2 Temple and History
2.5 KMT Culture Politics and the New Life Movement (1934-1945)
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Chinese section of the official newspapers published by the Japanese colonial government, the Taiwan Daily News.183
The wartime policies, which started in 1936, brought rapid changes to the colonial administration. Cultural accommodation was replaced by the kōminka campaign to turn the inhabitants of Taiwan into imperial subjects. Chinese sections of newspapers were abolished in 1937, and in 1940, the name-changing campaign was initiated. Local customs were to be replaced by Shinto rituals, traditional religious festivals were forbidden, and people were supposed to wear Japanese clothing.184 Sacrifices to Confucius in the Taipei temple were performed in Shinto style since 1940.185 The cover page of January issue of the Confucius’
Teachings Journal (Kongjiao bao) in 1938 wished on its Japanese troops good fortune and swift victory. Similarly, after the Pacific War began in 1941, cover page of the Venerating Sagely Virtue journal (Chongsheng daode bao) wished Japan victory over British and American forces and success in uniting Asia.186
2.5 KMT Culture Politics and the New Life Movement (1934-1945)
Having lost the war, Japan was required to submit to the terms of the Potsdam Declaration (26. 7. 1945) and cede the control of Taiwan to the Republic of China. Taiwan thus became an appendage of a large state and central government funnelled the island resources, including expropriated public and private Japanese property into mainland, in order to support the campaign against the Chinese Communists. Important development in this period was the creation of ethnic and political dichotomy between the newly arrived mainlanders (waishengren 外省人) and the local populace (benshengren 本省人). A tension between the two “groups” can be felt even today, as I observed repeatedly during the lectures on the Four Books in the Taipei temple. After its arrival in Taiwan, the Kuomintang enforced its specific vision of Chinese modernity. Modernization under Japanese rule in Taiwan was dealing with different issues, and even though an influence of the May Fourth movement reached Taiwan, it was reinterpreted according to the local needs. The Kuomintang decimated local intellectual and political elites during the 228 Incident, and cultural and political orientation from the Japanese era was suppressed. Instead, the Kuomintang continued its culture politics from the New Life era in Mainland China, which proved to have a lasting effect on the understanding of Confucianism in Taiwan.
Re-Sinicization campaign in Taiwan was continuation of Nanking era efforts at creating a universal national culture intended to displace local Chinese cultures. The watershed in the Nationalist culture policies was New Life movement. This neotraditionalist movement was a reaction to national and international crisis. On the level of discourse, it referenced ancient tradition, yet on the level of practice was in fact full-scale Westernization, modernization,
183 Taiwan Memory, Accessed August 30, 2016, http://memory.ncl.edu.tw.
184 Lamley, “Taiwan under Japanese Rule, pp. 240-242.
185 Taipei Confucius Temple Website, Accessed August 30, 2016, http://www.ct.taipei.gov.tw/zh-tw/L/About/HistoryChronicle/1/1.htm.
186 Li, Rijushidai taiwan rujiao jieshe yü huodong, p. 368.
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secularization. This era saw establishment of guiding principles of culture politics that reappeared during the Culture Renaissance, and recently during the presidency of Ma Ying-jeou. Society-wide political and intellectual negotiations, together with failed attempts at establishing Confucianism as a state religion or at least as a religion among others, resulted in Confucianism being categorized as a philosophy and not included among recognized religions.187 Eventually, it was identified as the core of national culture source of the Sunist ideology. This allowed introduction of Confucian values, with emphasis on obedience and social hierarchy, into school curriculum. Confucian temples were exempt from temple-destruction campaigns and protected as silent memorials of national culture. This development was linked with the process of creating national history and national heroes, which included Confucius and Mencius, as well as Sun Yat-sen. The sacrificial rituals in temples were replaced with civil ceremonies commemorating the birthday of Confucius.
The KMT for a long time had no clear unified vision concerning its political and cultural orientation, which was reflected in controversies about the role of Confucianism as well.188 Texts associated with Confucianism had been removed from the Westernized curriculum of modern republican schools in 1912, but were reintroduced again in 1929 after Nationalist had defeated Beiyang government in Peking (1912-1928) during the Northern expedition.189 The nation-wide ban on sacrifices to Confucius in 1912 provoked protests from academic institutions, and so did an unsuccessful attempt by Chen Jitang 陳濟堂 (1890-1954), the chief military commander of Guangdong province, to introduce the Classic of Filial Piety into local schools in the 1930s.190 Nationalists’ stance on ancestral rites was oscillating between proscription and promotion.191 Apart from the internal factors in the Nationalist party and in the China, developments in Japan showed to have a considerable influence on the Nationalists’
attitudes towards Confucianism.
