China and the West

Hu, Shi. John Dewey in China [ID D28461].
John Dewey was born October 20, 1859, and died in 1952, in his ninety-third year. This coming October there will be a celebration of the Centennial of his birth in many parts of the free world.
Forty years ago, early in 1919, Professor Dewey and his wife, Alice, left the United States for a trip to the Far East. The trip was to be solely for pleasure. But, before their departure from San Francisco, Dewey was invited by cable to give a series of lectures at the Imperial University of Tokyo and later at other centers of higher learning in Japan.
While in Japan, he received a joint invitation from five educational bodies in China to lecture in Peking, Nanking, Shanghai, and other cities. He ac¬cepted the invitation, and the Deweys arrived in Shanghai on May I, 1919- just three days before the outburst of the Student Movement on May 4th in Peking. That was the Student Movement which is often referred to as 'The May Fourth Movement'.
It was the Student Movement and its successes and failures that so much intrigued the Deweys that they changed their original plan to return to America after the summer months and decided to spend a full year in China. Dewey applied to Columbia University for a year's leave of absence, which was granted, and which was subsequently extended to two years. So, he spent a total of two years and two months in China, from May, 1919, to July, 1921.
When Miss Evelyn Dewey wrote in her Preface to the volume of Dr. and Mrs. Dewey's letters that 'the fascination of the struggle going on in China for a unified and independent democracy caused them to alter their plan to return to the United States in the summer of 1919', she was referring to their keen interest in the Student Movement. It is in order, therefore, to give a brief sketch of the May Fourth Movement and its nationweide influence as background of this talk on John Dewey in China.
World War I had ended only a few months before, and the Peace Conference in Paris was drafting the final terms of the peace treaty. The Chinese people had hoped that, with Woodrow Wilson's idealistic 'Fourteen Points' still echoing throughout the world, China might have some of her grievances redressed at the Peace Conference. But in the first days of May, 1919, authentic reports began to reach China that President Wilson had failed to render his moral support to China's demand that the former German possessions and concessions in Shantung be restored to China; and that the Peace Conference had decided to leave the Shantung question to Japan to settle with China. The Chinese delegation was helpless; the Chinese government was powerless. The people were disappointed and disheartened, but helpless.
On Sunday, May 4th, the students in Peking called a mass meeting of all colleges and secondary schools to protest against the Paris decision and to call on the government to instruct the Chinese delegation in Paris to refuse to accept it. The whole thing was a spontaneous and unpremeditated outburst of youthful patriotism. The communists’ claim that 'the May Fourth Movement' was a part of the World Revolution and was planned and led by Chinese communists is sheerly a big lie. There was no communist in China in 1919.
After the speeches and resolutions, the mass meeting decided on a demon¬stration parade which ended in forcing the closed gates of the house of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had been notorious for his pro-Japanese policies. The marching students went into the house and beat up one of the luncheon guests, who happened to be the Chinese Minister to Tokyo, recalled for consultation. In the turmoil, the house was set on fire—probably to frighten away the demonstrators. A number of students were arrested on their way back to their schools.
That was what happened on the fourth of May, forty years ago.
The Deweys were still in Shanghai when the news of the Peking student movement was first published and was immediately arousing sympathetic responses from students and the general public all over the country.
When the Deweys arrived in Peking, they saw the student movement at its highest moments during the first days of June. Hundreds of students were making speeches in the streets, preaching to the people that China could regain her lost rights by boycotting Japanese goods. On June 5, the Deweys wrote to their daughters at home: 'This is Thursday morning, and last night we heard that about a thousand students were arrested the day before. They had filled the building of Law [of the National Peking University, used as a temporary ‘prison’], and have begun on the Science building.'
Later, on the same day, they reported the most astonishing news: 'In the evening, a telephone call came that the tents [of the soldiers] around the university buildings where the students were imprisoned had been struck and the soldiers were leaving. Then the students inside held a meeting and passed a resolution asking the government whether they were guaranteed freedom of speech, because if they were not, they would not leave the building merely to be arrested again, as they planned to go on speaking. So they em¬barrassed the government by remaining in 'jail' all night.'
The Deweys later explained that the government's ignominious surrender was due to the fact that the merchants in Shanghai had called a strike the day before as a protest against the arrest of the thousand students. And they re¬marked: 'This is a strange country. The so-called republic is a joke… But in some ways there is more democracy than we have. Leaving out the women, there is complete social equality. And while the legislature is a perfect farce, public opinion, when it does express itself, as at the present time, has re¬markable influence.'
On June 16, the Deweys wrote home that the three pro-Japanese high officials (including the Minister of Foreign Affairs) had resigned from the government, and the students' strike had been called off.
