The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 18 (2007)

The Trans-Paciﬁc Experience of John Dewey

Youzhong SUN*

With the rapid progress of globalization and emergence of the UnitedStates as the only superpower since the end of the Cold War, American
culture has become more and more an international phenomenon, penetrating traditional cultures around the globe. This growing inﬂuence ofAmerican culture on indigenous cultures is everywhere denounced as
the Americanization of world cultures. In this context, American cultureis equated with Hollywood movies, Disneyland theme parks, Rock n’
Roll music, McDonald’s fast food, as well as the democratic rhetoric of
American politicians. The bulk of existing scholarship by non-US
Americanists is devoted to dissecting the nature and impact of this“American cultural imperialism.” What is often ignored in this debate,
however, is the fact that American culture has been reduced to American
pop culture, and usually the vulgar part of it.
To do justice to American culture, international Americanists are welladvised to make a distinction between the pop culture and “high” cultureof America. Due attention should be paid to the nature and value of this“high” dimension of American culture. This paper examines the reception and impact of the work of John Dewey, one of the greatest American
philosophers, in Japan and China over the past one hundred years or so.
It can be regarded as a case study of American high culture from a transPaciﬁc perspective in an attempt to shed some new light on the criticism
of American culture.
Copyright © 2007 Youzhong Sun. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Dean of the School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China

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DEWEY IN JAPANLong before John Dewey set foot on the soil of Japan, his philosophy
had been introduced to Japanese academic circles. As early as 1888, aJapanese journal published one of Dewey’s essays on psychology. In
1900, Dewey’s early work Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics wastranslated into Japanese. Then, in 1901 and 1918 respectively, two of
Dewey’s most important works on education, School and Society and
Democracy and Education, were introduced to Japanese readers. The
introduction of Dewey’s educational philosophy to Japan gave rise to theestablishment of about a dozen experimental elementary schools modeled on Dewey’s experimental school at the University of Chicago. All
these schools made efforts to put into practice Dewey’s educational principles of learning by doing and education as growth.
Dewey’s visit to Japan from February 9 to April 28 in 1919 came at
the right moment. First of all, the publication of his works in Japan had
helped to spread his democratic ideas among the educated public andhad won him a group of followers. More importantly, Japan at that time
was undergoing the democratization movement known as Taisho
Democracy. Just as Dewey and his wife Alice observed, “All Japan istalking democracy now. . . .”1 Naturally when Dewey, the American
philosopher of democracy, arrived to preach his experimental liberalismand democratic educational creed in the name of reconstructing philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a number of other schools, he was
everywhere warmly received. In a letter to his daughter, Dewey wrote,“[P]eople were so kind that they created in us the illusion of being somebody, and gave us the combined enjoyments of home and being in a
strange and semi-magic country. . . .”2 He was deeply impressed by thefriendly treatment they received from the Japanese people and exclaimed
to his daughter, “Politeness is so universal here that when we get backwe shall either be so civil that you won’t know us, or else we shall be soirritated that nobody is sufﬁciently civil that you won’t know us either.”3
As a pragmatic philosopher, Dewey was not carried too far away by
the seemingly endless excitement, with ceremonies and parties coming
one after another. He noticed that “[l]iberalism is in the air,4 but at thesame time, he was aware of “a race between fulﬁllment of the aspirations of the military clans who still hold the reins, and the growth of
genuinely democratic forces which will forever terminate those aspirations.”5 Looking into the future of Japanese liberalism, Dewey predicted:

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The cause of liberalism in Japan has taken a mighty forward leap—so mighty
as to be almost unbelievable. The causes which produced it can sustain it. Ifthey do sustain it, there will be little backward reaction. If they do not continue in force to sustain it, they will betray it. To speak more plainly, therelease of liberal forces that had been slowly forming beneath the lid was dueto the belief that democracy really stood for the supremacy of fairness,
humanity, and good feeling, and that consequently in a democratic world anation like Japan, ambitious but weak in many respects in which her competitors are strong, could afford to enter upon the paths of liberalism. The
real test has not yet come. But if the nominally democratic world should goback on the professions so profusely uttered during war days, the shock will
be enormous, and bureaucracy and militarism might come back. One cannot
believe that such a thing is to happen. But every manifestation of national
greed, every cynical attack upon the basic ideas of the League of Nations,
every repudiation of international idealism, every thoughtless word of race
prejudice, every exhibition of dislike and unjustiﬁed suspicion directed at
Japan is a gratuitous offering in support of the now waning cause of autocratic bureaucracy in Japan. Liberalism here has plenty of difﬁculties still toovercome.6

