Hsu Cho-Yun and China's Spiritual Crises

Hsu Cho-Yun, “Contemporary China’s Two Spiritual Crises”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
This is one of the texts translated for the collaborative project with GreatFire on Reading and Writing under Chinese Censorship, as an example of something that was published online in China and subsequently taken down.
 
Hsu Cho-Yun (b. 1930) is well-known Chinese scholar and public intellectual.  He was born on the mainland and grew up amidst the disruption and suffering of the Sino-Japanese War before relocating to Taiwan following the Communist victory – his father had worked in the KMT government.  He did his undergraduate and master’s degrees at National Taiwan University and then went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.  He subsequently taught at the University of Pittsburgh for most of career.  When he returned to Taiwan after his retirement he played an important role in Taiwan’s democratization, rallying intellectuals to support the movement and then helping to consolidate the new democratic regime.
 
Hsu trained as an historian but became increasingly interested in archaeology over time.  Like other scholars, early in his career he produced specialized studies, particularly of the Han and Zhou periods, and moved toward broader, more readable narratives of Chinese history and Chinese culture as he matured.  At the same time, he evolved to become a public intellectual, writing books about America for the Chinese audience and weighing in on questions of how traditional Chinese culture might possess the wisdom to save modern capitalism from itself.
 
The text translated here is part of Hsu’s work as a public intellectual.  In 2023 he published what may well be his final book, Latitudes and Longitudes of Historical China 經緯華夏 (I just completed the English translation for the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press), and to market the book gave a lecture series in China called “the current world situation and the future of mankind.”  I suspect that “Contemporary China’s Two Spiritual Crises” was part of this engagement.
 
In terms of content, Hsu’s jeremiad is consistent with his message of the past few years, which is that the modern capitalist order is devouring itself, driven by greed and selfishness.  China’s growth during reform and opening was of course positive for China and for the world, but China now is part of this same world that finds itself on the brink of disaster. 

Like many other Chinese intellectuals, Hsu believes that the spirit of the historical Confucian engagement with the world is in the abstract healthier and better balanced than its capitalist counterpart, although Hsu readily acknowledges that this Confucian spirit was defeated in practice by Chinese authoritarianism.  Indeed, to his mind, things have been going downhill in Confucian China since the Han period, rather a long period of decline.  Still, Hsu cannot help but feel that the world needs to be led by elite intellectuals who will work for the general good, and thus hopes that some kind of Confucian renewal may save the day.
 
It is not difficult to imagine why China’s censors might not have appreciated Hsu’s observations.

 
Crisis Number One: Chinese Culture is Tawdry

Ever since the May Fourth Movement [and its intentional rupture with the Confucian tradition], Chinese culture has existed basically in books, as well as in remote corners of poor villages. Culture influences how the people live and behave.  In today’s world, there is too great a difference between lowbrow and highbrow culture.  The songs of Kunqu Opera[2] cannot compete with pop music.  Similarly, it’s a big deal if a good book sells ten or twenty thousand copies, while a piece of literary trash can sell millions.  Entertainment magazines, fashion magazines, and gossip rags all sell like hotcakes. In other words, it is not an exaggeration or an injustice to say that today’s Chinese culture is tawdry.
 
Culture draws on vast resources to construct a superficially splendid world. A typical example is the director Zhang Yimou's style, which is a spectacle of sound, light and color, but without meaning.  All Zhang does is to take China’s four great contributions to humanity [the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing], but these belong to history, not to the present day.  None of his music or literature has cultural content; he can't find a poet to read good literature, nor has he written a memorable song.  Am I right?

Is all of this recent? Not at all.  Things were already like this in the Qianlong era (1736-1795), by which time Chinese culture already was void of content.  It was all adornment with nothing unique at the core.  So today’s Chinese culture is nothing a dead skin, with no meat or soul, something that causes me great pain. 

Everyone insists today that “national studies are super popular,” but there is no one in China like Bai Xianyong[3] (b. 1937) spending time with Kunqu Opera.  All of us are worn out and lifeless, our resources spent.  Those who once were part of the elite have become common, and the meaning we once possessed is now mere ornament.  This is true for music and for other art forms.  Again, I’m not talking just about today.  We’ve been going downhill for about a century, which is something of a paradox.  On the one hand we see democracy, universal education, and the broad respect for human rights as good things, but at the same time, once everyone becomes equal, the excellent and unique things we should making are in fact tawdry.

A Beethoven never appears among the people; it’s not that every thousand people will produce a Beethoven.  Elites should inhabit the world of culture, but the forces that once produced them are in retreat, which is why we are where we are.  This is crisis number one.

Crisis Number Two:  The Collapse of Social Values

The second crisis is the systematic collapse of values (which is a worldwide phenomenon).  Given the past three centuries that have produced the present day, we should no longer be sloganeering about modernity; modernity in practice is called modernization.

The past three centuries have produced capitalism, ideas of democracy and human rights, and the scientific spirit, all of which have common roots in having sloughed off the power and influence of Catholicism, restoring the direct relationship between man and God, so that people had something to believe it.

God did not make man for nothing but gave him certain powers and wisdom.  All of humanity is equal, meaning that no one can be oppressed or shackled, because we should all be free.
 
From another angle, in the minds of scientists, God’s law became the laws of nature.  Nature has always been present, so that in fact God’s law and the law of nature are the same.  We have to assume the existence of such laws, because otherwise science would not be able to make sense of things.

This same assumption led the earliest capitalists to work themselves to the bone in the search for glory and to achieve their mission; trustworthiness and “credit” were the basis for capitalism, because in the absence of credit banks could not loan money or invest or trust in their customers.

The root cause of the present economic turmoil (the 2008 financial crisis) is that there were no internal values to restrain behavior, so the CEOs in power became dishonest and immoral, and used the market as a cover to steal vast amounts of shareholders' property.  They failed to live up to the trust of shareholders, and trading on the stock market became a form of gambling.  Stock ownership has become so dispersed and the movement of stocks so rapid that the stocks themselves no longer exist, and everything is just a wager. 
 
The millions of small stockholders have no way to exercise their power as stockholders.  No one knows where their stocks actually are, to say nothing of using their rights to supervise the managers.  So the managers have no fear, nor are they restrained by workplace norms.  When FDR put the New Deal in place after 1932, there were laws concerning the management of capital, and an entire set of measures to protect labor and restrain capital.  However, over the course of the postwar era, American power and money have together managed to peel back the laws one by one, so that there are no longer laws to fight against illegality and unfairness.  The people have no control, shareholders have no control, nor does the notion of conscience.
 
Given the speed with which things are changing today, the social structure will surely change as well, but we do not know what these changes will be.  The most important thing is how the billions of people who inhabit this earth will live together, how they will tolerate one another, how they will build another world in which humanity can bend to one another’s needs and coexist.  I mean at the village level as well as at planetary level, conflicts among individuals as well as wars between countries.  What values will we use to adjudge these conflicts?
 
This is a serious issue.  We are now transforming, and the coming mutation can take two forms.  When a snake mutates, it sheds its skin to become bigger and newer, but it’s still a snake.  We cannot allow this kind of mutation because it will end in a huge collapse, whereas what we need is a great breakthrough.  This breakthrough is like the butterfly that emerges from the caterpillar, although most scholars pay no attention to what kind of butterfly humankind should become. 
 
Most scholars are publishing their little papers and trying to get promoted or get a grant.  Pop culture is simply looking for the next new thing, but none of this amounts to anything.  We should all be looking for a set of values that will allow us to live together:  what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad, what is beautiful.  This is what is most worrisome.

How to Get Beyond the Spiritual Crisis.

Given where we are, China should search through its traditional culture for things that can fill the gaps.  But today’s Confucians only talk about details, not about the essence of things.  Many scholars cover up their shallowness with verbosity and mask their lack of substance behind superficial slogans.  Since the beginning of reform and opening, China has not invested in the spiritual or the cultural realm.   This is especially true in the past couple of decades, in which people have lived in fear and dare not take initiative.  For this reason, simply insisting that “China has stood up” is not enough.
 
China’s economy is impressive.  No one starves in China anymore.  I am very impressed by China’s capacity to respond to disasters.  Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s much better than it has ever been, which is something we should respect.  But in terms of education, China should not shackle people’s thought or wrap the people up in dogma but should instead allow people to think freely.  Chinese scholars today continue to worship the West and are very conservative, two things that go together.  They cling to the old ways and are unable to see the big picture, so they look for what they need in the West, because they lack the spirit of self-regeneration.  They have intelligence and talent but dare not use them to solve their own problems of spiritual confusion and hunger, which is cause for concern. 

My goal is to build new values based on people, because people are real.  You can question and deny everything else, but not people.  If you respect yourself, then you must respect someone else who projects their image onto you, as well as the image you project onto them.  This chain of projection can extend infinitely.  If we take this as the definition of a beautiful, kind, upright, and fair society, then no one will want to suffer injustice. If they extend this to others, perhaps we can build new values on this basis.
 
Notes

[1]许倬云, “当代中国的两大精神危机,” published on 新少数派 on February 18, 2023. 
 
[2]Translator’s note:  Kunqu Opera is one of the best known of many of China’s styles of traditional opera.  It originated in Suzhou, but later spread throughout much of China, adapting to local dialects and audiences. 

[3]Translator’s note:  Bai Xianyong (or Pai Hsien-Yung) is well-known writer from Taiwan, who taught at UC Santa Barbara for much of his career.  Over the past few decades, he has sought to revive, modernize, and promote Kunqu Opera, which is what Hsu Cho-Yun is referring to here.