The modernisation of China had in theory been going on since the seventeenth century, but by the beginning of the twentieth it had in practice become a kind of game played by a few high officials who realised it was needed but did not have the political wherewithal to carry these changes through. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jesuit missionaries had produced Chinese translations of over four hundred Western works, more than half on Christianity and about a third in science. But Chinese scholars still remained conservative, as was highlighted by the case of Yung Wing, a student who was invited to the United States by missionaries in 1847 and graduated from Yale in 1854. He returned to China after eight years’ study but was forced to wait another eight years before his skills as an interpreter and translator were made use of.93 There was some change. The original concentration of Confucian scholarship on philosophy had given way by the nineteenth century to ‘evidential research,’ the concrete analysis of ancient texts.94 This had two consequences of significance. One was the discovery that many of the so-called classic texts were fake, thus throwing the very tenets of Confucianism itself into doubt. No less importantly, the ‘evidential research’ was extended to mathematics, astronomy, fiscal and administrative matters, and archaeology. This could not yet be described as a scientific revolution, but it was a start, however late.
The final thrust in the move away from Confucianism arrived in the form of the Boxer Rising, which began in 1898 and ended two years later with the beginnings of China’s republican revolution. The reason for this was once again the Confucian attitude to life, which meant that although there had been some change in Chinese scholarly activity, the compartmentalisation recommended by classical Confucianism was still paramount, its most important consequence being that many of the die-hard and powerful Manchu princes had had palace upbringings that had left them ‘ignorant of the world and proud of it.’95 This profound ignorance was one of the reasons so many of them became patrons of a peasant secret society known as the Boxers, merely the most obvious and tragic sign of China’s intellectual bankruptcy. The Boxers, who began in the Shandong area and were rabidly xenophobic, featured two peasant traditions – the technique of martial arts (‘boxing’) and spirit possession or shamanism. Nothing could have been more inappropriate, and this fatal combination made for a vicious set of episodes. The Chinese were defeated at the hands of eleven (despised) foreign countries, and were thus forced to pay $333 million in indemnities over forty years (which would be at least $20 billion now), and suffer the most severe loss of face the nation had ever seen. The year the Boxer Uprising was put down was therefore the low point by a long way for Confucianism, and everyone, inside and outside China, knew that radical, fundamental, philosophical change had to come.96
Such change began with a set of New Policies (with initial capitals). Of these, the most portentous – and most revealing – was educational reform. Under this scheme, a raft of modern schools was to be set up across the country, teaching a new Japanese-style mix of old and new subjects (Japan was the culture to be emulated because that country had defeated China in the war of 1895 and, under Confucianism, the victor was superior to the vanquished: at the turn of the century Chinese students crowded into Tokyo).97 It was intended that many of China’s academies would be converted into these new schools. Traditionally, China had hundreds if not thousands of academies, each consisting of a few dozen local scholars thinking high thoughts but not in any way coordinated with one another or the needs of the country. In time they had become a small elite who ran things locally, from burials to water distribution, but had no overall, systematic influence. The idea was that these academies would be modernised.98
It didn’t work out like that. The new – modern, Japanese, and Western science-oriented – curriculum proved so strange and so difficult for the Chinese that most students stuck to the easier, more familiar Confucianism, despite the evidence everywhere that it wasn’t working or didn’t meet China’s needs. It soon became apparent that the only way to deal with the classical system was to abolish it entirely, and that in fact is what happened just four years later, in 1905. A great turning point for China, this stopped in its tracks the production of the degree-holding elite, the gentry class. As a result, the old order lost its intellectual foundation and with it its intellectual cohesion. So far so good, one might think. However, the student class that replaced the old scholar gentry was presented, in John Fairbanks’s words, with a ‘grab-bag’ of Chinese and Western thought, which pulled students into technical specialities that however modern still left them without a moral order: ‘The Neo-Confucian synthesis was no longer valid or useful, yet nothing to replace it was in sight.’99 The important intellectual point to grasp about China is that that is how it has since remained. The country might take on over the years many semblances of Western thinking and behaviour, but the moral void at the centre of the society, vacated by Confucianism, has never been filled.
It is perhaps difficult for us, today, to imagine the full impact of modernism. Those alive now have all grown up in a scientific world, for many the life of large cities is the only life they know, and rapid change the only change there is. Only a minority of people have an intimate relation with the land or nature.
None of this was true at the turn of the century. Vast cities were still a relatively new experience for many people; social security systems were not yet in place, so that squalor and poverty were much harsher than now, a much greater shallow; and fundamental scientific discoveries, building on these new, uncertain worlds, created a sense of bewilderment, desolation and loss probably sharper and more widespread than had ever been felt before, or has since. The collapse of organised religion was only one of the factors in this seismic shift in sensibility: the growth in nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racial theories overall, and the enthusiastic embrace of the modernist art forms, seeking to break down experience into fundamental units, were all part of the same response.
The biggest paradox, the most worrying transformation, was this: according to evolution, the world’s natural pace of change was glacial. According to modernism, everything was changing at once, and in fundamental ways, virtually overnight. For most people, therefore, modernism was as much a threat as it was a promise. The beauty it offered held a terror within.
* Strauss was not the only twentieth-century composer to pull back from the leading edge of the avant-garde: Stravinsky, Hindemith and Shostakovich all rejected certain stylistic innovations of their early careers. But Strauss was the first.19
5
THE PRAGMATIC MIND OF AMERICA
In 1906 a group of Egyptians, headed by Prince Ahmad Fuad, issued a manifesto to campaign for the establishment by public subscription of an Egyptian university ‘to create a body of teaching similar to that of the universities of Europe and adapted to the needs of the country.’ The appeal was successful, and the university, or in the first phase an evening school, was opened two years later with a faculty of two Egyptian and three European professors. This plan was necessary because the college-mosque of al-Azhar at Cairo, once the principal school in the Muslim world, had sunk in reputation as it refused to update and adapt its mediaeval approach. One effect of this was that in Egypt and Syria there had been no university, in the modern sense, throughout the nineteenth century.1