Xu Jilin on Traditional Chinese Culture

Xu Jilin, “Getting a Hold on Tradition Requires Building Cultural Consciousness”[1]
 
Introduction by David Ownby and Freya Ge, Translation by Freya Ge
 
Introduction
 
Xu Jilin (b. 1957) is Professor of History at East China Normal University and a leading liberal public intellectual in China.  As an academic, he cut his teeth on various issues in the intellectual history of modern and contemporary China, which prepared him for his subsequent role, beginning in the 2000s, as an astute observer of how China’s thought world reacted to China’s rise.  His essays on statism and historicism, which take China’s New Left to task for abandoning the people and embracing the state (see his Rethinking China’s Rise) remain highly relevant today.
 
The strictures of the Xi Jinping era have led liberals like Xu Jilin to trim their sails, not by going silent, but by changing the subject.  Over the past few years, Xu has written extensively on Black Lives Matter and identity politics in the United States, and on generational and youth issues in China (see here and here for translations on this site).  He has also developed an interest in China’s traditional culture, and the interview translated here is part of a marketing campaign for his new book The Pulse of China:  Fifty Lectures on Traditional Culture which came out in March 2021 (and at least some of which is available as individual lectures on the Dedao app).  I have not yet read the book, but have no doubt that it displays the same energy and curiosity Xu brings to all of his projects.
 
I suspect that the immediate inspiration for this project on traditional culture came from two concrete sources.  Xu has been giving weekend seminars to Chinese entrepreneurs for some time, and they are often very interested in traditional culture, particularly as understood from a sophisticated intellectual perspective.  In addition, Xu greatly enjoyed Hsu Cho-Yun’s The Transcendental and the Mundane:  Chinese Cultural Values in Everyday Life, in which Hsu revisits Chinese traditional culture and offers it as a remedy to some of the ills of the modern, thoroughly Western, world.  Xu Jilin wrote an enthusiastic preface to the Chinese edition of Hsu’s work, and perhaps thought that he would like to try his hand at something similar.
 
Little of this resonates with Freya Ge, however, who translated Xu’s essay.  For her and her friends, “traditional Chinese culture” still means the pressure of filial piety and the need to live up to parental expectations.  Of course there is value in traditions, but Freya would like to pick and choose as an individual, and not have tradition packaged for her by someone else.
 
Translation
 
The true traditional culture is the one that still impacts us today
 
South Reviews: You are a scholar of Chinese intellectual history. Why did you choose to publish a book on "traditional culture"? How do you view the relationship between traditional culture and current society?
 
Xu Jilin: You’re right, I do not study ancient Chinese culture directly, but instead modern Chinese thought and culture. However, the more we talk about modern Chinese thought and culture, the more we discover that modern China has not only been influenced by the West, but at the same time is also an extension of traditional Chinese culture, and this tradition is in our blood. Without a clear understanding of traditional culture, we cannot understand modern China, to say nothing of today’s China.
 
Not all culture is “traditional culture.”  Real traditional culture must continue to exert an influence today. 
 
Philosophy, religion, politics, and society are all part of culture. But in this book, I have chosen to focus on elements from traditional culture that continue to have an impact today, and I attempt to draw a comprehensive cognitive map of Chinese culture using a new framework that I call "the deep structure of Chinese culture." A world or a person only takes on meaning in a specific time and place. Once armed with my map, people dealing with the complexity of today's China can avoid losing their sense of space, and may arrive at a kind of cultural consciousness.  The more conscious we are, the more we can get a hold on our tradition, rather than our tradition getting a hold on us.
 
I always say that to understand knowledge, you have to understand context—text and context. Texts are composed of internal connections; one idea is linked to another, or to another text.  Context is the external connection, the specific time and place where the knowledge exists.  Therefore, the traditional Chinese culture I talk about in the book is a contextualized map: looking at it, we can see the complementary structural relationships between Confucianism, Mohism and Legalism, as well as how the relationships developed in time and space.
 
I try to present traditional culture in this kind of dual context, which includes the internal logic of the texts and its concrete relationship to an historical era. 
 
South Reviews:  In your book, you define traditional culture as knowledge that is “useless, but good.”  What do you mean?  Today, how can we tell whether the knowledge is useful or useless, good or bad? 
 
Xu Jilin: In the book I mention a story the writer Wang Xiaobo 王小波 (1952-1997) used to tell. The first time he went to an advanced class, a doddering old teacher went up to the podium and the first thing he said was:  "The knowledge I am going to teach you today is useless, but it is really good."
 
