In previous chapters, we saw how Zhang Shizhao uses the participatory promise of democracy to challenge China's traditional elitism and bureaucracy. He insists, against Huang Yuanyong and Liang Qichao, that there exist legitimate arenas for meaningful participation outside the traditional ones of culture and literature. Yet the mechanism through which his challenge takes shape is not purely institutional, as a rule-by-law position might demand. Instead he offers a more complex argument in which the personal orientations of citizens are the decisive components of an emergent political community. Arguing that Zhang's ascription of political efficacy to individual acts breaks down the public/private divide, I offered a new way of thinking about the political, divorced from the prescriptions of collective action taken in public spaces with others.

In this chapter I begin to fill out the specific political acts Zhang believed would culminate in a transformation of China's political space, defending and modifying them to stand against critiques of their infeasibility or illegitimacy. I begin with what for Zhang explicitly links personal orientations to the possibilities of self-rule: self-awareness (zijue). In an eponymous essay, as well as in another that also appeared in the first volume of The Tiger, “The State and the Self” (Guojia yu wo), Zhang ties self-awareness to the ability of individuals to see their political and social selves critically and imaginatively, in the context of China's immanent postrevolutionary political demise.