Dewey’s astonishing foresightedness was to be borne out in the Japanese
history of the 1920s and 1930s. Not long after Dewey left Japan, liberalism gave way to militarism and the emperor-cult, which ultimately
drew the whole nation onto the path of imperialism.
The short-lived democratization movement between the two worldwars in Japan prompts Dewey scholars to conclude that Dewey’s pragmatism and progressive philosophy of education failed to take deep rootin the soil of Japanese culture.7 This claim, however, cannot be fully justiﬁed.
First, interest in Dewey’s philosophy did not recede after Dewey left
Japan. This could be seen in the increase rather than decrease in the number of translations of his works, including almost all his major works,
such as Reconstruction in Philosophy, School of Tomorrow, Quest for
Certainty, How We Think, School and Society, The Need for a Recovery
of Philosophy, Human Nature and Conduct, Experience and Education,
and Ethics. Altogether twenty-one of Dewey’s works have been translated into Japanese. There has also been a growing interest in Dewey
studies since the 1920s. Fifty-eight books on Dewey have been published, and the number of articles on Dewey has reached as many as 254.8
Second, Dewey’s educational philosophy played a signiﬁcant role inJapanese educational reforms after World War II. It is true that Dewey’s

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name was more or less forgotten during the Second World War.
However, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw a dramatic revival ofinterest in Dewey studies, called a “Dewey Boom” by Japanese scholars.
It is believed that Dewey’s educational philosophy laid the theoreticalfoundation for post-war educational reforms, and in return these reforms
contributed to the propagation of his philosophy. According to R. S.
Anderson, an American educator who was involved in Japanese educational reforms, Dewey’s liberal educational philosophy gained large
numbers of adherents among both American and Japanese educators
during the American Occupation period.9 That might explain why theJapanese Fundamental Law of Education is seen by many as an embodiment of the progressive educational ideals initiated by Dewey. Dewey’s
popularity could also be seen in the fact that the John Dewey Society ofJapan founded in the late 1950s succeeded in attracting 137 members
representing almost every university in Japan in the early 1960s.
Up until today, Dewey’s pragmatism has continued to inspire a newgeneration of Dewey scholars in Japan to inquire into new problems of
the age of globalization. For example, in an article entitled “Education
for Global Understanding: Learning from Dewey’s Visit to Japan,”
Naoko Sato argues:
The Deweyan wisdom of living in a middle way can be exercised not onlyin the history class or the social science class, as an extension of citizenshipeducation, but also in moral education in the broadest sense. In a world oftragic confrontations between different cultures and religions, Dewey offers
a way of living with the tragic beyond the absolute distinction between goodand evil. He suggests a way of education for global understanding that canenable us to overcome conﬂicts not by revenge or retaliation in the name of
combating evil, but by a pragmatic search for the better. This approach does
not see itself in terms of a realization of totalized good but rather encourages
patient dialogue as the most practical, intelligent means to live with different
others.10

DEWEY IN CHINA
After a three-month sojourn in Japan, John Dewey left for China. On
May 30, 1919, he arrived in Shanghai, to ﬁnd to his great surprise thatover a thousand of the leading educators in central China were expecting to hear his opening address three days later. Throughout the following two years and two months that Dewey spent in China, his speeches

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were attended by thousands of fervent young admirers, his lectures werecarried by numerous journals and articles, and at least ﬁve book editions
collecting different series of lectures were published. During this periodof time, he addressed Chinese audiences in seventy-eight different
lecture forums, including several series of between ﬁfteen and twenty
lectures. He left footprints in thirteen provinces spreading from the northto the south of China. In describing some of the fervor surrounding
Dewey’s visit, an article that appeared in the New York ChineseStudents’ Monthly only a month before he left China says:
Mr. Dewey’s career in China is one of singular success. From the time of his
arrival to the present, continual ovation follows his footprints. Bankers andeditors frequent his residences; teachers and students ﬂock to his classrooms.
Clubs compete to entertain him, to hear him speak; newspapers vie with eachother in translating his latest utterances. His speeches and lectures are eagerly
read; his biography has been elaborately written. The serious-minded comment on his philosophy; the lighthearted remember his name.11

This description is no exaggeration. The question is: Why was thisYankee professor so highly esteemed and fervently followed in China
in the 1920s?
I would attribute Dewey’s singular success in large part to the social
and intellectual context within China before the May Fourth Movement.
The internal situation of China then was well summarized by Lin Yusheng in one sentence: “After celebrating the collapse of the Ch’ing
empire, Chinese intellectuals soon came to realize that the founding of
the republic, instead of making China a modern nation-state, was merely
the culmination of the process of the disintegration of the traditionalsociopolitical and cultural-moral orders.”12This overall national crisis resulted in an alliance of the new intellectuals from 1917 to 1919 with Beijing University as the activity base.
United around New Youth magazine and New Tide magazine, New
Culture intellectuals such as Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Ch’ien Hsuan-tung, Hu
Shih, Li Ta-chao, Kao I-han, Fu Ssu-nien, Luo Chia-lun and many others
launched a concerted attack on “old literature” and “old ethics,” encouraging at the same time “new thoughts ” and vernacular literature. The
basic principle of the new intellectual leaders was best summarized by
Ch’en Tu-hsiu in an article published in January 1919 in New Youth,
which was a response to the attacks from conservative intellectuals:

