5.4 REFORMERS IN THE 1890s

In each of the preceding sections, we have seen how internal trends and concerns mixed with external texts and traditions to produce early discussions of rights or related notions.

Much of my analysis in this section will revolve around the term “minquan” of which “people’s authority” is a good first approximation. I will begin by looking at some strands within Confucian tradition that have been identified by other scholars as contributing to the emergence of concern with minquan. Next I will strive to make connections between these native strands and what is explicitly said about minquan prior to 1898. After a brief excursion into another important rights-related concept, zizhu zhi quan, I will look at the critique of minquan written in 1898 by Zhang Zhidong, a powerful government official and proponent of moderate reform.

5.4.1 Traditions of Reform

Much has been made of the role of Western imperialism in stimulating a recognition by Chinese that some manner of reform was needed, and many have emphasized that Western ideas helped to shape the ways in which the needed reforms came to be understood. We saw earlier that both Chinese and Manchu officials associated with the “self­strengthening” movement were certainly reacting, in no small part, to military defeats and unequal treaties; we also saw the degree to which their responses came to be couched in terms that evolved out of the inter­pretation of Western texts. At the same time, we also saw that preexisting concerns and intellectual tendencies played important roles in motivating these individuals to engage with Western ideas and texts in the ways they did; we noted in particular the commitment of Wei Yuan, Li Hongzhang, and the others to “statecraft” thinking. In this section, I will sketch three other strands within the evolving Chinese tradition that clearly influence how rights discourse is articulated in the 1890s - and by whom.

The first is an aspect of Confucianism that has come to be called minben sixiang, which means “people-as-root thought.” It holds that only when the people flourish will a state be strong; the well-being of both rulers and officials is decidedly less important than the well-being of the people. One classical Confucian work puts it this way: “When Heaven gave birth to the people, it was not for the sake of a ruler. When Heaven established a ruler, it was for the sake of the people.”^[117] It is often claimed, in fact, that classical Confucian political theory includes a “right to rebel” against a tyrannical ruler. This notion is based primarily on a passage in the Mencius in which it is made clear that rulers who “mutilate humane­ness” and “cripple rightness” no longer count as true rulers; to kill such a person is to punish an outcast rather than to commit regicide.^[118] This passage clearly supports the idea that the people’s well-being is of para­mount importance, to which any ruler must be committed in order to merit his position.

Should there be a man... who is not given a share in [the realm’s] enjoyments, he would speak ill of those in authority. To speak ill of those in authority because one is not given a share in such enjoy­ment is, of course, wrong. But for one in authority over the people not to share his enjoyment with the people is equally wrong.^[120]

Another passage makes the related point that for a ruler to fail to provide properly for his people, and then to punish them when they “fall into excesses” seeking what they need, is to “trap” the people.^[121] The stress throughout is on the ruler’s responsibility to the people, rather than on any correlative right that the people might have. The fact that speaking ill of a bad ruler is still wrong seems to make clear that no general right to speak out is intended - even though speaking out cannot be avoided.^[122] Even if “people-as-root” did not mean that the people had a right to rebel, it did lay the foundation for critiquing rulers. The most famous such critique was that of Huang Zongxi, whose Waiting for the Dawn we began to examine in the last chapter. Huang argues that emperors routinely assumed that the wealth of the nation was intended for their personal benefit, and so passed strict laws which tried to ensure that “[nothing] beneficial should be left to those below, but rather that all blessings be gathered up for those on high.”^[123] Huang urged a number of institutional changes that he felt would lessen the ability of rulers (and other power-holders) to take advantage of the people.

One more aspect of the people-as-root idea bears emphasizing before we move on: The interests and powers of the people are conceptualized collectively. Huang thought that the people as a whole - whom he referred to as “all-under-heaven (tian xia)” - should benefit, but he never put this in terms of protecting the interests of every individual. We will see that 1890s reformers, too, tended to think collectively. When they talk of minquan, for the most part they have in mind the authority of the people as a group. We will see a few hints of a more individualized con­ception of quan, but these are rare exceptions to the general trend.^[125]

Another large trend that fed into the 1890s reform movement was the ever-increasing economic and social power of local landlords, gentry, and merchants, and the related arguments that came to be made in favor of local self-government. We saw earlier that Gu Yanwu argued strenuously against the central government’s “rule of avoidance” - which mandated that officials not serve in their home counties - and term limits, in part because he sought to increase the ability of local elites to influence policy related to them. Although, in the face of opposition from the central court, progress toward local self-rule was slow, institutions serving local needs did continue to be created.^[126] Virtually all of the proposals put forward by minquan advocates in the 1890s bear some relation to these earlier trends. For one thing, the proposals tended to serve the same local elites, since they, rather than the entire populace, were the “people” envi­sioned in at least the first stages of power-sharing and representative assemblies. We can also find explicit evidence that reformers saw their visions as promoting local self-rule and decentralization.^[127]

A final traditional contribution to 1890s reform thought is the so- called New Text school of thought.

