Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

of nationalist and statist ideas, and this was probably due to historical circumstances (foreign powers, political crisis). But since the late twentieth century, society and mindsets have changed deeply, and the individualization process is uncontroversial. What the authorities have been attempting to do is to maximize the benefits of a market economy without endorsing political liberalism—an exercise of social engineering that can be roughly defined as “authoritarian individualization.”³⁰ So far such process of individualization has followed the Legalist formula of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers and revolutionaries, who had originally employed it for the sake of achieving national wealth and power. The meeting of the Legalist tradition with nationalism reintroduced the importance of the public-general (wei gong 為公), with authoritarian consequences in political and social spheres.³¹ This move suggests the existence of a larger political framework that has apparently remained strongly “collectivistic” not only in ideological terms but also with regard to many social practices and institutions, primarily the systems of education and information.³²

While stimulating work incentives and competitiveness, market-oriented reforms seem to have also brought a certain awareness of individual rights and, consequently, various forms of rights assertion and behaviors have emerged. Nobody can ignore the different lifestyles within the modern population—there are Buddhists, Confucians, Christians, Muslims, Maoists, Party members, environmentalists, liberals, patriots, and skeptics—and Chinese society is increasingly becoming a widely diversified and heterogeneous community. With the modernization process of the last three decades, a large portion of the population has been “disembedded” from the traditional organic communities and “re-embedded” in a modern, open, institutionalized structure. These tremendous changes in social structure was inevitably accompanied by a transformation of self-understanding and identity. Alongside these developments, the Chinese individual has begun to think of the self as a set of rights or entitlements that contribute to considerably expanding