History of Chinese Philosophy/Chapter 16

Previous◀ Chapter 15

History of Chinese Philosophy

NextChapter 17 ▶

Chapter 16: The Destruction of the Old and the Search for the New (1911–1930s)

1. The New Culture Movement's Attack on Confucianism

The New Culture Movement (新文化运动, Xin Wenhua Yundong), which emerged in the mid-1910s and reached its climax with the May Fourth Movement of 1919, was the most radical intellectual upheaval in Chinese history — a comprehensive assault on the philosophical, moral, literary, and social foundations of traditional Chinese civilization that sought nothing less than the total reconstruction of Chinese culture on new foundations. No previous intellectual movement in China's long history had ever called for so complete a break with the past; and the intensity, scope, and lasting consequences of the New Culture Movement's iconoclasm make it one of the most significant episodes in the intellectual history of the modern world.

The institutional center of the New Culture Movement was Peking University (北京大学, Beijing Daxue), which under the leadership of Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培, 1868–1940), appointed as chancellor in 1917, became the most intellectually vibrant academic institution in China. Cai, a former Confucian scholar turned revolutionary who had studied philosophy in Germany, transformed Peking University from a training ground for government officials into a genuine center of intellectual inquiry by recruiting a faculty of remarkable talent and by establishing a culture of free discussion and intellectual pluralism that was unprecedented in Chinese academic life. The journal Xin Qingnian (新青年, New Youth), founded in 1915 by Chen Duxiu and adopted as the unofficial organ of the Peking University faculty, became the principal vehicle for the New Culture Movement's ideas.

The New Culture Movement's attack on Confucianism was driven by the conviction that the traditional Confucian moral system was the fundamental obstacle to China's modernization and that it must be completely overthrown before a new, modern culture could be built. The targets of this attack were comprehensive: the "three bonds" (三纲, sangang) — the hierarchical relationships between ruler and subject, father and son, and husband and wife — were denounced as instruments of despotism and patriarchal tyranny; the family system (家族制度, jiazu zhidu) was attacked as the foundation of a social order that suppressed individual freedom, creativity, and initiative; the classical literary language (文言文, wenyanwen) was rejected as an elitist medium that excluded the vast majority of the population from intellectual participation; and the "Confucian shop" (孔家店, Kong jia dian) — the whole complex of institutions, practices, and beliefs associated with the Confucian tradition — was condemned as a dead weight that was dragging China down into national extinction.

The rhetorical intensity of the attack was remarkable. Chen Duxiu, in a famous manifesto published in the first issue of New Youth in 1915, called on the young people of China to embrace "Mr. Science" (赛先生, Sai Xiansheng) and "Mr. Democracy" (德先生, De Xiansheng) as the twin pillars of a new civilization and to reject the entire Confucian moral order as incompatible with modernity. Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881–1936), the greatest literary figure of modern China, portrayed traditional Confucian culture as a system of ritual cannibalism — a society that "ate people" (吃人, chiren) through its oppressive moral demands — in his devastating short story "A Madman's Diary" (Kuangren riji 狂人日记, 1918), one of the founding texts of modern Chinese literature.

The philosophical foundations of this iconoclasm were complex and in some respects contradictory. On one hand, the New Culture thinkers drew on Western Enlightenment values — reason, science, individual freedom, democracy, human rights — to critique the traditional Chinese order. On the other hand, they drew on a long tradition of internal critique within Chinese thought itself — from the early Qing thinkers' attack on "empty talk" to the late Qing reformers' critique of institutional stagnation — and their attack on Confucian orthodoxy echoed, in some respects, the anti-establishment impulses of the late Ming Taizhou school. The New Culture Movement was thus both a radical break with the Chinese tradition and, in certain paradoxical respects, a continuation of it.

2. Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Pragmatism

Chen Duxiu (陈独秀, 1879–1942) and Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962) were the two most influential intellectual leaders of the New Culture Movement, and their different philosophical orientations illustrate the range of positions within the movement. Chen Duxiu, who would later become the first General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, was a passionate polemicist whose philosophical commitments evolved rapidly from a generalized Enlightenment liberalism to a thoroughgoing Marxism. His early essays in New Youth articulated a vision of modernity that emphasized individual autonomy, scientific rationality, and democratic self-governance — values that he regarded as fundamentally incompatible with the Confucian emphasis on hierarchy, obedience, and the subordination of the individual to the family and the state.

