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* Go to CHARACTERS: Kang Youwei康有為/Liang Qichao梁啟超/Kang Tongbi康同璧

《大同: 康有為在瑞典》本事(短版)

《大同：康有為在瑞典》採取半紀錄半劇場的特殊手法，刻劃上世紀初政治/文化巨擎康有為 (廖啟智) 流亡外國時，曾在瑞典的「避島」居住。此片概括康有為生平，他的百日維新和《大同書》及「保皇會」。編導陳耀成訪問了中外學者，並請也在瑞典擁有世外小島的前女星兼舞蹈家江青擔任?述。陳令智飾演協助父業的康有為次女康同璧。此片對康有為、辛亥革命及百年中國提出獨特論點。

《大同: 康有為在瑞典》本事(長版)

1904年康有為（廖啟智）與二女兒同璧（陳令智）抵達瑞典，在斯德歌爾摩一個島上一住四年。
這是康有為百日維新失敗之後流亡海外十六年中最豐盛的歲月。他與梁啟超在海外成立橫跨四大洲的保皇會。於1905 年策動大型的抵制美國貨運動，以反擊美國的嚴苛的排華法。連美國西奧多‧羅斯福總統也主動與康有為兩度會面。
但康有為面對的最大的挑戰當然是：如何從慈禧太后掌中救出光緒帝，及如何說服海內外的國人，不走暴力革命道路，而籍改革帝制令中國現代化!?
記錄劇情片《大同：康有為在瑞典》特邀名編舞家及演員江青女士，在她在瑞典的私人島上追思重述這位思想/政治/文化巨擎的鮮為人知的輝煌功業。
康有為與孫中山的對比，對毛澤東的影響，震撼著中國過去百年的命運。編導陳耀成訪問了著名的中外學者, 追溯康有為重整的儒學，對婦女及弱勢社群權益的提倡，及他的傑作《大同書》對當世的啟示

Datong: The Great Society

(118 min/HD/Docu-drama/in English, Chinese and French/with English & Chinese subtitles
2011/Hong Kong, Taiwan and USA)

(Short Synopsis)

Framed around the Swedish sojourn (1904-1908) of Kang Youwei (Liu Kai Chi), who famously revived the Confucian utopia Datong (The Great Society), the film traces the struggle of Kang, his daughter Tung Pih (Lindzay Chan), and his disciple Liang Qichao (Ben Yeung) to modernize China's imperial monarchy. Renowned theatre artist Chiang Ching narrates and the virtuosic Mary Stephen edits director Evans Chan's inventive docu-drama.

Datong: The Great Society

(118 min/HD/Docu-drama/in English, Chinese and French/with English & Chinese subtitles
2011/Hong Kong, Taiwan and USA)

(Long Synopsis)

Accompanied by his daughter Kang Tung Pih (Lindzay Chan), the great southern visionary Kang Youwei (Liu Kai Chi) arrived in Sweden in 1904 and began a four-year sojourn on an idyllic island. A political fugitive from China's Qing dynasty, Kang and his disciple Liang Qichao (Ben Yeung) had organized China's first attempt at modern political reform in 1898, and built China's first political party in exile. Kang met US President Theodore Roosevelt twice as a result of the anti-American boycott (1905-1906) he orchestrated to protest the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act. Kang's most formidable challenge, though, was to convince his compatriots to modernize China by reforming the Manchu monarchy, rather than unleashing a violent revolution as championed by Dr. Sun Yatsen.

Datong: Great Society depicts the controversial career of a poet-politician-philosopher, whose writings would find an admirer in Mao Zedong. Yet, it was Kang's revival of the Confucian utopia, Datong (The Great Society) that may turn out to be his enduring legacy. Renowned Chinese/Swedish theatre artist Chiang Ching narrates this sweeping epic. Out of director Evans Chan's inventive blending of theatricalization and documentary, Mary Stephen, longtime editor of Eric Rohmer, shapes a bold and illuminating film about a Chinese century torn by ethnic discord and violent revolutions.

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CHARACTERS:
KANG YOUWEI (aka Kang Yu-wei, 1858-1927), was a major calligrapher, prominent political thinker, philosopher and reformer of the late Qing– China's last – Dynasty. He has been hailed as the first modern Chinese and China's greatest modern philosopher. A household name in China, he is famous mainly for engineering a political movement, known as the Hunded Days' reform, in 1898 that was supported by the receptive Emperor Guangxu but loathed by Empress Dowager Cixi, who crushed it.

