Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao 0804725837, 9780804725835

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

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

Xiaobing Tang

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

CIP data appear at the end of the book

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

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Acknowledgments

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 work-

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ing 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 twentiethcentury China, a man who bravely lived and confronted history. Over the past five years, this book has followed me about and

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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

Contents

Abbreviations xi Introduction: Toward a Geography of the Discourse of Modernity v in 1902 The Nationalist Historian and New Historiography The Nation and Revolution: Narrating the Modern Event Modernity as Political Discourse: Interpreting Revolution The Spatial Logic of the New Culture: Modernity and Its Completion Conclusion: Toward a Production of Anthropological Space

xi 1 11

46 80 117 165 224

Notes

241

Bibliography 271

271

Index 283

28383

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Abbreviations

NPCB

Ding Wenjiang and Zhao Fengtian, eds., Liang Qichao nianpu changbian (Chronological biography of Liang Qichao).

YBSHJ-WJ

Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi heji-wenji (Collected writings from the Ice-Drinker's Studio: collected essays). The number before the colon indicates the volume (juan)\ the number after the colon indicates the page. Book number (ce) is not given.

YBSHJ-ZJ

Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi heji-zhuanji (Collected writings from the Ice-Drinker's Studio: collected works). The number before the colon indicates the volume (juan)', the number after the colon indicates the page. Book number (ce) is not given. A 1962 edition of Yinbingshi wenji (jingjiao ben) (Collected writings from the Ice-Drinker's Studio [condensed edition]), ed. Fang Songjing and Hong Hui, is cited as Yinbingshi wenji.

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

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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

2

Introduction

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 excite-

Introduction

3

ment 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 com-

4

Introduction

muni ties, 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

Introduction

5

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, s 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

6

Introduction

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

Introduction

7

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 ex-

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Introduction

tensive 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

Introduction

9

"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 Pad) 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

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Introduction

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

12

History Imagined Anew

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

History Imagined Anew

13

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, provided the most convincing historical narrative and evocation of political agency. Legitimizing the New According to traditional Chinese calculation, Liang Qichao was 30 years old in 1902. Four years earlier, his name had been on the mostwanted list of the reactionary Qing court, and he had fled to Yokohama, Japan, in the wake of the aborted One Hundred Days Reform. These four anxiety-ridden years in a foreign land brought a new horizon of experience and intellectual excitement to Liang, who until the age of eighteen, when he saw a world map in the colonial port city of Shanghai, had had no idea that there were five continents and many other nations beyond the Middle Kingdom.6 The maps that Liang found in Xu Jiyu's Yinghuan zhilue (A brief account of the maritime circuit) informed him not only of the physical geography of the world but also its political divisions and population.7 In the last years of the nineteenth century, Liang, following his mentor Kang Youwei and drawing on a sprinkling of knowledge of the modern world, had actively contributed to the short-lived elitist drive for institutional reforms, but his forced trip to Japan continued the fundamental intellectual transformation initiated by the world map as a new totalizing discourse.

14

History Imagined Anew

Months after landing in Japan, Liang issued an urgent call to his comrades and compatriots to learn the Japanese language. Now able to read books he had never seen before and to ponder over matters he had never quite thought through, the Mourner of the Times (Aishi ke—Liang's self-description after the frustrated reform) felt almost a physical gratification from his studies: "It was like catching a beam of sunshine in a dark room, or having a cup of warm rice wine when you were starving."8 The smothering "dark room" that Liang now saw crumbling had always been a central image in his perception of the precarious situation of Qing China. To him the whole country resembled an ancient, dilapidated building on the verge of collapse, with its inhabitants happily unaware of the impending catastrophe. Those in power, however, were willing only to make patches here and there rather than undertake overall repairs. It was with this captivating (and perennial) image that, in 1896, Liang Qichao opened his lengthy and programmatic General Discussion of Reforms and drove home the disastrous consequences of failing to implement institutional reforms and adapt to the times.9 Basing his discussion on the "universally acknowledged law of change," supposedly embodied in natural as well as social phenomena, the youthful Liang argued his case with great eloquence and immediately established himself as the most outspoken and readable advocate of the rising reform movement. The starting point of this celebrated document was a supposition that revealed, as Joseph Levenson pointed out, a paradigmatic shift in post-Confucian China, namely, a reconceptualization of China as a finite guojia (nationstate) rather than a boundless tianxia (all under heaven).10 The implications of this cosmological restructuring were still to be grasped and the meaning of a limited and territorial China yet to be fully explored when his escape to Japan placed Liang in a new historical and intellectual landscape. In the series of giant issues with which he was to wrestle, as Robert Scalapino and George Yu observe, "Liang Qichao was a near-perfect representation of the intellectual destined to be born into a narrow, highly traditional environment and thence to move into an ever-wider geographical and cultural arena, confronting troublesome complexities and dizzying changes at each turn. Like every serious Chinese intellectual of his generation, Liang could not avoid comparing China with this new world and attempting to draw the appropriate lessons from it."11