It really struck me when I read this. I find the same in my studies of history and culture, that the knowledge I learn from what I study is not necessarily useful, but it is really good. 
 
So what is useful knowledge and what is good knowledge? How can you tell the difference? The German thinker Max Weber said that human beings possess two types of rationality, instrumental rationality and value rationality. 
 
Instrumental rationality is used to gather useful knowledge and solve specific problems. It's like a toolbox full of hammers and wrenches...You pick whichever you need for your work. But these tools have no intrinsic value, they are just practical and easily interchangeable, and this is "useful knowledge." But the knowledge produced by value rationality can help to direct us toward meaning.  So good knowledge takes on value because it is knowledge that reveals meaning.[2] 
 
It is hard to say what is concretely useful about learning history and Chinese culture, but such "useless knowledge" can be of great use, just like Zhuangzi’s “usefulness of the useless.”  Good knowledge bestows meaning on people. Once we understand the humanities, philosophy, and religion, then how we view life, how we look at the world, even how we understand small things can "take on value," which is a function we should acquire. Good knowledge is not like a handy toolbox that that you take with you everywhere, but rather something you store up for future use, bringing it out at the right time.
 
It is very interesting that one of the most famous courses at Harvard in recent years is about ancient Chinese ethical and political theory. Why do Harvard students take this course? They hope that by understanding Eastern civilization, which is as great as the Western civilization, they can open their minds, have a better understanding of the person they are talking to, and increase their capacity for critical thinking.
 
Chinese and Western Civilizations, Ancient and Modern Cultures, are not in Opposition to One Another 
 
South Reviews: The core focus in Western culture is on god and man, while Chinese culture looks at heaven and man. From the perspective of culture, in both China and the West, people seem to care most about their relationship with some "mysterious power."  Why the similarities in terms of cultural psychology? 
 
Xu Jilin: Modern society is different from ancient society. In Max Weber’s terms, modern society is “disenchanted,” because the enchantment is gone. What is enchantment? Where does it come from? It comes from another world, which is called the transcendent world. With the development of technology, it is difficult for modern people to imagine a world other than the one we live in today. 
 
But ancient people could readily imagine such a world. In the West, this was "God's world;" in China, it was "the Way of Heaven or the meaning of Heaven.”  The further we go back in time, the less rational man is, and the more prone he is to fear that he cannot control his fate.  A hurricane comes and blows away his tribe’s tents; they planted the crops, but they were destroyed by hail and floods. The more you are afraid, the more you worship, like the wolf totem for the Mongols, which is another proof of what I am saying.[3] 
 
From this shared "fear" and "worship," we can also see that while we often talk about Chinese and Western cultures in terms of difference, in fact, these differences are not as great as we often think.
 
Why is this? Western civilization, Indian civilization, and Chinese civilization are all axial civilizations. These "axial civilizations," as the philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) dubbed them, include the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Chinese civilization. He said that these axial civilizations all shared the same concerns, and all had to solve two problems:  one is the relationship between people, which are ethical problems; and the other is the relationship between man and god, that is, between man and the transcendent world. Axial civilizations all have a transcendent nature and knowledge of the transcendent world, which also marks the difference between advanced and low-level civilizations. 
 
In the West, it's man and God. In China, it's man and heaven.  It is clear that their concerns are the same and they are looking at the same external environment.  These great civilizations arose at about the same time, faced the same questions, but came up with different answers. 
 
In fact, the differences don’t really matter. What's important is that we share common concerns, which serve as a basis for dialogue.  If you care about something I don't care about, then its apples and oranges and we have nothing to talk about.  It is because of these common concerns that we say that Chinese civilization can talk to Western civilization. Many Westerners with their own businesses are eager to understand and analyze Chinese culture, because they want to see if China came up with a different sort of wisdom to address our shared concerns.  For example, it is possible to find similarities in certain "theoretical presuppositions" shared by Eastern mysticism and quantum mechanics. 
 
Therefore, we should not "draw a clear line"[4] between the West and China, or between ancient and modern times, as if there were an unbridgeable gulf between them.  This is wrong.  We can transcend China and the West, as well as ancient and modern.  That's why we want to learn the meaning of traditional Chinese culture today. Why should I learn about it if it has nothing to do with who I am today? 
 
South Reviews: In contrast to the idea of valorizing traditional culture so as to "make the past serve the present," you argue in your book for a strategy of "de-contextualization" and an abstract inheritance of traditional culture. But once we have reappropriated is, it really traditional culture in anything but name?  Is traditional culture still itself?  
 
