After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 by Peter G. Zarrow

Abstract

Reviewed by: After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 by Peter G. Zarrow David Strand Zarrow, Peter G. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. xiv, 395 pp., $85.00 (cloth), $27.95 (paper). After Empire is a wide-ranging and stimulating work that places the reader in the midst of one the most turbulent and creative periods in modern Chinese history. The title itself makes the point that the 1911 Revolution was a profound moment of departure from preexisting ways of governance but lacked a clear sense of destination for the country or for individuals caught up in the end of empire, the beginning of a republic, and "the establishment of modern Chinese national identity" (p. 272). This is intellectual history with a process-oriented accent on thinking one's way through the end of one world and into the beginning of another. In short order the conventional political world had become so moldable that someone like Kang Youwei could imagine a myriad of options for himself and his contemporaries even as the modern world sharply limited what was actually possible. Among his own many plans, Kang for example considered teaching in America or establishing a new China in Brazil. This radical social and ideological plasticity, tested and tempered by the hard edges of war and revolution, outlived failed proposals for constitutional or charismatic monarchy in the habits of thought and serial enthusiasms of the next and later generations. Although the subject of After Empire is not China today, but China a century and more ago, Zarrow's engaging exploration of the Chinese state as concept helps us understand the logical basis of China's surprising political path from empire to "after empire" and on to the post-Mao party-state as world power and real estate speculator. By re-directing our attention to the political thought of Kang, Liang Qichao, and a host of less well-known thinkers and thought-driven actors, Zarrow shows how the disintegration, decay, rejections, and survivals of what he calls "imperial Confucianism" helped "shape efforts to build new political systems into the twenty-first century" (p. 3). Kang is a critical figure in this process not so much because of his utopian ability to think beyond the world of ideas he grew up with but because he "pushed the classical tradition to the point that it imploded," bursting inward in the first instance, armed with the idea of Confucius as not just a reformer but as a charismatic "uncrowned king" (p. 54). The result therefore was not a pure, explosive act of destruction followed by substitution of an entirely new concept of political life, but rather a more complicated disintegration of the imperial institution, with the emperor progressively devalued and disappeared, and simultaneous reintegration of grand and transcendental ambitions in the state (guojia) itself. Reformers and revolutionaries wielding "new terms and concepts eclectically derived from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Western science and commerce (especially utilitarianism)" also asked the imperial state a corrosive, utilitarian, and disenchanting question that still rings true in Xi Jinping's China: "What have you done for us (citizens) lately?" Zarrow's focus is not on the operations of government but rather on the idea of government. The distinction is akin to the one historical sociologist Philip Abrams once made between the "state-system" and the "state-idea," or, as Abrams elaborated, between the state as an ensemble of institutions and the state as a "mask." Prior to the collapse of the Qing, China had a very modest state-system. It was tiny relative to size of population if ably staffed by a meritocratic elite. But this "Confucian monarchy" was anything if modest as an idea. The regime was cosmic and transcendental even as it cultivated homely and local "state-as-family" roots. In the last hundred years, the Chinese state has grown in size to approximate the population of a largish country (fifty to eighty million depending on who counts as an official) with a "socialism with Chinese characteristics" mask that begs utilitarian questions. A refreshing and challenging feature of Zarrow's account is...