late Qing Context
The Chinese translation of nation is borrowed from Japanese. There are two main ways in both languages to convey the idea of nation: minzu 民族 (Jp. minzoku 民族) and guomin 國民 (Jp. kokumin 国民). Roughly, minzu and guomin can be respectively regarded as the Chinese counterparts of the German model and French model of nation. The French ideal of nation builds on political togetherness, in which a collectivity of people obtains a common political identity and source of solidarity. In contrast, the German type of nation stresses the importance of blood, race, language, and history. Although these two models are not mutually exclusive, the “culture” put forward by the German ideal of nation is often regarded as a conservative resistance to the French type of civic nation which contains a universal aspect of “civilization,” that is, the obligation of promoting French political ideals beyond the national geographical scale. This “process of civilization,” as Norbert Elias terms it, embodies a colonialist and expansionist trend.Footnote 13 But, for Japanese progressives in the early Meiji era, the process of civilization that implied the construction of a nation in line with that of the French was considered indispensable if Japan was to reach a higher level on the universal ladder of progress.Footnote 14 As a result, the first Japanese trend of nationalism was kokumin-nationalism, which accentuated people's rights in a democratic and constitutional regime.Footnote 15
This nationalist expectation collapsed with the promulgation of the 1889 Constitution which accorded no legal recognition of popular sovereignty and defined the people as subjects and not nationals.Footnote 16 Meanwhile, Meiji reforms in the 1880s structured around Westernization greatly concerned Japanese conservative intellectuals. In an effort to come up with a nationalism independent of the state, but also capable of revitalizing Japanese tradition, minzoku, the alternative translation of nation stressing traditional culture and overwhelmed by kokumin-nationalism in the early Meiji era, reappeared.Footnote 17 One of the most fervent advocates of minzoku-nationalism was Shiga Shigetaka 志賀重昂 (1863–1927), founder of the nationalist journal Nihonjin 日本人 (Japanese), in which he invented and developed the concept of “national essence” (kokusui 国粋; Ch. guocui 國粹) which greatly influenced Chinese intellectuals’ writings in later years. Shiga used kokusui to translate the English word “nationality.” To him, the Japanese national character could not be easily modified since it was identified with something naturally immutable:
Everything shrouding the Japanese archipelago, sky, physiography, environment, climate, temperature, humidity, soil, water and land dispositions, mountains, rivers, animals, plants, natural views, influence of the atmosphere, scientific reactions, habits, incidents, experiences of hundreds of thousands of years … fostered, secretly and unfeelingly, in the Yamato people a special nationality (kokusui).Footnote 18
The location of the nation was in this way shifted from politics to culture during the late Meiji era. This is not to say that politics no longer mattered. Instead, the central issue of this new culturalist nationalism was how to establish a political system in line with Japan's cultural tradition. In this ideological context, minzoku and kokumin, which respectively stressed the cultural and political dimensions of nation, became interchangeable.
Culturalist Nationalism at the End of the Qing
The Japanese quest for the unification of the minzoku-nation and the kokumin-nation in and around the 1890s was introduced by Chinese intellectuals in exile in Japan, later becoming the foundation of Chinese nationalism.Footnote 19 Liu Shipei 劉師培 (1884–1919), a member of the National Essence School, remarked in 1903: “Minzu is the unique character of guomin.”Footnote 20 As its Japanese counterpart, the late-Qing nationalism was a culturalist one, which rests upon the homogenization between the political nation and the cultural nation, while implying that political reforms should resonate with China's cultural tradition. Many intellectuals of the time appropriated and elaborated on the Japanese term of national essence to forge this culturalist nationalism.
National essence is a polysemous concept. While, for some, it was represented by the nation's cultural heritage of unique value, such as ancient books, calligraphy, and antiquities, others associated national essence with China's history and ancient sociopolitical system, brought to light as useful resources to shape the nation's future political landscape. In comparison to its Japanese counterpart, the national essence promoted by late Qing progressives took on greater importance in terms of openness towards Western culture. Huang Jie 黃節 (1873–1935), one of the founders of the National Essence School and editor of the association's official journal Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 (Journal of National Essence, 1905–1911), put it this way: “National essence is an independent idea and a refined … powerful and open spirit that advances the society. Thus, the elements rooted in our culture and useful for us are national essence, but foreign cultural elements that can serve us and be adopted are also part of our national essence.”Footnote 21
National essence was used by intellectuals of different political persuasions to rationalize different policy futures. The difference between revolutionaries and other defendants of national essence lies first in their attitudes towards the monarchy. Xu Zhiheng 許之衡 (1877–1935), a contributor to Guocui xuebao, once remarked: “When the government evokes national essence, the purpose is to control the intellectual field and to stop people from taking the initiative to renew (the politics and the culture).”Footnote 22 As will be discussed below, traditional culture defended by reformers and officials of the Qing Court, however culturally “radical” it might have been, was geared towards the objective of preserving the monarchy. In contrast, revolutionary intellectuals transformed traditional cultural elements through reinterpretation to comply with the political reforms inspired by Western modern politics and to rationalize revolution.
