Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road: Reviving Confucian Culture - Part 2 | WPN World People News

British Subversion

One of the British tactics to counter the Confucian tradition was the recruitment of a young opium addict named Yen Fu, who was shipped off to London in 1877, where he was indoctrinated in British radical empiricism, which was to be presented to the Chinese as the essence of “Western thought.” He learned nothing of the science of Leibniz and his collaborators in Europe and the United States, nor of the great development projects of the Americans, Germans, and Russians through their cooperation after the American defeat of the British in the American Civil War.

Rather, Yen Fu became a rabid defender of amorality in science, in statecraft, and in economics, preaching the code of “wealth and power” as the criteria for truth. He translated the works of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the other sponsors of the British Empire, which were then presented to the Chinese as “Western thought” and whose ideas constituted the proper path to wealth and power.

On behalf of his British sponsors, Yen Fu launched an assault on Confucianism, in favor of Legalism and Daoism, which, he wrote, are the only views compatible with those of Darwin, Montesquieu, and Spencer. True indeed—and, he could have added, with the colonialization of China by the British Empire.

This was the world into which Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866, in the southern province of Guangdong.

Sun Yat-sen and the American System

It was Sun Yat-sen, schooled in the American System of Political Economy, who singularly identified and exposed the fraud behind the British portrayal of “Western thought” as Enlightenment empiricism, and went on to break the back of British imperial power in China. Sun, known in China as Sun Zhongshan, was educated in Hawaii in the 1870s and ’80s by the family of Frank Damon, who played a leading role in the work of the Philadelphia circles of Abraham Lincoln’s economist Henry Carey. This was the Henry Carey who took the concept of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad to Russia, leading to the creation of the Trans-Siberian Railway (the first “Eurasian Land-Bridge”), and who took the American System of protection and government-directed credit policies to Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, leading to the creation of modern industrial Germany.

Damon provided Sun Yat-sen with a sensuous grasp of the opposing worldviews competing within the West, characterized politically by the American System versus the British System. Sun utilized this understanding of Universal History, together with his own study of and insight into Chinese history and culture, to present to the world a penetrating analysis of the evil of the British Empire and its ideological roots.

Sun strenuously opposed China’s support for the British in World War I, arguing in his book The Vital Problem of China in 1917 that the British seizure of portions of China as her “sphere of influence,” and “forcing our people to buy and smoke opium,” demonstrated that “if one really wants to champion the cause of justice today, one should first declare war on England,” not Germany, adding: “But China does not want to declare any war.”

At the end of the Great War, Sun proposed a unique method for reversing the ongoing collapse of Western civilization—through cooperation in the development of China! The International Development of China, written by Sun in 1919, accused the Western nations of driving themselves into global depression and “the War to end all wars” by failing to act on the basis of truthful ideas.

Sun identified those truthful ideas as precisely those of Alexander Hamilton and the U.S. Constitution, as against the British system. Even within the United States, Sun pointed to the difference between Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, whereby Hamilton’s federalism, rather than Jefferson’s libertarianism, lay at the root of the American System.

By unifying under the U.S. Constitution, said Sun, the new Republic attained the strength to defend against British “free trade” policies, which aimed at preventing the development of domestic U.S. industries. He insisted that the British free-trade doctrine of Adam Smith was based on the Darwinian notion of each-against-all competition, whereas “the primary force of human evolution is cooperation, and not struggle, as that of the animal world.” This was the Confucian concept of Harmony.

Sun’s International Development of China was a detailed expansion of the concepts presented by Henry Carey, including extensive rail and canal systems criss-crossing the whole of China, extending into South Asia and through Russia into Europe, coupled with rapid national industrialization. His aim was not just the transformation of China, but of the world. This plan, he wrote, must be “a practical solution for the three great world questions, which are the International War, the Commercial War, and Class War.”

Sun’s polemics against Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, and the Darwinians were counter to nearly all prevailing opinion in China during the ferment of the early 20th Century. Both the “reformers” and the “radicals” generally accepted the lie that British empiricist ideology was the only alternative to the “old thinking” (i.e., Confucianism) which, they preached, was responsible for the economic and social decay in China. Sun rejected such British subversion, and saved China in the process.

