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T'ien-hsia and Kuo, and the “Transvaluation of Values”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Joseph R. Levenson
Joseph R. Levenson
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong with China in the seventeenth century. The trouble was this, they felt: men had strayed from the fixed ideals of Chinese civilization. In the early twentieth century, anti Confucian reformers found a great deal wrong in the China of their day; they traced disaster, however, not to the flouting of fixed ideals but to blind and slavish respect for them, to the fixity itself. A seventeenth-century world, a t'ien-hsia, in which traditional values claimed authority, had become a twentieth-century nation, a kuo, in which traditional values were impugned as tyranny.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , August 1952 , pp. 447 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1952

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References

1 Huang Tsung-hsi , Ming-i tai-fang lu , 1 chuan, in Ku Hsiang (ed.), H siao-shi shan-fang ts'ung-shu , 1874, tse 5, lb-2bGoogle Scholar. A translation of a part of this passage and of several others in the Ming-i tai-fang lu will appear in the forthcoming volume tentatively entitled China's Response to the West, by J. K. Fairbank, Teng Ssu-yu, and E-tu Zen Sun.

I wish to thank Mr. David Nivison for valuable criticism and suggestions.

2 Huang, op. cit., 4.

3 Ku Yen-wu , Jih-chih lu , 32 chuan, ed. Huang Ju-ch'eng , 1834, 1.13Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 13.5b.

5 Ibid., 13.6.

6 Ibid., 7.1b.

7 Mencius, VII B, ch. 13. See Legge, , The Chinese Classics, (Oxford, 1895) II, 483: “There are instances of individuals without benevolence who have got possession of a (single) state, but there has been no instance of the throne's being got by one without benevolence.”Google Scholar

8 Ku, op. cit., 12.10b.

9 Ibid., 2.12–12b.

10 Liang Ch'i-ch'ao , “Hsin-min shuo” (Discourses on the new people), Yin-ping-shih wen-chi (Collected essays of the Ice-drinkers’ Studio), Shanghai, 1925, 12.51–51bGoogle Scholar.