To this end they even borrowed from the French orientalist Terrien de Lacouperie's (1844–1894) theory that the Yellow Emperor was a native of Mesopotamia and that the ancestors of the Chinese nation shared the same origin of civilization with Westerners. Lacouperie's heavy influence on revolutionary intellectuals spawned further criticism against the authoritarian regime and the ideology that undergirded it. Lacouperie situated the golden age of China in the period of the Yellow Emperor and downplayed the role of the Zhou, glorified by Confucianism as the ideal society that following generations should emulate. Accusing Confucianism of being complicit in dictatorship, revolutionaries found in Lacouperie's theory the opportunity to bring to light the true Chinese culture and its thinkers who contributed to the nation's glorious past, to be later destroyed by the ideological control of Confucianism.Footnote 23 It is in this context that other branches of the Hundred Schools of Thought (zhuzi baijia 諸子百家), such as Mohism and Legalism, were rediscovered. These alternative traditions make up an important part of China's national essence, as Deng Shi 鄧實 (1877–1951), another founder of the National Essence School, remarked:
Books of the Hundred Schools of Thought covered psychology, ethics, rhetoric, sociology, history, politics, jurisprudence, physics, and chemistry of the West. … Since the Han Dynasty, Confucianism has dominated our country for more than one thousand years. When a new foreign knowledge is introduced in China, we find it strange. However, once we examine it closely, we become aware of its grand utility in the West … (and) realize that there are other teachings other than Confucianism and there are, not only the Six Confucian Classics, but also the Hundred Schools of Thought. … Even if these ancient teachings are little-known, they also constitute our national essence.Footnote 24
The very reason Deng Shi gave for the necessity of reviving ancient teachings was not for their own sake, but for their concordance with Western traditions. For revolutionary intellectuals, the opportunity to transport Western experiences of political modernization to China was founded on the hypothesis that alternative Chinese traditions echoed Western political theories and systems. But why does this correlation matter? Wang Jingwei 汪精衛 (1883–1944) explained:
The difference between England, France, and the United States on one side and our nation on the other side is not that their political systems do not exist in China, but that they have better developed these systems. In fact, it is difficult to imitate something that does not exist [in our tradition]. But imitation becomes simpler if we try to ameliorate what exists already.Footnote 25
In other words, attempts to homogenize the cultural nation and the political nation facilitate the nation's political modernization in line with Western experiences. To this end, national essence was forged and harmonized with Western modern political themes of democracy, constitution, federalism, division of powers, and parliament, as well as the motto of the French Republic: liberty, equality, and fraternity. While the French Revolution was a political model for revolutionaries, reformers regarded it as a symbol of the failure of radical actions. One of the most prominent reformers at the time was Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929), a student of Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927). Actively involved in the Hundred Days’ Reform (百日維新 Bairi weixin), which later ended in a coup d’état initiated by Empress Dowager Cixi 慈禧 (1835–1908), he fled to Japan where he continued to promote constitutional monarchy. To Liang, the French initiated their revolution for liberty, an illusion that incited the masses to create a barbarian despotism. In comparison to other nations where liberty was obtained through a long period of nonviolent construction, liberty in post-revolutionary France was incomplete and restraining.Footnote 26 But, for revolutionaries, the Chinese quest for liberty, equality, and fraternity did not suggest in any way an ideological invention, since these spirits were believed to be rooted in traditional political culture, later crushed by monarchial dictatorship in favor of an oppressive Confucianism. While government officials such as Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 (1837–1909) proclaimed that the ideas of civil rights (minquan 民權), liberty, and parliamentarism were inconsistent with China's cultural tradition and reality,Footnote 27 revolutionaries justified these political themes based on their interpretation of traditional culture. Chen Tianhua 陳天華 (1875–1905), a well-known revolutionary, uncovered the vestige of liberty of expression, publication, and assembly during the Three Dynasties (三代 Sandai), while the burgeoning Hundred Schools of Thought and the reunion between Confucius and the 3,000 students who accompanied him to spread Confucianism in various states also attested to the existence of the liberty of expression and movement in ancient China.Footnote 28 Regarding equality and fraternity, Mohism was often evoked as the philosophy in which the Chinese origin of these spirits were rooted. Contrary to the Confucian concept of hierarchy, the keyword of Mohism is jianai 兼愛 (universal love). Gao Xu 高旭 (1877–1925), one of the founders of the Southern Society, actively promoted Mohism as the intellectual pioneer of egalitarian societyFootnote 29 and even suggested replacing Confucianism with Mohism as the state ideology.Footnote 30 The economic vision and “logic” mode of thinking of Mohism were further compared with Western materialism and scientific spirit.Footnote 31 To Wang Jingwei, “given the fact that the nation has the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and that people's power and constitution are all founded on these ideals, these political themes certainly suit the nation.”Footnote 32 He thus believed that a democratic regime could be fully concretized through the implantation of modern political institutions and the reinforcement of nationalism through education.
Although many revolutionary intellectuals reproached the authoritarian elements in Confucianism for constituting the backbone of dictatorship, some still found the actualization of certain aspects of Confucianism possible and useful in creating a democracy. Liu Shipei emphasized the Confucian embodiment of checks and balances. One example is the notion of tian 天 (Heaven): since an emperor's power is granted by tian, he was deemed to follow its impartiality and order to avoid being abandoned by tian and lose his power.Footnote 33
The establishment of rational laws was also frequently debated. This recalls the duality between the rule of man (renzhi 人治) and the rule of law (fazhi 法治). Since Confucianism tends to emphasize the virtuous nature of men and believes that the value of a community depends on education instead of punishment, revolutionaries turned to Legalism for which the vicious human nature makes discipline, intimidation, and rigid laws possible and indispensable. While it may seem problematic to deduce from Legalism—which, after all, reveals itself to be an authoritarian form of thought—the concept of law associated with justice, individual dignity, and protection from oppression, the inclusion of the emperor in the juridical order was sufficient for many to support Legalism as the ideological foundation of the juridical system of the regime that they were engaged in constructing.Footnote 34
Examples of this kind are too numerous to be fully discussed here. But this brief overview of revolutionaries’ culturalist nationalism clearly shows that the defense of traditional culture was by no means automatically conservative or anti-Western. Lucian Pye maintains that nationalism in China jeopardized the nation's modernization and the insistence on the preservation of Chinese cultural tradition only reinforced the opposition between Chinese nationalism and modernization.Footnote 35 While this observation might be partially true in the case of the court's officials, Pye fails to recognize the constitution of political projects that integrated the reformulation of traditional teachings and modern Western politics. A culture, both traditional and unconventional, that was open to interpretation and flexible enough to respond and adapt to the new political context did emerge in the 1900s.
While previous paragraphs have mainly addressed revolutionaries’ culturalist nationalism, it should be underlined that reformers also articulated their political projects following this ideology. Kang Youwei's discovery of jinwen 今文 (New text) is one of the examples illustrating reformers’ effort to unify the political nation and the cultural nation.Footnote 36 Although reformers’ reinterpretation of the nation's cultural tradition could be as radical as that of revolutionaries, it was their loyalty to the traditional political order, the survival of which was legitimized by their often-radical cultural stands, that made reformers conservative. Thus, culturalist nationalism nourished both Chinese conservatism and radicalism at the end of the Qing. However, after the foundation of the Republic in 1912, even revolutionary intellectuals’ radical culturalist nationalism came to be seen as conservative. The historical and intellectual context that led to this transformation now needs to be evoked.
From Nationalism to Conservatism
The culturalist nationalism that emerged in the last years of the Qing insisted upon the unification of the political nation and the cultural nation, in the sense that political reforms were consistent with the nation's cultural heritage. As such, it cannot be automatically considered conservative, or limited to the cultural sphere, since the cultural elements mobilized by different intellectuals to institutionalize the nation entailed different or even oppositional political projects. It was only after the foundation of the Republic, and more particularly with the rise of the “iconoclast” generation of the New Culture Movement, that this type of culturalist nationalism came to be seen as conservative overall.
