The trend of intellectual emancipation in ancient China

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the division of powers resulted in the emancipation of thought of "a hundred schools of thought", a rare occurrence in Chinese history, during which Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, and Legalism emerged. The ****same characteristic of this ideological liberation is that people, while abandoning the culture of divination that had been prevalent since the Yin and Shang dynasties, developed the original - albeit crude - form of theoretical thinking of the Huaxia nation. The early master of Chinese culture, Lao Ran, discarded the dregs of Yin and Shang culture (and at the same time inherited the essence of Yin and Shang), and developed the doctrine of Taoism, which was very close to nature; Confucius and Mozi discarded the negative parts of Laozi's doctrine and developed the doctrine of focusing on political practice ("Learning and excellence lead to serving," Shi, which cannot be understood simply as "to be an official") and social effectiveness. The part of Confucius' doctrine that emphasized human agency was later abstracted and elevated to a very high position (no less than that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in recent times) by Mencius ("Everything is ready for me") and Xunzi ("Man will overcome heaven"). The ethical doctrine of mediocrity in the doctrine of Confucius was played out by the rulers and became an ideological tool for social management, while the doctrine of Taoism founded by Laozi and developed by Zhuangzi was gradually accepted by the oppressed social strata and became an ideological weapon of resistance against class oppression. The two constitute the main aspect of the unity of the opposites of later Chinese thought.

During the period from the Western Han to the Wei and Jin Dynasties, China's political economy migrated from the north to the south. This migration was accompanied by a new emancipation of Chinese national thought. When Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty, due to the need to consolidate power arising from the pressure of the north (Xiongnu's southern invasion), Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty made use of Dong Zhongshu's "exclusive respect for Confucianism", and amended the part of primitive Confucianism that emphasized human initiative and primitive democracy, so as to make it into a doctrine that served for the feudal dictatorship. At this point, the vitality of Confucianism began to dry up.

After East Han Dynasty, due to large-scale wars, Confucianism lost its function of supporting social psychology, and thus its binding force on social ethics. In this general psychological emptiness caused by the decline of Confucianism, metaphysics, which is a combination of Lao Zhuang's doctrine of inaction, became a social trend. The emergence of metaphysics had a double significance at that time: on the one hand, it gave people new psychological support when the social psychology was out of balance. It advocated the abandonment of rituals and laws and the pursuit of nature, which already had the significance of ideological enlightenment. For example, Bao Jingyan, in his Treatise on No King, placed the rites of nature above the imperial power, which weakened man's attachment to the imperial power and thus strengthened the connection between man and the objective nature. On the other hand, since the society at that time did not have the economic conditions for the change of social relations, the chaos caused by the southern invasion of the nomads from the north did not bring to China at that time a new prospect like the one brought to Europe by the Germans and the Huns, and the society after the great upheaval could only negatively return to the world of "nothing" in the end. The sense of "nobility of nothing" (He Yan and Wang Bi) reflects the bitterness of the literati in this period.

The period of the Three Kingdoms, the Jin Dynasty, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties was a period in which the center of economic gravity gradually shifted from the north to the south, thus separating the center of economic gravity from the center of political gravity. At this time, the political still to the north as the center of gravity, while the economic center of gravity has moved to the Yangtze River basin. This centrifugal shift was finalized in the Tang and Song dynasties with the opening of the Grand Canal. In the meantime, the vast and unexplored banks of the Yangtze River provided a new space for replication of the natural economy and feudal social system of the north, which once again aroused the enthusiasm of the Chinese people to re-establish the social system of the Qin and Han dynasties. This enthusiasm, catalyzed by the metaphysics and the western Buddhism, formed a new and vital social thought.

