Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge Studies in American)

Making the Political Democratic political theory often sees collective action as the basis for noncoercive social chan...

Author: Leigh K. Jenco

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Making the Political

Democratic political theory often sees collective action as the basis for noncoercive social change, assuming that its terms and practices are always self-evident and accessible. But what if we find ourselves in situations where collective action is not immediately available, or even widely intelligible? This book examines one of the most intellectually substantive and influential Chinese thinkers of the early twentieth century, Zhang Shizhao (1881– 1973), who insisted that it is individuals who must “make the political” before social movements or self-aware political communities have materialized. Zhang draws from British liberalism, democratic theory, and late Imperial Confucianism to formulate new roles for effective individual action on personal, social, and institutional registers. In the process, he offers a vision of community that turns not on spontaneous consent or convergence on a shared goal, but on ongoing acts of exemplariness that inaugurate new, unpredictable contexts for effective personal action. leigh k. jenco is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. Her dissertation was awarded the 2008 Leo Strauss Prize for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy by the American Political Science Association.

Making the Political Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao

leigh k. jenco

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao ˜ Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521760607 © Leigh K. Jenco 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Jenco, Leigh K., 1977– Making the political : founding and action in the political theory of Zhang Shizhao / Leigh K. Jenco. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-521-76060-7 (hardback) 1. Zhang, Shizhao, 1881–1973 – Political and social views. 2. Political participation. 3. Social change. I. Title. DS777.15.Z45J46 2010 320.092 – dc22 2010006646 ISBN 978-0-521-76060-7 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To PEC and LEJ (just another part of me)

Contents

Preface Notes on the text

page ix xiv

Part I Introduction 1 Making the political Thinking from the early Republic: some methodological considerations on “comparative political theory” Founding and paradox Chapter summary Zhang’s “democracy”

2 Zhang Shizhao and his world China at the turn of the twentieth century Zhang’s life and thought The Tiger The turn to “political theory”

3 6 12 15 22 29 29 34 38 41

Part II Founding 3 The founding paradox The first paradox: mass versus elite The second paradox: constituting authority A Chinese founding narrative: the social contract Another Chinese founding narrative: “making the political lies in people” The nexus of efficacy and legitimacy Conclusion

4 “Rule by man” and “rule by law” “Rule by man” ideals in early Republican China Liang Qichao and “the cause of society” Zhang Shizhao’s “rule by law” arguments Conclusion

5 Public, private, and the political Gong and si

45 48 50 53 58 65 69 72 76 83 89 98 103 104 vii

viii

Contents Public action as political action The problem of feasibility Making the personal political A return to founding Conclusion

111 116 125 130 133

Part III Action 6 Self-awareness The “I” of The Tiger The problem of the theorist The literatus posture Self-awareness as political action Conclusion

7 The self-use of talent Using talent Talent and virtue Federalism Talent and democracy Conclusion

8 Accommodation Sameness and difference The practice of difference: revisiting the “public way” The public and its problems A balancing democracy Conclusion

Conclusion: A return to beginnings An inner–outer axis of action Toward the development of (a) Chinese political theory

Appendix A: notes on translated terms Fazhi, “rule by law” Gongdao, “the public way” Guo, “polity” Li guo, “founding” or “polity-founding” Ren, “persons” or “individuals” Renzhi, “rule by man” Tiaohe, “accommodation” Wei zheng, “to make the political” Zijue, “self-awareness”

137 139 144 147 154 159 162 164 171 176 185 190 193 195 206 215 221 223 226 227 233 237 237 239 240 241 241 242 243 246 247

Appendix B: Character list

248

Bibliography

258

Index

277

Preface

In this book I examine the work of Zhang Shizhao (1881–1973), one of the most intellectually substantive Chinese thinkers of the early twentieth century. I do so to raise a series of questions about political action, targeting in particular the equation of collective action with political action prevalent in much contemporary democratic political theory. This book is thus not an intellectual biography, but an attempt to treat Zhang seriously as the theorist of politics that he – and many of his contemporaries – claimed he was. Readers who are not interested in or familiar with Chinese thought should nevertheless find the analysis significant, because it treats of an important problem rarely considered in contemporary Euro-American political theory: how can we as individuals take effective action to change social and political environments, when no self-consciously political community exists to legitimate or execute such action? Those who are interested in Chinese political thought will also hopefully find something of value in this book. The present study is the only extended examination of this influential political thinker in any Western language; it is also the first book-length attempt by a political theorist to critically engage any member of Zhang’s transitional generation, whose work set the stage for Chinese political thinking in the twentieth century. By showcasing the often overlooked clarity and persuasive force of the arguments advanced in this era, I hope to offer a new perspective on modern Chinese intellectual developments even as I defend a compelling political theory. This dual commitment to area-based and theoretical scholarship, to me, is one of the most fruitful ways to pursue the study of non-Western thought, given the historically entrenched parochialism of political theory. Far from being in tension with the self-reflexive examination of political life that political theory takes as its disciplinary mission, taking careful account of Zhang’s work, his contemporaries’ responses to it, and subsequent Sinophone scholarship on this rich era of Chinese ix

x

Preface

thought seems to be minimal criteria for taking that thought seriously as a basis for political critique and insight. Anglophone political theorists, unfortunately, have for the most part ignored the two millennia of rich debates and traditions of interpretation that have developed in Chinese scholarship. Chinese thought is usually considered – when it is considered at all – in terms of canonical Confucian works, which emerged from the seminal but distant Warring States period more than twenty centuries ago. This book hopes to offer a more dimensional picture of Chinese thought, by situating Zhang within a series of historical and ongoing discussions in that political discourse – some of which he decisively shaped, and most of whose contents have never been translated into English. I follow him and his interlocutors to pose new questions about community-building, political agency, and the dilemmas of disagreement that I hope will be of interest to more conventional political theorists. This book has its origins in the study of modern Chinese political thought that I undertook with Professor Liu Linyuan while a student at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, PRC, before I reached graduate school and before I ever took a class in political theory. This biographical fact is important for explaining why this book has taken the shape it has. I asked my first serious questions about politics and the cross-cultural exchange of ideas while reading the work of early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers such as Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. Although later I acquired the proficiency in Western texts required of any student of political theory at an American university, I persistently returned to these transitional Chinese thinkers, whose innovative cultural syncretism offered unparalleled resources for thinking about political dilemmas and possibilities. This book by no means marks the end of my efforts to understand their thought, but I hope it begins to demonstrate, to a wider audience of scholars, the value of that thought for political theory and practice more generally. It would be impossible to thank everyone who has helped me develop and improve this project, but many people deserve special mention here. Ben Tsai and Emily Hantman first pointed me in the direction of early Republican thinkers and encouraged my reading of them as political theorists. My dissertation committee sustained faith in my work even when my own waned, and I learned from each member’s own special strengths. Lisa Wedeen’s careful attention to detail and argument have immeasurably improved not only the dissertation but also

Preface

xi

my analytic skills. Guy Alitto’s engagements with Chinese-language scholarship are a direct inspiration for my own, and much of what I know about Chinese history I learned from him. Jacob Levy provided emotional and professional support well beyond even the supervisor’s call of duty. My original chair, Iris Young, was always ready to pose a challenge to lazy thinking or undeveloped arguments. She passed away in the middle of my writing the dissertation, but I hope that she would approve of those chapters that she never got to read. Others who very generously read the entire project as it took shape include Chang Hao, who offered extremely sympathetic and insightful suggestions for revision. I hope this book lives up to those suggestions, as well as to the high standards Prof. Chang has set in his own work – which in my view offers some of the best syntheses of Chinese intellectual history with political theory available in any language. Reader reports from Peter Zarrow and Steve Angle, as well as two other anonymous readers, were unusually careful, thoughtful, and useful, pointing out not only where to clarify or qualify my arguments but also where to find resources for addressing these problems. While in Taiwan, Huang Ko-wu, Shen Songqiao, and Wang Fansen gave generously of their time to discuss political theory and Zhang Shizhao with me; so too did Lam Kaiyin in Hong Kong. Finally, my undergraduate mentor at Bard College, Kris Feder, deserves mention here for teaching me how to handle a large research project without going totally crazy, and for showing me the connection between clear writing and clear thinking. My teachers at the International Chinese Language Program in Taipei, Taiwan, had a tremendous impact on more than my Chinese. Wu Zhicheng and Chen Yizhen engaged my research materials with diligence and insight. Chou Changjen and Yang Ningyuan have probably had more influence on my reading of Zhang and Chinese thought than anyone else, and I remain eternally grateful to them for sharing with me their intelligence, humor, and passion for Chinese thought. Once I returned to the US, Libby Anker, Perry Caldwell, Jen London, and Emily Nacol were willing to read large parts of my manuscript, and I owe much to their incisive comments. Sharon Krause offered encouragement at a particularly pessimistic time. In addition to the above names, many other people gave me particularly helpful advice, whether by commenting on specific chapters or by engaging me in inspiring conversation. They include: Brooke

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Ackerly, Robert Adcock, Mike Aronson, Ewa Atanassow, Daniel Bell, Ben Berger, Mark Bevir, Corey Brettschneider, Chris Buck, Sam Chambers, Anne Chao, Ann Colmo, Roxanne Euben, Russell Arben Fox, Farah Godrej, Mary Alice Haddad, Steve Halsey, Matt Hoffman, Jeff Huang, Sara Jordan, Alison Kaufman, Alisa Kessel, Philip Kuhn, Loy Hui-chieh, Nancy Luxon, Mara Marin, Patchen Markell, Thomas Metzger, Viren Murthy, Melissa Orlie, Liz Perry, Chris Planer, Michael Puett, Vera Schwarcz, Joe Soss, Tan Sor-hoon, Nathan Tarcov, Tu Wei-ming, and Tim Weston. Numerous audiences at Wesleyan University, Harvard University, Brown University, George Washington University, University of California–Berkeley, University of Wisconsin– Madison, University of San Francisco, National University of Singapore, University of Toronto, Academia Sinica, and at Association for Asian Studies, and American Political Science Association annual conferences, as well as the University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop, have given helpful feedback on many drafts of these chapters. I have taken much if not all of their advice, and, of course, any mistakes or infelicities that remain in this book are entirely my own. The research and writing of this book were made possible by several Humane Studies Fellowships during the years 2000 to 2003 and 2005 to 2006, as well as a Summer Research Fellowship in 2006, from the Institute of Humane Studies. I wish to thank Elaine Hawley, Marty Zupan and all at IHS for their financial and intellectual support. A Blakemore-Friedman Foundation Grant sponsored my language study in Taiwan from 2003 to 2005, and a William Rainey Harper Dissertation–Year Fellowship from the University of Chicago supported my final stage of dissertation writing in 2006 and 2007. A postdoctoral research fellowship at the Brown University Political Theory Project in 2007 and 2008 gave me the precious gift of time to turn the dissertation into a book manuscript, for which I would like to thank the Project’s director, John Tomasi. Finally, I would like to thank John Haslam, Carrie Parkinson, Rosina Di Marzo, and the ever-patient John Gaunt at Cambridge University Press. A different version of Chapter 4 originally appeared as “‘Rule by Man’ and ‘Rule by Law’ in Early Republican China: Contributions to a Theoretical Debate,” in Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 1 (February 2010), and I thank Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint it here. Large portions of Chapter 6 were originally published as “Theorists and Actors: Zhang Shizhao on ‘Self-Awareness’ as

Preface

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Political Action,” in Political Theory 38 (April 2008), for which thanks are due to Sage Publications for permission to reprint. Finally, my family has for many, many years put up with my eccentricities and are largely responsible for my continual well-being. My parents have always encouraged my academic pursuits, even when I moved away to a distant foreign country. My sister Lauren and my husband Perry are my two sources of all that I find good in the world, and I would like to dedicate this book to them.

Notes on the text

In this book I use the Hanyu pinyin system to romanize Chinese names and words, except in the case of proper names better known to Anglophone readers in a different form (e.g. Sun Yat-sen instead of Sun Zhongshan). The appendices to this book provide a list of traditional characters for terms and proper names, as well as more information about my translation of key terms and phrases. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Zhang’s work are taken from Zhang Shizhao quanji (The Collected Works of Zhang Shizhao) (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2000), Volume 3, which I cite as ZQJ in the text. I refer to other volumes by adding a Roman numeral to the citation (e.g. ZQJ IV indicates the Quanji, Volume 4). Zhang wrote in an era known as the “Republican” period, which refers to the post-dynastic constitutional republic of early to midtwentieth-century China. All capitalized references to “Republican” mean the historical era or particular regime established in 1911, and all lower-cased references to “republican” mean the non-monarchical regime type. Finally, all translations from the Chinese, including those from secondary sources, are my own unless otherwise noted.

xiv

part i

Introduction

1

Making the political

How can our shared, humanly created environment be effectively transformed – to make it better, less confining, more tractable to our control? Is it even possible to change, in a spontaneous and noncoerced way, the social and political world we inhabit? If we are unwilling to accept coercive impositions by the state or the powers that be, it seems that only public or collective action has such a capacity. After all, when we as individuals act for social change, we usually do so within the parameters of an already existing set of institutional arrangements, histories, and social understandings, created and animated largely through the work of others. Innovation is an extension of these socially constituted practices, whose contradictions, gaps, or inadequacies engender change yet persist in constraining it. Hanna Pitkin echoes the beliefs of many when she notes that “for most of us . . . private, isolated acts will make little difference” for public life unless taken in concert with others.1 Such intuitions find their most prominent institutionalization in democratic regimes, which for both normative and practical reasons facilitate collective as opposed to bureaucratic, dictatorial, or unilateral action. Participatory acts in public arenas – such as voting, collective protest, the exercise of and respect for free expression – coordinate a plurality of individual actions and authorize collective interventions in shared space. But how, then, do new political movements get off the ground, from the ground? Can ordinary individuals act for change, even if no one has enough already in common to make those actions effective or legitimate? These are not simply academic considerations. Knowing what role individuals can play in collective transformation is crucial for those many instances where collective action is simply not forthcoming, or where social movements have not yet materialized. In many ways, this dilemma is reducible to that of political founding, which asks how we 1

Pitkin, “Justice,” 344.

3

4


can take specifically political action if no political community has yet emerged – indeed, if no “we” yet exists even to wonder about the question. Both cases seem to require the intervention of an innovator, a founding father (or mother) who can call into being the community that underwrites political actions as much as political regimes. Yet these interventions are paradoxical – because “those who get together to constitute a new government are themselves unconstitutional.”2 The entire community must somehow authorize its own being before any individual or small group of individuals can act upon, through, or in it – even as it is surely the community and its practices that make available all spaces for meaningful action. Legitimacy is not the only paradox here, however. Consider those cases where the very communities that foster and make possible necessary political practices may be eroding, or where those persons inscribed as “citizens” in the law nevertheless lack the social practices, mutual recognition, and vocabulary that make “citizenship” meaningful. If democracy or liberalism or any other regime is simply not working – what then? Is top-down imposition the only alternative? This more difficult question of social change was faced by several generations of reformers in China around the turn of the twentieth century. For these radical thinkers, democracy and other forms of “Western” government held the promise of modernizing the imperial state, enlivening its masses, and making those in power accountable to those they governed – but fulfilling such a promise required that they succeed in building a new kind of regime with no precedent in Chinese history. China at that time was still a monarchy, ruled from the center by the emperor and his legions of trained bureaucrats. The emperor certainly enjoyed the putative authority to impose his sovereign will on the Chinese people, but to the surprise of many reformers, imperial command was not enough to make these Western institutions work. A republican convention and the nominal establishment of a constitutional order after the emperor was deposed in 1911 were equally ineffective, even as China grew weak in the face of foreign incursion, domestic unrest, and national debt. At this time of unprecedented crisis, one influential thinker by the name of Zhang Shizhao (1881–1973) explored the possibility that individual action may be capable of bringing about a democratic regime 2

Arendt, On Revolution, 176.


5

where one does not exist, and has never existed. He does not do so, however, by presuming that individuals are somehow ontologically prior to their political communities, that they can mimic benevolent dictators and force their view on others, or that they can act in an autonomous and unencumbered way. Instead, he reinterprets the sites and actions of political founding (li guo). For Zhang, founding does not mean the imposition of a sovereign will on an abject people, but the gradual reorientation of personal practices and outlooks toward unprecedented, society-wide ways of living and governing. This reformulation throws light not only on founding acts, but on all acts of everyday innovation that require, even as they call into being, an entire community to ensure their eventual execution. Theorizing within a tradition and to an audience that did not produce democratic practices like those in contemporary Britain and America, Zhang’s task extends beyond simply identifying how a people (min) can call into being its government (zheng).3 Zhang also tries to explain how the individual self (ji or wo) can perform both the constituting of the people and the constituting of the government – indeed, must perform it, given the absence of widespread agreement and of shared democratic norms. Zhang’s efforts do not deny the efficacy and importance of collective action; they simply draw attention to the steps that take place before individual visions of change may culminate in collective support – whether as a means of invigorating public space, changing shared environments, or building institutions where none existed before. In other words, these steps do not assume but actually “make the political” (wei zheng), as Zhang phrases it,4 under conditions that are deeply fragmented and (to many of Zhang’s readers) completely hopeless. He must explain to his dispirited contemporaries how the action of individuals can be effective in founding a new self-ruling regime – despite the fact that no obvious community existed in China at that time to underwrite the novel Western practice of democratic citizenship. In the mature democracies of northern Europe and North America, such problems are rarely discussed as theoretical issues because so many of the necessary institutions and shared practices of democracy 3 4

This is the definition of constitutional founding offered by Arendt, On Revolution, 145. See Appendix A for detailed discussions of how I translate this and other key terms in Zhang’s work.

6


are already there. They have existed, in Edmund Burke’s words, since “time out of mind.” Nothing as dramatic as founding is necessary, because peaceful, incremental changes spring satisfactorily enough from already existing or historically accessible practices and institutions. In these societies, it is easy to see political innovations as circular, as many recent political theorists have: regimes inflect the very citizens that create them, novel actions interpellate the very actors that initiate them.5 The same cannot be said, however, for many other parts of the world – including former European colonies whose people often express a desire for democracy, but whose governments remain unable or unwilling to implement it. Indeed, I would argue the same cannot be said for any instance of innovation under conditions of fragmentation, social opposition, or even widespread disbelief in its possibility. Zhang’s work, then, offers a rare look at the not-so-rare problem of how we as individuals innovate politically, before a critical mass of persons has coalesced around a shared goal or developed awareness of themselves as a community capable of taking action. In the process of explaining what such innovation entails and what it can and cannot assume, Zhang’s work highlights important blindnesses in many accounts of political agency offered both by his peers and by contemporary political theorists. More importantly, he also offers a constructive path forward for political action that aims for the not-yet without being unduly constrained by the already existing. He suggests ways for individuals to act politically, before the political domains that foster such actions are conceptually present in the minds of those who constitute them.

Thinking from the early Republic: some methodological considerations on “comparative political theory” Zhang put forward this vision for diffuse and incremental change at a time when Chinese politics was growing increasingly and intractably radical. In his influential political journal The Tiger ( Jiayin zazhi), Zhang drew on his exceptional conversance with both British political theory and the Chinese intellectual tradition to defend China’s nascent republican order. More importantly, he produced novel explanations 5

See, e.g., Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation”; Olson, “Paradoxes”; Frank, Democracy of Distinction.


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for the theoretical and personal, as well as political, advancements required for a functional self-ruling polity. Yet Zhang’s ideological dissonance with contemporary and later twentieth-century Chinese politics has made him difficult to fit into any teleology for modern Chinese intellectual history, which often focuses on explaining the rise of revolutionary communism and ignores “failed” attempts to advance moderate reform. Perhaps for this reason, much post-1949 secondary literature on modern China has neglected Zhang – yet this marked absence is belied by his central presence in earlier accounts of political thought and history.6 Revised projections of China’s historical path are lending Zhang’s thought new relevance, however. As “socialism with Chinese characteristics” replaces Maoist visions of ongoing revolution, the reform movements of the late Qing and early Republican periods (dating roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to 1919) – once seen as distracting way stations on China’s march to communism – are now seen to share significant continuities with the dilemmas of the present.7 With this rethinking of history has come a new valuation of the role played by moderate reformers such as Zhang in China’s modernization process.8 His calls for moderate constitutionalism, his obvious importance in influencing early twentieth-century political debate, and his skillful blending of Western and Chinese political theories has recently enjoyed a considerable revival among Sinophone scholars, especially since the publication of his ten-volume Collected Works (Zhang Shizhao quanji) in the year 2000.9 This book, the first extended study of Zhang Shizhao in any Western language, continues this ongoing reflection on Zhang’s importance by demonstrating the relevance of his thought to both modern and contemporary debates on democracy and political action. It might seem odd to dedicate an entire book to the work of someone so unfamiliar to Anglophone audiences, but there are multiple good reasons for 6

7 8 9

Chang Naide, for example, devotes almost an entire chapter of his less than two-hundred page comprehensive overview of the entire history of Chinese thought, Zhongguo sixiang xiao shi, to Zhang Shizhao and The Tiger. See the next chapter for more discussion of Zhang’s life and influence. Wang, “Zonglun”; Karl and Zarrow, Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period. E.g., Huang, Yi ge bei fangqi de xuanze; Gao, Tiaoshi de zhihui, 2–6. Bai, Zhang Shizhao zhuan; Guo, Kuanrong yu tuoxie; Zou, Zhang Shizhao shehui zhengzhi sixiang.

8


doing so besides Zhang’s obvious influence on past and contemporary Chinese thought. Most centrally, Zhang’s work is fundamentally concerned with articulating and answering fundamental questions about the nature of political life, and thus with making defensible claims that concern – in addition to the carefully argued specifics of his reform program – the causal mechanisms of social change and the relation of those mechanisms to the kind of politics he advocated. This means that he is a political theorist whose work offers insight into dilemmas common to a wide variety of societies – not only those struggling to establish permanent liberal-democratic institutions, such as in Thailand and East Timor, but also those in the contemporary West who have forgotten the challenges of this process.10 His outstanding conversance with multiple thought traditions, including classical and imperial Chinese philosophy as well as British and European thought, equips him to undertake this challenge with insight and sensitivity. Indeed, given the current focus of political and social theory on transcultural learning in an age of globalization, Zhang’s work offers unusually rich theoretical resources for negotiating this terrain. For these reasons, the point of this book is not really to compare Zhang’s work with that of particular Western thinkers, so much as to explore and assess the questions Zhang and his interlocutors articulate. I do this by tying these questions to ongoing, sometimes millennia-old Chinese debates, such as those concerning the role of institutions in political transformation, as well as to past and present Euro-American discussions that interrogate or amplify Zhang’s conclusions, such as recent discussions about the implications for democratic politics of founding and innovation. Acutely sensitive to Roxanne Euben’s insight that all theory is grounded in some form of comparison, however, I acknowledge those implicit comparisons on which any translator of languages and ideas must draw in order to render her words and arguments meaningful. My own representation of Zhang’s arguments in English, I realize, are part of what “constitute[s] the very conditions of intelligibility across difference.”11 This process of translation is at the same time a process of interpellation and transformation, leading 10

11

On the paradoxes of constitutional founding in Southeast Asian states that cannot presuppose liberal-democratic institutions, see Ramraj, “The Emergency Powers Paradox.” Euben, Journeys, 16.


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many comparative political theorists to characterize it as a “conversation” or “dialogue” in which differently situated interlocutors address each others as equals rather than as radical “others.”12 Despite this obvious debt to comparative method, here and in other work I resist the construction of a “comparative” political theory. My resistance stems mainly from the tendency of comparison to preclude the development (if not the examination) of arguments and viewpoints from outside those texts and debates that have marked Euro-American discourse in political theory for the past century. Comparison tends to draw attention only to those aspects of other thought traditions that exhibit obvious resonance with Western categories, rendering non-Western ideas, thinkers, and traditions interesting as case studies but not themselves the domain of theorizing. The problem that troubles me here is not the often-noted one in which the construction of markers of difference and sameness enables a culturally imperialistic project. Much of comparative political theory takes such an insight to be a starting point, and its practitioners have already elaborated quite sophisticated theoretical models to ward off or avoid such a possibility. I am more concerned that the acknowledgment of inevitable cultural embeddedness – encouraged in the wake of Orientalist agendas that seek to exploit rather than understand the cultural “Other” – authorizes attempts at cross-cultural borrowing much less radical than they can be. Postcolonial scholars and the comparative political theorists influenced by them present Western traditions as inevitable aspects of all theorizing, in the process suppressing or ignoring the indigenous traditions of inquiry that have motivated political thinking in diverse places and times.13 The presumption is that although we can, through whatever model of interaction, come to understand insiders’ points of view, those of us situated on the “outside” are unable to let the foundational premises of “insiders” fully persuade us. The best we can do is recognize that and how particular arguments make sense for the insiders making them, or perhaps work toward a dialogically mediated perspective in which the mutually intelligible insights of both sides are combined. In no case can these so-called insider perspectives ever serve

12 13

E.g., Euben, Enemy in the Mirror; Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism. E.g., Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Euben, Enemy in the Mirror. I discuss this critique in more detail in Jenco, “What Does Heaven Ever Say?”

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as building blocks for a political theory along lines that draw more from “them” than from “us.” Yet if we in American and European academic settings wish to make our thinking about politics less Eurocentric and more capable of comprehending the variety of political experiences across the globe, simply recognizing each other as equals offers few constructive guidelines; staging a unilaterally initiated “conversation” between two situated interlocutors only reinforces the very boundaries that cross-cultural research has the potential to broach so fruitfully. It seems to me that the best way to affirm the global diffusion of political theorizing is to act upon it: to develop from alternative traditions and in alternative modes new possibilities for thinking critically about politics. That way, we do not see political theory as an activity that coheres on the basis of “shared dilemmas and questions”14 – which, not surprisingly, are usually identified as those that are already articulated within the “Western canon” – but as an enterprise designed to acquire new conceptual and practical resources which can themselves prompt entirely unanticipated questions and answers. Keeping the focus on Zhang and his interlocutors, then, helps me bring to light certain contemporary Chinese debates that hold meaning for broader audiences, rather than returning always to parochial Western ones. My attempt somewhat resembles the application to political theory of what historian Alexander Woodside calls “appropriating Occidentialism,” which encourages West-based historians to examine Western history self-reflexively through the eyes of non-Westerners, rather than only the other way around. Yet even Woodside’s call simply asks us to render the practice of history “appropriate to the study of the huge storehouse of Chinese historical experiences,”15 much as Euben suggests that we “introduce non-Western perspectives into familiar debates about living together.”16 The goal for both remains merely to craft a theory adequate to address a wider set of evidence. In contrast, my method hopes to view and select evidence through the lens of a different theory, and from there rethink the project at hand in a variety of new settings. 14 15 16

Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 10; see also Salkever and Nylan, “Comparative Political Philosophy.” Woodside, “Reconciling the Chinese and Western Theory Worlds,” 121. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 9.


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Obviously, any reader brings her own prejudices to the texts she analyzes, and my reading of Zhang’s work is undoubtedly influenced by personal experience. But claiming that such prejudices inhibit a successful reconstruction of the arguments Zhang put forward is to court a strange double standard about the capacity of political theorists to learn anything from the texts they study. That is, the ability of political theorists to draw out compelling arguments from historically situated canonical texts remains – pace Quentin Skinner – a contested but often utilized conclusion of the subfield. That Zhang is Chinese and I am not has little to do with my own ability to extract from his work sophisticated theoretical arguments, given adequate grounding in the language and discourse of that time and place.17 It may be possible to formulate an argument that cultural versus historical differences demand alternative modes of engagement, but until that time I will press forward on the assumption that, given proper training, the political thinking of early Republican China is as accessible to me as is that of any other time and place, whether ancient Athens or Florentine Italy. In any case, the interpretive insights to be gained by reading Zhang as an agent of theory and not simply of history are considerable enough to broach such risks. While historians have exhaustively documented the intellectual debates of the Republican era, they rarely consider the simple fact that these thinkers were, in Chang Hao’s words, “speaking both to the historical and to the existential situations.”18 Seeing them only as historical actors cannot adequately comprehend the nature of persistent dilemmas that confronted them on the level of theory. In fact, taking Zhang seriously as a theoretical, and not merely historical, agent allows me to analyze in a deeper way than otherwise possible the major issues that continue to animate modern Chinese political thought and practice – including the relationship of intellectuals to the masses, the role of government in social transformation, and the articulation of political action and authority in a post-dynastic Confucian system. 17

18

What constitutes “adequate” grounding is, of course, a point of debate, but this remains as true for the interpretation of canonical Western texts as it does for interpretation across perceived cultural boundaries. My point is simply that if we accept the possibility of such historical reconstruction given temporal distance, we should have no problem accepting the possibility of cultural reconstruction given spatial distance. I am indebted to Mark Bevir for clarifying this similarity for me. Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis, 8.

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In this book, I therefore begin – though I do not end – with a set of theoretical problems articulated by Zhang and his fellow intellectuals in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, insisting always that their concerns reach beyond their immediate historical and cultural contexts even as their and my arguments draw important resources from them. In other words, I do not wish to contribute to Western debates by critiquing them from “the outside,” so much as to sustain an argument from Chinese thought, with implications for contemporary Chinese as much as Western concerns.

Founding and paradox Zhang was not the only person in China at the time to realize that community creation was the first order of business for any successful reform, but he was among the few to recognize the close relationship of self-aware communities with specifically political institutions. Political education – not only for the largely illiterate Chinese masses but also for the educated elites who equally lacked any real experience of governing democratically – was a primary concern of most reformers in the years following the Qing deposal in 1911. Liang Qichao (1873– 1929), one of the most influential intellectuals and social activists in modern China, advocated mass education campaigns. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), leader of the revolutionary forces that toppled the Qing dynasty, demanded political tutelage under party leadership. Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), elected president of the newly declared Republic, recommended (and after only a short term in office, attempted to install) benevolent dictatorship. Zhang dismissed these proposed solutions as not only elitist, and therefore threats to both the practice and foundation of democracy, but also ineffective. After spending the early years of his public career promoting liberal institutions – like constitutions, parliaments, and civil liberties – that persistently failed to materialize, Zhang came to identify the problem of founding as a problem of the right people: “As I see it, making the political lies in people; those people exist and the political flourishes” (ZQJ 5). Although here Zhang uses the word for “persons” (ren) rather than for “the people” in the sense of masses (min or pingmin), he does not expect elites alone to do this work – even if, by writing in classical rather than vernacular Chinese, they were the audience he primarily addressed. To Zhang, political


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regimes meant nothing without the commitment of the people who both founded and sustained them; as later chapters will demonstrate, this included people at all levels of society, and of all degrees of talent (see, e.g., ZQJ 307). A study abroad in England convinced him, in fact, that these specific, diffuse capacities of everyone in society could be encouraged by the proper institutions, which he argued did matter to the kinds of action people can and will take, and to how those actions affect other members of the political community (ZQJ 430). With these observations, Zhang pictures the relationship between persons and laws as circular, but this circularity only underscores the indeterminacy of beginning: where do these people who can found and sustain democratic regimes come from? Social-contract theorists, such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, often paradoxically hold that the necessary character traits – civic involvement, participatory capacity – exist prior to membership in a political community (as in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government), or can be instilled by a benevolent lawgiver (as in Rousseau’s On the Social Contract).19 Recently, however, a variety of democratic theorists – including Hannah Arendt, William Connolly, Sheldon Wolin, Bonnie Honig, and Hanna Pitkin – have noted the rich, mutually constitutive relationship between the individual and the community to remind us that no demiurgic founder can definitively reshape the face of society or politics. It is only the political community itself, in a series of incremental, unpredictable steps, that can noncoercively effect positive social and political transformation. In this view, neither persons nor laws are ontologically or historically prior to each other. In Bonnie Honig’s words, the founding “quandary of chicken-and-egg (which comes first, good people or good law?) takes off and attaches to democratic politics more generally.” As she points out, Every day, after all, new citizens are born, and still others emigrate into established regimes. Every day, already socialized citizens mistake, depart from, or simply differ about the commitments of democratic citizenship. Every day, democracies resocialize, capture, or reinterpellate citizens into 19

More recently, John Rawls, in Political Liberalism, has appealed to Kantian universal reason to make foundational decisions about the obligations and goals of political membership before the community is even formed – overtly displacing the liberal rights and democratic decision-making the polity is meant to champion.

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their political institutions and culture in ways those citizens do not freely will, nor could they.20

This process of ongoing, mutual constitution renders founding acts merely symbolic: no act, however novel, is not already somehow conditioned by the community in which it must take place. A founder may “remain the subject, the ‘hero,’ of the story,” but he or she is never “unequivocally . . . the author of its eventual outcome.”21 This is because it is assumed that the world – any world – into which a founding act is inserted necessarily comprises an “always-already” existing community, that executes, interprets, and inflects action taken to change it.22 Foundings – and political innovation in general – are better described as interventions that contribute to, but do not masterfully control, the inauguration of new political movements, ideas, and conditions. These readings of founding offer crucial insights into the nature of action in democratic regimes, explaining that the novelty of founding is not a characteristic exclusive to it. Broadly diffuse interventions in everyday political life, by ordinary citizens, inaugurate new lines of action for the entire community, and for that reason are analogous in both form and scope to initial, community-establishing acts. But it is not clear that all founding acts are simply interventions in some existing set of arrangements – what Hanna Pitkin, following Hannah Arendt, has called the “always-already” available resources for inaugurating and sustaining action in public.23 Zhang’s dilemma – indeed, the dilemma of many democratizing societies all over the world – demonstrates that this assumption is not universally applicable. The China of Zhang’s time did have some functional social organizations, including trade guilds, native-place associations, and secret societies. Yet Chinese society did not possess a cache of relevant sentiment that was already available for invocation by the theorist or activist. Zhang’s question remains: how may individuals and small groups effectively build a political regime or set of institutions, when that task demands the coordination of an entire society around a particular set of norms that are not yet shared, or even widely understood? Only in mature selfruling polities can political self-sufficiency be endowed by an already 20 21 22

Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation,” 3. Arendt, The Human Condition, 185. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 282. 23 Ibid.


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existing historical acceptance of the regime, and only from the perspective of Euro-Atlantic political experience can such a view ever make sense. Founding on this account loses the paradoxical edge that made it useful as a model for sustaining action in the first place, and becomes simply another instance in which Western political theory solves problems only for itself. Zhang’s founding narrative turns instead to investigating how the internal struggle of individuals can be influenced by external environments without being reduced to them, paying special attention to the incremental but nevertheless necessary steps that must be taken before collective action around a shared goal is even possible. In reformulating the question of founding, Zhang does not assume the imminent arrival of a benevolent lawgiver, the possibility of spontaneous coalescence, or the reality of an already existing community. He asks, rather, how may individuals act efficaciously and noncoercively, before collective action with others on however minimal a shared goal is likely or possible? He theorizes multiple steps in this bootstrapping process – from self-awareness, to local engagement of one’s talents, to intersubjective negotiation or “accommodation” – each of which turns on resonance and exemplariness rather than force or persuasion as its central mechanism of change. Part of what makes this approach to social transformation credible is the very social embeddedness of individuals: existing within social and familial (if not political) frameworks, the work of singular actors can build to dramatic effect simply by influencing those closest to them. Zhang’s dilemma, however, is precisely that these already existing relationships do not transparently and self-evidently translate into the kinds of political practice that make democratic, constitutional government possible. The chapters that follow explain how Zhang elaborates this vision of founding in terms of meaningful practice, how he extends the logic of his founding to apply to acts that sustain as much as inaugurate, and how he reads interpersonal accommodation of differences as integral to building a coherent yet internally diverse polity.

Chapter summary Zhang confronts his task of founding by negotiating a series of paradoxes: which comes first, people committed to self-rule or the institutions that make self-rule possible? Why was elite-led, top-down reform

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not effective in fostering democratic practice among China’s masses – and what was the alternative? How can taking political action make sense as “political” before the communities that could underwrite or legitimate such action exist? Part I of this book, comprising this chapter and the next, provides the historical and theoretical context that for Zhang brought these questions to the fore. Chapter 2 delves into the specific influences and dilemmas that shaped Zhang’s intellectual trajectory, singling out his extensive work in his political journal The Tiger for its historical significance as well as it unusual intellectual heft. In that chapter I also explain why Zhang believed careful attention to “theory” (lilun) could help to solve the practical dilemmas China faced. I divide my subsequent discussion of Zhang’s political theory into two parts that make up the remaining sections of this book. Part II, “Founding,” explores the key concepts and debates that mediate Zhang’s thoughts on how to establish a self-ruling community. These chapters construct a conceptual frame through which the specific practices examined in Part III, “Action,” can be construed as both political and effective given these founding dilemmas. Chapter 3, “The founding paradox,” begins Part II. There I show how Zhang worked to resolve the paradoxes of founding by drawing on a powerful repository of both Chinese and Western resources. Bringing Rousseau’s Social Contract to bear on the story of political origins in the neo-Confucian text Doctrine of the Mean, Zhang suggests that an ongoing process of gradually increasing resonance, rather than a moment of instantaneous consent, offers a more realistic but equally noncoercive model for political founding. Zhang’s paradoxical interventions here are largely framed by an ongoing, two-millenniaold Chinese debate over institution-based (fazhi) versus person-based (renzhi) reform, which I analyze in detail in Chapter 4, “Rule by man and rule by law.” Although Zhang is best known – both among his contemporaries and among modern-day Chinese scholars – for being an uncompromising advocate of “rule by law,” I argue that he in fact occupies a more ambivalent position that reflects the nuances of his founding narrative. In imperial times, “rule by man” indicated a faith that the virtuousness of the persons in power – the emperor and the scholar-officials or “literati” (shi) that ran his bureaucracy – determined the quality of the government. In the tentatively democratic discourses that circulated in the early Republic, rule by man came to be identified with mass education campaigns designed to outfit the


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new putative rulers of China – not only the non-officeholding gentry, but also the largely illiterate peasantry – with virtues appropriate to their station. For reformers like Liang Qichao and later thinkers of the radical, modernization-focused May Fourth Movement, rule by man specifically required action in “social” (shehui) and “cultural” (wenhua) spheres and disavowed the efficacy of institutional or “political” (zhengzhi) reform – the position associated with rule by law. Zhang in general rejects these rule-by-man interpretations and upholds rule by law, at least insofar as he affirms the necessity for political action. His reasons for doing so, however, are less related to a commitment to certain liberal institutions than they are to a deep distrust of the top-down transformative power rule-by-man rubrics authorized, and the stark binary of society versus politics that underlay them. Zhang in fact shares with rule-by-man theorists a belief in the decisive role played by the mental and moral orientations of individuals in transforming the socio-political environment, even as he extends this logic to include institutional as well as moral transformations. This belief in the efficacious political potency of individuals made Zhang skeptical of a pure reliance on institutional changes to achieve political reform, even as it suggested other, noncoercive ways in which a constitutional, self-ruling republic could be brought about. Zhang depicts “men” (or, better, “persons”) and “laws” as complementary components of republic-building; his “political talk” (zhengtan) simply points out that judicious reliance on institutions offers a path for change that need not presuppose values that are already present on a wide scale. As a noncoercive model for social change, however, Zhang’s reconstructed rule-by-man position commits him to explaining how such personal and community-wide transformations can take place without resort to top-down imposition. If the outcome is to be more spontaneous and ground-up than shaped by external controls, how can differences of opinion, outlook, and background be effectively legitimated? How can the conflicts between differently oriented individuals be adjudicated in a way that will construct, rather than subvert, the cohesiveness of a political community? To his audience trained in the Confucian tradition, Zhang must also explain how and in what ways the morality of an act is related to its efficacy. Can “virtue” admit of plural but equally resonant interpretations, and if so, what are the implications for politics of these plural notions of the good? If Zhang means to place the capacity for political action within reach of every

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citizen, contemporary understandings of political action and political actors would have to change. That change specifically involves how – and in what realms – those actors identify themselves and their actions as “political.” In Chapter 5, “Public, private, and the political,” I point out that Zhang’s unusual combination of individuals acting in diverse, politically significant ways challenges a key distinction that for a diverse range of political theories maintains the integrity of the “political realm”: the public-private binary. I argue that Zhang’s notion of “political,” rather than ascribing political meaning to an act on the basis of where or with whom it is performed, is better understood as a deliberate intervention in a shared fate, or, differently stated, as an attempt to shape social circumstances (shi) and environments (jing) that are not automatically self-regulating. Comparing his work to a wide variety of theorists of public action, including Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, as well as his own contemporary, Liang Qichao, I show that Zhang shares their basic understanding of and goals for political action. He disagrees with them, however, about the need – or availability – of collective action to constitute it. It is in fact precisely because individual actions comprise necessary everyday elements of an emergent, shared life that they play such formative roles, even if they can never decisively shape the community in one direction rather than another. By drawing attention to the incremental and everyday processes of polity-building in places of all kinds, Zhang alerts us to further locations for political action that the categories of public and private obscure, and to the activities they categorically constrain by deeming them too limited in effect. Part III of this book, “Action,” details those specific political practices Zhang believes will motivate this emergent, sustainable polity. The first and most foundational of those practices is what Zhang calls “self-awareness” or zijue, the eponymous topic of Chapter 6. By “self-awareness,” Zhang means the realization by individuals that their actions and mental orientations can constitute the foundation for wider socio-political change. Combined with Zhang’s reconstructed rule-byman position, self-awareness does not elide intersubjective elements or impositions of political forms, but it does frame political action in a way that is not always concerned to build majorities or gather allies to one’s cause. I defend this model of singular personal orientation against the argument – made most explicitly by Hanna Pitkin, and indirectly by Liang Qichao – that only action in concert can reflect


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the common purpose required for non-tyrannical, legitimate change to shared environments. Drawing attention to the strong resemblances between Zhang’s idea of self-awareness and the practices of moral and political mediation that constituted political authority under the Chinese empire, I argue that Zhang pictures the individual citizen as a pivot around which turn the materially efficacious power his internal moral effort partly calls into being (that of the polity acting together) and the moral legitimacy of democratic rule. Where Pitkin demands that such self-aware “theorists” become democratic actors by joining together in common purpose with others, Zhang urges those actors who have always had a significant but unrecognized impact on Chinese political life – farmers, rebels, merchants, women – to become “theorists” by assuming their position at the crux of this fraught triangle of legitimation. The first step in taking political action for Zhang, then, consists not in bridging the gaps between oneself and others for the purposes of concerted action, but in overcoming the disparity between the world one envisions internally and the reality one faces externally. This kind of awareness of the self may be needed precisely when politics itself has failed – that is, has failed not in terms of accomplishing some objective, but failed absolutely – though this does not discount its political characteristics. Self-awareness is the first of Zhang’s explicit strategies to reorient the focus of political activity away from “action in concert” toward disparate – though cumulative – efforts to render shared problems incrementally and personally tractable, in ways that complement or supplant deliberately coordinated public control. The internal retooling that begins with self-awareness takes concrete shape in the “self-use of talent” (ziyong cai), the subject of Chapter 7, and extends farther outward to include intersubjective understanding and mutual interpretation with the “accommodation” (tiaohe) of difference, which I discuss in Chapter 8. Identifying the “foundation” (ben) of specifically democratic government in the self-use of talent, Zhang overtly repudiates traditional forms of governance in which the imperial center exercised political control through the management and training of personnel. Whereas “virtue” (de), the term more commonly a focus of Chinese political reform, has been historically linked to a discernible and unitary idea of the good, talent manifest outside imperially sanctioned outlets had long been associated with subversive cunning – especially on the part of females. The self-use of talent, then,

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unmoors talent from the virtues that normalized its deployment, transforming talent into an emblem of unpredictability and nonconformity. Like self-awareness, the self-use of talent signals Zhang’s innovative refurbishment of imperial modes of rule for democratic purposes. The decisions required to “use one’s talent” do not involve negotiating the choices of others, but overcoming the tension generated by one’s inner moral directive, on the one hand, and the external conditions and oppositions (including legal and political regimes and the actions, desires, and demands of other people) that hinder, shape, or encourage it, on the other. In concrete terms, Zhang’s advocacy of the self-use of talent indicated his support for the local political assemblies that nurtured hope for an incipient federalism in early Republican China. Such assemblies were primary outlets for the unstructured talent of merchants, local gentry, and other agents whose lack of an exam degree systematically excluded them from political participation and decision-making under the empire. On institutional and conceptual levels, talent signifies the always destabilizing potential of democratic action. These local transformations of both institutions and attitudes are complemented by Zhang’s well-known doctrine of appreciation of difference, which I examine in Chapter 8, “Accommodation.” Like the mental preparation that enables one to self-use talent, accommodation of differences involves a rigorous internal reorientation, yet derives its definitive character and purpose from the changes it inspires in the external world. Where the use of talent acted upon and within local environments, accommodation acts to foster particular relationships between persons, acknowledging the political world as comprising interconnected but differently motivated agents. These “differences” in Zhang’s work find personal expression as idiosyncrasy, and political expression as dissent. Idiosyncrasy recognizes difference across persons as not only inevitable, but also invigorating for political association. For Zhang, this kind of difference names a productive gap between individuals that need not provoke hostility; as opposed to “sameness,” difference invites interpretation and engagement that may go far toward explaining how a shared vision of community may be possible among disparate, self-aware individuals. The acceptance of manifold difference facilitates (though, it is worth noting, does not guarantee) the interpretive acts that render any particular exemplary action – like those


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of Zhang’s founders – meaningful and effective in a political community. As such, the process of recognition and accommodation incited by an instance of difference is more definitively other-oriented than are self-awareness or the self-use of talent, inviting a closer look at the implications of accommodation for the political arenas and discourses Zhang was trying to construct. Zhang characterizes dissent, the second meaning of difference, as motivating an interplay of forces, ideas, or interests that sharpens the commitment of its participants without fostering mutual exclusivity. Drawing heavily on the work of British liberals Walter Bagehot and John Morley, Zhang insists that spirits of dissent and compromise can both play roles in China’s political advancement, as they did in Britain (ZQJ 254). At the same time, it is also one of its preconditions. As Zhang points out, citing Bagehot’s lack of appreciation for the habits of the British that make their government successful, “Only once a nation allows dissenting opinions to flourish, can it have cabinet government” (ZQJ 9). China must not only have a parliamentary system, but a range of opinions to express in it. Accommodation is part of this imported framework, yet at the same time remains uniquely capable of resolving the problems of difference and disagreement that arise as China transitions, peacefully and incrementally, to democratic rule. In contrast to Western agonists and difference democrats, however, Zhang characterizes public commonality as multiple accommodations incrementally negotiated within interpersonal relationships, rather than the a priori space that forms the basis for resistance to imposed authority. Zhang thus draws attention to how even public discussions do violence to difference by assuming a willing and pre-formed public to govern the terms of political action. The tension between “inner” cultivation and “outer” worldordering that runs throughout Zhang’s thought helps him to draw attention to the wide range of transformative individual actions that are taken neither in deliberate concert with others nor completely independently of them. In the concluding chapter of the book, I suggest how this inner–outer axis culminates in a model of political action that can contribute both to the historiography of Republican thought and to modern-day Western discussions of political agency. Zhang’s model challenges contemporary perceptions of the political as an exclusively collective and public endeavor, by focusing instead on how internal states result in, even as they are shaped by, external transformation.

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He therefore urges a reconsideration of how individual moral effort can be rendered meaningful and effective politically, even as that effort remains embedded within circumstances and institutions beyond the capacity of any one individual to control.

Zhang’s “democracy” All of these practices build toward the self-constitution of a republican regime (gonghe zhengti), which to Zhang bears close resemblance to the British liberalism he observed during his studies in England: officeholders are beholden for their power and legitimacy to those they govern, that is, the polity or guoti; the legal regime, whether embodied in a written constitution or not, binds both government and governed alike; a federal structure assures self-ruling opportunities for traditionally autonomous locales; and the populace is guaranteed the protection of certain rights such as habeas corpus, free expression, and (to a limited degree) political participation.24 He expects this new order to come about, however, largely by means of action constituted by purely personal, internal transformations – an approach many have associated with neo-Confucian self-cultivation. Why, then, do I classify Zhang’s political theory as a “democratic” and not a liberal, republican, or Confucian one? In general, liberal and republican theories see particular definitions of liberty as central to their arguments for the best form of government. Although both camps disagree among and between themselves about the exact definition of liberty, most agree that political institutions – including those Zhang advocated – are defensible to the extent that they promote or secure liberty.25 But Zhang’s insistence on these selfconstituting practices suggests that he saw little at stake with liberty alone – a word that almost nowhere appears in the work I examine 24

25

Many historians identify liberal currents in China with the “Anglo-American” variety, but differences between British and American forms of liberalism, as well as their multinational influences from French and German thought, were clear to Zhang and other Republican thinkers. For example, Zhang explicitly defended British parliamentarism against the American-style presidential system promoted by Sun Yat-sen (ZQJ 104–127). The paradigmatic examples here are Rawls, Political Liberalism, and Pettit, Republicanism.


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here. Zhang’s more salient concern is promoting citizen involvement in polity-building, given the absence of even minimal consensus, stable political signs, and social cohesion in the nascent Chinese Republic. These are primarily problems of founding, and they implicate him more closely in democratic discourses about the nature and sites of political action than in liberal or republican discourses about the promotion of liberty. Although he knows his cause could surely be served by the exercise of certain liberties and the protection of an established constitution, he could not assume the security of either. His question was precisely how political communities with particular values and capacities, including the valuing and protection of particular forms of liberty, can come into being, and what role individual citizens play in that formation. Some commentators have denied the importance of “democratic” discourse to early Republican Chinese thought, pointing out that the term hardly ever appears in texts from that time.26 However, as historians like Xu Zongmian have pointed out, the concept of democracy was implicit in many early Republican debates as reformers articulated alternatives to “state power” (guoquan) by using the concept of “the people’s power” (minquan). State power was explicitly formulated to counter the democratic tyranny and factional chaos many believed would result from giving the people power.27 Zhang’s vision of a selfconstituting republican government is, moreover, unusually egalitarian even among advocates of people’s power, in that it does not privilege elites as the sole source of social change or political leadership. He elaborates instead a more accessible set of practices designed to harness, cultivate and regulate diverse sites of power diffused throughout society. In my view, “democracy” captures better than other terms these plural instincts about political action. Whether that democracy be deliberative, aggregative, or even liberal, one of its defining characteristics is recognition of a mass of actors with valid claims to participate in political processes, however defined. To Zhang, self-awareness, the self-use of talent, and the accommodation of differences can and should be undertaken by all individual citizens, to craft not only the contours of their own citizenship, but the polity itself. In this endeavor, 26 27

Jin and Liu, “From ‘Republicanism’ to ‘Democracy.’” Xu, “Shibaizhe de tansuo,” 23–25.

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the “supreme political value is . . . dispersed power” – a notion at least one political theorist has seen as definitive of democracy.28 Zhang’s Tiger essays were therefore preoccupied with the attempt to bring ever greater numbers of nonelites into political life. It is worth noting, however, that this broad participatory impulse, and the space it furnished for political critique, was not an entirely novel Western import. These political possibilities in the early Republic reflected the influence of neo-Confucianism (lixue), a rich and diverse body of thought that constituted late imperial orthodoxy even as it provided resources for critiquing the imperial order. Officially, lixue texts – namely Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) authoritative compilation of and commentary on the “Fourteen Books,” a set of canonical texts that included works closely associated with Confucius and his followers – served as the basis for state-administered civil exams. Because the exams determined entry into government service, Zhu Xi’s texts were intimately familiar to all literate men in China, even if many late imperial intellectual trends differed from or directly rejected the methods and assumptions of this neo-Confucian orthodoxy. At the time of Zhang’s birth and early education, for example, “empirical research” (kaozheng) scholarship dominated the Chinese intellectual world, promoting philological rather than what was, in the view of its advocates, an overly subjective, philosophical inquiry into canonical texts.29 Kaozheng ideas played major roles in reform ideology of the late nineteenth century, most famously the attempt by Kang Youwei (1858– 1927) to idealize Confucius as an advocate of radical institutional reform.30 However, Zhang’s biographer notes that in Zhang’s native Hunan province, neo-Confucian lixue remained the dominant intellectual force until the exams were abolished in 1905.31 Zhang’s own attempt to locate these sources of authority and political interpretation in China’s new citizens, and not only their intellectual leaders, reflects the neo-Confucian faith that the Confucian Way (dao) heralded values everyone could potentially share. Contrary to much popular opinion, Cheng Yi (1033–1107), Zhu Xi and later imperial neo-Confucian

28 29 30

Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide,” 98. The classic study of this transition is Elman, From Philosophy to Philology. Kang, Kongzi gai zhi kao. 31 Zou, Zhang Shizhao zhuan, 7–8.


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thinkers were not bent on sustaining what Europeans called an “Oriental despotism” by centralizing absolutist authority; but nor did they irresponsibly ignore the work of governing, as their kaozheng critics would later contend. In the words of historian Peter Bol, these neoConfucians crafted a political theory that destabilized the authority of the central ruler by treating “successful government as dependent on a process of personal and social transformation that could be adopted by all people.”32 Thomas Metzger, Chang Hao, and other historians have shown that lixue’s emphasis on the personal interpretation of Confucian classic texts authorized a deeply fraught mode of political contestation under the late empire, in which scholars could leverage their own interpretation of moral and political authority to censure the rulers in power.33 Although never officially sanctioned or institutionally implemented, this tradition of moral censure influenced the articulation of political relationships by Chinese elites well into the early Republic and beyond. Zhang’s theory can be seen in some ways as extending this form of neo-Confucianism, which historically devolved power away from the ruler toward an independent moral authority – the daotong, or “succession of the Way” – lodged in scholars and their ancient learning.34 Analogously, Zhang attempts to devolve power away from the intellectuals who had assumed the mantle of leadership after the fall of the dynasty, toward the new citizens of China’s Republic. Although Zhang’s move retains the form of neo-Confucian political theory, in that he sees personal effort acting independently of the government apparatus as the pivot of wider socio-political order, he must ensure that traditionally unsanctioned actors can be registered as politically legitimate without conforming to the unitary and sometimes mystical moral order neo-Confucianism assumed. This required Zhang to rethink the substantive foundation of politics, marking his major break with the “epistemological optimism” that some have argued motivates the Confucian moralization of social and political life.35 Part of what so rankled Zhang about the Chinese imperial system,

32 33 34 35

Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 116. Metzger, Escape from Predicament; Chang, You’an yishi. Metzger, Escape from Predicament, 132; c.f. de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, 27–38. Metzger, A Cloud across the Pacific, 21–31; Chang, You’an yishi, 3–32.

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and about those who continued to think within its categories, was its conflation of ethical virtue with the capacity to effect political good – a logical fallacy that he explicitly blames on Confucianism (ZQJ 181). Moral goodness does not always result in political efficacy, Zhang realizes, and being “selfless” in the way many contemporary political leaders recommended often resulted in sacrificing oneself not for the greater good but for the power plays of political elites. He saw his own work as an important corrective to particular Confucian tenets embodied in the institutional apparatus of the late empire, particularly those which in his view conflated loyalty to the emperor with loyalty to the Chinese political community as a whole, and those that effectively invalidated both the agency and the contributions of the common people. At that time and place, such a position required Zhang to conceptually refute the still widespread Confucian notion of minben, or “the people as root,” and replace it with a compelling theory of minzhu, or “the people ruling,” the term by which democracy eventually came to be known in Chinese.36 Zhang does so by emphasizing the legitimacy of an enlightened selfinterest, developing concepts such as “talent” and “self-awareness” that bear strong resemblances to late imperial critiques of the “public good” made by Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), Dai Zhen (1724–1777), and others. More importantly, these concepts theorize an outlet for traditionally unsanctioned sectors of society, such as merchants and peasants, to make their mark on politics and work against the grain of established authority. Much of Zhang’s work in The Tiger, in fact, is dedicated to explaining what it means, in Zhang’s words, “to have a self” (you wo) – implying that such inner-directed self-reflexivity constitutes an important starting point for thinking and acting politically, for everyone. As a theorist of the so-called “New Culture Movement” that arose after the revolution of 1911, Zhang heralds the growing trend to transform Chinese political culture into 36

Minzhu, like many other terms of Euro-American political, literary, and scientific discourse, was borrowed by Japanese scholars from classical Chinese and then jaggedly reimported back into Chinese linguistic communities. Jin and Liu (“From ‘Republicanism’ to ‘Democracy,’” 473) document four meanings for minzhu in China at this time: the emperor, which was the original and earliest meaning of the term in classical Chinese; a popularly elected ruler; a political system opposed in any way to hereditary monarchy; and finally, rule by the people.


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one more amenable to individual expression and liberation – returning us to the liberal elements that some commentators assume define his work. From this perspective, Zhang ultimately takes important issue with both neo-Confucianism and democracy. Adherents of the former, for the most part, historically denied the agency of nonelites, who were seen as the beneficiaries rather than the actors of politics; and adherents of the latter usually read the capacity to take free action in concert with others as definitive. In short, Zhang’s democratic/neo-Confucian/liberal account of political action amounts to much more than any of those things considered separately: Zhang’s political theory is informed by contemporary British liberal values, conditioned by the new attempt at republican rule in China, and yet deeply indebted to notions of political agency and institutional structure that developed under China’s late imperial government. Whatever Zhang’s own professions of ideological influence, the tensions among these three disparate political visions help us locate Zhang’s unique political stance. Despite, or perhaps because of, his belief that the capacity for founding acts was diffused throughout society rather than concentrated in one or a few elite hands, Zhang’s approach to politics does not turn on a belief that such action must always be collective action. This individualized approach to political intervention may be one reason why, despite his faith in broad, varied participation at all levels of society, he rarely invokes such terms as “commoners” or “masses” (pifu, pingmin) as political actors.37 For Zhang, min (the people) possess ruling authority, but political actors are almost always referred to simply as “persons” (ren) – implying by turns that anybody, if not always everyone, can participate successfully in changing shared environments. Zhang’s syncretic theory ultimately signals the possibility that some forms of Confucianism can accommodate egalitarian impulses, some forms of liberalism can be focused on personal effort as much as on institutions, and some forms of democracy can harbor individualistic strains. In what follows, however, I refer to Zhang’s efforts as “democratic,” or alternatively as linked to “self-rule,” because I see his defining 37

One notable exception is in his essay “The State and Responsibility,” discussed more fully in Chapter 5, where Zhang states, “the responsibility for protecting the state cannot but extend all the way down to the commoners [pifu]” (ZQJ 127–8).

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dilemma in the years following 1911 until the May Fourth Movement of 1919 as the attempt to theorize individual members (ren) of the people (min) as rulers. Although democratic collective action suggests that “global” processes often remain beyond the reach of one individual, the neo-Confucian model Zhang develops reminds us that local environments are almost always tractable in some degree to individual control, and that these local transformations can have sometimes spectacular effects on the wider environment. By acting on local events, people, and environments; revising their inner visions; working through their inner struggles; confronting the demands, feelings, and talents of others; and, most importantly, convincing themselves that their actions, however incremental and small, matter to wider outcomes, individuals can harness their own uncertain power before – and sometimes as a prerequisite to – joining together with others. In the next chapter, I give a fuller picture of the historical background against which this theory of action played out.

2

Zhang Shizhao and his world

Zhang Shizhao’s ability to advance dispassionate and logical argument in the pages of The Tiger belies the personal and political crises that motivated the journal’s establishment. In the aftermath of the “Second Revolution” – a failed attempt by Zhang and some of his colleagues, including Sun Yat-sen, to oust Yuan Shikai from power – Zhang and his family fled to Tokyo in 1914 to begin a self-imposed exile. This political failure was only the latest faced by Zhang and those of his contemporaries sympathetic to republican and democratic government. The theoretical explorations that I examine in this book are Zhang’s responses to these failures, even if they incorporate reflection on far more than the immediate political events of Zhang’s time. In order to give some sense of the wider dilemmas Zhang confronted in this era of unprecedented upheaval in China, this chapter briefly surveys the major historical and intellectual developments that preceded and followed Zhang’s work on The Tiger. Situating Zhang in his historical context underscores his own contribution to twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, and gives a sharper sense of the urgency with which his thoughts on founding were formulated.

