"Maintaining the Timely Mean": The Three Ages in Kang Youwei's Conception of History

Kang Youwei was a heterodox Confucian scholar recognized today for his role in a failed 1898 attempt to overthrow Empress Dowager Cixi and initiate sweeping institutional reforms. This event's historical significance has prompted most studies to approach him through the lens of political history. However, Kang was not just a political reformer, he was a complex thinker whose ideas developed though creative engagement with indigenous Chinese tradition.

Specifically, he drew on Gongyang hermeneutical schools that purported to decode esoteric philosophical principles hidden in classical Confucian texts. The proposed research takes Gongyang's historical ontology, the "Three Ages", as its theoretical fulcrum.

Kang used the Three Ages to impose unity on history by partitioning historical time into a progressive tripartite sequence, reinterpreting traditionally absolute principles as valid only in relation to a particular "age". Through a rigorous analysis of this historical ontology, I will propose a new reading of the relationship between Kang's utopianism and reformism, issues that have drawn the bulk of scholarly attention.

Against influential commentators like Hsiao Kung-ch'uan and Chang Hao, I will argue that he failed to integrate his conflicting commitments into a coherent whole. This is important, because Kang was not simply inconsistent, he was necessarily inconsistent, given the conceptual tensions of his thought and the objective historical contradictions of his time.

Kang presented his utopia as the universalization of an idealized Confucian system, but its theoretical foundation, the Three Ages, was accelerating the disintegration of this ideal by relativizing and historicizing its core values. The resulting conception of history reflects many of the sociocultural contradictions leading to the collapse of the Qing empire. Accordingly, its study makes an important contribution to theoretical debates on Chinese modernity.

Joseph Levenson set the agenda for these debates by positing China's linear development from universal culture to particular nation-state. More recently, Wang Hui has criticized this distinction as a model derived from modern European "ethnonationalism", unhelpful for understanding Chinese history. Wang theorizes China as a "transsystemic society" displaying complex tensions between cultural universalism and national particularism.

The present study aspires, by identifying similar tensions within Kang's historical thinking, to contribute to Wang's ongoing deconstruction of Levenson's dichotomy.

The proposed research combines traditional Chinese philological methods with modern historical and comparative approaches, operating simultaneously on two levels of analysis: the "internal" and the "external".

The internal analysis engages what Yu Ying-shih calls the "inner logic" of an intellectual tradition. Since Kang expressed himself in an explicitly philological idiom, this analysis adopts the exegetical methods of Chinese "classical studies", taking traditional Chinese philology seriously as a valid form of philosophical speculation, and not as an inchoate and pre-scientific form of historical linguistics.

Interrogating the textual details and the philosophical content of Kang's philological works, it will relate them to the complex internal history of Gongyang Confucianism in general and Three Ages thought in particular.

An external analysis offsets the internal by endorsing what Maurice Mandelbaum calls "sociological monism", the idea that intellectual phenomena require, for their thorough understanding, an analysis of their function within a wider social whole. The methodology here is historical, aimed at uncovering the salient features of the socio-political "whole" that shaped Kang's ideas.

However, since Kang's socio-political "whole" was rife with heterogeneous cultural stimuli, his core Confucianism will also be brought into comparative dialogue with his non-Confucian Buddhist and "Western"