No More Learning

At first I wrote the letters and he copied them. She sent the answers to him. . . . At first he promised to do what I said. He thought it was romantic and exciting. I thought it was business. Then he felt he was being pushed by me. He wanted to be on his own or else quit. I said he could not write love letters himself, as he wouldn't know how to word it for the Communists. He wrote a letter to her saying that I was unreason- able and he had had enough of me and would do things by himself. . . . She wrote me that something was wrong. I told her to drop the corre- spondence. . . . I had an argument with the boy and he said to me, "You came out cold-hearted and half-dead, I am still human/' Maybe people think that Communism does this to people. . . . I have become more calculating, but this does me good. Sooner or later one must be practical. But people here say it comes to me too early.
These two themes--her guilty involvement with her girl friend, and her anxiety over her own conflict with the boy--were brought out in her further associations. She and the girl had been room- mates at college, and Grace had advised her about many problems and had influenced her regarding her approach to the Communists. She felt responsible for the girl, and was distressed that her argu- ment with this boy had brought about an end to the attempted arrangements. It also came out that part of the diEculty was Grace's "disgust" toward the boy when he began to make romantic over- tures toward her as well as to her friend in China.
Her second dream was primarily a plea for help, partly directed at me; but at the same time it was also an attempt at reconstructing her life and her sense of self:
? GRACE WU; MUSIC AND REFORM 353
Last night I dreamed I met a pianist from my home town. She had al- ways been a great success, and had studied in the States with Schnabel. . . . SolastnightIdreamedofher. . . . Imetheronthetrainand was so glad to see her. . . I asked her many things but I don't remem- ber what she said. I was asking from a musical point of view. Shall I take other work than music if I am offered it? Should I try to get a piano? Should I go to a teacher? . . . I even asked her what books I should read. . . . But 1 don't remember what she told me. . . . It's funny I didn't get any answers from her.
As she talked more about this dream, it became evident that both the girl and the girl's father had played a very important inspira- tional role in Grace's past.
She is twelve or thirteen years older than I am. When I was very young I was influenced by her. I knew everything she played by heart. . . . I called her Elder Sister. . . . After I left college and returned home, I went to see her father and he gave me books and advice in literature and history. He said to me, "You must read as well as play. " He talked to my parents to help them understand.
She went on to talk of her immediate life situation, and con- trasted its tenuousness with the more secure sense of personal growth during her earlier days: "Now if the weather is cold, I am cold. . . . I feel almost transparent, so tiny, so little, that I don't exist. " Yet she still expressed affirmation in her expectation of a solution from within: "I must get answers from myself, though it takes a long time. "
Although she valued her new freedom to engage in such a search, she felt that her past had not prepared her for this self-concern. She expressed this in relationship to our interviews.
I have found it difficult to talk to you. It is nothing personal, just that I have never before had the chance to express myself. All of these years I was told not to think of myself or my own ideas--and it faded out. Now I don't feel embarrassed. I feel better to talk and to reach scientific con- clusions.
She compared her suppressed personal past to the demands of the Communist regime.
Under the Communists, because of the outside pressure, you think less about yourself. . . . I tried to think less of myself because it becomes
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too complicated if you don't. . . . It becomes a habit not to think too much about your own feelings.
She vividly described the pleasure and pain of her new self- expression.
It was like being shut in a tight room and suffocated. Then you are thrown open into a desert. You can have free air but it has its disad- vantages. . . . Thinking brings more confusion. In China it is simple just being against things. But when you come to the real world, you find everything is not like that. . . . Freedom makes things more compli- cated.
During the six months in which I knew Grace in Hong Kong, she periodically lapsed into psychosomatic illness, usually diarrhea. After such bouts, she appeared to be more calm and composed. Once, following a week of bed rest, she expressed to me both the type of guilty conflict which contributed so much to her illnesses, and the secondary gain--that is, the satisfying respite--which the illness provided.
I keep thinking, am I asking or wanting too much for myself, and is this what makes me feel so bad? . . . When I was young I always expected too much--so now I expect the worst. . . . I am glad I got sick. I had time, and didn't have to rush.
She wondered how much any residual effects of thought reform might be contributing to her problems; at the same time she thought she had survived and gone beyond thought reform.
