Zhang Jingsheng and Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society [the Confucian aesthetic state, the necessity of gynocracy, cures for nymphomania, rule of beauty] [first of two Zhang Jingsheng entries]
UNRELATED TRIVIA | POSTING: I resent that my social media is full of trivia. I’m sure it is my own fault. I don’t engage enough to give the algorithms anything to work from. What I mean is that the content of my feeds has been taken over by revelations. This is the easiest sort of content to produce. I have experienced the pleasure of producing it, too. I do it with films sometimes, I realize, producing entries that do not go much beyond announcing the existence of a particular film or novel, historical event, or even a thinker. I forgive myself. It is good to share the discovery of a Nguyễn Hồng Sến film from the 1970s. But I am nervous when I see myself going down that road. ▤ ▥ ▤ When I write at length, I commit another error, which is assuming that the reader will figure out what I am talking about. To return to the example of Hồng Sến, I realize that my entry on his films drops many names and events without explanation. I do not explain why it is significant that Mùa gió chướng (1978) was made in collaboration with a particular writer. Why is the breastfeeding scene in Còn lại một mình (1984) so shocking? There is not enough explanation. Perhaps the entry should begin by explaining the state of Vietnamese cinema in the 1970s. ▤ ▥ ▤ When writing at length I hope that readers will type unfamiliar names into a search engine. I hope that they will draw their own conclusions about what I mean. I can do that here, if I should choose, since these entries do not need to be marketable. ▤ ▥ ▤ There must be a middle path.
WHAT I DO NOT KNOW ABOUT ZHANG JINGSHENG
I will concede that you may know more about me than the life of Zhang Jingsheng. I will suggest that this brief introduction is not necessary to understand what will come next, which is a discussion of Zhang Jingsheng’s works of political theory. It will help, thought, perhaps, if you are not familiar with Zhang Jingsheng, the early twentieth century in China, or the reasons that the reformers of the May Fourth movement were often eugenicists. ▤ ▥ ▤ I will admit that I am mostly relating what I gleaned from Jiang Xiaoyuan’s introduction to a recent reissue of Sexual Histories.1 There is in Zhang Jingsheng’s ten-volume collected works an autobiography, I believe, or, at least, from his essays, enough to piece one together, but I have not read those. ▤ ▥ ▤ I will relate simple facts, like his birth in the fourteenth year of the reign of the Guangxu Emperor in Raoping County, Guangdong. He died eighty-two years later in the same place, suffering a stroke, which was related to his age, perhaps, but also his requirement to put in long hours as a farm laborer, as well as harassment and confinement by local activists. ▤ ▥ ▤ Between those two facts, the imperial system was abolished and replaced. The replacement was replaced several more times. In those years, I can tell you that he went to France as a young man. If I didn’t tell you this, you might guess it from his admiration of European women, and the way he speaks of the ideal proportions found in Baroque nudes. He was among the first students dispatched from the Republic of China to study in Europe. I know he traveled to Japan, since he mentions his experiences there, too, and the women of this country, but I know little about his time there. ▤ ▥ ▤ He was a reformer of the May Fourth generation. Like many of his peers, taking in the chaos around him in the 1920s, he saw the Chinese nation and race as inferior to the Europeans. He was convinced that this did not need to be the case. Eugenics offered solutions to racial weakness. Technological progress would close the gap between West and East. Radical politics might give an advantage to the Chinese. I must stop there, since I have to admit that I do not know quite how he fit in with his peers. Apart from a few notorious examples, I know little about how his work was received. I admit that I do not understand his relationship with Hu Shih or Zhou Zuoren, for example. I don’t know what he had to say about Chen Duxiu or Lu Xun. ▤ ▥ ▤ He was not alone among the May Fourth generation in pursuing the topic, but I don’t know precisely when he began writing about the liberation of women. I could not tell you why he became such an avid promoter of sexual modernity for China. I can understand a man of his time, or any time, perhaps, becoming invested in the issue of breast binding. I have read his essay on that topic. And I don’t know how he came to be interested in eugenics, either, although it is also related to those topics. I don’t know why he was with Hu Shih when he met Margaret Sanger. ▤ ▥ ▤ I don’t quite understand his relationship to Pan Guangdan.2 They clashed over the problem of female ejaculation and the “third fluid.”3 Pan Guangdan claimed that Zhang Jingsheng was indulging in pornography. I can name these controversies but not much more. It is clear that they had deep philosophical differences. ▤ ▥ ▤ I am not sure why he is remembered now mostly for his works concerning sex. These were the ones that Pan Guangdan did not approve of. The most notable was Sexual Histories, published in multiple parts starting in 1926, which collected alongside his commentary sexual narratives that he solicited through a newspaper advertisement. This is another work that I have not actually read. ▤ ▥ ▤ I am interested in the works that Zhang Jingsheng published before Sexual Histories, which could be described as utopian political theory. To read those, some of this information should rise from trivia to context. ▤ ▥ ▤ But is that enough?
