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.Rather, Mao called for a highlyinclusive mass politics  a  great union of the popular masses to undertakethorough reform.Why is the great union of the popular masses so terribly effective?Because the popular masses in any country are necessarily morenumerous than the aristocracy, the capitalists and the other powerfulpeople in a single country.& If we truly want to achieve a great union& we must necessarily have all sorts of small unions to serve as its foun-dation.The human race has an innate talent for uniting together &peasants, workers, students, women, primary-school teachers, rickshawboys and others of all sorts.&The more profound the oppression, the greater its resistance; thatwhich has accumulated for a long time will surely burst forth quickly.12Perhaps the germs of class struggle are here, but so is a conviction in thefundamental unity of the Chinese people and, indeed, of international broth-erhood.In this, Mao was echoing Kang Youwei s cosmopolitan utopianism. 178 Nationalism and revolution, 1919 37The cautious and piecemeal liberalism of Hu Shi, resting on a morepessimistic if not cynical view of human nature, had little patience for writ-ings like Mao s.In fact, Mao would later complain that the major figures atBeida, like Hu, snubbed him.We will return to Mao.Nor was this the last ofHu Shi.Yet some of the weaknesses of liberalism faced in China shouldalready be clear.Above all, liberals, with their abhorrence of violence andmilitarism, had no way to suggest how the reformist programs they favoredcould be executed.As long as warlords and foreign powers controlledChina, they wielded veto-power over any attempts to ameliorate the situa-tion.As well, liberalism lacked a social base.A liberal political systemdepends on a liberal society based on procedural consensus.Political losershave to be prepared to wait and make their case again, and political winnershave to be prepared to give them that chance.As many observers noted,China s bourgeoisie or middle class was small and weak.Perhaps politicalconsensus might have emerged from a stable rural society, but the Chinesecountryside was far from stable.Endemic violence made liberalism irrele-vant.For although liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism andproperty rights, seems to negate the state, it actually depends on a strongcivil society coinciding with a strong state able to monopolize violence.Still, Chinese liberalism should not be underestimated either.Prominentliberals and their followers basically dominated the worlds of education,journalism, publishing, and perhaps even commerce.Not only were a fewwarlords sympathetic to reform, but also the limitations of warlord poweroften presented interstices within which the liberals could work.Thus coulda Cai Yuanpei become president of Beida.Forced to compromise with thepowers-that-be, whether of the right or, later, the left, liberals acknowledgedthe righteousness of nationalist concerns, at least parts of Confucianmorality, and peasant uprisings, without losing their essential respect for theindividual or limited government. Science versus metaphysics and modern ChineseconservatismIf many of China s students became disillusioned with Wilsonian liberalismin the wake of World War I, turning to the left, others were disillusioned bythe war itself and rediscovered Confucianism.Liang Qichao, for one, foundhis faith in progress challenged.If the West represented a better future, thenhow had it collapsed into insane warfare? Visiting Europe in 1919, he metthe anti-positivist, intuitionist philosopher Henri Bergson, and concludedthat Europeans  have dreamt the dream of the omnipotence of science, buttoday they are declaring the bankruptcy of science. 13 Bergson, who alsoappealed to Li Dazhao, emphasized the limitations of rational thought.Rationality was a useful tool, he said, but insufficient to grasp the ceaselessflux of the universe.Only intuition or the unconscious and disinterestedmind can do that and also allow the self to attain freedom.For Liang, National identity, Marxism, and social justice 179Bergson and other critics of Enlightenment rationalism confirmed his sensethat the Chinese tradition had something to offer China and the world.Chinese thought did not have all the answers, but its humanism couldcomplement the technological successes of the West.Liang particularlyfocused on the Confucian Mencian ideal of ren, compassion.In contrast toWestern competitiveness, he said, ren taught harmony and compromise.Liang s ultimate vision was an amalgamated universal culture to whichvarious civilizations would contribute.It is worth noting that BertrandRussell, no friend of intuitionism, shared this composite view of a newworld civilization.After his successful May Fourth speaking tour of China,Russell wrote:  The distinctive merit of our civilization, I should say, is thescientific method; the distinctive merit of the Chinese is a just conception ofthe ends of life. 14In 1923 certain Chinese thinkers mounted a direct attack on science sinability to answer the important questions.Science was analytical, objective,and useful for solving practical problems.But ultimately more importantwas  philosophy of life : understanding the human experience.Philosophyof life was the opposite of science: synthetic, subjective, and with moralconcerns.Zhang Junmai (1886 1969) frankly laid out the heart of the issuein East-versus-West terms [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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