China at the turn of the twentieth century The revolution of 1911 that ended China’s dynastic system was only one event in a transitional period that, as is true with many historical stages, has no clear starting point. Many historians agree, however, in identifying a series of watershed events that were to shape Chinese political, social, and cultural contexts well into the twentieth century. One such pivotal event was China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese war of 1895, which awakened many intellectuals to the realization that China’s attempts at “modernization” lagged far behind their oftenderided but now much more powerful neighbor. Japan, long perceived by the Chinese elite as a derivative civilization inhabited by “dwarf 29

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pirates” (wokou), had adapted Western military technology and political institutions during the Meiji Restoration to gain imperial control over much of Asia, including what had been the Qing-controlled territories of Manchuria and Taiwan. In fact, Japan was the source for much of China’s knowledge of Western thought and institutions. Its scholars were the first to translate Western works of political theory into any Asian language, drafting neologisms from classical Chinese to translate Western terms into Japanese, which then often were reimported back into China, producing what Lydia Liu has called “roundtrip words.”1 Japan was nevertheless as much a source of danger as of enlightenment. Its growing dominance in the region added to European and American military pressures on China that began in the 1840s, when British gunships forced the Qing court to reopen China’s ports to the opium trade. Radical reformers anxious to remedy China’s insecurity and lack of relative prosperity petitioned the Qing court to implement institutional transformations similar to Japan’s. The result was the “Hundred Days Reform” of 1898, carried out under the direction of the young Guangxu Emperor (1875–1908). These reforms deepened already existing, late imperial trends toward political decentralization and extra-bureaucratic, gentry-led management of local affairs. Among the most notable and influential reforms carried out in this period was the establishment of the Southern Study Society in Zhang’s home province of Hunan, which was designed by Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong (1865–1898) and other radical reformers to educate local gentry in democratic practices and local self-government. Unfortunately, the emperor’s aunt and former regent, the powerful de facto ruler of China, Empress Cixi (1835–1908), perceived the reforms as a threat to her conservative power base and staged a coup. Tan was publicly executed for his participation, and the remaining leaders of the movement – including Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao – fled to Japan. This defeat did not signal an end to radical reform in China, however. By the turn of the century, reformers anxious to buttress Chinese strength in the face of foreign incursion came to believe that copying Western military technology alone would not guarantee the security they required. If the Chinese state were to settle domestic military 1

Liu, Translingual Practice, 39; see also Masini, The Formation of the Modern Chinese Lexicon, 145–153.


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conflicts, revive its economic base, and deal effectively with international threats to its security, these reformers believed, its structure and outlook demanded transformation more fundamental than simple institutional reform. In a famous open letter written to the Foreign Affairs journal in 1905, the influential translator and political thinker Yan Fu (1854–1921) blasted conservative attempts to preserve the “Chinese essence” while ornamenting it superficially with “Western utility” – a dichotomy attributed to the court reformer Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), who claimed that no major social changes were necessary to gain conversance with Western science and technology. To Yan and many others, including Liang Qichao, it was the Chinese essence itself that required fundamental transformation. Not only Western technology, but also Western modes of democratic citizenship, market entrepreneurship, and scientific inquiry must be adopted if China were to compete with Western and Japanese powers and secure its future prosperity.2 The contemporary superpower, Great Britain, was the goal to which these Chinese “modernizers” most frequently aspired, even as their model of how to get there came from Japan’s recent success with industrialization under the Meiji Restoration. Yan and Liang believed that the current dynasty could accommodate Western political principles if it reconfigured as a constitutional monarchy. More revolutionary activists, however, insisted that only violent upheaval could do away with the old order. Sun Yat-sen and the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui) – later reorganized as the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, often romanized as Kuomintang) or KMT – aimed to rid China of four centuries of rule under the Qing dynasty and its foreign, ethnically Manchu leaders as much as open it to drastic reform. Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, these revolutionaries initiated a series of attacks on Qing armories, hoping to abolish Manchu supremacy and to establish a modern state on the basis of Han nationalism. Added to the state’s persistent fiscal and military weakness, these attacks eventually resulted in the official end not only of the Qing court in 1911 but also of China’s two-thousand-yearold dynastic political system. Sun was elected temporary president of 2

Yan, “Lun jiaoyu shu.” Liang’s best-known call for radical transformation is found in his 1902–1904 serial publication Xinmin shuo (On Renewing the People).

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the new Republic, replaced in 1913 by Yuan Shikai, a former general who once had close ties to the Qing court. Although the revolution heralded a new and optimistic transition in the eyes of many Chinese, Yuan’s increasingly predatory and illinformed policies – combined with imperialist pressures such as landgrabbing, rapacious foreign loans, and indemnities inherited from the Qing era – soon dashed hopes for a new order in China. Dismissing first the regional and then the national assemblies, Yuan hoped to restore the monarchy and crown himself emperor. Only his unexpected death in 1916 ended these attempts, even as China was plunged, once again, into chaos. The lack of a stable political center invited a series of regional warlords to claim various parts of China as their exclusive domain, a process of fragmentation halted only temporarily and in limited geographic regions by the KMT-led Northern Expedition in 1926–1928. Although the KMT general Chiang Kai-shek was able to install himself as leader of China and maintain control over the central agricultural provinces, by the 1930s a new threat appeared on the horizon. Japanese colonial power in Manchuria soon expanded southward, provoking a Communist–Nationalist alliance. By 1945, the Japanese were thrown out but civil war erupted, ending in Communist victory over the mainland in 1949 and the flight of Nationalist sympathizers to the island of Taiwan. The events of 1895, 1898, and 1911 all hastened the breakdown of the imperial model of Chinese political authority, a process compounded by increasing Western military incursions, as well as by infusions of thought mediated by foreign missionaries, travelers, and translators. Under these pressures, intellectuals began to grapple seriously with a new political imaginary, in which not only the emperor but also literati elites had begun losing their hold on political leadership. The question became how to incorporate a notion of the people as their own rulers in a territory with no historical precedent for democracy, but there was little agreement on how to do that. These dilemmas were reflected in and complicated by the exploration of the idea of nationalism, as elites queried the nature of the political community that could occupy sovereign authority. The events of 1911 were widely articulated as an “anti-Manchu” revolution, most prominently by Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionary camp. They identified the Chinese nation with the majority Han ethnicity (Hanzu), in conflict with the Manchu (Manzu) dynasty that had ruled China since


33

1644. Yet not all parties articulated nationalism in ethnic terms, nor urged its narrativization as a process of ongoing yet still incomplete Sinicization of non-Han groups. Cultural, ethnic, and political visions of the Chinese nation all circulated throughout the early years of the Republic, coming into continual (and sometimes productive) conflict as intellectuals, educators, and ordinary citizens acted on a broad range of visions in crafting their ideal community.3 Zhang himself opposed the race-based nationalism of Sun Yat-sen, preferring to side with contemporaries who saw the nation as simply “neither more nor less than those people who would be represented when the state saved itself.”4 The nation, for Zhang, was simply “a body of free persons united together for common benefit, to enjoy what is their own and to do justice to others” – bearing closer resemblance to the English term “polity” than to “nation” per se.5 To accomplish this uncoerced organization, however, Zhang believed that a sharp line must first be drawn between what he calls the guojia (“state” or “nation”) and the zhengfu (“government”). The guojia, as the seat of sovereignty and the organization of free individuals, exists independently of and prior to the zhengfu, the administrative delegate of the guojia. The problem, as Zhang explains it in his essay “The State and Responsibility,” is that for centuries the state and the government were combined together into one concept. Later, although the differences between them gradually became more clear, when Government A collapsed and changed into Government B, the former was confusedly considered to be the state. The latter [i.e. Government B] really was quite distinct from the state, but because the traces of this transformation were nearly imperceptible, and its process slow and indirect, the line between old and new [governments] became difficult to draw. Therefore, it was never completely possible to build a state outside the government, allowing the state to be a state and a government to be a government (ZQJ 109). 3 5

Culp, Articulating Citizenship. 4 Fitzgerald, “The Nationless State,” 86. I am here citing the English definition of guojia that Zhang provides in a footnote (ZQJ 105), and repeats in Chinese translation at various other places in the essay (e.g. 110). He provides another, similar definition for the English term “nationalism” in his essay “The State and Oneself” (“Guojia yu wo”), quoting Ernest Renan in defining the nation as a group of people who freely agree to live together by contract (ZQJ 513). Significantly, Zhang ignores the other half of Renan’s definition, as presented in his lecture “What Is a Nation?”: “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories.”

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As Zhang’s own rather complex discussion shows, the precise meaning of “nationalism” was by no means self-evident to early Republican thinkers, nor was its application definitively accepted. Liang Qichao urged a “renewal of the people” to build toward but not exactly duplicate a nationalist consciousness that could outfit the Chinese for selfrule; self-proclaimed “liberals” demanded a constitutional order based on individual rights; conservatives in the “Preserve the Peace Society” (Chou an hui) urged a return to the old monarchical order; anarchists with their aggressive class-based ideology presaged the communism that would take shape only later in the 1920s. At the Republic’s founding, in fact, over 680 political parties were in existence, about thirty of which had official lists of members and party charters.6 Not until the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), over the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek (1887– 1975), did a particular political ideology gain stable dominance over China, and Zhang’s thought no doubt benefited from this diversity.

Zhang’s life and thought I often had foreign friends ask me, “What does your father do?” I had a very hard time answering that question. My father’s whole life was so rich and splendorous: early on he was a revolutionary; he was a patriot, a vanguard, who searched for the path to China’s wealth and power; he was a politician, a scholar, a calligrapher; he was a great professor of logic . . . 7

Zhang was a member of the third generation to examine the problem of republican founding in China, and the last to draw with equal facility from both imperial Chinese and contemporary Western thought to solve it.8 He was like his contemporaries in many respects, and nowhere more so than in his search to find cures to China’s political crises in Western political institutions and ideas. Despite the progressive political activity in his own province of Hunan, Zhang’s 6 7 8

Shen, “Wusi shiqi Zhang Shizhao,” 174. Zhang Hanzhi, “Qian yan,” 12–13. The biographical information provided in this section is drawn variously from Boorman, “Chang Shih-chao”; Bai, Zhang Shizhao zhuan and “Zhang Shizhao”; and Zou, Zhang Shizhao zhuan. For a more personal account, see Zhang Hanzhi’s memoirs of her father in “Qian yan” and Feng yu qing. I do not cite specific references in this section unless they provide unique or especially detailed information.


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own exposure to “the Western learning” did not begin until he enrolled in the Jiangnan Military Academy in 1902 at the age of twenty-one. Like other members of his generation, from childhood Zhang had been trained in Confucian orthodox texts to prepare him for the civil exams and a lifelong career in government. Although in his early years enamored of Chinese traditional literature, which may explain his oft-noted literary skill,9 Zhang later developed interests in dissident thinkers like Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu – two late Ming–early Qing advocates of rule of law and responsible government whose works were widely cited in the republican fervor of post-revolutionary China.10 Zhang’s early exposure to the work of the Tang dynasty iconoclast Liu Zongyuan (773–819), moreover, blossomed into a lifelong obsession that Zhang later identified as a formative influence on his thought at every stage.11 It was his time at Jiangnan, however, that turned his thoughts away from literature to politics and social betterment, and to the Western learning believed to hold the secrets for China’s future. Given the revolutionary climate of the time, it is not surprising that Zhang quickly became involved in radical activity, even serving a stint on an assassination squad. But although he maintained respectful and lifelong ties to revolutionists, including Sun Yat-sen, Hu Hanmin (1879–1936), Huang Xing (1874–1916), Zhang Taiyan (1868–1936), and his own wife, Wu Ruonan (1886–1973), Zhang refused to join the Revolutionary Alliance.12 After spending time abroad in Japan studying English and teaching classical Chinese at a girls’ school, Zhang became convinced that nonviolent, educational solutions to China’s plight were possible. Publishing the textbook on classical Chinese grammar that he wrote while teaching in Japan,13 Zhang earned enough money to study firsthand the Western institutions that seemed to hold so much promise. 9 10 11

12

13

Hu, Wushinian lai Zhongguo zhi wenxue, 224. Zou, Zhang Shizhao zhuan, 3, 12–13. Zhang, Liu wen zhi yao. For further discussion of Liu’s intellectual influence on Zhang, see Bai, Zhang Shizhao zhuan, 5; Shen, “Wusi shiqi Zhang Shizhao,” 170–171. In fact, despite his demonstrated admiration for Sun Yat-sen, Zhang aligned with the moderate Huang Xing in opposition to Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary tactics within the early KMT. Huang formed the European Affairs Study Group (Oushi yanjiu hui) as a way of avoiding pledging loyalty to Sun; Zhang was the group’s secretary (Zhang, “Oushi yanjiu hui shi yi”; Bai, Zhang Shizhao zhuan, 86). Zhang, Zhongdeng guowen dian.

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In 1908, at the age of 27, Zhang traveled to Great Britain. He stopped briefly in Paris, where he praised the work ethic of its prostitutes as precisely the kind of energy China needed to inculcate in its citizens.14 After enrolling in a master’s degree program at the University of Edinburgh, Zhang made extra money – and his reputation – as a foreign correspondent for the Beijing-based Imperial Daily (Diguo ribao) newspaper, reporting to Chinese audiences on European opinion leading up to the First World War. In 1912, with less than one month left to complete his master’s degree in political and legal studies, Zhang returned to China at the behest of Sun Yat-sen. He carried with him the knowledge and experience of four years’ study of British thought and institutions. His influence grew while abroad, as powerful moderates like Song Jiaoren (1882–1913) collected Zhang’s articles and used them as a basis for their own attempts at constitutional reform.15 After returning to China from England, Zhang assumed the post of chief secretary to Sun, who was now provisional president of the Republic. Around the same time Zhang began to work out his views on British liberalism by writing a series of essays for the People’s Stand newspaper (Minli bao), advocating cabinet government, individual rights, and parliamentary responsibility. His unusually informed political views earned him enough of a reputation to be asked by Hu Hanmin to edit the Minguo, the official journal of the Nationalist Party, in 1914. Zhang, always resistant to party politics, politely refused the honor and instead went on to form his own journal, The Tiger, its English title alluding to the year of the Chinese zodiac in which it was founded.16 In the mission statement for the journal, he stated his desire that “in what follows the priority will be to engage in examination and exploration, not for the purpose of advocacy but rather to drive the discussion forward without any empty talk, and even less without favoring the interests of any party.”17 In subsequent years, following the May Fourth student movement of 1919, Zhang began to doubt the suitability of Western-style 14 15

16 17

Bai, Zhang Shizhao zhuan, 53. Price, “Constitutional Alternatives,” attributes Song’s postrevolutionary support for constitutionalism directly to Zhang Shizhao; see also Bai, Zhang Shizhao zhuan, 64. The journal’s Chinese name, Jiayin, names the calendrical year for 1914 using the traditional ganzhi (stems-and-branches) cycle. Zhang, “Benzhi xuangao.”


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representative government for China, which at that time was primarily a preindustrial agricultural nation. He joined fellow Hunanese Liang Shuming (1893–1988) and others in urging closer attention to the economic and social plight of the nonurbanized masses as a prerequisite for (or in some cases outright replacement of) modernization.18 Liang called this movement “rural reconstruction” (xiangjian) but Zhang, perhaps building from earlier work, preferred to label it “rural selfrule” (nongcun zizhi) (ZQJ IV, 147–152). Zhang’s new reluctance to pursue parliamentary government for China at that time inspired Duan Qirui (1865–1936), a former warlord turned provisional chief executive of the Beiyang government, to ask Zhang to serve as his minister of education in 1924. Zhang may have been motivated to ally with Duan out of sympathy for a regional rather than a centralized approach to nation-building, reflecting his sustained faith in local self-rule rather than top-down political transformation.19 In any case, Zhang’s association with this reviled former warlord was not his most notorious post. Shortly thereafter Zhang was appointed acting minister of education. His decisions to reorganize Beijing’s universities under a single administration (compounded with his relatively conservative views in an age of unprecedented radicalism) resulted in his house being burnt to the ground by rioting students – twice. Despite such rough treatment, and unlike many influential Republican-era intellectuals, Zhang did not flee to Taiwan when the Communists established the People’s Republic on the mainland in 1949. For the most part, Zhang remained in Shanghai to pursue his legal practice in relative peace. Despite his educational background he did not suffer the humiliation and torture inflicted on many scholars during the Cultural Revolution (a youth-led insurrection, lasting roughly from 1966 to 1976, meant to purge the Party of rightists, intellectuals and “capitalist roaders”). The reason for Zhang’s unusual luck was due to his close ties to fellow Hunanese and later chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong. In the early 1920s, Zhang gathered money from personal acquaintances to lend Mao – a petty librarian at the time – a large sum to organize a youth excursion to 18 19

Alitto, Last Confucian, 138–140. Benjamin Tsai suggests such a motivation in the case of other members of Zhang’s circle, including Liang Qichao and Zhang Dongsun (“Enemies of the Revolution,” 14, 204).

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Europe. Mao later repaid the loan, with interest, and in subsequent years ensured that Zhang received special protection from the marauding Red Guards.20 Zhang Hanzhi, Zhang’s adopted daughter, even became Mao’s English teacher, and served as a translator for Richard Nixon’s diplomatic visit to China in 1972.21 Zhang managed to produce two more significant scholarly works in his later years that reflected his interests in political thought. The first was a culmination of decades of his work on logic, which he began in bits and pieces while writing for the Minli bao. The Luoji zhi yao (Outline of Logic) includes Zhang’s analysis of what he calls the “science of names and disputation” (mingbian xue) in classical Chinese thought, as well as his arguments for how the term for post-Baconian Western “logic” should be translated into Chinese.22 (Zhang is in fact responsible for creating and defending what has now become the standard translation in modern Chinese, luoji.)23 The last significant scholarly work Zhang produced was an extended exegesis of Liu Zongyuan’s corpus, titled Liu wen zhi yao (Outline of Liu Zongyuan’s Writings). This fourteen-volume work is notable for its unusual reading of this revered Tang dynasty poet as a political and social thinker. One year after completing this work, Zhang died in 1973 at the age of 92. He had just arrived in Hong Kong on one last political mission, to negotiate terms of conciliation between the Nationalists on Taiwan and the Communists on the mainland.24

The Tiger Despite these later adventures and later publications, it was the early twentieth-century journal The Tiger – my focus in this book – that secured Zhang’s influential position in Chinese political debate, and in more recent times has piqued interest in Zhang’s political thought and historical influence. Recognized as among the more “scholarly” of Republican-era publications,25 The Tiger was extremely influential, 20 21

22 24

“1963 nian 7 yue.” Zhang volunteered to raise Hanzhi because her birth parents, a shopkeeper and a businessman, could not agree on custody. Her death in early 2008 was recognized by a feature article in the New York Times, attesting to her historical significance (Barboza, “Zhang Hanzhi”). Kurtz, “Coming to Terms with Logic,” 165–172. 23 Ibid., 169. Li, “Zhang Shizhao zui hou yici.” 25 Ge, Zhongguo bao xue shi, 223.


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and regarded by contemporaries such as Luo Jialun and Hu Shi as of particular intellectual substance and logical clarity.26 The Tiger’s Shanghai publisher, Wang Yuanfang, recalls in his memoirs that the popularity of Zhang and his journal were so overwhelming that they not only rescued his failing publication house, they even overshadowed what was to become one of twentieth-century China’s most influential journals, Chen Duxiu’s New Youth (Xin qingnian).27 “Although very short-lived,” historian Timothy Weston argues, “The Tiger was arguably the most influential political journal in China between the time Liang Qichao published New Citizen [or On Renewing the People] (Xinmin congbao) (1902–1907) and the high tide of the New Culture Movement.”28 Weston and others have traced the intellectual similarities as well as personal relationships that tie Zhang and his journal closely to other reform attempts, such as the student-led New Culture Movement (beginning around 1915) and the May Fourth Movement (circa 1919). Both movements heralded an increasing interest in science, democracy, and other contemporary Western European and American political arrangements as alternatives to Chinese political reality, and their syncretic intellectual products set the foundation for Chinese political thought in the twentieth century. These historical connections are important for seeing why Zhang was influential in both contemporary and later Chinese political thought, despite the fact that his political agenda of limited government and self-rule “failed” in the wake of increasing radicalization under first a Nationalist and then a Communist mainland government. Determining historical influence, however, is not my purpose here. Although I trace in greater detail than do other available sources the substance and participants of the debates Zhang provoked, and thereby shed a bit more light on the circle of his influence, I do so as a means of determining the stakes involved in his theoretical positions. What kind of ground must Zhang clear to advance arguments about selfruling, republican government? On what theoretical and conceptual resources does he draw? How does he translate terms from both the 26 27 28

Hu, Wushinian lai de Zhongguo zhi wenxue, 224–226; see also Chang, Zhongguo sixiang xiao shi, chap. 20. Wang, “Jiayin zazhi qianlu,” 28, 32. Weston, “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community,” 260–261.

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Western and Chinese pasts, and in what contexts does he deploy them? Most importantly, how do his specific responses to his critics enable a compelling reconstruction of the political theory he held at the peak of his influence – one that articulates significant questions about the nature of political life in self-ruling regimes? The Tiger essays are uniquely suited to this task of both reconstruction and defense, because it is there that Zhang turns away from the short, two-page articles on policy recommendations that marked his work in the Imperial Daily and the People’s Stand toward theoretical, meta-level considerations of political action and institutions. The essays I focus on in this study were published between 1914 and 1917, most of which were later selected by Zhang himself for reprinting in 1922 as Extant Manuscripts of The Tiger (Jiayin zazhi cungao). As the only volume of selected essays Zhang ever prepared, the Extant Manuscripts suggests the enduring relevance of his Tiger essays to the political discussions of the era as well as to Zhang’s own intellectual biography, despite the fact that later in life he assessed China’s chances for establishing republican government more pessimistically. Although written over a relatively short time span, the essays constitute a particularly rich and lengthy corpus, comprising more than the entirety of the third volume of Zhang’s Collected Works.29 The Tiger essays are exceptional for the era, and contrast with Zhang’s earlier work, because they explore in much more extended form the theoretical limits and possibilities of both individual action and institutional reform. They ask questions about the moral as well as institutional requirements of democratic participation, and attempt to determine how and if institutions and personal effort can work together. His foray into theory in these essays had decidedly political effects: as a contemporary put it, at a time when everyone in the country was submerged in practical problems, and were at their ultimate point of depression and unhappiness, suddenly along came someone who took up new theories and used them to call to our citizens, making people suddenly aware that a world existed outside our present reality.30 29

30

To give the reader some indication of the range of this corpus, it totals nearly 650 modern book pages of classical Chinese, equivalent to approximately 1,200 pages of English at a conservative estimate. Cited in Zou, Zhang Shizhao shehui zhengzhi sixiang, 86.


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In focusing on this particularly rich corpus of texts, I make an argument for Zhang’s theoretical importance by demonstrating how these texts sustain reflective inquiry on the means and ends of political action. Although this choice entails sacrificing historical breadth to gain theoretical depth, I hope my analysis can nevertheless complement existing literature on Zhang, much of which already thoughtfully addresses how his thought changes over time or how it ties in to wider developments in Chinese history.31

The turn to “political theory” Zhang’s turn to “theory” (lilun or lixiang) and away from the institutional, policy-specific advocacy that marked his early work is well noted in the secondary literature, but few have explored the implications for his thought of this new, reflective approach.32 As Zhang himself explains it, China is situated at a unique historical juncture in which experimentation is possible. But that experimentation does not map exactly onto a scientific model, in which an absolute truth is established through rigorous testing. Rather, political study and experimentation aim to advance “the process of political reform.” Whereas scientific experimentation “can firmly situate the ‘ought to be’ in the realm of the ‘actual,’” political experimentation “can entirely abolish the ‘actual’ and construct another kind of ‘ought to be’” (ZQJ 380). Here Zhang explains that politics, as both a product and a reflection of a political theory (what he calls zhengli or zhengxue), need not be limited by what has already been shown to be true. Informed by political theory, politics can be a creative space that constructs its own “oughts” and “can be’s” rather than limiting itself to the actual (literally, yiran, “the already-so”). His definition of “theory” here indicates both the scope of his task and the radical implications for political practice of solving it. Facing the unprecedented collapse not only of a political system that had existed, in some form or another, for nearly two thousand years, 31

32

See especially Price, “Constitutional Alternatives”; Shen, “Wusi shiqi Zhang Shizhao”; Weston, “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community”; Zou, Zhang Shizhao shehui zhengzhi sixiang. E.g., Lam, “Yan Fu yu Zhang Shizhao,” 353; Zou, Zhang Shizhao shehui zhengzhi sixiang, 86.

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but also of the cosmological, cultural, and social institutions that sustained it, Zhang’s political theory is necessarily a theory of the possible, attuned more carefully to the not-yet rather than to the already existing. His strategy reflected a dismal political reality that contrasted painfully with the optimism that the 1911 revolution had once heralded. Recognizing that textbook information about constitutionally limited government could do little to solve China’s current political crisis, Zhang turned to examining the theoretical underpinnings of why and how free government could succeed in China. Read in these terms, as theoretical interventions designed to provoke and inspire action rather than to determine its ultimate outcome, it is perhaps not surprising that Zhang’s Tiger essays lack the concrete policy implications of his earlier work. His interventions are not meant to solve, once and for all, the problem of who acts and how they act effectively, so much as they hope to identify a new, more productive set of tensions that diffuse political actors can negotiate. As the following chapters will demonstrate, rather than casting the problem of founding and action as a negotiation of the tension between individual imposition and community identity or agency, Zhang instead pictures political life as a series of balancing acts – between dissent and agreement, difference and commonality, the exceptional founder and the ordinary citizen, innate, unpredictable capacity and external environments. Although these new tensions of Zhang’s are perhaps irresolvable, the nature of their provocation and assuagement suggests some alternative spaces in which founding acts can be performed: within as well as between persons, who act in disparate locations and in ways that often cannot be mutually coordinated. This project is thus a book about Zhang’s thought, but it is just as much an exploration of how individuals can initiate effective, noncoercive political and social innovation in situations of seemingly hopeless adversity. In the next chapter, I begin that exploration by arguing that, for Zhang, foundings are not moments but widely diffuse activities that provoke action. They proceed by means of example as much as by persuasion, and individual “founders” need not await benevolent lawgivers or assume an existing community to begin their work.

part ii

Founding

3

The founding paradox

When Zhang Shizhao returned to China from Great Britain in 1912, he found himself in a very different place from the one he had left four years ago. In 1908, China was still governed by the Qing, though its elites were struggling to square new “Western” ways of governing with deeply entrenched habits and institutions that had survived nearly two thousand years of continuous imperial rule. In 1911, China became, in name at least, a republic, committed to the principles of self-rule embodied in Western theories of democracy, liberalism, and constitutionalism. Zhang should have been happy; this is what he had been advocating all along. In fact, Zhang knew more about the theoretical foundations of these Western institutions than perhaps anyone writing in Chinese at the time. Apparently, however, he did not know enough – not enough to explain why, after the provisional constitution was ratified in 1913, no one took it seriously; why, once human rights were recognized as keys to Chinese political regeneration by most elites, the government did not seem to be respecting them; why, once self-rule was declared after a short but violent revolution, no one seemed willing to stay in China and build parliaments, assemblies, and courts to replace the imperial bureaucracy that no longer existed. Zhang quickly realized that there were deeper, more general questions at stake than simply what kind of regime to build. Confronting nearly total political collapse, Zhang mined both novel Western theories and long-standing Chinese debates to develop a rich theoretical vocabulary for exploring the sources of effective transformation, and establishment, of a political community. In doing so, he confronted a series of seemingly irresolvable paradoxes. Successful selfrule in a political community requires certain personal and collective qualities, such as autonomy, intersubjective recognition of citizenship, and collective identity; yet their character is such that their establishment requires acts different from, and often contradictory to, those that constitute their subsequent practice. Zhang saw, moreover, that 45

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democracy and constitutionalism are not simply ideas localized in individual minds, but ways of life and patterns of responsibility which require the participation of an entire community to give them meaning and effective force (e.g. ZQJ 113). To make political arguments that at the same time invoke rather than disavow the kind of society Zhang wished to bring into being, he required a shared vocabulary, a language of common purposes and ends, that did not yet exist. Yet he found top-down imposition – the usual response to paradoxes of this kind – to be not only illegitimate but puzzlingly ineffective. He had to found this set of shared practices and language even as he realized the incapacity of himself, or any one person, to do so. Confronted with these paradoxes, Zhang frames the tensions of founding in an importantly different way than do many contemporary political theorists, who use founding narratives not to illumine the events that establish polities but to underscore the recurring problems of ordinary political action. In most of the political communities of the modern West, “founding” as an inaugural, polity-establishing event is no longer relevant. What remains perpetually subject to contestation and “re-founding,” these theorists argue, is how and on what grounds power invoked in the name of the community can be constrained without appeal to a transcendent principle.1 Founding stands as a motif of the circularity of politics, specifically the ongoing contestation of authority, rather than as a moment of real action.2 Founding narratives like those of Locke and Rousseau are thereby rendered not blueprints for polity-building but stylized lessons about the inescapable circularity of all political action. Yet in a world in which democracy and rule of law are simultaneously uncontested (at least publicly) as supreme political values but remain among the most difficult of all political institutions to establish permanently, the negotiation of legitimacy in mature regimes does not seem to loom nearly as large as does Zhang’s more literal founding dilemma: how can we – or I – get a particular kind of regime off the ground in the first place? Even if ordinary political action in mature regimes does resemble the paradoxical task of “founding,” not all acts of founding exhibit the characteristics of ordinary political actions. Founding acts are not always in medias res interventions 1 2

Arendt, On Revolution, 170. E.g. Honig, “Declarations of Independence”; Olson, “Paradoxes.”


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that can draw upon already existing political habits or institutions for their efficacy. Zhang’s political theory draws attention to the fact that founding acts must first constitute power before authority becomes intelligible as a problem; they must foster a shared consciousness of self-rule before collective self-determination is even possible. These very real paradoxes of Zhang’s founding moment cannot be dismissed as ahistorical tropes, elements of post hoc political myths designed to efface inaugural violence or to justify particular political positions. A circular basis for founding – in which the right people and the right institutions are seen always as mutually constitutive, rather than one being ontologically or historically prior to the other – may exploit, but does not transcend, such paradoxes when they appear in real historical time. What does transcend those paradoxes? Zhang does not offer a definitive answer, but by recasting the problem of founding he offers conceptual resources to think through both the dilemmas of actual founding moments and the nature of subsequent political action. Zhang puts forward the possibility that individual action may be capable of bringing about self-rule where self-rule does not exist, and has never existed, but he does not do so by positing the ontological priority and autonomy of individuals. Nor does he play benevolent lawgiver to impose a new way of life on the Chinese people. Zhang interprets founding as an empirical question: recognizing the necessarily shared, interpersonal nature of functional political rule, Zhang asks how personal practices and outlooks can be gradually reoriented toward unprecedented and society-wide ways of living and governing. He believes that this process is precipitated but never determined by the incremental, exemplary actions of ordinary individuals. In formulating this solution, he recasts the legitimacy/efficacy question in a slightly different light, borrowing from a neo-Confucian model in which the efficacy of an act turns on its very moral rightness. Zhang’s arguments suggest that the efficacy of an act turns not on its absolute moral authority but, in a democratic society at least, on its resonance with others – which rests legitimacy in what are often incomplete but always ongoing attempts at inspiring and being inspired by others, rather than in a set of institutions to which all must instantaneously consent. In the process, Zhang offers a more realistic picture both of inaugural political action and of the spaces and times in which such action is possible.

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The first paradox: mass versus elite Zhang inhabited a world whose unprecedented political and cultural fragmentation rendered unavailable the shared meanings that underwrite democratic political action. The changes he sought were not imminent in his own traditions, and so could not be “recovered” and brought into the service of contemporary problems; but Western-style democratic norms could not yet constitute shared bases for action either. He did not have the luxury of pretending that the Chinese, as a “people,” already existed, or that this collection of over 400 million individuals had all already ingested the concept of public space in which transformative political action could be staged. Zhang’s theorizing, in other words, must begin from either the not-yet or the almost-gone. This is not to say that no communities existed at the time, that people did not join together for specific, self-conscious purposes, or that Zhang was completely bereft of any already-existing social practices upon which to draw. As I will show, his theory of individual action banks on its deeply social, embedded characteristics: individuals are important because Zhang assumes they stand at the crux of a network of social relationships that both shape and are shaped by the everyday participation of discrete persons. The problem for Zhang, it seems, is that these communities effectively were not any kind of political communities at all, because their members lacked the self-reflexive comprehension of themselves as such. Temple festivals, merchant associations, village markets and other groups organized to execute specific tasks continued to flourish outside of any revolutionary political changes, but their existence apparently could not constitute a sufficient basis for the ultimately interpretive, self-conscious, and intersubjective practice of democracy. Like other well-educated elites of the early Republican period, Zhang confronted these issues through the lens of another paradox, related to founding but not reducible to it. Recognizing that political and social reform turned crucially on the character of the Chinese masses, yet believing that the masses could not reform themselves, elites pondered how they could include the common people in their nationbuilding projects without at the same time imposing this project on them. Often what emerged was a discourse not of the common people, but on the common people.3 When calls for “Western learning” and 3

Judge, “Publicists and Populists,” 166.


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constitutional reform near the end of the nineteenth century rendered bureaucratic activity and the examination system increasingly irrelevant, the crisis of the elite did not lessen but intensified. “The people” came to occupy an unprecedented position of sovereignty and agency – most spectacularly when the revolution of 1911 named them as rulers – but elites most definitely remained the center of both political action and the social imaginary. This new, awkward problem of mass versus elite was often articulated by such luminaries as Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai as an issue of political education, built on the same premise of elite-led social transformation that had shaped political agency in the late empire. To Zhang, however, political regimes meant nothing without the commitment of the people who both founded and sustained them. Zhang points out that were the Chinese masses as inept as the elites were painting them no functional government – including despotism – could get off the ground (ZQJ 31).4 At the same time, without a tradition of democratic self-rule, the Chinese people were bereft of the practices that could motivate and sustain a self-ruling government. This paradox, which appeared to Zhang and his contemporaries as a tension between mass action and elite leadership, is often articulated as a tension between ruler and ruled, between those who initiate political community and those who comprise it. The Social Contract of JeanJacques Rousseau offers what is probably the most famous articulation of this paradox: In order for a nascent people to appreciate sound political maxims and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be the product of the way in which the country was founded, would have to preside over the founding itself; and, before the creation of the laws, men would have to be what they should become by means of those same laws.5

Rousseau’s reading of the problem helps explain why founding remains such a troublesome matter for a self-ruling regime. To distinguish itself from other, more imposing regimes (including tyranny), a republic or 4

5

The insight that modernization and political reform was something everyone in Chinese society needed to do was recognized over a decade earlier by Liang Qichao in Xinmin shuo. Theresa Lee (“Liang Qichao,” 317) traces this conclusion to Liang’s depiction of despotism as a political system that corrupts everyone in society, both ruler and ruled. Rousseau, Social Contract, bk II, ch. 7.

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a democracy must call into being a majority, or at least a collective, to participate in its functioning and to share its values. But avoiding tyrannical imposition first demands an identity between what these people as individuals want – the particular will – and what these individuals as a people want – the general will. For Rousseau, a benevolent lawgiver relieves these tensions by setting up those laws that can both educate and constitute a polity. Before going on to consider Zhang’s response to this seeming paradox, including his own reading of Rousseau, it may be helpful to survey how contemporary Anglophone theorists have interpreted the paradox of founding as a means of redirecting its central concerns. Rousseau’s extrapolitical solution of a lawgiver draws attention to the difficulties of truncating what are ultimately the “chicken-and-egg” dilemmas that, in the view of many contemporary theorists, mark all action in self-ruling regimes. On the basis of these similarities, Rousseau’s narrative has been appropriated to unravel the problems of founding that seem to recur daily even in mature democracies.

The second paradox: constituting authority Rousseau’s influential statement of the founding problem identifies one of the primary issues at stake as the creation not of people as individuals with particular characteristics, but of “a people” as a cohesive group, whose members self-identify both with the group and with each other. Contemporary theorists have come increasingly to recognize that, speaking realistically, the people as a group is never consistently present when political actions are taken, and its consent is never fully acquired. It must therefore be called into being whenever, as in everyday political interventions, individuals take actions in its name – creating a paradox akin to that which Rousseau characterized as a prepolitical problem.6 Because self-ruling regimes in principle are meant to embody widely shared, collective aims, political action within such regimes must assume that certain commitments to self-ruling practices exist already by a body of persons who can act together; otherwise, political action undertaken in the name or under the auspices of the community becomes imposing or coercive, precisely that which by definition it cannot be. 6

Keenan, Democracy in Question, 11–13.


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The act of a literal founding, in this account, appears violent and imposing, and so too do the political actions in a mature regime that may mimic it. William Connolly warns that the violence of a literal founding threatens to recur throughout democratic practice – in the form of “a series of cruelties, dangers, and violences in the present that need to be addressed” – and can only be brought under control by a community understood to exist in perpetuity, rather than deliberately constructed in a moment of spontaneity or force.7 Similar wariness about the impositions of unilateral action prompts Hannah Arendt, in On Revolution, to look to mutual promise-making as a self-constituting method of community formation, a move which reinterprets polity establishment as itself bound up with ongoing political practices rather than episodic events. Her solution, like Connolly’s, presumes a community – in this particular case, one that already understands the political meaning and force of promising, and engages in the practice regularly. Rather than see these presumptions about already existing communities as illogical, however, Bonnie Honig argues that their very lack of foundation gestures toward – and helps to pry open further – the gaps between performative capacity and transcendental referent that is, according to Jacques Derrida, a structural foundation of all utterances.8 These irresolvable gaps allow Honig to transform the moment of founding into a story about everyday resistances to authority that, on her account, ironically figure as constitutive practices of authorization.9 Others join Honig in insisting that legitimacy is not only the primary, but also the only, problem of founding, because “it would not be a problem to create an illegitimate system of laws de novo. This could simply be done by force: ‘obey these laws or suffer the consequences.’”10 For the most part, these approaches read founding as an alwaysexisting problem whose resolution motivates the real work of daily political action. It is probably true, after all, that the work of building political structures and the individual characters that inhabit them is a circular one, because institutions and characters are themselves

7 8 9

Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 137. Honig, “Declarations of Independence,” 105. Ibid., 111. 10 Olson, “Paradoxes,” 331.

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mutually constituted and reciprocal.11 Founding as an actual, polityestablishing event, then, is a “myth” (or, in Honig’s Derridan vocabulary, a “fable”) – valuable for its symbolic richness but not for its prescriptive design. All that remains is a story about how subsequent actions taken against popular will can be legitimate. Paul Ricoeur realized this dilemma as both necessary yet irresolvable; he called it “the political paradox.” Founding myths are necessarily adduced from contemporary reality; they are events that have never taken place, because it is in the very nature of political legitimacy to be recoverable only in retrospection, after the community has been united. “Political thought proceeds from the state, to citizenship, to civism [i.e. the virtues of citizenship] and not in the reverse order.”12 The problem “founding” typifies, then, is not so much one of how to establish regimes as one of how to constitute authority – which, because it is continually contested in regimes of self-rule, can be considered a recurring rather than an episodic problem. When “founding” moments are seen to occur perpetually in this way, they no longer appear as true beginnings. Rather, they draw attention to the embedded nature of political actors whose interventions draw inevitably from the “always-already” available political resources that community life affords.13 The paradoxes of founding are thereby assuaged by situating them in an already existing, self-ruling polis, in which authority is daily contested but the difficulty of actually constituting the people is set aside as a problem no longer relevant. Authority can then be grounded in the promise of ongoing negotiation, secured either by the years of proto-democratic practices that preceded the official establishment of particular regimes,14 or in the promise of a dynamic constitution to evolve toward realization of those values that the original founding could not initially satisfy.15 Yet when no community yet exists to contest authority in a particular way, the paradoxes of founding do not disappear; they simply resound along a different register. Chinese reformers confronted these 11 12 13 14 15

Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 1, 11. Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” 252, 254. E.g. Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, The Attack of the Blob; Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation.” Wolin, The Presence of the Past; Connolly, Identity/Difference; Arendt, On Revolution. Olson, “Paradoxes.”


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resounding paradoxes when they realized the difficulty of inculcating principles of self-rule – the very principles that make legitimacy accessible as a grounds for contestation – in a populace whose only political experience had been subjection under an absolute monarchy, and whose political conceptualizations seemed unable to render claims to self-rule intelligible. Upon what grounds can a self-ruling community take shape, if not through top-down impositions that would themselves inhibit the practices that constitute self-rule? Zhang’s own interventions in these debates help to elaborate his own views regarding the paradoxes of elite rule in mass society, but he does not embrace the mass/elite dichotomy that marked so much of Chinese political thinking in the twentieth century. Instead, Zhang uses the language of Rousseau’s social contract to rethink the capacities for political action on both sides. Confronting founding as a real and immanent event, Zhang is forced to truncate the circularity that for many contemporary political theorists assuages founding’s paradoxes. In the process he is led to identify for individuals a more central role in both political founding and ongoing, regime-sustaining action.

A Chinese founding narrative: the social contract Rousseau’s On the Social Contract (Min yue lun) stood for many years, beginning in the late nineteenth century, as one of the only sources of Western political theory available in Chinese, endowing its themes and vocabulary with an unusual polemical potency.16 Early revolutionaries used Rousseau’s work to articulate their opposition to Manchu rule not only in terms of resistance to a foreign oppressor, but also in terms of “natural” equality and popular sovereignty.17 The language of social contract amplified earlier attempts by Ming and Qing progressives, including Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu, to forge a conceptual separation between the ruler and the society he ruled. Yan Fu, in one of the earliest and best-known invocations of social-contract language in Chinese, argued that imperial-era political relationships between the ruler and his ministers, as well as between ministers and the people, underscored the identity between the Chinese state and the imperial house, in the process confounding the ruler’s good with the people’s good. To eradicate this conflation, Yan urged 16

Dong, “Lun xinhai geming,” 81.

17

Lam, Bu xiang minzhu, ch. 2.

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the cultivation of “the people’s intelligence, strength, and virtue” to fit them for self-rule.18 Ironically, although his rhetoric seems to indicate support for widespread political participation, Yan stopped well short of arguing for democratic government. Like many influential thinkers at the time, including Liang Qichao, Yan too claimed that “the time was not yet right” for doing away with monarchical structures because the customs and habits of the people “were not yet adequate to sustain self-rule.”19 In an essay written for Liang’s Yongyan journal in 1914, almost twenty years after his first encounter with Rousseau, Yan reaffirms his suspicion of popular self-rule by denying any empirical basis for “natural” rights and equality. The obvious incapacity of the Chinese to reform themselves, Yan believes, is strong evidence not only that Rousseau was wrong about rights being “natural,” but also that his prescriptions for democratic transition had no applicability in the Chinese case.20 Yan’s reading is somewhat extreme compared to that of other Chinese contemporaries, but typical insofar as it dismisses freedom and equality as substantive concepts of rights centered on individuals.21 The persistent and widespread distrust of popular self-rule in this era demonstrates the extent to which invocations of freedom and equality buttressed arguments against specific forms of government but did not extend to a theoretical examination of the foundations of government per se, and their possible relation to individual rights and capacities. In the absence of a hereditary ruler, intellectual elites stepped into largely unquestioned positions of rulership as they assumed the handles of various mechanisms of social control, including education and economic regulation. In contrast, Zhang exploits the naturally existing capacity for pre-governmental action implied in Rousseau’s “state of nature” to respond to the mass-versus-elite paradox, without taking elite rule as central. His ideas were spelled out in a 1915 essay, “Reading Yan Fu’s ‘Critique of the Social Contract’” (“Du Yan Jidao ‘Min yue pingyi’”), where he refuted Yan’s reading of Rousseauian natural right. In this exchange, Zhang defends neither radical democracy nor 18 21

Yan, “Pi Han,” 91. 19 Ibid., 92. 20 Yan, “‘Min yue’ ping lun,” 757–758. One important exception was Liu Shipei, whose essay “On the Social Contract” identified the individual as the primary unit of Rousseau’s analysis; Dong, “Lun xinhai geming,” 77.


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liberal values; in fact, at no point does Zhang offer explicit reasons to support any of Rousseau’s ideas, even as he exposes as spurious Yan’s own attacks on them.22 Rather, I see Zhang using Rousseau to reexamine a long-standing debate in Chinese thought between what, following Rousseau, was now called the “naturally given” (tian fu zhi) and the “man-made” (renzao zhi). By drawing an explicit link between these issues and the purposes and capacities of the political realm, Rousseau’s Social Contract helps Zhang to think through what is within the scope of humans (separately as individuals, or aggregated as polities) to achieve politically. Zhang begins his essay by explaining, contra Yan’s slight mischaracterization, that Rousseau’s ideas of freedom and equality are not descriptions of an irrefutable reality but instead are normative prescriptions for political association. Zhang goes on to defend the empirical possibility of a spontaneous contract arising from a state of warfare, mainly by pointing out that others (including Thomas Hobbes and the Tang dynasty thinker Liu Zongyuan) have drawn the same conclusion from available evidence (ZQJ 21–22). Against Yan and Liang, both of whom see the social contract as brokering agreements between collectives (usually guo, states), Zhang insists, following Rousseau,23 that “the contract is between individuals” (ZQJ 23). This devolution to individual choice for Zhang is linked primarily to the inefficacy, rather than the bold illegitimacy, of force as a foundation for political association, but it also foreshadows his response to the legitimation problem. For Zhang, the tension between Rousseauian “will” and “force” seems to map a tension between innate capacity, on the one hand, and the contingencies of external, structural influence, on the other. When Yan interprets the fragility of human infants as evidence that they possess no naturally given freedom, and the obvious

22

23

In fact, Zhang explicitly distances himself from Rousseau when he insists from the very beginning that he is not a supporter of Rousseau’s theory of republicanism, discussion of which Zhang fears can easily result in “empty speculation” (ZQJ 19). Although most commentators on Zhang’s work take this essay as an instance of Zhang’s commitment to liberal rights (e.g. Lam, “Yan Fu yu Zhang Shizhao”; Weston, “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community”), I think Zhang’s “defense” of Rousseau simply points out that Rousseau’s claims are reasonable (though contestable) given certain conditions. Rousseau, Social Contract, bk I, ch. 4.

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interpersonal differences in intelligence and ability as proof that equality is nonsensical,24 Zhang responds by drawing a distinction between innate capacity and the event of being born. He calls only innate capacity “natural” (ZQJ 25), analogizing it to the liangzhi (“innate moral knowledge”) concept of neo-Confucianism. To neo-Confucians like Wang Yangming and his followers, liangzhi was an always-already source of moral-philosophical insight into the world that was perpetually in danger of being obscured by what were seen as externally derived passions and material influences.25 To recover and develop this moral capacity, Wang advocated meditative self-cultivation and the daily practice of Confucian virtues. Liangzhi, however, was not “natural” in the ziran sense; that is, these capacities could not develop necessarily simply as part of the process of living or maturing, nor could they be duplicated by the application of external encouragement. As merely “naturally given” (tian fu zhi), liangzhi required self-motivated, directed efforts (gongfu) to actualize its potential. By seeing natural rights as more like liangzhi and less like ongoing biological processes, Zhang characterizes them as widely diffuse, innate capacities that exist prior to government but not to the deliberate human effort to cultivate them. Although not spontaneously effective, these capacities must be self-directed; they cannot be imposed by government or created through force, because the government can work only on material that is already there in individuals. Quoting Herbert Spencer’s refutation of Bentham, who insisted that governments “create” rights, Zhang insists on an a priori basis for the free actions of individuals and their unforced capacities for action: Two meanings may be given to the word “creating.” It may be supposed to mean the production of something out of nothing; or it may be supposed to mean the giving form and structure to something which already exists. There are many who think that the production of something out of nothing cannot be conceived as effected even by omnipotence; and probably none will assert that the production of something out of nothing is within the competence of a human government.26 24 25

26

Yan, “‘Min yue’ ping lun,” 758–759. In Wang Yangming’s words, “The nature endowed in us by Heaven is pure and perfect . . . It is the original substance of the clear character which is called innate knowledge of the good” (translated in Chan, Sourcebook, 661). Spencer, Social Statics, 389; cited in a response to a letter from Gao Yihan, ZQJ 327.


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These beliefs have profound implications for how the tensions of founding can be defined and assuaged. By insisting that governments cannot create something out of nothing, Zhang implies a definite beginning to a political regime, albeit one sited ambiguously both in naturally existing capacities and in deliberate human effort. Zhang’s analogy of “natural rights” to liangzhi suggests that it is ordinary people who inaugurate the possibility of self-rule: just as they are said to possess liangzhi, so too do they have a “natural” capacity for independent and creative action. Zhang’s thoughts on liangzhi reflect contemporary Chinese thinking on rights, which interpreted “rights” (quanli) more often as capacities or ethical orientations than as legal sanctions that draw or guarantee spheres of privacy around autonomous individuals. Zhang does not, however, reproduce the ethical imperative of liangzhi that many of his contemporaries believed made rights effective politically. By seeing liangzhi as analogous to, rather than constitutive of, the natural rights that ground the capacity for political action, Zhang dissociates them from the particular ethical prescriptions many of his contemporaries, including Liang Qichao and Liu Shipei, believed were the cause of their effectiveness.27 To Zhang, “rights” simply mark the innate capacity of anyone to act, not only to act morally. He in fact denies, contra Yan Fu, that Rousseau believed that these “natural” conditions were inherently good at all. Zhang claims that “the good Rousseau ascribes to these original people [in the state of nature] simply points to the time before they began fighting with and slaughtering each other . . . it is not the goodest good” but a relative term only (ZQJ 26). These capacities for action Zhang identifies with Rousseau’s concept of “will”: it is these innate capacities that construct the social contract. Force cannot create them or sustain them, because as Rousseau pointed out once the source of forceful imposition is lost so too are the activities that found and sustain a polity. Yan believes that rights and capacities can be created by means of violence, and Zhang acknowledges that the capacities of “rights” are like force in that they exert powerful influences on existing environments and can even depose tyrants: As Su Dongpo [Su Shi, 1037–1101 CE] has said, “What does the ruler rely upon? In the Book of Documents, it is written: . . . ‘When [their 27

Angle, Human Rights, 154, 168.

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hearts-and-minds are] gathered together, they are as loyal ministers; when scattered apart, they are as enemies.’ . . . Therefore I say, what does the ruler rely upon? Simply the hearts-and-minds [xin] of people.” When “gathered together,” this means gathered together as in a contract; when “scattered apart,” this means dissolving the contract. This should be obvious. Therefore, when the people[’s hearts-and-minds] are scattered, they regard their ruler as an enemy, and oppose him. This [opposition] has nothing to do with what Rousseau calls force. (ZQJ 34)

Although the people may use force, as the Chinese did when they founded the Republic, their actions cannot be confounded with coercion simpliciter because the capacities that make them possible are always innate and personal – expressed in their “heart-and-mind” – and do not disappear as the force behind coercion disappears (ZQJ 34–35). The social contract solves part of the mass-and-elite paradox for Zhang: as a widely diffuse capacity for action, “rights” understood as liangzhi are something all – not only elites – possess and can use efficaciously to transform their society and to establish their government. Political action, far from being circular and bound up in already existing institutions, truncates the moment individuals activate their innate capacities. But Zhang has not yet solved the original founding paradox: even if these innate capacities, and their successful exercise, are within the purview of all, the great unanswered question is, then, why have they not yet been activated? Who are the prime movers, if any? And how can their limited interventions as individuals have any real effect on collective, shared environments? The answer may lie in an alternative founding narrative from China’s past, one premised more on transmission across time than on instantaneous political creation.

Another Chinese founding narrative: “making the political lies in people” In an essay promisingly titled “The Foundations of Government” (“Zheng ben”), Zhang anticipates his social-contract vocabulary by insisting that the “root” or “foundation” (ben) of government lies in people. The essay inaugurated the first issue of The Tiger, further marking its significance to Zhang’s attempts to unravel founding narratives. The essay begins by claiming that toleration of differences is the foundation of government, but goes on to elaborate where and how that


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toleration can be found: “As I see it, creating government lies in people; those people exist and government flourishes. The successes and failures of government must be accounted for in the achievements and failures of individual talent [ren cai]. Government is the leaves and branches, but talent is its roots” (ZQJ 5). Zhang’s statement here about the root of government residing in people is a word-for-word allusion to the neo-Confucian text the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), which stood for centuries at the center of late imperial Chinese debates over the relationship of individual self-cultivation to statecraft.28 A very literal (and heavily interpolated) translation of the cited passage would read: . . . the Master [Confucius] said: “The government [zheng] of Kings Wen and Wu is spread upon the wooden tablets and the bamboo strips. [This shows that] once [these?] person(s) exist(s), then [the?] government stands firm. [When] [this or these?] person(s) disappear, then [the?] government ceases. The way of [these?] person(s) is amenable to government as the way of the land is amenable to growing vegetation. Thus [their?] government is [as] an easily growing rush.” Therefore, the creation of government [or, making the political] lies in person(s); selecting person(s) lies in character; the cultivation of one’s own individual character proceeds on the basis of the Way; and the cultivation of the Way is grounded in benevolence [ren].29

As indicated by my frequent use of brackets, this Chinese founding narrative is rich with ambiguity, much of it traceable to the lack of number, gender, or identifying articles (such as “the” or “this”) in classical Chinese.30 Zhang’s own application of the passage exploits this acrobatic versatility, even as he anchors his invocation of “doing government lies in people” firmly within the received meaning of the text. Combined with his reading of Rousseau, Zhang’s allusions to this neo-Confucian text suggest both a way of situating action and a way 28

29

30

This short work was extracted from the larger, Han-era canonical text The Book of Rites by the neo-Confucian Zhu Xi, and was required reading for the civil examinations beginning in the Song era. As a text extremely familiar to Zhang’s educated audience, Zhang does not cite the text explicitly. Zhongyong, ch. 19. This translation is my own, but draws on Song Tianzheng’s annotated Chinese edition, Zhongyong jinzhu jinyi, and James Legge’s English translation in Confucian Analects. It is important to note that I am not making any claims about the meaning or ambiguity of the text in its original historical context; I only wish to explain how the grammatical flexibility of the passage allows Zhang to deploy it in the way that he does.

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of generating it that relies exclusively neither on the raw capacity of autonomous, pre-political individuals nor on preexisting constituents of an established political community. The traditional (and, for the imperial civil examinations, authoritative) meaning of the Doctrine narrative, as interpreted by the twelfthcentury neo-Confucian Zhu Xi, holds that once individuals of King Wen and King Wu’s extraordinary stature exist, then government can be established. “The creation of government” lies more specifically for Zhu in “the selection of persons” for government service, which interpolates into the original text a specific capacity for the sage kings Wen and Wu.31 These kings are not only sagely founders, but also – necessarily, Zhu thinks – discriminating judges of men. The “people” of which the Doctrine speaks, in other words, are held to be specific people (Wen, Wu, and their selected ministers) with specific talents (for administering government efficiently and with a sense of moral purpose). No “popular” agents (min) are invoked; rulership is confined to men of exceptional purpose who (presumably) are the only ones capable of setting a government in motion. The Doctrine’s celebration of top-down political establishment seems to mimic Rousseau’s account of a benevolent lawgiver, but the exceptional persons who “raise government” in this narrative do not leave once the task of founding is accomplished. Bonnie Honig suggests that the exit of Rousseau’s lawgiver links to a persistent image in Western narratives of a “foreign founder,” whose unique potency for founding polities (especially democratic polities) also threatens them once they are established. Whether it be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz or the Biblical Moses, founders who liberate peoples or establish law for them also implicitly deny that those people can do the same for themselves. When the founder leaves voluntarily, he helps to expunge from the people’s memory their own political impotence; when he is cast out, the newly governed can both disavow their own capacities for violent founding and deny that some acts must be undemocratic to be effective.32 In the Doctrine case, however, the very purpose of Wen and Wu as founders is to remain solidly within the structures they have created and thereby to begin transmitting; they mark “the wooden tablets and the bamboo strips” so that their practices – which the Doctrine 31

Zhu, Si shu, 28.

32

Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 23–40.


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identifies with the very beginning not just of a particular polity, but of government itself – can be perpetuated. It is precisely by means of their ongoing interventions in politics that “the government stands firm” and becomes like “an easily growing rush.” This founding narrative focuses on enduring sustenance, rather than a single felicitous intervention sandwiched between a sudden moment of rescue and an equally unforeseen exit. In fact, the Doctrine is only one of many narratives in the Chinese corpus that read political founding in terms of ritual transmission or organization by exceptionally attuned sages, rather than innovative imposition by an external lawgiver. In his extensive survey of early Chinese political and cultural creation narratives, the sinologist Michael Puett identifies a persistent bias in proto-Confucian and classical Confucian texts against deliberate innovation, which, when it appears at all, is usually associated only with bandits, rebels, or other unworthies. “Despite the many differences between these texts, they all share an attempt to develop a framework wherein creation is denied altogether, and sages serve simply to organize correctly that which was found originally in nature” or, sometimes, to reappropriate and transform the negative, violence-rooted creations of unsavory characters.33 Creation was explicitly associated with violence and disruption; “founding” work, then, had to be done by other means. The founding event or events of the Doctrine passage, appropriately, turn in large part on transmission, and so too does Zhu’s own appropriation of them. By delineating a genealogy for the text, Zhu locates its authenticity and authority in its transmission. He goes on to see this narrative as an important component in the “succession of the Way” (daotong) which Zhu identified as the true but long-neglected heritage of those Confucians who would oppose the incursions of Buddhism.34 Many contemporary sinologists trace these transmission narratives and the practices of textual analysis that embody them to Confucius’ own insistence that his scholarly accomplishment lies not in creation but in transmission: “I transmit but do not create; I believe in and love the ancients.”35 Confucius and his followers see their task 33 35

Puett, “Sages, Ministers, and Rebels,” 476. 34 Zhu, Si shu, 14–16. The Confucian tradition, in fact, is unique among canonical traditions for identifying scriptural redaction and transmission as the quintessential work of its founder (Henderson, Scripture, Canon and Commentary, 113).

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as preserving ancient Zhou ritual by implementing it in the present, not by creatively adapting it but by carefully replicating it. Wen and Wu are exemplary instances of this preservation, in which “founding” as a generative possibility is explicitly disavowed.36 This is not to say that transmissive founding precludes innovation or change. Despite Confucius’ protestations, transmission is more than simply replication: by being linked so tightly to an inaugural act, transmission is configured as transformative – it is an act that changes (or perhaps precipitates change in) a community otherwise fragmented or wayward. In the Doctrine narrative, this act consists primarily in the inauguration of certain orientations, worldviews, or moral attitudes that then go on to support particular kinds of institutions, a task amplified by and reflected in acts of transmission. Successful transmission implies the founder’s exceptional attunement to an existing situation; he or she must divine precisely those actions that will resonate with an entire community, without resorting to violent or institutional impositions. It is a reiteration of existing practices with an eye toward initiating new ones that themselves can go on to generate new institutions and practices. In Puett’s view, many texts from early China such as the Doctrine portray founding in a similar light: the task of founding is not to break with an order, nor is its dilemma how to legitimate that break and the subsequent order that follows from it. Rather, Puett argues that “these texts start from a sense that humans experience their surroundings as fragmented and discontinuous, and the questions that emerge are thus focused on how one builds a better world from this discontinuity.”37 How does founding as a transmissive practice throw light on the tensions of Zhang’s founding narrative? Although the lineages Zhu constructs in his own story of transmission – from Mencius in the Warring States period to the Cheng brothers in the early Song 36

37

Shortly before Zhang gained prominence in the early twentieth century, transmissive founding appeared again as Chinese thinkers responded to the rise of Western hegemony in Asia. Chinese reformers, especially those associated with the revisionist, philological Gongyang school, sinicized Western pasts and futures through recourse to a transmission narrative. In the mind of these anxious Chinese elites, the very Way that bound them to the ancient sages and demanded transmission to the future also anticipated Western inventions and served as the foundation for an as-yet unrealized Western heritage. Westerners, in other words, were seen as part of daotong transmission: see Wang, “Qingji weixin renwu,” 34. Puett, “Innovation as Ritualization,” 27.


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dynasty – mean to authorize his own appropriations of the text, Zhang’s insistence that “creating government lies in people” (wei zheng zai ren) – or, what is perhaps a more appropriate translation in Zhang’s case, “making the political lies in individual persons” – suggests that the problem of founding is to find prime movers who will set in motion some kind of society-wide, and trans-temporal, transformation. To Hanna Pitkin, the resonance necessary for all such inaugural action implies an already existing community whose collective values are the empirical and normative basis for further effective action: “No leader stands in relation to his followers as a craftsman to material, imposing form on inanimate matter. He must always deal with people who already have customs, habits, needs, beliefs, rules of conduct, who already live somewhere in some manner.”38 By suggesting that founders “transmit” rather than create ex nihilo, Zhang seems to endorse this circular notion of political action, rejecting in the process founding narratives that pivot on the historical or normative priority of either individuals or political institutions.39 But what kinds of action can be taken in situations of extreme political fragmentation, in which creating a community turns on motivating disparate individuals to take action in ways that are not directly resonant with any already existing environment? The transmission performed by the Doctrine’s sage kings – and, by extension, implied in Zhang’s allusion to them – seems to signal a different kind of political intervention, the constitutive components of which are not spontaneous consent or episodic resistance but resonance and exemplariness. These extraordinary individuals act by setting a law that is binding not because it is an expression of universal reason or consent, but because it is an exemplary act that compels through its virtue, however imperfectly the full contours of that virtue may be captured in extant written words.40 The Doctrine develops earlier themes found in the Analects of Confucius, as well as in the text attributed to Mencius, to explain 38 39

40

Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, 99. Sheldon Wolin (“Norm and Form”) and Jill Frank (A Democracy of Distinction) join Pitkin in embracing an idea of political action as a circular and self-perpetuating activity that privileges neither individual efforts nor institutional influences, but instead draws forth new possibilities from the interaction of both. Zhu Xi explicitly laments these omissions in his preface to the Doctrine. In fact, it was precisely because of the inability of words to convey this virtue that Chinese exegetical practices often emphasized oral transmission (especially through the teacher–student relationship).

