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Abstract Cai Yuanpei's translation ,introduction and dissemination of western moral theories in China underwent three stages during the late QingDynasty and early Republic of China .Thefirst stage was during the Reform Movement when he embraced the evolutionary ethics and utilitarian theory after reading classics of western learning translated by Yan Fu and the Wan Kwoh Kung Pao founded by missionaries . The second stage lasted from1901 to1906 ,when Cai disseminated Kropotkin's anarchism and mutual aid ethics ,immersing himself into the new education reform and revolutionary activities . The third stage covered his stay in Germany from1907 to the1911 Revolution .He read extensively in western thoughts ,culture and science ,which made him discard the values advocated by anarchism . He also started to work on the translation and introduction of Paulsen's A System of Ethics ,and Kant's Moral Rationalism . In 1910 ,he uncovered the heritages of ancient Chinese ethics ,and ,employing western values and scientific approaches ,he wrote The History of Chinese Ethics . The book has groundbreaking significance in that it has not only provided a scientific classification of the developmental stages of Chinese ethics ,and distinguished the history of ethics fromethics in terms of their research objectives and fundamentals ,but also found universal values in ancient Chinese ethics and Chinese tradition that would gain general acceptance in the age of modernization . As the first Minister of Education of the Republic of China ,Cai Yuanpei actively promoted moral education reform in both system and practice . In 1912 ,he put forward a new education policy under the public regime by integrating Confucian ethics with western values and ethics .In his new educational system centering on civic virtues ,he shifted the perspective of educational narrative in the late Qing Dynasty from monarch-subject to nation-citizen .Employing the Kantian idea of phenomenal and noumenal worlds ,he expounded the dual goals of actuality and transcendency of civic moral education . He opposed religious education in civic moral education and made the famous statement that religious indoctrination should be replaced by aesthetic education .In the two text books ,the New Self-Cultivation Textbook for Elementary School which he editedin collaboration with Zhang Yuanji in1904 and the Self-Cultivation Textbook for High School which he compiled independently in the early Republic of China ,Cai showed his attempts at exploring the practical system of civic moral education . In them ,Cai not only fully acknowledged the structure of Confucian self-cultivation ethics ,but brought new meanings to civic virtues under the new regime by giving high priority to social morality ,especially national ethics and professional ethics in moral education . This paper studies the formation of Cai's moral knowledge and ideology by looking at his translation and introduction of western moral education theories during the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China . This perspective not only explains the major underlying forces and ideological resources that helped to initiate and promote his new education reform in the early years of the Republic of China ,but also accounts for the internal logic of moral revolution during the New Culture Movement .
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2012, Vol. 42 
