What is not in dispute is Keynes’s brilliant success, not only in terms of polemical argument but also in the literary skill of his acid portraits of the leaders. Of Clemenceau, Keynes wrote that he could not ‘despise him or dislike him, but only take a different view as to the nature of civilised man, or indulge at least a different hope.’ ‘He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen and his colleagues not least.’ Keynes takes the reader into Clemenceau’s mind: ‘The politics of power are inevitable, and there is nothing very new to learn about this war or the end it was fought for; England had destroyed, as in each preceding century, a trade rival; a mighty chapter had been closed in the secular struggle between the glories of Germany and France. Prudence required some measure of lip service to the “ideals” of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen, but it would be stupid to believe that there is much room in the world, as it really is, for such affairs as the League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except as an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one’s own interest.’23
This striking passage leads on to the ‘foolish’ American. Woodrow Wilson had come dressed in all the wealth and power of mighty America: ‘When President Wilson left Washington he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history’ Europe was dependent on the United States financially and for basic food supplies. Keynes had high hopes of a new world order flowing from New to Old. It was swiftly dashed. ‘Never had a philosopher held such weapons wherewithal to bind the princes of this world…. His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs. … But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hands of the adversary. … The President’s slowness amongst the Europeans was noteworthy. He could not, all in a minute, take in what the rest were saying, size up the situation in a glance … and was liable, therefore, to defeat by the mere swiftness, apprehension, and agility of a Lloyd George.’ In this terrible sterility, ‘the President’s faith withered and dried up.’
Among the intellectual consequences of the war and Versailles was the idea of a universal — i.e., worldwide — government. One school of thought contended that the Great War had mainly been stumbled into, that it was an avoidable catastrophe that would not have happened with better diplomacy. Other historians have argued that the 1914-18 war, like most if not all wars, had deeper, coherent causes. The answer provided by the Versailles Treaty was to set up a League of Nations, a victory in the first instance for President Wilson. The notion of international law and an international court had been articulated in the seventeenth century by Hugo Grotius, a Dutch thinker. The League of Nations was new in that it would provide a permanent arbitration body and a permanent organisation to enforce its judgements. The argument ran that if the Germans in 1914 had had to face a coalition of law-abiding nations, they would have been deterred from the onslaught on Belgium. The Big Three pictured the League very differently. For France a standing army would be to control Germany. Britain’s leaders saw it as a conciliation body with no teeth. Only Wilson conceived of it as both a forum of arbitration and as an instrument of collective security. But the idea was dead in the water in the United States; the Senate simply refused to ratify an arrangement that took fundamental decisions away from its authority. It would take another war, and the development of atomic weapons, before the world was finally frightened into acting on an idea similar to the League of Nations.
Before World War I, Germany had held several concessions in Shandong, China. The Versailles Treaty did not return these to the Beijing government but left them in the hands of the Japanese. When this news was released, on 4 May 1919, some 3,000 students from Beida (Beijing University) and other Beijing institutions besieged the Tiananmen, the gateway to the palace. This led to a battle between students and police, a student strike, demonstrations across the country, a boycott of Japanese goods - and in the end the ‘broadest demonstration of national feeling that China had ever seen.’24 The most extraordinary aspect of this development - what became known as the May 4 movement — was that it was the work of both mature intellectuals and students. Infused by Western notions of democracy, and impressed by the advances of Western science, the leaders of the movement put these new ideas together in an anti-imperialist program. It was the first time the students had asserted their power in the new China, but it would not be the last. Many Chinese intellectuals had been to Japan to study. The main Western ideas they returned with related to personal expression and freedom, including sexual freedom, and this led them to oppose the traditional family organisation of China. Under Western influence they also turned to fiction as the most effective way to attack traditional China, often using first-person narratives written in the vernacular. Normal as this might seem to Westerners, it was very shocking in China.
The first of these new writers to make a name for himself was Lu Xun. His real name was Zhou Shuren or Chou Shu-jen, and, coming from a prosperous family (like many in the May 4 movement), he first studied Western medicine and science. One of his brothers translated Havelock Ellis’s theories about sexuality into Chinese, and the other, a biologist and eugenicist, translated Darwin. In 1918, in the magazine New Youth, Lu Xun published a satire entitled ‘The Diary of a Madman.’ The ‘Diary’ was very critical of Chinese society, which he depicted as cannibalistic, devouring its brightest talents, with only the mad glimpsing the truth, and then as often as not in their dreams - a theme that would echo down the years, and not just in China. The problem with Chinese civilisation, Lu Xun wrote, was that it was ‘a culture of serving one’s masters, who are triumphant at the cost of the misery of the multitude.’25
The Versailles Treaty may have been the immediate stimulus for the May 4 movement, but a more general influence was the ideas that shaped Chinese society after 1911, when the Qing dynasty was replaced with a republic.26 Those ideas — essentially, of a civil society — were not new in the West. But the Confucian heritage posed two difficulties for this transition in China. The first was the concept of individualism, which is of course such a bulwark in Western (and especially American) civil society. Chinese reformers like Yan (or Yen) Fu, who translated so many Western liberal classics (including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology), nonetheless saw individualism only as a trait to be used in support of the state, not against it.27 The second difficulty posed by the Confucian heritage was even more problematic. Though the Chinese developed something called the New Learning, which encompassed ‘foreign matters’ (i.e., modernisation), what in practice was taught may be summarised, in the words of Harvard historian John
Fairbanks, as ‘Eastern ethics and Western science.’28 The Chinese (and to an extent the Japanese) persisted in the belief that Western ideas – particularly science – were essentially technical or purely functional matters, a set of tools much shallower than, say, Eastern philosophy, which provided the ‘substance’ of education and knowledge. But the Chinese were fooling themselves. Their own brand of education was very thinly spread – male literacy in the late Qing period (i.e., up to 1911) was 30 to 45 percent for men and as low as 2 to 10 percent for women. As a measure of the educational backwardness of China at this time, such universities as existed were required to teach and examine many subjects – engineering, technology, and commerce – using English-language textbooks: Chinese words for specialist terms did not yet exist.29