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how the ruler’s virtue acts as a potent, transformative influence on the hearts and minds of the people, independently of any institutions that may mediate his power. A well-known example is from the Analects: “The Master said, ‘The rule of virtue can be compared to the Pole Star, which commands the homage of the multitude of stars simply by remaining in its place.’”41 Pitkin denies that exemplariness or imitation can constitute a true model of founding for self-governing polities, because the very act of imitating what is exemplary belies the innovation – and hence the autonomy – necessary for founding acts. One can imitate such founders’ innovation “only by not imitating anyone,” whereas true imitation of their actions would refute the autonomy such founding was trying to instill.42 Pitkin therefore links founding to the situated practices of citizenship that read autonomy as embedded in practices of mutuality, in which free citizens hold “each other to the civil limits defined by their particular tradition” which they recognize as already given “yet honor or alter as conscious ‘co-founders.’”43 When capacities for self-rule are not defined in terms of autonomy, however, many of Pitkin’s objections to the characterization of efficacious founding acts as exemplary ones appear irrelevant. So too does the analogy of founding to everyday practices of mutually constituted citizenship, when the “particular tradition” of participants no longer engenders trust, much less defines “civil limits.” The model of transmissive founding, with its constitutive political actions of exemplariness and imitation, offers an alternative that recognizes the situatedness of political actors without at the same time conflating (and thereby eliding) the episodic, founding act with those everyday acts that sustain any particular regime. The very point of Zhang’s theory is to demonstrate how actions under conditions of extreme fragmentation can be effective when taken incrementally and interpersonally. In this account, founding will not be one event but many dispersed and cumulative ones, in which not absolute virtue but the appeal of one’s ideas and actions in a local environment emanate outwardly to create emergent political arenas. It is in fact the close association of efficacy and resonance that enables Zhang to replace the inaugural sage kings of the transmission model with the plurality of actors under democracy – but consonant with that model he expects resonance to 41

Analects 2.2.

42

Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, 272, 268–273.

43

Ibid., 315.


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turn on the incremental and imitative appeal of the boldly new, rather than the already existing. Two questions remain, however: how can these exemplary actors serve as legitimate founders of a democratic polity, if they act independently of the very community they hope to bring into being? And just as importantly, how can the paradoxical combination of individualized effort for community-building actually be efficacious?

The nexus of efficacy and legitimacy In a 1914 essay explaining why the provisional constitution failed to take effect, Zhang insists that the stability and legitimacy of this new political arrangement lies not simply in promulgating a draft and going through however many formalities and then declaring, ‘it is stable, it is stable.’ It must be something every person in the country must tend toward, something they must feel that they can entrust their lives and property to without fear. (ZQJ 523; italics mine)

Linking the strength of the political regime to its legitimacy, as Zhang does here, alludes to long-standing Confucian assumptions that acting effectively meant acting in cosmologically sanctioned ways, whether by following established ritual or by cultivating moral insight within oneself. Although the precise means of abiding by this cosmic moral order (tian, often misleadingly translated into English as “Heaven”) were widely debated, it was agreed that earthly peace and prosperity lie in the balance. Only proper moral actions, informed by virtue (de), could be effective actions – that is, capable of inspiring others and aligning political and social institutions with cosmological principles. Zhang does not pursue the ethical content of this ideal, but its framework for joining legitimacy to efficacy is helpful for understanding why Zhang believes individual exemplary acts can both challenge authority and justifiably embody it. One consequence of the individual’s position in these Confucian cosmological relationships was that although he or she acted through embedded social relationships and according to a presumably universal standard of virtue, his or her political motivations were seen to arise beyond and (sometimes) in tension with both. Chang Hao attributes this widely shared Confucian belief to a

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pattern of authority established by Confucius’ ideal of the junzi, a concept which later became absorbed into the scholar-official ideal. Unlike under earlier Zhou-era political institutions in which the political ruler mediated both Heavenly mandate and worldly authority, Confucian junzi of the Warring States and after saw the independent alignment of their minds with Heavenly mandate as a primary political and ethical responsibility. As such, self-cultivation – the reestablishment of an individual’s inner core to align with cosmological patterns, or with historical exemplars like kings Wen and Wu as recorded in the classic texts of Confucianism – stood as a radical interpretive opportunity to reorder external environments on the basis of this personal vision, encouraging a heightened critical spirit that often rejected the necessary impositions of external institutions.44 Under the empire, this mediation process produced what Thomas Metzger characterizes as a “triangular” relationship of authority, a complex conceptual matrix that delimited the fields of political intervention available to reform-minded scholar-officials. Metzger describes this situation as one in which “the sovereign authority of the jun [ruler] was balanced by the junzi’s role as the potentially ultimate vehicle of moral insight, and the authority of the Classics overarched both these roles.” The junzi alone had the capacity for political admonishment, comprising a world that saw authority as ultimately lodged not in one’s social superiors, but “in the structure of the cosmos itself as something accessible without mediation to each individual will.”45 When Zhang suggests, in similar fashion, that political “foundations” lie in the “persons” that enliven government rather than in the rulers who commandeer it, he suggests that citizens step into the role 44

45

Chang, “Some Reflections,” 24–28. This was the fundamental motivation behind the late imperial “statecraft” tradition (jingshi), in which world-ordering in the form of administrative innovation was seen as directly complementary to, rather than a replacement for, self-cultivation activities (Chang, “Song–Ming yilai Rujia Jingshi sixiang shishi”; Rowe, Saving the World, 327–330.) Chang notes, however, that other important strands of Confucianism – especially those associated with Han-era correlative cosmology – held that the alignment with Heaven that legitimated political authority rested in external institutions rather than in internal self-cultivation; see Chang, You’an yishi, 51–55 et passim. Metzger, Escape, 176, 179.


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of imperial junzi. In a democracy, both the moral legitimacy of democratic rule, and the materially efficacious power incurred by the polity acting together, flow through the individual citizen. As both ruler and ruled, the “people” as an entity simultaneously act and are acted upon – meaning that into the place of both Heaven and ruler steps a plurality of actors with disparate interests and abilities, who must authorize action as well as perform it. Paradoxically, then, the union of legitimacy and efficacious power represented by democratic founding is first performed not when collectives act together, but when the individual acts to align the external world with his inner moral insight. Insertion of the “self” into democratic life means that individuals act for commonly shared ends, but they do so separately; they do not act “together” to transform their socio-political environment. This counterintuitive model of democratic action can be rendered sensible when seen through the lens of triangular authority that Metzger describes above. For Zhang, the will of each individual perpetually calls into being the source of political legitimacy, because even if the “people” now occupies the normative position of the “cosmos” to legitimate political rule, it is each individual who acts to mediate and criticize the normative whole toward which his or her capacities are oriented. Echoing certain progressive strands of neo-Confucianism, most prominently the Taizhou school, Zhang saw each person striving, in perhaps idiosyncratic but still meaningful ways, to become aligned with a vision of order.46 This vision is informed, however, not by cosmological patterns or Heavenly mandate, but by intuitions about what will and will not resonate with fellow citizens. In this modified neo-Confucian model of legitimacy, founding individuals read the interpretation of democracy as their personal responsibility, realizing that the very attempt to call it into being requires dedication to external community-building amid what is necessarily a plurality of other interpretations. Such plurality also speaks to that other founding paradox, the one most salient for Zhang and his contemporaries: that of efficacy. Dispersed acts motivated by critical distance take place in multiple arenas and at different times, by an uncoordinated plurality of individuals. 46

E.g. de Bary, Self and Society, 157–159, sees Taizhou thinkers such as Wang Ken promoting a similar egalitarianization of sagely potential.

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Founding is thus not a singular event, but a set of plural activities that may happen either instantaneously or in sequence, and at a pace set not by an external demand but by the ongoing efforts that both motivate and constitute those activities. Unlike the instantaneous transformations of Rousseau’s lawgiver, then, Zhang’s aims are more incremental and demand no spontaneous consensus on a set of institutions that define community identity. To be effective in creating the order they promise, these interpretations of democratic legitimacy need only resonate with ambient others; and if they are resonant, they will be legitimate. Zhang’s point is not that a democratic people should “bootstrap” its way into legitimacy,47 but that interpretations of legitimacy by disparate, self-aware actors “bootstrap” individuals into a democratic people. With this reading, he effectively re-creates the spontaneous, organic unity that, in the minds of many thinkers such as Walter Bagehot and Edmund Burke, legitimated British liberal institutions. Before these political systems became “natural” components of British political life, Zhang explains, there necessarily existed “individuals who transcended their times, patriotic men who all undertook the task of abolishing the old and thinking about the new, and finally the new was able to triumph over the old.” This was not a process of imposition, precisely because it was a process that unfolded slowly and among and between various bold individuals who went on to influence the rest of society. Only once these individuals of exceptional vision made their mark “could Europe have the political landscape it does today” (ZQJ 134).48 By characterizing the British governmental system as historically emergent rather than instantaneous, Zhang identifies the foundations of constitutionalism in incremental, historically specific changes that culminate in wider transformation. “Constitutions are matters of politics and history,” Zhang insists, “not purely matters of laws” (ZQJ 521). 47 48

As in, e.g., Olson, “Paradoxes.” Zhang asks his readers to regard the seven hundred years of British freedom under the Magna Carta not as a rebuke, but as an inspiration: “I simply want you to take that seven-hundred-year-old dead man and use him as a mirror to view yourselves, issuing forth just a little of his conscience and good nature . . . to make our grandchildren, or our grandchildren’s grandchildren, have something to cherish and look back on after more time than that has gone by” (ZQJ 520).


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Conclusion Zhang’s redescription of founding acts does not mean to ascribe impossible autonomy to singular, founding individuals. It simply indicates a framework by which individuals can act independently of currently existing political ideals and realities, without denying that what makes such aloofness possible may be traceable to equally embedded, idiosyncratic experiences within or outside the political community itself. The sages of the Doctrine narrative, in fact, are efficacious founders because they transcend the dichotomy of ordinary and exceptional. They are both ordinary enough to remain functional members of their communities long after the founding moment, but exceptional enough to discern and act independently upon orders that do not already exist. To found is to be exemplary in a resonant but unique and hitherto unprecedented way. Zhang’s insistence that resonance, and hence social change, lies in widely dispersed assertions of difference rather than in the replication of values already widely shared dissolves another paradox of founding, this one identified by Arthur Waley as specific to the Chinese case: the “disordered world can only be reformed by a sage; but so long as the world is disordered, no sage can appear.”49 Zhang’s model, however, points out that only in disordered worlds can sages appear because only in disordered worlds can order have meaning and appeal. What sagely founding calls for, in fact, is an aloofness from the current situation, an event of personal vision that temporally precedes acting upon the world even as it makes action in the world possible. As Sheldon Wolin explains it (albeit in a very different context), The paradigm observer is not the man who sees and reports what all normal observers see and report, but the man who sees in familiar objects what no one else has seen before. Thus the world must be supplemented [by this individual’s perspective, or insight] before it can be understood and reflected upon.50

Wolin’s choice of words is revealing: sometimes, certain acts of seeing supplement the world; they are visions brought to, rather than

49 50

Waley, Three Ways of Thought, 10, n. 11. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” 1073.

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drawn from, the existing worldly reality of the potential political community.51 Such idiosyncratic insight exists always, but its recognition as a source of politically potent leverage does not. The centrality of idiosyncrasy, or what Zhang in other essays theorizes as “difference” (yi), goes far toward resolving the tensions between mass and elite that marked all political action in the Republican period. Idiosyncrasy need not rely on elite action for either its inauguration or its imitation, and can be both initiated and witnessed at all levels of society. The radical reflexivity of foundational concepts such as self-awareness and the self-use of talent, which are explored further in later chapters, play such an important role in his political theory because he realizes that an essential feature of those institutions appropriate to constitutional and republican rule lies in particular ways of being and acting, on the part not only of elites but of ordinary people. These broad, socially dispersed capacities for founding are bound tightly to those innate though underdeveloped capacities Zhang identifies with “rights”: exercising these capacities turns in large part on embracing one’s idiosyncratic experience and forging ahead with exemplary acts that both challenge and change existing environments. There is always something particular to each – and every – individual that is never reducible to structure, to external influence, to the always-already. The Doctrine narrative appears in Zhang’s essay as an instance of how “individuals” (ren) “make the political” (wei zheng) rather than a hagiographic myth about deified sages, which suggests that founding turns in large part on each individual tapping this innate capacity, now specified as idiosyncrasy. These individuals foster rather than disavow their personal alienation from what is already there, but couple this feeling of difference with the faith that their disparate visions can eventually have meaning in a future political community of which they will all remain a part. The need for aloofness in the act of founding also helps to mitigate the mass/elite dilemma as Zhang personally experienced it: that is, as one individual importer of Western ideas who realizes that the

51

Mou Zongsan (Zhengdao yu zhidao, 203) has suggested that similar conditions gave rise to uniquely critical and reflective theory during the Ming–Qing transition: the political uninvolvement of thinkers such as Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu enabled them to begin realizing the institutional requirements for accountable government more clearly than had their predecessors.


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practice of those institutions requires an entire community’s spontaneous participation. The borrowing he sought to initiate is grounded in a certain kind of founding that gives structure and meaning to what is imported; and founding is itself a kind of borrowing that demands comprehensive stage-setting – if not wholesale replication – before more creative interventions can be meaningful. Although Zhang’s attempt to import unprecedented institutions into the Chinese milieu renders many indigenous practices useless or dangerous, such borrowing also provided a perspective from which to view Chinese political realities in a new and reinvigorated light. Those new, foreign practices at the heart of his vision – specifically, those seen to cluster about British and American liberal–democratic regimes – were precisely what motivated him to look beyond existing realities and to encourage others to cultivate whatever internal resources lay beyond, rather than within, the structural determinants of contemporary political despair. The founding acts Zhang alludes to here, then, are both ongoing across time and dispersed across space. For these reasons, such founding can be read into everyday political action, but it warns against the reverse possibility of interpolating everyday political action into founding acts. Emphasizing circularity or the already there as a means of assuaging founding’s paradoxes would dissolve all possibility of true founding: what generates and motivates sagely founding is not the sages’ intuitive manipulation of commonly shared principles or ideas, but their critical distance from those ideas. Zhang’s response to the paradoxes of founding therefore can be said to bank on both innovation and continuity; it refuses to accept as a goal or a premise the impossibly autonomous self, but it insists that individual interventions in political life – those actions that both found political regimes and sustain them – can and must lie beyond the predictable margins of an established political community and its set of habits. Founding is a process that, while never existing apart from a socially constructed milieu constituted by both institutions and individuals, remains irreducibly individual.

4

“Rule by man” and “rule by law”

Zhang’s elevation of individual persons to act as sagely founders resolves only part of founding’s paradoxes. What of the role played by external rather than internal forces, such as political structures, in shaping the actions of citizens? Could republican governance be successfully executed by installing the correct institutions, without recourse to motivated personal efforts at founding and regimebuilding? Many of Zhang’s contemporaries insisted that these feats were both theoretically unnecessary and practically impossible. Many of them, including such influential writers as Liang Qichao, Du Yaquan (1873–1933), and Gao Yihan (1885–1968), began urging the development of personal virtue rather than political involvement or institutionbuilding – a so-called renzhi (rule by man) position – to bring about social stability and renewal. This focus on the quality of leaders, rather than on any particular political institution or form of involvement, soon became a mainstream rallying cry for dispirited elites frustrated by China’s obvious failure in establishing republican government. Not long after the founding of the first Chinese republic, Sun Yat-sen stepped down as provisional president. The newly elected president of the Republic, Yuan Shikai, soon began maneuvering for greater power. He dissolved the national assembly and, many believed, assassinated opposition leader Song Jiaoren, whose views on constitutional government were inspired directly by Zhang Shizhao’s work in such publications as the Minli bao.1 In this period of pessimism and crisis, many intellectuals began to doubt the efficacy of Western-style institutions – such as the assembly or the presidency – for assuring China’s prosperity and national strength. Despite his insistence on the irreducibly individual acts that constitute political founding, however, Zhang spoke against such “rule by man” arguments. His position was understood by his 1

Price, “Constitutional Alternatives.”

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contemporaries to mean that the decisive issue was not how or whether men in positions of power were virtuous, but whether the regime type in which they worked was the “correct” or most efficacious one. It is certainly true that Zhang aligns himself against monarchy and benevolent despotism in favor of a constitutionally limited parliamentary government. But, as the previous chapter’s discussion has shown, Zhang’s commitment to institutional reform in these limited respects cannot be confounded with a conviction that institutions alone have the power to transform reality and thus shape China’s future – a fazhi or “rule by law” position to which his arguments are still frequently ascribed.2 A fuller and more accurate picture of what he was arguing would be to look at what he argued against: what precisely did he reject or oppose in order to stake out ground for the institutions of limited government that he hoped the Chinese people could found? And does this opposition create new possibilities that remark the territory within which he – and we – can formulate ideas about politics? Answering those questions requires examination of who argued for ideals of “rule by man” versus ideals of “rule by law” and why they expected these methods to ameliorate China’s political crisis. The disagreements between these thinkers did not fall along the simple opposition the terms might suggest, namely between a rule of law that provides security and predictability, on the one hand, and a tyrannical rule by man that gives full rein to autocratic power, on the other. Rather, its participants elaborate a series of complex relationships along different registers entirely – man and law, it turns out, tracks the tensions not only between moral and legal authority, but also between personal and institutional efficacy, and between actions taken in society and those taken in political spaces. As such, the binary helped reformers think creatively about the sources of social change available at a time when state power was deeply fragmented. In the early Republic, the frame of man and law was further intersected by an equally salient dichotomy between society/culture and politics that began to take shape in the years following the 1911 revolution. The two debates were mutually fructifying but not completely coterminous, complicating the discourse on social and political transformation by extending its debates to realms seemingly unrelated to 2

E.g. Hu, “Zhongguo zhi wenxue,” 226–227; Zou, Zhang Shizhao shehui zhengzhi sixiang; Wang, Zhongguo jindai sixiang, 251–253.

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political reform. In part the society/culture vocabulary emerged as a response to the elitism and impracticality of rule-by-man arguments, heralding the populism of the 1919 May Fourth Movement. Zhang stood at the center of both discussions, depicted by his opponents at times as a defender of radical Westernization, at others as a naive conservative. Contemporary commentators on Zhang’s work have repeated these characterizations, agreeing that Zhang’s advocacy of institutions and politics necessarily denies the importance of action in spheres unrelated directly to government, such as literature and everyday culture.3 Read together with Zhang’s person-centered theory of founding, however, a more nuanced interpretation of his position comes into view. Zhang’s rule-by-law allegiances turn more on a disagreement with his interlocutors over the involvement of elites in political transformation than over the mechanisms of that transformation. His engagement with rule by man arguments exposes elitism as an implicit component of their execution, even after thinkers like Liang Qichao and Huang Yuanyong used “society” and “culture” to turn their reform focus away from China’s political leadership and toward the betterment of the downtrodden masses. By endorsing institutions as a pivotal factor in reform, Zhang simply grapples more directly with a reality that all contributors to the debate acknowledge, namely the mutual interaction of individuals and the wider forces that they both create and are restrained by. He does not for that reason abandon the possibility that the moral quality of individuals exerts an effect on government; rather, his position suggests ways in which a logic of rule by man, properly chastised, can articulate a participatory role for nonelites in political community-building. Interpreting Zhang’s thought in the context of these debates, then, demonstrates his active role in molding the shifting cluster of ideas associated with limited government and democratic participation in early twentieth-century China. But, more importantly, it situates those ideas within more general theoretical claims grounded not in Western liberal commitments, but in contemporary Chinese disagreements over the sources of political and social change. These debates have been 3

Weston, “New Culture Community,” 271; Wang Fansen, Zhongguo jindai sixiang, 253.


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almost ignored in Anglophone historiography of the period, despite the fact that the opposition between man and law continues to shape legal and political discourse in modern-day China.4 Chinese commentators who examine the debate cast its participants as “losers,” scholars committed to doomed ideologies whose intellectual significance lies primarily in their contribution to May Fourth thinking.5 Yet the continuing resonance of man and law in modern Chinese thought inveighs against reading these early Republican debates as simply politically motivated factional struggles in which May Fourth radicalism wins out, or as spectacles of traditional residues in Republican-era thinking. As a response to substantive theoretical issues, the opposition between “man” and “law” helps us gain analytic purchase on the more general relationship between individual effort and institutional influence that they track. This approach renders the debates relevant not only to understanding wider issues in early Republican political discourse, but also to redrawing the frame through which any politics of transformation can be viewed. By bringing the theories into play with the problems they were formulated to confront, I draw attention to previously overlooked contradictions, alliances, and similarities that delimited early twentiethcentury Chinese discussions about reform and politics. Zhang’s insistence here that people and institutions are mutually constitutive components of political life forms the background against which he resists any dichotomy – whether of politics versus society, or of public versus private – that would shuttle into “nonpolitical” domains an unduly wide range of activities. In the next chapter, I explain how Zhang’s theory of social change can straddle both public and private domains while remaining explicitly political. Before I tackle that larger task, however, I focus in this chapter on how the concepts of man, law, culture, and politics worked (and worked together), and what Zhang’s commitment to them as meaningful political concepts implies for his political theory of founding: if individuals truly “make the political,” what role remains for institutions? How did contemporary theorists formulate this question, and how did Zhang respond? 4 5

For more details on how this Republican-era debate can illumine contemporary invocations of “man” and “law” in the PRC, see Jenco, “‘Rule by Man.’” Xu, “Shibaizhe de tansuo.”

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“Rule by man” ideals in early Republican China The appearance of “rule by man” and “rule by law” arguments in the early Republic was only the latest iteration in an ongoing debate in Chinese political thought that linked human moral effort to correlated changes in the cosmological order. Rule-by-man logics were built on an assumption that exceptionally cultivated individuals could act as an exemplary pole around which those with lesser moral capacity could revolve. Republican-era thinkers largely abandoned the cosmological premises of their neo-Confucian progenitors, however, even as their articulation of rule-by-man arguments identified similarly correlative relationships in analogous forms of republican governance. Specifically, these thinkers asked whether it is institutions (rule by law), or the people who create and maintain them (rule by man), that are most efficacious in reforming the socio-economic environment. These straightforward labels belie their complexity: the vocabulary of “man” and “law” did not merely identify these discrete concepts, but rather referred metonymically to the wider systems of rule that instantiated one or the other value on the basis of its political efficacy. Because the term “rule by law” grew out of (but was not ultimately reducible to) Legalist arguments of classical Chinese philosophy, which many somewhat mistakenly believed promoted institutions as coercive levers manipulated for the ruler’s whim, Republican reformers often shied away from advocacy of institutions. They focused instead on “rule by man,” an ideal first put forward by Confucius and Mencius in the Warring States period as an alternative to inter-state violence. These philosophers argued that the ruler’s virtue alone could bring states into peaceful alignment without resorting to military force, as stated in the Analects: “The Master said, ‘The rule of virtue can be compared to the Pole Star, which commands the homage of the multitude of stars simply by remaining in its place.’”6 Confucius suggests here that exemplary individuals need to focus on the cultivation of their own habits and virtue, rather than on the external environment or on other people, whose behavior one cannot directly control. The moral examples these paragons establish then become standards toward which lesser men orient themselves. 6

Translation adapted from Lau, The Analects, 2.1.


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The rule-by-man arguments of early Republican reformers drew on this logic of exemplary rulership to craft theories of comprehensive social and political transformation. Unlike an earlier generation of reformers, the “self-strengtheners” who believed the relics of imperial Confucianism could be made to support some form of constitutional government, these thinkers realized that traditional modes of thinking required fundamental amendment, if not revision, to navigate China’s sudden entry into modern politics. The deposal of the emperor in the revolution of 1911 left empty not only his political position, but also the conceptual space he had once inhabited in Chinese political thinking. Rule-by-man arguments reflected a growing realization that institutions alone were unable to call into being both the practices and the attitudes needed for a functional constitutional regime. The historian Xu Zongmian identifies these years between 1913 and 1915 as a “high point” for questions of democracy in China, no doubt because many of those thinkers who had formerly celebrated democracy came to view its practicability with increasing skepticism.7 Liang Qichao and his Progressive Party began supporting elected president Yuan Shikai’s bid for greater central power, as the efficacy of regional and national assemblies receded in the face of growing national debt, domestic unrest, and international pressure. Those who supported Yuan feared democratic tyranny, political fragmentation, and factional struggle more than the possible dictatorship Yuan might – and eventually, in 1915, did – install.8 Yuan Shikai took further advantage of conservative hopes by evoking the potential for “virtue government,” leading some to invoke “rule by law” to counter this sham justification for authoritarian rule. Although Yuan Shikai’s bid for the restoration of the monarchy in 1915 no doubt intensified the debate, the two camps cannot be distinguished from each other simply on the basis of their appraisal of Yuan. As I will show, rule-by-man theorists and their rule-by-law interlocutors were responding to a problem that marked all early Republican political theory, namely the lack of a stable center from which reform and change could emanate. The Republican revolution installed “the people” as political agents and rulers, but they exhibited no 7 8

Xu, “Shibaizhe de tansuo,” 23. Ibid., 25; Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k’ai, 149.

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spontaneous capacity for exercising their new role. With the elimination of the emperor as the only political agent not beholden to higher command, change in society and politics became radically contingent upon the decisions of others to act, and act as freely, as the emperor once did. It seemed only natural to expect this selfless yet selfconfident resolve to appear in morally muscular individuals – variants of imperial-era personages, such as local gentry leaders and conscientious literati, informed by activist readings of neo-Confucianism – whose virtue could help them discern both the urgency of the situation and the steps they should take to remedy it. The work of Wu Guanyin (1879–1936) exemplifies the problems for and of republican rule engendered by commitments to rule by man. Along with Liang Qichao, whom he met while studying at Waseda University in Japan, Wu edited the influential journals Yongyan (given the English name The Justice by the editors) and Da Zhonghua Zazhi (Great China Magazine).9 Wu centers his discussions on the importance of cultivating renwu – exceptional individuals, often those playing a public role, who possess special talent or merit. For Wu, it is the renwu that populate a community or its government, rather than the prevalent political institutions, that decisively determine the goodness or success of that community: government and its institutions can make the nation prosper, it is true, but those very institutions can only be made possible by granting exceptional renwu leverage to order them properly.10 The claims he makes for renwu are bold: those who are properly cultivated quite literally have “power enough to transform an age,” and for that reason are deserving of intense study.11 “The determining factor for whether a society will be pure or dissipated is its renwu. If it has renwu, then the state, though endangered, can be made orderly; though dissipated, can be made pure again. Such is the reason that the world is [merely] a stage for the renwu [to act].”12

9

10

11

Wu was a native of Chenghai district in Guangdong. After his work on these journals, he served in several positions of the Beiyang government before retiring from politics in 1927 to pursue his academic interests in history and linguistics. Wu, “Zhengzhijia zhi pingge,” 2, 10–11. Note that all essays from both Yongyan and Da Zhonghua zazhi are paginated internally beginning with page one; they are not paginated cumulatively relative to other articles in the same issue. Wu, “Shehui chongbai zhi renwu,” 2. 12 Ibid., 1.


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Each age and each country has its own standards for determining which of its renwu will be most valued, and it is from this social valorization that renwu gain their strength. Fortunately, Wu notes, one of China’s many admirable distinctions is that the renwu it values are not adept though conniving figures like Catherine the Great, Wu Zetian, or the Three Dynasties General Cao Cao, but those individuals most committed to the study of the dao – that is, Confucian moral principles. He admits that people like Cao Cao and others did do good work, yet he continues to defend the philosophically virtuous on the basis not of their ethical superiority but of their greater efficacy, as if the successes they wrought upon the world are simply greater in magnitude. Only these exceptionally virtuous individuals are able to “consummate the work, as well as rectify the practices, of an entire generation.”13 He is careful to distinguish the philosophical commitments (specifically Daoxue) that enhance individual virtue and presumably render it efficacious from the techniques of unadulterated power (quanshu) that characterize the political–institutional realm. Wu’s putative distinction between “virtue” and “power” here leads him to invoke an analogous opposition between “society” (as the proper domain for renwu) and “politics” that gradually supplants – and in some ways contradicts – the pristine discreteness between man and law that originally motivated his analysis. When Wu insists that politics should be avoided in favor of cultivating virtue, it is not because he believes that politics is ineffective, but because it is too negatively influential. For Wu, politics and political institutions inevitably produce behavior inimical to virtue and the preservation of dao. Those who enter politics hoping to make a positive difference or “save the country” are necessarily implicated by the pressures of using power, and distort their morality for the excuse of circumstance and practicality.14 In these essays Wu is less sanguine in pushing for good renwu than he is in making society as a whole better: the talent these figures display, Wu notes, is half naturally given and half determined by what is encouraged by their social environment, either through the process of common opinion (yulun) or through widely felt approbation.15 While China’s long history provides many instances of

13 15

Ibid., 3. 14 Wu, “Zhengzhi yu daode,” 1. Wu, “Yulun yu renwu”; “Zhengzhi yu renwu.”

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its society “lacking dao,” there always existed “independently motivated gentlemen” whose disdain for social opinion left them ever-ready to cultivate the “people’s virtue,” but now society labels these kind of people “stubborn and old-fashioned.” To Wu, the only way out of this is to “awaken the world and awaken the people” by declaring war on society and to change prevailing practices by convincing other like-minded moral individuals to combine and “accrete their power.”16 Wu’s solution renders salient the contradiction of his unequivocal faith in renwu to effect seemingly endless beneficence with his simultaneous conviction that widespread social endorsement is required to make renwu function appropriately. Similar problems plague Du Yaquan, whose essay “Individual Reform” (“Geren zhi gaige”), published in 1914 in the Eastern Miscellany, is considered by many the representative example of rule-by-man thinking in the Republic:17 There has never been a case where one who is not rectified is able to rectify others; nor has there ever been a case where parts [of the whole] are corrupt but the group can remain good. Our great mistake actually lies in not reforming the individual [geren], but instead continuing to talk about reforming society.18

Du attributes the ongoing failures of reform to an inability to selfreform, directly linking individual effort with wider social transformation. Yet he does not explore the reverse proposition, which would predicate individual motivation or efficacy upon particular social or political conditions. Where do the individuals who engage in reform of other individuals come from? Suggestive of the old Confucian idealism that believed in the exclusive and nearly omnipotent power of virtuous men to guide the ship of state toward peace and virtue, Du and others like Gao Yihan embraced “individual reform” rather than political agitation. 16 17

18

Wu, “Shehui yu renwu,” 1, 2, 5–6. Du Yaquan, a native of Zhejiang province, gained fame for promoting Western sciences at the Yaquan Academy in Shanghai, which he founded in 1901. After taking up a position as chemistry and physics editor for the Shanghai-based Shangwu press, Du became increasingly interested in philosophy, medicine, and “Western learning.” Liu Zhaotang, “Du Yaquan,” 70–72. Du, “Geren zhi gaige,” 303.


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Lydia Liu has argued that Du’s rule-by-man individualism, like other contemporaneous appearances of geren in Republican Chinese discourse, does not promote autonomous independence. Rather, it seeks to liberate persons from the bonds of family to refashion them into nationalist subjects, as called for by the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, among others.19 Whatever Du’s relationship to a burgeoning nationalist consciousness, Liu’s reading nevertheless suggests that his “individual reform” speaks not only to the imperial system, but also to the regulative, hierarchical control that characterized it. By promoting reform on an individual level rather than an institutional one, Du suggests that it is no longer the education and virtue of the emperor and his attendants, but that of individual citizens, that required the most intense cultivation. For that reason, Du’s commitments to rule by man lead him away from Yuan Shikai, toward advocacy of apolitical participation in civil society. He hoped a civil society could unite intellectual and merchant classes into an entity capable of acting independently of and in opposition to the state, just as they had in Europe.20 Du’s rejection of institutions, although based in European liberal theory, was in a sense more thoroughgoing than traditional Chinese arguments. In his view, the actions of exceptional individuals were no longer seen to be enhanced or enabled by the positions they occupied – political means of transforming society or leveraging power were given up completely in the face of what to Du was their obvious failure after 1911. Yet if individuals are uniquely capable of transforming intersubjective reality absent institutional leverage, there seems to be no clear answer why they could not have done so already. Du’s lapses are more productive than his explanation here, because they gesture toward unresolved tensions created when “man” (Du’s geren) and “law” (external forces and institutions) are upheld as an absolute dichotomy. Where Wu answers the question by assuming that such efficacy inheres only in exceptional and thus rare individuals (renwu), Du simply fails to wrestle with the possibility that forces external to the individual may be impeding his successful reform. In fact, Wu’s careful attention to the way in which the quality and hence efficacy of these renwu is linked to external conditions and the wider socio-political environment betrays an implicit conflation of “man” with the institutions and political environments (“laws”) in which individuals find themselves. 19

Liu, Translingual Practice, 89, 91.

20

Gao, Tiaoshi de zhihui, 32.

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He struggles to craft a theory of political transformation that relies purely on rule-by-man logics, but consistently portrays the relationship between “man” and “laws” as reciprocal. And Du’s argument, when seen in light of this tension, appears unable to promote the egalitarianism it implies: it must either assume that only exceptional (yet oddly unmotivated) elites can transform reality, or succumb to the charge of impracticability. Why, then, do these thinkers place their hopes squarely on the worldchanging capacities of exceptional elites, even in the face of a reality that convinces them that institutions are at least equally influential on political and social order? Wu is concerned not only that the power of precisely these kinds of individuals can be destabilized (“corrupted”) by institutions, but also that this instability itself signals powers and forces that exist outside, and sometimes in opposition to, the intentions of the extremely virtuous. The revolution had already denied to virtue the efficacy once guaranteed it, at least in theory, by the imperial system, further breaking apart Confucian morality from its pre-revolutionary administrative base. This rift between politics and morality encouraged contemporary scholarship to draw a theoretical distinction between action taken in the sphere of “culture” or “society,” on the one hand, and in “politics,” on the other.21 Conceptualizing “culture” or “society” as entities isolated from “politics,” as Wu Guanyin explicitly does, may undercut his faith in morally muscular individuals, but it allows him and other advocates of rule by man to promote their displaced literati ambitions without harnessing them to imperial institutions. By focusing exclusively on singular individuals and their actions independent of “politics,” advocates of rule by man shore up the line between virtuous and dissolute that they no longer felt comfortable establishing through institutional means that smacked of imperial bureaucracy. They can defer issues of political administration indefinitely, and avoid falling prey to objections that their arguments lack an account of intersubjective political regulation. Yet this conceptual bifurcation between society and politics, while resolving some of the contradictions of the rule-by-man position, at the same time produces its own tensions. Invoking “society” as a realm of action partly explains how nonpolitical, self-directed activity can be effective absent the institutional leverage associated with the older imperial order (including the emperor’s role as exclusive motor of all 21

Wang, Zhongguo jindai sixiang, 248.


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change), but it also alludes to precisely those diffuse new powers whose cumulative zeitgeist poses such a challenge for rule-by-man arguments. Du and Wu fail to attend adequately to the apparent efficacy of those who act outside proscribed norms, with the result that they are unable to explain why the efficacy of virtue is constantly undermined. Cognizant of these contradictions, Wu’s better-known colleague at the Yongyan, Liang Qichao, reexamines the opposition between society and politics to formulate a new path for reform. Distancing himself from rule-by-man arguments like Wu’s on the basis of the tensions they leave unresolved, Liang responds to both the egalitarian potential and the structural oversights of Du’s and Wu’s arguments by avoiding their emphasis on exceptional individuals. He examines instead the systemic problems that to him produce suboptimal social conditions, foregrounding “society” as the target of and source for his reform. But by refusing to address directly the potential of political institutions to fashion new social and political realities, Liang is still bound to many of the same conceptual strategies employed by Wu and Du. His preference for action in “society” rather than in “politics” aligns him with the theory of rule by man he explicitly rejects, and brings him into direct conflict with Zhang Shizhao.

Liang Qichao and “the cause of society” Although Liang Qichao first earned fame agitating for constitutional reform under the Qing regime, he grew increasingly doubtful after 1911 that the Chinese people had reached a level of knowledge and experience capable of supporting democratic or constitutional government. On the basis of this doubt, Liang began to point out the contrasts between the ideals advocates of rule by man espoused and the reality they confronted. Specifically, he criticizes Chinese society for producing a mutually reinforcing system of suboptimal officeholders, who then attempt to govern a populace that lacks the capacity for intelligent evaluation of their political world. He is far more anxious than either Du or Wu, then, that the quality of the population from whom renwu would be drawn is inadequate for building a modern democratic state in China. In his provocative essay “The Foundations of Government, and Guidelines for Public Opinion Leaders” (“Zhengzhi zhi jichu yu yanlunjia zhi zhizhen”), Liang critiques public opinion newspapers for being unable to transform the political realities they presumably act

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to change. He uses this case as a jumping-off point for remarking upon the inefficacy of political institutions in general and the uselessness of talking about how to change them – a position for which he takes Zhang Shizhao to task. While Zhang and the contributors to his Tiger magazine chasten Yuan Shikai for usurping power and dismissing the National Assembly, Liang sees their advocacy of “political talk” (zhengtan) useless without the elite-led, society-wide moral education he sees as the minimally necessary foundation for any and all political activity: This question [about the foundations of politics] has actually become a stagnant one. Why do I bother to broach it again? It is because I want to stop years of useless political talk, and shift our focus rather toward the cause of society [shehui shiye]. I further hope that China’s experts in political talk also manage to change their attitudes a bit. But I fear that those who misunderstand me will think I am using this to lead the people to disregard government completely. For that reason, I have written this essay to explain that the very foundation of government is in society.22

Liang’s exhortation to take up “the cause of society” indicates his conviction that only by focusing on society can both government and society be properly renovated. Liang endows “society” (shehui) with such a pivotal role in securing the conditions that make for successful political order that he deems it the “foundation of government.” Politics, in Liang’s argument, is the product, rather than the context or condition, of “society,” whereas society comprises a set of mores, practices, and general “culture” that Liang assumes functions independently of politics. Here Liang partially returns to the “individual reform” concept found in the work of Gao and Du to argue that not only the leaders, but everyone, in society must be good in order to make the government good. However, his critique shifts the focus away from individuals and their behavior toward evaluating the moral status of collectivities – specifically the masses of Chinese, whose preferences in however indirect a fashion had acted as a barometer for the health of the Chinese political community since before the time of Confucius. He contends that “good laws” can be formed in only two ways: either Heaven gifts 22

Liang, “Zhengzhi zhi jichu,” 1.


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China with a king of superlative, Manu-like physiological and intellectual capacities, or the Chinese people become able to understand their government well enough to supervise and criticize it, thereby forcing officeholders to do good. Liang admits that the first option is unlikely, but the second option brings attention back to the failures of “society” to meet certain standard capacities for republican governance.23 This commits him to considering more carefully than do other ruleby-man theorists the possibility not only that individuals are susceptible to manipulation or influence by ambient incentives, but also that systematic, large-scale environmental factors may exist whose impacts on socio-political outcomes equal or surpass those of individual moral behavior. The moral and intellectual condition of “society” supplants that of specific officeholders or local leaders as most crucially deserving of redress. Using public opinion to criticize renwu (as Wu does) and thereby attempting to help the political process in “finding the right people” is an activity Liang identifies with “useless rule-by-man arguments.” In Liang’s opinion, all fail to realize that this process will simply replace one bad public figure with another, and make good men unwilling to risk the criticism of public opinion by taking leadership roles. Despite his attempts to place himself beyond the pale of these “useless” arguments, however, Liang nevertheless employs their logic when he points out that changing the institutions under which the Chinese live does nothing toward their betterment. It is the people themselves who must be changed. For Liang the root of the problem is that the very institutions the revolution was expected to found are useless when peopled by the Chinese race, whose culture gives them no sense of what they are meant to accomplish. “Discussing political institutions” and making this the focus of reform efforts, as he claims Zhang Shizhao’s journal The Tiger does, is still left with the unfortunate problem of China’s backward “national nature”: Think about it carefully: monarchy or republicanism, a unified or federated state structure, a dictatorship or a popular government – other countries have tried one or another of them before, and have been successful. But our country has tried every single one of them these past few years. Since success continues to elude us, it can be inferred that the answer must lie outside 23

Ibid., 2.

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of political institutions. No matter [what kind of institution we have tried], they are all peopled by this generation of Chinese. Saying then that although using structure or institution A does not work, but that B will, is nonsense that I simply cannot understand.24

Just as changing the wax coating on a pill will not change the medicine inside, Liang contends, promulgating a constitution or establishing a democracy ipso facto will not make any difference to the society it governs.25 But unlike Wu, Liang here does not assume that the connection between people and institutions is unilinear or necessarily destructive; rather, his grasp of the wider forces to which individuals are potentially susceptible allows him to acknowledge a potential interplay between government and society. Articulating the problem as one of reinvigorating a potentially successful but languishing “national nature” opens new avenues for political reform, because it renders the masses of Chinese an internally undifferentiated entity actionable by those who remain above them and can guide their improvement. Liang does not deny so much as defer a role for political institutions in responding to what he sees as China’s more urgent and fundamental problems. Once action is taken to make society better, its political functions will assume proper shape. Liang’s endorsement of society as the initial site, if not ultimate resting place, of China’s transformation amplified calls made by Huang Yuanyong and others for finding solutions to China’s problems outside the realm of politics. Huang presaged the May Fourth Movement when he pointed out the importance of acting on and through culture as a fundamental component of social reform. In a letter to Zhang Shizhao in Zhang’s capacity as editor of The Tiger, Huang identifies literary reform and language vernacularization as the key to bettering China’s plight and advancing Liang Qichao’s “cause of society.” “Political talk,” like Zhang’s pleas to accommodate different opinions and uphold particular institutional structures, is useless without first establishing a new literature adequate to “awaken” China. Huang writes, In my humble opinion, politics is in such a confusion that I am at a loss to know what to talk about. Ideal schemes will have to be buried for future 24

Ibid., 10.

25

Ibid.


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generations to unearth . . . As to fundamental salvation, I believe its beginning must be sought in the promotion of a new literature. In short, we must endeavor to bring Chinese thought into direct contact with the contemporary thought of the world, thereby to accelerate its new awakening. And we must see to it that the basic ideals of world thought be related to the life of the average man. The method seems to consist in using plain and simplified language and literature for the wide dissemination of ideas among the people.26

Huang gestures here toward a diverse range of socially and culturally centered reforms that served the goals of both the contemporary New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement that followed closely behind it. These included rebuilding the cultural character of society through education, language vernacularization, the encouragement of popular literature, and – an obvious relic of earlier rule-by-man arguments – the elevation of ethical conduct.27 Huang sees contemporary social problems as rooted in the inability of current tools of discourse (the most salient being the obscure classical Chinese within which all political matters were discussed) to relate to the “common man.” “Old” culture, in other words, fundamentally incapacitates “new” social reforms. By carrying on “political talk” in classical Chinese, Zhang and his compatriots were betraying both the Chinese masses and the very modernization they were trying to champion. In his reply to Huang’s letter, Zhang stated bluntly that only once the political structure was in place could “the matters of society, which include art, be discussed” (ZQJ 612–613). For many scholars, Zhang’s response here is taken as the definitive defense of ruleby-law arguments in Republican China, a position linked in turn to 26

27

Huang’s letter is reprinted in ZQJ 614–615. Here I use Chow Tse-tsung’s translation in May Fourth Movement, 272. Chow and others (e.g. Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 24) have identified Huang’s call for “literary renaissance” in the style of the European humanistic Renaissance as one of the May Fourth Movement’s most defining characteristics. Yue, “Yizhi xifang minzhu zhengzhi,” 129–131, identifies at least three separate “theories for national salvation” (jiuguo lun), not all of which led specifically to May Fourth ideology, that called upon cultural and moral alternatives to politics in light of what they considered its demonstrated inadequacy: the virtue theory, the social education theory, and the new literature movement. See also Wang, Zhongguo jindai sixiang, 251–252.

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the “Western liberalism” Zhang was attempting to introduce.28 In his still widely read analysis of the literature of this period, the iconoclastic and hugely influential May Fourth intellectual Hu Shi follows Chang Naide to distinguish Zhang and his followers (including Li Dazhao, the early version of Chen Duxiu, and Li Jiannong) as the only school of contemporary thought willing to “talk about politics” (lun zheng) and uphold legislation and institutional capacity, rather than the social/cultural reform that dominated later May Fourth thought, as the primary motors of social transformation.29 Hu Shi’s analysis has become the standard reading of Zhang Shizhao’s political thought, persuading most later commentators to read Zhang’s work through the lens of the May Fourth radicalism that it implicitly (though antecedently) opposed. Timothy Weston believes that Zhang’s emphasis on politics blinded him to the need for cultural reform urged by May Fourth intellectuals like Huang Yuanyong, resulting in the failure of his political program: “In the end, Zhang Shizhao proved unwilling to imagine that anything other than politics could save China or that it was necessary to appeal to a more diverse audience than that which could make its way through the dense articles in his journal.”30 The loss of place of Zhang’s formerly dominant Tiger magazine on the intellectual scene to Chen Duxiu’s New Youth (Xin qingnian) conveniently symbolizes for these commentators the shift in mainstream Chinese thought away from “political solutions” toward what in their view was more necessary to modernize China: literary and social reform, cultural transformation, and consciousnessbuilding.31 I argue, however, that Zhang’s advocacy of institutional reform signals neither blindness, intransigence, nor elitism. Zhang in fact presents 28 29

30 31

Yue, “Yizhi xifang minzhu zhengzhi,” 111–112; Zou, Zhang Shizhao shehui zhengzhi sixiang, 3. Chang, Zhongguo sixiang xiao shi; Hu, “Zhongguo zhi wenxue,” 181, 224. After the May Fourth Movement, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu embraced iconoclastic antitraditionalism, throwing their weight behind cultural reform and abandoning their earlier commitments to liberal institutions. Chen went on to found first New Youth magazine (which, significantly, took awareness-building and consciousness-raising as its goals) and then the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s. Weston, “New Culture Community,” 271. Wang, Zhongguo jindai sixiang, 253; Yue, “Yizhi xifang minzhu zhengzhi,” 132.


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institutional reform as necessary to register what is ignored by ruleby-man arguments, including the political energy that arises outside as much as within politics. He attends especially to the problems that result when aggregative concepts like “culture” and “politics” are used to authorize wholesale transformation, arguing that Liang’s “cause of society” demands a level of elite involvement inimical to the egalitarian participation it seeks to promote. It is not the transformative potency of individuals, but the dangers of their extreme political enshrinement, that for Zhang most greatly undermines the foundations of a republic and motivates his advocacy of “rule by law.”

Zhang Shizhao’s “rule by law” arguments In his essay “Politics and Society” (“Zhengzhi yu shehui”), his longest and most involved confrontation with rule-by-man arguments, Zhang rebuts Liang’s claims by using the very evidence Liang provides. Revealingly, Zhang’s contention here is not that politics and society are starkly dichotomized, but that they are mutually interactive. Zhang cites Liang’s own admission of multiple “difficulties” for his theory, related to the problems created by government, against which Liang’s theory offers no reply: There are those who may criticize my theory and say, “Society needs positive support from the government, or if not positive support, at least a little less interference to allow it to develop. But under such a corrupt government, there will be times it will not only not support, but actively work to destroy, society. How then can this so-called ‘cause of society’ have any freedom to exist?” To this criticism I also have no reply.32

Zhang criticizes Liang for bracketing an admittedly important factor in producing the conditions he expects to change. Claiming that government affects society at the same time that he champions society as the exclusive motor of reform means that Liang is saying that “government is not good because society is not good; but society is not good because politics is not good. Both are simultaneously causes and effects of the other.” This failure to acknowledge the circularity of causation blinds Liang to another possibility. Zhang theorizes that 32

Liang, “Zhengzhi zhi jichu,” 1.

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even these “causes” [may not be] absolute causes . . . are there other factors involved? If they are absolute, then they cannot both be simultaneously upheld (as causes) . . . but if they are not absolute, then these supplementary factors must be investigated, and their importance evaluated with respect to the other factors. Only then can one know whence must ameliorative efforts proceed (ZQJ 428; cf 437–438).

Zhang defends his reasoning for institutional reform precisely by demonstrating the effects institutions have on the quality of the people who interact with them. Unlike Liang, whose medicinal metaphor suggests that the Chinese people remain permanently intractable to institutional influence, Zhang contends that people’s natures can and will change based on the incentives the socio-political environment presents to them: People with talent have a talented nature [caixing]; but they also have a not-talented nature [bu caixing]. When people inhabit a good society, their humane side is strong and their inhumane side is weak; if they inhabit a bad society, the reverse is true. When talented individuals enter a good government, then their talented nature is manifest and their not-talented nature is suppressed. If they enter a bad government the reverse is true. (ZQJ 438)

This decision to exhibit his talented nature or his not-talented nature crucially pivots on whether or not his talent will be able to “find a proper place” within the society or political system to which he contributes. Under the current situation, however, “even if Hugo and Shakespeare were to be born again, they could not develop their aptitudes [under these conditions]” (ZQJ 614). Where Liang and Huang assume that the natures of individuals are inelastic and imbued with fundamental essences or “spirits” that obstruct or enable their development, Zhang pictures individuals as choosers who make deliberate decisions about the incentives their environment proffers, who respond to institutions but are not decisively determined by them. Denying the role of institutions – such as assemblies or constitutions – in producing relevant incentives would mean assuming, as Liang does, that nonelite individuals lack the capacity to change their behavior. His discussion here makes clear that the people in a constitutional government are not condemned by their “Chinese-ness” to replicate the stagnation and exploitation of imperial times; in fact, if the right institutions are in place then China’s new


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era presents a unique opportunity to consider new possibilities of “rule by man”. Far from rejecting a “rule-by-man” ideal, Zhang celebrates the quality of people in government as the decisive factor in political success and identifies institutions as serving in a supplementary role: “A good government is nothing other than creating an organization and encouraging all the courageous, intelligent, clever and strong people in the country to contribute to it, directly or indirectly, as the quality of their talent dictates” (ZQJ 431). For Zhang this core elite – an elite determined not by class, but by talent – is the decisive force behind a good government for all developed countries: “In general, the course of politics is directed by the most talented people in a society. If they are left unencumbered by devices that may sap their energies, then the government will be good. If not, it will be inferior” (ZQJ 429–430). Zhang admonishes Liang not for adopting rule-by-man assumptions, but for failing to exploit the conceptual resources offered by the mutual interaction of individuals and institutions. His primary critique is that Liang fails to consider the possibility that the government or its institutions may decisively influence the very cause of society he hoped to undertake. The powers inhabiting “social” or “cultural” spheres are neither independent of nor uniquely powerful over the political influences that interact with them. To argue that they are, Zhang contends, Liang must first posit the condition that politics and society are completely separate, such that “You do your politics business; I do my society business.” Only after society has developed can one dedicate real energy to politics, and reunite the two in order to renew the country. But I would like to ask – is this condition tenable? (ZQJ 427)

Rather than parcel out who affects what and how, Zhang foregrounds the possibility that no clear answer may exist. For Zhang, the circularity of influence between politics and people is critical to making sense of how reform should proceed, as well as to taking full advantage of the energies available in society for initiating it. Others of Zhang’s colleagues at The Tiger, including Li Dazhao and Zhang Dongsun, made similar claims about the interactive potency of institutions and virtues, belying a common characterization of these thinkers as unremitting advocates of rule by law. In his 1916 essay “Popular Habits and Government” (“Min yi yu zhengzhi”), Li begins

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by endorsing a solid legal foundation for democratic government in China, but returns repeatedly to the dependence of law on custom, practice, and virtue. In fact, he explicitly contends that only if man and law are kept in balance can the political order succeed: “If you seek to correct the deficiencies in rule by man by relying only on law, you risk inviting the problems of [pure] rule by law [regimes]; but simply waiting on a hero will also produce imbalance.”33 Zhang Dongsun, similarly, urges caution in presuming that law alone can transform both politics and society. China’s current crisis can be traced precisely to the gap between republican institutions and traditional popular sentiment that emerged in the wake of the 1911 revolution. A republican spirit was not a necessary consequence of a republican revolution; changing laws and changing attitudes were two distinct tasks, and both must be attended to at once.34 This circularity between men and laws is one foundation of the Tiger group’s moderate politics, which reflects a British liberal emphasis on the need to accommodate diverse opinions. Citing Jeremy Bentham’s history of British government, Zhang claims that only the gradual balancing of distinct interests in society produced Britain’s enviable prosperity (ZQJ 257). This balancing demands both flexible institutions and a critical but broadly tolerant populace – a relationship of mutual interdependence whose formulation Zhang traces to the contemporary liberal thinkers Leonard Hobhouse and John Morley (ZQJ 264–265).35 Yet the very interaction between men and laws that contemporary liberal thought posed left Zhang at a loss to explain how, short of imperialism, those institutions could be successfully installed. Here, Zhang turns again to man/law vocabulary, centering his response to the dilemma on “habits” (xiguan), a term that had become a shorthand explanation for why China could not support free institutions. Zhang agrees with Frank Goodnow, foreign political adviser to Yuan Shikai, that “for a thousand years the [Chinese] people never discussed the shape of government, and had no right to participate in it.” The habits that this produces, however, do not translate into destiny, as Goodnow claims they do; in fact, Zhang argues that “if the habit is not a good one, then seek ways to change it. Discussing 33 34 35

Li, “Minyi yu zhengzhi,” 49; cf. Zhang and Zeng, “Renzhi yu fazhi,” 214–215. Zhang, “Zhengzhi geming,” 6. Hobhouse, Liberalism; Morley, On Compromise.


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whether or not to change habits . . . on the basis of current habits [as he claims Goodnow seeks to do] is begging the question” (ZQJ 137). It is the mutual interaction of persons and institutions that for Zhang renders habit not a destiny that forever sets China at a level below free Western nations, but an influence that, like political institutions, is potentially beneficial in sustaining positive change while remaining constantly subject to deliberate intervention: It really is true that representative mechanisms and the institutions of selfrule were not something people could talk about ten years ago, and that was a “habit.” But in the ten years since, [the number of] people who talk about them have been increasing daily, to the point where they have become a kind of common knowledge. This is also a “habit.” It is just that the former is an old [habit], the latter a new one. Once a new habit has been established, what sense does it make to focus obsessively on the old habit, unrestrainedly declaring this [old habit] as “what we are used to”? (ZQJ 137)

These changes are incremental and sometimes invisible, suggesting that habit has the unique characteristic of being tractable not to external impositions but only to the people who daily act to change it. Ironically, institutions can play a role in fostering just this kind of decentralized process by opening spaces for a wider range of people to participate in altering old habits. Zhang articulates this possibility more fully in a response to an article published under the pseudonym Xuan Yuan (lit. “obscure beginnings”) in the Shenzhou Daily. The author invokes Montesquieu to make an argument very similar to Goodnow’s that the habits of the Chinese people condemn them to replicating their authoritarian past. Only when “citizens appreciate virtue and knowledge” can a republic succeed, Xuan Yuan contends, but “citizens still lackadaisically breathe in the pollution of the old, and lack the determination that would spur them to seek success themselves” (cited in ZQJ 226, 227). No amount of revolution or regime change can alter this condition, Xuan Yuan believes, and therefore he concludes that in this respect republican government and authoritarian government are essentially the same. Echoing Liang Qichao’s rule-by-man arguments, Xuan Yuan argues that the appropriate kinds of habit must first be cultivated before China will see any real difference in her social and political orders (ZQJ 226). Zhang agrees that the violence of revolution will not combat China’s contemporary ailments, but lambasts Xuan Yuan for placing utopian

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conditions on the country’s ultimate betterment. “The author says, ‘If only this were possible, then . . . ’ But this is a fantastical supposition, not a logical condition. Even if you could turn this fantastical supposition into reality, by what path can this be done?” Zhang suggests attending more closely to the practical mechanism of change by abandoning the supposition that only once particular levels of “virtue” were attained, or habits cultivated, could efficacious action be taken. This either begs the question of where new habits begin in the first place, or supports arguments like Goodnow’s for tutelage dictatorship. The key is realizing that ethics is not a measure of political efficacy or success: In our country our perspectives on ethics and politics have never been clearly distinct. Outdated ethics talk has confused the point of government . . . Ethics takes virtue as its topic, and politics takes institutions. Politics uses institutions to regulate an entire state, from the leader to the ordinary people, from the extremely worthy to the extremely dissolute. In the eyes of the law, there is no distinction between them. All have a fixed space that circumscribes them. (ZQJ 230)

Zhang’s argument for the impartiality of institutions relies heavily on Anglo-American liberal thought, but in light of Yuan Xuan’s argument – heavily redolent of rule-by-man logic – it also makes another important claim. Granting everyone a “fixed space” by way of the impartiality of law denies more than simply distinction based on rank. It contributes to a theory of social change by denying that political efficacy can be ascribed to individuals solely on the basis of their level of virtue. Zhang uses the vocabulary of “politics” to articulate this inclusion, evacuating it of the ethical mandates that traditionally authorized rigid hierarchies (such as the “five relations” of Confucianism) and that continue to underlie claims made by renwu for exceptional status (ZQJ 417–419). This is different from separating persons and the “culture” or “society” they inhabit from political institutions, however. Zhang’s counterargument to Liang has already established that that relationship is both necessary and reciprocal. In fact, he demonstrates that he shares with advocates of rule by man a desire to uncover efficacious sources for socio-political transformation, as well as a belief that individual effort does matter to political outcomes. He simply resists solving the circularity problem by resorting to the coercion of one-man rule.


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In other words, it is his disagreement with the “who” of rule-byman arguments, rather than the how, that ultimately frames his support of institutions. Zhang suggests that transformations on the scale of “society” and “culture” are not only very unlikely, but also highly dangerous. The capacity to discern the necessary direction of society, Zhang believes, comes dangerously close to the authoritarian ambitions of Yuan Shikai, whose ironic motto “Virtue is the substance; laws are merely instrumental” (daode wei ti, er falu wei yong) simply served to undermine the new Republic: it invoked the idealism of the past while simultaneously promoting its feudal excesses, including authoritarian rule justified by claims to superior “virtue.”36 Yuan’s disingenuous claims took advantage of a widespread belief that virtue could ensure political order and legitimate political rulership independently of external restraints, which Mou Zongsan has labeled the key weakness of imperial Confucianism.37 In contrast, Zhang denies that virtue can ever attain a level that would justify the unrestrained political authority of its possessor:38 The absolute authority of virtue, no one but sages can attain . . . [but] has there ever been this kind of sage? . . . Among all of that which historians recorded and literary figures transmitted, and which can be used as irrefutable proof, has there ever been among emperors and kings one who is so strong, so clear of mind, so intelligent that he can be praised by all under Heaven in the way Xunzi has described? . . . if there is not [such a person], then this would be saying that order must rely on someone that can never exist in order to come about. (ZQJ 267)

Zhang summarizes his position using a quote from Liu Zongyuan, a Tang dynasty iconoclast whose work was among the first political and social theory Zhang encountered: “The way of sages is of no use to this world.” By denying the contribution of sages, neither Liu nor Zhang means to render all human effort pointless, however. During the Tang dynasty, Liu meant with these words to unmoor the potential for creative social transformation from the sages, going on to identify 36 37 38

Cited in Yue, “Yizhi xifang mingzhu zhengzhi,” 107–108. Mou, Zhengdao yu Zhidao, 167 et passim. That Liang and others of the rule-by-man faction at one time promoted Yuan Shikai’s dictatorial ambitions for the purposes of reenacting the “rule of sages” testifies to their own lack of faith in the efficacy of virtuous action: were Yuan as virtuous as was hoped, it does not seem necessary to endow him with political power as absolute as they recommended.

