6
could include the common people in their nation-building projects without at the same time
imposing this project on them. Often what emerged was a discourse not of the common people,
but on the common people (Judge 1997, 166). Zhang was himself a member of the elite, trained
from early youth for the civil service exams that would guarantee him lifetime employment in
the imperial bureaucracy. When calls for ―Western learning‖ and constitutional reform near the
end of the nineteenth century rendered bureaucratic activity and the exam system increasingly
irrelevant, the crisis of the elite did not lessen but intensified. ―The people‖ came to occupy an
unprecedented position of sovereignty and agency—most spectacularly when the Revolution of
1911 named them as rulers—but elites most definitely remained the center of both political
action and the social imaginary.
This new, awkward problem of mass versus elite was often articulated as an issue of
political education, built on the same premise of elite-led social transformation that shaped
political agency in the late empire. The prominent intellectual Liang Qichao advocated mass-
education campaigns; Sun Yatsen, leader of the political association later to become the
Nationalist Party, insisted upon political tutelage under party leadership; and the elected
president Yuan Shikai came to promote benevolent dictatorship. Zhang dismissed these proposed
solutions as not only elitist, and therefore threats to both the practice and foundation of an
eventual democracy, but also as ineffective. To Zhang, political regimes meant nothing without
the commitment of the people who both founded and sustained them. Zhang points out that were
the Chinese masses as inept as elites were painting them no functional government—including
despotism—could get off the ground (ZQJ, 31).
1
At the same time, without a tradition of self-
1
The insight that modernization and political reform was something everyone in Chinese society needed to do was
recognized over a decade earlier by Liang Qichao in his agenda-setting 1902 serial Xinmin shuo (On Renewing the
People). Theresa Lee (2007, 317) traces this conclusion to Liang‘s depiction of despotism as a political system that
corrupts everyone in society, both ruler and ruled.
Convention