5 ideas
In 1898 the Guangxu Emperor issued a burst of modernizing edicts over roughly a hundred days. Empress Dowager Cixi then staged a coup, confined the emperor and executed six reformers, including Tan Sitong. Liang fled to Japan, and from exile in Yokohama he serialized the Xinmin essays in his journal Xinmin congbao, arguing that reform decreed from the top had collapsed because no citizenry existed to sustain it.
A nation's strength is the sum of its people's qualities, the way a body's health depends on its cells. Weak, passive or servile subjects will produce a weak state whatever its laws, ministers or institutions. Institutional change is therefore downstream of changing people's habits of mind, and it is fragile without them.
Private morality (side) covers duties between individuals: filial piety, loyalty to friends, personal integrity. Public morality (gongde) covers duties an individual owes to the collective, such as serving the common good and not free-riding on shared goods. Liang argued that Confucian ethics had highly developed the first and almost ignored the second, which left people individually decent but collectively inert. From about 1903 he qualified this, holding that public virtue must still be rooted in cultivated private character.
Chinese people had attachments to the family and to 'all under heaven' (tianxia), a universal civilizational order. They lacked the middle term: a bounded nation of equals competing among other nations. Without national consciousness, loyalty ran either too small, to kin, or too large, to civilization, to mobilize people against foreign powers.
Drawing on Jhering's 'The Struggle for Law,' Liang held that rights are not granted but won and kept through continual assertion. A person who meekly yields a right wrongs the whole group, because the nation's rights are the aggregate of individual rights. A people habituated to submission therefore cannot hold national sovereignty against stronger states.