Abstract
The past hundred years has been a turbulent period in China’s history. October 10, 1911, marked the beginning of a revolution to overthrow millennia of monarchial rule and to establish China in a new age. Many saw the Qing dynasty as impotent and unable to protect China from foreign, colonizing powers. Under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan, 1866–1925), known today by many as the father of modern China, a new republic was to be born. The decades to follow consisted of a growing sentiment against all that was seen to hinder the advancement of China. Science, rational thinking and egalitarian values were championed while “nonscientific” religious and philosophical ideologies were laid victim to a spirit of iconoclasm. Though this breadth of independent thinking would wane due to civil war and subsequent communist dominance, a second major wave of intellectual ferment developed again in the 1980s.
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Notes
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See Julia Ching, Chinese Religions (London: Macmillan, 1993), 51–52.
Julia Ching makes this argument when comparing Chinese religious thought against other traditions. “Instead of ascribing evil to a superhuman principle [as in Christianity], or of relegating it to a basically unreal phenomenal world [as in Hinduism and Buddhism], the Chinese theory of evil is inseparable from its theory of human nature. Evil exists; it is either inherent in human nature—which, however, can learn to control it by education—or the product of contact between an originally good nature and its wicked environment.” Julia Ching, “The Problem of Evil and a Possible Dialogue between Christianity and Neo-Confucianism,” Contemporary Religions in Japan 9, no. 3 (1968): 164.
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© 2013 Alexander Chow
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Chow, A. (2013). The Chinese Enlightenments. In: Theosis, Sino-Christian Theology and the Second Chinese Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312624_2
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