Abstract
Instead, we must scrutinize the adequacy of our basic assumptions
about the Chinese scene. This is John King Fairbank’s last reflection in the last paragraph of the“Conclusion” of China: A New History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), his last and could be
most conclusive masterpiece. It represents the self awareness of the necessity for western intellectual to abandon their more than three hundred
years self centered perception on China. Concerning the Chinese political and juridical tradition the author after thirty nine years studies on the 1911 Chinese revolution tries hard in this article to introduce his findings on the functions and also the deep structure of an independent and efficient bureaucracy concerning the backbone of the Chinese three thousand-year successful governing. He also discusses in depth three important and very influential western scholars: Charles Baron de Montesquieu, Max Weber, and Fairbank, who treated the issue one after another via way of encyclopedia, sociological, and historical in the past three to four centuries. He tells us that the observation of Montesquieu on China in De l’esprit des lois, as well as those of Weber’s, was and still is the basis of the western conceptual distortion.
The article traces the origin of in the republican Chinese revolution through the thought of Sun Yat-sen, and proves the impact of the western
Christianity from Sun’s speeches and writings after 1912 on the contribution of Christians, such as missionaries and YMCA. They, led by Sun, introduced the above distorted misconceptions to China and persuaded successfully the Oriental society to accept Parliamentary Democracy and at the same time to abandon their own tradition. With it Sun overturned not only the Qing Dynasty, but also their legacy of political and juridical culture that proves to be much advanced system for governing, at least in China.
Keywords
1911 Revolution、China、Political and Juridical Culture、Bureaucratic System、Christian Missionary、Parliamentary Democracy
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