“A person is like a boat that has lost its rudder, adrift on the ocean. Fortune or ruin, gain or loss — how could one decide for oneself? There is nothing to do but leave it to heaven.” — Gu Jiegang, 1948
Gu Jiegang: historian, folklorist, academician of the Academia Sinica under the Republic. Born in Suzhou in 1893. At seventeen he set his mind on scholarship and printed books with his classmate Ye Shengtao. At eighteen he cut off his queue. At twenty he entered the preparatory course at Peking University, where a passion for opera — not a day without a performance — kept him from graduating. At twenty-three he entered Peking University again, in Chinese philosophy; after the May Fourth movement he stayed on and studied under Hu Shi. At thirty-four, at Fu Sinian’s invitation, he taught at Sun Yat-sen University and helped found the Institute of History and Philology. At thirty-seven he recommended Qian Mu for a post at Yenching; at thirty-eight he moved to the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the history department at Peking University. At forty-four, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, he and Wu Wenzao cabled the Nationalists demanding resistance to Japan; Beiping soon fell and he went south to Chongqing. At fifty he founded the Da Zhonghua Book Company; the next year he met Zhang Jingqiu, whom he later married. At fifty-two Japan surrendered and he taught at Fudan. At fifty-five the civil war reached its decisive stage and the People’s Liberation Army encircled Beiping.
On 7 December 1948, with the battle for Beiping at its height, Gu received an urgent telegram from his wife and returned from Lanzhou to Shanghai to settle the family’s future.
Gu Jiegang wanted to be a pure scholar, neither swayed by politics nor pinned down by money. His devotion to learning was of the most elemental kind, yet the storms of the age swept him along, “like a boat that has lost its rudder, adrift on the ocean. Fortune or ruin, gain or loss — how could one decide for oneself? There is nothing to do but leave it to heaven.” In a violent and unsettled time, his choices and his fate had long since been written into the persistence and the hesitation he showed from first to last.
In 1950 Gu drew up “My Plan of Study,” which by then included the Four Inquiries into Ancient History, the editing and translation of classical texts, and the compilation of Historical Materials on the Chinese Nation. In his diary he went on to sketch the “ideal achievement” of his life — the Collected Works of the Hall of Late Attainment — in three parts, research papers, monographs and miscellany, plus a Compendium of Ancient History covering ethnic history, territorial history, intellectual history, the history of scholarship, social history and more: fifty monographs, eleven miscellanies, seventeen volumes of the compendium. In 1953 he drafted another “Publishing Plan” — twenty-four titles in four categories — and a list of “Books Gu Jiegang Intends to Compile,” forty-one titles in four categories, plus six explanatory booklets for “Maps of Suzhou, Past and Present.”
In fact this vast program of study had been gathering and piling up in Gu’s chest since the later years of the war against Japan, and he had never managed to carry it out. In 1943 he hoped to write a general history of China in a popular form, but financial pressure and official trivia held him back. “In those years,” his daughters would later write, “apart from scholarly work, Father’s social engagements kept growing; people and affairs crowded in, and he had no time to write, nor even to read — his days were taken up with receiving callers and writing letters, attending meetings and banquets, teaching and grading. He could not help feeling hollow at being so far from the life of learning. He wrote: ‘This is truly my fatal wound. On the surface I have gained social standing, and that is exactly what must change. But today I have no money in hand and cannot gather talent around me… if I could, I might free my time to continue the research of former years and not be mourned by the ages to come.’”
With victory over Japan the situation seemed to steady. Gu returned to Shanghai, became a director of the Da Zhongguo Book Company, then its general manager and editor-in-chief; his idea was still to settle the money first and lay down resources for scholarship later. But his anxiety only deepened. He wrote to Hu Shi: “I too have become a small shareholder. I feel keenly that without a stable economic footing, neither work nor study has any root, so I very much want to use this to build my financial base and then bury myself in books. This is truly the sorrow of our academic world, and the shame of our country.”
