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 Nietzsche in China

By
Lixin Shao

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Letters

the Graduate School of
State University of New York at Buffalo
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

1995
 UMI Number: 9525621

UMI Microform 9525621

Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized

copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI
300 North Zeeb Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
Dedicated to Georg Iggers and Wilma Iggers
 Acknowledgment

This dissertation would not exist without the generous

help from the following people.
Professor Georg Iggers encouraged the project from the
beginning and his guidance and support were critical to its
completion. Professor Wilma Iggers read the whole
manuscript and made numerous insightful suggestions.
Professor Peter Heller shared his expertise on Nietzsche's
philosophy with me and helped me to work through the drafts.
Professor Roger DesForges introduced me to important sources
of Chinese history, gave me valuable advice and read my
drafts. Professor Aleksander Gella's analysis of Polish
intelligentsia shed light on the situation of Chinese
intellectuals. Professor Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal of
Fordham University brought my attention to Nietzsche's
influence on Mao Zedong. Her study on Nietzsche's influence
in Russia has been a source of inspiration to me.
I would like to thank my parents Lin Shao and Xuemei
Zhai for their support and sacrifices. I also want to thank
Zhang Dongdong and Wang Hongyan from the People's University
of China, Wong Lai-fan from the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. Their help in acquiring Chinese sources has made the
project possible.
I am also grateful to Mrs. Katharine Becker, Mrs. Mary
Wagner and Mrs. Dorothy Ward of the History Department for
their help. My thanks also go to the Department of History
at SUNY Buffalo for providing a research grant which allowed
me to gain access to the East Asian collections of Columbia
University and Harvard University.
Special thanks are due to my wife Dawn who, besides
sharing my stress in writing the dissertation, read the
different versions of the manuscript and made invaluable
suggestions.
 Contents

A Note About Chinese Names Used in this Dissertation ii

Chronology iii

Abstract v

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Nietzsche and Social Darwinism: Liang Qichao on

Nietzsche 6

Chapter 2 A Nietzsche That Is Believable But Not Lovable:

Wang Guowei and Nietzsche 31

Chapter 3 From Nietzsche to Bolshevism: Chen Duxiu and Li

Dazhao 57

Chapter 4 Lu Xun: China's Nietzsche? 78

Chapter 5 To Rebel Is Justified: Young Mao Zedong and

Nietzsche 103

Chapter 6 Disassociating Nietzsche from Social Darwinism:

Li Shicen 124

Chapter 7 Nietzsche and Fascism: the Case of Chen Quan_168

Chapter 8 Nietzsche in New China 210

Chapter 9 The Fruition of Nietzsche Scholarship: Zhou

Guoping 225

Postcript 268

Selected Bibliography 270

 A Note About Chinese Names Used in this
Dissertation

Chinese names used in this paper are spelled according

to Pinyin system. Chinese names are given in their original
order, that is, the family name first and the given name
last. For example, Liang Qichao's family name is Liang.

ii
 Chronology
Political Trends and Events
1894-1895 First Sino-
Japanese War.
Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao
emerged as leaders of a
reform movement.
1898 The Hundred Days
Reform.
1900 Boxer Rising
1900-1911 Late Qing Reform
Dr. Sun Yet-sen called for a
Republic Revolution
1911-12 Republic of China
(Qing dynasty was overthrown)
1919 May Fourth Event
1923-1927 United Front of
Nationalists and Communists;
the Northern Expedition.
1927 Chiang Kai-shek purged
the Communists.
1931 Japan invaded and
occupied Manchuria
1937-1945 Second Sino-
Japanese War
Trends and Events Related to
Introduction of Western
Thought
1896 Yen Fu's On Evolution
was published. Social
Darwinism and other Western
socio-political ideas were
introduced to China
Liang Qichao expounded the
idea of "people's
rejuvenation"
1915 The journal New Youth
published.
1915-1923 New Cultural
Movement (Also referred to as
the May Fourth Movement)
General interest in Western
thought.
1920s and 1930s Marxism
gained wide acceptance among
intellectuals.
1920s and 1930s Western
thought continued to be
introduced to China
iii
1947-1949 Civil War
1949 People's Republic of
China founded;
(Nationalist government moved
to Taiwan.)
1966-1976 Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
1979- Economic reforms; China
reopened to the outside
world.
1989 Prodemocracy protest
and Beijing massacre
1949-1957 Ideology mainly
influenced by the USSR
Systematic translation of
works of Marxism
1966-1976 Severe thought
control and censorship.
Ideas from the West and the
USSR were condemned.
1979-1983 Marxism
reinterpreted.
1983 Campaign against
Spiritual Pollution
1980s Study and introduction
of Western thought
flourished; political taboo
still existed.
iv
 Abstract

Nietzsche in China is a chapter in the intellectual

history of twentieth century China. It shows how
Nietzsche's philosophical ideas were understood by the
Chinese and how, interacting with China's indigenous thought
and other schools of Western thought, they influenced
ethical, social, and political thinking in China.
Chapters 1 and 2 discuss Nietzsche's reception in the
last decade of the Qing dynasty [1644-1911]. Liang Qichao
and Wang Guowei, both pioneers in introducing Western
thought to Chinese readers, had very different views of
Nietzsche: while Liang treated him as part of the social
Darwinist tradition, Wang regarded him as a philosopher who,
like Buddha and Schopenhauer, fathomed the fundamental truth
about human suffering.
Chapters 3 through 6 discuss Nietzsche's influence on
leading Chinese writers during the period of the New Culture
movement and the subsequent period of socio-political
activism. All figures studied here, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao,
Lu Xun, Mao Zedong and Li Shicen, sooner or later turned to
Bolshevism, but did not necessarily abandon Nietzsche. Case
studies of this phenomenon bring to light the intellectual
dynamism of the time.
Chapter 7 deals with the Fascist interpretation of
Nietzsche's philosophy in the late 1930s and the early
1940s. Chen Quan differed from all other figures dealt with
in this dissertation in his high-handed manipulation of
Nietzsche's texts and concepts. This chapter is therefore a
case study of a propagandist at work.
Chapter 8 encompasses the first three decades of the
People's Republic of China (1949-1979). It studies how
Nietzschean ideas influenced the policy making of the New
China through Mao Zedong and the Communist ruling elite in
the guise of Marxism, although Nietzsche's philosophy was
denounced publicly.
The last chapter describes the surge of a new Nietzsche
fever in the 1980s and reviews works on Nietzsche by Zhou
Guoping. After free discussion of Marxism was censored by
the Beijing authorities, some of the best scholars in China
have found in Nietzsche's philosophy a new language of
social and moral criticism.

\fl
 Introduction

The last one hundred years of intellectual life in

China are characterized by an intensive interaction between

Chinese ideas and Western thought. The story of this

interaction has caught the imagination of many scholars both

in China and in the West, resulting in a large body of

literature on Western intellectual influence in China. A

number of these studies deal with the reception of

individual Western thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Herbert

Spencer, Henrik Ibsen, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund

Freud, and Karl Marx. 1

Nietzsche, as this dissertation will show, has also had

an enormous influence in China. Yet there does not exist a

comprehensive study of Nietzsche's influence in China in

Chinese or English, or for that matter, in any other

language. This lack is surprising because an extensive

literature exists not only on the role of Nietzsche in

1
For example, See James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983); Elisabeth
Eide, China's Ibsen From Ibsen to Ibsenism (London: Curzon Press
Ltd., 1987); Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China:
Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early
Republic,(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977); and
Zhang Jingyuan, Psychoanalysis in China: Literary
Transformation, 1919-1949 (New York: Cornell University Press,
1992); Lin Maosheng, The Spread of Marxism in China (Beijing:
Beijing University Press, 1984).

Page 1
Western but also in Russian, Latin American, and Japanese

thought.

A few brief discussions of Nietzsche's influence in

China do exist. The earliest is Cai Yuanpei's article of

1923, "Chinese Philosophy in the Past Fifty Years." Cai

surveyed the then existing mentions of Nietzsche in Chinese

writings. He quoted Wang Guowei's comments on Schopenhauer

and Nietzsche at length, and characterized them as being

"succinct." He also mentioned People's Bell's special issue

on Nietzsche in 1920, compiled by Li Shicen.2 In 1932, Guo

Zhanbo discussed Nietzsche's influence on Chinese philosophy

in The Intellectual History of China in the Last Fifty

Years. His treatment, however, was flawed when he confused

Nietzsche with Comte's positivism and Marx's historical

materialism.3

In 1982, Le Daiyun, a literary scholar, wrote an

article "Nietzsche and Modern Chinese Literature," in which

he dealt specifically with the role of Nietzsche's ideas in

the New Culture movement and in the Chinese Fascist

movement. He argued that in borrowing foreign ideas,

Chinese writers have always been selective.4

2
Cai Yuanpei, "Chinese Philosophy in the Past Fifty Years," in
Selected Works of Cai Yuanpei (Beijing: People's Press, 1984),
pp. 48-54, 56.
3
Guo Zhanbo, Intellectual History of China in the Last Fifty
Years (Beipei: Renwen Books, 1936), p.364.
4
Le Daiyun, "Nietzsche and Contemporary Literature in China,"
Beijing University Journal, No. 3 (June, 1980), pp. 20-33.

Page 2
 In the 1980s, a number of articles that discussed

Nietzsche's influence on individual Chinese writers were

published. Most of them examined Lu Xun's numerous

references to Nietzsche and focused on his turn from

Nietzsche to Marx. Of these studies, Cheng Zhizhong and

Cheung Chiu-yee should be mentioned particularly for their

understanding of Lu Xun's works. The latter's booklet

Nietzsche and the Development of Lu Xun's Thought (1987) has

a comprehensive bibliography, which includes Chinese studies

of Nietzsche, Chinese translations of Nietzsche, and other

works related to Nietzsche's influence in China. Based on

this bibliography, he later published Nietzsche in China: An

Annotated Bibliography in 1992. 5

There are even fewer non-Chinese works on Nietzsche's

influence in China. Onoe Kanehide pioneered the study of

Nietzsche's • influence on Lu Xun in 1961. Malian Galiak

published "Nietzsche in China (1918-1925)" in 1972, in which

he examined Liang Qichao's references to Nietzsche, Wang

Guowei's criticism of Nietzsche, and reviewed the writings

of major literary figures of the New Culture movement on

5
Cheng Zhizhong, "Lu Xun's concept of "creating men' and
Nietzsche's philosophy," Learning and Searching, No. 3 (1989),
pp. 109-111, 101; "Lu Xun's Early Novels and Nietzsche," Henan
Normal Universty Journal No. 4 (1989), pp. 48-52; and "On Lu Xun
and Nietzsche," Anqing Institute of Teachers Journal, No. 1
(1989), pp. 43-50. Chiu-yee Cheung, Nietzsche and the
Development of Lu Xun's Thoguht (Hongkong: Qing Wen Bookstore,
1987) and Nietzsche in China (1904-1992): An Annotated
Bibliography (Canberra, Australia: Australian National
University Press, 1992) .

Page 3
Nietzsche. He offers a comprehensive analysis of Mao Tun's

introduction to Nietzsche's philosophy and reviews all

articles in the Nietzsche issue of People's Bell.6

In 1991, David Kelly published an article "The Highest

Chinadom: Nietzsche and the Chinese Mind, 1907-1989." This

is a general survey of Nietzsche's influence on several

Chinese writers. Half of its pages are devoted to

Nietzsche's influence in the post-Mao era. Its title needs

some explanation. Nietzsche created the term "Higher

Chinadom" as an epithet to characterize his concept of the

"last man"; David Kelly used "Highest Chinadom" to refer to

the post-Mao Chinese polity which he thought "combines all

the worst features of modernity and feudalism." In his

review he highlighted and approved Nietzsche's influence

whenever it was employed as an individualistic criticism of

Chinese tradition or Chinese reality.7

Perhaps a work of fiction, Nicholas Jose' novel, Avenue

of Eternal Peace, should be mentioned here. Nicholas Jose

was a cultural counselor for Australian embassy in Beijing

6
Onoe Kanehide, "Lu Xun and Nietzsche," [ JH _h jtjt:^ ' H x E
cl fb T|$ ] ] in Journal of the Japanese Society of Chinese
Studies [ B ^ Pf3 Hill W&] no. 13, (1961), pp. 102-115; Von
Marian Galik, "Nietzsche in China (1918-1925)," Nachrichten der
Gesellschaft fur Natur und Volkerkunde Ostasiens, vol. 110
(1971),pp. 5-48.
7
David A Kelly, "The Highest Chinadom: Nietzsche and the
Chinese Mind, 1907-1989," in Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche and
Asian thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1991), p. 167. Nietzsche's reference to "Higher Chinadom" is in
section 866 of his iVill to Power.

Page 4
from 1986-1990, a time when Nietzsche was very much in

fashion. In the novel there was a Nietzschean young man, Ma

Zhe, which means "Philosopher Horse" in Chinese, who took

every opportunity to promote Nietzsche's philosophy and to

condemn Chinese traditions. The "Philosopher Horse" was

portrayed as a straightforward, compassionate and courageous

man. At the same time he was a caricature of those Chinese

cultural critics whose enthusiasm for Nietzsche was not

matched by their philosophical sophistication. Jose's book

is fictional, but it conveys the atmosphere of Beijing in

the mid-1980s in a way unmatched by any scholarly work. 8

All the above profiles and sketches testify to an

increasing recognition of the importance of Nietzsche's

thought in China. Still missing is a comprehensive study of

Nietzsche's influence as part of the intellectual history of

twentieth-century China. This dissertation seeks to fill

that gap.

8
Nicholas Jose, Avenue of Eternal Peace (Harmondsworth and
Melbourne, 1989)

Page 5
 Chapter 1 Nietzsche and Social Darwinism: Liang
Qichao on Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was first introduced to the Chinese

in People's Rejuvenation, a journal published by Chinese
exiles in Japan with a clandestine circulation inside China.
In July 1902, an article signed by "China's Rejuvenated
Citizen" quoted Benjamin Kidd--a British writer:

The goal of evolution is to create a future. The past

and the present are nothing but convenient means of
transition. Regretfully all contemporary political
science scholars and sociologists emphasize the present
while paying little attention to the future. . . . In
Germany, there are nationalism, conservatism, and
socialism; all of them are based on presentism.9 The
most influential schools of thought in Germany today
are Marx's socialism and Nietzsche's individualism.
Marx says that the problem with today's society is the
oppression of the majority of the weak by the minority
of the strong. Nietzsche says that the problem lies in
the constraints set by the majority of the inferior
over the minority of the superior. Although both
theories are well argued and reasonable, they are,

Presentism [JM,f^^^ ] is a term coined by the Chinese writer.

Page 6
 after all, geared to the present, and have nothing to
10
do with the future. . . .

Regarding the identity of Nietzsche, the Chinese writer

inserted a note:

Nietzsche is an extremist advocate for the right of the

strong. He died of madness three years ago. His
influence has swept over Europe and [his theory] is
regarded as the new religion of the fin-de-siecle.n

These few words that first introduced Nietzsche to

China give little information about him. And the views

about Nietzsche and Marx are bewildering: What did the

Chinese writer mean when he spoke of Nietzsche as "an

extremist advocate for the rights of the strong"? Was he

making a compliment or a denunciation? If criticisms of

both Nietzsche and Marx were "well-argued and reasonable,"

how could these two thinkers "have nothing to do with the

future"? There are no apparent clues to these questions:

Liang did not discuss Nietzsche or Marx in any of his other

writings in the late 1890s and the early 1900s.

Had these comments on Nietzsche and Marx been made by

an obscure writer in an obscure journal, they would deserve

no more than a passing remark in this dissertation. But

People's Rejuvenation happened to be one of most influential

10
Liang Qichao, "Kidd: A Revolutionary of the Theory of
Evolution" In Liang Qichao, Collected Works of Liang Qichao,
ed. by Lin Zhijun (Taipei: Zhonghuo Shuju, 1960), vol. 5, No.
12, pp. 12:84-86
11
Ibid.

Page 7
publications in the early 1900s and "China's Rejuvenated
Citizen" happened to be the pen name of Liang Qichao, one of
the most important political figures of that era. Liang
Qichao was a leader in the 1898 Reform, better known as the
Hundred Days' Reform. In the early 1900s, Liang Qichao was
the soul and mind of the reform movement. Since he was an
excellent stylist, many of his writings that appeared in
People's Rejuvenation had a great impact on Chinese readers,
especially the young. They helped shape the mind of a
generation of intellectuals and set the tone for the
subsequent history of China. Chen Duxiu, the leading figure
of the New Culture movement (1880-1940) praised Liang Qichao
for opening the eyes of his generation to the outside world.
Hu Shih, the best known liberal scholar in 20th-century
China, observed that among those who read Liang Qichao's
writings in the 1900s, "There was no one who was not shaken
and moved by him." Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's
Republic of China, in his youth read Liang's articles in
People's Rejuvenation until he "knew them by heart." He
named the student society he organized in 1916 the "Study
Society of People's Rejuvenation." The pen name he used for
a few years literally means "Following Liang Qichao." Liang
Qichao was such a seminal thinker of 2 0th-century China that
it would be premature to declare his references to Nietzsche
and Marx superficial before examining them carefully.12

12
Three books about Liang Qichao have been published in the
United States: Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind
Page 8
 In order to understand the meaning of Liang Qichao's

brief comments on Nietzsche (and Marx), it is necessary to

know his intellectual background, the circumstances and the

main concerns he had at the time he made them.

Liang Qichao's early education was typical of most

Chinese literati of his time. He was born in 1873 to a

farmer's family in Guangdong, a southern province far from

the capital Beijing. His father and uncles were all well

versed in the Confucian classics. From the age of about

three or four to the age of twelve, Liang Qichao studied

Confucian classics and Chinese history under the guidance of

his mother, his grandfather, and his father. He began to

practice writing at eight. At the age of twelve, he took

the civil service examination and acquired the "xiucai"

(literally means "a talented person") degree, the first of

three hierarchical degrees of the civil service examination

system.

From the age of twelve to eighteen, Liang Qichao

studied in the Academy of the Sea of Learning in Guangzhou,

the provincial capital. The academy had been established in

the early nineteenth century by Ruan Yuan, a famous scholar-

official who was versed in "Evidential Studies."

of Modern China (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Hao

Chang, Liang Ch'i-chao and Intellectual Transition in China,
1890-1907 (Cambridge, Massashusetts: Harvard University Press,
1971); Philip C. Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Modern Chinese
Liberalism (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,
1972). Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, and Mao Zedong will be discussed in
chapters 3 and 5.

Page 9
"Evidential Studies" was a tradition of Chinese scholarship

developed since the seventeenth century. It consisted of

the study, exegesis, and collation of ancient texts. It was

called "evidential studies" [Kaozheng) because of its

emphasis on evidence rather than on metaphysical

speculation. 13 During his years in the academy, Liang

Qichao was mainly interested in the textual studies of the

Chinese classics and in Chinese poetic literature. In 1890

he passed the provincial level civil service examinations

and acquired the "juren" (literally "a recommended person")

degree.

A critical moment in Liang Qichao's life came when he

was introduced to Kang Youwei, a scholar, philosopher and

social thinker.14 According to Liang's recollection, he was

overwhelmed by Kang' s unconventional analysis of the

Confucian tradition as well as by Kang's views on

contemporary issues. After this meeting he withdrew from

the Academy of the Sea of Learning and enlisted as a student

of Kang. Between 1891 and 1894, Liang intermittently

studied under Kang Youwei in Kang's private school, the

"Thatched Hall of Ten Thousand Trees."

13
About "evidential studies," see Benjamin A. Elman, From
Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects Of
Change, in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on
East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984) .
14
Kang Youwei(1857-1927) was a Confucian scholar and a leading
figure in the late Qing reform movement.

Page 10
 Kang Youwei made the process of learning relevant to

life and presented a new vision of history and society.

Kang Youwei expressed his ideals in the book, The Great

Unity.15 Although he claimed to have the true spirit of

Confucianism, his theory was actually a creative synthesis

of Confucianism and Buddhism.16 The Confucian concept of

"benevolence" motivated him to search for a moral order for

mankind. Buddhism supplied him with a metaphysical basis

for a socialist vision. Buddhism attributes suffering to

men's illusions about life and the universe. These

illusions result from the artificial differentiation and

particularization of a unified ontological entity-the

Emptiness or the Nothingness. The way to end suffering is

to be enlightened about these illusions. When Kang Youwei

applied Buddhist epistemology and ontology to the socio-

political realm, he turned this otherwise escapist

philosophy-religion into a revolutionary one. Then the

inequality among classes, genders, nations, and races are

illusory too. To abolish these illusions demands more than

meditation and metaphysical speculation: it calls for action

as well.

Kang Youwei also made Confucianism a progressive

philosophy through reinterpreting the Confucian tradition.

15
For English translation, see Ta T'ung Shu. The One-World
Philosophy of K'ang Yu-wei, trans, by Laurence G. Thompson.
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1958).
16
Kang Yuwei was also influenced by Western missionaries in his
attempt to give Confucianism the form of a state religion.

Page 11
In history, Confucius had generally been perceived as a
conservative traditionalist who deplored the moral decline
of his time and implored princes and administrators to
return to the practices of the sage kings in remote
antiquity. Kang Youwei portrayed Confucius as a great
reformer of his time. He demonstrated that Confucius
envisioned a moral order of equality and harmony in the
future, and also a practical program to lead mankind to that
goal by stages. When Confucius talked about legendary sage
kings to the ruling class of his time, he was merely trying
to make his social and political innovations more acceptable
and easier to implement.
In 1895, in the aftermath of China's defeat in the
Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), both Kang Youwei and Liang
Qichao plunged into politics as China's leading reformers.
The most urgent issue was to strengthen China and prevent it
from becoming a colony of Japan and the Western powers.
Japan's Meiji Reform set a convincing model for the Chinese
reformers. "To learn from the West" seemed the secret of
Japan's success and a challenge to the Chinese reformers.
Liang Qichao wrote many years later:

The ardent leaders [of the reform movement] were the

people like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. The people
in this group were well trained in Chinese learning,
but as for foreign languages they actually could not
understand a single word. They could not tell others
"what Western knowledge consists of and how to learn
it." They could merely shout in loud voices every day,
saying, "The old stuff of China is insufficient; many
Page 12
 good points of the foreigners should be learned. . .
. "17

When the reform movement began in 1895, its leaders'

knowledge about the West was indeed meager. Liang Qichao

learned of the existence of the five continents and many

other countries in the world for the first time in 1890 when

he was seventeen. In that year he passed through Shanghai

and was able to purchase An Outline of World Geography, a

book compiled by a Chinese scholar in the late 1840s in

response to the Opium War crisis.18 Later Liang Qichao

learned more about the West from his mentor, Kang Youwei who

had limited contact with Western missionaries. 19

Liang Qichao was eager to learn. In the summer of

1895, as secretary of the "Self-Strengthening Society," an

association of reform-minded literati and officials, Liang

Qichao lived in the Society's building and was able to read

its collection of Chinese translations of Western books.

Before it was banned by the government, the "Self-

Strengthening Society" was sponsored by some high ranking

officials in the court and in provinces, and its collection

of Western books must have been quite extensive. Liang

17
The translation is from Teng Ssu-yu and John K. Fairbank, ed.
China's Reponse to the West (New York: Anetheum, 1975), pp. 70-
71.
18
The book was compiled by Xu Jiyu(1795-1873). See Fred W.
Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yu and his Geography of
1848 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975).
19
Liang, Collected Writings, vol. 4, no. 11, p.16 and no. pp.
33-36.

Page 13
Qichao had become an authority on translated Western books.

In his famous editorial "General Discussion of Reform" in

1896, Liang Qichao devoted a section to the importance of

introducing Western books to China. He also called for

broadening the scope and improving the quality of

translations.20 In the same year he compiled a

comprehensive bibliography of Western books translated into.

During the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, Liang Qichao was

appointed by the Guangxu Emperor as the director of the

Translation Bureau in the newly founded Beijing University.

Access to Chinese translations of Western books since

1895 made Liang Qichao aware of their inadequacy. He noted

that since China began to translate Western books in the

1860s, more than three hundred books had been translated by

the mid 1890s. Most of them were related to weaponry and

•military technologies, a few books were about science and

technology in general, and the rest were about Western

administrative systems, international law, and international

trade regulations. There were no translations of Western

social science disciplines or humanities.

Liang Qichao had his first taste of Western thought in

1896, when Yen Fu finished his monumental work On Evolution,

the first book in Chinese that systematically introduced

modern Western thinking. Before sending it to printer, Yen

Fu showed the manuscript to Liang Qichao.

Ibid., vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 64-76.

Page 14
 Yen Fu (1853-1921) was among the first Chinese who had
direct experiences in a Western society. After studying in
Majiang Naval Academy, a school created to study Western
military technology in the 1860s, Yen Fu was sent to England
to study navy technology in 1876. During the four years he
stayed in England, Yen Fu took a keen interest in British
legal, political, economic, and social institutions and was
also interested in Western thought. Among Western books he
was particularly impressed by Herbert Spencer's A Study of
Sociology which he read in 1881.21 After China's defeat in
the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), he published a series of
articles advocating reforms in which he made comparisons
between Western nations and China. He argued that Western
nations were superior to China in their educational systems,
economics, political institutions, social customs and
religion. He called for reforms of China in all these areas
and argued that a rejuvenation of the Chinese people's
physiques, intellects, and moralities was an essential
precondition for China to survive as an autonomous nation.
In these articles, he began to refer to Charles Darwin, Adam
Smith, Herbert Spencer and other Western thinkers as the
intellectual sources of the power and wealth of the- West.

Yen Fu's On Evolution is based on Thomas Henry Huxley's

Evolution and Ethics. Huxley is best known as a staunch

21
Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power -- Yen Fu and
the West (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press), p. 33.

Page 15
defender of the Darwinian theory of evolution against its

ecclesiastical critics. But in this particular book, Huxley

was mainly engaged in a polemic against social Darwinists

such as Herbert Spencer. He emphasized that human

relationships should be governed by ethical values that are

different from the principles governing the natural

processes. Ethical values of human society transcend the

dictates of power relations.

Yen Fu chose Huxley's Evolution and Ethics for two

reasons. First, Huxley's book contains a succinct, vivid,

poetic presentation of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory

and a comprehensive historical account of the idea of

evolution from ancient Greek thought and Buddhism to modern

European thinking. On the basis of Huxley's book, Yen Fu

introduced Darwin's theory of evolution to China.

Second, Huxley's book gave Yen Fu a chance to discuss

the issue of moral process versus natural process. Yen Fu

did not agree with Huxley. In On Evolution, he defended

Herbert Spencer against Huxley's criticism. Yen Fu

presented nature and human society as a single cosmos that

evolves progressively through the mechanism of natural

selection; and where the struggles for survival are the rule

of the day.22

Yen Fu's introduction of the theory of evolution and

social Darwinism was an immediate success. The messages Yen

22
Ibid. pp. 98-112.

Page 16
Fu sent were both terrifying and consoling. Social
Darwinism touched upon the deep anxiety of the Chinese
literati over the fate of their country in the age of
imperialism. At the same time, the theory of evolution also
suggested opportunities. When Yen Fu presented the theory
of evolution, he made the adaptation of a species to its
environment largely a volitional act. It sounded as if a
species or a nation would be able to survive if only it was
willing to change and to adapt.
The success of On Evolution was also due to the fact
that the form and content of the book were familiar to the
Chinese readers. The book was written in elegant and
forceful classical Chinese, and the ideas about evolution
and social Darwinism were not strange to the Chinese: From
early times, most philosophical schools believed that
mankind had evolved from animal-like creatures. For Daoist
philosophers, both nature and human society are part of an
amoral universe. Legalist philosophers argued that the fate
of a state was not determined by ethical values but by its
wealth and military power.23 And the necessity and
advantage of adapting to changing conditions were recognized
by many Chinese philosophers. For all these reasons, the
book struck its readers as a continuation of Chinese
intellectual traditions. Zhang Rulun, a renowned Chinese

23
Legalism is a school of political thinking originated in
China's classical antiquity.

Page 17
scholar and stylist of the time, wrote a preface for the

book, in which he praised it for "being as excellent as the

philosophic classics of the late Zhou era."24

Within a few years, Charles Darwin became a household

name in China, and the words Yen Fu coined to translate the

theory of evolution, such as "competition of creatures,"

"Heaven's selection," or the "survival of the fit," became

part of the Chinese language.25

Liang Qichao was immensely influenced by Yen Fu' s

thought on reform and by Yen Fu's interpretation of social

Darwinism. Before he could read books in Japanese, Yen Fu's

book was the main source of Western thought for Liang

Qichao. All Liang Qichao's early political writings were

based on a social Darwinist assumption: China had to reform

or it would face, in Liang's words, the fate of "the death

of the state and the extinction of the species."

For Liang Qichao and other Chinese literati, Confucian

values were too powerful an influence to be simply replaced

by something completely opposite to it. Confucianists

believe in establishing and maintaining a moral order of

human society; social Darwinists accept a social order

24
Late Zhou (771 B.C. - 222 B.C) was China's late antiquity that
produced the hundred schools of thought that underlay subsequent
Chinese civilization.

Page 18
totally dominated by power relations. How could the Chinese

literati accept the one without abandoning the other?

From the very beginning, social Darwinism had a special

meaning for the Confucian literati. Chinese literati were

willing to believe social Darwinists that competition among

nations would bring progress, but they were not ready to

accept the competition of self-interests as a principle for

their own society. Yen Fu admired almost everything British

with one exception: he criticized this wealthy country for

treating its poor just as badly as China treated its poor.

Yen Fu believed that Western powers were strong because

people in the West put their national interests above their

individual interests. He discussed the need to "rejuvenate"

the Chinese people physically, morally, and intellectually.

He talked about nurturing "public morality," so that people

would subordinate individual interests to public interests,

that is, to national interests. It seems that for Yen Fu

social Darwinism and Confucianism had different

applications: one to China's relations with foreign

countries, the other to social relations within Chinese

society.26 Thus Yen Fu was able to make social Darwinism

25
"Competition of creatures" [^Jjjjyi ] stood for "competition of
species;" "Heaven's selection" [^ Jlp ] for "natural selection;"
and the "survival of the fit" [jjjt ^3] for "survival of the
fittest." Please note that by translating the "survival of the
fittest" to "survival of the fit," the Chinese author left room
for coexistence.
26
Yan Fu, Selected Essays and Poems of Yan Fu (Beijing, Remin
Wenxue Chupan She, 1959), pp. 14-52.

Page 19
and Confucian values look compatible. Such a combination,
however, contradicts the Confucian belief in a moral
universal order and turns Confucian cosmopolitan morality
into a nationalist morality.
When Liang Qichao started his journal People's
Rejuvenation in 1902, he did exactly what Yen Fu had
suggested seven years earlier. In his long essay "On
Rejuvenating People," Liang spelled out his idea of turning
China into a modern national state capable of competing with
foreign powers. He emphasized the importance of teaching
people "public morality." Liang believed that "public
morality" could be established only through education.
People's Rejuvenation was a journal for political
education and general education. It was different from any
known in our day. This fortnightly journal contained news
about China and about international politics, commentaries
on various issues, theoretical discussions, political
satires, poems, biographies of Chinese and Western
historical figures, and introductions to Chinese and Western
thought. It was basically Liang Qichao's one man show. He
wrote and edited almost all of it.

Liang's writings on Western thought were only a

fraction of his work for the journal. By the time he made
references to Nietzsche and Marx, he had already produced
more than a dozen articles on a wide spectrum of Western
thinkers from classical antiquity to the 20th century.
Considering the sheer amount of writing involved, and

Page 2 0
considering that Liang Qichao had been learning Japanese for
less than three years, a critique of these writings applying
the usual scholarly standard would be totally misguided.
These writings were intended to supply readers with a basic
knowledge of Western thought and to promote Liang Qichao's
ideas about "rejuvenating people" and about "public
morality."
The article containing references to Nietzsche and Marx
is entitled "The Teaching of Kidd, a Revolutionary of the
Theory of Evolution." According to the author, Western
thought and Western society had been dominated by the theory
of evolution for several decades and would continue to be in
the future. Charles Darwin laid the foundation for the
theory of evolution, Herbert Spencer made it a systematic
science, and Benjamin Kidd inherited and revolutionized it
by answering the following question: How could mankind
achieve evolution in the future and whither would it lead
mankind? Liang Qichao predicted that future generations of
mankind would be indebted to Kidd.

When Liang Qichao's intellectual background is taken

into account, it is easy to understand why Darwin and
Spencer loomed so large to him. But why did he take
Benjamin Kidd so seriously?
In his two major works, Social Evolution (1894) and
Principles of Western Civilization (1902), Benjamin Kidd

Page 21
applied Darwin's theory of evolution to Western societies. 27

Starting from the proposition that human activities must be

judged by their long term effects on the evolution of the

race, he took issue with the utilitarian tradition, which he

traced back to Hobbes and Locke, and particularly with

Jeremy Bentham and Herbert Spencer. What he found most

erroneous of the utilitarian tradition was its focus on

individual's self-realization. In his view, the interests

of individuals could not be reconciled with those of

society. Pitted against the principle of the "greatest

happiness of the greatest number," Kidd conjured up the

concept of the interests of "a silent majority," by which

he referred to the unborn generations, and the future

interests of society and the race. Kidd asked people not to

pursue the interests of an individual, a class, or the

State. And he emphasized the role of religion, particularly

of Christianity in its Protestant form, which, according to

Kidd, put the interests of society and the race above an

individual's interests. Politically such a solution means a

reconciliation of all classes in Western societies. It also

demands a guarantee of the "utilization" of natural

resources of the whole world by the West. 28

27
Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (Chicago: Charles H. Sergei
Company, 1894), and Principles of Western Civilisation (London:
MacMillan and Co. Limited, 1902).
28
Kidd, 1984: pp. 107-108, 259-269, 288-289.

Page 22
 In his article, Liang Qichao introduced Benjamin Kidd's
main ideas without mentioning Kidd's idea of the economic
domination of the world by the West or his recommendation of
Protestantism. With such a selective introduction, Kidd's
application of the theory of evolution is very similar to
the kind of "public morality" Liang Qichao used to
"rejuvenate" the Chinese people. Both proposed
subordination of individual interests to national interests,
and both endorsed international competition. No wonder
Liang Qichao was interested in Kidd and called him a prophet
of the 20th century.
In his earlier book Social Evolution (1894), Kidd
frequently referred to Karl Marx. On the one hand, Kidd
regarded Marxist socialism as the logical consequence of
Western liberalism, a threat to the existing order and a
liability of the Western race in the coming global
competition. On the other hand, Marx's criticism of
capitalist society was cited approvingly to show the
deceptiveness of the principle of the "greatest happiness of
the greatest number" and to show the looming danger of a
society coming apart due to unabated competition among its
members. In Principle of Western Civilization, Nietzsche
joined Marx in supporting Kidd's arguments. Kidd understood
Nietzsche's "masters," "superiors" or "Ubermenschen" [Kidd
used the German form of "supermen"] in a purely descriptive
and sociological sense. He invoked Nietzsche to support his
own misgivings about universal suffrage, liberalism,

Page 23
democracy and the socialist movement. At the same time, he

treated Nietzsche's ideas as part of a materialistic trend

that disregards the future.29

Liang Qichao's comments on Nietzsche and Marx were

based on a paragraph from Principle of Western Civilization,

in which Kidd criticized Nietzsche and Marx as two extreme

expressions of the same principle, "the ascendancy of the

present, and the elimination from society of every cause,

sentiment, principle and belief which prevents the strongest

interest in the present from realizing itself."30

Liang's rendition shows that he understood Kidd's

arguments only vaguely as he did not know much about

Nietzsche and Marx. His short description of the two German

thinkers is so general that it could have been applied to

some other thinkers as well. He seemed to treat Marx as a

German Confucius or Buddha, and Nietzsche as a German Darwin

or Spencer, just as he treated Kidd as an English version of

himself. That is why Liang commented that "both theories

[of Nietzsche and Marx] are well argued and reasonable," a

comment not to be found in Kidd's book. When Liang

criticized both for "having nothing to do with the future,"

he was actually saying that Confucianism and social

Darwinism in their original forms were inadequate, and what

29
Kidd, 1902, pp. 128-131. He regarded a theory as
"materialistic" if he thought it was not concerned with the
interests of future generations.
30
Ibid. , pp. 91-94.

Page 24
is good for the future is a synthesis that Yen Fu, Kidd and
Liang Qichao had made.
The note on Nietzsche does not carry much information
about Nietzsche's thought. It might have come from a
Japanese dictionary or textbook. It also shows that Liang
treated Nietzsche as a representative of social Darwinism.
In the note, he called Nietzsche "an extremist advocate for
the right of the strong." He could have used such a
description about any social Darwinist who applied the
theory to internal relations of a society.
The synthesis of social Darwinism and Confucian-
Buddhist values was built on a certain optimism: the moral
order of each society is ultimately compatible with amoral
international competition. Liang Qichao believed that
international competition would bring progress to all
competing nations and the weak nations could become
stronger. Eventually the day would come when all nations
would be equally strong, and then as a natural result a

Page 2 5
moral order would triumph.31 Many years later Liang Qichao
was to reevaluate his own views when this optimistic outlook
was shattered.
In the beginning of 1919, as a renowned veteran scholar
and politician, Liang went on a semi-official journey in
Europe. (Liang left China for Europe on Dec. 28 and returned
to China on March 5, 1920.) In a series of articles written
during his journey, Liang described the devastation of the
war, the economic hardships in the warring countries, and
the confrontation between the working class and the
bourgeoisie. He also gave his diagnosis of Western
societies and expressed new opinions about intellectual
trends in the West.
In 1919 Liang Qichao became more sophisticated about
the West than in his People's Rejuvenation days. He seemed
to have grasped the dialectic of the Enlightenment. On the
one hand, the liberation of men from old superstitions and
autocracy had made industrial revolution and democracy
possible. On the other hand, the "omnipotence of science"
had undermined human values. He pointed to the similarity
of science and fortune telling: Both science and fortune
telling presume the predeterminability and predictability of

31
Liang Qichao, "On the Right of the Strong," Book of Liberty [
lli EJ3 Ir 1 (Taibei: Taiwan Zhonghua Shuju, 1960), pp. 29-33.

Page 2 6
man's fate, either according to their zodiac stars or to

according to scientific laws.32

Many evils came from moral nihilism, thought Liang.

Moral values in Europe had been upheld by three pillars: the

feudal system, Greek philosophy, and Christianity. In the

feudal era, the relations among individuals, and between

individuals and society, were prescribed, therefore

constituting conditions and conventions of moral behavior.

Philosophy tried to seek moral standards by studying the

ultimate principles of the universe and the effects of the

human spirit. Religion gave mankind a transcendental faith

by appealing to human emotions and feelings. All these

pillars of values had been undermined since the 18th

century. The feudal system was destroyed by the French

Revolution, philosophy was subordinated to science since

Charles Darwin, and religion was uprooted by science. The

Europeans were left without ethical values. Liang called

this absence of morality "the deepest crisis of the present-

day intellectual world. "33

Liang Qichao was not pessimistic about the future of

Europe. He thought the War might be a turning point from

which the Europeans would be able to find a new direction in

32
Liang Qichao, ed., General Observation and Reflections on the
Journey to Europe (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1922), vol. 1,
pp. 17-23. His analysis bears similarity with that of
Horkheimer and Adorno. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans, by John Cumming (New
York: Continum, 1982).
33
Jbid.

Page 27
thinking. This new direction, Liang thought, would be a

syncretism of science and religion, nationalism and

cosmopolitanism; individualism and social consciousness.

His advice to the Chinese people had changed

accordingly. In 1902, he criticized the Chinese for

"knowing only individuals without knowing the state, knowing

only the world without knowing the state" and advocated a

"public morality" that demanded that individuals subordinate

their interests to national interests. In 1919, he called

on the Chinese to avoid narrow minded patriotism and

construct a "cosmopolitan country." He recommended the

following,

Our patriotism cannot only be concerned with the state

and ignore individuals; it cannot only be concerned
with the state and ignore the world. We should fully
develop the natural endowment of all individuals in the
country within the framework of the state, and
contribute to the civilization of all of mankind.34

With this new outlook, Liang's view of Nietzsche and

social Darwinism turned extremely critical. He attributed

the class exploitation in Western societies and the War to

"egoism" and to the theory of evolution. He noted that in

the West, there are two combinations of "egoism" and

evolutionary theory. One is that of Charles Darwin's

original theory of evolution combined with John Stuart

34
Ibid. pp. 38-39.

Page 2 8
Mill's utilitarianism and Jeremy Bentham's theory of the

"greatest happiness of greatest number." This British

combination is a benevolent one. Nietzsche is part of the

second combination, a malignant one. Liang wrote:

Max Stirner and Soren Kierkegaard propound egoism.

Friedrich Nietzsche represents its worst form. He
calls altruism the morality of the slaves and regards
it as a natural obligation of the superior to
annihilate the weak; he treats it as a precondition for
evolution. This bizarre theory appeals to the
psychology of modern men by borrowing Darwin's biology
as its foundation. So far as individuals are
concerned, it accepts the worship of power and money as
commandments from heaven and earth. As far as states
are concerned, it turns militarism and imperialism into
the most fashionable policy. The previous world war
was caused by this theory; and the future class war in
each country will also be caused by this theory.35

By now Liang Qichao obviously had a better understanding of

Western thought in general. But there is no evidence that

he had studied Nietzsche's philosophy. He still treated

Nietzsche as an extreme example of social Darwinism.

