I

Like many of his liberal friends, Luo Longji hailed from a literati family and showed a talent for learning at an early age. In 1913, he was admitted to Tsinghua College, a prestigious preparatory school for those gifted juveniles aspiring to study in the United States. Here, Luo received rigorous training in science, politics, sociology, European history, and English literature. In 1921, he graduated and entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a master’s student, where he carried out his research on British politics.Footnote ⁸ Then he was enrolled at Columbia University as a doctoral student in public law and continued his study on British politics. In the summer of 1926, he travelled to Britain and studied as a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science under the supervision of Harold Laski, who had just published his magnum opus, A grammar of politics.Footnote ⁹ Since then, Luo had been identifying himself as ‘a disciple of Laski’, a title he kept all his life.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1928, he returned to New York to complete his project and publish his first book, The conduct of parliamentary elections in England.

Luo’s book makes a meticulous investigation of how the English electoral system operates.Footnote ¹¹ The fact that he spent years studying the political institutions of a foreign country attests to his strong interests in Western democratic systems. His articles written in 1929–30 after returning to China further demonstrate his democratic stance, in which he frequently quoted Laski. Yet how Luo became interested in Laski’s political theory in the first place is unclear. What we are sure of is that he was at this time a fervent nationalist, if not a statist.

Back in January 1919, when the First World War came to an end, the victorious Allies organized a conference in Paris to discuss the post-war international order. The Japanese delegation demanded that its territorial claim on China’s Shandong Peninsula (formerly German’s concession) be recognized, which provoked nationwide protests of students, workers, and merchants in China proper, known as the May Fourth Movement. Amongst the enraged students, Luo emerged as an outstanding activist who publicly denounced Japan’s expansionist ambition.

When Luo arrived in the United States, he organized with friends from Tsinghua College the ‘Society of Great Rivers’ (Dajiangshe) and ran a little magazine named Great Rivers Quarterly (Dajiang jikan) in 1925. The origin of its name came from their romantic belief that the root of the Chinese civilization would never be extirpated, just as great rivers would never be cut off. Born in an age of imperialism, this group of young people highlighted nationalism and statism (the two ideologies to them were interchangeable, both translated into Chinese as ‘guojia zhuyi’), for ‘any country whose citizens did not submit to nationalism will inevitably be extinguished by imperialism’. The preface of the Great Rivers Quarterly, drafted by Luo Longji, applauded Napoleon, Bismarck, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour for their achievements in building modern nation-states. Following their paths, Luo and his friends called for a sovereign state, which integrated the Han Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, Muslims, and Tibetans into a unified Chinese nation. This strong government, representing the collective will of the Chinese people (Zhonghua renmin quanti yizhi), they argued, was the precondition of reconstructing China’s politics, economy, and culture.Footnote ¹²

In April 1925, Luo, the president of the Chinese Students Association in the United States (Zhongguo liumei xueshenghui, CSAUS), attended the memorial service for Sun Yat-sen in New York and praised Sun’s dedication to China’s nation-building.Footnote ¹³ Weeks later, when the furious masses protested against the Shanghai Municipal Police’s massacre of the Chinese striking workers (known as the May Thirtieth Incident), Luo organized the CSAUS for a student protest over American soldiers’ participation in the massacre.

Luo’s outspoken nationalist and anti-imperialist stance should not be neglected when we consider his interest in Laski. Though subscribing to liberalism after reading Laski’s works, Luo insisted all along that the Chinese people ought to be united under a strong nation-state for national survival. The tension between his strong nationalist and statist feelings and the English liberal tradition became prominent and would last throughout Luo’s political career. The characteristic English distrust of the state, as Walter Bagehot writes in his seminal work, The English constitution, positioned the government as an alien force: ‘We look on state action, not as our own action, but as alien action; as an imposed tyranny from without, not as the consummated result of our own organised wishes’, though ‘by definition, a nation calling itself free should have no jealousy of the executive’ when ‘the nation, the political part of the nation, wields the executive’.Footnote ¹⁴

This inherited feeling encouraged young Laski to attack in the 1910s the supreme power of modern states. Laski criticized the monistic theory of state as something ‘both administratively incomplete and ethically inadequate’, insisting that ‘the state has a history’ and does not have ‘any permanence of form’.Footnote ¹⁵ The state had no sound basis to claim sovereignty over other social associations, for ‘the agents of any State are not different in character from the rest of its members’.Footnote ¹⁶ Laski was particularly bothered by the division between ‘a small number who exert active power, and a large number who, for the most part, acquiesce in the decisions that are made’, the dominant minority transforming their wills into the justified general will through state apparatus.Footnote ¹⁷ This governmental system, he believed, had always been ‘dominated by those who at the time wield economic power’, and the so-called ‘general will’ lifted for ‘the preservation of their own interests’.Footnote ¹⁸ He therefore bridged his anti-statist, pluralist passion with a socialist democracy which hoped the masses to rise up and hold the state accountable. This belief ran through his life despite the gradual shift of his emphasis from pluralism to socialism in his late years. In the 1930s, Laski accepted the sovereignty of the state and converted to Marxism and state socialism.Footnote ¹⁹ But even at this late stage, his pluralist philosophy, as Peter Lamb argues, remained a core spirit of his socialist project.Footnote ²⁰

