MARCO PSICOLÓGICO

more than anything else this dispute over language, and literature by extension, constitutes the first decisive cause of their parting company in later years. As Lu Hsiin himself admitted: "I dare not to see him (Chang) any longer since

advocating the use of vernacular Chinese for literature".21

Chinese is unique in at least the following senses: it is ideographic in contrast to alphabetic Western languages; there is a huge gap between the oral and the written forms of the language, and there is the traditional neglect of grammar. Like many other institutions, it was against the background of Sino-Western confrontation that the problem of the Chinese language became apparent. Under the impact of the encroachment by the West, Chang became aware that what was at stake was not only China’s sovereignty and her culture in general, but also, specifically, her language. He was perhaps the first Chinese intellectual who perceived that confrontation as a ‘battle of words’, among other things. Certainly his effort to tackle this unique problem of the language was one of the earliest attempts on this front.

As early as 1898, he was already concerned about the relative limitedness of Chinese vocabulary. "There can be no equal competition in the battle between Chinese and English, which have respectively, two thousand words and sixty thousand words in n u m b er" ,22 he said. Hence, in his programme of language reform he urged the coining of new terms to reflect the expansion in technology and ideas. Though trained in the old ‘p ’u hsüeh' tradition, he fully recognized the fact that language grows and changes. And not only did new terms need creating; the process of linguistic growth and change had to be speeded up. However, these goals could not be achieved in a random fashion; they must be put in line with the principles underpinning the various linguistic phenomena. It was this concern that inspired him to launch a research series concerning the origin and nature of the

21. See Lu Hsiin’s letter to Ts’ao Chii-jen in Lu Hsiin shu-hsin chi (A Collection of Lu Hsiin’s Correspondence), v o l.l, p.380.

Chinese language. This effort, as I have examined in Chapter Three in some detail, included his study of etymological origins, phonetic shifts and semantic changes to Chinese characters in various dialects.

Apart from this concern arising out of the threat to the status of Chinese from what he considered superior languages such as English, another aim of Chang’s was to establish the study of language as an autonomous discipline, liberated from its previous status as the handmaid of classical learning. But Lu Hsiin, unlike Chang’s other students - Huang K’ang for example - did not pursue Chang’s linguistic enquiry any further along this line. It is true that he made use of this learned equipment on many occasions to taunt certain eminent scholars (who happened to be his opponents) over their illiteracy, but he never bothered to contribute to discussions on the subject - though obviously qualified to do so had he so wished. In the light of his overall lack of enthusiasm for Chinese linguistics proper, his subsequent condemnation of this arduous discipline, which according to him would only lead the masses to obscurantism and reduce the country to a ‘silent China’, was hardly surprising.

Chang Ping-lin and his Critic, Wu Chih-hui

Before going further to examine Lu Hsiin’s departure from his teacher’s views on language, it is worth recalling the dispute in 1908 between Chang Ping- lin and Wu Chih-hui over the issue of whether or not to replace Chinese with Esperanto. Their dispute represented the most significant, if not the earliest, attempt to tackle the problem of Chinese, the inadequacy of which, real or apparent, became intensely felt in the light of the urgent need for translation and communication which had resulted from the threatening presence of European culture on the Chinese scene.

Chang was one of the main architects of modem Chinese nationalism, whereas Wu was a self-professed anarchist who stood, quite legitimately, for a modem Chinese version of anarchism then prevailing in the West. Whether there

was any intrinsic connection between anarchist ideology and the adoption of Esperanto in particular, and the rejection of tradition in general, and whether nationalism and anarchism were necessarily diametrically opposed, are matters I will pursue further and treat separately below. Given the fact that both

nationalists and anarchists in China at the turn of the century were fighting for the same cause, and given the ambivalence manifested in Kropotkin (as Chang rightly pointed out) - namely, that he was at once an anarchist and Slavophile, anarchism and nationalism may not be as mutually exclusive as they first appear. For convenience, however, let us simply describe the duel between Chang and Wu as an uncompromising one of nationalism versus anarchism.

Wu’s attack on the Chinese language and promotion of Esperanto was launched on two levels. The first was based on the cosmopolitan ideal which is probably an offshoot from the doctrine of anarchism. He perceived language barriers as inhibiting understanding and communication between peoples. Hence, he argued, tribal or national languages should be replaced by a single, unified, universal language, in this case Esperanto. The second dealt with the deficiency of Chinese: that is, the lack of identity or relationship between ‘form’ and ‘sound’ in Chinese script owing to the pictographic or ideographic nature of the characters themselves. Alphabetic languages, by comparison, do not suffer this shortcoming. In Chinese, the form of a character does not even readily indicate its

pronunciation, a divorce of ‘form’ and ‘sound’ which, together with the

complexity of the written language, was largely responsible, according to Wu, for the high level of illiteracy among the Chinese. And despite the early successes of Chinese printing, there was also a perception that type-setting works in that

language, so vital for the transmission of knowledge and the raising of educational standards, was more laborious than doing the same with English or other

alphabetical languages.

