Introduction

Abstract

China is one of the few countries in the world that has an uninterrupted history of civilized development lasting four or five millennia. Seldom seen in the world’s history of civilization are the richness of its cultural accumulations and the sustained stability of its traditional value concepts. Two major transformations have taken place in the long history of the development of China’s civilization. The first was the transformation from the concurrent existence of numerous states in pre-Qin times to the era of centralized power and monarchical autocracy of the unified Qin and Han dynasties, and the second, which began in the late Qing Dynasty, was the transformation from the era of unified centralized power under monarchical autocracy to a modern society based on people’s self-governance. These major transformations were changes both of social patterns and of cultural patterns. This book is a study about modern cultural patterns, or in other words, a study about the transformation, since the late Qing period, of China’s culture, which had been a medieval culture adapted to the monarchical autocratic system of unified centralized power, over to a modern culture of recent and modern times, suited to a democratic system based on people’s self-governance. This process is still ongoing. There is a major difference between this transformation and the historical transformation of pre-Qin to Qin and Han times, in that the historical transformation of pre-Qin to Qin and Han times was driven entirely by dynamics generated by the accumulation of various changes within China’s society, whereas the transformation that started in the late Qing period took place in an ambience of enormous external pressures. Seen from the angle of cultural transformation, the former transformation was a transformation of values internal to Chinese culture, whereas the latter transformation appeared to consist of a replacement of China’s inherent value concepts by certain value concepts from the outside, a substitution of Chinese culture by certain foreign cultures. (This was, of course, only a superficial perception.) A great many people, therefore, adapted poorly to this transformation. Some who tended to be conservative saw this transformation as “using foreign things to transform China,” as a violation of a categorical ancestral taboo. Others felt far less at ease with this transformation than with their previous life amid the old traditions. Many ordinary people, unaccustomed to changes tinged with foreignness, found themselves in a state of profound and prolonged perplexity. The perplexity was, first of all, about the contrasts between “Chinese” and “Western” cultures and the difficulty of reconciling the two. Secondly, it arose from the resulting enhanced perplexity about what was “old” culture and what was “new” culture, the perplexity over the relationship between material and spiritual cultures, and so forth.