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15

Immersing himself in the new knowledge, Liang Qichao systematically studied social theories and political philosophies from modern Europe and changed, in the words of Philip Huang, "from an essentially Confucian intellectual orientation to that of a modern liberal-nationalist."12 This intellectual transformation, on one level, was very much an acquisition and testing of an alien but invigorating vocabulary and language. One new word Liang started using frequently during this period was wenming (civilization), adopted from the Japanese phrase bummei kaika (generally understood to mean "civilization and enlightenment"), which in Meiji political culture had unmistakable connotations of modernization and of modernity as a new civilization.13 Also, for a while he adopted the Japanese term Shina to refer to China, a coinage that must have enabled a different political and geographical perspective and reinforced his sense of being on a new threshold.14 In his selection of modern Western political thinking through the Japanese filter, on the other hand, Liang showed much purpose and deliberateness. He was, for example, more attracted to writers in the Meiji Enlightenment tradition such as Fukuzawa Yukichi or recent proponents of nationalism like Kato Hiroyuki than to their anti-modern and conservative contemporaries such as Uchimura Kanto or Hazumi Yatsuka. What intrigued Liang even more than the new intellectual landscape, however, was the experience of living in a deeply un-Chinese and change-conscious culture. This direct contact contributed greatly to his understanding of what he believed to be modern civilization. A casual stroll in the Ueno district in Tokyo, for instance, allowed him to witness the ritualistic ceremony of recruiting soldiers. The crowds that followed the newly uniformed soldiers with banners of encouragement appeared to him both proud and happy. To Liang, they amounted to a vivid demonstration of bushido. First amazed and then impressed by a banner he thought read "Pray for Death in War," he came to a perplexing conclusion that the militant Japanese indeed differed from the pacifist Chinese, for whom war was somehow never enjoyable or glorious.13 He would later attribute China's weakness to a lack of military spirit and adventurousness, agreeing in essence with what Ozaki Yukio, a contemporary Japanese liberal thinker, had to say about the effeminate Chinese nation.16 Incidents like this were just as stimulating to Liang as his abundant reading. In August 1899, he began a column called Book of Liberal Writings in his Journal of Disinterested Discussion to record his

16

History Imagined Anew

thoughts on and responses to events, readings, and conversations in Japan. He introduced the column with a direct reference to John Stuart Mill, his first ever: "The Western scholar J. S. Mill once said: In the progress of mankind, there is nothing more important than freedom of conscience, of speech, and of the press. All these three major freedoms I now enjoy, and thus I shall name my writings."17 A refreshing absence of political constraint and the concomitant prospect of unhampered expression gave tremendous impetus to his intellectual development. A happy conflation of "freedom" as a philosophical concept with the political notion of "liberty" in the one Chinese phrase ziyou (jiyit in Nakamura Masanao's translation of Mill's On Liberty, Jiyu no ri [Principle of liberty, 1872], with which Liang apparently was familiar)18 also added much to his enthusiasm about the new world. In his pioneering analysis of Liang Qichao's intellectual development, Joseph Levenson believed that the second phase (1898-1912) was marked by a paradigm shift in Liang's discourse. After his arrival in Japan, the "precarious Confucian-Western structure" that Liang had achieved in the 1890's readily gave way to a history-oriented belief in progress and nationalism, with the result that the binary opposition was no longer constructed between West and China but between the "new" and the "old."19 This intellectual reformulation not only indicates a change in perspective but also suggests that the temporal categories (new versus old), brought into use to generate new historical possibilities, contained and explained the previous spatial mapping (Chinese versus Western). Around 1895 a shift from Chinese learning versus Western learning to old learning versus new learning occurred in general political discussions in China; from this grew the popular notion of engineering a political reform or institutional renewal (weixin, inspired by the Japanese precedent of Meiji ishiri).20 Liang was an active promoter of both institutional reforms and the new learning. The change from "Western learning" to "new learning," to Liang, was largely a strategic move; after all, the concept of "making new" was arguably part of the Confucian tradition. The canonical text the Great Learning, as Liang and others were quick to point out, contains the quintessential phrase "If you can one day make yourself new, make new from day to day, and make new again every day."21 A semantic as well as interpretive appropriation of classical sayings such as this pro-

History Imagined Anew

17

vided the reformist Liang with an initial justification for his Discourse on the New Citizen. But the "new" in the canonical text might appear to be an abstract quality, a natural force that was at the same time universal. The classical presuppositions were quite different from those of Liang's notion of "making new" in modernity, which took hold of him only after his arrival in Japan and had its roots in a distinct historical consciousness. In other words, as Levenson suggested, Liang's conception of the new was predominantly a temporal one and entailed a different spatial imagining. A brief comparison of Liang's 1897 preface to a new collection of essays on practical governance edited by Mai Zhonghua and his own 1902 Discourse on the New Citizen, which contains Liang's most systematic explication of the new as a fundamental value in the modern age and his new cosmopolitanism, will illustrate the difference between the two understandings of the "new." The brief preface of 1897 begins with extensive citation of aphoristic sayings on the idea of making new from canonical texts such as the / Ching, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean. In an intellectual tradition where, to be valid, meaning had to be derived from the established body of a few sacred texts, this ostentatious homage served to legitimize the new writing as yet another exegetic effort at clarifying what was already encoded in the scripture. The new that Liang praised here is therefore substantially deflated as a historical category; instead, the new as well as the old is more of an expression of some omnipotent will and an effect or explanatory cause of dynastic successions. It still resides in the realm of the historia rerum gestarum, governed by an incomprehensible, if willful, destiny. "Making new and remaining old—they have always been the ultimate sources for either prosperous growth or catastrophic adversity," announced Liang. Every form of movement or development, from the rotation of heavenly bodies to the biological phenomenon of breathing to the realm of politics, necessarily contains the twofold process of making new and cleansing the old and stale. Happiness reigns in the blessed land of the new, and the human world stands in a homological relationship to the natural world: "Those who open themselves to the new will prosper and grow strong, but those who confine themselves to the old will diminish and become weak. Such is the natural way; such is also the human way."22 Given the cosmological

