Leigh Jenco’s chapter revisits the radical possibility, advanced in earlier work, that transcultural political thought can go beyond dialogue, enabling us to engage as full participants in forms of thought developed by political agents in contexts thoroughly different from our own. Others’ modes of knowledge and knowledge-seeking can become the platforms from which we innovate our own political thought and practice. In this chapter, Jenco argues that the most ambitious way of understanding the project of “deparochializing political theory” goes beyond “decentering” European thought traditions in the way we understand politics, thus making space for non-Western thought as constituent elements in this discipline we call political theory. A more thoroughgoing deparochialization of our discipline would recenter historically marginalized thought traditions as the starting point for critical inquiry and theoretical innovation, eventually yielding new theories that count as knowledge that is relevant to our own sense-making in the world, knowledge for us and not merely about them. Jenco elaborates this Gestalt-shifting approach to cross-cultural theorizing through a discussion of some of its best exemplars, including Stephen Angle’s work on sagehood and Ingrid Jordt’s work on Theravada Buddhism.

When Zhang Shizhao returned to China from Great Britain in 1912, he found himself in a very different place from the one he had left four years ago. In 1908, China was still governed by the Qing, though its elites were struggling to square new “Western” ways of governing with deeply entrenched habits and institutions that had survived nearly two thousand years of continuous imperial rule. In 1911, China became, in name at least, a republic, committed to the principles of self-rule embodied in Western theories of democracy, liberalism, and constitutionalism. Zhang should have been happy; this is what he had been advocating all along. In fact, Zhang knew more about the theoretical foundations of these Western institutions than perhaps anyone writing in Chinese at the time. Apparently, however, he did not know enough – not enough to explain why, after the provisional constitution was ratified in 1913, no one took it seriously; why, once human rights were recognized as keys to Chinese political regeneration by most elites, the government did not seem to be respecting them; why, once self-rule was declared after a short but violent revolution, no one seemed willing to stay in China and build parliaments, assemblies, and courts to replace the imperial bureaucracy that no longer existed.

Zhang quickly realized that there were deeper, more general questions at stake than simply what kind of regime to build. Confronting nearly total political collapse, Zhang mined both novel Western theories and long-standing Chinese debates to develop a rich theoretical vocabulary for exploring the sources of effective transformation, and establishment, of a political community.

In previous chapters, we saw how Zhang Shizhao uses the participatory promise of democracy to challenge China's traditional elitism and bureaucracy. He insists, against Huang Yuanyong and Liang Qichao, that there exist legitimate arenas for meaningful participation outside the traditional ones of culture and literature. Yet the mechanism through which his challenge takes shape is not purely institutional, as a rule-by-law position might demand. Instead he offers a more complex argument in which the personal orientations of citizens are the decisive components of an emergent political community. Arguing that Zhang's ascription of political efficacy to individual acts breaks down the public/private divide, I offered a new way of thinking about the political, divorced from the prescriptions of collective action taken in public spaces with others.

In this chapter I begin to fill out the specific political acts Zhang believed would culminate in a transformation of China's political space, defending and modifying them to stand against critiques of their infeasibility or illegitimacy. I begin with what for Zhang explicitly links personal orientations to the possibilities of self-rule: self-awareness (zijue). In an eponymous essay, as well as in another that also appeared in the first volume of The Tiger, “The State and the Self” (Guojia yu wo), Zhang ties self-awareness to the ability of individuals to see their political and social selves critically and imaginatively, in the context of China's immanent postrevolutionary political demise.

