Social Darwinism in Chinese history of international thought: Enduring relevance

Throughout this paper, we use the term social Darwinism with reference to sets of ideas providing causal explanations of the social world by transposing claims derived from biological evolutionary theory. The term was introduced to the broader public in Richard Hofstadter’s influential 1944 work Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860–1915.Footnote ⁶ The mutual inspiration of 19th-century social and biological theories is a complex phenomenon which has received broad scholarly attention.Footnote ⁷ The concept of SD was used to describe a plethora of theories, often mutually contradictory, including ideologies inconsistent with Darwin’s hypotheses (e.g. social Lamarckism).Footnote ⁸ While the overwhelming impact of SD on China has been discussed extensively by sinologists,Footnote ⁹ intellectual historians,Footnote ¹⁰ and political theorists,Footnote ¹¹ International Relations scholars have so far paid little attention to this topic. We argue that SD became a pathbreaker in the history of Chinese international thought. Its surge marked an unprecedented discontinuity with China’s centuries-old traditions of thinking about international politics. As Anna Wojciuk argues, the emergence of these new ideational structures was also a critical step behind the Qing empire’s effective efforts to confront threats on the part of the Western powers and Japan. It was only upon the adoption of SD that Beijing eventually engaged in balancing, reacting to threats then present for over 50 years. SD prompted China to build and mobilise internal resources through administrative, educational, military, and fiscal reforms, in addition to purely constitutional changes. According to Wojciuk, during the last decade of the empire and, subsequently, the republican period, the SD-inspired foreign policy maxims were shared by the entire Chinese elite, no matter how divided it might have been.Footnote ¹²

Sinicised SD was the first stream of globalised international thought in China. In the spirit of David Armitage’s framework, the case we analyse is an example of the transnational process of the formation of modern international political theory, having occurred in a country previously upholding its own and, to a lesser extent, regional intellectual traditions.Footnote ¹³ SD’s special place in the history of Chinese international thought is due to the fact that its introduction paved the way for various concepts and ways of thinking about international politics hitherto absent from the Chinese discourse. These included, in particular, concepts of sovereignty, power politics, and the ‘image’ of the international system in which no entity was destined to lead or enjoy a special status. These approaches were fundamentally distinct from previous Chinese understandings of the Middle Kingdom’s relations with the outside world – an amalgam of the rich and diverse traditions of Legalism, strategic thought,Footnote ¹⁴ Buddhism, and – most importantly – Confucianism. As such, SD was, in our view, a manifestation of the globalisation of international thought, a process in which political ideas about relations between large groups of people could be no longer produced only locally. At that stage, China’s foreign policy was confronted with events incomprehensible to previous patterns of thought; the ‘old’ concepts apparently ceased to offer politically effective prescriptions for how to approach the growing challenges. The terms adopted to describe the experience of the time were therefore foreign ones, creatively translated and transformed in order for them to neatly correspond with earlier political ideas.

Our work is part of a wider strand of research seeking to integrate intellectual history into the study of world affairs, including, in particular, historically critical non-Western and non-canonical works.Footnote ¹⁵ (In a somewhat similar way, SD has been assimilated in the Arab world, as described by Cemil Aydin.Footnote ¹⁶) Quoting Sun Yat Sen, Charles Mills points out that the contemporary International Relations debate suffers from a relative lack of awareness of how important the evolution-theory-derived categories of race, whether justifying white domination or opposing it, were in the early 20th century.Footnote ¹⁷ We believe our work facilitates a better understanding of how foreign knowledge of the time, including racial categories, influenced Chinese international thought, and, in turn, how this thought was redesigned to enable China’s more effective response to the threatening international phenomena of that period. We show that this intellectual output was nonetheless of a contingent nature, even if presenting itself as a set of objective and scientifically confirmed ‘truths’.Footnote ¹⁸

Furthermore, our article shows how ideas ‘travelled’: who brought them, what content they carried, and how they were assimilated and domesticated. Following in Martin Bayly’s footsteps, we emphasise the importance of ‘intermediaries, translations and networks’ for this process.Footnote ¹⁹ Our three protagonists, Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao, were typical cultural mediators navigating a triangle comprising China, Japan, and the West. Their travels, readings, and translation projects were crucial for the analysed process. Their renown in the region made them, in turn, knowledge brokers for contemporaneous thinkers in other countries, such as Korea or Vietnam. For Yan, Kang, Liang, and their intellectual circles, this process of translation, circulation, and intercultural functioning under conditions of cooperation and contestation was a mode of shaping new understandings of the Chinese self in international relations and transcending the identity of an unthreatened and indestructible hegemon.Footnote ²⁰ Early 20th-century Chinese international thought, based on the theory of evolution, was characterised by a focus on natural selection through racial competition (zhongzu jingzheng). It largely resembled ideas put forward by Herbert Spencer and Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck – oftentimes without an acknowledgement of their source (Lamarck was particularly rarely mentioned).Footnote ²¹ But, unlike with Spencer, it conceived of struggle as the one between groups rather than individuals. Finally, unlike numerous deterministic versions of Western SD, Chinese social evolutionary theories were voluntaristic. This seems crucial in the light of the fact that SD played the role of turn-of-the-20-century Chinese reformers’ ideational ‘weapon’.