Liang Qichao had friendly conversations with socialist

leaders in France and Germany during his European trip and

his views on Western societies were influenced by them.

However, turning away from social Darwinism did not bring

him closer to Marxist socialism. He returned to his

intellectual roots, Confucianism and Buddhism. In the

35 Jbid. pp. 16-17

Page 2 9
remaining years of his life, Liang Qichao taught and wrote
about the Chinese intellectual heritage. As an enlightened
traditionalist, he treasured China's indigenous humanism
while being open to Western thought. He no longer had any
interest in social Darwinism and Nietzsche.

Page 3 0
 Chapter 2 A Nietzsche That Is Believable But Not
Lovable:
Wang Guowei and Nietzsche

Two years after Liang Qichao's brief comments on

Nietzsche, the first Chinese article which analyzes and
interprets Nietzsche's writings appeared in the Journal of
the Educational World. It was entitled Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche" and was written by Wang Guowei, the editor of the
journal, who is remembered as one of the best literary
critics, historians, and archeologists of twentieth century
China.
Compared with the best Western treatises on
Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, Wang Guowei's article is not
sophisticated. But at this early stage of China's
acquaintance with Western thought when most Chinese authors
were content with rudimentary, inexact, and undocumented
paraphrases of Western writing, Wang's article stood out as
a rigorous inquiry. Wang Guowei made documented references
to the English translations of Schopenhauer's World as Will
and Idea and Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, as well as

to two general books on Western thought--the English

translations of Windelband's History of Philosophy and

Page 31
Friedrich Paulsen's System of Ethics.36 In this article he

quoted excerpts from these books, including the first two

excerpts of Nietzsche ever translated into Chinese.

Wang Guowei was an anomaly in his time, neither

belonging to a political group that sought to transform

China's political system, nor to a conservative camp that

defended the old regime.

He had no respect for politically motivated importers

of Western thought. In 1905, he criticized Liang Qichao and

other exiled rebel writers:

Since 1900, all kinds of journals have mushroomed. The

contributors are either student trouble-makers or
exiled renegade courtiers. These magazines are
motivated only by politics and have nothing to do with
scholarship. When they discuss scholarship, they offer
nothing more than plagiarism and dismembering [of
Western thought] . An article on Kant in People 's
37
Rejuvenation is such an example. Eighty to ninety
percent of it is misinformation. . . . Literature is
not different from philosophy. In recent years it has
not been pursued for its inherent value but as a means
of political education. . . . J_f they are interested

36
Wilhelm W. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, Authorized
trans, by James H. Tufts, (New York: the Macmillan Company,
1914); Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics, trans, by Frank
Thilly, (New York: Scribners' Sons, 1899).
37
Here he was referring to Liang Qichao's article on People's
Rejuvenation, "The Teachings of Kant - the Greatest Philosopher
in Modern Times," [ < ^ i S fg — j&MW: £. H !£> ] See Liang,
Collected Works, vol. 5, No. 13, pp. 49-60.

Page 32
 in politics, why don't they talk about politics instead
of desecrating philosophy and literature?"38

Wang Guowei was similarly disappointed in the

conservatives' ignorance and xenophobia:

Today our universities do not offer a major in

philosophy. Confucian literati condemn philosophy as
heresy; the government authorities, wary of political
instability, view Western thought as seeds of turmoil;
the masses equate Western thought with the two
Christian Testaments, [resent it] out of religious
jealousy.39

Wang Guowei respected Yen Fu who pioneered the introduction

of Western thought in China. But he also thought that Yen

Fu's interest was in economics and sociology, not in

philosophy. Thus for Wang Guowei, China was a desert for

Western philosophy:

I am certain that there is no one [in China] who can

understand the profound and great thought of the
Europeans. Even if there is such a person, I am
certain that he does not have the capability to express
himself. Besides, in recent years, students studying
in foreign countries are either politically ambitious
or have other practical purposes. It is needless to
say that even if there was someone who deigned to study
those dry and useless issues of thought, he would not
have the least impact on the scholarly world.40

38
Wang Guowei, Complete Works of Wang Guowei [ ( J | | ^vr, 4 ^ ^ :
» ] (Taipei: Wenhua Press, 1968), vol. 5, pp. 1737-1738.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid.

Page 33
Even if one questions the appropriateness of limiting the
horizons of philosophy to non-political and impractical
issues, one cannot help feeling sympathy for Wang Guowei:
too often Chinese students of Western thought were so eager
to apply a few half-digested Western concepts to urgent
social and political issues that they stopped far short of
rigorous philosophic inquiry. Wang Guowei had decided to
venture into this philosophic desert, probably not expecting
to have much impact on the scholarly world, but merely to
open up an oasis.
Wang Guowei, four years younger than Liang Qichao, was
born in 1876. The education he received in his childhood in
the Confucian classics, was not very different from that of
Liang Qichao. But unlike Liang Qichao, whose meteoric rise
through China's civil service examination system and his
association with Kang Youwei made him a national figure
after 1896, Wang Guowei failed his provincial examination in
1894. By 1898 when Liang Qichao was assigned by the emperor
to head the translation bureau of Peking University, Wang
Guowei had to make a living as a clerk for the journal
Current Affairs, which Liang Qichao had started two years
earlier in 1896.

The turning point in Wang Guowei's life came when he

attended the Oriental Languages Institution in 1898. It was
there that Wang Guowei received systematic training in
Japanese and English. It was in this Institute that Wang
was discovered by his life-long patron Luo Zhenyu. There

Page 34
Wang also met two exceptional Japanese scholars who gave him
inspiration and guidance in Western thought, especially in
German philosophy.
The Oriental Languages Institute was founded by Luo
Zhenyu and Jiang Fu.41 After the Sino-Japanese war (1894-
1895), Luo and Jiang created an association, the Agriculture
Society, whose aim was to translate European, American, and
Japanese agricultural publications into Chinese. The
Eastern Language Institute was founded in 1898 to supply
translators for the Society. Both Luo and Jiang were
committed adherents of orthodox Confucianism. They were
moderate reformers within the ruling elite, wanting to learn
technologies from the West while defending China's culture.
The choice of instructors for the Institute reflected
its founders' sentiments. The first two scholars Luo
invited from Japan to teach in the institute were admirers
of Chinese culture. The main instructor was Fujita
Toyohachi (1869-1929), an authority on classical Chinese
literature, highly regarded in both Japan and China. The
English instructor was Taoka Sayoji (1870-1912, also known
as Taoka Reiun) who was very critical of Western
nationalism, social Darwinism and the materialist and
mechanistic values of the nineteenth century and looked back

41
Lo Zhengyu (1866-1940) was a philologist, archaeologist, and
scholar of Chinese classics; Jiang Fu (1866-1911) was a
Confucian scholar.

Page 3 5
nostalgically to China's remote past for an aesthetic
socialist vision.42
Wang Guowei was one of the six students the institute
recruited in its first year. The two Japanese scholars were
of critical importance in Wang Guowei's study of Western
philosophy. Wang Guowei's infatuation with German
philosophy began one day in 1899 when he read excerpts of
Kant and Schopenhauer in Taoka Sayoji's writings. At the
time he admired the two German philosophers, but thought
that he would never be able to read them himself because he
did not know their language.43
After graduating from the Oriental Languages Institute,
Wang Guowei was recommended by Luo Zhenyu to serve as editor
in chief of The World of Education. In 1901 or 1902, he
began to study Western philosophy under the guidance of
Fujita Toyohachi, his Japanese teacher at the Eastern
Language Institute. Fujita Toyohachi thought highly of his
Chinese student. He remembered:

[Wang Guowei is a student] whose Japanese was excellent

and whose English was good as well; who had, moreover,
a profound interest in the study of Western philosophy,
and whose future appeared highly promising. Most
Chinese youths of the time were interested in political
science or economics when they pursued the new

42
Masaaki Kosaka, ed., Japanese Thought in the Meiji Era (Tokyo:
Pan-Pacific Press, 1958), pp. 358-360.
43
Wang, Complete Works, p. 1824.

Page 3 6
 learning. Very few wanted to study Western
44
philosophy.

It is reasonable to assume that Wang Guowei's total

indifference to the nationalism and social Darwinism

prevalent among Chinese intellectuals can be partly

attributed to the influence of his two Japanese teachers.

Unlike Liang Qichao and most other intellectuals who

turned to the West for ideas to enable China to survive in

the age of imperialism, Wang was attracted to Western

philosophy by a personal existential urge. He recollected:

As I am delicate physically and depressed by

temperament, riddles of life haunted me day by day; I
decided to study philosophy.45

Consequently, Wang Guowei's understanding of Western

thought is not as broad in its scope as that of his

contemporaries. But this lack of a socio-political

dimension was more than compensated by the persistence and

meticulousness he showed in his philosophic studies.

During the few years Wang studied Western philosophy,

he was mainly interested in three German philosophers: Kant,

Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Although he admired Kant very

much and even wrote a poem eulogizing him, Wang did not

write much about Kant. The first time he read Critique of

44
Joey Bonner, Wang Kuo-wei: an Intellectual History (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.20. The term "new
learning" refers to Western learning.
45
Wang, Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 1824-1825

Page 37
Pure Reason he found it difficut and he turned to
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He was immediately attracted to
Schopenhauer and read The World as Will and Idea twice. He
also read On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason, On the
Will in Nature, and other works by Schopenhauer. He admired
Schopenhauer for his eloquent style and incisive observation
of life. From the summer of 1903 to the winter of 1904,
Wang Guowei recollected, he had Schopenhauer's books with
him all the time. But gradually he found some problems with
Schopenhauer's philosophy.
In an article entitled Comments on Dreams in the Red
Mansion," published a little earlier than his Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer," Wang Guowei cast doubt on a fundamental
principle of Schopenhauer's: the possibility of the
annulment of the Will. According to Schopenhauer's
metaphysics, the Will to Live of an individual is only a
part of the Will to Live of the whole--Nature as thing-in-
itself. Wang Guowei, probably influenced by Eduard von
Hartmann (1842-1906), argued that "unless all human beings
and all other things in the universe annul their will to
live, the will of one man cannot possibly be annulled."46

Wang Guowei noticed and quoted a whole paragraph by

Schopenhauer in which the latter tried to invoke the Vedas,
Angelus Silesius, Meister Eckhart, the Bible, and a Buddhist
text to show that the divine being, whether Occidental or

46
Ibid. , p. 1658

Page 3 8
Oriental, has indicated that human beings can be
instrumental in releasing all other things from suffering.47
He commented:

But Mr. Schopenhauer has quoted classics in vain.

These classics have supplied no theoretical foundation
for Schopenhauer. We can ask: since Buddha achieved
nirvana, since Jesus Christ died on the cross, what has
become of the will to live of the human beings and all
other things? What has become of their suffering? I
believe that they are no different from what they were
before. Are we still to wait for the promised good men
to bring all created things to God [Schopenhauer quoted
Eckhart as saying "Thus, all created things become
useful to the good man. A good man brings to God one
created thing in the other."]? Or is it a self-
deceptive theory which can never be realized? If it is
the latter, it is far from clear that Buddha or Jesus
Christ have released themselves from suffering. . .
_ ii 4 8

It is difficult to determine whether Wang Guowei had

become critical of Schopenhauer after he studied Nietzsche,
or if his dissatisfaction with Schopenhauer led him to
Nietzsche. One thing is certain: by expounding Nietzsche's
philosophy, Wang Guowei was able to bring to light his
criticism of Schopenhauer. He wrote:

Soon I [Wang Guowei] realized that Schopenhauer's

theory comes partly from his subjective temperament
rather than from objective knowledge. In my

47
Ibid. , pp. 1659-1661,
48
Ibid.

Page 3 9
 'Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,' I first fully explained
this realization.49

In his article Schopenhauer and Nietzsche," (1904) Wang

made two major arguments: Nietzsche's philosophy is a
development of Schopenhauer's philosophy; and Schopenhauer
is actually not what he appears to be, but really is a
Nietzsche in disguise.
According to Wang, Nietzsche agreed with Schopenhauer
regarding the Will as the essence of human life, but
questioned his theory on the annulment of the Will.
Nietzsche argued that the will to annul the Will was also a
will. Therefore he went against Schopenhauer's ethics. It
is fortunate that Nietzsche had found in Schopenhauer's
aesthetics something positive, even though he was
disappointed in the latter's ethics. Taking Schopenhauer's
intellectual elitism and his theory on genius as models,
Nietzsche developed the notion of superman. In Wang
Guowei's words,

Nietzsche's philosophy was an elaboration of

Schopenhauer's aesthetics and an application of the
latter's aesthetics to ethics, just as Hartmann's
theory of "unconsciousness" was an elaboration of
Schopenhauer's ethics.50

Wang's assertion was based on what he saw as a parallel

between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Wang Guowei speculated

49
Ibid., p. 1547.
50
Ibid. , p. 1672

Page 40
that the superman's transcending morality is an extension of
the Schopenhauerian genius's transcending sufficient reason.
Although Wang quoted from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to
show the similarity between Schopenhauer's aesthetics and
Nietzsche's ethics, he did not seem to realize that
Schopenhauer's argument was built upon a Kantian assumption-
-the division of the world into the phenomenal and the
noumenal. If he had known that the principle of sufficient
reason does not apply because there is a noumenal realm that
defies such reason, he would have realized that the
superman's transcendence of traditional morality has little
to do with genius's transcendence of sufficient reason,
because Nietzsche did not recognize the dual realms of
existence.
Wang Guowei also drew parallels between the symbolic
uses of the image of the child by the two German
philosophers. The quotation of the spirit's three
metamorphoses by Wang is the first Chinese translation of
Nietzsche's words, and is a very respectable one. Wang
understood it as a variation on a Schopenhauerian thesis.
Wang quoted Schopenhauer's comment on the childlike
character of the genius after translating Nietzsche's
passage on three metamorphoses from Thus Spake Zarathustra.
According to Schopenhauer, the child's intellect develops
ahead of its other organs, especially its genitals, so that
its intellect surpasses its will and it can look at the
world with pure objectivity. For Wang Guowei, Nietzsche's

Page 41
superman is a child that is not restrained by morality in
acting, while Schopenhauer's genius is a child that is not
restrained by rational thinking in perceiving and knowing.
After demonstrating his theory of superman as a
development of the theory of genius, Wang went on to show
that Nietzsche's distinction between the superman and the
herd, between the morality of the nobles and the morality of
the slaves is an extension of Schopenhauer's intellectual
and aesthetic elitism. He quoted "On the Morality of the
Petty Men" from Zarathustra and passages from The World as
Will and Idea to show the parallel. Wang concluded that
what Nietzsche accomplished is merely to extend
Schopenhauer's elitism to the field of ethics.
But is Nietzsche's extension of Schopenhauer's
philosophy plausible? Wang Guowei did not even raise the
question. In the latter half of the article, Wang argued
that the two philosophers were not very different after all.
He first quoted two general books about the private lives of
the two German philosophers. By quoting a long paragraph
from Paulsen's System of Ethics describing the
inconsistencies between Schopenhauer's theory and his life,
Wang showed that Schopenhauer led a sensual life despite his
call for the denial of the will to live; that he was selfish
and cruel to others despite his espousal of universal love.
Wang Guowei then quoted a passage from Windelband's History
of Philosophy about Nietzsche's life:

Page 42
 What [Nietzsche] sought is happiness, either that of
knowing or that of power. He was exhausted by the
struggle between these two pursuits. When he became
older, he could no longer be satisfied by impersonal
and superpersonal, as for example, intellectual,
aesthetic, and moral values. Instead he tried to
develop his own infinite power in his practical life. .
51

While Wang's translation is generally very good, here he

erred. The passage quoted does not concern Nietzsche's
personal life. Windelband's original says:

The enjoyment which he [Nietzsche] seeks is either that

of knowing or that of power. In the struggle between
the two he has been crushed--the victim of an age which
is satisfied no longer by the impersonal and
superpersonal values of intellectual, aesthetic, and
moral culture, but thirsts again for the boundless
unfolding of the individual in a life of deeds. . . .

After mistakenly assuming the similarities of the two

philosophers' personal lives, Wang proceeded to speculate
why Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had invented their systems of
metaphysics. He thought that both philosophers were men of
genius with an exceptionally strong will to live and an
exceptionally great intellect. But both were, just like
everyone else, externally limited by their physique, subject
to the law of causality, the forms of time and space, and
internally propelled by endless volition and by national

51
Windelband, p. 677.

Page 43
moralities. Since one's genius is proportional to one's
will and intellect, suffering is also proportional to the
magnitude of one's genius. For geniuses such as
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, small happiness in life could
not console them. They had to seek consolation in
themselves:

They have to see themselves as emperors and as God and

look down at others as ants and feces. They are sons
of Nature but desire to be its mother; they are slaves
of Nature but desire to be its master. They take all
things that limit their will and their intellect and
subject them to destruction, incineration, abandonment,
and domestication. It is not that they could really do
it, but that they just say so and take pleasure in it.
It is not that they intend to speak to others, but that
they do so simply to amuse themselves. Why? With the
enormity of their intellect and will, and the enormity
of their suffering, there would be no other way for
them to console themselves.52

Wang's comments on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer did not

stop at this speculation on the psychology of suffering. He
continued with a theoretical analysis of Schopenhauer's
metaphysics. Schopenhauer, according to Wang, extended
Kantian epistemology in conceiving the world as one's idea
and all the world and its content as a manifestation of the
same will. This same will of the universe is the will of an
individual too. Wang Guowei said:

52
Wang, Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 1690-1691.

Page 44
 Although Schopenhauer aims at the annulment of will, he
also contemplates in the fourth chapter of his great
book that this annulment could not be final. He
advocates universal love; but it is not the world he
loves but his own world. He advocates annulment of the
will, but it is not real annulment, he is simply
dissatisfied with the present world. Such a view goes
beyond what Buddha says, "all above in heaven and down
on earth, the self is the only master.' It is nothing
short of 'all above heaven and down on earth, the self
is the only thing that exists.' In working out his
theory, Schopenhauer saw himself as Atlas who shoulders
the earth, as Brahma who gives birth to the universe.
Herein lies his metaphysical needs; herein lies his
life-time consolation. Therefore, across the ages,
there has been no one who affirmed the will more than
Schopenhauer does. However, he reveals his true
features only intermittently in his aesthetic theory of
genius .53

Such a representation of Schopenhauer leads directly to

Nietzsche. Wang continued:

Believing in a positive philosophy, Nietzsche is not

satisfied with a metaphysical imagination. He
attempted to realize the will in this world rather than
the nonexistent other world; in the material rather
than in the nonexistent spiritual. Therefore, in its
early phase, Nietzsche's thought was dominated by
Schopenhauer's aesthetics. When he was older, he took
innocence as his ethical model. Imitating
Schopenhauer's theory of genius, he advocated superman;
imitating Schopenhauer's abandonment of sufficient
reason, he abandoned morality. Raising his head, he

53
Ibid. , pp. 1691-1693 .

Page 45
 walked on with long strides, allowing his will to
wander playfully in the universe. . . . It is like a
tree: Schopenhauer's theory is its roots reaching deep
and wide in the ground, Nietzsche's theory is its
branches and leaves, rising high into the heavens,
piercing through the clouds. Nietzsche's theory is the
three peaks of Taihua [Huashan, a Chinese mountain in
Shaanxi Province], Schopenhauer's theory is the
mountain's granite. . . .54

Such analogies favor Nietzsche more than Schopenhauer.

For Wang Guowei, Nietzsche avoided the inconsistencies of
Schopenhauer. But Wang Guowei's real attitude toward the
two philosophers is by no means clear. He treated
philosophic systems as a means of consoling people and
releasing them from their sufferings. A more relevant
question for Wang, then, should be: Which of the two German
philosophers has supplied a better consolation to mankind?
Wang Guowei did not spell out his position in this article.
He quoted a story from a Chinese classic:

The nobleman Ying conducted his business on a large

scale. His slaves worked for him from morning to night
without rest. There was an old man who was quite
feeble but was forced to do even more chores. He
worked and moaned in the daytime. In the night when he
fell asleep, he would dream that he was a prince,
ruling a country, and leisurely wandering in the palace

Ibid., pp. 1693-1695.

Page 46
 and doing whatever he enjoyed. When he was awake, he
55
continued with his drudgery.

Wang Guowei then told his readers that Schopenhauer's

suffering as a genius is like the old slave when he was

awake and his aesthetic elitism and metaphysical annulment

of the will is like the prince in the slave's dream.

Nietzsche did not have any faith in metaphysics, therefore

he would be a slave day and night unless he "overthrew all

values" and actualized his dreams in the daytime.

The above comment will be obscure if one does not

understand Wang's allegory. For Wang Guowei, the nobleman

Ying from the Chinese classic who forced his slaves to work

symbolizes not only the will to live but also other limits

to which mankind is subjected--time and space, the frailty

of the human physique, and national morality" as well. Of

all these limitations, none can be eliminated except

morality. This is why Wang concluded that Nietzsche's

ethics lead to rebellion against morality. The choice of

the allegory reflects Wang's dilemma: he understood the

errors of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and abhorred the moral

consequences of Nietzsche's positivism."56

During the next three years, Wang Guowei continued to

be vexed by this dilemma. During this period, he wrote

55
Ibid.. The Chinese classic is from Lie Zi, a 4th century B.C.
book; for English translation see The Book of Lieh-tzu, trans,
by A. C. (Angus Charles) Graham, (London: Murray, 1961)
56
Wang, Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 1693-1695.

Page 47
literary criticism of Chinese poetry, employing
Schopenhauer's and Kant's concepts of "universal forms" of
things, of disinterested contemplation, etc. He also
studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason three more times,
trying to find an intellectually sound and morally
satisfying system. Meanwhile he continued to be an admirer
of Nietzsche. Merely knowing that Nietzsche had written an
article entitled Schopenhauer as an Educator, he was

inspired to infer Schopenhauer's opinions on education from

his philosophical views.57 Nietzsche's thought and style
also influenced Wang Guowei in his articles and aphorisms of
this period, among which were some pungent criticisms of
China's tradition and the contemporary situation. For
example he criticized Chinese philosophical and artistic
traditions for being dominated by ethical and political
considerations .58

Nietzsche's influence sometimes overshadowed that of

Schopenhauer or Kant. In 1907 Wang Guowei wrote an article
entitled "A study of Man's Pastimes," in which Wang made an
attempt to bridge Schopenhauer's "will to life" and
Nietzsche's "will to power." According to Wang, there are
two kinds of suffering. Human beings have to work, either

57
Wang, "Schopenhauer's Philosophy and his Theory of Education,"
in Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 1596-1628.
58
Wang, "On the Heavenly Duty of Philosophers and Artists," in
Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 1748-1752.

Page 48
physically or mentally, to make a living. This is active
suffering. Active suffering is propelled by the "will to
life." There is also "passive suffering"; it refers to the
suffering of ennui, and man pursues various pastimes to
overcome ennui. Once a man succeeds in making a living in
competition, his fundamental will ["will to life"] is
transformed into the "will to power," and he wants to make
sure that his life exceeds other people's "materially and
spiritually." This "will to power" grows out of the "will
to life." Wang Guowei illustrated the theory of "will to
power" with various activities such as chess playing, drama,
art and literature.59
This treatise was Schopenhauerian in its use of certain
terminology. Whatever man's activities are, they serve as a
means of combating suffering. There is, however, a tone of
anti-asceticism and vitalism. First, Wang affirmed that
activities are necessary in order to overcome suffering. He
speculated that passive suffering is much more unbearable
than active suffering. Because active suffering is still a
kind of mental activity, it contains an element of
enjoyment, while the suffering of ennui does not even have
this element. "It is better to [live and] dislike life than
not to live; it is better to dislike activities than not to

Wang, Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 1795-1803.

Page 49
have activities. . . ."60 The whole article was written to
propose a principle of education.

Man's activities originate from the will to power and

their effects are to activate the human mind in order
to overcome the suffering of ennui. This is an issue
of facts rather than an issue of values. Therefore if
one wants to suppress base pastimes, one has to
substitute noble ones, lest one day the dam [to
suppress base pastimes] collapses. Those who are
responsible for education and who intend to educate
themselves must pay attention to this principle of
mental activities.61

Thus the Wang Guowei of 1907 came much closer to Nietzsche

than to Schopenhauer in his affirmation of the "will to
power" and in assigning it a central role in his arguments.
Of course, Nietzsche would not have discussed the issue of
life in terms of release from suffering, though he sometimes
compared Buddhism favorably with Christianity.62 But this
deviation of Wang Guowei might not be important. It all
depends on one's view of Nietzsche's philosophy. Has
Nietzsche's vitalism succeeded in overcoming modern nihilism
in the West? If not, then Nietzsche's heroic gesture does
not make him very different from Wang Guowei who, without

60
Ibid. , pp. 1795-1796.
61
Ibid., pp. 1802-1802.
62
For example, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power,
trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (New York: Vintage
Books, A Division of Random House, 1968), pp. 95-96 (Section
154-155).

Page 50
much fanfare, accepted Nietzsche's vitalism as a supplement

to Taoist and Buddhist views about life.

Wang Guowei's involvement with Nietzsche and other

Western philosophers was promising in the beginning but did

not last. The spiritual tensions between his commitment to

a universal morality and his disillusionment with

metaphysics forced him to give up philosophy. He wrote in

1907:

I have been tired of philosophy for a considerable

time. Among philosophic theories, it is a general rule
that those that can be loved cannot be believed, and
those that can be believed cannot be loved. I know
truth, and yet I love the absurd. Great metaphysics,
sublime ethics, and pure aesthetics, these are what I
love most. Yet in searching for what is believable, I
am inclined to believe in the positivistic theory of
truth, the hedonistic theory of ethics, and the
empiricist theory of aesthetics. I know these are
believable, but I cannot love them, and I feel the
other theories are lovable, but I cannot believe in
them. This is the great vexation I have experienced
during the past two or three years. Recently my
interest has gradually shifted from philosophy to
literature, because I wish to find direct consolation
in the latter.63

63This translation is based on Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of

Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, (New York: The Free
Press, A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., 1966), p. 327.

Page 51
A study of Wang's writings between 1904 and 1907 indicates

that what he called "great metaphysics, sublime ethics, and

pure aesthetics" refers to Kant and Schopenhauer, and what

he calls the "positivistic theory of truth, the hedonistic

theory of ethics, and the empiricist theory of aesthetics"

refers mainly to Nietzsche's philosophy. Wang Guowei's

abandonment of philosophy for literature therefore is at the

same time his rejection of Nietzsche's philosophy on moral

grounds and his acknowledgment of the validity of

Nietzsche's philosophy from the epistemological point of

view.

Beside this conflict of what is believable and what is

lovable, there may have been another reason for Wang Guowei

to give up philosophy. When Wang Guowei began to study

Western philosophy, China did not have higher educational or

research institutions that sponsored the study of Western

thought.64 Wang was able to study philosophy as well as

Japanese and English only because of the good will of his

patron Luo Zhenyu, the founder of the Oriental Languages

Institute. After his graduation, he was recommended by Luo

Zhenyu to work in various positions, sometimes as an

instructor, sometimes as an administrator, always as a

translator for the Agricultural Society and as the editor in

64
Much to Wang Guowei's chargrin, even after a major educationl
reform in 1904 when the Qing government abolished the civil
service examination, philosophy was still not included in the
curriculum.

Page 52
chief of The World of Education. Without these Wang would
not have been able to continue his study of Western
philosophy while making a living.
Considering the fact that Wang Guowei's patron Luo
Zhenyu was very critical of Western values, one suspects
that Wang's respect for Luo might have influenced his
decision to stop studying Western philosophy. It is
surprising that after writing "Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,"
Wang Guowei seldom mentioned the names of these two
philosophers in his writings even when he was apparently
applying their concepts. Could Luo Zhenyu's views have any
bearing on this? No answer to this question can be found in
Wang Guowei's own writings. But Luo Zhenyu took credit for
turning Wang Guowei away from Western thought.
After the 1911 revolution, Wang Guowei followed Luo
Zhenyu to Japan. According to Luo Zhenyu, upon their
arrival in Kyoto, Luo persuaded Wang to study sinology as a
means of preserving the Confucian tradition. In a
conversation between them, Luo Zhenyu attributed the decline
of Confucianism to two factors. The first was that the
Confucian scholars of the past three centuries had
questioned the authenticity of the Confucian classics; the
second was the importation of Western thought:

Many Western philosophers conducted their arguments in

a way similar to non-Confucian philosophers of the Zhou
and Qin periods. Some doctrines such as that of
Nietzsche's disparage benevolence and righteousness,
hold modesty in low esteem, and disapprove of self-
Page 53
 restraint. They even wish to create a new culture to
replace the old.65 Many evils have resulted from this.
Nowadays more opinions are circulating than ever. In
order to keep the three thousand years of Confucianism
alive, one must repudiate erroneous views and return to
the Confucian classics.

According to Luo,

Upon hearing these words, Wang trembled and regretted

that what he had learned before was not pure knowledge.
Thereupon he took more than a hundred copies of his Jin
An Collection [his collection of essays on Western
philosophy and aesthetics, including the article
"Schopenhauer and Nietzsche."] from his trunk and
burned them all.66

If Luo's recollection was accurate, it must have been a

painful experience for Wang Guowei to abandon his study of

Western philosophy.

After 1907, Wang Guowei turned to the study of Chinese

drama and poetry. Although he did not write on philosophy,

his literary criticism was distinctly different from earlier

Chinese literary criticism and reflected the influence of

Western thought. After 1911, Wang Guowei devoted himself to

sinology. His voluminous writings on China's ancient

institutions and artifacts deal with such subjects as the

65
Wang Guowei wrote in his "Nietzsche and Schopenhauer," that
both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche attempted to replace the old
culture with a new culuture.
66
Luo Zhengyu, "A Biography of Wang Zhongque from Haining," [ \
JM 3£ ' $5 Hi 31/'S W: & ft ] in Wang, Complete Works, vol. 16,
pp. 7019-7022.

Page 54
inscriptions on oracle bones and the genealogy of the royal
family in remote legendary times. They are totally devoid
of any philosophic or aesthetic overtones. It seems that
Wang Guowei consciously avoided Western philosophy. Kano
Naoki, a Japanese scholar who knew him well, recollected:

During our conversations whenever I mentioned Western

philosophy, Mr. Wang would always smile bitterly and
say that he did not understand the subject.67

Why did Wang Guowei feel bitter about Western

philosophy? Was it caused by the memory of the traumatic
incident when he burned his philosophic writings before Luo
Zhenyu. Or may he simply have felt that Western philosophy
had failed him in supplying a vision that was both
believable and lovable? It is difficult to find a definite
answer.
The new project, the technical and factual study of
ancient history, that Wang Guowei devoted himself to and at
which he excelled, was perhaps a better solution to his
existential dilemma. Such study was at least more lovable
than Nietzsche's philosophy and it definitely led to
believable things. While he had spent about one decade of
his life on philosophy and literature, he devoted the rest
of his life, from 1911 to 1927, to sinology.
The suicide of Wang Guowei in 1927 has been a riddle
for Wang's biographers. Some have attributed it to Wang

Bonner, p. 160.

Page 55
Guowei's loyalist sentiments: he was shocked at the recent
mistreatment and humiliation of the abdicated Qing monarch
at the hands of a military strongman. Others attributed it
to tensions in the personal relations between Wang Guowei
and Luo Zhenyu, now that they had become inlaws from the
marriage of Wang's son and Luo's daughter. But could Wang's
suicide be the result of a spiritual crisis? Was he
disillusioned with the kind of scholarship he had engaged in
for so long? Did he finally realize that seeking factual
certainty in China's antiquity could not assuage existential
suffering? Perhaps Nietzsche's contempt for "pure"
scholarship is not without good reasons.

Page 5 6
 Chapter 3 From Nietzsche to Bolshevism:
Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao

Nietzsche kept a low profile in China before the

outbreak of World War I. Although all three Chinese who had
written about Nietzsche by this time were seminal thinkers,
they did not make him popular in China. Liang Qichao had
written too much on too many Western thinkers for his
readers to pay particular attention to his comments on
Nietzsche and Marx. Both Wang Guowei and Lu Xun were still
relatively unknown when they wrote about Nietzsche.68 Yet
in 1915, Nietzsche suddenly became a national figure in
China. In the following years, it seems that everyone
started to talk about him.
The time between 1915 and 1922 was called "the New
Culture movement." Before this period, there had been the
hectic constitutional reform, the republican revolution that
led to the fall of China's last monarchy, Yuan Shi-kai's
authoritarian government that ended with the fiasco of his
monarchist movement. After this period, there were more
than twenty years of wars, between the North and the South,
between the Communists and the Nationalists, between China

Refer to Chapter 5 for Lu Xun.

Page 57
and Japan. But during the period of the New Culture

movement, the nation's energy seemed to be devoted to

matters of thought and culture. Chinese intellectuals

assessed their cultural traditions with a critical eye,

while eagerly introducing Western thought and experimenting

with new styles of literature and art. By replacing

classical Chinese with colloquial Chinese, they even changed

the Chinese writing system. The catch-words of the time

were' "Science" and "Democracy." The intellectuals examined

various aspects of Chinese customs, conventions, thoughts

and institutions. They denounced all that could not

withstand the scrutiny of rational thinking as obsolete and

superstitious. They relentlessly attacked China's political

tradition, especially the Confucian social-political order,

and declared it the main obstacle to the democratization of

Chinese society. This period can be regarded as the dawn of

an age of enlightenment in China.69

Nietzsche was not the only Western thinker who became

popular during the New Culture movement. Along with

Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Leo Tolstoi, Henrik Ibsen, John

Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and others had also become

69
For example, see Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: the
intellectuals and the legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919
(Berkeley: University, of California Press, 1986). The New
Culutural Movement is also referred to as the "May Fourth
Movement." But the latter term is sometimes used in a narrower
sense, referring to the nation-wide mass protest in the few
months following the May Fourth student demonstration in Beijing
in 1919.

Page 58
household names for Chinese readers. Nietzsche may not have
been the most often mentioned, but he was exceptional in
that he was referred to with veneration by all leading
intellectuals.
In the initial stage of the New Culture movement, the
general interest in Nietzsche was not based on any better
understanding of his philosophy. Wang Guowei had stopped
discussing Western philosophy by 1911. It would take nearly
a decade, until 1920, for another Chinese scholar to make
scholarly enquiries into Nietzsche's philosophy.70 Neither
was there any evidence that those who talked about him were
inspired by Nietzsche as a result of reading Nietzsche's
writings before Lu Xun appeared on the scene in 1918.71
Throughout the period of the New Culture movement, most
writers had only rudimentary ideas about Nietzsche's
thoughts. For them, he served as a symbol for a set of
values: individualism, a critical spirit, rebellion against
tradition and the establishment.

Hu Shih is one of the leading liberal writers in

twentieth century China. He went to Cornell University in
1910, and transferred to Columbia to study philosophy in
1915. Hu Shi was a student of American pragmatism and his
thinking and writing reflected the profound influenced of
John Dewey. He joined the New Youth editorial board in 1918

See Chapter 5.
See Chapter 4.

Page 59
after returning to China from the US. Compared to other

writers of his time, Hu Shih had a better background in

Western thought. Hu Shih referred to Nietzsche instead of

John Dewey to characterize the atmosphere of the epoch: The

essence of the new thought is only an attitude. This

attitude can be called the "attitude of evaluation." In

simple terms, the attitude of evaluation meant that one

should look into everything with new perspectives to see its

advantages and disadvantages. . .

Nietzsche said that our time is an age of "revaluation

of all values." "Revaluation of all values" was the
best interpretation of the attitude of evaluation. In
a previous age, the smaller a woman's feet were, the
prettier they were. Now we not only do not think bound
feet pretty, but regard foot binding as cruel and
inhuman. . . 72

While some historians suggest a continuation between

epistemologies of Nietzsche and Dewey,73 Hu Shih did not seem

to have such philosophic considerations in mind when he

wrote the above passage. Neither did he elaborate on

Nietzsche's philosophic concepts in his other writings. His

reference to Nietzsche's "revaluation of all values" did not

72
Hu Shih, "The Meaning of the New Thought," [$fJH}H3(!ft!ict£ ' <S9
M^Cfe} W> — H i in Writings of Hu Shih, (Shanghai: Ya Dong Tu Shu
Guan, 1930), vol. 1, pp. 728-729.
73 p o r e x a m p l e , a n early e d i t i o n of T h i l l y ' s h i s t o r y of
philosophy treated William James, John Dewey and Nietzsche as
belonging to the same tradition. See Frank Thilly, A History of
Philosophy (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1914), pp. 566-576.

Page 60
bring anything new to his common sense proposition. His

invoking Nietzsche only suggests that Nietzsche was a

commonly accepted symbol for critical thinking at the time

in China.

Guo Moruo was the best known poet in the New Culture

movement. His poetic inspiration came mainly from Walt

Whitman and from German Romantic literature. In one of his

poems, "An Ode to Bandits," (1921) he shouted "long live" to

eighteen revolutionary "bandits" in the history of North

America, Europe and Asia. Along with Nicolaus Copernicus

and Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche was among the three

"bandits of intellectual revolutions." Later he began to

translate Thus Spake Zarathustra into Chinese, which

appeared in a journal by installment.74 When he was asked

to explain the meanings of Zarathustra, he asked his readers

"not to have too much confidence in [his] translation,

especially not to wait for his interpretation."75

Soon Guo was swept into the "Great Revolution" when the

Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, with the blessing

of the Comintern, joined hands in launching a social and

political movement in China. He stopped writing highly

74
Guo Moruo, "An Ode to Bandits," in Goddes (Shanghai: Taidong
Book, 1921), pp. 161-166; Guo Moruo, trans., "Zarathustra and
others," in Creation Weekly, No. 1 to No.39, (1924) [ ( J J i BIRJ
JSfe »]
75
Guo Moruo, "Words and Self-reliance," Works of Guo Moruo [ ^
^}CM ] (Beijing: People's Literature Press, 1959), pp. 71-75.
(Originally written on November 29, 1924.)

Page 61
individualistic poems and gave up translating Thus Spake

Zarathustra after the first part was over. He began to

champion "Proletarian literature" and claimed that he had

discovered Marx who was "a thousand times greater than

Nietzsche." Guo's involvement with Nietzsche was thus

brief. However he seemed to have a life-long respect for

Nietzsche. He later expressed regret that he had not

finished translating Thus Spake Zarathustra. In the early

1940s, when he condemned the political use of Nietzsche by

the Fascists, he still referred to Nietzsche as a "great

philosopher." When his poem "Ode to the Bandits" was

published during the People's Republic era, he kept

Nietzsche's name among the eighteen "bandits" while dropped

Bertrand Russell and Francis Galton, two "bandits of social

revolution," and replaced them with Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels.76

Both Hu Shih and Guo Moruo were latecomers to the New

Culture movement. Nietzsche's popularity in China was

established as early as 1915 with the launching of the

journal New Youth, a journal whose publication was accepted

by historians as the beginning of the New Culture movement.

In the the first issue of New Youth, Chen Duxiu, the

76
During that era, due to political reasons, it was not uncommon
for writers to edit their earlier works when they were
republished. In the early'editions of the "Ode to the Bandits,"
the three "bandits of social revolution" were Bertrand Russell,
Francis Galton and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Page 62
journal's founder, called upon Chinese youth to "be
independent, not servile. . . progressive, not conservative.
. . dynamic, not passive. . . cosmopolitan, not
isolationist. . . utilitarian, not emptily formalistic. . .
scientific, not (merely) imaginative." Chen invoked
Nietzsche to support the first of the six pairs of
qualities--"Be independent, not slavish,"

All men are equal. Each has his right to be

independent, but absolutely no right to enslave others
nor any obligation to make himself servile. . . .

The great German philosopher Nietzsche divided morality

into two categories-that is independent and courageous
is called the "morality of the noble," and that is
hunmble and submissive is called the morality of the
slave."77

This is certainly a simplistic interpretation of the

"morality of slaves" and the "morality of nobles." Why was
Chen Duxiu inclined to allude to Nietzsche? Weren't there
many other thinkers, Chinese and Western, who also promoted
a spirit of bravery and independence? There was at least
one reason for Chen to single Nietzsche out. Calling the
Chinese "slaves" had been popular rhetoric among anti-Qing

77
Chen Duxiu, "To Youth," New Youth, vol. no. 1 (1915). The
translation is from Ssu-yu Teng, China's Response to the West,
pp. 239-251.

Page 63
revolutionaries since the early 1900s.78 As an active anti-

Qing revolutionary writer, Chen Duxiu himself had employed

such rhetoric in 1903. In Citizens' Daily, a revolutionary

journal Chen edited, he anonymously wrote an article

entitled "Warnings to the Slaves" in which he said:

Slaves are not born slaves. That the Chinese are born
slaves is due to the influence of three thousand years
of slave history, thousands of years of slave customs,
numerous generations of slave education, many slave
philosophies. All of these were handed down from
generation to generation, and developed into a
nature.79

In that same year, Chen Duxiu and Su Manshu translated

Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. As was a common practice of

the time, the two translators took the liberty to fabricate

a character, in this case, a revolutionary named Nan De

[literally the name means masculine virtue] and added him to

Hugo's novel. Through Nan De, the translators said:

Confucius' teachings for the slaves are only venerated

by the submissive Chinese race. Are we noble citizens
of France also going to listen to his nonsense?

While these and other references to slaves are

revolutionary rhetoric intended to incite people to rebel,

78 p o r example, see Zou Rong (Tsou Jung), The Revolutionary Army:

A Chinese Nationalist Tract of 1903, trans, by John Lust (The
Hague, 1968).
79
Chen Wanxiong, Chen Duxiu before the New Cultural Movement,
1879-1915 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Press, 1979),
p. 116.

