Xu Jilin, "Wang Yuanhua"

Xu Jilin, “’I am a Child of the Nineteenth Century:’ The Last Twenty Years of Wang Yuanhua’s Life”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Wang Yuanhua 王元化 (1920-2008) is little known in the West, even if he is a hero to many Chinese liberals.  This is because Wang, like his better known counterpart Li Shenzhi 李慎之,[2] was deeply steeped in traditional Chinese culture, joined and loyally served the Communist Party for decades, and in later life developed an independent, critical, “liberal” voice grounded in humanism. 
 
Wang joined the Communist Party in 1938 and worked in the realms of propaganda, thought, art and culture.  After the revolution, he served in the Shanghai Writers Association and did editorial work for different newspapers and magazines.  He was caught up in a major purge in 1955 against Hu Feng 胡风,[3] who had dared to argue that Mao Zedong’s theories of art and literature were too narrow and repressive.  Wang was incarcerated and interrogated for some time, and was not finally rehabilitated until 1981, which meant that he had 16 years to reflect on his thought and experiences.  Once rehabilitated, he published a series of books—often composed of notes, commentaries, and brief essays—that were immensely influential among Chinese intellectuals because of Wang’s willingness to use his personal experience to question received wisdom.
 
While Liu Qing, in his essay on this site, reflects on the fate of Chinese liberalism from a theoretical perspective, Xu Jilin uses Wang’s experience and reflections to ground Chinese liberalism in the soil of modern Chinese history.  Wang, like Li Shenzhi and others, came to his “liberal” stance after considerable personal pain and suffering, which had brought him to reflect deeply on his prior ideological beliefs and commitments.  Furthermore, as Wang questioned his earlier commitment to revolution, his thoughts turned more to the humanism of traditional Chinese civilization than to the classics of Western liberalism.  This is the point of Wang’s embrace of Du Yaquan杜亞泉,[4] a figure of ridicule during the iconoclastic May Fourth Period because he dared to suggest moderate solutions that found a place for the past and the present, Chinese and foreign.  Such moderation was important for Wang and remains so for Xu, who often argues that Chinese scholars must set aside petty ideological differences in the search for a consensus that can help to create the basic values Chinese society currently lacks.  In the end, Wang Yuanhua represents a personality type, a commitment to independent thinking and personal integrity that to Xu Jilin serves as a Chinese “contribution,” drawing on the moral stance of the traditional Chinese scholar-official, to liberal “theory.”
 
Translation
 
On May 9, 2008, at 11:40 p.m., in a room at Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital, Wang Yuanhua 王元化quietly departed this earth.  Three days later the Sichuan earthquake occurred, and throughout China tears were shed for those killed and injured.  Wang had struggled with his own suffering in his old age, and being spared the horrible bad news that followed his death might be seen as the fortunate side of his own misfortune.  At the funeral ceremony, Wang lay peacefully among the fresh flowers, his expression as calm as ever; I could hardly believe that he was gone for good.  A sadness overcome me that I could not control. 
 
When I met Wang, he was already elderly, without much time left.  The twenty years around the turn of the century were difficult times.  I was lucky enough to witness the last years of Wang’s life from a close vantage point.  While Wang was alive, he would discuss affairs of state or talk about the Way in a manner that seemed completely ordinary.  But after his death, as his familiar silhouette slipped over the horizon, I suddenly felt a huge lump in my throat, a hole that could never be filled.  The loss was not just personal, but belonged to all of Chinese culture.
 
During this period of mourning, I reread Wang’s writings, with the idea of working my scattered memories into a larger canvas that might convey Wang’s thought, spirit and frame of mind in his later years.
 
In death, Wang’s body was draped in the flag of the Chinese Communist Party, with its hammer and sickle.  He entered the party at the age of 18, in 1938, a year marked by constant warfare, especially in bloody, occupied Shanghai, where Wang was living.  Like Li Shenzhi, Wang joined the revolution in the wake of the December 9 [1935] movement, on fire to save the country.  Like Li, Wang was an “old-style Communist Party member.”  “Old style” was what Li Shenzhi called himself.  New-style Communist Party members join the party for material gain; the Party is a tool in their efforts to climb the hierarchy and make money.  Old-style Communist Party members poured the loves and hatreds of a lifetime into the Party, and their identification with the Party, their idealism—all of this is hard for later generations to grasp.   
 
Not only was Wang “old-style,” possessed of a burning idealism, but he also had an independent will and a theoretical mindset.  Prior to liberation, the Communist ranks were essentially composed of intellectuals and peasants.  There were two important waves of intellectuals who joined the party:  the first was in the early 1920s, when the Party was being established, and the founders of the Party were all intellectuals, even well-known members of the elite.  The second wave came in the wake of the December 9 movement of the 1930s, when their passion to save the country compelled young intellectuals to join the revolution in droves.  Wang belonged to the underground Party culture committee in Jiangsu, made up of a particular group of intellectuals.  Looking just at the leadership, we find Sun Yefang 孙冶方[5] as committee secretary and Gu Zhun 顾准[6] as vice secretary.  Both of these figures were theoretical and thoughtful, and both were important leading intellectuals within the party.  Wang Yuanhua was fortunate, in that once he joined the revolution he was groomed in such an atmosphere of theoretical richness.  The Jiangsu cultural committee was, for the young Wang, no different from a university, and molded his character for life.  Wang was of course a Communist Party member, but in his own eyes he was first an intellectual, a Communist Party Member with an intellectual temperament.  In a personal letter to Li Rui李锐[7] written in his later years, Wang exclaimed that:  “I joined the Party more than half a century ago, and am embarrassed to have never completed an intellectual task or responsibility.  In such turbulent times, to have never done anything to encourage myself and others, is enough to keep me up nights when I think back on things.”[8]
 
