Bringing the World Home : Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Abstract

I reserve particular thanks to Ming Feng-ying for both putting up with and encouraging the final stages of finishing this long labor.1912] achievement could have been attained without Japan, the story's missing key.''In fact, one of the major concerns of Reynolds' book is to supply this missing story, the proper understanding of which he maintains has been ''retarded severely by academic taboos that bar from consideration the element of Japan, which alone can explain what happened and how.''45 In elucidating why this story has been ignored, Reynolds is in agreement with other scholars in assuming that Japan's long history of aggression and imperialism toward China after 1915 is accountable.46 What is striking, however, is that even in what Reynolds labels the ''Golden Decade'' of the late Qing, when Sino-Japanese amity and cooperation were at their height, there is little serious analysis in China-as opposed to exhortations to emulate the political institutions-of the root causes of Japanese success.This paucity of analysis certainly contrasts with the intense scrutiny of Western society and history that we shall see illustrated in Yan Fu's writings, the focus of chapter 2.Writing toward the beginning of the period, for instance, the great late-Qing moderate reformer Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) adduces a number of reasons in urging Chinese students to study in Japan: ''[The Japanese language] is close to Chinese, making for ease of comprehension; there are vast numbers of Western books, and whatever is trivial in Western learning has already been sifted through [in Japan].The situations and customs of China and Japan are similar, and [ Japan] is thus easy to imitate.''47 The view of Japan here is little more than as the most convenient path to Western learning.Even more striking is that, as we shall see in chapter 10, Lu Xun, writing in Tokyo in 1907-1908 at the height of the ''Golden Decade,'' has virtually nothing to say about the Japanese I met in Canton some of the chief officials of the revolutionary government, the chief justice, the foreign secretary, and others.I was astonished.They were exactly like American undergraduates.Their whole mentality, so far as I could see, was American. . . .This conversion may, of course, be superficial.There may be underlying it an unchanged basis of Chinese character.It is these young men that have made the revolution and established the Republic; they are doing all they can to sweep away the old China, root and branch, and build up there a reproduction PA R T I Late Qing Ideas C H A P T E R 1 China as OriginFor domination today is rarely justified through oracles, ritual superiority, or claims to birth rights; domination is now more frequently justified in terms of better acquaintance with universal knowledge and better access to universal modes of acquiring knowledge.Ashis Nandy, ''Shamans, Savages, and the Wilderness: On the Audibility of Dissent and the Future of Civilizations'' Even in submitting to the dominance of a world order it is powerless to change, nationalism remains reluctant, complaining, demanding, sometimes angry, at other times shamefaced.

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