Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the historical background as well as philosophical outlook behind the twentieth-century Confucian thinker Liang Shuming’s 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) engagement with the movement for “rural reconstruction” (xiangcun jianshe 鄉村建設) which took off during the 1930s in Republican China. After situating Liang’s turn toward the countryside and his activities in Shandong province as leader of the Institute for Rural Reconstruction in their broader socio-political context and his own trajectory as an intellectual and reformer, I describe and analyze the complex constellation of cultural, historical, social, political, and economic elements in his 1937 Theory of Rural Reconstruction (Xiangcun jianshe lilun 鄉村建設理論). In doing so, I pay particular attention to the relation between Liang’s idiosyncratic reinterpretation of premodern China’s social order as grounded in an affirmation of “reason” (lixing 理性) and his vision for a form of “national self-awakening” (minzu zijue 民族自覺) rooted in the countryside as a place where the traditional Confucian primacy of “ethical relations” (lunli 倫理) has supposedly been preserved. In conclusion, I argue that Liang’s idea of rural “collective life” (tuanti shenghuo 團體生活) as the basis for a wholly new form of society counts as a non-state-centered approach to modernization which continues to resonate in contemporary postrevolutionary China.
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Notes
- 1.
Alitto 1976a, Lin 1990, Zhu 1996, Lu 2010, Lynch 2010, and Cui 2013 offer detailed accounts of Liang’s theory and practice of rural reconstruction, a topic which also plays an important role in the following book-length studies: Alitto 1979, Zheng 2000, Thøgersen 2002, Han 2005, Gu 2016, Merkel-Hess 2016, and Lynch 2018. It is worth noting that Liang laid claim to the invention of the term “rural reconstruction.” See Liang [1936a]: 602, cf. Zheng 2000: 78. James Yen appears to have already begun using the term in 1927 (Hayford 1990: 57).
- 2.
These two parts respectively take up around 130 and 300 pages in the edition of the text in the second volume of LSMQJ from 1990.
- 3.
Consider Liang’s following pronouncement: “I cannot die now, for if I do, heaven and earth will change color and history will change its course . . . Not only would China perish, but the world itself would perhaps be on the edge of extinction” (quoted in Alitto 1976b: 224).
- 4.
A conference on the topic of “Rural Confucianism and Rural Civilization (鄉村儒學與鄉土文明)” was held a couple of years ago in Beijing from 14 to 16 October 2015, organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the International Confucian Association, Nishan Shengyuan Academy 尼山聖源書院, and Yunshen Academy 雲深書院. For a brief report on this event, see Zhao 2016.
- 5.
In this respect, it is interesting to note that Liang did not perceive any contradiction between his activities as a rural reformer and his continued commitment to Buddhism, as is evident from the fact that he spoke of “engaging in rural work in the spirit of a Buddhist renunciant (以出家的精神做鄉村工作)” (Liang [1933a], also see Meynard 2010: 198–200). For a study of Liang’s attempt to reconcile Confucian and communist visions of society and human emancipation after the establishment of the People’s Republic, see Van den Stock 2020b.
- 6.
According to Albert Feuerwerker for instance, “in the vast area of rural China the traditional market structure was flourishing with few signs of decay right down to 1949, a strong indication that the rural economy had not been substantially transformed. The peasant household in the mid twentieth century probably depended more on commodities not produced by itself or by its neighbours than was the case 50 years earlier. But, because there was little real improvement in transportation at the local level, the primary marketing area was not enlarged so as to bring about a radical replacement of standard markets by modern commercial channels organized around larger regional marketing complexes” (Feuerwerker 1983: 32).
- 7.
James Yen’s movement is still the source of inspiration behind the “International Institute of Rural Reconstruction” (IIRR) which he established in 1960. The Institute has its headquarters in the James Yen Center in the Philippines and has offices in 8 other countries. Part of its credo and mission statement reads as follows: “Go to the people, live among them, learn from them, plan with them, work with them […] Not piecemeal, but integrated approach; not to conform, but to transform; not relief, but release” (IRRR 2020).
