In the midst of the Qing Dynasty, the Changzhou School revived modern Confucianism in the Han Dynasty to rid Confucianism of the internal abuses that arose in the early days of the dynasty owing to the overflourishing of textual studies. These abuses were numerous and varying, including failing to seek “reason” by textual research and often falling into the dilemma of “constraint to the classics”, and interpreting Confucianism trivially and vaguely and even going against the Confucian tradition of applied governance or statecraft. Scholars such as Zhuang Cunyu, Liu Fenglu and Song Xiangfeng highlighted the theory of Gongyang, interpretation of Confucianism according to reason and pragmatic style of learning, highly renewing the situation of Confucianism studies in the Qing Dynasty. This directly enlightened the methodology of interpreting modern Confucianism of the later Confucians represented by Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan, promoted the further development of studies of Analects of Confucius and laid a foundation for the oldtextConfucianismdenying campaign in the late Qing Dynasty. It also pulled open the modern development of Confucianism studies and gave a new life to traditional Confucianism to make it rejuvenated again.

academia in the Qing Dynasty; the Changzhou School; modern Confucianism; Zhuang Cunyu; Liu Fenglu; Song Xiangfeng