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actually constituting the people is set aside as a problem no longer relevant. Authority can then
grounded in the promise of ongoing negotiation, secured either by the years of proto-democratic
practices that preceded the official establishment of particular regimes (Wolin 1989; Connolly
1991; Arendt 1965), or in the promise of a dynamic constitution to evolve toward realization of
those values the original founding could not initially satisfy (Olson 2007).
Yet when no community yet exists to contest authority in a particular way, the paradoxes
of founding do not disappear; they simply resound along a different register. Chinese reformers
confronted these resounding paradoxes when they realized the difficulty of inculcating principles
of self-rule—the very principles that make legitimacy accessible as a grounds for contestation—
in a populace whose only political experience has been subjection under an absolute monarch,
and whose political conceptualizations seem unable to render claims to self-rule intelligible.
Upon what grounds can a self-ruling community take shape, if not through top-down impositions
that would themselves inhibit the practices that constitute self-rule? Zhang‘s own interventions
in these debates help to elaborate his own views regarding the paradoxes of elite rule in mass
society, but he does not embrace the mass/elite dichotomy that marked so much of Chinese
political thinking in the twentieth century. Instead, Zhang uses the language of Rousseau‘s
social contract to re-think the capacities for political action on both sides. Confronting founding
as a real and immanent event, Zhang is forced to truncate the circularity that for many
contemporary political theorists assuages founding‘s paradoxes. In the process he is led to
identify for individuals a more central role in both political founding and ongoing, regime-
sustaining action.
A Chinese Founding Narrative: The Social Contract
Convention