Were Chinese liberals liberal? : reflections on the understanding of liberalism in modern China

Liberalism has been understood in a variety of ways. Stephen Holmes maintains that liberalism contains many strands and tensions and “continues to be a field of contest, not an unambiguous creed that demands total allegiance and stigmatizes dissent.”1 He further states that none of the liberal thinkers from Milton to Spinoza to Locke to Kant to Bentham to John Stuart Mill and many others can be fully understood “if plucked ahistorically from his political and intellectual context.…”2 In similar fashion, John Gray writes that essential to any correct understanding of liberalism is “a clear insight into its historicity, its origins in a definite cultural and political circumstance and its background in the context of European individualism in the early modern period.”3 And Richard Rorty has argued that the contingency of a liberal state is no objection to it. Liberal societies and states are wholly contingent creations of specific historical practices; they cannot, and need not, claim to be privileged or especially authentic expressions of “human nature.”4 Liberal practices may be worthy of support piecemeal by virtue of their contingent benefits, as long as they serve the wellbeing of society and promote human progress. Accordingly, I propose that a vital key to understanding how modern Chinese have understood liberalism is an acknowledgment of different strands of liberal thought and a historicist approach that takes account of the historical contingencies and conjunctures of modern China. From this perspective, modern Chinese liberal thought is interpreted as growing out of a confluence of cultural, political and specific historical factors: China’s semi-colonization by the foreign powers, the demise of the monarchical system and of the notion of universal kingship, the failure of the Republican experiment, the spread of Enlightenment thought, the exigencies of nationalism and the imperatives of state building