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Many of us who have studied the modern history of China first learned of the late nineteenth-century reform movement in texts with chapters or sections entitled, “The Hundred Days of Reform,” or “The Reform Movement of 1898.” In such works our attention was directed to that group of politically inexperienced idealists who sought to impose upon a recalcitrant bureaucracy and apathetic populace a series of reforms designed to rescue the empire from impending dismemberment at the hands of foreign powers. The main emphasis of these standard accounts was upon the events of 1898 and their significance in China's political history. During the past twenty years, however, scholarly interest in the reformers has shifted from a preoccupation with their activities in 1898 to a more general consideration of their intellectual antecedents and the ideological content of their reform programs. Studies along these lines have placed the events of 1898 in a broader historical perspective—as the climax of a movement that was more than a decade in the making. This recent trend in scholarship is reflected in the four papers of this symposium. Separately and collectively, these papers confirm what earlier studies have suggested, that the reformers' objectives in 1898 can best be understood in the context of an intellectual movement that assumed its distinctive characteristics during the decade of the 1890's.
- Type
- The Chinese Reform Movement of the 1890's: A Symposium
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- Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1969
References
1 For example, Onogawa Hidemi, “Shimmatsu hempōron no seiritsu,” (On the late Ch'ing reform writings) Tōhō gakuho (Kyoto) No. 20 (March 1951), 153–84Google Scholar. Also in this trend would be the four-volume collection of materials on the reforms of 1898: Po-tsan, Chien et al. , eds., Wu-hsü pienfa (The reforms of 1898) (Shanghai: 1957)Google Scholar, which first appeared in 1953. Despite its title, this collection includes numerous writings of the early 1890's, which serve to place the 1898 reforms in broader perspective.
2 Notable among these books were the Wei-yen (Words of warning) (1890)Google Scholar, by T'ang Chen; Sheng-shih wei-yen (Words of warning to an age of prosperity) (1893)Google Scholar, by Cheng Kuan-ying; Chih-p'ing t'ung-i (Comprehensive proposals for maintaining the peace) (1893)Google Scholar, by Ch'en Ch'iu; and yung-shu (Trite sayings) (ca, 1894)Google Scholar, by Ch'en Chih. These writings and their authors have been discussed in Onogawa, 156–74; briefly in Kung-ch'üan, Hsiao, “Weng T'ung-ho and the Reform Movement of 1898,” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies I, No. 2 (April 1957), 150–52, and 222–24Google Scholar (notes 253–64); and most recently in Eastman, Lloyd E., “Political Reformism in China Before the Sino-Japanese War,” Journal of Asian Studies, XXVII (August 1968), 695–710.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 This aspect of protonationalism in China was brought out in relation to Feng Kuei-fen, Wang T'ao and K'ang Yu-wei in papers presented at a panel on Nationalistic Thought in Nineteenth-Century China, held at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago in March 1967, under the joint sponsorship of the Society for Ch'ing Studies. One of these papers has since been published: Cohen, Paul A., “Wang T'ao and Incipient Chinese Nationalism,” Journal of Asian Studies, XXVI (August 1967), 559–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Concern about the barriers to communication was often expressed by such phrases as “t'ung min ch'ing,” or “ta shang hsia chih ch'ing,” or other variants. These phrases occur, for example, in Sheng-shih wei-yen (rev. ed. 1900), I (i-yüan), 5b; Chih-p'ing t'ung-i, V (Chiu-shih yao-i), 11b–12a; and Yung-shu (2d. ed., 1897)Google Scholar, nei-p'ien (hsing-cheng), 15a–16b. Perhaps the first writer to use the phrase in a modern context of reform was Wang T'ao, as in his T'ao-yüan wen-lu waipien (Outer section of the writings of T'ao-yüan) (Hong Kong): 1883)Google Scholar, I (chung-min: hsia), 22b.
5 Onogawa, , pp. 156–74Google Scholar; Eastman, , pp. 701–05Google Scholar. Even before the 1890's, however, Western parliamentary systems had been described in favorable terms in Wang T'ao, T'ao-yüan wen-lu wai-pien, I (chung-min: hsia), 21b–22a. See also, Cohen, , p. 567Google Scholar. Perhaps the earliest writer to recommend a “parliament” for China was Cheng Kuan-ying, in his I-yen (Words, of change) (pref. 1875, publ. 1880), shang (lun i-cheng), 38b–39a. Many of the reform ideas in this work later appeared in more elaborate form in his Sheng-shih wei-yen.
6 Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, “Lun chün-cheng min-cheng hsiang-shan chih li” (On the principles of succession of monarchy and democracy), Shih-wu pao (Current affairs magazine) No. 41 (October 6, 1897), 1a–4aGoogle Scholar; also in Ying-ping-shih wen chi (Collected literary works of the Ice-drinker's Studio), Vol. II, 7–11.Google Scholar
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9 Howard, Richard C., “Japan's Role in the Reform Program of K'ang Yu-wei,” in, Lo Jung-pang, pp. 280–312.Google Scholar