kelly, d. - nietzsche in china by shao lixin (review)

College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National UniversityAustralian National University

Nietzsche in China by Shao LixinReview by: David KellyThe China Journal, No. 44 (Jul., 2000), pp. 240-242Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the College of Asia and the Pacific, TheAustralian National UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2667526 .Accessed: 21/02/2015 03:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University,Australian National University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheChina Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 147.96.1.236 on Sat, 21 Feb 2015 03:21:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

240 REVIEWS

era in Japan's cultural policy toward China. Viewed in this light, Teow opts for 1918 as a convenient point of departure for his study. In doing so he poses the

following rhetorical question: "What motivated Japan to make a Boxer Indemnity remission and use it to evolve a cultural policy toward China?" (p. 32). He notes that it was "American insistence the remission be used to support the Chinese Educational Mission and Tsinghua College, China had little choice but to accept the American conditions. The American cultural remission was welcomed by Chinese educators who, together with the Chinese government, sought thereafter to press for similar actions on the part of the other powers" (p. 124).

Teow's arguments seriously underestimate Japanese influence among the Chinese educated elite. The influx of Chinese students to Japan at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century predated any remission of Boxer

Indemnity funds. However, Teow is right to point out that the partial remission of

indemnity funds by the United States did provide a competitive impetus that

Japan could not ignore. A new contest for cultural influence in China started in 1918 between the United States and Japan. This may comprise a more important chapter in the Japanese-American relationship, though, than in the Sino-Japanese relationship. The cultural relationship between the two East Asian neighbours has

deeper historical roots, as well as greater ambiguities arising from the need for Japanese intellectuals to distinguish between classical and contemporary China.

Teow's discussion of Japan's cultural policy toward China within the confines of a competitive cultural imperialism does, however, contribute to our understanding of East Asian international relations during that period, and confirms that in the 1920s Japan's Foreign Ministry was considerably influenced by American policy in the region. But as the Manchurian Incident of 1931 demonstrated, America's own perception of its influence in East Asia was inflated. Japanese diplomats who shared the American perception were to see their influence in Japanese politics dwindle during the 1930s, and with tragic consequences.

Lincoln Li Aichi Bunkyo University and Monash University

Nietzsche in China, by Shao Lixin, New York: Peter Lang, 1999. xi + 146 pp. US$40.95 (hardcover).

Nietzsche revolted against the heavy prose of classical German philosophy, favouring an ironic, aphoristic style that still serves as a literary model in German and in many other languages. This fascinating style helps explain a great deal of Nietzsche's appeal to Chinese thinkers this century. Chinese thought has never favoured rambling syntax and fussy-seeming qualifications. As Shao Lixin puts it in his book, "When translating Western philosophical works, a Chinese writer had to break up long sentences and turn them into short and choppy ones, resulting in inaccurate, unnatural and often incomprehensible texts" (p. 117).


REVIEWS 241

The short, choppy sentences that are a feature of Nietzsche's writing may have made him easier to translate faithfully than, say, Hegel. Nonetheless, as Shao shows in his readable though sketchy volume, Nietzsche was barely translated until well into the 1930s. This should not be surprising considering the similar scarcity of translations of the writings of Marx until the 1960s. Despite this, not only have both Nietzsche and Marx been major influences on Chinese

thought, their influences have intertwined in curious ways. Shao is particularly interesting regarding the early wave of Chinese

"Nietzscheans": Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, the young Guo Moruo and Lu Xun. Teasingly, Mao Zedong is included in this group. The notion of a "Nietzsche complex" on the part of Mao is not as radical a departure as it may sound. When, after the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four was widely criticized for "voluntarism"?a scare word often associated with Nietzsche and his putative disciples, the Nazis?the clear implication was that this error could

only have occurred with the tacit connivance of Mao. The chapter on Li Shicen turns up some fascinating facts about Li, among

which is a possible friendship between Li and Mao Zedong. One anecdote is that Li was once invited, through Mao Zedong's arrangement, to give a speech at the First Normal School in Hunan. After the event, he and his hosts went swimming in the Xiang River, and he taught Mao and others how to swim using the

Western-style kicks and strokes that he had learned in Japan (p. 91). When Mao in July 1965 "heroically" swam 15 km in the Yangtze River at the age of 73, the rhetoric surrounding this feat resonated with certain vulgar interpretations of Nietszche's Superman, but can more rigorously be traced to what Meisner and a number of Chinese scholars refer to as voluntarism?the primacy of the will over intellect and objective conditions. The early connection with Li gives added

depth to this interpretation. On the whole, however, this chapter exemplifies the sketchiness referred to

earlier. While Li's short book on Nietzsche, Chaoren zhexue qianshuo (Outline of the Superman Philosophy) (1931), is summarized, nothing is said about his

attempted magnum opus, Rensheng zhexue (Philosophy of Human Existence, Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1926). This work was an expansion of Li's influential critique of Liang Shuming's famous book Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies. It is clear from these works that Li understood the Superman in the non-vulgar sense of a triumph over the self.

Arguably the best chapter is the concluding one devoted to the work of Zhou

Guoping, a scholar in the Philosophy Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who wrote extensively on Nietzsche in the 1980s.

