Liang Shuming’s China: the Country of Reason (1967–1970): revolution, religion, and ethnicity in the reinvention of the
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Liang Shuming’s China: the Country of Reason (1967–1970): revolution, religion, and ethnicity in the reinvention of the Confucian tradition Ady Van den Stock1
Received: 20 August 2020 / Revised: 3 October 2020 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 / Published online: 11 November 2020 © Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture 2020
Abstract Liang Shuming’s 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) China: the Country of Reason (Zhongguo: lixing zhi guo 中国:理性之国) is a little-known, posthumously published manuscript composed between 1967 and 1970 during the Cultural Revolution. It offers a unique perspective on Liang’s philosophical attempt to reconcile the Communist revolutionary legacy with the Confucian tradition that he continued to uphold in mainland China after the founding of the People’s Republic. By presenting and analyzing the main themes and concepts of this book, I try to cast some light on Liang’s idiosyncratic repurposing of historical materialist concepts in reinterpreting what he takes to be “early enlightenment” accomplished through the Confucian celebration of “reason” (lixing 理性) and its “replacement of religion by morality.” In doing so, I explore the complex relations between revolutionary, religious, and ethnic identity in his late philosophy. Keywords Liang Shuming · Modern Chinese philosophy · New confucianism · Chinese communism · Religion · Ethnicity
Introduction Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893–1988) needs little or no introduction to scholars and students of modern Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. Combining the multiple identities of Confucian revivalist, cultural philosopher, educational reformer, champion of rural reconstruction, “hidden Buddhist” (Meynard 2010), and, in the words of his most famous biographer, “lifelong activist” (Alitto 2015) within * Ady Van den Stock [email protected] 1
Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
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himself, Liang counts as one of the most multi-faceted, complex, and at times contradictory figures in the twentieth-century Chinese philosophical and intellectual landscape (see Alitto 1979, p. 5). For the purposes of the present paper, a particularly interesting aspect of Liang Shuming’s development as a thinker is the fact that he, in clear contrast to the majority of philosophers now usually categorized as belonging to the “New Confucian” (xin rujia 新儒家) movement in modern Chinese thought, displayed a consistent willingness to conceptually (as well as practically) engage with historical materialism, Marxism, and communism, philosophical and political orientations which most if not all other representatives of this movement considered to be the diabolical arch-nemesis of the Confucian tradition at the center of China’s “cultural life” (wenhua shengming 文化生命), to use Mou Zongsan’s 牟宗三 (1909–1995) preferred phrasing. Unsurprisingly then, in Mou’s characteristically blunt retrospective evaluation of his fellow “New Confucian,” Liang was “caught unprepared by the demonic Communist Party [an
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