PART I—
INTRODUCTION
1—
The Problem
"Marxism," a critical commentator has observed, "represents an historiographical turning point, the revolutionary effects of which we are only now coming to appreciate."[1] When historical materialism (or "the materialist conception of history," as Marx described his view of history) entered Chinese thought in the second and third decades of this century, its impact on Chinese historiography was no less profound for its sources being exogenous to Chinese thought. In the Marxist theoretical system Chinese intellectuals encountered perhaps the most comprehensive "sociology of change" to issue from nineteenth-century European thought,[2] one which unequivocally posited society to be the starting point of historical inquiry and sought in social processes the forces that shaped history. In its new context, Marxist historiography represented an unprecedented undertaking to root history in social structure, revolutionizing the conceptualization of China's past. The proliferation of socialeconomic history of an unmistakably Marxist bent by the 1930s pointed to the ascendancy of historical materialism in Chinese historical studies. This trend continues to the present in the People's Republic of China where, now under official aegis, the materialist conception of history monopolizes historical scholarship and, equally significantly, infuses the historical consciousness of great numbers of people. Historical materialism, in short, represents the counterpart in the intellectual realm to the
[1] G. Leff, History and Social Theory (New York: Doubleday Anchor, (1971), pp. 141–142.
[2] L. Btamson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 21.
revolutionary changes communism has wrought in Chinese society in the twentieth century.
The radical reinterpretation of Chinese history made possible by the introduction of Marxist historical theory to China after 1919 provides the subject of the present study. The substantive portion of the discussion here is devoted to examining Marxist interpretations of the past in the years after 1927 when Marxist historians produced their first major historical analyses. While Chinese intellectuals became acquainted with Marxist historical theory as early as the 1910s, they initially displayed only a marginal interest in its application to Chinese history. Their grasp of historical materialism remained superficial through the early twenties, when knowledge of Marxist theory was derived largely from a spotty selection of primary and secondary, especially Japanese, sources. The few authors who applied it to the analysis of Chinese history at this time employed it eclectically, without clearly distinguishing the materialist conception from other socioeconomic approaches to history. For reasons to be discussed here, Marxist historiography did not appear as a distinct trend until after 1927 when, with the so-called "social history controversy," it emerged rapidly as possibly the most dynamic and stimulating current in Chinese historiography. Seminal works produced at this time left a visible imprint on historical work in the thirties; the questions they raised also laid the foundation for much of the historical inquiry Marxist historians in China have undertaken in subsequent years. In fact, Marxist historians were responsible for first demonstrating the importance of questions that have since come to serve the more social science oriented historians of China, Chinese or non-Chinese, as points of departure for the resolution of the most fundamental problems of Chinese history.
The present study departs from previous studies of Marxist historiography in China in regarding these questions as direct offshoots, rather than incidental correlatives, of the political and therefore historical consciousness Marxism engendered in China. Whether or not later research has upheld the specific conclusions of Marxist historians is not as crucial to the evaluation of the Marxist contribution as the simple fact that their
conceptualization of Chinese history from the perspective provided by historical materialism endowed them with a deeper awareness of the complexity of historical problems than had existed until then. This new awareness, moreover, reached beyond the realm of historical inquiry in its effects. Intense Marxist historiographical activity during the decade after 1927 disseminated Marxist sociohistorical concepts widely so that the materialist conception of history came to shape the views on the past, the present, and the future of significant numbers of Chinese intellectuals. Important as this problem is to understanding the mood of the Chinese intelligentsia in the thirties, it is beyond the scope of the present study, which takes account of it only marginally in speculating on the appeals of Marxism to Chinese intellectuals after 1927. The main task undertaken here is to analyze the origins and nature of Marxist interpretations of the past during the thirties, to elucidate the problems Marxist historians encountered in applying Marxist theory to Chinese history, and to examine the ways in which their preoccupation with broader questions of revolutionary change in contemporary China shaped their treatment of both theory and history.
Marxist historiography is approached here through the perspective provided by intellectual developments in modern China, in other words, as a subject of intellectual history. In adopting this approach, I do not mean to reduce the work of Marxist historians to a mere datum of intellectual history that is devoid of historiographical validity; on the contrary, I believe that despite culpable defects in their scholarship, and their often crude handling of Marxist concepts, Marxist historians made lasting contributions to the study of Chinese history. Nevertheless, Marxist historiography was shaped by its intellectual and political context. For the same reason, it offers clues to understanding intellectual developments in China at this time; in its genesis and development, Marxist historiography was bound up with social and intellectual currents in the period following the New Culture Movement.
As I shall endeavor to demonstrate, it is essential to take note of the contemporary revolutionary scene that provided the
backdrop to the writing of history to fully appreciate the complexity of Marxist historiography or to assess its role in modern Chinese thought. History to the Marxist historians was neither a mere pastime nor a scholarly enterprise; it was both functional and eminently practical. Marxists wanted urgently to understand the past because it held within it, they believed, the secret of the dynamics of contemporary society, a society whose destiny they wished fervently to shape. For the same reason, the changes they envisioned for the future shaped significantly their views of history. In this particular sense, Marxists differed from their predecessors and contemporaries only to the extent that they announced openly the political intention underlying their historical efforts. Theirs represented the latest in a series of efforts dating back to the early twentieth century to rewrite Chinese history so as to bring it into conformity with the requirements of change in the present. It is not surprising to discover that as the problem of change assumed new dimensions, the shifts were reflected in modifications in the problem of history. The rise of the Marxist view of history, and its increasing popularity among Chinese intellectuals in the late twenties, suggests another such shift. On the one hand, I think, historical materialism owed a good deal of its appeal among Chinese intellectuals at this time not to its virtues as historical method, but to its relevance to the problem of revolutionary change, as that problem came to be perceived in the twenties. On the other hand, the spontaneous diffusion of Marxist historical theory in whole or in some attenuated form in the field of Chinese historical studies indicates that its appeal was not due merely to its political implications. Though history per se was initially only of secondary interest in Marxist historiography, the materialist conception of history offered a sorely needed methodology for rewriting Chinese history at a time when modernist iconoclasm had undermined the authority of traditional interpretations without, however, offering substitutes of its own. With all the defects in its application to Chinese history, therefore, historical materialism alleviated what was in effect a crisis in Chinese historical consciousness.
Three premises guide the evaluation of Chinese Marxist historiography in this study. These premises relate to the nature of the Marxist contribution to Chinese historical thinking, the relationship between politics and history in Marxist historiography, and the place of the materialist conception of history in modern Chinese thought. A discussion of these premises here will provide a better sense of the arguments to be pursued later and also will indicate the ways in which this study departs from earlier studies of Marxist historiography in China.
The Marxist contribution to history was primarily conceptual, even though the new conceptualization of the past had important ramifications for historical inquiry as well as for problems of methodology and explanation. The impact of Marxism on history is more readily appreciable if historical materialism is viewed as a "paradigm theory" as used by Thomas Kuhn in explaining the advance of scientific knowledge.[3] Kuhn has argued that scientific inquiry does not proceed by the random accumulation of data but rather is organized in accordance with a paradigmatic theory that the scientific community takes for granted at any one time in formulating problems and selecting the means to resolve them. The scientific community, according to Kuhn, abandons a paradigm gradually, and with reluctance, only as mounting evidence reveals the existence of important problems that cannot be accounted for within the boundaries of the existing paradigm. The "crisis" in scientific thought created by repeated challenges to the accepted paradigm is resolved ultimately by a "scientific revolution," which is realized when a new paradigm is assimilated by a significant portion of the scientific community. The new paradigm accomplishes "the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact," as well as providing criteria for
[3] T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). The relevance of the paradigm concept to political and social theory has been pointed out by Sheldon Wolin, who also identified Marxism as one of the paradigms in modern political theory. See Wolin, "Paradigms and Political Theories," in P. King and B. C. Parekh (eds.), Politics and Experience (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968).
"choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions."[4] This is what the materialist conception of history achieved in the realm of history, both in the original context within which Marx formulated his theory and when it was applied to the analysis of China's past in the twenties.[5]
It might be noted that historical materialism owed its basic emphases, and even some of its essential concepts, to the expanded consciousness of the social roots of historical change, which was reflected in the increasingly sociological orientation of European historical thought in the nineteenth century. What distinguished historical materialism as a paradigm, however, was its bold definition of the relative significance of the sociological factors that went into the making of history and, therefore, its view of what constituted a significant historical problem: The materialist conception of history, more than any other contemporary theory of history, moved society to the center of historical inquiry and asserted the logical priority of those aspects of society which were most intimately linked to economic activity. The resulting conception of history yielded a radically different
[4] Kuhn, Structure, p. 7.
[5] I use the paradigm concept, mindful of the need to distinguish between the paradigms of natural science and the paradigms of social science with respect to their internal characteristics and their status in their respective realms. The distinction I would like to stress pertains to the sources and implications of the two types of paradigms. According to Kuhn, paradigm shifts in the natural sciences occur in response to crises in scientific inquiry and are of direct relevance only to the community of practicing scientists. The paradigms of social and political theory, however, are bound up much more closely with their social context. Major paradigm shifts within social and political thought would seem to be called forth by crises in the existing social system, rather than the challenge of new intellectual problems, and the new paradigms aim not merely to alleviate intellectual crisis but the crisis of the system as a whole. This "practical" dimension to the sources and consequences of social paradigms renders them much more susceptible to the influence of political ideologies, with consequences for their theoretical formulations. In the case of Marxism, while Marxism was a part of the general reorientation of European social thought in the nineteenth century, its revolutionary stance on the resolution of social problems infused its theoretical premises. While most other currents in social science since that time have taken for granted "the ensemble of practices and beliefs" (Wolin, "Paradigms") that characterized market society, Marxism adopted as its premises those elements relevant to revolutionizing (and dissolving) that society. The consequences of these premises for the materialist conception of history will be examined in detail in Chapter 8.
view of the interrelationship between historical phenomena and the dynamics of historical change than had existed until then.
In evaluating the significance of the impact of historical materialism on historical thinking in China, therefore, it is necessary to bear in mind the departure of the materialist conception of history from previous modes of historical thought. The radical break of Marxist historians with their predecessors becomes evident when their conceptualization of Chinese history is contrasted to the inherited view of history represented by the Confucian historical tradition which, though undermined by radical break of Marxist historians with their predecessors becomes evident when their conceptualization of Chinese history
The Marxist outlook on Chinese history inverted the traditional Confucian view of the past. While it is possible to draw parallels between the two views on the basis of their common aspirations to universalism and their perception of history in terms of its practical, political consequences, the more significant consideration is that the substance of the Marxist conception of politics and, therefore, history was the diametrical opposite of the Confucian, as is clearly evident in the different historiographical consequences of the two outlooks.
Chinese political theory regarded politics as a function of the virtues of political leaders; the evaluation of the performance of past leaders in order to provide present and future leaders with precedents from which "to extract political and moral lessons" was, therefore, a central function of history.[6] History was for the most part officially sponsored and "served an essentially moral purpose 'for aid on government,' for guiding administrative action, encouraging virtue and deterring vice."[7] The conception of history that resulted from this premise was individual-centered and one that visualized history not as an autonomous realm but as the field upon which eternal principles guiding human behavior played out their fate: "The reverence
[6] L. A. Struve, "Uses of History in Traditional Chinese Society: The Southern Ming in Ch'ing Historiography," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1974, p. 99.
[7] J. Needham, "Time and Eastern Man," in Needham, The Grand Titration (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 241.
for history as a storehouse of precedent" went hand in hand with "the interpretation of history from a standpoint of permanence (rather than process)."[8] Chang Hsueh-ch'eng, one of the few premodern Chinese thinkers to address directly what might be termed questions of the philosophy of history, regarded history as the account in time of the fate of the ultimate principles, the Tao. Tao was, in Nivison's words, "the basic potential in human nature for living an ordered, civilized life, a potential that gradually writes itself out in history, and actualizes itself in what man must come to regard as right and true."[9]
It followed from this attitude that the traditional evaluation of history was guided by the desirability of order and harmony and a distaste for chaos and conflict, for conflict represented an aberration, the breakdown of morality.[10] The historical outlook that resulted from the confluence of these attitudes shaped the writing of history and the nature of historical explanations. The Chinese historian did not make an effort "to analyze and classify his facts for presentation in that logical sequence which shall seem to his individual brain best calculated to expose, not merely their order in time, but also the concatenation of cause and effect."[11] Within the limits imposed by their outlook, traditional historians made an admirable effort to achieve accuracy and developed sophisticated methods of empirical investigation. The conception of history as a realm where individual behavior manifested the success or failure of morality, on the other hand, obviated the need to search for historical explanation within the inner workings of history. Even the writers of universal political and institutional histories (rather than the more common dynastic histories) did not supplement their recognition of change in history with explanation in terms of
[8] J. Levenson, China: An Interpretive History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 49.