The more I tried to explain all of these things, the more complicated it gets. . . . I feel a person is hurt by a Communist education. But we have a saying in China that a lotus is grown from the mud, yet is still pure.
She recognized, however, that elements of reform were still with her, and that at times she could not avoid judging herself by Com- munist standards.
Sometimes I feel subconscious influences from the Communists. If I make a decision I think that I shouldn't go through with it because they would disagree. . . . Or I think back and feel that one or two of their theories are right.
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But despite this stormy course, her adjustment in Hong Kong gradually improved. She was greatly helped by an older woman she met through friends ("a mother more or less") who began to take a great personal interest in her, accepted her as one of her own family, encouraged her to play the piano at her home, and also served as an understanding confidante. First she helped Grace find young pupils as a means of support, and then helped her make arrangements to continue her musical studies in Europe.
Three themes dominate Grace Wu's life story, from early child- hood through thought reform and her Hong Kong experiences: her Westernization, her musicianship, and her illnesses.
She encountered Westernizing influences far stronger than those met by George Chen. Her treaty port background, her father's oc- cupation, and her mother's staunch Christianity all placed the family in a special Chinese subculture, removed from a good deal of Chi- nese life. This subculture had its particular heritage of identity strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths lay in its sense of being mod- ern and progressive, and in its relationship to Christian ideological supports; its weaknesses in its partial severance from Chinese roots, in the often shallow, imported middle-class ethos (the Communists did not entirely make this up) which Grace herself condemned, and in the intensified susceptibilities to guilt created by the super- imposed Christian conscience. It is true that when under great duress, Grace reverted to pre-Christian ghosts (and it was her Christian mother who took her to the fortune teller); but her sense of being the Westernized Christian girl was nonetheless very basic to her character.
Grace became the dedicated musician early in life. This also was an identity closely tied to her relationship with her mother, but it was a good deal more. Rather than developing generalized artistic sensibilities, as George Chen did, she possessed a focused talent which became one of the main centers of her existence. To be a dedicated musician meant, for her, to have a form of self-expression which could not be denied, a refuge from emotional blows, and a sense of being a unique human being. This kind of identity can survive almost anything, even if it must be temporarily modified or subdued.
Closely associated with Grace's musicianship, however, were
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feelings of evil, of selfishness, of hating and being hateful--all of which went into her negative identity. To be sure, these feelings must have originated in Grace's early sense of being emotionally deprived and frustrated. But they were also related to her quest for artistic expression--to the artist's need to ignore ordinary ameni- ties of life and to selfishly insist on the opportunity to develop talent, even at the expense of others7 sacrifices. Her negative identity was enhanced by her father's deprecation of her musical interest (an attitude which was undoubtedly shared by many others around her), and by her awareness that in the difficult family circumstances such an interest could be considered something of a luxury.
An outgrowth of her negative identity was her pattern of escape from emotional problems through illness. She carried with her-- always ready for use--the identity of the invalid. The psychological sequence involved, first, a sense of being denied her wishes, along with an unusually strong need to obtain what she was after; then a feeling of anger and frustration; a sense of guilt over both her de- mands and her anger; the illness itself; and the combination of attention, sympathy, and relief which it afforded her.
Of central importance was the dilemma of a girl endowed with unusually strong passions who felt the need to repress and deny these passions almost entirely. Hence her "disgust" (a word which she used constantly) over sexualityand her use of Christian ideology as an aid in the struggle against her passions. As a musician, she became aware that she could hardly dispense with strong feelings of love and hate, feelings which she could justify in herself only as a musician. Her music-versus-Christianity conflict was essen- tially an expression of this same inner struggle. It is true, of course, that Christianity, and perhaps especially her polite form of Chinese Christianity, has long recommended the taming of sexual and of hateful impulses; but she could have--had she felt the need-- just as well found Christian support for her artistic passions in the music of Bach or the paintings of El Greco.
Her adolescent identity crisis therefore took the form of illness. With the intensificationof passions characteristic for that stage of life, her problem became not only what to be--how much the musician, the journalist, the Christian, the Chinese, and the woman --but what she could safely permit herself to feel.
