this would not have been the time to play up any differences he would have had with Fu in the past. However, an analysis of the debate between New Tide and National Heritage shows that he was on to something.
The debates at Beijing University
When newspapers claimed in the early months of 1919 that Beijing University was experiencing yet another debate between academic factions, they implied that there was nothing spectacular about this. But the classifications had an addi-tional, “patterning”58 effect on the reality of the debates: They broke down highly academic and abstract discussions into neat categories, making them more tan-gible to a newspaper-reading public.
The debates themselves were extremely nuanced. The most obvious differ-ence between National Heritage and New Tide was that the former was written in Literary Chinese and the latter in baihua. While this sounds very clear-cut, a closer look shows that the languages used in the journals belonged in fact to a spectrum of styles, the boundaries between which were blurred. Zhang Xuan’s (National Heritage) very straightforward Literary Chinese was full of neolo-gisms.59 As such, it was as different from the archaic Literary Chinese of his friend Yu Shizhen, who hardly used any neologisms, as it was from the baihua of his opponent Fu Sinian. Fu Sinian’s (New Tide) baihua, on the other hand, was full of classical allusions, and sometimes he even wrote in Literary Chinese.60 Baihua was, moreover, not the only language ideal held by the circle to which Fu Sinian belonged. Some of his associates advocated a Romanization system to replace Chinese characters. Or they were in favor of Esperanto.61 When I therefore call these authors “groups,” “circles” and “advocates of baihua or Literary Chinese,”
this must be understood as a simplification, made necessary by the requirement to refer to them by some sort of shorthand. After all, it would be very tedious to list all their names every time.
58 Lit. “patterned,” Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 216.
59 Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 2A.
60 Fu Sinian, “Zenyang zuo baihua wen” (How to Write Texts in the Plain Language), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian), vol. 44 (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1128; Fu Mengzhen, “Qing Liang Yusheng zhi shiji zhi yi sanshiliu juan” (The Doubtful Points in the Records of the Historian by the Qing Historian Liang Yusheng, Volume 36), in Xinchao (New Tide), vol. 1 (Beijing, 2006), 145–47.
61 Zhou, Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature, 35–36; Sang, “The Divergence and Convergence of China’s Written and Spoken Language,” 74, 77.
Not only was there a spectrum of ideas within the groups. The allegedly opposing “factions” also had a lot in common and only differed in the nuanced interpretations of the same concepts. They were, in Thomas Bender’s words, part of the same “coummunit[y] of discourse” and as such they shared “the collec-tive concepts, the vocabulary of mocollec-tives, and the key questions that give shape to their work.”62 One such shared concept and a core argumentative strategy for both baihua and Literary Chinese was evolution, a theory that the authors of both magazines endorsed. The authors of New Tide and National Heritage even agreed with respect to some basic patterns in the evolution of the Chinese language.
Authors of both journals believed that the Zhou Dynasty had been a golden age for language: in the Zhou Dynasty, language had been right, according to both Fu Sinian from New Tide and Zhang Xuan from National Heritage.63 The authors of New Tide and National Heritage also agreed that the scholar was rooted in both past and present: He (at the time still mostly he) had to study the past, but he also had to prescribe the current and future criteria for the culture.64 They even shared the same vocabulary to describe their theories: They wanted culture to be “alive” (sheng, huopo), rather than “dead” (si),65 and they all referred to the culture they had inherited from old times, the “national heritage,” as “material”
(cailiao or cai).66
So how did they differ in their analysis of the evolution of the Chinese lan-guage? The differences lay in the diagnosis of what had gone wrong in evolution since the golden days of the Zhou Dynasty. According to Fu Sinian, written lan-guage had stagnated. According to Zhang Xuan, it had evolved wrongly.
For Fu Sinian, language in the Zhou Dynasty had been perfect because people wrote like they spoke, and because they did both in the language of their times. The downfall had come in the Han Dynasty, when Sima Xiangru (179-127 BC) and Yang Xiong (53 BC-18 AD), who were keen on writing but bad at speaking, had started again to write in the language of the Zhou Dynasty.67
62 Bender, “The Cultures of Intellectual Life,” 3.
63 Fu, “Zenyang zuo baihua wen,” 1123; Zhang Xuan, “Wen yan heyi pingyi” (The Integration of Written and Spoken Language), Guogu (National Heritage), no. 1 (1919): 1B–2A.