[9] D. Nivison, The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-ch'eng (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 141.
[10] J. P. Harrison, The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 77.
[11] C. S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 69.
historical process.[12] Chinese historians in general stopped short of "binding events together in a causal nexus and treating them as connected wholes."[13]
The Marxist conception of history departed radically from this view. The premise that the dynamics of historical development could be discovered only in the interaction of forces immanent in the socioeconomic structure altered the scope of historical inquiry and expressed a new awareness of the complexity of historical explanation. Where previous historians had marked time according to political (whether individual, dynastic, or institutional) or intellectual changes, Marxist historians turned to transformations in the socioeconomic structure as the criteria for determining significant historical change. This new conception of historical time also transformed the scope of history, as it focused attention on the social space that bound and shaped political and intellectual phenomena. As long-term socioeconomic processes achieved primacy in the attention of the historian, explanations based on suprahistorical notions of morality gave way to explanations of history in terms of historical processes themselves; to the Marxists, historical explanation was valid only to the extent that it was able to take account of these basic processes. They saw history in terms of a series of dynamically related wholes which not only yielded a completely different picture of the past than the Confucian but also reduced individual behavior and morality to a mere component, or reflection, of the social whole. Society now emerged as an autonomous realm which contained within it the source of its own progress and shaped all other aspects of human behavior. Furthermore, the same conception stressed, even glorified, the
[12] Ma Tuan-lin, one of the major institutional historians of traditional China, saw continuity in institutions from period to period but not in "history": "Each period has its own history and it is sufficient to cover in full the period from the beginning to the end of the dynasty without referring to other dynasties or attempting to draw parallels." In Win. Theodore deBary (ed.), Sources of the Chinese 'I'radition , Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 446.
[13] E. G. Pulleyblank, "Chinese Historical Criticism," in W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank (eds.), Historians of China and Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 152.
role of conflict as the prime mover of history. This view yielded a more dynamic and integrated explanation of the past than had been available in Confucian historiography. More important, it endowed society with a supreme status in historical consciousness as the starting point of history.
As I shall note in the next chapter and again in the conclusion, some of these ideas had gained currency in Chinese historical thought prior to the rise of Marxist historiography, as Chinese thinkers became increasingly aware of the complexity of historical change in the twentieth century. Historians from Wang Kuo-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao in the early part of the century to Ku Chieh-kang in the twenties had implicitly or explicitly challenged the sufficiency of the scope and/or the empirical basis of Confucian historiography. Without downplaying the importance of their work to the twentieth-century revolution in Chinese historiography, it seems fair to point out nevertheless that their contributions remained restricted to uncovering previously hidden or ignored facets of Chinese history or, as in the case of Ku, demolishing the claims of crucial Confucian traditions to empirical validity. While their work justifiably provided later historians with models of historical inquiry, they were unable to substitute for the Confucian view a comprehensive theory of history that could account for the interrelationship of historical phenomena or the dynamics of historical change. The materialist conception of history provided just such an urgently needed theory. It not only substituted for the Confucian vision of the past a secular view of history that recognized history as an autonomous realm, but also provided a theory that could serve as the starting point for achieving a longstanding dream of twentieth-century intellectuals: the creation of a "new history."
The methodological consequences of this new conception were evident both in its implications for the critical treatment of historiographical problems and in the potential it offered for systematic inquiry into the past. The application of Marxist socioeconomic theory to China's past instigated changes in Chinese historiography not dissimilar to the impact of Marx's formulations on the development of the modern sociological
approach to history in the West. In both cases, the result was to expand consciousness of the forces that went into the making of history, which led to the fundamental reformulation of historical problems and stimulated efforts to devise new methodologies and concepts to cope with a whole range of basic problems that had been at best of marginal concern in earlier historical thought.
From their new perspective, Chinese Marxist historians redefined the relative significance of historical phenomena and turned to the reexamination of historical sources to uncover data relevant to the understanding of the economic and social forces that had operated in Chinese history, to clarify the significance of the interaction between economic and social institutions and their implications for political and intellectual phenomena. Their assumption of a hierarchical relationship among historical phenomena (ranging from basic economic to cultural phenomena) engendered a critical attitude toward the treatment of facts and explanations in history. It is quite obvious in their interpretations of Chinese history (and in their theoretical statements) that they considered it insufficient to simply determine the accuracy of historical facts and to arrange them along a temporal and/or spatial dimension to get at the truth of history; it was also necessary, they believed, to take into account the relative significance of different facts relevant to the explanation of an historical phenomenon. They introduced into Chinese historiography, in effect, the fundamental sensitivity of the Marxist theory of history to the ideological determinants of the choice of facts and, therefore, explanations in history. It is not difficult to argue, as I shall do in the analysis of their works, that the Marxist historians themselves cavalierly ignored data that did not fit in with their preconceptions, and were so infatuated with their new explanations as to dismiss the need to utilize different kinds of data and conceptions to deal with different kinds of historical problems. Such defects in their treatment of history were partially consequences of ambiguities within Marxist theory, and partially due to the interference of extrahistoriographical considerations with their use of history; but these defects only point to ways in which Marxist historical
theory and its application require qualification, they do not negate its seminal insights into problems of history or the potential for critical inquiry which is worked into its basic assumptions. With all its defects, the Marxist historians' awareness of the complexity of historical explanation was certainly a great deal more sophisticated than the naive positivism of contemporary academic historians who believed, in the words of Fu Ssu-nien, then president of the Institute of History and Philology of the newly founded Academia Sinica, that it was sufficient "to put materials in order for facts to become naturally evident"; Fu, in fact, denied the process of interpretation a place in history, the scope of which he limited to textual criticism and collation.[14]
On the positive side, the materialist conception of history offered a methodology for the writing of universal histories (t'ung-shih ), which Chinese intellectuals, beginning with Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Chang Ping-lin around the turn of the century, had deemed essential to the creation of a "new history." The universal history was, of course, not a new form in Chinese historiography, but its modern advocates demanded the devising of causal explanations to reveal historical processes which differentiated their idea of universal history from the stringing together of historical facts that had characterized, they believed, traditional universal histories.[15] They themselves were unable, however, to offer a viable methodology for writing universal histories mainly because their approach to the problem was overly inductive. Their plans assigned priority to the accumulation of monographic studies which would ultimately provide the building blocks for universal history.[16] What they failed to provide was a well-defined starting point and a coherent principle of organization that could guide investigation and
[14] Fu Ssu-nien, "Li-shih yu-yan yen-chiu suo kung-tso chih chih-ch'u" (The Direction of the Work of the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica), October 1928, pp. 8, 9.
[15] For a discussion of the early expressions of interest and ideas on t'ung-shih , see Chin Yu-fu, Chung-kuo shih-hsueh shih (History of Chinese Historiography) (Taiwan reprint of 1944 ed., Taipei, 1968), pp. 296–326.
[16] See the supplementary volume in Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Chung-kuo li-shih yen chiu fa (Method of Researching Chinese History), (Taipei: Chung-hua shu-chu ed., 1968). Chin also gives Chang Ping-lin's plan for universal history.
explanation. Again, the Marxist view of hierarchy among historical phenomena helped resolve the problem: Historical materialism pointed to socioeconomic phenomena as the starting point of analysis and revealed in social-economic processes the links which joined together vast stretches of history, thereby providing a foundation upon which to build universal history. Chinese historians did indeed produce a number of important universal histories in the thirties. It is difficult at this point to tell the extent to which Marxist methodology can claim credit for the achievement, for the writers of universal histories included non-Marxists as well. But Marxist historians were prominent among the authors of the most impressive universal histories, and almost all important Marxist work took this form. These works served to organize the multifarious data of Chinese history into coherent and systematic analyses and opened new channels of inquiry into China's past.
The second methodological problem relevant to the analysis of Marxist historiography in this study concerns the relationship between history and politics in Marxist historiography. The basic political motivation underlying historical materialism has led many to reject its validity as a theory of history. There are, of course, other reasons for objection to historical materialism, especially among historians. The most important of these is the professional historians' disdain for generalizing approaches to history. It should be obvious from my preliminary remarks here that only historians who agree with E. H. Carr's statement that "the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both,"[17] would be willing to consider the value of Marxist historiography. This problem, which involves definition of the tasks of history, is not peculiar to historians' reactions to historical materialism but rises out of attitudes on the general question of the relationship between history and the other social sciences. It need not be dwelt on, therefore, except to note that such objection has become less tenable as the social scientific approach to history has demonstrated its usefulness in explaining the dynamics of historical change.
[17] E. H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 84.
The more telling criticisms leveled against the materialist conception of history have focused on the explicitly political intention which guides its treatment of history. Marxists, of course, have never denied that political assumptions, theirs or other historians', shape historical interpretation. It does not follow, however, that the materialist conception of history posits a uniform relationship between politics and history. Marxist historiography has, on the one hand, treated history simply as an extension of politics, the passive legitimizer of a predetermined notion of political change, or even of a short-term political policy. This has been the case especially when history has been subjected to the needs of political movements or Communist regimes in power. In these cases, historical interpretation has also tended to stress the teleological conclusions and the deterministic view of history which Marx himself imposed on his historical theory to support his political assumptions.[18] On the other hand, however, history is equally important in historical materialism as the source of a critical perspective on the present and as an autonomous field of forces in the interaction of which the revolutionary discovers the guide to correct political action. In this case, the Marxist political outlook has demanded that historical analysis, armed with critical judgment of the present, dig beneath the surface phenomena of history to grasp its dynamics. The political motivation is central in either case, but it is nevertheless important whether the Marxist historian, starting from the critique of existing society, turns to the examination of its contradictions to demonstrate its inevitable demise or transformation, or whether the same historian seeks to prove the legitimacy of the political goals of particular movements or regimes; in the one case, the result is the critical comprehension of history, while in the other, it leads to the molding of history in the image of political goals and assumptions. As these questions are of crucial significance both in the evaluation of Marxist historical theory and its applications in China, they will be examined in detail in Chapter 7 within the context of Marxist historiography in the thirties, which provides insights into the
[18] K. Marx, Letter to J. Weydemeyer (March 5, 1852), for his description of his theoretical contributions. Selected Works of K. Marx and F. Engels, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 528.
effects of Marxist political assumptions on the interpretation of history. Suffice it to note here that this study presupposes a more complex relationship between politics and history in Marxist historiography than has been assumed in previous studies, which have concentrated on past-1949 historiography and therefore have judged the Marxist contribution to Chinese historiography by its manifestations under the Communist regime. How this choice has colored the evaluation of Chinese Marxist historiography is evident in the following statement from one of the most influential studies to date on Marxist historiography in China.[19]
Yet it was recognized that there was promise in the new methodology as well, for behind the egregious claptrap of Marxist ideology and language is evidence of an acceptance of new ideas, new techniques in the writing of history. It has been through Marxism-Leninism, in fact, that, sometimes in a blurred form to be sure, much of the new historical technique and methodology developed in the modern West came to China. Notwithstanding its cramped ideological boundaries, Marxism does in some directions border upon the modern social sciences, the fruits of which illicitly but undeniably penetrate into her confines.
The portrayal of Marxist historiography in this passage, which begrudgingly recognizes the Marxist contribution to Chinese history only to explain it away as incidental to Marxist theory, may be unusual in tone but is otherwise indicative of the attitude of many historians on this question.[20] In evaluating this attitude, it behooves us to ask how much "modern social science" existed when Marx and Engels formulated their theory; it is also noteworthy that seminal figures in social science as well as prominent social scientists, and not just leftist ones, have acknowledged the debt of their disciplines to the challenge of Marx's ideas on historical change.[21]
[19] A. Feuerwerker, and H. Kahn, "The Ideology of Scholarship: China's New Historiography," in History in Communist China, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1969), p. 6.
[20] Ibid., p. 1, footnote, states that the views expressed in this article (but not the form) represented the consensus of the participants in the conference on Chinese Communist historiography, held in Ditchley Manor, Oxford, September 6–12, 1964. The participants, it must be noted, included some of the most prominent Western historians of China.
[21] See H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 46–50, for the influence of Marx on Weber, and S. M. Lipset,Political Man (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1963). pp. xx–xxi, for Marx's influence on American sociology. A comprehensive discussion of Marx's impact on sociology is provided by T. B. Bottomore in his introduction to Karl Marx; Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 29–48.
The more immediate question here concerns the ideological affiliations of historical materialism which, though undeniably a component of Marxist historical theory, bear a more complex relationship to history than is suggested by statements such as the one quoted here. The political motivations of historical materialism, while they have invited abuse by its practitioners, have also been a source of the critical attitude which pervades Marxist historical theory. On the whole, however, studies of Marxist historiography have concentrated on the former to demonstrate the subjection of Marxist historiography to rigid political ends and to denigrate the Marxist contribution to history. In the case of China, the neglect of pre-1949 Marxist historiography has had two negative effects on the evaluation of the impact of historical materialism on Chinese history. First, it has obscured the contributions of historical materialism to Chinese historiography. The most original contributions of Marxist historians to Chinese historiography predated the establishment of the Marxist orthodoxy in historical studies after 1949. Marxist historians continued to make contributions to the study of Chinese history after 1949, but their task was now of a more pedestrian nature, involving the elaboration, refinement, and revision of questions that had been raised earlier. Second, concentration on post-1949 historiography has created the impression that Marxist historiography in China is significant chiefly for the political function it performs. Since 1949 an officially promoted view of history has narrowed the range of interpretations available to historians. By contrast, the study of Marxist historiography in the thirties, when history was free of official direction if not oppression, reveals considerable diversity in the understanding of the materialist conception of history and its application to Chinese history. While the political and ideological commitments of Marxist historians were crucial in shaping their analyses, the interplay between politics and history was a great deal more complex than after 1949, and so were the implications of politics for historical work.
The third, and final, problem to be addressed in this study concerns the evaluation of the appeal of the materialist conception of history to Chinese intellectuals and its consequences for twentieth-century thought. The significance of historical materialism in the evolution of the modern Chinese historical outlook was first pointed out by J. Levenson in his highly stimulating study of the problem of history in modern China.[22] Levenson regarded Marxist historicism to have provided the means whereby Chinese intellectuals resolved the tension between "history and value" created by the Western intrusion into China. Marxist historicism, in his view, enabled Chinese to come to terms with the need to abandon the basic values of traditional culture by historicizing those values (thereby salvaging them as historical relics); at the same time, it alleviated the sense of inferiority before the West which this situation created by demonstrating the equally time-bound nature of modern Western values (now reduced to bourgeois values).
The interpretation offered here differs from Levenson's by stressing the social, revolutionary implications of the materialist conception of history. Although the problem Levenson identified was a crucial one, he wen. t too far in treating ideas qua ideas, abstracted from their historical context, which in turn reflected his conviction that Sino-Western cultural confrontation provided the ultimate datum of modern Chinese history. The function of historical materialism, however, was not simply, or most importantly, to alleviate the psychological-intellectual crisis created in China by the clash between Western and Chinese values. This clash was serious enough, but undue emphasis on values ends up disguising, whether or not so intended, the material roots and consequences of the confrontation between China and the West — the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society under the impact of Western capitalism. If the only function historical materialism served in China was the historicization of Chinese values, it is difficult to see why Marxist historicism and not some other alternative was chosen to play the part.[23] The materialist conception of history, it
[22] J. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 3 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).
[23] For a discussion of this problem in the case of T'ao Hsi-sheng, see my "T'aoHsi-sheng: The Social Limits of Change," in C. Furth (ed.), The Limits of Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
must be remembered, is not merely a historicism but an explanation of the dynamics of historical change in terms of basic socioeconomic processes, in particular the historical changes instigated by the rise of the market economy. It is not coincidental that historical materialism proved to be appealing to Chinese under social conditions reminiscent of the conditions of European society which shaped Marx's own formulations on history, conditions of rapid change when the revolutionary transformation of society was daily becoming evident both in the breakdown of the old order and in the emergence of new social forces. An overriding concern with values and ideas was possibly the case with Chinese intellectuals in the first two decades of this century, especially the period of the New Culture Movement around 1920; it is misleading to take these two decades as the paradigm for the whole of modern Chinese history. As the revolutionization of Chinese society progressed, it created shifting constellations of internal and external problems of which the intellectual confrontation between China and the West was only one aspect. By the mid-twenties, when Chinese politics took a social revolutionary course, social problems had acquired prominence in Chinese consciousness. Marxist historiography, in fact, grew directly out of efforts to explain the social dimensions of contemporary revolutionary change; it also expressed in the realm of history the new, revolutionary paradigm of change. It is noteworthy that Marxist historians in the thirties paid relatively little attention to traditional thought and culture in their work — except, of course, to the extent that it affected their social analyses.[24] Their primary concern was to understand the past so as to carry out the task of revolution in the present.
[24] Exceptions to this statement are to be found in the studies, of Chinese thought and thinkers by T'ao Hsi-sheng, Kuo Mo-jo, and Li Chi, which are cited in the bibliography. These studies, however, do not represent the basic concerns of their authors but were outgrowths of their work on social history.
2—
The Context
The diffusion of Marxist political ideas among Chinese intellectuals in the mid-twenties facilitated the assimilation of historical materialism in Chinese social historical thought. In the early twenties important advances had been made in familiarity with theory, but Marxism did not have an immediate impact on Chinese thought. Understanding of the materialist conception of history remained formulaic; the few authors who attempted to apply Marxist analysis to Chinese society ignored the complications raised by Marxist historical concepts and failed to come to grips with essential premises of the theory. Only after developments in Chinese politics in the middle of the decade demonstrated the relevance of Marxist theory to the problems of Chinese society was there a significant upsurge of interest in Marxist analysis.
Acceptance of Marxist theory, nevertheless, did not necessarily imply acceptance of the appeals of communism. Though the recognition of at least theoretical validity to the basis premise of class opposition as the determinant of social and political structure was a prerequisite to the assimilation of materialist theoretical formulations, such recognition did not demand commitment to a particular political strategy or even to a single model of social change. The distinction is crucial not only to elucidate the autonomous appeals of theory, but also to explain why, in spite of a common starting point, Marxist social analyses differed widely in their conclusions. Much of the disagreement among Chinese Marxists did in fact revolve around the question of whether or not the political premises that informed Marxism bound theory in such a way as to predetermine the conclusions of theoretical analysis. The first serious Marxist
analyses of Chinese society were undertaken to refute, not to bolster, the Communist strategy of revolution, which was predicated on the assumption that Chinese society was shaped by class divisions similar, if not identical, to those Marxism had uncovered in Europe. In the late twenties, many Chinese intellectuals were drawn to the Marxist theoretical system for its efficacy in articulating the problems of Chinese society, yet they rejected the proposition that unmodified Marxist political premises were applicable to China.
It is possible to identify roughly three phases in the introduction of Marxist theory to Chinese social thought in terms of the intensity and the nature of Chinese interest in Marxism. Between 1899, the date of the first reference to Marx in Chinese,[1] and the late 1910s, interest in Marxism was highly restricted and Marxism made no significant impact on Chinese thought or politics. Between 1918 and the mid-twenties, interest in Marxism expanded steadily. During this period, the impact of Marxism on Chinese politics was much more conspicuous than its impact on Chinese thought. While the establishment and growth of communism transformed the language of political expression in these years, in terms of theory the period represented a time of gestation. The third phase started with the revolutionary movement of the mid-twenties, which spread Marxist ideas among large numbers of Chinese intellectuals and prepared the ground for the flourishing of Marxism after 1927. The revolutionary movement converted class conflict in China from an abstract into a concrete question and compelled Chinese Marxists to confront Marxist theory as a totality. Ironically, in the years when the fortunes of communism in China were at their lowest ebb, Marxism emerged as the most dynamic current in Chinese social thought.
Marxist Theory in the May Fourth Period
For the purposes of this study, the first of these phases does not call for much elaboration. If those radicals who showed an
[1] M. Bernal, Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 37.
interest in socialism in the first decade of the century were cognizant of the historical outlook that underlay Marxism, they did not make use of their knowledge in their polemics on Chinese society and politics. When Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and T'ungmeng hui theoreticians debated the relevance of socialism to China, they did not even refer to historical or dialectical materialism.[2] On the contrary, they concurred that Marxist analysis was not very relevant to China.[3] Nevertheless, the first materialist analysis of Chinese history was undertaken a dozen years later by Hu Han-min, one of the major spokesmen for the T'ung-meng hui in 1905–1907, and Hu's interpretation of early Chinese society as "primitive communist" provoked the first controversy on Chinese social history triggered by Marxist historical ideas.[4]
If historical materialism entered Chinese historical vocabulary before 1918, it failed to make any significant impact on the conceptualization of Chinese history. In terms of intellectual significance, its origins go back to 1918, when Chinese intellectuals undertook the first serious discussions of Marxist theory in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Thereafter, interest in and knowledge of Marxist theory expanded without interruption. Even though Chinese intellectuals remained dependent on secondary sources for their knowledge, the proliferation of publications on historical materialism reflected the new interest. Until the mid-twenties when students educated in the Soviet Union and Europe began to undertake translations of Marxist texts into Chinese, Japanese writers served as the conduit through which knowledge of Marxist theory (as distinct from its political applications) reached Chinese intellectuals, continuing a trend that had started in the first decade of the century. Some of the texts central to materialist theory were translated into Chinese from their Japanese versions, and Japanese names were more conspicuous than any others in the interpretive discussions of materialist theory as well as in the references of Chinese
[2] Li Yu-ning, The Introduction of Socialism to China (New York: Columbia East Asian Institute, 1971), p. 21.
[3] For these discussions, see ibid. Also Bernal, Chinese Socialism , chap. 7, and R. Scalapino and H. Schiffrin, "Early Socialist Currents in the Chinese Revolutionary Movement," Journal of Asian Studies , 16 (1957):321–342.
[4] The controversy over the well-field system. See following section.
writers. Without doubt the most frequently encountered name was that of Kawakami Hajime, one of the most prolific writers on materialist theory in Japan.[5] Translations from Kawakami were an important source of Marxist texts, and the interpretations he placed on those texts were accepted by many Chinese writers. Other Japanese authors whose works were translated into Chinese were Yamakawa Hitoshi (b. 1880), Kuwaki Genyoku (1874–1946), Kushida Tamizo (1885–1934), and Takahata Motoyuki (1886–1928), who had translated Capital into Japanese.[6]
Through these authors, Chinese Marxists became familiar with those writings of Marx and Engels that outlined the formal ideas of historical materialism. The preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (hereafter, the Critique ), which is Marx's most cogent statement of his historical ideas, was made available as early as 1920 in an article by Kawakami translated in the Chien she (The Construction).[7] As this was a text that Kawakami deemed especially important, it was included in many of his articles translated into Chinese and printed in a variety of journals.[8] Kawakami's article in Chien she also contained copious quotations from Capital that were relevant to history. The Communist Manifesto , parts of which had been translated into Chinese in the first decade of the century, was translated in whole at this time. Chinese Marxists also had access to Engels's ideas on Marxism through his Socialism: Scientific and Utopian , which had been translated in part in 1912.[9] Hu Han-min, in his 1920 article "Wei-wu shih-kuan ti
[5] At this time, Kawakami himself had converted to Marxism only recently, and though his writings displayed an awareness of the problems of materialist theory, his interpretations lacked depth. One biographer has even questioned the extent of his Marxism. See G. Bernstein, "Kawakarni Hajime: A Japanese Marxist in Search of the Way," in B. Silberman and H. Harootunian (eds.), Japan in Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 89.
[6] These were mostly articles published in journals that did not necessarily hold a Marxist position. The more outstanding were Hsin ch'ing-nien, Tung-fang tsa-chih, and Hsueh I .
[7] Kawakami, "Chien yu Tzu-pen-lun ti wei-wu shih-kuan" (A Look at the Materialist View of History in Capital ), Chien she , 2.6 (August 1, 1920): 1151–1171.
[8] For example, see "Ching-chi-hsueh p'i-p'ing hsu chung chih wei-wu shih-kuan kung-shih" (Formula of the Materialist View of History in the Preface to The Critique of Economy [sic]), Hsueh I (Wissen und Wissenschaft), 4.1 (July 1922).
[9] Published by Hsin shih-chieh (New World). See Chang Ching-lu, Chung-kuoch'u-pan shih-liao: pu-p'ien (Materials on Chinese Publications: Supplement) (Peking: Chung-hua Bookstore, 1957), p. 442.
p'i-p'ing ti p'i-p'ing" (Critique of Critiques of Historical Materialism), quoted extensively from passages on history in The Holy Family, The Poverty of Philosophy, The Communist Manifesto, Wage-Labor and Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , the Critique , and Capital .[10] These works were referred to over and over again in the writings of the period and were accessible to all who were interested in Marxist historical ideas.