Although widely considered to be the cultural continuation of the May Fourth Movement, which grew out of student protests in Beijing in 1919 against the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded German rights in Shandong to Japan, the New Culture Movement “was not primarily a patriotic protest against Western double standards, but a wide-ranging and radical moment of soul-searching.”Footnote 37 This period of soul-searching was inevitable after the failure of the Revolution of 1911 to institutionalize the nation state. While the Republic was proclaimed in 1912 in Nanjing, Emperor Puyi 溥儀 (1906–1967) still held onto his throne in Beijing. After convincing the last emperor to abdicate, Yuan Shikai 袁世凱 (1859–1916) was given the position of the President of the Republic as promised. Worried that his power would become restrained by parliament, which was dominated by the Kuomintang after its victory in the election of 1913, Yuan ordered a purge against the Kuomintang in the same year and dissolved parliament. His crackdown on the Kuomintang was followed by other repressive actions. Reasoning that the Chinese people were not used to republicanism and that the nation's political stability could only be ensured by monarchy, he proclaimed himself emperor of the Chinese Empire on December 12, 1915. Although the Empire was never established, due to protests throughout China and Yuan's sudden death in 1916, Qing loyalist Zhang Xun 張勳 (1854–1923) seized the capital on July 1 and restored the Manchu monarchy. A general assault launched by Republican troops quickly destroyed this regime, which lasted only twelve days, but Qing royalists never ceased to advocate restoration.Footnote 38 Furthermore, Yuan's sudden death deprived China of a strong central government, with political power passing into the hands of the local warlords. China would remain a dismembered nation for a decade to come.
This process of soul-searching, prompted by the failure of the institutionalization of the nation state, began with a questioning of the revolutionary ideal. Gao Yihan 高一涵 (1885–1968), an intellectual associated with the New Culture Movement, noted in Xinqingnian (新青年 La Jeunesse) in 1918 that the victory of the Revolution of 1911 “was won through nationalism, and not republicanism, thus, although the emperor renounced the throne, he has not abdicated yet in people's mind.”Footnote 39 That is to say, despite the foundation of the Republic, traditional culture sustaining the previous political order persisted. Yuan's restoration, for example, was rationalized with the reinstitution of Confucianism as the state ideology. It is in this political context that the “soul-searching” of the May Fourth activists was steered towards the creation of a “New Culture,” without which the Republic was bound to perish. While revolutionary intellectuals in the 1900s had also denounced the authoritarian elements of Confucianism, without losing sight of the way in which traditional culture could be revamped through a new vision and inform modern politics, the particularity of the anti-Confucianism of the May Fourth period lies in what Lin Yü-sheng calls a “holistic mode of thinking,” which rejected traditional scholarly teachings as a whole.Footnote 40 The cultural nation was criticized for the stagnation and the retrocession of the political nation, since it was exactly the homogenization between the political nation and the cultural nation that caused the nation's political defects and crisis. Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) once said that, “if national essence is to be preserved, national essence should first and foremost be capable of preserving us.”Footnote 41
Another factor that explains the New Culturalists’ repulsion towards culturalist nationalism is the atrocity of World War I. Suspicious of the nationalist ideology prone to fall under the sway of folly, Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879–1942) juxtaposed nation and religion as two idols to be contested.Footnote 42 The hostility of many New Culturalists’ towards the ideology of nation does not suggest that they were not nationalist in the sense of a shared sensitivity towards the survival of the nation. In a 1914 text, Chen urged his fellow citizens to sacrifice themselves for the nation, provided that the nation established itself as guardian of their rights and well-being.Footnote 43 Nevertheless, the new Republic, whose government was carried on without law, was not a nation worth fighting for. The persistence of a “backward” Chinese national essence was the very explanation for the failure of the institutionalization of the Republic.Footnote 44 Hence, to save the Chinese nation as a political entity, traditional culture should be abandoned. Subsequently, the political nation and the cultural nation were dissembled, and the efforts of intellectuals of the previous generation to accommodate traditional culture and modern politics were rejected as fruitless from the very beginning, while attempts to preserve this culturalist nationalism came to be recognized as conservative. In this ideological context, Liu Boming 劉伯明 (1887–1923), a member of the Critical Review Group (Xueheng pai 學衡派), criticized the fact that “[the supporters of the New Culture Movement] belittle minzu-nationalism which they find conservative.”Footnote 45
Nevertheless, the meaning of traditional culture during the Republican era diversified among the conservatives. World War I led some to question the merits of the modern Western civilization that they used to set up as the model for China. While they continued to defend their ideal of culturalist nationalism, cultural elements which were used to shape political transformations differed from one conservative to another, and no longer evoked only those corresponding to modern Western politics. By identifying the different cultural and political implications of traditional culture, this article proposes a typological approach in order to differentiate various branches of the Chinese conservative intellectual movement of the Republican era. The challenge now is to find a balance between over-general terms, like that of cultural conservatism, and excessive specificity which risks turning each intellectual into a particular case of note. I divide the Chinese conservatism of this period into four categories.
Liberal Conservatism
The most loyal heirs of the revolutionary intellectuals’ culturalist nationalism might be called liberal conservatives. Conservatism is not necessarily at odds with liberalism. In fact, the question of liberty is central to Western conservatism, which stands in opposition to the liberty pursued in the French Revolution, characterized by detachment from the collective whole and by a belief in human reason as the indubitable guarantee of one's actions and judgments. Conservative liberty, by contrast, is associated with order, which “places an important limit on the proliferation of subjective rights leading to abnormality,”Footnote 46 and relies on traditional social structures, such as family, local communities, and church, thereby excluding the ideological and abstract interpretation of liberty during the French Revolution. Order is not exclusive of liberty and must not be confused with arbitrariness or coercion. If order is to be reconciled with liberty, social cohesion must start from below, ensuring the organic integrity of free and self-reliant men. In other words, liberty is not solely a matter of individual action; it must involve restraint and be established in an institutional level.
While Western conservatives of the nineteenth century set out to save this type of liberty from the utopian concept of French liberty, which they feared would turn into tyranny in disguise, as it had during the Reign of Terror, it is difficult to speak of Chinese liberal conservatism because of the nation's lack of a liberal tradition. However, as shown above, aspiration to a more liberal regime had fueled progressive intellectuals’ political engagements at the end of the Qing. Moreover, the Chinese concept of liberty has much in common with Western conservative liberty. Edmund Fung interprets the Chinese concept of liberty in the framework of what he calls “double responsibility,” in the sense that, like Western liberals, Chinese intellectuals rejected “freedom as an absolute concept that could be justified simpliciter by opposing the individual to society and state,” and assumed that “genuine liberty could be achieved only in a harmonious or integrated society.”Footnote 47 Although, at the beginning of the New Culture Movement, the importance of individual liberty was deemed to outweigh that of society and the nation, the emancipation of “the small self” (xiaowo 小我) from a traditional sociopolitical structure, including family, was, in the end, expected to be integrated into “the big self” (dawo 大我)—with due acknowledgment here of Hu Shi's 胡適 (1891–1962) words.Footnote 48 In sum, the theme of liberty needs to be understood at both the individual and the political level.
