Wu Mi (August 1894-), founder and editor of the Hsüeh-heng [critical review], an important literary journal which opposed the literary revolution in China in the 1920's. A disciple of Irving Babbitt, he taught Western literature at Tsinghua University in 1924-44.
The Chingyang district of Shensi was the birthplace of Wu Mi. His father, Wu Chungch'i, a landholder who was known as a scholar of traditional Chinese literature and as a skilled swordsman, served as deputy military governor of Chahar province during the late Ch'ing period. After receiving a conventional Chinese education as a boy, Wu Mi studied at Tsinghua College in Peking. Upon graduation in 1916, he went to the United States to continue his studies, first at the University of Virginia and then at Harvard University.
Wu received a B.A. cum laude from Harvard in 1920 and an M.A. in 1921. During that period in Cambridge, he came under the influence of Irving Babbitt, the stimulating professor of comparative literature and leader of the New Humanism movement, which was dedicated to upholding the values that Babbitt and his associates believed to be the abiding elements in literature in the face of unbridled experimentalism and romantic subjectivism. After a brief sojourn at Oxford, Wu Mi returned to China, where he attempted to apply Babbitt's theories regarding the importance of discipline and tradition to the chaotic literary scene during the period following the May Fourth Movement. While serving as professor of English at Southeastern University (after 1927, Central University) at Nanking in 1922, Wu Mi became one of the founders and chief editor of Hsüeh-heng [critical review], one of the most important periodicals opposed to the literary revolution. Mei Kuang-ti (q.v.), who also had studied with Irving Babbitt at Harvard, was a close associate of Wu in this endeavor. Although they received the ill-deserved epithet of "fake antiques," the Hsüeh-heng writers were not fighting literary reform in a spirit of blind reaction; many among them were perhaps better informed about Western literature than the zealous Chinese advocates of "total Westernization." The aims of the Hsüeh-heng were stated in English in every issue: "(1) to study, elucidate, and systematize the Chinese learning with critical method and scholarly equipment; (2) to introduce and to assimilate what is best and most important in the literature, philosophy, art, etc., of the West, presenting Western Civilization in its entirety and most salutary aspects; (3) to be a literary magazine of high standard ... by employing a pure, elegant and pleasing style, ... by publishing in each issue a strictly selected number of essays, poems, and stories ... to create a model style of Chinese prose . . .." To illustrate its principles, the Hsüeh-heng prefaced its first issue with portraits of Confucius and Socrates, neither of whom were heroes to the Chinese intellectuals of the 1920's. In this and subsequent issues, there appeared essays criticizing the new literary movement for its shallowness, its opportunism, its ignorance of the Chinese past, and its lack of understanding of the West which it was attempting to imitate. As a corrective, Liu I-cheng (q.v.) contributed a comprehensive history of Chinese culture ; and other Chinese writers translated selections from Plato, Aristotle, and Voltaire. An ambitious plan to translate all the works of Irving Babbitt, referred to by Wu Mi as the most significant writer of modern times, was carried out in part. Wu Mi himself wrote the initial chapters of a projected history of Western literature, beginning with Homer. He compiled lists of reference books for Chinese students of English literature. In addition, he translated English poems into classical Chinese verse, adding detailed notes on their historical background, literary allusions, and prosodic features.
Although the Hsüeh-heng made an important contribution to the stream of translations of and introductions to Western literature, it did not noticeably affect the particular course that Chinese creative writing was already beginning to take in its attempts to imitate the West. The Hsüeh-heng, in fact, deplored the then current emphasis on "social realism" and the admiration for such writers as Tolstoy, Balzac, Zola, and Ibsen. Wu Mi and his group failed to take sufficient account of the fact that the modern Chinese literary revolution was motivated largely by a desire for social and political reform. The demand of the times was not so much for the development of a new literature in itself as it was for the recruitment of literature into the service of social action. Zola therefore, was more "useful," more relevant, and more popular than Vergil. For similar reasons, fiction and drama, the two forms most adaptable to the detailed documentation of social conditions, attained the status of serious literature for the first time in Chinese history. However, examples of these genres were conspicuously absent from the pages of the Hsüeh-heng, in part because they were not highly regarded by the American-educated New Humanists. Poetry written in the classical language and based on classical conventions was a central concern of Hsüeh-heng contributors. Their belief, expounded earlier by the poet and reformer Huang Tsunhsien (ECCP, I, 350-51), was that modern poetry should use traditional language and forms while attempting to embody contemporary ideas. In 1935 Wu Mi published a volume of poems written in accordance with this principle. The journal Hsüeh-heng is remembered and vilified by its critics chiefly for its opposition to the use of colloquial language in prose as well as in poetry. Any views on literature, no matter how liberal or judicious, would have been unlikely to gain a sympathetic hearing among the new intellectuals and writers of twentiethcentury China if couched in a language already widely labeled as "dead" or "reactionary." The classical style employed by Hsüeh-heng writers had been stripped of archaisms and empty rhetoric, but in their hands it did not become a vigorous instrument of debate and did not lend itself to the formulation of appealing slogans or rousing battle cries. During a period of tumultuous change, the voice of moderation, if not conservatism, is likely to go unheeded; and the Hsüeh-heng failed to provide a rallying point for effective opposition to the new literature. It nevertheless was able, under the indefatigable editorship of Wu Mi and in a period marked by the proliferation of short-lived literary magazines, to appear monthly for five years and intermittently thereafter for another twenty or so issues.