By the middle of the decade, examples of applications of materialist theory, as well as treatises on historical materialism by later Marxists, had been introduced to China. Around 1920 Yun Tai-ying translated Karl Kautsky's Class Struggle , and Tai Chi-t'ao published in Chien she the same author's Oekonomische Lehren under the title "Ma-k'o-ssu tzu-pen-lun chiehshuo" (Explanation of Marx's Theory of Capitalism) based on a Japanese translation.[11] Wang I-ch'ang, who provides considerable information on the status of Marxism at this time, reported that Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was translated into Chinese around 1925.[12] More significant because of their impact on Chinese materialist thought were exegeses on materialism by Russian Marxists. Li Yu-ning found out through interviews with early socialists that Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's The ABC of Communism , which represented the official Soviet view, was a popular source of information on Marxism at this time.[13] Especially relevant to materialist theory was Bukharin's Historical Materialism , which was adapted into Chinese by Ch'u Ch'iu-pai under the title She-hui k'o-hsueh kai-lun .[14] Bogdanov's Outline of Economic Theory
[10] Chien-she , 1.5 (December 1, 1919). Reprinted in Hu's book Wei-wu shih-kuan yu lun-li ti yen-chiu (Researches in Historical Materialism and Ethical Theory) (Shanghai, 1925).
[11] Chien-she , 1.4, 5.6 (November–December, January 1920) and 2.2, 3.5 (March–April, June 1920).
[12] Wang I-ch'ang, "Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun shih" (History of Discussions on Chinese Social History), Tu-shu tsa-chih (Research Magazine, hereafter TSTC ), 2.2–3 (March 1932), p. 19.
[13] Li Yu-ning, The Introduction of Socialism to China , p. 110. The earliest reference to this book I have seen was in an advertisement in Hsin ch'ing-nien , 9.5 (September 1, 1921).
[14] N. Bukharin, Historical Materialism (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965; reprint of 1925 ed.). T'ao Hsi-sheng says in his memoirs that Ch'u's version waspublished in 1925. See Ch'ao-li yu tien-ti (The Tide and the Drop) (Taipei, 1964), p. 81.
was also translated into Chinese in part between 1925 and 1927, and some Chinese authors attempted to apply Bogdanov's ideas to China, but the real effects of the work were not felt until after 1927.[15] In its May 1926 issue, the Hsin Ch'ing-nien published the introduction to Pokrovsky's Russian History in the Briefest Outline, which provided one of the rare instances of the discussion of historical formations published before 1927.[16] Finally, one non-Marxist author worth mentioning here because of his popularity with Chinese Marxists was E. R. A. Seligman, whose Economic Interpretation of History informed many Chinese interpretations of historical materialism at this time.
This broad, if fragmentary, selection of material imparted a fairly good notion of the outlines of materialist theory. In contrast to their predecessors, Chinese writers of the early twenties appreciated the importance of history to Marxist theory and were much impressed by the implications of historical materialism for social analysis, even though their interest was at first expressed at a philosophical level. Materials on Marxism available to Chinese intellectuals at this time drove home the centrality of history to social analysis. Kawakami had written the article cited previously to demonstrate the inseparability of economic analysis from historical analysis and repeatedly stressed this point throughout his essay. An article by Kushida Tamizo, after surveying the role history occupied in Marx's works, concluded that "Marxist theory stands and falls with historical materialism."[17] Among Chinese authors, the most
[15] Wang I-ch'ang, "Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun shih," pp. 19–20.
[16] "Ma-k'o-ssu chu-i ti li-shih yen-chiu kuan" (The Marxist View of Historical Research), tr. by Wang I-wei, Hsin ch'ing-nien chi-k'an (New Youth Quarterly, the successor to Hsin ch'ing-nien ). Note that the translator simply took Pokrovsky's view as "Marxist." Other discussions of social formations available by the mid-twenties were Chou Fo-hai, "Sheng-ch'an fang-fa chih li-shih ti kuan-ch'a" (An Historical Examination of Modes of Production) (tr. of chap. 1 of H. M. Hyndman, Socialist Economics ), Hsin ch'ing-nien chi-k'an , 3 (August 1, 1924), and Chiang Kuang-ch'ih, "Ching-chi hsing-shih yu she-hui kuan-hsi chih pien-ch'ien" (Economic Formations and Changes in Social Relations), Hsin ch'ing-nien chi-k'an , 2 (December 20, 1923).
[17] "Wei-wu shih-kuan tsai Ma-k'o-ssu hsueh shang ti wei-chih" (The Place of Historical Materialism in Marxist Theory), tr. by Shih Ts'un-t'ung, Tung-fang tsa-chih (Eastern Miscellany), 19.11 (June 10, 1922): 33–46. Quote, p. 46.
prolific writer on history was Li Ta-chao. Li not only stressed the centrality of history to Marxism but he regarded historical materialism as Marx's single most important intellectual achievement.[18] Marx, he pointed out, had done more than anyone else to weld together history and sociology and by doing so had for the first time demonstrated the autonomy of history. Before Marx, history had been restricted to the study of great men or politics, and political and theological concerns had dominated historical studies.[19] Marx had pointed to the social roots of historical change and had encompassed all phenomena of life within history. Li waxed poetic when he described the success of historical materialism in demonstrating the unity of life which, for the first time, promised the liberation of mankind by offering a genuine explanation of history and the ties that bound together the past, the present, and the future.[20]
The new appreciation of historical materialism was also evident in the immediate, if short-lived, attempts to examine current problems of Chinese society from the Marxist perspective. The first historical analysis to claim Marxist inspiration appeared in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. In September 1919, Chien-she published Tai Chi-tao's "An Economic Analysis of the Origins of Disorder in China."[21] During the next few months, the same journal also published two long articles by Hu Han-min on the history of Chinese thought and the evolution of kinship organization in China, which were the most ambitious, and impressive, attempts in this period to apply historical materialism to Chinese history.[22] An essay by Li Ta-chao published in 1920 applied Marxist analysis to recent
[18] Li discussed this problem in a number of articles. The earliest and most direct was "Wei-wu shih-kuan tsai hsien-tai shih-hsueh shang ti chia-chih" (The Value of Historical Materialism in Contemporary Historiography), Hsin ch'ing-nien , 8.4 (December 1, 1920):515–520.
[19] Ibid., p. 517.
[20] Ibid., p. 518.
[21] Tai Chi-t'ao, "Ts'ung ching-chi shang kuan-ch'a Chung-kuo ti luan-yuan" (Examination of the Origins of Disorder in China from the Economic Perspective), Chien-she , 2.1 (September 1, 1919): 1–19.
[22] Hu Han-min, "Chung-kuo che-hsueh chih wei-wu ti yen-chiu" (A Materialist Research into Chinese Philosophy), Chien-she , 1.3 (October 1, 1919): 513–543, and 1.4 (November 1, 1919):655–691; "Ts'ung ching-chi ti chi-ch'u kuan-ch'a chia-tsu chih-tu" (An Examination of Kinship from Its Economic Basis), Chien-she , 2.4 (May 1, 1920):731–777.
intellectual changes in China.[23] These essays exhaust the list of Marxist analyses of Chinese history during the New Culture Movement period.
Despite divergent themes and the widely different interests of the authors, these initial attempts to apply historical materialism to Chinese history shared two salient characteristics. First, they used Marxism eclectically, freely blending Marxist concepts with socioeconomic concepts derived from other sources. Second, they concentrated mainly on the question of the relationship between economic dislocation and institutional and intellectual change. They all bypassed fundamental problems of Marxist historical theory, especially the role of class relations in history and their structural expression, social formations corresponding to particular class relations.
The eclectic use of concepts provides one reason why, despite their authors' formal professions of loyalty to Marxism, these analyses were not readily recognizable as Marxist. Tai stated the necessity of using Marx's methods for understanding the crisis in Chinese society, and his article referred to Marx, Engels, and Kautsky to bolster specific arguments. But he also advocated the combination of Darwin's methods with those of Marx, and among the hodgepodge of ideas he drew on, those of Sun Yat-sen on livelihood were the most conspicuous in his explanation of the sources of disorder in China as well as in the remedies he offered for its alleviation.[24] Li, who was expressly committed to Marxism by 1920, was even more eclectic than Tai in the concepts he employed, and freely blended Marxism with the social Darwinism of Spencer and the geographic determinism of Montesquieu and Buckle.[25] The same was the case
[23] Li Ta-chao, "Yu ching-chi shang chieh-shih Chung-kuo chin-tai ssu-hsiang pien-tung ti yuan-yin" (An Economic Explanation of the Causes of Recent Intellectual Changes in China), Hsin ch'ing-nien , 7.2 (January 1, 1920). The references here are to the reprint in Li Ta-chao hsuan-chi (Selected Works of Li Ta-chao) (Peking, 1962), pp. 295–302.
[24] Tai, "Ts'ung ching-chi shang kuan-ch'a Chung-kuo ti luan-yuan," p. 11. Also see pp. 1, 6.
[25] Li explained the strength of the family in terms of the agricultural basis of Chinese society, which he in turn attributed to China's location in the "southern climatic zone." For the same reason, he argued, natural resources were abundant in China, which obviated the need for struggle. He used Yen Fu's static-dynamic culturedistinction to contrast Eastern to Western civilization. For Yen's distinction, see B. Schwartz, In Search of Health and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).
with Hu Hanomin. Hu explicitly stated his adherence to the materialist view of history, but his analysis did not preclude the use of other sociological theories. In his study of the family in particular, he relied more on the German sociologist Grosse than on Marx and freely utilized theoretical insights derived from late-nineteenth-century social theories that were only remotely, if at all, Marxist.[26]
Neither were these writers primarily interested in testing the validity for Chinese society of Marxist theoretical formulations; rather they sought in historical materialism confirmation of the convictions that dominated the New Culture intellectual scene. Tai Chi-t'ao concentrated on the relationship between "people's livelihood" (min-sheng ) and order. His essay was devoted to demonstrating that both in the past and in contemporary China disorder (which he equated with revolution, ko-ming ) arose from the destabilization of livelihood by the emergence of excessive differences of wealth due to extreme circumstances of unduly harsh exploitation or natural disasters.[27] Li Ta-chao's primary interest lay in the fate of the Chinese family which he regarded, as did other New Culture intellectuals, as the soil which nurtured and perpetuated Confucian thought and values. His essay viewed the patriarchal family as an offshoot of the agrarian economy and predicted that as industrialization progressed in China this type of family would disappear and with it the hold of Confucianism over Chinese thought. The premise that "economic change was the cause of all intellectual change" represented the extent of the materialist contribution to his analysis.[28]
[26] The reference is to Ernst Grosse, Die Formen der Familie und die Formen der Wirtschaft (1896). Hu utilized Grosse's categorization of the evolution of kinship into four historical forms. See "Ts'ung ching-chi ti chi-ch'u kuan-ch'a chia-tsu chih-tu," p. 741. The article also referred to the works of Engels, Howard, Westermaarck, Starcke, McLennan, L. H. Morgan, J. Lubbock, and G. Schmoller, nineteenth and early twentieth century sociologists and anthropologists, most of whom were only remotely Marxist.
[27] Tai, "Ts'ung ching-chi shang kuan-ch'a Chung-kuo ti luan-yuan," p. 10.
[28] Li, "Yu ching-chi shang chieh-shih Chung-kuo chin-tai ssu-hsiang pien-tung ti yuan-yin," p. 296.
The same premise was echoed in Hu Han-min's statement that "changes in the method of material production [wu-chih sheng-ch'an ti fang-fa ] initiated changes in all social relations" as well as the intellectual and attitudinal components of culture.[29] Hu's studies of Chinese philosophy and the evolution of the Chinese family deserve lengthier treatment not only because they were a great deal more sophisticated than the other analyses, but also because they represented the first genuine applications of the materialist method to Chinese history. Unlike Tai and Li, whose interests lay primarily in contemporary society, Hu extended his analyses over the length of Chinese history. And whereas Tai and Li barely mentioned historical materialism, Hu's preface to his essay on Chinese philosophy explicitly stated his acceptance of the materialist interpretation of history and offered a methodological outline which enumerated the principles that, he believed, constituted the essence of the materialist method. His analyses also were considerably more attentive to the details of the interrelationship between economic change and social organization and philosophy. Nevertheless, Hu's essays had a good deal in common with those of Tai and Li both in subject matter and in his understanding of historical causation in Marxism. His essay on philosophy was designed to demonstrate that while periods of instability instigated intellectual diversity as thinkers turned to the search for new principles of social organization, periods of stability curtailed intellectual creativity by subjecting thinkers to political authority and thought to political exigency.[30] His essay on the family tied the various forms of kinship organization throughout history to the division of labor demanded by the prevailing economic system.[31] While his analyses were highly perceptive and original, the interpretations offered were not peculiarly Marxist. His observation that social change arose from the "disharmony" between social relations and material production caused by economic change was a highly diluted expression of
[29] Hu, "Chung-kuo che-hsueh chih wei-wu ti yen-chiu," Chien-she , 1.3:513–514. 1.3:513–514.
[30] Ibid., p. 514.
[31] Hu, "Ts'ung ching-chi ti chi-ch'u kuan-ch'a chia-tsu chih-tu," pp. 741–755.
