Reasons for the Failure of Confucianism in the Ming and Qing Dynasties to Go Beyond the Confucian Traditional Ideal of Cultivating the Body and Ruling the Country

In fact, Gu Yanwu in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties had already developed Confucianism, which is the famous sentence "The rise and fall of the world is the responsibility of all men", and before this sentence there is another sentence "The rise and fall of the country is the responsibility of those who eat meat". The meaning of these two sentences is that the survival of the country is the business of the officials, but the rise and fall of the world is the business of the people, which is in fact a transcendence of the traditional Confucianism that emphasizes the responsibility of the scholars (officials).

While the Qing Dynasty, the cultural dictatorship, the great prison of words, from the Song continued to the Ming folk lectures on the wind is broken, the scholar or specializing in their own glory and wealth, or buried in the pile of paper to engage in academic research, cultivation and governance has long been an empty word, can not talk about transcendence.