Zhang's interventions in the rule-by-man and rule-by-law debate expose the claims of his interlocutors based on these models as dangerously autocratic, yet his interventions do not fully set out the scope or nature of the kind of politics Zhang envisioned. “Self-awareness” models the structure into which individuals can be said to make meaningful, effective interventions in politics, but the concrete manifestations of self-awareness – why and how its cultivation may impact the shared environment – remain unspecified. This chapter begins to address these gaps by looking at what Zhang identifies as another of “the foundations of government” – namely the “self-use of talent” (ziyong cai). Zhang's invocation of talent as a political remedy is unusual for a democratic theory whose emphasis on equality tends to ignore or vilify the benefits accruing to expertise and natural ability. Talent is a concept invoked more commonly by late imperial Chinese officials, whose responses to political crisis often turned on the need for superiors to “find the [right] person” (de qi ren) with the necessary talents to execute particular tasks. Even in Chinese politics, how ever, talent is an ambiguous value. Sometimes associated with knowledge (zhi) but identified with activities as diverse as military strategy, literary composition, entrepreneurial ability, and mechanical craftsmanship, it tended to be seen either as unpredictable and potentially subversive, or as profoundly inefficacious, without proper regulation by virtue (de).

In this book I examine the work of Zhang Shizhao (1881–1973), one of the most intellectually substantive Chinese thinkers of the early twentieth century. I do so to raise a series of questions about political action, targeting in particular the equation of collective action with political action prevalent in much contemporary democratic political theory. This book is thus not an intellectual biography, but an attempt to treat Zhang seriously as the theorist of politics that he – and many of his contemporaries – claimed he was. Readers who are not interested in or familiar with Chinese thought should nevertheless find the analysis significant, because it treats of an important problem rarely considered in contemporary Euro-American political theory: how can we as individuals take effective action to change social and political environments, when no self-consciously political community exists to legitimate or execute such action? Those who are interested in Chinese political thought will also hopefully find something of value in this book. The present study is the only extended examination of this influential political thinker in any Western language; it is also the first book-length attempt by a political theorist to critically engage any member of Zhang's transitional generation, whose work set the stage for Chinese political thinking in the twentieth century. By showcasing the often overlooked clarity and persuasive force of the arguments advanced in this era, I hope to offer a new perspective on modern Chinese intellectual developments even as I defend a compelling political theory.

Zhang Shizhao's ability to advance dispassionate and logical argument in the pages of The Tiger belies the personal and political crises that motivated the journal's establishment. In the aftermath of the “Second Revolution” – a failed attempt by Zhang and some of his colleagues, including Sun Yat-sen, to oust Yuan Shikai from power – Zhang and his family fled to Tokyo in 1914 to begin a self-imposed exile. This political failure was only the latest faced by Zhang and those of his contemporaries sympathetic to republican and democratic government. The theoretical explorations that I examine in this book are Zhang's responses to these failures, even if they incorporate reflection on far more than the immediate political events of Zhang's time. In order to give some sense of the wider dilemmas Zhang confronted in this era of unprecedented upheaval in China, this chapter briefly surveys the major historical and intellectual developments that preceded and followed Zhang's work on The Tiger. Situating Zhang in his historical context underscores his own contribution to twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, and gives a sharper sense of the urgency with which his thoughts on founding were formulated.

China at the turn of the twentieth century

The revolution of 1911 that ended China's dynastic system was only one event in a transitional period that, as is true with many historical stages, has no clear starting point.

If modern Chinese thought is to become accessible to a global audience of conventional political theorists and philosophers, and recognized more widely as a rich, nuanced, and diverse repository of compelling theoretical resources, scholars must recognize its terms as suitable for extended theoretical as much as historical analysis. In this vein, I offer below some explanations for my own translations of key terms in Zhang's work, hoping that these explanations can serve as glosses for an emerging cross-traditions vocabulary – which, in the Chinese/Euro-American case, Zhang himself helped to develop. Some of the translations have general application to all instances where the original Chinese term appears; others are keyed to Zhang's specific arguments, in which he invented or sought to influence the deployment of specific terms in early Republican political discourse. I have tried to indicate as accurately as possible the meaning of these terms, without narrowing their scope so radically that their more general theoretical applications are obscured. Indeed, the very theoretical ambition of Zhang's work requires that even those words with uncontroversial meanings in everyday talk, such as ren or tiaohe, be given special treatment as terms of art.