SUMMARY | THE BEAUTIFUL SOCIETY The Philosophy of a Beautiful Life and Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society, published in 1925, drew from notes made from lectures Zhang Jingsheng delivered at Beijing University.4 ▤ ▥ ▤ Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society is Zhang Jingsheng’s plan for a society ruled by aesthetics. It is a plan for the reorganization of the state and legal system, the deep reform of culture, and a revolution in human organization. ▤ ▥ ▤ I cannot summarize these works in full and I will miss the digressions. I will do my best.
ORGANIZATION IS THE KEY: The foreword by Zhang Jingsheng to Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society explains the title. It is a book about beauty, but it is also a book about organization. He is not an anarchist. If he aspired to hedonism, he is too Confucian. Organization is the only thing that makes beauty possible. ▤ ▥ ▤ He states a rule to understand the evolution of societies: they move from a state of chaos to one in which they can imitate other societies (he does not specify what is imitated, but the text seems to suggest that he is talking very widely about material things, spiritual practices, and social structures); from there, they might become capable of also creating new things; at the final stage, a society is capable of organizing all of those endeavors—imitation and creation—in a rational way. ▤ ▥ ▤ This level of organization requires some grand undertaking that can unite society. That cannot be strictly economic, either. Economic production for its own sake is destructive, he warns. ▤ ▥ ▤ So, one of the titular methods to organize a beautiful society is to arrive at a worthy enterprise. For Zhang Jingsheng, that is a nation ruled by aesthetic cultivation. The quest for beauty—that is physical beauty of the individual, technical beauty, bureaucratic beauty, beauty in the arts produced, and so on—in society is enough. ▤ ▥ ▤ I return briefly to the context… His utopian vision requires, first, the foundation of organization. It could not sweep in from nowhere. ▤ ▥ ▤ Zhang Jingsheng had seen other schemes for the transformation of the nation destroyed. He was writing at a time when China had fallen to pieces. Yuan Shikai, who seized power after the Xinhai Revolution was dead, but the Kuomintang has not yet been able to consistently hold key parts of the country. This is the period in China called sometimes semicolonial, when each new power that tried to grab control had to grapple with the legacies of former foreign intrusions; simultaneously, they had to stave off more power and territory being taken. ▤ ▥ ▤ China, Zhang Jingsheng writes, is so disorganized that, although it can to a limited extent imitate and create, those things are done haphazardly. If the level of organization drops any further, he warns, what had been created or imitated successfully in the past would be dismantled. Organization would save China.
