Kang Youwei

Kang Youwei (1858 to 1927) was a Chinese political thinker and reformer of the late Qing dynasty, born into a Cantonese family of scholars and trained in the Confucian classics. After reading Western books and visiting Hong Kong he argued that Confucius had been a reformer of institutions rather than a defender of the past, and he used the New Text tradition to give reform a classical justification. His utopian Datong Shu looked toward an end to private property and the family and toward a single cosmopolitan society. Through his student Liang Qichao and his influence on the young Guangxu Emperor he shaped the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, and after Empress Dowager Cixi ended it he lived in exile and promoted a constitutional monarchy among overseas Chinese. The atlas treats him as a social and political theorist of modernising China whose reading of Confucianism remains debated.