Page 124 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
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well-known writer of the time who was captivated by Darwinism and
materialist philosophy.
He [Liang Ch'i-ch'ao] mentioned idealism and materialism at least as early
as the October 16, 1902 issue of the Hsin min ts'ung pao [a Chinese jour-
nal]. Probably he had mentioned them somewhere before, for he gave no
explanation of their meaning, and yet h he did imply that materialism was
the better and that it was winning out over idealism, thanks to Darwin.
"How great," he wrote, "is the world of the last twenty-four years, a world
belonging to the theory of evolution. Materialism has arisen and idealism
has cowered in a corner..." 75
China and Charles Darwin relates how Darwinism was responsible
for establishing China's disputatious revolutionist culture and its great
influence on bringing Maoism to power:
Darwin helped inspire a true renaissance of Chinese thought by specifi-
cally challenging (or seeming to challenge) certain favorite traditional
ideas and by discrediting all ancient authority...But it was cut short—by
the early imposition of a neo-orthodoxy, the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.
That "imposition," of course, also owed much to Darwin. For Darwin had
legitimized violent change and revolution. Surely that was one of the most
momentous things Darwin did to China... At any rate, those Chinese who
were convinced that China needed rebellion were desperately in need of
some legitimizing theory, for without the Mandate of Heaven rebellion for
three thousand years had been one of the two cardinal sins (the other being
filial impiety). It was that powerful sense of sin that Mao Tse-tung, Wu
Chih-hui, Sun Yat-sen, and even Liang Chi'i-ch'ao combated so strenu-
ously in all their Darwinian protestations that revolution was legitimate.
Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled
down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li—"To rebel is justified" ...[That expres-
sion] meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been
taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch'i-
ch'ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin.
Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of
Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many oth-
ers), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K'ai-shek, and
Mao Tse-tung....