Chinese Learning as Substance, Western Learning for Application

[1] At the time, leading Chinese thinkers were interrogating how to approach the threat posed by encroaching Western states.

Feng argued for China's self-strengthening and industrialization by borrowing Western technology and military systems, while retaining core Neo-Confucian principles.

[2] The concept was widespread among intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century, and it remains relevant in the modern studies of China-West cultural relationship.

After the Anglo-Chinese First Opium War (1839-1842), Wei Yuan advocated for China to learn “shipbuilding techniques and weapons production” from the west in order to subdue foreign invaders (“師夷長技以制夷”).

[6] After the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the Reformists proposed a new cultural concept of “the Integration of China and the West”, diverting from the original theory of “Chinese Substance, Western Application.” Scholar Yan Fu asserted that "Chinese learning and Western learning both have their unique substance and application.

[7] Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and other members of the Hundred Days' Reform also broke through the restrictions of “Chinese substance” and strived to adopt the western political systems, industrialization, and capitalism.

The solution with which he concluded his lectures muddled the central issue: to "completely accept Western culture while fundamentally reforming its mistakes".

He encouraged Chinese people to study and relish the beauty of Western philosophy and digest it into their own ideological achievements.

Li Zehou stressed that only the real life of the people, the mode of production and economics could be considered as the "base" (substance).

To reconstruct Chinese national character, Liu insists that we negate thoroughly the three primary theoretical paradigms underlying traditional culture: the Confucian democratic model of minben (for the people), the model personality of Confucius and Yanhui, and the concept of tianren heyi (unification between heaven and humans) "Explicitly placing himself in the tradition of those Chinese modernizers who advocated 'total Westernization'", Liu "accused Li Zehou of trying to revive the 'rationalistic' and 'despotic' Chinese tradition," as scholar Woei Lien Chong explains.

The Taiping Rebellion can be seen, in parts, as a heretic Christian group, but also as a proto-communist peasant militia based on the Western value of "equality".