大同書: Kang Youwei's Utopia & Mao's Revolution (康有為 & 毛澤東)

if you've traveled around China almost
any part of China but especially Taiwan you will have seen a lot of things named data you will see in road signs you will see universities name that song you will have seen monuments with data and things like it written on them what's the big idea well the dad's home shoe is one of the most influential books in the history of modern China and the idea of dads home does go back to Confucius pretty much all sources will agree that Kang Yu Wei is famous and is important for history but though this degree as to why he's famous or what he's famous for in an earlier period of his life what really brought him to national and international acclaim was a period in Chinese history called the 100 days of reform during these 100 days he was at the pinnacle of international influence Fame and frankly notoriety the hundred days of reform ended in failure which means that the social reforms he was proposing at the time never had a chance to play out for better or for worse so in some ways as he entered into a long period of Exile he was a symbol for the promise that China could have had would have had or should have had if only things hadn't fallen apart quite so disastrously at the end of the Imperial period in terms of what Kenya Way actually proposed the Chinese government should do you adapt to the modern world during this earlier time 1898 many people remember him either as a sort of moderate reformer as some kind of Confucian conservative which is misleading as we'll get into or at least associated with the kind of pragmatic westernizing tendency in China at the time you could say that he was trying to preserve the monarchy in China but to move towards something that much more resembled modern England a constitutional monarchy with some small rule for the Emperor but elected officials end all the advantages of Western technology is democratized society as you can imagine given the extreme violence of what happened both earlier and later in China's political history this generally means the county way is remembered as one of the good guys however his own philosophy is much more radical much more subversive than people tend to want to admit in retrospect that's why it's a bit strange that still today some sources report that he was a conservative Confucian when his own ideas included the total abolition of the family the abolition even of family names and of basically everyone being reduced to being an orphan raised in government orphanages from birth never knowing or meeting their parents if you know even a little bit about Confucianism you'll realize that that's radically anti confusion and well it's impossible to associate him with either conservative confusion as a more conservative Buddhism at the time his most influential work which is why there are so many street signs called that home was called the da Tong shoe I guess you could translate that as the book of the great unity some others call it the book of the great harmony something like that the idea of dat home does appear in Confucius however it's just a vaguely alluded to future utopia of some kind it isn't really an idea or philosophy that's worked out of detail in Confucius although the phrase itself does go back to that period of earlier antiquity one of the main reasons why the study of Kanye's intellectual legacy is so important today was that he directly and deeply influenced Mao Zedong that's despite the fact that as I've already mentioned he wasn't a communist he actually openly rejected communism his own writing and as I've described he was mostly remembered for very moderate pro-democratic reforms however there's a big gap between that period of early fame and when his actual utopian vision of the future the Dada Hong Xiu was finally published in 1935 actually years after the author's own death you'll find a lot of misleading information about this because I guess you could say the prologue to the book just the first two chapters was published in a much earlier date whoever those first two chapters are a kind of pseudo Buddhist set of reflections on the suffering and corruption and evil of the world setting up the case as to why a future utopia is necessary or how Chinese society can should be better you don't really get a hint as to how radical can you A's ideas really work or how far is going to take it what were the ideas that Kenya Wei wrote about that so appealed to Mao Zedong or so strongly influenced them well you have to remember communism was originally a European philosophy and even though many intellectuals including Mao himself tried to adapt communism to be more appealing to and more relevant to an Asian reading audience works like congee ways that song had the advantages of really being written in an idiom that would appeal to a Chinese intellectual of course that includes the Selective use he made of Confucian and Buddhist sources everything about his verbiage but also his interpretation of reinterpretation of what was then going on in Western science he has a lot to say about Darwin and social Darwinism for example however to be more specific and concrete I could say that you really see in Kenya way very particular ideas about how social change is going to be brought about about how for instance villages would be reorganized into communes how agriculture would be transformed in rural China and most directly how industry and the distribution of goods would change when the private sector was destroyed and replaced with an expanded public sector in reading those parts of the text we see now the very clear outlines of what Mao Zedong attempted to do especially during the Great Leap Forward period of China's history I'll provide a link in the description to this video so that you can read my relatively long and boring essay that fills in a lot of the details on this but very briefly I should also mention how can you as philosophy is very different from that of Mao Zedong well there are several aspects of his thought that were obviously either appealing to Mao taught him ideas that hijole or confirmed ideas that now already had we can also see that Mao chose to ignore a large part of what Kenny weighs philosophy was all about among other things kang youwei completely assumed that the future for china would start with emulating Western democracy involving elections Parliament's ballot boxes voting to decide almost every major issue in society including the prices of goods educational reforms things like that obviously China would be a very different place today if now that respond to that aspect of what Kenya's philosophy had to offer although it would be misleading to describe him as either a Buddhist or Confucian it's true that his future utopia does include both of these religions in some capacity and that for example he takes a lot of interest in the suffering of animals and promotes veganism saying that in the future human beings simply will not eat meat at all and that all exploitation of animals will be discarded as a thing of the past now you have to consider Mao had many possible sources of influence to choose from however the type of grandiose verbiage that Kanye offered to mal were to any Chinese reader at the time it was probably a lot more inspiring than detailed boring reports from the USSR about Soviet attempts to bring about collectivization and economic change whether at the village level of factories or otherwise remember by 1949 the Soviet Union already had decades of experience with well failed experiments and social change that China could have learned from but that stuff to be pretty very to go through and by the 1960s and 1970s it's pretty clear that China wanted a refreshing break from their own past including their very recent communist past and that's when they took on the much more radical and frankly disastrous movements of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution you can watch some of my earlier videos by the way discussing what happened how many people died and the new English language literature talking about it in short it's a shame that so little is written about kang youwei and so little is understood in english he really was one of the most influential Chinese authors of the 20th century both in terms of the influence he had on hardcore communists and paradoxically because the directives ones he had on anti-communists not least of all in Taiwan