Zheng Guanying, Merchant Reformer of Late Qing China and his Infl ...

Shanghai was a special city but far from an isolated island. The culture of Shanghai was formed partly by the “Western impact,” but it was also deeply rooted in the internal transition of the Chinese cultural and intellectual tradition. Nineteenth-century China changed not only economically and demographically but also culturally and intellectually. Before the arrival of Western forces, Chinese thought and the attitude of the gentry-elite had been undergoing a gradual transformation since the late Ming and early Qing periods. The great philosophers of the late Ming and early Qing transitional periods—Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), and Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692)—had attempted to get out of the shadow of the metaphysics of Wang Yangming (1472–1528), whose late Ming neo-Confucianism had pursued elusive ideas such as “Human Mind” [xin] and “Innate Moral Sense” [Liangzhi]. Blaming the fall of the Ming dynasty to the Manchu on the “emptiness” of late Ming scholarship, these Han nationality scholars turned to a focus on textual examination of the classics and to a Substantial Learning [shixue] that was concerned about society and people's livelihood. Gu Yanwu envisioned the purpose of learning as “enlightening the [Confucian] Way and saving the world” and advocated Confucianist activism instead of passive meditation.⁴⁵

During the Qianlong-Jiaqing period, when the Qing dynasty started to have a downward turn to a decline, scholars like Dai Zhen (1723–1777) and Duan Yucai (1735–1815) continued to attack the “empty” Song-Ming scholarship that was obsessed with abstract ideas such as heavenly truth, mind, and conscience but turned to philology and textual collation and criticism, partly as a result of the repressive policy of the Qing court on scholars of Han ethnicity.⁴⁶ Wang Zhong (1744–1794) showed interest in concrete matters such as taxation, irrigation works, and social welfare, and Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801) emphasized scholar's apiration to “manage the world.”⁴⁷ With the gradual loosening of state control, scholars during the Daoguang and Xianfeng reigns revived the early