Kang Youwei Research Articles

Kang Youwei's Point of View on the Relationship between the Six Confucian Classics and Confucius - Focusing on Kang Yuwei’s Kongzigaizhikao (孔子改制考)

Kang Youwei's Point of View on the Relationship between the Six Confucian Classics and Confucius - Focusing on Kang Yuwei’s Kongzigaizhikao (孔子改制考)

Two or three things about Mao, Godard and Kang Youwei

This is an interview with Evans Chan about his recent documentaries Two or Three Things About Kang Youwei (2013) and Datong: The Great Society (2011), in which he discusses the various cultural and historical issues surrounding the significance of his chosen subject.

“Poisoning China”: Kang Youwei's Saving the Country (1911) and His Stance against Anti-Manchuism

“Poisoning China”: Kang Youwei's Saving the Country (1911) and His Stance against Anti-Manchuism

Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao's Views of a "Constitution"

Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao's Views of a "Constitution"

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

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...

Kang Youwei(康有爲) and His Reconstruction of the Universal Values

Kang Youwei(康有爲) and His Reconstruction of the Universal Values

Kang Youwei’s Journey to India: Chinese Discourse on India During the Late Qing and Republican Periods

This paper examines Kang Youwei’s perception of India as well as his impact on the Chinese discourse on India during the late Qing and Republican periods. The analysis is pursued on the basis of a letter entitled ‘A letter to Liang Qichao and other students on [the fact that] the Fall of India [as an independent country] was due to the Independence of Its Provinces’. Kang wrote this letter to Liang, his closest student and associate who was also a famous intellectual, when Kang was in Darjeeling in May 1902. Kang was keen to diagnose India’s collapse to British colonialism for the purpose of helping China avoid a similar fate. This essay argues that his journey to and writings about India were of great significance in shaping the modern Chinese perceptions of India. He, for the first time, explicitly made a comprehensive comparison between China and India and positioned India as a negative example for the Chinese. From then on, India’s image among many Chinese intellectuals was that of a failed nation unable to confront imperialism.

Who Was Homer Lea (1876–1912), and Why Should We Care? Myth and History in the “American Century”

Who Was Homer Lea (1876–1912), and Why Should We Care? Myth and History in the “American Century” Roger R. Thompson (bio) Lawrence M. Kaplan. Homer Lea: American Soldier of Fortune. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. x, 314 pp. Hardcover $40.00, isbn 978-0-8131-2616-6. Homer Lea (1876–1912), whose short but full life ended a century ago, shared the stage with Sun Yat-sen at a critical moment in modern Chinese history: the early days of the Republic of China in Nanjing. Sun and Lea, who sailed together from France, reached Shanghai in December 1911 with a vision for China that scarcely accommodated the complexities of those final months of the Qing dynasty. A decade earlier, Homer Lea had dreamed of occupying center stage with Kang Youwei and the emperor of China; in 1942, thirty years after his death, the significance of his life and work was revisited, recreated, and reimagined in ways that resonated with a stunned America in the first weeks and months after Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor. When Lea landed at Shanghai in 1911, it was not the first time he had been in East Asia. In 1900, he had sailed from San Francisco in hopes of aiding Kang Youwei’s violent effort to restore to power the Guangxu emperor, whose reforming impulses had been checked by the empress dowager in 1898. Kang Youwei needed guns for his men in Guangdong and the mid-Yangzi provinces, and it was to Lea that he turned for guns and the training of troops1. Lea, undaunted by his failures in 1900—neither guns were obtained nor troops trained—had sought to train and drill young Chinese men living in Los Angeles in 1904–1905 at the Western Military Academy. In this period, Lea also helped organize the visit of Liang Qichao, Kang’s ally, to Los Angeles (1903), and he traveled in 1905 with Kang Youwei on his high-profile visits to Washington, DC (where they met with President Theodore Roosevelt), New York, Philadelphia, and other American cities with large populations of Chinese overseas. While completing a book about military affairs in 1909, Lea also conspired to raise money and troops for a mercenary army that he hoped would invade South China and topple the Qing dynasty. Like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen needed as many Western allies as possible, and Lea’s growing reputation as a military strategist, when combined with his revolutionary credentials, gained him access. Sun, having worked together with Lea in the United States in 1910, met Lea again in London in the fall of 1911 after the beginning of the 1911 Revolution. In London, and then in Paris, Lea and Sun sought the government backing, both diplomatic and financial, that the revolution needed. Doors were opened, but neither promises nor money was obtained. En route to China, Lea, who had been informing reporters and the U.S. Department of State that he would be Sun’s military chief of staff, was forced by circumstances and U.S. neutrality laws to relinquish this dream. He continued, [End Page 9] however, to be called General Homer Lea by the press, although clearly with a sense of irony in some cases (p. 178). But it was Sun’s revolutionary ally Huang Xing, not the one-time Stanford student and now-acclaimed author of the military treatise The Valor of Ignorance (1909), which had warned of an impending Japanese attack on America, who would be assigned the military portfolio in Sun’s short-lived cabinet.2 Sun Yat-sen ceded his position as provisional president to Yuan Shikai, the northern-based Qing official and military leader, whose Republican presidency was supported by both revolutionaries and reformers alike. Sun returned to his ambitious schemes for modernizing China. Homer Lea, who had suffered a debilitating stroke the day before the abdication of the Qing emperor on February 12, 1912, returned to America with his new bride, Ethel Powers, who had been his secretary intermittently during the previous five years. Many have asked for more than a century, who was Homer Lea? Lawrence Kaplan has addressed that question in his new...