The reader should also keep in mind that Chinese has no plural constructions or verb conjugations, and that many Chinese words can function as different parts of speech (e.g. verb, noun, and adjective) depending on their placement within a sentence.

The issue of difference has not yet been explicitly theorized here, but both Zhang's problems and his solutions seem to center on it. Zhang initially responds to the problem of irreducible plurality and political breakdown, yet it is precisely because self-awareness and the self-use of talent turn on individual distinction rather than on community coherence that Zhang could pose them as solutions to the lack of a shared basis for political action. In the first case, difference is presented as a kind of aloofness from a dispiriting political situation to which others were succumbing, and in the second case as the free play of diverse and traditionally unsanctioned forms of expertise and experience. Zhang's notion of “accommodation,” or tiaohe, the subject of this chapter and increasingly a focus of Zhang scholarship among Chinese commentators, works from these implied celebrations of difference to theorize the constructive potential of difference more directly. In the process, Zhang also broaches possible meanings for politically relevant “difference” (yi) that range from individual idiosyncrasy to political dissent to the deployment in politics of nontraditional knowledge. His conceptualization thus shares instructive similarities with liberal toleration, as well as difference politics formulated by democratic theorists such as Iris Young, but also offers some important contrasts. Most significantly, consonant with his view of sagely founding under conditions of fragmentation, accommodation offers a means by which differences can be constructively bridged not within already-existing public spaces but first within and between persons.

How can our shared, humanly created environment be effectively transformed – to make it better, less confining, more tractable to our control? Is it even possible to change, in a spontaneous and noncoerced way, the social and political world we inhabit? If we are unwilling to accept coercive impositions by the state or the powers that be, it seems that only public or collective action has such a capacity. After all, when we as individuals act for social change, we usually do so within the parameters of an already existing set of institutional arrangements, histories, and social understandings, created and animated largely through the work of others. Innovation is an extension of these socially constituted practices, whose contradictions, gaps, or inadequacies engender change yet persist in constraining it. Hanna Pitkin echoes the beliefs of many when she notes that “for most of us … private, isolated acts will make little difference” for public life unless taken in concert with others. Such intuitions find their most prominent institutionalization in democratic regimes, which for both normative and practical reasons facilitate collective as opposed to bureaucratic, dictatorial, or unilateral action. Participatory acts in public arenas – such as voting, collective protest, the exercise of and respect for free expression – coordinate a plurality of individual actions and authorize collective interventions in shared space.

Zhang's elevation of individual persons to act as sagely founders resolves only part of founding's paradoxes. What of the role played by external rather than internal forces, such as political structures, in shaping the actions of citizens? Could republican governance be successfully executed by installing the correct institutions, without recourse to motivated personal efforts at founding and regime-building? Many of Zhang's contemporaries insisted that these feats were both theoretically unnecessary and practically impossible. Many of them, including such influential writers as Liang Qichao, Du Yaquan (1873–1933), and Gao Yihan (1885–1968), began urging the development of personal virtue rather than political involvement or institution-building – a so-called renzhi (rule by man) position – to bring about social stability and renewal.

This focus on the quality of leaders, rather than on any particular political institution or form of involvement, soon became a mainstream rallying cry for dispirited elites frustrated by China's obvious failure in establishing republican government. Not long after the founding of the first Chinese republic, Sun Yat-sen stepped down as provisional president. The newly elected president of the Republic, Yuan Shikai, soon began maneuvering for greater power. He dissolved the national assembly and, many believed, assassinated opposition leader Song Jiaoren, whose views on constitutional government were inspired directly by Zhang Shizhao's work in such publications as the Minli bao. In this period of pessimism and crisis, many intellectuals began to doubt the efficacy of Western-style institutions – such as the assembly or the presidency – for assuring China's prosperity and national strength.