Next to Lu Xun and Hu Shi, What Can Lin Yutang's Legacy Teach Us About China's Future? | Interviews

Liberal critic, lyrical philosopher, cosmopolitan critic — Lin Yutang was all three at once

Qian Suoqiao settled on Lin Yutang as his subject in 1994. For 25 years since, nearly everything he has published has been about Lin: two monographs, Lin Yutang and China's Search for Modern Rebirth and Liberal Cosmopolitan: Lin Yutang and Middling Chinese Modernity, plus an edited collection, The Cross-Cultural Legacy of Lin Yutang: Critical Perspectives.

Like Lin's own May Fourth generation, Qian — formed by the mood of the 1980s — carries the same "obsession with China": where is the country going, how can its traditional culture be reborn in modern form, who are the Chinese. So for him Lin Yutang is a "chess piece." By digging up a piece that the mainstream talk of his own upbringing had buried, he wants to sort out his own history and find himself. Could China have taken another road to modernity? Could there be another way to live, now and later?

Qian is Chair Professor of Chinese Studies at Newcastle University in Britain, working on Chinese modernity and cross-cultural studies between China and the West. He was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu, in 1963 and grew up during the Cultural Revolution; by the time he sat the college entrance exam, reform and opening up had just begun. "Reform and opening up meant accepting the Western world, so studying English was the most reform-and-opening-up thing you could do. Back then our teachers said Beijing Foreign Studies University was the best place in the country for English." So he went there, into the English department. After graduating in 1985 he taught in the foreign languages department at Shenzhen University.

Like many Chinese then, he was captivated by Western theory, and translated Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. He also wrote to its two authors, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, asking to study where they taught, at the University of California, Berkeley. They took up his case, writing to the chair of the comparative literature department on his behalf. He went to the United States in 1990 and took an M.A. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1996) in comparative literature at Berkeley.

For his first years at Berkeley, Western theory still held him. But, he writes in the afterword to Lin Yutang and China's Search for Modern Rebirth, "As my first-hand experience of the United States piled up, I felt more and more that 'Western theory' could not be spliced neatly onto an obsession with China that kept growing stronger. To understand modern China you need a Chinese voice. ... I buried myself in the Berkeley library and checked out every book by Lin Yutang (some shelved under Asian studies, some under American studies). I felt I had found a Chinese voice, and slowly worked out what my father's and grandfather's generations had actually done — which handed me a 'new China' I could grow up in."

The German sinologist Wolfgang Kubin has called him "the foremost Lin Yutang scholar in the world today," adding that "a conversation with Professor Qian Suoqiao is never dull." That sounds like high praise, but the truth is that Lin Yutang has never counted for much in either China or the United States, and the scholarship on him is thin. In China he is filed as an important essayist of modern literature, praised for "humor" and "sensibility." In the United States he is often read as a Chinese American writer, and often faulted for not doing what such writers are supposed to do — take America as their home — which makes him politically incorrect; the attention goes almost entirely to one novel, Chinatown Family.

All of this, Qian thinks, is lopsided, and misses both the whole man and his worth. As he sees it, Lin Yutang, Hu Shi and Lu Xun are the three coordinates of modern Chinese thought. "All three legacies are important intellectual resources for twentieth-century China. But I have a hunch that in the twenty-first century, as China is bound to rise into a major world power, Lin Yutang's legacy will prove especially useful, and especially instructive, for China and for the world."

The Hu Shi and Lu Xun coordinates, he argues, both need rethinking. "The all-embracing 'scientific method' comes very close to scientism — arrogant and dangerous, as though the meaning of human life were nothing but experiment and proof. ... Hu Shi's call for 'wholesale Westernization' (later softened to 'thorough Westernization') has met doubt and resistance throughout modern China. To put it in the terms of postcolonial critics: Lu Xun 'turned a blind eye' to the hegemonic character of Western missionary discourse, and Hu Shi never admitted that colonialism existed at all."

"Set against the intellectual legacies of Lu Xun and Hu Shi, Lin Yutang's path stands out in three ways. First, like Hu Shi and Lu Xun, Lin took criticism to be the mark of the modern intellectual. But as a liberal critic he defended Mr. Democracy more ably, more firmly and more eloquently than either — and when autocracy trampled human rights, his attacks were the sharpest and the least forgiving."

