Research Of Liang Qichao And Hunan Shiwu School

Establishing Hunan Shiwu School is an important institutional change made in Hunan Reform Movement.In response to the call in society,provincial governor Chen Baozhen initiated this School to achieve educational reform and nurture industrial talent.Jiang Dejun,a Hunan gentry,recommended Chen to employ Liang Qichao as a director of the School.At that time,Liang was the chief editor of Shiwu Journal,but an irreconcilable confrontation between Wang Kangnian and him made Liang decide to left Shanghai.Receiving invitations from celebrities including Huang Zunxian,Xiong Xilin and Chen Sanli,Liang came to Hunan and became the director in Chinese courses of the School.Based on Confucian thought and reformist conceptions of his mentor Kang Youwei,Liang changed educational aims and contents in Hunan into Kang’s theories.Thus,the School was turned into a political one set up to propagandize Kang’s ideas.In this School,Liang mainly taught courses of Mencius and Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals.Students were required to grasp “essential points about the composition of Confucian Six Classics”,which was inherently interconnected with Kang’s idea of that “simple words with profound meanings” of Confucius could only be understood through investigating both Four Books and Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals.To help students,Liang wrote two introductions of the classics.The first is Guidelines in Reading Mencius which stated that Mencius advocated Confucius’ ideal of Great Unity.The second is Guidelines in Reading the Spring and Autumn Annals which stated that the Spring and Autumn Annals was the book recording political institutions that Confucius designed for future generations.Generally,Liang’s lectures given in the School were based on Kang’s theories.At this early stage of the Wuxu Reform Movement,these lectures also showed some hints of Kang’s peculiar theories of political reform,including “Discourse of Three Ages of Great Unity”,.After Liang went to take metropolitan examination in Beijing,Bin Fengyang and other Hunan gentries quickly recognized abnormality resulted from Liang’s lectures.Inspired by Ye Dehui,Bin collected teaching materials of the School and presented them to Wang Xianqian.With serious dissatisfaction at Liang’s unconventional ideas which might jeopardize Qing’s legitimacy,Wang contacted other conservative gentries to charge the School.In these difficult circumstances,the School is supported by reformist Emperor Guangxu,and the end of Wuxu reform finally spelled the end of the School.These conflicts originated in different ideas held by Kang school and Hunan gentries,and also profoundly reflected their different approaches of “Conserving Chinese”,“Conserving China” and “Conserving Confucianism”.