Page 120 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
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spreading quickly among Chinese intellectuals. In The Encyclopedia of
Evolution, Richard Milner writes:
During the 19th century, the West regarded China as a sleeping giant, iso-
lated and mired in ancient traditions. Few Europeans realized how avidly
C Chinese intellectuals seized on Darwinian evolutionary ideas and saw in
them a hopeful impetus for progress and change. According to the
Chinese writer Hu Shih (Living Philosophies, 1931), when Thomas
Huxley's book Evolution and Ethics was published in 1898, it was immedi-
ately acclaimed and accepted by Chinese intellectuals. Rich men spon-
sored cheap Chinese editions so they could be widely distributed to the
masses. 66
Just as young Turks were captivated by Western materialist ideas at
the end of the Ottoman period, so in China, ideologues appeared who
adopted materialism and Darwinism. As a result, the Chinese Empire
that had lasted thousands of years was abolished in 1911 and replaced
by the Republic of China. Those who founded the republic, no matter
how anti-Western their rhetoric and policy may have been, adopted the
same racist and Social Darwinist understanding that had justified
Western imperialism. In an article in the American magazine New
Republic, senior editor Jacob Heilbrunn writes:
The idea of using Western ideas and inventions against the West was at its
zenith in those days. In the wake of the famous May 4, 1919, demonstra-
tions in Beijing, calls for modernity and patriotism, science and democ-
racy, gained currency among intellectuals. ..."Lurking behind the scenes,"
as Tu Wei-ming [a professor of Chinese History and Philosophy] has
pointed out in the winter 1996 issue of Daedalus, "was neither science nor
democracy but scientism and populism.... [I]nstrumental rationality and
Jacobin-like collectivism fundamentally restructured the Chinese intellec-
tual world in the post-May Fourth period." Reformers, such as Liang
Qichao, who edited a clandestine journal, were influenced by a debased
but popular version of Darwin and Spencer. They saw race war as the key
to progress. 67
The racist thinker Herbert Spencer, mentioned in the quotation
above, was a contemporary of Darwin, whose theory he adapted to so-
cial science. Among other violent, unjust and cruel ideas, Spencer pro-