Kang Youwei - A Life of Determination

Author: Guo Haijun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-10-01
Features: Kang Youwei, also known as Zu Yi, styled Guangsha, and styled Changsu (1858319－1927331), was a Chinese politician, thinker, and educator from Danzao Su Village, Nanhai County, Guangdong. He was known as Kang Nanhai. He believed in Confucianism and dedicated himself to reforming it into a national religion that could adapt to modern society, serving as the president of the Confucian Association. Kang Youwei was born into a feudal official family. His grandfather, Kang Zanxiu, was a scholar in the Daoguang era, and his father, Kang Dachen, served as an acting magistrate in Jiangxi. Kang Youwei studied Confucianism from a young age and began to be exposed to Western bourgeois culture in 1879. In 1882, Kang Youwei went to Beijing to take the Shuntian provincial examination but failed. On his way back south, he passed through Shanghai and purchased a large number of Western books, absorbing the evolution theory and bourgeois political views brought from the West, which initially formed his ideological system for the reform and innovation movement.