Identity Of Western Missionaries And Social Construction Of Science In The Late Ming And Early Qing Dynasty

More than400year ago, a group of western missionaries, undertaking the mission of "expending the territory for God", came from tens of thousands miles away to China, to spread God’s doctrine under the knowledge and discourse background of foreign civilization.In the process of making contact with local bureaucrats and literati and officialdom stratum, they investigate to created a strategy to acquire identity,set foothold and do missionary work in China by means of publicizing western science technique knowledge.Thereby they set up the course of western learning entering into the east.In this process the foreign missionaries engendered complicated dispute of discourse with different intellectual groups,which reflect the complicated relations of multi views and levels between the scientific knowledge loaded by western learning during the course of spreading in China with Chinese Confucian orthodoxy, ruling order and academic tradition(治统å'Œå­¦ç»Ÿ)The thesis takes the proposal, establishment and evolution of Matteo Ricci’s strategy as a starting point,analyzes the dialogue text between western missionaries and intellectuals’ of Confucian followers, other religion people in amity and those anti-religion people.Based on the framework of interaction and communication by Nicolas Standaert,used identity as principal line.the author attempt to reveal how the western missionaries establish their own identity, how the Chinese scholars accept and reject this process, what’s the role of western scientific knowledge in this process,what kind of reconstruction the Western learning they brought to China came through during the course of the missionaries associate with Chinese scholars.In the author’s opinion, during the process of western learning spreading to the east in late Ming and early Qing dynasties,missionaries not only endue western science and technology with instrument meaning to set foothold in central China, more importantly, they hope to acquire,by this means, the Chinese scholars’ acceptance for foreign culture, so as to establish the foundation to get rid of Chinese centralism and obtain the legal status of western learning and western religion. This purport immersed them in the complex argument about Confucian orthodoxy, ruling order and academic condition.lt also made astronomical almanac, firearms, water conservancy and other types of new knowledge appear in the appearance of new science,finally incorporated in the form of serving the unification politics, and unable to become the preliminary of modern science emerged in China.The missionaries themselves were regarded as barbarians, savages, uncommon people and even as saints, but ultimately they were taken as imperial intellectuals in the identity of "court experts".Their mission of doing missionary work and diffusing western learning therefore were ruined. These two lines interweave each other to build the discourse framework of western learning spreading to the east in late Ming and early Qing dynasties.