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other sites of moral, political, and social power. In his famous essays “On Heaven” (“Tian shuo”) and “On Feudalism” (“Lun fengjian”), Liu asserts that personal and social outcomes are not fates decided by the will of Heaven, but instead are the results of man’s deliberate choices and the institutional forces his actions set into motion. These forces are often so strong that even sage kings cannot help but adapt to them, rather than attempt to transform them. Social forces and circumstances (shi) are depicted as objectively felt barriers to the “virtue government” of sage kings themselves, meaning that close adherence to sagely norms – the “virtue” central to rule-by-man logic – will not bring about transformation without due attention to social realities that are themselves constructed by humans. Zhang follows Liu to picture social and political forces as both arising from and tractable to human decision-making – though not only on the part of “sage kings” and the elites who strive to fill their shoes. Although Liu’s denial of Heavenly intention reduces the power of any one individual to transform social reality, it leaves society and politics open to human intervention on a broader scale. With this response, Zhang stridently, if indirectly, contradicts the rule-by-man logic of Du Yaquan, which assumed that only if the quality of individual virtue is raised can China’s postrevolutionary order gain some measure of stability. Yet his argument has more important implications for society/culture arguments like Liang’s. Institutions of the type Zhang promotes subject the activity of nonelites to both regulation and recognition, which has the effect of registering such activity both legitimate in, and efficacious for, a republican government. This undercuts the authority of those elites Liang assumes will be capable of rising above social influences to guide “society” toward transformation – not only because elites and political leaders will be as beholden to the law as any other citizen, but because institutions are rendered independent of virtue entirely, in terms both of those who run them and of those who are subject to them. The monopoly on virtue and culture that elites formally held in the forms of literacy, access to books and art, and elevated status within their communities holds much less weight in a constitutional system when culture and society are no longer seen as necessary or exclusive sites of socio-political transformation. Zhang’s emphasis on politics rather than culture or society, then, reveals that even the cultural movement to democratize literature, promoted by Huang Yuanyong and later May Fourth intellectuals, contains elements that are both unavoidably political and


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inegalitarian. By seeking to reform literature, elites privilege their traditional domains as unique sites of transformative intervention, even in the face of “social forces” arising from below as much as from above. They remain blind to the contributions of nonelites because they take forms different from what has traditionally been recognized as meaningful political action. The cultural reform Huang advocates attempts to facilitate the access of nonelites to these traditional elite domains – specifically, high culture and literature – but does not entertain the possibility that efficacious action undertaken to sustain free government can take other forms or occur in other places. In other words, the levers that elites once exclusively maneuvered can remain in their control even as they attempt to “democratize” literature by eliminating classical language. Liang Qichao alludes to the assimilative tendencies of social and cultural reform when he articulates “majority rule” as developing the virtue of the majority in accord with correct moral principles – that is, the contributions of nonelites are discounted when unmediated by proper cultivation.39 It is precisely a radical openness to unforeseen alternatives, however, that Zhang’s separation of ethics from politics makes possible. He suggests other, less elite-centered outlets for creative local changes, specifically the use of talent unregulated by central command: “if a country has good institutions, and allows everyone to make use of them, the virtuous and able will come to increasingly display their abilities. Would the incompetent then be willing to continue being incompetent?” (ZQJ 439; emphasis my own). When Zhang echoes Liu in claiming that “the way of sages is of no use to this world” (ZQJ 267), he does not mean to disparage the efforts of exceptional, “sage-like” individuals in building social and political reality. He simply hopes to drive a final and decisive wedge between sageliness and political authority, by enacting impartial laws that make the efficacious action once ascribed only to sages become the responsibility of the citizens of the Chinese Republic.40 39 40

Liang, Xian Qin zhengzhi sixiang shi, 3644. Compare Yan Fu’s account of a need for this disjuncture in “Pi Han,” (“Critique of Han Yu”) discussed in Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 51–56. Pusey maintains that Yan’s simultaneous upholding of human power to manipulate evolution, with the belief that sages were powerless against the forces of fate, is “bafflingly inconsistent,” but it may signal Yan’s struggle to assimilate the idea of individual potency within the reality of the limitations of human-made institutions and forces.

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These implications help to specify what exactly Zhang is opposing with his support of institutions. He does not neglect the impact of individual activity or quality on political outcomes; in fact, Zhang depicts “virtue” and “laws” as complementary components of republicbuilding. “The foundation of a so-called ‘republic’ is virtue, when considered from the perspective of ethics; when considered from the perspective of politics, it is institutions” (ZQJ 230). Rather, he points out that judicious reliance on institutions offers a path for change that need not presuppose values that are already present on a wide scale. Zhang insists, in fact, that “new virtues can be pursued only by pursing new institutions; they cannot be attained directly” (ZQJ 230). The Chinese citizenry do not need wide-scale, elite-led transformation of their value system to transition from imperial governance; the institutional shift already effected by the revolution can do more than is usually acknowledged to build the moral and personal requirements for republican self-rule. Efforts at national renewal should be directed at preventing those institutions from falling into despotic control, lest the efforts of “those below” likewise decline. As Zhang explains, “a renewal of our institutions is enough to enliven the good tendencies [shan xing] of the people” (ZQJ 440). Ordinary citizens are as responsible as elites for bringing republican government into being, because national construction is an incremental and ultimately personal process, undertaken by everybody (ren ren) as they turn toward developing their talented natures. Zhang’s theory of rule by man thus valorizes the contributions of people both inside and outside government – that is, intellectuals as much as politicians, and ordinary individuals as much as literati: Today, if everybody makes the decision not to just leave things to chance, and instead applies his mind to refining their learning and capabilities, each person developing his natural aptitudes while manifesting strong resolve, gradually these efforts will accumulate and in five years we will see a small accomplishment; in ten years a large accomplishment. These increases in prosperity will aggregate to a surprising degree. (ZQJ 227)

Conclusion The picture I have sketched above contrasts sharply with the characterizations of Zhang’s political project in the secondary literature.


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Where modern commentators – and a few of Zhang’s contemporaries – see Zhang as promoting politics to the exclusion of all other forms of action, I argue that he is less concerned with promoting either men or institutions than he is with finding noncoercive paths to social and political change. Zhang grapples with, but never abandons, the concerns of the rule-by-man position, insisting that the interaction of individuals and institutions shapes all politically transformative action. In fact, his support for institutions seems to be provoked at least as much by an anxiety that poorly designed or unfairly motivated institutions are creating incentives that frustrate the efforts of exceptionally talented, meritorious (and therefore potentially powerful) individuals, as they are by a concern over the abuse of power by officeholders. Zhang’s rule-by-law argument, then, is opposed to rule by man not because it lodges efficacy in institutions over individuals or virtue, but because it rejects as at best unnecessary and at worst dangerously autocratic the wholesale transformations of personal values and the centralized control that rule-by-man logics imply. The change in focus from leadership to masses that rule-by-man arguments manifest heralds the May Fourth Movement, seeming to challenge elitism in the name of democracy and accessibility. Yet Zhang’s arguments reveal that this shift in focus only raises more questions about the origins of social change and the role of elites in fostering it. Focusing not on individuals but on the aggregative entities of “culture” and “society,” Liang and Huang attempted to remedy the faults in arguments like Du Yaquan’s and Wu Guanyin’s, which paid insufficient attention to social forces that may act to thwart the goals, and thus remain beyond the control, of any one person. Liang and Huang end up repeating Du’s mistake, by assuming that certain individuals do have the power to initiate wholesale change independently of actions others may take. They insist either that only certain individuals (benevolent despots) can enjoy the virtuous efficacy that alone is capable of initiating socio-political change, or that only once all of society en masse decides to become morally good and politically aware can a government form that is not dictatorship or tutelage succeed. Allegiance to “the cause of society” or “cultural reform” over politics and legal institutions appears profoundly disempowering, denying to nonelites the possibility that political, moral, and social space is created by and for them.

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These tensions continue to linger in modern political discourse. China’s former president Jiang Zemin, for example, has recently articulated law as the domain of normalization, “authority and force,” and man (or the virtuous leadership that that concept represents) the domain of “moral consciousness” and persuasion.41 Jiang insists that the two realms are complementary and necessary, but the contestation of Republican reformers over “man” and “law” helps reveal the historical thrust, as well as ideological dangers, of Jiang’s simple dichotomy. From one view point, the very “rule-by-man” arguments that are excoriated today for being inimical to contemporary political modernization by legal theorists such as Peerenboom are seen by historians of the early Republic as crucial to that very project – and Zhang’s rule-by-law position is seen as nearsightedly opposing what was necessary to transition China from feudalism to modernity.42 In another view, however, Zhang’s argument highlights the ways in which the “persuasions” of virtue can oppress rather than liberate, because they protect already privileged forms of expression and therefore accord undue space for elites, rather than everybody, to act. While some modern political theorists like Iris Young have argued that impartiality inhibits expressions of difference43 – truly amounting to nothing more than the volatile combination of “authority and force” that for Jiang comprises “rule by law” – for Zhang the impartiality of laws that apply to everyone is an important first step in recognizing the contributions of nontraditional and nonelite actors to political outcomes. As Lin Yusheng has observed in his study of May Fourth radicalism, whose intellectual agendas followed closely on the heels of rule-by-man debates, institutional reform was avoided by many Chinese intellectuals precisely because its results did not always predictably conform to elite expectations: Because there are many possible ways for the mind to respond, no change of external stimuli can assure a desired intellectual change. Intellectual persuasion, on the other hand, is justified by a traditional Chinese belief in the

41 42 43

Jiang, “Jianghua”; discussed in Cook, “The Debate over Coercive Rulership,” 399. See also Jenco, “Rule by Man.” Peerenboom, China’s Long March. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference.


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natural ability of the human mind to grasp truths – however defined – when they are fully explicated.44

Lin’s observation reveals the close alliance in Chinese discourse between claims to virtue and claims to absolute, and therefore politically enforceable, truth. Zhang’s interventions in the rule-by-man debate have shown, further, that the influence of institutions on political outcomes challenges elite monopolies on political efficacy. The ruleby-man proposals advanced by thinkers like Liang Qichao ascribe efficacious action only to cultivated elites, with the result that he endows particular individuals with undue authority and ignores the necessary contributions of nonelites to political transformation. Zhang’s contrasting position emphasizes the role of institutions as a means to secure a space for difference on the part of nonelite actors. Law does not act directly on anyone; it does not intend to create the radically “new people” (xinmin) that Liang and others of his faction posited as the minimally necessary goal of their “cause of society.” Rather, it provides a framework for a political system independent not of “people” in general, but of any one person. The self-cultivation of individual talent according to “natural aptitudes” supplants the implantation of virtue from above and forms the foundation of Zhang’s theory of social change. To Zhang, everyone can begin from where they are, and their actions can be efficacious irrespective of their site of expression: be it in culture, society, politics, or personal life. Zhang’s promotion of “political solutions” ironically has less to do with robust political participation or a belief in institutional politics than it does with making space for individually directed action, including on nonelite levels. This reading of Zhang’s position renders coherent various “traditionalist” elements in his thinking, including his reliance on human effort to change political situations, that are usually explained away as illogical anomalies by commentators.45 It also helps explain foundational aspects of his political theory, including its focus on innovation and social change. Zhang’s insistence that innovation happens in these small acts of personal determination absent widespread agreement on social values not only belies rule-by-man arguments. It also opposes modern assumptions that political transformations, to be noncoercive, 44 45

Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness, 55. E.g. Zou, Zhang Shizhao shehui zhengzhi sixiang, 88.

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must take place collectively, on the basis of values that are “alwaysalready” extant. Rather, Zhang believes that change begins ultimately in individualized instances of “self-awareness” and the “self-use of talent,” exercised within conditions of “accommodation.” Before elaborating what those acts entail, however, it is necessary to establish why such individualistic acts can be political at all, absent the two obvious conditions for political action Zhang dismisses as impractical in the rule-by-man debate, namely an already existing institutional authority, and the collective convergence around some specific, shared goal. This is the task of the next chapter.

5

Public, private, and the political

Zhang’s interventions in the rule-by-man debate turn on two iconoclastic commitments. Both of them seem to efface the “political” element of his theory despite the usual ascription of Zhang to a simple fazhi (rule-by-law) position. First, he insists that individuals can effect broad transformations of Chinese society and politics, while rejecting those notions of virtue that in imperial Confucian discourse tied such individuals to cosmological patterns and assured their efficacy; second, he elaborates a role for institutions and their mutual interaction with individuals, while recognizing the utter absence of functioning institutions. Both commitments, as I explained in the previous chapter, undermine traditional, elite-controlled sources of political power and transformative change. They thus complement contemporary democratic political theories that see hope for change in the actions of ordinary citizens, rather than of social elites or other powerholders. Yet both commitments, by turning on the uncoordinated actions of individual citizens, also collude to produce an unusual reading of the political that starkly departs from the reliance of much democratic theory on collective action and the prior existence or memory of functional democratic institutions. The chapters in the next section of the book separately consider the specific actions Zhang recommends – including the cultivation of selfawareness, the self-use of talent, and the practice of accommodation – and show how they do typically political work, such as initiating the non-tyrannical transformation of shared environments, negotiating the demands of others, confronting power imbalances, and according each person a place in a shared community. This chapter frames that later discussion by explaining how such actions can be categorized as political at all, and more importantly how Zhang’s intuitions on this matter help us think about individual actions as meaningful and efficacious beyond the personal realms to which such actions are often confined. Intervening in contemporary debates that complicated the meaning of 103

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“public” life and action in a post-dynastic republic, Zhang recognizes the value of individual, “private” (si) acts as uniquely capable of resisting homogenizing domination taken in the public name. In so doing, Zhang identifies certain private activities as politically relevant, deriving their “political” character not from the public sphere in which such acts putatively take place, but from their capacity to deliberately intervene in a collective fate – their attempt to shape social circumstances (shi) and environments (jing) that are not automatically self-regulating. Ironically, Zhang’s intuitions as to what characterizes political action are shared by some of the best-known defenders of distinctly public, collective action in contemporary political theory – including Hannah Arendt, Hanna Pitkin, Tracy Strong, Benjamin Barber, and Sheldon Wolin. The crucial difference between their conception and Zhang’s lies in how each side confronts the thorny character of political communities: as emergent entities, political communities do not necessarily bear any obvious connection to the multiplicity of individual actions that in fact generate them. Public action theorists therefore tend to default, for reasons of efficacy and egalitarianism, to the power of large numbers of people acting on a concerted goal. Zhang’s model of action, in contrast, banks on the paradox that even as individual actions cannot definitively shape any particular political community or decisively direct it toward one goal or another, the character of these actions constitutes the community’s very functioning. This insight renders feasible the incremental, everyday practices that Zhang insists come to constitute a democratic regime. More importantly, it suggests that the binary between public and private, at least so far as inscribing a domain of “political” action is concerned, may unduly constrain expectations about where and how political transformation can begin. Zhang instead turns our attention to other ways to define political activity that – consonant with the task of founding as he conceives it – turn on the cumulative cultivation of personal qualities rather than on existing institutions, shared values, or spontaneous, community-wide consent.

Gong and si If we recognize that humans are neither independent of their environments nor completely determined by them, how are we to distinguish where individual, personal life ends and the systematic, wider-ranging


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influences of the public begin? How are we to discern which activities correspond to the larger, collective whole, and which to personal attachments? In general, both Republican Chinese thought and much contemporary Western political theory draw these lines in the same clear way, associating the “private” (si) with the family, the partial, and the individual, and the “public” (gong) with the community, the general, and the collective. These definitions confine political life to public activity for reasons of both efficacy and generality: it seems that only in public, amidst a shared existence, can the wideranging influence and interests that constitute political life come to fruition. Yet, given the political fragmentation Zhang confronted, it should come as no surprise that he does not see the public sphere, or its relationship to political action, as an existing recourse for the problems of postrevolutionary China – it was instead another part of what needed to be precisely defined. Emerging from centuries of debate about the nature of the public good and its empirical and normative relation to private interest and feeling (yu),1 gong and si in the early Republic were deeply implicated in defining the political agency that reformers across the spectrum hoped to secure for the Chinese people. These definitions were tied ineluctably to the imperial rule that originally gave them content, and Zhang struggles to find forms of political action that do not reproduce those forms of domination. Concluding that only certain forms of personal activity fulfill this criteria, Zhang’s theory must provide answers both to contemporary invocations of gong and to certain Western discussions of “public” action – both of which hold that only action taken in and for the public can qualify as meaningfully political. By the time Zhang wrote, the link between gong and imperial rule had broken down in the face of a republican revolution. Appeals to a genuinely public interest were seen as quick replacements for the “privatized” (si) or “commodified” (huo) state that in the view of many contemporary intellectuals characterized the false legitimacy of monarchical power. This reading of public and private derives from the late Ming–early Qing thinkers Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) and Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), who first articulated a disconnect between “all under Heaven” (tian xia, i.e. the world) and “the state” (guo), two 1

For discussion of this trend in late imperial neo-Confucianism China see Angle, Human Rights, ch. 4.

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terms at the time used interchangeably.2 Huang and Gu insisted that the public good rests in what society and individuals can discern, rather than in what rulers promote. Late Qing thinkers such as Gong Zizhen, He Qi, and Hu Liyuan worked from these premises to force a reconsideration of precisely how si, the private and partial, could reconfigure, or even replace, the gong that for Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism constituted the only legitimate grounding for both personal desires and government policy.3 By the time of the early Republic, these public and private concepts sometimes collapsed into one another, complicating their relationships with emerging definitions of state, nation, and government. An incipient Chinese nationalism came to see the nation as that which “the entire people take private possession of” (you quanti guo min si qi guo), categorically incapable of enacting the true public interest without taking account of popular political expression.4 Zhang criticized these widespread appeals to “national” self-interest, despite their invocation in discourses of republican self-determination. He recognized that while renderings of the public/private divide were nominally inspired by democratic ideals, they often aimed more to legitimate revolutionary over monarchical leadership than to celebrate popular self-determination. Unlike many contemporaries, Zhang did not identify self-sacrificial behavior on behalf of the state or the nation as a true advancement of “public” interest, but nor does he articulate political control as a form of “privatization” in the name of the people. He warned especially that appeals to patriotism (ai guo) would simply replace the veneration of dynastic scions with loyalty to elected officers: We are in a state such that we don’t even notice the dissolution of our country’s foundations. But is this entirely the fault of those in power? I would like to straightforwardly ask everyone, if the people’s (min) benefit is not developed, whence national benefit? If the people’s power is not consolidated, 2 3

4

Huang and Zhang, Gong yu si, 71–72. E.g. Gong Zizhen, “Lun si.” The early Qing dynasty critic of neo-Confucianism Dai Zhen played a major role in rehabilitating the usually despised “private” desire, connecting it to both proper moral action and the public good (Mengzi ziyi shuzheng, 181, 217). Yet unlike his later Qing counterparts, Dai continued to regard si on its own rather suspiciously, defining it as a mistaken form of desiring (160, 216). Huang and Zhang, Gong yu si, 64, 88.


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whence national power? When the people seek their own benefit, this is benefiting the country. When the people forge their own power, then the country is protected. Advocating the destruction of the people in order to worship the nation is false nationalism. (ZQJ 185)

Zhang’s primary concern with these false “public” appeals during the early years of the Republic was that, despite their rhetoric, they failed to distance themselves from the historical reality of imperial rule. An understanding of “public” capable of establishing a true republic (gonghe) has failed to crystallize because the politically powerful have learned to conceal their political misdeeds under its moral sanction.5 . . . the doctrine of “sacrifice those on the bottom for the benefit of those on top” has been transformed into the lesson of “sacrifice the private to benefit the public.” If you search for the path through which this phrase was formulated, you will find that it is still constricted by the doctrines of Confucianism, such that in realizing private benefit one must hide behind the public name, wreaking havoc with the will of the people in order to carry out one’s own licentiousness. (ZQJ 181)

His critique here is not that private benefits are to be exalted absolutely, but rather that the content of what is “public” remains permanently and dangerously open to capture by the regime in power. Under the imperial system, the state or the people had become “privatized” when one family monopolized rule and silenced dissent. In Republican China, Zhang argues, nationalism and the “public good” have at various times served the same function of “privatizing” the state: We think that the ruler [jun] is the person to whom the state has been entrusted, such that in redressing a matter relating to our country we are redressing our ruler; and that in risking our lives for the person of the ruler, we are risking our lives for the state. (ZQJ 80–81)

If the “privatization” of the state is to be avoided under the Republic, Zhang warns, no one individual’s will or wishes should achieve public status in being generally and forcefully applied. Zhang’s main critique of the state – whether imperial or nationalist – is that it impedes, influences, or directs something that properly lies 5

Note that the gong in gonghe, “republic,” is not the same character or word as the gong meaning “public.”

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within the power and judgment of the individual. His position in the rule-by-man debate, examined in the previous chapter, turned on precisely this need to secure a domain of control for individuals, specifically those lower classes typically considered passive receptors of governmental policy, vis-a-vis elite leadership. There, Zhang’s concern ` was that appeals to cultural reform by rule-by-man advocates such as Huang Yuanyong preempted the spontaneous capacities for institutional transformation of these nontraditional actors. In his essay “Self-Awareness” and elsewhere, Zhang identifies more explicitly how this domain of control for individuals is important not only for resisting elite dominion, but also for legitimating the existence of the state itself: If I have something that I am good at, such that by not doing that thing I cannot achieve my fullest capacity, and if something forcibly prevents me from doing this thing . . . how can I possibly bear to associate with [that inhibiting thing] for any length of time? It is at this point that a state loses its significance. This is where [talk of] not having a government begins. Why? If a state does not succeed in doing what it was established to do, it can be destroyed. If a government does not succeed in doing what it was established to do, it can be demolished. The legal scholars in the world today all say that the existence of a state depends on the existence of the public way [gongdao]. What is this public way? It means that each person in a state attains his appropriate lot [de qi xiangdang de fen]. What does this “appropriate” mean? If in fully exercising my portion [jin qi fen] I achieve something good, I should preserve it. If in fully exercising my portion I find something bad, I should abandon it. If in fully exercising my portion I find something that is beneficial, I should develop it. If in fully exercising my portion I find something harmful, I should suppress it. (ZQJ 183)

This passage suggests that the key to democratic rule is accepting that individuals performing these tasks are alone capable of judging whether these tasks are “good” or “bad” and hence worthy of being “preserved” or “abandoned.” Democracy will replicate the logic of monarchical rule if it fails to devolve decisions about these values to individuals, because it is only by preserving individual particularities that the true “public” can emerge. Accordingly, when he directly addresses the relationship between individual action and state-building, in the essay “The State and Responsibility,” Zhang defines the function of a government as an


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organization in which feelings of pain and pleasure, functioning primarily within what is considered the private/si domain, are preserved without being consolidated. In Zhang’s words, a government is nothing other than creating an organization, and allowing those people within that one society to have a shared law by which their avoidance of pain and pursuit of pleasure can be mediated . . . Except that which is called “pain” should be what each person himself [ji] feels to be “pain,” and not what others [ta ren] imagine it to be. That which is called “pleasure” should be what each person himself feels to be pleasure, and not something others have designed for him. And additionally, that which they call pain should be what each person [ren ren] calls pain, not that which legal experts and overeducated counselors have felt to be tragic, but what ordinary people feel to be tragic. That which they call pleasure should be what each person calls pleasure, not what makes great men and gentlemen smile, but that which makes children and average people smile. (ZQJ 124; see also 523)

What Zhang is advocating, I think, is not merely substituting the majority opinion about pain and pleasure for the private opinion of an emperor. His insistence that each “defines for oneself” (zi ding; ZQJ 124, 470) what is “good,” “bad,” and “appropriate” locates the practices necessary to building the state in individual capacities for personal judgment. For Zhang, these moments of judgment are informed by the presence of others, but they are not coordinated with them. The particularity of each participant is kept instead in a constant state of negotiation or what Zhang calls tiaohe, “accommodation”: to “attain one’s lot” in these cases is to take “good and bad, benefit and harm, and make them meld together, rub together, harmonize with each other, and yield to each other. Then, together we can see a way in which to settle these [feelings]” (ZQJ 183). Such accommodative acts accomplish the “publicization” of the state by preserving individual capacities, wishes, and wills without reducing them to a false unity – recalling the arguments of those Qing dynasty critics of neo-Confucianism, who interpreted subjective desire as both necessary and legitimate for a fulfilling human life and flourishing political community. By emphasizing the private actions, feelings, and needs of each individual in the construction of the public – including the commoners, or pifu (ZQJ 128) – Zhang attempts a solution to Gu Yanwu’s original problem: how to separate the state from all under Heaven, without

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at the same time allowing claims about the constituency of the latter to reproduce the same “privatization” in the name of selfish interests found in the former.6 To Zhang, failing to affirm a personal, individual perspective – the “I” – when political decisions are made would exclude nonelites from “attaining their lot” (de qi fen) and hence inhibit the construction of a genuine “public.” Reducing individuals’ abilities to merely derivative value is problematic not because such evaluations rebuke individual rights, but because they picture political life as something taken for granted, something generated prior to and independently of individual existence and the moments of judgment that inflect it. The emblematic form of such disempowerment, to Zhang, is imperial rule because it offers an easy and obvious site of power and authority: the monarch or emperor. These conditions were being reproduced, however, by contemporary calls to elevate the nation at the expense of the individual – leading Zhang to interpret what contemporary and much other discourse would term “private interests” as constitutive exercises of public-creation. He does not reject the creation of a public sphere as a possible goal (the details of which process I explain in later chapters). Rather, he simply rejects as misdirected and unfeasible the possibility of gong as a means, whether in terms of its acting as a guiding principle or as furnishing an existing space from which a public will could be extracted.7 The means of community-building lie instead with self-aware individuals, the “sagely founders” described in Chapter 3. Zhang’s discussion here envisions each of these founders bringing the public into being not by elevating her pains, interests, or 6

7

In “The State and Responsibility,” Zhang cites Gu directly: “Gu Yanwu once asked, ‘What is the difference between losing the state [wang guo] and losing all under Heaven (wang tian xia)? When the name of the dynasty changes, that is called losing the state. When benevolence and righteousness are impeded, leading wild animals to feast on the people, and people to eat each other, this is called losing all under Heaven. Protecting the state is what rulers and officials and gentry scheme about. But protecting all under Heaven – this is the responsibility of the common people.’ Mr. Gu does not clearly distinguish the state from the ruler; and what he calls all under Heaven, we now call the state [guo]. But from this it can still be seen that the responsibility for protecting the state cannot but extend all the way down to the commoners [pifu]” (ZQJ 127–128). Arguably, by seeing gong as primarily the end, rather than the guiding principle or means, of such private/si activity, Zhang follows Gu Yanwu rather closely. For discussion, see Angle, Human Rights, 93.


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talents above those of others, but by recognizing the capacity of other individuals to make similar contributions and mixing together with them in the process of accommodation. “In reality, a republic is created by persons. No form of government is able to arise on its own” (ZQJ 297).

Public action as political action Many theorists – and not only Zhang’s contemporaries – would regard this reliance on private action to build the public (however defined) as nonsensical. Although liberal theorists and utilitarians (including Jeremy Bentham, whom Zhang cites) do believe that personal interests can ground the public good, those interests are only legitimated insofar as they harmonize into mutual agreement – that is, are identical in some way significant enough to ground polity formation in a contract. Zhang, of course, did not view such agreement as forthcoming (hence his fundamental dilemma), and in any case the more characteristic feature of his theory is its reliance on individual action to call into being some form of public way. Zhang’s notion seems to straddle, if not completely erase, the divide between private and public that for so many democratic, liberal and republican theorists structures the proper domain of “political” action.8 Hannah Arendt, Hanna Pitkin, Benjamin Barber, and Sheldon Wolin explicitly banish from the political realm the personal, individualist features that mark such commitments, and thus present one of the greatest challenges to Zhang’s politics. They insist that a political community can legitimate its rule over its members, and bring into being the very plans over which it deliberates, only by acting together in a public space. For them the publicness of an act qualifies it as political, but that act can only be public by being not-private. In Hanna Pitkin’s words, where moral discourse “attempts to restore a personal relationship,” “political discourse is public and general.”9 For some, including 8

9

Hannah Arendt is among the best-known advocates of a sharp public/private divide, arguing that public exposure enables freedom from “private” realms of necessity and feeling, constituting in the process the unique realm of the political (The Human Condition, Sec. II). The divide reappears in theories of civic republicanism that celebrate the unique nature of life in public, and in liberalism, which often insists on privacy as an irreducible limit on public agents (e.g. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” 24). Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 204.

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Tracy Strong and Marcel Henaff, the fulfillment of one’s requirements to be in public space “may sometimes be in contradiction with the private sphere, with an individual’s intimate convictions or with personal preferences. The gap is unavoidable: it indicates . . . the necessary difference between public choices (which involve the community) and personal preferences.”10 Strong, Henaff, and Pitkin link publicity to specific, nonpersonal action; for them, privacy reduces to personal ethics that have little or no effect on the community in general. This boundary maintenance between public and private has surprising consequences. Not only must the self (or at least the actions that self undertakes) be bifurcated into two separate realms or ways of doing, so too must the nature of the world, if a sharp division between public and private acts is to be maintained. Arendt very explicitly states that the private realm is characterized by the necessity of life and for life, in which individuals are deprived of “objective” relationships with others.11 For Arendt, the private is appropriately hidden from view and hermetically sealed off from the public realm, which is the sole arena for taking action capable of changing the large-scale conditions to which individuals are otherwise subject. Political activity for these theorists is thus largely defined by “where” it happens, buttressed by preexisting understandings that fracture and delimit, rather than unite or holistically comprehend, complicated realities. Both the space and the action that occurs within it each lack meaning without the other. There could be no public space without people to act within it; and, according to Pitkin and Arendt, there can certainly be no political or public action without a space in which it can be performed in front of others – that is, recognized as political in terms of the constitutive conventions governing that realm. “Political man,” to Hannah Arendt, is driven by “the passion for distinction . . . a desire to be heard, talked of, approved and respected,” not because he is ambitious but because doing otherwise would violate the means by which he can be said, according to Arendt, to be acting politically.12 Even when Pitkin points out how Arendt’s overemphasis on such agonal striving comes at the expense of a serious discussion of justice, she does so in a way that preserves Arendt’s artful definition of the 10 11

Strong and Henaff, Public Space and Democracy, 9. Arendt, The Human Condition, 70–71. 12 Arendt, On Revolution, 115–116.


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public realm as that which “gathers us together” and “prevents us from falling all over each other.”13 For all of these theorists, politics takes the form of explicitly coordinated action to deal with commonly shared consequences: in Benjamin Barber’s words, “the logic of consequences is thus always a public logic.”14 Pitkin herself operationalizes public and private by reading the dichotomy in terms of real efficacy: the world the agent confronts when performing “private” activity by definition lies largely beyond his capacity to control.15 This anxiety over consequences suggests that the problem to which public action responds is at least partly that of uncertainty, the unavoidable effect of a world rent by plurality and power. Politics – action taken together with others – is seen as the only way in which ordinary citizens can “nurture the value of a common good in a society whose main institutions are structured to produce differentials of income, status and power.”16 Pitkin joins Wolin to argue for the unique power of collective action in rendering the world tractable: only through joining together can we assure “the ability to realize one’s intentions in the world” and make “something like control” possible through the adjustment mechanism called politics.17 Arendt is less sanguine about the possibility of control, but she affirms the unique capacity of action in public to make salient the consequences of individual actions and to grant them effective leverage. She argues that we understand the concept of “rule” in terms of its original Greek definition of arche: rule should be understood not as command, but as “beginning” or natality. We can begin actions, but can never decisively control their final consequences. Although our interconnected relationships with others thrust upon us the burden of uncertainty, Arendt advises us to embrace this uncertainty by orienting ourselves toward action in public. The public enables actors to avoid the urge to exercise personal control, arising from the analogy of political action to material fabrication, and instead to act in concert with others.18 These arguments about the importance of acting together, then, rest largely – but not entirely – on empirical claims about what the

13 15 17 18

Pitkin, “Justice,” 340, 342. 14 Barber, Strong Democracy, 126. Pitkin, “Justice.” 16 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 604. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 200. Arendt, The Human Condition, 224–229; see also Markell, “The Rule of the People.”

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public alone can resist, perform, and call into being. This celebration of action in public recognizes that if the world of plurality opens us to depredations of inequality and power, it also promotes unique political forms, particularly democracy, that foster moments of intense engagement with our shared world. For Wolin, democracy shifts in form away from the ossifying, elitist constitutionalism that marked its early inception into a “moment of experience, a crystallized response to deeply felt grievances or needs” that allows its participants the freedom to “reinvent the political periodically, perhaps even continually.”19 To Wolin, democracy must be fluid and self-constituting if it is to face a world whose fate lies in the machinations of “Superpower” and thus largely outside the hands of ordinary citizens. He suggests that democracy involves more than participation in political processes: it is a way of constituting power. Democracy is committed to the claim that experience with, and access to, power is essential to the development of the capacities of ordinary people because power is crucial to human dignity and realization.20

Wolin’s definition is helpful here because the action it endorses need not begin within the range of choices delimited by most modern democratic state systems. He takes democracy as a goal (or, perhaps more precisely, a process) rather than an assumed context from which subsequent actions can assume their democratic character.21 By engendering “the demotic” in this way, Wolin potentially widens the range of participatory acts that constitute democracy. Zhang’s account is similar to Wolin’s in that it seeks to identify acts of democracy that are not merely definitional but constitutive. Both, then, are involved in a project of refining a uniquely “democratic” power, a power that in at least some sense speaks to antielitism by acknowledging the participatory acts of ordinary citizens as constitutive of a nonelitist political order.22 Democracy can be “acted” or performed before a democracy 19 20 21

22

Wolin, Politics and Vision, 603; “Norm and Form,” 55. Cited in Kateb, “Wolin as a Critic,” 41. Contrast Wolin’s view with that of, say, Benjamin Barber. Although Barber claims that the creation of a political community is one of political activity’s chief tasks (Strong Democracy, 133), he also describes his project as an interrogation into the categories of already existing democracy, seeking to show citizens that much of what they already do is “democratic” action (xiv). See especially Wolin, “The Liberal/Democratic Divide.”


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is in place, indeed must be so acted, because for both Zhang and Wolin democracy is what we do rather than where we are. This emphasis on a process – a process in Zhang’s case explicitly theorized as and necessitated by political founding – insists that democracy (or any institution, for that matter) cannot ever be “done” being established. Wolin’s depiction of the power in (of?) a democracy is not, however, as a discrete quantity of power brought by individuals to the political realm from some kind of preexisting repository, nor as something that can be retracted by individuals for later, nonpolitical use. Democratic power, for Wolin, is something participated in, not created – that is, created in the way wealth is created, in which the bargains struck by goal-pursuing individuals produce ever greater gains in efficiency, registering on the individual level as greater exchange value. Its constitutive value lies in its being “accessed” or “experienced” rather than aggregated or bargained for. This power appropriate to and constitutive of democracy is something realized in common and only accessible there, when individuals are acting together with others; thus the power that emerges assumes a character irreducible to the sum of its parts. Like Pitkin and Arendt, Wolin realizes that democracy is more about how and if we act than it is about the regime that supports our efforts. But also like them, he believes that this action is meaningfully efficacious only within the spheres of public intercourse that alone are capable of giving definition to action. What Tracy Strong calls “boundary maintenance” – shoring up the categories of public and private – becomes necessary to ensure that the unique power of political action, arising from public power, is protected.23 If forced to articulate his purposes in terms of the public-private binary as these public action theorists invoke it, Zhang would have difficulty explaining how his “sagely foundings” can be anything but limited, impotent, and selfishly partial. At best, his ascription of political efficacy to internal strivings seems to confound “real” political actions with the mental and sometimes ethical processes of preparing oneself to perform them – seemingly resuscitating a Chinese tradition of eremitist dissent that would ultimately remain ineffective at changing the structure of power. How can such practices really have

23

Strong, The Idea of Political Theory, 2–3.

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explicitly “political” effect, if they lack a theory of coordinated collective action and are based instead in personal exercises to transform individual consciousness? To show why Zhang’s individualist model is political, we need an account of how an individual’s activities can effectively intervene in transforming shared environments, as well as how they can fit within a theoretical structure that credibly registers them as contributing to more than merely personal or moral issues. I begin by offering some new ways to think about the feasibility of Zhang’s project: how might individuals possess the material capacity to achieve goals that for the public action theorists are only empirically possible and meaningful in concert?

The problem of feasibility The seemingly irrational conviction in individual potency that Zhang holds has been dismissed by more than one sinologist as “the trouble with Confucianism,” the manifestation of a flawed belief system – often attributed to the historical conflation of politics with morality – that prevented Chinese society from developing theories of rights-based political reform, impartial law, and constitutionally limited government.24 Assuming the structure of this belief system (albeit while rejecting its substantive moral content), Zhang’s vision of self-aware individuals reordering both world and state likewise seems hopelessly naive. Without an account of how such internal work could fit within an empirical story about social change, collective action would seem to possess obvious advantages over Zhang’s rather minimalist model: a large collection of people acting together cannot help but have effect on the world they share, if for no other reason than their sheer weight alone. Such an intuition guides Arendt’s definition of power, which for her turns not on violence but “on numbers.”25 It 24

25

“The trouble with Confucianism . . . was not that it gave too little scope or importance to the noble man as an individual but that it gave perhaps too much. It put upon him all the burden of responsibility that the prophets of Israel laid on the whole people.” De Bary, The Trouble with Confucianism, 22–23. Mou Zongsan has also argued that much Chinese thought conflated morality and politics, preventing it from inventing and implementing “external” restraints on political power (Zhengdao yu zhidao, 19, 124–125 et passim). Arendt, “On Violence,” 140.


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also lends credence to the assumption of contemporary rational-choice theory that the efforts or choices of any given individual to many kinds of collective enterprises is negligible.26 Yet recent literature in political and social theory has begun to question how individual participation matters to collective outcomes, helping to demonstrate the feasibility of Zhang’s theory of founding as well as to place it within a larger, more holistic picture of social and political transformation. In his book Free Riding, Richard Tuck argues that the widely shared intuition about the negligibility of individual contributions to collective outcomes was “far from ‘natural’ to most thinking people in human history” before the 1930s.27 It was at that time that many social scientists began to view various forms of social action through the model of economic competition. Many of them – most famously Mancur Olson – concluded that the value of any one individual contribution to a group enterprise was negligible, increasing incentives for that individual to “free ride” off the public goods generated by others. As Tuck and others point out, however, these rational-choice theories turn on a paradox: they presume that imperceptible, negligible contributions somehow add up to perceptible, nonnegligible differences, leading their believers to promote coercion as a necessary measure to prevent free riding even as they simultaneously insist that any given free rider should not matter.28 This problem of individual contributions to collective enterprises maps onto what ancient Greek and Roman writers called the sorites, or the “paradox of the heap.”29 Tuck argues that although we cannot assign definite criteria to how many stones make a heap, or how many citizens make a community, we should not follow Olson and later rational-choice theorists to deny the efficacy of any one component (whether stone or citizen) in bringing about the outcome. Olson and his followers misconstrue a component’s lack of pivotal efficacy in bringing about the desired outcome as a reason for that component not to participate at all – a conflation not found in earlier thinkers who have confronted the problem, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume.30 Zhang recognizes both the allure and the 26 27 29

The classic source for these claims is Mancur Olson’s 1965 book The Logic of Collective Action. Tuck, Free Riding, 3. 28 Ibid., 66. Hyde, “Sorites Paradox,” sec. 1. 30 Tuck, Free Riding, 73.

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alarming consequences of equating one’s lack of pivotal efficacy with a lack of efficacy per se: [There are those who say,] “Even if I don’t get involved, there are probably 33,999 other people out there who can ensure that nothing bad will happen.” However, you do not know how many other people are thinking the same thing you are. If all those 33,999 people did the same thing [you do], and none get involved, then this means the entire country has lost its self [wo]. (ZQJ 514)

Each of the components, in other words, is individually instrumental in bringing about the outcome, because surely nothing would get done if none of them were there. Tuck argues that this dilemma presents a threshold problem, in which we do not know quite where the threshold is or when we will reach it.31 Despite this ignorance, we may still conclude that so far as individual decision-making is concerned, one would do best to recognize that I have brought about the outcome even if my action was not necessary, in the sense that without it the outcome would not have happened. It is enough to for me to be able to claim causal responsibility for the outcome that my action was sufficient, given the other circumstances, for the outcome to occur.32

Tuck’s analysis suggests that Zhang’s expectation that individual efforts can culminate in broadly transformative, intersubjectively effective social change is not as nonsensical or hopeless as it seems. Individual actions can have a causal efficacy even if we are to assume they are relatively negligible: they are no less causally efficacious for being first or second in a cascade than they are for being the last, pivotal contribution that decisively turns the tide one way or another. This is especially the case for conditions of nearly complete political or social breakdown, where the problem is not that individuals would be tempted to free ride off the contributions of others to public goods, but that they would be tempted to not do anything at all. In this situation, we would be wise to err on the side of caution when deciding whether or not our individual actions can contribute anything to the outcome – that is, whether or not we decide there has already been 31

Ibid., 95.

32

Ibid., 100.


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“enough” action taken by others. We would have very little to lose by not contributing, and so would have a good reason to take action. Zhang’s analysis limns another more subtle point, however, having to do not only with the causal efficacy of individual acts but also with their eventual coalescence into distinctive patterns in the absence of shared goals. What Zhang is specifically struggling to exploit is the fact of unintended emergence: not only that individuals often act in ways that produce cumulative effects they did not intend, but that political regimes, social arrangements and cultural modes are crucially dependent upon a series of everyday interactions with no obvious connection to specific, deliberate acts or coercively enforced institutions. Contemporary analyses of complexity and emergent social properties – travelling under such names as the “invisible hand,” “mutually constitutive systems,” and “spontaneous order” – address precisely this core problematic: how open-ended systems like language, games, and social networks are or have been described, reproduced, and developed.33 Complexity recognizes that the overall characteristics of these systems are “emergent,” meaning they cannot be exhaustively predicted by reference to individual-level data; but at the same time, theorists of complexity identify individual components as sites of perpetual innovation in the system as a whole.34 This entails that the rule-making apparatus of a complex system is distributed among individual actors rather than located in some globally potent site of decision-making. As such, more complex systems such as societies, cultures, and languages can be rendered tractable by looking at the local, individualized occurrences and the rules that govern them, rather than at the large-scale emergent properties that complexity theorists maintain are unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable. It is because such systems have no “single governing equation, or rule, that controls the system” that micro-level participation is so influential in such a process.35 For 33

34 35

The phenomenon has been documented in multiple dimensions of human life and in multiple disciplines – from culture (e.g. Ikegami, Bonds of Civility), to biology (e.g. Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems”), to international relations theory (e.g. Hoffmann, Ozone Depletion), to law and economics (e.g. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, 35–54). Michael Kalton, “Extending the Neo-Confucian Tradition,” 84–92, uses neo-Confucian metaphysical beliefs to theorize emergent complexity, though he argues for the normative rather than empirical force of human interdependence that is my emphasis here. Holland, Emergence, 5, 12. Holland, “Complex Adaptive Systems,” 21.

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example, the sociologist Eiko Ikegami explains shifts in Tokugawa-era Japanese cultural and aesthetic sensibilities as the result of ongoing contact between individuals, each of whom carries within herself “an amalgamation of cognitive, social and symbolic networks.”36 In this system, order did not emerge from top-down command, but nor did it require collective, coordinated action. It is precisely because individuals are connected to others so intimately that they need not resort to the artifice of the public realm to bring them together.37 Emergence theories may thus help explain how Zhang links consequences normally associated only with collective action to the actions of individuals situated within networks of social connections – absent the neo-Confucian cosmology that, to many imperial-era literati, endowed individual ethical action with political force and relevance by producing identifiable, one-to-one correspondences with larger social, political, and cosmic patterns.38 But while complexity theories such as these go far in explaining in a detailed way the mechanisms by which systems – including political and social ones – evolve, they cannot provide guidance as to their political application. Typically, the task of these disciplines has been to explain, ex post facto, the emergence of particular traits or associations in a holistic order, given particular individual components. Zhang’s task is a bit more difficult, however, because it reverses the arrow of causality: how can a complex, holistic entity like a political system be activated by a series of small, local transformations? If democracy, as Tocqueville famously noted, is supported by mores and civic associations motivated by ends independent of any desire to support that particular regime, is it possible that self-aware individuals can deliberately assume those motivations, or imitate those actions, to bring about democracy? If we accept as a “fact” the mutual constitution of institutional and individual action, what can we say about deliberately initiated positive change in the system?

36 37

38

Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 48. By “public realm” here I mean the civic public realm of Arendt, not the “public” of sociability, which for Ikegami and other sociologists denotes those spaces of contact between networked individuals. I discuss this distinction in more detail below. Metzger, Escape from Predicament. In other words, Zhang rejects the “epistemological optimism” that Metzger argues grounds neo-Confucian claims to knowledge of, and unity with, an ultimate cosmological reality (Metzger, Cloud across the Pacific, 673).


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Unlike immune systems or massively parallel neural networks, humans and their interactions do not obey predictable laws or even abide by consistently life-sustaining norms. Where systems of these former kinds are self-regulating, human systems rely on the deliberate actions of their members for their constitutive shape and continued existence. I believe it is this potential to which both Zhang’s, and Arendt’s and Pitkin’s, accounts of political action speak, and which indeed constitutes their politicalness: the ability of humans to intervene in their collective fate, to begin to shape social forces gone awry. The mutually constitutive nature of human society and political order is in fact the very thing that opens spaces for plural actors to initiate change with deliberate actions. Zhang identifies these actions as self-awareness, the self-use of talent, and accommodation, but for Arendt and the other public action theorists it is action in public fora. The public provides opportunities to see and be seen by others, affirming a common shared reality as well as a mechanism by which actions of individuals are undertaken, and completed, by others.39 To Arendt, political action should abandon the ideals of sovereignty or “rule,” in which one actor is seen to be responsible for both the decision and the execution. Instead, political theory should recognize that the execution, or completion, of each individual decision is dependent on the responsive actions of others.40 Pitkin and Wolin interpret this challenge in terms of collective (or, in Wolin’s words, demotic) action. As Pitkin describes it, Most aspects of social life are left to evolve through drift and private power. Many activities probably can be successfully conducted only in that way. But the distinctive promise of political freedom remains the possibility of genuine collective action, an entire community consciously and jointly shaping its policy, its way of life.41

Unlike these other theorists, however, Zhang’s “public” seems to point toward an uncoordinated process – a “public way,” to use his words, rather than an already established space of communication. This conceptualization is more akin to what contemporary sociologists like Jane Jacobs and Philippe Aries call a “public of sociability,” 39 41

Arendt, Human Condition, 234–235. Pitkin, “Justice,” 344.

40

Ibid., 201, 224–238.

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in which individuals are not concerned to engage in collective decisionmaking or deliberation. Rather, their relationships are best characterized as ones of peaceful coexistence, “mediated by conventions that allow diversity and social distance to be maintained despite physical proximity.”42 In contrast, the public of Arendt, Pitkin, and the others is a civic public; that is, it is a self-governing, deliberately coordinated polis. The ancient Greeks believed that the unregulated heterogeneity of cosmopolite centers like Babylon prevented their becoming truly “free” political communities, a judgment reflected also in Arendt’s work.43 But in light of the relationships that emergent properties foreground, Zhang’s approach belies the strict division between these two kinds of public because he suggests that the line between coordinated effort and uncoordinated harmony is not as obvious or necessary as these accounts suggest. To a nonelitist like Zhang, acts of creation and building take place when individuals come to be self-aware, and begin the struggle against the external reality that denies them use of their talents. Internal, moral effort is critical in shaping the national future precisely because the recognition of a collective whole, like a nation or a state, “is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting men attribute to their acts.”44 It may be, in fact, because Zhang has so internalized the fact of human plurality – in Arendt’s words, “the fact that men, not man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”45 – that his model offers hope for fulfillment. Added to the tumultuous disagreements by intellectuals, commoners, and foreign experts as to China’s fate, Zhang is very much aware of the problems that occur when human beings share a world with others, and his theory responsibly attends to them. He assumes without question that individuals are embedded in a variety of networks – families, friendships – such that steps they take to become “self-aware,” critical of

42

43

44

Weintraub, “Public/Private Distinction,” 16. It is also this kind of “public” to which Ikegami refers when she uses complexity theory to track changes in Tokugawa civic culture. Weintraub, “Public/Private Distinction,” 25–26. These distinctions both inform and are informed by disciplinary divisions between sociology and political theory: the former documents the unconscious, patterned movements of human societies; the latter asks normative questions about how that collective of humans should be controlled and its direction shaped. Mises, Human Action, 43. 45 Arendt, The Human Condition, 7.


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the regime, and masterful of their talents incrementally alter the environments in which not only the individual himself, but also everyone else, is necessarily subject. From this decentered political perspective, privileging a realm in which individuals come together to serve other than individual ends may ascribe to those persons an unwarranted or unrealistic autonomy in their “private” lives. In these accounts, it is external pressures – to solve problems, to escape loneliness, to seek majesty in majorities – rather than natural sociability that connects people to each other. Celebrating common action as uniquely transformative of common life acts on the impression that individuals cannot otherwise be drawn together, or act with others to change their shared world. There is always for this reason an artificial quality to the public – artificial not only in that it is a product both humanly made and humanly regulated, but that it is forced, unwieldy, and not a mode of organization in all of the world’s societies. Contrastingly, when we are already seen as inescapably connected, other human modes of contact, like those Zhang assumes to be sites of political action, provide the tangible elements to both connect and separate us – a function Arendt associates explicitly and exclusively with the public realm.46 Far from being a state of deprivation, our “private” lives are inextricably entwined with the layers of relationships that sustain us always and everywhere. This leads to another paradox, however: if these social forms rely on what participants believe about them in order to work, then one cannot simply “go public” (or go political) as an act of will. The context of publicness, or politicalness, “must be available, allowing these actions to count in a public way, to be transformative” – even as the very idea of a public in individual minds is constitutive of that social imaginary called the public.47 But when Zhang imported into China ideas about democracy and constitutional government rooted in the British historical experience, no communities existed to support either the process or the content of his transcultural borrowing. Although these ideas had some limited analogues in Chinese history, they were for the most part exogenous to Chinese political thinking. The crises of authority engendered by a republican revolution and foreign incursion, moreover, had curtailed or destroyed once-viable possibilities for 46

Ibid., 50.

47

Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 12, 59.

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effective action. Any community with the power to prevent situations from careening out of control was no longer present. Establishing foundations for the acceptance and practice of democracy without resort to coercion was, for Zhang, the first goal of action; only once these foundations were secured could deliberately coordinated control be considered a realistic option. With respect to the situation Zhang confronted, spontaneous individual interventions offered obvious advantages over coordinated, public control as a means of regulating emergent properties of political interaction. This brand of methodological individualism foregrounds the contribution individuals make to collective orders, but more importantly it gestures toward the crucial relationship that in a mutually constitutive system always obtains between internal, individual cognition, individual activity, and collective outcomes. The structure the public action theorists have developed to account for such action is that of public versus private activity. Private actions are seen as limited in both scope and efficacy; because by definition they affect only private actors, these actions are normatively less important to world-changing action than are those taken within a collectively mediated space called the public. Yet seeking action “in public” only contradicts the reality of complexity because it implicitly denies the considerable institutional leverage lodged in individuals. Like complexity theorists, Zhang realizes that in any system it is the individuals who comprise it who are ultimately responsible for bringing about (but, of course, not controlling) its emergent properties. This is the foundation of his argument against contemporary advocacy of dictatorship: an imposition from above cannot provide for the intelligence, virtue and strength that alone makes a country strong (ZQJ 119). Zhang’s theory also offers a rejoinder to those, such as Mou Zongsan and Wm. Theodore de Bary, who have criticized Confucianism’s seemingly naive reliance on virtue (or other such personal qualities) rather than institutions to secure political order and the public good. Mou explicitly argues that even the most insightful of Chinese thinkers, including Huang Zongxi, were unable to truly grasp the necessity of a democratic, constitutional order for controlling the power of rulers.48 Yet neither de Bary nor Mou consider how, even were Chinese thinkers 48

Mou, Zhengdao yu zhidao, 173.


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to have grasped the ideal of constitutional government to their satisfaction, the necessary institutions could arise and gain support in society. Their analysis presumes that the conceptual availability of constitutional government is all that stands in the way of its practical realization, and thus sidesteps the paradoxes of founding that Zhang must confront. Zhang certainly realizes the importance of institutions for reining in political power, but he does not have the luxury of assuming that those institutions will spontaneously arise once their necessity is realized. He has no choice but to make the personal political.

Making the personal political Zhang’s insistence that certain self-directed actions are both necessary and at least partially sufficient to shift from imperial rule and tyranny toward self-rule and democracy intuits key characteristics of emergence theory. Paired with his theorization of “private” interests and activities as constituting a dynamic public way, we can begin to see how personal actions constitute, and do not simply complement, the political. I label his attempt “making the personal political,” but mean something different by this phrase than do contemporary Western feminists, who most famously invoke it. Feminists who “make the personal political” hope to render activities traditionally concealed from public view as rightful targets of political action and control.49 When personal relationships and the power dynamics they foster are opened to public scrutiny, these personal experiences and activities become drawn into the domain of control by a community of others that extends beyond merely the affected parties.50 In such accounts, the boundary between public and private may be renegotiated on the basis of its historic privileging of certain classes, genders, or lifestyles, but it is not rejected. In fact, feminists reinscribe it for the purposes of remedying “private” injustices. “Personal” problems are recognized as solvable “only through political means and political action.”51 In other words, 49

50 51

Indeed, some feminists have claimed that this negotiation of the public and the private, for liberal feminism at least, is “what the feminist movement is about.” Pateman, The Disorder of Women, 118. Okin, “Gender, the Public, and the Private,” 123. Pateman, The Disorder of Women, 131.

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feminists who associate with the slogan “the personal is political” transverse the two dichotomous categories of public and private in the name of justice, but do not deny the analytic capacity of either.52 In contrast, Zhang’s version of “personal politics” is not ultimately motivated by a desire to overcome or expose injustices. It is instead a call to become more effective by managing the self within. Rather than open the personal to a public gaze, Zhang opens the public to the personal gaze, asking individuals to survey from their own perspective the problems at hand and the solutions available to them. The actions taken in response to this survey are irreducibly particular; neither the “self” that acts nor the tasks he or she undertakes can be determined by others and then “parceled out” – even if all separately recognize that they contribute to a larger enterprise never entirely of their own making (ZQJ IV, 5). This involves a complex series of personal, internal struggles to define one’s own capacities vis-a-vis not only ` other people, but also the worldly structures within which one finds oneself – including regimes of self-rule and imperial command: What, then, can be done? I say, search for one’s own “I” [qiu wo]. From lofty Heaven to grounded earth, respect only this “I.” If there is no “I” on earth, then there is no world. If there is something I cannot do, it is also not something I can have others do for me . . . if there is something that can be done, doing it ultimately lies in myself. (ZQJ 630)

What Zhang is doing here is identifying, and navigating, the tension between individual, inner struggles and outer worldly change. The first question of political action is thus an internal struggle to “find the ‘I,’” which is “the source of all myriad things” (ZQJ 630). Only once the “true self” is found can individuals hope to overcome and transform the environments (jing) that constrain them (ZQJ IV, 3). The crucial shift that must be enacted here, Zhang reminds us, is not only a relational one between self and other, but also an internal one with external manifestations: the self under a tyranny acts in a distinctly different way from the self under a democracy, and it is this discrepancy that fuels the emergence of a particular institutional shape, a zhengti. 52

E.g. Allen, Uneasy Access. I should note that I do not consider here other work that “public” and “private” may do for these or any other theories, such as circumscribing normative spheres of “privacy” and the like.


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The generality that for Arendt, Wolin, and the other public action theorists emerges only in public is, in Zhang’s reading, made available through disparate personal acts that collude both to affirm and to produce a new way of acting in the world. Anything else would be a monarchical sleight of hand that merely substitutes one individual’s or one group’s concept of good for that of another’s. Where feminists advocate political action to transform or emancipate private selves and lives, then, Zhang sees internal decisions coming to have external, more general, overtly political consequences, whether those consequences lead to a change in regime type or to national disaster. He collapses the “political” into the private, rather than the other way around: consonant with the emergent properties of political community, Zhang recognizes that individual acts within and between selves have resonating, community-creating effects, and hence are political. The personal is not politicized so much as politics is personalized – rendered a matter of ethical choices, personal decision-making, selfapplications of expertise, and individual vision, rather than reified as an existing common space to facilitate critique of personal conditions. “Although [the true nature of] the state may be obscured by those in power, the power to establish that state nevertheless still lies within me. If I want the state to be square, it will be square; if I want it to be round, it will be round” (ZQJ 513).53 Zhang’s conceptualization has a worthy precedent in Liang Qichao’s discussion of public and private virtue. Liang makes for a particularly fruitful contrast, because his theory – in which “public” appears not as a space of action, but as a personal virtue (de) – has often been misinterpreted as confusing the moral and the political. Liang’s concern initially, in his 1902 essay “Lun gong de” (On Public Virtue), was that specifically public energy demands a qualitatively different kind of excellence and orientation than traditional neo-Confucian selfcultivation could provide. He argued that what is needed to counteract the perfusion of this “private virtue” (si de) in society is more “public virtue” (gong de) to create a vigorous energy capable of “grouping” the Chinese and uniting them as a nation-state.54 Liang’s public virtue 53

54

Here he uses the wo instead of the wu pronoun he usually uses to indicate first-person plural, so I have translated it here as first-person singular, a translation also supported by its contemporary meaning in vernacular Chinese. Liang, “Lun gong de,” 13.

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demands a reorientation of personal virtue toward those collective concerns shared by all Chinese as an ethnically and geographically defined community.55 Unlike Aristotle, who held that man and citizen exhibit distinct excellences appropriate to their separate functions,56 for Liang the orientations or attitudes that define public virtue obtain across polis-oriented and personal divides. A “public virtue” is not operational only when one occupies the role of officeholder, or in preparing one to rule and be ruled in turn,57 but comes into play throughout one’s daily activities. In fact, Liang presents both public and private virtue as emanating from the same root: he claims that the purpose for which “virtue” (daode) of both kinds was established was “to advance the group” (jin qi qun).58 With “public virtue,” Liang means to elaborate the heretofore obscured nature of true “virtue” by collapsing private virtue into public virtue. In an essay published a year later on private virtue (“Lun si de”), Liang is more careful to distinguish the two kinds of virtue from each other, but still ends up identifying both “public” and “private” with ethical, not political, practices. In this latter essay, Liang changes his position to argue that private virtue is in fact the necessary (though not sufficient) foundation of public virtue: “Public virtue is simply the extension of private virtue; to know private virtue but to not know public virtue is to neglect simply this extension. To slight private virtue and promote only public virtue would mean that the very thing to be extended is lacking.”59 This redirection of the causal arrow (what Liang calls a clarification of his original position) only reinforces his point, however, that personal morality – whether oriented toward personal self-perfection or toward public-mindedness and group cohesion – has public consequences.60 Success in any endeavor, most of 55

56 57 58 60

Liang’s reformulation responds to what he saw as the major flaw of Confucian social relations: the particularity of their role-based norms. That is, rather than articulating social relationships in terms of an individual’s relationship to the group (or, using Aristotle’s terms, to the constitution of the polity), traditional Confucian thinking focused solely on the relationships of particular people in particular roles to other particular people in particular, corresponding roles: the minister related to the ruler, and vice-versa, but neither related to the community as a whole (Liang, “Lun Gong De,” 13–14). Politics of Aristotle, bk 3, sec. 4. Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 124. Liang, “Lun gong de,” 15. 59 Liang, “Lun si de,” 110. See Chang, Liang Ch’i ch’ao, 151, for more discussion.


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all one that aims to reconstruct political and social life, relies crucially on (private) virtue.61 Some commentators, like Chang Hao, have pointed to this paradox of public and private to deny that Liang’s “public virtue” has a moral component at all. Chang insists that Liang was concerned rather with political values, despite his preservation of the outward form of what were moral Confucian values – that is, Liang discussed items of obviously public and political significance as items of virtue.62 Like the public action theorists I examined above, Chang assumes that morality and politics – persistently though problematically linked throughout imperial and Republican Chinese thought – are distinct activities confined to particular modes inscribed by the terms private and public. But amputating moral from political action, as Chang and the public action theorists do, leaves messy remainders. As a conceptual apparatus, not a material reality, public/private vocabulary is open to ongoing interpretation and contestation. Liang’s analysis ends up interrogating the imposing binary of public and private action by insisting on a role for personal, moral orientations in constituting political action.63 The structure upon which such arguments turn makes clear that internally directed improvements are integral parts of the larger systems – political as much as social – in which they are embedded.64 Zhang does not agree with Liang that morality should be oriented toward, or will converge inevitably upon, some sort of unitary public virtue, but he does share with him the insistence that personal actions, whether good or bad, “do not transcend the scope of politics” (ZQJ 179). For both Liang and Zhang, the categories of public and private cut across, rather than divide, modes of acting, mirroring the cumulative process of transformation articulated in texts such as The Great Learning (Da xue): “Those who want to order their states must first ready their families; those who want to ready their families must first cultivate themselves; those who want to cultivate themselves must first rectify their heart-and-mind.”65 Cultivating himself in 61 63 64

65

Liang, “Lun si de,” 120. 62 Chang, Liang Ch’i Ch’ao, 280. Angle, “Concepts in Context,” 97. Pitkin recognizes this logic when, in The Attack of the Blob (ch. 12), she speaks to her reader not as a collective audience but as an individual whose orientations must change; like Liang and Zhang, she seems to think that she must begin with the “I” to get to the “we.” Great Learning, ch. 1.

