Zhang Junmai : the political and cultural thought of a new Confucian

The New Confucian, Zhang Junmai 張君勱 (1887–1969), was a cultural nationalist, democratic socialist, constitutionalist, public moralist, and leader of a minor political party who had devoted the best part of his life to China’s modern transformation. Seeking “national salvation (jiuguo 救國)” through political reform, cultural change, moral rejuvenation, public education, and love of the nation, Zhang exemplified modern China’s cultural and political reformers whose outlook was modern yet traditional, Westernized yet Chinese, liberal yet conservative, and socialist yet non-Communist. They constituted the middle-of-the-road elements searching for a third way between East and West, between democracy and autocracy, between capitalism and communism, and between the Nationalists and Communists. Seeking practical solutions to the real problems facing post-imperial China, the likes of Zhang found them in constitutional democracy, democratic socialism, rule of law, public morality, and social justice. Zhang championed individual freedoms and civil liberties without ignoring larger community interests and the national good, while confident that Confucianism could be rejuvenated and transformed creatively to serve the purposes of China’s modernization. He became a staunch anti-Communist liberal émigré intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s, an exile first briefly in Hong Kong, then in the United States, where he published to promote New Confucianism to the world as well as rejuvenating it as important intellectual resources for China’s modernization in the last two decades of his life.