Gan Yang, Tongsantong, chapter 1

Gan Yang, “Unifying the Three Traditions” in the New Era:  The Merging of Three Chinese Traditions”

甘阳，“新时代的“通三统”：中国三种传统的融汇,” chapter one of  通三统 (Beijing:  Sanlian shudian, 2007), pp. 1-13, 45-49. 

N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction

Although he has published sparingly compared to figures like Wang Hui 汪晖 (b. 1959) or Xu Jilin 许纪霖 (b. 1957), Gan Yang 甘阳 (b. 1952) is a major figure in the thought world of contemporary China, known both for the ideas he has espoused as for his efforts at institution-building.  He first came to prominence during the “culture fever” 文化热 of the 1980s as the chief editor of the influential book series “Culture:  China in the World” 文化：中国与世界, which made available hundreds volumes of translations of Western thought and philosophy to Chinese readers. Gan himself studied Western philosophy, first at Beijing University and subsequently at the University of Chicago.

Gan’s intellectual orientations have varied over the years.  His engagement with the “China in the World” series gives the impression that he was a Westernizing liberal in the 1980s, but as he explains in the text translated here, he sees the West not as a model to be followed or imported, but as a body of historical experiences and institutional experiments that China should learn from, if not copy.  Gan also identifies with many of the stances of China’s New Left, as illustrated by William Sima and Tang Xiaobing’s translation of Gan’s “Liberalism:  For the Aristocrats or for the People?” also published in this volume, in which Gan’s preference for mass democracy is clear.  Gan also embraces a certain cultural conservatism, as illustrated by his discussion of “unifying the three traditions” in the text translated here, which on occasion positions him close to China’s New Confucians.  In the preface to the volume from which this translation is drawn, Gan includes a long discussion of Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858-1927) and Kang’s efforts to imagine a future world where Confucian civilization would be part of a new universal modernity.  Studies of Kang have subsequently become a staple of the Mainland New Confucian repertoire, insisting that Kang, rather than Sun Yat-sen or Mao Zedong, should be seen as the architect of modern China.

Compared with the bombastic tone of many authors touting the “China model” today, Gan’s text recalls an era when Chinese were more modest about their accomplishments and their heritage.  Yet despite its simplicity and its lack of scholarly flourish, the text translated here on “unifying the three traditions” set the template for the evolution of much of the Chinese thought world in the period since China’s rise.  Gan argues that the task before China is to effect the merging of the “three traditions” that undergird China’s modern experience:  the Confucian tradition (elitism, affective personal and local relationships), the Maoist tradition (equality and justice), and the Dengist tradition (markets and competition).  Gan’s argument is essentially conservative; like many others thinkers across China’s ideological spectrum, he believes that China needs to find a new equilibrium after a century of revolution.  Appropriately, his idea of “merging the three traditions” draws on Confucian discourse concerning the evolution of China’s classical civilization:  the “unification” of the varied historical experiences of the Xia 夏, Shang 商 and Zhou 周 dynasties over the course of the three millennia before China’s first political unification under Qinshihuang 秦始皇 (259-210 BC).  The argument, first advanced by Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179-104 BC) in the Western Han period, is that despite important differences in terms of culture and institutions, and in spite of the violence that marked dynastic transitions, rulers of the successive dynasties sought out continuities linking one regime to another, which the Zhou kings crystallized into an institutional and ritual order that laid the framework for centuries of enduring, stable Confucian rule.

One may question the accuracy of this origin myth; after all, China did not become thoroughly Confucian until the Song dynasty, more than a thousand years after the end of the Zhou period, and thinkers like Qin Hui 秦晖 (b. 1953) have argued that the basic institutional wiring of China’s classical political order was more Legalist than Confucian.  But Gan’s argument speaks to a powerful yearning within contemporary Chinese culture to find peace with itself and with its past.  Gan is saying, in essence, that Chinese do not have to choose between market efficiency and social justice, or between being modern and being Chinese.  All it takes is the creativity and imagination to rethink China’s recent historical experience in the light of China’s imminent return to great power status. 