Taking a journalism course was submission to her parents; at
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the same time, her emergence as the "progressive" journalist allowed an alternative form of self-expression, one by which she could avoid the emotional conflicts which surrounded her music. This identity compromise, however, could not work: not only was music too basic a part of her to be long denied, but, as it turned out, being a journalist in Communist China involved her in a new set of passions (or rather, an arduous reshaping of the old ones). Re- turning to the identity of the dedicated artist could not protect her from these passions, but it could at least permit her to meet them with her strongest weapons.
Grace's constellation of identities gave her encounter with thought reform an unusual emotional coloring. As a Westernized Christian girl, she was immediately identified (and not entirely inaccurately) as one of the opposition. Studying in a missionary-established "castle of reaction," she was in this respect by no means alone. But she was particularly vulnerable because of her close relationship with an American teacher--an artist-disciple bond, in which, pro- tected by barriers of culture and status, she could experience a form of love. This does not however account for the extreme emotional pain she suffered during thought reform; her inner stress was greater than any of my other Chinese subjects, with the possible exception of Hu. The explanation lies partly in her long-standing attitude toward any form of strong emotion: suddenly confronted with mass frenzy, with the exaggerated passions unleashed by the Com- munists, it is not surprising that she became terrified. And when she was urged to join in with these passions, to denounce her revered teacher, she was overwhelmed by fear and by guilt--guilt both over refusing and thereby resisting the authorities, and over tendencies within her to comply and make the denunciation. Simi- larly, the denunciation of her university president by his daughter revived her own complicated feelings of guilt and resentment to- ward her parents. The hateful emotions so central to thought re- form were precisely the kind she had been warding off all her life.
These emotional patterns led her to distort sexual matters. It is true that in the Communist environment politics came first and love often was mechanical; but other students reported an atmos- phere more puritanical than the uninhibited one Grace described. As can occur in any moment of crisis, Grace's fears about sex and hostility became confused. Thus, all of her anxieties came to a head
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in her response to the germ warfare inoculation, and she experienced the injection as an assault upon her entire person. In making her exit from thought reform through illness, she brought a tremendous histrionic force to the old identity of the invalid, which was also in keeping with her previous use of hysterical mechanisms. Grace's negative identity was therefore an important factor in both her pain and her escape.
It would be wrong, however, to stress only this side of her char- acter. In her resistance to thought reform, she also gave evidence of the surprising strength inherent in her sense of being the Western Christian girl and the dedicated musician. Her previous exposure to W estern liberalism and her absorption with W estern classical music supported her in her belief that "the world could not be like this" (or at least that it need not be like this). These two identities, and perhaps especially the one of the dedicated artist, gave Grace extraordinary staying power. Not only did they help her survive thought reform pressures, they also served as important sources of stability during her tribulations in Hong Kong.
There she had to face--at first in lonely isolation--both the con- fusing aftereffects of thought reform, and an external environment which was unusually provocative for someone like her. So great was her identity diffusion that she reverted to every pattern of self- destructive emotional behavior, and every level of sexual and family conflict she had known since early childhood, to the point where she felt her sense of existence almost entirely fading away. Yet on her own emotional terms her movement toward renewal of identity was active from the first. In her dreams, in her relationships in Hong Kong, and in her attitudes toward me, she was searching for help, but she insisted on being the arbiter of her own life. Among my Chinese subjects, she was unusual in her ability to face and to talk about both the difficulties of freedom and the extent of residual
Communist influences.
Her return to a mildly Christian, firmly Westernized, and profoundly artistic way of life (as well as extreme good fortune) led her to her new "mother," and to the promise of a creative personal future. Her old emotional patterns were of course still very much with her, as was also some of the message of thought reform; but equipped with a newly-integrated adult self and a clear sense of direction, she would probably manage to live with them.
