Kang Youwei and the Rise of Modern Chinese Thought

A Chinese Quest for "Grand Unification"

Prior to the Christmas interlude, I wrote about Kang Youwei, a Confucian sage and reformer. I had become aware of Wang Hui’s recent book, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Harvard University Press, 2023), and after reading the preface and introduction on Amazon, I decided to give it a try. (Not by forking out the $72.65, but by requesting it via interlibrary loan.) At over 1,000 pages, it’s apparently a reduced version of an even more compendious Chinese edition.

The book arrived. I dug in. I was in over my head. But no matter. The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought culminates in Kang Youwei’s visionary work, Datong, or The Book of Great Unity. And this interested me.

I am going to offer a view from 30,000 feet, describing the general lay of the land, noting some interesting features, and risking the scornful frown of experts. In this I’ll be covering a bit of the same territory as before, but now from a different angle, and with better backing.

The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought

As Westerners, we think of today’s China as a “country” that’s very large and very old. It has a shape, which we can recognize and study in an atlas or map of the world. But for Chinese in the nineteenth century, China was the Middle Kingdom. And for those who were educated enough to think about it, the Middle Kingdom was a complex empire, with “inner” and “outer” dimensions, and it employed a tribute system to keep its outermost points under its imperial canopy.

The diversity of the “Middle Kingdom” consisted of numerous ethnicities, tribes, and languages. Preeminent among these peoples were the Han, and the Manchu ruling class. But as the late-eighteenth-century Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples amply illustrates,¹ the rule of the Qing dynasty embraced a dazzling array of peoples that could be described in physical appearance, dress, customs, beliefs, and proclivities. What’s more, they did not all relate to the Qing throne in exactly the same way. Even calling it a “tribute system” masks an underlying complexity of political relationships to imperial power.

The editor’s introduction to the English translation of the Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples gives us a sense of this reality:

The Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples aimed to capture—or rather to project—Qing glory, but from the standpoint of the human diversity and fealty of those in the various rings of its orbit. Examining the work as a cultural cartography of empire in the context of these other geographic maps clarifies that the image the work implied of the Qianlong emperor as located at the center of the world was understood as an ideological projection, not a geographical reality. Yet, at the same time, the extended claims of these geographic and cultural cartographies, which were rooted in military conquest and the ritualized submission of specific groups of people, served to shore each other up.²

I imagine the Middle Kingdom as a large table-top puzzle of hundreds of pieces carefully assembled into a map, which includes the peoples and nations on its periphery. While the pieces have a variety of shapes (ethnicity, customs, language) and placements, the puzzle pieces all cohere in a longstanding pattern and history of being joined and relating to the emperor and his mandate “Under Heaven.” They are all connected to Beijing. And an important part of that coherence is their place in a longstanding and extensive economic system of trade.

The nineteenth-century intrusion of Westerners into this order was profoundly disruptive. They brought with them their razorblades, and they re-cut and claimed pieces of the puzzle, coloring and labeling them as Treaty Ports, which they in turn carved up (e.g., the original French and British Settlements of Shanghai) and governed by their own laws.

During the Ming Dynasty, Japan had been in a tributary relationship to China.³ But that relationship had terminated, the China’s cultural influence on Japan remained strong. After the West broke through Japan’s isolation in the 1850s, Japan rapidly modernized, and by the late nineteenth century had entered into the Western game of Carving Up China (this terminology was actually used). Japan secured its own place in the treaty ports and claimed outlying but strategic pieces it wanted (Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, and let’s take Korea too).

The standing order of the Qing’s glory, its ideological cohesion, cemented by carefully defined rites and rituals, was coming undone. The Westerners (rude visitors, who refused to kowtow to the Puzzle Master) had thrown a wrench into the assembled puzzle, introducing all sorts of new notions, including new rules of engagement that they conveniently called “international law.” And this international law, as a new universalist vision, promoted the perverse heresy that nations were equal sovereignties. This in turn vitiated and transcended China’s tributary system. Japan’s 1895 defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese war was a monumental crisis preceding the Qing empire’s collapse.⁴

The late-eighteenth-century Illustrations of Tributary Peoples (mentioned above), which was a cartographic handbook for understanding parts of the puzzle, was now out of date. A new and comprehensive atlas was required to reflect the new realities.