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All these charges are conceded. But we plead not guilty. We have committed
alleged crimes only because we supported the two gentlemen, Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. In order to advocate Mr. Democracy, we are obliged
to oppose Confucianism, the codes of rituals, chastity of women, traditional
ethics, and old-fashioned politics; in order to advocate Mr. Science, we haveto oppose traditional arts and traditional religion; and in order to advocate
both Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science, we are compelled to oppose the cultof the “national quintessence” and ancient literature.13

This attempt to “save China” and “re-create civilization” by introducing
and establishing in China new learning, new values, new thoughts, newmodes of life, new literature, new education and new spirits, or brieﬂyin Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s words, “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science,” was thesocial atmosphere already in existence before Dewey arrived in China.
And this cultural orientation was a stand shared by different groups of
new intellectuals, not just the liberals such as Hu shih. Dewey himself
and his disciple Hu noticed this phenomenon. In his article “New Culture
in China,” Dewey obviously agreed with Hu’s summary of the stages offoreign inﬂuence in China. According to Hu, the ﬁrst stage was characterized by the realization of the importance of western powers’ new military devices. In the second stage, the weakness of China was attributed
to her outgrown form of government, and so the construction of a republic became the aim. The third period is that of reliance upon technicalimprovements. In the fourth period, the period around the May Fourth
Incident in 1919, in which Dewey was caught up, a new formula evolved:
China could not be changed without a social transformation of ideas.14
This sketch by Hu is basically in accordance with the real historical
process as proved by historians’ studies.
Many Dewey scholars such as Barry Keenan, Maurice Meisner, andRobert B. Westbrook tend to believe that Dewey, in his articles as wellas his lectures in China, was either preaching his “irrelevant” culturalreform program or just “aiding” his liberal disciples in spreading theirwishful liberal ideas, or else “had heard echoes of his own voice in
China.”15 They tend to link Dewey with Hu Shih and in turn Hu Shihwith the trend of cultural reformism. Then, they regard cultural reformism as the hopeless search of a liberal minority, failing to see theprevalence of this attitude before the May Fourth Incident. To be moreexact, it was neither Dewey nor Hu Shih who had initiated the New
Culture Movement or the New Thought Tide or even the cultural reconstruction approach that is often ascribed to Chinese liberals. As Chow

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Tsetsung writes, “This approach was neither planned nor directed by any
one person. Rather, it represented a common meeting ground for anumber of people with divergent ideas.” Lin Yu-sheng further traces this“cultural-intellectualistic approach” to “a deep-seated traditional
Chinese cultural predisposition, in the form of a monistic and intellectualistic mode of thinking,”16 which is quite convincing. That is to say,
Dewey arrived in China just in time to convey his culturally-based
reform program as well as his democratic ideas and scientiﬁc methodology to an already largely receptive audience. He was warmly welcomed and highly esteemed because what he preached was just what the
new intellectuals had been more or less propagating and were still striving to strengthen. As Dewey observed, “The Chinese liberals do not feelvery optimistic about the immediate outcome. They have mostly given
up the idea that the country can be reformed by political means. They
are sceptical about the possibility of reforming even politics until a newgeneration comes on the scene. They are now putting their faith in education and in social changes which will take some years to consummatethemselves visibly.”17 In a sense, Dewey helped the new intellectuals to
express themselves more systematically and more clearly in the earlytwenties. On his arrival, he was at once recognized and accepted as a
powerful ally by the new intellectuals.
It was soon after the May Fourth Incident in 1919 that the allianceamong different groups of new intellectuals began to disintegrate.
Dewey had arrived in China at a time when the cultural reformist movement had began to decline. Just one month after he began his lectures at
Beijing University, Hu Shih and Li Ta-chao started the famous debate
over “problems” and “isms,” which reﬂected the conﬂict within the newintellectual circle. Sympathizing with Hu’s stand, Dewey tried on
different occasions to persuade his audiences to adhere to the way of a
“step-by-step” cultural reconstruction. This effort by Dewey and his followers to hold fast to the cultural reformism of the ﬁrst period of the May
Fourth Movement, however, turned out to be futile. The Chinese liberals failed to realize that China then was faced at the same time with twoserious problems. One was the “survival” and “unity” of the nation; theother was modernization. They were concerned with the latter while
taking the former almost for granted. But the problem of national survival and unity on which the problem of modernization depended somuch for its effective solution was actually more urgent. It was becauseof this fatal failure that the liberals’ reform program, or in other words,