FIRST | BUILDING A PASSIONATE AND BEAUTIFUL SOCIETY | MILD GYNOCRACY | FREE LOVE | INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE TO SAVE THE NATION: The first chapter returns to the critique he offers in the foreword of what could be termed economism. The most evolved societies would not, he proclaims, be organized to maximize production and profit, but would be ruled by a clear conception of what society is for, which must come down to serving the public good. He is being a bit brief here, based on the content of the book, but it’s a beginning. ▤ ▥ ▤ He proposes the aesthetic society, or the beautiful society, if you would prefer it translated that way, as one ideal. He does not explain this particular choice of an organizing principle.5 The aesthetic society is one in which aesthetic beauty is prized. All life is organized around aesthetic beauty. That means the incorporation of the aesthetic principle into all aspects of human society, from songs and dance, to hygiene, to industrial production. Men and women in the most revered to the lowliest professions, for example, are given time and resources in Zhang Jingsheng’s utopia to perfect their craft—not to increase the profitability of their work, but to make it more aesthetically perfect. ▤ ▥ ▤ I am being vague here. I charge Zhang Jingsheng himself with being vague. ▤ ▥ ▤ He gives us the first step to achieving his utopia… It is quite simple: women must not only be fully liberated but put in charge of many aspects of social life. ▤ ▥ ▤ How can this sort of aesthetic society be realized? I believe it begins by turning over all aesthetic undertakings to women. Whenever a woman takes over an undertaking, they change the thought and talent required to accomplish it. A woman is a creature that loves emotion and beauty. Unfortunately, since men have come to occupy the center of our society, women have become no better than slaves, performing the labor of slaves, and forced to hide their aesthetic sense. At best, women in our society can aspire to be playthings for the wealthy. Those women are not free to give voice to their emotions. When women are free to engage in aesthetic pursuits, they can even further develop their emotional and aesthetic sense. The men will be influenced by women. They will cure the pathology that has led them to replace passion with reason, beauty with practicality, and the spirit of sacrifice with the one of self-interest. Men surpass women in reason and are good at solving engineering problems, and their work in science and economics will help women. Women should comfort men with their emotions and their beauty. If men are bees, then women are like flowers. The flower does not provide mere comfort to the bee but becomes their sustenance. The ideal society, then, is one in which women can become all manner of flowers, providing the worker bees with ample opportunity to sip their nectar.6 ▤ ▥ ▤ He lists occupations restricted by gender, with women engaged in perfume shops and as nannies; men take care of any labor that might be physically demanding or filthy; and both genders come together to work in engineering, science, education, politics, commerce, dancing, animal husbandry, and art. ▤ ▥ ▤ Freedom for women, though, requires abolishing the traditional family. That would begin with a "lover's system" taking the place of the "marriage system." He is talking about a system of organized free love. The ideal future society would be full of healthy aesthetic competition, not possessiveness. ▤ ▥ ▤ Women would be free of the oppression of marriage, but also, he notes, of its protection, so, naturally, they would form their own lover's societies. which could pool knowledge on the arts of love, spirituality, thrift, and methods of contraception. ▤ ▥ ▤ This is not unrelated to Zhang Jingsheng’s interest in eugenics. Men are not natural eugenicists, he seems to say, and care mostly about maximizing production, or satisfying their own self-interest. The aesthetic minds of women make them natural eugenicists. Maybe he was thinking of Margaret Sanger. With their newfound control over romance and mate selection, women would be frontline soldiers in the project of beautifying the Chinese race. ▤ ▥ ▤ There is inserted after this explanation the first of many lengthy digressions. This one is about interracial marriage. He undertakes a ranking of the races by their potential as mates for his countrymen. Southern Chinese should mate with Northern Chinese, he advises, to cure the latter of their laziness. The Russians seemed promising, too. The European woman is an ideal advisor to the Chinese man. He also sees the possibility of this—the bright and beautiful marrying out of the race—producing an underclass of bachelors. These men, in turn, must take up the burden of raising up "Indian, black, South Seas, and Australian archipelago women" through intermarriage. ▤ ▥ ▤ What follows is a lengthy section praising the virtues of the liberated women of Europe. ▤ ▥ ▤ This, too, naturally brushes up against the context only hinted at before. Dismantling the feudal society was a concern. Strengthening the Chinese race, which seemed at that time to be vulnerable to a superior European one, was a concern. More concretely, an appendix to this chapter deals with what was the present stage of the women’s liberation struggle, at least as Zhang Jingsheng and other May Fourth reformers saw it. The preliminary stages of the revolution are clear: gaining for women equal power in management of their households, ensuring that girls have equal access to education, and securing the safety of women and girls fleeing from abusive households.