? CHAPTER 19
CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES:
THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY
Each of the four Chinese subjects I have described
experienced first an immersion into thought re- form--the beginnings of a personal change--and then a recoil from its demands. What brought about this recoil, which contrasted with the continued enthusiasms of more successfully reformed Chi- nese intellectuals? Without a comparative study of the latter group, no certain answer can be given to this question. But from the evi- dence at hand, we can say that some features of personal character and identity were consistently important in resistance to thought reform, not only for these four people, but for the remainder of my subjects as well. These are: tendencies toward rebelliousness and fear of domination (especially marked in Hu); strong need for in- dividual self-expression (George Chen and Grace Wu); binding family ties (George Chen); previous patterns of anomie and of emotional escape (Robert Chao, Grace Wu, and H u ) ; and a significant degree of Westernization, whether Christian or other- wise (Robert Chao, Grace Wu, and George Chen). These tend- encies are not simply rallying points of resistance; the conflicts exist- ing around them can also create specific susceptibilities to thought reform.
Even more important, these are themes which have long been at 359
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the very center of the personal struggles of most Chinese intel- lectuals. Tension about rebelliousness, self-expression, family loy- alties, alienation, and Westernization have particular significance for Chinese at this point in their history--as they must for the intellectual vanguard of any society whose traditional patterns are being replaced. In other words, these four case histories have intro- duced a set of conflicts relating to identity and ideology which no Chinese intellectual, in facing thought reform, could really avoid.
The roots of such tensions lie in the interplay of individual emo- tions with cultural and historical influences. I have chosen, as the title of this chapter suggests, to group all of these psychological factors around the concept of filial piety, a basic theme of Chinese culture, and one which has specific bearing upon the tensions just enumerated. And the historical vicissitudes of filialism, or rather of Chinese intellectuals (or literati) in relation to filialism, have spe- cial psychological importance for thought reform itself.
The individual lives we have been studying in many ways mir- ror the history of China itself: early years of filial identities derived from traditional Chinese culture; attraction during adolescence and young adulthood to more modern and Western influences; and finally, a third phase of Communism or thought reform. It seems that each Chinese intellectual has had to recapitulate personally the larger experiences of his culture in a psychocultural counterpart of the biological tenet that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Filial influences are part of the entire history of China's tradi- tional culture, going back to the Han dynasty (206 B. C. -22O A. D. ) and before, and extending through the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644 A. D. - 1911 A. D. )to the revolution of 1911. "Modern" (I am using the term in a more restrictive sense than the way it is employed by historians) Chinese identities emerged during a transitional period which can be roughly located in the first half of the twentieth cen- tury, although it had its beginnings about fifty years before that. The third phase, of course, began with the Communist takeover of 1948-49.
For each of these historical stages a distinct pattern of Chinese cultural identity, based on shared individual experiences, can be delineated. To be sure, we must discuss ideal types, in some ways over-simplified, and by no means completely inclusive. But these can enable us to place both thought reform and the people under-
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going it in a perspective which, for being historical, is all the more psychological. 1
Traditional Filialism and the Filial Son
In traditional Chinese culture (I refer here most specifically to the period of the Ch'ing Dynasty), one was expected to be filial if nothing else. For the son or daughter of a gentry-literati family, the principle of hsiao or filial piety was at the very center of personal, family, and social existence. Its mystique was so powerful and so pervasive that Fung Yu-lan, a leading contemporary Chinese philos- opher, has called it "the ideological basis of traditional [Chinese] society. " 2
Whether he was seven or seventy, a son's attitude toward his parents was expected to be one of reverence, obedience, and loy- alty. Nor was this to be a token response, since if it did not stem naturally from his inner being, he was not being truly filial. He learned how to be a filial son from his parents and his older brothers and sisters, through the unconscious transmission of cultural forms as well as through their conscious elaboration. And the indoctrina- tion began early: when only three or four, a child might be told stones (in a culture very fond of storytelling) of the famous 'Twenty-four Examples of Filial Piety. " These included such tales as that of the eight-year-old boy who allowed mosquitoes to "feed without restraint upon his blood until they were satisfied" in order to prevent them from biting his parents; of the seventy-year-old man who dressed himself in gaily-colored garments and played like a child "in order to amuse his parents"; and the most impressive story of all, entitled "On Account Of His Mother He Buried His Child," which is worth quoting in full:
During the Han dynasty, Ko Keu, whose family was very poor, had a child three years old. Keu's mother usually took some of her food and gave to the child. One day he spoke to his wife about it, saying, "We are so poor that we cannot even support mother. Moreover, the little one shares mother's food, Why not bury this child? We may have an- other; but if mother should die, we cannot obtain her again. "
His wife did not dare to oppose. Keu, when he had dug a hole more than two feet deep, suddenly saw a vase of gold. On the top of the vase was an inscription, saying, "Heaven bestows this gold on Ko Keu7 the dutiful son. The officers shall not seize it, nor shall the people take it. " 3
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The father-son relationship was most important, the ultimate model for almost all other relationships in Chinese society. It com- bined love and respect and a certain distance, the last created both by family ritual and by the limited role which the father played in the child's early upbringing. A child was to feel similar emotions to- ward his mother, although here the barriers were down a bit and there was room for more indulgence; but, as Ko Keu's story sug- gests, there was no lessresponsibility.
