Hua Murthy 1

Reviews !"#

© $%&$ by University of!Hawai‘i Press

expect no variety between di'erent villages. Johnson’s claim for the importance of performance may be true for many rituals, including the funerary rites for which the argument was initially made, but that does not necessarily mean that it is true for all rituals, especially when considering that ritual in itself is a concept that can be understood in many di'erent ways.

Both Johnson and Formoso discuss areas and topics which so far have not received much attention in the study of Chinese religion, whatever that may be. But both books o'er more. Johnson’s discussion of Shanxi ritual opera should be of interest to anyone studying Chinese theatre; Formoso discusses important questions regarding the identity of overseas Chinese. Di'erent as the books may seem to be, both Johnson and Formoso make clear that there is always more behind religious issues than religion alone.

Yves Menheere

Yves Menheere is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, working on local religion in Taiwan.

REFERENCES Feuchtwang, Stephan. $%%&. Popular religion in China: "e imperial metaphor. London: Curzon Press.

Freedman, Maurice. &#(!. On the sociological study of Chinese religion. In Religion and ritual in Chinese society, edited by Arthur Wolf. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Watson, James L. &#)). *e structure of Chinese funerary rites: Elementary forms, ritual sequence, and the primacy of performance. In Death ritual in late imperial and modern China, edited by James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Shiping Hua. Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist "ought with Japan and Russia, #$%$–#%%&. Stanford: Stanford University Press, $%%). $%) pp. Hardcover +",.%%, -./0 #()-%-)%!-(1&1&-&.

Among the many changes that occurred during the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-2rst century, one could count a general shi3 away from revolutionary utopias. Of course, in the 2nal decades of the twentieth century, people already criticized utopian thought and doubted the search for alternatives to the world of global capitalism, and so we can understand the pessimism of the twenty-2rst century as continuing a larger trend. However, during the greater part of the twentieth century, people in China and elsewhere showed a faith in utopia

(CS4) (UHP) (7!10”) Minion J-2573 CRI, 17:4 2573_17-4_02_Reviews pp. 438–506 (p. 438)PMU:(idp[KN]/A) 16/3/2012 23 March 2012 11:03 AM


!!% China Review International: Vol. &(, No. !, $%&%

and the possibility of a di'erent future. Hence, it is particularly interesting now, from the standpoint of the early twenty-2rst century, to look back from a compara-tive point of view at the di'erent utopian projects that pervaded the previous century. *is is exactly what Shiping Hua does in his book, Chinese Utopianism: A!Comparative Study of Reformist "ought with Japan and Russia, #$%$–#%%&. Hua compares the governmental policies along with ideologies of reform in Japan, China, and Russia and argues that political changes in these three countries occurred as ruling elites implemented reforms in response to structural problems, but emphasizes that the resulting trajectories were in4uenced by cultural traditions.

*e author’s focus is on twentieth-century China. He has divided the book into six chapters and a conclusion. *e 2rst chapter, deals with “*eory and Method”; the second provides a general discussion of “Utopianism” in Japan, Russia, and China; the third chapter concerns “Modernizing Reforms” in Japan and China; the fourth treats “Reforms within Communism: *e Soviet Union”; the523h analyzes “Reforms within Communism: China”; and the sixth considers “Reforms out of Communism: China and the Soviet Union.” Finally, the conclu-sion discusses “Hopefulness towards the Future as Nature, Supernatural and the Product of Human Endeavor.” In the second chapter, he lays out a major point in the book, speci2cally, that Chinese utopian thought is connected to the prevalence of the Taoist small kingdoms with limited population, a tradition of peasant rebellions, and especially, the Confucian ideas of the grand harmony (datong).

Hua shows the importance of the concept of the grand harmony in Chinese thought by comparing the Meiji reforms to the late Qing reforms, namely the Hundred Days Reform during the late Qing. In Chapter *ree, the author com-pares the Meiji thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi (&)",–&#%&) to the late Qing philosopher Kang Youwei (&),)–&#$() and contends that both were representative of the pol-itical culture of their respective societies. In general, Hua argues that by comparing Kang and Fukuzawa, we can conclude that the Chinese were more radical than their Japanese counterparts. He cites Kang: “[S]low reform is not as good as rapid reform; little change is not as good as wholesale change” (p. ""). A few pages later, he explains the di'erence in terms of culture. “*e traditional Japanese notion of accepting life as it is, as discussed in Chapter $, probably explains why the Meiji leaders adopted moderate strategies with limited goals, while the Chinese tradi-tional belief that striving will lead to a better life for the group may explain the impatience and greater ambition of the late Qing reformers” (p. "1).

