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Struggle vs. Harmony: Symbols of Competing Values in Modern China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Arthur F. Wright
Arthur F. Wright
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

TRaditional China was characterized by a remarkable homogeneity of mores, institutions, and values. In this it resembled the simpler societies in which, as Maclver has pointed out, the institutions are in broad accord with the mores, and one system of values prevails, being reaffirmed in every aspect of life. During the past hundred years, China's perdurable synthesis of doctrines and institutions has been slowly but certainly undermined. While the impact of the Western powers and Western technology forced the modification of Chinese institutions, the subtle penetration of Western ideas altered or destroyed every long-accepted value. The past century of China's history can be seen as a continuous struggle to regain its ancient homogeneity. That century is marked by repeated attempts to create groups of modified institutions to meet the challenge of Western power, together with groups of modified values which, it was hoped, would support the new institutions and check the spread of divisive Western ideas. These efforts failed, and with each failure more and more traditional institutions and values were abandoned as incapable of existing in amalgam with Western elements. In this process, different social groups reacted differently to the persisting appeal of the old and the attraction of the new and, in so reacting, further undermined the old synthesis of values and institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , October 1953 , pp. 31 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1953

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References

1 Legge, James, The Chinese Classics, Oxford, 1893, I, pp. 384–85.Google Scholar

2 Kirchner, Walter, “Mind, Mountain, and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XI (October 1950), p. 429.Google Scholar

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5 Ibid., pp. 133–34.

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7 These are very tentative suggestions of a qualitative change; the study of such changes in doctrinal emphases might well suggest long-term trends in the development of Communist China, adjustments and shifts of policy for which such changing emphases would be the preparation and justification.

8 Lun kung-ch'an-tang-yuan ti hsiu-yang, first given at Yenan in July 1939. Translation by the Foreign Languages Press, Peking, October 1951, from the December 1949 edition of the Hsin-hua shu-tien; reprinted in Current Background (hereafter CB), No. 159 (January 31, 1952), compiled and issued by the American Consulate General, Hongkong, p. 18. Cf. also Compton, Boyd, Mao's China, Seattle, 1952, pp. 108–55.Google Scholar

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10 “On Intra-Party Struggle,” CB, No. 105, p. 3.

11 Chinese thinkers, from very early times, had a concept of the oscillation of positive and negative forces in natural phenomena, and were thus not committed to any notion of a static universe. To relate this “dialectic” to that of the Marxists would involve a lengthy discussion not appropriate to this article.

12 Cf. CB, No. 105, p. 5; and Compton, , op.cit., pp. 188–238.Google Scholar

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19 New China News Agency translation of his speech of November 24, 1951; CB, No. 156 (February 5, 1952) p. 31.

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22 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

23 Mao Tse-tung, “In Opposition to Liberalism,” in Compton, , op.cit., p. 187.Google Scholar

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25 Cf. Forke, Alfred, Geschichte der neueren chinesischen philosophie, Hamburg, 1938, pp. 575–97.Google Scholar

26 On People's Democratic Dictatorship, 3d ed., Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1950.

27 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

28 Cf. “On Contradiction,” CB, No. 202 (August 15, 1952), p. 23. Marx, though not consistent in his expressed views, says, at one point: “The abolition of the state has meaning only for Communists, as the necessary result of the abolition of classes, with which the necessity of the organized force of one class for the suppression of other classes falls away of itself.” Quoted in Bloom, Solomon, “The 'Withering Away' of the State,” Journal of the History of Ideas, VII (January 1946), p. 114.Google Scholar

29 “On the Training of a Communist Party Member,” CB, No. 159, p. 19.