The Qing Dynasty in Crisis (1839–1911)

Abstract

As discussed in chapter 1, the Chinese intellectual elite, the educated stratum, has been both the political and/or cultural leaders of the society and the driving force of societal change. In traditional, dynastic China, an important part of the ruling elite—the imperial bureaucracy—had been composed of and recruited from intellectual elite who mastered Confucian doctrine on how to govern a society based on a set of moral principles believed to be rooted in the natural law of the universe. Thus, traditionally an intellectual1 had two ways of self-fulfillment: he could either join the imperial bureaucracy and become a member of the ruling elite (the political and cultural elite), or stay outside of the officialdom and become a member of the cultural elite by engaging in teaching or illuminating Confucian knowledge and spreading it to the whole society and generation after generation of Chinese to come. The role of the Chinese intellectual, thus, has been to carry a missionary spirit of safeguarding and spreading Confucian teachings of civilization ideals for the whole of mankind. It is because of this missionary spirit that Chinese elite (both intellectual and political) had difficulty in modern time (i.e., from the Opium War onward) in coming to terms with the seeming superiority of the Western civilization to the Chinese one.KeywordsQING DynastyPolitical ReformRuling EliteCultural EliteIntellectual EliteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.