The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought

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The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought David Martin Jones

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The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought

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Also by David Martin Jones CONSCIENCE AND ALLEGIANCE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT IN PACIFIC ASIA TOWARDS ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY IN PACIFIC ASIA

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The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought David Martin Jones Senior Lecturer School of Government University of Tasmania

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© David Martin Jones 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–91295–0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, David Martin. The Image of China in Western social and political thought / David Martin Jones. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–91295–0 1. Social sciences—Europe—History. 2. Social sciences—North America—History. 3. Political science—Europe—History. 4. Political science—North America—History. 5. China—Foreign public opinion. 6. Orientalism. I. Title. H53.E8 J66 2001 300’.9181’2—dc21 2001032129 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: the Bewilderment of Names and Images: East Asia in Western Social and Political Thought 1

2

3

4

1

East Asia in the Early Modern European Imagination

14

Eighteenth century critics of virtuous China

28

Summary of the eighteenth century engagement

33

Ambassadors, Economists and Oriental Despots: the Early Nineteenth Century Understanding of China

37

Ambassadors and oriental despots

38

Sinology, philology and China

52

Conclusion

64

Nineteenth Century Progress and Arrested Civilizations

67

Romanticism, authenticity and China

70

The Aryan myth, the yellow race and the problem of degeneration

76

China and racial apotheosis in late nineteenth century Germany

81

Comte, Darwin, Spencer and Chinese evolution

85

Racial determinism, the China case and late nineteenth century thought

96

Peculiar Nation: Sinology and the Social Sciences 1890–1949

99

Sinology at the nineteenth century’s end

99

Weber, Durkheim, and Asia

119 v

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vi Contents

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Culture, psychotherapy, universal history and China in the early twentieth century

125

A brief genealogy of western approaches to China 1895–1949

137

Awakening, Arising, Developing and Deconstructing: China’s Mutable Modernization in Contemporary Social and Political Science

145

Comparative politics and the modernization paradigm

148

History, area studies and China

166

Peasant revolutions, dependencia and developmental states

174

The developmental state, Asian values and the deconstruction of post Maoist China

187

China wakes (again)

192

Nationalism and contradictions with Chinese characteristics at the end of history

199

Toward a conclusion

201

Notes

204

Bibliography

207

Index

228

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Acknowledgements This book developed from a seminar given in the Political Science Department at the National University of Singapore and subsequently published in the Department’s working paper series in 1992. Papers randomly delivered at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore) and at the East Asia Research Institute (Singapore) eventually evolved into discrete chapters. A number of colleagues in both Singapore, London and Australia have generously offered advice and suggestions for further reading. These include Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, James Cotton, Baogang He, Kenneth Minogue, Terry Narramore, Roger Sandilands and M. L. R. Smith. The errors and lacunae are, of course, all of my own making. Tasmania, the sclerotic bureaucracy of its university notwithstanding, provided a suitably bucolic setting in which to complete the manuscript. Note: Most western-authored books prior to the 1980s followed the Wade-Giles system of Romanization of Chinese names and places. Since the 1980s most follow the Chinese pin yin system of Romanization. In a number of places in the book where a pre-1980s source is cited I have placed the pin yin in parentheses, for example, Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong).

David Martin Jones, Hobart 2001

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Introduction: The Bewilderment of Names and Images: East Asia in Western Social and Political Thought

Whoever orients himself to the Orient feels incapable of formulating from the bewilderment of names and images that come to him a clear figure and a definite thought. Paul Valery Orientem Versus 1938 In these politically correct, ethically relativist and culturally confused times, the popular discourses of cinema or advertising that saturate us with images of sultry Singapore girls or untrustworthy Asiatics earn official and academic condemnation. It is further maintained, by those who detect a concealed prejudice in most European and North American academic comment on the Near and Far East, that a similar disposition has long informed the discourse of ‘western’ political and social thought. This work thus seeks to identify both how thinkers within the canon of Enlightenment and post Enlightenment European political thought have presented China and the Far East and the ideological implications, if any, of their various interpretations. How, we might wonder, did European thinkers of the Enlightenment and after categorize the Orient in its Chinese manifestation? Such a question immediately evokes the postcolonial response that they were orientalists, that is that representations of the East ‘were deliberately concocted . . . as instruments to contain and manage these cultures and civilizations’ (Sardar 1999: 4). Indeed, this view of the western encounter with the East has become something of a fashionable academic orthodoxy. For Ziauddin Sardar it became ‘a self-perpetuating and closed tradition which aggressively resisted all internal and external criticism; an authoritarian system that is flourishing as much as it ever did in colonial times’ (5). Let us, then, first examine a little more closely the character of this orientalism, before tracing the lineaments of the 1

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2 The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought

western engagement with the idea of the east in its specific manifestation in China and the Chinese World.1 Post colonial theorists agree, almost to a woman, that ‘Edward Said’s Orientalism . . . (1978), single-handedly inaugurates a new area of academic inquiry: . . . colonial discourse analysis’ (Williams and Chrisman 1994: 5). It was Said ‘who shifted the study of colonialism among cultural critics towards its discursive operations, showing the intimate connection between the language and forms of knowledge developed for the studies of cultures’ and demonstrated the ‘complicity of Western literary and academic knowledge with the history of European imperialism’ (Young 1995: 159). Ultimately, Edward Said in his critically acclaimed polemics Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) and subsequent epigoni like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985, 1994), Homi K. Bhaba (1993) and Robert Young (1995) unmasked a long established European penchant for representing non-western civilizations as the ‘other’ of western values and practices whilst rendering those so othered practically as well as metaphorically speechless. Indeed, the success of this enterprise ‘can be measured by a change in terminology’ (Freitag 1997: 620). Before Said orientalism merely denotated oriental scholarship and knowledge of Eastern languages. Post postcolonial discourse theory, it assumed a perjorative connotation referring primarily to older European scholars whose conservative methodology reflected a ‘contemptuous . . . attitude’ toward non-western peoples (Freitag: 620–1). More precisely, Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, out of Foucault by Gramsci, contends that the popular image of a mysterious and exotic orient is not merely a product of xenophobia, but in fact reflects an academic discourse pertaining to the East and an ideology that it has engendered, namely, orientalism. In Said’s view both a western dread of the ‘Other’ combined with the rational need to contain it, informed the academic study of the Orient as it developed in the course of the nineteenth century. Thus, the exploratory attempts to examine oriental language in the early philological enquiries of William Jones, Sylvestre de Sacy and later in the nineteenth century Ernest Renan, and the anthropology that succeeded it were never purely scientific. This orientalizing science merely concealed prejudices that went back at least to the earliest Christian European encounters with Islam. Not only did nineteenth-century science mask this fear and loathing, it also, by an apparently objective process of measurement and observation, smuggled it into its categories, descriptions and tables. The figure of the East, then, was delineated, anaesthetized and dissected in the

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Introduction 3

hospital/laboratory of Western science. Of course, the operation was not a prophylactic one. It was, in fact, a castration. Having successfully completed the scientific emasculation of the East, the West, or more precisely European academe, could proceed to exploit it. Orientalism thus prepared the way for, and legitimated both European colonization and ultimately imperialism. In an attempt to prove this, Said contends that there is not in fact a ‘western’ study of the orient, but a European one. More precisely orientalism was an essentially Anglo-French phenomenon which apparently explained and justified their nineteenth century imperialist enterprises. Said’s exploration of the manner in which the European mind came to address the East was not, of course, without critical insight. It invigorated the area studies of specific East and Southeast Asian states and certainly introduced a critical edge to more general studies of the evolution of the western engagement with the East dominated in the pre- and postwar period by respectable scholarly, but ideologically limited accounts of The Invasion of China by the Western World (Hughes 1937), The Far East in World Politics (Hudson 1937), Scratches on our Minds (Isaacs 1958), China and the West (Franke 1967), The West in Russia and China (Treadgold 1973), and most painstakingly, Asia in the Making of Europe (Lach 1965–93). Nevertheless these accounts demonstrated the two-way nature of the exchange and the often unsuspected impact of Asian culture upon Western understanding. Hughes and Isaacs demonstrated an acute awareness of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury European and American insensitivity towards Chinese civilization together with the ambiguity of western responses. Hughes recognized the misunderstanding, suspicion and injury generated by the unequal terms of western intervention in China (Hughes 1937: 285). While Isaacs painstakingly demonstrated that, ‘American images of the Chinese tend to come in jostling pairs. The Chinese are seen as a superior people and an inferior people; devilishly exasperating heathens and wonderfully attractive humanists. . . . These and many other pairs occur and recur, with stresses and sources varying widely in time and place’ (Isaacs 1958 (1980): 70–1). More tellingly still, the German sinologist Wolfgang Franke observed that nineteenth-century European scholarship treated every manifestation of Chinese civilization ‘by standards derived from western developments, but assumed to be absolute’ (Franke 1967: 146). Significantly, postcolonial discourse, as it evolved after 1978, either ignores or dismisses the more nuanced western commentaries of the inter-war and immediate postwar period. This neglect, moreover,

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appears deliberate. It facilitates the postcolonial enterprise of reducing a wide and often contradictory range of European and American responses to the different civilizations of Asia to a single pattern of western representation. This questionable enterprise has evoked a variety of sympathetic modifications together with a few critical rebuttals. Thus B. S. Turner agrees with Said that, ‘the orientalist paradigm was a persistent feature of social science which constructs the Orient (as stagnant, irrational and backward) as a contrast case to explain the Occident (as changeful, rational and progressive). These orientalist components generate an essentialist concept of “Oriental society” which become the object of colonial discourses of knowledge and power’ (Turner 1994: 97). More precisely, this discourse, rather than discourses, involved a number of components. Firstly, orientalism portrayed the East as an undifferentiated and ultimately despotic social system; it was also stagnant, sensual and lacked a process of rationalization (99–100). Nevertheless, Turner also contends that the ‘orientalist tradition was often ambiguous in its assessment of oriental cultures’ (101). Analogously, Arik Dirlif considers that while it is ‘indisputable’ that ‘orientalism was an integral part . . . of a European conceptualization of the world’ (Dirlif 1996: 100), nonetheless, the relationship between occident and orient was more complex than Said allows. More precisely, as James Clifford observes, Said ‘never defined Orientalism, but rather qualifies and designates it from a variety of distinct and not always compatible standpoints.’ Thus orientalism is ‘what orientalists do and have done.’ Alternatively, it is a ‘style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient (and most of the time) the Occident.’ Differently again, ‘it is a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient’ (Clifford 1988: 259–60). Somewhat confusingly, ‘in the first and third of Said’s meanings Orientalism is concerned with something called the Orient, while in the second the Orient exists merely as the construct of a questionable mental operation’ (260). Somewhat differently, Aijaz Ahmad criticized the view that there could be ‘an epistemic construction traversing the whole breadth of “western history” and textualities spanning not only the modern capitalist period but all the preceding pre-capitalist periods as well’ as both ‘un-Marxist’ and ‘radically un-Foucauldian’ (Ahmad 1992: 166). From a similarly unsympathetic perspective, John Mackenzie discovers in Said’s orientalism a ‘disabling paradox, that the author of a work purporting to identify a master discourse of the Orient operating over at least two centuries himself distrusts all global theorization. It is as though, his

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Introduction 5

critical totalizing head is at war with his nomadic, polymorphous heart’ (Mackenzie 1995: 7). Consequently, Said has difficulty ‘in connecting representation to agency, (and) establishing the precise relationship between scholarly orientalism and imperial instrumentality.’ Analogously J. J. Clark detects in Said a worrying ‘reductionism’ and considers ‘that while no human knowledge is apolitical’, Said’s ‘association of orientalism with colonizing power can represent only one part of the story’ (Clarke 1997: 26). Ultimately, Said’s endeavour to reduce complex and often contradictory European understandings of non-European civilizations to an all embracing orientalism is worryingly unfalsifiable. Indeed, an orientalist ideology actually rests on a series of logical incoherences. Significantly, Said’s version of orientalism depends almost exclusively upon an understanding of European attitudes to Islam and treats China, South East Asia and India as an extension of this original project. While exposing the prejudices informing the nineteenth century oriental exegesis of Ernest Renan or Edward Lane, Said himself, it would seem, falls victim to his own discursive bias in assuming what he has failed to examine or prove. For it is clear that historically, European Christian culture experienced a much more difficult and much longer encounter with Islam and the Near East than it ever enjoyed subsequently with India and China. To an extent, Said attempted to rectify this lacuna in his discursive project in Culture and Imperialism (1993). However, the attempt to reduce the history of nineteenth and twentieth century development to orientalism and the subsequent ‘subaltern’ resistance it evoked among the orientalized, requires the increasingly nebulous category of oriental resistance to embrace, inter alia, Irish nationalism (Said 1993: xii). This notwithstanding, the fact that the study of the orient might have occurred historically prior to the imperial enterprises of late-nineteenth-century England or France, does not necessarily entail that it happened because of the earlier academic endeavour. In committing post hoc ergo propter hoc, Said crucially ignores the Germanic contribution both to philological enquiry, the philosophy of history, and a variety of eugenic and historicist theories in the course of the nineteenth century. In spite of these evident limitations to an orientalist methodology, a number of postcolonial critics, nevertheless have endeavoured to recuperate the notion of orientalism while at the same time affording greater prominence to the voice of the orientalized. This entailed drawing promiscuously upon a wide variety of fashionable European poststructural, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literature in order to establish

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the postcolonial and subaltern perspective. As Dane Kennedy observes, the term postcolonial evokes both ‘an anti-imperialist political stance and a poststructuralist theoretical one’ that ensured its subsequent usage (Kennedy 1996: 347). In this context Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak seeks to highlight subaltern resistance and illustrate the extent to which subordinate peoples retain control over their own destiny. The baleful conclusion that the subaltern could not speak (Spivak 1985) proved no impediment, however, to the pursuit of self conscious theorizing in order to deconstruct imperializing representations of the silenced subaltern. Thus, Homi Bhaba’s ‘ruminations on the cultural effects of colonialism draw inspiration from poststructuralist psychoanalysis and semiotics’ (Kennedy: 348). Subsequently Bhabi contends that ‘counter narrative’ could ‘erase totalizing boundaries’. Meanwhile ‘culture’s compareinity’ offered ‘both a theoretical position and a narrative authority for marginal voices or minority discourse.’ Equally obscurely, Partha Chatterjee has distinguished between what he terms the problematic and thematic levels of counter oriental discourse in South Asia. Chatterjee attempts to show that in its relationship with western thought indigenous discourse was not ‘a simple relation of correspondence, even of derivation . . . nationalist thought is selective about what it takes from western rational thought.’ In fact it has the capacity to ‘argue in favour of political possibilities which colonialist thought refuses to admit’ (Chatterjee 1995: 41–3). This seems only a more jargonized way of illustrating the paradox initially identified by Rupert Emerson (1960), that Asian nationalists and Marxists in their determination to replace a decadent colonialism with an authentic new Asian identity informed by legacies from the pre-colonial past, nevertheless had to learn their ideology in the west before transferring the doctrine to an Asian context. As Arik Dirlif contends, ‘the nineteenthcentury Euro-American assault on imperial China both provoked the emergence of Chinese nationalism and, ironically, provided it with images of the Chinese past that could be incorporated in a new national identity’ (Dirlif 1996: 106). Perplexingly, then, only the subaltern can authorize representations of subalterneity and yet the subaltern cannot speak. In an attempt to explain away this postcolonial incoherence Robert Young considers it a deliberate strategy to disorient the reader so as to prevent ‘closure’ and thereby subvert the ‘authoritative’ mode of western discourse (Young 1990: 156–8). Leela Gandhi meanwhile advises the postmodern practice of ‘knowing differently – of knowing difference in and for itself’ (Ghandi 1999: 41) in order ‘therapeutically to retrieve the colonial past’

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Introduction 7

(5). In a similarly therapeutic mode, Fred Dallmayr seeks to move Beyond Orientalism (1996) while embracing its constituting ambivalence. Adumbrating Foucault and Said with Heidegger and Gadamer, Dallmayr postulates that a ‘self-decentring’ western thought required a ‘renunciation of the voluntaristic metaphysics of the will to interpret the other, a willingness to let the other be’ (Dallmayr 1996: xxiii). This ‘letting be’ would apparently allow ‘the other to gain freedom and identity while making room for cultural difference and diversity’ (3). This postmodern ethic endorsed both a Heideggerian suspicion of technology and a form of politics that hovered elusively ‘on the gateway of the form to the formless and the sound of the soundless’ (Dallmayr 1993: 76; see also Bauman 1993). Apart from endorsing a vapid mysticism, this style of thought is also suspicious of the liberal notion of freedom and the modernization ‘grand narrative’ more generally (Lyotard (1991) 1979: 61). The Heideggerian understanding of freedom, embraced by postmodernism, welcomed an Eastern notion of self-negation and an absence of desire (Dallmayr 1996: ch.8). Such a view, of course, contrasts diametrically with the classical liberal concept of negative liberty that consists in the ‘absence of obstacles to the fulfilment of a man’s desires’(Berlin 1975: xxxviii). For the postcolonialist this modernist ethic only sustains an orientalism that erects ‘western society into a universal standard’ and an Enlightenment model that postulates global rules of emancipation ‘without, however, mediating these rules through agonal dialogue’ with non-western cultural traditions (Dallmayr 1996: xxi). More precisely, ‘modernity . . . is nothing more than extrapolation and abstraction of certain specifics of western development.’ This ‘abstracted framework’ is then used to define and detect lack of development in ‘the Orients ’ (Sardar 1999: 78). Was this, in fact, the case? Significantly Said, and those who have modified Saidian discourse to take account of the subaltern Other and intercultural difference, have consistently neglected Raymond Schwab’s seminal study, La Renaissance Orientale (1950). Schwab particularly attended to those early nineteenth century European scholars and critics who were not only profoundly influenced by oriental forms of language and knowledge, but also wished to see Europe transformed by an orientally inspired renaissance.2 In other words, there already existed a late Enlightenment linguistic discourse, that as we shall see in Chapter 3, had anticipated in a number of ways the cross-cultural encounter and its decentring possibilities identified by Heidegger and Gadamer and eagerly awaited by their partisan postmodern and postcolonial acolytes.

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Certainly, such a project informed the career of Sir William ‘Oriental’ Jones whose contemporary editor considers Said’s caricature of the jurist, democrat, linguist and founder of the Bengal based Asiatic Society ‘utterly inadequate’ (Franklin 1987). Indeed, the fact that orientalists like Jones found in Indian myth and culture both a source of imagery to rejuvenate the decayed European palate and material for reflection on the nature of language and law presents problems for the notion that western scholars were willing accomplices in the European colonial mission. Interestingly, Schwab identified a category of scientific ‘orientalists’ that he distinguished from those writers from Goethe, through Flaubert to Rimbaud who used the East as a vehicle to explore their yearning for romanticism, exoticism and otherness. By contrast, for Said and postcolonialist discourse more generally, the philology of Jones or Renan necessarily elides into the febrile imagination of nineteenthcentury romantic poets and novelists. Said defends this questionable elision on the grounds that he detects an ‘insidious hubris’ (Said 1995: 115) in those who otherwise find the Eastern other more compelling than the materialist West. The ability to detect hubris where others find only admiration, curiosity and scientific interest, amplified by the technique of collapsing competing understandings into a single truth, enables Said and his postcolonial disciples to establish a totalizing orientalist vision. As all science and literature shared the same orientalist epistemology, different interpretations must be explained away by some version of hubris that permeates this distinctively European false consciousness. Indeed, only by collapsing understandings from different categorial provenances into a single epistemological orthodoxy can the orientalist critique sustain itself. Yet problematically such an all embracing ideology offers no explanation of why those Europeans who investigated Asian practices of government, self understanding, economics and language often arrived at very different understandings of them. The recourse to such questionable representational strategies amplified by a selective use of attenuated and impressionistic sources, earned Ernest Gellner’s admonition that the issue Said raised was ‘too important to be left to lit. crit’ (Gellner 1994a: 169). It is too important, firstly, because a variety of contemporary East Asian regimes and their statelicenced academics consistently dismiss any western attempt to criticize Asian economic or political performance on the grounds that it constitutes a new manifestation of orientalizing colonialism. Secondly, a number of neurotic western academic commentators have become so

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Introduction 9

inured to postcolonial guilt that they equally assume that any critical reflection upon contemporary East Asian political culture conceals an unconscious orientalism. This curious practice of western self loathing in fact dates from the counter cultural experience of the 1970s, the decade that also shaped the composition of Orientalism. The felt need to endorse the Eastern other in order to avoid the slur of imperialism inspired French Maoists and poststructuralists associated with the journal Tel Quel to celebrate the China of the Cultural Revolution. Philippe Sollers devoted the Autumn 1974 edition of Tel Quel to describing China as a recently achieved political utopia. Interestingly, the French radicals that eventually evolved the notion of deconstructionism considered the study of Mao ‘the number one imperative’ (Sollers 1974: 3). For the influential postmodern feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva the Tel Quel China trip inspired the bizarre assertion that the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s had achieved total gender equality and, further, that in so doing, the revolution merely intensified a continuing Chinese tradition of equality between the sexes (Kristeva 1974: 19–30, 1986: 99, 151). Liberated from the demons of imperialism by deconstruction, Kristeva could overlook two thousand years of Chinese patriachy. An analogous desire to avoid the slur of orientalism in their discussion of western attitudes to Asia leads contemporary western cultural theorists like Australian scholar-diplomat, Alison Broinowski, indiscriminately to bracket those Australian aesthetes who ‘appropriated’ Japanese, Balinese or Chinese caligraphy or pottery into the same suspect oriental category with racialist writers who saw Asia as the source of a ‘yellow peril’ threatening to swamp the immature and defenceless Australian federation (Broinowski 1992: 4–5, 30–1). Subsequently, both a western and Asian enthusiasm for a distinctive East Asian form of developmental capitalism in the period prior to the financial collapse of 1997, facilitated an academic and political orthodoxy that made it difficult to identify flaws in the Asian model precisely because criticism invoked the slur of ‘orientalism’. Clearly, as David Williams observes, the attack by both Said and the subaltern school ‘is insufficiently rigorous to justify the abandonment of Western social science’ (Williams 1996: 142). This is largely because the manner in which social and political theorists attempted to analyze the social structure and thought of the East is rarely addressed in either a systematic or even a genealogical manner by its orientalist critics. Indeed, most postcolonial discourse theory seems more at home with exposing representations in literary ‘texts’ or in film and music rather

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than addressing the empirical realm of social facts (see Gandhi: 11–17; Sardar: 85–106). Somewhat differently, even scholarly dissertations like Jerome Ch’en’s China and the West Society and Culture (1979) and Colin Mackerras’ Western Images of China (1989) tend indiscriminately to collect ‘images’ from travel writers, missionaries and popular novelists that present China as backward, exotic, brutal and decadent. Certainly these images proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century, but how, if at all, did they affect a social scientific analysis of Asian government and society? Moreover, those few social scientists that do attempt to trace the ‘the genealogies of sinological knowledge’ start from the negative assumption that western capitalism ‘distorted’ the understanding of China (Brook and Blue 1999: 6). Yet, as Henry Maine, writing on ‘The Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought’ (1875) maintained, any scientific analysis needed to distinguish between observable facts and often unsustainable ‘speculations about them’ (Maine 1974: 221). From the perspective of social science, Maine’s empiricism has to be preferable to a movable deconstructive feast of suspect observations culled from a variety of sources selectively chosen to disclose what has already been assumed, namely, a disfiguring western bias. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to examine how the orient in its East Asian manifestation has been depicted in European and subsequently North American social and political thought and what, if anything, this depiction tells us about the character of this social and political thought. In order to examine the pertinence of the charge of orientalism and the manner in which knowledge of China and East Asia affected the methodology of the human sciences subsequent chapters will consider the nature of this engagement. Chapter 1, therefore, examines the manner in which a discourse about China and the figure of Confucius affected European selfunderstanding from the seventeenth century onward. In particular, we shall explore how the dissemination of the accounts of the Jesuit missions and the translation of Confucian texts created an European audience for Chinese moral and political understandings. In this context the manner in which Enlightenment critics of European absolutism sought to employ East Asian understandings for reforming European moral, economic and political practice will be evaluated. The reasons for the discursive reversal of the previously positive image of China and the wider Asia-Pacific littoral opened up by European missionaries, navigators and traders in the early nineteenth century follows in Chapter 2. The reasons for this are in part a consequence of trade and the growing

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Introduction 11

need to bring China and East Asia more completely into the global trading system of Europe and particularly Britain. After the British Macartney mission of 1794 traders and missionaries of a Protestant persuasion offer a far more captious assessment of China and its Confucian moral and political legacy. Nevertheless, trade and diplomatic missions also afford the context for detailed studies of East Asian character and its relationship to rule, as well as new theories concerning the dispersion of language. Coterminously, but somewhat differently, the industrial, American and French revolutions that radically revise European self understanding and facilitate a new concern with history, self determination and progress at the end of the eighteenth century promote a generally negative assessment of Chinese civilization and government. The understanding of historical determinism, authenticity and reason that informs the philosophical histories written by J. G. Herder, J. G. Fichte, G. W. F. Hegel, F. Schlegel and others at the start of the nineteenth century established philosophic foundations for the study of progressive European and stagnant non-European civilzations. This forms the backdrop to the consideration of the place of China in the evolutionary social sciences as they developed in the course of the nineteenth century in Chapter 3. This entails a discussion of the liberal utilitarian understanding of China as it emerged in the writings of John Bowring, the utilitarian governor of Hong Kong, James Mill, Richard Jones and John Stuart Mill. This is followed by a consideration of the economic model of Asiatic despotism both in the writings of liberal economists and in the works of Marx and Engels. In this chapter we shall also consider the different position that China occupied in the sociological imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville and Auguste Comte. The impact of social Darwinism upon social and political thought about China in the second half of the nineteenth century is also evaluated, as it emerged in the developmental theories of Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor and J. K. Bluntschli. The evolutionary social science approach will be compared and contrasted with both the emergence of eugenic theorizing in the writings of A. de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain and with the writings of sinologist diplomats like Sir John Davis, W. Medhurst and H. Giles and academic sinologists like W. W. Williams. It will be observed that the latter often offered a more nuanced account of China, its values and potential than is found in the social Darwinist accounts of this period. Chapter 4 examines those theorists, notably, E. Durkheim and M. Weber, who decisively broke with theories of racial determinism and

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instead attempted to depict the emerging arrangements in Europe and North America in terms of institutions, structures and values that made a distinctively modern or industrial society function. This also led to the first sociological accounts of Asian values. We also examine the changing image of China’s historical development presented in the prewar sinology of K. Latourette, H. Cordier and M. Granet, together with attempts to explore the structure of Chinese thought by philosophers and literary theorists like Bertrand Russell, John Dewey and I. A. Rochards. The evolving concern with the character of linguistic and psychological difference and the manner in which it informs understandings of cultural difference in the anthroplogy of Ruth Benedict, and the political and social science of Harold Lasswell and C. Wright Mills will also be considered. Finally, in the context of totalizing accounts of civilization, this chapter will discuss the world histories pioneered by O. Spengler and A. Toynbee and the impact of speculations about challenge and response and burgeoning twentieth-century European disillusion upon the status of China in this discourse. Such civilizational views interestingly contrasted with the different understandings of intercultural exchange pioneered by Joseph Needham and Frederick Teggart. Finally, we examine how understandings of structure and function, bureaucratic rationality and political culture translated into American social and political science most notably through the work of Talcott Parsons and facilitated a distinctive postwar modernization thesis. In particular, the work of the American Social Science Research Council’s Comparative Politics Committee indicates that the modernization thesis manifested, over time, both a liberal, universalistic understanding of development together with a somewhat ambivalent assessment of the role of traditional understandings or culture in the nation building states that were considered necessary to fulfil the modernization enterprise. This distinctive view of the preconditions and stages that advanced or hindered modernization had profound implications for a new breed of area studies specialists who applied this understanding to social and political development in China and the ‘new states’ of East Asia. The paradoxes in, and changing contours of, the modernization approach to China and the new states will be discussed in relation to the work inter alia of Karl Deutsch, David Easton, Reinhard Bendix, Gregory Almond and Bingham Powell, S. P. Huntington, Lucian Pye and L. Binder. We shall also pay attention to the manner in which political and social science sought to model the crises and sequences of development and how this understanding continues to affect and structure thought about the process of change in China and Pacific Asia, not only

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Introduction 13

in the United States but also among the East Asian technocratic elites, often themselves the paradoxical product of North American graduate programmes. This chapter will also consider the neo-Marxist theories of dependency and world system that proposed an alternative view of development to the ‘liberal pluralist’ modernization thesis. Relatedly, we shall examine those following Barrington Moore who proposed a macro historical approach to development and subsequently Theda Skocpol who attended increasingly to the role of state capacity in the development process. This macro historical view of China will be contrasted with the developing images of China promulgated by sinologists and area studies specialists. Finally, we shall return to the question of orientalism through an examination of the question does modernity imply westernization? In this context, we shall examine how postcolonial discourse, particularly in its East Asian manifestation, has itself come to constitute an ideological resource upon which late modernizing states call in order both to defend the political character of their ruling arrangements and as a resource for modifying traditional high cultural understanding to the requirements of late modernity and the globalization process. In this context, we shall examine the notion of Asian values and trace the mutable image of Confucius and Confucianism from Couplet’s first translation through Weber and down to contemporary Singaporean scholar bureaucrats and other East Asian theorists of the somewhat orientalist vision of an ‘Asian Renaissance’ (Anwar 1996). We shall consider how values or ideology have problematically informed recent works of both an oriental and an occidental provenance such as Mahathir and Ishihara The Asia that Can Say No, He Beilin et al. China Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi Shuo Bu), Anwar Ibrahim’s The Asian Renaissance, and S. P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. We shall conclude by observing the pluralism that has informed European attempts to engage with East Asian cultural practice and the curious instability of all projects that attempt to identify an all embracing eastern ‘object’ of political reflection. To begin, then, if there is any substance to Saidian or post Saidian claims that an all pervasive Orientalism concealed a project both to categorize and colonialize, it should be immediately apparent in the way that European thinkers dealt with the growing awareness of China and the Chinese world from the late seventeenth century onward. It is to the unfolding of this encounter that we shall now turn.

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1 East Asia in the Early Modern European Imagination

Portez le flambeau solitaire, A ces faux sages d’Orient Parlez;est il plus de justice, Plus de candeur et moins de vice Chez nos devots de l’Occident?1 Ode sur la superstition Voltaire 1732 It is only from the seventeenth century that we can identify the beginnings of a continuous European engagement with China and the Asia-Pacific littoral. (Pinot 1932; Gernet 1985: 3; Spence 1985) From the outset the encounter assumed an essentially missionary character. The first serious attempts to offer an idea of China emerge in the accounts of the Jesuit missions to Beijing and Canton beginning with that of Matteo Ricci at the end of the sixteenth century. This Jesuit account evolved gradually in the course of the seventeenth century, but it was through it that we get both an initial idea of China and a European reaction to it. As Jacques Gernet observes, ‘it was under the influence of their own educations as Europeans’ that these missions ‘made their judgements on China’ (Gernet 1985: 6). What, then, was the Jesuit view of China and what impact did it have upon European political consciousness in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The first Jesuit mission of Fathers Ricci (1582–1610) and Michele Ruggieri drew attention not only to the antiquity of China but also to its philosophy and its superstitions. Nicolas Trigault, the leader of the second Jesuit mission, published Ricci’s views in his Histoire de l’expedition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine entrepris par les PP de la Compagnie de Jesus comprise en cinque livres . . . tirée des commentaires du 14

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East Asia in the Early Modern European Imagination 15

P. Matthieus Riccius (1618). This work not only made reference to the Confucian morality of the Imperial bureaucracy, but also described ‘Fohist’ or Buddhist (Pinot 1932: 284) superstitions and the ubiquity of fortune tellers among the common people.2 The subsequent Martino Martini mission of the mid-seventeenth century modified the by no means unflattering portrait left by Ricci. Martini placed much greater emphasis on the character of Chinese speculative thought and particularly the antiquity and sophistication of Chinese chronological records. In his Historiae Sinicae Decus Prima . . . (1658) Martini published the first chronology taken from the Chinese annals. Applying the system of the sixty-year cycle, he traced the first year of the first Emperor, Qin shi huang di, to 2697 years before Christ, that is to 600 years before the Flood according to calculations made from the Old Testament chronology. Such revelations threatened to explode the foundations of traditional Christian eschatology. The explosive however, even in an era of European political and religious turmoil, took a while to detonate. On the basis of Martini’s calculations sceptics like George Horn in England and Isaac Vossius, a peripatetic Dutch freethinker, elaborated the view that as the Chinese records predated the Old Testament these annals might be both a more accurate and a more authentic reflection of the initial ordering of the world. Similar speculation by John Webb (1669) in England at the end of the seventeenth century promoted the view that Chinese was an original pre-diluvian language, while in France, La Peyrère, came to the heterodox conclusion that the Chinese people were a pre-Adamitic survival (see Blue 1999: 63). Jesuit writers, increasingly conscious of the heretical implications contained in their Chinese histories, made elaborate attempts to fit the Jesuit reports of Ancient China into a more acceptable European teleology. Thus Father Louis Couplet in his Tabula chronologica trium familiarum imperialium monarchiae sinicae (Paris 1686), proved, at least to the satisfaction of the theological faculty of the Sorbonne, that Chinese history actually dated from the Flood. Indeed, Couplet speculated that Noah’s Arc had eventually hit land somewhere in Central Asia. The Chinese, therefore, constituted the ‘prima gentis’. Analogously, Peter Alix (1681) contended that the Chinese were descended from the lost biblical tribe of Seth. This understanding of the Chinese as a lost Old Testament tribe, speaking the original tongue, profoundly affected later philological and eugenic speculation about the common source of language and a shared basis of civilizational development.

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Thus the initial reception of the earliest accounts of Jesuit missionaries radicalized European self understanding. They inspired an interrogation of the authenticity of the Old Testament, upset conventional exegesis and threatened the traditional European understanding of history. Clearly such revelations demanded further inquiry into the nature of Chinese law and the character of their ancient institutions. For, if Chinese civilization dated back to Noah, its ancient works might more accurately reflect the morality practiced by the chosen people before the Flood. Its sacred texts, moreover, might shed further light on the mystery of the creation. Subsequent Jesuit sinology suggested that the Chinese could be practicing a system of belief that would not be inherently antithetic to Christianity and which merely required amplification by the revelation of Christ’s death and God’s Grace. In sum, the translation of Chinese texts together with explicatory commentaries by Jesuits like Couplet, Martini and subsequently Le Comte and Du Halde, which came to constitute the primary sources for the European understanding of China, depicted the Chinese as an ancient civilization with a notion of heaven (tian guo) and God (shang di) who could by a process of Jesuit inspired accommodation be syncretized into a Christian eschatology. This ‘Confucian–Christian synthesis’ consistently promulgated by the Jesuits from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century (Mungello 1988: 254) however, aroused, or more accurately, revived suspicion of Jesuit ethical practice that had troubled both the Catholic and Protestant moral conscience since the late sixteenth century in Europe. Indeed, China became the curious mis en scene for a continuing theological battle about the understanding of revelation and grace that had haunted Europe since the Reformation. In France, it culminated in an acerbic dispute over the Chinese ceremonies or ‘rites’ that culminated with the condemnation in the first decade of the eighteenth century of several Jesuit positions. The conflict initially concerned Jesuit casuistry, but expanded to involve considerations of the ‘philosophic’ sin and the utility of the Jesuit strategy towards an ultimately pagan culture. It had been central to the post-Tridentine vocation of the Jesuits that they constituted a missionary order. They were, milites Christii, but they were not to martyr themselves unnecessarily. In order to preserve the faith, therefore, their ‘probabilist’ casuistry that permitted equivocation also facilitated a strategic accommodation to local circumstances especially when confronted by a hostile power.

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The sixteenth century Jesuit missions to Asia, that followed in the wake of first Portuguese and subsequently French attempts to exploit the spice routes to the East Indies, took with them these controversial ethical tactics first practiced in Protestant Europe. The first missions, Xavier’s to Goa and Macao and subsequently Ricci’s to China, realized that to be effective they had to win the support of local pagan rulers. Following Ricci’s advice, the Jesuits deliberately cultivated the Chinese literati in order to promulgate the faith (Spence 1985; Mungello 1989). In China such a strategy seemed peculiarly appropriate because, unlike the superstitious common people who followed the ‘Bonzes’, the Imperial Court and the mandarin intelligentsia practiced the rule of reason, worshipped heaven and followed a Confucian morality that the Jesuits maintained could be adapted to Christianity (Pinot 283–313; Gernet 1985: 40). From the first Jesuit mission of Ricci, the Jesuits deliberately promulgated an image of the rational Chinese literati (Rule 1986: 50–8). Subsequently, Father Louis Le Comte (1696) contended that the Jesuits might make use of any methods that human prudence offered in order to advance the faith in China. Hence Jesuits skilled in Mathematics, like Adam Schaal, ‘had most advanced the cause of religion in China’ (Pinot: 47) by astonishing the Imperial Court with their accurate calculation of solar and lunar eclipses. In order to convert the Literati, moreover, the Jesuits had, they contended, first to assimilate Chinese doctrine in order to persuade the Chinese intelligentsia of the truths of revealed religion. Thus, between 1687 and 1688, the Jesuit Fathers Incoretta, Herdtrich, Rougement and Couplet published their Confucius Sinarum Philosophus sive Scientia Sinensis Latine Exposita ‘one of the supreme achievements of Jesuit accommodative scholarship in China’ (Mungello 1989: 247). This translation of the four Confucian classics namely The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects and the Mencius constituted the cumulation of a century of Jesuit investigation into Confucianism and made it available to a European readership. The first Jesuit sinologists, moreover, deliberately used ‘the spiritual ambiguity of the ancient Chinese and early Confucian tradition to forge a sympathetic treatment of the Confucian literati’ (Mungello 1989: 249). Their efforts subsequently constituted both a source for future missions and evidence to European readers of the humanistic moral and political philosophy of Confucianism (Rule 1986: 122). In the first decades of the eighteenth century the French Jesuit

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J. B. Du Halde amplified this knowledge with an edition of letters describing Jesuit experiences of Chinese government, geography, infrastructure and moral practice in Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses Écrites des Missions Étrangers par quelques missionaires de la compagnie de Jesus (1713–24) and the hugely influential Description. . . . de la Chine (1733), consulted by ‘almost all the important mid and late eighteenth century writers’ (Rule 185). These works transmitted a generally positive picture of Chinese ethical practice for European consumption, in order to defend the Jesuit policy of accommodation. Jesuits, like Couplet, further asserted that the missions could accommodate Confucianism because it was essentially a civil morality, not a religious code. He went on to argue that the rites performed by the Chinese Emperor were essentially secular and had no particular religious significance. In articulating this view, Couplet only elaborated the position outlined by the first Jesuit mission. Thus, Matteo Ricci had observed that the imperial court possessed ‘neither priests nor ministers of religion, neither solemn rites to be guarded, nor precepts or commandments imposed, nor spiritual chiefs charged to declare or promulgate the doctrine and to admonish those that transgress it. Moreover, they do not recite prayers either together or individually. Finally, they believe that the Emperor only must offer homages and sacrifice to the King of Heaven. Their true temple . . . is this Confucius.’ (Pinot: 96–7) Such a view, and the sophistry that it entailed, however, seemed anathema to many non-Jesuits. Significantly, other Catholic missions to the East, like the Société des Missions Étrangers, condemned the Imperial rites as dangerous pagan superstitions. In France, Jansenists like Blaise Pascal and Antoine Arnauld mounted a telling critique of the Jesuit missions and their syncretic practice (Pinot: 94–5). Arnauld averred that the doctrine practiced by the Chinese Emperor sounded even in its Jesuitized rendition like atheism. Alternatively, if there was any substance to Chinese religion, it looked suspiciously like the Deism propounded by Locke and Toland which had found influential supporters amongst the Molinists at the Sorbonne. It consequently followed as Bishop Bossuet, another influential Jesuit detractor, argued that such a doctrine allowed the possibility of salvation without grace. As Bossuet evinced, in a letter to Pope Alexander VII, this constituted the philosophic sin: Here, indeed, they derive solace from China, blinded by that people and their immense arrogance, they detract from the wisdom of their

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parents. By their practice grace is questioned. The pagan transgresses nature and deserves eternal punishment, but they deny and excuse them maintaining that ignorance of God and his law does not merit such harsh treatment. (Ibid) The eventual outcome of this quarrel over the Chinese Rites saw the Papacy condemning the Jesuit strategy of accommodation in the Bull Ex Illa Dei (1715). Subsequently, Benedict VII’s Bull Ex Quo Singularii (1742) more completely denounced the practices of the Jesuit missionaries. Shortly after this, the French Jesuit order was itself temporarily dissolved and the first chapter of Europe’s encounter with China came to a close. This notwithstanding, the Jesuits, in the course of a bitter struggle over the correct method of promulgating the faith, left a collection of reflections and works from which most eighteenth-century speculation about China derived. Moreover, from the perspective of a developing sinology, it is quite clear that the Jesuits went to great lengths to place a favourable construction upon Chinese culture and values. Thus the Couplet production of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus sive Scientia Sinensis (1688), includes a preface that both demonstrates Confucian compatibility with Jesuit religious teaching and presents Confucius as a ‘most wise . . . master of moral philosophy’ whose practical reasoning governed by the law of nature informed both imperial governance, moral and civil law (Couplet et al. 1687: iii–viii). Similarly, the compilations that formed Le Comte’s Nouveaux Memoires sur l’état présent de la Chine (1697), Le Gobien’s L’Histoire de l’édit de l’empereur de la Chine (1699) and subsequently J. B. Du Halde’s edition of Lettres Édifiantes et curieuse écrites des memoires par quelques missionaires de la compagnie (1713–24), J. M. Moyriac de Mailla encyclopaedic thirteen volume Histoire de la Chine (1777–85) and the most influential source for eighteenth century thought, Du Halde’s Description . . . de la Chine present a ‘fruitful’ image of China (Du Halde 1733: 236); China that both justified and expanded the Jesuit strategy outlined by Ricci at the end of the sixteenth century (Pinot 1932: 139). Central to this strategy is the view that reason informed Chinese moral practice and that its major sage Confucius was a secular saint guided by its pure light unencumbered by artifice. Indeed, so pure was the reasoning that the Jesuit sinologists placed him in the same league as Socrates. For, his philosophy was ‘to obey the Lord of Heaven, to honour and fear him, to love our neighbour as ourselves, never to take

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our passions for our rule of conduct, to submit to Reason, [and] to listen to it in all things’ (Du Halde 1724: 298). Biased to justify Jesuit strategy, these sources, nevertheless, provided an abundance of material for philosophic reflection on the nature of government, tolerance, morality and the rule of right reason. Paradoxically, despite the Jesuit promulgation of documents that offered an image of China that justified their missionary strategy, Enlightenment philosophers and scientists discovered in these accounts precisely what the Jesuits denied. In other words, the Enlightenment thinkers of the early and mid-eighteenth century, found in China a model of a moral society governed by natural reason and freed from the superstitious fetters of religion that had imposed a cake of custom on European institutions. French, German and to a lesser extent British philosophers looked to the China represented in the curious and edifying observations of Couplet, Le Comte and Du Halde to confirm the intuition that morality might exist independently of theology and that man could conduct himself and his social relations by a moral science unencumbered by supernatural injunction. Thus, at the close of the seventeenth century, the German philosopher G. W. Leibniz recognized the utility of the Chinese language and its civil morality for European development (Lach in Ching and Oxtoby 1992: 116). Initially, Leibniz considered the Chinese people the prima gentis and its language the key to a universal language. Leibniz, consequently became instrumental in the emergence of a German philological enterprise dedicated to what Andreas Muller believed he had discovered in the 1670s, namely the clavis sinica or key to the Chinese language. Interestingly the pursuit of an original language root which preoccupied European philology for most of the eighteenth century assumed ‘a shared logical and linguistic structure between China and Europe’ (Mungello 1989: 246). Confucius’ civic morality, moreover might, Leibniz contended, serve as the basis of a universal moral science. In his scheme for a progressive world civilization Leibniz envisaged an alliance between China and Europe. Consequently, he became interested in the Jesuit missions to China during the 1680s. He communicated extensively with the Jesuit missionaries Bouvet and Grimaldi. In his Novissima Sinica (1697–99) Leibniz proposed a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas between Chinese and European scholars: And so if we are their equals in the industrial arts, and ahead of them in contemplative sciences, certainly they surpass us (though it

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is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts ethics and politics adapted to the present life and use of morals. (17) Leibniz identified a Chinese preoccupation with a practical ethics that ramified the moral and political order. Such evidently rational rule particularly appealed to the emerging European Enlightenment intelligentsia. What had most worried the Jansenists in the Jesuit accounts, paradoxically, constituted the basis of China’s appeal to Enlightenment rationalists. The paradox is not hard to explain. Leibniz, Locke, Toland and Bayle, in the earlier part of the century, and Hume and Voltaire, from the mid-eighteenth century, sought to escape the enthusiasm and fanaticism of European, Christian, religious fundamentalists through the Enlightenment project of transforming morality into a science. Leibniz, and subsequently, Voltaire, argued that what Europe had only just come to realize through Lockean psychology and Newtonian physics, the Chinese had known from the earliest historical times and had sustained that knowledge through the practical virtue of a Confucianized mandarinate. In the light of the reported accounts of the efficiency and stability of Chinese rule it consequently seemed obvious to look to China for guidance most specifically in the areas of public morality and government. Confucian precepts could, it was felt, provide a source of guidance to the absolutist governments that had emerged across Europe in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). The post-1648 solution to the problem of religious difference had been the doctrine of cuis regio eius religio and the further recognition that a strict separation should be maintained between the public and the private realm. Consequently, raison d’état or Hobbesian contract legitimated the absolute ruler taking any action he deemed necessary to maintain the public peace. By the end of the seventeenth century, absolutist thinkers like Bossuet and La Bruyere had established the view that the monarch was a patriach whose interest should nonetheless coincide with that of the people. Although such a clear separation of politics from morality solved the religious issue, it did not resolve the question of the manner in which the ruler exercised his patriachal right. Frenchmen might agree that L’état was Louis, but they worried about the absence of political morality or a science of government. In the course of the eighteenth century, absolutism became increasingly subject to a Lockean law of public opinion (Koselleck 1988: 53–8). Freed from religious fundamentalism,

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the Enlightenment intelligentsia became increasingly vocal critics of the quotidian conduct of increasingly corrupt monarchical rule. French sceptics favourably contrasted the pagan Chinese Emperor’s toleration of a new Jesuit mission in 1685 with the moral bankruptcy associated with the cynical Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the same year (Pinot: 405–22). It was in the context of moralizing the activity of rulers like Louis XIV that Academicians like J. B. Régis noted the rationalism of Chinese rule and its apparent conformity with the principles of Descartes. At the same time another Academician, the devotee of Gassendi, doctor and traveller to the Mogul Empire, François Bernier, derived from Couplet’s translation of Confucius, a political science for Princes published in the Journal des Savans (1688). Bernier argued that Confucian precepts taught the prince to have ‘no other interest than that of his subjects, loving them, like the good father loves his own children’ (Bernier 1688: 25–40). In this view Confucian precepts were not abstract speculations, but a concrete political science with a practical object. The moral and political maxims that Confucius taught might usefully, in Bernier’s view, instruct ‘young princes in all the countries of the world’. Bernier’s translation interpolated the Couplet translation to emphasize the identity of interest of prince and people and evince that the moral example of the ruler determines the moral conduct of the subject. Thus if the Prince is virtuous ‘so will the people be virtuous, if he is not the people will follow this example and abandon themselves to disorder’ (ibid). The great principle of government, therefore, was love. The Prince consequently must love what the people love and hate what the people hate. Rule based on this principle, Bernier termed absolutism, not despotism. The excellence of Chinese government consisted in the fact that the Emperor was inculcated with a moral sense from an early age. Chinese absolutism in consequence required no constitutional law as it adhered to moral principle. Interestingly, this positive view of Chinese rule differed profoundly from Bernier’s far more captious account of his Travels in the Mogul Empire, where he spent the years between 1656 and 1668. In ‘Hindoostan’, Bernier maintained, the absence of private property and the tyrannical rule of ‘Timonists, Governors and Revenue con-tractors’ reduced peasants and artisans to indigence, obstructed commercial activity and impoverished the towns (Bernier 1914: 226–7).3 For the French enlightenment, by contrast, China’s great achievement was its wealth founded on a public morality that informed both

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political and economic practice without any reference to constitutional restraint. For Bernier and, later, Etienne Silhouette (1731) and Marshal Vauban, reason ruled China and the economic benefits were impressive. Du Halde’s description of the economic productivity and order of the Chinese state demonstrated the utility of its practical morality. In particular, French ministers like Vauban and subsequently, Turgot, and economic thinkers like Quesnay, Hume and even Adam Smith, commended the management of agriculture, labour and communications within the Celestial Empire. In the first decade of the eighteenth century Vauban used the model of the efficient Chinese administration of agriculture in order to promote domestic reforms that gave French peasant farmers greater security of tenure. He particularly praised the high status accorded to farmers in China and the Chinese bureaucracy’s accurate statistics at a time when the French King, administering a much smaller realm, had no such information. Maximilien Misson in his account of the Voyage et Aventures de Francois Legaut (1708) similarly admired this first Asian economic model. A significant factor for both Misson and Vauban’s praise of Chinese agricultural practice was its apparent success in addressing the problem of indigence at a time when Europe found rural poverty an increasingly intractable problem. Chinese economic efficiency, Misson attributed to the practicality of Confucian ethics. Following the doctrine of the mean, the wealthy protected and did not exploit the poor. In Misson’s view the fundamental Confucian law underlying the polity was ‘remember that all the world lives and that if it is possible all the world should live happily’. Mason observed, with obvious reference to contemporary absolutist France, that Confucius condemned as ‘executioners of the people’ those who, entrusted with their welfare, whether Emperor, mandarin or satrap, abused that office (Pinot 402). In Germany, similarly, enlightenment figures like Christian Wolff commended Chinese government as an ‘illustrious example’ of philosophical government, while the Prussian jurist J. H. G. von Justi favoured a German version of a Confucian style civil service (Blue 1999: 67). Directed by this practical reason China not only worked economically, it also constituted a model of tolerance and stability. This tolerance, exemplified by successive Chinese Emperors’ attitude to the Jesuit missions, offered further possibilities for exposing the comparative deficiency and irrationality of contemporary European mores. Employing a rational Chinese mandarin in London or Paris to comment on questionable European values became an attractive satirical device.

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Writers like Boyer d’Argens, Oliver Goldsmith and Voltaire used the wise and tolerant mandarin to draw attention to the inadequacy of European sexual, ethical and political behaviour (see Blue 1999: 67). Hence Goldsmith’s admirable Lien Chi Altangi comminates against the mutability of European taste: The polite arts in this country are subject to as many revolutions as its laws or politics; not only the objects of fancy and dress, but even of delicacy and taste are directed by the capricious influence of fashion (Goldsmith 1762 (1966): vol. 2 176–7). By contrast as his communicant in China Fum Hoam observes: When I compare the history of China with that of Europe, how do I exult in being a native of that kingdom which derives its original from the sun. Upon opening the Chinese history, I there behold an antient extended empire, established by laws which nature and reason seemed to have dictated. The duty of children to their parents, a duty which nature implants in every breast, forms the strength of that government which has subsisted from time immemorial. Filial obedience is the first and greatest requisite of a state . . . By this the state may be said to resemble one family, of which the Emperor is protector, father and friend. (177) Goldsmith, who elaborated this panegyric from Du Halde’s Description, goes on to describe China, through the character of Fum Hoam, as ‘this happy region, sequestered from the rest of mankind’ that witnessed a ‘succession of princes who in general considered themselves as the fathers of their people; a race of philosophers who bravely combated idolatry, prejudice and tyranny at the expense of their private happiness and immediate reputation’ (ibid). Voltaire in plays like Orphelin de la Chine (1755), also adapted from a report in Du Halde, his Essai sur les Moeurs (1756) and his Philosophy of History (1765) dedicated to the Russian Empress Catherine, made a similar point. The Chinese, he wrote, had ‘brought morality to perfection which is the first of the sciences.’ Indeed, ‘their vast and populous empire was governed like a family whose monarch was the father . . . while we were wandering in the forests of the Ardennes.’ (Voltaire n.d.: 399) Religion and morality in China was, of course, like Voltaire’s own, ‘wise, august, free from all superstition and all barbarity.’ Thus, the

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rational religion of the Emperors was never sullied by imposture or ‘burdened with absurd innovations which are supported one against another by arguments as absurd as themselves, the rage of which has at length placed the poignard in the hands of fanatics led on by factions.’ (Ibid) In their detached tolerance, Voltaire maintains, with obvious reference to the political and religious discord in Europe, ‘the Chinese are particularly superior to all nations of the universe’ (400; see also Pocock 1999: 102–7).4 For Voltaire, like Bernier before him, believed China’s moral superiority resided in its Confucian practical wisdom. Confucius’ peculiar virtue lay in the fact that ‘he framed neither new opinion nor new rites. He neither pretended to be an inspired man nor a prophet. He was a magistrate who taught the ancient laws. We sometimes say very improperly, “the religion of Confucius”, [yet] he had no other than that of the first sages, he recommends nothing but virtue, [and] preaches no mysteries’ (ibid). Centrally, Voltaire contended, Confucianism recognized the intimate connection between the character of the ruler and the capacity to rule. Thus ‘in order to learn to govern, we should pass our whole life in correcting ourselves.’ By practicing an ‘exact policy’ consistently, the Chinese Emperors had transcended fluctuating opinions, factions and fashion. The people consequently learnt to ‘fear a law always present’ rather than demand new laws ‘in the future’. Such precise rule, in Voltaire’s judgement, was efficient but not oppressive. Consequently, in The Chinese Catechism (1764), a dialogue between a scholar and a prince, Voltaire has the Confucian scholar, Cau, observe, ‘toleration you know is the principle of the Chinese and indeed of Asiatic government.’ His prince continues, ‘by the law of Nature everyone may believe what he will, as well as eat what he will. A physician is not to kill his patients for not observing the diet he has prescribed to them; neither has a sovereign a right to hang his subjects for not thinking as he thinks; but he has a right to prevent disturbances and with prudent measures he will very easily root out superstitions of all kinds.’ (Voltaire 1764 (1936) vol. 1: 461–72) With both Goldsmith in England, Christian Wolff in Germany and Voltaire in France as well as in the work of lesser known writers of the classical age of Enlightenment like Misson and Argens, China serves a critical literary, historical, moral, economic and political purpose. The wise Chinese sage, in the political or historical treatise, travel novel, letter, or dialogue, draws attention to a rational and correct moral and political order that contrasted favourably with the weakness,

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corruption and superficiality of contemporary European politics, manners and morals. It also provided the model for enlightened reformation. China represented an absolutist society perfectly ordered according to reason and organized around a monarch whose only interest was that of the public. The myth of China and Chinese virtue, whatever the actual merits of its society, enabled Enlightenment moralists to sustain a practical critique of contemporary European politics. Such criticism, moreover could be presented subtly, seeking not to undermine despotism, but merely to enlighten it. Utopia, the philosophes contended could be realized through ‘innoculer l’esprit du Chine’ (Pinot: 9). The apotheosis of Chinese influence on European moral, political and especially economic thought, however, came not in the political writings of Voltaire, or Christian Wolff, but in the political economy of François Quesnay. Surgeon to Mme De Pompadour, Quesnay exercised a considerable influence in the court of Louis XV. In the course of the 1750s, Quesnay developed the theory of physiocracy, or the economic understanding that all wealth derived from land. This theory profoundly affected the subsequent development of economic thought. In Le Despotisme en Chine (1767) Quesnay claimed to derive this physiocratic understanding from a close study of Chinese economic and governmental practice and elaborated from it a fully integrated theory of enlightened despotism. Like his fellow philosophes, Quesnay found in China the model of a perfectly regulated state. (Quesnay 1767 (1946) vol. 2: 109–38). Yet Quesnay further discerned in Chinese agricultural and administrative practice, a rational society that conformed to the physiocratic laws of nature and formed a model for all political order. ‘A systematic digest, worthy to be used as a model for all states’ (vol. 2: 264). Quesnay maintained that a natural order composed of physical and moral laws affected all human activity. The physical law, he asserted, ‘regulated the progress of every physical event advantageous to the human race, whereas the moral, constitutive law regulated all moral action’ (ibid: 264–5). These laws formed the moral and political basis of government. Given this natural determinism, Quesnay contended that the body politic demanded a tutelary authority to govern by positive laws that reflected or confirmed this ‘irrefragable’ natural order. Such an authority could not be arbitrary. Constitutional systems that mixed or balanced political authority or that gave exclusive power to

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the people, the elite or the monarch were in Quesnay’s view inadequate. Such authority would become partial, self-interested and facilitate, not a true reflection of the natural order, but discord. Properly understood, rule required ‘a unique and impartial authority’, (268) united ‘under a head who alone holds the executive power and the power of compelling all citizens to the observance of the laws, of assuring the rights of all against all, of the weak against the strong, of preventing and suppressing unjust encroachments and usurpations’ (ibid). In Quesnay’s view, therefore, a truly enlightened despot constituted the ‘immovable foundation of the perfect government’. Such a style of rule offered the enticing prospect of constant supervision of the ‘economic order of the nation’. The physiocratically informed despot conscious of his responsibility to the natural order, would see that ‘his interest’ properly understood ‘always agrees with that of the nation’. Aware of the scientific basis of this relationship the despot and his tribunals continuously assess the impact that positive law might have upon the natural physical laws ‘which affect the annual reproduction of the wealth of the nation’ (271). European governments, monarchical or republican, had, in Quesnay’s view, neglected the scientific study of wealth. Instead of applying physiocratic theory, European monarchs undermined both political stability and the agricultural production upon which it rested by arbitrary taxation. By contrast, the Chinese, who had pioneered physiocracy, taxed only a proportion of the net product of the land. The enlightened Chinese Emperor studied the natural physical order and framed appropriate laws in accordance with the natural circulation of wealth. An enlightened European governor would, therefore, study Chinese practice. The despot must become a skilled manager of the national product. This required the sedulous application of reason’s latest tool that ‘great science . . . that underlies the government of nations’, namely economics. As Quesnay noted, this science, newly developed in Europe, had been taught immemorially in China to the Confucian literati. This virtuocracy thus corresponded to the good gardener who ‘must remove the moss that injures the tree, but he must avoid cutting into the bark through which this tree receives the sap that makes it grow’ (274). The Chinese, like the physiocrats, agreed that all positive or man made law derived from and depended upon the natural order. Any conflict between the two caused instability, whereas their harmonization ensured ‘rewards’. It was not, therefore, ‘special circumstances’ that had ensured ‘the perpetuity of Chinese government’ but

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‘an inherently stable order’ that consistently reflected the natural order. Ultimately, Quesnay concluded that: Ignorance is always the principal cause of the most disastrous errors of government, of the ruin of nations, and of the decadence of empires, from which China has always been so securely preserved by the ministry of the scholars, who occupy the foremost rank in the nation and who are as attentive in guiding the people by the light of reason as in subjecting the government clearly to the natural and immutable laws which constitute the essential order of nations. (304) Quesnay’s work and that of the physiocrat school deeply influenced later eighteenth century political and economic thought. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations referred to the influential ‘sect’ of French economists, and both Parson Malthus and David Hume commented critically on their works (Smith (1776) 1964 vol. 2: 300). Mirabeau in his funeral oration maintained that Quesnay’s theory of wealth was ‘one of the three great inventions that have given stability to political science since the world began’ (ibid). The fashionable cult of the enlightened despot that the physiocrats inspired even led impressionable European monarchs to imitate the rites of the Chinese Emperor. The Dauphin features in a number of paintings of the late eighteenth century holding a model plough, whereas the more completely enlightened Hapsburg Emperor, Joseph II, actually took up ploughing to indicate his physiocratic enlightenment.