Page 64
it is also true that in Chen Duxiu's view Chinese

traditional values and morality tend to make people

subservient to autocratic rulers. Chen must have been

delighted then to find a well-known Western philosopher

using the term "the morality of slaves." He must have

regarded Nietzsche as a like-minded revolutionary critic.

Had Chen known that for Nietzsche the "morality of slaves"

was not merely a means of keeping people enslaved but also a

means of the slaves to turn tables on their masters, he

might have had second thoughts about using the term.

Chen Duxiu's respect for Nietzsche is also shown in his

other references to him. In an article praising the French

contribution to mankind [Chen attributed the theories of

human rights, evolution, and modern socialism to the

French], Chen supported his own arguments by quoting

Nietzsche:

When France was defeated by Germany, the Great German

philosopher Nietzsche warned, "Our Germans must not be
conceited because of this victory. The creative genius
of the French is superior to our copied
civilization. "80

Such references suggest that Nietzsche was an authority

of the first magnitude for Chen Duxiu. They also indicate

80
Chen Duxiu, "The French Nation and Modern Civilization," [ $z
M M S 1M #1 ifitS ^C^M ] in Selected Writings of Chen Duxiu
(Beijing: Sanlian Books, 1984) [jf JS ' H ffl fr i£ ' < [$C$I l§:£
^pKHiHl } 1, PP • 79-81. Originally published in New Youth, vol.
1, no. 1 (Sept. 15, 1915).

Page 6 5
that Chen's knowledge of Nietzsche's philosophy or Western

culture in general can only be characterized as rudimentary.

Chen Duxiu's frequent allusion to Nietzsche in 1915 shows

nothing more than his embrace of individualistic values of

the West. The following is a typical comment of Chen's:

Western nations, from the ancient times until today,

have been thoroughly individualistic. Britain and the
US are individualistic, so are France and Germany.
Nietzsche was an individualist, so was Kant. The
objective of all ethics, morality, politics and laws,
the aspiration of society, the purpose of the state,
are nothing else than individual freedom, rights and
happiness. . . .81

Later Chen Duxiu became a little more sophisticated

about Western thought. In a speech made in 1917, Chen

explained defended the necessity of morality in the age of

science and characterized morality as "a tool of maintaining

good social relations ." [$H;Jtf S£ t n ^ ^ 1 82 H

e divided all moral

doctrines into three schools. Two are from the West: the

individualist egoist school and the socialist altruist

school. The former grew out of Greco-Roman tradition and in

modern times was transformed first into the Darwinist

struggle for survival, then into Nietzsche's teaching of

81
Chen Duxiu, "The Differences in the Basic Ideas of Western and
Eastern Nations," [j|[j?fj3; M tit 2fc ,1H $!;£. ZrE=§?] in Selected
Writings, pp. 97-100. Originally published in New Youth, vol. 1,
no. 4 (December 15, 1915).

Page 66
superman, and finally into German militarism. The latter

grew out of the Christian tradition and was advocated by

Tolstoi. The third school was the Chinese morality of

"three bonds" and "five virtues." It was neither egoistic

nor altruistic, neither individualist nor socialist; it was

nothing other than a "slave morality" based on "familism."

Chen Duxiu deemed it unworthy of discussion. He called

those who are still attached to the Chinese morality as

"people who have not rid themselves of slavishness and dare

not live as citizens." 83 Apparently, he still did not use

the term "slave morality" in its original sense, but used it

for anything that revealed a lack of autonomy. And he did

not seem to understand that "the morality of slaves" was

used by Nietzsche to describe Christian morality rather than

Confucianism.

In 1917, Chen Duxiu no longer uncritically embraced

individualism as he had in 1915. He wavered between what he

understood as the two main Western moral systems:

"individualist egoism" and "socialist altruism." There is a

parallel between Chen Duxiu in 1917 and Liang Qichao in

1902. Chen Duxiu also sought to find a synthesis of the two

Western moral systems. On the one hand, Chen thought,

82
Chen, "The Definition of Morality and Schools of Moral
Teachings," VM'0 ~Z- H ^ $ ^ H WtM SO 1 in Selected Writing,
pp. 194-195. Originally published in New Youth, vol. 3, no. 3,
(March 17, 1917) .
83
Ibid.

Page 67
egoism was an "unshakable truth." It would be a lie for

anyone to claim that he loved only others and not himself.

Even Buddhism, the "ultimate altruism," was a kind of egoism

after all. Although it promoted love for all living

creatures, it still sought, after all, to achieve nirvana,

that is, to leave the wheel of life and death, and to become

a buddha. On the other hand, "extreme egoists" tended to be

concerned only with their own interests, and thus would

cause endless conflicts in life. Chen Duxiu expected that a

solution of moral issues lay in broadening egoism and

extending it to "a nation's egoism, a society's egoism, and

mankind's egoism."

The irony of Chen Duxiu was that while dismissing

Chinese, especially Confucian morality, as a worthless slave

morality, his own moral views were more Confucian than

Western in essence. The characterization of Western

morality as egoistic and altruistic revived a two-thousand-

year old classic Chinese debate between the Mohist

"universal love" [^^] and the Yang Zhu School's "for

oneself" [^f£]. In another article, he actually talked

about Mo Di and Yang Zhu.84 He criticized Mo Di as "too

84
Mo Di, a 5th century B.C. philosopher, was the founder of
Mohist School. His teaching was recorded in the book, Mo Zi.
Yang Zhu was the founder of Yang Zhu school. His own writings
have been lost, but some of his ideas are known through the
words of his other critics such as Mencius.

Page 68
partial" to advocate "sacrificing oneself for others." He

also criticized Yang Zhu along with Nietzsche:

The teaching of Yang Zhu and Nietzsche reveals the

truth of life, but if it is followed to its extreme,
how can our complicated civilized society survive?85

These comments remind us of Wang Guowei who thought

Nietzsche's philosophy was believable but not lovable.86
Chen's solution to moral issues was a classical
Confucian response to Mo Di and Yang Zhu. Confucianists
stood above the debate between the Mohists and the Yang Zhu
School and refused to accept irreconcilability between the
interest of individuals and society. They advocated the
"principle of extending" [j?5£l|] : to extend what one aspires
to for oneself to others, exactly what Chen had proposed to
solve the moral dilemma. It seems that despite Chen Duxiu's
anti-tradition rhetoric, he had not abandoned the moral core
of Confucianism.
Despite Chen Duxiu's unconscious Confucian ethical
stance, he believed that the result of the World War would
suggest a solution to the moral issue. He was unsure of his
own sythesis of what he thought of as "Nietzsche's
individualism" and "Tolstoi's socialism." He expected one
of the two would become the dominant trend after the war.

85
Chen, "The Essence of Life," [ A 4 R ^ 1 in Selected Writings,
pp. 239-240. Originally published in New Youth, vol. 4, no. 2,
(February 15, 1918).
86
Cf. page 51.

Page 69
On the one hand, he believed that the French nation and
President Woodrow Wilson represented a noble idealism for
democracy, justice and peace; on the other hand, he believed
that the War was something that would bring enormous
progress to Europe.
The events of 1919 ended Chen's wavering. On February
2, 1919, Chen condemned the five Powers' monopoly of post-
war solution and the exclusion of Belgium from decision
making. He called the Allies' espousal of justice a "mask."
One week later, he called attention to the murder of
Liebknecht:

. . . those who previously supported the German Kaiser

now persecuted and murdered [Liebknecht]. One should
ask: "Where is justice?"87

These events in Europe revealed to Chen Duxiu that a

Darwinian-Nietzschean "egoist" morality was totally
incompatible with Chen's own moral sense. He started to
talk about using the "bright side" of human nature to combat
the "dark side," because

. . . international power politics, political iniquity,

the vice of private property, class inequality, and
various laws and moralities that are irrational and
inapproriate for spontaneous life. . . are bitter
fruits of the dark side of our nature, of our greed,

87
Chen, "Where Is Justice?" [& SfRprE] in Selected Writings, p.
342. Originally published in Maizhou Pinglun, [iEgr j^J ff^ |§) ] no.
7. (February 2, 1919).

Page 7 0
 cruelty, and selfishness, that are similar to those of
other animals.88

Politically and socially, Chen Duxiu was gradually drawn to

Marxism and the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. Ethically,

Chen Duxiu made his choice between "the morality of

Christianity" and that of Nietzsche:

Due to enormous progress made in history and the

natural sciences in modern times, Christian "Creation,"
"trinity" and all kinds of miracles have lost their
authority. People think that Christianity has gone
bankrupt. I believe that Christianity is a religion of
love. As long as we do not follow Nietzsche in
opposing the mutual love of mankind, we cannot say that
Christianity has collapsed. The ultimate teaching of
Christianity is only love and faith, all others are not
essential ,89

By reducing Christianity to "love and faith," Chen

Duxiu treated it more as an ethical tradition than as a

religion. He did not intend to convert himself or others.

He criticized the Western support for "unchristian

activities of the warlords and the rich." He condemned

Chinese politicians for using Christianity to oppose the

future "proletarian society."90 Thus Chen Duxiu's turn to

88
Chen, "What Shall We Do?" [$% {f^MM &W. ? ] in Selected
Writings, p. 380. Originally published in New Youth, vol.6, no.
4, (April 15, 1919) .
89
Chen, "Christianity and the Chinese," [lHllifc JS| 4 1 U S A ] in
Selected Writings, p. 482-489. Originally published in New-
Youth, vol. 7, no. 3, (February 1, 1920).
90
Ibid.

Page 71
socialism was not only a political action but also a moral
decision.
Due to Chen Duxiu's deep-rooted antipathy to Chinese
culture, he did not recognize common features between the
Judeo-Christian tradition and the Confucian moral tradition.
He continued to criticize the Chinese moral tradition, but
on different grounds. Before he had accused the Chinese
culture of lacking individualism; now he attributed the
"decadence of the Chinese" to "an absence of pure aesthetic
and religious emotions in the sources of Chinese culture."91

It is interesting to compare Chen Duxiu and Liang

Qichao. Both had admired Nietzsche. The former had admired
Nietzsche for his individualism; the latter for his social
Darwinism. Both rejected Nietzsche after the catastrophic
events of the First World War. Their responses were
different: while Liang Qichao harked back to China's past,
Chen Duxiu saw China's future in the Russian Bolshevik
Revolution.
Under the influence of Chen Duxiu, New Youth gradually
became a political journal advocating a Bolshevik
revolution. In 1921 Chen Duxiu and his comrades founded the
Chinese Communist Party, and Chen was elected the first
Chairman of the new party.
Li Dazhao [1889-1905] was another leading figure of the
New Culture movement. Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu were often

91
Tbid.

Page 72
referred to as "the Southern Chen and the Northern Li," for
Li Dazhao was more influential in Beijing and northern
China; Chen Duxiu was more influential in Shanghai and
southern China. After returning to China from Japan in the
summer of 1916, Li started Morning Bell, a newspaper
propagating new thought. In Morning Bell, Li Dazhao wrote
two articles, one introducing Leo Tolstoi, the other,
Friedrich Nietzsche. Li had an unbounded admiration for
Tolstoi. He adored Tolstoi's personality and identified
with his moral values, and especally his compassion for the
downtrodden peasants. Li recommended Nietzsche mainly
because he liked Nietzsche's critical and rebellious spirit.
How Nietzsche was conceived by Li can best be illustrated by
his own words:

Nietzsche was a man who was determined to

construct an authentic life based upon his needs and
convictions. He demanded the weak to be strong, the
defective to be perfect. He led a tragic, earnest, and
thorough life. He charged forward with valor and would
not shrink from a hundred battles to liberate and
uplift human nature. He achieved penetrating
introspection into his own mind and his own life; and
he produced thorough criticism of the status quo of the
society. He took upon himself the duty to study and
modify the weakness of human nature and the defects of
civilization. He was certainly a man who loved
himself, society, and civilization, and who devotedly
embraced life.

Nietzsche's thought underwent three changes. He

was first influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner, and

Page 73
 thought life existed only for the sake of art; he was
then influenced by Paul Ree, and shifted his emphasis
to intellect; later he combined art and intellect,
laying foundations for individualism by using will and
creativity as key elements. He fiercely attacked
nineteenth century philistinism and materialism, saying
that the true meaning of life was obscured by the
rhetoric of religion, morality, fraternity and
humanism; [people] wore the mask of hypocrisy to seek
compromise and contentment, as if trapped in a den of
disease and vice. Nietzsche proposed a philosophy of
superman, advocated heroism, praised the enjoyment of
power, glorified the noble personality, and propagated
the gospel of war. He intended to guide modern
civilization into the realm of a new idealism.
Nietzsche's teaching was capable of revitalizing the
degenerate and the decadent. Since our nation is
extremely formalistic, very conformist, and confined by
the morality of slaves, Nietzsche's teaching will have
the special effect of enlivening the spirit of our
youth, and of boosting our people's courage. 92

Just like Chen Duxiu's allusions to Nietzsche, Li's

short introduction does not suggest a thorough knowledge of

Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche was more of a symbol than

something substantial for both Chen and Li. While he stood

for an individualistic value for Chen Duxiu, he symbolized

for Li Dazhao a will to self-perfection, vitalism, courage,

92
Li Dazhao, "An introduction to Leo Tolstoy," [JY Wi^S K rEI
^ ] in Selected Writings of Li Dazhao (Beijing: People's Press,
1984), pp. 186-187, Originally published in Morning Bell, August
20, 1916; "An introduction of Friedrich Nietzsche," [ T ^ ^ S ^ A / b
7|<] in Selected Writings, pp. 188-189, Originally published in
Morning Bell, August 22, 1916.

Page 74
and heroism. In the case of Li Dazhao, Nietzsche and
Tolstoi were not conflicting moral forces but supplementary
human qualities.
Li Dazhao was among the first to welcome the Russian
Bolshevik Revolution and to introduce Bolshevism to China.
The Bolshevik Revolution was seen by Li Dazhao as an
embodiment of the values of universal love, the sacredness
of labor and of the peasants; and as a heroic rebellion
against oppression and injustice in Russian society, and
against international power politics. Choosing Bolshevism
does not constitute a revision of his ethical view, but only
brings Li Dazhao's admiration for Tolstoi and Nietzsche to
its logical conclusion.
Li Dazhao was one of the co-founders of the Chinese
Communist Party in 1921 and died a martyr in 1927. His
noble character has been respected even by his political
enemies. The two introductions he wrote in 1916 might not
be exact portraits of Tolstoy and Nietzsche but they served
well as ideal types Li Dazhao lived up to.
Chen Duxiu's and Li Dazhao's turning to Bolshevism
epitomized a general change of intellectual atmosphere in
China. At the beginning, the New Culture movement was
basically an iconoclastic movement aimed at China's
political, social and moral traditions. The other side of
the movement was a consensus among its leading figures that
"Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science," in Chen Duxiu's words,
would replace ancient sages as the Chinese nation's guides.

Page 75
They looked up to European democratic nations and the United
States as models for China. Associated with this consensus
there was a belief that the Great War was fought between
democracy and autocracy, between aggression and
international justice. Near the end of the war, there was
an intense anticipation of an emerging world order of
justice and peace.
The exclusion of small countries from decision making
in the peace settlement and the Power's decision to let
Japan keep a former German colony in China shocked the
Chinese. When news reached China on May Fourth of 1919 that
Chinese governmental representatives were going to accept
the peace settlement, students from Beijing University and
other universities took to the streets and rallied against
what they perceived as their government's "selling out." In
the next few months, the student protest spread to other
social strata and other cities, and turned into a national
mass movement. The government was forced to dismiss two
cabinet members to pacify the public. The May Fourth event
was a turning point for the New Culture movement. It
signaled the coming of age of mass participation and a shift
of emphasis from individual emancipation to socialist and
nationalist aspirations. Many intellectuals like Chen Duxiu
no longer treated the captitalist West as their model to
reform China. Instead, they turned to the Bolshevik Russia
for inspiration. From then on, historians, especially those

Page 7 6
who welcomed this change, would refer to the New Culture
movement as the "May Fourth Movement."
The spread of Bolshevism did not immediately cause
Nietzsche to be out of fashion. In the early years of the
Chinese communist movement, the Chinese left-wing
intellectuals were not dogmatic and were open to non-Marxist
ideologies. In the early 1920s, due to the Nietzsche-
inspired short stories and essays by Lu Xun, the systematic
introduction to Nietzsche's philosophy by Li Shicen, and the
Chinese translations of excerpts of Thus Spake Zarathustra,
there was a new surge of interest in Nietzsche.

Page 77
 Chapter 4 Lu Xun: China's Nietzsche?

Of all writers of the New Culture movement, no one has

been more often associated with Nietzsche than Lu Xun. If
others' relationships with Nietzsche could be described as
transient, Lu Xun's attraction to Nietzsche was lifetime.
He was called "China's Nietzsche" by both his friends and
his enemies. If the title suggests a similarity of their
thinking, it needs too many qualifications to be meaningful.
But if the title simply refers to the fact that Lu Xun is
the most renowned cultural critic in China as Nietzsche is
in Germany or the fact that Lu Xun was greatly influenced by
Nietzsche, it is certainly appropriate.
Lu Xun began to take a strong interest in Nietzsche
long before he emerged as China's leading novelist and
essayist during the period of the New Culture movement. In
1902, the same year Liang Qichao first mentioned Nietzsche,
Lu Xun was sent to Japan by the Zhejiang provincial
government to study "Western learning." This is a time when
Nietzsche was much in fashion in Japan, and Lu Xun must have
been affected by the interest of the Japanese in

Page 7 8
Nietzsche.93 He spent his first two years in Japan learning

the Japanese language and then attended the Sendai Medical

College in 1904. In school, Lu Xun acquired a reading

knowledge of German.94 As his interest in medicine waned,

he turned his attention to literature. His knowledge of

Japanese and German gave him access to Western literature.

It is during this period that Lu Xun became acquainted with

Nietzsche.

According to the memoirs of his brother, Zhou Zuoren,

who lived with Lu Xun during this time, Lu Xun was mostly

interested in writers from Eastern and Northern European

countries. He did not read much German literature, except

for Heine and Nietzsche. A copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake

Zarathustra was often seen on his desk, and it accompanied

him for many years. 95 Lu Xun was to translate the preface

of the book twice, first into classical Chinese and again

into colloquial Chinese. In the mid 1920s, he continued

purchasing Japanese translations and interpretations of Thus

93
Ito Toramaru, "Early Lu Xun's View of Western Culture-Japan's
Nietzsche and Lu Xun's Nietzsche (an Outline)" [f^H Jj^^L ' " -?•
mmmmfricit m mm) -u*tm&mmffim&»i in Trends
in Lu Xun Studies (monthly), [ || ;®ff ;%lft S ] 1986, no. 11, p. 34.
94
Japan's medical education, as that of many professions, was
modeled on that of Germany. German was a required course for all
students.
95
Zhou Xiashou, People and Events in Lu Xun's Early Life, [ 18-jEl^u]
$£ ^ ] (Shanghai: Shanghai Chuban Gongsi, 1953.3), pp. 390-391.

Page 7 9
Spake Zarathustra. In the 1930s, he encouraged and

sponsored the first complete translation of the book. 96

Lu Xun was a prophet of the New Culture movement. As

early as 1906 or 1907, he already viewed cultural

transformation as China's priority. He expressed his views

in two articles published in a Chinese language journal in

Japan. Both show his indebtedness to Nietzsche.

In his "On Cultural Extremism," Lu Xun discussed the

issue of learning from the West. Other intellectuals,

whether reformist constitutionalists or revolutionary

republicans, admired the West for its military strength,

scientific progress, economic prosperity, and political

democracy. Lu Xun thought that these aspects represented a

"cultural extremism" of the West, that had been necessary in

an earlier time when Europe faced the problems of poverty

and autocracy. Once the old problems were solved, its cure

-cultural extremism"--began to show its limitations. Its

emphasis on material well-being diminished men's

spirituality. In Lu Xun's words,

Having benefited from [material progress], people have

mounting faith in it. They treat it as the jewels of

96
See The Diary of Lu Xun, August 11, 1925 and September 12,
1925, in Complete Works of Lu Xun (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue,
1981), vol. 14, pp. 557, 562; and Xu Fancheng, "On Thus spake
Thurathustra_, " in Lu Xun Yenjiu Ziliao (19), [^^tWt ' " ( !§£ H"
^£ !£ £| » H e " " (UMR9u'M%% (10) » ] (Beijing: Zhongguo Wenlian
Chupan She, 1987), pp. 142-143.

Page 80
 their life, the root of all their existence, and even
apply it to all spiritual matters. 97

The democratic ideal of thiscultural extremism" is "a noble

one," Lu continued, "but it ignores unique individuality"

and has the tendency to "reduce all individuals under heaven

to one form." Therefore today's "rule of the rabble" is as

bad as the ancient "autocratic monarch." 98

Lu Xun noticed that there was a new trend in the West

to combat this "cultural extremism." This new trend

emphasized "subjectivity" or "the will to power." It would

strengthen men's "internal life" and promote "individual

dignity." Followers of this new trend were Stirner,

Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and above all Nietzsche.

Lu Xun predicted that "Relying on will power, the new spirit

of the twentieth century will sail to a safe harbor through

the violence of wind and waves." 99

Lu Xun conluded his article with the proposal that the

Chinese should not blindly import the "cultural extremism"

of materialism from the West. In order to survive the

international competition, the most important task for China

was to raise people's consciousness, promote their

individuality, and to "turn a country of loose sand into a

97
Lu Xun, "On Cultural Extremism," in Complete Works, vol. 1,
p.48.
98
Ibid. ,pp. 50, 46.
99
Ibid. , pp. 55, 56.

Page 81
 Lu
human state [AS]]-" Xun summarized the means to
achieve this goal succinctly in two phrases: "exalt
individuals, and expand spirituality."100
Lu Xun did not hide the fact that his "On Cultural
Extremism" was inspired by Nietzsche. The anti-democratic
tendency of the article came from Nietzsche's superman
concept and Nietzsche's idea that the goal of civilization
was to produce the best exemplars of individuals. When he
criticized the self-pursuing materialism of the West and of
the Chinese Westernizers, he also referred to Nietzsche. Lu
Xun gave an abridged translation of "The Land of Education"
from Thus Spake Zarathustra:

I have gone too far and lost my companions. Now I

return to look at today's world. What a civilized
country! What a motley society! This is a society
that lacks faith. The masses do not have originality
when knowledge is concerned. How can I stay in a
country like this? I am exiled from my fatherland and
motherland. My hope lies only in the future
generation.101

Aside from its simplicity, the above translation is

basically true to the spirit of the original text.
Nevertheless, its style and content reminds the reader of a
classic Chinese poem, "The Song of Sorrows" by Qu Yuan. To
a certain extent, Lu Xun must have conceived Nietzsche as

100
Tbid. , pp. 56-57.
101
J b i d . , p . 49.

P a g e 82
something of a European Qu Yuan, who was not tolerated by

his society due to his talents and high moral standards.

Lu Xun's understanding of Nietzsche was influenced by

both Chinese classical thought and previously imported

Western thought. Some of his arguments against democracy

came not only from Nietzsche but also from the Chinese

Legalist tradition. In the following passage, Lu Xun's

words echo ancient Legalist classics in their logic, style

and even syntax:

The power of judgment cannot be entrusted to the

public; doing so can only lead to prejudice. Politics
cannot be entrusted to the public, doing so can only
lead to disorder. As soon as the superman emerges, the
world is in great order. If there is no superman
emerging, heroes and sages will do. Look at those
anarchists who subvert the government and eliminate
classes. Their founders all proclaimed themselves to
be teachers. One teacher followed by a multitude; this
is the distinction between the wise and the ignorant.
Rather than suppressing the heroes and the sages, and
listening to the rabble, why don't we ignore the
multitude and look for the heroes and the sages. . . 102

Although Lu Xun abandoned this view later, this is the

first instance in China that Nietzsche's philosophy,

combined with Chinese traditional authoritarianism, was used

to support an anti-democratic political stand.

102
52.

Page 83
 Lu Xun's arguments for individuality and spirituality

are based on a social Darwinist premise. Lu Xun thought

that the "root" of the West's strength lay in Western

people's national character. He warned his countrymen

against importing a "cultural extremism" to China. In his

words, China was like a patient suffering from atrophy and

if it were to acquire a new disease from the West, it would

perish even sooner.103

What kind of spirituality and individuality was in Lu

Xun's mind that could serve to strengthen China as a nation?

In another essay published earlier in 1908, Lu Xun

specifically addressed this question.

The article was entitled "On the power of Satanic

Poets." Lu Xun explained,

The term Mara comes from Sanskrit; it refers to the

devil; Europeans call it Satan. Originally people
called Byron [a satanic poet], now I will use the term
[Satanic poets] to describe all those poets who
intended to rebel, who were determined to take actions,
and, therefore, were disliked by the society. . . 104

In this poem, Lu Xun gave a biographical introduction

to a number of European rebel poets, among them Byron,

Shelley, Pushkin, Lermontov, Mickiewicz, Slowacki,

Krasinski, and Petofi. He praised them for their rebellious

103
Ibid. , .p. 57
104
Lu Xun, "On the Power of Satanic Poets," [J§S JSIvf^ |&] in
Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 66.

Page 84
spirit against social convention and foreign domination. Lu

Xun's appreciation did not end here, he regarded these rebel

poets as prophets and saviors of their country. Nietzsche

was Lu Xun's main inspiration in writing this article, which

started with a quotation from Thus Spake Zarathustra,

Whoever has exhausted ancient streams will look for

fountains of the future and for new origins. Oh my
brothers, it will not be long before new life rises and
new fountains surge in the depth.105

In Lu Xun's view, China was such an ancient stream. Lu Xun

explained the issue by presenting a theory about poems and

songs:106

The most powerful thing a culture leaves to later

generations is the voice of mind and heart.107 People
of ancient times had access to the mystery of Nature.
When achieving spiritual union with the universe, what
they, expressed spontaneously were poems and songs.
Their voices passed from generation to generation and
reached into the depth of people's minds and hearts. .
. . When [a nation's] literary expression is weakened,
the nation's fate is sealed too. . . Then lives are
silent . . . Civilization is at its end.108

105
Ibid., p. 63. Lu Xun's translation was slightly different
from the original. For English translation of the same passage,
see Walter Kaufmann, Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin
Books, 1976), p.323.
106 T h e r e w a s n o d i s t i n c t i o n b e t w e e n p o e m s a n d songs in t h e e a r l y
h i s t o r y of C h i n a . P o e m s w e r e simply r e c o r d e d s o n g s .
107
In Chinese classics, the "voice of mind and heart" ['£* St? ]
refers to language.
108
Ibid. , p. 63.

Page 85
This theory echoed Nietzsche's theories about Greek tragedy

in the notion of a mystic union with nature, the Dionysian

dithyramb as the origin of tragic art, and the degeneration

of art as a symptom of cultural decline.

The Chinese, Lu Xun commented, were too fond of peace

and too suspicious of a genius who dared to challenge the

status quo. If there were no more lively voices heard in

China, the nation was doomed. In order to reverse this

process, Lu Xu asked his countrymen to "seek new voices from

foreign countries."109

The most powerful voices abroad came from "Satanic

poets," Lu Xun explained. Satan represented an affirmation

of the universe's eternal conflict. While most human beings

were afraid of the eternal conflict and longed for peace,

Satan glorified it and drew power from it.110 In this sense,

the concept of "Satanic poets" sounds like Nietzsche's

Dionysian artists. In another sense, Satan represented an

amoral will to power. Lu Xun compared Satan in Byron's Cain

to Nietzsche:

[Satan says:] "He [God] defeated me, and thus he called

me the evil one; if I had won, God would have been the
evil one. . ." This view of good and evil is opposite
to that of Nietzsche. Nietzsche thought the strong
defeated the weak, therefore the weak describe whatever
the strong do as evil. The term evil is but a
substitute for strength. . . . their views of good and

109
Ibid. , pp. 66-68, 65.
110
Ibid. , pp. 66-68.

Page 8 6
 evil are different, their thirst for power is the
same. l n

Thus Satanic poets represent both the Dionysian and the

will to power. They exalted power and strength, they loved

to fight for freedom and independence. By recommending

European Satanic poets, Lu Xun expected to see the Chinese

imbued with the same spirit.

At the end of the article, he asked: "Look across China

now. Where are spiritual fighters?" Lu Xun did not receive

an answer. He unsuccessfully attempted to start a literary

journal New Life. In 1909, he and his brother were able to

publish a collection of short stories, most of them by

"satanic" writers from Eastern and Northern European

countries. The books were poorly received. Lu Xun felt as

if he were shouting among strangers and received no response

whatsoever. He felt "loneliness that grew larger by the

day" coiled around his soul "like a giant venomous snake." 112

Lu Xun went back to China in 1909. He first took up

teaching positions in his home province, then, after the

1911 Revolution, was employed by the Ministry of Education

of the new government and, later, moved to Beijing with the

government. The years followed were uneventful for Lu Xun

at first, but then the "New Culture movement" came and the

111
Ibid. , pp. 77-79 .
112
Lu Xun, "Preface to Cheering from Sideline, " Lu Xun, Diary of
a Madman and Other Stories, trans, by William A. Lyell, (South
Orange, New Jersey: Seton Hall University Press, 1990), p. 25.

Page 87
age of "spiritual fighters" dawed upon China. In 1918, Lu
Xun was invited to write for New Youth. His short stories
won him immediate national recognition. When he died in
193 6, he left behind twenty-five stories, hundreds of
essays, and ten volumes of translations.
As a mature thinker and writer, Lu Xun continued to be
influenced by Nietzsche, but he no longer accepted every
word of Nietzsche's as he did earlier. When commenting on
his earlier stories, Lu Xun acknowledged influence from
three Western writers: Nikolai Gogol, Leoni Andreev, and
Friedrich Nietzsche. He attributed the Chinese readers'
enthusiasm for his earlier stories to their lack of
knowledge of European continental literature:

Around 1834, Gogol from Russia had already written the

Diary of a Madman; around 1883, Nietzsche had already
spoken through Zarathustra, "You have made your way
from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once
you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than
any ape.' And the conclusion of "Drug" [one of Lu
Xun's stories] apparently revealed an Andreevesque
grisly coldness. But the later "Diary of a Madman" [Lu
Xun's story bearing the same title], in exposing the
vices of the family system and the Confucian teaching
of li ["Li" is a Confucian ethical principle.
Sometimes it is translated as "propriety"], showed an
anguish deeper and broader than Gogol's story, and was
less elusive than Nietzsche's superman.113

113Lu Xun, Thirty Years' Writings of Lu Xun, [ ( H3fi^=- ~t" ^4

(Hong Kong: X i n y i Chuban She, 1 9 7 1 ) , v o l . 8, p p . 2 7 - 2 8 .

P a g e 88
 "Diary of a Madman" was the first story Lu Xun wrote
for the New Youth in May of 1918. While its title was
borrowed from Gogol, the portrayal of a sober-minded man who
is persecuted as a madman because he sees through the
madness of his world was inspired by Zarathustra. In this
story, the madman realizes that he lives in a dog-eat-dog
[the story used the image of man-eat-man] society. He
preaches to his brother and others in the tone of
Zarathustra:

Elder Brother, way back in the beginning, it's probably

the case that primitive peoples all ate some human
flesh. But later on, because their ways of thinking
changed, some gave up the practice and tried their
level best to improve themselves; they kept on changing
until they became human beings, real human beings. But
others didn't; they just kept right on with their
cannibalism and stayed at that primitive level.

Think how ashamed those primitive men who have remained

cannibals must feel when they stand before real human
beings. They must feel even more ashamed than reptiles
do when confronted with their brethren who have evolved
into apes.

Page 89
 Change this minute! Change from the bottom of your
hearts! You ought to know that in the future they're
not going to allow cannibals in the world anymore.114

The tone of this speech is unmistabably Nietzschean but

the madman asks people to be "real human beings," [l^fi^jA]
instead of supermen. Lu Xun was not repeating Nietzsche's
criticism of nineteenth century European bourgeois society
as he did in "On Cultural Extremism." Here he was launching
an attack on the family system based on Confucianism that
still dominated Chinese society. In his view this
hierarchical system reduced all human relations to power
relations, and forced conformity in thought and behavior
upon each individual, who, in his turn, participated in and
sustained this hierarchy. Drawing an analogy between
hierarchical social relations and cannibalism, Lu Xun gave
the most vehement expression to the ethos of the New Culture
movement.

Lu Xun did not define "real human beings." But he,

through his stories and essays, made known what he despised
and valued in human beings. He exposed the vices of Chinese
people, their lack of compassion and love, their apathy
toward injustice and cruelty, their lack of integrity, their
cowardice in not facing reality and not standing up to it.
These stories and comments suggest that Lu Xun's "real human
beings" are those who have compassion for other people, have

Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman, trans, by Lyell, pp. 38-40.

Page 90
courage to resist oppression and injustice, and have
perseverance and wisdom to continue their fight against all
odds. "Real human beings" share a trace of tragic heroism
with Nietzsche's supermen; but that is all. The Madman's
preaching is Lu Xun's creative appropriation of Zarathustra.
Similar cases are seen elsewhere in Lu Xun's writings.
For example, Nietzsche believed that "the goal of humanity
cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars."115
This proposal, at best, is incompatible with the ideal of
democracy, and at worst, it can justify the exploitation of
the majority in a society by a minority of elites. Lu Xun
applauded this view when he was a student in Japan; now as a
mature writer, he had his own opinion on the subject. In a
lecture delivered in 1924, Lu Xun discussed the relation
between genius and public. The premise of his discussion
was that the Chinese public clamored for geniuses among
writers and artists. Lu Xun told his audience that the
critical issue for China was not to conjure up genius from
nowhere but to create a public capable of producing genius,

Before we can expect a genius to appear, we should

first call for a public capable of producing a genius.
In the same way, if we want fine trees and lovely
flowers we must first have good soil. The soil,
actually, is more important than the flowers and trees,
for without it nothing can grow. Soil is essential to

115
Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans, by R.J.
Hollingdale, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), p. 111.

Page 91
 flowers and trees, just as good troops were to
Napoleon. 116

Lu Xun explained what he regarded as good soil for

genius. To be good soil, the public should be open minded

to foreign cultures. Lu Xun lamented that while many people

were talking about Tolstoi, Turgeniev, and Dostoyevsky, few

of their books had been translated. To be good soil, the

public should also encourage writers' artistic experiments

instead of dismissing these as "childish." Lu Xun did not

like those "destructive critics" who "have great fun

galloping over tender shoots."117

In his analogy of the public and geniuses as soil and

flowers [or troops and Napoleon], Lu Xun echoed Nietzsche's

preoccupation with "best exemplars" of mankind. But Lu

Xun's formulation of the issue did not diminish or degrade

the public. There were no power relations between geniuses

and the public. Lu Xun's concluded his lecture with these

words.

Of course the soil cannot be compared with genius, but

even to be the soil is difficult unless we persevere
and spare no pains. Still, where there's a will
there's a way, and here we have a better chance of
success than if we wait idly for a heaven-sent genius.

116
Lu Xun, "Before there is a genius, " [ 7^ ;j=j^C ~3{ A^L BU ] (A speech
to the alumni of Beijing Normal University's Middle School on
January 17, 1924), in Selected Works, trans. Xiangyi Yang and
Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1956)vol.2, p.
95-100.
117
Jbid.

Page 92
 In this lies the strength of the soil and its great
expectations, as well as its reward. For when a
beautiful blossom grows from the soil, all who see it
naturally take pleasure in the sight, including the
soil itself. You need not be a blossom yourself to
feel a lifting of your spirit--provided, always, that
the soil has a spirit too.

On some occasions, Nietzsche's writings are more an

inspiration than a direct influence. In Thus Spake
Zarathustra, there is a section "On Child and Marriage, " in
which Zarathustra speaks to the young:

You shall build over and beyond yourself, but first you
must be built yourself, perpendicular in body and soul.
You shall not only reproduce yourself, but produce
something higher. . . . You shall create a higher
body, a first movement, a self-propelled wheel--you
shall create a creator. . . 118

Lu Xun did not repeat Zarathustra; he wrote three essays on

fathering in 1918 and 1919 for New Youth. [Lu Xun did not
have a child at the time.] In "Random thoughts No. 2 5," Lu
Xun criticizes his countrymen for giving birth to many
children without educating them to be "human." He asked
that schools for fathers be built, "because China has
abundant fathers of children, but in the future, only
fathers of "human beings' are needed."119 In another essay
"What is required of us as fathers today," Lu Xun argued

118
Nietzsche, Portable, p . 181-183.
119
Lu Xun, Thirty Years' Writings, v o l . 1, p . 13-14

P a g e 93
that in the Chinese family, Confucian moralities such as
duties, obligations, and obedience are imposed on children
but the most important element of parental-child
relationships--"love" is missing. He proposed that fathers
should be not authoritarian but loving and encouraging. For
children, the parents should "give healthy birth, best
education, and total emancipation." Through the sacrifices
of the parents, children would grow into human beings better
than their parents.120
That Lu Xun was fond of Zarathustra was also
demonstrated by Lu Xun's frequent use of images and terms
from Thus Spake Zarathustra. The titles of Lu Xun's prose
poems "The Beggar," "Farewell of the Shadow," and "Wanderer"
are reminiscent of such sections as "The Voluntary Beggar,"
"Shadow" and "Wanderer" in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The
title of his essay "Night Song" might also have come from
"Night Song" in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Lu Xun called
conservative writers "the virtuous and the upright" or the
"preachers of death," all of whom are echoes of Thus Spake
Zarathustra. On most of these occasions, the ideas conveyed
were not Nietzsche's but Lu Xun's. For example in an essay
written in memory of students massacred by the government,
Lu Xun wrote: "Lies written in ink never disguise facts

120 121
Ibid., p. 114-128. Lu Xun, "More Roses without Blooms,
Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 260.

Page 94
written in blood. Blood debt must be repaid in kind."121
Such rhetoric did not exist previously in Chinese
literature. It might be a variation on Zarathustra's words:
"Of all that is written I love only what a man has written
with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience
that blood in spirit."122 In cases like this, Nietzsche's
influence on Lu Xun was limited to rhetoric.
Lu Xun turned to the Chinese Communist movement much
later than Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao and most other writers of
the New Culture movement. Due to Nietzsche's influence, Lu
Xun was very critical of Western culture from the very
beginning, and therefore he was not traumatized by the
events of 1919 as other intellectuals were. In his writing,
he applauded the independence of several central European
countries as achievements of the Paris conference. And he
warned the Chinese people not to overlook their own moral
degradation while pointing fingers at Western powers. To
his grief, Chinese intellectuals and society in general were
galvanized politically after 1919; an age of cultural
enlightenment gave way to a period of social-political
agitation. From 1922 t-o 1925 Lu Xun became increasingly
pessimistic about China's future. Lu Xun did not believe
that a miraculous transformation could occur in China
through political means. He thought that the primary issue
was the people's mentality, not political structure. Or in

Portable Nietzsche, p. 152.

Page 95
his word, "entrusting family matters to slaves comes to no

good end;" "the most important is to transform the national

character. Otherwise, whether it is autocracy or

republicanism or anything else, it is no more than changing

labels on some merchandise." He still held to his early

belief that the Chinese nation needed a few "spiritual

fighters." 123 He fought on desperately with his pen,

chastizing people and events that exemplified the vices of

the Chinese nation.

Lu Xun liked neither the Communists nor the

Nationalists. In 1925, he confided to his beloved student

and future wife Xu Guangping:

There are two kinds of "ists" [Lu referred to the

Communists and the Nationalists] active in China. Both
appeared to be brand new. I have studied their spirits
and found them to be old stuff. At this moment I do
not belong to any party. But I hope they will
enlighten themselves and change for the better.124

When Lu Xun wrote the above words, he did not expect

that he was going to be forced to choose sides. In March

18, 192 6, the Government in Beijing opened fire on students

who demonstrated peacefully in front of the goverment

building, killing forty seven students, including some of Lu

Xun's. Lu Xun was infuriated and condemned the massacre in

123
Lu Xun, "Letters to Xu Guangping," (March 30, 1925) in Thirty
Years' Writings, Vol.7 pp.35-37.
124
Ibid.

Page 9 6
most vitriolic words. In the aftermath of the massacre, he

left Beijing for the South and assumed a position in

Guangzhou where the headquarters of the National

Revolutionary Government were. This was a political choice

the hitherto apolitical Lu Xun was forced to make. On April

12,1927, another bloodbath occurred in Guangzhou and other

major cities, far larger in scale than the first. Chiang

Kai-shek, the head of the Nationalist Party, staged a coup

against the Communists--their former allies. Tens of

thousands of Communists and their sympathizers, including

some of'Lu Xun's friends, were rounded up and executed. Lu

Xun moved again, this time, to the Japanese concession in

Shanghai where he lived with his family until he died in

1936.125

The brutal political reality had its effect on Lu Xun.

It suggested to him the inadequacy of his previous belief

that the various forms of "cannibalism" in Chinese society

could gradually be eliminated through the tenacious efforts

of a few "spiritual fighters." It begged the question of

direct action. At the time, as the only force of direct

action against the Nationalist government, the Chinese

Communist movement certainly looked like a logical choice.

Lu Xun's joining the Communist movement, however, was

125 F or eign concessions in Shanghai and some other Chinese cities

were districts administered and policed by foreign authorities
according to treaties signed between China and those foreign
countries in the 19th century.