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the cultural-intellectualistic approach of the earlier period, gradually lostits appeal and was ﬁnally replaced by the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary
solution.
In terms of Dewey’s inﬂuence in China in the 1920s, Dewey scholars
have focused on his relationship with Hu Shih and the Chinese liberal
movement. Since liberalism was short-lived in China, the Deweyan
experiment in China was, of course, a total failure. As Meisner writes:“As applied to China, Dewey’s program was neither conservative norradical but largely irrelevant.” Talking about the educational reform carried out by Dewey’s followers, Keenan writes: “Deweyan experimentalism, as a way of thinking, as a way of acting politically, and as acomponent of democratic education, offered no strategy his followers
could use to affect political power.” Based on Meisner’s and Keenan’scomments, Westbrook concludes: “Dewey was not the man to talk politics with the Chinese in the early twenties.”18
Compared with the above writers, Michael Eldridge takes a more balanced view. He holds that the charge of Deweyan strategic shortcomings with regard to China is not accurate, pointing out that Deweyrecognized the need for both a new culture and a new politics and theirinterdependence in China. He is also keen to note the signiﬁcance of thetransformation of the Chinese vernacular into the standard written language.19 It is true that although Dewey more often stressed the importance of gradual progress and foundational cultural reconstruction, he
did realize the complexities of China’s situation. He wrote: “China wastrying to crowd into a half century literary, religious, economic, scientiﬁc and political revolutions which it had taken the western world centuries to accomplish.” He saw the need in China for a stable, centralized,
domestic government, a uniﬁed and nationwide currency, a uniﬁed andcomprehensive transportation and communication system, and a national consciousness to supplement local loyalties with strong nationalist
feelings and sentiment. He saw the danger of extreme cultural radicalism
among the new intellectuals, describing it in terms of embracing the viewthat “the more extreme and complete the change, the better.” He evenenvisaged the possibility of China taking the Bolshevist road in a letter
to Albert C. Barnes: “It is conceivable that military misrule, oppression
and corruption will, if they continue till they directly touch the peasants,
produce a chaos of rebellion that adherents of the existing order will certainly label Bolshevism.” This was exactly what happened later in China.
Commenting on the New Culture Movement, he pointed out that what

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was required in China was “a new culture, in which what is best in western thought is to be freely adopted—but adopted to Chinese conditions,employed as an instrumentality in building a rejuvenated Chinese culture.”20 Obviously, Dewey did not expect his liberal disciples simply to
put their lecture notes into practice in China. Seen from a historical perspective, this last comment is especially insightful.
Dewey’s inﬂuence in China in the early twenties went beyond thesphere of Chinese liberalism and education reform. His experimental
methodology greatly inﬂuenced not only the liberals but also the leftists.
As Hu admitted, his thought was mainly inﬂuenced by two people,
Huxley and Dewey. Huxley taught him how to doubt and to believe innothing without sufﬁcient evidence. Dewey taught him how to think andto consider the immediate problems in need of veriﬁcation, and to take
into account the effect of thoughts. These two people made him understand the character and function of scientiﬁc method. For Hu, pragmatism was “only a methodology”—a way to think about life, not what tothink of it.21 Through Hu’s active promotion and Dewey’s own lectures
and the translations of his works, pragmatic methodology—concentration on real “problems” in life and searching for solutions through criticalanalysis based on facts—became a shared “instrument” for both theliberals and the leftists.
In the famous debate over “problems” and “isms” between Hu Shihand Li Ta-chao, the real disagreement was not over whether “problems”
or “isms” should be studied, but what should be considered as China’s
real problems. In Hu’s mind, the problems were the working conditionsof Peking’s rickshaw coolies, the customs and prejudices that perpetuated the social abuse of women, standards and systems of public health,elementary and secondary school textbooks and curricula, and scholarly
issues having to do with the interpretation of China’s historical and literary inheritance. In Li’s mind, China’s real problem was the fact that
China was not a well-organized and vital society, but a disorganized andmoribund society, its faculties already impaired.22 Therefore, although
Li shared Hu’s argument that China’s real problems should become thefocus of study and no “ism” should be accepted and practiced in total,they parted in their conclusion as to the route China should take. In otherwords, they shared the pragmatic methodology, but came to different
conclusions because they studied different problems. This is a point
many scholars of the May Fourth Movement and Chinese liberalism havefailed to see.

