Research On Constitutional Thoughtof Kang Youwei

In recent years, with the deepening of reform and opening up and the rapid development of market economy, our party and the state pay more attention to the rule of law, and China’s democratic and legal construction is increasingly perfect. Constitutionalism, as the theory closely related to the rule of law, has been paid more and more attention in discussing the construction of socialist democracy and the rule of law. Constitutional government is an original political structure of western world, and has the characteristics of compositionality and complexity; when introduced to China, it was faced with lack of local environment, conflicts of traditional culture and so on, which brought about many disputes. In this paper, The author will take the “goal of richness” in modern times as the starting point, to find out how the western constitutional thoughts developed in China, and to make an objective study of its development under China’s national conditions, and try to discover how to make the constitutional thoughts the booster of the implementation of the rule of law, which has theoretical and practical significance.In this paper, over ten years around the Reform Movement of 1898 is selected as the time scope of the study. In this historical period, collisions and conflicts between China and foreign countries intensified. After defeated for times, China signed a series of unequal treaties, and entered the semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. So, the state and national crisis began to deepen day by day. In order to win national independence and to realize prosperity and strength of the country, progressive intellectuals carried out active exploring. They saw the failure of the Westernization Movement, the defeat of Sino-Japanese War, and then turned their vision to learning from advanced western political rules. Thus, the Constitutional Thought began to enter China. Under the influence of Chinese traditional culture, while introducing constitutional ideas into China, intellectuals, represented by Kang Youwei, made transformation of the Constitutional Thought to adapt to China’s situation. They had the wish of “prosperity and strength” and the thought of humanistic pragmatism, and produced the mode of “richness – constitutionalism”.In this paper, the approach of qualitative research is applied. Methods of literature study, comparative study, case study and the systematic study are comprehensively used, so as to present the process of the development of China’s constitutionalism growing out of nothing and becoming mature. In this paper, Kang Youwei, the reform leader and representative personage of that period, was the core figure of the study, and his thoughts of constitutional monarchy under the “goal of richness” was the major research object. The development of the constitutionalism in the period of its “rooting down” in China is summed up in a historical perspective, and relative viewpoints of intellectuals in the same period were compared and analyzed. Finally, a conclusion of “richness – constitutionalism” is made with objective commenting.In the end, the author tries to give an analysis of the “richness – constitutionalism” thought, to find out its objective necessity and historical origin of constitutional thoughts in China, hopefully to be beneficial on the Research of the current democracy and rule of law in China.