Liang
Qichao (1873-1929)
"Liang Qichao, who was born in 1873 in a small southern village,
not far from the Portuguese colony of Macao, died in 1929 after an intellectually
tumultuous life. He wrestled continuously with the problem of how to
reform China without destroying what he took to be its cultural essence
and without humiliating its people with cultural annihilation. Among
Liang's formative political experiences was his participation in China's
first student demonstration, in 1895. The Imperial government had just
signed a humiliating peace treaty with Japan following China's defeat
in the Sino-Japanese War; in response, eight thousand young Chinese scholars,
who had come to Beijing to take the national civil service exams, signed
a petition expressing their opposition to the treaty. They then formed
a line one-third of a mile long in front of Duchayuan, the Censorate
of the Qing government, in protest. Their public demonstration proclaimed
for the first time that Chinese citizens had the right, indeed the obligation,
to regulate those by whom they were governed. Confucius's disciple Mencius
had written, "He who restrains his prince, loves his prince." But
Liang belonged to the first generation of scholars who, instead of going
into voluntary exile when their entreaties were rebuffed by the Imperial
government, dared to organize a constituency outside of the government
to apply political pressure.
Like other forward-thinking Confucian scholars, Liang came to see "wealth
and power" as the only salvation for a beleaguered China living
under the threat of national extinction at the hands of Japan and the
technologically advanced, rapacious Western powers. Just as intellectuals
in the nineteen-eighties were debating the causes of China's backwardness
and searching for ways to remedy it through "modernization," so
too had Liang and his generation of reform-minded scholars sought to
understand the origins of China's dynastic weakness and to suggest remedies.
A brilliant Confucian scholar, Liang came to believe that the source
of Western wealth and power lay in democracy. He held that the energy
generated by popular participation in the political process was what
drove any dynamic society forward. But while he valued the dynamism that
free, competing individuals might contribute to the building of a nation,
he was vague indeed about how these Promethean, alien forces he wished
to see released in China might be reconciled with the interests of the
Chinese state. In fact, in optimistically Confucian fashion, he avoided
entirely the problem of possible conflict by assuming that the natural
order of things was harmony between rulers and the ruled. Whereas Western
thinkers such as Hobbes and Rousseau (who recognized how particular interests
easily come into conflict with the "general will") had immediately
identified this obvious point of discord in any democratic social contract,
Liang missed it completely. In holding his new convictions that individuals
should and did have "rights" (quan), he never imagined
that a state might become tyrannical or that its people might become
rebellious."
Excerpted from Orville Schell, Discos & Democracy:
China in the Throes of Reform (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988;
paperback: Anchor Doubleday, 1989). Reprinted with permission.
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