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However, the confidence of the Chinese scholar in his culture can slide into an arrogance which shields narrow cliques from outside criticism, and the Chinese culture in which he has so much confidence. In particular, the li (propriety) that serves within that culture as a basic principle of voluntary relations among people and of government, can become quite empty as a social programme among the conflicting ideologies of the modern world. The culture of the Chinese scholar, as Dennerline puts across so beautifully in this book, is not the culture of the Chinese farmer or artisan, or of the urban poor, or of the minorities. The culture of the scholar is the culture of the elite. However, as an elite culture, it must make a claim to its utility as a principle of government, and I have always suspected that the scholar in exile who preaches it as a tenet of morality is not facing up to the basic claim of his religion.
Frankly, traditional propriety as it is practised often leaves me in shudders. Respect for Teacher means that students should not argue against Teacher, and to be contented with one's lot, so often, is to re-affirm the powers of the existing status quo.
Nevertheless, all this is not to say that one can blame the narrowness of Chinese culture on the scholarship of Qian Mu, or that one can feel anything but respect for his erudition. Qian was a self-made scholar in his native Wuxi at a time when many of the more reputable scholars acquired their fame in the budding universities. Qian's early reputation, in the 1920s and 1930s, came from his expert knowledge of Chinese history, and he demonstrated in his writings the uniqueness of the Chinese experience in the last few millennia. The intellectual background to all this may be found in a masterly summary in Dennerline's Chapter Two. Propelled into the battleground of the scholarship of Beijing, where different intellectual parties tried separately to capture the "essence" of Chinese culture, Qian developed a line of attack that may almost be described as Hegelian. It was the "spirit" of Chinese culture that he traced, through the scholarship of the last three centuries in one book, and through the decline and fall of Chinese dynasties in another. Qian argued that there was an inherent force within Chinese culture that allowed it to renew itself in the face of challenge, and he identified Sun Yat-sen's ideology as one such response. Backed by his enormous learning, this vague argument was given a sense of reality. As Dennerline
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However, the confidence of the Chinese scholar in his culture can slide into an arrogance which shields narrow cliques from outside criticism, and the Chinese culture in which he has so much confidence. In particular, the li (propriety) that serves within that culture as a basic principle of voluntary relations among people and of government, can become quite empty as a social programme among the conflicting ideologics of the modern world. The culture of the Chinese scholar, as Dennerline puts across so beautifully in this book, is not the culture of the Chinese farmer or artisan, or of the urban poor, or of the minorities. The culture of the scholar is the culture of the elite. However, as an elite culture, it must make a claim to its utility as a principle of government, and I have always suspected that the scholar in exile who preaches it as a tenet of morality is not facing up to the basic claim of his religion.
Frankly, traditional propriety as it is practised often leaves me in shudders. Respect for Teacher means that students should not argue against Teacher, and to be contented with one's lot, so often, is to re- affirm the powers of the existing status quo.
Nevertheless, all this is not to say that one can blame the narrowness of Chinese culture on the scholarship of Qian Mu, or that one can feel anything but respect for his erudition. Qian was a self-made scholar in his native Wuxi at a time when many of the more reputable scholars acquired their fame in the budding universities. Qian's early reputation, in the 1920s and 1930s, came from his expert knowledge of Chinese history, and he demonstrated in his writings the uniqueness of the Chinese experience in the last few millenia. The intellectual background to all this may be found in a masterly summary in Dennerline's Chapter Two. Propelled into the battleground of the scholarship of Beijing, where different intellectual parties tried separately to capture the "essence" of Chinese culture, Qian developed a line of attack that may almost be described as Hegelian. It was the "spirit" of Chinese culture that he traced, through the scholarship of the last three centuries in one book, and through the decline and fall of Chinese dynasties in another. Qian argued that there was an inherent force within Chinese culture that allowed it to renew itself in the face of challenge, and he identified Sun Yatsen's ideology as one such response. Backed by his enormous learning, this vague argument was given a sense of reality. As Dennerline
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