Kang Youwei

Kang Youwei (born March 19, 1858, Nanhai, Guangdong province, China—died March 21, 1927, Qingdao, Shandong province) was a Chinese scholar, a leader of the Reform Movement of 1898 and a key figure in the intellectual development of modern China. During the last years of the empire and the early years of the republic he sought to promote Confucianism as an antidote against “moral degeneration” and indiscriminate Westernization.

Kang Youwei came from a scholarly gentry family in the district of Nanhai in Guangdong province. His teacher imbued him with the Confucian ideal of service to society, and his study of Buddhism impressed him with its spirit of compassion. He rebelled against convention, Neo-Confucian authoritarianism, and the demands of the civil service examination system. After reading about the outside world, he came to admire Western civilization. In the 1880s he began to conceive some of his basic ideas: ideas of historical progress, social equality, a world government, and the nature of the universe.

Kang’s first venture in social reform was in 1883, when he tried to abolish in his village the custom of foot-binding imposed on women. The decay of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12) prompted Kang and other concerned Chinese to urge fundamental institutional reforms. After his plans for the salvation of China—submitted in 1888 to the Qing court—were ignored, Kang set out to convert the educated class to his views and to arouse the people from their lethargy. In 1890 he opened a school in Guangzhou (Canton) to teach new learning. Assisted by his students, among whom was Liang Qichao, who collaborated in his reform movement, he wrote The Forged Classics (1891), which reveals that the Confucian Classics held sacrosanct as bases of the state cult had been tampered with in the Han period (206 bc–ad 220). This book was followed by Confucius as a Reformer (1897), which expounded Kang’s belief that Confucius was concerned with contemporary problems and stood for change and that the progress of mankind was inevitable. His interpretation of Confucian teachings and researches on ancient texts later inspired modern scholarship in the reappraisal of China’s past, although critics have charged that he invoked Confucius to further his aims and was undermining the established way of life.

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When China was defeated by Japan in 1895, Kang mobilized hundreds of provincial graduates then in Beijing to protest against the humiliating peace terms and to petition for far-reaching reforms to strengthen the empire. To arouse the people to the dangers confronting China, he and his associates published newspapers and founded the Society for the Study of National Strengthening, the archetype of political parties in modern China. The society was suppressed in 1896.

In 1898, when foreign powers threatened to partition China, Kang and his followers suggested an alliance with Britain and Japan to check Russia’s advance and insisted that only institutional reforms could save China. He urged the clearing of channels for the expression of public opinion, the convocation of assemblies, and even the acceptance of popular sovereignty and the separation of state powers, and he organized the Society to Preserve the Nation to marshal support. Finally, he prevailed upon the Guangxu emperor to launch the reform program. Among the many measures that were promulgated were streamlining the government, strengthening the armed forces, creating new standards in the civil service examination system, developing commerce and industry, promoting local self-government, and opening Peking University and modern schools.

The reform measures were annulled, however, when the dowager empress Cixi reasserted control. The emperor was placed in confinement, six of the reform leaders, including Kang’s brother, were executed, and scores were arrested. Kang and Liang Qichao escaped to Japan. Unable to persuade the Japanese and British governments to intervene for the emperor, Kang went to Canada and founded the China Reform Association (Zhongguo Weixinhui; popularly known as the Save the Emperor Association and in 1907 renamed the Constitutional Party) to carry on his plans.

After the failure of the revolts instigated by the reformers in 1900 in Anhui and Hubei provinces to restore the emperor, Kang resumed his writing in exile. His most significant work completed at this time was The Great Commonwealth (Datongshu), in which he envisaged a utopian world attainable through successive stages of human development, a world where the barriers of race, religion, state, class, sex, and family would be removed and where there would be an egalitarian, communal society under a universal government.

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Kang emerged from his retreat in 1903. To help the overseas Chinese and to unite them in a common effort, he and his colleagues founded an international business firm and established schools and newspapers. These activities, conducted in the United States, Mexico, Japan, and Southeast Asia, brought them into sharp competition with the Chinese revolutionists.

During his exile, Kang traveled extensively. His stay in Europe and his study of Western history moved him to shun the violence and destructiveness of revolution as means of political change, and he proposed as an alternative course the promotion of science, technology, and industry to rebuild China.

After his return in 1913 to a weak and troubled China, he was soon involved in the campaign to thwart the monarchical scheme of the Chinese statesman Yuan Shikai. In 1917, in line with his idea of a constitutional monarchy to bridge the transition to a truly democratic republic, he participated in the abortive restoration of the Qing ruler. In the years that followed, animated by the fear of a divided country, he opposed the South China government of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925). He called for the preservation of the best of China’s heritage and the establishment of a reformed Confucian church to provide the people with spiritual guidance. Partisan writers have criticized him for holding to these views. In his later years, he renewed his philosophic reflections, completing his last book, The Heavens, in which he blended astronomy with his own metaphysical musing, a year before his death at Qingdao in 1927.

Besides prolific writings on the Chinese Classics, politics, and economics, Kang also left travel accounts and an anthology of his poems; he was also a famous calligrapher.