Elizabeth Dale, University of Florida Dept of History- "Putting “Liberty” in its Place: Zi You, Slavery and Notions of Sovereignty in Turn-of-the-Century China"
Elizabeth Dale
University of Florida, Department of History and Levin College of Law
Putting “Liberty” in its Place: Zi You, Slavery and Notions of Sovereignty in Turn-of-the-Century China
Abstract
This paper is part of a bigger project that will look at constitution-making efforts in China between 1894, when Sun Yat Sen created the Xing Zhong Hui (Revive China Society), a social movement that pushed for constitutional reform, and 1928, when the Guomin Dang that Sun founded took control of China and implemented a constitution based on Sun’s theories. While the dates of the project as a whole are defined by Sun’s constitution-making efforts, the larger project is not just a study of Sun. Rather, its focus is on the several social movements that dominated Chinese constitution-making in that era, and its aim is exploring how their interaction and competition influenced China’s constitutional debates. As that suggests, the larger project, like my earlier work in American history, Debating—and Creating—Authority (2001), is an effort to unpack the ways in which social forces help shape the way constitutional orders are made. But this study moves beyond the very local approach that marked my earlier study by situating the constitutional project in China in a broad field. It is my contention that constitution-making in China was both transnational and global: Transnational because China’s extensive diaspora played a major role in the social movements that were so central to China’s constitution-making efforts. Global because many of China’s constitutional activists saw themselves trying to create a constitutional order that would solve China’s problems and would serve as a model for other constitutional orders around the world. I plan to explore all those layers, from the local to the global, in the larger study.
While the project as a whole attempts to combine social and intellectual history by mapping the way social forces structured constitutional discourse, this paper is a very narrow slice of that larger study and is far more of an intellectual history than the project as a whole will be. The paper engages a basic historical premise: Sun Yat Sen was a better activist than he was a theorist, with the result his constitutional ideas were at best unformed and at worst inconsistent. The paper starts with an example that seems to prove the point—Sun’s discussion of the role of liberty (zi you) on two separate occasions, one early in his career and one at its very end. Having used those apparently inconsistent descriptions to set the conflict, my paper re-examines Sun’s idea of liberty by considering them in light of recent scholarship on the discourse of slavery and citizenship in turn-of-the-century China. I show that when viewed from that perspective, Sun’s comments about liberty appear more consistent and coherent. And, more important, that reconsideration of his arguments about liberty reveals an unexplored aspect of the debate over sovereignty in turn-of-the-century China, a debate that has implications for our understanding of the Chinese theories of citizenship and constitutional order in that period.
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