Learning from the Other/making sense of the past: Zhang Jingsheng's utopia of German aestheticism and Confucian statecraft

It seems to me that there have been several conversations here lately that circle back to the idea of lessons from the Other as one part of progress. It seems to come down to the idea that America, embarking on its own Century of Humiliation, or at least in critical decline, could, as the reformers in Japan and China did, take lessons from its supposed present-day or future adversaries (there are problems with these analogies that can be fruitfully ignored). We have been talking about Confucianism, as well, and other Eastern philosophies.

In light of that, and because I find his work somehow inspiring, I want to introduce a man named Zhang Jingsheng (1888-1970), the Confucian romantic whose model of aesthetic governance captured the imagination of segments of the Chinese elite in the 1920s.

I wouldn’t argue that his model of government-for-beauty has much relevance, but maybe there’s something to be borrowed from his methods of philosophical syncretization, something to be learned from the methods by which he combines Confucian statecraft, German aestheticism, eugenics, and bureaucratism.

Although not from an aristocratic family, Zhang ended up through personal connections to be among those students sent in 1912 by the Republic of China to study philosophy in France. A liberal reformer before he left, he returned in 1921 with much stranger, more radical politics. His politics were to some extent out of step with what had developed in his absence, speaking broadly, but he found an audience among the more hopeful reformers, as well as their students.

In 1925, he put out his lecture notes from his Peking University courses as a pair of books: The Philosophy of a Beautiful Life and Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society.

That second book is more interesting. In it, he describes his utopia of thorough organization. His ideal society is founded on beauty. That principle must be honored in everything. It has to extend from the individual, to government, to industrial production... Beauty is an obligation. Science is its servant. He is going to re-imagine for semicolonial, semifeudal China some version of Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic state.

Zhang dispenses with a philosophical basis for most of this, and spends most of his time on sketching out his utopian society.

He says that he would begin by turning most responsibilities over to women. Rather than reason, women are ruled by passion. They have a spirit of self-sacrifice, instead of self-interest. They like beautiful things, basically.

To free women would require an end to the traditional marriage system, and the creation of a system of organized free love. Women could take lovers as they chose. They would be organized into loose cooperatives, where information about sex, love, and practical tasks could be exchanged. On top of these concerns, the aesthetic concerns of women make them natural eugenicists, which was crucial at a time when the Chinese race was being overcome by the more vigorous European races. Free love might also help to destroy destructive vices, like buggery and masturbation (but an underclass of bachelors could be solved by, Zhang says, by Chinese men taking up the obligation of raising up black and brown women through interbreeding).

He does not differ much here from other reformers of his age. Zhang was under the influence of local progressive eugenicists, and he was among those that met with Margaret Sanger on her visit to China in 1922.

The pursuit of beauty has to be extended down even to menial tasks. He calls for academies to be set up for even the most menial sorts of employment. Prostitutes and night soil collectors, carpenters and mechanics—they would all be instructed how to use the latest scientific advances to improve their work (and to expand the time available for other aesthetic pursuits), and to bend their labor toward producing beauty. Occupations would be divided up by gender, as well, so that women were free from hard labor.

There would also be a complicated quasi-religious system put in place. He is against feudal superstitions, and imagines instead a system of belief based on aesthetics. He calls for the construction of temples devoted to the cultivation and worship of aesthetic sense. Great artists and thinkers would be enshrined. The most beautiful people in the country, ranked by officials, would tour these temples, accompanied by accomplished artists, poets, or craftsmen, to exhibit themselves nude. Rather than being worshiped, these models of perfection would inspire passionate adoration, maybe approaching lust. Space would be given over to bathhouses, gymnasiums, and libraries. The temples would contain negative examples, too: in the crypts below, the bones of rebels would sit alongside sculptures or paintings deemed unacceptable. A list of holidays and festivals, including orgies, is provided, as well.

There is nothing anarchistic in all of this, as Zhang sees it. Romanticism, orgies, poetry...—all of this has to be supported by ritual, by strict observance of etiquette, by Confucian statecraft, by a bureaucracy.

He redesigns only slightly the organs of the state, imagining a nation carefully governed by the Ministry for National Strength, Ministry of Engineering, Ministry of Education and Art, Ministry of Entertainment, Ministry of Etiquette, Ministry of Communication, Ministry of Industry and Finance, and the Ministry of Transportation and Travel. Everything is carefully managed. The Ministry of Etiquette, organized internally into the Department of Rites and Etiquette, the Department of Dance and Music, and the Medical Department, for example, would be charged with arranging festivals, approving ceremonial dances, and dealing with crimes (these all stem in the utopia from medical conditions and can usually be solved through pharmaceutical or surgical intervention: nymphomania can be cured through labiaectomy, malingering by a shot of stimulants; the truly mad, who cannot be cured by medical science or contemplation of the arts, will be electrocuted in their sleep).

The functioning of the bureaucracy would be shielded from political competition, which would take place mostly as a beautiful distraction. Those touring nudes and poets would, after visiting the temples to aesthetic achievement, be sent to sit in a parliament of sorts, which would have limited power to make legislation. The heads of the Ministries would serve as the executive.

Of course, this is only based on my limited reading on Zhang’s work, and it might only give you a rough idea of what he actually wrote. It’s a shame that these works have never been translated into English.

Zhang Jingsheng was a minor celebrity in China in the 1920s. These ideas were widely circulated.

He became fixated on other problems, mostly related to sex. The country went in another direction, but not one that was completely disconnected from his utopianism, or the related projects of other reformers. China after 1949 was secular, bureaucratic, and feminist; aesthetics and science, even if they were not talked about in the same way, remained central.

But so, it’s interesting to me as a case study of ideological fantasy in a time of crisis, drawing on indigenous conceptions of governance, as well as Western philosophy, and I have thought about Zhang Jinsheng several times while reading discussions here. Maybe it's is interesting to you, too.