Luo must have been deeply touched by Laski’s democratic outcry and condemnation of minority rule, particularly the latter’s entrenched disobedience of the omnipotent capitalist state. Indeed, as David Runciman puts it, Laski’s theory ‘is a history of disobedience, and of the state’s fear of disobedience’.Footnote ²¹ This explained why Luo claimed himself to be a committed disciple of Laski and became a liberal. Pluralism and liberalism, as discussed in Jacob T. Levy and Peter Ghosh’s works, have always been intertwined with each other.Footnote ²² Both Laski and Luo called for a vibrant mass democracy that held the rulers accountable and brought equality to every member of the political community they envisioned.

However, Luo did not see the state as an alien tyrant, but rather an intrinsic force of a nation flourishing from within, as he stated clearly in the Great Rivers Quarterly. Dictators, oligarchs, and corrupt bureaucrats should be brought down, as they only pursued their own interests and thus impeded the evolution of a nation. A strong nation-state in the hands of the people, on the other hand, was desirable, for it would stand as a Hobbesian protector of the collective interests in a world of social Darwinism.Footnote ²³

It was this national liberalism that led him to struggle with both the GMD dictatorship and the communist class war after returning to China in 1928. China’s political situation changed swiftly during the time when he studied abroad. Sun Yat-sen’s GMD and the newborn CCP formed their first alliance in 1923 to initiate a nationalist revolution. The two parties together established a new government in South China, and launched a northern expedition against the Beijing government. The expedition, led by commander-in-chief Chiang Kai-shek, swept the Yangtze River Valley and penetrated North China in 1927. The same year, however, saw the GMD–CCP split and Chiang’s slaughter of the communists, as Chiang was increasingly concerned about a possible communist rebellion.

As a result, the CCP had to retreat from cities, infiltrating into mountainous areas and establishing communist enclaves, while the GMD continued its northern expedition and formally unified China in December 1928. After several rounds of competitions with his opponents, Chiang Kai-shek established a dictatorship over the whole country and forcibly oppressed the dissidents. Although the Japanese army occupied Manchuria in September 1931 and raided the Shanghai International Settlement in 1932, Chiang decided to consolidate his rule by appeasing the Japanese and destroying the communists.

Luo Longji, who had just arrived in Shanghai from abroad, soon stood up to Chiang’s authoritarian regime. In 1929, he started teaching at two universities and joined the editorial board of an influential literary journal, Crescent (Xinyue).Footnote ²⁴ The journal was run by leading intellectuals, such as Hu Shi and Xu Zhimo. Most editors obtained degrees from Britain and the United States and admired the Anglo-Saxon democracy. Crescent soon became a flagship of Chinese liberalism.

The political reviews in Crescent were mostly written by Luo. He criticized the GMD’s one-party rule and condemned Chiang’s brutal suppression of civil movements. Luo Longji and Hu Shi were particularly bothered by the GMD’s arbitrary power to arrest, detain, torture, and even execute those categorized as ‘communists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. They asked for a real constitution to limit state power and protect human rights.Footnote ²⁵ Human rights, according to Luo, were those satisfying basic needs for an individual to survive and develop, and the function of the state was to protect these rights and enable everyone to ‘be myself at my best [sic]’. This was to Luo the only reason why a citizen should obey the state authority.Footnote ²⁶ Luo admitted that he was inspired by Laski’s A grammar of politics, which indicated that ‘the identity of men’s nature makes them need a common minimum of satisfaction for their wants’. These requirements in turn ‘implies a responsible State’. Therefore, the state ‘possesses power because it has duties’ and ‘it exists to enable men, at least potentially, to realise the best that is in themselves’.Footnote ²⁷

Again, despite the similarities between Luo and Laski’s texts, the former’s intention was not to challenge state sovereignty and champion a pluralist, decentralized politics; rather, he hoped to construct a unified political community under the rule of a capable and responsible government. Luo emphasized his disagreement with the natural rights theory,Footnote ²⁸ for he had never found an ultimate value in human rights but an instrumental value for members of a nation to fully develop themselves and, in return, contribute to the collective welfare. The human rights of the people, to Luo, were inviolable not because of their sanctity but their function (gongyong) for a nation to survive, thrive, and build a democratic community. Liang Shiqiu, Luo’s close friend and one of the Crescent editors, defined Luo as a ‘radical patriot’ (jilie de aiguo zhuyi zhe) believing in nationalism, who became interested in liberalism.Footnote ²⁹

Luo claimed that the state was created by the people to protect human rights and they had the right to disobey if state power had been abused. Human rights predated and were independent of state power.Footnote ³⁰ These claims have driven those studying Luo’s political thought to depict him as an outspoken dissident under authoritarian rule. Liu Zhiqiang, in particular, praises Luo as a martyr who sacrificed for the cause of Chinese human rights.Footnote ³¹ We should, however, interpret Luo’s statement within the context of 1930s China, where state power to him was monopolized by a small group. Chiang Kai-shek’s government relied heavily upon his military advantage, never intending to establish a genuine democratic system that integrated the non-GMD forces. Luo’s claim was therefore not to refute the state sovereignty as European pluralists had done, but to question the legitimacy of this particular regime and demand a powerful state based on popular sovereignty and the people’s general will. This helps explain why Luo seldom adopted a discourse of human rights versus state power after the founding of the communist regime, replaced by his compliment of people’s democracy, political unity, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.Footnote ³²

