The Discourses Of Radicalism In The Late Qing Dynasty And The Early Republic Of China

ABSTRACT:Radicalism is the most influential ideological trend in modern China,and one of the focus of academic attention in recent years. Previous studies paid more attentions to the origins and impacts of radicalism,they either made general discussions about the radical thoughts in modern times by following a linear path,or concentrated on several radical ideas of certain periods or persons,lacking an analysis of the radical texts. Newspapers, periodicals and other print media are the most important mediums which spread new thoughts in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China,further more,it is with the aid of the form of text that radicalism won the supportion of its target audience. This thesis attempts to explain why radical thoughts were in flood in the past one hundred years by investigating the characteristics and argumentation ways of the radical texts.It consists of six parts:Part One is an introduction,which presents the origin of this topic,a summary of relative studies,and the significance of this research.What’s more,the intension of radicalism has been defined in this part. The first chapter analyzes the relationships between the intellectuals and the three waves of radical thoughts in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China,which are so called WuXu Radicalism,GuiMao Radicalism and WuSi Radicalism in this article.Chapter One also discusses the generation background of radicalism,and its developing trends and characteristics.The intellectuals lacked political practices, but their statecraft spirit and strong moral responsibilities made them can not help taking care of the current situation.Limited by thought resources and conceptual tools,the intellectuals naturally tried to find the root causes of China’s problems from cultural and political perspectives,which were most familiar to them.As a consequence,cultural radicalism intertwined with political radicalism.Chapter Two discusses the role and characteristics of new conceptions in radical texts.The new conceptions,including reformation, evolution, revolution, democracy, science,etc., could help the intellectuals get rid of restricted thought resources,and to construct new social orders and action theories.But due to the difference of using context, translation defects,and conscious advocating and remaking by radicalists, the significance of these new conceptions gradually blurred, eventually decayed to the labels of morality. Chapter Three discusses the rhetorical figures of radical texts.Rhetoric is the backbone part of the radical texts,its main mission is to make radical doctrines attractive enough to get social recognition.The intellectuals of modern China evolved from the traditional literati, writing is a skill they do best.In order to make their suspected opinions be accepted by more people,the radical intellectuals frequently added active rhetorical figures to their writings,or directly used literary words to construct and publicize abstract political principles.This is so-called literary politics phenomenon what Tocqueville had ever discussed.The combination of parallelism and exclamatory,rhetoric question,shixian and metaphor were the most common rhetorical figures of radical texts.These figures changed originally complex and abstract theories into simple and concrete daily-life scenes, not only reduced the difficulty of understanding the radical ideas,but also injected emotional and moral meanings into them. The fourth chapter analyzes the logical structures of the radical texts.Three common logics were followed when radicalists attempted to defend their claims.The first one is so-called Despair Inducing Discourse,which indicated that the reality had been desperate,and that people must take swift and comprehensive measures to change it.The second one is Best Future Discourse,which attempted to lay the rationality of the radical propositions on imaginary future,that is to say,it asserted that radical means will bring best results.The last one is Arbitrary Value Discource, it claimed that the radical propositions were based upon absolute axioms,or themselves the absolute axioms, therefore they must be implemented with no doubt. The last part is the conclusion,this paper argues that alienated conceptions,excessive emotions,and strong moral tone in the texts are the main factors which caused the deluge of radicalism.