An Onto-Hermeneutic Turn in China's Political Modernization: The Revival and Reconfiguration of Confucianism During the Late Qing Reform

After the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, China's leading political reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) presented modern political concepts in musical, visual, and fictional terms. Instead of general political propaganda tools, his affective presentations were informed by a series of repressed academic practices, marginalized philosophical positions, and underrepresented moral traditions that he sought to restore, enlist, and incorporate in China's incipient democratic movement. By initialing an affective turn as such, Liang was to expand China's modern political reform into an all-inclusive internal moral-intellectual transition.