Page 122 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH

In Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New
Culture, the American historian Charlotte Furth
examines Ting Wen-chiang, the dean of the New
Culture movement, in considerable detail.
According to her, Wen-chiang merely translated
W
the ideas of evolutionist ideologues such as
Darwin, Huxley and Spencer into Chinese. For this
reason, Furth even refers to Ding as the "Huxley of
China." 70 (Huxley, Darwin's biggest supporter,
Darwinism fostered was known in his day as "Darwin's bulldog.")
Communism and Ting Wen-chiang studied zoology and geol-
Fascism in China. ogy at Glasgow University in Scotland. Returning
Fascist leader Chiang
Kai-Shek was influ- to China in 1911, he exerted great efforts to spread
enced by Darwinism. materialist and Darwinist ideas in the newly-
founded Chinese Republic, even supporting the
theory of eugenics proposed by Francis Galton,
Darwin's cousin. 71 (Eugenics proposed the disposal of those within a
race who were sick or disabled, thus ensuring so-called universal ad-
vancement by the "mating" of the healthy ones. This theory was applied
most widely in Nazi Germany.)
James Reeve Pusey, a Harvard professor of history and an impor-
tant commentator on the New Culture movement, says:
The New Culture Movement's cries were all cries Darwin had backed be-
fore, and he now backed them again in the same old way. He [Darwin] was
the patron saint of the New Culture Movement. . . [H]is theory, so the New
Culture Movement's leaders still insisted, "proved". . . that "the present sur-
passes the past, and the future surpasses the present." That was the faith be-
hind the Anarchists' injunction to tsun chin po ku (respect the present and
belittle the past) and the Communists' later injunction to hou chin po ku
(extol the present and belittle the past). 72
As a result of the spread of Darwinism in China, the emergence of
this kind of Chinese ideologues at the beginning of the 20th century gave
birth, first, to the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang party with its fascist
tendencies, then to Chinese Communism. In an article written in the peri-
odical New Scientist, Michael Ruse, a Canadian philosopher wrote: