Chao news client Yang Nianqun.
Editor's note:Historian and professor Yang Nianqun of the Chinese People's University recently published a new book, "Ask: A New History of Chinese Thought", which was recently published by Chongqing Publishing House. Based on the author's political history and social history, this book interprets the history of Chinese thought from important themes such as the view of the world, orthodoxy, Confucianism, Lao Zhuang wisdom, Neo-Confucianism, and Han Buddhism. This article is excerpted from Chapter 1 and is authorized by Chao News**.
In the order of the "world" view, the emperor is at the center, but everyone can also take their own origin and push others from near to far, establishing an overall understanding of the world. Observed from the perspective of the dynasty, it radiates from the monarch to the barbarian Rongdi; From the perspective of the people, it is from the individual to relatives and friends. Whether it is "Kyushu" or "Wufu", the spatial design of "Tianxia" is infinitely extended to all corners of different regions, and the boundaries between the circles are blurred, as if there is no end and no end.
Yang Nianqun, Asking: A New History of Chinese Thought, Chongqing Publishing House, 2024.
When the Han dynasty, which claimed to be the center of China, was surrounded and harassed by Yidi, or even replaced, the "world" would show a chaotic and fragmented situation, leading to the collapse of the "unification" situation. For example, in Chinese history, the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, the Song Dynasty and the Liaojin regime, and the long-term confrontation between the Ming Dynasty and the Manchurian regime in Northeast China were all regarded by Confucian scholars as abnormal cases of drastic changes in the concept of "Tianxia". After years of conquest and the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the Manchus finally achieved the situation of "great unification" with the participation of many ethnic groups, until the Westerners opened the door of China with guns.
When Chinese first meet Westerners, they are often accustomed to starting with their unfamiliar appearances, and they are rigidly classified into a category with Yidi, who has always dealt with them, and all of them are regarded as variants of "Yi", such as calling the British "Yingyi" and handling foreign affairs with the West called "Yiwu"; as a result, after encountering many blows from European ships and artillery, the method of looking at the world with old eyes quickly failed, forcing the Qing court and the opposition to constantly change their course and come up with new countermeasures to deal with the "new Yidi" from the other side of the ocean.
Preparation for the beginning and end of Yiwu (Xianfeng Dynasty), Tongzhi six years (1867) Inner House manuscript. Source: The Palace Museum.
How Chinese people use the word "Yi" when they perceive the West has undergone a process of change. After the Opium War, the Qing Dynasty was forced to agree that the word "Yi" should not be used in diplomatic documents to negotiate with the British. After 1860, the Qing Emperor's edicts "Yi" and "Yiwu" were all replaced by "Yang" and "Yangwu". Some scholars in the late Qing Dynasty with an open mind began to abandon the thinking of "Yixia discrimination" and gradually faced up to the positive significance of the West's all-round challenge. Wei Yuan, a pioneer of modern Chinese thought, objected to the arbitrary labeling of "barbarian Qiangdi" on the heads of Westerners, pointing out that these labels originally referred to "cruel and lazy people" who did not accept the teachings of "Wanghua", and that it was not appropriate to continue to use these insulting titles in the treatment of "educated countries" outside their own country. Because outside the country, there are also "people who practice righteousness and righteousness, go up to the heavens, look down at geography, penetrate the situation of things, and run through the ancient and modern", these people are "the wonders of Yinghai, the good friends of the territory", how can they all be called "Yidi". (Atlas of the Sea Kingdom, Vol. 76, "General Treatise on the Land of the Nation").
Wei Yuan's Atlas of the Sea Kingdom.
Another person who consciously knew the West earlier was Xu Jiji, who wrote in Chinese the famous book "Yinghuan Zhiluo", which summarized the general trend of Western geography, and the manuscript of this book is full of the word "Yi", for example, the English section of the book has only 2429 characters, and the word "Yi" appears 21 times. The official edition of Yinghuan Zhiluo increased to 7,620 words in the same section, but the word "Yi" did not appear once. It can be seen that this group of intellectuals who were the first to open their eyes to the world have realized that they must get rid of the long-term shackles of "Yixia" antagonistic thinking.
Despite this, although some flexible and open-minded intellectuals in the late Qing Dynasty no longer equated the West with "barbarians", they still stuck to the inertia of traditional thinking to measure and judge the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese and Western cultures, and even used the theories of "five elements" and "gossip" to compare the relationship between the two sides. For example, Xu Jiji cited the "Five Elements Theory" to demonstrate why Western science and technology are far ahead, and he started from the five geographical directions of east, west, south, north and middle, and determined that Europe was the West, nourished by gold, good at manufacturing utensils, and naturally developed and advanced technology. If we use the "gossip theory" to examine the position of the West, the truth is the same. The "Bagua" in the Book of Changes symbolizes the eight natural phenomena of heaven, earth, thunder, wind, water, fire, mountain, and Ze, and Xu Jiji describes the "Bagua" into eight different directions, namely east, west, south, north, southeast, northeast, southwest, and northwest, forming the Bagua direction. According to the direction indicated by the compass, the direction of Europe is in the northwest, and the qi of heaven and earth runs from the northwest to the southeast, all the way to China. What is more strange is that Xu Jiji believes that firearms were invented in China, and Europe secretly imitated them, but they were just transformed and upgraded to be more exquisite; The advancement of European civilization was only inspired by the originality of Chinese culture, which was able to develop and progress, and now this force is showing signs of moving eastward, and there is hope for the revival of Chinese culture.
