English Abstract: This paper employs the Political Philosophy Cohesion Model, the Dynamic Success Probability Model, and the Community Cohesion Model to systematically trace the full evolutionary chain of Confucianism from the Zhou dynasty's "public virtue" to Wang Yangming's School of Mind, which pushed privatization and de-responsibilization to their extremes. The history of Confucianism is essentially a double degeneration of the privatization of virtue and the de-responsibilization of elites. Confucius extracted the idealist ethics of the Zhou Rites while stripping away their meritocratic core, breaking the first link in the mutual verification of virtue and merit. Xunzi, with his "Enhancing Nature through Ritual and Law," constructed the only nearly complete Confucian framework, yet it was permanently shelved by imperial rule. In 628 CE, Emperor Taizong of Tang abolished the sacrifice to the Duke of Zhou and elevated Confucius alone, initiating an institutional process that locked in passive synthesis. The semantic collapse of the term "gongde" (virtue-merit) is the deepest linguistic witness to this rupture. Mainstream Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism completed "ontological castration," and Wang Yangming's School of Mind became the ultimate theoretical closure of de-responsibilization. However, a countervailing "Legalist Bones undercurrent" persisted within Song-Ming thought, represented by the practical-achievement school of Chen Liang and Ye Shi, which reaffirmed the parallel pursuit of righteousness and profit and practical statecraft, yet remained anchored in the Confucian ethical matrix, unable to push the system toward a fully cohesive three-dimensional form. The deeper paradox of Confucianism's millennium-long dominance lies in this: its passive synthesis objectively suppressed qualitative leaps in productivity, thereby inadvertently eliminating the material basis for its own overthrow. When the first Industrial Revolution's gunboats tore through the agrarian barrier, and the second Industrial Revolution completed the productive gap, the material foundation of the traditional "Confucian skin and Legalist bones" model was hollowed out, and the Confucian skin was pierced like a windowpane. Because Chinese civilization possesses the rhythm of a "generalist species" and the hardcore "Legalist bones" beneath its surface, it rapidly completed a full replacement of its ideological matrix, achieving a spiral return to the Zhou's "public virtue" at the level of political philosophy. Keywords: Confucianism; Productive Political Philosophy; Privatization of Virtue; De-Responsibilization; Gongde (Virtue-Merit); 628 CE Ritual Shift; Ontological Castration; Suppression of Transitions; Legalist Bones Undercurrent; Wang Yangming's School of Mind.
鑫培 骆 (Thu,) studied this question.