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Rousseau‘s On the Social Contract (民約論) stood for many years beginning in the late
nineteenth century as the one of the only sources of Western political theory available in Chinese,
endowing its themes and vocabulary with an unusual polemical potency (Dong 2003, 81). Early
revolutionaries used Rousseau‘s work to articulate their opposition to Manchu rule not only in
terms of resistance to a foreign oppressor, but also in terms of ―natural‖ equality and popular
sovereignty (Lam 1989, Ch. 2). The language of social contract amplified earlier attempts by
Qing-era progressives, including Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu, to forge a conceptual separation
between the ruler and the society he ruled. Yan Fu 嚴復, in one of the earliest and most well-
known invocations of social contract language in Chinese, argued that imperial-era political
relationships between the ruler and his minister, as well as between ministers and the people,
underscored the identity between the Chinese state and the imperial house, in the process
confounding the ruler‘s good with the people‘s good. To eradicate this conflation, Yan urged the
cultivation of ―the people‘s intelligence, strength, and virtue‖ to fit them for self-rule (Yan 2004
(1895), 91).
Ironically, although his rhetoric seems to indicate support for widespread political
participation, Yan stopped well short of arguing for democratic government. Like many
influential thinkers at the time, including Liang Qichao, Yan too claimed that ―the time was not
yet right‖ for doing away with monarchical structures because the customs and habits of the
people ―were not yet adequate to sustain self-rule‖ (Yan 2004 (1895), 92). In an essay written
for Liang‘s Yongyan journal in 1914, almost twenty years after his first encounter with Rousseau,
Yan reaffirms his suspicion of popular self-rule by denying any empirical basis for ―natural‖
rights and equality. The obvious incapacity of the Chinese to reform themselves, Yan believes,
is strong evidence that not only was Rousseau wrong about rights being ―natural,‖ but that his
Convention