Abstract: After China's fiasco in the First Sino-Japan War(1894 A.D.-1895 A.D.),there arose a trend in Chinese scholars of harshly criticizing the Chinese traditional academic culture.By approving western knowledge and criticizing Chinese learning,they intended to find an urgent cure to save the nation from fragile condition.Unexpectedly,the new understanding of traditional Chinese learning caused the devaluation of Chinese humanities.The six Confucian classics were used as the material to prove historical truth and falsehood,rather than the basis of distinguishing between right and wrong as they used to be.HU Shi and GU Jiegang inherited and developed this kind of thoughts by emphasizing the role of “distinguishing between truth and falsehood” and leading the mainstream of the humanistic research in the Republic of China.At the same time,the crisis in ethical and moral value system caused by social transformation became more and more influential to social life.Some scholars expected to draw the essence from Chinese and Western learnings to create a “national morality” suitable for modern China.The conflict between the academic research orientation of “seeking truth” and the social expectation of rebuilding morality and ethics constitutes a great theoretical dilemma for the development of Chinese literature and history studies in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China.Which could be considered as the top significance of Chinese literature and history studies,“distinguishing between truth and falsehood” or “distinguishing between right and wrong”?This question has never been very well answered and is left for the Chinese scholars of modern humanities to keep exploring.

Key words: modern humanities, moral value system, devaluing, academic epistemology, national morality