The Long Reach

In the last ten years, few leaders on the world stage have been so praised and so damned as Chiang Kaishek, the intense, durable revolutionary who is Generalissimo of China's Nationalist armies, President of China's Nationalist Government, and boss of China's Nationalist (or Kuomintang) Party. This week a growing list of Americans are at long last getting inside Chiang's shaven head.

Two competing editions of China's Destiny* --Chiang's preachment on the Chinese revolution and Asiatic reconstruction--have sold a total of more than 10,000 copies. The independently translated Roy edition carries bitterly partisan and critical commentary and annotations by Philip Jaffe, pro-Communist editor of Amerasia. The "official" Macmillan edition has a preface by Philosopher Lin Yutang. The Roy edition includes a complementary work by Chiang: Chinese Economic Theory.

"To Act Is Easy." Written in 1942 and subsequently revised, China's Destiny displays a Confucian approach to the organization of society interestingly at odds with the democratic constitution adopted in January (at Chiang's urging) by China's National Assembly. Throughout both Destiny and Economic Theory, Chiang 1) attributes China's revolution (and the need for it) almost entirely to the Westernizing "corruption" of the unequal treaties; 2) rejects democracy in the Western sense in favor of the class "equilibrium" of Confucius; and 3) advocates a "Chinese" system of economics which rules out free enterprise capital as a dynamic factor on the one hand, and rejects the class struggle on the other.

The Generalissimo quotes Confucius: "The people may be made to follow a course of action, but they must not be expected to understand." From this, Chiang derives a guiding maxim: "To know is difficult, to act is easy." As developed in the supporting text, this maxim envisions a knowledgeable elite (the Kuomintang) which will "know" and rule the unenlightened mass of the people, according to the ancient precepts of "harmony," "benevolence," "justice," and "love."

This implies a paternalistic (or authoritarian) society in which the only vital components are men and land. Says Chiang: "The economic duties of the Government are twofold: to satisfy the people's wants, and at the same time restrict them. The former involves positive support, the latter precautionary control. . . . The application of these principles in social, political and economic organization will result in correct systems and policies."

Nonsense? Before dismissing these concepts as nonsense, Western readers would do well to go to the source--the great Iron-Age philosopher Confucius who, like Chiang, was born into a time of chaos when traditional values were going by the boards. Confucius was not a philosopher in a vacuum--he was a reformer who, like most reformers, criticized the society of his time by recalling and idealizing the virtues of a golden (and highly imaginary) past. In The Analects of Confucius, translated and annotated by British Sinologue Arthur Waley* (who apologizes unnecessarily in his preface for the "dry and technical" nature of the volume), Confucius explains, across the centuries, much that is hard to understand about present-day China.

Confucius wanted a society of harmonious, but thoroughly stratified classes, in which all persons would constantly seek inner "goodness" and act benevolently toward each other. To perpetuate this ideal society, he called for an enveloping ritual affecting everything from habits of dress to the functions of government. In the Liki (the Confucian Book of Rites), studied in China today by every school child, Confucius described the ideal:

"To gather in the same places where our fathers before us have gathered; to perform the same ceremonies which they before us have performed; to play the same music which they before us have played; to pay respect to those whom they honored; to love those who were dear to them--in fact, to serve those now dead as if they were living, and now departed as if they were still with us: this is the highest achievement of true filial piety."

Confucius saw his China beset by alien influences that threatened its old culture, by usurpers who sneered at the old precepts. In China's Destiny, Chiang--facing the same sort of situation today--reacts with the same nostalgia.

Chiang is preoccupied with the effect of "Western" ideas (both Communist and capitalist-democratic) on his country. As often happens when one culture collides with a "stronger" one (see EDUCATION), the immediate result has been that old values are destroyed faster than the new ones are assimilated. Chiang is wise enough to understand that the key to progress for China will be nothing so simple as "more land for the peasants" or the establishment of a well-run stock exchange in Shanghai. But is Confucius the answer? Or does Chiang's Confucianism merely attempt to apply brakes to a great national movement that needs steering more than it needs deceleration?

* China's Destiny (260 pp.)--by Chiang Kaishek, with an introduction by Lin Yutang--Macmillan ($2.75); and China's Destiny & Chinese Economic Theory (347 pp.)--by Chiang Kaishek, with notes and commentary by Philip Jaffe--Roy Publishers ($3.50).

* George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London (125 6d.).

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