The filial principle extended into all important family and social ties. Of the "Five Most Important Human Relationships" described by Confucius (between Sovereign and Subject, Father and Son, Husband and Wife, Elder and Younger Brothers, and Friend and Friend) three were within the family, and the other two were based upon specific family models.
One of these, the relationship between Sovereign and Subject, has special importance for us. It was conceived as an extension of the relationship between father and son: "From the way in which one serves one's father, one learns how to serve one's sovereign. The respect shown to them is the same. " 4 At the same time, it differed by being a "social or moral" relationship rather than a "natural"
(or blood) tie. Therefore, one felt respect but not love for one's sovereign. This attitude was compared to that between man and wife, in which respect and duty were also emphasized more than love. The analogy was especially important for the government official (the standard career of the literati class), since he was con- sidered "married" to the sovereign. He was expected to emulate the bride who transfers her loyalties from her family to her husband and his family: "Before marriage she was the daughter of her parents; after it, she became the wife of her husband"; in becoming "married" to the royal family, a man was expected to experience a similar "transformation of filial piety into loyalty to the sovereign. " But here too there was a distinction, for in this transformation "the filial son does not cease to be a filial son"; in fact, in his new situa- tion, this transformation "is the only way in which he can continue to be a filial son. " The point is that loyalty to one's sovereign should be part of, rather than conflict with, one's sense of being a filial son. 5
There was thus in the filial identity a strong sense of personal continuity, continuity between family and society, and in fact in the entire life cycle. The male infant was made much of because,
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as one of his most important filial duties, he would continue the family line. From the first stories casually (or not so casually) told to him, through a period of childhood and youth devoted largely to a-study of the classics (The Book of Filial Piety, The Book of Rites, the Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Spring and Autumn Annals, The Work of Mencius), his education was to a great degree an uninterrupted in- doctrination for this identity. As his first exercises in reading and writing, he began to memorize filial principles long before he could understand what they meant. Most of his education was under his family's control; sometimes his tutor was directly employed by his family, sometimes he was taught in a clan or village school. Ad- vanced institutions for the study of Confucianism did exist in large cities; but a gentry youth need not attend one of these to pursue his studies of the classics in preparation for state examinations, nor did these schools appear to provide the opportunity for youthful self- expression that we associate with European and American universi- ties.
In traditional China, there was no institutionalized youth culture or youth rebellion. 6 There was a group of ch'ing-nien jen (young peo- ple, or literally, "green-years men")--male youths between sixteen and thirty not yet married--who did to some extent associate with each other, but not to the extent of developing a collective voice or an organized group life. And since marriages took place early-- bridegrooms were often in their late teens and brides even younger --a youth was not likely to remain in this category for long. Even more important in preventing youthful rebellion was the ethos that youth was to serve age: whether indulged during early childhood, strictly disciplined during later childhood, or allowed a modicum of personal freedom during his teens, one's importance lay, not in the youth he was, but in the man he would become, and mainly in relationship to his family and his society. A Chinese youth became a man not by casting off his father's influence and control, but rather by adapting himself to them, by becoming like him, by identifying with him in attitude and belief, as generations before had done with their fathers. 7 A recent sociological observer has claimed that "for hundreds and thousands of years there was no conflict of generations in China. "8 This statement is surely ex- travagant, especially since it ignores inner conflict; but it does in-
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dicate the ideal of father-son continuity which held sway in China for so long.