Despite this shared understanding of liberty, contrary to the New Culturalists, liberal conservatives refused to locate the failure of the Chinese pursuit of a less authoritarian regime in China's cultural tradition and blame it for impeding individual emancipation. They were liberal in their outspoken opposition to despotism and efforts to implement a constitutional and democratic regime, while being conservative in their wish to reunify the political nation and cultural nation perceived to be under threat, as well as because of their belief that divorce from the nation's cultural tradition could only make the eventual Chinese liberal regime an illusion. While New Culturalists denounced Confucianism as a cannibalistic machine and drew a clear line between republicanism and traditional culture,Footnote 49 liberal conservatives responded by enumerating elements of the traditional moral values which should be preserved. Du Yaquan 杜亞泉 (1873–1933) wrote:
Xinqingnian questioned the place of the traditional principles of rulership (jundao 君道), integrity of servants of the state (chenjie 臣節), moral code (mingjiao 名教) and moral order (gangchang 綱常) in the republican regime. [For them], these themes constitute a rebellion and a betrayal of the Republic and an anti-constitutional crime. I am convinced that republicanism is in no case incompatible with indigenous civilization. … If the political regime [of China] has changed, the political principle remains intact. Thus, it is only a matter of integration of civilizations to combine the indigenous civilization, based on the traditional principles of rulership, integrity of servants of the state, moral code and moral order, and the current republican regime.Footnote 50
The combination of republicanism with these traditional values stressing personal responsibility, social hierarchy, and disciplined human relations as the foundation of a sane political culture underscores the relation between individual liberty and traditional order inherent to conservative liberal thought. If the Republic was to achieve stability, traditional values should be selectively actualized to allow for individual emancipation, which promotes liberty on an institutional level.
Liberal conservatives abhorred Yuan's restoration and regarded the transformation of people's mentality as the first step towards effective institutional changes. But this change could not come about once traditional values had been eradicated. One text in Minguo ribao 民國日報 (Republic Daily), edited by members of the Southern Society, affirmed the existence of an indigenous cultural tradition of special virtue, shared by all Chinese people, capable of “smashing the current regime, destroying the warlords and constructing a real republic.”Footnote 51 The challenge was to identify and politically materialize those cultural elements.
One example can be found in Gao Xu's critique of the Draft Constitution of the Republic of China, promulgated in 1913. Gao expressed several reservations regarding the themes of liberty and Confucianism, enacted as the foundation of national education. Urging the government to modify the Constitution to restrain the power of the presidency and remove undue limits on citizens’ freedom, he affirmed that Confucianism was complicit in dictatorship, while making Confucianism the state ideology jeopardized religious freedom. If Confucianism was useful to children, as he maintained, “Confucians would have already created a strong nation.”Footnote 52 One of the measures adopted by Yuan to consolidate his power was the proscription of local self-government. Reckoning the absolute necessity to protect the administrative independence of local authorities from the arbitrariness of the central government, Gao pointed out that, as attested in Zhouli 周禮 (Rites of Zhou), China had a long history of decentralization, which reflected “our ancestors' political spirit.”Footnote 53 While he believed that China could learn from Western political systems, he professed that Western experiences could not be automatically transposed in order to orient the Chinese pursuit of a liberal regime, the concretization of which relied heavily on the nation's archaic political culture.
However, in general, liberal conservatives could not agree on which traditional learning should be privileged, much less its concretization at the political level. Their efforts to politicize traditional culture failed to acquire a new dimension in comparison with their rigorous political projects in the 1900s and seemed to only become a vague comparison between Chinese culture and Western politics. While they insisted upon the correlation between traditional values and modern political themes such as equality and democracy, how these cultural elements could nourish and enrich a less authoritarian future for China remained an unanswered question. With the rise of the New Culturalists, liberal conservatives’ intellectual weakness became more pronounced. They failed to answer the question of why tradition still mattered, if Western experiences could be directly appropriated, as suggested the New Culturalists. G.A. Cohen's perception of conservatism may help us to understand liberal conservatives’ prepossession with traditional culture:
The conservative impulse is to conserve what is valuable, that is, the particular things that are valuable. … If an existing thing has intrinsic value, then we have reason to regret its destruction as such, a reason that we would not have if we cared only about the value that thing carries or instantiates. … “Conservation of what has value” is, indeed, the canonical phrase here, and not “conservation of value.” For if we take the phrase “conservation of value” in the standard way, on the model, that is, of “conservation of energy,” or “of matter,” a conservation of value policy is entirely unconservative … . Conservation of what has value is not in that sense, in the conservation of energy sense, conservation of value, for you lose no value, value itself is conserved, when you destroy something valuable and replace it by a thing of the same value. The conservative disposition is not to keep the value rating high but to keep the things that now contribute to that rating.Footnote 54
In other words, conservatives may be pragmatic, but they are not utilitarian in their willingness to pursue their goal by any potentially useful methods. Liberal conservatives were pragmatic in revealing the performative force of cultural tradition and the functions it could eventually serve for political reform but they refused to sacrifice, in a practical sense, tradition for the sake of “total Westernization,” even if the concrete political agenda they conceived might have been achieved more easily by abandoning tradition, as suggested by the iconoclasts. This characteristic of liberal conservatism also explains its failure to challenge the New Culturalists. Incapable of convincingly explaining in what way traditional culture could politically institutionalize the nation state, liberal conservatives gradually lost their intellectual vigor and became marooned amid the dilemma of pursuing the same political aspiration as the progressive liberals, but within a cultural language rejected by the New Culturalists as incompatible with liberty.
Antimodern Conservatism
Contrary to liberal conservatives, antimodern conservatives maintained that China should reject modern Western political and economic systems and return to the sociopolitical arrangements consistent with her agrarian and communitarian cultural tradition. In the Chinese ideological context, modernity was usually associated with Enlightenment ideals, especially with its conviction in progress and in reason, which translated into a veneration of “newness,” as well as industrialization, economic development, urbanization, democracy, and rational law.Footnote 55 In this regard, modernity is a Eurocentric concept, in which the non-West, as the otherness, is created as “the boundary of the space of modernity.”Footnote 56 Nevertheless, the otherness of modernity is not necessarily invented by the West: it could also be voluntarily established by the modernists in the non-West. During the May Fourth period, Chinese traditional culture, reduced by the New Culturalists to fengjian 封建, with its pejorative connotation, was deemed to be the other of modernity.Footnote 57 This dichotomy between tradition and modernity in the May Fourth narrative led to the construction of an image of Western modern values and institutions to criticize the Chinese past, the history of which should be revaluated and rewritten according to the Darwinist conception of progress, identified with the West.Footnote 58
Antimodern conservatives called into question the modernist idea of linear evolution and progress, as well as industrialization, capitalism, and political institutions associated with modernity. For them, Chinese political-cultural tradition was more capable of offering an adequate solution to the flaws they perceived in the Western model. This suspicion towards the West had much to do with World War I, which signaled to many the bankruptcy of Western civilization. The drive behind antimodern conservatism was a deep concern for ethnic minorities, localism, and customs and habits, from which they developed their own version of progress.