Eighteenth century critics of virtuous China At the end of the eighteenth century in Germany, the United Kingdom and especially in France there existed, then, a positive understanding of Chinese civilization. Both the Jesuit and rationalist inspired images of China were politically influential and fashionable. Not only did Goldsmith and Voltaire write satires and plays drawn from Chinese themes, the cognoscenti embraced the cult of Chinoiserie, they drank tea from China cups, decorated their houses with Adam wallpaper or Fragonard paintings depicting Chinese pastoral scenes and constructed Gardens, like the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, according to the Chinese style complete with pagoda and ornamental lake. (Reichwein 1925). Catherine the Great even built a complete model Chinese village. Although less advanced in science and medicine,

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China, for the European Enlightenment, constituted a source of tolerance, taste and political and economic utility, untainted by the corrosive poison of religious fanaticism. Moreover, its economic and moral thought intimated a physiocratic science of rule that Europeans had only inchoately grasped. What Europe discovered in Chinese government was stability, a cult of reason, efficient agriculture based on an economic science and a moral practice which rendered crime and indigence virtually unknown. Such an estimation suggests neither a narrow minded xenophobia, nor grounds for colonization. It might, however, suggest a one-sided depiction of China and its cultural legacy. What we might ask happened to alter or reverse this favourable eighteenth century image of enlightened China? There was in fact from at least the late seventeenth century a countervailing interpretation that questioned both the Jesuit and subsequently the early Enlightenment interpretation of the rationality of Chinese language government and morality. As early as 1668 John Wilkins of the Royal Society, while acknowledging the Chinese language ‘much talked of’, considered it ‘strangely complicated . . . difficult’ and ‘exceedingly equivocal’. It thus constituted an ‘imperfect’ basis for a universal philosophical language (Wilkins 1668: 10, 450). From a moral perspective, Jansenists like Antoine Arnauld and Eusebe Renaudot viewed not only the Jesuit strategy of conversion, but also their reports with a high degree of suspicion. In his Anciennes Relations des Indes et de la Chine (1718) Renaudot criticized Confucian ethics for being mere ‘rules of experience’ uninformed by any ‘abstract principle or transcendental imperative’. He writes, It is difficult to understand how one can admire a morality and a politics which has no principles, but which consists only in some vulgar sentences and examples extracted from history and without any examination of the actions and human passions of motives and ends. Indeed, it is certain that the Chinese have no fixed opinions on the immortality of the soul and are convinced that the recompense for good actions and the punishment of evil ones occur in this life. (Pinot: 406) The Chinese, according to the Jansenists, lacked an authentic moral doctrine. This view was shared by both Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Nicholas Malebranche in France. In his Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien avec un philosophe chinois (1707) Malebranche argued that the Chinese view

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of li (principle) that occurred in the Zhu zi (Chu Hsi) neo-Confucianist school, was reducible to a notion of reason informing a materialist world. This for Malebranche was atheism. Consequently, he condemned Confucianism for its ‘many correspondencies’ with ‘the impieties of Spinoza’. The sage not only taught arbitrary precepts, he also contributed to atheism (Buckley 1987:153) This captious understanding of Chinese moral practice received additional support from Commander George Anson’s account of his A Voyage round the World (1744 (1832)). Although an industrious and ingenious people, Anson’s experiences in China led him to conclude that their ‘principal excellency seems to be imitation; and they accordingly labour under the poverty of genius’ (in Spence 1997: 55). For Anson Chinese moral practice and even the artificiality of the language itself constituted a vast confidence trick (Spence: 56). Anson’s account of his trip circulated widely in Europe. It even influenced Louis Secondat the Baron de Montesquieu, whose L’esprit des lois (1748) offered the first systematic repudiation of Chinese ethical and governmental practice. Significantly, prior to formulating the contrasting ethics that informed different forms of rule, Montesquieu had initially shared the dominant early Enlightenment view that Confucian morality and its implementation by a Mandarinate was conducive to the rule of reason (Pinot: 409–10). After 1717, however, Montesquieu rejected the fashionable Enlightenment orthodoxy concerning China. He came instead to prioritize a mixed and balanced polity composed of democratic, aristocratic and monarchical elements, maintained through a judicious separation of powers, that facilitated the principle of virtue. From this perspective, simple despotism, however enlightened, could not provide stability. China, the despotic ideal type, Montesquieu contended, had experienced at least twenty two dynasties and the seeds of decay were inherent in the system. Thus, each began with ‘virtue, attention and vigilance’ which prevailed ‘in the commencement of the dynasties, and failed in the end.’ (Montesquieu 1949: 101). It naturally followed: that emperors trained up in military toil, who had compassed the dethroning of a family immersed in pleasure should adhere to virtue. . . . But after the three or four first princes, corruption, luxury, indolence and pleasure possessed their successors; they shut themselves up in a palace; their understanding was impaired; their life was shortened; the family declined; the grandees rose up; the

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eunuchs gained credit; none but children were set upon the throne; the palace was at variance with the empire; a lazy set of people that dwelt there ruined the industrious part of the nation; the emperor was killed or destroyed by a usurper, who founded a family, the third or fourth successor of which went and shut himself up in the very same place. (Ibid 123) Despotism also demanded fear, rather than virtue, as its governing principle. The preservation of peace and tranquillity formed the principle object of government. No transcendental consideration informed law and morality only a concern for subordination. Consequently, the empire was ‘formed on the plan of the government of a family’. In such a fragile arrangement, ‘if you diminish the paternal authority, or even if you retrench the ceremonies that express your respect for it, you weaken the reverence due to magistrates. . . . Retrench but one of these habits and you overturn the state.’ The failure to inculcate these habits, moreover, led to anarchy or brutality. Ultimately, ‘it was the cudgel that governed China’ (123). This preoccupation with order had debilitating moral consequences. The Chinese legal codes emphasized obedience and the need to be industrious, at the expense of personal integrity. In Montesquieu’s opinion, Confucian ethics condoned lying and deception. Indeed, the ‘Chinese are the greatest cheats upon earth’ (ibid). Compiling his entry on Chinese philosophy for L’encyclopédie, the Enlightenment project par excellence, Denis Diderot was less captious than Montesquieu. Nevertheless, he detected serious defects in the Chinese world view. Concisely reviewing the evidence for and against Confucian morality, Diderot concluded that it was surprising that a people that possessed so much wisdom had not done something to correct the deficiencies of a language that endlessly multiplied an infinity of characters (Diderot 1772 (1976) vol. 6: 431). Ultimately, Diderot found l’ésprit Chinois too complaisant. While China possessed enduring traditions, uniformity of government and durable laws, it lacked the curiosity, spirit of inquiry and sense of dissatisfaction necessary to personal, artistic and scientific progress (ibid: 433). In an analogously Olympian vein, the Marquis de Condorcet, reviewing The Progress of the Human Mind, contended that a ‘priestly caste’ ruled China and had undermined its progressive potential. He wrote from his imprisonment in the Bastille,

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For here we have a people who seem to have outstripped all other nations in the arts and the sciences only to find themselves overtaken by them all in turn; a people who, for all their knowledge of artillery, have been unable to prevent themselves from being conquered by barbarians; a country where knowledge of all the sciences is open to all and represents the only door to advancement, and yet where the sciences, being subject to absurd prejudices, are condemned to an eternal mediocrity. (Condorcet 1795 (1965): 38) As Montesquieu, Condorcet and Diderot sought to modify the received moral understanding of China, British political economy cast doubt upon the Chinese model of economic development. With the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) the notion that unfettered commerce ‘as if by an invisible hand’ might create wealth significantly altered first British and, with a certain amount of reservation, European attitudes to trade and manufacturing. The new science of political economy rejected the physiocrat view that trade and commerce diminished wealth by taking resources away from the land. From Smith’s laisser-faire perspective, China had failed to encourage foreign commerce and, in consequence, had stagnated. Adam Smith felt that ‘China had long been one of the richest, that is one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world’, he also observed that it had been, ‘long stationary’. So much was this the case, that ‘Marco Polo who visited it more than five hundred years ago describes its cultivation, industry and populousness almost in the same terms as they are described by travellers in the present time’ (Smith 1776 (1964) vol. 1: 62). Despite conflicting evidence, Smith contended that Chinese labourers received low wages. Although Smith praised China’s internal market and the concern with agriculture which ensured ‘a full complement of riches . . . consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions’, he nevertheless maintained that this complement was ‘much inferior to what with other laws and institutions . . . (it) might admit of’ (ibid). Because China ‘neglects or despises foreign commerce’, it could not, ‘transact the same quantity of business which it might do with different laws and institutions.’ In Smith’s opinion, the favourable view of Chinese infrastructure reflected the dubious accounts of ‘weak and wandering travellers’, and ‘stupid and lying missionaries’ (Smith vol. 2: 217). From a related premiss, Malthus further deduced that China suffered from a disabling economic paradox. Calculating wealth on the basis

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of population, Malthus discovered that although Chinese labourers endured acute poverty, ‘China is the richest country in the world without any other.’ Nor would society necessarily benefit by an expansion of trade and manufacturing (Malthus 1798: 328–34). Contra Smith, Malthus maintained, ‘that every increase of the stock or revenue of a nation cannot be considered as an increase of the real funds for the maintenance of labour and therefore cannot have the same good effect upon the condition of the poor, will appear in a strong light if the argument be applied to China’ (Malthus 1798: 321). The density of China’s population explained this paradox. China was caught in an equilibrium trap. The parson concluded that the ‘China Case’ exhibited a very high fertility level that kept living standards depressed. (56) Given the poverty of the population and the obscene, but officially condoned, practice of infanticide, Malthus could not understand why the Chinese had not developed colonies to dispose of their surplus population. Montesquieu’s debunking of Chinese practical morality and the laisser faire criticism of Chinese economics cast doubt on the integrity and reliability of Jesuit sources which, between 1573 and 1745, had largely controlled the image of China consumed by an enlightened European readership. From the later eighteenth century, however, the accounts of officially sponsored travellers like de Guignes, embassies like those undertaken by Macartney, Raffles and Crawfurd and subsequently the reports of Protestant missionaries and governors of newly acquired Asian colonies, afforded an alternative and, from the evolving nineteenth century understanding of history, morality, language and economics, a more objective source for the critical evaluation of Far Eastern morality, government and economics.

Summary of the eighteenth century engagement Central to the Jesuit mission to China was the fact that it adopted a strategy of converting the sect of the Confucian literati (which the Portuguese termed Mandarin). The Jesuit missions found in Confucianism an ethical doctrine of duty that, in the Jesuit view, corresponded to a natural reason which required only the amplification of revelation to make it fully Christian. The practice of the Jesuits was accommodationist and syncretic because Confucian natural morality followed the universal moral principle ‘do unto others as thou wouldst be done unto’. This discovery inspired the attempt to accommodate Confucian practices to Christian ends and bring Confucianism into a Christian

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dialogue. At the same time it required the rejection of Buddhism as common, superstitious and morally suspect. This controversial strategy had considerable success with both the Ming and Qing mandarinate and the European intellectual elite. However, it conflicted with other missionary strategies both Catholic (Dominican and Franciscan) and subsequently Protestant. As Jacques Gernet observed, the debate made the mistake of ‘limiting to one detail which had meaning only within the mental categories of the West, a question of much wider significance: namely whether it was possible to reconcile Christianity with a mental and socio-political system which was fundamentally different from the one within which Christianity had developed’ (Gernet 1985: 247). This propensity, as we shall see, had a tendency to repeat itself in other areas of the Chinese encounter with the West. In the context of the Chinese rites, the Jansenists particularly criticized Jesuit syncretism. They argued this strategy extended the dubious ethical practices condoned by the Jesuits to avoid persecution in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Their promotion of Confucianism, moreover, encouraged the heresy of deism and could be further construed as atheistic. For if natural reason could endow a people with a rational moral practice that led both to political stability, just economic distribution, and social coherence, why the need for Christian revelation at all? The answer to this question particularly appealed to a growing band of European philosophes whose reply ‘why indeed?’ reflected European disenchantment with the contentious spirit of European religion and a widespread intellectual rejection of religious enthusiasm. In fact, the Enlightenment writers used the increasingly accessible Jesuit accounts of China to reveal a moral and political model suitable for the reform of otiose European institutions. In other words, the first Asian model for European consumption was based on a Confucian political and moral order. Its earthly manifestation was the Chinese Empire. The works of the Jesuit missions suitably adapted for European consumption by Sorbonne propagandists like Du Halde and Couplet transmitted the lineaments of this empire of reason. In so doing they unintentionally furnished the basis for a critique of contemporary European religious, historical, moral, political and educational practice. This criticism in turn demanded a reinvention of government and morality according to a programme of rational rule first outlined by Confucius and developed in political practice by the duty oriented mandarinate of Confucian China.

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This Enlightenment view of China afforded the vehicle for a rational understanding of moral and ethical practice freed from the superstitious bigotry and enthusiasm of religious fundamentalists that had so disturbed the peace of Europe for two centuries. It also offered the lineaments of a rational science of politics again informed by Confucian principles that would afford a basis both for political order and rational rule. This rationalist approach to rule manifests itself clearly in François Bernier’s Science for Princes based on his interpretation of Confucian political ideas.5 Bernier was particularly attracted in this pre-democratic age to the Confucian understanding of moral government in which rulers and officials have duties that correspond with the exercise of sovereign power. A succession of Enlightenment thinkers subsequently found this an attractive theme. Princes and their advisers must be instructed in the theory, not of divine right, but moral obligation to the people. Just as subjects obeyed, rulers must learn to serve their people. This Enlightenment political understanding culminated in the physiocrat Quesnay’s promulgation of China as a physiocratic model for Europe. This apotheosis of China at the end of the eighteenth century, however, represented the high point of European appreciation of the East. It was, in fact, the failure of enlightenment despotism and its destruction in the course of the French revolution that prompted a reevaluation of the rational perfection of China. The dynamism released at the end of the eighteenth century by its three revolutions American, French and Industrial inspired this process. At the same time, the records of British ambassadors and traders to the Qing Emperor, Qien long, provided new sources for reinterpretation. The Macartney mission to China in 1794, in particular, left a number of highly critical and widely sought accounts of China (Wood 1998: 13). At the same time as travellers, merchants and ambassadors from France, Holland and the United Kingdom portrayed China and the Chinese in an increasingly critical light, the received version of Chinese government and society received a shattering blow at the hands of a number of developments that profoundly affected the early nineteenth century understanding of philology, history, political and national character and socioeconomic progress. The new mood is individualistic, liberal democratic, progressive, scientific and above all opposed to the self-incurred tutelage of tradition. European Romanticism added a further contradictory twist to the self determining rationalism that powerfully informs the reformist and revolutionary spirit of the early nineteenth century. The Kantian

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and post-Kantian Enlightenment of the later eighteenth century, the linguistic discovery of an Aryan root language and the development of romanticism and historicism that emphasized particularism against universalism and authenticity against artificiality, together with the proliferation of utilitarian and Marxist understandings conspired to affect negatively the eighteenth century picture of China. It is to these understandings and their ambiguous impact on the developing image of China that we next turn.

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2 Ambassadors, Economists and Oriental Despots: the Early Nineteenth Century Understanding of China

We considered China immense and impotent, inventive and backward, superstitious and atheistic, cruel and philosophical, paternal and corrupt; and being disoriented by the disorderly notion we had of her, not knowing where to place her in our scheme of civilization . . . unable either to relegate her to the ranks of the barbarian . . . or to elevate her to our own level of pride, we shut her off in another sphere and another scale of time, in the category of what is at once real and incomprehensible. Paul Valery Orient and Occident 1928 The orientalist critique notwithstanding, we can broadly identify a series of often conflicting discourses that shaped an evolving early nineteenth century view of China. First, there is a group of British ambassadors, diplomats and missionaries who produced conjectural histories concerning the character, development and political economy of the Asian states they visited. These histories, in turn, both affected and were influenced by those writers, who following Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, constructed the first global political economy. In this context the impact of the Mills’ pere et fils in shaping a utilitarian critique of oriental despotism was highly influential. Somewhat relatedly, but enjoying a different political trajectory, so too was the identification of the Asiatic mode of production (AMP) fitfully outlined by Marx and Engels in a series of books and articles that appeared in the course of the 1850s. Second, the development of what Ernest Renan termed ‘les sciences philologiques’ (Renan 1847: 833) transformed the European understanding of the Chinese language and had important resonances for 37

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an emerging sinology in the period from 1780 to 1850. The search for an original Ur language that preoccupied William ‘Oriental’ Jones, Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and Sylvestre de Sacy in the course of the eighteenth century influenced a European and especially a German philosophy of culture, history and progress that informed the thinking of J. G. Herder, J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, F. Schlegel and G. W. F. Hegel. This early nineteenth century philosophy of history profoundly affected the status of China as a world civilization. It is these often contradictory developments that we now address.

Ambassadors and oriental despots It is with the group of writers, diplomats, linguists and historians generally informed by Enlightenment values of reason and progress, as well as Adam Smith’s ideas on the benefits of free trade that we begin to get a critical appraisal of East Asian rule in general and the Chinese economic and political model in particular. It was the misunderstanding over the niceties of diplomatic etiquette encountered by the British embassy of Lord George Macartney (1793–95), in attempting to secure a permanent presence at the court of the Chinese Emperor Qianlong that profoundly altered European perceptions of China. The former French ambassador to the court of Chairman Mao, Alain Peyrefitte considers the Macartney mission one of history’s great ‘missed opportunities’ (Peyrefitte 1993: xxxiii). For P. J. Marshall the mission ‘illuminated’ a ‘long-term shift’ in European attitudes to China. ‘Put very crudely, this is a shift from an inclination to Sino-Philia in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century with its admiration for an imagined China, to the disdain for the supposedly known China.’ The affected superiority of the Chinese mandarinate and its reluctance to welcome the opportunity to trade with the United Kingdom clearly exacerbated this disdain (Marshall 1993: 11). Ultimately, Marshall maintains, the negative experience of the mission led to the relegation of the Chinese to just another ‘Asiatic people’ which legitimated growing British trade ‘pressure and ultimately the coercion of the opium wars’ (Marshall: 25). Similarly Gregory Blue contends that ‘anyone who studies the evolution of ideas about China is soon struck by the radical reversal of Western judgements about almost all aspects of Chinese culture’ that had occurred by the mid nineteenth century (Blue 1999: 70). The extent of the reversal of the image of China generated by the Macartney mission and subsequent embassies to the Far East is, perhaps, a little exaggerated. The journals of the various missions sponsored by

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The Early Nineteenth Century Understanding of China 39

the British government and the East India Company certainly reflect a new sense of European moral, political and technological superiority. Nevertheless, some of the criticism levelled at the character of East Asian government was not without substance. Moreover, despite a prevailing tone of scepticism, even captious accounts, like John Barrow’s Travels in China (1805), gave some credit to the more significant achievements of Chinese civilization. Apart from displaying a characteristic British reticence to kow tow to the Son of Heaven, the historically pivotal Macartney embassy produced a variety of books, journals and commentaries on Chinese government and legal codes that provided an array of sources to counteract the Jesuit records, recently summated in de Mailla’s thirteen volume history of China (1777–85). Even the 12 year old George Staunton who learnt Mandarin on the trip, became the first English sinologist, and translated the Chinese penal code the Ta Tsing Lu Li (Da Qing Lü Li , London 1810) kept a critical journal of his dealings with Chinese bureaucracy. So too did the leader of the mission, Lord George Macartney who found the close attention received from Chinese officialdom highly intrusive. Significantly, Macartney found that the Chinese elite ‘rather wonders at our curiousity than esteems us for our knowledge’. Indeed, it seemed the Chinese considered the British search for understanding ‘impertinent to them and useless to ourselves’ (Spence 1997: 60). From sundry observations Macartney postulated that, ‘the science of government in the Eastern world, is understood by those who govern very differently from what it is in the Western’ (in Barrow 1805: 415). For the Asian emperor ‘it was not locality’ or nationality, ‘but his own caste and family’ that determined political conduct. Macartney considered the Empire a ‘great machine’ that could not endure. However, it was unlikely that China could endure a sudden transition from ‘slavery to freedom, from dependence to authority’ without ‘the expense of many millions of lives’. Consequently, the Chinese needed to be ‘led to emancipation by degrees’ (in Barrow 417). The alternative would be a collective fit of madness that would render them as unfit for ‘rational freedom, as the French and the negroes’. An analogous perception of a Chinese propensity to xenophobia, arrogance and authoritarianism informed the comptroller of the embassy, John Barrow’s Travels in China. Barrow considered the Chinese a ‘semi-barbarian race’ prone to despotism and over encumbered by ‘stupid formalities’ (Peyrefitte: 487–91). His travels, however, represented more than an account of the sightseeing undertaken by the embassy. The journey from ‘Canton to Pekin’ apart, Barrow dedicated a

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number of chapters to ‘the manners, customs, sentiments and moral character of the people’ (Barrow 1805: ch. 4), ‘language, literature and the fine arts’, ‘government’, and ‘religion’ (chs 6–8). It was this view of China, moreover, that conditioned post Enlightenment and particularly early nineteenth century British political and political economic attitudes to the Celestial Empire. The hypocrisy of Chinese moral practice which deviated from its more widely advertised principles particularly irritated Barrow. Analyzing Chinese ‘moral character’, Barrow discovered that, ‘in the same breath that they extol the wonderful strength of filial piety . . . they speak of the common practice of exposing infants.’ More disturbingly ‘the strict morality and ceremonious conduct of the people are followed by a list of the most gross debaucheries; the virtues of the philosophy of the learned are explained by their ignorance and their vices; if in one page they speak of the excessive fertility of the country and the amazing extension of the agriculture, in the next thousands are seen perishing with want; and while they extol with admiration the progress they have made in the arts and sciences, they plainly inform us that without the aid of foreigners they can neither cast a cannon nor calculate an eclipse.’ (51) Moral authoritarianism from this perspective, had undermined China. Indeed, the Chinese had ‘suffered almost a total change by the laws and maxims of government’ (Barrow: 160). The ‘heavy hand of power had completely overcome and moulded to its own shape the physical character of the people’ (359). Consequently, ‘while they are by nature quiet, passive and timid the state of society and the abuse of the laws by which they are governed, have rendered, them indifferent, unfeeling and even cruel’ (160). Central to this moral and civilizational decline was the obeisance paid to filial piety. Indeed, filial duty was less a moral sentiment in China than a ‘positive law’ (Barrow: 143). Perversely, it was the practical absence of it that led government to emphasize this duty. Filial piety, also, of course, reinforced patriachal rule. Indeed Chinese authorities were ‘employed in writing volumes on the subject’. Its principal aim was to impress ‘on the minds of the people the comparative authority of the emperor over his subjects and that of a parent over his children’ (144). The fatherly power was endowed with an unnatural authority, one consequence of which was the ‘degradation of women through the practices of footbinding and concubinage’ (146). Barrow considered this

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fatherly care and affection in the governors, and filial duty and reverence in the governed, could be more accurately conveyed by the terms of tyranny, oppression and injustice in the one, and by fear deceit, and disobedience in the other (360). Following Montesquieu and the French sinologist Cornelius de Pauw, Barrow observed that ‘the whip and the bamboo’ together with an ‘immense standing army’ (Barrow 391, 405) reinforced Chinese moral authoritarianism. This had the further consequence of facilitating government arrogance which consequently despised ‘anything new or foreign’. Thus, it failed to encourage ‘new inventions however ingenious’, and was ‘greatly detrimental to the progress of the arts and manufactures’ (306). Inculcating unreflecting obedience contributed to technological and mental stagnation reducing everything in China from education to science, the arts, agriculture and architecture to a bland uniformity (ch. 1). Consequently, although the Chinese: had been among the first nations now existing in the world to arrive at a certain pitch of perfection where, from the policy of the government . . . they have remained stationary: that they were civilized, fully to the same extent they now are, more than two thousand years ago, at a period when all Europe might be considered as barbarous; but they have since made little progress in anything, and been retrograde in many things: that at this moment, compared with Europe, they can be said only to be great in trifles, whilst they are really trifling in everything that is great. (Ibid: 355) Barrow also questioned the widely advertised achievements of Chinese infrastructure. The roads were only fit for single horsemen and the Grand Canal was constructed to ‘convey taxes paid in kind from the southern part of the country to the capital a great part of them having always been lost by the unskilfulness of Chinese navigation when conveyed by sea’ (52). However, Barrow still found a number of things to admire in China. Barrow felt that the ‘religious opinions and morals’ of Confucius did ‘him great credit’ (455). Unfortunately, they were too ‘sublime and too metaphysical to preserve their purity among a people so unprepared, as his countrymen were, to receive and cherish them’ (460). Barrow also found to his amazement the press in China ‘as free as in England and the profession of printing open to everyone’ (392). He

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considered this a ‘singular circumstance and perhaps the only instance of the kind in a despotic government.’ This curious mixture of autocracy and accountability also impressed subsequent commentators on Chinese administrative technique (see Williams 1892–93 vol. 1: 415–20). Moreover, although Barrow considered standards of hygiene, unimpressive – he found no ‘water-closet’ or ‘decent place of retirement in all China’ (333) – nevertheless, he recognized the Chinese capacity for organization and engineering. He considered both the Great Wall and the Grand Canal feats of technical planning. Barrow even conceded that ‘our most extensive inland navigation of England can no more be compared to the grand trunk that intersects China, than a park or garden fish pond to the great lake of Winandermere [sic]’ (335). In keeping with this uncertainty about the capacity and industriousness of the Chinese, Barrow regretted the indifference of British education in general and the China traders in particular towards the Chinese language. Consequently, ‘if . . . by neglecting to study the language of the Chinese we are silly enough to place ourselves and concerns so completely in their power, we are highly deserving of the extortions and impositions so loudly complained of’ by the Canton traders (617).1 The efficient solution to trading with China, and the Far East, therefore, lay in understanding further its language, customs, character and government. To this end the East India Company (prior to its dissolution in 1834) with government support funded the production of dictionaries, the translation of Chinese texts and various embassies to what became known as the ‘Far East’ that produced both a prodigious range of evidence and new modes of explaining Asia to a broad European audience. The Macartney mission itself began the process. The Company and the British government had jointly sponsored it. Subsequently, the writings of employees of the company like Stamford Raffles, John Crawfurd and William Marsden built upon the findings that emerged from the Macartney mission. Through their accounts of Java, Sumatra, Singapore, the Malay World, Siam, Burma and China, a new image of the ‘Far East’ in general and China’s place within it began to crystalize. This perspective in turn reflected developing western understandings of the relationship between climate and character, forms of government and forms of law and property ownership, the nature of language, civilization and stages of human development. A distinctly Scottish enlightenment perspective upon the stages of history, moving from primitive tribalism, through agricultural empires to modern commercial society permeated these official and semi-official reports and accounts.

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This viewpoint naturally assumed, given its provenance, the invisible handed benefits of trade and the economic utility of indefeasible property rights and an impartial rule of law. This spirit of British economic radicalism pervades Raffles’ two volume History of Java (1817), and his views on trade with China and Japan (1814; 1824) and William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783 3rd edn 1811). It similarly influences John Crawfurd’s three volume History of the Indian Archipelago (1820) as well as his more descriptive accounts of embassies to Ava (Myanmar) (1834) and Thailand (1828), and John Bowring’s reflections on governing Hong Kong and his trade embassies to Siam (1857) and the Philippines (1859). It also informs more specific studies of China like J. F. Davis’ The Chinese (2 vols 1836), Hugh Murray et al.’s comprehensive An Historical and Descriptive Account of China Its Ancient and Modern History, Language, Literature, Religion, Government, Industry, Manners and Social State . . . (3 vols 1843), and Thomas Taylor Meadows The Chinese and Their Rebellions (1856). The different but equally influential realm of Protestant missionary evangelism and scholarship, itself facilitated by burgeoning British and American trade with China, also affected the changing perception of China. As Eric Stokes observed, in the context of the reform of the India Office in the 1830s, it was the missionary evangelism of the Clapham sect allied with the economic radicalism of utilitarianism that inspired early nineteenth century Anglo-American liberal attitudes to trade and Empire (Stokes 1959: 40–80). In the context of God and trade, missionaries like Robert Morrison, supported by the East India Company, produced an authoritative Chinese Dictionary (1815), Dialogues and Detached Sentences (1816) and together with the Scots missionary W. Milne collected material for The Anglo-Chinese Gleaner (1817–21), while John Marshman contributed Elements of a Chinese Grammar (1811) and provided the first English translation of part of Confucius’ Analects (1813). Meanwhile, Karl Gutzlaff the enterprising Prussian Protestant, inspired by Morrison, embarked upon travels around China disguised as a Fujianese fisherman in order to proselytize and promulgate Morrison’s recently translated Bible (Gutzlaff 1834). In the process Gutzlaff’s activities indirectly influenced God’s Chinese son Huang Xiuchuan and the millenially inspired Taiping rebellion (see Spence 1997: ch. 1). This evangelical entrepreneurialism thus contributed an additional dimension to the perception of Chinese character, customs and manners. It also added a chiliastic edge to the American missionary Samuel Wells Williams influential The Middle Kingdom (1843) and

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Walter Medhurst’s China (1836). Williams sought to ‘fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah, delivered before the era of Confucius, [that] God’s people will come from the land of Sinim’ (Williams 1883: xv). From a different evangelical provenance the French catholic missionary apostolic, Everiste Régis Huc, in The Chinese Empire (1849) considered ‘the whole system of society and government . . . calculated with as little reference as possible to the moral and spiritual nature of man’ (Huc vol. 2 1859: ix). Reading these ‘texts’ ‘against the grain’ in the currently accepted deconstructive manner, postcolonialist critics find these early nineteenth century ambassadors, governors and missionaries, guilty of hypocrisy, conscious and unconscious racism, cultural arrogance and a propensity towards rapaciously exploitative imperialism. In this view this new European knowledge of Asia constituted a form of power that facilitated an imperial mission (Harlow and Carter 1999: v–x). Thus Syed Hussein Alatas maintains that Raffles History of Java ordered the ‘different nations of the earth into different grades of civilization morally and politically.’ Alatas considers this method ‘based on the idea of progress and the survival of the fittest.’ Notwithstanding the fact that Darwin had yet to formulate his doctrine of evolutionary adaptation and its impact on the social sciences lay half-a-century in the future, Alatas reveals that its ‘key notions were current in the Europe of [Raffles’] times. They were the stock in trade of Western Imperialism’ (Alatas 1971: 3). The postcolonialist argument further asserts that in order to impose the new doctrine of progress, company officials like Raffles sought to impose a western ‘despotism’ upon the Asian peoples (ibid: 4). Thus, Mary Quilty’s Textual Empires (1998) considers that the ‘scientific skills and encyclopedic scope’ of the works of Crawfurd, Raffles and Marsden ‘have rarely been interrogated’ (Quilty 1998: xv). Compensating for this by giving them the academic equivalent of the third degree, Quilty finds that the stylistic concern of these writers to depict the geography, customs and practices they encountered as objectively as possible, actually represented a suspicious ‘scientificization of the East’ (ibid: 9). The ‘ordering’ of this knowledge fashioned a new ‘weapon of eloquence’ (22). Marsden, Raffles, Crawfurd and other contemporaries ‘endeavoured to see and present Southeast Asia in a neutral tone [sic] however, their complicity in the colonial enterprise is revealed in their rendering of Southeast Asia and their vision for its future’ (113). This, it would seem, was particularly true of John Crawfurd’s ambiguous use of contract theory in his History of the Indian Archipelago. Unmasking these conjectural histories, Quilty reveals that their analysis of government and manners merely served as the basis for

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enslaving ‘women and non-European races’ as ‘a positive good’ (113). More blandly, Colin Mackerras finds European and particularly British attitudes to China ‘entirely consistent with the imperialism of their day’ (Mackerras 1989: 65). Certainly, the accounts of the various embassies to the Far East of the first decades of the nineteenth century evoked a degree of enlightened European disdain for a variety of Asian customs and manners. However, it is only by a wilful misreading of these histories that writers as various as Raffles, Crawfurd, Bowring, Davis, Meadows, Huc, Williams or Gutzlaff can be dismissed as proponents of slavery, female oppression and the exclusion of non Europeans from some putative social contract. For the central point of this initial European assault on Asian values was that Asian stagnation, poverty and underdevelopment reflected misguided legal and moral understandings that promoted despotism, polygamy, concubinage, female infanticide, and debt and personal slavery. To maintain, as a variety of postcolonial critics do, that these histories served as the basis for slavery runs counter to both the character of Enlightenment rationalism and the theory and practice of an evolving British utilitarian view of trade, property, the market and its regulation. The mode of categorization employed by these western observers, postcolonialists maintain, sustained a new mode of governmentality. It certainly reflected an Enlightenment concern with a rational and orderly procedure of investigation. Yet these categories, that postcolonial writers following Said and Foucault, consider suspiciously racist and imperialist are otherwise unremarkable. Thus, Crawfurd, Marsden, Raffles and later commentators attend to geography, natural history, customs and manners, national character, forms of government, and the state of the arts and sciences. Significantly, the view that this categorization, or more precisely chapterization, constitutes a weapon to enslave the East contradicts everything these writers consider necessary to Asian progress and development. In the view of Raffles, Crawfurd and Bowring the weakness of character, the perverse customs and laws, the under population and the economic and political corruption that pervaded the Far East stemmed ultimately from the debilitating consequences of what Crawfurd termed ‘oriental despotism’ (Crawfurd 1820 vol. 3: 3). Although Crawfurd found examples of ‘every form of social union from the equality which reigns among the savages’ to various forms of federalism as well as absolutism, it was despotism that paradoxically afforded the most civilized standards of life in the Far East (4). Consequently, ‘in these regions

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the more abject the state of man in the scale of social improvement, the freer the form of his government; and in proportion as he advances in civilization is that freedom abridged, until, at the top of the scale he is subjected to a tyranny where not a vestige of liberty is discernible’ (4). Ironically, the East Asian subject enjoyed ‘freedom where he has nothing else worth enjoying; and when the comforts of civil life accumulate around him he is deprived of the liberty of benefiting from them’ (ibid). Similarly, Raffles found in Java that,’ the prince is like a dalang (puppet master) his subjects like wayangs (puppets) and the law is the wick of the lamp used in these entertainments; for a prince can do with his subject what he pleases in the same way as a dalang acts with his wayangs, according to his own fancy, the prince being the law and the dalang being the lamp to point them the right way’ (Raffles 1817 vol. 1: 308). This somewhat confused analogy was to become one of the more familiar tropes for commentators on Javanese and Indonesian politics down to the present day. For Marsden observing Sumatran government, ‘the want of a written criterion of the laws and the imperfect stability of traditional usage . . . gave rise to arbitrary decisions’ (Marsden 1811: 218). Analogously in Ava and Thailand both Crawfurd (1821, 1834) and Bowring (1857) noted ‘the vassalage of the subject many and the domination of the ruling few’ (Bowring 1857 vol. 1: 124). The government of Ava was ‘a complete despotism’ its King, ‘the lord of life’, and consequently the people laboured ‘under all the disadvantages which can well be imagined from that form of polity’ (Crawfurd 1834: 136). While the Siamese ruling family were ‘vain, jealous, insincere . . . corrupt’, and overrated their power and strength (24). Such arbitrary rule undermined all political and social stability. Ironically, absolutist government suffered from a ‘radical want of strength’ (Raffles 1817: 258). This arose from ‘the ill defined succession to the throne . . . the doctrine of prerogative being imperfectly recognized, the prevalency of piracy in all the Eastern seas, the system of domestic slavery, the want of confidence between family and family, man and man; (and) the want of a generally established and recognized system of laws civil and commercial’ (ibid). This mixture of absolutism and insecurity impressed European observers across littoral Asia. Crawfurd found that even the ‘best forms of government’, in the Far East were ‘wretched, and confer little security on person and property’ (Crawfurd vol. 1: 43). Thus, ‘in the progress of society and despotism, we find no longer the existence of a private right of property in the soil, but the land belonging to the sovereign and the cultivator

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attached to it predially’ (Crawfurd 1820 vol. 1: 278). Bowring found in his travels across China, the Philippines and Siam (Thailand) that it was ‘idle to speak of a private right of property in the soil’ (Bowring 1859: 106). Despotism not only rendered property and person insecure it ineluctably promoted monopolistic behaviour and forms of dependence that varied from feudal vassalage to personal and debt slavery. Significantly, the Protestant evangelism and economic radicalism that combined to forge the colonial policy of early nineteenth century liberalism considered both monopoly and the slave trade abhorrent (Stokes 1959: 28–41). Indeed, British ambassadors and governors from Raffles to Bowring, and missionaries like Gutzlaff, found monopoly and slavery the necessary corollary of godless despotism. For Raffles slavery constituted the ‘principle evil’ that afflicted Asia (Raffles 1824: 32). As Bowring observed slavery was ubiquitous in Southeast Asia, ‘not absolute slavery . . . but such as usually implies a dependence’ or a debt (Bowring 1857: 123–34). In Java, Raffles contended ‘the system of contingents and of forced revenue reduced the people to the lowest state of vassalage and subjection and as no person could be certain of the product of his labour it must be supposed that his labour would not be exerted beyond his natural wants. Where no security existed, poverty and distress naturally followed’ (Raffles 1814: 61). At the same time as despotism afforded no personal security, it also rendered commerce uncertain. Thus Crawfurd found in China and throughout the Indian archipelago, ‘all the errors and absurdities of the mercantile system of political economy’ (Crawfurd 1820 vol. 1: 171), while Bowring maintained that across Asia ‘the old sport of monopoly not only delivered to the producer the benefit of high prices but trade itself was necessarily put in the hands of unenterprising and sluggish merchants. . . . For it is the condition, course and condemnation of monopoly that while it narrows the vision and cramps the intellect of the population, it delivers the great interest of commerce to the inferior race of traders excluding those higher qualities which are associated with commercial enterprise’ (Bowring 1859: 332). Apart from promoting poverty and insecurity, despotism also had a deleterious impact on personal and national character. Much postcolonial writing on western attitudes to Asia asserts that early nineteenthcentury European commentary discloses an ill-concealed racism towards Asian government and society. Certainly, Crawfurd, Raffles, Bowring and Davies identify serious character flaws among the Asian peoples they encounter. Marsden thought the Malays possessed ‘a

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low cunning and plausible duplicity’ (Marsden 1811: 207), while Raffles resigned himself to the fact that ‘from the comparative rude and uncivilized character of the Malay nation learned disquisition is not to be looked for’ (Raffles 1830: 15). Bowring considered the Siamese character combined the ‘mild, polite, courteous’ mixed with the ‘artful, deceitful, timid [and] avaricious.’ (Bowring 1857: 102), while Crawfurd, who wrote extensively on the relationship between character, race and language, maintained that there was ‘much diversity among the different tribes’ of the Indian Archipelago (Crawfurd 1820 vol. 1: 135). He broadly distinguished between the brown and negro races of the archipelago and found the latter every where ‘in the most savage state’ (17). Among the brown races, Crawfurd considered the Javanese, ‘like all people in the lower stages of civilization . . . defective in cleanliness’ (Crawfurd 1820: 38). Continuing in this patronizing vein he contended, that ‘the Javanese like his buffalo is slow, but useful and with kind treatment docile and easily governed’ (43). Indeed an Indian islander ‘of the best capacity is unequal to an individual not above mediocrity in a civilized community’, because ‘all the faculties of their mind are in a state of comparative feebleness . . . and their reason . . . when extended on any subject above the most vulgar train of thought commonly erroneous and mistaken’ (46). The attack on oriental despotism and its negative consequences for Asian character and progress notwithstanding, European commentators portrayed its Chinese manifestation in a curiously ambivalent light. For unlike other Asian nations, China possessed a ‘remarkable’ and an ‘industrious people’ (Murray et al. vol. 2 1843: 192). Bowring observed that the Chinese were adventurous, active and controlled the ‘channels of trade’ throughout the region (Bowring 1857: 212). Indeed, the extraordinary diffusion of the Chinese across the region ‘from the most western of the islands of the Indian archipelago . . . and now extending over a considerable portion of Western America particularly in California and reaching even Australia and Polynesia’ Bowring considered ‘one of the most remarkable events of modern history’ (Bowring 1857: 84). For Crawfurd and other observers, the Chinese were ‘the most generally engaged in trade, in which they are equally speculative, expert and judicious. Their superior intelligence and activity have placed in their hands the management of the public revenue in almost every country of the region whether ruled by natives or Europeans’ (Crawfurd vol. 1 1820: 135–6). For Sir John Davis, the second governor of Hong Kong, the Chinese displayed a ‘cheerful character’. Moreover, their ‘intelligence, industry and

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sobriety’ made them excellent colonists (Davis vol. 1 1836: 257). Hugh Murray together with Crawfurd, William Wallace and others in their Historical and Descriptive Account of China similarly admired the Chinese commitment to the family and their ‘polished manners’ (Murray et al. vol. 2: 295). However, they were still a ‘less admirable people’ than those found among the European nations (295). In this context of comparative morality, writers like Morrison, Gutzlaff, Crawfurd and Bowring found the practice of infanticide, particularly female infanticide, as a method of birth control to be ‘a deep stain’ on the national character and the custom of footbinding, polygamy and concubinage both ‘preposterous’ (192) and ‘degrading’ to the ‘female sex’ (Gutzlaff 1834: xxix). Equally disturbingly, these commentators found the Chinese ‘the least conscientious people alive’. They would not fulfil any engagement without ‘the constant prospect of gain or advantage’ (Crawfurd 1820 vol. 1: 136) and suffered from an ‘utter want of moral character and integrity’ (ibid: 73). The Scottish doctor, Finlayson, who died on Crawfurd’s 1821 mission to Hue and Siam, found the Chinese gambir growers of Singapore displayed ‘a total disregard of the wants, necessities and helplessness of their fellow human creatures . . . ‘so that,’ they knew not the pleasure of doing good for its own sake’ (Finlayson 1821 (1987): 53). A more nuanced commentator, John Davis considered the Chinese displayed both ‘docility, industry, peaceableness, subordination and respect for the aged . . . accompanied by the vices of specious insincerity, falsehood with mutual distrust, and jealousy.’ (Davis vol. 1: 256) He viewed their approach to business and matters of trust ‘Machiavellian’, (ibid) while Murray and his co-authors found them ‘dexterous in their knavery’ (Murray et al. vol. 2: 300). Summarizing these ambiguous qualities Robert Morrison averred that: The good traits of the Chinese character, amongst themselves, are mildness and urbanity; a wish to shew that their conduct is reasonable . . . docility, industry subordination of juniors; respect for the aged and for parents acknowledging the claims of poor kindred. These are virtues of public opinion, which, of course, are, in particular cases, often more show than reality; for on the other hand, the Chinese are specious, but insincere; jealous, envious and distrustful to a high degree. There is amongst them a considerable prevalence of scepticism, of a Sadducean, and rather atheistical spirit. . . . Conscience has few checks but the laws of the land; and a little frigid

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ratiocination on the fitness of things, which is not generally found effectual to restrain, when the vicious propensities of our nature may be indulged . . . The Chinese are generally selfish, cold blooded and inhumane.’ (Morrison in Gutzlaff 1834: xxvi–xxvii) Contemporary postcolonialist discourse assumes that such character analysis reflected a European propensity to racism that in turn justified a developing colonial project. Such a view, however, misunderstands the psychology of character that evolved in European and particularly British discourse of the late eighteenth century as well as the terms upon which racialist and eugenic thinking about the non Caucasian races crystalized at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, to dismiss European writing of the early nineteenth century as inherently racist neglects the manner in which the relationship between climate, manners, sensibility, virtue and government developed in the course of that century and profoundly altered European self understanding. As eighteenth-century writers as various as Blumenbach, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume and Smith observed, a number of factors shaped the formation of moral character and accounted for the ‘diversity of the races of mankind’ within what the modern founder of anthropology, Johann Freidrich Blumenbach, termed ‘the unity of the species’ (in Hannaford 1996: 210–15). For Montesquieu it was climate that softened or hardened sensibility according to temperature and the prevalence of luxury. The warmer the clime the more dissolute the temperament and the more despotic the government. The theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, together with the arbiters of English manners like Addison, Swift and Pope tended to reject this influential theory. For Hume and Smith it was government and education, rather than climate, that shaped sensibility, schooled the emotions and developed productive characters. Historical contingency, the fortunes of war, treaty or trade further moulded this character. Ultimately, ‘Hume did not believe that national character and manners were derived from natural causes, preferring instead to assign cause to congregation over a long period of time. Like Locke, he emphasized the effective communication of ideas of virtue and vice through long standing public arrangements’ (Hannaford 1996: 216). Thus Hume contended that ‘where a very extensive government has been established for many centuries, it spreads a national character over the whole empire and communicates to every part a similarity of manners. Thus, the Chinese have the greatest uniformity of character imaginable: though the air and

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climate . . . admit of very considerable variations’ (Hume (1777) 1987: 204). This character particularly influenced the conjectural histories of Raffles, Crawfurd, Davis and Meadows. Consequently, the pernicious features of Asian societies reflected the deleterious effects of despotism adumbrated, to a greater or lesser extent, by the baleful influence of climate and diet. Those writers like Crawfurd, who had periodic recourse to Montesquieu as well as Hume, observed that despotism flourished between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn (Crawfurd 1820 vol. 1: 13–15), while Marsden (1811: 261) thought polygamy between Sumatrans and Chinese migrants could be explained by the fact that in the warmer climes ‘the empire’ of feminine ‘charms was short’. Elsewhere, Crawfurd considered vegetarianism contributed to Javanese and Chinese effeminacy. Yet, ultimately, it was government, not genes that accounted for the moral and economic weakness of the Far East. As Crawfurd explained Southeast Asian ‘forms of government are wretched and confer little security on persons or property’. Consequently, ‘character feels the influence’. The casual observer might pronounce ‘the whole race indolent’ (Crawfurd vol. 1 1820: 43–6). Such a conclusion would, however, be wrong. In fact, the solution to this degeneracy was ‘good government’. This required the introduction of an indifferent rule of law, property rights for peasant agriculturalists and merchants, the abolition of slavery and the inculcation of moral principles through a Christian education. The active manner in which Raffles, as governor of Java from 1811–16 and founder of Singapore, sought to abolish slavery, introduce rule of law and security of tenure indicates that these liberal imperialists tried to practice what they preached. As governor of Java, Raffles declared slavery a felony and ‘had the satisfaction to introduce trial by jury (and) a clear and simple code of laws compiled under my authority containing the rules for the different courts and instructions for their offices according to the mild and just principles of the British constitution’ (Raffles 1824: 15). Slavery, he contended, ‘under any denomination whatsoever could not be recognized within the jurisdiction of British authority’ (Raffles 1824: 61). ‘The peculiar circumstances’ under which Raffles acquired Singapore from the Temenggong of Johore in 1819 (Turnbull 1992 ch. 1) afforded him ‘a fair opportunity of . . . acting up to our principles’ (Raffles 1824: 61). This policy transformed Singapore from a rat infested mangrove swamp into a flourishing multicultural free port, the second most prosperous in the Empire by 1838 (Crawfurd 1855: 6). Davis and Bowring,

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as governors of Hong Kong sought to conduct their administration according to similarly enlightened principles. Sir John Davis, commenting on his implementation of the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), considered that it provided ‘that the subjects of England and China should enjoy full security and protection of their persons and property’ (Davis in Moor 1857). Similarly, Davis’ successor, Bowring, never doubted that free trade ‘would yet be an immense benefit to the Chinese as well as the British commercial interest in the Far East’ (Bartle 1962: 299). To facilitate this, Bowring introduced a Benthamite inspectorate of the customs to regulate the market. Thus the introduction of what utilitarians like Bowring considered progress to the peoples of Asia would both reform their government and morals and ‘provide ample means for their maintenance and happiness’ (Bowring 1859: 106 ff). This might have been overly optimistic, but it was not racist. It is interesting to observe, moreover, that even among those who subscribed to the prevailing liberal view of the corrosive influence of despotism a significant number of sinologists and government officials experienced increasing difficulty in fitting China into this uniform Asiatic pattern. From George Staunton who offered the first summary of Chinese law through Morrison’s Chinese Miscellany to Davis, Medhurst and Hugh Murray’s accounts of Chinese government and society, the activity, sobriety and general intelligence of the Chinese fitted uncomfortably with the notion that China was just another decadent Asiatic form of governance. Indeed, the Catholic missionary Everiste Regis Huc, in the course of extensive travels in China in the 1840s, concluded that the very idea of a uniform ‘East’ represented an ‘inaccurate estimate’ based on the superficial impression of travellers ‘who have paid a passing visit to those ports open to Europeans’ (Huc 1859 (1970): 46). Huc doubted there was even an ‘intimate connection’ between those nations called Orientals ‘that we should class them under one general head’ (Huc: 59). We shall briefly explore the ambivalence of this early sinological understanding before considering the general theory of Asian despotism as it emerged in mid-nineteenth century social science and philosophical history.

Sinology, philology and China It is the received view, following Schwab (1950) and Clarke (1997), that in the course of the nineteenth century the civilizational status of China declined, as that of India as the cradle of language and civilization, rose. There is considerable evidence from the German school of

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philosophical history and the English one of political economy to support this thesis. Nevertheless, it is also possible to identify a developing European consciousness of China as a distinctive linguistic, customary and governmental practice worthy of comparison with the achievements of the west. The first academic sinologists like Abel Rémusat, who, from 1814, occupied the first European chair in Chinese language and literature at the College Royale de France, H. J. Klaproth in Germany and Sir George Staunton, Robert Morrison and Sir John Davis in England, profoundly altered the understanding of Chinese civilization and Chinese thought. In order to comprehend the impact of their work it is necessary both to assess the condition of linguistic knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century and the manner in which the scholarship of Rémusat, Staunton, Stanislav Julien, Klaproth, Marshman and Morrison affected the European perception of Chinese language and civilization. As Raymond Schwab has demonstrated, it was the philology of William ‘Oriental’ Jones, and Anquetil-Duperron that fuelled an oriental renaissance at the start of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, this renaissance saw India replace China as a source of European inspiration and rejuvenation (Schwab 1950: 20–8, Reichwein 1925: 149–53). More precisely Jones’ comparative philology identified ‘a single prehistoric language’ from whence all races and speech derived (Cannon 1964: 141, 169). Establishing the ‘fundamental postulate of IndoEuropean grammar’ (142), Jones argued in the eighth anniversary address before the Asiatic Society in February 1789 that, ‘we have proved that the inhabitants of Asia and consequently as it might be proved of the whole earth sprang from three branches of one stem: and that these branches have shot into their present state of luxuriance in a period comparatively short’ (169). ‘The whole race of man, proceeded’, Jones contended, from Iran ‘as from a centre whence at first they migrated in three great colonies and . . . these three branches grew from a common stock, which had been miraculously preserved (despite) a general convulsion and inundation of this globe’ ( Jones vol. 1 1799: 137). Jones’ comparative philology providentially met contemporary standards of biblical exegesis. The ‘three branches’ serendipitously coincided with the dispersion of the three tribes descended from Noah’s sons, Japhet, Shem and Ham who populated the earth after the Flood. Subsequently, comparative philology inspired, as we shall see, an anxious German pursuit of an Indo-European ‘cradle of the human race’ (Clarke 1997: 61) and its miraculous preservation, after some fortuitous volkwandering, in its purest state in the German woods.

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Jones’ philological endeavours, however, displaced Chinese as the fons et origen of language. Following Joseph de Guignes Memoire dans lequel on preuve que le Chinois sont une colonie Égyptienne (1760) and Cornelius de Pauw, Récherches philosophiques sur les Égyptiens et les Chinois (1770), who both contended that Chinese ‘hieroglyphs’ demonstrated a prior Egyptian colonization, Jones also speculated that Chinese characters derived from an earlier foreign settlement. Unlike de Guignes, however, Jones traced Chinese morality and language to a Hindu source. In his address to the Royal Asiatic Society On the Chinese (1790 in Jones 1799 vol. 1: 95) Jones observed that ‘Europeans authors have ever spoken of (the Chinese) in the extremes of applause and censure; by some they have been extolled the oldest and the wisest, as the most learned and most ingenious of nations; whilst others have decided their pretensions to antiquity condemned their government as abominable.’ Jones tended toward the latter view, maintaining that the Chinese possessed no original ideas ‘for which they have not been indebted to some more ancient and more civilized race’ (ibid: 96–7). Nevertheless, the Chinese ‘symbolical system’, was ‘dissimilar’ to the Egyptian, while its structure of thought and religion resembled that of the Indian world. From this slim database, Jones speculated that Confucian thought derived from the laws of Manu which Jones had, of course, translated recently. The Chinese people were a hybrid type descended from a tribe of Brahmins, known as the Chinas, who had miscegenated with the Tartars (101–7). Jones’ reassessment of non-European philology provoked a wide ranging discussion about the nature of the language. The publication of P. Bailla, Chretien Louis Joseph de Guignes and H. J. Klaproth’s Chinese, Latin and French dictionary (Paris 1813), arranged according to Chinese radicals, and the more extensive user friendly, alphabetically ordered, dictionary compiled by Robert Morrison (Macao 1815) further facilitated this inquiry. Compiling his Chinese Miscellany (1825) Morrison adduced that the origin of the language was prealphabetic and constituted a form of ‘picture-writing’ (Morrison 1825: 4). Surveying the condition of sinology in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Abel Rémusat, in his Lettre sur l’état et le Progres de la Litterature Chinoise en Europe (Paris 1822a) maintained that for two hundred years the activity of the Jesuits and other missionary groups had kept knowledge of the language a closely guarded secret. This had encouraged the treatment of Chinese characters as ‘mysterious hieroglyphs that could only be understood by a kind of divination’ (Rémusat 1822a: 4). This practice dated from the earliest western interpretations of the

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Chinese records and the search for a key to this pre-Adamite root language in works like Kircher’s China Monumentis . . . Illustrata (Kircher 1667). However, with the more rigorous and scientific approach to oriental languages inaugurated by Jones in England and Sylvestre de Sacy in France, empirical investigation had progressively replaced an earlier cabalistic mode of inquiry. For Rémusat the ‘open and scholarly approach’ was more rational than the hermetic one promoted by religious mystics pursuing the philological equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. In post Napoleonic France, one studied ‘Chinese, as one does Arabic or Sanskrit to see how ideas . . . [and] positive knowledge of man and nature’ developed, ‘one studies it in order to understand the history of migration and the revolution from the ancient to the modern world’ (Rémusat 1822a: 15). Rémusat subsequently engaged in debate with comparative philologists like Wilhelm von Humboldt who used Rémusat’s Élémens de la Grammaire Chinoise (1822b) to examine the general principles of grammar and ‘the metaphysics of language’ (Humboldt 1827: v–vi). Humboldt was particularly intrigued by the lack of grammatical structure in Chinese compared with the Indo-European languages he had studied. While the grammar of most known languages, had both an etymological and syntactic order, Chinese knew only the latter (ibid: 2). Moreover, as Chinese had no use for reflexive verbs, it had little capacity for precise thought (ibid: 16). Humboldt consequently reduced the difference ‘that exists between Chinese and other languages to the single fundamental point that to indicate the relationship between words and phrases, Chinese has no need of grammatical categories and no basis in grammar for the classification of words, but fixes in another manner that rapport between the language elements in the train (enchainement) of thought’ (ibid: 2). He concluded that Chinese as a consequence of its pictorial form, possessed a different structure from other languages. This form was, moreover, an inferior one and left the Chinese in a rudimentary stage of linguistic development (ibid: 71). Freidrich Schlegel shared Humboldt’s theory of linguistic development which increasingly coincided with a developing German understanding of philosophical and historical progress. In his Philosophy of Language (1847), Schlegel contended that ‘in the Chinese, this excessive and inappropriate expenditure of art has been directed to a very peculiar and complicated system of writing. There was no place for it in the [spoken] language itself, which is extremely poor, being in its basis extremely, not to say childishly, simple and quite ungrammatical’ (Schlegel 1847: 395).

