Why is the national crisis of modern China fundamentally a cultural crisis?

Beginning with the Opium Wars, "the West, with its international trade and wars," launched an all-out challenge to "China, with its insistence on agriculture and bureaucracy". The challenge took military, economic, political, and cultural forms, all of which involved the challenge of Western values to traditional Chinese values, and this led to a crisis of traditional Chinese values, that is, a crisis of traditional culture.

The crisis has led to a change in traditional culture, and this change is no longer possible on the original track, because the objective historical conditions have changed dramatically.

After the Opium War, due to the invasion of Western capitalist forces, China began to fall into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, and the feudal economy, which was a combination of small-scale agriculture and cottage industry, was gradually undermined, and the feudal autocratic system, which was built on the basis of this economic foundation, was also shaken.

Traditional culture, as a reflection of and in turn serving the feudal economy and politics, was no longer able to effectively answer and solve the problems facing society, which forced traditional culture to innovate in order to adapt to the new social situation -- the gradual development of the new economic component, capitalism, and the growth of the new class, the bourgeoisie. bourgeoisie is growing, so that the traditional culture is transformed in the direction of the new bourgeois culture.

On the other hand, with the invasion of western colonialists, western culture came in. Western culture, i.e., capitalist culture,

showed its dual character of barbarism and advancement to the Chinese. When this culture and traditional Chinese culture collide,

it reveals all the weaknesses and shortcomings of traditional Chinese culture, which pursues the traditional culture can not help but learn from the western culture,

because in accordance with the general law of cultural exchanges, it is always the backward culture to learn from the advanced culture. Thus, Chinese culture began to get rid of the previous isolation and go to the world.