Understanding Chinese Liberalism and Marxism in the 1930s

Organizer: Xiaoqing Diana Lin, Indiana University Northwest

Chair: Yu Shen, Indiana University Southeast

Discussant: Yung-Chen Chiang, DePauw University

The three panelists seek to explore the rich complexity and overlapping of different camps of Chinese thought in the 1930s. The Chinese intellectual scene diversified in the 1930s in response to the difficulty of the 1920s’ New Culture Movement (NCM) that had attempted to interject liberal democratic values into Chinese society and culture and to the looming confrontation with Japan. While some reform-minded intellectuals turned to the left and embraced Marxism, others tried to resurrect NCM and its original goals of liberalism and democracy. The division between liberalism and Marxism, however, was not definite. Chen Boda, Feng Youlan, Hu Shi, Lin Yutang, and Lu Xun—people who will be examined by the panelists, either crisscrossed intellectual camps or actively engaged in intellectual dialogues with other camps. Understanding liberalism in the 1930s and its connection to and difference from Marxism, as well as understanding the complexity of Chinese Marxism in the 1930s, is an important topic that this panel seeks to explore.

  Shiping Hua, in his "Chen Boda in the New Enlightenment Movement (1936)," discusses the nature of the New Enlightenment Movement (NEM) and its agenda "democracy, science, nationalism, and the mass line" as proposed by Chen Boda. In his "Enlightenment and National Salvation: the Politics of Liberal Nationalism--Lin Yutang, Hu Shi and Lu Xun," Qian Suoqiao explores diverse meanings of liberalism as represented by the differing political attitudes of Lin Yutang, Hu Shi and Lu Xun in the 1930s. In her "An Alternative Approach to Marxism in the 1930s: Feng Youlan and the Search for ‘Society,’" Xiaoqing Diana Lin explores the complex approaches to Marxism by focusing on Feng Youlan’s acceptance of a Marxist sociological explanation of society counterbalanced by his steadfast adherence to neo-Platonic ontology.

Shiping Hua, University of Louisville

A contemporary Chinese scholar recently argues that the future political culture in China should be founded solidly on the four pillars: Democracy, Science, Nationalism, and Popularism. He acknowledges that these four elements first appeared during the New Enlightenment Movement in 1936. However he fails to point out that Chen Boda* was the one who proposed these four essentials for remolding Chinese political culture.

  The New Enlightenment Movement inherited "democracy" and "science" from the New Culture Movement of the 1920s and early 30s. Anticipating a protracted and full-scale war with Japan and critical of the NCM’s elitist orientation, leaders of the NEM expanded the NCM’s original agenda with two more ingredients: "nationalism" and "the mass line" or "popularism" to boost Chinese nationalistic sentiment and to draw attention to the "masses."

  This paper will describe the circumstances under which these four elements were raised during the NEM and Chen Boda’s role in the movement. It will also make a connection between the proposed ideas in 1936 and the current interest in resurrecting these ideas. What is fascinating is that these four pillars still appeal to the reform-minded intellectuals in China today. To them they (democracy, science, nationalism, and popularism) hold promise for remolding China’s political culture.

  * Chen Boda (1904-1989) joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1924. Having served as Mao Zedong’s political secretary during the Yanan years, Chen was recognized as one of Party’s main theoretical workers after 1949. However, his prominence ended in 1970 when he disappeared from the political scene. Later he was accused of being a member of the Lin Biao and then Jiang Qing cliques.

Enlightenment and National Salvation: The Politics of Lu Xun, Hu Shi and Lin Yutang in the 1930s
Qian Suoqiao, City University of Hong Kong, China

Li Zehou once put forward a most influential thesis to account for the historical trauma of modern China that culminated in the Cultural Revolution. According to Li, the modern Chinese project of Englightenment as represented in the New Culture Movement was hijacked by the call for "national salvation" as embraced by nationalism as well as socialism which anticipated the authoritarian collectivism of the Cultural Revolution. But instead of pursuing a historical examination of the intricate relationship between liberalism and nationalism in the modern Chinese context, Li’s thesis ends up with an ahistorical and transcendental observation that the madness of the Cultural Revolution was somehow induced by the so-called feudalist legacy of traditional Chinese culture. By examining comparatively the political attitudes of Lu Xun, Hu Shi and Lin Yutang against the socio-political context of China in the 1930s, this paper will first acknowledge the modernity of the Chinese nation-state within which liberalism and nationalism interact, but more importantly, argue that a liberal nationalist alternative, especially as shown in Lin Yutang’s humorist politics, was readily available. While Lu Xun and Hu Shi’s political positioning differ greatly in the 1930s, they also share nationalist impulses. And Lin Yutang’s middling critique highlights two things: an insistence on intellectual autonomy in agreement with and in spite of the claim of national salvation as well as a critical consciousness over exclusive claims of justice and righteousness in the name of a collective cause.

Xiaoqing Diana Lin, Indiana University Northwest

A notable debate in the Chinese intellectual circle over where Chinese society was to go, called the "social history debate" took place in the 1930s. The focus was on whether Chinese history was parallel to Western history or not. Many Chinese historians adopted the Marxist periodization of history into slave society, feudal society, and capitalist society, only differing in the actual dates of when slave or feudal society started in China.

  Popular identification with Marxist historical materialism in the 1930s did not mean total agreements to it among those who accepted it. Here I want to explore the writings of Feng Youlan, a Chinese philosopher who accepted a Marxist historical materialist approach to society, represented in his sociological approach to values and ideologies, especially reflected in his On New Things (xinshilun). But Feng maintained a neo-Platonic approach in his overall framework. Distinctions between the city and the country, a society based on the family unit or a larger social unit, for example, were used as more or less universal concepts that came prior to and determined social behavior. Feng focused on universal stages of history based on social relations and treated them as separable concepts from the actual life experience. Feng’s could be seen as an alternative interpretation or utilization of Marx. This paper will be set against the background of the "social history debate" and the New Enlightenment Movement of the 1930s to highlight the rich complexity in Chinese intellectuals’ acceptance of Marxism in the 1930s and these scholars’ relationship to the other (liberal) schools of intellectual thought.