Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao

By Xiaobing Tang

This book reexamines the historical thinking of Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of the few modern Chinese thinkers and cultural critics whose appreciation of the question of modernity was based on first-hand experience of the world space in which China had to function as a nation-state. It seeks to demonstrate that Liang was not only a profoundly paradigmatic modern Chinese intellectual but also an imaginative thinker of worldwide significance. By tracing the changes in Liang's conception of history, the author shows that global space inspired both Liang's longing for modernity and his critical reconceptualization of modern history. Spatiality, or the mode of determining spatial organization and relationships, offers a new interpretive category for understanding the stages in Liang's historical thinking.

Liang's historical thinking culminated in a global imaginary of difference, which became most evident in the shift from his earlier proposal for a uniform national history to one that mapped "cultural history." His reaffirmation of spatiality, a critical concept overshadowed by the modernist obsession with time and history, made it both necessary and possible for him to redesign the project of modernity. Finally, the author suggests that the reconciliation of anthropological space with historical time that Liang achieved makes him abundantly contemporary with our own time, both inextricably modern and postmodern.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 1996
• ISBN: 9780804764742

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Stanford University Press

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© 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

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Stanford University Press publications are distributed exclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America; they are distributed exclusively by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world.

9780804764742

Acknowledgments

This book is a revision of my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. Its initial conception may be traced to Professor Fredric R. Jameson’s graduate seminar in fall 1986 on problems of historiography. Although much of the discussion in class may have escaped me, the seminar nonetheless opened up a new field of intellectual inquiry for me, a new graduate student who had arrived in the United States for the first time only weeks before school started. Needless to say, that class is but one instance of a much more general influence. I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Professor Jameson for his encouragement and support over the years.

While writing the dissertation, I benefited greatly from Professor Arif Dirlik’s critical comments and challenging questions. Those usually hour-long, page-by-page discussions, for which I am deeply grateful, helped me better formulate problems and clarify my arguments. I also owe a great deal to Professors Leo Ou-fan Lee and V. Y. Mudimbe for their unfailing enthusiasm. I am thankful to Professor Annabel Patterson, another member of my dissertation committee, for painstakingly plowing through and correcting all the chapters in draft form. Those chapters, I now realize, were for the most part simply unreadable.

Throughout the long process during which my dissertation grew into a book, many friends and colleagues aided me in various ways, sometimes perhaps unwittingly. I take this opportunity to acknowledge help and support from Sandy Mills, Sandy Swanson, and Professor Jing Wang at Duke; from Professors Howard C. Goldblatt, Paul W. Kroll, and Stephen Miller, my colleagues at the University of Colorado ; and from my friends Prasenjit Duara, Paul Pecorino, Rebecca Karl, Lee Yu-cheng, Gan Yang, Benjamin Lee, Lionel Jensen, Chin Heng-wei, Yuejin Wang, Xudong Zhang, Lydia H. Liu, Maria Zellar, and Matt Carter. I greatly appreciate the opportunities that Professors Ted Huters and Chen Xiaomei created for me to present a small portion of my dissertation on different occasions. I am indebted to Hu Ying, who helped me obtain essential materials for this study and closely shared my writing experience. In the sweltering summer of 1994, Elizabeth Baker kept me focused on the rather long revising process by constantly coming up with imaginative distractions. Elizabeth also read the entire manuscript with great care and love at the last stage of its preparation.

I am solely responsible, nonetheless, for all the errors and inaccuracies, as well as for the arguments, that are presented in the following pages.

My thanks are also due different institutions for their support. For the 1990-91 academic year, an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellowship administered by the Graduate School at Duke allowed me to finish my dissertation. During this period of time, I carried out much of my research at the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In summer 1992, a Junior Faculty Development Award, together with a research travel grant, from the University of Colorado enabled me to begin my revision and do research at the Harvard-Yenching Library. Timothy Connor, Public Services Librarian at Harvard-Yenching, would later help me locate several important sources. I also did some research at the main library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. More immediately, I wish to thank Shen Zhijia and Liang Hui, librarians at the University of Colorado, for always being ready to help.

