美 Mei - Zhong 中 關 Guan - Xi 系

Background For This Translation

Zhang Ping, of the Southern Metropolis Weekly (南都周刊), was demoted recently for an article on Tibet he wrote for the Financial Times. On his blog, many Chinese posted comments calling him a traitor and worse. The article below was taken from his personal blog.

Fan Meizhong was a teacher in Sichuan who fled when the earthquake struck, leaving his students behind in the classroom. Later, he defended his actions on his blog, arguing that as a teacher, it was not his responsibility to save students’ lives. He has become extremely well-known and controversial in China. Recently, China’s Ministry of Education revoked his teaching license. In response, he may be planning a lawsuit.

Yu Qiuyu is well-known for pleading with the victims of the Sichuan earthquake to avoid protesting against the government in order to maintain harmony and protect China’s international image.

What is the Opposition to Liberalism?

By 长平 (Zhang Ping)

http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1533821.html

Tranlated by Anton Lee Wishik II

When Fan Meizhong (范美忠) used ‘the pursuit of liberty and fairness’ to defend abandoning his students and fleeing, there were some who immediately stood up and said, ‘Look! This is how liberals behave.’ Soon afterwards, scholars swept them away with theory: First, liberalism does not reject responsibility, but exactly the opposite, only liberals can really assume responsibility. Second, liberals do not oppose morality, but only oppose false morality.

In reality, on each side, liberal and non-liberal, responsibility and morality have largely different meanings. As a model of modern Chinese liberalism, Hu Shi (胡适), wrote in his work Ibsenism (易卜生主义) that “Individuals should have the right of freedom of choice, and individuals should also take responsibility for all their actions.” This responsibility refers to individuals’ responsibility for their own choices, but non-liberals often demand that individuals take responsibility for the whole as well as the actions of others. For example, Mr. Yu Qiuyu’s (余秋雨 ) ‘tearful urging’ as he petitioned the victims to “as hosts, maintain this touching atmosphere.” The relationship between morality and liberty is even more complicated. John Rawls, in Political Liberalism, used an entire section of the book to discuss how rights and goodness relate to each other. However, in some moral noblemen, morals dominate everything, and it is not permissible to discuss their priority or worth.

No matter what, what is definite is that responsibility and morality are not at all always standing in opposition to liberalism. Therefore, in order to respond to the issues raised by Fan Meizhong, it should be made clear what exactly the opposition to liberalism is.

Throughout history, liberalism has developed, spread, and changed. Its opposition has included religious concepts, customs, interests, and so on. It has also been opposed by conservatism (but not the conservatism that many people often imagine — in contemporary Western politics, conservatism is often classical liberalism). However, from beginning to end, one thing has remained unchanged, its core opposition is made up of only one element, and that is the abuse of public (ie state) authority.

It can be said that liberalism was born in opposition to the unrestricted spread of government authority into personal space. This originated during the Renaissance and humanists’ opposition to the authority of the Christian church. The earliest clear definition of this concept was in John Locke’s book titled Government Contract Theory (translator’s note: it is not clear which book the author is referring to as Locke has no book by this name). As soon as you hear the title, one knows the book discusses the relationship between state rights and private rights. Later, England’s Whig party, Spain’s liberal party, and other political parties used Locke’s work directly in opposing monarchial power, and calling for a constitution. Even later, America established a democratic government with liberalism as its foundation. In the twentieth century, liberalism’s greatest opposition came from totalitarianism.

The first person to introduce liberalism to China was Yan Fu (严复). He translated John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which in Chinese is more often called On the Extent of the Masses’ Rights (群己权界论). This Chinese title gets at the pure essence of liberalism very precisely, distinguishing between the spheres of state rights and private rights: the government sphere talks of power, the private talks of rights, the government of democracy, the private of liberty.

Why would liberalism view the abuse of public power as its opposition? Because, only this abuse can really hinder liberty. What is liberty? Isaiah Berlin said that liberty’s most basic meaning is being free from captivity or enslavement, and “leads to people deciding themselves which moral path to follow without any obstruction. This kind of liberty, in the end, is not at all up to whether I start off or how far I go, but depends on how many doors are open and how they are opened.” He quoted Rousseau in saying that “being aware of the nature of one’s fetters is better than decorating them with fresh flowers.” It goes without saying that all of these statements were aimed at state authority, otherwise they would be meaningless. Berlin didn’t agree that in ancient Greece there existed the idea of individual liberty, but said that “There have been no clear instances in any era, of public power, no matter secular or religious, that didn’t regularly overstep its boundaries.”

When Yan Fu changed the book’s title, it was also because “In Chinese, the word for liberty (自由), often embodies various negative meanings such as wild, unrestrained, and fearless.” He feared that the original title would be misunderstood “as wanton, as debauched, as incapable, and as rude.” What is regretful is that a century has passed and despite Mr. Yan Fu’s bitter diligence, this misunderstanding has not been averted. Instead, it has been strengthened to some extent. One example is the famous essay Oppose Liberalism, a ‘red classic.’ As soon as the Fan Meizhong incident came out, there were those who firmly believed that it was classic liberal behavior. This was due to exactly the kind of misunderstanding described above.

For another example, there are always people speaking plausibly and at great length, asking me: “Don’t you stand for ‘if criticism is not free, then praise is meaningless’? Why did you shut down the discussion on your personal blog? If you yourself don’t like being criticized, why should the government tolerate criticism? Don’t you want the government to tolerate rumors? So, how about if I create a rumor for you?” This is a classic example of a lack of division between public and private rights. I am the same as many other people. I closed the discussion on my blog because some people insulted me in an insane manner, and I don’t feel like suing them. However, closing the discussion on a personal blog, no matter for what reason, and even closing down the entire blog, can not be construed as a limitation on the liberty of those who are criticizing. All they have to do is go somewhere else, unless I have the police arrest them. In that case, I would be using government authority. There are also those filled with righteous indignation who question why certain newspapers that stand for liberal democracy don’t publish their own views. These people make the same silly mistake. The government’s commitment to freedom in the news refers to permitting many different kinds of media to exist, and is not a demand for newspapers to publish all their own views. Even if in order to balance readers’ demands, many newspapers increased the amount of varying viewpoints they published to the greatest extent possible, this would not at all prove that tendencies in a newspaper’s viewpoint would hinder freedom of speech. The only exception would be if the newspaper could prevent you from making your statements elsewhere in the media. In that case, it would constitute the use of government authority.

From the standpoint of liberalism, Fan Meizhong’s criticism of the ‘kidnapping of morality’ is definitely reasonable. His mistake lay in making responsibility and morality out to be in opposition to liberalism. And Yu Qiuyu’s mistake lay in his attempt to use a kind of abstract public interest to suppress, deprive, and even expunge specific individual rights in order to make excuses for the abuse of government authority.

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