Gan Yang, “Unifying the Three Traditions” in the New Era: The Merging of Three Chinese Traditions”
Lecture presented at Tsinghua University on May 12, 2005
Translation by David Ownby
"His engagement with the “China in the World” series gives the impression that he was a Westernizing liberal in the 1980s, but as he explains in the text translated here, he sees the West not as a model to be followed or imported, but as a body of historical experiences and institutional experiments that China should learn from, but not copy. Gan also identifies with many of the stances of China’s New Left, as illustrated by William Sima and Tang Xiaobing’s translation of Gan’s “Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People?” elsewhere on this site, in which Gan’s preference for mass democracy is clear."
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The Coexistence of Three Traditions in Contemporary China (pp. 1-13)
At present, we can identify three traditions in China. One is the tradition that has taken shape after 25 years of reform. Although this is not a lengthy tradition, many ideas and terms that have grown out of reform and opening are already deeply impressed on the people’s minds and have entered into the daily language of the Chinese people, basically becoming a kind of tradition. This tradition has, for the most part, grown out of the “market,” and includes many concepts with which we are all familiar today, such as freedom and rights. Another tradition is that beginning with the establishment of the People’s Republic and that took form during the Mao Zedong era. This is a tradition characterized particularly by its emphasis on equality and justice. It is clear today that from the mid- to late-1990s onward, the Maoist tradition of equality has been quite powerful, and beginning in the mid-1990s there has been a great deal of discussion of the Mao era. Ten years earlier, this would have seemed impossible, but the Maoist tradition of equality has become a powerful tradition in contemporary China. Finally, of course there is also the tradition of Chinese civilization, forged over thousands of years. This is what we often call Chinese traditional culture or Confucian culture. It is often difficult to describe Chinese traditional culture, but in the everyday life of the Chinese people it is basically expressed, to put it simply, in terms of interpersonal relationships and ties of locality. This can be seen very clearly in many current television dramas in today’s China, especially those focusing on the family or on marriage and divorce.
The coexistence of these three traditions is an extremely unique feature of Chinese society, particularly on the Chinese mainland. If we make a comparison with Hong Kong society, we note that it has the first tradition (the tradition of markets and freedom) as well as the third tradition (highly developed sensitivity to interpersonal relations and ties of place), but it lacks the second tradition, a tradition with a strong emphasis on “equality.” For this reason, even if Hong Kong is a very unequal society, and even if many people are working to relieve this inequality, the problem of inequality has never provoked an intense ideological conflict. From another perspective, if we make a comparison with the United States, it has the first two traditions, with a strong emphasis on both freedom and equality—in fact we might say that the tension between these two traditions constitutes the basic national character of the United States—but America does not have the third tradition, and thus pays less attention to interpersonal relationships and emotional links to localities, and especially lacks the cultural traditions and cultural psychology that lie behind China’s third tradition.
Yet we often observe, in discussions in contemporary China, that these three traditions seem to be placed in a position of mutual opposition. Some people will particularly emphasize one tradition while rejecting the others. Everyone has surely felt that Chinese society, since the 1990s, has been full of debate, and that these debates have come to influence even people’s individual lives. Good friends whose relationships go back for decades suddenly have opposing viewpoints, and when the divergences become important, the friendship is threatened, which leaves everyone hurt. This is because in some of these larger debates, particularly those concerning the Mao era, differences of opinion are quite large, and the debates easily become emotional.
The topic of today’s lecture, “The uniting of the three traditions and the revival of Chinese civilization,” is based on an interview published at the end of 2004 in Economic Reporting on the 21st Century 二十一世纪经济报道. In that interview I talked in premature and simplistic terms about my view that today we need a new understanding of the linkages and continuities between the success of reform and opening and the Mao era, as well as a new understanding of the foundational role that traditional Chinese history and civilization have played in modern China. The main point of my talk today is to emphasize that the Confucian tradition, the Mao Zedong tradition, and the Deng Xiaoping tradition, all belong to a unified continuity in China’s history and civilization. To use the terms of the Gongyang 公羊 tradition,[9] we need to “unify the three traditions” of the new age.
What is “the problem of Chinese culture”?
It seems that most people today can readily accept a positive vision of China’s traditional culture, or that even if there are differences of opinion, these differences don’t necessarily lead to fights that hurt people’s feelings. But this is something that has evolved only over the past two or three years, and in the past, discussions of Chinese traditional culture often led to violent disagreements.
