Britain forced China to lease it Weihaiwei and the New Territories north of the island of Hong Kong. France established a base on Hainan Island and mining rights across China’s southern provinces. Germany occupied part of Shandong province. Even Italy, a latecomer to Chinese affairs and expansionism in general, demanded territory (although it was successfully rebuffed). The United States did not participate in this dismemberment of the Middle Kingdom, the slicing of the Chinese melon as it came to be called. But, reaching the limits of their own westward expansion and urgently seeking foreign markets, the Americans announced in 1900 an ‘Open Door’ policy that cannily reserved the profits of an informal empire of free trade for foreigners while leaving the costs and responsibilities of governance to the Chinese.
THE FIRST IMPULSES OF REFORM
By 15 April 1895, when the terms of the treaty with Japan were announced, Liang Qichao had reached Beijing with Kang Youwei and hundreds of other candidates to compete for the two hundred available degrees. The news, which spread rapidly from the coastal cities to the hinterland, wounded the Chinese in a way that the Opium War had not. ‘Previously young Chinese people paid no attention to current events,’ a provincial reader of newspapers later recalled, ‘but now we were shaken … Most educated people, who had never before discussed national affairs, wanted to discuss them: why are others stronger than we are, and why are we weaker?’21 It was brutally clear that two decades of ‘self-strengthening’ reforms undertaken by the Qing – the building of arsenals and railways – had amounted to nothing. For the first time, China was being forced to give up an entire province, Taiwan, to a foreign power, in addition to paying the largest indemnity ever and renouncing suzerainty over Korea, its last major tributary state.
Enraged by China’s abasement, an activist called Sun Yat-sen organized an uprising in Guangzhou with the help of money raised from overseas Chinese communities. His plot was discovered and the uprising aborted by the Qing authorities. Sun was forced to flee to Japan, and then on to London, where he was to meet many other nationalists and radicals from India, Egypt and Ireland.
Kang, who had also witnessed the shaming defeat of China by France in 1884, wasn’t about to try something as extreme as overthrowing the Qing Empire. Still, the extreme humiliation inflicted by Japan, a country which, gallingly, had received its high civilization from China, forced Kang to do something unprecedented in the history of politics in Qing China. He organized a meeting of the examinees, the young men aspiring to be the country’s next elite, and petitioned the emperor, the young and weak Guangxu who was in thrall to the dowager empress, his aunt, to reject the treaty.
The drama of this is easily missed. As a humble aspirant to the civil service, Kang had no locus standi; and his long petition, which called for the total transformation of the economic and educational systems, aimed at nothing less than a revolution from above – a Tanzimat-style shake-up of institutions. Extraordinarily, his petition reached the emperor, who read it and forwarded a copy to the dowager empress. Nothing came of it, and conservative elements at the court eventually forced Kang out of Beijing. But he had set a precedent by organizing a meeting and authoring a mass petition in a place where such things were unheard of; he had initiated nothing less than what Liang later described as the first mass movement in Chinese history.22
Kang now threw himself into propaganda and organization work, establishing study-societies for the edification of the scholar-gentry across China with names like ‘Society for the Study of National Strength’. Often helped by politically congenial local governors, these voluntary organizations set up libraries, schools and publishing projects that aimed to make the Chinese ‘people’, a hitherto unheard-of category, more responsive to the emperor, and active participants in public life.
Liang, who had laboriously made copies of the long petition submitted to the emperor, was freshly energized. Visiting Shanghai in 1890 – the same year he met Kang Youwei in Canton – Liang had come across an outline of world geography and translations of European books. His horizons expanded even more when in 1894 he acted as the Chinese secretary to a British missionary, who translated a then popular book, a booster-ish history of Europe’s progress.
The next year Liang became the secretary of the Beijing branch of a study-society, and started a newspaper with the help of private donations. When imperial censors closed it down, he went to Shanghai and started another paper in 1896 called Xiwu Bao (‘Chinese Progress’). It lasted for a mere two years. However, it was read widely for its articles on the urgency of industrialization and modern education, many of them authored by Liang himself, and it made Liang the most influential journalist in China.
Nearly two decades had passed since the press became, with al-Afghani’s help, an instrument for aspiring modernizers in the Arab world. Nearly a century before, a public sphere for debate and discussion had opened up in India. China was starting relatively late, and Liang tried to make up for lost time. In article after article, he stressed the urgency of political reform, which he held to be more important than technological change; the key to this reform was the abolition of the old imperial examinations and the establishment of a nation-wide school system that created confidently patriotic citizens for the New China. For,
If there is no moral culture in the schools, no teaching of patriotism, students will as a result only become infected with the evil ways of the lower order of Westerners and will no longer know they have their own country … The virtuous man, then, will become an employee of the foreigners in order to seek his livelihood; the degenerate man will become, further, a traitorous Chinese in order to subvert the foundations of his country … In the state of disrepair to Chinese armaments, we see one road to weakness; in the stagnation of culture, a hundred roads.23
Calling for a severe modification of existing institutions, Liang was not blind to the appeal of Confucianism, or that of the traditional structure of Chinese society and state in which the individual was loyal to his family and an elite of scholar-officials mediated between the imperial court and the population. He still hoped to rouse the scholar-gentry first to the tasks of nation-building. Addressing scholars in Hunan in 1896, he said, ‘Now you gentlemen, who wear the scholar’s robes and read the writings of the sages, must find out whose fault it is that our country has become so crippled, our race so weak, our religion so feeble.’24 In fact, he was as loyal as Kang at first to the ruling Qing order; the idea of overthrowing it, which had already energized Sun Yat-sen, did not feature in his political plans for the future. But his intellectual trajectory, though initially hewing close to Kang’s, was showing signs of divergence.