A number of the figures treated in this chapter were advocates of New Text readings of the classics - from Wei Yuan, who commissioned the very first international law translation, to Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who were central participants in the reforms of the 1890s, as we will soon see. In addition to finding grounds for criticism of the ruler, men like these also found support for the very ideas of reform and progress in the New Text tenet that human history would pass from an era of “disorder” to one of “approaching peace” and finally to one of “universal peace.” Kang Youwei, in particular, viewed Confucius as a full- fledged prophet who foresaw the need for fundamental reforms.^[129]

New Text ideas were not as closely related to the specifics of minquan as either of the other strands of thought that I have canvassed in this section, nor did they continue to exert their influence for as long as some of these other ideas. I suspect that two reasons lie behind this. First, the very idea of a New Text school depends on a considerable familiarity with, and concern for, difficult and often obscure texts from the classical tradition. Such familiarity is possible only in certain social and cultural circumstances. These circumstances began to break down after the end of the nineteenth century.^[130] Second, the principal purpose served by the New Text ideas was the justification of reform, progress, and so on.

5.4.2 Minquan to 1898

The year 1898 is the pivot around which the balance of this section will revolve. 1898 is famous for the “Hundred Days” reform effort, in which the youthful Guangxu emperor threw his support behind reform, issuing a series of wide-ranging edicts. After slightly more than one hundred days, a palace coup led by the empress dowager ended the reforms and resulted in the execution of several reform advocates, and the flight to Japan of a number of others. In addition to this abortive attempt to insti­tutionalize reform, 1898 also saw some very important writings in favor of minquan, as well as the most famous argument against minquan, Exhortation to Learning by the moderate reformer Zhang Zhidong. I turn first to the advocates of minquan.

Coined in Japan sometime in the late 1870s, the word “minquan (J: minken)” was first used in Chinese soon thereafter by two diplomats familiar both with the Japanese usage and with political institutions in various Western countries.^[131] It was not widely adopted in China until fairly late in the 1890s, when reformers in Hunan, Hubei, and Shanghai began to invoke it as one of the goals of their proposed institutional changes.^[132] What did it mean? “People’s authority” may be the best trans­lation one can find, but let me note one respect in which it may be mis­leading. Minquan was not about complete popular sovereignty. No one in China in the 1890s advocated full-scale democracy - nor, of course, did very many people in the West at this time. The goal of minquan advo­cates was instead an institutionalized, consultative role in a constitutional monarchy. They saw participation in national and provincial assemblies as means to strengthen the nation. One Hunanese reformer put it this way:

If we do not establish a national assembly there will be no uniting the citizen’s voices.... When asked “What would it be like to estab­lish a national assembly now?” we answer “the national assembly represents the people’s public duty (gongyi).” “But is the national assembly not then a representation of the people’s authority (minquan)?”We say that the [imperial] order we have now received, the instructions we have taken, of the public duty to enlighten each other and revive learning is a public undertaking of the people. Con­sidering the public duty to be a public undertaking, and the public undertaking to be a public assembly, what else can we call it but the people’s authority? It precisely means the people’s authority! Besides, people’s authority is people’s duty. “People” cannot be sep­arated from “authority.” The people devote themselves to their duty and the people engage in their own undertakings, while the ruler’s authority draws together these myriad undertakings. “People’s authority” is to manage one’s own undertakings. If the people lack authority, they cannot devote themselves to their duties. If they do manage their own undertakings, then the sovereign’s authority will also reach its utmost.^[133]

In other words, responsibility for the fate of the nation rests not only on the shoulders of the ruler, but also on those of the “people,” by which the author clearly meant elite members of the society, since they are charged with reviving learning. These “people” have a part in the shared “public duty” which can only be carried out if they are able to contribute their “undertakings” to the public good, which in turn requires that they have a forum for so contributing: thus the national assembly and the people’s (limited) authority, or minquan.

