“Roaming through the Heavens”; Kang Youwei’s Imagined Cosmos and Global Unity

In Datong Shu, Kang Youwei highlights his lineage from a “tradition of literary studies for thirteen generations” and his survey of “several tens of nations of the earth,” giving him intimate knowledge of the world1. Yet in this preface, he also delineates the limitations of his discussion, and in doing so also defines the limits of his global unity, the heavens. He admits he has no connection to “the living creatures on Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune”, and that his Jen or Wisdom “can extend [only] to [this] earth.”2 The achievement of his global unity does not represent the ‘end of history’ but instead the perfection of one singular world in a complex cosmic system filled with “uttermost happiness” and “uttermost suffering.”.3 It’s hard not to link this view of the universe with his view of distinct civilizations and his utopia’s emphasis on racial unity and natalism. When considering the framework of these imaginary worlds with their unique “states, men and women, codes of social behavior (Ii), music, civilized pleasures”, one can appreciate how Kang hasn’t abandoned the paradigm of competing civilizations but instead projected it from the earth onto the heavens.4

Kang Youwei’s interest in astronomy dates back to 1886, when he began writing the Book of the Heavens.5 Cited in Datong Shu by name, the book opens with Kang gazing at Mars through a telescope, and deducing that “the heavens being infinite in number, they then must be hosting an infinite number of peoples, governments and religions, customs and traditions, rituals, tunes, and written records”.6 The book weaves Confucian doctrine with modern scientific discoveries, asserting in chapters 10 and 11 the existence of extragalactic heavens and God, who resided above all the heavens.7 Lecturing on the subject in Shanghai, Kang was deeply attuned to Scientific debates at the time, refuting Einstein in the final chapter of his book and citing the discovery of “Martian canals” as proof of extra-terrestrial civilization.8

Whilst he does occasionally pull from these imagined communities to mirror mankind’s flaws such as war, more often this focus on Earth represents a place in contrast with the “vast and boundless” space around it.9 Similar to how Kang describes the expansion of “our Yellow Emperor race” displacing the Hmong-Mien peoples and filling geographic space, he recognizes that the earth constitutes the final geography boundary.10 This historic expansion of the Han from the Central Plain to all of China through incorporation and extermination is the model for the spread of a single “superior race” to encompass a single planetary state.11 He envisions this super race inheriting the best traits from the “silver” and “gold” race, embodying all the qualities of the world as he sees it.12

Furthermore, Earth’s place among a family of imagined communities ties with Kang’s championing of natalism. The primary goal of his great unity is to relieve suffering which is independent of population growth, however Kang’s vision for a unified society emphasizes childbirth, something he believed would increase once certain social barriers were lifted. Despite praising the power of the “silver race”, he is deeply critical of Western family structures, describing how many Westerns did not wish to get married and that “Frenchwomen do not wish to bear children; the population of France is declining”.13 Kang relates the danger of population decline with the metaphor that whilst those who dedicated themselves to Buddhism are “noble”, if everyone did so “China would not be inherited by the Chinese” and “all the vastness of the Divine Land would for ever be a colony of a different race.”14 Kang’s interpretation of Divine Land transcends China however, made clear when he applies the latter principle to the whole world, arguing “inside of fifty years mankind would become extinct”.15

He argues just as it would be a betrayal to let Chinese people die out and their land be occupied, so too would it be a betrayal of the earth to not grow its population. Why Kang Youwei insists on smelting the “silver” and “gold” races together was their supposed balance in power, with the white race being “assuredly superior, while the yellow race is more numerous”, showing he recognized population size as a strength in and of itself.16 Social Darwinism assumes that if one group can successfully propagate more relative to another group, they are self-evidently superior, and therefore global population growth is occurring in the context of the “billions” of lives on Mars and other planets.17 This is why Kang applies special emphasis to how his abolishment of family and marriage would liberate families from the “toil of nurturing” and therefore encourage “human propagation”.18

Even if Kang concedes the limits of his knowledge in Datong Shu, elsewhere in his writtings he asserted that “There must be wireless electronic devices to communicate with our earth and other planets”, and given his global vision transcends millennia, he almost certainly believed contact was inevitable.19 These glimpses into his vast spatial imagination are invaluable to understanding his perspective on humanity and global relations, just as Confucianism is to understanding his philosophy. His ideal world was deep within the context of and theoretically modeled against the many competing civilizations of his imagined galaxy. Kang’s universalist philosophy was limited by the pace of scientific progress and his ability to imagine a cosmos, and yet that did not prevent him from applying his principles of universal brotherhood to all life;

“All us earthlings are heavenlings: we truly are creatures of the heavens…when all of us will realize that the Earth is but one celestial body [among many] in the heavens, we will then understand ourselves as celestial beings.”20

  1. Laurence G. Thompson, Ta t’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London: Routledge, 2005) 67-68 [↩]
  2. Ibid, 66-80 [↩]
  3. Ibid, 67 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 67. [↩]
  5. Lorenzo Andolfatto, “Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens and the Porous Epistemological Grounds of Early-modern Chinese Science Fiction,” in Chinese Science Fiction: Concepts, Forms, and Histories, ed. Mingwei Song, Nathaniel Isaacson, and Hua Li (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 39. [↩]
  6. Thompson, Ta t’ung Shu, 40. [↩]
  7. Zheng Wan, “The Relationship between Science and Religion in Kang Youwei’s Confucianism” (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2019), 222. [↩]
  8. Ibid,
    Andolfatto, “Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens”, 48. [↩]
  9. Thompson, Ta t’ung Shu, 67 [↩]
  10. Ibid, 142 [↩]
  11. Ibid, 147 [↩]
  12. Ibid, 141 [↩]
  13. Ibid, 174-175. [↩]
  14. Ibid, 157. [↩]
  15. ibid. [↩]
  16. Ibid, 141. [↩]
  17. Ibid, 80. [↩]
  18. Ibid, 165-186 [↩]
  19. Andolfatto, “Kang Youwei’s Book of the Heavens”, 48. [↩]
  20. Ibid, 49. [↩]