"Second, as one of the champions of the New Culture Movement, Lin Yutang was far less hostile to tradition than Hu Shi or Lu Xun. He criticized traditional culture too, but his stance corrected much of the movement's fierce anti-traditionalism. He dug back into the resources of traditional Chinese culture, built a 'lyrical philosophy' out of them, and carried it to the world with great success — proof that traditional culture still held usable material and living force for China's road to modernity."

"Third, unlike Hu Shi and Lu Xun, Lin Yutang's cross-cultural journey — in his life and in the range of his criticism — was transnational and global. This is not simply a matter of translating Chinese culture outward. In that act of cross-cultural translation, Lin took on the role of a cosmopolitan critic, aiming his judgment at modern civilization as a whole, of which the problem of Chinese modernity was one part, rather than judging 'the writings of the universe' from the standpoint and concerns of Chinese nationalism alone."

Even so, Qian says, much of Lin Yutang and his place in modern intellectual history still cannot be discussed openly. "Lin Yutang is now accepted as an important modern Chinese writer and his works may be reprinted, but it is best not to bring up his political positions and activities," he writes in the biography. Earlier he could not be mentioned at all: there is a group photograph of Lin with Lu Xun, Xu Guangping, Sun Fuyuan and others, and when domestic publications ran it, Lin was painted out. "Looked at another way, that proves Lin Yutang belongs to the twenty-first century, to our own time. He hasn't dated in the least," he told QDaily.

Q = QDaily

Qian = Qian Suoqiao

One Writ of Habeas Corpus Is Worth All the Confucian Classics

Q: On the liberal-critic side, you write: "Like Hu Shi, Lin Yutang was a liberal critic all his life. The core of Lin's liberalism is the philosophy of tolerance he developed through a creative reading of traditional Chinese culture." Both men stand for liberalism, but in your view how do their liberalisms differ? Princeton's Zhou Zhiping, for instance, holds that they represent two faces of liberalism — Hu Shi leaning toward "freedom under law," Lin Yutang toward "freedom of the spirit." What do you make of that?

Qian: I find that reading interesting, and it captures something, but not everything. Let me stress first that Lin Yutang put enormous weight on law. When he wrote about Chinese culture and Chinese character, he named certain failings — people are slippery, they smooth things over, they are slack. He said the root of many of those traits is that Chinese history never had a constitution protecting your freedom of speech. Say too much, give offense, and you pay for it, so everyone learns to be slippery. Given guarantees, Chinese people would behave exactly like Westerners: protest, lobby, fight for their interests. Without guarantees, speaking up costs you — and may land you in prison.

So in the 1930s Lin Yutang pressed hard on the rule of law. On the question of inheriting Confucian culture, for instance, he held that in the political realm it could be converted, that it carried democratic genes, and he stressed the humanism of Confucius and Mencius. In his view the tradition always contained something combative — "Confucius composed the Spring and Autumn Annals, and treacherous ministers and unfilial sons trembled." What force in that! Confucianism holds many such genes, and we can comb them out; his A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China was one attempt. But he said plainly that against the West, Confucian culture obviously fell short.

He wrote one line that matters enormously: "One writ of habeas corpus is worth all the Confucian classics." The writ of habeas corpus is the foundation of British constitutional democracy. In the Middle Ages, as the nobles fought the crown for power, they said: you may not seize people at will; if you take a man, I have the right to ask the court where you are holding him. You cannot simply grab someone and make him vanish. Lin Yutang called that a great advance in human civilization. Compare the late Ming: you could resist all you liked, and a eunuch would have you thrown in prison. No such guarantee existed. The English worked out that even if they lock you up, they must at least say where you are; there has to be a reason, and the case has to be argued. That was their invention — but Lin Yutang thought it was exactly the road Confucianism had been feeling for, and that we could pick it up from there. So he also insisted on constitutional law. He threw himself into the China League for Civil Rights, wanting civil rights and constitutional protection.

