Liang Qichao (1873–1929) was a leading political thinker and publicist. His manifesto, On the New People, was published serially in Japan, where Liang—like many other progressive intellectuals in the late Qing—lived and worked for a decade in order to avoid governmental suppression. The present essay was published in 1902 as part of On the New People. Liang began writing about rights as early as 1896; they came to occupy a prominent place in his theorizing after he arrived in Japan in 1898. He was influenced by the Social Darwinist ideas of Kato Hiroyuki, which can be seen most clearly in Liang’s 1899 essay “The Right of the Strongest.” Although some of these ideas are still present in the current essay, Liang had by this time developed a more complex position, partly through reading and interpreting the ideas of Rudolph von Jhering (1818–1892), a pioneering German legal theorist whose influence on Liang was significant, as Liang himself declares early in this essay.
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