What is "Chinese" about China's modern state? This book proposes
that the state we see today has developed over the past two
centuries largely as a response to internal challenges emerging
from the late empire. Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted
such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political
participation affect state power? How is the state to secure a
share of society's wealth? In response to the changing demands of
the age, this agenda has been expressed in changing language. Yet,
because the underlying pattern remains recognizable, the
modernization of the state in response to foreign aggression can be
studied in longer perspective.
The author offers three concrete studies to illustrate the
constitutional agenda in action: how the early nineteenth-century
scholar-activist Wei Yuan confronted the relation between broadened
political participation and authoritarian state power; how the
reformist proposals of the influential scholar Feng Guifen were
received by mainstream bureaucrats during the 1898 reform movement;
and how fiscal problems of the late empire formed a backdrop to
agricultural collectivization in the 1950s. In each case, the
author presents the "modern" constitutional solution as only the
most recent answer to old Chinese questions. The book concludes by
describing the transformation of the constitutional agenda over the
course of the modern period.
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