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A more typical example would be the inﬂuence of pragmatism on Mao
Tse-tung. Mao began to learn about Dewey and his pragmatism while
he was working as a librarian’s assistant in Beijing University from
August 1918 to the spring of 1919. He attended Hu Shih’s courses andhad private talks with Hu asking for Hu’s advice on whether he should
go abroad or do “on-site investigation and research” in China—Hu suggested the latter—and also on how to carry out Dewey’s educational
program. Hu suggested the creation of a “Self-Study University” in
Mao’s home province. Mao accepted both suggestions. Mao must also
have read many of the translations of Dewey’s works, since Dewey’sbooks such as Five Major Lectures, Trends in Modern Education, On
the Development of Democracy in America, Pragmatic Ethics, andPragmatism frequently appeared on “important books” lists and on thelist of books sold by the Cultural Book Society, of which Mao was oneof the founders. Among the bestsellers of the Society were the newspapers and magazines that often carried Dewey’s lectures. In a letter to afriend of June 7, 1920, Mao said he was reading “three great contemporary philosophers,” namely Dewey, Russell and Bergson. Also, in“Manifesto on the Founding of the Xiang River Review” published inJuly 14, 1919, Mao listed pragmatism as the most progressive thought.
He wrote: “In the area of thought, we have moved forward to pragmatism. . . .”23
From 1918 to 1919, Mao’s acceptance of pragmatism was wholesale.
Between the “extreme” and the “moderate” ways of social progress, hechose the latter. He wrote: “Thus it is our position that as regards scholarship, we must uphold thorough study . . . we must seek the truth. . . .
Thus we will not provoke widespread chaos, nor pursue that ineffectual‘revolution of bombs,’ or ‘revolution of blood.’ ” Later he wrote again,
explaining the aim of his newspaper Xiang River Review: “This paper isconcerned purely with academic theories and with social criticism. We
do not meddle at all in practical politics.” Following Dewey’s and Hu
Shih’s educational program of social reconstruction, Mao together withhis friends established the Xiangtan Society for the Promotion of
Education in 1920. In “Declaration of the Xiangtan Society for the
Promotion of Education,” he wrote: “Education is an instrument for promoting the progress of society; an educator is a person who utilizes this
instrument. . . . Dr. Dewey of America has come to the East. His new
theory of education is well worth studying.” For Mao and his comradesat this time, Dewey and Russell meant “the hopeful and bright side ofthings” instead of “the hopeless, dark and evil side of things.”24THE TRANS-PACIFIC EXPERIENCE OF JOHN DEWEY

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It was after the end of 1920 that Mao gradually leaned toward
Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary activities. In a letter of December
1, 1920, Mao formally declared Dewey’s “method of education” as “notfeasible.” According to his detailed analysis, education required“money,” “people” and “institutions.” But:
In today’s world, money is entirely in the hands of the capitalists; those incharge of education are all either capitalists or slaves of capitalists. The
schools and the press, the two most important instruments of education, areall under the exclusive control of the capitalists. In short, education in today’s
world is capitalist education.25

According to Mao, the capitalists controlled parliaments, governments,
armies, police, banks and factories. “That is why,” he wrote, “I believethat the method of education is not feasible. A Russian style revolution,
it seems to me, is a last resort when all other means have been exhausted.”
He further argued from a historical standpoint that “human life is nothing but the expansion of men’s desires.” “Intelligence can direct impulse
effectively only within certain boundaries. Once beyond those boundaries, impulse will prevail over the intellect, advance boldly, and not be
stopped until confronted with forces greater than itself.” Therefore, tostop the bourgeoisie’s desires, the only effective way was to appeal to
the greater force of the proletariat that Mao believed “is actually several
times more numerous than the bourgeoisie.” It is interesting to noticethat Mao’s criticism of the Deweyan experiment is strikingly similar tothe charges often made against Dewey by his American critics.
However, although Mao ﬁnally gave up the Deweyan formula of education as a way to social progress, he did not give up the pragmatic
methodology he learned from Hu Shih and Dewey. In 1919, soon after
Mao returned to Hunan province from Beijing, he established the
Problem Study Society. Article I of the Statutes of the Problem Study
Society stipulated: “All things and all principles, whether essential ornonessential to contemporary human life, that have not yet been solved
and yet inﬂuence the progress of contemporary human life, are problems.
Together we today found this society, emphasizing that the solution tosuch problems as these starts ﬁrst with study, and name it the Problem
Study Society.” Article VI stipulated: “The emphasis will be on the studyof problems related to contemporary human life, but we shall also takenote of those for which projections about the future can be made.
Problems of the past that have no relevance to the present or future will
not be examined.” In terms of study method, Article III stipulated: “The118