In Shanghai, another prominent advocate of reform wrote about minquan in a very similar vein. He explicitly rejects the Western model of “democracy (minzhu),” preferring joint governance between ruler and people [Wang 1953 (1896), p. 147]. He demonstrates that the notion of a ruler consulting with his people has ample precedent in the Confucian classics, and urges that a recognition of people’s authority, institutional­ized in a parliament, will support the state by solidifying the power of the ruler, increasing the identification of the people with the interests and needs of the state, and increasing the ability of the state to fend off external enemies [ibid., pp. 147-8]. To those who fear that minquan means that authority will simply devolve onto the people, he replies that such people “do not know that in a nation governed jointly by the ruler and the people, when there is an important national issue, it is sent to the parliament for discussion and decision, which is then executed by the ruler.... The highest authority is still held by the ruler” [ibid., p. 147].

We will see later that there were indeed people who feared what minquan might mean for the ruler’s authority. First, though, I want to turn to what is probably the most radical pre-twentieth-century Chinese statement relating to rights, and to explore the degree to which this doctrine, which puts greater weight on the individual than anything we have seen so far, derives indirectly from the writings of Protestant missionaries.

5.4.3 Individual Rights?

Virtually all of the thinkers we have looked at so far in this chapter view the subjects of quan - the ones who have rights or authority - as collec­tivities. For a range of reasons, as Chinese rights discourse develops in the twentieth century it will continue to posit a closer, more harmonious rela­tionship between individual and collectivity than is found in at least some versions of Western rights theorizing. One strand of the nineteenth­century Chinese discourse, though, does highlight the quan of individuals: These are the writings that place at their center the claim that “every person has the quan of self-mastery (ren ren you zizhu zhi quan).”

We have already seen that Protestant missionaries played roles in stimulating Chinese rights discourse. Through their translations of inter­national law texts, Parker, Martin, and others all contributed to the devel­opment of terminology and concepts related to rights. In this section, the role of more purely religious writings becomes important. The source in which I am particularly interested is the Globe Magazine (Wanguo Gongbao), which was published in Chinese during 1874-83 and 1889-1907.^[134] It began as a successor to the Church News (Jiaohui Xinbao), but went through a series of format and content changes, each time growing more secular in orientation. It was among the most widely read periodicals in China prior to 1896 [Shek 1976, p. 196].

We saw earlier that “zizhu zhi quan” was used in the General Laws as a translation for “independence.” It works quite well as a gloss on independence: Literally meaning “the power to rule oneself,” it readily conveys the idea of being independent from the control or authority of another. In the writings of Alexander Williamson in the Globe Magazine, this term, and variations on it, come to be used to express the idea of free will.^[135] For instance:

The source of [man’s] ability to distinguish between good and evil lies entirely in his having self-mastery (zizhu) over his opinions. If he lacked mastery over his opinions, he could act neither for good nor for evil.... It is like when God created the archangels: he had to endow them with the power to be masters of themselves (zineng zuozhu zhi quan). As a result when these angels did good, it was certainly through self-mastery; when they did evil, this was also through self-mastery. [quoted in Liu 1994d, p. 6]

One scholar comments on this passage that “this kind of moral right of self-determination is a central topic in Christian theology” [ibid., p. 6]. A second scholar translates as “the right of personal autonomy” the term I rendered as “the power to be master of themselves,” and concludes that this missionary had introduced “the concept of basic human rights” [Shek 1976, pp. 198-9].

I believe that it is anachronistic to read “rights” into Williamson’s language. The idea behind the Christian doctrine of free will, after all, is that one can choose to do good or do evil: One has this ability or power. As Williamson puts it elsewhere: “The capacity to make free, independent choices without interference from outside is the basis of man’s humanity” [ibid., p. 197]. Here the Chinese original does not allow the translator to substitute “rights” for “capacity.” There is no reason to conclude that when Williamson expresses this same idea with “quan” he is using it in any sense other than its traditional mean­ing of “power.” Not only that, but whatever Williamson may have taken to follow from his assertion, it seems clear that no Chinese reader needs to have attributed to him any distinctive concept of rights. Williamson’s discussion of free will made adequate sense without conceptual innovation.