18

History Imagined Anew

generalization of the force of the new, the historical process in which the active enterprise of making new should be engaged is inevitably short-circuited. The notion of the new, too, is emptied of any specific content or practical relevance. However, Liang Qichao quickly sensed the danger implicit in turning the idea of making new into a too comfortably general concept and, worse, a too agreeable part of the native cultural heritage. He realized that he faced a theoretical problem concerning the legitimacy of the new knowledge and, more generally, of modernity as a historical threshold. Starting with a painstaking attempt to incorporate the demand for political and social renovation into the existing epistemological order, he came to see that the reforms or changes he advocated were inspired by a knowledge system almost incompatible with the traditional order of things. The very idea of "institutional reform" (bianfa) already suggested a different political approach to the issue of native tradition than that implied in an earlier official effort at containing an ominous foreign presence (yangwu). One of the conceptual novelties that challenged the organizing logic of analogy, or an explanatory "imagination of resemblance,"23 as Liang gradually discovered, happened to be the modern discourse of history or historicity. Therefore, in the 1897 essay, we see an abrupt insertion of a historical narrative that reclaims human agency and responsibility for making new in history. After concluding the first part of the essay with the statement that making new is the natural as well as the human way to reach perfection, Liang Qichao switched to the historical experience of the West. "Furthermore, it is not true that the Great West is now wealthy and powerful, stronger than all the other continents, because Heaven finds its particular favorite among people there. I once made a study of this situation and discovered that everything started with Bacon, the English gentleman." Francis Bacon, proclaimed Liang, first made it mandatory to reward renovation and creation. As a result, "new laws and reason, new instruments and technology, new knowledge and institutions" all followed each other and made a daily difference. In Liang's fairly dramatic description, "within a day all the old laws in the country were changed, within ten days all the old laws in the world were changed. No instrument was not modified, no knowledge was not renewed, and then there came into being a new world."24 Admittedly, Liang's knowledge of the West was fragmentary at the time, and his characterization was more of a fiction or a political fan-

History Imagined Anew

19

tasy that expressed his own wishes. Yet this brief reference also reveals his initial fascination with the extraordinarily productive power that modern technology and social organization had released. Contrary to this new world that had emerged in the West through an active making new, China, "the so-called ancient country of civilization, for 2,000 continuous years and through 24 dynasties, has always had the same government, knowledge, and tradition. Even though a toddler may already be reciting the Great Learning, the way to 'make new the people,' however, has always been either ignored or regarded as irrelevant, by common people and knowledgeable scholars alike."25 With the presence of a different and developed West, Liang could at last criticize and repudiate the recalcitrant native tradition as a cumulative betrayal of its original spirit or potential. The task of making new amounted to a return to the essence of tradition as a historical formation. At this point, Liang concluded that the new was a historical category that should overcome the division between China and the West. "Some conservative morons are still screaming: 'The Western way is to seek for the new, which China should not imitate.' Do not these people know that our ancestors would despise us most if we stay unchanged and conservative?"26 Liang's rhetorical detour here—starting with a return to the primary texts of the native culture, swerving to include a few quick references to the Western example, and then arriving at a radical denunciation of the inherited tradition—was a standard practice among contemporary reform-minded intellectuals, virtually the last generation of Chinese gentry-literati to reach intellectual maturity after dutifully immersing themselves in texts of the Confucian tradition. The textual breaks and strategies we find in Liang's essay are symptomatic of the cultural predicament of the time. Commenting on the intellectual paradigm of the late Qing period, Wang Ermin observes that many intellectuals shared a Renaissance-like interest in classical texts. These scholars did not study the canonical texts entirely for the purpose of smuggling in their own ideas, a practice at which Kang Youwei was a master. Neither did they aim at conserving the tradition at all costs. Instead, they were trying on the one hand to "rethink the value of the native culture" and on the other to "pioneer, now equipped with a substantial knowledge of the outside world, new paths of creation."27 Significantly, it was in this 1897 preface that Liang Qichao indicated his plan to expound the notion of "making new the people." By

20

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the time he wrote the first part of his Discourse on the New Citizen in 1902, some of his theoretical premises had undergone profound changes. First of all, the violent end to the reform movement and his subsequent escape to Japan prompted Liang to call for an uncompromising abolition of the old order.28 One of the more radical essays he wrote in these years of "destructionism" focused on the issue of Confucianism: Should the Chinese preserve and exalt the Confucian doctrine (Kong jiao) as an article of faith, or should they instead drop the whole problem as a false one and ask another question? Liang's answer was predictable. "Judging the whole situation from my present perspective and with intelligence," Liang began his famous essay on the question of Confucianism by offering a halfhearted apology for his radical position, "I believe what we should try to do from now on is simply to preserve the country."29 Not only was the attempt to institutionalize Confucianism as a quasi-religious practice theoretically unsound and practically impossible, but it was also detrimental to intellectual creativity and fundamentally contradictory to what Confucius symbolized, namely, historical thinking. Priority should therefore be given to developing the nation as a modern political institution rather than count on a systematized Confucianism for cultural protection. Also in this essay Liang Qichao suggested a context-oriented method of reading canonical texts. The past has its own validity as a historical reality, just as the present should be fully recognized as having its own specificity. A text from the past, be it by Confucius or any other saint, is relevant only to its own time, but this does not diminish its historical significance.30 With his commitment to active destruction and making new, Liang regarded it as crucial to discard the conventional metaphorical way of thinking in which one always tried to find a similarity between different things. He determinedly rejected the desperate effort by traditionalists to hold on to a cultural identity and continuity by fabricating resemblances between Christianity and Confucianism, or between Western learning and the native tradition. "What 1 despise most is the pretentious and spineless scholars who love to compare Western learning to Chinese learning. On the surface this generates new knowledge, but in fact it is mere conservatism, brewing only intellectual slavery." He then made the wellknown pronouncement: "Faith should protect people and not be protected by people."31 Liang's changed attitude toward Confucianism, and traditional

History Imagined Anew

21

culture, reflected his new historical consciousness and nationalist ideology. He took pride in the fact that a devout defender of the Confucian system had become an enemy to those who wished to ossify Confucianism into a religion. His new sociopolitical thinking demanded a fresh mode of historical comparison and reorientation. Even in his writing, contextual analysis and reasoning more and more frequently replaced metaphorical generalization.32 The crucial question, for Liang, had now shifted from seeking legitimacy for reform in the past, or within the vocabulary of the native tradition, to opening up history to a fulfilling future. This shift was part of Liang's intellectual transformation and constituted the theoretical premises of Discourse on the New Citizen. Whereas the new historical knowledge gave him a much more plausible explanation for China's predicament, the influence of classical Western liberalism made him realize that a new citizenry with different values, especially a modern attitude toward the public good and political participation, lay at the root of any successful nation-building effort. The two dominant themes of this lengthy treatise are therefore nationalism and liberalism. Nationalism, as Liang now understood it, had been the central motor of modern history for the past four hundred years, and "no less than the ultimate cause for all the modern nations." As nationalism triumphed and gradually captured the imagination of all people from different countries, there came into being modern nation-states; this eventually led to imperialism because national boundaries soon proved a hindrance to national development.33 Liberalism, on the other hand, provided Liang with a systematic program for comprehensive political and social reform, whose end result would be a nation of new, autonomous, and conscientious citizens. Since nationalist ideology predetermined the well-being of the nation as an overwhelmingly important goal, Liang projected the "new citizen" as a self-conscious and functioning member of the modern nation-state. It has been pointed out that in Liang Qichao's political thinking nationalism invariably overrides liberalism, because the Confucian belief in fundamental harmony between the private and the public, individual rights and collective interests, persisted and led him to prioritize the group and the nation,34 and because his main concern was to resist foreign imperialism. The very concept of making new the people nevertheless suggests a much more complex relationship between Liang's nationalism and