Xu Jilin: The "abstract inheritance method" I mentioned in my book was proposed by the philosopher Feng Youlan (1895-1990) in the 1960s. At the time we thought that Confucianism represented the dregs of feudal culture.  Feng Youlan believed that a concept can be separated from its context, abstracted out and interpreted in a new way, so that its core elements can still be handed down. 
 
This makes sense to me. In the 21st century, we have stripped away the context of the abstract theoretical concepts of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Mohism, etc., distilling their core and reinterpreting them so that "new shoots sprout new from old trees." 
 
Have we done this before? Of course.  In fact, Confucian culture is not immutable. In my book, I particularly stress the historical changes within Confucian culture itself, from Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Dong Zhongshu, to Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming dynasties, through the efforts of several generations of modern Confucians to incorporate “Western” philosophical thinking into “traditional” Confucianism. 
 
The same is true of the work we doing today. For example, one point I particularly stress in my book has to do with statements like " Subjects, sons, and wives must be absolutely obedient to their kings, fathers, and husbands."  These are surely “feudal dregs,” right?  But if we interpret it in a new way it can take on a new meaning. For example, if we say "The state must love the people, and at the same time, the people should be loyal to the state. One is the prerequisite for the other.” Might we be more likely to accept this? It's like a ship, where you can change the parts, but it's still the same ship, it's still the same structure, the same spirit. 
 
So we should not assume that tradition is dead and buried. Tradition is constantly changing, like flowing water, which is also its charm.
 
The Answers to Today's Social Problems Can be Found in Tradition 
 
South Reviews:  Traditional sayings like "Mencius's mother moved three times [before finding the proper environment for her child] 孟母三迁,” or “orphaned children and widowed mothers produce great scholars 孤儿寡母出人才,"[5] will always make people think of contemporary discussion of school districts and helicopter parents鸡娃.[6] Is it a cultural tradition to hope for the success of future generations and to pay the price, however high it may be? Why have people lived with this kind of pressure throughout history? 
 
Xu Jilin: This question actually has to do with the Confucian cultural tradition. There are many explanations for where it came from, and here is one from my good friend, the well known anthropologist Yan Yunxiang 阎云翔. As we all know, the core symbol of what we call modernization is the pursuit of "individuality," by which we mean individualism, the separation of the individual from the family. 
 
Yan Yunxiang has long been involved in a longitudinal study of the development of individuation in China. From the 1990s through the early 2000s, he found that children in rural areas were indeed increasingly likely to leave their families and hometowns and establish independent lives in the in cities. In the last decade, however, he has noted an important reversal: the "individualized" child has returned to the family network.[7] 
 
This is not hard to imagine: even if you graduate from a famous university, if you work in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen, you can't afford to buy a house, and you need your parents’ life-saving to help with the down payment.  Can you be independent? No, you can’t. Once you have a house and a baby, who will look after the baby? You will need to depend on your parents again, and when you child goes off to university, your parents are getting old and it is your turn to look after them. Professor Yan Yunxiang finds that in today's China, competition is between families, and individualization is impossible. 
 
From a cultural point of view, this has to do with Chinese people's understanding of their own lives. It is different from the Westerners’ thinking that the “child is a gift of God, so I’ll bring him up, and then give him back to God, and then he’ll be independent.”  There is no God in Chinese culture, and everyone's understanding of the meaning of his or her life in embedded in kinship.  This is the context within which they understand life.  Can sons and daughters achieve the dreams their parents could not? Can the young make up for the regrets of the older generation? 
 
Therefore, Chinese children belong to the family, to the bloodline, and bear the brunt of a good many expectations. This subconscious culture is very strong: parents are giving and selfless, and as long the children have the least bit of conscience, they will experience this as pressure. This is neither good nor bad, but it makes up the tradition of Chinese culture itself and can only be understood in this context. 
 
South Reviews: Just like collective emotion everyone felt when they watched the movie “Hi, Mom 你好，李焕英.” 
 
Xu Jilin:  Exactly. "Hi, Mom" was a film that no one believed would be a hit at the beginning, but now it is very popular. Why is that? It's not just good marketing or good timing. Instead, I think "Hi, Mom" speaks to the inner guilt of many young people. No matter how modern a Chinese person is, they are still Chinese. An individual cannot complete himself on his own, and he still has to understand his own meaning of life through blood and family. 
 
