"A Chinese Reformer in Exile" Published by Brill as Open Access Book

A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911 

By Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, with Zhongping Chen, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Chen Xuezhang, and Yang Zheng 

Brill (Leiden), 2025

https://brill.com/display/title/70307

Open Access PDF:

https://brill.com/downloadpdf/display/title/70307.pdf

This complex, transnational history was made possible by . . . 

A team of scholars with different perspectives and areas of expertise.

Outside collaboration with local historians, specialists on topics as diverse as trolley lines in Mexico and Chinese currency, descendants of Kang and Baohuanghui members, and those who interacted with this blog, Baohuanghui Scholarship.

A wide variety of primary sources:

•       Government records, Chinese and foreign language newspaper coverage.

•       Personal correspondence, diaries, poems, publications by Kang and others.

•       Baohuanghui records and ephemera, from menus to membership buttons.

The origin of this book is Worden's 1972 Georgetown University Ph.D. dissertation, “A Chinese Reformer in Exile: The North American Phase of the Travels of Kang Youwei, 1899–1909.” We significantly amplify, update, and reconfigure Worden’s original work, enriched by the many primary sources discovered since 1972 and our complementary areas of expertise.

Tracking Kang’s travels in exile was challenging in itself. Kang toured or lived in all the European countries except Russia, as well as Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine; India, Sikkim, Ceylon; Burma, Malaya, Thailand, Straits Settlements, the Netherlands Indies; Japan and Hong Kong. 

This book documents Kang’s visits to the North American countries of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, where he spent approximately twenty-nine intermittent months between 1899 and 1907. 

Kang traveled for self-edification and to satisfy his prodigious curiosity about the world, but he was also seeking models for all aspects of Chinese life, from technology to government. In North America, Kang focused on expanding and monitoring the Baohuanghui. 

The Baohuanghui enabled Chinese in North America to organize and fund political, commercial, educational, journalistic, even military, endeavors that improved their communities and gave them the skills and political savvy to fight for their rights both in North America and in China itself.

We focus on Kang as a political organizer, who awakened Chinese nationalism and formed the first mass Chinese political party. We also discuss his impact on politics and movements inside China, in many ways creating the conditions that led to the 1911 revolution.   

We welcome readers' comments and criticism, new information and sources, as we know the work of documenting Kang's exile and the Baohuanghui is not done.