22

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his liberalism. For although it can be argued that Liang's nationalist concerns are the precondition for his interest in liberal values, it is also obvious that his conception of an ideal international community consisting of modern nation-states derives from the basic liberal idea of equal rights and autonomy. His nationalist project, in other words, is in a difficult and necessary relation to his liberal ideology because his new citizen is expected to be a member of the world and the nation simultaneously. "The significance of the formulation of the ideal of the new citizen in 1902," as Hao Chang points out, "is not confined to the emergence of a full-fledged notion of a nation-state; it also signified a new view of world order which imparted some meaning and coherence to a political reality which the Chinese people had long known but with which they had never come to terms."35 The new that Liang was now able to explicate in Discourse on the New Citizen, therefore, is not merely a historical and philosophical necessity; it also implies an elitist political agenda. A defining feature of modern elite nationalism, as Levenson perceptively suggested, is the belief that "nationalism had to be preached first by men who knew the world, at least more of the world than 'provincials' would ever know."36 Elite nationalism would ultimately accomplish its mission of renovation by making people aware of the new world order and capable of representing themselves politically. It therefore endorsed an orderly and controlled program of reform, for it ultimately modeled the new sphere and institutions of political authority on modern Western precedents. In this new sphere of public administration, as Partha Chatterjee observes of the nationalist elite in colonial India, "nationalism insisted on eradicating all signs of colonial difference by which the colonized people had been marked as incorrigibly inferior and therefore undeserving of the status of self-governing citizens of a modern society."37 At this stage, a global imaginary of identity underlay the discourse of nationalism; the nationalist insurgence and claim to history had to begin with an insistence on similarity, equivalence, and the right to participate. As a result, the traditional and the popular, both denounced as antithetical to the modern by elite nationalism, had to be superseded by a new national form of political power that, however, could be embodied only in the modern state and its centralized administration. This political predilection decided the statist inclination in Liang Qichao's reform-oriented nationalism. In Discourse on the New Citizen, for example, besides a preliminary definition of mod-

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23

ern nationalism, a whole section is devoted to guojia sixiang (literally, "idea of the nation-state") and Liang's discussion of the specific content of national consciousness. The explicit ideologies of nationalism and liberalism supporting Discourse on the New Citizen find their representation in the world map. In the introductory remarks, a modern world map, or the new totalizing vision of the globe, helps situate the historical present and establish the new meaning system. Of the thousands of societies that have existed since human history began, Liang poses the rhetorical question, "How many remain intact and own a color on the map of the five continents? No more than a hundred and a dozen. Of these one hundred and a dozen countries, how many now stand as a world power and will be able to survive in the world of evolution? No more than a half-dozen."38 This initial spatial conceptualization, discussed at greater length below, introduces at once difference and simultaneity and turns space into a historical category. It effectively engenders Liang's modern historical consciousness and renders essential validity to nationalism, a territory-bound historical discourse. It also directly images the nationalist concept that the nation is as much a geographical as a political entity. For Liang, therefore, the urgent task of renovating the people and building the nation consists of developing a collective political consciousness and claiming a national space on the contemporary world map. This explains why Liang defines nationalism primarily as a political discourse, and national consciousness as a form of spatial consciousness. In an independent modern nation-state with a democratic political system rather than an aristocratic or despotic one, Liang writes, the people are expected to assume responsibilities in determining the destiny of the country. To depend on a wise and benevolent emperor is nothing less than to give up one's own political rights and autonomy. "The evil habit of counting on others and never on oneself, expecting others rather than oneself to be responsible, abundantly explains why reform has not succeeded in China.. . . With four hundred million people all counting on others, by what means will the country stand on its own?"39 To develop political awareness and capacity, then, is not to impose on people externally; rather, it is to help them adopt new attitudes and discover themselves as responsible citizens of the nation-state. It is practicing self-renovation, becoming conscious of one's own public obligations. In terms of Liang Qichao's newly acquired philosophical vocabulary, it is to enjoy "free-

24

History Imagined Anew

dom," a modern value of the public rather than the private realm. His brief entry "On the crime of giving up freedom" in Book of Liberal Writings reads, "If no one in this world will give up his freedom, there will be no one who will intrude on another's freedom Each and every human being is free to the extent of respecting another person's freedom."40 Similarly, in terms of international relations and geopolitics, those who talk about protecting others are in fact impinging on others' rights, and those who expect protection from others are abandoning freedom.41 Freedom, to Liang's mind, is a great privilege enjoyed only by an autonomous subject who holds fast to his own territory of sovereignty. Unless a nation of such individuals is cultivated, a modern state will remain as remote as ever. This is, then, the internal or national aspect of the renovation of the people, which is largely a program inspired by liberalism for instituting new cultural values and practices such as patriotism, adventurousness, civic virtues, and political participation. Economic development and social equity become concerns because they may directly contribute to the well-being of the nation. In Liang's proposal to nationalize new norms of social behavior and moral standards, however, the new citizen is affirmed for the most part for his public and clearly masculine qualities, whereas the domestic or private sphere is far from explicitly related to the collective task of nation-building. Nationalism as a comprehensive program for social and cultural reform is a masculine discourse not so much because it purposely ignores women—in fact, Liang touched on the question of women and domestic labor while analyzing the composition of the national economy in Discourse on the New Citizen**—as because the perceived priority of nationalism is mass mobilization by means of a unitary political discourse and because the new public domain was still in formation and had yet to assert itself and adjust its relation to the private sphere. Liang Qichao was forced, however, to confront this issue soon enough. By 1903, he found it necessary to add a specific section on "private virtues" to Discourse on the New Citizen because, he explained, the new public virtues should not be practiced at the expense of basic codes of conduct such as personal integrity and self-discipline.41 By then Liang had grown much concerned with an apparent disregard for the moral content of social life that was often excused by political radicalism, and he turned to the traditional private sphere for balance and re-

