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arises in those balancing acts that mark Zhang‘s two founding narratives: between the
exceptional and the ordinary, and between innate, unpredictable capacity and external
environments. Founding, and the political actions it informs, are as much internal, personal
struggles against external conditions as they are the functional creation and legitimization of
political institutions. Although this new tension of Zhang‘s is perhaps irresolvable, the nature of
its provocation and assuagement suggests some alternative spaces in which founding acts can be
performed: within as well as between persons, who act in disparate locations and in ways that
often cannot be mutually coordinated.
Drawing the tensions of founding along an internal/external rather than an
individual/community axis, Zhang locates efficacious, democratically legitimate means for
changing worldly reality not in collective action that must first assume some form of
commonality, but in independent, individual cultivation of what lies beyond those ―always-
already,‖ structurally determined elements of political community. Like founding, however,
both the questions Zhang poses and the solutions he suggests turn on paradox, in which tensions
between institutionally or conceptually apposite elements are not resolved so much as rerouted
into more productive channels.
Zhang‘s paradoxical interventions are largely framed by an ongoing Chinese debate over
institution-based (fazhi, ―rule by law‖) versus person-based (renzhi, ―rule by man‖) reform.
Although Zhang is best known—both among his contemporaries and among modern-day
Chinese scholars—for being an uncompromising ―rule by law‖ advocate, I argue that he in fact
occupies a more ambivalent position that reflects the nuances of his founding narrative. Zhang
rejected the top-down ―social‖ (社會) and ―cultural‖ (文化) transformation that his
contemporaries identified as appropriate ―rule by man‖ reform strategies, as well as the binary of
Convention