Negative issues faced by Japanese Confucian revivalists like Shibunkai served as a positive inspiration for the Kuomintang appropriation of Confucianism into national culture.
The first problem was failure to develop any form of Confucian practice in order to make the tradition a meaningful part of the everyday life of the ordinary Japanese. Second problem was the influence of the state and state ritualism. Newly created Confucian rituals were developed alongside the rituals of state Shinto, and were thus closely linked with the Emperor and, ultimately, the military. 192 The rhetoric of Japanese militarists, claiming for themselves the possession of the Confucian “Kingly Way” (ōdō/wangdao 王道) in order to justify Japan’s
187 See for example Chen, “Confucianism Encounters Religion: The Formation of Religious Discourse and the Confucian Movement in Modern China.”
188 Shuk-wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900-1937, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011, p. 120.
189 Zheng Yuan, “The Status of Confucianism in Modern Chinese Education, 1901-1949: A Curricular Study,” in Glen Peterson, Ruth Hayhoe, and Yongling Lu (eds.), Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China, Ann Arbor Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 209.
190 Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China, pp. 120-122.
191 Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009, p. 240.
192 Paramore, Japanese Confucianism, p. 156.
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leading role among the Asian nations and assert its supremacy over the Republicans and Communists in China, eventually elicited reaction from the Republican ideologues such as Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1961). Hu Shi in 1930s engaged in polemics with the Japanese ideologues over the issue who had the right to represent Confucianism. In effect, the Japanese empire could serve as an example for Nationalists’ policies incorporating the ultra-conservative interpretations of the Confucian tradition in order to bolster their efforts at creating a powerful party-state.193 While Japanese Asianism emphasized universality of Confucian message, the Kuomintang nationalist interpretations eventually linked Confucianism with Chinese ethnicity.
The puppet state of Manchukuo (Manshūkoku 満州国), established in 1932, was proclaimed by the Japanese ideologues to be a Confucian state, since its policies were supposed to follow the principles of the Kingly Way. In the early stages, this orientation was rather similar to Japanese conservative corporatism and free from militarists influences, and was eagerly supported by the Qing loyalists who formed the core of the puppet cabinet.194 To this end, the Japanese to de-Nationalized the school curriculum in Manchukuo, replacing the Nationalist courses on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles with Confucian “ritual teachings” (lijiao 禮教),195 i.e. with Four Books and Five Classics, which were later substituted by a course on moral cultivation, based on Confucian values, and a course on Confucian classics in higher education.196
Apart from the cultural challenge posed by Japanese Asianism, Republican revolutionaries after 1912 had to differentiate and distance themselves from the imperial government and its cultural legacy. Although the late Qing moral education classes remained at schools, their contents were recast towards education in Republican civic duties.
Confucianism remained only in university departments of philosophy as a component of the lessons on Chinese philosophy.197 In 1920, all the textbooks in classical language were to be removed and replaced by those written in the new standard vernacular Chinese, i.e. Mandarin, by 1922, when the republican educational system adopted the American model inspired by John Dewey. The Nanjing decade (1927-1937) brought a change when Nationalist party leaders, in order to consolidate power and secure the foundations of the party-state system, introduced Sunism together with Confucianism into school curriculum in 1929.198 The turn towards Confucianism, which peaked during the New Life Movement launched in 1934, can be interpreted as a defence against accusations that the Chinese government had abandoned the country’s cultural heritage,199 especially when compared to the Japanese empire’s claim on the orthodox Confucian Way. Other factors pushing the Kuomintang towards Confucianism and “traditional” Chinese culture was the need to not only combat the Communist social
193 Paramore, Japanese Confucianism, p. 160.
194 Paramore, Japanese Confucianism, p. 161.
195 Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, p. 270.
196 Zheng, “The Status of Confucianism in Modern Chinese Education”, p. 212.
197 Zheng, “The Status of Confucianism in Modern Chinese Education”, pp. 203-204.
198 Zheng, “The Status of Confucianism in Modern Chinese Education”, pp. 206-208.
199 Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, p. 270.
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program and their influence among the common people, but at the same time draw a distinct line between the two parties and distinguish Nationalist party from the Communists on the level ideology.