Page 97
faciliated by his discovery of Nietzschean themes in Soviet
writers' works.
Lu Xun's interest in Russian literature went back to
his student days in Japan. Throughout his life, he
translated more works of Russian or Soviet writers than from
any other country. From early on, Lu Xun's understanding of
Nietzsche was influenced by Russian literature. One such
work was Michael Artsybashev's "The Worker Sheveriov." Lu
Xun always associated Sheveriov with Nietzsche, and his
criticism of Sheveriov could be viewed as his criticism of
Nietzsche too. In 1920, Lu Xun had referred to him as a
"Nietzschesque man of strength." Later in 1926 he realized
that Sheveriov's rebellion near the end was empty and
horrible, since Sheveriov "hated everything and destroyed
everything." Lu Xun's later criticism of Nietzsche's
philosophy reflected the same thinking:

Nietzsche asked people to prepare for the appearance of

"superman." If superman does not appear, the
preparation would be in vain. Nietzsche, however, had
a way to excuse himself: he went crazy and died.
Otherwise, he would either be content with nothingness,
or rebel against the nothingness. Even if he sought
warmth in his solitude, he could do nothing more than
despise all authorities and shrink into nihilism.126

As the Sheveriovesque Nietzschean hero lost relevance,

Lu Xun found a new type of Nietzschean heros in Soviet

Lu Xun, Thirty Years' Writings, Vol. 8, p. 49.

Page 9 8
literature. It was not "spirit fighters" or "Satanic poets"

who would wake their nation as he envisaged earlier. Now Lu

Xun was attracted to heroes in the works of Soviet writers,

who would lead people to liberation. They were Red Army

officials who attacked the old order not with pens but with

guns. 127 In these Soviet novels, revolutionary heroes who

have an iron will to fight the enemies in seemingly

impossible situations and who are totally ruthless in

pursuing their goals are compared favorably with

intellectuals who cannot face the cruelties involved in a

revolution and who are so paralyzed by their conflicting

moral concerns that they cannot act. Lu Xun might not have

known that these Soviet writers were influenced by Nietzsche

too.128 He obviously shared with these Soviet writers

admiration for the heroism, the strong will, and the

ruthlessness exemplified in Bolshevik leaders. Lu Xun and

these Soviet writers would probably have joined the

Bolshevik movement even they had never known Nietzsche. But

127
Lu Xun translated Anatoly Lunacharsky's "Don Quixote
Liberated,"(1931.11), Alexander Fadeev's The Rout, (1931.10) and
other Soviet writers' works. He also recommended Soviet
literature in his essays. For Lu Xun's translation of Soviet
literature, see Shiga Masatoshi, "A Study of Lu Xun's
Translation," [^ $f? JE ^f ' H-XtS^ IP W "%\ in Tenri Univerity
Journal [^ H T ^ P H #§], no. 19 (1955), pp. 71-92.
128 p o r N i e t z s c h e ' s influence in Russia, see B e r n i c e G l a t z e r
Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia (Princton, NJ: Princeton Un.
Press, 1986); and Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and
Adversary (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Page 99
their early encounter with Nietzsche certainly added a

dimension to the Bolshevik movements in Russia and China.129

Since Lu Xun sided with the Chinese Communist movement,

his essays were directed less at the defects of the Chinese

national character in general, and more at the Nationalist

government and those who supported or condoned it. Lu Xun

was looked upon by the left as a banner bearer. But Lu

Xun's relations with the Communists were not easy. When the

Chinese Communist Party changed its policy of class struggle

to that of a "united front," the Party organization in the

literary circle started to reach out to writers on the right

and in the middle, the very people Lu Xun had been

castigating. Lu Xun was reluctant to collaborate with them

and slow to respond to the new policy. The Communist

party's organizers in the Shanghai literary circle began to

put pressure on Lu Xun. While they continued to flatter Lu

Xun, they instigated other writers to circulate innuendos

about him.130 Lu Xun had conceived of working in the

Communist movement as a heroic cause and suddenly found

himself embroiled in petty politics. He felt himself "a

slave constantly whipped by slave overseers." Lu Xun lived

129
In answering a questionnaire, Lu Xun acknowledged the role of
Soviet literature in his turn to Communism. He said that he had
been suspicious of the Bolshevik revolution and unsure of the
future of the "new society," but later he was impressed with the
success of the Soviet Union. Of Soviet literature, he preferred
books about fighting to those about construction. Lu Xun,
Thirty Years' Writings, vol. 8, p. 20. [ ^MV&'X^iffl ]
130 p o r e x a m p l e , they i n t i m a t e d that L u X u n w a s a T r o t s k y i t e .

Page 100
his last few months in agony and anger. He seems to have
known that those "slave overseers" would continue to use him
after his death, and, with Nietzschean contempt for them, he
wrote in 1936, shortly before his death:

According to Zhuang Zi, it does not mattter where you

leave a dead body, for it will perish just the same,
"devoured by the birds of the air or the ants in the
earth."

I am not so generous, though. If my flesh and blood

are to feed beasts, I prefer to feed lions, tigers and
eagles. Not one scrap will I give to mangy curs.

When lions, tigers, and eagles are well fed, they

afford a magnificent spectacle in the sky, on cliffs,
amid deserts and jungles. Even when captured and kept
in a zoo, or killed and stuffed as specimens, they are
still a fine sight which drives petty thoughts from the
mind.

But if you fatten a pack of mangy curs, all they can do

is to rush madly about and whine--disgusting!131

Lu Xun's readers, young and old, all grieved at his

death. Lu Xun has since become a legend, an idol of the
Communist movement. Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist
party, had a genuine admiration for Lu Xun. When he staged
the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he conceived of himself as

131
Lu Xun, "Jotted in the Mid-Summer," in Selected Writings,
vol. 4, p. 303.

Page 101
continuing the cause of Lu Xun, whom he exalted as "the
great banner bearer of the proletarian cultural revolution."
Those Communist agents who plotted against Lu Xun
became the dominant figures of China's cultural elite when
the People's Republic was founded in 1949. They praised Lu
Xun in most extravagant terms, while using their power to
cover up the fact that their relations with Lu Xun were by
no means cordial. In 1966, when they became the first
victims of the Cultural Revolution,"Persecuting Lu Xun" was
among their gravest "crimes."

Page 102
Chapter 5 To Rebel Is Justified: Young Mao Zedong
and Nietzsche
Of Nietzsche admirers of the May Fourth period, Mao
Zedong was to play the greatest role in China's later
developments. Mao Zedong was born in 1893 in Shaoshan, a
village in Hunan Province. Between 1900 and 1906, Mao
Zedong studied Confucian classics under private village
tutors. His father, a well-to-do landholder, was not
supportive of his son's aspiration for further education.
Mao Zedong was unable to continue his education until 1910
when, against his father's will, he managed to attend a
higher primary school at the age of 17 among students much
younger than he. Next year, through a teacher's
recommendation, Mao went to Changsha, the provincial capital
of Hunan, to study in a secondary school. When the 1911
Revolution broke out, he enlisted himself in the
revolutionary army for a few months. He did not have a
stable study environment for another two years until he was
admitted into the Provincial Fourth Normal School in 1913,
which was soon merged with the First Normal School. It is
during the next few years in the First Normal School that he
received most of his formal education.

Mao's writings and speeches indicate that he was

subjected to various intellectual influences from different

Page 103
sources, both Chinese and Western. Mao Zedong had a
predilection for China's Legalist tradition. In secondary
school, he was once highly praised by his teacher for
writing a paper on Shang Yang, a Legalist reformer of fourth
century B.C.. He also enjoyed reading On Evolution and
other books written by Yen Fu and was influenced by social
Darwinism. Of contemporary writers, Mao Zedong was most
impressed by Liang Qichao. When he was in higher primary
school, Mao Zedong read Liang's writings with such
enthusiasm that he could recite many of them. In 1917 when
Mao Zedong, with a friend, organized a student
association, he named it "Study Society of People's
Rejuvenation," apparently inspired by Liang Qichao's idea
that China would become a strong nation only after its
people were rejuvenated. When the New Culture movement
began, Mao Zedong read New Youth and other progressive
journals avidly and became an admirer of Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun
and other leading literary figures.

Mao Zedong must have read Chen Duxiu's references to

Nietzsche in New Youth. But his interest in Nietzsche was
probably roused more by Yang Changji, a teacher in the
Normal School who had studied in Japan, Germany and
England.132 In late 1917 and early 1918, Mao Zedong took an
ethics course from Yang who assigned Chinese translation of
Systems of Ethics by Friedrich Paulsen as reading. The copy

Yang Changji(1871-1920) was a prominent scholar and educator.

Page 104
of Chinese translation Mao used miraculously survived all
the tumultuous years. From notes written on the book, it is
known that young Mao Zedong was an admirer of Nietzsche.133
German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen might be an
unfamiliar name to many readers in our time, but he was
quite influential in the beginning of this century and his
book system of Ethics was the first systematic introduction
of Western ethics ever published in Chinese. Between 1917
and 1918, Mao Zedong studied this book and his enthusiasm
for the book is undisputed: his marginal notes number about
ten thousand Chinese characters, while the book itself is
about a hundred thousand Chinese characters long.
The translator of Paulsen's book, Cai Yuanpei, was a
highly respected scholar, political activist, and educator.
Cai Yuanpei published the book in 1909 while studying in
Leipzig. He based his translation on a Japanese edition
instead of the German original. The Japanese translation,
in its turn, was a partial translation of an English version

133 There are two stories about the book. According to Li Rui,
Paulsen's book, along with Mao's other books, had been kept at
his parents' house in Shaoshan. In 1927 when the right wing of
KMT began to purge the Communists, Mao's family burned most of
Mao Zedong's diaries, notebooks and books. Only this book and a
notebook were rescued by a friend. See Li Rui, Comrade Mao
Zedong's Early Revolutionary Activities (Beijing: Chinese Youth
Press, 1957) [ $ $ » (^ # JiCf^ 6 W $ 3 1 % ft %j » ]ftj£: \ S tB
ftKriUpp- 37-42. According to another source, one of Mao's
classmates borrowed the book from Mao and kept it for many years
before he returned it to Mao Zedong in 1950. See Gao Jucun and
others, Young Mao Zedong (Beijing: Publisher for Historical
Sources of the Chinese Communist Party, 1990) [ iKB^j ^»f ' ^ll^k »
mm m > m&m, m^mm itM^^m &im mm^t] .
pp. 48-49.
Page 105
by Frank Thilly.134 Before Cai Yuanpei went to study in

Germany in 1907, he had already studied in Japan for a few

years and probably had more confidence in his Japanese than

in his German. It is not known if Cai Yuanpei ever checked

his translation against the German original, but one thing

is clear: differences between the Chinese translation and

the German original are many and significant.135 Cai

Yuanpei's translation includes only the "Introduction" and

"Book II" of Paulsen's book, and is a mixture of paraphrases

and literal translations. While it would be interesting for

us to know whether mistakes in the Chinese translation were

made by Cai Yuanpei or had already been inherited from the

Japanese translation, it was the same for Mao Zedong: he

responded to Nietzsche not through his writing or writings

about him, but through a Chinese interpretation of a

Japanese translation of a English translation of Paulsen's

comments.

In Book I of his System of Ethics, which was not

translated, Friedrich Paulsen traces the main developments

of moral ideals from classical Western antiquity to the end

134 Friedrich Paulsen, A System of Ethics, trans, by Frank

Thilly, (New York: Scribners' Sons, 1899). See Stuard R. Shram,
ed. Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. xxix. (The author has
yet to find the Japanese translation.)
135
In the following pages, I will compare Thilly's English
version of Paulsen's book with Schram's English translation of
the Chinese version of Paulsen's book to illustrate the
differences between the Chinese translation and the German
original.

Page 106
of the nineteenth century. He was dismayed to notice the
spell Nietzscheanism cast over the contemporary Germans,
especially young Germans. His book can be viewed as an
attempt to roll back the kind of "moral nihilism"
represented by Nietzsche as well as the pessimism
represented by Schopenhauer. Paulsen tried to revive
Europe's old values, which could, he thought, be achieved by
combining Hellenic humanism with Christian holiness.
Paulsen saw in these two sets of values a common feature:
what Nietzsche called "ascetic ideals."
In the introduction of Paulsen's book, what caught Mao
Zedong's attention was the part referring to Nietzsche.
Paulsen cited Nietzsche, the youth culture, and socialism as
symptoms of cultural nihilism and a continuation of a
misguided Enlightenment. He presented his book as an effort
to ward off this anti-traditional trend without resorting to
obscurantism. What Mao read is not the real Paulsen but a
transformed Paulsen who, after a three-step interpretation
and translation (German-English-Japanese-Chinese), embraced
the spirit of the Enlightenment and extolled the kind of
iconoclasm characteristic of his time. There is no better
way to describe this miraculous metamorphosis than to put
side by side an English and the Chinese translation of the
same paragraph. [To facilitate further discussion, Mao's
marginal notes are inserted in the Chinese translation
within square brackets].
Paulsen's words as translated by Thilly:

Page 107
 The present is characterized by a strong desire to
reject a priori all the old accepted truths. There are
many symptoms of this desire: think of the avidity with
which Friedrich Nietzsche's oracular utterances
concerning the necessary transformation of all values
(die Umwertung aller Werte) are received by the young,
as well as of the violent condemnation by the social
democracy of all existing political and social
institutions. A passionate mania for the new and
unheard-of, in thought, in morals, and in modes of
life, has taken hold of our times. It is utterly
useless to appeal to authority and tradition; this
mania is nothing but an outbreak of free individual
thought, which has been repressed so long, and made
distrustful by coercion; it is the reaction against the
school, which forced men not to think, but to
memorize, against the church, which asked them not
think, but to believe. These are the symptoms of the
Aufklarung, the Aufklarung which was long since
reported dead; it has come back to life and has taken
hold of the masses, of the young men especially, of
course; they want to do their own thinking and mould
their lives, and not to be governed blindly by the
traditional thoughts and actions of others. And to
this they have a perfect right; . . . It will be the
business of ethics to invite the doubter and the
inquirer to assist in the common effort to discover
fixed principles which shall help the judgement to
understand the aims and problems of life. . . .
Perhaps he will then find that much of what he was
about to cast aside, as a mere command of caprice, is
rooted in the very nature of things, and consequently
also in his own will.136

Paulsen, 1899, pp. 28-29.

Page 108
The Chinese translation with Mao's marginal notes in bold
type face and in brackets reads:

The contemporary social mind has an increasing

tendency to seek what is new, to reject the old
accepted a priori truths. There are many evidences of
this tendency, such as Nietzsche's statements, the view
of the age of youth that everything should be
transformed, of socialism that would change the old
customs of state and society. These are but the most
obvious examples. The contemporary age, whether in
thought, in morality, or in life styles, is rejecting
all things old and seeking the new. As for the
authority of religion and its ancient proverbs,
everyone regards them as worthless. Having been so
excessively repressed, in reaction they rebel and
become skeptics, and their subjective ideas are
breaking down the walls and escaping in all directions,
in reaction to the old unthinking learning and the
religions of unquestioning faith. [Mao's marginal note:
All our nation's two thousand years of scholarship may-
be said to be unthinking learning.] These are the
characteristics of the Enlightenment. The
Enlightenment of the past still exists and is
reappearing again today. At first taking hold of the
young people, today it is spreading among the common
people. [Mao's marginal note: This is today's
situation in our nation.] Those who have been
oppressed by the thought and the prescriptions for
living of the past, regard this as the blind leading
the blind, and inevitably want to do their own thinking
and to open up another world. Such is the right of
freedom. . . . The problem of ethics is to help those
who have fallen into skepticism, to discover the true

Page 109
 purpose and task of life and to give it a foundation in
free investigation.137

The Chinese translation does not misrepresent Paulsen's

view that Nietzsche, along with German youth culture and
socialism, represented rebellious sentiments against
traditional thinking and institutions. However it misled
Mao to believe that Paulsen shared Mao's exhilaration at
living in an age of Enlightenment, when a new world is
rising from the rubble of the old.
It would be wrong to assume that Mao's aversion to some
Chinese traditions came from reading Paulsen's book. Since
the last decade of the nineteenth century, there had been a
prevalent sentiment among Chinese intellectuals that China's
indigenous thought and institutions were inadequate and
irrelevant in the age of imperialism. Mao did not need to
wait for Nietzsche or Paulsen to be infected with this
sentiment. Kang Youwei's attack on orthodox Confucian
tradition, Yan Fu's introduction to social Darwinism, Liang
Qichao's trenchant and emotional appeal for "rejuvenating"
the Chinese nation, and the ongoing New Culture movement,
all had left indelible marks on Mao Zedong. It is even
possible that Mao knew little about Nietzsche except for
hearing his name mentioned by Paulsen and some Chinese
writers such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. For Mao Zedong,
Nietzsche was first of all a symbol of rebellion against

137
Shram, 1992, pp. 193-194.

Page 110
tradition and against established order. That Nietzsche was

chosen as a symbol might also have something to do with

young Mao Zedong's special respect for things German. Both

the recollection of Mao's friends and his own writings

indicate that in his First Normal School years Mao Zedong

was an admirer of Prussia and the Wilhelminian German Reich

and that Otto von Bismarck and William II were two of his

idols. Probably because of his enthusiasm for the German

military, he was nicknamed Molkte by his classmates.138 In

this instance, Mao Zedong was just like other Chinese

reformers at the turn of the century who genuinely believed

that a nation's wealth and power was proof of the

superiority of its leading intellectual trends, and that

adopting those same trends would lead China out of weakness

and poverty.

The inadequacy of Mao's knowledge of Nietzsche does not

preclude parallels between Nietzsche's and Mao's thought.

With enormous differences in educational, social, and

national backgrounds, their views of life are certainly

different: Nietzsche was not in the least concerned with

defending his nation against imperialist encroachment or

138 A reference to Helmuth Karl von Molkte. Molkte's name

translated into Chinese is "Mao Qi," [^ "BT ] as if having the
same family name as Mao Zedong. Siao Yu, Mao Tse-tung and I
were Beggers (Syracuse University, 1959), pp. 69-70; Zhongguo
Geming Bowuguan and Hunan Sheng Bowuguan, eds., Sources of the
Study Society of People's Rejuvenation (Beijing: People Press,
1980) [ tipmmft mwm* mm wwm> <&&m mm »i, P.
250.

Page 111
with achieving social justice through revolutions as Mao
was; Mao had no such subtlety or profundity in philosophic
speculation, or any aesthetic interests in music or art as
Nietzsche did. On the other hand, Mao did show a remarkable
affinity to Nietzsche in his general outlook of universe and
human life, in his volitionary view of history, his advocacy
of a dynamic life and his amoralism. Mao's marginal notes
on Paulsen's Ethics reveal that he was much closer to
Nietzsche than to Paulsen in cosmology and moral philosophy.
Included in the Chinese version and quite well
translated is a section that discusses the issue of "death."
Without mentioning the name of Nietzsche, Paulsen tried to
defend traditional values against a Nietzschean theme: God
is dead, and men have no after-life; the whole set of
traditional values is indeed left without a foundation.
Paulsen attempted to trivialize the whole issue by
making a distinction between "the finite" and "the infinite"
God. He said,

Everything finite is perishable; God alone, the

Infinite One, fills all times with His presence.139

(The Chinese translation dropped the reference to God:

Everything finite is perishable; only the infinite

reality is forever and unperishable.140)

139
Paulsen, 1899, p. 338.
140
Schram, 1992, p. 251.

Page 112
If God is reduced or expanded to "the Infinite One," (or as
the Chinese translation put it, the "infinite reality,")
then Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead," if not
totally absurd, has lost much of its weight. If men, by
their very nature, are "finite" beings, then the lack of an
after-life, or men's eventual death does not constitute a
reason for moral nihilism, on the contrary, it is even a
precondition of a moral life. As Paulsen put it: Death
enables men to live a historical life; death makes relations
of love and caring between parents and children possible;
the death (of individuals, institutions, nations etc) makes
renovation and evolution possible; and despite their
mortality, men can pass their achievements on to their
descendants, etc.

Paulsen emphasized that traditional values are valid

because they serve men's finite existence:

If the life of a generation has no value in itself, if

its relation to its immediate ancestors and descendants
cannot make it valuable, then its relation to those
most remote successors cannot give it worth. The value
of our science and philosophy, of our art and poetry,
depends upon what they do for us; . . . 141

Mao admired Paulsen too much to disagree with him. But

he sensed that there was something wrong with Paulsen's
arguments. He concluded that Paulsen did not "state them

141
Paulsen, 1899, p. 338.

Page 113
very clearly."142 Mao made comprehensive remarks to express
his own views on life and the universe, which he believed he
shared with Paulsen. But these views are in fact a
refutation of Paulsen on a quasi-Nietzschean ground.
Mao refused to accept any distinction between the
"infinite" and the "finite." He commented in the margin:

Although it is not infinite, yet it is infinite. This

finite really can never be destroyed.

The context of this marginal note suggests that "it" refers

to what Paulsen called "the finite." For Mao a dichotomy of
"the Infinite One" and "the finite" does not exist. There
is only becoming, the totality of a universal process, in
Mao's words:

All phenomena in the world are simply a state of

constant change for which there is no birth and death,
no formation and no demise. Life and death are both
change. Since there is no birth and destruction, but
only change, and change is inevitable and necessary,
the formation of this necessarily means the destruction
of that, and the destruction of that necessarily means
the formation of this. . . .143

By rejecting the notion of "the finite," Mao actually

abolished the possiblity of basing moral values on the
finite existence of men. Mao's universe of constant
destruction and formation can be nothing but an amoral

142
Schram, 1992, p . 253.
143
Tbid. , p. 249.

Page 114
natural process. And it is much closer to Nietzsche's
cosmos than to Paulsen's. There is, however, a difference
between Mao and Nietzsche. For Nietzsche the universal
process is abysmal, it demands heroism and a tragic spirit
to apprehend it without succumbing to total desperation.
For Mao this process was progressive and to be welcomed and
enjoyed. The difference probably came from the fact that
Mao's cosmology was rooted in Chinese philosophy, especially
its Daoist tradition and was affected by Spencerian
evolutionism in its Sinicized form shaped by Yen Fu and
Liang Qichao. Unlike Nietzsche or other Westerners, Mao did
not experience the "death of God" as a trauma.
With such a different, if not opposite, cosmology, Mao
turned Paulsen's defense of traditional values into a
glorification of destruction and revolution. Paulsen's
comments on men's finiteness or death as the precondition of
moral value was perceived by Mao Zedong as a call for death
and destruction. In the margins, Mao elaborated on the
necessity to change China's political systems, social
systems, the "national character." He also commented on the
"great revolutions" launched by various nationalities,
"periodically cleansing the old and infusing it with the
new, . . . " And he was exhilarated at the prospect of the
destruction of the universe,"... because from the demise

Page 115
of the old universe will come a new universe, and will it
not be better than the old universe?"144
Given such an outlook, it is not surprising that Mao
expressed an ethical view very different from Paulsen's. He
described his own ethics as a combination of individualism
and realism. About the meaning of individualism, Mao
explained:

Every act in life is for the purpose of fulfilling the

individual, and all morality serves to fulfill the
individual. Expressing sympathy for others, and
seeking the happiness of others, are not for others,
but for oneself. My heart contains this love of
others, so I need to fulfill it, for if it cannot be
fulfilled then there is something lacking in my life, I
have not achieved my ultimate end. . . .145

By "realism" Mao referred to the absolute and exclusive

value of "the spiritual and physical experiences that I
bring together in the course of my life in the universe, and
which I must make every effort to actualize. . . . I am
responsible only to my subjective and objective reality; I
am not responsible for whatever is not my subjective and
objective reality." Aside from this reality of self,
according to Mao, nothing from the past or future has any
relevance.146

144
Ibid. , p . 250.
145
Ibid. , p. 251.
146
Ibid. , p. 251-253.

P a g e 116
 Mao mistakenly believed that Paulsen in fact meant
these two principles, but "just did not express them
clearly." If Paulsen had been asked, he would have
emphatically rejected Mao's ethics and regarded it as a
Chinese variation of Nietzscheanism.
After 1919, Mao Zedong, along with many other
intellectuals, began to take an interest in Bolshevism and
in 1921 he became actively involved in the founding of the
Chinese Communist Party. He rose to the top of the
Communist party's leadership in the 1930s and was the
undisputed leader of the People's Republic of China from
1949 to 1976. During this period, his personal impact on
Chinese history is unmatched by any other Chinese figure.
To what extent did Paulsen's book and Mao's encounter with
Nietzsche influence Mao's thought and life? Was this
predilection for Nietzsche the momentary whim of a young man
at the age of 24, which left no trace on his character?
There is evidence that Mao's acquaintance with Paulsen and
Nietzsche had an impact on Mao's outlook that extended far
into his later life.

What happened between 1917/1918 when Mao read Paulsen's

book and formulated his own ethics and 1919, when he
appeared as a potential organizer of a mass movement? A
common interpretation is that Mao had overcome his own
individualism and acquired a social consciousness.147 The

For example, See Schram, 1992, pp. xxxii-xxxiii)

Page 117
presumption of this interpretation is specious in that it
does not distinguish between a person's personal ethics and
his social and political thought. Between 1918 and 1919,
much happened in China: Leading Chinese intellectuals
introduced Marxism to China; many Chinese intellectuals were
disillusioned with Western liberal countries because of the
Paris peace conference and many were drawn to the model of
the Russian Bolshevik revolution; the eruption of mass
protest after the May Fourth Events pointed to a new source
of social change. A new vision of a total transformation of
China through mass revolution dawned upon many intellectuals
including Mao Zedong. Mao no longer envisaged an elite
playing the sole role in revolutionizing China but saw
political power lying in organized masses.

Such a change in social and political thinking,

however, does not necessarily entail a change in cosmology
and ethics. Those ideas which Mao had associated with
Nietzsche remained a powerful force in his thought. They
affected his actions as a political activist, and later on,
as the leader of the country. In studying historical
figures of any complexity, one cannot expect a constant
pattern of behavior conforming to one set of fixed concepts.
An individual is very likely to be dominated by different
aspects of an ideology or different ideologies in diffferent
phases of his life. In Mao's case, the concepts associated
with Nietzsche surfaced again and again during some critical
moments of his life and were often turned into actions. The

Page 118
iconoclastic attitudes toward tradition first took the form
of the "new democratic revolution" which overthrew the whole
established economic, social and political structure which
was associated with the influence of foreign powers, feudal
land ownership and privileged big business. Later, in the
beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao called for
smashing all things feudal, capitalist, and revisionist,
which included all traditions of China, the West and the
Soviet block. This time, cultural nihilism was not
championed by a disgruntled young intellectual but by the
al'l powerful leader of China's Communist Party. Mao's
concept of the universe as a constant flow of destruction
and formation, and his belief in the absolute advantage of
destruction of the old or the existing continued to dominate
his later thought. Up to his death, Mao never really
believed that World War III was avoidable. He envisioned a
Communist victory after hundreds of millions of people were
wiped out in a nuclear war.148 In the "little red book"
widely circulated in China and in other countries in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, a motto of Mao's was included:

There will be no creation without destruction; go ahead

with destruction and creation will naturally follow.

Does this not echo Mao's marginal notes on Paulsen's Ethics?

148
Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers; the Last
Testament, Trans, and ed. by Strobe Talbott. (Boston: Little
Brown, 1974), pp. 255-275.

Page 119
 Mao's "individualism" and "realism" did not become the
moral foundation for the socialist society, but they
continued to influence Mao as an undercurrent. Mao believed
that the interests of individuals should be subordinated to
the interests of the society. Nonetheless he also believed
that men would always act solely according to their
individual interests. Thus from the beginning of his career
as a revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong distinguished himself
by a "realism": he always based his policies on an analysis
of the self interest of individuals from diffferent social
backgrounds. Later, when Mao was older, the "individualism"
and the "realism" of the young Mao turned into a fundamental
cynicism about human nature. Mao Zedong became increasingly
wary of people around him as enemies or potential enemies.
He did not trust anybody. Political purges in Mao's later
years were frequent and cruel. Out of the same cynicism,
Mao felt the necessity of incessant "class struggles" to
maintain a collective socio-economic order against
"spontaneous capitalism."

It would be a mistake to attribute Mao's outlook to

Nietzsche alone. As explained before, his philosophic and
moral thinking was shaped by a multitude of influences, both
of Chinese and Western origin. However, either because of
the reverence of Chen Duxiu and other leading intellectuals
for Nietzsche or mistranslated comments by Paulsen on
Nietzsche, Nietzsche was an idol for the young Mao Zedong.
As a powerful symbol, Nietzsche served as an endorsement and

Page 12 0
reinforcement of some basic ideas Mao had acquired from

other sources, thereby contributing to the formation of

Mao's outlook about life and the world.

Mao Zedong and most of his generation of young

intellectuals were searching for ready-made answers to

China's social and political problems. Many did not have

the patience to study Western thought beyond a few basic

catch words. Mao Zedong's turning to Marxism illustrated

the theoretical poverty of the age. All evidences indicate

that Mao had no more than rudimentary knowledge about

Marxism when he became a founding member of the Chinese

Communist Party in 1921. He learned of Bolshevism and

socialist movement mainly from the magazine articles of Chen

Duxiu and Li Dazhao and from letters received from his

friend Cai Heseng who had joined the French socialist

movement while working and studying in France. In 192 0 Mao

Zedong made a two year plan to form "clear ideas" about

"various teachings of China and foreign countries from the

ancient times to the present" through reading translations

and articles from newspapers and journals.149 When Mao

Zedong and other members of the Study Society of People

Rejuvenation held discussions, all members spoke in very

general and vague terms about various theories and "isms."150

When Mao Zedong advocated Bolshevik revolution, he used

Ibid., pp. 64, 118.

Zhongguo Geming Bowuguan, pp. 15-41.

Page 121
Malthus to refute anarchism. He argued that if there was no

government and no war, the population would rise unchecked

and could not possibly be sustained.151

Given the general level of Mao's understanding of

Western thought, Mao's encounter with Nietzsche, through

Paulsen, might not be as insignificant as it first appears

to be. For Mao Zedong, his accepting socialism is not a

turning-away from Nietzsche but rather a logical development

of his respect for Nietzsche. In July 1919 Mao wrote an

editorial predicting the coming of the Communist age in

Germany. While he did not mention Karl Marx in it, he

emphatically insisted that Germany would not succumb to

Western Powers for long, because the German nation "had in

recent years been shaped by the philosophic ideas of

"uplifting' and "action' of Nietzsche, Fichte, Kidd, and

Paulsen. "152

It is unclear why Mao used "uplifting" and "action" to

characterize the four thinkers. It seems that for Mao the

Communist movement first of all represented a vitalism and a

Faustian spirit. "Uplifing" was a very important concept

for Mao. He discussed it with his classmates in 1917, and

151
Ibid., 149-150.
152
Shram, 1992, 363-366; the four names listed in Schram's
translation are Nietzscheed, Fichte, Goethe and Paulsen.
According to Colleted Works of Mao Zedong, [^ H§ J$C|j|] (Tokyo:
Sososha, 1983), vol 1, the third name is [ ^ ||f ]--an
established transliteration of Bejamin Kidd. Mao must have read
about Liang Qichao's discussion of Benjamin Kidd and mistaken
Kidd as a German.

Page 122
in 1920 he demanded "a life of uplifting" to be a
qualification for new members of his Study Society of People
Rejuvenation.153 When he became the leader of the People's
Republic of China, he wrote in Chinese calligraphy "Study
Well and Uplift Yourself Day by Day" as a motto for the
Chinese Communist Young Pioneers. From the 1950s to the
197 0s, these few words were inscribed on the front doors and
walls of every primary school in mainland China. The school
children did not know that their great leader had learned
the idea of "uplifting" from the four Westerners--Nietzsche,
Fichte, Kidd and Paulsen.154

153
Sources of the Society for People's Rejuvenation, pp. 2, 9,
110.
154
Mao's role in the PRC era is discussed further in Chapter 8.

Page 123
 Chapter 6 Disassociating Nietzsche from Social
Darwinism: Li Shicen
Li was born on December 27, 1892, one year minus one
day before Mao Zedong. His early life showed some parallels
with Mao Zedong's. Li was born in Liling, Hunan province, a
village not far from that of Mao Zedong. Like Mao Zedong,
he was educated by private teachers in his childhood and
later went to Changsha, the provincial capital, to continue
his education. In 1912, one year before Mao Zedong enrolled
in the Third Normal School, Li Shicen went to Japan and
began his study at the Tokyo Advanced Normal School. Just
as Mao Zedong , Li Shicen also admired Nietzsche at first
and turned to Marxism later.

In 1920 when Li worked for the Commercial Press as

editor in chief of the journal Education he was invited to
deliver a speech in the First Normal School through Mao's
mediation. After the speech, Mao and his friends asked Li
Shicen to teach them Western-style swimming and they all
swam in the River Xiangjiang. While it is unclear what Li
Shicen spoke about on this particular occasion, it is known
that Li Shicen delivered a speech about Nietzsche in

Page 124
Changsha in 1920. It is very likely that a common interest

in Nietzsche brought them together.155

By temperament, Li Shicen and Mao Zedong were very

different. While Mao Zedong was a politician and

revolutionary who took an interest in philosophy, Li Shicen

was a philosophically minded scholar. Both started their

careers in the early 1920s. Mao Zedong was a founding

member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. As the

leader of the peasant movement, he took an active part in

the Northern Expedition--a Communist-Nationalist joint

campaign against military strongmen and imperialist

influences in China. After Chiang Kai-shek's purge of

communists in 1927, Mao Zedong became one of the leaders of

the Red Army and later emerged as the leader of the Chinese

Communist movement.

Li Shicen returned to China from Japan in the spring of

1920. For the next eight years, he served as an editor for

the Commercial Press, a prestigious publisher, and for

several literary and scholarly journals. He also gave

lectures in several universities. In 1928, Li Shicen went

to France and Germany to study philosophy. After his return

155 The event was recalled by a student of the First Normal

School, see Gao Jucun, p.51. The date given, March 1918, must
be wrong. Li Shicen was not back in China until 192 0. Li's
visit must have been in 1920 or 1921. In October 1920, Bertrand
Russell, the British philosopher, was invited to give a lecture
by the General Educational Association of Hunan. Li Shicen
accompanied him on the trip. It is possible that Li Shicen was
invited to give a speech at the First Normal School on this
occasion.

Page 12 5
to China in 1930, Li devoted himself to teaching and writing
about philosophy until his death in 1934. Compared to Mao
Zedong's life, Li's was less eventful and colorful. But as
a perceptive philosopher, Li was among the few Chinese at
the time who systematically studied Western thought and were
capable of introducing Western philosophy to Chinese
readers. During his short academic life, Li Shicen wrote
articles and books on the history of Western philosophy. He
introduced a dozen Western thinkers to Chinese readers,
including Greek philosophers, Henri Bergson, William James,
Sdren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, and, above all, Friedrich
Nietzsche.
By the time Li Shicen graduated from Tokyo Advanced
Normal School and returned to China in 1920, Nietzsche's
name had already become very popular. He was known
variously as an uncompromising critic of tradition, an
individualistic thinker, a social Darwinist and someone who
promoted selfishness. And for being these he was mentioned,
alluded to, quoted, condemned or praised by many Chinese
writers. But this popularity, or notoriety, lacked
substance. Since Wang Guowei wrote "Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche" in 1904, there had not been further studies of
Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche's writings were not
available in Chinese, with the exception of a few excerpts

Page 12 6
of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a one-page synopsis of The

Birth of Tragedy.156
Li Shicen took it upon himself to systematically

introduce Nietzsche's thought to Chinese readers. As the

editor in chief of People's Bell, an influential journal, Li

edited a special issue focusing on Nietzsche's thought in

August 1920. He contributed an article and a bibliography

about Nietzsche to this special issue.157 Later in the same

year he made a short speech on "Nietzsche's Thought and Our

Life."158 In 1931 he published a booklet A Brief

Introduction to Superman Philosophy.159

Li Shicen's speech "Nietzsche's Thought and Our Life"

was delivered at the General Educational Association of

Hunan in 1920. In it, Li discussed the relevance of

Nietzsche's philosophy to people's lives. He argued that

Nietzsche's thought was the best means of transforming life

in China. What is especially interesting are his opinions

156
Tian Han, "On Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy," [g£/§ $ (ft (
MM Z H 4.) ] in Juvenile China [ ( ')} ^.f£ |IJ» ] (The Journal of
Juvenile China Association) No. 3, (Sept. 15, 1919)
157
Li Shicen, "A Criticism of Nietzsche's Thought," and
"Nietzsche's Works and Works about Nietzsche" in Vol. 2 No. 1
of People's Bell (August 1920) [J3c ip ] . The article was later
published in Articles of Li Shicen (Shanghai: Commercial Press,
1924) [ ^ ^ ^ ! i ycM ]
158
Li Shicen, "Nietsche's thought and our Life" was delivered
for the General Educational Association of Hunan. It was
published in his Lectures of Li Shicen (Shanghai: Commercial
Press, 1924) [ ^ ^ ^ ^ i l ^ ]
159
Li Shicen, A Brief Introdution to Superman Philosophy [ { j|g
A @ H iMM} ] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1931)

Page 127
about Nietzsche's criticism of Darwinism and democracy, two
ideas prevalent in China at the time.
According to Li Shicen, Nietzsche contradicted all
three major principles of Darwinian evolution: the struggle
for life, the survival of the fittest, and natural
selection. First, the struggle for life would be
meaningless if men did not constantly conquer and create.
The competition based on the will to power was more
important than the struggle for life. Second, Nietzsche did
not agree that the survival of the fittest was a rule. The
fittest originally meant the strong, but in society the
strong were often less adapted to survival and the weak were
not necessarily unfit to survive. Finally, natural
selection ignored the inner power of man, and gave undue
emphasis to external factors. Human life could not be
uplifted if human beings were only concerned with adapting
to their environment instead of conquering and creating
their environment.160

Li also gave a sympathetic interpretation to

Nietzsche's thoughts about equality and hierarchy.
According to Li, Nietzsche did not mean to oppose social and
political equality or advocate social and political
hierarchy. The problem with the idea of equality was that
it emphasizes external regulations while neglecting man's
inner quality:

Li, Lectures, p. 140.

Page 128
 Although we advocate "equality' in terms of various
external regulations, we have to support "hierarchy'
regarding inner quality. . . . If humanity had been
equal in quality, "evolution' would never have been
possible. According to Nietzsche, changing and
becoming naturally lead to inequality, to a power
hierarchy.161

This hierarchy, Li explained, is a result of efforts and

competition, and it is compatible with Kropotkin's mutual
aid:

All people who practice mutual aid are the ones who are
up to mutual competition. For those who do not
compete, mutual aid amounts to nothing more than the
lame helping the lame. They would neither go very far,
nor last very long.162

Though this short speech of 1920 about Nietzsche is

informal, it shows Li to have been a perceptive critic with
a sharp eye for important issues.
Both Li's 1920 article and 1930 booklet provided a
general introduction to Nietzsche's philosophy. The booklet
was basically an expansion of the article: it reorganized
the main ideas expressed, substantiated some arguments, and
added a brief biography of Nietzsche and a chapter on the
development of Nietzsche's thought. The ten years between
the two writings did not change Li's views about Nietzsche.

161
Tbid. , pp. 141-142
162
Ibid.

P a g e 129
For convenience the following analysis will be based mainly
on the booklet.
A Brief Introduction to Superman Philosophy was
published in 1931.163 It was divided into twelve chapters,
totaling ninety-nine pages. The appended bibliography
indicates that Li Shicen drew his sources from English
translations of Nietzsche's works, as well from books about
Nietzsche in German, English, and French. The book,
however, rarely gives sources when making references to
Nietzsche's works. Its style is informal. Li Shicen
approached Nietzsche's thought as an intuitive philosopher
rather than a pedantic scholar. There are no hairsplitting
arguments about particular texts but bold sweeping
generalizations. The Nietzsche he construed was much more
consistent than the real Nietzsche who was constantly
struggling with himself and wading through conflicting
ideas. Despite all its defects, Li's interpretation was
insightful and interesting.

In his preface to the booklet, Li Shicen made clear his

purpose in studying Nietzsche--he wanted to use his
philosophy to awaken and to shock the Chinese nation and to
change the nature of the Chinese people. After explaining
each of Nietzsche's main concepts, Li Shicen would use it to
condemn Chinese thought and values. Li Shicen was neither

163 The preface to the book was written in 1930. It is unclear

when Li actually wrote it.

Page 13 0
the first nor the last of a group of Nietzschean cultural
critics in twentieth century China.164 But he was probably
the only one who had systematically used Nietzsche's
concepts to criticize the Chinese culture.
Li Shicen began his introduction with a short biography
of Nietzsche and a chronological description of his thought.
He divided Nietzsche's thought into three phases: the
aesthetic, the positivistic, and the ethical. Although he
considered Nietzsche's later works more important, his brief
discussion of individual books by Nietzsche shows that he
was far more familiar with Nietzsche's earlier works than
with his later works. Li Shicen gave a succinct summary and
insightful comments on the The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely

Meditations, and Human, All too Human. For example in the

following two paragraphs about Human, All Too Human, he

brought to light Nietzsche's perspectivism and the origin of
the superman concept:

In his Human All Too Human, Nietzsche showed

himself an absolute skeptic. He overthrew the
authority of all values and felt elated about his
freedom. He approached every issue with an icy
coldness at one moment, and with a fervent passion at
another; soon he would return to it with an icy
coldness again. He did not make assertions about
anything. His attitude was that of "either/or." He
constantly moved between two opposing views and treated
all knowledge and beliefs as fluid. For Nietzsche

164
Two examples of Nietzschean cultural critics discussed so far
are Chen Duxiu (chapter 3) and Lu Xun (chapter 4).

Page 131
 great skepticism was a necessary precondition of great
creation. The affirmation inherent in life consisted
of activities that were generated from "negation of
knowledge" and either/or." Therefore for Nietzsche,
skepticism was the sound foundation of the affirmation
of life.