When he was young, Wang had a heroic spirit, and liked to read Nietzsche, Lu Xun 魯迅,[9] and Romain Rolland.[10]  He believed that this filthy world would be saved by Mara poets[11] with transcendent wills.  At the time, his favorite figure was Lu Xun, and when he fled Beiping after it fell to the Japanese, all he took was a small image of Lu Xun that he had drawn himself; Lu Xun was his idol.  His favorite book was Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, which he greatly admired, believing that every word and act of this idealist represented critical righteousness and artistic truth.  The essays that Wang wrote as a youth were excellent, with a bookish flavor, full of vim and vigor, and earned him a bit of fame within the Party.  The young Wang was proud of his determination and his talent; right after liberation one of his co-workers, Xia Yan’s 夏衍[12] secretary, Li Ziyun 李子云,[13] described him as haughty and insulting, somewhat overwrought.[14] 
 
Pride goeth before a fall.  Wang was caught up in the vortex of the anti-Hu Feng 胡风 movement of 1955. He suffered two years of isolation and investigation, receiving nothing but cold glares and serious denunciations.  He later remembered: “My mind was in shock. The thing that for years I had made out to be beautiful, even sacred, was destroyed in an instant.”[15]  During his isolation and investigation, he read a great deal—no more stories of heroes, but rather philosophical works, including those of Mao Zedong, Lenin, Marx and Hegel, returning to the classics.  His personal failures and the wisdom of the philosophers made him thoughtful, and he was transformed from a radical literary youth into a thinker with a capacity for deep reflection.    
 
Wang went through several periods of deep reflection in his life.  To my mind, the most important were those of the mid-1950s and the early 1990s, periods that coincided with sudden changes in the political situation, leading Wang to reconsider his basic beliefs.  His life during these periods was isolated from current affairs, and he nursed his wounds in an atmosphere of loneliness, calmly examining sacred beliefs he had previously held, wondering whether they would survive his reflection.  In 1950s China, dogmatism was in full force, and while Wang was in prison, he painstakingly read Hegel’s Shorter Logic, and finally grasped the origin of the dogmatic theory of knowledge:  in the passage from emotional knowledge to rational knowledge, there is also an intellectual stage in which we make abstract generalizations about things.  But if the intellectual stage becomes absolute, replacing dialectical rational knowledge, then one can fall into rigid dogmatism, for example, recognizing only man’s class nature and denying his basic human nature and his richly diverse personality, or discussing only the universal aspect of a thing while ignoring its particularity.  These reflections, rooted in classical German philosophy, were undoubtedly seen at the time as heterodox, and could not be publicly discussed until the thought liberation of the early 1980s.  In 1982, like Wang Ruoshui 王若水,[16] Wang Yuanhua, gave a talk entitled “An Exploration of a Number of Theoretical Questions in Marxism” at the conference planned by Zhou Yang 周扬[17] to mark the hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s death.  This leading document in the movement to liberate thought, which later fell afoul of the anti-spiritual pollution campaign [in 1984], not only reintroduced Marx’s theory of alienation, but also set out Wang’s thoughts about intellectual issues.  During the thought liberation movement and the New Enlightenment of the 1980s, Wang was a leader in the thought world, and was ahead of his time, but Wang’s rethinking at this time was not thorough enough, and still contained a good many habitual notions. 
 
The early 1990s constituted the most important turning point in Wang Yuanhua’s life.  During that period, Wang’s normally busy living room was much quieter.  Wang moved to the south, living for a time on Baiteng Lake in Zhuhai.  In letters that he wrote me during this period, Wang described his state of mind: “I’m cut off from the outside world here, as if I were in another world.  I once enjoyed this kind of calm in my youth.  In front of where I live is a small flower garden, with grass, flowers, and trees.  When the weather is nice, I sit in the yard looking out into space and the cloud formations.  This takes away the mind’s volatility, and imposes a sense of calm.”
 
Having suffered the unforgettable wounds of time, Wang drew lessons from his painful experiences, and undertook the most important reflection of his life.  Later, he often explained himself like this:  “I started to write when I was young, but did not really enter the world of thought until the 1990s…The 1990s were my age of rethinking, and it was only then that I did a thorough examination of my own thoughts and assumptions, accumulated over a long period of time.”[18]  In the works Wang published in his later years, he liked to use words like “thought” and “reflection.”  Some people don’t like to reflect, and think that they are always right.  One of Wang’s scholarly colleagues got nervous at the very idea, abruptly arguing “What should I rethink?  There’s no reason for that.”  Wang saw rethinking as part of an intellectual’s penchant for worrying over things 忧患意识,[19] and as the basic feature of his own life.[20]  Just as Lin Tongqi 林同奇[21] said, rethinking was, for Wang, not just a way of thinking, but a way of life.  Such a lifestyle was surely not without pain, since the object of rethinking was not other people, but rather the self that once thought it was right.
 
