英文书评一则

Zarrow, Peter, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924.
Stanford: Stanford   University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-804-77868-8. Vii+viii+395pp. $ 27.95 (paperback).

The centennial of China’s 1911 revolution in 2011 provided an opportunity for commemorative symposiums that explored the multiple dimensions of the revolution and its meanings. Besides micro studies of details occurring before, after, and during the revolution, as aspects of a sociopolitical process, and general social inquiries about its success or failure, several recent works draw our attention to the cultural-intellectual aspect. Peter Zarrow’s After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924 is such a work, which is an intellectual history ranging from the late Qing to the early Republic, and focusing on the cultural and conceptual meaning of the revolution.

Indeed, when looking back to China at the turn of the twentieth century, we still can’t help asking the question raised by Peter Zarrow in his introduction: “Why was Yuan (Shikai) unable to reverse the Revolution of 1911, for all its manifest failures”? (p.2) and how was the revolution intellectually prepared and fomented? The fact was that all attempts to restore monarchical rule in China failed in spite of the chaos and many failures in the early years of the Republican regime. For Zarrow, a “deep” reason here lies in a profound change of the political culture prior to 1911, which made republicanism an irreversible trend as well as an internalized value in the minds of the Chinese people. Thus, as the author claims, the book “describes some of the ways Chinese political culture changed at the turn of the century” (p. 3). The state is the focal point of Zarrow’s discussion, which tackles the issue of changing concepts during the significant transitional period of China.

For Zarrow, this inquiry about what kind of form of the state suits China’s need as a modern nation state started from Kang Youwei and the 1898 reform movement, which is the topic of chapter 1. Zarrow correctly points out that a main feature of this time period was that the concept “people” (min) as active political agents was incorporated into the political vocabulary of the reformers, and they started to pursue the balance of power between court and locality and between high and low. In his analysis of the very complex intellectual world of Kang Youwei, Zarrow demonstrates the seemingly contradictory visions of Kang with regard to the status of the monarchy. On the one hand, Kang thought that the king should be a mediator chosen by the people, but on the other hand, he also envisioned an absolute and highly active monarchy (p. 33). How did Kang reconcile this contradiction? Zarrow’s interpretation is that what Kang really extolled was the power associated with the monarchy rather the monarchy itself, which means Kang was utilitarian when glorifying imperial power because his final concern, as a self-styled Confucian sage, was the welfare of the people and morality of rule (p. 36), as well as the institution of a modern state in China. Zarrow suggests that for Kang the emperor was the focus of sovereignty. He should be a charismatic, proactive,but also spiritual and detached leader of the new and strengthened China. Here, building the modern state, rather than the emperor‘s personality cult was Kang’s real goal.

In chapter 1, Zarrow suggests that even Kang Youwei, known for “protecting the emperor,” used monarchy more as a strategy than as an ultimate value. Kang’s disciple Liang Qichao went even further. First, Liang made it explicit that his goal was to “protect the nation,” and he claimed that he loved the truth more than Confucius (pp. 57–58). Zarrow shows that Liang Qichao was concerned about a wide range of questions, from intellectual freedom, nationalism, and morality, to the “public” (gong). By using “gong” (public or public-mindedness) as a conceptual framework, Liang decided that monarchism is simply selfish while democracy is public-minded. Since as early as 1896 Liang felt that the duty of rulers should be to actively take care of the people. At the same time, as Zarrow points out, the secular political power of kings could not supersede the moral authority of Confucius, who was the de facto law giver. Liang also kept reminding the emperor of his duty but at the same time denied the ancient theocratic basis for the imperial institution (pp. 70–73). Here again, Zarrow suggests that Liang’s approach, as with Kang’s toward monarchy, was quite “pragmatic,” and their ultimate concern was the state. The separation between the monarchy and the state was also emphasized by Yan Fu, who went as far as to say that the state was stolen from the people by the ruler (p. 85).

In chapter 3, Zarrow delineates how “state” was conceptualized in late Qing China under the influence of Western legal theories and political language. For instance, Yang Tingdong in his Study of the Laws emphasized the independence of the state, its uniqueness, and he highlighted the state’s character as cooperation among human beings so as to progress (p. 101). Yang’s distinctive contribution, as Zarrow points out, was his insistence on the primacy of the state, which creates the law, not the other way around. Yang also emphasized the people’s “public rights” which include “liberty rights” (ziyou quanli) such as freedom of religion, speech, publication, and association. In the same chapter, Zarrow continues to expand on Liang Qichao’s “statism.” Liang suggested that only a democratic state counted as a true state, while emphasizing two essential factors: territoriality and sovereignty. However, it was Liang’s preference that constitutional monarchy might be the best form for China, because full democracy tended to be unstable. Zarrow successfully shows that Liang’s thought about the state was in flux and full of tensions and contradictions. He rejected coercive statism, as mapped out by Herbert Spencer, but could not accept the egalitarianism of Rousseau. Being critical and selective, Liang identified himself more with Bluntschli by 1903, when he preached a didactic, strong, and even despotic state to unify China, and he argued that the citizen’s identity should be defined by the state, but should also be the vessel for the right of political participation.

Radical revolutionaries appear in chapter 5, where the voices of Zhang Taiyan, Liu Shipei, Zou Rong, Yang Du, Song Jiaoren, etc., articulate further discussion about the modern state. The Qing emperorship was attacked from many different angles: the ethnic nationalism of Zou Rong, the historicization of the Chinese nation by Zhang Taiyan, and the philological disenchantment of the moral basis of the imperial state by Liu Shipei. Zarrow also shows the complexity of the intellectual world of the radical thinkers. For instance, Zhang Taiyan supported revolution but did not trust constitutionalism; Wang Jingwei trusted democracy and equality but also doubted the fairness of electoral politics, Song Jiaoren’s high moralism versus his sacrifice of family to serve the state, Liu Shipei’s call for the state’s role in supporting popular rights, and Liang Qichao’s emphasis on the involvement of the state in the economy.

Now, if we go back to the foundational question about why China never truly returned to the toppled imperial system, then it seems that Zarrow, in After the Empire, clearly shows that the most brilliant and farseeing Chinese leading intellectuals in the four decades under discussion did not pay much attention to the sanctity of the monarch, nor defend it on any theoretical ground. Instead, all they were limited to discussions of the meaning of a modern state, the duty of the state (or the monarch as a symbolic rallying point), and the proper relationship between the state and the people. None of the intellectuals and scholars, except those who are mentioned in chapter 4 such as Zhang Zhidong, Wang Renjun, and Ye Dehui, continued to insist on the concept such as the distinction between superior and inferior and the sacredness of the Three Bonds. Compared with the “statists,” as Zarrow would call them, those “reactionaries” (Zarrow’s word, p. 139) can be called “culturalists,” who failed to present any in-depth and valuable discussion about the questions that the radical reformers and revolutionaries were concerned about. At the turn of the twentieth century, the cultural conservatives, whose nationalist sentiments could be admired and not merely dismissed, of course,seemed anachronistic, for they “never saw the state as the highest good” in an age of international rivalry. The strong state sentiment as embodied by the radical thinkers of the late Qing definitely ran throughout the entire twentieth century, and continued into our times. As political culture, this conceptualization effectively nullified the attempts to restore monarchy in China, however, the perpetualization of it would perhaps also block China’s democratization, for we also see its illiberal aspects, as described in Zarrow’s book.