At the same time, here is where I think he parts from Hu Shi. Late in life Lin Yutang said that during the Debate on Science and Metaphysics, Hu Shi was essentially of the Anglo-American pragmatist school — logic, evidence, proof — and had no feeling at all for the French Bergsonian line, for élan vital, that "flood-like spirit," anything of the spirit. Lin Yutang had studied in Germany and loved Heinrich Heine and Henri Bergson; by temperament he was a poet. That is where he touches Lu Xun. So when he combed through Chinese culture he dwelt on the late Ming — Li Zhi, Yuan Zhonglang, Jin Shengtan. For him all those free-spirited literati were emblems of freedom. His model of a personality, of course, was Su Dongpo. He thought these men possessed a free spirit, and he kept coming back to spiritual temperament. Tolerance, magnanimity, breadth of mind — he argues them all from the side of the spirit.

Where constitutional government fell short we can make up the difference. But you also need the free spirit of the literati; that too is a treasure, and we can inherit it.

Q: Along the same lines: Lin Yutang and Lu Xun differed on a great deal, most obviously in politics. In your view, what did they share?

Qian: I think the friendship between Lu Xun and Lin Yutang worked by attraction of opposites; in essence the two seem very unalike. Lu Xun came from a declining gentry family in Jiangnan, soaked in Chinese culture, which meant he felt its ugly side unusually keenly and hated it, and went after the new. He studied in Japan, but what he admired was the Westernized. He went abroad to study, took up Western medicine; in spirit he wanted to break with the old. In Diary of a Madman he hopes for a new kind of man who will bring liberation.

Lin Yutang was nothing like that. He grew up in a Chinese Christian family, raised from childhood on a mild Christianity, on God; he went to St. John's University, where the classes were in English and the education Western. He kept up an interest in Chinese culture at St. John's, but his manner and his clothes were thoroughly Westernized, which was rare then.

They met, I think, only after Lin Yutang came back from Germany, in Beijing, where the Threads of Talk group gathered every weekend near Central Park. To Lu Xun, Lin Yutang must have looked like a polished new-style figure in a Western suit, 14 years his junior. So a Chinese man could be this Westernized! Was this not the condition he imagined Chinese people ought to be able to reach? To Lin Yutang, the Zhou brothers had the air of classic Chinese men of letters; their whole cast of mind was Jiangnan. But as I said, Westernizer though he was, he never stopped searching Chinese culture. And his own field at the time was linguistics, which sat in the Chinese department, so the literary people were all mixed in together.

The other thing, and I think the most important, is what I said just now: in temperament, Lin Yutang was in fact very unlike Hu Shi. Hu Shi you could call a genuine gentleman; Lin Yutang had a side that stressed spirit, the side of a poet, and his criticism could cut. That is what he shares with Lu Xun. Don't forget that the essay on Lu Xun ("Lusin," The China Critic, December 6, 1928) was written in English by Lin Yutang in 1928 — not the first such piece, but very early. The two attracted each other. Both were men of strong character. As Lin Yutang said in the 1930s, what matters most is character. Hard bones, both of them; character, and the air of freedom.

The 1930s Bear the Guilt for the 1950s

Q: You note a conviction Lin Yutang held: that anyone working toward a free and democratic China had to watch both the far right and the far left. So in the 1930s he was against the right — the quasi-fascist rule of the Kuomintang — and against the left, communist ideology. That seems very hard to pull off at the time. Why do you think he managed it?

Qian: I don't think it was hard at all. Much of our thinking today has been conditioned, which makes it look hard. It wasn't like that then. Look at the history: Chinese liberalism had a powerful lineage. In the late Qing, Confucians like Guo Songtao went abroad, looked at England, and concluded that this was what Confucianism had wanted — we want democracy. Communism and fascism were two forces that rose later. In the Republican era, I don't think liberal intellectuals were a minority. In the 1930s the communists and the left dominated public argument because they charged the barricades and tried to sweep everything aside; they were fierce and looked important. But count the heads and they were not the majority.

Lin Yutang's politics held steady his whole life; he never had any interest in the worldwide communist movement. Communism was one of the great phenomena of the twentieth century, a global movement, not just a Chinese one. It reached China with tremendous force, and many intellectuals were drawn to it, Lu Xun included. You can't call Lu Xun a Marxist, but he was certainly drawn. Even Hu Shi felt some pull — on his trip to the Soviet Union he wondered whether this might be a road for humanity, and he said some fairly positive things. Lin Yutang did not. He never had any warmth for what the Soviets were doing, which surely had a great deal to do with his Christian upbringing and his education in Europe and America.

