Saving the World through Democracy in China: Gu Hongming and the Overseas Chinese, 1901-1924

• In Event: Global History of Democracy in East Asia

Abstract

Scholars have argued that the efforts at state-sponsored nationalism and rise in popular demonstrations of Chinese sovereignty after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident resulted in rising ambivalence among the Chinese towards Western-style democracy. This paper argues that discourses linking sovereignty and democracy began much earlier in the form of a prominent Chinese intellectual, Gu Hongming, opposition to Western-style democracy from 1897 to the 1920s. In examining Gu’s critique of democratic governance in Republican China, Europe, and the United States, exposition of Pan Asianism in Japan, and reinterpretation of China as the first democratic polity, this article reveals how Gu sought to articulate an alternative vision to existing forms of democracy practiced in the United States and Europe. Gu proposed that enlightened aristocrats who have internalized democratic and peaceful virtues should lead China and the world, rather than corrupt democrats and belligerent citizens. Even though contemporaries such as Hu Shi did not endorse Gu’s proposals, many of Gu’s ideas that underpinned his discourses on democracy were widely shared by his peers such as Kang Youwei and Hu Liyuan. These ideas included Gu’s support for internationalism, Overseas Chinese participation in China, and the redemptive values of top-down education. Such a phenomena challenges scholarly perception of Gu as an “eccentric reactionary scholar” and mainstream Republican Chinese intellectuals as “liberals,” even as it shows how the longstanding historical discourses linking Chinese sovereignty with democracy impeded, complicated, and refracted a straightforward trajectory of the inevitable acceptance of Western-style democracy by a modernizing China.

Author

• Wayne Soon, Earlham College