OBJETIVO 3 HUELLAS DE LA SONORA

55. Chang, "Pien hsing hsia" (On Human Nature II), in Kuo-ku lun-heng, p.211; see also Chang "Four Delusions", in Chang Tai-yen wen-lu, pei-lu 3, p.70a.

to confuse the issue by mixing the two to avoid interpreting the past in terms of the present, which was the central proposition of the Verstehen method. Although he was sceptical about the positivists’ claim for covering-law forms of

explanation, he never rejected contributions on social-historical interpretation which could well save historiography from the fetishism of facts. Here again, Chang’s methodology displayed the eclectic and paradoxical character. Perhaps the least ambiguous pronouncement of his historical methodology was when he set six criteria for the ideal type of classical scholarship. Let me quote them to conclude this chapter about Chang’s methodology which apparently needs more space to elaborate.

The six criteria are:

a. no confusion between the nominal and the actual; b. reliance on evidence;

c. no far-fetched analogy;

d. respect for precedents or conventions; e. elimination of sentiment or passions; and f. removal of embillished language.

Chang claimed that "without the equipment of these six standards, there is no way to become a classical scholar (read great historian)".56

56. Chang, "Shuo lin hsia" (On Classical Scholars II), in Chang T’ai-yen wen-lu, wen-lu, p .ll7 b .

Partisan of the People -

Chang Ping-Iin and His Political Thought

A significant political thinker is often a frustrated activist, and the very significance of his political thinking may largely lie in his dismissal of the power- game that we call politics. Such seems to be the case of Chang Ping-lin.

Chang Ping-lin was obviously not a successful politician. This was partly because he was after all a full-blooded scholar, lacking both the temperament and the skill to succeed in the political profession, and partly because he never

possessed real power even in the brief period (January-June 1913) when he was the Special Minister (ch’ou-pen-shih) of Manchuria, the only formal position he ever held. Without the support of the Central Government, and ignored by the governors under his administration, his grand proposal for exploiting the three north-east provinces had no chance of being put into practice.! For Chang Ping-lin, politics did not mean an all-embracing activity which affected the lives of all; on the contrary, Chang appeared to hold the view that politics should be kept to a minimum. He would not have agreed with the teleological premise of Aristotle that man is by nature a political animal intended to rule or to be ruled; nor would he have shared Westerners’ optimistic confidence in the promise and practice of politics - that the political process (even in its most benign form of tolerance or conciliation) is a proper and sufficient means for solving the

problems of the human predicament and conflict at various levels. Instead, as we shall see, Chang wanted to go beyond politics by proposing an ultimate

philosophical solution to obviate once and for all any need for government and politics. Politics appeared to Chang to be only of limited value in the mundane 1. For this proposal, see T’ang Chih-chiin (ed.), Chang T ai-yen cheng-lun hsiian-chi, pp.626-

world where men were doomed to suffering and no political device or effort was capable of bringing about their final deliverance.

Despite his transcendental or apolitical aspirations, Chang had an active and eventful political life, and developed a distinctive body of political ideas. For more than three decades, his voice of protest and his alternative remedies for political ills were heard time and again. Virtually every great power-holder of the Republican period had some sort of acquaintance with him, however shallow or insincere. Barely a single one of them, however, was exempted from his sharp criticism. "Whenever there is uneasiness about a matter of principle, there is the compelling duty to spell out and to uncover (any inadequacies) regardless of whatever authority one may offend" (i yu wei-an, t’an-she chiu-fa, pu-pi shang- sheng)2 These words, which he used to describe the great sceptic of the Han dynasty, Wang Ch’ung, whose intellectual daring he greatly admired, became something of a motto for Chang’s own political conduct. Perhaps it is this underlying spirit, unfettered by orthodox morality, which has given Chang a maverick image in the political scene of modem China. 3

Chang’s political career after the founding of the Republic was colourful and varied. He was leader and deputy-leader of the Unification Party and the Republican Parties respectively; he was recommended to be Minister of Education in the Provisional Government and the Governor of the Chekiang province. He was also offered the post of Chief Advisory - a sinecure - by the first three presidents (Sun Yat-sen, Yiian Shih-k’ai and Li Yuan-hung). At a later time, numerous warlords, great and small (including T’ang Chi-j)ao, Wu P’ei-fu, Tuan Ch’i-jui, Sun Ch’uan-fan, Chao Heng-t’i and Feng Yu-hsiang), continued to seek his advice as if Chang’s approval were an asset in their struggle for power. Chang was also a front-runner in the Federalist Movement of the early 1920s and helped

2. Chang Ping-lin, "Hsiieh-pien", in his Ch’iu shu (2nd ed., Tokyo, 1904), p .ll; also in his "Ting ching-shih’, Chang T a n ho-ch’ao, p.478.

