张晨晨：梁启超与国家-天下的两难_国际汉学研究——汉学，汉学家，汉学研究，sinology，china studies

张晨晨：梁启超与国家-天下的两难

来源:译研网作者:无时间:2013-03-31 19:17

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be atheistic with the part of myself which is not made for God. Among those men in whom the supernatural part has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers are wrong.

Simone Weil, 1947.

The serial essay Xinmin shuo was without any doubt one of the most influential, systematic and ambitious works of Liang Qichao. Accordingly, this single essay has received remarkable scholarly attention. But underlying these generally far-reaching studies on this subject is a simple, yet noteworthy fact that the English translations of its title differ slightly in choosing an equivalent to the Chinese word ‘min’. The title could be translated as New Citizen (Chang 1971), Discourse on the Making New of the People (Leveson 1959), or the New People (Zarrow 1997)[1] from different points of view. Considered more carefully, this is not merely a matter of translation, but also a reflection of the ambiguity, or the paradox in the concepts of nationality and citizenship. Thus the multifold meaning of ‘min’ in the New People marks the starting point of our exploration of Liang’s nationalist thought.

Citizens, Nationals, and the Individual

Like his many other essays, the Xinmin shuo also began with a dramatic depiction of the historical and geographic map of the modern world: ‘There have been no less than thousands of countries that have existed on the earth in human history. But how many remain intact and own a color hitherto on the map of the five continents? No more than a hundred and a dozen. And of these countries how many now stand as a world power and will be able to survive in the world of evolution? No more than a half-dozen.’ (WJDJ: 547) This consciousness and scheme of mapping the world marked the keynote of his project of renovating the people, namely: the survival and strengthening of the nation. The introduction was followed by a section explaining why making new the people was the most urgent task of his time. Then he moved onto giving a definition of the “new people” (xinmin). But convinced that the meaning of ‘people’, or min was quite clear to all the Chinese readers, he actually only explained the meaning of ‘new’. He wrote: ‘On one hand, it is to purify what one already has and to renew it; on the other, it is to acquire what one does not have so as to make new. If either one is missing, there will be no achievement.’ In illustrating the first aspect of renovation, he claimed that every country stood as a power in the world must be unique in its national characteristics. From morality and laws to customs and habits, ‘the independent spirit was carried on from generation to generation, thus the grouping (qun) was formed, and the state (guo) was built. This is truly the fundamental wellspring of nationalism.’ (WJDJ: 550) When he spoke of ‘national character’ here, he used the word ‘guomin’ which was apparently should be understood as the national, instead of the citizen.

Nomura is absolutely right in suggesting that the whole series of The New People is committed to the project of ‘creating the guomin’ (Nomura 1970), but what remains unclear is what the term guomin (literally, people of the nation) exactly means. Unlike its equivalent words in Western languages which name the collective and the individual respectively[2], the Chinese word guomin couldindicate the collective people, the individual citizens or nationals, and even the nation-state occasionally. We can see the last usage, for example, in one of Liang’s essays entitled Lun jinshi guomin jingzheng zhi dashi yu zhongguo qiantu (on the competition among modern nations and the future of China, 1899). He made a distinction between the traditional concept of guojia and the modern nation-state: ‘Guojia (literally, state-family) is the name that takes the state as property of one family. Guomin, is the name that takes the state as the public property of one people. The guo (state, nation) is the aggregation of the min (people, citizen); so without the latter, there would be no the former. That public affairs of one nation are managed by the people of this nation … is called guomin.’ (WJDJ: 1345) Here the meaning of guomin was very similar to that of ‘nation’ as a political community embodied in a certain form of state. But it is rare to point out such cases. More commonly, the neologism guomin, as Zarrow’s concludes, ‘in effect straddled the distinction between a mere ‘national’ and a full-fledged ‘citizen’.’ (Zarrow 1997: 18)