- 8.
In what is one of the most comprehensive studies of the rural reconstruction movement available, Zheng Dahua (Zheng 2000) provides extensive discussions of Yen’s and Liang’s projects, while also devoting considerable attention to lesser-known experimental areas such as Wuxi 無錫 (Jiangsu), Xu Gongqiao 徐公橋 (Jiangsu), Wujiang 烏江 (Anhui), Zhenping 鎮平 (Henan), and Jiangning 江寧 (Nanjing).
- 9.
- 10.
Interestingly enough, there are indications for an indirect link between some of the most important figures in the early Chinese communist movement and the figure of Mushanokōji Saneatsu 武者小路 実篤 (1885–1976), a member of the Shirakaba 白樺 (“White Birch”) literary society who had founded a community called “New Village” (Atarashiki mura 新しき村) in the mountains of Miyzaki Prefecture (Kyūshū), inspired by the ideas of Kropotkin and Tolstoy. The example of Mushanokōji’s “New Village” led to a short-lived call for “New Village-ism (xincunzhuyi 新村主義)” on the part of Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) during the New Culture Movement, with Zhou establishing a branch of Mushanokōji’s commune in his home in Beijing, attracting the attention of Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879–1942), Li Dazhao 李大釗 (1889–1927) and Mao Zedong among others. See Ou 2017: 40–41. Rural reconstruction in China was thus perhaps not simply a reaction against communist activism, but rather very much part of a broader (if not global) utopian concern for the countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
- 11.
In a text from 1922, James Yen declared that “if the great majority of the people, because of their social habits and knowledge, consider themselves to be dregs (hsia-liu [下流]), they will by that very act transform the world’s oldest culture, largest population, the great Chinese nation, into a nation of dregs! Our only hope is to uplift our illiterate brothers and sisters.” (Hayford 1990: 39).
- 12.
For a more recent and comprehensive (though largely descriptive) monograph on the Folkstudies Movement, see Gao 2019.
- 13.
Similarly, James Yen saw the “transformation of the peasants (hua nongmin 化農民)” as being predicated on a process of “peasantization (nongminhua 農民化)” on the part of the intellectuals as leaders of the rural reform movement (Zheng 2000: 157–159).
- 14.
On Mou’s own perception of the peasant as an incarnation of “life in itself (shengming zhi zai qi ziji 生命之在其自己)” in relation to his critique of communist ideology, see Van den Stock 2020a: 50–55.
- 15.
As Kate Merkel-Hess notes, the rural reconstruction movement was preceded by a “social survey movement” in the 1920s and 1930s, “which sought to collect and aggregate information about China’s new national subjects and particularly, as the 1920s wore on, those in rural areas” (Merkel-Hess 2016: 2). In other words, “the people” (or segments seen as representative of the population such as “the peasant”) were not a known quantity, but rather something to be discursively constructed and subsequently “discovered” (see Hayford 1990: xiii, 62).
- 16.
The distinction Liang Qichao’s mentor Kang Youwei 康有爲 (1858–1927) drew between morally and politically responsible “citizens (gongmin 公民)” as opposed to mere “people (renmin 人民)” is also worth considering in this respect (see Lee 1998: 40–42).
- 17.
For a record of some of Liang’s observations on the experiments in Jiangsu, Hebei, and Shanxi during his travels, see Liang [1932].
- 18.
- 19.
“In quantitative terms the village schools were no big success. In 1933 there were 54 village schools in Tsoup’ing [Zouping] with 214 female students in the women’s section and 5781 male students in the adult section. By 1936 the RRM [Rural Reconstruction Movement] had been forced to concentrate their efforts in only 28 schools enrolling just 181 female and 1515 male students. Tsoup’ing had around 250 villages and a population of more than 165,000 at this time, so the new type of schooling reached only a small and even declining part of the villagers” (Thøgersen 2002: 111). Cui Xiaohui崔效輝 puts the total number of educational facilities and students in Zouping around the time of the Japanese invasion at 566 and 27,257 respectively (Cui 2013: 49).
