Young People, China, History: Ge Zhaoguang on the Big Questions

“I find students very hard to teach now. Scholarship is hard to do, teaching is hard too — nothing like when we were students.”

You have probably heard the line “X has been Chinese territory since ancient times.” But what does “since ancient times” mean? Most such claims simply take a slice out of one period or another. Territory follows political power and military force, and it never stops moving. So the “China” that looked perfectly clear begins to turn complicated and blurred.

For the past decade, the work of 67-year-old historian Ge Zhaoguang has circled exactly this question — studying “China,” trying to understand its complexity and its changes through history.

Ge Zhaoguang belongs to the generation of scholars who got their chance to study only after the Cultural Revolution ended and the college entrance exam was restored. Through the Cultural Revolution's ten years he was sent down with his parents to Kaili County, Guizhou Province, where he worked in a brick factory, a pesticide factory, and a supply and marketing cooperative. At 27, in 1977, he entered the Chinese department at Peking University. He is now a distinguished professor at Fudan University's Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and Department of History, working on the history of Chinese religion, intellectual history, and the history of scholarship. He has been known in academic circles for a long time: he began studying Buddhism and Daoism in the 1980s, and in the 1990s wrote the well-known two-volume A History of Chinese Thought (《中国思想史》), which used a new set of concepts and a new way of writing intellectual history, and turned him toward broader intellectual history.

“Since the 1990s, China's entire intellectual world has cared deeply about intellectual history. Because politics is not easy to discuss openly in China, people have often used intellectual history to discuss political questions,” Ge Zhaoguang told CNPolitics.

“Concern for reality” was the starting motive behind the scholarship of Ge Zhaoguang's generation. In 2011 his book Here in “China” I Dwell (《宅兹中国》) set off another round of argument about “China” — and behind it, again, lay a concern with politics, society, and the present. Territory, ethnicity, religion, the state, identity: every one of those keywords is tied to the here and now.

At the start of 2017, Ge Zhaoguang published two new books at once. One is Lingering Echoes (《余音》), a selection of his essays on the history of scholarship written over 24 years; the other is another of his books on “China,” Historical China, Within and Without (《历史中国的内与外》). Earlier related works include Here in “China” I Dwell: Reconstructing the Historical Discourse on “China”, What Is “China”? Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History (《何为“中国”：疆域民族文化与历史》), and Imagining a Foreign Land: Notes on the Chinese-Language Yeonhaengnok Records of Joseon Korea (《想象异域：读李朝朝鲜汉文燕行文献札记》).

QDaily interviewed Ge Zhaoguang at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, in the west main building of Guanghua Tower at Fudan University, and talked with him about young people, history, China, and other big topics. Mr. Ge says his “eyes are bad, ears are bad,” but when the talk heated up, his critical edge had not dulled at all.

Looking at China from Its Periphery

“As a political-cultural core region, ‘China’ has been broadly stable and continuous ever since the Qin and Han laid its foundations, but it has not necessarily been a fixed political dynasty. Sometimes it was the core region of an empire ruling all under heaven (as in the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang); sometimes it straddled several divided empires (as in the Northern and Southern Dynasties); sometimes it overlapped with a contracted empire, or was very nearly the empire itself (as in the Song and Ming); and sometimes its borders did not overlap with those of a dynasty founded by another ethnic group, yet it remained, at the empire's core, a community sharing a political-cultural identity (as under the Mongol Yuan and the Manchu Qing),” Ge Zhaoguang writes in Historical China, Within and Without.

China as a political-cultural community, he argues, has always had a center. Only the edges have kept shifting, pushed by the rise and fall of national power, by wars, by the migration of ethnic groups.

One must distinguish, Ge Zhaoguang says, between the historical, the political, and the cultural China. Nor can concepts like government, state, and motherland be treated as equivalents.

If you know some of postmodern historiography's theories about the modern nation-state — Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, say — you may feel Ge Zhaoguang's research more deeply. Because in his view, “China” as a community is real, not imagined.

These recent books all belong to Ge Zhaoguang's research program of “looking at China from its periphery.” He treats materials on Chinese history preserved in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as “new material,” and uses them to offer several vantage points from which to understand East Asia and China again.

To Koreans of the Joseon dynasty at the time, for instance, the Qing separation of men and women — the rule that unrelated men and women must not touch or hand things to each other — was close to collapse; Qing funerals came with drums and pipes and even staged plays; and in the Qing everyone from commoners up to grand academicians was doing business, with commerce thriving. Past research, by “us,” overlooked all of it.