64 Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 2B, 3A; Fu Sinian, “Xiju gailiang gemian guan” (A Comprehensive View of the Reform of Drama), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian), vol. 4 (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1075–97.
65 For “sheng,” see Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 2A. For “huopo,” see Fu, “Wen yan heyi caoyi,” 1066. For “si,” see Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 2A; Fu, “Wen yan heyi caoyi,” 1065.
66 For “cailiao,” see Fu, “Mao Zishui ‘Guogu he kexue de jingshen’ shiyu,” 1258. For “cai,” see Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 2B.
67 Fu, “Zenyang zuo baihua wen,” 1123.
The debates at Beijing University 41
While spoken language had thus continued evolving in keeping with the trend of times, written language was stuck in the Zhou Dynasty until the present day:
Therefore “the living were being given the language of the dead to use.”68 Fu Sinian expressed this problem of stagnation most vividly when talking about Chinese drama, which was “as if an ape had evolved into a hairy man, stopped there, and could never change into a man.”69 It was now the responsibility of a scholar to make sure that Chinese culture would get back in touch with the times.
If Fu Sinian saw the virtue of the Zhou as people who wrote as they spoke, Zhang Xuan saw it in the exact opposite way. In his view, language had been perfect in the Zhou Dynasty because people spoke like they wrote.70 The downfall came in the Han Dynasty, when Han Gaozu (256-195BC), an uneducated “man-aging clerk” became emperor, and people started writing like they spoke, that is, in mutually unintelligible dialects, which changed from generation to gener-ation. As a result, a scholar in the north could not understand a scholar in the south, and a scholar in the Ming Dynasty could not understand a scholar from the Han Dynasty. Zhang Xuan therefore concluded that “when the vernacular was introduced into written texts, they became quite difficult to understand.”71 There-fore the baihua project, he felt, was a development into the wrong direction – as wrong a direction, incidentally, as were tendencies to use ever more complicated characters in Literary Chinese, a practice that newspapers would have ascribed to Zhang Xuan’s very own group, the “Old Faction.”72
These two differing diagnoses of the ills of the Chinese language were based on different understandings of how evolution worked and how past and present were, and should, therefore be related to each other. For Fu Sinian, evolution meant a succession of individual time periods, in which each new time period was different from its predecessor. They were like a “child [that] is born from its mother, [but] should develop distinct features of its own.”73 Evolution thus showed Fu Sinian how different the old and the new were – an opinion shared
68 Fu Sinian, “Hanyu gaiyong pinyin wenzi de chubu tan” (Abandoning Characters in Favour of Pinyin in Chinese: A Preliminary Discussion), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian), vol. 4 (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1138.
69 Fu, “Xiju gailiang gemian guan,” 1078.
70 Zhang, “Wen yan heyi pingyi,” 1B.
71 Ibid., 2B.
72 Zhang Xuan, “Zhongguo wenxue gailiang lun” (The Reform of Chinese Literature), Guogu (National Heritage), no. 4 (1919): 4B.
73 Fu Sinian, “Wenxue gexin shenyi” (An Explanation of the Reform of Literature), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian), vol. 4 (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1053.
by others in his circle.74 In each time period, Fu Sinian held, “the times” made all things social and cultural adjust to the “demands of the times.”75 For instance, in the Zhou Dynasty, times were ripe for the literature of the Zhou; in the Ming Dynasty, times were ripe for the literature of the Ming; and today, times were ripe for the literature of today.76
This meant that, in each new era, it was a scholar’s task to grasp the “demands of the times” and to implement them in culture. Consequently, Fu Sinian kept asking about methods of doing so: How should we write baihua texts?77 How should we periodize history?78 This had practical implications for academic study: New Tide was full of theoretical discussions about all those new methods and theories, among them logic, science or the language of present times. Articles exclusively dedicated to actual research on China’s past were rare. The New Tide writers, in other words, were very much concerned with exploring and expound-ing the theories and paradigms of this new age they lived in.
What happened to culture when a new time had begun, according to these writers? The past culture was “dead,” and the new one “alive.” In the past, for example, Literary Chinese had felt “spontaneous” or “natural”79 – a view with which present China scholars disagree, as they argue that Literary Chinese was always the constructed lingua franca of the nobility.80 Still, Fu Sinian went on to say that Liter-ary Chinese in his times was “outdated” and had become “already stale and dead.”
