'China's first iconic modern intellectual. His lucid and prolific writings touching on all
major concerns in his own time and anticipating many in the future inspired several
generations of thinkers' - Pankaj Mishra 'I have been waiting a very long time for a volume
like this one [it is] a real milestone [...] Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the
considerable scholarly effort to translate masterfully and lucidly key essays from Liang
Qichao' - Leigh Jenco 'A country does not become corrupt and weak overnight. Rather we are
now reaping the evil harvest of what previous generations sowed.' 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 ardour
and passion which only ice could cool. China could only recover through a clear-sighted
informed understanding of its enemies - and by engaging in a thorough-going 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 which drove him on attempting to galvanize and refresh an
entire nation. Blending together 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.