One of the most eminent antimodern conservatives was Zhang Taiyan. Influenced by Buddhism and Daoism, he criticized social evolutionism for neglecting the bad in progress and asserted the simultaneous progression of the good, the bad, the pleasurable, and misfortune.Footnote 59 For him, “what we call progress is nothing but a result of illusion; progress does not exist [since] the quantity of the quality of a certain thing does not change: if it progresses in one aspect, it regresses in another.”Footnote 60 Zhang pointed out that the danger of social evolutionism lay in its implication concerning a universal law of progress, portrayed as objective and associated with the West, which internalized the subordination of weak nations to the strong. In this sense, evolution, far from a moral obligation for China, emerged as the hegemony and arrogance of the West that had invaded China while claiming it to be the universal ideal.
Zhang remained an ardent nationalist his whole life. At the international level, he called for solidarity among weak nations to resist imperialism.Footnote 61 At the national level, he argued against both the political and the cultural impositions of the central government and the mechanical replication of Western models. Instead, he called for a return to traditional political practices that he regarded as part of the national essence, and concluded that, “to unify the nation, … customs and habits of each region should be surveyed and let evolve spontaneously.”Footnote 62 In such a way, the political nation and the cultural nation became one.
Concretely, he supported local self-government, which he claimed could be traced back to fanzhen 藩鎮, a system of administration through regional governors of the Tang Dynasty.Footnote 63 His conception of local self-government was different from that of liberal conservatives. While they all sought resistance to the eventual arbitrariness of the central government through local self-government, Zhang criticized representative democracy for exacerbating social inequality by setting up a parliament to which only the rich and the powerful could be elected. By the same token, he rejected partisan politics, arguing that political parties only served to entrench corruption and vested interests.Footnote 64 To prevent the president from obtaining monopolist rule, he proposed the nomination of fali 法吏 and xueguan 學官, social instructors who would enjoy the same level of power as the president.Footnote 65 He further suggested the reestablishment of the ancient official positions of supervising secretary (jizhongshi 給中使) and censor (yushi 御史) to supervise the government and check on public servants’ morality, something that could neither be legislated for nor sanctioned by vote.Footnote 66
Another example is that of Liu Yizheng 柳詒徵 (1880–1956), a historian with the Critical Review Group. He observed, in Zhongguo wenhuashi 中國文化史 (A History of Chinese Culture, 1919), three steps of development that Chinese history had gone through: ancient, middle age, and modern. The ancient period spanned from antiquity to the end of the Han Dynasty, when Buddhism began to flourish in China and led her to the middle age. The contact with Western civilization at the end of the Ming Dynasty brought China into the modern age. Although Chinese culture was influenced periodically by foreign cultures and never remained homogeneous, Liu maintained that Chinese culture was extraordinary in its power of assimilating external cultures. Hence, in the same way that Buddhism was Sinicized and instilled in Chinese culture the religious spirit that it lacked, a modern China would be capable of assimilating Western culture without sacrificing her roots.Footnote 67
Liu considered this type of cultural progress, which had accrued throughout China's interference from foreign influences, to be the result of the collective efforts of the Chinese people. However, Chinese history is not always a story of progress. In common with Zhang Taiyan, he asserted that evolution was by no means a linear and progressive process, but always accompanied by counteracting disadvantages and recessions. The fact that progress does not represent the only route of evolution is the outcome of the unpredictability of people's mentality, which makes progress possible in the first place. Citing Hong Fan 洪範 (Grand Rules), Liu explained that human endeavors triggered “the actions of Heaven” (tianxing 天行). It should be noted that, in Hong Fan, human endeavors refer to the emperor's conduct, which, if inappropriate, results in punishments imposed by Heaven: an excessive heatwave, for example, symbolizes the emperor's inability to distinguish the good from the bad. Liu partially rejected this belief and explained that it was not the emperor's, but people's actions that were directly linked to sociopolitical order. Flood and severe drought, for example, are Heaven's punishments for failures in environmental protection, caused by people's negligence and laziness.Footnote 68
Therefore, in order that history evolves in a positive direction, people's actions should reflect heavenly principles. Nevertheless, the normative order of heavenly principles cannot dictate people's choices. It is based on this philosophical conviction that Liu contested the modernist optimism of evolution—evolution does not equal progress, and China has her own trajectory of progress, fraught with uncertainty. To him, the Chinese principle of progress is filial piety (xiao 孝), which goes beyond the family level: “Everything that promotes moral quality, improves social costumes, scrutinizes politics and defends our territory is the manifestation of piety filial.”Footnote 69 While the New Culturalists thought of Confucianism as the nemesis of modernity, Liu retorted that piety filial, a moral principle stressing the reciprocal responsibilities of the “five relations” (wulun 五倫),Footnote 70 could not be held accountable for national decadence. Instead, the nation's affliction was caused by “Manchu, opium addicts, corrupted officials, disreputable soldiers, scoundrels who claim to be revolutionaries, gentry and politicians who pretend to defend democracy, and local rascals,” none of whom follow Confucian teachings.Footnote 71 Confucianism, therefore, is not the problem; the lack of it is.
To restore this virtue that particularized China's trajectory of progress, Liu explained that the Chinese people should first realize that China was a Confucian nation (ruguo 儒國): her moral dispositions of ren 仁 (benevolence) and yi 義 (justice, righteousness) were unknown in the Western commercial countries (shangguo 商國), whose sole interests were profit, which had led to World War I.Footnote 72 While he considered scientific technologies and industrialization to be the progress of civilization,Footnote 73 the outbreak of the Great War seemed to be a tragic melodrama of what scientific progress could do in the wrong hands, revealing the inherent defect in the Western cultural, economic, and political model that Confucian values could overcome.Footnote 74
To rematerialize Confucian virtue, Liu proposed to reinstitutionalize village self-government. Practiced across several centuries, this system created a network of mutual aid, in which each member's morality was constantly checked by others. Liu explained that, compared to the Western political system, Chinese village self-government not only ensured that elected officials were morally impeccable, since each candidate's conduct was under the supervision of the whole community, but that each region might also enact laws adapted to its tradition and customs, allowing the rule of virtue to take precedence over the rule of law. To him, the rule of law, while necessary, could easily be turned into an instrument of political manipulation. His suspicion of the rule of law was largely due to the multiple modifications of the Constitution over the course of one decade after the foundation of the Republic for the benefit of the holders of power.Footnote 75
Village self-government also inspired other antimodern conservatives such as Zhang Shizhao 章士釗 (1881–1973), Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) and James Yen 晏陽初 (Yan Yangchu, 1893–1990). A former liberal invested in initiating an English-style parliament in China, Zhang was disillusioned by the West after World War I and turned to China's cultural tradition for a better political solution. Like Liu, he addressed the agricultural character of the Chinese nation and considered rural self-government to be the answer to the nation's crisis. Opposing capitalism and Western democracy, he saluted the local self-government of rural communities as a system built upon solidarity, virtue, and tradition.Footnote 76
Liang and Yen were among the few who had in fact concretized their political projects, but neither managed to extrapolate their political programs to the national level. Even within the areas where they attempted to transform rural villages by coordinating modern technologies, popular education, and Confucian values, the results were cut short by political and economic restraints beyond their control. Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909–1995) believed that, without evident political and economic progress and a strong state's sponsorship, their projects were bound to fail.Footnote 77 However, the real question concerns whether their projects were realistic for a country in desperate need of industrial investment and a functioning economy. Furthermore, how could they ensure that the masses would accept their guidance, both politically and morally? While they celebrated the fact that most of China was still a virgin land with respect to capitalism and industrialization, they had to accept that cultural elites were no longer leaders of the nation able to influence the political decision-making process, even if they still claimed to represent the people.