History Imagined Anew

25

straint. This concern with personal moral accountability would resurface later in Liang's objection to a massive social revolution. In another section, Liang offers a more nuanced discussion of the content of the new. Two aspects of the process are indispensable and interdependent. "On the one hand, it is to purify what one already has and to renew it; on the other, it is to acquire what one does not have so as to make new. If either one is missing, there will be no success." To develop nationalism, explains Liang, involves mainly the first aspect of refining the national heritage, but to keep alive the national spirit means more than a conservative notion of keeping intact what there is. "Take a tree, for instance; if there are no new buds every spring, in no time it will wither away; or take the example of a well, if there is no fresh water coming in every moment, in no time it will dry up." Like a tree, a blooming nation absorbs nutritious sustenance from sources other than itself so as to extend itself. The dialectic of the old and the new determines that the new need not be totally antithetical to the old because these two categories, when not taken as absolutes, describe a continuous process of renewing. Even the act of "preserving" can be creative and contribute to the development of the new, and "conservatism" may even have a positive impact. "What worries me is not conservatism per se, but that no one practices genuine conservatism. What is genuine conservatism if not to refine what there already is?"44 Liang's redefinition of conservatism as a transformative appropriation of the past suggests a historicist approach that recognizes a continuity denied by both the antiConfucian iconoclasts and Confucian traditionalists. For Liang the modern nationalist, history, or the process of becoming, now holds the absolute value and ultimate truth of human experience. To change and act upon history is therefore to possess and create history as well as value. A second aspect of making new the people has to do with meeting the challenge of the modern world system of nation-states. The unprecedented and repeated threats of "national imperialism" to the sovereignty of China, in Liang's mind, made it abundantly clear that a Chinese nationalism must be developed to resist foreign aggression and encroachment. "Europe has evolved and the world has progressed since the sixteenth century for no reason other than the enormous power of nationalism. . . . National imperialism, an outgrowth of nationalism, seeks to expand the territory of one nation

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and colonize other nations. By means of either military force, or trade, or industry, or the church, every effort is coordinated and directed by the national government." Because what stands behind imperialist expansion is a whole nation rather than a number of ambitious individuals, it is up to an entire nation to mobilize and defend itself. The renovation project, in other words, has as its goal the assertion of the subject/agent position of a nation in the period of imperialist colonization. "Therefore in today's situation if we want to counteract the national imperialism of all those world powers so as to save the country from total catastrophe, we must develop a nationalism of our own. In order to institute nationalism in China, there is no other way than to renew the people."45 The significant achievement of Discourse on the New Citizen is not so much Liang's systematic elaboration of his nationalist beliefs and liberal programs, which formed the intellectual matrices of his reformism during this period. Rather, it is the fact that nationalism (national sovereignty pitted against imperialism and colonialism) and liberalism (domestic political reform and cultural transformation) are subsumed within the single notion of making new the people. The inherent tensions and conflicts between a collective, national identity and the liberal notion of individuality, however enfeebled the latter may be, are overcome by the exciting prospect of action, of making new. Liang's call for national renovation, therefore, introduces a new historical consciousness in which time as historical process becomes a revolutionary resource. History in the form of temporal unfolding now moves in the same direction as the dynamic process of making new, which effects at once an overcoming of the historical past and a claiming of the future. Embedded in this valorization of the new and temporality are a modernist conviction and an ethics that "seem ever more insistently to locate the value of an action in the fact of its making possible other choices and other actions, thus opening up a future."46 For all his careful efforts at incorporating traditional wisdom, Liang's call for the "new citizen" and "making new" articulated a fundamentally modern, revolutionary aspiration that would be echoed repeatedly in twentieth-century China, most notably in the celebratory myth of a "New China" during the latter half of the century. The inner dynamics, and the logical conclusion, of Liang Qichao's Discourse on the New Citizen is a modernist ideology of progressive time, through which human history becomes an active evocation of meaning. Liang's belief in the positivity of progress and change is

History Imagined Anew

27

concretized and also heightened in the vision of people being made new. The nation and the new individual (citizen) separately have the utmost importance, and they are simply different moments or expressions of the grand modern drama of history fulfilling itself on a national stage. The various aspects of a new culture and new citizenry, such as the notion of rights, civic virtues, and the spirit of adventure, that Liang discusses in the subsequent lengthy sections are to a large extent concrete effects and consequences of this historical spectacle. The perceived dilemmas of modernity, the polarizing tendencies of the modern world system of nation-states, are optimistically overcome and resolved in and through the action of making new. Indeed, a central image in Liang's concept of history during this period was the "great stage" of world history onto which China had been thrown. This sense of dramatic action or historical spectacle is directly related to Liang Qichao's modernist understanding of the new or making new as a collective and conscious intervention in human history. Before, within the boundary of China, the stage of history may have been the central plains between the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers. America and Australia, in other parts of the world, were also once new territories for European colonialists to stage their drama of expansion and conquest.47 The world as one great stage, however, was an apt metaphor for the modernist belief that human history had arrived at a new horizon of purposeful and representable totality. Such a spatial configuration demanded that previous concepts and practices of the self as well as of the community be readjusted in terms of a new scenario of intelligibility and a new field of relations and significance. Not only was the modern "period of transition" an immense stage for national heroes of all sorts, but China as a nation also had to project its own identity and image onto this great spectacle of world space. With this overwhelming sense of the world as a theatrical spectacle, traditional Confucian universalism, as Levenson observed in an extraordinarily seminal essay, is suddenly revealed as embarrassingly provincial and self-complacent.48 A new cosmopolitanism arises when the world space is accepted as the basis for a new cosmological order and cultural logic. It will turn into a revolutionary ideology when this world space is also perceived as prone to change, dynamic, and historical. For this revolutionary cosmopolitanism, the world is a stage, a historical spectacle insofar as it demands action and transformation