In the same text, Luo drafted thirty-five articles to protect human rights. The first three articles, inspired by the 1789 Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, asserted that the state sovereignty resided in the whole nation (quanti guomin) and that the constitution and law were the expressions of the people’s collective will (gonggong yizhi). What Luo objected to here was not the superiority of state power which Laski had stood against, but an alien authority forcibly imposed upon the people. State sovereignty, in other words, was illegitimate insofar as it was not endorsed by the people. That was why Luo did not demand in China a federal and decentralized system but asked Chiang’s government to abolish the ruling party’s privilege and incorporate all kinds of talents, whether they were GMD party members or not.

When Japan occupied Manchuria and was about to establish a puppet Manchukuo in the early 1930s, Luo’s petition for an accountable government became more urgent. He demanded that the authorities immediately prepare for a total war with Japan and convene as soon as possible a National Salvation Congress (quanguo de jiuguo huiyi). This national congress was supposed to elect a new democratic government that represented the people’s will and accommodated non-GMD elites.Footnote ³³

Luo’s appeal received no positive response but hostility from the government. In November 1930, Luo was arrested for his ‘subversive’ writings. Thanks to Hu Shi’s rescue, he was quickly released from prison. Three years later, when teaching at Nankai University in Tianjin, he was targeted by the secret police for his inflammatory speech.Footnote ³⁴ Again, he was fortunate enough to have a narrow escape from being assassinated. The attempted murderers, according to Luo’s recall, shot tens of bullets at his car but only hit his seat backrest.Footnote ³⁵

Challenging the GMD government did not mean Luo was sympathetic to the Chinese communists. As a nationalist, Luo was alert to the threat of communist class struggle to the national unity he had been dreaming of. He denounced communism, not so much because its violent class struggle endangered human rights or its unrestricted revolutionary power damaged individual liberty. The greatest danger of communism, to him, was its destruction of a unified state and its anarchist ideal. First, the bloody civil war between the GMD and CCP would achieve nothing other than plunge the country into bankruptcy and collapse. And second, a democratic nation-state had never been on the political agenda of the communists, who ‘simply did not want a state’ in their blueprint and instead tried to establish a one-party dictatorship. Chiang Kai-shek’s despotic party-state, according to Luo, was only a poor imitation of the Bolshevik dictatorship.Footnote ³⁶ This ‘one-party dictatorship’ (yidang ducai) was in essence a forcible rule of the minority over the rest of society and would never produce a modern nation-state based on popular sovereignty.Footnote ³⁷

II

Indeed, Luo’s mixture of liberalism and nationalism can be observed in many leading Chinese liberals over the past century,Footnote ³⁸ and Luo was a pre-eminent figure among them. It was based upon a common belief that Luo could organize with a group of liberals a significant third force (disan shili), independent from the GMD and CCP, in the 1940s and after.

In 1934, Luo was not content to be a political commentator and became a leader of the newly established National Socialist Party of China (Zhongguo guojia shehui dang, NSPC). The core of the NSPC project, facing the menace of Japan, was to foster a strong parliamentary democracy and a nationalized economy, which was quite in line with Luo’s national liberalism.Footnote ³⁹ However, under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule, the NSPC was not recognized until the breakout of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

The period 1931–7 saw numerous Chinese political commentators (including Hu Shi) feel pessimistic about this forthcoming war. Compared to China, Japan was highly industrialized and had a formidable military force. Luo, however, from the beginning had high hopes for the war. He believed that Japan’s expansionist policy would sooner or later lead it to confront the Western sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and give rise to a world war. And this world war would end with Japan’s defeat.Footnote ⁴⁰ More importantly, he expected the war to be the best opportunity for China’s political reorganization and democratization, as the government could not deal with it without the help of non-GMD forces. ‘War made the state.’ Luo would have agreed with Charles Tilly’s famous argument.Footnote ⁴¹ The idea of ‘winning the war and building a nation-state at once’ (kangzhan jianguo), which gained ground during the wartime, had been raised by Luo six years ahead of the war.

When the war started, Tianjin was quickly occupied. Luo, a leading anti-Japanese activist, was among those who would have been arrested and executed. He made a quick decision to flee to Nanjing, the Chinese capital. Then he retreated with the government westwards to Wuhan and finally to Chongqing, the provisional capital in wartime. There he worked together with the GMD leaders to wage an unprecedented total war.

