World revolution knocking at the heavenly gate

After 1895 as the Manchu monarchy failed to deal with the national crisis created by China's loss in the first Sino–Japanese War, the ideology of revolution won a foothold. A paradigm shift in Chinese revolutionary discourse, radicalized by way of Japanese translations and symbolized by Sun Yat-sen's self-proclaimed “revolutionary party,” embraced the view of the rising masses as masters of history. It was during the age of world revolution that Kang Youwei shaped his worldview. While juxtaposing the French Revolution with the anti-Manchu revolution, he betrayed his background in the New Text Confucian canon by lending legitimacy to the rebels. In analyzing Kang's memorials of 1898, this paper reveals how his reform theory and practice were framed by his vision of world revolution, and how the words bianfa, weixin and bianzheng were interwoven with the unseen geming, rhetorically mixing the history of world revolution with the Tang–Wu tradition. This paper asserts that the geming discourse in Kang's use inscribed with a radical blueprint for China was actually an imposition of modernity onto the Qing court rather than empowering its legitimation in a traditional Confucian way. In scrutinizing these keywords in transnational contexts, the analysis crosses not only the fields of language, politics, Classical study and intellectual culture, but also the subtle layers of intertextual verification, psychological complexity and political and cultural intensities, and attempts to open new dimensions for the study of Kang Youwei and the 1898 reform movement.

Art · China · Ideology · Legitimacy · Legitimation · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Sociology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Chinese history and philosophy · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

• Realistic Revolution

  Open Access•Els Van Dongen•Realistic Revolution•2019

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