Liberalism in China and Chinese Liberal Thought

Edmund S. K. Fung

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511730139.006

4 - Liberalism in China and Chinese Liberal Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010

Edmund S. K. Fung

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Edmund S. K. Fung: Affiliation:
University of Western Sydney

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Summary

This chapter sets out to explore modern Chinese liberal thought on the premise that liberalism is the political doctrine of modernity. It is fitting to begin with a reference to Jerome Grieder's seminal work on Hu Shi in which the author draws a distinction between liberalism in China and Chinese liberalism:

Liberalism in China…meant much the same thing that liberalism has meant elsewhere: a belief in popularly based institutions of government, in the rule of law, in political processes that are made legitimate by the manner in which they function rather than by the ends ascribed to them; and, uniting all these elements, a belief in the creative and benign power of free intelligence. Liberalism in China remained, in the context of Chinese conditions, essentially an abstraction.

On the other hand, ‘Chinese liberalism meant something more concrete in the Chinese mind: a pattern of personal values reminiscent of the values of the Confucian “superior man,” an ideal that had existed virtually unchanged through the long centuries of imperial history.’ Grieder's point is that the Confucian tradition profoundly influenced Chinese liberal thought. The distinction he draws helps me to frame two questions for investigation in this chapter. First, how did Republican Chinese intellectuals understand liberalism? Second, what were the features and specific concerns of their liberal thought? In answering these questions, I will also attempt, at the end of the chapter, to shed light on the relationship of liberal thought to cultural radicalism and to conservative thought.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity
Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era
, pp. 128 - 158

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511730139.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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