The works of leading Chinese intellectuals of that time were (sometimes incoherent) assemblages of ideas, constantly evolving depending on circumstances and audiences.Footnote ²² Distinct lineages of SD were not clearly demarcated. The point of emphasis was elsewhere – on China’s survival, modernisation, and adaptation to the changing international situation. While Chinese SD developed in the idiosyncratic context of late Qing rule, close associations with intellectual currents influential in Europe and North America at that time were nonetheless maintained. As Torbjørn Knutsen’s rare account shows, SD indeed impacted speculation about international relations in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe and North AmericaFootnote ²³ (see also Duncan Bell’s work on Anglo-America of that period).Footnote ²⁴ Darwin’s ideas featured in the thought of, among others, liberals (Walter Bagehot, William Graham Sumner) and nationalists. Among the nationalists, the founders of geopolitics (Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén, Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer)Footnote ²⁵ are especially worth mentioning.Footnote ²⁶ Liberal Darwinists dominated numerically, having become especially influential in the UK and the USA. Yet their theories emphasised domestic market economies rather than international issues. Nationalists, such as Ernest Haeckel, Ludwig Gumplowicz, or Friedrich Ratzel, developed the most complex SD-inspired international thought, popular especially in Germany and Austria. Haeckel believed that nations were like living organisms which must struggle for survival. Among them, Germans were a superior Volk, capable of maintaining that status only if they preserved racial purity and eliminated devastating doctrines, such as liberalism. Ratzel analysed interactions between large human groups in geographical space, developing the notion of Lebensraum. The topic of Darwinian inspirations in Western international thought still remains to be systematically explored by the field of International Relations.Footnote ²⁷

As we mentioned above, certain structures of SD thought are nowadays still present in Chinese discourse on relations between large groups of people. We thus aim to make arguments from the past understandable and relevant to contemporary readers.Footnote ²⁸ We also bring to the contemporary debate the knowledge of historically important ideas that can help explain contemporary world politics. Given contemporary China’s increasingly assertive behaviour in international politics, understanding this background knowledge may contribute to a more complete explanation of the People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy.

Social Darwinism enters China: Broader picture

Following its huge popularity in the West, SD was diffusing to numerous other locations, including in East Asia.Footnote ²⁹ By the end of the 19th century, it had gained a strong foothold in various areas of the world, allowing hierarchies of enlightened civilisations to be sustained – or evolutionary racialism for that matter, between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘backward’ – and justifying imperial exploitation. The Darwinian thought that ‘travelled’ to Asia tended to emphasise race as a set of factors combining biology, geography, and culture, being the primary precondition for a group to fit in civilisational progress or form a nation-state.Footnote ³⁰ In particular, SD was the first Western and the first so-called ‘scientific’ theory adopted in China and, more broadly, the first Western social ideology to exert a major impact in the Middle Kingdom. Although SD was not an ideology officially subscribed to by the Chinese state, we argue that, in the late Qing period, it played a pivotal role as the trigger of the profound transformation of Chinese ideas on global politics and China’s place within the international system. Throughout that process, SD was being transformed, adapted, and questioned by those who transplanted it into the local context.

Not only did SD become extremely popular, challenging local background knowledge about international relations, but it also played a fundamental (and very unique) practical role. As China had very few professional scientists at that time, the thought of Darwin was originally transplanted exclusively as an uncompromisingly radical social ideology rather than as a scientific theory.Footnote ³¹ Nonetheless, it appears to have fully benefited from an enormous authority of Western science among the contemporary Chinese. Unlike the normatively constructed Confucianism, Sinicised SD functioned as a reliable scientific theory, developed and ‘proven’ by Western scholars.Footnote ³² ‘Disclosing’ nature’s secrets, it ‘revealed’ universally applicable natural laws. Consequently, while traditional Confucian literati established their elitist role by demonstrating proficiency in the canonical texts, the new elite’s legitimacy was derived from their adherence to the contemporary Western intellectual fashion. Furthermore, the group of Chinese able to speak on political matters significantly expanded in that period. After 1895, politics, hitherto confined to a narrow circle of high-ranking literati and the emperor, opened up to new voices from lower-level intellectuals and the broader public.

For several years, SD dominated Chinese intellectual imagination, and its influence persisted far into the future. Darwin’s name had become commonly known among intellectual circles, and Chinese equivalents of popular slogans expressing SD became broadly present even in everyday discourse.Footnote ³³ Both among elites and in the popular imagination, they played a critical role in overcoming many ‘everlasting’ premises about the Chinese special role in the world order and understanding how a good society should work. Upon studying more than 500 autobiographical memoirs of the period, Cao Juren, a student of modern Chinese intellectual history, concluded that virtually all the authors were influenced by Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun, a translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics.Footnote ³⁴ It became widely read, with about 30 editions appearing within 10 years of its publication. James R. Pusey observes that the well-known Spencerian slogan you sheng lie bai (the superior wins, the inferior loses) was echoed in countless essays and, for decades, became an argument for almost any course of political action, especially reform.Footnote ³⁵

By the 1900s, the theory was so popular among the literate classes that Wang Guowei wrote in 1905 that the names of Darwin and Spencer were on everyone’s lips. The notions of ‘survival of the fittest’ and natural selection, translated from Huxley as 物競天擇 (wujing tianze), were found even in popular literature and readings for junior high schools.Footnote ³⁶ Many people attached nouns such as competition, selection, and choice to their own and their children’s names. A contemporary translator of Liang Qichao, an intellectual leader of the Darwinian turn, concluded that ‘even Napoleon at the height of his power could not have captivated a larger number of men in his armies than the numberless youths whom Liang held under the influence of pen’.Footnote ³⁷ Yuehtsen Chung argues that, for many Chinese intellectuals, SD replaced traditional Confucian notions of an ethical cosmic order.Footnote ³⁸ In the same spirit, Jilin Xu notices that, in the process of adoption of evolutionary theory, the traditional social order was subverted and replaced by a new one, predicated on the rule of violent international competition, based on ruthless, brute power.Footnote ³⁹ The mental outlook it brought, so explicitly granting power priority over everything else, was fundamentally at odds with the previously dominant, traditional Chinese view of the universe and human history. Normative distinctions between moral and immoral actions, dominant in Confucian mainstream narratives about statecraft, were substituted by the opposition of the strong and fit who will survive and those who are weak and destined to extinction.