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prescribed ways and according to ritualized moral precepts, the cultivated person (especially the emperor) need do nothing more than “face south”: family, society, state, and cosmos immediately fell into line and prospered. Similarly, the political, personal acts upon which Zhang builds his theory involve commitments to cultivate and transform the self as much as they do the external world; they ascribe a distinct and direct relationship between personal consciousness and external (political, social) transformation; and they are nonhierarchical, at least in the sense that Zhang holds them to be able to be performed by, potentially, anyone (though not necessarily by everybody). Contrary to arguments of the public action theorists, then, the personal can be political. To Liang, Zhang, and much late imperial neoConfucian philosophy, these acts of internal resolve both mirror and motivate wider political realities. One does not perform separate and different actions in each sphere to assure the latter’s distinctive character; rather, a singular action registers in both spheres at the same time. In this conceptualization, the spheres are not really divided, but nest inside each other – reflecting not necessarily a belief in neo-Confucian cosmology so much as an intuition about the mutually constitutive relationships of both persons and institutions, which Zhang defends explicitly in the rule-by-man debate. The following chapters will show, in fact, that much of Zhang’s political theory banks on the potency of a singular act to infuse multiple registers of action – personal, social, and political – simultaneously.66

A return to founding The foregoing discussion thus has a major bearing on Zhang’s problem of founding – the inauguration of new ways of thought and action – but the theory of complexity I introduced also adds a new, difficult twist. If political properties are emergent, diffuse, and uncoordinated in the way Zhang implies, then they can be brought about, but not controlled by, individual actors; there can be no precise, a priori knowledge of how the self-application of talent, for example, will result in a specifically democratic society. It may even be the case that deliberate attempts to bring about desired outcomes have the paradoxical result of frustrating them: only by acting for other, individual 66

See especially the section “The public and its problems” in Chapter 8.


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purposes (such as self-interest) can cumulative, society-wide transformations (such as more efficient resource use) result.67 One way of responding to this challenge would be to change how we characterize founding. Rather than see it as an individual act of mastery with absolute control over the future shape of a community of others, we may understand it as an act of intervention or innovation. Arendt has argued, in fact, that all political actions should be seen in this way: they are not sovereign acts because their initiators are never truly the authors of their final outcome. The eventual result of any given action is always subject to the actions of others.68 Yet once we abandon the notion of sovereign mastery or will, are we not necessarily bound to accept a chicken-and-egg notion of the always-already proscribed character of action – as so many of Arendt’s interpreters have?69 It seems we cannot both disavow our own mastery in the face of differently oriented others and still insist on characterizing our world as fragmented and ourselves as uniquely efficacious actors. The sinologist Michael Puett suggests, however, that much early Chinese philosophy offers an alternative frame for viewing the problem of political and social innovation. In certain early texts, such as the Laozi and the recently excavated Xing zi ming chu (Nature Emerges from the Decree), innovation is characterized not as a willful discontinuity that must break through an already established context, but as uncertain, everyday interventions designed to better a world that is “fragmented and fractured.”70 The starting assumptions in these texts, as in Zhang’s work, do not draw a solution from the always-already so much as provide a different set of ontological conditions that political founding must meet. Where Arendt and her interpreters read the inauguration of a political community as illegitimate unless taken by all persons together, innovation is simply the continual refinement by individuals of their responses to situations (what Confucians and other classical thinkers called li, “propriety”), resulting in “a canon of practices that everyone should follow.”71 Zhang, likewise, foregrounds the interplay between internal understanding of rules and the external response, transfiguration, or rejection of those standards – what 67 68 69 70

Levy, “The publicity Problem.” Arendt, The Human Condition, 185–188. E.g. Honig, “Declarations of Independence”; Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob. Puett, “Innovation as Ritualization,” 24. 71 Ibid., 29.

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sociologists and scholars of emergence theory call their “reproduction” and what Puett calls ritual innovation. These innovations drive social change, because “when some agents change their behavior, this alters the context for the other agents.”72 To be effective, actions in this register need not be aimed at, or performed with, others; they can be, as Zhang points out, deliberate engagements with man-made environments, and they are necessarily diverse. Changes in local components can potentially wreak remarkable shifts in the characteristics of the system itself, which engender incremental changes that cumulate to form always-changing intersubjective worlds. Like the emergent qualities of the public and political space, however, these innovations can only be identified in hindsight: “What is defined as innovation, therefore, is always ex post facto: a given action may be defined as one that should be followed, and thus, by implication, it becomes a founding, innovative act . . . in the sense that it is a response later deemed exemplary.”73 Intersected with Zhang’s theory of action, Puett’s analysis does not necessarily mean that all acts in the present are necessarily condemned to meaninglessness in the face of an uncertain future. It simply reminds us of the temporal dimension of innovative action – which includes a constructive and forward-looking as much as a retrospective, critical component. Zhang confronts this temporal challenge by formulating a theory of action that recognizes not only that others exist in the world and contribute to its character, but also that actions are taken both in and through time. These results, he reminds us, unfold in a variety of times and spaces – including, most importantly, within and between persons in disparate, local environments. They are not always decisive acts, but mere “attempts, probes, adaptive reachings that may not succeed or may even undercut themselves by their own success.”74 Foundings, in sum, are not instantaneous moments that require collective coalescence, but incremental innovations in multiple spheres of life. Styled in this way, inaugural acts can and do innovate under circumstances of extreme fragmentation, but only if they give up any claim to knowing how or even if they innovate. Later in time, other persons and communities come to identify (past) acts as inaugural, but these acts 72 73 74

Hoffmann, Ozone Depletion, 40. Puett, “Innovation as Ritualization,” 30. Kalton, “Extending the Neo-Confucian Tradition,” 92.


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of identification are not themselves the founding acts. Founding acts are rather those risky, uncertain attempts at creating order, applying expertise, and forging interpersonal connections where no context for these attempts currently exists – even if no one knows that at the time they are performed, least of all the actor him- or herself. Early American settlers did not know that township associations would foster a democratic society; we know this only because, looking back (and with the aid of perspicuous observers like Tocqueville), we can see that they have done so.

Conclusion These considerations about the legitimacy and efficacy of individual action, and their confounding relationships with “public” and “private” labels, suggest the radical implications of Zhang’s theory for contemporary political and social sciences. Like Tocqueville’s civic associations, Zhang’s notion of individual founding action questions whether the vocabulary of public and private really helps us describe and understand what we are doing when we engage in political action. These insights have significant implications for the task of founding. Because the society inaugurated by diffuse founding acts gains its particular character only retroactively, founding requires a different set of personal qualities than is usually assumed. It does not require wisdom so much as motivation; it does not require an already existing community so much as self-awareness, the creative application of one’s talents and abilities, and a willingness to live together, somehow. Breaking down the divisions between public and private provides greater numbers of sites for such transformative action, even as it invites us to reconceptualize the meaning of “political” without recourse to these terms. When the political is defined as any deliberate attempt to intervene in a collective fate, the personal and the political do not stand as opposed or as distantly separate as they seem when the binary inscribing our action is a public-private one. In the next section of this book, I explore what, to Zhang, are the specific contents of those interventions that he believes call into being effective political institutions. Zhang urges founders to take risks amid an uncertain world, to maintain forbearance of others’ attempts, and to remain undaunted by the enormity of the problem, but he does not expect them to rise up and definitively shape a community in

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established ways. Nor does he abide by the neo-Confucian faith that cosmic resonances will secure to individuals a direct connection to the political regime. Individual efforts at self-awareness, accommodation, and the use of talent are rendered political, state-building devices not because they connect humans to their natural world by means of Heaven-crafted patterns, or because they culminate in collective action or decisive consequences, but because they are deeply implicated in networks of relationships that respond to individual variation and intervention.

part iii

Action

6

Self-awareness

In previous chapters, we saw how Zhang Shizhao uses the participatory promise of democracy to challenge China’s traditional elitism and bureaucracy. He insists, against Huang Yuanyong and Liang Qichao, that there exist legitimate arenas for meaningful participation outside the traditional ones of culture and literature. Yet the mechanism through which his challenge takes shape is not purely institutional, as a rule-by-law position might demand. Instead he offers a more complex argument in which the personal orientations of citizens are the decisive components of an emergent political community. Arguing that Zhang’s ascription of political efficacy to individual acts breaks down the public/private divide, I offered a new way of thinking about the political, divorced from the prescriptions of collective action taken in public spaces with others. In this chapter I begin to fill out the specific political acts Zhang believed would culminate in a transformation of China’s political space, defending and modifying them to stand against critiques of their infeasibility or illegitimacy. I begin with what for Zhang explicitly links personal orientations to the possibilities of self-rule: selfawareness (zijue). In an eponymous essay, as well as in another that also appeared in the first volume of The Tiger, “The State and the Self” (Guojia yu wo), Zhang ties self-awareness to the ability of individuals to see their political and social selves critically and imaginatively, in the context of China’s immanent postrevolutionary political demise. He triangulates from these particular vantage points a new republican regime, built on the incremental changes that accumulate as individuals shed their roles as imperial subjects and envision themselves as citizens of a republic. Like other rule-by-man ideals, Zhang’s “selfaware” individual bears a more than superficial resemblance to the literati–bureaucrats who were the primary political actors under the Chinese dynastic empire. However, while contemporaries invoked

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the literatus ideal to claim a right to educate and manipulate the masses, Zhang recasts the literatus posture to formulate a new form of political action: one that disaggregates the “group” (qun) concept central to contemporary elite political thinking – especially prominent in the work of Liang Qichao – and in turn opens greater spaces for political participation. Consonant with his resistance to a public–private binary that divides action into distinct and autonomous spheres, Zhang uses selfawareness as one means by which people change their political worlds by changing themselves. By encouraging citizens to rethink how their personal lives affect political outcomes and vice versa, Zhang hopes self-awareness will consolidate republican practices in a deeper way than elite-led transformations could make possible. It effects this transformation by presuming a link between theory-building capacity and the efficacious actions that build and sustain regimes of self-rule. The act of re-seeing one’s self, everyday activities, and environment in a different light, Zhang seems to think, both motivates and constitutes social and political transformation. In this sense, self-awareness stands both as a primary defense and as an embodiment of the need for “theory” – imaginative visions of political life that ground both action and reflection – in fragmented contexts. I evaluate Zhang’s model of self-awareness through an extended engagement not only with contemporary alternatives, but also with the work of Hanna Pitkin. In the previous chapter I engaged Pitkin and others who maintained the unique capacities of public action to address collective problems, arguing that their conditions for political action could be adequately met by the more individualized activities Zhang advocates. Here I address a related but more specific set of arguments that Pitkin has made repeatedly throughout her career, which articulate conditions under which actions can qualify not only as political, but also as democratic and non-tyrannical. Pitkin shares with Zhang his sympathies for individually differentiated action in the process of founding polities, but she would argue that – contra his own claims – his model threatens to individually impose, rather than collectively craft, the conditions and goals of political life. Self-awareness implies a tyrannical process of manipulation, because the self-aware individual in effect assumes the role of an “epic” political theorist (to borrow Sheldon Wolin’s term) in which he sees other people as objects

Self-awareness

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and himself as the only relevant decision-maker.1 Pitkin emphasizes the need for the theorist to overcome such tyranny by dissolving the “I that theorizes” into a participatory “we that acts.” Her argument reflects a widespread democratic impulse to resist any orders – even abstract ones – that are not truly the product of all who are affected by them.2 Her work offers a particularly bold counterpoint to Zhang’s insistence that only awareness of and by individuals can constitute a foundation for democratic action that neither imposes nor invites tyranny. My argument below does not attempt to defend the entirety of Zhang’s vision of “self-awareness” as much as use Pitkin’s arguments to discuss in more detail its limits and possibilities, especially with respect to how self-awareness can avoid elitism and still facilitate effective action in a context of irreducible plurality and political breakdown. Zhang may not provide an exhaustive account of political action under mature regimes, but his notion of self-awareness begins to specify what kinds of internal retooling are required to inaugurate founding. Drawing from the forms of political action he inherited from the late empire, Zhang begins to explain how individual founders can avoid imposing their views from the top down – a tyranny that Zhang everywhere condemns, but only begins to constructively address with his calls for self-awareness.

The “I” of The Tiger Zhang’s essay “The State and the Self” provides his lengthiest description of self-awareness, alluding to a story from the Mencius, a seminal text of the Confucian tradition that Zhang’s audience had most likely memorized in early childhood. He uses the story to locate the spirit of self-awareness in a very personal reaction to political power: Mencius has said [to King Hui of Liang]: “Now, [suppose] your Majesty is having music here. The people hear the noise of your bells and drums, 1

2

Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 326. To Wolin, the theorist is creator “of a new political cosmos,” who orders “an entire society and the lives of all of its members” (Hobbes and the Epic Tradition, 29). Ruth Lane has dubbed this problem “Pitkin’s dilemma” in an essay of the same name; see especially 459.

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and the notes of your fifes and pipes, and they all, with aching heads, knit their brows, and say, ‘Our king so enjoys his music, but why does he reduce us to such an extreme state [of distress]? Fathers and sons cannot see one another. Elder brothers and younger brothers, wives and children, are separated and scattered abroad.’” [Mencius 1.2.2] . . . Getting a headache [from this situation] is a reaction you can’t say is not a source for selfawareness, but it doesn’t go a step further and say, “Now that I am in such an extreme state, how can I act as a king?” Because our state lacked this kind of true self-awareness, for millennia we have only had a history of rulers [jun], and not a history of the people [min]. (ZQJ 509–510)

Zhang portrays the disjuncture between some ideal state of affairs and a gravely troubled political reality as an actual physical pain. As indicated by the etymological derivation of the Chinese character for “self” from “suffering,” this pain is most acutely felt on the individual register.3 This individualized pain prompts reflection on “how I can act as a king,” in the process transforming the individual from an imperial subject to one who participates in ruling. As Zhang portrays it here, self-awareness is a process of interrogating who the rulers are supposed to be, and how those who do rule undertake effective action in the world. Although an implicit part of rule by “the people,” because it in some way constitutes the agency of the people’s history, the headache that facilitates self-awareness nevertheless does not entail questions about membership and exclusion, as much as a cultivation of a particular, internal self-orientation. With the turn to individualized feeling, Zhang reduces government by the people (min) to an awareness of and by the self (here articulated as the “I,” wo), urging the particularization of distinct selves and abilities from what was formerly treated as a blind, passive mass.4 The very process of an individual coming to a realization and making a decision is precisely what constitutes the state; indeed, once this realization is made, “the work of creating a state is already half-done” (ZQJ 515). 3

4

Wilhelm, Heaven, Earth, and Man, 83. Although thinkers like Hannah Arendt have relegated pain to the nonpolitical realm precisely on the basis of its irreducibly individual qualities, others have seen a more explicit link between (individual) physical pain and political consciousness. For example, Liang Qichao drew upon the nineteenth-century German legal philosopher Rudolph von Jhering to argue that the pain that accompanies a violation of one’s rights awakens one to knowledge of the law (Angle, “Should We All Be More English?”, 246). C.f. Hall and Ames, Thinking through Confucius, 143.

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Acquiring self-awareness is, to Zhang, thus a process that fosters democratic practices and subjectivities spontaneously, without recourse to the top-down control Yuan Shikai and foreign advisers like Frank Goodnow were advocating. Its goal is to motivate the differentiated comprehension by China’s citizens that the “loss of the state” (wang guo) is a direct result of their personal disengagement from both social and political life – a loss caused not by deliberate political manipulation, but by an unconscious perception that the imminent collapse of the Republic is a matter of fate rather than a matter for (individual) human intervention (ZQJ 127–128, 181).5 Such desperation drove many of Zhang’s compatriots to flee abroad, smoke opium, or give up on the constructive everyday activities that kept Chinese society functioning (ZQJ 4, 179, 184). In response to a reader criticizing the Japanese tendency to suicide, Zhang argues that even feeling “disgusted with the world” and committing suicide would be more productive than “living lackadaisically” as many Chinese do. Disgust and even deliberate withdrawal would at least mark awareness of one’s situation, provoking individuals to take action that, however negative, can leave residual effects on the world (ZQJ 529–530). In fact, Zhang believes that self-awareness will rescue his contemporaries from fatalism precisely by motivating them to rethink how their individual choices and lifestyles are constitutive of republican polity-building. Self-awareness begins to specify the actual content of individual founding efforts by encouraging a dynamic condition of critique, aimed at reseeing the surrounding world so as to take positive action within it. Only this kind of preparatory and self-conscious thinking, paired with a knowledge of the political situation as immanently nonexistent, can “effect the regeneration of dead tissue” that is the state (ZQJ 509). The condition of having a self, for Zhang, thus implies the capacity for action based in imaginative reflection – the kind of “theory” that he elsewhere defends as necessary for exploring China’s “yet to be’s” rather than its “already-so’s.”6 Previous chapters have already articulated Zhang’s defenses of the self and its relevance to political outcomes. Yet his theory of selfhood grew more elaborate, and urgent, in the face of persistent political 5 6

Zhang’s interpretation of “losing the state” is here informed by that of the Qing literatus Gu Yanwu; see Chapter 5 above. See Chapter 2 above.

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erosion in the years following the establishment of The Tiger.7 The urgency of this political situation is most explicit in a pair of essays Zhang published in 1916 and 1917. One, titled “Beginnings” (“Fa duan”), inaugurated the new daily edition of his journal The Tiger. The other, titled simply “I” or “Self” (“Wo”), appeared in the Eastern Miscellany, one of the longest-running and most influential Republican-era journals, known for its focus on issues of self and psychology and their relationship to politics.8 In these essays, Zhang specifies the dangers of “forgetting the self” (wang wo) and the urgent need for “searching for the self” (qiu wo) by explaining the relationship between the self and the external world: The self is not something one person gets and then keeps to himself . . . What individuals are engaged in doing has its own logical space. This is called “the self.” What is called “exerting all one’s effort” [jin qi zai wo] is to act within this space with integrity and persistence. What is called “searching for the self” is to search within this space rather than fleeing from it. When what I can do is clearly coordinated with this space, this can truly be called “achieving the self.” It is like a light in a room: if I use a candle to take a portion of this light, the light is divided but the light in the room remains just as it was before. The strength of the light does not increase or decrease based on the number of people who have divided it up. Thus if what is called “self” just stops at the “inhibited self,” then one will be able to feed, clothe, and shelter oneself and perhaps one’s friends and associates. But ultimately the affairs of Heaven and Earth will not matter at all [to you]. However, if what you achieve is the “unbounded self,” this is the logical [space for the] self, the self that has not expended its light. Thus what is achieved will not be [limited to] something just one individual happens to acquire by chance, but will be something that becomes linked to social mores and the minds of others. (ZQJ 630–631) 7

8

Zhang’s biographer and student Bai Ji’an attributes the personalist turn in Zhang’s work to Zhang’s penchant for activism (xing dong) (Zhang Shizhao zhuan, 115–116). To me, this turn also seems to foreshadow the frustrations with politics and institutional reform that, only a year later, prompted Zhang to forsake political office for full-time academic study, which Bai also documents (120–125). Liu, Translingual Practice, 87. Liu analyzes the essay “Self” from the perspective of the evolving discourse of individualism in pre- and post-May Fourth China, but she does not seem to realize that the pseudonymous author is Zhang.

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This passage suggests the mechanism by which Zhang expects his self-aware individuals to make an impact. The “self” becomes “unbounded” – that is, effective – not by communicating directly and purposefully with others, or by engaging in the kinds of political behavior that typically mark democratic regimes, such as voting, mass action, or holding political office. Rather, by attending to his or her own talents, integrity, and courage, the self-aware individual becomes “linked to the social mores and minds of others” via the ambient changes his or her actions have in the world that go on to inspire responses. Zhang describes these efforts as “a light in a room”: their divisibility or diffusion does not negatively affect their potency, and may even increase it as others see the light and bring themselves into line with the exemplary moral behavior these efforts strive toward. That means that to have effect on others, one does not act in concert with them, deliberate with them, or even negotiate with them. Instead, self-awareness prompts one to refashion the external environment in a manner that allows one to “exercise one’s due portion” by “using one’s talents” without denying to others the chance to do the same (ZQJ 183). Zhang seems to be advocating what could be called a politics of exemplariness and local action, in which one’s self-awareness as a republican citizen will inspire others to act by example to do as you do.9 Engaging the wider world changes oneself, and one’s own incremental self-awareness constitutes small changes in the wider world that others may then engage. Although the external environment influences individual feelings, tendencies, and actions, it is equally true that individuals are the primary shapers of this environment. External things [wu] and the self are mutually corresponding [xiang dui], such that it would be totally ridiculous to speak only of things and not the self, to speak only of the self and not of things. Therefore, if there are no “selves,” there can be no country; how can we conduct national affairs without “selves”? (ZQJ IV, 3–7)

Placing the individual, the “I,” at the center of political action by activating his or her capacity for theorizing has definite resonances with certain trends in late imperial Chinese thought, which I discuss below. Such individualism does, however, sharply distinguish Zhang’s 9

Cf. Analects 4.25: “Virtue never dwells alone; it always has neighbors.”

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account from most other contemporary Chinese treatments of “selfawareness,” which tracked an obsession with collective awakening, modernization, and national identity in the face of foreign incursion.10 To Zhang’s contemporaries, such as Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen, the best hope for Chinese survival lay in grouping together as a nation by recognizing a shared ethnic heritage. The focus on mass action that came to characterize Nationalist and, later, Communist radicalism in China was built primarily on the insight that such grouping was more effective than individual attempts to reshape China’s future. Zhang’s emphasis on individual consciousness harkens back to the isolation and impotence of traditional Chinese political organization, which in Sun’s view rendered the people like “a heap of loose sand,” unable to transcend their parochial commitments in the name of national and social progress.11 May Fourth activists, including Hu Shi, also were careful to situate the “small self” within the “great self” of society and its demands, even as they championed an emancipatory individualism. Against this background, Zhang’s concept of “self-awareness” develops a much-needed account of the personal shifts in orientations as individuals transform themselves from imperial subjects to republican citizens, but he does not offer an immediate response either to his contemporary critics or to the basic principles of modern, selfruling communities. By leveraging individual sensations and orientations, Zhang seems to be heightening rather than resolving the tensions between individual efforts to change reality, on the one hand, and the recognition that, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “men, not man, live on earth and inhabit the world,” on the other.12 Rather than bridging that gap between self and community necessary for all ground-up social transformation, self-awareness seems to widen it further.

The problem of the theorist Hanna Pitkin shares many of Zhang’s intuitions about political life, and her work can partly rescue Zhang on this point by explaining how individual particularity can strengthen rather than fragment a regime of self-rule. Like many other public-action thinkers, including Arendt, Pitkin recognizes the individual “both as the source of initiative and 10 12

Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 6, 13. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7.

11

Sun, San Min Chu I, Lecture I, 4–5.

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as the locus of moral value and dignity.”13 In fact, Pitkin even sees the motive for this individualized initiative, which she calls “theory,” much as Zhang sees self-awareness: as a critical reconceptualization of political life so as to discern what is necessary from what can and should be done.14 Yet part of the reason Pitkin’s defense of the individual makes sense is because such action, as both she and Arendt read it, “is always interaction,” linked to others equally involved in the common enterprise of politics.15 Pitkin worries that the generic rules such abstraction demands will reflect more of the theorist’s – or, in Zhang’s case, the self-aware individual’s – own agenda than the collective actions of those uncoerced citizen-subjects that create political order. “The theorist stands outside the political system about which he speculates and writes; of necessity he deploys and manipulates its citizens without consulting their wishes or opinions.”16 As such, Pitkin argues that the integration of theorizing with political action can never be the solitary activity that Zhang expects; rather, it is made possible only by bridging the gap between the theorist and his or her “subjects” by way of public action. Pitkin points out that just as individuals cannot create their own personal languages, neither can they initiate unilateral political change without taking into account the existing “grammar” of the community that gives meaning to their actions and words and is alone capable of executing the entirety of a theoretical vision.17 The very plurality of the public realm inveighs against seeing the initiation of action in mechanistic or biological terms, where individual beginnings might be meaningful. Biological beginnings presume a relationship of direct causality between act and response, but political beginnings insert themselves into a community of individuals whose responses, particularly when they are uncoerced, are open-ended and unpredictable.18 This is more than an argument about the unique efficacy of action in public, already addressed in the previous chapter. Pitkin here raises the thornier dilemma of executing action that both fosters and abides 13 14 15 16 18

Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 147. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 35, 290. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 146; Arendt, The Human Condition, 23. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 326. 17 Ibid., 199–201. Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, 281–282; Wittgenstein and Justice, 321–322, 326–330.

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by democratic principles, action which fulfills the dual mandate of encouraging the self-initiative of citizens while refusing to impose on them unilaterally a single vision of political order. According to Pitkin, the ideal of a lone founder, “an auctor who initiates and induces the free actions of others, so that his project becomes what they willingly carry out,” is a “fantasy solution” to the problem of making citizens.19 If theoretical exercises like self-awareness are to be effective and meaningful as democratic or at least nonelitist actions, they must be non-tyrannical – that is, they must relate the “I” to a “we,” promoting decisions for effective intervention made in the name of and by the community collectively.20 Zhang’s turn to “self-awareness,” after years of advocating distinctly institutional measures for political betterment, can be seen as motivated by precisely these difficulties. If self-aware individuals, by definition, act upon their own unique visions of political life to found a new community, how can they avoid imposing that vision on others – especially under conditions of extreme fragmentation? Zhang’s self-aware individual, in fact, emerges directly from the confrontation between the traditional, literatus-centered model of political agency and the new forms of political action made available by European and American democratic theory. The civil examination system that in imperial China funneled educated men into government service was abolished in 1905, forcing China’s educated elites to reconsider both their relationship to wider Chinese society and their role in political reform. Erstwhile literati, now called intellectuals, continued to be influenced by the traditional obligations of the well-educated classes – who saw themselves as charged with the responsibility to care for “all under Heaven” – even as republican rule necessarily changed the way in which these intellectuals identified the proper “subjects” and “objects” of political life.21 Their preoccupation with themselves as “charismatic leaders” (renwu) during this early period at the very least indicates a self-conscious confrontation with their newly destabilized positions, including a more objective look at to what extent popular acceptance conditioned their success as policy-makers.22

19 20 22

Ibid., 53, 75. Pitkin does not explicitly acknowledge any debt to Hannah Arendt on these pages, but compare Arendt, The Human Condition, 181–190. Pitkin, “Justice,” 345. 21 Yu, “Zhongguo zhishi fenzi,” 17. Wu Guanyin’s contributions to the Yongyan political journal, examined in Chapter 4, are representative of this self-perception.

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These conceptual puzzles about the status of intellectuals remained an important part of the unexamined assumptions of Chinese political theorizing well past the 1911 revolution.23 I argue that Zhang responds to these puzzles by revising the literatus (shi daifu) ideal in light of what he identifies as a diffuse capacity for self-awareness. Invoking the literatus as a model not of elite leadership, but of the union of political efficacy and theoretical reflection, Zhang believes self-aware individuals can perform a similar synthesis of acting and theory that enacts political authority in the process of interpreting it. He ends up formulating a different relationship between theory and political action than Pitkin does, but his neither turns on, nor disavows, concerted action. The exercises in self-reflection and imaginative visualization that constitute self-awareness rather disaggregate larger political transformations into personal commitments, prompting individuals to act precisely when and because others are not acting.

The literatus posture Influenced by neo-Confucian cosmology, in which self-reflection could both reveal and correct the larger patterns in the external world, the imperial Chinese literatus stood at the center of political action under late dynastic rule. As everyday executive of the law, upholder of the community’s moral character, and interpreter of the morally and politically authoritative canon of Classics, it was the literatus, not the ruler, who perceived himself as primarily responsible for effecting the “moral juncture” between normative and actual authority.24 According to the historian Thomas Metzger, as a matter of both institutional and conventional practice the cultivated literatus alone had the capacity for political admonishment, constituting in his person the “ultimate vehicle of moral insight” into a world that saw authority as ultimately lodged not in one’s social superiors, but “in the structure of the cosmos itself as something accessible without mediation to each individual will.”25 The literatus’s insight was buttressed by the executive power 23

24 25

According to Yu Yingshi (“Zhongguo zhishi fenzi,” 18–19), this literatus ideal did not recede from mainstream political thinking until the intellectual class was definitively marginalized by the construction of Soviet-style party states (first the Nationalist, then the Communist) after the failure of the Beifa government in 1924. Metzger, Escape from Predicament, 115; cf. Rowe, Saving the World, 89–92. Metzger, Escape from Predicament, 176.

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derived from his position within the Chinese imperial bureaucracy, or (for those millions of educated men who did not gain official employment) his status in local society. Encouraged by a neo-Confucian model of power in which scholars drew authority not from the state apparatus but from their own grasp of the ancient Classics,26 individual literati began to cultivate the belief that “while the external cosmos was seen as tending organically to unite ultimate being and experienced events, the mind had a diffuse, transnatural power to bring this tendency to full realization. That is, the ethical activity of the individual could cause vast changes in the social and metaphysical world.”27 Yet the political promise of self-rule, the basis of both the 1911 revolution and the Republic it established, presents two questions for this model: how “the people” could become effective political actors; and how the erstwhile literati-turned-intellectuals could perform effectively within this new structure of authority. As both ruler and ruled, the “people” as an entity simultaneously act and are acted upon; in other words, their action is supposed to be both normatively authorized and materially effective. The position of the literatus in this triangular relationship therefore becomes compromised: no space is left for his decisive action or political insight, for the very reason that he affirms the capacity of everyone else, not only himself, to rule. Confronting this new division between the sources of authority, the sources of insight into that authority, and the sources of action, intellectuals in Republican China confronted the same tensions between individual theorist and wider community that Pitkin argues only “public freedom” can solve. One of the most influential interpretations of this new, dual position of “the people,” and their relationship to intellectual elite rule, was elaborated by Zhang’s frequent interlocutor Liang Qichao. Liang’s early essay “On Self-Rule” (“Lun zizhi”), a component of his magisterial and influential compendium On Renewing the People (Xinmin shuo), explains that “self-rule” will rescue the Chinese people from the mindset that accepts rule by either literati-bureaucrats or

26 27

Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 34–36, 128–132, et passim. Metzger, Escape from Predicament, 115. Such beliefs are often traced to the wide influence of radical neo-Confucian movements, particularly the Taizhou school, in the late Ming dynasty; e.g. Rowe, Saving the World, 322; Wang, Zhongguo jindai sixiang, 138.

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“hegemons” (authoritarian rulers). However, Liang’s definition of the term is more reminiscent of fascism than of the democracy he purportedly advocated. To Liang, “to be ruled” meant to be “without disorder,” a literally mechanistic metaphor that he applies without distinction to a single body as to a body of persons.28 Liang compares this group to an “army,” by appealing to a Rousseauian general will: “the leader of this army is the law comprising the inner knowledge of each person’s mind.”29 That the law emerges from the mass, rather than from one person, somehow makes everyone the leader. This has the result of theorizing the individual actors out of the picture, substituting their divergent motivations with a reified groupness that Liang deems tractable only to outside forces (that is, foreign domination). This sudden move from individual to group destabilizes the meaning of “self-rule,” rendering it not an internally governed impulse as he seems to say at the beginning but a condition of “being in order” that presumes a homogeneity of preference, activity and opinion. Not only does this silence the question of individual motivation, it also makes the group vulnerable to an “ordering” from the outside, either to enforce this homogeneity or to manipulate it without the friction that attends political action in conditions of true plurality. Once the assumption of “self-rule” as a purely group concept is made, the masses again recede into the background of political life. Society is thus rendered simply another external reality, like regional warlords, economic stagnation, or foreign aggression, whose influence was to be borne out, fought against, and perhaps manipulated, but never activated in any political sense. Because the people must be acted upon before it (or they) can become actor(s), the literatus–bureaucrat is once again cast as a member of a privileged elite that alone possesses a self-motivated capacity for action. Zhang reverses Liang’s typology by asking how the “people,” a group in classical philosophy condemned to be effectually inert, can occupy the roles once played by literati. Zhang’s most explicit treatment of the identity and implications of non-traditional political actors is found in his 1914 essay “On the Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces of Government,” inspired by an essay of the same name by the English political scientist James Bryce. Zhang’s essay is revealing both for how it applies (however superficially) scientific principles to politics, and 28

Liang, “Lun zizhi,” 54.

29

Ibid., 55.

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for how it comes to terms with the variety of “forces” unleashed in Chinese society after the fall of the Qing. From journalists to warlords to local gentry, massive numbers of new political actors responded to the unprecedented political contexts generated by the Republican revolution.30 Rather than dismiss these new actors as enemies of order, Zhang’s essay straightforwardly incorporates them as inevitable and potentially useful elements of political life. These forces are defined by their ability to apply what Zhang calls extra-political measures to problems that are not formally recognized by the official regime. Quoting Bryce, Zhang explains that in politics, “we may call the tendency which draws men or groups of men together into one organized community and keeps them there a Centripetal force, and that which makes men, or groups, break away and disperse, a Centrifugal” (ZQJ 188–189).31 The “centrifugal” forces of nontraditional actors, Zhang argues, should be balanced by a constitution that integrates their needs and abilities by viewing their activity as politically relevant. Zhang’s adoption of such scientific language for describing how politics and political actors work suggests a deliberate rendering of political activity as a force of nature, which I take to be his first step in incorporating “the people” into the literati model. Like many of his contemporaries, Zhang too invoked Darwinian social theories and the doctrine of evolution to supplement his arguments about politics. Yet using science rather than more interpretive or normative techniques for understanding political life seems to work against Zhang’s exhortations to self-awareness. In the process of incorporating nontraditional political actors, Zhang seems to discount, rather than valorize, their contributions to the polity-building project: it casts them as independent variables in a prototypical, behavioralist social science rather than as spontaneous actors whose self-awareness alone can give meaning to the polity they build. But Zhang may be attempting another kind of transformation here, one that turns on his identity of theorizing with effective political action typified by the literatus posture. Consider why the behavioralist revolution in Western political science has provoked criticism from advocates of more agonistically political conceptions. These theorists warn that scientific terminology applied to politics enacts a categorically incorrect 30 31

Rankin, “State and Society.” Zhang is citing Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 217.

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and potentially stultifying conceptual shift: using science to describe or analyze political phenomena edges dangerously close to condemning spontaneous political behavior to the status of a predictable activity, and hence evacuating political actors and activity of their spontaneity, unpredictability, and will. As Sheldon Wolin explained in his seminal essay “Political Theory as a Vocation,” these assumptions enforce the same uncritical and ergo “untheoretical” assumptions of prevailing political ideology that justifies the present “authoritative allocation of values” in society.32 The employment of such “methods” itself transforms the world into the shape the researcher’s agenda needs it to be: “the employment of method [i.e. behavioralist political science] assumes, even requires, that the world be of one kind rather than another if techniques are to be effective.”33 Wolin’s essay means to criticize the ways in which behavioralism casts the world in its own image, and thus lacks the objectivity it professes. Like Pitkin, Wolin himself maintained an ambivalent position about the status of the theorist, reading theory as both dangerously potent, and yet decidedly necessary for seeing otherwise overlooked possibilities for action.34 Such ambivalence suggests that when Wolin criticizes practitioners of behavioralism for their failure to recognize the bias of their own vision, he also says something else: how we see or “theorize” is integral to establishing our orientation in the world, and that this act of theorizing (including even the initial decision about how to theorize) wreaks indelible changes in the entire structure of fact.35 In other words, a theory constitutes a method for viewing a situation that remains a highly potent device through which real control can be exercised. It is this more general notion that, despite Wolin’s opposition to the scientific vocabulary Zhang employs, is recoverable as a way of articulating how Zhang expects “self-awareness” to actually work. Zhang is not “naturalizing” these social forces so as to render them politically intractable (and thus beyond the pale of criticism); he adopts these terms rather to affirm them as actors of political life. Zhang’s

32 33 34 35

Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” 1063. C.f. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 321–322. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” 1064. Connolly, “Politics and Vision,” 7. Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition, 5.

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analysis thus leads him to identify many nontraditional subgroups and individuals as politically significant and as worthy political agents, including most prominently individuals who do not occupy official posts, peasants (especially those involved in uprisings), and factional interests opposed to policies of the ruling party. For Zhang, these sometimes violent interventions in politics should find peaceful yet powerful outlets within a properly designed constitution that allows all comers to “express their ideas and find peace in their own lot,” and makes them capable of “achieving their own place” (ZQJ 203). In fact, his identification of these people and groups as “forces” (li) does not disable them from rupturing, challenging or changing the political status quo. The scientific language he adopts here rather legitimates these actors, by underscoring the extent to which they are not only politically, but also metaphysically, potent. Self-awareness contributes to this renovation by articulating both a means of and a significance for action taken by nontraditional actors. Earlier scholar–officials sensitive to the plight of the masses, like the heterodox Tang dynasty thinker Liu Zongyuan, simply urged officials to serve the people, without articulating an effective mechanism to make corrupt officials “frightened and obeisant” of the power the people actually possessed (ZQJ 201). Zhang sees this solution as leading merely to thousands of years of pent-up resentment and oppression, resolvable only by violent uprisings or outright revolution (ZQJ 202). To change this situation, the people must realize that “the power to rise up in anger to chasten and admonish [their rulers] abides in their own selves” (ZQJ 202). This return to the “self,” I argue, signals Zhang’s attempt to grant these nontraditional political actors the virtuous and effective capacities of literati, and thereby facilitates the second step in Zhang’s attempt to transform “the people” into literati actors. Where much of the efficacy of the traditional Confucian literatus was seen to derive from his perfectibility, Zhang identifies alternative modes of efficacy and incorporates them into his model of action.36 Zhang invites these actors to see for themselves, to become aware, to act as 36

In this sense, Zhang’s project contributes to the “democratization of personality” discourse that, beginning in the late Qing dynasty, critiqued traditional Confucian sagehood ideals centered on ritual, strict personal control, and hierarchy, and offered instead a less perfectionist, more accessible human ideal centered on the decisive role of emotions, reason, and (by Zhang’s time) science. See Gu, Xiandai Zhongguo pingminhua, 13–15.

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if they, like imperial literati, alone bear responsibility for ordering the world. Zhang was not the only thinker to read the political action of a selfrule regime in terms of literati action; Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalists also invited the people “to occupy the seats once reserved for gentryscholars [i.e. literati]” in a “refurbished theater of moral politics.”37 Sun, however, believes that this model of action requires top-down regulation of personal habits and hygiene as much as moral virtue.38 Only Zhang realizes that the identity of political actors with literati can ascribe to nontraditional actors an open-ended capacity to interpret, theorize about, and criticize their environment. Specifically, Zhang exploits the identity between ruler and ruled implicit in democracy to argue that individuals comprising “the people” can most effectively operationalize their sovereignty not by rising up en masse, but by working toward achieving the status of literati themselves – namely by joining their demonstrated political efficacy to self-awareness; that is, to the capacity for reflecting, envisioning, and enacting the socio-economic principles their commitment to democracy demands. In assuming this literati posture, nontraditional actors will possess not only the raw power, but also the individualized will, to stand in tension with the normative values that overarch their social and political order. Zhang’s idea of “self-awareness” accomplishes this by articulating this formative political action in personal terms. The “self” is invoked at critical moments to do the really hard and efficacious work of political life: it is always the self that “carries out one’s word, and finds peace in one’s lot” (ZQJ 203), “finds one’s appropriate place in life,” “uses one’s own self,” and, which for Zhang is critical to establishing peaceful government, makes the decision to “not favor the same and hate the different” (e.g., ZQJ 1–18, 179–186). Failing to gain awareness of this self “risks the dangers of shirking one’s responsibility and self-confusion” that end ultimately in a failed state: What do I mean by shirking one’s responsibility? Those who believe that the amount of good and bad in the world is not something that can be increased or lessened by one’s own involvement . . . What do I mean by selfconfusion? Those who think that their talents are commonplace: ‘Even if I [wo] get involved, what difference will it make?’ (ZQJ 514) 37

Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 35.

38

Ibid., 10–11.

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Zhang’s jeremiads are meant to bring to the attention of everyone how their own decisions can make a difference, how individuals acting alone can count for something. The “people” do come to occupy the normative position capable of legitimatizing political rule; at the same time, however, each individual acts to mediate and criticize the normative whole toward which his or her capacities (activated via “self-awareness”) are oriented.39 For Zhang, then, the insertion of the “self” into democratic life means that individuals act for commonly shared ends, but they do so separately; they do not act “together” to transform their socio-political environment. The scope Zhang allows for theorizing, therefore, is neither as broad nor as ambitious as Pitkin characterizes it. What the selfaware individual reenvisions is not primarily all of society, but rather his or her place within a properly reconfigured political and social milieu. The fragmentary and diffuse character of theory, emblematized by the wide dispersal of nontraditional actors, need furnish no transcendent perspective to be inspiring or meaningful as world-changing theory. It is rather active within local situations and unexpected places, not only at the top of the political (or intellectual) hierarchy. Zhang essentially asks those capable of social and political action to become “theorists” – inverting Pitkin’s solution, which makes theorists become actors.40

Self-awareness as political action Despite the insights self-awareness affords, Zhang’s account does pose an array of nonnegligible problems that have long been identified as 39

40

The philosopher Brian Fay (“How People Change Themselves”) explains the importance of self-awareness to social change in terms very similar to Zhang’s: Fay points out that many social relationships and institutions depend for their meaning and function on the self-interpretations individual actors bring to their performance of them. But his model assumes that false consciousness exists in the minds of social actors, and that this condition can be overcome by the felicitous intervention of the social theorist who (like the members of Marx’s revolutionary vanguard) are somehow able to transcend the institutional restraints on true understanding that frustrate his less fortunate targets of reform. Fay’s argument thus underscores the importance of individual effort in imparting new political direction to a democratic community, but unlike Zhang, neglects to attend to the ways in which such instances of “self-awareness” may be motivated independently of elite intervention. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 280–281.

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problematic for (even if characteristic of) imperial Chinese political thought. I have already discussed above some Republican-era critiques of traditional Chinese individualism made by Liang Qichao and Hu Shi. These critiques have been further elaborated by modern-day scholars of late imperial China, who blame the individuality of Chinese political action for impeding the collective identity that makes democracy and limited government possible. Frederic Wakeman, for example, characterizes the role of Ming and Qing intellectuals as perpetually caught up in the irresolvable conundrum of criticizing a despotic state while remaining unable to acknowledge the possibility of “detaching sovereignty for themselves” as a group.41 Wakeman argues that the long-standing Confucian virtue of dissent and censure – the interpretive mediation between moral and political authority performed by the literatus – was merely a “self-defined right of evaluative dissent” that did not reach beyond individual admonishment to “conceive of group rights” that Wakeman believes could endow them with independence from state control for effective social action.42 The failure of Chinese scholar–officials to establish politically grounded and defensible rights of collective action also troubles Chang Hao, who pictures would-be Chinese reformers perpetually vacillating between personal self-cultivation as an “inner” location of cosmological authority, on the one hand, and unquestioned obedience to “external,” cosmologically sanctioned institutions, on the other, as methods of ameliorating social and political problems.43 For Wakeman, Chang, and others, Western theories of constitutional government and collective political mobilization, introduced into China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rescued Chinese thinkers from perpetually replicating these futilely individualist political actions to which most brands of Confucianism encouraged 41 42

43

Wakeman, “The Price of Autonomy,” 37. Ibid., 36–37. Wakeman traces part of their difficulty to a long-standing Chinese resistance to political organization of parties and groups: “Scholars alone, acting as individuals, were respectably impotent. Scholars together, constituting a faction, were dubiously partisan” (41). Chang, You’an yishi. Wakeman’s and Chang’s critiques are only two among several. William T. de Bary similarly argues (Waiting for the Dawn, 11) that even for extremely progressive and critical scholar–officials like the Ming dynasty iconoclast Huang Zongxi, the key to socio-political improvements ultimately lies in “the nature and quality of leadership” rather than the “rights” of individuals collectively and universally granted.

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them.44 These critiques can be amplified by Pitkin’s own characterization of political life as a collective enterprise, whose possibilities necessarily exceed the powers of any one individual to control or even decisively influence. When others are acknowledged to possess an equality of self-directed capacity, any political theory must grapple with the unpredictable consequences of both coordinated and noncoordinated action taken with and against others. Taken together, these critiques reveal the limits of Zhang’s self-awareness: although Zhang sometimes treats self-awareness as both necessary and sufficient to build a political regime, it should not (and probably cannot) dominate the practices that sustain regimes of self-rule: Zhang’s individualist model may potentially create what, using his own words, we could call “centrifugal,” polity-destroying “forces” that threaten to submerge democratic politics in a regime of either self-absorption or radical impotence. Selfawareness is important but insufficient; in a mature regime, for both normative and empirical reasons, it requires tempering by other values that orient the self to others and their demands. In his work as a whole, Zhang does elaborate a set of such values, and I explain them in more detail in the next two chapters. I still believe, however, that his concept of self-awareness on its own contributes to thinking about political action, especially in conditions of political breakdown. By characterizing action as something that “while based in individual autonomy” is nevertheless “oriented toward solidarity with others,”45 Pitkin (via a discussion of Arendt) means to affirm the capacity of other individuals to change political environments. Action taken with others seems essential to performing politics as an activity that works with, rather than on, fellow human beings – it is an antidote to the mentality Arendt identified as belonging to Homo laborans and a return to the vita activa.46 Yet Pitkin’s account is somewhat vague when it comes to identifying the precise steps by which individual theorizing relates to collective self-rule, and this oversight has important consequences for how future changes in an existing political system 44

45 46

These scholars do acknowledge that late Qing “statecraft” (jingshi) traditions provided an imperial Chinese vocabulary for institutional (rather than merely individual or moral) reform; however, jingshi thinkers continued to interpret politics as a matter of individual virtue rather than collective effort. See Chang, “Jingshi sixiang,” 12. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 182. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7, 26, 205–214.

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can take place. On the one hand, Pitkin does place the agent at the center of any strategy to change those conditions of inertia and selfindulgence that in early work she calls “drift.” In The Attack of the Blob, Pitkin associates these conditions with “the social”: a situation “in which a collectivity of people – for whatever reason – cannot (or at any rate do not) effectively take charge of the overall resultants of what they are severally doing.”47 Yet on the other, her solution is ultimately the establishment of politics “where politics could and should be,” the spontaneous engagement by a community of “shared self-government, public freedom.” She revises an earlier fear about the unique potency of the lone theorist to affirm that such capacity for theory and for action is really more diffuse than she had originally portrayed it, but continues to characterize the “isolated deviant individual” who works to change political institutions as “utterly helpless.”48 The problem with conditions of “drift” or “the social,” however, is precisely that collaborative efforts of “cofounding” and concerted action are not forthcoming. They therefore cannot be relied upon as vehicles for change, or for the “rejoining of the concrete and general, local and large-scale” that both she and Zhang seem to be pursuing with their respective accounts of theory.49 Pitkin claims at one point that the community is “always already free to become free,” meaning that the spontaneous coalescence of individuals in public action only awaits a revival.50 But even this possibility assumes a context of political experience that can be remembered or made accessible by reference to existing concepts and practices – a difficult task even for the “thoughtless,” but much more so for those living in communities that have not “forgotten” this “lost treasure” of public freedom, but have never in their history experienced it.51 She tells individuals to “just do it!”, all the while characterizing their solitary actions as nonpolitical and ineffective. Zhang’s self-awareness concept reminds us, in contrast, that although politics is about living together with others, specific kinds of political action may require thinking about our efforts in a way

47 48 49

Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 252. Pitkin discusses “drift” in more detail in “Justice,” 344, 346. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 280–284, 281; cf. “Justice,” 345–348. For discussion of Pitkin’s shift, see Hauptmann, “Local History,” 54. Ibid., 278. 50 Ibid., 282. 51 Ibid., 274.

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that does not take action with others as constitutive (even if, and as, it affirms the potential of others to transform the political landscape). In this sense, self-awareness is both something to see and a way of seeing, both a vision and a lens. As a vision, it crafts those material and visual environments that mark effective, human-initiated change. Zhang’s juxtaposition of the “self” and “external things,” a point I discussed above, reminds us that our material environment also stands to influence, inspire, and shape personal action. The self-aware individual takes actions and affects environments that influence and are influenced by the decisions of others, but he does not take acting with others as definitive of political action or efficacy. This is how selfawareness functions as a lens: it helps us see an old situation in a new way that revises our targets and sources of action. Because other people are no longer what the individual is striving to overcome, they also cannot be seen as constant potential inhibitors of his own interests. Disagreement between political actors is not cast as the “problem” that must be resolved before efficacious political action can take place. Instead, the individual can begin from just where he is. In situations where we “lack the very ideas of action, of politics, of freedom” because no one has “the relevant experience that would make those ideas meaningful,”52 this dual function of self-awareness helps to identify what steps can be taken before spontaneous public action is possible. Zhang explains that these little steps accumulate “like grains of rice in a storehouse,” beginning from the insight that “selves” are the first actors upon “external things” (ZQJ IV, 5). Asking how self-rule could establish itself in a place like China, which lacked the indigenous traditions that supported its emergence elsewhere, Zhang cannot regard acting together in public in the way Pitkin and Arendt do: it cannot be seen as a “lost treasure,” an experience whose eventual return can perhaps emerge from existing vestiges of past practices.53 Therefore, Zhang’s first task is to motivate disparate, internal visions of political community and to explain how their external manifestation, even by one individual in the form of everyday practices, can matter. Zhang wants us to shift attention away from others and toward ourselves – not so as to indulge unreflective and selfish desires, but to 52 53

Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 274. Ibid., 276; Arendt, “On Violence,” 204.

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guard against shifting to others our own responsibility for change. In “The State and the Self,” Zhang identified “self-confusion” and “shirking one’s responsibility” as the twin dangers that arise out of a “neglect of the self” (wang wo). These dangers emerge as a result of believing that “the amount of good and bad in the world is not something that can be increased or lessened by one’s own involvement” (ZQJ 514). Although potentially indulging our capacity for tyranny, selfawareness nevertheless explains why that danger must be courted: presuming that action in concert is everywhere always possible, or at least is always the proper orientation for our actions, overdetermines the sources of change. Assuming that the only effective action is action taken with others, Zhang fears, can easily fall into the trap of thinking that “my contribution doesn’t matter.” In the situation Zhang faced, the danger of individuals failing to take action was far greater than the danger of tyranny that self-awareness may inadvertently produce.

Conclusion Taken alone, self-awareness may underwrite a politics of isolation and alienation: when one is stuck believing that only one’s own actions matter, the mutual relationships and sheer collective energy that sustain a republican political regime are lost, and individuals are driven either to tyranny or, as were many imperial Confucians, eremitism. But there are also dangers to reading political action as always and everywhere culminating in action with others: at best, we risk overlooking the important kinds of self-work that must take place before collective action even makes sense. At worst, we allow ourselves to blame the failure of our ideal world to emerge on those intransigents who refuse to coalesce in collective action toward one’s own specified ends. In Republican China, the kinds of subjectivities required by democracy were not necessarily engendered by the Chinese past, by its shared practices, or by recognized co-membership of its citizens in a nominally republican polity. Indeed, under conditions like these, or under those Pitkin and Arendt identified with “the social,” the circular relationships that tie individuals to their community just as often replicate past regimes as produce future ones. Self-awareness can rescue political actors in these uncertain, desperate situations from the paralysis of futility, by explaining why and how personal, micro-level foundations for action do matter.

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By concentrating on the process individuals undergo in coming to believe that a polity or state is worthy of being willed into existence, Zhang identifies one important way in which personal transformation is intimately linked to political reality and explains why such transformation must necessarily take place on that individual level. In becoming “theorists” in the process of self-awareness to which Zhang exhorts us, we necessarily take on for ourselves the perpetual mediation of the gap between our own efficacy and the wider social order that our efforts bring into being. Indeed, the very power of this action is that it sometimes can and must proceed when one “knows that it cannot be done, but does it anyway” (Analects 14.6) – assuming anything less would mean giving in to the reality one’s ideals persist in striving against, a move that would fundamentally disable the efficacy of one’s “self-awareness.” That the position of this willful individual is tenuous and anxiety-ridden only attests to the magnitude of one’s power. To paraphrase Pitkin, it is always oneself, and never others, that is simultaneously the hindrance to and the source of all change in the world. Zhang, however, insists that to render this insight an effective motivation for political action, we must realize that it is the “I” that must first act, because it is that same “I” that theorizes. Awareness of the self is needed precisely when politics itself has failed – that is, has failed not in terms of accomplishing some objective, but failed absolutely – but this does not discount its political characteristics. As an important component of transformative action, “selfawareness” provides a potentially fruitful reinterpretation of what we may consider to be “political action.” It reorients the focus of political activity away from “action in concert” and toward disparate – though cumulative – efforts to render shared problems incrementally and personally tractable, in ways that complement or supplant deliberately coordinated public control. At the very least, this account suggests that the first (but, importantly, not the last or only) question to ask when faced with “drift” may not be how to communalize our goals and thus build from shared purposes, but how to realize these goals successfully, severally. It builds on the framework I set out in the first part of this book, by explaining in detail the kind of inner reorientation required to inaugurate the bootstrapping process that transforms wider political reality. As the individual becomes aware that she can make a difference, she is increasingly motivated to act upon social and political environments.

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Self-awareness does not, however, supply an institutional means or directive to sustain such transformation. For that, Zhang looks to two other practices: what he calls the “self-use” of talent, and the “accommodation” of differences. Both go beyond self-awareness to offer a more concrete account of how individuals may work transformations not only upon themselves but also upon their external environments – which includes establishing enduring institutional structures to secure local legislative and administrative capacity, and calling into being a shared conception of a “public way” by negotiating its content with others. Self-awareness is thus only the beginning of Zhang’s attempt to theorize social and political innovation. The “self-use of talent,” the subject of the next chapter, constitutes the rule-by-law complement to self-awareness’s rule-by-man maneuvering. Suggesting local autonomous institutions as an institutional outlet for the heterodox applications of human ability, Zhang identifies talent as one lever by which the self-aware individual can begin to identify, and work upon, unsatisfying social realities.

7

The self-use of talent

Zhang’s interventions in the rule-by-man and rule-by-law debate expose the claims of his interlocutors based on these models as dangerously autocratic, yet his interventions do not fully set out the scope or nature of the kind of politics Zhang envisioned. “Self-awareness” models the structure into which individuals can be said to make meaningful, effective interventions in politics, but the concrete manifestations of self-awareness – why and how its cultivation may impact the shared environment – remain unspecified. This chapter begins to address these gaps by looking at what Zhang identifies as another of “the foundations of government” – namely the “self-use of talent” (ziyong cai). Zhang’s invocation of talent as a political remedy is unusual for a democratic theory whose emphasis on equality tends to ignore or vilify the benefits accruing to expertise and natural ability.1 Talent is a concept invoked more commonly by late imperial Chinese officials, whose responses to political crisis often turned on the need for superiors to “find the [right] person” (de qi ren) with the necessary talents to execute particular tasks.2 Even in Chinese politics, however, talent is an ambiguous value. Sometimes associated with knowledge (zhi) but identified with activities as diverse as military strategy, literary composition, entrepreneurial ability, and mechanical craftsmanship, it tended to be seen either as unpredictable and potentially subversive, or as profoundly inefficacious, without proper regulation by virtue (de).3 Typically, such virtue was identified with that range of 1

2

3

For example, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and others insist that society’s basic distribution of goods should reflect well-reasoned just principles rather than the morally arbitrary benefits that accrue to natural endowments. I discuss their claims in more detail below. Mary Wright provides a litany of citations for this claim, including Prince Gong’s essay “On the Primacy in Government of Human Ability” (The Last Stand, 327, n. 2). Lau, “Zhongguo chuantong cai de guan,” 95–99.

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state-sponsored values central to both Han and neo-Confucian orthodoxy: loyalty to the emperor (zhong), filiality to one’s parents and inlaws (xiao), and general observance of one’s place in the “three bonds and five relations” (san gang wu lun)4 – a comprehensive series of hierarchical social relationships that, among other things, determined which skill sets particular persons could develop, where they could employ them, and how and if they would be socially valued. The imperial examination system was among the most prominent of late imperial institutions that subjected the cultivation of talent to the regulation of virtue. It required candidates to develop their literary skills by learning the moral lessons of the neo-Confucian canon, and limited government employment to those with demonstrated competence in a very narrow skill set. Zhang’s emphasis on talent alone is therefore unusual, and so too is his insistence that it be self-used. In this chapter I explain how Zhang expects the self-use of talent to contribute to effective political action under circumstances of political disintegration, primarily by elaborating its content and political relevance in a democratic, decentralized system. The self-use of talent is a unique invention of Zhang’s that explicitly unmoors talent from the centralized control that once deployed it under the imperial bureaucracy: rather than wait to be “used” (that is, assigned to an official post) by the emperor on the basis of examination results, Zhang argues, one must now decide for oneself where one’s talents fit best. He thereby devolves the use of talent to the individuals who possess it but retains the use of talent as politically relevant. The singular emphasis on talent alone detaches the exercise of talent from homogenizing social norms or “virtues,” and invites a wider spectrum of expertise to be developed and applied. In prerevolutionary China, talented individuals unconditioned by the moral curriculum of the civil examinations most often found employment in sub-administrative local institutions at county levels, and Zhang exalts these institutions as possible sites of local self-rule. By showing how the exercise of talents can serve as an assertion of difference and dissent within these institutions of local administration and participatory government, Zhang alludes to an overlooked history of talent

4

Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” 151; Liu, “Socio-ethics as Orthodoxy,” 64–65.

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in China even as he constructs a new institutional platform for its political relevance. Accordingly, this chapter assays the social history of talent in late imperial China, but focuses more closely on the institutional forms available for its application in the early Republic. Zhang’s arguments lead us to consider an alternative form of political action that is both antielitist and from the ground up but is not reducible to typical liberal or democratic institutions. In Zhang’s work, “talent” marks the capacity of individuals to oppose forces of normalization that act upon them both personally and politically, whether in the form of social values or centralized political control. At the same time, applying one’s talent to particular situations also constitutes a starting point for the transformation of those situations, encouraging changes both institutional and personal. The self-use of talent, then, can be seen as the next extension of self-awareness: it begins to act upon those external environments that self-aware visions of change targeted, but did not engage directly.

Using talent The Western incursions of the mid-nineteenth century provoked widespread suspicion among Chinese reformers that traditionally cultivated talents were inadequate for strengthening the state. These suspicions led eventually to revision of the educational curriculum to include “Western” disciplinary knowledge and encouraged ongoing debates about what direction these new forms of talent should take.5 The failure of Republican government after the 1911 revolution encouraged further anxiety, as many of Zhang’s contemporaries lay blame for this political catastrophe on China’s lack of talent – understood both as a widespread failure to grasp what were perceived as essential Western political institutions, and as an absolute dearth of politically oriented, well-educated individuals. In “The Foundations of Government,” Zhang echoes these fears by urging the convergence of the talented on political change: The successes and failures of government must be accounted for in the achievements and failures of personal talent [ren cai]. Government is the leaves and branches, but talent is its roots. Today, to say that we have not 5

Liu, Xueshu yu tizhi, 16–17; Yan, “Lun jiaoyu shu.”


