ABSTRACT
The Chinese enlightenment movement took place during the late nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century. It was largely the Chinese response to China’s crisis in face of Western power, and may be considered the first step in China’s path to modernization. After the Opium War in the 1840s, China, once one of the greatest powers in the world, was reduced to the status of a semicolony. Many Western countries (later joined by Japan) came to control large parts of China and forced the Chinese government to give them what they wanted. By the end of the nineteenth century, for the first time in history, the survival of China as a nation became problematic. To save China, China’s best minds started to investigate the reasons why the West had become powerful and China had weakened. This is the historical background to the Chinese enlightenment movement. What Chinese enlightenment thinkers during this period did essentially was to extensively introduce Western thought to the Chinese and critically evaluate Chinese tradition. It was through their work that Western theories of liberty, equality, and democracy, and Western scientific method, were brought to China. These new ideas became powerful weapons against Chinese despotism. This enlightenment movement at first prepared China for the 1911 revolution that overthrew China’s last emperor, although some enlightenment thinkers themselves were reformers but not revolutionaries. Later on it developed into the New Cultural Movement (approximately from 1915 to the early 1920s) whose passionate advocacy of science and democracy and sharp critique of traditional Chinese culture greatly shook the cultural foundation of traditional Chinese society and profoundly shaped Chinese minds in the twentieth century. Yan Fu (嚴复), Liang Qichao (梁啟超), Wang Guowei (王國維), Hu Shih (胡適), and Zhang Dongsun (張東蓀) were among the most distinguished Chinese enlightenment thinkers. Their great significance in the history of Chinese philosophy does not lie in their originality in a purely philosophical and scholarly sense, but in the creative way they connected Western ideas with the Chinese situation and integrated Western philosophy into Chinese philosophical traditions. This chapter is a brief discussion of their major ideas.
