The Truth Behind The Absurdness

The cultural conservative Gu Hongming is really a fascinating humane scene in Chinese modern cultural history. But for a long time, the evaluation about Gu Hongming is always from his viewpints' social effects on his times. He is regarded as a stubborn conservative, denounced and derided. In this thesis I intend to put him in the circumstances such as Chinese modern cultural conservatism, modernization, post-colonization and use analytical, comparative, synthetical methods, make an intensive and profound study on his cultural ideology. I simply analyze the difference of "conservatism" in the western and eastern circumstances, and then make an observation and study of the Chinese modern cultural conservatism. The cultural ideology was related to these foctors, such as background of times he lived, the feelings of overseas Chinese, the educational background, the brain trusters of Zhang Zhidong, and his own nature and experiences and so on. And the characters of his cultural ideology are also descripted in details. This thesis points out that Gu Hongming's cultural ideology was different not only from the Foreign Affairs School and the National Quintessence School in late Qing, but also from the Orient Culural School, Xueheng School in the early period of the Republic of China and the Modern Confucian School later. In the cultural conservative groups that time, Gu Hongming showed his distinction. As a cultural ideological trend, conservative humane tendency and the deeply thought of modernization have it's specialcultural values. Gu Hongming's cultural conservatism may provide historical values as a kind of critical constructive thought. In new century, how we regard the modernization and the Chinese culture, how the culture can keep it's national characters in the cultural storm of the whole world, Gu Hongming's cultural ideology may give us the deeply thoughts and enlightenments to some extent.