LIBERAL POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN KUOMINTANG AND COMMUNIST CHINA: LO LUNG-CHI IN CHINESE POLITICS, 1928-1958

This is a study of the career of a Chinese liberal intellectual during four decades framed loosely by the May Fourth Movement and the Hundred Flowers Campaign. An essayist and editorialist, publicist and politician, Lo Lung-chi received his formative schooling in the days when liberal values first became widely disseminated on the campuses of schools and universities in Peking during the late teens and early twenties and championed a liberal alternative in China until his final downfall after the "blooming and contending" of the spring of 1957, the last gasp of his generation of Chinese liberals.;Lo's hopes for the realization of a liberal order in China were predicated on the assumption that the intellectuals, a group traditionally called upon to fill positions of responsibility in Chinese government, would eventually be turned to by political authorities--whose power was derived ultimately from force of arms--to aid not only in the tasks of administration, but in the complex processes of economic development. If the chih-shih fentzu correctly appreciated the elements of the liberal "way" they would then eventually be in a position to insist on the creation of a political order satisfactory to them. The intellectuals in China would thus play the role performed by the bourgeoisie in the West in building a liberal republic. It was with such a scenario in mind that Lo came forward again in 1956-1957 to indict the Communist government for falling heir to the Kuomintang's "Empire of the Party" and to challenge several of the basic ideological premises of the regime.;The thesis recognizes the limitations of Lo Lung-chi as an individual and seeks to go beyond the problem of the "failure of liberalism" in China to explore broader and persistent issues in modern Chinese history which the liberals addressed: the use and misuse of talent, the relationship between intellectuals and the state, the relationship between individual freedom and public order, and the relationship between freedom and growth and development.;Through essays in Hsin-yueh, the leading journal of the Anglo-American returned student set from 1928 to 1932, and editorials in Yi shih pao, one of the largest dailies in North China during the thirties, Lo sought not only to inform Chinese readers of the meaning of core values of the Western liberal outlook--individual freedom, rule of law, constitutional government, intellectual and political pluralism, tolerance for diversity--but, moreover, to make liberalism in China capable of inciting the emotional response and commitment to action generated by the ideologies of the left and the right. He discussed these values not merely as abstract principles, but sought to link them to the concrete realities of China's domestic and international political environment. A political system in which rival political parties could coexist in an atmosphere of mutual toleration and in which individual liberty was affirmed in a "human rights" section of a constitution was seen as essential to national unity and the cultivation of the public spirit necessary to meet foreign aggression. In the 1940s Lo went beyond the role of publicist to emerge as a political tactician, fashioning alliances among intellectuals and minor political groups in an attempt to galvanize out of the majority non-aligned elements of public opinion a movement capable of inserting itself between the principal armed antagonists and playing the role of arbitrator of China's fratricidal war.