REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM : the western stage and the chinese stages. 9780520303867, 0520303865

Citation preview

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright© 1971, by The Regents of the University of California ISBN: 0-520-61737-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-12188 Printed in the United States of America

“Baudelaire” by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans­ lated by Martin Turnell, copyright 1950 by New Directions Publishing Corpora­ tion, is reprinted with permission of the publisher. The quotation from Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, is reprinted with permission of Random House, Inc., copyright 1928.

Contents

FOREWORD by FREDERIC E. WAKEMAN, JR.

ix

PREFACE by JOSEPH R. LEVENSON

COMMUNIST COSMOPOLITANISM

xxxi

i

“BOURGEOIS” COSMOPOLITANISM (I)

19

“BOURGEOIS” COSMOPOLITANISM (II) AND COMMUNIST PROVINCIALISM

38

NOTES

56

BIBLIOGRAPHY

61

Foreword

Revolution and Cosmo­ politanism came in the autumn of 1965 dur­ ing one of those sparkling Berkeley after­ noons when the hills behind the university seem even closer than they are. Joe Levenson and I had met for coffee on the terrace of the student cafeteria; and I re­ member feeling a little nervous—both because I was still gawkily somewhere between feeling myself Professor Levenson’s former student and being his current col­ league, and because we were sitting there that warm af­ ternoon to discuss my reactions to a talk which he had just prepared for a luncheon meeting of the Ameri­ can Historical Association.1 Whatever my insecurity (would my criticisms pass his muster?), it was rapidly dispelled by Joe himself, who listened intently to my desultory comments, then went on to fascinate me by speaking of his own feelings about his work at that junc­ ture. The great trilogy, Confucian China and Its Mod­ em Fate, had just been finished. Momentarily uncertain of his future course, Levenson was then groping beyond his dialectic of history and value toward a new theme: y first inkling of

M

provincialism and cosmopolitanism. Then and now it seemed to me a natural and noble sequel to the first. The trilogy had been about the death of a oncehermetic Chinese culture, and the birth of a new world ■History through which China would somehow keep its own “historical personae ... in a single many-colored, more-than-national civilization.”2 What Levenson was saying that day on the terrace was that such a temporal solution to the modem dilemma of cultural identity also raised spatial problems. Particularism and universalism —history and value—were reconciled in the particular­ universal world civilization in which he believed, but within that new world another tension could be found along the same fault line. This tension was expressed in the contradiction between provincialism and cos­ mopolitanism. Levenson’s plans for exploring that relationship be­ came more specific during his 1966-1967 year of leave in Hong Kong where he completed most of the re­ search for this book. After his return to Berkeley he explained to me that he envisaged an entire new trilogy. The first volume, to be called Provincialism, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism, would explicitly define the general themes of his vision and erect the framework for two succeeding books. One would il­ lustrate the provincialism-cosmopolitanism tension by examining Asian classics.3 The third and last book was to elaborate the same theme through a study of twen­ tieth-century Chinese translations of Western plays. Late in 1968, Professor David Abosch, a friend and former student of Levenson, arranged for a series of three lectures to be given the following spring at the

University of Northern Illinois. Levenson saw this as an opportunity to put together what would be a first, though polished, version of that third volume of the new trilogy. He entitled the work Revolution and Cos­ mopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages. It was in the process of being typed when Joseph Levenson drowned in April, 1969. And just as he did not live to deliver those lectures, so did he never have the opportunity to present the entire theme of pro­ vincialism and cosmopolitanism. What we are left with here, to our own great loss, is a side panel of the triptych without the centerpiece to which it refers. But because Revolution and Cosmopolitanism was meant to stand alone as well, we can quite clearly see how far along Levenson was toward formulating a new and suggestive definition of the dilemma of the modern Chinese intellectual. As Confucian literati (cultural cosmopolitans in their own world, “a world itself, a world whose values were Value, whose civili­ zation was Civilization”) became provincials in our age, they were replaced by a new Chinese cosmopoli­ tan— deracine and alienated—whose intelligent interest in the foreign made him part of a non-revolutionary intelligentsia. Levenson’s sympathetic understanding of both kinds of cosmopolitan displacement reflected his continuing sensitivity for the violent assault of modem times upon traditional Chinese society. Indeed, the malaise of mod­ ernity was for him “a universal state” which bound China to the world around it.4 The confusion of in­ tellectuals like Liang Ch’i-ch’ao had not been signs of an exceptional national history, but rather expressed

China’s new involvement in a strictly modern world history. Consequently Levenson’s own scholarly meth­ od, which relied so frequently upon analogies between China and other countries, was consciously intended to give Chinese history its due as part of a common human experience. “I tried to relate the experience of other peoples and civili­ zations to the Chinese experience—not as forced analogy, not as decoration, not simply as ‘contact,’ and not as an aggregation making instant world history, but to reveal Chinese history as a universal subject.”5

Two refrains make themselves heard again and again in Revolution and Cosmopolitanism. First is Leven­ son’s concern for Chinese sensibilities when caught in “silk-fan attitudes”: fare for someone else’s aesthet­ ics, ingredients for an international Schavannerei. Sec­ ond is the tension he establishes between universalism and particularism. This thematic conflict, of course, repeats the strain in the Confucian China trilogy be­ tween value (veruni) and history (meuni); and stands behind all of the heuristic dichotomies which he fa­ vored: absolute/relative, culturalist/nationalist, cosmopolitan/provincial. It is based, on the assumption, which he acquired from Morris Raphael Cohen’s Rea­ son and Nature, that “a stable society is one whose members would choose on universal principles, the particular culture they inherited.”6 Levenson’s ear for these two refrains was cultivated by his own cosmopolitanism. A man of graceful and catholic erudition, he seemed to float effortlessly from culture to culture—Mozart and the Chinese lute, Ibsen and Lu Hsiin, Hasidic tales and chin-aven Confucian­ ism-unhampered by the particularities that limit most

men. But as he so aesthetically enjoyed the rearrange­ ment of ideas and the play of images, he also feared being merely an aesthete. The very field he chose, Chinese history, lent itself so easily to a dilettantish de­ light in “silk-fan attitudes.” To be sure, China—not chinoiserie (Is there any other so nationally-tagged a word for cultural bric-a-brac?)—enthralled him. But he could still have absorbed it in the spirit of the French Enlightenment which he had so carefully studied in college: Classical China as an object of philosophy, and Sinology as a sign of the savant. Instead, he found that resolution far too static and turned to modem China where it was the separation between thought and think­ ing, “the possible fission between philosophy and his­ tory,” that immediately captured his attention.7 Seeing that the Confucian Classics had once been history, he quickly realized how much of the Chinese past had been philosophy (of absolute value), and in turn how necessary it was for the revolutionary Chinese present to make it history (of relative significance). He developed this theme by way of metaphor, his favorite device. In 1957, the French journalist, Robert Guillain, had shown the Communist Chinese to be “museumifying” the symbols of past “feudal” oppres­ sion. As the Forbidden City became thronged with holiday strollers, Confucian temples were restored and opened to visitors. “The Ancient Culture is honored as it had not been for many years but as one honors only the dead—it has been admitted into the museums.”8

Levenson began to view this in historically metaphor­ ical terms upon reading Andre Malraux’s Voices of xiii

Silence. His early working notes for Confucian China contain Malraux’s assertion that museums “estrange the works they bring together from their original func­ tions and transform even portraits into ‘pictures’ ”;9 to which Levenson commented: “Note: ‘restored’ Con­ fucius not Confucius—associations of literal original are dispelled as above.”10 While he thus conceived of “museumification” as relegating to the past what was once an authority of the present, a guidebook for the city of Hangchow suggested that this mummification relativized the absolute value of the past. The guide­ book described the tomb at West Lake of the great pa­ triot, Yueh Fei, who had been betrayed by Ch’in Kuei during the Southern Sung period.

“Before the tomb kneel the figures of the traitor Ch’in Kuei, his wicked wife, his accomplice Mochi Hsueh, and Chang Chun who deserted Yueh Fei at the critical mo­ ment. It was the tradition for tourists to throw stones and other objects at these figures to show their contempt for their treachery. But nowadays the practice has been dis­ continued owing to the need for preserving the figures which are of historical value.”11 According to his notes he was struck at just about the same time by a passage in one of Leon Edel’s studies of Henry James:

“. .. Minny alive was a creature of flesh and blood to be loved; and also, for Henry, a threat, as women were; Minny dead was an idea, a thought, a bright flame of memory, a statue—Diana!—to be loved and to be worshipped in com­ plete safety, ‘embalmed forever in all our hearts and lives.’ ”12 An embalmed creature was an exorcized one—or, as Levenson glossed Edel’s phrase:

“Historical thinking as release from a living domination. Living: a dead hand; dead, a living ideal. Cf. Confucius: ‘Historical Significance.’ ”13 It was not just that history could be used to relativize living values. Rather, man’s ability to make the past past depended upon his own confidence in the present. Levenson explained to students in his historiography seminar:

“One cannot assume relativism as sufficient or men would never summon up the absolute convictions that permit them, and enable them, by rejection of standards they find in their world, to make these standards past, or ‘his­ tory.’ Once having done that, so that later men can look at those early, successfully challenged standards in mood of censure, they can extend to those standards the rela­ tivist’s rehabilitation: that of the museum, the sterilizing restorer and preservative (as relativism preserves) of what the passionately contemporary makers of history, as dis­ tinct from those who breathe the historical spirit, had done so much to scuttle. Only the non-historically minded, the non-relativists, can assume that historical relativism is the utter solvent of value.”14 The fully rounded metaphor was finally extended to China in comments which Levenson prepared for a paper read by Gerhard Masur to the i960 meeting of the American Historical Association.15 After contrast­ ing Masur’s description of the Christian sense of tran­ scendental divinity and evolutionary history with Confucian immanence and cyclical process, Levenson pointed to a fundamental change in the modem Chinese historical consciousness. As China contracted “from a world to a nation in the world,” traditionalists moved “into a situation which forbade the traditional abso­ lutes.” Deprived of a rationalistic confidence in the

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

universal values of the past, they were forced to ad­ vance new and “essentially romantic (relativist) argu­ ments from ‘national essence.’ ”lfl But relativism alone was insufficient, so that the wound—to use one of Lev­ enson’s own images—was healed with a Marxist salve. First came periodization: the division of Chinese history into Marxian eras so that modern Chinese could recover their own past “through a supposedly universal (not exclusively Western) sequence of historical stages.” Second was democratic museumification, which per­ mitted a transition of “historical significance” from normative to relativist usage. Traditional orthodoxy which had in 1915 stifled the New Youth could now be viewed with detachment so that by 1964 Levenson thought the idols of the past to be safely historified. As he explained in the last volume of Confucian China-. “. . . though early Christians might break the images of pagan gods, centuries later the Vatican Museum would shelter its Apollos. The gods no longer signified a living rival in a contemporary struggle. They were historically significant, or, the best of them, aesthetically significant— merely aesthetic, fragments of a vanquished, vanished whole. And that is why a Confucian temple could be re­ stored in Communist China. . .”17

And yet no more than two years had passed before Red Guards were burning those same Confucian tem­ ples. Had his metaphor been utterly mistaken in the first place? If not, how could the specters of Confucian China so quickly return to haunt its Marxist present? There were many different ways of answering that second question. He chose to respond with a new query: had modern Chinese really been that confident all along of their Marxist identity? Levenson selected

the question of identity, I believe, for two reasons. First, it permitted him to retain the original metaphor of “museumification.” And, second, just as external events made him doubt the ease of relativizing away culture, so now did his inner concern with his own identity as an American Jew alert him to the difficulty of reconciling particular (“provincial”) origins with universal (“cosmopolitan”) values. Over these years, Levenson’s concern with Judaism had widened and deepened although his fundamental (not fundamentalist) beliefs and attitudes had changed little since his undergraduate days. He spoke, very privately, of his “retirement” book on Judaism, and was preparing for it in much the same way that he wrote the Confucian China trilogy, by reading, think­ ing, note-taking, and speaking on the central themes at Hillel, during meetings of a luncheon group of Jewish scholars, and once at his synagogue. In fact, among his papers was later found an opening to the work in the form of a twenty-two-page manuscript, entitled: The Choice of Jewish Identity. There, and in his notes on Judaism, he wrote passionately of the ne­ cessity for choosing his own particular identity in the eclectic, assimilating culture of the United States:

“My own stand: Jews must remain visible—and not out of a sense of defeatism about anti-Semitism (‘Jews cannot be generally accepted’); not even out of a sense of honor in face of anti-Semitism; not out of cultural sentimentality about Jewish cooking, or Jewish chess championships. I am willing to make the assumptions that most American Jews make: that one can get lost in America very easily; that cultural eclecticism, a modern trend, can permit any­ one to get gefiillte fish at the Co-op, anyone to enjoy xvii

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

Israeli folksongs at the Hungry i, anyone to read the He­ brew bible as a common literary treasure and even for spiritual refreshment. I can read Confucius, and nod my head at his sage dicta, without being Chinese. Why do I need to be a Jew in order to have a few Jewish spices in my recipe for life? Rhetorical question. I need to be a Jew—I feel Judaism compelling—for reasons other than ‘Jewish contributions.’ And this not just because I consider that futile apologetic: since I could simply as syncretic modern man receive contributions. . . . But because men who would ‘place’ Judaism in this way, in history, have lost the meaning of what they seem to be locating.”18

i

Levenson’s distaste for cultural syncretism bridged his inner faith and his more public scholarship. As he per­ sonally resisted assimilation into a neutral cosmopolitan identity, he simultaneously saw a similar dilemma posed for modem Chinese intellectuals. In short, his percep­ tion of modern China was framed by, and in turn helped frame his vision of himself as a believing Jew. Just as he could nod his head at Confucius’ dicta, so he worried that others would similarly appropriate Ju­ daism; full circle, the one sensitivity reinforced the other, whether in his notes on Judaism or in Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, The interplay was constant. For example, just as he distrusted mere aesthetic appreciation of Chinese civili­ zation, so was he wary of a detached admiration for the subtleties of Judaism. Both were equally devoid of commitment. Once he was struck by the quasihomonymic relationship between Sinai and seneh ([burning] bush) in Hebrew. This dual revelation of God (“here, in Bush; there, at Sinai”) impressed him with its “overwhelming literary effect.”19 But he im-

mediately felt that he was being too cerebral, missing the religious cause for the rhetorical effect. “Remem­ ber,” he told himself, “that the effect is in a cause”

“There is a religious imperative for Jews to live, and the religion has certainly informed ‘Jewish culture,’ but the culture is incidental, not the end. The imperative, the Smaz-born mitzvah, is the end, and if it [is] just assimilated to ‘culture’ the Jews will be truly assimilated, dissolved, our own version of the final solution (like the classical Greeks)—the culture, as an end, will come to an end. The ‘Bible as living literature’ will no longer be the Jewish Bible, bible of a living people, vessel of Judaism, whose profound message—from seneh to Sinai—is /zfe.”20 In the same way, Levenson’s recollection of the con­ sequences of his own Chinese-derived museum meta­ phor alerted him to the danger of reading the Torah as though it were a literary classic. Then a museumpiece, the Jewish bible would “belong to any admirer, like Homer—a ‘contribution to world culture? ”21 Let others embalm their past (“Modem Greeks are museum keepers”); but “Jews must live, i.e. be in history as Jews while there is history, not die in the flesh while malting a ‘spiritual—or a ‘literary—contribution.”22 Levenson therefore believed that Jews and Judaism could only survive by retaining their historical particu­ larity—and in this context particularly meant deny­ ing syncretic universalities. For, his study of Chinese cultural history convinced him that syncretisms like the nineteenth-century’s fi (“substance”) and yung (“function”) formula seesawed continually off balance. Above all they denied history. At first glance there appears to be a clear contradic-