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study of problems should be solidly founded on academic principles.
Before studying the various problems, we should therefore study various‘isms.’ ” Obviously, Mao was much inﬂuenced by Hu Shih at this time;
but unlike Hu, he did not see any conﬂict between problems and “isms.”
In particular, the Statutes listed seventeen educational problems including “[t]he problem of how to implement [John] Dewey’s educational
doctrine,” seventeen women’s problems, ﬁfteen labor problems, eightindustrial problems, seven transportation problems, nine public ﬁnancial
problems, ﬁve economic problems, and more than sixty other international and general human problems.26
It was this problem-centered pragmatic way of thinking that distinguished Mao from other new intellectuals in the May Fourth Movement
period. Soon after the May Fourth Incident, he was the ﬁrst one who set
out to study real social problems systematically. As for Hu Shi himself,
who most vigorously preached the “scientiﬁc method” and the study ofreal problems, the scholarly study of the history of Chinese thought andliterature remained the focus of his interest. In a large sense, Hu was theman who was not practical or pragmatic in the face of China’s criticalsituation from the teens to the twenties.
Mao was also the ﬁrst one among his Marxist comrades who went
deep into the social and political realities of China instead of just talking “isms” in order to ﬁnd the revolutionary way suitable for China’s
situation. In 1926, Mao did a very factual study in an article entitled“Analysis of the classes in Chinese Society” in order to combat two deviations within the Communist Party. One, represented by Ch’en Tu-hsiu,
advocated cooperation with Kuomingtang; the other, represented by
Chang Kuo-tao, advocated a labor movement. A year later Mao made aﬁrsthand investigation of the peasant movement in ﬁve counties of
Hunan province. With this long investigative report and the above analysis based on China’s situation, Mao established his basic theory of peasant revolution, which distinguished his revolutionary ideas from thoseof the more dogmatic Marxists, and through which he gradually won the
support of his comrades and ﬁnally established his theoretical and political authority within the communist Party.27
The pragmatic methodology that inﬂuenced Mao in his early years
remained an important element of his thought for a long period of time.
In 1937, on the eve of the Anti-Japanese War, he wrote one of his mostimportant philosophical works entitled “On Practice—On the Relation
between Knowledge and Practice, between Knowing and Doing,” which

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was mainly intended to criticize the dogmatic Marxists within theCommunist Party. First, Mao argued that “[a]ll genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.” He wrote: “If you want knowledge, you musttake part in the practice of changing reality.” Second, the purpose of gaining knowledge lay in “applying the knowledge of these laws actively tochange the world.” In Mao’s words: “Knowledge begins with practice,and theoretical knowledge is acquired through practice and must thenreturn to practice.” Third, the movement of human knowledge was neverending. He wrote: “Every process, whether in the realm of nature or ofsociety, progresses and develops by reason of its internal contradiction
and struggle, and the movement of human knowledge should also
progress and develop along with it.” Fourth, “man’s social practice alone
is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. Whatactually happens is that man’s knowledge is veriﬁed only when heachieves the anticipated result in the process of social practice.” Finally,
Mao pointed out: “Our conclusion is the concrete, historical unity of thesubjective and the objective, of theory and practice, of knowing anddoing, and we are opposed to all erroneous ideologies, whether ‘Left’ or‘Right,’ which depart from concrete history.”28 Obviously, these ideas
concerning knowledge and experience, knowing and doing, regardlessof their mixture with dialectical materialism and the theme of classstruggle, are surprisingly consistent with or close to Dewey’s pragmatic
methodology. Although it can never be said that Mao was a pragmatist,
it can be said that what he emphasized from Marxism and Leninism inthis article revealed the inﬂuence of pragmatic methodology on his
thought in his early years. It can also be said that one major characteristicof early Maoism is its “practicalism,” if not pragmatism.
With China plunged into the whirlpools of the Anti-Japanese War andthe Civil War from the 1930s to the 1940s, Dewey’s name was somewhat forgotten. The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949,
however, brought in another opportunity for Dewey to become wellknown again, this time not as a “fad,” but as a target of attack.
From 1951–1952, there appeared a barrage of articles and a few booklength critiques of Dewey and pragmatism. From 1955–1956, Dewey’s
disciple Hu Shih was targeted and criticized together with Dewey andpragmatism. This wave of critique was under Mao’s direction. In
December 1954, Mao said: “Essays criticizing Hu Shih’s thought must
be written in a vernacular and popular manner and should propagate
Marxism in a direct way. Every one of Hu Shih’s essays had a political

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purpose. We too should have targets in mind when we write.”29 As aresult, Dewey’s educational philosophy became “poisonous,” “reactionary,” and “subjective-idealistic;” Dewey himself became a “great
fraud and deceiver in the modern history of education.”30 In 1963, there
was another systematic critique of all aspects of pragmatism, andDewey’s epistemology and pedagogy in particular. Dewey’s fame in
China thus fell to its nadir.
Several reasons can be pointed out as to why Dewey was reduced toa target of attack in these three decades. First, as early as 1937, Dewey
led the American Preliminary Commission of Inquiry to Mexico to hearand study the charges against Leon Trotsky made by the Moscow Trials
under the control of Stalin. In opposition to Moscow’s charges, theDewey Commission, after careful study of the evidence, declared that
the Moscow Trials were frame-ups and that Trotsky and his son were
innocent. This event suddenly turned Dewey from a “friend” to an“enemy” of the Soviet Union. Dewey was condemned as “one of themost ﬁendish reactionary thinkers in the imperialist age.” His instrumentalism was castigated as an “instrument” to “serve the big capitalists
and the most reactionary imperialist bourgeoisie.”31 The attitude of theSoviet Union toward Dewey was soon adopted by the Chinese Communist Party.
Second, during the period from the ﬁfties to the seventies, Extreme
Leftism ruled China and all academic activities were politicized. As Liu
Fang-tong, a witness of that generation, recalled in 1997: “In the midﬁfties, dominated by the Leftist political ideological line, a large-scale
movement was launched in order to criticize pragmatism. This wave ofcritique mainly aimed to serve certain political purposes; as a result, mostcritics divorced themselves from Dewey’s pragmatism itself. . . . Henceforth, the Leftist political criterion dominated the academic criticism of
Dewey and other western Philosophers, resulting in oversimpliﬁed negation taking the place of objective and concrete analysis. As a result, thereal image of Dewey and other western scholars as well as their theories
was often twisted. . . .”32
Finally, since Soviet-style Marxism, Leninism and Extreme Leftism
dominated China’s intellectual circles in these years, it is not surprisingthat Dewey was severely attacked. In other words, part of the criticism
of Dewey was not merely due to misunderstanding. For instance, Deweystrongly opposed “class struggle” and “revolution” as well as dialecticalmaterialism, all of which were kernels of the political ideology of theCommunist world including China in the Cold War years.