Wang had many feelings about the May Fourth movement, and once said that he was a child of the May Fourth.  As part of a generation of intellectuals that came after the May Fourth, he had drunk deeply at the well of the May Fourth, and the most profound aspects of his thought and personality were full of the spirit of the Enlightenment.  Yet, prior to the 1990s, he had not understood that there were negative elements hidden in May Fourth thought.  When, in the late 1980s, criticism of the May Fourth by Chinese scholars abroad filtered back to China, in a fit of pique Wang wrote an essay called “On Tradition and Anti-Tradition:  In Defense of the May Fourth Spirit.”  But his solitary reflections at Baiteng Lake led him to a new appreciation of the tragedy of twentieth century radicalism, and to a bitter search for the historical origins of such thought.  Not long after his return from the south, I was asked to request that Wang write a foreword for The Collected Words of Du Yaquan.  Not long after he telephoned me, saying: “Little Xu, that Du Yaquan 杜亞泉is really something.  The problems we’re thinking about today, he had already thought about them back then!”  In the summer of 1993, in Shanghai’s extreme heat, Wang took off his shirt and painstakingly read Du Yaquan’s essays on thought during the May Fourth period.  Three months later, he produced his essay—“Du Yaquan and the Debate on Problems in Eastern and Western Cultures”—an essay with an immense impact in China and abroad. 
 
This essay opened a curtain on Wang’s thoughts in the 1990s, as he had discovered that the intellectual origins of twentieth century radicalism emerged first in the anarchism of the late Qing-early Republican era, and that it was latent in the Enlightenment thought of the May Fourth period.  In Chen Duxiu’s[22] May Fourth period writings on the debates between Eastern and Western cultures, Wang found a kind of dogmatic personality.  In the past, Wang had fiercely defended May Fourth and the Enlightenment, but now he felt that some negative elements within the Enlightenment mindset required rethinking, such as:  a primitive evolutionism, radicalism, instrumentalism, and situational ethics.[23]  As a son of the May Fourth who in addition had been much influenced by Hegel, Wang originally believed that human rationality could become all knowing and all powerful.  Directed by rationality, people would be capable of destroying an old world, and of building an ideal new world.  Yet the human and Chinese tragedies of the twentieth century coldly illustrated that vast numbers of sins had been committed in the name of rationality.  Wang suddenly realized that “the spirit of rationality and human strength brought mankind out the medieval dark ages, but once rationality was deified to the point that we believed it to possess the final truth, then in the name of truth we could brand as heterodox all those who opposed or disagreed, and those who were not transformed could be eliminated.”[24]  Although he had once been a dedicated follower of Hegel, in the 1990s, one of the first objectives of his rethinking was to cleanse himself of the poison of absolutism and dogmatism found in Hegelian thought.  At the same time, he also invested a great deal of energy in a painstaking reading of Rousseau’s Social Contract, reflecting on the inner connections between Rousseau’s theory of the general will and totalitarian ideology.
 
Wang repeated many times that it was not until the 1990s that he himself was “enlightened,” and that his rethinking had only just began, leaving him with too much research to do.  The ups and downs of his life and the many important events he experienced made him an important historical witness.  I urged him many times to write his memoirs.  He replied in a letter: “I am not self-reflexive enough, and although I’m old and rigid, I still have to study, I have to study.  As long as I have breath, my heart will not die.  At present I am writing this and that.  I haven’t yet thought about my memoirs.  I feel like first I need to finish up these little projects.  Maybe you think that I’m abandoning the fundamentals to tend to nonessentials, but everybody has his own way of thinking.  I know that what I’m writing is not worth much, but I never thought to make a name with my writing, and I don’t want to use my essays to seek after anything (even if it is the respect of others).  Crickets chirp and crows caw because they have to.  When I ask myself what it is that I want to write, it’s not purely academic, nor do I want to use scholarship to discuss politics.  But I’m not just writing to amuse myself, or to cheer myself up, or to flaunt some sort of naturalistic style.  I have always believed in the notion that knowledge is power.”  Wang was too modest.  The “odds and ends” that he mentioned in his letter were precisely the important “rethinking” essays that he published after 1993.
 
What is too bad is that Wang’s “enlightenment” came a bit late!  After the 1990s, his energy was no longer what it once was, and writing an essay often took too much out of him.  Especially once he passed 80, his health declined, and he was often hospitalized, afflicted by all sorts of illnesses and suffering.  Although his thought was not as sharp as before, nor his memory as clear, his reflections remained profound, even if his aging body brought him down.  He was no longer able to write long essays, and expressed his fresher thoughts through notes, interviews and talks.  He was also a perfectionist, and every character had to be weighed and considered to find the best, most perfect way to express the ideas—he was almost pitiless with himself.  He did not write all that much when he was old, but every word was a pearl, everything coming together to express the force of his ideas and will.
 
