The Impact Of The Deterioration Of Western Thoughts On The Early Chinese Modernization

Since the closed door was opened in the middle of19th century, western article, system, thoughts and knowledge were introduced to china, presenting a social scene totally different from that in china. At first, a few of elite represented by Guo Songtao, found the differences between Chinese traditional system and western modern ideology, and realized that it is the difference that result into Chinese backwardness. Because of the responsibility toward the country, they put forward some useful suggestions, took some improving measures, and enlightened more intellectuals. Some officials of Qing Dynasty government who propose to learn western world come up with a series of improving measures among which the westernization movement from1861is the most important, which try making the imperial system lasting two thousand adapting to the competitive global environment.However, during decades from1861to the end of19th century, international relations became more complicated and tense. Reasons of this chaos are complicated:first, from the view of Marxism, the development of capitalistic countries is not balanced, newly emerging capitalistic state request to establish a new international order; secondly, liberalism setting up from17th and18th century was suspected in this period. Social Darwinism and racialism had been mainstream ideological trend, which lead to the deterioration of international environment. In Europe and American, profound and severe social movements were broken. The similarity of those movements is overturning the common concepts. Policies derived from those ideology caused deep conflicts at home and abroad.The concept of evolution based on Social Darwinism together with the deterioration of international environment influenced the predictions on the developing trend of Chinese civilization and international civilization. With the deepening of the contrast of history and culture between china and western world, Chinese people realized the advancement of western system and culture gradually, therefore, a trend of introspection and reexamination of history has gradually spread in intellectual community and in public. Those thoughts lead to the transformation of concepts of Chinese people:ideologist like Yan Fu and Liang Qichao introduced this thought to china, which caused racial revolution, meanwhile, when introducing concepts like liberty and democracy, he didn’t insist individualism of western liberalism. On the other hand, loyal apologist trying to defend the traditional civilization of modern values, the way they use is western style. Struggle with Western advanced thoughts, china’s unenlightened culture is always a failure, the ideal Confucian harmony is far shelved in the history and the future. Social Darwinism have penetrated into every corner of the Chinese people’s minds, and affected subsequent social thought, socialism, communism, including the spread and development in China.