Chinese classical thought was directed primarily to politics in the wider sense, yet China produced relatively little systematic political philosophy. The Chinese cities of the Warring States period (481-221 bc) were not, like Athens, the home of maritime traders with wide experience of other cultures, but centres of Chinese acculturation of the surrounding areas. China did not experience Christendom's struggle between Church and State, nor the enforced religious pluralism which succeeded the European wars of religion. Feudalism, which in Europe provided the basis for constitutionalism, disappeared from China with the war chariot; indeed it was the collapse of feudalism which created the problems with which China's ancient thinkers were preoccupied. Finally, the emphasis on finding new means of maintaining social harmony led Chinese philosophers to think less in terms of abstract principles and more in terms of the processes of socialization. As a result, China produced a political culture rather than a political philosophy.
The agenda of Chinese philosophy was set by Confucius, and after two centuries of debate Confucianism became dominant in the version created by Mencius (d. bc). However, in the disorder which followed the fall of the Han dynasty (202 bc-ad 220), during which Buddhism, imported into China in the first century ad, became a serious rival, Confucianism suffered a decline. In attempting to attract support away from Buddhism, the Ru (the Confucian scholars) turned their attention to cosmology and metaphysics, and their concern with public values and public service declined. However, after many centuries the commitment began to be revived, paradoxically by giving it a new metaphysical basis in continued rivalry with Buddhism. Zhu Xi (1130-1200), using metaphysical arguments, reasserted the claim of Confucianism as a means to control erring emperors.
Every phenomenon, argued Zhu Xi, is an imperfect expression of its own eternal principle. Good government also expresses such principles. The emperors, however, were quick to make themselves the supreme interpreters of principle. Zhu Xi's philosophy, thus captured by the throne, remained the official orthodoxy until modern times.
Wang Yangming (1472-1529), in opposition to this orthodox view, asserted that moral principles were created by the response of an active conscience to individual experience. He developed the Zen idea that if, through meditation (which to Wang meant essentially introspection) a man can clear his mind of prejudice, fear, and self-interest, he will be able to act with the speed and strength of the tiger. Wang also argued that knowledge was incomplete until applied in action. There is a clear implication that consciousness thus attained will itself motivate to moral action.
In the late seventeenth century three scholars who had retired from affairs after participating in the popular but unsuccessful guerrilla defence of central China against the Manchu conquest of 1644, sought to explain why the Ming dynasty had collapsed. Gu Yanwu (1613-82) argued that China was at her weakest when the central government was strongest, and at her strongest when her local communities were strong. Huang Zongxi (1610-95) reasserted the belief that the true guardians of morality were the Confucian gentry, and advocated that the emperors should have to choose their councillors from the independent Confucian academies. Wang Fuzhi (1619-92) demystified the ancient idea of the Mandate of Heaven by which successful revolt against a failing dynasty was justified after the event, and the new dynasty said to have received the Mandate. He argued that the struggle for the throne was usually a struggle among rogues, but that the rogue who won was obliged to rise to the responsibilities of empire. He thus secularized China's moral legitimation of government. All three in different ways were asserting the primacy of civil society.
The political culture was, in the same way, full of alternative possibilities. First, although the theory of government was autocratic and totalitarian, in practice Chinese communities largely governed themselves, and the emperor's official representative made the best bargain he could with them; he was more of a British District Officer than a French prefect. Second, while official Chinese society was elaborately hierarchical, informal egalitarian associations flourished. Third, while the normal way to deal with potential conflict was to suppress it, there was a strong belief in the virtues of moderation and a widespread belief that the best solution to many problems was a bargain which gave something to both sides. Fourth, in spite of the attempted atomization of Chinese society and the refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of special interests, voluntary associations flourished in China on a scale more characteristic of a modern democracy than of an ancient monarchy. Political thought in China was closely related, both as cause and effect, to such habits and assumptions. Thus the political culture offered some, at least, of the means of creating a pluralist system.
On the other hand, political thought and culture offered certain stubborn obstacles to institutional control of the emperors. Patron-client relationships prevented impartial administration. The stress on harmony led to fear of conflict—even of the legitimized controlled conflict which is the content of democracy. There was resistance to the idea of precise law, reflecting Confucian hostility to Legalism as well as the problems of the acculturation of local communities with differing customs.
