This is a lonely guard to the motherland's love letter

"the Spirit of the Chinese people", also known as "the Spring and Autumn period", is Gu Hongming's most influential English representative work. The book was published by the author in 1914 in the English newspaper "China Review" and published in English in 1915. When was 1915? When Yuan Shikai took power, the Chinese people were bullied and oppressed internally. "barbarian small countries" forced the "upper kingdom of China" to sign "21 articles." Domestic unrest, constant war, prices skyrocketing, Yu Jue selling official. At that time, Gu Hongming could have lived in Germany, but chose to write this book. For him, it was an indictment of foreigners' contempt for China. The argument that foreigners misunderstand the Chinese. Indeed, once published, the book does change the way some foreigners view Chinese people. But what really changed China's international status was the victory of the second World War, the victory of the Korean War and the success of the Vietnam War. The book of a hundred years ago, appealing to the pen, is full of patriotism and boxing.

This book attempts to explain the Chinese spirit and the value of Chinese civilization. To measure the value of a civilization, the question, in my opinion, is not whether it has been built and how great the city can be built, how luxurious the building is, how beautiful the road is; It's not about how nice and comfortable the furniture it already has and what it can produce, how smart and useful the equipment, tools and instruments are; no, not even what kind of research institutions it has created, what art and science it has created. In order to truly measure the value of a civilization, we must ask what kind of person it can make. Sex type, that is, what kind of men and women. In fact, the men and women created by a civilization-the specific forms of human beings-are the manifestation of a civilized soul.

In this book, Gu Hongming writes, "the Chinese people live a spiritual life, so it is more a nation that never grows old than the development of the Chinese people." A nation that has kept its youth secret. The nation of "living a spiritual life like a child" is of course not interested in abstract, rigid science and technology. This is an explanation of closed-door self-protection policy and a rebuttal of China's disdain for the two industrial revolutions. In my opinion, for the Japanese invasion, Gu Hongming interpreted it as "a sinister soldier entering the Man-to-earth wonderland" This is a foreign Chinese to the ancestor The country is deeply attached. In his opinion, the Chinese are gentleman, simple, broad and sensitive.

At that time, at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, there was a clash of Western civilizations. At a time when almost all the advanced elements in China were advocating the complete negation of Chinese traditional culture and absorbing Western civilization without reservation, the Chinese and Western scholars were proficient in nine languages. Cultural geeks with 13 doctorates have boldly stood up for traditional Chinese culture. He promoted the ancient spirit of the East in the language of the West. As a result, we saw Gu Hongming, who was derided as a clown by the people of the same era, left behind a lonely and unruly figure. At that time, it seemed that there was a slogan, "100 good harlot first, 100 evil filial piety first." Traditional Chinese culture The injury to the old man made him miserable.