19
寅雜誌》, which he founded while in exile in Tokyo in 1914, further marking its significance to
Zhang‘s attempts to unravel founding narratives. The essay begins by claiming that toleration of
differences is the foundation of government, but goes on to elaborate where and how that
toleration can be found: ―As I see it, creating government lies in people; those people exist and
government flourishes. The successes and failures of government must be accounted for in the
achievements and failures of individual talent (人才). Government is the leaves and branches,
but talent is its roots‖ (ZQJ 5).
Zhang‘s statement here about the root of government residing in people is a word-for-
word allusion to the neo-Confucian text The Doctrine of the Mean 中庸, which stood for
centuries at the center of late imperial Chinese debates over the relationship of individual self-
cultivation to statecraft.
9
The original reads, with added punctuation:
子曰：“文武之政，布在方策。其人存，則其政擧；其人亡，則其政息。人道敏政，
地道敏樹。夫政也者，浦盧也。” 故為政在人，取人以身，修身以道，修道以仁。
A very literal (and heavily interpolated) translation would read:
…the Master [Confucius] said: ―The government (政) of Kings Wen and Wu is
spread upon the wooden tablets and the bamboo strips. [This shows that] once
[these?] person (s) exist(s), then [the?] government stands firm. [When] [this or
these?] person(s) disappear, then [the?] government ceases. The way of [these?]
9
This short work was extracted from the larger, Han-era canonical text The Book of Rites by the neo-Confucian Zhu
Xi, and was required reading for the civil exams since the Song era. As a text extremely familiar to Zhang‘s
educated audience, Zhang does not cite the text explicitly.
Convention