Sun Yat-sen believed passionately in the coherence of Christianity and Confucianism. The Confucian reformers of the late Qing Dynasty, however, much like today’s “fundamentalist” movements around the world, rejected ecumenicism in favor of a politicized Confucianism, while actually adopting the ideological premises of their colonial masters. The leader of the reform movement in the 1890s and early 20th Century, Kang Youwei (K’ang Youwei, 1858-1927), even proposed the adoption of Confucianism as a state religion, under the Emperor.

Yet their philosophical arguments cohered with the materialist and utilitarian ideology of British empiricism—they simply wanted a Chinese version. Sun confronted Kang Youwei and his supporters, not only on their refusal to give up reliance upon the monarchical system, but also their acceptance of the Darwinian view of man. Kang’s view of Confucianism was, not surprisingly, derived from the School of Evidential Research. Kang believed the Emperor was essential to rule China, while his interpretation of Confucianism reduced it to a set of rules of conduct, rules derived ultimately from the Son of Heaven (the Emperor), rather than from Heaven itself, as Mencius had insisted. Sun Yat-sen’s concept of a Republican government rested upon a higher hypothesis of man and nature, while the reformers refused to part with their familiar, failed assumptions.

Sun was just as uncompromising with the radicals and the emerging Marxist ideologues. This became even more critical after 1919, when the British, with President Woodrow Wilson’s full support, sold out their Chinese “allies” from World War I, by maintaining and expanding the colonial “spheres of interest” in China by the major powers, and turning over control of the former German concession, Shandong Province, not back to China, but to Japan! This sparked a massive resistance movement within China, known as the May 4th Movement.

Sun argued that the May 4th Marxists (and the new Soviet Republic), although they had identified some of the evils of the existing social and economic order, had not broken from the axioms of the British view of man as a beast. The Marxist’s “scientific materialism,” Sun said, does not break from the social-Darwinist’s “survival of the fittest” perversion of humanity.

In his Lectures on “The Three Principles of the People,” Sun wrote:

“Class war is not the cause of social progress, it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. What Marx gained through his studies of social problems was a knowledge of diseases in the course of social progress. Therefore, Marx can only be called a social pathologist, not a social physiologist.”

In The Vital Problem of China, Sun identified the root of Marxism in the Enlightenment ideology of the rule of force. While the Marxists were sincerely concerned about the problems of poverty and oppression, they were ignoring the fundamental problem of the creation of wealth, which comes about only through enhancing and mobilizing the creative powers of the entire nation—what Sun called “the law of social progress.” The young Marxists, he wrote in his Lectures, “fail to realize that China is suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth.”

The Three Principles of the People

It is important to note that Sun Yat-sen followed the Song Renaissance philosopher Zhu Xi in identifying The Great Learning, from The Book of Rites (as quoted earlier in comparison to the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution) as the core of China’s highest moral and intellectual tradition. In the opening pages of his published Lectures from 1917-19, in which he introduces his concept of “The Three Principles of the People,” Sun writes:

“We must revive not only our old morality, but also our old learning ... , the Great Learning: Search into the nature of things, extend the boundaries of knowledge, make the purpose sincere, regulate the mind, cultivate personal virtue, rule the family, govern the state, pacify the world.”

He expanded upon China’s responsibility, as called for in the Great Learning, in a passage which cannot fail to provoke a reflection on the vision of Xi Jinping today:

“Let us pledge ourselves to lift up the fallen and to aid the weak; then, when we become strong and look back upon our own sufferings under the political and economic domination of the Powers, and see weaker and smaller peoples undergoing similar treatment, we will rise and smite that imperialism. Then will we be truly governing the state and pacifying the world.”

Sun’s “Three Principles of the People,” which served as the unifying principle for the Chinese Republic, were inspired directly by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, defining a true republic as “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Sun’s Three Principles are: 1) national sovereignty (of the people), 2) republican government (by the people), and 3) the general welfare (for the people). Taken together, wrote Sun, “these Three Principles are identical with Confucius’ hope for a Great Commonwealth.”

