《中国人的精神》决赛作品 E08 高紫玉
Impression of The Spirit of the Chinese People
The book is Gu Hongming’s most influential representative works in English.The book is made of a series of English papers with “the spirit of Chinese people”.The author——Gu Hongming’s purpose of writing this book is reveal the spiritual life of Chinese people and elucidate the eternal valule of Chinese traditional culture.
The book changed the prejudice of some westerners towards China,maintained the dignity of Chinese culture.The author compared Chinese with Americans,Englishmen,Germans and Frenchmen,it highlights the characteristics of Chinese people.He thought that Americans are erudite and unsophisticated,but easy to understand;Englishmen are deep and unsophisticated,but not erudite;Germans are erudite and deep,but sophisticated;The French are not as deep as the Germans,not as broad-minded as the Americans and simple-minded as the Englishmen, but they have the sensitivity that these three nations lack;only the Chinese people have all these four outstanding spiritual characteristics.
Chinese people seem to be born with a sense of honor.In Gu Hongming’s writing,the reason why a cause can obtain the continuous fresh energy injection must be attributed to its noble spiritual attribution. Troubled, improve yourself; valued, improve the world.;no matter one stands in the golden chamber or hides in the jungle,Chinese people are always retractable.China has been regarded as a national existence without belief all the time.
In modern Europe, where the moral power represented by religion has been declining in maintaining social order, the worship of force has developed into militarism, and the conflict of economic interests has evolved into the contradiction of striving for hegemony over the world, which ultimately led to the collapse of the whole European social order. As a citizen of the passive side of the victim of militarism, Gu Hongming stood still while the nation was chasing the upsurge of Western thought. Instead of looking on coldly without the complaints of the weak, he boldly pointed out to foreigners:"Europeans will find this new moral force in China, in Chinese civilization." Gu Hongming has this confidence. His self-confidence stems from his profound understanding of Chinese traditional culture over the past 2500 years, especially Confucian culture. The realization of moral power does not depend entirely on religion in the literal sense of Europe, but can be extended to a broader belief system, that is, religion of good citizenship, which he believes exists in the hearts of Chinese people for thousands of years.
The Chinese spirit is Confucian, but it is not all Confucian. n today's China, cultural conflicts and integration still exist, and the national personality is confronted with the same choice and confusion in the impact of foreign culture and traditional ideas. “How the later generation thinks of us is just like how we think of the ancestors.”The radicalization of the New Culture Movement failed to fill the cultural gap after the destruction of the Confucian tradition. This work still needs to be completed by us today. Gu Hongming can be said to be the first step to take the lead in cultural self-confidence. This step coexists with advantages and disadvantages, but it is always a direction of thinking.
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