Hu Shi, by contrast, was the most philosophically systematic thinker of the New Culture Movement and the principal introducer of American pragmatism into Chinese intellectual life. A student of John Dewey at Columbia University from 1915 to 1917, Hu Shi absorbed Dewey's philosophy with thoroughness and conviction and devoted his intellectual career to adapting it to the Chinese context. He returned to China in 1917 to take up a position at Peking University and immediately became one of the most prominent and influential figures in Chinese intellectual life.

Hu Shi's pragmatism provided the New Culture Movement with its most sophisticated philosophical methodology. Following Dewey, Hu Shi argued that philosophical problems should not be addressed through the construction of grand metaphysical systems but through the careful, empirical investigation of specific, concrete problems. His famous slogan — "study more problems, talk less about isms" (多研究些问题, 少谈些主义, duo yanjiu xie wenti, shao tan xie zhuyi) — expressed his conviction that the abstract ideological debates that preoccupied Chinese intellectuals — debates about capitalism vs. socialism, democracy vs. authoritarianism, Western civilization vs. Chinese civilization — were less productive than the patient, piece-by-piece investigation of specific social, economic, and political problems.

Hu Shi's philosophical method also provided the foundation for his most enduring intellectual contribution: the advocacy of the vernacular language (白话文, baihuawen) as the medium of all serious writing. Hu Shi argued that the classical literary language, which had served as the written medium of Chinese civilization for over two millennia, was a dead language that had become an instrument of intellectual elitism, preventing the vast majority of the Chinese population from participating in intellectual and political life. The adoption of the vernacular — the living language that people actually spoke — as the medium of all literary, scholarly, and political writing was, in Hu Shi's view, not merely a linguistic reform but a democratic revolution that would transform Chinese intellectual culture from the bottom up.

The visit of John Dewey himself to China (1919–1921), during which he delivered over two hundred lectures on topics ranging from philosophy of education to political theory to the philosophy of science, was a landmark event in the history of Chinese-Western intellectual exchange. Dewey's lectures, translated by Hu Shi and widely reported in the Chinese press, introduced a broad Chinese audience to the ideas of pragmatism, experimentalism, and democratic education. Dewey's emphasis on education as the key to social transformation and his insistence that democracy was not merely a form of government but a "way of life" resonated powerfully with Chinese intellectuals who were searching for alternatives to both the traditional Confucian order and the revolutionary radicalism that was gaining ground on the left.

However, the influence of pragmatism in China proved to be less durable than Hu Shi had hoped. The gradualist, problem-by-problem approach advocated by Dewey and Hu Shi seemed inadequate to many Chinese intellectuals who were confronted with what they perceived as a total systemic crisis requiring a total systemic solution. The appeal of comprehensive ideological frameworks — first anarchism, then Marxism — was precisely that they offered such total solutions, promising not merely the reform of specific institutions but the complete transformation of society. Hu Shi's pragmatism, with its distrust of grand theories and its insistence on incremental, empirical inquiry, came to seem, to its critics, like a counsel of complacency in a time of revolutionary urgency.

3. The Reception of Marxism

The reception of Marxism in China was one of the most consequential intellectual events of the twentieth century — an event whose effects extend far beyond the history of ideas into the political, social, and economic transformation of the world's most populous nation. The story of Marxism's arrival in China is inseparable from the broader narrative of the New Culture Movement, for it was in the intellectually fervent atmosphere of the late 1910s and early 1920s that Marxism was first seriously studied, debated, and adopted by Chinese intellectuals.

Li Dazhao (李大钊, 1889–1927), a professor of history and librarian at Peking University, was the first major Chinese intellectual to embrace Marxism as a comprehensive philosophical system. Li's conversion to Marxism was triggered by the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which he interpreted as a world-historical event of the first magnitude — proof that a backward, predominantly agrarian nation could leap directly from feudalism to socialism without passing through the intermediate stage of capitalist development that orthodox Marxist theory deemed necessary. This interpretation was of enormous significance for China, because it suggested that China's very "backwardness" — its lack of industrial development, its predominantly peasant economy — was not an obstacle to socialist revolution but could actually be an advantage.

Li Dazhao's Marxism was from the beginning deeply colored by his Chinese intellectual background and his nationalist concerns. He was less interested in the technical economic analysis of Marx's Capital than in the broad philosophical vision of historical materialism — the idea that human history is driven by material forces (the development of productive forces, the struggle between classes) rather than by ideas, moral principles, or the will of great men. This materialist philosophy of history appealed to Li because it offered a comprehensive explanation of China's historical experience — the decline of the imperial order, the humiliation by the Western powers, the failure of reform — that did not attribute China's weakness to moral or cultural deficiency but to objective historical-economic causes that could be understood and addressed through revolutionary action.

