An Ethical Study Of "New Life Movement"

During the period of the Republic of China, New Life Movement was launched by Kuomintang in February 19,1934 in Nanchang, which aimed at restoring the inherent morality and national spirit by changing the unsuitable living habits, which did not meet the requirements of that time, and consequently reviving the nation. This movement set about dealing with the daily life of the public, hence sought the effective ways to construct morality and revolutionize people’s life in accordance with the sense of propriety, righteousness, honesty and shame. This movement lasted 15 years with people’s broad participation and became an important event in the period of Republic of China.The sponsors of the movement observed that there was the phenomenon of moral disorder in the basic life in China. Thus, they attempted to launch a campaign to reshape the people, and explore the moral construction through a bottom-up way, which was very featured. The New Life Movement still shed a new light upon the moral construction today, though it failed and achieved no result in the end.This paper analyzes theoretical basis of the research from perspectives of the transformation of daily life on moral philosophy and the moral formation and development in the ethics movement, and inquires into the ethical ideological basis of the New Life Movement from the aspects of Chinese traditional Confucianism thought, Three People’s Principles raised by Sun Yat-sen, western modern ethics and so on. In addition, this paper focuses on the moral standards based on the sense of propriety, righteousness, honesty and shame in the New Life Movement and moral requirements, such as the basic needs of shelter and food, and further illuminates the ethical features of the New Life Movement.The content of the New Life Movement was listed as follows:movement of the cleaning and the rules, national life becoming artistic, procreative and military, planting in Spring, cleaning in Summer, economizing in Autumn, relieving in Winter etc. There were also some special movements during the war time, which played a positive role in cultivating the morality of the people. Public servants, young students and women were the important constituents during the practice of the New Life Movement, who also made certain contribution to the promotion of the New Life Movement. The ways of promoting the morality of the New Life Movement were to raise the self-identity of the moral code by all-around promotion, to realize the effective supervision and encouragement by strict standards of reward and penalty, to play an exemplary role by emphasizing the typical and key points.Although real effect of the New Life Movement might not meet the expectation of the sponsors and failed eventually, it had achieved the following moral effectiveness:the moral quality of the citizens to some extent was improved; the moral life of the citizens changed in the certain areas; patriotic awareness had been strengthened during the certain time. The ethical reasons of the New Life Movement’s failure were as follows:the lack of material basis of the ethical spirit movement, inadequate preparation of moral theories for the movement, insufficient modeling behaviors of the sponsors and out-sync development of the moral reform and other reforms.On reflection of ethics in the New Life Movement, this paper maintains that the transformation of the moral construction should be shifted from one-way top-down method to the combination of top-down method and bottom-up method. People could carry out moral construction by means of daily life. Meanwhile, the paradigm of moral construction could be changed from stressing propaganda and instilling to relying on certain form of movements. People should take a dialectical view on the role of movement and promote the effect of moral construction by movements.