Research experience about Zhang Junjie's ups and downs

Zhang Junjie was a famous thinker and politician in modern China. He was a young prodigy with extraordinary talent, he passed the Xiucai examination at a young age, and later went to Japan to study, entered Waseda University to study political science, and went to Germany twice after the Xinhai Revolution to study philosophy, with a strong Western literacy. He followed Liang Rengong in his early years, devoted himself to political party activities during the Republic of China period, and formed the National Socialist Party in the 1930s and became the leader of the party. After the war, he drafted the Constitution of the Republic of China on behalf of the Kuomintang government, and was praised by the people of the time as "the father of the Constitution of the Republic of China". He admired British parliamentary politics and German philosophy, and spent his life hovering between academics and politics.

He was enthusiastic about politics and participated in state affairs all his life, but he was always rhetorical and untargeted; Eager to make a contribution, but the design of various solutions, all ended in failure. But looking at the representative figures of neo-Confucianism in the early modern period, no one can stand out. His political life was very long, and his academic achievements and influence are still very far-reaching today.

The tragedy caused by the First World War to human society caused him to wake up from his dream and begin to doubt the omnipotence of science, and his ideological trajectory gradually changed from the early radical blind worship of Western civilization to the pseudo-proposition dominated by scientificism in the transformation of the concept of life, and he also cut into the essence of the problem and tried to answer the relationship between matter and spirit. He believes that it is precisely in the settlement of the conflict between spirit and matter, through exploration and effort, that human beings have formed their own civilization.

Zhang Junjie's desire to make contributions to politics is very strong, however, in the whirlpool of realpolitik, he has not crossed the chasm after all, and at best he is a "political educator" and "political commentator". He ran a political university and intended to make it an "experimental institute of democratic politics", but within a few years, he was suspected of being a "progressive party" and the university was also accepted by the Kuomintang; He also co-founded magazines and newspapers and published many articles expounding the idealistic view of history, criticizing the one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang, and criticizing the Soviet Russian revolution and the armed revolution led by the Communist Party of China.

These remarks and deeds of hiss laid the basic path for his future political activities: they did not associate themselves with the Kuomintang headed by Chiang Kai-shek or the Communist Party of China headed by Mao Zedong, and tried to present themselves as "the third way" and transcend partisan strife.

In his declaration, he stressed that China should establish party politics: "In the future, China should take into account the spirit of the Anglo-American present system and have the cooperation of all parties to give the government great power." The ideas he put forward were somewhat naïve and childish, pure wishful thinking.

He once did something that made people cry and laugh, that is, the face of the dead skin pulled the two parties into the framework of the party politics he envisioned, and the result was self-evident and did not succeed in putting it into practice.

We often say that the scholar is wrong, knowing that his professional skills are very limited, but he still has to be a wolf with a big tail, and he is always general and empty in national politics, without purpose, and this kind of "giant in theory, dwarf in action" often makes him troubled as a scholar, and accompanies him to drift overseas all his life.