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

tion here between history-as-particularity and the pros­ pect of some future world unity. Levenson was certain­ ly aware of this contradiction; for, while he at times shared the hope of nineteenth-century men for one world, he also failed to see the historical means toward that unity. “Some speak of the need to construct a culture out of selected values from particular histories, so that a cultural esperanto will accord with the new technological universe. Others speak rather of essentially parallel histories, whose cultural destinations will be essentially the same. However, I do not consider that history can ever be made in the first way, as though by cultural selection boards, taking the best from East and West for a nice synthetic balance; and I do not think it has been made in the second way, down some universal paradigm, Marxist or Toynbeean or any other.”23 The prospect of an imposed and specious unity threat­ ened the particularity basic to his own belief. In fact, the source and foundation of that belief—Judaism—was by his own definition a faith that required a particular people to survive. It was for this reason that Judaism was not to be confused with “Judeo-Christianity.” “It is the embodiment of Judaism in a people which is the principle distinguishing ‘Judeo’ from ‘Christian.’ It is this distinction which makes the homogeneous ‘JudeoChristian’ a misnomer.”24 Levenson had first made a sharp distinction between the two terms when he reviewed Moses Hadas’ Hellen­ istic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion. Reading Hadas’ description of the “ecumenical culture” of philosophers like Isocrates, he determined that Platonic Idealism had eased “foreign religious conceptions into hellenistic

syncretisms” because there was no need to resist par­ ticulars “when reality was the noumenon, the universal which lay beneath them.”25 But Jehovah was not Zeus. Even to describe their melding in hellenistic culture smacked of Jewish defensiveness on Hadas’ part. Since Levenson was aware from his own study of Chinese history of the desperate search for equivalence be­ hind reconciliations of history and value, he adamantly though respectfully criticized the vaguely “apologetic” air of Hadas’ presentation of Jewish history in a hel­ lenistic context. While “hellenic” meant “Greek” (the specific historical people), “hellenistic” was “trans­ national and universalist,” requiring no particular peo­ ple to embody it. “But Judaism requires Jews.”26 And so was not one of Judaism’s major impulses to resist the meta-cultural implications and other-worldliness of Platonic hellenism? Believing that Judaism was of this world, a “choice of life,”27 Levenson took his own faith as a denial of faith-in-the-abstract. His notes thus attest to his “preference for Judaism because it rejects the abstract” in contrast to the “life-denying assumptions” of Christianity.28 Still, he realized how “hopelessly particular” this definition might make Judaism appear to others: sub­ versive of Kant’s liberal imperative to conceive the individual’s governing principle as a universal (“Kant thought so, and so have many Jews”),29 it could seem a sort of primitive ethnocentrism. Since he was angrily conscious of Toynbee’s association of Judaism with a “lower religion” of the tribes of Israel, Levenson ar­ gued, first, that a nation (Jews) could not be entirely separated from its culture (Jewishness):

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

“Valid Judaism invalidates the question [i.e. is Judaism a national or cultural identity? ]. Judaism, a religion is em­ bodied in nation and culture.”30 Second, he asserted that he himself must:

“Turn Toynbee on his head—and suggest that Judaism is truly high because it has the courage of the law, the par­ ticular, in creative tension with the universal.”31

Levenson confirmed this particularity by singling out Judaism’s abhorrence of idolatry.32 Since anti-idolatry restricted Jews to imitating (not identifying with) God, it called for action in this world. Christianity, on the other hand, embodied the con­ tradiction between the anti-historical bias of neo­ Platonism and this “Jewish historic]ism,”33 so that the only consistent logic of Christianity was its chiliasm.34 As a culmination, a synthesis, Christianity was “not successfully at peace . . . but off-balance, disturbed because of irreconcilable Hellenistic and Jewish ele­ ments.”35 It was therefore forced to make an Augus­ tinian division between Heilsgeschichte and Weltgescbichte.36 The split may have been breached by Hegel who converted the temporal realm into the reality of spirit; but his ideology was still of Christian derivation, still groping for the spiritual ideal beneath matter. Since Levenson beheved that Judaism refused to separate the two, he roughly characterized Western thought as possessing four great historical modes:

“Judaism: spiritual + temporal (i.e., intermixed) Christianity: spiritual / temporal Hegel: spiritual in temporal Marx: temporal alone.”37 This observation reflected his desire to define Ju-

daism not as “a drop dissolved in a synthesis,” but rather as a choice of life whose historical particularism was the truer universalism.

“History is a motif in Judaism, and the latter’s very par­ ticularism-such a scandal to so many open minds with large views, impatient with closed communities and petty selves—does not, in fact, constitute parochialism, but con­ verts it. The Jewish people, by its very existence, and only in its existence, its historical visibility, states a general proposition. Judaism does not fall short of the ‘truth’ of universalism. It stands against that spurious universalism which is so often invoked against it.”38 His notes on Judaism are therefore filled with examples of what he took to be evidence of the particular-in-theuniversal. The Jewish Sabbath, for instance, commem­ orates both universal creation and the historical origin “of the Jews as a people, a vessel of history.” These two realms of creation were thus preserved by Jewish prac­ tice in a “creative tension.”39 For, though Levenson had stated that his use of contradictions was heuris­ tic, he believed that a tension which prohibited the merging of opposites was dynamically creative. “Jew­ ish distance and familiarity” with God, he wrote, was like the “tension between national/universal, history/ timeless, cyclical/linear”; and added, “Sch'wer zu sein ein Yid. . . .”40 Just as all contradictions came back to history, his­ tory in the end resolved for him the ultimate tension between universal and particular. At times Levenson looked towards Jewish messianism which predicted (as in Zachariah) ultimate universalism: the Lord and his name one and the same. But he preferred to interpret Judaism short of divine resolution and nearer to the

xxiii

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

Jew’s human condition. Remembering Lefebvre’s judg­ ment of the eighteenth century’s secularization of the idea of a Christian community (salvation to all without distinction)/1 Levenson wrote that Judaism refused to culminate in Christian universalism because of its respect for history

“which takes the form not only of envisioning oneness (in man and God, subjective awareness completing ontological existence) as something coming in the fullness of time, but also the form of preserving the vessel of history, the particular people. And this is not only theologically con­ sistent but socially-psychologically sound, in the modern world of concern for roots in the face of premature (be­ cause pre-messianic) cosmopolitan-mass abstraction and homogenization. Everything about the Enlightenment that made it subject to romantic reaction gives Judaism spe­ cial strength in its romantic-rationalist, particular-universal combination.”42

And because the Jews’ condition in an “actual, his­ torical, human situation—pain, travail, sweat of the brow,”43 was existential, Judaism almost posed a de­ cision of the Absurd for him. Although he did not be­ lieve that Judaism was an utterly free choice “left up to” Jewish children, its embodiment in a people (not a culture) demanded conscious acceptance of one’s necessary place within it. Thus, he managed to sustain the capacity for choice by subsuming under “abstract, intellectual, universal” Judaism (“indeed a subject for modern choice or rejection”) the “concrete, non-intellectual particular existence” of a people (“an historical quantity”).44 This existential resolution no doubt owed a great deal to his conviction that the sheer capability of assimilation for modern Jews was a fa­ vored chance for choice. For, after talking with a

colleague about the “modem attrition” of Jews in America, Levenson elliptically noted: “Modern situa­ tion (empirically grounds for pessimism)) reanimates Jewish potential: choice (possibility of dissolution cre­ ates possibility of choice).”45 But it also—and once again I emphasize the harmony between Joseph Levenson’s innermost convictions and his published writings—stemmed from a Dilthey- or Croce-like view of himself as an historian. He once told his students that they must come “to accept that history [is] but a personal vision,” and that the “past could not exist apart from [their] selves.” This meant that they, as historians, would have to live by a notion of relativ­ ism. But they must not take this as the “counsel of despair.” Rather, he wished it to be “a counsel of ex­ cellence^ a moral imperative.” If the historian instead “shunned the risk” of taking a stand, he would be re­ signing himself to disengaged “objectivity,” which was “merely bland”:

“The safe production of ‘editions’—oh-so-scientific and value-free. Scholarly objectivity should not be an escape from the issues of [one’s] own culture. It is sterile to be­ lieve in and aim at complete and dispassionate description of any facet of reality.”46

Instead, he urged his students to hold fast to the con­ sciousness of their limitations. Otherwise, the contem­ porary arrogance of “objectivity” would ”historify” them, as they in future times came to “represent the particular spirit of [their] own times while [they] pre­ tend to capture another.”47 Levenson’s lectures on historiography, as well as Rev­ olution and Cosmopolitanism, evinced his continuing fear of the end of true (i.e. particular and universal)

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

history. Writing of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan bourgeois, he carefully distinguished their intent from the “quasi­ Platonic anti-history”48 he abhorred. At the same time, he showed how easy it was for them to lose their own history, to step out of their own skins, and so “objecti­ fy” the subjective self as to lose it.49 Despite his sym­ pathy for them (^inon semblable, mon frere”), their aestheticism made him wish to be consciously in con­ trol of his own history. For, he viewed their presentism as artifice: sensation without meaning. Reading Sartre’s description of Baudelaire

“He hated Progress because Progress made the future state of a system the cause and explanation of its present state. Progress meant the primacy of the future and the future justified long-term undertakings.”50 Levenson had realized that Baudelaire’s detached sense of the timeless present denied past as well as future, making him “the founding father of ‘the moderns.’ ”

“What is ‘modernism’? The opting out, the individualism, that makes Baudelaire both anti-nature and anti-industrial. . . . What kind of ‘sense of the past’ can be ‘modern’ in same way as Baudelaire’s ‘sense of the present’? The sense of the past which is artificially constructed.... How con­ struct? From a world—exclusively the modem world, the condition of ‘modernism’—which is Malraux’ ‘Musee Imaginaire1—where ‘stable and stock’ response (depend­ ing on firm, traditions and limited past) are gone. . . . Be­ cause of this enormous extension of the past, conception of tradition has changed radically. Tradition now not something which is given, handed down from one gen­ eration to the next—but something deliberately construct­ ed ... i.e. rather Baudelairean—go anywhere for a sensa­ tion, any mixture on the palette—and product of human artifice ... and thus, for all ‘sense of the past,’ really anti-

historical. For one thing, ‘construction’ of a past is anti­ integrity, anti-web, with all its connotations of relativism. And for another—perhaps history does have that necessary connection with the particular. .. . “Is there some connection then between the universalistic substratum (i.e. Platonic) denial of history—and the mod­ ern syncretistic, surface merging of histories—both of these anti-particular, and distinct from the romantic, national­ essence historicism that intervened? Link: weakness of tra­ dition. ... What is this freedom of selection but the making the past past, the museumification which detaches present from (particular) traditional authority and releases it for universal choice.

“ ‘All pasts are ours’ . . . and ‘all pasts are theirs’: i.e. dis­ tinction between separate histories on the way to be­ ing past (history—what is happening out there; and his­ tory—what we write: now with the sense of ‘world of intellectual discourse,’ through historical analogy) come together.”51

Levenson enjoyed the attachment to his own par­ ticular past. To hold it exclusively, however, would be sheerly provincial, merely romantic. The answer was to recognize in himself the human condition, so that analogical history created the connections which might bring his particular world in time and space into uni­ versal perspective. Then Levenson, the Bostonian Jew, could be kindred to the intellectuals of Shanghai. And as he so consciously articulated his own motives and assumptions, he also discovered that contradictions be­ came creative when one had the courage to perceive them. Thus, he learned to explain the failure of Chinese “museumification” as a crisis of “confidence in histori­ cal progress.” As Chinese Communists could no longer

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

afford to “patronize their Chinese cultural past, “they also became more provincial. Perhaps this parochialism would someday dissolve, but Levenson’s confidence was guarded. “One way or another (the choice of ways is fearful) China will join the world again on the cosmopolitan tide. Cultural intermediaries, Cultural Revolutionaries—neither will look like stranded minnows or stranded whales for­ ever.”52

For, simple cosmopolitanism would not alone resolve the matter. By asking himself (and Chinese history) again and again, how particularity could be reconciled with a universal world history; and by refusing to ac­ cept either the meta-history of Marxists and Platonists, or the arid universality of technology, he had to believe in a new kind of cosmopolitanism, “burgeoning,” rising from the ashes of earlier cosmopolitanisms. This faith was the writing of history, the conviction that dis­ course about would have to stand for discourse between China and the West.

“... something is emerging that really can be called world history, not just the sum of histories of separate civiliza­ tions. Historians of China can help to make this history as they write of the past. ... An historian, bringing China into a universal world of discourse, helps to unify the world on more than a technological level. ... I saw a world made when an understanding of Chinese history, without violence to its integrity and individuality, and an understanding of western history reinforced each other. The two histories belong together. . . . because minds of observers can transpose the problems (not, transplant the problems) of one into the other.... And Chinese history, then, should be studied because ... it can be seen to make sense in the same world of discourse in which we try to

make sense of the West. If we can make this kind of sense, perhaps we help to make this kind of world. The act of writing history can be an historic act itself.”53 His own appreciation for and creation of intelligibil­ ity allowed him to exist as a particular man with cosmo­ politan concerns. In the act—the historic act—of writing history, he knew he gave himself and history real mean­ ing. Perhaps it was Proust (in lines that Joe deeply admired) who best expressed that confidence for him:

“... I summoned up all my courage and said to him: ‘Tell me, sir, do you, by any chance, know the lady—the ladies of Guermantes?’; and I felt glad because, in pronouncing the name, I had secured a sort of power over it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my dreams and giving it an objective existence in the world of spoken things.”54 Frederic E. Wakeman, Jr. Berkeley, California January,

Author’s

preface

is the text of three lectures [which were to have been] delivered at the University of Northern Illinois in April, 1969. The publica­ tions on which the book is based, most of them very rare, are in the unique collection of foreign dramas in Chinese translation in the library of United College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I am very grateful to my friends at both these universities, in Hong Kong and DeKalb, for many kindnesses. his book

T

I wish to thank the Center for Chinese Studies and the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the American Council of Learned Societies for their generous support of my research in Hong Kong in 1966-1967. Joseph R. Levenson Berkeley, California

Communist

cosmopolitanism

people have pondered the ambiguity, at least in English, of “history”: the records men make, the records men write. In modern Chinese history, these are beginning to cor­ respond. Revolutionary spirits like the famous writer Lu Hsiin (188 i-i 936) felt that the old high culture was dead, and they resented being instructed, as it seemed, to rest quietly, uttering platitudes in silk-fan attitudes. They wanted to create (and destroy): to make their own history, not to be politically stricken by forces from abroad, or culturally sterile at home, their past frozen solid in the present. The revolution they helped to foster in a cosmopolitan spirit—against the world to join the world, against their past to keep it theirs, but past—may be interpreted, in cultural terms, as a long striving to make their museums themselves. They had to escape being exhibits themselves, antiques preserved for foreign delectation. It amounted to this: let foreign­ ers not be cosmopolitan at Chinese expense (as Japanese who prefer Brecht to kabuki—“for foreigners”—hold that the western taste which the national must resist or a long time now,

F

is the western Schavdrmerei about the national tradi­ tional arts). At last, western writing on China is matching this situation. Instead of painting China as a still life for a connoisseur’s collection, scholars see it as an action painter on a world canvas. This is not merely a matter of giving modem China its due, after the sinologues’ long attention to antiquity. With such rich works on early themes as The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics* and The Vermilion Bird: T'ang Images of the South* Edward Schafer illustrates what has happened. There is all the difference in the world between thinking about China as exotic—an old way of annexing China to the domain of western consciousness—and thinking about exoticism in China, which is a universal subject. The universal subject is particularly appropriate to our age, the age of “museums without walls,” when the seals are broken and histories flow together. World history can no longer be seen as an aggregate, just the sum of the histories of separate civilizations. Historians are trying to bring Asia into a world of discourse, not by assuming a paradigm (Marxist, Toynbean, or any other), not by sentimentally contriving a nice synthetic balance (so much western influence on the East, so much eastern influence on the West), but by discern­ ing mutual relevance. One’s interest in Chinese history now is of a universal order—the interest of cosmopoli­ tans in a burgeoning cosmopolitanism, rising (like the vermilion bird) from the ashes of cosmopolitanism. Confucian literati, the (often literally) official bearers •Published in 1963 and 1967, respectively; University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

of “high culture,” had had a cosmopolitan aura (and provincials to condescend to) in the world that they defined. But when China embarked on nation-building in a wider world concept, new intellectuals defined the nation’s tasks. A new culture, drawn from all the world, defined the content of cosmopolitanism. In the new world climate, lingering Confucianists, recalcitrant and traditionalistic, seemed provincial themselves. They were passing out of history, into history. In the manner of their passing, they bequeathed their particular world (universal, to them), where they had been historians in particular, to historians in general. And although they did not will it, they yielded title to cosmopolitan­ ism to a new youth in a new China, which was now a part of the general world, instead of being world enough itself.

