Mountain people encounter water

1897, the unchanging history of China for thousands of years has finally opened a stirring new chapter, which is also the saddest era in thousands of years of history: the hope of building a brand-new China has been ruthlessly extinguished again and again; Stubbornly lit again and again. The Confucian tradition seems to have come to an end, and those concepts previously called "western learning" are now crowned as "new learning", and Kang Youwei has made an incredible new interpretation of Confucian classics; Liang Qichao regarded the thought of the past as "foreign things" as a brand-new wealth belonging to China people, and took this as the direction; However, Yan Fu and Tan Sitong agreed that China culture needs to be thoroughly rectified. Conservative old literati wept bitterly: destroying this tradition will make our compatriots struggle in fire and water!

Is this sad cry partly from hopeless stubbornness and partly from the intuitive prophet of human instinct? Today, history has not given us a complete answer. However, reform and change have become an irresistible trend for a hundred years. At that time, the reformists were far from the Kangliang Party, and people had different understandings of the word "political reform". Some people only regard political reform as the reform of some administrative systems; Others believe that it has changed the whole model of government; Others think that the whole social order needs to be completely rebuilt. Under the call of the slogan of "political reform", the reformists are not a specific political faction. They are like a seven-color spectrum. The mildest ending is only the continuation of the Westernization Movement, and the most radical ending is even worse than the overseas revolutionary party. The fundamental motive of uniting people of all colors under the banner of "political reform" is to push China into the ranks of "rich and powerful" countries. Political reform is a means to achieve the goal of strengthening the country, not to make everyone alive get the value they deserve. This goal laid the foundation of China's modern history, and the gradual loss of land and state power aggravated the anxiety of achieving this goal.

/kloc-in the last two decades of the 0/9th century, the Qing government's control over local governments was very weak. Xiang Yong, a local armed force of Han nationality, defeated Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Nianzi and Bian Hui, recovered Xinjiang and saved the Great Qing Dynasty, which should have perished. The Qing court had no choice but to hope for the continued loyalty of the local Han army. As the engine of China's modern history, Hunan has once again reached the forefront of political reform and reform. Under the two governors of Wu Dayou and Chen Baozhen, Hunan has carried out a lot of reforms ahead of other provinces in education, industry and commerce, and the new army: not only have a large number of academies been established to improve the literacy rate, but some academies have also added subjects such as mathematics, geography, and foreign languages, and there are periodicals, the most famous of which is Xiangxue New Newspaper; Private shipping companies and match factories are running well, while Baoshan City Company, a joint-stock private enterprise, is ambitious to build a railway from Hankou to Guangzhou. As for telegrams, electric lights and highways, it is even more obvious. Although these reforms did not go beyond the scope of "self-improvement movement", they were initiated by China. 1897, Huang Zunxian, an important figure of the reformists, went to Hunan as an acting provincial judge (in charge of personnel and criminal law). He worked as a diplomat in Japan, the United States, Britain and Singapore, especially influenced by the Meiji Restoration in Japan, and was determined to extend the Japanese system to China. Huang Zunxian, as the name implies, was once a member of Kang Youwei's strong society and the most important patron of Liang Qichao's current affairs. His arrival made Governor Chen Baozhen feel even more powerful, and he made up his mind to reform. This reform has been strongly supported by local celebrities and nobles. It is hard to imagine that about ten years ago, Hunan was the base camp of xenophobia in the Yangtze River valley, full of elements resisting western affairs and pro-Western. 1892, Hunan gentry even launched a large-scale campaign to boycott the laying of telegraph lines.

The fiasco of the Japanese-Qing War and the unprecedented loss of land and state power are the direct causes of this rash and fickle mood. There is some dangerous power behind it, which means that enthusiasm is easily ignited by some superficial opinions and easily crushed by small setbacks. The success of Meiji Restoration in Japan was largely due to China's corruption, weakness and extensiveness, which enabled them to win the expansion and burn the enthusiasm of a "powerful country". China, on the other hand, lacks a hunting object that can make the "dream of a strong country" upgrade continuously. From the beginning, China's "dream of becoming a powerful country" was full of deep sadness.

