Kang Youwei

Chinese intellectual and nationalist leader

• Born: March 19, 1858
• Birthplace: Guangdong Province, China
• Died: March 31, 1927
• Place of death: Qingdao, Shandong Province, China

One of the leading Chinese political thinkers of his time, Kang wrote practical memorials concerning economic and political topics, as well as utopian essays. After he was forced to flee China as a dangerous radical in 1898, he became an influential agitator and organizer seeking Chinese political reform.

Early Life

Kang Youwei (kahng yoo-way) was born into a relatively well-to-do family. His father, a government official, died when he was eleven years old, and his mother was challenged to manage with a much reduced income. Her coping skills and affectionate bullying left Kang with great admiration for her, and helps explain the favorable attitude toward women’s rights that he developed later in his life.

Kang was tutored by his grandfather in the traditional literary and philosophical Chinese classics. These studies were aimed at helping him pass the government civil service examinations and qualify for an official position—then the most appealing route to wealth and power. However, he failed the examinations in 1876—perhaps because his rebellious and creative streak was beginning to surface.

From his early years, Kang displayed extraordinary self-confidence, reflecting his wide reading and unusual verbal skills. Aided by family financial support, he embarked on a career as a “public intellectual.” His reading moved beyond the Chinese classics into the more mystical realms of Buddhism and Daoism and then into public affairs—government, history, geography, economics.

In 1876, Kang married Zhang Miaohua, a woman three years older than him, and they had two daughters together. Although Kang often affirmed Confucian endorsements of marriage, he was also involved successively with two concubines, in part because he was away from his wife for long periods of time. His writings repeatedly affirmed the value of pleasures and comforts, and his lifestyle reflected these convictions.

Life’s Work

Like many contemporary Chinese thinkers, Kang was disturbed by the weakness of China’s imperial government and the ease with which it was bullied by Japan and Western powers. He began writing about possible social and political reforms from several angles. The most noteworthy of these viewpoints involved reinterpretations of the writings of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius. In 1891, he produced a book the title of which translates as the “forged classics of the Wang Mang period.” This work claimed that many of the revered Chinese classical texts were actually forgeries. His book generated so much public outrage that it was banned by the imperial court. In 1897, Kang published a book on Confucius that argued that the ancient sage had been a supporter of institutional change. Clearly Kang was using Confucius as a medium to advance his own agenda for political reform, sometimes at the sacrifice of truth and accuracy.

In 1891, Kang established an academy in Canton (Guangzhou). There, he provided instruction in the classics—according to his own interpretations—and also in modern subjects such as mathematics and the study of Western learning. His prize pupil was Liang Qichao, who became a remarkably prolific writer on Chinese public affairs and introduced into China many Western writers.

Kang finally passed the civil service examinations in 1893; two years later, he received an appointment in the government’s board of works. China had just been defeated in a war with Japan and was in the process of accepting the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which gave Japan control of Korea. Kang petitioned Emperor Guangxu to reject the treaty, thus beginning his series of widely publicized memorials to the throne advocating reforms to strengthen China against imperialist pressures. In 1895-1896, he and Liang Qichao produced a reform-oriented newspaper, and Kang organized at least two associations dedicated to reform.

Emperor Guangxu, who sincerely desired modernizing reforms, invited Kang to an imperial audience in June, 1898. In response to the suggestions of Kang and other advisers, Guangxu issued a breath-taking series of decrees establishing a national university (later called Beijing University) and other modern schools, modernizing the civil service examinations, establishing a budget system, abolishing useless public offices, and reorganizing both the military and civil administrative systems.

These rapid moves were disturbing to the inner circle of palace officials, who feared for their own power and influence and claimed that reform measures were being used by foreign powers to weaken the monarchy and the state. Indeed, the Japanese were, in fact, trying to persuade the young emperor to give them a major role as advisers seeking China’s modernization. An influential clique of palace insiders persuaded the dowager empress Cixi, the emperor’s aunt, to take a more active role in warning Guangxu of the dangers they perceived in the reform program. They presented evidence that Kang and his associates were planning to assassinate some leading officials. Kang later claimed the emperor had been forcibly deposed and was being held prisoner, but Sterling Seagrave’s 1992 book, Dragon Lady, refutes this claim.