Efforts to bring kabuki or Chinese opera into the circle of western experience have been matched in China, the other way round. Western plays (though fewer of them than western novels) have been trans­ lated abundantly, ever since the “new culture move­ ment” of 1915. It was one sign of Confucian attrition. Even Chinese plays, although—or because—they were popular in China, had never been acknowledged as high art in the Confucian “higher life.” And even though material innovations from the West had been finally, grudgingly accepted by Confucian intellectuals, high art and “culture” (in the genteel sense of the word) were still supposed to be governed by literati standards. But now, when a Chinese intellectual could be turned on by Ibsen, he was part of a restless intelligentsia, not a conservative body of literati.

Restless, perhaps revolutionary. . . . And rootless? These new cosmopolitans, so ready to shock the old ones with their quest for western spirit as well as matter, were ambiguous figures in modern Chinese history. Undeniably, they had some revolutionary standing. It made them at least potentially congenial to the rising Communist movement, and genial towards it. But Com­ munism, for all its revolutionary and internationalist implications, has “rootless” in its armory of epithets— just as the last Confucianists had, with their traditional­ istic shibboleth, “national essence.” “Rootlessness” (as an especially “bourgeois” malady) has been a shock, not only to “feudal” Confucian sensibilities, but to Communist as well. Professor Y. C. Wang, describing Chinese Intellec­ tuals and. the West, 1872-1949 (1966), depicts a new intelligentsia, different in values and status from the Confucian “literati,” who had set the cultural tone, the political pace, and the economic style of the old bureau­ cratic-imperial world. He follows the new intellectuals down to 1949, not up to 1949: as he constructs the story, it points, not to the Communist culmination, but to the Confucian and post-Confucian decline and fall. This makes a difference. Instead of showing why a synthesis, a Chinese (“anti-imperialist”) and a new (“anti-feudal”) Communist future, came to seem com­ mended against both a Chinese (but moribund) Con­ fucian past and its antithesis and solvent, a new (but alien) western present, Wang concentrates on the abor­ tiveness of the westernizing movement. Modern Chi­ nese history is represented, not as a set of responses to the ruin of Confucian civilization, but as a departure from Confucian civilization (which indeed it is)—a

departure that in itself seems to constitute the ruin. When Wang castigates the new intellectuals in general for opportunistic individualism, he defines this blight as a defection from the Confucian spirit of public ser­ vice, and a detachment, in the new men’s cherished urban setting, from a still-Confucian countryside (“... day to day life in rural China had not changed radically and conformed largely to the basic ideals of Confucian­ ism. Unfamiliarity with the classics therefore dimin­ ished the students’ understanding of the traditional social order”).1 However, viewed organically, the “traditional social order” no longer existed when a Chinese intelligentsia could show “unfamiliarity with the classics.” What made the intellectuals defect in the first place was the reduction of Confucianism, as it seemed, to the non­ Confucian point whereby it deserved only the dumb loyalty of unreflective peasants. When Confucianism was vital (i.e., when it informed the intellectuals, when the latter were the corps of literati), it was cosmopol­ itan: it did not simply correspond to “day-to-day life in rural China.” But when China ceased to be the world and became a nation, or struggled to become one, Con­ fucianism was provincial in that larger world that con­ tained the Chinese nation. The intellectuals left it then, for a new cosmopolitanism, which did indeed detach them from the peasants. And this set them up for censure and control, not just by Wang but by Mao, and not on grounds of departure from “pre-western” Confucian norms, but on grounds of not fulfilling “post-western” Communist requirements. The full force of the shock of “rootlessness,” or of the Maoist riposte, was not felt until the “Great Prole-

tarian Cultural Revolution” of the middle 1960s. In the 1950s, the first decade of general Communist rule, China was reasonably open to cosmopolitanism. Al­ most all the world enriched the Chinese stage, or at least invited translation. And from the translations that the Communists sponsored we can divine a stage of the Chinese revolution: a middle stage between a revolutionary—but non-Communist—Republican stage of reaching out to the world, and the curious stage of withdrawal in the “Cultural Revolution.”2 In 1952, a translator offered his version (from the French) of selected plays by “Rumania’s great realist author,” I. L. Cariagale, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.8 In their publication of this work three years later, we see the Chinese Communists in their early internationalist manner, joining a fellow-people’s celebration. This was the simplest kind of cosmopolitan expression, the forging of common bonds with social­ ist friends. An American friend, Albert Maltz, wrote his own preface (put into Chinese) for three of his agit-prop plays of the 1930s. He said he was delighted to be translated, since China, a liberating force for the whole world today, had a special place in the hearts of Ameri­ can progressives. “I am exceedingly grateful, because you are Chinese and I, while in one aspect an interna­ tionalist, am also, in another, an American.”4 What were Maltz and his Chinese publishers point­ ing to? It was the binding ties of “peoples”: “peoples,” in a doubly plural sense. There were the national “peo­ ples”—Chinese, American, and all the rest, at all points of the compass—and there was “the people” as an in-

COMMUNIST COSMOPOLITANISM

ternational class. There are different Chinese terms for the two conceptions: min-tsu for a people in organic national synthesis, jen-min for the people in abstract class analysis. The Kuomintang’s “nation” was min-tsu, an integral nationalist organic community. It implied a national essence, transcending individuals but an in­ dividual itself, a folk, in its resistance to cosmopolitan­ ism. The Communists had the term, too. But what they described as “the people” was not min-tsu but jen-min (or the Chinese min-tsu as jen-miri), not organic collec­ tive life but a collectivist abstraction—and not single and self-contained but cosmopolitan. Nationalism, in modern times, had come to have an unquestioned moral claim on the national. Hence, in the late 1920s and 1930s, between the end of the first United Front of Kuomintang and Communists in 1927 and the beginning of the second in 1937, there were mutual charges of ethical monstrosity: splitting the na­ tion in face of the enemy, or letting the enemy in to save a class position. Kuomintang nationalists could talk simply about the Chinese nation against the Rus­ sians or Japanese. They could damn the Communists as anti-nationalist, anti-7wi»-£jw, for allegedly following Russian orders, indulging their class animus, and tear­ ing the nation apart in spite of the Japanese menace. But the Communists, adding jen-min to min-tsu, countered the charge. They held that the Kuomintang (with its ap­ peasement of Japan, its “bandit-suppression” priority) did violence to both: as an opponent of “the people” (the masses), it betrayed “the (Chinese) people.” As the Communists honored both these “peoples,” they could be nationalist and internationalist at the same time. Cultural cosmopolitanism, on a class basis, seemed

to pair with nationalism, not to impair it. For the jenmin of all nations were supposed to have a common cause, while the jen-min of each nation (especially China) was supposed virtually to constitute the nation. If the local bourgeois failed to make common cause with “the people” {jen-min)^ they were denational­ ized, as imperialists or running dogs of imperialists, dis­ qualified for the nnn-tsu variant of “people.” By the 1950s, then, the Chinese Communists had had plenty of practice with this class-analysis nationalism. During the long crisis and war with Japan, when the Kuomintang, the ostensible “Nationalists,” opposed the “United Front” in the early 1930s and strained and broke it in the 1940s, the Kuomintang’s nationalist standing was impugned. Chiang Kai-shek’s party be­ came suspect nationally for its fear of revolution. The Communists, by trading on their revolutionary reputa­ tion, while at the same time restraining their revolution­ ary impulse, enhanced their own nationalist credit and drained their rivals’ account. Acts of revolution were suspended but the promise lingered, as a lever to pry the Kuomintang loose from “the nation.” For the “Nationalists” made it easy for themselves to be classed as just a class—the wrong class—ready to squander the Chinese people’s sovereignty if this would buy protec­ tion against “the people.” The Communists were cer­ tainly happy to insinuate as much, to suggest that the Kuomintang, in the last analysis (class analysis), could not be nationalist, since adherence to the people’s will would cost them their class position. Perhaps (in the softest innuendo) Chiang really did oppose Japan while China stood alone. The invaders threatened, after all, to usurp power from Mao and Chiang alike. But when

the United States became committed to finishing off Japan, the united front was finished. America was wel­ come to win the war for the Kuomintang (so that the Kuomintang was released to break the peace with the Communists), and then to abort the people’s justice that the Kuomintang deserved. This conception of class and nation could be trans­ lated into cultural terms and inspire the translations of certain western plays. Naturally, in the early years of People’s China, Russia was the most obvious place to look for foreign sustenance. In earlier years, for many Chinese readers, the same had been true, not only (not especially) for plays and not only for Communists. In 1922 the non-Communist Cheng Chen-to translated The Pale Horse, about Socialist Revolutionaries, by the Russian terrorist, Ropsin. Though Ropsin died in a Bolshevik prison in 1918, Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, a newly minted Communist Party member, wrote an apprecia­ tive preface to his friend’s translation in 1923—a tribute to the great “Russian spirit,” “Russian soul,” embodied in Russian literature, which was the glory of modem world literature, whose history was inseparable from the history of revolutionary thought. And literature, said Ch’ii, was the reflection of a people’s {mn-tsu) spirit and social life.5 But in the early 1950s, recourse to Russian materials was so obvious an expedient that it is less interesting than the wider Chinese search for foreign theater. In the first few years (with a few efforts before the “Lib­ eration”), there was more translating of Soviet drama than of other western specimens. In the translations from the Russian, the essential Chinese motive was the spread of ideology, by showing examples and claiming

affinities. But in the translations of non-Communist plays, ideology seemed more a means than a motive, a means to achieve a cosmopolitan end. A foreign “high culture” was made “people’s”—and appropriate, then, to the Chinese people, since “people” is international. Carlo Goldoni, for example, was welcomed into the Chinese fold, a little late, on the 250th anniversary of his birth. He was not only a great contributor (said one of his translators) to drama reform in Italy, but he was also a treasure of world culture, a playwright warmly cherished by world progressives.6 Another Goldoni man agreed, repeating, in his encomium, the nice bal­ ance between Italian master and hero of world culture.7 What was Goldoni’s special virtue? It was realism: a highly legitimizing Communist term in the 1950s, whether its implications were philosophical (as a ma­ terialist’s counter to idealism) or sociological (as some­ thing pertaining to “real life,” majority life, not the artificial existences of an effete, self-styled elite). So Goldoni was a creator of realistic drama, said at least a couple of his Chinese translators, and his whole life a battle against aristocratic and feudal power.8 His language was that of the popular masses—and “popular masses,” in this Chinese appreciation, is not only the bland internationalist abstraction, jen-min ta-ctfung, but lao-pai-hsing, “old hundred names,” a concrete ref­ erence to the age-old Chinese peasants.9 This is a no­ tably cosmopolitan performance, this use of a special Chinese locution, adapted in a general way to Italy. A homely term, redolent of China, of a specific, national Chinese people, is injected metaphorically into an Ital­ ian milieu. And the “class” premise, the interchange­

ability of “peoples,” brings a specifically Italian play into a Chinese milieu. The Sun Wei-shih translations of Goldoni, inciden­ tally, were from Russian versions of the Italian. Is this the last turn of the cosmopolitan screw, or something near the first? Some Chinese translators in the early Communist stage would go quite naturally to Russian, not quite so naturally, still—and not just for political reasons—to Italian. But there is no doubt that the orig­ inal Goldoni, at any rate, was an especially suitable subject for cosmopolitan attentions. For the Nieh Wench’i translation was from the French, but it was Gol­ doni’s original French, not Italian—in a play written to celebrate the wedding of Louis XVI! Louis XVI? To Marie Antoinette? What are Com­ munists, of all people (and of any people), doing with this association? It was Goldoni’s popular associations that acted as prophylaxis against Communist contempt. As a mark of his realism, he was said to have “the style of the age and place” (shih-tai ho ti-fang se-ts’ai)™ and ti-fang, “place,” was locality. It is generally considered that Goldoni’s best plays were those he wrote in Vene­ tian dialect, not in Italian. And for the Chinese Com­ munists, dialect, the language of local or provincial culture—while doomed to yield to centralizing, “na­ tionalizing” pressure—had proto-revolutionary “popu­ lar” standing under old regimes (Chinese or any other), since the “high cultures” of old elites, so ripe for revo­ lution, transcended local regions. Goldoni, then, with his anchor in the backwaters of provincial eighteenth­ century Venice, was certified as popular. And when he ranged all the way to cosmopolitan Paris, from dia­

lect to an international French, he could keep his popu­ lar standing. For the Chinese Communists at home in the 1950s were celebrating, selectively, both the “low” culture of the lao-pai-hsing in all their local provinces and the “high” culture of the cosmopolitan Confucian literati—as long as the latter, safely dead, were banished to history. Thereby, their best achievements could be “nationalized,” i.e. purged of living class character and “museumified” into “the people’s national her­ itage.” Goldoni, too, could claim as much historicist indulgence. From Italy to England, Goldoni to Fielding. Here we find the tendentious, class-struggle international note, not just the common people’s (Chinese or for­ eign) capturing of an old high culture. For The CoffeeHouse Politician was not considered high Fielding by “capitalist scholars.” From his own contemporary mandarins down to modem American critics (writes the translator), everybody calls the play “vulgar,” “coarse,” “derivative.” But their slanders and bans re­ veal their own inferiority and shamelessness. The peo­ ple (jen-nnn) understand its value. In the Soviet Union (Academician called to witness), Fielding’s play has a very high reputation. For it exposes the dark spots in the English legal system, the evil side of the English governing class. And now Fielding’s work is loved not only in his own country; it is a literary treasure of the progressive people of the whole world.11 So much for Fielding and the standard populist ver­ sion of the Triumph of the Right (i.e., the Left). Shakespeare, a sun of another magnitude, was another problem, calling for more than standard treatment by the Chinese Communists. Others abided their question,

