Editor's note:
Is the Chinese nation one or more? Can the Western concept of nation describe "Chinese nation"? A few days ago, Pan Yue, the first vice-president of the Central Institute of Socialism, wrote an article about the entanglement between Gu Jiegang and Fei Xiaotong, both of China’s two universities in the last century. The excerpt of the article is as follows, and the title is drafted separately by the editor.
Within each civilization, there are commonalities and differences.
When the community splits, in order to delimit the boundaries and consolidate themselves, the various political centers will inevitably exaggerate their differences and belittle the common, until they become permanent divisions.
Even with the same ancestry, language, memory, and beliefs, as long as there is a political multi-centered competition, this tragedy will inevitably occur.
Sects split and ethnic groups collapsed.
Political unity is the basis for the existence of cultural diversity.
The stronger the political unity, the more diverse cultures can express their individuality; the more fragile the political unity, the more diverse cultures will fight each other and eventually die out.
Unity and pluralism are not the same as each other but the same weak and strong.
Failure to understand the dialectical relationship between unity and pluralism will both divide the world and mess up oneself.
The concepts of unity and pluralism were entangled in the two universities in China in the last century.
Gu Jiegang
The first one is Gu Jiegang.
In 1917, the New Culture Movement created a group of fierce radicals, Gu Jiegang was number one.
In 1923, the 30-year-old young man from Suzhou slammed the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, thinking that ancient history was "made" layer by layer by Confucianism.
He advocated using empirical methods to examine everything. Whoever wants to prove the existence of Xia, Shang, and Zhou must produce evidence from the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties.
He used sociological and archeological methods to compare ancient books with each other, "dare to defeat all the idols in "Jing" and "Biography"."
The extreme development of this movement is "Xia Yu is a worm".
Hu Shi praised this, "I would rather be suspicious of the past and lose it, but if you don't believe it, you will lose it."
Using this method, he proposed to deny the "nationality is unitary" and "regional unity".
He believes that in ancient times, "it was only affirmation that a nation had the ancestor of a nation, and there were no recognized ancestors of many nations", "they originally had their own ancestors, so why not demand unification"!
As soon as the "skepticism of ancient times" came out, the ideological world was shaken, and history was disintegrated, and "Chinese identity" was dismantled.
But Gu Jiegang didn't care.
In his eyes, only such a brand-new method can recreate the decadent 2000-year knowledge pedigree.
Like the pioneers of the New Culture Movement, he worked hard to create a new China.
However, it was not Gu Jiegang who questioned the ancient history of China first, but the Japanese and Oriental historians before World War II.
At the beginning of the 20th century, these historians described the rise and fall of East Asian civilization, the rise and fall of nations, and the rise and fall of nations from the perspective of Eastern nations.
His representative Shiratori Kouji used empirical historical methods to propose that Yao, Shunyu, and Yu did not really exist, but were "idols" fabricated by later Confucians.
Gu Jiegang, who was originally influenced by the spirit of Qianjia's textual research, deeply convinced Shiratori Kuji, and also shouted "Down with ancient history."
But while these great masters of Oriental history are engaged in academic innovation, they have developed a complete set of theories about "deconstructing China by race", such as the theory of "Eighteen provinces in the Han region", the theory of "African China north of the Great Wall", and the theory of "Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet". "Back to China" theory, "China without borders", "Qing Dynasty non-state theory", "Conquest of foreign nations is happiness", etc.
This became the predecessor of the "New Qing History" view in the United States today, and it is also the basis for Lee Teng-hui and other independent factions.
The Dongyang masters also believed that after the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the "Ancient Han people" had already declined, and the Manchu and Mongol people had the arrogant "Yidi disease".
Only Japan, which combines the strengths of the brave spirit of the northern peoples and the exquisite culture of the southern Han people, is the "end of civilization" to save the evils of East Asian civilization.
Japanese culture is a sub-system that has grown up under the stimulation of Chinese culture. It has the qualifications to undertake Chinese civilization, and the center of Chinese civilization will be transferred to Japan.
Gu Jiegang was awake.
In the face of the "September 18th" war and smoke, he once devoted himself to Oriental historiography, and finally understood the relationship between academics and politics.
In 1938, he witnessed Japan continue to instigate the independence of Thai and Burmese in the southwest, and was shaken by Fu Sinian's spirit, and finally denied his theory of fame.
When he was ill, he wrote "The Chinese nation is one" on February 9, 1939, when the stick arrived at the table.
He opposed the use of "nationality" to define the various ethnic groups in the country, and suggested that "cultural groups" should be used instead, because "the Chinese people since ancient times have only cultural concepts but no ethnic concepts."
In fact, Gu Jiegang put forward the concept of "nationality" here, that is, "people under the same government" belong to the same nationality, that is, the Chinese nation.
