Kang Youwei (19 March 1858 – 31 March 1927) was a Chinese political thinker and reformer in the late Qing dynasty. His increasing closeness to and influence over the young Guangxu Emperor sparked conflict between the emperor and his adoptive mother, the regent Empress Dowager Cixi. His ideas were influential in the abortive Hundred Days' Reform. Following the coup by Cixi that ended the reform, Kang was forced to flee. He continued to advocate for a Chinese constitutional monarchy after the founding of the Republic of China.
Kang was born on 19 March 1858 in Su Village, Danzao Town, Nanhai County, Guangdong province (now the Nanhai District of Foshan City). His family had produced scholars for thirteen consecutive generations. His great-great-grandfather, Kang Bingtang, was recognized as a master of Neo-Confucianism in Guangdong. His grandfather, Kang Zanxiu, served as an educational official in Lianzhou, and his father, Kang Dachu, was an acting magistrate in Jiangxi. Furthermore, his grand-uncle, Kang Guoqi, held the high-ranking position of acting governor of Guangxi. Kang was raised in an environment saturated with Confucian values and literary appreciation. His family home, "Yan Xiang Lao Wu," was built by his great-grandfather and filled with books and historical records. Kang took great pride in this heritage, later writing poems to commemorate his family's long history of scholarship.
According to his autobiography, his intellectual gifts were recognized in his childhood by his uncle. By the age of five, he was already able to recite hundreds of Tang Dynasty poems. At age six, he began formal study of the core Confucian classics. After his father passed away when Kang was eleven, his grandfather, Kang Zanxiu, took charge of his upbringing. He subjected Kang to a rigorous and traditional education. Under this guidance, Kang expanded his studies beyond the classics to include history and administrative records. The suppression of the Taiping Rebellion and the careers of prominent statesmen like Zeng Guofan, Luo Bingzhang, and Zuo Zongtang deeply inspired him. However, as a teenager, he was dissatisfied with the scholastic system of his time, especially its emphasis on preparing for the eight-legged essays, which were artificial literary exercises required as part of the examinations.
Studying for exams was an extraordinarily rigorous activity, so he engaged in Buddhist meditation as a form of relaxation, an unusual leisure activity for a Chinese scholar of his time. It was during one of these meditations that he had a mystical vision that became the theme for his intellectual pursuits throughout his life. Believing that it was possible to read every book and "become a sage", he embarked on a quasi-messianic pursuit to save humanity.
Kang called for an end to property and the family in the interest of an idealized future cosmopolitan utopia and cited Confucius as an example of a reformer and not as a reactionary, as many of his contemporaries did. In his work A Study of Confucius as a Reformer of Institutions, he discussed the latter point in great detail. He argued, to bolster his claims, that the rediscovered versions of the Confucian classics were forged; he expounded this idea in detail in A Study of the Forged Classics of the Xin Period.
In 1879, he met Zhang Dinghua, a scholar-official from Beijing whose deep knowledge of contemporary affairs and "new books" exposed Kang to early reformist trends. In the same year, Kang traveled to Hong Kong and was shocked by the prosperity there, which started his interest in Western culture and thoughts. These observations also shattered his traditional view of Westerners as "barbarians," convincing him that Western nations possessed systematic methods of governance that were superior to the stagnant practices of the Qing dynasty. In 1882, Kang went to Beijing to take the imperial examination. While returning home, he stopped over in Shanghai and bought many Western books there, and started developing his ideology based on these writings. He was influenced by Protestant Christianity in his quest for reform.
In 1883, Kang founded the Anti-Footbinding Society near Canton. Following the outbreak of the Sino-French War in 1884, Kang returned to his hometown in Su Village to escape the unrest. Influenced by the national crisis and his burgeoning interest in Western natural sciences, he began drafting his earliest philosophical treatises. In 1885, he started writing Renlei Gongli, a work that utilized geometric methods to argue for universal human equality. By 1887, he had expanded these ideas into the Neiwai Pian (Inner and Outer Chapters), which envisioned an egalitarian society free from the constraints of absolute monarchy and gender inequality. He also authored Jiaoxue Tongyi in 1886, which advocated for a practical educational system designed to serve statecraft rather than abstract academic debates.
In 1888, alarmed by the foreign encroachment on China's southwestern frontier that followed the Sino-French War, Kang used a trip to the capital for the Shuntian provincial examination to submit his First Memorial to Emperor Guangxu. In this document, Kang proposed three major reforms: "Changing Ancestral Laws" to modernize the state, "Communicating the People's Feelings" to bridge the gap between the ruler and the ruled, and "Prudence in Choosing Advisors". However, the memorial was blocked by conservative officials, such as Xu Tong, and never reached the Emperor’s hands.
Kang realized that to convince the scholar-official class of the need for reform, he required a more powerful theoretical framework based on the Confucian classics themselves. He subsequently abandoned his lifelong devotion to the "Old Text" scholarship, such as the Zhou Li, which he began to view as stagnant and irrelevant to the national crisis. He turned instead to the New Text (Jinwen) school, specifically the Gongyang commentary. To vent his political frustrations during this time, he also authored Guang Yizhou Shuangji (廣藝舟雙楫, a highly influential work on calligraphy and stele inscriptions.
In the spring of 1890, Kang moved to Guangzhou. His growing reputation for innovative scholarship attracted Chen Qianqiu (also known as Chen Tongfu), a student from the Xuehai Academy, who visited Kang and was immediately won over by his ideas. In the autumn of that year, Chen introduced his friend Liang Qichao to Kang. Liang, who had achieved the juren degree at a young age, arrived with a "sense of pride" in his mastery of traditional philology and literature. However, during the encounter, Kang systematically dismantled and criticized the traditional academic styles that Liang had been pursuing. Liang Qichao later described the experience as feeling like "cold water being poured down his back". The very next day, Liang formally requested to become Kang’s student and was accepted.
At the request of his students, Kang opened the Wanmu Caotang academy, which served as a training ground for the "backbone" of the future reform movement. To provide a theoretical justification for radical change, Kang published Xinxue Weijing Kao (Study of the Forged Classics of the Xin Period) in 1891 and began drafting Kongzi Gaizhi Kao (Study of Confucius as a Reformer). These works argued that the conservative "Old Text" classics were forgeries and that Confucius himself was a reformer who mended ancient traditions to improve the present.
Kang Youwei launched the Qiangxue hui ("Society for the Study of National Strengthening") in Beijing. It was the first political group established by reformists in China. Through it, Kang became acquainted with Governor-General Zhang Zhidong and received his financial support to inaugurate the Qiangxue bao ("Journal of the Society for the Study of the National Strengthening") in January 1896. In the same month, the society was dissolved and the journal had to cease publication.
Kang was a strong believer in constitutional monarchy and wanted to remodel the country after Meiji Japan. These ideas angered his colleagues in the scholarly class who regarded him as a heretic.