The essential writings of China’s first iconic modern intellectual intent on reforming an
entire nation now published for the first time in Penguin ClassicsA Penguin Classic The power
anger and fluency of Liang Qichao’s writings make him one of the towering figures in modern
Chinese literature. He saw his great almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China
into the new era—to provide an ancient country devastated by civil war and foreign predators
with the intellectual equipment to renew itself. Liang said that he wrote from an ice-drinker’s
studio ” implying that underneath his dispassionate disabused and rational tone lay an ardor
and passion that only ice could cool. China could recover only through a clear-sighted
informed understanding of its enemies—and by engaging in a thoroughgoing self-critique. Liang
did not propose aping the West but taking only what China needed to renew the people” and
create new citizens.” Then China would be able to expel its invaders reform its society and
become a great power once more. This selection of pieces shows Liang’s extraordinary range and
the burning sense of mission that drove him on attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire
nation. Blending Confucianism Buddhism and the Western Enlightenment Liang’s ideas about
nation democracy and morality had a profound impact on Chinese visions of the political order
though the China that eventually emerged from the further disasters of the 1930s and 1940s
would be a very different one.
