Qian Mu, then president of Xinyashu Academy, performs the hand salute at the academy’s celebration party in September 1955
Academic Achievements
After the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the middle school was closed and Qian Mu studied at Home, then taught in an elementary school. According to Yu Yingshi’s “A Lifetime of Inviting the Soul of the Homeland: A Tribute to Qian Bin Si Shi,” after Liang Qichao’s article “The Hope of China’s Future and National Responsibility” in 1910, which proved that China would not die, Qian Mu was deeply infected, but unlike most young people, he did not take the path of political salvation, but turned to the study of history. He turned to the study of history, hoping that through the study of history, he could find the basis for China’s non-extinction, and this was the driving force behind his 80 years of historical research.
In 1927, at the age of 33, Qian Mu taught at the Suzhou Provincial High School, where he completed his Introduction to National Studies and began writing his book The Chronology of the Sons of the First Qin. The historian Gu Jie Gang, whose Family was in Suzhou, met Qian Mu when he returned home for a short stay, and after reading the manuscript of his book The Chronology of the Sons of the First Qin, he said, “It is not advisable for you to teach Chinese literature in a high school for a long Time, but to teach history in a university.” So he recommended Qian Mu to teach at Sun Yat-sen University. However, Qian Mu did not go to Sun Yat-sen University for this reason.
At the age of 36, Qian Mu was invited by Gu Jie Gang to write “A Chronology of Liu Xiangxin’s Father and Son” to refute Kang Youwei’s and other’s suspicion of ancient times. The article was published and immediately shook the academic world, liberating people from the cloak of Kang Youwei’s “Examination of the Pseudepigrapha of the New School”. Gu Jie Gang thus recommended Qian Mu to teach at Yanjing University, where he taught Chinese literature. After that, Qian Mu taught the history of ancient China and the Qin and Han dynasties in the history department of Peking University, and later he also offered a course on the history of Chinese political systems and a course on the general history of China. It is said that Qian Mu’s General History of China classes were full and well received by the students, and he spent four years at Peking University and two years at the Southwest Union University.
In addition, Qian Mu also taught part-time at Tsinghua University and Beiping Normal University.
In 1935, when The Chronology of the Pre-Qin Sons and Daughters was published, another Republican master, Chen Yinke, after reading his manuscript, privately commented to others, “I have not seen such a work since Wang Jing’an.” (Note: Wang Jing’an is Wang Guowei.) Qian Mu’s knowledge and reputation can be seen.
After Peking University and Tsinghua University moved to Yunnan to form the Southwest United University, Qian Mu wrote his masterpiece on history, “Outline of National History”, which is the most prestigious work of his Life and is still read today.
After the victory of the war, Qian Mu did not receive an offer to renew his appointment at Peking University, which may be related to the fact that the acting president of Peking University, Fu Sian, did not agree with Qian Mu’s philosophy. Qian Mu eventually chose to teach at Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China, where he wrote The Book of Leisurely Thoughts on the Lake and The Codex of Zhuangzi.
A message from Mao made Qian Mu choose to leave
In the spring of 1949, Qian Mu went to Guangzhou to teach at Huaqiao University. At that time, many intellectuals chose to stay on the mainland under the compulsion of the Chinese Communist Party, but Qian Mu decided to go to Hong Kong. What was the reason? An article in Caijing magazine on the mainland mentioned an incident in his memoirs, “Miscellaneous Memories of Teachers and Friends”.
In 1949, when the Chinese Communist army crossed the Yangtze River and started to advance to Jiangnan, intellectuals were faced with the dilemma of staying or leaving. The twin brother of Mr. Qian Jibo, who was famous for his study of classical literature, advised Qian Mu to stay. Qian Mu asked, “You are a scholar of ancient literature and rhetoric, see the bulletin of the army crossing the river, is there a generous and tolerant atmosphere? Mr. Kisei did not say anything.
