Research On Feng Guifen's Practical Thought

As an important tradition of ancient China,Statecraft Ideology springs up whenever the society is at the end of the dynasty or plagued by social ills.The profound social crisis in the Late Qing Dynasty makes practical thought once again been held in high esteem.Meanwhile,a group of scholars appeared and one of the important representatives is Feng Guifen.Feng Guifen's practical thought is influenced by many factors,including the family tradition,the study style of Jiangnan region,the statecraft theories in western learning and so on.Facing the social crisis in the Late Qing Dynasty,Feng put forward a relatively comprehensive reform proposition,and devoted himself to put the theories into practice,such as calling for political reform,cutting the high taxes in Jiangnan,suppressing the people's upspring with foreign troops,advocating western style education,focusing on the local charity,etc.Compared with the statecraft scholars in other periods,the study object for Feng Guifen is the western learning,which is also the most direct difference from the traditional statecraft scholars.He is not only based on the statecraft tradition of Confucianism,but also learns from the western culture.It can be said that his statecraft thought combined the tradition with the western learning.However,Feng Guifen's practical thought is still at the “Chinese-style Westernization” level,which is mainly reflected in three aspects: Firstly,Feng Guifen's general understanding of the West still remains in the level of “using one barbarian against the other”;Secondly,his understanding of Western learning,especially the Western political system,do not really exceed the predecessors or contemporary scholars.The third one is about the attitude towards Western learning.Feng Guifen advocated that learning Western science is mainly limited to the Western artifacts skills.Therefore,it can be said that Feng Guifen's practical thought did not go beyond the framework of the traditional ones.The problems and shortcomings of his thought are not the exceptions.In fact,the implied message of the Confucian statecraft tradition is that the Confucian theories have no defects and it only need to be put into practice or learn from other culture's implements aspects.Besides,it is true that traditional statecraft has its own advantages,but the lack of Western tradition such as “knowledge for knowledge” and “learning for learning” in Chinese society makes it difficult for the statecraft scholars like Feng Guifen to have a thorough understanding of the western world from the academic level,instead of the implements ones.