In the later stages of preparing the manuscript, I appreciate Professor Prasenjit Duara’s initial recommendation and the encouragement from Professor David Laitin, director of the Wilder House series at the University of Chicago. I am most grateful, moreover, that working with my editor, John Ziemer, at Stanford University Press has been such a pleasant and reassuring experience.

Last but not least, I express my greatest gratitude to my parents and sister in China, whose absent presence in my life makes it imperative for me to continually contemplate the implications of space and simultaneity. They understand what I am trying to say here, even though they may never be able to read the book.

On a brief and personal note, it has been a wonderful and stimulating experience reading Liang Qichao, imagining with him, and going through the same emotional and intellectual excitements that he went through more than three quarters of a century ago. The sense of reliving and reconfronting history has been particularly sobering. I remember vividly one day in summer 1992 at the Harvard-Yenching Library when I found myself turning the brittle, yellowing pages of Liang’s journal La Rekonstruo. For one moment I could not free myself, nor can I now, of the notion that Liang Qichao and his times are indeed inextricably contemporary with our own. Those pages of La Rekonstruo also brought home the extraordinary faith and commitment of Liang, who throughout his life stubbornly refused to let despair or setbacks block an optimistic vision.

About six years ago, I began my research, innocently enough, with Meng Xiangcai’s biography of Liang Qichao produced in the late 1970’s in mainland China. When I finished reading that ferocious little book, I simply could not reconcile the evil image of Liang found there with Liang’s impassioned and inspiring essays that I was also reading. During the rest of my research and writing, I felt ever more strongly that for my generation of Chinese, an inescapable historical responsibility is, as Walter Benjamin once put it, to recapture and reassemble images of the past as our own concerns and even identity before they disappear irretrievably. Or, as Liang Qichao himself would advise students of history in The Research Method for Chinese History, we should not carelessly wipe out what was valuable in the past but is immaterial in the present; nor should we easily let go of what was unimportant before but has become significant now. In retrospect, I see that my duty also includes having an intelligent dialogue with one of the greatest and most imaginative thinkers of twentieth-century China, a man who bravely lived and confronted history.

Over the past five years, this book has followed me about and quietly witnessed many changes in my life—intellectual, emotional, and geographic. It has become a virtual part of my identity and often provided me with an anchor and sense of belonging in the fastchanging, if also uncannily familiar, contemporary world. For this reason, I am glad that I wrote the book.

XBT

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: - Toward a Geography of the Discourse of Modernity

1 - History Imagined Anew: Liang Qichao in 1902

2 - The Nationalist Historian and New Historiography

3 - The Nation and Revolution: Narrating the Modern Event

4 - Modernity as Political Discourse: Interpreting Revolution

5 - The Spatial Logic of the New Culture: Modernity and Its Completion

6 - Conclusion: Toward a Production of Anthropological Space

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

Introduction:

Toward a Geography of the Discourse of Modernity

The protagonist of this study, Liang Qichao, was born in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in February 1873. The year 1873 may not have appeared particularly eventful or memorable to the Chinese of the Qing empire; it belonged to a brief period of military and political resurgence of the central government, under the able reign of the Tongzhi emperor. In historical hindsight, however, it was one of the final and ever more agonizing years for the last imperial dynasty in Chinese history. It also registered, in Liang Qichao’s autobiographical account, an almost anticlimactic moment preceded by many a great event inside as well as outside China. It was ten years after the demise of the Taiping Kingdom in Nanjing, one year after the death of the great Qing scholar Zeng Guofan, three years after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, and the same year that Italy declared itself a unified kingdom in Rome.¹ Yet such a spatial and juxtapositional, rather than causal, connection among historical events across the globe was not possible for Liang until much later. Trained from a young age to excel in the conventional career of a gentry-literatus, Liang Qichao was not the least concerned with the existence of either France or Italy, or indeed with the rest of the modern world until 1890, when after failing the civil service examinations in the capital he stopped in the fast-growing port city of Shanghai. Only then did he come across a world map and realize that beyond the boundless Middle Kingdom were five continents and many other thriving nations.

