Liang Qichao Utopia Thought

Since the late Qing Dynasty, various kinds of western trends of thought hasentered China in a large scale with the pace of aggressors and colonialists, andbrought about fresh ideological resources and wide reflections in Chinese society. Asa typical representative of Chinese intellectuals in that period of time, Liang Qichao(1873-1929) not only mastered a good knowledge of Chinese traditional learning, butalso deeply influenced by numerous western thoughts as well. During the trend ofWestern learning introduced into China, he was both a receiver and a propagator, andhis works involved various domains such as politics, history and literature. This thesisselects the dimension of Utopian ideology from his complex thoughts as the object ofstudying.The two different streams of Utopian thoughts in China and the west are illustratedin the first chapter of this thesis, and Kang Youwei's Datong ideological system istaken as their jointing point. The second chapter divides Liang's Utopian thoughtsinto three periods according to his works, and describes the concrete process of itsdevelopment and vanishing. The third chapter takes Liang's novel"The Future Storyof New China"as the central context, and gives comprehensive illustrations from thefollowing four pairs of relative concepts: tradition and modern, China and the west,reality and dream, literature and politics. The thesis tries to seek the crisscross cluesinside the novel, and analyses its speciality of"mixture"in the background of culturalcollision and combination between China and the west.