I noticed yesterday that it was the 79th anniversary of the death of Liang Qichaot, the famous late Qing Dynasty scholar, journalist, translator, reformer, exile, historian, and all around busybody. Liang Qichao has often been a popular focus for studying numerous facets of China’s encounter with the “modern”: newspapers, anthropology, historiography, education, sports, democracy, science. Liang was a complicated guy, and like any good scholar his views and ideas changed over time. But throughout his career he wrestled with two overlapping ideas, both of which were profoundly influential not only to his peers, but in Chinese society ever since: an evolutionary view of history, and the mortal threat to the existence of China as a race and nation.
By the late Qing, having lost wars, territory and pride to foreign nations, Chinese elites were utterly consumed with the fear of the extinction of China, as a culture, a people, a nation and a race. It did not help matters much that these four concepts were often seen as being one and the same, though there was an enormous amount of trouble defining quite what it was. It was easier, however, to talk about the things China was not: it was not strong; it was not modern (developed, we say now); it was not Manchu; it was not safe; it was not healthy. There were numerous voices for change, such as Zhang Zhidong, Kang Youwei and Zhang Binglin. Though they jockeyed amongst themselves for influence and power, and differed on ideas about how to go about it (respectively, “Chinese learning for fundamental principles, Western learning for practical application”; the Confucian utopia of”Great Unity” and “self-strengthening”; and “kill all the Manchus”), they agreed on the problem, and to varying degrees with each others solutions.
Into this environment came Darwin, or rather interpretations of Darwin were reinterpreted to explain what had happened and what must be done. In a translators game of telephone, Darwin as described by social Darwinist thinkers such as Spencer and Huxley were first translated into Japanese during their own Meiji reform, and then into Chinese, notably by Yan Fu. Translations of Darwin’s actual work would come later. Yan Fu was, along with Liang Qichao, a disciple of Kang Youwei. As Andrew Nathan summarized in his review of Pusey’s China and Charles Darwin,
Where Darwin said that evolution proceeds by competition among individuals within a species, Chinese social Darwinists read that the strugggle to survive occurs among nations or races as groups; where Darwin saw this competition as the effort of each organism to survive and reproduce in a given environment, Chinese social Darwinists saw conscious rivalry among enemies; where Darwin defined fitness as adaption to an environment, Chinese social Darwinists saw it as a quality of moral stature and will power; where Darwin regarded all species as being fit for the environments in which they happened to exist, Chinese social Darwinists saw a hierarchy, with men more fit than animals and the white and yellow races more fit than any others.
As anthropologist Wang Mingming has pointed out
In their translations, evolutions was termed “the Argument about the Heaven’s Change” (tianyan lun). In the footnotes that they made to the translated texts, many comments were made to interpret evolution into “the turn [or conjuncture] of fortune” (yunhui). Evolutionism was, to them, not simply a bio-medicine that was prescribed for the “East Asian Sick Men” (dongya bingfu), a self-name for the Chinese. It was, more importantly, an explanation of how Heaven that once shifted to Europe had by the late 19th century returned to its home in China. In the 20th century, Chinese-speaking anthropology has served as an instrument whereby the shift of Heaven from Europe to China has been made more or less a mytho-history.
Liang Qichao played quite a role in taking this interpretation and applying it to history. As he wrote in the first issue of his journal-in-exile, New Citizen (part of a continuing habit of labeling everything he did as “new”), he wrote:
What is history? History is nothing but the account of the development and strife of human races. There is no history without race .. .. I don ‘t know whether we can enjoy the great harmony of mankind across the boundaries of race in the future. Today, however, it is no exaggeration to say that the racial problem is the biggest problem in the world.. .. The essence of history is to follow the tracks of the rise and fall of every race over thousands of years. The spirit of history is to uncover the reasons for the rise and fall of every race over thousands of years.
Liang also promoted “survival of the fittest” from his perch at the newspaper Shiwubao (where he also constantly proclaimed everything was “new”, though scholar Natascha Vitinghoff has argued convincingly that practically every thing he claimed was “new”, from circulation to the importance of the fourth estate to journalistic ethics had in fact already been done in the 1870s by newspapers such as Shenbao). In the “newspaper wars” in the first decade of the 20th century, arguments over competition between papers was cast by some as a battle between the old and the new, with one being condemned to extinction, while others argued that in the “survival of the fittest”, the truth would emerge. The truth that, all agreed, would save the nation and the race.