His strong concern for reality does not conflict with the rigor of his research. As a historian, Ge Zhaoguang has an almost “pathological” urge to possess source material. His daily “diary” is nothing but copied-out material. “My diary is all source material. Every day I copy material — all day I'm copying all kinds of material into my diary,” he says.

In 2000, Ge Zhaoguang had someone photograph more than 50,000 pages of diaries and brush-talk records written by Joseon Koreans who traveled to China during the Qing (collected as Complete Collection of Yeonhaengnok [《燕行录全集》] and Complete Collection of Yeonhaengnok: Volumes Held in Japan [《燕行录全集日本所藏编》]). He read every page of this “new material” on a computer, and his eyes eventually gave out. In 2008 he went through three retinal operations; the uncorrected vision in his right eye is now only 0.1–0.2. In 2014 he also published Taking Refuge in Paper (《且借纸遁》), a selection of his reading diaries from 1994 to 2011 — a record, too, of just how much material he copies and how much he reads.

Scholarship and Politics

On scholarship and politics, what Ge Zhaoguang keeps coming back to is norms and limits. “Those of us who do history are doctors who diagnose the source of a disease, not doctors who operate or write prescriptions, so we can only speak as far as history goes. As for how you understand a present-day problem: first, that is a politician's business; second, it is something that has to be drawn out of the wisdom of history,” he says.

On many occasions Ge Zhaoguang has said he is getting old, that he can only put the questions, and that the work after that will take scholars working together. Still, he feels a “bleak state of mind” about the future of Chinese humanities scholarship. That is why he called his collection of essays on 16 dead scholars, from the late Qing and Republican era onward, Lingering Echoes. “The figures of these predecessors, along with the scholarly style and the character of an age, seem to be fading into a dark fog, and what comes to mind is that somewhat helpless phrase, ‘lingering echoes,’” he writes in the book.

Those predecessors include Wang Guowei, Chen Yinke, Gu Jiegang, Yang Lien-sheng, Pan Guangdan, Zhou Yiliang, and Ray Huang. What mattered about them, Ge Zhaoguang believes, is that they created “new paradigms.” The word paradigm comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, and means the beliefs, values, techniques, and norms shared by an academic community. Paradigms are incommensurable, and the relation between them is not a simple line of progress. “It isn't the grand martial-arts assembly in a wuxia novel, where someone can fight his way to first or second place,” he says.

Behind the book, though, is still what he so often calls “concern for reality,” or “concern for politics.” “Only when politics and institutions have made an environment with room to set down a quiet desk — only then, perhaps, can this academic world get better, and only then can modern scholarship possibly surpass the late Qing and Republican era,” he writes in Lingering Echoes.

Has This Society Been Too Good to Young People?

Q=QDaily

G=Ge Zhaoguang

Q: Why did you publish this book, Lingering Echoes?

G: The reason it is called Lingering Echoes — and you're right, there is something bleak about it — is that in this age we can't quite see what lies ahead for Chinese humanities scholarship. I once said at Peking University that this is a murky, unclear age. We don't know what will become of the humanities. We write about those remarkable scholars of the past — something of their spirit, their thinking, their feelings, their scholarship. And we wonder whether these lingering echoes will slowly die away, and whether we will be unable to carry them on.

Q: In the book you discuss how to judge late-Qing and Republican scholarship. How should we look at those scholars and their work?

G: On judging late-Qing and Republican scholarship, I already said this in the preface. Whatever you make of the era itself, from the standpoint of the history of scholarship it was a great transformation, a huge shift from tradition to modernity. Any period of transition throws up new paradigms. Some people rate late-Qing and Republican scholarship very low, believing New China ought to have done far better. In fact that isn't necessarily so, because whether scholarship is good or bad is not only a matter of particular results; you have to look at paradigms and models, at how the whole method changed. We should respect, and see clearly, what late-Qing and Republican scholarship means for us today. That is why some people say we should leap over an entire era, go back to the late Qing and the Republic, and set out again. Such views do exist.

Q: So what do you make of the “national studies craze”? What do you make of Confucianism?

G: Let me be frank: I don't like the term “national studies,” because it brings three very serious consequences. First, it narrows Chinese thought, culture, and scholarship. It narrows them to the Han, then narrows them again to Han Confucianism. In fact Chinese culture holds a great deal more than that — not only the Han, but other peoples too.

As for Confucianism, I think there is much in it we can respect. But we have to see that it must be transformed — what Lin Yu-sheng called “creative transformation,” as you mentioned later. Without that transformation, trying to revive antiquity and return to that age is impossible, because the social foundation for it is gone.