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Subsequently, Ernest Renan agreed with Humboldt and Schlegel that ‘comparison was the great instrument of critical awareness’ (Renan (1847) 1900 vol. 3: 965). Nevertheless, contrary to the German linguists, Renan considered that the development of comparative philology ‘enabled us to take a bold glimpse’ at the first stage of civilisation ‘that one terms Aryan, where the germ of the civilizations of the world were concentrated in a narrow radius’ (Renan 1848 (1900) vol. 8: 31). As Renan understood it, ‘the spirit of each people and their language are in the most close relationship: the spirit forms the language and the language in its turn shapes and limits the people’ (ibid: 96). For Renan, this development proceeded through three stages (see Wadman 1964: 46) and the Chinese case offered an interesting example of a people who had become what they were at a very early stage. China offered the historian and the philosopher the ‘marvellous and instructive spectacle of another humanity developing itself almost without contact with Europe and western Asia and following her own line of development with a rigour which our more complicated civilisation has scarcely any idea’ (Renan (1859) vol. 2: 49). Yet this Chinese endeavour to follow rationally its linguistic destiny had, unfortunately, culminated in a ‘decrepit state without parallel in history’ (49). Renan, Edward Said alleges ‘set up a complex affiliation between Orientalism and its putative human subject matter that is based finally on power’ (Said 1995: 148). In tracing the emergence of an orientalist philological laboratory that began with Jones and de Sacy and culminated with Renan, Said, however, ignored the inconvenient fact that major differences existed between the first comparative philologists. An ontological gulf separated Renan’s historicist approach to comparative linguistics from the universalist one propounded by earlier comparativists like Jones and de Sacy. Indeed, Renan’s essay on ‘M. de Sacy et l’école liberale’ (1859) takes issue with de Sacy’s Enlightenment rationalism which assumed liberty to be a product of abstract reflection rather than the outcome of historically contingent experience. For Renan, Chinese decrepitude demonstrated the inadequacy of bureaucratically instrumentalizing an abstract rational order (Renan 1859 (1900) vol. 2: 46–9). The evolving science of comparative linguistics, despite its internal disagreements, generally contrasted unfavourably the imprecision of Chinese with the simplicity and grammatical sophistication of Sanscrit. This comparative perspective, however, contrasted in its assessment of Chinese from that advanced by ‘sinologues’ like Morrison, Rémusat, Meadows, Medhurst, Williams and Davis. The first sinologists, who

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concentrated exclusively on Chinese language and civilization, did not consider the evolution of the Chinese language indicative of a lower level of cultural accomplishment, nor was its form of government as morally corrosive as other Asiatic despotisms. Addressing Humboldts’s strictures on the weakness of Chinese grammar, Rémusat observed that comprehending Chinese presented few grammatical obstacles (in Renan 1847 (1900) vol. 3: 591). Its words were grouped conveniently in ‘polysyllabic forms, its conjunctions and prepositions neatly put in place, its adverbs distinguished by distinctive terminations, [with] a crowd of auxilliaries and analogical words for particles’, a language ultimately whose construction conformed ‘to the natural order of ideas [and] which made common Chinese the clearest and easiest of all languages’ (Rémusat in Renan (1847) vol. 3. 1900: 591). Similarly, Sir John Davis addressing the China branch of the Royal Asiatic Society observed that Chinese, ‘in a merely philological view, may be considered as a species of miracle. It is, in fact, the most ingenious and nearly the most perfect application of the hieroglyphic principle that can be imagined . . . and a new or additional language might be constructed out of the infinite combinations of their distinct constituent portions’ (Davis 1865: 115). As the authors of the third edition of An Historical and Descriptive Account of China (Murray et al. 1843) observed, a century and a half before Roland Barthes (1972) made a similar observation concerning Japan, the Chinese language structured a distinctively ‘written’ rather than a spoken or phonetic world. The language, these authors maintained, laboured ‘under great and obvious defects’ (1843 vol. 2: 17). Nevertheless, ‘to convey to the reader a correct idea of the people of China’ it was necessary to ‘assign to letters a more prominent place than if we were treating of any other nation’ (ibid: 13). Significantly, ‘literature, which elsewhere forms only a brilliant ornament at the summit of the social edifice is here the foundation on which the fabric rests and the whole system of the Empire is professionally regulated in accordance with the books . . . of the ancient sages’ (ibid: 14). This distinctive bookish character, moreover, had important ramifications for the formation of Chinese morality and government. For Everiste Régis Huc the Chinese administration represented a form of ‘literary oligarchy’ (1859: 56), while official morality, as Edouard Biot observed, was premissed upon a familiarity with the literary classics of the Confucian canon (Biot in Renan vol. 3: 577). Indeed, for some commentators this ‘respect for letters might at first appear to place China in a point of civilisation above the most improved

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countries of the west’ (Murray et al. vol. 2: 15). However, this was not the case. State control of ‘letters and philosophy’ meant that ‘opinions which in Europe would be mere subjects of discussion . . . create in China a political agitation’ (ibid). This contributed to an atmosphere of intellectual conservatism and stagnation. Everiste Huc considered ‘one of the most distinctive features’ of the Chinese was an almost ‘religious veneration for ancient institutions, and all things ancient’ (1859: xvi). It also prevented the formation of a public sphere. The failure to generate political commitment had ultimately exposed China to the ‘foreign yoke’ imposed by the aggressive but unsophisticated Tartar dynasty of the Manchu/Qing. Despite its literary character China, for some commentators, remained a ‘complete and unmixed despotism’ (Murray et al.: 160). This was even more the case after the imposition of the Manchu ‘foreign yoke’ in the course of the seventeenth century. Yet, for more sophisticated European observers like Staunton, Huc and Davis it was a paradoxical despotism that offered important social and political resources. Career bureaucrats like Davis and Meadows observed, that the Chinese system of law and administration was well adapted for ruling a population ten to fifteen times the size of the largest European states. Sir James Mackintosh reviewing Staunton’s translation of the Chinese penal code, in the Edinburgh Review of 1810 considered it reasonable, clear and consistent. It did not suffer from the ‘verbiage’ that ‘afflicted most other Asiatic productions, none of the superstitious deliration, the miserable incoherence . . . and eternal repetitions of those oracular performances’ (in Davis 1865: 51–3). Indeed, Mackintosh knew no European code ‘that is at once so copious and consistent, or that is so nearly free from intricacy, bigotry and fiction’ (ibid). As Sir John Davis subsequently observed the law was ‘well adapted to the existing conditions of the Chinese people – the true test of the fitness of all laws’ (Davis 1865: 51). Sinologists with a mission like Samuel Wells Williams similarly considered that ‘the long continuance of the Chinese polity is a proof both of its adaptation to the habits and condition of the people, and its general good management’ (Williams 1883 vol. 1: 380). Chinese law reflected a form of government which all nineteenth century observers considered patriachal. Huc in The Chinese Empire considered ‘the idea of the family’ the ‘grand principle that serves as the basis of society in China. Filial piety, the constant subject of dissertation to moralists and philosophers, and continually recommended in the proclamations of Emperors . . . has become the fundamental root of all other virtues’ (Huc 1859: 54). Consequently, as Sir George Staunton

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explained ‘the vital and universally operating principle of the Chinese government is the duty of submission to parental authority, whether vested in the parents themselves, or in their representatives, and which, although usually described under the pleasing appellation of filial piety is much more properly to be considered as a general rule of action than as the expression of any particular sentiment of affection’ (Staunton 1809 in Davis 1836: 205). Moreover, Mackintosh observed that although ‘for the repression of disorder and the gentle coercion of a vast population’, Chinese law was ‘equally mild and efficacious’, it knew nothing of ‘political freedom or individual independence’ (Davis 1865: 51). Similarly, in his ‘general examination of the Chinese government . . . conveniently considered under the heads of the Emperor and his court, classes of society, the different branches of the supreme administration, the provincial authorities and the execution of the laws’ Samuel Wells Williams contended that the defects of this ‘remarkable body of laws’ consisted in the fact that ‘the degree of liberty that can be safely awarded to the subject is not defined in it, and his rights are unknown in law’ (Williams (1848) 1883 vol. 1: 392). Consequently, the government was despotic, ‘but having no effective military power in their hands, the lawgivers resort to a minuteness of legislation upon the practice of social and relative virtues and duties . . . and exhibits a minute attention to trifles’ (ibid: 392). This attention to detail and administration by a system of central offices or boards regulating conduct through a bureaucracy or mandarinate at the state or provincial level ultimately explained the peaceful, orderly and generally well-supervised character of China. English civil servants found more to admire in this bureaucratic ‘machine’ which in Sir John Davis’ view ‘works well’, than Medhurst, Gutzlaff or Williams who wrote, in part, from a proselytizing sense of mission. Both AngloAmerican scholar bureaucrats and scholar missionaries recognized that the constitution of the people was a ‘reflection of the dominant morality’ (Meadows 1856: xiv), and e converso ‘the good humour and peaceableness of the Chinese was a product of their political and social institutions’ (Davis vol. 1: 211). The dominant Confucian morality permeated the Chinese constitution. For Davis and Meadows the Imperial bureaucracy with its attention to universal political education and offices open to competitive examination based on the four Confucian classics and the commentaries of Zhu xi (Chu Hsi) represented a model to be emulated. Indeed, Meadows’ preface to The Chinese and their Rebellions included an extended essay on how the growing ranks of the British imperial civil service could profit from the example of the

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Confucian system of public examinations for entry into the mandarinate. As Meadows observed, there existed ‘an enormous difference between the administrative system of the Chinese and those of certain other oriental nations, Persia and Turkey for instance. Eastern Asia differs widely from Western Asia, as does the latter from Western Europe’ (Meadows 1856: 22). In contrast with the rest of Asia, and much of Europe ‘hard and successful study only enables a Chinese to set foot on the lowest step of the official ladder’ (ibid). The Chinese executive system was ‘at once the most gigantic and most minutely organized that the world has ever seen. It and its modes of action are carefully defined by regulations emanating from the Emperor’ (ibid). Such a system, Davis observed enabled ‘the people to possess their full share of their own labour’, thus, facilitating a characteristic industriousness (209). The moral preoccupation with education and the ‘diffusion of intelligence’ further facilitated ‘general prosperity’ (210). Ernest Renan, similarly observed this distinctive Chinese penchant for education. Renan was particularly struck by the fact that China from its earliest history possessed an administrative system and a form of government and society comparable with that only recently developed in nineteenth century Europe. Chinese education in particular afforded an intriguing insight into the ‘laws of the human spirit’ (Renan (1847) 1990 vol. 3: 588). ‘The fundamental principle of the Chinese system is the uniformity of literary, intellectual, moral and even specialized education’, Renan contended (585). The system of public examination leading to qualification for public office, meant that the people had become inured to ‘the idea that intellect constituted a natural right to office holding’ (580). However, whereas in Europe it was assumed that all ‘men called to a liberal profession shared a common intellectual culture’, in China this principle had been carried to extremes. Thus the Chinese government required ‘the adminstrator, the magistrate, the teacher and even the soldier . . . to pass’ through the same stages of secondary and tertiary education (585). Such an insistence on common educational goals had limitations, however. For Renan China was a ‘sort of imperfect Europe which had been from its infancy what it always was’ (577). Informed western observers of China thus recognized that Chinese civilization, as that term came to be used in the nineteenth century, had fashioned an unusual and paradoxical form of government and morality. Summing up this achievement, T. T. Meadows commented that ‘while the Russian autocracy is a despotism maintained by a

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physical force’, the Chinese version was not. Rather it formed ‘an autocracy existing in virtue of the cheerful acquiescence of the people. The latter actually do share largely in a kind of self government in consequence of the mandarins being taken impartially from all classes’ (27). Somewhat differently one of the more perceptive missionary observers of early nineteenth century China, Everiste Régis Huc, considered the Emperor and the mandarinate subject to limitations that even rendered the notion of a Chinese despotism questionable. The government although absolute was not ‘tyrannical’. For, ‘if it were, it would probably long since have ceased to exist; for it is not easy to conceive that three hundred million men could be ruled arbitrarily and despotically for many successive centuries, let them be ever so apathetic and brutalised – and assuredly the Chinese are neither the one nor the other’ (Huc 1859: 65–6). Huc, in fact, was possibly the first commentator to observe that the centralizing authority of the imperial state permitted considerable autonomy and even popular democracy at the village level (66). He further contended that ‘there may be even much that is admirable and instructive in their ancient and curious institutions, based upon literary qualification, by which it has been found possible to grant, in the communes, universal suffrage to three hundred millions and to render every distinction accessible to all classes’ (66). Moreover, this unique ability to combine local democracy and centralizing authority, shed doubt on a number of ‘false ideas’ held about China, like its fixed and unchanging nature. Indeed, the civil wars and dynastic changes that characterized Chinese history belied the view that China was a homogenous unity accustomed to peace, ‘attached to ancient laws and institutions’ and ‘renowned for its immobility’ (Huc in Martin 1927: 27). Worryingly, for an ultramontane conservative like the abbé Huc, nineteenth century Europe seemed intent on emulating China in its ‘feverish taste for political change and a profound indifference to religious topics’ (ibid 6). Paradoxically, the radical social theories fermented in France after 1789 and ‘which are represented as the sublime results of the progress of human reason, are but exploded Chinese utopias which agitated the Celestial Empire centuries ago’ (ibid). The combination of absolutism and democracy together with the Chinese preoccupation with tradition ultimately accounted for this perennial political instability. Despite ‘numerous revolutions’ the system

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of Chinese monarchy remained basically intact. Moreover, at the time Huc wrote, it seemed to be entering one of ‘those epochs in which the evil has gained the ascendant over the good with the most frightful corruption penetrating the whole mass of society’ (Huc 1859: 66). Meadows and Davis traced this paradoxical capacity for absolutism leavened by popular accountability to the Confucian legitimation of the right to appeal to the magistrate and ultimately, if the Emperor failed to maintain virtue and good government, to heaven. Meadows observed, from his rooms in the Oriental Club overlooking the Strand, as the Taiping rebellion raged in Southern China, that the Chinese had ‘no right of legislation, they have no right of self-taxation, they have not the power of voting out their rulers or of limiting . . . supplies’ (24). They did, however, possess the right of rebellion that derived from the Confucian classic written by Mencius. Indeed, of all ‘nations that have attained a certain degree of civilisation, the Chinese are the one least revolutionary and the most rebellious’ (24). Consequently, despite their ‘incurable conservatism’ the people constituted an important and salutary check on imperial power (Davis 1865: 212). Missionary scholars like Medhurst, and Williams whose The Middle Kingdom (1883) was the textbook for American university syllabuses until the 1920s (see Latourette 1941: x), also recognized the moral and legal limitations on imperial authority. However, these writers remained sceptical about the more positive features of the regime. The system of law actually isolated and immured the Chinese subject in a network of endless observation. ‘The great and leading principles by which the present administration preserves its power over the people’, Williams wrote, consisted ‘in a system of strict surveillance and mutual responsibility among all classes’ (Williams 1883 vol. 1: 382). Geographical isolation, a continuous history and the system of political education and official examinations combined to create this system of almost Foucaultian surveillance (see Dutton 1992). For Williams, it was ‘like a network extending over the whole face of society, each individual being isolated in his own mesh, but responsibly connected with those around him’ (382). The technique of Chinese rule ‘necessarily undermines confidence and infuses universal distrust.’ The government, Williams maintained, sought the isolation of the subject, even though it came at the ‘expense of justice, truth, honesty and natural affection’ (383). Consequently, ‘the idea of government in the minds of the uneducated people is that of some ever present terror, like a sword of Damocles; and so far has this undefined fear of some untoward result when connected with it counteracted the real vigour of the Chinese, that to it may be referred

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much of their indifference to improvement, contentment with what is already possessed, and submission to petty injustice’ (383). Mutual suspicion combined with fear of surveillance prevented subjects from combining to resist unjust governmental exactions. Consequently, for missionaries like Williams, Medhurst and Gutzlaff, the institutions of China remained essentially despotic, ‘defective and founded on wrong principles.’ They possessed the ‘element of stability, but not of improvement’ (Williams 382). For Gutzlaff, one of the more captious missionaries, Chinese morality was confused, because the spring of Confucian moral action resided in self interest (Gutzlaff: 378). Confucian scepticism afforded ‘no just and solid foundation for virtue and happiness’, while the ‘religion and mythology of China’ was ‘a dark and cheerless system’ (xx–xxvi). Williams similarly observed that the patriarchalism informing Confucian thought could ‘not make men honorable, truthful or kind; it does not place woman in her right position, nor teach all classes their obligations to their maker; the wonder is . . . that this huge mass of mankind is no worse’ (382). The fact that the Chinese were no worse, ironically, was also due to the inculcation of Confucian values of orderly relationship elaborated over two millenia. Almost despite themselves, sinologists informed by evangelism, like Morrison and Williams and subsequently at the end of the century Legge and Soothill, still found much to commend in Confucian thought and practice. Williams favourably compared Confucian virtue with that practiced by his pagan Graeco-Roman contemporaries. The Four Books of Confucian thought and the Five Classics (Qing), available in a variety of European languages by the 1850s, ‘would not’ Williams averred, ‘be considered as anything more than curiosities in literature . . . were it not for the incomparable influence they have exercised over so many millions of minds.’ This influence gave them an interest which no book ‘besides the Bible, can claim’ (Williams 1848 vol. 1: 664). The fact that the Chinese Classics were free ‘from descriptions of impurity and licentiousness’ redeemed them in William’s view (ibid). In particular, the Confucian ideal of the jinzi, the gentleman scholar, had exercised a tremendous ‘power for good’ over the Chinese. Despite its virtue and rationality, however, the Confucian ethic was fatally flawed by its ultimately secular and this worldly orientation. In Medhurst’s view, the Confucian system ‘is merely a scheme of ethics and politics, from which things spiritual and divine are uniformly excluded’ (Medhurst 1838: 154). From the missionary perspective the ‘school of Confucius’ was ‘deficient in two important points: the

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existence of a God and the interests of the world to come’ (ibid: 163). Chinese ethics taught a ‘lifeless, cold-hearted, uninfluential system which is powerless in the present and hopeless for the future world’ (ibid). Ultimately Confucian concern with the five cardinal duties affecting the sum of human relationships could have no moral interest when it neglected ‘the foundation of all virtue’ (ibid). Confucius, Williams, Medhurst, Legge and Soothill observed, had a worrying propensity to equivocation and economy with the truth and this, too, had had disturbing social consequences. From the missionary perspective, the Chinese had attained a ‘higher position in the general security of life and property and in the arts of domestic life . . . and a greater degree of general literary intelligence, than any other heathen or Mohammedan nation that ever existed.’ They had, however, achieved as much as they could without the revelation of the gospel (Williams vol. 1: 46). For the Protestant sinologists who tended to dominate the academic discipline of Chinese studies in the latter half of the nineteenth century the progress, and moral and political salvation of China lay in the success of the missions (Williams vol. 1: xv).

Conclusion By the middle of the nineteenth century, western observers – whether in the guise of ambassadors, missionaries or governors – had effectively revised the eighteenth-century image of China. Their commentaries and histories expanded in both scope and quality western knowledge of China. By the 1850s all the classic works in the Confucian canon were available to the English and French speaking world, and early nineteenth century philology had produced an effective Chinese dictionary and an understanding of Chinese grammar. The evolving knowledge of both China and the Far East more generally had radically affected understandings of the nature of language and its relationship to stages of civilizational development. In particular, the developing awareness of Asian languages provoked an enduring philological controversy. Those informed by Enlightenment universalism like de Sacy, Jones, Marsden and Humboldt maintained that all language shared a pre-diluvian common root, while others increasingly argued that different languages were distinctive products of historically contingent cultural experiences. John Crawfurd pioneered the latter view in his History of the Indian Archipelago and his

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two volume A Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language (London vol. 1: ii–iii). Ernest Renan subsequently adumbrated it in his philological laboratory. Apart from stimulating philological inquiry into the nature of language and civilization, the nineteenth-century ambassadors and missionaries also provided a wealth of information on the relationship between government and moral and national character. This material has been widely misread as facilitating the colonial exploitation of ‘lesser breeds without the law’. Yet the primary motive of the early nineteenth-century liberal imperialists was utilitarian. The government representatives or East India Company agents from Barrow and Staunton to Raffles, Crawfurd, Bowring, Davis and Meadows thought the moral character of the Asian peoples had been deformed by the character of government rather than racial inferiority. Indeed, a notable feature of their histories is their belief in the benefits that trade, liberty of person and property rights maintained by law would deliver to the oppressed masses of Asia. Moreover, as their familiarity with East Asia developed, informed western commentators increasingly recognized important differences within the general form of Asiatic despotism. China offered a particularly perplexing case. Thus, it appeared to utility maximizing British bureaucrats, that the subjects of the Middle Kingdom were efficiently governed, had access to a known law and a competitively examined mode of entry to public service that the west had only just begun to develop. The commentaries of scholar bureaucrats like Bowring, Davis and Meadows indicates an awareness of a Chinese moral and legal framework, grounded in a conservative Confucian ethic of a hierarchical and non-liberal character that, nevertheless, rendered the majority of people industrious and cheerful. For liberal free traders this constituted a source of much confusion. China evidently possessed values, but they were not liberal or progressive; could they, therefore, still be considered values? Those of an evangelical persuasion like Medhurst, Gutzlaff and Williams maintained that the question could only be resolved by China’s exposure to the saving grace of revelation. Consequently, it was in the writings of the more fervid evangelicals that classical Confucianism received its most critical reappraisal. At the same time, the new intelligentsia of early nineteenthcentury western Europe informed by a curious mixture of post Kantian progressive rationalism and a spirit of romanticism that facilitated a propensity to philosophical history, evinced great interest in these

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commentaries (Wood 1998: 13). The grand theories proposed by post Enlightenment thinkers from Herder, Schlegel and Hegel to Mill and Marx, in fact, tried to reduce the perplexing and ambivalent material made available through the enterprise of governors and evangelists to a scheme that revealed the apparently iron laws of historical development. It is to this progressive development that we next turn.

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3 Nineteenth Century Progress and Arrested Civilizations

The truth is that these old empires endure, not because the cohesive bond is strong, but because though it is weak, the disuniting elements are still weaker. But if you destroy the bond, or much weaken it, these agencies will win and that will be the total dissolution of all authority. Bagehot Physics and Politics 1872 The evident ambivalence towards the China Case expressed in the writings of both Smith and Malthus failed to concern a later generation of British political economists. Imbued with a normative faith that society could and should be transformed by the application of a felicific calculus, British economic liberals saw nothing intrinsically valuable in the habits, manners and customs of traditional civilizations. James Mill in his seminal History of India (1858) particularly found the economic arrangements of both India and China autarchic and, therefore, contrary to utility. Although he thought the Chinese in many respects a ‘civilized people’, Mill considered their future progress encumbered by the lack of an authentic morality and ‘the cumbrous contrivance of the Chinese symbols’ which impeded ‘the advancement of knowledge’. Significantly, Mill viewed ‘Hindu’ and Chinese society and institutions broadly similar. (Mill vol. 1: 109) Indeed, throughout his History of India, Mill treated China merely as a footnote that supported Indian socioeconomic practice, rendering generalizations about a common Asiatic model of production plausible. For Crawfurd whose fieldwork in Java, Burma and China gave added credence to Mill’s hypothesis, the economic foundation of despotism throughout Asia, consisted in the competition ‘not of cultivators for the land, but of land for cultivators’ (vol. 3: 5, 52). 67

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In such a system, therefore, it was ‘idle to speak of a private right in property’ (ibid: 53). Crawfurd maintained that Mill’s analysis had revealed for the first time the pattern of ‘landed tenures in oriental countries’ (52). His philosophical grasp of this pattern, Crawfurd bizarrely contended, had been enhanced by the fact that he had never left London (53). Subsequently, Richard Jones who lectured at Haileybury College, the training school of the East India Company, embellished this political economy with the theory of the global labour fund and its utility in identifying the sources of wealth. For Jones, in his Textbook of Lectures on the Political Economy of Nations Delivered at East India College (1852), the pattern of Asian economic landholding and agricultural production was ‘alike’ throughout ‘the wide region’ (62). This meant that ‘the despotic governments which have ever prevailed in these countries have ordinarily claimed for the monarchy not merely a dominion over his territories but the property of the soil in them.’ It required no great leap of the utilitarian imagination to move from this pattern of labour and land holding to identifying a common ‘Asiatic’ form of governance that gave all Asian regimes distinctive commonalities. Thus, whereas earlier orientalists of a philosophical or philological vocation had primarily attended to the different cultural, aesthetic, moral and governmental practices of India and China, for the developing British school of political economy, by contrast, these civilizations were isomorphic because their economic practice was broadly similar. For John Stuart Mill, therefore, all Asia remained calcified in an agricultural state where governments established themselves as ‘lords of the soil’. Though such governments might vary in ‘qualities according to the accidents of personal character’, none leave ‘much to the cultivators beyond mere necessaries’. In these Asiatic regimes ‘though the bulk of the population are ill provided for, the government by collecting small contributions from a great number is enabled . . . to make a show of riches out of proportion to the general condition of society’ (Mill 1965 vol. 11: 15). Such, in Mill’s view, was ‘the economic condition of most of the countries of Asia as it has been from beyond the commencement of authentic history and is still, wherever not disturbed by foreign influences.’ Such calcification could only be overcome Mill argued by the extension of trade, property rights and free market principles. In the aftermath of the Opium War (1841–42) and the opening of the China market, Mill defended the continuing export of East Indian opium to China on utility maximizing grounds (Mill 1859 (1962): 228).

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From a contrasting political economy perspective, Karl Marx agreed that the opening of Asia to European and American trade would inexorably erode despotic sclerosis. Evidently, Marx and Engels derived their controversial understanding of the Asiatic mode of production from Mill. Yet, apart from concluding that Mill’s Political Economy was the work of a ‘cretin’, Marx and Engels nowhere acknowledge this utilitarian influence (Marx (1867–1991) vol. 3 pp. 778–89). Instead, on a somewhat cursory reading of François Bernier’s seventeenth century travels in India, while ignoring his meditation on Chinese politics, and Raffles’ History of Java, Marx and Engels in the Grundrisse (1857), The Critique of Political Economy (1857) and Das Kapital (1867), identified a separate and distinctive Asiatic economic and political order. Almost in passing they had germinated ‘a conceptual canker which once introduced into the Marxist belief system ends up by corroding it fatally’ (O’Leary 1989: 152). We shall subsequently discuss in Chapter 5 the implications of this corrosion for twentieth-century understandings of Asian totalitarianism. Nonetheless, given the obviously limited and orientalist derivation of Marx and Engels understanding, it is hard to see why Said considers Marx’s ‘humanity’ and ‘sympathy’ so ‘clearly engaged’ by the plight of the Asian masses (Said 1995: 154). For Marx, uncritically following early nineteenth century developmental orthodoxy, it is climate and ‘the low degree of civilization’ (Mellotti 1977: 56) in Asia that produced a society characterized by an ossified agriculture and a sclerotic bureaucracy. The village community was the foundation of this oppressive regime. Oriental despotism consequently ‘restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules [and] depriving it . . . of all energy.’ It was in fact slavery ‘the undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life’ interrupted by the periodic explosion of ‘wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction’ (ibid). However, because of the ‘simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities . . . Asian villages instantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again in the same spot and with the same name’ (Marx 1991 vol. 1: 778). Such simplicity explained the ‘riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies’ which strikingly contrasted with ‘the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states and their never ending changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental elements remain unaltered by the storms which blow above the cloudy regions of politics’ (ibid: 779).

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In Marx and Engels’ view, bourgeois commerce would inevitably undermine ‘Asiatic barbarity’ in general and ‘the rotting semicivilisation’ of China in particular (1857 (1964)). Scientific socialism’s evident repulsion from the Asiatic mode, however, drew its inspiration not only from British political economy, but also from post Enlightenment German historicism. Thus Marx, commenting on the ‘socialism’ of the Taiping rebellion, asserted that: Chinese socialism may stand in the same relation to the European variety as Chinese philosophy stands to the Hegelian. Yet it is a gratifying fact that the bales of calico of the English bourgeoisie have in eight years brought the oldest and most imperturbable empire on earth to the threshold of a social upheaval, one that will in any case hold most significant consequences for civilisation. (Marx and Engels 1850 (1964): 14) Marx and Engels’ attempt to marry economic determinism with the dialectic of world history, thus, reflected the other major shift in European thought that shaped the transvaluation of Chinese civilization. This was essentially German in inspiration and promoted an activist conception of freedom and progress that profoundly altered the early eighteenth-century view of civilizational development and the role that non European cultures played within it.

Romanticism, authenticity and China As we noted in Chapter 1, the discovery of an ancient Chinese and an ancient Indian civilization had disturbed the late seventeenth century European understanding of the past, the Bible as an authentic record of the earliest times, and the operation of God’s providence. In the course of the eighteenth century, the growing awareness of these civilizations led philosophers like Leibniz, Wolff, Vico, Kant, Herder, Hegel and Schlegel to revise the European understanding of history, replacing Christian eschatology with Enlightenment philosophy. In contrast with British political economy, the European post Enlightenment philosophy of history drew a distinction between ancient Indian and Chinese civilizations and increasingly found the latter artificial and enfeebled. The German school of historical philosophy and philology in particular regarded China as an early and incomplete stage in a pattern of world historical development. Early philologists like Cornelius de Pauw, Joseph de Guignes and William Jones had considered

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China an ersatz civilization whose written ‘hieroglyphs’ derived either from an Egyptian or Brahminic provenance. This developing philology enabled some European and most German critics of Enlightenment to explain their own relatively late historical emergence by the notion of progress presented in terms of an evolving authenticity, national selfconsciousness and the ‘concretization’ of the idea of freedom in democratic institutions. It was Kant and Rousseau, neither of whom subscribed to the fashionable late eighteenth century vogue for a Chinese science of government, who first intimated this new European self understanding. For Kant Enlightenment constituted ‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage’ (Kant 1963: 3). Tutelage in this view consisted in ‘man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.’ It was in this irrational tutelary relationship that most of humanity dwelt. Lacking the will and the courage to follow reason, mankind had languished in ‘laziness and cowardice’, uncritically bound by fear, superstition and tradition. Only in Europe, and only recently, had the enlightened cast off these fetters to reach a philosophical appreciation of freedom couched in a new vocabulary of authenticity, development, self realization, fulfilment and consciousness. Kant maintained that slaves obeyed the law out of fear of the consequences, and the hedonist out of a deluded hope of happiness, but the authentic practitioner of practical reason obeyed because, ‘as a pure rational being, he participates in its legislation and thus has an interest in its faithful execution’ (Kant 1988: 18). Thus, as the advanced European states progressively achieved this ‘rational freedom’ in their constitutions, relationships ‘between citizens and amongst similarly constituted states’ became truly ethical (ibid: 108). It was, however, as a generation of post Kantian thinkers that included J. G. Herder, J. G. Fichte, G. F. W. Hegel and F. Schlegel worked out the world historical implications of this abstract morality, that a further transvaluation in China’s civilizational status occurs. It was further and indirectly affected by the German intellectual perception of German backwardness. By the first decade of the nineteenth century the ubiquity of French cultural influence, followed by the humiliation of French conquest upon German amour propre, had unforeseen consequences for the German professoriate’s evaluation of Chinese civilization. Thus, J. G. Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation (1811) explained Prussian defeat at Austerlitz and Jena, as the moment of kairos or historical reversal intimating the birth of a new Germany leading the world into an age of reason as art. Fichte’s wissenschaftslehre depicted the German

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race as a nation progressively revealing itself through language and blood rather than the conventions of traditional politics. This fateful connection between blood, language and nation facilitated a new understanding of history where distinctive volk cultures constituted the logical organizing principle of civilization and race. It was, however, J. G. Herder who, in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschicte der Menscheit (1799), linked the differences in social and political institutions of different races to innate psychological qualities (Hannaford 1996: 230; Herder 1969: 117–69). Curiously, Isaiah Berlin regarded Herder, Vico and Schlegel as early proponents of a liberal cultural pluralism. In Berlin’s assessment, Herder opposed the universalizing rationalism of the Enlightenment with the autonomous development of distinctive cultures (Berlin 1990: 76–7). Somewhat differently Raymond Schwab and J. J. Clarke consider Schlegel in particular, a key figure in promoting the Oriental renaissance that swept early nineteenth century Germany. This view of Schlegel and Herder as anti-ethnocentric cultural pluralists, however, rests on the assumption that their attention to Indian civilization and the purported Indo-European linguistic foundations of European civilization intimated a premonitory snuffling of liberal multiculturalism. This was far from the case. Philosophically inclined philologists like Herder and Schlegel, as well as classical historians like Barthold Niebuhr, treated India as the cradle of civilization because it had nurtured the Aryan race, from whose root the teutonic flower of exceptionalism bloomed. To solve a mounting romantic neurosis concerning German inadequacy Herder, Schlegel and Fichte embraced the idea of cultural particularism. However, some cultures and/or races were evidently more equal than others. Thus the German promotion of India and Greece as the source of the values that created the unique, but as yet unrealized, German culturstaat, came at the price of reducing the earlier Enlightenment promotion of China. Herder’s Philosophy of History (1799) elaborated the world historical implications of this doctrine. The ‘sovereignty of Europe is founded’, Herder asserted, upon ‘activity and invention, on science and united emulative exertion’ (631). By contrast, China, locked in its Asiatic fastness, evinced the limitations of the ‘semi-Mungalian form’. Its eugenic limitations, moreover, entailed that ‘this race of men, in this region, could never become Greeks or Romans. Chinese they were and will remain: a people endowed by nature with small eyes, a short nose, a flat forehead, little beard, large ears and a protuberant belly; what their organization could produce it had produced’ (297). This was, of course, despotism, ideally suited

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to the Chinese temperament, but unfit for Promethean, Aryanised Europeans. From this activist viewpoint, the ‘authentic’ European contrasted positively with the imitative Asiatic. Tradition and temperament had reduced China to ‘an embalmed mummy, wrapped in silk and painted with hieroglyphics, its internal circulation’, resembled ‘that of a doormouse in its winter sleep’ (296). Consequently, Chinese morality was mere hypocrisy and its government a machine that reduced everyone to an equal slavery. If, moreover, as Herder held, language was the vehicle of national intelligence then Chinese hieroglyphics (together with the decadent habit of tea drinking which undermined the character) ‘ennervates the thoughts and reduces the whole national way of thinking to painted or air drawn arbitrary characters.’ In relation to the idea of progress and cultural development, therefore, China stood ‘as an old ruin on the verge of the world’ (ibid). Inspired by William ‘harmonious’ Jones’ path finding translations of Indian sacred texts for the Bulletin of Asiatic Researches in Calcutta (Schwab 1950: ch. 1), Freidrich von Schlegel, like his fellow French and German Asianists, considered China ‘an entire, absolute and rigid monarchical unity’ (Schlegel 1837: 124). According to Schlegel, in his influential Philosophy of History (1837) even the leading sinologist of the period Abel Rémusat, had found Chinese ideas ‘limited’ (126). For Schlegel himself, they constituted a ‘mechanical play of idle abstractions’ (132). While recognizing that in its initial stages Chinese civilization had produced some remarkable moral and scientific insights, its culture like its economy had subsequently calcified and degenerated. Problematically, ‘at a very early period, [Chinese] science had taken a course completely erroneous, and even their language partly followed this direction, or at least assumed a very stiff and artificial character.’ In terms of its government, moreover China had staggered ‘from one degree of political idolatry to a grade still lower’ (137). Similarly, G. W. F. Hegel found it convenient to consign China to the earliest stages of world historical development in order to explain the preoccupation of Geist with revealing the idea of freedom and reason in the dialectical play of an essentially European history. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1827) Hegel showed that the dialectic of universal history revealed ‘the development of the consciousness of freedom on the part of spirit and of the consequent realization of that freedom’ (Hegel 1827: 69). This developing self consciousness received its concrete manifestation in the constitutional and legal forms of world historical states. India and China, however, were ‘wanting in

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the essential consciousness of the idea of freedom’ (71). China consequently lay ‘outside world history’. Subsumed within the spirit of the family, the individual could achieve no formal independence. The idea of freedom in Chinese thought thus constituted a mere abstraction and the ‘universal will displays its activity immediately through that of the individual; the latter has no self-cognizance at all in antithesis to substantial positive being’ (71). In China, therefore, the universal will ‘immediately commands what the individual is to do and the latter complies and obeys with proportionate renunciation of reflection and personal independence’ (120). The Chinese state rested on the elementary union of the family, and the people existed in a state of ‘nonage’. Chinese law, moreover, was a mere corrective deterrent. It did not induce any ‘consciousness of wrong’. Consequently the distinguishing character of China indicates that everything which belongs to spirit: unconstrained morality, in practice and theory, heart, inward religion, science and art properly so called is alien to it. The Emperor always speaks with majesty and paternal kindness and tenderness to the people; who however cherish the meanest opinion of themselves and believe that they are born only to drag the car of imperial power. The burden which presses them to the ground, seems to them to be their inevitable destiny; and it appears nothing to them to sell themselves as slaves, and to eat the bitter bread of slavery. (120) Kant, Hegel, Herder, Schlegel and Rousseau all shared the view that despotism, in its oriental version, was antithetical to the emergence of a positive or moral freedom. For Hegel, the dialectic of freedom constituted a universal available to world historical peoples, unlikely to be attained by those lost in particularity. For Herder, Fichte and Schlegel, by contrast, the individual achieved autonomy and self consciousness through the progressive emergence of the modern nation state and the authentic language that articulated its consciousness and spirit. Activity and conflict from this perspective constituted the means of achieving full self-realization. If as Hegel quoting Holderlin maintained, ‘the dissonances of the world are like the quarrels of lovers. Reconciliation is in the midst of strife and everything that is separated finds itself again’, Chinese isolation and stability intimated impotence. For, as J. G. Herder explained, ‘only amid storms can the noble plant grow . . . the seed germinates more beautifully in a subsequent period from the

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ashes of the good and when irrigated with blood seldom fails to shoot up into an unfading flower.’ The violent political and industrial transformation that embraced Europe in the course of the early nineteenth century, thus engendered a new sensibility grounded in a philosophical understanding of sturm und drang and blud und boden. This evolving European self-understanding profoundly affected the perception of China. The idea of authenticity and self-realization allied to the virtue of progressive change in a democratic constitutional direction undermined an earlier Enlightenment understanding of rational rule. According to the new historicism, China had failed the challenge of kairos. Consequently, its civilization, which had provided the mid-eighteenth century Enlightenment with a model of despotism at its most rational, now came to represent much that was rebarbative in this servile form of rule. Whereas for philosophes like Voltaire and Quesnay the Celestial Empire enjoyed a sequestered stability, the various progressive ideologies forged in the crucible of European modernization viewed Chinese auctothony conducive only to political and economic degeneracy. Its enlightened patriarchy constituted a brutal tyranny. Its morality turned out to be mere debauchery and hypocrisy. Its practical reason was ‘ignorant of the very point that constitutes the interest of philosophy’, (Hegel 1827: 138) and its apparent tolerance masked a servile flattery. Curiously, China’s decline into embalmed impotence also served as a comminatory prophylactic for Europeans disenchanted by the prospect of modern mass democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville, J. S. Mill and Schlegel all observed that because ancient China had enjoyed a civilization more highly developed than ancient Europe, it offered a salutary illustration of the dangers arising from an uncritical acceptance of orthodoxy and tradition. Consequently, Tocqueville (1840) comminated that the modern democratic preoccupation with public opinion could induce a version of Chinese sterility in the west. Tellingly, Tocqueville observed that: when the Europeans first arrived in China . . . they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection. . . . The nation was absorbed in productive industry; the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science no longer existed there. This served to explain the strangely motionless state in which they found the minds of this people. The Chinese in following the tracks of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by which the latter had been guided. . . . The Chinese, then, had lost

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the power of change; for them to improve was impossible. They were compelled at all times and in all points, to imitate their predecessors, lest they should stray into utter darkness, by deviating for an instant from the path already laid down for them. The spring of human knowledge was all but dry; and though the stream still ran on, it could neither swell its waters, nor alter its channels. (1840 (1980): 144) Analogously, Mill considered that China’s paternal despotism constituted a ‘fit instrument’ for carrying it to the point of civilization. Yet, having reached that point, it was ‘brought to a permanent halt for want of mental liberty and individuality’. Moreover, as the institutions did not break down and ‘give place to others, further improvement stopped’ (Mill 1859 (1962): 52). The fact that the Qing dynasty, despite eventually suppressing the Taiping rebellion and attempting a Confucian restoration, entered irreversible political decline in the last half of the nineteenth century, seemingly justified the increasingly captious western assessment of East Asian civilization. To avoid a similar fate, aristocratic liberals like Tocqueville and Mill advocated the progressive value of a competitive market in ideas, while liberal nationalists like Schlegel and Hegel, somewhat differently, emphasized the condign benefits of sturm und drang. Moreover, the transformation of China from a model of moral rule to the ‘sick man of the east’ offered the enticing prospect for additional reflection on the impact of evolution, environment, nutrition and race upon civilizational progress and decay.

The Aryan myth, the yellow race and the problem of degeneration Early nineteenth century European theorists of social change, therefore, recognized that progress and development entailed a shift from tutelage to reason and from status to contract. The growing awareness of the difficulty of this transition, and the dangers arising from it, evoked a growing intellectual and elite preoccupation with the factors that promoted both evolutionary growth, and those that caused personal and political degeneration. This concern invited a number of scientific and pseudo-scientific explanations that sought both to account for biological, social and economic change as well as different rates of progress across the globe.

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The mid-century decade in which Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) also witnessed Marx producing his Grundrisse and Critique of Political Economy (1857), Mill’s essay On Liberty (1859) Auguste Comte completing the four parts of his System of Positive Polity (1851–54), and Herbert Spencer enunciating the Principles of Psychology (1855). It also saw Count Arthur de Gobineau propounding his profoundly pessimistic and anti-evolutionary theory of race in an Essai sur L’Inegalite des Races Humaines (1852). In the second half of the nineteenth century, this European and American preoccupation with the causes of evolution and degeneration further altered the image of China and the Far East in social scientific discourse. Postcolonial discourse enthusiasts assume, of course, that the various accounts of development and degeneration that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century were either implicitly or explicitly racist. Such simplistic and unhistorical reductionism, however, only obscures the important differences among these methodological orientations which, together with a more traditional sinological perspective, gave rise to a plurality of sometimes contradictory explanations of China’s role as a world civilization. Indeed, an evolving preoccupation with the impact of race upon social and political organization even gave rise to contradictory understandings of what ‘race’ actually entailed. This in part reflected the fact that nineteenth century conceptions of race somewhat promiscuously elided degenerative as well as progressive theories of human development. Scientifically inspired thought about biological evolution and its relationship to social progress had from its inception to contend with the countervailing influence of a school of degenerative theorists that took its cue, not from science, but from the romantic reaction to the European Enlightenment. The civilizational determinism, evident in much early nineteenth century thinking about civilization, mutated into a racial determinism facilitated by the developing penchant for speculation about mental capacity (Biddiss 1996: 73 ff). This mutation was apparent in the work of ‘the father of racist ideology’ (Biddiss 1970), Arthur de Gobineau. For de Gobineau race formed the basis of civilization, but everywhere race was degenerating rather than developing. Significantly, de Gobineau’s racial pessimism derived not from any scientific analysis, but from the aristocratic Catholic reaction to the progressive revolutions of the nineteenth century. Here de Gobineau took his cue from an earlier generation of Catholic aristocratic reactionaries notably Henri de

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Boulainvillier, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald who expressed their revulsion from the Enlightenment spirit of reason, secularism and democracy through a recourse to Catholic reaction and irrational faith in a preordained hierarchy. The French hierarchy resided in the Frankish nobility’s racial superiority established, Henri de Boulainvillier (1727) had contended, by the right of conquest over inferior Gauls. De Gobineau subsequently projected Boulainvillier’s distinction between the tribes that formed the French nation onto a global stage. Moreover, he combined this with his own despondent prognostication for the prospects of post revolutionary aristocratic ultramontanism. Thus what de Maistre had considered ‘abnormal’ and corrosive ‘novelties’ – the growing preponderance of fat and cupiscient peasants, ignorant workers and useless bureaucrats – had, de Gobineau contended in the 1850s, become an established feature of modern Europe. In this view democratization and popular nationalism actually spelt progressive ‘degeneration’ (de Gobineau Oeuvres vol. 2 1983: lvi). Thus, the emerging European and American egalitarian democratic ethic illustrated the exhaustion of aristocratic Aryan values. The triumph of mass man and the herd mentality, once more, suggested stagnation and a Chinese-style mediocrity. There was, then, no place for an evolution of racial types in de Gobineau’s essay, because they had existed separately since the post lapsarian separation of the sons of Adam. The evolving philological controversy concerning the monogenetic as opposed to the polygenetic origins of language, moreover, reinforced the mid-nineteenth century preoccupation with the physiological identification of racial polygenesis. This had a number of consequences. From the identification of a family of Indo-European languages and their common ‘Aryan’ mother tongue, ‘it was a short [though illogical] step to the belief that a single race must correspond to this linguistic family’ (Bidiss 1970: 107). Subsequently, speculation about the wandering of the Aryans and their promiscuous mixing with different racial groups from Mesopotamia to Merioneth formed the fantastic mis en scene to much nineteenth century historical thought. In the nineteenth century the felt need to classify mankind in relation to the natural or biological order intensified speculation about Aryanism. Racial separation thus offered a possible key to the history of civilization. It operated in much the same way as economic determinism did for Marx, and some varieties of economic liberalism. Thus, racialist theorists maintained that in some obscure mythopoeic state all original civilizations – Graeco-Roman, Semitic, Persian, Indian and Chinese – had received

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varying doses of Aryan blood. Subsequently, however, once the Aryans had ceased to wander racial stocks became geographically fixed and civilizational growth reflected racial character. Thus: The existing races constitute separate branches of either one or many primitive stocks. These stocks have now vanished. . . . They differed from each other in the shape and proportion of the limbs, the structure of the skull, the internal conformation of the body, the nature of the capillary system, the colour of the skin . . . and they never succeeded in losing their characteristic features except under the powerful influence of the crossing of blood. (de Gobineau 1970: 104) Eventually, ‘this permanence of racial qualities is quite sufficient to generate the radical . . . inequality that exists’ between different races, ‘to raise them to the dignity of natural law and to justify the same distinctions being drawn with regard to the physiological life of nations.’ (Ibid) For a racial determinist like de Gobineau the three basic races were both unequal and separate. On the basis of his physiological determinism, de Gobineau identified ‘with absolute certainty . . . three clearly marked types, the black, the yellow and the white’ (de Gobineau (1852) 1915: 205) that had had profoundly different civilizational outcomes. Physiology determined race and race determined civilization. Consequently, without a dose of Aryan blood, black and yellow races remained in a state of savagery. In an interesting shift of metaphors the black and yellow races were the crude ‘cotton and wool’ in the fabric of civilization requiring the admixture of the ‘silk’ of the white race to make them supple. Meanwhile, ‘the Aryan group, circling its finer threads through the noble generations, designs on its surface a dazzling masterpiece of arabesques in silver and gold’ (de Gobineau 1970: 163). Without this additional tractility the black race was condemned to barbarism. Essentially the member of the black race was a ‘human machine’ easily aroused emotionally and indifferent to suffering. By contrast: the yellow race is the exact opposite of this type. The skull points forward not backward. The forehead is wide and bony, often high and projecting. The shape of the face is triangular, the nose and chin showing none of the coarse protuberances that mark the negro. . . .

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The yellow man has little physical energy and is inclined to apathy; he commits none of the strange excesses so common among Negroes. His desires are feeble, his willpower rather obstinate than violent. (135–6) Ultimately, the yellow race tends ‘to mediocrity in everything; he understands easily enough anything not too deep or sublime. . . . He is practical, in the narrowest sense of the word. He does not dream or theorize; he invents little, but can appreciate and take over what is useful to him.’ (Ibid: 136) For de Gobineau, the ‘yellow races are thus clearly superior to the black. Every founder of a civilisation would wish the backbone of his society, his middle class, to consist of such men. But no civilized society could be created by them; they could not supply its nerve force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action.’ (Ibid) To establish Chinese civilization however, required some Aryan influence. De Gobineau following Jones, thus, hypothesized that ‘an Aryan colony from India brought the light of civilisation to China’ (143). Civilizations originally created by the mixture of races in some mythopoeic past, come to constitute stable arrangements refined in ‘their conduct and intelligence’ and organized to satisfy wants by peaceful means (Biddiss 1970: 116). Over time they constituted an organic whole. Civilizations became assemblages ‘of events and ideas’, ‘a state in which a human society subsists, an environment with which it has managed to surround itself, which is created by it, emanates from it and in turn reacts on it.’ (117) Civilizations were, moreover, inherently unequal. Those of a more Aryan hue were superior to those with a preponderance of yellow or black. Thus, while the superior Aryan based populations of northern Europe were both inventive and prone to wild social and political experiment, Asian civilizations, by contrast, were characterized by collective uniformity (de Gobineau 1852 (1915) vol. 1: 95). Thus throughout the ‘immense territory’ of China, ‘whatever its principles may be, whether we approve of its aim or not, we must admit that the part played by the masses in their civilisation shows how well they understand it’ (ibid). Consequently, ‘the existing state of things is the object of unshakeable admiration to the whole people’ (ibid). Quoting J. F. Davis, de Gobineau considers the Chinese masses ‘steady conservatives’ possessed of a ‘strong instinct of repulsion against radical changes in the Government’ (96). This was not necessarily a problem unless a promiscuous and destructive miscegenation diminished the vigour of the more Aryan based

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civilizations. For de Gobineau, horrified by the spread of industry and the appeal of an untermenschen faith in equality and democracy, this had already occurred. As a result of the debasement of the higher stocks, civilization had reached its ultimate crisis. What made de Gobineau distinct from subsequent prophets of racial apocalypse was ‘his total paralysis of response’ to the impending crisis (Biddiss 1970: 26). Modernization meant miscegenation. To the extent that de Gobineau offered any solution to the unhealthy consequences of industrial growth it consisted in an apolitical regret amplified by a vain hope in the re-medievalization of Europe. To fend off the degenerate future he also advocated the rigid maintenance of ethnic separatism. Consequently, de Gobineau, like a number of late nineteenth century chauvinists, alarmed at the consequences of industrial democracy and economic growth, deeply disapproved of both imperialism and the activity of Christian missionaries in the Near and Far East. Missionary activity lead inexorably to a deracinating intermingling of bloods and hastened the universalizing of a Chinese style mediocrity. By 1881, de Gobineau observed that this was, in fact, happening. Racial fear of a spreading Chinese ‘peril’ was evident among European settlers, from California to the ‘heart of Australia’. ‘In all these countries’, de Gobineau asserted, ‘the Chinaman – though far from his native China – has become an object of horror and fear, because people do not know how to answer the industry, applications and persistence and ultimately, the unparalleled cheapness of his labour’ (de Gobineau 1970: 242). Ominously, de Gobineau warned that, ‘when I see so much rapid movement and upheaval in the East, I do not consider any less strange the rapid decline and spreading torpor in the whole western world’ (ibid: 246). Asiatic seduction combined with European degeneration was ‘a most alluring dish, but one which poisons those who eat it’ (Biddiss 1970: 213).

China and racial apotheosis in late nineteenth century Germany The fear of racial degeneration and the dangers associated with miscegenation was not without an impact on the social sciences, especially those operating within the fixed dialectical categories of Hegelianism. De Gobineau’s ideas eventually became fashionable in Imperial Germany. In the 1850s, the Swiss-German neo-Hegelian political scientist J. K. Bluntschli (who in translation exercised a considerable influence over early twentieth century Chinese reformers), presented an organicist

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conception of the Allgesmeines Statsrecht Geschichtlich Begrundet or Theory of the State (1852–75). Influenced by racial thinking, he further contended that, ‘at the very outset of the history of human development . . . we find the chief races differing in mental capacity as well as in build and colour and that diversity has remained essentially the same’ (Bluntschli 1901: 81). Bluntschli felt that science had ‘too long neglected the important bearing of race on law and politics’ (ibid: 85). Consequently, ‘we can see the distinction between white, black, yellow and perhaps red races at work in the history of development’ (82). Bluntschli accepted, moreover, that these races were differently endowed and this accounted for ‘the unequal capacity of nations that have grown out of them’ (85). Following de Gobineau, Bluntschli asserted that the Caucasian or Aryan family of nations stood ‘highest in the scale’ of development. They held ‘the first place in the history of States and the development of rights; they have found their true home in Europe, and it is here that their manly genius for politics has unfolded and matured’ (84). Beneath the Caucasians, of course were the yellow races, who in Bluntschli’s view came ‘nearer to the Caucasian than either the Negroes or the Indians do’ (83). Significantly, the civilised nations (Culturvolker) of China and Japan had ‘produced a subtle political philosophy’ based on an idea of humanity as opposed to barbarism and ‘personal merit as opposed to nobility of birth’ (83). However, unlike enlightened Europeans, Far Eastern nations had confused an idea of the law with moral precepts and limited it by considerations of family life and discipline. ‘Their government’, therefore, was ‘a benevolent despotism’ and they possessed ‘little idea of honour and no idea of national freedom’ (84). Operating within the categories of Hegelian dialectic, Bluntschli assumed that racial characteristics remained relatively fixed. Somewhat differently, Bluntschli’s contemporary, Freidrich Nietzsche – a figure much admired by postcolonial discourse analysts – believed the Chinese mode of life and thought it only ‘suitable to industrious ants’ (Nietzsche 1885 (1984): 127). Like de Gobineau, Nietzsche animadverted against the egalitarian ‘diminution and leveling of European man’. Indeed, the Nietzschean last man was becoming ‘thinner, more good natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese’ (Nietzsche 1887 (1969): 44). It was, however, in the circle of German Chancellor von Bulow and through the auspices of Richard Wagner, that the de Gobineau society was formed in 1894 to promote this style of racial thinking (Biddiss 1996: 79). It was, moreover, in this coterie that Houston Stewart

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Chamberlain adapted Gobineauism to a project for preserving Aryan racial fitness. In his influential Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1913) Chamberlain, like de Gobineau, recognized that the industrial and communicative advances, together with the decadent egalitarianism of liberal democratic progressivism, threatened to subvert and weaken the purity of the Teutonic race. However, rather than accept the thesis of inevitable racial degeneration, Chamberlain reversed de Gobineau’s formula, maintaining, arbitrarily, that the movement of history was from racelessness to ‘ever clearer distinctness of race’ (Biddiss 1996: 81). Aryan dominance, consequently, evolved over historical time. Moreover, it was the emergence of the nation ‘as a political structure’ that created the ‘conditions for the formation of race or at least leads to the highest and most individual activities of race’ (Chamberlain (1913) vol. 1: 292). Chamberlain’s theory of civilization thus assumes a development from racial diffusion to racial concreteness through the medium of the nation state. Rome fell, Chamberlain argued, because it had become a cloaca gentium. Chamberlain abstracted from this the historical lesson ‘that race and nationality which renders possible the formation of race, possess a significance which is not only physical and intellectual but also moral’ (vol. 1: 317). This ‘sacred law’ required that nations of the higher Aryan races exercise constant vigilance over their patterns of endogamy and the insidious infiltration of lesser breeds, which, in the European context, meant that ‘alien people’ the Jews. In other words, while purporting to be a study of the foundations of modernity, Chamberlain’s account ultimately reduced history to a crude Manichaean struggle between Teutons and Jews. Asian races from this eurocentric perspective were largely tangential to the eschatological struggle to achieve Aryan racial perfectibility (Biddiss 1996: 83). Chamberlain, like Hegel, therefore, places the Chinese outside history. Moreover, given the natural dominance of the Aryan type there was no need for a Darwinian struggle for survival. These natural aristocrats could only be corrupted by the proliferation of Judaeo Christian understandings of democracy that transvalued noble values and promoted the incontinent spread of democracy and empire. In his dismissively brief comparative study of races, Chamberlain considered Chinese philosophy and, in particular, Confucianism, ‘shallow’. Indeed, the extent to which China possessed a culture, Chamberlain claimed, merely reflected ancient contact with Aryan peoples. Interestingly, Chamberlain rejected the dominant nineteenth century understanding that China had declined from a period of

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inventive, creative and scientific activity into a stationary relic. Instead, ‘this people’: lives a most thriving, active life, shows no trace of decline, swarms and grows and prospers; it was always the same as it is today. . . . And what is its character? Industrious, skilful, patient, soulless. In many respects this human species bears a striking resemblance to the Jewish, especially in the total absence of all culture and the one sided emphasising of civilisation; but the Chinaman is much more industrious, he is the most indefatigible farm labourer in the world and in all manual work he has infinite skill; besides he possesses, if not art (in our sense) at least taste. It becomes it is true more questionable every day whether the Chinaman possesses even moderate inventive talent, but he at least takes up anything that is conveyed to him by others so far as his unimaginative mind can see any practical value in it. (Chamberlain 1913 vol. 2: 249). Chamberlain considered the Chinese collectively a ‘human machine’. Consequently, as ‘long as he remains in the villages which the community itself manages . . . the Chinaman inspires us almost with admiration’ (250). Such admiration, however, was constrained within narrow limits. For when mechanical skill and industry did not suffice, the Chinese became ‘comical’, ‘for all this collecting of material studying and book keeping, these imposing public examinations, this elevation of learning to the highest throne, this fabulous development under State support of industrial and technical art lead to absolutely nothing’ (250). Despite their ability and industry, moreover, China had been ‘conquered and ruled by every tiny nation’ (2: 249). Chinese culture, ultimately, lacked soul. Consequently, ‘the Chinese, like the French, possess moralists but no philosophers’ (ibid). Predictably, Chamberlain considered Confucius an unimaginative pedant. By contrast he found Taoism (Daoism) an ‘original and captivating philosophy’. Taoist negation, in fact, marked ‘the highest point of what is attainable by the Chinese spirit’ (251). It was as profound as Confucianism was shallow. Nevertheless, the example of Chinese culture was ‘extremely instructive’ for the West. It demonstrated that civilization was a product of personality and race rather than evolution and growth. The Chinese despite producing a ‘feverishly active civilisation’ possessed no culture. As it was impossible to civilize non-European civilizations, so ‘we shall fail to graft culture upon the Chinaman’ (252).