This is not to say, however, that scholars who see Williamson playing a role in the development of Chinese rights discourse are all wrong. In light of what we have seen earlier, it is a striking feature of the “powers” Williamson discusses that they belong to individuals. If someone already committed to the inference from quan to legitimacy were to interpret Williamson’s writings, then they might well come to use the term to express a new set of commitments, namely to the legitimacy of individ­ual powers.

The earliest example of something like this process of adapting Protes­tant claims about free will can be found in a remarkable essay called the Complete Book of Substantial Principles and General Laws, written by Kang Youwei (1858-1927) from 1885 to 1887. Kang was one of the intel­lectual leaders of the reform movement, both through his direct par­ticipation in reform agitation and through his teaching: Several other prominent thinkers studied with him, including both Tan Sitong and Liang Qichao, the latter a subject of this book’s next chapter.^[136] Kang drew on many aspects of the Chinese tradition; he was a chief proponent of the New Text ideas about reform and development mentioned earlier. He also strove to learn everything he could about Western science, reli­gion, and philosophy, and incorporated many of these ideas into his wide- ranging writings. One of his main sources for things Western was the Globe Magazine, whence he probably derived the term “zizhu zhi quan.”

The Complete Book of Substantial Principles and General Laws has an unusual organization which Kang based on his understanding of Western mathematics. Each section begins with one or more “substan­tial principles.” These are general truths which the following analysis will take as axioms. Based on these axioms, he then derives several “general laws,” each of which is contrasted to various “lesser alternatives” which do not follow from the axioms. Contemporary Chinese practices are inevitably to be found among these lesser alternatives, which makes the text into a wholesale critique of Chinese customs, values, and institutions.

At the center of the whole structure is the notion of zizhu zhi quan. This is introduced in the “General Discussion on Humankind,” an excerpted version of which runs as follows:

Substantial Principles.... [1] Human beings are formed by taking their respective share of the primordial substance of heaven and earth. [2] Every individual possesses a soul and hence possesses reason....

Universal Laws.... [1] People have the quan of self-mastery. Note: This is a law derived from geometrical axioms and is wholly in accor­dance with the substantial principles that human beings are formed by taking their respective share of the primordial substance and that every individual possesses a soul.... [Kang 1978, p. 699]

The next section of the text discusses “Husband and Wife,” and Kang continues on to examine other categories of human relationship (ruler­subject, teacher-disciple, and so on), in every case arguing for equal rela­tionships based on equal quan of self-mastery.

It is quite clear, I think, that Kang is here influenced by the Protestant teachings we looked at earlier, but in the context of Kang’s writings, I find myself more tempted to read “quan” as entailing commitments similar to those entailed by “rights.” In particular, Kang links quan very closely to equality. His argument is not that we in fact have free will, since God made us that way, but rather that since we are all equal, we ought to be masters of ourselves. Another way of saying that is that we have a right to self-mastery. Some years later, a student of Kang’s wrote the following: “When Christianity was first founded... it established [the concept of] the Heavenly Kingdom which gives each person the right of autonomy (zizhu zhi quan) and abolished all inequalities to restore equality.”^[137] This once again conflates Christian doctrine with developing ideas about rights, but since it recognizes the normative character of quan in the tie it makes to equality, and since it explicitly applies quan to individuals, “rights” may not be a bad translation for this instance of “quan.”

5.4.4 Zhang Zhidong

Like the self-strengthener Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) was an official who, while firmly grounded in Confucian values, recog­nized the need for reform. Among his many progressive activities was his patronage of the pioneering literati newspaper, the Chinese Progress (Shiwu Bao), which was published in Shanghai from mid-1896 to mid- 1898, when it was closed down after the failure of the Hundred Days reform. Zhang had envisioned the Chinese Progress as a means to gather and publicize information on foreign relations and other topics; certain sensitive areas of domestic affairs were to be taboo [Yoon 2000, p. 12]. As it turned out, though, the men whom Zhang employed to run the newspaper had a more radical agenda which very much included advo­cating minquan.^[138] Despite Zhang’s repeated attempts to control what was published, editorial after editorial appeared in the Chinese Progress extolling minquan, including some of the very articles I examined a few paragraphs ago.^[139] In an effort to clarify his own position, Zhang wrote an extended essay entitled Exhortation to Learning (Quanxue Pian) in which he supported a variety of reform efforts but criticized the notion of minquan. Zhang’s essay was submitted to the court, and as the Hundred Days reform crumbled, an imperial edict was issued requiring officials in all provinces to publish Exhortation to Learning.

