The Forgotten Shadow

WITH HIS BIOGRAPHY of the virtually unknown (to Americans at least) Liang Shu-ming, Associate History Professor Guy Alitto has completed the tortuous journey from dissertation to finished book. Alitto succeeds in retelling with new insight the story of intellectual crisis and quest in 20th-century China. Liang and his work in the service of the "Third Force" in China, between Nationalist and Communit, never occupied center stage. His failure and decline into historical obscurity capture much of the story of the early 20th century in China. Bust as Alitto has sought to tell that story from the novel perspective of failure, he slipped into a trap of his own making. By the end of his treatment, the nowforgotten figure of Liang Shuming emerges from the shadows endowed with significance he cannot claim as Alitto uses Liang to represent a great traditional alternative to Mao, and then by inference, raises Liang to greater heights of historical importance than any legacy has left him.

At the core of the book, however, is an excellent biography, a well-written one, and one that is worth reading for itself, whatever the ultimate importance history gives Liang Shu-ming. Liang was, for a time, a pivotal figue in both the epochal intellectual debates and in the early attempts to mobilize China's peasantry that marked China's pre-1949 history. Alitto tells Liang's individual story with a sure hand, combining clear writing with extraordinarily comprehensive research.

From his Western training Liang gained nationalism, and a commitment to the revolutionary movements that sought in the first decade of the 20th century to overthrow the Manchu ruling dynasty. With the revolution of 1911, however, came disillusionment; the political disintegration that was to lead to the warlord Balkanization of China was already underway. Embittered by the political failure of the 1911 battles, Liang returned to his father's house, and turned in fits of deep depression to Buddhism.

Liang then entered into the decisive period of his career. Hired by Peking University to teach Indian studies, he entered the great debate over what could constitute the basis for the renaissance of China. He came most of the way down on the side of traditionalists who sought to rebuild China on some kind of Confucian mold. He rejected both of his youthful affectations: Westernization and Buddhism. The rest of Liang's career was spent attempting to build a state based on a Confucian value system that would prescribe a "Chinese" core for any institutional setup. As part of the non-Communist opposition to Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist regime, Liang helped form the rural reconstruction movement that sought to create a new China on the backs of a liberated and mobilized peasantry. After the Communist victory in 1949, Liang's Confucian orientation towards rural reform became anathema, but because Mao knew Liang personally, aside from one campaign against him in the mid-fifties, Liang has managed to live quietly in Peking for the last 30 years.

In his nine decades, Liang took part in most of the great debates and political movements that have swept China since the downfall of the imperium. But throughout, his influence has primarily been restricted to what Alitto has called the literate "middlebrow" strata of Chinese society. Alitto, however, chafed in his role as the chronicler of one man and his influence. Consequently, the book is marred by his attempts to make Liang an overarching symbol for traditional China, striving to capture in one life, the dilemmas of an entire nation confronted with alien cultures and agonizing domestic political choices.

For Alitto, Liang's early life is a parable of psychiatric disorder, in which Liang's dizzying rush through a Western, and Indian, and finally a Chinese Confucian stage provide a microcosm of China's search for a culture to serve in the modern era. Alitto uses Eriksonian analysis to ascribe to Liang a crisis of identity, and then claims that Liang projected "his own encounter with meaninglessness onto China's cultural dilemma."

It might be interesting to examine non-Western figures through the lens of Western psychoanalysts. Alitto might even be right here, and when he argues that Liang sought to emulate his father in this or that gesture. He may be right, but he does not prove his contention, and this attempt to include a psychobiography within a biography is misguided. If Liang is important at all to Western readers, it cannot be because he exhibited personal psychosis or psychological pecurliarities. Liang is significant only as long as his life directly yields insights on the choices confronted by his fellows in the 20th century. Unfortunately Alitto sought to demonstrate how Liang's behavior was a universal human response to crisis. Instead, he simply manages to show that Liang was mixed up at various points in his life.

THIS aggrandizement of Liang, this attempt to see the man as an embodiment of the recent Chinese experience, threatens to obliterate the biography in the book when Alitto reaches the crucial point in his narrative. Liang's rural emphasis matched Mao's in timing and belief in the power of the peasantry, however much the two disagreed about Confucian and Marxist values. In 1938, Liang even went to Yenan and engaged in a lengthy discussion with Mao that probably forged the friendship that came to Liang's aid after 1949.

But in his search for significance for his hero, Alitto reduces both Liang and Mao to caricatures--Alitto wrote that

...The two men shared a bone-deep Chineseness...Perhaps the Chineseness of both the Confucian Sage and the Marxist revolutionary is more important than the contrasts.

Perhaps, as archetypes, such Chineseness is more important than any other consideration. But Liang and Mao do not in themselves embody two great cultural systems competing for the Chinese soul, and Liang himself lacks either the record or the lasting intellectual power to rank him as the last, best hope of the traditional order of China. Throughout the book, Alitto juxtoposes Liang and Mao, always hinting that Liang is the ghost of the Chinese past that dogged Mao until his death.

Here lies the true irony of Alitto's approach to his subject. His attempt to give this one man historical potency produces cartoon drawings of intellectual developments. Ultimately, Liang was not "the last Confucian" that could defend two millenia of Confucian tradition. His Confucianism was a tool, picked up relatively late in life, with which he sought to preserve China in the face of modernity. He could not stand for the old order; he chose only one of many intellectual responses to simultaneous demands of Chinese culturalism and nationalism; he failed to make any new synthesis that challenged Mao on his own, political ground. Liang is overburdened as a symbol of old China's decline; he is significant as he makes his decisions as an individual.

When Alitto just tells Liang's own story, Liang is perfectly capable of holding the reader's interest as dynamic, powerful, figure. He is important then, because as he grappled with the general problem of Chinese intellectuals--the preservation of Chinese culture--Liang illustrates how Alitto's "Chinese dilemma of modernity" affected the individuals being modernized. And as Liang's life touched upon other leading figures of the day, his individual story does yield new insights into the general milieu in which both Mao and Liang worked.

The failings in this book probably arise out of the complications of transforming a dissertation into a published volume. The exhaustive research of a history thesis leaps out from every page, from a bibliography that numbers over 600 items. The psychobabble, the careless juxtaposition of men and events seem out of place, slapped on in a revision ordered by some editor searching for a hook to brandish in publisher's blurbs. Though sometimes obscured by the fluff, Alitto's tale of one man does emerge in the end. It is a tale worth telling, and as Alitto illuminates how Liang faced universal problems, he does, almost in spite of himself, uncover the universal import of the life of Liang Shu-ming.