Had he not failed in this last respect, Kang might have survived the bitter opposition that his reforms provoked from the entrenched bureaucracy. It was perhaps characteristic of his dogged adherence to principle, if not indeed indicative of a self-righteous and egocentric character, that Kang reckoned little with such hostility and even less with the surprise and bewilderment felt by many who were simply unaccustomed to rapid change and unable to cope with his radically new ideas. Before many of his plans could take effect, a coup d’etat restored the more conservative Empress Dowager to active control of affairs and drove Kang’s group from power. Some died as martyrs to the cause of reform; others, like Kang, escaped to become exiles.
Until the dynasty itself collapsed, Kang continued to write and raise funds overseas on behalf of the movement. After the Revolution of 1911, however, Kang’s “cause” became more and more a personal one. In a little more than a decade the trend of events and ideas had left him behind. As a constitutional monarchist who still protested his loyalty to the Manchu dynasty, Kang was now swimming against a strong Republican tide; as a reformer who had always insisted on his fidelity to Confucius, he found himself suddenly surrounded by progressives—a generation that no longer needed to be won over to reform and could not now be won back to Confucius.
The significance of Kang Youwei as a thinker lies in his attempt to provide a Confucian justification for basic institutional reforms. The so-called Self-Strengtheners had urged reform on the grounds of immediate utility, thinking that Western weapons and techniques could be adopted without proceeding further to basic changes in Chinese government and society. They spoke of preserving the Confucian Way (Dao) through the use of Western “instruments” (qi) or “methods” (fa). Yet, as men like Wang Tao came to appreciate, Western power and prosperity rested on something more than technology. To bring China abreast of the modern world, therefore, would require changes that were more radical. Thus reform began to take on a new meaning for them. Change would now extend to fa in the sense of institutions as well as fa in the sense of methods.
It was here that real trouble arose. According to a hallowed principle of Chinese dynastic rule, the life of a dynasty was bound up with its adherence to the constitution laid down by its founding father (the first emperor). Supporters of Manchu rule could be counted on to resist any such tampering with its institutions. For those more concerned about the Chinese way of life than the fate of the Manchus, the problem was even more acute. How far could one go in changing basic institutions while still keeping the Way intact? Would not Confucianism be reduced to a mere set of pious platitudes once its social integument had been destroyed?
Kang’s resolution of this dilemma was a bold one. Rather than permit the sphere occupied by the Confucian Way in Chinese life to be further narrowed and displaced by Western “methods,” he would redefine the Way and enlarge its scope so as virtually to include the latter. Instead of making more room for Western institutions alongside Confucianism, he would make room for them inside it. This he did by exploiting to the fullest two ideas already put forth by Wang Tao. The first of these was that the Way of the Sages was precisely to meet change with change; Confucius himself had done so, and if he were alive today he would do so again. Kang provided this theory with an elaborate scriptural justification through his studies of the so-called forged classics and his sensational tract Confucius As a Reformer. In terms of its historical influence this was undoubtedly Kang’s main contribution—though not an original one—to the thinking of his times.
Implicit in his notion of reform, however, was a still more momentous idea, since it ran more directly counter to the age-old Confucian view of history and tradition: the idea of progress. It was one thing to assert that the Confucian sage, when faced by one of those cyclically recurring cycles of degeneration spoken of by Mencius or the Classic of Changes, took appropriate steps to reform the times, reassert the Way, and restore the institutions of the sage kings. It was quite another to offer, in place of a return to the Golden Age of the past, a utopia beckoning in the future.
Here again the idea was, among Chinese, originally Wang Tao’s. He had glimpsed a future stage in which the Way would make all things one, a natural result of the process going on around him by which the different nations in the world and their respective ways of life were being brought together by technological progress. He had even referred to it in terms taken from the Confucian Record of Rites as the age of Grand Unity or Commonality (Datong). What the Record of Rites had spoken of as a golden age at the dawn of history, however, Wang Tao saw as a vision of the future. And Kang Youwei, in his Grand Commonality, made this vision the center of his whole worldview. Henceforth, “reform” would not mean what it had in the past—an adaptation of laws and methods to cyclical change. It was now a wholesale launching of China into the modern world and, beyond that, into a glorious future.
Feng Guifen and Xue Fucheng, in their writings on reform, had shown deference to China’s age-old pretensions to cultural superiority by reassuring their readers that it need not merely follow along behind the Western powers but could overtake and surpass them. Kang, in the Grand Commonality, took the lead for China himself by pointing the way into the One World of the future. If China suffered humiliation now for its backwardness, looking ahead, he would be satisfied with nothing less for it than the ultimate in progress. In his world of the future there were to be no social, provincial, and national barriers. Government would virtually cease to exist except in local units fixed arbitrarily on the basis of square degrees of longitude and latitude. Within these units life would be completely communal and egalitarian. All distinctions of race, class, clan, and family would disappear, since they could no longer serve any valid social function. And in place of the differentiated loyalties that had bound men to their particular social group, there would be only an undifferentiated feeling of human-kindness or love, which he identified with the Confucian virtue of humanity (ren).