In the sixth chapter of Exhortation to Learning, entitled “Rectifying Quan” Zhang argues that “the doctrine of minquan brings no benefits and a hundred harms” [Zhang 1970 (1898), vol. 1, p. 23a]. In the next several pages, he outlines a series of reasons why giving the people quan would lead to these harms. Two of the more interesting reasons make it clear that he sees minquan as demanding power or authority for the people at the expense of the power of the government. He writes, for instance, that people with capital can already open business enterprises, and those with skills can already invent things, even without quan; if offi­cials lost their quan, though, criminal activity could not be restrained and the people would suffer. Officials have to have the authority, that is, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate businesses and to sup­press the latter. Minquan, in Zhang’s eyes, would strip officials of this authority. Similarly, Zhang says that people can already open their own schools, even without quan; if officials were to lose quan, though, then the route to official status through education would lose its appeal and people’s motivation for study would lapse [ibid., pp. 23b-24a]. Zhang clearly sees quan as something that is desirable, and if officials no longer have it, there is less reason to work to become an official.

We saw earlier that advocates of minquan explicitly claimed that minquan did not imply a usurpation of the ruler’s authority by the people: It meant a sharing of authority, based in part on consultation in a national assembly. Zhang does not believe that authority can be shared; if the people have quan, then officials do not. After outlining the various problems he sees with minquan, Zhang adds that he believes that “minquan” is a poor term for capturing the foreign ideas that inspired it:

An investigation of the origin of the doctrine of minquan in foreign countries reveals the idea that a state should have a parliament where the people can express their public opinion and communi­cate their group feelings. It is only desired that people should be able to explain their feelings; it is not desired that they should wield any power. Translators have altered the wording to call it “minquan,” which is a mistake. [1970 (1898), vol. 1, p. 24b; transla­tion adapted from Teng & Fairbank 1954, p. 168]

Transmitting the feelings of the people to their leaders is legitimate, but should not be confused with matters of quan. At the end of this chapter, Zhang says that once the people’s level of education has risen suffi­ciently, he would support a purely consultative parliament, but not the idea of minquan.

By “quan” Zhang means legitimate power or authority. He under­stands and endorses the norms that limit and legitimize state power. Reading between the lines, we can see that he fears minquan both because there are no norms constraining it - it would become naked power, benefiting criminals more than anyone else - and because he sees no means to adjudicate the sharing of legitimate authority.^[140] On the former question, I believe Zhang is very astute. What might the basis for people’s quan be? There are certainly classical precedents for a ruler’s having responsibility to the people, and even for a ruler’s obligation to consult, in some limited fashion, with the people. I argued earlier, though, that people-as-root does not include people’s political rights, nor any other basis for people having legitimate political power. On the latter issue, we should remember that the most common reason given by minquan advocates for needing a ruler was that the people were not yet ready to govern themselves. In their eyes, the monarchy is justified by its unique ability to carry out what the Hunanese writer we examined earlier called “public undertakings”: to keep the state in harmony and order, strong enough to sustain itself in a hostile international arena. If the people knew enough and were organized enough to do this them­selves, then perhaps the monarch would no longer be necessary.^[141]

After discussing minquan, Zhang takes up the related claim, discussed earlier in the context of Kang Youwei’s writings, that all people have the quan of self-mastery (zizhu zhi quan). Zhang thinks that this is even worse than minquan. Zhang’s arguments against the quan of self-mastery take similar form to the considerations he adduces against minquan. First, he says that “zizhu zhi quan” is a bad translation of the Christian idea of free will, which is not actually about any sort of authority [Zhang 1970 (1898), vol. 1, p. 24b]. I think that Zhang is basically right: He has correctly identified the source of this phrase, as we saw earlier, and insightfully notices its lack of any connection, in its original context, with authority. He apparently has no problem with the commitments entailed by the Christian concept of free will, but he rejects the innovation entailed by Kang’s use of the phrase. He rejects the conceptual innova­tion because he feels that if each person had his or her own power of self-mastery, the result would be selfish chaos. Zhang adds that in all Western nations, no matter whether they are monarchies, democracies, or constitutional monarchies, there are laws and other legitimate means of checking individual power: This, he says, is equivalent to people not having the quan of self-mastery [ibid.,pp. 24b-25a]. Once again it is clear that what Zhang is worried about is power unchecked by any norms or institutions. He understands how state quan can be subject to norms (like the “Three Bonds”) and thus rendered legitimate; he does not see the grounds for a comparable process for people’s quan. He thus can see the former as authority, while the latter is mere power.