Marx's premise that the contradiction between the mode and the relations of production lay at the source of the social revolutions that guaranteed historical progress. More importantly, in stressing economics as the motive force of change in history, Hu's interpretation disguised the dialectical relationship between the mode of production and the relations of production, which is one of the most problematic aspects of Marxist historical theory. By ignoring the dialectical nature of this relationship, Hu denied the relations of production an independent role as a source of change in history.
Indeed, in these early analyses, historical materialism appeared as a variant of evolutionist theory based on economic change. All three authors stressed the importance of economic to social, political, and ideological stability and change; they paid little attention to the question of class relations in history and, therefore, displayed little appreciation of the difficulties involved in applying Marxist categories to Chinese history. These attitudes reflected, in part, the interpretation of Marxism in the sources available to Chinese intellectuals. They also pointed to the limitations on the Chinese interest in Marxist theory in the early twenties.
Chinese Marxists were familiar with the fundamental ideas of historical materialism through the works just cited, in particular the preface to the Critique . Their formulaic phraseology, however, imposed a mechanical and even diagrammatic quality on those ideas.[32] The following statement of the basics of historical materialism by Shih Ts'un-t'ung, one of the more active Marxist writers and translators of the period, gives an impression of the flavor that pervaded contemporary expositions of materialist theory:
In order to discuss the application of historical materialism to China, we must first understand historical materialism. The essence of historical
[32] The term formula (kung-shih ) was actually used in many of the theoretical discussions at this time, probably under the influence of Kawakami who frequently employed the term (note the article cited in footnote 8). For a methodical survey of the "formula" by a Chinese author who based his views on Kawakami's, see Kao I-han, "Wei-wu shih-kuan ti chieh-shih" (Explanation of the Materialist View of History), She-hui k'o-hsueh chi-k'an (Sociological Quarterly of Peking University), 2.4 (July–September 1924):473–487.
materialism is as follows: (1) Economic organization (method of production and distribution) is the foundation of social organization; all aspects of spiritual culture such as law, politics, religion, art, philosophy, etc. constitute a superstructure built upon this foundation. (2) When the material forces of production in society advance to a certain level, they come into conflict with the existing relations of production. Society can advance only after this conflict has been resolved. Social revolution resolves this question. Once the conflict has been resolved and the economic basis changes, the superstructure changes accordingly. (3) The basis of all spiritual revolution (whether in law, politics, religion, art, philosophy, etc.) is the conflict between the forces of production and the relations of production (or property relations); spiritual revolution emerges to resolve that conflict. All "dangerous thought" [wei-hsien ssu-hsiang] reflects the economic situation. (4) All revolutionary class struggle (whether political, economic or intellectual) originates in the conflict between the relations and the forces of production. The greater the consciousness of such conflict, the greater the effort to resolve it and the sooner the revolution. (5) When the material conditions are ripe, all questions are resolved.[33]
This step-by-step textbook approach, reminiscent of Hu's outline of materialist method, established a tight hierarchy of causation and abolished the dynamic tension between economy and society which in historical materialism supplies the motive force of historical development. Chinese Marxists were aware of the importance of society as a component of equal status to the economy in the dialectic of development,[34] but the feature of historical materialism that most impressed them seemed to be "the economic interpretation of history." In their descriptions of the social manifestations of economic modes, Marxist writers rarely referred to class relations, more commonly employing the broader term social organization (she-hui tsu-chih ), which did not necessarily exclude classes but did not give any hint of their primary role in historical dynamics either.
This attitude mirrored the interpretation of historical materialism in the secondary works available to the Chinese at this
[33] Shih Ts'un-t'ung, "Wei-wu shih-kuan tsai Chung-kuo ti ying-yung" (The Application of Historical Materialism in China), She-hui chu-i t'ao-lun chi (Discussions on Socialism) (Shanghai: Hsin ch'ing-nien Society, 1922), pp. 427–428.
[34] This distinction was made and rejected by Kawakami in his article in Chien-she , even though Kawakami's articles in Chinese ignored the question of society. For another example, see Yamakawa Hitoshi, "Ts'ung k'o-hsueh ti she-hui chu-i tao hsing-tung ti she-hui chu-i" (From Scientific Socialism to Socialism in Action), Hsin ch'ing-nien , 9.1 (May 1, 1921):7–10.
time. Kawakami Hajime, even with his appreciation of the complexity of the Marxist theory of historical dynamics, almost completely ignored the role social relations played in historical development and concentrated mainly on the causative function of productive forces which he identified with technology.[35] Even when he discussed the relations of production explicitly, he referred only to "social organization" in the abstract and dwelt on whether or not relations of production included communications, exchange, and distribution, without once mentioning classes.[36] Kawakami was taken to task for his lack of attention to social relations by his Japanese critics, and one Western historian of Japanese thought has remarked significantly that Kawakami's approach to historical development was closer to that of E. R. A. Seligman than to that of Marx.[37] The same attitude was echoed in Bukharin's treatment of historical dynamics in his Historical Materialism , the only formal treatise of European origin available at the time, and was even more forcefully stated in Ch'u Ch'iu-pai's adaptation of that book. The so-called "tool view of history" (kung-chu shih-kuan ) dominated Ch'u's book, which presented a scheme of historical development based entirely on technological accretions to labor that advanced productivity through history.[38]
These works left the overall impression that historical materialism was a version of evolutionist theory based on technological progress, and Chinese writers not infrequently remarked the parallelism between Marxism and evolutionist theory.[39] They
[35] "Wei-wu shih-kuan chung suo-wei 'sheng-ch'an,' 'sheng-ch'an li,' 'sheng-ch'an kuan-hsi' ti i-i" (The Meanings of the So-Called "Production," "Productive Forces," and "Relations of Production" in Historical Materialism), Hsueh I , 4.3 (September 1, 1922): 1–18, especially p. 12.
[36] Ibid., pp. 15–18.
[37] Gino Piovesana, Recent Japanese Philosophical Thought, 1862–1962 (Tokyo: Enderie Bookstore, 1963), p. 171.
[38] See Bukharin, Historical Materialism, and Ch'u, She-hui k'o-hsueh kai-lun, pp. 17–19, especially the table.
[39] Kao I-han described it simply as evolutionist theory. See "Wei-wu shih-kuan ti chieh-shih," p. 481. Ch'u's book gave the same impression, and Bukharin himself acknowledged that revolution was not necessary to change (Historical Materialism , chap. 8). Revolutionaries rejected Marxism as an evolutionist theory but it was another matter for historical materialism, which some distinguished from Marxism: See the exchange between Ts'ai Ho-sen and Ch'en Tu-hsiu in Hsin ch'ing-nien , 9.4: 555–560. Ts'ai suggested that Marx had synthesized "evolution and revolution."The interesting point was that Ts'ai separated historical materialism from class struggle as two components of Marxism, a distinction reminiscent of Seligman's.
displayed little awareness of the differences between historical materialism and European sociological and anthropological studies of the second half of the nineteenth century that stressed the economic basis of society.[40] The work that went the farthest in reducing historical materialism to its economic component was, however, that of Seligman. There is direct evidence of Seligman's influence on Chinese materialist thought only in the case of one important Marxist author — Li Ta-chao — who was not only a Marxist but a confirmed Communist by this time, but the approach taken by many of the Chinese authors at this time recalled Seligman's view of historical materialism.[41] Li Ta-chao's evaluation of historical materialism was derived almost in its entirety from Seligman's Economic Interpretation of History . Seligman not only played down the importance of class analysis in historical materialism; he even regarded it as coincidental that Marx the socialist and Marx the economic historian were one and the same person.[42] In his view, Marx's greatest contribution was in formulating a unitary perspective on social organization with economics as its fundamental motive force. Marx appeared in Seligman's work as one of the outstanding exponents of an historical approach that infused European and American sociology in the second half of the nineteenth century.[43] These ideas were echoed by Li, who even agreed with Seligman that the phrase economic interpretation of history described Marx's theories better than the more vague historical materialism , which did not indicate the distinction between Marxist materialism and other materialistic explanations of society.[44] Although Li formally emphasized the importance of sociological explanation in Marxist theory, he did not dwell on
[40] This is true of all the applications of historical materialism discussed previously.
[41] Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924; first published in 1902).
[42] Ibid., pp. 108–109.
[43] Ibid., part 2, chap. 6. See also part I, where Seligman treats materialism as simply a new current of sociology of which Marxism was one, if the most powerful, exponent.
[44] Li, "Wei-wu shih-kuan tsai hsien-tai shih-hsueh shang ti chia-chih," p. 515.
the social mechanisms that served as the propelling forces of history in his theoretical discussions or in the analysis just discussed.
Even if available sources inclined Chinese intellectuals to interpret Marxism as an economic theory of evolution, it was obviously not lack of familiarity with the sociological concepts of Marxism that led Marxists such as Li Ta-chao, Tai Chi-t'ao, and Hu Han-min to ignore the importance of class analysis. The first Marxists who turned to historical analysis after 1927 were not much more sophisticated than these early Marxists in their familiarity with Marxist literature, yet they had a considerably more comprehensive grasp of the complexities of the theory. Li was a leader of the Communist party, where the issue of class struggle was presumably a matter of daily debate. Hu Han-min and Tai Chi-t'ao were among the best-informed Marxists of the early twenties. Their uses of Marxism in the analyses discussed here suggest that classes were simply not the issue of the day, as is confirmed by other Marxist writings from the period. The response to Hu Han-min's studies yields an illuminating insight in this regard.
Hu in his analysis referred to classes only to dismiss class conflict as an important datum of Chinese history, as did Tai in his article.[45] This is significant in itself because it came to characterize a basic premise of Kuomintang Marxists' analyses of Chinese history in the late twenties. In this case Hu did not elaborate on his reasons for dismissing class in Chinese history but even more interesting, his statement did not stir any significant response among other Marxists. Similar statements by Kuomintang Marxists after 1927 were largely responsible for triggering the Social History Controversy. The only response Hu's article evoked was a letter from Hu Shih to the editor of Chien-she , criticizing Hu Han-min for his unquestioning acceptance of the existence of the well-field system as the basis of Chou economy.[46] Hu Shih questioned the veracity of historical records pertaining to the well-field, and attributed the latter to
[45] Hu, "Chung-kuo che-hsueh chih wei-wu ti yen-chiu," Chien-she , 1.4:657; Tai, "Ts'ung ching-chi shang kuan-ch'a Chung-kuo ti luan yuan," p. 10.
[46] Chien-she , 2.1 (February 1, 1920):1–4.
the utopian imagination of Mencius. Hu Han-min, and the Kuomintang theoreticians who rushed to his defense, did attempt a defense on the grounds that this kind of system was characteristic of the early period of human history; their arguments in terms of sociological validity were overshadowed, however, by their not-so-successful defense of the empirical basis of Hu Han-min's argument.[47] In the so-called "controversy over the well-field" that followed, the debate was conducted mostly on the grounds delineated by Hu Shih and, in a larger sense, by the intellectual preoccupation of the New Culture period with the veracity of received traditions. Within the decade, the grounds for controversy would change as a new generation of Marxists discovered the ideological implications of historical documents. Then it would be up to Hu Shih to prove that the well-field system had no bearing on historical reality and represented simply a utopian dream rather than nostalgia for a passing social system.
If the political tracts devoted to the defense of communism are excluded, Marxists in this period mainly sought in historical materialism answers to questions that dominated the New Culture intellectual scene. The political analyses produced at this time contained little social analysis but rather transferred to China Lenin's views on class structure and political organization in non-European societies under imperialist penetration, defending communism and Bolshevik organization against anarchists and liberal socialists (see Chapter 3).[48] The few applications of Marxism to social analysis addressed contemporary intellectual preoccupations; the relationship between intellectual change and material change, voluntarism and determinism, the nature of morality, and the basis of kinship organization were the dominant themes which provided contemporary Marxists with their subject matter and overshadowed the rare expression of interest in class relations or social formations in history. Chinese intellectuals discovered in Marxism functional explanations of
[47] For this controversy, see "Ching-t'ien chih-tu yu-wu chih yen-chiu" (Examination of Whether or Not the Well-Field System Existed) Chien-she , 2.1 (February 1, 1920):149–176, 2.2 (March 1, 1920):241–250, 2.5 (June 1, 1920):877–914.
[48] These essays were collectively published as She-hui chu-i t'ao-lun chi .
ideas, values, and social organization which augmented New Culture arguments on the insufficiency of traditional values and institutions for contemporary China. The new standpoint enabled a more plausible and deterministic rejection of the trans-historical claims of Chinese tradition than was available in liberal attacks on tradition in the name of values of Western origin: The materialist argument rendered the conflict between East and West superfluous by arguing the historicity of tradition. Marxist authors consigned traditional values and institutions to the superstructure of society and predicted their "natural" extinction as a new economic structure replaced the old ones. Values, they argued, represented the projection into spiritual life of particular social-historical needs; as the material basis of life was transformed, old values lost their function and yielded to values more suitable to the sustenance of the new society.[49] The immediate effect of Marxism in the May Fourth period was to confirm and enrich the more prevalent Darwinian views of change by providing social evolution with an economic dimension.