In any event, the government moved vigorously to suppress the reform movement. Kang’s brother was executed, and the same fate would have befallen Kang and Liang Qichao, had they not fled the country. After arriving in Hong Kong, Kang began a campaign to discredit the dowager empress and did in fact attempt to engage hired assassins to murder her. Kang then proceeded to Japan, Great Britain, and Canada, lobbying their governments to intervene to free the supposedly captive emperor and restore him to power. In July, 1899, when he was in Victoria, British Columbia, he organized the Society to Protect the Emperor, which developed branches among overseas Chinese in the United States and several other countries. During that same year that same emperor offered a reward of more than 100,000 dollars for Kang and Liang. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Kang and other leaders of Chinese insurgent movements tried to organize the overthrow of the empress.

Kang spent most of 1900-1903 relaxing and writing in Penang in Malaya and in Darjeeling, India. He extended his discussions of Confucius as a reformer, attributing to him the idea that society was moving through three stages—an age of disorder, an age of “minor tranquility,” and a final stage of “great peace.” Kang then absorbed this sequence into a book—which is his most interesting to Western readers—Datongshu , the book of great harmony. Kang apparently began this work in 1885, and completed it in 1902, but published only a small portion of it during his lifetime. It was later translated into English. The book was a blueprint for a utopian socialist society, comparable to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), which appeared in Chinese translation in 1891-1892.

Kang believed that much of the world’s conflicts arose from the competitive striving after gain animated by the family system. In his ideal socialist system, marriages would be modified into short-term contracts and child-raising would be taken over by the state. Kang stressed the need to achieve equality and to eliminate barriers among races, classes, and the sexes. He envisioned the merging of national states into a democratic, federated world government.

Kang’s composition itself displayed many conflicts. Many of his other writings had stressed the virtues of competition and free enterprise. He expressed contradictory views on the desirability of competition. In one place he wrote that competition was “the greatest evil to the public existing in the world.” Elsewhere he wrote that “without competition there is laxness and decadence.”

In 1903, Kang began shifting his political focus to press for China to adopt a constitution and become a limited monarchy similar to that of Great Britain. He traveled extensively, speaking to groups of overseas Chinese and raising money to support Chinese reform and—so his critics claimed—to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle.

Kang was not a supporter of the 1911 revolution. As it proceeded, he campaigned unsuccessfully against overthrowing the monarchy. He remained loyal to the fallen dynasty and urged that Confucianism be established as China’s official religion. He returned to China in 1913. He was involved in 1917 in a plot to restore the deposed emperor and narrowly escaped arrest and possible execution. Disillusioned with public affairs, he turned his attention to cosmology, combining scientific knowledge and fantasy in his final writings.

Significance

Kang symbolized the struggle of Chinese intellectuals to modernize their society, while at the same time preserving the esteemed values of Chinese culture celebrated in the Confucian classics. His conflicted inclinations are evident: He simultaneously wrote memorials supporting competition and market economy while designing a utopian socialist system.

Assessments of Kang’s life and work vary widely. Most historians of Chinese intellectual development deal respectfully with his writings. In China he is praised as a hero of the reform movement of 1898. Sterling Seagrave gives a very different picture. He views Kang as a vain, pompous, and dishonest opportunist who greatly exaggerated his own originality and importance and whose main achievement was in helping to create a false negative image of the dowager empress Cixi. Kang’s most praiseworthy effort was probably his consistent defense of constitutional monarchy during the years following 1903. Had the Chinese followed his path, they might have avoided the disastrous failures of the ill-fated republic that emerged from the 1911-1912 revolution.

Bibliography

Hsiao, Kung-chuan. A Modern China and a New World: Kang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858-1927. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. A comprehensive review of Kang’s writings, effectively assessed on the context of what everyone else was saying and doing.

Karl, Rebecca, and Peter Zarrow, eds. Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Places Kang’s ideas and activities into the broader context of his times.

Lo, Jung-pang, ed. K’ang Yu-wei: A Biography and a Symposium. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967. Lo was Kang’s grandson and the tone of this volume is respectful rather than critical.

Seagrave, Sterling. Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Written with a novelist’s flair for drama. Stresses Kang’s role in the 1898 political upheaval and in creating a false impression in the West about developments in China.

Thompson, Laurence G. Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1958. This is the English translation of Kang’s utopian book.