3. "Maverick" is the expression used by Charlotte Furth in her description of Chang. See Furth, The Limit o f Change, p.114.

to draft the so-called Kuo-shih Constitution. The above list, which is by no means exhaustive, gives some indication of his importance and influence in the political arena, an influence which was more apparent than real. Appearances can,

however, be deceptive. Chang’s prestige accrued initially from his involvement in the Reformist movement, and later as the leading architect of modem Chinese nationalism and as an avant-garde advocate for overthrow of the Manchu

monarchy. But his prestige declined dramatically after the 1911 Revolution, and particularly after the early 1920s. The crushing of the unpopular Federalist Movement by Chiang Kaishek’s Northern Expedition finally put an end to Chang’s active role in politics. Towards the end of his life, his discontent with Chiang’s reluctance to resist the Japanese invasion, his contact with anti-Japanese generals such as Sung Che-yuan and Chang Hsueh-liang, and his appeal to stop the civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) amounted to little more than the patriotic activities of a common citizen which echoed the stand he had taken when in the forefront of Chinese

nationalism.

Generally speaking, Chang was held in respect, but was in effect kept some distance from the centre of Republican political power, a fact which indicates he was politically a very marginal figure in the new regimes. It is therefore not surprising to detect a sense of alienation underlying his claims when he went to admonish Yuan Shih-k’ai at the risk of his own safety: "The Republic was created by us, I could not bear to see her being destroyed, so I come to enquire about her".4 Rather like a mother separated from her new-born child, Chang was alienated from the outcome of the 1911 Revolution for which he had so passionately preached and fought, and for which he had suffered as a political prisoner and exile under the monarchy.

Having raised this image of a "marginal man", perhaps we should immediately point out a qualitative difference between Chang’s mental make-up

and sense of marginality that some sociologists have ascribed to people such as Karl Marx, a sense which lead him to an expression of Jewish self-hatred.5 Chang’s political character is basically a nationalist one, and no true nationalist is really marginal. He stuck to his race or "nation" both before and after the 1911 Revolution. His national identity was so strong that he refused to take Japanese citizenship when in exile and refused to be an emigre again after the "restoration" of Chinese sovereignty. Hence there is no sign that he was unduly bothered by marginality, in spite of his long anxiety and frustration. This is particularly pertinent if we understand the notion of marginality as involving loyalty without power and consider Chang Ping-lin against the background of the most chaotic and confusing power struggle of the early Republican era. Save for his loyalty to his "nation", Chang might well have asked: "Where else, after all, is the centre to be found?"

On the political level, Chang’s notion of the "nation" was always

consistent. Priority - logical and practical - was always given to the nation over the state. Without the entity of a nation, the state is nothing. This nationalistic premise that the state is always secondary must surely account for Chang’s rejection of Yang Tu’s statist politics before the 1911 Revolution, as well as for his seeking a federalist alternative in the early 1920s. It is this distinctive type of nationalism which allowed him to go so far as to advocate the separation of China into a number of small states. By the same token, Chang looked upon the entire controversy regarding the problem of polity, which had occupied the minds of Chinese reformers from the late Ch’ing campaign for constitutional monarchy to the establishment of the Nationalist regime, as merely a battle over forms. He clearly contended that while the fact of government is inevitable, there is no necessary form of government that can best guarantee the quality of "people’s rights". On Chang’s scale of "what is real", it is the people who constitute the

5. Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (2nd ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p.78.

nation, who form its most substantial element of it, hence most real. The state is merely a conceptual construct doubly removed from the reality, compared to the nationhood. Hence a distinction between this or that state should be made only in terms of quality (or essence) rather than form. That is to say, in Chang’s opinion there would only be good government (that best suits the interest of its people, who are the substance of the state) and bad government (that which pertains if these conditions are not fulfilled). This emphasis on the substance, at the cost of its unity with the form, led Chang to conclude that the Republican polity was not necessarily good, nor was despotism necessarily evil. As a result, he challenged the modem Western assumption that representative government, in its English, American and French varieties, was universally the best form of government and that it was worthy of China’s emulation. His refusal to take for granted the merit of Western democracy was such that his contemporary critics and later historians were tempted to dub him authoritarian, conservative and, much worse, feudalistic and reactionary.

Obviously, Chang’s distrust of modem democratic institutions such as political parties, parliaments, suffrage and so on, was associated with the nationalist character of his political commitment. For him, the national interest was the only legitimate one. He held that all partisan interests were not only illegitimate but also unethical. Parties, by definition, could hardly be

representative of the public as a whole. This was supported by his own

observation. (Notice that he criticised both the multi-partisan politics of the early Republic and the one-party practice which followed the warlords’ exit from the stage.) Instituted for the sake of political parties, parliament would eventually strengthen factional interest and legalise the status quo, since no person of worth, only the rich and the strong - and no person of independent worth - could be elected a parliamentarian by suffrage, according to Chang’s evaluation at the time. While a parliamentary system could not guarantee the rule of the best, its

the ruler and the ruled; and its members would end up being "people’s enemies instead of friends".6 He denied that China was still a class society and rejected the notion of class interest as a fruitful political construct. It is also probably due to his predominantly national concern that he longed for a charismatic leader, and defended the efficiency of enlightened despotism - a ruler regularly elected by universal franchise, who could transcend particular interests without being corrupted by power.