Again, it was his nationalism that transformed a liberal dissident into a passionate co-operator with the GMD government. The government established the People’s Political Council (Guomin canzhenghui, PPC) to provide an official channel for the opposition parties to participate. It was seen by some to be a wartime quasi-legislative body but never enjoyed the power of a real parliament. Luo was soon elected into this council.Footnote ⁴² Two years before, Chiang Kai-shek, seeing that imprisonment and assassination could not bring Luo to his knees, had invited Luo to join the government but was rejected. Now, when Chiang had nothing to offer, Luo came to help. But Chiang soon realized that Luo’s co-operation came at a cost, for the latter campaigned for democracy rather than supported Chiang’s leadership in wartime.

In November 1939, under Luo’s guidance, several PPC councillors proposed a standing people’s political committee (guomin yizhenghui) to supervise the government’s actions when the planned national congress was not convened. This political committee was designed to be a de facto parliament where opposition parties could limit the GMD’s power. In order not to irritate Chiang Kai-shek, Luo deliberately kept the unrestricted power of the president free from supervision.Footnote ⁴³

Nevertheless, Luo’s modest proposal was refused in April 1940, and Chiang even rebuked Luo to his face at a PPC conference. The leaders of the NSPC and other opposition parties were deeply frustrated with the outcome.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1941, even Luo’s position in the PPC was removed.Footnote ⁴⁵ Luo must have been disillusioned with Chiang’s regime after these frustrations, for he even secretly tried to flee in 1942 to Yan’an, the CCP’s headquarter. His adventure, however, failed, for the soldiers at a checkpoint recognized him and returned him to Chongqing.Footnote ⁴⁶

Considering Luo’s serious criticism of communism in the 1930s, his adventurous escape to the CCP’s territory was intriguing. It was not a reckless decision. On the one hand, things became clear that, even in the wartime, Chiang Kai-shek was never willing to share his power. Without a strong state based on popular sovereignty, Chiang’s military dictatorship turned out unpopular and feeble. In 1944, while the Japanese navy was decisively defeated in the Pacific Ocean, the GMD’s army suffered a humiliating debacle. Even Chongqing was seriously threatened. Since the outbreak of the war, Luo had been looking for a silver lining in Chiang’s leadership, but the government turned out to be completely incapable of uniting and modernizing the country.

On the other hand, the CCP had changed its leadership. In the late 1930s, Mao Zedong emerged as an outstanding leader of the party. At roughly the same time, Stalin cancelled the initial sectarian ‘class-against-class’ policy and turned to the anti-fascist ‘popular front’. The CCP under Mao, therefore, withheld its communist fervour and advocated for a united front with all the anti-Japanese forces. The party replaced its class struggle programme with a nationalist one, which successfully won over the liberals in cities and mobilized the poor peasants in villages.Footnote ⁴⁷ Luo’s view of the communists changed accordingly, as the CCP now looked like a nationalist party that worked for the interests of the Chinese people.

In Chongqing, the communist delegates, such as Zhou Enlai and Dong Biwu, further gained Luo’s favour. They were approachable, conscientious, erudite, and humorous in private. They were flexible in political struggles but would scarcely sacrifice their principles for short-term benefits. They stood up to Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorial policies and, together with the liberals, asked for a democratic and responsible government that included all major parties in policy-making.

In 1944, several opposition parties (including the NSPC) and associations formed the Chinese Democratic League (Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng, CDL). The CDL has since become the apostle of Chinese liberalism. It demanded a real national congress based upon universal suffrage and a formal constitution. It asked for legal protection of human rights and the releases of imprisoned dissidents. It looked forward to constructing with the GMD and CCP a coalition government (lianhe zhengfu) after the war. Luo was elected as head of the CDL Department of Propaganda (xuanchuan buzhang), responsible for drafting important documents and acting as the CDL’s spokesman. The CDL’s political demands were generally those Luo had been promoting for a number of years, and, unsurprisingly, Luo played a key role in the CDL leadership.

When Japan’s surrender became inevitable in early 1945, the CDL leaders echoed the American President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘Four Policemen’ proposal and looked forward to a close post-war co-operation between the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China.Footnote ⁴⁸ They saw this co-operative order as a favourable atmosphere for China’s post-war democracy, as Chiang Kai-shek would be forced to accommodate opposition forces and organize a coalition government, which both Roosevelt and Stalin would have liked to see.

Interestingly, Chiang was hoping for the same, though out of a different consideration. He wanted support from both Stalin and Western leaders so that the CCP, in his eyes Stalin’s agents in China, would be forced to submit to his rule. For a time, Chiang’s plan worked very well, when the Sino-Soviet treaty was signed in August 1945 and the US government promised military and financial support in the following months. The communist armies that had flooded into Manchuria were restrained by the Soviet Red Army, and the CCP had to reconfirm its allegiance to the GMD government. Upon Stalin’s request, Mao Zedong travelled to Chongqing to meet Chiang. An agreement was signed between the two parties, in which the CCP acknowledged Chiang’s leadership and agreed to join the government. A ‘Political Consultative Conference’ (Zhengzhi xieshang huiyi, PCC) was held in January 1946, bringing the GMD, CCP, CDL, and other democratic forces into negotiations. The PCC resulted in an array of agreements on constitution, government reorganization, and resettlement of the CCP’s army, though leaving several outstanding issues unresolved. A historic moment of establishing a democratic coalition government thus emerged.Footnote ⁴⁹

However, with the gathering clouds of a cold war, the new Truman administration had to rely more on Chiang’s rule to curb Soviet expansion in East Asia. George Marshall was sent to China as the president’s special envoy to mediate the intensified conflicts between the GMD and CCP, but his visit failed. The country went to civil war, and the germ of China’s democracy was nipped in the bud.