The elderly Wang’s state of mind was often in pain.  Physical suffering was less important; what really tortured him were spiritual concerns.  In a letter to one of his students, he said:  “I remember that Lu Xun said, right before he died, in a letter to a young person, that ‘To live truly is to suffer,’ and I find that this is indeed true.”[25]  Wang’s pain finds its origins in the mentality of worrying practiced by China’s scholar-officials.  He was once an idealist full of utopian imaginings, believing in historical evolution, believing that civilization always progresses.  He believed that he was part of a transitional generation, and invested all of his hopes in the younger generation.  But in the last twenty years of his life, from a rational perspective he saw through the deification of historical evolution, and never again ignored the utopian aspects of any ideology.  Wang was both happy and concerned about the huge changes that occurred in China after the 1990s.  The world that he saw in his final years was not the world that he had hoped for; reality had become exceptionally utilitarian, fragmented, and vulgar.  It was not a world that captivated people. 
 
From what I observed at close hand, what the aging Wang most worried about was three things:  the divorce of thought from scholarship, the factionalism of the intellectual world, and the decline of ancient world civilizations.
 
The separation of thought and academics was a phenomenon of the post-1990s scholarly world.  This problem did not exist in the 1980s, because during the New Enlightenment period, thought and academics were blended together, mutually embedded.  Reading a few pages of the journal Dushu 读书[26] from that period will suffice to make that clear.  The New Enlightenment of the 1980s was both a rational movement and a movement of sturm und drang.  In fact, feelings ran stronger than rationality.  In the context of the history of Chinese scholarship, the 1980s were like the Song dynasty,[27] with people of every stripe freely discussing ideas and principles, all of it chock full of the traditional scholar-official notion of making the world a better place.  Although “respect for morality” (idealism) and “inquiries into the Way” (intellectualism) were both valued, morality trumped inquiry.  After the 1990s, with the huge changes in the intellectual world, part of those involved in the Enlightenment returned to the academy from the public square, relinquishing the search for truth for academic scholarship, so that “inquiry” suppressed “morality” and intellectualism replaced idealism, which evolved toward paper-shuffling…Ji Xianlin 季羨林 and Li Shenzhi, two great academic scholars with principle and vision, can stand as spiritual symbols of the bifurcation of “inquiry” and “morality.”  Ji Xianlin (1911-2009), as the great master of a generation of national studies, is widely seen as the representative of Qing-style studies, of academics for academics’ sake, of seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and ultimately became the model of today’s widely educated scholar.  Li Shenzhi inherited the sturm und drang tradition of the May Fourth, and deeply felt that the personality of the 1990s scholar was listless, having lost critical passion.  To mobilize the scholarly spirit and point out the future direction, Li took up the great banner of liberal ideology, and sought through his own moral practice to serve as an example and carve out a new escape route to an ideal world.
 
Faced with the split between academic research and truth, Wang was quite concerned.  In the battle between arid scholarship and moral engagement,[28] Wang occupied the middle ground. In terms of scholarly style, he was partial to “inquiry,” but in terms of spiritual concerns he also was concerned with “morality.”  Wang deeply understood that thought and scholarship were better when combined than when separated.  Academic study without deeper intellectual engagement is like the minor technical skills of an artisan’s subordinates, while thought without an academic basis often winds up being conceptual slogans without foundation.  Upon reflection, Wang proposed the formula “scholarly thought and thoughtful scholarship.”  In his old age, the senior scholars he most respected were:  Gu Zhun, the great theorist who was full of knowledge, and who embodied the model of “scholarly thought;” and Chen Yinke[29], who, in addition to his great learning, addressed the world with exceptionally deep concern, thus fulfilling the model of “thoughtful scholarship.”  To combine thought and scholarship in one pursuit is the scholar’s highest goal.  Wang himself sought to apply himself to such a project, through knowledge, scholarship and self-cultivation coming to master literature, history and philosophy, achieving first-class results in pursuit of truth, scholarship, and the art of writing.  In the academic world, people talked about the “southern Wang (Yuanhua) and the northern Qian (Zhongshu) 钱钟书[30],” and in the thought world they talked about the “southern Wang (Yuanhua) and the northern Li (Shenzhi).”  Even if Wang did not himself accept such accolades, it nonetheless illustrates his great achievements in the two realms of scholarship and thought.  
 
In our current age of scholarship for the sake of scholarship, what does Wang finally symbolize?  If we see Li Shenzhi as a descendant of Wang Yangming 王陽明[31], and Ji Xianlin as an inheritor of Qian Daxin 钱大昕,[32] the great Confucian scholar of the Qianlong-Jiaqing 乾隆嘉慶era [1735-1820] of the Qing dynasty, then we might see Wang Yuanhua as a contemporary version of Dai Zhen 戴震.[33]  According to Yu Yingshi 余英時,[34] Dai Zhen’s mode of study valued essence rather than breadth, and his ultimate goal was to understand the Way.  He used the teachings of the ancients to seek out truth, and argued that behind truth was efficacy.  In Qing scholarship there was a conflict between emphasis on breadth and emphasis on insight.  In the academic style of the Qianlong-Jiaqing era, there was breadth but not insight, which often yielded useless details.  As for those who still followed the scholarly styles of the Song and Ming, their priority was the great insight, which often wound up in empty abstraction.  The reason that Dai Zhen transcended his era was because he was a hedgehog in an age of foxes, possessing the talents of a fox (the breadth of evidential scholarship), but the vision of the hedgehog (and a hedgehog’s embrace of insight).[35]  Wang’s accomplishments approach those of Dai Zhen.  In the summer of 2006 I went to a conference in Tunxi, Anhui, and visited the Dai Zhen Memorial Hall.  I discovered that Wang Yuanhua had written the couplets to accompany the general title, “Of great breadth and deep essence.”  The left-hand couplet read “develop deep thought by teaching classical truths 训绎经义发幽思,” and the right-hand couplet read “universal meaning is profound, and will sustain careful thought 公意渊深耐细思.”  This may have been Wang’s formula for self-encouragement.
 
