16
Two meanings may be given to the word ‗creating.‘ It may be supposed to mean
the production of something out of nothing; or it may be supposed to mean the
giving form and structure to something which already exists. There are many who
think that the production of something out of nothing cannot be conceived as
effected even by omnipotence; and probably none will assert that the production
of something out of nothing is within the competence of a human government
(Spencer 1901, 389; cited in ZQJ 327).
These beliefs have profound implications for how the tensions of founding can be defined
and assuaged. By insisting that governments cannot create something out of nothing, Zhang
implies a definite beginning to a political regime, albeit one sited ambiguously in both naturally-
existing capacities and in deliberate human effort. Zhang‘s analogy of ―natural rights‖ to
liangzhi suggests that it is ordinary people who inaugurate the possibility of self-rule: just as they
are said to possess liangzhi, so too do they have a ―natural‖ capacity for independent and creative
action.
Zhang‘s thoughts on liangzhi reflect contemporary Chinese rights-thinking, which
interpreted ―rights‖ (權利, quanli) more often as capacities or ethical orientations than as legal
sanctions that draw or guarantee spheres of privacy around autonomous individuals. Zhang does
not, however, reproduce the ethical imperative of liangzhi that many of his contemporaries
believed made rights effective politically. By seeing liangzhi as analogous to, rather than
constitutive of, the natural rights that ground the capacity for political action, Zhang dissociates
them from the particular ethical prescriptions many of his contemporaries, including Liang
Qichao and Liu Shipei, believed were the cause of their effectiveness (Angle 2002, 154, 168). To
Convention