As Liang began to see, China’s old system of monarchy had become a force for the status quo and intellectual and political conformity; it was capable now of nothing more than maintaining the ruling dynasty in power. The state needed popular consent from those it ruled, and only a well-educated and politically conscious citizenry could create the kind of collective dynamism and national solidarity essential to China’s survival in the dog-eat-dog world of international geopolitics.
Never explicitly named, ideas of popular sovereignty and nationalism bubbled beneath the surface of Liang’s writings for Xiwu Bao, and his teachings at a reformist school in Hunan (where he went in 1897 after leaving Xiwu Bao over a disagreement with its manager). In the beginning, Liang phrased them through invocations of Chinese tradition: ‘Mencius says that the people are to be held in honour, the people’s affairs may not be neglected. The governments of present-day Western states come near to conformity with this principle, but China alas, is cut off from the teachings of Mencius.’25
Liang was beginning to realize that, however admirable in itself, the old Chinese order was not capable of generating the organizational and industrial power needed for survival in a ruthless international system dominated by the nation-states of the West. Though educated traditionally, he had already begun to drift away from the narrow world of Chinese scholarship an
d imperial service. And he was to move far from the ideas of his great teacher and mentor. Kang saw himself as a Confucian sage with a moral mission to rejuvenate China. With this outcome in mind, he didn’t hesitate to reformulate Confucianism itself. Liang would follow a different path for much of his life before returning to some of the ideals of his youth.
In retrospect, and especially from the outside, Confucianism seems like an abstract philosophy or a set of beliefs imposed upon the Chinese people by the state – something easily and voluntarily discarded. But its roots in China were deep and it provided by general consensus the religious and ideological underpinning of China’s political order. It upheld the principle of kingship; the only political community it envisaged was the universal empire, ignoring the city-state and the nation-state that were central to the Western tradition. And it prescribed the duties of the state as the maintenance of Confucian moral teachings, rather than political and economic expansion.
So for Kang, as for many other reformers of the late Qing period, Confucian teaching was beyond reproach. Even Liang, who would depart radically from his mentor, did not cease to see himself as an embodiment of a unique repository of cultural ideals and beliefs – one that defined China as much, if not more, than Christianity defined the West. Confucianism’s extraordinary continuity partly ensured this reverence. The social and ethical norms it prescribed for both the ruler and the ruled seemed essential to maintaining order. Peasant uprisings in the past had challenged the Confucian system and its main representatives, the scholar-gentry, but they could be explained away as revolts against Chinese rulers and imperial bureaucrats who had betrayed Confucian teachings.
Still, the new external threat posed by Western capitalism and Christianity was not explained away so easily. Indeed, as these pressures intensified by the 1850s, many imperial bureaucrats defensively put forward an extremely conservative view of Confucian belief and practice: one that preserved their moral and judicial authority. (A similar hardening of religious and ethical belief-systems was also under way in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Muslim world.)
This is why both Kang and Liang were nothing less than radical in their demand for political innovation and public participation in government. In their milieu, the mastery of Confucian classics and success in traditional exams were what brought power and respect to the literati. It was their task to uphold the dictates of Confucian morality, which emphasized a hierarchical society held together by mutual moral obligations. This elite with its highly developed sense of social responsibility, refined manners and etiquette provided the natural leaders of communities in villages and towns across China. Confucian teaching provided the content, for instance, of the civil service examination: the so-called ‘eight-legged essay’, which had decided the outcome of the examinations for centuries, was to be written on one of the themes from the canonical Confucian writings, the ‘Four Books’.
Such formalist education was clearly ill suited to the modern age, and the Confucian stress on private morality was not up to the task of creating the public-spiritedness needed for a new nation. Writing in 1895, the writer and translator Yan Fu described the differences between China and the West as stark:
China values the Three [family] Bonds most highly, while the Westerners give precedence to equality. China cherishes relatives, while Westerners esteem the worthy. China governs the realm through filial piety, while Westerners govern the realm with impartiality. China values the sovereign, while Westerners esteem the people. China prizes the one Way, while Westerners prefer diversity … In learning, Chinese praise breadth of wisdom, while Westerners rely on human strength.26
It was clear to Kang that China could survive only by absorbing some of the virtues of the West. At the same time, Confucianism had to be maintained in some form in order to preserve the political and social basis of China. In other words, Confucianism had to be reinvented in order to save it.