Another thing that greatly troubled Wang Yuanhua was the factionalism in the post-1990s academic world, and its partisan “party spirit.”  In the Enlightenment camp of the 1980s, noble colleagues shared common ideals, and faced common enemies.  Even if there were internal debates, there was mutual support and shared struggle.  The Enlightenment camp began to divide in the mid-1990s over differences in intellectual backgrounds and ideological quarrels, as well as questions of material interest.  Wang was very concerned about the state of the scholarly world, and was often wounded by the conflicts and mutual recriminations.  He would wake up in the middle of the night wondering why Chinese intellectuals could not develop reasonable, normal relationships, instead of acting like prima donnas or jackals.[36]  What he hated most were those that formed a faction, ran up a banner, and attacked all of those that were different in the name of some mysterious something, or on the slightest pretext accused someone of representing a certain -ism or a certain faction—judging all scholars from the point of view of their own little group.  Wang was above the partisan positions and the ideological wars.  His “middle way” and his rethinking sometimes incited gossip, and were sometimes misunderstood by outsiders as a “transformation” in which he joined the national studies group or the conservative group—there were many such accusations.  This made Wang angry, and he often sternly pronounced: “There is a tendency now in the scholarly world to form groups and factions, but I am not joining either the ‘mutual aid group’ or the ‘cooperative society.’  I’m staying alone until the end.”[37] 
 
Although pained by the factionalism in the academic world, Wang also resembled Hu Shi 胡適[38] in his later years, and increasingly came to feel that tolerance was more important than freedom.  Tolerance doesn’t mean being two-faced, or abandoning one’s own standpoint for that of other people; instead it means listening to the voice of the other, seeking out mutual understanding.  In a 1993 letter to me, Wang described the conflict in the intellectual world between radicals and conservatives in the following way: “Please listen to an old man’s sincere words:  In scholarship we should adopt a democratic practice in which we are both extremely open-minded (accepting other people’s viewpoints) and unyielding (holding to our own truths).”  Wang’s way of friendship was to disregard shared viewpoints and the closeness of positions in favor of the closeness of the minds.  His friendship with Lin Yusheng 林毓生[39] and Yu Yingshi is a charming tale of turning enemies into friends.  Lin and Yu had originally both criticized Wang’s 1988 essay “On Tradition and Anti-Tradition:  In Defense of the May Fourth Spirit,” which had led to bitter exchanges between Wang and the two.  Later on when they met at an international conference in Hawaii they became intellectual bosom buddies.  In recalling these events, Wang said: “For such a thing to occur, I think that on both sides there must exist a genuine search for truth and a respect for intellectual democracy and free discussion.  Only then can one forget oneself for the common good and treat people equally, rather than looking down on others and seeking victory.”[40]
 
When Wang was alive, his living room was full of famous as well as ordinary people; everyone was welcome.  He had an accepting heart, and a charisma that brought people together.  No matter what was said, as long as it was reasonable and spoken with a purpose, Wang was always willing to listen closely.  But if you knew Wang well, you saw that behind his moderate rationality there was also a radical side.  He often said: “I’m from Hubei, and my personality has a certain Hubei wildness.”  He had a fiery spirit, and on certain questions of importance he might explode in a rather extreme fashion.  Friends who didn’t know him well were often shocked when this happened, as it was something that one did not sense in reading his writings.  Why was there such a distance between his writing and his personality?  Wang once revealed to me what he had learned through writing: “One should never write when agitated, because when you do, what you write is more emotional than rational.  Wait until you have calmed down, and use your knowledge.  That’s the only way to come up with even-handed arguments.”  And it’s true that Wang’s writings are calm and reserved, their power contained. Yet behind the seemingly rational writings was a flood of uncertain emotions.  Wang’s true nature may well have been to be externally soft (peaceful) and internally hard (fiery).   
 
The deepest impression Wang made on people was his eyes, which were extremely bright, expressing dignity and incisiveness, as if they penetrated the surface of what they saw to discern their true meaning.  In his last few years, he had already seen through the dusty world and its tawdry dramas.  After seventy years of political life, with its rude ups and downs, plus his careful reading of the classics and history and his deep grasp of human nature—Wang had no more facile political beliefs and paid little attention to the politics of the day.  Heroes came and went on the political stage, but the hard facts of history hardly changed at all.  Looking toward the future, Wang often revealed an ineffable preoccupation.  His perspective had, for some time, transcended that of a particular period, nor did he believe that institutions could change everything. In his view, even if we created a democratic system, it could still change for the worse if we still lacked humanistic spirit and public morality.[41]  Wang often mourned the decline of traditional Chinese civilization, especially that of the humanistic spirit.  His earliest worries concerned a mass culture that had gotten out of control.  As part of the intellectual elite, he was not opposed to mass culture in and of itself, but rather worried about its deleterious effects on art appreciation and the spiritual life.  He often said:  “Art cannot be judged according to traditional and modern, Chinese or foreign, old or new; the distinctions are rather between lofty and petty, beautiful and ugly, eternal and vulgar.”[42]  There are good things in mass culture, but if it dominates culture, it lowers the standards of art.  If the sole goal is to be popular and trendy, then the taste of the market replaces art.  Wang was most opposed to kitsch, and he often cried:  “A society whose culture is led by what is trendy has no true, deep spiritual life.”[43]  Sadly, Wang’s voice was too weak, and he could not reverse what had already happened, and could only watch as traditional humanistic culture and civilization declined day by day.
 