In a certain sense, Nietzsche was a pessimist.

Though he was unlike other philosophic pessimists such
as Buddha or Schopenhauer, his utter contempt for
things "human" was also a variety of pessimism. He did
not see anything valuable in mankind, and therefore
abandoned all human ideals and aimed at an ideal beyond
mankind. Why was this ideal valuable? Out of
overflowing power and exuberant life, a superman
spontaneously emerged, who was capable of noble and
sacred deeds. To despise mankind for the sake of
supermen, isn't this also a form of pessimism?165

When Li Shicen came to Nietzsche's works in the third

phase, he lost much of his earlier eloquence and assurance.
He had great respect for Thus Spake Zarathustra but wrote
little about it. He stumbled through the remaining works,
imparting a few insights here and there, but seems to have
had difficulties comprehending them. Or perhaps the later
Nietzsche was less agreeable to Li's own philosophic
views.166
After giving a bird's-eye view of Nietzsche's
philosophy, Li discussed two thinkers who, he thought,

165
Li, A Brief Introduction, pp. 20-21.
166
Li Shicen's own philosophical views and their relations to
Nietzsche will be discussed later in this chapter. See page 156

Page 132
influenced Nietzsche most: Max Stirner and Arthur
Schopenhauer. The inclusion of Stirner in the booklet
deserves an analysis. Although he knew that Nietzsche had
not mentioned Stirner, Li still thought the latter's
influence on him was obvious.167 What attracted Li's
attention was the similarity of the two men's individualism.
According to Li, Stirner's concept of the "self" was
different from that of Kant, Fichte or the 18th century
individualists. It was a self that was "a unique,
indivisible, and heterogeneous microcosm, that was self-
created and self-completed." Nietzsche inherited this
concept of the self and rejected any attempt to superimpose
any interest above individual interest, whether it was the
other world, a god, abstract ideas, or the interest of a
class, a state or the whole society.168

Li Shicen was not the first to link Nietzsche with

Stirner; but as a critic of Chinese culture, he gave this
association a particular relevance. Li thought that the
kind of Western individualism Stirner and Nietzsche
represented was different from Chinese individualism. In
the Confucian tradition, individuals have always been
defined in social terms, by their roles in society.
Philosophers in the Daoist tradition, on the other hand,
have tended to treat any social relations as detrimental to

167
Li, A Brief Introduction, p. 31.
168
Ibid. , pp. 28-31]

Page 133
individuality. While there have been thinkers who tried to

base a good social-political order on the interests of

individuals, these thinkers always conceived the interest of

individuals in terms of basic material needs. For them,

individuals were a homogeneous whole. The concept of a

society founded on private interests of separate and unique

individuals was alien to China.

Li Shicen believed that it had been a grave problem for

the Chinese not to understand Western individualism. He

commented that the term individualism, when translated into

Chinese, had a negative connotation and was associated with

selfishness.

The concept of the self was most underdeveloped for the

Chinese. Having lived for several thousand years in a
patriarchical society, a feudal system, and a despotic
polity, the Chinese could live only as ignorant
subservient subjects, only as obedient descendants of a
family. Has the nation ever understood the dignity of
the self and its enormous responsiblity?169

Both Stirner and Nietzsche signified for Li Shicen a total

rejection of individuals making sacrifices for any

metaphysical ideas, institutions, or any other authorities.

Of the two Western thinkers, Li Shicen gave preference to

Nietzsche. He thought that Stirner's ideal society was an

association of egoists who act according to their own

interests, while Nietzsche was more concerned with

169
Ibid. , p. 91.

Page 134
transforming human nature and with creating superman, with
"elevating mankind to the status of supermen and founding a
world governed by supermen." In defending Nietzsche against
Arthur Drews' criticism, Li Shicen emphasized that Nietzsche
did not advocate the notion that a society should serve, and
sacrifice itself for, the will of a few individuals. For
Nietzsche, Li explained, "humanity consisted in free and
true individuals; there is no humanity above the
individual." Nietzsche's individualism was for "the cause
of humanity, humanism, and human dignity." [A^lErlli ' A^lLiti '
0
A^HF
In the seven chapters of the booklet, Li Shicen
introduced seven aspects: "Nietzsche's views on life,"
"Nietzsche's cosmology," "Nietzsche's views on values,"
"Nietzsche's views on evolution," "Nietzsche's views on
morality," and "Nietzsche's views on art." The first aspect
of Nietzsche's philosophy--"Nietzsche's views on life" was
mainly based on The Birth of Tragedy. Through a discussion
of the origin and decline of Greek tragedy, Nietzsche
commends a way of life. Li Shicen gave a succinct but very
accurate paraphrase of this earliest book of Nietzsche's.
After describing the orgiastic worship of Dionysus, Li
defined the Dionysian thus:

Thus submitting to the universal will and merging one's

own will with the universal will constitutes the

170
Ibid., pp. 31-32, 88-89, 90-91.

Page 13 5
 Dionysian spirit. The Dionysian spirit brings about
the art of music. Music used to be the expression of
primitive will and the symbol of the eternal will that
flows in the abysmal universe. Those people who were
wandering and roaming about in the Dionysian mode would
constantly elevate themselves and strive for the
ultimate fulfillment and, at the same time, feel the
eternity of nature and their own immortality, that is,
the ever presence of power, and the discovery in
themselves the life of the eternal will. 171

Li Shicen did not stop at paraphrasing. He argued that

the dual gods of Dionysus and Apollo are, after all,

symbolic and mystic representations of modes of human life.

The Dionysian is Nietzsche's counter-proposition to

Schopenhauer who had sought to deliver human life from

suffering by way of negating the will. Nietzsche's approach

was the contrary:

One should use suffering to deliver life from

suffering: to forge one's will and to ennoble one's
personality through suffering. Therefore [Nietzsche
thought] suffering is the source of beauty and power:
the more one suffers, the greater is the exertion for
beauty and power. Suffering is the only stimulant to
enhance the value of life. . . . The first principle
of life is to challenge life, to create a noble life
through the greatest suffering, to create a paradise on
earth with a tragic spirit.172

171
Ibid., pp. 37-38
172
Tbid. , pp. 39-40

Page 13 6
 While Li's interpretation of the Dionysian as plunging
into abysmal existence with a challenging stance is
plausible, the possibility of establishing an ideal society
is something he read into Nietzsche's work. In The Birth of
Tragedy and elsewhere, Nietzsche had repeatedly rejected any
sort of "paradise on earth." This mixture of understanding
and misunderstanding of Nietzsche bespeaks the underlying
reason of the Nietzche cult in China during the May Fourth
Movement and the 1920s. With a faith in progress, Li Shicen
and other Chinese reform-minded writers translated
Nietzsche's philosophical and aesthetic proposals into
socio-political ones and made him a prophet of social
reforms.
After formulating Nietzsche's views on life, Li Shicen
used them to evaluate "Chinese views of life." He concluded
that "the Chinese have always sought inner consolation in
the sanctuary of the Apollinian." Confucianism and other
Chinese philosophies "all lead the Chinese on to one road,
the road of passive deliverance [from suffering] and cheap
affirmation [of life]." It requires "a strong will" and "an
intoxicating Dionysus" to change "the passive and cheap
life" of the Chinese. The world of will, the Dionysian,
"represents the realistic, the revolutionary, the creative."
These concepts alone could overcome the defects of Chinese
culture--"the addiction to illusion, the inclination to

Page 137
compromise, and the tendency to remain within the boundaries

of tradition."173

Li Shicen next discussed two issues regarding

Nietzsche's cosmology. First he gave a full translation of

a section from Twilight of the Idols--"The History of an

Error" and credited Nietzsche with having decisively

abolished a philosophic error--the division of the world

into one of being and one of appearance.174 Then he

addressed the concept of eternal recurrence. The concept of

eternal recurrence is difficult and all kinds of questions

can be raised about it: Does Nietzsche intend a cosmology

with this concept? Is it always such a gloomy and

foreboding message that only a superman can accept it

without flinching? Or does it also serve as a consolation

or even an incentive for people to accept a world without

God? 175 For Li Shicen, this concept presented an entirely

different difficulty. As most other Chinese intellectuals

of his time, Li believed in progress and could not--or would

not--conceive of a Nietzsche who rejected the idea of

progress. Li Shicen tried hard to reconcile the concept of

eternal recurrence and the concept of progress in Nietzsche.

His first strategy was to distinguish between the

quantity and the quality of the will to power:

173
Ibid. , pp. 41-43.
174
Portable Nietzsche, pp. 485-486.
175
Cf. Zhou Guoping's discussion in Chapter 9; see page 263.

Page 13 8
 The quantity of the will to power is permanent, but the
quality of the will to power is in flux. In its
totality, the universe is a monster of power, that has
neither beginning nor end, that neither decreases nor
increases, that is neither mechanistic nor
teleological. It is a world where incessant self-
creation and incessant self-destruction elicit each
other and clash with each other. Our life is the same;
it is the perpetual recurrence of self-destruction and
self-creation. A demon shouts at your ears all day and
all night: "All you have lived through will return to
you in numerous times, nothing new will occur. All
kinds of pain and joy, separation and union, will
return to you in the same sequence and with the same
ending. Is there anything, such as the spider in the
pavillion, the moonlight between the trees, and even I
myself (the demon), who can ever expect to avoid this
eternal recurrence?" 176

But the quality of the will to power was in flux:

So far as it [the will to power] is in flux, the world

is full of a drive to move forward. Therefore although
the world recurs eternally, it is not without
evolution, without creation. . . . The will to power
is the eternal recurrence of destruction and creation,

17g
Li, pp. 50-51. The last part of the quotation (from "The
demon shouts at your ear" to the end is an exact translation of
a passage from The Gay Science. The English translation by
Kaufmann is the following: "What, if some day or night a demon
were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say
to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you
will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and
there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy
and every thought and every sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in
the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this
moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.
. . . " The Gay Science, p. 273.

Page 13 9
 but it always changes and develops. Thus is the world.
Thus is human life. Mankind always strides toward what
is bright, it would never stop at the same level. . . .
177

Li Shicen, however, was not totally convinced of this

explanation. He tried another strategy to reconcile the
concept of eternal recurrence and progress:

Although eternal recurrence could be interpreted by the

quantity and the quality [of the will to power],
Nietzsche's real motivation was to describe the
universe as extremely lifeless, extremely meaningless,
so that it could be rescued by the superman, so that
the lifeless could be revived and the meaningless could
be given meaning. . . .178

This second interpretation could be regarded as a

rhetorical one. It makes the idea of eternal recurrence a
literary mechanism to extol the ideal of superman rather
than a fact. But Li was not completely satisfied with this
second explanation either.
After the two tentative and apologetic analyses, Li
Shicen expressed his objection to the idea of eternal
recurrence, the only outright disagreement with Nietzsche in
his booklet:

Judging Nietzsche's thought from a logical point of

view, it is, after all, a pity that [Nietzsche]

177
Li, A Brief Introduction, pp. 50-51,
178
Ibid. , p. 51-52.

Page 140
 included the eternal recurrence in his superman
philosophy.179

This chapter on cosmology was the only one in which Li

Shicen did not criticize Chinese thought with Nietzsche's
ideas. There are probably two reasons for this. First,
China does not have a tradition of separating existence into
a world of being and a world of appearance, comparable to
that of the West, from Plato through Christianity to Kant
and Hegel. Second, Li Shicen could not reconcile the
concept of eternal recurrence with the idea of progress, in
which he firmly believed.
Li Shicen began his chapter on Nietzsche's views on
values with a partial translation of section 4, part I of
Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra exhorted the
people in the market place to be faithful to the earth and
to respect the body. Li Shicen explained that Nietzsche's
new valuation is based on "the exuberance of life and the
expansion of life," on men's instinctual life.180
The issue of instinct and sensuality in Nietzsche's
philosophy is a difficult one. How was Nietzsche different
from a libertine in regard to instinct and sensuality? Is
there a basic instinct or is there a multitude of equally
important instincts for Nietzsche? When Nietzsche talked
about "organizing chaos," what was this organizing power?

179
Ibid.
180
Ibid. , p . 58.

Page 141
Does rationality play any role at all in man's instinctual
life? Li Shicen did not elaborate on these issues. For Li
Shicen, Nietzsche's theory on instinct was merely a
refutation of asceticism. It was not categorically an idea
of Nietzsche but belonged to a broader tradition of Western
secularism.
Li Shicen rightly pointed to the ascetic tendency of
Neo-Confucianism. Otherwise, his criticism of Chinese
values in this chapter was not convincing. He contrasted
the Chinese concept of heaven with Nietzsche's commendation
of the earth, condemning the former as desecrating the
earth. Actually, the Chinese concept of heaven is very
different from the Western one. It does not represent a
separate realm from the earth, whether the latter is
understood as human society, earthly life, or instincts.
Whenever the term "heaven" is used along with the term
"earth" in China, they are always complementary to each
other rather than contradictory. Nietzsche's praise of the
"earth" does not, as Li Shicen proposed, warrant a rejection
of the Chinese concept of "heaven."

Li Shicen also mistakenly portrayed the Chinese concept

of "soul" as the counterpart of the Western concept of soul.
When Nietzsche said "this soul itself was still meager,
ghastly, and starved, and cruelty was the lust of this
soul," he referred to a particular ethical-religious
existence of man, that demanded "the mortification of

Page 142
body."181 In China, the concept of soul does not have great
relevance in Confucianism, Taoism, or Buddhism. When a
Chinese talks about the soul, he has in his mind the
immortal existence of a deceased person. There is no
tension between the "soul" and the "body." Li Shicen's
misguided attacks on these Chinese traditional concepts
suggests a major pitfall in cross-cultural understanding: it
is too tempting for one to take for granted the meanings of
common terms translated from another culture. In fact, the
more common a term is, the more likely it has culture-
dependent connotations that are difficult to convey in
another language.
The chapter "Nietzsche's View on Evolution" again shows
Li Shicen's intellectual brilliance. He first presented
Nietzsche's criticism of Darwinism and social Darwinism, a
topic he discussed in one of his earlier speeches.182 In
this booklet, Li went further to elaborate on Nietzsche's
theory of evolution, which serves at the same time as a
definition of superman.
He started with Nietzsche's allusion to evolution and
superman in Thus Spake Zarathustra:

I teach you the superman [orginally translated as

overman]. Man is something that shall be overcome.
What have you done to overcome him?

181 portabie Nietzsche, pp. 125-126.

182
See page 12 8.

Page 143
 All beings so far have created something beyond
themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great
flood and even go back to the beasts rather than
overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock
or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that
for the superman [overman]: a laughingstock or a
painful embarrassment. You have made your way from
worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you
were apes, even now, too, man is more ape than any
ape.183

This passage had been quoted by other Chinese writers to

demonstrate Nietzsche's concept of superman in Darwinist
terms. Li Shicen emphasized that the use of the words "from
worm to man" by Nietzsche was only a "symbolic expression."
Nietzsche did not accept Darwin's theory of evolution, but
"merely used it for the convenience of presentation."
"Superman was not a new species developed from man through
evolution, as man was from ape."184
What then is superman? Li Shicen gave three
interrelated definitions of superman. Li explained that
Nietzsche thought the life of mankind should be based on the
will to power. The will to power was the "true self of
mankind." All physical and spiritual movements aros,e from
this "true self." A true individual was not confined by
fixed concepts. He was nothing but "unreserved unfolding of
the true self." This was the origin of endless evolution.

183 Portable Nietzsche: p. 124.

184
Ibid. , pp. 66-67.

Page 144
Those who live by the will to power could not help having a
sense of distance from the ordinary masses. Li Shicen's
first definition of superman is "a sense of distance" due to
evolution.185
Since human evolution comes from those supermen who
lived in true freedom, superman is the symbol of human
evolution. "Superman is not an ultimate goal but a sign of
the process of life's evolvement--evolution." This was Li's
second definition. His third definition was: As soon as the
superman emerges, mankind returns to freedom. Hence the
superman is "the symbol of the salvation of mankind."186
Li Shicen's interpretation is not without problems.
His first two definitions are associated with the notion of
evolution, and the last refers to the salvation of mankind.
Even if Nietzsche was concerned with evolution or the
salvation of mankind, at the very least, he would have been
reluctant to apply these terms to his theory of superman.
Li Shicen's generalization about superman reflects his own
belief in non-Darwinist progress.
Li's interpretaton of the superman concept,
nevertheless, was superior to that of the social Darwinists,
which was popular at the time. By treating the superman as
"a sense," "a symbol," and "a sign" instead of a new

185
Ibid.
186
Ibid. , pp. 67-68.

P a g e 145
species, Li Shicen rescued Nietzsche from the narrow
confines of social Darwinism.
While he appreciated Nietzsche's concept of superman,
he did not share the elitism of many other Nietzsche
admirers. He even gave Nietzsche's aristocratism a populist
interpretation:

Nietzsche was disappointed about genius as well as

about the masses. He thought that in modern society
those who are viewed as the high and the noble are
mostly philistines, those who are regarded as the lowly
and worthless are mostly noble persons. Therefore
those commonly known as heroes or great men are not
necessarily noble, and those commonly known as the
ignorant and the lowly are not necessarily ignorant and
lowly. These terms such as high, noble, ignorant, and
the lowly should be applied to people according to the
quality of their inner life, not according to their
external attributes. . . This is the essence of
Nietzsche's aristocratism.187

Li Shicen began his discussion of "Nietzsche's View on

Morality" with Nietzsche's definition of the "master
morality" and the "slave morality" in Beyond Good and Evil.
He told readers that master morality "takes the noble race
who are remote from the ruled as the model," slave morality
"takes all lower classes, serving classes, and the slave
class as the model." Li Shicen characterized the two

187
Ibid., pp. 68-69.

Page 146
moralities respectively as "promoting the strong and the

great" and "protecting the weak and the small."188

There are two sections from Beyond Good and Evil that

deal with master morality and slave morality. If Li had

read these carefully, he should have understood that

Nietzsche named two types of morality not according to their

models but according to their origins: master morality

originated from the ruling group and slave morality from the

ruled group. Li should also have given a more sophisticated

account of the two types of morality.189 Li's oversimplified

presentation confirms the suspicion that he did not quite

understand Nietzsche's later works in their entirety, if he

had read them at all.

Li Shicen had a better understanding of Nietzsche's

criticism of Christian morality. He called Christian

virtues, such as "pity" and "love," "unseen murderers"

"whose victims do not feel hurt." Pity was the worst:

Pity appears to be very kind, but it in fact destroyed

independence, fortitude, perseverance and combativeness
of those being pitied. In addition, pity leads to
hypocrisy and destroys the spirit of freedom.

The reason for Nietzsche's rejection of Christian love,

Li explained, is that "to mete out only small favors and to

188
pp. 72.
189 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 260-261, in Friedrich
Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans, by Walter
Kaufmann, (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 394-399.

Page 147
seek only immediate results" could not provide mankind with
fundamental changes. What is needed is the true love that
is concerned with the future of mankind, with the supermen.
Li Shicen found a parallel between Christianity and
Confucianism. He equated the Confucian virtue of
benevolence with pitying; he thought that the Confucian
emphasis on mutual obligation among family members amount to
sacrificing the interests of individuals and mankind to the
self interests of families. He attacked the whole Chinese
moral tradition with an excessiveness which he learned from
Nietzsche:

Of the moral thoughts of the Chinese, there has been

only morality based on selfishness, not morality based
on humanity and human dignity; there has been only
morality reinforcing slave consciousness, not morality
improving the spirit of independence.

The morality Li Shicen intended to substitute for

Confucian moral values was the morality of the superman. He
based his exposition of the superman morality on three
paragraphs from Thus Spake Zarathustra.
The first of the three came from Part III, in which
Zarathustra called on his audience to "become hard."190 Here
Li Shicen translated the phrase into a Chinese term which
meant emotionally cold and indifferent to others, an antonym

190
Li, A Brief Introduction, pp. 73-75; Portable Nietzsche, p.
326.

Page 148
of "compassion."191 The original context of Nietzsche's text

suggested that by "becoming hard," Nietzsche simply meant

forming a strong will and character. While Li's translation

was problematic, his interpretation was not totally

inconsistent with Nietzsche. According to Li Shicen,

"becoming hard" had two layers of meanings. First, it was

an attitude of the superman toward others. While it looked

cruel when one "became hard" toward others, it could elicit

independence, fortitude, perseverance and combativeness from

others, thereby benefiting them.

Second, "becoming hard" should also be applied to the

superman himself.192 The superman would never surrender to

any force and would resist with the utmost effort. This is

also called the philosophy of war or the morality of war.

He also quoted "On War and Warriors" from Thus Spake

Zarathustra to illustrate the morality of war. Li Shicen

understood that in this context Nietzsche was not talking

about actual warfare but about attitude of life.193 He gave

a somewhat idealized but nevertheless legitimate summary of

the morality of war,

Nietzsche thought Goodness was a feeling of power;

happiness a feeling of increased power, a feeling of
succeeding in resistance. In other words, happiness

191
}%ffi
192
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche mentioned that a noble man
was "hard and severe" with himself, see sect. 260.
193
It should be noted that Nietzsche did mean actual warfare by
"war" in some other contexts.

Page 149
 was not satisfaction but expansion; not virtue but
capacity. The opposite of happiness, such as
wretchedness or sin, was but the sign of too much
cowardice and too many defects.194

The third passage Li Shicen used to illustrate the morality

of the superman is about the spirit's three Metamorphoses
from Thus Spake Zarathustra. He came up with an unexpected
interpretation, thinking that the camel, the lion and the
child stood for three "strategies" or "spirits" that "every
warrior of life must have." Probably because it is easy to
associate the lion with the spirit of a warrior, Li Shicen
did not specify what spirit the lion stands for. He
explained that the camel stands for perseverance and
endurance, qualities that were basic requirements for any
battle. The child stands for optimism that was critical for
victory. Together the three spirits completed Nietzsche's
morality of war. Li Shicen thought that the Chinese lacked
the morality of war, therefore he applied these same
metaphors to the Chinese in a different way:

The Chinese look like camels, but it is a sick camel

instead of a robust camel. The Chinese look also like
a lion, but it is a sleeping lion instead of an awake
lion. So far as the spirit of a child is concerned,
the Chinese do not have a trace of it. The Chinese
children could only drag along with their long sleeves
and their long pants. Could they ever dream of how the
Western children feel in their sailor's shorts? If

Li, A Brief Introduction, pp. 75.

Page 150
 even the Chinese children do not have the spirit of a
child, what do we expect of those precocious [Chinese]
youth?195

At first sight Li Shicen's interpretation and

application of Nietzsche's metaphors seem preposterous. But
they appear more understandable if one considers the
enormous distance between Li Shicen and Nietzsche. Even the
language barrier is of only secondary importance compared to
the dissimilar living conditions of Li Shicen and Nietzsche.
Throughout his life, Nietzsche lived in a protected
environment, among philosophers, scholars, and artists. He
was able to speculate on aesthetic, philosophic, and moral
questions, and to go through his spiritual metamorphoses
while keeping a safe distance from political and social
struggles. On the other hand, Li Shicen, like most other
Chinese writers of his generation, was an engaged reformer.
His paramount concern was to liberate the Chinese people
from poverty, social injustice, and political violence. As
a gifted thinker, Li Shicen was able to grasp Nietzsche's
message when the issues discussed were universal, even
though he sometimes tended to add to or subtract from what
Nietzsche intended. But there were also desperate
situations where Nietzsche's words were totally
incomprehensible for Li Shicen because of their divergent
experiences. The metamorphosis of the spirit is such a

195
Ibid. , pp. 79-80.

Page 151
case. By the three metamorphoses, Nietzsche described the

process of his own grappling with inherited ethical values

and his eventual liberation from them. Li Shicen did not

experience the same process of metamorphosis. From what he

wrote about ancient Chinese values, he did not seem to have

a thorough command of Confucian values. As he grew up, he

spent most of his time learning about Western ideas,

including Nietzsche's thought. Even if he had experienced a

metamorphosis from the camel and the lion, his status as a

writer committed to social reforms would have dictated that

he could not turn into a child,-a status only a detached

philosopher like Nietzsche could acquire.

While he could not understand Nietzsche's intention in

the three metamorphoses, he had reason to be impressed by

Nietzsche's imagery. Like every child in China, he must

have known the stories about the magic monkey.196 The magic

monkey had learned seventy-two metamorphoses. In fighting

all kinds of gods and demons in the universe, he changed

from one form to another to confuse his enemies. In the

end, the monkey was given the title of "god of war and

victory" by the Buddha. Nietzsche's three metamorphoses of

the spirit must have reminded Li Shicen of the magic

monkey's metamorphoses. The association of the three

metamorphoses with a warrior's strategies or spirits was

natural to Li Shicen.

196 The stories about the magic monkey were from The Journey to
the West, a sixteenth century novel.
Page 152
 The chapter "Nietzsche's View on Art" does not deal
with a new topic. In a previous chapter, Li Shicen had
explained Nietzsche's views on life by analyzing the
concepts of the Apollinian and the Dionysian, thus defining
life in terms of art. In this chapter his emphasis was
still on life, on art's relation to life.
Li Shicen argued that Nietzsche had first conceived two
types of art, the Dionysian and the Apollinian in The Birth
of Tragedy due to Schopenhauer's influence. But later he
abandoned this bifurcation, and proposed that both the
Apollinian and the Dionysian came from the same source--
intoxication. Apollinian illusion was but a variation of
Dionysian intoxication at a slower tempo.197
Compared to morality and knowledge, art is more
important. Morality and knowledge are static by nature;
like toxic drugs they will do harm when taken in excess.
Art is ever in flux by nature. When life tends to be
negated due to an overdose of morality and knowledge, art
can serve as the antidote. Art will enliven and elevate
life when it prevails.
By its nature, mankind is an artist just as it is a
product of art. The status of intoxication corresponds to a
sense of increased power, and it indicates an intensified
and enkindled existence. The essence of art is to express
life and express the will to power. Nietzsche thought that

Li, A Brief Introduction, p. 82.

Page 153
a major deficiency of previous aesthetic theories is that

they approach aesthetic issues from the viewpoint of the

"receiving side." The starting point of aesthetics should

be the "giving side," that is, appreciation of art is not a

passive activity but an indirect creation.

Just as in other chapters, Nietzsche's views of art

were also used to criticize Chinese culture. Li Shicen

thought that the Chinese have known only moral concepts and

have never known an art that expresses the climax of life.19

In his view, everthing turns around ethical concepts in

China:

The Chinese do nothing else but indulge in Apollinian

dreams; they have never known the existence of a world
of Dionysian intoxication, and they have known even
less about founding an Apollinian world through
Dionysian intoxication.199

Li Shicen's second criticism was that Chinese art

theory emphasizes the "receiving side" rather than the

"giving side." To make the inner life of the Chinese "more

intense and more profound," Li thought, Dionysian

intoxication and an art of "givers" are needed.200

In the beginning, A Brief Introduction to Nietzsche's

Superman Philosophy was intended by the author only as part

of a more ambitious work to be called Nietzsche 's Thought.

198
Cf. Wang Guowei' s comment, see page 48.
199
Li, A Brief Introduction, pp. 93-94.
200
Ibid., pp. 86-87.

Page 154
Li Shicen never had a chance to complete the larger project.
However, it is a momumental work in Chinese Nietzsche
scholarship. From its publication in 193 0, it remained the
only comprehensive introduction and criticism of Nietzsche's
philosophy in Chinese for three decades.
How and to what extent did Nietzsche's thought have an
impact on Li Shicen? According to Li Shicen himself,
Nietzsche's influence on him must have been overwhelming.
In "A Confession of My Attitudes Toward Life," which was
written as the preface to the Collected Speeches of Li
Shicen (1925), he recalled that in the late 1910s,

. . . I received a tremendous inspiration--

Nietzsche's thought. Probably my present life is still
a consequence of this inspiration. I felt that his
thought was very congenial to my nature. Since then my
life has been tinted with a very rich color. From then
on, I have never deviated from this idea [the context
makes it clear that "this idea" refers to Nietzsche's
thought] in whatever I am doing, in my studies, my
work, and my association with others. . . .201

Such panegyric, however, should not lead us to an

overestimation of Nietzsche's influence on Li Shicen. His
generation of Chinese intellectuals had the tendency to
exaggerate their intellectual debt to Western thinkers.
This habit was partly a cultural inheritance. For

201
Li, Speeches, pp. 19-20. The'preface was written on January
1, 1924. The time is somewhere after 1916 but before his return
to China.

Page 155
centuries, it had been a fashion for Chinese literati to

attribute their ideas to ancient philosophers and writers.

Just as in medieval Europe, such a practice was not regarded

as a sign of lack of creativity. Now in the twentieth

century, there was a tendency to ascribe all ideas to

Western inspiration. But an examination of Li's philosophic

writings shows that it is far from certain that Li's thought

was dominated by Nietzsche.

In a speech he delivered for the Philosophy Society of

Southeast University in Nanjing and at the Suzhou Second

Women's Normal School, he outlined his view of life which

was called a "life only theory [ H^^.f^] . " Li Shicen defined

"life" as containing five perspectives: dynamism [jjfj ] ,

becoming [ §| ] , instant creation and destruction [ijijt ^BijjJtM ] ,

expansion [ tH;7v ] , and mutual encompassing [ J c M ] - 2 0 2

"Dynamism" refers not only to human beings but to all

other beings in the universe, inorganic as well as organic.

Everything in the universe is acting and moving. The

universe is dynamic. This dynamism of the universe, Li

Shicen agreed with Schopenhauer, is blind and purposeless

[W @ &t|] - The shining of the stars, propagation of plants,

the blowing of the wind, the murmuring of the springs, the

202
Li Shicen, "An Outline of Philosophy of Life," [ A ^.HfH J\
§*] in In Yi Jianfei and Fang Songhua, eds., Selected Readings
of Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (Shanghai: FudanDaxue
Chubanshe, 1989) [ ff&lj M> jj f& M ' < 4 1 MWl W W£ H »
]pp. 226-234.

Page 156
singing of birds and insects, the flight of birds and
fighting among the beasts, as well as human speeches,
activities and thoughts: all are blind and purposeless
actions; and they are all the expression of the "will to
life. "203
The second perspective, "becoming," refers to changes
in essence or quality. Becoming is associated with, and
contained in, the concept of dynamism. However, it is more
important than dynamism. Just as Li associated dynamism
with Schopenhauer's "will to life," he identified
"becoming" with Nietzsche's "will to power." Li explained
that the "will to life" aims only at the continuation and
preservation of life. But if our life is conquering and
creating, then continuation and preservation alone are
meaningless:

. . . the "will to life' is external; the "will to

power' is internal; the "will to life' is continuation
and the "will to power' is conquering or creation as
well as continuation; the "will to life' is
preservation and the "will to power' is exploration.204

While Li Shicen mainly relied on Nietzsche for illustrating

the concept of "becoming," he also commented that Bergson's
idea of "duration" is the same as "becoming."205

203
ibid.
204
Ibid.
205
Ibid. , p. 230.

Page 157
 The third perspective explains the way of "becoming."

Here Li thought that there is no better characterization of

"becoming" than the Consciousness Only Buddhist concept of

"instant creation and destruction. "206 According to

Consciousness Only Buddhism, all processes in the universe

are constituted of an infinite number of micro-processes

which are called "instant creation and destruction." In

each such micro-process, simultaneous creation and

destruction occur. It is only due to the similarity between

succeeding micro-processes that many people fail to feel or

observe "Instant Creation and Destruction." "Instant

creation and destruction" best illustrates the essence of

"becoming," and serves as the third perspective of life for

Li Shicen. There is "instant creation," therefore there is

no break or interruption; there is "instant destruction,"

therefore there is never permanence. Li thought that this

Buddhist concept better explains "becoming" than Bergson's

"duration. "207

The fourth and the fifth perspectives of life describe

two characteristics of life. All actions, "becoming," or

"instant creation and destruction" are ever-expanding

processes. Men or other beings in the universe are

expanding their existence through the never ending processes

206
Consciousness Only Buddhism [Rf| ff§ g|j ] is a Buddhist school in
China.
207
Yi Jianfei, p. 230.

Page 158
of "instant creation and destruction." Li called it the
perspective of "expanding." He thought Rudolf Eucken's
(1846-1926) theory on the universal spirit covers the same
principle. If all beings in the universe are expanding
their selves, will they not obstruct each other and come
into conflict? The fifth perspective--the principle of
"mutual encompassing"--answers this question. The ever-
expanding identities in the universe will not obstruct but
encompass each other. Li illustrated this with the
following analogy: "Mutual encompassing" is like installing
many electric lamps in a room, each lamp emits light and
casts a shadow. Increasing the number of lamps will not
eliminate shadows but will increase the brightness of the
room. Li told us that this is the same as the notion of the
"omnipresence of all divine laws" [jHf^fe (W| j§ — J^ ] of the
Consciousness Only Buddhism.
The five perspectives of life can be regarded as Li
Shicen's cosmology. Although Nietzsche was invoked to
illustrate the second perspective, he was not indispensable
to Li Shicen's system. Given his understanding of the
Buddhist concept of "instant creation and destruction," or
the Bergsonian "duration," Li might well have reached the
same conclusion on "becoming" without Nietzsche. Both Li
Shicen and Nietzsche's universes are dynamic, in which
creation and destruction are the main themes. Both thought
that the order of the universe suggests a philosophy and a
way of life. There are, however, fundamental differences

Page 159
between their cosmologies. Nietzsche's was basically a
violent and threatening universe which one could embrace
only with a tragic spirit. Li Shicen's universe was
basically benign and inviting. Nietzsche's eternal
recurrence is a much more pessimistic notion than that of an
ever-expanding life in Li Shicen's universe. As to the
relations among individual elements in the universe, their
views are at two extreme poles. Nietzsche would have
treated the perspective of "mutual encompassing" as an
invalid's wishful thinking; Li Shicen would have thought it
absurd if he had understood the necessarily violent and
confrontational nature of Nietzsche's world.
The apparent differences between Li Shicen and
Nietzsche in their cosmological views become less
significant, however, if one considers the different roles
they played in their thought. For Nietzsche, cosmology
directly suggested a philosophy of life based on the mimetic
principle.208 For Li Shicen, cosmology represented an ideal
status toward which human beings should strive. After
clarifying the five perspectives of life, Li stated that
"expressing life" is the meaning of life:

What is expressing life? Our life is an inexhaustible

treasure that contains the five aspects mentioned
before. All we have to do is to express this life with

208
In both the West and China, there are schools of thought
which suggest or demand that men imitate Nature. When their
perceptions of Nature differ, their moral values do also.

Page 160
 all our efforts and never to allow this life to be
overshadowed by other concerns. Life is something
given and natural; something vividly striving upward
and full of vitality. If we try every means to keep
life's vitality, we are expressing life; . . . When
life's vitality is blocked by other things, and we move
away obstacles and enable life to grow, we are
expressing life too. . . .209

If the five perspectives of life constitute the ideal

status of life to be realized, their moral implications come
closer to that of Nietzsche's cosmology. Then it would not
be appropriate to compare Li's fourth perspective
"expansion" with the concept of "eternal recurrence."
Instead, it should be regarded as part of "the will to
power." Of the five perspectives of life, only the fifth,
"mutual encompassing," is alien to Nietzsche, who would have
rather believed in "mutual excluding," if there had been
such a term.

When explaining his idea of "expressing life," Li

Shicen discussed the issue of good and evil and the issue of
decadence. He felt it necessary to answer the question
whether human beings should express evil as well as good
when expressing life. He proposed his "moral monism" as
the answer. According to him, good and evil are relative
terms. There are only relative good and relative evil.

209
Yi Jianfei, p. 232.

Page 161
Both head in the same direction--the "ultimate good" [ ^ ^
]. What is the "ultimate good?"

The ultimate good is neither good nor evil. It is

neither no-good and no-evil, nor a mixture of good and
evil. The ultimate good is like the status of a
tranquil, transparent, rippleless sea. life in its
original form is in this status. . . . Therefore evil
is also a way to the ultimate good.210

Although Li Shicen did not make a distinction between

the duality of good and evil and the duality of good and
bad, he actually rejected the duality of good and evil by
relativizing both. When describing the "ultimate good" as a
tranquil, transparent, and rippleless sea, Li actually
presented an amoral world where both good and evil have lost
their relevance. In Li's amoral world, only one thing
counts: expressing life. Li explained to his readers that
an otherwise morally perfect individual could be decadent if
he failed to express life and form a unique character. And
an individual who is addicted to gambling, drugs and alcohol
and leads a debauched life is not necessarily decadent as
long as he expresses life and forms a unique character.211
This view comes very close to how Nietzsche defines "health"
and "sickness" of an individual.

210
Ibid. , p . 234.
211
Ibid.

P a g e 162
 If expressing life is the goal of individuals, what
then is the best way to reach it? Here Li Shicen invoked
Lao Zi's "no action" or "non-purposive action" t 4 ^^ ] .

Most activities in the world are pursued with a

purpose. Look at morals, religions, politics, and
laws. Which of them is not pursued out of men's
apprehension or expectation? All things pursued with a
purpose obstruct life and cripple vitality.

Li explained that when people do things with purpose, they

lose their own life and identity. An individual becomes
his/her own master only when his/her life is composed of
non-purposive action. Li recognized that "non-purposive
action" cannot be acquired without great efforts. Life is
often concealed from human beings by various distractions.
Men have to clear these distractions away constantly in
order to reveal their true life. Suffering, rather than
contentment, often suggests to men the means to express
their life.
A fair number of authors have suggested that similarity
exists between Daoist "non-purposive action" and the last of
Nietzsche's three stages in the metamorphosis of the spirit.
It would not do justice to Nietzsche's philosophy to neglect
the difference between the two concepts. The Daoists
arrived at their "non-purposive action" through their
metaphysical view of nature and human nature. Their views

Page 163
of human nature were unhistorical and sometimes mystical. 212

Relying on such Daoist premises, Li Shicen simplified the

issue of expressing life. He did not take into account

various human conflicts, which certainly have bearing on

their actions, whether non-purposive or purposive. Neither

did he deal with the chaotic nature of life, as if "life"

was a bud of innocent instincts, just waiting to bloom into

flower. Nietzsche's three metamorphoses described the

development of man's grappling with values. A spirit is

transformed into a child only after having commanded and

challenged, thus having been liberated from, all

conventional values. The child is in a position to create

new values, probably upon the ruins of all the old values;

certainly not on an idealized "life" or nature.

What do all these similarities and dissimilarities

between Li Shicen's view of life and Nietzsche's philosophy

tell us? Did Li Shicen draw inspiration mainly from

Nietzsche when formulating his own philosophy? Did his

acquaintance with Nietzsche awaken his interests in Daoism

and Buddhism? Or did his familiarity with the latter

facilitate and dominate his understanding of Nietzsche? Was

he basically explaining Nietzsche's (and Bergson's)

philosophy to his audience in Daoist and Buddhist terms? Or

212 The use of the word "unhistorical" does not imply a

criticism. Many Buddhists, some Confucianists and some modern
Western psychologists and philosophers also assume a core of
human nature which has remained permanent throughout human
history.

Page 164
was he invoking Nietzsche to support his basically Buddhist

and Daoist beliefs? These are the kinds of questions that

deserve to be considered but defy definitive answers.

After his A Brief Introduction to Superman Philosophy

in 1930, Li Shicen moved in a new direction in his

philosophical outlook. Until then, he seemed to be more

interested in Western irrational thinkers. After 1930, he

developed an interest in materialism. He translated Lange's

History of Materialism in 1931. When he wrote An Outline of

Philosophy in 1933, he was already a Marxist. In its

introduction he praised Marxism for "turning philosophy

into a science of methodology, " and predicted that it would

have "a splendid development in our time and in the

foreseeable future."213

As one of the best trained Chinese scholars in Western

philosophy, Li Shicen might well have contributed more to

Marxist studies in China if he had not died in 1934 at the

age of forty-four.

Li Shicen was one of many Chinese intellectuals who

turned from Nietzsche to Marx. In Li's case, the Nietzsche-

Marx metamorphosis came from a genuine affinity he must have

felt toward Marx. If Li Shicen's five perspectives of life

are viewed as a cosmology, they are much more compatible

213
Li Shicen, "An Outline of Philosophy," [^^p $Mm 1 in Yi
Jianfei, p. 235.

Page 165
with Karl Marx's world view than Friedrich Nietzsche's.214
Li Shicen's first three perspectives would have met no major
objections from either Marx or Nietzsche. But his last two
principles--his vision of an ever-expanding, but mutually
encompassing order of things are alien to Nietzsche, while
easily translatable into Marx's belief in progress and into
the socialist ideal society in which each individual's
freedom is the condition of the freedom of others. One can
imagine the elation Li must have felt at discovering Karl
Marx.
Considering what had motivated Li to introduce
Nietzsche in the 1920s, one can better understand why Li and
other like-minded Chinese turned from Nietzsche to Marx.
For Li Shicen, Nietzsche's philosophy was, in his words,
"the best stimulant" for the enfeebled Chinese nation.
There are four major reasons for this: First, the Chinese
nation was "too self-content, too apathetic, and too
phlegmatic," and needed the superman philosophy to change.
Second, the worst weakness of the Chinese nation was its
tendency to compromise and this had to be addressed with "an
extremely shocking stimulus and a thorough awakening"
through Nietzsche's philosophy. Third, the traditional
values of China had made the Chinese hypocritical and
subservient; therefore a rebel philosophy, a philosophy of

214
As previous'ly discussed, these five principles are not purely
cosmological propositions. Their ethical implications can be
quite Nietzschean.

