Daily Archives: October 14, 2012

The Daoist Nazi Problem

I am pleased to present a guest-post from Donald Sturgeon. Donald is a PhD candidate in philosophy at HKU and founder, editor, programmer, and general man-behind-the-curtain of the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org), an extremely useful online etext database with which many blog readers are familiar, I’m sure. Donald reports that according to Google Analytics, over the last 30 days the site has exceeded 1 million page views and 100,000 unique visitors! Please address all comments to Donald.

The Daoist Nazi Problem

Donald Sturgeon

Suppose there is a person, or a group of people, committed to practicing what we can for convenience call a “Nazi Dao”: a Dao that, though practically successful from the perspective of its followers, involves commitment to some abhorrent practices that all “right-minded people” would condemn as exemplary immoral acts that should be universally condemned – “killing innocent babies for fun”, for example.

What can a Zhuangist – someone committed to a relativist position about differing practices and the nature of their justification, questioning of conventionally accepted values, and skeptical about certain kinds of knowledge – say about such a Dao? Can he condemn it? Is it a “bad” Dao, and if so in what sense? Or is it just as good a Dao as any other? Continue reading →

Nanjing Decade Returns to Life at China Heritage Quarterly

The China Heritage Quarterly, a terrific electronic journal cum research project, has published its August-September issue with a special focus on an early-twentieth century English-language journal called the China Critic. The editor writes:

The China Critic was a product of a cosmopolitan demeanour, a fluency in English-language expression and ideas and an informed concern for contemporary China, its achievements and its limitations. The era of The Critic was also one of mounting international conflict and patriotic fervour. It is timely to reconsider The Critic and also to make available some of the insightful and controversial writing that appeared in its pages over a fourteen-year period.

There’s a tremendous amount of material available at the site: scores of original articles available as pdfs (much of it available via this annotated chronology), insightful commentary, articles about related figures, and so on. One thing that caught my eye was the journal’s endorsement of Chiang Kai-shek’s “New Life Movement.” Certainly there is much about the Nanjing Decade (1927-37) that resonates with contemporary China!