Chen Duxiu's path to Marxism was different from Li Dazhao's but led to the same destination. Chen's disillusionment with the liberal, democratic values he had championed in the early years of New Youth was accelerated by the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where the victorious Allied powers transferred the former German concessions in Shandong province to Japan rather than returning them to China — a decision that provoked the massive student protests of the May Fourth Movement and that convinced many Chinese intellectuals that Western liberal democracy was a sham that served the interests of the imperialist powers rather than the universal principles of justice and equality it claimed to represent. Marxism offered an explanation for this betrayal: the "democratic" rhetoric of the Western powers was ideological camouflage for the class interests of the bourgeoisie; genuine liberation could come only through the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist-imperialist order.

The founding of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921, with Chen Duxiu as General Secretary and Li Dazhao as a leading figure, marked the institutional crystallization of the Marxist current in Chinese intellectual life. From this point forward, Marxism would be not merely one philosophical option among many but a living political force that would shape the course of Chinese history for the next century. The relationship between Marxism as a philosophical system and Marxism as a political movement — between theory and practice, between abstract ideas and concrete political power — would become one of the central problems of modern Chinese intellectual life.

4. The "Science vs. Metaphysics" Debate (1923)

The "Science vs. Metaphysics" debate (科学与玄学论战, kexue yu xuanxue lunzhan) of 1923 — also known as the "Science and Philosophy of Life" (科学与人生观, kexue yu renshengguan) debate — was the most significant philosophical controversy of the Republican period and one of the most revealing episodes in the history of modern Chinese thought. The debate, which engaged nearly all of China's leading intellectuals over a period of several months, addressed a question that remains fundamental to contemporary philosophy: can science provide a comprehensive worldview that addresses questions of meaning, value, and human purpose, or are there dimensions of human experience — moral, aesthetic, spiritual — that lie beyond the reach of scientific inquiry?

The debate was triggered by a lecture delivered by Zhang Junmai (张君劢, also known as Carsun Chang, 1887–1969) at Tsinghua University on February 14, 1923. Zhang, a philosopher trained in Germany who was deeply influenced by the Neo-Kantian philosophy of Rudolf Eucken and Henri Bergson's vitalism, argued that the "philosophy of life" (人生观, renshengguan) — the domain of values, meaning, and purpose — was fundamentally different from the domain of natural science and could not be reduced to it. Science, Zhang argued, deals with objective facts; the philosophy of life deals with subjective values. Science seeks universal laws; the philosophy of life addresses individual experience. Science is governed by logic and evidence; the philosophy of life involves intuition, creativity, and personal commitment. The attempt to extend the methods of science to the domain of human values was, Zhang argued, a category error that would impoverish human experience by reducing the rich, multidimensional reality of human life to a set of measurable, quantifiable variables.

Zhang Junmai's lecture provoked an immediate and vehement response from Ding Wenjiang (丁文江, 1887–1936), a geologist and leading proponent of scientism, who attacked Zhang's position as a retreat into obscurantism and metaphysical mysticism. Ding argued that science was the only reliable source of knowledge and that the attempt to carve out a separate domain of "values" or "meaning" that was immune to scientific inquiry was a disguised attempt to preserve the authority of traditional beliefs that could not withstand rational scrutiny. Science, Ding insisted, was not merely a method for investigating the natural world but a comprehensive worldview that could and should be extended to every domain of human experience, including ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

The debate quickly expanded beyond the original participants to include nearly all of China's major intellectuals. Hu Shi sided with Ding Wenjiang and the "science" faction, arguing from his pragmatist position that all genuine knowledge is empirical and that the attempt to establish a non-scientific form of knowledge — whether metaphysical, intuitive, or spiritual — is philosophically indefensible. Liang Qichao, surprisingly, sided with Zhang Junmai, arguing that the excesses of scientific materialism in the West — exemplified by the unprecedented destruction of World War I — demonstrated that science alone was not sufficient to guide human civilization and that the insights of Eastern philosophy, particularly its emphasis on inner cultivation and moral wisdom, remained essential.

The Marxist intellectuals intervened in the debate with a distinctive position that rejected both sides. Chen Duxiu, writing as a Marxist, argued that both the "science" faction and the "metaphysics" faction were trapped within an idealist framework that failed to recognize the material basis of all philosophical problems. The debate between science and metaphysics was, from the Marxist perspective, a superstructural reflection of underlying economic contradictions that could only be resolved through revolutionary transformation of the material conditions of social life. The "philosophy of life" was not a matter of individual choice, as Zhang Junmai claimed, nor of scientific determination, as Ding Wenjiang insisted, but of the material conditions of production and the class structure of society.

