It is an irony that whereas the first modern Chinese university was established based on Kang Youwei’s reform proposals of 1898, he became a marginal figure in the new disciplinary approach to knowledge production. Prior to the twenty-first century, Kang Youwei was studied mainly in history departments, and was a marginal (or even invisible) figure in the field of Confucianism or Chinese philosophy. He was a leader of late Qing New Text classicism, but he did not receive much attention as a Confucian figure during the “National Learning fever” (guoxue re 國學熱) of the 1980s, or even the Confucian fever of the 1990s. However, just in the past decade, he became an important Confucian figure and finally an icon of Mainland New Confucianism. The current article offers a preliminary explanation for the phenomenon of “Kang Youwei Fever” (Kang Youwei re 康有為熱) and the emergence of the “Kangism” (Kang Youwei zhuyi 康有為主義).