With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, China entered the “Golden Age” of reform, which ended tragically within a decade in 1989. Deng’s Southern Tour launched economic reforms without its political counterpart, and created huge interest groups that have benefited from the authoritarian system, further hindering political reform. The Initiative for Building Consensus on Reform advocated comprehensive constitutional reforms to be taken for China to return to healthy economic development. Without political reform that makes the ruler accountable to the ruled, no matter how much freedom, wealth or half-baked rule of law enjoyed by the ruled, it can be taken away from them overnight, as the zero-Covid policy showed in 2020– 22.

The century-long predicament of Chinese constitutionalism lies not in its constitutions, but in the complete absence of social contracts as the legitimizing foundation of any constitution. Although the Xinhai Revolution did not shed much blood, it was carried out very much in a way opposed to the spirit of social contract. In less than two years after the establishment of the First Republic, the ill-fated political cooperation between Yuan Shikai and the Nationalist Party was fatally disrupted. The Treaty of Versailles ignited the patriotic fire overnight and set the stage for Communist ascendance. The frequency analysis of keywords from the Xinhai Revolution to the May Fourth Movement showed that anti-contractual concepts such as revolution, Leninism and socialism had been soaring, and had become a popular trend by 1919, leading to the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949.

Over the past century, there have been two landmark events in Chinese constitutionalism: the promulgation of the Outline of the Imperial Constitution in 1908 and the Xinhai Revolution in 1911. In between there was also the hastily enacted and short-lived Nineteen Articles, which envisioned a constitutional monarchy. Unfortunately, the Imperial Court repeatedly obstructed the constitutional reforms and squandered its own opportunities of self-renovation by forfeiting the faith of the public. The arrogant and myopic Qing dynasty dug its own grave and deserved its fate, but the success of the revolution meant the end of constitutional reform. Although the First and Second Republics came one after another, China has decidedly drifted away from the path of constitutionalism over the past century. The Third Republic will hopefully bring China back to its constitutional path through the third cooperation between the two rival revolutionary parties.

A hundred years after the Xinhai Revolution, a centennial judgment has to be made by an impartial observer for the interest of China’s constitutional cause. Despite its sharp language, the main theme of the Manifesto is to explore the conditions and mechanisms of constitutional transformation, as well as the way out of the hopeless historical cycle of reform and revolution. It analyzes the cultural syndrome under absolute despotism and the difficulties it has caused to constitutional transformation, and presents the human dignity theory of modernized Confucianism as a possible solution to transform the Chinese moral and political personality.

Once the totalitarian regime is established, various disasters are bound to recur. A totalitarian state is diagonally opposite to liberal democracy, which is characterized by prevalence of horizontal connections, the sum total of which constitute a social contract. An ideal totalitarian structure, to the contrary, is like a zero-impedance conductor: orders flow from the top to the lowest level all without any obstacle. It was this totalitarian system that enabled Mao, the charismatic leader, to use his overwhelming social support to overthrow his political rivals within the system when his authority was weakened. Like a courtly struggle, the Cultural Revolution was for the sake of Mao’s personal power, but the cost of social destruction was incomparably greater.

Chapter 4 starts with a discussion of imperialism constructed as a fact and as theory. It highlights the major disruptions in East Asian and world history. The prevailing realist, liberal institutionalist, and constructivist theories are not scaled to explain such dramatic transformations of East Asia by Western imperialism. Rather, a historical sociological approach anchored on evolutionary theory is a better fit. Western domination based on the rise of the West in terms of economic, technological, and military power took several centuries to complete. Some East Asian empires were also expanding after 1500. A turning point was Britain’s defeat of China in the Opium War of 1839–1842. After that, East Asian nations engaged earnestly in reform. Some, like Japan, succeeded, while others, like China, failed, resulting in a great divergence among Asian countries. To some extent, much of East Asia still lives in the shadow of that imperialist past.

Chapter 1 introduces evolution theory and evolutionary explanation for studies of East Asian international relations and lays out the design of the whole book