LIANG QICHAO, Kang's famed student, stirred the nation with the 1895 Gongche petition, which was considered the first modern political movement in China. Kang and Liang rallied 13,000 civil service examination candidates to co-sign the petition, urging a boycott of the unequal Treaty of Shimonoseki with Japan. Additionally, the petition urged the Qing government to implement a modernization program, which ranged from implementing postal service and modern monetary system, to introducing the modern press and reforming the corrupt civil bureaucracy.

Kang's rising reputation and his persistent petitioning of Emperor Guangxu finally enabled him to win Guangxu's confidence to launch the Hundred Days -- actually103 days of feverish legislating -- Reform in 1898. A strong believer in constitutional monarchy and keen to remodel the country after Meiji Japan, Kang could claim to be the originator of instituting a constitutional government in China. But his idea of introducing a parliamentary system sets off a huge backlash from Empress Dowager Cixi's conservative faction. Cixi swiftly put Guangxu under house arrest and issued death warrants on all reformers. Kang and Liang had to flee China for their lives.

Liang ended up staying mostly in Japan, and Kang began living in various countries for 16 years.In exile, they organized the Bauhuanghui (BHH), Protect the Emperor Society, among the Chinese diaspora. Yet BHH's agenda of rescuing Guangxu to create a constitutional monarchy had to compete for funds and followers against Sun Yat-sen's Revive China Society and Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng Hui), which advocated a violent revolution to expel Qing's inept minority Manchu rulers. In the end, the revolutionaries succeeded in launching the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which managed to found a new, but tortuously unstable republic.

Kang remained an advocate of constitutional monarchy five years into the republican era. To the tremendous dismay of his followers, including Liang Qichao, he joined a failed coup d'etat in 1917, led by General Zhang Xun, in an attempt to restore the abdicated last Qing Emperor Puyi. Kang quickly became suspicious of Zhang's intent and fled to the American legation before Zhang was driven out of the Forbidden City.

In his last decade, Kang could not recover his ruined reputation due to the restoration fiasco. He died suddenly, at 69, at his home in the city of Qingdao, Shandong in 1927. There is a deeply held family belief that he was poisoned.

One reason for Kang being a “repressed figure” in modern Chinese history probably has to do with the reflexive condemnation of a reformer/thinker who dared question the wisdom of starting a revolution to overthrow the monarchy. The reflexive equating of monarchy with feudalism by ignoring the many modern nations, such as Japan, Britain, Sweden and others, which have retained their monarchies, bespeaks an indoctrination of a monolithic notion of progress that propels the officially sanctioned narrative about the birth of modern China to this day. Kang's reasoning to salvage the monarchy was many-faceted, but part of it had to do with his sensitivity to the multi-ethnic makeup of the Qing Manchu empire. Apparently, he was wary of a Han-identity fueled revolution, which trended toward inducing a Han Chinese triumphalism that could sever the country's cultural links with non-Han minorities, such as Tibetans and Mongolians.

Among Kang's admirers was Mao Zedong, who enumerated Kang, Dr. Sun and Hong Xiuquan, leader of the Taiping uprising (1845-1864), as the three most important political figures of early modern China. Still, Kang's rivalry with Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his widely condemned restoration attempt didn't endear him to the official history of PRC, and to a lesser extent, Taiwan, when Dr. Sun had been hailed as “the father of modern China” by both Chinese governments across the Taiwan Strait. A certain uneasiness about the complex and controversial career of Kang -- an odd amalgam of gradualist conservatism and radical politics -- persists to this date. Still, he has been brought back cautiously into official favor in the PRC. One can find at least four state-run sites in Guangdong, including his childhood home, the Wanmu (Ten Thousand Tree) Hut School that he founded, the Three Lakes school he attended, and a Kang Youwei museum. His last home in Qingdao is now also a museum. But the fate of his old residences in Beijing and Hangzhou remains uncertain.

What actually defeated Kang's reform dream might not be the revolutionaries as such, but the resistance of the Manchu Qing Court to reform, or to reform fast enough, for a lethally changing global modernity. Kang's political defeats may be many. Yet no evaluation of his career and influence is complete without taking into account his tremendous impact as a thinker and cultural figure.

