6.3 CONCLUSION
The perspective that allows us to make sense of all that Liu says about quanli is this: By adding “quanli” to his vocabulary, Liu was able to stress the importance of affirming both individual interests and abilities, and the satisfactions gained by exercising responsibilities, more easily than he could have without the concept of quanli.
The idea that individuals have legitimate interests is not at all new to Confucianism; indeed, it is a prominent theme in a strand of Confucian writings with which Liu quite consciously identified. Be this as it may, the unsavory connotations of “personal” and of “desire” made affirming people’s legitimate interests a difficult topic for Confucians, and one fraught with the possibility of misinterpretation. “Quanli” gives Liu new resources for dealing with this problem.My contention, in sum, is that Liu’s quanli does not represent a radical break with the Confucian tradition. Liu shares with other Confucian writers, with Liang Qichao, and with Rousseau the assumption that when properly understood, individual and group interests coincide.[182] Confucians have always believed that correctly understanding the kinds of creatures that we are and the kind of cosmos that we inhabit leads us to see that there is a single pattern of interactions between things in the cosmos that results in harmonious flourishing for all. There is room in this picture for differences between the pattern of my behavior and the pattern of your behavior, so long as they fit together to complement the overall pattern of human interactions. Thus my nature might have made me fit to teach college students, while someone else’s might have prepared him or her to be an entrepreneur or a public servant. I will explore the plausibility of such visions of harmony in Chapter 8.
Liu’s assertion that people may have to follow different paths in order to realize their natures has some Confucian precedent.
Mencius had long ago argued that a division between those who labor with their minds and those who labor with their strength was both acceptable and even necessary [Mencius 3A:5]. His focus on the responsibility of individuals (jishen) to stand up for themselves, though, may sound un-Confucian. Mencius puts very little ethical responsibility on the shoulders of the masses (min): He says that if rulers fail to provide for the masses and then punish them when they act wrongly, the rulers have “trapped” the masses [Mencius 1A:7]. Theodore de Bary’s The Trouble with Confucianism stresses this point, arguing that one of Confucianism’s great weaknesses was its confining of ethical responsibility to a moral elite.[183] Without insisting that every Confucian agreed that ethical responsibility was solely a noble man’s burden, we can conclude that Liu diverged here from the Confucian mainstream.In the years immediately after writing the Essentials and the Textbook, Liu turned toward increasingly radical egalitarian views, becoming one of the leading spokespeople for anarchist ideology among the Chinese intellectuals in Tokyo. At the time he wrote the texts with which I have been concerned here, Liu had not yet completely rejected hierarchy, as can be seen in part by his continued assumption that the sovereign of the state would be an individual ruler. His views were evolving; he was, after all, only twenty-one years old when he completed the Textbook. It is at least fair to say that he identified with a strand of Confucianism that itself had mounted significant critiques of an overly rigid hierarchy, and that in his early writings on quanli, we can see some hints of a move beyond Confucian elitism altogether.
Liu’s personal trajectory need not detain us further. Differences from Liang Qichao notwithstanding, I think it is clear that the two men’s concepts of quanli shared a great deal. One’s quanli were one’s legitimate interests and abilities - legitimate, that is, so long as one worked to fulfill one’s responsibilities to oneself and to others.
I have argued in this chapter that we must see Liang’s and Liu’s concepts of quanli as emerging out of their engagement with their contemporary realities and with particular aspects of their traditions. They draw on, interpret, and react to a range of Western writings, but this does not mean that they simply import one or another Western conceptualization of rights. The concepts they develop are significantly different from the Western ideas on which they draw. Neither laws, nor the potential for conflict between individuals and states, are as central to Liang and Liu as they are to their Western contemporaries, though both themes are still present. Part of the explanation for this is that both thinkers see quanli as a partial solution to China’s need for greater national strength, as Marina Svensson has emphasized [Svensson 1996, ch. 5]. As I hope I have made clear, Liang and Liu also care about the quanli of individuals because of the ways that exercising quanli contributes to the legitimate good of the individuals themselves. It is now time to see how the story of Chinese rights discourse develops, and concepts of quanli change, as China moves toward the middle of the century.