South Reviews: So traditional Chinese culture values family and blood ties. At the same time, we also attach great importance to "the world," as expressed in expressions like “taking the world as one's own responsibility." But today, a more commonly used term might be "exquisite egoists."[8] What do you think about this change?
 
Xu Jilin: The first question raised by the expression "taking the world as one's own responsibility" is, what is the world? Ancient Chinese thought that the world was larger than any particular country, and their concern was about “a world community with a shared future.” In their view, China and the outside world were not as separate as they we take them to be today. They were actually one world with common values. 
 
Therefore, except for the Legalists, who only cared about the state, Confucians, Daoists and Buddhists and others all took the world as their own responsibility. In today's terms, they were not nationalists but internationalists.
 
So how should we view “exquisite egoists”?
 
In a way, they are like Yang Zhu, the earliest Daoist in ancient China, who predated Laozi. Yang Zhu has a famous saying "I would not pull a single hair from my head, even to save the world." This is extreme egoism, which we find even in ancient China. However, we cannot make a simple moral judgement of Yang Zhu, because the society he lived in was chaotic, and he felt that people of all different factions were trying to save the world, which meant that thinking about the people and the world was completely out of kilter.  Yang’s solution was for everyone to focus on himself and not think about others:  "Every man for himself, and the world will take care of itself." 
 
This is a lot like economics today, the idea that everyone pursues Adam Smith’s notion of self-interest and eventually "the invisible hand" makes everything work out.  This is more or less what Yang Zhu was saying, so we can’t condemn him out of hand.  
 
On the other hand, the term "exquisite egoists" was coined by Professor Qian Liqun to criticize certain students at China's elite universities. This is because societies have something called public goods. Who provides the public goods? From the point of view of an egotist, public goods are produced by individuals, and are distributed in ways that are not symmetrical. How do they deal with that? They become free-riders. They let others produce the public goods, while they enjoy them. But if the whole society thinks this way, no matter whether its egoists are "exquisite" or "vulgar," this will produce neither the good society nor the public goods that we need. Yang Zhu's era was a kinship society with few public goods, so it was not a big problem. But today we are a society of strangers, and someone should stand up for the public and public goods. 
 
Thus, in my understanding, the Professor Qian’s criticism is that as elites in first-class universities in China, these students should not only think of themselves, but should also assume their responsibilities. This responsibility is to provide more and better public goods for society. You can do it yourself, or you can help governments, foundations, or social organizations to do it. 
 
A few years ago, Bill Gates berated Harvard University at a commencement ceremony, saying that Harvard has taught us much, including "the spirit of freedom" and "leadership." But Harvard has not taught us about the many poor people in the world, or about our responsibility to them.  So he later gave most of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, a large part of which is to aid refugees in Africa. 
 
Is Bill Gates an altruist? Microsoft products are expensive, aren't they? But far from being an "exquisite egoist", he provides public goods, which is what we might call an "elitist attitude," in that he is not content to be merely a "exquisite egoist," but to "take responsibility for the world".
 
Do not Create New Rituals in the Form of Law 
 
South Reviews: Almost every year during the national "two sessions,"[9] there is a discussion about “carrying forward traditional culture." For example, this year, some members suggested setting up a "coming-of-age festival" modeled on a traditional ritual, or replacing the handshake with the traditional linked-hands greeting . What do you think of these discussions? Can they play a role in the popularization of traditional culture? 
 
Xu Jilin: I personally do not quite approve of creating new rituals in the form of law. 
 
Traditional China was ruled by both ritual and law, in the sense that both governed society, but ritual came first and had a higher status.  In other words, laws were adopted to maintain the Confucian ritual order. 
 
Now what is "ritual?"  Rituals make up the ethical order of daily life, and the point of law is merely to maintain this order. When daily life has no such rituals, then, according to our cultural tradition, it is impossible to create a new order through the coercion of the law. In other words, man-made law is the recognition and norming of customary law at the national legal level, but life cannot be created through man-made law. 
 
Today, of course, the situation is different, and it seems like everyone is used to a legal order, and rituals seem not to exist at all. But even so, according to Chinese cultural tradition, laws should not create new concepts. For example, is it really a good idea to replace the handshake ritual with the linked-hands ritual? I may not be against it, but it cannot be created by using law. Law is coercitive, but ritual is not. Ritual is voluntary and is created naturally through repeated interactions and exchanges between people. Therefore, if we think something is good and then immediately think of enforcing it through laws, it will cause social resistance and backlash, and the same is true for the promotion of traditional culture. 
 