At the same time, the Marxist argument represented a departure from New Culture thought in introducing a sense of the burden of history and society into the dialogue on change that was missing in the writings of contemporary non-Marxist thinkers. While Marxists such as Li Ta-chao and Hu Han-min were reluctant to accept the deterministic implications of historical materialism, their arguments implicitly challenged the New Culture faith in social transformation through general public enlightenment.[50] If economic change was ultimately responsible
[49] Li Ta-chao, "Wu-chih pien-tung yu tao-te pien-tung" (Material Change and Change in Morality), Hsin ch'ao (The Renaissance), 2.2 (December 1919):207–224. Li combined Darwin and Marx to explain the historical nature of morality. Morality, he argued, was no more than "social instinct" (she-hui pen-neng ) and its major function was to preserve social cohesion. Once society had changed, the old morality became dysfunctional and had to go. Hu Han-min acknowledged that Li's article had influenced him (see "Ching-t'ien chih-tu yu-wu chih yen-chiu," Chien-she , 2.5:872). He went even further than Li in describing morality as class morality, meant to preserve the power of the ruling class. See "Chieh-chi yu tao-te hsueh-shuo" (Classes and the Theory Of Morality) in Wei-wu shih-kuan yu lun-li ti yen-chiu , pp. 221–224, 225.
[50] This was true even of those who took a very deterministic position on the progress and ends of history. See Chiang Hsia-tseng, "Wei-wu shih-kuan tui-yu jen-leishe-hui li-shih fa-chan ti chieh-shih" (The Explanation of Historical Development in Historical Materialism), Hsin ch'ing-nien , 13.3:356–372. For the tension between determinism and voluntarism in Li Ta-chao's thought, see M. Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
for dooming traditional society, the creation of a new society had likewise to await changes in material conditions and could not be achieved through education alone, as New Culture liberalism suggested. Materialism introduced into political discourse an awareness of historical and material factors as the preconditions as well as the limiting conditions of change, as was to become clear in the course of the decade.
Social Politics, Sociology, and Marxist Theory in the Mid-Twenties
The revolutionization of Chinese society, which became increasingly evident as urban mass movements assumed a radical character in the mid-twenties, led to a reorientation of Chinese thought on change. The sudden expansion of literature on society and social problems served as the clearest indication of the sociological turn Chinese thought took at this time. Liberal sociologists joined Marxists in exposing the deterioration of Chinese society. They believed the tenuous ties holding China together would snap if the deterioration remained unchecked. Although the Liberals, unlike the Marxists, regarded social conflict as an evil to be eliminated rather than as the harbinger of universal political liberation, they did much to diffuse consciousness of society among Chinese intellectuals. The generation that came of political age in the twenties was much more concerned with social change than the preceding one and, as it turned out, more attuned to the message of Marxism. It was with this generation that Marxist theory was assimilated in Chinese social thought.
The fundamental question that impelled the new generation of Chinese radicals had been formulated by their predecessors around the turn of the century: how to constitute China as a
nation or, as it was referred to at the time, the "Chinese question" (Chung-kuo wen-t'i ). This generation departed from earlier radicals, however, in their perception of the dimensions of the question. To put it somewhat schematically, whereas the first generation of radicals had concentrated on political institutions and the second on the values inherited from the past, the third generation of radicals looked to the social substructure for the resolution of all other problems.[51] Earlier radicals had agonized over the implications for "Chineseness" of abandoning native traditions, and political debate had revolved around the consequences of change in institutions and values. The present generation, having absorbed victorious modernist arguments in the course of its coming of age, relegated the concern with tradition or national identity to a secondary position, turning instead to the social causes that underlay the failure of attempts to change China.[52] The consciousness of society and social forces was greatly magnified in the twenties by general social mobilization which brought the "social question" (she-hui wen-t'i ) to the center of attention by the middle of the decade. This shift in the grounds of political debate had important consequences for Marxist thought among Chinese intellectuals.
The emergence of the "social question" both as political reality and intellectual concern was a by-product of the New Culture-May Fourth movements. This is not to say that earlier radicals had been oblivious of the social dimensions of political change. Anarchists had insisted on the necessity of social change in the first decade of the century, though in their case social
[51] This is not to say that such attitudes were exclusive characteristics of the generations involved. Given the short time span within which China underwent crucial changes, there was considerable overlap in attitudes from one generation to the next. Nevertheless, it is possible to make distinctions in terms of emphasis.
[52] The new generation took for granted what had been problematic for the earlier generation. It is possible that the 1923 controversy on Life Outlook was a turning point for most of the Marxist historians. Wang Li-hsi later described the 1923 controversy as the most important intellectual "battle" that had taken place before the Social History Controversy. That controversy, be continued, signaled the victory of science over metaphysics, of dialectical materialism over formal logic. Translated into the attitudes described here, with the 1923 controversy attention turned from intellectual issues to the "actual, dynamic society of China." Wang, "Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan hsu-mu" (Introduction to the Chinese Social History Controversy), TSTC , 1.4–5 (August 1931).
change was not an aspect of, but a substitute for politics.[53] Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and T'ung-meng hui radicals debated the "social question" about the same time but, significantly, the debate was mostly over programs rather than immediate issues, and both sides agreed on the absence in China of social problems that required urgent attention.[54] It was ironically New Culture thinkers who, in their insistence on the priority of individual liberation from society, demonstrated the importance of the "social question." The main thrust of the New Culture Movement was that the minds of people had to be transformed before any significant and lasting changes could be achieved in the political organization of the country,[55] and it set itself the task of creating through education a new liberated youth as a first step in that direction. The question of values led New Culture thinkers inexorably to the social organization that perpetuated those values. The social problems of greatest concern to New Culture intellectuals were the organization of the family and the status of women, two problems of immediate relevance to the liberation of youth. Even this limited concern, however, created a greater consciousness of the need to change social institutions. It was not fortuitous that Chinese intellectuals,
[53] R. A. Scalapino and G. T. Yu, The Chinese Anarchist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Center for Chinese Studies, 1961), pp. 9–13, 18.
[54] See the citations in footnote 3, this chapter. Ta-ling Lee has observed that although the reformers and the Republicans debated the issue of social revolution, their differences over this issue were by no means unbridgeable and were secondary to the issue of political institutions. See Foundations of the Chinese Revolution, 1905–1912 (New York: St. John's University Press, 1970). It is interesting that Liang's arguments against T'ung-meng hui advocacy of a social program were almost identical to those used by the Kuomintang against the Communists in the twenties.
[55] This was the attitude even of Ch'en Tu-hsiu, the later Marxist. In an article in Hsin ch'ing-nien , 1.6 (February 15, 1916), he stated that "ethical awakening is the final awakening of final awakenings" (quoted in Kiang Wen-han, The Chinese Student Movement , p. 32. In "Chiu ssu-hsiang yu kuo-t'i wen-t'i" (Old Thought and the Question of the Regime), he argued that political reorganization was useless unless people's minds were purged of old thinking (Hsin ch'ing-nien , 3.3 [May 1, 1917]:207–209). The priority of thought reform to social change was discussed extensively in Wu K'ang, "Ts'ung ssu-hsiang kai-tsao tao she-hui kai-tsao" (From Thought Change to Social Change), Hsin ch'ao , 3.1 (October 1, 1921):25–52, and Ch'en Ta-ts'ai, "She-hui kai-chih wen-t'i" (The Question of Social Reform), Hsin ch'ao , 2.1 (October 13, 1919):23–28. These authors all gave priority to thought change over social change. For general discussions of the New Culture emphasis on intellectual change, see the articles in B. Schwartz (ed.), Reflections on the May Fourth Movement , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), and J. B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
including liberals and later Communists, hailed the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the harbinger of a future wave of social revolutions throughout the world.[56] This development also lay at the roots of the conflict that after 1919 produced the split between those who continued to insist on the priority of intellectual change to achieve limited social change and those who gradually shifted their priorities to the immediate realization of social change.[57]
As urban mass movements forced a social consciousness onto the political thinking of Chinese intellectuals, the relevance of general problems of social organization to political problems became more apparent and the social question assumed a much wider scope and greater urgency. Social mobilization also strengthened the hands of those who preferred rapid, social revolutionary means against the advocates of gradual change through education. The emergence of mass movements with the May Fourth Movement, but especially after the May Thirtieth Incident of 1925, altered the nature of politics in China and, among intellectuals, the conceptualization of political change.[58]
[56] Li Ta-chao greeted the Russian Revolution as a social revolution that concluded the age of political revolutions started by the French Revolution and commenced a new age in history. See "Fa E ko-ming chih pi-chiao kuan" (A Comparative View of the French and the Russian Revolutions), Li Ta-chao hsuan-chi, pp. 101–104 (article first published in Yen Chih , July 1918). Liberals adopted the same attitude toward the Russian Revolution. Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei remarked on its relevance to China: "Since the penetration of European thought into China, a process of social, economic and political changes have [sic] developed in this country. The Chinese revolution was a political one. Now it is tending toward the direction of a social revolution. Russia furnishes a good example to China, which thinks it advisable to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution which started also as a political revolution. Please accept the hearty welcome of the pupil to the teachers." In China Year Book (1923), p. 858 (quoted in Kiang Wen-han, The Chinese Student Movement ). Also see Fu Meng-chen, "She-hui ko-ming — E-kuo shih ti ko-ming" (Social Revolution — Russian-Style Revolution), Hsin-ch'ao , 1.1 (November 1918):128–129, and Lo Chialun, "Chin jih chih shih-chieh hsin ch'ao" (The New Tide of the Contemporary World), Hsin ch'ao , 1.1 (December 1919): 19–24 (3rd printing).
[57] Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 225–226. Chow views the post-May Fourth transition as one from cultural-intellectual to political emphases. This is valid only if "political" is interpreted in a narrow sense. When it is recognized that the cultural arguments of New Culture thinkers also had political inspiration and consequences, the cultural-intellectual to social emphases distinction describes the transition more accurately.
[58] Lo Chia-lun, "I nien lai wo-men hsueh-sheng yun-tung ti ch'eng-kung shih-pai ho chiang-lai ying ch'u ti fang-chen" (The Successes and Failures of the Student Movement for the Past Year and the Direction It Ought to Take in the Future), Hsin ch'ao , 2.4 (May 1920):846–861, especially pp. 847–850. Also see Chung Chiu, "Wussu yun-tung ti hui-ku" (Looking Back at the May Fourth Movement), Chien-she , 1.3 (October 1919):599–612.
After the middle of the decade, the dominant paradigm of politics was sociological; both liberals and radicals agreed that political change was contingent on social change and took society as the common starting point of political analysis.[59]
The new outlook was reflected in the upsurge of interest in sociology and social science which was shared alike by radicals, liberals, and foreign scholars and social workers in China. After 1925, courses on sociology and social problems were incorporated into university and even middle-school curricula.[60] Governmental authorities and the new sociological associations undertook extensive social surveys which not only provided concrete information on Chinese society but also revealed the depth of its social problems.[61] At the same time, there was a boom in the availability of sociological literature. One contemporary author, Y. T. Wu, described "the increased publication of what was called the New Social Sciences" as "the most significant trend after the May Thirtieth Incident of 1925."[62] The new trend reached its height in the late twenties. Wu noted that "among the 400 new books produced between the Spring of 1928 and the Summer of 1930, eighty percent were translations and twenty percent original works, seventy percent were books on social sciences and twenty percent of general and literary interest such as novels, poetry, short essays, etc."[63] More recently, Chang Ching-lu concluded from his survey of
[59] For some of the liberal views on the subject, see Liang Jen-kung (Ch'i-ch'ao), "She-hui-hsueh tsai Chung-kuo fang-mien ti chi-ko chung-yao wen-t'i yen-chiu chuli" (Illustrations of Sociological Research on Several Important Questions concerning China), She-hui-hsueh chieh (The World of Sociology), 1 (June 1927): 1–20; Ts'ai Yu-ts'ung, "Chung-kuo she-hui-hsueh fa-chan shih shang ti ssu-ko shih-ch'i" (Four Periods in the Development of Sociology in China), She-hui-hsueh k'an (Journal of Sociology), 2.3 (April 1931): 1–33, Hsu Shih-lien, "Chung-kuo she-hui-hsueh yuntung ti mu-piao ching-kuo ho fan-wei" (The Aims, Development, and Scope of the Chinese Sociological Movement), She-hui-hsueh k'an , 2.2 (March 1933):1–29. On p. 28, Hsu described sociology as the "thought tide" of the twentieth century.
