Searching for the self: Zhang Shizhao and Chinese narratives (1903-1927)

This study explores the Chinese quest for a new political and ethical order in the early 20th century from the perspectives of Zhang Shizhao (1881--1973), an intellectual and politician with national influence. He played a leading role in shaping the discourse for the Republican revolution of 1911, the constitutional vision of the new Republic of the 1910s, and a return to traditionalism in the 1920s.;Zhang embraced the revolution as a journey from slavery to citizenry. His revolutionary discourse sang of the emancipation from traditional constraints and the birth of a new citizen. It was nonetheless a rhetoric that espoused "national learning" and the value of national identity.;In the early Republic, Zhang applied English-inspired political liberalism to the Chinese situation. He advocated a political system with an omnipotent parliament, a responsible cabinet, and two major political parties. The threatening nature of these ideas induced President Yuan Shikai and his military clique to crush the nascent democratic institutions. Zhang turned to a theory of compromise and implored political factions to practice tolerance and share state power but he was not persuasive in the face of intensifying factional conflict. Nonetheless Zhang's theory of the state, predicated on the self-consciousness of the Chinese people and their individual rights, helped keep the idea of liberal republic alive.;As Chinese politics degenerated into chaos, Zhang suspected that the theories of representative government might not have universal validity. He argued that agricultural China needed to have political and cultural institutions different from those of the industrialized nations. Against the New Culture movement, which espoused modernity and progress as universal doctrines, Zhang turned traditional, and defended Chinese culture as an invaluable living tradition.;This research links the progressive thinking of the 1911 Republican revolution to the traditionalism against the May Fourth Movement of 1919. It demonstrates this connection through a close examination of the intellectual and political trajectories of Zhang Shizhao, one of the most learned and cosmopolitan intellectuals of his generation, who regained his bearing in the sphere of culture after a plunge into the vortex of revolutionary politics.