Sun also specifically identified the psychological problems which could potentially block the Chinese from embracing and implementing these Three Principles. He saw the greatest danger in the influence of British radical liberalism among the leaders of the May 4th Movement, which influence was under the personal direction of Bertrand Russell, London’s foremost psychological warrior.

Sun, like Henry Carey before him, singled out John Stuart Mill for criticism, denouncing his advocacy of extreme individual liberty, which, Sun warned, would soon become “unrestrained license.” Such libertinism would destroy the national cohesion required for social progress, he warned, and the Chinese people “shall become a sheet of loose sand.”

The British War Against Sun Yat-sen

Sun’s Republican Revolution of 1911 threw a scare into the British. The Revolution was not entirely successful, in that Sun Yat-sen was forced to strike a deal with the head of the Qing Dynasty Army, Yuan Shi-kai, who pledged to adhere to the Republican Constitution forged under Sun’s direction. With British backing, Yuan broke that pledge, and even attempted to declare himself Emperor. Although that effort failed, the result of Yuan’s sabotage of the Republic was the division of China into regions governed by competing warlords.

The British were pleased with Yuan Shi-kai, and even more with the era of the warlords, since a divided China, and weakening of Sun Yat-sen, protected their interests. However, they knew that Sun’s influence threatened the entire Asian branch of the Empire, or more.

The sellout of China at the Versailles Conference in 1919, which imposed the will of the winners of the war on the rest of the world, had been forecast by Sun Yat-sen in his The Vital Problems of China. Sun predicted that China’s support for the British would simply encourage them to chop China into pieces, as prizes to the stronger nations which helped London destroy Germany. This was in keeping, Sun wrote, with the “Balance of Power” mentality of British geopolitics: “When another country is strong enough to be utilized, Britain sacrifices her own allies to satisfy its desires, but when that country becomes too weak to be of any use to herself, she sacrifices it to please other countries.”

He compared British relations toward its allies to that of a silk farmer to his silkworms: “after all the silk has been drawn from the cocoons, they are destroyed by fire or used as fish food.”

Versailles was total confirmation of Sun’s insight. To the British, Sun’s International Development of China represented the greatest single threat in the world (the U.S. was “safely” in the hands of Anglophile racist Woodrow Wilson at the time), the threat of a reemergence of “American System” ideas and programs.

The British deployed their leading colonial warriors into China to attempt to isolate Sun Yat-sen—Bertrand Russell and his American counterpart John Dewey. Russell spent a year in China in 1920-21, and wrote a book, The Problem of China, in 1922. Russell blamed China’s backwardness not on a century of British warfare and looting—but on Confucianism! He attacked the Confucian tradition, and praised Daoism for its anti-scientific doctrine—the Green doctrine of today—that man must accept “nature” as it is, denying the Christian (and Confucian) belief in man’s creative powers to discover the laws of the universe and to transform nature. He even glorified the Legalist Qin Shi-huang from the 2nd Century BC for burning the Confucian classics and burying Confucian scholars alive.

Russell’s historical writings had a particularly deleterious effect in China, since his books on the history of philosophy and science had become a standard source on “Western thought.” Leibniz, in particular, the East’s greatest friend and most profound analyst of China’s philosophic contributions, was slandered by Russell as “the champion of ignorance and obscurantism.” Russell’s Nietzschean intentions towards China were quite openly pronounced: “China needs a period of anarchy in order to work out her salvation.”

Although John Dewey maintained a formal distinction between his “American Pragmatism” and the Hobbesian and Nietzschean radicalism of Russell, the Chinese have historically, and correctly, linked the two men as a common source of (false) knowledge on “Western thought.” Dewey, a professor at Columbia University, had instructed several young Chinese scholars in his “deconstruction” of classical methods of education, in favor of a “learn through doing” variety of pragmatism. He was deployed to China directly by the Morgan banking interests (London’s primary arm of control over the U.S. economy and ideology), serving as a journalist for the Morgan-spawned New Republic during his two years in Beijing.

The Cultural Revolution—a British Policy

Although the infamous Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in China came nearly half a century after the Russell/Dewey visits to China, I believe that that national nightmare for the Chinese people can be traced to their influence.