SECOND | THE WORSHIP OF BEAUTY | HOLIDAYS ARE TO REMEMBER QIU JIN AND FOR ORGIES: Humanity can abandon religion, but they cannot live without beliefs, and without something or someone to worship. As a society evolves, it becomes less religious but more faithful. Religion cannot satisfy the educated man with its ridiculous superstitions and empty prayers. What the educated man needs is a genuine faith and a noble way to worship. This is why we have seen the power of religion declining in Europe over the past century. Many people have turned instead to science and aesthetics. The reason for this is that science provides genuine ways to behave and think through problems, while aesthetics provides noble concepts and invites one to admire things. If it hopes to survive, any future society will combine science and aesthetics into a single faith. ▤ ▥ ▤ Zhang Jingsheng takes this proposal literally. He calls for the construction of temples across the nation devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic sense. Complete instructions are given for the layout of each structure. They take up most of the chapter. I will summarize them very briefly. In the center of the temple, great artists and writers would be enshrined. The most beautiful men and women, ranked by local officials, would tour these temples to model nude. Down below, there would be a shadow image of the vital aesthetic perfection above. He writes of crypts, housing the remains of rebels and wretches, and paintings too hideous for most people to regularly contemplate. ▤ ▥ ▤ This summary of his plans for the temple are too brief. I am limited Zhang Jingsheng. ▤ ▥ ▤ I should say something about the places that will surround the temple. There would be studios to work on art, or to dance, of course. More important might be the bathhouses. These would themselves become minor temples to aesthetic perfection. They mimic the Baths of Diocletian, and include gymnasiums and libraries. Their purpose is not only hygiene, which could be taken care of in even the meanest accommodations tolerated in a modern city, but aesthetic inspiration. Sharing his experience in Japan, Zhang Jingsheng says that mixed-gender nude bathing would be a necessary ingredient. He relates that the Japanese have sturdy bodies, in general. The sexual organs were, as he observed, well-developed in both sexes. He believed it to be part of the reason that Japan had successfully modernized. Mixed-gender nude bathing would also stimulate desire.7 ▤ ▥ ▤ The temple and the other parts of the complex would become part of a new faith system. There would be idols, of course. They would be living people. They would not be worshipped as gods of the past, either. Worship would be based on a distant but passionate romantic love for these individuals. This would necessarily replace, for example, the worship of a wife by her husband, or vice-versa; their virtues would not been guaranteed by the state, and that kind of mutual worship would lead to the possessiveness that is the enemy of free love. The living idols, given royal ranks, would stand in for the God of Love. They would be beautiful people with supreme aesthetic sense. Their sex lives would be kept private so as not to discourage their public admiration. ▤ ▥ ▤ Like all remnants of old superstitions, old holidays based on national victories or ancient religious events would be pushed aside. The Day of National Beauty would replace them, during which politicians would meet to discuss the progress of beauty in the country. The people would have a vacation on that day, during which even the rickshaw pullers and prostitutes would be compelled to rest. While Zhang Jingsheng believes all healthy societies must ban intoxicants, the prohibition must be lifted on this national holiday, particularly as it would lubricate the grand orgy that he imagines taking place in the streets of Chinese cities. In the evening, solemn tribute to the Republic's martyrs, like Xu Xilin and Qiu Jin, would be followed by a street carnival, with common people dressed up as the bureaucrats and emperors and eunuchs of the old days.
