This issue features three items I think I might someday want to look up. 

China scholar Orville Schell writes that the Confucian and Legalist traditions of classical Chinese thought may offer guidance to coming generations of Chinese leaders.  About 16 years ago I read a translation of selected works by Han Fei, the leading light of the Legalist tradition; all my knowledge of that tradition comes from that one book.  So I was astounded by Schell’s characterization of the Legalist thought as “an amoral conception of statecraft.”  That certainly wasn’t the impression Burton Watson wanted me to have.   It’s lucky for me I never had a chance at that time to show off my one scrap of knowledge about Chinese political thought by casually describing myself as an adherent of the school of Han Fei Tzu.  Anyway, Schell’s idea that classical Chinese thought might help China find its way forward in the century to come reminds me of Wu Mi and Liang Shiqiu, Chinese students of Irving Babbitt whose work is discussed here.  Having studied under Babbitt at Harvard, they returned to China in the 1930s and there defended Babbitt’s view that a healthy society must be informed by a dialogue between the dead and the living, between the wisdom of the past as preserved in revered texts and the critical spirit of the present as cultivated by literary education.  In the upheavals of those years, not too many people seemed interested in such an urbane and polite doctrine.  Maybe Schell is onto something, though, and Wu Mi, Liang Shiqiu, and other Chinese Babbitt-ites (like the famous Lin Yutang) will be respected figures in China’s future national memory. 

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