Pao Ching-yen

Bao Jingyan or Pao Ching-yen was a Chinese libertarian/anarchist philosopher and Taoist who lived somewhere between the late 200's AD and before 400 AD.

Dating Hong Kong sinologist Xiogan Liu placed Bao Jingyan before 363 AD, but considered it an open question, and was not a dedicated study of his dating.

Political thought A successor of Laozi and Zhuang Zhou strain of libertarian Taoism, Pao Ching-yen was, according to Etienne Balazs, "China's first political anarchist." Xiaogan Liu considered the philosophy as primarily developing out of "anarchist" strains in the Zhuangzi.

Bao Jingyan was the author of the treatise "Neither Lord Nor Subject" (無君論 or 無君無臣). It is preserved in the Waipian (part of the Baopuzi) of the Taoist Ge Hong, though the latter works to refute Bao's essay. Bao was the first in China to place utopia in the field of politics. Influenced by Zhuangzi's thought, he opposed despotic absolutism.

Given the obscurity of Bao Jingyan's person, Jean Levi hypothesized that he could have been the pen name of Ge Hong, who would thus pass subversive theses without taking too many risks, or at the very least that Ge felt a certain sympathy towards these theses. But this claim does not fit well with his Confucian-legalist political philosophy and criticisms of the disorderly political consequences of Lao-Zhuang political discourse.