In 2002, on Lin Yusheng’s recommendation, Wang read Harvard professor Benjamin Schwartz’s essay on “China and Contemporary Millenarianism,” which affected Wang deeply.  Schwartz, basing himself on the spirit of ancient prophets, and deeply preoccupied by the fate of the civilization of mankind, warned humanity just before he died, saying:  the consumerism and materialism bequeathed to mankind by technological progress and new scientific developments already constitute a sort of material millenarianism, and the accumulated humanistic spirit of the axial civilizations is in decline.[44]  On reading this, Wang understood that the decline of the humanistic spirit is not only a particular feature of contemporary China, but is also a collective threat faced by the civilizations of all mankind.  Wang then wrote a short essay devoted to this theme, pointing out with great concern that “today’s China truly has no reason to feel excited about the spread of universal Western notions concerning consumerism and materialism.”[45]  In subsequent years, Wang became increasingly concerned about this, even obsessed with it, and he talked about it virtually every time I went to see him.  I vaguely came to feel that Wang shared with the elderly Wang Guowei 王国维[46] and Chen Yinke a sadness and desolation born of a fear of civilization’s imminent decline.  Wang had lived to the twenty-first century, but was not optimistic about mankind’s future, and in a letter to Lin Yusheng he noted with great concern:  “Isaiah Berlin said that the twentieth century was a terrible century, but observing how things look now, the twenty-first century may well mark the eclipse of culture.”[47]  “Each time I think of this, it truly makes me sad.  I am already old, and no longer search for anything, but when I think of future generations, and when I think of our long cultural tradition, and that it might cease to exist—I can hardly bear such a catastrophe.”[48]  
 
Unwilling to look back on the twentieth century, and convinced that the prospects of the new century were bleak, Wang, in his final months and years, began to recall the nineteenth century, which is really not that far away.  In 2001, in an important interview entitled “A Dialogue between Humanistic Spirit and the Twenty-First Century,” he publicly declared: “I have more feelings for the nineteenth century than for the twentieth.  Even now, my favorite literature is Western literature from the nineteenth century…Spiritually, I am a child of the nineteenth century, and was raised on the nourishment of nineteenth-century writers.”[49]
 
Why did Wang pine for the nineteenth century?  What did the nineteenth century mean to him?  For Wang, the first meaning of the nineteenth century was breadth.  Culturally, the nineteenth century was a “wide open field,”[50] people’s hearts and minds were wide open, rivers flowing into the seas, East and West absorbing one another.  Hu Xiaoming, one of Wang’s best students, once said to Wang: “You have been greatly marked by the cultural spirit of the nineteenth century.  Your spirit and nature in your later years are like those of the generation just preceding the May Fourth—Liang Qichao 梁啟超,[51] Yan Fu 严复,[52] Wang Guowei…At the time they were considering how to develop traditional studies and integrate new knowledge, believing that East and West were basically similar.  Things changed after May Fourth, when something approaching belief took over.”  Wang agreed.[53]  At one point Wang had been the son of the May Fourth, and threw himself into the Enlightenment project in defense of the May Fourth.  In the 1990s, reflecting on the May Fourth, he came to understood that the movement that had represented the spirit of the twentieth century had a narrow character.  And when he reconsidered the turn of the twentieth century and late Qing scholars from Liang Qichao through Yan Fu and Wang Guowei, he found that they did not emphasize the gulf between China and the West, but rather worked toward communication among civilizations. The figures that Wang appreciated in his later years, like Du Yaquan and Chen Yinke, all possessed this nineteenth-century breadth and attitude of acceptance.  This was an attitude of cultural self-consciousness, the attitude of a great civilized country, neither arrogant nor self-denigrating. 
 
There was another reason that Wang liked the nineteenth century, and this was because Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth century were full of the spirit of humanism.  Living quietly in occupied Shanghai at the beginning of the anti-Japanese War period with nothing to read, nineteenth-century European literature became Wang’s only spiritual nourishment.  From the English Dickens and the Bronte sisters, the French Balzac and Romain Rolland, and the Russian Chekov and Dostoevsky—these writers, brimming with the humanistic spirit, molded Wang’s soul.  He said: “I like that nineteenth-century literature is always revealing people’s feelings, and worries about their fate.  This underscores the importance of spiritual life and affirms mankind’s worthy feelings.”[54]
 
The core of the humanistic spirit is to view people as the goal, to respect the personality and dignity of each person.  Wang accorded great importance to dignity.  In political violence like the anti-Hu Feng campaign and the Cultural Revolution, Wang had been grievously harmed and was exceptionally sensitive to questions of dignity.  He once said: “You can’t insult a person’s dignity…Thought is a strange thing.  Thought cannot compel others to accept it, and thought cannot be destroyed by violence.”[55]  Human dignity comes from human spirit, and from the beginning people are thinking animals.  In a letter to one of his students, Wang once wrote: “In my life, and especially during the Cultural Revolution and other movements, I experienced too much cruelty, callousness, brutality.  For this reason, I hope your generation will no longer be insulted, and can preserve your own human dignity.”[56]  Human dignity, in past political campaigns, was assaulted at the level of power, and today it is suffering from the vulgarity of the market.  This was painful for Wang, and he repeatedly brought up the tomb inscription Chen Yinke wrote for Wang Guowei: “Independent spirit, free thought.”  Wang’s goal was to encourage the people of the present generation, to inspire himself and others.  By independence and freedom, he meant not only in the face of despotic power, but also the power of the market and of money.
 
