Wei Yuan was the first representative of modern China who opened his eyes to see the world, and put forward the slogan of "learning from foreigners and mastering foreign skills". This slogan reflects, on the one hand, seeing and recognizing the strengths of the West, and on the other hand, advocating learning from the "long skills" of the West, which boils down to resisting the Western invaders. It is clear here that the object and purpose of choice are only because of subjective understanding and objective conditions, and military "long skills" such as "strong ships and guns" are chosen.
Feng Guifang's schools B and N @ ⑧ Lu protested. Clearly stated the purpose of "taking China's ethics as the original, supplemented by other countries' rich and powerful skills", and advocated "taking western learning" and "controlling foreign devices". Summarized as "middle school as the body, western learning for use." "Theoretically speaking, the concept of' learning from foreigners to control foreigners' confirms the position of introducing western science and technology, and to a certain extent, temporarily solves the problem of how to deal with the cultural relationship between China and the West after introducing western culture. It has effectively promoted the social movement of establishing modern enterprises by introducing western technology and management methods. The problem is that this choice is not to make the inherent culture adapt to the "modern" changes, make it have "modern" functions, and correctly absorb the beneficial things in modern western culture, but to maintain the feudal ideological culture and feudal ruling order, which fully shows the conservatism and narrowness of this cultural choice. Next came the reformists represented by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. They reflected on China people's attitude towards western culture decades after the Crow Crusade War, and summarized their experiences and lessons. They criticized the mistake of the theory of "Chinese style and western use", went beyond the limitation of "Chinese style and western use" and took a big step in the choice of Chinese and western cultures. For western culture, they mainly choose to absorb the ideas of evolution and civil rights, freedom and equality, as well as the political system of constitutional monarchy. Kang Youwei is a typical example of the ingenious combination of bourgeois political theory and China traditional culture. He combined the theory of bourgeois evolution with the theory of "Ram III" in ancient China, and "wanted to form a new school that was neither in China nor in the West" [⑤], which formed China's bourgeois reformist thought with China characteristics and western bourgeois ideological connotation in the Reform Movement. However, reformers also showed obvious defects in cultural choice. They respected Confucian classics, advocated Confucianism and maintained the monarchy under the banner of Confucius.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the bourgeois revolutionaries headed by Sun Yat-sen also chose to absorb the ideas of evolution and civil rights, freedom and equality from western culture, but they were different from the reformists in political system. They adopted a plan of democracy and peace and abandoned the constitutional monarchy. Sun Yat-sen studied in Europe and America and lived in Hong Kong and Japan. He has more western knowledge and experience than Kang Youwei and others of his time, and has a more thorough grasp of bourgeois social and political theory. He not only saw the superiority of the western capitalist society, but also saw the negative influence brought by the capitalist system. Subjectively, he doesn't think everything is fine in the western political system. So he didn't copy western culture to China, but made a good choice. His "democracy" and his "separation of five powers" theory are bold creations of China's western "separation of three powers" theory.