To marry and have children of one's own were in themselves filial tasks; as Mencius pointed out, "there are three unfilial acts, and of these lack of posterity is the greatest. " And as a mature man and a father himself, the filial son reinforced his filialism by teach- ing its principles to others. At the same time his responsibility for the care of his own parents increased, and still included the most personal form of attention--a responsibility he could never shirk no matter where in the empire he served, or how high in the bureaucracy he rose. When his parents died, the filial son was expected not only to arrange a proper burial, but subsequently to "love what they loved77 and "revere what they reverenced. " Only when he himself became an old man was he able to relax into a more carefree existence. Then he finally reaped the full benefits of filial piety and enjoyed the solicitude of his family, for it was the old whose happiness mattered most.
A woman's life cycle, despite her shift from her own to her hus- band's family, had similar continuity, since her marital relation- ship was but another dimension of filial responsibility. Men, how- ever, were the main repositories of the filial mystique: their studies and writings perpetuated its classical ideology; their patriarchal position made them its more symbolically important practitioners; and in a patrilineal society, it was through the male that the filial chain was extended.
Ancestor worship was the filial son's spiritual expression. As practiced in literati families, it emphasized the personal, rather than the supernatural or absolute. The worshiper was to try to recall the faces and mannerisms of his departed parents so that "the eyes of the son should not forget the looks (of his parents) nor his ears their voices; and that he should retain the memory of their aims, likings, and wishes. " 9 Ancestor worship was a reinforcement of one's sense of biological immortality, and the quest for this immortality was itself at the root of the filial ideology.
Needless to say, nobody could completely satisfy these filial re- quirements. Indeed, the filial son was attracted from time to time to trends in Chinese culture specifically antagonistic to filialism. In the ideology of Legalism, which prevailed for a brief period dur- ing the third century B. C. , he found an authoritarian doctrine which
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advocated loyalty to a centralized warlike state rather than to the family, and the use of coercion rather than the moral exhortations of filial piety. In Taoism, as old and as basic a Chinese doctrine as Confucianism, he found an opposite extreme, a mysticism which viewed earthly obligation as transient and unimportant, and which offered a call to withdraw from these in body and spirit to find The Way, And later, for several centuries after the first centuryB. C. , Buddhism had a similar appeal Each of these three doctrines made contact with (and itself reflected) a special facet of Chinese char- acter. Taoism and Buddhism, in particular--although they were most widely accepted by the common people--had lasting appeal to the gentry as well, satisfying their more passive, imaginative, and nonrational impulses.
Even while he clung to his rationalistic Confucianism, the filial son was likely to feel deeply attracted to the escape into nothingness of Taoist hermits and Buddhist mystics. This attraction is described in the great eighteenth-century novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, whose youthful hero, Pao Yu, abandons both an official's career and his pregnant bride for a supernatural Buddhist-Taoist destiny. Generations of gentry youth have since vicariously experi- enced Pao Yu's escape from filial obligation, neglecting Confucian volumes for the surreptitious pleasures of The Dream of the Red Chamber. But even Pao Yu squares his filial account before his departure: he applies himself to his Confucian studies and passes his state examinations with distinction, thereby bringing great honor upon his family; he impregnates his bride, thereby insuring his posterity; and as his last act before disappearing, he seeks out his stern father and bows four times before him "in a solemn Ko-t'ou" thereby expressing his symbolic filial submission. 10
Thus the filial son could be both Confucian in his worldly obliga- tions and Buddhist and Taoist during inner moments of flight from them. Or he might express other forms of antagonism toward the filial web--an admiration of outlaw heroes, heavy gambling, or opium smoking--all strongly-developed cultural patterns. One Western authority, C. P. Fitzgerald, was so impressed with these escapist tendencies in Chinese character that he regarded filial piety as an essentially compensatory phenomenon: "The Confucian in- sistence on filial duty and the strict training of the young would seem harsh until it is realized that the Chinese, a people naturally
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over-kind and indulgent to children, are also averse to discipline. "u Yet during the traditional period Confucianism prevailed over all rival ideologies, for its stress upon filial piety gave it abiologically- based social ethic of great force, an ethic known in all societies, but brought to its highest development in China.
