Machine Gun and Thread-bound Chinese Book-The Tension between Science and Chinese Learning in Early Republican Period from the Dispute of Chinese Learning Bibliography(II)

In early 1923, Hu Shi and Liang Qi chao opened a Learning Bibliography for students from Qinghua University, which resulted in a dispute concerning the sorting out of Chinese classics. Participants in this dispute were mainly scholars with new ideas, hence the dispute could be viewed as an effort of integrating concepts within themselves. Both supporters and opponents of sorting out Chinese classics relied on science: Wu Zhihui, Kang Youwei and other senior scholars with different political and cultural stands emphasized Chinas urgent need of the material layer of science, while Lin Yutang and several young returned students from abroad, with different urderstandings of Learning, stressed more about the integrity of science(in fact, the spirit and appraches of science),and further advocated scientific Chinese Learning. Such academic phenomena reflected some super academic significance and should be studied in the historical framework of modern Chinese ideological evolution.