Baihua, however, was “alive and full of joie de vivre” because it “suited today’s world.”81 In the present, the past should only be the “material” for academic study.82
74 Leigh Jenco, “The Problem of the Culturally Unprecedented: Cultural Difference as Historical Dis-continuity after May Fourth” n.d., 15–16; Luo Zhitian, “Xin wenhua yundong shiqi guanyu zhengli guogu de sixiang lunzheng” (Intellectual Debates about “Tidying up China’s National Heritage” in the Period of the New Culture Movement), in Guojia yu xueshu: Qingji minchu guanyu “guoxue” de sixiang lunzheng (Country and Scholarship: Intellectual Debates on “National Learning” at the End of the Qing and in the Early Republic) (Beijing: Shenghui dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2003), 230.
75 Fu Sinian, “Duiyu Zhongguo jinri tan zhexue zhe zhi gannian” (Feelings on People Who Talk about Philosophy in China Today), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian), vol. 4 ( Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1253.
76 Fu, “Wenxue gexin shenyi,” 1053.
77 Fu, “Zenyang zuo baihua wen.”
78 Fu Sinian, “Zhongguo lishi fenqi zhi yanjiu” (Research on the Periodization of Chinese His-tory), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian), vol. 4 (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1224–33.
79 Fu, “Wen yan heyi caoyi,” 1070.
80 Ping Chen, Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7–9.
81 Fu, “Wen yan heyi caoyi,” 1065–66.
82 Fu, “Mao Zishui ‘Guogu he kexue de jingshen’ shiyu,” 1258.
The debates at Beijing University 43
This implied that Fu Sinian rejected the prescriptive functions of the past.
The past should not determine the way of presenting arguments, of writing texts and of behavior in the present. However, calling the past “material” not only meant reducing it. It also meant preserving it as “material” for academic study.
In Fu Sinian’s words, the study “material” should be “tidied up” (tiaoli) with the paradigms that suited the current time period.83
Judging from how Fu Sinian combined this “material” with contemporary theories, this appeared to mean that a scholar should examine how these up-to-date theories like logic or science had developed in China, or how Chinese culture had, or had not, responded to the “demands of the times” over the course of its history. In this way, it was possible to determine China’s current stage in evolu-tion. The story usually read that evolution had started out well in the beginning, but had then come to a point of stagnation. Language, for instance, had stag-nated in the Han Dynasty. Drama had stagstag-nated in the Yuan Dynasty and was now stuck at the “hairy man”-stage – between ape and man.84 Similar things had happened to the notion of “logic,” according to Hu Shi.85
This story of evolutionary stagnation sounds quite drastic. But it was, in fact, an alternative to an even more hopeless story, which was told in the West: the story that “in its innate nature, Eastern scholarship is unable to fully develop,” as Fu Sinian put it.86 This narrative had been told and retold by Western thinkers since the 18th century, including Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873).87 Fu Sinian was well aware of it, as the citation above shows. When he said that China had fallen back in evolution, he implicitly challenged the idea that China was unable to develop: the current stagnation was only a temporary setback, which could be remedied through the intervention of scholars who could identify the evolutionary mishap. This was what Fu Sinian called the “first duty” of New Tide in his manifesto to the magazine.88
83 Fu Sinian, “Gu shu xin ping” (A Re-Evaluation of Old Books), in Xinchao (New Tide), vol. 1 (Beijing, 2006), 145.
84 Fu, “Xiju gailiang gemian guan,” 1078.
85 On “doubting antiquity,” see Fu, “Qing Liang Yusheng zhi shiji zhi yi sanshiliu juan,” 147.
On logic in China, see Shi Hu, “The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China” (PhD, Columbia University, 1922).
86 Fu Sinian, “Zhongguo xueshu sixiangjie zhi jiben wumiu” (The Fundamental Faults in Chinese Scholarship and Thought), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian) (Taibei:
Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1213–14.
87 Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 59.
88 Fu Sinian, “Xinchao fakan zhiqushu” (Aims behind the Publication of New Tide), in Fu Sinian quanji (Collected Works of Fu Sinian), vol. 4 (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1980), 1398.
Fu Sinian and his circle, in other words, learnt from cultural evolution that history was a succession of individual time periods. In each new time, a scholar had to explore the theories that suited the age and analyze their development in the past culture.
If Fu Sinian was worried about evolutionary stagnation, the worst fear of National Heritage author Zhang Xuan was that culture could develop in the wrong direction. Through studying the past, a scholar had to make sure that this did not happen. This idea was based on a notion another National Heritage writer, Yu Shizhen, expressed most clearly when he said about general patterns of change that “past and present are of one tally. They do of course not follow separated tracks.”89 Evolution and the patterns of change were thus a continuum of eternal
“trails.” If these patterns showed Fu Sinian how different past and present were, they showed the National Heritage writers the ways in which past and present were connected. It showed them the “joints” or “rhythm” (jiezu) that linked the old and the new.90
This implied, Yu Shizhen went on, that “if we try to understand [lit. ‘strive for’] the present on the basis of the old, we will understand the system of the present.” Significantly, this also worked the other way around: “If we want to try and preserve the old, we must comprehend the present.”91 Finally, if the knowl-edge of past and present was brought together, both past and future could be comprehended.92 Zhang Xuan, for example, argued that historical phonology could enable a scholar to uncover a “general law of pronunciation change.” Since past, present and future all followed the same “tracks,” it was possible to deter-mine the pronunciation of the future.93
This notion of evolution again had practical implications for academic study.
While New Tide was full of theory discussions, most articles in National Heri-tage contained actual, often kaozheng-style, research on old texts, with the aim to uncover the “tracks” of change. Xue Xiangsui, for example, reconstructed the original pronunciation of historical books.94 Zhang Xuan also used the “new,”
Western concepts differently than Fu Sinian and Hu Shi. While Fu and Hu had deployed them to show China’s stagnation within evolution, Zhang Xuan used them to illustrate China’s past more clearly. After all, according to his colleague,
89 Yu, “Gu jin xueshu goutong siyi,” 2B.
90 Ibid., 1B.
91 Ibid., 2B.
92 Ibid., 1B.
93 Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 3A.
94 Xue Xiangsui, “Du gushu fa ju yu” (How to Read Old Books), Guogu (National Heritage), no. 1 (1919): 2B.
The debates at Beijing University 45
the past, present and future could be better understood if they were brought together.95 In one article, for example, Zhang Xuan explained a paragraph from the Mozi by saying that it could be understood as an exposition of the “law of cau-sality.”96 Unlike Fu Sinian, Zhang did not ask how “causality” had not developed in China. He asked how the notion of “causality” helped him to understand the Mozi better.
The past, for Zhang Xuan, had another advantage: It could help create a good future, by preventing culture from evolving wrongly. The “general law of pronunciation change,” Zhang wrote, was sometimes broken. While this law claimed that pronunciation became easier over time, pronunciation sometimes became more difficult in reality. Apparently oblivious to the many loanwords in his own writing, and mixing the ideas of pronunciation and language, Zhang Xuan complained that this usually happened when foreign words were intro-duced into a language.97 The baihua of the Hu Shi-Chen Duxiu circle, however, was full of foreign loanwords. To avoid this, in Zhang Xuan’s view, mistake, a scholar had to use the past as a reference to identify good and bad turns in evo-lution, to abandon the bad ones, and to create a new culture in accordance with the “true” laws of change. The past, together with the new European culture, thus “provides [scholars] with material for transformation.”98 On the other hand, treating the past as “material for the history of scholarship,” “making stale lists of stale and dead people,” as New Tide proposed to do, meant to be killing off the past.99 The terms “material,” “alive” and “dead,” which both New Tide and National Heritage authors used to describe evolutionary patterns, therefore did not show something Fu Sinian and Zhang Xuan had in common, but revealed the different ways in which they perceived the relationship between past and present.
Evolution was not the only issue under debate, but there were other ideas too. For example, the authors of the two magazines engaged in similarly sophis-ticated discussions about how China should position itself to the West and its
95 Yu, “Gu jin xueshu goutong siyi,” 1B.
96 Zhang Xuan, “Mozi jing shuo xin jie: xu” (New Explanations of the Mozi, Continued), Guogu (National Heritage), no. 3 (1919): 1B.
97 Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 3A.
98 Ibid., 2B. Zhang Xuan uses the expression “ouhua,” instead of “Ouzhou” here. Literally this means “Europeanization.” But with Axel Schneider, I translated it as “European culture,” Axel Schneider, Wahrheit und Geschichte: zwei chinesische Historiker auf der Suche nach einer mod-ernen Identität für China (Truth and History: Two Chinese Historians in Search of a Modern Identi-ty for China) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 151.
99 Zhang, “Bo Xinchao guogu he kexue de jingshen pian,” 2A.
culture.100 Nor was language the only notion the journals cared about. New Tide,
culture.100 Nor was language the only notion the journals cared about. New Tide,