In 1901 Liang traveled to North America and it proved to be a turning-point in his career.
- Before the trip Liang was actively using ideas of popular sovereignty and democracy in his journalistic appeals.
- After: He saw there that 70% of the entire wealth is in the hands of 200.000 rich people. He began to lose his faith in individual rights as the cure-all to autocracy as he gained a more cynical picture of how American democracy worked. The revolutionary, democratic model of the US had turned into a corporate, imperialist, colonizing venture (предприятие) that could not be an inspiration to China. As a result, Liang said that he would no longer ‘tell a tale of pretty dreams. Chinese people must for now accept authoritarian rule; they cannot enjoy freedom…’ This view was confirmed by the success of authoritarian Meiji Japan (period in Japan from 1868 to 1912, when modernization occurred).
Liang sought (стремился) a centralized state that could forge (ковать) the Chinese people into a united citizenry. He believed that it could only be achieved under a benign (доброкачественная) autocracy.
8. How did Kang’s and Yuan’s neo-Confucianism covertly lay the ground for what might be called Mao’s ‘apocalyptic communism’ (i.e. a communism involving a radical rejection of the past)
Yuan - general with the strongest army. In 1911 there was a revolution in China and Sun Yat Sen became the first president of the Chinese Republic. Chaos did follow after this, so after 6 weeks Sun Yat Sen was forced to cede (передать) his presidency to Yuan Shikai, the general with the strongest army. Yuan revived Confucianism as a state ideology, receiving the help from Kang. Yuan was soon forced to sell railway and mining concessions to foreigners to balance the economy and it became clear that colonial imperial interference was by no means (никоим образом) over. Worse, Japan now joined in, imposing harsh demands on China along with the Western powers. Yuan died in 1916, but this chaotic situation continued till 1927 and scarred Chinese for the coming years - Hunan province were Mao was living was particularly harshly ravaged (разоренная). Now power would flow not from the Confucian scholarly class anymore, but as Mao remarked ‘power would now flow from the barrel of the gun’. Yuan’s attempt to use Confucianism in his revolution alienated younger Chinese intellectuals from Confucianism, Buddhism or Taoism - they now called for a wholesale adoption of the Western values of democracy and science. The disastrous 1911 revolution may not have realized people’s dreams, but it did create an absolute break with the past and it laid the ground for the complete rejection of Chinese values espoused by the communists, especially Mao Zeodong.
How did Western thought (liberalism, Social Darwinism, nationalism) influence Chinese modernist thinkers?
Social Darwinism - survival of the fittest. The Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth era abandoned social Darwinism and embraced the idea of evolution through mutual assistance. May Fourth movement (part of New Culture movement) - intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform movement that occurred in China in 1917-1921. Leaders of this nationalistic movement believed that traditional Confucian values were responsible for the political weakness of the nation. They called for rejection of traditional values and supported liberalism, nationalism. Science and democracy became the code words of the day.
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HEGEL AND MARX
Hegel:
World-spirit
By the term, “World Spirit,” Hegel means the sum total of human thought, its speech and its culture. His stance is entirely subjective, and he believes in no external truth or ultimate reason. According to Hegel, truth may be correct from where you stand at a certain position in time, but it may change from generation to generation. His philosophy is a method of understanding and thinking in a productive way about the progress of history.Therefore, according to Hegel, world spirit is identical to reality.
Folk-spirit (Volksgeist)
The word Volksgeist itself was coined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) to denote the separate spiritual essences of the diverse nations that characterized the present stage of human history and that would, through a dialectical process, produce the uniform "world-spirit" which spelled history's end.
*Буквально переводится как «национальный дух»
Dialectic
Hegelian Dialectic is a mechanism to arrive at a final truth or conclusion. Right now you probably use the Aristotelian method for arriving at truth, which is to observe all the facts of the situation and then make the most logical conclusion based from those observations. Hegel explained a process where truth is instead arrived through the friction and conflict between one force (the thesis) and its opposite (the antithesis). The final result from that clash, the synthesis, is the best conclusion. In all likelihood, the synthesis is not the final and absolute truth. It becomes the new thesis where a new antithesis forms to oppose it. The conflict between them leads to a second synthesis. This process repeats until the final synthesis is revealed, which theoretically is absolute truth.