The explosive impact of global space, as a geographical and political reality, on the impressionable mind of the teenage Liang Qichao can hardly be overstated. The world as a mappable totality, or rather the concept of a whole world, introduced a sudden spatiotemporal reorientation. It forcibly revealed a limitedness or parochialism in the traditional cosmological order, by which Liang, like generations of Chinese, had organized his daily life and sense of identity. The new world map of modern nation-states, while deflating a local plenitude and contentment, suggested the simultaneous existence of uneven and different national territories and spaces. It visually demonstrated a new world order. To have access to the modern world, therefore, one had both to accept a new global, universal time and to claim a stable and coherent self-identity by means of a territorial nation. We can take this moment of simultaneous differentiation and identification as the birth of a collective modern Chinese subjectivity, its constitutive imaginary now being a world space in which China as a nation-state has to inscribe itself. The same moment also figuratively signals the inception of modern Chinese historical consciousness, for the dialectics of national space and universal time now becomes indelible in the Chinese discourse of modernity and its historical representation.

It was the contraction of China from a world to a nation in the world, the historian Joseph Levenson once observed with great sympathy and insight, that changed the Chinese historical consciousness. ² The intellectual and political consequences of this contraction, in particular Liang Qichao’s heroic effort at coming to terms with the new global space as an inescapable modern condition, are the subject matter of the present study. At the center of this examination is Liang’s continuous negotiation between a revolutionary, universal time and an equally persistent and interconnected, uneven space. As various forms of this negotiation, we will look into his Enlightenment-style narration of the arrival of the modern world, his critical insight into the problematic nature of national revolution, and his project for a complete modernity.

In terms of Liang Qichao’s intellectual development, the concept of a totalizing world space as the hallmark of modernity helped radically transform him, in the second half of the 1890’s, into a vociferous advocate of change and new learning. His intellectual excitement over the new world order would lead him to meet and follow the prominent reformist thinker Kang Youwei. Together, they would propose and popularize a comprehensive program of educational, social, and institutional reforms. By 1896, at the age of 23, Liang had emerged as a notable public figure and, after publishing an eloquent General Discussion of Reforms, established himself as the spokesman for the increasingly momentous reform movement. From that time on, Liang Qichao lived a dramatic, productive, if sometimes frustrating, life intimately intertwined with the public and political dimensions of modern Chinese history.

Toward the end of 1898, when the intransigent Qing court put an abrupt and bloody end to the One Hundred Days Reform, Liang Qichao, as one of its key instigators, fled to Japan for what would become nearly fourteen years of political exile. The forced exile, however, never cut his emotional and intellectual ties to China. Reviving and modernizing Chinese civilization was a political commitment that had already become, for Liang as well as for many of his contemporaries, a moral imperative. Hoping to better continue the reformist cause, Liang quickly acquired a reading knowledge of Japanese and avidly perused both classical and contemporary Western social and political theories.

During the first few anxiety-ridden years, he devoted all his talents and energies to propagating nationalism and liberalism, both new intellectual justifications for modernization. His inspirational influence as a political journalist and universal intellectual, which owed much to a self-conscious evocation of the Enlightenment philosophe, was unparalleled, particularly among the rapidly expanding Chinese student community in the Japanese capital. If the General Discussion of Reforms was the document of Liang’s formative years, the publication of the New Citizen Journal in 1902 signaled a tremendous coming of age. A milestone in his thinking was also reached when he declared himself a New Historian that same year and laid the theoretical foundation for a nationalist rewriting, or creation, of Chinese history. Although this ambitious project for a general Chinese history never materialized, Liang’s pathbreaking contribution to modern Chinese historiography lay in his urgent call for a thorough historiographical revolution at the turn of the century.³

