This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
After the fall of the Qing empire in 1912, Kang Youwei argued for Confucianism, which he called Kongjiao, to be adopted as the new republic's own state religion, a documented postimperial project distinct from his earlier 1898 reform program, which had sought to modernize the empire rather than replace it. That later campaign asked a republic already committed to abolishing the monarchy to nonetheless install a formal state religion, a documented request distinct from a project that simply carried his earlier reforms forward unchanged.
He envisioned Kongjiao organized with its own clergy, its own canon and its own calendar, a documented institutional design distinct from a Confucianism left as informal ethical teaching with no comparable church-like structure of its own. He argued explicitly that a Confucianism built this way could hold its own against Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, a documented comparative aim distinct from a project meant only to preserve Confucian teaching without positioning it against rival organized religions.
That the same reformer who had once argued Confucius secretly reinvented antiquity to smuggle reform past a conservative court later tried to give Confucianism a clergy, a canon and a calendar built to compete directly with Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, marks Kang Youwei's postimperial campaign as a documented case where a scholar who had reread Confucius once attempted to rebuild Confucianism a second time, this time as an organized religion rather than a reinterpreted philosophy.