How stand I, then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
Crisis
We seem to be approaching 1914. For the past few years, geopolitical tensions between China and the “Western World” have dramatically risen, and there seems to be no way out. Since China joined the WTO in 2001, at least part of the hope for a peaceful solution lies in the nation’s gradual liberalization, a dream now dead amidst economic recession and increased nationalism. On the other side of the Pacific, Donald Trump’s election marks a return of isolationism – and reduced American interest in the preservation of the international liberal order. Some say there will be a conflict by 2025, some say 2027, and others say later.
But it is not the dates that concern us; it is the West’s inability to understand the nature of this crisis that poses risks. For one, this is not a Cold War. We are no longer in the 1970s when Mao’s communist movements were called “democratic” in an anti-liberal, Hayekian sense. There is no “axis of evil” that can be so easily determined. In today’s world, ideas about justice, liberalism, and freedom seem to be losing color day by day; like Hamlet, we, on the one hand, feel an urgent need to prevent something from happening, yet, on the other hand, seem to destroy something more profound with each step we take. We are closer to another European Great War, only this time truly worldwide. Are we moving towards destruction like beasts, as Hamlet says? Do we even know what destroys us? Is this our 1914?
This article seeks to provide a preliminary new perspective on the looming question of war. It argues that a general intellectual crisis of the Chinese identity underlies the current geopolitical crisis; in turn, it proposes that positive engagement with this psychological crisis contains new opportunities for resolution. The world needs neither aggression nor appeasement towards this rising power. It needs an alternative mode of analysis that relies upon enlightened empathy, the recognition that China is foremost man, not beast, and that his motives must be taken into consideration with the context of the times, which is inseparable from the origin of human thought. It needs a new mode of thought that can unify the West and the East.
A Hamlet of History
Hamlet’s story begins with the “taint” of his mother and the loss of his father. Starting from the First Opium War of 1839, colonialism challenged what scholars have termed the “ultra-stable cultural system” of China. The historian Joseph R. Levenson argued that colonization was a new kind of cross-cultural interaction where colonizers could exploit China’s land without becoming part of it. Whereas the broad idea of “China,” literally termed the “Central Kingdom” in the Chinese tongue, had assimilated countless external cultures from Buddhism to the Manchus, Western colonization thus proved to be the first serious challenge to China’s ethnocentrism, and the effect was a cultural transformation, an Enlightenment enforced. Scholars from Marx to Foucault have examined the relationship between technological advances and self-consciousness, whether of the body or of class. Similarly, the engagement with a distinctly modern and mechanically superior civilization created a “ self-consciousness” in China that is unprecedented in its history. China was no longer self-sufficient culturally. Pre-modern China found unity between the family and the state. Yet this new consciousness created two distinctly modern concepts, one the “individual,” the other the “nation.” In place of a Confucian value system of patriarchy, the Chinese must now define for themselves what it means to be an individual, and in place of an ethnocentric worldview where China was the morally superior, the Chinese must inquire what it means to be Chinese.
China’s 20th century is a history of the interaction between those two issues. Historians point to the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 as a turning point, when widespread Westernization finally began, and a modern intelligentsia emerged. Westernized and urban, they embodied a paradox that remains today. Does not nationalism curb the individual’s self-consciousness, and does not individualism undermine the nation’s self-consciousness? In 1913, just months after the Revolution of 1912 ended China’s dynastic tradition of more than two millennia, a Parliament leader was assassinated, spiraling into conspiracies that were to result in a monarchist Restoration by 1915. The Waterloo of nearly half a century of modernization left China’s early thinkers in despair. “I’m turning mad. Perhaps wait for a few more years?” 1914, written in a diary entry by Chen Duxiu, the future founder of the Chinese Communist Party. The thinkers pinpointed the cause of democracy’s collapse as the lack of civic participation, a result of the lack of modern values in the individual mind.
Thus, in 1914, when Europe descended into a great war that would, in Eliot’s words, make “hollow men” in the West, the Chinese intelligentsia were invigorated to create a new Chinese man – “stuffed,” so to speak. In 1915, Chen Duxiu led a group of intellectuals to found a magazine fashioned after Europe’s progressive movement, crystallized in the 1919 joint declaration of “independent spirit” by authors such as Romain Rolland, Jane Addams, and Bertrand Russell. Fashionably, they named it La Jeunesse, “youth” in French. In the opening edition, Chen called for a Nietzschean re-evaluation of Chinese values, and, following that, the creation of a “free and independent” individual. It championed a “final awakening,” one “moral in nature” that was to finish the process of Westernization since 1839. It was the individual who was to awake, and it was the idea of the individual that was to dominate the New Culture Movement, an intellectual storm set off by the magazine’s publication, marking the beginning of modernity in China. Confusion with politics’ uncertainties and the violent determination to fight a way out through the creation of a self-sufficient (健全) individual, as the thinker Hu Shih was to write, became an undercurrent to China’s modernization.
Meanwhile, the Great War furthered China’s national self-consciousness. The Treaty of Versailles confiscated Germany’s colonies, including the Shandong Peninsula, which had formerly belonged to the Qing. In 1919, this territory was transferred to the Japanese Empire. The Chinese intelligentsia led the newborn bourgeois class and students of Peking in a massive protest against the now autocratic government’s weakness, forcing cabinet members to resign and refuse to sign the Treaty. How impressive is this modern awareness of sovereignty, and how could it have been possible without the individual first awakening himself, thus making citizenship a desire? Yet it was precisely this nationalism that began to suffocate the newborn individual inside of Hamlet. Both the modern conservative Nationalist KMT party and the socialist CPC trace their origins to the idealistic students of 1919. Geopolitical turmoil following the nation’s military unification in 1927 obscured the urgency of intellectual change, while increased governmental suppression warned free thinkers against it. By 1949, Marxism-Leninism had become the state ideology. The May Fourth Movement of 1919, born out of Chen’s individualism, has itself given death to the individual.