Under the auspices of Huang Zunxian; Judicial procedures and corresponding laws conform to international standards; The cooperation between officials and gentry imitated the security bureau and reformatory of modern police and prison system and replaced the original Baojia system; A college was reorganized into a military school; The subjects of current affairs politics and western-style political science were added to the rural examination, and martial arts was changed to hot weapons subjects; Officials receive regular training so that they can play a leading role in reform activities; One of the most striking achievements is the establishment of the current affairs school, which is organized by the people and its courses are mainly natural science and political science, international law and foreign languages. Liang Qichao was hired as the chief Chinese teacher of the current affairs school. Zhang Zhidong, governor of Huguang, is optimistic about these reform projects.

With the arrival of Liang Qichao, Kangliang Party gradually dominated the pattern of Hunan Reform Movement. Tang became the editor-in-chief of Hunan New Newspaper, the most important publication in Hunan, and Tan Sitong devoted himself as an activist. Liang Qichao gave the concept of "country" a definition in line with the world trend: the country is the same body of all classes on the map! To pursue the prosperity of a country, we must bridge the gap between ruling and ruled, because only democratic politics can be practiced. However, he does not think that China has the conditions to implement democratic politics. Democratic reform should first seek to break the monopoly of the royal family and the bureaucratic class on political affairs and promote the participation of non-governmental forces in political affairs. As far as China's blueprint for political reform is concerned, he is not keen on Kang Youwei's fantasy of directly impressing the imperial court and launching a top-down political reform movement. He imagined that if one province succeeded first, all provinces would follow suit. If the imperial court takes a hostile attitude, they will instigate these reformed provinces to seek independence. Under his auspices, young students and squires formed the "South Society", which met regularly every seven days to criticize the current disadvantages and publicize the reform concept. The institute can consult all the information compiled by the government at any time and submit various suggestions directly to the governor's office. For a time, there were many lecture halls, and the enthusiasm for participating in the reform was increasing day by day. At the peak, the number of members of Southern College reached 65,438+0,200, and the magazine Box was founded. Various associations have been established, and there are as many as thirteen well-documented associations in the province.

However, there is no Huang Zunxian's name in the list of the South Hospital. This strange signal seems to hint at the bleak prospects of the reform movement.

The mass organizations became the Dojo for Liang Qichao and Tan Sitong to preach the new law, and publicized the modern concepts of civil rights and equality in the lecture halls and courses of the academy. China's old political model was accused of moral decay and extortion. The famous banned books in the late Ming Dynasty: Huang Zongxi's anti-authoritarian works "Ming Yi to be visited" and Wang Xiuchu's "Ten Days in Yangzhou" recorded the crimes of the Manchu dynasty and circulated in the society semi-openly. Tan Sitong pointed directly at China's traditional ethics of monarch, minister and father, and believed that these unconditional arbitrary powers in state and family life were the root of all evils in China. Equal status in family life and social life is a natural right of human beings. Liang Qichao plans to gradually upgrade the research institute to parliament and gradually gain legislative power. The Southern Institute is called the Institute, and its scale is equivalent to a local council. In fact, it does have the nature of parliament in some aspects, which greatly affects the decrees of the governor's office.

When the voices of reform are endless and the old guard can't cope with it gradually, the Westernization School, the ally of the reformists, unconsciously re-allied with the old guard. /kloc-at the beginning of 0/898, Governor Zhang Zhidong serialized his Persuasion in the reformist publication Xiangxuehai New Newspaper. Governor Zhang smelled a thorough subversion of the old order and anti-Manchu in the South Courtyard. His "Persuade to Learn" throws out the theme of "taking middle school as the body and western learning as the use" in an elegant and charming style. There is only one final conclusion in the voluminous chapter: the concept of the country refers to Manchu! No one can be classified as subversive. The old bureaucratic gentry took advantage of the situation to launch a counterattack, shouting: "The source comes from the sky, the sky remains unchanged, and the Tao remains unchanged." The refutation that "poverty leads to change, change leads to communication, and general principles last for a long time" cannot resist the power of the rulers. A large number of members of the Southern Learning Society went with the flow, and immediately went with the flow, signing the Hunan Learning Covenant with the old school, reaffirming that the old political order could not be shaken and that new learning could only be supplemented by middle schools.

Soon, Liang Qichao was deprived of the teaching position of the current affairs school and expelled from Hunan, and the province returned to the old track, and the reform movement failed before it started.

Lack of lasting determination; Look at the powerful face and act; The undercurrent of Huang Zunxian and Liang Qichao's struggle for the leading power of reform has sown the seeds of division within the reformists, and it is inevitable that they will reap the consequences. Although the immature reformists soon failed in the maelstrom of fate, this reform still divided China into two eras, and the curtain of reform slowly opened.