Kang Youwei

Agora

Kang Youwei

1858–1927

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

For Kang Youwei, Confucius was really a reformer, and history moves toward a Great Unity in which nations, classes and even families dissolve.

Placement

East Asian Philosophy · East Asia · Politics & Law, Society & History

Leader of the 1898 Hundred Days’ Reform: read Confucius as a reformer and envisioned a utopia of “Great Unity” beyond nations, classes and families.

Key ideas

Confucius as reformer
Great Unity (datong)
Three ages of history

Students: Liang Qichao

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Influence

Influenced by 2

Confucius

influenced by
In Confucius as a Reformer (Kongzi gaizhi kao, 1897) Kang Youwei presented Confucius as a reformer who invented the golden age of the sage-kings to justify institutional change. Kang Youwei, Kongzi gaizhi kao (1897); K.-c. Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian (1975)
Evidence: AI draft
Confucius › traditionally 551–479 BCE
Mengzi (Mencius)

influenced by
In The Subtle Meaning of the Mencius (Mengzi wei, 1901) Kang Youwei read Mencius’ priority of the people as an early statement of popular rights and constitutional government. Kang Youwei, Mengzi wei (1901); K.-c. Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian (1975)
Evidence: AI draft
Mengzi (Mencius) › c. 372–289 BCE

Influenced 1

Liang Qichao taught

taught ✓
Liang, already a juren graduate, became Kang’s student in Canton in 1890 and studied at his Wanmu Caotang academy; he assisted Kang with his reform writings and in the Hundred Days’ Reform (1898). Liang Qichao, Sanshi zishu (1902); H. Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China (1971)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Liang Qichao › 1873–1929

Works

1902The Book of Great Unity (Datong shu)
A utopia written around 1902 and published in full only in 1935: a world without nations, classes, private property or the traditional family.

Position

Kang Youwei turned the Confucian New Text school into a programme of reform. He declared the Old Text classics forgeries by the Han scholar Liu Xin and saw Confucius not as a transmitter of antiquity but as a reformer who invented the golden age of the sage-kings to justify change. From the Gongyang commentary he took three ages of history: disorder, approaching peace, great peace. The Book of Great Unity pictures the final age – a world without states, classes, private property or family, with equal sexes, but also with a racial hierarchy: “black” and “brown” peoples were to be “improved” by intermarriage with whites and East Asians, and some of them sterilised (F. Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 1992). He kept this utopia private and later urged Confucianism as state religion.

Life & context

Kang Youwei was born in 1858 near Guangzhou into a gentry family. In 1891 he opened a school whose pupils included Liang Qichao. In 1898 the Guangxu Emperor adopted his ideas in the Hundred Days’ Reform, until Empress Dowager Cixi’s coup forced him to flee to Japan. Abroad he led the Society to Protect the Emperor. Back in China from 1913, he remained a monarchist; he died in 1927.