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Notes
- 1.
Despite their previous difficulties, Chen Cheng was perhaps the only member of Chiang Kai-shek’s clique that Liang got along with somewhat. What characterized both his students and his friends, whether military men, scholars, social activists, or political figures, was a common antipathy toward Chiang. Liang seemed to have got along with many people associated with the northern militarists, such as Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan, those associated with the Guangxi Clique, those associated with the 1933 Fujian Revolt, and those Guomindang members who were not part of Chiang’s inner circle. Of course, he also got along with the Communist Party leaderships, such as Mao and Zhou.
- 2.
I think that this must have been the Bodhi Monastery (菩提寺), located on a hill outside the county seat. It was a famous ancient monastery situated in a scenic area. Peng Yuting himself often went there to rest. When I visited in 1982, the Henan Provincial Government had designed it as an important historical preservation site. Because it had been ravaged during the Cultural Revolution, I was not permitted to visit it.
- 3.
This was a murder of revenge. Peng Yuting was assassinated by his own bodyguards, former bandits, who were connected with another bandit gang that Peng had successfully campaigned against previously. The other party involved was an influential local man who had been Peng’s patron when young. He was angered by Peng’s refusal to grant him a special favor after Peng took power with his “local self-government” revolution against the Henan Provincial Government.
- 4.
Peng and Bie Tingfang took power in the four counties to the west of Nanyang in the late 1920s. Chen Zhonghua (陈重华) ruled one of these counties, Xichuan (淅川). The entire area, sometimes called “Wanxi” (宛西), maintained complete independence from the Henan Provincial Government from then until 1940, when Chiang Kai-shek’s general Wei Lihuang (卫立煌) betrayed Bie and “angered him to death” (气死).
- 5.
Chen Xujing (1903–1967) was perhaps the most extreme of advocates for “Wholesale Westernization.” He was highly critical of Liang Shuming and of rural reconstruction.
- 6.
Qian Jiaju (1909–2002) did have more contact with Liang because of his membership in the Democratic League and the People’s Political Consultative Conference. He moved to Los Angeles in 1989, and subsequently lost his positions in the CPPCC. In the 1930s, Qian was a severe critic of Liang’s rural reconstruction movement.
- 7.
Huang Yanpei (1878–1965) was also involved in rural work in the 1930s, and was a member of the various groups of democratic parties that Liang had founded. Huang is sometimes erroneously credited with the founding of the Democratic League.
- 8.
As Liang knew Huang in the 1930s, it is strange that he mentions Hong Kong here. Possibly it was because Huang was in Hong Kong in 1949 before going to Beijing as part of the newly formed government. Huang made criticisms similar to Liang’s about the Party’s policy of forcing peasants to sell grain to the government. That is, following the Stalinist model of economic development; the capital to build China’s urban industries came from the countryside. Huang was then labeled by Mao Zedong as a “representative for the capitalists.” The open conflict between Mao and Liang in September 1953 was because of the same issue.
- 9.
The name is 沈定一. Shen was among the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party. He was expelled from the Party in 1925, and immediately after that participated in the Nationalist Party right-wing “Western Hills Group,” and later participated in the Nationalist Party’s purge of the Communists. He returned to his native area of Xiaoshan (浙江萧山) in 1928 to run a local self-government experimental area. He was assassinated by unknown parties in the same year. Shen is the subject of an interesting book by R. Keith Schoppa, Bloody Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berkeley, CA. 1995).
- 10.
Mr. Li Zonghuang (1887–1978) was the Nationalist Party’s chief theoretician of local self-government (地方自治) from the 1930s through to the 1970s. I interviewed him quite extensively in 1970 in Taipei, especially about his trips to Zouping, Ding County, and other non-governmental local self-government districts. He was the architect of the Nationalist Party’s 1930s local self-government experimental district in Jiangning (江宁) County, Jiangsu. Aside from his writings on local self-government and local administration, he also wrote a history of the Nationalist Party.
- 11.
I asked Liang about Mr. Wu, not only because he was a famous intellectual and Nationalist Party member at the time, but also because he had publicly criticized Liang’s book, Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, not long after its publication in 1922. Apparently, Mr. Liang had forgotten about this criticism or had never paid any attention to it originally. As Wu’s criticism was published in the middle of 1923, this ramble on the Great Wall might well have been published after he and Liang had become friends. In any case, as usual, Liang did not seem to pay much mind to criticism.
- 12.
These two events were separated by several years. Zhang was Fu Zuoyi’s secret representative in the surrender negotiations in 1948. He wasn’t accused of “having illicit relations with a foreign country” until 1951. He was arrested in January of 1968 (relatively late), sent to the famed Qincheng (秦城) prison for high level political prisoners, where he died in 1973. I do not doubt that Zhang was an opportunist (and so the sort of person Liang particularly distained), but I do wonder about the charges concerning the leaking of secret documents. Coming from a family which produced multiple generations of scholar-officials, and being, relatively speaking, a successful opportunist until then, could Zhang have been so stupid as to have believed a “swindler”?
- 13.
One of Gu Hongming’s granddaughters taught at the American Chinese language school in Taipei (colloquially known as the Stanford Center), and I got to know her very well. Later she went to California to teach Chinese, where she remained. I had asked her if there were any family records, papers or artifacts left from Mr. Gu, but she said that it had all been lost. He was born, raised and educated outside of China. The great irony is that, although he held a position for a time in Zhang Zhidong’s (张之洞) staff, he had mastered several European languages before learning Chinese. His important writings were in English. Mr. Gu was unique among Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century in that he was far more thoroughly and completely culturally conservative than any other. W. Somerset Maugham’s sketch of Gu (“The Philosopher”) forms the center of his book On a Chinese Screen (1922).
- 14.
I do not remember who this refers to. The compiler didn’t hear the name clearly.
- 15.
Elsewhere as well, Mr. Liang stated that he had not criticized National Heritage. On pp. 204–205 of Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, there is the remark that those engaged in classical studies “pile up stiff rotten goods” and call that Chinese culture. He is right, however, in that he does not specifically mention National Heritage by name. The journal was rather short-lived, ending in 1919 with the death of its editor, Liu Shipei. Many of the editors, such as Liu, Zhang Binglin (章炳麟), Ma Xulun (马叙伦), and the two Huangs, (黄侃、黄节), had been associated with the Journal of National Essence (《国粹学报》), published in Shanghai from 1905 to 1911. This tradition of regarding the literary heritage as the “national essence” continued into the 1930s through the Critical Review (《学衡》) group of Wu Mi (吴宓), Liu Boming (刘伯明) and Mei Guangdi (梅光迪).
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Alitto, G.S. (2013). August 20, 1980. In: Has Man a Future?. China Academic Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35816-6_9
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