Yongle ZHANG

This interdisciplinary project focuses on the relationship between the First World War and the change of China’s constitutional order in the 1910s and 1920s, with an effort to bridge constitutional history, diplomatic history, and intellectual history. It is based upon the assumption that the ultimate collapse of the Vienna system during the war and the failure to re-establish concert of great powers in the post-war era created an international context radically different from the pre-war era, thus gave rise to China’s new path of constitutional change. The project will explore a series of themes such as the decline of the discourse of the “standard of civilization”, the conflict between constitutional monarchism and republicanism, the politics of constitutional legitimism, the changing agendas of constitution-making in the early ROC, the decline of the politics centred on constitutional forms and the rise of new revolutions, etc., attempting at a new narrative and understanding of China’s political development in the 20th century.

Yongle Zhang is an associate professor in the School of Law, of Peking University. He was born in 1981 in Wenzhou, China, and received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008.  He was a visiting fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) during the academic year 2014-2015. His academic interests include comparative constitution, modern Chinese constitutional history, European intellectual history, the Greco-Roman historiography, etc. His recent research focuses on topics like state/nation building and constitutional change, empire and international law, political party and political representation, as well as politico-legal ethics. He publishes mainly in Chinese and English and some of his works has been translated into Spanish, French, and Korean.

ZHANG, Yongle. “The Historical Sources of China’s Political Meritocracy", in Politics and Religion, Vol. 11, N°4, 2018.

ZHANG, Yongle. Wan Guo Jing Zheng: Kang Youwei yu Weiyena Tixi de Shuaibian  万国竞争：康有为与维也纳体系的衰变 [The Rivalry of Nations: Kang Youwei and the Decay of the Vienna System], Beijing, The Commercial Press, 2017.

ZHANG, Yongle. Jiu Bang Xin Zao 旧邦新造: 1911-1917 [Remaking An Old Country: 1911-1917], Beijing, Peking University Press, 2016.

ZHANG, Yongl. "The Future of the Past: On Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought," in New Left Review, n°62, 2010.

ZHANG, Yongle. “No Forbidden Zone in Reading?", in New Left Review, n°49, 2008.