Page 166
transvaluation such as Nietzsche's, was much needed.
Fourth, many Chinese still believed in polytheism and needed
Nietzsche to tell them that "God is dead," so that they
would turn from superstition to science.
Judged by these four reasons, Li's turning from
Nietzsche to Marx could be nothing but a most natural
development. Marx's philosophy was unequivocally
revolutionary, uncompromising, rebellious and atheistic. It
had one great advantage over Nietzsche's philosophy: it
reached out not only to a small number of intellectuals as
Nietzsche's philosophy had, but to the masses as well. If
Nietzsche's superman philosophy had appeared to be the "best
stimulant," Marx's philosophy must have been better than the
best.

Page 167
 Chapter 7 Nietzsche and Fascism:
the Case of Chen Quan

The 1930s saw several new translations of Nietzsche,

which were of higher quality than the earlier ones.215 For a

few years Nietzsche was widely read in China, as indicated

by the repeated reprints of his translations, but he was

less discussed than before. Those who had made Nietzsche a

fashion in China had by this time turned to the Communist

movement, bringing with them Nietzsche's or Nietzschean

ideas and sentiments. They no longer quoted or alluded to

Nietzsche in their writings. The rise of Nazism and the

Nazi use of Nietzsche further distanced the left wing and

the liberal writers from him. On the other hand, Nietzsche

was not embraced by the conservatives, who had always

regarded themselves as champions of Chinese tradition. For

them, the image of Nietzsche as a cultural critic and as a

defiant rebel against the establishment, had been so firmly

established that he probably looked as subversive as

Bolshevism.

215
Two translations of Zarathustra and one translation of The
Gay Science, The Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo were
published during the 193 0s; some of them underwent several
reprints.

Page 168
 The appropriation of Nietzsche by the right did not

occur until 1937 when China began its defensive war against

the Japanese invasion. At first Nietzsche was used to

support Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorial power; later, when

Nazi Germany overran Europe, Nietzsche became the key figure

in a short-lived Chinese Fascist movement. The central

figure of this new phenomenon was Chen Quan.

Chen Quan was born in 19 05, the year the Qing

government abolished the civil service examination based on

the Confucian classics. Chen Quan's classical training was

not as good as the other writers discussed so far. He

studied in the Department of Western Languages and

Literature at the Peking National Tsinghua University and

later received his bachelor's and master's degrees at

Oberlin College in the US. 216 He then went to Germany and

studied German literature at the University of Cologne with

a minor in philosophy. He graduated from the university

shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.

His treatise "From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche" was

published in April of 193 6, after he returned to China and

assumed a teaching position in the National Wuhan

University. It is the first article about Nietzsche known

to have been written by him. While all his later writings

on Nietzsche reflect obvious political motives, this article

216
National Tsinghua University was funded by the Boxer
Indemnity. After initial years of study in the university, most
students were sent to the U. S. to complete their undergraduate
education.

Page 169
has the form of a purely academic treatise. It deserves a
careful examination.
The treatise appeared in Tsinghua Journal, a
prestigious university journal, with a scholarly format and
complete references. Its bibliography listed complete works
of Nietzsche in German and secondary German sources about
Nietzsche's philosophy. Chen Quan's educational background
and the format of his article tend to raise reader's
expectations. Compared to Li Shicen, Chen Quan seemed to
rely more on Nietzsche's original writings rather than
secondary sources. Compared to Wang Guowei, whose knowledge
of Nietzsche was mainly derived from Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Chen Quan seemed to have read far more books by Nietzsche.
Unfortunately, Chen's Nietzsche treatise is disappointing,
showing neither Li Shicen's understanding and insight nor
Wang Guowei's precision and rigor.

The article does not deal with Schopenhauer and

Nietzsche from the viewpoint of the history of philosophy.
It studies only one question: How did Nietzsche outgrow his
belief in Schopenhauer's pessimism? According to Chen Quan,
Nietzsche had been the most devout follower of Schopenhauer
in the beginning but later became his most vehement critic.
Chen Quan's article is concerned with this transformation
between 1870 and 1885.
In the first chapter, Chen briefly introduced Western
pessimism in general and Schopenhauer's pessimism in
particular. In the second chapter, "The Phase of

Page 170
Agreement," Chen characterized the early Nietzsche as
basically agreeing with Schopenhauer's pessimism, with minor
reservations. He juxtaposed quotations from Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche to show that both shared the same pessimism.
Whether and to what extent the early Nietzsche agreed
with Schopenhauer is a scholarly issue and open to debate.
Although Nietzsche, in retrospect, characterized the Birth
of Tragedy as expressing "by means of Schopenhauerian and
Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were
basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and
taste, "217 he may have understated his early indebtedness to
Schopenhauer. While Chen Quan's conclusion that early
Nietzsche was very similar to Schopenhauer in his pessimism
may be correct, his arguments were often wrong.
Chen Quan based this chapter mainly on Nietzsche's The
Birth of Tragedy and "Schopenhauer as Educator" from
Untimely Meditations. But in this chapter he never
mentioned the duality of the Apollinian and the Dionysian.
From his reference to the Dionysian in later chapters, one
can be almost certain that he did not understand the concept
at all. He told his readers,

In an earlier time, Nietzsche proposed narcosis [ JftPf

+. Ht , the term Chen used, is not an established
Chinese word. He put a German word Narkotismus after
it], just as the Greeks worshipped Dionysus, which he

217
Nietzsche, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," in Basic Writings,
p. 24.

Page 171
 thought could lead to eliminating individuals and thus
is very meaningful. Now he found the influence of
narcosis of art, especially tragedy, harmful. . .218

Here Chen was wrong almost on every point. Nietzsche

did not propose narcosis in The Birth of Tragedy or in other

writings. If he had used the analogy of intoxication or the

Dionysian revelry, drowsiness was not the goal. On the

contrary, he aimed at a heightened and intensified

experience of the essence of existence. Exactly here

Nietzsche differed from Schopenhauer. Nor did Nietzsche

think that Dionysian revelry or Greek tragedy would

eliminate individuals. What he meant was the "collapse of

the principle of individuation." Individuals were not to be

eliminated, they were to merge with each other and with

nature.219 Though Chen referred to Schopenhauer's

metaphysics in his article many times, he did not seem to

understand it at all.

When explaining Nietzsche's reservations toward

Schopenhauer's pessimism, he revealed that he did not

understand the Apollinian either. Chen said,

In his The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche told us that the

suffering world was in need of the art of tragedy.
Only by such art were individuals able to have the

218
Chen Quan, "From Schopenhauerto Nietzsche," [ f& ^J?.^ ij§ §?!]/b TR
] in Tsinghuan Journal [ ( Vff lj§ H $g} ] vol. 11, no. 2, (April,
1936), p. 489.
219
For example, see Nietzsche, Basic, pp. 36-37.

Page 172
 illusion of release, and to be immersed in the
observation of illusions, as if with a peace of mind,
sitting in a boat swaying in the sea . . . .
Schopenhauer might not agree with such an
interpretation of his philosophy. 220

This is a misrepresentation of a passage from Nietzsche's

Birth of Tragedy. What Nietzsche intended in this paragraph
was to describe the Apollinian in Schopenhauer's words:

. . . we might apply to Apollo the words of

Schopenhauer when he speaks of the man wrapped in the
veil of maya: "just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded
in all directions, raises and drops mountainous waves,
howling, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his
frail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments the
individual human being sits quietly, supported by and
,221
trusting in the principium individuationis.

Here Nietzsche was neither expounding his theory of Greek

tragedy nor arguing with Schopenhauer. He was merely
quoting Schopenhauer to explain his concept of the
Apollinian. Chen missed the point.
In another place Chen quoted a passage from Untimely
Meditations:

He would always be the first to sacrifice himself for

truth while being fully aware that suffering must come
out of such truth. Certainly his bravery would destroy
his worldly happiness. He must resent the mankind he
loved and the society from which he came. He could not

220
Chen, From Schopenhauer, p. 47 8.
221
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Basic Works, pp. 35-36.

Page 173
 tolerate feeling pain for the destruction of particular
people and particular things. He must be
misunderstood. He must be regarded as a comrade to
those he hated. The masses must think his opinion as
wrong, but he must fight for justice.222

Chen thought that the passage was used by Nietzsche to

characterize Schopenhauer's ideal man. "It is hard to say

that such an ideal is compatible with Schopenhauer's

beliefs," commented Chen Quan. Thus it indicates that

Nietzsche entered the "phase of transition" away from

Schopenhauer.

Just as in the previous chapter, Chen had once again

misread Nietzsche. The quotation was taken from Nietzsche's

book out of context and was mistranslated. The point

Nietzsche made is:

The Schopenhauerean man voluntarily takes upon himself

the suffering involved in being truthful, and this
suffering serves to destroy his own wilfulness and to
prepare that complete overturning and conversion of his
being, which it is the real meaning of life to lead up
to.223

The passage Chen Quan quoted was cut from a long

description of what Nietzsche called "a Schopenhauerean

man," which concluded with Schopenhauer's words:

222
Ibid. , p. 481-482.
223 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans, by R.J.
Hollingdale, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), p. 152.

Page 174
 [A Schopenhauerean man] strangely composed about
himself and his own welfare, . . . always offering
himself as the first sacrifice to perceive truth and
permeated with the awareness of what sufferings must
spring from his truthfulness. He will, to be sure,
destroy his earthly happiness through his courage; he
will have to be an enemy to those he loves and to the
institutions which have produced him; he may not spare
men or things, even though he suffers when they suffer;
he will be misunderstood and for long thought an ally
of powers he abhors; however much he may strive after
justice he is bound, according to the human limitations
of his insight, to be unjust: but he may console
himself with the words once employed by his great
teacher, Schopenhauer: "A happy life is impossible: the
highest that man can attain is a heroic one. . . . 224

If such words were taken as the sign of Nietzsche's

turning away from Schopenhauer, then Schopenhauer must have
turned away from himself.
The third chapter of Chen's treatise was "The Phase of
Transition," in which Chen described Nietzsche's break with
Schopenhauer's pessimism. Chen quoted extensively from
Human, All Too Human to show the fundamental changes in
Nietzsche's outlook. As in the previous chapter, these
references also attest to the author's misreading of
Nietzsche.

224
Ibid., pp. 153-155. Niezsche quoted from Schopenhauer's
Parerga und Paraliponema: "Nachtrage zur Lehre von der Bejahung
und Verneinung des Wiliens zum Leben.'

Page 175
 First Chen did not understand the title of the book.
He translated it as Human, and Purely Human. He said,
"discarding metaphysics and descending to things purely
human is the first step Nietzsche took away from
Schopenhauer."225 Human, All too Human was a compendium of
aphorisms in which Nietzsche subjected many aspects of human
actions, thoughts, institutions, customs and values to
ruthless analysis and criticism. The title of the book
suggested condescending, but well meaning admonishment of
what is "human, all too human." Nietzsche regarded
metaphysics as part of the "Human All Too Human." He did
not move toward, as Chen Quan thought, but away from things
"Human, All Too Human."
Chen explained Nietzsche's break with Wagner in the
following words:

Because Wagner's opera could produce a narcosis,

enabling the spectators to forget their suffering
temporarily, Nietzsche had admired Wagner with his
whole heart. While Schopenhauer's philosophy and
Wagner's art could overthrow superficial optimism, they
totally annihilated our interest in life. Wagner's
opera, in particular, served only as our narcotic and
could not release us. . . The road of Schopenhauer and
Wagner was better than philistine optimism, but it was
more dangerous and deadly than the latter in leading us
to decadence, despair, enfeeblement, and degeneration.
After such realization, Nietzsche had to abandon

Chen, From Schopenhauer, p. 486.

Page 176
 Schopenhauer's metaphysics and to break with his most
admired and respected friend Wagner. . ,226

This description of the relations between Nietzsche and

Wagner was incorrect. Nietzsche did not admire Wagner for

his ability to produce a narcotic in the first place.

Rather he misunderstood him as representing a contemporary

cultural movement that pointed to a culture resembling the

ancient Greek one.

Human, All Too Human contained Nietzsche's philosophic,

logical, and psychological analyses of many aspects of human

life and thought. These analyses often examined the same

issues in a different light. This reflected Nietzsche's

newly formulated perspectivism, his ability to control "For"

and "Against" in the service of a higher goal. Chen Quan

did not have an inkling of Nietzsche's new perspectivism and

only picked up fragments of Nietzsche's texts to present a

one-sided picture of him in the "phase of transition." He

asserted that Nietzsche "fundamentally opposed logic." In

fact what Nietzsche said was "the illogical was necessary

for mankind" and what he opposed was the naive belief that

"the nature of man can be transformed into a purely logical

one." 227 Chen Quan again reached such a wrong conclusion

through misreading. He quoted Nietzsche:

226
Tbid. , pp. 494-495.
227 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free
Spirit, trans, by R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 28.

Page 177
 Whoever revealed the essence of the world to us, must
cause us most unpleasant disappointment. The world is
not the thing in itself. The world is nothing but idea
or error that contains deep meanings and miraculously
produces happiness and suffering. This consequence
leads us to a philosophy of logical denial of the
world: a philosophy capable of uniting with logical
world affirmation or its opposite. 228

What Nietzsche said is:

It is not the world as thing-in itself, it is the world

as idea (as error) that is so full of significance,
profound, marvelous, and bearing in its womb all
happiness and unhappiness. This consequence leads to a
philosophy of logical world-denial: which can, however,
be united with practical world affirmation just as
easily as with its opposite.229

Apparently Chen Quan did not understand that Nietzsche was

criticizing philosophic idealism instead of proposing that

the world is only ideas or errors. Nor did he understand

that Nietzsche was not opposing logic but was actually

formulating a philosophy of logical world-denial, that would

lead to the transvaluation of all values and to the theory

of eternal recurrence.

Chen Quan also wrongly asserted that Nietzsche had

renounced art in favor of science in this new phase. 230 In

Human all Too Human, Nietzsche revealed a positivistic

228
Chen, From Schopenhauer, pp. 488-489.
229 N i e t z s c h e , Human, p. 27.
230
Chen, From Schopenhauer, pp. 488-489.

Page 178
tendency in his approach to many issues, as part of his
"logical world-denial." However Nietzsche did not renounce
art and was aware of the danger of the dominance of science.
He said in the book:

But if science provides us with less and less pleasure,

and deprives us of more and more pleasure through
casting suspicion on the consolations of metaphysics,
religion and art, then that mightiest source of joy to
which mankind owes almost all its humanity will become
impoverished. For this reason a higher culture must
give man a double-brain, as it were two brain-
ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the
other for those of non-science: lying beside one
another, not confused with each other, separable,
capable of being shut off; this is a demand of health.
231

Aside from asserting that Nietzsche turned away from

art to science, Chen told his readers that Nietzsche thought
every individual could "avoid assuming responsibility" and
"discard the constraints of conscience. . . by the force of
science."232 One needs only to read Nietzsche's "three
stages of morality" and his analysis of conscience to know
that Chen had missed the point again. For Nietzsche the
issue was not whether an individual should assume
responsibility or not, but on what ground responsibility
should be based. And Nietzsche did not simply call the

231
N i e t z s c h e , Human, p . 1 1 9 .
232
Chen, From Schopenhauer, p . 492

P a g e 179
"sting of conscience" "a piece of stupidity," but also said,
"In every case in which a thing is done with "because' and
"why', man acts without conscience; but not yet for that
reason against it."233
Chapter 4 of Chen Quan's treatise deals with "the phase
of opposing" when Nietzsche became opposed to Schopenhauer's
pessimism. According to Chen, Nietzsche achieved a thorough
negation of Schopenhauerian pessimism through the concept of
the "will to power" and the theory of eternal recurrence.
Nietzsche's concept of the "will to power" has been
subjected to various interpretations. The one given by Chen
Quan could hardly be called an interpretation: it was
composed of three badly or incompletely translated passages
from The Gay Science. The first passage quoted by Chen:

What is life? --Life--that is, continually pushing away

something that wants to die. Life--that is: ruthlessly
opposes the weak and the old among us, and not merely
among us. Life--that is opposing the dying, the
wretched, the elderly. Constantly being a murderer?

Nietzsche's original words are also brutal, but unlike

Chen's rendition, they are somehow open to non-literal
interpretations:

What is life? --Life--that is continually shedding

something that wants to die. Life--that is: being
cruel and inexorable against everything about us that
is growing old and weak--and not only about us. Life--

Nietzsche, Human, pp. 50, 323.

Page 180
 that is, then: being without reverence for those who
are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient?
Constantly being a murderer? --And yet old Moses said:
234
"Thou shalt not kill.'

The second passage Chen quoted is "War is the father of

all good things." It is a partial translation of an

original passage which reads "War is the father of all good

things; war is also the father of good prose."235

The third passage Chen used to illustrate the concept

of the "will to power" reads: "The poison of which weaker

natures perish strengthens the strong--nor do they call it

poison." It comes from a long paragraph in which Nietzsche

proposed that the adverse external and internal factors turn

out to be "favorable" conditions for the formation of great

characters.236

Such arbitary editing created a monster out of the will

to power. And it was this monster which Chen exalted as the

highest form of life affirmation.237

As to the concept of eternal recurrence, Chen did not

understand at all the anguish associated with it. Chen

quoted a section from The Gay Science without further

explanation, thinking that the concept was used to combat

234 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans, by Walter

Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House,
1974), p. 100.
235
Ibid. , p. 145.
236
Tbid., pp. 91-92.
237
Chen, From Schopenhauer, pp. 503-504.

Page 181
the fear of death since people loved life but disliked
metaphysics.238
Chen Quan did not discuss Nietzsche's concept of
superman. He said that the most important issue in his
treatise had been solved: "Nietzsche had completely freed
himself from Schopenhauer's pessimism and set up a new
objective, for which everyone can strive." What is this
"new objective"? Here Chen Quan quoted two more sentences
out of context:

The only happiness resides in work: All of you ought to

work together and enjoy happiness in every single act
of yours.

Work and death, the life of superman, these are the

standards against which human life is measured, because
mankind is something to be overcome.239

Without elaborating on the concept of "work," Chen created

something very un-Nietzschean.
Sloppy scholarship is bad; but it is not a grave sin.
There have been many follies in history and in our time.
Who cares if a scholar makes some misguided and absurd
comments on Nietzsche? Besides, Nietzsche is a complicated
thinker whose thought is open to different interpretations.
But there is something ominous in Chen Quan's treatise: He
was interested in picking up bits and pieces from volumes of

238
Ibid.
239
Chen, From Schopenhauer, p . 507.

Page 182
Nietzsche's works, twisting and manipulating them to
construe a Nietzsche that promotes cruelty and violence.
Then he commended this Nietzsche to readers. A scholar's
carelessness alone cannot account for such behavior.
Before Chen Quan began studying Nietzsche, he had
already shown some interest in philosophy. At the age of
twenty-three, Chen published a novel Questioning Heaven
(1928) . The title was borrowed from an ancient poem
attributed to Qu Yuan. The poem Questioning Heaven consists
of dozens of questions addressed to heaven, which range from
legends and myths to history and natural phenomena. They
are posed by a bewildered and philosophically-minded poet
about general human conditions. Chen Quan also meant to be
philosophical. His questions to heaven, however, are of a
aifferent character.

The novel was set against the background of the 1910s

and the 1920s in the author's home county. It was about the
ambition, greed and disillusionment of a young man, Lin
Yunzhang. In his boyhood, Lin liked to command other
children. He had a strong desire to be a leader. The
historical novel The Story of the Three Kingdoms was his

favorite. He worshiped Cao Cao, the novel's hero, a prince

of third century China, who vanquished his enemies and
unified China through war and trickery. Due to poverty Lin
was not able to continue his education and had to work as an
apprentice in an apothecary shop, where he fell in love with
Zhang Huilin--the shop owner's daughter. Later he joined

Page 183
the army of a warlord who promoted him to a senior official.

At the time, the warlords of the province were fighting each

other. War "made Lin Yunzhang a heartless devil who kills

without blinking. "240 After serving the warlord for three

years, Lin was sent to his hometown by the warlord as

regional military chief. After finding that the girl he

loved had already married, he arranged her husband's murder

and then married her.

This novel itself had little influence and few Chinese

have read it. However, it deserves attention because it

reveals its author's spiritual horizon and sheds light on

his moral-philosophical outlook. One remarkable feature of

the novel is the total lack of dignity of its characters.

One cannot find a trace of noble sentiment in any of them.

It is a story of universal betrayal: everyone betrayed

someone else at his first convenience. Of more than a dozen

figures introduced in the novel, there are only two

exceptions: a man who was killed through betrayal too soon

to have a chance to betray others, and a mentally retarded

person incapable of betraying. "The world," in Lin

Yunzhang's word, "is cruel and ruthless; if you do not kill

others, others will kill you. . . . "241

240
Chen Quan, "Questioning Heaven, " [^C fn] 1 (Jiangsu Wenyi
Press, 1985), p. 137. (The book was originally published in
1928. )
241
Ibid., p. 2 07.

Page 184
 The question raised and answered by Chen Quan through
the novel Questioning Heaven is about the meaning of life.
In the novel Lin Yunzhang was disillusioned about whatever
he gained. After serving the warlord for three years,
killing numerous people, Lin returned to his hometown with
power and money only to find his beloved girl married
already. After having the woman's husband murdered, he
married the woman only to be disappointed in her. And
through intrigues and cruelty he acquired power and money,
but lost them easily when the warlord he relied upon was
killed by another warlord. Near the end of the story, Lin
and a friend climbed a mountain that was renowned for its
beauty, the South High Peak in the West Lake. Reaching the
top, both were disappointed: "The South High Peak is just so
s0 1 ii242 rpf^ novel ended with Lin Yunzhang as a sick and
totally disillusioned person. Questioning Heaven revealed
the young author's bewilderment at the discovery that
happiness is unattainable.

Whether Chen had read Schopenhauer or not, his novel

illustrated a Schopenhauerian theme in a vulgar form. It
would not be too far-fetched to assume that Chen Quan's
intellectual starting point was a Schopenhauerian pessimism.
But it was only a quasi-Schopenhauerian pessimism, since the
author's horizon was much narrower than that of
Schopenhauer. Chen Quan's world does not harbor artistic

242
Ibid. , pp. 197-199.

Page 185
aspirations or noble feelings. There cruelty to other human
beings is taken for granted, and happiness is understood as
the satisfaction of one's greed. What was traumatic for the
author was boredom--a recognition that any goal once reached
would be disappointing.
In this light, Nietzsche's overcoming Schopenhauerian
pessimism might have given inspiration to Chen Quan. It was
natural for Chen Quan to read in Nietzsche only things
relevant to his world, that is, greed and cruelty, and to
ignore or misunderstand those things that were alien to his
world. Thus Nietzsche's final overcoming of Schopenhauerian
pessimism meant to Chen: If no particular objective was
worth striving for, then power itself should be enjoyed--the
power to dominate, to inflict pain upon and to destroy
others.

"From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche" was the first and the

last of Chen's writings on Nietzsche without direct
political reference. After clarifying his own ideas in this
article, Chen took his Nietzsche scholarship into politics.
In the fall of 1937, Chen Quan's "Nietzsche and Modern
Historical Education" appeared immediately after an article
entitled "Idealism in Historical Science and its Critique"

Page 186
in a scholarly journal. This latter article was written by
Jian Bozan, a prominent Marxist historian.243
The coexistence of a Nietzschean and a Marxist in the
same publication had been made possible by the newly formed
united front. The end of 1936 saw a new political
development in China. Since turning against his Communist
allies in a bloody coup in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek had
considered his campaigns against the Communists his first
priority. Such a policy had become increasingly unpopular
as Japan stepped up its expansion in China. In December
1936, after being arrested in a mutiny, Chiang Kai-shek
reluctantly agreed to form a united front with the
Communists to fight Japan's further encroachments in China.
A united front government came into being after Japan
launched its full scale invasion of China in the summer of
1937 .

The cooperation between the nationalists and the

Communists was an uneasy one. The two parties had different
approaches to a defensive war against the Japanese invasion.
Chiang Kai-shek preferred to rely exclusively on regular
armies. He tried to limit and restrict political
participation and to block social reforms. In the 1920s and.
1930s he relied on Germany to modernize his army and his

243
Chen Quan, "Nietzsche and Modern Historical Education," [ H ^
^k itiiX Wt 5cl|^l=f] ari(3 Jian Bozan, "Idealism in Historical
Science and its Critique," in Quarterly of the Hall of Sun Yet-
sen Cultural Education [C^ |lj ~% it %k ^ § 1 ^ flj ] , Fall, 1937.

Page 187
armament production. He was attracted to Fascist political
ideologies and attempted to further his personal power
through the war.
The Communists argued that in order to win the war
against the Japanese invasion, it was necessary to
strengthen the country through democratization and social
reforms. According to the Communists, only a mobilized
people could succeed in a defensive war against a better
armed enemy. Debate over policies in the war against Japan
was conducted through public speeches and polemical writings
from all sides. It also appeared in the guise of scholarly
exchanges. The simultaneous publication of the two articles
on Marxism and on Nietzsche in the same journal was a small
skirmish in this general political rivalry.

Jian Bozan's article criticized idealism in history and

gave a short introduction to Marx's historical materialism.
When commenting on recent developments in idealism, Jian
also applied Lenin's theory of imperialism to the phenomenon
of Fascism. The article emphasized three issues: History
was not created by a small number of "great men" or
"leaders," but by the masses; the bourgeois order was not
sacred and was to be replaced by a better system as a
historical necessity; and violence did not decide the course
of history. By raising these issues, Jian Bozen implied a
criticism of Chiang Kai-shek government's tendency to
personal dictatorial power, aversion to social reforms and
over-reliance on his military machine.

Page 188
 Chen Quan's article presented opposite views about
everything Jiang Bozan had said. He explained why he
introduced Nietzsche's criticism of modern historical
education to Chinese readers:

We are living in a time of competition for survival. .

. . It is obvious that China's culture has many
aspects that are incompatible with modern times. On
the other hand, prophets in the West have seen crisis
in their own culture too. What position should we take
regarding the creation of a culture for the future? I
feel that Nietzsche's ideas are quite helpful for
enlightening our thought.244

Did Nietzsche judge the value of a culture in terms of

competition for survival? Perhaps a few passages from his
works were open to such interpretation. However, Chen
Quan's article was not an interpretation of Nietzsche's
philosophy in general but a paraphrase of his "On the Uses
and Disadvantages of History for Life" from Untimely
Meditations. In this essay, Nietzsche did not concern
himself with competition for survival at all. He showed the
utmost contempt for bourgeois society along with its
education in history not because this social system could
not compete, but simply because it was ignoble.
If one can attribute misrepresentation in "From
Schopenhauer to Nietzsche" to bad scholarship, one can
hardly do the same in the case of "Nietzsche and Modern

Quarterly, p. 1178.

Page 189
Historical Education." Chen Quan's paraphrase showed that
he had read Nietzsche's article very carefully. To present
it as supporting a Fascist agenda, Chen employed a number of
disingenuous devices, even sheer fabrication. Chen
paraphrased Nietzsche as saying:

History can be useful only to the minority, not to the

majority; only to adults, not to youth; only to great
men, not to mediocre men. The former kind of men can
maneuver history, the latter are maneuvered by history.
245

It is true that Nietzsche had no respect for the

majority or the medicocre. Nevertheless, Nietzsche did not
proclaim history to be only useful to the minority, the
adults and great men. In "Uses and Disadvantages," he
discussed in detail how history could serve life in its
various forms. He stated that "every man and every nation"
required "a certain knowledge of the past."246 The notion
that Nietzsche thought youth should not read history was
even more absurd. What he considered harmful to youth was
not history itself but an excess of historical sense, more
specifically, the kind of bourgeois historicism that
dominated German historical science and education.

In his article, Chen also twisted and cut Nietzsche's

original text to make his own points. He presented
Nietzsche as saying,

245
Quarterly, p. 1177.
246
Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 77.

Page 190
 If a man feels the historicity of everything, he would
be like a man who dares not sleep, or an animal that
dares not stop eating and drinking. Therefore there is
a happy life only when there is no memory. In a
fundamental sense, without forgetfulness life is
impossible. To a certain degree, the concept of
history is like sleeplessness: it can destroy a life, a
nation or a cultural system.247

With such a paraphrase, Nietzsche seemed to agree that

history had devastating effects on a nation's ability to
survive. What happened is that Chen Quan had cut and
twisted the following passage from Nietzsche:

There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of

historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal
to the living thing, whether it be a man, a people or a
culture. To determine this degree, and therewith the
boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is
not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would
have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a
man, a people, a culture is: . . . and the most
powerful and tremendous nature would be characterized
by the fact that it would know no boundary at all at
which the historical sense began to overwhelm it; it
would draw to itself and incorporate into itself all
the past, its own and that most foreign to it, and as
it were transform it into blood. . . . the
unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal
measure for the health of an individual, of a people
248
and of a culture.

247
Quarterly, p . 117 9.
248
N i e t z s c h e , Untimely, pp. 62-63

Page 191
 Chen's presentation of Nietzsche as opposed to history
is not due to accidental neglect. The last section of the
article is entitled "Nietzsche's Expectation for Youth," a
paraphrase of section ten of Nietzsche's "Uses and
Disadvantages of History." According to Chen, Nietzsche
expected youth to use the "unhistorical" and the
"suprahistorical" to resist science, because they were the
best antidotes to the malady of history.249 What Chen did
not tell his readers was that Nietzsche also expected youth
to be "sufficiently healthy again to study history."250
The misrepresentation of Nietzsche as being against
history was not an innocent academic prank. It had
political implications. As discussed in previous chapters,
nearly all Nietzsche admirers of the May Fourth era turned
to the left sooner or later. Throughout the 193 0s, Marxism
continued to spread among Chinese intellectuals. The
Chinese Marxists were not subverting a liberal democratic
government committed to civil liberty and social justice.
The regime against which they fought was a repressive one
that was reactionary socially and inclined to Fascism
politically. After the formation of the united front
against Japan, Chiang Kai-shek's government could no longer
suppress Marxist writers through censorship and imprisonment
and was forced to compete with Marxism on theoretical

Quarterly, p. 1192.
Nietzsche, Untimely, p. 122.

Page 192
grounds. Chen Quan's attack on history in the name of
Nietzsche was first of all an attack on Marxism.
A comparison of Chen Quan's article on Nietzsche and
Jian Bozan's article on Marxism reveals the moral bankruptcy
of the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Jian Bozan's article had
defects such as the tendency to apply the economic
interpretation of history mechanically. It also emphasized
human history as part of natural history, but failed to
envision the kingdom of freedom beyond the kingdom of
necessity. However, Jian Bozan was an honest scholar. He
did not quote Marx or Engels out of context or arbitrarily
twist their words. He stood unequivocally against Fascism,
whether it was European or Chinese.
Chen Quan, on the other hand, had to twist Nietzsche's
words to suit a Fascist agenda in order to defend the
policies of the Nationalist government. His presentation of
Nietzsche as basically against historical science is just
one example.
Here is another example: In a paraphraph from "The Use
and Disadvantages of History," Nietzsche praised the Greeks
for assimilating foreign cultures and achieving their own
identity "after a hard struggle with themselves and through
protracted application of that oracle ["Know yourself1],"
and he referred to the Greeks as "the happiest enrichers and
augmenters of the treasure they had inherited." Chen Quan
paraphrased Nietzsche as praising the Greeks.for liberating
themselves "from the past and from the invading foreign

Page 193
cultures, forming their own culture through fierce wars."251
Thus distorted and truncated by Chen Quan, Nietzsche's
words seemed to endorse Chiang Kai-shek's assertion that he
was defending the Chinese culture by waging war against
Marxism and Western liberalism.
Aside from his implied attacks on Marxist historical
materialism, Chen Quan did not specify what should be a
substitute for history, but intimated that war and violence
were more suited for the education of youth. He also quoted
Nietzsche as saying that youth would not "express their
existence with all those modern slogans" but should "believe
in their capacity to survive through activities of war and
destruction. . . . "252 Nietzsche actually was talking about
the existence, in the nature of youth, of "an active power
that fights, excludes and divides, and of an ever more
intense feeling of life."253 Chen also intimated-that
Nietzsche preferred Greek to German culture, because in the
former only a minority had freedom, while in the latter
everyone did.254 Nietzsche was indeed critical of German
culture but he never thought that everyone was free in
modern Germany.

In 1937, not many people noticed this article by Chen

Quan. Three years later, in 1940 Chen Quan caught national

251
Quarterly, p. 1192.
252
Ibid. , pp. 1190-1192.
253 Nietzsche, Untimely. , p. 121.
254
Quarterly, pp. 1937, 1189..

Page 194
attention when he became the central figure of a Fascist
movement. Fascism was not new in China in 1940. In the
1930s, Chiang Kai-shek sponsored the "Blueshirts," a
military and secret-police apparatus whose functions and
ideology were greatly influenced by German Nazism and
Italian Fascism.255 There had also been a few writers
applauding Fascism before 1940. What was new in 1940 was
that Chinese Fascists had established a forum and started a
concerted campaign to promote their ideas.
The inauguration of the new Fascist movement coincided
with Nazi Germany's offensive in April 1940. The group was
called the "Warring States Group," for their activities were
first centered around a journal — Strategies of the Warring
States [Hereafter referred to as Strategies]256 and later in
a special weekly page Warring States in a major newspaper.257
The journal Strategies was founded by Lin Tongji. In
the first issue, Lin Tongji wrote "Reoccurrence of the Epoch
of the Warring States," which explained the journal's title
and set its ideological and political tone.

255
Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under
National Rule, 1927-1937 (Harvard University Press, 1974),
chapter 2.
256 The Journal ( l^HH ) started in Kunmin in April 1, 1940 and
ended at the beginning of 1941, total seventeen issues.
257
The weekly edition [ < Tvfi- $H> " 1£ IH " 10 TU ] started
December 3, 1941 in Chongqing, the provisional capital of China.
It stopped publication on July 1 of the next year. Total thirty
one issues.

Page 195
 According to Lin, human history evolved in expanding
cyclical movements. Two thousand years ago, China had
passed from the "Epoch of the Warring States" to a unified
empire. The same process was evolving on a global scale.
China was now part of the world that was at the stage of
"Warring States" and was heading gradually to a unified
world state. Just as in the historical time of the "Warring
States," the central phenomenon of modern times was total
war. All the participants in "high politics" were forced to
choose between victory and ruin, not between war and peace.
All the above ideas were not Lin's own invention. They
were borrowed from Oswald Spengler's discussion of "Warring
States" and "Caesarism" in the Decline of the West.258 Lin
did not credit them to Spengler but was quite willing to
show their German connection by inserting German words in
his writing.
Based on this Spenglerian analysis of a world process,
Lin proposed that China should accommodate herself to this
global trend, and make changes in the direction of "Warring
States style," that is, in founding a "totalitarian state"
on the model of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.259

258
See Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang Des Abendlandes, Zweiter
Band: Welthistorische Perspecktiven [The Decline of the West,
Vol. 2: Perspectives of World History] (Miinchen: C. H. Beck'sche
Werlagsbuchhandlung, 1922), pp. 521-540.
259
Su Guangwen, Selected Sources of Literary Theories, [ {.^Z ^P
Mm 3£$4 si ) ] (Chengdu: Sichuan Education Press, 1988), pp.
301-312.

Page 196
 While Oswald Spengler gave China's Fascist movement its
title, Friedrich Nietzsche gave it its soul. Lin Tongji
himself was a admirer of Nietzsche. But he apparently did
not know much about Nietzsche and only imitated what he
regarded as Nietzschean style. In his "To China's Artists,"
he asked Chinese artists to paint three motifs: terror,
ecstasy, and piety. He explained that terror comes from the
self being overwhelmed by time-space; ecstasy results from
the triumph of the self over time-space; and piety was the
total abandonment of the self to the "absolute" that was
above the self and space-time. In the end of the article,
he presumably quoted Nietzsche:

My brothers! Here are the three motifs. Do paint

them.

What? You are going to create a brand new situation of

"extreme intensity"? I need to add only one more
advice:

Snatch terror, ecstasy and piety, knead them into a

lump, and paint it!

— from Thus Spake Zarathustra [this is

260
part of Lin Tong j i ' s article].

The quotation does not exist in Nietzsche's Thus Spake

Zarathustra or other writings. Lin's words are not even a
paraphrase. While Nietzsche did mention "terror,"

260
Su, p. 329.

Page 197
"ecstasy," and "piety" in his Zarathustra and elsewere, he
used these terms in very different senses. Such false
attribution to Nietzsche only highlights Lin's ignorance of
Nietzsche as well as his unbounded worship of him.
The main theorist of the "Warring States" group was
Chen Quan--whose early essay on Nietzsche was discussed
earlier. Chen Quan's writings on him in the "Warring
States" movement were different from his previous ones,
being closely and explicitly associated with Fascist
ideology. They no longer assumed a respectable academic
form. Chen Quan no longer thought it necessary to
substantiate his interpretation even with distorted and
arbitrarily edited quotations of Nietzsche's words. Now he
simply told readers that Nietzsche had such and such ideas.
One of Chen's articles appeared in Strategies on June
25, 1940, three days after Germany forced France to sign an
armistice. The title of this article, "The Character and
Ideals of the German Nation," could have been appropriately
changed to "The Character and Ideas of Hitler," since Chen
quoted more from Hitler than from any other German. In this
article Chen Quan expressed his strong admiration for Nazi
Germany's military successes. He explained to his readers
that Hitler was not an accidental phenomenon but represented
the character and ideals of the German nation.
What was the German national character? Chen pointed
to three features: idealism, precision, and love of war.
What were the German nation's ideals? According to him, the

Page 198
first ideal was "the state above all, the nation above all."
Chen argued that Fichte, Hegel and Nietzsche all proposed
that the individual should sacrifice himself for the state,
and the masses should worship the leader and sacrifice
themselves for him, since the leader was the locus of the
national spirit. The second idea was opposition to
democracy. The most pronounced anti-democratic thinker,
according to Chen, was Nietzsche. The third ideal was hero
worship. Human evolution, according to Chen, relied on the
genius rather on the masses. The leadership of the genius
was the basis of statism and nationalism.
Having explained how the German nation's character and
ideals, as exemplified by Hitler, had contributed to the
military expansion of Nazi Germany, Chen concluded with a
warning: A nation could not preserve its freedom and life if
it did not adopt "a new attitude, new means, and a new
spirit. "261
Of the dozen or so articles written by Chen Quan during
the time of the "Warring States Group," five were devoted to
Nietzsche:
"The Thought of Nietzsche," [ — — Q]
"The Political Thought of Nietzsche," [/bTR61JJ&?aJS31 ]

"Nietzsche and Women" [/b5£|&^ct£ ]

"Nietzsche's Moral Ideas; [f^^^WiMW.lt >
"Nietzsche's Atheism." [f&^ffiMffim ]

261
Su, p. 321.

Page 199
In addition nearly all of his other articles by Chen alluded
to Nietzsche.
What new Nietzschean ideas had Chen brought to his
writings? "The Thought of Nietzsche" was a general
introduction to his philosophy. It was divided into three
sections, corresponding to the three phases of Nietzsche's
thought: that of art, science, and superman. The first two
sections of this article were basically an abridgement of
Chen's earlier From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche. There was,

however, one revision. In his former work, Chen thought

Human, All Too Human [which he translated as Human, Purely

Human] signaled Nietzsche's turning away from metaphysics to

things human.262 According to his new explanation, Nietzsche
realized that,

. . . real philosophers much avoid the "human, too

human" ideas, but pursue ordinary and practical
studies. The property of mankind, values of mankind,
and ideas of mankind, must be abolished, because these
are human, too human.263

But this is the only progress he made in understanding

Nietzsche. At the same time, he created problems that did
not exist in his 1935 article by asserting that Nietzsche
had proposed abolition of all human property, values and
ideas.

262
See page 17 6.
263
Chen Quan, "The Thought of Nietzsche," [/b £R(u7il!l M ] in
Warring States, no. 7, (June 1940) p. 19.

Page 200
 The third section was new: it dealt with the "phase of
superman," which Chen Quan had not explained in his previous
writings. He summarized the idea of superman as consisting
of four dimensions. First, Nietzsche's superman referred to
the geniuses who, according to him, were suppressed in the
nineteenth century, due to science and democracy. "The
greatest issue in the world is to produce geniuses, and to
enable them to develop. . . "
Second, "Nietzsche's supermen were the leaders of
mankind." Chen continued,

The leaders are the most excellent elements in a

society. Their intelligence is higher than that of the
masses, therefore the latter must obey them to conduct
great deeds. The difference between the supermen and
ordinary people is like the difference between mankind
and monkeys. . . If we allow the masses to control
things, we are returning to the status of beasts."

Third, supermen were "social reformers." The masses

could never overthrow all old values, only supermen could
discover the defects of these values and start reforms
against the will of the masses.
Lastly, supermen were warriors. In a narrow sense,
they were fighters on the battlegrounds who wanted to
triumph over, conquer, and destroy all.

