Whither China? Its Cultural Destiny

“Traditional Chinese culture deserves its due attention” “We should conform to the trend of the times”—in lieu of a Foreword

by Liang Peikuan

Three years ago, in 2010, when this book first came out, it had neither “Preface” nor “Postscript.” However, that does not mean the compiler had nothing to say by way of an Introduction or Foreword. Now that the book is reprinted, a few words are appended here, in lieu of a Foreword.

Meanwhile, I was told by the publisher that this small booklet of barely 100,000 Chinese characters has so far been reprinted a total of twelve times, to the pleasant surprise of both the publisher and myself. As a happy coincidence, two visitors who came to my house yesterday also mentioned this latest publication, and rather enthusiastically at that. One of them, chief director of a film and TV studio, said she bought a total of sixty copies, to be distributed among friends. The other, a professional committed to the restoration of China’s rural ecology, said that she had successively bought more than a hundred copies of the book and had sent these as gifts to young university student volunteers working together with her. These encouraging words persuaded me that I need to say a few words about what has been published.

Please note: Up to now, the two collections, namely “China and the West: Two different paths of social evolution” (PART II of this book, henceforward abbreviated as “China and the West”) and “The need to bring into union China’s strengths and foreign strengths” (PART III of this book), published here in this book, have not yet made it into The Complete Works of Liang Shuming.

First, a few words about “China and the West.” The text was first published in 1942 in the May–June issue of the journal Thought & Culture (based in Chengdu). In September 1944, it was reprinted by the Zhongzhou Press (based in Chongqing) in the format of a small booklet. But these were stories of prewar years published 70 years ago, before the Japanese surrendered.

After a narrow escape from Hong Kong, my father journeyed back to Guilin in early February 1942. Then, in September 1944, he was forced to flee to Zhaoping by the Japanese incursion from Hunan into Guangxi. Accordingly, his withdrawal from public life in and around Guilin lasted about two and a half years. During this period, he was doing less advocacy for a Nationalist–Communist alliance for war against Japan and less routine work for the China Democratic League. Instead, he was concentrating on lecturing and writing, especially his writing of The Essence of Chinese Culture (Zhongguo wenhua yaoyi 中国文化要义), to which he devoted the lion’s share of his time and energy. Thus, it is highly probable that he composed “China and the West” shortly after he arrived at Guilin.

The full title, “China and the West: Two different paths of social evolution”, itself makes the theme obvious: Owing to the different paths of social evolution taken in China and in the West, different social organizational structures ensued.

The themes of The Essence of Chinese Culture (first published at the end of 1949) and of “China and the West” exactly coincide. The Essence of Chinese Culture also deals with the progression of China’s history over more than a thousand years. It concludes that the Chinese coordinated society by means of ethics, and that they have seldom deviated from this initial pattern. The West, in sharp contrast, has organized societies by group life, or the collective way, that are often based on differences in religious, political (national, class, etc.), or economical setup, with eternal and constant opposition, competition, confrontation, and struggles between and among them.

Thus, we can see that “China and the West” and The Essence of Chinese Culture are treatments of the same issue. They differ only in that the first work was written earlier (while the author was in Guilin in 1942) and the second later (in 1949, while the author was living in the district of Beibei 北碚 of Chongqing); in comparison, the earlier work was briefer and relatively more crude, while the latter work was much more refined, with deeper analysis.

Based on what I have researched and discovered during the past 2 or 3 years concerning “China and the West”, I can testify that this is the first reprint of the article published 70 years ago. Simply because it was published during the turmoil of war, its accessibility was highly restricted. I doubt whether even my father had a chance to see the initial publication in proper format, and that is what anybody can guess. When a copy turned up at the Shanghai Library much later, in 1996, The Complete Works of Liang Shuming had already been printed, and so “China and the West” has remained outside the corpus until now. So, to readers of today, this is its de facto first publication. That might account for readers’ passion for “China and the West” when it was published in this book.

Now something about PART III: “The need to bring into union China’s strengths and foreign strengths.” The title says almost everything, so its gist warrants no reiteration here. It is worth pointing out that this part was first of all a record of my father’s lecture at Beibei in 1949 and was published as a small booklet shortly thereafter by the Beibei Administrative Bureau.

As for PART I, “The spirit of the Chinese culture,” it is largely an excerpt of pieces from The Essence of Chinese Culture. So, the three parts of this book together zoom in on an essential feature of the old Chinese society, that is, social coordination by means of ethical principles, from a variety of perspectives, like, Did China have a religion? What has been its national spirit? Were class hierarchies apparent or not? Did China resemble a modern nation-state? Was China lacking in democracy in terms of politics? Did the Chinese excel in personnel administration to the neglect of physics or the sciences?, etc.

Only by knowing the old China can we hope to build a new one, and needless to say, it is essential to be clear about the characteristics of the old Chinese society.

Lastly, I wish to add a note on an interview that my father gave shortly before he passed away.

The date was May 17, 1988. The venue: a ward of the Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, with my father lying in bed. The interviewer was a journalist from Taiwan, Miss Yin Ping 尹萍 of Global Views Monthly. As the patient was extremely weak, their conversations were likewise extremely short, as follows: