TY - JOUR
T1 - Conceiving an Alternative
T2 - The Ideological Underpinnings and Political Blueprints of Chinese Federalism
AU - Guo, Vivienne Xiangwei
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
PY - 2024/3/7
Y1 - 2024/3/7
N2 - This article contributes to the hitherto limited scholarship on the Chinese federalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s by conducting a thorough investigation of its ideological underpinnings and political blueprints. It compares the federalist ideas, plans, and activism of three thinkers-Zhang Taiyan, Zhang Shizhao, and Chen Jiongming-who stood firmly against the centralist trajectory of state-building in China after 1911 and advocated the formation of a Chinese federation. It argues that Chinese federalists, instead of emulating Western models, critically engaged with a broad spectrum of ideologies-Daoism, Buddhism, social Darwinism, parliamentarianism, guild socialism, anarchism etc.-when formulating their federalist agendas. Emphasizing the Chinese tradition of self-government, which underwent reinterpretations during the late Qing and early Republican periods, this article examines the extent to which Chinese federalism presented an alternative to Western political modernity.
AB - This article contributes to the hitherto limited scholarship on the Chinese federalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s by conducting a thorough investigation of its ideological underpinnings and political blueprints. It compares the federalist ideas, plans, and activism of three thinkers-Zhang Taiyan, Zhang Shizhao, and Chen Jiongming-who stood firmly against the centralist trajectory of state-building in China after 1911 and advocated the formation of a Chinese federation. It argues that Chinese federalists, instead of emulating Western models, critically engaged with a broad spectrum of ideologies-Daoism, Buddhism, social Darwinism, parliamentarianism, guild socialism, anarchism etc.-when formulating their federalist agendas. Emphasizing the Chinese tradition of self-government, which underwent reinterpretations during the late Qing and early Republican periods, this article examines the extent to which Chinese federalism presented an alternative to Western political modernity.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85187358991&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/jch.2023.37
DO - 10.1017/jch.2023.37
M3 - Article
SN - 2059-1632
JO - Journal of Chinese History
JF - Journal of Chinese History
ER -