Reflection upon mores and the Reconstruction Movement: A dilemma of the Yongjia Conservatives during the Post-Taiping Restoration

Abstract

The law of power in Xia-Qi (chivalry) destroyed the hierarchical structure of the Imperial and produced an equalization so that the traditional governance was involved in crises. It was on the reflection upon the crises that the reconstruction prompted by literati during the Tongzhi and Guangxu periods was based. Confucian classics studies played an important role in shaping the elites’ ideology and individual wills. Associations of literati and kinship networks also contributed to the spread of these academic studies. Different judgments about the real relations between people of different social statuses caused conflicts in social transformation practices. For example, a higher-ranking group of literati in Wenzhou in southeast ZhengJiang province adopted a conservative scheme of reconstructing the patriarchal clan system and Confucian academic traditions in order to realize moralization in the imperial political structure. This conservative reconstruction, however, had an impact contrary to its initial goal of moralization: scholar-tyrants plundered finite land resources in the local mountainous society, while those disciples following the higher-ranking masters corrupted the academic atmosphere so that aristocratic politics became the principles dominating the private school of the prominent clan. In addition, immorality among close relatives in the prominent family ruined local customs. Superficially, it seemed that conservative moralization was obstructed and that local affairs managed by the literati had failed, but this created a new historical opportunity for the transformation of social structure in modern China. Social organizations that were based on general individual mind structures would play a fundamental role in the modern democracy in China.