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Vision Across the Centuries. Chen Li-fu is not much in the news these days. It is not up to him to win the civil war, block the inflation or get reconstruction going. He has set himself the less immediate but greater task of a chih-k'o, or marriage broker, between two great civilizations—one based on the culture of Confucius, the other on the technology of the West. His activities toward this end take two very different forms: he writes erudite books on social philosophy and he operates a political machine that extends from Chiang Kai-shek's ear down to the wards and villages. If James Aloysius Farley in the New Deal's turbulent heyday had attempted to bring up to date the philosophy of John Locke, the U.S. would have a better precedent for understanding Chen Li-fu. (Chen's best-known book Life—subtitle, Vitaism—has had a sensational sale in China: 250,000 copies.)
Chen is China's leading Confucian-in-politics, and he stresses the excellence of all—or most—things Chinese. Yet Chen is not antiforeign. He deplores the tendency of Westernized Harvardman T. V. Soong to infuse massive doses of Westernization into a country which, so far, has been at least as much hurt as helped by contact with the West. Like any thoughtful Oriental, Chen is aware of the Japanese example of too rapid, superficial absorption of Western ways. Chen says:
"Today the progress of science . . . has torn to pieces our agelong habits. . . .
We are left to wonder . . . We have to reform our social habits, conquer our mental inertia, mercilessly throw away our pet customs and traditions before we can enjoy the fruits of science, before we can prepare against the growing dangers brought about by its constant unfoldings. Our airplanes . . . are supersonic, but our bodies are not yet supersonic. In such a world a dynamic, progressive, evolutionary, yet balanced, view of life is necessary for mankind. . . ."
Chen is not a man with his eyes shut running rapidly backward to 500 B.C. He reads, and admires, philosophers of change, especially Henri Bergson. But Chen insists that since billions of Chinese people have carried on the world's most stable society on Confucian principles, those principles must be reapplied, not abandoned. Confucius said: "A river, like truth, flows forever and will have no end." Chen does not want the continuity of Chinese society submerged under Western ideas of individualism or materialism.
There is nothing hopelessly mysterious about the Confucian principles Chen Li-fu wants to refurbish. Essentially, Confucianism teaches that human nature is good,* that harmony among men is the goal of life, that rulers rule by example and exhortations to virtue. However, the Confucian system assumes that government shall rest in the hands of scholars and of gentle and honorable men—the chiin-tzu. The benevolent paternalism of the chiin-tzu ideal (still reflected in China's 36-year Kuomintang "tutelage" and in much of the new Constitution) is not popular government as the West understands it. To many a Western-trained ear Chen often seems to be asking for an indefinitely continued rule of the Kuomintang party elite.