To elaborate this equivocality, let us take a look at another instructive section of the Xinmin shuo, in which Liang heavily stressed the importance of the ideas of the state[3] (guojia sixiang). The first line of this section stated: ‘When the human grouping (qun) was first formed, there were no citizens (guomin), but only tribe members (bumin). The progress from the tribe member to the citizen marks the dividing line between the savage and the civilization.’ Here he almost seemed to be echoing Fukuzawa, who mentioned in the Outline, that the English word ‘civilization’ is derived from the Latin word ‘civitas’ which means no other than the state ([1875]1997:57). ‘What is the difference between the tribal and the citizen?’ He then asked, ‘Answer: people who live in groups and preserve their own customs are viewed as tribal, whereas people who have the ideas of the state, and become capable of political autonomy should be called citizens/nationals (guomin). It is impossible for a state to exist without citizens/nationals.’ From this we may notice a slight shift from the meaning of citizen to the meaning of national in his use of the word guomin, andthe following explanation about what the ideas of the state (i.e. national consciousness) mean make the shift more evident. In Liang’s analysis, national consciousness is to be understood from four perspectives, namely: be aware of the nation/the state in contrast to the individual; in contrast to the government; in contrast to other nations and to the world. Many have argued that Liang’s elaboration of his concept of xinmin in The New People implied some crucial elements of the very concept of modern citizenry – popular sovereignty, political participation, a new view of world order and so forth (Chang 1977:158-66; Zarrow 1997: 16-20). While not ignoring the significance of this point, we shall pay more attention to the way in which the single Chinese character ‘min’ combined the somehow liberalist notion of citizenry with an absolute belief in the power of nationalism and the nation. As Tang points out penetratingly: ‘The inherent tensions and conflicts between a collective, national identity and the liberal notion of individuality, however enfeebled the latter may be, are overcome by the exciting prospect of action, of making new.’ (1996:26) But considering our review of the history of nationalist theories, the question is not so much the conflicts between the so-called collective nationalism and individualist liberalism, since nationalism by its own nature, as well as national identity, depends directly on the abstract individuals who are divorced from the mediation of webs of relationship. Rather, it is the fact that the dilemmas of the modern concepts of nationality and citizenship always open up potential possibilities of calling forth such conceptual confusions, and accordingly, how naturally such ambiguities arose in the thinking of Liang.

Morris-Suzuki’s observation on the imperial expansion and identity crises of Japan in early 20^th century (1998: 157-89) may offer us a good reference to approach this problem. The political and intellectual crises that faced Japan during this period were to a large degree mirrored by the similar situation in China. With the same Chinese characters yet different pronunciations, pre-modern Chinese thought had been dominated by the vision of tianxia (the world under heaven), and pre-Meiji Japanese thought by the vision of tenka. But it was the new vision of kokka (the state), not guojia that first took shape in East Asia accompanied by ‘a sense of unequivocal common membership of a single body politic’ (Morris-Suzuki 1998:159). This sense, therefore, is usually considered as the birth of modern citizenship in East Asia. Before his analysis of the dilemmas of citizenship in Japan and their relationship to the imperial expansion, Morris-Suzuki mentions, not surprisingly, the opposite directions in the idea of citizenship based on individual rights and freedoms in Enlightenment thought, and in the emphasis on a national community only through which could those rights and freedoms be possible in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European thought. So from the beginning – though he does not explain the link between the two phases in intellectual history, and therefore the word ‘beginning’ seems not quite precise – ‘the status of citizen was inextricably bound up with the obligation to defend the nation – that is, the willingness to die (or at least to kill) for one’s country.’ (1998: 160) Since the theoretical equality of citizenship is confined in a national community, a citizen must be identified as a national in the first place. This link is adequately demonstrated in the Japanese term kokumin, and in the Chinese term guomin. Thus one of the important consequences that followed from the equation of being a citizen with being Japanese was a repeated call for an amorphous ‘national spirit’ (kokumin seishin). The national spirit was supposed to be a sense of solidarity and loyalty that sprung from shared customs, language, and ethnicity. But Morris-Suzuki suggests this relationship was a troubling one, for ‘Japan has never been culturally homogeneous’ (ibid.). Another consequence or the logical extension of the first-mentioned idea to the realm of international society was, as is well known, the imperial expansion of Japan and its absorption of other communities. Once again, one of the roots of the complicated relationship among nationalism, imperialism and colonialism could be traced back to the limitations of the modern notion of citizenship, and its inextricable ties to nationality.