The decline of Confucianism in Eastern China provided a vast market for the spread of cultures in Southwest Asia. Since the beginning of the Eastern Han Dynasty, China has introduced Zoroastrianism, Nestorianism, Manichaeism, Islam and Buddhism. The first few religions were mainly circulated among the hu merchants in the western region, and the Han Chinese mostly worshiped Laozi as the ancestor of their religion and began to accept Buddhism. Like Christianity, Buddhism was a weapon of intellectual emancipation for the working people in the early days. When Buddhism was first introduced into China (this is an early period of China's ideological movement to absorb the best of Western culture), China was in a period when the center of economic and cultural gravity was about to move south and Jiangnan was about to enter a period of development. The large-scale development of economic space requires that people's thinking space should also have a great liberation, which makes Taoist thought and Buddhist thought became the people who were at the beginning of the economic changes consciously accepted the form of thinking. Not to mention the wild and unrestrained, unrestrained style of LaoZhuang's thought on the people's old-fashioned thinking at that time to produce how much impact, as long as to look at the LaoZhuang in the rich relativistic form of thinking, it is not difficult to understand the reason for the prevalence of Taoist thought in this period. However, Chinese metaphysics was only a fruitless flower, and its metaphysical thinking alone was not enough to promote the emancipation of people's thinking at that time. Coincidentally, the introduction of Buddhism added a new impetus to the open-mindedness of the society at that time. When Buddhism was first introduced into China, it did not only anesthetize people's thinking, but also liberated them. Taking Zen Buddhism as an example, Southern Zen Huineng's "theory of enlightenment" advocated that everyone could achieve enlightenment independently and cultivate himself to become a Buddha without relying on outside help. This is very similar to Martin Luther's view that individuals can save themselves through faith! The difference is that the dualistic nature of the European social structure (the coexistence of a natural economy and an artisanal economy that tended to be commercialized, and the coexistence of secular and religious power) allowed the liberation movement initiated by Martin Luther to have a capitalist future, whereas the liberation of ideas in China, which was not embraced by the new economic system, had to return to the traditional way of thinking after a lot of ups and downs. As for those who are not willing to be "recruited" literati only in the full of Taoist consciousness of the "Peach Blossom Garden", to send their own that "torture the sky dance Ganqi, fierce Zhi solid always" [1] ideal.

Since the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, the traditional Chinese method of thinking, based on the natural economy and the small agricultural economy, has evolved into a mature stage in the evolution of Shengke fusion. At this time, the southern land development is increasingly saturated, production from the rough management to intensive farming type of operation; correspondingly, the foreign Buddhist thought in the Chinese Confucianism and Taoism, after the fusion, rooted in China and with Taoism in the Tang Han Yu advocated the "retro movement", began to accept Confucianism, "recruited". "The Song Dynasty saw the beginnings of a new Confucianism in southern China. In the Song Dynasty, southern China began to have a weak commodity economy, along with this is the rational consciousness of Buddhism and Taoism began to penetrate into Confucianism, and Confucianism **** fusion, and thus gave birth to the new Confucianism marked by the Song and Ming philosophies. Zhu Xi is the master of the Song and Ming philosophies, he believes that "reason" is the origin of all things, is the first nature. Zhu Xi pushed the "reason" to the supreme position, and then the Confucian social norms into the reason. He said: "between the universe, a reason only. ...... Its Zhang for the three programs, its discipline for the five rules, all cover the popularity of this reason, nothing suitable and not in." [2] Here, "reason" has become the core content of Confucianism. At the same time, Zhu Xi and the Buddhist Zen Buddhism in the elimination of distractions in the practice of thought and Confucianism of the idea of cultivation of the body as a whole, put forward the "go to the human desires, the existence of heavenly reason" [3] of the ethical norms, and so, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and the three schools of thought in the Song and Ming ethics to get the integration of the seamless.

Similar to the fate of Hegel's doctrine-which, while compromising with an authoritarian society, also fostered a sense of revolution-the process of intellectual liberation of Chinese society after Zhu Xi, in a painful reflection on the phenomenon of the Song people's empty talk about the demise of the country, gave rise to an ideology similar to that after Hegel in Germany, but which is a different one. German Hegel after a similar, but lower level of evolution.

