Late Qing Gentry And Merchants And Their National Consciousness Research

In the late Qing Dynasty seventy years, occurring "the changes which have never happened in the last3000years", is the period of ancient-present fission. After Kangxi and Qianlong golden period in Qing Dynasty, the internal problems had already made the empire difficult, but at this time, the Western powers'aggression coming, which first triggered the financial crisis of the Qing Dynasty, and thus gradually induced a series of crisis of its'governance. But this time the crisis was different from the traditional dynastic crisis, because of the challenges from Western culture, the traditional "tianxia" cultural community are facing survival crisis. Faced to this dangerous situation, the Qing government and the traditional gentleman elite groups were all trying to save the dynasty and their "culture world" in their own way. And in the process of this salvation, the mercantilism and the trend of gentry and merchants confluence were rising. The gentry and merchants groups, which rise in the national salvation movement, with a strong sense of political mission, had combined the advanced concept from the West—the national outlook, and formed the national consciousness based on the political consciousness of national salvation, which is different from Westerns.The majority of previous studies of the gentry and merchants groups either did not pay sufficient attention to the groups'feature of leading by gentry—only made a brief summary for it with the birth of modern Chinese national bourgeoisie, but ignoring the traditional inheritance of these groups; or did not accurately summarize the essential connotation of their national consciousness, and did not carefully investigate the relationship between their national consciousness and their political participation. In this thesis, I want to do some efforts to breakthrough in these areas.In this paper, I have two ways to explore the issue. Firstly, to analyze the nature of their national consciousness, through studying the background of the gentry and merchants groups. In this part, I will interpret mercantilist tendencies of the late Qing government essentially from the reality of huge financial pressure by the particular way of observation in financial history. So we can find that in the rise of the gentry and merchants groups, the Qing government played a crucial role, which can explain why these groups had an extremely close relationship wish the Qing government. At the same time, with the mercantilism as the background, to clarify "gentry for the leader" in real terms of the gentry and merchants groups. Besides, the groups'national consciousness is formed by the gentry's "statecraft" culture, so we can infer that the essence of national consciousness that is based on the concept which is exotic from western culture is the political awareness which takes the national salvation as the goal. Secondly, I will analyze the internal logic of the evolution of their political participation through the groups' national consciousness connotation and the traditional gentry's culture; and discuss their final political destiny in the process of modernization. Considering the series problems of Qing dynasty, such as the corruption of bureaucracy, the more populations but less land, and so on, so the Qing dynasty's political system was doomed that could not adapt to the development of the modern society. Additionally, the gentry and merchants groups'national consciousness is the political consciousness salvation essentially, so the groups will take reforming the Qing dynasty traditional political system as their target of political participation. But as we know, the traditional political system is the gentry's root, it relate the groups'survival. Therefore, there is a inherent tension exists between saving movement and keeping traditions. And, for the processing of the tension would determine the gentry-merchants groups and even the entire empire's fate.