No More Learning

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.
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 355
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
? 356 THOUGHT REFORM
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
? GRACE WU: MUSIC AND REFORM 357
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
? 358 THOUGHT REFORM
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
? 360 THOUGHT REFORM
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-
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 361
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
? 362 THOUGHT REFORM
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,
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 363
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-
? 364 THOUGHT REFORM
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
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 365
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
? 366 THOUGHT REFORM
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
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 367
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
? 368 THOUGHT REFORM
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
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 369
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
? 370 THOUGHT REFORM
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. He can trust them; they can trust him. 24
Although these feelings are in many ways very similar to those experienced by generations of Westerners as they emancipate them- selves from family control, this youth identity was in China a vitally important part of the cultural countertrend. The term ch'mg-m'en, "youth," which had little significancein the past, took on a new and revealing meaning; it came to suggest articulate young advocates
(including women, and to some extent peasants and laborers, rather than only male gentry-literati) of political radicalism and social reform: new generations of youth who married later, often resisting their parents' marital arrangements for them, and who demanded independent lives physically and emotionally separate from parental control. 25
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 371
Almost overnight the modern student seemed to step into an identity which allowed him to be active rather than passive, which offered him a sense of logic and purpose rather than meaningless compliance with tradition, and an opportunity for self-realization rather than self-denial. So strong was the reaction against Con- fucianism, and so timely the New Tide's appeal, that the Chinese student movement during the transitional period achieved a power and influence unmatched by any similar movement in the modern world. This power was demonstrated in the celebrated "May 4th Movement" of 1919, in which student demonstrations sparked an effective national protest against the humiliating Versailles Peace Treaty; in the "May joth Movement" of 1925, another mass demon- stration against imperialism; and in the continuous student agita- tion against the Nationalist Government (in which Hu and Grace Wu participated) prior to the Communist takeover. The first of these, the 1919 May 4th Movement, was particularly significant as a turning point: as one authority put it, "Henceforward, agitation by students gave an ever more powerful impetus to the release, slow or violent, of the forces of change in China. "26
In simultaneouslyrebelling against his family and usurping social authority, the modern student was being far from filial, and this was bound to cause him suffering. Even if he went on to become
(like Hu) an extreme rebel, an avenger, or a would-be martyr, the filial son within him was likely to remain very much alive. After thousands of years, it was not to be easily destroyed. In this respect, the modern student's inner life resembled the state of his country: immobile tradition, petrified into traditionalism, existed side-by- side with iconoclastic and totalistic revolutionary urges. Indeed, the psychological strength of the filial tradition was attested to by the immense energies necessary to attack it: that part of the past which resides within oneself is most difficult to sweep away.
No one expressed this inner dilemma more powerfully than Lu Hsun, the greatest of modern Chinese writers and the leading literary spirit of the New Tide Movement. His short story, "The Diary of a Madman/' which appeared in The New Youth in 1918, is one of the most effective condemnations of traditional Chinese society ever written. The author speaks through his hero, a mad- man-sage, who, in his persecutory fears, evokes a twilight world be- tween delusion and reality. The story's theme is the "man-eating"
? 372 THOUGHT REFORM
nature of traditional Chinese society, a theme which is expressed on several simultaneous levels of symbolism. The hero notices the threatening faces of the people around him, and from various bits of evidence concludes that they are going to kill and eat him. Wondering what he has done to cause their enmity, he decides that it must result from his earlier rebellion:
Twenty years ago I trampled the daily account book [a derogatory al- lusion to the Classics] of Mr. Hoary Tradition under my feet. . . . I did not thinlc that I could be considered a wicked man, but . . . I am no longer so sure. They seem to think so . . . they have a way of brand- ing anyone they don't like as a wicked man.