Philosophical Conservatism
Among the most typical philosophical conservatives are members of the Critical Review Group. The association was founded in 1921 by several students educated in the United States who advocated a gradual reform of Chinese culture by incorporating it into New Humanism, a philosophy developed by the American scholar Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), professor of several members of the group. Babbitt launched this philosophical movement to challenge what he called sentimental and scientific humanitarianisms which dominated American society.
On the one hand, Babbitt reproached sentimental humanitarianism for accusing society of corrupting innate human love and piety and undermining the foundation of traditional education and civilization on the basis of constraining human nature and emancipation.Footnote 78 On the other hand, Babbitt viewed scientific humanitarianism as an ideological tool used to maximize materialistic gains in society by transforming men into an instrument serving that end.Footnote 79 While sentimental humanitarianism exaggerates the inner goodness of human beings, scientific humanitarianism magnifies the badness. What is missing is the spirit of moderation that New Humanism upholds as being of paramount importance. For him, men are born with an inner dualism and propensity to succumb to inferior instincts, but only humanists understand the law of measure and achieve a higher self. The capacity to unite in oneself opposite qualities constitutes what Babbitt called the inner check, a spontaneous moral uneasiness preventing a moral man from doing wrong when such an impulse emerges.Footnote 80 The inner power of veto can only be acquired through critical understanding and actualization of tradition, while the purpose of higher education is to cultivate this intuition among individuals with rigorous classical training.Footnote 81 Thus, the true modern never stands for a radical break with the past, but seeks a critical understanding of tradition as a negotiated and complex notion, which is useful for guiding the present and the future. If sympathy towards those who are not intellectually gifted is necessary, sympathy must be combined with selection. Therefore, Babbitt was highly critical of democracy, since the masses are doomed to illusion and momentary impulses.
Babbitt believed that the West can learn a lot from Confucianism and considers Confucius to be the Oriental Aristotle. He praised Confucianism as the real humanism for its emphasis on introspection, responsibility, social hierarchy, morality, and the law of measure, and he admired in particular the Confucian morality of ren, rooted in a hierarchical structure, along with social order and authority. He explained that this is exactly what he meant by “sympathy tempered by selection.”Footnote 82 Critical of democracy and suspicious of scientific materialism, New Humanism greatly fueled the Critical Review Group's criticism of the New Culture Movement which operated under the slogan of “Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science.” Inspired by Babbitt, the group believed that the national essence of China comprised neither liberal cultural elements nor agrarian aspects of her tradition, but Confucian values of elitism, social hierarchy, and the doctrine of the mean. These elements must be reintegrated into society to save it from corrupted politics.
The very danger of democracy is the illusion of equality which leads to the destruction of freedom and the regression of civilization. Hu Xiansu 胡先驌 (1894–1968) explained that the reason why the French Revolution and the Glorious Revolution produced widely different results was due to the differences in their goals. Consistent with his mentor Babbitt, he termed the French Revolution as a Romantic revolution based on an unrealistic ideology of equality. Equality essentially implied a comparison with others, making people eager to live the same way and by the same means as others, even to the detriment of liberty.Footnote 83 Inevitably, the Terror followed the French Revolution, which promised nothing but illusion. The Glorious Revolution, on the other hand, constituted a fight for liberty. Unlike equality prescribing a general rule for the outside world, liberty requires introspection and structures entirely around an individual's mentality and choice. Hence, equality is rooted in jealousy, and liberty in the virtue of spiritual independence.Footnote 84 Likewise, the group conceived of socialism, which grew in strength in the 1920s, as a doctrine of rancor, anchored in a sort of extreme interventionism glorifying average men's greediness.Footnote 85
In the literary field, democracy translated into the abandon of classical Chinese and the expansion of commoners’ literature, written in vernacular language. For Wu Mi 吳宓 (1894–1978), Babbitt's student and founder of the group, the dichotomy established by the New Culturalists between “dead literature” and “living literature” is simply nonsense. There is only one “genuine” literature, which allows for authentic morality and emotion to transcend racial, cultural, and geographical boundaries.Footnote 86 Genuine literature can only be produced through established literary structures, that is, in classical Chinese. This aversion to vernacular language did not simply constitute a “cultural” conservatism but had much to do with Babbitt's view. For Babbitt, the vers libre is an outer symptom of the “inner formlessness and anarchy” of Romanticists in dealing with their “pretence to a vast illumination with the utmost degree of spiritual and intellectual emptiness and vagueness” to the detriment of established literary conventions.Footnote 87 It is often with the same language that the Critical Review Group evaluated the New Culturalists’ vernacular poems and fiction. If this cultural view is stigmatized by the New Culturalists as elitist and aristocratic, then let it be—after all, as Babbitt maintained, civilization is sustained by centuries of designed knowledge and should be rigorously taught to the selected few who overcame their animalistic nature and embraced higher standards with the aim of becoming society's leaders. Few people are intellectually competent to understand high culture. New Humanism, as he maintained, is “aristocratic and not democratic in its implication.”Footnote 88 Mei Guangdi 梅光迪 (1890–1945), another founder of the group, held that cultural democracy remained a means for opportunistic intellectuals to earn an exalted reputation among the young generation, who were easily mesmerized by their radical and iconoclast cultural standpoints against high culture.Footnote 89 Like his mentor Babbitt, Mei found the trivialization of the high culture that sustains Chinese civilization's capacity to feed banality and the mindlessness of the masses in the name of equality unacceptable.
