From the Mandate of Heaven to Social Evolution——On Historic Views Prepared by Scholars of Qing Dynasty for Chinese Social Evolution

Yang advocates the mandate of heaven,considering social as a copy of the heavenly order.It proclaims the emperor is empowered by the heaven,and,on the other,believes in the cyclic development of society.The idea of the emperor empowered by the used to be the spiritual backbone of feudal despotic regimes.In the process of social transformation from the feudal to the modern,scholars in early Qing period replaced heaven with society as the supreme power that determines human destiny in their criticism of the mandate of the heaven.In middle Qing period,scholars of Changzhou school took notice of the conception of change in the idea of the mandate of the heaven.In late Qing period,Kang Youwei and his students,having inherited the notion of social determination and attempting to weld the idea of in Gong Yang theory with Western thoughts,transformed such conceptions as three-era cycle,three-era evolution and Confucius's writing Spring and Autumn in order to establish a new dynasty into a theory of social evolution,and thus laid an ideological foundation for their democratic reform movement.