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that contribute to a self-conscious and purposeful staging. Through such staging, human history itself will become a spectacular unfolding. In other words, the world as a stage is fundamentally a metaphor that grows out of a temporalization of space, a dramatization in terms of a potential and progressive time. Indispensable to Liang's "great stage" of history was a cosmic emplotment, a fulfilling vision that reconciled human action with the destiny of history. In his imagination, Liang effectively brought together the modernist desire for temporal homogeneity and the equally revolutionary acceptance of world space. China as great drama has to yield a historical spectacle whose very spectacularity confirms its truth and the truth of the modern world. More than an antagonistic "joining the world against the world," as Levenson suggested, this grandiose vision of a spectacular arrival served as the motivation for Liang's nationalist discourse. Liang expressed this dramatic vision most forcefully in The Future of New China, where he foresaw a prosperous and cosmopolitan Great Republic of China (Da Zhonghua minzhu guo) by the year 1962. The 60 years between 1902 and 1962, according to the prophecy found in the novel, formed a "most decisive threshold" leading to either destruction or renaissance. "It was also a grand drama where all the major forces came into a volatile play."49 Evocation of the future enabled an anxiety-ridden grasp of the present as historically meaningful; moreover, the spectacular future would unfold only when the national space was reaffirmed as such and simultaneously partook of a universal time. The metaphor of the great stage and historical spectacle best captures Liang's new historical consciousness in that it suggests an effort at reconciling universal, modern time with particular, national space. To stage a historical spectacle of arrival first means to make new and modernize the nation, a project that will affirm the position as well as the value of the nation in the world space. The new in Liang's historical imagination, in other words, signifies a potential time and a better future. This future is nevertheless already present, for it becomes conceivable in terms of the global imaginary of identity to which nationalism must subscribe in order to obtain a selfimage. For this reason, the project of renovating the people gives concentrated, political expression to the modern historical consciousness, which can also be described as an ideological consciousness of time. To further understand this modern historical consciousness, its formation, and its function, we will look at Liang Qi-

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29

chao's knowledge of and response to modern Western historiography. We will also examine his thoughts on geography, which to him was part of modern historical discourse, and see how Liang the New Historian found it necessary to temporalize space and turn it into a historical category. History and Geography as New Knowledge Essential to Liang Qichao's experience and understanding of the modern world was a historical discourse that helped make connections and explain differences. History, or the new knowledge of history as a vehicle for meaningful comparison, systematically redirected his intellectual energy and imagination. His entire frame of reference was transposed and with it his approach to formulating problems. Just as Liang's knowledge of Western social theories and political and economic systems was greatly indebted to the translations and explications of his Japanese contemporaries, so his historical thinking was deeply influenced by the development of modern historical discourse in Meiji Japan. Yet since Liang's intellectual as well as emotional investment remained firmly fixed on China and its current political crisis, and since his exposure to new theories was more selective than comprehensive, there was a slight time lag between new developments in Japanese political and social thinking and Liang's response to them. The Japanese experience became relevant only when he encountered a similar problem or situation among his own concerns. When he first arrived in Japan, for instance, Liang was greatly inspired by the universalistic discourse of bummei kaika from the early Meiji period. However, his arrival came almost a decade after the promulgation of the Meiji constitution, drafted by Ito Hirobumi and indelibly influenced by conservative German political ideas.50 The Japanese had also followed the German model conscientiously in law and economics by the turn of the century and placed much emphasis on developing a centralized and powerful state.51 Liang's arrival also followed quite a few years after the "civil code controversy" that in the early to mid-1890's marked a transition in Japan's attitude toward Western legal and institutional forms of social administration. "The controversy over the new code had many facets," as Hirakawa Sukehiro observes, "but in general terms it can be viewed as a conflict

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between the universalistic, theoretical legal thought espoused by French jurists of natural law and a more particularistic and empirical set of ideas advanced by proponents of historicist legal thought who drew their arguments from English and especially German traditions."52 During the 1890's, persistent critiques of industrialization and Western institutions notwithstanding, modernization became the dominant ideology in Japan, and a conservative monarchical constitutionalism rather than radical republicanism became the mainstream in Japanese political discourse. The latter development Liang once incisively characterized as the replacement of the French school of political thought (Rousseau being its singular representative) that had prevailed in the first twenty years of Meiji Japan by the model of a Bismarckian German state.53 Although early on Liang showed some interest in the Meiji constitution and called on the Qing court to follow the Japanese example,54 he soon found in nationalism a much more convincing political discourse and began advocating radical "destructionism." By 1902, however, he would take a closer look into the German liberal tradition in his political novel, The Future of New China, and virtually recreate a Chinese Ito Hirobumi in the central character Huang Keqiang. As discussed later in this study, the importation of a Bismarckian state-centered conservatism would become pertinent only when Liang himself engaged in a series of debates with Chinese republican revolutionaries after 1903. In the field of history, where the bummei kaika enterprise had probably scored its first and most consequential victories in advocating Western modernity in Meiji Japan, the conservative challenge had also grown stronger and much more systematic. "By the Meiji twenties (1887-96), Japanese historians' initial enthusiasm for a philosophy of history that implicitly imposed a uniformity based in European progress had waned, and they began to turn toward a Japanese and Asian past."55 More specifically, the emergence of toyoshi (history of the Orient / East Asia) as a new discipline and body of knowledge in the early 1890's signaled the maturing of a nationalist consciousness and a prideful "return to Japan." This move toward a more affirmative cultural nativism was also mirrored in a new intellectual interest in the positivist historiography of the Rankean school. Yet the distancing of Japan from the Asian mainland implied in the creation of toyoshi seemed to interest Liang less than did the

