| During the late Qing constitutional reform, some intellectuals raised the issue of "national qualification for constitutionalism", namely whether Chinese people could meet demands of a modern constitution in terms of intelligence, morality, or legal-political knowledge. This issue had been vehemently debated in the great controversy between Liang Qichao's Xin-Min-Cong-Bao and the Revolutionaries' Min-Bao during 1905-1907 over whether China could immediately become a republic. A careful observation of their opinions shows that, while the two sides carried out heated debate on several concrete issues, they shared the same mode of thinking, i.e., that the practice of modern constitutions takes adequate "national qualification" as a prerequisite. Such mode of thinking mainly originated from Confucianism, particularly from Neo-Confucianism, which paid close attention to inward moral and intellectual experience of the human mind. The "national qualification" doctrine on the one hand recognized indirect influences of intellectual-cultural factors outside the political sphere on the constitutional practice and on the other hand neglected direct influences of factors inside that sphere. |
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