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bound tightly to those innate though underdeveloped capacities Zhang identifies with ―rights‖:
exercising these capacities turns in large part on embracing one‘s idiosyncratic experience and
forging ahead with exemplary acts that both challenge and change existing environments. There
is always something particular to each—and every—individual that is never reducible to
structure, to external influence, to the always-already. The Doctrine narrative appears in
Zhang‘s essay as an instance of how ―individuals‖ (人) ―created government‖ (為政) rather than
a hagiographic myth about deified sages, which suggests that founding turns in large part on each
individual tapping this innate capacity, now specified as idiosyncrasy. These individuals foster
rather than disavow their personal alienation from what is already there, but couple this feeling
of ―difference‖ with the faith that their disparate visions can eventually have meaning in a future
political community of which they will all remain a part.
The need for aloofness and ―difference‖ in the act of founding also helps to mitigate the
mass/elite dilemma as Zhang personally experienced it: that is, as one individual importer of
Western ideas who realizes the practice of those institutions requires an entire community‘s
spontaneous participation. The borrowing he sought to initiate is grounded in a certain kind of
founding that gives structure and meaning to what is imported; and founding is itself a kind of
borrowing that demands comprehensive stage-setting— if not wholesale replication—before
more creative interventions can be meaningful. Although Zhang‘s attempt to import
unprecedented institutions into the Chinese milieu renders many indigenous practices useless or
dangerous, such borrowing also provided a perspective from which to view Chinese political
realities in a new and reinvigorated light. Those new, foreign practices at the heart of his
vision—specifically, those seen to cluster about British and American liberal-democratic
regimes—were precisely what motivated him to look beyond existing realities and to encourage
Convention