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In Chamberlain’s anti-evolutionary conception of racial determinism each civilizational personality remains eternally ‘what he is and was.’ For what ‘we erroneously call progress is the unfolding of something already present.’ Consequently, Chamberlain, like de Gobineau, considered the doctrine of evolutionary progress from a common species profoundly misconceived. However, it was the evolutionary view of development that influenced the new biological sociology and political science of the second half of the nineteenth century far more than these ahistorical and apocalyptic theories of racial supremacy and degeneration. How we might wonder did the translation of Darwin’s understanding of natural selection affect the vexed issue of race and its ramifications for continuing Asian stagnation?

Comte, Darwin, Spencer and Chinese evolution From the mid-century the growing European intellectual faith in progress and the evolutionary explanation of its physiological and cultural roots profoundly affected European self-understanding and by extension the prevailing interpretation of ‘arrested’ and ‘primitive’ societies. Indeed, the felt European need to explain scientifically different stages of growth gave a powerful stimulus to the new social sciences of psychology, sociology, eugenics and anthropology. The social sciences formed from an unstable developmentalist amalgam of positivism, social Darwinism, historical philosophy and romanticism. They reflected these influences in their subsequent analysis of the east and its ‘systems’ of thought. Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species was, of course, a defining moment in the evolution of western modernity’s struggle for self-definition. Yet, from one perspective, Darwin merely gave scientific plausibility to an already widespread European belief in a relationship between biological and social development. Indeed, Darwin admitted that his understanding of the principle of natural selection was merely ‘the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms’ (Darwin 1859 (1968): 117). Darwin borrowed the term ‘struggle for existence’ from an essay written by Herbert Spencer for the Westminster Review on ‘The Theory of Population’ (1852) which had revised Malthusian speculation on the limits of growth in a way that gave plausibility to Spencer’s own doctrine of the survival of the fittest (Darwin 1859 (1968): 33).

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Elsewhere, Auguste Comte had also linked his social ‘statics’ to evolutionary biological understandings of a Lamarckian provenance. Indeed, the progenitor of the positivist priesthood had established, at least to his own satisfaction, the law of the three stages of development. Comte had optimistically identified a universal progress from the ‘theological fictitious’, through the ‘metaphysical abstract’, to the scientific positive age. In the inchoate positive age, industrial administrators and scientific moral guides would govern society (Thompson 1976: 13). From this perspective, Comte considered the ‘inferiority of the theocratic states’ of Asia, not a consequence of race, but a mistaken belief system (Comte 1854 vol. 4: 448). It was the task of positivist social science, therefore, to put an end to the theocratic ‘disease’ of succession by divine right and replace it with ‘Sociocratic succession by the choice of the Superior; so that no break will be caused in the continuity of mankind’ (Comte 1852 vol. 2: 376). Theocracy in China, Comte argued, had, in the course of time, transformed itself into a ‘pedantocracy’. Yet, once the Chinese mandarinate had overcome its ‘empirical habits, traceable to the excessive prominence of practical questions, they will welcome the only doctrine competent to direct systematically the activity of men’ (Comte 1854 vol. 4: 448–9). Informed by positivism, the mandarinate would revive China. While Comte viewed China, India and Japan capable of rejuvenation through the transformation of Confucian bureaucracies and Brahmin castes into a modern priesthood of positivism, subsequent evolutionary social scientists – those informed by a Darwinian understanding of struggle – were less optimistic. Significantly, although Darwin’s theory of evolution supported the post Enlightenment faith in progress and growth, its method profoundly disconcerted conventional assumptions about nature and the rigid distinction between species. Darwin considered nature plastic and the distinction between species and varieties arbitrary (Darwin 1859 (1968): 108). Changes to this now pliable ‘nature’ resulted not from any providential divine plan, but from the ‘struggle for life’. This meant that ‘any variation . . . if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual and will generally be inherited by its offspring’ (ibid: 35). This new insight into the random character of development gave a tremendous stimulus to speculation about the impact of heredity, climate, diet and geography upon the development of both individuals and civilizations. Darwin, thus, provided a new

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language in which to discuss social change. Under its influence, moreover, the social sciences of psychology, anthropology and sociology assumed something of their modern guise. Indeed by the end of the century, the Fabian socialist imperialist, Benjamin Kidd, unquestioningly accepted that, ‘History and Politics are merely the last chapter of Biology’ (Kidd in Jones 1980: 1). In what way then did speculation in the social sciences upon the factors that inhibited social evolution affect the understanding of the ‘arrested civilization’ of China? What Karl Popper termed the Darwinian ‘metaphysical research programme’ implied no necessary racial, environmental, social, economic, eugenic or psychological outcome (Jones 1980: 179). Nevertheless, it did stimulate social and political concern with, and inquiry into, these factors and their affect upon the growth, arrest and decay of societies over vast tracts of time as well as the individual over the course of a lifetime. Herbert Spencer, the main proponent of the English version of scientific positivism, unequivocally maintained that ‘the struggle for existence’ both in nature and in history was an ‘indispensable means to evolution’ (Spencer 1893 (1969): 176). As Stanislas Andreski (Spencer, 1969) explained, ‘whereas Comte drew a plan for a social system conducive to moral improvement, and Marx attacked the very idea of universal moral standards, Spencer attempted to deduce ethical norms from the principle of evolution.’ Significantly, Spencerian social Darwinism exercised both a growing influence over the sociological imagination of East Asia prior to World War I and an even more enduring one upon East Asian self awareness of the causes of its economic and political backwardness. Spencer particularly sought to identify the structural factors influencing evolution from primitive organic simplicity to highly differentiated, but functionally integrated, industrial organization (Andreski 1971: 8). To explain this developmental pattern, Spencer, together with a number of late nineteenth century liberal progressives, like Walter Bagehot, the first editor of The Economist and the jurist Sir Henry Sumner Maine, investigated a number of causes: psychological; cultural; and racial. Their research showed that the diffusion and permanence of a custom depended upon its ability to enhance the powers of survival of a group. This generated an interesting paradox. While this ‘cake of custom’ facilitated the advance from barbarism to civilization, it could also arrest further development by sacrificing the individual to the needs of the group.

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The inculcation of habits of obedience into the constitution of a people was for Bagehot the necessary first step on the path to the ‘animated moderation’ of modern deliberative democracy (Bagehot 1872 (1974) vol. 7: 131). Yet, it also meant the ‘ages of servitude’ must necessarily precede ‘the ages of freedom’ (33). The inability to escape this ‘net of custom’ constituted for Spencer, Maine and Bagehot the apparently insurmountable problem confronting oriental despotism. While in the west, the advance of industrialism had weakened customary practice, this had not occurred in Asia. What Spencer termed the ‘semi-civilized nations of the East, past and present were or are characterised by a greater rigidity of custom than characterised the . . . West’ (Spencer 1868 vol. 3: 428). Across Asia, the ‘range and elaborateness of ceremonial rule’ had assimilated ‘the control of civil life to the control of military life’ (Spencer 1893: 169). Analogously, for Maine, progress in China had ‘arrested, because the civil laws are coextensive with all the ideas of which the race is capable’ (Maine 1875 (1974): 22). An all pervasive rigidity of custom inhibited developmental progress from status to contract (Spencer 1893 (1969): 423). This was because, Spencer contended, ‘each individual’, in China, ‘is moulded by the governing power and stamped with the appropriate idea of duty which it is heresy to question; it becomes impossible for any considerable change to be wrought in the social structure by other influences.’ (Spencer 1971: 162) Similarly, E. B. Tylor in the introduction to his study of Primitive Culture (1891) maintained that ‘arrest and decline in civilisation are . . . amongst the most frequent and powerful operations of natural life’ (Tylor 1970 (1891) vol. 1: 47). Tylor additionally contended that the ethnographic comparison of different cultures revealed a ‘scale of civilization’. On this scale, ‘few would dispute that the following races are arranged rightly in the order of culture: Australian, Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian . . .’ (ibid: 27). Tylor considered ‘culture or civilization’ a ‘complex whole’ which included ‘knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law . . . and any other capabilities . . . acquired by men as members of society’ (1). From this perspective, the Chinese remained for Tylor, in 1891, as they had been for Herder a century before, ‘a peculiar culture’ (Tylor (1891) vol. 2: 370). This peculiarity, Bagehot maintained, meant that European dealings with China over issues of trade and territory ‘must always be delicate’ and fraught with danger (Bagehot 1874 (1974) vol. 7: 345). China was, Bagehot argued, ‘one of those immense absolute monarchies which

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have been so common in oriental civilisation from the beginning, but which are so opposite to our present western experience’ (346). Such arrangements were founded with ‘singular ease’ and endured with ‘marvellous tenacity’. China was the most important global survival of this ancient phenomenon. Moreover, contact between such a ‘survival’ and the modernizing west in the first age of globalization exacerbated international friction because of the absence either of a common history or shared diplomatic language. China, long immured in its own cultural world possessed no understanding of international society. Indeed, ‘its whole efforts are to keep itself existing, and it has no conception of duty beyond its own boundaries’ (346). Most western diplomacy with China consequently assumed maxims which have ‘no meaning to those whom it addresses’ (346). China responded only to fear. However, given the weakness of its monarchy and the fact that ‘the vitality of the state’ rested on its ‘prestige’ (347), it was difficult to identify who or how to intimidate it. Loss of face preoccupied the Emperor and the people, an understanding incompatible with yielding to fear, ‘yet its subjects, like itself, have simply no notion of yielding to any other motive’ (347). Bagehot presciently observed that war with China might precipitate an internal collapse leaving Britain or a western condominium with the baleful consequences of having to ‘manage the country’ (348). The international difficulty posited by the apparently arrested development of Asian civilization facilitated further speculation about both its causes and solution. In particular, the theory of natural selection boosted speculation concerning the psychological, racial and environmental determinants of the wealth and poverty of nations. The Darwinist author of The History of Civilisation in England (1857–61), Thomas Henry Buckle, argued that an environment of ‘physical laws’ powerfully influenced the character of a civilization. Buckle set out with the Darwinian doctrine that ‘all human progress is in terms of the interaction of organism and environment’ (Buckle 1904: x). Yet, he rejected the view that ‘total racial experience’ was reducible ‘to our total race character’. Instead, he maintained that we must look ‘for our experience in the total experience’. This required a more detailed scientific understanding of the impact of the ‘physical laws’ of climate, geography, soil and diet upon development. Thus in India, and Asia more generally, Buckle averred that: The great heat of the climate brings into play that law . . . by virtue of which the ordinary food is of an oxygenous rather than of a

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carbonaceous character. This, according to another law, obliges the people to derive their usual diet . . . from the vegetable world. . . . At the same time the high temperature, incapacitating men for arduous labour, makes necessary a food of which the returns will be abundant. Here then we have some characteristics which . . . ought to be found in the ordinary foods of the Indian nations. [Consequently] from the earliest period the most general food in India has been rice . . . the most nutritive of all the cereals. (Buckle 1904: 41) Buckle contended that it was plausible through ‘the application of a few physical laws to anticipate what the natural food of a country will be, and therefore anticipate a long train of ulterior consequences.’ Food and its productive technology could, Buckle contended, explain the pattern of property holding throughout Asia (41). Proponents of the psychological and racial roots of cultural difference, however, rejected such nutritional determinism. Indeed, theories of racial difference and eugenic fitness built on physiological, Darwinian and organicist understandings of evolution, for a number of later nineteenth century scientists and philosophers, increasingly overrode environmental, nutritional and climatological explanations of cultural difference and economic stagnation. John Crawfurd, for instance, whose writings in the 1820s attributed differences in the East Asian world to different climatological, cultural and economic stimuli, moved, in the 1850s, to a physiological account of human difference. In his The Plurality of the Races of Man, A Discourse (1867) Crawfurd rejected the monogenetic understanding of evolution from a common ancestral stock. Investigating the diffusion of different language groups around the Malay archipelago, Crawfurd observed that they shared no common root (Crawfurd 1852 vol. 1: iii). From this proof of linguistic diffusion, Crawfurd inferred an original racial pluralism. ‘We may safely conclude’, Crawfurd informed the Ethnological Society, ‘that when the earth assumed its present form, species of man were distributed over its surface in the same manner as species of the lower animals and of plants’ (Crawfurd 1867: 3). However, Crawfurd continued, following Blumenbach, that ‘the pure and unmixed races of man are wholly distinct species of one genus’ (ibid). Crawfurd’s views on racial and linguistic pangenesis reflected a growing nineteenth-century preoccupation with the scientific categorization of psychological and physiological types. From the 1830s statisticians, like Lambert Quetelet in Belgium, had drawn attention to the

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physiological and psychological determinants of moral behaviour and their implications for a ‘physico-political science of man’ (Quetelet 1842: viii). The Comtean Quetelet, ultimately considered the social organism itself responsible for social ills. From this perspective, ‘nations would be in respect of the social system, what individuals are in respect to nations’ (8). To improve society, therefore, Quetelet began collecting and analysing moral statistics in order to establish a scientifically probable theory of national types. The resulting physico-political typology established ‘the average man amongst the different nations, both physical and moral’ (9). Precise anthropometric measurement of height, weight, diet, brain mass, sex, education, class and, of course, race would establish a national average man, deviations from which could be measured and the norm progressively improved (ix). Both English and French psychologists subsequently adapted Quetelet’s average man to an evolutionary concern with natural selection as it affected ‘racial fitness’. Spencer increasingly related progress and development not to environmental factors but to ‘the mental evolution of different human types’. In his essay on ‘The Comparative Psychology of Man’, (1874), Spencer conjectured a physiological connection between the ‘mass of mental manifestation’ and the ‘complexity of mental manifestation’. Moreover, these could be related ‘to physical characters – the bodily mass and structure, and the cerebral mass and structure’ (Spencer 1874: 424). The principles of psychology complementing those of sociology could reveal, by objective measurement, how, as a consequence of the correlation between race and intelligence, ‘the Australian differs in this respect from the Hindu [oriental] as the Hindu does from the European’ (ibid: 427). If there was, as Spencerian psychology averred, a relationship between physiology and psychology, this opened the enticing prospect of a new field of disciplinary inquiry. Theories of mental mass and cranial difference between the more intelligent dolichocephalic (narrow headed) types and their brachycephalous (broad headed) bretheren rendered mental deficiency within a population and the level of mental development attainable by different racial groups scientifically measurable (425). Although Spencer assumed, incoherently, that European national characters had originally evolved as a consequence of Dark Age miscegenation, he evidently felt that any prospective race mixing between very different racial ‘species’ would arrest modern democratic progress. On the basis of the Darwinian theory of blood ‘gemmules’, Spencer contended, that different races acquired ‘a certain constitutional adaptation’ to their ‘particular form of life’ over many generations.

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Consequently, the mixing of markedly different race stocks resulted biologically in a defective constitution, ‘not fitted for any set of conditions whatever’ (Spencer 1892: 257). Advising the Meiji era Japanese reformers on how to sustain modernization, Spencer proposed they both graft new institutions upon existing ones and introduce laws interdicting the ‘inter-marriage of foreigners and Japanese’. On analogous grounds derived from gemmule theory, Spencer supported the restriction of Chinese migration to the United States. For if the Chinese migrants remained ‘unmixed’ they would form an American underclass, while if they mixed, they would form ‘a bad hybrid’. Darwin himself had little time for racial reductionism and considered that ‘men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.’ Nevertheless, his cousin, Francis Galton, opened an Anthropometric Laboratory in Kensington in 1884 devoted to testing ‘bodily faculties’ (Galton 1908: 287). Its avowed purpose was the study of heredity and the promotion of ‘eugenic’ or ‘racial fitness’ (Galton 1869 (1892): 7). In Heredity Genius (1869) Galton argued that European intelligence had been in decline since the period of the Greek city states. A modern industrial democracy, Galton maintained, could not ‘endure unless it be composed of able citizens; therefore it must in self-defence withstand the free introduction of degenerate stock’ (Galton 1908: 311). Consequently, ‘race’ was ‘a question that deserves a far larger measure of critical investigation than it receives’ (Galton 1869 (1892): xxv). The purpose of eugenic research, therefore, was to watch ‘for the indications of superior strains or races, and in so favouring them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the old one’ (Galton 1883: 307). Like Spencer, Galton argued from the gemmule theory (Galton 1908: 296) that ‘when the differences between the races is not so great as to divide them into obviously different classes, and where their language and education is the same’ miscegenation had positive outcomes. Thus, intermarriage between the ‘races’ of northern and southern England could promote better adapted racial strains (310–11). Meanwhile, in France and Germany ethnologists and anthropologists like Paul Broca and Louis Armand de Quatrefages pioneered anthropometric studies of northern and southern European stocks and contested the relative merits of broad and long headedness in national types. Translated to an Asian context the reduction of civilization to its race gemmules had unforeseen and disturbing consequences. Galton averred that industrial development and eugenic awareness meant that ‘we men of the present centuries are like animals suddenly transplanted among

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new conditions of climate and of food; our instincts fail us under the altered circumstances’ (Galton 1908: 317). This failure was most evident among ‘old civilizations’ like the Chinese who seemed insensible to the fact ‘of their nature being inadequate to their moral needs’ (ibid). Somewhat contradictorily, Galton approved the restriction of Chinese immigration to California and Australia, yet believed that the Chinese once disabused of ‘their peculiar religious fancies . . . bid fair . . . to become one of the most effective colonizing nations . . . who may . . . extrude hereafter the coarse and lazy Negro from at least the metaliferous regions of tropical Africa’ (Galton 1883: 317). This ambiguity towards the ‘industrious’ yellow race became increasingly evident in a number of evolutionary inclined political and social studies of the late nineteenth century. Those working within the Darwinian paradigm recognized the impermanence of nature and the alterability of species. This, in part, explained the enthusiasm of Galton and others for maintaining racial fitness. It was only by imposing some constraints upon the profligate mating habits of the masses that prosperity and development could be sustained in an era of industrial democracy. A further feature of Darwin’s research programme was the contingency of natural selection. The unplanned character of evolution rendered the idea of a historically revealed dialectical pattern or an Aryan providential mission ultimately untenable. Furthermore, applying the doctrine of the struggle for survival to ‘the yellow race’ revealed some uncomfortable facts for those attached to a providentially ordained European historical mission. For somewhat perplexingly for eugenic theory the yellow race had showed itself supremely adaptable to climactic and labouring conditions that proved intolerable for increasingly cosseted Aryans. The China Case, in fact, presented a paradox for those who sought to extract a racially deterministic message from the application of Darwin’s biological model to the progress of civilization. E. A. Ross, Professor of Sociology at Wisconsin University, accounting for The Changing Chinese (1911) in eugenically determinist vein, found the ‘toughness of the Chinese . . . attributable to a special race vitality1 which they have acquired in the course of a longer and severer elimination of the less fit than our North-European ancestors ever experienced. . . . Such selection has tended to foster not so much bodily strength . . . as recuperative power, resistance to infection and tolerance of unwholesome conditions of living’ (42–5). The former editor of the North China Herald J. MacGowan, similarly found the Chinese a ‘strong race’ handicapped, until

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the revolution of 1911, by ‘the dead hand of the past that has gripped the nation for so many long centuries’ (1912: 18). The Chinese, in MacGowan’s view, had ‘no original genius’ and its customary practice ‘spread like a Banyan tree stifling growth beneath its cumbrous branches.’ Ross concurred, observing that ‘the struggle for life had no perceptible effect in promoting economic and moral improvement’ (92) because for many centuries the Chinese ‘psychological climate’ was ‘unfavourable to innovative thought’ (54). ‘Patent stagnation’ permeated the ‘collective mind’. For Ross this by now familiar defect was a product of cultural conservatism rather than ‘native sluggishness’ (57). Patriachal familism informed Chinese values. Mismanagement and inefficiency haunted Chinese industry. Lethargy characterized the mandarin class and government corruption and irresponsibility had muzzled ‘the spirit of enterprise’ (121). However, released from the encumbrances of its stagnant civilization, the migrant Chinese worker and trader proved highly adaptable to the new markets opening from California, through Southeast Asia to Australia. Ross perceived such adaptability as both a threat and an opportunity. Chinese resilience combined with the cheapness of Chinese labour that was ‘something to make a factory owner’s mouth water’ (117) constituted a ‘yellow peril’ that could ‘swamp’ ‘slow multiplying, high wage, white societies’ in a globalized free market. Consequently, western capital’s access to Chinese labour would have to be restricted otherwise the west would experience ‘the substitution of low wages, bad living conditions and the increase of the yellow race for high wages, good living conditions and the increase of the white race’ (48). This notwithstanding, Ross considered the view that a yellow peril represented either a military or an industrial threat to the west exaggerated. Evidently a wholesome, all American, democrat, Ross placed his faith in fresh air, Protestant missions and decent education. Curiously, he contended exposure to ‘the relaxing effects of drains, ventilation, doctors . . . pure water, open spaces and out-of-door sports’ would eventually ‘eradicate the peculiar vitality that the yellow races had acquired’ (48). At the same time education, especially that organized by American missions, would change Chinese values and ideals for the better (233). Introduced to Christian morality and equipped with a western education, China would no longer be isolated from world history. Indeed, ‘their destiny is that of the white race; that is to share in and contribute to the progress of a planetary culture’ (258). Decadent Europeans were more pessimistic about the prospects for global integration. Recognizing the superior adaptability of East Asian

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workers in the first age of global free trade, Charles Pearson, Galton’s successor at the Anthropometric Laboratory, now located at the University of London, accepted that ‘the day was probably not far distant when we would see the races of our Western civilisation . . . in a large measure superseded by the yellow races of the world’ (Pearson 1902: 28). In applying the principle of natural selection to civilization, Galton and Spencer had either overlooked or underestimated the potential of Chinese racial character, Pearson observed in his National Life and Character (1895). Moreover, the free market model, which both Spencer and Galton considered best adapted to the struggle for survival, would inexorably promote the export of labour intensive manufacturing to the East, where labour proved itself both ‘fitter’ and cheaper. Ultimately, Pearson contended, this would render the view that the future of the world ‘belonged to the Aryan peoples and to our western civilisation . . . little more than a passing delusion’ (449). Pearson accepted, albeit reluctantly, the logical implications of an eugenically determined economic model. However, for Fabian socialists like Benjamin Kidd such conclusions worryingly undermined the ‘mission’ of western civilization. Accordingly the doctrine of social Darwinism required modification to meet the needs of early twentiethcentury imperial realities. For both Conservative and Fabian imperialists the irresponsible extension of ‘laissez-faire competition’ to ‘the world stage’ had had the unforeseen consequence of driving down the material standards of the west. Outlining The Principles of Western Civilisation (1902) Kidd observed that it was ‘a matter of common knowledge, that in one of the modern phases of the development proceeding throughout the world British capital exhibits a tendency to migrate from the irksomeness in England of . . . State regulation . . . and of that rising standard of life for labour’ (444). The threat of cheap Japanese and Chinese labour haunted the prolix Kidd. It also troubled: the consciousness of Western Democracy, as it sees the international process in trade and industry tending throughout the world to be forced to the level of its lowest and most animal conditions in human labour, simply in obedience to that law of universal equalisation of economic conditions by capital in the irresponsible scramble for private gain divorced from all sense of responsibility which the Manchester school consistently contemplated. (447–8) To avoid the worrying consequences of a global free market, Fabianism maintained that Spencerian evolutionary theory had

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misunderstood natural selection as it applied to social evolution. Herbert Spencer had considered the struggle of the fittest necessitated laissez faire individualism. However, following Alfred Wallace and T. H. Huxley’s later modifications to the theory of natural selection, both Kidd and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, maintained that natural selection served the future survival of the species or civilization rather than the present success of the individual (Kidd 1902: 48; see also Jones 1980: ch. ix). Consequently, the erroneous belief that evolution required an irresponsible commitment to the unfettered operation of the free market would ultimately destroy the west as a species of civilization. In order to protect western civilization, Kidd, therefore, advised against either global or imperial free trade. Instead, future prosperity required the protection of European markets and the imposition of restrictions on both the export of capital and Chinese labour. Only in this way, Kidd averred, could the values and material standards of an organically integrated western civilization be maintained. Interestingly, late Qing Confucian reformers like Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei and Yen Fu derived an analogous message from Darwinian and Huxleyan theory. In order to regenerate China collective solidarity required strengthening, or as Liang Qichao explained, ‘Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be achieved’ (Pusey 1983: 111; see also Spence 1982: ch. 2). Significantly, this Chinese adaptation of Darwinism for purposes of renewal and self-strengthening profoundly affected the movement towards reform and revolution in China in the first decades of the twentieth century and continues to inform the political thinking of East Asian ruling elites.

Racial determinism, the China case and late nineteenth century thought The purported threat that the eugenically fitter yellow races represented to western civilization ultimately exposed the weakness inherent in social, biological or racial explanations of civilizational development. The fact that Chinese and Japanese labour proved highly adaptable to free market conditions once removed from its Confucian shackles indicated that race and civilization were empirically separable phenomena. Indeed, the attempt by a post-Spencerian generation of western social scientists, as well as Chinese radicals, to maintain the organic integrity of civilization at the expense of the individual pursuit of self interest, merely illustrated the categorial fallacy of reducing individuals to

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species and race to civilization. Interestingly, the more original thinkers of the nineteenth century like Tocqueville or Mill consistently rejected such causal determinism. In the 1840s J. S. Mill had attacked those who sought to reduce problems of mind to physiology and biology ( Jones 1980: 107). A decade later, Tocqueville criticized his former secretary, de Gobineau, for proposing in his Essai a materialist form of predestination based on blood. Such theorizing, Tocqueville considered, false, pernicious and conducive to the ‘complete abolition of human liberty’ (Tocqueville 1980: 321). It is also apparent that to view the racial categorizations of the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of an official liberal antipathy to race and racism as it exists in the late twentieth century assumes that the term ‘race’ and the content of racial analysis were the same in the nineteenth century as they are in liberal academic faculties of the late twentieth century. Clearly they were not. This brief interrogation of race and China indicates a number of quite different understandings of ‘race’ at work in western social science from the mid nineteenth century. Theorists of racial separateness, like de Gobineau, or racial purity, like Chamberlain, assumed race a fixed category and dismissed evolutionary accounts of development based on the principle of natural selection. This was because evolutionary biological accounts of development recognized that the process was neither providential nor planned. Moreover, those who operated within the paradigm of socially applied Darwinian theory need not necessarily view race as either a remote or proximate cause of civilizational progress. Even when they did advance racial explanations of progress based on some version of an Aryan history they had to accept that racial species, like nature itself, was both contingent and mutable. Even eugenicists like Galton, who seems at times to have forgotten this, used race in a sense that seems odd today. In discussing the improvement of the English racial stock he proposed crossbreeding of northern with southern English ‘races’. Similarly, like Spencer he condemned the mixing of widely different racial ‘species’ as they produced ‘bad hybrids’. Galton, like de Gobineau, deploys race as an all purpose explanation for a wide variety of historical and social phenomenon, yet his racist attitude to miscegenation, unlike de Gobineau, stemmed from a scientific acceptance of the ultimately falsifiable gemmule theory. Although the equation of race and intelligence remained a significant feature of intelligence testing well into the twentieth century, it is noticeable that the more influential social and political theorists of the

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mid nineteenth century, Mill, Marx and Tocqueville, rejected it as either a necessary or sufficient cause of the rise and fall of civilizations. Even when evolutionary social scientists like Spencer and Bagehot countenanced racially reductionist cultural arguments, this did not necessarily undermine other aspects of their argument that sought to explain why civilizations arrested or progressed. Finally, it is evident that the major influences on the maturing social sciences at the turn of the century like J. A. Hobson, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber and Emil Durkheim attached little value to race and abandoned it for theoretical purposes. The motivation for these theorists to reject racially determinist explanations of development and progress partially reflects a growing awareness of the relationship between values, structure and function in any given social system. For those that gave some attention to non western civilizations it also reflects their reading of sinology at the end of the nineteenth century. Given that postcolonial approaches to the study of non-western civilization emphasizes that knowledge of China was a precursor to colonization, it is surprising to find that late nineteenth-century sinology actually contributed to undermining the racial reductionist speculations of Galton, Kidd or Ross. We shall next consider the character of late nineteenth century sinology and its impact on the understanding of development in the early twentieth century.

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4 Peculiar Nation: Sinology and the Social Sciences 1890–1949

The grand theorists of the mid-nineteenth century and the developmental and degenerative models they constructed, conspicuously disregarded the burgeoning commentaries and documentary evidence that bore testament to the fact that neither Asia, China nor India fell into the broad racial, economic or philosophical categories devised for them. Reading Mill, Spencer, Marx, de Gobineau, Chamberlain or Spencer it is interesting to find how sparing and selective are the references that they make to the various British, French, Dutch and German administrators, historians and sinologists who drew attention to the variegated character and sophistication of Chinese culture and language. Indeed, the dichotomy between the discourse of the supposedly ‘orientalized’ colonial administrator or sinologist and that of the developmental social scientist becomes increasingly apparent in the course of the century. Let us now examine a little more closely the sinology of the late nineteenth century and its impact on the western social, political and cultural imagination as that evolved in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sinology at the nineteenth century’s end In the period up to 1850, colonial administrators turned sinologists like J. F. Davis, had maintained that the Chinese character was not servile nor its civilization stagnant. In the view of administrators like Davis, and Meadows it was the missionaries who had been responsible for a ‘too unfavourable picture of their moral character’ (Meadows 1856: 337). Later in the century, administrator–sinologists like Herbert Giles and administrator journalists like Archibald Colquhuon were, if anything, more impressed by the unique Chinese capacity for order and 99

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government. For Giles this reflected the fact that government, even at the district level, embraced the Confucian and neo-Confucian view that ‘the people are the most important element in the nation’ (Giles 1912: 86). ‘Theoretically’ China was an ‘autocracy’ (75). Nevertheless Giles observes, ‘even the meanest subject of the Son of Heaven’ enjoys ‘a large measure of personal freedom’ (87). Giles, like Meadows and Huc before him, recognized that the viability of imperial rule owed little to despotism, but much to ‘rule by moral force, coupled with the institution of public examinations’ that afforded at least a semblance of equal opportunity (Meadows 1856: xvi; Giles 1912: 79). The penal code was not rigidly enforced, and the people were lightly taxed and ‘exceptionally law abiding’ (Giles 1912: 88–92). Moreover, popular obedience had its limits. The capacity to organize in trade associations or combinations enabled even the ‘meanest sorts’ to resist successfully ‘any attempt by the governing classes to lay upon them loads greater than they can or will bear’ (92). In The Civilisation of China (1911), Giles considered China an ‘enigma’ and a ‘puzzle’. The keystone of Chinese social and political life resided in the practice of filial piety (62). Writing during the travails of imperial decline and at the time of the promulgation of the first Chinese constitution, Giles observed that ‘the old patriachal form of government, autocratic in name but democratic in reality, which has stood China and the Chinese people in such good stead for an unbroken period of twenty two centuries is also to change . . . in the hope that a new era will be inaugurated’ (244). Given that Confucian moral understanding facilitated popular accountability, Giles was optimistic about the prospects for a transition to Chinese democracy. Significantly, former administrators like Meadows and Giles sought to revive, from their personal experience, the earlier image of Chinese rule as broadly accountable, administratively competent and morally efficacious. As we have seen, Everiste Régis Huc had observed in the 1850s that ‘public opinion is always ready to check any excesses on the part of the Emperor’. A. R. Colquhuon, former Deputy Commissioner to Burma and The Times special correspondent to the Far East, subsequently expanded the view that ‘the faculty of local self-government . . . runs in the Chinese blood’ (Colquhuon 1898: 284). Colquhuon reasserted the understanding that Chinese government had no real western equivalent. Consequently ‘if we call it a despotism, we are confronted with facts which would show it to be the most democratic polity extant, and if we call the Empire a Federation of independent states, we are met by the absolute power vested in the Throne’ (170). This uniquely Chinese

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form of government, then, was a composite of two systems ‘a centralised autocracy and a democratic self-government’ (286). The family and filial piety constituted ‘the germ cell’ of the body politic that linked the two systems. However, the two systems were not homogeneous. The autocratic/ bureaucratic element sat increasingly uneasily upon an ancient system of peasant communitarian democracy. The Emperor was a Pontifex Maximus ruling by divine right. Yet more important, for practical purposes, was the Confucian civil administration which stretched from Beijing to the local district magistrate. The system was, Colquhuon recognized, well thought out, but prone to abuse. The bureaucratic process had atrophied initiative and lack of accountability had facilitated corruption at the centre. The long duration of the system meant that by the late nineteenth century, government exhibited ‘the widest discrepancy of any known system between theory and practice’ (188). Consequently, the standard of public duty, ‘lost in clouds of inflated verbiage, is wholly disconnected from practical affairs’ (189). It had been replaced by a corrupting ‘reign of sham in the general administration’ which had its ‘roots in the Central Government’ (189). Throughout the financial and legal system bribery and corruption prevailed. Thus, Chinese government was ‘like a pear, most rotten at the core’ (191). Yet, despite the decadence of civil administration, the older system of local self-government remained robust. This system, and the various peasant, trade and secret associations that sustained it, had to defend itself against the potential ‘tyranny’ of the official system. The absence of a machinery of popular representation, Colquhuon observed following Meadows, legitimated the growing nineteenth century recourse to popular rebellion. This ‘the ultimate remedy in the West, is the proximate remedy in the East, for want of any adequate intermediate machinery of redress’ (289). Colquhuon, F. von Richtofen, W. F. Mayers and other ‘China hands’, provided increasingly detailed accounts of the geography, industry, government and diplomacy of the decaying Celestial Empire. Both Mayers in his The Chinese Government A Manual of Titles (1878), Richtofen in his Letters to the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce and Colquhuon noted China’s tremendous industrial potential, while at the same time observing the weakness of its government and its increasing exploitation by the European powers, Japan and the United States, scrambling for Empire at that century’s end. China’s industrial potential, however, like its government, ‘slumbered’. Its natural resources were undeveloped, while its people both in

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their ‘mass’ and diligence represented an impressive resource. The Chinese worker, Colquhuon predictably observed, ‘fulfils in the highest degree the ideal of an intelligent human machine’ (58). As a British Government Report on the Trade of Central and Southern China (1898) noted ‘a man of good physical and intellectual qualities, regarded merely as an economical factor, is turned out cheaper by the Chinese than by any other race’ (Colquhuon 1898: 58). Intelligent observers like Colquhuon considered it inevitable that: ‘in many important industries use will be made of this still latent activity, and that the seat of many industries will therefore be transplanted to Chinese ground. The people themselves may lack the initiative, but foreign capital will utilise the opportunity for flooding the markets of the world with the products of cheap Chinese labour.’ (Ibid) It was the poor state of communications, western commentators concurred, that both inhibited Chinese industrial development and exacerbated rural poverty. Chinese roads were ‘proverbially the very worst in the world’ (82). While ‘foreign nations have closed in upon China both by sea and land’ internal communications had fallen into neglect (89). Inadequate communications were largely responsible for the Chinese government’s failure to alleviate the famine in North China that accounted for thirteen million lives between 1875–79 (Gernet 1982; Becker 1996: 11). The development of China, therefore, required the construction of railways along the lines that had opened up the Indian hinterland to trade. In Colquhuon’s view, ‘so long as China was . . . not . . . hemmed in, as she now is, by Western Powers, it was quite possible for the Empire to hold together’ (89). However, ‘disintegrating processes’ were at work. Physical deterioration further exacerbated the dynasty’s weakening grip over the country. ‘The same cause that kills trade on its way inland paralyses the authority of Peking a few hundred miles from the capital’ (ibid). The rapid development of infrastructure would, therefore, facilitate good government by alleviating famine and ‘crushing the secret societies’ that fomented rebellion (90). Despite the government’s impotence in dealing with internal collapse and external pressure, Colquhuon nevertheless regarded the Chinese an ‘amazing people’ (1902: 397). Analogously, Anglo-American and Dutch Protestant missionaries who also doubled as social commentators or sinologists, like Justus Doolittle, Arthur H. Smith, J. R. Legge, J. J. M. De Groot and William Soothill, variously admired the duration of Chinese

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civilization, the sociability of the Chinese and their immense capacity for hard work. What these writers increasingly questioned was the continuing viability of its Confucian value system. This, in part, reflected a missionary desire to ‘harvest’ souls for ‘the Lord’ (Legge 1880: 309). It also stemmed from the western view that the great weakness in Chinese civilization was rooted in an indifference to the truth and a preoccupation with giving and losing face. For the missionary–sinologist, this was a direct consequence of paganism. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, The Chinese Classics were available in Legge’s impressive seven volume translation, while the major Taoist works of Lao Zi (Lao Tzu) and Zhang Zi (Chuang Tzu) were also available in a variety of European translations. Indeed, following Rémusat’s initial appreciation of Taoism, a number of European writers displayed an interest in the negative dialectics of the Way. Stanislas Julien had published a French translation of the Dao de Qing (Tao Te Ching) in 1842 and the missionary Reverend J. Chalmers had produced an English translation in 1868, while Herbert Giles translated the Chuang Tzu (1889) and developed, with T. F. Wade, the Wade–Giles system for romanizing Chinese characters. Meanwhile J. J. M. de Groot had comprehensively summarized The Religious System of China Its Ancient Forms; Evolution; History and Present Aspect; Manners; Custom and Social Institutions Connected Therewith (1892–1900) in six volumes. Despite a growing European awareness of the three religions of China, European commentators, nevertheless, continued to emphasize the enduring importance of Confucianism to Chinese education and socialization. European commentators, whether of a missionary or secular background, viewed this legacy with a certain ambivalance. Thus, while the majority of commentators admired Confucius as a teacher of moral integrity in a corrupt age, they also contended that the ethical system he bequeathed had serious limitations. As William Soothill explained in his translation of The Analects of Confucius (1910): Our Lord did not destroy the Philosophy of the West; he purified and ennobled it. Nor will He destroy the Philosophy of the East, but will ‘fulfil’ it, transforming what is worthy from vain adulatory approval into a concrete asset in the nation(al) life and character. (iv–v) Soothill generally approved the moral integrity and conscientious probity of Confucius, but considered he committed a ‘serious offence against higher morals’ by breaking an oath taken under compulsion (29).

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J. R. Legge meanwhile considered Confucius the great codifier and synthesizer of the Chinese national religion. Confucianism, he averred, established ‘the five constituent relationships of society’ between ruler and subject; father and son; husband and wife; elder and younger brother and friends (Legge 1880: 105). Legge further considered ‘the whole duty of man’ in China ‘pervaded by religious sentiment’ (123). Indeed, Confucius taught a morality that referred to the will of God (124). Curiously, the Presbyterian Legge at the end of the nineteenth century reached a conclusion about the divine inspiration of Confucian morality not markedly dissimilar from that arrived at by the French Jesuits two centuries earlier. Nevertheless, Chinese morality was not without fault. Legge particularly took exception to the Confucian advice promulgated in the Ch’un Ch’iu (Chun Qiu) or Spring and Autumn Annals. This Chinese Classic of political strategy, attributed to the Sage, Legge considered highly ‘injurious’ to the subsequent conduct of Chinese government and the national character. For the annals disregarded ‘the truth in history’. In this work, Confucius ‘shrank from looking the truth fairly in the face’ and demonstrated more sympathy ‘with power than with weakness and would overlook wickedness and oppression in authority’. The promulgation of these ideas among Chinese scholar–bureaucrats, Legge averred, stood in the way of the improvement of China (Legge 1872 vol. V pt 1: p. 50). For Ernst Faber compiling his Systematic Digest of the Chinese philosopher Mencius (1882), the great political and ethical weakness of the doctrine was the absence of a relation ‘to a living God’. The moral consequences were superstition and the confounding of ethics with external ceremonies ‘and a precise despotic political form’ (Faber 1882: 15–20). Somewhat ironically, as the American missionary Arthur Smith observed, ‘the life and state papers of a Chinese statesman, like the confessions of Rousseau, abound in the truest statements and the foulest deeds’ (Smith 1894: 296). Other missionaries were even more captious. For Justus Doolittle, in his Social Life of the Chinese. A Daguerrotype of Daily Life (1868), China was ‘the Gibralter, the Svestapol of heathenism of the globe’ (607). Confucian pragmatism had, in the view of more critical missionaries, entirely eroded the religious impulse from the national mind and led it into an abyss of indifferentism. While Doolittle somewhat eccentrically examined the variety of Chinese customs connected with birth marriage, education, religion, punishment and death, the American missionary, Arthur H. Smith, writing later in the century, attempted to describe the Chinese character. This Smith analyzed in terms of ‘Face’

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(chapter 1) ‘Economy’, ‘Industry’, ‘The Talent for Misunderstanding’, ‘Intellectual Turbidity’, ‘Flexible Inflexibility’, ‘Contempt for Foreigners’, ‘Patience and Perseverance’, ‘Content and Cheerfulness’, ‘Filial Piety’, ‘Mutual Responsibility’, and ‘The Absence of Sincerity’. By no means all these Chinese Characteristics were negative. The chapters on the Chinese capacity for economy and industry together with their habitual perseverance and cheerfulness, and what Smith and later commentators viewed as a notable ‘absence of nerves’ endowed the Chinese with resources which, properly deployed promised economic and social benefit. The Chinese in fact were ‘a most practical people’ (Smith 1864: 160).’We have come to believe’ Smith admitted, ‘at least in general, in the survival of the most fit. Which is the best adapted to survive in the struggle of the twentieth century, the “nervous” European, or the tireless, all pervading, and phlegmatic Chinese?’ (97) As there was no evidence of ‘race decay’ in China, and as the people possessed great reproductive and recuperative power, Smith left his question unanswered (144). The weakness of Chinese society, in Smith’s view, consisted in the tyranny of custom, an intellectual turbidity and xenophobia. The ‘machinery’ of social convention ‘moved the cogs and not the cogs the machinery’ (119). Assessing the ‘real condition of China’, Smith contended that, ‘the Confucian Classics are the chart by which the rulers of China have endeavoured to navigate the ship of state. It is the best chart ever constructed by man, and perhaps not too much to say . . . that its authors may have had in some sense a divine guidance’ (314). Nevertheless, its results were contradictory. The Chinese possessed patience, practicality and intellectual ability. But they lacked conscience and character (317). This defect, together with the absence of a sense of public duty could not be rectified from within. Smith considered the answer lay not in free trade and intercourse with the west but the greater access to western science and ‘funded civilization’ or ‘the manifold marvels resulting from steam and electricity’ (327), as well as those emanating from Christian revelation (329). Smith, like Legge and Soothill remained broadly sympathetic to Chinese culture and its prospects for ‘improvement’, J. de Groot, by contrast, became notably more hostile to the Confucian legacy in the wake of the Boxer rebellion in 1900. In his Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China (1903), de Groot contended that ‘the state policy, institutions and laws of China . . . are and ever have been based systematically upon the most ancient data traceable in her writings’ (vol. 1: 7). Consequently, the laws and polity of China could only be understood

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in accordance with the Chinese classics. Historically, de Groot considered the Qin, Han and subsequent Chinese dynasties distinguished by ‘a fanatical adhesion to the traditions and examples of the ancients considering these the highest and holiest standard for government and morals’ (ibid). Contemporary China merely replicated the ‘ancient system of distinction, persecution and extermination and throughout the history of the empire has carried it out into its minutest detail and its extremest consequences’ (ibid). Significantly, de Groot dismissed the view held by the majority of sinologists, and even de Groot himself at one point, that China had historically tolerated three ways of thought and religion, namely, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, which, nevertheless, could be syncretically blended for practical purposes. Instead, de Groot now claimed that the Han dynasty amalgam of Confucian morality and Taoist legalism sustained an official religion utterly intolerant of dissent. de Groot contended that: A chimera has to be banished from our minds . . . to make room for the conviction that we approach to a great deal nearer the truth by admitting the Chinese state to be the most intolerant, the most persecuting of all earthly governments; a State which on account of certain ancient dogmatic principles in the system of political philosophy whereon it is based, could not consistently do otherwise than brandish fire and sword in the face of every religious community or sect, which, since the days of Confucius, has ventured to make its appearance in China. (4) De Groot recognized that China was ‘not an empire of a day’. He similarly accepted that the polity, law and institutions of China followed with ‘fanatic systematization’ the oldest principles found in the Chinese classics (ibid). However, unlike most late nineteenth century sinologists, he maintained these ancient principles were both intolerant and autocratically enforced by the imperial mandarinate. De Groot’s understanding of an evolving Chinese authoritarianism grounded in the Chinese classics, however, conflicted with the growing historical awareness of the pattern of the Chinese past traced by sinologists like Otto Franke, Edouard Chavannes, Henri Maspero, and Henri Cordier. Studies of the archaeology and fragmentary literary records of the early dynasties and pre-dynastic history of China by Maspero (1927), Chavannes (1901) and Franke (1932) illustrated both the antiquity of China and the originality of its civilization.

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Those historians, in the first decades of the new century, who wrote general histories of China brought to the task a growing awareness of the way a distinctive philology, geography, science and literature had shaped Chinese civilization. Thus R. K. Douglas The History of China (1911), Henri Cordier’s Histoire Generale de la Chine (1920) and K. S. Latourette’s The Chinese Their History and Culture (1941) further embellished the notion of the singularity and duration of the Chinese experience. Following the abolition of the Confucian examination system for entry into the imperial bureaucracy (1905), the subsequent collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the instability that followed, early twentieth century histories periodicized the imperial past as a coherent whole separated by the rise and fall of dynasties from the Han to the Qing. The final chapters subsequently considered the traditional resources left to respond to the challenge from the west at the end of the nineteenth century together with the problems confronting a modernizing Chinese nationalism. Thus, the least flattering of these studies Douglas’s History of China, which went through four editions between 1882–1912, devoted the first five chapters to Chinese history prior to the Macartney mission and the subsequent ten chapters to China’s difficult encounter with the West. Douglas blamed most of these difficulties on ‘the distant and lofty attitude’ adopted by the Chinese government to Europeans (187). In Douglas’ view, the sorry influence of Confucius ‘the great master of make believe’ together with a western propensity to glamourize the ‘Celestials’ had only exacerbated crosscultural misunderstanding. Interestingly, Ian Hannah, who revised Douglas’s work, was more sympathetic to China’s humiliation at the hands of the great powers and sympathized with the nationalism that inspired the Boxer rising (Hannah in Douglas 1911: 470). Unlike Douglas, Hannah considered that the west ‘unquestionably’ had ‘something to learn from Asia. Perhaps it may yet be that some modification of the communistic feelings of the placid East may prove to be exactly what is wanted to correct the . . . wild exaggeration of individualism that is so very real a menance to the West’ (476). By contrast, in his far more sophisticated analysis of the evolution of Chinese history and western sinology, Cordier’s general history is notably critical of eighteenth and nineteenth century speculation about the Egyptian, Brahminic and/or Aryan roots of Chinese civilization. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, Cordier had already compiled his Bibliotheca Sinica – a comprehensive index of Occidental scholarship ‘on the different aspects of the history of this vast Empire’

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(Cordier 1920, vol. 1: 41). Significantly he maintained that there was no ‘critical history’ of China and, until the scientific researches of Chavannes, sinologists had paid insufficient attention to the Chinese historical records (41). Consequently Cordier considered that, from Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century, through Cornelius de Pauw and de Guignes in the eighteenth century, down to de Gobineau in the mid nineteenth century, no rational method had informed the study of China (35). The philological dissertations of de Guignes, Klaproth, Schlegel, Medhurst or Chalmers, Cordier dismissed as ‘high fantasy’ which threw no light on ‘the origin of the Chinese language and by extension on the origins of the Chinese people’ (ibid, see also Cordier 1917). The problem that beset European sinology, Cordier contended, was the ‘tendency to envisage world history exclusively from an occidental viewpoint’ (Cordier 1920, vol. 1: 38). Each nation, Cordier observed, tended to treat its particular history as pivotal to the unfolding of world history, ‘when in fact it constituted a mere fragment’ of the whole. An event that began in the Far East, like the invasion of the Huns or the rising of the Golden Horde in the thirteenth century, had profound consequences for European development. However, the tendency to treat such events as ‘the scourge of God’ ignored their geographical source. For, ultimately, their European impact was ‘an indirect repercussion of an event (évenement) that originated in the Far East’. Consequently, any general history that neglected the importance of China was not properly critical (38). Renan, in Cordier’s assessment, committed an error when he maintained that the history of the philosophical spirit required the study of only three ancient civilizations, namely the Greek, the Jewish and the Roman (39). For Cordier world history constituted a unity. Evaluating this history required more than an accumulation of isolated facts. ‘History’, Cordier presciently observed, ‘is composed not only of a series of discrete facts which when combined and coordinated constitute a general history, but instead forms a vast whole that serves to mark the outlines of the history of humanity’ (39). From this perspective it was misguided to represent Chinese civilization as stagnant and immobile. Cordier, like Huc before him, dismissed those commentators who superficially regarded the Chinese as the ‘most stable in their institutions and the least changeable in their manners, customs and institutions’ (40). Nothing was further from the truth. ‘No country has had more revolutions and upheavals in its form of government. Politically it has experienced every possible system, from socialism to tyranny; it has known all the philosophic doctrines; [and]

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its morals and its customs have changed profoundly’ over time (40). Cordier particularly emphasised the changing character of Chinese selfunderstanding. Nevertheless, he also recognized that its continuity constituted the central fact of Chinese civilization. Moreover, the vast size of its territory and the weakness of its neighbours had ‘forced China to live off itself’ (vol. 1: 8). In this enterprise, China had discovered within itself ‘the intellectual resources useful to the development and conservation of her particular genius’ (ibid). Historically, China’s encounters with the outside world were on Chinese terms. Nations that needed ‘silk, rhubarb or musk came to her’ (ibid). Consequently, the Chinese had no need to leave the country to find foreign merchandise, or to export products. Although the Chinese had an idea of a wider world prior to the nineteenth century, it was not until the rapid development in communications that the Chinese were obliged to abandon their ‘magnificent isolation’. Somewhat reluctantly, China had been dragged into ‘the great international concert of the world’ and forced to study previously neglected problems of politics and economics (9). Thus, a variety of factors had combined to undermine the Empire’s viability in the course of the nineteenth century. These included an historically acquired tendency to ignore the repercussions for China of ‘perturbations’ in the occidental hemisphere; the impact of trade and communications and the decadence of the Manchu rulers. Moreover, the disintegration of the dynasty would have global implications. Yet, it was not the first time that a ‘decadent throne suddenly collapsed in the Middle Kingdom’. New dynasties had always been built on the wreckage of the old. ‘There was’, Cordier observed, ‘a curious resemblance between the end of the Sung [a foreign dynasty] and the end of the Ming [a Chinese dynasty]: the enfeeblement of imperial power; factions at court; the influence of eunuchs. Down to the present day foreigners who have acquired power, the Mongol in the thirteenth century and the Manchu in the seventeenth, have not succeeded in altering the general character of the norms and administration of the country’ (vol. 4: 283). Nevertheless, it was evident both to exiled critics of the regime, like Sun Yat Sen or Kang Youwei, and to foreign observers that China’s ‘outmoded civilization’ could not coexist with a progressive modernity (285). The problem for reformers was that they had to placate traditional secular interests while introducing radical reforms. Unlike the Meiji reformers in Japan, the Chinese progressives had to contend with a secular Confucian tradition which ‘although responsible for the grandeur of the Chinese past, now stood as an obstruction to the path

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of reform’ (286–7). It was certainly possible to change the form of government, but ‘the mentality (mentalité) of a people is formed slowly over the course of centuries, it has suffered disastrous wars, endured the judgement of conquerors, but its civilisation, superior to any that have subjugated it, has until now overcome any serious assault’ (287). Observing the internal threat of warlordism and the external threat, posed by Japan, especially after 1918, to the new republic, Cordier maintained that China undoubtedly needed reform but ‘it is not Montesquieu, nor Rousseau nor Russian socialism that can usefully serve as models’ (291). ‘Each country’, Cordier sagely observed, ‘has its own needs and what is good for France or the United States is not necessarily good for an ancient Asiatic empire’ (ibid). Ultimately, there were ‘no universal panaceas’ (ibid). Cordier, like a number of commentators, believed late nineteenth century China was ‘awakening’, but to what was not entirely clear. By the second decade of the twentieth century China was, in the view of a number of observers, in a state of anarchy which could ‘minus the terror’ be compared with Russia after 1917 (315). The country was divided between north and south and between Parliament and President. The students were alienated. ‘Bolshevism tried to enter the masses like a poisonous virus. The administration was corrupt and certain officials were suspected of treason.’ The people, of course ‘were excellent’, but ‘jealousy between officials, personal rivalry . . . unequaled corruption, deep ignorance . . . lack of ideals, patriots loud rather than sincere: that is the new China. Hidden from us are the real virtues of the old China’ (318). While many observers in the first decades of the twentieth century were sceptical about China’s prospects, not all of them were as pessimistic as Cordier. Nevertheless they all, shared the view that China either had awakened or was on the verge of it. Hosea Morse in his meticulous study of The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (Shanghai 3 vols 1910–18) maintained that Chinese relations with the West in the course of the nineteenth century went through three difficult and unresolved stages, namely, conflict, submission and subjection. At the beginning of the period of western engagement, the Empire was internally stable. However, this ‘civilisation was arrested and denied all progress’ (Morse 1918 vol. 2: 391). Moreover, after 1796, it was: . . . cursed with a succession of weak emperors, under whose rule the administration became corrupt and morals degenerated; until finally the devastation of the Taiping rebellion reduced the nation to a state

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of misery and anarchy, from which nothing but a firm and honest administration could have rescued it. Firmness and honesty were both lacking, and China slumbered. (Ibid) ‘China’s western friends’, Morse maintained, ‘looked forward to her awakening from this slumber’. After the war with Britain and France (1860), both friendly westerners and Chinese diplomats concurred, that China had had ‘to agree to conditions and give up vestiges of sovereignty which no independent nation can agree to . . . without an attempt to change the one and recover the other’ (392). Sir Robert Hart, subsequently appointed to organize the Chinese customs and postal service, observed that the first minister in the state, Wen Xiang, had informed him in the 1860s that: ‘You had better let us sleep on; if you awaken us, we’ll go further and faster than you like’ (in Lawton 1912: 1361). Nevertheless Sir Robert optimistically opined in 1881 that, ‘I think China is waking up, but it is still very early morning with her’ (Morse vol. 2: 391). Yet the awakening, it appeared, could not occur under the auspices of the decadent and corrupt Manchu dynasty. In the event, it was to prove an exceptionally long morning. Both western and Chinese writers for the next century, however, would make much of the metaphor of awakening. Some commentators felt that China had awoken with the fall of the Manchu and ‘the inauguration of sweeping reforms throughout the Empire’. This ‘seemed to indicate that progressive forces had begun to move in earnest . . . and that within a few years she would attain to a degree of national efficiency that would equal . . . that already achieved by Japan’ (Lawton 1912: 1359). Lancelot Lawton, whose study Empires of the Far East (1912) considered China ‘a problem fraught with possibilities so immense as to appal the imagination’ (ibid), maintained there were two ‘distinct schools’ of thought on the awakening of China. One lent ‘its authority to the final verdict that China is awake’, while the other, better informed school, in Lawton’s assessment, ‘takes the cautious view that she has opened her eyes and is gazing in wonderment at the world of progress around her, but that she has, as it were, not yet made up her mind to rise from her bed’ (1360). Shortly before his death, Robert Hart maintained that, the ‘new learning is at work all over the country, but mistakes will be made, and the crop will not yield so much or so quickly as has been anticipated, It is no small task to force four hundred millions of people into line, and yet time will see changes, and the apostles of the new learning will have scholars, and the end will be the product of evolution at work, and the fittest will

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survive’ (1361). Chinese potential, then, was immense. A population tenfold that of Japan and individually ‘more thrifty, more industrious, more honest . . . are preparing to throw their full energies into the world’s competition for trade and commerce’ (1361). Moreover, the population had at its command vast, but untapped resources. Yet commentators also noted that its resources also constituted potent drawbacks to China’s development. Infrastructure in a country of China’s size were an enduring problem. Moreover, adherence to Confucian custom while, on the one hand, conducing, in Hart’s estimation, to a ‘singularly law abiding people, frugal, industrious and contented’, on the other, imbued the ‘defect’ of its ‘qualities, inasmuch as while excellent for domestic guidance . . . they do not supply what the present times of foreign intercourse demand’ (1363). For Lawton the forces of progress contended with the forces of reaction. Ultimately, China was in a state of turmoil rather than transition, and subject to exploitation by external powers. Summarizing Chinese history for a general readership in the early 1930s, K. S. Latourette still considered China ‘only dimly appreciated by the modern Occident’ (vol. 1: ix). Latourette contended that by the early twentieth century China was locked in a clash between two cultures, ‘with the partial and progressive disintegration of the one which we think of as traditionally Chinese’ (vol. 2: 334). Chinese history thus consisted in tracing the long evolution of traditional China through its various dynastic mutations. Until the arrival of the Qing dynasty (1661–1911), ‘the course of Chinese cultural development, while marked by certain fairly constant factors and characteristics, had shown progressive change’ (341). From the fourteenth century, however, the repetition of custom and form replaced ‘creativity and originality’. The ‘enforced conformity to Sung Neo-Confucianism and the lack of stirring contacts with other cultures’ were responsible for this. Subsequently, from the late eighteenth century, contact with the west was to prove revolutionary and ultimately deracinating. Thus, the concluding chapters of Chinese history deal with ‘the transformation wrought by the impact of the occident’ (vol. 1 chs 10–13). Explaining what would now be termed his ‘methodological framework’ Latourette first describes the geography and natural resources of China and their influence upon the people. ‘Then follows a summary, comprising more than half of the work, of the nation’s history from the beginning to the present’ (vol. 1: xi). This was followed in the second volume by thematic chapters covering population and ‘each of the main phases of the culture and institutions of the country–political,

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economic, philosophical and religious, social, aesthetic and intellectual’ (ibid). This structure both reflected and modified, in the light of evolving understandings of historical development, earlier nineteenth century taxonomies. With some modification concerning the character of Ming and Qing dynasty rule it has served as the basic framework for histories of China down to the present day.1 From this perspective, Chinese self-understanding reflected a synthetic blend of Confucian, Legalist, Taoist and Mohist thinking that dated from the Han dynasty. From this moral amalgam flowed a distinctively Chinese civilisation capable of enduring a variety of internal and external challenges. However, in the course of the nineteenth century, a combination of circumstances exhausted this indigenous tradition. These included inter alia the pressure from the external powers including Japan; the collapse of the Qing dynasty which deprived ‘China of its best chance of going through the inescapable transformation without chaos’ (vol. 1: 423), and the corruption and economic and political anarchy that followed. China, therefore, possessed a distinctive cultural tradition, but whether it had the resources to modernize was questionable. Latourette, like a number of his successors at Harvard, recognized the enduring character of Chinese institutions. Under this Confucian form ‘seldom has any group of mankind been so prosperous and so nearly contented as were the Chinese under this governmental machinery when dominated by the ablest monarchs of the various dynasties’ (vol. 2: 21). Although the system was essentially Confucian, Latourette, like Cordier and Huc before him, recognized that Chinese political science constituted a ‘vast body of political thought, experimentation and experience’ (24). Yet, it was not without limitations. The civil service examinations, only abolished in 1905 placed a ‘premium upon memory . . . rather than originality or vigor of thought and promise in administrative skill’ (40). Traditional high culture encouraged ‘an intellectual arrogance, a narrowness of outlook and a stereotyping of thought which discouraged all progress’ (40). At the same time, ‘the large degree of local autonomy’ afforded by the system hindered effective action when the complex civilizational edifice confronted an unyielding external threat (53). Consequently, by the second decade of the twentieth century revolutionary change suffused traditional China. Summating the impact of the West, Latourette averred: Although it was not subjugated to an alien political yoke nearly so fully as it had repeatedly been in earlier centuries, and by 1933 had

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made decided progress toward the recovery of such portions of its independence as had been sacrificed, in almost every other phase of its life the country yielded to the Occident (530).