[60] Ts'ai Yu-ts'ung, "Chung-kuo she-hui-hsueh fa-chan shih shang ti ssu-ko shihch'i," pp. 22–24.
[61] Ibid., p. 25.
[62] Y. T. Wu, "Movements among Chinese Students," China Christian Yearbook , vol. 17 (Shanghai, 1931), p. 265 (as quoted in Kiang Wen-hah, The Chinese Student Movement , p. 97).
[63] Ibid.
Chinese publications that 1929 was a "turning point" in the history of social science in China.[64]
Interest in sociology and social problems was very much a response to the revolutionary situation in China. It is not surprising, therefore, that as the revolutionary movement intensified, there was a corresponding shift to the left in the perception of social problems which enhanced the appeal of Marxist sociology over its liberal competitors. The two distinct attitudes toward social problems at this time can be viewed as extensions of the two standpoints that were first articulated in the debate between Hu Shih and Li Ta-chao over "problems and isms."[65] In the liberal-positivist view social problems appeared as a series of separate problems, which was also Hu's position in that debate.[66] The solution was consonant with liberal academic proclivities, calling for sociological analysis followed by gradual corrective measures by the government to alleviate those problems.[67] The radicals took the various problems as manifestations of a fundamental structural infirmity in the social makeup of China and advocated total social transformation through revolutionary measures. Through 1925–1927 many young intellectuals gravitated toward the latter solution. This trend became even more pronounced after 1927. "When the leftist writers began to clamor for revolutionary literature," Leo Ou-fan Lee has written of the literary movements of this time, "revolution was at its lowest ebb."[68] The same observation holds for the Chinese intellectual scene in general. The suppression of revolutionary activity in 1927, when the Kuomintang turned to the right, intensified intellectual interest in the question of revolution which was manifested in the proliferation of leftist publications at this time.[69] Once the initial shock at the rapid dissolu-
[64] Chang Ching-lu, Chung-kuo hsien-tai ch'u-pan shih-liao (Historical Materials on Publishing in China), vol. 2, p. 7.
[65] For a discussion of this debate, see Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism , pp. 105–114.
[66] Works on social problems by prominent sociologists such as Hsu Shih-lien, Sun Pen-wen, and T'ao Meng-ho all shared this attitude.
[67] Ts'ai, "Chung-kuo she-hui-hsueh fa-chan shih shang ti ssu-ko shih-ch'i," p. 32, provides a good example of this attitude.
[68] Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 253.
[69] See Chapter 3.
tion of revolution was over, Chinese intellectuals turned, on the one hand, to the support of leftist intellectual movements such as the movement for proletarian literature and, more importantly, to the investigation of the causes responsible for the failure of revolution. The events of 1927 discredited both the Kuomintang and the Communist party but did nothing to lessen the commitment to the social revolutionary goals that had animated the revolution and mobilized youthful intellectuals between 1925 and 1927. Y. T. Wu described the prevailing mood as follows:
There is now a change in the atmosphere. The social aspect of our life has come to the forefront and now dominates the whole outlook of students. It is not such social problems as family and sex relations, illiteracy, narcotics, and the reform of certain time-worn customs, matters in which students were once intensely interested, but the problem of the fundamental reconstruction of society . The lesser problems still occupy people's attention, but in quite a different setting. The emphasis is on the change of the whole social structure, rather than minor changes within the old framework [emphasis mine].[70]
Marxist solutions to China's problems, which presupposed the integration of social and political phenomena in a structured whole, were more attuned to the propensities of this intellectual climate. Liberal solutions also lost their credibility as the threat of social conflict drove most liberals closer to the conservative stance of leaders who, in their betrayal of revolution, confirmed the Marxist view of the inseparability of political and social struggles.[71]
If the diffusion of Marxist political ideas among Chinese intellectuals contributed to the deepening awareness of social problems and the importance of social change, sociology now provided a medium through which Marxist social theory reached
[70] Y. T. Wu, "Movements among Chinese Students," p. 259.
[71] Such fears were expressed soon after the May Fourth Movement. See the article by Lo Chia-lun cited in footnote 58. In a 1928 article, Hu Shih described disorder as the "greatest enemy" ("Wo-men tsou na-t'iao lu," reprinted in Hu Shih yu-ts'ui , Taipei, 1970). In the 1930s, most former liberals came to cooperate with the Kuomintang government. See discussions in L. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); C. Furth, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); J. Israel, Student Nationalism in China, 1927–1936 , (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966).
the attention of many. Historical materialism was one of three important currents in sociological curricula in Chinese universities.[72] Marxist premises and concepts permeated social analyses to the extent that many Chinese intellectuals seem to have made little distinction between "social thought" (she-hui ssuhsiang ) or "social science" (she-hui k'o-hsueh ) and socialism, between social history and historical materialism.[73] Sun Penwen, a prominent sociologist, complained in 1927 of the prevailing confusion of sociology with socialism, which was confirmed by Wu in his 1931 essay.[74] Works on Marxism were published simply as works on sociology and propagated the necessity of structural transformation as the only way to resolve China's problems.[75] According to Wu's report, five-sevenths of the works on social science published from 1928 to 1930 (or one-half of the four hundred books published)were "related in one way or another to Marxism and dialectical materialism."[76] The interest in Marxism was of such magnitude that between 1928 and 1935, according to Kuo Chan-po, Marxism or dialectical materialism, as it was commonly referred to, emerged as the defining feature of Chinese thought.[77]
Though secondary interpretations continued to occupy an important place in Chinese knowledge of Marxism, the flourishing interest in Marxist social theory instigated a desire to know Marx's works at first hand and resulted in a far more sophisticated appreciation of the complications of Marxist theory than had existed earlier. It is difficult to say to what extent Communist inclinations before 1927 paved the way for the popularity Of Marx's theories. All that can be asserted with any degree of certainty is that most Chinese intellectuals who participated
[72] Ts'ai, "Chung-kuo she-hui-hsueh fa-chan shih shang ti ssu-ko shih-ch'i," p. 23.
[73] Kuo Chan-po, himself a historian of Chinese thought, used the terms in this fashion. See chin wu-shih nien Chung-kuo ssu-hsiang shih ('Chinese Thought in the Past Fifty Years) (Hong Kong, 1965; first published, 1935), p. 196.
[74] Sun Pen-wen, "Ho wei she-hui wen-t'i" (What Are Social Problems?), Tung-fang tsa-chih , 24.21 (November 10, 1927): 53.
[75] She-hui wen-t'i tz'u-tien (Dictionary of Social Problems) (Shanghai, 1929), p. 377. Despite its title, this was indeed a dictionary of sociology, which indicates further that these terms were used interchangeably at the time.
[76] Y. T. Wu, "Movements among Chinese Students," p. 265.
[77] Kuo Chan-po, Chin wu-shih nien Chung-kuo ssu-hsiang shih , p. 196.
in the revolutionary movement between 1925 and 1927, including the later Marxist historians, did so without a firm grasp of the theoretical foundations of communism.[78] In the confident days before 1927, few intellectuals displayed a tendency, and even fewer commanded sufficient knowledge, to engage in theoretical discussions on Marxism. Until 1928, most radicals seemed content to rely on Russian leaders or Japanese intermediaries for their knowledge of Marxist theory, just as they relied on Russian social analyses in the formulation of revolutionary strategy. The works of Marx and Engels remained inaccessible to all but those who could read a foreign language. One compilation of works by leading Marxists available to Chinese intellectuals indicates that before 1927 translations from Lenin and Stalin outnumbered those of works by Marx and Engels.[79] These translations, moreover, were poorly executed, partial, and reflected the whims or individual inclinations of the translator in their selection.[80] This situation changed dramatically after 1927. If in the earlier period intellectuals had been drawn to Communist ideas of revolution with only the slightest familiarity with Marxism, many now renounced Communist policies while embracing Marxism as their intellectual guide. As the table in footnote 79 indicates, there was a rapid growth after 1927 in the translation into Chinese of works by Marx and Engels. By 1937, all the important works of Marx and Engels, as well as of other European Marxists such as Plekhanov and Kautsky, had been translated into Chinese, some of them in more than one edition.[81]
[78] T'ao Hsi-sheng told me in an interview in Taipei in the fall of 1969 that he had started to write Marxist analyses before he had read the important works of Marx. The careers of the Marxist historians indicate that many of them moved "backward toward Marx"; their initial familiarity with Marxism was derived from the few available Marxist translations as well as the sociological works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which had incorporated many of the ideas of historical materialism as conceptual tools.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[80] Cheng Hsueh-chia, "A Brief Account of the Introduction of Karl Marx's Works into China," Issues and Studies , 4.2 (November 1967):6–16, especially p. 10.
[81] Ibid.
The period also witnessed the maturation of Marxist thought in China and a growing freedom from dependency on Soviet guidance, as Chinese Marxists began to apply Marxism to the analysis of Chinese society. Interest in Russian discussions of Marxism continued to grow in the thirties, not however because of a willingness to follow Russian leadership blindly but as the result of a critical attitude that had been missing before 1927.[82] Disappointment with Comintern strategy which had led to the disaster of 1927 did much to awaken a desire to go to the sources of theory, as it did to create the contemporaneous trend toward autonomy in the Chinese Communist movement. Awakened to the complexity of Marxism, the Chinese now proved unwilling to bow before the dictates of Soviet leadership and even used their newly acquired appreciation of Marxist theory to challenge the official version of Marxism propagated out of Moscow.
At the same time, Chinese writers clearly enunciated the differences of historical materialism from kindred sociological theories. Marxist writers of the late twenties, in contrast to their predecessors, were highly sensitive to questions of social structure and class relations. Especially important was the issue of class. While earlier writers had barely shown interest in the question of classes in China, the appearance of social conflict as the characteristic of Chinese politics compelled Chinese radicals to take a stand on this issue. The political crisis of 1927 made class an urgent issue that required immediate resolution. It was then that Chinese radicals abandoned the imported slogans of an earlier day to engage in serious analysis of Chinese social structure. The effects were felt throughout the Chinese intellectual world as the political conflicts which resulted from different views of the Chinese revolution spilled out into the open. The so-called "Social History Controversy" that followed was the most exciting intellectual phenomenon in China for the next decade.[83] The excitement the controversy generated indi-
[82] Ibid., pp. 12–13.
[83] The discussions acquired the title "Social History Controversy" from the four special double issues of the Tu-shu tsa-chih , the major forum for Marxist discussions between 1931 and 1933, published under that title (Chung-kuo she-hui shih lunchan ).
cates the sense of urgency attached to the issues discussed.[84] The Social History Controversy owed much of the enthusiastic reception it was extended to the current interest in Marxism among Chinese intellectuals; in turn, it contributed to the intensification of that interest and, in the issues it raised, to the maturation of Marxist thought in China.
Marxist Historians and the Origins of the Social History Controversy
The first Chinese Marxist historians were products of the developments already discussed.[85] The participants, with one or two exceptions, were born between 1900 and 1910 and ranged from twenty to thirty years of age at the time of the Controversy. In 1911, at the inception of the Republic, they had been children; at the time of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, they ranged in age from early adolescence (at least one of them had not yet reached his teens)[86] to college age. Some observers have stressed the psychological implications of their youthfulness for their intellectual and political commitments.[87] Like all psychologically
[84] Books and journals on social history were apparently the rage of the Chinese public; T'ao's books became best sellers immediately. His first book went through eight printings between 1929 and 1933, each time between 2,000 and 5,000 copies. Kuo Mo-jo's book went through three printings in as many months. The first special issue of the Tu-shu tsa-chih was printed twice within ten clays and sold out, this in spite of the fact that most of the contributors were relative unknowns. See. Ch'i Ssu-hou, "Chin pai nien lai Chung-kuo shih-hsueh ti fa-chan" (The Development of Chinese Historiography in the Last Hundred Years), Yen-ching she-hui k'o-hsueh (Yenching Social Science Journal), 2 (October 1949):30.
[85] Little information is available on most of the participants in the Social History Controversy. I was able to find detailed information on only a few of the participants and, where information was available, it was not possible to corroborate it from other sources. Most of the Marxist historians were relatively unknown except for their brief appearance during the Controversy. The following discussion uses biographical information where possible and supports such sources with observations on intellectual tendencies in China at this time by other authors. For those Marxist historians for whom information is available, more detailed outlines of biographies will be provided in the following chapters. It seems more appropriate to provide such information when I discuss their views of Chinese history, because their intellectual development was relevant to their understanding of Marxism.
[86] Hu Ch'iu-yuan was born in 1910.