COMMUNIST COSMOPOLITANISM

he was—sometimes—free. Or rather, he was a marvelous cultural property whom anyone would covet, without fussing too much about class credentials, and the Com­ munists made a straight bid for cosmopolitan shares. A writer named Chu Sheng-hao had translated thirtyone Shakespearean plays between 1935 and 1944. All but four had been published in 1947, not under Com­ munist auspices, but in 1954 Peking published the whole batch. The translator, though working under enemy rule (in Shanghai), was said to have shown a tenacity of purpose, while the translation, in its clarity and fine flow, preserved the spirit of the original: a treasure.12 But even for Shakespeare, a simple acceptance of ab­ solute value was not enough. A relativistic, “periodiz­ ing” ideology was ladled out to validate his cosmopoli­ tan appeal. The translator of Henry the Fourth paid courteous respects to English critics like L. C. Knights and G. B. Harrison, but he took a man of letters named Stalin (on the nationalities question) as his principal foreign authority. The Lollards and Wat Tyler, as “people’s” tribunes, leave their marks on the Chinese introduction, which stresses, too, the making of the English people. For history plays, says the translator, began to flourish in the later sixteenth century, when the English feudal system began to crumble. The com­ mon characteristics of these plays were intelligibility in form, a burning national (min-tsu) sense of selfaggrandizement, and anti-feudal tendencies. Henry the Fourth was supreme in this genre of historical plays. Prince Hal, the brilliant leader of a new min-tsu kuochia, a new nation, was in the forefront of his times. Shakespeare, who dramatized him, was not only the greatest interpreter and recorder of his age, but a source

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

of stimulus and scholarship in ours. He reflected the breakdown of feudalism, but he already had doubts about the capitalist road. The transition from historical plays to tragedies was the symbol of his doubts.18 Does this introduce a translation of the saga of Prince Hal, or a dehydration (not that he couldn’t use some drying out, to fit him for the role of Henry the Fifth) ? The introduction is ruthlessly sociological, though with a seed of aesthetic sympathy; Shakespeare, after all, is judged to be exemplary, not simply an example of the spirit of the age. But it is a desiccated Shakespeare, dry cargo for export to a Communist country, which can moisten it for its own consumption. The concrete, the particular paean to England, becomes abstract—not the people of England but an age of peoples is celebrated, and gentlemen in China will think themselves accursed upon St. Crispin’s Day. Not space—English, French, Chinese—but time claims attention. One savors the pe­ riod, not the place, so that any place can involve itself in the history of any other, if only the histories seem to share a process and an end. “Realism” fits such histor­ icist periodization; it disallows idealism, which would disengage from history (or the “periods” in succes­ sion). Chinese Communist theory in the 1950s, like standard Marxism anywhere, rejects “human nature.” Instead, there are human natures, variously made by history to be appropriate to their times. Man’s nature is not universal, but his history is. If one road to cos­ mopolitanism is closed, another is open. On the latter road, a Chinese could travel from Eng­ land to Germany, from Shakespeare to Lessing and Schiller. The translator’s afterword to Lessing’s Emilia

Galotti begins with Engels’ description of eighteenth­ century Germany: a decaying feudal order, its blood­ sucking governments inhibiting commerce, industry, and agriculture. Lessing’s drama was a blow against the oppressive governments of that day, and its dramatic technique, as a means of projecting a realist aesthetic, was very inventive.14 Schiller’s Wallenstein, translated long before, in the 1930s, by the veteran leftist scholar and litterateur, Kuo Mo-jo, was also prescribed as revo­ lutionary medicine for the Chinese body politic. Kuo made both the “periodization” case for Schiller’s rele­ vance to China and the “pattern” case, the universal play of people-vmwr-antipeople. The temporal setting of the drama, said Kuo, the Thirty Years War, was the final phase of European feudalism. Our China’s society has still not stripped itself sufficiently of the skin of the feudal period. And Wallenstein, besides showing us where we stand, introduces a western version of Han-chien (“Chinese traitor”) to our Chinese literary world.15 France, too, almost every cosmopolitan’s mother country, showed up on the translators’ lists. T’ien Han, discreetly omitting to mention Merimee’s political dis­ grace as a supporter of Louis Napoleon (one of the many betes noires in Marx’s bestiary), offered Carmen to the People’s Republic. And why not? It was realist, observed the translator. And it scored capitalist op­ pression, and showed the evils of the army officers and gentry of the time. Moreover (but this would suggest the why-not of Carmen in the coming years of the Cultural Revolution, which ruined T’ien Han), this Chinese version had been produced in Shanghai in

1930, to warm applause. The Kuomintang reactionaries had banned it, but now, in 1955, T’ien was bringing it out (revised) in print.16 A translator of Victor Hugo took an easier, more confident great leap forward from his text to interna­ tionalism. Introducing L’epee in 1952, when Hugo, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, was passed fit as a “cultural giant,” the Chinese sponsor plunged immedi­ ately into anti-American invective on the Taiwan and Korea issues. Hugo had good credentials as a prosecu­ tion witness for our times. He was hailed for being anti­ war (an accolade that would soon subside); being anti­ Bonaparte (better) and pro-Roman Republic of 1849; supporting the Polish rebellion of 1863, the Cretans against the Turks, the fight for a Spanish republic, the Mexican blow against Maximilian and French adven­ turism. In good cosmopolitan (but bad Cultural Revo­ lutionary) fashion, no particular pride of place was given to Hugo’s blast at the British and French for burning the Yuan Ming Yuan, the Summer Palace near Peking, in i860. His outrage at the hanging of John Brown was fine. And for culture, after all this politics (but not very far from politics), Hugo was sound in scorning art for art’s sake. In sum: “Hugo was a pro­ gressive ... no matter how history limited him. .. .”17 That is, Hugo’s expression, relative to what it could have been in his own time, was good for moderns. And French experience, relative to the possibilities in the French compartment of universal history, was instruc­ tive to Chinese. Moliere was more solidly fixed than Hugo in the French pantheon (“Victor Hugo, helas:” the famous answer to one who inquired for the best French poet of

modern times). Like Shakespeare, Moliere could al­ most be admitted on his own recognizances. True, Les precieuses ridicules and Le medecin malgre lui were introduced to China as “faithfully reflecting the face of seventeenth-century French society,” as “realist” and jen-min “popular.”18 But translations of L’ecole des marts and Sganarelle, published in Peking in the next year, 1958, were administered straight, without any preambles about class struggle or periodization. Presumably, it was just in the spirit of malting “cultural giants” available to the people in a people’s cosmopoli­ tanism. But Cultural Revolutionaries in the middle and late 1960s, as they cooled on cosmopolitanism, would not be so keen on cultural giants. When school was out for the Red Guards, “School for Husbands,” like most things old or foreign, was way out. The early People’s Republic mood would be interestingly modified. And so there was something ephemeral about a ’fiftyish admiration for Romain Rolland, expressed in a preface (1935, published in 1950) to the Les loups translation. His friendship with the Catholic poet, Clau­ del, was all right. His discipleship to Tolstoy was all right. His pacifism was all right, and his distinction in being savaged by the ai-kuo chu-i men, the “patriots.” His trip to the Soviet Union, his meeting with Gorky, were all right. It was right to translate Les loups, to show Rolland’s unbending, unflinching spirit.19 But the day was coming when connections with Catholic poets, when Tolstoyan quietism, when scorn for chauvinism, when a Meccanistic view of Russia would be all wrong, and when “unbending, unflinching spirit” would sound suspiciously egoistic. No Rolland, “most ardent backer of the peace movement among modern French authors

U

and thinkers,” would be acceptable to the Cultural Revolution, for all the fact that “his deeds and works, throughout his life, had only one purpose: to oppose im­ perialism and to support peace among the nations,” for all the fact that his play, Le quatorze juillet, about the great French Revolution, “showed the great strength of the jen-min”20 Back to Russia where it all began, in the early 1950s when the Soviet Union was the prop for reconstruction. Borodin’s Prince Igor was hailed “a prime example of nineteenth-century European min-tsu (national) mu­ sic.” Here is localism conceptualized (cosmopolitanized), not just unconsciously expressed. The libretto’s Chinese translator was part of a truly cosmopolitan enterprise, as he worked from the French version of Jules Ruelle. And he saw the latter performed, says Wang Wei-k’e, in the Theatre Lyceum in Shanghai, in 1939!21 This lets us see the precarious place of such a cos­ mopolitanism in early Communist China. Prince Igor was all right as new (to China), and as Russian (in 1951), and as “folk” or national. But that Shanghai showing, in 1939 (Shanghai, half Japanese that year, half French Concession and International Settlement), will have a haunting echo when a Cultural Revolu­ tionary China looks for “ghosts and monsters.”

“Bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(i)

when the Cultural Revolution began, the People’s Republic had many vicissi­ tudes. But generally, at least for about a decade, the Communists kept their lines out to the peoples of the world. They had their class definition of “people,” but they did not neglect the “peoples” as nations, and cultural imports (nicely sifted, of course, and inter­ preted) were welcome. This was when industrializa­ tion—a neutral, international, modem value—was the prime objective, and when it was reckoned to be the road to proletarianization, not the other way round. Expertise, technical competence, seemed likely to be decisive, and the Chinese invited the contributions of “bourgeois” returned students, and the aid of “socialist friends,” preeminently Russia. As a matter of fact, significantly, the publication of foreign plays seems just about to have dried up after 1957. This was the year of the “Hundred Flowers” campaign (“the storm in the universities”) and Mao’s disenchantment with the academic-professional critics —and with the Soviet Union’s “revisionist” caution. The process of fission, internal and international, had rom i 949 to i 966,

F

begun. The confusion, the explosion, of the Cultural Revolution, still a cloud no bigger than a Mao’s hand, was in the offing. Where had the original openness, the relatively cath­ olic internationalist outlook, come from? How did it make for the combination of Communism and na­ tionalism? And how did it lead to its seeming negation in the Cultural Revolution, which deprecated so much international art (in our illustrations, drama) that once had been highly valued?

Communist China: . a reviving Chinese power under a leadership driven by an ancient nationalcultural chauvinism and a modern ultra-revolutionism. The first demands restoration of China’s greatness and the regaining of its place at the center of the world. The second ... some ultimate global triumph.”1 Let us worry about the first (plenty of people are worrying about the second). True, most recently in the eigh­ teenth century, China was unmistakably “great,” and it saw itself at the center of the world. Indeed, it was a world itself, a world whose values were Value, whose civilization was Civilization, a trans-national antithesis to barbarism. Confucian “culturalists” in China-as-aworld had traditionalism as a world view. But Chinese nationalists, in the twentieth century, were iconoclas­ tic.2 Either they were avowedly new men, in the “May Fourth” spirit;3 or, if conservative, they trans-valued old values in their very affirmations of the old. If they tried to retain Confucius, for example, in China as a nation in the world, they were traditionalistic, not tra­ ditional—they had a relativistic concept, “national es­ sence,” not an absolute conviction.

National feeling, then, wherever it was going in the twentieth century, was going forward from the nineteenth, not backward to the eighteenth. An “an­ cient national-cultural chauvinism” is not quite the spectacle that China affords today. For after 1839 and the Opium War, China’s humiliations were distinctly modern. When China was beaten before, her “place at the center of the world” had not been jeopardized. No one had moved the center away; the conquerors simply moved into it. They borrowed the mantle of greatness, the mandate of Heaven. Mongolia was not the center of the world for the Yuan dynasty of Mongols (12601368), nor Manchuria for the Manchu Ch’ing (16441912). China was the prize, and China remained the center, even among—especially among—those victims of barbarians who resented the conquests most. And resentment turned to acceptance, as the barbarians’ sins were bleached (more or less) in sinification. China was still the still point, the Middle Kingdom, in the turning world. But the Manchu conquest was the last of its kind. In the nineteenth century, the old recurrent form of Chinese weakness—a dynastic disarray that tempted the foreigners in—was complicated by new disabilities: in­ adequate technology and social vulnerability. China could be manipulated from a distance. Unlike the Manchus, modem Europeans had no need to assimilate to China. And the Chinese, unable to take them in, were just as unable to throw them out as long as the technological gap endured. The road to hell—and to national resurrection—was paved with new inventions. Thus, from the 1840s on, a line of “self-strengthened” brought western technology more and more into their

circle of acceptance, and they were drawn inexorably through merely military science to the industrial and political. The perimeter of the purely indigenous val­ ues shrank, even for bureaucratic Confucianists who longed to keep their social prominence and cultural dis­ tinction. While they defended the ever more narrowly defined “Chinese essence,” the same West which gave them the insidious tools of defense—a merely useful technology, as it was supposed to be—was transforming an old social type, the agrarian rebel, into a proto­ revolutionary, and creating a new social type, the legally protected capitalist, in the treaty ports. New roads to social prominence, new content to cultural distinction began to threaten the old elite, even as the latter, in its own right, was shifting the ground of Con­ fucianism, converting it from substance of education for life and action, to symbol of China’s individuality. The agrarian rebels were the Taipings (1850-1864). They flouted Confucianism with a garbled Christianity, part of the western intellectual penetration. And they were pushed over the edge of rebellion by western economic penetration, which aggravated endemic so­ cial bitterness to a new intensity. Intellectual apostasy underscored this bitterness. Literati-officials and land­ lords, almost unanimously loyal to the Manchu dynasty, damned the rebels as seceders from cultural China. For what the Taipings proclaimed was a national China, in which an ethnically foreign dynasty, however Con­ fucian in its sympathies and culturally legitimate, was nationally illegitimate. The dynasty survived for a while, the Taipings went down. But the intellectual revolution of the twentieth

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(i)

century was anticipated in the Taipings’ fusion of cul­ tural iconoclasm and political nationalism. And their fusion of cultural iconoclasm and rudimentary class­ analysis (the Taipings’ animus toward landlords being inseparable from their anti-Confucianism) foreshad­ owed the fate of that revolution: preemption by the Communists.