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found a way to “create government” is equivalent to saying that we have not found a way to use talent. (ZQJ 5)

For Zhang, the dearth of talent is directly related to “favoring the same and hating the different”: intolerance of different opinions prevents the most talented from finding their most effective use (ZQJ 1). Zhang is careful to explain that by “using talent” he does not mean the deployment of personnel, whose “use” in the imperial system was reserved solely for the emperor. “Su Zizhan [Su Shi, 1036–1101] has said, ‘Intelligence, courage, wit, and strength are the greatest excellences under Heaven.’” Chinese governments, from the days of the ancient kings until the late empire, found these talents in various places, from palace guests to formal examinations. Zhang adds another, better method for fostering politically relevant talent. In Europe, these outstanding people emerged out of the national assembly (that is, the representative system). But this “emergence” [chu] was not [effected] by an emperor dividing up the spoils of all under Heaven, and having those [who exhibited] the four excellences gather around him. Rather, it was [those individuals] themselves having their own purpose, each taking up his intelligence, courage, wit and strength and seeking to contribute it to political affairs . . . This is why a constitution is valued. A constitutional government is nothing other than collecting together [those with] the four excellences, throwing them into the apparatus of government, and allowing them to accommodate [tiaohe] each other and meld together there, so as to bring forth the greatest and most flourishing of group organizations. (ZQJ 461–462)

This capacity for self-direction, for Zhang, symbolizes the specific excellence of a constitutional republic. Yet self-direction offers hope for political renewal only if the historical understanding of talent and its use is revised. In his essay “The State and the Self,” Zhang identifies the personal, nontransferrable nature of talent as the characteristic essential to talent’s politically transformative potential. He cites a passage by the Song dynasty literatus Su Xun (1009–1066, father of Su Shi): “Is that [talent] with which Heaven has endowed me something to be taken for granted? Yao could not give it to [his son] Dan Zhu; Shun could not give it to [his son] Shang Jun; and [Shun’s evil father] Gu Sou could not snatch it away from Shun. It begins from the heart-and-mind [xin]; issues forth in words; finds expression in important matters; and corrects what it cannot

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change. Sages cannot give it to other people, and fathers cannot snatch it away from their sons. Therefore, in seeing what Heaven has given me, [my talent] is certainly not something to be taken for granted.” (ZQJ 514–515)

Zhang uses this Su Xun quote not to express the reliance of talent on genetic endowment (“what Heaven has given me”) but to acknowledge the relationship of talent to selfhood. As something uniquely given to particular individuals, not classes or families, talents should not be taken for granted. The acknowledgment and development of an individual’s talent, to Zhang, is truly what it means “to have a self” (you wo). “There are those who say they have great talent that can be useful to the world, but they do not enter [the business of building a state]. Why? It is because they do not have a self” (ZQJ 514). Zhang affirms that when given space to develop, talent can furnish a single individual with an undeniable and potentially transformative power – a process that begins with inner determination (“the heart-and-mind”) and extends outwardly by means of one’s words and one’s deeds (the correction of “important matters”). “Using others is called ‘using,’ but using oneself is also called ‘using’ . . . I say, if all of this stagnant, unused talent is turned to good use [by those who possess it], there is no political matter we cannot handle” (ZQJ 5). This exhortation is directed not only to those who possess traditionally celebrated talents, nor even to those with exceptional abilities. “The solution to our current problems of politics and virtue,” Zhang argues, “lies not in promoting the talented and demoting the untalented, but in uniting great and lesser talents and invigorating them, making them all exhibit the virtue of cultivated talent” (ZQJ 439). For these reasons, where Su goes on to profess his willingness to wait for an enlightened junzi to ascend the throne and find a use for his talent, Zhang insists that under the Republic it is essential to realize that “Today is an age of self-use [ziyong], not of waiting for others to make use of you.” By locating selfhood (or, as Zhang calls it, “having a self”) in the use of talent, Zhang deliberately rebukes the far more common linkage of efficacious selfhood to virtue (de), found in such thinkers as Zhu Xi as well as modern-day New Confucians like Qian Mu.6 This shift is evident in Zhang’s invocation of Mencius’ “great man” (shi daifu) ideal, typically taken to be an affirmation of how 6

Qian, Zhongguo sixiang tongsu jianghua, 54–56.


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virtue can imbue action with a unique efficacy. Zhang instead uses the image to explain how one is meant to use oneself rather than wait for others to put one’s talents to use: It is to have a definite idea, and to act according to this idea, fighting on [for it] despite a hundred setbacks: “to be above the power of riches and honors to make dissipated, of poverty and mean condition to make swerve from principle, and of power and force to make bend – these characteristics constitute the great man.” [Mencius III. ii. 2. 37 ] It is most important to grasp the idea behind Mencius’ question, “If I cannot do it, then who will?” (ZQJ 515)

The sage kings that Mencius elegized with this “great man” ideal are credited with fostering the roots of China’s ancient civilization – these are the “sagely founders” that, as I explained in previous chapters, provided Zhang with a template for political action under conditions of political collapse. By linking such founding actions to talent, and by insisting that all classes of talent must take part, Zhang suggests that the widespread application of expertise and knowledge is a crucial step in founding the flailing Chinese Republic on more solid ground. Zhang therefore urges his audience to become entrepreneurial about finding ways to “use their talents” in a hostile world, whether this means writing political opinion pieces, caring for one’s family and friends, or simply remaining aloof from corruption. “Whether it is in administration, in the assembly, in business, in managing a school – if you have even just one shred of talent, you have a duty to find a shred of use for it . . . [it is] in this way that intelligence, courage, critique, and strength each comes to find its place” (ZQJ 17). In “The State and the Self,” he insists that even those “who have no natural talent, but have the courage to go forward, perhaps by being involved in a vocation or in running a business,” are essential contributors to the polity-building process (ZQJ 515). In other essays, however, Zhang gives little indication of what will be the specific content of talent, perhaps to draw attention to how its deployment can reshape its content and value. Because the process of self-use problematizes conventional definitions of worthwhile talent, talent’s exact content and scope are largely not specifiable a priori. As did self-awareness, the self-use of talent envisions the contemporary citizens of China using older models 7

The Mencius quote is adapted from Legge, Works of Mencius, 265.

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of efficacy, without assuming their former substance: like the ancient sage kings, citizens can work smaller but equally positive transformations in the world around them by finding heretofore unnoticed or undeveloped applications for their talents. This surprisingly heavy emphasis on individual people (ren) and their talent rather than on concrete institutional arrangements (zhi) did not go unnoticed by Zhang’s contemporaries. The readers of The Tiger were educated elites, most of whom gained conversance with many Western political theories either from their own studies abroad or from high-quality Chinese and Japanese translations of Western canonical texts. One particularly nonplussed reader named Zhou Wumin wrote a letter to The Tiger, expressing his surprise at finding that the political system Zhang described seemed closer to China’s imperial government than that of the modern Western powers: The essay on “The Foundations of Government,” as the crowning piece of the first issue, identifies itself as being your plan for how politics should be discussed. It says, “Government has a foundation. That foundation lies in having tolerance, in not favoring the same and hating the different.” It goes on to say, “Government lies in people; if people exist then the government arises. The successes and failures of government can be measured by the successes and failures of talent . . .” But in these lines, I dare to suppose that what you are supporting emphasizes “rule by man” [renzhi], and neglects “rule by law” [fazhi]; emphasizes the virtue side of things, and neglects the legal side of things . . . And so I say that what you are asserting is closer to the common precepts of our country’s history, than to the political principles of today’s civilized nations and world powers. It is rife with old concepts from our history, but lacks the new insights of American and European constitutional government.8

In this passage Zhou reflects the anxiety felt by liberal reformers about the extent to which the political regime of imperial China, and the way of thinking about political life that it engendered, would inhibit the health of the hard-won constitutional government implemented just three years earlier. Zhou specifies his complaint as a concern about the extent to which Zhang’s theory of “using talent” can be interpreted to mean the use of talented officials by particular individuals who enjoy only ephemeral political power; when their power wanes, so too do the talented officials their power attracted. In Zhou’s opinion, providing 8

Zhou, “Fu lu,” 153.


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a legal framework within which talented people can enjoy predictable and long-term “use” is the optimal arrangement for ensuring the flourishing of that talent. Otherwise, those in power have no check on their greed and ambition and become “laws unto themselves,” with the result that “the majority of talent is sheltered by the temporary power of a small minority of people, and it is unable to receive protection from this nation’s laws.”9 Power, and not the more relevant factors of hard work, merit, or intelligence, then becomes the ultimate determinant of whether or not talented people can achieve their goals; factional strife, which could be directed into more productive channels of parliamentary debate, inhibits progress and invites ruin. Bereft of the predictability and security public laws provide, men of talent have no incentive to develop their abilities: In a nation ruled by law, talent is not sought-for but presents itself. In a nation ruled by man, even if sought for, talent will not present itself . . . this is because whatever credentials I have, to perform whatever service or to engage in whatever profession, the country will have a stable law by which to use me.10

In articulating these problems in terms of the assumed dichotomy of rule by law and rule by man, Zhou reflects an uncertainty shared by other early Republican intellectuals about how compatible Western liberal constitutionalism could be with Confucian government. The logic of rule by man that Zhou detects in Zhang’s advocacy of talent seems unable to avoid the autocratic rule it has traditionally supported. Zhou worries that Zhang, despite his somewhat egalitarian concession that using talent is no longer the domain of those in power, is nevertheless still promoting a system of partiality and contingency rather than of transparent rules and institutions. In his direct reply to Zhou, Zhang flags the substantive issues at stake with “using talent” but overlooks the theoretical resources furnished in his own essay that would allow him to articulate a comprehensive rejoinder. Specifically, Zhang fails to explicate his own break with traditional and contemporary rule-by-man arguments. Both strategies see people (ren) as the solution to political problems; however, with talent, Zhang questions not only the substantive content of political efficacy but also the process by which fitness for political action is 9

Ibid., 154–155.

10

Ibid., 156.

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assessed. Whereas conventional accounts – including not only those of Liang and Wu examined in Chapter 4, but also those of much classical philosophy – see virtue as the key to their rule-by-man arguments, Zhang insists that talent alone is the “root” of government and the uniquely salubrious “cure” for current political sickness (ZQJ 5). But before we can understand what is at stake with this claim, we must first explain the fraught historical legacy of talent in Chinese political practice and discourse – including the overlooked potential for subversion that its unconventional use often harbored. I see Zhang’s understanding of talent as linked to at least two Chinese precedents, which acknowledge the mutual interaction between men and laws to limn both personally and institutionally transformative aspects of Zhang’s claim. The first is the relationship of talent to virtue, which – particularly when embodied in late imperial institutions such as the bureaucracy and the family – marks a series of tensions between spontaneity and discipline, idiosyncrasy and normality, disruption and collaboration with the status quo. The second comprises long-standing debates over local self-rule or “federalism” (lianbang), the institutions of which Zhang expects the use of talent to both construct and inhabit. Zhang does not extensively discuss the relationship of talent to either virtue or federalism, but only by drawing out these two connections can his radically decentered politics of talent be rendered both coherent and persuasive. By recognizing that talent enjoys a substantive capacity independent of virtue, Zhang affirms it as a potential space of particularity and difference rather than as a vehicle for applying politically and socially sanctioned norms. This separation makes possible the affirmation in politics of a wider variety of value judgments, interests, and perspectives. Federalism, in turn, provides a historically grounded alternative to this unmoored talent, offering Zhang a believable rejoinder to concerns that such widespread inclusion, usually through participation by nontraditional political actors, would lead to disaster.11 As Zhang presents it, federalism encourages a participatory structure continually reinvigorated by widely dispersed political energies embodied

11

Seventeenth-century “nontraditional” thinkers such as Lu Liuliang were the first to point out how regional autonomy could liberate talent from the roles assigned it by the examination system and bureaucracy (Xiong, “Fei chuantong chengfen de fenxi,” 17), enabling institutional outlets for what Zhang calls its self-use.


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in a variety of traditionally unsanctioned talents – specifically those of lower gentry, merchants, and experts in foreign affairs – whose participation was integral to local self-governing bodies throughout the late imperial period but was often delegitimized or ignored by those at the political center. These reflections culminate in an inclusive vision of political participation, but not one necessarily mapped by existing liberal-democratic models.

Talent and virtue Zhou Wumin’s discomfort with Zhang’s singular emphasis on talent, and his skepticism that Zhang can extricate himself from a politics of personal morality, gesture toward the long-standing but tensionridden relationship between talent and virtue in much Chinese thought. Zhang’s insistence on talent alone requires inquiry into what prompted those tensions between virtue and talent, and how, if at all, their tensions can be exploited for the purposes of democratic polity-building. The overwhelming inclination toward emphasizing virtue at the expense of talent during periods of political upheaval is suggestive of the political stakes of Zhang’s claim. Talent provokes anxiety, if not outright dismissal, among Chinese thinkers in a surprisingly wide variety of times and places. During the initial assimilation of Western political ideas into China, for example, reformers argued that “reforming men’s minds comes before reforming institutions,” meaning that moral integrity should be privileged over technical training when selecting officials for service.12 Even the most arguably forthright defense of the importance of talent to politics in China, the Study of Human Abilities (Renwu zhi) of Liu Shao (written circa 240 CE), allows talent to shape, but not supersede, virtue. Of course, talent as a singular value had its defenders: the Three Dynasties military and political leader Cao Cao (155–220 CE), in a series of decrees, demanded talent as the criterion for selecting officials because virtue did not necessarily bring benefits to the state: “Sometimes those who are neither serving in office nor filial,” Cao points out, “nevertheless have unusual expertise in ordering states and leading armies.”13 The late Qing reformer Zeng Guofan also emphasized the 12 13

Chu, “Reforming Men’s Minds,” 275. Cao Cao, “Ju xian wu ju pin xing ling,” 580.

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need to secure men of ability, regardless of their virtue, to fight the Taiping insurgency. But these were self-consciously heterodox voices amid a widely held consensus that usually “emphasized virtue and deemphasized talent” (zhong de qing cai), whether by assuming the instrumental capacities of virtue without resort to talent, or urging the necessity of restraining expertise with virtue.14 In any case, the debate between useful skill and moral worth was not resolved with the victory of Communism in 1949; China’s modernization process has intensified the same dilemma under new guises. Maoist political ideology reinforced the faith that moral virtue – expressed under Communism as being “red” – was necessary to buttress, and could sometimes supplant, the talents of “experts” in the ongoing work of Chinese social and political transformation.15 Scholars on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, including contemporary New Confucians such as Qian Mu and Zeng Zhaoxu, concur that substantive moral goodness can more effectively sustain prosperity than can simple expertise, and urge greater attention to virtue rather than to technological talents as key to furthering modernity.16 These dynamic interactions are well illustrated by the case of female literary production in the late imperial period, which in altering the talent–virtue balance also articulated its significance to wider social order. During the early Qing, a “chastity cult” rooted in a conservative reading of neo-Confucianism gained considerable ground in everyday ethics, even as growing numbers of literate, cultivated women provoked explicit debates over how and in what way their talent could complement or threaten virtue.17 Virtue, understood in this context as feminine propriety and respect for gendered hierarchical social roles, was often assumed to be the goal to which the talents of literacy and 14

15

16 17

Lau, “Zhongguo chuantong cai de guan,” 100. Lau notes that those thinkers with more experience serving at court and involved in day-to-day political administration tended to hold talent in high regard, whereas the more isolated and less politically active tended to see virtue as decisive (99). Schurmann, Ideology and Organization, 164–167. He attributes the tension in Maoist thought between virtue and ability to a speech of Stalin’s (164), but it seems just as likely that Mao was influenced by long-standing debates in the Chinese political tradition. Qian, Zhongguo sixiang tongsu jianghua, ch. 3; Zeng, “Lou cai de weiji,” 214. Lau, “Zhongguo chuantong cai de guan,” 110–112; Chang, “Ming–Qing Women Poets,” 241.


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writing were ultimately directed.18 Part of this virtue involved learning that the extent of women’s powers stopped at the edge of the “inner quarters,” as conservatives realized that the very skills cultivated as a means of supporting virtue could also be used to undermine or challenge its claims to authority. “From the men’s point of view, a woman’s education was . . . a double-edged sword . . . Her ability to disrupt boundaries between inner [women’s quarters] and outer [public] made her dangerous.”19 Considered alongside the other examples I gave above, such tensions between talent and virtue suggest the further implications of Zhang’s self-use of talent. In the case of women in particular, talents such as literacy meant access to books that provoked critical reflection on the status quo. The access to books and expanded cultural production that such education afforded may not have led many women to challenge Qing-era social inequalities, but it did invite some measure of subversive pride and gender-specific reflexivity.20 These dangers were especially salient because the education of women was largely decentralized, leaving education “in the hands of mothers and aunts who often had their own agendas.” In this unregulated arena, women’s literary talents perpetually threatened to “reveal inner secrets to the public” and thus upset the balance between men and women that many late imperial thinkers saw as a foundation of social order.21 The situation of literary women mirrors that of literary men, whose involvement in the bureaucracy both as examination candidates and as agents for the state’s “processing of virtue” also reproduced a set of hierarchical virtues, most prominently that of loyalty (zhong) to the emperor and the subordination of the people to their ruling officials.22 As Benjamin Elman puts it, examination preparation “entailed longterm internalization of orthodox and regionalized schemes of classical language, thought, perception, appreciation, and action . . . Inculcation of Confucian culture, when tied to social elites and political success, serially reproduced assimilated individuals through the selection process for officialdom.”23

18 19 20 21 23

Lau, “Zhongguo chuantong cai de guan,” 105–106. Ko, “Pursuing Talent,” 16. Chang, “Ming–Qing Women Poets,” 238, 245. Ko, “Pursuing Talent,” 20, 33. 22 Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” 129. Elman, “Political, Social, and Cultural Reproduction,” 20.

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Many literati, of course, used their learning and position to argue against this orthodoxy, and visions of ideal virtue, especially in a crisis, were often deeply ambiguous.24 Nevertheless, the examination system and other significant institutional processes – including state-sponsored awards for virtuous acts – promoted what Kang-I Sun Chang calls the “cultural priority” of “prizing morality over talent.”25 State control of examination content shored up a particular form of Confucian moral orthodoxy against the challenge of unbridled ability, discouraging pure competency as a criterion for evaluating performance and behavior. Under the guise of selecting talent, the civil examinations implemented a system of social selection that effectively eliminated “the masses of peasants, artisans, clerks, Buddhists and Taoists – not to mention all women – even from the licensing stage of the selection process” and allowed the imperial center to exercise cultural and political control through the management and training of personnel.26 The cultivation of virtue in both of these cases represents a highly institutionalized normalization process, whose purpose often seems in tension with the particularity – and social diffusion – of talent. Zhang speaks explicitly to this legacy of talent as a marker of social dissonance when, in the “Foundations of Government” essay, he connects the use of talent to the “accommodation” (tiaohe) of political dissent, alternative opinions, and factionalism. The unchecked tendency to “favor the same and hate the different,” Zhang argues, makes “forcing agreement” rather than the flourishing of talent the goal of a political regime, and the creativity of talented individuals is actively discouraged from improving the status quo (ZQJ 9–11). In Zhang’s reading, this lack of accommodation prevents well-meaning people from developing what they believe is valuable in themselves and forces them to fit a mold determined by others, inhibiting the flowering of their talent and thus leading inevitably to political and social decline: When we get to the point of ostracizing each other, there is an evolutionary principle at work. That is, those who are creative and independent usually are eliminated, and those who sneak around manipulating their authority often 24

25 26

See Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” 143, for examples of how the usual social practice sometimes differed from what would be considered the most virtuous choice to make under given circumstances. Chang, “Ming–Qing Women Poets,” 240–241. Elman, “Political, Social, and Cultural Reproduction,” 19, 23.


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remain. If not, the former are usually assimilated into the latter . . . So those who sneak around using their authority, who are remorselessly stupid, who take bribes and wreak havoc on the government – when they see one who is not like themselves, they mold and assimilate him, making him conform. (ZQJ 15)

Zhang’s emphasis on talent therefore affirms the free play of those who would otherwise be assimilated, molded, and made to conform. Carving out spaces for nontraditional talents in a new republic involves rethinking how the contributions of disparate individual persons fit together with each other, as well as with reigning standards of virtue. Talent is part of Zhang’s challenge to the very existence of a unitary, knowable, and politically enforceable value system that restrains the development and proliferation of human abilities. Writ politically, this challenge rebukes the necessary connection between talent and a predetermined moral standard – other, that is, than the minimal standard of “respect for differences” (shang yi), which encouraged accommodation not only of different values but also of political participants from nontraditional backgrounds, including peasants, merchants, and intellectuals who did not serve in official government posts.27 This minimal normative standard does make the recognition and inclusion of unconventional talents possible, but unlike imperial Confucian orthodoxy it structures a procedural rather than a substantive basis for an emergent political community. It places limits on acceptable political elements only as a means of opening the terms of that community – its potential and reigning virtues – to contestation. The radical potential of self-using talent without reference to a set of specific social norms now comes into view: where the talents of women threatened a gender hierarchy enforced by restrictive notions of feminine virtue, and the talents of literati threatened a political hierarchy buttressed by a particular reading of neo-Confucian orthodoxy, the self-use of talent throws the responsibility for regulation back upon individuals themselves. By “throwing their talents into the warehouse” that is public service, and allowing them to “meld together,” Zhang’s 27

Zhang defines shang yi as “no matter what kind of doctrine, it ought to find its appropriate space and be allowed so far as possible to judge its own proper time [for expression]” (ZQJ 459); see Chapter 8 below. Cf. also Li, “Bianxuanzhe xu.”

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talented individuals produce something irreducible to any particular view or interest (ZQJ 5). What emerges is a political community whose standards for talent arise from diffuse self-application, exploration, and negotiation, rather than top-down imposition. Zhang’s separation of talent from virtue is the first, conceptual step in this process, which establishes the possibility of fostering abilities without recourse to centralized control or in opposition to overweening moral conventions, or both. Zhang’s elaboration of a functional federalist regime constitutes a second, institutional step, which outlines the participatory structure for differently talented individuals.

Federalism Like earlier and contemporary versions of federalism and regional autonomy in China, Zhang’s is centered on the potential for local mobilization vis-a-vis a corrupt, absent, or inadequate central regime. ` Arguments for local mobilization grew out of or invoked the concept of fengjian, a term often translated into English as “feudalism” but which is best understood as a system of territorial autonomy contrasted to that of centralized imperial control, or junxian. Debated since at least since the Tang dynasty, the term fengjian marked historical and theoretical connections between ancient, Zhou-era feudal rule and contemporary local voluntary associations, which took forms such as regionalized self-defense, tax collection, the provision of social welfare services, and public sanitation. Given the egalitarian participation the self-use of talent makes possible, it is significant that Zhang does not expand these institutional forms to include the exercise of democratic voice. Nor does he justify federalism with respect to how well it facilitates particular democratic institutions, such as voting or public assembly. His insistence on the self-use of talent does, however, introduce a critical democratic component that aims to secure a particular kind of relationship between local energies, identified as talent, and the political center. Applying talents in local arenas constructs and sustains the external institutions that foster increasing self-awareness, even as a deliberate system of decentralized administration secures the continuation of local institution-building. Zhang’s essays “On Federalism” (“Lianbang lun”) and “An Academic Theory of Federalism” (“Xueli shang zhi lianbang lun”) appeared in 1914 and 1915, soon after Yuan Shikai had consolidated


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power by abolishing, among other things, all provincial-level legislative institutions. Zhang nevertheless insists that his discussion of federalism is one of “ideal” or “academic” theory, designed to outline what could happen, not what should (ZQJ 379–380, 482). He is careful to distinguish his own project of federalism from competing contemporary ideas about “local self-rule” (difang zizhi), defining federalism as simply “a system of divided powers” enjoyed by localities combined within but not exhaustively controlled by the central state (ZQJ 381). Calling it a “temperate zone” for China between a relative “arctic” of centralized rule and the “tropics” of confederacy, Zhang takes issue with colleagues like Zhang Dongsun, who insist that reform in the direction of federalism should be abandoned given its obvious absence in Chinese postrevolutionary reality (ZQJ 483). Dongsun’s recommendation that local self-government be pursued instead reflects the fear that China lacks the political capacity and awareness that drove the creation of other federalist systems such as the United States. Creating a federal system now would require devolving control from the currently existing, albeit ineffective, central government to the provinces. In Zhang Dongsun’s view, however, this move would simply reproduce the hierarchical and antidemocratic structures he believes local self-rule was designed to counteract.28 Against Zhang Dongsun, Zhang Shizhao argues that federalism is a viable option for China, which requires him to explain how the local and the central could coexist productively and without threat of autocratic usurpation. Most commentators categorize this dilemma as an administrative one, which in the late imperial period emblematized an ongoing conflict between local social elites and the imperial court over who would control social mobilization.29 But this reading of the problem (albeit suggested by how the literati themselves understood their task)30 implies that a resolution can emerge from either objective empirical analysis or arbitrary power struggles. In contrast, the differentiated talents Zhang praises as “the foundation of government” 28 30

Cited in ZQJ 285. 29 Thompson, “Statecraft and Self-Government,” 204. Feng Guifen, for example, presents his own formulation of regional autonomy as imposing uniform representative structures on what he presumes are already-existing local capacities for rule. Citing the existence of similar Zhouand Han-era institutions, Feng assumes (“Fu xiang zhi yi,” 34–36) that ancient precedent will win out over any organic forms that may in fact currently organize such capacities.

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populate the local contexts that challenge top-down administrative uniformity, suggesting that federalism can benefit from the ongoing and perhaps irresolvable tension between the organic energies generated by diverse and differentiated social groups, on the one hand, and the political forms that regulate such energy, on the other. Zhang Dongsun expects this arrangement to be possible only by a group of independent sovereign states coming together to form a federation, but Zhang explains why it is also possible in a unitary system devolving power to localities. Zhang’s term for federalism, lianbang (literally, “states that are connected [within a larger state]”), points to just such a system, which we may translate – following the political scientist Alfred Stepan’s terminology – as “holding-together federalism.” For the other, more “American” form of federalism, which Zhang agrees is not appropriate for China, he reverses the characters to make the word banglian (literally, “states connecting”), a notion Stepan calls “coming-together federalism” (ZQJ 381–387).31 To Zhang, whether a country pursues one path or another is purely a matter of current conditions, not of definitional impossibility.32 As such, these matters are not theoretical but purely constitutional; they require changing the wording in the constitution to enumerate different powers to the localities, but not any fundamental transformation or destruction of what Zhang calls “the state’s foundation” (ZQJ 385). Ultimately, the definition of federalism turns not on the sequence of events, the “what comes first and what comes later,” but on the relationship of the provinces to the center (ZQJ 288). Although the end 31

32

Stepan, “Federalism and Democracy,” 21. Zhang explicitly links lianbang to the English word and concept “federal” in his 1912 Minli bao essay “Lun zhuquan,” distinguishing it from Yan Fu’s earlier suggested translation, hezhong (ZQJ II 243–244). I am grateful to Jacob Levy for helping me find precise translations for Zhang’s terms. Zhang’s point can be defended on the basis both of historical examples of functional federal systems, and of recent research in political science. According to Stepan, US-style federalism – in which a group of autonomous states contract together to form a larger sovereign state for the purposes of collective security or other goals – is the exception rather than the rule among actually functioning federalist systems. Countries as diverse as India (in 1948), Belgium (in 1969), and Spain (in 1975) all began as central, unitary states but devolved power to constitutionally defined regions (Stepan, “Federalism and Democracy,” 21). Citing the political scientist Georg Jellinek, Zhang himself offers the United Kingdom, Venezuela, and Mexico as examples of this kind of federalism (ZQJ 384, 393).


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result – a system of provincial assemblies with legislative and executive powers – is the same, as Zhang Dongsun acknowledges, Zhang insists that retaining the name “federalism” is important given the deference many contemporary accounts of regional autonomy have paid to the historical purposes of decentralization under the empire. In Zhang’s view, federalism reinforces the idea that individual provinces, as bang (“states”), enjoy sovereignty by way of a contract with the central government, even when their powers are constitutionally devolved to them by the center. Provinces are neither beholden to arbitrary control like that which characterized traditional experiments in regional autonomy, nor are they bereft of any autonomous energy to challenge the center. Zhang’s expectations allude to an overlooked development of regional autonomy during the late empire: the provincial assemblies, administrative duties, and charitable work associated with local selfgovernment initiatives provided meaningful participatory opportunities for those whose talents exceeded or challenged the moral curriculum embodied in the civil examination system. A centuries-long process of commercialization, beginning in the Ming dynasty, along with bureaucratic decline and increasing Western incursions in the nineteenth century, produced massive numbers of educated or semieducated persons with little chance of official assignment. Joined by growing numbers of people from typically denigrated but increasingly vital sectors of society, such as professionals, urban intelligentsia, merchants, and military officers, these unemployed gentry and others with “skills that initially could not be used easily in Chinese society” grew increasingly frustrated by their powerlessness.33 Provincial assemblies and other so-called “public,” non-“official” (guan) work proved to be one outlet for their community-building efforts and the exercise of what were traditionally overlooked talents. In some local assemblies, for example, from one-third to nearly one-half of the members were men of no noted rank, education, or class.34 Other data indicate that while gentry educated in the traditional manner continued to occupy a large number of seats, the majority was dominated by what we may call the “differently talented.” This included men with modern, Western educations whose status within traditional registers of education or socio-economic distinction was increasingly difficult to identify, as 33

Rankin, Elite Activism, 9, 24.

34

Schoppa, “Local Self-Government,” 507.

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well as merchants, compradors, and others whose connection to the specific expertise of commercial life had formerly rendered their activities conceptually external to, and illegitimate within, the Confucian bureaucracy’s monopoly on “public-mindedness” (gong).35 Given the diversity of their expertise, these talented individuals lacked a shared background akin to that which, by the turn of the twentieth century, increasingly united upper gentry into a self-aware class.36 In fact, although invoked as a means of ascribing political efficacy to groups of people historically excluded from political participation, the self-use of talent cannot serve as a class- or groupbased political value at all, in the way collective categories such as race, class, and gender have advanced similar efforts in the modern American context. The political interventions of talent, then, bear far less relation to those traditional literati and local gentry interests that many reformers, including Liang Qichao and Yan Fu, expected local self-government to serve. These reformers largely saw local energies as prerequisites for, rather than the outcome of, functional, locally autonomous institutions.37 Local autonomy, in their view, turned first on the self-awareness of educated gentry, whose elite leadership could go on both to cultivate mass energies and to bring them into the service of nation- and state-building.38 Zhang’s federalism, however, offers a different solution because it asks a different question. Zhang asks not how particular institutions can harness and then cultivate the managerial energy of local gentry, but how institutional forms can ensure that the personal energies – which he specifies as those roused to self-use talent – can achieve their maximum efficacy within local administration and communitybuilding. Zhang believes either the people have these requisite energies for federalism and a public opinion that supports it, or they do not; but if they do not, no amount of elite interventions or violent impositions can secure it (ZQJ 388). Zhang’s insistence on self-using talent, in 35 36 37

38

Fewsmith, “From Guild to Interest Group,” 619–623, 631–632. Min, National Polity, 171. These “energies” were most famously articulated by Yan Fu as “the people’s power,” “the people’s virtue,” and “the people’s wisdom.” Yan, “Pi Han,” 91; Shen, “Difang zizhi sixiang de shuru,” 170. Some, including Huang Zunxian and He Qi, simply interpreted local deliberative bodies in traditional terms as modes of communication between “above and below,” reflecting a widespread belief in the instrumental but not ideological function of democratic institutions in the late Qing (Huang Kewu, “Qing mo min chu de minzhu sixiang,” 373).


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fact, reveals as a category mistake one of the primary purposes of local self-government as identified by Liang Qichao. Under a decentralized system, Liang argues, locales can compete with each other for talented men and thereby encourage more talent to enter public service.39 The problem with this formulation is that Liang assumes that only elite leaders can construct opportunities for nontypical political actors to become educated and involved – a move that Zhang would see as fundamentally enervating of the very energies upon which local selfgovernment turns. Against critics who claim that Zhang’s federalism, motivated by these disparate, unmoored individual talents, will result in interminable devolution of power to ever-smaller self-interested “local organizations,” Zhang offers an institutional solution.40 He argues, The power allotted to a local organization is limited to administration; the power allotted to the bang includes both administration and lawmaking.41 In general, if the locality has an independent assembly, and according to the constitution can freely create laws within a specified domain and freely execute government business, and does not look to the central government for its direction, then it is a bang. Otherwise, it is an ordinary local organization. (ZQJ 484)

Although his entire analysis of federalism remains purposefully theoretical, Zhang seems to map his notion of bang on to provincelevel (sheng) institutions, whose assemblies were founded by local gentry but then almost immediately dissolved by Yuan Shikai after the 1911 revolution.42 Zhang approvingly cites Zhang Dongsun on the dangers of arbitrarily transforming these provinces into smaller 39

40

41

42

Consonant with his belief that competition is crucial for strengthening states, Liang writes, “Each feudal lord makes efforts to form a good administration and, in the hope of building a strong country, attempts to raise the educational level of the people. They compete with each other to recruit talented men, and as a result succeed in drawing many into public service” (translated in Min, National Polity, 110). Neither Zhang nor his critic, Pan Lishan, provides specific examples of these “local organizations,” but they likely referred to organizations in charge of sanitation, tax collection, public safety, opera performances, and the like. By distinguishing local associations from bang on the basis of the latter’s legislative capacity, Zhang anticipates contemporary political-science definitions of federal systems quite closely; see Filippov, Designing Federalism, ch. 1. Zhang does not make this connection between sheng and bang directly, but he cites Ding Foyan’s celebration of China’s unique sheng as fundamental components of a regionalized political system (ZQJ 290–292).

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and more bureaucratically manageable but less organic units such as “circuits” (dao) or “departments” (zhou), and suggests by association that the county-level (xian) administrative structures could serve these more localized administrative and participatory – but not necessarily legislative – functions (ZQJ 283–284).43 Depriving local associations of legislative power does not signal the restriction of participatory powers for local actors so much as it suggests a new way of thinking about the sites and means of political participation, one with roots in late imperial reform movements to legitimate extra-bureaucratic actors rather than modern liberal democracy. Zhang’s arguments point to an important and often overlooked aspect of imperial Chinese administration: although often criticized by European observers as an absolute despotism, the Chinese state was sharply limited in its reach and historically relied on unregulated local activism by non-degree-holders to accomplish many of its day-to-day administrative goals. Throughout the late empire, the self-ruling capacities of ordinary, local people were not only accepted as a matter of faith but relied upon as an important component of state control. As Philip Kuhn’s seminal article on local self-government points out, The magistrate was an outsider imposed upon local society; selected, evaluated, and rotated by powers exogenous to the local scene. But the control requirements of the state dictated that his control reach somehow into village society. To accomplish its purposes, therefore, the state had to draw local people into its service. Thereby was established the characteristic interaction between state control and local autonomy that marked the government of Ch’ing [Qing] China. The control–autonomy interaction operated through three principal channels: the formation of decimal hierarchies, the penetration of indigenous social groups, and the delegation of powers to the local elite. In none of these enterprises was autonomy permitted to remain a mere residual category of social action, a designation of areas of life not directly controlled by the bureaucracy. Instead, a positive value was placed upon local people doing “necessary” tasks for themselves, as an essential adjunct to bureaucracy. For if local administration were to function, it was not enough that the people submit; they also had to act.44 43

44

Although circuits and departments were technically sub-provincial units in Qing imperial administration (Hucker, Dictionary of Official Titles, 88–90), Zhang Dongsun (and Zhang Shizhao, in citing him) implies here that county-level assemblies will fall directly beneath provincial-level ones (ZQJ 283). Kuhn, “Local Self-Government,” 258–259.


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Kuhn insists on this basis that the roots of regional autonomy in imperial China lie more in attempts by the center to secure control over otherwise unreachable areas than in any commitments to democratic rule or local participation. His analysis explains why Zhang Dongsun believes that any system decentralized from the top down (that is, any system that is not “coming-together federalism”) will produce not local self-rule but simply more efficient central control. But Zhang’s argument – as well as emerging research pointing to the development of “public-sphere” activities on local levels developing toward the end of the Qing – suggests that Kuhn’s emphasis on control and Zhang Dongsun’s fears miss an important and ambiguous aspect of regional autonomy that enables bottom-up reform and resists central encroachment. Historians such as Mary Rankin and William Rowe have shown that by the late nineteenth century a wide range of social services and administrative functions – among them water control, public hygiene, public opera performances, and education – were largely in control of non-bureaucratic local elites acting without direct support from or control by the state.45 This research on late imperial civil society suggests that under particular circumstances the capacity for handling “mere” administrative (rather than legislative) matters could enable sometimes radical political critique and transformation. One of the most compelling of such critiques, and one that resonated with late Qing and early Republican reformers struggling to build democratic institutions, was rooted in a widely shared suspicion among late imperial literati that “using the big to govern the little” could desiccate the local energies and know-how that were uniquely capable of addressing a variety of local concerns.46 On the basis of this suspicion the seventeenth-century reformer Gu Yanwu emphasized not only the regulatory but also the productive powers of local self-rule. Gu advocated revoking the centuries-old “law of avoidance,” the rule that prohibited officials from serving in their home provinces, on the grounds that the private interests and knowledge of native officials would better serve the needs of the people there. According to Min Tu-ki, Gu’s view signals a radical ideological shift that resonated with later, Western-influenced Qing reformers: local self-rule can center the purpose of government on the welfare of the 45 46

Rankin, Elite Activism; Rowe, Hankow. Shen, “Difang zizhi sixiang de shu ru,” 169.

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people, rather than on dynastic longevity.47 Indeed, extra-bureaucratic agents, in providing private funding and initiative for much of what is today considered “public” work, extended their function beyond the simple execution of orders to the articulation and redress of formerly unnoticed local needs, the assessment of bureaucratic inadequacy and attempts to fill gaps in the “official” imperial administration, and finally the invigoration and ultimate legitimation of specific kinds of unsanctioned expertise for effective governing. The legitimation of specifically commercial and other non-literary expertise as politically relevant in the final reforms of the Qing dynasty, in fact, effected the transformation of local associations from what historian Joseph Fewsmith has called pouvoirs subsidiaires into full fledged pouvoirs interm´ediaires between society and state.48 Zhang’s argument draws much from this Chinese discourse on local autonomy: like Gu’s, Zhang’s vision is not democratic, in that it does not seek to secure an opportunity for local populations to voice opinions or exercise their freedom to exit. But it does emphasize the productive potential of local attachments and knowledge – including their potential to check the incursions of the central government and to secure not the longevity of the regime but the well-being of the people. In other words, it is the unique relationship such local energy enjoys vis-a-vis the central government that counts – although for Zhang, ` the locally differentiated nature of such energy, which he identifies as talent, challenges homogenizing projects launched by the center rather than consolidates them. Prasenjit Duara characterizes Zhang’s analysis here as “a call to fight the historical narrative from within,” a daunting task that required refuting “the ideology of the centralizing tradition” in Chinese political history currently being invoked to rationalize an emerging nationalist discourse.49 For Zhang, the struggle to self-use talent is emblematized in this resistance between central institutions and local people – another iteration of the tension between rule by man and rule by law. This reading suggests that the constitutive tension of federalism is best understood not as a power struggle between two groups of elites (the court and the literati), nor even as a liberal-democratic split between local and 47 48 49

Min, National Polity, 95. Fewsmith, “From Guild to Interest Group,” 637. Duara, Rescuing History, 185, 186.


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centralized legislative capacities, but as an ongoing tension between the people themselves and the institutions they create. Constitutionally enumerated, devolved legislative powers are produced by, and themselves condition, the administrative responsibilities undertaken by local people – motivating political transformation by setting up a permanent dissonance between the intransigence of institutions, including central institutions, and the always-shifting demands and capacities of China’s citizens. As such, the unique and personal process of “self-using” talents will be less representative of local concerns than creative in taking steps to address or critique them. In fact, Zhang seems to hope for aggressive heterodoxy from these talented and self-aware individuals, subsequent opposition to which will render their interventions increasingly fecund. Like “sprouts after a rainstorm,” once the ideas of these individuals shoot up, “fully formed melons will fall from their vines” (ZQJ 395).

Talent and democracy Can more general lessons for democracy be drawn out of the “self-use of talent”? In my discussion of federalism, I was careful to distinguish Zhang’s project from an explicitly democratic one. Tying his reading of federalism to imperial discourses on local autonomy, I pointed out that Zhang’s self-use of talent gestures toward the diffuse, broadly egalitarian participatory structure of late imperial regional associations but not toward the attempt to secure voice or exit for local populations. However, contrasting Zhang’s views on this point with other thinkers on both sides of the democracy spectrum – the contemporary AngloAmerican justice theorists John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, on the one hand, and former prime minister of Singapore and theorist of hierarchical “Asian values,” Lee Kwan Yew, on the other – does help to link Zhang’s vision for talent to a broadly egalitarian politics. More importantly, these comparisons explain in greater detail why talent as Zhang understands it can be so politically transformative. The first contrast, between Zhang on the one hand and Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls on the other, centers on what kinds of problems and solutions talent affords society. For Dworkin and Rawls, the political relevance of talent does not turn, as it does for Zhang, on its polity-building capacity. Rather, they picture talent as an especially difficult case of natural endowments: dependent on deliberate post

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hoc effort – what Dworkin calls “ambition” – for their expression and meaning, talent frustrates any attempt to discern returns to morally arbitrary natural endowment from the benefits or costs that accrue to deliberate choice.50 Precisely because its exercise is necessary for a productive society, talent influences the flow of resources, wealth, and opportunity; its lack in any one person is therefore considered by Dworkin to be a “handicap.”51 At the same time, in an age of nonaristocracy, as John Rawls has pointed out, marketable talent rather than birth is what stands as an entry to elite status, mobility, and wealth.52 Its presence in any given society or person must therefore be subject to regulation on the basis of justice – whether by means of a hypothetical insurance market for skills or of context-blind positions on justice taken from the original position. Rawls and Dworkin, as well as their critics, present talent as having an unchanging quantity and character that can be parceled out, regulated, or encouraged as justice demands.53 The idea of “talent” with which Zhang is operating, however, is a bit more dynamic. That talent can and should be self-used is more than simply an exhortation to activism; it also implies the dependence of talent on both context and personal application. Dworkin and Rawls partly acknowledge this dependence when they qualify talent as being “marketable” or not – that is, its real use to society is subject to market forces of supply and demand, and possesses no absolute and unchanging value in this sense. But by insisting that talent is itself part of natural endowment and hence morally arbitrary and subject to regulation, they fail to consider to what extent talent is not always a known quantity – either in terms of substantial content, or of degree – even to its possessor. Zhang’s defense of rule by law discussed in Chapter 4 in fact turns on precisely the ability of individuals to exhibit and develop either their “talented natures” or their “not-talented natures” in response to different institutional conditions. Just as importantly for Zhang’s argument, skills also develop and change over time as they adapt to different needs and as their possessors use them in the process of transforming political environments. As his emphasis on the need for a group of 50 52 53

Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, 91. 51 Ibid., 92. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 73–75. E.g. Van der Veen, “Equality of Talent Resources”; Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?”


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“exceptional individuals” demonstrates, Zhang not only expects but counts on a natural and unalleviated inequality of ability. Paradoxically, it is by allowing this very inequality that Zhang can build a more egalitarian structure of participation, though not simply because he expects a particularly talented group to rise first and pull up the others alongside. Zhang’s notion of talent turns on self-application under conditions of adversity, in which no state or dominant institution exists through which expertise can be evaluated and applied by one’s superiors. The self-use of talent therefore demands not only finding one’s place but also creating it, and the need to “create” a place for oneself means that at present one’s talent may very well be socially meaningless or politically irrelevant. Talent’s efficacy, then, rests not on contemporaneous recognition by others of its value, but on dynamic self-application that changes over time and in response to environmental adversity. Talent must be unequal across persons so that its application can either demonstrate its own relevance in the face of contrary social convention, or (more importantly) facilitate the transformation of its possessor from passive subject to active citizen who “self-uses” her talent. If all “unmarketable” talent were to be compensated for its lack of marketability, this process of transforming environments to enable the use of one’s (currently “unmarketable”) talent could not go forward and dominant norms could never be subverted. This very inequality of talent does pose a considerable political danger, however: it potentially authorizes unmitigated elitism, which must be confronted if Zhang’s self-use of talent is to succeed as a democratic value. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, is one of the most vocal advocates of a talent-based elitism. Like Zhang, Lee lodges great faith in a small minority of people to sustain social and economic prosperity: to Lee, this small group alone provides “that yeast, that ferment, that catalyst in our society that alone will ensure that Singapore shall maintain its pre-eminent place in the societies that exist in South East Asia.”54 Significantly, however, Lee prohibits this leavened bunch from intervening in fields where they are not “competent disinterested explorers,” including “the heat and dust of the political arena.”55 Instead, Singapore’s civil examination system 54 55

Cited in Tremewan, Political Economy, 100. Cited in Josey, Lee Kwan Yew, 72; for discussion see Hill and Lian, Politics of Nation Building, 192.

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effectively urges conformity to state norms in the name of creating national unity. Lee has explicitly stated that the purpose of his party’s education and examination systems is to build “the reflexes of group thinking” across Singapore’s wide diversity of ethnic groups “to ensure the survival of the community, not the survival of the individual,”56 and to protect Singapore from pandering to the “populism” and “egalitarianism” that have been the downfall of “broken-back countries” such as Jamaica, Uganda, and Ghana.57 To cast his words in the idiom of historical Chinese experience, talent is never permitted to bear critically on the pronouncements of a hierarchical virtue. Lee’s views act as a foil to reveal one of the most important expectations Zhang harbors for the use of talent in postrevolutionary China. Unlike the “experts” of Lee’s regime, Zhang expects the contributions of this talented elite to be explicitly political: the very inequality of talent promotes a politically disruptive efficacy that enables a democratic value to emerge. Zhang recognizes that although talent can be controlled by the dominant regime to a degree, it remains diffuse and versatile, persistently chafing at the bit of social orthodoxy that restrains it.58 By elevating talent over virtue, Zhang alludes to the historical transgressions of literary women and others excluded from social advancement through the exam system, whose unpredictable deployment of ability remained perpetually in tension with dominant social norms embodied in virtue. By insisting that talent in a democracy is most properly self-used, and should be cultivated without respect to the needs of the regime in power, Zhang fractures the traditional linkage of talent with state-sponsored civil service. Zhang devolves the power of using talent to individuals both within and outside various levels of government rather than to the state, privileging personal practice rather than immediate, wholesale changes in institutional shape that are only possible by means of elite intervention. At the same time, he realizes that this devolution of power both prefigures and demands a change in regime type (zhengti) that supports bottom-up awareness rather than top-down change – in which “rule by man” turns not on an individual’s positional leverage but on his or her determination to transform local environments. 56 57

Cited in Tremewan, Political Economy, 100. Lee, “The Search for Talent,” 18, 20. 58 Cf. Piven, “Deviant Behavior.”


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This heterodox potential of self-used talent can be better seen in Zhang’s rather puzzling invocation of the neo-Confucian text the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), from which Zhang draws his repeated insistence on the need to “find people” whose extraordinary abilities and personal fortitude will transition China to democracy in the face of foreign incursion and domestic collapse. As I explained in Chapter 3, the “people” to which the Doctrine alludes are the two sage kings of the Zhou dynasty, Wen and Wu. The exceptional moral worth of these sage kings afforded them extraordinary empirical and political potency, which included the sole authority to use the talents of their subjects. In invoking this passage, Zhang affirms the Doctrine’s faith that exceptionally talented individuals harbor politically transformative potency, but at the same time rejects the political institution of centralized control that, according to the Doctrine, made the use of their talents possible. The New Confucian Xu Fuguan offers a reading of these Doctrine passages that may help explain both why this can be done and why democratic rule, in particular, enables such a shift. Xu reads the rule-by-man ideal articulated in this passage as a historical contingency rather than a theoretical necessity. At the time of early Confucian philosophy, no institutional or other nonviolent means existed to check authoritarian power, leaving philosophers like Confucius and the author of the Doctrine little choice other than to urge the ruler to exercise personal restraint when “using” the talents of his subordinates.59 Xu argues on this basis for the democratic potential of classical Confucianism, pointing out that the institutions of Western governance have made the power of the emperor for using people no longer necessary. Zhang’s promotion of talent suggests one way in which such a democratic transition can take shape. Like Xu, Zhang is loath to accept the assumption of the Doctrine (or of Lee Kwan Yew) that leaders alone operate the levers of transformative power and social prosperity. He agrees with the Doctrine when it insists that the “proper people” for government should be “attained by means of the ruler’s own character,” but by situating this text within an essay on constitutional government he interrogates who the rulers actually are. When Zhang 59

Xu, Zhongguo sixiang shi lun ji, 138, 216.

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urges self-use, he deliberately fragments state authority by removing talent from its control, leaving the state without the material to bring its goals to fruition. He asks ordinary citizens to undertake the task of using talent once reserved only to the emperor, inviting those citizens – not their leaders – to perform what historically was one of the most important functions of rulership in China. These characteristics of talent bring the transitional elitism of “exceptional individuals” into the service of democratic commitments and bottom-up social change. The very principle that makes such a minority effective also dissociates talent from the central state, deliberately making available ever greater opportunities for political action outside the traditionally sanctioned official life and the exam system. The self-application of talent injects ambiguity and unpredictability into the ongoing processes of polity-founding, and this characteristic helps explain why Zhang’s theory of the self-use of talent is also a theory of decentralized political action – which, as we have seen, finds institutional form in federalism.

Conclusion These two contrasts, the first with Dworkin and Rawls and the second with Lee, rescue Zhang from charges of authoritarianism because they bring the personalism of rule by man into the service of political participation and plurality. Dworkin, Rawls, and Lee all identify talent as politically relevant, affirming its efficacy in affecting shared political environments. Yet each in different ways sees that efficacy as a problem, a threat to the political system each hopes to enforce. For Dworkin and Rawls, talent upsets the egalitarian distributions of justice by claiming an unfair share of goods and status for its possessor. For Lee, talent is a carefully regulated component of top-down political control that must never broach the carefully circumscribed, nonpolitical arenas established for it. Zhang’s advocacy of talent, in contrast, suggests that the disruptive qualities of talent can animate a broad variety of participatory structures emblematized by local sovereignty. Federalism decentralizes power by restructuring institutions, but also by encouraging activity in and from traditionally unsanctioned persons and arenas. Working within long-standing Chinese discussions of regional autonomy that saw local self-rule more as a mechanism for harnessing or invigorating


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efficacious activity than as a vehicle for representing group interests or securing individual rights, Zhang’s reading of federalism maps out a new possible configuration of political participation that is neither one of rulers and ruled – in which representatives of the people (whether elected elites or dynastic families) rule the people – nor one of pure, public-minded democratic expression.60 Rather, Zhang views these locales as potential arenas of (unpredictable) action – namely the selfuse of talent – and a focus for local attachments, where administrative capacities feature as significantly as legislative ones. As many of Zhang’s contemporaries realized, this attachment to local interests need not lead to a weak state, nor need it frustrate constructive political community-building.61 What characterizes Zhang’s federalist project as much as those of Liang Qichao or Feng Guifen is the insistence that small-scale, local institutions can build to dramatic cumulative effect. Zhang enthusiastically affirms Ding Foyan’s argument that the “special foundation” (te ji) and great strength of China lies in its characteristically diverse localities (difang) rooted in a historical regionalism (ZQJ 291),62 but he does not expect that these organic social groups can furnish organized opposition to overall transformation; they are not necessarily-existing political entities bounded by enumerated constitutional rights. In effect, Zhang does not so much build from already-existing institutions as suggest alternative targets for both political loyalty and action.63 Within already-established communities, 60 61

62

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These two alternatives are sketched, and the latter defended, by Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 227–230. Like some European and American liberals, these Chinese thinkers did not see a necessary tension between individual rights and powers, on the one hand, and a fully functional centralized state apparatus, on the other. See Tsai, Enemies of the Revolution, 28–32. Inferring Zhang’s exact opinion on this matter is a bit tricky, because the bulk of his two essays on federalism consists of lengthy citations of other thinkers’ work, after which Zhang appends either specific criticism or vague affirmative remarks. But because Zhang affirms that Ding’s is “an exceptionally clear and exhaustive account of federalism” (ZQJ 296), I am assuming here that he agrees in however general a way with Ding’s evaluation of China’s regional strengths. Zhang can be seen here as articulating a “separation of loyalties” argument for federalism, which sees federalism more “as a source for institutions and loyalties that can generate needed counterbalancing or resistance to the state” than as an embodiment of the moral claim (often invoked by democratic theorists) that natural communities have a right to govern themselves (Levy, “Federalism,” 475).

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especially those endowed with coercive state power, individuals with unusual expertise or experience are sharply circumscribed in how and where they can apply themselves. This need not be the case among groups of individuals typically regarded as “nonpolitical,” however, including families and personal networks, as well as the trade guilds, local place associations, and charity organizations that managed local needs under the late empire, to which Zhang’s discussion of federalism alludes. Amid such groups, talented, self-aware individuals can begin inspiring functional polities that eventually come to constitute democracy, not presume its institutional existence. In fact, Zhang insists that arguments for the possibility of federalism in China should be understood as motivations “to set aside the already-so [yi ran] and create new examples of what ought to be” (ZQJ 381), specifically to “encourage the spirit of self-rule” based on these hopes for change rather than mobilize local energies only to generate power for others (ZQJ 283). Zhang’s federalist project, then, offers an unusual institutional arrangement in which talent maintains its full potency by being completely self-directed. Even the group of “exceptional individuals” Zhang hopes will initiate China’s transition to democracy have no power over the use of others’ talents, a limitation so great that Zhang believes it can effectively prevent the rule of this self-selected elite from turning into a predatory despotism. Ultimately, Zhang does not expect these individuals to do anything more than precipitate change; they cannot “rule,” because no one – except its possessor – has the empirical capacity to control talent completely. Read in this way, talent harbors a tendency toward equality that also conditions its potential for regime change: by refuting hegemonic notions of virtue, the selfuse of talent implies a radically decentered and diffuse capacity first to build and then to participate in political institutions. These unpredictable capacities of differently talented political actors do, however, commit Zhang to explaining in detail how such plurality can be peacefully accommodated in a constitutional regime – the problem to which I turn in the next chapter.

8

Accommodation

The issue of difference has not yet been explicitly theorized here, but both Zhang’s problems and his solutions seem to center on it. Zhang initially responds to the problem of irreducible plurality and political breakdown, yet it is precisely because self-awareness and the self-use of talent turn on individual distinction rather than on community coherence that Zhang could pose them as solutions to the lack of a shared basis for political action. In the first case, difference is presented as a kind of aloofness from a dispiriting political situation to which others were succumbing, and in the second case as the free play of diverse and traditionally unsanctioned forms of expertise and experience. Zhang’s notion of “accommodation,” or tiaohe, the subject of this chapter and increasingly a focus of Zhang scholarship among Chinese commentators,1 works from these implied celebrations of difference to theorize the constructive potential of difference more directly. In the process, Zhang also broaches possible meanings for politically relevant “difference” (yi) that range from individual idiosyncrasy to political dissent to the deployment in politics of nontraditional knowledge. His conceptualization thus shares instructive similarities with liberal toleration, as well as difference politics formulated by democratic theorists such as Iris Young, but also offers some important contrasts. Most significantly, consonant with his view of sagely founding under conditions of fragmentation, accommodation offers a means by which differences can be constructively bridged not within already-existing public spaces but first within and between persons. The emergent process of a “public way,” already discussed above in the context of Zhang’s notion of the political, here is revisited 1

Several recent appraisals of Zhang’s work identify his arguments for an “appreciation of differences” (shang yi) grounded in accommodation as his most famous contributions to post-1911 Chinese discourse (e.g. Li, “Bianxuanzhe xu”; Guo, Kuanrong yu tuoxie).

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and further elaborated to ground Zhang’s ideas about communitybuilding. In upholding difference, or what he sometimes calls “mutual concessions and mutual assertion,” as a necessary part of political life, Zhang rebuked contemporary Chinese reactions to his work that identified polity-building with conformity to a knowable, unitary public good – a version of the founding narrative that truncates circularity by demanding or assuming spontaneous consensus. His notion of difference in various forms does not unsettle sedimented identities so much as it invites counterbalancing efforts from other, differently situated individuals who come to found political community. Activities of accommodation bring these individuals into mutual engagement, bridging their personal efforts with the demands for other-oriented action. Zhang identifies accommodation as a process “born of mutual opposition, and developed through mutual concessions” (sheng yu xiang di, cheng yu xiang rang) (ZQJ 253). He argues that its best embodiment lies in parliamentary government, leading many commentators on his work to identify tiaohe with those liberal notions of toleration that developed in step with constitutional government in Europe and England. Although Zhang does draw explicitly on British theorists of parliamentarianism, such as Walter Bagehot and Albert Venn Dicey, he does not share their concerns to secure tolerance by means of a division between a secular public realm and a private realm of expression. Difference for Zhang is unrelated to questions of religious practice that prompted the elaboration of toleration in European and American liberal thought, even as it upholds a central premise of Millean liberalism typically resisted by Chinese thinkers: the permanent existence of political and moral dissonance.2 Zhang’s notion of accommodation, I argue, ultimately signals the need for a political association to open itself to radical challenge by views that would otherwise be classified as beyond legitimate political expression – bringing him close to the critical pluralism and difference politics of contemporary Euro-American political theory. Difference theorists as diverse as William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, and Iris Young have argued that, in the process of imparting meaning and character to political community, such overarching values foreclose challenges to political orders that suppress the emergence of difference. 2

Metzger, A Cloud across the Pacific, 419.

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The antidote, they argue, is the inclusion of marginalized groups into political discussions and the simultaneous subjection of the terms of political community to public contestation. The goal with difference as these theorists pose it is to unsettle and disturb what are seen to be objectionable identities, institutions, and modes of association. Again, however, similar commitments belie important differences between Zhang and this set of theorists. Zhang does not directly pose or respond to questions that mark difference politics, namely those arising from contests about identity, inclusion, or representation. What Zhang is most concerned to elaborate is, as always, a theory of politybuilding in which the existence of political community is a goal rather than an assumption. Accommodation is so important to this enterprise that Zhang identifies it explicitly with founding (li guo) in the title of one of his best-known essays, “Accommodation as Founding” (“Tiaohe li guo lun”). Accommodation is thus a fitting capstone for my discussion of Zhang’s work. It situates my previous discussions of various elements of Zhang’s argument within a conceptually rich and usable political theory that answers the most basic of political questions: how does one begin to build a peaceful and functional community in the presence of difference and disagreement? In what follows, I build on the commitments Zhang shares with both liberals and difference theorists to elaborate an English vocabulary and conceptual schema for translating Zhang’s arguments, which are articulated primarily using the deceptively simple Chinese words “same” (tong) and “different” (yi). Acknowledging that accommodations of difference occur on multiple levels of human experience and sometimes all at once – the personal (internal) and the social (intersubjective) as much as the political – Zhang further elaborates his idea of the political by refusing to see difference as either a political or a personal issue. His arguments invert questions of identity and toleration by asking not how difference in various forms troubles already-existing polities, but how it can consolidate political community. How can assertions of difference act not in opposition to but – paradoxically – as a foundation for certain kinds of shared political institutions and attitudes?

Sameness and difference Like many other concepts Zhang invoked, “sameness” (tong) and “difference” (yi) already had a long history among Chinese elites, but

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Zhang’s nuanced and controversial arguments enacted subtle shifts in their meaning. Unlike most terms of political art in Republican China that were formulated by Japanese scholars from classical Chinese to translate Western terms, and then reimported back into China with new meanings, this contrastive pair (much like renzhi and fazhi) retain a close connection to classical Chinese usage. In transmitting accommodation as a Western political value using Chinese terms, Zhang utilizes the conceptual resources of the Chinese vocabulary even as his emphasis on “Western learning” (Xi xue) draws attention to the unexamined premises that vocabulary assumes. Mapping out where Zhang utilizes the terms “accommodation,” “difference,” and “sameness” is the first step in determining the contours of his political theory of difference.3 Given their controversial influence on contemporary debate, these concepts find expression not only in the overt definitions Zhang offers but also in the array of arguments to which he responds. Difference rose to the fore of late Qing and early Republican debates as the political pressures of revolution and state-building polarized intellectuals into radical and conservative camps. This antagonism prompted thinkers like Du Yaquan, Cai Yuanpei, and Li Dazhao as well as Zhang to defend more moderate political and cultural approaches. Du and Cai focused carefully on the benefits of “cultural” blending between the “passive” Chinese spirit and the “aggressive” Western one.4 Zhang and Li, in contrast, avoided cultural descriptions to speak more directly to the problem of conciliation of political “forces” (shi li).5 Their arguments revolved mainly around the particularities of party politics and factionalism. Zhang did not give an explicit theoretical defense of difference, however, until the Tiger articles appearing in 1914 and after. Although letters written to Zhang as editor of that journal reveal that his views on difference and accommodation were anything but orthodox, his work did decisively shape

3

4 5

Guo (Kuanrong yu tuoxie, 79–85) parses the complex syncretism of Zhang’s tiaohe into eight distinct concepts: toleration, compromise, mutuality, balancing of contradictions/forces, stability and moderation, continuity (of old and new), gradual change, and circularity of effect. Gao, Tiaoshi de zhihui, 29–30. Earlier in the Diguo ribao, Zhang had articulated his accommodation concept primarily in terms of party politics and cabinet government (e.g., “Lun jixing neige” (“On the Deformed Cabinet”), ZQJ I, 527–531). He alludes to this earlier conception at certain points in the Tiger essays (e.g. ZQJ 11).

