La proposta reformista de Kang Youwei
[SPENCE, Jonathan (1981) The Gate of Heavenly Peace. The Chinese and their Revolution, 1895-1980, Londres, Penguin]

        The document that Kang drafted was a cry for change, directed in part to the young Emperor Guangxu, in part to the Emperor’s sixty-year-old aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, who held much of the real power in the state, and in part to the senior officials at the Qing dynasty court. What Kang Youwei and his cosigners were requesting—albeit in the most courteous language possible—was a complete transformation of China’s economic and educational system. After reviewing the various defeats that had made China’s nineteenth century so bleak, Wang pointed to China’s own history for one encouraging sign to the future. In the past, he noted, the most skillful emperors had never regarded their country’s laws and customs as frozen; on the contrary, the founders of the Han dynasty (in 206 B.c.), of the Ming dynasty (in A.D. 1368), and of the Qing dynasty (in the mid-seventeenth century) had all adjusted to new circumstances by establishing new institutions, and had employed new men drawn from outside conventional bureaucratic channels. The Japanese had acted similarly in their dramatic Meiji Restoration reforms of the 1860s and l870s.

        Such personnel and institutional flexibility would "arouse the country’s spirits," wrote Kang similarly, moving the capital away from Beijing would "strengthen the country’s base." Beijing was hopelessly vulnerable, too near the sea to be easily defended, and hence constantly luring the emperors into making foolhardy concessions to foreign powers.—"to preserve this insignificant ten-mile span of city we have given up thousands of miles of territory." Just as previous emperors had changed institutional modes, so had they changed their capitals when strategic considerations called for it. For the Qing court in the 1890s, of all the possible choices in the far north, the south, or the far west, the city of Xian in Shaanxi province seemed the best to Kang in this inland center of power, once the base of the Qin dynasty (in the third century B.C.) and site of the great capital of Changan during the Sui and Tang dynasties (between the sixth and ninth centuries), the Chinese armies could muster in depth, and commerce and transportation routes could be reopened in naturally protected and distant fastnesses that Japanese troops would never dare to penetrate.

        In another section of the document, which Wang headed "Increasing the Countrys Power" he urged a return to the ideal of the "people under arms" that had once been a feature of China’s earlier regimes and was now the basis for success of the Western countries that bordered on the Atlantic. The Qing state needed a better regular army of strong young soldiers (as the Emperor Kangxi had suggested two centuries before, Kang noted), which could be combined with local militia forces into a truly effective military system. The troops of this revivified army should draw on the best military technology: Chinese infantry should have small, arms and rifles such as the German Mauser, the French Chasseur, the British Martini gun, and the American Hotchkiss and Remington; Chinese artillery should have heavy guns made to the same standard as those manufactured by the Krupp company. What China could not initially manufacture herself she should purchase at intelligently competitive rates—for instance on the international Hong Kong arms market—rather than at inflated domestic prices. And the Chinese should be aware of how swiftly military technology changed: in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, guns had been able to fire ten rounds a minute; by the time of, the Russian clash with China in the 1880s, there were guns.able to fire thirty rounds a minute; and now (as the Chinese had learned at their cost) the Japanese had guns that could fire sixty rounds a minute. If China herself could not muster enough technically skilled persons, then she should call on the four million Chinese who lived overseas in Southeast Asia—who felt China’s humiliation all the more keenly for looking on from the outside, but remained Chinese at heart and would be eager to help her regain her lost prestige.

        These opening sections of the memorial must have been startling enough reading for conservative officials in the bureaucracy, even those who had known the various reformist arguments of the previous thirty years; but, Kang pointed out, they were really only preambles, temporary expedients proposed in response to enemy pressure. The only hope for China’s future lay in a full "self-strengthening program" that would reform the basic governmental structures of the country. "When objects get old, they break. When institutions get old, they are corrupted." Therefore the Emperor must move boldly in at least six areas of fundamental importance. First, the Qing government must increase taxes and raise more domestic revenue. The current government receipts were at the level of only seventy million ounces of silver a year. Such a sum was quite inadequate—it would take every ounce of the current seventy-million-a-year income for three years just to pay off the Japanese indemnity demands from the last war, for example. By drawing on rich gentry households and merchants, by developing state banks and extending transport systems, there was no reason that China’s revenues could not exceed a hundred million ounces of silver a year. Second, China must develop a national railway network—for national defense, to open up border regions, and to stimulate commerce. Third, the Qing government must encourage the machine industry and develop shipping. Fourth, China must exploit her own vast mineral resources—the copper of Yunnan, the coal and iron fields of Shanxi and Guizhou, the lead in Shandong and Hubei, the tin in Jiangxi and Hunan, the many resources of Sichuan—for "if we don’t open them up, then others will." Fifth, the Chinese currency system must be unified and stabilized; and sixth, an effective national postal system must be set up.