World revolution knocking at the heavenly gate: Kang Youwei and his use of geming in 1898

After 1895 as the Manchu monarchy failed to deal with the national crisis created by China's loss in the first Sino–Japanese War, the ideology of revolution won a foothold. A paradigm shift in Chinese revolutionary discourse, radicalized by way of Japanese translations and symbolized by Sun Yat-sen's self-proclaimed “revolutionary party,” embraced the view of the rising masses as masters of history. It was during the age of world revolution that Kang Youwei shaped his worldview. While juxtaposing the French Revolution with the anti-Manchu revolution, he betrayed his background in the New Text Confucian canon by lending legitimacy to the rebels. In analyzing Kang's memorials of 1898, this paper reveals how his reform theory and practice were framed by his vision of world revolution, and how the words bianfa, weixin and bianzheng were interwoven with the unseen geming, rhetorically mixing the history of world revolution with the Tang–Wu tradition. This paper asserts that the geming discourse in Kang's use inscribed with a radical blueprint for China was actually an imposition of modernity onto the Qing court rather than empowering its legitimation in a traditional Confucian way. In scrutinizing these keywords in transnational contexts, the analysis crosses not only the fields of language, politics, Classical study and intellectual culture, but also the subtle layers of intertextual verification, psychological complexity and political and cultural intensities, and attempts to open new dimensions for the study of Kang Youwei and the 1898 reform movement.

Kang You-wei and Characteristics of Comment on Zhongyong

Kang You-wei and Characteristics of Comment on Zhongyong

From Sinocentrism to Civilization Discourse

The Sinocentric dichotomy between civilized people and barbarian people has long been the worldview of East Asians. Although this view was challenged before, the decisive challenge was posed by the changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What was the reason for the irreversible overthrow of traditional Sinocentrism and the adoption of what they had previously considered to be barbarianism? Qing China’s Kang Youwei (1857-1927), Japan’s Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901), and Joseon Korea’s Yu Giljun (1856-1914) all thought Western civilization to be a more advanced civilization. However, the eventual aims the three men sought were not the same. From revitalization of Confucianism (Kang Youwei), permanent separation from the tradition of Confucianism through “de-Asianization” (Fukuzawa Yukichi), to the pursuit of a modern independent state without abandonment of traditional Confucianism (Yu Giljun), these three representative intellectuals of East Asia display how the traditional mentality formed during the premodern period continued to influence the modern transformation. The variations and methods of acceptance of the Sinocentric dichotomy of civilized and barbarian played a very important role in the formation of mentalities among the three nations of East Asia. Psychological responses to the injury created by the impact of the Western civilization were not unrelated to the extant mental attitude displayed by Sinocentrism. While China failed to abandon its narcissism and maintained its faith in its origins, Japan radically abandoned Sinocentrism and assimilated itself to Western culture ? creating its own narcissism vis-a-vis others. Korea appears to have switched the object of assimilation beginning at the point of the Sino-Japanese War. While traditionalism may have persisted at the underlying level, the thrust of modern Korean society could be found in this transformation.