One of the most virulent forms of this narrative of racial struggle was in anti-Manchu revolutionary thinking, and the revolutionaries were the ideological enemies of Kang and Liang, who were by and large royalists. Zhang Binglin, for example, called for revenge against the Manchus, the “public enemy of the Han race”, while Liang (and Kang) argued that
It has been said that the Manchus and we are completely different races, but that is not strictly true.. ,. Actually, the Manchus have been definitely assimilated into us in four out of the six elements which the debater [namely, Wang Jingwei] applied to classify races. In the remaining two elements, we cannot easily draw a conclusion that they and we are different. We therefore conclude that, judging from the sociological definition of race, that the Manchus have already assimilated into the Han and have sufficient qualifications to be members of our mixed nation.
Note here that Liang’s defense of Manchu’s is to say that they are Chinese, so they aren’t bad guys. Given that he saw history as a struggle for racial dominance, the only way to cast the Manchus as allies was to claim they had been sinicized. All the same, Liang still participated somewhat in the vilification of the Manchus, as he was one of many who helped circulate tales of the Yangzhou and Jiading massacres in the late 1890s. These accounts of survivors of Qing atrocities during the fall of the Ming Dynasty were re-cast with entirely Manchu soldiers (originally some were Chinese), and the victims implied to not simply be those unfortunates present, but later generations, the Han people, and China itself. These stories, and the idea that the Manchus were bloodthirsty wolves and the Han “slaves to an inferior race”, were later used by Sun Yatsen. In the Darwinist/Confucian hierarchy that Liang Qichao had helped promulgate in his writings, the Han were really at the bottom of the ladder. They weren’t just under the Manchus, they were under the Manchus who were under the Europeans. And for Sun Yatsen, in his own version of the Dolchstoßlegende, some Han were race traitors. Popular response to the massacre tales and this whipping up of racial hatred was “irrepressible gnashing of teeth and shouts of anger” (much like many on the Chinese Internet today gnash their teeth over the Japanese, or Chinese with foreign passports).
As a major popularizer of social Darwinist thought, Liang applied it to various subjects. According to Barry Sautman, he wrote that since Hungary was founded by the Huns, it was “established by the yellow race on the territory of the whites”. The ideas colored everything he wrote: when writing on education, he combined the idea of foetal education, a traditional belief that the mothers of great men, such as Mencius, had sat up straight and spoke no evil, thus contributing to the moral character of the foetus, with a micro-level view of Darwinism. If the child evolved right, then the nation would too. Women’s education was necessary, he argued, because without it they could only teach their children to be materialistic and shallow, and the nation would suffer. Rote memorization would block the development of the brain, and the nation would suffer. Competitive sports were necessary, for both men and women, as he wrote in On Martial Spirit, because without every “new citizen” engaging in physical competition, the nation would be weak… and yes, suffer.
Liang Qichao was not solely responsible for China’s fixation on “survival of the fittest” in the early 20th century, but he was tireless in disseminating it. He was very much a man of the times, seeing everything under the shadow of impending extinction. To be sure, the reformers championed many ideas that we today find progressive and laudable, such as ending footbinding, but the underlying reasons for it are profoundly disturbing. One can’t help but look to the coming Olympics, which overlaps the 110th anniversary of the Hundred Days Reform, and think of how many in China view it through the lense of the honor of the nation and the race, to prove to themselves that they are not inferior, and that they are strong. Guys, that’s so nineteenth century.
Brilliant post.
I’ve read similar chronicles of how the Japanese, and then the Koreans through their Japanese colonizers, came to follow Western racial theories at the start of the 20th century. It leads me to wonder: what was “race” like for Asian people before European influence was felt?
Dave,
Excellent, excellent post.
These perversions of social Darwinism spread all over the world like a plague at the end of the 19th Century – although I haven’t seen much evidence of it having spawned in Asia the murderous extremes of ‘eugenics’ that it did in Europe (except, I suppose, in the attitude of the Japanese to the Chinese during the War).
In China, the ‘superiority’ – or the desire to assert some kind of superiority – seems to be largely focused on culture; hence their sometimes risible insistence that they invented everything.