Throughout the book, Shao relies on his own reading of texts, ignoring a wide range of scholarship directly relevant to his case. For example, nowhere does he note the comparisons made between Nietzsche and the ancient

philosopher Zhuang Zi. While discussing the work of Zhou Guoping, Shao says little about the wider Nietzsche revival in the "cultural fever" which preceded the Tiananmen massacre. Worst, there is nothing at all about its most controversial

figure, the explicitly Nietzschean Liu Xiaobo. Had Shao made use of the

scholarship of Cheung Chiu-yi, whose tireless cataloguing of Chinese scholarship


242 REVIEWS

on Nietzsche has been reviewed in this journal in recent years, he would

undoubtedly have enriched his coverage of the recent trends. On the whole, though, Nietzsche in China has a number of virtues as a work

of intellectual history. It is economical, highly readable and likely to inspire other scholars to further efforts in this field.

David Kelly University of New South Wales, Canberra

Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist

Leadership, by Thomas Kampen. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1999. xiv + 144 pp. A$75.00/US$45.00/?30.00 (hardcover), A$38.00/US$ 19.95/ ?15.99 (paperback).

This skillful examination of Chinese Party history dissects one more case of

alleged "two line struggle" in the Party's past?the conflict between the "28 Bolsheviks" and Mao Zedong in the 1930s. Kampen's targets are both the

oversimplifications and deceptions of official CCP history and the tendency of Western scholarship to uncritically adopt Chinese factual claims and general perspectives. His method is to carefully check the dates when key events occurred, determining who was actually present on such occasions and examining who held major positions in the formal Party structure. Comparatively little attention is given to policy debates or the complicated interpersonal relations of Party leaders?this latter aspect is somewhat ironic given that Kampen repeatedly focuses on the "28 Bolsheviks" as if they were a group while denying (correctly) that such a cohesive group existed.

Apart from demonstrating that the "Bolsheviks" were not cohesive, Kampen demolishes a number of other long-held views: these "Returned Students" did not seize control of the Party in January 1931, Mao did not become the leader of the Party at the January 1935 Zunyi conference (Kampen argues, again correctly, that Mao's formal position as leader was only conferred at the little-known March 1943 Politburo meeting), and the role of the Comintern in CCP affairs, rather than being undermined by Mao's "victory" at Zunyi, remained strong throughout the 1930s. In fact Moscow played a key role in the development of Mao's power at the Sixth Plenum in 1938. In short, much of what has been accepted by Western scholarship does not stand up to scrutiny when examined in the light of the new and detailed Chinese sources available since the 1980s.

There are, however, a number of problems in Kampen's attack on Western scholarship. While this reviewer has often pointed out erroneous conventional views derived from orthodox Party historiography and while I wholeheartedly welcome the accumulation of detailed evidence as superior to reliance on a "few vague sentences" in official pronouncements (see p. 70), Kampen's method of attack is troubling both stylistically and substantively. To provide extensive and thematically repetitive quotations demonstrating how earlier scholars got it wrong


Article Contentsp. 240p. 241p. 242

Issue Table of ContentsThe China Journal, No. 44 (Jul., 2000), pp. 1-246Front Matter [pp. ]Richer and Taller: Stature and Living Standards in China, 1979-1995 [pp. 1-39]Subsistence Crises, Managerial Corruption and Labour Protests in China [pp. 41-63]Xinjiang in the Nineties [pp. 65-90]State Coercion and the Balance of Awe: The 1983-1986 "Stern Blows" Anti-Crime Campaign [pp. 93-125]Report from the FieldCultural Life and Cultural Control in Rural China: Where is the Party? [pp. 129-141]

Review EssayThe Thin Line between Loyalty and Treachery in Mao's China [pp. 145-152]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 157-158]Review: untitled [pp. 158-160]Review: untitled [pp. 160-162]Review: untitled [pp. 162-164]Review: untitled [pp. 164-166]Review: untitled [pp. 166-167]Review: untitled [pp. 168-169]Review: untitled [pp. 169-170]Review: untitled [pp. 170-173]Review: untitled [pp. 173-175]Review: untitled [pp. 175-177]Review: untitled [pp. 178-179]Review: untitled [pp. 179-180]Review: untitled [pp. 180-182]Review: untitled [pp. 183-184]Review: untitled [pp. 184-186]Review: untitled [pp. 186-187]Review: untitled [pp. 188-189]Review: untitled [pp. 190-191]Review: untitled [pp. 192-194]Review: untitled [pp. 194-196]Review: untitled [pp. 196-198]Review: untitled [pp. 198-200]Review: untitled [pp. 200-202]Review: untitled [pp. 203-204]Review: untitled [pp. 204-206]Review: untitled [pp. 206-208]Review: untitled [pp. 209-210]Review: untitled [pp. 211-212]Review: untitled [pp. 212-213]Review: untitled [pp. 213-214]Review: untitled [pp. 214-216]Review: untitled [pp. 216-218]Review: untitled [pp. 218-220]Review: untitled [pp. 220-222]Review: untitled [pp. 222-223]Review: untitled [pp. 224-225]Review: untitled [pp. 225-228]Review: untitled [pp. 228-230]Review: untitled [pp. 230-232]Review: untitled [pp. 232-233]Review: untitled [pp. 233-235]Review: untitled [pp. 235-237]Review: untitled [pp. 237-239]Review: untitled [pp. 239-240]Review: untitled [pp. 240-242]Review: untitled [pp. 242-244]

Back Matter [pp. ]

kelly, d. - nietzsche in china by shao lixin (review)

Documents