The New Life Movement was aimed at reinvigorating behavioural patterns of
"traditional morals" and enforcing public hygiene. The ultimate goal was to transform the whole nation200 by revolutionizing the people’s lives to battle the spiritual and material
"degeneration", to raise their national awareness at the time of national crisis, and to overcome the alienation between the Party and the people.201 The messages of anti-Communism, Confucian morals, and public hygiene were disseminated through the New Life Movement associations at national, county and city levels, and through schools.202 Curriculum was further modified to educate both children and adults about Sunism, Communist atrocities, traditional morals and citizenship. Physical education was emphasized in order to strengthen the citizens’ bodies and to teach them self-defence in preparation for the war against Japan.203 The campaigns included purchase of national goods, or implementation of baojia system.204 Kuomintang leaders were also trying to use personal connections to co-opt Christian churches to help in spreading the New Life Movement.205
Although the rhetoric of the New Life Movement was couched in a Confucian terminology, and emphasized traditional virtues of propriety (li 禮), uprightness (yi 義), integrity (lian 廉 ) and sense of shame (chi 恥 ), at its core was the idea of totalizing modernization, and terminology from the past was infused with new meanings of proper citizen conduct, i.e. discipline and commitment to nation-building.206 Filial piety was paired with loyalty to extend its sphere from parents to sacrificing oneself for the nation, in what Ferlanti calls “filial loyalty”. 207 Moreover, in a manner reminiscent of Neohinduists in India, New Life ideologues saw the Western modes of behaviour promoted though the campaigns as originally present in traditional Chinese culture and merely temporarily lost in the recent times.208 New Life Movement was a similar attempt at cultural fusion marked with colonial complex and inferiority vis-à-vis western culture, and utilized a high degree of selectivity in choice of native and “Western” cultural values and their reinterpretation. New Life discourse was marked with bifurcation between Western and Eastern culture, with “Western learning”
being seen as useful in sciences and technology but not in other spheres of knowledge production. 209 The ultimate goal was to create a strong and competitive national state. To
200 Federica Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province, 1934–1938,” Modern Asian Studies 44:5 (2010):
963-64.
201 Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution,” The Journal of Asian Studies 34:4 (1975): 945-47.
202 Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province”, pp. 969, 978.
203 Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province”, pp. 978-979.
204 Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province”, pp. 983-984.
205 Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province”, p. 973.
206 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, p. 965.
207 Ferlanti, “The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province”, p. 979.
208 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, p. 960.
209 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, pp. 961, 963.
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this end, Kuomintang ideologues adopted a modern mechanistic vision of society – with emphasis on total control from the centre, hierarchical organization of society, obedience, uniformity, efficiency, and productivity – that was coated in moral language borrowed from Confucian political discourse, which in contrast imagined state as a ritual and moral polity.210 In the New Life Movement, moral and immoral was distinguished on the basis what advances national goals and increases power of the state.211 The core ideals of New Life Movement were thus militarization (jünshihua 軍 事 化 ), productivization (shengchanhua 生 產 化 ) and aestheticization (yishuhua 藝術化).212 Although frugality, which was also part of New Life Movement campaigns, could be identified as a Confucian virtue, given the context of the close ties to Christianity among the Nationalist cadres, especially Chiang Kai-shek’s wife who was one of the leading figures in the movement, it could equally well be a Methodist virtue. Given the overall ideological context, it can be identified with productivization.
Although the New Life Movement was a thoroughly modern movement, it was criticised by contemporaries as a conservative attempt at restoring he old social structures. In response to these charges, Nationalists explained that they did not want to restore the old society (fugu 復古) but to revive (fuxing 復興) its virtues, the value of which transcended time and socio-cultural context,213 and were at the core of the national culture of the Chinese people. However, New Life Movement was in fact influenced by the New Culture Movement perception and interpretation the traditional culture. New Life ideologues inherited the image of Confucianism by the New Culture intellectuals as an anti-individualist, hierarchical and undemocratic ideology; but what had been criticized by the New Culture Movement was appreciated by the Nationalists.214 Nationalists simply rejected the individualism of the New Culture Movement just as they refused the class struggle of the Communists. They also criticized the elitism of the New Culture Movement in contrast to the New Life Movement, which aimed at revolutionizing the lives of the people.215 In contrast to these claims, the New Live Movement proved to be a complete failure because of it contradictory nature, both on the level of ideology and implementation, and its inability to appeal to people; unlike the Communists’ programs, it did not improve the livelihood of the people. Nationalist government denied any responsibility for the state of affairs, instead laying the blame on the people and their cultural and moral deficiencies. Neither did the Nationalists have the force necessary to coerce people into cooperation.216
New Life references to Confucianism had a ritual aspect as well. The same year the movement was announced by Chiang Kai-shek in 1934, the Central Executive Committee invented a new public holiday to celebrate Confucius’s birthday.217 Qing government, as part
210 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, p. 968.