In 1948 the situation went straight downhill, from clear back to treacherous. The clouds gathering over Gu’s plans were no longer only political; they were also about his own aging. “The ancients said that at fifty a man begins to decline. I am already fifty-five this year. Even if I work to seventy, only fifteen years remain. I cannot but set a fifteen-year plan of work and seek to carry it out; I must not spend my limited spirit on endless human affairs and end with nothing accomplished.” Finally, in July, at the invitation of Xin Shuzhi of Lanzhou University, Gu went northwest to teach — a piece of good ground, as it turned out. His friend Xin looked after him not only in the classroom but did everything to provide the conditions for his research, even paying the Da Zhongguo Book Company in advance to print Gu’s unfinished Key to Ancient History, so that Gu “not only organized thirty years of research into a system, but advanced a good deal,” and “in the seventeen years since the Mukden Incident, I have never felt as open in spirit as today.”
The open-spirited days of free study did not last long. In September 1948 the civil war came to its decisive battles. From Shanghai his wife Zhang Jingqiu wrote letter after letter urging him back: two children born in two years, a third on the way, and now this — chaos in the world, chaos in the money — she could not keep going, and worry kept her from sleep. Gu wrote back proposing that she bring the little ones to the northwest; she would not. And so on 7 December 1948, with the battle for Beiping at its height, Gu Jiegang returned from Lanzhou to Shanghai to settle the family’s future.
“Since Xuzhou fell, panic has spread through Nanjing and Shanghai. Jingqiu is planning to flee and presses me to come east. On my return we discussed where to go and settled on Guangzhou, since Lianqing wrote that the college of culture run by Wu Jingxuan could hire us both. So I offered myself to Sun Yat-sen University, obtained Ke Guimin’s consent, and the letter of appointment has already been sent… The reason Jingqiu insists on fleeing is that wherever the Communist army arrives, it separates men, women and children, and she fears the family will never see one another again — better to go and suffer elsewhere. … Communism will sooner or later be the politics that prevails; what I fear is the storm of its first arrival, tearing the people I love most from me alive. So it still seems best to go far away. The Soviet Union wants to remake society by abolishing natural love and replacing it with an order of reason; I fear this runs against heaven and will accomplish nothing, only leaving the people caught in the storm to suffer. The other day Shaoyu came and said that Xiao Zhengyi is founding Eastern University in Taiwan and invites me to go along; I agreed. How things will unfold, who can tell. Uncle Qiqian came and passed on Zheng Zhenduo’s words: ‘Tell Jiegang not to run east and west; the left-leaning historians respect him greatly’ — he clearly thinks I need not go. In this great age a person is like a boat that has lost its rudder, adrift on the ocean. Fortune or ruin, gain or loss — how could one decide for oneself? There is nothing to do but leave it to heaven. Recorded the 28th day of the 12th month, 1949 by the Republic’s count.”
So when the People’s Liberation Army attacked Shanghai on 12 May of the following year, Gu had had six months’ grace to plan his course. By April 1949, with Xin Shuzhi’s Lanzhou invitation renewed, there were five roads before him:
- The first: the post he had sought at Sun Yat-sen University, granted, appointment letter in hand — to Guangzhou.
- The second: the invitation from Guo Shaoyu and his wife, saying Xiao Zhengyi was founding Eastern University in Taiwan and wanted Gu along; he had agreed — to Taiwan.
- The third: Wu Jingxuan’s college of culture at Huanghuagang — to Guangzhou.
- The fourth: back to the northwest with the family, taking up Xin Shuzhi’s offer — “the Communist world is suffocating; there is no foothold there for people like us” — to Lanzhou.
- The fifth: the message relayed from the left, Zheng Zhenduo’s “tell Jiegang not to run east and west; the left-leaning historians respect him greatly” — stay where he was, and not move.
Five roads, none of them clear, each with something to recommend it and something to be given up; the weights were hard to balance. Because his wife’s “fear of the Communists” would not easily be cured, she pressed hard to move the whole family. Gu went on hesitating, never quite made up his mind to move, and would not declare himself publicly.
Family
Gu’s choice concerned more than himself, and more even than the small household of his wife and three young children. While he was still in Lanzhou, what his wife feared was that the turmoil would cut the family in two with no way across, and she did not scruple to use a difficult childbirth as the reason to summon him back. Now that the family was finally reunited and discussing a move, his wife insisted on traveling together with her brother’s and her sister’s households — more than ten people in all to transport and settle, at a cost that could not be borne. “Besides,” his daughters wrote, “Father had seen how the White Russians lived, and he did not want to become a White Chinese, drifting homeless all his days. And we sisters were still small; at home there were relatives to help look after us, but if the whole big family set off together Father simply could not pay the fares, and if the children were parceled out to several places our parents could not bear it. Under such conditions, how could moving the family even be discussed?”