Hua continues this mode of analysis in his treatment of reforms during the communist period and interestingly points out that reformers of Mao’s China, such as Chen Boda, were inspired by the idea of datong (p. (1). In discussing the Great Leap Forward, he notes that in &#,), “Mao visited the People’s Communes in Xu Shui County, Hebei Province. *e leaders from the CCP Central Committee’s Department of Peasant A'airs were asked to bring Kang Youwei’s Datongshu with



Reviews !!&

them ‘as the guideline for the People’s Commune’ ” (p. (1). Moreover, in what could be described as an invocation of Confucius, Mao claimed that one should rely on cultivation rather than law (p. (1). However, it is not just Confucianism that in4uenced the Maoist regime. Hua contends that the Chinese reformers interpretation of “Marxian dialectics resembles the Taoist yin/yang approach that was responsible for justifying the chaos of the GLF [Great Leap Forward] and the CR [Cultural Revolution]” (p. ()). *e author asserts that such dialectics could justify anything.

Hua contends that the in4uence of aspects of the Chinese tradition continues even in the post-Mao period, for example in the television series, Kewang (Yearn-ings), which aired in the early &##%s. *e author cites Li Rui, a member of the Politburo, who claims that the show depicted a new model of relationship that was “sincere, honest, equal, mutually supportive, united, friendly and harmonious” (p.5#!). According to this view, Kewang was a protraditional soap opera as opposed to the River Elegy, which was antitraditional and praised the West.

Although I have not touched on Hua’s discussion of the Soviet Union, from the above discussion, the reader should get a sense of the types of argument in this5book. Hua’s descriptions are, at times illuminating, but ultimately his line of reasoning su'ers from an insu6cient attention to history and rash attempts to invoke culture. A closer examination of the intellectual history of the regions in question would have made the book stronger. For example, in the Japanese case, the author suggests that traditional Japanese culture might have made the Japanese less utopian than the Chinese. In this case, the author must explain the emergence of utopian socialism in the late Meiji, including the thought of socialists such as Katayama Sen and of the anarchist K7toku Sh8sui, both of whom are extremely well known and in4uential. Moreover, the latter explicitly draws on the Mencius in order to promote his vision of utopia, suggesting that cultures are not so easily separable in terms of nations. If one continued to look beyond the Meiji, one would also have to explain the utopianism of the scholars who wished to overcome modernity during the interwar and war periods.& Finally, during the postwar period, given the simple paradigm that Hua has provided in his book, how would one explain the vast number of pro-Mao intellectuals in postwar Japan?$

However, the problems do not stop merely with Hua’s treatment of Japan, but concern his explanation of modern Chinese thought and culture. Missing from Hua’s book is a sustained analysis of the transformation of the conceptual terrain with the emergence of the modern world. He 2lls this void with cultural character-istics based largely on the nation-state model and a related assumption of national continuity. In the Chinese case, the analysis could have been more convincing had Hua engaged more thoroughly the literature, both Chinese and Western, about some of the cultural phenomena with which the book deals. For example, in the &##%s, Zhang Yiwu, a cultural critic at Beijing University, argued that the television series Kewang expressed the emergence of a new type of entertainment, which



!!$ China Review International: Vol. &(, No. !, $%&%

emphasized emotion and a new a-political subjectivity." We could probably under-stand this gesture, which continues in Chinese television dramas today, as a response to the a3ermath of the Tiananmen social movement in &#)#. Although Hua is right to point out Li Rui’s reading of Kewang as connected to tradition, it would have been interesting to note how Li Rui was attempting to construct, or even reinvent, tradition in the context of Chinese capitalism and market reforms in the &##%s.! It is not that culture is unimportant. Rather, by examining the way in which culture intersects with and is reconstituted by political economy, which itself has cultural conditions that are transnational, we could better understand the issues that face modern China and the global capitalist world.

Perhaps such oversights are unavoidable in a book that tries to do so much, a comparison of political thought in three complex regions, in only &%( pages of text. I commend the author for a brave attempt to bring a comparative perspective to the fairly parochial 2eld of Chinese studies. I would recommend the book for students interested in Chinese utopianism. It could be an interesting springboard for critical discussion.

Viren Murthy

Viren Murthy teaches Chinese and Japanese history at the University of Ottawa. His primary interest is in modern Chinese and Japanese intellectual history and the problems of global capitalist modernity. His book, *e Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: *e Resistance of Consciousness, was published by Brill in '(##.

NOTES &. For a discussion, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, $%%%).

$. On Japanese interest in Maoism, see Curtis Anderson Gayle, “China in the Japanese Radical Gaze: &#!,–&#,,,” Modern Asian Studies !" (,): &$,,–&$)1. For a discussion of Japanese sinologists conceptions of Chinese modernity and Maoism in postwar Japan, see Viren Murthy, "e Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: "e Resistance of Consciousness (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, $%&&), chapter &.

". Zhang Yiwu, Cong xiandaixing dao houxiandaixing (Guangxi: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, &##().

!. *ere has been a large number of books that have dealt with the reconstitution of ideology as China entered the global capitalist system of nation-states. For somewhat di'erent approaches, see Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, &##,) and Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, $%%$).



Hua Murthy 1

Documents

Transcript of Hua Murthy 1