The Changing Role of the Chinese Intellectual: an Introductory Note

The rapidly mounting Occidental pressure that China felt after 1800, and her evident need of new devices to meet it, faced the Chinese intellectual with hard decisions. His reactions become more understandable if we consider them in the context of his history – a context of which he was particularly aware, since his training and his approach to political problems were strongly historical. His position had not always been as secure as it seemed ostensibly in 1800; his outlook and even his identity had undergone several transformations before he arrived at the Confucian orthodoxy of the Manchu period. Two centuries after Confucius, the dominant thinkers were power-oriented Legalists, eclipsed by the Confucians only after permanently discrediting themselves through their brutally oppressive methods of unifying government and thought. After the 2nd century, Confucian ardor declined; intellectual leadership (and an important share of political influence) had passed to essentially anti-political Taoists and anti-worldly Buddhists. The Confucianists of the 10th and 11th centuries established their intellectual primacy and unchallenged political leadership only through an intense ideological struggle with these rivals.