THIRD | POLITICAL AFFAIRS | AESTHETIC BUREAUCRACY | MINISTRY OF ETIQUETTE: The third chapter of Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society returns to the problem of organization. This is a chapter about the functions of the state. This might be surprising. He has spent the previous two chapters describing a society that seems organized only around hazy ritual. The police will be abolished! Nobody will be compelled to take jobs that they disdain! Traditional institutions will evaporate! But the state will not wither away. Haiyan Lee writes: ▤ ▥ ▤ However, even as his blueprint for an aesthetic state blots out a realistically functioning government, he does not consider himself an anarchist committed to the abolition of the state. His treatises elaborate not so much a theory of the state sui generis, as the practices of government that produce the effect of the state. He is therefore able to speak breathlessly of a “Fifth International” of cosmopolitan lovers and an exogamous schema of “blending” (hunhua) the races and, at the same time, dissertate patiently on the different governmental ministries and their responsibilities for each and all of their subjects. ▤ ▥ ▤ Zhang Jingsheng’s patient dissertation begins: ▤ ▥ ▤ A beautiful society requires the following organs to administer its state: 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. ▤ ▥ ▤ The former society's rule of superstition gave way to our present rule of law, but as a society evolves, it will be administered according to the rule of beauty. The rule of superstition might frighten primitive people, but its foundations will be dispelled by people of the modern age. The rule of law is fine to administer industrial society, but it will eventually hold back the development of educated people. The spirit of aesthetic governance that we advocate is not only the guarantee of sufficient food, shelter, and water, but also the best way to supply people with material and spiritual happiness. This is politics predicated on all aspects of human evolutionary vitality, without any interest in suppressing those things. Therefore, you will see that many of the organs designed for this new state are novel, and that many familiar institutions have been done away with or modified. In short, all of these organs of the state take as their purpose the expansion of beauty in the general sense. ▤ ▥ ▤ With that explanation, you might have a sense of what duties these ministries might be charged with. To administer a new system of free love requires bureaucracy. Somebody has to be paid to design and build the public baths that Zhang Jingsheng advocates. Somebody has to be paid to mop the waste out of them after public orgies, too. And educators would have to be organized to be sent down to the backwards parts of the country, for example. The licensing system for prostitutes still requires administration. City planners would be engaged to reform the layout of the city. And so on… ▤ ▥ ▤ One of those ministries that is novel is the Ministry of Etiquette. It would be responsible for "positively, establishing and administering etiquette and rites, and negatively, for correcting breaches of etiquette and the observance of rites." This means that it would replace both the Ministry of Justice and the police force. Instead of being as harsh and unfeeling as law enforcement officials of the old society, the officers of the Ministry of Etiquette would govern according to ceremonial rites, music, and dance, and punishment would be devised by medical professionals. Internally, it would be organized into three department: the Department of Rites and Etiquette, the Department of Dance and Music, and the Medical Department. ▤ ▥ ▤ There follows a lengthy description of what music and dance they should shut down or encourage. They would make sure that funerals did not go on too long, and Zhang Jingsheng carefully dumps into the pile of feudal superstition most practices of his own society. ▤ ▥ ▤ Most people censured by the Ministry of Etiquette will fall into one of three categories. The first will be those that do not know the correct etiquette and rites to conduct certain dances or perform music. They will be taken to the Department of Rites and Etiquette or the Department of Dance and Music for remedial education, and their release will be approved after the Medical Department has confirmed that they are not ill. If someone is hungry and steals a loaf of bread, he will be examined by the Medical Department. If he is deemed unable to work, his livelihood will be provided for him. If he is too lazy to work, he should be injected with a pharmaceutical preparation capable of giving him the enthusiasm for his job. If he has a curable disease, then he will receive treatment and be given a job. If a woman has committed the crime of nymphomania, doctors at the Medical Department will determine the cause of her dysfunction and take necessary steps, such as clipping her labia majora.8 Many other sorts of offenders in this group can be cured by medical science. The third class of offender will be the mentally ill, who must be treated by the appropriate medical professional. They will determine if the person should be confined. If the person has committed serious crimes, such as murder, they should be studied and rehabilitated through the arts, and only released when physicians have determined that their temperament has changed. Those individuals will be subject to ongoing surveillance. If a murderer cannot be rehabilitated, they will be killed, with all care taken to spare them emotional or physical pain. That will be done through electrocution in their sleep.