In former days, the old Confucian fiction about “beckoning barbarians from afar by civilized example” had covered a harsh politics of beckoning by weakness. But in the latter days the cover was stripped away, and the new conquests meant deflation of China, not infla­ tion of the conqueror by his becoming quasi-Chinese. Ever since the early nineteenth century, foreign intru­ sion could nurture only resentment—against others, and against the self—not self-esteem. From its beginnings in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Chinese Communism reflected that resent­ ment, with both its targets. “Anti-imperialism” struck at the foreign foes of the new or would-be nation; “anti-feudalism” hit the domestic foes of the new cul­ ture. The combination released Chinese feeling against the Confucian past, which, though moribund, had still invited acceptance, as Chinese; and against a western present, which, though rejuvenating, had still invited rejection, as alien. To be both Chinese and fresh instead of either foreign or stale: that was the Communist promise. Chinese nationalism, in both its affinities—with political self-assertion and cultural revolution—was bound to pervade Communism and make China new. Where was the novelty, really? If Chinese Commun-

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

ism is strongly nationalist, a universal creed in a partic­ ular vessel, how does a Communist China differ from a Confucian China? The latter, too, had an ecumenical spirit and a well developed sense of Chinese selfhood. But it had no sense of mission, which Communist China has. Christian Europe had had it, too. In the Pauline spirit, Christian universalism was supra-cultural, trans-historical. It fostered expansion out from Christian lands to newly discovered lands of potentially Christian souls. Confucian universalism, however, was supremely cul­ tural, invincibly historical. Its values were universal, like the Christian, but Confucian universalism was a criterion, a standpoint, not a point of departure. It ap­ plied to all the world (all “under-Heaven”: fien-hsia, both “the Empire” and “the world,” where the “Son of Heaven” ruled); and it was open to all. But Confucianists as pragmatists accepted cultural differences as the way of the world, always producing candidates for the title of barbarian. From the point of view of normative Confucianism, wedded to culture and history and anti-messianic to the core, the barbarians are al­ ways with us. From the point of view of normative Christianity, transcending culture and history (those marks of distinction between “Jews and Greeks”), the pagans are not always with us: they can be sought out and converted. The Kingdom of Heaven was nowhere in the world. But the Middle Kingdom, the point of balanced perfection in the world, under-Heaven, was at home. Though Chinese left home in great numbers, no one had any Confucian pretensions to be bearing out a Word.

“bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (i)

Now, however, the new China was a Word for the world, beginning with all its Bolivias. China commends itself as a model of revolution. The model applies, al­ legedly, because all “peoples” (i.e., all victims of im­ perialists) are brothers. But the model is political and economic. Culturally—with reference to specific, his­ torical Chinese culture—Mao has no message for the world. Old China claimed to be exemplary because oth­ ers were different and therefore lower. New China claims to be exemplary because it identifies affinities, a common plane of victimization and a common destiny, so that the Chinese mode of liberation should meet the needs of others. At the end of the eighteenth century, in that other age of claims to central greatness, a (Manchu) Chinese emperor dismissed the English blandishments: rudi­ ments of Chinese culture could hardly be transplanted to a distant barbarous land. Ch’ien-lung’s edict, of course, was universalist; China’s civilization was the touchstone for the barbarousness of England. If Eng­ land was a backwater, it was the distance from China, in every sense, that made it one. But this older univer­ salism allowed for, even demanded (as the fuel for con­ descension), the fact of western ignorance of China. That was the traditional situation. Next, transitionally, between the Ch’ien-lung and Mao eras, China became the backwater—an object of western influence, not a source of inspiration or of Chinese condescension to the hopelessly uninspired. And now, as China seeks to be the fountainhead again, the central source of world values, there is a different world from Ch’ien-lung’s and a different China. “Sub-structure” (a general social

system), not “superstructure” (a special Chinese high culture), serves as model. And the world’s attention, not its inattention, ministers to China’s self-esteem.

Peking neglected to send George III an English ver­ sion of the Confucian classics. But Peking thoughtfully broadcasts far and wide, in English, Spanish, Arabic and everything else, the “thoughts of Mao Tse-tung.” Perhaps the balance of payments is meant to be re­ stored, with an outflow of influence after a century of inflow. There can be nationalist satisfaction in this presumption of Chinese leadership. But it depends on an internationalist premise. Mao, quite unequivocally, represents himself not as a Chinese sage prescribing for the world, but as a world sage in a line of sages (Marx, Lenin, Stalin . . .), bringing China—agreeably, to the nationalistic spirit—to the forefront of history, every­ body’s history. To the culturalistic Confucian spirit (Ch’ien-lung’s), Chinese history was the only history that mattered. To the nationalistic Communist (Mao), the satisfaction comes in having Chinese history matter to the world. For “restoration of China’s greatness” required an end to a century’s ravages in the confidence in Chinese continuity. “Westernization, ” the spectre since the Opium War, threatened to divert Chinese history into the western stream, as though the West, spreading over the world, had the only line from the past to future. Mao, no Boxer xenophobe, is ready to tap the western line; but Mao, no “rootless cosmopolitan,” is not pre­ pared to cut himself off from home. And so he arrives at a modem synthesis, not an “ancient national-cultural

“bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (i)

chauvinism.” He sees that a considerable MarxistLeninist ancestry might establish China’s leadership, not its dependence. To restore the continuity of Chi­ nese history, Mao insists on the continuity of Marxist history. Aspiring to a world leadership that would reflect glory on China, Mao contends that he has creatively enriched in China what he has nevertheless drawn openly from international sources. The alterna­ tives of “Chinese” (nationalist) or “Communist” (in­ ternationalist) are misconceived. Mao has consciously lodged himself in Chinese history by drawing materials from histories outside China. He is not “Chinese” in the sense of presiding over the restoration of “old China.” He is Chinese in wishing to extend Chinese history, not to repeat it (for one must be “anti-feudal”), nor to end it (for one must be “anti-imperialist”). Mao, then, has meant to be Chinese nationalist and Marxist theoretician. He united the two personae in moving on from a westernizing to a modernizing zeal. In 1919, in a westernizing vein, Mao inveighed especial­ ly against the backwardness of the Chinese social sys­ tem. Confucian intellectual life was stale. Confucian society unraveled and unappealing. But westernization could hardly hold him or many of his countrymen, for what led them to disaffection was their identification with China. As modem, but not as “western,” China could still be “theirs” without still being traditional. With the aid of a Marxist time-scale, China might own its own share of modern time—a huge share for a huge country—instead of deferring to the West. Class­ analysis identified the stages of progress, class-struggle provided the motor: Marxism, especially Leninist anti-

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

imperialism, would implement Chinese nationalism. Marxist and national fervor seemed to reinforce each other. Ultimately, what made China seem so ominous to the West and the Soviet Union was Mao’s last turn of the screw: Chinese nationalism was brought to the fore to implement Marxism (as proletarianization, in its turn, was brought to the fore to implement industrialization). If China could be free of “antagonistic contradictions” internally, China would finally become what Mao’s mentor, Li Ta-chao, had called it in 1920—a proletarian nation. The proletarian nation, with the other “victims of imperialism” in tow? As Stuart Schram has remarked, if the Chinese people is a revolutionary class, then na­ tionalists and revolutionaries are one and the same.4 The Chinese, by contriving a classless society in their nation, would constitute a class, or the vanguard of a class, in the society of the world. This fancy has nothing to do with any Confucian eternal return. It derives, however eccentrically, from a world-view that com­ pensates for Confucianism lost. Just like the modern West, old China would be laid away in history. And so would Soviet Russia, while the new proletariat, new China, assumed for itself the grace of the quondam savior. Caveat redemptor. The Chinese Communists claim to stand for both min-tsu and ]en-min. The Soviet “revisionists” and the United States “imperialists” call to the Chinese bour­ geois remnants, who still blemish the jen-nnn People’s China. Chinese bourgeois, if they seem determinedly unaffected by “the thought of Mao Tse-tung,” can be denounced as de-nationalized. The internationalist

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(i)

term, jen-min (for there are “the peoples of the world,” on China’s side), becomes the vindicator of nationalism.

An earlier generation of radicals, the leaders of the “Chinese Renaissance” (around New Youth, founded 1915, certain other periodicals, and the May Fourth Movement of 1919) were avowedly nationalistic, by and large. This meant that they were, both literally and figuratively, anti-provincial, with a cosmopolitan cul­ tural drive that distinguished their case, as nationalist, from a Boxer anti-foreignism. They took Europe as a model for China (reversing the eighteenth-century tack of western cosmopolitans): “Chinese Renaissance” was plotted as a counterpart to the Renaissance in Eu­ rope. Science, vernacular literature, and national iden­ tity were supposed to be the common issue of western and Chinese histories, periodized in parallel lines, an­ cient . . . medieval. . . renaissance modernity. But the parallel, while it had to be sought, was convincing—just because it had to be sought. For the substitution of national loyalty for cultural loyalty was implicit in the young Chinese nationalism; the new cultural values did not spring from native ground. Chinese “Renaissance” men were taking a Eu­ ropean line, not really coasting parallel down history. Uncomfortable in space (Chinese space, impinged upon by western), they were driven to seek comfort in time, the “modem” time that ticks away for everyone. But cultural evolution, the European process, was not the same as cultural transformation. There was a difference between Renaissance and “Chinese Renaissance, ” be­ tween articulating nations out of Christendom and

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

transmuting “Confuciandom” into a nation. If the anal­ ogy were valid, this would invalidate the analogy: the same process that created nations in Europe would have fragmented China into provinces. The nationalist pre­ text for cosmopolitan sympathies made the Chinese cos­ mopolitans (in the new cosmos, not the old t’ien hsia) still see China as a whole. It was true of China, but not of Europe, that unity—all-inclusive nationhood—was required as compensation (and as a prescription for cure) for a cultural debacle. For China to be both cul­ turally cut down and politically cut up was too crush­ ing to contemplate. And the second of these conditions promised to perpetuate the first. A cosmopolitan culture, then, for national enhance­ ment and defense: these went together, in some few minds. Why have they been so few? The “Great Pro­ letarian Cultural Revolution” suggests why, and sug­ gests where Chinese nationalism is going.

In the 1920s and 1930s, especially in Shanghai, there was a cosmopolitan Chinese fringe. It had the tinge of revolution in its obvious “anti-feudalism.” Yet it seemed as though it might be “imperialist-puppet,” or at least semi-colonial if not semi-feudal. Detached from “people” as min-tsu, it had no saving character of “people” as jen-wnn. It was incorrigibly bourgeois, and while for classical Marxism the bourgeoisie was na­ tionalist, for Chinese Communism, ultimately, the bour­ geoisie was internationalist in a reactionary way. How could Shanghai or Peking types be “national,” much less “popular,” when they translated Pirandello or Schnitzler, just to have the fresh air of “advanced art” in China? Here is Pirandello in Shanghai, 1936:

“bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (i)

published with the translator’s wistful hope and plea that “official or private cultural organizations will give us a chance to have direct contact with his art.”5 And the translator of the sophisticated Schnitzler was at pains to be sophisticated, pointing out that German and Austrian drama, though written in the same language, are quite different in spirit. Ordinary men confuse them, but one represents the Berlin spirit, the other the Viennese. Our translator, clearly no ordinary man (and no purveyor of jen-wnn works to jen-wriri), has only these modest and not outstandingly socially conscious purposes: to introduce a representative Austrian writer by a representative work, and to introduce the spirit and art of Schnitzler.6 No red flag was likely to rise from this well manicured hand. These were not serious purposes by any Communist standard. And serious Communists were hardly lilcely to laugh along with Mirbeau, whose Chinese translator wrote, in France, in 1928: “Mirbeau’s short playlets make us laugh, but this laughter is not satisfied laughter, but bitter laughter.”7 “Us” .. ., I’homme (as a cosmopoli­ tan might say), not Chinese or Frenchman but man, the Enlightenment’s vessel of universal human nature. Neither class nor nation could mark such a blank uni­ versalism-process of history could not be assumed to impair it—and for Communists on duty this was bour­ geois cosmopolitanism, reaching everywhere for expe­ rience because everything applied. Everything, transhistorically, was shareable or already implicitly shared. Bourgeois cosmopolitanism had another face, post­ Enlightenment as well as post-Confucian, and equally unacceptable to Communists. Instead of piercing through to a meta-culture of universal humanity, this

kind was an aggregation of varieties of cultural expe­ rience. It was not a quasi-Platonic anti-history, cutting past the veil to the “One”; it suggested, rather, an end to histories as they cumulate in one. Thus, a translator of Congreve, declaring in Shanghai, in 1937, that drama was the least advanced of the genres of Chinese litera­ ture, held that English drama, far surpassing Chinese in substance and weight, had a very important place in world literature. Yet, translations into Chinese were very few. So Wang Hsiang-hsien would try The Way of the World, though much in the play was hard to convey in a foreign language. For a man coming for the first time to western literature, it was like coming for the first time to western cooking: a special taste.8 The food analogy was a relevant one, and other trans­ lators thought of it. Individuals would always have special tastes, of course, but in modem times (when one could speak of English literature “in world litera­ ture”), nations, for all their historically special cuisines, were not sealed hermetically against originally foreign tastes. Chinese food, after all, was being taken out all over the West, not just to reduce fare to a mass chop suey in the international style, but to add a style to the many styles in the cosmopolitan domain: bourgeois, not proletarian internationalism. “Man needs [“man,” again, that undifferentiated concept] biological and artistic sustenance,” wrote the Chinese translator of PagnoPs Fanny in 1935. “Artists must seek to make nourishing food, not poison. ... At present I take French food just out of the pot, transfer it to China, and ask everyone to eat western food.” And he praised Pagnol for his thought, “which does not lean to right or left. He only draws a pure likeness of society.”9

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(i)

The famous anarchist writer, Pa Chin, leaned to one side more visibly than that. But he stood more for the homogeneous Chips 'with Everything than the collected smorgasbord. Amicis’ La floro de la pasinto (1906), especially chosen for the ministrations of the Interna­ tional Esperanto Association, had been translated into that composite language. Pa Chin’s 1933 translation in­ to Chinese was dedicated “to my comrades in Esperan­ to.”10 This de-nationalized cosmopolitan sentiment would have little appeal to conventional comrades in the Chinese Communist Party. The internationalism of the international language was not in itself anathema. But the synthetic quality of Esperanto could hardly make it relatable to a rooted Chinese people, in either of the “popular” connotations. At the other pole from boundless Esperanto was re­ stricted local dialect. Here, too, Communists had some grounds for sympathy: like internationalism in its own way, subnational local expression (since it underlay and undercut the “high culture” of old elites) had a claim on Communist patronage. But a translation of the Irish (English) vernacular of John Millington Synge, the harp of the west, was not a likely candidate. His Chinese translator, in 1926, used a sort of p'u-t’ung-hua (colloquial), but he acknowledged that the effect of local speech was lost. He hoped (how quixotically) that when his Shanghai effort had a chance on the boards in local places, local people would put it into their own local dialect.11 This was quite in the Synge spirit: Synge himself had made Villon speak with the voice of an Irish countrywoman. But the Synge spirit, con­ sistently, was nostalgically anti-industrial, unmistakably alien to the Chinese Communist spirit. And the trans-

lator of Lady Gregory, Synge’s friend, did little to im­ prove the luck of the Irish in radical Chinese circles. Huang Yiieh-nien had no intention, he said, of using the Irish National Theatre to sponsor nationalism for China, nor did he have any pipe dreams about peasant literature. He merely thought that he ought to intro­ duce Lady Gregory during this high tide of the drama movement in China.12 Admirable cosmopolitan sim­ plicity! But art for the sake of nothing but art—it was getting harder all the time to be spreading this news in China. The Communists might find it acceptable for Chou Tso-jen, the great literary scholar, to praise Corneille for making French drama something more than a ve­ hicle of mass enjoyment. The “mass line” by no means committed the Communists to pander to mass enjoy­ ment unmediated by seriousness of purpose. But Chou ran on, right into trouble. He was too pure and disen­ gaged. What did French drama begin to become, in­ stead of the said vehicle? “Pure art,” said Chou,13 and “pure art” gets no red ribbon. The pure art of Corneille was a vehicle for another man of letters. “Le Cid,” said its translator, “is stan­ dard reading for French people and students. Perhaps our translation can become standard reading for Chi­ nese people and students?” Good luck. “At least this is a hope of mine. ... In China, just about everyone knows Shakespeare.” Well . . . The jen-min were clearly out of his sight and mind. “Just about no one knows Corneille. To the French . . . Shakespeare is ‘a barbarian of genius’; the product of an English literary education calls Corneille ‘a cultivated mediocrity.’ ”14 Our translator here is qualifying as a cultivated bour-

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(i)

geois. What could be more deliciously cosmopolitan, there in China, than to tell this western in-joke, to show this discrimination (Corneille fulfilling, Shake­ speare flouting, the Aristotelian unities) ? And what was more cosmopolitan, anyway, than to be a French, not an English translator? The relative eclipse of France in the twentieth century, except in culture, made French the language of the purest cultural sophisticate; English speakers were more likely, and more than likely, to be just gross, utilitarian lackeys, serving imperialist busi­ ness and politics, not Shakespeare. But all the same, “bourgeois,” that fine French word and cosmopolitan type, was as baneful an epithet, in certain circles, as “barbarian,” “mediocrity,” or “running-dog. ” How cosmopolitan could you get? Distinguishing between Shakespeare and Corneille was first class. But still, giants are obvious. When a translator beats the bushes for little men, and takes pains to distinguish be­ tween Henri Bataille and Maeterlinck,15 he is making a finer show of subtlety and cosmopolitan bravura. To feel that one can make an impression in the 1930s with such fiddling is to reveal the inroads of new cos­ mopolitanism in China, far beyond the “Renaissance” days, when “western drama” tout court was at least mildly sensational. The earlier interest in western arts made a crack in the old Confucian cosmopolitanism. The later quest for nice distinctions was cosmopolitan in its own right. And its own wrong—since the Chinese intelligentsia that addressed itself to the quest, and to which it was addressed, was so tiny. It was revolution­ ary for Chinese intellectuals to be so detached from China. But intellectuals so detached could hardly be hailed by Chinese revolutionaries.