In a further quest for understanding, he studies ancient history. He finds that despite the high moral claims ("over every page was scrawled the words 'Benevolence and Righteousness'"), in reality "the book was nothing but a record of man-eating"; and that "this world in which I had moved about for half a lifetime has been for over four thousand years a man-eating world. " He thinks of can- nibalistic practices which actually occurred in Chinese society and decides, "Everyone wants to eat others but is afraid of being eaten himself, and so everyone looks at everyone else with such profound distrust and suspicion. " The leader of the man-eaters around him, he discovers, is none other than his older brother (the father's representative in the family, and here a symbol of family authority); he decides to begin with his brother, first in "cursing man-eating men," and then in converting them from their evil ways. But his pleas ("y? u must repent . . . change at once . . . you must know that the future has no place for man-eating men") are ignored-- out of wickedness and because of the habit of rationalization. "Some felt that it had always been so and that it was as it should be, while others knew that it was wrong, but wanted to eat just the same. "
Only then does he come to a terrible realization that he too is among the guilty. He recalls his older brother's having taught him an old principle of filial piety: the belief (which really has existed) that if a parent is sick, the child should cut off a piece of his own flesh, boil it, and feed it to the parent as medicine. Since this brother was in charge of the family at the time of his sister's death, he decides (with the logic of a madman-sage) that "they ate my
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 373
younger sister"; and since he also partook of the family meals, "it is not at all impossible that I had myself eaten a few slices of my sister's flesh! " He comes to know "how difficult it is to find a true and innocent man," The only hope lies with the young, and the story ends: "Maybe there are still some infants that have not yet eaten men. Save, save the infants. " 27
Commentators have rightly emphasized this story's assault upon traditional Chinese society, but they have overlooked something else in it which is equally important: the desperate psychological plight--the intolerable anger and overwhelming sense of guilt--of the man who has chosen the path of rebellion. The story's hero is burdened by three great sins: first, having participated in and "tasted" the rewards of the "man-eating" society which he now condemns; second, defying four thousand years of authority in mak- ing this condemnation; and third, harboring within himself such explosive hatred.
Through his imaginative use of his hero's psychosis, Lu Hsun made contact with the emotions of the Chinese modern student as no other creative writer had before or has since. "The Diary of a Madman/' described as "the overture and finale" of his writings, evoked a sensational response. Young intellectuals found "man- eating" an apt description of their own attitudes toward their filial heritage, and the psychotic's suffering an expression of their own pain.
The antitraditional passions of the New Tide Movement--in both its political and literary expressions--set the tone for the en- tire transitional period. Emotions and ideas which had been smol- dering for several previous generations were now forcefully artic- ulated on a mass scale, and they continued to be shared and reinforced by succeeding generations of modern students until the Communist takeover in 1948-49. But the undermining of the gen- eral principle of filial piety (which the New Tide accelerated rather than initiated), far from satisfying the widespread ideological hunger, created an even greater ideological vacuum. Chinese intel- lectuals sought a more comprehensive set of beliefs and a more spe- cific program of action.
What psychological characteristics did they require of a unifying ideology they might embrace? Any such ideology would have to be rebellious in tone to encourage full expression of great hostility,
? 374 THOUGHT REFORM
to offer some relief for feelings of guilt, and to provide a solution to the broad crisis in identity which I have described. It would have to be a "modern" (and therefore Western) movement, and offer a program for economic development as well as some form of popular participation in government. It would inevitably call for a national resurgence achieved by casting off both Confucianism and Western imperialism. Consequently it had to supply some way to attack the past and yet feel pride in it, to condemn the West and yet use Western ideas to find a solution to Chinese problems. This was a big order, and contending ideologies were tortuously examined, experienced, and refashioned in a series of desperate attempts to find answers to problems which seemed always deepened rather than resolved by time.
The modern student (both during and after his student days) was confronted by three ideological alternatives, two of them or- ganized movements: the Chinese versions of Nationalism, liberal democracy, and Communism. Without attempting to trace a full history of any of these, we may ask to what extent each was able to satisfy the psychological requirements just mentioned.
By Nationalism, I mean the revolutionarymovement initiated by Sun Yat-sen, and subsequently embodied in Chiang Kai-chek's leadership of the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. Both Sun and Chiang won great personal acclaim; their call for a strong, modern Chinese government was supported fervently by modern students as well as by much of the rest of the Chinese population. Just after Sun's death, which occurred during the period following the May 3oth incident of 1925, Chiang brought the Nationalist movement to its greatest momentum and highest point of popularity. The "Second Revolution" of 1926-27 was successfully carried out in the midst of a wave of popular sentiment, mass demonstrations, and boycotts of Japan and the W est. The atmosphere was violently anti- imperialist, and therefore anti-Western.