The philosophical significance of the 1923 debate lies in the clarity with which it exposed the fundamental tensions that had been building within Chinese intellectual life since the beginning of the encounter with the West. The debate was not merely about the relationship between science and values — it was about the nature of Chinese modernity itself: whether China's modernization required the wholesale adoption of a scientific worldview that would displace all traditional forms of knowledge, or whether there remained a place for non-scientific forms of wisdom — philosophical, moral, spiritual, aesthetic — in the modern world. This question, far from being resolved by the debate, has remained at the center of Chinese philosophical discourse to the present day.

5. The Problem of Chinese Modernity

The debates of the 1910s and 1920s converged on what may be called the "problem of Chinese modernity" — the question of whether and how China could become a modern nation without sacrificing its cultural identity. This problem, which has no exact parallel in the Western philosophical tradition (where modernity developed endogenously), was the defining intellectual challenge of early twentieth-century Chinese thought and continues to shape Chinese philosophical discourse in the twenty-first century.

The problem can be stated in its starkest form as a dilemma. On one hand, the overwhelming evidence of Western military, economic, and technological power suggested that Western modernity was the only viable model of development and that China must adopt its fundamental features — science, democracy, industrialization, individual rights — in order to survive in the competitive international order. On the other hand, the wholesale adoption of Western modernity seemed to require the abandonment of the distinctive Chinese cultural tradition — the philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual heritage that had defined Chinese civilization for millennia — and the acceptance of a Western model of civilization as universal.

The various philosophical positions of the early Republican period can be understood as different responses to this dilemma. The radical iconoclasts (Chen Duxiu, the early Hu Shi, Lu Xun) accepted the necessity of breaking completely with the Chinese tradition and embraced Western modernity with few reservations. The cultural conservatives (Zhang Junmai, the later Liang Shuming) defended the continuing relevance of the Chinese tradition and argued that modernity need not take a Western form. The Marxists (Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu after his conversion) offered a third option: a revolutionary transformation of both Chinese tradition and Western capitalism that would create an entirely new form of modernity based on the principles of class struggle and socialist construction.

None of these positions proved fully satisfactory. The radical iconoclasm of the New Culture Movement, for all its intellectual energy and moral passion, failed to provide a coherent alternative to the tradition it had destroyed — a positive vision of Chinese modernity that could command the allegiance of a civilization in crisis. The cultural conservatives, for all their insight into the limitations of Western modernity, could not convincingly explain how the Chinese tradition could be preserved in a world that was being transformed by the forces of industrialization, urbanization, and global competition. And the Marxists, for all their political effectiveness, subordinated philosophical inquiry to political necessity in ways that ultimately impoverished both.

6. Anarchism and Other Western Imports

The intellectual ferment of the early Republican period was not limited to the three main currents of liberalism, Marxism, and cultural conservatism. A remarkable variety of Western philosophical and political ideas were introduced into China during this period, each attracting its own circle of adherents and contributing to the extraordinarily rich and diverse intellectual landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.

Anarchism was, for a time, the most popular radical political philosophy among Chinese intellectuals — more popular, in the years before 1921, than Marxism. Chinese anarchism developed in two main centers: Paris, where a group of Chinese students led by Li Shizeng (李石曾, 1881–1973) and Wu Zhihui (吴稚晖, 1865–1953) published the journal Xin Shiji (新世纪, New Century, 1907–1910) and promoted the ideas of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and the French anarcho-syndicalists; and Tokyo, where a group led by Liu Shipei (刘师培, 1884–1919) and Zhang Ji (张继, 1882–1947) published the journal Tianyi bao (天义报, Natural Justice, 1907–1908) and promoted a distinctive blend of anarchism and traditional Chinese egalitarian thought. The anarchists advocated the abolition of the state, the elimination of private property, the destruction of the patriarchal family, the liberation of women, and the creation of a free, egalitarian, self-governing society based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.

The appeal of anarchism to Chinese intellectuals was partly philosophical and partly emotional. Philosophically, anarchism offered a more radical and more comprehensive critique of existing social structures than liberalism — it attacked not merely specific political institutions but the very principle of coercive authority, whether political, economic, familial, or religious. Emotionally, anarchism's vision of a world without hierarchy, domination, or exploitation resonated with the egalitarian impulses of the Chinese radical tradition — from the Mohist ideal of "universal love" to the Taizhou school's populist philosophy to the utopian visions of the Taiping Rebellion.