So in March 1949 Gu did not go to Taiwan as agreed, and he declined the post at the college of culture at Huanghuagang, saying “a good family is hard to move.” In April he declined his good friend Xin Shuzhi’s offer as well: “I went home and discussed it with Jingqiu. She says it is certainly unsuitable for me to stay here, but moving the family is very hard — first, we lack the means; we are poor here already and would be poorer anywhere else; second, she cannot let go of the children; if one person minds all three it is too exhausting, and if several people mind them, how could we bring them all to the northwest?” Xin then urged him south instead: “Since the northwest is inconvenient, better go to Guangzhou — the fares are cheaper, you can bring more things, and more people can go.”
The southern option had already been discussed with his wife before he came back to Shanghai. “In Suzhou and Shanghai you have many friends and relatives and naturally don’t feel lonely; in Hong Kong you would still have Lanshao for company; in Guangzhou you would have only me — and once I start teaching at Sun Yat-sen, I’d rarely be home. Would you be afraid?” So it was not only the cost of moving; it was also the picture of loneliness after the move, which made the piece even harder to place. And because Gu was generous to a fault — not only supporting his own household but taking in a number of relatives and friends — what to do about all those people was another large problem.
Beyond all this, from 1949 on, in the final months when the decision to go or stay came to a head, his wife’s health began to fail, again and again.
20 March: “Jingqiu is quick to anger. Last year, when the gold yuan collapsed and there was nowhere to buy rice, she was in a fever of anxiety, and the running between Suzhou and Shanghai wore her out. After the birth she had a cough; the doctor said it was not the lungs but the heart. Today her left hand is badly swollen and her face too — I suspect the sign of heart disease. She should see Dr. Qiu at the Hongqiao sanatorium.”
21 April: “Jingqiu… is overtired. Today she bled again from below, as in October of the thirty-fifth year, worst at night, and dark. It must be a vessel broken again.”
27 April: “Today Jingqiu was up for a short while; we dare not let her do anything. She says the badness of the times weighs on her heart terribly.”
4 May: “Jingqiu bled again yesterday, apparently clotted. Today the doctor examined her and said the womb is out of place and she must kneel in bed two hours a day to correct it.”
19 May: “Jingqiu’s bleeding has not stopped. Is it her period, or the illness?”
The Situation
Gu had no wish to be drawn into politics. He wanted only to secure enough money to study at his ease, and he stood in the middle of the storm like a bystander. He loathed the Nationalists and knew nothing of the Communists, so felt no fondness for them either. Politically he wanted to keep “a social position above the fray”; to move the family would be to choose a side. So he watched the civil war with a cold eye — every rumor of peace talks was like a glimpse of hope, and every collapse of talks brought instant anger and grief.
16 December 1948: “Jingqiu went out and heard there would be peace talks; she came back and told us, and the whole room rejoiced.”
17 December 1948: “Read the papers today: yesterday’s peace talks were a rumor. Chiang still means to force it through to the end — what can he do when the people are already lost?”
21 December 1948: “What the nation hopes for now is peace, only peace; peace would let us draw a breath. If the talks succeed there will surely be firecrackers. Looking at the fighting on the Tianjin-Pukou line, which has bogged down, it seems the Communist army too is inclined to seek peace.”
10 February 1949: “The Communists have shut the door on peace talks, and the Nationalists are again singing of war. Alas for our people, the water ever deeper, the fire ever hotter — how are they to bear it?”
