THE TWENTIETH CENTURY brought with it the beginnings of sustained engagement between Western and Chinese rights dis­courses.

This chapter focuses on the works of the two Chinese intellec­tuals who best exemplified this trend at the turn of their century. The first is Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who was a student of Kang Youwei, a sometime employee of Zhang Zhidong, and a participant in the failed Hundred Days reform movement, after which he fled to Japan and wrote the essay we will examine here.

Choosing to focus on Liang and Liu also means choosing to leave out a host of interesting texts and authors; justifying my choice of subject matter thus has two dimensions. On the positive side, I include Liang and Liu because they are the most sophisticated advocates of a “new moral­ity” in their day. Their grasp of foreign ideas far exceeds that of most of their contemporaries; their knowledge of and engagement with their own traditions are similarly broad and deep. Their writings on quanli are fas­cinating and, given the intellectual standing of each, also influential. As far as the negative side - why I left out so many others - goes, I reason as follows. First, I need to consider my subjects carefully and in depth, since it is only from inferential connections among people’s commit­ments that we determine the contents of their concepts. Second, the early twentieth century, while vitally important, is only one part of a longer narrative; my ultimate concern is with the shape of a larger discourse. Finally, I know that the ideas and, in many cases, texts of those whom I omit are accessible for those interested in pursuing this period’s rights discourse in greater depth.¹

The central theme of this chapter is that if we read texts carefully, mindful of how they were read by their intended audiences, we can recover connections between the concepts in these texts and elements of their authors’ traditions - connections that are lost if we presume that all instances of “quanli” simply mean rights, and that all instances of “rights” mean the same thing. I explore the complex relations between the texts and ideas of Liang and Liu, on the one hand, and foreign texts and authors with which they explicitly engage, on the other. The inter­actions we see with German and French ideas of rights are rich and fas­cinating; they contribute to the significant dynamism that Chinese rights discourse enjoys in the first decades of the century. These interactions do not negate, on the other hand, the connections to tradition that I have already noted. Chinese rights discourse appears to develop in its own, distinctive fashion.