Abstract: Mr. WANG Yuan-hua's thought is characterized by its strong inner tension between various elements, including academics and thought, the normativeness and limitedness of reason, individual consciousness and group consciousness, the May 4^th spirit and the post May 4^th spirit, democracy and science, the ambiguous meanings of “people”, the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility, the dilemma of Confucianism, the darkness and brightness of Chinese tradition and so on. On the one hand, the inner tension in thought is originated from the time; on the other hand, the inner tension together with the problems remain unsolved provides intellectual potentiality for the time. The inner tension in WANG can be traced back to his training in the Hegelian way of thinking and his multiple academic origins and resources. He was a rare theorist in the Party embracing comprehensive academic backgrounds of traditional Chinese learnings, Russian literary theories, German classic philosophy and liberalist thought of politics and economics(as a follower of GU Zhun and SUN Ye-fang), as well as Western and Japanese sinology. In addition, his free and independent personality also led to the inner intension. He once said that he was an individual thinker who would join neither an organization nor a cooperative society so as to maintain the inner dynamic in thought and independence and freedom in personality. The last but not the least, every influential thinker functions as the mind and conscience of the time. The features of WANG's thinking were closely related to the Chinese history in the 20^th century. By examining his personal history of a hundred years, we can understand the complex history of the 20^th century in China.

Key words: inner tension, intellectual history of the 20^th century, thought of WANG Yuan-hua