Gu Jiegang
Gu Jiegang was a Chinese historian, philologist, and folklorist, noted for his critiques of traditional historiography. Born to a family of scholars in Suzhou, he developed a great interest in philology and the Chinese classics from an early age. He became involved in radical politics following the 1911 Revolution, but grew disillusioned and began to focus on historical studies. He was admitted to Peking University, where became interested in critique of the classical histories, inspired by academics such as Wang Guowei and Hu Shih. After graduating in 1920, he was hired by the university; he became active in the study of folk songs and folklore while continuing his classical philological studies. He initiated a wave of scholarly controversy between the Doubting Antiquity School and conservative academics in 1923 after he published letters criticizing legendary ancient figures such as Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun as unhelpful Confucian myths. He later edited the large volume of responses he received in the aftermath into the first volume of the , a seven-volume work published from 1926 to 1944.
Political and economic tensions forced Gu to leave Beijing in 1926. After only a few months at Xiamen University, where he feuded with novelist Lu Xun, he was employed by his former roommate Fu Ssu-nien at Sun Yat-sen University, where he continued to study folklore while managing a research and history department. He moved to Yenching University in 1929, where he taught philology courses and edited several periodicals, including a historical geography journal he founded with a student. Initially a staunch critic of the Kuomintang's nationalistic view of history, he grew more sympathetic towards it following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the university's evacuation to Chongqing.
He served in various educational and editorial positions following the war. In 1950, he was forced to condemn his former colleague Hu Shih under pressure from the incipient Communist government; possibly in exchange for his criticism of himself and Hu, he was appointed to head the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in 1954. He was condemned during the Cultural Revolution; while nominally still a professor, his position was demoted to janitorial duties. Despite being barred from his own library, he continued his studies of the Book of Documents in secret. He returned to academics after he was tasked by Zhou Enlai to participate in the production of modern punctuated versions of the orthodox histories. He was gradually rehabilitated during the 1970s, and continued academic work until his death in 1980.
Early life and education
On 8 May 1893, Gu Jiegang was born in Daoyi, a village in eastern Suzhou, Jiangsu. Suzhou was a center of scholarship during the late Qing dynasty; both his father and grandfather were prominent local academics, descended from the 17th-century scholar-official Gu Yanwu. As Gu was the eldest child in his family, his paternal grandfather took a strong interest in his education from an early age; an expert in classical literature and textual criticism, he instructed Gu in a traditional manner with a strong focus on the classics and histories. Gu had developed a strong interest in literature by six or seven, to which he later attributed a speech disorder and a lack of artistic skill.Gu was fascinated by historical texts such as the Zuo Zhuan, although his grandfather forbid him from reading them until he was first taught the Odes and the Book of Rites by a private tutor. The focus on the most archaic and difficult classics immensely frustrated Gu, who later wrote that his instructor "had sacrificed me on the altar of his pedagogy." After his family subscribed to the in 1903, Gu read the essays of the political theorist Liang Qichao. Gu was introduced to modern critiques of classical works through books brought home by his father, including a scathing critique of Han Yu's Yuandao by Yan Fu.
File:Gu Jiegang, Ye Shengtao, Wang Boxiang.jpg|alt=A black and white photo of three adolescent men standing together.|thumb|Gu Jiegang with fellow Socialist Party members Ye Shengtao and Wang Boxiang,
After the imperial examination system was abolished in 1905, Gu entered private school, attending a class taught by his father at a residence north of Suzhou. After his father was admitted to Peking University, the class was taught by a rapid succession of teachers, and he became essentially self-taught. In 1906, he transferred to a grammar school in Suzhou, which taught a mix of traditional and western-style material; disappointed in this modernized education, his grandfather continued giving him separate instruction in the Classics. He later graduated into a local secondary school. Gu bemoaned private school as "paltry and vulgar", but also valued its focus on science and field research. In 1909, he took entrance exams into a prominent academy in Suzhou, but failed due to an entrance essay which criticized Zheng Xuan's interpretations of the Classics. His grandfather died around this time, leaving Gu to pursue increasingly heterodox study material, taking particular inspiration from the work of Tan Sitong.
On 27 January 1911, Gu was entered into an arranged marriage with Wu Zhenglan. Wu was four years older than Gu, and largely illiterate, although Gu attempted to teach her to read and write. They had two daughters. In 1912, Gu published an article under Wu's name in the Funü Shibao, a prominent early Chinese women's magazine.