[87] See Cheng Hsueh-chia, She-hui shih lun-chan ti ch'i-yin ho nei-jung (TheOrigins and Content of the Social History Controversy) (Taipei, 1965), and Hsu Wen-shan, Chung-kuo shih-hsueh kai-lun (General Discussion of Chinese Historiography) (Taipei, 1967), pp. 123–124.
reductionist arguments, however, this view ignores the sociological factors that shaped the perceptions and education of the Marxist historians. If they are viewed collectively rather than as isolated individuals, the greater significance of their age lay in the fact that they represented the third generation of Chinese radicals, and the first to be nourished on the intellectual fare provided by the New Culture Movement after 1915.[88] They were successors to the generation that came into prominence with the May Fourth-New Culture movements and, to a large extent, those movements provided their point of departure. The revolutionary movement which flourished with the mass mobilization of 1925–1927 provided a turning point in their lives. T'ao Hsi-sheng expressed the impact of these movements on his career:
The May Fourth Movement stimulated the awakening of individual [awareness] among youth and intellectuals. All varieties of social thought and political theory spread among students and the masses without giving rise to conflict. The interest [possibly] reflected the closeness of youth to problems of clan and marriage. At the same time, the main current of social problems, the labor problem, entered the realm of actuality from the realm of fantasy. The labor problem was the link between society and politics, and the May Thirtieth Movement the key to this link. The May Thirtieth Incident did not only lead from the awakening of youth and intellectuals to the awakening of the urban laboring masses; it also transported the Chinese revolution from its political and intellectual center in Canton to Shanghai and led to the emergence of Shanghai as the center of social thought and of the labor problem. In 1919, as a student, I participated in the May Fourth Movement in Peking. Now in 1925, as an independent professional, I encountered the May Thirtieth Incident in Shanghai. That these two events had a great influence on my scholarly career, my thought, and my life was natural and inevitable.[89]
[88] Generation is taken here not in the biological sense but in the political sense: "A political generation is seen as a group of individuals who have undergone the same basic historical experiences during their formative years." Marvin Rintala, "Political Generations," in A. Esler (ed.), The Youth Revolution (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1974), p. 17. Members of a political generation share common bollds "created . . . by their being exposed to social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic destabilization." K. Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations," in ibid., p. 8.
[89] T'ao Hsi-sheng, Ch'ao-liu yu tien-ti (The Tide and the Drop) (Taipei, 1964) p. 77. Hereafter cited as CLTT .
Yen Ling-feng, in a more private vein, recalled how it was at this time that, impressed with the importance of the social problems that China faced, he finally decided to turn to social scientific studies. To that end, he went to Canton, the Mecca for revolutionaries after the May Thirtieth Incident, and in the following year to Moscow.[90] Between 1925 and 1927, in fact, most of the future Marxist historians joined the revolutionary movement in some capacity or other, first in Canton and with the northern expedition, in the seat of the revolutionary government in Wuhan.[91] For the majority of them, active participation in political life coincided with an abrupt intensification in the social revolutionary complexion of the Chinese revolution. Their exposure to post-May Fourth intellectual and political currents during the formative years of their lives, as T'ao affirms for his case, was for most a crucial, if intangible experience that shaped their political as well as historical outlooks.[92]
When these young intellectuals turned to writing history after 1927, they did so not as professional historians but as revolutionaries who sought in history answers to practical problems of revolution.[93] The Social History Controversy owed its origins to the conflicts over revolutionary strategy that broke out in 1927 pursuant to inter- and intraparty divisions within the United Front. The first response to political disintegration was to articulate the divergent revolutionary goals and strategies
[90] Yen remarks that it was the Controversy on Life Outlook (Jen-sheng kuan ) of 1923 that turned him from self to society. "Wo yu she-hui k'o-hsueh" (Social Science and I), TSTC , 3.1 (January 1933): 1–44, especially pp. 12–13.
[91] T'ao went to Wuhan in January 1927 to teach political science at the Central Military Academy; Kuo Mo-jo joined the revolution in Canton in 1926; Chu P'ei-wo worked under Mao Tse-tung in the central propaganda section of the Kuomintang from 1926; Hu Ch'iu-yuan got involved in revolutionary activites during the course of his studies at Wu-ch'ang University from 1925; Wang Li-hsi worked with Mao in the Central Peasant Training Institute in 1926–1927; Li Chi was also in Canton and Wuhan, but I have not been able to determine his function. In most cases, these young intellectuals were also given glamorous military titles out of all proportion to their experience.
[92] Rintala argues that "late adolescence and early adulthood are the formative years during which a distinctive political outlook on politics emerges, which remains essentially unchanged through old age." (in Esler, Youth Revolution , p. 17).
[93] None of those involved in the first phase of the Controversy had been trained as a professional historian. The two outstanding historians, T'ao Hsi-sheng and Kuo Mo-jo, had so far led careers in law and literature respectively.
that had hitherto been subsumed under the facile slogans of the United Front. Dissidents within the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist party, convinced that revolution had run into a dead end, hoped to revive the revolution by analyses that would reveal the causes of failure. Ho Kan-chih observed in 1937 that "the controversy on the nature of Chinese society appeared after China's national liberation had come to a temporary standstill."[94] The participants in the discussion conceded freely that the rejuvenation of revolution was their primary aim. T'ao Hsi-sheng, whose historical interpretations did much to shape the issues in the Controversy, prefaced his History of Chinese Feudal Society (published 1929) with a call to "reevaluate" (hui-hsiang ) the events of the preceding years in order to overcome the obstacles the revolutionary movement had encountered.[95] Wang I-ch'ang, who was a participant in the Controversy as well as its first historian, confirmed the generality of this attitude when he labeled the years 1928–1930 the "period of reevaluation" in the evolution of social history.[96] The preoccupation with revolution persisted into the later phase of the discussion when, according to Wang, it had supposedly entered its "scientific" or "research" stage.[97] Wang Li-hsi, the editor of Tu-shu tsa-chih , proclaimed in his introductory article announcing the initiation of the Controversy in that journal that the discovery of a revolutionary strategy remained the foremost goal of the discussion: "By now, the aimless pursuit of revolution has encountered obstacles. The hidden forces of revolution cannot be destroyed by tyrannical pressures; nevertheless, [we] need a firm and precise theory of revolution to lead it onto a new course."[98] The theory that Wang referred to here was social theory or, more accurately, social analysis.
The dissidents explained the failure of revolution in social terms: The counterrevolutionary social forces they had in-
[94] Ho Kan-chih, Chung-kuo she-hui hsing-chih wen-t'i lun-chan (Controversy on the Question of the Nature of Chinese Society) (Shanghai, 1937), p. 1.
[95] T'ao Hsi-sheng, Chung-kuo feng-chien she-hui shih (History of Chinese Feudal Society) (Shanghai, 1929), p. 1.
[96] Wang I-ch'ang, "Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun shih," p. 25.
[97] Ibid., p. 39.
[98] Wang Li-hsi, "Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan hsu-mu," pp. 9–10.
tended to eliminate had successfully gained power in the movement and subverted its goals because revolutionary leaders, due to their mistaken assessment of the configuration of social forces in China, had pursued the wrong strategy. They in turn cast their evaluation of alternative revolutionary strategies in the form of analyses of contemporary society. Given their theoretical premises, the question of contemporary society provided the link which connected revolution to history. Wang Li-hsi concluded the statement just quoted with the assertion that a correct "theory" of revolution could be formulated only after the determination of the historical "stage Chinese society had reached." Many of the works produced during the initial phase of the Controversy in 1928–1930 freely blended the discussion of history, back to its earliest period, with prescriptions for revolution purportedly derived from their analyses.[99] A comprehensive, if historiographically slanted, statement linking revolution, the present, and the past was provided by Ho Kan-chih in his 1937 description of the goals of the Social History Controversy:
We can say that the controversies on social history, the nature of contemporary society, and the nature of the village are investigations of the many aspects of a single question. To recognize clearly the Chinese society of the present and to determine its future course, we could not but eliminate the demands of past society. The controversies on the nature of Chinese society and on social history were preparatory tasks for the comprehension of the past and the present and the search for the future. The questions that this Controversy dealt with were very complex: to start with contemporary China, to reach back from that to China before the imperialist aggression, to trace the history of the Chinese feudal system, from the feudal system to go back to the slave system, and, finally, to reach the period of the Asiatic Mode of Production. All was in order to expurgate the demands of the past and the present and to ascertain our future direction.[100]
The revolutionary dissenters kept alive the debate over revolution even after their ability to influence political events had
[99] T'ao Hsi-sheng's first essays were all in this format. He first discussed China in the Chou period and followed up with recommendations on revolutionary strategy.
[100] Ho, Chung-kuo she-hui hsing-chih wen-t'i lun-chan , p. 5.
vanished. The persisting concern with the discovery of an appropriate revolutionary strategy through history, at least until 1933, distinguished the Marxist historical discussion from other currents in Chinese historiography.
Marxist historians sought in history arguments to bolster their various standpoints and gain for them ideological supremacy in the revolutionary movement. And some have, with hindsight, claimed victory for their historical interpretations, which they contend prepared the ground for the political victory of one revolutionary strategy over the others.
Notwithstanding the fact that they, that is "the Marxist historical workers" might have some differences in assessing the social characteristics of some dynasties in history and might have some views that are unilateral [sic] or fail to conform entirely to the historical reality, nevertheless they were unanimous in upholding the Marxist-Leninist principle and position, in dealing serious blows to the pseudo-Marxists and in undertaking the arduous task of defending Marxism and revolution. They mercilessly exposed the "fake materialists" of the "New Life School" and the Trots-kyites who tainted "historical materialism" by publicizing their "ignominous conduct of confounding the masses. . . . " By the eve of the national anti-Japanese War the reputation of the "New Life School" and the Trotskyists among the Chinese people had also become fraught with odium and with such labels as "Plekhanovism," "Trotskyism," and the "New Life School"; and the "Trotskyists" became synonymous with anti-Communism and anti-Marxism. . . . Through the above-mentioned struggle it has become possible for rank-and-file Marxist historical workers to be steeled and enhanced, thus making specific [sic] achievements.[101]
Others, dissatisfied with the ultimate outcome of political developments in China, have attributed to the Controversy the causes of their defeat. Cheng Hsueh-chia argued in his 1965 study that the Controversy exposed Marx's poor comprehension of Chinese society and would have destroyed his popularity among Chinese intellectuals had the war with Japan not intervened.[102] Hsu Wen-shan, another author from Taiwan, agrees with Cheng that the Controversy was an extension of May
[101] Lu Chen-yu, "The Struggle between Marxism and Pseudo-Marxism on History and Philosophy during the Time of the Second Revolutionary Civil War," as translated in Chinese Studies in History and Philosophy, 1.2 (winter 1967):46–80; quote, pp. 68–69, 76.
[102] Cheng Hsueh-chia, She-hui shih lun-chan ti ch'i-yin ho nei-jung , p. 104.
Fourth nihilism but endows it with even more sinister consequences:
Therefore, in the Chinese historical sphere, there were people who, following them [Westerners], started to talk about all kinds of slave societies, feudal societies, capitalist societies, etc. There also came one after the other, the idealist view of history, the materialist view of history, and so on and so forth. Without any regard for whether or not such things existed in history, they filled the air with confusion. As a result, they not only distorted facts, but also harmed the country and helped the Communists.[103]
It is impossible to speak of winners and losers among the alternative interpretations of Chinese history offered at the time. It is obvious that those who provided the most thorough and insightful explanations of Chinese history did not draw the winning conclusions from their analyses, nor was the revolutionary strategy that ultimately emerged triumphant backed by the most satisfactory historical analyses (as distinct from revolutionary analysis). It is more accurate to say that once the revolution had entered a new course, alternative strategies became irrelevant, and the political victors themselves chose as the victor in the realm of history the interpretation that corresponded best to their view of their historical achievement.
These authors are no doubt correct in tying the Social History Controversy to the Chinese Revolution and pointing out its impact on Chinese thought; the Controversy did contribute to perpetuating the radicalism of Chinese intellectuals by keeping alive the issue of social revolution in Chinese thought in the thirties. It is the practical significance of the Controversy for the course the revolution took that they exaggerate. It is highly simplistic to encompass the causes and the consequences of the Chinese Revolution within the realm of intellectual activity, when it is obvious that the fate of ideas was closely tied in with the outcome of fundamental social changes and conflicts. The more tangible long-term impact of the Controversy was in the realm of thought, in particular, historical thought. In the course of their efforts to rationalize their political commitments, Marxist historians went beyond immediate issues of revolution.
[103] Hsu Wen-shun, Chung-kuo shih-hsueh kai-lun , p. 124.
Though commitment to different revolutionary perspectives continued to color historical analyses, by the early thirties, when the Controversy reached the height of its intensity, the past had become a subject of debate in its own right. With the Controversy, a new view of history entered Chinese historical thought with irrevocable effects on the comprehension of the past.