For the past four summers I have taught a class in July for the Renmin University of China International Summer School: “Confucianism in America.” We read and talk about the ways in which Confucian ideas circulate in US academia and society. I give them, among other things, my book to read. They find some of my ideas (an affirmative Confucian case for same sex marriage) a little crazy, but we have fun and they are good students.
The first order of intellectual business for the class is the ponder the kinds of cultural assumptions Americans bring to any encounter with Confucianism. And that requires some familiarity with liberalism, as both a political-economic and cultural system. So, I give them the Introduction to John Stewart Mill’s On Liberty, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance.” I’ve written in the past about some of the issues Mill raises in a Chinese context. This year what struck me was how some of my students embraced Emerson’s call to individuality.
There are thirty students in the class and I encourage active participation. The vast majority are Renda undergraduates, most having just finished their first or second year. About a third of them quite willingly throw themselves into classroom discussions, answering my questions and raising queries of their own. English is the language of instruction, and I assume some are uncomfortable or embarrassed to speak up in a foreign tongue. The bulk of the grading centers on written assignments, and it is there, with a little more time for thought and composition, that they express more of their world views.
For the first assignment they can write about either Mill or Emerson. Mill is the safe choice: it is easy to recognize some value in his famous “harm principle” – the idea that people should be free to behave as they like as long as they do not harm others – and then argue for a rather broad definition of “harm.” For some of my students, “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” would seem to be consonant with Mill. Yet even though they might stray rather far from Mill’s own position, I understand their impulse. They are simply reflecting the pervasive social acceptance here of a much greater limitation on individual behavior than would be tolerated by Americans. Though that attitude is certainly encouraged by the ruling Communist Party, its roots run deeper culturally than Mao and his revolution and Xi and his neo-traditionalism.
The Emerson essays are of a different sort altogether. In explicating why the notion of self-reliance is important to Emerson, some of the students clearly speak to their own hopes and frustrations in China now. This passage, edited very lightly for stylistic clarity, captures well what several expressed:
Society wants us to be obedient, punctilious and to be a yes-man; it likes obedience, nominal and traditional rules, and hates self-reliance, truth and creativity. In this way society keeps its stability. But we must know that obeying rigid social rules will scatter our strength, waste our time, and blur our personalities; our mood and thinking will be manipulated by public opinion; our brain, heart and body will not be able to keep independent; our life will be chosen by society, rather than by ourselves. We must know that sticking to the convention is useless, it cannot solve any problems or promote any progress; we need to live with self-reliance, in knowledge, in society and in law; we should break the shackles with all our might; we should trust ourselves and show our talent.
Were I teaching this text in the US, to American undergraduates, this sentiment would be unremarkable. But here it stands out: a clarion call for personal independence. And it makes sense to me, based on comments from other students and my casual observations of young people in China now.
In general (and it is always a bit dangerous to try to generalize about such a large and diverse place as China), Chinese youth are much more restrained than their American counterparts, and we might mistakenly take that reticence as a kind of self-denial: the weight of expectations of filial obedience coupled with the hectoring morality of the party-state overwhelm individuality and self-expression. But that's not true. Young people here now find all sorts of ways to demonstrate their personal identities over and against social conformity. You can see it in little things: tattoos (which not all that long ago were taboo for "good girls"); t-shirts (one young woman on the subway sported one announcing "No Commitments" - a most un-Confucian sentiment); and the wacky hair colors down on Gulou Dajie. But you also see the desire for individuality presented in more thoughtful ways, like another student paper that pushes against the usual argument that individuality must be constrained in order to protect the broader interests of society. The title of her paper is: “Self Reliance Benefits Both People Themselves and Society”. Her conclusion is that individual flourishing not only allows each of us to find and develop what is uniquely best in us as persons, but it is only when individual flourishing is promoted and supported that societal flourishing and prosperity and, yes, stability, can be achieved. We hadn't read Adam Smith (I don't know if she had previously) but she could have easily added: "as if by an invisible hand." In her own words: "personal improvement contributes to social improvement."
I am not suggesting that liberalism is about to take over China. Far from it. But we should also avoid the opposite falsehood: that young people here have no sense of their own individuality and simply conform to social norms and conventions. I found this even in the more circumspect papers on Mill, as here:
But I agree with Mill, and I insist that enough freedom or tolerance in society is the mother of variety, and variety is the origin of flourishing, and real stability comes from long-term prosperity, not assimilation.
The Renda kids are alright.
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