Luo Longji must have been disappointed. He was seen as a promoter of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, but now the American leaders, in his eyes, were destroying China’s unity and democratic prospects. In a press conference, he condemned the US government for backing a fascist GMD regime.Footnote ⁵⁰ In November 1946, Chiang Kai-shek’s government unilaterally convened a national congress and promulgated a constitution. The CCP denounced the new constitution as being illegitimate. The CDL sided with the CCP and was soon outlawed. Luo Longji and Zhang Lan, the chairman of the CDL, stayed in a sanatorium in Shanghai. There they were closely monitored by the secret police until May 1949, when Chiang’s army in North China was annihilated and Shanghai was within arm’s reach for the communist soldiers. One night, they were rescued by underground communists,Footnote ⁵¹ after which they took a train to Beiping (later changed into Beijing), the capital of the planned new republic, and received a warm welcome along the way.

The civil war exposed the vulnerability of Chiang’s dictatorship. His troops, though well equipped with arms delivered by the US government, were crushed. The economy was on the brink of bankruptcy. The poor were struggling with starvation. Yet the GMD officials were making huge profits through bribery, embezzlement, and blackmail. Intellectuals and journalists protested, and students took to the streets asking for peace, freedom, and democracy.

By contrast, the CCP’s local administration in the vast rural areas gained popularity for its honesty, vigour, and dedication to mass politics. The old elite groups were discredited and toppled, replaced by communist cadres. Poor peasants generally benefited from the CCP’s land reform. The united front rallied democrats, nationalists, and some patriotic capitalists around the party. Its mass campaigns mobilized millions of ordinary people to construct a new society. The vitality, youthful exuberance, and optimism among all walks of life under the CCP’s rule impressed the visitors, including even some senior GMD officials.Footnote ⁵²

Once arriving in Beiping in June 1949, Luo Longji and Zhang Lan were greeted with great enthusiasm. They attended the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a new ‘consultative conference’ that replaced the old PCC. The CPPCC invited political parties, social organizations, and representatives of ethnic minorities to join and support the CCP’s leadership. The CDL was the largest one in this democratic united front. Through this conference, the CCP wanted to show its leadership in building a new nation-state with the Chinese people.

At the conference, Luo applauded the new PRC as the product of the Chinese people’s general will. With Chiang Kai-shek, ‘the enemy of the Chinese people’, escaping to Taiwan, the people had become the true master of their nation.Footnote ⁵³ For three decades, Luo had been working for an independent and unified nation-state. Now the dream seemed to have come true.

III

However, Chiang’s defeat did not mean ‘the Chinese people’ now had no enemy. The new enemies were on the way.

Despite a cordial relationship with the communists, Luo took great care to maintain the CDL’s independence. When being confined to the Shanghai sanatorium, he wrote a secret letter to Mao Zedong, insisting that the soon-to-be-established government should be a coalition one and that the CDL retain the right to withdraw.Footnote ⁵⁴ Luo knew very well that the CCP was not a party dedicated to liberal politics. Laski’s criticism of communism deepened Luo’s suspicion.Footnote ⁵⁵ In fact, the arbitrary style of this revolutionary party, even before taking power, was not a secret within the liberal circle.Footnote ⁵⁶

The CCP leaders did not completely trust him either. In 1931, the party denounced Luo as an anti-communist arch-villain.Footnote ⁵⁷ When working with Zhou Enlai in Chongqing in the 1940s, he was seen as a leftist sympathizer rather than a true comrade.Footnote ⁵⁸ On the eve of the founding of the PRC, Luo still suggested that all the communists lurking in the CDL withdraw from the league, which annoyed Mao.Footnote ⁵⁹ The CCP’s distrust of Luo ultimately led to his downfall in the summer of 1957.

Behind the distrust was the political distance between Chinese liberals and communists. Luo turned his back on Chiang and embraced Mao because the latter could forge a strong democratic nation-state. He applauded the birth of a new China because it was a people’s sovereignty, a product of mass political participation. Yet Mao’s CCP was not a nationalist party by nature. The state meant to the communists more an instrument for class struggle and socialist revolution than a way of cultivating an inclusive political community. The CCP’s integration of the masses into everyday politics was not simply to empower them but to lead, shape, and discipline them for socialist transformation. In this sense, mass political participation and the CCP’s mass mobilization were just two sides of the same coin. It looked as if the power was being dispersed, but the communist party-state was penetrating every corner of social life.

How should the power of this gigantic people’s nation be restricted so that liberty could be guaranteed? Luo seemed to have never come up with a definite answer to this question. For years he had been struggling for both people’s sovereignty and individual rights. Yet under the CCP’s rule, the tension between the two loomed large. As one political campaign after another were launched after 1950 against old GMD forces, dissidents, capitalists, intellectuals, and even his CDL colleagues, Luo must have sensed the threat of an unrestricted revolutionary power to individual freedom.

A constitution would probably help limit state power. Luo had long held this view and spent decades fighting for a constitution of China. In September 1949, the CPPCC approved a ‘Common Programme’ (Gongtong gangling) as the provisional constitution, named by the CCP as ‘the Magna Carta’ (daxianzhang) of Chinese people. The programme, however, barely mentioned the restrictions to the ruler’s power as the English Magna Carta stipulated; instead, it was to confirm the CCP’s leadership and domination over the rest of the society. The word ‘coalition government’, which implied equality among the different parties, was not even mentioned once.

Five years later, when the first national congress was convened and a formal constitutional moment came, the position of the ruling party became more consolidated. The promulgation of the 1954 constitution did not produce a competitive political system but marked further marginalization of the democratic force. MacFarquhar notices that half of the deputy chairmen and premiers came from the democratic parties in 1949. Yet after 1954, all of them were removed from their positions.Footnote ⁶⁰

A constitution turned out to be incapable of balancing state power. This was unsurprising if we consider Carl Schmitt’s warning. Since the nineteenth century, a constitution has been expected to both express the ‘political will of the state totality’ and protect ‘the sphere of individual freedom of the citizens’, but between the two goals is the inevitable tension between the ‘political concept of law’ and ‘the Rechtsstaat concept of law’. The latter sees the constitution as a legal norm that limits the state action and safeguards individual rights, while the former regards it as a ‘concrete will and command and an act of sovereignty’.Footnote ⁶¹ For the communists, a democratic constitution had more to do with the justification of state sovereignty than with individual freedom. Mao Zedong even tried to delete the articles about the freedom of assembly, petition, and demonstration in the draft, in case it threatened national security.Footnote ⁶²

Xiao Gongquan, an authority on political pluralism who worked with Luo Longji at Nankai University, also realized this. ‘Constitutional law, as rules and principles of the distribution of the sovereign power of the state’ is not something counterbalancing state power, but has ‘always been regarded as the supreme legal authority of the state’. ‘The constitutional idea as realized in the modern democracies, therefore, is through and through a monistic idea, against which the pluralists would naturally be expected to react.’Footnote ⁶³ Even the English constitution, according to A.V. Dicey, can hardly restrict the parliamentary sovereignty.Footnote ⁶⁴

Indeed, when Luo cast aside Laski’s pluralism and espoused the concept of popular sovereignty, he was embarking on a path that would possibly lead to a destination opposite to individual freedom. The key point about Chinese liberalism is that it does not draw a line down the middle between authority and freedom as the British liberal tradition does. State power is seen not as an alien force but an intrinsic one of the people. This is closer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s approach, which sees liberty and authority coincide like ‘the reverse and obverse of the same medal’, to quote Isaiah Berlin.Footnote ⁶⁵ No freedom, according to this logic, could be maintained without state sovereignty, while no nation-state could be built without individual development. Individual freedom would not exist without the emancipation of the whole nation. Some CDL leaders later complained that they had been cheated by the CCP’s propaganda,Footnote ⁶⁶ but it was their persistent pursuit of a unified people’s state that made them fall for it.

If we follow Rousseau’s path, democracy and autocracy are simply two sides of the same coin. Léon Duguit, a French jurist who had a deep impact on Laski, noticed that ‘the idea of the State as a sovereign personality is repugnant’ to liberals.Footnote ⁶⁷ If liberalism highlights the liberty and rights of individuals, state sovereignty implies that the state has its own will inherently superior to the individual one. Rousseau believes that, in a democratic nation, the general will can be expressed through the will of the state and that popular sovereignty can thus be translated into state sovereignty. This state sovereignty, Rousseau insists, ‘does not need to give any form of guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible that the body should want to harm all its members’. If anyone who does have ‘a personal will that is contrary or dissimilar to the general will’, ‘he will be compelled to do so by the whole body’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Duguit immediately senses the despotic suggestion of these sentences.Footnote ⁶⁹ Georg Jellinek also maintains that the principles of Rousseau’s Social contract are ‘at enmity with every declaration of rights, for from these principles there ensues not the right of the individual, but the omnipotence of the common will, unrestricted by law’.Footnote ⁷⁰

It is at this point that Luo diverges from Laski, the seeds of which were sown when the former organized the Society of Great Rivers. To pluralists, to insist that there exists a supreme general will is to suppress all other wills and ‘impedes the expression of individual freedom’.Footnote ⁷¹ Indeed, to Laski, ‘we have been led astray by the facile brilliance of Rousseau’, for ‘we are simply confronted by a series of special wills none of which can claim any necessary pre-eminence’.Footnote ⁷² These special wills, Laski claims, ‘cannot, in some mystic fashion, be fused into a higher unity somehow compounded of them all’.Footnote ⁷³