Those who recall the layout of Mencius’s well-fields, of which Kang’s polity based on square degrees of longitude and latitude are so reminiscent; or the neat symmetrical organization of society set forth so early in the Rites of Zhou and so late in the plans of the Taiping rebels; or the Chinese fondness for political geometry, reflected even in the plan of capital cities like Changan and Beijing, will recognize in Kang’s grand design a quality by no means foreign to native tradition.
If in this respect, then, Kang’s vision of the future still reflects something of the past, what can be said of his Confucianism? The ostensible claims for placing him still within the Confucian tradition are his emphasis upon the cardinal virtue of humaneness (ren), his universalistic humanism (in contrast to ethnic nationalism), and his efforts to preserve Confucianism as the state religion. Against this, most obviously, is his decisive rejection of the Confucian family system along with other structural elements in culture and society that he considered divisive.
Whatever abuses may have appeared in the family system as it was formulated and practiced down through the centuries, it would seem difficult to disassociate Confucius completely from it or to preserve Confucianism entirely without it. Without the family virtues and obligations, certainly, the concept of ren loses much of its tangible significance and approaches more nearly—if it does not exactly coincide with—Mozi’s principle of undifferentiated universal love or Buddhist undifferentiated compassion. Since Mozi’s social ideals resemble Kang’s so closely, the comparison is all the more pointed.
Furthermore, in Kang’s attempt to preserve Confucianism as a kind of national religion, there is something foreign to the spirit of Confucianism itself. The sage’s teaching had been offered, and accepted by many peoples, as something universal. Its humanistic values were rooted in the nature of man and human relationships. Kang’s defense of it now as a religion and as the focus of a new state ideology, while testifying no doubt to his belief that China must have something comparable to the Christianity of the West or
state Shinto in Japan, nevertheless sacrifices the substance of tradition for the trappings of modern nationalism. Henceforth Confucianism is to be valued not on its own terms but as a state ritual.
What remains as unquestionably Confucian is Kang’s own sense of dedication to the service of society, his aim of “putting the world in order.” Yet even this is not exclusively a Confucian concern (certainly Mozi shared it), nor does his favorite expression for it, “saving the world,” hark back only to the sage—there may be overtones here, too, of the Buddhist saviors (bodhisattvas) and of Jesus Christ.
After the collapse of the 1898 reform movement, Kang spent much of his life in exile. The final statement of his vision of the Grand Commonality was completed in India in 1902. Kang had been a fugitive from the Qing while still professing loyalty to it and after 1911 was enough of a “Confucian” monarchist to survive only as an anachronism in republican times; his utopian vision of the Grand Commonality had little influence on China’s turbulent political course, except paradoxically, by the sweep of its universalism and egalitarian leveling of all social distinctions, to clear the way for the revolutionary juggernaut to follow. The excerpts given here from the introduction and conclusion of Kang’s Grand Commonality convey the totalistic vision of a world order and human perfectibility so reminiscent of earlier Chinese idealisms that would still lend themselves, in a chaotic age, to simplistic revolutionary solutions and enthusiasms.
In the light of history, Kang and the reform movement may well appear as the great turning point between old and new in Chinese thought. In his hands, China was being launched on a perilous journey, in the course of which much baggage might have to be jettisoned if anything at all was to survive. Confucian traditionalists saw the dangers perhaps better than Kang did. Dropping him as pilot, however, was not the same thing as steering a safe course homeward. The storm now drove all before it, and there was no turning back.
CONFUCIUS AS A REFORMER
Kang’s Kongzi gaizhi kao (lit., study of Confucius’s reforms) was started in 1886 and finally published in 1897. It provides an extended analysis of the innovations that Kang believed to have been advocated by Confucius. The following are taken from section introductions that present his general argumentation. As Kang’s subheadings indicate, they purport to show that Confucius’s greatness derives from his having written the Six Classics to promote reform in his own time.
How Confucius Founded His Teaching in Order to Reform Institutions
Every founder of doctrine in the world reformed institutions and established laws. This is true with Chinese philosophers in ancient times. Chinese principles and institutions were all laid down by Confucius. His disciples received his teachings and transmitted them so that they were carried out in the country and used to change the old customs. [9: 1a]
The Six Classics Were All Written by Confucius to Reform Institutions
Confucius was the founder of a doctrine. He was a godlike sage king. He complements Heaven and earth and nurtures the myriad things. All men, things, and principles are embraced in the Great Way of Confucius. He is, therefore, the most accomplished and perfect sage in the history of mankind. And yet, concerning the Great Way of Confucius, one would search in vain for a single word [under the master’s own name]. There are only the Analects, which was a record of the master’s sayings taken down by his disciples, and the Spring and Autumn Annals, which was a kind of old-fashioned gazette copied from ancient documents relative to public events and ceremonies. As to the Classics of Odes, Documents, Rites, Music, and Changes, they are regarded as the ancient records of Fu Xi, the Xia and Shang dynasties, King Wen and the Duke of Zhou; thus they have nothing to do with Confucius. If this were true, Confucius would have been merely a wise scholar of later times, no better than Zheng Kangcheng [127–200] or Zhu Xi [1130–1200, who wrote commentaries on the Confucian classics]. How, then, could he have been called the only model of the human race and the perfect sage of all generations? . . . Before the Han dynasty it was known to all that Confucius was the founder of the doctrine and the reformer of institutions and that he was the godlike sage king. . . . Wherein lies the reason for this? It lies in the fact that scholars knew the Six Classics were written by Confucius. This was the opinion of all before the Han dynasty. Only when a scholar recognizes that the Six Classics were written by Confucius can he understand why Confucius was the great sage, the founder of the doctrine, and the model for all ages; and why he alone was called the supreme master. [10: 1a–b]
[Kongzi gaizhi kao 9: 1a; 10: 1a–b—CT]
THE THREE AGES
Kang’s theory of progress is set forth in terms of the Three Ages, a concept of the New Text school for which he derived classical sanction from the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, the “Li yun” section of the Record of Rites, and commentaries by the Han scholars Dong Zhongshu and He Xiu. Here we see the earlier view of the devolution of history adapted to the modern evolutionary view, by a process of rationalization and idealization that bears little resemblance to the traditional account in the Record of Rites.
