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After Revolution : Reading Rousseau in 1990S China This document is downloaded from DR‑NTU (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. After revolution : reading Rousseau in 1990s China van Dongen, Els; Chang, Yuan 2017 van Dongen, E., & Chang, Y. (2017). After revolution : reading Rousseau in 1990s China. Contemporary Chinese Thought, 48(1), 1‑13. doi:10.1080/10971467.2017.1383805 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/143782 https://doi.org/10.1080/10971467.2017.1383805 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Contemporary Chinese Thought on 14 Dec 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10971467.2017.1383805. Downloaded on 29 Sep 2021 15:15:43 SGT The final version of this article was published in Contemporary Chinese Thought 48.1 (2017): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10971467.2017.1383805 Introduction After Revolution: Reading Rousseau in 1990s China Els van Dongen and Yuan Chang Abstract This article reviews Zhu Xueqin’s (b. 1952) writings on Jean-Jacques Rousseau against the background of the reception of Rousseau in China since the late nineteenth century. Rousseau was both an advocate and critic of the Enlightenment, and his work hence appealed to many Chinese intellectuals who struggled with the conundrum of how to modernize. During the late nineteenth century, Chinese supporters of Rousseau drew on his work to defend the viability of revolution. During the 1990s, following the tragedy of Tiananmen and the decline of socialism, Rousseau served to reflect on China’s twentieth-century trajectory and the disastrous political consequences of collective moral idealism. For Zhu Xueqin, a key question was: Why were the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution so similar? Rousseau and the Double-Edged Sword of Modernity In the history of modern Western political thought, few have managed to achieve the fame and influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Yet even fewer have managed to leave a legacy as paradoxical as the great “Citizen of Geneva.” His reputation has run the gamut, from being the inspiration and leading light of the French Revolution in the view of Maximilien Robespierre to the intransigent enemy of liberty and the master thinker of “totalitarian democracy” in the writings of Isaiah Berlin and Jacob Talmon.1 The latter used the term totalitarian democracy to refer to the collective pursuit of an all-embracing vision of a perfect society where politics came to dominate all aspects of human life and social action served to realize the general good. A central figure of the Enlightenment, Rousseau was, however, at the same time a sympathizer of a primitive and pastoral past, a believer in rustic simplicity, and a passionate critic of modernity.2 Immanuel Kant once described him as the “Newton of the moral world,” while Allan Bloom wrote that “Rousseau gave antimodernity its most modern expression and thereby ushered in extreme modernity.” 3 This conflicting evaluation of Rousseau forms part of the broader conflicting evaluation of the Enlightenment philosophers. For some scholars, they were closet Christians engaged in the construction of a “heavenly city”; for others, conversely, they were Lumières who sought to replace religion with rationality.4 The ambiguity surrounding Rousseau is also reflected in the continuing discussion of that mystical concept known as the general will”(volonté générale) introduced in The Social Contract (1762), which more than any other idea has become synonymous with the Genevan maestro.5 1 Rousseau’s contemporaries, however, mostly equated him with revolutionary thinking; he was after all a thinker who believed in the “radical transformation and reformation of state and society.”6 Rousseau has been credited with influencing the French Revolution, a connection that Edmund Burke famously made in his 1790 work Reflections on the Revolution in France. Other contemporaries such as Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Hippolyte Taine made similar observations.7 Both the revolutionaries themselves and Robespierre appealed to Rousseau, a connection symbolized by the revolutionaries’ moving of his body to the Pantheon for reburial after his death.8 From being the inspiration for the French Revolution, Rousseau became associated with revolution tout court. It was only later that scholars began to see Rousseau in different and often contrasting lights. What more can be said about Rousseau? The following is an attempt to explore the reception and study of Rousseau in 1990s China through the work of Zhu Xueqin 朱学勤 (b. 1952), a noted liberal scholar and historian who has published widely on Chinese culture and Western thought. Zhu became famous by and large due to his 1994 book titled The Demise of the Republic of Virtue: From Rousseau to Robespierre.9 This work, which is based on his PhD dissertation, has attracted countless readers since its publication and is still being read in the People’s Republic of China today. Before we formally analyze Zhu