The impact of structural functionalism and the developmental paradigm on early twentieth century social science The changing European perception of Chinese history and civilization had implications for the way in which it fitted into the evolving framework of the social sciences as these sciences abandoned a crude organic and physical evolutionism in the first decades of the twentieth century. The need for a more sophisticated appreciation of Chinese development is clearly evident in J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism A Study published in the same year that Kidd animadverted against the principles of free market individualism. Unlike Kidd, Hobson had little difficulty with classic liberal trade principles especially when they were linked to the promotion of industrial democracy and equal converse between nation states in an open global order. Instead, Hobson condemned ‘the new imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century as protectionist, misguided and destructive of international order (Hobson 1902: 27). From Hobson’s perspective, if there was an Asian threat to western civilization, it was western imperialism that had created it (314). Hobson, like Kidd, admired Alfred Wallace and Julian Huxley’s contribution to evolutionary theory and its social implications. However, Hobson drew quite different implications for the social sciences from Huxley’s biology. In particular, Hobson took from Huxley the idea that there was no necessary connection between human values and the natural constraints that occurred in the animal kingdom. Consequently, Hobson rejected biological sociology and considered fallacious the application of the principle of natural selection to the rise and fall of civilizations. Its crude application to an international race for markets, moreover, had merely facilitated a disturbingly ‘autocratic’ imperialism. Hobson reverted instead to earlier understandings of free trade and its invisible handed promotion of individual property rights. Like James Mill, Hobson considered the spread of empire ‘a vast form of outdoor relief for the upper classes’ (51). Not only was the ideological justification of modern imperialism questionable, moreover, its economic benefits were negligible. Trade, Hobson showed, had not followed the flag. The new imperialism, by which he understood the competitive territorial expansion of European and American power after 1884, had not spread wealth or facilitated growth. From the commercial standpoint,

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for instance, British imperial trade with its tropical and sub-tropical regions, acquired after 1880, was ‘small, precarious and unprogressive’ (38). Indeed, ‘aggressive Imperialism proved of little value to manufacturer or trader, perilous to the citizen, burdensome to the taxpayer and of benefit only to a narrow elite of plutocratic investors and their associates in the burgeoning military class’ (55). Finance capital, in fact, was ‘the governor of the imperial engine’ (59) and it was detrimental to the free market in goods and services. From the perspective of Hobson’s liberalism, any danger to the international order was, thus, a direct consequence of an illiberal and essentially protectionist new imperialism that repudiated free trade (67). Significantly, the economic disruption and the military aggression that stemmed from a protectionist imperialism based on the false perception of the struggle for national survival became most apparent, Hobson argued, in the Great Powers attempt to partition China after 1900. Imperialism in the Far East was ‘stripped nearly bare of all motives and methods save those of a distinctively commercial origin’ (307). China appeared to offer a unique opportunity to Western investment capital because it possessed a large population ‘endowed with an extraordinary capacity of steady labour, with great intelligence and ingenuity inured to a low standard of material comfort’ (308). The imperial profits taken from China, however, Hobson maintained, would undermine western competitiveness. The open door policy, inaugurated by the United States in 1899, whereby the imperial powers agreed not to deny each other access to their respective spheres of influence in China (Spence 1990: 231), would prove counter productive. The policy would, in fact, create a Far Eastern manufacturing superpower, ‘taking to itself first the trade of Asia and the Pacific and then swamping the markets of the West and driving these nations to a still more rigorous protection with its corollary of diminished production’ (317–18). Moreover, if there was a growing threat of increasing competition from the East it was a Frankensteinian creation of western aggression. Western commercial exploitation of ‘backward races’ passed through three stages: first, ordinary commercial exchange; second, the acquisition of territory or the investment of capital in order to develop resources; and third, a period when capital and organizing energy ‘may be developed within the country’ (308). China would soon reach the third stage and possess the material wherewithal to ‘turn upon her civiliser, untrammelled by need of further industrial aid, [and] undersell him in his own market.’ It was, thus, conceivable that China ‘might

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so turn the tables upon the Western industrial nations, and either by adopting their capital and organizers or, as is more probable, by substituting her own, might flood their markets with her cheaper manufacturers’ (309). Somewhat incoherently, however, Hobson also contended that China did not possess the organizational capacity to resist its partitioning by the aggressive imperial powers, namely, England, France, Japan, Russia and the United States. Historically, the Chinese Empire had exhibited a casual indifference to external relations, but unless it transformed itself into a military power, China could not escape this external pressure. Echoing Herder, Hobson observed, China could not be ‘roused quickly from the sleep of countless centuries of peace’ (310). Consequently, the exploitation of China for the profit of a western investing class rather than ‘whole peoples’ would prove conducive in the west to increasing ‘oligarchy in politics and parasitism in industry’ (314), while China might disintegrate rather than develop (312). Such disintegration, moreover, would be detrimental to a civilization that had much to offer the west. Hobson contended that to view China as a great but calcified Empire was misconceived. Instead, Hobson drew upon the late nineteenth-century accounts of Mayer, Colquhuon and others, to show that China was in reality ‘a huge nest of little free village communes, self-governing and animated by a genuine spirit of equality’ (319). The basis of the self-governing community was the family and this constituted the mainspring of national vitality. It was the moral authority of the family that commonly sufficed to preserve order and upon it the Chinese had built ‘one of the most extraordinary civilizations the world has known’ (321). Significantly, this civilization had always recognized the dignity of labour and the need for universal education (322). Although Chinese civilization undervalued the individual, inhibited technological development and suffered from an excessive regard for convention, ‘no thinking man can seriously question the immense importance of free intercourse between the West and the East’ (325). Chinese civilization, Hobson maintained had ‘stood the test of time; the qualities which have enabled them to survive ought surely to be matter of deep concern for the mushroom civilizations of the West’ (326). The west, then, needed eastern insight, while Asia needed an infusion of western vitality. This could only be achieved in a spirit of democratic co-operation, not one of forceful exploitation. Thus Hobson concluded presciently that ‘for Europe to rule Asia by force for purposes of gain, and to justify that rule by the pretence that she is civilizing Asia . . . will be

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adjudged by history, perhaps, to be the crowning wrong and folly of Imperialism’ (327). Hobson, was by no means a lone liberal voice condemning the crude application of a biological paradigm to justify the late nineteenth century imperial mission. Hobson reverted to a modification of liberal economics to excoriate organicism and imperialism and their distorting effects upon an understanding of contemporary China and its potential role in a modern democratic global order at the start of the twentieth century. Economists following Hobson, like R. H. Tawney, equally rejected the sterile biological analogy. Significantly, Tawney’s Land and Labour in China (1932) drew on a much broader and more impressive array of data than that available to Hobson. Tawney, like Hobson and a number of early twentieth-century sinologists, believed China had tremendous economic resources and potential. However, drawing upon the work of economists like John Lossing Buck, Tawney remained sceptical about the possibility of China achieving its full potential. A similar ambivalence informed the thinking of twentieth century liberal philosophers toward China’s developmental prospects. Both John Dewey and Bertrand Russell taught in China in the early 1920s, when Chinese students in the wake of the May 4th Movement were eager for western ideas. Russell, in analysing The Problem of China (1922), like a number of liberals of his generation, considered the position of modern China ‘among the nations of the world quite peculiar, because in population and potential strength China is the greatest nation in the world, while in actual strength at the moment it is one of the least’ (63). This was for two reasons: the Chinese were ‘incompetent in politics and backward in economic development.’ However, in other respects, China possessed ‘a civilization at least as good as our own, containing elements which the world greatly needs, and which we shall destroy at our peril’ (63). Rather differently, western civilization, Russell contended, was built upon ‘assumptions which, to a psychologist, are rationalizings of excessive energy. Our industrialism, out militarism, our love of progress, our missionary zeal, our imperialism, our passion for dominating and organizing, all spring from a superflux of the itch for activity’ (16–17). The west, in Russell’s view had made a ‘fetish of progress, which is the ethical camouflage of the desire to be the cause of changes’ (202). By contrast, Russell felt, the Chinese character and worldview emphasized instead an ‘imperturbable quiet dignity’ and a humour too ‘profound for self assertion’ (202). Although, Russell acknowledged that as a European he could not adjust happily to a Chinese worldview, and

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found worrying and somewhat predictable defects in the Chinese character,2 nonetheless he was ‘inclined to think that Chinese life brings more happiness to the Chinese than English life does to us’ (75). Indeed, Russell found Chinese urbanity ‘restful’ (205). In a manner reminiscent of an eighteenth century philosophe Russell recognized the achievement of Chinese civilization and its distinctive moral qualities. Unlike the Enlightenment sage, however, Russell, preferred the teachings of the Taoists (Daoists), to that of Confucius. In this Russell was not alone. The elusive quality of Taoist thought, particularly the epigrammatic quality of Chuang Tzu (Zhang Zi),3 appealed to European philosophers increasingly preoccupied with the relationship between language and a decentred ‘being with the other’. Yet Russell, evidently not content to let China be, further maintained that traditional civilization had become ‘unprogressive’ through an absence of external or internal stimulus. This had had a negative impact on scientific inquiry where China remained ‘deficient’ (193). Nevertheless, Russell believed that if China could establish a stable constitutional government, develop its industrial potential, reform higher education and avoid unequal treaties and foreign colonialism, particularly by Japan, it could serve as the template for ‘a new civilization better than any that the world has yet known’ (250). Russell’s pragmatic contemporary, John Dewey whose, lectures to students in Beijing exercised a considerable influence over Chinese educational thought, also emphasized the relationship between progressive development and the constitutional rule of law (Dewey 1973: 12–13 and 150–1). Unlike, Russell however, Dewey considered the radicalism of Taoism and the official conservatism of Confucius broadly similar to the pattern of radicalism and conservatism that permeated western thought. Dewey sought to blend these traditions with a modern conception of science to inculcate a pragmatic liberal educational spirit. Such pragmatism proved curiously ‘congenial to the Chinese mind’ (13) particularly in the period between 1919 and 1927. Although a linguistic pragmatist, in his more philosophical moments Dewey does not seem to have considered the fact that the distinctive structure of the Chinese language and its symbolic system might affect the Chinese understanding of progress, science and education and that this in turn might have implications for its liberal democratic prospects. This was not the case, however, with Max Weber and Emil Durkheim, whose writings transformed the social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century, and whose understandings of modernization crucially affected the interpretation of Chinese political culture and

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economic development. Equally, Sigmund Freud, whose views on massenpsychologie also influenced twentieth century understandings of culture, like Weber and Durkheim, rejected the physiological determinism that informed nineteenth century interpretations of the rise and decline of civilization. It was a curious confection of Weber, Durkheim, and to a lesser extent Freud, Spengler and Toynbee that eventually shaped the modern comparative political understanding of the East in the course of the twentieth century. With the exception of Spengler, all these writers accepted the social fact of evolutionary progress from simplicity to complexity in modern industrial organization together with the equally evident social fact that different cultures experienced growth differently and that stages of historical, political and economic development could be fruitfully investigated and compared. Yet, while all these theorists accepted the political, ethical and economic ditch between tradition and an increasingly rationalized modernity, they rejected racially determinist and socio-biological explanations of this transition. This sociological and culturally relativist reading of non western society, moreover, was influenced by and, in turn influenced, the developing sinology of the early twentieth century and it is this complex interrelationship that we next explore.

Weber, Durkheim, and Asia In contrast with Galton and some aspects of Spencer’s sociology, Max Weber questioned the validity of both race and ethnicity as sociological concepts. Instead he insisted, logically, that regardless of the outcome of genetic research ‘social behaviour must be interpreted primarily in social terms’ (Weber 1968 vol. 1: lxix). The ‘critical targets’ of Weber’s sociology were, as Guenter Roth and Claus Wittich explained, ‘evolutionary conceptions . . . and the . . . socialist theory of family, property and the state . . . ; the neighbourhood sentimentalism of agrarian romantics; Gierke’s notion of the kin group as the first political association; and racist and nationalist ideas’ (ibid lxvii). Applying this critical approach to The Religion of China (1916) Weber significantly rejected evolutionary and genetically determined explanations of Chinese stagnation. Instead, he identified a social structure and an ethical practice that effectively inhibited the formation of a Chinese spirit of capitalism. Moreover, although his study has been described as one of the classic failed attempts at crosscultural comparison, Weber’s analysis exercised an enduring influence over later explanations of China’s failure to develop.

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From at least the Tang Dynasty (626–960), Weber contended, a ‘Caesaro-papist’ government and its patrimonial bureaucracy of Confucian trained literati at the centre presided over relatively autonomous self governing familial sib or clan associations at the local level (87). Within the sib or clan, Weber observed, a ‘combination of hereditary–charismatic, and democratic principles prevailed’ (Weber 1916: 89). The cohesiveness of the sibs, which might include a confederation of several villages, reflected the fact that land belonged to it rather than the individual. Its patriachal form both mirrored and counterbalanced ‘the patrimonial rule from above’ (86). This mutually reinforcing arrangement had prevented the emergence of alternative centres of economic power and fettered development. In particular, cities in China, unlike their European counterparts, had failed to establish charters of rights or self government. ‘To this very day’, Weber remarked, ‘the institutions characteristically developed by the flourishing burghers of the Medieval cities are either entirely lacking in China or they typically display a different physiognomy’ (85). More precisely, China lacked the legal forms and societal foundations for capitalist enterprise. Unlike urban medieval Europe the Chinese town lacked both ‘corporate political autonomy’ and ‘decisive legal institutions’ (101). Administration in China remained patrimonial, its Confucian ethical orientation maintained the ‘correct’ substantive relationships that induced harmony. Such a value system emphasized duty towards concrete people: princes, fathers, and elder brothers. It could, thus, never aspire to the depersonalized rationalism of the western capitalist ethic and its impersonal rule of law. The ‘reason’ of Confucianism, therefore, is a rationalism of order (169). Consequently, it could not countenance rational science, the rational practice of art, rational theology, jurisprudence, medicine, natural science or technology. Indeed, ‘there was neither divine nor human authority which could contest the bureaucracy’ (151). Weber, then, examined the foundations of Chinese morality and like both Hegel and Montesquieu before him found them wanting. In particular Confucianism in China reduced tension with the world to an absolute minimum. It thus induced a rational ordering of the self and the world that produced a static balance which prevented the emergence of any prophetic religiosity. Yet it was precisely such religiosity that informed the Protestant Calvinism and through its tension with the world unintentionally fostered the emergence of a commercial ethic in Europe. A Confucian ethical regimen by contrast, conspicuously lacked ‘any tension between nature and deity, between ethical demand and human shortcoming, consciouness of sin and need for salvation.’

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Hence, there was no leverage for influencing conduct through inner forces freed from tradition and convention. Chinese culture had prevented ‘an inward aspiration’ toward a ‘unified personality’, a striving which Weber associated with rational modernity. In Chinese thought, life was a series of discrete occurrences. It did not become ‘a whole placed methodically under a transcendental goal’ (76). Ultimately, the dead hand of Confucian morality was worryingly particularist and lacked the necessary tension to induce an individual conscience capable of guilt and sin that was separable from and, sometimes, in conflict with, the community or sib. The Confucian way of life might, in Weber’s view, have the appearance of reason, but it had been ‘determined from without rather than from within.’ The Chinese obey rules but they have no capacity for guilt. Confucianism and Taoism both failed, therefore, to generate the ‘this worldly asceticism’ of the Protestant ethic vital to inculcating the spirit of capitalism. China’s unique bureaucratic stability had not only prevented the rise of capitalism, it also formed under its aegis those features Weber considered essentially Chinese. These included inter alia, ‘the striking lack of nerves in the specifically modern European meaning of the word; the unlimited patience and controlled politeness, the strong attachment to the habitual; the absolute insensitivity to monotony; the capacity for uninterrupted work . . . slowness in reacting to stimuli; and . . . the specifically cool temper of Chinese humanity and formal kindliness to one’s fellow man.’ In other words, what for Ross, Galton or Chamberlain constituted aspects of the ‘yellow’ racial mind, for Weber were in fact the product of a long habituation to a patrimonial bureaucratic order informed by a Confucian ethic. By contrast, it had been the ‘great achievement of ethical religions, above all of the ethical and asceticist sects of Protestantism’ to shatter ‘the fetters of the sib. These religions established the superior community of faith and a common ethical way of life in opposition to the community of blood, even to a large extent in opposition to the family’ (237). Significantly, not only was Weber’s Protestant ethic shaped by his own German Protestant background, but also his reading of the Protestant missionary sinology informed his understanding of Chinese morality. Unlike the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both the missionaries and late nineteenth century sinologists like Legge, Soothill and de Groot developed a far more sceptical view of Chinese moral practice. Weber particularly referred to Jacob de Groot’s critical evaluation of The Religious System of China (6 vols 1892–1900). Weber, then, performed

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his seminal transvaluation of Confucian ethics by filtering late nineteenth and early twentieth century European sinology through his developing understanding of the relationship between norms, economy and society. De Groot’s comprehensive account of Chinese religion also offered Emil Durkheim a valuable range of source material for his exploration of Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse (1912). Durkheim, like Weber, objected to the methodological individualism of Spencerian sociology and Tylorian anthropology. He also objected to the historical materialism and evolutionism that had characterized nineteenth century attempts to assess progress and identify the stage of development in different civilizations. For Durkheim a properly scientific social science had to examine social facts like suicide, religion or the division of labour as ‘things’. It was ‘the power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals’ that constituted these facts (Durkheim 1895 (1966): 10). From a Durkheimian perspective social facts are socially determined. As Raymond Aron explains, ‘the social fact is specific; it is born of the association of individuals and it differs in kind from what occurs in individuals, in individual consciousness’ (vol. 2: 69). Significantly, they could be studied objectively because ‘they can be arranged in categories and because social entities themselves may be classified in genera and species’ (ibid). Central to sociological method, therefore, were the problems of definition and classification. In his early work, De la division du travail social (1893), Durkheim introduced a distinction between the mechanical solidarity of primitive societies and the organic solidarity of a developed modernity where the unity of the collectivity is expressed by increasing differentiation. It is through the operation of the collective consciousness that solidarity expresses itself. Moreover, it is more complete and embraces the greater part of individual existence in primitive societies. Consequently, the social facts that constrain the individual are most easily accessible there. Interestingly in 1902, Durkheim and Marcel Mauss classified China as a primitive system whose Buddhist and Taoist distinctions between the sacred and the profane arose from China’s social division into clans or sibs. Its feng shui and geomantic system of classification reflected its social categories. In identifying this system of Chinese classification, Durkheim further confirmed the view explored more completely in Les Formes Elementaire de la vie religieuse that the collective consciousness of the sacred represented the form through which society worshipped itself. Significantly, Durkheim’s Primitive Classification nowhere alludes

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to Chinese thought or science or its Confucian morality (Durkheim and Mauss 1902 (1973): 75). This sociology of Chinese classification, which again drew extensively on de Groot’s source material, reinforced Durkheim’s view that all social categories were both affective and ‘intended above all to regulate the conduct of men’ (71). The complexity of Chinese cosmography, moreover, aided this endeavour. Its ‘infinitely numerous elements’ determined the ‘genus and species of things in nature, the direction of movement of forces, and acts which must be performed, thus giving the impression of a philosophy which is at once subtle and naïve, rudimentary and refined’ (75). China, thus, constituted a ‘highly typical case in which collective thought has worked in a reflective and learned way on themes which are clearly primitive’ (ibid). Durkheim’s methodology had a worrying propensity both to assume what it had to prove (Needham in Durkheim and Mauss 1963: xiv) and to interpolate sources taken from de Groot (72). Nonetheless, it exercised a profound influence over subsequent French and European evaluations of the structure of Chinese civilization. In particular, perhaps one of the more influential inter-war intepreters of Chinese civilization, Marcel Granet, ‘was “a Durkheimian before he ever dreamt of China” ’ (M. Freedman in Granet 1922 (1977): 7). In 1934, Granet contended that Durkheim and Mauss’s observations on classification marked ‘a new era in the field of sinological studies’ (Needham in Durkheim and Mauss 1963: xxii).4 Granet, thus, applied to the study of The Religion of the Chinese People (1922), Chinese Civilization (1930) and Chinese Thought (1934) the Durkheimian view that society and thought had to be grasped in their totality. Granet, in other words, applied the structural method to sinology (Freeman in Granet 1974: 27) by reducing the great variety of Chinese civilization to a few basic principles of thought and order. The subsequent development of civilization over time revealed the unfolding of these principles. In his study of Chinese religion Granet rejected both the physiological reductionist psychology of the late nineteenth century and the evolutionary approach to development associated with Tylor and Spencer. Instead, following and amplifying Durkheim, Granet argued that ‘the sociological analysis of religion must enrich psychological knowledge by imbuing it with the idea that it is social life itself which has always been a great creative agent of rules of behaviour, sentiments, ideas and psychological realities.’ (18) Significantly, Granet unlike both Weber and Durkheim dismissed de Groot’s ‘folklorist’ approach to Chinese religion. Instead Granet set out ‘to determine the social system of the Chinese; . . . to point out its

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distinctive features – in political life, in manners, in thought, and in the history of thought and manners; to try further to indicate what of wide human experience lies hidden within it, by making apparent the truth that, from one civilisation to another it is often only the outward symbols that differ; to try finally, to reveal this system of behaviour in the setting and movement which are natural to it’ (Granet 1930 (1957): 3). Granet observed what he considered a ‘complete remoulding’ of Chinese society ‘about the time of the Christian era’ (405). An essentially literary national religion based on Confucianism replaced earlier feudal understandings. This developing worldview nevertheless assimilated earlier understandings that assumed a close bond between ‘the natural world and human society’ (Granet 1922 (1974): 46). Moreover, ‘the idea of an active solidarity between man and the world has remained powerful; everyone feels the need for an organization of existence congruent with the order of things, and in consequence oriented . . . in time and space; whence the (continuing) importance of . . . geomancy’ (151). Ultimately, the Confucian literati came to order the Empire because they ‘had penetrated the nature of the links which in their country tied men together in society and had become aware of the interdependence of human society and natural conditions’ (103). Like Weber, Granet viewed Confucianism suffused by a ‘principle of order’ (102). Unlike Weber, he also presented Confucianism as a state religion practiced by a bourgeois literary elite. ‘In public life’, Granet maintained, ‘all was religious: the political use that could be made of ritual language imposed upon everyone the need to learn it thoroughly and to know its spirit.’ In such a public religion prestige constituted a virtue maintained by the practice of rites. It also facilitated the cultivation of specialized techniques of government, economy and military arts. The Confucian elite thus constituted a ‘quasi sacerdotal class’ whose ritual practice constituted therapeutic observances aimed at ‘the good hygiene of society’ (108). As it evolved, this official therapy achieved a moral formalism, a formal conformism and a ritual symbolism with practical aims. Its pragmatism in part stemmed from the Confucian facility in syncretizing elements of a Taoist and Buddhist provenance into its system of classification. Thus, neither ‘dogma nor clergy presides over the religious life of the Chinese’ (146). Innumerable customs constituted the sum of religious life. ‘Almost all of them observe the sum total of customary practices out of the spirit of tradition and a taste for conformity; it is a general fidelity that constitutes the national religion’ (147).

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Contrary to Durkheimian expectations, Granet also found that ‘the sacred and the profane’ did not form two separate genres of Chinese experience. As he subsequently observed in La Pensée Chinois (1934), Chinese thought interested itself not in contraries but in contrasts, in alternations and correlatives and in ‘the hierarchical exchange of attributes’ (Wright Mills 1940: 519). This observation subsequently exercised an enduring influence over western understandings of Chinese ethical and political practice. C. Wright Mills, who was himself to have a major impact on the development of the western sociological imagination between 1940 and 1960, believed Granet’s Durkheimian sinology had important ramifications for the sociological approach to mind and knowledge. Modifying Karl Mannheim’s work on the sociology of knowledge, Mills considered the sociological imagination historical, comparative and relativist. More precisely, in Mills’ conception of ‘sociotics’ the generic function of the field of language co-ordinated ‘diverse social actions’ (495). From this perspective Granet’s work revealed the ‘rules and symbols which govern the life of the mind in China.’ The concern was not with judging moral or intellectual worth, but with the relationship or ‘ “parallelism” of ideas and social structures, the “origin” of conceptions from social forms and drifts’ (Mills: 473–4). Consequently, the graphic symbolism of Chinese, combined with the taste for the emblematic and concrete, had facilitated ‘the sociopragmatic and the semantic dimension of language’ (495). Chinese was ‘largely a denotative language in which the denotata elicit consummatory responses. Such responses and concepts channel perception’ (ibid). This denotative structure, moreover, profoundly affected the Chinese approach to categorizing, generalizing and rationalizing experience as well as the organization of time and space. Indeed, ‘the collective representations of time and space constituted a framework for the total art of ruling. They supported an art of managing by symbol and ritual, the world and the society of humans at its center. There is nothing about them which even faintly suggests the employment of categories in the organization of abstract thought which has been among western thinkers a predominant ideal’ (506).

Culture, psychotherapy, universal history and China in the early twentieth century In his analysis of ‘the language and ideas of ancient China, Mills drew not only upon Durkheimian sociology, but also upon a developing English philosophy of language. In particular Mills drew attention to

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I. A. Richards Mencius on the Mind (1932). Interestingly, Said had attended Richards’ lectures as a postgraduate at Harvard and considered them ‘vague, vain and rambling’ and his scholarship ‘thin and unaccomplished’ (Said 1999: 290). Perhaps if he had attended a little more closely, he would have discovered Richards postulated a decidedly relativist approach to language and thought before French poststructuralism rendered it fashionable. Richards, like Weber, Durkheim and Hobson, rejected the crude reduction of cultural difference to genetics to explain different developmental paths. Following a period in Beijing, Richards asked rhetorically, ‘if we grant that the general physiology and neurology of the Chinese and Western races are the same, might there not still be room for important psychological differences? Peoples who have lived for great periods of time in different cultural settings – developing different social structures and institutions – might they not differ vastly in their mental constitution?’ (Richards 1932: 80–1). Interestingly, as a result of his encounter with Mencian modes of thought, Richards contended that western philosophy needed to revise its assumptions about the character of thought, will and feeling. Indeed, it was plausible that ‘we perhaps Think and Feel and Will because we have for so long been talking as though we did and that if language and tradition professed a different set of psychic functions we might be conducting our minds otherwise’ (82). Thus, Richards recognized the significant and potentially non-negotiable, cultural differences generated from the relationship between the structure of language, the character of thought, and its contribution to different, but equally valuable, practices of self understanding. Richards also regretted that ‘good psychoanalytic studies have not yet been undertaken in China’ (Richards 1932: 75). In fact, Richards considered that it was possible that ‘Mencius anticipates some of the educative prescriptions of Freud’ (75). Psychoanalytic theory, nevertheless, would come to exercise a curious influence over the evolving understanding of Chinese political culture. It should, of course, be observed that as his psychoanalytic theory evolved between 1899 and 1920, Sigmund Freud like all the more influential of social theorists and philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rejected any reduction of cultural difference to inherited racial characteristics. In fact, the talking cure, as it developed out of Josef Breuer and Freud’s practice in the course of the 1890s, dissociated the structure of the mind from a crude biological or physiological determinism. At the same time, Freud also came to recognize that the psychology of the individual could not be separated from a consideration of the ‘group mind’ (Freud (1921) 1985: 95). Indeed

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‘individual psychology is from the outset social psychology at the same time’ (Gay 1988: 404). A deepening awareness of the relationship between individual and group led the later Freud to pay attention to the work of Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd (1896) and William McDougall in The Group Mind (1920). Le Bon a medically trained doctor and a political reactionary, had drawn attention to the growing power of the masses in the modern democratic era and the importance of the psychology of groups for modern political development. Le Bon believed that ‘to know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them’ (Le Bon (1896) 1947: 71). Le Bon, as R. K. Merton observed, took dramatic account of ‘the thirst for obedience that marks the crowd and the crowd-man’ (Merton in Le Bon (1896) 1947: xi). He also recognized the crowd-man’s susceptibility to ‘impulsiveness, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit and of others besides – which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution’ (Le Bon (1896) 1947: 35–6). In fact, Le Bon’s social psychology shared the fear of democracy and cosmopolitanism evident in earlier nineteenthcentury theories of racial degeneracy. Consequently, Le Bon’s psychology of the masses was reducible to the evolution of a national mind, that emerged somewhat problematically from the fusion of common environment, interest, language and religion (1921: 198). Moreover, some group minds were better than others. Latin crowds were ‘feminine’ and emotional, Anglo-Saxon ones individualistic and the Chinese variety obsessively conservative and ‘incapable of improvement’ (Le Bon (1896) 1947: 83). By contrast, Freud, while equally unimpressed by the masses, rejected the notion of a racial mind. Instead, he valued the necessary repression that, paradoxically, made possible the greater tolerance of a civilized liberal modernity. Contrary to Le Bon, Freud offered an ambivalent interpretation of the fraught relationship between individual psychology and civilization or culture.5 Civilization, in Freudian terms, represented the whole sum of the achievements and regulations ‘which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes – namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations’ (1921: 278). Civilization, which emerged out of an unsatisfactory union between Eros and Anenke, constituted a necessary restraint upon mankind’s basic instincts. Its ‘replacement of the power of the individual by the power of the community constitutes the decisive step of civilization’ (ibid 284). However, the repression of the individual that inspired the sublimation of culture left permanent

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tensions. This was particularly evident in modern mass democracy. Following the evolving crowd psychology of the late nineteenth century, Freud considered the democratic masses prone to collective psychoses and susceptible to the libidinal appeal of a charismatic leader. In this they suprisingly resembled a primitive horde. Ultimately, the terms of any cultural authority required that relations of dominance and dependence permeate all political and social institutions. Le Bon, in Freud’s view, had neglected ‘the function of the leader and the importance of prestige’ to the group mind (Freud 1921: 109). Consequently, at the root of all political arrangements lay the search by the crowd for a political father. As Philip Rieff explains, ‘Freud’s belief that politics is founded in the group’s erotic relation with authority is made concrete by his claim that authority is always personified’ (Rieff 1979: 235). Modern rule in this view suggests the primary function of the leader is psychological ‘he acts as a center around which otherwise disturbed lives can be organized.’ Given the ubiquity, and the unfalsifiability6 of the unconscious processes shaping the individual, Freud assumed that the basic structure of the unconscious and its drives operated across different civilizations with broadly similar outcomes upon social and political conduct.7 Freud’s remarks on Chinese civilization are thus few and enigmatic. The Chinese language, we are told, resembled the ‘indefiniteness of dreams’ and required an analogous interpretory technique (Freud 1961: 230). Meanwhile, the Chinese practice of footbinding represented a collective manifestation of a fetishistic preoccupation with castration (Freud 1961: 157). The mutilation of the feet evidently indicated a collective Chinese male desire ‘to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated.’ Freud’s approach applied to the development of non western civilization, obviously gave insufficient attention to the cultural constraints upon the formation of the ego and the unconscious (Richards 1932: 75). However, psychoanalytic fieldwork, as Richards suggested, could correct this lacuna. From the 1930s onward a number of psychoanalytically inclined American political scientists attempted to compensate for this deficit by applying the Freudian understanding of the contradictory desires repressed by civilization, to the transition from traditional to modern political arrangements in what was to become known as the developing world. In particular, psychoanalysis offered insights into the nature of political culture that might elucidate the character and style of leadership in non western societies. Harold Lasswell, in Psychopathology and Politics (1930) also considered psychoanalysis useful in distinguishing ‘political types’ according ‘to the specialized or the

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composite character of the functions which they perform and which they are desirous of performing. There are political agitators, administrators, theorists and various combinations thereof’ (Lasswell (1930) 1951: 262). Lasswell’s psychopathological method revealed the ‘differences in the developmental history of each type’ as well as illuminating the ‘displacement’ responsible for political movements, the unconscious roots of political conviction and the appeal of political symbols (264–6). Ultimately, a political therapy of prevention might obviate the stress of modernity ‘by the definite reduction of the tension level of society by effective methods’ (265). Applying psychopathology to the Asian cultural experience, Lasswell (1937) analysed how military demands combined with the evolving mass communications media of modernity manipulated national symbols in order to sustain a ‘garrison state mentality’ (in Rogow 1969: 173). Subsequently, Lasswell attempted to evaluate how the postwar ‘revolution in rising expectations’ affected traditional values particularly in the late developing Asian context (see Lasswell et al. 1977: vii). This modification of Freudian technique to political ends affected the developing understanding of comparative politics and political sociology particularly in the United States after 1945, as we shall discuss in the following chapter. At the same time as Freud implied a common role for all civilization in shaping individual neuroses and the collective desire for authority, other interwar European cultural theorists looked for alternative ways of comparing civilizations without recourse either to a universal psychic structure or a discredited Darwinian physiological determinism. This produced some weighty, pessimistic and oracular pronouncements about the nature of civilization, its direction and the inexorable cyclical character of its rise and decline. In particular, Arnold Toynbee’s multivolume A Study of History (1948–67) and Oswald Spengler’s two volume The Decline of the West (1922–23) came to exercise an enduring, if ambivalent, influence upon the understanding both of comparative political culture in general and the place of China and Asia in world civilization in particular. Both Spengler and Toynbee developed the view, first propounded from a notably eurocentric perspective by Herder, that different civilizations embodied separate and distinctive national spirits. Indeed, for Spengler each culture was suffused by a distinctive spirit which bound together through ‘morphological relationship’ all the forms under which it expressed itself (Biddiss 1996: 90). Significantly, both Spengler and Toynbee adopted an ethically relativist and distinctively ‘postmodern’8 analysis of the rise, clash and decline of civilizations. Equally, they both rejected a eurocentric historiographical

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framework that constructed the past in ancient, medieval and modern periods. As Spengler observed, this tended to relegate ‘the vast complexes of Indian and Chinese culture to footnotes with a gesture of embarrassment’ (Spengler 1980 vol. 1: 16). More particularly, Toynbee claimed that even the ‘attribution of political and cultural significance’ to the terms ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ had ‘led to nothing but confusion’ (1957 vol. 2: 388). Similarly, Spengler argued that ‘the word “Europe” should be struck out of history’. There is historically, no European type, and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes as ‘European antiquity’. Nonetheless, while Europe was ‘an empty sound’, ‘East’ and ‘West’ represented ‘notions that contain real history’ (1980 vol. 1: 16). Unfortunately, Spengler replaced the failed categories of western historiography with a controversial ‘procrustean bed of his own upon which facts might be tortured’ (Biddiss 1996: 89). A romantic blend of Goethe’s ‘urphanomenon’ and Nietzsche’s genealogical understanding of the eternal recurrence inspired Spengler to conceive of an octet of ‘independent and individual plant-like cultures’ (ibid: 89). Of these, Spengler treats the Egyptian, Indian, Babylonian, Chinese and Mexican ‘plants’ with relative brevity, while the bulk of the project addressed the character of the Apollinian culture of Greece and Rome, the Magian culture of the Islamic and Judaic world and the Faustian culture of a German tinged modern west. The Decline amounts ‘essentially to an historical investigation of “the morphological” relationship between these eight elements, with a view to elucidating the laws and rhythms governing their fate’ (ibid 89). Cultures, therefore, ‘are organisms and world history is their collective biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man’ (Spengler 1939 vol. 1: 40). Culture resembled the relationship of the soul to the living body. Mixing metaphors, Spengler contended that cultures bloom on the ‘soil of an exactly-definable landscape to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences and reverts into the proto-soul’ (ibid 106). Morphological determinism further required ‘every culture’ to pass through ‘the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age’ (107). Unlike Freud, but like Nietzsche and Chamberlain, Spengler distinguished culture as destiny from the civilization it necessarily moulds. For Spengler, this meant that the particular genius of a race or a nation was a consequence rather than a cause of culture. This inexorable cultural destiny also concealed the

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seeds of its own inevitable entropic decay. Civilization ultimately implied the rise of a ‘megapolitan’ spirit of cosmopolitanism, urbanity and world improving doctrines of pacifism that intimated ‘a formless and therefore historyless mass’ (Spengler 1939 vol. 2: 185). As with Herder’s Kulturstaat, de Gobineau’s theory of racial degeneration and Heidegger’s anti-technological view of authenticity, Spengler’s cultural springtime nostalgically lingers after the unconscious gemeinschaft of the village green. By contrast a wintry petrifaction embraces the civilizational phase and a megapolitan stone colossus marks the tomb of every world culture. In Spenglerian terms, then, Chinese civilization represented a distinctive form of petrifaction. The Chinese culture ‘soul’ shared certain ‘magian’ features. Taoist naturalism constituted ‘its intensely directional principle’ (Spengler (1939) vol. 2: 190). This principle reflected ‘a deep historical feeling’ that contrasted diametrically with the ‘present mindedness’ of Graeco-Roman civilization (1980 vol. 1: 11–14). ‘The Chinaman wanders through his world; consequently he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb . . . by friendly nature herself’ (Spengler (1939) vol. 2: 190). A Taoist ethic pervaded Chinese culture making it the ‘only one in which the art of gardening is a grand religious art’ (190). This Taoist spirit contrasted with the imperial syncretism cultivated by a Confucianized mandarinate that ultimately brought about civilizational petrifaction (1939 vol. 2: 312–14). Both Spengler and Toynbee, W. H. McNeill contends, imparted a new breadth of ‘historical consciousness’ to the study of civilization (McNeill 1989: 165). Nevertheless, Toynbee criticized Spengler’s inability to account for the genesis of civilizations. Consequently, he sought to replace German a priorism with a more objective English empiricism (99). From this somewhat debatable empirical viewpoint, Toynbee discovered between 19 and 34 developed civilizations9 and an odd assortment of arrested and aborted experiments (see Geyl 1952: 69; Kedourie 1984: 195). Toynbee, like Spengler, treated civilizations as organically separate units. However, he permitted some interaction between civilizations through ‘affiliations’ and renaissances. At the same time, he firmly rejected racial and environmental evidence so central to the evolutionary accounts of civilizational growth in the nineteenth century. These lacked any explanatory utility. Toynbee considered the myth that an Aryan Volkerwanderung was responsible for western civilization particularly nonsensical (Toynbee 1957 vol. 1: 52–3). Equally, Toynbee dismissed the view that there was ‘only one river of civilization, our own, and that all others are either tributary to it or else lost in the desert

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sands’ (vol. 1: 37). This reflected three western ‘illusions’, namely, the egocentric, ‘the illusion of the unchanging East’ and ‘the illusion of progress as a movement that proceeds in a straight line’ (37). Instead, Toynbee made much of the notion of challenge and response to ‘a situation of special difficulty which rouses’ a protean civilization ‘to make a hitherto unprecedented effort’ (1957 vol. 2: 358). Faced with analogous challenges, Toynbee contended that successful civilizations might be compared ‘to rock climbers, and on the showing of this simile the several climbers, though they are certainly separate individuals, are all engaged on an identical enterprise’ (vol. 1: 243). Thus civilizations possessed an underlying unity. Nevertheless, and, at the same time, varying the metaphor, civilizations represented ‘separate seeds and each seed has its own destiny. Yet the seeds are all of one kind; and they are all sown by one sower in the hope of obtaining one harvest’ (243). This inconsistent position, sustained by ‘fallacious arguments and spurious demonstrations’ (Geyl: 78) enabled Toynbee to articulate a vision that was at least ‘non-Europe centered’ and emphasised ‘the future potential of East Asia’ (Wakaizumi in McNeill 1989: 271). In Toynbeean terms, the East Asian civilizational seed had responded to ‘a challenge from physical nature’ (Toynbee vol. 1: 74). This resulted in a Sinic Society that permeated subsequent Far Eastern civilizational growth. The central feature of this Sinic civilization was a concern with stability. ‘The mundane wisdom’ of Confucius and the other-worldy quietism of Taoism recognized ‘that the age of growth already lay behind them’ (vol. 1: 22). Indeed, bitter experience taught the ‘Sinic world to appreciate the stabilizing power of the pedantic Confucian ethos’ (Toynbee 1948 vol. 3: 329). Consequently, the Confucian corpus became the official canon of Sinic statesmanship. As with the other civilizational seeds, Sinic society faced an enduring external challenge from the West. Unlike the Americas, the emblematic Far Eastern societies, China and Japan, initially ‘survived the deadly peril to which they were exposed’ (vol. 2: 180). In the seventeenth century, ‘they managed to weigh the Western civilization in the balance, find it wanting, make up their minds to cast it out, and muster the necessary for putting into effect a considered policy of non-intercourse’ (ibid). This, however, was not the end of the story. The west returned transformed in the nineteenth century ‘now offering its technology instead of its religion as its principal gift and the Far Eastern societies now found themselves confronted with a choice of either mastering this newfangled technology for themselves or else succumbing to it’

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(vol. 2: 180). The impact of western technology induced both China and Japan to abandon the policy of isolation. In both cases, pressure from below for the ‘fruits of Modern Western scientific knowledge’ (vol. 2: 181) inspired change. The fact that Japan responded to the technological challenge more effectively than China, Toynbee attributed to the ‘geographical–political’ fact that China ‘is a vast and sprawling empire and Japan a close knit insular community’ (385). Meanwhile, in China, the nationalist reform programme, sponsored by the western educated politicians of the Guomindang (Kuomintang–KMT) in the 1920s, that appeared morally bankrupt, Toynbee postulated, ‘may bring King Confucius back into his own again’ (ibid). Indeed, the failure of China to respond to the challenge of the west during the interwar period suggested the general historical rule of the ‘withdrawal– return phenomenon in histories of civilization’ (Toynbee 1948 vol. 3: 329). Clearly Toynbee envisaged a future China governed by ‘a rule of technocrats with the state acting as paterfamilias’ (in Kedourie 1984: 203). The metahistorical consequences of withdrawal–return, challenge and response, cycles of progress and decline, and external and internal proletariats upon the organic separateness of civilizations and their distinctive culture spirits gave both Toynbee and Spengler’s models a scientistic and unfalsifiable flavour. This notwithstanding, Toynbee and Spengler’s interest in a world history that transcended European parochialism, together with Freudian insights into the unconscious promptings towards civilization proved influential both at a popular and intellectual level in both the west and, after 1945, in Japan and the Far East. As W. H. McNeill noted, ‘Toynbee’s vision of a cyclical pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations, embracing all the world, together with a clear endorsement of the truth of Christianity and a tentative reaffirmation of the idea of progress’ appealed to an American audience, especially when popularized through Henry Luce’s Time magazine (McNeill 1989: 212–13). Luce of course, also retained a profound interest in bringing modernity and Christianity to China. Indeed, this mission had led him in the 1930s to see Chiang Kai-shek as ‘the greatest man in the Far East’ and to put his considerable resources at the KMT’s disposal ( Jespersen 1996: 28). The growing sensitivity to the organic separateness of cultures, and the traditional and historically contingent components of traditional identity, powerfully affected the developing social sciences and their interpretation of non western cultures. From a related organicist perspective, Joseph Needham drew attention to the autonomy of Chinese

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science and civilization and its significant contribution to western conceptions of politics, ethics and science since the eighteenth century. As a Christian biologist with a Marxist penchant for a dialectical approach to the development of civilization, Needham’s approach entailed a curious blend of evolutionary biological science and historical materialism. Needham believed western civilization ‘had been profoundly affected not only in its technical processes, but in its very social structures . . . by discoveries emanating from China and the Far East’ (Needham: 1970b: 11). However, it was only from the 1930s that, ‘the great story of the influence of China on European thought’ came to be written (Needham 1944: 139). Differently from Toynbee and Spengler, Needham considered ‘the history of science . . . an integral part of the whole history of civilization; an essential ingredient in the development of human culture’ (Needham 1978: 1). More importantly, ‘no single group of peoples had had a monopoly in contributing to the development of science. All achievements should be recognized . . . if we are to move our way to a universal brotherhood of Man’ (4). From this progressively humanistic perspective, Needham contended that China had autonomously developed its own science and civilization, and had also transmitted ideas and developments to the west by a little understood process. Throughout the nineteenth century the west had conspicuously neglected the Chinese contribution to scientific development. Needham sought to rectify this through an ambitious and comprehensive seven volume study of Science and Civilization in China (1948–58). This showed that there was ‘a Chinese contribution to man’s understanding of nature’ and Needham sought to show that it was ‘a great one’ (4). Nevertheless, as with other civilizational studies, Needham accepted that ‘modern science as opposed to ancient and medieval science develop[ed] only in the West’ (Needham 1970a). Ultimately, irreducible cultural difference alone could explain this western exceptionalism. This view was subsequently explored in greater detail by W. H. McNeill’s Triumph of the West (1966) and David Landes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1999). While Needham recognized that the west certainly had a profound impact on Chinese understandings of science from the seventeenth century onwards, he nevertheless contended that ‘it slowly fused with Chinese science and with universal world science’ (1970a: 57). Needham’s careful analysis of the ‘great titration’ between East and the west, while accepting the Toynbeean model of autonomous civilizational ‘seeds’, reduced the significance of challenge and response and

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intimated instead a developing organic and ultimately global civilizational synthesis (1972: 11). In the United States, by contrast, it was the model of Western challenge and Chinese response, rather than impending global synthesis, that informed the developing understanding of the pattern of the Chinese past. This neo-Toynbeean thesis permeated the postwar attempt to place the study of China on a professional disciplinary footing. In particular, the Harvard East Asian Research Center under John King Fairbank’s seminal guidance demonstrated a continuing preoccupation with the Western challenge and the confused and uncertain nature of the Chinese response (Feuerwerker et al. 1967: 5; Fairbank 1982: 355; Cohen 1984: 11). This approach notably informed the multivolume Cambridge History of China (1991) under the editorship of Fairbank, Macfarquahar and Twitchett. As Paul Cohen observes, ‘Western impact and Eastern response are . . . core concepts’ which, together with the development of area studies, (Fairbank 1982: 326) came to constitute the postwar ‘framework for serious scholarly analysis of China’ (Cohen 1984: 11). This model of autonomous civilizational development thus served as the template for the subsequent attempt by postwar and, in particular American, historians and sinologists to come to grips with the twin facts that China constituted the ‘oldest living civilization’ and that contemporary China continued to grapple with the western threat (Lattimore 1945: 9). From Owen and Eleanor Lattimore’s The Making of Modern China (1945) through Fairbank and Teng’s China’s Response to the West (1954), Clyde and Beers The Far East: A History of the Western Impact and the Eastern Response (1966) to Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig’s East Asia Tradition and Transformation (1976) there was an assumption that China’s twentieth century travail reflected its engagement with the west and that its resolution would be benign, democratic, and yet reflect its distinctive Asian cultural self-understanding (Lattimore 1945: 29; Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig 1976: xvi–xix and 928). Indeed, challenge and response, supplemented by the modernization paradigm that postwar American political scientists constructed from an amalgam of Weber and Durkheim, shaped later twentieth-century interpretations both of China and East Asia, more generally, as we shall see in the next chapter. Yet, whatever the limitations of the emerging character of the social science in the early twentieth century – and there were a number – it is nevertheless clear that the models invoked, whether economic, historical, socio-psychological, sociological or civilizational, broke

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fundamentally with earlier social Darwinist and racially determinist approach to non western civilizations. As Ruth Benedict explained cultures were distinctive human constructs that organized thought and action. Within ‘each culture there comes into being characteristic purposes not shared by other types of society’ (Benedict 1934: 46). For anthropologists like Franz Boas and Benedict it was philosophers like Wilhelm Dilthey and Oswald Spengler that had first exposed the relativity of philosophical systems and values. Spengler, Benedict averred, had particularly attended to the role of culture. Indeed, it was Spengler’s identification of ‘contrasting configurations in Western civilization’ that had proved intellectually stimulating and demonstrated the conditional and mutable character of values. From this perspective, the study of different societies and ‘simpler cultures’ revealed ‘social facts that are otherwise baffling and not open to demonstration. This is nowhere more true than in the matter of the fundamental and distinctive cultural configurations that pattern existence and condition the thoughts and emotions of the individuals who participate in those cultures’ (Benedict: 55). Thus, while the functional study of different societies could shed light on a variety of social facts, the appreciation of the relativism of values necessarily rejected the view that western understandings were either superior or must necessarily prevail. This evolving relativism further recognized that while culture was destiny, it was not racially determined. As both Boas and Benedict demonstrated it was a social fact that ‘peoples have been able to adopt the culture of peoples of another blood’ (13). In this context, both Franz Boas in Race, Language and Culture (1992 (1940)) and Benedict in Race and Racism (Benedict, 1934) showed that much speculation on the nature of Aryanism had worryingly conflated an Indo-European root language with a mythical original people. Following the nineteenth century philologist, Max Muller who declared ‘when I say Aryans I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean those who spoke an Aryan language’,10 social scientists increasingly dismissed racial explanations of cultural difference. Culture, in fact, signified the ‘sociological term for learned behaviour which a man is not given at birth, which is not determined by his germ cells as is the behaviour of wasps . . . but must be learned anew from grown people by each new generation’ (Benedict 1942: 13). Rejecting Le Bon’s view that heredity determined the norms established by national groups, Benedict showed in her study of the changing values of modern Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1947), that culture was both constructed, mutable and

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responsive to external stimuli. In fact, the rapid transformation of Japanese culture from its ‘ceremonious way of life . . . to its modern bustle, [and] its dedication to commerce . . . was dramatically explicit and man made’ (Benedict 1942: 84). Ultimately, the developing study of cultural anthropology, which inspired the concept of political culture, ‘was aggressively hostile to the suggestion that any aspect of behavior could be inherited’ (Pye 1988: 22). Moreover in their ‘passionate’ opposition to racial or genetic theories Franz Boas, Mary Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, the pioneers of comparative anthropology freely developed Freudian as well as Spenglerian insights. In Lucian Pye’s view, they grasped at the theories of psychoanalysis because they provided an answer to the most vexing question in anthropology: Why do cultures persist? . . . In Freud’s work they found their answer. Personality and culture could now be seen as the opposite side of the same coin, and according to the theory, personality was determined by the childhood experience of socialization. (1988: 22) This evolving understanding of political culture and the terms of its often traumatic transition to modernity was, as we shall see, not without its problems. Nevertheless, the emerging concern with the autonomous character and development of the non western world belied the assumption of much recent postcolonial discourse that modern social science was permeated by nineteenth-century assumptions about European racial superiority.

A brief genealogy of western approaches to China 1895–1949 The nineteenth and early twentieth century western response to the challenge of China was a complex and variegated one. As we have seen post Enlightenment and romantically inspired European intellectuals of the early nineteenth century sought Promethean self clarification through the identification of a stable and unchanging Chinese ‘other’. Under the impact of Enlightenment rationalism, the first social scientists offered grand theories of universal application to account for Chinese sclerosis. These ranged from both liberal and Marxist explanations of an oriental despotism impenetrably caked in custom, to theories of racial evolution and degeneration that biologically accounted for Asian stagnation and sometimes defended

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and legitimated European imperialism as part of a universal struggle for survival. Significantly, this evolutionary universalism contrasted with the particularist viewpoint adopted by a variety of adminstrators and sinologists who observed the unique character of Chinese civilization and its defiance of universalist or evolutionary categories. Equally interestingly the grand theorists of modernity and the developmental and degenerative models they constructed in the course of the nineteenth century, either disregarded or used selectively, the wealth of documentary evidence that bore testament to the fact that neither Asia, China nor India fell into the broad racial, economic, philological or philosophical categories devised for them. Reading Mill, Spencer or Marx, it is surprising to find how sparing their references are to the mainly British and French administrators, historians and sinologists who drew attention to the variegated character and sophistication of Chinese culture and language. The contrast between the discourse of the ‘orientalized’ colonial adminstrator or sinologist and that of the developmental social scientist became even more marked in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century as Darwinian theories of natural selection influenced evolutionary social science accounts of non western civilizations. Tylor, Spencer and Galton under the impact of Darwinian biology scientificized cultural understandings to fit the prevailing nineteenthcentury ethos of progress and its stages of economic and psychological development. Coterminously, contradictory anti-evolutionary theories of racial determinism, stemming from de Gobineau’s aristocratic pessimism, recast as a theory of Aryan racial supremacy by Chamberlain, exercised a febrile influence over Wilhelmine Germany. Here it seems the neurosis generated by late development made the German political and intellectual elite susceptible to apocalytpic theories of degeneresence. In contrast with the Darwinist and degenerescent paradigms of civilizational rise and decline, British diplomats like Meadows, Giles and Colquhuon blamed bigoted Protestant missionaries for an unflattering portrait of Chinese government and character. Scholar–bureaucrats like Herbert Giles were struck by the public order and governmental bureaucracy which functioned in a manner that was democratically accountable. Significantly, observers like abbé Huc, Meadows, Giles and Colquhuon revived and deepened an earlier understanding of Chinese rule as rational and legitimate. As Meadows pointed out in 1856, the continuing viability of imperial rule owed little to despotism, but much

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to ‘rule by moral force, coupled with the institution of public examinations’ (Meadows 1856: xvi). From the late nineteenth century, more tolerant missionaries like J. R. Legge, together with academic historians and sinologues like Cordier, Maspero, Morse and Latourette, drew increasing attention not only to the antiquity and sophistication of Chinese culture but also to the dynamism and variegated character of Chinese political thought and practice. This academic commentary also recognized the challenge presented to the decaying Qing dynasty by western technology and commerce and reflected upon the manner in which China had ‘awakened’ to that challenge. The evidence provided by professional sinologues in turn served as a source for those social scientists who broke with the Darwinian paradigm towards the end of the nineteenth century. This epistemological rupture in the social sciences, largely ignored by postcolonial analysts of western imperialist discourse, radically affected the subsequent perception and classification of China. From somewhat different epistemological foundations, Durkheim, Freud and Weber rejected racially determined accounts of social development. Durkheim’s attention to social structure, collective consciousness and the classification of social facts stimulated the Durkheimian sinology of Marcel Granet. From this emerging structural functionalist perspective, Granet depicted a Chinese society suffused by a principle of order, in which Confucianism represented a public religion. Max Weber also considered the Confucian ‘religion’ central to the moral and political development of China. However, because this ethic lacked a sense of inner tension, the Chinese had been unable to generate either this worldly asceticism, or the legal structures necessary to encourage the spirit of capitalism. The reversal of the evolutionary and racial determinism of the nineteenth century established conditions for political scientists, sociologists, historians and economists not only to draw upon the insights of Weber and Durkheim, but also those of Freud, Spengler and Toynbee. From their different perspectives the psychoanalytic and the world historical approach also rejected an evolutionary or racial basis to civilizational difference. Freud, it would seem, assumed a universal civilizational predisposition to neuroses and a shared predilection among the democratic masses of modernity and members of tribal societies for the assurance of stern leadership. Somewhat differently, both Toynbee and Spengler maintained that organically separable civilizations endured comparable challenges and responses, withdrawals and returns, arrests and renaissances.

