China’s intellectuals of the past century could not deeply understand Western “liberalism” because of the clash of culture and land. Many of them tried their best to “master Chinese and Western learning” after the late Qing Dynasty, but their lives were too short.
Qian Zhongshu was the only one who had reached the encyclopedic level of learning Chinese and Western literature, comparing Chinese poetry with Western literature; or Yang Xianyi and Yu Guofan translated the Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West into English, struggling with the difficulties of translating cultural terms, and finished their lives in a few decades.
However, Qian Zhongshu and Yang Xianyi were unable to extend their literary knowledge to Chinese and Western cultural thought, nor were they able to show the Chinese a path to modernity from an applied point of view.
Western liberalism began in the late eighteenth century and was divided into two phases. In the first period, Western liberals pondered the relationship between man and the universe from the order of nature in spring, summer, autumn and winter, and gradually gained a new understanding of God in theology. The early liberals believed that God’s divinity, natural order, and human nature should be in harmony with the Trinity. The natural order is a manifestation of God’s will, and the development of human nature is in harmony with nature and should not be in conflict.
Western culture is thus in harmony with the Taoist concept of “teaching nature”. The Chinese philosophy of life, with Su Dongpo as a model, was originally in harmony with nature. However, Chinese scholars failed to release human nature from the confines of the Confucian ethics of rulers, officials, fathers and sons, and got the inspiration of human experience from nature. When they saw the spring flowers and the autumn moon, they concluded, “If there is nothing else on your mind, it is a good time to be on earth. This is a little unproductive.
But Western liberalism, from the observation of and participation in nature, formed a rebellion against the theocratic-centered Western establishment.
So even Chinese culture, which included the spirit of Taoism, and then the East and the West, went their separate ways at this point.
But in the mid-19th century and beyond, liberals, from caring for the humanistic society, developed the idea of socialist equality. At this point, it came into conflict with the traditional humanistic thinking of the Chinese. Coupled with the Industrial Revolution, Western liberals became ambitious, moving from obedience to nature to a desire to harness and manipulate it. The intervention of Marxism has led to a side branch of Western liberal thought that has gone astray. This force is now turning around and eroding the American liberal mainstream, advocating drug use, abortion, and sex change, all of which are qualitative changes against nature.
There is also a branch of Chinese intellectuals who, after the May Fourth Movement, opted for communism. There is no need to go into detail about the disasters that followed.
If Hu Shih and Liang Qichao had not taken the evil path since then, and if there were enough foreign students studying liberal arts, you would have been able to explore on your own and avoid the trap of communism, that is, if the Republic of China had followed the constitutional development of the Three Principles of the People in mainland China, then in the twenty-first century, the Chinese people would have a chance to blend the pre-liberalism of the West with the culture of Taoism and Buddhism, and the liberalism of the East and the West would have fallen into the devil’s path, and China would have been able to launch a true community of human destiny for the whole world.
But it is too late now.
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