Ironically, from Liang’s point of view, imperial Japan was both an admirable model and an implied threat. The two nations had shared the vision of tianxia in their recognition of the world order, and both of them were confronted with the invasion of the West by now. A similar situation made Japan a valuable source of reference for Chinese intellectuals, and therefore they were enthusiastic about borrowing vocabulary and ideas from Japan. But things were changing; not only because of the lateness of China in the modernizing process, or Westernizing process, but also because of the changing role of Japan in East Asia, they soon found it difficult to follow the same road that their teacher had taken just a few decades earlier. Nonetheless, convinced that the Japanese experience was most helpful for China at the moment, Liang’s perception of guomin as integration between nationality and citizen was profoundly influenced by the indications of this word in Japanese context – a simple fact is that the modern usage of guomin in Chinesethat was invented by Liang and his contemporaries, like many other social political words, was borrowed from Japanese. This is why Morris-Suzuki’s analysis of the dilemmas of citizenship in prewar Japan is particularly noteworthy for our examination of the notions of citizen and national in early 20^th century China. While Japan has never been culturally homogeneous, one must admit that China has been far more heterogeneous, both culturally and politically. Perhaps inspired by the advocacy of kokumin seishin in Japan, Liang consciously made a great effort to plead for national spirits (guomin jingshen) and national characters for the Chinese nation. On the whole, the term guomin in the New People, as well as in other essays, was primarily referring to the awareness and practice of becoming national, even if becoming national inherently entails the principles of citizenry.

But is this project of becoming national the only approach to gaining modern subjectivity? Are there any other essential requirements for being a new citizen besides being a national? For Liang the answer is definite. That is to say, the term xinmin should be understood not only as the new people, or the new citizen, but also as the new person. It is only in this sense that one can argue that Liang had done some crucial work in creating an active citizenry – or making modern subject of the individual in the context of early twentieth-century China. But before looking at this aspect in Liang’s writing, we have to trace again the evolution of the concept of citizenship to its ancient Hellenic origins. It is widely know that the problem of citizenship was at the centre of the politics of Greek city states, since politics, in the view of Greeks, essentially means participating in public activities by free and rational people. Therefore, citizenship was confined strictly to a few residents living in the city, who had the time to spend to understand political issues and were capable of taking action. For women, slaves and Persians, apparently citizenship was impossible. Aristotle, claiming that the true nature of the human being is that of a political animal, counted life in the polis as the highest this-worldly good for man. With the breakdown of the city states, and the rise of the Roman Empire, the significance of citizenship in secular politics was reduced, and not viewed as essentially relevant to the good life any more. Although Machiavelli’s reflections on classical republicanism in the early sixteenth-century were momentous, the prevailing trend in modern political thought was less classical than medieval. As Benjamin Constant argued in his consequential essay the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns, modern freedom was ‘the freedom of the private person rather than the citizen, and was freedom from politics as much as freedom in politics.’ (Miller 1991:75) Seeing that liberalism was confronted with more and more explicit problems, some renewed academic concern about the concept of citizenship and republicanism had been increasing in recent years. Since the modern context of practising citizenship is no longer the city-state, but the nation-state in a large scale in which direct participation in political activities and interpersonal relationships spreading within the whole community are nearly impossible, the modern concept of citizenship contains deep tensions. We have seen that Rousseau, in whom the clash between the ancient and the modern concepts of citizenship was clearly reflected, gave his great praise to the small State.

It is not surprising that in his introduction to Rousseau’s political theory, Liang found the tension along with the compatibility between the individual and the state utterly incomprehensible. For Liang, the individual as ‘ge’ was a term paralleled by the term of ‘qun’ (grouping), yet both of them were in the category of social networks which was not irrelevant to, but independent from the category of nation-state. In some aspects Liang’s attitudes toward citizenship – though he himself never used this word – shared some elements with the Aristotelian tradition: the individuals were ‘to be integrated into the political community like parts in a whole, individual identity was to stem from the interplay of social traditions and institutions.’ (Zarrow 1997:17) However, these elements were less influenced by Western thought he learned from the Japanese books than by traditional Confucius principles. He defined the qualities of the individual as a part of the whole, to a large extent, in terms of Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind (xinxue) which laid the significance of conscience (liangzhi; literally good-knowing) at the very centre of all human activities. Liang pointed out that the pursuit of ‘public morality’ (gongde) was crucial to everyone living in a community, since abstract individuality was impossible and a person was to be a person only in the network of social groupings. While his discourses upon the concept of grouping were consistent and clear, the state, as an unfamiliar concept written in familiar Chinese characters, appears far more uncertain in his writing. Is the state merely a particular type of grouping? Or, is it the highest type of grouping only in which individuals can survive as citizens? Though his answers oscillate between the two extremes, it is certain that his perception of the state diverged from that in Western political thought.