- 20.
The attempt to recruit peasants into local militia was initially met with distrust and resistance on the part of the population of Zouping due to their recent experiences with warlords who had used similar tactics for drafting peasants into their own private armies. See Thøgersen 2002: 112.
- 21.
That said, Liang distinguished between (1) “students (xuezhong)” in a more literal sense, (2) “teachers (jiaoyuan 教員),” “school directors (xuedong 學董),” and the “school principal (xuezhang 學長),” the latter being a morally exemplary person of a certain seniority capable of moral as well as practical supervision who would occupy a “transcendent position (超然地位)” (XCJS: 216, 223) within the school organization, in the sense of not being in charge of administrative affairs, but rather being responsible for impartially mediating between different parties in the case of conflict. For more details on the concrete organizational structure of the village and rural subdistrict schools, see Liang 1935 and Lin 1990: 26–30.
- 22.
That said, in the draft table of contents from 1928 for the manuscript that would later become his Theory of Rural Reconstruction, the two last chapters are devoted to describing a possible future direction for the GMD as the party that would have to take up the task of “national revival” (see Zhu 1996: 63).
- 23.
Nevertheless, Liang still continued to conceive of the relatively recent transformation of the West into a system of industrialized modern nation-states as being grounded in “a changed attitude toward human existence” (Liang [1930b]: 59), that is to say, a rediscovery of the “humanist” and “this-worldly” outlook of Greek antiquity leading to a liberation from the religiosity of the Middle Ages. As such, Liang never ceased to attribute a significant causal force to cultural difference as the ultimate basis for differing trajectories of social, political, and economic development.
- 24.
A wealth of shorter texts related to rural reconstruction published between 1930 and 1937 can be found in volume 5 of LSMQJ.
- 25.
For Liang’s contemporary Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990), in whose 1940 New Treatise on Practical Affairs (Xin shilun 新事論) the distinction between the rural and the urban is treated as coinciding with that between tradition and modernity as such (see Van den Stock 2016: 144–146), the “assimilative power” of Chinese civilization had essentially been the result of China’s “urban” status vis-à-vis its “barbarian” neighbors. See Feng [1940]: 47–48.
- 26.
At one point, Liang claims that the decay of Chinese culture had already set in with the transition from the Ming (1368–1644) to the Qing dynasty and proposes that the confrontation with the West would not have been quite as destructive of the Chinese tradition if the latter had not already turned into a “hollow shell (僵殼)” under the Manchu Qing rule (see XCJSL: 128).
- 27.
Despite Liang’s staunchly anti-Western stance, he admitted being inspired by similar movements toward economic and educational reform in Europe, most notably agricultural cooperatives and “folk high schools” in Denmark, which he quotes as a source of inspiration and even an example for China on multiple occasions (see Thøgersen 1995).
- 28.
Liang believed the social stratum of the shi 士 (scholar-officials), as privileged representatives of “reason,” to have occupied a mediating position between the ruler and the common people in imperial China (XCJSL: 44).
- 29.
When Liang asserts in intentionally paradoxical terms that “relativism is the truth (相對論是真理),” what he means is precisely that the fundamental interrelatedness of human existence is both ontologically and socially prior to the perspective of individualism (see XCJSL: 159–160).
- 30.
During his teens, Liang already read the Japanese anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui’s 幸徳 秋水 (1871–1911) 1903 book The Quintessence of Socialism (Shakaishugi shinzu 社會主義神髓) in Zhang Puquan’s 張溥泉 (Zhang Ji 張繼, 1882–1947) translation (see XCJSL: 255).
- 31.