KANG TUNG PIH (aka KANG TONGBI 1887 – 1969) was the first Asian student ever to be enrolled in courses at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York in 1907, and earned an associate degree in Journalism in 1909.

Tung Pih was the second daughter of Kang Youwei, who had five concubines, from his first wife. After the crushed Hundred Days' reform, Kang fled China with some members of his family, spending the next 16 years living around the world. As a result, much of Kang Tung Pih's youth was spent abroad.

In 1903, while the Kangs were in Japan, teen-aged Tung Pih met Luo Chang, Liang Qichao's student and a young staffer at the Chinese embassy in Tokyo. The two soon married thereafter. Tung Pih received her tertiary and higher education in the US, while assisting her father's political activities. She founded the female branch of Baohuanghui (BHH, Protect the Emperor Society), the political organization Kang and Liang created overseas. And she followed her husband Luo Chang when the latter was assigned to the Chinese consulate in Denmark. Later on, Luo became China's ambassador to Britain and Singapore.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Tung Pih returned to China, where she continued to agitate for feminist causes. She was deeply involved in the women's movement in Shanghai, advocating women's rights through meetings and speeches. She was an editor and major contributor to Nuxuebao (Women's Education), one of the first women's journals in China. Like her father, she took a stand against the practice of foot-binding, establishing and co-leading a Tianzuhui (Natural Feet Society) with other Chinese feminists that served as a base of operations for their activities. She was part of the effort to organize the various Shanghai women's groups into a united Shanghai Women's Association, which petitioned the Nanjing Nationalist Government (1940-1945) for a new constitution under the slogan, “Down with the warlords and up with equality between men and women”.

Kang Tung Pih's emergence from the obscurity of time and from her father's shadow happened only in the past decade, thanks to the moving evocation of her by the memoirist Zhang Yihe in her collection of essays The Last Aristocrats (Zu hou di gui zu, 2004), in which Kang Tung Pih's legendary solitary journey in 1902, at 18, to look for her ailing father in exile was evoked. Zhang Yihe's book ran into censorship problems in China but has quickly established itself as an important political memoir about the Anti-Rightist Campaign era with remarkable literary beauty. Kang Tung Pih befriended Yihe's father Zhang Bokun, labeled as PRC's number one rightist, out of respect for this Berlin-educated party official who dared criticize the party, and subsequently offered protection to Yihe, the would-be memoirist, during the latter's most difficult and vulnerable years. Kang Tung Pih's heroic defense of Kang Youwei's legacy and her own humanity in a China drifting toward chaos and breakdown makes her as much a cultural giant as Kang Youwei.
In recent years, Kang Tung Pih has attracted much attention in the US. She is featured on the “Intriguing Persons” page (http://www.barnard.edu/archives/persons.htm#top) of the Barnard College website, which proudly notes that “in 1908-1909, Miss Kang was one of only 28 students out of a total registration of 498 bold enough to publicly support the radical cause of women's suffrage by joining the Barnard College Chapter of the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York.” A symposium in Kang Tung Pih's honor was organized by Barnard College/Columbia University in Beijing in 2009. Even the proposed National Women's History Museum in Washington D.C., sponsored by Meryl Streep, features Tung Pih prominently in its website's Chinese American page – “Chinese American Women: A History of Resilience and Resistance” (http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/chinese/33.html)-- in recognition of Kang Tung Pih's pioneering role in Chinese women's exposure to a Western education. In an excerpted interview in Harper's Magazine during her Barnard years, Tung Pih contrasted America as “the land of freedom” to China, “the land of filial obedience.”

Kang Tung Pih edited the hundreds of poems and many manuscripts left behind by Kang Youwei, whose complete work runs to twelve 300-page volumes. Her supplement of Kang Youwei's memoir was published in 1958. Tung Pih died during the Cultural Revolution, in 1969, due to deliberate medical neglect, the confluence of events around which is shown in the film.

Tung Pih had one daughter, Yifeng Luo, who also perished tragically during the Cultural Revolution. Her son Jung-Pang Lo (aka, Jung-Pang Luo, 1912-1981) was a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, who edited a pioneering study of his grandfather, Kang Yu-wei:A Biography and a Synposium (1967).

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