Also during these first years, Liang had the opportunity to travel widely, first to Australia and then to Hawaii. Although his mission was to promote the reformist cause among overseas Chinese communities, Liang’s politics grew increasingly radical as he leaned more and more toward a republican revolution to overthrow the Qing government. In 1903, however, on his return to Japan after an extensive tour of North America, Liang announced a political change of heart. Now resolutely opposing republicanism as the appropriate political system, he decided that a constitutional monarchy, modeled after the successful examples of England, Germany, and Japan, was the only viable and nonviolent path to lead China into modernity. This development, perhaps less sudden than it may have first appeared, was immortalized in a bitter exchange between Liang, now the leading theorist for a constitutional movement, and the Revolutionary Alliance headed by Sun Yat-sen in the years 1905–7. The debate involved two competing visions of modernity and was in fact a transposition to China of the tension between the contemporary German conservative, state-oriented liberalism and the democratic heritage of the French Revolution. It was also a debate that Liang had already staged in his 1902 political novel, The Future of New China. The abundance and clarity of Liang’s anti-republican writings, nevertheless, were not persuasive enough to prevent the republican revolution in 1911.

With the crumbling of the Qing empire, Liang Qichao changed his politics again and gave full support to the new republic. In 1912, he returned to China as a widely respected intellectual leader, with the goal of helping orchestrate large-scale social and political modernization in the wake of the revolution. For the next seven years, he was closely engaged in national politics and assumed various key posts in a succession of short-lived cabinets, only to find his hopes dashed, efforts wasted, and projects aborted one after another. In the end the revolution was a failure, and it did not make Liang feel vindicated to see it fail for reasons that he had long predicted and analyzed. His seven futile years in national politics caused Liang to reconsider the efficacy of a political revolution and seek other solutions. In December 1918, he quietly left Beijing and a few days later boarded a Japanese ship in Shanghai for the South Pacific to begin a year-long journey across Europe, which was still very much embroiled in the catastrophe inflicted by World War I.

The devastated postwar landscape, together with rampant social crises and the pessimism prevailing among European intellectuals, led to serious modifications in Liang’s understanding of Western modernity. The journey also confirmed Liang’s idea that productive domestic politics ultimately depended on a new political culture. By the time he sailed back to China in 1920, he had concluded that the project of modernity had to be reimagined and completed as a truly global experience. Together with a group of Western-educated scholars, he launched a series of educational and cultural programs as part of a general endeavor to create a syncretic new culture. During this period Liang returned to historiography and focused on developing a systematic methodology. In his thinking history writing in the nationalist tradition gave way to the provocative notion of a global cultural history. Both Liang’s theory and his practice would contribute significantly to historical studies as a modern and independent discipline of knowledge. In 1929, his extraordinary life came to an end when Liang died of kidney failure at the age of 56.

With his heroic efforts at every endeavor he chose to undertake, as Joseph Levenson described them in his pioneering Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China, Liang, a brilliant scholar, journalist, and political figure, contributed heavily to modern Chinese history and helped unwittingly to reveal its meaning.⁴ This unwitting aspect of Liang’s activities and experience, however, should not suggest a lack of consciousness on his part as a man thinking in history; rather, it acknowledges the fact that the meaning of modern Chinese history, or its revelation offered by Liang, may still be an ongoing interpretive process. Indeed, Liang Qichao was always in the process of constructing an intellectual synthesis, of providing a cognitive map, that would make modern Chinese history both intelligible and articulable. The questions he raised and the issues he dealt with were always directly related to the unfolding of modern Chinese history, both as a collective enterprise and an individual engagement. For this reason, Liang was indeed a paradigmatic thinker of his time—the mind of modern China.

Since the publication of Levenson’s work on Liang Qichao (1st ed. 1953, rev. ed. 1959), from which the Mozartian historian would later derive the much grander theme of Confucian China and its modern fate,⁵ several scholarly books, in English as well as Chinese, have been devoted to Liang. These monographs, together with the almost mandatory chapter on or discussion of Liang in all volumes on modern Chinese political and intellectual history, have formed a veritable subfield of Liang studies. The three works that gave form to this subfield and have provided an indispensable basis for this study appeared in 1964 and the early 1970’s; all focus more or less on Liang’s vacillating political thought and intellectual system.⁶