Later, Hu Shi would recollect that the Darwinian discourse had been like a severe blow that had made the people aware of the gravity and the enormity of the Chinese situation: ‘within just a few years, these ideas spread like wildfire and inflamed the minds and blood of many young people. Evolution, competition, weeding out, natural selection, and other terms gradually became familiar clichés in newspapers and essays, gradually became the conventional platitudes of most patriots.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Yang Du observed that ‘ever since Darwin and Huxley proposed the theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, every aspect of social life has been affected. Few human affairs can be exempted from the law they have established.’Footnote ⁴¹ SD inspired and educated the public, supporting virtually all political movements present in China in that period, from Confucian literati, to communists, from nationalists to liberals, including Taoists, Legalists, and Buddhists. Among others, SD heavily influenced Mao Zedong. In 1935, in the caves of Yan’an, he confessed to the journalist Edgar Snow that he had ‘worshiped’ Kang and Liang and ‘read and reread those books until [he] knew them by heart’.Footnote ⁴²

Intellectual leaders: Kang Youwei, Yan Fu, Liang Qichao

SD was brought to China by three leading intellectuals and reformers of that period: Kang Youwei, Yan Fu, and Liang Qichao.Footnote ⁴³ Pursuing the goals set by an earlier generation of intellectuals, the so-called self-strengthening movement, all of them wanted a restoration of fuqiang, that is, ‘wealth and power’ of the Middle Kingdom. In order to make that big dream come true, they first needed to comprehend the sources of power and prosperity in international relations. Following the undoubted failure of the generation of ‘self-strengtheners’, a new group of public intellectuals, oftentimes their students, developed Sinicised SD, a novel approach to international thought, allegedly distinct from everything China had known before. SD with Chinese characteristics brought a powerful prescriptive message: success in gathering ‘wealth and power’ in world politics could be achieved if actors behaved according to the rules of struggle for survival. Familiarity with this set of maxims and the implementation of the recommendations was an alleged source of strength in world politics.Footnote ⁴⁴ This recipe for survival brought hope and optimism for the elites and the people of that time. It is therefore unsurprising that Sinicised SD became politically powerful in China, having prompted an even stronger urgency for domestic reforms and a reorientation of foreign policy practices.Footnote ⁴⁵

Each of the aforementioned three Chinese social Darwinists was distinct in his thought. To an extent, the ideas pursued by each of them also evolved over time.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yan Fu was primarily a translator of Western social philosophy; his renditions oftentimes proactively reshaped the original content, adapting it to the Chinese context. Kang Youwei was an intellectual radically reinterpreting Confucian thought in an effort to find in it entirely novel meanings. Alongside other activities, Kang served as an advisor to the emperor and his ideas informed what is known as the One Hundred Days Reforms. The third ‘heavyweight’ of this generation, Liang Qichao – the most prominent and widely read intellectual of the period, sometimes called the ‘paradigmatic thinker of his time’ – vigorously embraced and propagated the SD introduced by Yan and Kang. As a journalist, editor-in-chief and co-founder of major journals, public intellectual, and reformer, he consolidated the influence of SD in the late Qing Empire, despite his most active period having been spent in exile in Japan. Yan and Liang tended to emphasise their distinct epistemological status and Western origin as an advantage, whereas Kang sought to spread new ideas by incorporating them into the Confucian tradition.

Kang, Yan, and Liang encountered SD primarily during their visits and studies in Meiji Japan, the first East Asian country where Western SD writings were introduced, gaining high popularity. Kato Hiroyuki was a major proponent of this approach among Meiji intellectuals, and he was a crucial inspiration for Yan and Liang.Footnote ⁴⁷ In his collection of books, Kang had a number of works by Japanese evolutionists,Footnote ⁴⁸ including many texts of the biologist Ishikawa Chomatsu, a disciple of Edward Morse, an American professor of zoology and a correspondent of Darwin, who in 1877 brought the theory of evolution to Tokyo University.Footnote ⁴⁹ Later, Darwin’s theory and its social applications were included in the University of Hong Kong curriculum. This is where Sun Yat Sen became familiar with it.Footnote ⁵⁰ Furthermore, Chinese social Darwinists travelled to the West; Yan studied in Britain, Kang visited Europe, and Liang the United States and Australia (and after the First World War – Europe), albeit most of their key works on SD had been written prior to those trips. On the other hand, Chinese SD diffused further in the region. In particular, it had a profound impact on Korean intellectuals, gaining the status of the dominant national socio-political ideology of the early 20th century and, again, serving as a justification for a fundamental break with the Confucian past. Similarly, Chinese SD ‘travelled’ to Vietnam, inspiring local nationalism, in particular through the works of Phan Bội Châu, written in direct collaboration with Liang.Footnote ⁵¹

Social Darwinism in China: Logic of modification

Popular Darwinism was a creative assemblage of numerous, sometimes incoherent, interpretations and adaptations of Western authors. In fact, even if inspired by selected imported concepts, they were products of their Chinese authors, modified to fit into the Chinese tradition. Translations from Japanese were even more creative than the ‘pre-transformed’ adaptations of Western SD texts by Japanese authors. In the course of their translation into Chinese, they were further reinterpreted in a way that the authors viewed as suited to the needs of China at the time.Footnote ⁵² Rather than being passive, intellectuals translating notions and theories exercised their own agency. They thus tended to appropriate the ideas, sometimes recasting basic meanings.

