13
prescriptions for democratic transition had no applicability in the Chinese case (Yan 1998 (1914),
757-758). Yan‘s reading is somewhat extreme compared to that of other Chinese contemporaries,
but typical insofar as it dismisses freedom and equality as substantive concepts of rights centered
on individuals.
3
The persistent and widespread distrust of popular self-rule in this era demonstrates the
extent to which invocations of freedom and equality buttressed arguments against specific forms
of government but did not extend to a theoretical examination of the foundations of government
per se, and their possible relationship to individual rights and capacities. In the absence of a
hereditary ruler, intellectual elites stepped into largely unquestioned positions of rulership as
they assumed the handles of various mechanisms of social control, including education and
economic regulation. Pro-democracy arguments, far from being theoretically linked to the anti-
monarchical sentiments of the 1911 revolution, were seen as functionally and conceptually
distinct from support for ―self-rule‖ (自治).
4
In contrast, Zhang makes founding actions a central part of his appropriation of Rousseau.
The naturally-existing capacity for pre-governmental action implied in Rousseau‘s ―state of
nature‖ goes far toward helping Zhang articulate a response to the mass versus elite paradox that
does not take elite rule as central. These ideas were spelled out in a 1915 essay devoted to
refuting Yan‘s attacks on Rousseauian natural right.
5
In this exchange, Zhang defends neither
radical democracy nor liberal values; in fact, at no point does Zhang offer explicit reasons to
3
One important exception was Liu Shipei, whose essay ―On the Social Contract‖ identified the individual as the
primary unit of Rousseau‘s analysis (Dong 2003, 77).
4
This conceptual separation between democracy and ―self-rule‖ was no doubt exacerbated by the latter‘s identity
with Chinese imperial institutions of regional autonomy, a system designed not to encourage local participation in
political decision-making but to expand state power into local levels (see, e.g., Kuhn 1975). I discuss these
institutions more fully in chapter four.
5
―Reading Yan Fu‘s ‗The Social Contract,‘‖ 讀嚴幾道《民約平議》, The Tiger, May 10, 1915.
Convention