Since China’s “opening-up” in the early 1990s, the nation has become the foremost contender against an American-led international order. At the same time, economic growth has created a significant bourgeois class, numbering around half a billion. This new class, Westernized, urban, cannot find in itself any reasonable tie back to tradition and a past. It echoes the predicament faced by the intelligentsia in 1914. Yet today, this new class is of a much more sizeable minority, and the character of Chinese society has fundamentally modernized. Moreover, it exists as a result of upward mobility among traditionally disenfranchised groups, most prominently women, peasants, and children. In other words, those individuals are not only beginning to experience and express a particular crisis of the Chinese mind, but they also embody it. I argue that this crisis requires a new intellectual reaction.
Creating the Individual
Today, the Chinese wakes up and does not know who he is, a man or a state. He is a beast, a kind of Hamlet, trapped within his own workings, his tragedy leading to the deaths of other men. And now the idea of “China” is violently torn between two equal entities, the man and his nation, each shadowing the other, so that the man’s sufferings become the nation’s international threat, and the nation’s humiliation becomes the man’s sufferings once again. He cannot become a liberal for the individual, for “He may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself,” yet, to become a nationalist, what “sanguinary and totally unmatch’d sight will he see!” In other words, the true cause of his deadly crisis today is an anxiety of identity. But it is precisely this identity’s self-division that provides a solution. In seeing the sufferings of his nation, the Chinese individual can unify himself, and in creating the individual, the Chinese nation can free itself.
The Chinese Hamlet can only understand what troubles himself by first creating a self, one that unifies the individual with his nation. When the Lisbon Earthquake shook the European mind, so did the image of God falter. But to the Chinese mind, it is precisely society’s trembling that presents hope for its own Enlightenment. In other words, the Chinese mind is not ill; it merely requires the reassessment of its relationship to its world. Let us have a Copernican Revolution of our own – for around whom do we revolve? This is China’s epistemic revolution. In his American Scholar, Emerson writes for the creation of a new American identity that is both progressive and of worth. He writes for a literary class of action who combines the maxim of “know thyself” and “study nature,” who is both the subjective man of independence and the objective man of virtue. He calls for a Romantic movement in America despite its lack of a European soul. Upon citing Hamlet’s “pale cast of thought,” Emerson cheers for an age “when the old and the new stand side by side,” “when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope,” that “this time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” Can the Chinese not find in himself an American soul, without any irony?
Economic prosperity provides an incredible opportunity for a new time of cross-cultural discussions, while advances in technology allow a revolution of the mind. A new intellectual project that resolves the individual and the nation and finishes 1914’s feat awaits to be pursued. The new Chinese man must both resolve his own, individual intellectual crisis and his society’s crisis. The words of Montaigne echo: the greatest universality in the world is diversity. The world lies in the individual. I wish to propose a simple and preliminary method for assessing this new individual. The Chinese should see in his individuality his entire society, but in his society himself. The Chinese individual should assess his inner psychology as a product of social changes; his mind is the Platonic city-state. I wish to suggest three preliminary directions for thought.
First and foremost, the problem of modernity is one of aesthetics. Likewise, the question of feminism remains the most subversive in Chinese society. The question of aesthetics is integral to the individual Chinese mind in preserving his free, subjective mind. The lack of the ability to create renders him a perpetual object of appreciation. In that sense, despite misogyny as a prominent feature of Chinese society, the individual Chinese man is, psychologically, feminine. His national identity also finds itself to be feminized by other states, and that motivates a profound revisionism in international affairs. It is obvious that the Chinese need a new literary tradition of their own, one that allows them to create for their individual will. He needs to resolve the aesthetic implications of his modern history. Perhaps he needs to return to the Romantic roots of his Ancient literature.
Secondly, the epistemic issues of power and freedom can be analogized by the contradiction between the child and the man that co-exist in the Chinese man. Education, which gives power and virtue to the child to become a man, can give a fundamental transformation to China. Social education distorts the paradigms of truth in the Chinese man, whereas moral education suffocates the apprehension of power. Socially, the inability to democratize can be seen as a lack of political education, yet in order to become a man, the Chinese man must educate himself. In that sense, it is only in the cultivation of his subjective youth that the Chinese man can actualize true power and, finally, individual freedom.
Finally, the existential questions of poverty can be analogized by the class relationship between China’s peasants and its bourgeoisie. Whether a socialist or a nihilist, the modern Chinese man seeks to starve the peasant inside of him, yet he is always one. What is the relationship between poverty and history? What meaning can be derived from the self detached from his land? Is poverty his original sin? It is so, then, that despite Christ reserving his kingdom for the women, peasants, and children, it appears suicidal for the Chinese man to Christianize. Today, for the Chinese man to think as an individual is to save his society; Hamlet was not saved.
Perhaps we are approaching 1914, that “undiscovered country” of death. But 1914 was not only a time of destruction; it was also one of hope through the individual. There are also the “goodly states and kingdoms seen,” where we once “stared at the Pacific.” Like Hamlet, China’s fate is determined from the very beginning by the fate of his father. We are beasts who cannot escape the spell of origin. We can transcend class, time, or even love, but we can never escape ourselves. Yet if there is one political value to great art, then it is the proof of human existence. It is the proof of agency that Shakespeare, a man, wrote Hamlet’s tragedy. And if there is one thing we can do in the face of ultimate destruction, then it is to write our own story, our own political narrative.