Nietzsche advocated war because war was ruthless. The

advantage of wars lay in their ruthlessness: they
weeded out the weak and kept the strong alive, thus
making progress of human beings possible.

Page 2 01
In a broader sense, supermen were warriors against the
stupid masses who were unwilling to accept new values.264
These assertions of Chen's were not based on an
analysis of Nietzsche's writings and do not warrant an
academic analysis. For a better understanding of the
character of this article, let us read its conclusion:

China is now in the epoch of competition for survival.

Is Nietzsche's philosophy relevant to us or not? The
answer depends on whether we prefer to be slaves or
masters; to be monkeys or human beings. . . .
Nietzsche's works were not written for slaves or
monkeys.265

The remaining four articles on Nietzsche by Chen cover

different issues. Similar to "Nietzsche's Thought," they
are more political exhortations than academic discussions.
Of the four, "Nietzsche's Poltical Thought" best illustrates
the kind of association between Nietzsche and Fascism
established by Chen Quan.
This article approached three aspects of Nietzsche's
political thought. The last--Nietzsche's thought on war,
being a repetition of what Chen said in the previous
article, will not be discussed here. We will examine only
the first two aspects: Nietzsche's views on the state, and
Nietzsche's views on democracy and socialism.

264
Ibid. , pp. 22-23.
265
Ibid. , p . 24.

P a g e 202
 Chen Quan did not find any comments by Nietzsche on an
ideal state and therefore had to infer what Nietzsche's
views were. He told readers that an ideal society for
Nietzsche was one of supermen, where the supermen and
geniuses had "absolute freedom to develop."

In such a society, the strong ought to conquer the

weak, the wise ought to dominate the unwise. We should
have no sympathy at all for the weak and the unwise,
because they should not live in the world at all. The
territories they have occupied should be reserved for a
superior kind of people.266

The modern state protected the weak and the unwise and
restrained the strong and the wise with laws. The strong
and the wise were regarded as criminals when they were
opposed to laws of the modern state. Chen told us that
"every great man in the world was the worst kind of
criminal."

Only this kind of great criminals deserves to be the

masters of mankind. They do not recognize morality,
laws, or state. They are the scourge of mankind. In
order to develop their personality, they need mankind
to experiment with. . . 267

After telling readers about Nietzsche's ideal society and

Nietzsche's dislike of the modern state, Chen speculated:

266 Chen Quan, "Nietzsche's P o l i t i c a l Thought," [fb %:$$& tn® M 1

Warring States, no. 9, pp. 21-22.
267
Ibid. , p. 22.

Page 203
 If there is a new state organization, in which supermen
can assume dictorial power, which symbolizes the will
to power, Nietzsche would have no reason to reject such
a state.268

Having deduced a "superman dictatorship" for Nietzsche,

Chen Quan went on to demonstrate Nietzsche's opposition to

democracy and socialism. Chen explained that Nietzsche

opposed democracy and socialism, because both committed the

same error--preoccupation with the happiness of the majority

of the masses and neglect of the development of the minority

of geniuses. Here he should have had little difficulty

finding support from Nietzsche's own words, because

Nietzsche did oppose democracy and socialism. But Chen Quan

did not look for such words in right places. Instead, he

quoted a long passage from Nietzsche's sister, calling

attention to Nietzsche's criticism of the socialist leaders

in Dawn.269 If any reader had taken the trouble to consult

this passage from Dawn, he would have found that it gave

Chen Quan and his group little support.

In this passage, Nietzsche, just like Karl Marx, viewed

the working class as "factory slaves." Also like Marx,

Nietzsche thought that no piecemeal reforms within bourgeois

society could lift the working class "from the essence of

their miserable condition. . . . their impersonal

268
Jbid. , p. 23 .
269
See Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices
of Morality, trans, by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 215-217.

Page 204
enslavement." Nietzsche's criticism of the establishment
and his implied disapproval of enslaving the working class
would have lent no support to Chen and his group.270
Nietzsche's criticism of socialist leaders would not
have supported Chen and his group either. In this
particular passage, Nietzsche did NOT criticize the
socialists for trying to liberate the workers. His
criticism of what he called the "socialist pied-pipers" was
on the grounds that they bid the workers "to be prepared and
nothing more," so that the workers "wait and wait for
something to happen from outside and in all other respects
go on living as [they] have always lived. "271 Such criticism
could even be used to endorse more radical socialist
movements.

Of course Nietzsche's answer to the enslavement of the

working class in Europe was not radical socialism. He
advocated mass emigration of workers from Europe to colonize
remote countries. If Europe became thus short of working
hands, the Europeans could, Nietzsche suggested, either
reduce their material consumption or bring in numerous
Chinese to serve as "industrial ants." On this point
Nietzsche's ideas could indeed be used by Fascists, but only

270
Ibid.
271
Ibid.

P a g e 205
by European ones, not by Chen Quan and the "Warring States

Group. "272

All liberal and Marxist writers condemned the "Warring

States Group." Fortunately for Chen Quan, none of his

critics took the trouble to study Nietzsche to be able to

debunk the Nietzsche cult created by European and Chinese

Fascists. Among the critics, some writers avoided

evaluating Nietzsche's philosophy. Given the prominence of

Nietzsche in the group's writings, such omission might be

intentional. Probably these left-wing writers still

respected Nietzsche.273 At least one of them asked: "The

Fascists have invoked great philosphers such as Hegel and

Nietzsche to support their views. What do they know about

Hegel and Nietzsche?"274

Other critics simply denounced Nietzsche along with the

Chinese Fascists and German Nazis. For example, Ouyang

Fanfu's article in the Communist Party's journal The Masses,

called Nietzsche's philosophy the "true soul" of the

"Warring States Group." It quoted a German Nazi journal as

272
Even here, Nietzsche's view was incompatible with Nazi
ideology. Nietzsche's prejudice against the Chinese was
cultural, not racial. In the same paragraph, he also suggested
that the Chinese could bring some good qualities to Europe. See
Jbid.
273 F o r critics who did not mention Nietzsche at all, see Mao
Dun, "Errors of Time," [ (Bfftfell} 1 in Dagong Bao, [ <7^:&$I> ]
Jan. 1, 1941; Han Fu, "The Essence of the Warring States Group's
Fascism," [ Ife S M & H U f i i g K l f ] Masses, [ < ffifR > ] vol. 7, no.
1; see Su Wenguang, pp. 342-351.
274
Guo Moruo made this comment. For Guo Moruo's relation with
Nietzsche, see page 61

Page 2 06
saying "The Nazi movement and Nietzsche's philosophy are one

in their fundamental world view." He also asserted that one

could frequently see arguments for racial dominance in

Nietzsche's works just as in Mein Kampf.275 Ouyang Fanfu's

article quoted Nietzsche more than a dozen times, but none

of the quotations consisted of a whole sentence or were

placed in a context. Considering the ongoing war with Japan

and the threat from the Chinese Fascists, this kind of

writing played a useful role and was understandable. It,

however, indicated an unpropitious trend. The Chinese

writers on the left allowed their writing and thinking to be

totally dominated by immediate political needs and thus lost

a critical spirit and an open mind. Before long, when the

Communists assumed power, China would be inundated by

similar kind of "criticism," that served as a tool for

thought control and political persecution.

In the early 1940s, Chen Quan also wrote a number of

short stories and a few plays. Chen did not refer to

Nietzsche in these literary writings, but he might well have

presented in them what he thought of as Nietzschean ideas.

"Auntie Wang's Political Participation" was a short story

that ridiculed the Communist-led mass movement. Chen made

fun of Auntie Wang's family background and her personal

life: her mother collected garbage for a living; Auntie Wang

275
Ouyang Han Fu, "The Literary theory of the Warring States
Group," [lie S^61]>C'P Sfra ] in Masses, vol.1, no. 7. See Su
Guangwen, pp. 333-341.

Page 2 07
was illegitimate and was raised in an orphanage; she gave

birth to three children who all died young. He also made

fun of Auntie Wang's illiteracy: she did not understand what

imperialism was and did not know where Nanjing or Japan

were. In the short story, Auntie Wang was impressed by

Comrade Xu, a young student who was apparently influenced by

the Communist Party, and joined a demonstration against the

Nationalist government. Comrade Xu was arrested and beaten

by the police after the demonstration scattered. It turned

out that Comrade Xu was a lunatic who had escaped

surveillance. With this story, Chen Quan showed his

Nietzschean disdain for the masses and his dislike of the

Communist movement. He might well have made most of its

readers more sympathetic to the Chinese Communist movement.

Chen also wrote three plays with the anti-Japanese war

as background.276 Their heroes were invariably KMT

(Abbreviation of Kuomingtang, the Nationalist Party) secret

agents and senior military officials, loyal to the Chinese

nation and to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It is hard to

say whether in Chen's mind they represented supermen or

followers of a superman. Among the three melodramas he

wrote, Wild Rose was the best known. It described a

276
Chen Quan, IVild Rose [ (iJgcJlt} ] (Chongqing: Commercial
Press, 1942.) (Originally published in Journal of Humanities,
[;££itfS] vol. 1, no. 6-8, (June 16 to July 17, 1941.); The
Hall of Golden Crane [Jfii®] (Chongqing: Commercail, 1945); and
"Golden Ring" [$£$gM] in Military Affairs and Politics, [ < IjUl
#| 5& tp» ] vol. 2, no. 5 and no. 6, vol. 3. no. 1, (from April
to June, 1942).

Page 2 08
collaborator Wang Limin and a few people around him. It
turned out that four figures around Wang: Wang's main
servant, Wang's best friend, Wang's wife, and a beggar who
always sat near the house, were all secret agents for the
KMT. They all competed with Wang Limin, the collaborator,
in treachery, ruthlessness and cruelty, but were glorified
as the "good guys." In the Golden Ring, a bandit chief
submitted his force to the Japanese occupation. But he was
still a hero, since he intended to join the Nationalist
government after receiving military equipment from the
Japanese. The world of these plays was similar to that of
Questioning Heaven in one respect. It is a world full of
betrayals, with nearly everyone betraying someone else.
There is, however, one difference: now betrayals had
acquired meanings when they were done in the name of the
nation and the leader. If these literary works reflected
the author's understanding of Nietzsche at all, they also
reflected his narrow and barren intellectual horizon.

The end of the Chinese Fascist movement was as

opportunistic as its beginning. In June 1942 the allied
victory in the Far East and Pacific was assured after the
navy of the US destroyed the Japanese carriers in the battle
of Midway. In July the "Warring States" weekly edition
ceased publication. Along with it ended the Fascist
interpretation of Nietzsche.

Page 2 09
 Chapter 8 Nietzsche in N e w China

Between the waning of the "Warring States" movement in

1942 and the founding of the People's Republic of China in

1949, Nietzsche remained on the stage. In 1946, Chen Quan's

1935 article "From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche" was published

in book form. In 1947, Chu Tunan (1899-?), a Communist

writer, published a translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra

which was superior to previous ones.277 Older translations

of Nietzsche's works, reprinted during these seven years,

are also evidence of continued interest in Nietzsche.

During the same period, socio-political changes were

too many and too radical for Nietzsche to be in the

spotlight. As an active member of the world's anti-Fascist

camp, China threw off the yoke of Japanese occupation in

1945. During the next four years, after a fiercely fought

civil war, the defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan. On the

mainland, the Communists founded the People's Republic of

China in 1949.

From 1949 to the early 1980s, the two societies on the

Mainland and Taiwan respectively moved in different

277
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, [^ fcl ^Jffijul %U
7E !&] trans. Gao Han (Chu Tunan), (Shanghai: Jiaotong Books,
1947) .

Page 210
directions. The governments on both sides of the Taiwan
straits had very different ideologies and cultural policies.
Between the two parts of China, there was no exchange except
crossfire from guns and propaganda machines. During these
years, Nietzsche acquired two existences in China, one in
the mainland and one in Taiwan.
Before Jiang Jingguo lifted the martial law in 1985,
the Nationalist Party's rule in Taiwan combined a capitalist
economy with authoritarian political control. The
ideologues of the party waged a two-front war against
Communism and Western liberal-democratic ideas in the name
of China's traditional values. Due to its political and
economic reliance on its Western allies, especially the US,
the nationalist government's policy toward liberal ideas was
comparatively lenient. Even so, the government showed
little tolerance of open criticism. Some of its liberal
critics spent years in prison. The government's repression
of communist ideas was thorough and ruthless. Any challenge
from the left was quickly met with imprisonment and
execution. Under such conditions, liberals in Taiwan
launched attacks on China's traditional ideas and values in
the later 1950s and the 1960s, covertly criticizing the
KMT's authoritarian policies. These rebel intellectuals and
discontented university students saw Nietzsche on their side
and speaking for their cause. In the 1960s several
translations of Nietzsche were published. Chen Guying, a
scholar from National Taiwan University, came forward with

Page 211
his Nietzsche scholarship and his Nietzschean criticism of
Chinese tradition.278 Nietzsche was as much loved by rebel
intellectuals as he was hated by the authorities.
After Chiang Ching-kuo assumed power in 1975, there was
a gradual loosening of political control on the island. The
ruling party's critics become bolder and a political
opposition was formed and tolerated in the Diet, even though
its existence was illegal in the beginning. Zhu Gaozheng,
the most defiant speaker for the opposition was a scholar of
German philosophy with a Ph.D. from a German university. He
was said to be an admirer of Nietzsche. Meanwhile, as open
criticism of the ruling party was increasingly tolerated,
criticizing Chinese tradition and extolling Nietzsche had
become less fashionable. In the late 1970s and early 1980s,
as university students began taking a strong interest in
Marxism and Marxist-influenced New Left writers from the
West, Nietzsche gradually receded to the background. Chen
Guying, the leading scholar on Nietzsche, left Taiwan and
assumed a teaching position in Beijing University in 1985,
where the influence of Nietzsche began to gather power with
a revengeful force after decades of official suppression.279

278
Chen Guying, Tragegic philosopher Nietzsche, [^§,0] Hf'P ^ fb
T|$] (Beijing: Sanlian Books, 1987). The book was first
published in 1962.
279
The fact that this treatise makes only passing comments on
Nietzsche's influence in Taiwan does not in any way imply that
cultural events in Taiwan are less important. It is simply an
invitation to better qualified scholars to contribute their
expertise on Taiwan's cultural scene.

Page 212
 In the first three decades of the PRC's history (1949-
1978), Nietzsche's name acquired an unsurpassed notoriety in
the mainland. The PRC government had close relations with
the USSR in the first few years of its history. In accord
with the Party's slogan, "the Soviet Union's today is
China's tomorrow," the PRC's political and economic
structures were largely borrowed from the Soviet Union.
Ideologically, the Chinese Communists adopted the entire
Stalinist political catechism. According to it, Nietzsche
was a chief spokesman for the bourgeoisie in the age of
imperialism. Open any philosophy textbook, history of
philosophy, or encyclopedia published in this period, one
will invariably see Nietzsche described as an imperialist
and Fascist who advocated war, nurtured racial hatred, and
justified oppression and exploitation.

But this is not the whole story. The first generation

of the PRC leadership had grown in the days of the New
Culture movement. Many had been baptized in a Nietzschean
spirit before converting to Marxism-Leninism.280 Among the
more prominent were Guo Moruo, the Chairman of All China's
Cultural Union, and the President of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences; Mao Dun, the vice-chairman of the All China
Cultural Union and the Chairman of the All China Writers
Association; Tian Han, the Chairman of the All China
Playwrights' Association; and above all, Mao Zedong, the

See Chapters 3 to 5.

Page 213
founder and chairman of the PRC.281 For these Communist
leaders Nietzsche's ideas, values and sentiments acquired
during their formative years did not simply evaporate but
were subsumed under, and merged with, Marxist and Leninist
ideologies. With these communist activists in power, the
history of PRC was colored with Nietzschean ideas, values,
and sentiments. Nietzsche lived a double life in the first
three decades of the PRC's history. Publicly he was the
most maligned devil; secretly he was one of the guardian
angels, watching over the Communist leaders with bemused
eyes .

There are several aspects of the PRC's history between

1949 and 1979 that will become more understandable if
Nietzscheanism and other influences are taken into account
along with Marxism. First there was a combination of
Promethean spirit and voluntarism that colored the PRC' s
policy. Mao Zedong and PRC leaders believed in the
omnipotence of the will. After adopting the Soviet Union's
economic model for their first Five-Year Plan, they became
impatient with the already spectacular economic growth, and
decided that they could turn China into a Communist society
through a "Great Leap Forward." Mao Zedong and most of his
colleagues had misgivings over plans drafted by technocrats
and statisticians. They believed in the omnipotence of

281
About Nietzsche's influence on Mao Tun, see Von Marian Galik,
pp. 9-21.

Page 214
revolutionary enthusiasm. Such slogans of the time as "One

day equals twenty years," "The earth yields as much as men

dare to imagine," and so on reveal a voluntarist element

more consistent with Nietzscheanism than with Marxism.

After such irrational policies caused economic

disasters and incurred criticism within the Party, Mao

Zedong and some of his followers turned to another

Nietzschean motive, the emphasis on spirituality over

material well-being. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Party

glorified a stoical lifestyle and campaigned actively

against the "bourgeois life style," a term referring more to

any effort to improve the living standard than to luxuries.

Meanwhile the Party vehemently attacked Khrushchev's welfare

socialist program as betraying the Marxist revolutionary

elan. In the last years of Mao Zedong's time, the leftist

ideologues extended their attacks to any serious effort to

increase economic production, labeling it

"counterrevolutionary." They advocated such propositions as

"Socialist weeds are preferable to capitalist wheat" and

warned against the prospect of "Satellites rising up in the

sky while the red flag is falling to the ground." This

obsession with spiritual purity while sacrificing material

well-being was in tune with a Nietzschean motif. 282

282
Nietzsche was thought of as representing spirituality against -
materialism. For example, see Lu Xun's comments on p. 80 and p.
82.

Page 215
 A Promethean thrust associated with Chinese
Nietzscheanism was reflected in the PRC's cultural policy.
In theory and practice, the PRC's art and literature was
influenced by the Soviet Union's "socialist realism." Yet
Mao Zedong and Guo Moruo, both former Nietzschean admirers,
agreed that Chinese artists should combine "revolutionary
realism" with "revolutionary romanticism." The point was
that the objects of literature and art should not be a
realistic portrayal of people and events, but a creation of
ideal figures performing heroic deeds. To a large degree,
the difference between the Soviet label and the Maoist label
was rhetorical rather than substantial. Early Soviet art
and literature was also influenced by Nietzscheanism. Works
created under Soviet socialist realism also portray larger
than life figures in exaggerated heroic postures.283 If
there was any difference, it would be the extreme form the .
Maoist theory took. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mao's views on
art and literature were condensed into one tenet: use all
artistic means to elevate the image of the central
revolutionary hero in any piece of art. The hero and
heroine thus produced were not human, they were the
"supermen" for Mao and his followers.

The PRC's political policy was also tainted with a

Nietzschean concept of "superman." In the Chinese media,

283
In the 1920s and 1930s, many Chinese Nietzschean writers were
attracted to Soviet literature and drawn to Bolshevism. For the
case of Lu Xun, see page 98.

Page 216
Mao Zedong had been referred to as the "great savior of the
people" as early as the 1950s. But on most official
occasions, he was still treated as one of the CCP leaders
and a human being. In the 1960s, when Mao Zedong's power
was somewhat diminished due to his disastrous "Great Leap
Forward" policy, leftist ideologues within the Communist
Party consciously started a "god building" movement to
further Mao Zedong's personality cult. Mao Zedong was
described as the kind of "genius" that history produced only
once or twice in a thousand years. Mao's thought was
exalted as the third milestone in the development of
Marxism, the first two being Marx and Lenin. Corresponding
to this personality cult, there was an undercurrent--a
Nietzschean contempt for them. Most observers agree that in
Mao Zedong's time the PRC was characterized by
egalitarianism, but many have ignored the elitist side of
the Communist Party. According to the "mass line" as
defined by Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party should
always serve the interests of the masses and draw its power
from the masses. Yet, according to the same "mass line,"
the Party must always be the "head" instead of the "tail" of
the masses. The Party's attitude toward the masses was a
mixture of paternalist love and elitist contempt. As the
masses did not know their own real interests, they needed
guidance from the leader and the party. Being ignorant and
corruptible, they must be kept away from any subversive
ideas and influences from the outside world. On the other

Page 217
hand, the elite members of the Communist Party were always
kept informed of situations in China and abroad in order to
rule. They also had access to "reactionary" writings from
the West, since they were supposed to have enough faith in
Marxism to withstand any corrupting influence. The sharp
contrast between the Party's democratic rhetoric and its
monopoly of power and information manifested a combined
influence of Marxist populism and Nietzschean aristocratism.
In the mid-1960s, the ghost of Nietzsche, the cultural
critic, triumphantly haunted China in the form of Mao
Zedong's "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" [hereafter
GPCR]. The GPCR was a series of power struggles between
factions of the Communist Party, and a continued contention
over the Party's general political-economic policies. For
Mao Zedong, the GPCR was first of all a re-enacting and a
continuation of the New Culture movement. Mao Zedong, in
his seventies, decided to complete what the young Mao Zedong
had started in his twenties: to wipe out China's old values
and traditions, and to replace them with new ones.

Mao Zedong had power and prestige unsurpassed by any

other figure within the Communist Party, but he positioned
himself as a chief rebel, inciting students to "bombard
bourgeois headquarters," a term he fabricated to designate
Party leaders who had different visions of Chinese society
and an echo of a New Culture movement's slogan, "Smashing
the Confucius & Son Co." The GPCR had a broader objective
than purging the Party of a few potential enemies. It

Page 218
called for "smashing the old world and creating a new one,"

a sentiment young Mao Zedong had assigned to Nietzsche.

This "old world" was not a particular social order but all

previous social orders along with their values and

ideologies. The early targets of GPCR were the "Four Olds"-

-old ideas, old cultures, old customs and old habits. They

included the cultural heritages of all countries and all

times. Anything associated with Chinese tradition belonged

to the "feudal"; anything associated with the West to the

"bourgeois"; anything associated with the Soviet Union and

her allies to the "revisionists." Nietzsche's "revaluation

of all values" was turned into an attack on all cultural

heritages. In the time of the New Culture movement, Mao

Zedong organized the "Study Society for People's

Rejuvenation" to propagate new ideas; now he instigated the

"Red Guards" across the country to rebel against

authorities. In the early days of the GPCR, the Red Guards

were most fond of quoting a statement Mao Zedong made in

1939:

There are thousands of clues to Marxism, but in the

final analysis, it can be summarized in one sentence:
"to rebel is justified.'284

Perhaps Mao was embarrassed by this quotation, which

testified to his earlier ignorance about Marxism. He asked

284
Mao's speech in Yenan on December 21, 193 9. Stuart R. Schram
had a different translation, see his The Political Thought of
Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praegue, 1969), pp. 426-428.

Page 219
the Red Guards not to quote it anymore, saying he did not
remember when he had said it. But he continued to ask
people to rebel against revisionists and capitalists within
the Party. All Red Guards and other mass organization in
the GPCR called themselves "rebels."
Another Nietzschean theme of the New Culture movement
revived in the GPCR was the duality of slave morality and
master morality. In the New Culture movement, Chinese
writers used the concept to refer to a contrast between
dependence on tradition and authorities on one hand, and
autonomy and independence on the other.285 In the GPCR, Mao
accused Liu Shaoqi, his chief political opponent within the
Party, of extolling the virtue of "slavishness." Liu
Shaoqi, in his book On the Self-Perfection of Communist
Party Members, asked Party members to be "meek tools" of the
Party organization. It was against Mao's ideal of
revolutionaries who should be able to make their own
judgment independent of party bureaucracy.286

While Mao Zedong never mentioned Nietzsche during the

GPCR, Nietzsche's influence on his policies was perceptible.
Mao Zedong praised Lu Xun as the "standard bearer" of the
"cultural revolution," calling youth to study Lu Xun's

285
See page 62.
286
Another accusation was that Liu Shaoqi asked his readers to
"seek high position through joining the Communist Party." It
also reflected the value of the New Culture movement when
leading intellectuals had vowed to decline governmental
positions.

Page 22 0
spirit. Lu Xun, "China's Nietzsche," together with Marx,
Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, were the only historical figures
who shared the exalted status of proletarian thinkers with
the living demigod Mao Zedong.
In the three years following Mao Zedong's death, while
criticizing him was still taboo, people started to criticize
Mao's policy through attacking the fallen "Gang of Four"--
Mao's leftist followers. Several articles began to draw
parallels between the "Gang of Four" and Nietzsche,
condemning "the Gang of Four" as fascists influenced by
Nietzsche's philosophy.287 One example ran as follows,

The "Gang of Four' . . . inherited Nietzsche's and

Hitler's fascist teachings. Combining these with
China's own feudal autocratic tradition, they tried to
create a new fascist dictatorship in China"288

For a good reason the author mentioned "China's own

feudal autocratic tradition" along with Nietzsche. In his

287 F o r example, Zhou Shun, "The philosophy of Nietzsche and the

Idealism of the Gang of Four," [JH MI » fg T R ^ H H H A S l l 5 ^ ^
3£ IS;] Yangzhou Shifan Xuebao (Philosophy and Social Science
e d i t i o n ) , June 1977; Xiao Hong,"The Gang of Four are True
Disciples of the Theory of the "Will To Power," [ff'Jft ' H A S E H I H
^S/SH^iS-Sfff^!] Inner Mogolia Daily, March 28, 1978; Zhang
Wen,"New disciples of Nietzsche's philosophy" in Scholarly
Research [^3^,/!^@'$&>jffP^] (April 1978); Zhuomin, "The Will
to Power and social fascism" Collection of Social Sciences [^H^i
S, ' ¥&f3Mi&Wffitf±&fcmWi3E.B] (January, 1979); Su Ren,
"Nietzsche and his "Will to Power,'" iMW ' I^^.RKW.tJSc/Sl
Beijing Daily (February, 2, 1979).
288
Dai Wenling, "The I n t e l l e c t u a l Source of Fascism--Criticizing
Nietzsche's Superman Philosophy," [Wl'XWt ' "&Hf$T^ $(.frxJiSM $rl
$1--#t £lj /b TR£E A ?Fll ffiKWj'^'M) Nanjing University Journal,
1978, No. 3 .

Page 2 2 1
last years, Mao Zedong was somehow disillusioned with what

he had achieved in the GPCR. He shifted the emphasis of his

revolution from its liberating effects to its function of

suppressing. He also no longer presented his social-

political vision as a totally new order but harked back to

China's Legalist tradition to support his theory of

"continued revolution under the proletarian dictatorship."

This change does not indicate the disappearance of

Nietzschean influence but rather a realignment of various

elements in Mao's thinking. After all, both Legalism and

Nietzscheanism had been among Mao's intellectual

underpinnings .289

Despite all the publicized denunciation and unspoken

practice of Nietzschean philosophy, Nietzsche scholarship

did not exist in China between 1949 and 1979. When editors

of philosophic textbooks and reference books had to deal

with Nietzsche, they simply resorted to books published in

the Soviet Union.290 During these three decades, there were

only two publications containing new translations of

Nietzsche's works. One had three pages of translations from

the Will to Power, the other had one page from The Birth of

289
About Legalist influence on Mao, See page 104.
290
See Xiao Yongjun, "The misinterpretation of Nietzsche in
philosophical textbooks in China" People's University Journal,
no. 5 (1989) .

Page 222
Tragedy.291 Both books were intended for Party ideology
officials. In libraries, they were put on closed reserve
[ F*3 R $ H f^= ] , inaccessible for general readers. Aside from
these, in 1950 and 1952 there had been two reprints of Thus
Spake Zarathustra translated by Chu Tunan. The fact that
cultural censorship was not complete in the early years of
the PRC was not the only reason for these reprints. The
status of the book's translator, Chu Tunan, now the Chairman
of the Association of Friendship between the Chinese People
and Foreign People, had more bearing on the reprinting.
Copies of Chu's translations, along with all previous
translations, were soon put on closed reserve in Chinese
libraries.
Due to lack of access to Nietzsche's works and the
stereotypes of official propaganda about Nietzsche, general
readers in China could not help being shocked to meet a
different Nietzsche when they read works by prominent
writers of the New Culture movement. They could find
frequent allusions to Nietzsche in Lu Xun's essays, as well
as a partial translation of Zarathustra included in a
collection of Lu Xun's essays. They knew that the Chairman
of the Academy of Science, Mao Zedong's personal friend, Guo

291
Hong Qian, ed., Selection of Contemporary Western Bourgeois
Philosophies, [WlWX "MMmWi W m M ilff 1 (Beijing:
Commercial Press, 1964 [Limited circulation]), pp. 14-24; Wu
Lifu, Selection of Western Literary Theories, [I37j >CBRH iH]
(Shanghai: Yiwen Press, 1979) (This book was published for
limited circulation long before 1979. Its publication
information is yet to be checked.)

Page 22 3
Moruo had exalted Nietzsche along with Lenin. 292 Many of

them had nurtured a curiosity about Nietzsche, even while

they accepted the official explanation that those writers

had abandoned him after turning to Marxism.

A few privileged readers in China even had a chance to

become acquainted with the new perception of Nietzsche's

philosophy in the West. In No. 6 of 1962's Sources of

Scholarship in Foreign Countries, a journal with limited

circulation among party officials, there was a summary of an

article about Nietzsche written by a Soviet scholar.293 This

article "Nietzsche and his Heirs" was an example of how a

scholar managed to show some independence in a society with

strict censorship. He introduced favorable assessments of

Nietzsche's philosophy by Western scholars and then declared

them all as "absurd and senseless reactionary theories."

Labeling Nietzsche's philosophy as a "reactionary doctrine,"

he interpreted it in aesthetic terms. Through this one page

digest, interested Chinese readers got to know the name of

Walter Kaufmann and other Western scholars. 294

292
See page 61 and footnote 76.
293 Yi * W e i e r c i m a n [$t* $fl||j<$i j | / the C h i n e s e t r a n s l i t e r a t i o n of
the Soviet w r i t e r ' s n a m e ] , "Nietzsche and h i s H e i r s , " t r a n s , by
Xiaoxu, [/hill!? ' / b ^ R S ^ i ^ # ] Sources of Scholarship in
Foreign Countries [ ^f ISII HfSf^N- ] 1962, no. 6 (Originally
published on no. 7 of a Soviet Union's journal Issues of
Literature in 1962.
294
Jbid.

Page 224
 Chapter 9 The Fruition of Nietzsche Scholarship:
Zhou Guoping
Mao Zedong's era ended two years after his death with

the Third Plenum of the Communist Party's Eleventh Congress.

Those who had been denounced by Maoists as "revisionists"

and "capitalist roaders" were now fully in charge.295 In the

beginning, it was by no means clear where this new

leadership would direct the country. Only gradually did the

intentions of Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues become

discernible: the two pillar policies--"Reform" and "Opening

to the Outside World" stood for nothing less than steering

the country toward a capitalist economy and integrating

China into the capitalist world order.

New socio-economic realities and a new open-mindedness

to China's own traditions and to ideas and values from the

outside world have led to a revival of cultural life in

China. The contentions of various ideologies, intertwined

with conflicting social and political interests, formed a

295 The term "capitalist roaders" is a standard translation of a

Chinese term [ 7$t'fi;^ ^E ^&iJ^^IM 1 used during the Cultural
Revolution. It refers to those Communist Party leaders who were
accused of trying to lead China to capitalism.

Page 225
complex and fascinating picture. In this new era, Nietzsche

walked from backstage into the spotlight.

With the onset of the reforms in 1979, the censorship

of publication of Chinese and foreign books was all but

gone.296 After a ban of more that twenty years, translations

of Nietzsche's works appeared again. More and more articles

and writings about Nietzsche were also published, testifying

to a revived public interest in him. Most articles written

before 1984 had one feature in common: out of conviction or

caution, they repeated the official labeling of Nietzsche as

a reactionary philosopher. Their quality, however, varied

greatly. Some of them obviously were not based on reading

Nietzsche, but only repeated the hitherto official

condemnation, reflecting the worry of the authorities over

Nietzsche's mounting influence.297 Others did not dispute

the official view of Nietzsche, but showed a certain degree

of independence. For example, Le Daiyun traced Nietzsche's

influence on Chinese literature from the May Fourth era to

the 1940s. He concluded that "a foreign thought always

exerts its influence through a process of selection,

evaluation, di-gestion, absorption, criticism and sublating."

296 T h e r e w e r e still r e s t r i c t i o n s : books c r i t i c i z i n g C o m m u n i s t

ideology w e r e s u b j e c t e d t o limited d i s t r i b u t i o n a n d b o o k s
directly attacking the Chinese Communists were forbidden.
297 p o r example, Mu Gong, "Nietzsche," Yunnan Daily, May 15, 1982
[^£\ ' fb7^]; Heifeng, "Nietzsche-the Forefather of Fascist
Thought," Workers' Daily, May 5, 1984 [ $5 #• ' "<£0$f ® M fflM- ffi
]•

Page 22 6
Such influences were mediated by the disseminator's own

world view, political bent, and personal taste. Rather than

describing Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Guo Moruo as having

abandoned Nietzsche, Le Daiyun praised them as models in

learning foreign thought. Qian Bixian in his "Nietzsche and

Lu Xun" also rejected the official view that Lu Xun had

abandoned Nietzsche. His conclusion is: "Just as he [Lu

Xun] had in part accepted Nietzsche's influence, his

criticism of Nietzsche's thought was also partial." By

associating Nietzsche with respected Chinese writers, these

articles served as tentative attempts to rehabilitate him.298

Nietzsche's popularity rose rapidly after 1984. One

major reason for this development is that in 1983 the

Communist central authorities banned attempts to reinterpret

Marxism outside the official guidelines. Up to 1983,

Marxism had been the most widely studied and discussed

social and philosophic theory in China, while other

contemporary theories had gained ground, due to the new

liberal atmosphere. Marxism had been the official orthodoxy

in the PRC in the past three decades, and it had been the

best known theory for all politically conscious

298
Le Daiyun, "Nietzsche and Contemporary Literature," Beijing
University Journal (Philosophy), no. 3, (1980); Zhao Xiuyi in
his "Nietzsche's "Superman' and his Superman Philosophy" also
referred Nietzsche's positive influence on Chinese literature,
see Eastern China Normal School Journal [ij£ ^ ^ ^ - p $Eh ( Hf
H Jnfc) , no. 2, (1983), pp. 30-33, 36; Qian Bixian, "Lu Xun and
the Philosophy of Nietzsche," Chinese Social Science, 1982, no.
3, pp. 113-130.

Page 227
intellectuals. Although many atrocities had been committed
in the name of Marxism during Mao Zedong's time, thereby
greatly discrediting Marxism, people still tended to
attribute them to the deviation or betrayal of Marxism of
Mao Zedong and his followers rather than to Marxism itself.
During Mao Zedong's time, far more Marxist critics than
members of the non-Marxist opposition had been imprisoned or
executed. When the reform era dawned upon China, there was
a revival of interest in Marxism. Many intellectuals within
the Chinese Communist Party as well as outside the Party
were attracted to new interpretations of Marxism by
reformers in the Soviet Union and other East European
Countries, to Eurocommunism and to the New Left in the West.
By elaborating on the theory of alienation and treating
Marxism as part of humanist tradition, Chinese intellectuals
started what can be called a new Marxist movement.

The new Marxist movement reached a climax on the one

hundred year anniversary of Marx's death in 1983, when many
leading intellectuals within the Party launched a concerted
assault on undemocratic aspects of the PRC's political
system with their writings commemorating Marx. The central
leadership of the CCP was alarmed. They stood behind a few
conservative ideologues and started the "Campaign Against
Spiritual Pollution." In the campaign, several outspoken
writers were denounced in the Party controlled media and
demoted. Any Marxist criticism of the establishment was
regarded as attacking and subverting China's "socialist

Page 228
system" and strictly banned. Further study and discussion
of Marxism became impossible.
Yet the CCP's leadership was not interested in
promoting the existing orthodox interpretation of Marxism
either. In 1984, when the few ideologues who rose to power
in the "Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution" started to
criticize capitalist reforms, the CCP central leadership put
brakes on the campaign and called for a cease-fire of
ideological controversies. What the Communist reform
leadership needed was a Marxism that legitimized their
political monopoly without criticizing capitalism. Such a
Marxism, however, does not exist. After both the new
Marxist movement and the "Campaign Against Spiritual
Pollution" were curbed, a preposterous situation arose: the
Communist central authorities were relatively tolerant of
dissemination and discussion of many ideas from the West,
but not of serious discussions of Marxism.

The intellectual vacuum was filled by various economic,

political and philosophic theories from the West. Among
others, Nietzsche's philosophy rapidly kindled great
interest among the general public and had an enormous
influence on the history of PRC in the next few years.
The rehabilitation of Nietzsche began in 1985 with an
article written by Ru Xin, a prominent Marxist scholar who
was, at the time, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences. Ru Xin's article was an analysis of The
Birth of Tragedy. Instead of labeling Nietzsche as a

Page 229
prophet of monopoly capitalism and fascism, Ru Xin assigned
Nietzsche a less notorious role--Nietzsche's view of life
was representative of that "part of bourgeoisie and petty
bourgeoisie who were discontent with German reality but
could not find a way out." According to Ru Xin, The Birth
of Tragedy was Nietzsche's negation of Schopenhauer's
pessimistic philosophy, "So far as tragedy leads people to a
positive, active attitude toward life, Nietzsche was much
closer to Hegel." Nietzsche's tragic spirit was a "deformed
variation of the Faustian spirit."299
Ru Xin was not known as a dissident but was viewed as
partly representing official views. His very lenient
comments on Nietzsche may have emboldened editors and
publishers as well as writers who appreciated Nietzsche's
philosophy. Three months after Ru Xin's article, an article
dealing with the issue of the political implications of
Nietzsche's thought was published. Zhang Rulun, a graduate
student from Shanghai, presented a new image of Nietzsche,
totally different from the official one. Zhang's article
described Nietzsche as being disgusted with narrow-minded
nationalism and anti-Semitism. It asserted that Nietzsche
did not espouse men enslaving and oppressing other men. And
the "will to power" did not refer to political power, but to
a kind of power possessed by great artists and philosophers.

299
Ru Xin, "On the origin of Nietzsche's theory of tragedy,"
Foreign Aesthetics, series 1, (Beijing, Commercial Press, 1985)

Page 23 0
Zhang attributed Nietzsche's image as a predecessor of

Nazism to the distortion and falsification of his philosophy

by his sister and Nazi propagandists. The article was not a

research paper, but merely introduced views of Western

Nietzsche scholars. For a country/ that had only recently

emerged out of the most obscurantist thought control and

censorship, these views were new and shocking. The article

was summarized and published again in August 1985 in a

newsletter with a wide national circulation.300

The year 1985 saw the publication of more of

Nietzsche's works, most of them reprints of pre-1949

translations or post-1949 Taiwan translations. One event

worth noting was the publication of the good translation of

Nietzsche by George Brandes at the end of the year. The

book was an immediate success and was reprinted many times.

In the preface, An Yanmin, the translator, expressed his

ambiguous feelings towards Nietzsche's philosophy:

I like the breathtaking lightening of its [Nietzsche's

philosophy's] critical thinking and its frenzied call
for wholesome individuality; at the same time, I am
extremely disgusted with the dark shadows of his
omnipresent, blatant aristocratism.301

300
Zhang Rulun, "A misunderstood philosopher--my views on
Nietzsche philosophy." The Book Forest [ff| ffi] , no. 3, May 1985.
The article appeared again in an abridged form in Newsletter of
Theoretical Discussions [ISaro fH M $§] • August 26, 1985.
301
George Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans, by An Yanming,
(Beijing: Workers' Press, 1985), p. 3. The book was based on
the English version translated by A. G. Chater, (London: W.
Heinemann, 1914).

Page 231
 He compared Nietzsche's "superman" with Marx's "all-
round developed man." Both Marx and Nietzsche have
recognized man's alienation in class societies. Marx calls
for a community where "the free development of every
individual is the condition of the free development of all."
Fulfillment of the individual in such a community was not
for a privileged minority but for everyone. On the other
hand, Nietzsche's "superman," in An Yanming's words, "no
matter how one interprets it, applies only to a few."302
General trend between 1986-1994. (unfinished)
As the stereotype of Nietzsche as a Fascist philosopher
was questioned in 1985, a Nietzsche fever started to seize
Chinese intellectuals. Since 1979, many trends of Western
thought had been introduced to China. Karl Popper, Hans
Gadamer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl and others had
expounders and students in China. But their influences were
more or less limited to specialists and a small number of
admirers. None of them had as much influence as Nietzsche
on intellectual and college students. The only other
Western thinkers who had nearly the same status in China
were Jean Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud.

