China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Peter Zarrow, University of New South Wales
Chair: Stephen C. Angle, Wesleyan University
Discussant: Jerome B. Grieder, Brown University
The centenary of the reform movement of 1898 (wuxu bianfa) offers an opportunity to reassess its significance. The political firestorm of the summer of 1898 is generally seen as a failure resulting in the Empress Dowager’s coup d’etat. It is also seen as China’s last opportunity to avoid revolution amid the tumultuous domestic and foreign pressures of the late nineteenth century. The purpose of these back-to-back panels, however, is to offer broader perspectives on the movement as a whole, examining its context and background (Part I) and its impact and significance (Part II). The movement promoted institutional and social change, and had profound consequences in the realms of the political, intellectual, and social.
The 1898 reforms have not been subject to scholarly re-evaluation in some time. We propose in these two panels to apply new approaches such as cultural studies, postcolonial discourse, and gender theory, as well as to utilize newly available information. Although the nineteenth century has fallen out of historical fashion in American Sinology, the "Hundred Days" of 1898 remains a pivotal moment in the development of modern China. The actual effects of the reform movement, rather than its failures, deserve a closer look at the 100-year mark.
The panels will present the work of scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds. In Part I (context) panelists focus on the some of movement’s leading players and inner tensions. In Part II (significance) panelists focus on how some of these tensions were played out in subsequent developments. Collectively, we synthesize intellectual, political, and cultural approaches hitherto kept distinct.
Seungjoo Yoon, Harvard University
This paper examines how new forms of political participation were furthered by changes in the modes of political communication before the Hundred Days of Reform. Of these new modes, the rise of the political press was the most salient. This paper focuses on key controversial articles which appeared in the China Progress. It modifies brokerage models to explain how patron-broker-client networks fostered dissenting voices within the company. This provides a better explanation to the historical debate than the simplistic "radical vs. moderate" model.
The main areas of concern include: First, the debate within the CP over editorial policies. Zhang Zhidong, the key patron of the whole enterprise, set the tone for the editorialists, and his broker-clients, for their part, competed with each other to produce more "orthodox" views. Second, the controversy between the ins and outs. Zhang’s clienteles formed autonomous links to each other and tried either to marginalize or to exclude others. Those excluded tended to call for more radical constitutional change. Finally, the changing attitudes of officials toward the political press. While the outsiders criticized the press for spreading heterodox "democratic theories," those under Zhang’s patronage proposed a Mencian ideal to accommodate the press as an auxiliary to the existing political communication system.
Tze-ki Hon, State University of New York, Geneseo
In recent scholarship assessing the Hundred Days of Reform, Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) occupies a pivotal role. His Quan xue pian (Exhortation to Learning) has been considered to be the epitome of late Qing conservatism. His famous statement "Chinese learning for the fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application" is widely used to illustrate the reformers’ half-hearted measures for reforming China.
While there is much to be learned from this generalization, nonetheless it takes Quan xue pian out of its own context. We forget that the original intent of the work was to offer, in China’s crisis, a proposal for comprehensive reform. It was part of the ongoing debate on how to change China based on substantial borrowing from the West.
In this paper, I locate Quan xue pian in the reform debate of 1898. I read the work as Zhang Zhidong’s attempt at reconciling two extreme views of reform—the radical reformers’ plan for introducing sociopolitical changes with little regard to their relevance for Chinese needs, and the conservative reformers’ preoccupation with preserving the status quo at all costs. By comparing Quan xue pian with other existing reform proposals, I evaluate the salient contribution that Zhang made in expanding the scope of reform in China from superficial technological transfer to deep-seated social and educational changes. My conclusion is that although Zhang might be a moderate reformer who preferred gradual change to drastic change, he was by all measures a creative thinker committed to transforming China into a modern state.
Peter Zarrow, University of New South Wales
The ability to rethink both the institution and the meaning of the monarchy was a mark of the radicalism of the reform movement of the 1890s. The events of 1898 played a key role in creating a new symbolism of authority. Led by Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, and Liang Qichao, radical scholars challenged the traditional view of the centrality of the monarchy. Ironically, the glorification of the charismatic emperor of New Text Confucianism led directly to the political nullification of the emperor and the promotion of popular sovereignty. This was because the New Text school emphasized the monarchy’s moral and cosmic nature, leaving the political realm open to institutional innovation.
Yet the reformers sought to use Guangxu’s authority to bring about a new constitutional order. The specific proposals of the 1898 reforms fell short of this goal; it was impossible to raise the question of constitutional limitations on the emperor’s power explicitly, though the intention to do so was clear. The political experience of the Hundred Days confirmed the need to radically constrain or even abolish the monarchy. The philosophical basis for this view lay in the ideal of public-mindedness (gong). In this sense, 1898 was a key moment in the rapid transition from a basic acceptance of the institution of the monarchy, based ultimately on the Confucian concept of charismatic kingship, to a basic rejection. The events of 1898 brought together theoretical and pragmatic perspectives of the monarchy in a way the institution could not long survive.
Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara
The 1898 reform movement laid the institutional and conceptual groundwork for the fuller integration of women into late Qing social life by including them in the nation-building project and the modern imaginary. The reformists mobilized the core institutions of the movement—associations, schools, and newspapers—to this end, establishing anti-footbinding societies, the first Chinese-run women’s school, and a new discourse on the imperatives of women’s education. Over the next decade and a half these initiatives generated further dramatic institutional, cultural, and social changes in the perceived and actual role of women: a new system of women’s education was sanctioned by the first official regulations on education for females in Chinese history; journals and books specializing in women’s issues appeared; female students travelled to schools abroad; and women’s groups were formed.
This paper will examine the reformist legacy in the sphere of gender and trace how it merged in the early twentieth-century with new ideas imported from the West and Japan, and new practices associated with emerging disciplines such as hygiene and physical education. It will assess this legacy in terms of both its conceptual limitations and its actual possibilities. While the new discourse subsumed women within the nationalist quest as mothers of citizens, further entrenched them in the domestic sphere through the ideology of wise mothers and good wives, and reproduced the Confucian emphasis on forming feminine conduct rather than feminine minds, it also opened new spaces, from the classroom to the overseas student journal, in which new subjectivities and political positions could and did develop.