Pragmatic China

I was reminded of the common conception that general Chinese thought is in keeping with the more pedestrian form of pragmatism when watching an episode of the recent BBC series A Year in Tibet. Besides, what seemed to me, a good summation of China’s pragmatic attitude to Tibet upon its invasion (or annexation) of the region, one particular incident seemed to capture the pragmatic heart of Chinese thought.

A Tibetan man who had been awarded two stars for his hotel but, against Chinese instruction, didn’t want to display the certificate for fear of making his hotel appear too expensive was visited by a Chinese delegation from the relevant hotel body. After brief discussion between the parties the respective views were outlined: The Tibetan still didn’t want to put up his certificate and the Chinese delegation felt that it was his duty to do so. What was striking was the conclusion that both factions finally agreed upon. In what the BBC narrator called ‘a typical Chinese agreement’ the Tibetan was requested to publicly display the sign only when Chinese officials were making a visit to the town; at all other times he could put the sign informing customers that his hotel had two stars anywhere he wanted. This seemed to me an excellent example of pragmatic thought in the pedestrian sense, a line of thought that dates back to the earliest Chinese thinkers.

Confucius (551-479) and his teachings are generally recognised as the genesis and bedrock of much of ancient Chinese philosophical thought. Confucius, born in the state of Lu, was descended from a family of impoverished aristocrats that dated back from the Shang dynasty. He made a prosperous living in politics, instructing civil servants and concerning much of his time organising the running of provincial governments and, like Socrates, he never wrote anything down.

Confucius’ philosophy is a collection of political instructions, just as he was, in essence, a statesman, a traditionalist and a civil servant. The concerns of his contemporaries in ancient Greece about what we can know and how we can know it would have seemed alien to him. Confucius’ teachings were more appropriated to the efficient running of government and effective means of taxation.

This down-to-earth pragmatism is something that has stayed with Chinese philosophy through millennia. As Robert E Allinson puts it, ‘we could demarcate the Chinese mind in terms of its greater emphasis upon, and consequent development of, the practical as against the theoretical mind’.

It is worth another sideways look at ancient Greek philosophy to highlight how pragmatic Confucius was. While Plato, Confucius’s junior by two-hundred years or so, was searching in his Republic for an over-arching and perfect definition of Justice, Confucius’ instructions to his disciples often bore no relation to a single, consistent philosophy but would alter from instance to instance. For example, when asked by one disciple what to do when the disciple’s province was confronted by an invading army Confucius instructed him to forge a language of communication between the invading and defending force, so that discussion between the two could bring peace. On another occasion, however, when asked by a different disciple how to successfully repel an aggressive force Confucius answered that the best thing to do would be to spare no mercy and to slaughter every enemy.

Adaptive and pragmatic as Confucianism may have been there is no doubt that the movement had an immensely far reaching influence on subsequent movements of Chinese philosophy, which were often products, in one way or another, of different parts of Confucius’ pragmatic teachings.

Daoism teaches that because all things are, like running water, constantly shifting in value from opposite to opposite we cannot prioritise one belief over another. Therefore, without any consistent idea of what good or bad might really be, we must act to emulate ‘Ziran’ (acting spontaneously). The emulation of Ziran, Daoists believe, leads to a way of living that gets things achieved in the most effective and efficient way possible – a pragmatic goal that would not have been a priority had Confucius not set it as such centuries earlier.

Further evidence of the influence of Confucianism can be seen seven hundred years after Confucius’ death in the writings of the philosopher and poet Tao Qian. In his Utopia Account of Peach Blossom Spring Tao Qian describes a community isolated from the rest of the world whose members are happy and content because they have decided to live ‘naturally’. This strong pull towards nature is an important topic in ancient Chinese philosophy, yet I believe it is symptomatic of an even greater theme of simplicity. Both nature and simplicity, however, owe their origins to Confucius’ pragmatism. When are things most effectively, easily and efficiently achieved? When their environment is kept simple. How is an environment best kept simple? When it is natural and uncomplicated by human designs. Again, all thought appears to be traceable to Confucius.
Until 1912 and the collapse of the dynastic system in China this influence was openly promoted either under the name Confucianism or Neo-Confucianism. However, the leaders of the ‘New Culture’ movement in China during the 1920s, enthused by Western traditions such as democracy and modern science rejected traditional Confucianism and turned their attention to Pragmatism in the late 19th Century sense.

One leader, Hu Shih was particularly vocal in expressing the attitudes of the ‘New Culture’ movement. Hu thought that Pragmatism, in its formal sense, was the long desired solution to the problem of finding a naturalistic philosophy of life. Indeed, members of the opposition National People’s Party appear to also have had Pragmatic tendencies as Sun Yan-Sen (one of the founders of the Kuomintang NPP) wrote,
‘We cannot decide whether an idea is good or not without seeing it in practice.’

In rejecting Confucianism on the grounds that it was not Pragmatic enough in the 19th Century sense, members of the Communist and Nationalist parties failed to recognise that Confucius was responsible for almost all pragmatism present in Chinese thought. Not only this but, due to the influence of his fundamental pragmatism, a strong case can be made that Confucius himself has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for almost all strands of Chinese thought.
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Rocco Sulkin is a second year undergraduate reading English and Philosophy at the University of York.