Fan Yi's Understanding Of Christianity And Confucianism Before And After The "Anti-Christian Movement"

In late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, China was undergoing “a great-changing vicissitudes ever”. With strengthen China and the West cultural exchange, there had been rising contact and frictions between Confucianism and Christianity, which are representatives of Chinese culture and western culture respectively. Standing at the heart of these two impacts, Chinese intellectuals have changed their ideas significantly. As a “Confucian Christian”, Fan Yi, in his early years, was an extreme believer of Confucianism and became outstanding in this field.Upon his mid-years, he turned to and highly promoted Christianity and demoted traditional Confucianism. He not only believed Christianity would bring democracy,but Confucianism would produce autocracy; Christianity would promote the progress of science and society, but Confucianism would only hinder the steps of them. He also considered that Jesus is superior to Confucius. Fan Yi strongly objected to the ideas of“Confucianism Combination” and “Confucianism Supplement”.After the New Culture Movement(1919), especially after "Anti-Christian Movement" in 1922, he began to reevaluate Confucianism and Confucius, thinking there is wide common ground between these two thoughts. He even put that “China will never become Christianized if Christianity hasn't become Chinese” The contrasted ideas and altitudes in his early and late years towards the relations between Confucianism and Christianity was not just because of the changing domestic and overseas development trends, it is also closely related to his own personal life experience. Besides, it was a must of transmitting Christianity and was an example of his strong love for the country. Fan Yi through all his life, was transferring from western and Chinese Culture, tradition and modern. His different thoughts for the relation between Confucianism and Christianity was a typical case of inter-communicating, inter-colliding and inter-acting of Chinese and western culture.During this period, Chinese letter men lived a quite complicated and entangled life in choosing their religion.