The reason for this is that behind the problem of Chinese culture in fact lies the problem of the opposition of Chinese and Western culture. What you say about Chinese culture reveals what you think about Western culture, and often contains a hidden comparison of China and the West, which speaks to the debate between Chinese and Western culture that has raged incessantly across the entire 20th century. In the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals were most worked up about the so-called “culture fever,” which in fact was nothing more than yet another “debate about Chinese and Western culture.” The good thing about the debate in the 1980s was that it led contemporary Chinese intellectuals back to the problem of Chinese tradition that had agonized Chinese intellectuals from late Qing times onward. This problem was the “greatest change in three thousand years,”[10] the fact that beginning in the late Qing, all of Chinese civilization disintegrated, completely fell apart, including not only the political system and the economic system, but also the cultural and educational institutions, which meant that beginning in the 20th century, Chinese intellectuals, whether studying China or the West, consistently invoked the West as their authority. They might mention Confucius, but would never cite him as an authority. This seems to have started to change over the past few years, and at the end of 2004, Southern Weekend 南方周末 and other mainland periodicals said that 2004 was the year of the return of traditional culture.
This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the abolition of the Confucian examination system. People today have a hard time imagining what the abolition of the examinations meant, what Chinese intellectuals of the period might have felt about this kind of attack. By way of comparison imagine today’s Tsinghua students, who tested into middle school from primary school, from middle school to high school and from high school into university. What if when you graduated, there was an announcement saying that everything you had studied to that point was useless, that your studies were not going to help you find a job. What would you think? You would surely go crazy, and some would surely think about jumping off of a building. The shock would be that great. Can you imagine this sort of attack? The disintegration of Chinese society at the time was thorough and comprehensive.
What was the examination system? Today’s Chinese are used to thinking about the examination system dismissively. But at the simplest level, the examination system was a basic mechanism for the reproduction of the elite system of Chinese society as a whole. In traditional China, in theory all students could take the exams. Of course not many would make the top (jinshi 进士) level, but all students would think about taking the exams, and at a subconscious level they would identify with the thought and the lifestyle of the Chinese traditional elites. So even if you did not become a jinshi you were still part of China’s elite. And you could keep trying year after year; in the traditional Chinese exam system there was no age limit, so you could keep trying until you were in your 70s or 80s. Sometimes, even if you still failed, the emperor would be impressed by your age and would grant you a jinshi. Why? So that China’s latent elite would always have hope; it functioned to maintain the reproduction of the elite system. From its beginnings in the Sui-Tang period, the examination system endured for at least 1300 years, and was traditional China’s most basic political-cultural mechanism.
The abolition of the examination system in the late Qing simply meant the thorough-going collapse and disintegration of the entirety of the Chinese traditional political-cultural mechanism. With the collapse of this mechanism, China faced the vast mission of reorganizing its society. For a society like this to establish a new set of mechanisms is no easy task. In the West, the transition from tradition to modernity required several centuries, while in China only a century or so has transpired since the late Qing collapse. We today are still living this transition, and we must see the entire process, from the late Qing collapse through the Chinese revolution and reform as a continuous process whose goal is the search for a new continuity on which to base modern China.
Familiarity is not true knowledge
The American Joshua Ramo recently coined the concept of the “Beijing Consensus,” and argued that it had already displaced the “Washington Consensus.”[11] The concrete details of his argument are debatable, but the point of his initiative is to remind us that understanding China is extremely difficult, and requires going beyond popular clichés. From the Western perspective, the biggest problem of the 21st century is China. China is a problem for the West, because the West has already ruled the world for several centuries, and the Western-dominated world has created a certain number of norms and procedures. Today’s China is like someone who just crashed the party, which has put the entire system on alert. What is to be done? What will China be like in the future? No one knows.
Two or three months ago, America’s Boston Globe newspaper published an editorial criticizing the American Secretary of Defense who, in an interview made the following very interesting remark about China: “We pray that China will enter the civilized world in a well-behaved manner.” The editorial in the Boston Globe took exception, and at the outset of the piece noted that China has 3000 years of history as a civilized nation, while America has been only established for a little over 200 years. The civilization you are talking about has been around for more than 3000 years, and yet you treat China like a country from beyond the bounds of civilization, and hope that it will enter the civilized world in a well-behaved manner? The editorial advised Americans to study Chinese history, and noted that China is reviving the glory and greatness that characterized her in the past. I of course consider that the Boston Globe editorial had a lot of insight.
