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When Zhang Shizhao returned to China from Great Britain in 1912, he found himself in a
very different place than the one he had left four years ago. In 1908, the land called China was
still governed by the Qing, though its elites were struggling to square new ―Western‖ ways of
governing with deeply entrenched habits and institutions that survived nearly two thousand years
of continuous imperial rule. In 1911, China became, in name at least, a republic, committed to
the principles of self-rule embodied in Western theories of democracy, liberalism, and
constitutionalism. Zhang should have been happy; this is what he had been advocating all along.
While in Great Britain, Zhang had made extra money—and his reputation—writing articles for a
Shanghai newspaper that explained why China could and should adopt British-style
constitutional self-government to protect human rights and advance the rule of law. In fact,
Zhang knew more about the theoretical foundations of these Western institutions perhaps better
than anyone writing in Chinese at the time. Apparently, however, he did not know enough—not
enough to explain why, after the provisional constitution was ratified in 1913, no one took it
seriously; why, once human rights were recognized as keys to Chinese political regeneration by
most elites, the government did not seem to be respecting them; why, once self-rule was declared
after a short but violent revolution, no one seemed willing to stay in China and build parliaments,
assemblies, and courts to replace the imperial bureaucracy that no longer existed.
Zhang quickly realized there were deeper, more general questions at stake than simply
what kind of regime to build. Confronting nearly total political collapse, Zhang‘s work after
1914 turned decidedly speculative, concerned less with institutional design than with institutional
foundation. Zhang mined both novel Western theories and longstanding Chinese debates to
develop a rich theoretical vocabulary for exploring the sources of effective transformation of
political community. Which comes first, people committed to self-rule or the institutions that
Convention