Speech in memory of the 1933 visit of George Bernard Shaw to Shanghai
Sun Yat Sen Museum, Shanghai, 11th December 2014
A chairde na hÉireann agus na Síne,
Dear friends of Ireland and China,
It is a particular honour for me to visit the former residence of Sun Yat Sen and Song Qingling, and to commemorate the visit here, in February 1933, of one of Ireland’s greatest intellectual and literary figures, George Bernard Shaw.
May I start by paying tribute to the curators of this beautiful museum, which brings to life the story of such prominent figures in the transformation of China. You have a saying in Chinese: wen gu zhi xin, which I find particularly appropriate for this occasion: “we need to review the old to learn something new.”
Song Qingling [Soon Ching Ling], Sun Yat Sen and George Bernard Shaw were, each in their own way, seminal actors at a crucial juncture in the history of their respective countries. They were also high-profile intellectuals who engaged fully with the great ideological debates of their time and who were eager to sustain a conversation across national borders.
Today’s gathering, then, is not just an opportunity to recall the seminal role played by these three figures in the history of Ireland and China. Commemorating Shaw’s encounter with Song Qingling [Soon Ching Ling] and several other Chinese writers and intellectuals also provides a valuable occasion to celebrate and assert, together, the value and abiding importance of inter-national exchanges of ideas.
I know that such recognition of the shared humanity sought in great ideals, an eagerness to engage in cross-cultural exchanges, resonates with many of you here, Chinese experts on Shaw, Yeats and Joyce, and enthusiastic members of the Irish Studies Network.
It is impossible to capture in a few words George Bernard Shaw’s rich personality or the astounding diversity of his work and interests. A Nobel Prize winning playwright and novelist, Shaw was also an essayist and polemicist, a free-thinker and a stout defender of the rights of the working classes and the marginalised.
George Bernard Shaw continues to inspire us as the epitome of the engaged public intellectual, somebody who put his talent to the service of emancipatory change. Indeed Shaw was an astute observer of his times but never a bystander – he consistently sought to translate his ideas into actual, public realisations. For example, he was a co-founder of the distinguished London School of Economics, and he helped to establish the New Statesman magazine; two “institutions” which have been handed on to us.
Shaw’s visit to Shanghai coincided with an era of great turbulence globally – a period when foreign powers were pushing rival claims onto China, as the Chinese people struggled to assert national sovereignty and define both an appropriate form of government and a new model of society for themselves.
As a Fabian, Shaw was undoubtedly alive to the possibilities of a wider socialist awakening in China. As an Irishman he would have been sensitive to the Chinese calls for national sovereignty. At the same time, he was mindful not to be prescriptive in his conversation with his Chinese counterparts – conscious as he was of the travails of Europe’s own economic and political affairs.
In the message he addressed to the Chinese people on the occasion of his visit, Shaw thus wrote:
“It is not for me, belonging as I do to a quarter of the globe which is mismanaging its affairs in a ruinous fashion to pretend to advise an ancient people striving to set its house in order.”
George Bernard Shaw has earned our respect for his ability at critically examining his own society’s structures of domination, and at deriding misplaced conventions and respectabilities – what renowned Chinese writer Lu Xun, who was among the guests at Song Qingling’s table, described as Shaw’s habit of “tearing the masks from gentlemen’s faces”.
Such ability for critical reflection and anti-conformist judgement is, in my view, the hallmark of genuine intellectual activity. These are qualities that are as necessary today as they were in Shaw’s times.
George Bernard Shaw’s 1933 visit was not alone in building up the conversation between Chinese and foreign intellectuals. The visits of prominent thinkers and scholars such as Bertrand Russell, Rabrinath Tagore and Albert Einstein, throughout the 1920s and 30s, also contributed to the intellectual and political ferment during and after China’s “New Culture Movement”, also known as “May Fourth Movement.”
In the early decades of the 20th century, Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism was very popular among the Young China and the “May the Fourth 1919 Movement,” as noted by Yeats in the 1920s. We must also remember how the works of playwrights such as Shaw and Ibsen were linked to the emergence in China of what was known as ‘bai hua’, i.e. drama in vernacular Chinese, and how they deeply influenced playwrights such as Hong Shen.
I believe that, today again, great creations can come out of the renewed intellectual, cultural and scholarly engagement between the Chinese and the Irish.
I am really pleased that the study of Shaw and Irish literature remains so lively in Chinese universities. Quite uniquely among foreign writers, Shaw has a widely recognised and intimate Chinese name: “Xiao Bona”. I was also delighted to learn that Fudan University, where I will have the privilege of delivering an address tomorrow, holds a Shaw essay competition every year.
I would like to conclude by saluting all the academics and students in the Irish Studies Network who are here with us this afternoon. Shaw recognised no boundaries in the commitment to international solidarity. I believe that your interest in our culture and language, as well as the revived interest in your great civilisation currently manifest in Ireland, offer a robust and fruitful base for the future of Irish and Chinese relations.
May the relations between our two peoples, Irish and Chinese, continue to be infused by the spirit of cross-border friendship and mutual curiosity which animated George Bernard Shaw’s visit in 1933.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh – Xie Xie dajia