LIU RENHANG AND HERBERT G. WELLS

Abstract

Liu Renhang (1885–1938) was known as a Shanghai publicist and propagandist of Buddhism, vegetarianism and non-violence. Having been educated in Japan, he could not establish relations with Zhang Xun and Yan Xishan. He made a long journey to India and Indochina, talked with Rabindranath Tagore. In the 1920s and 1930s, Liu Renhang published over 30 books, mostly translated from Japanese and English. He published translations of L. N. Tolstoy’s short stories, books on hydrotherapy and yoga, and founded the Institute for the Cultivation of Joy in Shanghai (乐天 修养 馆). The main work of his life was Dongfang Datong Xuean in 6 juan, the creation of which was carried out in 1918–1924. The treatise was fully published in Shanghai in 1926, and was reprinted in 1991 and 2014. Its main content was to consider the classical ideals of Xiaokang and Datong, and the possibility of combining ideals with the realities of the modern world. Liu Renhang believed that the ideal of Datong Confucius and Kang Yuwei is fully compatible with Buddhist teachings. During the fifth session of the Central Election Commission of the Kuomintang of the fourth convocation (1934), he tried to announce at the meeting a petition on the introduction of the principle of Great Unity in international relations. In 1938, he created the utopian commune Datong in his native village, and tried to interest Zhou Enlai and Dong Biu with his theories. In the Dongfang Datong Xuean treatise, Liu Renhang introduced the “history of the future”, which was influenced by H. G. Wells’ globalist and Fabian ideas. Liu Renhang directly referred to his novel The War in the Air in conclusion to his own treatise. Like Wells, Liu looked with pessimism on the prospects of modern mankind, and called for the emergence of a “modern Genghis Khan”, who would ruin the world, on the ashes of which the sprout of a new Great Unity would rise.