Shared angers and shared hopes did at first unite intellectuals and peasants. But Nationalism's effectiveness as an ideology vir- tually stopped here: it was able to gain the allegiance of modern students, but as these students matured into harassed intellectuals they could not find within it a sustained program or a set of ideas to satisfy their emotional urges and their rational standards. Sun's "three people's principles" (Nationalism, People's Rights or De-
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 375
mocracy, and People's Livelihood) were acceptable enough but amorphous, and only the first was convincingly put into action. These principles came to be more a catechism recited by school children than a set of living beliefs. Nationalism took its forms from both Western liberalism and Russian Communism, but in a way which was frequently devoid of the inner meaning. It placed great stress upon modernization, but at the same time it joined forces with the traditionalists in hollow and ritualistic revivals of ancient Confucian values. The modern student usually found this combination of filial piety and Westernization an incompatible ideological admixture, which intensified rather than solved his guilt and identity problems. Increasingly, the intellectual drew a sharp line between himself and the bureaucrats, financiers, and mili- tary men of the Nationalist regime, and looked elsewhere for his ideological nourishment. Nationalism was indispensable to him, but he found in it no more than half an ideology.
The failure of liberal democracy is a much more complex story. By liberal democracy I mean that loose tradition developed in Eu- rope and America which advocated social reform, parliamentary government, and full expression of individual rights. It would be too facile to state categorically, with retrospective wisdom, the reasons why it could not have succeeded, although it did face extraordinary problems in meeting existing emotional demands. Its achievements in China were in fact considerable. It supplied the original inspiration for China's trend toward Westernization dur- ing and before the transitional period, and was the model for indi- vidual expression which lay behind the attack on filial piety.
Ch'en Tu-hsiu's ringing declarations inaugurating the New Tide movement, for instance, were inspired by the Manchester liberalist- like philosophy which he then espoused,28 although he later shifted his position and became one of the founders of the Chinese Com- munist Party (and still later was deposed as one of its first villains). Hu Shih, also a leading spirit in the New Tide, remained one of the most articulate spokesmen for liberal democracy throughout the transitional period. A disciple of John Dewey, he sought in the Chinese past a basis for the pragmatic, scientific approach of his teacher; and he accompanied the American philosopher on his celebrated and highly influential lecture tour of China in 1919-20. And Lu Hsun, although deified by the Communists and certainly
? 376 THOUGHT REFORM
a militant leftist, held fast to the liberal principles of "the right to life, the right to food and shelter, and the right to the unlimited development of the individual. " 29
Spread by missionaries, by Western and Chinese educators, and by Chinese students returning from the West, liberalism had tre- mendous appeal for the Chinese intellectual. But it could never satisfy his need for totalism, and its "drop-by-drop" moderation
(in Dewey's phrase) seemed weak in contrast with the messianic tone of its ideological competitors. Liberalism was least able to make sustained use of feelings of hostility and rebellion, and al- though its stress upon individualism inspired Chinese to challenge family authority, it offered little help for the resulting guilt and identity stress. It offered no lasting group identity to a people who had become dependent upon one, and no substitute for the filial loyalties being cast off. In addition, because of its Western origins, it bore the stigma of Western imperialism, no matter how strongly Chinese and Western liberals opposed to imperialism sought to dis- sociate themselves from this stigma. Liberalism also created a problem about "Chineseness" (as, for example, for Robert Chao and Grace Wu), since the individual Westernization which was likely to accompany any profound acceptance of liberal democratic ideas often led to a sense of being severed from Chinese roots.
Without entering further into the question of potential com- patibility between traditional Confucian humanism and modern liberal democratic ideals (and a case can be made for sucli com- patibility), we can say that no effective political-ideological form was evolved to unite them. Liberal democratic ideology during the transitional period therefore proved more effective in stimulating opposition to the past than in resolving pressing emotional con- flicts of the present.
