Guo Moruo on Nationalism and Supranationalism

In Chinese literary history, it is especially the work of Guo Moruo 郭沫若(1892-1978) that postdates his self-declared conversion to Marx-ism a transition that allegedly occurred in 1924 after he had read the theories of the Japanese economist Kawakami Hajime 河上肇(1879-1946), while in Japan that has been studied. This paper will, howev-er, focus on Guo Moruo's thinking prior to his conversion to Marx-ism. This will, more precisely, be done through an analysis of the es-say "Guojiade yu chao guojiade”(国家的与超国家的;The National and the Supranational). Guo Moruo wrote this essay in 1923 as a re-sponse to a novel written in 1919 by Henri Barbusse亨利·巴比塞 (1873-1935), entitled Clarté (Guangming 光明) in which the absurdi-ty of World War I (1914-1918) - or the European War, Ouzhan欧战, as it is generally referred to in China is depicted. Against the back-ground of the just finished First World War, Guo Moruo argues that the traditional Chinese mind has always had the supranational as norm, not the national. With this, he posits a claim for 'universal peace' that is characteristic of Chinese philosophy

Nationalism · Political science · Politics · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Chinese history and philosophy · Law