I picked up Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia in Tom’s DVD Store a little while ago. I gather it’s a very popular title at the moment.
Froog, you’re right that it didn’t lead to outright eugenics, but it did lead to a “master race” mentality on the part of the Japanese and the Koreans, as well as a racial purity obsession which still resonates in North Korea today — thus we hear North Korean propaganda about US-sponsored “miscegenation” destroying the Korean race — but has mostly disappeared in Japan and South Korea.
Excellent post. Didn’t realize that Liang Qichao was such a big advocate of social Darwinism.
For the Chinese, unlike European social Darwinists or the Japanese, culture always seems to have been more important than blood. For example, nce the Tuoba and the Xianbei adopted Chinese culture they were thoroughly assimilated and now their descendants have no separate identity. After the trauma of Mongol rule this seems to have changed, but even now you meet Chinese people who insist that Mongolians “became” Chinese after ruling China.
@Matthew: as far as “race” in China before Western influence, there’s the whole idea that there were radial lines of civilization emanating out from the Emperor. A Confucian hierarchy of groups of people, ending with the “yi” or barbarians. Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao’s mentor, did some work trying to integrate these ideas with social Darwinism (as Wang Mingming suggests in the quote I give).
@Froog: The Japanese certainly did get into the “master race” stuff. As for eugenics, its an interesting word in Chinese: 优生学, which is still very commonly used without the stigma you find in English and overlaps with the word for “gifted”. All the same, you can still find an article like this one, published last September, talking about “social eugenics”, birth defects and “improving the nation”.
@J: The whole idea of cultural assimilation, though, kinda glosses over the whole “clash of civilizations” tone of Liang and others work. In the anti-Manchu example I give, Liang provides the Manchus with an out: they’ve assimilated, so they’re ok. While not of the same blood, they’re excused because they became “one of us”. This might not be as abhorrent as the genocidal rhetoric of the Revolutionaries, but lets be clear – there’s no debate, in this “sociological/cultural” view of race, over whether different = threatening. Assimilation can be just as destructive as genocide. Indeed, its precisely what some refer to today as “cultural genocide”, although often they themselves are falling into the trap of drawing ethnic lines in the sand (I have a post about Tibetan activists along these lines).
I don’t think I’ve seen the term “cultural genocide” used before, and I don’t like it. Genocide is genocide. While I deplore the extirpation of indigenous cultures – and the psychological oppression of peoples that goes along with that – I don’t think it begins to compare with the systematic butchering of people in the 10s and 100s of thousands. “Assimilation can be just as destructive as genocide”? No, Dave, I just don’t see that.
I haven’t read that link article yet, but I suspect that ‘eugenics’ in Chinese thinking doesn’t really have much to do with Darwinism – it’s an older set of prejudices which devalues the female child, the cripple, the mentally ill.
Ideas of ‘racial purity’ are also, I think, much older and deeper rooted. They might have got an extra impetus of academic credibility from the popularity of Darwin’s ideas, but I think they’ve always been with us. North Korean propaganda is pretty loony stuff; and for them – but also for China and many, most, all other nations – resisting miscegenation is one part of their nationalism, their self identity. It’s not so unlike the anxiety that many Americans in the southern States feel about the influx of Mexicans.
Like Matthew, I’m really curious as to what the Chinese conception of racial or cultural difference (and superiority/inferiority) was in earlier periods of history. How did they view their near neighbours – the Japanese, the Koreans, the Tibetans, the Mongolians, the Manchus – in the more distant past?
@ Dave: I’m aware of the hierarchical theories of the Chinese and “the Other” but I always assumed they were cultural rather than racial identities. My Chinese history teacher always used an egg metaphor to speak of barbarian tribes, saying that the “raw barbarians” weren’t respected by the Han, whereas the barbarians that learned from China (e.g. the Liao Dynasty, Mongolians, and Manzu after Nurhachi) were “hard-boiled barbarians” and somehow “more equal” to the Han people, so I always thought moving up the hierarchy a matter of cultural transmission.
Moving on, like Froog, I also have reservations about using the term cultural genocide, since, to an extent, cultural shifts and cultural changes are an inevitable process — just consider how many of the world’s cultures were lost before the first empires held sway over the globe — whereas genocide is never inevitable. Perhaps we can split the difference and speak of “cultural cleansing”?