So in the 1920s he backed the National Revolution. He wanted revolution; Hu Shi was against it. But be clear about what that meant: the National Revolution was the Kuomintang's revolution, run in harness with the Communists. The Beiyang government was already a republic, but the Kuomintang called it warlord rule and meant to set up its own government in Nanjing, and he agreed with that. In the end the two parties fell out during the Northern Expedition ... and the National Revolution came to nothing.

Once the Nanjing government was set up, Lin Yutang did not think it perfect, not the ideal the revolution had called for — but it was still the National Revolution. In the 1930s the Communists wanted to keep the revolution going and topple the Nationalist government. Even at the height of Kuomintang power, Lin Yutang was in no sense one of Chiang's men. As a liberal intellectual he did not want to overthrow the sitting government; he wanted to criticize it. When criticism was blocked, he took to humor and mockery. Through the 1930s he counterattacked only when left-wing writers set out to hound him; he never went on the offensive.

As a liberal intellectual you have to judge and grasp the whole situation — the context, the background, the criticism. You need wisdom. Lin Yutang and Hu Shi were regarded at the time as China's two leading critics, but there were plenty of others; it was not a handful of men.

Q: In an earlier interview you said that the May Fourth generation, obsessed with China, prescribed Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science for it. What I want to understand is how Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science ended up in radical revolution. Have you worked that out?

Qian: In his last years in Taiwan, Lin Yutang wrote a great deal recalling the Chinese literary world of the 1930s, wondering what had become of Mao Dun, Lao She and the rest. This was the 1950s and 1960s, when every one of those writers was being persecuted, brought down one by one, and turning on each other. A terrifying business. So Lin Yutang said something I find very telling, which I quote at length in my final chapter: "The 1930s bear the guilt for the 1950s." The seeds were all sown in the 1930s. For what happened to Chinese intellectuals in the 1950s, the intellectual leaders of the 1930s were responsible. Back then they were all urging the young to go left — don't read the old books, the old books are poison — all of it extreme. He said: you produced the next generation's radicalism. Those young people later went off to Yan'an. Their formation was too thin in Western culture, and thinner still in Chinese culture, which they had thrown away, so all that was left was to run to Marxism.

So in the course of Chinese modernity, finding a sensible road between Chinese and Western culture is very hard, and this is the sort of result you often get. Marxism also came from the West, not from China, and of all imports it was the furthest from native Confucian doctrine — Confucianism holds nothing that radical. Hence Lin Yutang's view that the roots lie in the 1930s. Never mind what the Cultural Revolution was like; its origins are not in the 1950s but run all the way back to the start of the 1930s. Many of its radical forms are identical to the methods of the 1930s left: cultural encirclement, and if someone stands up, no speaking for you ... Look at those methods and much of it feels familiar. By the Cultural Revolution it had gone to the extreme.

Lin Yutang's Wartime Contribution Was Crucial, and Is Now Badly Underrated

Q: On the lyrical philosopher and the cosmopolitan critic, I'm most interested in his American years. You write that over those 30 years (1936–1966), Lin Yutang and Pearl S. Buck were the most influential Chinese voices in America, speaking to the West about China culturally and politically. You wrote the biography as a historian, so you offer few opinions of your own. How would you judge that stretch of his life? Was it a success?

Qian: First, I think it is an important and fascinating chapter in the history of Sino-American exchange, and one people now seem to overlook. Contact between ordinary Chinese and ordinary Americans was at its closest then. Look at him going on the radio to urge Americans and Chinese to write letters to each other. That kind of gesture has basically disappeared, but at the time it was possible, and he could pull it off. His friendship with Pearl S. Buck and her husband Richard Walsh is also worth remembering. Intellectuals can work together like that. How much of it survives, I don't know.

Was it a success? At the time, very much so, politically as well, I think. There was an Indian writer in America who said that in the war years, for China to have a writer like Lin Yutang who could go to America and write was worth more than gold. The Japanese had no one. Think about it: if the Japanese had had a writer like Lin Yutang speaking in America, the whole picture would look different. So we don't give his wartime contribution nearly enough weight; it is badly underrated. What he said during the war mattered enormously at the time. Don't shrug off his letters to The New York Times letters column — that was no small thing. Lin Yutang wrote and the paper printed it. Try it today: who would run your letter?

