Zhang Shizhao (1881–1973) was a lawyer, politician, and public intellectual of the early Republican period. Well-versed in Western political ideas following studies in Britain, he left a distinct trace in the development of “China's awakening,” particularly as editor of The Tiger, an influential journal that retained much of its impact even after the advent of New Youth in 1915. Through it, Zhang helped mould early Republican opinion in a broadly constitutional-democratic direction.
The book's focus is on this phase of Zhang's career. Through The Tiger, he joined the debates on a major question of the era—that of “how to incorporate a notion of the people as their own rulers in a territory with no historical precedent for democracy” (p. 32).
Zhang concentrated on the issue of how constitutional, democratic institutions drawing on Western models were to develop in circumstances so different from their points of origin. The “founding” referred to in the book's title refers to this problem. Could actions on an individual level really prove effective in bringing about “democratic” political change in the face of well-ensconced opposing forces? Zhang argued that they could and indeed that the capacity for founding acts was “diffused through society rather than concentrated in one or two elite hands” (p. 27). This did not eliminate elitism entirely, however (see below).
Jenco pursues Zhang's answer though three institutional means or directives: self-awareness, the self-use of talent, and accommodation.
Self-awareness. Zhang's notion of self-awareness as a mode of political action predates the impact of romantic individualism of the May Fourth movement, when the debate over a “lack of self” in Chinese culture really got under way. This is related to “the kind of inner reorientation needed to inaugurate the bootstrapping process that transforms wider political reality” (p. 160). Jenco finds an individualist strain to Zhang's thought, resistant to the collective definition of the self that was so attractive to others of his generation.
The self-use of talent: “Talent” is an individuating principle in Chinese thought. Under constitutional government differing talents would be allowed to come into their own to form powerful social resources, supporting, among other things, federalism. Jenco argues that Zhang's invocation of “exceptional individuals” as agents of change is redeemed from authoritarianism. Some contemporaries, however, suspected that it favored the rule of man rather than the rule of law.
Accommodation: Political pluralism, moderation, and inclusion are aspects of Zhang's conception of tiaohe, often identified with the tolerance embodied in democratic constitutions. Jenco points out the current interest in the moderate, “accommodative” approach of early Republican thinkers, once regarded as conservative.
Concluding, Jenco finds that Zhang's most prominent contribution was his “unexpected location of the political. In… not countenancing the public/private divide, Zhang lowers the threshold for political activity, making it at once less imposing and less isolated from other life activity” (p. 235).
Seeking to remake Chinese institutions using non-Chinese models, Zhang's core response was to fuse them with neo-Confucian value commitments. His approach to “the political” remained within the stratified worldview of the Confucian elite. “Founding” can be ascribed to individuals: not Western-style affirmative individuals but those who have already formed a spontaneous harmony with the surrounding society. This is code for a traditional hierarchy:
Zhang's “self-aware” individual bears more than a superficial resemblance to literati bureaucrats who were the primary political actors under the Chinese dynastic empire. However, while contemporaries evoked the literatus ideal to claim a right to educate and manipulate the masses, Zhang recasts the literatus posture to formulate a new form of political action: one that disaggregates the “group” (qun) concept central to contemporary elite political thinking…and in turn opens greater spaces for political participation (pp. 137–8).
Ambivalence and equivocation thus seem stamped on the whole endeavor at one minute, but in the next all doubt is swept aside, and epistemological and ethical optimism hold sway. Thus, as noted above, Zhang believed that the capacity for founding acts was “diffused through society” (p. 27).
Reflecting the author's broad scholarship and appetite for theory, Making the Political challenges the reader. Some more “takeaway” summaries would have been welcome. On the positive side, we are reminded of the immense stretch of the theoretical imagination that members of Zhang's generation had to make in crafting a political philosophy for their times. The problem of “founding” still resonates in China, as seen in the reception of Carl Schmitt's idea of the exceptional moment of “decision,” superior to any constitutional order. Schmitt, who supped with dictators, proposed basing the political on the distinction of friend and enemy: “founding” is openly correlated with terror. Zhang's outlook on founding is more palatable, more in line with Confucian thought. Given the current Chinese vogue for squaring Schmitt's style of “founding” with pre-Qin feudal institutions, there is comfort in such a difference. As we brace ourselves to deal with this trend, it is as well to see how thinking about such issues, albeit along different directions, developed strongly in the past.