After Wei Yuan and Xu Jiji, Chinese intellectuals began to think about how to change the traditional cognitive framework of "tianxia" and learn how to correctly establish the concept of modern "state".
The real formation of China's "national" consciousness can be traced back to after the First Sino-Japanese War. Chen Duxiu published the article "Speaking of the Country" in 1904, recalling that ten years before the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War, he just wanted to "deceive a few layers of fame", glorify the lintel, ** know what the country is, "In the First Sino-Japanese Year, I heard people say that there was a Japanese country that defeated our China." In the year of Gengzi, the combined forces of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Austria, and Japan defeated China. At this time, I realized that the people of the world were originally divided into one country and one country, and each frontier and the other were not inferior to each other. We are one of the countries in the world, and I am one of them."
The formation of the concept of "state" and "national" in modern China is not an idea that naturally arises from within. In the continuous interaction and collision with the West, the anxiety of "self-preservation" and "self-existence" of Chinese has been constantly strengthened. Zeng Jize, a diplomat who went to the West at that time, once wrote an article entitled "The Theory of China Sleeping First and Waking Up Later" in 1887, first proposing how to wake up the sleeping ancient China. Take the initiative to wrestle with the West on the big issue.
In 1899, Liang Qichao, a pioneer of China's reform of the law, founded the Qing Yibao in Japan, using the "sleeping lion" as a metaphor for backward China, claiming that the "sleeping lion" could only truly awaken when he became a "national". In his view, "country" corresponds to "family", "country" is "public", "family" is "private", and only by breaking free from the shackles of a small family and becoming a citizen of a country can it be liberated. From this point of view, the "concept of the state" derived from the psychology of "self-defense" did not put individual liberation in an important position from the beginning, and it is still accustomed to thinking in the name of the "state" as a whole. At the same time, "the state" and "the world" are placed in opposing positions. Liang Qichao called on the people to get rid of the status of subjects regulated by the concept of "the world" and become the "citizens" of the modern state.
The political community of "state" is composed of "people", and at least nominally, "people" are equal within the "state", and there should be no hierarchical differences, which is fundamentally different from the relationship between the emperor and his subjects in the "view of the world" in ancient dynasties. Liang Qichao also distinguished between the two concepts of "tribesmen" and "nationals", in the past, Chinese people lived together in a small area for a lifetime, this "tribe" lifestyle determined that they could not realize that there was another broader world outside the family, clan, and hometown, and only by jumping out of the familiar network of relationships around them and participating in "national" affairs could they become a member of the "national". Only by breaking the original habitual thinking of "knowing the world but not knowing the country" and "knowing that there is a self but not knowing the country" can we get rid of the subject status of the old dynasty and truly become a "new people".
Liang Qichao's "Xinmin Theory", in which he mentions the difference between "people" and "people".
In the late Qing Dynasty, which explained how the "state" functioned, the "world" in the mouths of those reform pioneers was an old word opposed to "state", which had a derogatory connotation. Nowadays, we often say that we should "keep the world in mind", and this "world" already includes the vision of modern international relations, and "the world" is the general term for all modern countries in the world, and it is no longer the "world" described in ancient books.
The first issue of Zhejiang Chao", which is the publication of the Zhejiang Student Association in Japan. Source: Zhejiang Archives.
In 1903, a revolutionary newspaper called "Zhejiang Chao" blamed the Chinese for being unpatriotic and being deeply corroded by the poison of the "view of the world", which said: "Never regard China as my China, but as the China of the monarch; And we do not regard China as the China of the Chinese, but as the China of the people of the world. You see, "Tianxia" is juxtaposed with "China" under the rule of "monarch" in this passage, but it is completely opposed to "China" as a modern "state". In the eyes of some, "world" has become a negative term compared to "country", because the connotation of "world" is not "international" enough. As Yang Du said: "In China's thousands of years of history, there has been no international term, and the Chinese people only have a world concept, but no national concept." The "world" in this sentence is equivalent to the ancient "world", because it is opposed to the "international", it has been criticized for being outdated and not in line with the general trend of historical development. It can be seen that at that time, only "country" was the most fashionable and advanced term, which was worth learning and using.
The intellectuals of the late Qing Dynasty were in a very complex and entangled state of understanding of "the state", "monarchical power" and "civil rights", and at least two different theories of "sovereignty resting with the people" and "national sovereignty" appeared. The revolutionaries represented by Sun Yat-sen demanded the complete overthrow of the monarchy and the true realization of the democratic goal of "people's sovereignty"; The constitutionalists represented by Liang Qichao advocated that the monarch's power should not be excessive, but it should not be abolished altogether, and the scope of sovereignty should be defined with the national constitution as the center. The Revolutionary Party believes that the monarchy is incompatible with modern democracies and must be completely outlawed; However, the constitutionalists believe that the monarchy and the modern national constitution are compatible and coexist, and that the monarch must be retained as a symbol of traditional culture, but does not bear administrative responsibilities, and that specific affairs are undertaken by the parliament and cabinet.
In the late Qing Dynasty, "state" replaced "world" intellectual discourseThe ostensible purpose is to hope that the old dynasty can break free from the shackles of "the world", but it is not concerned with the emancipation of the individual in the substantive sense, but only hopes that the individual will step out of the shadow of traditional family oppression and join the modern national political community outside the dynasty to serve, struggle and sacrifice for it.
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