| Sun Qifeng was an ideological master in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties,also known as the leader of Northern Studies,with numerous works.His upbringing in a Confucian family shaped his worldview,which evolved accordingly with the death of his families and the collapse of his country.After experiencing personal hardship and witnessing the suffering of the ordinary people during his exile,he gradually developed a people-oriented thought,including three aspects: attaching importance to the people,supporting the people,and educating the people.He raised the status of the people to an unprecedented level,with profound reflection profoundly on the autocratic system of the monarchy,and proposed people-oriented thoughts such as “the people signify everything” and “the people are equally important as the heaven”.In terms of the thought of attaching importance to the people,he put forward the thoughts of focusing on agriculture,tax reduction,and relief for the poor with the assimilation of the traditional essence in this field,and affirmed the reasonableness of the pursuit of wealth.In addition,the thought of educating the people was proposed by Sun Qifeng in view of the social reality at that time with the summary of the thoughts of predecessors.He advocated the combination of politics and social education and emphasized the significance of moral cultivation,developing the Confucian thought of “educate people after they are rich” into “educate the rich and the poor equally”.Sun Qifeng’s people-oriented thought was deeply influenced by traditional Confucianism,the traditional thoughts of valuing agriculture and the famine relief policy,and the practical learning philosophy of the early Qing dynasty.His philosophy combined elements of both the Greatest Hits and the Mean,which not only transcended the traditional people-oriented thought,but also promoted the deepening of the thought of practical application,and enriched his own ideological system.Advanced and limited,Sun Qifeng’s people-oriented thought has exerted a great influence on his time and later generations.The emergence of Sun Qifeng’s people-oriented thought demonstrates the changes in society and social thoughts in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.Sun Qifeng’s people-oriented thought was developed on the basis of the reflection on the historical lessons on the demise of the Ming dynasty as other thinkers of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.Despite in the same era,Sun’s criticism of the monarchy was less deeper than that of Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu.One reason of the phenomenon mentioned above was the different economic environment in the north and the south;on the other hand,his experience,being subjected to the literacy inquisition because of his sensitive identity as a surviving adherent of the Ming dynasty,resulted in his concentration on the people-oriented thought or his escape from politics under the oppressive ideological policies of the early Qing dynasty.The development of Sun’s new people-oriented thought manifested the end of his attachment to the past and out from his own ego,as did some of the other legacy thinkers,and his personal involvement in a novel way in the advancement of the of history.To some extent,Sun Qifeng’s ideological changes also indicate the diversity and complexity of the political attitudes or orientations of the Ming Dynasty’s adherents after the Ming and Qing dynasties’ revolution. |