On July 2, they wrote home: 'The anxiety here is tense. The report is that the [Chinese] Delegates did not sign [the Peace Treaty].' Two days later, they wrote: 'You can't imagine what it means here for China not to have signed [the Peace Treaty]. The entire government had been for it. The President up to ten days before the signing said it was necessary [to sign]. It was a victory for public opinion, and all set going by these little schoolboys and girls.'
I have quoted these letters to show a part of the first impressions Dr. and Mrs. Dewey had during their first two or three months in Peking. Somehow, this 'strange country' had a strange appeal to them. They decided to stay on, for a year at first, and finally for two years and two months. They visited 11 of the 22 provinces—4 provinces in the North, 5 in Central China, from Shanghai to Changsha, and 2 in the South,
A word may be said about the preparations made for the reception of Dewey's lectures. A month before his arrival in China, I was asked by the sponsoring organizations to give a series of four lectures on the Pragmatic Movement, beginning with Charles S. Peirce and William James, but with special emphasis on Dewey. A series of articles on Dewey's educational philos¬ophy was published in Shanghai under the editorship of Dr. Chiang Monlin, one of his students in Teachers’ College at Columbia.
A number of Dewey's students were asked to interpret his lectures in the Chinese language. For example, I was his translator and interpreter for all his lectures in Peking and in the provinces of Shantung and Shansi. For his several major series of lectures, we also selected competent recorders for re¬porting every lecture in full for the daily newspapers and periodicals. What came to be known as 'Dewey’s Five Major Series of Lectures' in Peking, total¬ing 58 lectures, were recorded and reported in full and later published in book form, going through ten large reprintings before Dewey left China in 1921, and continuing to be reprinted for three decades until the communists put a stop to them.
The topics of the Five Series will give some idea of the scope and content of Dewey's lectures:
I. 3 lectures on Modern Tendencies in Education
II. 16 lectures on Social and Political Philosophy
III. 16 lectures on Philosophy of Education
IV. 15 lectures on Ethics
V. 8 lectures on Types of Thinking
His lectures in Peking included two other series:
VI. 3 lectures on Democratic Developments in America
VII. 3 lectures on Three Philosophers of the Modern Period (William James, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell—these lectures were given at special request as an introduction to Russell before the latter's arrival in China in 1920 to deliver a number of lectures.)
Dewey's lectures in Nanking included these series:
1. 10 lectures on the Philosophy of Education
2. 10 lectures on the History of Philosophy
3. 3 lectures on Experimental Logic
Typing on his own typewriter, Dewey always wrote out his brief notes for every lecture, a copy of which would be given to his interpreter so that he could study them and think out the suitable Chinese words and phrases before the lecture and its translation. After each lecture in Peking, the Dewey notes were given to the selected recorders, so that they could check their reports before publication. I have recently re-read most of his lectures in Chinese translation after a lapse of 40 years, and I could still feel the freshness and earnestness of the great thinker and teacher who always measured every word and every sentence in the classroom or before a large lecture audience.
After one year of public lectures in many cities, Dewey was persuaded by his Chinese friends to spend another year in China, primarily as a Visiting Professor at the National Peking University, lecturing and discussing with advanced students without the aid of an interpreter, and devoting a part of his time to lectures at the Teachers' College in Peking and in Nanking. He was interested in the few 'experimental schools' which had been established by his former students in various educational centers, such as Peking, Nanking, Soochow, and Shanghai. Some of the schools, such as the one at the Teachers' College in Nanking, were named Dewey schools.
The Deweys left China in 1921. In October, 1922, the National Educational Association met in Tsinan to discuss a thorough revision of the national 4 school system and curriculum. Article 4 of the New Educational System of 1922 reads: 'The child is the center of education. Special attention should be paid to the individual characteristics and aptitudes of the child in organizing the school system. Henceforth, the elective system should be adopted for sec¬ondary and higher education, and the principle of flexibility should be adopted in the arrangement and promotion of classes in all elementary schools. ' In the new school curriculum of 1923 and the revised curriculum of 1929, the emphasis was placed on the idea that the child was the center of the school. The influence of Dewey's educational philosophy is easily seen in these revisions.
Dewey went to China in May, 1919—forty years ago. Can we now give a rough estimate of his influence in China after the passing of forty years?
Such an estimate has not been easy, because these forty years have been mostly years of great disturbance, of civil wars, revolutions, and foreign wars— including the years of the Nationalist Revolution, the eight years of the Japanese War and the Second World War, the years of the communist wars, and the communist conquest of the Chinese mainland. It is exceedingly dif¬ficult to say how much influence any thinker or any school of thought has had on a people that has suffered so much from the tribulations of war, revolu¬tion, exile, mass migration, and general insecurity and deprivation.