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the views of moderates, such as Zhang Dongsun and Li Jiannong, in the years preceding the May Fourth revolution.6 The Tiger’s longer page allowances encouraged Zhang to explore how difference could be embodied in more places than party politics, and how accommodation could be leveraged to do more than simply rationalize factional disputes. We have already seen in the previous chapter that, to Zhang, the use of widely differential talents and the practice of accommodation are complementary. In the same essay, “The Foundations of Government,” that identified talent as integral to polity-founding, Zhang claims explicitly that “the foundations of government lie in having tolerance [you rong]. What is having tolerance? It is not favoring the same because it is the same, and not hating the different because it is different [bu hao tong wu yi]” (ZQJ 1). Zhang explains how expelling or suppressing “what is different” exacerbates the problem of polity-building by consuming energies better spent on constructive projects, and inhibiting the growth of unexpected and perhaps unorthodox approaches to living, thinking, and acting. Those who “favor the same and hate the different” discourage the active cultivation of intelligence and talent by China’s citizens because they actively oppose the very conditions for “self-use” that make such cultivation possible and useful (ZQJ 5, 17). Zhang urges an alternative approach in “Accommodation as Founding,” which embraces rather than expels difference, and uses accommodation of differences to found the polity (li guo) rather than accept its imminent fragmentation (ZQJ 251). To Zhang, the institutional embodiment of accommodation is the “well-balanced constitution,” as exemplified by Great Britain. In Chinese experience, Zhang claims, this recognition and practice of accommodation is largely unknown. Zhang identifies this “balance” with a scientific law in his essay “On the Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces of Government” (“Zhengli xiangbei lun”), though he is careful to distinguish the science of physical objects in nature from the science of human interaction. The latter gestures toward a kind of prototypical social science that yields general insight about the course of human behavior, though Zhang is well aware that so far as human interaction is concerned outcomes are never certain. It does imply, however,

6

Shen, “Wusi shiqi Zhang Shizhao,” 177.

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that China may not be, as foreigners deemed it, so “peculiar” that “it cannot be discussed in the usual political ways” (ZQJ 188): If other countries have a way of ensuring their countries do not harbor revolutionary elements, that their people are happy and at peace, and that their societies can peacefully advance, and we are the only ones to not have such a way, then there is no reason other than that we did not plan for it. The blame is on us [for not adopting their way]. (ZQJ 188)

Zhang believes that the primary lesson to be learned here is that of accommodation, which means learning about how political forces within and outside the government interact. Alluding to Liu Zongyuan’s lament in “On Feudalism” (“Fengjian lun”), Zhang declares that “If political forces have not been balanced, then even a sage will be unable to keep order” (ZQJ 206). For Zhang, as for James Bryce, whose work on “the centrifugal and centripetal forces of government” has already been discussed, this is accomplished by means of a judiciously balanced constitution that takes account of everyone’s emotions, opinions, and demands. This failure on China’s part to include everyone’s opinion “accounts for the gap between Eastern and Western governments”: The former just trifles with the people’s emotions and is unaware that this pent-up frustration will eventually find another outlet. The latter, however, is familiar with the people’s power and lets it develop. The transparency or corruption of a government, the stability or peril of a state, the happiness or turmoil of a society – all are seen in this. My point in saying this is to explain that the hearts of foreign and Chinese people are exactly alike . . . except that we [the Chinese] bully the people for not getting angry and chastising officials, though one day, when they finally do, their numbers will have multiplied a hundredfold [greater than they originally were]. But they [the Westerners] extend a hand to the people, and allow them to get angry and chastise officials, and so the people realize that the power to do so lies in them. When they use this power, they do so with respect and restraint; if they decide not to use it at any one time, they may nevertheless use it later. (ZQJ 202)

Continuing to struggle against traditional and contemporary Chinese beliefs that ethical values inform and predict political outcomes, Zhang here defends a view that the central problem or reality of politics can be read in empirical terms, as a “balancing” of what are quite literally

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diffuse “powers” (shi li) in society. The idea of balance as Zhang presents it is purposefully dualistic and tension-ridden, suggesting a much more aggressive counterweight to political authoritarianism than a simple exhortation to harmony. Zhang asserts that much of the work of accommodation resides in the cultivation, in terms of both resources and attitude, of what his contemporaries called “oppositional force” (dui kang li). In fact, some readers, like Zhang Dongsun, interpreted Zhang’s call for “accommodation” to mean something akin to active engagement, marked more by aggressive participation and the deliberate cultivation of opposition, than by passivity and forbearance.7 Commentators like Guo Huaqing have sometimes translated Zhang’s term with the English word “toleration,” but in these essays Zhang characterizes tiaohe as a positively asserted, constructive value that lays the groundwork for a republican polity. This contrasts sharply with the more passive connotations of “tolerance” in the Anglo-American liberalism, a term which “highlights two components as basic to its structure: (a) disapproval of or disagreement with practices, beliefs, or persons; and (b) restraint of oneself from imposing one’s reaction.”8 Toleration understood as both a personal and an institutional virtue in fact rests its status as such on the capacity for passivity in accepting rather than acting deliberately against the object of accommodation. Seeking active opposition or antagonism, as Zhang does, seems inimical to the concept as Creppell defines it here; toleration is meant to assuage tensions rather than celebrate them.9 To make this point about the necessity of opposition, Zhang juxtaposes the histories of revolutionary England and revolutionary France, explaining that each represented two different responses to conflict and difference. In England, tensions between Parliament and the king played out in a series of mutual concessions, resulting in increasing freedom and prosperity for its citizens. In France, by contrast, similar tensions erupted in revolution after bloody revolution, with no clear benefits secured to either side and certainly not to the citizens of France (ZQJ 257–260). The lesson Zhang draws from these two 7 8 9

Zhang Dongsun, “Du Zhang Qiutong.” Creppell, Toleration and Identity, 3. See Appendix A for more discussion of the translation of tiaohe.

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parallel histories is not the need for the imposition of a unified public interest, but the recognition of legitimate tension within the polity. It is precisely because France sought to eliminate these tensions that it could not avoid revolution; England, on the other hand, did not seek to root out opposition and so its political systems evolved gradually and without violence. These examples demonstrate the dual nature of Zhang’s idea of accommodation: it can be seen both as a way of dealing with tension, and yet also as an invitation for contestation. Zhang repeatedly chides his countrymen for not realizing this dual nature of “accommodation”: I have heard that accommodation is born of mutual opposition, and developed through mutual concessions. Without an oppositional force, one cannot speak of accommodation. Without the virtue of making concessions, one cannot speak of accommodation. Yet today most of the Revolutionary Party have fled abroad, and the Progressive Party is gasping for breath. They fail to produce enough energy for themselves, much less for mutual opposition. Their own powers are diminishing to the point where they have almost none, so how can they speak of making concessions? . . . yet today our [political] figures are speaking everywhere of accommodation. I think this is the kind of talk that would make even a small child laugh until he busted his gut. (ZQJ 253)

It is at this point that having respect for the opinions of others blurs into the active cultivation of opposition adequate to make “accommodation” meaningful in the first place. What emerges is a celebration of difference not for its own sake but for its ability to enliven and make available new ways in which the government (and other people) can be challenged. These include incorporating, rather than eliminating, those elements of contemporary society seen as outdated, threatening, or even morally wrong – monarchical restoration being one salient issue in Republican China that fulfills all three characteristics. In “Appraisal of the Restoration Movement” (“Fu bi pingyi”), Zhang argues that a republic is defined as a system in which everyone can find his or her place, and in which all have the freedom to be persuaded by others’ different opinions – even opinions that technically oppose the republican form of government (ZQJ 399–400). So long as the principle of accommodation is upheld, the only considerations for negotiating political doctrines are their suitability and feasibility – criteria for which can be determined only politically and contextually,

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not theoretically (ZQJ 257–258). With this claim, Zhang affirms tension and conflict as necessary components of accommodation, suggesting that the process neither signals passive conciliation nor aims toward Millean evolutionary progress. For Zhang, the possibilities against which such accommodations hedge are not chaos and bloodshed, but something worse: “forced conformity” (wei tong) wielded by those in power. “What is a dictator? It is someone who forces others to conform to him. No one does not want others to be like them, so no one does not want to be a dictator” (ZQJ 7).10 Allowing any one person or group of people to monopolize public mechanisms in the name of securing a “common interest” – much like Yuan Shikai and his supporters desired to do – would abolish admonishment, dissent, and disagreement from political and social life. Zhang is trying to show his readers, in contrast, that the energies and virtues of accommodation are identical to those that underlie conflict, dissent, and difference (yi). In recent contemporary political theory, theorists like Chantal Mouffe, Iris Young, and William Connolly have begun to explore, as Zhang does, the political benefits and necessities of difference or plurality – by which they mean the assertion of identities and perspectives typically excluded, miscategorized, or assimilated by dominant conventions and political imaginaries. In their view, such assertions by way of politically mediated opposition or antagonism disturb those universalist political premises that homogenize, normalize, and suppress difference. Because such opposition (what Mouffe, borrowing from ancient Athenian politics, calls “agonism”) recognizes difference without reducing it to a homogenizing unity, these theorists have influentially argued that disagreement and struggle are constitutive of, rather than provocative distractions from, healthy political life.11 For these theorists, as for Zhang, what emerges from such a process of contestation remains bound to the negotiations that instantiated it, rather than to some uncontestable notion of a prior good. Mouffe, Young, and others like Bonnie Honig all demonstrate how political agon of the kind Zhang advocates can be used to prevent absolute notions of 10 11

The underlined words are all translations for the Chinese word tong (“sameness”). See note 14 below. See e.g. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; Connolly, Identity/Difference.

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“the good” from becoming dominant and suppressing difference (or in Zhang’s words, “forcing conformity”).12 The politics of difference that these theorists examine provide a helpful way of thinking about why Zhang puts forward “not favoring the same” as a “foundation” of government. That is, when subject to certain conditions, conflict can actually mitigate political rifts rather than widen them further. Their arguments help to clarify why Zhang fears that political structures generate an inherent tendency to conformity, and that only carefully cultivated difference can render the social and political environment secure against totalizing concepts embodied in persons or institutions. Such comparisons help us see that a process containing both concession and confrontation, conciliation and agonism need not completely fragment the political world, but can in fact strengthen it, whether by cultivating “critical responsiveness to new movements of pluralization” or by coping straightforwardly with the “ineradicable” fact of power.13 Such a paradoxical claim, perhaps not surprisingly, met with stiff contemporary resistance. A letter written to The Tiger by Li Beicun is representative of the distrust that many of Zhang’s contemporaries harbored: As for the meanings of difference and sameness, you have confused what you should be arguing for with what you should be arguing against. That is to say, a bad government invokes its partisan interests to suppress all under Heaven and make it conform [to these interests]. But all under Heaven needs only to preserve its natural harmony to ensure that this public consensus does not come under the control [of these partisan interests]. This is what I mean by what you should be arguing for. Yet you sincerely put forward the idea that the government ought to be led by the principle of accommodation. The intended result of this must be that you want to take up this natural agreement shared by all under Heaven, and make it conform to this one small partisan interest. This is what I mean by what you should be arguing against. The logical extension of your idea is to destroy all citizen life. So how then can you even discuss a “foundation” for a state that has is in this way already been ruined? (ZQJ 149)14 12 13 14

Honig, Political Theory. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, xvi; and Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 20–22, respectively. This paragraph is unusually elliptical and difficult to translate. Li here makes full use of the grammatical flexibility of classical Chinese to render tong

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Here Li reveals at least two assumptions driving his reservation that disagreement, especially when politically legitimated, can ever serve the public interest. The most obvious is his insistence that social harmony is natural and effortless; his invocation of “Heaven” here imbues this harmony with transcendental meaning, and ties it to the fated prescriptions of Heaven rather than to the deliberate machinations of man. Li’s arguments are based on the assumption that any disagreement represents partisan, selfish interests, gesturing toward a centuries-long injunction Chinese intellectuals and political thinkers have maintained against the forming of parties and factions in government.15 Accordingly, his invocations of sameness and difference are saturated with ethical connotations: “difference” is partisan, selfish, and aberrant, the mark of a “bad government”; “sameness” is harmonious, otherregarding, and naturally shared by all members of an assumedly mutually beneficial community opposed to the government that oppresses them. Li’s impulses here are not uniquely Chinese; similar convictions about natural consensus were held by many thinkers in the British liberal thought Zhang imported. Victorian Britons widely believed that, once aroused, the deepest human feelings would always be ethically right and compatible with each other.16 The second and less obvious assumption Li harbors here is that sameness and difference inhere in specific people, things, or groups, and serve to identify their nature metonymically and exhaustively. Li demands to know of Zhang, What is your standard for “difference” and “sameness”? According to what you have written, it seems it ought to be understood in terms of how those who rule treat the ruled, which amounts to deciding on the basis of . . . “those who agree” and “those who do not agree” with the choices [the rulers make] . . . [But] when state affairs have no fixed standard in this way, the meanings of sameness and difference ultimately have nothing to rely on. Suppose there are two people who disagree. Person A will always seek to

15 16

(sameness) and yi (difference) at different times adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs. To give the reader a way to track the grammatical and thus conceptual fluidity of these central concepts, I have marked my English translations of tong by underlining them, of yi by italicizing them. I maintain this convention throughout the chapter. For more on imperial Chinese views of factions see Wakeman, “The Price of Autonomy.” Collini, Public Moralists, 64–65.

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disagree with Person B, [which means] they need not ever agree on what is proper for state affairs. The result is that making others conform to A’s private interest cannot be avoided [in the interests of those state affairs], so that Person B, who does not like agreeing with A, will still tolerate him, and state affairs are helped not a whit. (ZQJ 150)

Li has discerned that the fundamental challenge raised by Zhang’s advocacy of difference is not only a political one directed at Yuan Shikai and the partisan violence his increasingly authoritarian government perpetrates. It is also a conceptual one, directed primarily at contemporary Chinese thinking about the nature of the political community and the common good that underlies it. Li’s response thereby demands from Zhang more specificity about what “difference” might actually be. He interprets Zhang’s “difference” in at least two ways, and both limn the less obvious implications of Zhang’s concept: one, as dissent from a harmonious consensus, which Li interprets as a needless disruption of the status quo; the other, as a relational opposition to some prescribed object or opinion, whether expressed by a particular person (“Person B”) or by some standardized, preexisting agreement about ends. Based on this second reading of difference, Li criticizes Zhang’s accommodation principle as underdetermined and needless. His frustration with Zhang is fruitful, however, because it indicates the duality inherent in Zhang’s idea of difference: between dissent and political disagreement, on the one hand, and particularity or personal expression, on the other. Li violently disagrees with Zhang, but reads his argument correctly. Zhang denies that that the same individuals will always be “different” or “the same,” and instead puts forward the possibility that such distinctions emerge in response to a changing environment, arrayed along a graded continuum in which the multiple choices individuals and groups make every day contribute to a nuanced spectrum of agreement and disagreement. Zhang’s argument for political dissent and disagreement, in other words, relies upon an understanding of difference as local and relational rather than preexisting and absolute. To Li Beicun, however, “accommodation” of different opinions could only make sense as a principle of political organization and shared life when it was assumed that such differences of opinion and practice could add up to, or were ultimately derived from, the same thing. Confucius once stated that the cultivated person is “harmonious

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without conforming” (he er bu tong; Analects 13.23), referring to the belief that mere conformity would simply pander to external forms of correct behavior without actually comprehending their essential meaning.17 Particularity of expression and interpretation was needed to ensure moral self-discovery and adaptation to diverse circumstances, even if this relative freedom was justified only by the assumption that these particularities ultimately converged (“harmonized”) on a unitary good. Later Confucians theorized this possibility of convergence by recognizing the need for particularity, or what they called “individual getting-at” (zi de), in attaining what was ultimately a universal and absolute Way (dao). “Old prose” (gu wen) thinkers of the Tang and Song dynasties, for example, believed that the varied manifestations of the one Way are not only too complicated to express but also crucially dependent on personal experience for their interpretation. Peter Bol describes this predicament as “believing that one should know for oneself while seeking to know what all can share.”18 For these thinkers, the particularity required for finding the Way did not play out as a recognition that disagreement was either inevitable or legitimate. Rather, such particularity justified a devolution to the individual of those powers that made the realization of the Way possible.19 Without a similar background assumption of an emergent though ultimately unitary public good, Li Beicun could not quite conceptualize how differences could comprise a functional political organization without coercively imposing one person’s “difference” onto the “agreement” of others. The spontaneous harmonization of difference in the absence of a guiding principle upon which all were expected to converge simply did not make sense. In fact, many of those writers who agreed with Zhang that “favoring the same and hating the different” was a problem for contemporary Chinese politics, including Li Dazhao, nevertheless seemed to misunderstand Zhang’s main idea in precisely Li Beicun’s terms. Li Dazhao, eventually to become one of the founding fathers of Chinese Marxism but at the time a liberal constitutionalist, cited Zhang’s “The Foundations of Government” in 17

18 19

This reading is supported by Confucius’ argument, repeated throughout the Analects, that the mere performance of rituals and obeisance means nothing without the substantive feeling or understanding (yi) they both refine and call into being; see e.g. 3.8, 6.18. Bol, “This Culture of Ours”, 258. Ibid., 276; see also Nivison, “Protests of Convention.”

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an essay explaining how to reform the people’s customs. Li Dazhao echoes Zhang in identifying “the origins of authoritarianism and the opposite of constitutionalism” as “forcing the different to conform,” but assumes that the relevant dangers to difference exist at the institutional level, when the ruler imposes new habits and ways of life on the people. He interprets the “people,” however, as having “inherent” (ben you, gu you), natural characteristics, not subject to change – because it is change itself that constitutes the threat to their prosperity and happiness.20 How, then, does Zhang’s theory of “accommodation” trace a path from relational, personal difference to workable political community, without resort to a known common good? The answer lies in a complex synthesis of personal, social, and political activity that Zhang believes can disturb norms even as it constructs alliances. Like William Connolly, who is unique among difference theorists for elaborating internal, personal transformations that can fuel a “micropolitics” of pluralism,21 Zhang recognizes that accommodation must occur within selves as much as within polities. But as we shall see, consonant with his notion of “self-awareness,” Zhang does not picture such personal efforts as external to, so much as constitutive of, political engagement.

The practice of difference: revisiting the “public way” Although Zhang foregrounds the use of accommodation to found the polity, he just as often portrays the tendency to “favor the same and hate the different” as an irreducibly personal issue. He believes that in order to resist forced conformity, assertions of difference and accommodation must be practiced within and between individual persons as much as between institutions and politically positioned officials. In “The Foundations of Government,” Zhang invokes accommodation specifically to oppose the ambitions to dictatorship that he believes lurk in every human heart. Our “wild tendencies” (ye xing) urge us to force others to be like ourselves, Zhang claims, but fortunately the practice of accommodation can rescue society from the dangers that follow from succumbing to this temptation (ZQJ 7). Although Zhang here notes the importance of instituting constitutional limitations on the rulers, he expects the effective force backing those limitations to 20

Li, “Minyi yu zhengzhi,” 41.

21

Connolly, Pluralism.

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derive ultimately from the decisions of individuals to overcome this natural predatory desire for conformity, and oppose the dictator in the name of pluralism (ZQJ 8). It is an irreducibly personal process in which one must separate what one likes from what one recognizes as valuable, overcoming one’s “animalistic desires” (shou yu) to naturally “favor the same and hate the different” (ZQJ 7). Part of what makes this inner resolve possible is self-awareness, described earlier as the recognition of oneself as republican citizen rather than imperial subject. Zhang’s problem with China’s other revolutions is that they never amounted to increasing the power of the people vis-a-vis the emperor; to the contrary, individuals outside the ` bureaucracy, the gentry, and the court never realized that they possessed the power to “express their hearts to the government.” Lacking self-awareness, they also lacked “oppositional force,” and so these revolutions only consolidated authoritarian control and made constitutional reform in China ever less conceivable (ZQJ 8–9). Personal efforts like those embodied in accommodation (“not favoring the same and hating the different”) find expression also in interpersonal or social relationships. Accommodation provides a constructive outlet in which difference can be asserted while being conditioned, at the same time, by means of the particularity of others. It is a training for sociality, such that the process of situational judgment and negotiation with these differences can be formative without being specifically teleological. For Zhang, such assertions of difference can take many disparate forms, including writing public-opinion articles, running for office, or engaging in explicitly political persuasion. But the most interesting and, to Zhang, the most efficacious and foundational expressions of this “difference” are those actions inspired by self-awareness, in which talented individuals find their own applications for their abilities. We have already seen in Chapter 7 that talent, as Zhang invokes it, implies a long cultural history of dissent and social disturbance that Zhang reevaluates as politically relevant and efficacious. Not surprisingly, then, talent bears a close and necessary relationship to Zhang’s accommodation principle (e.g. ZQJ 461–462). The particularity of applying one’s talent is conditioned by the recognition of difference in others, but this recognition of difference, too, requires the discernment and exercise of particularity. Difference, as Zhang describes it, relies on its local situation for meaning. Zhang does not agree with Li Beicun that a universal “standard” can be set for the terms of politics. “You

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want to find a precise definition for ‘sameness,’ but I say there is no definition to be found,” he responds (ZQJ 147). Read in this way, difference is ultimately a local phenomenon, both because the dangers of forced conformity really do exist on all levels of personal and social interaction (including one’s own “wild tendencies”), and because difference has only situational or relational meaning. Assertions of difference, then, require multiple platforms for both their remedy and their expression. For Zhang, these platforms are not only mutually reinforcing, but situated such that action taken on any one of them will impact the others. Zhang’s reading of talent – as a particularity that is best “self-used” rather than awaiting use by others – is a good example of how a very personal decision to apply one’s abilities rejects, and by rejecting revises, the tendencies to “forced conformity” operating on political, social, and even personal (self-internalized) levels. Zhang’s discussion of “rights” (quan) offers another example of how difference can act on multiple levels simultaneously. In Zhang’s account, rights are simultaneously artifacts and motivations of the struggles undertaken to claim them – thus the assertions of difference underlying those struggles create rights, rather than merely occupying the space they secure. They do not exist other than through “finding one’s own lot” in the mutual concessions and mutual agonism of accommodation. Zhang characterizes that portion of space the individual acquires for himself as a “natural right” (tianfu zhi quan), but this space is ultimately contingent on being “fought for,” and it does not necessarily remain coterminous with rights alone (ZQJ 613). One’s “lot” (fen), which Zhang repeatedly identifies as an outcome of accommodative activity, is not a quantitative allotment known in advance and promoted by the state. Rather, it gestures toward a contingent boundary for individual action of multiple varieties, activated by personal effort and regulated by the principle of accommodation. Rights seem to circumscribe less a realm of “privacy” and noninterference than they do an entire range of actions that individuals undertake as a response to information about others gathered in activities of accommodation. In so far as Zhang claims these rights to be “natural,” I believe he only means to sever the acquisition or recognition of a right from state power and return it to the efficacious capacity of the individual. In his debate with Yan Fu over how to read Rousseau’s Social Contract,

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Zhang clarifies that “natural rights” do not have anything to do with the kind of congenital nature that Yan draws from Huxley’s essay “On the Natural Inequality of Men.” These rights are more analogous to the liangzhi (“inborn knowing”) of Ming neo-Confucians: while present in everyone and therefore “natural,” they are ultimately contingent on a deliberate process of cultivation and – Zhang adds later – engagement with others (ZQJ 25). To presume that the extent of “rights” can be known before the struggle to “gain one’s lot” is undertaken would be to claim knowledge that can only be revealed in the process of accommodation. “Natural,” in other words, does not imply entitlement to a known quantity, because only the process of winning rights makes them meaningful.22 These examples give a sense of the kind of process accommodation constitutes. Gaining victory over one’s personal tendency to “hate the different” both turns upon, and constitutes, a politically relevant recognition that others are both different and (in this limited sense) equal. Constitutions emerge from the interactions of oneself and others, but the impact cuts across both individual psychology and sociological order: “Within any given country feelings, pleasures, and pains are all mixed together, and unless they are each one allowed to develop their abilities and come to terms with their inadequacies, the group will collapse” (ZQJ 252). Accommodation, in other words, happens not only in parliaments, but also in centers of feeling and pleasure: families, friendships, and even acerbic interpersonal conflict. Although Zhang’s language of “pain and pleasure” is derived from Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian calculus, the embodiment of such feelings in world-changing actions like self-use and self-awareness, and their conditioning by accommodation, blur the distinction between what individuals feel and what registers on the political level. The individual’s relationship to his political environment, as well as to the needs, behavior, emotions, and desires of others, are all identified as acts of accommodation. Initiated and sustained by individual action, yet happening 22

Zhang’s account of rights here closely resembles that of Liang Qichao, whose insistence on the necessity of struggling for rights derives from German jurist Rudolph von Jhering’s book Der Kampf ums Recht (The Struggle for Law). See Angle, “Should We All Be More English?” 242–244. Compare Zhang’s view of “lot” (or “portion”) and “rights” here with the entry in Zhang Dainian’s Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, 364–366, which collapses both into each other and into the concept of “responsibility” or “duty.”

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in the company of others, accommodation resists easy characterization as something either personal or political or social. This ambiguity is nowhere more evident than in Zhang’s discussion of “the public way” (gongdao). As explained in Chapter 5, the public way marks the cumulative effects of personal action, here identified with multilayered accommodations: [A] constitution is what everyone in the country upholds together. If it lacks a sense of the public way, then who will uphold it? But note that this so-called “public way” is not one person sticking his head out, holding something up to show the masses and saying “This is the public way, this is the public way.” The public way must completely take account of the entire country’s intelligence and talent before it can be called such. In other words, unless the intelligence and talent of the entire country are all collected together, and their costs and benefits are individually set out, their feelings are worked through, and all this is subject to mutual negotiation and mutual compromise, it cannot be called “the public way.” (ZQJ 522)

The “public way” that structures his ideal constitution is, ultimately, the engagement with accommodation by everyone in society, though it may not entail all of them acting together. Accommodation of differences provides the final grounding of Zhang’s notion of “the personal as political”; insisting that “costs,” “benefits,” and “talent” bear the stamps of individual experience in the form of “feelings,” Zhang reads accommodation of these particularities as integrally related to the project of the “public way.” In other words, the process of realizing commonality or “publicity” may not entail one path but multiple ones, potentially convergent but still several and diffuse. In Li Beicun’s frustrated words, Zhang’s “doctrine will never have a time at which a standard can be attained!” (ZQJ 149). Indeed, Zhang aggressively banishes from the negotiations that culminate in the public way the ethical sanctions that could justify difference to his readers. In his response to Li Beicun, Zhang explicitly severs the ethical identity Li urges him to draw between “public” and “good.” Zhang explains, I do not recognize that there is a fixed standard for commonality . . . You say that if the proper affairs of state are not defined, then commonality will not reach fruition. There is no better place to look for such “commonality” than in the affairs of state. But if the affairs of state are to conducted according to a fixed standard, then what can properly be taken as “good”? Is ren

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[humanity] to be considered ten times greater than yi [righteousness]? Think about the way of kings, and the machinations of a hegemon: each has its own idea of right and wrong. Today has one standard, tomorrow another. How then can we even come to an agreement to set a standard for them? The idea behind difference and similarity does have a basis: if you force agreement and destroy dissenting opinions, making everyone agree with what you like and hate what you hate, then will anyone under Heaven dare disagree with you? . . . in short, when I discussed the foundations of government, I talked only about similarity and difference, I did not talk about right and wrong. Identifying “right” with similarity and “wrong” with disagreement would be “favoring the same and hating the different.” Thus the one rule that political parties in a real constitutional state should stringently uphold is the legality of dissenting opinions. (ZQJ 147–148)23

Zhang questions here even the possibility of agreement on standards, suggesting that difference should penetrate the categories of political life much more substantially than simply on the level of party politics. Consistent with Zhang’s emphasis on difference, this division he poses between absolute moral judgments about the good (what he calls lunli, or “ethics”) and politics serves to open important spaces for contestation. Chantal Mouffe points out that casting political positions as moral/ethical ones would remove their judgments from the domain of contestation, preempting challenges to their hegemony – which Mouffe maintains should remain permanently open to interrogation and capture.24 As Zhang explains further, ethical judgments not only preclude contestation, but they threaten to replicate in seemingly less threatening guises the dangers of conformity/sameness on both personal and political levels. By moving away from fixed ethical norms as standards for interpersonal regulation, Zhang’s prescription for accommodation can counter arguments by Frank Goodnow, Yuan Shikai and others that China must first meet particular established standards – political, educational, or ethical (i.e. based in de, virtue) – in order to realize free government. Zhang’s point, I think, is not to reject the importance of morality to human life; indeed, his own concept of accommodation offers a prescriptive principle, and at least part of his argument for the efficacy 23 24

See also Zhang’s response to a reader going by the pseudonym GPK: ZQJ 307–309. Mouffe, On the Political, 4.

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of individual action turns on the resonance many “moral” actions – such as bravery or fortitude – will produce with proximate others. The danger, Mouffe and Zhang separately warn, is elevating these ethical choices to absolutist judgments that persist across time, exclude challenges to their authority now and in the future, and see those who disagree as “enemies” instead of legitimate “adversaries” (to use Mouffe’s terms). Although arguably an ethical prescription, then, accommodation is more importantly a practice that makes challenge to politically dominant values possible. Cultivating appreciation of this practice in republican citizens, Zhang believes, will help to organize difference differently. That is, difference will not be assessed by means of the moral categories of “virtuous” versus “not virtuous,” and dealt with by way of approbation or exclusion, but will be read (even on the personal level) in terms of political categories of consensus and dissent, and dealt with by way of accommodation.25 Accommodation thus contributes to social and political health by rendering differences productive rather than explosive, even if its specific content must always be changing across time, persons, and issues. Zhang’s substitution of morally unanchored political agon for national unity was idiosyncratic, especially with respect to contemporary Chinese discourse on polity-building. Most of Zhang’s contemporaries, including Sun Yat-sen, would see in Zhang’s argument a return to the weakness of imperial Chinese society, which in their view was enervated by an individualism that discouraged the communal unity grounding modern nation-states. Liang Qichao’s well-known exploration of “public” and “private” values in his On Renewing the People similarly argued that Chinese political thinking leaned too heavily on individual particularities and ultimately failed to foster a sense of community consciousness. Although Liang shares Zhang’s emphasis on agonism and striving as necessary to improving the vitality of the participants in the struggle, Liang’s attempts at “renewal” centered on strengthening China vis-a-vis the international incursions ` that encroached upon it. His hopes banked on a Darwinian, survivalof-the-fittest struggle articulated through the category of “grouping” (qun), a word invented by Yan Fu and popularized by Liang to identify 25

Working in the contemporary Euro-American context, Mouffe identifies these political categories as “right” and “left,” but these terms are inapplicable to early Republican Chinese politics.

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the capacity for collective mobilization essential to evolutionary success. In contrast, Zhang’s insistence that accommodation can only make sense under conditions of disagreement reveals his own belief that individual acts of dissent, or “difference” (yi), are not only beneficial to but also constituent of the social coherence Liang and Sun want to promote. Only by “letting each person who has a different opinion find his own place, and not using force to interfere with that opinion” (ZQJ 147) can the incorporation into a state apparatus of the “intelligence and forces of talent [cai li] of every person in the country” as well as their “emotions, pains, and pleasures” be made possible: the balancing of differences, enacted as multiple diffuse negotiations, melds individuals together in a constitution and guarantees that they are respected (ZQJ 252).26 Further, these multiple accommodations are diffuse throughout society, rather than concentrated in elite hands; he expects everyone (ren ren), not just paragons of virtue, to undertake them. “My doctrine of accommodation does not expect a high degree of magnanimity in any one person; rather, it takes an important task and splits it up to the greatest extent possible, parceling out the responsibility to many people” (ZQJ 307). Zhang’s characterization of accommodation, as a widely diffused virtue that can be only imperfectly realized by any one person, means that its effects will not proceed smoothly. Rather, it is ongoing and mutual, disorganized and tentative. “Appreciation of differences” on the part of participants both initiates and smoothes – without completely paving over – this rocky path leading from what individuals want to what others demand. Individuals strive to “attain their own lot” in the process of “mutually seeing, mutually conceding, mutually asserting.” This heterodox approach to public life, in which the solitary activity of an assertion of difference is seen to have a multiplicity of effects, clarifies how and where Zhang sees difference working. Although these applications seem contradictory or mutually incompatible, I argue that they mark the rich dimensionality of Zhang’s reading of difference, 26

The he (harmony) component of tiaohe (accommodation) can sometimes connote this non-unitary but jaggedly aggregated mixing (see Angle, “Human Rights and Harmony”; Kwok, “Ho and T’ung”). For more discussion, see Appendix A.

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which belies the confinement of difference and accommodation to the “public” realm only. Zhang’s “accommodation” registers a series of balancing and counterbalancing acts in which ongoing disagreement rather than consensus marks political life, and each performance in the series potentially corresponds to different realms of engagement. The difference of political opinion, which we may call dissent, produces and takes place in civil society, parliamentary debate, and public opinion; the difference of personal characteristics, which we find operating in the use of talent and self-awareness, populates markets, local institutions, and administrative offices. Difference does not stop working there, however; the relationships between renzhi and fazhi that Zhang elaborates throughout his essays suggest how difference can go on to modify the very institutions it inhabits. Officeholding and essaywriting, for example, are powerful instruments of persuasion that can facilitate change as much as they can harbor difference. It is significant, however, that even as analytic a thinker as Zhang does not explicitly parse out these assertions of difference as separate events; in fact, he uses the same word (that is, yi) to describe them all. It could be that Zhang reads both political dissent and personal particularity as two sides of an identical phenomenon or action. The same act of accommodation appears on multiple registers at once – the personal, the social, and the political – which is precisely why Zhang can invoke it as a polity-building device in the absence of a clearly defined public space. That is, by successfully fighting one’s “wild nature” to “favor the same and hate the different,” one will necessarily be engaging in “mutual concessions and mutual assertion,” a process that contributes to crafting, and eventually to upholding, the principles of the constitution. For Zhang, all three processes are different aspects of the same act of “accommodation,” and happen simultaneously: one cannot do any one, Zhang believes, without doing them all. Personal processes are not the “civic virtues” that Connolly, or even liberals like George Kateb, reinscribe as politically significant for what they “bring to” or “inject into” the public sphere;27 rather, they are themselves intricately bound up with the performance of public space. Because the exercise of accommodation is or can be taken on personal, social, and political levels all at once and with the same action, the boundaries that delineate public “space” or particular public “actions” are undermined. 27

Connolly, Pluralism, 122, 125.

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These circular, networked balancing acts become constitutive of a certain kind of emergent rather than ready-made political community, in which unpredictable connections are made and differences asserted throughout society and within individuals. Registering difference in this emergent, multidimensional fashion has significant consequences for how (and, perhaps more importantly, where) Zhang theorizes “the public way” – bringing his theory into conflict once again with more commonly invoked definitions of “public” space. This time, the issue is not how or whether such actions taken singularly rather than in concert with others can be considered “political.” Rather, in the absence of public space, can such individualized actions truly make available, as Zhang insists they can, spaces for assertions of difference and contestation of imposed values?

The public and its problems For the theorists of public action I examined in Chapter 5, including Hanna Pitkin, Hannah Arendt, and Sheldon Wolin, the concept of the public marks off a domain of “political” action, defined as action uniquely capable of taking control of unintended consequences (what Pitkin calls “drift”). In that chapter, I attempted to show how individual actions can be meaningfully seen as political and important, because they intervene in sometimes equally efficacious ways without resort to the action in concert that for Pitkin, Arendt, and the others characterizes the public realm. In difference politics, however, a slightly different notion of “public” plays a major role for many theorists sensitive to the impositions of sameness or identity. Difference theorists such as Iris Young, Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe read inclusion and self-determination in public arenas as integral to effective resistance to conformity and normalization. Public space becomes a default position for many theorists of difference who struggle against the homogenizing universalism promoted by modern political projects, most prominently liberalism, and their arguments pose an important challenge to Zhang’s more diffuse blueprint for the “public way.” Grounded on the communicative potential of all persons, the public sphere as these theorists understand it is a broadly inclusive space of debate and contestation with fellow citizens. Only in the broad inclusivity of public space, Honig, Mouffe and Young argue, can claims to universality and impartiality be revealed as masking an

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inescapably subjective point of view whose partiality demands political intervention.28 The concern here is that the merely personal, private relations of “society,” besides being ineffective at mitigating what appear to these theorists as the most trenchant problems of living together, fail to vouchsafe to oppressed individuals and groups the space to negotiate and contest the sources of their oppression. Indeed, Young singles out such uncontested social relations as one factor in perpetuating injustice. Yet in banking so heavily on the potential benefit to social justice of politicization, the theorists examined here – much like the theorists of public action – erect or assume strict boundaries that predefine political (and, by extension, social and ethical) space as a way of dealing with conflict and difference. In her later work, Young distances herself from the explicitly circumscribed public realm upon which she relied earlier, arguing instead for a range of differentiated activities that, as elements of a broadly defined civil society, can disrupt hegemonic discourses by fostering association with others in similar circumstances.29 There remain, however, important differences between what she labels “private” and “political” civil associations, and the latter rely crucially on a public sphere. Following Jurgen Habermas, Young defends the ¨ circumscription such a spatial metaphor imposes on the idea of the public: The spatial metaphor helps distinguish public discourse and expression not only by content or import but as differently situated. The spatial metaphor also helps describe public discussion as a process which people enter and leave, but that it goes on even when some leave. The spatial metaphor, finally, enables the theory to say that a society has one continuous public sphere without reducing those who are “in” it to common attributes or interests.30

In addition to “spatially,” as Young describes it here, this area of the “public” has been differentiated by other theorists in two further ways, some of which are also implied in Young’s statement above: in terms of the unique kinds of action that take place there, or in terms of temporal parsing. Hannah Arendt is a prominent theorist of the 28 29

Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 119–121; Honig, Political Theory, 119–122. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 158–160. 30 Ibid., 170–171.

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first variety. To Arendt, speech and action distinguish the realm of the public; work and labor (the handmaidens to biological necessity) the private.31 Other theorists, whether or not they are ultimately satisfied with Arendt’s political theory, build on her description of the public as a realm of “appearance,” in which we act “in a common world” among others, to argue for the unique collective nature of action in public; it is only in public that problems are solved in a collective rather than individualized and personal way.32 Distinguishing the public realm temporally means that we cannot be in both public and private spaces at the same time. This notion is sometimes bound up with spatial metaphors. As Young seems to indicate, because we cannot be in both public and private spheres at the same time, the spaces do not overlap; we are either in one or the other and can “leave” one to go to the other. Although few theorists explicitly define the public sphere as delimited temporally, the dimension of time as well as space comes to the fore as an essential feature of the public space when compared with Zhang’s notion of the public way. For Zhang, accommodation is seen to happen on multiple registers at once, and the exercises taken on a “personal” register simultaneously affect, and are affected by, the intersubjective exercises of accommodation that are identified with polity-building. Hence the relationship between difference and public space is far more fraught in Zhang’s account than in those above, mainly because the acts of accommodation that comprise “the public way” exhibit no clear temporal, spatial, or action-based separation. Zhang expects citizens to exercise “accommodation” not episodically and deliberately in public fora but constantly, as a habit of everyday life. In the process, a broader spectrum of human experience is opened to the assertion of difference. This more open reading of difference throws light on what Zhang means by theorizing not a space for a “public,” but for a “public way.” The common enterprise that constitutes the constitution is best understood as a “path” (dao) or a “way of action” that entails activity and process on all levels, and has effects on all registers. This argument uses “sameness” and “difference” as conceptual tools to unsettle the idea that shared life and shared problems can presume an already constituted public, rather than at best strive to create one 31 32

Arendt, The Human Condition, 7, 24. E.g. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement.

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incrementally. Reading public space as something colonized rather than negotiated ex nihilo fails to capture the process-oriented nature of accommodation, which resists the imposition of any hegemonic norms – including those of publicity. Part of what distinguishes Zhang’s notion of difference, in both its deconstructive and its constructive aspects, may be its focus on the not-yet rather than the already-existing. Where agonistic or difference democrats seek to unsettle the sedimented and work from the problematization of constructed identities, Zhang uses the disturbing capacities of difference to reconstruct spaces for taking efficacious action. These constructive aspects distinguish Zhang’s work from that of William Connolly, who also articulates appreciation of differences – what Connolly calls “the ethos of pluralization” – on multiple intersecting levels, including the personal or “micropolitical” one. For Connolly, the key to the deterritorialization of the sovereign nation-state, and hence to an expanded assertion of disruptive difference, lies in “public spaces and points of reference through which issues can be defined and pressures for action can be organized,” as well as the construction of “governmental assemblages” defined by the intersection of constituencies.33 The assertion of politically efficacious difference ironically requires a public space to uncover and organize points of similarity between and amongst groups. A similar problem marks attempts to foster global civil society, in which issues like feminism are used as common, global rallying points to oppose local oppression. The central problem such activities face is not the creation of public space so much as its effective embodiment, which is frustrated by various political, technological, or geographic factors. The solution responds to the already-existing (in many cases, sedimented hierarchies or injustices) as a means of coalition-building, and does not grapple with the attempt to give meaning to, or motivate a desire for, public space in the first place.34 Zhang, in contrast, is asking a different question: how can distinct individuals within groups challenge, reject, or manipulate the orthopraxis of group life while maintaining the coherence of group life as such? In the case of federalism and local self-government, the question becomes further specified: how can individuals act upon local 33 34

Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, xx, 153. E.g. Ackerly, “Deliberative Democratic Theory.”

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contexts and reorient themselves to political action, without reducing their own differences (talents, opinions, backgrounds) to a false group unity? Zhang’s solution is that alliances and groups are themselves constituted by difference, but can be reconciled by exercises of accommodation. Difference, then, exists at the heart of all group life, rather than existing outside or in exception to it. By positing accommodation as a foundation of all politics, Zhang need not expect difference to dissolve at the level of the social movement or the political action group, such that agreement to address particular problems will suddenly make particularity or dissent less operative.35 Zhang’s rendering of the “public,” then, may be arguably more loyal to Connolly’s Foucault-inspired commitments to “micropolitics of action by the self on itself” as a means of fostering respect for differences than are Connolly’s own formulations.36 The public way is not assumed for the purpose of contesting public issues, nor is it the target to which personal efforts at pluralization are directed, so much as it is created in the processes by which an individual comes to “appreciate differences” through accommodation. This is a very different process than finding incidental similarities in others from which to build toward a shared goal of asserting difference vis-a-vis ` some already existing hegemonic entity. Zhang’s public way nowhere emerges in full form, least of all in some kind of hypothetical bound arena, and it never underwrites an assumption of conformity or even agreement for anything more than temporary purposes. Ultimately, participation in accommodation takes place by means of the relationships and struggles each individual undertakes. Reading the public way as constituted by difference all the way down again draws attention to the inadequacies of a public-private framework, this time demonstrating how that binary unnecessarily isolates, and therefore frustrates, the expression of difference. First, such divisions into public and private realms prevent difference theorists from thinking creatively about how the assertion of difference will work locally to give meaning and concrete application to the assertions made

35

36

Adam Tebble (“Does Inclusion Require Democracy?” 206–208) makes a similar critique of Iris Young’s work on difference, arguing that she puts forward a fluid and inclusive notion of group identity, but a rigid and exclusionary notion of group recognition and representation. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, xxi, 69.

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in “public.” That is, everyday practices of ethical decision-making and personal interaction are isolated from “true” assertions of difference, despite the fact that difference theorists widely recognize normalization processes at work in these spaces. Connolly’s book The Ethos of Pluralization has suggested valuable ways in which the self can foster creative distance from institutionalized disciplines of normalization to further the project of pluralization, but his point is to contest the notion of a unified self put forward by contemporary liberals, social scientists, and others. Zhang’s point, in contrast, is not a claim about the nature of self-identity so much as it is a claim about the political efficacy of personal action. His argument thus helps us see that by failing to examine the personal contours of accommodating and asserting difference, difference theorists endanger the exercises that make difference possible on the political register. Bonnie Honig, for example, revises Hannah Arendt’s definition of “private” to include all that which “occasions action” to preempt the “forces of closure” that coerce, rather than seek agreement with, other persons. In this way she hopes that “we might then be able to act – in the private realm” – to counteract instances of daily oppression based on criteria like class, gender, and race.37 Although Zhang does not specifically address such issues as class and gender, his notion of accommodation compares to Honig’s in that both seek “occasions for action” in multiple and diffuse arenas. Yet Honig gives no clear idea of what that action in “private” might look like, or how, once asserted, such action will reflect on the activities of other citizens. More troublingly, she never explains what constitutes a properly “public” action to begin with, if such action can take place in private. The courage and efficacy of these actions is undermined when their categorization as (merely) “private” denies them the broad, intersubjective value they ultimately offer. Moreover, presuming that the negotiation of difference and resistance to normalization can happen only in public space fixes the shapes difference can take, and threatens attempts to assert difference in other ways and on other registers. Contestation may replace transcendent or a priori, pre-political reasoning, but carries with it its own imposition of homogeneity – this time not of substance, but of method. The

37

Honig, Political Theory, 120–122.

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“absolute” that difference theorists seek to counteract is not evacuated, but simply reappears in the form (if not substance) of a politics that is inescapable, decisive, and beyond contestation. In other words, the major goal of these solutions to difference is not the creation of public space, but the colonization of a space that already exists under what are identified as oppressively hegemonic conditions.38 Some theorists, reacting to Hannah Arendt’s claim that issues like poverty and health care are not properly “political,” have pointed out that even contestations of public and private boundaries, or of what constitutes “the political,” themselves are political questions open to debate.39 But this response presupposes a broad, coherent, already existing space of contestation, supported by a ready definition of “politics” that proscribes as it describes. Their arguments are thus unable to countenance, as Zhang’s does, a less freighted (because more diffuse and uncertain) activity of incremental exchange among particular individuals that registers on multiple levels and does not necessarily assume a preestablished form.

A balancing democracy This fact of difference confines acts undertaken in “the public interest” to incremental actions rather than sweeping social reforms, remaining always dependent on the actions of individuals, rather than collectivities, to preserve and enlarge it. The “foundation of government,” then, is not an entity or an ideal but a process that acts on all levels to accommodate, tolerate, and assert difference. Because concessions and “yielding” are integral components of the process, the practice of accommodation gives citizens ever greater experience interacting as equals. Accommodation can be deliberately initiated with each act of fostering, appreciating, and negotiating with difference, without necessary recourse to long-standing habits that inculcate a particular culture amenable to such practice. 38

39

The point could also be made – though that is not my argument here – that public space is bound up with Western democratic development such that its export to foreign lands is deeply fraught; see Wakeman, “The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate,” for discussion. Honig, Political Theory, 121; Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy, 72–74.

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Zhang can be seen here as constructing a vision of democracy in which democracy is both a form of rule or governance, and also “an egalitarian constitution of cultural life that encourages people to participate in defining their own troubles and possibilities.”40 This is why Zhang argues, following Aristotle, that “we are all political animals,” and that we cannot be free of the influences of politics (ZQJ 179). His claim does not mean to politicize “private” life, or anything else; rather, he recognizes that the energies and differences manifest in these manifold activities are essentially the same. “These days everyone is saying, ‘I don’t talk about politics; it has nothing to do with me.’ But personal behavior does not transcend the scope of politics. This behavior most certainly has either a direct or indirect effect on the quality of government” (ZQJ 179). This democracy, however, cannot be described in any of the usual ways; it is neither unitary, deliberative, nor adversary. It is not adversary, because although it assumes that no common good exists, it does not turn for its effect on voting or other mechanisms of representation; moreover, the process of accommodation does not simply gather information, but requires give and take on the part of all participants, an action that potentially transforms them.41 Yet it is not deliberative democracy either, because it recognizes even the imposition of a particular form or space for political action as unacceptably homogenizing. The consensus expected to emerge from or to be worked toward in some forms of deliberative democracy, in addition, finds no analogue in the ongoing negotiations of accommodation. In fact, as I have pointed out in previous chapters, one of the central problematiques of Zhang’s political theory is precisely the lack of consensus on both goals and action, and the absence of shared practices conducive to free government, that marked the political environment of early Republican China. Rather, Zhang’s democracy (or at least the actions that begin to construct it) can be described as a “balanced” (or, even better, “balancing”) democracy. The “balance of forces” produced by accommodation does not reduce to a totalizing unity; this would simply be inserting “sameness” in place of the “difference” that Zhang celebrates. Rather, 40 41

Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 153. I take my definition of adversary democracy from Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, 15–17.

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Zhang insists that “no standard exists” for “sameness” and “difference,” indicating a disbelief that sameness can exist at all times for everyone. It also calls into question the possibility that the outcome of “accommodation” at the national level will ever be anything but a temporary imposition – a “forcing of conformity” (wei tong) onto a constantly shifting terrain of difference and disagreement. For this to occur, Zhang insists, there is only one “general rule that you must observe”: That is, opposing opinions must be legalized, because people’s opinions are not the same; and their feelings are even more different [from each other]. The best kind of rule is when mutual balancing and mutual concessions lead toward a common [gongtong] goal. Otherwise, any kind of submission [to an opinion] would presuppose a corresponding extension [of power]. When submission and extension do not reach a balance, then political phenomena become nonsensical. (ZQJ 461–462)

“Balancing” as a democratic ideal is not only pessimistic, however, and it promotes more than simply modus vivendi agreements. The most important outcome is not the fleeting balance established at any particular moment, but the performances from citizens that it evokes and the remainders – in the form of dissatisfaction – that it leaves aside. These benefits, ironically, emerge from some of accommodation’s negative consequences. Zhang brooks no illusions that accommodation will result in total satisfaction. In a world in which “everyone’s opinion is different,” no one will ever find total agreement on any issue among and across individuals.

Conclusion In contemporary Chinese political discourse, Zhang’s concept of accommodation or tiaohe is gaining increasing prominence. Seeking critical purchase on the Maoist revolutionary ideology that dominated Chinese political and social life from the 1950s, many mainland Chinese intellectuals have increasingly sought to identify and theorize social and political pluralism as a foundation for a more moderate politics. While ideas of more recent and foreign vintage, like Rawlsian liberalism and even fundamentalist Marxism, continue to shape these debates, many important resources for rethinking Maoism have come from earlier Chinese political and intellectual experiences,

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including noncanonical Chinese philosophies and Song and Ming-era neo-Confucianism. What has proven to be among the most fruitful troves for this kind of moderate political theory, however, is the so-called “accommodative” thought of Zhang and his colleagues, including Li Dazhao and Du Yaquan. Once lumped together with conservative “reactionaries,” these thinkers have been rehabilitated as progressive and enlightened theorists of modernity.42 The reading I have offered of Zhang’s idea of accommodation here contributes to this ongoing reassessment of Zhang, arguing for his relevance to the pressing “modern” issue of plurality prompted by the delegitimization of transcendental justifications for political community. Zhang’s political theory of difference draws from contemporary British thought and bears strong resemblance to current work in Euro-American academe on agonistic democracy and critical pluralism, making him well suited to theorizing issues of difference and identity formation brought to the fore as the Chinese negotiate their political and economic status in a globalized world. Equally important, however, is how Zhang’s notion of accommodation answers to a long-standing tension in Chinese thought between convention and the necessary spontaneity of moral action. The ragged and uncertain outcomes of accommodation allow individuals to become involved and effective on a genuine level by “melding together” with others, without at the same time “conforming” to what others do and thereby sacrificing the very thing that motivates and gives meaning to their participation. David Nivison articulates this tension as endemic to the dual emphases of Chinese imperial Confucianism. The Confucian ideal was of a superior, well-cultivated gentleman whose attention to “learning for himself” stood him apart from the vulgar values of society. At the same time, the Confucian duty to take office meant doing well in the civil examinations, but doing well in most cases meant “selling out” to rote memorization rather than acquiring real understanding 42

Gao, Tiaoshi de zhihui, 4–6. Many of those who are revisiting early Republican moderate thought have done so within the paradigm of “transformative” (zhuanhua) versus “accommodative” (tiaoshi) thinking. First formulated by Thomas Metzger in Escape from Predicament, this paradigm was given concrete application to late Qing and early Republican thought by the Taiwanese historian Huang Kewu in his study of Liang Qichao, Yige bei fangqi de xuanze.

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of morality or ethical action (the dao).43 The tensions of this paradox between creativity and conformity, or individuality and community, found expression first in Zhang’s call to “self-use talent,” discussed in the previous chapter. Accommodation is its necessary complement, to ensure that whatever emergent social balance is struck between disparate actors will always go on balancing, by being constantly confronted with dissent, particularity, and nay-saying – the “differences” that unsettle the at best lethargic, and at worst coercive, “sameness” that lurks beneath modus vivendi agreements. In so far as difference does have as one of its effects a recalibration of the political environment, Zhang’s elaboration of accommodation means to offer another resource for thinking about how we may give space over to individuals – rather than circumstances or institutions – to shape political life, without at the same time becoming vulnerable to the depredations of despotism or the falsehood of the completely unencumbered, atomized individual. Accommodation of those differences makes possible the attempt to navigate this rocky landscape of diffused, individualized power while still preserving the promise of noncoercive, self-motivated reform. 43

Nivison, “Protests of Convention,” 229–230.

Conclusion A return to beginnings

Zhang’s vision of social change described in the preceding chapters pivots around two major poles: institutions (conceptually identified in the early Republic as a fazhi, rule-by-law position) and people (renzhi, or “rule by man”). As I noted earlier, institutions were a major preoccupation of Zhang’s before 1914, but while writing and editing the journal The Tiger his interest turned more theoretical. In the period spanning 1914 to just before 1919, Zhang spends much less time explaining constitutional frameworks and parliamentary structure than he does explaining how those forms will interact with individuals to produce a free and stable Chinese republic. This leads to the second pole of his analysis, the role played by exemplary, talented individuals who foster change in the external world by initiating an internal process of “self-awareness.” He analogizes these self-aware persons to that of Mencius’ “great man straddling the world,” characterizing the effect of their actions as “lights in a room” and ascribing to them a force so potent that once their self-awareness is activated, “the work of the state is half-done” (ZQJ 515). Although his institutional design implies, not entirely incorrectly, a commitment to overtly Western models of governance, Zhang’s call to self-awareness gestures toward a model of social change more akin to neo-Confucian voluntarism and self-cultivation than to modern politics. Nowhere does Zhang appeal to mass consciousness or the large-scale social movements that occupied his contemporaries and that, in the form of collective action, continue to occupy many democratic theorists today. Although he does elaborate a mode of what he calls “accommodative” interaction between these individuals, the paradoxical picture Zhang seems to be sketching with these images is nevertheless that an individual’s internal decision to take action is ultimately what initiates and sustains change in the intersubjective, external world. Even the modalities and outlooks Zhang fosters are not typical civic virtues, in that they take being together with others in 226

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a particular, political way as a goal rather than as an assumed starting place. The way to solve large-scale social and political problems is through individual, rather than collective, effort. As Zhang insists, “making the political lies in persons.” In the preceding chapters, I attempted to explain how the various strands in Zhang’s argument – his insistence on the reciprocal relationships between institutions and individuals, the importance of dissent and idiosyncrasy in founding shared communities, and the dissolution of public and private as markers for political activity – challenge or rework a series of conceptual binaries that in both Chinese and Western thought have unduly constrained transformative activity. In this concluding chapter, I draw these strands together to illustrate an alternative model of political agency, one that connects human internal states to external activity by explaining how the former precipitate ever-widening transformations of political and social environments. The inner–outer axis upon which such action turns redeploys particular structural assumptions of Confucian political thought amid democratic possibility – elaborating a new model of action that can guide general theories of political agency (both “Western” and “Chinese”) without resort to public-private binaries that sometimes constrain action rather than inspiring it.

An inner–outer axis of action Zhang’s efforts to leverage the particular, the individual, and the internal (rather than the universal, the collective, and the external) to remedy political problems resemble closely what some commentators have identified as “the central theme of the Confucian [more precisely, perhaps, the Song–Ming neo-Confucian] tradition, namely the interaction between the internal and external, between particular and universal, and between moral self and metaphysical reality.”1 The locus classicus of this inner–outer relation and its political relevance is found in The Great Learning (Da xue), originally part of the Han-era Book of Rites (Li ji) but – along with the Doctrine of the Mean, discussed above – this subsection was extracted by Zhu Xi for neo-Confucian study in the eleventh century. The first chapter details the intimate links between self-cultivation and world-ordering: 1

Yao, “Preface,” xii.

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The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue to all-under-Heaven, first ordered their own states. Wishing to order their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things . . . from the Son of Heaven to the masses of people, all must consider the cultivation of the person as the root.2

Robert Hymes and Conrad Schirokauer, in their landmark volume on intellectual transitions in the Song dynasty, remark on the fruitful ambiguity of this passage for both Song and later intellectuals. Although Confucian scholars often enough interpreted the exhortations of the Great Learning as commands to eremitize and self-cultivate when political situations careened out of their immediate control, others throughout history interpreted this passage – and the meaning of Confucianism – in a more activist way. Hymes and Schirokauer note that more than one Song-era literatus, including Su Shi and Zhu Xi, interpreted the relationship between inner and outer as a positive, world-oriented one rather than a privatist, inner-oriented one. Although later neo-Confucians, especially during the Ming dynasty, deemed the heart-and-mind (xin) itself of paramount value, others were more sanguine about the role institutions and external order could play in the moral life of that mind, and vice versa. Their doctrines of statecraft (jingshi) held that internal strivings provided the inspiration and basis for positive political activism.3 For these Confucians, “self cultivation was never its own end.”4 Zhang’s political theory as discussed in this book offers a powerful and revealing interpretation of this neo-Confucian doctrine of social change. The pivot of transformation is not the Confucian sage, however, but self-aware individuals who act as “lights in a room.” These individuals are exemplars, who shine forth to condition and inspire, but not control, the actions of others and the wider patterns their mutual activity engenders. Zhang cites the following passage from

2 3 4

Translation modified from Legge, Confucian Analects, 357–359. Chang, “Jingshi sixiang shishi,” 7. Hymes and Schirokauer, Ordering the World, 22, 39.


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John Morley, to convince his readers that individual effort in propagating valuable ideas really can make a difference: A new idea does not spring up uncaused and by miracle. If it has come to me, there must be others to whom it has only just missed coming. If I have found my way to the light, there must be others groping after it very close in my neighborhood. My discovery is their goal. They are prepared to receive the new truth, which they were not prepared to find for themselves. The fact that the mass are not yet ready to receive, any more than to find, is no reason why the possessor of the new truth should run to hide under a bushel the candle which has been lighted for him. If the time has not come for them, at least it has come for him. No man can ever know whether his neighbours are ready for change or not. (ZQJ 255)5

This passage suggests the kind of self-work the individual truth-teller must do. Sustaining the bravery to make one’s mark on the world, even in the face of contrary opinions or widespread institutional impediments, requires a great deal of hard psychological work. In the process of mediating between empirical and normative authority, the selfaware individual produces influences on others that function “like a light in a room”: that means that to have effect on others, one does not act in concert with them, deliberate with them, or even negotiate with them, but enacts changes in oneself. Contra Morley’s expectations, Zhang’s self-aware individuals do not herald a convergence on truth; rather, they simply promise gradual, ever-widening ripples of transformation. These internal reorientations are foundational for building up momentum for regime change and for motivating the other two activities, accommodation and the self-use of talent. On its own, self-awareness affords not so much an aggregation of interests as a jaggedly cumulative resonance. Zhang adopts the language of Rousseau to describe a “general will” emerging from selfawareness, but revealingly he avoids the idea of a “common” or “public” will by altering the standard translation, from gongyi, a “public will”– used by Liang Qichao in his seminal discussion of Rousseau – to zongyi, “aggregated wills” (ZQJ 512). “Like grains of sand,” these efforts “mutually accumulate” (ZQJ IV, 6). Using the metaphor of sand to describe these efforts is most likely a deliberate involution of 5

Zhang is citing the fifth chapter of Morley’s On Compromise, “The Realisation of Opinion” (143–144).