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In the interwar period the growing awareness among social scientists of the discontent that permeated western civilization facilitated ethically relativist approaches to the study of non western societies evident in the anthropology of Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas. Meanwhile European sinologists like J. J. L. Duyvandak or poet sinologists like Arthur Waley, Paul Valery or Victor Segalen contended that examined at ’close range these notions of east and west vaporise; we find in fact that the western world is not a unity but full of inner contradictions. Similarly when we look to the east we discover that there is a great variety of cultures’ (Duyvandak 1953: 137). Indeed, the more perceptive sinologists of the period realized the danger of presenting Asia as a unified cultural ‘other’. Thus, F. J. Teggart, in contradistinction to Toynbee and Spengler, demonstrated how European and Asian history had interacted since the earliest historical times. For Teggart, like Cordier, the study of the past could become effective only when it was realized ‘that all people have histories (and) that these histories run concurrently in the same world’ (Teggart 1969: 245). Ultimately, as Valery observed, Europe was geographically ‘a kind of cape of the old continent, a western appendix to Asia’ (Valery 1928: 312). This notwithstanding, historians like Granet, Latourette and Fairbank and historians of science like Needham, continued to present China as a discrete civilization, either challenged by, or in the process of dialectically synthesizing with, the west. In England, liberal and socialist economists, like Hobson and Tawney analysed the immense economic potential of the oldest living civilization. They also recognized that a baleful combination of internal weakness coupled with a predatory external environment driven by what Hobson described as an anti-market imperialism, prevented the realization of this potential. At the same time, liberal philosophers like Russell and linguistic theorists like I. A. Richards drew attention to the strengths and weaknesses of a different, but equally valuable, Chinese grammar of self understanding. Coterminous with the continuing philosophical and historical absorption with the nature of civilization and its impact upon political development and economic change that the China case stimulated in the west, there also developed a popular discourse that offered often crudely racist stereotypes of John Chinaman and the yellow peril. As Lynn Pan in Sons of the Yellow Emperor (1991) and Alison Broinowski in The Yellow Lady (1992) demonstrate, popular novels and yellow journalism dwelt neurotically on this threat and retailed images of inscrutable and untrustworthy Asiatics. Books like What’s Wrong with

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China (1926) by acerbic former China hands like Rodney Gilbert reflected a century of western disapproval of Chinese society, government and moral character. For Gilbert, China was irredeemably economically and morally corrupt. Half of China’s available iron deposits are already leased or mortgaged, her industries except in the foreign governed concessions are invariably bled white by a greedy officialdom. Interior trade struggles with bad roads, car monopolies on the railways, the heavy burden of domestic transit taxes, likin and countless impositions in each locality, not officially listed as taxes. Everywhere there is favouritism, nepotism, corruption and outlawry to fight at every turn in even the most humble undertaking. Agriculture, which is the mainstay of China’s existence, is always bungling and primitive, yielding a minimum return upon a maximum of toil. (Gilbert 1926: 21) In Gilbert’s captious assessment, partition constituted the only remedy for China’s otherwise endemic faults. Significantly, much postcolonial theorizing concerning a western ‘othering’ of Asia assumes that the stereotypes promulgated by China phobic journalists like Gilbert or popular novelists like Sax Rohmer in The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (1936) merely represented in a concentrated form an understanding that permeated more sophisticated works of historical and social analysis. Yet, a cursory familiarity with the work of Needham or Toynbee, Granet or Fairbank, Russell or Richards reveals a relativist approach to cultural difference that undermines the claim that the practice of early twentiethcentury social and political science was isomorphic with popular racist discourse. Moreover, even within the more popular forms of journalism and novel writing, there existed a variety of commentary, some of which offered highly favourable images of China and the Chinese. Writers as various as Pearl Buck, Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Robert Payne, Putnam Weale and André Malraux, while acknowledging the travail of twentieth century China nonetheless recognized its future potential. Thus, in her bestseller The Good Earth (1931) Buck used the fictional tribulations of the Chinese farmer Wang Lung to explore the stoicism of the Chinese peasantry and draw attention to the plight of China. Elsewhere, in popular polemics like Asia and Democracy (1943) Buck observed that ‘China was the oldest and most pragmatic of democracies’ and should be allowed to manage itself. In the context of the war

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in Asia, Buck maintained that the allies needed to make clear their determination ‘for real democracy for all peoples with mutual responsibility’ (Buck 1943: 3–5). Somewhat differently writers like Snow, Malraux, Theodore White and Payne assumed China’s twentieth-century trials indicated that it was on the verge of awakening, or what Gilbert termed dyspeptically ‘wakeful irritability’ (Gilbert 1926: 17). In depicting this wakefulness, Marxists like Smedley and Malraux, and journalists of a left democrat provenance like Snow, looked to the growing authority of Communism as evidence that China was at last ‘standing up’. In novels like The Conquerors (1928) and Man’s Estate (1933) Malraux saw Chinese communism producing a new social type. Indeed, ‘all modern Asia’ was: learning about life and discovering death. The masses are understanding that their poverty is hopeless and they can’t expect anything from an afterlife . . . Every man who’s cut himself off from Chinese life, from its rituals and hazy beliefs, and then rebels against Christianity, is a good revolutionary. You’ll see a good example of that in Hong, and almost all the terrorists you meet. Simultaneously with the fear of a meaningless death, a death that redeems nothing and avenges nothing, another idea is born: a possibility that any man can beat the life of mass misery and struggle through to a particular individual life; they think of it as well-being, worth much more than life.’ (Malraux (1928) 1983: 84) More prosaically, the American journalist, Edgar Snow, spent three months in Yenan in 1936 with this new social type in the shape of Mao Zedong. Somewhat predictably, in Red Star over China, Snow described Mao as ‘a gaunt rather Lincolnesque figure’ (Snow 1944: 90). Snow interestingly opined that although ‘there would never be any one saviour of China, yet undeniably one felt a certain force of destiny in Mao’ (ibid). In a similar vein, Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby looked forward with a frisson of anticipation to some Thunder Out of China (1944). Ultimately, therefore, what Jonathan Spence terms the ‘sightings’ of China in the course of the nineteenth century offered a broader and often more contradictory range of images than much modern scholarship allows. At the same time, there also emerges a distinctive continuity in the European engagement with China. This reflects a perennial preoccupation with the manner in which a Confucian ethic came to

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permeate Chinese government and society over two millennia. Indeed, the dialectical manner in which the European consciousness negotiated the East revolves around its engagement with the figure of Confucius. For Voltaire and Quesnay, Confucius was the Enlightenment saint par excellence, for he spoke only reason ‘without seeking to dazzle the world’, moreover, ‘one believed it and even more his country’ (Voltaire 1765: 76). By contrast, Hegel viewed this Confucian reason and morality merely as an ‘abstract unity’ (Hegel 1827: 77). Subsequently, as missionaries, merchants and adminstrators drew more detailed accounts of Chinese government and character, Confucianism assumed an increasingly ambivalent flavour. Rather than an embodiment of Enlightenment secular rationalism, a growing number of Protestant missionaries and sinologists considered Chinese morality to be backward, conservative, pagan and even intolerant. For others it constituted a public religion. Yet again it constituted the basis of an enduring social order and represented a valuable contribution to the language of philosophical and ethical self understanding. However, despite the varying merits attached to Confucianism by European and American commentators, most agreed that as a social, political and moral practice, Confucian China was inadequately equipped to deal with its modern fate (Levenson 1965). At the same time, the burgeoning early twentieth century awareness of the ethical achievement of Chinese civilization and the need for open handed philosophical exchange between East and West undertaken in an egalitarian spirit, evident in the works of Russell, Richards, Granet, Dewey and Hughes’ The Invasion of China by the Western World (1937) was relatively shortlived. With the triumph of Maoism, liberal democratic attempts at pragmatic syncretism with the East were officially condemned. Dewey’s former pupil, Hu Shih, denounced his educational ideas as vulgar evolutionism and idealist empiricism (Dewey 1973: 28). China’s desire to stand up also entailed, in the course of the cold war, a retreat into a new isolationism that rendered the sighting of the new China fraught with difficulty and susceptible to ideological manipulation, as we shall see in the next chapter. What finally does this mutable image of China tell us about the eurocentric roots of western social and political thought? Far from supporting Said’s view that the presentation of the Orient illustrates a particularly virulent form of xenophobia, the European encounter with China exemplifies, if anything a creative, but highly ambivalent engagement with an oriental ‘Other’. The discovery of Chinese civilization, together with its manners and arts of government, constituted the basis

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for an often contradictory, but pluralist set of discourses that in turn facilitated an evolving understanding of the idioms of culture, history and sociology. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, oriental understandings certainly formed the basis for grand theoretical speculation and the universal systems of developmental and degenerative theorists that formed the grundrisse of the social sciences. While these social sciences have, in Saidean terms, smuggled into their categories a dubious eurocentricity, it is important to note that this was often by overlooking the more nuanced insights of those Asianists who had experienced India and China at first hand. In terms of the reduction of the role of China in world civilization, Said fails to observe the central role played by German philosophy in this enterprise. Moreover, even if the social sciences demonstrate evidence of dubious categorization, this endeavour cannot be related to a colonialist project unless that project is limited to the very late nineteenth century – a period when the more influential social scientists were busily undermining any social scientific basis for imperialism. Indeed, it would seem that postcolonial discourse theory has adopted the worst excesses of the pseudo scientific generalizations of degenerescent theorists like Chamberlain and reversed them, in order to construct a monolithic west, as a source of all corruption, posed against a pure east. This might be useful for ideological purposes. As scholarship, however, it does not get us very far. Let us, then, examine next how the evolving concern with civilization and development affected the presentation of China in the second half of the twentieth century.

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5 Awakening, Arising, Developing and Deconstructing: China’s Mutable Modernization in Contemporary Social and Political Science China’s . . . people have two remarkable peculiarities . . . they are first of all poor and secondly blank . . . Poor people . . . want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it. Mao Tse-tung (1958) in Schram ed. 1966: 352 It is a fashionable contemporary orthodoxy that the engagement of the social sciences with the East is eurocentric and ultimately orientalist. To modify the thought of the formerly great helmsman, China, it seems, represented a clean sheet of paper upon which western commentators expressed their dread of the other. This understanding further maintains that the putative objectification and categorization of the East, implicit in the methods of the human sciences, concealed an ultimately imperialistic project of exploiting or appropriating the non western world for western consumption. Consequently, much contemporary theorizing, drawing on the anti-method of poststructuralism and the unfalsifiable claims of postcolonial theory, purports to deconstruct or expose this process of ‘othering’, in the contradictory endeavour to allow the silenced subaltern voice to articulate its apparently endless oppression. Curiously, this critique of orientalism through its own relativistic reductionism, which equates power with knowledge, resembles a postmodernized version of Maoism. Indeed, the cultural revolution’s criticism of imperialist paper tigers and its consequent self conscious struggle for the mass line against the bourgeois deeply affected the post 1968 generation of impressionable and ultimately influential French middle-class revolutionary intellectuals. In particular, Maoist ideas informed the influential Tel Quel group’s deconstructive criticism that subsequently informed the postcolonial assault upon the orientalism of 145

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the social sciences. Postcolonial theory, like its Marxist precursor, found much to criticize in the modernization approach that exercised a growing influence over the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s and re-emerged powerfully in the late 1980s in the modified form of democratization theory. From the Marxist and neo-Marxist perspective of the cold war period, its association with an American government agenda that assumed that the only way to run modernity was on western liberal pluralist lines, compromised this school of thought . This notwithstanding, it is clear that a number of powerful explanatory frameworks derived from a curious and unstable mixture of Mill, Weber, Durkheim, Marx and Freud and to a lesser extent Toynbee and Spengler, constructed an image of developing China in the postwar West. In particular, modernization theory, which came to permeate the understanding of area studies and comparative politics as those disciplines developed on American campuses in the course of the 1950s and 1960s, sought to situate the non western world within a developmental paradigm. This approach, which owed much to Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils’ synthesis of Weber and Durkheim, sought initially to identify the structures and functions that framed pluralist modern social action. Subsequently, a later and more sceptical generation, tried to establish the preconditions, processes, sequences, and crises that promoted or inhibited the always anxious transition from tradition to modernity. This imposing postwar methodological edifice both reflected and subsequently informed a western understanding of Chinese history. As such it remained preoccupied both with the pattern of the Chinese past and evaluating the relative impact of internal and external tensions upon the revolutionary transformation of East Asia. The answers given to three methodological questions subsequently came to dominate this research programme. First, what policies and processes determined what W. W. Rostow identified as industrial ‘take off’, in late developing economies? Second, what was the relationship between economic and political development, and third, to what extent did culture and or contingent historical experience impede or promote development? Subsequently, this approach fashioned alternative answers to a fourth question: did modernization necessitate democratization? This liberal pluralist approach to development existed uneasily alongside an explanatory model of change premissed on comparative history and a political economy that ultimately derived from an historicist or historical materialist provenance that gave somewhat different answers to a similar range of questions. This neo-Marxist ‘research tradition’

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(Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 26) necessarily questioned the assumptions governing the ‘liberal pluralist’ developmental project maintaining, with varying degrees of justification, that it assumed and promoted liberal democratic outcomes. By contrast a historicist political economy attempted to empathise with non western arrangements and expose the ideological and economic shortcomings of western modernization in both theory and practice. This debate ran coterminously with and was, to some extent, shaped by the cold war. This posed additional difficulties for incorporating the People’s Republic of China within these interpretive schemes. For in January 1949, the People’s Liberation Army occupied Beijing, and China subsequently entered three decades of self incurred political, economic and intellectual isolation. The cold war and immediate post cold war perception of China as a real or imagined threat to western polyarchy, together with the manner in which China once more entered a global economic and political discourse after 1978, aggravated by the events in Tiananmen Square (1989), additionally problematized this hermeneutic endeavour. Had Maoism in fact modernized China or was it still in the seemingly endless post narcoleptic phase of wakening? Had the cultural revolution finally destroyed the traditional vestiges of an otiose Confucianism, or did a Maoist political culture merely present a variant on an ancient theme of hydraulic total power? For its admirers, both western and non-western, China had pioneered a sinified version of Marxist– Leninist–Stalinist modernization during its splendid isolation from western capitalism. Yet as it underwent a modernization travail almost as painful as its initial awakening, China constituted, and to some extent remains, an essentially contested concept for the social sciences. Such concepts, as W. B. Gallie explained, demonstrate how ‘perfectly respectable’ and, in China’s case, not so respectable ‘arguments and evidence’ can be adduced for competing understandings of the character of modernization, its historical path of development and its traditional and contemporary political culture (121). In order to examine this essentially contested understanding we shall first examine how modernization theory evaluated China and contrast this with neo-Marxist readings of historical sociology and political economy that also sought to explain China’s role, or lack of it, in both the world system and as an Asiatic mode of production. We shall then examine the manner in which these theoretical understandings assessed China’s development in the Maoist and post Maoist period and the extent to which the curiously neo-Maoist attempt to deconstruct

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the social sciences, in order to allow the subaltern to speak, has come to justify a form of postmodern oriental despotism.

Comparative politics and the modernization paradigm Tracing the evolution of modernization theory, the conservative doyen of comparative politics, Samuel Huntington, contended that prior to the 1950s ‘political change tended to be ignored because comparative politics tended to be ignored’ (Huntington 1971: 284). Consequently, a renewed postwar American interest in ‘the comparison of modern and traditional political systems’ engendered a ‘renaissance in the study of comparative politics’ (285). However, in order to map the various paths, routes and stages that facilitated the transition from tradition to modernity, the emerging disciplines of comparative politics, political sociology and historical sociology had to identify the characteristic features or ‘systems’ that distinguished traditional from modern society. This concern with system and structure reflected a growing interest in ‘a more scientific practice of political inquiry’ (Lindblom 1997: 230). Leonard Binder reflecting on the natural history of liberal development theory contended it consisted in the aspiration that the dominant ‘pragmatic pluralist system’ in American political science ‘could be the basis of a universal political science’ (Binder 1986: 10). To this developing process of scientific redescription, Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils usefully contributed the factors that governed the pattern variables or values within which political actors structured their social action. In the mature Parsonian scheme, The Social System (1951), consisted of ‘interdependent elements that cohere into a self-regulating whole’ (Parsons 1982: 24). From this organicist perspective human groups formed ‘systems when interactions between members come to have stable patterns of organization’, maintained by ‘drawing upon the resources that nourish group life’ (ibid). Consequently, the functions of adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latent pattern maintenance sustain the social system. In this context pattern maintenance, otherwise known as values, engendered a hierarchy of ‘cybernetic’ controls that supported the ‘homeostatic’ propensity of social systems. In the late 1960s, critics contended that the structural functionalist model possessed an inherently conservative bias towards stability. This was not entirely accurate since Parsons demonstrated a growing interest in the problem of modernization. Modern societies, unlike primitive or less developed ones, had evolved highly differentiated social systems

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that enabled concrete subsystems, to develop. The success of the modern condition consisted in the integration of subsystem complexity through an institutionalized normative culture. The secret of modernity, then, is the movement from ascription to functional differentiation, mobility and specialization. Central to the success of this transformation is the manner in which the normative order adjusts to new realities without abandoning basic understandings upon which the system depends. While some early modernization theorists assumed that pluralist secular values would erode tradition leading ultimately to The Passing of Traditional Society (Lerner 1958), Parsons considered, somewhat optimistically, that the process of normative modernization merely generalized ‘historic’ values (Parsons 1982: 45). The problems that modernity generated, therefore, were not primarily cultural, but those of inclusion and institutionalization. In particular, modernization posed the question of how the culture of a modernizing elite could be integrated with that of the mass society. Inclusion and the effective transmission of modernizing values required institutionalization. Modernization, consequently sought to establish inclusionary values that transcended local or traditional attachments of religion, kin or ethnicity, while at the same time adapting those understandings to the process of development. Parsons saw democratic citizenship, industrialization and education as inclusionary processes central to creating new institutional forms, legal structures, market mechanisms and bureaucracies that bring isolated and dependent populations into normatively regulated social participation. Parsons considered these institutions to have such ‘great adaptive capacity as to suggest that they will ultimately dominate the social life of all modern societies’ (ibid 48). From an analogous perspective David Easton and Karl Deutsch equally considered modernity a cybernetic order whose success resided in the effective transmission of norms and information. For Easton normative theory, as opposed to the outmoded historicist variety, revealed how ‘competing groups in the political process’ reached ‘equilibrium’ in The Political System (Easton 1953: 274). Subsequently, in A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965) Easton revealed how an effective normative system maintained its equilibrium. Essentially a political system performed two functions: it allocated values; and induced ‘most members to accept those allocations’ (Easton 1963: 22–3). This entailed a process whereby the system processed demands or ‘inputs’ and transformed them into decisions or ‘outputs’. In this flow of inputs and outputs feedback provided vital information on the success of previous

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allocations. From this cybernetic perspective government represented a ‘stimulus–system–response–outcome’ sequence (38). Consequently, when information was unsuccessfully fedback or the system became over ‘stressed’ by excessive demands, it broke down. While Easton gave greater attention to the values, or norms that legitimated political systems, Karl Deutsch particularly emphasized the fact that political systems were networks of decision and control ‘dependent on processes of communication’ resembling aspects of manufactured communication equipment because they depended upon the processing of information (Deutsch 1963: 145). Modernizing an old organic metaphor of the body politic, the cybernetic process formed The Nerves of Government (1963). Like other functionalists, Deutsch contended that ‘communication overload’ or ‘decision overload’ represented a ‘major factor in the breakdown of states’ (162). The problem of political development consisted, therefore, in the integration of sets of autonomous units with their own strategic value; and the success or failure of political integration could also be evaluated in terms of the presence or absence of a second-order strategy of value, or a “common spirit” that could be identified in the different value patterns and steering systems of the smaller autonomous units. (241) Attention to the processing of information and the transmission of values, ineluctably led to considerations of national character, culture and nation building which all political elites and, in particular modernizing ones, had it seems to address. The medium for the transmission of values, as well as processing demands and feedback on decisions, was culture. From the cybernetic viewpoint cultures ‘produce, select and channel information’ (Deutsch 1953: 92). In functional terms, the stability of the system required not only an inclusionary group of shared values but a shared language. In other words, modernization required a people constituted as a nationality that could be cybernetically ordered. From the early functional viewpoint, shared ethnicity or history were tangential to order. All the political system required was a people that possessed ‘a wide complementarity of social communication’. Communication made a people cohere. Thus, in the structural functional view the modernization process involved greater inclusiveness achieved through the institutionalization of norms in an evolving network of communicatory practice. Ultimately, this liberal theory argued that ‘modernization, and hence democracy would result in the

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short or long run so long as change was introduced into any part of the social system.’ (Binder 1986: 11) Yet, these lucubrations upon the social system, shed little direct light upon the process of modernization in China or Asia more generally. Easton fails to refer to China’s modernizing travail, while Deutsch considers it only incidentally in terms of the interplay between fertile waterways and patterns of linguistic integration (1953: 43). If it was not neglected by the comparativist, China had a tendency to be dismissed as having ‘marked time’ since the late thirteenth century (Deutsch 1969: 71). More precisely, Parsons in assessing ‘the empirical differentiation and variation’ among societies, considered the traditional Chinese bureaucratic empire an impediment both to the development of feudalism and capitalism. Parsons, in other words, structural functionalized a Weberian understanding of China. Capitalism, Parsons maintained, would have ‘destroyed the Confucian synthesis by shifting the balance of internal power to a group which could not be integrated into the “humanistic universalism” of the diffuse politico-cultural type which was distinctive of the Chinese literati’ (Parsons 1951: 179). The Chinese case thus illustrated ‘the dependence of a key structure of society, the special Chinese type of bureaucracy, on its relation to another structure, the status of the gentry class, and one which was not by any means in full conformity with the cultural value-pattern which gave the former its raison d’être’ (179). The Chinese gentry class functioned as an ‘adaptive structure’ between the hierarchically governed political organization and the localism and familism that characterized the mass of Chinese society. This diffuse Chinese political system linked bureaucratic status with responsibility. Such an arrangement tended to be both ‘collectivistic and authoritarian’ (197). Consequently, ‘the fact of being particularistically bound within the relational system also contributed to the accent on traditionalism, the acceptance of a model of propriety which was permanently binding and which, since it was conceived to have been realized in the past, was to be continually re-achieved’ (197). Historically, then, the Chinese social system was traditionalist and ritualistic, and its symbolic system ‘expressive’ rather than evaluative (415). Given its particularistic understanding of solidarity such a system could not ‘without drastic reorganization of its reward system . . . develop strong loyalty to other types of collectivity . . . particularly those institutionalizing universal standards’ (418). Therefore, in prerevolutionary China ‘a very small governing group [was] set over against an enormous mass of politically “inert” peasants’ (523). In such a state,

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Parsons contended, ‘the power structure is peculiarly unstable, and can be “pushed over” by what is virtually a coup d’êtat, especially when it is under such strains as a result from defeat in war’ (523). In other words, despite its in-built propensity to stability, the example of the collapse of the Chinese empire illustrated how a social system could be destabilized. Consequently, social revolution organized by a charismatic leader and a party mobilizing the previously inert masses afforded the opportunity to modernize both the social system and the political and economic subsystems. Subsequently, S. N. Eisenstadt in Tradition, Change and Modernity (1973) developed a comparative model demonstrating that China represented a particularly egregious case of the systemic problems afflicting bureaucratic empires in their traumatic transition to modernity. Assessing the relationship between religious organization and the political system in bureaucratic empires, Eisenstadt observed that ‘none of the Chinese religions became a properly organized autonomous unit’ (Eisenstadt 1973: 187), while the Confucian elite were synonymous with the state bureaucracy. Consequently, rebellions in China never promoted modernization because their symbolism was apolitical, ahistorical and ultimately ‘rule bound to the existing value structure and orientation’ (188). Unlike other Asian monarchies, the Chinese imperial reformers of the 1890s and the Guomindang (Kuomintang) in the 1920s failed to concoct the appropriate neo-traditionalist recipe necessary to guide ‘the concrete, instrumental, organizational and institutional problems attendant on the creation and development of a viable modern polity’ (267). For Eisenstadt the centrality of China to Asia combined with the external threat from both Japan and the west ultimately invalidated a neo-traditionalist and semipatrimonialist response that had worked in the Thai and Japanese modernization cases (268). Moreover, the internal structure of familism combined with the traditional capacity of the Confucian literati to regulate and absorb changes ‘severely inhibited development of a reformative or transformative capacity’ (271). Traditional China had failed to develop a differentiated social and cultural order. This explained the internally cohesive character of the empire, but it also accounted for its failure to adapt to ‘modern conditions’ (273). Yet, what modern conditions actually entailed, how they were distinguished from tradition and the processes that linked or inhibited the transition from one to the other, became an area of growing scholarly attention. By 1971, a modern polity required inter alia: ‘a differentiated and functionally specific system of government; a prevalence of

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rational and secular procedures; efficacious administrative decisions; popular identification with the history, territory and national identity of the state; the allocation of roles by achievement rather than ascription; and an impersonal and secular legal system’ (Huntington 1971: 287–8). To bridge what Huntington termed the ‘Great Dichotomy between modern and traditional societies’ required the ‘Grand Process of Modernization’ (288). This encompassed a growing variety of procedures and processes. From a structuralist perspective, it required the shift from uniformity to differentiation and from ascription to achievement. For Marion Levy modernization was a ‘universal social solvent’ that involved a shift in the ratios of inanimate to animate power (Levy 1972: 3, 136), for Dankwart Rustow, more prosaically, it included ‘industrialization, rationalization, secularization and bureaucratization’ (Rustow 1967: 6) while for David Apter it required commercialization and, in its non economic dimension, embodied ‘an attitude of inquiry and questioning about how men make moral, social and personal choices’ (Apter 1965: 9–10, 43). Summarizing the practices involved, Huntington contended it was: revolutionary, inducing ‘total change in the patterns of human life’; complex; systemic; global; lengthy; phased, in terms of the stages of the process; homogenizing towards interdependence amongst societies so constituted; irreversible and ultimately progressive (Huntington 1971: 289–90). Increasing attention to this process revealed a number of difficulties in earlier structural models. Later developmental theorists argued that the cybernetic model failed adequately to capture what Samuel Huntington (1971) termed the change to change. In The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) Daniel Lerner had proposed the sequence of urbanization, literacy, extension of mass media, wider economic participation, and political participation as the natural order of political modernization. By the 1960s, however, it had become evident to the members of the American Social Science Research Council Committee (SSRC) on Comparative Politics that all political systems were in some senses transitional, combining elements of modernity and tradition (Almond in Almond and Coleman 1960: 20–4). Following Gabriel Almond and James Coleman’s The Politics of Developing Areas, the SSRC gave increasing attention to the dynamics of the development process. The identification of sequences and crises further facilitated the differentiation of political development as a concept. By the early 1970s, Lucian Pye and James Coleman identified a ‘development syndrome’ that promoted increasing equality, capacity and differentiation within the political system. Yet somewhat problematically it was never entirely

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clear whether the syndrome represented a description of processes transforming a system in transition or a teleological destination for the system (Huntington 1971: 314). Writing in 1986, at a time when modernization theory appeared, prematurely, to be in its death throes, Leonard Binder observed more trenchantly that the comparative systems approach rested on the paradox that change could somehow be structured. This was a little like trying to capture infinity in the palm of a hand. This categorical fallacy appeared in the title of Talcott Parsons The Structure of Social Action (1937). It sought contradictorily to capture in a single framework the constant flux ‘of a thing’ like the state as a process together with the idea of a process as a fixed arrangement (Binder 1986: 13). Yet successive generations of comparative political scientists ignored this incoherence to the detriment of their studies of development in non western societies. Given the different dimensions of the development syndrome, it became incumbent upon the SSRC on comparative politics to identify the sequential character of development and the crises that might afflict a system. This problem became increasingly acute for, as Samuel Huntington observed, ‘political decay and political instability were more rampant in Asia, Africa and Latin America in 1965 than they were fifteen years earlier’ (Huntington 1968: 6). Given that political development ultimately understood ‘the prerequisite political environment essential for economic and industrial development’ (Pye in Pye and Verba 1965: 11), the failure to traverse the Great Dichotomy constituted a problem that resided in the Crises and Sequences of Political Development as another work of the SSRC eponymously intimated (Binder: 1971). For Rustow (1967), a sequence of national identity, authority of the state and equal participation represented the least traumatic modernization sequence. By 1971, the SSRC had arrived at five potential sequential crises that the modernizing state had to negotiate. These included identity or nation building, state legitimacy, penetration of the wider society by a state bureaucracy, political participation, and the effective distribution of resources as a consequence of the development process. The evidence of the friability of new states created in the wake of decolonization after 1945 elicited additional concern with the character of political stability, the preconditions for economic development, its relationship to the political variety, and the role of culture in the development process. In his multi-volume study Asian Drama An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968), Gunnar Myrdal identified increasing economic disparity between the first and the third, or underdeveloped,

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world. The obstacles to Asian economic development resided in the ‘inefficiency, rigidity and inequality of the established institutions and attitudes’ (Myrdal 1972 (1968): 20). Myrdal doubted ‘whether the ideal of political democracy . . . should be given weight in formulating the modernization ideals’ (30). The internal weakness handicapping developing South and Southeast Asian states demonstrated, rather, the need to consolidate the state. These states were ‘soft’ in that they lacked the penetration to implement policy. For Myrdal ‘national character’ and a variety of ‘Asian values’ that emphasized consensus and agreement, religious inertia and ignored legal procedure, together with lack of access to world markets had inhibited Asia’s economic ‘take off’. Interestingly, Myrdal’s critique of postcolonial Asian values echoed those Raffles discovered in Bencoolen 150 years before. From a related perspective, W. W. Rostow also considered national stability and legal procedures necessary political preconditions to economic growth. Elaborating upon the politics that shaped The Stages of Growth (1958), Rostow maintained that it was the British economic take-off from the 1780s and the diffusion of this model that broke a ‘pre-Newtonian’ pre-industrial cyclical pattern of expansion and decline, not unlike that of the ‘sequence of Chinese dynastic history’ (Rostow 1971: 50–3). A sense of national identity forged by external threat and institutions engendering a sense of national consensus ‘formed part of the back-drop for the take-off in the 1780s’ (65). Subsequent take-offs reflected the response of a purposeful modernizing elite to actual or threatened foreign intrusion. Significantly, ‘the troubled and contentious nature of the transition from a traditional society to one capable of sustained industrialization did not lend itself easily to stable democratic rule’ (96). For, Rostow, moreover, nowhere was the problem of take-off more acutely experienced than in China. Unlike Japan, Chinese ‘history, culture and social structure failed to yield’ a ‘single-minded drive to modernization’ (72). Indeed, ‘at no time down to 1949, did external pressures and internal struggles over the control of China’s modern destiny leave the government . . . free to concentrate on the tasks of modernization’ (91). Even after it had freed itself from internal struggle, the Chinese communist party (CCP) had ‘designed an unworkable policy towards growth.’ Ultimately, Maoist mobilization towards take-off aborted in the late 1950s; and ‘in the 1960s the mainland was thrown into a rolling unresolved crisis’ (133).1 From this developmental perspective, then, China had endured a traumatic pre-take-off phase followed by a Communist phase where Mao ‘used his immense power . . . to pursue policies inappropriate to

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the modernization of China’ (135). This strategic failure, Rostow interestingly opined, granted the rest of Asia a decade in which to ‘fashion a framework of progress and cooperation which might balance in the long run the power and influence of the modernized China, which, in time, would surely emerge’ (135). The 1970s, thus witnessed a shift in developmental thought towards establishing the legitimating preconditions for economic development and the crises that could lead, not to political stability but to political decay, as latecomers embarked upon an increasingly fraught transition to modernity. Part of the problem, Marion Levy ironically noted, resided in the paradox that the ‘requisites’ that were necessary for the first European states to modernize might not be the same as the ‘prerequisites’ for late developers (Levy 1972: 25–6). Moreover, even among late developers the prerequisites for modernization might differ. For Samuel Huntington, modernization theory had neglected the fact that ‘as social forces became more variegated, political institutions had to become more complex and authoritative’. Worryingly, in the newly industrializing economies ‘the development of the state lagged behind the evolution of society’ (Huntington 1968: 11). As the comparative method evolved, it became apparent that a frequently overlooked distinction existed between ‘political modernization defined as movement from a traditional to a modern polity and political modernization defined as the political aspects and political effects of social, economic and cultural modernization’ (35). The gap between the two could be vast. ‘Modernization in practice’, Huntington contended, ‘always involves change in, and usually the disintegration of, a traditional political system, but it does not necessarily involve significant movement toward a modern political system’ (35). Instead, it might involve an ‘erosion of democracy’ and the promotion of autocratic military regimes and one party states (36). Furthermore, while those states that had achieved modernity tended to be wealthy, liberal democratic and stable, those seeking to achieve modernity frequently encountered political disorder and political decay. Thus, while modernity meant stability, modernization often meant the opposite. As Huntington once more demonstrated in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), it was ‘not the absence of modernity but the efforts to achieve it which produce political disorder’ (41). This, it now seemed, reflected the failure to develop stable political institutions to deal with the economic, social and psychological demands generated by rapid development, the frustration of rising expectations and the growing economic disparities between rich and poor and town and

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country. Consequently, the lack of ‘mobility opportunities’ the absence of mechanisms for political participation and ‘the low level of political institutionalization in most modernizing countries produce a correlation between social frustration and political instability’ (55). Significantly, Huntington further contended that the extent to which a society undergoes ‘complete political decomposition during the modernization process’ reflected the character of its traditional political institutions (87). In particular, societies like China or France that possessed ‘a reasonably highly developed and autonomous bureaucratic structure in its traditional phase’ faced ‘acute problems in adapting to a broader political participation than traditional political systems which are less rationalized and differentiated, but institutionally more complex and pluralistic’ (87). Bureaucratic empires like China failed to evolve the institutions to organize the mass of the population. Traditional political structures attended only to a narrow elite. Modernity, however, had to organize mass participation. In this context, the political party represented the crucial institutional innovation separating the traditional from the modern polity. The realization of the institutional complexity governing the modernizing process, then, promoted increasing interest in the role of political parties, especially revolutionary parties, in mobilizing the populace, inducing political stability, nation building and legitimating a new order of things. Revolutionary parties brought new groups into politics when traditional structures dissolved. In power, the revolutionary party structure expanded the capacity of the state. As leaders of a ‘more modern social force’ overcame a ‘more backward’ variety, a single party system emerged (Huntington and Moore 1970: 12). The single party system evolved through three phases, namely, transformation, consolidation and adaptation (24). In this context, the transformation effected by the Chinese Communists represented the paradigm of an ‘Eastern revolution’ (Huntington 1968: 272). Unlike western revolutions, the Asian variety was ‘the culmination of a long drawn out process’ (273) that first embraced the countryside before it captured the urban centres. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) like other single parties in the developing world, therefore, constituted a distinctly modern form of government. Such systems, Clement Moore maintained represented ‘imposed’ solutions to crises of legitimacy and participation (Moore 1970). By the 1950s, James Townsend contended that the party constituted the logical vehicle for organizing Chinese society and giving leadership and direction to its development. In the process

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of institutionalizing their authority such systems tended to suffer however from a tendency to oligarchical bureaucracy, ideological erosion and uncertainty over leadership succession. In China, the inability to resolve these issues resulted in Mao reasserting his authority through the mechanism of the Cultural Revolution (1967–76). This notwithstanding, the Chinese authoritarian single party system illustrated ‘the powerful attractiveness’ to modernizing elites ‘of a highly politicized but non-competitive party system’ (Townsend 1970: 307). As a number of commentators observed, nationalism formed the ‘cement of the revolutionary alliance and the engine of the revolutionary movement’ (Huntington 1968: 308). The evolving preoccupation with the problem of maintaining stability in modernizing states drew further attention to the vexed problem of nation building in a cybernetic modernity. As Reinhard Bendix demonstrated the ‘balancing of contingencies upon which the legitimacy’ of the nation-state system in western Europe rested did not easily translate to the developing world (Bendix 1969: 23) and as he pessimistically concluded, the dominant experience of his generation was that ‘the unanticipated repercussions of European expansion were effective enough to undermine or destroy existing social frameworks, but often not nearly effective enough to provide viable structural alternatives (360). This growing scepticism among modernization theorists in turn promoted an increasing awareness of the role of political culture in shaping the national identity necessary to the cybernetic order of modernity. Edward Shils, reflecting on systems theory, admitted that the modern sociological propensity to suppress ‘pastness’ had blinded the social sciences to the place of tradition in the social order (Shils 1981: 7). Under the aegis of the SSRC, Gabriel Almond, Sydney Verba and Lucian Pye in particular sought to rectify this neglect by transforming political culture into a ‘valuable’ social scientific tool for comparison (Almond and Powell 1966: 51). Thus, as comparative political science evolved, it sought to establish the understanding of culture on a more empirical footing than that found in the discredited literature of national characters, or on the wilder shores of Spenglerian culturgeists. National characters, that evolved from seventeenth century European casuistry, had become a ‘residual category to “explain” all the differences that could not otherwise be accounted for by objective analysis.’ Consequently, they tended to emphasize the role of the unconscious at the expense of ‘the place of reason in human affairs’ (Pye & Verba 1965: 10). Even when informed

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by a synthesis of ‘psycholanalytic ideas and cultural anthropology’ found in the work of Harold Lasswell and Ruth Benedict, national character writing, Gabriel Almond averred, demonstrated a propensity to psychological reductionism (Almond 1994: vii–viii). Such weakness notwithstanding, the first volume of the SSRC-sponsored political development series, nevertheless, included a chapter on ‘National Character and Economic Growth’ (Mclelland 1963: 152). As the SSRC evolved its understanding of political culture, however, it came to mean a more sophisticated and ‘recent term’ that systematized understandings ‘associated with such lay study concepts as political ideology, national ethos and spirit, national political psychology and the fundamental values of a people’ (Pye & Verba 1965: 8–9). These constituted the ‘underlying propensities’ or the ‘psychological dimension’ of any political system (Almond and Powell 1966: 23). For Gabriel Almond, who did much to organize the concept, the postwar failure of ‘enlightenment expectations’ regarding universal modernization, and ‘the incapacity of a comparative politics based on these expectations’ explained the motivation ‘among social scientists’ contributing to political culture research (Almond 1987: 15). As a conceptual tool, therefore, political culture sought to ‘bridge a growing gap’ between micro analysis based on the psychological interpretation of individual political behaviour, particularly leaders, and a macro analytic level that referred to the variables common to political sociology (Pye & Almond 1965: 8). In order to achieve this, Almond averred, the study of political culture adopted a ‘more rigorous methodological posture, requiring statistical sampling of large populations and subcultural groups, the sophisticated construction and analysis of interview schedules, content analysis of the media and other materials and similar quantitative and scientific procedures’ (Almond 1994: x). In particular, ‘the development of survey research brought to bear on politics a set of precision tools enabling us to move from relatively loose and speculative inferences regarding psychological propensities from the content of communications, from clinical materials, or from behavioural tendencies’ (Almond 1987: 16). It was the ‘invention’ of this ‘new research technology’ that catalyzed ‘the political culture conceptualization and research that took place in the 1960s’ (Almond 1987: 15). Subsequently, the evolving problem of development, ‘viewed in terms of political culture’ involved ‘less the gross elimination of old patterns and values and more the successful discovery of how traditions can contribute to, and not hamper, the realization of current national goals’

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(Pye & Verba 1965: 19). From the culturally relativist position, that Pye deemed essential to the appreciation of different cultural understandings, tradition, in some societies, provided ‘a ready basis for democratic evolution, while in others the tendencies were more consistent with authoritarian ways’ (11). Thus, although the social sciences addressed the dynamics of development, it could not avoid the impact of tradition in giving ‘a sense of uniqueness and meaning to individual political cultures’ (19). Indeed, political development in terms of its sequencing tended to be accompanied ‘by crucial developments in political culture’ (Almond and Powell 1966: 59). Yet political culture, as opposed to the traditional variety, also involved, somewhat confusingly, a process of secularization whereby ‘the rigid, ascribed and diffuse customs of social interaction come to be overridden by a set of codified, specifically political and universalistic rules’ (61). This required both a pragmatic, empirical and specific orientation of outlook. Indeed, the political culture which embraced both elite participants, political subjects ‘oriented to the political system’ and parochials who had little investment in it (55), had to become increasingly secularized if ‘the new differentiated structures’ of modernity were to function effectively (58). Thus, just as the structure of the modernizing state went through a series of crises and sequences, so its culture proceeded through stages and combinations that existed ‘along the continuum from traditional to secularized political culture’ (61). It was in this context of modernizing both structure and culture that ideology played an increasingly crucial role. For the SSRC an ideological style suited the needs of both the modernizing party mobilizing participation and the anomic individual by developing a ‘specific set of political orientations.’ Such an ideological style, however, failed ‘to develop the open bargaining attitudes associated with full secularization’ (61). An ideological cybernetic order provided an inflexible image of political life, closed to conflicting information, and offered a specific code of conduct for most situations. As Almond and Powell explained ‘the various forms of communism and clericalism’ represented ‘the most common examples of ideological political cultures’ (61). Given the party’s control of the means of communication, such an ideological or totalitarian style governed the process of political socialization. Significantly, Chinese political culture after 1949 seemed to reflect features of this modernizing ideological style. Yet given the evident centrality of a territorial unit the size of China to the modernizing paradigm, it featured only tangentially in the key comparative studies

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of the period. This was for a variety of reasons. First, during the Maoist era, western social scientists found it difficult to access Chinese data for comparative analytic purposes. As Gabriel Rozman observed, ‘scholarship on China has been more isolated from the currents of comparative social science research than that of any other major country’ (1981: 14). Moreover, even when limited data became available China appeared somewhat anomalous. Reviewing the changing interpretation of Chinese politics in 1986, Townsend and Womack pertinently observed that China did not seem to fit either the totalitarian model (Arendt 1960; Freidrich and Brzezinski 1965) or the permutations of modernization theory that during the Cultural Revolution presented the CCP pursuing a penetrative ‘authoritarian–technocratic–mobilizational’ developmental strategy (Almond and Powell 1978: 381–7; Townsend and Womack 1986: 21). By contrast for Huntington and Moore, the elite dissensus of the 1960s indicated a failure to institutionalize the single party system. Indeed the Mao inspired Cultural Revolution constituted ‘the most striking example’ of ‘the disintegration of practical ideology and organization’ (Moore in Huntington and Moore 1970: 60). Somewhat disturbingly for both pluralist and, as we shall see, for Marxist or Marxisante theories of development, China seemed to be sui generis (Townsend and Womack 1986: 22). Second, with the establishment and growth of the Harvard East Asian Research program China increasingly constituted the province of area specialists who, while not necessarily averse to the various permutations of the modernization thesis, nevertheless prioritized the unique Chinese historical and cultural tradition. For Gabriel Rozman trying to revitalize modernization theory in the course of the 1980s, ‘the prevailing worldview in scholarship on China’ was ‘hardly less sinocentric than that traditionally held by the Chinese themselves’ (1981: 14). Even, Lucian Pye, perhaps the most influential comparative political scientist to study China, accounted for its developmental path by reference both to its unique cultural tradition and its contingent historical experience. This seemed to demand a sinocentric awareness of the nuances of Confucianism together with a sophisticated appreciation of China’s apparently endless response to the west. In works as various as The Spirit of Chinese Politics (1968), The Mandarin and the Cadre (1988) and Asian Power and Politics The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (1985), Pye elucidated how a modified traditional self understanding explained ‘the giant ups and downs in Chinese expectations’ and its incomplete postwar development (Pye 1985: 183). Importantly, Pye maintained that

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‘the critical difference between the Chinese and most of the other developing countries begins with the fact that the Chinese have been generally spared the crisis of identity common to most other transitional systems’ (Pye 1968: 5). The Chinese, in other words, knew who they were. Unfortunately, they were not very happy about it. Psychoculturally, China suffered from an authority crisis which reflected a persistent sense of dissatisfaction with their leaders together with a countervailing longing ‘for the decisive power of truly effective authority’ (6). Consequently, Chinese development required a form of authority that reconciled the need to reassert a historic self-confidence with a reordering of society for modernization purposes (5). This explained the ease with which the revolutionary Maoist regime established its authority and identified itself with the Chinese nation after 1949. Indeed, as Benjamin Schwartz demonstrated, it was as ‘perfervid Chinese nationalists’ that the Chinese leadership ‘shared the preoccupations that informed the collectivist model’ (Schwartz 1968: 179). Consequently, Maoism could draw upon a reservoir of popular support by demonstrating that China had at last stood up. Yet, as Maoism developed, it merely confirmed the view that ‘cultural factors dominate public life in China’. Thus both mandarin and cadre cherished ideological truth and sustained the ‘unique Chinese belief in authority’s right to arrogance’ (Pye 1968: 13). By the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1967–76), however, it was apparent that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) possessed two political cultures and a considerable amount of psychological ambivalence towards them. These cultures were broadly reducible to ideology and pragmatism, or ‘red’ and ‘expert’, and received quotidian manifestation in the shift from Maoism to Dengism. Ultimately this split political personality reflected traditional tensions within institutional hierarchies and ‘hence conflicts between centralization and decentralization, [and] between orthodoxy and heterodoxy’ (Pye 1988: 39). The two Chinese Communist cultures, therefore, in fact reflected ‘certain key psychological ambivalences’ that Pye and a variety of American sinologists, increasingly thought ‘basic to Chinese psychic life’ (43). Manifest in the maintenance of contradictory sentiments, this ambivalence translated into strikingly different policy approaches like the Great Leap Forward (GLF – 1958–60), the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent transition to the idea that to get rich was glorious. Ultimately, these contradictions reflected a traditional understanding of bipolarity translated into the jargon of a sinified Marxism. Benjamin

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Schwartz demonstrated that analogous polarities between inner and outer, and knowledge and action, had ramified Confucian thought. In this Confucian practice of self disclosure, moreover, it was inappropriate to ‘use words such as antithesis, contradiction and dichotomy’ to describe such polarity. Most orthodox Confucianists considered the practice not ‘antithetical but as inseparably complementary’ (Schwartz 1959: 51–2). In this view ‘comparison with one pole in a set of polarities’ merely constituted one ‘element in evaluation’ (Munro 1979: 139). From this perspective, Mao’s writings, paradoxically appeared to be traditional. Significantly, one of Mao’s consistent themes ‘On Contradiction’ acknowledged this paradox. Mao argued that any activity necessarily contained ‘within itself its own particular contradictions’ (Mao 1969: 221).2 Subsequently area studies experts like Schwartz, Stuart Schram and Franz Schurmann explored the distinctively Chinese genealogy of the antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions that pervaded Mao’s sinification of Marxist–Leninist thought. This concern with the character of Maoism further reflected both the cold war preoccupation with ideology and the need to explain the developing Sino-Soviet split after 1960. For Schurmann the Chinese revolution was for ‘the latter half of the twentieth century what the Russian revolution was for the first half. By transforming Chinese society it has brought a great power into being which proclaims itself the revolutionary and developmental model for the poor countries of the world’ (Schurmann 1968: xxix). Attempting to reveal the basic pattern of Chinese ideology and organization, Schurmann discussed how the leaders of Communist China used ideology ‘to analyze the basic elements (ie contradictions) of their society and to develop a program of action’ that led to the catastrophic Great Leap Forward (1958–60) (Schurmann 1968: 9). For Schurmann, like Pye and Schwartz, the central idea of Maoist thought was the theory of contradictions (53). Subsequently, Schwartz presciently explored the essentially incoherent nature of this theory. Contradiction, it seemed, concealed ‘the cultural crisis which has shaken China since the beginning of the century [and] remains unresolved’ (Schwartz 1968: 45). Schram analogously considered that the ‘dialectics’ in Maoism reflected ‘currents in traditional Chinese thought’ (Schram 1966: 90). Marxian dialectics, therefore, problematically reinforced an enduring Chinese preoccupation with classifying things in terms of contradictory or complementary pairs (Munro 1979: 139). The growing evidence that traditional cultural preoccupations explained the sinification of

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Marxism, prompted Lucian Pye to elaborate a revolutionary version of the bipolar oppositions that had traditionally permeated Chinese political practice. These included inter alia loyalty versus effectiveness, self sacrifice versus self aggrandizement and the power of symbolism versus the constraints of realism (Pye 1988: 53–66). These ambivalences reflected a core problem in Chinese tradition: the fact that the self always constituted part of a relationship. Consequently Chinese culture possessed ‘no distinct concept of the self except in terms of the other, which is generally a collectivity’ (71). Analogously, Munro observed that society and government could effectively define the sense of self. This explained both the Confucian and Maoist penchant for rectification. Thus while in the Confucian past: a person might be thought of as belonging to the group ‘younger brothers’ which is defined in terms of the group ‘elder brothers’ and part of the definition of each consists of the duties or the expectations to which it is entitled from the other . . . In contemporary China, individuals are identified in terms of classes or sub-classes, such as lower-middle peasant, which is defined in terms of other groups. (Munro 1979: 17) Indeed, Maoism reinforced the notion of social dependency by dismissing the notion of autonomy and innate inner forces. It replaced them instead with the concept of the malleability of humanity that would ultimately ‘transform social natures’ (24–5). Malleability, combined with Mao’s extreme voluntarism informed, what Schram, with an unconscious echo of nineteenth century German romanticism, termed a ‘Promethean’ approach to modernization. This assumed that as a conscious revolution transformed social relationships, it followed that revolutionaries could also ‘freely command as by magic the latent productive forces’ of economic development (Schram 1966: 99). It seemed to those working within this culturally nuanced view of Chinese self understanding that distinctively indigenous processes of psycho-social adjustment had profoundly affected traditional and revolutionary understandings of power and ideology. Pye, Munro and Richard Solomon thus explored within the framework of an American concept of political psychology and culture, intimations about the character of Chinese civilization initially promulgated by I. A. Richards and elaborated by the French sinologist Jacques Gernet. This view maintained that a different structure of language and mind would have

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different moral and political outcomes. Irresoluble differences in intellectual and religious traditions between West and East, Gernet maintained, were a sign of ‘different mental categories and modes of thought’ (Gernet 1982: 3). Similarly, American political scientists, like Pye and Solomon attributed culturally different perceptions of power to differences in psychology. From this perspective ‘culture and personality were both systemic in quality: they are not unrelated collections of ideas, or attitudes or emotions’ (Solomon 1971: 4). This attempt to psychoanalyse Chinese political culture, however, was not without epistemological difficulty. The approach entailed an unfalsifiable circularity. Thus, Chinese values ‘structure’ personal attitudes and personal attitudes shaped distinctive Chinese attitudes to ideology and power (Solomon 4; Pye with Pye 1985: viii). Paradoxically, moreover, a Freudian approach to China revealed a non-Freudian self. As Solomon observed, Oedipus ‘by Confucian standards was a most unfilial son’ (Solomon 1971: 35–7). The Chinese instead resolved the intergenerational problem that Oedipus symbolized by requiring the son ‘to realize his social identity in a life-long prolongation of his original state of dependency’ (35). Even ‘Mao’s personal reaction to the pain and injustice he had known in the dependent period of his own life’, explained his ‘activism in the use of power and fear of passivity in the face of strong enemies’ (183). Similarly, Schram considered Mao ‘a janus-like figure looking forward to the future, despite the limitations resulting from his deep roots in the past’ (Schram 1969: 144). More generally psychological reductionism explained the Chinese relationship of self to society and authority. For Pye, ‘the political effect of a socialization process that separates feelings from action had been to impose upon the otherwise pragmatic and materialistic Chinese a belief that politics should be highly moralistic if not socialistic’ (Pye with Pye 1985: 204). Moreover, a pedagogical regime which required the consumption of bitterness and the inculcation of virtuous models facilitated selfhood understood in terms of interdependency and the need for moral authority. In this context, the party cadres represented a revolutionary version of the Confucian gentry and Marxism– Leninism Maoism replaced Confucianism as the official source of moral and ideological guidance. The psychological predisposition to paternalism endowed virtuous leadership with virtually unlimited authority. The Chinese revolutionaries, in other words, did not remove paternalism, instead they sought ‘a stronger, better father’ (189). Indeed, ‘the

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concept of revolution for all Chinese has been one of creating a truly dominant authority’ (190). The cultural predisposition in traditional China to emphasize rule by good men rather than good laws, reinforced the modern tendency to personalize power and facilitate personality cults. China increasingly resembled a revolutionary virtuocracy in which Mao’s mandate replaced that of the Qing dynasty. This, together with a traditional suspicion of any form of pluralistic decentralization, intensified the state directed mass mobilization campaigns that characterized the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. These practices reinforced the Maoist propensity to exalt the revolutionary spirit until it becomes ‘an allpowerful force capable of reshaping the material environment’ (Schram 1966: 79). The propensity to permanent revolution, the need for hierarchy and loyalty allied with the Maoist suspicion of bureaucracy and intellectuals, made for a difficult developmental mix. It also promoted academic interest in increasingly narrow attempts to define the main features of the Chinese elite and the difficulties of elite transition in a political culture distinguished by oscillations between ideological commitment and pragmatic adjustment. Thus Robert Scalapino and others pointed to the evolving character of the post-Long March elite in order to evaluate the comparative importance of ‘each kind of input for different explanatory purposes’ (Bennett 1972: 7). Indeed as the Chinese ideological system developed ‘the apparent need to balance separate, partially competitive organizations and groups’ in the military, party and ‘mass representatives’ further complicated the process of elite recruitment (vii). The uncertainty of elite transference, combined with Mao’s faith in the Yenan spirit and the mass line and an unresolved cultural crisis, explained the convulsions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. History, area studies and China This attention to the internal dynamics of the PRC somewhat uncertainly reflected developments in the broader historical understanding of China’s seemingly interminable response to the challenge of modernization. Three broadly related paradigms promulgated in the first half of the twentieth century determined the interpretation of China’s development: the challenge and response theory of broadly Toynbeean origin; the tradition–modernity dichotomy of Weberian derivation and imperialist determinism of Marxist, Hobsonian and Leninist provenance (see Cohen 1984 ch. 1). Thus, historical studies like

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Fairbank, MacFarquhar and Twitchett’s fifteen volume The Cambridge History of China or Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China, ponder in panoptic detail the question of China’s uncertain and failed nineteenth century attempt to respond to the western challenge. Similarly, studies of nineteenth-century imperial decline, like Mary Wright’s The Last Stand of Chinese Confucianism The T’ung-Chih Restoration 1862–1874 (1957) and J. R. Levenson’s seminal three volume study of Confucian China and its Modern Fate (1965) dwelt upon the failure to adapt Confucianism to modernity without abandoning tradition. Confucianism had failed, it seems, to generate the internal resources to restore itself. The Confucian reformist slogan ‘Chinese learning for the essential principles, western learning for the practical applications’ (Cohen 1984: 30) came to naught. Indeed both the restoration of 1857–61 and the neo-restoration of the Guomindang (Kuomintang) collapsed ‘because the requirements of a modern state proved to run directly counter to the requirements of the Confucian order’ (Wright 1957: 312). Confucuan heritage inexorably gave way to the ‘demonic new world of expanding national power’ which assumed the sinified shape of the great helmsman. For Levenson the disintegrating great tradition’s sad departure from history, ironically constituted its means of entering it. For ‘yielding the future, [Confucianism] became a thing of the past’ (Levenson 1965 vol. 3: 3). Corresponding to China’s intellectual incapacity to syncretize western science with Chinese civilization, Mark Elvin showed in The Pattern of the Chinese Past that the indigenous agrarian economy, found itself in a high level equilibrium trap from early in the seventeenth century. This unfortunate balance of ‘input-output relationships’, initially identified by Parson Malthus at the end of the eighteenth century, meant that ‘the late traditional economy had assumed a pattern that was almost incapable of change through internally generated forces’ (1973: 312). Using a familiar trope, Elvin believed that a reawakening China would of course astonish the world. Nevertheless, for industry to advance sufficiently to let agriculture and the economy as a whole break out of the trap, China needed to ‘enter the international market to a far greater extent than hitherto’ (319). From this economic perspective, the encounter with the west was a shock from which the great tradition could not recover. While for Wright and Levenson such a fate seemed tragic, for Elvin by contrast, the west’s relatively limited impact between 1840 and 1950 merely stimulated a ubiqutous recognition of internal decadence. There was, Elvin maintains, ‘astonishingly little creative conservatism in China’.

