In 1920 a group of Chinese citizens deeply distressed at the oppressive policies of the warlords running Beijing issued the following “Manifesto.” Hu, Li, and Gao all have articles elsewhere in this volume; see those entries for their biographical details. Jiang Menglin (1886–1964) completed a Ph.D. thesis on Chinese education under John Dewey at Columbia, wherein he advocated combining the best elements of Chinese culture with certain Western ideals, among which he included the safeguarding of individual rights. Jiang served several stints as chancellor of Beijing University, the first in 1919, and spent the rest of his career in educational administration, including serving as minister of education in 1928. Tao Menghe (1887–1960) was a British-trained sociologist who taught at Beijing University and subsequently became the director of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Wang Zheng was secretary of the New American Consortium, and Zhang Weici was a professor of political science at Beijing University. Two years later, a similar group tried again, signing onto “Our Political Proposals,” a document written by Hu Shi and published in the periodical The Endeavor. “Our Political Proposals” is less concrete than the “Manifesto”; rather than calling for specific regulations to be rescinded because they violate people’s freedom, it calls in general for the protection of the freedom of the individual and suggests a framework within which a “good government,” which would have the interests of the citizens in mind, could be implemented. Neither the “Manifesto” nor the “Proposals” were backed by political action or significant political power, and in the end neither had any appreciable result.
Last updated:
This page copyright © 2001 by Stephen C. Angle and Marina Svensson, and M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Permission is hereby granted for all non-commercial uses of these materials.