and his writings in depth, a description of the context of the reception of Rousseau in modern China is required in order to facilitate the discussion: Why did Chinese intellectuals engage with Rousseau in the 1990s? During this period, China witnessed debates of Rousseau’s thought against the broader background of the crisis of revolutionary ideology and amidst the advocacy of a reformist approach to solve the problems of Chinese modernity. The 1990s is also a period of significant interest due to the post-1989 Tiananmen effect, as the liberal intellectual atmosphere of the 1980s came to a close. It serves as a microcosm of modern Chinese intellectual history because the period witnessed the return of intellectual discussions of the problem of Chinese modernity that had first come about in the late nineteenth century. This time around, however, the intellectual atmosphere was more poignant, given that the Chinese had experienced the harsh realities of the failures of repeated radicalizations and revolutions during the long twentieth century. The end of the Cold War and China’s move toward globalization following Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern Tour in 1992 triggered new questions about China’s socialist path, the relation between the state and civil society, and the role of intellectuals in Chinese society. Still, the question remains: Why Rousseau? What makes his thought so engaging to Chinese intellectuals, not only in the 1990s but throughout the entire modern period? What lies behind the allure of his philosophy? Because the quest for modernity in China was at the same time an attempt to resist the Western powers—what Wang Hui has referred to as “anti-modern modernization”—Rousseau was particularly appealing to the Chinese audience given his dual role as advocate and critic of modernity.10 During the late nineteenth century, Rousseau became interpreted in China in the context of Western expansion, and supporters referred to his work to advocate a revolutionary Chinese modernity. During the 1990s, however, after a century of upheavals, Rousseau helped scholars analyze the limits of Chinese modernity and the vicissitudes of revolution in China’s long twentieth century. Now, connecting the French Revolution to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China, intellectuals tried to come to terms with the realities of post-1989 China. The stance of Chinese intellectuals toward this philosopher hence symbolizes China’s continuing struggle with the conundrum of modernization and the quest for a Chinese modernity. 2 The Reception of Rousseau in China Given the above, we hence first need to return to the period of crisis that was the late nineteenth century. In the span of less than a hundred years, China had gone from being a dominant civilization in Asia to a weak and fractured society. By the end of the nineteenth century, many of the leading writers of the day expressed the fear that Chinese civilization would eventually dissipate under the weight of European imperialism. The mounting pressure from the West led to new thinking and reflections on the status of Chinese culture and to the increasing study of Western literature, philosophy, and history. As the situation within the country worsened and as the failure of the Self-Strengthening Movement became apparent with the loss to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, Chinese intellectuals began to call for political reforms of the highest order. Modern China’s exposure to Rousseau began during this very period of Western intrusion and the quest for modernization. Historical records show that in 1878, Guo Songtao (1818-1891), the Qing ambassador to Britain, made a note in his diaries about a French thinker named Rousseau who was resented and feared by the church. Another diplomat mentioned Rousseau in the same year as well, indicating that his work was influential in Europe.11 The literatus-scholar Wang Tao (1828-1897) wrote about Rousseau in 1890 and called him a “famous sagely man.”12 In 1899, a partial translation in classical Chinese of The Social Contract by the Japanese scholar Nakae Chomin (1847-1901) was published in Shanghai. This was probably the first time that Rousseau’s work was formally introduced to Chinese audiences. Other translations of The Social Contract soon followed, and along with it, commentaries and discussions of the text by the prominent figures of the day, including Yan Fu (1854-1921), Zou Rong (1885-1905), Liang Qichao (1873-1929), and Zhang Shizhao (1881-1973), among others.13 While some scholars such as Zhang Xirou (1889-1973) devoted time to study the content of Rousseau’s thought, more scholars seemed to prefer to use Rousseau to express their own view on the affairs of the day. This was especially so for the topics of individual liberty and the viability of political revolutions.14 According to Max Ko-wu Huang, Rousseau was popular during this period because of the fear that China would perish, which led intellectuals to embrace theories that required drastic action.
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