"Kang Youwei and Institutional Confucianism"

Gan Yang, et.al., “Kang Youwei and Institutional Confucianism”

Gan Yang 甘阳, et.al., “康有为与制度化儒学,” originally published in 开放时代 2014.5, available online at www.aisixiang.com/data/79543.html . 
 
​N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby.
 
This transcription of a scholarly debate held in late June of 2014 reflects an important trend in the thought world of contemporary China:  the revival of interest in Kang Youwei (1858-1927), particularly among Mainland New Confucians.  Kang was a towering figure in the late Qing period who, despite his controversial loyalty to the Qing court, remained important in the Republican period as the leader of a campaign to establish Confucianism as China’s national religion.  For Mainland New Confucians, Kang Youwei is above all important as a conservative figure, one who understood the importance and potential of Confucianism in a modern context, and they propose taking up his reform agenda once again, arguing for the revival of Confucian culture through educational or perhaps religious initiatives.

In the 1890s, and particularly after China’s loss to Japan in the Sino-Japanese War, Kang and his student Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873-1929) were important and controversial figures in reform circles among China’s mandarin élite, both in terms of setting an intellectual agenda and in implementing reform ideas on the ground (Liang was particularly active in Hunan).  Building on his status as a Confucian wunderkind, Kang fashioned a multi-faceted response to the challenges of the day that broke with the conservatism that had characterized most of China’s reform movement to this point.  In writings that shocked many of his peers, he argued that Confucius had been misunderstood throughout much of Chinese history; instead of the “ancestor-worshipper” depicted in traditional portraits of the sage (“I transmit but do not create”), Confucius was instead a dynamic institutional reformer (like Peter the Great or Itô Hirubumi) who might even have become king had the political cards been dealt differently.  Such arguments allowed Kang to agitate for important reforms while at the same time claiming allegiance to the Confucian tradition.

The concrete aim of many of these reforms was rapid modernization; Kang was impressed by Meiji Japan and other late-developers.  But what interests today’s admirers of Kang were his efforts to reform China in such a way as to avoid a destructive political revolution or a painful rupture with her Confucian roots.  To achieve these goals, Kang proposed a thorough-going restructuring of several of the basic elements of Chinese society.    He argued that the property of the temples of Chinese popular religion be confiscated, providing funding and housing for the modern schools that would be established.  He further argued that Confucianism should become a religion—indeed, China’s national religion—on the model of the Western and other examples he had studied (the Church of England, Shintô), with a clergy, a body of text, and weekend services.  The notion was both to provide China with an educated citizenry, in scientific and technical terms, and also to create a renewed Confucian culture by eliminating most of the practices of popular religion (now seen as “superstition”) and welcoming the people into a newly popularized Confucian church.  Kang’s defense of the idea of a constitutional monarchy should be understood from this angle as well; the emperor would be another symbol linking past, present, and future.  And the entire project was linked to utopian imaginings of a unified world of great harmony.

It is not difficult to understand the appeal of Kang Youwei’s ideas to today’s Mainland New Confucians, who claim to be looking for a sensible conservatism that will put an end to a century of revolution and consolidate China’s economic progress of the past few decades.  They see most of China’s twentieth century experience as a failure:  neither the Enlightenment project championed by China’s liberal tradition, nor the communist project (in either its internationalist or Maoist guise) made good on its promises.  Under Mao, communism provided faith and common purpose, but the flame of communism was extinguished by the Cultural Revolution.  If China is flourishing now, it is because Deng Xiaoping returned to Kang Youwei’s reformist tradition, but this success may well be fleeting because China lacks both the moral core and the social cohesion necessary to make the good life possible on a lasting basis.  Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” calls for a revival of the Chinese nation.  Why not revive Confucianism?

The absence of Jiang Qing 蒋庆 (b. 1953) in a discussion of institutional Confucianism is surprising, since his proposals to remake China’s political institutions (see the introduction to Jiang's interview on women and Confucianism) are well known.  My impression is that Jiang’s proposals came at an earlier period, predating the wave of enthusiasm for Mainland New Confucianism that gave rise to the discussion translated here, and that Jiang’s ideas were perhaps seen by the authorities as too outlandish to be taken seriously.  By contrast, the main speakers at this event are all mainstream professors of philosophy at major universities in China, addressing questions of culture, values and education that are widely raised across the political spectrum in China.