SD, including its international thought angle, was unknown in China until the late 19th century. However, just like with any other rich, ancient tradition, the statements of the Chinese classics could be interpreted post factum in accordance with the needs of the new fashion. For example, the ‘Pledge of Zhonghui’ contained moral-obligation-based justifications of military interventions of the self-claimed ‘civilised’ peoples in ‘uncivilised’ territories. Kang repeatedly quoted that passage, including in the early 1898 memorial to the Guangxu Emperor, as a warning for the declining empire, allegedly doomed to foreign annexation and subjugation unless it found a remedy for the disorder and ignorance.Footnote ⁵³ It is hard to establish to what extent Kang’s thinking at that time was driven by SD discourse. Still, in 1901, his eminent student Liang fully incorporated Darwinian thought in an essay on modern international conflicts and modes of subjugation through colonialism. He argued there that ‘Darwin had replaced the mythological adviser Zhonghui as an authority on “national ruin”’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Importantly, although the Confucianism-dominated decades of the 1870s and the 1880s had seen debates about limited reforms in China, necessary to self-strengthen in a world of aggressive Western powers, the ideas that the struggle generated by expansion and war could actually be a positive necessity never appeared in public discourse. At the same time, because of its drawing a clear connection between the natural and the social world, SD resembled Confucianism structurally. Thus, when Confucianism eventually started to be seen as an ‘obstacle on the path to progress and survival’, SD was its ‘natural’ successor.Footnote ⁵⁵

Leigh Jenco argues that, actually, not only did the Chinese thinkers introducing Western theories to China (including those classified as ‘social Darwinists’) exercise agency in developing conscious theorisations for domestic audiences, but, throughout this major creative absorption process, they also developed one of the most remarkable discourses about how, and why, it is important to study foreign theories and learn from cultural others, and what is worth learning.Footnote ⁵⁶ On the basis of new referents, they put forward specific political, social, and technical ideas, which served as constitutive sources of knowledge. Reformists’ commitment to transform China according to foreign inspirations facilitated the movement of ideas and practices across historical and cultural boundaries. They ‘urged not just the hybridisation or translation of Western ideas into Chinese contexts but the total re-alignment of local institutions and ways of life to accord with what they believed to be “Western’ models’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Unlike the earlier generation of the ‘self-strengtheners’, they did not believe that a purely instrumental ‘transplantation’ of certain Western knowledge, limited to areas of science and technology, could change the lot of China. The necessary reforms were so fundamental that they could not be accommodated in the existing Confucian framework, no matter how capacious and flexible this framework seemed to be. The new, profoundly different institutions they advocated were perceived by them as facilitating new actions, including new modes of knowledge production, and as ones which, in fact, enabled the effective thriving of the West in the domain of world politics.

At the same time, the reformers approached modernisation very pragmatically, introducing modifications as they saw fit. They considered adoption of new institutions and cultural patterns only if those changes could help make China powerful and wealthy again. Indeed, hundreds of politicians and intellectuals from various generations and political options discussed the restoration of fuqiang – ‘wealth and power’ – in the international context. Concepts such as constitutionalism, democracy, and education were worth considering, but only as potential vehicles to wealth and power rather than as autotelic values.

Struggle and survival in international relations

Sinicised SD put survival and power in the centre of world politics. Success or failure in the struggle depended on the will of a given group and a skilful adaptation to the changing context. Unlike some of its Western versions, SD with Chinese characteristics avoided determinism and, as such, was instrumental in mobilising for the building of national strength. When Liang, Kang, and Yan wrote about the struggle for survival between groups, they meant a conscious one, one that valued self-cultivation, self-strengthening, self-improvement, and self-reliance. In the evolutionary process, humans were empowered to act and could influence their chances of succeeding.

Following the defeat in the 1895 war with Japan, Yan Fu, in the Zhi bao newspaper, published an article entitled ‘Yuan qiang’ (Whence strength), pointing to the need for urgent reforms. In his discussion of the notions of natural selection and survival, he referred to Darwin but actually used Malthusian arguments (without mention of the latter scholar). In Yan’s view, the Chinese classics underestimated the importance of the perpetual struggle that brought change and dynamism to societies. In his eyes, human greed knew no bounds; human groups reproduced incessantly, never satisfied with the wealth and power they had accumulated. Chinese classics were wrong to call for self-restraint, Yan argued, while Western intellectuals encouraged competition, viewing societies as striving for progress and development. He pointed out that the danger facing China at the time was not a temporary problem, but rather a symptom of an essential mechanism driving inter-group relations, a symptom that was not properly diagnosed by traditional Chinese international thought. The analysis of Western sources of power and wealth led him to conclude that the Chinese position was inferior, characterised by weakness, poverty, and backwardness. Yan argued that the West’s superiority stemmed from its successful internalisation of Darwin’s theory, leading to an awareness that all species must struggle for their own existence.Footnote ⁵⁸ Consequently, Yan believed that, in order to compete with the Western powers and Japan, China would have to undergo a profound, unprecedented change, transforming its people mentally, physically, and morally, and thus remodelling the entire society, government, and military.Footnote ⁵⁹ ‘Whence strength’, a prolegomenon to Yan’s whole intellectual contribution, profoundly impacted Chinese thought for the following three decades.

