UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the first sustained Chinese encounter with Euro-Atlantic liberalism. Asking how foreign ideas were rearticulated in the period following the Qing Dynasty’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) through the 1911 Xinhai 辛亥 Revolution, this study focuses on the intertwined questions of liberalism, nationalism, and state power in the writings of Yan Fu (1854–1921) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), two of China’s earliest translators, interpreters, and popularizers of Anglo-European liberalism. Yan’s and Liang’s writings reflect their syncretic and eclectic approaches to foreign texts, combining Euro-Atlantic thought with various Chinese intellectual traditions, including Daoism, Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism. In this process, Yan and Liang reimagined liberalism’s central concepts. Yan and Liang thus articulated forms of what the dissertation refers to as peripheral liberalism.Confronting the simultaneous crises of dynastic decline and imperial encroachment, Yan and Liang integrated liberal ideas into a program of national revitalization, linking individual liberty to moral self-cultivation and state power. Working within the core tenets of 19th-century liberalism, they centered their political theories and reform proposals within progressivism and perfectionistic conceptions of freedom, rights, and the rule of law. In different ways, their liberalisms aimed not merely to protect the natural rights of individuals against state tyranny but to increase freedom by producing a new political subject, the citizen (guomin 國民), through an activist state committed to education, economic reform, and constitutional governance.Methodologically, this dissertation eschews scholarly fixations on chronology, linear causality, and intellectual genealogy that anachronistically ground evaluations of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao in Cold War terms. The Cold War liberals’ interpretation of liberalism—with its emphasis on contractualism, natural rights, and the free market—has led both Chinese and Anglo-American scholars to characterize Yan and Liang as insufficiently liberal. In contrast, by studying Chinese liberalism from the periphery, this dissertation brings to light variations of liberalism that have been obscured by the libertarian-inflected, hyper-individualistic, and Eurocentric definitions of liberalism that dominated the post-World War II era. Yan and Liang’s works are part of the global history of liberalism, not outside of it. Reexamining their contributions reveals those previously disregarded, buried, and forgotten forms of liberalism, without which the contemporary world cannot be fully understood.The dissertation first examines Yan Fu’s essays and his interpretations and translations of major liberal thinkers, including Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Montesquieu, and J.S. Mill. Chapter One dismantles the long-standing view of Yan as a flawed transmitter of Anglo-European ideas and repositions him as an innovative liberal theorist in his own right. Chapter Two argues that Yan links the imperial global order to a teleology of moral and political progress. He reformulates the state as obliged to enhance the people’s strength, intelligence, and virtue so they can exercise self-rule, producing policy proposals that yield a distinctively Chinese, anti-imperial liberalism.The dissertation then turns to Liang Qichao’s writings. Chapter Three shows how Liang articulates a historically unfolding conception of freedom—as emancipation from tyranny, individual civil rights, political participation, and moral autonomy—that also emphasizes the common good and the need to strengthen a reformed Qing state to resist foreign imperialism. Chapter Four demonstrates how Liang combines his reading of Kant with Neo-Confucian thought to reconceptualize China’s place in the world—from a universal Confucian civilization, tianxia 天下, that considers itself the world to a single nation-state (guojia 國家) in a new competitive global order. Across both chapters, Liang’s syncretic method produces a peripheral liberalism that emphasizes individual rights, moral autonomy, and state power as the necessary prerequisites for realizing ever-expanding spheres of liberty.The Epilogue details how, after their discretization under Mao, Yan and Liang reemerged as central sources in debates about economic and political reforms in the decades following the Reform and Opening period (1989–2015). Focusing on debates between Chinese “Liberals” and “the New Left” during the 1990s and early 2000s, the Epilogue traces how ‘Yan’ and ‘Liang’ became rhetorical markers for Chinese Liberals who wanted to anchor pro-market, anti-democratic policies in the “classical liberal” tradition, on the one hand, and New Left Thinkers who sought to articulate a social-democratic, civil-liberties oriented form of specifically Chinese liberalism, on the other. As these debates in China demonstrate, the ideas of Yan and Liang remain vital. In recent decades, China has embraced forms of neoliberal policies that suggest Mill may be as important as Marx in understanding contemporary China.