Q: In the 1930s Lin Yutang opposed the Kuomintang's quasi-fascist rule, but later he took a pro-Nationalist line. That was a major reason he drifted apart from Pearl S. Buck and Richard Walsh, and it put him at odds with American opinion. He said at the time that "the collapse of the Nationalist government would mean the defeat of liberalism in China," that "Chiang's defeat is my generation's defeat," and he even wanted Chiang to write him the four characters for "serving the country through writing." Isn't there a contradiction between the earlier and later Lin? How should we read the complexity?

Qian: That is a really important question, and I see no contradiction at all. We tend to hold a very naive picture of what an intellectual is and what he says — especially from a post-theory angle, where the intellectual is simply the one who says no to power. Whatever the moment, the setting, the situation, so long as I protest I am great, glorious and correct, and my own standing floats above it all. That is far too simple. When an intellectual speaks to power and criticizes it, he has to read the context, the history, the background. Chinese history is so tangled, every stage different, and it demands a different wisdom at every moment. Of course you have your own position, and that position is exactly what shows here. But it does not follow that because I am a liberal I say no to power forever. That kind of liberalism doesn't exist. Nobody speaks in a vacuum; everyone lives inside a reality, and has to make judgments about it.

Seen that way: in the 1920s Lin Yutang's politics were very unlike Hu Shi's. Hu Shi wanted no revolution, and opposed the Kuomintang and the Communists joining forces to make one; he thought Chinese democracy had to come step by step. Say the Beiyang government was corrupt — you still work through rules, and teach it step by step. Lin Yutang and Lu Xun backed revolution. By the 1930s Lin Yutang and Hu Shi were on the same side again, both against continuing the revolution, while Lu Xun still wanted it. Each period is different.

On their 1920s politics, I'd say the honors are at least even, each with something to be said for it. Hu Shi was right about a great deal. Look: the revolution — you two won it, then you fell out, and the Kuomintang took power anyway. Once in power, it policed intellectuals' speech harder than the Beiyang government had; in that sense democracy went backwards. So through the 1930s Lin Yutang kept his distance from the Nationalist government, but — this must be clear — he did not want revolution, which set him sharply apart from Lu Xun and the left. He had reservations about the government, but as a liberal intellectual he meant to exercise the right to criticize, and that was often dangerous. Criticize then and you were suspected of being a Communist. It put his life at risk more than once.

The war changed the picture completely. At least the two parties were cooperating again; this was the nation's cause. Lin Yutang believed China could come through the war against long odds and emerge as a new China. Once again he was hoping for the birth of a new China. Chiang Kai-shek was by then leading the war and was China's only wartime leader. Lin Yutang was internationally known and widely respected, and Soong Mei-ling in particular had come to think highly of him. He came home for the national interest, of course; he had already been speaking out abroad for the war before he returned. Soong Mei-ling told him: better that you go abroad and make our case. All of that strikes me as sensible. As for "serving the country through writing," I find it revealing: he wanted it on record that he had contributed to the war, because he always feared being told that he had sat abroad rather than at the front. It was a narrow charge. I think I've shown in the book how much Lin Yutang did during the war; it is there for anyone to see. Why Chiang never wrote those characters I don't know — it is odd — though Chiang did later write him the character for longevity, on his seventieth birthday.

The 1980s Felt Like a Return to May Fourth's Passion

Q: Some critics of the biography say you write a little as a fan, that you identify too closely with Lin Yutang. What do you make of that? Is there anything about him that dissatisfies you?

Qian: "Fan" is too cheap a word; I'm nobody's fan. My relationship with Lin Yutang isn't fan and idol. Call it a companionship of spirit, a friendship. The point is that we no longer have men like him, so I can only go back into history to look for a kindred spirit and a teacher.

He certainly had his failings, and you can see it in the way I tell the story. I wrote almost nothing about many of his late novels, for instance. Had the typewriter not left him broke, he would have had the energy to write something better. He kept saying he wanted to produce a masterpiece. You could call Looking Beyond a picture of one, but I feel there should have been more and better work than those novels. Writing them ate up a lot of his time, mostly for the money, to keep the household going. Not that one can blame him; he had a family to feed. That is the first condition of the liberal writer — you must be financially independent.