The first work comprehensively introducing this new approach to change was Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun [The theory of heavenly evolution], published between 1896 and 1898. It was a selection and assemblage of motifs from Huxley, Spencer, Malthus, and Darwin, but not taken directly from those authors. Instead, Yan proposed a paraphrased version of Thomas H. Huxley’s 1894 lectures on evolutionary theory. He reinterpreted the fundamental concept of ‘heaven’ (tian), which until then meant the moral principle legitimising the cosmic imperial order. Yan used it to describe the principle of evolution. Tianyan lun argued that evolution was a universal process, encompassing biological, intellectual, moral, social, and political realms. Change was natural and inevitable; constant adjustment was an imperative. The rewards for timely and effective adjustment were survival and progress; failure to adjust led to extermination. The strength of European states was an outcome of their centuries-long evolution, forcing adaptation and efficiency in a competitive process. The Old Continent, divided into small countries, formed conditions for continuous, voluntaristic reforming in search of the most effective modes of functioning of survival-oriented polities. Those adverse conditions facilitated the European powers’ gaining an advantage over China, a polity experiencing centuries-long existence in a relatively uncompetitive environment.

Upon reading Tianyan lun, Kang Youwei developed his philosophy of progress, aiming at a reconciliation of Confucian thought with SD. This resulted in, again, a voluntaristic approach to both social change and the interpretation of history. In his renowned 1897 essay, A Study of Confucius as a Reformer, he retroactively inscribed the idea of progress into classical texts. The purpose was to undermine the intellectual foundations of the old political order, which he saw as anachronistic in a changing world. At the same time, it was well fortified with built-in mechanisms to resist reform. Unlike mainstream interpreters of Chinese classics, Kang claimed that canonical texts, including those of Confucius, authorised radical change. Jenco notices that, paradoxically, that interpretation of ancient texts facilitated their own negation, as ‘reformers used the theory of inevitable change found within them to justify their displacement in favour of Western knowledge’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This way, Kang developed a historical relativisation of the Confucian order, in accordance with which China could not continue as a dynastic empire; instead, it should enter the phase of sovereign nation-state to eventually reach great unity under which borders, a cause of wars and human suffering, would lose their significance. At a more abstract level, Kang actually developed a creative approach to history, according to which the nature of the past was neither certain nor given. Instead, it was a constant object of investigations, which people were actively referring to every time they thought or talked about history. In a similar vein, current reforms were legitimised by new interpretations of the past, creating potential for transformation of future generations.

Liang Qichao, another early reader of Tianyan lun, was profoundly influenced by Yan and his own teacher, Kang. The introduction to the first issue of the widely read journal published by Liang began with the declaration that change was necessary for survival. ‘Without change, heaven, earth, and man would in the same hour all cease to exist.’ Just as Yan did, Liang also saw human beings’ agency in this natural process of change: ‘whether it will be changed for better or for worse depended on the way of man’. Progress was unstoppable, but not for everyone; some actors were bound to lose out in the process. The rise of one nation was the fall of another. The statement: ‘The strong flourish; the weak are destroyed’ was illustrated by the example of Poland and India, both having failed to reform and adjust themselves to the circumstances of the international environment and therefore having disappeared from the map.Footnote ⁶¹ The theme of countries that did not reform, which led to their annihilation (wangguo), often returned later in political debates. Sometimes, Liang even fabricated translations in order to mobilise his nation to fight for survival: ‘Mr. Darwin has said, every living thing, no matter of what kind, must frequently change its form and make it beneficial to itself, for only thus may it survive.’Footnote ⁶² Those who ignored the rules of international relations, failing to adapt to contemporary challenges, were doomed:

Thus, Sinicised SD, unlike its Western and Japanese counterparts, emphasised the possibility of the weak becoming powerful in international relations.Footnote ⁶⁴

In his main pro-reform treatise, Bianfa tongyi, Liang followed in Kang’s footsteps, backing his own radical propositions with citations from ancient books, including the Yijing (Book of Changes). Despite being arguably the most Darwinian and ‘Westernised’, Liang creatively adapted Chinese tradition in his efforts to reform China. By combining foreign ‘scientific discoveries’ with a creative reinterpretation of the past and the classical intellectual heritage of Confucianism, he described the conditions for China’s entry into the modern international order.Footnote ⁶⁵

Races and nations in interaction

Chinese social Darwinists, especially Yan and Liang, developed a new sociological practice: a study of groups or groupings (qun), which, in their view, were undergirding Western prosperity. In accordance with that notion, China could not succeed in international relations unless it implemented a similar approach. States, nations, and races played a central role in the logic of struggle. Patriotic unity was considered to be the most effective form of interaction between subjects of the same state.Footnote ⁶⁶ Overall, this set of ideas constituted fundamental inconsistency with the individualist core of mainstream Western SD.

