Taipei First Girls’ High School teacher Alice Ou (區桂芝), who last year drew attention for criticizing Taiwan’s “shameless” academic curriculum, has now posed the question: “What is freedom? Freedom in the West means personal freedom and freedom of speech, while in China, it is portrayed in the ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s (莊子) ‘A Happy Excursion’ (逍遙遊),” the first chapter of his eponymous book. Her assertion seems to be that Chinese have long had personal freedom and freedom of speech akin to that of the West since Zhuang’s time in the 4th century BC.
It is hard to know if Zhuang, 2,400 years ago, had the kind of freedom Ou described. A search for an answer in his book is complex. Over time, the book has been annotated by countless academics, with interpretations often diverging from the modern understanding of freedom.
Although the early “inner chapters” of the Zhuangzi are generally considered to be written by Zhuang himself, the text never mentions the word freedom. Even in the most generous interpretation of the chapter, where the act of wandering is considered as an expression of freedom, those who equate wandering with freedom fail to distinguish between the concepts.
Zhuang, who lived through the Warring States period, could not have been free. It was his lack of freedom that prompted his book, in which he expressed his dream to wander freely.
The period was marked with warfare and suffering, so much so that Zhuang aspired to overcome the confinements of his surroundings, but only on a spiritual level. How could he have felt free?
Had Zhuang really spoken of freedom, why have the Chinese remained confined for thousands of years? Today, under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party, personal freedom and freedom of speech are still out of reach.
The book Zhuangzi remained obscure for several centuries before gaining popularity during the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties (220 AD to 589 AD). This resurgence was due to China’s fragmented state post Qin Dynasty unification in 221 BC, a period marked by greed, warfare and massacres between powers.
In times of chaos, freedom of speech was momentarily revived to rival Confucian orthodoxy, but this revival was limited to a small group of individuals such as Ji Kang (嵇康) and Ruan Ji (阮籍), known collectively as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (竹林七賢), who gathered in bamboo forests and drank, indulged, disrobed and expressed defiance to orthodoxy. Yet, even this brief freedom was brutally suppressed.
When Ou mentions the Chinese history behind freedom, the most concrete execution of this would be to retreat into secluded woods. Escaping worldly constraints was the altogether Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist way Chinese intellectuals sought spiritual transcendence. As long as they did not rebel, these recluses could enjoy a life unconcerned with the state of the nation, and this contributed to the flourishing of Chinese pastoral literature and landscape painting.
The works of artists Tao Yuan-ming (陶淵明), Wang Wei (王維) and Su Dongpo (蘇東坡) portrayed the attempts of Chinese intellectuals under imperial authoritarianism to claim spiritual freedom.
However, that freedom existed only on the mental and spiritual levels.
Chinese freedom is clearly not the same as Western civic freedom. Zhuang’s way of freedom could even be seen as the precursor of self-deception. The freedom of Chinese intellectuals could never lead to the fight for human rights and freedom of speech as seen in the West. Thousands of years of history have numbed the Chinese in their approach to achieving things only on a spiritual level, solidifying a national character that wills to prefer servitude.
Chen Ching-kuen is an assistant professor.
Translated by Wang Yun-fei
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