National identity, nation and race: Wang Jingwei's early revolutionary ideas, 1905–1911

This article examines Wang Jingwei's ideas on nation and race before the 1911 Revolution. It has often been agreed by scholars that there was a strong current of anti-Manchuism among the revolutionaries and as a result, on the eve of the 1911 Revolution, the revolutionaries remained divided as to whether the new Republic should inherit all the territories ruled by the Manchu dynasty and whether it should include the Manchus into the nation. It was only in the reformist camp led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao that the Manchus were unambiguously regarded as part of the Chinese nation. This article suggests that in the revolutionary camp before the 1911 Revolution, it was Wang Jingwei who broke new ground in mapping out a place for the Manchus after the revolution. He stood out among the revolutionaries in the clear formulation of the idea that the new Chinese nation should be composed of different nationalities including the Manchus. This article also suggests that although Sun Yat-sen had an influence upon Wang Jingwei's political thinking during the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance) times, Wang's intellectual talents and resources enabled him to outgrow Sun's framework and develop his own ideas. His concepts on race and nation and perceptions of Han–Manchu relations owed a considerable debt to the Swiss legal scholar, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli. Wang Jingwei has been a much reviled political figure in twentieth century Chinese history. His contribution to the formulation of a racial identity for the new Chinese nation has long been underrated, and this article attempts to throw light upon this aspect of his political thought.

The Source of the Idea of Equality in Confucian Thought

Although the traditional society in China was not necessarily a society of equality, and the classical Confucianism did not speak much about the principle of universal equality, in modern times, in the midst of a transformation of value systems, people still find correlating sources within the Confucian tradition that is connected to the modern idea of equality. This essay makes a detailed study on this correlation and points out that ancient Chinese society and the western feudal society are different in terms of social systems and education systems. For example, China has the imperial examination but no patrimonial aristocracy. Confucianism opposed the huge gap between the poor and the rich, and this idea has become a modern tradition in the ideal of “great harmony under the sky,” especially in Kang Youwei’s 康有为 Datong Shu 大同书 (Book of Great Harmony). There were also some elements of agricultural socialism and equalitarianism in traditional Confucianism. The potential idea of equality (or reciprocity) in “friendship,” embodied in the principle of Confucian ethics of the Three Bonds and the Five Relations, is explored and explained in a modern way. The theory that the sages are equal with the masses, which originated from the theory of human being’s intrinsic goodness, may be directly connected with modern principle of equality. The modern transformation of equality is both political and ethical. The former is to struggle for individual rights; the latter is to establish moral subjectivity. Therefore, equality between sages and the masses manifests modernity. Like the epistemic subjectivity, which could not be discussed without referring to group-individual relationship, the moral subjectivity also contains a consciousness of equality.

Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist Thought with Japan and Russia, 1898–1997 (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist Thought with Japan and Russia, 1898–1997 Viren Murthy (bio) Shiping Hua. Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist Thought with Japan and Russia, 1898–1997. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 208 pp. Hardcover $35.00, ISBN 978-0-804-76161-1. Among the many changes that occurred during the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century, one could count a general shift away from revolutionary utopias. Of course, in the final decades of the twentieth century, people already criticized utopian thought and doubted the search for alternatives to the world of global capitalism, and so we can understand the pessimism of the twenty-first century as continuing a larger trend. However, during the greater part of the twentieth century, people in China and elsewhere showed a faith in [End Page 439] utopia and the possibility of a different future. Hence, it is particularly interesting now, from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, to look back from a comparative point of view at the different utopian projects that pervaded the previous century. This is exactly what Shiping Hua does in his book, Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist Thought with Japan and Russia, 1898–1997. Hua compares governmental policies and ideologies of reform in Japan, China, and Russia and argues that political changes in these three countries occurred as ruling elites implemented reforms in response to structural problems, but emphasizes that the resulting trajectories were influenced by cultural traditions. The author’s focus is on twentieth-century China. He has divided the book into six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter is titled “Theory and Method”; the second provides a general discussion of utopianism in Japan, Russia, and China; the third chapter concerns modernizing reforms in Japan and China; the fourth is titled “Reforms within Communism: The Soviet Union”; the fifth is titled “Reforms within Communism: China”; and the sixth is titled “Reforms out of Communism: China and the Soviet Union.” The conclusion is titled “Hopefulness toward the Future as Nature, Supernatural, and the Product of Human Endeavor.” In the second chapter, he lays out a major point in the book, specifically, that Chinese utopian thought is connected to the prevalence of the Taoist small kingdoms with limited population, a tradition of peasant rebellions, and especially, the Confucian ideas of the grand harmony (datong). Hua shows the importance of the concept of the grand harmony in Chinese thought by comparing the Meiji reforms to the late Qing reforms, namely the Hundred Days Reform during the late Qing. In chapter 3, the author compares the Meiji thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) to the late Qing philosopher Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and contends that both were representative of the political culture of their respective societies. In general, Hua argues that by comparing Kang and Fukuzawa, we can conclude that the Chinese were more radical than their Japanese counterparts. He cites Kang: “[S]low reform is not as good as rapid reform; little change is not as good as wholesale change” (p. 33). A few pages later, he explains the difference in terms of culture. “The traditional Japanese notion of accepting life as it is, as discussed in Chapter 2, probably explains why the Meiji leaders adopted moderate strategies with limited goals, while the Chinese traditional belief that striving will lead to a better life for the group may explain the impatience and greater ambition of the late Qing reformers” (p. 36). Hua continues this mode of analysis in his treatment of reforms during the communist period and interestingly points out that reformers of Mao’s China, such as Chen Boda, were inspired by the idea of datong (p. 76). In discussing the Great Leap Forward, he notes that in 1958, “Mao visited the People’s Communes in Xu Shui County, Hebei Province. The leaders from the CCP Central Committee’s Department of Peasant Affairs were asked to bring Kang Youwei’s Datongshu with [End Page 440] them ‘as the guideline for the People’s Commune’ ” (p. 76). Moreover, in what could be described as an invocation of Confucius, Mao claimed that one should rely on...