Beyond anarchism, Chinese intellectuals during this period also engaged with Nietzsche's philosophy of the "Ubermensch" and the "will to power," which was interpreted by some as a call for the revitalization of the Chinese national spirit; with Bergson's vitalism and his concept of the elan vital, which appealed to those seeking a non-mechanistic, non-materialistic philosophy of nature; with Russell's logic and his social philosophy, which he presented during a celebrated visit to China (1920–1921); and with Kropotkin's theory of mutual aid, which offered an alternative to the Social Darwinist emphasis on competition and struggle.

The sheer variety of Western philosophical imports during this period reflected both the intellectual openness and the intellectual disorientation of Chinese thought in the aftermath of the collapse of the Confucian worldview. With the traditional framework of meaning destroyed and no single alternative yet established, Chinese intellectuals were in a condition of radical philosophical freedom — free to explore any and all philosophical possibilities, but also burdened with the task of constructing a new framework of meaning from the bewildering array of options that confronted them.

7. Liang Shuming and the Defense of Chinese Culture

Liang Shuming (梁漱溟, 1893–1988) was the first major Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century to mount a systematic defense of Chinese culture against the wholesale Westernization advocated by the New Culture Movement — and in doing so, he inaugurated the tradition of cultural philosophy that would become one of the most important and most distinctive currents of modern Chinese thought.

Liang Shuming's major philosophical work, Dongxi wenhua ji qi zhexue (东西文化及其哲学, Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, 1921), proposed a comparative framework for understanding the three great civilizations of the world — Western, Chinese, and Indian — based on the different "directions of the will" (意欲的方向, yiyu de fangxiang) that characterized each. Western culture, Liang argued, is characterized by a will that is directed "forward" — toward the conquest and transformation of the external world through science, technology, and institutional innovation. Chinese culture is characterized by a will that is directed "laterally" or "harmoniously" — toward the adjustment and harmonization of the self with its environment through moral cultivation and interpersonal harmony. Indian culture is characterized by a will that is directed "backward" — toward the negation of worldly desire and the transcendence of the phenomenal world through spiritual discipline and metaphysical insight.

On Liang's analysis, each of these cultural orientations represents a legitimate and valuable response to the fundamental problems of human existence, and each has its own strengths and limitations. Western culture has achieved extraordinary success in the conquest of nature and the development of material civilization, but it has done so at the cost of spiritual impoverishment, social fragmentation, and ecological destruction. Indian culture has achieved profound insights into the nature of ultimate reality and the transcendence of worldly suffering, but it has done so at the cost of social passivity and material underdevelopment. Chinese culture has achieved a remarkable balance between material and spiritual life, between individual self-cultivation and social responsibility — but it has fallen behind in the development of science, technology, and institutional organization.

Liang Shuming argued that the current dominance of Western culture was a historical stage, not a permanent condition, and that the future belonged to Chinese culture — which, he believed, would eventually emerge as the most appropriate model for human civilization once the limitations of the Western path had become fully apparent. This was not a call for the rejection of Western science and technology — Liang acknowledged that China needed to develop these — but for the preservation and revitalization of the Chinese cultural spirit, which he believed contained insights into the nature of human life and human flourishing that were absent from Western civilization.

Liang Shuming's philosophy was deeply influenced by Confucianism — particularly by the Wang Yangming tradition — and by Buddhism, which he had studied seriously in his youth and which continued to shape his philosophical outlook throughout his life. His concept of "intuition" (直觉, zhijue) as the distinctive mode of Chinese philosophical knowing — a mode that grasps reality directly and holistically rather than through the analytical, abstractive methods of Western science — was central to his philosophical system and would influence subsequent generations of Chinese cultural philosophers.

Liang Shuming's practical philosophy was equally significant. Unlike many Chinese intellectuals who confined their ideas to the written page, Liang devoted decades of his life to the "Rural Reconstruction" (乡村建设, xiangcun jianshe) movement, which sought to revitalize Chinese rural life through a combination of modern organizational methods and traditional Confucian ethical education. His work in Shandong province in the late 1920s and 1930s was a practical experiment in the possibility of combining Chinese cultural values with modern institutional development — a possibility that the New Culture iconoclasts had dismissed but that Liang was determined to demonstrate in practice.

Liang Shuming's significance in the history of modern Chinese thought extends far beyond his specific philosophical arguments. He established the fundamental problematic that would define much of twentieth-century Chinese philosophy: the question of the relationship between Chinese cultural identity and Western-derived modernity. His insistence that Chinese civilization had something of permanent value to contribute to the world — that it was not merely a "backward" civilization waiting to be modernized along Western lines but a distinctive philosophical tradition with its own insights into the nature of human life — provided the philosophical foundation for the New Confucian movement that would develop in the subsequent decades and that remains a vital force in Chinese intellectual life today.