In our present case, however, the Chinese communist regime has given us unexpected assistance in the form of nationwide critical condemnation and purging of the Pragmatic philosophy of Dewey and of his Chinese followers. This great purge began as early as 1950 in a number of inspired but rather mild articles criticizing Dewey’s educational theories, and citing American critics such as Kandel, Bode, Rugg, and Hook in support of their criticism. But the purge became truly violent in 1954 and 1955, when the Chinese communist regime ordered a concerted condemnation and purge of the evil and poisonous thoughts of Hu Shih in many aspects of Chinese intellectual activity—in philosophy, in history, in the history of philosophy, in political thought, in literature, and in histories of Chinese literature. In those two years of 1954 and 1955, more than three million words were published for the purging and exorcising of the 'ghost of Hu Shih'. And in almost every violent attack on me, Dewey was inevitably dragged in as a source and as the fountainhead of the heinous poison.
And in most of the articles of this vast purge literature, there was a frank recognition of the evil influence of Dewey, Dewey's philosophy and method, and the application of that philosophy and method by that 'rotten and smelly' Chinese Deweyan, Hu Shih, and his slavish followers. May we not accept such confessions from the communist-controlled world as fairly reliable, though probably slightly exaggerated, estimates of the 'poisonous' influence left by Dewey and his friends in China?
I quote only a few of these confessions from Red China:
1. 'If we want to critize the old theories of education, we must begin with Dewey. The educational ideas of Dewey have dominated and controlled Chinese education for thirty years, and his social philosophy and his general philosophy have also influenced a part of the Chinese people'. (The People’s Education, October, 1950).
2. 'How was Dewey's poisonous Pragmatic educational philosophy spread over China? It was spread primarily through his lectures in China preaching his Pragmatic philosophy and his reactionary educational ideas, and through that center of Dewey's reactionary thinking, namely, Columbia University, from which thousands of Chinese students, for over thirty years, have brought back all the reactionary, subjective-idealistic, Pragmatic educational ideas of Dewey. ... As one who has been most deeply poisoned by his reactionary edu¬cational ideas, as one who has worked hardest and longest to help spread his educational ideas, I now publicly accuse that great fraud and deceiver in the modern history of education, John Dewey! ' (By Ch’en Ho-ch'in, one of the great educators of the Dewey school, who was responsible for the moderniza-tion of the Shanghai schools, who was ordered to make this public accusation in February, 1955. It was published in the Wenhui Pao, February 28, 1955.)
3. 'The battlefield of the study of Chinese literature has, for over thirty years, been occupied by the representative of bourgeois idealism [that is, Pragmatism], namely, Hu Shih, and his school. Even years after the 'Libera¬tion' when the intellectual circles have supposedly acknowledged the leader¬ship position of Marxism, the evil influence of that school has not yet received the purge it rightly deserves'. (The People's Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party and Government, Nov. 5, 1954).
4. 'The poison of the philosophical ideas of Pragmatism [as represented by Hu Shih] has not only infiltrated the field of the study of Chinese literature, but has also penetrated deep into the fields of history, education, linguistics, and even the realm of natural science—of course, the greatest evil effect has been in the field of philosophy'. (Kuang-ming Daily, of Peking, Dec. 15, 1954).
These confessions should be sufficient to give us an idea of the extent of the evil influence of Dewey and his followers and friends in China. According to these confessions, the Pragmatic philosophy and method of Dewey and his Chinese friends have dominated Chinese education for thirty years, and have infiltrated and dominated for over thirty years the fields of the study of Chinese literature, linguistics, history, philosophy, and even the realm of natural science!
What is this Deweyan brand of Pragmatism or Experimentalism that is so much feared in communist China as to deserve three million words of purge and condemnation?
As I examine this vast purge literature, I cannot help laughing heartily at all this fuss and fury. After wading through literally millions of words of abuse, I find that what those Red masters and slaves dread most and want to purge is only a philosophical theory of thinking which Dewey had expounded in many of his logical studies and which he had made popular in his little book, How We Think. According to this theory, thinking is not passive and slavish deduction from unquestioned absolute truths, but an effective tool and method for resolving doubt and overcoming difficulties in our daily life, in our active dealings with Nature and man. Thinking, says Dewey, always begins with a situation of doubt and perplexity; it proceeds with a search for facts and for possible suggestions or hypotheses for the resolution of the initial difficulty; and it terminates in proving, testing, or verifying the selected hypothesis by successfully and satisfactorily resolving the perplexing situation which had challenged the mind to think. That’s the Deweyan theory of think¬ing, which I have in the last forty years tried to popularize by pointing out that that was an adequate analysis of the method of science as well as an adequate analysis of the method of 'evidential investigation' (k’ao-chü, k'ao- cheng), which the great Chinese classical scholars of the last three centuries had been using so efficaciously and Fruitfully. That is the method of the dis¬ciplined common sense of mankind: it is the essence of the method of science, consisting mainly in a boldness in suggesting hypotheses, coupled with metic¬ulous care in seeking verification by evidence or by experimentation.