Q: Of the 16 dead scholars in the book, which do you feel closest to, or like best?

G: Of the dozen or more scholars in the book, I can't say which I like best or am most like. It's hard to say. Frankly, writing these pieces is on one hand a way of remembering scholars of the past, and in truth a way of expressing our views on the present. So it isn't that I want to imitate any one of them. Each of them achieved his own things, and it's hard to say who stands higher than whom. It isn't the grand martial-arts assembly in a wuxia novel, where someone fights his way to first or second place. It isn't like that. There is something in every one of them we can learn from, imitate, and draw on.

Q: You were in the first class of university students after the Cultural Revolution ended, and you have taught at universities ever since. What is different about universities today? What is their biggest problem now, and how should it be solved?

G: I find students very hard to teach now. Scholarship is hard to do, teaching is hard too — nothing like when we were students.

Q: Hard in what way?

G: For one thing, in our time our hearts were simple and things were simple. Everyone had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, and people had idealism. Learning well was a rare chance. At the same time everyone cared about society and about politics. There was discussion about which way China's future should go, and some consensus about it. Later the good part was that things became plural; the bad part was that consensus was lost. Without consensus people had more choices, and they didn't all have to walk the same road. We wished the day had 36 hours so we could put them all into our work, but people are different now. Our students today have a great many choices; they don't have to grind away at the same thing here every day the way we did. So we feel students today don't work as hard as we did. At the same time, their choices have become plural. So they don't care about politics and society the way we did, and since there is no consensus, people without a shared consensus often have no shared topics. Without shared topics, the exchange of feeling and of thought between people is far thinner. Everyone just looks at his own phone, and that's that.

Q: What do you mean by consensus?

G: There is no way to explain this to you young people. People of our generation lived through the Cultural Revolution and went through a great deal. We hold a certain criticism of this society, or a certain dissatisfaction with it. So I think we express a concern for reality. Young people today don't necessarily care about reality the way we do.

Q: Is that an attitude?

G: Only an attitude? It's a value.

Q: Some people feel this society has been too good to young people. What do you think?

G: Too good to young people? I'd say this society isn't good to young people at all. The world may look colorful, with plenty of choices, but does it really care about young people?

Q: Young people today seem to have many choices, but much of the time they have no choice at all.

G: Whether a society treats young people well is not only about offering them a range of choices in work and interests. It also has to give them a free environment for thought, so they can develop their own thinking. But this society has not given young people a truly free space or a truly free time in which to think, and that is a big problem as we see it.

Take you: textbooks have already disciplined you into this shape, so what more can I tell you? Those of us who teach often feel we have to fight the things textbooks have standardized in young people's heads — first drive that stuff out, then talk to them about something else. When we teach history, the history they have taken in is what middle school taught them; when they read literature, what they know is what middle-school textbooks poured into them; and now, with television shows like the Chinese Poetry Conference and Lecture Room, you still have to fight all of that.

Is any of it real knowledge? On the surface it looks like knowledge, but mixed in behind it is a great deal of ideological propaganda and instruction. It seals you inside a fixed, very solid frame, and that frame leaves young people little room to work with. When we teach abroad, for example, the contrast with foreign students is obvious: Chinese students don't seem good at asking questions, and especially not at asking doubting ones. Why is it that an overseas student can ask 100 questions, 90 of them wrong, and still come back with 10 that excite even the teacher? That is the difference.

We often say a society has to meet three conditions to be good to people. The first is to make you feel safe; the second is to let you reach happiness — we have got as far as the second. But the third? Freedom and dignity — do you have those? It's as if you have been handed a cage one meter high: as long as you bend over and squat inside without touching it, things are fine. But what if you stand up? Everyone has simply gotten used to bending over.

Q: So what do you think young people can do?

G: I would never tell young people what they should do. First, you have no standing to point fingers; second, you don't know young people that well. So I keep warning myself: never point fingers, never assume you are wiser than others and can lay out the course of someone else's life. Don't think that way.

Q: But ideology does want to regulate young people's lives.

G: Of course ideology wants to regulate. An ideology that doesn't regulate isn't an ideology — it becomes a body of thought. That is the biggest gap between a body of thought and an ideology.

Q: Being regulated without knowing it is the frightening part.

G: That unconscious regulation is everywhere. If it were coercive, if you could feel it regulating you, then the ideology would be about as crude as it gets. Go look at Foucault's theories; what he is talking about is discipline and punishment. “Discipline” means exactly this: little by little, without noticing, you become this shape.

Cover image from: cnpolitics, Wikipedia