Of course, at some level, this discussion is as abstract and utopian as the writings of Kang Youwei or Jiang Qing.  After all, China has a well-developed educational system, fueled by Communist ideology and a new iteration of the examination system, and the possibility of setting up a Confucian religion seems highly unlikely. Because their project is at present largely an abstraction, disputes turn on intellectual understandings of the meaning of “culture,” “religion,” and “education.”  Here and there the speakers wander into the deep weeds regarding details of Kang Youwei’s thought and their application.  There are translation difficulties, as well, precisely because the Mainland New Confucians are hoping to recreate a world in which education and morality and not divided as they are in most secular societies.  One of the most commonly discussed terms is jiaohua 教化, which meant, under the dynasties, “moral transformation through teaching,” and included music and rites as well as formal learning.  In a modern context, it is difficult not to translate jiaohua as “education,” but it means “education” in much the way the pre-Reformation Catholic church would have used the term.  In any event, these exchanges present some of contemporary China’s best New Confucian thinkers, discussing issues they found important at a moment such exchanges were permitted.
 
Translation
 
Chinese Editor’s Introduction
 
In the 120 years since the first Sino-Japanese War, our nation’s fate has gone through many changes.  With the waves of Westernization and the fading of Chinese tradition, today’s China is no longer the China of a century ago.  But the question “What is China?” remains as pressing as ever.  Kang Youwei was born in the late Qing period in a period of intense exchanges between China and the outside world.  Faced with the irresistible current transforming China from an ancient empire to a modern nation-state, and confronted with the powerful “other” that is Western civilization, Kang devoted himself to the institutionalization of Confucianism (or the Confucian religion), hoping to create a new cultural form from within the tradition.

Confucianism practices the way of the inner sage and the outer king.   But for a reasonably long historical period in the recent past, Confucianism has basically expressed itself as the study of the inner sage.  A Confucianism that merely practices personal cultivation without attention to world affairs and popular livelihood is not the true Confucianism, and the idea of “institutional Confucianism” is to focus on revealing the characteristics of the “outer king” that Confucianism should have.  Kang Youwei’s thoughts and actions over the course of his life have much to teach us now.

