Kang Youwei's Annotations of The Analects of Confucius and His Reconstruction of Confucianism: Taking His Criticism of Zhu Xi as a Clue

Kang Youwei claimed that the purpose of his works on Confucian classics, such as Annotations of The Analects of Confucius, was to reconstruct Confucius' Dao (way), so that it could be free from "the cede territories" state of Neo-Confucianism, and return to Confucian "unified state" to continue playing the role of norm and guidance for China's development. Mainly in opposition to Zhu Xi's thought, his Annotations of The Analects of Confucius condenses his disagreement with Neo-Confucianism. In the annotations, he criticized Zhu Xi as not only being restricted by Zengzi's thought of personal moral cultivation, but also deceived by Liu Xin's mixing new text classics with old text, which made him fail to elucidate the sublime words with deep meaning in The Analects. He attacked Zengzi's thought, and asserted that The Analects of Confucius was edited only by Zengzi's disciples and was expressing Zengzi's thought, so that he devalued its significance and strongly opposed Zhu Xi and others Neo-Confucians who had emphasized the importance of Zengzi. Meanwhile, he insisted in rejecting the old text by distinguishing it from the new text in The Analects. Based on those ideas, he tried to reconstruct the socio-political dimension of Confucianism and accept some religious content that attracts common people by focusing on the elucidation of Datong (Great harmony), Shenming (spirit / soul), Ren (benevolence), and Ming (fate). Although he has often been criticized for his arbitrary explanations, by which he could bring social political system, values, etc. into Confucianism in his annotations, many of his thoughts are still worthy of consideration.