One Hundred Years of Chinese Studies on Philosophy of Bertrand Russell: Continuities, Retrospectives, and New Directions

Abstract

The years 2020 and 2021 mark a centenary since the great British polymath Bertrand Russell visited China. One hundred years after the visit of this preeminent British philosopher to China, studies in modern Chinese intellectual history are still directly or indirectly concerned with the consequences this trip had for the Chinese scientific, philosophical, and sociopolitical discourse in the Republican era and thereafter. With his personal and scholarly integrity, his polymathic erudition, progressive social ideas, and unbending fervor in his endeavors for freedom of thought and personal choice, Russell left an enduring imprint on numerous aspects of Chinese modern thought and society. Although, over time, the character and the extent of Russell’s influence on Chinese philosophical discourse have reached both extremes of recognition and rejection, its deep entanglement with the very roots of Chinese modernity guaranteed his philosophy a sustained influence and presence in the content of contemporary Chinese philosophical currents. Tested and shaped by the ebbs and flows of Chinese social, political, and intellectual trends in the last 100 years, Chinese intellectuals’ interest in Russell’s philosophy went through different, and at the time directly opposite, phases: from its (1) initial establishment in the May Fourth period, to (2) establishment of Russell’s philosophy and logic in Chinese academia in the 1930s, to (3) its ideological denunciation in the first decades of the People’s Republic (PRC, 1949–), down to (4) its (predominantly retrospective) rehabilitation in the 1980s and (5) its ultimate reestablishment at the heart of current Chinese philosophical trends. In a manner typical for the majority of large-scale and swift, especially politically induced, intellectual turns in the 20th century, the transitions between the later stages were characterized or accompanied by a strong retrospective dimension, which aimed at establishing a new relationship between the nature and content of his philosophy, on one side, and the political identity of past and present Chinese philosophers, on the other. Because each of the major ebbs and flows in Chinese scholarship on Russell’s philosophy was founded as a profoundly historical event, in which the wefts of the past were replaced by those pertaining to the new realities, a certain degree of continuity was retained throughout the studies of Russell’s philosophy, which thus remained deeply embedded in the tissue of the long warp of Chinese history. On the other hand, a high level of continuity was also retained by means of traditionally strong student–teacher relationships. At the same time, past and contemporary retrospectives usually marked the entrance of a new generation of