Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2019, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (3): 1-56.

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The Ambit of Flourishing Peace: Kang Youwei's Perspective of Eurasian Civilizations as Seen in The Travelogue of Italy

WANG Mingming   

  1. Department of Sociology, Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, Peking University;Yunnan Institute of Ethnic Studies, Yunnan Minzu University
  • Online:2019-05-20 Published:2019-05-20

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Abstract:

In the middle of 1904, the renown Chinese thinker and reformer Kang Youwei made his "journey to the West". In Italy, the first of the 11 European countries he visited, Kang inspected the historical relics, political institutions, and local customs. Taking the opportunity of "being there", he made an on-the-spot inquiry into the age-old Roman civilization. He also compared the Western way with the "Continental" Chinese way of being political and civilized. Near the end of 1904, Kang compiled his diaries, poems, and notes of the journey into a book entitled The Travelogue of Italy (the first of the series of his Travelogues of 11 European Nations), which is the focus of this study.
The Travelogue of Italy is treated in this paper as an example from which a major perspective of "civilization" can be reconstructed and re-enacted. To the author, a social anthropologist keenly interested in the political and cosmological perspectives of civilization, Kang's Travelogue of Italy, an old-style "ethnographic" text in which a pattern of "civilizational modernity" (in contrast with "national modernity") is inscribed, proves to be one of the most fascinating achievements of late period traditional Chinese "gazettes of foreign countries".
This paper offers the following four parts of discussion:(1)a synoptic biography of Kang's life with a specific focus on his political thinking during the epoch of transition;(2)a mapping of Kang's voyage from the East to the West; (3)an overview of Kang's interpretation of the civilizational differences between Roman empire and the Han "All-under-Heaven" as presented in the travelogue; (4) an analysis of Kang's viewpoints of the relation between European and Asian civilizations. In the introductory and concluding sections, the author presents his views on the relevance of Kang Youwei's perspectives to the critique of post-traditional Chinese "nation-building" social sciences.
The paper serves as a sequel to the author's extended essay on the re-conceptualization of "civilization" by Kang Youwei's European contemporary Émile Durkheim (and his inheritor Marcel Mauss). Interwoven throughout the discussion are comparative points between King and Durkheim. It is suggested that both men define "civilizations" in terms of "supral-societal" or "supra-national" systems. Nonetheless, unlike Durkheim, who remained deeply concerned with improving the life of the nation, Kang was inclined to conceptualize such systems in terms of the "ambit of flourishing peace" (shengping shi), a dynamic state of human political existence between the age of violent chaos and that of the Great Unity.

Key words: civilizations, Eurasia, the unity of nations, ambit of flourishing peace, anthropology, intermediaries