But the problem is that many people in China look at China in the same way as the American Defense Secretary. Opinions have circulated in China in recent years with which I do not agree, for example many in the media say that “China must enter the mainstream of international civilized society,” by which they mean that Chinese people should see themselves as barbarians, and that they need to completely remake themselves to as to “enter mainstream civilized society.” For this reason, since the 1990s there has been a kind of attitude that believes that the basis of legitimacy in China should not come from China herself, but rather from Western acknowledgement. It used to be that the United States was the United States and China was China, but sometimes Chinese take the side of the Americans, and argue until they are blue in the face.
What has brought this about? I think it is because a fair number of Chinese think that China should stand with the United States on everything, that if America attacks Iraq, China should naturally follow along, or to put it more generally, their overall goal in all things is to make the West happy—and especially should avoid upsetting the United States. But I think there have been positive developments on this front in recent years. In other words, more and more Chinese people have begun to understand that there are many instances in which China cannot satisfy the West, has no way to make them happy—unless we want to surrender completely. For example, all of a sudden all the Western countries are talking about the problem of the Chinese currency, the Renminbi (RMB). I don’t know whether the RMB should be devalued, but this should be something that Chinese people decide for themselves, something that Chinese people will decide based on their own interests. Another example is that everyone talks about the WTO and free trade, but at the same time the US and Europe use their own laws to limit imports of Chinese fabrics.
Compare this to China. China followed the rules and after entering the WTO China engaged in domestic propaganda telling Chinese companies that they had to be ready to face the competition. But other countries use their own laws to impose quotas on Chinese fabrics. We seemed to think that once we were in the WTO then these questions would be regulated by the WTO and that it was completely out of our hands. Only China was naïve enough to believe that international organizations were bigger than the Chinese government, while all Americans know that their government is bigger than any international organization. When did the US ever pay attention to international law or international organizations?
There are two kinds of people in the West. One is fond of China, and admits that if Chinese economic growth has reached a certain level by 2020, then by 2030 it might be second only to the United States. The other sees China as always on the verge of collapse, citing any number of Western theories and any number of Chinese problems, for example the notion that China’s GINI coefficient is in dangerous territory for some time now, or maybe the current crisis in raw materials. Yet I never care that much if Westerners are well-meaning or not; all that matters is the basis of their judgement.
The complexity of things at the present moment resides in the fact that almost anything you can say about China has some basis in fact. We should not think that because we are Chinese we have a better understanding of China. I don’t think that we do, or at least I really don’t. Part of this has to do with my academic speciality, which is to study the West. When I was at Peking University I studied Western philosophy, and when I was in the US I spent most of my time studying the West. While I was there I was always afraid that someone would ask me about China, because I really didn’t understand China. This isn’t false modesty, because I feel that I understand certain things, but not China. Looking at China from the Western perspective, it is truly hard to understand China.
I urge everyone to be a bit more modest, and not to think that you understand China just because you are Chinese. Of course we know a lot of things about China, but it’s like what Hegel said: “What is ‘familiarly known’ is not properly known, precisely for the reason that it is familiar.”[12] Why? Because since you think you know the matter well you don’t look further into the “why” of the matter, which means that you really don’t understand.
Regarding China, I could ask a lot of questions which those in the audience would not necessarily be able to answer. For example, in the course of 25 years of reform and opening, Chinese results have been quite extraordinary, but I have yet to find an entirely satisfactory explanation for this. In fact, from the early 1980s through the early 1990s, no one in the Western academy approved of China’s economic reform.
The reason is simple. They quite naturally felt that if the economic reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did not succeed, then why would they succeed in China? Especially since the USSR was ahead of China in terms of industrialization, modernization, and education; her agricultural population was also less than China’s, and overall living standards were higher than China’s. For example, Western scholars discovered that in 1978, the average educational level of China’s factory heads or managers was a ninth to eleventh grade level. Ninth grade is middle school. Eleventh grade is still high school level, since twelve years are required to graduate. And in the USSR at the time the managers were uniformly college graduates.
