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puts it, this was xuewen, which we can render only crudely as "learning" or "book learning". As Dennerline notes, there is really no English equivalent for the term, for what matters is not the learning but the spiritual communion that xuewen establishes among scholars.
Qian Mu understood more than most Chinese scholars of the present time (though as Dennerline demonstrates, the matter was one of much open dispute in the 1930s), that aside from the culture of the written word with which he identified Chinese culture, there was an arena that might be described as local custom. In Chapter Three Dennerline describes this arena as it appeared in Qian's home village, and in Chapter Four as it appeared to Qian himself when, at the age of eighty, he wrote about his childhood and youth, and especially, his parents' devotion to his upbringing.
These are fascinating chapters. Outside the scholar's intellectual world was this community in which his values early in life were formed. This was a community that saw itself as being organised into a lineage. An apical ancestor gave birth to seven sons and so Qian's family was immersed in one of seven lines. This was a community that was very much represented by its ancestral halls and temples, where outwardly the rules for governance might be described in terms of propriety. However, harsh reality was different in many ways from the requirements of propriety. Competition for scarce resources gave rise to the control of family estates by a minority of rich households, and to widows being forced to disinherit their adopted sons (so that their legacy might be assigned to another member of the lineage). Dennerline refrained from commenting on Qian's own description of his family's position within the community, but Qian's reminiscence that he translates in full in Chapter Four would have us believe that his father, who died at forty-one, could hold the balance in this complex world of wheeling and dealing, by sheer force of moral character. There is the sense of a fairy tale in that account, of traditional morality winning in a contest dominated by private greed, with only a little support from a local magistrate. Those two chapters form the real background to Dennerline's own conclusion in Chapter Five.
During one of Dennerline's interviews with Qian Mu, Qian asked him if he thought there was hope for mainland China. Dennerline states
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puts it, this was xuewen, which we can render only crudely as "learning" or "book learning". As Dennerline notes, there is really no English equivalent for the term, for what matters is not the learning but the spiritual communion that xuewen establishes among scholars.
Qian Mu understood more than most Chinese scholars of the present time (though as Dennerline demonstrates, the matter was one of much open dispute in the 1930s), that aside from the culture of the written word with which be identified Chinese culture, there was an arena that might be described as local custom. In Chapter Three Dennerline describes this arena as it appeared in Qian's home village, and in Chapter Four as it appeared to Qian himself when, at the age of eighty, he wrote about his childhood and youth, and especially, his parents' devotion to his upbringing.
These are fascinating chapters. Outside the scholar's intellectual world was this community in which his values early in life were formed. This was a community that saw itself as being organised into a lineage. An apical ancestor gave birth to seven sons and so Qian's family was immersed in one of seven lines. This was a community that was very much represented by its ancestral halls and temples, where outwardly the rules for governance might be described in terms of propriety. However, harsh reality was different in many ways from the requirements of propriety. Competition for scarce resources gave rise to the control of family estates by a minority of rich households, and to widows being forced to disinherit their adopted sons (so that their legacy might be assigned to another member of the lineage). Dennerline refrained from commenting on Qian's own description of his family's position within the community, but Qian's reminiscence that he translates in full in Chapter Four would have us believe that his father, who died at forty- one, could hold the balance in this complex world of wheeling and dealing, by sheer force of moral character. There is the sense of a fairy tale in that account, of traditional morality winning in a contest dominated by private greed, with only a little support from a local magistrate. Those two chapters form the real background to Dennerline's own conclusion in Chapter Five.
During one of Dennerline's interviews with Qian Mu, Qian asked him if he thought there was hope for mainland China. Dennerline states
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