In Wang’s view, the literature and philosophy of the nineteenth century were full of human spirit and dignity.  Even if in his later years Wang abandoned Hegel, nonetheless Hegel’s embrace of the power of the human thought and spirit, his insistence that “the strength of spirit cannot be underestimated or ignored” remained for Wang the rule by which he lived his life.  Wang lived in a turbulent yet furtive age, when all kinds of dangers and temptations followed close on one another, yet he frankly admitted that “I am someone who works with his pen, and what I would most like to do is to fulfill my responsibility as a Chinese intellectual, and leave behind something of use, something that is not tawdry or falsely intellectual.  And I also hope in any situation to be able to not surrender my will, not besmirch my person, not seek after fashion, not hide from danger.”  Even if Wang, in his later years, did nothing earth-shattering, still in his words and in his actions he chose some courses and avoided others.  This may look ordinary, but in today’s scholarly world, how many people can say as much?
 
Wang lived for thought, and died for thought.  His was a spiritual existence.  When he entered the hospital for the last time, and understood that he had little time left, he said:  I am a believer in spirit only, and now I am transforming from a spiritual person to a biological person.  I have no more to fear from this world.  He told his relatives, and asked for assurance that in the final stages, they not agree to any traumatizing, life-saving measures.  He believed that to experience the end of life stuffed full of tubes or with the body opened up was not in accord with human nature.  Human life requires dignity, as does human death.
 
Wang finally left with his dignity.  This son of the nineteenth century guarded his dignity throughout his life.

Notes
 
[1] Xu Jilin 许纪霖, “‘我是十九世纪之子’ —王元化的最后二十年,” originally published in 读书, 2008:8, currently available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/20738.html.

[2] Translator’s note: Li Shenzhi (李慎之; 1923–2003), was a noted Chinese establishment intellectual, rising to prominent positions in such institutions as the Xinhua News Agency and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  He was dismissed for his blunt criticisms of the government after the violence June 1989, and emerged in the 1990s as a prominent and vocal exponent of Chinese liberalism.  He is often described as “China’s Havel.”

[3] Translator’s note:  胡风 Hu Feng (1902-1985) was an important literary figure in the Chinese Communist movement, and the object of an important purge in 1955.  Hu had argued that Mao’s theories on art and literature were too confining and ignored the real lives of workers and peasants.  He was subsequently jailed for some twenty years.

[4] Du Yaquan 杜亞泉 (1873-1933) was a writer and thinker who sought to reconcile East and West and avoid extremes.  His views were rejected during the May Fourth Period, but have been revisited by Chinese scholars in the past decades.

[5] Translator’s note:  Sun Yefang 孙冶方 (1908-1983) one of Communist China’s best known economists, serving in a variety of important posts in the 1950s.  He eventually came to advocate market reforms, which earned him the criticism of the left.

[6] Translator’s note:  Gu Zhun 顾准 (1915-1974) originally trained as an accountant and subsequently converted to communism.  Imprisoned for political reasons under Mao, he “reinvented” liberalism while in confinement and his writings later made a major contribution to the emergence of liberalism in post-Mao China. 

[7] Translator’s note: Li Rui 李锐 (b. 1917) is a well-known Communist Party member of the same generation as Wang Yuanhua.  Li served briefly as Chairman Mao’s secretary in the 1950s, but was jailed in the late 1950s after criticizing the Great Leap Forward, and became an outspoken liberal in the post-Mao era.

[8] Wang Yuanhua, 清园书简, (Wuhan:  Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2003), 153. 

[9] Translator’s note Lu Xun魯迅 (1881-1936) was a prominent figure in the May Fourth movement and remains modern China’s most important literary figure. 
[10] Translator’s note:  Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a French idealist and man of letters, who opposed war and embraced Joseph Stalin as the “greatest man of his era.”  He is much admired by Chinese intellectuals.

[11] Translator’s note: “Mara poets” were iconoclastic, romantic figures celebrated in Lu Xun’s early translations of East European revolutionary poetry.

[12] Translator’s note:  Xia Yan 夏衍 (1900-1995) was a famous playwright and screenwriter, and served as China’s Minister of Culture for part of the 1950s.

[13] Translator’s note:  Li Ziyun 李子云 (1930-2009) was a well-known writer and editor in the People’s Republic.

[14] Li Ziyun 李子云, “我所认识的王元化,” originally published in天涯，2000:7, available online at http://www.zwszzz.com/qikan/bkview.asp?bkid=126045&cid=389114.

[15] Wang Yuanhua, “记我的三次反思历程,” in王元化, 清园近作集, (Shanghai:  Wenhui chubanshe, 2004), 13.