        At this point Kang interjected a note of caution. These six reforms would strengthen the nation, he said, but of themselves they could not alleviate the suffering of the Chinese poor.

        China’s population was more than four hundred million in the Daoguang reign [1820—50], and in the several decades of prosperity since then, the population has increased further. Yet our industry and trade have not flourished; the people’s lives have grown harder and more constricted; some have emigrated to other countries, there to live as slaves, and others have stayed but have become thugs who prey upon the local villages. Even though the foreigners are not now attacking, our internal troubles are serious Our nation is founded upon people—if we cannot think how to foster those people, then we ourselves destroy our own foundation.

        Thus Kang led into the last part of his memorial, which he described as a.four-part program for "helping the people’s livelihood." In agriculture, he saw the need for much greater sophistication if China was to do well in a competitive world market where even Chinese staples such as silk were being challenged by Italian, French, and Japanese manufactures, while tea was being produced with success in India and Ceylon. China needed to set up agricultural societies and training schools to develop higher levels of rural skill, to divetsify further into forestry and fisheries, and to investigate new products. In industry, the Chinese must learn from the Western development of steamboats, rails, and telegraphs, which had so boosted Western power in the previous decades—and must transcend the fairly limited interest in innovations that had been expressed by such Confucian statesmen as Zeng Guofan in the 1860s and 1870s, and instead concentrate on building centers for advanced training in modem technology. These centers, in turn, would draw on students well educated in mathematics and mechanics. The constructive interaction of ingenuity and education could most graphically be seen in the United States, where thirteen thousand patents a year were issued for new industrial inventions, as opposed to the hundred or so issued in Russia.

        As to foreign trade, obviously China had to meet the competition from the West and Japan by developing her own products, by boosting indigenous Chinese trading companies, studying Western mercantile methods, translating Western commercial texts, and developing the teaching of "merchant skills." China could not forever use the excuse of the deleterious opium trade to explain her ineffectiveness in current markets, since imported textiles accounted for far more of China’s adverse payments balance than opium itself. In a kind of hymn to Western technology, unprecedented in any Chinese official document, Kang listed for the Emperor some examples of what China was buying from the West in the 1890s:

        In addition to the fifty-three million ounces of silver we spend on foreign cottons, we buy such items of ordinary use as heavy silk, satins, woolens, fine silks, gauze, and felt; umbrellas, lamps, paint, suitcases and satchels; chinaware, toothbrushes, toothpowder, soap, and lamp oil. Among comestibles we buy coffee, Philippine and Havana cigars, cigarettes and rolling paper, snuff, and liquor; ham, dried meats, cake, candy, and salt; and medicines—liquid, pills, powders—as well as dried and fresh fruit. We also buy coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, and other materials; wooden utensils, clocks, watches, sundials, thermometers, barometers, electric lamps, plumbing accessories, mirrors, photographic plates, and other amusing ot ingenious gadgets. As more households get them; more people want them, so that they have reached as far as Xinjiang and Tibet.

        China must stem this spending by developing her own industrial base.

        In suggesting plans for helping the rural poor in China, Kang cited a number of foreign examples—from Siberia to Mississippi, Borneo, Brazil, and Canada—as he looked to resettlement programs (whether penal and compulsory, or voluntary and commercially motivated) that would induce the Chinese to colonize their own frontier areas. Such a policy would reverse the pattern of overseas emigration among China’s very poor, which had led to the exploitation of coolie labor in the United States and to the eviction of other Chinese from their homes and jobs in Australia and Southeast Asia. For the criminals, there should be rehabilitation through work training, and for the disabled or seriously diseased, a system of hospices.

        Kang’s lengthy document closed—as was fitting for an examination candidate—with a broad overview of problems in Chinese education, from the stilted formalization of examination prose to the low appropriations for library budgets. Again, he drew on many examples from foreign states—India, England, Bismarck’s Germany, Japan—but as if realizing that too many of his arguments drew on foreign examples, Kang included a ringing reaffirmation of Confucian moral values and their crucial importance to the survival of a vigorous China. Kang, a brilliant Confucian scholar himself (albeit one known to be both iconoclastic and eccentric), even suggested that the Emperor encourage the sending of eminent Confucian scholars to the West—thus reversing the apparently inexorable flow of Western missionaries bent on converting the Chinese to Christianity. Though Kang probably was not aware of it, a similar suggestion had been made by Leibniz almost exactly two hundred years earlier, in the full flush of his enthusiasm for Chinese Confucian values. Kang went beyond Leibniz, howewer, in suggesting that the Chinese not only spread the teaching of the Confucian Way but also seek to establish major Confucian academies overseas—any scholar attracting over a thousand students to such an institution should be rewarded, he thought, with hereditary noble rank.