Liang Shuming And His Shandong Rural Construction Movements

Through study of Liang Shuming's thoughts on rural construction, this paper probes Liang's Shandong rural construction practice, and further explores the essence of his thoughts, in order to benefit today's modernized socialist rural construction, focusing on elaboration of the origin, development, failure, etc.This paper analyzes Liang Shuming and his Shandong Rural Construction Movements in the following three aspects: Liang Shuming's thoughts on education; his thoughts on rural education and his Shandong rural construction movement.1. Liang Shuming's thoughts on educationHis thoughts on education had much to do with his family education. He received semi-western education when he was young, and started to care and think about the life and social issues at a much earlier age. Liang divided the development of his own thoughts into three phases, western Benthamism, Buddhist Go-to-the-world Theory and Confucianism respectively. At first, he accepted the western Benthamism, but he never forsaken his first believe even in the year 1913, when he admitted his desire to convert himself to be a Buddhist. The publication of his book The Western and Eastern Cultures and Its Philosophy, symbolized that his thoughts had developed into the third phase.Liang Shuming went to Caozhou, Shangdong Province to conduction education in 1924, and afterwards established Mianren College in Sichuan Province. While, the rural education mold he advocated in conduction education experiment in Shandong had a clearer feature of integrating social education and social reforms. The Japanese invasion made the implementing of Liang's social reforms impossible, but by then, he had already become a well-known thinker and social activist. Ever since the starting of the anti-Japanese war, he had been deeply involved into the political life, and had been a key figure in the political circle of the China. During that war, he had been a member of the National Defense Senate, and National Political Congress. After 1951, he had been a member of Political Consultative Conference National Committee.After the founding of the PRC, in order to seek independence in both his thoughts and activity, he shunned from participating the government work. Though faced with the success of CPC, he seriously reflected the positions and practice in the past, and agreed with lots of ideological propagandas of CPC in policies and ideology; he still adhered with his cardinal thoughts and positions. He did not completely agree with the class struggles after the founding of PRC, and he clearly opposed the Grand Cultural Revolution and the following Anti-Confucius Movement.2. Liang Shuming's Rural Construction TheoryLiang held that due to the particularity of the Chinese society, China could not completely borrow the western approach in its social reforms, and neither the western bourgeois democracy nor the Soviet political system could work in China. Rural construction movement was the key to building a new social organization. Liang believed that the foundation of a constitutional nation was regional autonomy, while regional autonomy should start from the rural areas. He also held that the rational of the China was peaceful and reasonable in nature, and the rural areas were fit to be the starting areas. These two are the main reasons that Liang put forward his theory that the construction of China's new organizational structure should start from the rural areas. Meanwhile, Liang put forward the road of the China's economic development and the principles of new social organization. Liang both opposed bourgeois economic system, and also the social based economic system. He advocated a moral-based economic system, and it should be started from the rural areas and carried out in a cooperative manner to realize his moral based economic system. His thoughts were amendments and transformation of the ancient Chinese's rural contract theory.3. Shandong rural construction movementGenerally speaking, Shandong rural construction was under the guidance of Liang's Rural Construction Theory and based on the rural construction institutes, to conduct experiments in Zoupin and Heze and then extend to larger experimental areas to gradually popularize this school system to the other parts of the province in order to phase in the county level political reforms. There are three sections of the rural construction research institutes, which is the research section on rural construction, training section of rural service personnel and the rural construction experimental section, respectively. This theory exerted some influence on the rural development at that time, but due to the lack of the right understanding of the root problem of China, Liang's theory was doomed to fail.Nowadays, we should re-study and evaluate Liang Shuming's rural construction movement, and give it an objective comment in the manner of the historical materialism.