On Liang Shuming's Modern Thinking

Liang Shuming is a well-known scholar, thinker, educator, community activist, patriot and democrat in modern history of China and the originator of modern Confucianism movement in the 20th century. He devoted himself to the theoretical creation and practice of China's modernization and proposed a unique modern thought of saving China through culture, which made him the pioneer of China's modern "New Confucianism" and the founder of cultural conservatism. This paper mainly starts with the overall modern thought of Liang Shuming and makes an analysis of it from the perspective of the background, the theoretical elaboration, and the practice and makes an objective evaluation of it.In the first part, we explore the origin of Liang Shuming's modern thought. As far as the social background is concerned, it includes two aspects: one is the "salvation" and "survival" as its background of the times and the other is the cultural controversy between the East and the West as its cultural background. Under such situations, Liang Shuming must find a way to the modernization of China. He was deeply influenced by his father Liang Ji who found it difficult to make a decision between the tradition and the modern and the dilemma of his father had great impacts on Liang's exploration of the way to modernization. Bergson's philosophy and the theory of Lu and Wang are the theoretical sources of Liang's modern thought and they made Liang consider the social and cultural transformation and the moral cultivation as the first in the construction of the modern theory.In the second part, we makes an analysis of Liang's modern thought from the perspective of culture as its foundation. He proposed his own theory of "three-way to culture", that is, to analyze the characteristics of Eastern and Western culture as well as the differences between them through a comparative study of Chinese culture, Indian culture and Western culture from a broad perspective. It argues that traditional Confucianism should be transformed through distinguishing between the true and false Confucianism as well as re-interpretation and utilization of the improved ideas of Confucian philosophy by Bergson's philosophy of life and the Western democratic and scientific spirit should be fully approved and absorbed on the basis of the maintenance of "Confucian attitude toward life" and the combination between them is regarded as the cultural guideline of the development of China's modernization. In the third part, we elaborate the rural construction in terms of the concrete practice of Liang's modern thought. Liang is not just a theorist but also a famous social activist. He thought the rural areas to be the base of practice and actively involved in the rural construction in order to find the way to China's modernization. He regarded "creating new culture" as the fundamental task of modernization, "rural schools" as a modern way of organization, "triggering industrial agriculture" as the modern economic foundation and "the combination of fanners and intellectuals" as the forces of the realization of modernization.In the fourth part, we make comments on the contradictions and difficulties that Liang's modern thought encountered. Although his modern thought is very meaningful and has got some achievements, there still exist some contradictions and conflicts in how to deal with the compromised roads of modernization and the choice between reality and life. These emotional contradictions and conflicts had been bewildering Liang Shuming all his life so that finally he could not bring China into modernization.