Chang’s attitude toward power-holders or power-brokers was ambivalent. On the one hand, he expressed the deepest disdain for them by claiming that "No one under heaven could be more mean or toadying than a politician. "7 On the other hand, he demanded perfection from the politician. It may be argued that these were not really ambivalent attitudes, because one was the inverse of the other. It simply emphasises Chang’s strong belief in the supreme importance of moral principles in the realm of public affairs. To be a politician is thus not to take or "mistake" an occupation, it is a moral undertaking, particularly so in the Republican form of the state. Chang was therefore in total agreement with Montesquieu’s axiom of "Republican virtue".6 7 8 Unfortunately, his high-brow concern with the quality of the "moral sectors" in a government was no more than an anachronistic obsession in the eyes of his contemporaries.

Chang declined most of the offers of the offices mentioned earlier, or resigned shortly after accepting them. We do not have to be impressed by his high-sounding principles of integrity or by his own lack of hunger for power, it is nevertheless worth keeping in mind, in order to do justice to his outspoken and relentless condemnation of various authorities. On this point, his contemporaries tended to dismiss him lightly by simply labelling him as "Lunatic Chang". In fact,

6. Chang Ping-lin, "Tai-i jan-fo lun", in T ’ang, Chang T’ai-yen, p.468.

7. Chang Ping-lin, "Chu cheng-tang", in T ’ang Chih-chun (ed.), Chang Tai-yen nien-p’u ch'ang-pien, p.353.

not many people of his own time could have been more serious than Chang in believing that a true statesman should behave entirely "for the people". Perhaps this is another reason why he chose to be an amateur politician. He believed the best position for a conscientious intellectual was neither on the stage of power, nor in opposition but "in the wilderness"; as he put it on one occasion when he declined an official post: "I preferred to be a "partisan of the people" (min-tang); it suits my temperament".9 He paid a great cost for his forthright opinions as a "partisan of the people", being once again confined for three years by Yuan Shih-k’ai, while later, too, the KMT sought his arrest.

Chang’s objection to the uncritical grafting of Western democratic institutions into the Chinese "body politic" was also based on historical

arguments. He noticed that the British Parliament had emerged as an institution from the need to levy taxation on the great landlords without causing large-scale discontent, and he noted the fact of the establishment of the House of Lords. Hence the original notion of "rule by consent" had nothing to do with common peasants. Chang thereby reached the thesis that the parliamentary system was originally a covert form of feudalism. 10 The period of evolution from feudal society in Western countries and Japan was comparatively short, and hence parliamentary institutions were suitable for them. However, this was not the case in China, where feudalism was a vestige of the remote past and a crude form of congress had already been practised as early as the Han dynasty. This, on top of the fact that China had only a small number of great landlords, led Chang to believe the distinction between classes in China was rather minimal. He claimed that the Chinese, being free of the caste system of India and the class antagonism of capitalist societies, were the most equal of people under the rule of a superior ruler. Why then, he argued, was it necessary to create an intermediate class by instituting parliamentary rule? If one emperor was bad enough, what about

9. Chang Ping-lin, "Chih T’ang Shou-ch’ien tien", ibid., p.546. 10. Ibid., p.456, n.6.

hundreds of "parliamentarian emperors"? What was the point in having a

congress when great landlords in China were in fact few? The logic here is that at this time Chang supported the programme put forward by Sun Yat-sen for a "single tax", borrowed from Henry George, and Sun’s programme of "land to the tiller". In their visions of a new society in China,H both Sun and Chang paid great attention to preventing the spread of what they saw as the "disease" of Western capitalism. Their difference lay in the fact that while Sun aspired to a capitalist-cum-industrial culture, Chang did not think it possible to separate the kind of prosperity from its associated undesirable consequences - a belief based on his own notion of progress. Chang challenged the West’s optimistic faith in progress by advancing a theory of "progress as a differentiating process",12 in which the good and the bad could progress simultaneously. While happiness advances in our civilisation, suffering also deepens. (Understandably, Chang has little to say about modernisation, especially when modernisation was generally taken by his contemporaries to mean Westernisation.)

The weakness of Chang’s argument against parliamentary representation is quite obvious. Nevertheless, the point to be noted here is the recurrent emphasis on the "particularity" or "uniqueness" in Chang’s historicist approach to politics. The particularity of a nation’s political culture is the most important variable that any realistic politician has to reckon with. Historical conditions feed the body politic, and any attempt to reorder a civil society must take its tradition into account. On the birth of the Republic, Chang kept reminding his colleagues that China was not, after all, a new state. He appealed to them to respect social