The greatest change in a thousand years

New Ideas and The Scholar Class

The class of scholars outside the sub-feudal system was formed in the Spring and Autumn Period, flourished in the Warring States, and was fixed in the Han and Tang Dynasties. Just as the managerial class is dependent on the bourgeoisie, the gentry class is attached to the monarch.

After the imperial system dominated the world, the scholar class was faced with the demand for talents monopolized by the royal family, and their bargaining position was greatly reduced. In many competitive systems of doctrine, Dong Zhongshu persuaded Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty to respect Confucianism alone, and to build the country based on the order depicted by Confucianism, which gave the most sacred and noble position to the emperor, and offered the loyalty of his subjects and the effectiveness of Confucianism.

The Confucian clique is an ideological ruling clique that, depending on its mastery of the Way of Confucius and Mencius, is divided into different levels by selection and examination at different levels, and granted corresponding official teaching positions and privileged positions. As an ideological ruling group, the Confucian clique has a dual nature: both the inheritors of the Confucian Taoist system and the employees of the royal legal system.

As employees of the legal system, officials born in Confucianism may sincerely believe in Confucian Taoism, and are more likely to use it as a means of promoting officials and getting rich. As the inheritors of the Taoist system, the Confucian clique struggled to control imperial power, strive for the status of the emperor's mentor and friend, and even harbored illusions about the Yao Shun system of passing on the Xian Zen system.

However, in the real competition to control the imperial power, the Confucian clique was no more successful than the eunuch clique, the military clique, or the hou clique. The Confucian clique lacked the tight organization of the European Catholic Church, and its political opponents were not as fragmented as in Europe, so it was difficult for the Confucian clique to escape its attachment to imperial power.

After the Opium War, the Western powers broke the isolation of the empire, and China was pulled into a vast and unfamiliar political, economic and cultural competitive environment. This amounted to a catastrophic environmental mutation, and the adaptation of the imperial system to the new environment was in crisis. Faced with this new situation, Confucian ideology must come up with convincing explanations and countermeasures.

Wei Yuan put forward the countermeasure of "mastering the art of mastery and skill to control the yi", the empire continued the tradition of official industry, and established dozens of enterprises centered on the arms industry in the past thirty or forty years, but the official industry and commerce were still poorly managed, and the defeat of the Sino-Japanese War highlighted the shortcomings of the imperial political system and ideology. Kang Youwei used the Confucian conceptual system to reinterpret the history and situation of the empire, in an attempt to catch up with Europe and the United States through a fundamental change in constitutional monarchy. However, the failure of the Penghu Reform Law shows that Kang Youwei's views on major domestic interest groups are too simple and sparse.

The chinese ideological field has sprung up, and the Scholar Group has organized hundreds of societies in various places to find a guide in an unfamiliar environment without traditional guidance. The Three People's Principles, liberalism, Marxism, and other doctrines originating from the West have appeared one after another, giving their own interpretations of history and reality, and winning over their own followers. The Three People's Principles formulated a nationalist and democratic prescription of "expelling the Tartars and establishing the Republic of China", concentrating the dissatisfaction of all strata of the Han nationality on the upper ruling clique of the Manchu Qing Empire, disintegrating what little deterrence and cohesion it had left, and creating the trend of "Wang Gang breaking the button".

The Manchu Qing Empire soon fell, and the banner of the Republic of China was easily hung up, but the small-scale peasant base of the imperial autocracy and the bureaucratic agency system, the old and new problems of the empire, remained almost unchanged under the banner of the Republic of China. China entered the traditional situation of warlords fighting in the Central Plains after the collapse of the authoritarian empire.

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