In 1983, the definitive edition of Ding Wenjiang’s much respected Chronological Biography of Liang Qichao (the first draft appeared in Taiwan in 1958) was published in Shanghai.⁷ Three years later, also in Shanghai, a comprehensive chronological bibliography became available. ⁸ The publication of these two crucial reference works in mainland China, however, did not effect a policy change in the official condemnation of Liang Qichao as a reactionary constitutionalist for his opposition to the republican revolution in 1911. As long as affirmation of that revolution constitutes the political identity and legitimacy of the existing regime, both the Communists on the mainland and, to a lesser extent, the Nationalists on Taiwan will continue to cast Liang as a transitional historical figure who was rapidly outmoded, and justifiably rejected, by his own times.⁹ A hegemonic revolutionary culture in mainland China has reduced Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei to synonyms for such negative traits as political myopia, ready compromise of principles, and incapacity for resolute action.

Nonetheless, those two publications in the first half of the 1980’s did indicate a steady revival, both in China and abroad, of scholarly interest in Liang Qichao, which has branched out to include a more systematic examination of his literary and historical thinking.¹⁰ At the same time, Liang’s political ideology has also received renewed attention.¹¹ My study reflects this reassessment of Liang, not merely as a paradigmatic modern Chinese intellectual but also as an imaginative thinker of global significance. With an emphasis on his historical thinking, my re-reading of Liang Qichao relies not so much on new archival research or discovery as on the discourse of modernity as a larger theoretical framework. What I wish to accomplish is as much a reexamination of the emergent nationalist discourse of modernity in turn-of-the-century China as a study of Liang Qichao’s historical consciousness. More specifically, by reconstructing the changes in his conception of history, I wish to show that a global space both inspired Liang’s longing for modernity and eventually led to his critical reconceptualization. Spatiality, or a given mode of determining spatial organization and relationships, offers a new interpretive category for analyzing Liang’s historical thinking.

My exploration of Liang Qichao’s historical consciousness, consequently, ends with the emergence of a consummating spatial turn. Central to my argument is the theoretical assumption that a productive reimagination of modernity has to begin with a differentiating or spatializing operation that has been successfully subordinated and even effaced by the modern ideological valorization of time. To reexamine the myth of the modern, it is necessary to read modern historical writings as strategies on the part of the historian, either explicit or implicit, to configure a temporalized space in which the multiple conflicts and contradictions of the present time are narrated historically and made meaningful. The centrality of a potential and unifying time in modern historical discourse engenders what I will call a global imaginary of identity, often evoked to justify a democratic assertion of political equivalence and universality. Such a revolutionary global imaginary both generates the fundamental dynamic of modernity and gives rise to its lasting dilemma. The modern subjugation of uneven spaces to homogeneous time, or what David Harvey calls the heroic modernist annihilation of space by time,¹² contributes to the subordination and reduction of other historical realities outside Europe and Western modernity. More specifically, this despatialization of history in dominant modern ideologies results in an aporia in nationalist discourse. For nationalism is essentially a discourse organized by a territorial imagination, and yet, for its own political legitimacy, it needs to subscribe to a universal timetable of evolution and change. To overcome this inherent contradiction and its practical difficulties, a global imaginary of difference has to be evoked in postnationalist thinking, and the production of anthropological space, rather than the conquest of historical time, becomes the human enterprise, collective as well as personal.

The movement of my narrative in the present study is therefore punctuated by the three different experiential horizons through which Liang Qichao moved from 1898 to 1920. These horizons also constituted three spatiotemporal regimes, each with its own operating logic. Without doubt, Liang remains one of the few social thinkers and cultural critics in modern China who have encountered and contemplated the question of modernity based on a firsthand experience of a world space. No one has traveled as extensively and responded to his journeys as productively and influentially as Liang did. His flight to Japan in 1898, which increased his physical distance from China, firmly implicated him in modern nationalism and the political space of the nation-state. From this reified nationalist space, he nonetheless celebrated a new global imaginary of identity. For nationalism as the chosen political ideology of change was also based on a universal principle of equality and progress. Then, in 1903, Liang’s extensive travel in North America further helped him chart and differentiate modernity as complex political geography. On his return he looked to monarchical Russia and accepted enlightened absolutism. The institutional, cultural, and historical differences between dynastic China and republican America compelled Liang to ask questions about the possible content of Chinese modernity. Modernity, in other words, could no longer simply be embraced as a universal form. By 1920, at the end of his year-long journey through postwar Europe, Liang finally disengaged himself from an understanding of modernity as progressive temporality. Instead, he discovered a dynamic anthropological space in separate but interacting cultural systems, which became accessible and appreciable only in a new global imaginary of difference.

