Kang Youwei

By the 1890s the Qing dynasty had lost wars to Britain, France and, most humiliatingly, to a modernized Japan, and Kang Youwei's answer was neither wholesale Westernization nor conservative retrenchment but a reinterpretation of Confucius himself. His Confucius as a Reformer argued that the sage had not merely transmitted a golden antiquity, the standard Confucian self-understanding for two thousand years, but had invented much of that antiquity as a rhetorical device to smuggle his own radical institutional program past a conservative audience. If Confucius himself was a reformer working under cover of tradition, Kang reasoned, then a Confucian could reform the Qing state, adopting a constitution, modern schools and industry, without betraying Confucianism at all.

Given direct access to the young Guangxu Emperor in the summer of 1898, Kang's faction pushed through a hundred days of reform edicts before the Empress Dowager Cixi's coup ended it, executed several of his allies and sent Kang himself fleeing abroad. In exile he did not moderate; he wrote The Book of Great Unity, a utopian sketch of a coming world with no nations, no families and no private property, and after 1912 campaigned, against the tide of a new republic that wanted no religion at all, to have Confucianism formally established as China's state religion. Both his reform and his religion failed in his own lifetime, but the reading of Confucius as a figure who could be actively reinterpreted for a modern crisis, rather than only preserved, outlived him in the Confucian revivals of the following century.

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.