Through all this Gu gave no sign of moving. He went on reading documents, collating classics and planning his scholarship, believing that “people’s hearts do not incline to the Communists; it is that they detest the Nationalists too much. The Nationalists have lost the people entirely, hence the urgent wish that they hand over power.” When Beiping fell, Chiang Kai-shek stepped down and Li Zongren appointed He Yingqin as president of the Executive Yuan, Gu was scornful: “Li Delin has made He Yingqin premier — another great embezzler… whose crime of killing conscripts is heavier still. That this man in power should be called hope — I do not believe it.” In April Gu moved to Wukang Road and needed a residence pass, only to be shaken down for a bribe by a neighborhood warden: “From Kung, Soong, He and Sun at the top down to the warden at the bottom, rotten through — how could it not fall!” And at the end, as Shanghai fell and the Nationalists were about to collapse, Gu heard that “several hundred teachers and students of the schools here have been arrested, and most classes suspended,” and condemned “this last perverse turn at the end of the road.” When Chiang, aboard a warship off Wusong, ordered Tang Enbo to hold out to the death: “As if afraid the people might still keep a shred of goodwill toward the Nationalists — a stupidity beyond reach.”
To the Communists’ repeated overtures, including Zheng Zhenduo’s “no need to run east and west,” Gu showed no interest at all in drawing near:
26 March 1949: “Mr. Jin says he heard in Nanjing that the Communists have broadcast an invitation for me to go. In a time of arms, how can one talk of culture and education? Were I to go, I would be an ornament and nothing more, and be cursed as an opportunist besides. To live quietly in Shanghai and put my old writings in order — that is a real contribution.”
11 May 1949: “Cheng’an tells me a friend of his heard the Communist broadcast inviting me. So what Mr. Jin reported is true. But how can one promote culture in the midst of war? If I went I would be no more than a vase for decoration.”
Nor was that all: Gu had sharp words for scholars who stood too close to politics.
Of Hu Shi: ”…When the Nationalists flourished he never shared their comfort; now that they are collapsing he wants to share their hardship. In the end the Nationalists are past saving, and his good name is ruined.” And: “The Communists have published a second list of war criminals, and Mr. Hu Shi is on it. Attacked by the Nationalists in ordinary times, and now to be buried with them — it is not worth it.”
Of Qian Mu, who had already gone south to Guangzhou and was about to leave for Hong Kong: “Qian Mu and Zhang Qiyun have joined an anti-Communist organization in Guangzhou and given speeches; this gentleman too has entered politics.”
A Pessimistic World
That the Nationalists were bound to lose, Gu had seen plainly while still in Lanzhou. Militarily, he said, “they still have some means; politically, none at all… the military commanders have been replaced by Chen Cheng’s ‘army reorganization,’ and the economy has been wrecked by the Kungs and the Soongs — even a good man could do nothing.” Back in Shanghai, his diary rages at the Nationalists: “rotten to the core,” “the end of the road, perverse to the last,” “stupidity beyond reach,” “how could it not fall!”, “an army collapsing like a mountain,” “what I gained by myself I lose by myself — what is there to resent?” Their economic failure pained him most of all: “From 1937 to May 1949, prices in Shanghai rose thirty-six trillion times. Money that in 1937 bought five and a half million piculs of rice bought, in 1949, a single grain. Money that in 1937 bought forty billion piculs of coal briquettes bought, in 1949, a single briquette. What staggering figures, what terrifying ratios! From the fabi to the customs gold unit, from the customs gold unit to the gold yuan — prices differed not just from morning to evening but from one instant to the next.”
It is clear, then, that Gu had serious doubts whether the Nationalists — after a rout brought on by their own rot — could hold Guangzhou, hold the northwest, or even hold Taiwan. Better to stay put and leave it to fate.
On the international situation, too, Gu saw only darkness. He believed a world war was imminent: “The Americans and the Soviets are rolling up their sleeves; a third world war is unavoidable… The fighting between them may be in Korea, or in our own Northeast, and when it comes the coast — Nanjing and Shanghai above all — will not escape Soviet bombing.” There was nowhere to flee and no point in fleeing; you might escape a moment, but not a lifetime, still less an era, and you might well end with your family destroyed. “To be a person born into this age is too bitter; to be a person who wants to study, born into this age, is more bitter still.” Then he read that “the papers report the Communist front in Eastern Europe faces collapse; Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria have all turned against the Communists. If this could bring Stalin down, a third war would not break out. People like us might yet hope to read in peace.”
To pin the hope of “reading in peace” on so unrealistic a political fantasy was emptiness itself. Truly “a boat that has lost its rudder, adrift on the ocean,” with nothing to do but obey heaven.
