China Turns Inward: the Cultural Turn between the Song and Song Dynasties
About This Novel
During the war and turmoil between the two Song Dynasties, politics took precedence over economy and culture, and autocratic imperial power expanded into dictatorship. Some intellectuals who tended to be conservative turned to Confucianism and regarded moral reconstruction as the way to save the nation. This conservative thought was finally established as national orthodoxy. This was the "Neo-Confucianism" that influenced later generations of China for nearly a thousand years. However, for the development of thought and culture, this was a Pyrrhic victory. Chinese intellectuals and the ideas they created, which were once unbridled, brilliant, and full of extroverted vitality in the 11th century, became inward, conservative, closed, and introspective under the influence of orthodoxy, and lost the power to innovate.
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