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Sun Yat-sen’s famous condemnation of Chinese individualism. Where Sun saw the Chinese people as a “sheet of loose sand” unable to come together as a unified nation, Zhang sees these discrete grains of sand as constitutive components of successful community-building. In contrast to self-awareness, which is ultimately an internal exercise, the self-use of talent is an outwardly oriented activity, which engages directly the material impediments to transformation of the world. Selfuse urges talented individuals to find their own place for themselves, in the process demanding an intense refashioning of local environments so as to enable this new fit. These activities in turn create new contexts for the action of oneself and others to take place. Zhang is pointing out the importance of broadening our targets of action to include the local environments (including our own selves) that change as a result of our self-aware resolve. To overcome our paralysis at the overwhelming and sometimes tragic consequences of our and others’ collective actions – whether those consequences be social, political or economic – Zhang offers hope that individual activities will make a difference to those larger social problems that seem intractable to our immediate control. Only by discovering or, better, creating a place for your “shreds” of talent can “intelligence, courage, critique, and strength each come to find its place” (ZQJ 17). These characteristics of self-use make it unequivocally clear that with “talent” Zhang is talking about individual actions rather than collective ones. In Chapter 7 I explained how talent alludes to a long social history in China that marks the concept as a site of disruption and difference. When Zhang articulates “the self-use of talent” as a “foundation of government,” he enshrines particularity and diffuse self-application as the basis of his politics of difference. Unlike other categories like class, race, or gender that animate most contemporary Western difference theories, Zhang’s category of “talent” is not a group-based property. Talent rather varies from individual to individual, and perhaps for this reason Zhang characterizes it as a quality only the individuals themselves can know best how to apply. The “self-use of talent” acknowledges that talent garners meaning and context only from the contingent, local circumstances of individuals, not the top-down commands of a political center. Accommodation, the third activity Zhang identifies, is oriented simultaneously toward both the internal and the external world: as a reflective device it helps individuals gauge to what extent their


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visions can reshape collective reality, and also to what extent they must revise their plans, work up resolve, or engage in the kind of internal retrenchments that can abide ugly realities without being consumed by them. Accommodation of differences, as Zhang describes it, is a fruitful exploitation of the tension between individual striving and social/political order: by refusing to “favor the same and hate the different,” the accommodating individual is exposed to a new order of difference and otherness. This contact with others uncovers information about the limits of his or her individual capabilities, even as it enables action across persons by forging alliances that do not presume totalizing commonality between participants. Accommodation somewhat resembles the virtue, or de, that for imperial literati motivated both personal and cosmological transformations, because it proscribes (minimal) moral criteria before such changes can take place. As I discussed above in Chapter 8, however, accommodation does not replicate the monistic content of imperial de. The “sages” (or self-aware individuals) who propagate and practice it do so as a means, rather than an end; accommodation makes possible a basic structure for discussion and debate without prescribing its specific content. It posits modes of interchange that take place without appeal to a normalizing universalism – indeed, they uncover their own regulatory principles in the process. For this reason, it can deal productively with the unpredictability of individuals “unregulated” by a substantive shared morality. At the same time, as we have seen, the inevitable compromises that result from action together with others generate productive discontent. Zhang pictures this discontent as feeding into the personal resolve that is the motor of all social change. Accommodation thus foregrounds good judgment as an important part of political action: one must be able to discern when one’s ideas will matter and be meaningful, but if they are not, one must also know what to do until they are. What Zhang gestures toward here is a system in which individual actions affect not only others, but also the environment within which others act and make decisions. Part of the problem with reforming Chinese politics, Zhang believes, lies in the environmental factors created by human activity: most prominently, “favoring the same and hating the different” creates disincentives for others to join government. These factors partly determine individual behavior, and that can sometimes override well-meaning attempts to use the institutional apparatus as

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established (ZQJ 4). In other words, Zhang recognizes that people affect not only themselves and others, but also their environments (jing). “People and their environments are counterposed [xiang dui], and it is only exceptional individuals who can overcome this environmental [influence]” (ZQJ IV, 5). Despite this admitted reliance on exceptional individuals, Zhang’s theory depends just as significantly on lesser talents. Recognizing that the responsibility for founding extends all the way to the “commoners” (pifu), and indeed turns on their increasing self-awareness, Zhang believes even tertiary abilities have something to contribute (e.g., ZQJ 307). All three activities show that Zhang’s model of action takes self– other relationships into account, and certainly reads them as fundamental components of political reality, but does not turn on them. These activities are simply not of the kind suited specifically to “public” management: the judgments and motivations they involve are irreducibly personal and cannot be externally prompted. To Zhang, overcoming those environments that “restrict, agitate, constrain and run [you] amok” can only be done with a clear sense of the “true self” (zhen wo) that engages the world rather than running from it in fear or frustration (ZQJ IV, 3–5). Leveraging the dynamic of inner and outer, this “true self” can provide an alternative platform for action. As with reformers in the early Song dynasty, the emphasis on internalization and self-cultivation frees Zhang’s actors from the constraints of their historical past and allows them to envision new institutions to complement their internal inspiration.6 Of course, Zhang does not seem to think that these personal efforts at cultivation and awareness can smoothly “bring peace to all-underHeaven” as they do in the Doctrine of the Mean; rather, they are a constant striving to overcome both an unpleasing reality and one’s own aversion to difference. These efforts are thus imperfect, and rooted in unpredictable, diffuse actions uncoordinated by any shared understanding. The outcomes of such negotiations are not convergent, but emergent: they cannot be known or predicted a priori. These characteristics lead Zhang to formulate solutions to the problems of founding broached neither by neo-Confucian cosmology nor by contemporary democratic theory, even as he uses their premises to see new potential for otherwise neglected realms of thought and action. 6

Hymes and Schirokauer, Ordering the World, 22.


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Toward the development of (a) Chinese political theory The more nuanced position on the relationship between individuals and political institutions, public and private, and self and community that Zhang elaborates can, I hope, contribute both to intellectual historiography of the Republican period, and to contemporary Western theories of political action and democracy. Intellectual historians have often sought to comprehend late Qing and early Republican thought by way of Eurocentric yardsticks, and as a result its rich insights have often been identified only in terms of these more “developed” Western theories. This impulse has led to conclusions that thinkers such as Yan Fu “deformed” liberalism and missed its point, or that Liang Qichao’s interpretation of the mutual interaction of persons and their environments was “confused, ill-defined, and analytically worthless.”7 More recent historians shuttle Qing and Republican thinkers into the foreign categories of “classical liberalism” or “civic republicanism,” staking their positions along the dualistic line of individual versus collective (or state) interest.8 These labels fail to capture the more nuanced categories assumed, and sometimes explicitly theorized by, the historians’ own subjects of research. Zhang’s model, for example, points out one way in which individually motivated political participation and the promotion of a common good are not necessarily opposed goals, but not because they embody a distinctly liberal or civic republican sensibility.9 Rather, they point to two poles of a united axis, largely derived (in my analysis) from neo-Confucian presumptions about the relationship of an individual’s internal state to her potential for external transformation. Motivated by her self-awareness to find outlets for her talent yet regulated by the principles of accommodation, these diffuse pivots of transformation incrementally construct not an imperial bureaucracy but an emergent democratic political order. By defending Zhang’s inner–outer axis of action as a compelling contribution to political theory yet irreducible to the Western ideas he imported, I join intellectual historians such as 7 8 9

Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power, 240–241; Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 105. E.g. Grieder, Hu Shih; Yue, “Yizhi xifang minzhu zhengzhi”; Culp, Articulating Citizenship, 104–106; Nathan, Chinese Democracy, 113. Weston, for example, in “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community,” 267, attributes Zhang’s views on this issue to his liberal stance.

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Chang Hao, Huang Kewu and Lam Kaiyin that treat late Qing and early Republican political theory as an intelligible (if still fraught) repository of often interconnected arguments that do not embody “-isms” so much as respond to pressing dilemmas and fundamental political questions.10 Striving to capture the theoretical richness of late Qing and early Republican thought in more nuanced ways will also show the value of Chinese thought lying beyond canonical Confucian texts, opening important new avenues for political theorists to explore political thought outside their discipline’s Euro-American focus. As the first to interpret those categories and institutions of Euro-American origin that now, for better or worse, dominate global vocabulary, thinkers of this era contribute directly to political theorizations articulated all over the postcolonial and globalized contemporary world. At the same time, as participants in a discussion exhibiting remarkable continuity with its “traditional” past, and in a region never colonized by European powers, they and their inheritors resist the presumption that political thought in the contemporary world must rest always on Europeanized categories. As Zhang and his interlocutors have demonstrated, Chinese thought remains a vital source not only of cultural values but also of categories of analysis, paths of inquiry, and potential solutions to still-unresolved dilemmas – even those brought on by the specific demands of imported zhengti, including democracy. In the introduction to this book, I explained my resistance to comparative political theory, on the basis that comparison precludes treating non-Western thought as a domain of theorizing compelling to “us” as much as to “them.” Accordingly, I have attempted to treat Zhang as more than a mere conversational partner, allowing his work to offer more than simply an incitement to self-reflection. Zhang, his interlocutors, and generations of intervening Chinese commentators constitute communities of reflective argument that have decisively shaped my own inquiry, aligning it as much along indigenous, “internal logics” (neizai lilu) as along foreign ones.11 Whether by exploring the 10 11

Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis; Huang, Ziyou de suoyiran; Lam, “Yan Fu yu Zhang Shizhao.” On the role of these internal and external “logics” in Chinese intellectual history see Yu, “Qing dai sixiang shi,” 187 et passim.


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categorical valence of “rule by man” versus “rule by law,” or by articulating the socio-structural assumptions behind late imperial neoConfucianism, these scholars have suggested new conceptual frames for thinking about political life in their place and ours. My approach takes further cues from Zhang’s own blending of indigenous and foreign resources in the contentious intellectual atmosphere of the early Republic, which does more than simply provide a Chinese perspective on democracy, stage a cross-cultural conversation with selected Western interlocutors, or claim – as “Asian values” literature does – that there are normatively justifiable differences between Chinese and Western political perspectives. Zhang’s work in The Tiger is ultimately focused not on rendering foreign ideas intelligible as a means of including them within an existing conversation, so much as on the actual adaptation of foreign practices. Accordingly, his contribution to cross-cultural theorizing is far more complex. As I explained in Chapter 3, he realizes that constitutional democracy presents particular dilemmas of political action that cannot assume the existence of particular foundational beliefs or practices. He therefore suggests that the lack of cultural precedence for certain ideas, institutions, and practices can be fruitfully interpreted as a problem of founding, of communities as well as governments. Doing more than merely “translating” ideas from one discourse into another, Zhang joins his contemporaries in thinking seriously about how foreign ways of life can discipline or supplant domestic practice. His ultimate theoretical response to this dilemma, I hope, demonstrates the value of Chinese thought even to those who may have no particular interest in China. Without the particular lenses he, and the traditions of thought circulating around him, offer, these issues of founding and action would likely go unexplored. Zhang’s most prominent contribution, and the one that stands in starkest contrast to the Western theories I have examined in this book, is his unexpected location of the political. In breaking down (or, more precisely, not countenancing) the public/private divide, Zhang lowers the threshold for “political” activity, making it at once less imposing and less isolated from other life activity. He turns our attention to the wide range of transformative individual actions that are taken neither in deliberate concert with others nor completely independently of them, and demonstrates how they can be rendered meaningful and efficacious beyond

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their local settings. Unlike the structurally similar “micropolitics” of William Connolly, or Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari,12 Zhang’s political theory begins with incremental individual actions primarily as a way of building and creating the yet-to-be, not unsettling or resisting the already-there. In doing so, he shows how individual decisions to begin ordering the world can actually leverage a far greater power for change than many collective-action accounts maintain. Zhang’s theory thus shows us that it need not always be the case that “private, isolated acts will make no difference,” or are by definition always “directed toward private, partial goals,” as Hanna Pitkin, among others, insists.13 Believing this as an empirical truth traps the individual into thinking that he or she cannot take action independently of his or her peers, even when historically it has often been the case that exceptional individuals are the vanguard of new movements that only much later incite popular allegiance.14 In elaborating how self-awareness, the self-use of talent, and the practice of accommodation transform individuals from passive victims of fate to effective participants in crafting the environment in which they find themselves, Zhang’s theory draws attention to heretofore neglected capacities of individuals and in doing so adds to the repertoire of noncoercive techniques that can change wider reality. Parsing human action in an alternative way, as Zhang helps us do, is the first step toward altering the individual awareness that Zhang believes can and will build a better society. 12

13 14

Connolly, Pluralism; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. As Jane Bennett (Thoreau’s Nature, 98) explains in the case of the latter, they aim for a “deterritorialization” of those existing practices of late Western modernity, in the face of a “reterritorialization” that “more or less takes care of itself.” Pitkin, “Justice,” 344. As Friedrich Hayek points out (The Constitution of Liberty, 110), “New views must appear somewhere before they can become majority views. There is no experience of society which is not first the experience of a few individuals . . . [I]t is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.”

Appendix A Notes on translated terms

If modern Chinese thought is to become accessible to a global audience of conventional political theorists and philosophers, and recognized more widely as a rich, nuanced, and diverse repository of compelling theoretical resources, scholars must recognize its terms as suitable for extended theoretical as much as historical analysis. In this vein, I offer below some explanations for my own translations of key terms in Zhang’s work, hoping that these explanations can serve as glosses for an emerging cross-traditions vocabulary – which, in the Chinese/Euro-American case, Zhang himself helped to develop. Some of the translations have general application to all instances where the original Chinese term appears; others are keyed to Zhang’s specific arguments, in which he invented or sought to influence the deployment of specific terms in early Republican political discourse. I have tried to indicate as accurately as possible the meaning of these terms, without narrowing their scope so radically that their more general theoretical applications are obscured. Indeed, the very theoretical ambition of Zhang’s work requires that even those words with uncontroversial meanings in everyday talk, such as ren or tiaohe, be given special treatment as terms of art. The reader should also keep in mind that Chinese has no plural constructions or verb conjugations, and that many Chinese words can function as different parts of speech (e.g. verb, noun, and adjective) depending on their placement within a sentence. This is especially true of the classical Chinese in which Zhang wrote.

fazhi ⊩⊏, “rule by law” In his widely influential and still-authoritative book History of PreQin Political Thought (Xian Qin zhengzhi sixiang), perhaps circulated sometime before 1911, Liang Qichao invokes the terms fazhi and renzhi to describe the characteristics of various Warring States 237

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philosophies and to distinguish them from one another. He did not invent these terms, but they are pervasive in early Republican and later Chinese political thinking.1 At present, fazhi and its related terms stand at the center of a vigorous current debate over the possibility of “rule of law” in an increasingly capitalist China.2 The word is a combination of two characters, fa (“law,” “standard”) and zhi (“to rule, to order”). In this book I argue that, in the early Republican and earlier periods, fazhi indicates a general belief that institutions rather than virtuous people most directly influence political and social order. Here fa/law is taken in the broader sense of “social and political standards,” related to its historically prior meaning of “norms, model,” rather than in the narrower, more particular sense of positive laws. Chad Hansen has argued that, in early Chinese thought, “laws” in the sense of penal statutes (xing) were originally only instances of fa, not its constitutive referents. Fa indicated nonsubjective models or standards that (for their greatest proponents, the so-called “Legalists”) publicly delineated rewards as much as punishments, professional standards as much as positive laws.3 The idea of fazhi, then, does not point directly or unproblematically to what many have assumed is its literal English translation, “rule by laws (i.e. statutes).” Fa as “law” here points to external, publicly accessible standard(s), counterposed to subjective, intuitive standard(s) accessible only to particularly well-cultivated individuals (i.e. the ren of renzhi, a position often associated with Confucians in contrast to Legalists). Historical usages of fazhi, in texts such as the Yanzi chunqiu and the Huainanzi, dating from several centuries before the common era, bear this reading out. Perhaps “rule by external standards” would be a better translation for fazhi, but I retain the more conventional translation, for two reasons. First, “law” in English does convey some notion of general or external standard, such as in the expression “laws of the land” which points to unwritten conventions as much as written constitutions. Second, and more importantly, “rule by law” signals more clearly the connection of my fazhi discussion to contemporary debates, which see the term as linked closely to “rule of law” on the basis of some 1 2 3

See Xiao, Zhongguo zhengzhi sixiang, 23–24. E.g. Fazhi yu renzhi; Peerenboom, China’s Long March; Shen, “Conceptions and Receptions of Legality.” Hansen, “Fa (standards: laws),” 471.

Notes on translated terms

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historical and contemporary usages.4 By choosing to translate fazhi as rule by law rather than rule of law, I am not rejecting its potential relevance to the latter so much as indicating that fazhi (and its paired opposite, renzhi, q.v.) is an essentially contested term. It possesses an indigenous theoretical capacity that is independent of this more recent debate, even if it can fruitfully inform it. By locating the term within a long-standing indigenous discussion, however, my analysis demonstrates its role in ongoing Chinese discussion over the sources of political and social transformation (which is more efficacious – external standards or intuitive, spontaneous ones?) rather than merely legitimating legal restraints or authority. These older, more indigenous usages remain relevant to, and are frequently invoked in, contemporary Chinese debate independently of their association with rule-of-law discourse.5 Fazhi as rule by law should not be confused with its homonym, fazhi (⊩ࠊ), which points specifically to legal institutions themselves, rather than to the conceptual and normative question of how to employ them.

gongdao ݀䘧, “the public way” In Chapter 8, I defend a reading of Zhang’s “public way” as “the engagement with accommodation by everyone in society, though it may not entail all of them acting together.” In my view, the term is best not rendered as “justice,” the English term with which Zhang sometimes conflates it (ZQJ 60–62). It is worth noting that Zhang suggests this idea of “public way” as an alternative to what Liang Qichao and Zhang Dongsun put forward as translations of the English term “justice,” a term for which Zhang uses the transliteration zha si ti si. The broad disagreements between these three thinkers about the meaning of the term suggests its newness as a discrete topic of Chinese political discourse, in contrast to Western political theory which takes it as foundational of political life. Moreover, although justice is a term that for many of the theorists examined above organizes and legitimates the assertions of difference, Zhang resists 4

5

Randall Peerenboom (“Varieties of Rule of Law,” 2) defines rule of law basically as “a system in which law is able to impose meaningful restraints on the state and individual members of the ruling elite.” Jenco, “‘Rule by Man’ and ‘Rule by Law.’”

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it as itself a process of normalization. The “public way,” in my view, better identifies the process of public formation (and contestation) that Zhang envisions as ongoing and dynamic. Another viable translation for the term would be “process of generalization,” in that Zhang expects a series of (often non-public or socalled “private”) accommodations to continuously widen the scope for and of political activity. Although this translation captures the basic meaning of the term, it fails to connect gongdao in an obvious way to contemporary discourses on gong and si, in which Zhang deliberately and self-consciously intervened. The “public way” translation better signals this linguistic relationship, without which Zhang’s attempt to ground the public in private action, and indeed to challenge the boundaries between those two spheres, would lose its subversive thrust.

guo ೟, “polity” Originally meaning “state,” the meaning of guo was heavily debated by elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the authority of the Qing dynasty was increasingly called into question by new theories of nationalism and democracy. Many of these elites also drew from the work of Ming–Qing transition literati Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu, whose loyalty to the defeated Ming dynasty in the seventeenth century spurred them to question the foundations of political community, and to identify the constituents of the guo as the people (min) rather than the dynasty (chao dai) or ruler (junzhu). Given this shift in perspective, one obvious translation for this term in the early Republican period would be “nation.” Unless the context or accompanying words (such as min, to produce the word min guo) suggest an unambiguously nationalist reading, however, I use the broader terms “polity” to translate the term where it appears in Zhang’s work. I do this for several reasons. However much Zhang and his contemporaries may have assumed a nationalist background for their political theorizing, little of Zhang’s work in The Tiger speaks necessarily or exclusively to nationalism. Although Zhang’s earlier work does frame revolution and reform in nationalist, Hanversus-Manchu terms, I argue in this book that the Tiger essays offer a theory about community-building in general. As he argues in “The State and the Self,” “banishing the oppressors of another nation [i.e. the Manchus] is exactly the same as overturning usurpers who


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are of our same nationality,” namely Yuan Shikai (ZQJ 514). His point is that nationalism should neither decide the membership of the regime nor legitimate its ruler; these questions are determined by principled argument and political practice rather than ethnicity. To translate guo as “nation,” then, would interpret Zhang’s vision for China’s emerging political existence too narrowly, and unduly obscure its contribution to ongoing, diverse debates in liberal, democratic, and New Confucian thought about the meaning and membership of political community. “Polity” captures better than does “nation” Zhang’s arguments for a consensual, participatory republic, constituted by a self-aware populace intervening as individuals or as groups into their shared fate rather than by some putative a priori communal identity.

li guo ゟ೟, “founding” or “polity-founding” Given the presence of guo in this phrase, a frequent translation of this term is “nation-building” (see above under guo). For reasons already given above, I resist translating guo as “nation” so as to reveal what I take to be Zhang’s broader purposes in the Tiger essays, namely to construct a general theory of community-building with applications beyond nationalism. Further, the li of this phrase means to “found,” “establish,” or “plant”; nation- or state-building, in contrast, implies an architectural metaphor of construction, as in the phrase jian guo (jian meaning “to build” or “to construct”). Zhang’s preoccupation with founding, argued for in detail in Chapter 3 and throughout this book, further encourages a more political-theoretical reading of li guo as “founding” or “to found.”

ren Ҏ, “persons” or “individuals” My translation of ren as “person” or “persons” is relatively uncontroversial, but my emphasis (via Zhang) on what I call their individuality is not. As I have tried to make clear in various places in the book, however, I do not see Zhang’s persons as autonomous and unencumbered, so much as embedded within networks of relationships that ensure the efficacy and relevance of their individualized actions and talents. It would be more accurate to say that the individuality of these ren lies not in their rugged independence from all others, but

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in their irreducible uniqueness. Sor Hoon Tan’s description of individuals within classical Confucianism aptly captures this distinction: “The value of a unique individual lies in its character as a single and unsubstitutable particular. This uniqueness is defined contextually, in terms of one’s contribution to the character of one’s natural and social environment as well as the environment’s contribution to oneself. Access to and development of the uniqueness in an individual is through these unique relationships.”6

I should note, however, that although Tan and others have subtly elaborated the ontological status of “persons” with respect to their ethical and political roles in various Confucian contexts,7 I neither make nor imply claims about such ontological status. The political theory advanced in this book values individual persons and their unique capacities (such as individualized talent and each individual’s perspicacity in employing it) only with respect to their role in political founding and action. There did exist a contemporaneous coinage, geren, which pointed unambiguously to individuals rather than mere persons/ren – as in Du Yaquan’s 1914 essay “Individual Reform” (“Geren zhi gaige”) discussed in Chapter 4 – but Zhang nowhere to my knowledge invokes this new term. I presume this is because he wrote in refined classical Chinese and could adequately articulate his notion of individualism by redeploying classical terms, such as wo, ren, and ji, without relying on this rather vernacular term.

renzhi Ҏ⊏, “rule by man” I have retained this idiomatic, albeit gendered, translation because it is so often used to translate renzhi in contemporary legal studies of China.8 It should nevertheless be understood in its broad, ungendered sense of “rule (zhi) by persons (ren; q.v.),” which is a translation I sometimes invoke to underscore the role played by all ranks of individuals in Zhang’s transformative politics. It can be noted here that although gender politics play little direct role in the Tiger essays, 6 7 8

Tan, Confucian Democracy, 25. E.g. Elvin, “Between the Earth and Heaven”; Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 23–43. E.g. the contributions to Turner, Feinerman, and Guy, Limits of the Rule of Law; Cao, Chinese Law, 42.


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feminism gained considerable ground during the late Qing and early Republic under the leadership of women such as Qiu Jin. Like many of his colleagues, Zhang himself promoted the education of women and taught at a girls’ school for a time while in Japan. His own wife, Wu Ruonan, was among the most progressive and politically active women in China, and played a major role in Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance. Zhang also advocated the abolishment of certain discriminatory practices such as footbinding and concubinage, and even adopted and raised the daughter of a client of his law practice when her parents could not agree on custody. It is therefore not much of a stretch to infer that Zhang would welcome, and may even have assumed, “rule by woman” as much as “rule by man”; in any case, I believe his arguments can easily accommodate non-masculinist notions of political agency.

tiaohe 䂓੠, “accommodation” This term appears throughout Zhang’s work, and not only in the essays I examine in this book. Zhang advises tiaohe to manage the tensions arising variously between political opposition parties, between diverse political opinions, and between old and new.9 In the Tiger essays, however, his use is more specific. Most prominently, in his essay “Accommodation as Founding,” Zhang uses tiaohe to translate “compromise” when he refers to the pamphlet On Compromise by the English journalist John Morley. In that pamphlet, Morley sets out to explain why political compromises need not threaten a commitment to rational truth. As Chapter 8 makes clear, however, neither Zhang’s use of Morley’s work nor Zhang’s broader use of the term tiaohe corresponds to the word “compromise” (in contemporary Chinese, tuoxie) as Morley rather narrowly uses it. This poor fit has led the Chinese scholar Guo Huaqing to suggest a variety of other English words for the term, including “accommodation,” “toleration,” and “harmonization of opposites.”10 Further, emerging research on reformist over 9

E.g. the 1912 essay “Hui dang zao dang” (ZQJ II, 441); the 1914 essay “Tiaohe liguo lun” (ZQJ 251–280); and the 1918 essay “Jinhua yu tiaohe” (ZQJ IV, 102–105) respectively. 10 Guo, Kuanrong yu tuoxie, 79–85; Zou, “Zhang Shizhao ‘Jiayin’ shiqi ziyouzhuyi,” 113–120, suggests a similar range of meanings.

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revolutionary responses to China’s political crises, such as that of Gao Like, has associated Zhang and his colleagues with an “accommodative” (tiaoshi) versus abruptly and coercively “transformative” (zhuanhua) set of political strategies.11 I have chosen “accommodation” (despite its sometimes pejorative connotations) as my translation of tiaohe because of all the available options I believe it best expresses Zhang’s meaning in the Tiger essays, namely the peaceful, non-assimilative negotiation of differences between two or more putatively equal parties. “Toleration” is not suitable, for two reasons. Not only would it unduly imply a liberal argument for religious pluralism irrelevant to the syncretism of much Chinese religious life, but it would also imply (as Wendy Brown has pointed out) an aversion to difference that both degrades and depoliticizes it.12 Zhang would find either implication inimical to the entry of diverse political opinions and social classes into political life. The English translation “harmonization” is less easily dismissed, especially given that half of the term tiaohe is he, “harmony.” Stephen Angle points out that historically and conceptually, the term he/harmony in Chinese thought does not necessarily imply unity or conformity, but rather promotes “an organic interconnectedness based in our complementary differences.”13 Guo links the term to ideas of “balance” and “harmony” found in both the ancient Book of Changes (Yijing) and the Doctrine of the Mean, and he traces Zhang’s conceptualization to these sources as well as to John Stuart Mill, James Bryce, and Leonard Hobhouse.14 Defined in this way, he seems to have much in common with tiaohe, and complements its other component, tiao – evolved from a term originally indicating a matching up of equal elements, eventually being used to mean “culinary seasoning.”15 To me these expositions of he do not recommend “harmony” or “harmonization” as a translation for tiaohe, so much as they demonstrate Zhang’s indebtedness to, or at least resonance with, Chinese metaphysical principles of sameness and difference. Even granting that the Chinese concept of he can be both dynamic and capable 11 12 13 14 15

Gao, “Minchu tiaohe sichao shulun”; Tiaoshi de zhihui, 4, 187–188. Brown, Regulating Aversion, 14–15. Angle, “Human Rights and Harmony,” 79. Guo, Kuanrong yu tuoxie, 92–100, 105–130. Ibid., 57.


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of capturing differences without reducing them to unity (tong), the English terms “harmony” or “harmonization” remain unsuitable as translations for tiaohe. The Oxford English Dictionary lists as its first definition for “harmony” the “combination or adaptation of parts, elements, or related things, so as to form a consistent and orderly whole; agreement, accord, congruity.” While harmony does sometimes connote a pleasing mixture of elements without reduction to “orderliness” in the political sense, I do not think its emphasis on consistency and order – portrayed in this definition as the consequences of a deliberate, top-down design – properly conveys tiaohe’s emphasis on difference, ongoing contestation, emergent rather than planned order, and political and personal opposition that “balances” rather than harmonizes.16 And in practice, I think the OED’s definition is accurate: appeals to social or family harmony too often excuse the suppression of dissent, idiosyncrasy, and “boat-rocking.” In most if not all cases, harmony implies an ultimate telos, rather than encouraging an open-ended process of negotiation – and these connotations sometimes extend to the Chinese term he as well. The philosopher Deng Honglei has argued that in some Warring States texts, such as the Xunzi, he points to a distinct telos of appropriateness (yi) delineated by the rites.17 Compare also an even earlier use of he: in the excavated manuscript Cao Mo zhi zhen (Cao Mo’s Battle Formations), dating from the fourth century BCE, for example, fostering he in the state as well as in military encampments is explicitly linked to the hierarchical leadership meant to facilitate group coordination and control.18 Thus “harmony,” while not completely inaccurate as a translation, would in my view unduly imply the ultimate assimilation of difference rather than celebrate what Li Miaogen, in reference to Zhang’s work, calls its “appreciation” (shang).19 Accommodation, defined as a “process of being accommodated; of fitting, adapting, adjusting, suiting; adaptation, adjustment,”seems a bit better.20 16

17 18 19 20

Wood (Limits to Autocracy, 175) situates harmony in explicit contrast to balancing as a metaphor for socio-political order: harmony “would issue forth in a political community in which all parts fit together perfectly.” Deng, “Hexie lilun,” 62. Cf. Guo, Kuanrong yu Tuoxie, 13, 76–77. Chen and Ji, Shanghai bowuguan cang, 144–145. For discussion, see Caldwell, “Defining Leadership,” 23–24. Li, Weizheng shangyi lun. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. online, s.v. “accommodation”.

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wei zheng ⚎ᬓ, “to make the political” Taken separately, wei means “to do” or “to make,” and zheng means “politics,” “political institutions” or “government.” The combination of the two characters appears in early texts, most prominently Lunyu (The Analects of Confucius), as well as the Great Learning. I translate the combined phrase wei zheng as “to make the political,” rather than the perhaps more intuitive choice of “to do or participate in politics,” for several reasons. Wei, meaning “to make” (zaozuo), has a well-established historical pedigree, with examples going back to the Shujing (Book of Documents). This gloss on wei to form wei zheng makes particular sense given Zhang’s historical and intellectual context. Facing the imminent collapse of the Republican system, “making” was much more on the agenda than “participating.” Simply “doing politics” or “participating in politics” would seem nonsensical to Zhang and his contemporaries as they effectively had no functional, explicitly political institutions in which to participate – hence Zhang’s fundamental dilemma. Just as importantly, the unconventional political practices Zhang recommends widen the spaces of politics to include personal orientations such as self-awareness and everyday activities (including the self-use of talent), without explicit connections to political institutions as such. These activities mean to bring political community into being, not assume its existence by participating in it. Finally, historical precedents also suggest that wei zheng cannot be reduced simply to “participating in politics” in the modern, political-science sense. Consider this translated statement by Confucius in Analects 2.21: “In being a filial son and a good brother one is already ‘taking part in government’ [wei zheng]. What need is there, then, to speak of ‘participating in government’ [wei zheng]?”21 The translator of this passage translates wei zheng differently in the two places it is used, recognizing that filiality – that is, deference to one’s parents and older brother – is not usually considered “participating in government” in the formalist sense. A long tradition of classical and neo-Confucian interpretation of this passage does, however, see such “personal” behavior as constitutive of a healthy, functioning polity. In fact, the formative neo-Confucian Zhu Xi invokes 21

Analects 2.21; here I use the translation from Slingerland, Confucius Analects, 15. Cf. D.C. Lau’s similar translation (The Analects, 66).


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wei zheng to make the same point Zhang does: that political leaders and state apparatus alone were neither effective nor authoritative sources for socio-political order, and as such those outside government must undertake the prerogatives for building political life heretofore reserved for the state.22 This suggests that Confucius, Zhu, and Zhang all may have meant something more ambitious with the term wei zheng than simply “doing politics.” This layer of theoretical possibility requires a different translation, one that captures the act not only of doing something political but also of calling political space, awareness, and action into being.

zijue 㞾㾎, “self-awareness” In his book Awakening China, the historian John Fitzgerald explicitly links Zhang Shizhao to an emerging, early Republican discourse on what he calls the “awakening” or “consciousness” of the self, nation, and people. This historical link suggests that another translation for zijue (zi, “self”; jue, “awareness, knowledge, awakening”) may be “self-consciousness” or “self-awakening.” I abstain from both of these translations, the latter because its meaning is somewhat ambiguous in English, and the former because it suggests personal embarrassment more than the empowerment zijue discourse explicitly promoted. In any case, a better match for “consciousness” in Chinese is yishi, not zijue; and “awakening” suggests a variety of other Chinese words, such as xingwu or just xing. As I explain in Chapter 6, Zhang deploys zijue to mean both the self-motivated awareness of political crisis and awareness of one’s potential to influence future political outcomes – dovetailing nicely with the English word “selfawareness” first used by Timothy Weston to translate Zhang’s zijue concept.23 Fitzgerald concurs in using “self-awareness” to translate zijue when it refers to the awakening and awareness of individuals (especially individual citizens) rather than the masses.24 22 23 24

Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 140–141. Zhang, “Self-Awareness.” Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 192.

Appendix B Character list

Please note: significant terms and phrases are translated as they appear in the text. Titles of newspapers, books and other texts are capitalized in both their romanized and translated form; proper names of persons are capitalized and their alternative names are provided if they are mentioned in the text. All terms are alphabetized by Chinese syllable, not letter order; thus Duli zhoubao (first syllable “du”) precedes Duan Qirui (first syllable “duan”). For other names and titles cited in the text but not listed here, please consult the bibliography.

A ai guo (patriotism) ᛯ೟

B banglian (coming-together federalism, lit. “states connecting”) 䙺㙃

ben (root, foundation, source) ᴀ ben you (inherent) ᴀ᳝ bu caixing (not-talented nature) ϡᠡᗻ bu hao tong wu yi (to not favor the same and hate the different) ϡདৠᚵ⭄

C cai (talent) ᠡ cai li (forces of talent) ᠡ࡯ caixing (talented nature) ᠡᗻ Cai Yuanpei 㫵‫ܗ‬෍ Cao Cao ᳍᪡ Chang Naide ᐌЗᚾ

248

Character list

249

chao dai (dynasty) ᳱҷ Chen Duxiu 䱇⤼⾔ Cheng Yi ⿟䷸ Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) 㫷ҟ⷇ Chou an hui (Preserve the Peace Society) ㈠ᅝ᳗ chu (emergence) ߎ

D Da xue (The Great Learning) ໻ᅌ Da Zhonghua zazhi (Great China Magazine) ໻Ё㧃䲰䁠 Dai Zhen ᠈ᤃ dao (circuit – a sub-provincial administrative unit) 䘧 dao (way, path) 䘧 daode (virtue) 䘧ᖋ daode wei ti, er falu wei yong (Virtue is the substance; laws are merely instrumental) 䘧ᖋ⚎储ˈ㗠⊩ᕟ⚎⫼ daotong (succession of the Way) 䘧㍅ Daoxue (ethical/philosophical teachings of neo-Confucianism) 䘧ᅌ

de (virtue) ᖋ de qi fen (attain one’s lot) ᕫ݊ߚ de qi ren (find/appoint the (right) person) ᕫ݊Ҏ de qi xiangdang de fen (attain one’s appropriate lot) ᕫ݊Ⳍ⭊Пߚ difang (locality, place) ഄᮍ difang zizhi (local self-rule) ഄᮍ㞾⊏ Diguo ribao (Imperial Daily newspaper) Ᏹ೟᮹ฅ Ding Foyan ϕԯ㿔 Du Yaquan ᴰѲ⊝ Duli zhoubao (Independent Weekly journal)⤼ゟ਼ฅ Duan Qirui ↉⽎⨲ dui kang li (oppositional force) ᇡᡫ࡯

F fa duan (beginnings) ⱐッ fazhi (rule by law) ⊩⊏ fen (lot) ߚ

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Feng Guifen 侂Ḗ㢀 fengjian (“feudalism,” system of local autonomy) ᇕᓎ “Fengjian lun” (“On Feudalism”) ᇕᓎ䂪 “Fu bi pingyi” (“Appraisal of the Restoration Movement”) ᕽ䕳ᑇ䅄

G ganzhi (stems-and-branches calendrical cycle) ᑆᬃ Gao Like 催࡯‫ܟ‬ Gao Yihan 催ϔ⎉ geren (individual) ‫ן‬Ҏ gong (public, public-mindedness) ݀ gongdao (public way) ݀䘧 gong de (public virtue) ݀ᖋ gongfu (directed efforts) ࡳ໿ gonghe (republic) ݅੠ gonghe zhengti (republican regime) ݅੠ᬓ储 gongtong (common) ݅ৠ Gong Zizhen 啨㞾⦡ gu wen (old/classical prose) স᭛ Gu Yanwu 主♢℺ gu you (inherent) ೎᳝ guan (official) ᅬ guo (polity, nation, state) ೟ guojia (state) ೟ᆊ “Guojia yu wo” (“The State and the Self”) ೟ᆊ㟛៥ Guomindang (Nationalist Party or KMT) ೟⇥咼 guoquan (state power) ೟⃞ guoti (polity) ೟储

H Hanzu (Han ethnicity) ⓶ᮣ he er bu tong (harmonious without conforming) ੠㗠ϡৠ He Qi ԩଧ hezhong (federal, federated) ড়ⴒ Hu Hanmin 㚵⓶⇥

Character list

251

Hu Liyuan 㚵⾂൷ Hu Shi 㚵䗖 Huainanzi ⏂फᄤ Huang Xing 咗㟜 Huang Yuanyong 咗䘴ᒌ Huang Zongxi 咗ᅫ㖆 huo (commodified) 䉼

J ji (oneself) Ꮕ Jiayin Zazhi (The Tiger journal) ⬆ᆙ䲰䁠 Jiayin Zazhi Cungao (Extant Manuscripts of The Tiger) ⬆ᆙ䲰䁠 ᄬ〓

jian guo (nation- or state-building) ᓎ೟ jin qi fen (fully exercise or fully use one’s portion) ⲵ݊ߚ jin qi qun (advance the group) 䘆݊㕸 jin qi zai wo (exert all one’s effort) ⲵ݊೼៥ jing (environment) ๗ jingshi (statecraft) ㍧Ϫ jiuguo lun (theories for national salvation) ᬥ೟䂪 jun (ruler) ৯ junxian (system of centralized imperial control) 䚵㏷ junzhu (ruler) ৯Џ junzi (gentleman, literatus) ৯ᄤ

K Kang Youwei ᒋ᳝⠆ kaozheng (evidential research (form of Chinese classicism)) 㗗䄝 kuanrong (tolerance) ᇀᆍ

L Laozi 㗕ᄤ li (propriety, ritual) ⾂ li (to found or establish) ゟ li (force, power) ࡯ Li Beicun ᴢ࣫ᴥ

252


Li Dazhao ᴢ໻䞫 li guo (political founding) ゟ೟ Li ji (Book of Rites) ⾂㿬 Li Jiannong ᴢࡡ䖆 lilun (theory) ⧚䂪 lixiang (theory) ⧚ᛇ lixue (neo-Confucian “school of principle”) ⧚ᅌ lianbang (holding-together federalism, lit. “states that are connected”) 㙃䙺 Liang Qichao ṕଳ䍙 (Liang Rengong ṕҕ݀) liangzhi (inborn knowing) 㡃ⶹ Liu Shao ࡝䚉 Liu Zongyuan ᷇ᅫ‫ܗ‬ Lu Liuliang ਖ⬭㡃 “Lun jixing neige” (“On the Deformed Cabinet”) 䂪⭌ᔶ‫ݙ‬䭷 lunli (ethics) ‫⧚׿‬ Lunyu (Analects) 䂪䁲 lun zheng (talk about politics) 䂪ᬓ “Lun zhuquan” (“On Sovereignty”) 䂪Џ⃞ “Lun zizhi” (“On Self-Rule”) 䂪㞾⊏ luoji (logic) 䙣䔃

M Manzu (Manchu ethnicity) ⓓᮣ Mao Zedong ↯╸ᵅ min (the people) ⇥ min ben (democracy; the people as root) ⇥ᴀ min guo (nation) ⇥೟ Minli bao (People’s Stand newspaper) ⇥ゟฅ minquan (popular power) ⇥⃞ minzhu (democracy; the people as rulers) ⇥Џ Min yue lun (Rousseau’s On the Social Contract) ⇥㋘䂪 mingbian xue (science of names and disputation) ৡ䖃ᅌ

N neizai lilu (internal logic) ‫ݙ‬೼⧚䏃 nongcun zizhi (rural self-rule) 䖆ᴥ㞾⊏

Character list

O Oushi yanjiu hui (European Affairs Study Group) ℤџⷨお᳗

P Pan Lishan ┬࡯ቅ pifu (commoners) ऍ໿ pingmin (commoners) ᑇ⇥

Q Qian Mu 䣶〚 Qiu Jin ⾟⩒ qiu wo (search for the self) ∖៥ quan (rights, powers) ⃞ quanshu (unadulterated power, expediency) ⃞㸧 qun (group, grouping) 㕸 qunxue gongli (sociological events/cases) 㕸ᅌ݀՟

R ren (person or persons) Ҏ ren (humanity) ҕ ren cai (personal talent)Ҏᠡ ren ren (everybody) ҎҎ renwu (exceptional individuals, figures) Ҏ⠽ Renwu Zhi (Study of Human Abilities)Ҏ⠽ᖫ renzao zhi (man-made) Ҏ䗴П renzhi (rule by man) Ҏ⊏ rong (accommodation) ᆍ

S san gang wu lun (the three bonds and five relations) ϝ㎅Ѩ‫׿‬ shan xing (good tendencies) ୘ᗻ shang (appreciation) ᇮ shang yi (respect for difference) ᇮ⭄ shehui (society) ⼒᳗ shehui shiye (cause of society) ⼒᳗џὁ

253

254


sheng (province) ⳕ sheng yu xiang di, cheng yu xiang rang (born of mutual agonism, and developed through mutual concessions) ⫳ᮐⳌ ᢉˈ៤ᮐⳌ䅧

shi (social forces, circumstances) ࢶ shi (literatus/i) ຿ shi daifu (“great man,” literatus) ຿໻໿ shi li (forces, as of politics) ࢶ࡯ shou yu (animalistic desires) ⥌℆ Shujing (Book of Documents) ᳌㍧ si (private) ⾕ si de (private virtue) ⾕ᖋ Song Jiaoren ᅟᬭҕ Subao (Jiangsu Gazette) 㯛ฅ Su Shi 㯛䓒 (Su Dongpo 㯛ᵅവ, Su Zizhan 㯛ᄤⶏ) Su Xun 㯛⌉ Sun Yat-sen ᄿ䘌ҭ (Sun Zhongshan ᄿЁቅ)

T ta ren (other person or people) ҪҎ Taiping ໾ᑇ te ji (special foundation) ⡍෎ tian (cosmic order, Heaven) ໽ tianfu zhi (naturally given) ໽䊺П tianfu zhi quan (natural right) ໽䊺П⃞ tian ren he yi (the unity of Heaven and man) ໽Ҏড়ϔ tian xia (all under Heaven) ໽ϟ tiaohe (accommodation, tolerance) 䂓੠ tiaoshi (accommodative) 䂓䗖 tong (same, sameness, conformity) ৠ Tongmeng hui (Revolutionary Alliance) ৠⲳ᳗ tuoxie (compromise) ཹन

W wai jing (external struggle) ໪ナ wang guo (loss of the state) ѵ೟

Character list

255

Wang Yangming ⥟䱑ᯢ wang tian xia (loss of all-under-Heaven) ѵ໽ϟ wang wo (neglect of the self) ᖬ៥ wei tong (forced or manufactured conformity) ⚎ৠ wei zheng (to make the political) ⚎ᬓ wei zheng zai ren (making the political lies in individual persons) ⚎ᬓ೼Ҏ

wenhua (culture) ᭛࣪ wo (self, myself, the “I”) ៥ wokou (“dwarf pirates”) ‫؁‬ᆛ wu (we, us) ਒ wu (objects, external things) ⠽ Wu Guanyin ਇ䉿಴ Wu Ruonan ਇᔅ⬋

X xiguan (habits) 㖦᜷ Xi xue (Western learning) 㽓ᅌ xian (county) ㏷ xiang dui (mutually corresponding or counterposed) Ⳍᇡ xiang jian (rural reconstruction) 䛝ᓎ xiao (filiality) ᄱ xin (heart-and-mind) ᖗ xinmin (the new people, to renew the people) ᮄ⇥ Xinmin Shuo (On Renewing the People or On the New People) ᮄ⇥䁾

Xin qingnian (New Youth journal) ᮄ䴦ᑈ xing (awaken, awakening) 䝦 xing (penal codes) ߥ xing dong (activism) 㸠ࢩ xingwu (awaken, awakening) 䝦ᙳ Xing zi ming chu (Nature Emerges from the Decree) ᗻ㞾ੑߎ Xu Fuguan ᕤᕽ㾔 Xuan Yuan ⥘‫ܗ‬ “Xueli shang zhi lianbang lun” (“An Academic Theory of Federalism”) ᅌ⧚ϞП㙃䙺䂪 Xunzi 㤔ᄤ

256


Y Yan Fu ಈᕽ (Yan Jidao ಈᑒ䘧) Yanzi chunqiu ᰣᄤ᯹⾟ ye xing (wild tendencies) 䞢ᗻ yi (different, difference, dissent) ⭄ yi (righteousness) ᛣ yi (appropriateness) ᅰ Yijing (Classic of Changes) ᯧ㍧ yiran (the already-so) Ꮖ✊ yishi (consciousness) ᛣ䄬 yong cai (to use talent or make use of (others’) talent) ⫼ᠡ Yongyan (The Justice journal) ᒌ㿔 you quanti guo min si qi guo (the entire people taking private possession of their nation) ⬅ܼ储೟⇥⾕݊೟ you rong (to have tolerance) ᳝ᆍ you wo (to have a self) ᳝៥ yu (private interest, feeling, desire) ᝒ yulun (common or public opinion) 䔓䂪 yumin (commoners, benighted masses) ᛮ⇥ Yuan Shikai 㹕Ϫ߅

Z zaozuo (to make) 䗴԰ Zeng Guofan ᳒೟㮽 Zeng Zhaoxu ᳒ᰁᯁ zha si ti si (justice [transliteration]) ᴁᮃᚩᮃ Zhang Dongsun ᔉᵅ㪔 Zhang Shizhao ゴ຿䞫 (Zhang Xingyan ゴ㸠ಈ, Qiutong ⾟Ḥ) Zhang Taiyan ゴ໾♢ (Zhang Binglin ゴ⚇味) zhen wo (true self) ⳳ៥ zheng (government, politics) ᬓ zhengli (political theory) ᬓ⧚ “Zhengli xiangbei lun” (“On the Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces of Government”) ᬓ࡯৥㚠䂪 zhengtan (political talk) ᬓ䄮 zhengti (regime, regime type, government) ᬓ储 zhengxue (political theory, studies of politics) ᬓᅌ

Character list

zhengzhi (government, politics) ᬓ⊏ zhi (knowledge) ᱎ zhi (institutions) ࠊ zhong (loyalty) ᖴ zhong de qing cai (emphasize virtue and deemphasize talent) 䞡ᖋ䓩ᠡ

Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) Ёᒌ zhou (department – a sub-provincial administrative unit) Ꮂ Zhou Wumin ਼ᙳ⇥ Zhu Xi ᴅ➍ zhuanhua (transformative) 䔝࣪ zi de (individual getting-at) 㞾ᕫ zi ding (define for oneself) 㞾ᅮ zijue (self-awareness) 㞾㾎 ziran (natural, “self-so”) 㞾✊ ziyong cai (self-use of talent) 㞾⫼ᠡ

257

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Index

“Academic Theory of Federalism, An” (“Xueli shang zhi lianbang lun”) 176 accommodation (tiaohe) 19, 20–21, 109, 197–198, 230–231, 243–245 as requiring opposition 199–201 as tolerance 194, 197, 199 concrete processes of 209–210, 213–214, 218–223 contemporary influence of 223–224 difference and 20–21, 194–195 difference politics and 194–195, 201–202, 224 individuals and 206–207 role of talent in 165, 174–175, 197, 213 public realm and 213–214, 215–221 virtue and 211–212 “Accommodation as Founding” (“Tiaohe liguo lun”) 197 action, political 4, 17–18, 227–232 as circular 63n.39 as collective 3, 5, 28, 123 as individual 124, 125–127, 130, 134, 149–154, 160, 226–227, 235–236 related to public sphere 3, 105, 123 administration, political see federalism “Appraisal of the Restoration Movement” (“Fu bi pingyi”) 200 Arendt, Hannah 14, 51, 144 views on public/private divide 112–113, 216–217 Bagehot, Walter 194 Bentham, Jeremy 92 Bryce, James 149, 151, 198

Cai Yuanpei 196 Chang, Hao 11, 65 analysis of Liang Qichao 129 critique of neo-Confucianism 155 Chen Duxiu 39, 88, 88n.29 Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) 32, 34 citizenship 4 Communism, Chinese 7, 32, 172 communities, political 104 see also founding comparative political theory 9 alternatives to 8, 9–10, 234–235 necessity of comparative method 8–9 role of dialogue in 9 comparison see comparative political theory complexity, theory of see emergence, theory of Confucianism see neo-Confucianism Connolly, William 49, 51, 194, 206, 220, 236 views on public space 218, 219 constitutionalism Zhang’s advocacy of 197, 226 see also rule by law culture (wenhua), concept of in early Republican debate 73–74 in rule-by-man arguments 82–83, 91 Dai Zhen 26, 106n.3 Daotong see succession of the Way democracy (minzhu) 4, 23, 24, 48 as topic of early Republican Chinese debate 23, 26n.36, 77, 148–149 minben concept and 26 self-awareness and 140 Sheldon Wolin’s definition of 114–115

277

278 democracy (minzhu) (cont.) Zhang’s engagement with 67, 120, 149–154, 222–223, 226–227 see also elitism Dicey, Albert Venn 194 difference (yi) 193–197, 204, 210–211, 223 as particularity and dissent 205, 214–215, 225 contemporary Chinese interpretations of 196–197, 202–205, 212–213 public way and 213–214 translation of 202–203n.14 see also accommodation; public, as “public way” Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong) 16, 59–62, 69, 70, 189–190, 227, 232 Du Yaquan 72, 80n.17, 80, 82, 99, 196 contemporary relevance of 224 individual reform and 80, 96, 242 rule-by-man arguments of 81–82, 83 Duan Qirui 37 Duara, Prasenjit 184 Dworkin, Ronald 185–190, 192 elitism Zhang Shizhao’s critiques of 12–13, 23–24, 27, 48–49, 74, 94, 96–98, 213 Elman, Benjamin 173 emergence, theory of in Zhang Shizhao’s thought 119–123 empirical research (kaozheng) 24 Euben, Roxanne 8, 10 European Affairs Study Group (Oushi yanjiu hui) 35n.12 examination system, civil 187 Extant Manuscripts of The Tiger ( Jiayin zazhi cungao) 40 Fay, Brian 154n.39 fazhi see rule by law federalism (lianbang) democratic rule and 184–185 late imperial precedents for 179–180

Index local self-rule (difang zizhi) and 177 relationship to fengjian (decentralized imperial administrative system) 176 role of talent in 20, 163–164, 170–171, 190–192 Zhang’s definition of 177, 178–179 feminism 218, 242–243 public/private divide in 125–126, 127 Feng Guifen 177n.30, 191 “Foundations of Government, The” (“Zheng ben”) 58–59, 164, 168, 174, 206 founding, political 3, 5, 131–133, 241 accommodation and 195 as circular 6, 13–14, 46, 47, 71 as individualized 67–68, 69–71, 131–133 as transmissive practice 60–64 contemporary readings of 50–52, 60 Chinese models of 59–62, 69, 131 legitimacy and 46, 47 paradoxes of 45–46, 48–51, 52–53, 71 talent’s role in 164–168 Gao Yihan 72 Goodnow, Frank 92–93 arguments for political tutelage 94 Great Learning (Da Xue) 129, 227 Gu Yanwu 26, 35, 53, 105 as critic of state 109, 110n.6 as supporter of decentralized political administration 183–184 habits (xiguan) 92–94 Hayek, Friedrich 236n.14 Hobhouse, Leonard 92 Honig, Bonnie 13, 51, 215, 220 Hu Shi 39, 144 Huang Yuanyong 74, 86–87, 88, 108 language vernacularization and 86–87, 96–97 Huang Zongxi 26, 35, 53, 105, 124 “Hundred Days Reform” 30

Index individuals 241–242 as actors for change or innovation 3–4, 6, 28, 56–57, 90–91, 125–127, 131–133, 160, 226, 235–236 as founders 5, 63–65, 67–68, 69–71 as national subjects 81 as socially embedded 15, 22, 48, 122, 134, 241–242 difference and 20–21, 206–207, 213, 225 relationship to public 110–111, 122–123, 124, 130 relationship to external or social environments of 15, 117–120, 121, 126–127, 130, 143, 231–232 talent and 180–181, 191–192 see also action, political; self-awareness institutions see rule by law Japan 29, 30 as imperialist threat to China 29–30, 32 as model for Chinese modernization 31 influence of, on Chinese intellectual developments 30 Sino-Japanese War 29 Jiang Zemin 99 junxian (system of centralized imperial control) 176 see also federalism junzi (gentleman, superior person) 66–67 see also literati, imperial; neo-Confucianism; self-awareness justice 239 Kuhn, Philip 182 Lee Kwan Yew 189, 190 views on talent of 187–188 legitimacy 65 of founding practices 4, 46, 47, 65 Li Beicun 202–205, 210 Li Dazhao 88n.29, 196, 205–206, 224 rule-by-man arguments and 91–92

279 Liang Qichao 12, 30, 34, 54, 101, 209n.22, 237 as critical of political reform 83–84, 85–86 democracy and 148–149 education reform and 49–50 local self-rule, views on 180, 181 public and private virtue, views on 127–130, 212–213 rule-by-man arguments of 72, 83–86, 96, 99 “society” concept and 84, 85 Liang Shuming 37 liangzhi (innate moral knowledge) 56–57, 209 liberalism Anglo-American 22n.24, 94 as inadequate description of Republican thought 233 as political theory of freedom 22–23, 74 British 22, 27, 68 literati, imperial 173–174 as models of political action 149–154 see also neo-Confucianism; self-awareness Liu, Lydia 81 Liu Zongyuan 35, 38, 95–96, 152, 198 Locke, John 13 Mao Zedong 34, 37 Zhang Shizhao and 37–38 May Fourth Movement 36, 39, 75, 87, 99 democratization of literature in 96–97 radicalism of 100 Zhang Shizhao’s relation to 88 Mencius 139–140, 166 Metzger, Thomas 66 Minli bao see People’s Stand Morley, John 92, 229, 243 Montesquieu 93 Mou Zongsan 70n.51, 95 critiques of Confucianism of 124–125 Mouffe, Chantal 194, 211, 212

280 nationalism 32–33, 34, 81 guojia concept and 33n.5, 240–241 Zhang Shizhao and 33 neo-Confucianism (lixue) 24, 67, 109, 224, 227–228 as critical of state authority 24–25, 66–67, 147–148 liangzhi concept and 56–57 late imperial moral orthodoxy of 172, 174, 175, 224–225 modern critiques of 116, 116n.24, 124–125, 154–156 Zhang Shizhao and 24, 25–27, 56, 59–62, 226–227, 228, 233 New Culture Movement 26, 39, 87 “On Federalism” (“Lianbang lun”) 176 “On the Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces of Government” (“Zheng li xiangbei lun”) 149–150, 197 order, spontaneous see emergence, theory of Orientalism 9, 10 People’s Stand, The (Minli bao) 36, 38, 40, 72 Pitkin, Hanna 3, 14, 111, 154 conditions for democratic action, views on 138–139, 144–146, 156–157, 236 founding, views on 63, 64 public/private divide, views on 111, 112–113, 121 political, the 103–104, 246–247 definition of 104, 133, 134 relation to public sphere 105, 111–113, 235–236 “Politics and Society” (“Zhengzhi yu shehui”) 89 public (gong) 179, 180, 200 as sphere of action 104–116, 121–122, 183–184, 215–217 difference politics and 215–217 virtue, Liang Qichao and 127–130 see also action, political; private; public way public way (gongdao) 108, 121, 193, 210–211, 213–214, 217–218, 219–221, 239–240

Index Puett, Michael 131 private (si) as sphere of action 104–116, 130 contrasted to political 111–113 virtue, Liang Qichao and 127–130 see also action, political; public Qian Mu 172 Rawls, John 185–190, 192 reform, moderate 7, 92, 223–224 renwu (public figures) 78–79, 80, 81, 85, 94, 146 renzhi see rule by man republicanism as inadequate description of Republican-era thought 233 as regime type 22, 27, 77, 107 political theory of freedom of 22–23 revolution of 1911 29 Ricoeur, Paul 52 rights 57–58, 70, 208–209 see also liangzhi; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 13, 54, 59 founding dilemmas and 49, 50 natural rights theory of 54–56 social-contract theory of 13, 16, 49–50, 53, 54–55, 56 rule by law (fazhi) 73–74, 76, 99–102, 168, 169 definition of 72–73, 237–239 historical context of 77–78 Zhang Shizhao’s advocacy of 74, 89–91, 99, 226 rule by man (renzhi) 72, 73–74, 99–102, 168, 169–170 assumptions of 76 definition of 72, 242–243 Du Yaquan’s arguments for 81–82 historical context of 76–78 Wu Guanyin’s arguments for 78–80 Zhang Shizhao’s advocacy of 91, 95–99, 188, 226 rural reconstruction (xiang jian) 37 sages 70, 95–96, 97 as founders 60–65, 69, 110

Index as users of talent 60, 168 see also neo-Confucianism sage kings see sages sameness (tong) 202–205, 210–211, 225 as forced conformity 201, 223 translation of 202–203n.14 see also accommodation; difference self (wo), search for self-awareness, relation to 140, 142–144, 152, 153–154 talent, relation to 166–167 “Self, The” (“Wo”) 142–144 self-awareness (zijue) 18, 143–144, 176 accommodation and 207 definition of 137, 247 founding of democratic polity and 140–141, 156–161 limitations of 156, 159 theorizing activity of 19, 138, 141, 160 see also action, political; individuals; self, search for; theory, political “Self-Awareness” (“Zijue”) 108, 137 self-rule, institutional forms of see democracy, federalism “socialism with Chinese characteristics” 7 social-contract theory 13, 54–55 society (shehui), concept of, in early Republican debate 73–74, 79 Liang Qichao’s arguments about 84, 85, 89–90, 91 May Fourth Movement and 86–87 rule-by-man arguments and 82–83 society, civil see federalism; public Song Jiaoren 36 Sorites paradox (paradox of the heap) 117 “State and Responsibility, The” (“Guojia yu zeren”) 108 “State and the Self, The” (“Guojia yu wo”) 139, 165, 167, 240 statecraft (jingshi) 66n.44, 156n.44, 228

281 Su Shi (Su Zidan) 165, 228 Su Xun 165 succession of the Way (daotong) 62n.36, 63–65 Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) 12, 29, 31, 72 nationalism and 31, 32, 143–144 political education, ideas on 49, 50, 153 Zhang Shizhao and 35, 36 talent (cai) 19, 58, 59, 60, 90 accommodation and 165, 174–175, 197, 207–208, 213 civil examination systems and 173–174, 187, 188 contemporary definitions of 185–186 democratic rule, relation to 163–164, 168–171, 175–176, 182–185, 192 founding communities, role of in 164–168, 175–176 in history of Chinese political thought 162–163, 164–165, 170–174 institutions of self-rule/federalism and 20, 163–164, 170–171, 176–185, 190–192 self-use of (ziyong cai) 19–20, 166–167, 173, 187, 197, 225, 230 virtue and 162–163, 166–167, 170–174, 188 Tan Sitong 30 theory, political 10, 11, 41–42, 141 position of theorist in 144–146, 154 Tiger, The (Jiayin zazhi) 6, 29, 38–39, 58, 85, 226 founding of 36 Zhang Shizhao’s essays in 40, 42 Tocqueville, Alexis de 120, 133 Tuck, Richard 117 virtue 19, 95, 100–101 public and private, Liang Qichao’s reading of 127–130 talent and 162–163, 166–167, 170–174

282 Weston, Timothy 39, 88 Wolin, Sheldon 69, 121 behavioralist social science, views on 149, 151 definition of democracy of 114–115 women, virtue and talent of 172–173 see also feminism Woodside, Alexander 10 Wu Guanyin 78, 78n.9, 82, 99 Liang Qichao and 78 rule-by-man arguments of 78–80, 83 Xu Fuguan 189 Yan Fu 31, 97n.40, 180 social-contract idea of 53–56 Zhang Shizhao’s response to 54–56 Young, Iris 100, 194 public space, views on 216 Yuan Shikai 12, 29, 32, 49, 51, 176, 208 as rule-by-man advocate 77, 95 attempt at restoration of monarchy of 32, 72, 77

Index Zhang Dongsun 91, 197, 199 federalism, views on 177, 178, 179, 181, 183 rule-by-man arguments of 92 Zhang Hanzhi 34, 38 Zhang Shizhao as advocate of rule by law 87–89, 94, 98–99, 101 as political theorist 8, 11–12, 39–42 democracy and 27–28 early childhood education of 34–35 education in Great Britain of 36 educational reform, views on 12, 35 founding dilemmas of 4–5, 6, 12–13, 14–16, 54–55 intellectual influence of 7–8, 39, 223–224 nationalism, views on 32, 33n.5 revolutionists, relationship to 35 Sun Yat-sen, relationship to 36 Zhang Zhidong 31 Zhou Wumin 168–169 Zhu Xi 60, 246

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