Summary
Banished from the great Qing empire after his moment of glory at the head of the reform government in 1898, Kang Youwei (1858-1927) spent fifteen years in exile. After an initial stay in Japan, he embarked on a world tour. At each stop, he investigated local history, drew comparisons with China and asked questions about the future. As he went along,he published his travel notes in a personal journal ,Buren zazhi (" I will not suffer that... ").
Sitting, like Edward Gibbon, in the ruins of the Roman Forum at dusk in 1904, Kang gave himself over to a long meditation on popular assembly practices. What were the conditions that made this possible, and what factors led to their disappearance ? What comparisons can be made between the Roman and Chinese empires ? Is the marginalization of the Senate by Augustus part of a universal dynamic, linked to factors of population, territory and food supply, or is it merely the outcome of a local conflict ? Is the transition from state to empire inevitable ? How do parliaments survive despotic regimes ? Is it possible to imagine a transition from imperial to democratic rule ?
There's nothing in this approach to the problem of the facile relativism that is so often lectured in this kind of grand intercivilizational comparison. Racial or cultural determinism has no place with this utopian thinker of the " Great Unity " (datong).
We will revisit Kang Youwei's dialogue with Cicero, Montesquieu and Gibbon, a testimony to his desire to integrate Chinese history into the history of humanity. The questions he raises are obviously still relevant today. The way he poses them, and the prospects for the future he opens up, demonstrate the intellectual ambition and synthetic imagination of a thinker of change whose primary orientations derive from the Gongyang interpretation of the Classics.