He gave an example of his own background, "My surname is Gu and I am from an old clan in Jiangnan. No one would ever deny that I am Chinese or Han. But my family was still one of the Baiyue people who had no tattoos when I was in Zhou and Qin. On the seaside of Fujian and Zhejiang, if you don’t communicate with China, it’s really not a Chinese. Ever since our ancestor Dongou Wang expressed his heart to the Han Dynasty and asked Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty to move his people to the Jianghuai area...we can no longer say that we are' The Vietnamese nation is not a member of the Chinese nation."
He always believed that the "continuation of the three generations" was fabricated by post-Confucianism, and he began to argue about the transformation of Shang and Zhou. "Even Confucius, a descendant of the king of Shang, would say,'The Zhou was in the second generation, and I was so depressed, and I was from Zhou'. I don’t want to say, “You are the Zhou people, we are the Shang people, we should remember the old hatred of Zhou Gong’s east campaign”; he admires Zhou Gong to the extreme, and often dreams of Zhou Gong.” “Just imagine what kind of tolerance this is. With the slightest narrow racial concept"!
After the publication of "The Chinese Nation is One," a famous discussion arose. The skeptic was Fei Xiaotong, a younger anthropologist and ethnic scholar.
He was 29 years old, and Gu Jiegang was a fellow in Suzhou, who had just returned from studying in the UK.
Fei Xiaotong
Fei Xiaotong believes that "nation" is a group formed based on differences in culture, language, and physique, and is a scientific concept.
There are indeed different ethnic groups in China. This is an objective fact. There is no need to deliberately eliminate the boundaries of various ethnic groups in order to seek political unity, and there is no need to worry about the enemy using the concept of "nation" and shouting "national self-determination" to divide China.
He emphasized that "people with the same culture, language, and physique do not have to belong to the same country", "a country does not have to be a cultural and language group", because the reality of the Republic of China is precisely the multi-political center, and there are also multiple political divisions in Chinese history. Period.
Hearing this, although Gu Jiegang was lingering on the bed, but like "the bones are in his throat", he got up and wrote "Continuation of the Chinese Nation Is One", retorting that the "nationality" of the Chinese nation is strong enough and "differentiated." It is an "unnatural situation".
As long as the splitting force is slightly weaker, the people will spontaneously end the split.
If "long-term separation" had natural stability, China would have long been fragmented and not a nation.
He even roared at the end of the article-"Wait, when the Japanese army withdraws from China, we can see what the people of the four northeastern provinces and other enemy-occupied areas are like and give us a good example"!
Fei Xiaotong was silent about Senior's illness and anger, and did not answer any more.
"Whether the Chinese nation is one or more" has become an inconclusive case.
41 years later, Gu Jiegang died (1980) at the age of 87.
Eight years later (1988), 78-year-old Fei Xiaotong delivered a long speech entitled "The Chinese Nation's Diversity and Unity".
He acknowledged the existence of a free entity such as the "Chinese nation".
He said, "As a conscious national entity, the Chinese nation has emerged in the confrontation between China and Western powers in the past 100 years, but as a free national entity it has been formed in the historical process of thousands of years. Its mainstream is formed by the historical process of thousands of years. Many scattered and isolated ethnic units have undergone contact, mixing, connection and integration, and at the same time they have split and died. They have formed a world where you come and I go, I come and you go, I have you in me, and I in you, but each A pluralistic unity with individuality".
After another five years, Fei Xiaotong returned to his hometown in Suzhou to attend the Gu Jiegang memorial, and for the first time responded to the public case more than 60 years ago-"Later I realized that Mr. Gu was based on patriotic passion and targeted the Japanese imperialism at the time. The Northeast established the "Manchukuo" and incited division in Inner Mongolia, so it was filled with outrage and strongly opposed the use of the "nation" to divide our country. I fully support his political stand."
Some critics believe that Fei Xiaotong's theory of "one body and pluralism" is nothing more than a compromise and bridging "political argument" between "one" and "multiple."
However, Fei Xiaotong believes that the fundamental problem is that it is impossible to describe the "nationality of China" in the Western concept of nationality.
"We should not simply copy the existing concepts in the West to talk about the facts in China. Nation is a concept that belongs to the historical category. The essence of the Chinese nation depends on China's long history. If you cling to the Western concepts of nation, you will not be able to justify it in many places. ".
Fei Xiaotong also explained the changes in his later years, "When I was in the Confucian forests of Qufu, I suddenly realized that Confucius was not just a pluralistic order? He succeeded in China and formed a huge Chinese nation. The reason why China did not have the split of the former Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union is because the Chinese have a Chinese mentality."
Konglin in Qufu, Shandong
The entanglement between Gu Jiegang and Fei Xiaotong reflects the common mindset of modern Chinese intellectuals-they are eager to use Western concepts to transform China’s intellectual tradition, but they find that Western experience cannot generalize their own civilization; they are eager for Western academics independent of politics, and at the same time. I found that Western academics have never been separated from politics.
