K’ang Yu-wei, the great Chinese reformer and political philosopher of
the turn of the century, has been famous as the one great figure of
imperial China who made the attempt to transform China within the
framework of the Confucian tradition into a society capable of living in
the modem world. K’ang Yu-wei saw the Chinese transformation as
but a part of that general development of all societies and states toward
a great unity, which in his view would eventually come to pass. What
singles him out among all the Chinese political and intellectual leaders of
his time is not only that he stood for reform and transformation, and
opposed revolution, believing that a break with the past would be
disastrous, but also that with this transformation he wanted to give the
people of China their full role in working out their political fate.
Contradictory in his statements though he may have been occasionally,
sometimes uninformed of the state of knowledge in other civilizations of
his time, and at times perhaps naïve in his views, K’ang appears to us
today in retrospect as one of the great men of traditional China—
perhaps the last of them— and his full importance has yet to be
uncovered from the hostile record built around him by the impatience of
the young generation and later by the dogmatism of the MarxistLeninists.
The year 1958 was the anniversary of K’ang Yu-wei’s hundredth
birthday and the sixtieth anniversary of his short role of political
leadership in the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898. This was the
occasion for his grandson, Dr. Lo Jung-pang, then research assistant
professor at the University of Washington, to undertake the compilation
of a symposium on K’ang Yu-wei and thus help to bring out the record
of his eminent grandfather.