The Spirit of Chinese People was published by Hongming Gu in 1914 when China had been long suffering from the invasion and depredation of the imperialism in defence of Chinamen against the westerners who held the false opinion on us.

To briefly introduce the author, Gu was a scholar and translator whose English works had profoundly influenced the westerners, The Spirit of Chinese People being one of them.

As the title patently indicated, the book argues about the topic of the spirit of Chinamen, refuting many of the prejudices the westerners had on us. There are several viewpoints that impressed me the most, the first being “the question we must ask, in order to estimate the value of a civilization,——is, what type of humanity, what kind of men and women it has been able to produce”, instead of what material wealth we made. Civilization makes the inner value of men while men create material wealth, a grand kingdom would turn nothing without the residents and the civil affairs and the tight social bond. We involve to be deep, broad, simple and delicacy, there is no terminal to humans, yet the development of the material world seems to have.

The initial of the spirit of Chinese people, as the author claimed, is gentle, which is equivalent to neither weak inherence nor submission, let alone harshness, vulgarity and violence. We tend to live in peace and harmony, with the mass of people observing and maintaining the conventions. The longer you live in China and live with Chinamen, the more adorable you will find them while you may be weary of a Japanese once you spend a relatively long time with him.

Here you might inquire: what does the gentle inherence of Chinamen stem from? As to the answer to this inquiry, Mr. Gu laid much emphasis on the Confucianism and made a comparison with the religions in the west, drawing a conclusion that Confucianism functioned as a religion from the semi-patriarchal society to our contemporary society yet it is evidently superior to religions for it has nothing to do with fraud and violence just as the western social systems do.

Lastly, Mr. Gu pointed out that Chinamen are leading a spiritual life, thus, it would be more proper to say that the Chinese people is a permanently young one rather than the development of Chinamen is blocked like some westerners assumed. And we has always been leading a spiritual life like children so as we attach no importance to the abstract and stiff science and technology.

Mr. Gu provided us with an insight into the Chinese society, Chinese spirit and Chinese civilization, voicing his unique opinion, at least to the westerners, in such a difficult time, refreshing the foreigners’ recognition and significantly inspiring morale of us Chinamen. Despite throughout the book, Mr. Gu made all the statements in a kind of urgent and passionate tone, eager to show the spirit of Chinamen to the world and prove that we remained gentle, deep, broad, simple, shouldering a heavy sense of duty and honor even during our most difficult time, yet it did present the true spirit of Chinamen.