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Consequently, ‘the specific superstructure of Confucianism collapsed much more completely than did those of Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism in other parts of Asia’ (Elvin 1986: 112–13). Elvin’s understanding of Chinese economic exceptionalism represented, to some extent, a response to Karl A. Wittfogel’s classic study of Oriental Despotism A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957). Controversially, Wittfogel abstracted from the elusive and diffuse comments of Marx and Engels on the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) a model of hydraulic society whose most extensive formation could be found in China, ‘the legendary trail blazer of governmental water control’ (1957 (1964): 27). The imperial control of the hydraulic means of production constituted an enduring pre-capitalist but non-feudal bureaucratic managerialism. This pre-modern despotic form, moreover, was by no means benevolent. Thus, athough, as numerous nineteenth-century commentators observed, Chinese guilds and villages of the imperial era achieved ‘far-reaching autonomy’, such freedoms were politically irrelevant; at best they established ‘a kind of beggars democracy’ (125–6). In fact hydraulic despotsim tolerated no relevant political force besides itself. It succeeded on the institutional level because it blocked the development of such forces, and on the psychological level because it discouraged man’s desire for independent action. It was a regime, therefore, of total submission and total loneliness epitomized by the castration of Ssu-ma Chien (Xu ma Qian), the Han dynasty historian who disagreed with the Emperor, Wu Ti (Wu di), over the evaluation of a defeated general. Wittfogel tellingly contrasted the Chinese historian’s solitary fate with that of Socrates punishment for corrupting Athenian youth. Socrates’ enforced death in an open society ‘far from alienating him from his followers – or from his ideas – cemented his union with both’ (158). As Brendan O’Leary observes Wittfogel’s ‘theoretical and ideological project . . . sought to develop a theory of pre-industrial totalitarianism’ (O’Leary 1989: 240). Consequently, ‘hydraulic regimes were portrayed as the ideal typical antonyms of pluralist agrarian regimes. In this way he extended the contrast between pluralist and monist regimes, developed for industrialized societies, back into agrarian society’ (240). In other words, the hydraulic despot’s total terror producing total submission and total loneliness (244) eerily prefigured the evolution of modern Asiatic totalitarianisms of the Stalin and Mao varieties. As Wittfogel himself noted in a later preface, two aspects of his study aroused interest: ‘the attempt to establish the peculiarity of a non-western semi-managerial system of despotic power and the

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interpretation of Communist totalitarianism as a total managerial, and a much more despotic, variant of that system’ (Wittfogel 1964: 3). The problem of an Asiatic mode of production (AMP), in either its Marxist or Wittfogelian modes, occasioned an academic controversy among Marxists, neo-Marxists and their critics in the course of the 1970s. George Lichtheim had early considered the concept ‘an oddity’ (Lichtheim 1973: 168). Marian Sawer, in Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production meanwhile traced the genealogy of the idea, somewhat erroneously, back to Bernier and the critics of French eighteenth-century sinomania (1977: ch. 1). M. Godelier found the concept consonant with a stagnant pre-capitalist formation which the western challenge would dissolve (1972: 135–7). By contrast, Althusserian inspired Marxists like Hindess and Hirst maintained, that the ‘existence or non-existence of the AMP cannot be settled by reference to concrete social formations, it is a strictly theoretical question’ (Hindess and Hirst 1975: 180). Perry Anderson, meanwhile, denied the pertinence of a common oriental model, and maintained somewhat cavalierly that the Chinese imperial model of strong state– weak society confirmed Anderson’s own curious inversion of Marx which showed that ‘the modes of production of any pre-capitalist social formation are always specified by the politico-juridical apparatus of class rule’ (Anderson 1974: 543). Examining this debate Brendan O’Leary dismissed the AMP as ‘the bastard child of historical materialism’ whose ‘ideological resonance’ would diminish in the face of its ‘multiple contradictions, dilemmas and empirical deficiencies’ (1, 335). This critique notwithstanding, Wittfogel unlike Marx and later proponents of the western challenge to oriental stagnation, evidently considered the managerial model capable of replicating itself in an oriental, or more particularly, Chinese technological society without the intervening stage of bourgeois liberal democratic capitalism. As Ernest Gellner remarked in his foreword to O’Leary’s more captious study, ‘an increasingly complex and interdependent technology may produce a social system closer to the Asiatic Mode of Production than to the pluralism and individualism which gave birth to the industrial mode of production’ (Gellner in O’Leary 1989: xii). For Gellner, it would seem a Chinese hydroelectric state might constitute a modern embryonic form of total power ideologically guided by the charismatic thinking of the Great Helmsman, or the more pragmatic ideas of the Great Patriach, Deng Xiaoping. Contrary both to the oriental despotic thesis and the thesis of Confucian decay, other sinologists treated the historical impact of the

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west on China more positively. In this view, Confucianism or, more particularly, post seventeenth century neo-Confucianism, possessed considerably greater creative resilience than generally allowed. Rather than stagnating, the Confucian mind was in dynamic tension with its material conditions and responded positively to the western encounter. In a series of books and articles William Theodore de Bary emphasized both the vitality of Confucian thought, its diversity and the erroneous propensity to dismiss it merely as ‘an official tool of government’ (de Bary 1959: 34). While recognizing that despite protestations to the contrary, many traditional features of Chinese autocracy had been dressed up in a politically correct Maoism since 1949, de Bary nevertheless discountenanced the impression that ‘all of Chinese history and civilization bears the mark of unrelieved oppression and totalitarian control’ (de Bary 1993: 3). De Bary argued that western commentators had, since the nineteenth century, presented the managerial bureaucracies of the East as inhibitors of economic development condemning these agrarian civilizations to stagnation. As a result, Confucianism too was represented as a ‘reactionary force’ and ‘an instrument of ideological control in the hands of a predatory dynastic state’ (de Bary 19830: 94). By way of contrast, de Bary detected a liberal individualistic tradition evolving from the reinterpretation of the classics during Sung dynasty and culminating in Huang Tsung-hsi’s (Huang Zongxi) neo-Confucian liberal synthesis of the late seventeenth century. Contrary to both Wittfogel, and Weber, therefore, de Bary contended that Qing neoConfucianism developed the internal resources for a powerful critique of the existing order. Thomas Metzger somewhat differently maintained that seventeenth century neo-Confucianism grappled with a comprehensive set of ‘bipolar’ dilemmas that embraced ‘both the “inner” psychological and moral and the “outer” economic and political realms’. The neoConfucian project far from stagnating sought to transcend these difficulties by transforming self and society. This reforming impulse, however, was continually frustrated. In this context, then, the advent of the west offered not a threat but the prospect of release and the opportunity to Escape from Predicament (1977). The challenge of the west, thus, engendered a creative re-evaluation of interpersonal relations and by extension political authority. Confucian culture, then, was not inert, but capable of a creative response to the challenge of modernity. Consequently, in the course of the twentieth century, ‘the topology of interdependence’ changed. The

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new Maoist pattern of ‘solidarity, merging the moral empathies of the polity, the village, and the family to an unprecedented extent, seems to be connected to the enthusiastic feeling that the Chinese are now entering an era during which they will be more successful . . . in realizing their moral goals’ (Metzger 1977: 192). Ultimately, ‘westernization and modernization helped realize powerful, long frustrated hopes in China, especially the hope of establishing a morally interdependent society’ (231). Mao’s sinification of Marxism not only released and channelled the long suppressed anger of the ‘dependent’ personality and the exploited masses, it also expressed and reinvented for revolutionary purposes the ‘traditional ethos of interdependence’ (233). Differently again from both the Confucian decay and the neoConfucian response theses, a number of historians and commentators in the 1980s tried increasingly to escape their own predicament of challenge and response and modernity versus tradition, by ‘centering Chinese History in China’ (Cohen 1984: 153). For Paul Cohen the central feature of this approach is that it begins with ‘Chinese problems set in a Chinese context. These problems may be influenced, even generated, by the West. Or they may have no Western connection at all. But either way they are Chinese problems’ (154). This perspective, to some extent, reflected the research of European sinologists like Jacques Gernet and Wolfram Eberhard (1950) who had already drawn attention to the continuities in Chinese modern history and the distinctive character of Le Monde Chinois (1982). For Gernet that world was ‘quite different from the one in which we ourselves have been moulded and . . . it remains so today’ (Gernet 1982: 29). Examining China’s reaction to western missionaries in the seventeenth century, Gernet contended it revealed ‘a quite different conception of human agency, in which any opposition between reason and senses and any separation between the spiritual and the temporal are unknown’ (4). Moreover, the privileged position given to the written sign at the expense of the spoken word explained the deep-rooted Chinese tendency to perceive logic in terms of signs possessing opposing and complementary values and an order of being constituted through systems of variable, dynamic symbols (29) that continued into the modern era after 1949. Analogously, Benjamin Elman showed that the Qing ‘philological tradition of evidential research’ already posed a threat to orthodox Confucianism before the advent of western pressure (Elman 1981: 68). For Elman the ‘roots of modern thought and scholarship in contemporary China’ were both ‘complicated and diverse’ (88). Elsewhere, Philip Kuhn drew attention to the enduring character of the Chinese rural gentry

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and the historic tension between central and local government that existed long before contact with the West (Kuhn 1970: 216). Indeed, despite the collapse of the Qing dynasty local elite structures proved remarkably resilient. In other words, Kuhn like Schwartz and Schram, contended that, as China developed in the twentieth century, modernity and tradition did not constitute mutually exclusive categories. From this perspective, the Chinese revolution represented a response not just to new ‘problems created by the western intrusion’ but also to older problems ‘of internal origin’ (Cohen 1984: 82). Thus for Edward Friedman in Backward toward Revolution (1974), Maoism offered ‘another opportunity for the renewed community to come to grips with and try and solve the most basic problems of life’ (4). Similarly, Stuart Schram considers it was Mao’s roots in tradition that enabled him ‘to play the role he did’ in sinifying Marxism. Indeed, the Cultural Revolution could be ‘defined as one vast attempt . . . to overcome the evils inherited from the past, but to do so in original and specifically Chinese terms’ (Schram 1966: 6–7). For Cohen, the emerging perspective on China not only recognized the endogenous forces that shaped twentieth century developments, it also facilitated the ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ disaggregation of an otherwise monolithic China (1984: 186). Western observers, of course, were early aware of a distinction between the Chinese littoral that experienced western influence in a variety of forms and the hinterland that remained isolated. From the 1970s, however, there developed a growing awareness of variations within the hinterland. G. William Skinner identified nine historic macro regions effectively determined by geography and the limitations of transport technology. Skinner’s approach significantly highlighted spatial and temporal variation both among regions and also between core and periphery within regions. Interestingly, Skinner emphasized that the major catastrophes that perennially punctuated Chinese history – droughts, floods and rebellions – were generally regional, rather than national in impact (Skinner 1977: 211–49; Cohen 1984: 163–5). Subsequently, province centred studies together with a growing awareness of the stratification of Chinese society offered a portrait of a more diverse and complex China. Ultimately, attention to regional diversity and differences between rural and urban elites and within the peasantry, revealed a China of ‘contradictions’. Irrespective of external western influences, there were endogenous features of the Chinese political, economic, social and intellectual heritage that were conducive to modernization. For Paul Cohen this historical and cultural attentiveness meant that:

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the entire structure of assumptions inherited from the nineteenth century – the perception of China as barbarian and the West as civilized; of China as incapable of self-generated change and therefore of requiring for its transformation a ‘force from without’; the assumption that the West alone could serve as the carrier of this force; and finally the assumption that, in the wake of the western intrusion, ‘traditional’ Chinese society would give way to a new and ‘modern’ China fashioned in the image of the West – this whole structure of assumptions is thoroughly shaken.’ (81) Cohen clearly underestimates the variety of nineteenth century western responses to China. Moreover the fact that a modernizing China might represent a far more complex amalgam of tradition and modernity than generally appreciated, did not necessarily invalidate the modernization thesis. Furthermore, it left the character of a developed or developing China after Mao disturbingly vague. The collaborative volume The Modernization of China (1981) tried to address this issue. Gabriel Rozman and his associates sought to link a more nuanced understanding of Chinese history to a comparative evaluation of China as a ‘highly developed premodern society, as a latecomer, and as a socialist country’ (Rozman 1981: 14). A trifle disappointingly, Rozman’s study concluded rather conventionally, unlike other late developing states, that the authority of tradition in China was so complete that ‘modernity was in effect rejected by the elite’ (511). Political weakness at the centre and the failure of reform promoted elite reluctance. Problematically, for comparative purposes, China remained stubbornly distinct. Reluctant to recognize its altered place in the nineteenth century world, China had nevertheless entered modernity with ‘an unusual combination of assets and liabilities, and these are reflected in the pattern of its contemporary level of development’ (514). Thus, ‘the capacity of its political system to mobilize its skills and resources for specific goals, reflecting its bureaucratic heritage as well as the organizing ability of the Communist Party, is relatively rare among the latecomers to modernization.’ Yet, in other respects, China remained ‘a country at a low level of development and the portion of its population living in urban areas is also relatively small’ (515). From the revised modernization perspective of the 1980s, it was ‘still too early to determine to what extent the vigorous programmatic and organizational initiatives taken since 1949 by the Chinese leadership will endure as a distinctive pattern of modernization’ (ibid). Basic elements typical of modernization under communist leadership

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exacerbated by the legacy of Maoist romanticism persisted and their ambivalent implications for the future course of modernization remained considerable. Modernization theorists and area studies specialists thus remained uncertain about the character and trajectory of Chinese development and generally sceptical of the endogenous political factors shaping change. Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China (1990) and Roderick Macfarquhar’s three-volume study of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (1974–1997) reflected this scepticism. Indeed, Macfarquhar notably located the origins of the cultural revolution in the Maoengineered endogenous catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward and the elite dissension that emerged in its aftermath (Macfarquhar 1997 vol. 3: 3–4).

Peasant revolutions, dependencia and developmental states Modernization theory, as we have seen, altered over time. It did not adhere to one explanatory model or process. Consequently, since 1945, Chinese development has been variously presented in terms of cybernetic systems, the preconditions for economic take-off and the need for public order, as well as through the lens of western challenge–Chinese response and tradition versus modernity, that culminated in more recent appreciations of indigenous cultural factors and the contingent historical experience that shaped China’s developmental trajectory. By contrast, those writing from a Marxist or neo-Marxist perspective presented a more positive view of both the Chinese revolution and Maoist ideology. As we have seen, Marx and Engels had been enigmatic about the AMP. Later revolutionaries following Lenin, however, overlooked the distinctive economic character of Asia while emphasizing the manner in which capitalism in its ‘highest’ stage of imperialism had exploited the colonial periphery in the interest of the European core bourgeois states and in the process corrupted their indigenous proletariats (Lenin in D’Encausse and Schram 1969: 24). By the late 1960s, moreover, Maoist thought, contra Marx, emphasized inter alia, the poor and blank peasantry of Asia as the agent of materialist change, the continuation of antagonistic contradiction into the post revolutionary condition and a distinctive theory of the people’s war where the rural areas encircled the bourgeois city ‘leading to the final capture of the cities’ (Lin Biao in D’Encausse and Schram 1969: 64) appeared to have sinified Marxism (Knight 1985: ch. 3).

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This vogueish anti-imperialism influenced both real and armchair revolutionaries from Hanoi to Paris, Berkeley and Havana. Writers within this research ‘tradition’ dismissed modernization theory as an ‘ideological construct used by leading China specialists to justify America’s political, military and economic intervention in Asia in the post war era’ (Cohen 1984: 98). In a celebrated debate in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, James Peck, Moss Roberts and David Horowitz contended that the Joint Committee on Contemporary China, which organized ‘modern China studies’ at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and Michigan Universities, not only disguised current American imperialism, ‘it also failed to take seriously the role that imperialism had played in the last 150 years of Chinese history’ (Horowitz 1971: 139; Roberts 1971: 113; Cohen 1984: 98). By contrast Peck, Horowitz and Roberts offered a picture of ‘imperialism as . . . the key explanatory variable in the past century and a half of Chinese history’ (Cohen 1984: 100). There were, however, a number of difficulties with this seemingly sinocentric version of Marxist unmasking. In 1950, both Owen Lattimore and J. K. Fairbank had been the subject of senatorial investigation for their complicity in the ‘loss of China’ because of their ‘communistic’ sympathies (Fairbank 1982: 337–47). Horowitz explained away this contradiction as an ‘intra-bureaucratic struggle within the government’ (Horowitz 1971: 157). More precisely, as Fairbank himself subsequently elucidated, the neo-Marxist differentiation between modernization theory and the revised imperialist version of dialectical materialism did not represent genuine explanatory alternatives. Both, in fact, constituted versions of a grand modernizing narrative and prognosticated the inexorable emergence of a new industrialized economic and political order. More particularly, in their analysis of the causes of China’s nineteenth century weakness, Marxist and post Marxist as well as postcolonial versions of this narrative merely represented an extreme version of the challenge – response theory that held that China did not possess the internal resources to withstand the impact of western technology. This teleological difficulty, however, proved no impediment to a generation of social scientists who drew inspiration from ‘the potentialities of a Marxist approach’ to the ‘sociology of modernization’ (Skocpol 1994: 26). From the late 1960s, the most influential version of this neo-Marxist critique of ‘capitalist development’ came from the Latin American ‘dependentistas’. Following Paul Baran’s (1968) reworking of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, this school of thought contended that there was an ineluctable link between the development of the

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west and the underdevelopment of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In particular western capitalism ‘burst with explosive force into the glacial movement of . . . ancient societies and tremendously accelerated the process of decomposition of their pre-capitalist structures’ (Baran 1968: 143). Ultimately, the west both destroyed the agricultural self sufficiency of traditional non western societies and by extracting the affected countries ‘previously accumulated and currently generated surplus capital’ condemned the third world to underdevelopment (ibid: 143). Further elaborated by those working within the United Nations Economic Commission for South America, dependency theory postulated the economic dependence of ‘the peripheral countries upon the capitalist heartlands’ (Rist 1997: 116). At the same time, the ‘lumpen bourgeoisie’ of the periphery remained in thrall to their metropolitan masters and were unable to fulfil their appointed historic mission. As one of the leading luminaries of dependency theory, André Gunder Frank, contended ‘structural underdevelopment’ would be deepened until the ‘satellite’ states ‘liberated themselves from capitalism itself’ (Frank 1969: 3). In other words, capitalism through ‘its internal contradictions’ generated underdevelopment and ‘determined its forms’ (10). On the basis of these findings Guillermo O’Donnell further detected an ‘elective affinity’ between ‘advanced capitalist development in dependent political economies and bureaucratic authoritarian rule’ (O’Donnell cited in Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992: 22). Even more extravagantly, given the small number of Latin American case studies upon which dependency depended, Immanuel Wallerstein elaborated a world-system that had emerged from a European feudal crisis in the sixteenth century to embrace the planet by the end of the twentieth century. By a curious extension of dependency theory, Wallerstein tried to show that the European economy ‘took off’ in the sixteenth century. Subsequently, ‘the capitalist world economy’ had ‘(a) geographically expanded over the globe, (b) manifested a gradual pattern of expansion and contraction . . . and (c) undergone a process of secular transformation’ (Wallerstein 1980a: 8). Unlike earlier world empires (Rome, China and India) which ‘administered trade’ from a political centre, the modern European world economy encouraged ‘the economic predominance’ of the market and a single division of labour. It also facilitated multiple polities and cultures (Wallerstein 1980b: 6). Within this world-system ‘three structural positions – core, periphery and semi-periphery – had become stabilized by about 1640’ (Wallerstein 1980b: 18). From both the dependency and world-systems perspective,

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therefore, development inexorably consigned some countries to the peripheral status of underdevelopment. Moreover, given capitalism’s inherent contradictions, Wallerstein considered the world economy perennially prone to crisis. As a result of a series of sixteenth century historical, ecological and geographic ‘accidents’ (18), the west had ‘invented this curious system where instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.’ Significantly, all other world civilizations had ‘sensibly avoided this inversion’ (Wallerstein 1999: 56). Being ‘substantively irrational, this western system was ultimately untenable’ (ibid). Armed with this economically unfalsifiable version of Spenglerian declinism, Wallerstein envisaged a Maoist process of permanent revolution emerging on the Chinese semiperiphery and promoting a socialist world government as a plausible alternative to the capitalist world economy (Wallerstein 1980b: 35). Meanwhile, dependency theorists maintained that satellite countries had to ‘de-link’ from the world economy and ‘follow the strategy of self-reliance’ (Hettne 1995: 102). In this context, the Chinese model in general and the Cultural Revolution in particular enthralled a post-1968 generation of sociologists, historians and political economists seduced by an arrangement that promised both a ‘critique of industrial society’ and a ‘new model of development’ (Rist 1997: 140–1). Disillusioned western radicals found in Maoist China what their Enlightenment philosophe forebears had discovered in the Jesuit records – a font of economic, political and moral inspiration. Thus the Maoists who assumed control of the influential French journal Tel Quel, claimed that Mao had revealed the necessity of a cultural variety of revolutionary experimentation (Sollers 1971: 4). Philippe Sollers asserted that Louis Althusser’s identification of the problem of the overdetermination of the ideological superstructure by the economic infrastructure had already been anticipated in Mao’s 1937 essay On Contradiction (11). Subsequently, the Maoist Pierre Victor, in conversation with Michel Foucault in 1971, advocated the necessity for revolutionary people’s justice conducted on Maoist lines suitably modified for Gallic consumption (Eribon 1993: 246). After a trip to the Chinese socialist utopia in 1974, Sollers further contended that China offered the space for ‘another politics’ which combined ‘a living millenial culture with a revolutionary theory and practice that is rightly passionate’ (Sollers 1974: 19). Meanwhile the French feminist psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, thought the Cultural Revolution represented the first emergence of a ‘massively repressed’ (refoulée immense) global culture and promised the emancipation of

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women together with the abolition of social inequality (Kristeva 1974: 22). In characteristically jouissant prose, Kristeva enthused that in China ‘the die is cast . . . for a socialism without God or Man, which will accompany, at a distance, the perilous, unprecedented renaissance of a new humanity which is gathering momentum’ (Kristeva 1974: 201). It was in the disturbed light of this Mao inspired insistence on the materialism of ideas that radical social critics like Foucault,3 Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kristeva and Sollers, discerned the possibility of a new social being, liberated from the baleful consequences of capitalist over determination. Subsequently, these theorists promiscuously blended Maoism with a modified Nietzscheanism to elaborate the doctrine of poststructuralism. This held that the will to knowledge and the materialism of ideas constituted the discursive realm of truth and power, which it was the duty of the radical intellectual to deconstruct. This understanding subsequently informed Edward Said’s identification of orientalism as a colonialist discourse, a view, of course, which Mao would have found highly congenial. Analogously, those who approached the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of a more traditional Marxist political economy also found much to admire in Maoist self reliance. Johan Galtung detected a new socialist developmental model in China more appropriate to the third world than the World Bank alternative (Galtung and Nishimura 1978). E. L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane described its lineaments in The Chinese Road to Socialism (1970). For these writers, Maoist struggle ‘challenged not only the morality, but also the economics and the psychology of monetary incentives as a motor driving the economy’ (Wheelwright and McFarlane 1970: 149). In this view, the Great Leap Forward (GLF 1958–61), based on Mao’s faith in the transformative power of the will, had enabled the Chinese economy to walk ‘on two legs’. Small scale industrial production and agricultural collectivization, had ‘resulted in the discovery of many new techniques’ (48). Significantly, Joan Robinson, the doyenne of 1970s Cambridge economists, denounced those critics who contended that the GLF had resulted in ‘breakdown, famine and chaos’. Rather ‘China had paid off all her debts and is now giving aid to developing countries. . . . It passed through the bad years, 1959–61, without inflation and its currency is one of the few that is stable today’ (Robinson in Wheelwright and McFarlane: 9). In her study of The Cultural Revolution in China (1968), Robinson, like the Tel Quel group, considered Mao’s distinctive contribution to revolutionary thought consisted in the identification of ‘the material force

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of ideas’ (12). Those ensconced on la rive gauche or Free School Lane could subsequently enjoy the vicarious thrill of revolution through the serendipitous discovery that membership of the international proletariat was ‘a state of mind’ (15). Predictably, Robinson discovered ‘pasture for subtle minds amongst the Selected Works’ (29) and considered the personality cult enveloping the great helmsman a ‘national asset’ for nothing could be further ‘than Mao’s style from the paranoia of Stalin’s last years’ (ibid). Ultimately, Robinson attributed the violence of the Red Guard and such unfortunate ‘diplomatic gaffes’ like torching the British Chancellery, to the naïve ‘enthusiasm of youth’ (39). In fact, ‘when the young things are singing of Mao Tse-tung as the leader of all the world, it does not occur to them that their neighbours . . . might think them arrogant or fanatical’ (38). Meanwhile, in France Roger Pellisier (1967), discussing China’s revolutionary reawakening, considered Mao ‘an immense intellectual force’, and ‘the coolest and most balanced mind I. . . . encountered in China’ (Pellisier 1967: 442). Equally a younger generation of American sinologists were not immune to the vicarious thrill of revolution. Thus, Richard Baum and Louise B. Bennett, maintained that western observers had overestimated the violence released by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Thus, ‘to apply the term “total anarchy” to China’s Cultural Revolution would be highly misleading’ (Baum 1971: 3). For Baum, the intra party struggle stressed rehabilitation, ‘rather than the primitive function of a purge’ (ibid). Assessing the impact of the ‘Maoist programme of decentralization’, Louise Bennett maintained, in 1971, that the revolution was not ‘irrational for a developing country like China’ and perhaps appropriate to ‘the development of a socialist society’ (Bennett 1971: 254). With a premonitory snuffle of postcolonial theorizing, Bennett concluded that in order to understand ‘what is occurring in the Chinese People’s Republic . . . we must start by examining our own assumptions and perspectives’ (ibid). Somewhat differently, those working within the confines of a more conventional sinology found in Maoism a particularly virulent expression of a Chinese felt need for authoritarian moral guidance. Thus Simon Leys observed that ‘Mao, with his subjective and arbitrary political line, resembles the emperors of former times surrounded by their little circle of corrupt eunuchs . . . Mao pursues unrealisable chimeras . . . and practices a despotism which is based on violence and coercion’ (Leys 1977 (1981): 35). Subsequent western studies, including Baum’s own, substantiated the view that the revolution destroyed the more pragmatic party faction, undermined the education of a generation and

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culminated in the estimated death of half a million Chinese in 1967 alone (Fairbank 1986: 296–97; Harding 1995: 244). Summing up, the Maoist experience from the modernization perspective, Lucian Pye contended, ‘Mao’s exaggerated promises and exhausting campaigns, which brought little progress, have resulted in scepticism if not cynicism especially among the younger generation’ (Pye with Pye 1985: 212). Reviewing the intellectual legacy of Maoism for the social sciences in 1985, Pye observed that, ‘the explicitly ideological criticism of development theories which had asserted that those theories were biased in favor of order and stability and opposed to revolution and popular participation’ were, in fact, ‘fueled by the passions generated by the Vietnam war and by a glorification of Mao’s Cultural Revolution’ (15). Significantly, it was in this radical intellectual climate that influential ‘macrosocial’ studies like Francis Moulder’s Japan China and the Modern World (1973) first appeared. Moulder’s work applied a heady mixture of dependency theory adumbrated by Wallerstein’s world-economy model to explain Japan’s development and China’s underdevelopment. Thus, the fact that western imperialism placed fewer constraints upon Japanese development, explained Japan’s successful breakthrough to modernity. Following dependency orthodoxy, Moulder contended that Japan’s relative autonomy within the world economy, rather than differences between the cultural traditions or domestic economies of the two countries, accounted for Japan’s twentieth century economic success. At the same time, China’s late nineteenth century underdevelopment and prolonged stagnation reflected its incorporation into the world system as a dependent satellite (1973: 3–4, 25). Consequently, Moulder rejected, the view maintained by ‘traditional society theorists’ that differences in values, beliefs and world views or state structures affected the developmental paths pursued by Japan and China. Instead, it was the importance of the satellite to the metropole that determined the intensity of the struggle to hold the satellite. This further determined the difficulties the people of the satellite faced in their efforts to liberate themselves and develop a self reliant national economy. For the doyenne of ‘macrosocial’ analysis, Theda Skocpol, ‘Moulder’s entire book’ represented a closely argued attempt to establish this ‘one crucial difference between China and Japan, its logic being an impeccable application of the Method of Difference’ (Skocpol 1994: 81). However, what Skocpol considers impeccable macroscopic social analysis, Paul Cohen dismisses as a crude example of the zoological fallacy (Cohen 1984: 116). Rather worryingly, in order to establish the case for China’s incorporation in the semi-periphery of the late

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nineteenth century world economy Moulder conveniently ignored a ‘considerable body of literature by American economists and economic historians which holds that the economic effects of Western imperialism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China were negligible . . . or even beneficial’ (117). In other words, one of the problems that both the western challenge – failed Chinese response or its imperialist world economy variant consistently failed to address was the relatively peripheral economic impact of western imperialism upon late nineteenthcentury Chinese development. As Paul Cohen observes, ‘imperialism’ or for that matter world economy, seen in metahistorical terms as ‘the master key to an entire century of Chinese history was . . . a myth’ (147). More precisely, as Jacques Gernet contended, to reduce history to the confrontation between civilizations effectively substituted a ‘stereotype for a series of successive changes which have affected both China and the western world’ (Gernet 1982: 541). The evident empirical weakness of applying some version of global economic determinism driven by a neo-Marxian teleology to the China case, did not, however, prove an impediment to the further elaboration of what Theda Skocpol terms ‘doing macroscopic social science’ (Skocpol 1994: 10). Two additional explanatory models that facilitated a ‘macro-historical’ perspective warrant further scrutiny as they profoundly affected the social scientific appreciation of the relationship between revolution and late modern development with Chinese characteristics. Barrington Moore in The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) notably modified a Marxist version of class analysis to identify alternative routes from a traditional society culminating in one of three ‘societal political outcomes . . . : Western democracy, fascism and communist dictatorship’ (Skocpol 1994: 27). For Moore, ‘the class structures of agrarian states undergoing the initial stages of economic modernization are linked to alternate political outcomes via critical political events . . . bourgeois revolution [for] . . . Western parliamentary democracies’; ‘revolution from above’ in the case of societies that ended up as fascist dictatorships and ‘peasant revolution’ in the case of the societies (Russia and China) ‘that became Communist dictatorships’ (ibid: 27–8). In order, to give full scope to the seminal importance of peasant, rather than proletarian, revolution from below, Moore contended that an ‘adequate theoretical comprehension of political systems had to come to terms with Asian institutions and history’ (Moore 1966 (1981): viii). Moore, nevertheless, rejected ‘cultural explanation’ as a species of circular reasoning that justified inertia and ‘cultural and social continuity’ (ibid: 455–7).

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By contrast, Moore, following Marx, reduced values to class. In the case of China this entailed rejecting the propensity of western scholarship to ‘stress the bureaucratic character of the Chinese Empire’ (161) and underestimate the role of the Chinese ‘landlord–peasant relationship’ which constituted a ‘political device for squeezing an economic surplus out of the peasant and turning it into the amenities of civilization’ (179). The Chinese imperial system locked the official class into the local gentry class in such a way that ‘landed property in Chinese society would not easily serve as a basis for political power separate from the political mechanism that made it pay’ (181). Consequently, the fact that the imperial system ‘precluded the emergence of a liberal aristocratic opposition decreased the flexibility of a totally novel historical challenge [from the west] and helps to explain one new feature that we encounter in the Chinese case, the nearly complete disintegration of the central government’ (182). This is a rather convoluted way of saying that the imperial system and the class relationships it sustained failed to respond to the western challenge. Moreover, the exploitative character of imperial rule at the centre and gentry rule in the provinces exacerbated the already weak links ‘that bound the peasantry and the upper classes [and] helps to explain why China was especially subject to peasant insurrections’ (213). Subsequently, the ‘Kuomintang interlude’, which sought to maintain the exploitative status quo in the countryside, exposed the nationalist regime to the peasant masses organized and mobilized for the first time as a revolutionary force by the CCP. Thus ‘the mass basis of the revolution that began in 1927 and culminated in the Communist victory of 1949 was a land-short peasantry’ (220). The peasants, in other words, ‘provided the dynamite that finally exploded the old order’ (227). Later, ‘the Communist regime forged a new link between the village and the national government. It became evident to every peasant that his daily life depended on a national political power’ (ibid). Significantly, Moore’s former student, Theda Skocpol found Moore’s insights weakened by an inadequate appreciation of political sociology (Skocpol 1994: 36). For Skocpol ‘the fatal shortcoming of all Marxist theorizing . . . about the role of the state is that nowhere is the possibility admitted that state organizations and elites might . . . act against the long-run economic interests of a dominant class’ (37). In her own work, therefore, Skocpol combined a new sensitivity to the variable autonomy of states and their capacity ‘to implement official goals’ with an awareness of the ‘intersocietal orientation’, or world system within which states functioned (Skocpol in Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol

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1985: 9; Skocpol 1994: 48). Elaborating this somewhat unstable composite of class analysis, state autonomy and world system determinism, Skocpol sought to compare the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions as examples of ‘social change’. For Skocpol these successful social revolutions gave rise ‘to models and ideals of enormous international impact and appeal–especially where the transformed societies have been large and geopolitically important’ (Skocpol 1979: 3). All three Revolutions occurred in wealthy and politically ambitious agrarian states none of which was ever colonially subjugated. These old regimes were proto-bureaucratic autocracies that suddenly had to confront more economically developed military competitors. . . . The revolutionary outcome in each instance was a centralized, bureaucratic, and mass incorporating nation-state with enhanced greatpower potential in the international arena. (41) The Chinese revolution, then, represented for the second half of the twentieth century what the Russian revolution had been for the first half and the French revolution for the nineteenth century – the paradigm of a successful social revolution. ‘The Yenan way’ and ‘the countryside against the city’ offered fresh ideals and models and renewed hopes for revolutionary nationalists in the mid-twentieth century’ (4). Problematically, however, Skocpol’s comparative historical explanation of why the imperial system collapsed merely repeats the view that it failed to respond to an external western challenge. Similar assumptions permeate related 1970s social science works on Modern Revolutions (see Dunn 1972). This ultimately Toynbeean perspective, for all its apparent ‘macroscopic’ originality, belied the possibility of a distinctively ‘interior, China-centered view of recent Chinese history’ (Cohen 1984: 153). Not only does the comparative historical method assume the impotence of Chinese cultural traditions in the face of internal and external challenges, it also treats Chinese historical scholarship in a selective and tendentious manner. In epistemological terms it further suffers from the confusion of the revolutionary process with a social category. As Elie Kedourie explained, ‘revolution . . . is no longer a cluster of events [and no more than these events]; it becomes hypostasised, transformed into some kind of substance or stuff to be examined in the same way as a chemist, say, examines toothpaste’ (1984: 155). Such hypostasizing becomes evident when both Skocpol, Moore and their epigoni produce a wide range of material to demonstrate that

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the events between 1911 and 1949 constituted a distinctive peasant revolution rather than a traditional rebellion announcing the termination of the mandate of heaven. Moreover despite their best efforts to generate comparative data from purportedly analogous revolutions in Russia and France, nowhere do they acknowledge the unique longevity of Asian revolutions. Thus, Skocpol contends that ‘social revolutions are rapid basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures’ (Skocpol 1979: 4). Yet the ‘method of difference’ obscures the central feature of twentieth-century East Asian peasant revolutions – that they were a work of many decades. Indeed, more historically sensitive accounts of the Chinese ‘revolution’ trace its origin to the events of 1895 and its continuation into the 1980s (Spence 1982; Fairbank 1986). A further corollary of this comparative historical preoccupation with revolution entailed a propensity to overestimate its transformative potential. Both Skocpol and John Dunn view the impact of Maoism on Chinese development in largely positive terms (Dunn 1972 (1989): 83). Skocpol considered ‘collectivized peasant agriculture’ a ‘dynamic sector’ and the GLF ‘a balanced strategy for national development’ rather than an economic catastrophe (269). This balance had contributed to coordinated and ‘responsible leadership at local and provincial as well as national levels’ (271). Indeed, the Chinese Communist party between 1955 and 1975, stood out as a revolutionary agency promoting both mass mobilization and economic and sociopolitical equalization (274). Clearly, the application of the historical method to successful revolutions, suffered from both logical and empirical shortcomings. As Kedourie observed, ‘we soon discover that “modern revolutions” as a model or ideal type is no more than a delusive construct, the pale shadow of what men in the endless variety of their circumstances and the ever surprising originality of their minds do and suffer.’ To speak, then, as Moore, Dunn and Skocpol do, of comparative historical case studies is ultimately ‘to speak the language not of history but of toothpaste-making’ (Kedourie 1984: 157). In empirical terms, moreover, recent studies evince that, far from constituting a new model of development or a distinctively non western path to modernization, the GLF and the Cultural Revolution actually culminated in unprecedented economic and political chaos. Thus Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts China’s Secret Famine (1996) demonstrates that even given China’s endemic propensity to shortages, the consequences of Maoist economic planning were uniquely disastrous. Indeed, ‘for the first time, every corner of this huge country experienced hunger. . . . It was a situation which, even during the famines of the 1920s, experts

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had said was impossible. . . . Yet this time people starved elsewhere.’ (Becker 1996: 99) Even in ‘heaven’s granary’ Sichuan province, between seven and nine million of a population of 70 million perished in what Joan Robinson euphemistically termed ‘the bad years’. Perplexingly, even in the 1990s a number of political economists could still discover some virtue in Mao style economic devolution. Thus Chris Brammall’s In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning while recognizing that the GLF had the ‘inauspicious’ consequences of consigning ‘more than ten million peasants to a premature death’ (Brammall 1993: 90), nonetheless contends that Maoist emphasis on investment rather than consumption made post-1975 Chinese growth possible (105). Somewhat differently, Gordon White maintained Mao had sought to adjust the Soviet developmental model to meet Chinese needs. For White, this Maoist developmental paradigm had bequeathed an ambivalent legacy of famine, chaos and a more devolved pattern of local economic autonomy (White 1993: 4–7). China’s reform experience, after 1978, thus reflected the institutional legacy of Maoism which, during the cultural revolution, offered cadres at the local level scope for initiative. This partitioning of the central from the local, enabled the local state bureaucracy to formulate a distinctive developmental agenda. Jean Oi terms this version of bureaucratically guided growth local state corporatism (Oi 1995: 1139). It constituted a hybrid form that utilized local capacities inherited from the Maoist era blended with forms found in other East Asian capitalist developmental states. This Maoist legacy and its aftermath inexorably invites an interpretation of China as a particularly dilatory example of a distinctively East Asian developmental model. Interestingly, it was the rise of the East Asian newly industrialized economies (NIEs) between 1960 and 1997 that, among other things, tolled the death knell for dependency theory. By the 1980s a number of neo-classical economists claimed that the emergence of Japan followed by the ‘dragon’ economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore and latterly by the ‘tiger’ economies of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia represented a startling victory for the competitive advantage afforded by open markets in generating developmental opportunities (Chowdhury and Islam 1993). However, what the World Bank subsequently christened the ‘high performing Asian economies’ (World Bank 1993) did not obviously meet the classic liberal pluralist criteria for economic take-off. A series of studies in the 1980s by Chalmers Johnson (1982), Gordon White and Robert Wade (1988; 1990; 1992), Alice Amsden (1989), and Stephen Haggard (1990) evinced that although export oriented, the rise of

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the Pacific Asian economies demonstrated a high degree of domestic market governing behaviour. The subsequent debate over the political, economic and cultural character of The East Asian Miracle (World Bank 1993) that briefly raged between 1990 and 1997, suggested, at the very least, a variety of Pathways from the Periphery (Haggard 1990). The disclosure of these new developmental opportunities only provoked those with a penchant for materialist and systemic determinism to further disquisitions upon the relationship between the world system and the late developing state. The limitations of macrosocial analysis notwithstanding, both Moore, Dunn and Skocpol had intimated that peasant revolutions enhanced state capacity. Skocpol maintained that ‘revolutions function in the end to further bureaucratic domination’ (1979: 286). Indeed, centralized, bureaucratic and autonomously powerful states seemed the inevitable consequence of both successful revolution and modernization. This growing attentiveness to the structural analysis of state organizations and their relationship both to ‘the international environments and to domestic classes and economic conditions’ (291) somewhat fortuitously coincided with the recognition that a number of formerly peripheral East Asian states had achieved extraordinarily high rates of economic growth under authoritarian political guidance. This evidently required further reassessment of the role of the state and its institutions in promoting development. Subsequently, Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol’s Bringing the State Back In (1985) attempted to demonstrate that ‘states conceived as organizations claiming control of territories and people may pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes or society’ (Skocpol 1985: 9). In the course of the 1980s, therefore, the recognition, even by former dependency theorists, that the states of the Asian Pacific littoral had successfully plugged in to an American ordered Pacific trading order caused a notable shift in the developmental paradigm. This shift which inaugurated a renewed preoccupation with the merits of the open market relative to the governed one, liberal as opposed to illiberal cultural values and the prospective emergence of civil society in non western strong states had distinctive resonances for evaluating the post-1978 turn to market Leninism, which Deng Xiaoping termed China’s ‘second revolution’ (Harding 1987: 1). It is to this understanding of China as a particularly curious case of a late developing state and what that entails for its democratization that we finally turn.

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The developmental state, Asian values and the deconstruction of post Maoist China At the end of the cold war, and in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a resurrected modernization theory claimed that a Pacific Asian version of economic take-off had occurred. Confidently, announcing the end of history (1992), Francis Fukuyama contended that despite the worrying persistence of authoritarianism and the rise of identity politics there was only one global ‘destination’ (339). Market driven industrialization, global trade, the growth of an urban middle class and the emergence of a vibrant civil society intimated the serendipitous global conjunction of development and democratization. Fukuyama, thus, rejuvenated the liberal pluralist tradition of the late 1950s initially articulated by Rostow and Seymour Martin Lipset that sought to demonstrate ‘a high correlation between the existence of democratic institutions and high levels of economic development’ (Lipset 1959: 5). Analogously, Samuel Huntington contended that ‘the extraordinary economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s’ had ‘propelled forward’ a ‘third wave’ of global democratization after 1974 (Huntington 1993a: 311). This revived interest in democratization further maintained that the inexorable rise of an articulate and economically secure middle class created the economic preconditions for ‘the voluntarist, self-generating autonomous and rule governed associations of civil society’ that negotiated the transition to democracy (Diamond 1994: 5–6; Huntington 1993a: 66). Yet, paradoxically, whilst modernization theorists of 1960s vintage had considered the expanded capacity of the strong state the central agent of economic growth, their successors in the 1980s required a strong society and a weaker or, at least, more accountable state. In this understanding, that came to fruition in the pages of The Journal of Democracy economic growth and rising expectations created the irresistible preconditions for political liberalization. Thus as a fully developed modernity approached the Pacific Asian littoral, a redundant authoritarianism withered away. It was further assumed, somewhat uncertainly, that any residual illiberal regional values would either adapt to the demands of democratic pluralism or perish in the process. Curiously, those commentators who derived their thinking from some version of a neo-Marxist international political economy or world systems theory also now assumed that the process of economic growth released a process of liberalizing political decompression. Somewhat contradictorily, ‘the processes of economic development, which . . .

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produced bureaucratic–authoritarianism in the 1960s, thus also provided the impetus for democratizating in the 1980s’ (Huntington 1993a: 68). In their influential three volume study of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (1986), O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead examined the character of transitions ‘delimited on the one side by the launching of the process of dissolution of an authoritarian regime and, on the other, by the installation of some form of democracy’ (vol. 3: 6). In examining the various pacts that led first to a liberalizied authoritarianism which preceded a limited democracy, these writers contended that the transition process was both a matter of degree and involved institutionalizing uncertainty (ibid. 9; see also Przeworski 1986). Central to this newly institutionalized uncertainty was the resurrection of civil space illustrated by the ‘explosion of a highly repoliticized and angry society’ (O’Donnell et al. vol. 3: 49). Modifying this historically informed ‘political economy’ approach in their 1990s cross regional study, that significantly omitted Asia, Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens maintained contradictorily that ‘democratization was both resisted and pushed forward by class interest’ (1993: 46). Recognizing, in predictably Marxist fashion, that it was the ‘contradictions of capitalism that advanced the cause of democracy’, they further contended that the ‘subordinate’ working class rather than the more ambivalent middle class was a necessary but not a sufficient condition ‘for the installation and consolidation of democracy’ (59, 282). Nevertheless, it was also the ‘denser’ civil society created by capitalism, that constituted ‘an important counterweight to the power of the state apparatus’ (66). At the same time, following some version of dependency theory the state’s position in a world system of ‘economic and geo-political dependence’ could weaken the process of democratization. This political economy framework, of course, linked ‘values, ideologies and religious orientations to structural and organizational realities.’ More precisely, political culture represented ‘the historical articulation of class interests’ (50). Analogously, those who favoured a liberal pluralist or ‘neo-classical’ approach to development also assumed that economic development shaped culture, rather than vice versa. This shared materialist teleology subsequently informed a number of studies of emerging Pacific Asia in the course of the 1990s. Following some version of the preconditions or process model a number of scholars consequently maintained that Pacific Asian economic growth meant that the region had also embarked on an inexorable process of democratization.

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Thus, after 1987, South Korea, we are told, spawned an increasingly self-confident middle class that terminated an ‘authoritarian cycle’ of rule (Han 1989: 292). In Taiwan, the middle class became ‘politicized and powerful’ (Robinson 1991: 2) and forged the ‘first Chinese democracy’ (Chao and Myers 1994: 213). Meanwhile in Southeast Asia, the Thai middle class was developing a ‘separate identity based on liberal democratic values’ (Samadvudanija 1991: 76) and growing democratic ‘revolt’ in Malaysia stemmed from ‘a type of middle class politics’ (Saravanamuttu 1992: 50). In Singapore, the burgeoning confidence of an educated middle class seemed to represent one of the ‘extremely important preconditions for political liberalization’, (Rodan 1993: 104), while in Indonesia a ‘middle class has grown larger and is demanding more public information’ (Chalmers 1991: 21). Subsequently, Richard Robison concluded that, ‘the reality is that Asian political systems are moving rapidly along the various paths trodden in the West, driven by the same set of social and political dynamics even if the outcomes are not all the same’ (Robison 1996: 16). From a different premiss, Edward Friedman reached a similar conclusion. Thus, ‘the East Asian experience is one in which strong states committed to social equity serve the interests of a new, grand, moderate, coalition and thereby contribute mightily to democratic institutionalization’ (Friedman 1974: 45). However, the studies of Chalmers Johnson, Robert Wade, and Alice Amsden demonstrated this East Asian economic transformation owed nothing to constitutional democracy and little to neo-classical economic policy. In fact, it was government planned, export led growth, coupled with the wealth it generated, that ultimately granted ‘performance legitimacy’ to the rule of the autocratic Generals or quasiLeninist political parties that governed postcolonial Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. Moreover, in order to secure the political stability considered vital to sustain growth, the technocratic elite increasingly entrusted with development policy, exploited and sometimes selectively reinvented Asian traditions of deference, bureaucracy and consensus. Subsequently, a number of area studies specialists, contradicting Max Weber and Gunnar Myrdal, contended that traditional Asian culture of a Confucian provenance, modified for developmental purposes, offered as Roderick Macfarquhar opined, ‘a potent combination for development purposes’ (Macfarquhar Economist 6 October 1994). Similarly, Lucian Pye’s Asian Power and Politics concluded that the hierarchical ‘traditions of paternalistic authority in Asia will produce forms of modernized societies different from those known in the West’ (Pye with Pye 1985: 341).

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By the late 1980s, a growing band of commentators asserted that Asian values of legalistic bureaucracy and Confucian deference in emerging South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, traditional practices of merit and status in Thailand and co-operation and consensus building in Indonesia and Malaysia explained Pacific Asian economic dynamism, social order and the capacity to industrialize without incurring undue social dislocation. In a manner reminiscent of the mid-eighteenthcentury China cult, political scientists, politicians and management theorists found East Asian ‘communitarianism’ a prophylactic against the excessive individualism and attendant social breakdown associated with the Anglo-Saxon market liberalism and political neo-conservativism of Thatcher and Reagan. For George Lodge and Ezra Vogel it was the consensus driven ‘communitarian’ societies of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore that possessed a comparative advantage in the increasingly competitive global order of the late 1980s. In this view, ‘competition in world trade is among nations as well as firms, and national governments compete to make their jurisdictions the most hospitable for global production systems’ (Lodge and Vogel 1987: 23). Efficient governments actively engaged in such systems. Indeed, ‘far from being merely a referee they become coach, manager, even a key player’ (ibid). This western managerial thinking that conceived states as enterprise associations fed the amour propre of a number of East Asian technocrats. By the early 1990s, Asian politicians, scholar bureaucrats and their western admirers postulated the comparative advantage of Asian values over the more decadent western variety. From this perspective, promoted both by influential regional autocrats like Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir Mohamad and Jiang Zemin and state managed academics like Chan Heng Chee, Kishore Mahbubani, Noordin Sopiee and Jusuf Wanandi, East Asian understandings of rule, law and obligation evolved separately from western practice and formed the basis of an alternative model of political development. Identifying the ‘characteristics’ informing Asian ‘democracy’ Chan Heng Chee contended these included: ‘the communitarian sense’ which emphasized the ‘common good rather than individual rights’; ‘respect for authority and hierarchy’; and dominant party systems adumbrated by a ‘centralized bureaucracy and a strong state’ (Chan 1993: 21–2). From this perspective, therefore, planned development informed by traditional values modified for developmental purposes shaped the modernization process in Pacific Asia. For its more enthusiastic

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proponents, moreover, this Asian model seemed eminently superior to the decadent western alternative. Kishore Mahbubani asserted that by the 1990s, ‘a major reversal of a pattern lasting centuries’ had transpired. Thus, ‘many western societies . . . are doing some major things fundamentally wrong while a growing number of Asian societies are doing the same things right’ (Mahbubani 1996: 5). So much was this the case that East Asia’s ‘moment in history’ had arrived (103). Indeed, Anwar Ibrahim, in curiously orientalist terms, announced a new ‘Asian Renaissance’. The combination of ‘Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) cohesiveness, economic strength and developing countries’ solidarity’ afforded the ‘confidence to influence the course of world events’ (Ibrahim 1996: 136). Analogously, Mahathir Mohamad and Shintaro Ishihara asserted that ‘the high tide of history’ was ‘returning to Asia’ (Mahathir and Ishihara 1995: 95) as western societies dissolved into ‘incest’ and ‘homosexuality’, directionless ‘flotsam’ adrift on the oceans of the world (80). This Asian version of western declinism received additional academic endorsement from world systems theorists like André Gunder Franke and Immanuel Wallerstein. Franke, in post dependency mode, now claimed that there had only ever been one ‘millenial’ world system in which ‘Europe was marginal and west Asia central’ (Franke and Gills 1996: 21). The brief western ascendancy in this two thousand year old world system had only been the result of premature Eastern decline between 1250 and 1350. Since by the late 1980s the west appeared mired in economic decay, Franke erroneously inferred that this necessitated the return of the world system to its Asian core. This late twentieth century revival of civilizational discourse first promulgated by Spengler and Toynbee received additional impetus when Samuel Huntington, apparently abandoning the third wave of democratization, identified instead a global ‘clash of civilizations’ that was remaking the world order. ‘In the emerging global politics’ of the 1990s, Huntington argued, ‘the core states of the major civilizations are supplanting the two Cold War super powers as the principal poles of attraction and repulsion for other countries. These changes are most clearly visible with respect to Western, Orthodox and Sinic civilizations.’ (Huntington 1996: 155) Huntington, like Franke and Wallerstein arrived at the post Toynbeean conclusion that the sinic world had successfully responded to the western challenge, so much so that ‘the era that began with the Western intrusions of the 1840s . . . is ending, China is resuming its place as the regional hegemon, and the East is coming into its own’ (238). Was this the case?