In Liang’s Theory of Rural Reconstruction, the distinction between industry and agriculture appears to be of secondary importance in relation to the conceptual difference between the two sides of what Marx called the “commodity form” (Warenform): Liang stresses that China should refrain from emulating the “Western” capitalist tendency to produce for the sake of production, that is to say, in order to accumulate exchange value, but should rather focus on producing actual use value aimed at consumption (XCJSL: 155, 325). This plea for reorienting economic activity toward the production of use value (“consumption”) (which can be found in the writings of other “New Confucians” as well, see Van den Stock 2016: 163–164) is also expressed in Liang’s insistence on the fact that the “subject of the economy (jingji zhuti 經濟主體)” is the human being itself, and that the rural reconstruction movement must try to “keep the economy from slipping from our hands” (XCJSL: 187), that is to say, degenerating into a form of commodity production that is no longer aimed at the satisfaction of real human needs but rather at the self-valorization of exchange value. As such, he is convinced that achieving industrialization by means of the development of agriculture will lead to a renewed focus on production for the sake of consumption and restore human beings to their rightful place as self-determining “subjects” of society (XCJSL: 391).
- 32.
Tellingly, instead of interpreting a famous passage from the 80 th chapter of the Daodejing 道德經 (“people can hear the sound of each other’s chickens and dogs, but they will die of old age without ever having gone to visit each other,” 雞犬之聲相聞, 民至老死, 不相往來) as a description of a utopian state, Liang reads it as reflecting a pathological lack of concern for a form of collective existence beyond the immediacy of the “ethical relations” between family members in traditional China (see Liang [1936a]: 628, 634).
- 33.
Liang’s vision of rural reform as a precondition for finding, as the subtitle of his Theory of Rural Reconstruction reads, “a path forward for the Chinese nation (中國民族之前途)” has continued to inspire intellectuals and activists in contemporary mainland China (see Day 2008, Thøgersen 2009, Ma and Xu 2012, Ou 2017). The late 1990s saw the rise of a veritable “New Rural Reconstruction Movement,” even if the “Confucian” inspiration and credentials of the diverse projects seen as belonging to this movement are not always clear-cut (Billioud and Thoraval 2015: 29, footnote 33). This contemporary incarnation of rural reconstruction is aimed at what one of its leading figures, Wen Tiejun 温鉄軍 (b. 1951), famously described as the “three rural problems (san nong wenti 三農問題)” (i.e. agriculture, the countryside, and the peasants), which became an important policy issue under the Hu-Wen administration and was explicitly highlighted at the tenth National People’s Congress in 2006 (Sit and Wong 2013: 56) in its call for the creation of a “new socialist countryside” (Wu and Tong 2009). While Wen initially traced back his motivations to the figure of James Yen, founding the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute in Hebei in 2003 (shut down in 2006 by local authorities, ostensibly over an issue with building permits, see Ou 2017: 45), he later shifted his allegiance to Liang as a source of inspiration (Lu 2010: 235). Although most of the figures associated with the “New Rural Reconstruction Movement” are not dissidents, but rather “have an entangled relation with the state” (Day 2008: 51), it is clear that this movement aims to offer a “powerful critique” (Day 208: 51) of the uneven development between urban and rural areas which has continued under the economic reforms following the end of the Maoist period. Wen Tiejun is not alone in discerning a strong continuity between the pre- and post-Maoist periods, in the sense that an unequal relation between city and countryside inherited from the revolutionary era still characterizes the process of industrialization and economic development in contemporary China (see Day 2008: 53). From this perspective, in the words of Tsui Sit and Tak Hing Wong, “rural collectivization was less an ideological maneuver than an institutional strategy to systematically extract rural surplus at a lower transaction cost,” the socialist state effectively engaging in a form of “internal colonialism” (Sit and Wong 2013: 46) or, according to another observer, downright “Apartheid” (Qin [2010]) institutionally buttressed by the “household registration system (hukou 戶口)” which binds peasant to their land while at the same time using them as a reserve army of proletarian labor in their capacity as “migrant workers” (see Ngai 2016).
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Van den Stock, A. (2023). Liang the Rural Reformer. In: Meynard, T., Major, P. (eds) Dao Companion to Liang Shuming’s Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18002-6_8
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