From sophistication to ripe corn, or chestnut. La dame aux Cornelias., perhaps the best known piece of French literature in China, was prepared for the Chinese stage in the 1930s. A cosmopolitan partisan of Bernard Shaw in the 1920s had not been so sure about Dumas fils—and Scribe—old-hat French favorites when the Eu­ ropean drama scene was stirring with the new.16 But the Camille translator, noting that Lin Shu’s version of the novel had set a new style for the novel in China, declared that the original, in France, had shown a new way to the French theater. And in the Chinese theater, too (he went on), it looked like having an affinity with the “new literature and art movement.”17 If it did, this suggested how problematic the new literature and art of the Republican era was going to appear to the Com­ munists, for whom the melting story of the demimondaine in the haut monde of the Second Empire could hardly seem edifying. In their China, with its newer literature and art, Mao (and his wife, Chiang Ch’ing, the drama czarina of the Cultural Revolution) could feel little affinity with Dumas and Camille. Another claimed “affinity” was simply made for a frosty reception. The translator of Gogol’s Marriage described the predilection for French among the priv­ ileged class of Czarist Russian society. He transposed this to China, where English served as the upper-class language—de rigueur, he said, for the young ladies in particular.18 Let us contemplate this grace of elegant females, reflect for an awed moment on the likely Communist reaction, and soldier on, for our last turn (just now) on the cosmopolitan stage, to Strindberg. With this dour misogynist, a Chinese translator was out of the shadow of jeunes filles en fieur, but not out

“BOURGEOIS” COSMOPOLITANISM (i)

of the woods as far as the Communists were concerned. Speaking of The Father, “No one,” he said, “describ­ ing the nineteenth-century European thought-tide can avoid taking up this famous play.”19 This was “pure” cosmopolitanism again—“bourgeois,” for that reason— with its almost disinterested reference to nineteenth­ century Europe, its thought-tide for thought-tide’s sake. There was no hint of Sweden, or Europe, as a land with lessons for China, and plays to convey the lessons. As we have seen for the 1950s, and will see for the years between the Wars as well, most Chinese cos­ mopolitanism was in aid of radical Chinese aims, and one of these was feminism. Strindberg’s anti-feminism (which the translator particularly notes) had no stand­ ing at all with Communists or “New Youth” revolu­ tionaries. A Doll’s House was more their speed from the Scandinavian lists— though the individualist Ibsen, for interesting reasons, was slowed in his conquest of the radical intellectuals, and stopped dead in the Cul­ tural Revolution.

“Bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (ii) AND COMMUNIST PROVINCIALISM

Confucian literati were expected to bear social responsibility. In republican China, many scholars kept this sense of commitment to society; for all the over-production of careerists and opportunists, an educated elite was still supposed to be a public resource. But the education which marked them as elite, and which they meant to bring to bear on China’s problems, was a new education, western or western-inspired, and it threatened them with the char­ acter of “rootless cosmopolitans.” In a nationalistic age, while the nation needed their contributions, they were open to the charge of being de-nationalized. As Chinese intellectuals, still sufficiently “literati” to aspire to pub­ lic service, they saw (they helped to ensure) that the old Confucian cosmopolitanism of self-sufficient literati was now quite provincial, quite parochial. Seeing this, the new cosmopolitans seemed to be stepping out of their skins, objectifying their subjective selves: “aliena­ tion.” And the mass of people, whether or not they saw these intellectuals as alienated, certainly saw them as alien. In the old society there was just the natural distance (divisive, but domestic) between literati and n imperial china,

I

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(ii)

peasants. Now, on the two sides of the great divide, there were the western (ized) and Chinese. The Mencian assumption of organic tie between those who worked with their minds and those who worked with their hands had become anachronistic. One of those who worked with his mind was Hu Shih, champion of vernacular literature, subverter of classical authority, spokesman for science and scientific method. In all these things, Hu, like the drama trans­ lators (he himself tried his hand at Ibsen), had some points of contact with Communists. But divergence was the rule, two kinds of divergence. First there was the case of Hu and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the first leader of the Chinese Communist Party. Both Hu and Ch’en were anti- anti-western, contemptuous of the canting preach­ ers of “Chinese spirit” against “western matter.” But Ch’en accepted the description, if not the prescription; China had indeed been a citadel of spirit (illusion), but the walls ought to be razed, not defended. Hu, how­ ever, defended science and the validity of western civilization against the China/spirit fraternity, not by stigmatizing spirit, but by associating the “materialistic” West, precisely because of its science, with a higher “spirit” than an anti-scientific China could claim. And also, Hu maintained, China was not so doggedly antiscientific as all that, for its past could show some im­ pressive essays in scientific method. In this connection one should note Hu’s anti-Indian bias, with its im­ plication of a Chinese essence that was not so bad, by the standards of modern science, if only it could be extricated from the metaphysical Buddhist Indianization. Thus Hu, not accepting—as Ch’en did, in his way —the spirit-matter distinction between China and the

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

West, felt a cooler passion against traditional forces. It was fitting for a gradualist reformer in the 1920s, on a parting of the ways from Ch’en Tu-hsiu. But it was fitting, too, for Mao of the 1950s, also long since parted from Ch’en Tu-hsiu. Mao, almost like Hu, was talking of taking the good elements of the Chinese heritage and combining them with the good elements of the outside world. Yet, Mao did not like Hu and was not like Hu, on other counts. As Jerome Grieder puts it, in his masterly full-scale study of Hu Shih, Hu’s scientism “made of him, in an angrily nationalistic era, a more comfortable citizen of his cen­ tury than of his country. . . . He was less disposed to anger at the wretchedness of China’s swarming millions than to be grateful that he lived in an age that com­ manded the means of alleviating their misery, at least in theory.”1 We have here the recipe for Hu, the hap­ py modernist warrior against cultural reactionaries, and also at odds with anti-imperialist revolutionaries. This was the vital center he delighted to occupy. Intellec­ tually, it was just the place for a gradualist reformer. End of possibility of reconciliation with Mao. Hu— gradualist, reformist, Ibsenite individualist—was in the wrong set. His early prestige in China, as carrier of light from the West, had flowed back with him to America, where not just sinological admiration but gen­ eral sentimentality cast him as bearer of light from the East. Fantastic misconceptions and hyperbole about Hu’s “wisdom” (a dangerous word in East-West mat­ ters) got abroad, practically confusing him with the spiritual-mystery mongers whom he most despised, and who were most outworn. His optimistic, class­ unconscious westemism was wearing out, too. The

“bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (ii)

center was not so vital. Hu, cosmopolite from East and West, was beginning to seem anachronistic, as much as Mencius, and on a global scale. In an age of contention for proletarian hegemony, to be bourgeois was anachronistic, too, by the stan­ dards of the Marxist contenders. Progressive in its “own” age in history, when it was liquidating feudal­ ism, the bourgeoisie is reactionary in a later age. In China in the 1920s, where several lands of liquidation were going on at once, Mao called the bourgeoisie ambivalent, like a coin wavering on edge, one side stamped with the face of revolution, the other with the face of compromise. The bourgeoisie is of the bourg, the city. When Mao turned to the country for the forces he could trust, his face was turned decisively against the bourgeoisie. The Chinese bourgeoisie of Shanghai, at least the tight little public for plays in translation, seemed alien. It was not the cosmopolitanism just in itself that made it so, but the fact that the cosmos was somebody else’s— the usual case near foreign enclaves in underdeveloped societies. The very cosmopolitanism of some Shanghai Chinese, looking out from China, seemed a provincial variant, at the end of the line, to men who were looking in. The coin wavers, one side with the face of sophisti­ cation, the other with the face of questing, diffident innocence. The translator of The God of Vengeance by Sholom Asch had a cosmopolitan will, but it fal­ tered before the task of introduction. He yielded there to Abraham Cahan, a famous figure in Yiddish letters, and made no effort on his own to assimilate the play to Chinese needs or experience.2 Such limbo-cosmopoli­ tans, provincially unconfident with their original texts, 4r

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

internationally unloosened from their original land, between two worlds, seemed above the battle between them. But to the Chinese Communists, “above the battle” meant in the battle, on the wrong side. Mao, for one, was unequivocal: “pure” art, ideology-free (and this included foreign art as an ostensibly free, high-cultural ornament), was bourgeois ideology. Now, most of the early non-Communist cosmopoli­ tan essays were not supposed to be merely ornamental. If a Schnitzler or Pirandello was hard to see as “na­ tional” or “popular,” most of the foreign playwrights could be rendered (though maybe tortured) into useable teachers and preachers. A Chinese Galsworthy translator, introducing The Skin Game to China and explaining what it taught him, wrote: “I deeply be­ lieve that art is the imitation of life, not the imitation of old art.” Chinese society might learn from the play to challenge restraints, the arbitrary artificialities of tradition.3 Addio giovinezza, a pre-war Italian play about student youth, reminded its Chinese translator in 1936 of bright college years and student strikes at Pei-ta, the university power-house of Chinese radical move­ ments.4 The deepening national crisis of 1937, and the national defense literary movement, including the new drama movement (“useful plays as weapons”), and the extension of the latter to a new class, the urban masses— these impelled the publication of a Chinese version of Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell.5 Wilde was a champion of art for art’s sake, but he was offered to China for his social significance. Salome, said the translator in 1926, was Wilde’s greatest play, and it flouted the moral out­ look (tao-te, a traditional term for the Confucian moral

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(ii)

outlook) of the English shen-shih (Chinese term for the Chinese “gentry” class). Banned in England, it had a succes de scandale in Paris. All great works transcend their time. Maybe Salome can rock the orthodox types in China and their conventional morality.0 In other words, “epater les bourgeois.” Fine, stirring. But, for Chinese social revolutionaries, the Bund in Shanghai was not the seacoast of Bohemia. It was pro­ vocative in another way. To Communists, the coterie art implied in “epater les botirgeois” was incorrigibly bourgeois. For the bourgeois were not the philistines but the enemies of the people, the anti-nationals and the anti-proletarians. The David’s-band of artists, though anti-philistine as the day is long, could not win their “people’s” passage that way. What, in the end, did even the western art of social and political protest have to say? Imagine Shaw’s The Devil's Disciple as the tutor for China in “spirit of re­ sistance and self-sacrifice . . . the essence of success in the American Revolution”—a spirit sadly hard to find in li-i chih pang China, the land of classical rites and obligations.7 Think of Byron as China’s patriot bard, with at least five translations of “The Isles of Greece” (“... But all, except their sun, is set... I dreamed that Greece might yet be free ...”) .8 What could a Marxist revolutionary mentality make of the bourgeois “revo­ lutionary” mentality that offered Barrie to China, with his pink-tea The Admirable Crichton as the clarion call to egalitarian, mm-ch'uan (people’s rights) revolt?8 How could a Chinese radical, looking for a La Pasionaria, take Paula Tanqueray for her “fearless social criticism of a conservative society,” and Pinero as

“fitting perfectly” (but only metaphorically: the play was translated literally and still set in England) “into Chinese dress?”10 Ibsen was stronger medicine, as well as better art. There was a translation of A DolPs House (by Hu Shih and Lo Chia-lun) back in “Renaissance” days, and it kept its relevance to the plight of Chinese women.11 Kuo Mo-jo preached from A DolPs House that the problem of women’s freedom was part of the over-all problem of attaining social freedom. Lu Hsiin, less exalted, made the characteristically mordant comment that a Chinese Nora, leaving the doll’s house, would in the end only come home.12 But whether the cure would work in China or not, the diagnosis was widely accepted. The translator of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (“China has still not left feudalism completely be­ hind, so that woman’s lot is ten times more bitter than man’s”) let a woman friend have a look at his manu­ script. “She wrote in amazement that she discovered herself in The Lady from the Sea.”™ This was all very edifying, and even close to revolu­ tionary. But not close enough. And now we can see what was doomed, too, about the early Communist stage of cosmopolitanism. For all its more formal and plausible ideological trappings, its resemblances to the “bourgeois” type were damning. Both brands were blemishes that the 1960s sought to obliterate, in the Cultural Revolution. To the Cultural Revolutionaries, the earlier stage of Communist revolution, quite as much as the earliest stage, the bourgeois stage, of rev­ olution was not revolutionary enough. National re­ construction, the great but largely technical task of