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China wakes (again) The rise of Asia thesis depended on the assumption that China in the era of its second revolution had embarked on the developmental path initially charted by Japan. Whether this developmental path entailed Discos and Democracy (1989) as Orville Schell contended prior to the debacle of Tiananmen Square, or a single party dominant state promoting a Deng inspired pragmatic market socialism was a matter of intense scholarly and not so scholarly debate after 1978. A brief survey of titles indicates a general faith that China had embarked upon some version of the Asian developmental path and that this development was irreversible. For John Gittings China was changing face (1990), David Goodman found China ‘deconstructing’, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn (1994) considered it ‘waking’, while William Overholt (1993) saw it emerging as ‘the next economic superpower’ and David Shambaugh viewed it evolving into a ‘greater China’ (1995). However, the assumption that China would inevitably assume its rightful place in a new Asiacentric world order received a rude setback when East Asia went from being an economic miracle to needing one, after the financial meltdown that began in Thailand in 1997. The meltdown and its aftermath revealed that what looked like Asian values were, in fact, the more traditional vices of corruption, cronyism and nepotism that facilitated opaque business government relationships and obscure financial practices. Moreover, as Asia uncertainly recovered after 1998, it became increasingly apparent that the Asian developmental model itself was something of a chimera. Indeed, there existed at least two distinctly different models: one that governed internal markets, developed trading conglomerates and captured external markets for manufacturing goods; and another, largely confined to Southeast Asia, that attracted foreign fdi in order to assemble labour intensive manufactures for export to the North American market. In this ersatz and technologyless economy that relied on cheap tourism, cheap labour and short term loans funding long term debt, city states like Hong Kong and Singapore operated as hubs for the operation of overseas Chinese business empires. It was moreover, increasingly evident that post meltdown, Southeast Asian economies like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand looked a lot more fragile politically and economically than their Northeast Asian equivalents. Economic pundits, like William Overholt, blandly contended that ‘in politics as well as economics, China was the beneficiary of successful Asian models’ (Overholt 1993: 11). Yet, it is important to note that

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the late developing Chinese state resembled a particularly large scale variant of the fdi-friendly Southeast Asian model. Indeed, the emergence of Chinese Special Economic Zones (SEZs) after 1978 actually contributed to the loss of foreign interest in Southeast Asia. Moreover, this model lacked the capacity for the long term bureaucratic planning, administrative guidance and state directed conglomeratization that had shaped, for example, Taiwanese and South Korean development. This notwithstanding, the strategy of market Stalinism unleashed a process of rapid change unprecedented in post-revolutionary history. This process, as Gordon White observed, sought to disengage the state from direct economic control while retaining ‘the integument of socialist political ideas and institutions. This project of market socialism thus involved significant change in the developmental aspect of the state, but not in its political aspect’ (White 1993: 6). Unlike the ‘big bang’ approach adopted in the former Soviet Union, the leadership of the CCP reached a near consensus that political democratization would not accompany economic modernization. This policy choice, in fact, accounted for the comparative success of this Chinese model of pragmatic development. Thus Barry Naughton maintains the China case demonstrated that ‘gradual change of a command economy is feasible’ (Naughton 1995b: 311). ‘It matters not whether the cat is black or white’, Deng had remarked in 1980, ‘if it catches mice it is a good cat.’ For observers like Naughton and White, the modification of the Chinese cat from the utopian pursuit of Maoist visions to more mundane mouse catching activities, occurred in two stages. The first step involved a series of institutional reforms, notably the decollectivization of agriculture, reform of the industrial urban sector and a Great Leap Outward to conduct foreign trade and permit foreign investment. Between 1979 and 1983, rural per capita income increased by about 70 per cent. Less immediately successful was the introduction of market mechanisms into the urban–industrial economy. Most significant of all was the creation of four special economic zones on the coast of the south-eastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. The results of the Open Policy dramatically altered the economy of Guangdong and Fujian which witnessed a dramatic increase in foreign investment. However, dramatic growth in this first phase of market opening resulted in bottlenecks developing in key sectors. An absence of financial control, provoked a series of disintermediation crises for the fiscally challenged People’s Bank of China (Naughton 1995a: 1098). As Gordon White observed, the difficult business of ‘riding the tiger’ of economic

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reform exacerbated the problem of democratic transition which according to the dominant social science paradigm must inexorably follow (White 1993: 69; 1994: 73). The felt need for political reform to accompany economic reform provoked a growing conflict in the CCP between conservatives like Li Peng and Jiang Zemin and reformers like Premier Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. Elite dissensus coincided with growing social unrest and political discontent among students and urban elites both within and outside the party culminating in the Beijing massacre of 4 June 1989. Significantly, those operating within some version of the modernization and area studies paradigm in the 1980s seemed initially attuned to the difficulties confronting China’s putative political liberalization. In Politics China (1986) Townsend and Womack considered that ‘although pressures for popular political participation are likely to increase under the modernization model . . . the PRC will remain essentially a party dictatorship’ (419). Similarly although Chinese society had experienced greater autonomy as a result of the social market, China remained, Harry Harding contended, ‘a single party state that systematically suppresses fundamental dissent’ (Harding 1987: 4). Indeed, the post Mao reforms had created a disturbingly ‘mixed economic and political system combining elements of both plan and market and aspects of both political relaxation and authoritarianism’ (283). This both exacerbated the endemic problem of corruption at state and province level and promoted growing inequities of distribution that might ultimately curtail both political and economic liberalization. Tracing the evolution of Chinese Democracy (1985) from the late Qing to the democracy wall movement of 1980, Andrew Nathan remained sceptical about the prospects for eventual Chinese democratization. Indeed, ‘support for pluralist democracy’ seemed weaker in 1985 ‘than when the democracy movement emerged’ at the start of, what other commentators had termed, the late nineteenth-century revolution (1986: 231). Analogously, Orville Schell observed that since 1949, ‘Chinese politics had swung continuously from “left” to “right” oscillating between what the Chinese refer to as the tendency toward either “expanding” (fang), or “contracting” (shou) the boundaries of what was politically permissible’ (1989: 21). Part of the problem for political reform was that party officials viewed ‘democracy as a practical means toward very specific ends, namely modernization, economic well being and perhaps future parity with the world’s great powers’ (30). In terms of the reform agenda, therefore, ‘the Chinese Communist Party looked on democratization more as a vitamin supplement than as a complete meal’ (31). When the

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supplement failed to have the desired effect, a more familiar pattern of Chinese autocracy, informed by the desire to maintain national cohesion in the face of internal and external pressure to democratize, reasserted itself. Thus, the aftermath of Tiananmen witnessed the pyrrhic reassertion of conservative orthodoxy under Premier Li Peng and the new Party Secretary-General, Jiang Zemin. The party elite subsequently attempted to slow the pace of economic reform and reassert the authority of the party state through slogans like yadao yiqie (stability overcomes all) and campaigns of spiritual purification. In Burying Mao (1994) Richard Baum, like Orville Schell, found this uncertain conservatism illustrative of a distinctively Chinese political bipolarity that let go with one hand while tightening up with the other (Baum 1997: 341, see also 1994). Consequently, an anxious attempt to plan development and manage growth, without undermining the central political authority of the CCP politburo characterized the post Tiananmen phase of market Leninism. Given the huge inflows of foreign investment, particularly from East Asia, following Deng Xiaoping’s reaffirmation of the open economic policy during his 1992 visit to southern China, this has constituted an increasingly onerous task. Consequently, after 1989, both reformist and conservative elements in the CCP agreed upon the need to reimpose central authority especially over macroeconomic decisions. Policy reform thus reflected the need to maintain political stability (Nolan and Ash 1995: 986). However, Beijing also had to promote inward investment that paradoxically weakened central control over the regions, which had achieved increasing autonomy, both in terms of revenue gathering and developmental policy (Oi 1995). The local state, it appeared, guided development by the characteristic Asian method of preferential allocation as an inducement for independently-owned firms to conform to state-set strategies of economic growth. Yet, local state bureaucracies were evidently more successful in guiding such allocations when they drew upon foreign capital or expertise to facilitate development. William Overholt commenting on the distinctive structure of Chinese growth conceptualized the coastal takeoff as ‘four joint ventures and their nearby ramifications’ (1993: 43). Indeed, a key factor in the PRC’s post Maoist growth was the serendipitous coincidence of market opening with the appreciation of Northeast Asian currencies, rendering the price of labour in Hong Kong and Taiwan increasingly uncompetitive. The 1980s thus witnessed a movement of labour intensive manufacturing to the Chinese special

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economic zones particularly Fujian and Guangdong. (Xu 1994: 147). Moreover, because of the troubled relationship between the ‘rebellious province’ of Taiwan and the mainland, much of this investment passed through Hong Kong. In fact Hong Kong entrepreneurialism created a southern China growth triangle that embraces Hong Kong, Taiwan and the special economic zones of Fujian and Guangdong. Indeed, the integration of Hong Kong with adjacent Guangdong meant that the area functioned economically as Greater Hong Kong prior to the crown colony’s return to greater China in 1997 (Goodman and Feng 1994: 190). Nevertheless, despite achieving growth in the SEZs comparable with that of the take-off stages of the ‘tiger’ economies of South Korea and Taiwan, ‘new and unsettling signs of socioeconomic malaise’ gripped the middle kingdom in the course of the 1990s (Baum 1994: 377). Spiralling inflation deepened economic disparities between urban worker and peasant exacerbating rural discontent and internal migration. In Guangzhou alone in 1993 ‘an estimated average of 190,000 rural floaters entered the city each day in search of employment’ (Baum 1994: 378). At the same time, cadre corruption and organized crime flourished as the state ambivalently retreated from the market. As Baum concluded in 1994, this data ‘bore vivid testimony to a significantly strained social fabric’ (384). Evidently, as the party state retreated from some but by no means all sectors of the economy, what emerged was not civil society but organized crime, an unstable floating population of youmin and structural corruption that permeated both the party, business government relations and the army. Indeed by the start of the new millennium it was open to question whether incremental reform rather than ‘the big bang’ had been effective in the PRC. This has been particularly evident in policy towards inefficient state owned enterprises (SOEs) that continue to constitute a significant proportion of the Chinese economy. The state sector accounts for 45 per cent of industrial output and, with 107 million workers, provides the CCP with its largest body of support. Central government consequently continues to support loss making state owned coal and petroleum extracting industries. In the mid 1990s political economists like Barry Naughton, David Goldstein and Jean Oi as well as journals like the Far Eastern Economic Review considered it feasible to transform the largest SOEs into Chinese chaebol. Conglomerates like Larry Yung’s CITIC Pacific with its links to the party and its interests in everything from airlines to shopping malls strikingly paralleled similar Chinese economic groupings in Southeast Asia. However, in the wake

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of the Asian financial meltdown what seemed like interesting synergies geared to the requirements of the global economy only turned out to be corrupt, nepotistic and financially questionable. Indeed, by 1998, one in two Chinese SOEs were loss making. Summing up the vicious financial circle that is China’s state owned sector, The Economist maintained that ‘State banks pump their depositors money into SOEs. From there it flows into the coffers of various government branches through taxes and into working capital, but the actual output is of no saleable worth’ (The Economist 30 September 2000). Given this practice the intention of transforming the state sector seemed increasingly ill fated. The fragmentary and erratic development of post Mao China had an analogously uncertain effect on the understanding of Chinese development. Edward Friedman (1994) generalizing the East Asian experience, saw no major impediment to Chinese democratization. Despite the debacle of Tiananmen, it merely required a conjunction of progressive and elite interests to ‘craft’ this necessary and desirable coalition (Friedman 1994: 42–5). Equally, Chris Pattern, retiring from his gubernatorial responsibilities in Hong Kong, anticipated China’s eventual transformation into an open society (1998: 326–8). Similarly, William Overholt found China pursuing the development path already travelled by the NIEs of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. ‘The Asian experience’, Overholt confidently asserted, ‘is that economic success leads inexorably to political reform, but that political reform lags economic reform by a generation’ (Overholt 1993: 80–1). Contemporary China from this perspective was ‘not another Soviet Union, nor the totalitarian state that China was in 1966, but rather a gigantic, vintage 1972 South Korea’ (91). In the same period, which coincided with breathless western admiration of the Asian model, Merle Goldman could identify the ‘seeds of democracy in China’ (Goldman 1994). Kristof and Wudunn anticipated the replacement of the old communist dynasty ‘by a civil society [and] the autocratic emperors by elected presidents’ (1994: 450). Meanwhile, Andrew Nathan, observing the self contradictory character of post-Tiananmen China, nevertheless, considered that ‘economic reform is ushering the rule of law; moderation of individual interest and the post Deng succession is likely to expose the need to find a new basis for legitimizing the regime’ (1997: 218). Ultimately, post Maoist pragmatism had left the problem of the political system ‘unresolved’ (Fewsmitch 1997: 537). Unable to resolve the dissonances in China’s developmental path western scholars instead resorted to paradox. China, it seemed, was both growing in political and economic power and simultaneously exhibiting signs of weakness and

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fragmentation. Nathan contended that these paradoxes might be ‘constitutive of a system in which power is so all-encompassing yet decentralized that the trinity of state, society and economy had become one’ (Nathan 1997: 230). Similarly perplexed by The Paradox of China’s post Mao Reforms, Merle Goldman and Roderick Mafarquhar observed that opening China to the outside world seemed to fulfil ‘the wish of China’s reformers since the late nineteenth century’ of rendering China ‘rich and powerful’ (1999: 25). Yet this dynamic economy had ‘undermined the authority of the political leaders who made it possible.’ There existed, therefore, a growing ‘dichotomy between China’s economic growth and its increasingly fragile party–state.’ Moreover, as long as this contradiction existed, ‘China will be haunted by the spectre of political instability’ (16). The contradictory and varied character of China’s development became an enduring trope of China studies in the 1990s. Thus, Goodman and Segal, uncertainly adapting the postmodernist’s favourite verb, maintained that China Deconstructs (1994). By this they meant that China had ‘changed shape’. Moreover, while China’s political and economic development reflected regional imperatives, this did not necessarily entail either regional separatism or political disintegration (Goodman 1994: 8). It did, however, seem to indicate a growing decentralization of political and economic power that increasingly rent the national fabric (Segal in Goodman and Segal 1994: 342). In this fragmentary context, Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim contended that the Almond–Pye–Verba version of political culture had misunderstood developing China. China had not resolved its identity crisis. In fact, the aftermath of Tiananmen had generated a ‘profound crisis of national self-definition’ (Dittmer and Kim 1993: 257). Meanwhile, a Rand corporation study group on the future of China contended that while China was not necessarily evolving into a major global player neither was it inevitably integrating into the international economy in a way that would ‘propel it toward political liberalization and ultimately democratization’ (Oksenberg, Swaine and Lynch 1999: 507). Undergoing transformation from an agricultural to an industrial, and from a command to a planned market economy, as well as facing a revolution of rising expectations and generational succession, the only certainty about Chinese development seemed to be its uncertainty. Despite the ambiguities troubling post Deng China, its regional and international ambitions nevertheless provoked additional scholarly and western governmental concern. Observing the reconfiguration of the world order in the 1990s, David Shambaugh considered one of its new

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realities to be the emergence of ‘Greater China’ (1995: 1). Here once more, however, the emerging Greater China, with its aspirations to reintegrate Taiwan and assert regional hegemony, exhibited a predictably contradictory character. Indeed, lacking formal institutionalization it seemed to be both an integrative and a disintegrative phenomenon at the same time (Harding 1995: 8–34; Shambaugh 1995: 2). Meanwhile David Goodman and Gerald Segal having deconstructed China now sought to ‘think strategically’ about the ‘implications of a rising China’ (1997: 1). This required attempting to engage China through a structure of international rules, containing China’s irredentist tendencies while ‘making space’ for the PRCs more reasonable claims (5). The contradictory phenomenon of Greater China, thus, seemed to require contradictory policy responses. In an equally obscure vein, Ezra Vogel contended that China was ‘already beginning to act as if it were the major power it is likely to become’ (1997: 18). Seeming to endorse both the emergence of China and the Asian way of diplomacy, Vogel maintained that ‘when the United States confronts Chinese bluster . . . it needs to take a breath before reacting and remember that China will likely at most be a source of problems for America not a threat’ (39).

Nationalism and contradictions with Chinese characteristics at the end of history The contradictions, rather than paradoxes, that increasingly informed western accounts of China’s domestic politics and international relations at the end of the twentieth century strikingly resembled perceptions at the end of the nineteenth century, when China’s economic potential seemed to pose a ‘peculiar’ challenge to the West. China, as Andrew Nathan observed, was waking in the late Qing only subsequently to dissolve into the anarchy of civil war and Mao inspired utopianism. Part of the problem reflected a habitual western tendency to measure events in China by fashionable western ideological standards (White 1994: 73). Nevertheless, it was increasingly evident to most western observers that a central ideological prop of the post-Tiananmen party leadership was not sinified Marxism, but nationalism. In foreign policy terms the growing tension between ‘nationalism and internationalism’ fuelled Chinese irredentism and presented serious implications for ‘the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes’ (Scalapino 1993: 251). Chinese political authority faced an unprecedented crisis after Tiananmen. In order to cope with fragmentation and problems

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of legitimacy, the political leadership increasingly resorted to nationalism. Somewhat perversely, as China became ‘more regionalized and diverse, the political leadership re-emphasizes ideological and political unity’ (Goldman and Macfarquhar 1999: 22). Yet this was not entirely surprising in view of the fact that the Chinese bureaucratic elite from at least the late nineteenth century had been anxiously preoccupied with awakening the narcoleptic masses (see Fitzgerald 1996: 315–48). With the Maoist form of awakening losing credibility and with pragmatism limited in ideological utility, a strident and irredentist nationalism became the obvious legitimatory device for a gerontocracy mired in corruption and confronting political and economic dissolution. In the late 1990s, the new identity politics took the form of a rejection of western values and a reassertion of a strategically reinvented Chinese historical mission. Interestingly both official and unofficial China adopted an increasingly strident occidentalism (Chen 1995). Thus, Chinese scholar–bureaucrats in works like China Can Say No (He et al. 1996) considered western notions of democracy and human rights a devilish strategy designed to subvert national unity and weaken China. In this they merely reflected a wider Asian triumphalism disported in Mahathir and Ishihara’s The Asia that can say no and the prolix meanderings of the Singapore School of reinvented Confucian authoritarianism. In a vein reminiscent of both Mao and Mahathir, Marxist intellectual Gong Shuduo contended in 1995 that ‘western culture is not exported to China for the sake of China’s independence, democracy or prosperity; instead it facilitates military, political and economic invasion’ (Gong in Guo 2000). The evolving critique of western cultural imperialism and the corresponding need to reassert Chinese identity interestingly coincided with the introduction of postcolonial theory into Chinese cultural discourse via the literary journal Dushu in September 1993. Prior to 1993, Chinese academe had remained blissfully unaware of the blandishments of postcolonial thinking. Indeed, during the 1980s the Chinese intelligentsia criticized Chinese traditions and institutions and sedulously advocated western style liberalization. In this they were influenced by the view that modernization required westernization. Post Tiananmen, however, those who continued in their ‘foreign worship’ were criticized for ‘internal orientalism’. Interestingly, the ‘avant garde postcolonialists and anti-western crusaders’ of postTiananmen China had been, during the 1980s, with few exceptions avid westernizers educated in the United States (Xu 1994: 284). Subsequently,

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postcolonial discourse imbibed in Ivy League colleges, constituted the basis for the construction of a fashionable new sinocentric identity politics. Such a perverse reduction of knowledge to power clearly appealed to a decaying autocracy. It necessarily coincided with official pronouncements on the dangers of democratization, yet possessed the additional cachet of being a fashionable western academic orthodoxy. It also coincided with Mao’s strictures on the dangers of ‘internal colonialism’ and peaceful evolution. Indeed, it was through the agency of the CCP translation department (Zhaogong Zhongyang bianyiju) that Said’s thought first entered China. Thus, postcolonial analysis that purported to be both outside discourse and expose the colonialism endemic to western social and political thought ultimately came to legitimate the defence of a ‘subaltern’ national unity whatever the cost in terms of ‘western’ understandings of law and freedom. By a curious process of intellectual transmission, the Maoist notion of the materialism of ideas, refracted through the Ecole Normale Superieur, modified by Edward Said and promulgated by the liberal academic institutions of North America and western Europe returned to China in the form of a postcolonial theory that inspired a state licensed academic assault on the running dogs of orientalism. The latter included inter alia Montesquieu, Hegel, Weber, Marx and Wittfogel as well as J. K. Fairbank and Joseph Needham and more recent area studies specialists. Sinology, in this view, corrupted China. Furthermore, the deconstruction of this western orientalism, it seemed, would also end the west’s long intellectual hegemony. As Jin Guantao explained ‘not only is Western civilization losing its position as the centre of the world, but western learning and theories grounded on western experience will also lose their orthodoxy and hegemony’ ( Jin in Guo 2001). Meanwhile prominent academics at Beijing University confidently announced the arrival of the ‘Age of the Orient’. Paradoxically, such a prognosis relied on evidence deduced from Toynbee’s dubious views on the shape of world history.

Toward a conclusion This clash of values or ideology has both problematically informed the modernization process and sustains the utopic and dystopic prognostications evident in a number of recent works of both an oriental and an occidental provenance. Yet, a central paradox of those who identify orientalism as an ideology is that they confuse the socioeconomic process of modernization with a governmental form, imperialism, that

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is increasingly redundant for the still valid endeavour of investigating how late and late late developing countries move across ‘the big ditch’ (Popper 1950) from tradition to modernity. In this context, the orientalist critique, particularly in its East Asian manifestation, itself came to constitute an ideological or ethical resource upon which late modernizing Asian states draw in order both to defend the political character of their ruling arrangements while at the same time serving as a resource for modifying traditional high cultural understanding to the requirements of late modernity and globalization. In this context, the apparently occidentalist notion of Asian values identified in its initial Confucian manifestation by Du Halde and Voltaire in the eighteenth century enjoyed a mutable history. Traduced in the nineteenth century by both romantic and utilitarian progressives from Herder through the Mills to Marx, they were, at the end of that century, defined by Weber and subsequently reasserted by Myrdal in the 1960s, in a manner antithetical to development. By the early twentieth century, moreover, East Asian reformers from Kang Youwei to Sun Yat sen and Mao Zedong shared this anti-Confucian disposition. Nevertheless, as the social sciences developed various modernization paradigms in the postwar period it became increasingly evident that culture constituted a more enduring variable than previously recognized. While theories that continued to reflect a neo-Marxist, world systems or liberal market provenance continued to insist that all culture was reducible to economics, and modernization led inexorably to democratization, it became increasingly evident in the course of the 1980s that this was not the case. Moreover, the fact that a number of Asian states had successfully developed under a different ethic led once more to a reassessment of Asian values. This in turn enabled a number of East Asian autocrats from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing to maintain that the insistence by western social scientists upon the necessity of democracy complementing growth constituted a new form of colonialism. In this context, they discovered a valuable tool in the form of Said’s theory of orientalism and the subsequent explosion of postcolonial theory. Ultimately, however, this soi disant post ideological style ironically perpetuated a category error familiar in western discourse of Marxist and neo-Marxist provenance. Meanwhile the difficulty for those who link industrialization to a democratizing modernization process is that they share what Jonathan Clark identified in a different epistemological context Old Hat liberal and Old Guard Marxist teleologies of historical development (Clark 1986: 6). The growing awareness that the contingency of historical

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experience and the particularity of cultural expectation promote a contradictory rather than a coherent modernity in late developing East Asia, ultimately exposed a dissonance in the modernization programme. It has become unclear whether these dissonances, uncertainly enveloped by the category of political culture, represent a paradox in the liberal pluralist method or in the developing states they seek to explain or both. To its credit at least the liberal pluralist tradition has a research programme capable of recognizing that this constitutes an enduring hermeneutic difficulty. Finally, those seeking to practice an antiteleological scepticism in tracing China’s ‘curious’, ‘peculiar’ and less travelled developmental path might heed Ernest Gellner’s observation, that ultimately ‘neither the lack of political or intellectual liberty . . . nor the perpetuation of a Confucian family spirit seems bound to inhibit economic performance. Whether we like it or not the deadly angel who spells death to economic inefficiency is not always at the service of liberty. He had once rendered liberty some service, but does not seem permanently at her command’ (Gellner 1994b: 199).

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Notes Introduction 1. Prior to nineteenth-century colonialism, the cultural influence of the Ming and Qing dynasties permeated Korea and Vietnam. Through its tributary relations the Chinese cultural reach also extended over much of Nanyang or what, after 1942, was termed Southeast Asia. At the height of Qing influence, the central kingdom Zhongguo extended its tributary hegemony to Ayudhya Siam, and even as far as Mataram Jogjakarta. 2. Said typically sidesteps Schwab’s work. Thus Said observes that Schwab ‘analyzed comprehensively the oriental renaissance’ in Europe (1950: 137). Yet elsewhere without ever refuting Schwab’s analysis, Said considers the project of an oriental renaissance concealed a ‘very insidious hubris’. (115).

1

East Asia in the Early Modern European Imagination

1. Carry the solitary flame to those false oriental sages/Tell, is it more just/more candid and less vicious / than our Western wisdom? 2. The mission also saw Father Noccolo Longobardo’s more captious assessment of Confucian practice published in his Treatise on some points of Chinese religion (see Gernet 1985: 9). 3. Significantly, it was from this account of Mogul tyranny, rather than the more favourable account of Chinese enlightenment, that Marx subsequently drew for his image of an economically stagnant Asiatic mode of production (AMP). 4. Despite recognizing Voltaire’s tolerance and general opposition to the oriental despotism thesis, Pocock nevertheless convicts Voltaire’s treatment of Chinese civilization as a case of ‘incipient racialism’ (Pocock 1999: 115–16). 5. Bernier, it should be recalled is widely regarded as a founding father of Orientalism because of his more widely known travels through the Moghul Empire.

2

Ambassadors, Economists and Oriental Despots

1. Barrow continued, ‘if the trade of London was exclusively vested in the hands of eight merchants, and if the foreigners who visited its port could neither speak nor write one single word of the language of England, but communicated on every subject with those eight merchants, through a broken jargon . . . it might fairly be questioned, without any disparagement to the merchants of London, if those foreigners would have less reason of complaint than the Europeans have who now trade to China (Barrow 1806: 617). 204

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Notes 205

3

Nineteenth century progress and arrested civilizations

1. Italics in original.

4

Peculiar nation: sinology and the social sciences

1. The successor volume to Latourette’s would be J. K. Fairbank, E. O. Reischauer and A. Craig East Asia Tradition and Transformation (1973) and Fairbank and Reischauer China Tradition and Transformation (1990) which contradict Latourette’s views of the first century of Qing rule reflecting traditional China at its height (ch. 9). 2. In chapter 12, Russell offers an assessment of Chinese character, reminiscent of those written by nineteenth-century missionaries. While predictably reciting the Chinese characterological vices of callousness, cowardice and avarice, Russell contends that ‘the business of saving face’ reflects an ethical code that emphasizes urbanity, compromise and politeness (204–6). 3. The writings of Taoists and Legalists like Han Fei Tzu and Lord Shang, together with later Confucians like Hsun Tzu, were made available by the 1920s in translations by Herbert Giles, J. J. L. Duyvendak and Homer Dubs, through the medium of Arthur Probsthain’s Oriental Series. 4. This, notwithstanding, Needham points out, that Durkheim and Mauss contradicted themselves in describing Chinese classification as intended to regulate men and act as a guide to action, but also ‘not’ to ‘facilitate action, but to advance understanding’ (81). 5. Freud scorned efforts ‘to distinguish between culture and civilization.’ ‘The Future of an Illusion’ in Civilization, Society and Religion, The Pelican Freud Library vol. 12, London: Penguin 1985 p. 184. 6. Such thinking is informed by ‘a naïve belief that the methods of the natural sciences . . . must produce similar results in the social field.’ K. R. Popper The Open Society and its Enemies 1962 vol. 1: 285–6. 7. See E. Gellner The Psychoanalytic Movement. The Cunning of Unreason, London: Fontana 1993 pp. 185–6. Gellner makes the slightly different point that Freud constructed a religion for the neurotic products of modernity and its more specific doctrines are inter alia ‘questionable, unproven and elusive’ (ibid 205). 8. Indeed, Toynbee is perhaps one of the earliest writers to formulate a notion of a postmodern historical condition. See A Study of History 1957 vol. 2: 319. 9. In the abridged two volume A Study of History, Toynbee announces that societies are intelligible fields of study – ‘they are a genus within which our 21 representatives constitute one particular species. Societies of this species are called civilizations.’ (1957 vol. 1: 35). Nevertheless in the synopsis at the end of the second volume we find ‘twenty-three civilized societies’ (vol. 2: 357). 10. Muller added ‘To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic [narrow headed] dictionary or a brachycephalic [broad headed] grammar’ (in Benedict 1942: 12).

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206 Notes

5

Awakening, Arising, Developing and Deconstructing

1. This view somewhat contradicted Rostow’s general understanding, which argued that it was only during the last stage or the ‘age of high mass consumption’ and the drift towards durable consumer goods and services that communist regimes faced ‘difficult problems of adjustment’ (Rostow 1971: 10–12). 2. Somewhat predictably, a recent edition of Marx’s Grundrisse (1993) considered Mao’s contribution to materialist dialectics performed in On Contradiction constituted the standard ‘against which all other writings must be measured’(K. Marx Grundrisse trans M. Nicklaus Penguin: London 1993: 43). 3. Indeed, the French Maoist, Pierre Victor, considered Foucault’s idea of revolutionary justice too ‘radical’ (see Eribon 1993: 247).

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Index absolutism/absolutist government, 21, 22–3, 26, 45, 46, 61–2 Addison, J., 50 agriculture, 26–7, 29, 32, 40, 42, 69, 141, 167–8, 176 collectivization, 178, 184, 193 landholding, 23, 51, 68 Ahmad, A., 4 Alatas, S. H., 44 Alix, P., 15 Almond, G., 12, 153, 158–60 ambassadors, 35, 37, 38–52, 64, 65 American imperialism, 175 American Revolution, 11, 35 American Social Science Research Council, 12, 153–4, 158–60 Amsden, A., 185, 189 Anderson, P., 169 Andreski, S., 87 Anquetil-Duperron, H., 38, 53 Anson, G., 30 anthropology, 2, 50, 122, 137, 140, 159 Anthropometric Laboratory, 92, 95 Apollinian culture, 130 Apter, D., 153 area studies, 166–74 Argens, Boyer d’, 24, 25 Arnauld, A., 18, 29 Aron, R., 122 arrested civilizations, 67–98 art, 28 Aryanism/Aryan myth, 36, 56, 72, 76–81, 82–3, 93, 95, 97, 131, 136, 138 Asian Renaissance, 13, 191 Asian values, 12, 13, 45, 155, 187–91, 192, 202 Asiatic mode of production, 37, 67, 69, 147, 168, 169 Asiatic Society, 8, 53, 54, 57 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 191

atheism, 30 authenticity, 16, 70–6, 131 authoritarianism, 39–41, 106, 176, 186–9, 194, 200 authority, 59, 61–2, 128–9, 162, 165–6, 176, 179 see also paternalism; patriarchy autocracy, 100–1, 114, 156, 170, 183, 189, 195, 201, 202 Bagehot, W., 67, 87, 88–9, 98 Bailla, P., 54 Baran, P., 175–6 Barrow, J., 39–42, 65 Barthes, R., 57 Baudrillard, J., 178 Baum, R., 179, 195–6 Bayle, P., 21 Becker, J., 184–5 Beijing, 194, 195, 201 Bendix, R., 12, 158 Benedict, R., 12, 136–7, 140, 159 Bennett, L. B., 179 Berlin, I., 72 Bernier, F., 22–3, 25, 35, 69, 169 Bhaba, H. K., 2, 6 Binder, L., 12, 148, 154 Biot, E., 57 Blue, G., 38 Blumenbach, J. F., 50, 90 Bluntschli, J. K., 11, 81–2 Boas, F., 136, 137, 140 Bolshevism, 110 ‘Bonzes’, 17 Bossuet, J. B., 18–19, 21 Boulainvillier, H. de, 78 Bouvet, J. (Jesuit missionary), 20 Bowring, J., 11, 43, 45–9, 51–2, 65 Boxer rebellion, 105, 107 Brahmin, 54, 86, 107 Brammall, C., 185 Breuer, J., 126 Broca, P., 92

228


Index Broinowski, A., 140 Buck, J. L., 117 Buck, P., 141–2 Buckle, T. H., 89–90 Buckley, M. J., 30 Buddhism, 15, 34, 106, 122, 124, 168 bureaucracy, 101, 151, 153, 157, 185, 186, 189–90, 200 see also mandarinate bureaucratic authoritarian rule, 176, 188 bureaucratic rationality, 12, 157 Calvinism, 120 capitalism, 9, 10, 120–1, 139, 151, 169, 174–8, 185, 188 castration, 128, 168 Catholicism/Catholic missions, 16, 18, 34, 44, 52, 77–8 Caucasians, 82 Celestial Empire, 23, 40, 61, 75, 101 chaebol, 196 Chalmers, J., 103, 108 Chamberlain, H. S., 11, 82–5, 121, 130, 138, 144 Chan Heng Chee, 190 Chatterjee, P., 6 Chavannes, E., 106, 108 Ch’en, J., 10 Chiang Kai-shek, 133 Chien, Ssu-ma (Xu ma Qian), 168 China characteristics of Chinese, 104–5, 199–201 early nineteenth century understanding, 37–66 impact on European selfunderstanding, 10, 14–36 modernization, 145–203 nineteenth century progress, 67–98 sinology and social sciences, 99–144 Christianity, 15–17, 21, 33–4, 70, 81, 94, 105, 133–4, 142 CITIC Pacific, 196 civil administration, 101 civil society, 186–8, 196, 197 civilization, 52–3, 56–7, 60–1, 64, 65, 191

229

arrested, 67–98 totalizing account, 12, 127–40, 143–4 Clapham sect, 43 Clark, J. C. D., 202 Clarke, J. J., 5, 52, 72 class analysis, 181–3, 184, 188–9 Clifford, J. S., 4 Cohen, P., 135, 171, 172–3, 180–1 Cold War, 143, 146–7, 163, 187, 191 Coleman, J., 153 collective consciousness, 122, 139 colonialism, 118 postcolonial discourse, 1–10, 201–2 Colquhoun, A. R., 99, 100–2, 116, 138 commercialization, 153 communication, 102, 150, 159 Communism, 142, 155, 157–8, 160–3, 169, 173, 181–2, 184, 193–7, 201 communitarianism, 190 comparative politics, 148–66 competition, 114–15, 185, 190 Comte, A., 11, 77, 86–7 concubinage, 40, 45, 49 Condorcet, J.-A. N. de Caritat, Marquis de, 31–2 Confucianism, 11, 13, 54, 59–60, 62, 76, 83–4, 100, 105–7, 109, 112, 139 effect on Europe, 10, 15–23, 25, 27, 29–31, 33–5 ethics, 17, 18, 20–1, 23, 29–31, 33–5, 63–5, 103–4, 106, 120–3, 142 modernization and, 151–2, 163, 165–8, 170–1, 189–90 texts/literati, 10, 17, 22, 27, 33, 43, 120, 124, 151–2 Confucius, 10, 13, 19–20, 22, 25, 34, 41, 103–4, 118, 132 contract theory, 44, 45 Cordier, H., 12, 106–8, 109–10 corporatism, 185 cosmopolitanism, 127 Couplet, P., 13, 15–20, 22, 34 Craig, A. M., 135 Crawfurd, J., 33, 42–9, 51, 64–5, 67, 90


230 Index cultural imperialism, 200 cultural pluralism, 72 Cultural Revolution, 9, 145, 147, 158, 161–4, 166, 172, 174, 177–80, 183–4 culture, 105–7, 112–13, 118–19 civilization and, 70–6, 83–4, 87–90, 150 difference, 12, 125–37, 139–41 modernization, 145, 147, 149–50, 158–64, 170–1, 183 political, 12, 128–30, 137, 147, 158–60, 162, 165–6, 188, 198, 203 custom, 20, 45, 87, 88, 105, 112, 124, 137 cybernetic systems, 149–50, 153, 158, 160, 174 Dallmayr, F., 7 Daoism (Taoism), 84, 103, 118, 122, 131, 132 Darwin, C., 77, 85–7, 90–3, 96 Davis, J. F., 43, 45, 47–9, 51–3, 56, 57–60, 62, 65, 80, 99 de Bary, W. T., 170 de Bonald, L., 78 decentralization, 179, 198 deconstruction, 5, 9, 10 post-Maoist China, 187–91 degeneration, racial, 76–81, 83, 85, 127, 131 Deism, 18 Deleuze, G., 178 de Maistre, J., 78 democracy, 81, 117, 127, 141–2 absolutism and, 61–2 Enlightenment, 75, 78, 143 liberal, 118, 143, 147, 169 modernization and, 146, 150, 156, 169, 181, 194 self-government, 100–1 democratization, 187–91, 194–5, 197, 198, 201–2 Dengism, 162 Deng Xiaoping, 169, 186, 192, 193, 195 dependencia, 174–86 dependency theory, 13, 174–86, 188 de Quatrefages, L. A., 92

Derrida, J., 178 de Sacy, S., 2, 38, 55, 56, 64 despotism, oriental, 11, 22, 26–8, 30, 35, 37, 38–52, 67, 74, 76, 137, 148, 169 Deutsch, K., 12, 149, 150–1 development syndrome, 153–4 developmental paradigm, 114–19 developmental states, 174–86 Asian values and, 187–91 Dewey, J., 12, 117, 118, 143 dialectical materialism, 175 Diderot, D., 31, 32 Dilthey, W., 136 diplomatic missions, 11, 37, 38 Dirlif, A., 4, 6 Dittmer, L., 198 division of labour, 176 Doolittle, J., 102, 104 Douglas, R. K., 107 Du Halde, J-B., 17, 18–20, 23, 24, 34, 202 Dunn, J., 184, 186 Durkheim, E., 11, 98, 118–19, 122–3, 125, 126, 135, 139, 146 Dushu (literary journal), 200 Duyvandak, J. J. L., 140 East Asian in European imagination, 14–36 in Western social/political thought, 1–13 East India Company, 42, 43, 65, 68 Easton, D., 12, 149–50 Eberhard, W., 171 economic dependence, 174–86 economic determinism, 70, 181 economic development, 26, 32, 154–6, 170, 174–86, 187–91, 192–9 economic liberalism, 11, 67 economic radicalism, 43, 47 economics, 27–8 see also political economy Edict of Nantes, 22 education, 60, 94, 118, 179 Eisenstadt, S. N., 152 elites, 158, 166, 172–3, 182, 189, 194 Elman, B., 171 Elvin, M., 167–8


Index Emerson, R., 6 Engels, F., 11, 37, 69–70, 168, 174 Enlightenment, 1, 64, 118 democracy, 75, 78, 143 on historical development, 66, 70–2, 75, 77–8 linguistic discourse, 7, 72, 78 rationalism, 45, 72, 137, 143 Scottish, 42, 50 view of China, 20–2, 25–6, 29–31, 34–6, 38 ethics, 16, 21, 33 Confucian, 17–18, 23, 29, 31, 34–5, 63–5, 103–4, 106, 120–3, 142–3 Ethnological Society, 90 eugenics, 15, 50, 72, 90, 92, 93, 97 Europe East Asia in social/political thought, 1–13 self-understanding, 10, 14–36, 71, 85 evangelism, 43–4, 47, 63, 65, 66 Evans, P., 182–3, 186 evolution of China, 85–96 degeneration problem, 76–81, 83 social Darwinism, 11, 85, 87, 89–90, 95–7, 129 evolutionary social sciences, 11, 44, 85–7, 114–19, 138 Faber, E., 104 Fabianism, 95–6 Fairbank, J-K., 135, 167, 175, 201 family, 31, 116, 119, 120, 152, 171 filial piety, 24, 40, 58–9, 100, 101 famine, 102, 184–5 fascism, 181 Faustian culture, 130 federalism, 45 female oppression, 45 feudalism, 47, 151, 176 Fichte, J. G., 11, 38, 71, 72, 74 filial piety/duty, 24, 40, 58–9, 100, 101 Finlayson, A., 49 ‘Fohist’ superstitions, 15 footbinding, 40, 49, 128 foreign investment, 193, 195

231

Foucault, M., 2, 7, 45, 177, 178 Franke, A. G., 176, 191 Franke, O., 106 Franke, W., 3 free market/trade, 95, 96, 114–15 freedom, 46, 73–4, 168 French Revolution, 11, 35, 183 Freud, S., 98, 119, 126–9, 130, 137, 139, 146 Friedman, E., 172, 189, 197 Fujian, 193, 196 Fukuyama, F., 187 Gadamer, N., 7 Gallie, W. B., 147 Galton, F., 92–3, 95, 97, 98, 119, 121, 138 Galtung, J., 178 Gandhi, L., 6–7 Gellner, E., 8, 169, 203 gemmule theory, 91, 92 gender equality, 9 Germany, 71–2, 81–5 Gernet, J., 14, 34, 164–5, 171, 181 Gilbert, R., 141, 142 Giles, H., 99–100, 103, 138 Gittings, J., 192 globalization, 13, 89, 202 Gobineau, A. de, 11, 77–81, 82–3, 97, 108, 131, 138 Gobineauism, 82–3 Godelier, M., 169 Goethe, J. W. von, 130 Goldman, M., 197, 198 Goldsmith, O., 24, 25, 28 Goldstein, D., 196 Gong Shuduo, 200 Goodman, D., 192, 198, 199 Gorer, G., 137 government, 29, 31, 35, 57, 65, 110–11, 118, 152–3, 172 absolutist, 21–3, 26, 45, 46, 61–2 mandarinate, 23–4, 30, 33–4, 38, 39, 59–61, 86, 106, 131 natural order, 26–8, 153 self, 200–1 surveillance, 62–3 see also bureaucracy; despotism, oriental governors, 33, 47, 51–2, 64, 66


232 Index Gramsci, A., 2 Grand Canal, 41, 42 Granet, M., 12, 123–5, 139, 143 Great Dichotomy, 153, 154 Great Leap Forward, 162–3, 166, 174, 178, 184–5, 193 Great Wall, 42 Grimaldi ( Jesuit missionary), 20 Groot, J. J. M. de, 102–3, 105–6, 121–3 Guangdong, 193, 196 Guattari, F., 178 Guignes, C. L. J. de, 54, 108 Guignes, J. de, 33, 70 Gutzlaff, K., 43, 45, 47, 49–50, 59, 63, 65 Haggard, S., 185–6 Han dynasty, 106, 107, 113, 168 Hannah, I., 107 Harding, H., 194 Hart, R., 111–12 Harvard East Asian Research Center, 135, 161 Hegel, G. W. F., 11, 38, 66, 70–1, 73–5, 76, 143, 201 Hegelianism, 81 Heidegger, M., 7, 131 Herder, J. G., 11, 38, 66, 70–5, 116, 129, 131, 202 Herdtrich, C., 17 hieroglyphs, 54, 57, 71 Hindess, B., 169 Hinduism, 168 Hirst, P., 169 historical determinism, 11 historical materialism, 122, 134, 146, 169 history, 50–1, 140, 202–3 area studies (China), 166–74 Chinese characteristics at end of, 199–201 development (changing image), 12, 99–119, 123–5 development (nineteenth century), 67–98 historical philosophy, 70–3, 85 universal, 125–37 Hobson, J. A., 98, 114–17, 126, 140

Hong Kong, 52, 195–6, 197 Horn, G., 15 Horowitz, D., 175 Huang Tsung-hsi, 170 Huang Xiuchuan, 43 Huc, E. R., 44–5, 52, 57–8, 61–2, 100, 108, 138 Hughes, E. R., 3, 143 Humboldt, W. von, 55–6, 57, 64 Hume, D., 21, 23, 28, 50–1 Huntington, S. P., 12, 13, 148, 153–4, 156–8, 161, 187, 191 Hu Shih, 143 Huxley, J., 114 Huxley, T. H., 96 hydraulic society, 168 hygiene, 42 Ibrahim, A., 191 identity politics, 187, 200–1 ideology, 13, 160–6, 170, 199 Imperial Court, 17 imperialism, 138 cultural, 200 liberal, 65, 115–17 modernization and, 145, 174–5, 180–3, 200–2 new, 114–17 postcolonial discourse, 1–10, 44–5, 65, 144 individualism, 107, 114, 122, 127–8, 169, 170, 190 industrial democracy, 114–15 industrialization, 149, 153, 155, 178, 187–8, 190, 202 industrial revolution, 11, 35 industrial society, 177, 193 industry, 101–2, 114–16, 117, 119 infanticide, 33, 45, 49 information, 149–50 intelligence, race and, 97–8 Intorcetta, P., 17 Isaacs, H. R., 3 Ishihara, S., 191, 200 Islam, 2, 5, 168 Jacoby, A., 142 Jansenism, 18, 21, 29, 34


Index Jesuit mission, 10, 14–22, 23, 28, 29, 33, 34 Jews, 83 Jiang Zemin, 195 Jin Guantao, 201 Johnson, C., 185, 189 Jones, R., 11, 68 Jones, W., 2, 8, 38, 53–4, 55, 56, 64, 70, 73 Julien, S., 53, 103 kairos, 71, 75 Kang Youwei, 96, 109, 202 Kant, I., 70, 71, 74 Kedourie, E., 184 Kennedy, D., 6 Kidd, B., 87, 95–6, 98, 114 Kim, S., 198 Kircher, A., 55, 108 Klaproth, H. J., 53, 54, 108 knowledge, 2, 7, 10, 39, 125, 178, 201 Kristeva, J., 9, 177–8 Kristof, N., 192, 197 Kuhn, P., 171–2 Kuomintang (KMT), 133, 152, 167, 182 labour, 23, 33, 68, 94–6, 102, 116, 192, 195–6 La Bruyere, J. de, 21 land, 26, 32, 67–8, 182 see also agriculture Landes, D., 134 Lane, E., 5 language, 2, 30, 38–40, 118 Confucian texts, 10, 17, 22, 27, 33, 43, 120, 124, 151–2 linguistic development, 55–6, 72, 90, 140 linguistic structure, 7, 20, 29–30, 36, 64–5, 164 philology and, 8, 15, 20, 37, 52–64, 70–2, 78, 108 psychoanalytic theory, 125–9 Lao Zi (Lao Tzu), 103 La Peyrère, 15 Lasswell, H., 12, 128–9, 159 Latourette, K. S., 12, 107, 112, 113

233

Lattimore, E., 135 Lattimore, O., 135, 175 law, 8 rule of, 51, 118, 120, 197 Lawton, L., 111 leadership, 165–6, 174, 184, 193, 200 Le Bon, G., 127, 128, 136 Le Comte, L., 16, 17, 19, 20 legalism, 106, 113 Legge, J. R., 63, 64, 102–5, 121, 139 Le Gobien, P., 19 Leibniz, G. W., 20–1, 70 Lenin, V. I., 174 Leninism, 147, 163, 165–6, 186, 189, 195 Lerner, D., 153 Levenson, J. R., 167 Levy, M., 153, 156 Leys, S., 179 Liang Qichao, 96 liberal democracy, 118, 143, 147, 169 liberal development theory, 148, 170 liberal imperialism, 65, 115–17 liberalism, 47, 202 economic, 11, 67 liberal utilitarianism, 11, 43–9 liberty, 46, 65, 76, 97 Lichtheim, G., 169 linguistic development, see language Li Peng, 195 Lipset, S. M., 187 literature, 24–6, 28, 57, 124, 141–2, 200 local self-government, 100–1 Locke, J., 18, 21, 50 Lodge, G., 190 Luce, H., 133 Macartney mission, 11, 33, 35, 38–9, 42, 107 McDougall, W., 127 MacFarlane, B., 178 Macfarquhar, R., 135, 167, 174, 189, 198 MacGowan, J., 93–4 Mackenzie, J. M., 4–5 Mackerras, C., 10, 45 Mackintosh, Sir James, 58–9 McNeill, W. H., 131, 133, 134


234 Index macrosocial analysis, 180, 182–4, 186 Magian culture, 130 Mahathir, M., 191, 200 Mahbubani, K., 191 Mailla, J. A. M. de Moyriac de, 19, 39 Maine, H. S., 10, 87–8 Malebranche, N., 29–30 Malraux, A., 141–2 Malthus, T., 28, 32–3, 37, 67, 85, 167 Manchu dynasty, 58, 109, 111 mandarinate, 23–4, 30, 33–4, 38, 39, 59–61, 86, 106, 131 Mannheim, K., 125 Maoism, 113, 143, 145, 147, 155, 161–3, 165–6, 170–2, 174, 177–80, 184–5, 193, 200, 201 Mao Zedong, 9, 38, 142, 145, 155–6, 158, 161, 163–6, 168, 171–3, 177–80, 199, 201, 202 Marsden, W., 42–8, 51, 64 Marshall, P. J., 38 Marshman, J., 43, 53 Martini mission, 15, 16 Marx, K., 11, 37, 66, 69–70, 77–8, 87, 98, 146, 168–9, 174, 182, 201, 202 Marxism, 6, 36, 69, 134, 137, 142, 146, 161–6, 169, 171–2, 174–5, 178, 181, 188, 199, 202 Maspero, H., 106 mass media, 153 materialism, 30, 178, 188, 201 dialectical, 175 historical, 122, 134, 146, 169 Mauss, M., 122–3 Mayers, W. F., 101, 116 Mead, M., 137 Meadows, T. T., 43, 45, 51, 56, 58–60, 62, 65, 99–101, 138–9 Medhurst, W., 43–4, 52, 56, 58–9, 62–4, 65, 108 Meiji era, 92, 109 men, see paternalism; patriarchy Mencius, 17, 62, 104, 126 Merton, R. K., 127 Metzger, T., 170–1 Mill, J., 11, 37, 66–9, 114, 202 Mill, J. S., 11, 37, 68, 75–7, 97–9, 146, 202

Mills, C. W., 12, 125 Milne, W., 43 Ming dynasty, 34, 109, 113 miscegenation, 54, 80–1, 91, 92, 97 missions/missionaries, 10, 11, 37, 43, 47, 63–4, 65, 104, 138–9 see also Jesuit missions; Macartney mission Misson, M., 23, 25 modernity, 13, 129, 133, 137, 138, 202 modernization, 7, 12, 13, 81, 118–19, 135 in contemporary social/political science, 145–203 paradim, 148–66 Molinists, 18 monarchical rule, 21, 22 Mongols, 109 monopoly behaviour, 47 Montesquieu, Louis Secondat, Baron de, 30–3, 41, 50, 51, 201 Moore, B., 13, 181–2, 186 Moore, C., 157, 161 moral authority, 165, 179 see also paternalism; patriarchy morality, 16, 49, 54, 57, 71, 75 Confucian, see Confucianism filial duty, 24, 40, 58–9, 100, 101 natural order, 26–8, 153 Morrison, R., 43, 49–50, 52–4, 56, 63 Morse, H., 110–11 Moulder, F., 180–1 Muller, A., 20 multiculturalism, 51, 72 Munro, D., 163–4 Murray, H., 43, 49, 52, 57 mutual responsibility, 62, 142 Myrdal, G., 154–5, 189, 202 Nathan, A., 194, 197, 199 nation-states, 158, 183 national characters, 158–9 national identity, 154–5, 158–9 nationalism, 6, 78, 119, 158, 162, 183, 199–201 Boxer rebellion, 105, 107 Kuomintang, 133, 152, 167, 182 xenophobia, 2, 29, 39, 105, 143


Index natural order, 26–8, 153 natural selection, 85–7, 90–3, 95–7, 114, 138 Naughton, B., 193, 196 Needham, J., 12, 134, 201 neo-classical approach, 188, 189 neo-Confucianism, 112, 170, 171 neo-Marxist theories, 13, 146–7, 169, 174–5, 181, 187, 202 Niebuhr, B., 72 Nietzsche, F., 82, 130 normative modernization, 149–50 obedience, 88, 100, 127 see also filial piety/duty Occident/occidentalism, 4, 13, 107, 108, 112, 114, 200, 201 O’Donnell, G., 176, 188 Oedipus, 165 Oi, J., 185, 196 Old Testament, 15, 16 O’Leary, B., 168, 169 Open Policy, 115, 193 Opium Wars, 38, 68 orientalism, 1–10, 13, 56, 69, 145, 178, 201, 202 see also despotism, oriental other/otherness, 2, 7, 8, 137, 140, 141, 145 Overholt, W., 192, 195 Pan, L., 140 Parsons, T., 12, 146, 148–9, 151–2, 154 Pascal, B., 18 paternalism, 31, 165–6, 189 patriarchy, 9, 40–1, 63, 75, 94, 100, 120 Patten, C., 197 Pauw, C. de, 41, 54, 70, 108 Payne, R., 141, 142 Pearson, C., 95 peasant revolutions, 174–86 Peck, J., 175 Pellisier, R., 179 People’s Bank of China, 193 People’s Liberation Army, 147 Peyrefitte, A., 38, 39 philology, 8, 15, 20, 37, 70–2, 78

235

sinology and, 52–64, 108 philosophes, 26, 34, 75, 118, 177 philosophy, historical, 70–3, 85 physical law, 26–7 physiocracy, 26–9, 32, 35 physiology, 91–3, 97, 119, 123, 126, 129 political culture, 12, 128–30, 137, 147, 158–60, 162, 165–6, 188, 198, 203 political economy, 26–8, 32, 37, 40, 47, 53, 67–9, 146, 176–8, 185, 187 political modernization, 145–203 political system, 149–51, 153–4, 156, 173, 181 politics comparative, 148–66 East Asian (Western view), 1–13 identity, 187, 200–1 polygamy, 45, 49, 51 Pope, A., 50 Popper, K., 87 population, 32–3, 85, 111–12 positivism, 85, 86 postcolonial theory, 1–10, 13, 44–5, 47, 50, 77, 141, 144–6, 179, 200–2 postmodernism, 7, 198 poststructuralism, 5, 6, 126, 145, 178 Powell, B., 12 power, 164, 165, 201 production, 178 Asiatic mode, 37, 67, 69, 147, 168–9 see also industrialization; industry progressive development, 67–98 property rights, 42–3, 46–7, 51, 65, 68, 114 protectionism, 115 Protestantism, 11, 16, 17, 33–4, 43, 47, 64, 94, 102, 120–1, 138, 143 psychoanalytic theory, 5, 6, 126–7, 128–9, 137, 139 psychology, 91–3, 97, 123, 126–8, 159, 162, 165 psychotherapy, 125–37 Pye, L., 12, 137, 153–4, 158–65, 180, 189


236 Index Qianlong, 35, 38 Qing dynasty, 34–5, 58, 76, 96, 106–7, 112–13, 139, 166, 170–2, 194, 199 Qin shi huang di, 15 Quesnay, F., 23, 26–8, 35, 75, 143 Quetelet, L., 90–1 Quilty, M., 44 race Aryanism, see Aryanism/Aryan myth degeneration, 76–81, 83, 85, 127, 131 racism, 44–5, 47–8, 50, 97, 119, 136, 140–1 yellow race, 9, 76–81, 93–6, 140–1 see also eugenics; nationalism; natural selection; social Darwinism; xenophobia racial apotheosis (Germany), 81–5 racial determinism, 77–9, 85, 93, 138–9 sinology and, 11, 96–8, 136 Raffles, T. S., 33, 42–4, 46–8, 51, 69, 155 rationalism, 45, 65, 72, 120, 137, 143 rationality, 25–6, 28, 29, 35 bureaucratic, 12, 157 rationalization, 153 Red Guards, 179 Reformation, 16 Regis, J. B., 22 Reischauer, E. O., 135 religion, 41, 125 Buddhism, 15, 34, 106, 122, 124, 168 Catholicism, 16, 18, 34, 44, 52, 77–8 Daoism, 84, 103, 118, 122, 131, 132 Islam, 2, 5, 16 Jansenism, 18, 21, 29, 34 see also Christianity; Confucianism; Protestantism Remusat, A., 53, 54–7, 73, 103 Renan, E., 2, 5, 8, 37, 56, 60, 65, 108 Renaudot, E., 29 revolutionary parties, 157

Ricardo, D., 37 Ricci, Matteo, 14–15, 17, 18, 19 Richards, A. I., 12, 126, 128, 140, 143, 164 Rieff, P., 128 ritual, 124, 125, 151 Roberts, M., 175 Robinson, J., 178–9, 185 Robison, R., 189 Rohmer, S., 141 Romanticism, 8, 35–6, 65, 85, 174 authenticity and, 70–6 Ross, E. A., 93–4, 98, 121 Rostow, W. W., 146, 155–6, 187 Roth, G., 119 Rougement, F., 17 Rousseau, J-J., 71, 74, 104 Royal Asiatic Society, 8, 53, 54, 57 Rozman, G., 161, 173 Rueschemeyer, D., 182–3, 186, 188 Ruggieri, M., ( Jesuit missionary), 14 rule of law, 51, 118, 120, 197 Russell, B., 12, 117–18, 140, 143 Russian Revolution, 183 Rustow, D., 153, 154 Said, E., 2, 3, 4–5, 7–9, 45, 56, 69, 126, 144, 178, 201, 202 Sardar, Z., 1, 7 Sawer, M., 169 Scalapino, R., 166 Schaal, A., 17 Schell, O., 192, 194, 195 Schelling, F. W. J., 38 Schlegel, F. von, 11, 38, 55–6, 66, 70–6, 108 Schmitter, P., 188 Schram, S., 163, 165, 166, 172 Schurmann, F., 163 Schwab, R., 7–8, 52, 53, 72 Schwartz, B., 162–3, 172 science, 2–3, 8, 44, 73, 87, 133–4 Scottish Enlightenment, 42, 50 secularization, 153, 160 Segal, G., 198, 199 Segalen, V., 140 self/selfhood, 164, 165, 170 self-government, 100–1 self-realization, 71, 74, 75


Index self-understanding Chinese, 109, 113, 135, 140, 164 European, 10, 14–36, 71, 85 Shambaugh, D., 192, 198–9 Shils, E., 146, 148, 158 Silhouette, E., 23 Singapore, 51–2, 197 Singapore School, 200 single party system, 157–8, 161, 192 Sinic society, 132, 191 sinology, 10, 19, 38–9, 41, 179, 201 philology and, 52–64, 108 racial determinism and, 11, 96–8 social sciences and, 99–144 Skinner, G. W., 172 Skocpol, T., 13, 180, 182–4, 186 slavery, 45, 46, 47, 51 Smedley, A., 141, 142 Smith, A., 23, 28, 32, 37, 38, 50, 67 Smith, A. H., 102, 104–5 Snow, E., 141–2 social change, 183 social Darwinism, 11, 85, 87, 89–90, 95–7, 129, 136, 138, 139 Social Science Research Council Committee, 12, 153–4, 158–60 social sciences China’s modernization in, 145–203 evolutionary, 11, 44, 85–7, 114–19, 138 sinology and, 99–144 social systems, 148–9, 151–2, 154, 169 socialism, 70, 95–6, 119, 173, 177–9, 192–3 socialization, 137, 160, 165 Socrates, 19, 168 Sollers, P., 9, 177, 178 Solomon, R., 164–5 Soothill, W., 63–4, 102, 103, 105, 121 South Korea, 197 Special Economic Zones (SEZs), 193, 196 Spence, J., 142, 167, 174 Spencer, H., 11, 77, 85, 87–8, 91–2, 95–8, 119, 123, 138 Spengler, O., 12, 119, 129–31, 133–4, 136, 191

237

Spivak, G. C., 2, 6 Stalin, J., 168, 179 Stalinism, 147 state owned enterprises, 196–7 Staunton, G., 39, 52–3, 58–9, 65 Stephens, E. B., 188 Stephens, J. D., 188 Stokes, E., 43 structural functionalism, 114–19, 139, 148, 150–1, 153 subaltern perspective, 5, 6–7, 9, 148, 201 Sung dynasty, 109, 112, 170 Sun Yat Sen, 109, 202 surveillance, 62–3 Swift, J., 50 symbols/symbolism, 54, 124, 125, 151, 152, 164, 171 syncretism, 33, 34, 131 Taiping rebellion, 62, 70, 110–11 Taiwan, 195, 196, 197, 199 Tang dynasty, 120 Taoism, 103, 106, 113, 118, 121, 124 Tartars, 54, 58 Tawney, R. H., 117, 140 technocrats, 189, 190 technology, 132–3, 139, 169 Teggart, F. J., 12, 140 Tel Quel (journal), 9, 145, 177, 178 Teutonic race, 83 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 21 Tiananmen Square, 147, 192, 195, 197–8 Tocqueville, A. de, 11, 75–6, 97–8 Toland, J., 18, 21 totalitarianism, 69, 160–1, 168–9, 170 Townsend, J., 157–8, 161, 194 Toynbee, A., 12, 119, 129–34, 139, 140, 146, 191 trade, 10–11, 32, 35, 47, 48 East India Company, 42, 43, 65, 68 free market, 38, 52, 68–9, 95, 96, 114–15 tradition, 35, 61–2, 151–3, 155, 157, 159–61, 163, 165–7, 173, 180, 190 Treaty of Nanjing, 52 Trigault, N., 14


238 Index Turgot, A. R. J., 23 Turner, B. S., 4 Twitchett, D., 135, 167 Tylor, E. B., 11, 88, 123, 138 United Nations Economic Commission, 176 universal history, 125–37 urbanization, 153 utilitarianism, 36, 37, 45, 52 Valery, P., 1, 37, 140 values Asian, 12, 13, 45, 155, 187–92, 202 transmission of, 149, 150, 152 Vauban, M., 23 Verba, S., 158 Vico, G., 70, 72 Victor, P., 177 Vietnam War, 180 Vogel, E., 190, 199 Voltaire, 14, 21, 24–6, 28, 50, 75, 143, 202 voluntarism, 164, 187 von Bulow, B. H. F., 82 von Justi, J. H. G., 23 von Richtofen, F., 101 Vossius, I., 15 Wade, R., 185, 189 Wade, T. F., 103 Wagner, R., 82 Waley, A., 140 Wallace, A., 96, 114 Wallace, W., 49 Wallerstein, I., 176–7, 180, 191 Weale, P., 141 wealth, 26, 27, 28, 32–3

Webb, B., 96 Webb, J., 15 Webb, S., 96 Weber, M., 11, 13, 98, 118–24, 126, 135, 139, 146, 170, 189, 201, 202 Wen Xiang, 111 Wheelwright, E. L., 178 White, G., 185, 193–4 White, T., 142 Whitehead, L., 188 Wilkins, J., 29 Williams, D., 9 Williams, S. W., 43–4, 45, 56, 58–9, 62–4, 65 Wittfogel, K. A., 168–9, 170, 201 Wittich, C., 119 Wolff, C., 23, 25, 26, 70 Womack, B., 161, 194 women, 9, 40, 45, 49, 128, 177–8 world-economy model, 180–1 World Bank, 178, 185–6 world systems theory, 176–7, 180, 182–3, 186–8, 191, 202 Wright, M., 167 Wudunn, S., 192, 197 Wu Ti (Wu di), 168 Xavier (Jesuit missionary), 17 xenophobia, 2, 29, 39, 105, 143 yellow race, 9, 76–81, 93–6, 140–1 Yenan Way, 183 Yen Fu, 96 Young, R., 2, 6 Yung, L., 196 Zhang Zi (Chuang Tzu), 103, 118 Zhu Zi (Chu Hsi), 59

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