In Chapter 1, therefore, I trace the development of nationalism in Liang Qichao, in particular its cataclysmic role in the emergence of his new historical thinking. As the promise of a new form of knowledge, the notion of a national history has enormous emancipatory power and generates incomparable utopian longings among silenced and oppressed nations. Nationalism now signifies modernity not only because it explains the arrival of the modern world in terms of national revolution and collective progress but also because nationalist discourse mandates a new spatiotemporal regime. This is the subject of Chapter 2, in which the seminal text of Liang Qichao’s New Historiography receives a contextualizing reading. The central issue is that nationalism as a historical discourse prescribes at once acceptance and rejection of Enlightenment universalism. It becomes increasingly obvious that the reconstructed native or nationalist history surreptitiously embraces as normative the developmental pattern of the West. Nationalist historiography thus introduces a division between its form and anticipated content. Modern historicity, or the controlled use of reflection upon history as a means of changing history, ¹³ also becomes a problematic discourse when geography ceases to be an innocent component.

The next two chapters further develop what V. Y. Mudimbe aptly calls the geography of a discourse. In these chapters, I examine the discourse of national revolution against global political geography. Political modernity in China, just like the modern African thought that Mudimbe analyzes, is a mirror and consequence of the experience of European hegemony.¹⁴ In Chapter 3, I focus on the problematic nature of historical representation and the related question of agency for social change. While narrating separate national revolutions in the hope of obtaining useful historical truth and guidance, Liang confronted the difficult task of generalizing about history. His retracing of the Hungarian independence movement of the 1840’s, the Italian Risorgimento, and especially the French Revolution eventually brought him to see the absence of a historical norm or uniformity. Historical narration kept carrying him back in time and to different national and historical sites. Finally, in the fate of Madame Roland, to Liang’s mind the mother of modern civilization, he reached the limit and was compelled to demythologize a key component of modern nationalism, namely, the form of national revolution. The emancipatory rhetoric of nationalism now demanded a critical rethinking. It was at this moment that the theoretical difficulties of writing a national history began to surface in concrete ideological terms.

In Chapter 4, 1 relate in detail Liang’s discussion of China’s political future in terms of, or against, the experience of the French Revolution. Different interpretations of the French Revolution dictated different political strategies and alliances at the time. Liang’s debate with the Francophile revolutionary Min bao (Min Pao) writers can be read as a contestation of the history of modernity: with two major, if simplified, historical paradigms—French republicanism and German liberalism—the fundamental question was seen as how to envision and eventually implement modernity after the revolution. Through the extensive debate Liang also began to ask a related question: How should we understand China in terms of its own history and confront its own historical continuity? The debate of 1905–7 compelled Liang to reconsider his political and cultural strategies and gave him new insight into the complexity of engineering social transformation.

In Chapter 5, I examine Liang’s new cultural politics in light of his political practices and his poignant critique of Western modernity. His Research Method for Chinese History was a consummation of his rethinking of history, which found its focal expression in his enterprise of a global cultural history. At this historical juncture, Liang Qichao did not reject modernity as such but suggested that it could take other forms and be completed as a truly global enterprise. His notion of an ocean of cultural history and his theory on the importance of representing history as both movement and dissimilarity pointed to a reconceptualization of history as well as modernity. His final step was a global imaginary of difference, which demanded the production of anthropological space as its fundamental operation. Differing from the modernist-rationalist temporalization of history, this new imaginary opens up rather than hierarchizes historical representation, reveals rather than reifies relationships and consequences. Liang’s reaffirmation of spatiality, a critical concept overshadowed by the modern obsession with time and history, made it both necessary and possible for him to redesign the project of modernity. It is for this reason that Liang Qichao, as I suggest in the concluding chapter, remains profoundly contemporary and relevant to a world that is at once modern and postmodern.