The first to take up the task of transforming Cheng-Zhu philosophy was Lu Jiufen. He abandoned the recognition of external Confucian norms in Cheng-Zhu philosophy - similar to the abandonment of Northern Zen by Southern Zen in Chinese Buddhism - and directly proposed that "the mind is also the reason. [4] This proposition was taken to its peak by Wang Shouren, who simply put forward the proposition that "there is nothing outside the mind"[5] - a proposition similar to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" in the West. The philosophical value of this proposition is that it is The philosophical value of this proposition is that it moves the "reason" of Song Confucianism from the outside to the human heart, that is to say, people can grasp according to their own knowledge and understanding, rather than passively adapting to external norms. This will be the people's understanding from the reality of Confucianism, so that people have the possibility of independent judgment. This cannot be said to be the flower of progressive thought born from the soil of Cheng-Zhu rationalization.

Similar to the two types of students cultivated by Hegel's thought - the young Hegelians who talked about "criticism" and the young Marx who pursued practice - Wang Shouren's disciples had similar consequences. The consequences are similar, Wang Shouren's disciple Wang Geng the teacher's "reason" from the heart and back to reality, put forward: "that is the matter is to learn, that is the matter is the way" [6] proposition; Li Zhi more extreme, shouting "dress and eat is human nature Physical", [7] emphasizing the liberation of individuality: "If a person born with a person's own use, not to be taken to Confucius and then enough." [8] The most meaningful, Li Zhi proposed: "everything under the sun are born in two, not born in one" [9] a proposition against the Oriental monolithic thinking routine: he is in the "couples theory" this short article clearly expresses his ontological dualism, which and Kant "dichotomy "Unfortunately, Li Zhi's cross-generational flash of thought has not been favored by scholars for a long time, just as the Chinese people preferred the latter between Kant and Hegel.

After Li Zhi, China's intellectual circles focus on the combination of cultivation and practice of the trend, the representative of the Ming and Qing dynasties of the three major thinkers, namely, Huang Zongxi, Gu Yanwu, Wang Fuzhi, the doctrine is characterized by emphasizing the "Chongzhengzhi use". Probably the tragic lesson of the Song and Ming dynasty, after the Ming and Qing dynasty scholars are no longer limited to explain the world, but bravely engaged in the struggle for political change: Huang, Gu two people are to anti-eunuchs for the purpose of "restoration of the society" in the important figures, Wang Fuzhi is to lead the troops to fight against the Qing dynasty's courageous generals. This style of literati practice led to a new phase of the ideological liberation movement in China.

Even the practice of improvement is bound to touch the external world of authority. Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese scholars have raised the banner of intellectual liberation and launched a comprehensive and lasting impact on the old culture from different aspects. This process is roughly divided into three stages.

The first stage is to the Songming ideology of rational thought and the Laozhuang thought of egalitarianism as the basis of the theory of change, its representatives of the former, such as Zeng Guofan, Zhang Zhidong, Li Hongzhang, and so on, the latter, such as Hong Xiuquan, and so on. The former tried to make China realize modern industrial change without touching the premise of the old system. The latter tried to overthrow the old system and establish the ideal kingdom of egalitarianism while retaining small agriculture. Significantly, Hong Xiuquan combined the primitive egalitarian ideas of the Chinese peasants with the egalitarian ideas in Christianity, which signaled that the Chinese once again began to pay attention to drawing ideological sustenance from Western culture since they had studied Buddhism from the West. Hong Xiuquan aroused the enthusiasm of the peasants in southern China for equalization of fields and established a huge peasant regime. However, since the Chinese peasants at that time had difficulty in understanding the significance of the commodity economy that was happening at the same time, they held a big prejudice against the principle of commodity economy. To them, the commodity economy was the murder and exploitation of goods by Westerners and usury by domestic wealthy proprietors. It is no wonder that at that time the Chinese never felt the commodity economy in the field of production, they felt more limited to the circulation area of the commercial economy, which often made the non-producing "dumpers" rich, and made the producers, especially the small producers, bankrupt. As a result, traditional Chinese people tend to confuse the "commodity economy" with the "commercial economy", and commodity producers with "unscrupulous merchants". As a result, the traditional Chinese have blocked the development of the commodity economy while stopping the commercial economy. By the same token, it is easy for the traditional Chinese to slip into the commercial economy while engaging in the commodity economy.