The only legitimate equality is the equal chance of self-development to the extent of one's competence and intelligence. Xiao Chunjin 蕭純錦 (1893–1968), an economist educated at the University of California, pointed out that “the nature of democracy is elitism (xianxian zhuyi 賢賢主義), without recognizing any claim of equality other than equality of opportunity.”Footnote 90 To Chang Chi-yun 張其昀 (1901–1985), the founder of the Chinese Culture University (中國文化大學 Zhongguo wenhua daxue, 1962), elitism, whose historical origins can be traced back to Plato's Republic and the Zhou Dynasty, shares with democracy the objective of people's well-being. Nevertheless, by citing Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), he explained that only elitism could attain the goal, because democracy was the government of the masses condemned to irrationality and extremity.Footnote 91
The insistence upon elitism also translated into the group's distrust of science and its material application—industrialization. Conservatives’ wariness towards science could certainly be positioned on a philosophical level, as clearly reflected in the debate on “science vs. metaphysics” of the early 1920s.Footnote 92 Although Babbitt saw, in the contrast between utilitarian science and morality, a confrontation between barbarianism and civilization, he recognized the need for China to be industrialized in the context of an increasingly internationalized world economy.Footnote 93 His Chinese disciples were much more hostile towards industrialization, downplaying or even ignoring the threats that industrially superior nations posed to an underdeveloped China. Even Hu Xiansu, a scientist specializing in botany, warned of the crisis that scientific materialism had brought to China and pointed to a clear correlation between scientific progress and moral decadence.Footnote 94 Citing Babbitt, he maintained that the theme of utilitarian science did not reveal the incompatibility between modernity and tradition, but between civilization and barbarianism.Footnote 95 For Wu Mi, the real issue here was not how to ameliorate people's life by industrialization, but how to find a way to restrain and diminish materialist desires.Footnote 96
What concerned them furthermore was the change in social order brought about by industrialization and capitalism. During a trip to Japan in the 1920s, Hu Xiansu was aggrieved to learn that a rickshaw runner's income could be double that of a teacher. He blamed Western material civilization for overturning the natural order in this instance.Footnote 97 To him, the natural order intends that those who work with their mind should enjoy a privileged economic and social status compared to those who work with their hands. However, in an industrialized and capitalist society, productivity outweighs intelligence, as the latter has a limited impact on economic growth. It is this traditional social status that cultural elites enjoyed and that the group wished to conserve against the newly rich on the rise—or, in Babbitt's term, the natural aristocracy against the aristocracy of money. Mei Guangdi explained that Chinese intellectuals always retained a prominent place in the system of the “four categories of people” (simin 四民)—scholars, peasants, artisans, and merchants—in spite of the increasing influence of Western civilization from the end of the Qing, but the expansion of industrialization and capitalism marked the end of Chinese intellectuals’ leadership. Hence, Chinese students’ (or, rather, his own) resentment towards capitalism sprang from the loss of their traditional social status, jeopardized by greedy merchants.Footnote 98
Greatly influenced by Babbitt, this group's culturalist nationalism became structured around the Confucian and New Humanist value of order, law of measure, social hierarchy, elitism, and morality. While they believed that these values should be restored to overcome political corruption and moral indecency, unlike liberal and antimodern conservatives, they never conceived of a political project or institution to materialize their cultural ideals. Thus, their conservatism is a philosophical one.
Authoritarian Conservatism
When the Critical Review Group was disbanded in 1933, China's political scenario had drastically changed. One of the most remarkable events of the late 1920s was the victory of the Northern Expedition in 1928, a military campaign launched by the Kuomintang, with the purpose of reunifying China, which fragmented after the Revolution of 1911 and the death of Yuan Shikai. China entered “the Golden Decade” of strong economic growth and relative political stability. But the Golden Decade was also marked by conflict and fragility. Intellectuals’ disenchantment with the nation's experimentation with republicanism, as well as a backward economy, was accompanied by an aspiration to a nationalism identified with a strong state, which was considered indispensable in tackling the increasing strength of communism and foreign aggressors.Footnote 99 Many—including some former liberals—began to condone what they called a “new type of dictatorship.” It is in this context that the last type of conservatism in the Republican era emerged: authoritarian conservatism.
One of the major differences between authoritarian conservatism and the other three currents of conservatism is the state's endorsement. Rejecting the communists’ call for class struggle and the elimination of private property, the Kuomintang envisaged a state-led economy, a highly disciplined population, and a renewal of Confucian morality so that the nation could tackle the threat of Japanese imperialism. Subsequently, Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887–1975) initiated the New Life Movement, the Chinese “conservative revolution.”Footnote 100 In a speech given in Nanchang in 1934, Chiang cited the upturn of Germany after World War I to illustrate the importance of morality to national recovery. To renew the national spirit and retaliate against communist ideology, he explained that China's morality was determined by the “four social bonds” of Confucianism: propriety (li 禮), justice (yi 義), integrity (lian 廉) and a sense of shame (chi 恥).Footnote 101
Given Chiang's admiration for Nazi Germany and Confucianism, in which he found ideas to justify the creation of a strong state and a disciplined society, Frederic Wakeman describes Chiang's politics as “Confucian fascism.”Footnote 102 It is beyond the scope of this article to compare the Kuomintang's politics with fascism, but its insistence upon the reintegration of the cultural and the political nation makes it conservative in the Chinese ideological context. The culture that modeled the nation here was equal to the most repressive elements of Confucianism, such as the supremacy of the leader, absolute obedience to authority, and political tutelage. Authoritarian conservatism represents a distorted continuation of pre-1912 culturalist nationalism, since liberty was completely trumped by order, discipline, and nationalist collectivism.