1

History Imagined Anew: Liang Qichao in 1902

The year 1902, the fourth year of Liang’s political exile in Japan, witnessed the birth of Liang Qichao the New Historian. It also marked a high point in his career as a giant man of letters. Through his prolific writings, Liang Qichao found a way to make the changes of his time narratable as part of the global history of the arrival of modernity. The central, historicizing narrative was provided by nationalist discourse, which introduced to Liang a new and dynamic spatiotemporal regime.

Liang’s intellectual energy and versatility are abundantly demonstrated in the scores of diverse articles he authored in this one year. They range from expansive essays such as Discourse on the New Citizen and On the General Development of Chinese Scholarship and Thought to more specific studies like A Private Proposal for Financial Reform in China and A Brief History of the Development of Economic Theory. Other indications of his broad interests are his introductions to and biographies of personalities as varied as Darwin, Montesquieu, Kossuth, Mazzini, Descartes, Bentham, Kidd, and Aristotle. Also during this period, Liang wrote political commentaries on current domestic and world affairs and contributed to the development of a nascent reform literature by tirelessly promoting contemporary poetry. His notes on poetry would later be published as the influential Poetic Commentary from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio. All these voluminous writings first appeared in the New Citizen Journal, one of two journals that Liang Qichao operated virtually single-handedly.¹ Meanwhile, for the other journal, New Fiction, he composed, among other things, his major political novel, The Future of New China, and, in keeping with his intense interest in the future as a realm of anticipation, he wrought a rather liberal translation, presumably from Japanese, of Camille Flammarion’s dark La fin du monde (1896). In addition, Liang’s manifesto-like essay on the social function of a new form of fiction overtly stressed the moral content of literary representation and struck the keynote of modern Chinese literature.²

Looking back many years later at this prodigiously productive period, Liang Qichao (speaking of himself in the historical third person) would express a well-deserved pride in his accomplishments: "From that time on Liang once again devoted himself solely to the task of popularizing ideas, publishing the New Citizen Journal, the New Fiction, and other periodicals to expound his ideals and objectives.... The thinking of students for the next twenty years was much influenced by those journals."³ Not only were the ideas expressed fascinatingly new to the public, Liang noted, but his very style had a magical power over readers. It was a new and liberated writing. He interlaced his writings with colloquialisms, verses, and foreign expressions fairly frequently, letting his pen flow freely and without restraint. Writers then hastened to imitate his style, and it became known as the New-Style Writing.⁴

Indeed, at the turn of the century, Liang Qichao’s new-style writing inspired a generation of young and eager Chinese readers, not merely because he demonstrated the possibilities of an innovative and expressive written language, but also because his impassioned writing reflected a cosmopolitan intellectual orientation and signified modernity itself. Through his extensive writings on the new citizen, the new China, and a new historiography, Liang Qichao emphatically turned the new into an engrossing theme and a positive value. The new, or making new, firmly caught his imagination and best expressed his modernist-rationalist confidence and excitement about the future.

This ideological obsession with the new marked Liang’s profound intellectual transformation in the early years of the twentieth century. In exploring various dimensions and implications of the new, he found himself on a different level of knowledge and for the first time seriously confronted the question of history and modernity. A poem titled Self-encouragement from 1901, for instance, documents his heroic determination to embark on this new phase of his life.

Willing to subject myself to thousands of piercing arrows,

I shall always write to guide hundreds of generations.

Determined to advance people’s rights and remove old customs,

I must further my studies to embrace new knowledge.⁵

This Promethean heroism, foreshadowing the pervasive and supremely self-confident optimism and youth mentality of the May Fourth period, established Liang as a spiritual forerunner of what has been termed the Chinese Enlightenment in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Yet the new knowledge that Liang was eager to absorb was specific in content. The new involved a distinct historical vision of the emerging world space. The spatiotemporal horizon of human experience, both personal and collective, was to be reorganized around the modern nation-state, which now necessarily participated in a global imaginary of identity. For this new global imaginary, nationalist discourse, as Liang would soon theorize,