In most cases, Liang considered the state to be an aggregation of individuals, and in the same way, the freedoms and rights of the state was an aggregation of the freedoms and rights of individuals. In his discussion of the idea of rights, he wrote: ‘Assembling rights of the portions makes the right of the whole;aggregating individuals’ ideas of rights makes the idea of rights of the state.’ (WJDJ: 569) From this point of view, the state was just like any other types of grouping. Unlike in Western political theory, the absoluteness of the state was analogous to that of the individual; here in Liang’s thinking, the relationship between the two was aggregation, rather than analogy.

We have examined various dimensions of ‘min’ as a key concept in Liang’s writing around 1902. At the core of his discourses on making new the people is to urge the Chinese to be aware that they are members of the Chinese nation which is among other competing nations over the world. This is a project, or, to borrow Weber’s words, an ‘attainment’ – because ‘it seems that a group of people under certain conditions may attain the quality of a nation through specific behaviour and within short spans of time at that.’ (Weber [1948]1994:23) Liang seems quite sure about the fact that the very concept of nation, as ‘the beauty of history’, is based on the claim of all individuals to ‘active’, ‘equal’ membership of the nation, and the claim of all nations to ‘independent’, ‘equal’ membership of the international system. But there are some inconsistencies in his argument about how to become a xinmin (new citizen; new national; or new person) for an individual. The reason for this situation might lie in the fact that theoretical analogy between the individual and the state, as is drawn in Western political philosophy, is simply absent in Liang’s thinking. Indeed the destiny of the nation is exalted in provocative words, but there is hidden logic within, so to speak; it is merely because the nation-state is the prevailing form of political community at the moment that one has to be qualified as a national. Therefore, the requirements for a national and that for an individual who is dependent on a network of groupings are not necessarily, fundamentally relevant to each other. Moreover, the latter facet of the xinmin -- the grouping-relative individual (in a particular sense, might be called citizenry) instead of the state-relative individual, although shaped to a marked degree by traditional doctrines, also asserts itself as modern, or as new. To do this Liang made a great effort to rediscover traditional values and identify modern ‘moments’ within them. As we shall see below, this effort was inevitably caught up in other contradictions.

Who is the Chinese Nation?

In his many works Liang Qichao had named some particular qualities that were, both morally and practically, needed for an individual to be a new person – a person who viewed himself as a national and for the Chinese people to be a new people – a nation of solidarity. But another question faced by him was whom he was addressing. In other words, who are the prospective people to be qualified as belonging to the Chinese nation? Since China had never been a homogenous unity, and according to his acceptance of the notion of nation as defined in terms of certain empirical features common to those who count as members of the nation, he then, in order to make China meet the criterion of being a nation, must decide who to include and who not to. The various answers to this question divided intellectuals and political activists who were all calling for a unified Chinese nation at the time into different, even antagonistic political camps. The key controversy over this issue was whether to overthrow the Manchu government and to drive out the Manchus or not. Apparently, if the Chinese nation was equal to Han lineage (hanzu), any other ethnic groups, and in particular the current governing Manchus, should be absolutely excluded from the membership of the expected nation-state.