A study on the scientific background of thinking of Kang Youwei and a stage of 'Tianyou'

A study on the scientific background of thinking of Kang Youwei and a stage of 'Tianyou'

From “tianxia” (all under heaven) to “the world”: changes in late Qing intellectuals' conceptions of human society

传统的“天下”一词本具广狭二义， 分别对应着今日意义的“世界”和“中国”。过去 的流行说法是， 近代中国有一个将“天下”缩变为“国家”的进程。如果侧重昔人思考的对 象， 恐怕更多是一个从“天下”转变为“世界”的进程。康有为创造性地把公羊“三世”说 由历时性变为共时性， 使“天下”平顺地向“世界”过渡。但中国却被西方主导的“世界” 体系外在化， 中国士人渴望加入“世界”， 努力为中国在世界确立一个更好的位置， 这是一 个充满了彷徨的探索进程。 The concept of tianxia (all under heaven) had both a broad and a narrow meaning in traditional China, corresponding respectively to “the world” and “China.” It was generally believed that China's recent history saw a process in which tianxia contracted into a “state.” However, if we put the emphasis on what the Chinese literati had in mind, the process was more of a transformation from tianxia to “the world.” Kang Youwei creatively transformed Gongyang's idea of the “Three Worlds” from a diachronic to a synchronic concept, facilitating a smooth transformation from tianxia to “the world.” However, China was excluded from the Western‐dominated “world” system. The Chinese literati's yearning to become a part of “the world,” and their endeavor to earn China a better position in the world, involved a hesitant process of exploration.

Jingji xue: the history of the introduction of Western economic ideas into China, 1850-1950

Based on solid research, Jingji Xue presents how Economics, as a thought as well as an intellectual discipline, had been introduced to China. It identifies the Chinese who studied Economics in the West and evaluates their roles in teaching, research, and publication in China. Particularly, it describes and examines the activities of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, and Yan Fu et al in transmitting and interpreting Western Economics. The evolution of Economics programme in leading universities in China is also discussed.