A better way is to let good things gradually spread through social experimentation, rather than to prostrate ourselves before the law and handle everything that way. What is law? Behind the law is the will of the state, but in addition to the will of the state, we need a spontaneously occurring daily cultural and social order. 
 
Today, we should not expect law to solve everything.  Instead we want to let society mature slowly, producing its own daily rituals that everyone can accept because they seem to be reasonable.  This is what China lacks most.  China does not want for laws—indeed China is one of the countries with the greatest number of laws, but China is now missing the rituals that were common in traditional Chinese culture. 
 
South Reviews: The theory of evolution holds that human development will never turn back, and the future will certainly be better than the present. Chinese traditional culture has a cyclical view of things. Do you think the future will be better or worse from a cultural point of view? 
 
Xu Jilin: The evolutionism we accept is usually the social Darwinism introduced by Yan Fu[10] (1854-1921) in the late 19th century.  This model of evolution is partly influenced by the Christian idea that history is like an arrow, which, once released in one direction cannot turn back.  This concept also influenced China’s modern Enlightenment movement, and it seems that we are all educated in this sense. 
 
However, I am now more willing to accept Zhang Taiyan's[11] (1869-1926) "two-track evolution 俱分进化论," which in simple terms means that both good and evil continue to evolve.  There is no such thing as a free lunch, and progress in one area is balanced off against setbacks in another. 
 
In the past, we did not know what modernization was, and imagined that there was gold at the end of the rainbow.  Now that we are partially modernized, we find that we have paid a high price: the natural environment, the corruption of the heart, the exhaustion of the body and mind, anxiety of all kinds... Individuals, nations, and even the entire planet are paying the price of modernization. 
 
Will the future be better, or darker? It depends on how you look at it, which one you care about more. But one thing we must know is that any future comes with a price. All we can do is to try to pay less, and to find how to pay less, how to get more of what we want by paying less—but we can't eliminate costs. So the future is totally dependent on how we think, isn’t it?
 
Notes

[1]许纪霖, “把握传统需要建立文化自觉”, an interview with 南风窗/South Reviews, posted to Aisixiang on March 31, 2021.

[2]Translator’s note:  The expression Xu uses here is shang jiazhi/上价值, which literally means to “increase in value” or to “add value,” but the specific reference is to its use in the popular online reality show U Can U Bibi 奇葩说, which is extremely popular in China, a kind of debate/reality show where the best talker wins and stays on to debate again.  The Wikipedia description of the show is quite helpful; scroll down to see the kinds of questions they debate.  Episodes are available on YouTube.  Shang jiazhi is a technique used by contestants to win debates.  Xu talks about the show—and about his friend and colleague Liu Qing, a contestant on the show--here.    

[3]Translator’s note:  Wolf Totem is a semi-autobiographical account by Jiang Rong (a pseudonym), a student from Beijing sent to Inner Mongolia at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1967.  The book was controversial because it contrasted the vital, tribal lifestyle of the Mongols with the stodgy, conformist lifestyle of the village-bound Chinese, and condemned the forced collectivization of agriculture on the steppes.  The book is available in English translation. 

[4]Translator’s note:  The phrase Xu uses is huaqing jiexian/划清界限, which was used in the Maoist period to mean “drawing a line between your self and class enemies,”who might be members of your own family. 

[5]Translator’s note:  Presumably because hardship encourages greater resolve.

[6]Translator’s note:  The word ji (鸡) refers to injecting children with “chicken blood” (鸡血) (rooster blood), which in folk beliefs increases vitality. The word wa (娃) refers to children.

[7]Translator’s note:  See “Young People Returning to Dongbei,” translation available on this site.

[8]Translator’s note:  This expression originated with Professor Qian Liqun's (b. 1939) criticism of the glibness of certain Chinese university students:  “Some of our universities, including Peking University, are currently training ‘exquisite egotists,’ who are sophisticated, worldly, thoughtful, good at playing a role, good at fitting in, and even better at using the system to pursue their own goals.  By exquisite egotists, I mean egotists who have been skillfully dressed up or even disguised.” 

[9]Translator’s note:  I.e., the meetings of the People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

[10]Translator’s note:  Yan Fu, a scholar from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is best known for having translated many of the classic Western works of philosophy and social science, including Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill, among others.

[11]Translator’s note:  Also known as Zhang Binlin, Zhang Taiyan was an influential Chinese intellectual in the early 20th century.