Did this ethic allow for maximum personal growth? Could the identity of the filial son provide a rewarding sense of existence? Fung Yu-lan answers in the affirmative:
It is by becoming a father or a son, a husband or a wife, that an indi- vidual enlists himself as a member of society and it is by this enlistment that a man differentiates himself from the beasts. In serving his father and sovereign, a man has not given up his personality. On the contrary, it is only in these services that his personality has its fullest development. 12
Hu Shih, another contemporary Chinese scholar, expresses the opposite opinion:
All the much-idealized virtues of filial piety simply could not exist; and in those rare cases where they were consciously cultivated, the price paid for them was nothing short of intense suppression, resulting in mental and physical agony. 13
There is no doubt truth in both views. Filialism offered one a firm and respectable self-image;but many outwardly filial sons must have experienced profound inner hostilities toward their ostensibly revered fathers. And there is no doubt that society feared this hos- tility: in rare cases where parents accused their sons of being "un- filial," the latter were publicly disgraced, sometimes whipped by a magistrate to the point of death. Crimes of parricide were treated as desecrationsof the most dangerous sort: the culprit was not only beheaded and his body mutilated, but his house was razed to the ground, his immediate neighbors and teacher were punished, the district magistrate deprived of his office and disgraced, and higher provincial officials degraded in rank. 14
Clearly then, rebelliousness had to be repressed, which must have resulted in a significant amount of unconscious guilt. The prohibi- tion and repression of rebelliousness also undoubtedly contributed
(at least during the Ch'ing Dynasty) to the stagnation within Chi- nese society, to individual passivity, to rationalization of the exist- ing order, and to impotence rather than action in the face of a
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declining civilization.
How did Confucian proponents of filialism deal with such grave
emotional problems? They returned, in true fundamentalist fashion, to the classical texts, seeking to sanctify their message on the basis of such passages as the following:
The body is that which has been transmitted to us by our parents. Dare any one allow himself to be irreverent in the employment of their legacy? If a man in his own house and privacy be not grave, he is not filial. If in discharging the duties of his office, he be not serious, he is not filial. If with friends he be not sincere, he is not filial. If on the field of battle he be not brave, he is not filial. If he fail in these five things the evil (of disgrace) will reflect on his parents. Dare he be but serious?
The fundamental lesson for all is filial piety. . . . True love is the love of this; true propriety is the doing of this; true righteousness is the Tightness of this; true sincerity is the being sincere in this; true strength is being strong in this. Music springs from conformity to this; punish- ments come from violations of this. . . . Set up filial piety, and it will fill the space from heaven to earth. Spread it out and it will extend over all the ground to the four seas. Hand it down to future ages and it will be forever observed. Push it on the eastern sea, the western sea, the southern sea, and the northern sea, and it will be everywhere the law of men, and their obedience to it will be uniform. 15
Whatever its strains, filialism was the source of the predominant identity of traditional China, a basic ideal against which any other form of self-image had to be judged. To be regarded as "unfilial" was to be placed beyond the pale. The heritage of the filial son was one of the strongest and most enduring national identities ever created.
Transitional Rebellion: The Modern Student
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the world of the young Chinese intellectual had drastically changed, especially in his relationship to the ideology of filial piety. In fact, he had apparently made a complete about face: "The new China must eradicate the Confucian rules of obedience which make slaves of men. " 16 These words, written in 1916, typify the spirit of the "New Tide" or "Renaissance Movement" which was then beginning to flourish among rebellious avant-garde intellectuals, and especially among the young. Rather than being considered "the root of all virtue," filial
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piety was being denounced as "the source of all evils. " To be sure, not every young intellectual felt this way; but such was the power of this cultural countertrend17 that all were significantly affected by it. As one Chinese commentator observed,
The inner life of the youth of China was thus completely changed, for the ancient motto of China was: "W alk slowly behind the elders; revere the past/* while the motto of China's youth today is "self-expression. " 18
During the most active years of this movement (1915-1920), matters came to a head for China both in its national history and in the life patterns of its young students. China had long been lag- ging in its cultural creativity, deficient in social progress, woefully behind the West in technology. Although the Ch'ing Dynasty had been overthrown in 1911, the revolutionary movement had foun- dered; political chaos went hand in hand with social deterioration. And young intellectuals were aware of a similar sense of discon- tinuity in their own lives. Although traditional forms had already lost much of their hold, the emotions lingered on. Parents con- tinued to convey to their children in one way or another the filial principles upon which moral behavior should be based, even if (as was true of Hu) the social structure made it impossible to practice these principles. No longer capable of offering a sense of existential harmony, the identity of the filial son now seemed archaic and intolerably passive. Confucianism had become a rigid and nar- row orthodoxy: its voice was still heard, but to young ears it had a hollow ring. To Chinese youth, Western ideas and techniques seemed much more attractive than did the decaying institutions immediately around them. The cohesion and continuity of the traditional period disappeared, to be replaced by intellectual shop- ping and acute ideological hunger.