At the core of the hysteria was Bertrand Russell’s anti-Confucian polemic, as the ruling clique during the Cultural Revolution, known as the Gang of Four, waged an anti-Confucius campaign targeting the intellectuals (including especially Zhou Enlai, the Chinese leader most dedicated to scientific development and peaceful relations with the West) as the “stinking ninth category” (on a scale of 1 to 9); turned child against parent in a reflection of Russell’s hatred of the Confucian code of honoring ones parents; sent students to the countryside to learn from the peasants as called for by Dewey’s de-schooling and his “learn by doing” polemic against classical education; and rejected science and technology in favor of labor-intensive mass work projects, in keeping with Russell’s hatred of industrial development and glorification of the “noble peasant.”

The opening up of China after the death of Mao Zedong and the demise of the Cultural Revolution has changed the world dramatically, bringing much of the Chinese population out of extreme poverty and making China a major force for development in the world. There has also been a resurgence of interest in Confucianism, including the setting up of hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world, to promote Chinese culture and to teach the Chinese language.

Under Xi Jinping, China has unleashed an even more ambitious process, beyond the great development plans of Sun Yat-sen, through the New Silk Road process and new international financial institutions, uplifting the livelihood of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and South America through vast infrastructure development, and even going beyond the development of the biosphere, reaching out into space—even as the United States abandons its space program—to view the Earth from the perspective of the Solar System as a whole.

In Conclusion

We have now come full circle—except that it’s not a circle, because we have now reshaped and deepened what we only dimly understood at the start. We began by pointing to the revolutionary, unprecedented breakthroughs for human progress which China is leading today—even as you read this. We said that exactly these Chinese initiatives were earlier discovered and widely promoted by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, during their “Eurasian Land-Bridge” and related campaigns from the 1990s through the present—basing themselves on Lyndon LaRouche’s development of physical economy, on top of the initial platform provided much earlier by Gottfried Leibniz.

But, as we showed, China’s early 20th-Century revolutionary leader and genius Sun Yat-sen had also fought for this same program, basing himself both on the true understanding of Confucianism, on the one side—and, on the other, on the American System of economics of Alexander Hamilton, which he had studied and fervently adopted as a young man—as against the British system, which he fiercely opposed.

Against this, we have profiled over a century of attempts by the British Empire, to snuff out all truthful scientific understanding in China—as approximated by true Confucianism. Stop a moment to contrast London’s attempts to stamp out the analogous movement in North America. From 1688 through the American Revolution and the Civil War, the Empire sought to destroy us militarily—but it failed. Then, after the slaveholders, London’s proxy, lost the Civil War, London turned to subversion. Despite serious defeats for London since 1865, twenty-six recent years under the Bush family and Obama, have been the fruits of the success of this campaign of British subversion of the U.S.

In the 19th Century, Britain tried to destroy China through military aggression, narcotics, and all forms of subversion. It seemed that they had succeeded, but then they were forced to send Lord Bertrand Russell and John Dewey to subvert China once more in the 20th Century. With the catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966-76), it seemed that China had been destroyed for good—but no! Under Deng Xiaoping, China rallied—somewhat as Russia has rallied itself once more under Vladimir Putin, from its destruction by British Intelligence “free-market” fraudsters during the 1990s—although the cases of China and Russia differ widely.

Bertrand Russell is dead, fortunately, but his intention and his mentality continue to rule. This is the Bertrand Russell who wrote in 1946 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that the Soviet Union must be destroyed by nuclear bombs if it refused to kneel. This is what his heirs intend for China (and Russia, and their allies) today. However, Britain no longer has any nuclear forces to speak of. It is Barack Obama who must carry out this attack for London, and Barack Obama who must be removed, now, if nuclear holocaust is to be prevented.

The failed culture is trying to kill off the successful culture, during the brief moment remaining while it still has the ability to do so. The far reaches of human history stretching into the future—if it does—are being shaped during these present hours. If we succeed, then the Confucian Great Commonwealth is within our grasp.

Source: Executive Intelligence Review