As viewed from Beijing, the old order of “intra-Asian” flow—of immigration, trade, cultural influences—had been (in broad strokes) from north to south. Think of it as being regulated by the Great Wall, which stretched across the north. But now the flow was reversing. It was the “Maritime Age,” in which the Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese, were arriving by sea. This maritime expansionism developed into an oceanic hegemony.⁵ Instead of north to south, the flow was now south to north. To simplify it even further, we might think of the dominance of the old Silk Road being swapped out for the Pacific Ocean Highway.⁶

Reflecting this new world, and the jolt of the first Opium War, was Wang Yuan’s Gazetteer of the Maritime States (Haiguo tuzhi, published in successive editions in 1843, 1847, 1852). Wang Hui tells us that this was “a work that translated and compiled large amounts of historical and geographical information on countries around the world” (and was indebted, to some extent, to missionary publications⁷). In Wang Hui’s estimation, it was not just “a turn outward to the West or the world,” but “a sophisticated attempt to reconfigure long-standing ideas about inner and outer (nei/wai) in Chinese thought to account for the Qing dynasty’s place in the world of the myriad states.”⁸

Another way of thinking about it is to view China’s political imaginary as the interface, the computer screen, through which the Qing represented, plotted, interacted with, and manipulated its world. Westerners had now introduced distortions into this screen. The Western political imaginary, with its international protocols and manners, was entirely different from China’s. Continuing the computer interface analogy, the West had introduced a virus that was infecting the coding. And that coding was Confucian all the way down. China had tried to fend off and contain this maritime malware by using the Confucian arts of statecraft and war. But this approach had failed. China was being outflanked, overpowered, and bled by a thousand cuts.

As the Middle Kingdom fully awakened to this new world reality, some Chinese intellectuals realized that they needed a new political imaginary, or worldview. A major shift in thinking would be required. And a shift in thinking meant reconstruing
China’s operating system. The answer, of course, had to lie within the canonical texts of the Confucian tradition, the so-called Doctrine for All.⁹

In fact, the need for this sort of revision was not at all new in the long history of China. Wang Hui explains:

“Each generation of Confucian scholars developed an elaborate exegetical approach to the classics to align the major concerns of Confucian moral philosophy or expositions on meanings and principles (yili) with the specific fluctuations of their societies. They were thus able to organize new social relations within the framework offered by the classics and preserve Confucianism’s position as a timeless “Doctrine for All” (wanshi fa). This effort to preserve the universal applicability of Confucianism was the very thing that led to the incessant changes to the defining characteristics of Confucianism.”¹⁰

But this universal vision, the notion that Confucianism was universally true and applicable, had hit a wall. The great Middle Kingdom was shown to be now but one entity among many rivals. Its rites were not universal, its “universal knowledge” was now understood to be mere local knowledge.¹¹ Its proud place at the “Middle” was but an illusion. Wang Hui again:

Rather it was a country stuck in the past among a world of innumerable states, a decrepit wooden boat sailing along on a vast sea of iron warships competing for power. Even if Confucianism was a Doctrine for All, in this boundless world, its effectiveness was questionable. Kang Youwei asked: If the Six Classics were the Doctrine for All, why were all the seamen aboard this vast vessel of China all blind as bats? If the only way for China to escape from this predicament was to submit to the logic of war espoused by these competing states, then, in addition to proposing rationalization through the theory of reform in order to submit to the logic of the changing world, was Confucianism capable of becoming a universal knowledge that could rethink the entire process?¹²

Again, Wang Hui:

The collapse of the Celestial Empire was first and foremost a collapse of a worldview. No matter how vast the empire’s purview, no matter how powerful the empire’s hold over culture and ethnicity, the understanding of empire composed of a center and borderlands could not offer an episteme that regarded the entire world. How could it interpret those unique values found in the various religions that originated in west Asia and spread across the world? How could it interpret the magnificence of the Roman Empire, the warships of the British Empire, the advancements and prosperity of American society? Traditional Confucianism was entirely at odds to explain such things as the astonishing development of modern Europe, the internal and external complications of the tribute system, the unequivocal challenge of British warships, the constant advances of science and technology, and the increasingly accurate knowledge of the outside world that accompanied these. The clear existence of this outside world provided a violent disturbance to the universality of the “Doctrine for All.” … China was no longer All-under-Heaven but was one country among many. This was Kang Youwei’s summary of the age of nation-states.¹³

Assessing the damage, Kang Youwei sought to retrieve Confucian universalism from this tragic conflagration. But in order to do so he needed to break it free from its marriage to the Middle Kingdom, while at the same time setting the erstwhile Middle Kingdom among this newly revealed community of nations. The way forward through reform was daunting. The old distinctions between “internal” and “external” entities, which were subsumed under the carapace of the Middle Kingdom, needed to be exchanged for a political imaginary in which the Middle Kingdom was “a sovereign unit with a clearly demarcated external. It was from this paradox that Kang Youwei launched his sweeping vision of datong,” or The Great Unity.¹⁴

From my reading of Wang Hui, I picture Kang Youwei turning China’s political imaginary inside out. The Great Unity, which Kang sourced from deep within the Confucian canon, held the key to turning Confucianism into a vision of the international order and even the cosmos. As a classical scholar, Kang reached deep into the Confucian corpus, into the ancient Spring and Autumn Annals. There “he evoked the states of the Spring and Autumn period as a metaphor for the pattern of nation-states in the modern world, and the Warring States to illustrate discord in the ritual order.”¹⁵ Grasping hold of the idea of China’s Three Ages culminating in The Great Unity, he brought it to the forefront, into the modern age, with the rest of Confucianism now serving this repristinated telos. Kang concluded that “With the way the various nations of the world are today in conflict, it will be several hundred years before [the world] may enter the realm of Great Union.” China was still in the Age of Disorder.¹⁶ But even from there, The Great Unity could be seen on the far horizon.