From China's defeat in the First Anglo-Chinese War (1837-43) onwards, China faced an increasing threat which required an increasingly drastic response. In 1912 the Manchu ruling house was forced to abdicate. The result, however, was not the hoped-for democratic republic but the beginning of brutal civil wars among the provincial military commanders, while the new parliament, massively bribed, supported whatever puppet of the ruling warlord faction held power in the capital. In 1919 the willingness of one of this succession of governments to make concessions to Japan at Versailles led to student riots in Beijing (the May Fourth Movement), an event which crystallized the opinions of the new generation. This was the watershed, at which Confucianism was repudiated by almost all of educated China, dethroned to make way for ‘science and democracy’.
The writers of the European Enlightenment and their nineteenth-century successors were now being read in China by people who faced the task of founding a new state, indeed of creating a nation, where hitherto there had only been a culture. This culture, however, was too deeply based and rich in alternatives to be swept aside. Western ideas were assimilated in terms of Chinese heresies ignored until then. Western individualism was interpreted in terms of Wang Yangming, and Western ideas of the relation of civil society to the state in terms of the seventeenth-century patriot thinkers. Typical of the new synthetic thought was the philosophy of Yang Changji. After a classical education, he studied in Germany and in Scotland. He accepted, as most of his generation did, the idea that the liberation of the individual was the source of the wealth and strength of modern societies. He then attempted to determine how individuals could be expected to behave in socially responsible ways. This chimed with Confucian (and Buddhist) stress on self-cultivation. Yang also accepted T. H. Green's idea that consciousness of the gap between ideal possibility and ugly reality itself motivates the ‘conscious man’ to moral action, and he related this to Paulsen's theory of the will; this chimed with Wang Yangming's Zen-derived idea of the uninhibited power of a man to act when his consciousness is cleared of the distractions of self-interest and habit. He accepted, largely out of his commitment to the ideas of the seventeenth century patriots (especially of Huang Zongxi), the Western assumption that civil society creates the norms and the task of the state is to safeguard them. In sum, ‘conscious men’ would be compelled to throw themselves into the reform of society. They would create new norms and a new society, and the new society would create a new nation and a new state. Yang's theories were the basis of Mao Zedong's interpretation of Marxism.
Such ideas were addressed to the conscious few. They were not, however, given an elitist interpretation. The revolution would not be from the top. On this, virtually all Chinese radicals agreed. The most eloquent advocate of the duty of the intellectual elite to ‘go down to the countryside’ and induce a new consciousness among the whole mass of the Chinese people was Li Dazhao, later a founder of the Communist Party of China. Many intellectuals accepted his urging, and spent years in the villages. Their example was one of the origins of Mao Zedong's theory of the ‘mass line’. Such liberal forms of synthesis between Chinese and Western ideas were known to the whole May Fourth generation, including Mao Zedong. Yang Changji was his philosophy teacher. It seemed clear to this generation of Chinese that democracy and nationalism were two sides of a single coin, and that each was instrumental in achieving the other. All knew Gu Yanwu's assertion that ‘when the Empire falls, everyone is responsible’. Only a democratic system could create a sense of common responsibility.
Socialist ideas began to be widely discussed in China only after the Russian Revolution of 1917. They were readily received. The Chinese still entertained the distaste for capitalism general in pre-modern societies where trade is perceived as the exploitation of scarcities, and credit means usury at the expense of the distressed. And in a culture which attached supreme value to social harmony, capitalism was bound to be regarded as divisive and therefore deplorable. No party in China advocated uncontrolled free enterprise. All advocated redistribution of the land, at least a degree of cooperativization of agriculture, the development of local and village resources, and state control of the commanding heights of industry.
Socialism, however, was seen in the now accepted terms of revolution from below. Li Dazhao, with twenty of Lenin's titles available to him, showed interest only in State and Revolution, in which Lenin committed himself (theoretically) to a communalist view of socialism. It could be said that Chinese theories of democracy and of socialism paid too little attention to questions of law and institutions, for two reasons, one historical and one contemporary. The first was the traditional distaste for fixed law; the Chinese principle was ‘a government of men, not of laws’. The second was the cynical constitution-mongering of the warlords and the venality of their puppet parliaments. Democracy was seen, for example by Li Dazhao, as ‘a sort of spirit’, not a set of laws and institutions guaranteeing specific rights. Mao Zedong inherited this scepticism towards institutionalized democracy.
— Jack Gray