In On Grouping, an 1897 essay, Liang complains that ‘400 million people of China means to have 400 million countries, which is to say there is really no country at all’, implying that Western nations’ strength came from their grouping capabilities in the form of nation-states. ‘The perfection of the West’s methods of grouping has taken place within just the last hundred years, and so its rise followed.’ Furthermore, he argues that:

Liang’s 1902 essay on the historical development of humankind shows SD’s impact on China’s thinking about international politics in terms of degrees of civilisational development. Based on the ability (or inability) to organise lasting political entities, Liang divided the world population into two general categories: historical and non-historical races. The former were considered active in the search for expansion and subduing the latter by force. Conversely, non-historical races were deemed as passive and bound to a gradual ‘disappearance from the stage of world history’. His observations were firmly grounded in evolutionary theory: ‘For thousands of years there has been a process of rise and fall of various races (zhongzu), this is a nature of history.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Among the historical races, Liang distinguished only whites and (broadly understood) yellows, who were further subdivided into peoples with a prominent or insignificant impact on global history. The former category comprised peoples whose culture and military force transcends the boundaries of their states, wielding an impact on global development. In his inquiry, Liang ascribed the principal role in shaping the world’s civilisation to ancient Greece and Rome, concluding that the white race held 90 per cent of the contemporary world’s territorial sovereignty (tudi zhuquan).Footnote ⁶⁹ Under colonialism, he emphasised the unity of the yellow race as a critical factor for survival of people in East Asia. (He nonetheless did not rule out the possibility that the yellow race would outperform the white ‘lazy and arrogant’ one in future.Footnote ⁷⁰) Liang brought the racial dimension to the foreground, ignoring China’s internal diversity, especially the potential rivalry between the Han, the Manchus, and other groups inhabiting the empire. Following this reasoning, Liang’s associate, Zhang Binglin, conceived of the struggle between human races in terms of their capacity for grouping – the key factor in determining their varying fortunes. Therefore, Zhang posited, the yellow people, with their high levels of social organisation, were outperforming the black, the brown, and the red, but, for the same reason, the yellow races were held down by the white, a race with a supreme capacity to organise as a group.Footnote ⁷¹

Yan Fu’s most influential line of thought saw little space for the individual.Footnote ⁷² He subordinated the freedom of the individual, as well as individual energies, to the needs of the group. In ‘Whence strength’, he explained that once individuals start believing that the group is their own, they will see no conflict between an individual and a group. In this way, individual interests will be ‘naturally’ identified with the group. Yan used Spencerian ideas of communal bonds as analogous to a living organism. Only such a properly integrated organism could successfully withstand the ‘survival of the fittest’ environment. ‘Social organism’ became a powerful metaphor: ‘a country is like a body, and China will be strong if only it would … pull itself together and act as one body’. If not, ‘at very best, it will be enslaved; at worst – it will be exterminated’. The world was one of the warring social organisms. The way to make the organism strong was to cultivate people’s physical prowess, knowledge, intelligence, and their virtue. ‘When it is a question of one’s own life or the life of the species, then one should sacrifice oneself to preserve the species.’Footnote ⁷³

Distinct in terms of his approach to Chinese tradition, Kang nevertheless agreed with Yan’s fundamental conclusion: ‘heaven blesses only the strong’. China must realise that ‘all creatures alone are weak, united – strong’. The Middle Kingdom is a vast country, but its people ‘hold aloof and will not group; they are ignorant and will not study … in study there is strength; in grouping there is strength’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Kang, a loyal member of the literati class, aimed to promote a new, national, collective Chinese identity, integrating Western concepts and technology into a reinterpreted Confucian heritage, of which he considered himself to be a guardian.

Liang was not bound by an office requiring loyalty to the heritage. Therefore, he was in a better position to introduce nationalist and modern ideas, emphasising a break in continuity.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to some scholars, Liang emphasised this discontinuity of SD with the entire earlier tradition more firmly than would be required for the merely descriptive purpose. This was precisely because his intention was to promote a radical change. He thus built his discourse in fundamental opposition to everything that had come before, through millennia of Chinese tradition.Footnote ⁷⁶ His language was blunt:

Liang shared Yan’s view that an individual should completely subjugate themselves to the interest of the nation: ‘Freedom means freedom for the group, not freedom for the individual … Men must not be slaves to other men, but they must be slaves to their group. For if they are not slaves to their group, they will assuredly become slaves to some other.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Xiaobing Tang claims that, in his creative adaptation of SD, Liang used traditional Confucian belief in the fundamental harmony between public and private, collective and individual interests, which allowed him to easily justify priority given to a group at the expense of the individual.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus, this concept of group builds on the traditional Chinese belief in a community modelled on extended family. But, at the same time, SD strips from it the traditional metaphysical connotations. In this new sense, the group becomes a universal category, revealing the logic of history and mechanisms of international relations: ‘A barbarian society cannot survive a civilised society. The more advanced the world, the greater the role of collective social power. If one is unable to accept this, only extinction will follow.’Footnote ⁸⁰ In order to participate in world politics, a group has to transform itself into a modern nation. In an 1899 essay, he attributed the power of modern Western nations to the struggle (jingsheng) of their citizens (guomin), as opposed to the past wars of aggression driven by the Asian and European rulers’ individual ambitions. Instead, ‘the original impulse behind the rivalrous wars of Western nations is their citizens’ struggle for survival. Given the laws of evolution, there is no stopping in natural selection and survival of the fittest – even if we wanted to. Thus, the current struggles of the Western nations are not a matter of the state, but the people as a whole.’ ‘The European citizenries developed their power in just a hundred-odd years, but with their power, the Europeans have been able to reach every corner of the Earth, easily extending their dominance and overcoming any resistance.’Footnote ⁸¹

For Liang, the mere size of a group did not automatically guarantee its strength; sophistication and intellectual capacity were much more important. Such qualities resulted from both the size of the human brain and having broader knowledge than others:

At the same time, it is not enough, in his view, to acquire certain knowledge because, in a co-constitutive relation, knowledge has to ultimately transform the human group (produce institutions typical for advanced groups). Groups that do not have proper institutions cannot produce sophisticated knowledge, necessary to ensure survival. What makes the West so powerful is both its knowledge and the institutional conditions under which the knowledge is produced.