[Note: According to Lin Yutang and China's Search for Modern Rebirth, the Mingkwai typewriter Lin Yutang perfected in the 1940s could type English, Japanese, Russian and Chinese, and could print 90,000 Chinese characters. One character took three keystrokes, and it managed 50 characters a minute. He obtained a U.S. patent for it, but with the Chinese market unstable it never went into mass production. The invention buried him in debt — "This thing cost me US$120,000 and swallowed every cent of my savings." Beyond the savings, he took a loan from Chase Bank and borrowed from his friend C.T. Loo; his wife, Liao Cuifeng, pawned her jewelry and they sold their Manhattan apartment. He eventually cleared the debt out of royalties, but he never escaped money trouble, and had to keep writing to get by.]

Q: I recall you saying that his greatest literary achievement was not the fiction but the prose.

Qian: Yes. It rests mainly on his critical eye; he was a cross-cultural critic. For him the central element of modern culture was criticism. That is an important point. What our own age needs most is people with cross-cultural knowledge, grounded in both China and the West, who on that footing can pass judgment on anything, large or small. Your judgment may reach a great many people.

Q: He began with short critiques and moved to long ones.

Qian: Yes. My Country and My People and The Importance of Living are long critiques. His criticism of world civilization, his call for a "philosophy of peace," could have gone deeper, and it didn't have to come out as a novel. But he always felt fiction would sell better.

Q: Besides the biography you also wrote Liberal Cosmopolitan: Lin Yutang and Middling Chinese Modernity. What questions does that book take on? The biography's afterword only says, abstractly, that you try to sketch "liberal cosmopolitanism" as an alternative voice in the discourse of Chinese modernity, and to bring out the significance of Lin Yutang's literary practice within modern Chinese literary and cultural criticism.

Qian: The biography is a historical narrative, so I kept my own views out of it as far as I could. My first book was a work of cross-cultural criticism, where I had to step forward and say a great deal. Out of Lin Yutang's cross-cultural practice I sketch another road Chinese modernity might have taken.

Chinese modernity has two stages, with the First Sino-Japanese War as the divide. I work around the axis of liberal cosmopolitanism to ask how nationalism and cosmopolitanism relate inside Chinese modernity. Does Lin Yutang's practice suggest anything to us? In the twentieth century there were two great arguments within Chinese modernity: one was the revolutionary universalism of communism, the international communist movement; the other was the nationalism Sun Yat-sen launched. I take Lin Yutang to be a liberal cosmopolitan, and that liberal cosmopolitanism runs in the same line as liberal nationalism — it holds nationalism in check and insists on a world dimension, so that nationalism cannot simply swell unchecked. From that angle, the liberal cosmopolitan strand for which Lin Yutang is the marker represents another possible road for Chinese modernity.

Q: In analyzing modern Chinese intellectuals you pay close attention to how their intellectual formations differ, and how that shapes the legacies they leave. If you analyzed your own formation, what would you conclude?

Qian: I have a fair sense of myself. Ours is a formation that grew up in the "iron house." We were in primary school during the Cultural Revolution, raised from childhood on "Long live Chairman Mao." Primary school ended just as the Cultural Revolution did, we went straight on to middle school, and by the time we sat the university exams reform and opening up had arrived. It did raise a lot of doubts in my mind, because the language of reform and opening up was nothing like the language I had been raised on. That larger environment pushed me to ask who was right. That mattered a great deal.

The 1980s were fascinating: passionate, thoroughly open. Historically it amounted to repeating the mood of May Fourth. And Chinese history really is a sorry thing — 70 years on, we were going round again. Still, better late than never. From the 1980s on, in economic and social terms, we actually picked up much of what had been left in the 1930s. But culturally and intellectually it was as if we had returned to the fever after May Fourth, when everyone was a poet — and much of it was lopsided and extreme. I saw the problem for myself in the mid-to-late 1980s, which is why Lin Yutang struck me as interesting when I read him; he seemed different. Like him, I was preoccupied with the China question, the question of Chinese culture, who am I, what a Chinese person is ...