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The period of reform and opening up of China from the eighties to thepresent has coincided with a revival of interest in and a reevaluation of
Dewey. Almost every year a scholarly work on Dewey is published, andarticles discussing Dewey’s educational or social philosophy or aesthetics frequently appear in academic journals. Two years ago a center
for Dewey studies was established in Fudan University; in the same year
an international conference on Dewey and pragmatism was held in
Shanghai. Finally, although all of Dewey’s major works have alreadybeen translated into Chinese, an academic press has made an ambitious
plan to publish a Chinese version of the thirty-seven volumes of the Complete Works of Dewey.
Among the numerous works published in recent years, Liu Fangtong’s article entitled “Re-understanding and Re-evaluating Dewey” canbe regarded as a summary of this trend. Liu’s article focuses on three
aspects in which Dewey was misunderstood. First, Dewey was usuallyregarded as a subjective idealist opposing materialism, therefore unscientiﬁc. Liu writes: “Actually, the fundamental feature of Dewey’s
philosophy lies in its opposition against . . . dualism, stressing that theworld that man confronts, lives in and regards as the object of cognition,is the world in man’s view (experience) that has been acted upon andreconstructed (humanized) instead of the world per se that exists outsideof man.” It was often assumed that Dewey denied the objective existenceof the world. Liu argues that what Dewey stresses is the interdependence
and interaction between man and the world, subject and object, insteadof the independence of the physical world or the spiritual world. Therefore, “life” and “practice” are the basic concepts of Dewey’s philosophy.
Second, Dewey was usually criticized as an apologist of the bourgeoisie; therefore, his advocacy of democracy and freedom was considered hypocritical. Liu argues that what Dewey tries to defend is “thedemocracy and freedom of the majority,” although his theory is still“within the boundary of the bourgeois ideology of democracy and freedom.” Obviously, according to Liu, there could be two different democracies. Dewey himself would not agree, of course.
Third, Dewey’s theory of truth was often attacked as subjectivistic andegoistic, and his ethics as preaching selﬁsh individualism. Liu argues
that Dewey’s stress on the efﬁcacy of truth has nothing to do with theprivate proﬁt that truth produces; rather it means that the truth of ideas
lies in whether they can produce the anticipated result and stand the testof practice. Thus Liu’s article actually announced Dewey’s thoroughrehabilitation after he was wronged in China for more than three decades.

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Liu concludes: “Therefore, in a certain sense, we are back to the starting line similar to that of the May Fourth Movement after going arounda large circle.”33
Of course, China’s situation is different today, and certainly morefavorable for social experimentation. “Intelligence,” “cooperation,”“communication,” “social reconstruction,” “associated living,” “stepby-step progress,” “democracy as a way of living”—these Deweyan
reformist formulas have become more relevant today than in the early
decades of the twentieth century. And this, I suppose, is the reason for
the revival of interest in Dewey in today’s China. To a large extent, China
has become pragmatic, though not in a strictly Deweyan sense. When
Deng Xiaoping, China’s Chief Architect of Reform, stressed again the
Maoist motto “seeking truth from facts,” he actually declared an ofﬁcial
reconciliation between Chinese Marxism and Deweyan pragmatism.
CONCLUSION
The trans-Paciﬁc experience of John Dewey reminds international
American studies scholars of the hidden facet of American “high” culture that is often undervalued. While we have good reason to ﬁght thecheap American pop culture that is ﬂooding the globe, usually at theexpense of destroying the traditions of indigenous cultures, we should
not ignore the good things American culture can offer to world civilizations.
Americans should view the dramatic experience of Dewey in Japanand China as a dialogue rather than a clash between civilizations, a slow
but steady way of bringing the best of American democracy to the restof the world. By avoiding the irresponsible use of force, Americans canmake a greater contribution to the peace of the world and the progressof human civilizations.
NOTES
1
Evelyn Dewey, ed., Letters from China and Japan (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.,
1920), 38.
2
Ibid., 18.
3
Ibid., 31.
4John Dewey, China, Japan and the U.S.A. (New York: Republic Publishing Co.,
1921), 3.
5
Ibid., 6.