211 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, p. 971.
212 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, p. 972.
213 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, p. 961.
214 Nylan, Five ‘Confucian’ Classics, pp. 323-324.
215 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, pp. 961-962, 975.
216 Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement”, p. 976.
217 Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China, p. 120.
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of its modernizing and westernizing reforms, similarly declared Confucius’s birthday a public holiday in 1904.218 Since the ritual sacrifices to Confucius had been banned by the Nationalist government, his birthday (the date of which was set on August 27th in the new Republican solar calendar) was meant as a secular commemoration of a Chinese cultural hero. The Party, government, military and police, and schools were all required to celebrate this holiday and hold their own commemoration meetings, which were to follow the same framework of the Republican civil rituals. The ceremony would begin with the party song sung by the participants who then bowed three times to the flag, followed by bowing to the portraits of Sun Yat-sen and Confucius. After this, the chairman would read the Sun Yat-sen’s last will and explain the meaning of commemorating Confucius. The ceremony would conclude with participants jointly singing a newly composed "Commemoration Song for Confucius". The lyrics were based on a chapter from Records of Rites (Liji 禮記) because Sun Yat-sen’s concept that "all under heaven belongs to the public" (Tianxia wei gong 天下為公)219 originated from its passage.220 The ceremony was not substantially different from other national ceremonies such as birthday of Sun Yat-sen. This absorbing of Confucius into the Party ideology and political ritualism was in fact a part of a larger trend of Nationalists’ efforts at co-opting ancient sages to serve the new regime.221
The New Live Movement ought to be viewed in the context of other contemporary efforts in quest for Chinese modernity, and the process of inventing “Chinese culture”. In campaigns against the practices of traditional culture that did not fit Republican visions of national culture and were labelled as “superstitions”, the Nationalists adopted the paradoxical discourse of other modernizing states. While the state claimed to be secular and upholding the freedom of religious beliefs, the state interfered into this sphere precisely because it claimed sole authority to define what constitutes religion, and what distinguishes religions from superstitions.
Search for national culture required to administratively and ideologically sort out multitude of cultural practices into novel categories of "religion" and "superstition",
"Buddhism", "Taoism", or "Confucianism", which tended to emphasize beliefs and hierarchical organizational structure. This included regulation of other forms of organization and socialization, which were different from what the Kuomintang expected from modern Republican citizens. Coupled with aims to ascertain sovereignty of the national state, Republican government sought to suppress or co-opt other social institutions that might pose a challenge to state power, such as monasteries, local temples, local elites, lineages, together with plethora of religious specialists ranging from native Chinese-medicine doctors and fortune-tellers to Buddhist and Taoist clergy. Not only did temples often possess large holdings and posed a competition for nationalized enterprises, but religious economy in general was
218 Nylan, Five ‘Confucian’ Classics, pp. 311.
219 It should be pointed out that this concept of “gong” was quite different from the newly imported modern concept of “public”, which caused problems when Republican government tried to sort out temples and their property. See Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, p.71.
220 Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China, pp. 120-121.
221 Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China, p.122.
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adversarial to the kind of industrial economy Nationalists wanted to establish. On the one hand, Nationalist propaganda criticized religious practices, as excessive expenses because they did not contribute to the nation-building goals, on the other hand, cash-stricken government tried to include ritual products in its ever-expanding list of taxable items in order to secure income into government coffers.222
Common people and ritual specialist often protested, subverted the regulations, or used legal actions and turning the discourse of law and party ideology against the party itself in order to protect one’s interests against suppression and carve out their own niches inside the continually changing sphere of "religion" and "nation". As Government often altered its
Common people and ritual specialist often protested, subverted the regulations, or used legal actions and turning the discourse of law and party ideology against the party itself in order to protect one’s interests against suppression and carve out their own niches inside the continually changing sphere of "religion" and "nation". As Government often altered its