Wandering In The Eastward Spread Of Western

From the end of the 19th century to the early 20th century,the late Qing Dynasty went through a tremendous,unprecedented transformation.Since the Opium War,Western big powers had broken China's long closed gate by force. More and more westerners came to China.Accompanied by economic pillaging and forced outputting,western artifacts and culture had been inputting constantly,thus all these had affected the Chinese people's Life.Until the turn of the century,the Eastward Spread of Western had come to climax.It could be seen the influence of the West among every aspects,from the clothing,the food,the housing,the transportation,to the culture and the custom.The Chinese people were impressed of the West by more and more reality contacts. In this turbulent period in which many stimulated changed took place.Thus all the various fields of the Chinese society showed the change's characteristics.The Four great novelists of the late Qing dynasty were Liu E,Li Boyuan,Wu Jianren and Zeng Pu.The social circumstance that these novelists lived in was the Chinese and the foreigners lived closely.Based on this situation,they could regard the collision between Chinese Civilization and Western Civilization.However,the limitation of the age and the lack of the observation in practice pulled them away from real Western world.consequently,when they used the literary means to describe the West,they Inevitably demonstrated the "imaginative" particularity that "the West" and "China" were grafted.In this dramatic changed,turbulent period,the intense intersection of East and West,the old and the new in crashes,that made the innovation and the conservative,the Western knowledge and the Chinese tradition.All these various contradictions entangled together which constituted the late Qing Dynasty's complicated social status.On the one hand,novelists were aware of the advanced Western civilization,in favour of their absorption had come in meeting short;on the other hand,strong national pride made they could not forget the superior of Chinese civilization,could not escaped the cultural identity of the tradition literati.Their novels,reflected the wavering mentality between tradition and innovation This tendency was also the prevailing tendency of the late Qing Dynasty scholar which were in the cultural transition period.Faced with the influx of Western civilization,what should they do to preserve the traditional,extended the root of our national culture,while learning how to the West and promote the revitalization of national prosperity? The four major novelists as the representative of the intellectuals,with the social responsibility and the strong patriotic spirit,was thinking of this issue hard,And tried to find a suitable and effective way for China in all kinds of innovative ideas on learn from the West.Because of the unclear prospects for change,they couldn't have the confidence to win.So they could only placed a better idea of the new China of the future in the novel,which depicted a blend of Chinese and Western pieces of the ideal blueprint for civilization.