Confucianism and Familism: A Comment on the Debate Between Liu and Guo

The debate in Dao between LIU Qingping and GUO Qiyong (see Liu 2007 and Guo 2007) touches on a question that has accompanied Confucianism since the downfall of the Chinese empire: Is Confucianism “familism”? Has it been the ideology of the zongfa 宗法 system? Has, under its influence, xiao 孝 been the “cardinal virtue” of historical China? Has xiao been the entrance door not only to submissiveness and traditionalism, but also to nepotism and corruption, and has it prevented the growth of public spirit? This suspicion has been uttered not only by Chinese May Fourth thinkers like WU Yu 吳虞. It has also had a long European history, starting with Montesquieu and Herder and leading via Hegel to Weber, with a broad and lasting impact on the humanities and the social sciences (see Opielka 2004). Familism is not a peculiarity of China, but no other of the great ethical systems that have evolved in the history of mankind has been so closely identified with it as has Confucianism. However, while the influence of familism in Chinese history with all its concomitants can hardly be doubted, the Confucian part in it is not as evident as, for example, LIU Qingping’s articles suggest. Familism is certainly older than Confucianism and not necessarily dependent on it. Confucianism itself had, relative to the specific thinker or text and to the historical circumstances, not only a fostering, but also a moderating influence on familism, and it could even take on an explicitly critical attitude. On the one hand, the most prominent modern examples for radical criticism of the family system in the name of Confucianism are KANG Youwei 康有為 and XIONG Shili 熊十力. On the other hand, we have a strong accent on parental authority and kinship loyalty in periods of weak central government, e.g. in the Chinese “middle ages” (Knapp 2006). In general, Confucianism has tried to protect family structures and at the same time prevent their making themselves independent. The overall historical balance is open to dispute. As to the classical Confucian texts, family is, in general, certainly a first-rank topic. It is the place not only of the primary experience in moral action, but also a realm of particular Dao (2008) 7:41–44 DOI 10.1007/s11712-008-9039-z

Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (review)

Reviewed by: Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West Eric Hayot (bio) Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West. By Zhang Longxi. Cornell University Press, 2005. x + 256 pp. $39.95. This book continues the project Zhang Longxi began in The Tao and the Logos (1992) and made explicit in Mighty Opposites (1999): to assert, against those who would argue for the incommensurability of cultures, that whatever differences appear through the lens of anthropological or literary hermeneutics do not cut one kind from another. "I will argue," he writes in the introductory chapter, "that the belief in the possibility of common knowledge and cross-cultural understanding, in the availability of conceptual tools for [End Page 122] the interpretation of human behavior across the boundaries of language, geography, culture, and time, can indeed come from a genuine appreciation of the equal capabilities of different individuals, peoples, and nations" (11). As in Mighty Opposites, where a distinction between the "identical" and the "equal" grounded in explicitly Heideggerean terms allowed Zhang to insist on the possibility of cross-cultural comparison based on a universalist egalitarianism, Allegoresis aims to undermine the "cultural relativists" who would insist, sometimes from a sense of superiority, sometimes from a desire to protect others from misunderstanding, that no hermeneutic that does not emerge from a given epistemological "inside" can ever fully grasp the structures, habits, meanings, or values of that interiority, much less its obscene and wondrous hopes and possibilities. Readers from Chinese studies will recognize in the book's title a reference to the decades-long debate over the "problem" of metaphor in Chinese literature, a debate more or less settled for me, a non-sinologist, by Haun Saussy's The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1995). The related claim that Chinese literature does not have allegories, and is thus not susceptible to allegorical interpretations (aka "allegoresis") has nonetheless been remarkably hard to bury, and it claws its way out of the grave one more time in Zhang's first few chapters. He dispatches it with a number of vigorous blows from the hermeneutic shovel, moving back and forth between hypercanonical works from a number of traditions—the biblical Song of Songs and the Confucian Shi jing [Book of Poetry] in chapter 2, utopias like More's and Zamyatin's, and the early twentieth-century work of Kang Youwei in chapter 4. (The admirable range of Zhang's references generates for me one small quibble: why subtitle the book "Reading Canonical Literature, East and West," when all the "Eastern" literature is Chinese, and the boundaries of the "West" are so expansive—is the Song of Songs really "Western," or did it become so, and is this a difference worth remarking?) In general, Zhang's procedure is to begin with a recognizably "allegorical" work from the "Western" tradition, to present the history of its reading and interpretation, and then to follow up with texts from the Chinese tradition, which prove in each case to be not only amenable to an allegorical reading (which would suggest that serious critical effort can find allegory anywhere), but in fact to have consistently been subject to allegorical readings by the very people who were not supposed to believe in or have allegory in the first place. Layered over Zhang's interest in the question of allegoresis are a series of comments that attempt to parse the general and situational ethics of allegorical reading, and indeed of literary critical interpretation more generally. These occur often enough, and in enough crucial places, to establish a sort of [End Page 123] shadow thesis behind the book. This second thesis appears most prominently at the beginning of the book's third chapter, when Zhang tells the story of the powerful prime minister Zhao Gao, who in the third century B.C.E. brought a stag into the court and announced to the emperor that it was a horse. Zhao Gao's naming the animal as he saw fit tested the emperor's power and the loyalties of his court. His dislocation of the stag's "literal" meaning made interpretation an allegory of his domination, a domination that became profoundly literal when those who agreed with the emperor...