In response to these accusations, Chang delivered a counter-attack on two fronts, technical and ideological. On the technical front, while admitting the

difficulty of identifying pronunciation in an ideographic language, Chang argued that the alphabetical system was equally deficient in that ‘sound’ and ‘meaning’ bore no intrinsic relation to one another. Moreover, given the large number of homonyms in Chinese, any attempt to romanize Chinese characters would invariably cause extreme confusion owing to the loss of their differential

properties. Carrying this principle of differentiation further, Chang believed that a language system with more phonemes must be better than one with less. In the Chinese phonemic system there were 36 vowels combined with 20 consonants, which, together with the four tones, made for a more complex, hence ‘better’ system than Esperanto, whose phonetic system was made up of the mere 28 letters of the alphabet.

On the ideological front, Chang Ping-lin attacked Wu Chih-hui’s views on evolutionism, utilitarianism, pragmatism and scienticism. Wu had maintained, on the basis of the survival of the fittest, that the most advanced nations were those which had adopted alphabetical languages, and hence reached the sweeping conclusion that civilized people used alphabetic systems while barbarians adopted pictographic systems. The reason why Chinese should be abandoned, he claimed, was because it was unscientific, and so difficult and inconvenient that it was virtually unusable.

Chang responded to each of the allegations as follows:23 (a) ‘Many peoples, ranging from the Mongols in the north to the Malays in the south were using alphabets. Were their cultures necessarily superior to that of China?’ (b) Although in the Chinese lexicon, ‘technical terms’ (shu yu) were indeed wanting, it was not short of ‘everyday expressions’ (heng yen). The reverse case might appear to give European languages a scientific flavour, but "language by no means serves scientific or academic purpose exclusively. It should be able to express human sentiment as well as cater for everyday business", (c) The

23. For these points, see Chang, "Kui Hsin shih-chi'\ in Min-pao no.24, pp.41-65, and Chang "Po Chung-kuo yung wan-kuo hsin-yii shuo”, in Chang T ai-yen wen-lu, vol.2, pei-lu 2, pp.23a-40b.

discipline of science in its initial stages was purely concerned with physics. It was only later that this pure scholarship (science) was developed and extended into the area of technology or method (shu). The primary concern for a scientist should therefore be to seek truth; the application or utility of science was only a secondary concern. Wu Chih-hui’s criticism of Chinese in the name of science was in fact nothing but a partial view, if it did not show a misunderstanding, of science that in turn reflected the utilitarianism of Bentham and Spencer, (d) Moreover, language was much more than a set of abstract and arbitrary signs used as a mere tool, as the Anarchists assumed it to be. Language was a cultural product embodying the national charactistics and customs of its users. There was no such thing as a ‘natural language’. All human languages were a historical and cultural product. Thus language had to tolerate diversity or plurality. One could not possibly demand, as did Chinese advocates of Esperanto, the unification of all languages according to one arbitrary standard. This would be as absurd as to insist that all men be identical.

From the above can be seen the strikingly nationalistic principle which underlay Chang’s view of language. He lost no opportunity of hammering home the message that language was ‘the essence of a nation’. There were certain national boundaries, inherent in the phenomenon of language, that could not and should not be denied even by the noblest and most cosmopolitan minds (such as the Anarchists). Language, being an in-built and history-bound institution, could not be changed lightly, let alone wholly replaced. The Anarchists’ demand for the replacement of Chinese with Esperanto Chang regarded as snobbish and

philistine. It was snobbish and culturally cringing, because Wu had the

presumption to judge language according to an arbitrary European standard, and philistine, because Wu was concerned with the price of a language in a

competitive international market, ‘price’ for Wu signifying the small cash-value and the big cost of Chinese - whereas Chang was more concerned with the innate value of a national language; hence Chang’s mockery of Esperanto as ‘the

European newspeak’ or ‘the new speech for diplomacy’.

Chang’s defence of the value of ‘culture’ as opposed to anarchy here is not unlike Matthew Arnold, though it in no way resembled the cosmopolitan attitude Arnold adopted in his harsh judgement of English literature according to unitary Hellenistic values. Chang’s position was fully pluralistic, and hence nationalistic.

Though apparently conservative, Chang’s brand of nationalism should not be confused with jingoistic ideology. In the area of politics, he never advocated ‘integral nationalism’ or the kind of aggressive stance which came to be known as Bonapartism. In his scheme, each national community, however weak or small, had a right to enjoy independence and sovereignty, whether Manchu, Mongol or American Indian. Parallel to this political nationalism was a cultural nationalism derived partly from Taoist teachings (as transmitted by Chuang Tzu) on the relativity of standards. His onslaught on the Anarchist view of language was a manifestation of his belief in cultural relativism and cultural pluralism, the complete opposite of Wu’s absolutist stand.