And comparisons in living standards between China and the USSR and Eastern Europe were even less flattering to China. When I first arrived in the US I had a friend from Yugoslavia. At the time the various regions of Yugoslavia had all proclaimed their independence and war was everywhere. My friend was from Sarajevo, and after visiting China for three or four months he told me that China was rising and Yugoslavia falling, but that China still had a long way to go to catch up with Yugoslavia. It’s easy to imagine their sense of superiority and pride. In the 1980s, most Chinese homes had no telephones, to say nothing of cars. Yet in the USSR and Eastern Europe, electrical appliances and cars had long since been part of daily life. From a common sense standpoint, all Western countries reasoned that since they all were centrally planned economies, then why would China’s reforms work when those of the USSR and Eastern Europe did not? This is a very natural way to think. In the West, everyone thought that if the economic reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had succeeded as they did in China, then the subsequent collapse would not have occurred. It was because the reforms did not work that the collapse was so comprehensive.
We all know that China’s reforms started in 1978, yet throughout the entire decade of the 1980s, economic reforms were not the chief subject of concern from China’s intellectuals, who were instead focused on thought and culture, including what was called the “culture fever” of the 1980s. We know now that the Chinese economy grew at an annual rate of 10% during the 1980s, but those of us living in China at the time did not notice it, didn’t know it, weren’t aware of it. I don’t think it was just me, but rather that no intellectual who lived through the 1980s noticed that the economy had taken off.
It was the West that started talking about a Chinese take-off, which was reported for the first time in 1992, probably on the front page of the New York Times in September of that year, based on a report by the World Bank, and accompanied by a big picture. We were all surprised when we saw it, because prior to that point, all discussions about China were about when it would fall apart. Western scholars also said that not only had China’s economy grown by 10% a year during the 1980s, but had also maintained a high rate of growth from 1949 through the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, although during that period most of the gains were reinvested in the economy instead of being distributed to the people. Everyone who heard this for the first time was stunned, because it seemed as if those living in China didn’t understand China as well as the Westerners did...
Conclusion (pp. 45-49)
The questions I have tried to raise today suggest that we need to re-envision China. Perhaps our understanding of China is only at the beginning. We must understand it anew. This includes why this twenty-five years of reform has achieved such great results. We need to understand it all anew. We need a new understanding of the connections and continuities between the achievements of reform and the Mao era, and of the foundational role that traditional Chinese history and civilization have played in modern China. Today we must emphasize that the tradition of Confucius, the tradition of Mao Zedong, and the tradition of Deng Xiaoping are part of the continuous whole of Chinese history and civilization. To borrow the language of China’s old Gongyang school, they compose the “unifying of the three traditions” for the new era.
In sum, the greatest challenge of the 21st century is the need to come to a new understanding of China, an understanding that can only be based on comparison with other countries. There is one point on which I hope I won’t be misunderstood. I do not agree with those who argue that now we can completely ignore the West and simply study China from a Chinese perspective. I have long emphasized that to deeply study China one must first study the West. This is because in reality we live today in a Western-dominated globalized world. The West’s influence is everywhere. So a very important part of studying China is studying the West. Only when we deeply study the West can we develop the ability to be discriminating.
First of all we must understand that in reality over the past century we have all used Western perspectives to look at China. Marxism is also Western. Since the early 20th century, Chinese judgements of China are in fact implicit judgements of the West. These comparisons have dominated all 20th century discussions about China.
There is nothing inherently wrong with comparison. The problem is that many people who think they understand things base themselves on unreliable premises. People who blather on at length about what the West is like often know little about it. After we achieve a deep understanding of the West we will be able to see that so much of what Chinese say about the West reflects that they do not know what they are talking about. The West is not so superficial. It’s easy to spout sloganistic Western ideological discourse, like people who champion democracy. This requires no particular intelligence. But to deeply understand the West is no simple or easy matter. Even Westerners themselves do not necessarily understand the West, in the same way that I have argued today that Chinese do not necessarily understand China. To understand the West or to understand China requires the expenditure of a great deal of effort.
In fact, not many Chinese really understand the West, and plenty manage to make a hash of it. But the truth is that today everybody takes the West as a reference, which is as it should be. The problem is how precisely to go about it. For example, today it is 2005. Should our reference point be the West in 2005? Should the 2003 reform of Peking University be based on the newest and most recent methods of Harvard University? This sort of sloppy so-called “following international practices” is suspect. It can easily become an ignorant and mindless reference point that ignores Western history.