The meaning of the Spring and Autumn Annals consists in the evolution of the Three Ages: the Age of Disorder, the Age of Order, and the Age of Great Peace. . . . The Way of Confucius embraces the evolution of the Three Sequences and the Three Ages. The Three Sequences were used to illustrate the Three Ages, which could be extended to a hundred generations. The eras of Xia, Shang, and Zhou represent the succession of the Three Sequences, each with its modifications and accretions. By observing the changes in these three eras one can know the changes in a hundred generations to come. For as customs are handed down among the people, later kings cannot but follow the practices of the preceding dynasty; yet, since defects develop and have to be removed, each new dynasty must make modifications and additions to create a new system. The course of humanity progresses according to a fixed sequence. From the clans come tribes, which in time are transformed into nations. And from nations the Grand Commonality comes about. Similarly, from the individual man the rule of tribal chieftains gradually becomes established, from which the relationship between ruler and subject is gradually defined. Autocracy gradually leads to constitutionalism, and constitutionalism gradually leads to republicanism. Likewise, from the individual the relationship between husband and wife gradually comes into being, and from this the relationship between parent and child is defined. This relationship of parent and child leads to the loving care of the entire race, which in turn leads gradually to the Grand Commonality, in which there is a reversion to individuality.
Thus there is an evolution from Disorder to Order, and from Order to Great Peace. Evolution proceeds gradually and changes have their origins. This is true with all nations. By observing the child, one can know the adult and the old man; by observing the sprout, one can know the tree when it grows big and finally reaches the sky. Thus, by observing the modifications and additions of the three successive eras of Xia, Shang, and Zhou, one can by extension know the changes in a hundred generations to come.
When Confucius prepared the Spring and Autumn Annals, he extended it to embrace the Three Ages. Thus, during the Age of Disorder he considers his own state as the center, treating all other Chinese feudal states as on the outside. In the Age of Order he considers China as the center, while treating the outlying barbarian tribes as on the outside. And in the Age of Great Peace he considers everything, far or near, large or small, as if it were one. In doing this he is applying the principle of evolution.
Confucius was born in the Age of Disorder. Now that communications extend through the great earth and changes have taken place in Europe and America, the world is evolving toward the Age of Order. There will be a day when everything throughout the earth, large or small, far or near, will be like one. There will no longer be any nations, no more racial distinctions, and customs will be everywhere the same. With this uniformity will come the Age of Great Peace. Confucius knew all this in advance.
[From
Lunyu zhu 2: 11a–12b—CT]
The methods and institutions of Confucius aim at meeting with the particular times. If, in the Age of Disorder, before the advent of civilization, one were to put into effect the institutions of Great Peace, this would certainly result in great harm. But if, in the Age of Order, one were to continue to cling to the institutions of the Age of Disorder, this too would result in great harm. The present time, for example, is the Age of Order. It is therefore necessary to propagate the doctrines of self-rule and independence, and to discuss publicly the matter of constitutional government. If the laws are not reformed, great disorder will result.
[From Zhongyong zhu 36b—CT]
THE NEED FOR REFORMING INSTITUTIONS
This memorial to the throne, submitted January 29, 1898, and titled Comprehensive Consideration of the Whole Situation, gives the arguments by which Kang attempted to persuade the Guangxu emperor to inaugurate reforms, which he did a few months later. Note Kang’s equivocation on the question of “ancestral institutions,” while he has no reservations about taking Meiji Japan as the model for China.
A survey of all states in the world will show that those states that undertook reforms became strong while those states that clung to the past perished. The consequences of clinging to the past and the effects of opening up new ways are thus obvious. If Your Majesty, with your discerning brilliance, observes the trends in other countries, you will see that if we can change, we can preserve ourselves; but if we cannot change, we shall perish. Indeed, if we can make a complete change, we shall become strong, but if we only make limited changes, we shall still perish. If Your Majesty and his ministers investigate the source of the disease, you will know that this is the right prescription.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 40