5.4.5 Voices from Hong Kong

Although the failure of the Hundred Days brought to a halt discussion of minquan in venues like the Chinese Progress, the most thorough and sophisticated treatment of minquan - including an answer to Zhang’s implied challenge to find grounds for people’s authority - came in late 1898 from Hong Kong. Protected from the Chinese government by their residence in the British colony, He Qi (1859-1914) and Hu Liyuan (1847-1916) collaborated on “A Postscript to Exhortation to Learning” subsequently published in 1901 as part of their Real Interpretation of the New Policies. He Qi had spent a decade in England, earning degrees in both medicine and law, before returning to Hong Kong in 1882. He had an active career in Hong Kong as a public servant, declining an invita­tion in the late 1890s to serve as a diplomat for the Qing court [Xu 1992, pp. 3-5]. Hu Liyuan was educated solely in Hong Kong. Starting in 1887, when he translated one of He Qi’s English essays into Chinese, Hu and He worked together to publish a whole series of reform proposals. He Qi would write in English, then Hu Liyuan would translate into Chinese.^[142]

As early as 1887 He Qi wrote - in English - about foreign nations’ violations of China’s “sovereign right.” He continues: “If China wishes to have diplomatic relations with other countries on an equal footing and desires foreign powers to respect her sovereignty and rights, she must do more than simply get strong” [He 1992 (1887), pp. 137-8]. He Qi explains that China needs more than military strengthening: It needs to reform its corrupt legal system so that foreigners will be willing to submit to it, and more generally to improve “her loose morality and evil habits, both social and political” [ibid., p. 138]. When Hu Liyuan translates this material into Chinese, he uses “quan” to translate “rights” [He & Hu 1994 (1901), p. 86]. Together they produce a series of institutional proposals over the next decade. They seek a parliament, a cabinet system, and the quan for members of the press to speak and write freely. With the excep­tion of what sounds like a right to free speech, most of their ideas are quite similar to proposals made by advocates of minquan within China.^[143]

The biggest departure from previous writing and thinking about minquan comes in the essay that He and Hu compose to rebut Zhang Zhidong’s indictment of minquan. They write that

As for “quan” it is not [a word for] military power, nor for bureau­cratic influence. Quan is that with which one pursues the great norms and laws under heaven, and that with which one establishes the greatest justice and fairness under heaven. There must be some­thing with which one accomplishes these things, and lacking any other name for it, we can simply call it “quan.” Given that we are speaking of the great norms and laws, the greatest justice and fair­ness, thus quan must be given by heaven, rather than being estab­lished by people. Heaven gives people their lives, thus it must also given them the quan with which to attend to their lives. [He & Hu 1994 (1901), p. 397]

The role attributed here to heaven recalls the similar claims made in Japan a number of years earlier, but it is quite unlike anything that we have heretofore seen in China. In fact, the logic resembles that of John Locke more than that of the earlier mainland minquan advocates we examined earlier. Locke believed that there are natural laws defining our moral duties, and that there must be natural rights, corresponding to these duties, which enable us to fulfill the duties and laws. Quan, accord­ing to He and Hu, comes about in just such a way: It is the means by which one realizes heavenly morality.

Other aspects of the Hong Kong thinkers’ views are more similar to those of their counterparts on the mainland. They believe, for instance, that minquan will unify a collection of dispersed individuals: “Minquan is that through which the rulers and people... of a nation can be com­bined into a single mind.”^[144] In fact they maintain that the quan of self-mastery, which we saw Zhang attack precisely for its centrifugal ten­dencies, also serves to unify rather than disperse. Their reasoning to these conclusions is fascinating. They assert that only in society do we ever have quan, because only when we are part of a group is there a moral standard relevant to us. Alone, we simply choose to do that which ben­efits us; quan is neither needed nor relevant. In society, we are given the quan to do that which benefits us and our group, or at the very least to do that which does not harm the group [ibid., pp. 416-17]. Minquan is the quan of the collective. With it, people can do that which heaven intends for them, and their group can flourish. Without it, the state will descend into chaos and the people will suffer.