In "From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia," Pankaj Mishra describes the intellectual journey of two Chinese reformers, Kang Youwei and his student Liang Qichao. Youwei and Qichao were contemporaries of the future Chinese President Sun Yat Sen, though they advocated for reform rather than revolution, and they sought to ground change in a familiar tradition.
In China, Confucianism was the unifying ideology, a shared cultural system that carefully outlined the different relationships that made up society, from children and parents to rulers and subjects. While several empires had risen and fallen within China, they had all adopted and paid intellectual tribute to Confucianism, making it a binding tradition that stretched back thousands of years. China prior to the 1800s had grown confident in its place in the world, and the sudden, violent entry of the British Empire upended this system, leaving the Chinese shaken and confused. A century later, a heavily industrialized Japan trounced China in the 1894-95 war. The thorough defeat by a country that had once paid tribute to the Chinese Empire drove home how far the world had left them behind, and how urgent the need for modernization was.
In contrast to contemporary Middle Eastern reformers like al-Afghani, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao at first held no enduring hatred or distrust of Westernization, and in fact explicitly advocated for it. Part of the difference between these perspectives was perhaps regional. The Middle East held extremely salient examples of two once mighty nations, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, both crumbling as they tried to emulate the west. In East Asia, however, Chinese intellectuals had the example of Meiji Japan, a country that had grown so successful from modernization that it was able to throw off its shackles and even defeat the Russian Empire in war.
Kang and Liang belonged to a group of intellectuals who researched deeply in the Western cannon, and Liang read “Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau and Greek Philosophers, and even wrote biographical studies of Cromwell, Cavour and Mazzini.” Liang and his contemporaries saw Western dominance not as a product of simple military might, but rather of social and political organization: “Yan believed that the West had mastered the art of channeling individual energy and dynamism into national strength. In Britain and France people thought of themselves as active citizens of a dynamic nation-state rather than, as was the case in China, as subjects of an empire built on old rituals.” Note how different this diagnosis is from the modern, naive Western conception of the billion strong people of China as a perfectly united, synchronized nation state.
These Chinese modernizers, many of them Republicans and Social Darwinists, wanted society restructured and optimized for success. Here teacher and student differed; Kang was still convinced in the philosophical importance of Confucianism and believed China could be modernized with an enlightened despot holding the reins. Liang, however, felt himself pulled by the tide of Western rationalism and the alluring empowerment and egalitarian nature of democracy. However, both thinkers understood the need to ground their reforms in the context of Confucianism to maintain unity and continuity for the population at large. Kang was the first intellectual to voice to the Empire the idea that certain interpretations of Confucianism in fact allowed and even encouraged Western norms such as mass political organization, universal education and women’s rights.
After briefly considering Kang's and Liang's proposed reforms, the Qing central command swiftly changed its mind and decided to crack down on the upstarts. Kang was imprisoned and Liang was forced to flee to Tokyo, which at the time was becoming an intellectual hub for anti-colonial thinkers, sort of a Paris of East Asia. Everywhere Liang looked in his new home he saw the invasive presence of American business, and over time his opposition to Western imperialists steadily hardened, as did his conviction that China must adapt and survive like Japan or be forgotten to history.
From Japan he moved to the United States, where he finally had a chance to see democracy in action. Arriving a few years after the brutal American conquest of the Philippines, Liang was under no illusions as to the imperialist character of the United States. Still, he was shocked by the staggering economic and racial inequality he witnessed. I want to quote the next section at length because I believe it’s one of the most important excerpts in the book:
“Liang began to lose his faith in people’s rights as the cure-all to autocracy as his indictment of American democracy grew . . . As he saw it, corporate interests played an insidious role in American politics. Frequent elections made for policy short-sightedness and cheap populism . . . It was no longer possible for Liang to conclude that the Chinese were held back only by their autocratic system from becoming self aware and nationalistic individuals. ‘Who says America is a nation freely formed by all the people? I see only a few great men who imposed it on them. Since this true even of Americans who are so used to self government, others should certainly take warning’
. . .
