The Century Trace Of Traditional Cultural Outlook Of Chinese Liberalism

Since the Opium War, China has suffered great changes in politics, economy, military and culture. Especially after the failure of the 1894-95 war, the Chinese nation was facing a more serious national crisis. Faced with this big change, Chinese people were forced to protect their own nation, but all the efforts failed. People lose their confidence about Chinese traditional culture. However, the failure of the 1911 Revolution—a practice of democracy, did not realize democracy and freedom, but result in worse warlord infighting. Chinese intellectuals fell under strong convulsion and tried their best to reflect the problem of modern China in more fundamental dimensions, and the problem of Chinese culture became the subject of modern period. Based on different awareness, three main kinds of ideological trends formed in China: communism, conservatism and liberalism. The liberals chose to learn from the Western world. They introduced and tried to realize freedom, democracy and science in China. Meanwhile, in their opinion, Chinese traditional culture is the basic cause of the failure of China and the obstacle of modern values. They advocated that only by criticizing and abandoning traditional culture, could freedom and democracy be realized in China. The subsequent process of freedom and democracy was also rather difficult and slow. The liberals were forced to find the reasons in deeper dimensions. After the efforts of several generations such as Yan Fu, Hu Shih, Yin Haiguang and the followers, the Chinese liberal tradition changed in their outlook of traditional culture.Yin Haiguang was an important representative of Chinese liberalism; Faced with deep national crisis and the double loss in theory and practice of Chinese liberalism, Yin Haiguang made great effort to enrich liberal theories and improve the process of freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, because of limit comprehension of traditional culture and the shortcomings of logical empiricism, Yin Haiguang argued that the Chinese traditional culture was the root causes of the failure of China and the obstacles of freedom and democracy, and criticized traditional culture in both theoriodical and reality dimensions.After making years of difficult effort, Yin Haiguang changed his attitude about...