From "Gonglun" to "Public opinion": Negotiating Foreign Ideas and Traditional Political Identity

• In Event: Negotiating Foreignness: "Western Ideas" and the Building of Indigenous Identities in 20th-Century China

Abstract

When examining the European political systems--the models for China's administrative reform, late Qing and early Republican advocates of constitutional monarchy and republic often employed the Chinese term "gonglun" to translate the foreign concept of "public opinion". For them, the dominance of "public opinion" in European political institutions marked greater political transparency and broadened political participation--a system fundamentally contrary to what was considered "autocracy (zhuanzhi)". Most scholars maintain that this trend of thought was primarily stimulated by the collision with European thought and institutions. Based on the archival research at the First Historical Archives in Beijing (summer 2014), this paper examines the intellectual discourses concerning "public opinion" that emerged in the first two decades of the 20th century, arguing that the reformist movements in this period was inextricably linked to indigenous Chinese idea of "gonglun" which had been crucial to traditional political reformist discourses since the late-Ming era. The transplantation of "public opinion" into Chinese intellectual context as "gonglun" reveals significant changes and continuity in terms of the internal meanings, external ranges of reference, and social attitudes associated with both concepts. The invention of "public opinion" as "gonglun" through translation thus suggests a long-term structural change of Chinese politics and society that was deeply rooted in native political identity of the literati-scholars (shidafu) and their enduring quest for political transparency and political participation in both late imperial and republican era.

Author

• Yang Wei, University of Colorado