Luo thought otherwise. Driven by what Gloria Davies called the ‘crisis mentality’ (youhuan yishi), Luo and his liberal colleagues were deeply concerned with China’s survival, pursuing a unified, centralized modern state to emancipate their homeland from Western domination.Footnote ⁷⁴ Understandably, in a world characterized by global wars, the Cold War, and anti-colonial movements, Chinese liberals could scarcely resist the glamour of nationalism and statism. They should not be blamed for their wholehearted embrace of nation-building and popular sovereignty, for the different historical contexts where English and Chinese liberalisms grew raised different questions for their leading thinkers. The Chinese liberals might espouse the English distrust of state power when their government was autocratic and isolated from the people. Yet they were ready to sacrifice this distrust if a modern nation-state could be built and was widely supported, be it a liberal or a communist regime. Even though some of them were reluctant to submit to a communist dictatorship, they had to admit that the communist approach reorganized the society into a vigorous, forceful community. The task of China’s nation-building was being carried out by a Marxist–Leninist party committed to class struggle and the abolition of the state. This was the paradox of China’s long twentieth-century revolution.

The paradox meant the ruling party would not be content with an inclusive national community Luo and other liberals had imagined. There were always enemies of the socialist cause and life-and-death class struggle as long as social classes existed. Within the new political community, as Schmitt indicates, the people must ‘determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy’.Footnote ⁷⁵ With the people and their general will lifted to supremacy, those identified to be the enemy of the people would be forcibly excluded from the community and disqualified for civil rights. In this way, the communists achieved a hegemony in the name of the people, which left little space for disobedience and divergent ideas. Thus came the collision between popular sovereignty and individual freedom, though the two are not necessarily incompatible with each other in the Western context.Footnote ⁷⁶ Luo’s pursuit of the Chinese people’s nation, under such circumstances, became a somewhat fatalist journey leading to his downfall.

Nevertheless, the CCP was not to massively execute these ‘enemies’ as Stalin had done, but to make them confess their ‘mistakes’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The existence of this small discredited group helped strengthen the solidarity of ‘the people’ and position the ruling party always on the side of the majority, thus consolidating the communist rule. Such was the logic of the political campaigns in 1950–5, which would continue to dominate the 1957 ‘Anti-rightist’ one.

In 1956–7, China was said to have transitioned to socialism. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, accordingly, claimed to cease massive class struggles and adjust the relationship between the CCP and other parties. Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution exposed the serious problems under the rule of communist parties in Eastern Europe. To forestall a potential rebellion in China, Mao welcomed the non-party intellectuals to help improve the CCP’s governance. This was the start of the ‘Rectification Movement’. Luo and his CDL colleagues were at first careful not to raise questions about the CCP’s domination but, as the communists kept urging them to make suggestions, their criticism became sharp.

Compared to others who demanded power-sharing, Luo’s criticism sounded quite mild. In an address in May 1957, he mentioned some unfair charges and abuses of power during the 1955 ‘Purge of Counter-revolutionaries’ (Sufan yundong). He suggested that the government organize together with the democratic parties a commission to correct these ‘deviations’ (piancha).Footnote ⁷⁸

Luo’s proposal was not presented out of the blue; he was echoing the recent CCP’s policy. In December 1955, Luo Ruiqing, minister of public security and Mao’s loyal guardian, adjusted the initial strict policy and asked his subordinates to respect the law when arresting ‘counter-revolutionaries’.Footnote ⁷⁹ A month later, he further criticized those unlawful arrests as ‘leftist deviations’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In April 1956, he demanded a comprehensive and careful review of the 1955 purge across the country.Footnote ⁸¹ A year later, just one month before Luo presented his proposal, Mao Zedong publicly welcomed the CDL and other democratic parties to have a thorough investigation of the purge.Footnote ⁸²

Luo’s fate was nevertheless sealed. A week before Luo’s speech, Mao had decided in secret to launch a counter-attack against the critics. Mao planned to encourage, entrap, and destroy them, which he later called ‘an overt plot’ (yangmou).Footnote ⁸³ The CCP’s long distrust of Luo turned into an offence, and Luo’s address was immediately seen as solid evidence of his guilt. On 10 June, Mao began to label Luo as a sinister careerist plotting for the overthrow of the communist government. On 1 July, the CCP’s official birthday, Luo and Zhang Bojun, two vice presidents of the CDL, were formally declared as counter-revolutionary leaders. This declaration turned out to be written by Mao himself.Footnote ⁸⁴

Luo suddenly became the enemy of the Chinese people he had long exalted.Footnote ⁸⁵ Facing the frame-up, he no longer fought like a warrior as he had done with Chiang Kai-shek’s suppression. He never challenged Mao’s ‘overt plot’. He reiterated once and again his loyalty to the people and the communist party. He confessed that he had not got rid of the bourgeois ideas and failed to transform his worldview to a socialist one, though he denied involvement in a subversive plot. Still, the CCP stepped up the attack on him. He was required to attend numerous ‘struggle sessions’ (pidouhui), where his lovers, friends, colleagues, and subordinates were all desperate to expose his ‘crimes’ against the people. Private conversations, personal letters, and Luo’s anti-communist writings all became evidence of his conspiracy.