[16] Translator’s note:  Wang Ruoshui 王若水 (1926-2002) was a Communist Party member who spent much of his career as an important journalist, responsible for theory and propaganda in the influential People’s Daily.  In the post-Mao era, he sought to contribute to reform by writing about Marxist humanism and the possibilities of “alienation” in socialist China.  He died in exile in the United States.

[17] Translator’s note:  Zhou Yang 周扬 (1908-1989) was a well-known literary theorist and an important figure in the politics of literature in China from the 1930s onward.

[18] Wang Yuanhua, 九十年代日记, (Hangzhou:  Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 2001), 528.

[19] Translator’s note:  See Gloria Davies, Worrying about China:  The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

[20] Wang Yuanhua, 九十年代日记, 78.

[21] Translator’s note:  Lin Tongqi 林同奇 (1923-2015) was a Chinese scholar of intellectual history who worked frequently with Wang Yuanhua.  Lin was a professor at the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1985 until his retirement.

[22] Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879-1942) was a major intellectual figure in the May Fourth movement and a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

[23] Wang Yuanhua, “对’五四’的思考,” in Wang Yuanhua, 九十年代反思录, (Shanghai:  Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 127.

[24] Wang Yuanhua , “人文精神与二十一世纪的对话,” in Wang Yuanhua, 清園近作集, 8.

[25] 王元化致吴琦幸, in Wang Yuanhua, 清园书简, 117.

[26] Translator’s note:  Dushu 读书, founded in 1979, is reform-era China’s most important intellectual journal. 

[27] Translator’s note:  Xu’s reference is to the Song dynasty (960-1279), a dynamic, creative period in Chinese intellectual history, culminating in the establishment of Neo-Confucian texts and institutions. 

[28] Translator’s note:  literally “Han learning” and “Song learning.”

[29] Translator’s note:  Chen Yinke 陈寅恪 (1890-1969) was a well-known Chinese historian and humanist.

[30] Translator’s note:  Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书 (1910-998) was a famous literary scholar and writer, best known for his novel, Fortress Besieged 围城 (1947) Qian was also a multilingual translator and accomplished scholar.

[31] Translator’s note:  Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472-1529) is a major figure in the history of Neoconfucian philosophy, much admired by reacting to the rigidity of Song thought and scholarship by arguing that anyone could become “a sage” through his own efforts.

[32] Translator’s note:  Qian Daxin 钱大昕 (1728-1804) was a well-known figure in the “evidential scholarship” that dominated this period.

[33] Translator’s note:  戴震Dai Zhen (1727-1777) was a wide-ranging Confucian scholar who criticized an over-emphasis on scholarship for scholarship’s sake, and argued that human emotions should be recognized as part of the search for truth.

[34] Yu Ying-shih 余英時 (b. 1930) is a well-known Chinese-American historian of Chinese intellectual history.

[35] Xu Jilin is, of course, borrowing these symbols from Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox:  An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1953).

[36] Wang Yuanhua, 九十年代日记, 474.

[37] Ibid., 452.

[38] Translator’s note:  Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962) was a major intellectual during the May Fourth Period and later, and is seen as one of the major figures in Chinese liberalism.

[39] Translator’s note:  Lin Yusheng 林毓生 (b. 1934) is a prominent Chinese-American historian of Chinese thought.

[40] Wang Yuanhua, 九十年代日记, 85.

[41] Wang Yuanhua, 清园近作录, 52.

[42] Wang Yuanhua, 九十年代日记, 189-190.

[43] Wang Yuanhua, 清园近作录, 7.

[44] Translator’s note:  Schwartz’s essay is Benjamin I. Schwartz, “China and Contemporary Millenarianism:  Something New under the Sun,” Philosophy East and West 51.2 (April 2003):  193-196.  A Chinese translation of Schwartz’s essay is included in Wang’s 清园近作录, 142-150.

[45] Wang Yuanhua , “关于“中国与当今千禧年主义”的几句话,” in Wang Yuanhua, 清园近作录, 138-141.

[46] Translator’s note:  Wang Guowei 王国维 (1877-1927) was a prominent Chinese intellectual devoted to research in the Chinese humanistic traditions.  He killed himself in 1927 as revolutionary Guomindang troops entered Beijing.

[47] 王元化致林毓生, in Wang Yuanhua, 清园近作录, 204.

[48] 王元化致林毓生, 财经143 (October 3, 2005).

[49] Wang Yuanhua, “人文精神与二十世纪的对话,” 2. 

[50] Wang Yuanha, “仍然有很长的路要走,”财经年刊：世界2003, (Beijing:  Caijing zazhishe, 2003).

[51] Translator’s note:  Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873-1929) was an important figure in late Qing-early Republican history, who used his role as the founder of modern Chinese journalism to transmit knowledge about Western culture and institutions to his readers.

[52] Translator’s note:  Yan Fu 严复 (1854-1921) was an important figure in the late Qing reform movement, best known for translating many important works of Western liberalism and social science into Chinese.

[53] Wang Yuanhua, 清园近作录, 2, 51-52.

[54] Wang Yuanhua, 清园近作录, 2-4.

[55] Wang Yuanhua, 九十年代反思录, 355.

​[56] 王元化致吴琦幸, in 清园书简, 117.