China & East Asia · 1893–1988
Liang Shuming
Philosopher and rural reformer, called “the last Confucian”
Argued that Western, Chinese and Indian cultures express three different orientations of the will, and that the world would turn from the Western path to the Chinese one; he later led the rural reconstruction movement.
Life and thought
Liang Shuming was born in Beijing in 1893 into a scholar-official family. Largely self-taught and for a time drawn to Buddhism, he was hired by Cai Yuanpei in 1917 to teach Indian philosophy at Peking University. His Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) answered the New Culture movement’s rejection of tradition. He led a rural reconstruction experiment in Zouping, Shandong (1931–37), helped found the Democratic League, and in 1953 openly contradicted Mao Zedong and was publicly rebuked. He died in 1988.
He argued that cultures are shaped by the basic direction of the will. The West strives forward to satisfy desires, producing science and democracy; China seeks harmony and balance between desire and circumstance; India turns back and seeks to quiet desire altogether. Each fits a stage of human life, and once the West’s problems of material want were solved, he predicted, the world would need China’s attitude, and later India’s. In his later work he described China as a society organised around ethical relationships rather than individuals or classes. The historian Guy Alitto called him “the last Confucian”.