This wasn’t a sudden change of mind on Liang’s part. The success of Meiji Japan, where he lived, had proved that an authoritarian state could be more effective than liberal democratic institutions in building a modern nation. As European countries began to embrace protectionist economic policies and build stronger states, many intellectuals in East Asia began to change their minds.”
This section really struck me. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China would regularly brush off western criticisms of their autocratic regimes by referring to the United States’ enduring poverty and atrocious treatment of American minorities. Westerners, in turn, brush off these criticisms by calling them “whataboutisms,” or naked attempts to deflect attention from despotism. As far as I know whataboutisms are actually considered Soviet propaganda. I’ve read dozens of these debates, but it never occurred to me that there were influential intellectuals in the East who actually wanted democracy until they saw it in action in the United States. I naively assumed that autocracy in China was a natural systemic holdover from the empire to nationalism to communism, rather than a conscious and deliberate choice made after considering the alternatives.
Liang's philosophy began to grow and shift. Whereas once he had sympathized with Sun Yat Sen’s desire for a republic to be established through revolution, he now came to believe that revolution would lead to instability - and that the republic was no longer the essential model for modernization. Liang came to advocate a benevolent dictatorship which would use the state to support capitalists and grow domestic business till it could compete in the global market. He also envisioned the state playing the role of welfare administrator. His proposed model came to look something like welfare capitalism, only controlled by a central power rather than a rotating elected leader. Indeed this bore more than a little similarity to Otto Van Bismark’s model for Germany.
In the aftermath of World War 1, the brutality Liang saw rid him of his remaining notions of the supremacy of Western rationalism and materialism. He saw the West in its most uncivilized, most miserable state, and it finally led him back to his teacher Kang’s faith in Confucianism. Having come full circle, Liang shed his belief in Social Darwinism and preached the importance of China’s ancient ideology, stressing that it could generate moral order and contentment whereas materialism and Westernization would only bring spiritual emptiness.
Of course, eventually revolution did come to China, first validating Sat Yun Sen as a new republic was established with him as its leader - only later to validate Liang as the republic hardened into a military government and then burst and splintered into anarchy.
Briefly, the military dictator Yuan Shikai offered something like a chance at Liang’s vision, exercising centralized control and attempting to revitalize the communal bonds of Confucianism. Shikai brought back Kang Youwei to help him establish Confucianism as a ruling ideology and a link between him and his subjects, and appointed Liang Minister of Justice and financial advisor. But he went too far, too fast by re-asserting himself as the new emperor. A nation that had only just thrown off its imperial shackles rejected his attempts outright, leading to a second revolution, one that shattered the potential nation state of China into “innumerable fiefdoms of warlords and bandits.” In the same stroke, Shikai’s fall from grace tainted the ideology of Confucianism as reactionary and monarchical, and a new generation of young Chinese came to see the once vital tradition as backwards and regressive.
In the anarchy that followed, the need remained that Kang and Liang had articulated for China to unify under a cohesive ideology. But in the wake of Confucianism, what could unite the half billion people of China? The establishment of the People’s Republic of China was an attempt, in many ways successful, to do just that - only supplanting Confucianism with Maoism. As with Kang and Liang, the Chinese Communists drew their reforms directly from the western tradition, in this case from Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. As with Kang and Liang, they attempted to adjust what had worked in the west to their own situation. Marxism-Leninism was originally focused on industrial economies; Mao Zedong adapted it to the Chinese agrarian setting and invented Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the new ideology which was to define the nation. In later decades, as communism was rolled back and capitalism was adopted, the PRC retained the idea of a western model applied in the East, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
As Mishra points out, Liang’s ideas may never have materialized in his lifetime, but his model for a competitive China is not unlike the government the post communist PRC eventually settled upon. After Mao unified China under a centralized state, with a cohesive identity, his successor Deng Xiaoping introduced capitalism into the system. True to Liang’s prescription, modern China uses state subsidies to keep its private industry competitive internationally, and funnels the profit into welfare for its citizens. If Liang had lived, it would have been interesting to hear his perspective on the current Chinese statehood experiment.