Q: Your work on Lin Yutang is, at bottom, a way of sorting out your own history and finding yourself through him. After more than 20 years of it, how has your understanding of yourself changed?

Qian: Lin Yutang is a companion in spirit to me; I'm looking for a "father," a teacher from my father's or grandfather's generation. Through the research, by lifting the cover off this buried and obscured history, I've become clearer-headed and can take things more calmly. China's fate after 1949, for example, was in many respects not the Chinese people's own business at all — it was decided by Americans. A lot of things are not as simple as they look.

Lin Yutang ended his life with no home to go back to, and our generation could learn from the way he made the whole world his home. His stance on the intellectual — in politics, as a person, in character, in daily life — I find instructive even now.

Ku Hung-ming Was the Greatest Counterrevolutionary in Modern Chinese History

Q: You are working on Ku Hung-ming now. Why him?

Qian: I can't give too much away (laughs).

Q: My sense is that he counts as a forerunner of modern Chinese conservatism.

Qian: You're right. As I said, Chinese modernity divides into two stages. From the year Lin Yutang was born — 1895, the year of the First Sino-Japanese War — China entered the second stage, and the mind of the Chinese literati changed enormously. From then on revolution was unstoppable, wave after wave. But before 1895 the question was: the West has arrived, how do we answer it? So the Lin Yutang work addresses the later stage, and the Ku Hung-ming work the earlier one.

And let me tell you, Ku Hung-ming was the greatest counterrevolutionary in modern Chinese history. He spent his whole life opposing. He started by opposing Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, whom he took for Jacobins; the Kuomintang and the 1911 Revolution go without saying; and in his last years, up to his death in 1928, he opposed the communist revolution still more fiercely. If you want a genuine counterrevolutionary, that is your man. I find him a very interesting case, one that can open up the problem of early modernity and China's first answer to it.

One more thing. Ku Hung-ming had a vogue in the 1990s, when some scholars translated his work into Chinese, but it went nowhere near far enough — the materials simply aren't complete. He was dusted off then for the sake of nationalism and patriotism. Ku was a great patriot and attacked colonialism and imperialism, though he wrote it all in English. He was enormously learned, entirely English-educated, and loved to quote the lines and epigrams of famous British writers. His favorite was Samuel Johnson's "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

So he still knocks against a lot of our ready-made ideas and values, right down to today.

Q: This year marks the centenary of May Fourth. What would you say about taking stock of its legacy?

Qian: The heart of May Fourth was the two things it wanted to build: Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. So how much have we managed? Lin Yutang's lifelong effort on this is instructive. He held to Mr. Democracy, and his attack on the authoritarian tendency that ran through the whole twentieth-century world is valuable.

As for science, need one say more — how many Chinese men of letters were inventors or scientists? Lin Yutang did it with his own hands and invented a typewriter. Inventing a typewriter then was like inventing the computer later. What he was working on was how to organize the Chinese script so that it could be put out by machine. That was an important effort.

May Fourth also had a demolition side: knocking down the Confucian shop, a savage attack on Chinese culture. I think the harm from that has been endless. Perhaps it was needed at the time, but look at the line it runs down. When we were children there was a campaign called "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius." What did Lin Biao have to do with Confucius? Yet that was its name — Confucius really did suffer. And now Confucius is being raised up high again.

So I think many people in the May Fourth years took a nihilist view of Chinese culture, and Lin Yutang, by contrast, did not. He criticized plenty, but he also built. Which way should we go? Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, and literature and the written word too — concretely, how do we move forward? He had his own views on simplified characters and on prose style, to say nothing of his thinking about religion from within Chinese culture. All of it seems to me instructive.

For Chinese culture to be reborn, Lin Yutang's most basic point was that China must have constitutional government and constitutional protection before there can be free speech, and only then will people talk. Once people talk, there is drive and energy. That is the foundation. Half the Han Feizi, he said, is enough to rule the empire — the rule of law must actually be realized. Western intellectuals don't discuss this, because they have it already; for us it is unfinished, still being fought for.

(Thanks to Yan Wu, the commissioning editor of the biography, for help during the interview.)

The cover image shows Lin Yutang on the balcony of his former residence in Yangmingshan, around 1969. Collection of the Lin Yutang House, Taipei.