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John Dewey, Essays on China, Japan, and the War 1918–1919 (Carbondale, Ill.:Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 154–155.
7
Naoko Saito, “Education for Global Understanding: Learning from Dewey’s Visit
to Japan,” Teachers College, Columbia University: Teachers College Record, vol. 105,
no. 9 (December 2003): 1758–1773.
8
Shan Zhong-hui, “Dewey’s Educational Thought in Japan,” Foreign Education
Research, no. 8 (2002).
9
Ibid.
10
Naoko Saito, “Education for Global Understanding: Learning from Dewey’s Visit
to Japan.”
11
T.H.K., “Confucius and John Dewey: The Bankruptcy of the East and the West,”
Chinese Students Monthly, vol. 16, no. 8 (June 1921): 539; and quoted in Keenan, The
Dewey Experiment in China (Harvard University: Council on East Asian Studies, 1977),
34.
12
Liu Yu-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1979), 11.
13
Ch’en Tu-hsiu, “Our Answer to the Charges against the Magazine,” New Youth, vol.
6, no.1 (Jan. 15, 1919): 10–11.
14
Dewey, “New Culture in China,” The Middle Works, vol. 13 (Carbondale, IL: SIU
Press), 108–110.
15
See Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967), 10; Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American
Democracy (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), 250; and Keenan, The Dewey
Experiment in China, 51, 158.
16
See Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1960), 58; and Lin Yu-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 28.
17John Dewey, China, Japan and the U.S.A., 31.
18
See Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1967), 107–108; Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China, 161; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 251; and Dewey, “New Culture in
China,” 114.
19
Michael Eldridge, Manuscript, 154–155.
20
Dewey, “Is China a Nation?” MW13:77; ”Chinese National Sentiment,” MW11; “Is
China a Nation?” MW13; and Letter to Albert C. Barnes, 12 September 1920, 16 October
1920, Dewey Papers.
21
Hu Shih, “An Introduction to my Own Thought,” quoted in Grinder, Intellectuals
and the State in Modern China (New York: Free Press, 1981), 275.
22
Hu Shih, “To yen-chiu hsieh wen-t’I, shao t’ao hsieh chu-i,” [Study More Problems,and Talk Less about Isms], Mei-chou p’ing-lun, no. 31 (July 20, 1919); Li Ta-chao,“Tsai-lun wen-t’I yu chu-i” [Another Discussion of Problems and Isms], Mei-choup’ing-lun, no. 35 (August 17, 1919).
23
Mao Tse-tung, letter to Zhou Shi-zhao, March 14, 1920, Stuart R. Schram, ed.,
Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, vol. 1 (Armond, N.Y.: An
East Gate Book, 1994), 505–506; “First Business Report of the Cultural Book Society,”ibid., 585; “Business Report of the Cultural Book Society” (no. 2), ibid., vol. 2, 54–55;
letter to Li Jin-xi, ibid., vol. 1, 519; and “Manifesto on the Founding of the Xiang River
Review,” ibid., 318.
24
Mao, “Manifesto on the Founding of the Xiang River Review,” ibid., 319; “Explanations by the Xiang River Riverw,” ibid., 377; “Declaration of the Xiangtan Society
6

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for the Promotion of Education,” ibid., 536; and “Report on the Affairs of the New
People’s Study Society” (no. 2), ibid., vol. 2, 85.
25Mao, “Report on the Affairs of the New People’s Study Society” (no. 2), ibid., vol.
2, 8–10.
26
Mao, “Statutes of the Problem Study Society,” ibid., vol. 1, 407–413.
27
Mao, “Analysis of the Classes in the Chinese Society,” Selected Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967), 13–22; and “Report on an Investigationof the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” ibid., 23.
28
Mao, “On Practice,” ibid., 300, 304, 306, 296, 308.
29
Mao, The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, vol. 1, ed. Michael Y. M. Kao (NewYork: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), 508.
30
Quoted by Hu Shih in “John Dewey in China,” in Philosophy and Culture: East andWest, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Howaii Press, 1962), 767. The
quotation is from Wenbui Pao (Shanghai), February 28, 1955.
31
Kang Meiliwei’er, Meiguode Shiyongzhuyi [American Pragmatism], trans. Guo
Lijun (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1958), 76, 149.
32
Liu Fang-tong, “Daixu: Chongxin Rensi he Pinjia Duwei,” [Preface: Re-understanding and Re-evaluating Dewey], Xinjiu Gerenzhuyi: Du-wei Wenxuan [Individualism Old and New: Selected Writings of Dewey], trans. Sun You-zhong, et al.
(Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1997), 4.
33
Ibid.