The real eye-opener for the Chinese was the Western colonial imperialists armed with fire and sword. While they opened the gates of eastern China with their artillery and inflicted deep sins on the Chinese people, they also imported the commodity mode of production into China. This put a bloody wrapper on the commodity mode of production. This ghastly wrapping created a further delusion among traditional Chinese: that a commodity economy is colonialism and imperialism. This cognitive error made it emotionally difficult for the Chinese, who had been oppressed by the Western powers, to accept the choice of transforming the national economy into a commodity economy and then a market economy. On the contrary, the many horrendous crimes committed by the West in the East made the Chinese fall in love with the principle of resource allocation in their own culture of "making up for deficiencies by making up for surpluses", and understood the socialist ideology that was later imported into China in the light of this principle. This cognitive bias has not been fundamentally corrected until the 14th National Congress of China held in 1992.

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the failure of the foreign affairs movement led to the second stage of the ideological liberation movement of the Chinese nation since the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Sino-Japanese War fiasco, so that Chinese scholars since the fall of the Southern Song Dynasty again have the experience of loss of power and humiliation, and forced to reflect again. Chinese scholars realized in their pain that they could not save themselves by rejecting foreign ideas and closing and locking up the country. Since then, the process of intellectual emancipation of the Chinese nation began to face the world in the hope of seeking a new force for China's liberation from the West. This process was divided into two routes from the very beginning: one was to learn the material means of the West in order to strengthen the feudal system of government; the other was to learn the material and cultural means of the West in order to change the feudal society. The former was represented by the modern reformists led by the Guangxu Emperor, and the latter by the modern democrats represented by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. The struggle between the two sides was eventually defeated by Yuan Shikai's restoration. Fortunately, Yuan Shikai's feudal restoration was only a flashback that lasted only eighty-three days. Thereafter, the process of intellectual emancipation of the Chinese nation took another leap, characterized by the combination of Western progressive ideas with Chinese reality. This combination marked the growing maturity of the ideological liberation movement of the Chinese nation.

After the failure of Yuan Shikai's restoration, there emerged in China two forces representing the two futures: one was the warlord and feudal forces, and the other was the force of the Chinese democrats. Both sides for different political ideas, launched a deadly struggle. This struggle took a qualitative turn in 1919: after the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, socialist ideas landed in China. Sun Yat-sen adapted to this historical trend and practiced the New Three Principles of the People, which greatly aroused the Chinese people's enthusiasm for democracy and nationalism. The people sided with the democrats, and the democrats won the Northern Expedition.

However, unlike the democrats of early capitalism in the West, the democrats in China at that time already belonged to different systems of thought: one combining the democratic ideas of Western capitalism with the realities of China's bureaucratic capital, and the other combining the socialist ideas of the West with the revolutionary demands of China's poor peasants and workers. Their political representatives were the Kuomintang (KMT) headed by Chiang Kai-shek in the former and the ****production party headed by Mao Zedong in the latter. After the end of the Northern Warlords, China began the course of foreign ideas taking root in the struggle between the two forces. On the one hand, Chiang Kai-shek tried to realize the old Three Principles of the People (Sanminism), which Sun Yat-sen had abandoned, in the way that Orientals were accustomed to; on the other hand, Mao Zedong tried to realize the socialism propagated by Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu and others during the May Fourth period in the way that Chinese people were accustomed to. As a result, the Western socialist system of thought triumphed in China. In the meantime, after the failure of the Revolution in 1927 and the 25,000-mile Long March from 1934 to 1935, the ****Productivity Party further emancipated its mind in the course of its painful experience and finally explored the ideology of socialist revolution with Chinese characteristics, namely, Mao Tse-tung Thought.