@ Froog: The anti-miscegenation rhetoric of the North Koreans is interesting to me because it is explicitly blood-based, and use phrases like, “We will never allow a drop of ink to be spilled into the river of the Han [Korean people]” that just seems so Nazi-like and seemingly un-Asian. A similar thing pops ups with the weird fixation Koreans and Japanese have with blood type-as-destiny and their (possibly concomitant) Hitler fetish, a concept that’s spread to young Chinese also. This is a bit different than the Minutemen, who seem worried about cultural infiltration first and foremost (though obviously there’s a racial component at work also).
On the other hand, in China, the idea that “race mixing” produces a “superior” person seems almost universal in Chinese cities. (I can’t speak for the countryside.) In Chinese eyes, “mixing” includes not just Eurasians but also, say, half-Japanese/half-Chinese people like Takeshi Kaneshiro and Chinese people who are half-Chinese minority/half-Han. Can we call this concept a kind of eugenics?
A silly closing thought for everyone: if, as the Chinese nationalists say, the Mongolians are “Chinese” because Chinggis Khan’s son and grandson conquered and ruled China, then what should we make of the Khitan People, who were a cultural (possibly racial) mix of Persian and Chinese? By applying the “Chinggis Khan standard,” does that make the Iranians “Chinese” too?
@Froog & Matthew: Perhaps I misspoke – I don’t think “cultural genocide” is a great term either. I meant that “assimilation can be just as destructive…” is what people who use that word mean. For an example of someone who used it, look here.
On eugenics: Froog, I didn’t say the article I linked has to do with Darwinism. But it does make a connection between infant health, and the nation and the race (“minzu”).
Matthew, those Chinese ideas about mixed race would count as part of “eugenics” in the Chinese sense of the word.
As for cultural assimilation trumping race in Chinese culture… well, the Manchus did alot of cultural assimilating, but when things got bad they were singled out based on race.
Dave, in retrospect, I think the Manchu were among the least Sinicized of all the “foreign rulers” of the Han people. After all, for most of the Qing Dynasty, the Manchu not only preserved their own culture to a remarkable extent — they kept their language, they refused to bind their feet — they also imposed a lot of their culture on the Han such as the queue and Manchu dress.
In the minds of nationalist Chinese like Dr. Sun, these cultural differences were no doubt a reminder of the “alien-ness” of the Manchu, just as the clothing and hairstyles of Orthodox Jewry was a symbol of their “alien-ness” to Hitler in his rabble-rouser years. Culture difference can become the font of “racial difference” when manipulated by propaganda.
On another note, I’m struck that Chinese use the term “race” in English in a way modern Westerners do not by referring to other Asians such as Koreans, and Japanese, Vietnamese as different races, while referring to minority groups within China (including Koreans) as “ethnicities” or “nationalities.” How much of the Chinese notion of “race” means “people of another country”?
Finally, the modern and very cosmopolitan Chinese attitude towards “race-mixing” and cultural exchange is one of the reasons I’ve never felt that nationalism here was as disturbing as the racially tinged nationalism in Korea or Japan.
Sorry, I’m going to post what’s rambling around in my head. I haven’t really studied these issues carefully but I do think about them and would like to finally express them.
The way I see it, the name ‘China’ if translated from the Chinese point of view would be called ‘Grand Central Nation’ like Grand Central Station – the biggest, central hub that everything and everyone must pass through. All races and cultures. One would thus evaluate its success based on it’s effectiveness in sustaining this traffic. Wasn’t that the orignal reason for China – a system that unites distant regions and tribes?
Perhaps the origin and survival of Japan and Korea was based on their tribal ability to resist the gravitational force of China through keeping track of blood-lines. Also, due to the domination of the West, the Chinese were forced to see themselves as a racial category: ‘Chinese’, rather than ‘One from the Grand Central Nation'(Zhong Guo Ren). The name ‘Chinese’ is meaningless – it is merely a racial term. Modern China seeks to once again be seen as the Grand Central Nation where everyone can and must pass through and intermingle along the way. But then again there is also that temptation to be tribal especially if it turns out there’s really no complelling reason for other nations to acknowledge China as an important center.