Wu Mi continued to edit the Hsüeh-heng after he left Nanking in 1924 to begin two decades of teaching Western literature at Tsinghua University in Peking. In 1929 he also assumed the editorship of the literary supplement of the influential daily Ta Kung Pao at Tientsin. At various times he also held teaching or administrative positions at Northeastern University, Peking University, Peking Normal University, and Yenching University. During the Sino-Japanese war he migrated with Tsinghua to Changsha, and then to Kunming, where the university became part of the Southwest Associated University. He remained at Kunming until 1945, with the exception of a year as visiting lecturer at Wuhan University, then at Chungking.
Chinese acquainted with Wu Mi observed that he was a classicist in intellectual conviction but a romantic in temperament and sensibility. He was known for his lectures on the Hung-loumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber) , on which he published several studies; his gallant attention to female students; and his ill-concealed amorous involvements. Perhaps frustrated by the apparent contradiction between intellectual ideals and personal hedonism, Wu Mi became increasingly attracted to the study of metaphysics. At war's end he returned to north China, but in 1948 he moved from Peiping to Szechwan. There he studied Buddhism at Chengtu and later became chairman of the department of Western languages at Southwest Normal College.
These manifestations of romantic temperament and metaphysical yearnings in his later years reveal how far Wu Mi had moved from the New Humanist position of his youth. In one sense, however, he was continuing the search for unity and harmony between East and West, between old and new. In 1947 he published a Table of the One and the Many, written in English and then translated into Chinese, which summarized the conclusions of this search. Borrowing, as he explained, the terms "One" and "Many" from Greek philosophy and the Buddhist scriptures, he used them to classify all truth, knowledge, and experience into two opposite categories. His examples ranged from Plato to the Sung Neo-Confucians and the Hung-lou-meng.
To what personal synthesis of ultimate truths these investigations would have led Wu Mi will perhaps never be known, for in 1952 he became engulfed in the Communist program of "thought reform" of the intellectuals. He published a confession article in Chungking in which he renounced his previous intellectual positions and announced that he would dedicate himself to the study of Marxism-Leninism. The account he gave of his intellectual development followed the pattern of self-criticism and repentance prevalent in hundreds of similar confessions. His chief ideological fault, he wrote, had been his "feudal" respect for native Chinese culture. He had venerated China's cultural past while ignoring its ruthless and ugly aspects; he had loved ancient art objects without considering that they actually represented the fruits of the blood and toil of the oppressed masses. He acknowledged further as proof of his "criminal deeds" and "vicious influence" that few if any of his large number of students later became Communists or sacrificed their lives to the cause of revolutionary Communism in China. Wu Mi confessed also to erroneous romantic ideas about relations between the sexes. He had separated from his wife in 1929 and had engaged in various meaningless amorous activities. Fatigue and disillusionment then had led him to embrace Buddhism in an effort to "drug himself" and to alleviate his personal suffering through the "narcotic effects" of religion. When the Communists came, he had first attempted to fuse his old views with the new philosophy of dialectical materialism, but he now promised to reform his ideology more thoroughly in order to become a true teacher of the people. He would, he concluded, continue to study dialectical materialism and historical materialism, to accept Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tsetung's theory of the Chinese revolution, to uproot idealism, and to discard all reactionary ideas.