Similar anxieties had afflicted many of the scholar-gentry as the pressures from the West exposed the fragility of the Qing Empire, and there was a large enough audience for Kang by the end of the nineteenth century. Still, how was one to break with something so revered and rooted in Chinese soil as Confucianism? How was one to reinterpret something so symbolic of order and continuity as a philosophy of social change?
Kang was like the conservative reformers in the Muslim world for whom the verities of Islam could not be fundamentally challenged, or even like Gandhi, who saw Indian traditions as a perfectly adequate resource for a new nation. They all faced the task of having to generate a new set of values that ensured survival in the modern era while respecting time-honoured traditions – of appearing loyal to their nation while borrowing some of the secrets of the West’s progress.
Fortunately, in the intellectual free-for-all that characterized this moment of transition to new ideas of nation and people, the scope for radical interpretation of tradition was great. Confucianism, in particular, had been marked by competing schools of thought. Reviving an old controversy among Confucian scholars, Kang attacked the prevailing school of Confucianism as fake, claiming that the authentic teachings of Confucius were contained in the New Text School that had been dominant during the former Han dynasty.
Kang set out his ideas in two books, which Liang described as a ‘volcanic eruption’ and an ‘earthquake’ in the world of Confucian literati. 27 Kang, Liang later said, was the ‘Martin Luther’ of Confucianism. But Kang saw himself as entering something more than a scholastic or theological dispute with other Confucianists. As with Gandhi and the Bhagavadgt, and al-Afghani and the Koran, Kang was aiming to make political reform and mass mobilization a central concern of Confucius himself, in order to make his ideas relevant to China’s present and future and give sanction to the reformist aspiration for scientific and social progress. Thus, in Kang’s reading of the Confucian classics, emancipation of women, mass education and popular elections came to appear central concerns of the sixth-century BC sage.
Kang was to go even further, offering a utopian vision of an inevitable universal moral community, where egoism and the habit of making hierarchies would vanish, and which would realize the Confucian idea of ren (benevolence). But this would lie in the future, after the Chinese nation had pulled itself together. For now, Kang was content to emphasize the need for institutional reform within China, for the country, as he saw it, faced a challenge from the West that was not only political but also cultural and religious. The West not only endangered the Chinese state; it also threatened Confucianism. This anxiety motivated all his campaigns for a nationwide school system or a constitutional monarchy or military academies. Perhaps influenced by the exalting of Shintoism as a state religion in Japan, Kang would even propose that Confucianism be made a state religion to combat the effect of Christianity, with local shrines turned into temples to the ‘important sage’.
By the 1890s, many voluntary organizations in coastal China were propagating the religion they called ‘Confucianism’, and Kang converted many scholar-gentry to Western political values by making them seem part of Confucian traditions. The challenge he posed to the traditional political order with his arsenal of traditional political theory was to prove momentous; it was the beginning of a new radical phase in China’s history, in which all the old verities would be questioned and overturned.
Certainly there was a range of reformist ideas thrown up by the intellectual ferment of China in the 1890s. While Liang was publishing his periodical in Shanghai, Yan Fu was bringing out a popular newspaper and magazine from Tianjin, where he was president of the naval academy. Yan, who had studied in England for two years, was among the handful of Chinese to have experienced the West at first hand. His translations of Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and T. H. Huxley first introduced many Chinese thinkers, including Liang, to contemporary Western philosophers and, most importantly, to the quasi-Darwinian explanation of history as the survival of the fittest.
Like many intellectual
s in Asia, Yan awoke with a shock to the threat from Western imperialists. ‘They will enslave us and hinder the development of our spirit and body,’ he wrote in 1895. ‘The brown and black races constantly waver between life and death, why not the 400 million Yellows?’ Like many of his Asian peers, Yan Fu became a Social Darwinist, obsessed with the question of how China could accumulate enough wealth and power to survive. As he wrote, ‘Races compete with races, and form groups and states, so that these groups and states can compete with each other. The weak will be eaten by the strong, the stupid will be enslaved by the clever … Unlike other animals, humans fight with armies, rather than with teeth and claws.’28 ‘It is’, he added, ‘the struggle for existence which leads to natural selection and the survival of the fittest – and hence, within the human realm, to the greatest realization of human capacities.’29
Yan believed that the West had mastered the art of channelling individual energy and dynamism into national strength. In Britain and France people thought of themselves as active citizens of a dynamic nation-state rather than, as was the case in China, as subjects of an empire built upon old rituals. Like people in the West, Yan Fu asserted, the Chinese people had to learn to ‘live together, communicate with and rely on each other, and establish laws and institutions, rites and rituals for that purpose … We must find a way to make everyone take the nation as his own.’30 Yan’s ideas, which seemed at odds with Confucian notions of cosmic harmony, and helped introduce such words as ‘nation’ and ‘modern’ into the Chinese vocabulary in the 1890s, would not encounter much resistance among several generations of Chinese intellectuals, including, most prominently, Liang Qichao. In fact, they were quickly embraced, for they perfectly described the precarious situation China found itself in.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 17