It is clear that Liang had been with anti-Manchuists during his early years in exile. By 1902, the year he wrote the New People and other weighty essays, he still believed that to evoke the spirit of nationalism necessitated anti-Manchuism. In a letter to his teacher Kang Youwei at that time, he wrote: ‘This is the era of nationalism, without which it is impossible to establish the state. What to arouse the spirit of nationalism in China is no other than attacking on the Manchus. As the overthrow of the Bakufu was the best doctrine for Japan, the overthrow of the Manchu government would be the best doctrine for China. ‘ (NPCB: 157) But also in the year 1902 – before he became an open defender of the Manchu government, his attitudes toward the Manchu race and the given government were far more complicated than it appeared. This was revealed in a fictional debate between two leading characters in his unfinished political novel The Future of New China. In the debate, the revolutionary Li Qubai questioned his friend, the constitutionalist Huang Keqiang, who had just talked about Napoleon’s failure resulting from the triumph of nationalism, ‘Speaking of nationalism – can you tell whether the sovereignty of today’s China is in the hands of our own people or a foreign race?’ Huang answered, probably in the place of Liang himself: ‘… after 300 long years of cultural integration and assimilation, the Manchus are by now inseparable from the Han Chinese…. As long as parliamentary politics, party system, and democratic procedures are established, like the case in England and Japan, it matters little who seizes the throne. If you say that he is not the same race with us, of our 400 million fellowmen belonging to Han lineage, then, who could be qualified to claim the throne? My brother, my love for liberty and equity in my heart is no less than yours at all, as you may know; but I prefer peaceful liberty and orderly equity.’(ZJ 89:20-23) As the far-reaching debate between the two shows, the question of whether Manchu people and other ethnic groups should be included in the Chinese nation was entangled with the argument over whether revolution or reformation was the proper means for strengthening China. While the latter involved more practical concerns about the contemporary political situation, it seemed to Liang that the former had to be answered theoretically. Employing the theory of Staatswissenschaft through the intermediate of Japanese kokkagaku, Liang managed to reconcile his protestation of nationalism with the legitimacy of the Manchus as the present governor of China, with the help of the concept of ‘broad nationalism’ introduced by him against the prevalent racist discourse around 1906. To understand this we shall examine briefly the major work that influenced Liang in his arriving at this destination, namely the theory of the state by J. K. Bluntschli (1808-81).

In her comparative textual study of various versions of Bluntschli’s books translated into Japanese, Bastid-Bruguière has convincingly proven that a translation of a text by Bluntschli under the title Guojia lun (on the state), which appeared from April 10 to October 25, 1899 in the Journal Qingyi Bao was ‘pirated’ by Liang Qichao from Azuma Heiji’s Kokkagaku (science of the state; Staatswissenschaft), a translation of Deutsche Staatslehre für Gebildete that originally published in 1874 by Bluntschli. She also points out that Liang came to a real understanding of Bluntschli’s thought as opposed to other views of the state only after 1903, the year when he published Zhengzhixue dajia bolunzhili zhi xueshuo (on teachings of the great politikwissenschaftler Bluntschli; abbreviated below as on Bluntschli). (Bastid-Bruguière 2004:105-24) However, what conclusion should be drawn from placing Bluntschli in opposition to Rousseau remained unclear in Liang’s writing by early 1903; to put it in other terms, he was still vacillating between the two thinkers which appeared to him as representatives of two fundamentally contrary theories, and even of two contrary ages. Early this year, in replying to a reader who spoke of current affairs in France, and according to that asked for restrictions on civil rights and liberty, Liang stated that though ‘recent writers like Bluntschli strongly advocate statism, and claim that the individuals should sacrifice their own interests for the sake of national interests’, this theory was just made to meet the requirements of an imperialist age. Yet for today’s China, Liang argued, the spirit of Rousseau was precisely what she needed, and the Social Contract was the only ‘good medicine’ to cure her (WJDJ: 2199). Three months later, in his on Bluntschli, commonly viewed as a turning point of Liang from a revolutionary to a conservative, he openly attacked his former opinions and reconsidered the theory of the state given by Bluntschli as the real ‘medicine’ for China.

However, it seems to me that this transformation was not as dramatic as it appeared on the surface; this is because his understanding of Bluntschli’s thought as opposed to Rousseau’s was an illusion in the first place. Rousseau, as Balibar depicts, ‘had broken with past ‘constitutional’ theory on a decisive point’, and framed a new paradigm for all the political thinking after him. (1994: ix) While Liang had trouble understanding Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty and general will, which was regarded by him as an oppression of individual freedom, intriguingly, he found the organic state theory that had been prevailing in Meiji Japan during a short period prior to his exile fairly acceptable. There are various perspectives from which his acceptance of the organic state theory (apparently Bluntschli was a leading representative of such theory for Liang) and social Darwinism to be understood, and I will return to this issue later. But right here my examination is solely concentrated on his perception and reproduction of the distinctions between the concepts of Volk and Nation proposed by Bluntschli[4].

As usual, Bluntschli starts his survey on the conceptions ‘people’ and ‘nations’ with clarifying different senses in which the same words were used in English, in French, and in German. The English word ‘people’ and its French equivalent ‘peuple’, according to Bluntschli, are expressed in German by ‘Nation’, all of which were implying the notion of a civilization. In contrast to this group of terms, the English ‘nation’, the French ‘nation’ and the German ‘Volk’ are in another group referring to something political, rather than cultural. Both of the two ar

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