By the early 18th Century, the Rites Controversy among the missionaries themselves has evolved into a culture conflict between the Qing Empire and Europe. To make the European missionaries in China follow the rites of Matteo Ricci, Emperor Kangxi had French Jesuit missionaries Joachim Bouvet and Jean Francoise Foucquet study the Book of Changes in his royal palace and had further conversions with the European missionaries based on their researches. Not only did this cultural conversation reveal the Figurist’s tendencies, as represented by Bouvet, and the interior conflict among the missionaries themselves after the Rites controversy, but also showed Kangxi’s policies towards the missionaries, as well as his attitude towards Western culture and religion.
China’s imperial examinations greatly influenced the East Asian world. Japan imitated it during the eighth to tenth centuries; its subjects include xiucai, mingjing, jinshi, mingfa, as well as medicine and acupuncture. Korean imperial examinations are the longest and most comprehensive ones among other East Asian countries. Vietnam was the last to abolish the imperial examinations. All three East Asian countries imitated China in their imperial examinations, which greatly raised their cultural levels.
The Five Virtues theory, designed to legitimate rules, was based on the belief in a cosmological system. The theory of the Five Virtues was replaced by the theory of Confucian orthodoxy based on moral critics during the renaissance of Confucianism in the Song Dynasty. The intellectual elites in the Song Dynasty launched a campaign against the Five Phases theory and the Apocryphal Texts, Fengshan, and Chuanguoxi, which constituted the main body of traditional political culture. They sought to eliminate the theoretical value of these traditions and eradicate their influence on people’s thoughts. Their high keyed and advanced political and ethical notions during the Song period became universal values in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The changes in the traditional political culture reveal the intellectual trends from the Song Dynasty throughout the Qing Dynasty.
The construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history has combined the indigenization of Western historiography and the modernization of traditional Chinese historiography, which reflects the characteristic of a change towards modern historiography. The academic sources of Yan’s view on social history include some Western thoughts such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist theory, Edward Jenks’ patriarchal clan system theory, John Seeley’s political historiography, etc.; and also many indigenous sources such as Yang Zhu’s self benefit, Mozi’s selfless love, Buddhist views on mood, etc.
The campaign of rural reconstruction during the republic period was a comprehensive exploration of the changes in the traditional countryside. It establishes that the transformation of the countryside is a key issue in China’s modernization and attempts to find an effective way to connect the two. In political transformation, it promoted the system of democratic autonomy; in the transformation of agricultural economy, it advocated a joint-stock system with enterprise and market features; in the transformation of farmers’ quality, it tried to equip the farmers with basic modern cultural and technological knowledge. The characters above show a pattern of relatively systematic reconstruction of the countryside with modern significances.
During the Anti-Japanese War, universities became an important arena for the competition between GMD and CCP, as well as the contention among various nationalist factions. The GMD branch in the National Southwest Associated University was the most active one among its university party branches during the wartime. About half of the professors joined the GMD, and the university authorities also tolerated professors and students in other parties and factions. The professors made up a heterogeneous group that included democratic fighters like Wen Yiduo and faithful party members like Yao Congwu. The co-existence of intellectual elites belonging to different parties and factions created a highly tolerant fortress of democracy on campus.
The Qin laws kept on the bamboo slips unearthed from Tomb No. 11 of the Qin Dynasty at Shuihudi in Yunmeng County have great value for the study on the history of mathematics in Pre-Qin China. Many law texts recorded the severe requirements of the Qin State in the administration concerning accounting and statistics, the conversion rates between various types of foodstuffs and the proportional allotment of foodstuffs, as well as the plans and practices of engineering projets, etc. Comparative studies on the relationships between these severe Laws and the relevant methematical methords of Jiuzhang suanshu lead to such conclusions as: 1) the Qin laws were based upon the foundation of highly developed mathematics; 2) many mathematical methods of Jiuzhang suanshu were produced before the Qin Dynasty; 3) The influence of Legalists on mathematics mostly took place in the Pre-Qin Period or the Qin Dynasty.
