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

Controversial, too, is the great historian and thinker Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929), who offers a new contribution to a modern individualization. In his effort to syncretise Western Utilitarianism—significantly, he translates leli zhuyi 樂利主義—with traditional Chinese moral thought, he suggested that real joy (真樂) and real profit (真利) constitute “the greatest happiness (xingfu 幸福). In this way, Liang tried to reconcile the traditional contrasting concepts of fu and le by amalgamating them and justified the new ideas of progress and nationalism by the universalization of material prosperity for people: the people should strive for their own xingfu, in place of the illusion that the Qing government would enact reforms to promote human rights. He later modified this position by introducing the term “virtue,” de 德, and coined the neologism “unificationism of fu and de” (fude heyi zhuyi 福德合一主義). Thus, happiness (xingfu) is achieved when innate nature is reached, that is, when one’s internal, rational nature becomes consistent with the external world.⁶ In 1890, in the context of the worsening Chinese national crisis, Liang Qichao contrasted the mortality of the small self with the immortality of the big self and wrote:

There is a difference between the small self and the big self. The so-called “big self” is the self in groups; the so-called “small self” is the self in the individual body.⁷

In “Individual Self-Discipline and Collective Freedom,” Rune Svarverud examines the evolution of Liang Qichao’s thought and his distinctive concern for individual-collective relations, as expounded in his program for “renewal of the role of the citizen” (xinmin 新民). Svarverud explains how this concept has contributed to the development of liberal ideas: “when the individual is not independent, but merely acts as a member of a group, and only establishes his basis for morally good deeds in the image of the other, then he will always be dependent on others.”⁸ And yet, as noticed by Jerome Ch’en, Liang aimed to increase the power and wealth of the Chinese nation rather than the freedom and fulfilment of