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emancipatory discourse of bummei kaika. Indeed, general enlightenment and the legitimation of the modern were his overriding concerns and ideological commitments, and the calculated nativist move in toyoshi appeared to be no more than a logical consequence of enlightenment.56 In the lengthy article "Guidelines to Japanese Books" (1902), Liang gave an account of the ten subjects that constituted compulsory "general knowledge" in Meiji Japan: ethics, Japanese and Chinese, foreign languages, history, geography, mathematics, natural sciences, physics and chemistry, law, and economics. He began by commenting positively on the modern concept of ethics in Japan—the much revised civil code had finally been enacted in 1898—as comprehensive and much needed. Then Liang listed a number of reference books, including classics by such authors as Aristotle and Kant as well as more modern titles, both Japanese and Western. In the next section, on the subject of history, Liang supplied a longer and carefully annotated bibliography of history books then in wide use. The structure of historical knowledge that he found in these books was to be instrumental to his own approach to writing history. Taken together, all the history textbooks in Japan can be divided into eight different categories: (1) world history (including Western history [xiyang shi, seiyo shi]); (2) history of East Asia [dongya shi, toyoshi] (including Chinese history); (3) Japanese history; (4) history of different Western countries; (5) miscellaneous histories; (6) theory of history; (7) historiographical methodology; (8) biographies.57

Although Liang discussed only the first three groups in the "Guidelines," he mentioned some 50 different history works and over 100 volumes in total, all of which he apparently had not only read carefully but also appraised critically. Among the more significant volumes are Jules Michelet's Histoire du xixe siecle, Frangois-PierreGuillaume Guizot's Histoire de la civilisation en France, Karl Ploetz's then-influential Auszug aus der alten, mittelalterlichen und neueren Geschichte (translated as General History of the World by Wada Mankichi), Fujita Toyohachi's Toyoshi, Ariga Nagao's history of imperial Japan, and Taguchi Ukichi's two short histories of Japanese and Chinese civilization. This article reveals some meaningful changes in Liang Qichao's conception of history or, rather, an indication of his preparation for a new nationalist history. Indeed we see evidence of a strenuous but

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rapid process by which Liang came to grips with the various implications and functions of history writing in the modern age. At the outset, Liang categorically emphasized the importance of historical knowledge. History, being the most fundamental part of a general education and knowledge, provides a solid basis for pursuing other fields. "It is absolutely necessary not only to know well the significant facts of all the countries in the past thousands of years and the progress of civilization therein, but also to understand their causes as well as consequences."58 But the positive knowledge to be obtained from a study of history was placed in doubt almost immediately. The moment he opened a world history, Liang wrote, he was stricken by the blatant bias and incompleteness of its narrative scope. "What the Japanese call 'world' or 'general' histories are in fact merely Western histories," he complained. The myth of objectivity as well as the claim of universality in history writing was critically challenged when he realized how aggressively Eurocentric the "world histories" were. "The Westerners are so self-important that they always believe they have possession of the whole world. Because of this complacency, a story of an Aryan race that migrated westward to either prosper or wither away is very often erroneously entitled 'History of the World.' "39 Liang's contemporary, the noted Japanese historian and "synthesizer of mid-Meiji ideas" Shiratori Kurakichi would express the same dismay in a different context (1906): "Although such books bear the titles of world or global history [sekaishi, bankokushi], in actuality they are no more than the record of the rise and fall of European countries. The affairs of East Asia are virtually neglected."60 Understandably, even more frustrating to Liang, who was diligently perusing volume after volume of historical accounts, was the complete omission of nations such as China and Japan from so-called world history. Most offensive to him was the assertion of the early Meiji historian Tameyuki Amano, in slavishly adopting the style and terminology of Western historiography, that none of the Oriental nations qualified for inclusion in world history. "This might be acceptable in Japan, but in our country, China, how can we be expected to swallow this?"61 What Liang found unacceptable in this tradition of nineteenthcentury historiography, therefore, was the outright exclusion of other cultural traditions and spatiotemporal entities from the master narrative of European modernity. Yet he managed not to become ab-

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sorbed in reactive outrage at his country's deletion from history. Instead he rationalized and even concurred with this exclusion by reading it as the inevitable consequence of the historical condition of modernity. He was therefore sympathetic, for instance, toward the recent Japanese enterprise of differentiating a valid toyoshi from both a dominant seiyoshi and an authentic history of Japan. The nationalist implications of a not-so-subtle insertion of Japanese presence between East (toy5) and West (seiyo) did not escape Liang Qichao. He noted curtly that there would be much overlap between what Japanese called toyoshi and a history of China. He would later decide that the abundance of toyoshi in Japan testified to the fact that the main force in Asian history was the Chinese race, whose impact on the region's history was analogous to that of the Aryan race on world history.62 Also, as mentioned above, he did not contest the Japanese usage of Shina, instead of the more traditional Chugoku, as a reference to China, a change that was emblematic of a rising nationalist pride.63 "The key to educating the nation," so commented Liang on the thriving of historical studies in Japan, "is national history. It is therefore understandable that the Japanese take their history as the most important discipline."64 Of greater impact at the time, however, was Liang's observation that Western historians usually divided history into four periods: ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary. This periodization was convenient and useful because it not only made it possible to study history in greater detail but also, more directly, introduced the notion of progressive discontinuity. It explained why, to Liang's mind, almost all contemporary histories of the nineteenth century were filled with accounts of national conflicts and reorganizations. With discontinuity, in the form of distinct historical periods, now inscribed into the evolutional continuum of history, the exclusion of China could even be surreptitiously turned into a source of pride and aspiration. China was left out of modern history not because it was insignificant or marginal, but rather because it had declined only in the modern age. The lack of synchronicity between the history of premodern China and that of the modern world made China both unique and, much more important, susceptible to the same temporal scheme and historical progress. Thus Liang could articulate his confidence in the universality of the modern age: "Today's Europe has been in a period of transition for the last two hundred years, but now it enters a time