State-building and civilisations

Sinicised SD grants a unique status to the state and its institutions. In fact, putting the state in the centre distinguishes SD with Chinese characteristics from its original Western versions.Unlike with Europe or the USA, in China SD legitimised modern nation-state building. Again, reformers aimed to reject fundamental tenets of Confucianism in favour of the desacralisation of politics and the pursuit of logic in accordance with which only the strong states can survive.

Liang claimed that traditional China did not have ‘statehood’ in the modern sense of the term. In line with the principle of dynastic sovereignty, the Chinese state was a property of the ruling dynasties. In Liang’s view, the deficit of citizenry in China made the country vulnerable to foreign domination:

Liang described China as being in adolescence, still about to ‘mature’ and ‘show all of its potential to the world in full’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In his concept of reform, Western-style education, in addition to political and military reforms, were parts of an overarching, comprehensive programme of state-building, necessary to effectively balance against foreign powers. Yan, on his part, emphasised that constitutional monarchy and democracy consolidated Western countries. It was not the empowerment of citizens but the strengthening of state power that was at stake in arguing for popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, and democracy. Yan asserted that when people believed that they ‘owned’ the country, they were much more willing to give their all, including their lives, for it, as opposed to the situation of sovereignty resting with a dynastic monarch.Footnote ⁸⁵

Hence, in order to survive, China needed profound institutional reforms as ‘the state is the highest form of a group … Private interests related to oneself, family and class should be sacrificed for the sake of the state. The state is the basis for private attachments, the highest form of universal love.’ Yan hoped that the humiliation Chinese emigrants suffered in ‘white-dominated’ countries would eventually teach them to love their country, for ‘your human rights are gone if your state is gone’.Footnote ⁸⁶ He believed that a lack of patriotism among citizens was deeply immoral and compared it to a ‘suicide on the national level’. Interestingly, Chinese social Darwinists frequently used typical Confucian moralism to justify their exhortations. Thus, again, although traditional philosophy remained one of the main enemies, it simultaneously inspired creative adaptation of Western ideas to the Chinese context, producing SD ‘with Confucian characteristics’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Liang was considering which model of state would be the best for China and focused on two doctrines: the ‘social contract’ by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and German-style constitutionalism in the version put forward by Johann Caspar Bluntschli. Liang believed that while republicanism may be good for a smaller country, China needed statism and centralisation; otherwise, it would not be possible to achieve consensus and implement necessary reforms.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the 1902 essay New Citizen of China, he attributed China’s deficit of statism to two factors: its geographical conditions (vast plains), which often prevented political disunity seen in Europe (divided by rivers and mountains), and Confucianism, promoting the vague concept of all-under-heaven (tianxia)Footnote ⁸⁹ at the expense of state consciousness. Yan, meanwhile, argued that China should abandon its long-standing chauvinism against foreigners, which denigrated them as ‘barbarians’, and open up to foreign content, including values, institutions, and ideas. The only criterion of adaptation should be whether it will preserve and strengthen the nation-state.Footnote ⁹⁰ Transformation of China on the basis of Western cultural learning, in the view of both Liang and Yan, would strengthen and save the country. This institutional reform (bianfa) implicated qualitative transformations in personal relationships, material conditions of economic and social production, and standards of legitimisation of knowledge, of adequacy as well as fundamental referents. On the practical side, the comprehensive programme included Western-style education, reinforcement of nationalism, political reform, and the revival of military values.

Chinese SD juxtaposed the vision of social reality driven by struggle and competition to the traditional Confucian idea of order based on harmony and hierarchy. Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi all believed that moral virtue was an ultimate source of strength, right was might, and it was ultimately the way to peace and prosperity. According to the ancient tradition, even small polities, if virtuous, could thrive. Kang and Yan argued the opposite: morality was not enough. In their view, the sages’ suppression of confrontation and emphasis on harmony had created an intellectual environment in China in which people, and hence state institutions, had degenerated to the point where they were unable to survive a struggle against foreign powers. Yan saw the key Confucian value of harmony as a source of weakness. Chinese SD brought about an unprecedented interest in the outer world and the mechanisms driving international relations, especially focusing on the reasons for the ‘rise and decline’ of powers. This view depicted the world as brutal and unforgiving, but it was one world politics, a global theatre of contest for domination, might, and survival, one in which victimisation and violence were natural. The Chinese turn-of-the-century political debate claimed that it had ‘newly discovered’ a variety of states ‘under heaven’. It passionately analysed their incessantly changing fortunes, marked by spectacular successes and downfalls.

