Ethical Qualities Of The Traditional Chinese Social Structure

In the modern history, Chinese people carried out a series of self-saving movement in order to get rid of and to fight against the invasion from the western countries, to make the country powerful and to be ranked among the world's cultures. However, every movement was full of hardships and setbacks, together with pressures from the outside and commotions inside the country. It was under this social background that Liang Shuming made a profound study on Chinese culture and its social structure.Liang approached the above from two perspectives: the ontological meaning of culture and its historical manifestations. He not only expounded the demerits of Chinese culture which were manifested in the historical development of the society by regarding the culture as the origin of the demerits, but also based on the view that the ontology of a nation's culture is not discardable, made profound exploration of the core of Chinese culture and the ideological implications which were entailed in the structure of China's social organization - including the social relations and the ruling systems, to show what is typical of Chinese culture and social structure and its relation with the culture of the world, and to promote it to the height that it represents the orientation and future of human culture. Liang's efforts on these two perspectives made his view far-reaching and insightful which surpassed those of his contemporaries. His innovative approach, as well as his comprehensive grasp of the social structure of the country, is an important instruction for us to learn about the traditional social structure of the country and its complicated phenomena of the present day. His theory offers us a vantage point to observe the society effectively. In answer to the demand from the present development of the country and in connection with such a social history, this study made the following interpretations on Liang's theory of social structures:1. The characteristics of the social structure of China. Liang pointed out that social structure is the mainstay of culture. Chinese society is one with ethics as its standard. Moralization is the characteristic of all characteristics of China's social structure as well as Chinese culture. Liang also claimed that in traditional Chinese society "to convert the entire social relation into an integrated family relation", to merge the state into society, to incorporate the entire political construction into ethics is the most primary characteristic of traditional Chinese society. From Liang's analysis, we can see how traditional Chinese society, based on the moralization of social relations, developed itself all the way into a social structure with a unitary system following etiquettes and customs in practice, with the family and the nation incorporated into an organic whole, and with the political power centralized. 2. The inherent mechanism of the formation of China's social structure. Moralized social relation, also called "two-peoplized" social relation, is the social relation established on the coordinate axis of father-son, fraternal, and husband-wife relations, resulting in a kind of society of which all the relations are converted into a "friendship between this man and that man". "Two- peoplization" of the social relation is the inherent mechanism for the moralization of the social structure, and it is also the mechanism in shaping the political construction of the society. It makes the society assuming the same pattern as that of a family, with public space privatized, state merged into society, and politics and ethics lumped together. "Two-peoplization" of the social relation is the key to interpreting Chinese culture and social structure. 3. The characteristics of China's social relation. This study, starting from Liang's view that the social relation of China is "friendship between this man and that man" and by contrasting the relation with that of the western countries, analyzed and disclosed the characteristics of China's social relations, i.e. th...