Two corollaries from this conception of thinking stand out pre-eminently. First, the progress of man and of society depends upon the patient and suc¬cessful solution of real and concrete problems by means of the active use of the intelligence of man. 'Progress', says Dewey, 'is piecemeal. It is always a retail job, never wholesale.' That is anathema to all communists, who believe in total and cataclysmic revolution, which will bring about wholesale progress overnight.
The second corollary is equally anathema to the communists, namely, that, in this natural and orderly process of rational thinking, all doctrines and all theories are to be regarded, not as absolute truths, but only as tentative and suggestive hypotheses to be tested in use—only as tools and materials for aiding human intelligence, but never as unquestioned and unquestionable dogmas to stifle or stop thinking. Dewey said in his Peking lecture on moral education: 'Always cultivate an open mind. Always cultivate the habit of intellectual honesty. And always learn to be responsible for your own thinking.' That was enough to scare the Commies out of their wits, and enough to start years of violent attack and abuse on Dewey and Pragmatism and the 'ghost of Hu Shih'.
And the most amusing fact was that all those years of violent attack and all those millions of words of condemnation began in 1954 with a communist discussion of a popular Chinese novel of the eighteenth century entitled 'The Dream of the Red Chamber'. Why? Because nearly forty years ago I was tempted to apply the method of scientific research to a study of the authorship, the remarkable family background of the author, and the history of the evolu¬tion of the text of the novel. In the course of subsequent years, numerous hitherto-unknown materials were discovered and published by me, all of which have verified and strengthened my first researches. That was a conscious application of the Dewey theory of thinking to a subject-matter which was well known to every man and woman who could read at all. I have applied the same theory and method of thinking to several other Chinese novels, as well as to many difficult and forbidding problems of research in the fields of the history of Chinese thought and belief, including the history of Ch'an or Zen Buddhism.
But the best-known example or material with which I illustrated and popularized the Deweyan theory of thinking was the great novel 'The Dream of the Red Chamber', Nearly thirty years ago (November, 1930), at the request of my publisher, I made an anthology of my Essays, in which I included three pieces on 'The Dream of the Red Chamber'. I wrote a preface to this anthology intended for younger readers. In my wicked moments, I wrote these words in introducing my three studies of that novel:
My young friends, do not regard these pieces on 'The Dream of the Red Chamber' as my efforts to teach you how to read a novel. These essays are only a few Examples or illustrations of a method of how to think and study. Through these simple essays, I want to convey to you a little bit of the scientific spirit, the scientific attitude of mind, and the scientific method. The scientific spirit lies in the search for facts and for truth. The scientific attitude of mind is a willingness to put aside our feelings and prejudices, a willingness to face facts and to follow evidence wherever it may lead us. And the scientific method is only 'a boldness to suggest hypotheses coupled with a meticulous care in seeking proof and verification'. When evidence is lacking or insuf¬ficient, there must be a willingness to suspend judgment. A conclusion is valid only when it is verified. Some Ch'an (Zen) monk of centuries ago said that Bodhidharma came all the way to China in search of a man who would not be deceived by man. In these essays, I, too, wish to present a method of how not to be deceived by men. To be led by the nose by a Confucius or a Chu Hsi is not highly commendable. But to be led by the nose by a Marx, a Lenin, or a Stalin is also not quite becoming a man. I have no desire to lead anybody by the nose: I only wish to convey to my young friends my humble hope that they may learn a little intellectual skill for their own self-protection and endeavor to be, men who cannot be deceived by others.
These words, I said then, were penned with infinite love and infinite hope. For these words, I have brought upon my head and the head of my beloved teacher and friend, John Dewey, years of violent attack and millions of words of abuse and condemnation. But, ladies and gentlemen, these same millions of words of abuse and condemnation have given me a feeling of comfort and encouragement—a feeling that Dewey's two years and two months in China were not entirely in vain, that my forty years of humble effort in my own country have not been entirely in vain, and that Dewey and his students have left in China plenty of 'poison', plenty of antiseptic and antitoxin, to plague the Marxist-Leninist slaves for many, many years to come.