 There was certainly no single answer offered to these questions by any of the groups making up twentieth-century China’s political landscape, ranging from “New Confucians” to nationalists to liberals to Marxists. However, the “isms” approach won out through much of the century, and Thomas Metzger has shown that Chinese political thinkers of all camps tended toward what he calls “epistemological optimism”, which is a confidence that the one, universally applicable moral and political truth is knowable, and so great authority should be vested in those gifted individuals able to perceive this truth (Metzger 2005). Another way to put this would be to say that there is a strong Utopian strand in much twentieth-century Chinese political thought, which has both pushed toward radical solutions and led to dissatisfaction with continued dissonance or piecemeal progress. Even Chinese liberals have, in many cases, envisioned harmonious societies in which individual self-realization goes hand-in-hand with the realization the larger collectivity, which they often called the “larger self (dawo)” (Zarrow 2021).