The People's Republic of China

The People's Republic of China (PRC), with the leadership of the whole nation, defeated the Kuomintang in 1949.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese people began to experience the greatest stage in the process of emancipation of the Chinese nation. In this stage, the Chinese people have been able to understand the question of "What is socialism? How to build socialism?" In this stage, the Chinese people, through their understanding and exploration of "what is socialism and how to build it?", transformed the socialist ideological system from a theory and a movement into an open and dynamic political and economic system.

At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, it was difficult for the vast number of individual peasants in China to understand the scientific kernel of socialism with the rational thinking that Westerners were accustomed to, and it was difficult for them to understand that "socialism" was essentially a kind of socialism that guaranteed the increasing socialization of human society, especially in the area of the means of production. Karl Marx, the founder of the doctrine of scientific socialism, designed a social model of the "association of free men" to accommodate the social ownership that would emerge in the future. However, all of this has been distorted by the immense magnetic field of traditional Chinese culture. We have abolished private ownership, but we have retained state (state-run) ownership for a long time and in large numbers, and regarded state ownership as the highest form of public ownership that cannot be changed. We understood "big industry", characterized by extended and expanded reproduction, as the ideal form of a "socialized" economy. The idea that socialism would eliminate exploitation was misinterpreted in the traditional Chinese mindset as a small farmer's vision of "making up for what is lacking". In a word, most Chinese at that time could hardly associate socialism with the commodity economy and its advanced form, the market economy; on the contrary, many thought that the market economy was a form of economy incompatible with socialism. This kind of cognitive bias was pushed to the extreme during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, the so-called "Liu Deng Line" was in fact the road to a rich country, which seems to be correct today, promoted by those who advocated the road to a socialist commodity economy within the Chinese ****production party. "During the Cultural Revolution, a considerable number of people were trapped in the misunderstanding of socialism caused by a mixture of traditional and "leftist" prejudices, and they criticized the commodity economy while at the same time bringing the entire national economy back to the "loss of surplus to make up for deficiency" principle. While criticizing the commodity economy, they made the entire national economy return to the social system of absolute egalitarianism, in which "the surplus is lost while the deficit is made up". In the Cultural Revolution, the idea of "abandoning the sacred and the wise" in the thinking of Lao Zhuang was transformed into a persecution of intellectuals and a large-scale reform campaign; the Confucian concept of loyalty to the ruler was transformed into a campaign of expressing loyalty to hundreds of millions of people throughout the country in the Cultural Revolution. The Confucian concept of loyalty to the ruler was transformed into a campaign to show loyalty to hundreds of millions of people nationwide during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, the circulation of economic activities were cut off as the "tail of capitalism", consumer goods were evenly distributed, and all the surplus was turned over to the state, so that the Chinese economy almost came to the brink of collapse, and China once again distanced itself from the world.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping summarized the positive and negative historical experiences of China's socialist exploration, and raised the flag of ideological liberation at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Party, breaking through the ideological box of "two things are not true" and adhering to the principle that "practice is the only criterion for testing the truth". With the principle of "practice is the only criterion for testing the truth", the Party, with fearless political courage, reminded people to clarify the question of "what is socialism and how to build socialism", which, after 20 years of successful realization, eventually led to the formation of Deng Xiaoping Theory, another ideological leap in the process of the ideological liberation of the Chinese nation in the twentieth century, following Mao Zedong Thought and the formation of Deng Xiaoping Theory in the course of this leap. In this leap, Deng Xiaoping Theory was formed.