Zheng Guanying, Merchant Reformer of Late Qing China and his Infl ...

Chapter four is devoted to the reading and interpretation of Zheng Guanying's nationalistic ideas as manifested in his works and private letters, in order to demonstrate how the simultaneous strengthening of the state's capacity and people's power were two pillars in Zheng's thinking. By tracing the formation of Zheng Guanying's worldview and ideas about China's global position, I explicate the nature and multiple implications of incipient Chinese nationalism in the late Qing. I argue that Zheng Guanying's thought was an important contribution to the formation of a Chinese conception of a democracy-based nationalism. While he advocated the strengthening of the state's capacity to manage social affairs, he was not a supporter of authoritarian centralization. On the contrary, Zheng's nationalism showed traits of liberalism and populism. I also point out that the earliest territorial imagination and reconceptualization of China as a finite nation-state appeared in Zheng Guanying and his generation, though Liang Qichao, thirty-one years younger than Zheng, developed a more thorough narrative on this issue.²² In addition, Zheng can be seen as a transitional figure between “culturalism” and “nationalism” as defined by Joseph Levenson.²³ To retain his cultural identity, Zheng showed a strong commitment to Confucianism and an anti-Christian bent.

In chapter five, I turn to the concrete reform plans of Zheng Guanying and focus on his ideal of building a more active and engaging state and promoting the organic connection between the state and society and between different regions of China through education, media, and modern communications. Because Zheng never set foot in Europe or America, his descriptions of the “West” were largely a result of cultural imagination, in which he idealized Western superiority in social management and politics. However, this imagination reflected Zheng's desire to search, wittingly or unwittingly, for a liberating force that could prompt theChinese to reform and improve their country to attain a higher standard of world civilization. At the same time, to make his ideas more acceptable to the ruling elite, Zheng drew on the “historical” experiences of China's Golden Age of the Three Dynasties and actually romanticized the ancient times in order to legitimize reform within the framework of Chinese tradition.