Kang Youwei went from daring radical to relic in under twenty years
In 1898 the reformer Kang Youwei had the ear of China's young Guangxu Emperor and helped drive the Hundred Days' Reform. Within weeks the Empress Dowager Cixi crushed it and ordered his execution. He escaped abroad and kept campaigning for a constitutional monarchy long after China became a republic.
Kang was born in Guangdong in 1858 into a family that had produced scholars for thirteen generations. He could recite hundreds of Tang poems by five, but as a teenager he chafed at the eight-legged essays drilled for the imperial examinations. To unwind he meditated in the Buddhist manner, unusual for a Confucian scholar, and during one session had a vision that set him on a near-messianic mission to read everything and save humanity.
A trip to Hong Kong in 1879 startled him with its prosperity and overturned his view of Westerners as barbarians; in Shanghai he bought Western books by the armful. He founded an Anti-Footbinding Society in 1883, drafted a treatise using geometric methods to argue for human equality, and later imagined a cosmopolitan utopia without private property or the family. To make reform respectable, he recast Confucius as a reformer and argued that the Old Text classics favoured by conservatives were forgeries. His talent for persuasion showed when the young Liang Qichao visited him in 1890 and left feeling as if cold water had been poured down his back; the next day Liang asked to become his student.
Defeat by Japan in 1895 gave him his opening. He and Liang led more than 600 examination candidates in petitioning the emperor against the Treaty of Shimonoseki, often seen as the start of mass political movements in China. Kang admired Meiji Japan and wanted a constitutional monarchy, and in 1898 his proposals shaped the Hundred Days' Reform, including an edict turning unused temples into schools.
After Cixi's coup he founded the Protect the Emperor Society among overseas Chinese, competing with Sun Yat-sen for money and supporters, and visited India twice. He opposed the republic proclaimed in 1912 and backed General Zhang Xun's attempt to restore Puyi in 1917, then abandoned it and took refuge in the American legation. Kang died in 1927, an iconoclast who had come to look like an anachronism.
Source: Kang Youwei
