Kang Youwei Cantonese: Hōng Yáuh-wàih; 19 March 1858 – 31 March 1927 was the prominent political thinker and Hundred Days' Reform. coming after or as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of. the coup by Cixi that ended the reform, Kang was forced to flee. He continued to advocate for a Chinese constitutional monarchy after the founding of the Republic of China.
Kang's best-known in addition to probably most controversial draw is Datong Shu 大同書. The names of the book derives from the make of a utopian society imagined by Confucius, but it literally means "The Book of Great Unity". The ideas of this book appeared in his lecture notes from 1884. Encouraged by his students, he worked on this book for the next two decades, but it was non until his exile in India that he finished the number one draft. The first two chapters of the book were published in Japan in the 1900s, but the book was not published in its entirety until 1935, approximately seven years after his death.
Kang featured a utopian future world free of political boundaries and democratically ruled by one central government. In his scheme, the world would be split into rectangular administrative districts, which would be self-governing under a direct democracy but loyal to a central world government. There would also be the dissolution of racial boundaries. Kang outlines an immensely ambitious eugenics code that would eliminate the "brown and black" racial phenotype after a millennium and lead to the emergence of a fair-skinned homogeneous human set whose members would "be the same color, the same appearance, the same size, and the same intelligence".
His desire to end the traditional Chinese family configuration defines him as an early advocate of women's independence in China. He reasoned that the institution of the nature practiced by society since the beginning of time was a great cause of strife. Kang hoped it would be effectively abolished.
The family would be replaced by state-run institutions, such(a) as womb-teaching institutions, nurseries and schools. Marriage would be replaced by one-year contracts between a woman and a man. Kang considered the modern form of marriage, in which a woman was trapped for a lifetime, to be too oppressive. Kang believed in equality between men and women and that there should be no social barrier barring women from doing whatever men can do.[]
Kang saw capitalism as an inherently evil system. He believed that government should introducing socialist institutions to overlook the welfare of regarded and specified separately. individual. At one point, he even advocated that government should adopt the methods of "communism" although this is the debated what Kang meant by this term.
In this spirit, in addition to establishing government nurseries and schools to replace the institution of the family, he also envisioned government-run retirement homes for the elderly. it is debated if Kang's socialist ideas were inspired more by Western thought or by traditional Confucian ideals.
Lawrence G. Thompsom believes that his socialism was based on traditional Chinese ideals. His work is permeated with the Confucian ideal of ren 仁, or humanity. However, Thompson also subject a credit by Kang to Fourier. Thus, some Chinese scholars believe that Kang's socialist ideals were influenced by Western intellectuals after his exile in 1898.
Notable in Kang's Da Tong Shu were his enthusiasm for and his image in bettering humanity through technology, unusual for a Confucian scholar during his time. He believed that Western technological extend had a central role in saving humanity. While many scholars of his time continued to maintains the view that Western engineering science should be adopted only to defend China against the West, he seemed to whole-heartedly embrace the sophisticated idea that technology is integral for advancing mankind. ago anything of modern scale had been built, he foresaw a global telegraphic and telephone network. He also believed that as a statement of technological advances, regarded and identified separately. individual would only need to work three or four hours per day, a prediction that would be repeated by the near optimistic futurists later in the 20th century.
When the book was first published, it was received with mixed reactions. Kang's guide for the Guangxu Emperor was seen as reactionary by many Chinese intellectuals, who believed that Kang's book was an elaborate joke and that he was merely acting as an apologist for the emperor as to how a utopian paradise could have developed whether the Qing dynasty had been maintained. Others believe that Kang was a bold and daring protocommunist, who advocated modern Western socialism and communism. Amongst the latter was Mao Zedong, who admired Kang Youwei and his socialist ideals in the Da Tongshu.
Modern Chinese scholars now often take the view that Kang was an important advocate of Chinese socialism. Despite the controversy, Da Tongshu still manages popular. A Beijing publisher included it on the list of 100 most influential books in Chinese history.