I can’t help wondering whether Kang Youwei understood that the Protestant missionaries he encountered were motivated by an eschatological vision of the kingdom of God on earth, itself a “Great Unity,” the reconciliation of all things. For them, the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the nations converging on Zion had, for the present penultimate time, been reversed. Christ, the Davidic King, was sending forth his emissaries into all the earth to gather in the nations.

As Kang unfurled his utopian vision, was he conscious of certain resonances with the post-millennial eschatology of some of his Protestant conversation partners? In their eschatology, they were long-haulers. I recall the Southern Presbyterian missionary in Suzhou, Hampden DuBose, saying that in China “these great cities need a protracted [revival] meeting of three or four centuries.”

Kang Youwei had read the missionaries’ publications. He attested to the influence of missionaries such as Timothy Richard and Young Allen. We learn that Kang was a reader of Review of the Times (Wanguo gonbao), which was a publication of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese. Kang quotes or relies on it in sections of his Book of Great Unity. The Review was edited by Young Allen, and the SDCGKC comments in its 1891 Annual Report that it had achieved a wide and approving readership.¹⁷ Wang Hui does not pursue further the question of Protestant missionary influence. And the answer may be lost to history. But I would not be surprised to learn that someone has already explored it in depth.

A few weeks ago I said I would talk about Kang’s vision of The Great Unity in this post. But, thanks to my reading of Wang Hui’s The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, I’ve now done some backfilling of the story leading up to Kang’s vision. Next time The Great Unity.… I promise!

And History Matters!

Is all this historical investigation relevant to today? While reading Wang Hui’s book, I came across a story in the New York Times that points out the relevance of the events of the late nineteenth century:

“Mr. Xi [Jinping] has frequently drawn on Russia’s historical and literary tradition to convey his intent to undermine — and ultimately displace — Western ideas and institutions.” (NYT, 12/16/2024): This Unreadable Russian Novel Drives Xi’s Struggle Against America.

And then this:

Xi Jinping's Archival Project to Rewrite Chinese History

Well, history matters!

A Final Note of Thanks

When I started this Substack on January 18, 2023, I wondered how it would go. This is the 60th post, and the readership has grown modestly but steadily. While I had already spent a few years researching and writing, this Substack has been an excellent discipline and has opened up new lines of investigation. I have learned much more than I expected. And I hope it has been profitable for you, my readers.

Some of you are paying subscribers, and I am honored. Your dollars go toward the purchase of books that feed this little enterprise. As some of you know, academic studies typically come at premium prices. Sometimes I can access them free of charge (via libraries), but sometimes not. So thank you!

As 2025 begins, I’m committing to another year of The China We Never Knew.

1. This is not something Wang Hui takes up, but since I did (follow the link), I’m reintroducing it here.

2. Laura Hostetler and Wu Xumei, Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples: A Cultural Cartography of Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 5.

3. Ezra F. Vogel, China and Japan: Facing History (Harvard/Belknap, 2019), 30-31.

4. Wang Hui, Rise, 724.

5. Wang Hui, Rise, 632-634. He lays out the more complicated picture behind this transition.

6. As time went on it became apparent that some of these outsiders, the Americans, brought with them their own mandate from heaven, a Manifest Destiny, for a Westward Movement across the Pacific! But we are getting ahead of the story. For a recent study of this theme, see Tom Smith, Word Across the Water (Cornell University Press, 2024).

7. Among these missionary sources were Elijah Coleman Bridgman’s A Short Account of the United Provinces of America; Robert Morrison’s A Short History of Foreign Countries; Karl Gutzlaff’s A General Account of Trade, and his Universal Geography; Richard Quarterman Way’s Illustrated Geography; and Divie Bethune McCartee’s The Peace Almanac. These are English translations of Chinese publications, as noted in Wang Hui, Rise, 668-669.

8. Wang Hui, Rise, 6. Interestingly enough, the old Qing empire’s terms of inner and outer are preserved today in the distinction between Inner Mongolia (which was administered directly by the Qing and remains part of today’s China) and Outer Mongolia (which was on the periphery, had a tributary relationship, and is an autonomous nation today).

9. Cue up all sorts of interpretive parallels with the United States and “America’s Book,” the Bible, and the U.S. Constitution. In various and sundry ways, many Americans believe these texts must hold the key to the present.

10. Wang Hui, Rise, 755.

11. Wang Hui, Rise, 764.

12. Wang Hui, Rise, 772-773.

13. Wang Hui, Rise, 758-759.

14. Wang Hui, Rise, 773.

15. The Waring States period was 475-221 BCE.

16. Kang as quoted in Wang Hui, Rise, 758.

17. Wang Hui, Rise, 782-783; Fourth Annual Report of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese, October 31, 1891 (Shanghai, 1889), 9.