FOURTH | EXTREME FAIRNESS AND EXTREME LIBERTY: The beautiful society must proceed from two extremes: the first is a spirit of extreme fairness that extends to all of society, with equal protection and distribution of legal and political rights; the second is the belief in extreme liberty for the individuals, so that they can use their talents and organize their art, production, and lifestyles according to their own reason. ▤ ▥ ▤ We could begin here to attempt to put a name to Zhang Jingsheng’s political beliefs. We can be creative. He is an aesthetic authoritarian. That is too simplistic. Haiyan Lee notes the ingredients of “German aestheticism, but also sexology, eugenics, Confucian statecraft, and May Fourth iconoclasm and feminism.” You can go ahead and try it for yourself.
NEXT | ???? | ZHANG JINGSHENG DEEPER IN CONTEXT, TEASING OUT CONFUCIAN RITUAL, READING ZHANG JINGSHENG AFTER RE-READING DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH, ZHANG JINGSHENG DEFINING BEAUTY, PLAYING LIKE OUR HERO WITH THE IDEA OF REALIZING THE AESTHETIC STATE
This work is not available in English translation. I believe there are no works available by Zhang Jingsheng in translation.
Pan Guangdan’s name might not be familiar to most readers, either. I recommend reading the introduction to Leon Antonio Rocha’s “Quentin Pan in The China Critic” for China Heritage Quarterly.
Again, I am relating to you facts covered in the introduction to Sexual Histories. Translated, he writes:
This so-called "third fluid" referred to a fluid sent out from the vagina of a woman when she reached orgasm. It was something attested to by premodern Chinese thinkers and now confirmed by modern medical science. Zhang Jingsheng thought promoting the knowledge of this fluid could improve the sexual lives of men and women. He believed that children conceived during intercourse that produced this fluid would also be stronger. To achieve this ideal release of the third fluid, Zhang Jingsheng promoted various qigong exercises, such as dantian yunqi.
For more on this, see: “On Zhang Jingsheng’s Sexual Discourse: Women‘s Liberation and Translated Discourses on Sexual Differences in 1920s China,” Hee Wai Siam.
Let me say first of all: here and elsewhere, I am drawing on Haiyan Lee’s “Governmentality and the Aesthetic State: A Chinese Fantasia,” which was published in positions in 2006. Haiyan Lee’s article is where I first learned about Zhang Jingsheng’s works of political theory.
I don’t have an answer to that question. This kind of thing was in the air in Europe, China, and Japan in the early twentieth century. I don’t know enough to say more. Can I leave it at that? Haiyan Lee suggests, I think, that he may have read Friedrich Schiller. That would make sense, as he was a philosopher of education trained in Europe. He goes much further, obviously, although he is, in a sense, shallower.
These are my own translations of Zhang Jingsheng’s work. They are limited. I would like you to go back to the original texts. I would like even more for someone to translate Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society.
Zhang Jingsheng first appeared here in an earlier entry about bathhouse utopianism: Leaving the Bathhouse (scattered thoughts, scenes from the bathhouse / only notes, toward an essay never to be written).
I am not sure why nymphomania, or, more literally, “crimes of sexual madness,” would only be given as a concern with female offenders. Zhang Jingsheng does not seem to address anywhere the problem of men raping women, which would seem to be more of a problem in his free love society. I am not sure whether or not the belief was widespread at the time that trimming the labia of hypersexual women could cure them of their compulsion.