The teenage Gu was greatly inspired by the 1911 Revolution and joined the Socialist Party of China, declaring that the revolution was not finished until it "had abolished government, had discarded the family system, and had made currency unnecessary". However, he was quickly frustrated by cynicism within the party and left. The deteriorating political situation in China in the years following the revolution disillusioned many academics, including Gu. Yuan Shikai rose to power as a dictator in the aftermath of the revolution, leading to a conservative crackdown on academia. Gu wrote that "of all the joyous emotions and fervent hopes that we had heaped up in previous years, we now had left only melancholy memories."
University career
In 1913, Gu passed the entrance exams of Peking University. He was disappointed by academic conservatism at Beida and ignored his coursework in favour of attending Peking opera. He found friendship in fellow student. Mao introduced Gu to the lecturer Zhang Taiyan, who reinvigorated his studies. Gu increasingly focused on the scholarship of antiquity, stating that he had lost interest in "contemporary affairs". After reading the work of 18th century historian Zhang Xuecheng the following year, Gu became dedicated to disproving the notion that a Golden Age occurred in ancient Chinese history.He was introduced to the conflict between the New and Old Texts through the lectures of Zhang Binglin, one of the most influential philologists of the period. Gu was unimpressed by Zhang, who was a proponent of the Old Texts; he aligned somewhat with the work of Kang Youwei, who accused the Old Texts of being Han dynasty forgeries. Contemporary scholar Wang Guowei was another major influence of Gu's early thought on classical literature.
In 1917, Gu met philosophy professor Hu Shih, who had recently returned from study in the United States. He was inspired by Hu's heterodox views of Chinese history, and lured his conservative roommate Fu Sinan into attending his lectures. Writing to Fu in August 1919, Gu stated that "all learning must start with history". He came to believe that Chinese historians needed to divorce themselves from the orthodox histories and draw from both Chinese and Western historical traditions in order to better understand China as a nation. Inspired by Hu Shih, he advocated for the study of national heritage through the scientific method, although admitted that he had limited knowledge of its particulars.
Towards the end of 1917, Gu returned to Suzhou to care for his wife, who had fallen gravely ill. She died of tuberculosis the following year, leaving Gu depressed and in poor health. He recuperated in Suzhou for some time before returning to Beijing near the end of the year. Gu did not participate in the protests of 4 May 1919, or mention them in his writings. Alongside Fu, Luo Jialun, and Yu Pingbo, Gu was a co-founder of the student journal and its eponymous student organization, intended to rival the counterculture magazine New Youth. Like the university itself under chancellor Cai Yuanpei, the New Wave strongly opposed politics, regarding it as the domain of bureaucrats and warlords.
In 1919, Gu's relatives forced him to remarry, despite his strong reservations. Inspired by a regular folksong column in the Peking University Daily, he began to turn towards folklore and poetry studies, and joined the university's Folksong Research Society. During his stays in Suzhou, he collected a variety of local rhymes and songs; these were published the Beijing Morning Post in October 1920. He graduated from Beida in 1920, and was appointed the assistant librarian of the institute.
Early academic career
In his librarian position, Gu was able to read a variety of historiographical texts, including critiques of the Old Texts by earlier generations of scholars such as,, and. He briefly became an assistant lecturer at Beida's newly founded postgraduate institute in 1921. That year, he began to edit the Anthology of Critical Studies on Ancient Documents, intended to serve as a complete anthology of Chinese textual studies. He focused on past scholars, especially from the Qing period, who challenged orthodox historical narratives. Biographical sketches were included with entry, and were generally themed around the scholar's frustration by the academic orthodoxy. The "first collection" of the anthology was later published as a ten volume series from 1928 to 1935. By the 1930s, Gu acknowledged that he had been overly ambitious with his plans for the series, and that its completion would require the work of a large team of specialists over more than a lifetime.In 1922, Gu was forced to return again to Suzhou to mourn for his deceased grandmother. On Hu's urging, the Shanghai-based Commercial Press hired Gu as a history editor during this period, where he edited a secondary school textbook titled Elementary National History. Alongside scholar and archaeologist Dong Zuobin, he served on the editorial staff of the Folksong Research Society's periodical Folksong Weekly, which entered production in December 1922. The success of the Folksong Weekly and a growing interest in other forms of folk culture among its members led to the formation of the Customs Survey Society on 14 May 1923.