The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity by Edmund S. K. Fung

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity by Edmund S. K. Fung Leigh K. Jenco (bio) Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). xv, 319 pp. $90.00 (cloth). In this book Edmund S. K. Fung synthesizes an enormous range of intellectual materials generated during China's Republican period, dating primarily from the May Fourth period (1915-1923) to 1949. Fung argues that intellectuals of this era confronted the same crisis of modernity with which intellectuals, in both East and West, continue to wrestle today. These Republican conversations, he claims, provide the foundational vocabulary through which contemporary Chinese elites debate the direction of their society. Fung masterfully and carefully surveys both Chinese- and English-language scholarship to provide one of the most comprehensive and richly detailed pictures of these intellectual debates available in English. He carefully examines positions and thinkers that have been strangely overlooked in much academic work on the era, but that played decisive roles in shaping ideologies of the time. These include the Chinese "humanism" of the Critical Review Group (pp. 70-72); Chen Xujing's "total Westernization" thesis, which prompted Hu Shi to revise his views on cultural radicalism (pp. 46-60); and the political thought of the "Warring States School," which vested Chinese salvation in a revival of Qin-era concern for national security and military capacity (pp. 120-126). The broad scope of Fung's analysis belies his somewhat simplistic organization of thinkers and debates into an inadequate (and sometimes unhelpful) liberal-conservative-socialist trichotomy. He draws repeated attention to how thinkers and themes continually reappeared in diverse conversations, transcending the very labels he uses to describe them. As Fung effectively argues in Chapter 1, the Westernized radicalism of Chen Duxiu and other May Fourth thinkers betrays an unexpectedly conservative resistance to cultural pluralism and historical change, possibilities embraced by the so-called "conservative" thinkers examined in Chapters 2 and 3. His discussions therefore enable readers to draw connections between themes, thinkers, and materials usually thought of as isolated or distinct. For example, in Chapter 3 Fung points out that conservative impulses in China were not opposed to modernity but in fact saw tradition as an important part of modern development. One of the strongest elements of the book is Fung's discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 of the statist elements of liberalism and related ideologies in China. Rather than interpret Chinese liberals' emphasis on the need for strong state power as an aberration or misinterpretation of "true" liberalism, Fung uses the work of political theorists such as Stephen Holmes to show that extreme individualism did not necessarily always win out over socialist economic policies and strong nationalist states within such liberal thought (p. 140). By pointing out European precedents for these broader possibilities, Fung succeeds in his task of situating these intellectuals within global rather than merely "Chinese" conversations about modernity. He does, however, miss an opportunity here to reverse the gaze and to portray Chinese liberal thought as an independently significant contribution to global liberalism, not simply one of its many interpretations. The one flaw of the book is its failure to examine Marxism in China, at least in terms of addressing how Marxism transformed the landscape through which past and contemporary intellectuals debate the "modernity" mentioned in the book's title. Fung avoids this topic because, in contrast to many of the other intellectual debates the book brings to light, it has been so well-covered elsewhere (including by Fung himself). The importance of drawing attention, as Fung does, to the role played by non-communist elite discourses in modern Chinese intellectual history cannot be overstated, especially given their relative neglect among historians of China. In a book, however, with a title promising examination of "the intellectual foundations of Chinese modernity," it is not entirely obvious how Marxism "is outside the scope of [the] study" (p. 5). By the end of the book, for example, the author himself declares the "ultimate" triumph of Marxism and Mao Zedong thought over "all other schools of thought" (pp. 255, 262)—implying a historical discontinuity that troubles his depiction of a continuous, "ongoing conversation" between...