Every Chinese intellectual to whom I spoke emphasized just how pressing these conflicts were. Even taking into account the general tendency during any such transitional period to stress only chaos
(some intellectuals must have lived relatively stable lives), there is no doubt that emotional chaos was widespread. Generations of young students had their patriotic emotions aroused but unsatisfied, their rebellious feelings frustrated, their guilt unresolved, their self- definition obscured. Sons and daughters clashed openly with their parents in a society ill-equipped to deal with such strife. While
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 377
great strides were made in youthful self-assertion and in the posi- tion of women, much remained confused. In father-son conflicts, compromises were often achieved at the price of great anguish for both parties. And the breakdown of clear-cut male and female roles often resulted in uncomfortably overt female domination, a recur- rent theme in our case histories. 30
Once initiated into the antitraditional, modern Western world, the Chinese intellectual could never reverse the psychological forces generated within him. The intense conflicts and visions experienced during youthful struggles to attain adult identity often remained throughout life, and the struggles of the modern student in many ways came to characterize the entire transitional period. Sometimes the former student activist, as he got older, seemed to slip back into a traditional pattern, honor his filial duties, then see his own rebel- lions mirrored in those of his son. But no matter how filial or how "modern" the Chinese intellectual appeared on the surface, some conflict between these two emotional tendencies was bound to be taking place underneath. His undigested combination of filialism, Nationalism, and Western liberalism was likely to leave him-- at different times and in different degrees--rebellious, withdrawn, disillusioned, despairing. Continuous war and plunder further sapped energies and hopes--early revolutionary battles, encounters between warlords, Japanese invasions, World War II, and the Communist- Nationalist Civil War. Governed during the latter phase of the transitional period by a group which had become "conservative and antirevolutionary" and out of touch with his own aspirations, the modern student shared in the "general bankruptcy of morale" 31 and turned his gaze toward Communism--if it was not already there.
Thought Reform: The Filled Communist
In Communism, his third ideological alternative, the Chinese intellectual found a no-nonsense solution for his spiritual predica- ment. What role did thought reform play in this solution? Was the cure worse than the disease?
The interplay between Chinese intellectuals and Communism began, not in 1948, but in 1919, immediately following the Russian Revolution. From then on, Communism became linked with
? 378 THOUGHT REFORM
China's own continuous revolution--emotionally, organizationally, and ideologically. Of all Chinese mass movements, Communism was most capable of harnessing the powerful emotions released in the youth-age cultural reversal;32 moreover, its revolutionaryinspira- tion and practical techniques were attractive to Nationalist leaders like Sun and Chiang, and its emphasis upon social reform was much admired by Westernized Chinese liberals.
Communism's greatest ideological weapon was perhaps the "grandiose, starkly melodramatic image of the world"33 provided by the Leninist theory of imperialism, the doctrine which placed on the Western nations and their international finance capital vir- tually the entire onus for China's (or any other "backward" coun- try's) wretched condition. Intellectuals of all shades of political opinion found in this theory a focal point for hostilities, a reassuring interpretation of a humiliating situation, a way to avoid the pain of their own struggles with shame and guilt by centering their ac- cusatory emotions upon an outside enemy, and a rationale for re- jecting that Western enemy even while borrowing his knowledge and methods. This kind of emotional relevance leads to great over- simplifications, and Chinese intellectuals magnified the part-truths of the Leninist theory into a "scientific" gospel.
Liberals, Nationalists, and even traditionalists espoused this theory, but it was really Communist property, an integral part of the broader Communist scheme. As the modern student moved from the Leninist theory to its surrounding Marxist-Leninist prin- ciples, which had great currency even outside the Communist move- ment, he found that this hostile critique reinforced his own Chi- neseness, so that even when he severely criticized China's past, he was able to avoid a sense of being completely alienated from it. And the unwavering boldness of Marxist-Leninist and Communist attacks on both Chinese tradition and the modern West saved him from both the confusing complexities of liberalism, and the fluctuating ethics of Kuomintang Nationalism. The three-fold Com- munist program was clear enough: break filial bonds, expell the harmful Westerner, and follow the Communist Party on the path to total redemption. Thus the modern intellectual could begin to see a possible solution for his long-standing emotional torment; not only could hostility be expressed and guilt atoned for, but there seemed to be the promise of an identity which was both new
? THE FATE OF FILIAL PIETY 379
and Chinese.
Yet at first, for most intellectuals, all of this was no more than a
possibility, and here is where thought reform enters the picture.