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AS Michel Foucault has stressed in his writings, human knowledge is very much informed by its classification into different disciplines and branches. Before the impact of Western knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectual life had basically followed its own track for centuries. However, with the elimination of the examination system in 1905, everything changed. New academic institutions, functioning mostly according to the Western episteme, were established. After 1949, reforms were implemented following the model of the Soviet Union. Since 1978, the layout of academic disciplines has once again been re-adjusted to the dominant patterns of American and European academic institutions. Now, with the emergence of a trans-national market of education, China, as many other Asian and African countries, is compelled to follow Western norms and practices, unless it wishes to become marginalized.
From such a historical perspective, it seems that the shaping of the academia in modern China results from a continuous process of colonization by the West.Indeed, such a process has been analyzed from the points of view of influence studies, like Orientalism, Colonialism or cultural Imperialism. Such studies play out a fight between two actors, the dominating universalistic culture of the West and the resisting local culture. Even individual figures or institutions reacting against Western Imperialism are conveniently analyzed within this framework: a local culture reacting to an initial action imposed by a foreign force. Thus, in the case of modern education in China, it could be shown that 馬相伯 Ma Xiangbo, founder of the Aurora Academy (震旦學院 Zhendan Xueyuan, 1903) and of 复旦 Fudan University (1905), had attempted to create institutions of higher learning based on Christianity and Chinese humanism, but that he failed in his attempt because of the involvement of his own Church and of the national government. We could study the case of 梁漱溟 Liang Shuming along the same lines: Liang had left Peking University to engage in a programme of rural education in the thirties in the province of Shandong, in order to save Confucian values and way of life, but his efforts collapsed because of foreign aggression. The example of 钱穆 Qian Mu and 唐君毅 Tang Junyi could also be described in very similar terms: in the early fifties, they founded in Hong Kong New Asia as an independent college, in order to save the Chinese intellectual tradition and education threatened with being eliminated, but they finally decided to leave the college after it became incorporated into the newly founded Chinese University, losing its original independence. In these three cases above, we have figures of people or institutions attempting to resist foreign academic influence and to preserve the quintessence of Chinese education. However, foreign forces were more powerful and finally crushed any Chinese resistance.
Similarly, the recent debate in China over “national studies”, or 国学 guoxue, could be analyzed along this line of heroical cultural resistance. Yet, the debate over the “national studies fever” appears in a context quite different from the past, as shown by Professor 倪梁康 Ni Liangkang in an earlier issue of this journal.(1) According to him, Chinese mentality has now changed, from a psychology of resentment to a consciousness of the national might of China. The contestation of the Western epistemological monopoly made by Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century has now been replaced by a relative emancipation: boosted by the economic and political rise of the country, Chinese academia reshapes for itself its own episteme and claims its recognition from the international academia. Yet, in reading the paper of Professor Ni, the reader gets the impression that such an emancipation is more a pious wish than a reality, pointing out the lack today in China of a true thinker, either in the traditional mode or in the modern mode.
However, we can wonder if the model that we use is not too simplistic. When we deal with the establishment of the modern system of education in Republican China, or when we deal with the status of guoxue today, we analyze these phenomena through the overarching model of influence studies, playing out two actors in an ideological fight of power: on one side, there would be the dominant episteme of the West; on the other side, there would be a native culture reacting, either through a conscious attitude of resistance, or through an assertive attitude. Yet such a dualistic vision may leave in the shadows very subtle strategies: while the local culture seems to fully adopt a foreign episteme, in fact it may transform imported categories from within, along the lines of its own traditional episteme.
I would like here to report about a research project and its new methodology that goes precisely beyond the dualistic model of action and reaction. This project takes as its object of research the shaping of academic disciplines in China at the beginning of the twentieth century. Initiated by Professor John Makeham (梅約翰) of the Australian National University, it gathers specialists in eight different disciplines: history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, linguistic, architecture, religious studies and literature. These specialists are familiar with the shaping of their own academic discipline in China in the twentieth century. Yet, when we gathered for a workshop at Canberra on December 2007, what came as a surprise to most of us was to see the recurrence of identical issues across disciplines. For example, in the twenties, under the influence of the New Culture Movement, all academic disciplines accepted “science” as their definitive criteria and went to harshly criticize the traditional forms of knowledge as “unscientific”. However this apparently universal adoption of Western episteme was only one part of the story, and perhaps a misleading one. Indeed, if we look only at the specialized terminologies and the professed methodologies borrowed from the West and adopted by the intellectuals at that time, we can easily get the wrong impression of a radical rupture with the past and a full embrace of Western categories. In fact, in all these disciplines, the new knowledge was not so much the abandonment of the tradition but its recovery under new forms. Under the disguise of new names, Chinese traditional patterns were kept very much alive. Though academics used new terms borrowed from the West, yet they reshaped them along the lines of traditional knowledge, sometimes even unconsciously...
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