[
    {
        "id": 211543,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1988",
        "page_number": 260,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "236\n\nnames in Mandarin (Wade-Giles). This book is about South China. The whole \"feel\" of the place and its people is somehow different if it and they masquerade as something else: had Cantonese Romanization been used, the identification of the two villages named at pp. 126-127 need not have been explained, to cite one example. The late K.M.A. Barnett said the same when he reviewed my book, The Rural Communities of Hong Kong, in Vol. 24 of this Journal, when I was another victim of the system. Frankly, I should have known better, having even more to buck convention than Dr. Murray!\n\nJames Hayes\n\nJerry Dennerline, Qian Mu and the World of Seven Mansions, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.\n\nWhen Qian Mu (Ch'ien Mu) returned to the Chinese University some years ago on the occasion of the founding of the series of lectures that bears his name, students flocked to hear him even though few could have understood his Jiangsu dialect that passed for Mandarin. I have always looked upon that incident as being highly symbolic of the call of Chinese nationalism, of the attraction that the unity of Chinese culture held for Chinese students, and of their propensity to accept as wisdom what they could not understand.\n\nQian Mu symbolizes Chinese culture, untainted by Westernism or party politics. Qian Mu was my colleagues' teacher. He founded New Asia College that became a part of the Chinese University, in Hong Kong and not Taiwan, driven by nothing except his determination that scholarship should be pursued for its own sake. My colleagues at the Chinese University recall with nostalgia the comradeship they felt as students of New Asia in the 1950s. Despite Hong Kong's colonial status, and despite the 1949 Revolution, in New Asia they studied the Chinese classics as the fundamental philosophy that would remain forever Chinese. You cannot but marvel at the confidence that was inspired by this great man, and you can understand why students would turn to him for intellectual leadership.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
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    {
        "id": 211544,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1988",
        "page_number": 261,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "237\n\nHowever, 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.\n\nFrankly, 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.\n\nNevertheless, 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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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
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    },
    {
        "id": 211545,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1988",
        "page_number": 262,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "238 \n\nputs 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.\n\nQian 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.\n\nThese 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.\n\nDuring 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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    {
        "id": 211546,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1988",
        "page_number": 263,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "239\n\nthat the question stunned him. He did not really answer it. Like Qian, Dennerline was non-partisan, at least in this instance. However, he enumerated some instances of social changes in Qian's home village in Wuxi in recent years and made it very clear that these were changes that Qian had neither allowed for nor understood as he asked the question. As Dennerline explains, there was in Qian's appeal to Chinese culture an appreciation of the Chinese people as he might have found them in his home village, but the future that Qian sought for China was one that expressed more the yearning of the generation of the 1911 Revolution. That generation, one may say, was inspired by the brave new world of the early Chinese republic. The scholars of that generation realised that China had to change to adapt to a modern world, embraced the change and sought to understand their culture as it changed, fully confident that there was hope in the future. They went back to China's past in a sense of optimism, and produced the learning that inspired their students.\n\nThe generation that came after 1911 had less reason to be so hopeful about Chinese culture. Those who adhered to the same aspirations would have to want to hold the world still so that the culture that it treasured might continue to be meaningful. They would have to turn inwards, so to speak, and let their faith in their culture take over their ability to adapt it to the changing world. Qian Mu, in this sense, was a herald of the modern world, but that was the modern world of the 1910s.\n\nNo doubt, Chinese scholars have much of value to say to the world, but it is unlikely that they will do it without accepting that the world is necessarily changing and without learning about some of these changes. Dennerline reads this message in Qian Mu's writing. It would be gratifying if Qian's students can also rise up to it.\n\nDavid Faure",
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