It should be emphasised that other countries also used Darwinist categories, and sometimes China directly fell victim to this discourse, providing additional arguments for supporters of a radical shift in worldview. Japan, pursuing its expansive goals, joined the Western discourse, justifying domination of the superior ‘civilised nations’ over ‘non-nations’.Footnote ⁹¹ Vis-à-vis the Chinese, Japan displayed its racial and cultural superiority, in addition to demonstrating military and industrial advancement.Footnote ⁹² Tokyo, for example, exercised that approach during the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, the first international summit attended by China as a sovereign state (although its sovereignty was partial due to imperial encroachment of Western powers and Japan). The attending states, most notably Japan, acted largely in line with the Western discourse of international law, integrating (in a Darwinist manner) colonial nationalism and hierarchy of states. Accordingly, they deemed China’s judicial reforms to be unsatisfactory, thus insisting on their maintaining of the extraterritorial privileges and holding China’s progress in check. In his 1907 memorandum to the throne, Lu Zhengxiang, a diplomat and the Qing representative to the Hague conferences, observed that China’s low status as an ‘uncivilised state’ made the country’s request for equal treatment conditional, thus urging the imperial court for constitutional reforms.Footnote ⁹³ The decision of the 1907 Hague Conference infamously reflected China’s position as an ‘uncivilised state’, classifying it, together with several Latin American countries, among the lowest, third-ranking group, with limited rights to nominate its judicial representative to the would-be international Court of Arbitral Justice.Footnote ⁹⁴

Indeed, SD thinking had profoundly impacted Chinese perception of the international order through the prism of cultural advancement. At the same time, however, it has also shaped the domestic discourse of rising Han ethnic nationalism and the revolutionary transformation of the Qing empire into a nation-state. Zou Rong, in his 1904 essay entitled Revolutionary Army, acknowledged that Britain, France, and other countries could destroy China, relying on the higher level of civilisational advancement (wenming chengdu). However, in the same manner, Zou tried to delegitimise Manchu rule over the Han Chinese: ‘Worldwide minority obey the majority, the fool obeys the wise, the [total] number of the Manchu traitors (zei) is only five million which is less than a population of a prefecture. … In three hundred years, they had barely one or two sages, that is why they should be civilised by us.’Footnote ⁹⁵ The late 19th-century Qing ‘civilising project’ in Xinjiang was such a Sinicising effort, exploiting the perceived backwardness of non-Han peoples to justify Han Chinese domination and assimilatory colonialism.Footnote ⁹⁶ According to Xinjiang’s first provincial governor, Liu Jintang, the primary goal of the introduction of Chinese organisational and institutional order, along with Confucian education and Chinese language teaching, was to ‘civilise’ (jiao hua) the local Muslim populations and thereby ‘control the barbarians’ (bing yi zhi liang).Footnote ⁹⁷ In fact, as Duara posited, ‘SD in China translated historical Chinese conceptions of inferior races into a conception of a new global order of a hierarchy of races and nations’. For the republican revolutionaries, absorbing the international discourse of racist evolutionism, constructing a racial nation-state became a prerequisite ‘to forge ahead in the evolutionary struggle of life and death’.Footnote ⁹⁸ In other words, creating a racial nation, with non-Chinese races (e.g. Manchus) being either wiped out or absorbed into China’s cultural and political realm, would enhance China’s position in the global competition of nation-states. The ‘second generation of ethnic polices’ in China under Xi Jinping, with its ultimate goal to assimilate non-Han peoples through ‘ethnic unity and fusion’, resembles the aforementioned logic. As David Tobin infers, China’s most politically influential scholars are pushing for ‘fusion’ policies to transform China into a nation-state (minzu guojia) or race-state (guozu), to compete with other states and resist Western attempts to prevent its rise.Footnote ⁹⁹

Notwithstanding the above, in the process of what Benedict Anderson famously put as ‘stretching the short, tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’, the Han Chinese revolutionaries eventually accommodated the Manchus and other non-Han peoples into the broad concept of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Nonetheless, the ethnic framework of the future Republic of China, as designed by Zhang Binglin (Zhang Taiyan), was debated in line with the Darwinist assumptions and alleged ‘civilisational inferiority’ of the non-Han peoples. The last were granted a second-rate-citizen status in the would-be state, deprived of voting rights unless ‘improved’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Zhang made clear, ‘it is only possible to allow alien races to assimilate with us when sovereignty is in our hands’.

In addition, Liang was the first in the Chinese context to analyse interstate relations in terms of balance of power: ‘when two equal states meet, there is nothing called might, reason is their might. When two unequal states meet, there is nothing called reason. Might is their reason.’Footnote ¹⁰² For him, power was the substance of the universe and the cause of all transformation. In order to bring China into line with the rest of the world, the power of physics would have to displace the virtues of morality in the social and cosmic universe. In 1899, he wrote: ‘the only thing that matters in the world is power. The strong may bully the weak, but this is the fundamental law of nature.’ With reference to Hiroyuki’s interpretation of Hobbes, he wrote that ‘the strong have the power to back up their claim for rights. There is no such thing as right, but only power. Power and rights are called by different names, but they are really the same. Both are about asserting one’s own self-interest at the expense of others.’Footnote ¹⁰³

Chinese reformers often advocated extreme statism. For them, SD implied the deepening of society’s dependence on modern institutions, such as the army, school, and press. This ideology thus reinforced the influence of the modernising elite. State-led mass education was fundamental for the reform and regarded as the primary ‘patriotic duty’. Knowledge differentiated between ‘civilised people’ and ‘barbarians’; while both of those groups followed the laws of natural selection, the more educated ones were more likely to prevail. Their knowledge also justified their appropriation of the lands of the less advanced people. The former could better use the resources and make a greater contribution to the overall progress. On a more pragmatic level, the reformers believed that literacy made conscripts more cognisant of rules and instructions, and more conscious of their duties.