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Man and Nature in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Rhoads Murphey
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Extract

After nearly two decades of revolutionary rule in China, the break with the past which Communist direction has seemed to represent is increasingly being seen in a wider perspective. Few scholars would attempt to argue that the Communists have not brought a genuine revolution or that their ascendancy is merely the equivalent of a new dynasty. But as the character of the new order has become clearer with time and as an analysis both more detailed and less concerned with short-term matters has become possible, many scholars have been as much impressed by continuities with the pre-Communist past as by discontinuities. To take perhaps the clearest example, the current Chinese view of their relation to the rest of the world appears to represent little change from the traditional Sinocentric image. Ideological absolutism is also not new to China with Mao Tse-tung, nor is the conception of individual subsevience to public good, the unquestioned rightness of close social limits on individual actions. And contemporary China retains, for all its professed egalitarianism, a strongly elitist and hierarchial pattern.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , July 1967 , pp. 313 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

2 There were of course a variety of views, over time and even within a given period; for an example of different views, see the story of the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains, cited below.Google Scholar

3 I am grateful to Andrew March for calling my attention to this aspect.Google Scholar

4 For a fascinating account of the changing Western attitudes and behaviour towards nature since classical Greek times, see Glacken, C. J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Berkeley, California, 1967.Google Scholar

5 See inter alia Derk, Bodde, ‘Harmony and Conflict in Chinese Philosophy’, in Arthur, Wright, ed., Studies in Chinese Thought, Chicago, 1953; conflict was of course recognized.Google Scholar

6 For a useful comparison of Chinese and Western notions of time and progress, see Marcus, J. T., ‘Time and the Sense of History: West and East’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, III (1960–1961), p. 134.Google Scholar

7 The contrast between Chinese and modern Western ideas in these respects is noted as early as Lord Macartney's remarks at the time of his embassy to Peking in 1793–94: ‘A Nation that does not advance [i.e. as the West did] must retrograde and finally fall back to barbarism and misery’.—From Macartney's ‘Observations on China’, section entitled ‘Manners and Character’, printed in Cranmer-Byng, J. L., An Embassy to China, London, 1962, p. 276.Google Scholar

8 Many of the ideas and policies of the revolution were of course foreshadowed, not only in the earlier history of the Chinese Communist Party but also by the reformers after 1898, but they were few and powerless. The Kuo Min Tang produced little revolution. Effective change began in 1949.Google Scholar

9 Both statements are taken from Shao-chi, Liu, Report on the Work of the Central Committee, 2nd Session of the 8th Congress of the CCP, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1958. The report was delivered in May 1958. The context makes clear that Liu sees China as a ‘newcomer’ in its rivalry with the earlier industrialized West, and also that present models are superior to past models. Liu's current disgrace does not invalidate these remarks, which remain, as they were when he made them, basic to Chinese Communist doctrine.Google Scholar

10 For a recent review of this issue in Russian thought, see Matley, I. A., ‘The Marxist Approach to the Geographical Environment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 56 (1966), pp. 97–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 For example, the official explanation that the post–1958 failures in agriculture were due to natural calamities.Google Scholar

12 The quotations are all from Nung, Hsin, ‘A Great Revolutionary Ambition of the Tachai People’, published (in English) in China Pictorial, I (1965), pp. 10–15. This article is however typical of scores of others recounting an almost identical story of how other villages have done the same kinds of things.Google Scholar

13 This is the final stanza of a poem by Tse-tung, Mao entitled ‘Reply to Kuo Mo-jo’, dated 5 02 1963. The translation quoted here was published in China Reconstructs, XVI (03 1967), p. 2.Google Scholar

14 Levenson, Joseph includes an imaginative analysis of this attitude in his ‘The Province, the Nation, and the World’, in Approaches to Modern Chinese History, ed. A., Feuerwerker, R., Murphey and Wright, M. C., Berkeley, California, 1967, especially pp. 282–86.Google Scholar

15 For a discussion of this issue as applied to Party functionaries, see Vogel, Ezra, ‘From Revolutionary to Semi-Bureaucrat: the “Regularization of Cadres”’, China Quarterly, 29 (1967), pp. 36–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 For a survey analysis, see Lee, R. W., ‘The Hsia Fang System: Marxism and Modernization’, China Quarterly, 28 (1966), pp. 40–62. The movement was begun in 1957, but has been much intensified during the Cultural Revolution.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Peking Review, 16 September 1966, p. 14.Google Scholar

18 The impact of the Cultural Revolution on education was in many respects merely an intensification of the Socialist Education Campaign begun in 1962. This is in turn related to the widening use of the ‘half work—half study’ plan for education, adopted as a national policy in 1958—See Munro, D. J., ‘Marxism and Realities in China's Educational Policy: The Half Work–Half Study Model’, Asian Survey, 7 (04, 1967), pp. 254–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Quoted from Mao in Hung Ch'i (Red Flag), 31 March 1964, ‘Political Work is the Lifeline of all Work’.Google Scholar

20 See Richardson, S. D., Forestry in Communist China, Baltimore, 1966.Google Scholar