Title

On “The Three Works of Political Peace" (治平三議) by Chen Qiu (陳虬)

Author

Takeuchi Hiroyuki

Genre

Article  

Pages

345-361

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

Chen Qiu, the Three Works of Political Peace, the thought of great harmony, world wide government, Wenzhou

Abstract

  Chen Qiu (1851-1904) of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province was a doctor and one of the pioneers of the reform movement at the end of the Qing dynasty.

The paper that he wrote in 1883 called “The Three Works of Political Peace" was included in and published ten years later in 1893 in one volume of

the “The Complete Works of Political Thought," his anthology of reform theory. The contents of this paper were extremely large in scale, starting with stabilization of local areas by the revitalization of the family system and then restructuring the government by the implementation of the feudal system. In addition, he added the establishment of a unified world government leading to the achievement of complete world peace, which led this paper to be seen as one of the precursors in the works on “The Thought of Great Harmony" in leadership ideology in modern Chinese history. However, when looking at the contents of the paper thoroughly, we can conclude that Chen Qiu's philosophy does not have much connection with western democratic philosophy, but was only an extention of a unified Chinese imperial ideology.