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(ii)

the first Communist decade, was not fully Communist enough. Let us recapitulate the record of translation from the western stage in the ’fifties stage of the Chinese Com­ munist movement. There were many translations that spelled cosmopolitanism. “Realism” legitimized many a foreign dramatist in the 1950s, from Shakespeare down, and realism meant “the style of the age and place.” It was progressive, then, and internationalist to praise the art that celebrated nations and that limned the ages of progress (as from feudal to national con­ sciousness) in everybody’s history. History (and not just Chinese history), class-powered, was the realm of realism; “idealism,” anathematized, was the bourgeois concept of a timeless and classless universal “human nature.” What happened in the 1960s? “Universal human na­ ture” continued to be assailed. But the old realism (“critical realism”) became “bourgeois,” as it was taken to imply description of individual subjective states. This was the theme (alleged the Cultural Revolution­ aries) of cosmopolitan coterie art, egoistically uncon­ cerned with the collective. That lady who saw herself in The Lady from the Sea, she could only be bourgeois, she and the others who seemed to deny class character— and national character, too—in their search for “all­ mankind” (individual) universal themes. Empathy was out; not the agonies of transitional man, caught be­ tween the old society and the new, but the glories of the hero, unambiguous and unambivalent and larger than life, made the subject matter for art. For class struggle had to continue, and “literature

and art of the whole people” (a slogan attributed to Chou Yang, sometime cultural commissar, discredited now) was “revisionist.” The slogan was too irenic, like the Russian political pieties about “peaceful co­ existence.” The latter derived from fear of a nuclear end to man. But the Chinese avowed their conviction that man—revolutionary man—would end nuclear fear. Man, that is, and a fortiori the objective laws of human development (laws of struggle, not premature peace, one-into-two, not two-into-one), are superior to ma­ chines. Even the machine of machines, nuclear weap­ onry, cannot freeze history in the middle of life’s way. One of the struggles which continues, and which is hampered by “coexistence,” is the “revolution of peo­ ples (‘the people’) throughout the world.” Within the Chinese people, too, struggle continues. The bourgeoisie was still abroad at home. As the “Will” of Sun Yat-sen had put it, “the revolution is not yet finished.” True when Sun died in 1925, it was still held to be true forty years after. And so “economism” was fiercely denounced, because it implied the legitimacy of a trade-unionist type of search for individual satis­ factions, as though society had really accomplished its last structural change. But a goal not yet reached de­ manded collective self-restraint and ego-transcending discipline, precluding rest and recreation and the sense of gratification. The latter, if indulged, would justify the unjustifiable: coexistence, the end of struggle, and an art of (bourgeois) universal “human nature.” Thus, while they repeated the standard fulmination against idealism as distinct from materialism, the Cul­ tural Revolutionaries adopted idealism as distinct from

“bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (ri)

(bourgeois) realism. They wanted that art of the cele­ bration of heroes, not the description and analysis of “middle people.” They feared acceptance of the formula, “to explain is to excuse.” It would undermine their hard impeachments, which “struggle” implies: if one is passionless, there is no struggle. And if one de­ mands heroic art, the idealism of “what would be best,” this implies a continuing lack of fulfillment, except in heroic exemplars. The fact that they are exemplars means that lesser men need the examples, “the rev­ olution is not yet finished.” So life in literature and art should be on a higher plane than the everyday. Enough of the art of warts and all. Lei Feng, for example, the legendary People’s Liberation Army soldier—dead 1962, apotheosized 1963, marching still through song and story in the Cultural Revolution—had no warts at all. Cosmopolitanism, that is, was out. Sophistication, nuance were out. The Cultural Revolution had a pro­ vincial cultural spirit, and the sophisticates, detached from the jen-min by their culture, were detached from the min-tsu by their world-wide affinities with fellow cosmopolitans. Specialties, expertise, know no national boundaries. The red-and-expert would still be with “the people,” in the jen-min sense, and could thus still be certified in the ranks of the Chinese people. But the only-expert, experts of the wrong hue, bourgeois, not popular, had left the Chinese people; and the latter should struggle against them, in class struggle, in the name of the rmn-tsu nation. The Chinese nation had a new relation to China (to what China had been), and to what the world might be.

There were intimations of it in the early 1960s, and the Cultural Revolution was formally proclaimed in 1966. Why should a Communist movement that once had cosmopolitan associations have become so espe­ cially nativist then—not just politically prickly (no problem there), but culturally so anti-western? And why, just then, should a nationalist movement have been so harsh with the national culture, the heritage of the past? The last shall be first. Partly it was a matter of balance. The very intensity of the anti-westemism compelled a corresponding antagonism to traditional Chinese forms. Otherwise, it would have been merely xenophobia, a throwback to the anti-foreign Boxer movement of 1900. And while the Communists granted an honorable place to the Boxers, it was a place in his­ tory only. The Boxers were harbingers, not proto­ types, of the Communist fighters for Chinese indepen­ dence. For Boxer xenophobia, while commendably anti-imperialist in political intent, was reactionary in its defense of “feudal” culture. Chinese Communists were nationalist enough to seek deliverance from tra­ ditional imperatives, and Marxist enough to see history as a linear process: it is evolution through revolution, the past does not revolve. Yet, the problem of the Cultural Revolution’s special iconoclasm remains. Early twentieth-century radicals were generally hostile to the old values, and Chinese anti-Communists have always seen their enemies as de­ stroyers of Chinese culture. But once in power, the Party seemed to confound them. Iconoclasm was not a revolutionary prerequisite. Restoration was not a counter-revolutionary prerogative. The Communists

“bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (ii)

themselves were “restoring” (in a way), not scuttling the past. Their way was the museum way. The res­ toration—of imperial palaces or classical reputations— was not a restoration of authority but of a history which the Chinese people (under new authority) could claim as its national heritage. Their historicism enabled the Communists to keep the Chinese past as theirs, but to keep the past passe: the Communists owned the present and would preside over the future. In the Cultural Revolution, however, the museums, literal and metaphorical, were ransacked. Old books, once assumed to have been sterilized by history of the power to harm, slipped into obscurity, if not into the flames. All kinds of relics were treated as ominously significant for the here and now; they seemed no longer safely dead, or simply historically significant. Even as they threw off the hand of the past, the Com­ munists had once retained the priceless advantage of conserving traditional culture, to better effect than the modem conservatives did. Then why should Peking have thrown the traditional game? It was because the modem game was a tricky one to play, especially then. Especially in China, where the Confucian amateur-ideal was uncongenial to sci­ ence, the advancement of science had revolutionary implications. It led to specialization, the cultivation of experts. But these were suspect in Communist China— which, nevertheless, unlike Confucian China, was ab­ solutely committed to the celebration of science. It was not just that “scientific socialists” (hardly hu­ manist literati) could scarcely condescend to science. Marxists traded on the prestige of science, and they knew quite well that in everyone’s modem world

(quite unlike the Confucian world), in “bourgeois” countries and anti-bourgeois alike, science had pres­ tige. When the Chinese Communists put scientists down they acknowledged that prestige, they did not impugn it; its very universality, its apparent transcendence of ideology, was a threat to the masters of ideology. Sci­ ence had to be mastered by the ideologues, or their own occupation would be gone. In a world where science could not be gainsaid, mere experts, practioners of sci­ ence, had to be bent to Marxist authority, or Mao, the latest Marxist in line, would have lacked authority him­ self. Ideology, the correct ideology, must dominate the ostensibly non-ideological expert. Politics must take command. For, as Mao proclaimed in his Problems of Art and Literature, the very profession of ideological unconcern (“art for art’s sake”) was a classic product of bourgeois ideology. In spite of all the common “generalism” of the Com­ munist cadre and the Confucian official, the latter never believed what the former held as an article of basic Marxist anti-capitalist faith: that one of the reasons for demeaning expertise was the need to erase the distinc­ tion—a crucial Confucian distinction—between mental and physical labor. Just as the Confucianist, with his amateur ideal, had displaced the old aristocracy, and then taken on an aristocratic aura (with license to con­ descend to the technical professional), so the profes­ sional in the modem world, having broken the amateur ideal, had the status pride of the aristocrat today. There­ fore, the Party had to trim him down (hsien hung, hou chuan, “first red, then expert”), to vindicate its own version of autocratic rule. It is this that created the impression of a willful cul-

“bourgeois”

cosmopolitanism

(ii)

tural provincialism. The experts were China’s “rootless cosmopolitans”—rootless, since the peasants were the roots (whence the Red Guards, as a counterweight to the urban, university types); and cosmopolitan, since, with universal science, the experts might see their as­ sociations with professional colleagues on the other side of national and ideological walls. And so the climate became wintry for the cosmopolitan scientists. But though many were cold, few were frozen. The armies and industries needed them, after all. The ones who were really blasted by the anti-cosmopolitanism were the expendables in the arts, dispensers of English litera­ ture, French music, Hong Kong haircuts. Any mute inglorious Schnitzlers or Pirandellos were well advised to stay that way. Yes, the armies and industries needed the fruits of science, maybe to throw at the Americans. But the armies and industries might be hostages to science and technology, as well as beneficiaries. A war with Ameri­ ca would certainly ravage the scientific complex, and exclusively “expert” advisers would have to counsel peace. Did the deep freeze of the experts, the coldness toward western culture (which was the source of the expertise), mean that the risk of war was accept­ able, that merely prudential, technical-expert argu­ ments might be overruled? Then the old spirit of the Long March and the Yenan days, when the stronger battalions were on the other side, would naturally be invoked, and they were. Not senile nostalgia, nor a general taste for spiritual athletics, but a conviction of present crisis may have been driving the train of events. If the weight of weapons was against China, and yet the weapons might come into play, man’s spirit (very

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

much Mao’s province, and an anti-expert shibboleth), not weapons, would have to be decisive. The People’s Liberation Army (largely a peasant army) was given a leading role in the Cultural Revolu­ tion. The army was the natural place to find the sharp­ est contradiction between “red” and “expert.” Army commanders and planners might plausibly be the most eloquent spokesmen for expertise, professionalism. The imperialists, after all, were threatening China with just such tools and training. But professionalism—interna­ tionally valid technical expertise, ostensibly neutral, ideologically (and therefore “objectively” reactionary) —was precisely the hallmark of the western-trained bourgeois intelligentsia, those rootless cosmopolitans. “Spirit,” then, would have to be given priority. And that is why the People’s Liberation Army has had such overriding significance for the Chinese Revolution and revolutionary China—and why the Soviet Union, with its atomic fears (and its alleged attendant zeal for an American rapprochement) became anathema. The Cul­ tural Revolutionaries (their ideas deriving in part from Engels’ “The History of the Rifle”) celebrated man’s triumph over his machines, and over the bourgeoisie that lives by machines. Unlike their “New Left” aco­ lytes in the West, they were not seeking, humanistical­ ly, to banish “alienation.” They were deprecating the ultimate importance (but not the proximate impor­ tance: one despises the enemy strategically, not tactical­ ly) of machines of war. The peasants of the People’s Liberation Army, of course, needed the machines. But the peasants would transcend them, through “spirit.” For spirit, read ideology, the fantastic drenching in ideology (to purtfy man’s spirit) that China has ab-

“bourgeois” cosmopolitanism (ii)

sorbed in the Cultural Revolution. It came from a sense of danger, the danger of a war that could not be left to experts, because they would not choose it and could not win it with their expertise alone. And it was this danger that gave the Cultural Revolution its dual targets, the two cultures, western and traditional. The concurrent attack on the latter confirms danger as the source of attack on the former, on the cosmopolitan spirit which the experts represented. For the tendency to “museumify” the past, instead of rooting it out, be­ longed to the age of self-assurance. It had not been there in the early days of struggle, when the Com­ munists had the passion of engagement; and it vanished now in an embattled age of possible destruction. The god of history was a hidden god again. Relativistic his­ toricism, coolly accounting for one-time foes by giving them their niches, went out of fashion. The dead were no longer monuments, but “ghosts and monsters” to be slain again. When they had confidence in historical progress (confidence in their own success in moving from strength to strength), Communists could patronize their Chinese cultural past. But if the pastness of the past was not so certain, because the future was so un­ certain, if regress seemed possible, then the Commun­ ists would cease to be patrons, encouraging curators to restore; they would be out of the gallery, at action stations, finished with contemplation for a while. And regress was the spectre, regress seen as furthered by Russian action (like the withdrawal of technicians) and dramatized by Russian example (“revisionism”). If the essential Marxist notion of progress was not to be abandoned in a general failure of nerve, revolutionary

REVOLUTION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

voluntarism, not evolutionary determinism, had to be brought to the fore again, and the past be, not relativ­ ized, but seen as all too possibly present. Absolutes took command. Impending crisis put the expert under the gun, with the foreign cultural borrowings that made him. And crisis, too, stripped the national cultural heritage of its protective historical color. The Chinese were not listening much to ancestral voices. But some­ one in China was prophesying war.

Chinese national war or “wars of liberation: ” realism is not so dead that Mao’s China cannot see the present possibilities. The sense of peoplehood is strong—both senses. The national “people” rebuffs the West, but not as Confucian China did. For “the people” (in the other sense), claiming the nation, against “bourgeois,” as its exclusive class preserve, aspires to lead the peoples of the world, or at least to inform them with the “thought of Mao Tse-tung.” And this thought rebuffs the old thought, from the old culture, the centerpiece of the “center of the world.” “Reform the Peking Opera” was one of the cries in the Cultural Revolution. Not old Chinese drama but new Chinese drama was the order of the day. But Chinese drama, not western drama, was an implicit part of the order. The revolution had come home with a vengeance, vengeance against the past and the West, the too confining and the too expansive, the Confucian, the cosmopolitan. And yet, is China really on the beach now, out of range of the cosmopolitan tide? What do they signify, those few Chinese devotees of the western stage? The Cultural Revolution snuffed them out, after their short

^BOURGEOIS** COSMOPOLITANISM (il)

and lonely life. They seemed superfluous, carrying Asch to Shanghai. But in their insignificance, their re­ striction to the periphery of the Chinese world, is their significance. The loneliness of these dramatists in China is like China’s in the world at large, a China sitting solitary, her ties back to the Chinese past attenuated, her bridges across to the alien present barred. If the trans­ lators were almost solitaries, out of touch with their past history and their immediate environment (though they wished to affect it), the Cultural Revolutionaries, their foes, were their semblables, their freres. The pro­ vincialism of the culture of the Cultural Revolution­ aries is a mark of loneliness, too, a cutting off from their past and the contemporary world around them. They try to speak to the world, as our men of the foreign theater tried to speak. Some people are listening. May­ be some peoples are listening. One way or another (the choice of ways is fearful), China will join the world again on the cosmopolitan tide. Cultural inter­ mediaries, Cultural Revolutionaries—neither will look like stranded minnows or stranded whales forever.

Notes

FOREWORD

1 This was later published, in a revised form, as “The Prov­ ince, the Nation and the World: The Problem of Chinese Iden­ tity,” in Albert Feuerwerker, Rhoads Murphey, and Mary C. Wright, editors, Approaches to Modern Chinese History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, 268-288. 2 Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modem Fate, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. Volume Three, The Problem of Historical Significance, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, 123. 3 Levenson’s papers, which will eventually be collected in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, include parts of this manuscript in draft. 4 Joseph R. Levenson, “The Genesis of ‘Confucian China and Its Modern Fate,’ ” in: L. P. Curtis, Jr., ed., The Historian’s Workshop, New York: Knopf, 1970, 279. 5 Mid., 281. 6 Ibid., 280. 7 Ibid., 285. 8 Robert Guillain, Six Hundred Million Chinese, New York: Criterion Books, 1957,265. 9 Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence. Translated by Stuart Gilbert, Garden City: Doubleday, 1953, 14. 10 This is a collection of jottings, fragments, notes (some on regular I.B.M. cards) which Mrs. Levenson permitted me to read after her husband’s death. All of this particular group were clearly the substance of his research for Confucian China and Its Modem Fate. Hereafter, any notes from the set will simply be entitled: Levenson, “Confucian Notes.”

NOTES

11 Guide to Hangchow (N.P.jN.D.), copied into Levenson:

“Confucian Notes.” 12 Leon Edel, Henry Janies: The Untried Years, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953. Noted in Levenson, “Historiog­ raphy” (see Note 13). 13 This is from a file of notes and jottings on historiography which Levenson prepared for his seminar on historical thought (first History 202, later History 283) at Berkeley. Hereafter: Levenson, “Historiography.” 14 Levenson, “Historiography.” 15 Joseph R. Levenson, “Comments on ‘Distinctive Traits of Western Civilization: the Classic Interpretation,’ by Gerhard Masur” (American Historical Association, i960), 5-6. ™lbid.