Scholarship in Pieces
When Beiping fell to the Japanese in 1937, Gu had divided his books between two places, Chengfu and the Yugong office. After the victory, on returning to Shanghai, he first flew to Beiping to look for what survived: “Heartbreaking, dreadful to see! So many books lost, so many books damaged!” From those few words one can imagine how precious the books were to him, and how it hurt to lose them.
His library also held the rare materials on modern history he had collected without a break since middle school. “From the time I first had understanding, living in the midst of every upheaval, I wanted to collect materials and preserve the facts of this great age. In the last years of the Qing I was in middle school; in the early years of the Republic I was at university. Every day after class I would walk the streets and loved to rummage through the stalls, picking up documents, books and periodicals from every region, every regime, every party, every event. Beijing was the political center of the whole country and such things were especially plentiful on the stalls; because few people asked for them, they were cheap — often a bundle for a dozen coppers. In them one could see the reform movement, the feuds between people and missionaries, the 1911 revolution, the Hongxian monarchy, Zhang Xun’s restoration, the warlord wars, the brutality of officials, the struggles of parties, the deceptions of reactionary sects… Collected day after day, these materials had filled three rooms by the time I was in my forties… There were indeed many unique copies that no library anywhere possessed.” Blood and sweat had gone into them, and feeling was lodged there.
As for numbers: before moving to Beijing in 1954, Gu counted his books. “I never kept statistics on my books; now, Shanghai and Suzhou together, there are two hundred and twenty-five crates… at an average of four hundred volumes, that is already ninety thousand — and had there been no losses in the war and no donations after the victory, it would be a hundred and twenty thousand.” The Chinese Academy of Sciences shipped the whole lot to Beijing for him. Gu recalled: “All my life I loved books and skimped on food and clothing to buy them; I had accumulated too many. The Academy shipped them all to Beijing for me and gave me a big house to hold them… but not long after I arrived, Yin Da said to me: in my view you have been ruined by these hundreds of crates of books! I was startled. I thought: the Academy invited me here precisely so that I could get a grip on some historical materials. Now he says I am ruined by the books — then wasn’t inviting me pointless?” Yin Da’s remark repays thought; I set it aside here. In any case, deep in Gu’s mind his scholarship and his books were one thing: he cared about these books exactly as much as he cared about the research still ahead of him.
In 1947 Gu had written of himself with some self-mockery: “My sense of enterprise, of responsibility, of sympathy are all very strong; this is my strength and also my weakness. The strength is that I see problems, think of methods, seize opportunities, charge forward, put the public before myself, sacrifice for others, win people’s attachment and easily rally them. The weakness is that I love the grand and the many, am always pressed for time, am trapped by affairs, chase things and follow feelings, ride a tiger I cannot dismount — and before the work is done, the spirit is spent.”
So — to go or not to go, to stay or not to stay, to draw near or keep apart — the answer had in truth been settled long before. Gu Jiegang, protagonist of the history he stood inside, naturally could not see it. He went on hesitating, not knowing where the road led, able only to wait quietly on heaven’s will, keeping to his one study while the waves of the age rolled in from every side.
On 7 May 1949 Chiang boarded a river steamer from Shanghai to Zhoushan and flew on, by way of Penghu, to Taiwan. The Nationalist remnants stranded in Shanghai fell apart; on 27 May the city was taken. Gu Jiegang “lived quietly in Shanghai and put his old writings in order — a real contribution.”
In 1951 the New History Society was founded in Beijing; Gu, together with Chen Yinke, was left off the preparatory committee. After the Three-Anti campaign and thought reform, Gu was reassigned to Fudan University; two years later he was appointed to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in Beijing he took part, one after another, in the campaigns to criticize Hu Shi, Yu Pingbo and Hu Feng, and wrote his own self-criticisms.
In 1966 Gu was labeled a reactionary academic authority, made to wear the tall hat, and struggled against. Decades of diaries were handed over for examination; for years he was shackled to repeated confessions and thought reports.
In 1972 he was allowed to work again, elected a delegate to the National People’s Congress, and later made an advisor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In the winter of 1980, at eighty-seven, he died, and his body was donated to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences for dissection.
By the time of his death, of the “Plan of Study” he had set down in his diary thirty years before, not one item had been completed.