There had been important attempts at reform before this, be- ginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But they had usually followed the characteristic Chinese pattern of "finding in antiquity the sanction for present-day changes. " Faced with over- whelming threats from the West, both ideological and technolog- ical, reformers had maintained the ethnocentric hope of using Western knowledge for practical purposes only, while maintaining the more precious Chinese "essence. "19 They had wished to re- vitalize, rather than replace, the ideology of filial piety. This was
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even to some extent true for those early reformers to whom the modern student looked for inspiration, among them men still in- tellectually active at the time of the New Tide.
K'ang Yu-wei (1858-1937) was one of these early leaders. First at the turn of the century and then again during the New Tide itself, he bitterly criticized both the practices of traditional Chinese families ("They present a harmonious picture from the outside, but inside there is an unescapable and overwhelming atmosphere of hatred"), and the demand for filial piety within them ("Birds and animals care for their young but ask no reward. Real love does not ask for recompense"). Yet in his prescription for Utopia 20 (Ta-tung Shur The Book of Great Unity) he took Confucius himself as his authority, painting the Sage as a misunderstood Messiah. K'ang's famous pupil, Liang Chi-chao? went even further in his condemna- tion of the old order, and in his acceptance of Western ideas; but he returned from a post-World War I trip to Europe disillusioned with the West, and looked again to China's past for spiritual values.
In the New Tide, the modern student found something different from all that had gone before: a movement which advocated a break with tradition that would be both deliberate and decisive, and which made a special plea for young people to assume leadership within it. "It is the youth who must save this great revolution from the powers of the past/' wrote Ch'en Tu-hsiu, one of the leading figures of the New Tide, in the magazine which he edited appropriately entitled The New Youth. The modern student was even given a blueprint for the identity change asked of him: the "old youth"--weak, ef- feminate, devoid of militancy, seeking only wealth and high posi- tion--was to be supplanted by the "new youth"--courageous, strong, free of parental domination, idealistic, and patriotic. 21 In this national and personal transformation, the "two gentlemen" to follow, according to Ch'en, were "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Sci-
ence. " Democracy and science were defined specifically in relation- ship to the problem at hand: democracy meant release from the bondage of Confucian filial piety, the attainment of equality be- tween men and women, the opportunity for individual expression; science meant opposition to traditional Chinese thought, and its replacement by modern Western learning. 22 Here was the dichot- omy (relived by Hu and George Chen) between the "irrational past" and the "rational future. " And in the accompanying literary
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renaissance, the "new youth" were urged to express themselves in clear, forceful, conversational language--"in the living language of the people"--rather than in the effete and frequently obscure clas- sical style. 23
This was precisely the direction in which the modern student wished to go. His group identity had come into being with modern schools and universities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emergence of a Youth Movement gave him sudden prominence. The universities and upper middle schools offered him a forum for his rebellion, and an identity to challenge that of the filial son (as was true for Hu and George Chen). Fre- quently feeling persecuted by his family (and sometimes, like Hu, suffering at the hands of members of older generations made des- perate by the crumbling of the world they had known) the modern student plunged eagerly into the new group life. Thus, a celebrated and widely-read novel of the thirties, The Family, whose story is laid during the time of the New Tide, describes the young hero's isolation and misery when among family members: "He was sud- denly overwhelmed by a strange feeling of solitude. It was as if all the other members of his family were far away, as if they lived in a different world. He felt cold, as though he were oppressed by un- speakable sorrow and anguish," and contrasts this with his joy and trust when working among his friends for the new ideals they shared.
Here he feels that he is not an outsider, not a lonely man. He loves the other young men around him; they love him. He understands them; they understand him.