17 Levenson, Confucian China, 3:114. 18 This is from a file of notes “On Judaism” which were among Levenson’s papers. Hereafter: Levenson, “Judaism.” 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

21 Joseph R. Levenson, “The Choice of Jewish Identity.” An incomplete manuscript found among his papers, totalling twenty-two pages. 22 Ibid.

23Levenson, “The Genesis of ‘Confucian China,’” 283. 24 Levenson, “Judaism.” 25 Joseph R. Levenson, Review of: Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion, New York: Columbia Univer­ sity Press, 1959. 23 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

28 Levenson, “Judaism.” 29 Levenson, “The Choice of Jewish Identity.” 30 Levenson, “The Choice of Jewish Identity.” 31 Levenson, “Judaism.” 32 Ibid. This distaste for idolatry carried over into his analy­ sis of secular authority in Communist China. Commenting on a Chinese News Agency clipping (“Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the great teacher, the great supreme commander and the great helmsman of the Chinese people....”) dated August 31, 1966, he wrote: “One almost expects, ‘And Mao said unto Lin, “Lin,” and Lin said, “Hineni." ’ Recall expression of distaste for Judaism because of ‘oriental self-abasement’—but Mao ex­ ample shows valid object of distaste, precisely because antiidolatrous Judaism reserves such expressions for God.” 33 Ibid.

34 Ibid. **Ibid.

38 This point was derived from Jacob Taubes, in: “Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism,” Judaism, 12.2:150-164 (Spring 1963). 37 Levenson, “Judaism.” 38 Levenson, “The Choice of Jewish Identity.” 30 Ibid.

40 Levenson, “Judaism.” 41 Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolu­ tion. Translated by R. R. Palmer, Princeton: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 1947,183. 42 Levenson, “Judaism.” 43 Levenson, “The Choice of Jewish Identity.” 44 Ibid.

45 Levenson, “Judaism.” 48 Levenson, “Historiography.” 47 Ibid.

48 See p. 32. 4fi See p. 38. 50 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire. Translated by Martin Turnell, Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1950,159. 51 Levenson, “Historiography.” 52 See p. 55. 53 Levenson, “The Genesis of ‘Confucian China,’ ” 287. 54 Marcel Proust, Swann's Way. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, N.Y.: Random House, 1928,180. COMMUNIST COSMOPOLITANISM

1 Y. C. Wang, Chinese Intellectuals and the West, 1872-1949 (Chapel Hill, 1966), 373. 2 For ample lists of translated dramas, see United College Library, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, ed., Chungkuo hsien-tai hsi-chu t'u-shu mu-lu (Contents of the Chinese modem drama collection), Hong Kong, 1967, 45-84; and Chang Ching-Iu, ed., Chung-kuo hsien-tai ch'u-pan sbih-liao (Historical materials concerning modern publishing in China), I, Shanghai, 1957, 271-323 (translations of western and Asian literary works into Chinese, through March, 1929: dramas in­ dicated as such). Editor’s Note: Since Professor Levenson’s death the United College Library has issued a supplement to its 1967 lists. See: United College Library, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, ed., Chung-kuo hsien-tai hsi-chii t'u-shu mu-lu hsii-pien (Supplementary contents of the Chinese modern drama Collection), Hong Kong, 1970,47 pp. 3 Ch’i Fang, 1955, translator’s preface, 1.

NOTES

4 Albert Maltz, “Chung-i pen-hsii,” author’s preface, in Hsieh Mang, tr., 1956, 1. 5 Ch’ii ch’iu-pai, “Cheng i Hui-se ma hsii” (Preface to “The Pale Horse”), in Cheng Chen-to, tr., 1924,1-2. 6 Sun Wei-shih, 1957, translator’s preface, 7. 7Nieh Wen-ch’i, 1957, translator’s colophon, 71—72. 8 Ibid.., 71; Chiao Chii-yin, 1957, translator’s preface, 4; Sun Wei-shih, 1956, translator’s colophon, 143. 9 Ibid., 143. 10 Chiao Chu-yin, 1957,4. 11 Ying Jo-cheng, 1957, translator’s colophon, 143-144. 12 Chu Shcng-hao, 1954, preface, 1. Other Shakespeare plays published by the Communists included As You Like It (Pe­ king, 1955), translated in 1926 by Chang Ts’ai-chen, identified in the foreword as a “revolutionary martyr”; and Julius Caesar (Shanghai, 1956), translated by Ts’ao Shu(?)-feng. T’ien Han, who was later to be a prime target in the Cultural Revolution, translated Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. 13 Wu Hsing-hua, 1957, translator’s preface, 2-7,12, 22. 14 Shang Chang-sun, 1956, translator’s colophon, 96, 100-101. 15 Kuo Mo-jo, 1947, translator’s colophon, 219-220. 10 T’ien Han, 1955, translator’s preface. 17 Li Chien-yii, 1952, translator’s preface, 1—2,7,14-15, 35. 18 Chao Shao-hou, 1957, translator’s preface. 19 Shen Ch’i-yii, 1950, translator’s preface, 1-4. 20 Ch’iFang, 1954, translator’s preface, 1-2. 21 Wang Wei-k’e, 1951, translator’s colophon, 83, 85-86. “BOURGEOIS” COSMOPOLITANISM (i)

1 Harold R. Isaacs, “Old Myths and New Realities,” Diplo­ mat, XVII, No. 196 (Sept. i966),4i. 2 For the evolution from “culturalism” to nationalism, see Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-cb’ao and the Mind of Modem China, London, 1959, and Confucian China and Its Modem Fate: A Trilogy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968. 3 The “May Fourth Movement” of 1919 politically was a surge of feeling against the Japanese expropriators of Shantung province, their World War I allies, and their Chinese official creatures; and culturally, against the temper and institutions of China, which had allegedly made her such helpless, easy game. 4 Stuart R. Schram, 1963,26. 5 Hsii Hsia-ts’un, 1936, translator’s preface, 16. 6 Kuo Shao-yii, 1922, translator’s preface, 1-2. 7 Yiieh Huan, 1929, translator’s preface, 3. 8 Wang Hsiang-hsien, 1941, translator’s preface, 1-2. 9 Cheng Yen-ku, 1936, translator’s preface, 1-3.

10 Pa Chin, 1933, translator’s preface, 4. 11 Kuo Ting-t’ang, 1926, translator’s preface, 3-4. 12 Huang Yueh-nien, 1929, translator’s preface, 3. 13 Chou Tso-jen, 1918. 14 Wang Wei-k’o, 1936, translator’s preface, 7-9. 15 Wang Liao-i, 1934, translator’s preface, 1. ,6P’an Chia-hsiin, 1959, introductory essay, “Hsi-chii-chia ti Hsiao Po-na” (The dramatist, Bernard Shaw), 1. 17 Ch’en Mien, 1937, translator’s preface, 22. 18 Feng Tsou-kai, 1939, translator’s preface, 2. 19 Huang Feng-mei, 1938, translator’s preface, 2. “BOURGEOIS” COSMOPOLITANISM (il)

AND COMMUNIST PROVINCIALISM

I Jerome Grieder, 1970. For the Hu-Ch*en distinction, see also D. W. Y. Kwok, 1965. 2T’ang Hsii-chih, 1936, preface, 1-5. 3 Ku Te-lung, 1925, translator’s preface, 8. 4 Sung Ch’un-fang, 1936, translator’s preface, 3-4. 5 Hsieh Ping-wen, 1937, translator’s preface, 1. 6 Wang Hung-sheng, 1927, translator’s preface, 1. 7 Yao K’o, 1936, translator’s preface, xi. 8 Ke Lien-hsiang, 1963,83-97. 9 Hsiung Shih-i, 1930, translator’s preface, vii. 10 Ch’eng Hsi-meng, 1923, translator’s preface, 1. II Shen Pei-ch’in, 1937, translator’s preface, 1. The Hu-Lo translation appeared in June, 1918 in an “Ibsen number” of Hsin cWing-nien. Hu also contributed an article entitled “Ibsenism” to this issue. 12 Ti I-wo, n.p., n.d., translator’s colophon. 13 Shen Tzu-fu, 1948, translator’s colophon, 144.

Bibliography

Chang Ching-lu, ed., Cbung-kuo hsien-tai ch'u-pan shihliao (Historical materials concerning modern publish­ ing in China), I, Shanghai, 1957. Chao Shao-hou, tr., ICo-hsiao ti nii-ts’ai-tzu (fu Ta-ch'ulai ti i-sheng) (Moliere: “Les precieuses ridicules” and “Le medecin malgre lui”), Peking, 1957. Ch’en Mien, tr., Ch'a-hua nu (Dumas fils-. “La dame aux camelias”), Changsha, 1937. Cheng Chen-to, tr., Hui-se ma (Ropsin: “The Pale Horse”), Shanghai, 1924. Cheng Yen-ku, tr., Yii kuang nil (Pagnol: “Fanny”), Shanghai, 1936. Ch’eng Hsi-meng, tr., T'an-ko-jui ti hsu-hsien fu-jen (Pi­ nero: “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”), Shanghai, 1923. Ch’i Fang, tr., Ch’i yueh shih-ssu jib (Rolland: “Le quatorze juillet”) Peking, 1954. Ch’i Fang, tr., K’a-la-chia-lieh hsi-chii hsuan-chi (I. L. Cariagale: “Oeuvres choisies theatre”), Peking, 1955. Chiao, Chu-yin, ed., K’a-erh-to-ni hsi-chii chi (Plays of Goldoni), Peking, 1957. Chou, Tso-jen, Ou-chou wen-hsiieh shih (History of European literature), Shanghai, 1918. Chu Sheng-hao, tr., Sha-shih-pi-a hsi-chii chi (Shake­ speare’s Plays), I (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing), Peking, 1954.

Feng Tsou-kai, tr., Chieh-hun (Gogol: “Marriage”), Shanghai, 1939. Grieder, Jerome, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Hsieh Mang, tr., Ma-erh-tzu tu-mo chit hsuan-chi (Se­ lected one-act plays by Maltz), Peking, 1956. Hsieh Ping-wen, tr., Ch’en chung (Hauptmann: “Die versunkene Glocke”), Shanghai, 1937. Hsiung Shih-i, tr., K'o-ching ti K'u-lai-teng (Barrie: “The Admirable Crichton”), Shanghai, 1930. Hsii Hsia-ts’un, tr., P’i-lan-te-lou hsi-chii chi (Plays of Pirandello), Shanghai, 1936. Huang Feng-mei,tr.,Fw-cZ)’m (Strindberg: “TheFather”), Shanghai, 1938. Huang, Yiieh-nien, tr., Yiieh chih ch'u-sheng (“The Rising of the Moon”: seven short plays by Lady Gregory), Shanghai, 1929. Isaacs, Harold R., “Old Myths and New Realities,” Diplo­ mat, XVII, No. 196 (Sept. 1966), pp. 41-47. Ke Lien-hsiang, “Pai-Iun Ai Hsi-la shih Chung-i ti pichiao” (A comparison of Chinese translations of Byron’s poem, “The Isles of Greece”), Nan-ta Chung-wen hsiieh~pao,\\ (1963),pp. 83-97. Ku Te-lung, tr., Hsiang shu yu p’i (Galsworthy: “The Skin Game”), Shanghai, 1925. Kuo Mo-jo, tr., Hua-lun-ssu-Pai (Schiller: “Wallenstein”), Shanghai, 1947. Kuo Shao-yii, tr., A-na-t'o-erh (Schnitzler: “The Affairs of Anatole”), Shanghai, 1922. Kuo Ting-t’ang, tr., Yiieh-han Ch'in-ku ti hsi-chii chi (The collected plays of John Millington Synge), Shanghai, 1926. Kwok, D. W. Y., Scientism in Chinese Thought 19001950, New Haven, 1965. Li Chien-yii, tr., Pao-chien (Hugo: “L’epee”), Shanghai, 1952. Nieh Wen-ch’i, tr., Shan-hsin ti chi-hsing jen (Goldoni: “Le bourru bienfaisant”), Peking, 1957.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pa Chin, tr., Kuo-k'o chib hua (Amicus: “La floro de la pasinto”),Shanghai (?), 1933. P’an Chia-hsiin, tr., Hsiao Po-na hsi-chu hsilan-chi (Se­ lected plays of Bernard Shaw), Hong Kong, 1959. Schram, Stuart R., The Political Thought of Mao Tsetungy London, 1963. Shang Chang-sun, tr., Ai-mei-erh-ya Chia-lo-ti (Lessing: “Emilia Galotti”), Shanghai, 1956. Shen Ch’i-yii, tr., Lang-chiln (Rolland: “Les loups”), Pe­ king, 1950. Shen Pei-ch’in, tr., Na-la (Ibsen: “A Doll’s House”), Shanghai, 1937. Shen Tzu-fu, tr., Hai fu (Ibsen: “The Lady from the Sea”), Shanghai, 1948. Sun Wei-shih, tr., 1 p’u erh chu (Goldoni: “Il servitore di due padroni”), Peking, 1956. Sun Wei-shih, tr., Nil tien-chu (Goldoni: “La locandiera”), Peking, 1957. Sung Ch’un-fang, tr., Cb'ing-ch’un pu tsai (Camasio and Oxilia: “Addio giovinezza”), Shanghai, 1936. T’ang Hsii-chih, tr., Fu-ch'ou shen (Asch: “The God of Vengeance”), Shanghai, 1936. Ti I-wo, tr., K’uei-lei chia-ting (Ibsen: “A Doll’s House”) n.p., n.d. T’ien Han, tr., ICa-men (Merimee: “Carmen”), Shanghai,

*955United College Library, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, ed., Chung-kuo hsien-tai hsi-chil Pu-shu tnu-lu (Contents of the Chinese modem drama collection), Hong Kong, 1967. Wang Hsiang-hsien, tr., Ju ssu she-hui (Congreve: “The Way of the World”), Changsha, 1941. Wang Hung-sheng, tr., Sha-lo-mei (Wilde: “Salome”), Shanghai, 1927. Wang Liao-i, tr., Hun-li chin-hsiang ch'il (Bataille: “La marche nuptiale”), Shanghai, 1934. Wang Wei-k’o, tr., Hsi-te (Corneille: “Le Cid”), Shang­ hai, 1936.

Wang Wei-k’o, tr., l-ko-erh 'wang-tzu (Borodin: “Prince Igor”), Shanghai, 1951. Wang, Y. C., Chinese Intellectuals and the Westy 18721949, Chapel Hill, 1966. WuHsing-hua, tr.,Heng-lissu-shih (Shakespeare: “Henry the Fourth,” parts 1 and 2), Peking, 1957. Yao K’o, tr., Mo-kuei ti men-t’u (Shaw: “The Devil’s Disciple”), Shanghai, 1936. Ying Jo-cheng, tr., Chia-fei tien cheng-k'o (Fielding: “The Coffee House Politician”), Peking, 1957. Yueh Huan, tr., Mei-erh-po tuan chit chi (Short Plays of Mirbeau), Shanghai, 1929.