Regarding the problem of language at present under discussion, it is not easy to judge which view is more plausible. Both Chang and Wu were right to a certain extent. In hindsight, we know that Wu’s attempt to transplant Esperanto onto Chinese soil failed badly. Yet his criticism of the deficiencies of Chinese was not entirely groundless. His argument for the adoption of certain Western grammatical forms, such as suffixes for adjectives or adverbs and the marking of the plural number in nouns, were warmly received. As for Chang, while he may have scored better than Wu in the sphere of linguistics as an intellectual

discipline, he could not, however, rescue the Chinese language, in an age of the ‘masses’, from the tendency of popularization (or, for him, ‘vulgarization’). It was an inevitable result, as Chang foresaw it, of the Anarchist stance, one which later manifested itself in the ‘vernacular speech movement’. Besides, he had to concede that there were certain deficiencies in the Chinese language,

anarchist challenge. Without it, he might not have bothered to devise a system of notation to overcome the age-old problem of teaching pronunciation. This system of notation would subsequently become the blueprint for the standard "Mandarine phonetic symbols" widely adopted in China from the time of the early Republic.

Chang’s general attitude toward Anarchism was in fact much less hostile than the dispute as outlined above suggests. Among his friends, both Chinese and Japanese, there were a number of ardent anarchists. Some of his own writings even, if taken (or mistaken?) in isolation, could be read as typically anarchist works. Taoist principles, which occupied an important place in his philosophy, left room for anarchist interpretations (for Taoism can understandably be regarded as the earliest forunner of anarchism in human intellectual history.) Hence, for Chang, anarchism was not an entirely novel ideology. In short, he did not lack respect or sympathy for the Anarchist ideals - love of liberty and hatred of

authority. But he remained dissatisfied with Anarchism on two counts, one on the level of the ideal, the other on that of reality. Ideally, Chang argued, Anarchism was just not good enough; and more importantly, Anarchism by itself was not an attainable principle while human groups or societies still existed. It was simply a matter of time until a state machine would naturally and inevitably emerge from human society.24 The abolition of human groupings would not accomplish the abolition of states. Thanks to the challenge posed by the Anarchists, Chang put forward a view which could hardly have been more extreme, i.e., non-

generationism (wu-sheng chu-i) - the eschewing even of reproduction. The whole cosmos would cease to be, and an everlasting void result. In this way, he

incorporated anarchism into his personal philosophical temple where Buddhism and Taoism (before being joined by Confucianism in his later life) stood as two gigantic pillars. That he should have attempted to incorporate it in this way was simply another expression of his reservation about the practice of anarchism in politics on the one hand, and his complete rejection of the cultural policy

proposed by the anarchists on the other. In the realm of politics, Chang had no dispute over the oppressive nature of the state. (In fact he was the first intellectual in modem China to question the reification of the state from a philosophical point of view, regarding the state as a mere concept without substance.)25 But he criticized the anarchists for failing to recognize the reality of nationhood. Unlike the state, the nation was a relatively real entity in the sense that its components, that is, human individuals, were real. The state was the mere form of the nation, just as a table was merely a form of wood, its essential material. For Chang, while the inseparability of form and matter needed to be recognized (in the Aristotelian sense), it was the primacy of the nation that had to be highlighted. As far as our mundane world was concerned, the nation-state was therefore justified. Chang’s kind of nationalism therefore posed ‘the middle way’ by avoiding the two extremes of Yang Tu’s statism and Wu Chih-hui’s anarchism.

It was the anarchist view of culture that drew Chang’s strongest

opposition. He abhorred Wu’s lack of a sense of history as well as his lack of a taste for conventional wisdom. I have already considered briefly the reasons for Chang’s condemnation of the Anarchist rejection of Chinese tradition; but it should also perhaps be mentioned that the battle between nationalism and anarchism in pre-republican China was in one respect also a battle between traditionalism and modernism.

The reason I digressed to consider Chang’s dispute with Wu and to distinguish the three aspects of Anarchism is that Lu Hsiin’s views on China’s culture and language were, in my judgement, largely anarchical. Though he did not subscribe to the Anarchist view in general, many of his opinions concerning Chinese traditions bore much resemblance to the Anarchist attitude. His departure from Chang’s linguistics - a virtual betrayal of his mentor’s teachings on ‘national quintessence’ - was merely one example of the iconoclasm which prevailed in the

25. See Chang, "Kuo-chia lun", (On the State) in Chang Tai-yen wen-lu, vol.2 pei-lu 3, pp.76a-86b.

May Fourth period. This, to a great extent, can be seen as the triumph of

anarchism. By this I do not meant the anarchism of a particular political ideology or as a utopian ideal. Rather, I am referring to the iconoclastic role, and that of culture-critics, played by the Chinese anarchists. Such being the case, it is not difficult for us to understand that Lu Hsiin’s views on the problem of the Chinese language is basically a mixture of Chang’s nationalistic linguistics and Wu’s anarchist linguistics in which the latter had exerted more impact than the former - perhaps much more than Lu Hsiin would have liked to admit (bearing in mind that he initially took sides with Chang and consistently demonstrated the deepest contempt for Wu in his later wntings).

Let us consider Lu Hsiin’s eclectic position against the background set by his two predecessors.

First, Lu Hsiin endorsed Esperanto for the simple reason that he saw a future need for a common human language, and Esperanto, while not perfect, was a creditable attempt. Lu Hsiin maintained that every Chinese should learn

Esperanto as a second language, but not as one to replace Chinese, as Wu Chih-