The struggles against Luo and his ‘rightist’ fellows were further intensified when the National People’s Congress held its fourth plenum in the summer of 1957. Worker and peasant delegates fiercely condemned the ‘rightists’ for smearing the communist rule and destroying mass democracy. Some peasant delegates highlighted the improvement of their living standard and censured the ‘rightists’ for their criticism of the co-operative movement led by the CCP in villages.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yi Shijuan, a worker delegate, applauded the CCP’s policies for raising workers’ social status and protecting their welfare. ‘Everyone of us is clear’, this young ‘model worker’ emphasized, ‘that the working class would never have become master without the CCP’s leadership’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The delegates from Luo’s home province, Jiangxi, all demanded him to confess more details of his counter-revolutionary crimes, looking as if he had been spurned by his fellow countrymen.Footnote ⁸⁸

The people, through their delegates at the congress, came out and spoke. The struggle sessions became drama series, in which the people’s delegates were the hero and Luo the villain. For all his life, Luo had been calling for popular sovereignty, but when the people did wield their supreme power, it was to Luo’s disadvantage. The 1954 constitution, which Luo had expected to limit the CCP’s power, was exploited to defeat the ‘rightists’ as well. Some quoted the articles in the constitution that justified the domination of the working class and the socialist system in China, denouncing Luo and his ‘rightist’ fellows for their violation of the constitution.Footnote ⁸⁹

While the ‘Anti-rightist Campaign’ was often criticized by historians for its serious violation of human rights, the discourses adopted during the campaign to discredit and humiliate Luo were quite in line with the constitutional and democratic principles strongly endorsed by Luo himself. Once he was labelled an evil plotter against the existing system, he went against the constitution and the people’s will. He submitted to the people’s authority and admitted his guilt, as he had never wanted to challenge the verdict of a democratic polity. In 1960, he, publicly self-defined as ‘a man who had committed serious crimes’, was desperate to beg for the people’s forgiveness,Footnote ⁹⁰ though in private he never bought into communism.Footnote ⁹¹ The fear of being excluded from the people overwhelmed him.

Perhaps what Luo failed to understand was the essence of ‘the people’ (renmin) in Mao’s China. ‘The people’ in a political sense did not exist inherently and naturally; it was a constructed identity through constant political mobilization and participation. Even in a European parliamentary polity, as Rudolf Smend insists, ‘the people are not already politically present in themselves and are then given a special political qualification’ to participate in politics; rather, it has its existence ‘as a political people (politisches Volk)’ and ‘as a sovereign association of wills’ (souveräner Willensverband), as a result of elections, mass rallies, political debates, and voting.Footnote ⁹²

Under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule, ‘the people’, though frequently mentioned in public discourses, existed only in an ambiguous, imaginary form, for it referred roughly to those who were excluded from politics but should have been vested with the right to participate. Luo used the term in the 1930s basically in this sense.Footnote ⁹³ Although the GMD government launched a quasi-fascist campaign that attempted to mobilize the masses,Footnote ⁹⁴ the ‘politisches Volk’ was never truly constructed under Chiang. The communist party successfully integrated these disorganized masses into a new community. Accompanying this integration was the CCP’s reclassification of the society, such as ‘workers’, ‘peasants’, ‘petty-bourgeoisie’, ‘landlords’, and ‘capitalists’. ‘The people’, in this way, were largely shaped and defined by the CCP. It was thus no exaggeration to say that ‘the people’s will’ was a synonym of the CCP’s will. Luo’s quest for a democratic and constitutional nation-state ended up paving the way for the emergence of a ‘modern prince’, a revolutionary party of Jacobinism that acted in the name of collective will and, with unrestrained power, built a new form of mass politics.Footnote ⁹⁵

IV

Luo Longji’s political life shows the dilemma of a non-Western liberal. He wanted to build a political community where individuality and civil liberties were guaranteed. However, in a semi-colonial country, none of these would have been possible without a strong nation-state based upon popular sovereignty and collective will. He was convinced that nationalism was compatible with liberalism, for the power of the whole nation, to him, could be translated into the rights of each individual, and the development of individuals would in turn strengthen the national community. He, together with a group of Chinese liberals, believed that popular sovereignty and constitutionalism would lead to freedom and emancipation but paid little attention to the potential threat of a nation-state to his liberal cause. A liberator could meanwhile be an oppressor, whose unrestricted power was entailed by his national liberal project. Even a constitution made by the people was not sufficient to limit this power; on the contrary, the constitution per se could be ‘an intrusion into freedom and private property’ and could legitimize the massive violence of the government against its citizens.Footnote ⁹⁶

Luo should have been aware of this danger, as his colleague Kung-chuan Hsiao had warned in his Political pluralism in 1927. Still, he should not be blamed for disregarding Laski’s early 1920s pluralism and overlooking the risk of the majority tyranny. The lure of mixing liberalism with nationalism was just too hard to resist, especially to a liberal trying to modernize his or her home country in a hostile world, and a similar tendency can be found in the liberals of other countries like Russia.Footnote ⁹⁷ Chinese liberals saw in themselves a twofold mission: to safeguard individual freedom and to lead an independent nation-state. They wanted both but, in the end, got neither.