"A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture" (為中國文化敬告世界人士宣言; Wei Zhongguo Wenua Jinggao Shijie Renshi Xuanyan; also translated as “Declaration on Behalf of Chinese Culture Respectfully Announced to the People of the World”) is an essay originally published in China and Taiwan in 1958. The essay's collective authors included Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai), Tang Chun-I (Tang Junyi), Mou Tsung-san (Mou Zongsan), and Hsu Fo-kuan (Xu Fuguan), all “New Confucianism” scholars and notable students of Xiong Shili.
Objectives
The essay was first published in the journals Democratic Critique and the National Renaissance. It aimed to educate Western peoples with proper ways of appreciating Chinese culture. The Manifesto marked an important starting point for New Confucianism and while its significance towards ideology is debated, the essay's cohesion led to a shared identity and revival for Confucian thought. Many of the individual views of these four scholars differed but this essay issued a “common conviction” of the misunderstandings associated with Chinese culture as narrated by Western history and thought. In rejecting wholesale Westernization the essay “demands a place for Chinese cultural values on the world stage.” The essay declares a new, proper manner in which to pursue the study of Sinology and explains Chinese culture from an experience viewpoint instead of an academic one. In Serina Chan's summary, the Manifesto advocates “post-colonial cultural nationalist discourse for cultural parity between China and the West in the midst of continuing Euro-American cultural dominance…(and) the document served to move the authors' Han Chinese cultural nationalist discourse into an imagined global arena for an ideological contest between Chinese and Western Cultures.”
Shortcomings of Western Framing of Chinese Culture
The essay indicates three main approaches and subsequent failures in the Western study of Sinology. The scholars attributed these shortcomings to Christian missionaries, Sinologists or those who study Chinese history, and to members of the present world politics. Each of these three approaches presented an insufficient explanation of Chinese culture to the West and required the creation of a new approach to foster respect for Chinese culture on the world stage.
Christian Missionaries The Manifesto claims “Chinese thought was first introduced into the Western world some three hundred years ago by Jesuit missionaries, who had come to China to spread Christianity and incidentally scientific knowledge and technological skills.” The religious motives of the Christian missionaries accounted for differences in ideology, specifically with the Chinese Neo-Confucian “emphasis on rationalism and idealism”. The Chinese scholars highlighted the interplay between the “way of heaven” (tiandao) and “the way of man” (rendao) in the revival of Confucianism, creating differences in religious thought with the Christian missionaries. The essay argues “Chinese culture arose out of the extension of primordial religious passion to ethical moral principles and to daily living. For this reason... its religious aspects have not been developed…” The difference in cultural and religious values created misunderstandings between the two cultures, and fostered a bias in the cultural diffusion associated with Christian missionaries and their trips to China.
Sinologists/Myth of Chinese Antiquity The second approach that the New Confucian scholars denied is that taken by students and thinkers of Western Sinology. According to the manifesto, the new interest fostered by the Open Door Policy and the Boxer Rebellion led to curiosity about Chinese goods and history. “The objects of this interest soon included fine arts, archaeology, geography, history of frontier development, history of East-West communications, and even the characteristics of the written and oral language…” The issue taken up by the scholars was not in the curiosity towards Chinese artifacts, but to the apparent disinterest in the living, modern nation and its growth. The newfound awareness of China's antiquity downplayed the importance of China as a modern nation and actor on the world's stage. This study of antiquity “became the standard methodology of sinology” and portrayed an outdated and single faceted image of China as a country, a view the authors of the manifesto strongly disagreed with.