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Notes
- 1.
I happened to share this view, which is also shared by many others in the field including my teacher at Harvard, Benjamin Schwartz. Americans and Chinese on the whole both have the tendency to be very good at “cocktail party” interactions.
- 2.
This is to distinguish the present-day Nationalist Party (Guomindang, KMT) in Taiwan from the Revolutionary Nationalist Party that exists on the mainland.
- 3.
This was the situation in 1980. Since then, of course, the situation in Taiwan has changed enormously. Taiwan has transitioned to a multi-party political system, and thus has effectively ended the Nationalist Party’s monopoly on political power. The rise (and partial fall) of Taiwanese nationalism is another great change.
- 4.
I was struck at how much Liang’s views on such matters had been affected by general popular views, and, as such, shockingly naive. He admitted as much. Naturally he knew nothing of international affairs that had not presented by the Chinese media.
- 5.
Liang had traveled to Japan at the invitation of Japanese rural reconstruction colleagues and toured rural reconstruction sites during the trip.
- 6.
Immediately upon returning to the U.S., I contacted the “Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (美中学术交流委员会).” This was an organization founded in 1966 as part of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to facilitate academic traffic between the U.S. and China. The Committee was dissolved in the 1990s as scholarly communication between our two countries became commonplace, eliminating the need for such a committee. I relied Liang’s interest to the Executive Director of the Committee and requested that such a trip be organized for him. The director agreed, and, according to her, contacted Mr. Liang’s unit, the People’s Political Consultative Conference. Later, I was told that the authorities in China would not allow such a visit. Mr. Liang, however, was informed that it was the American side that balked. Frankly, I think this is unlikely, because it would have been on the initiative of the Committee that the question would have been brought up in the first place. I suspect that the Chinese authorities felt that Mr. Liang was too old and frail to make such a journey, and, moreover, because he was famous for speaking his mind, they might have been anxious about the possibility that Mr. Liang might make statements in the U.S. that could be embarrassing.
- 7.
Mr. Liang’s major goals in rural reconstruction were indeed to “organize” the countryside and diffuse modern technology there. Practically every political figure during the Republic did indeed complain that China was, as Sun Yat-sen put it, “a sheet of loose sand.” Sun, and many others, complained that Chinese society was suffering not from a lack of “liberty,” but from a surfeit of it. Everyone, then, hoped to transform the sand into cement, but the question was how. In the late Qing, moreover, a completely new concept appeared—mobilization. It appeared simultaneously with the idea of a modern nation to which its citizens owe loyalty. Therefore, underneath the organization question was the perceived need for mobilization. All figures were also interested in diffusing modern technologies throughout rural society. Liang’s rural reconstruction movement, however, had one other goal that these other leaders and movements did not include and, by their nature, could not include. It was a cultural revival that was to preserve Chinese cultural values—epitomized in his term “reason” (理性). Liang emphasized the idea that rural reconstruction must not be a political movement, but rather a grass-roots cultural movement. He had concluded by the late 1920s that governmental power was inherently like “an iron hook,” and society was like a bean curd. No matter what good intentions the iron hook might possess, as soon as it goes to “help” the bean curd, it destroys it. “As soon as you take power, you are separated from society… No matter if even a sage took power, it would not work.” Theory of Rural Reconstruction (《乡村建设理论》), 1937, p. 319. He never mentioned this special goal of rural reconstruction during these interviews.
- 8.
This is indeed true. Liang had always argued that until the customs, habits and attitudes of the masses changed, constitutional government would be a mere superficial copy of a foreign institution that would definitely fail. “China has not reached a stage where it can have a successful constitution.” (《中国此刻尚不到有宪法成功的时候》) Jan. 4, 1934, Dagongbao (《大剬报》). He continued this argument after the war as well. It is not a little ironic that Liang, who created and, for a time, lead the only truly liberal democratic political force in that period in China, the last incarnation being the Democratic League (民主同盟), had little faith that liberal democracy could work in China.
- 9.
During one of the times I visited Mr. Liang, There was an old man in another room, reading a book manuscript. This was Mr. Meng Xianguang, who was visiting from Nanchong, Sichuan. Mr. Liang introduced me to him later, and I interviewed him several times separately. Mr. Meng, a student of Mr. Liang dating from 1928, worked with Mr. Liang’s colleague Peng Yuting, who headed an extremely successful local self-government experiment in Zhenping County, west of Nanyang in Henan Province. Mr. Meng was 70 years old when I met him, but was still full of enthusiasm for local projects to help the public. Later in the 1980s, Mr. Liang’s son, Peikuan, told me that Mr. Meng was going to use some property that had been returned to him to do rural reconstruction work in his home locale in Henan; afterward he envisioned a project in the “great northwest,” the traditionally poverty-stricken area that the Chinese government was endeavoring to help economically. I interviewed Mr. Meng mostly about his work in Henan reconstruction, but in the process got to know him quite well. He was, like every one of Mr. Liang’s students that I had met, fiercely loyal to Mr. Liang, and burned with a flame of enthusiasm for good works in the public sector. Mr. Meng and I were also tied together by an extraordinary coincidence. In the fall of 1972, the first official Chinese delegations visited the United States, as arranged by the Zhou-Kissinger protocols for cultural and educational exchange which Premier Zhou Enlai and Secretary of State Kissinger had negotiated earlier in the year. I was the American interpreter for these delegations. The first was a delegation of medical doctors (医学代表团), the deputy delegation head of which was Dr. Fu Yicheng (傅一成), vice president of the China Medical Association. As I traveled with the delegation and was the chief source of information on U.S. society and politics, I got to know Dr. Fu very well. One night after a very late interview, I took Mr. Meng back to the place where he was staying with a relative. As I walked him into the courtyard of the house, who should I see, washing his shirt at the water tap but Dr. Fu! He was Mr. Meng’s relative! And this was the second coincidence involving Dr. Fu. As I boarded the train from Shenzhen to Guangzhou on my first actual visit to China in May 1973, who should I just happen to run into but Dr. Fu! He had just come south to welcome a Canadian medical delegation. Given that, in the entire country of a billion at that time I knew 30 people at most, the chances against such coincidences are truly astronomical, yet similar events occur every time I visit China.
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Alitto, G.S. (2013). August 14, 1980. In: Has Man a Future?. China Academic Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35816-6_3
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