One might object that “unifying the three traditions” cannot occur without ignoring the manifest discontinuities that make up modern Chinese history, but Gan’s proposal electrified the Chinese thought world, and Liberals, New Confucians and New Leftists all began to experiment with the basic periodization of modern and contemporary Chinese history in search of a new formulation that would restore continuity to China’s modern experience.  In the process, scholars added and subtracted “traditions” as they sought to fill in the details of Gan’s original template and build their arguments for the kind of state and society they would like China to become.  The most audacious among them, like the Mainland New Confucian Chen Ming 陈明 (b. 1962), basically ignored China’s socialist tradition in his pursuit of a “Confucian interpretation of the China dream.”  The liberal constitutional scholar Gao Quanxi 高全喜 (b. 1962) built his argument around key “constitutional moments” in modern and contemporary Chinese history which are leading to the establishment of a post-revolutionary order.

​Scholarly enthusiasm for recasting the foundational myths of modern and contemporary China over the past decade has ultimately produced a backlash.  Gan Yang himself has scolded Mainland New Confucians for their overly ardent embrace of Kang Youwei, and the legal scholar Jiang Shigong 强世功 (b. 1967), in what looks to be an authoritative 2018 essay linked to Xi Jinping’s efforts to reimpose ideological uniformity on China’s thought world, brings the three traditions back onto orthodox ground, identifying them as Mao Zedong’s tradition, in which China stood up, Deng Xiaoping’s tradition, in which China got rich, and Xi Jinping’s tradition, in which China is becoming powerful.

It is too early to tell if Xi Jinping’s attempts to control China’s narrative will succeed, or if the efforts by Chinese intellectuals to rethink China’s recent past and future will continue.  In any event, Gan Yang’s essay on “unifying the three traditions” stands as one of the most influential texts shaping intellectual currents in the age of rising China.
 
Translation of Lecture presented at Tsinghua University on May 12, 2005    
 
The Coexistence of Three Traditions in Contemporary China (pp. 1-13)

At present, we can identify three traditions in China.  One is the tradition that has taken shape after 25 years of reform.  Although this is not a lengthy tradition, many ideas and terms that have grown out of reform and opening are already deeply impressed on the people’s minds and have entered into the daily language of the Chinese people, basically becoming a kind of tradition.  This tradition has, for the most part, grown out of the “market,” and includes many concepts with which we are all familiar today, such as freedom and rights.  Another tradition is that beginning with the establishment of the People’s Republic and that took form during the Mao Zedong era.  This is a tradition characterized particularly by its emphasis on equality and justice. It is clear today that from the mid- to late-1990s onward, the Maoist tradition of equality has been quite powerful, and beginning in the mid-1990s there has been a great deal of discussion of the Mao era.  Ten years earlier, this would have seemed impossible, but the Maoist tradition of equality has become a powerful tradition in contemporary China.  Finally, of course there is also the tradition of Chinese civilization, forged over thousands of years.  This is what we often call Chinese traditional culture or Confucian culture.  It is often difficult to describe Chinese traditional culture, but in the everyday life of the Chinese people it is basically expressed, to put it simply, in terms of interpersonal relationships and ties of locality.  This can be seen very clearly in many current television dramas in today’s China, especially those focusing on the family or on marriage and divorce.

The coexistence of these three traditions is an extremely unique feature of Chinese society, particularly on the Chinese mainland.  If we make a comparison with Hong Kong society, we note that it has the first tradition (the tradition of markets and freedom) as well as the third tradition (highly developed sensitivity to interpersonal relations and ties of locality), but it lacks the second tradition, a tradition with a strong emphasis on “equality.”  For this reason, even if Hong Kong is a very unequal society, and even if many people are working to relieve this inequality, the problem of inequality has never provoked an intense ideological conflict.  From another perspective, if we make a comparison with the United States, it has the first two traditions, with a strong emphasis on both freedom and equality—in fact we might say that the tension between these two traditions constitutes the basic national character of the United States—but America does not have the third tradition, and thus pays less attention to interpersonal relationships and locality ties, and especially lacks the cultural traditions and cultural psychology that lie behind China’s third tradition.

Yet we often observe, in discussions in contemporary China, that these three traditions seem to be placed in a position of mutual opposition.  Some people will particularly emphasize one tradition while rejecting the others.  Everyone has surely felt that Chinese society, since the 1990s, has been full of debate, and that these debates have come to influence even people’s individual lives.  Good friends whose relationships go back for decades suddenly have opposing viewpoints, and when the divergences become important, the friendship is threatened, which leaves everyone hurt.  This is because in some of these larger debates, particularly those concerning the Mao era, differences of opinion are quite large, and the debates easily become emotional.