Gengzi qinwang yu wan Qing zhengju (review)

Reviewed by: Gengzi qinwang yu wan Qing zhengju Justin Jacobs (bio) Sang Bing 桑兵. Gengzi qinwang yu wan Qing zhengju 庚子勤王与晚清政局 (The 1900 loyalist movement and late Qing politics). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2004. 488 pp. Paperback 37.00 RMB, isbn 7-301-07079-9. Originally published as a series of separate essays on the 1900 loyalist movement and late Qing politics in general, Sang Bing's Gengzi qinwang yu wan Qing zhengju (2004) strives mostly to complicate the received historiographical demarcation of "revolutionaries" from "reformers." In the process, Sang methodically pokes holes in what he sees as the misleadingly righteous—and historically manipulative—rhetorical façade of Kang Youwei, and, to a lesser extent, his former disciple and frequent disputant Liang Qichao. Indeed, were it not for the inclusion of a lengthy, polemical introductory chapter in which Sang sounds off against the recent and decidedly lamentable invasion of theory-driven foreign scholarship into mainland scholarship, the author could very well have paid tribute to the unofficial dean of American postmodern scholarship on China by retitling his book Rescuing History from the Baohuanghui. It is precisely Kang's and Liang's "heavy hands in manufacturing the historical record that leads to such widespread confusion in [evaluating] the importance and authenticity of the documents available" to the historian (p. 6). Add to that Sang's conviction that Kang and his disciples consistently "aimed to overstate their own role in the 1898 reform movement and suppress that of others … while simultaneously taking great pains to conceal their critical role in the armed uprisings of the 1900 loyalist movement" (p. 7), and Sang has convincingly made the case for a thorough reappraisal of a Kang-Liang-centered narrative of late Qing politics. Sang Bing prefaces his study with a majestic tirade against the intrusion of theory-laden, "outside" scholarship into the field of Chinese history, and more specifically the "young scholars" in China who have recently adapted this fashionable—and conspicuously foreign—theory to a historical milieu supposedly ill-suited for its application. In form and content, Sang's critique of such scholarship closely resembles the empiricist side of the well-known 1998 debate in the pages of the journal Modern China regarding the utility and applicability of postmodern scholarship in the field of Chinese history.1 Sang accuses such historians of letting "theory take precedent" (guannian xianxing 观念先行) and forming conclusions "not based on what the historical documents actually record as having happened, but rather on theories that have arrived from abroad after the events in question took place" (p. 3). He deplores empirically handicapped scholars who "look at a text and invent meaning" (wangwen shengyi [End Page 539] 望文生义) and rely upon "supratextual analysis" (yanwai zhiyi 言外之意, or "meaning outside the text"). Having stated emphatically his lack of patience for theoretical musings that depart from the source material, Sang Bing then proceeds to delve into a flood of detail culled largely from a slew of new diaries (penned mostly by reformers and overseas Chinese) and Baohuanghui 保皇会 ("Protect the Emperor Society") documents that have come to light since the late 1970s. The reformist diaries and collected jottings include those of Sun Baoxuan 孫寶瑄, Zheng Xiaodan 鄭孝蛋, and Wang Kangnian 汪康年, while the Baohuanghui-related documents pertain to speeches and published material that appeared in overseas Chinese communities in the United States, Japan, and Singapore. This wealth of new material, Sang laments, has scarcely been acknowledged by the current generation of historians. "Though today's scholars have access to materials that were far beyond the grasp of their predecessors, our ability to read such sources scarcely approaches that of our forebears … and the number of people who are even looking at these sources today is decreasing daily" (p. 12). If Sang Bing is, indeed, the besieged gatekeeper of a dying breed of old-fashioned empiricist historians, then is it fair to say that his magnum opus on late Qing politics is a defiant and successful testament to the continued relevance of staunchly empirical scholarship painstakingly founded on a mountain of sources and details? The answer is less enthusiastic than it should be for a scholar as accomplished and capable as Sang Bing. Gengzi qinwang yu wan Qing zhengju contains a mind...