By Jerome A. Cohen
Here is an interesting interview (and the original interview text in French) between French China expert Ursula Gauthier and the great historian of China, Professor Yu Ying-shih of Princeton. I appreciate the beautiful translation of Michael S. Duke of an interview that originally was conducted in Chinese and English.
Reading it inspired many thoughts, including one about the preoccupying American presidential election: “The egotistical monarch who does not care for his subjects loses their support and finishes by losing the famous ‘tianming’, or Mandate of Heaven.” We await the fate of President Trump and note the warning that Prof. Yu explicitly gives to China’s current dictator, Xi Jinping.
I was glad to see Prof. Yu’s confirmation of the Confucian-Legalist “durable system synthesis” and the impacts that other contending philosophies had upon the evolving traditional Chinese theories of governance. Sixty years ago, Joseph Levenson’s great lectures at UC Berkeley introduced my wife and me to the concept of “syncretism.” Yu’s clarification of the relationship between the Chinese Classics and Confucianism is also enlightening to the non-specialist.
In addition, I benefited from Prof. Yu’s discussion of the Professor John K. Fairbank-led model of traditional China’s regional “tribute system”. Although Yu does not directly address the recent efforts to modify or reject that influential pattern imposed on hoary East Asian facts, his portrayal does add welcome detail, analysis and nuance to the Fairbank model, which I still regard as a useful insight into contemporary China’s relations with its East Asian neighbors.
Especially gratifying is Yu’s dismissal as “ridiculous” of the frequent claim by Xi Jinping that the Chinese have traditionally been a peaceful people, that China had never attacked other people and that China’s history is free of the crime of colonialism.
I do wonder, however, about Prof. Yu’s conclusion that It is not in imperial history that we must search for the roots of contemporary China’s totalitarianism but in the influence of the Soviet Union. One hypothesis need not exclude the other. He believes that the harshness of the autocratic traditional Chinese monarchy was “tempered by a government mainly of a moral and cultural elite” while today “we have a dictatorial system reinforced by arbitrary and despotic practices”. I suspect that the differences are not quite so stark and that today, just as in Russia, so too in China the propensity toward totalitarianism is sustained by inherited traditions, enhanced by the repressive potential of contemporary technology.