My personal opinion is that the Western reference point that is most worthy considering for today’s China is either England of around 1800 or America around 1900. These two periods more resemble the China of around 2000. At the turn of the 19th century, England’s industrial revolution had produced a huge transformation of English social structure. From 1780, there was huge economic growth on the one hand and on the other, a large divergence of rich and poor along with sharpening social contradictions. We need to understand how England, at this turning point of its own modern transformation, resolved the sharp social differentiation and conflicts that accompany modern economic development.
Next, there is America at the turn of the 20th century. Strictly speaking, after the Civil War, from around 1870 to 1930, America had its own modern transformation. Both its economy and society underwent huge changes, likewise experiencing high-speed economic growth as well as huge social differentiation and conflicts. All of these conditions greatly resemble ours at the present day, including various social movements that violently criticized America’s New Rich. The social contradictions and conflicts of this transformation continued down to the 1930s when Roosevelt’s New Deal created a new social and political order. The New Deal was something most people from various parts of society could accept, a product of compromise, and even if some people remained unsatisfied, the New Deal established a basic social consensus.
Many of the practices employed by England and America at the turning point of their own modern transformation are worthy reference points for us. Only when our understanding of and reference to the West proceeds from our own questions can we know which aspects will benefit us. For this reason, we should not see studying of China and studying the West as in opposition to one other. Rather we should more deeply and more broadly study the West. We should study the West on a large scale and deeply study the entire history of the West because in any event the West influences us in many areas, influences our thinking. Only when we have trained a great number of people who truly understand the West deeply will we be able to get past the false understanding of many so-called experts. This is why it is so important for the study of China to deeply study the West.
Translator’s Notes
[1] 甘阳，“新时代的“通三统”：中国三种传统的融汇,” chapter one of 通三统 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2007), pp. 1-13, 45-49.
[2] On the “culture fever” see Xudong Zhang, “On Some Motifs in the ‘Cultural Fever’ on the late 1980s: Social Change, Ideology and Theory,” Social Text 39 (Summer 1994): 129-156.
[3] Among many examples, see Zeng Yi 曾亦, “From Kang Youwei to Deng Xiaoping 从康有为到邓小平,” Tianfu xinlun 天府新论 6 (2016) available online at https://sns.91ddcc.com/b/45992 and in translation at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/kang-xiaoweKang Xiaowei to Deng Xiaopingi-to-deng-xiaoping.html; and Gan Yang, et.al., “Kang Youwei and Institutionalized Confucianism 康有为与制度化儒学,” transcription of a round-table discussion from November 2014, available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/79543.html and in translation at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/kang-youwei-and-institutional-confucianism.html.
[4] Qin Hui, “The biggest problem with China’s culture is that it is superficially Confucianian and fundamentally legalist 中国文化最大的问题是表儒里法,” originally published in January 2010 and available online at http://finance.sina.com.cn/hy/20100116/18207257091.shtml.
[5] See Chen Ming, “Transcend Left and Right, Unite the Three Traditions, Renew the Party-State: A Confucian Interpretation of the China Dream,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/chen-ming-transcend-left-and-right.html.
[6] See Gao Quanxi, Zhang Wei, and Tian Feilong, The Road to the Rule of Law in Modern China (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2015).
[7] See Gan’s opening comments in Gan Yang, et.al., “Kang Youwei and Institutionaliz"Kang Youwei and Institutional Confucianism"ed Confucianism 康有为与制度化儒学,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/kang-youwei-and-institutional-confucianism.html.
[8] See Jiang Shigong, “Philosophy and History: Interpreting the ‘Xi Jinping Era’ through Xi’s report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP,” translation available online at https://www.readingthechinadream.com/jiang-shigong-philosophy-and-history.html.
[9] The Gongyang, or Gongyangzhuan 公羊传, is a commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, a work classically attributed to Confucius, in which Confucius appears to be a visionary reformer. Over the course of China’s long history, the text has been used by Confucians, such as Kang Youwei and the contemporary Mainland New Confucian Jiang Qing 蒋庆, dedicated to profound political change.
[10] A remark attributed to the nineteenth-century Chinese statesman Li Hongzhang 李鸿章(1823-1901), which is often cited to suggest the magnitude of the changes China faced in the modern era.
[11] On Ramo and the Beijing consensus, see Shaun Breslin, “The ‘China Model and the Global Crisis’: From Friedrich List to a Chinese Mode of Governance,” International Affairs 87.6 (2011). 1323-43.
[12] From Hegel’s preface to his Phenomenology of Mind. See https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm.
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