After the dissolution of the Critical Review Group, several former members launched Guofeng banyuekan 國風半月刊 (Bimonthly Journal of National Soul, 1932–1936) in Nanjing. Although the contributors continued to defend Confucianism and blame the New Culture Movement and Western materialism for China's moral and political decay, their intellectual mentor was no longer Babbitt. Most writers with the journal sympathized with the New Life Movement. Jing Changji 景昌極 (1903–1982), a student of Liu Yizheng and a professor at the National Central University (Guoli Zhongyang Daxue 國立中央大學), positively judged Chiang's emphasis on the four bonds, claiming that equality is a hypocritical illusion that should be abandoned in favor of social hierarchy, which he regarded as essential in ensuring the well-being of an organic society.Footnote 103 While criticizing “unreasonable dictatorship” (buheli zhi zhuanzhi 不合理之專制), he showed ambivalence towards the political tutelage launched by the Kuomintang, asking rhetorically whether, in a democratic society, all citizens perfectly understand every government policy.Footnote 104
Guofeng was more pragmatic than the Critical Review. Its contributors no longer conceived of moral rejuvenation as being enough to ensure national revitalization. Instead, moral reconstruction should be combined with the exigencies of science, technologies and industrialization. Unlike the previous generation which promoted “Chinese learning as essence and Western learning for application (zhongti xiyong 中體西用),” the main issue here is not the coexistence of Confucian virtue and Western science, but rather the appropriation of Confucian morality into the spirit of science. The change of mentality as a result of scientific development was aligned with a deepening of cooperation and ardent devotion to work among social components to achieve national well-being and a planetary social order. One particular article explained that scientific spirit is composed of five moral qualities—justice, loyalty, honesty, diligence, and persistence—exploiting in this way Confucian ideas of social hierarchy and order to achieve absolute and mechanical discipline.Footnote 105 This rhetoric coincides with the state's policy of using Confucianism as a necessary ideological basis for industrial development.Footnote 106
Like many antimodern and liberal conservatives, Chang Chi-yun, who maintained a close relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, also supported local self-government. Nevertheless, his purpose was neither to form an aggregate of intermediate associations, nor to grant each region the possibility of following its own customs, but to reinsure a complete infusion of Confucian virtues of honor, justice, and loyalty into local communities, disciplined like an army dedicated to the state's mobilization.Footnote 107 With the steady campaign of Japanese aggression, the admiration for a militarized society translated into the veneration of war. The belief that peace was only the outcome of equal military, economic, and political power finally led to an aestheticization of violence. A university professor of literature, Hu Jixian 胡稷咸 (1899–1968), in an article in the last issue of Guofeng, published right before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, sublimates the war in such a way as to link it to a world of truth (zhen 真), goodness (shan 善), and beauty (mei 美).Footnote 108
Not all authoritarian conservatives in the 1930s and 1940s regarded Confucianism as Chinese canonic culture. The ephemeral journal Zhanguoce 戰國策, published in Kunming in 1940 by a total of twenty-six intellectuals mostly trained in the United States and Europe, blamed Confucianism for the nation's weakness against Japanese intrusion. This ultranationalist conservative journal was obsessed with what the founder Lin Tongji 林同濟 (1906–1980), a scholar of Shakespeare who graduated with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, called li 力 (fight, force),Footnote 109 which his colleague Tao Yunkui 陶雲逵 (1904–1944), an anthropologist educated at the University of Berlin and the University of Hamburg, translated into German as Kraft, Vitalität, Energie, and Macht.Footnote 110 Accusing Confucianism of tarnishing this vigorous spirit at the expense of a refined, mild-mannered but cowardly mindset, Lin urged the nation to turn back the clock to the Warring States Period, when this consciousness regarding fighting and bravery was fully concretized in military actions.Footnote 111 Instead of the Confucian four bonds, his motto was loyalty (zhong 忠), respect (jing 敬), bravery (yong 勇), and, ultimately, death (si 死).Footnote 112 Another journal worth mentioning is Sixiang yu Shidai 思想與時代 (Thoughts and Epochs), which appeared in 1941. Less radical than Zhanguoce, it received a monthly subvention from the government, which allowed its publication even during wartime. Hu Shi once observed that the journal was anchored in a “reactionary spirit, evident conservatism and support for dictatorship.”Footnote 113 Not all the contributors maintained a close relation with the Kuomintang, but the Kuomintang did make the journal a tool of propaganda. As recalled by Chen Xunci 陳訓慈 (1901–1991), the brother of Chen Bulei 陳布雷 (1890–1948), Chiang's trusted follower who was responsible for the funding of the journal: “[T]he articles of the journal … were heavily invested in the explanation and dissemination of the excellent cultural traditional of our nation … to hide the role of the Kuomintang in this journal and attenuate the influence of progressist and left-wing publications within the cultural sphere.”Footnote 114
Authoritarian conservatives led the last-ditch effort during the Republican era to revive the culturalist nationalism that unified the political and the cultural nation. It is worth emphasizing that the line between philosophical conservatism and authoritarian conservatism is sometimes blurred. Philosophical conservatism implies, after all, a moral commitment to a series of values, albeit without a clear political program to instantiate these values. Philosophical conservatives primarily underscored the importance of social hierarchy, social order, the law of measure, elitism and social responsibility. All these values could be easily appropriated and taken to extremes by authoritarian conservatives in a political arrangement which turned authority into authoritarianism.
Conclusion
This article challenges the interpretation of the Chinese conservative intellectual movement from a purely cultural perspective. The encounter between Chinese culture and Western culture at the end of the Qing did not lead to a “disastrous” clash of civilization, not only because living tradition never ceased to grow, but also because a culture, both traditional and modern, capable of shaping the nation's political reforms had taken shape at the behest of progressive intellectuals of this period. Progressives managed to reconcile modern Western politics and tradition through national essence, and the incompatibility between modernity and tradition was not totally imposed from the outside, but more essentially later created by the May Fourth paradigm.Footnote 115 Even then, efforts never ceased to be made for culture to be reintegrated into politics.
It should be underlined that conservatism should be strictly differentiated from reactionism. As Eugen Weber remarks, “Conservatives want to preserve the present even against the past. Reactionaries want to break with the present and return to a version of the past that omits all the aspects they dislike.”Footnote 116 The “present” here is the Republic. Notwithstanding their different political-cultural standpoints, conservatives were devoted to preserving and regenerating the present—the Republic. In contrast, although reactionaries also used traditional culture to justify their political aim, they unwillingly joined the new political order which they wished to abandon in order to return to the political arrangements that prevailed before the Revolution of 1911.Footnote 117
The coherence of the Chinese conservatism of the Republican era is manifest in the commitment to defend pre-1912 culturalist nationalism which insisted upon the integration of the political and the cultural nation. The four typologies of the conservative intellectual force of this period revolved around this same underlying principle, but the cultural tradition that they set out to preserve diversified. Thus, they differed with respect to the political and economic systems in which the Republic was to function. Placed in the same intellectual camp for the preservation of the same politics of culturalist nationalism, Chinese conservatism is nevertheless a polysemic term, attributing differential values and judgments to liberalism, capitalism, industrialization, statism, social hierarchy, democracy, and Westernization.
But these efforts all produced limited impacts and faced a major roadblock: in contrast to the 1910s, during the Republican era culture progressively lost its power to nourish politics.Footnote 118 Authoritarian conservatives were probably the only ones who managed to use culture to achieve political goals. But their support for Chiang's one-party state only further tarnished traditional culture, which, since the early 1910s, had been blamed for impeding the construction of a less authoritarian regime. The loss of the political vigor of conservatives' culturalist discourses can be explained by their detachment from political power, the often unrealistic or vague political projects, and the radicalization of the Chinese intellectual sphere from the late nineteenth century onwards. As Yü Ying-shih observes, the marginalization of the educated elites in the political sphere resulted in the increasing radicalization of the intellectual sphere.Footnote 119 What is interesting is that this intellectual radicalization began with revolutionary intellectuals such as those from the National Essence School and the Southern Society, whose culturalist nationalism, which marked the debut of intellectual radicalization, came to be seen as conservative due to the intensification of a radical movement that they themselves initiated.