The announcement was in the hand of Mao Zedong. Qian Mu read from the proclamation that the heroes of the world could not tolerate the atmosphere of all things, and suspected that as a historian he could not see the tolerance, so he went to Hong Kong, while Qian Kibo chose to believe in the Chinese Communist Party. The two men’s subsequent fates were naturally very different. Qian Mu founded a school in Hong Kong, and his works were widely disseminated to the world, while Qian’s manuscripts were burned in the 1959 “White Flag” campaign, and he eventually died in depression. Qian Mu’s insight is amazing.
He founded the New Asia College and rejected the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front
After Qian Mu arrived in Hong Kong, he founded the New Asia College. When Qian Mu first founded the New Asia College, he wrote an article in the school magazine, stating that “the College was founded in the autumn of 1949 in response to the Communist Party’s deliberate destruction of Chinese Culture in mainland China, so the College’s highest purpose of Education was to promote Chinese culture. In today’s struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, Chinese youth should have a correct understanding of their ideology so that they will not go astray, which will not only mislead their own future, but also harm the country and the world peace.
In fact, many of the initial teachers and students of Xinyia College were young intellectuals who fled the Chinese Communist Party and went south to Hong Kong; scholars who taught humanities at Xinyia at that time and thereafter, such as Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan, all wrote openly against the Communist Party.
Through hard work, the New Asia College grew bigger and bigger, and Qian Mu founded the New Asia Institute. Among them, the most famous was the contemporary historian Yu Yingshi, who was a professor at Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University. And Qian Mu was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Hong Kong in 1955.
In the early 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party launched a united war effort against Qian Mu, sending his teacher Lu Simian and his nephew Qian Weichang to write to him, urging him to return to the mainland. In his reply, Qian Mu said that he had seen his two friends, Feng Youlan and Zhu Guangqian, forced to write self-scandalizing reviews in the midst of the intellectual reform movement, and that doing so was like walking dead and losing human dignity, which he could never do. He would like to follow the example of Zhu Shunshui, who lived in Japan at the end of the Ming Dynasty to spread Chinese culture, hoping to spread one of the lines of Chinese culture in the South.
At the same time, Qian Mu continued to write and criticize severely the perverse practices of the Chinese Communist regime. In his History of Chinese Thought, he wrote: “The communism that is spreading rampantly in China at this moment will be at best a walking corpse with flesh and blood. …… The mainland regime is like a big rock rolling down a very high hill, and the closer it comes to collapse, the greater its power …… How horrible the Three Red Flags, how horrible the Cultural Revolution of the Red Guards, and how much more horrible things lie beneath.” It is evident that he loved China in the cultural sense, and had no illusions about the Chinese Communist regime that destroyed culture and distorted humanity.
In his later years, he refused the Chinese Communist Party’s statehood
In 1965, Qian Mu stepped down as president of the New Asia College and went to Malaysia to lecture. Two years later, at the age of 73, Qian Mu settled in Taipei and was elected a member of Academia Sinica, and later became a professor at the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Culture and a researcher at the National Palace Museum. In the 1960s and 1970s, when he gave a lecture tour to various military officer schools in Taiwan, he did not hesitate to attack the Chinese Communist Party’s destruction of culture.
In 1986, in his article “A New Year’s Perspective on the Current Situation,” Qian Mu still rejected the “national name of the People’s Republic of China” because it meant that “from now on, China will not be led by the Chinese themselves, but by non-Chinese people such as Ma En-Li Shi”; he even said bluntly He even said straightforwardly that unless this national symbol and communism were removed, there could be no talk of reunification across the Taiwan Strait.
In 1990, Qian Mu died at the age of 96.
Conclusion
It is certain that if Qian Mu had stayed on the mainland, not only would he not have been able to save his life, but he would not have been able to found the New Asia College, let alone live such a long life. His wisdom allowed them to escape from the Chinese Communist Party’s killing, from this point of view, those masters who mistakenly believed in the Chinese Communist Party and stayed in the mainland did not end up so well, Chen Yinke, Liu Wendian, Xiong Shili and so on.
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