Government in Republican China. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
World production has upset Chinese farm prices; international trade has ruined many peasant craft industries; modern armies have imposed unprecedented tax burdens; opium and erosion ruin large portions of the people and the land. In some cases the chaos in the countryside can only be stilled by massacre. Despite the presence of capitalist, proletarian, and agrarian economic movements, it seems likely that economic questions will be settled by groups which do not concentrate upon them to the exclusion of all others. Meanwhile, each of the movements seeking to create a new China will have to provide for reform or replacement of the economic system, which is decrepit because of its internal decline and the appearance of economic devices from the West vastly more effective, but inconsistent with Chinese modes of existence.
Confucianism in the Republic
Confucianism as an official movement has been used to support other tendencies, to further the opportunist activities of particular cliques, and to bolster—by disguising—the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. It is incorrect, however, to limit the role of Confucianism in modern China to these facts. In serving as a foundation for other movements it possesses unmeasured potentialities.
Confucianism supposes that the truth and the socially desirable are identical; that both are identical with the Confucian tradition; and that an elite of scholars is required to propagate truth, clothing it with the language of tradition and morality. Confucianism is hostile to the very notion of sovereignty, leaves no room for a system of permanently separate nations, and is unable to accommodate the Western idea of an accidental growth in knowledge, dependent upon sporadic individual initiative. Confucianism is strong in so far as it promotes a society based upon knowledge, in which individuals can ascend or descend according to their personal virtue and competence. Such an ideal has a definite end in the physical universe by working toward a human immortality of the flesh and the spirit—flesh through the perpetuation of the family name in the male line, spirit through the transmission of records and knowledge. Its present-day defects are obvious. The world of fact in the Confucian ideology does not correspond with the beliefs accepted as fact by the dominant West. The intellectual insulation against the outside necessary to ideological control could not be achieved by any single modern nation without the use of tyranny. Moreover, Confucian ethics and politics, more than twenty-four centuries old, can scarcely be expected to conform to the changed minutiae of human life, dominated by technology. Nevertheless, while the Chinese may not turn again to the classics for guidance in concrete situations, or consult ancient authorities for solutions to simple practical problems, the moral and social doctrines of Confucianism, redefined or modified, could well play a definite role in the modern world. In China the chief rivals to Confucianism will be the new heterodox schools of reinterpreted Confucianism—such as the versions posed by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang K'ai-shek, or the watery Confucianism of Manchoukuo.
The nonformal unorganized power of Confucianism weighs more heavily. If Confucianism were to be considered alone on the strength of the movements featuring the password "Back to Confucius!" it would be so negligible as to merit no attention. Not the strength of its partisans but the concessions of its opponents and rivals make Confucianism important. Confucius can no more be eradicated from modern China than Plato, Aristotle, and Christ from the background of Western society. Every Chinese movement, starting with Confucianism as the status quo, will have to incorporate a large part of the traditional doctrines. It may well be that in the new breeds of thought the Confucian strain will prove dominant and most lasting.
Until the breakdown of the Empire, Confucian texts were studied appreciatively rather than critically. One does not criticize common sense unless one is anxious for the reputation of a crank. With the blinding dawn of Western knowledge, Confucianism went into the wastebasket. Two years in New York were worth a generation of study over the ancient authorities. From time to time, under the Republic, the various governments discussed plans for educational reform, or haphazardly encouraged the dying traditionalist schools; but nothing could restore the prestige of classicism. Strangely, the greatest impetus toward classical learning was provided by the challengers of the classics. Modern Chinese scholarship, using Western methods of critical study, and armed with new specializations undreamed of by the archaists, found that the traditional authorities were valuable not only for what they pretended to be—plain, direct, factual records—but also as source material for penetrating interpretations.
The Chinese have turned to this task since the opening of the various scientific agencies of the National Government at Nanking and have already produced works of importance on their own past. They have pushed back their scientifically ascertainable history almost a thousand years. The modern Chinese students, who hated the classics when they were mouthed by sedate old scholars ignorant of the modern world, now devote themselves to the classics to criticize them; criticizing them, they study them; studying them, they love them. The "science of the country" (Sinology) has recently been added to the curriculum of the modern schools; it is causing a veritable renaissance. In fact, the Chinese are constantly becoming more anxious to find precedent for political growth and development in their own past rather than in the past of the West, which they could never appreciate as much as do Westerners.
The actual Confucian movements do not warrant attention. Militarists have sponsored little Confucian coteries, or have paid for the publication of sumptuous editions of the Confucian classics, with the expectation of acquiring a reputation for benevolence and intelligence. Wu P'ei-fu, the most accomplished scholar among the military leaders of his period, who owed part of his prestige to his scholarship, was diligent in promoting Confucianism. With his decline (1926) his example was no longer felt to be worth following; Confucianism as a practical political expedient passed from the scene. It gave too little sanction to the raising of local conscript armies, inflation of the currency, and the doubling of taxes. Its complete silence on such necessities could not be taken for consent.
In the Japanese-occupied territory in Manchuria, however, an interesting experiment in Confucianism has been made. The customs and organization of the last Chinese dynasty have been resurrected, touched up by a few classical scholars, given a somewhat more orthodox and unrealistic air, and proclaimed as the constitution of the Great Empire of Manchou (Manchoukuo). Since the effective government of the country is under strong Japanese influence, the venture is significant only as a political narcotic. The laws proclaimed are in Chinese; the officials' names are Chinese; the miranda of government, whatever the fact, are consistent with the grand traditions of Chinese history. The Japanese might have placed a handful of dreaming reactionaries in actual power and helped the growth of an anachronistic Chinese Empire in the northeast, but they seem to have spoiled their opportunity of creating a friendly and subservient state by acting too arbitrarily and making it impossible for the Confucian experiment to work.
Confucianism in modern China owes its position not so much to its prospects as to the fact that it has provided a frame of reference, however obsolescent, for the political struggle. Hence, through the tumultuous modern period, the Chinese have been strengthened by a philosophy which emphasized the separateness and stability of each institution in society, and which did not make them lose all with the fortunes of a single supreme organization. As a positive political force, Confucianism has done two things: It has kept the Chinese from depending too much on political control, and it has provided a rationale in the contest for power. It accomplished the first by making police a function of society as a whole, by stressing the appropriateness of behavior rather than its legality; and it has given the Chinese ethical values despite their sorry political condition. Confucianism has rationalized struggle by supplying each individual participant with a code to apply if he came to power, and by giving him a good pretense for seeking power. Confucius himself lived in a time when Chinese political organization was chaotic. He noted the need for righteous men in high places and pointed out the good which could be done, apart from general reform, by the furtherance of virtue through scattered efforts. Confucius supplied the ambitious men of his own time with a reason for aspiring to power—by making political responsibility a duty for the man of intelligence. The Confucian scholar was no saint contemplating eternity; he was a proud, correct, self-righteous, patient individual, obliged by his training to take public office wherein his talent could gain wide influence.
In modern China, the seekers of political office have been able to avoid the appearance of abject venality by