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

Chapter 7

Further Developments

Although beyond the scope of this enquiry, one cannot overlook the changes which took place in the more recent past, namely in Republican times when new perspectives on the individual and their relationship to society were discussed.¹ The first thing we observe is that the resort to individualism in the whole pre-Republican and Republican period (late nineteenth to early twentieth century) was rather instrumental to the formation of nationalist discourse. Still valid for this period is the caveat by Chow Tse-tsung on the ideas picked up from the West:

The trend toward the emancipation of the individual, however, did not mean the same as the exaltation of individualism as in the West, nor was liberalism promoted exactly in the Western sense. To many young Chinese reformers, emancipation of the individual was as much for the sake of saving the nation as upholding individual rights. The value of individual and independent judgement was indeed appreciated more in the May Fourth period than ever before, yet the individual’s duty to society and the nation were also emphasized.²

This judgment is persuasively confirmed by other studies. Leo Ou-fan Lee remarks on the iconoclastic stance of the May Fourth movement: