UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores the contested development of constitutionalism in Republican China (1922–1949), tracing how law, political authority, and citizenship were negotiated amid revolution, state-building, and social transformation. Rather than treating constitutions as static texts or failed liberal imports, it conceptualizes constitutionalism as a historically situated political language and governance technology—at once a tool of statecraft and a medium of popular contestation. Drawing on archival sources, political writings, trial records, periodicals, and minority petitions, the dissertation examines how constitutional ideas were mobilized by a diverse set of actors, including Nationalist legalists, intellectuals, women activists, and ethnic representatives, to assert legitimacy, demand rights, and negotiate the contours of political community. It foregrounds how scientific disciplines such as eugenics, demography, and frontier ethnology furnished the conceptual vocabulary for differentiated citizenship, while also providing resources that women and minority groups reinterpreted to advance alternative visions of justice and inclusion.Three features define this constitutional culture. First, it was ideologically hybrid, fusing Enlightenment liberalism, Leninist legality, and Chinese political traditions such as Legalism and Sun Yat-sen’s thought. Second, it was structurally ambivalent, simultaneously centralizing power and enabling popular mobilization. Third, it was participatory and performative, particularly in the ways marginalized actors translated abstract principles into lived claims.Historiographically, this dissertation contributes to three fields. In the study of modern Chinese legal history, it challenges narratives that treat constitutionalism as either a failed Western transplant or a mere façade for authoritarian rule, instead highlighting its multivalent meanings and social entanglements. In political theory, it complicates binary distinctions between liberal and illiberal constitutionalism by tracing how constitutional ideas circulated across ideological lines and institutional levels. In the global history of constitutionalism, it demonstrates how a non-Western case can illuminate broader questions about how law mediates revolution, governance, and citizenship.Ultimately, the dissertation shows that while the GMD’s constitutional project fell short of its democratic aspirations, it helped forge a political and legal vocabulary that subsequent generations would continue to use and challenge. It argues that Republican constitutionalism did not simply fail but generated a durable political and legal vocabulary. Its legacy endured across the Taiwan Strait, where it enabled rights-based activism in Taiwan and reinforced party-centered governance in the People’s Republic. In this sense, Republican constitutionalism was not an aberration but a generative moment in the long struggle to define the relationship between law, science, and the people in modern China.