In the end, they all returned to the matrix of Chinese civilization.
For more than a century, China has lost its political and cultural discourse power. "Historical China" is written by Western and Eastern.
The brothers' cognition of each other is shaped by an external academic framework.
For example, there is a big Hanist view that "there is no China after Yashan" and "there is no China after the Ming Dynasty"; there is a narrow nationalist view that "Man and Mongol return to Tibet and not China".
This is the legacy of the "History of the East".
For example, some historians try to use "ideology" to benchmark Western history.
When the West said that "great unification" was the original sin of autocracy, they blamed it on the Yuan and Qing dynasties.
It is said that the Han, Tang and Song Dynasties were originally an "enlightened autocracy" where "the emperor and the scholar-officials ruled the world together", not far from the West, but it was transformed into a "barbaric autocracy" by the nomadic "master and slave concept". The high degree of centralization in the Ming Dynasty was The remnants of the military system of the Yuan Dynasty, China did not produce capitalism because it was cut off by the Qing Dynasty.
They came to this conclusion because they did not thoroughly study the internal logic of China's failure to give birth to capitalism.
For example, when the West believed that China had not developed a democratic system due to the lack of a "tradition of freedom," some historians began to argue that "agricultural civilization" represents autocracy and "nomadic civilization" represents freedom.
If the Yuan Dynasty was not overthrown by the Ming Dynasty, then China had a social form above commerce and law as early as the 13th century.
They did not understand that the honor of "free spirit" only belonged to the Gothic and Germanic people in the West, and never belonged to the Huns, Turks and Mongolians in the East.
In Montesquieu's writings, it is also conquered. The Goths spread "freedom", while the Tatars (Mongolia) spread "autocracy" ("The Spirit of Law").
In Hegel's writing, the Germans knew all freedom, the Greco-Romans knew some freedom, and all the Orientals did not know any freedom ("Philosophy of History").
These disputes and controversies all come from the fact that we always look at ourselves with the eyes of other civilizations; while the eyes of other civilizations, although they have the benefits of multiple thinking, are often subject to international politics.
This is true in the past, and so will the future.
Chinese civilization is not without the concept of "race", but there is another stronger "world" spirit that surpasses it.
Wang Tong, the great hermit of the Sui Dynasty, taught almost the entire group of generals in the early Tang Dynasty.
As a Han, he said that the orthodoxy of China is not in the Southern Dynasties of the Han, but in the Emperor Xiaowen of Xianbei.
This is because Emperor Xiaowen "belongs to the kingdom of the first kings, accepts the way of the first kings, and the people of the first kings".
This is the true spirit of the world.
The same is true for other ethnic groups.
Folk Custom in Lhasa, Tibet-Clay Sculpture "Golden Monkey Presents Peach"
The Tibetans and Mongolians believe in Buddhism, regardless of the Tibetan-Chinese tradition, there is a doctrine of "eliminating the sense of separation".
The Chinese Muslims "Iru Huitong" tradition also has "the way of the saints of the Western Regions is the same as the way of the Chinese saints. The teachings are based on righteousness, understanding the principles of heaven and earth metamorphism, understanding the principle of death and life, general ethics, eating, resting, living, nothing There is a way, not afraid of the sky".
This kind of world spirit that breaks ethnic barriers is the background color of Chinese civilization.
A history of the Chinese nation is a history in which "the spirit of the world" transcends "ethnic self-limitation".
The integration of the Chinese nation is also full of deep emotions.
In the Mongolian "Golden History" written in the late Ming Dynasty, it is said that Emperor Yongle was the posthumous son of Emperor Shun of Yuan. Through the battle of Jingnan, the Emperor of Ming Dynasty secretly returned to the Yuan Dynasty. It was not until the Manchus entered the pass that the "destiny of Yuan" was ended. The "Han-Tibet History Collection" written in the early Ming Dynasty stated that the Yuan Dynasty was "the Mongols were in charge of the Han Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty." The late Song Emperor (Manzi Hezun) did not cast into the sea at Yashan, but went to Tibet for repairs. Practicing Buddhism, he became an eminent monk of the Sasgya school, and finally reincarnated as a Han monk named Zhu Yuanzhang, who seized the Mongolian throne and gave birth to a son named Zhu Di who looked exactly like a Mongolian.
The three dynasties of the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties are arranged into "reincarnations" and "cause and effect". This is not official history, but a religious legend. It is the simple consensus that people at that time had on each other in Greater China. It is an expression of different ethnic groups. Different ways of feeling in the "community of shared destiny".
These emotions are difficult for people who describe China based on foreign theories alone.
Only deep emotions can produce deep understanding, and deep understanding can complete the real construction.
In the end, the story of the Chinese nation has to be written by ourselves.
Pan Yue