The 1898 Reforms Revisited: A Review of Luke S. K. Kwong's A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898

Vol. 8, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1987 THE 1898 REFORMS REVISITED A Review ofLuke S. K. Kwong's A Mosaic ofthe Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of1898* Tang Zhijun and Benjamin Elman The 1898 Reform Movement has long been accepted as a fairly wellresearched event in late imperial Chinese history. Historians initially explored the writings of many of the participants in the "hundred days of reform" and frequently came to the conclusion that the defeat of the reformers led by Kang Youwei (1858-1927) spelled the end of any chance that the Qing dynasty had to cope with the twin challenges of internal dislocation and external aggression. The writings of Kang and his followers , distributed while in exile in Japan, were the major sources that supported the view that Kang had orchestrated a powerful push for reform only to be thwarted by reactionary forces at court. Later research established that such a view was overly simplistic because it overlooked the continuity of reform before and after the 1898 reforms. Mary Wright and Ernest Young were able to dispel the image that leaders at the head of the Qing government from 1900 until 1911 were "total reactionaries ." Wright and Young pointed to the concrete efforts at reform that continued during the first decade of the twentieth century, despite the failure of the 1898 Reform Movement. The historiography of the 1898 Reform Movement continued to emphasize, however, the centrality of Kang Youwei and his followers and Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1984. This review is based on notes prepared in Chinese by Professor Tang Zhijun, Vice-Director, Institute of History, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, during his visit to the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, March 8-15, 1985, under the auspices of the Distinguished Scholar Exchange Program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China. Benjamin Elman (University of California at Los Angeles), a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies during the 1984-85 academic year, prepared the present English version, based on Professor Tang's original notes, and also added some relevant material to the review. Thanks are due Noriko Kamachi and Richard Smith for their comments on an earlier draft. 205 206Tang Zhijun and Benjamin Elman the secondary role of the emperor in trying to help the reeling dynasty cope with the challenges of modernity. The empress dowager remained the arch-villainess in a melodrama that saw the forces of reaction triumph over the forces for progress. It was long thought that archival materials in the Palace Museum in Taibei and the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing would, when opened to researchers, provide new information concerning the 1898 Reform Movement. Using the Taibei Palace Museum archives, Huang Zhangjian (Chang-chien)1 of the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica in Taiwan demonstrated that the memorials that Kang Youwei had made public after fleeing to Japan differed from the memorials that had actually been sent to the emperor. The discrepancies suggested that Kang had willfully made changes after the fact to heighten his own importance in the events of 1898. Huang's discoveries indicated that Qing archival materials in Taiwan and Peking might contain other startling revelations. In his recent portrayal of the events leading up to the 1898 Reform Movement, Luke S. K. Kwong, primarily using Qing archival sources in Taiwan, has prepared a startlingly revisionist account of the daily political decisions made by the principal actors in the factional battles within the imperial court that led to the ultimate collapse of the Guangxu (Kuanghsu ) emperor's (r. 1875-1908) reform efforts. Although our review will be largely critical of Kwong's analysis, we should at the outset strongly emphasize that there is much that is useful in Kwong's reconsideration of earlier accounts of the political battles between the supporters of the empress dowager Cixi (Tz'u-hsi, 1835-1908) and those of the Guangxu emperor. Certainly Kwong's use of archival sources to reassess completely the accrued wisdom concerning the 1898 reforms must be taken seriously. Kwong's account, which draws on...