"Taking Kettle For Potting And Iron For Forging"-On Liu Xianxin's Cultural View

Liu Xianxin was born in a literary family well-known in the modern history of Chengdu. He was fond of learning when still young. Despite his short lifetime, he produced numerous volumes through persistent learning and writing. Most of his works were included in The Serial volumes of Tuishi. In 1996, the 100th anniversary of Liu Xianxin's birthday, Chengdu Ancient-volume bookstore published the photocopy of The volumes of Tuishi, including most of Liu Xianxin's representative works. Since 1980s, the studies on Modern Chinese thinking of culture have gradually drawn the attention of contemporary scholars. But such studies by now have mostly focused, while ignoring local scholars, on nationally-distinguished figures and groups. This thesis, taking Liu Xianxin as the study object and probing deep into his cultural theory, is to reveal, in the comparative perspective of Central versus Periphery and National versus Local, the evolutionary process of cultural conservatism in the Modern history of Chinese Concepts.Basing on his grandfather Liu Yuan's view about inherency and Zhang Xuecheng's thinking about acquirement, Liu Xianxin developed his own way of thinking to set up his comparative method of culture in an attempt to solve the fundamental cultural problems in his times. Taking Zhang's method of historiography ("Jiao chou") in examining the evolvement of Chinese intellectual thoughts, he advocated that nothing would be more important in unifying Chinese culture than the Six Canons("Liu Jing")...