By the 1890s the Qing dynasty had lost wars to Britain, France and, most humiliatingly, to a modernized Japan, and Kang Youwei's answer was neither wholesale Westernization nor conservative retrenchment but a reinterpretation of Confucius himself. His Confucius as a Reformer argued that the sage had not merely transmitted a golden antiquity, the standard Confucian self-understanding for two thousand years, but had invented much of that antiquity as a rhetorical device to smuggle his own radical institutional program past a conservative audience. If Confucius himself was a reformer working under cover of tradition, Kang reasoned, then a Confucian could reform the Qing state, adopting a constitution, modern schools and industry, without betraying Confucianism at all.
Given direct access to the young Guangxu Emperor in the summer of 1898, Kang's faction pushed through a hundred days of reform edicts before the Empress Dowager Cixi's coup ended it, executed several of his allies and sent Kang himself fleeing abroad. In exile he did not moderate; he wrote The Book of Great Unity, a utopian sketch of a coming world with no nations, no families and no private property, and after 1912 campaigned, against the tide of a new republic that wanted no religion at all, to have Confucianism formally established as China's state religion. Both his reform and his religion failed in his own lifetime, but the reading of Confucius as a figure who could be actively reinterpreted for a modern crisis, rather than only preserved, outlived him in the Confucian revivals of the following century.