Jean Paul Sartre visited China and met Mao Zedong in

the 1960s. The official propaganda machine treated him as a
bourgeois thinker but a friend nevertheless. In the 1960s,
his works were translated into Chinese for limited

302
Jbid. , p. 21.

Page 232
circulation. A Critique of Dialectical Reason had some
influence on China's Marxists. His novel Nausea, also
translated for limited circulation, had far more influence
in China. Numerous hand-copied versions secretly circulated
among young students in the 197 0s. It had been the bible
for rebellious literary youth. Many young avant-garde
writers who emerged in the 1980s had been ardent readers of
Sartre's books. When Sartre's Dirty Hands was staged by an
experimental theatrical group in Shanghai in 1980, it caused
a sensation before being banned by Communist authorities.
Sartre's influence was felt earlier than Nietzsche's in the
post-Mao era. His existentialism was partially merged with
and partially overshadowed by first the New Marxist
Movement, then the Nietzsche fever.
Sigmund Freud was known to Chinese readers in the 192 0s
and 1930s. During the first three decades of the PRC, he
was also strictly banned, less as a reactionary like
Nietzsche and more as a decadent bourgeois thinker. The
revival of Freudianism in the 1980s was partially due to his
frank discussion of sexuality, a reaction to the puritanical
ethic of the PRC in Mao's era, and partially a reaction to
the rationalistic tendency of the official orthodoxy of
"scientific socialism." The Freud Fever overlapped the
Nietzsche Fever, but its socio-political impact was not as
strong as Nietzsche's.

The Nietzsche fever in the 1980s comprised two

components: scholarly activities such as translations of

Page 233
Nietzsche's works and discussion of Nietzsche's philosophy;
politically charged cultural criticism and equally
politically charged mass entertainment based on Nietzsche's
concepts.
After nearly forty years of non-existence, the PRC's
Nietzsche scholarship suddenly came into being in the mid-
1980s, but it did not resemble the Nietzsche scholarship in
the pre-1949 period. It also showed a remarkable difference
from Nietzsche scholarship developed in Taiwan since the
1960s. Compared to the language of previous works of
Chinese scholarship on Nietzsche, the language used by PRC
scholars was more fluent, more exact and much more musical.
Also Western philosophic concepts used by new generations of
PRC scholars were much better defined and much less mixed
with Chinese connotations. China's Nietzsche scholarship
had taken a quantum leap.

The remarkable progress in Nietzsche scholarship was

not an isolated phenomenon. In the studies of other Western
philosophers, and in all other branches of the social
sciences and humanities, similar progress was made. The new
height of Nietzsche scholarship, and scholarship of Western
thought in general in the 1980s, benefited from a language
revolution accomplished in the first three decades of the
PRC's history, thanks to Marx and Engels.

Chinese intellectuals started to write in colloquial

Chinese in the May Fourth era. In the beginning, it was a
mixture of everyday and classical Chinese. It was a painful

Page 2 34
experience to read philosophic writings and translations
produced in the May Fourth era, in the 1930s, or even in the
1940s. There was no standardization in the translation of
philosophic terms from Western languages into Chinese.
Individual scholars made up their own terms or borrowed
Japanese terms if the Japanese term happened to be
understandable in Chinese. These fabricated terms, whether
from China or Japan, had their indigenous connotations.
They did not impart the same meanings as the originals did.
When writers and translators did not make a reference to an
original term, either by putting the original in brackets or
by supplying a list of corresponding terms, the readers
could hardly guess the original meaning of a translated
philosophic term. Aside from terminology, the Chinese
syntax was a major obstacle to understanding Western ideas.
The Chinese language was highly flexible and ambiguous.
There were few grammatical devices to indicate the relations
between different parts of a sentence, and therefore Chinese
sentences tended to be short and loose. In this respect,
the Chinese language was the exact opposite of German which
can construct long sentences with such grammatical devices.
Before 1949, Chinese writers tended to break long sentences
of original Western works into choppy short ones. Western
works thus translated were hard to understand, unnatural and
lacking in rhythm.

The founding of the PRC in 1949 created conditions for

a language revolution on the mainland China. As earlier

Page 235
monarchs had treated the Confucian classics, the new
government treated Marxism as the state ideology and spared
no financial or human resources in promoting the translation
and introduction of the Marxist classics. The most talented
translators and experts in Western philosophy were recruited
in the Bureau for Compiling and Translating the Works of
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, an organization directly
supervised by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
[ttqdi If ^ H i ^ y g l f ^ 1¥ B MM ] Unlike most pre-1949
scholars who were financially pressed, these scholars, like
privileged Confucian scholars in monarchical times, had the
full support of the state and were able to devote all of
their energy to the Marxist classics. In the tradition of
"evidential studies" of Chinese classics in monarchical
China,303 every word in these Marxist classics was discussed
and all its possible meanings were exhausted. Every
variation of translation was attempted until clarity and
beauty was achieved. Both Marx and Engels were erudite
thinkers and prolific writers who made comments on, and
references to, all major Western schools of thought. The
Chinese translation of their works not only created a
language capable of expressing ideas in more complicated
syntax, but also a standardized vocabulary for Western
thought. Through voluntary or forced study of Marxist
classics during the first three decades of the history of

About evidential studies, see page 10.

Page 23 6
the PRC, the new language of the Marxist classics became the

language of the educated population.304 While translating

the Marxist classics was monopolized by the Bureau, studying

and translating Western philosophers mentioned by Marxist

writers were activities carried on by individual translators

and by philosophy departments across the country. The PRC

state also sponsored the study and translating of

contemporary Western thought for a small number of

privileged Communist officials, mainly through the

Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Academy

of Sciences [The department was separated from the Academy

of Sciences and expanded into the Academy of Social Sciences

in 1979]. During Mao Zedong's era, there had been a number

of excellent translations of classic and contemporary works

of Western philosophy, all benefiting from the language

revolution. In the same period, the study of Western

philosophy was almost impossible, due to strict censorship

and a highly repressive cultural policy. It was only in the

freer atmosphere of the reform era, that the language

revolution led to a revolution in scholarship of Western

thought.'

After Nietzsche was exonerated from the accusation of

being a proto-Fascist in 1985, Nietzsche scholarship

bloomed. Western studies of Nietzsche were introduced and

304
While the works of Lenin and Stalin were also studied, their
influence on intellectuals was not as great as that of Marx and
Engels.

Page 237
Western Nietzsche experts were invited to speak in China's
leading research institutions. New translations of
Nietzsche were published and an increasing number of
articles were written about him. The man who contributed
most to the Nietzsche scholarship and to the Nietzsche fever
was Zhou Guoping. Starting in 1986, Zhou Guoping explained
Nietzsche's main concepts in numerous articles, as well as
his popular book Nietzsche: On the Turning Point of the
Century and hi's dissertation entitled Nietzsche and
Metaphysics. He also translated and edited The Birth of
Tragedy: Selected Aesthetic Works of Nietzsche, and The
Twilight of Idols. Zhou Guoping's translation showed his
familiarity with the original works and his masterful
command of the new Chinese language. Zhou's writings about
Nietzsche were a combination of passion, erudition and
style.

Zhou Guoping was born in 1945. He enrolled in the

Department of Philosophy in Beijing University in 1962,
where he was an enthusiastic reader of Western novels and
poems. Philosophically he was fond of Descartes and Hume.305
During the ten years from 1968 to 1978, he was assigned to
work in a county department of propaganda and Communist
Party School in Guanjxj province. In J 978, Zhou scarfed his

505
Zhou Guoping, You Have Only One Life [ < K ^— f@ A £.} ]
(Wuhan: Hubei People Press, 19Q.L), pp. 101-103.

Page 23 8
scholarly career in the newly reorganized Academy of Social

Sciences in Beijing, as a researcher and graduate student.

Like other intellectuals educated in Mao Zedong's era,

Zhou Guoping's intellectual starting point was Marxism. His

first scholarly effort in the early 1980s was Marxist

theory. He turned to the study of Nietzsche after further

Marxist study was rendered impossible by the "Campaign

Against Spiritual Pollution."306 His writings showed the

immense influence of his Marxist training, both in concepts

and in the new Chinese language.

When Zhou Guoping was a college student in Beijing

University in the 1960s, he had the opportunity to scan a

Chinese translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra. The book did

not make a great impression on him since it was translated

into classical Chinese and was difficult to understand.307

His real en-counter with Nietzsche came "many years" later.

He remembered his "delight at the discovery" of Nietzsche:

Because of my reflection on life, my love of poetry,

and my suspicion of scholastic philosophy, all found
echoes in it [Nietzsche's philosophy]. 308

For a few years after this discovery, he devoted himself to

the study of Nietzsche's philosophy.309 In May 1986, his

306 H j _ s w r i t i n g o n M a r x i s t h u m a n i s m c o u l d n o t b e p u b l i s h e d w h e n
the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution began. See ibid., p.
80.
307 The translation he read was translated by Xiao Gan, published
first in Shanghai in 1936.
308
Zhou, Only, pp. 103-104.

Page 23 9
Nietzsche: On the Turning Point of the Century was
published.

The book is unique. Zhou Guoping did not claim it to

be a scholarly work and described it as "at best a

collection of notes and reflections on Nietzsche's works." 310

The fact that the book has extensive references to

Nietzsche's works contributes to its success. In each

subsection of the book, Zhou Guoping used many quotations to

illustrate Nietzsche's ideas and these qutations were

translated precisely and beautifully. They made the book

not only credible but also useful as a reference for

Nietzsche's philosophy, especially at a time when

translations by Zhou Guoping and other PRC writers had not

yet been published.

While covering all major aspects of Nietzsche's

philosophy, the book was not meant to be a balanced

criticism of Nietzsche. Zhou Guoping explained that he had

presented the more positive aspects of Nietzsche's

philosophy in order to "correct a bias" against it that had

dominated China for many years.311 A few years later, Zhou

gave a different explanation: studying Nietzsche "did

nothing more than supply" "a convenient means of scholarly

309
It is unclear when he started to read Nietzsche. He began to
translate, and write about, Nietzsche around 1985-1986.
310
Zhou Guoping, Nietzsche at the Turning Point of the Century
(Shanghai: Shanghai People's Press, 1986), pp. 251-52.
311
Jbid., p. 252.

Page 240
expression" of his own thought.312 A question arises: Was
Zhou Guoping elucidating Nietzsche's philosophy, or was he
using Nietzsche to present his own ideas? As any
interpretation, by its very nature, is affected by the
interpreter's values and intellectual caliber, the above
question is better changed to: When Zhou expressed his own
philosophic views through Nietzsche, did he maintain his
intellectual integrity as an interpreter? Zhou Guoping
believed that the interpreter's emotional and intellectual
affinity to the interpreted is essential for an intuitive
understanding, but he was also aware of the risk involved.
When talking about Nietzsche study, Zhou once alluded to Lu
Xiangshan, a Chinese philosopher of the 12th century, who
regarded the textual study of the ancient classics as a dual
process of "I annotate the Six Classics and the Six Classics
annotate me." Zhou commented,

After all, scholarly studies are different from

literary creation, there have to be some constraints
over imagination. Even if it is a matter of annotating
one's own ideas with Six Classics," one has to know the
Six Classics well and to offer convincing proofs.313

The book Nietzsche: On the Turning Point of the Century

showed that Zhou Guoping was very familiar with Nietzsche's
works. He substantiated most of his interpretations and,
when he quoted Nietzsche, rarely distorted his meaning.

312
Zhou, Only, p. 100-101.
313
Jbid. , P. 83 .

Page 241
Even as the book expressed Zhou's own thought, it provided
an authentic silhouette of Nietzsche's philosophy.
Turning Point was a highly organized book. The first
chapter explained why studying Nietzsche's philosophy was
indispensable to any understanding of various philosophic
trends in the twentieth century. The second chapter,
"Before the canvas of life" could well have been renamed
"Nietzsche as a Philosopher." It was obviously inspired by
Nietzsche's "Schopenhauer as an Educator" in both style and
content. Zhou explained the necessary qualities of true
philosophers, how a thinker was fundamentally different from
a "scholar," how a philosopher must be a fighter for truth
against pressure from political power, professional need and
social ostracism, and why a philosopher was destined to live
a life of solitude.

The most important character of a true philosopher,

however, was his concern for man, with his inner and
external world. In Zhou Guoping's eyes, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Nietzsche represented two directions in
contemporary Western philosophy. Marx stood for the
direction of "Macro-Sociology" that "lays stress on
revealing the praxis of man as a social being; Nietzsche
stood for the direction of "Micro-Psychology" that "lays
stress on revealing the irrationality of man as an
individual. "314

Zhou, Turning Point, p. 30.

Page 242
 From Chapters 3 to 8, Zhou dealt with theoretical
aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. Each of the five
chapters concentrated on one group of Nietzsche's
categories. In this book Zhou Guoping was more interested
in the logical relations rather than the historical sequence
of Nietzsche's ideas. He gave Nietzsche's philosophy the
appearance of a consistent system.
The first cluster of Nietzsche's concepts include the
Dionysian, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence.
According to Zhou, any philosophy about life had to search
for a unity between the individual and a totality that
transcended the individual. For Nietzsche, this totality
was the eternal becoming of the universe. The Dionysian,
the will to power and the eternal recurrence were three
different presentations of this same totality. In The Birth
of Tragedy, Nietzsche inherited Schopenhauer's view that
ultimate reality was the will to life. And Nietzsche
carried this Schopenhauerian thesis to its logical
conclusion. If the will was the essence of existence, by
its very nature it must be eternal, it must always destroy
and create individual life. Such destruction and creation
are signs of nature's vitality. Zhou Guoping said,

Nietzsche imparted meaning to individual existence

through the universal life. He demanded that from the
standpoint of the universal life, individuals should

Page 243
 enjoy the eternal becoming, including the destruction
of finite individuals.315

Dissolving the principle of individuation could be

achieved only through "the Dionysian," a mystic status of
existence where an individual disintegrated and was united
with the universal will to life.
Zhou thought that the will to power was Nietzsche's
further definition of the will to life as a refutation of
both Darwin and Schopenhauer. Contrary to Darwin's view,
Nietzsche thought life in its total appearance is
characterized by "riches, profusion, even absurd
squandering," therefore the issue is "not struggle for
existence but struggle for power where there is struggle."316
The will to power also addressed Schopenhauer's
misunderstanding of life and will. Life was something that
must constantly transcend itself and expand to overcome its
limitations. The will to power was, after all, a will to
life, but it did not seek life itself, but aimed at
transcending itself. Yeasayers to life did not merely
preserve their life, but actively participated in creative
activities to increase their power and vitality.

Zhou Guoping thought that the problem with "the will to

power" was not the theory itself but the conclusion
Nietzsche drew from it. In Nietzsche's view, the will to

315
Jbid. , p. 61.
316
Jbid. , pp. 70-71.

Page 244
power was distributed unevenly among people, therefore a
minority of people who had a stronger will to power had the
right to dominate and rule the weak majority. Zhou Guoping
called such ideas the "worst dross of Nietzsche's
philosophy. "317
Zhou dissociated the theory of the will to power and
its corollaries from greed for political domination by an
analysis of the concept of "power." Zhou Guoping translated
the term with a Chinese word different from the word used by
previous translators. The previous Chinese translation of
power "Quanli" [^H^/j] was used to refer to political power
in most contexts. Zhou Guoping chose a better term
"Qiangli" [§^y^f] for the word "power." This Chinese word is
similar to "Macht" used by Nietzsche: it neither refers
specifically to political power, nor excludes it.
Despite the fact that Nietzsche had formulated "the
Dionysian" and "the will to power," Zhou Guoping continued,
he had never recovered from a "wound" he received from
Schopenhauer's metaphysics. At heart, he had always been a
pessimist. He created the theory of eternal recurrence,
attempting to bring about the union of man and eternity.
But this theory turned out to be more of a nightmare than a
consolation. Only through "amor fati," was Nietzsche able
to combine the idea of eternal recurrence with the Dionysian
and the will to power, and to give it an optimistic flavor:

317
Ibid., p. 77.

Page 245
 When Nietzsche stressed that the highest degree of
affirmation is achieved only after the fate of eternal
recurrence is accepted, he actually was saying that
life is meaningless, and the Yes-Sayer of life should
accept this meaningless life as it is. After seeing
through the true nature of the meaninglessness of life,
you still love life, and glorify it, only then, you
prove yourself a true tragic hero, and only then you
reach the ultimate affirmation of life. There was a
kind of heroism in this attitude, but unmistakably,
there was also a' hidden desperate sadness in it.318

By treating "the Dionysian," "the will to power," and "the

eternal recurrence" as originating from the same persistent
effort to find a transcendental meaning for man in a
universe without God, Zhou Guoping had come closer than
other previous Chinese scholars to the essence of
Nietzsche's thought.319
The next chapter was about human nature and the concept
of freedom. Zhou pointed to the fact that many contemporary
philosophic schools, including Western Marxist philosophy,
emphasized incompleteness, openness and the infinite
potentiality of human nature. Nietzsche's view of human
nature was built upon such a "modern" premise. Since man is
not a pre-defined animal, and has an infinite potential to
develop along different lines, man's valuation becomes the
determining factor of freedom. Zhou Guoping explained

318
Jbid., p. 82.
319
He had a more elaborate analysis of the eternal recurrence in
his other book, see p. 263.

Page 246
Nietzsche's dialectics of human valuation. Valuation
imparts meaning to life. It gives a purpose to life that is
higher than life. The undefined nature of man and the
persistent seeking for meaning enabled man to rise above
other animals. However, while man's valuation is
indispensable from an anthropocentric point of view, the
values thus created are nothing but "lies" or
"misunderstandings" if judged against the "truth" of nature
and the universe. From a certain point in history, these
values created by men began to pose a threat to men. They
diminished mankind's vitality and destroyed its healthy
instincts. They returned men to the status of well defined
animals. In response to this situation, Zhou Guoping
explained, Nietzsche proposed:

Among various possibilities it faces, mankind ought to

choose such a possibility that it will provide broader
space for new possibilities. That is, man should
always remain undefined, man's every activity of self-
creation should simultaneously create freedom for new
creation. Therefore Nietzsche proposed a new type of
morality for creators. This morality encourages the
spirit of progress and exploration.320

Zhou Guoping also discussed a theoretical difficulty: the

self-contradiction of Nietzsche's refutation of "freedom of
will" and his highly voluntarist view of the will. Zhou
Guoping asserted that Nietzsche refuted the freedom of will

Zhou, Turning Point, pp. 90-91.

Page 247
only to absolve man from his responsibility to any
transcendental moral purpose. In his words, "Becoming is
innocent. Men neither have any transcendental sin and nor
any responsibility to repent."321 "Once outside the realm of
morality, once the individual's will truly apprehends the
truth of the becoming and change of the universal will, it
acquires freedom. This is the will to create."322
Zhou Guoping saw a relationship between an individual's
will to create and the universal will,

Nietzsche viewed the becoming of the universe as the

creative activities of the universal will.
Correspondingly, he viewed the creative activities of
an individual as conscious implementation of the
universal becoming by an individual will.323

Zhou's characterization of this relation seems quite similar

to that between Virtue and Way in Daoism.
Zhou Guoping interpreted the three metamorphoses as
three defining qualities of freedom. The camel represents
the acquisition of power through self-overcoming and
resistance to obstacles. The lion represents valuation, the
independence of the will from all existing values. The
child represents creation. The will participates in
becoming through creation, and achieves union with the
universal will.

321
J b i d . , p . 96.
322
Jbid., p . 97.
323
Jbid.

P a g e 248
 At the end of the chapter, Zhou Guoping pointed to the
limitation of Nietzsche's view of freedom: Nietzsche was
only concerned with the world of culture and spirit and
totally ignored man's social development as a natural
historical process.
Chapter 5 discussed the concept of self. Compared to
the comments of previous writers on individualism, Zhou
Guoping's analysis of "healthy egoism" indicated how much
progress the Chinese had made in understanding Western ideas
and values. Zhou Guoping avoided the naturalist
understanding of individualism of previous Chinese authors.
He pointed to the two layers of meaning when Nietzsche
referred to the true "self." The lower layer of the "self"
referred to man's instinct of life, various kinds of
unconscious cravings, emotions, feelings and experiences;
the higher one referred to a spiritual "self," a product of
an individual's self creation. Although the "self" in its
lower meaning was the source of energy and the foundation
for the "self" in its higher meaning, Nietzsche's emphasis
was on the latter. Zhou Guoping explained in detail what
Nietzsche meant by the concept of "healthy selfishness," why
it was different from the profit seeking of the bourgeois
and the Christian value of love, and how it was based on the
vitality of life. Zhou Guoping did not agree with Nietzsche
on every point. He thought Nietzsche had the tendency to
treat society and the individual as inherently
confrontational. He criticized Nietzsche for ignoring a

Page 249
more important perspective: "society is the only locus for
self-realization and individual development." He also
thought that there was an inconsistency in Nietzsche's
concept of "healthy selfishness": theoretically all
individuals should be able to develop unique and excellent
characters, and their "selfishness" should have the
potential to be healthy; but Nietzsche treated most people
as tools for the development of a minority. Zhou concluded
the chapter with the following comment:

Nietzsche was dissatisfied with the status quo of

bourgeois society. Instead of formulating a more
progressive social ideal, he was always nostalgic about
and longed for a hierarchical society with a strong
taint of slavery. This is a most distressing
contradiction in Nietzsche's thought.324

In the next chapter, Zhou Guoping gave an enthusiastic

introduction to Nietzsche's criticism of reason, science,
rationalism, and language. It is remarkable that what Zhou
Guoping did in this chapter was more to point a finger at
the limitations of rationality than to advance
irrationalism. To explain a proposal that "Flesh is big
reason, spirit is small reason that serves the flesh" from
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zhou Guoping quoted from Gay

Science the following passage:

324
Ibid., pp. 123-131. Nietzsche discussed the concept of
"health selfishness" in Thus Spake Zarathustra, see Portable
Nietzsche, p. 302.

Page 250
 Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an
evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single
task, all of them and every one of them in particular:
to do what is good for the preservation of the human
race. . . . the instinct for preservation of the
species--erupts as reason and as passion of the
spirit.325

Then concluded Zhou Guoping:

We must remember that the instincts of life Nietzsche

emphasized are the instincts of life of the species;
when such instincts are expressed in individuals, they
are the inner vitality of individuals.326

With such an interpretation, Nietzsche's valuation is based

on a foundation that is very close to the "species being" as
defined by Marx. There is nothing irrational about the
subordination of reason or science to the interest of the
"species being." Considering that Zhou's writing on Marxist
humanism had been suppressed, he had certainly found in
Nietzsche's philosophy "a convenient means of scholarly
expression." In so doing, he hid from his Chinese readers a
less savory side of Nietzsche's philosophy. According to
Nietzsche, the preservation of the species requires more
than the creative activities of artists and philosophers: it
also demands exploitation, dominance and violence. In the

325
Ibid., p. 144. The English translation is from Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans, by Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1974), pp. 73-74.
326
Jbid.

Page 2 51
same passage from Gay Science, there are things Zhou did not
quote:

Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortunes of

others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else
is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of
the preservation of the species. . . . 327

The seventh chapter of Nietzsche: On the Turning Point

of the Century is entitled "revaluation of values." Zhou
Guoping thought the revaluation of all values was the most
significant of all of Nietzsche's teachings. He summed up
the essence of revaluation as "first seeing through the
irrelevance of good and evil from the viewpoint of nature,
life and becoming, then constructing a new valuation of good
and evil from the viewpoint of nature, life and becoming."328
In the previous chapter, Zhou Guoping had already discussed
the instinct of life as an instinct for the preservation of
the "species." In this chapter, he analyzed the reason
Nietzsche opposed Christian morality and what Nietzsche
meant by affirming life. As in the previous chapter Zhou
Guoping again dodged the issue of destructive instincts:

The issue is: How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify

a craving?" that is how to sublimate a craving. But
Christian morality had never asked this question, its
practice and its "cure' is castration. . . . It has at
all times laid the stress of discipline on
extirpation." But an attack on the roots of passion

327
Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 73.
328
Zhou, Turning Point, pp. 178-179.

Page 2 52
 means an attack on the roots of life." Its only
capability is to be hostile to life.329

This passage is a mixture of paraphrase and quotation, based

on section 76 of Twilight of Idols. Nietzsche's original
text is concise and even shorter than Zhou's rendition. The
only reason he did not quote Nietzsche's original text as a
whole was not to save space but to avoid an inconvenience.
In the original, the sentence "It has at all times laid the
stress of discipline on extirpation" is not followed by a
period but by a parenthetical passage, " (of sensuality, of
pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness) . "33°
In Zhou Guoping's interpretation, the instincts of life
comprise only sexual desire and its sublimated expression in
passion and art. The omission of man's destructive
instincts is regrettable: no theory based on instincts is
complete without dealing with the negative set of human
instincts. But this omission is more likely a reflection of
Zhou Guoping's own philosophic outlook. Zhou Guoping may
have intentionally dismissed the issue of man's destructive
instincts out of an optimistic view of human nature. And
this optimistic view may have come from the Marxist
tradition.331 Marx did not discuss abstract human nature.

329
Jbid., p. 184.
330 portable Nietzsche, p. 487.
331
Although Zhou Guoping often referred to Marx, Adorno,
Horkheimer, and Marcuse in his writings, the possibility that he
was also influenced by Confucius, Mencius and other Chinese
philosophers should not be excluded.

Page 2 53
But his theory of communist society implied an ultimate
optimism: once class confrontation was abolished along with
private ownership, men, recovering their essence as "species
beings," would naturally live in constructive relations with
each other. In line with Marx, some of the New Left
thinkers, such as Marcuse and Fromm, speculated that
destructiveness was not a basic but a secondary instinct of
man, it was engendered only when man's potential for
creativity and love was obstructed. From this perspective,
Zhou Guoping's omission of destructive instincts was not so
much a problem.
Nietzsche's formulation of "master morality" and "slave
morality" had caught the imagination of many Chinese writers
since the time of the New Culture movement. Zhou Guoping
explained these two opposing moralities from several
perspectives. In terms of man's relation with his "self,"
the "masters" were their own legislators who had the ability
to decide about values; the "slaves" were cowardly, lazy and
irresponsible, and knew only how to conform to convention.
In terms of man's relations with other men, the "master
morality" emphasized self-respect, while the "slave
morality" advocated "pity." Zhou Guoping explained,
"Nietzsche did not oppose extending a helping hand to
sufferers. The issue is that the best help resides in
raising the sufferers' self-respect and will to change. .

Page 254
_ «332 j n terms of man's attitude to life, "slave morality"

was characterized by cowardice and hypocrisy; the "master

morality" by sincerity. Zhou Guoping summarized these two

moralities:

Through a criticism of slave morality, we know that

Nietzsche's moral ideal is to create a wholesome,
courageous, independent, enterprising, and sincere type
of man. In his own words, he longed for the "highest
power and splendor actually possible to the type man."
In his view, mankind's future depended on whether such
a "master" type of man can be created, whether such men
can be dominant.333

Zhou Guoping concluded this chapter with a criticism

which in itself was no more than a repetition of his

expression of disgust with Nietzsche's aristocratism. It

revealed, however, Zhou's evaluation of Nietzsche's

philosophy in general: what aspects of this philosophy he

regarded as essential and what aspects as secondary. Zhou

Guoping thought that "Nietzsche's aristocratic sentiment

corrupted almost his every originally reasonable idea." It

is a matter of "revolutionary premises leading to

reactionary conclusions."334 That is to say, it is possible

to dissociate Nietzsche's aristocratic sentiment from his

philosophy and to deduce revolutionary conclusions from his

332
Zhou, Turning Point, p. 190.
333
Ibid., p. 196. Zhou was referring to Nietzsche's Genealogy
of Morals, see Nietzsche, Basic Writings, p. 456.
334
Jbid. , p. 197 .

Page 255
philosophy. Here Zhou Guoping made a rare political
allusion:

It would have no future if we adopt either an

aristocratism that sacrifices equality in favor of
progress, or ideal of the small farmers that sacrifices
progress in exchange for equality. Modern socialism
seeks a union of equality and progress, a social ideal
that guarantees the full development of the talents of
all individuals.335

In Chinese political vocabulary, the "idea of small farmers"

is the code phrase for Mao Zedong-style egalitarianism.
Zhou Guoping saw in Nietzsche's philosophy an antidote to
the homogenizing effect of the CCP's erstwhile values.
In the chapter on "The Present and the Future of
Mankind," Zhou Guoping treated Nietzsche's concept of
superman as an antidote to contemporary civilization. He
first portrayed Nietzsche as a prophet who was deeply
concerned with mankind's future. Nietzsche was critical of
modern civilization for two reasons: its decadence--the
degeneration of the instincts of life, and its philistinism-
-the poverty of spiritual life. Out of his disappointment
about modern civilization, Nietzsche dreamt of "superman."
Zhou Guoping cautiously referred to "superman" as the
embodiment of the master morality and as a symbol of a type
man that has not yet been produced. By carefully

335
Jbid. , p. 198.

Page 2 56
explicating a passage from Ecco Homo, Zhou dissociated
superman from Darwinism and Carlyle's hero worship.336
The last chapter of Nietzsche: On the Turning Point of
the Century was entitled "Poet-Philosopher." This chapter
seems out of place in an otherwise well-organized book. It
reads more like Zhou Guoping's afterthought than like a
summary of the book. Its first section "aesthetic life" was
a repetition of earlier discussions of the Dionysian and the
Apollinian. The second section "Aesthetic Being" was to
demonstrate Nietzsche's substitution of traditional
metaphysics with an aesthetic ontology. In this section,
all supporting quotations of Nietzsche came from The Birth
of Tragedy and The Will to Power. It is as if Nietzsche in

his later years still believed in the existence of "Being"--

a universal "will to life" or "will to power" that
encompasses individual wills. The last section was a
discussion of the inherent relation between Nietzsche's
thought and his style. The point was that no rational
reasoning can describe philosophic truth. The only means
was a poetic language that suggested rather than described.

336
Jbid., p. 219; Nietzsche, Ecco Homo in Basic Writings, p.
717. In the same passage Nietzsche also discussed why superman
was not"an "idealistic type of a higher man, half "saint,' half
"genius.'" (Original text: . . . "idealistischer" Typus einer
hoheren Art Mensch, halb "Heiliger," halb "Genie". . . ) Here
Zhou's translation—"an ideal type, a higher mankind" [ — I M S
Mtf$&M ' — WxSM^XW, 1 and the subsequent discussion did
not convey Nietzsche's ideas very well.

Page 257
 Nietzsche and Metaphysics was Zhou Guoping's Ph.D.
Dissertation. Zhou started writing the book at the end of
1987 and completed it in November of 1988. It was not an
introductory exposition, as his earlier book was, but an
analytical reconstruction of Nietzsche's philosophy. In its
postscript, Zhou Guoping told readers that unlike Nietzsche:
On the Turning Point of the Century which was "lyrical" in
character, this book was "intended to be a scholarly work."
And in writing the book he was "to treat Nietzsche as a
rigorous philosopher and to clarify Nietzsche's thought on
the most basic issue, the issue of metaphysics." Such a
starting point posed serious problems. In what sense is
Nietzsche a rigorous philosopher? Is metaphysics the most
basic issue for Nietzsche?

It seems that Zhou Guoping himself was concerned with

metaphysics and fond of rigorous philosophic systems. This
predilection had served him well in his earlier book,
Nietzsche: On the Turning Point of the Century, which, as an
introductory book for general readers, allowed him freedom
in processing his materials. The same predilection became a
handicap for the author in the case of a scholarly project,
especially a dissertation which he had to defend.
Unlike his earlier book which used Nietzsche's major
works evenly as sources, Nietzsche and Metaphysics heavily
relied on The Will to Power, a collection of Nietzsche's
notes edited by Nietzsche's sister and published
posthumously. Even the structure of the book had some

Page 2 58
parallels to that of The Will to Power as illustrated by the
table on the next page.

Page 2 59
Chapter titles of Nietzsche Corresponding section titles
and Metaphysics of The Will to Power

Chapter 1. European Book One. European Nihilism

Nihilism: Crisis of
Metaphysics

Chapter 2. Critique of Logic Book Three. I. The Will to

and Language: Psychological Power as Knowledge
Analysis of Metaphysics

Chapter 3. Critique of Book Two. I. Critique of

Religion and Morality: Religion
Psychological Analysis of Book Two. I I . C r i t i q u e of
Metaphysics II337 Morality

Chapter 4. Perspectivism: a Book Three. I. The Will to

Non-Metaphysical Epistemology Power as Knowledge

Chapter 5. The Will to Power Book Three. III. The Will to

and Eternal Recurrence: Power as Society and
Reconstruction or Sublation Individual
of Metaphysics Book Four. III. The Eternal
Recurrence
Chapter 6. An Aesthetic Book Three. IV. The Will to
Defense: Art as a Supplement Power as Art
to Metaphysics

337 This chapter and chapter 6 had been planned but were never
written. See the discussion on p. 266.

Page 260
 Two things are apparent from the above chart: the

systematic scheme of Zhou's book was influenced by the

editing of Forster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche's sister; Zhou gave

a metaphysical relevance to every aspect of Nietzsche's

thought.

Zhou Guoping himself had a proclivity for metaphysics.

In his earlier book Nietzsche: On the Turning Point of the

Century, Zhou often shed such expressions as "life in its

totality," "the universal life," "universal will," "the

world as a whole," or "Being." In Nietzsche and

Metaphysics, Zhou used these terms less frequently but the

metaphysical essence of the world became his central

concern.338

Of the four completed chapters, the first three had the

character of interpretative notes on The Will to Power. The

last chapter deserves more attention, since it went beyond

The Will to Power and constituted Zhou Guoping's

reconstruction of Nietzsche's metaphysics. The chapter was

divided into three parts, "Ways to a Reconstruction of

Metaphysics," "The Will to Power," and "Eternal Recurrence."

"Ways to a Reconstruction of Metaphysics" referred to

Nietzsche's "reversal of values" and his "principle of

analogy." Out of suspicion of becoming, traditional

338
Judging from his comments and the reference he made in the
book, Zhou's views about Nietzsche were influenced by Karl
Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. See Zhou Guoping, Nietzsche and
Metaphysics (Shanghai: Hunan Education Press, 1990), p. 240 and
pp. 242-243.

Page 2 61
metaphysics fabricated and exalted a rational "real world";
Nietzsche reversed this practice and applauded appearance
and becoming as the only world. This is Nietzsche's
"reversal of values." Zhou Guoping explained how man is
able to know the only world, the world of appearance through
the "principle of analogy." Nietzsche had a hypothesis that
an individual's body contains the memory of the whole
process of becoming. This "body," Zhou explained, is not
purely the biological body but a mixture of the body's
physiological and psychological functions; it corresponds to
Freud's "Id," and its memory corresponds to Jung's
"collective unconscious," or "archetype." Since there is
such an "analogy" between the individual body and the
essence of the world, it is possible for an individual to
access "Being," not through rational thinking, but through
irrational experience, through the Dionysian.339

In the section on "Will to Power," Zhou Guoping

proposed that the concept of the will to power is another
name given to the only world, the world of appearance. If
"becoming" describes the external character of this world of
appearance, "the will to power" describes its internal
content.340 Zhou Guoping reiterated a view expressed in
Nietzsche: On the Turning point of the century, that "the
power asserted by Nietzsche is not an external power, a

339
Zhou, Metaphysics, pp. 188-190.
340
Jbid. , p. 216.

Page 2 62
superficial union, domination by force, or superiority in
number, it is an internal power, the profusion of life, the
transcendence of life, and the self-discipline of the will."
He also emphasized as before that an individual is not
purely a singular existence, but "the line of mankind
leading to him," and the value of an individual is
"absolutely not decided by his strong biological craving, or
by his success in society's power struggles, but determined
by where he brings mankind's total .life, to an ascending,
stronger and prosperous life, or to a descending, weaker,
and degenerate life."341
In the next chapter, Zhou assigned the eternal
recurrence a role in the reconstructed metaphysics. Zhou
said,

If Nietzsche used the "will to power" to explain the

dynamic of "becoming," then the "eternal recurrence"
was a concept he used to explain the pattern of
"becoming. "342

The concept of eternal recurrence, according to Zhou

Guoping, had three implications for Nietzsche. First, it
was the result of a metaphysical craving on Nietzsche's
part. After rejecting eternity through Christianity or
traditional metaphysics, Nietzsche still needed eternity to

341
Jbid., pp. 201-203.
342
Jbid., p . 220.

P a g e 263
give life a meaning. Nietzsche formulated ""the eternal
recurrence': "recurrence' is for "eternity.'"343
Second, in Nietzsche's own words, eternal recurrence is
"the heaviest thought" and "the heaviest burden." While
eternal recurrence preserves life's eternity, making each
death no longer an irreversible nirvana, it is also the
eternal recurrence of death. From one angle, the wheel of
recurrence is an infinite repetition of life, from the
other, it is also an infinite repetition of death. More
important, in the grinding of the great wheel of the eternal
recurrence, man no longer has room for creation, "This
extreme fatalism leads to extreme nihilism, since it
proclaims that meaninglessness is eternal."344

Third, Eternal recurrence poses to man a moral

imperative. It forces man to ask himself, "Are you willing
to repeat your life as it is for infinite times?" Man has
to assume responsibility for his own actions in his life,
since what waits for him is not the one-time last judgment,
but numerous judgments in the form of recurrences of his
life.
Zhou Guoping associated the theme of man's
responsibility and the bright side of the eternal recurrence
with "amor fati." He explained that Nietzsche's love of fate
had two aspects, in Nietzsche's words, "Before fate has come

343
Ibid., p . 226
344
Jbid., p . 232.

P a g e 2 64
to us, we should guide it, . . . But if it has already come
to us, we should still try to love it." "Amor fati" did not
mean submitting to necessity. The individual's will and
actions are links in necessity and have, in Nietzsche's
words, an "infinitely great influence" over things to come.
Zhou called "amor fati" "the completion and sublation of the
nihilism and fatalism of "eternal recurrence."345
Zhou Guoping's interpretation of these concepts is
logical: "amor fati" combines the two positive implications
of the eternal recurrence to resist the threat from the
negative implication of the same eternal occurrence. He was
not, however, oblivious to the theoretical difficulties
involved and concluded his discussion with a minor revision,

As long as eternal recurrence is the repetition of all

details and allows no exception, the freedom for
revaluation of values will be groundless. One of two
must be true: either the theory of the eternal
recurrence was contradictory to Nietzsche's other
theories, such as the will to power, the revaluation of
all values, and the superman; or, in order to reconcile
these theories, the repetition of all details must be
purged [from the theory of the eternal recurrence] as
purely Nietzsche's hallucination . . . . Thus
cosmologically, the eternal recurrence can be viewed as
Nietzsche's description of the never ceasing will to
power; ethically it can be viewed as an affirmation of
the inexhaustible total life. An eternal recurrence
that allows changes of details leaves room for man's
freedom, since from the viewpoint of the infinite

345
Ibid. , p. 234;

Page 2 65
 becoming universe, is it not true that man's freedom
resides only in changing details?346

Zhou Guoping did not write the originally planned third

chapter on religion and morality and sixth chapter
"Aesthetic Defense: Art as an Supplement to Metaphysics."
He probably gave up the former because the topic was
politically too sensitive. That he gave up the latter was
more likely the result of a theoretical dilemma. While art
as a mode of human existence occupied a central place in
Nietzsche's philosophy, it is problematic to assume, and
therefore difficult to demonstrate, that Nietzsche intended
art to have a function for a new metaphysics, if he ever
meant to reconstruct a metaphysics. Besides, the role of
art in the new metaphysics depends on a condition: there is
a metaphysical "Being" which is not presentable due to the
inherent inadequacy of logic and language. Theoretically,
in order to make an "aesthetic defense" for metaphysics,
Zhou Guoping had to resort to the suggestive power of poetry
rather than write a prose chapter on the subject. Instead
of asking the fundamental question: Was Nietzsche concerned
with reconstructing a metaphysics at all? Zhou Guoping
projected the dilemma he himself faced onto Nietzsche. He
concluded that there is in Nietzsche "a contradiction
between criticizing metaphysics and reconstructing

346
Jbid., pp. 235-236.

Page 266
metaphysics," which "has left to contemporary philosophy a
bewilderment, probably an eternal bewilderment."347
Nietzsche and Metaphysics was published in 1990. Due
to its scholarly format, and its theoretical sophistication,
also due to a general apathy to theoretical discussions on
the readers' part after the 1989 crackdown, this book did
not have as great an influence as the first. In the
postscript, Zhou Guoping told readers that "I cannot help
becoming 'bored' after dealing with a historical figure for
a long time, even if the figure be Nietzsche." Zhou Guoping
declared that he would stop studying Nietzsche for "an
extensive period of time." Considering that the postcript
is dated June 1989, the month of the Beijing Massacre, his
real motive in ending his Nietzsche study might well have
been political

347
Ibid., p. 243.

Page 267
 Postcript

The flourishing of Nietzsche scholarship ended with the

Beijing authorities' crackdown on the pro-democracy movement
in June 1989. There was a tightening of thought after many
liberal ideology officials were purged because of their
sympathy for the pro-democracy movement and replaced by
conservative ideologues. Scholars and writers who had
discussed Nietzsche's philosophy stopped writing about
Nietzsche if they had not already been thrown into prison or
forced into exile.
Now five years have passed since the Beijing Massacre,
censorship of the press and of other media has relaxed.
Translations of Nietzsche's works again sell well, and
articles on him occasionally surface in regional journals.
But the kind of enthusiasm for Nietzsche and for other
Western philosophical thought seen in the 1980s has not
returned. The atmosphere in China has changed. On the one
hand, the nation is still too demoralized by the bloody
suppression to regain the momentum of social and political
reforms of the 1980s. On the other hand, part of Chinese
society is too preoccupied with capitalist speculation to be
concerned with anything else.

Page 2 68
 There is no reason to believe that Nietzsche's role in
China ended in 1989. On the contrary, as China becomes more
and more engulfed in the capitalist world order, Nietzsche
and other Western critics of modernity are becoming more
relevant to China's realities. It would not be surprising
to see a revived interest in Nietzsche in the near future.

Page 2 69
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