In search of wealth, power, and freedom: Yan Fu and the origins of modern Chinese liberalism (John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Schwartz).
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文摘
This dissertation is about how one of the leading intellectual architects of Chinese modernization, Yan Fu (1854–1921), introduced the Chinese intellectual world to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) by partly grasping Mill's ideas, partly misunderstanding and projecting onto them indigenous Chinese values, and partly criticizing or resisting them. Rather than bending Western liberalism to the purposes of Chinese nationalism, Yan initiated a distinctively Chinese liberal tradition that became a major strand of China's modern political culture.;It was Benjamin Schwartz's classic work on Yan that depicted him as putting primacy on the nationalistic pursuit of wealth and power. My conclusion is different. Yan did not fail to affirm Mill's emphasis on the dignity and ultimate value of the individual. He did, however, fail to appreciate or even understand other key aspects of Mill's liberalism: Mill's “epistemological pessimism,” his pessimism about human nature and history, and his emphasis on “negative freedom.” This failure, moreover, was not spotted by any of the many Chinese critics of Yan's work. Thus typical of the Chinese understanding of Millsian liberalism, this failure of Yan's should be taken into account when asking why Western liberalism did not easily take root in China.;The liberal ideal formed by Yan was that of a democratic society based on the “positive freedom” of individuals freely pursuing their personal interests only after an education guided by an enlightened elite had instilled virtue and wisdom into them, making them altruistic and patriotic. Like many other Chinese intellectuals in modern times, Yan was determined to synthesize two ideals: a picture of freedom, prosperity, and power presented by the West, and a vision of morality rooted in Confucian values. This synthesis can be called “liberal” because it turned on a complex concept of “freedom” combining “inner” values largely continuous with the Chinese tradition and “outer” institutions largely borrowed from the West, and because it shunned the idea of radical, coercive change. Yan combined his idea of freedom with an “accommodative,” gradualistic approach to the problem of how to pace the changes needed to realize his liberal goals.;To set forth this understanding of Yan's thought and his historical role, my study combines four approaches: analysis of the four problematiques so far developed in the large, international secondary literature on Yan; a biographical approach; a close analysis of the way Yan translated Mill's On Liberty ; and an analysis of all of Yan's politically relevant beliefs.;The most distinctive aspects of my research are: the analysis of his translation; the analysis of his concept of freedom as the central theme unifying his political philosophy; my thesis that his concept of freedom was not only inspired by the West but also continuous with much of the Chinese tradition; and my effort to view Yan as a dynamically critical thinker, not just a translator of Western wisdom. I also make use of analytical distinctions so far neglected by the scholarship on Yan: the distinctions between “transformative” and “accommodative” political thought, between the Rousseauistic and the Millsian concepts of democracy, between “epistemological optimism” and “epistemological pessimism,” between “positive freedom” and “negative freedom,” and between the humanistic and the iconoclastic interpretations of Confucian values.