The contents of this special issue reflect parts of discussions held at the conference entitled “Kang Youwei and Institutional Confucianism,” held on June 26 and 27, 2014, in Kang Youwei’s home town of Nanhai 南海, Guangdong, and jointly organized by the Philosophy Department and the Lingnan Cultural Institute of Zhongshan University.  Transcriptions of the oral presentations were approved by the speakers.  Editors added this brief introduction as well as captions.
　　 
Gan Yang:  Constructing a healthy conservatism on the basis of a stable and steady attitude
　　 
Gan Yang:  I have been asked to say a few words, but I’m really not the person who should give the main address.  I only read these essays on the way here, and what I’ll offer today are just a few preliminary thoughts of my own.
　　
Scholarly interest in Kang Youwei has clearly grown over recent years, a number of monographs have come out, and I have read even more manuscripts that are on their way to publication.  I believe that today’s proceedings will certainly push this trend forward.
　　
Everyone knows that views of Kang Youwei, in China, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and even abroad, are basically consistent.  In general, views of Kang’s earlier thought and activities in the Hundred Days reform period 戊戌变法 are viewed positively or even praised lavishly, while at the same time there is almost universal criticism of Kang’s later thought and activities aiming to protect the emperor.  My feeling is that this may change in important ways in the near future, and if my reading is correct, the best research on Kang Youwei will reverse these trends, with more people are coming to sympathize with and even affirm Kang’s conservatism after the Hundred Days period, while there will be more criticism of Kang’s earlier period.  Most of what I have read over the past few years has focused on an empathetic understanding of Kang’s later period.
　　
I suspect that all of this is probably part of a re-evaluation of the pro-emperor faction and the question of revolution, in the context of contemporary China.  We can also see this as a rethinking of conservatism.  Kang Youwei was probably the only person, before and after him, to consistently oppose revolution.  The reason that he wanted to protect the emperor and the monarchy was basically because he hoped that China could avoid taking the road of the French revolution, and instead choose the non-revolutionary path of reform, as England and Japan had done.  To repeat, he seems to have been the only one in the late Qing period to have been consistent on this point.  Everyone else, including Liang Qichao (1873-1929), went back and forth.  But Kang was clearer than anyone else on the negative consequences that could ensue if China followed the path of the French revolution.  Reading his early discussions of world politics in his petition to the Guangxu 光绪 emperor (r. 1875-1908), as well as his comparative political thought as reflected in the travel diaries of his later period, we can see that his knowledge of world political history, as well as his understanding of political reform, surpassed that of many of people even today.
　　
Of course, in the period leading up to the 1911 Revolution, the debate between the protect the emperor party and the revolutionary party played out politically, and China after Sun Yat-sen, twentieth-century China, is basically a revolutionary China.  And this is why Kang’s political conservatism has had to be comprehensively condemned.  But now we are rethinking this period of history on the basis of a century of revolutionary experience.  Let me remind everyone that we should not slip into paradoxes or vicious circles.  I myself believe that if today we merely condemn China’s twentieth-century revolutions on the basis of Kang’s conservatism, then this is a bit faddish, and not an expression of political maturity.  Indeed, we might well fall into a strange pattern where we would in fact be continuing to oppose revolution on the basis of a [rigidly] revolutionary attitude [i.e., going from extreme to extreme without due reflection].  What interests me more is how a post-revolutionary society can once again cultivate a healthy conservative stance, a conservative, gradual, and progressive attitude toward current social problems and modes of reform.  Of course this is just my individual point of view.  What I want to avoid is a position which seems to sympathize with the conservatism of Kang’s later period, but which in fact is still perpetuating a radical revolutionary attitude which has been with us for more than a century already.  In my view, what has happened has happened, and what is important, in the wake of all that has happened, after a century of revolution, is how to construct a healthy conservatism on the basis of a firm and steady posture.
　　
Beginning from this conservative standpoint, the next important question to address may well relate once again to the evaluation of Kang’s early period, and especially his Confucius as a Reformer (孔子改制考).  To my mind, in the two- to three-thousand year history of Chinese political thought, there has never been a work as destructive as Kang’s Confucius as a Reformer.  It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Confucius as a Reformer symbolically overturned and brought an end to Chinese traditional thought and culture, in an act of extreme destruction.  For example, Gu Jiegang 顾颉刚 (1893-1980), a founder of China’s new historiography, wrote in his autobiography that he read Confucius as a Reformer when he was young, and thereafter felt that nothing about China’s ancient past was believable.  The impact of Confucius as a Reformer on the creation of this completely negative view of Chinese classical history and civilization was unthinkably huge.  We have a hard time imagining it now, but for many literati at the time, Confucius as a Reformer was a catastrophe.  This is very important to those of us now engaged in rethinking the Confucian tradition.
　　
One problem I have with Kang Youwei was that while he worshipped Confucius, under the cover of that worship, he emptied out all of the concrete elements of the Confucian tradition of wenjiao 文教; his attitude appears to have been one of “abstract approval and concrete rejection.”  In later years he championed Confucianism as the state religion, but a glimmer of his thoughts on these issues can be found already in Confucius as a Reformer, because the notion of a “uncrowned king (素王)” must necessarily lead to this.  I personally feel that we should be more critical of Kang’s reading of Confucius and Confucianism in his early period, as represented by Confucius as a Reformer, as well as his basic Gongyang 公羊stance in the late Qing period, and should not continue, as we have in the past, to praise his role in the Hundred Days reform, and his Gongyang arguments in the late Qing, and even his development of “apocalyptic Confucianism 末世儒学.”  For example, his Gongyang “three ages theory 三世说” from the late Qing was extremely capricious, as the ages could evolve at any time, so it came to mean a stance in which you could undertake any reform whenever you wanted to.  I am hoping that there will be deeper criticisms of this kind of “apocalyptic Confucianism.”
　　
Simply put, my basic viewpoint is that while Kang Youwei was politically conservative, in terms of thought and culture he was an extreme radical.  And this intellectual radicalism seems to permeate his entire life, from the early period through his latter years.  For this reason, from my position as a conservative, all of late Qing Gongyang studies, including Kang’s “apocalyptic Confucianism,” are extremely suspect, and should be seen as a departure from or even a betrayal of the Confucian tradition, and whether or not it can provide intellectual resources for the construction of a healthy conservativism is worthy of careful thought.

And I feel that behind all this lurks another big question, which is that late Qing Gongyang thinkers, and Kang Youwei’s Confucius as a Reformer represents this thought to a certain degree, illustrate a tendency toward over-politicization, because they always insist that scholarship and thought be subservient to concrete political needs.  In other words, they did not protect the relative independence of thought and scholarship, so that they could remain outside currents of concrete politics, but instead decided the goals of thought and scholarship on the basis of great political changes they envisioned.  This is a very big problem, and can still serve as a lesson for us today.  I still believe that the true Confucian spirit gradually rectifies peoples’ hearts and brings order to popular customs through the patient work of education, and does not expect concrete results from expedient political reforms.  This is the distinction between “great politics” and “small politics.”  And this is probably the justification behind my devotion to education over the years.  That sums up what I had to say.  I look forward to your comments and criticism.  Thank you very much.