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of stagnation; China, on the other hand, has been caught in a period of stagnation for thousands of years, and now it is time for transition."65 Two historical projections, both subscribing to the universal law of progress and development, were contrasted and yet related on a global scale. Liang fully grasped the significance of historiographical periodization in terms of defining a nationalist ideology and geopolitics. Through macroscopic periodization, he put in historical perspective China's temporary falling behind and at the same time made it appear no less than a preparation for China's necessary, if not even more glorious, reentry into world history. The significance of grasping modernity as a general "period of transition," a historical threshold that every nation is expected to pass, is far-reaching. At the same time it is legitimated as a universal experience that occurs as naturally and irresistibly as time itself, modernity is also relocated, no longer as a specifically Western property, but as a world-historical moment that fulfills itself only in various bounded geographical spaces. This is the temporalization of space that lies at the core of a nationalist imagination, a "new vision of calendrical time and limited, but detailed space."66 It is a vision in which time and space play different roles but have to be unified for the vision to be viable in the first place. Liang endorsed this nationalist temporalization of space when he enumerated all the nations such as England, France, and Italy that had sailed across the turbulent modern transitional period. Two nations still in the middle of crossing, according to Liang, were Russia and China; he compared the latter to a boat just launched in stormy waters.67 Nationalism, as a historicizing narrative of modernity, provided Liang with a useful ideology for change. It gradually replaced what Levenson called a syncretic culturalism largely couched in traditional values, whose foundation was an ahistorical universalism. It also rendered less compelling Liang's perennial search for an equivalence between Western and Chinese historical experience and heritage, as Levenson's reading suggests is the case.68 Even though nationalist discourse implies a subordination of various particular spatialities to a universal time, Liang Qichao the modernist-rationalist was willing, at least at this stage, to accept it with its emancipating potentials and as a useful ideology for collective action. In announcing that nationalism was the most promising doctrine of the times, Liang wrote in 1900, "Today's Europe, every single part of it, has benefited from nothing

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35

so much as from nationalism. Read a history of the nineteenth century and you will understand that those who initiated this idea have achieved no less than Emperor Yu."69 Nationalist ideology not only made modernity a legitimate concern and subject of study for Liang Qichao but also formed the dynamic core of his historical consciousness. For it is at this point that history as the res gestae (events and happenings that constitute human experience) and history as the historia remm gestarum (account or narrative of those events and happenings) are brought together and placed into a causal relationship. The significance of this conflation is first seen in historiographical periodization as an interpretive reading. As Georg Lukacs remarked about the emergence of historical consciousness in Europe, the modern periodization of history resulted from the political demand of the French Revolution that the inner conflict between social forces be represented as the ultimate cause of human history. In this new attitude toward history, which replaced the Enlightenment understanding of history as an ahistorical struggle between universal law and feudal-absolutist unreason, history itself was made "the bearer and realizer of human progress." From this revolutionary concept arose "the first attempt at a rational periodization of history, an attempt to comprehend the historical nature and origins of the present rationally and scientifically."70 This new historical discourse, through which representation of the historical past constitutes an intervention in the historical present, also marks the emergence of what Anthony Giddens calls "historicity" in modernity—"the controlled use of reflection upon history as a means of changing history." Modern nationalism as a political ideology, Giddens points out, involves "the articulation of 'historicity' in relation to planned or actual trends of social change."71 The classic instance of such a conceptual transformation of "history" into "historicity" in modern Chinese intellectual history may be Kang Youwei's revolutionary pamphlet Confucius as a Reformer (Kongzi gaizhi kao), even though historical commentary has long been part of the native historiographical tradition. The thrust of Kang's little book, circulated among his disciples in the mid-1890's, was to "convert Confucianism into a philosophy of reform," specifically for the purpose of rationalizing institutional changes.72 For Liang Qichao, access to modern historicity first involved a critical rejection of traditional annals-style historiography. In his "Guidelines to Japanese books," Liang pointedly criticized a history of China writ-

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ten by the Japanese historians Ichimura Sanjiro and Takigawa Kametaro. The narrative in their six-volume account developed merely along the lines of successive dynasties, "without any specific structure." The absence of a causal narrative that separated historical representation from the cyclical successions of dynasties became a focal point in Liang's criticism of traditional historiography. There history was reduced to a chronicle of events, devoid of either causality or motivation, and shorn of practical relevance as such. But Liang's comments also had a general message: China is one of the five countries that have mothered civilization in the world, and its culture has continuously developed for thousands of years. This is indeed something to be proud of, but the progress and transformation this civilization went through has never been narrated historically. The reason is probably that the Chinese mind knows only the dynasty and not society as a whole, only the powerful and not civilization itself.73

The resolute repudiation of chronicle-style history writing would be Liang's first move toward a new historical discourse. Narrating "historically" the past of a great civilization or nation means more than just compiling the facts; it means reorganizing the past as a rational, collective experience around a reinvented agency.74 In short, history writing has to be analytical and reveal the causal relationship among historical events and conditions. It should also, concluded Liang, have as its aim the creation and reinforcement of a national identity. Insisting that the Chinese could not wait for the Japanese to compose a detailed Chinese history, Liang pointed out that "national history for one nation is that with which to cultivate the national spirit and promote patriotism."" This was the primary motivation behind his writing of the much more systematic "New Historiography" in the same year, 1902. To "cultivate the national spirit" in an age of rising nationalismLiang Qichao's predominant goal—means a concentrated, often elitist, effort to consolidate the nation as a self-conscious political unity in order to enable it to participate in the modern world system. It involves codifying and institutionalizing the cultural and the political, the historical and the territorial, dimensions of human experience, all for the purpose of developing a modern nation-state. National unity or the modern state, as Nicos Poulantzas remarks in analyzing the temporal and spatial matrices underlying the formation of modern capitalist state, "becomes historicity of a territory and territorializa-

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tion of a history—in short, a territorial national tradition concretized in the nation-state; the markings of a territory become indicators of history that are written into the state."76 Both history and territory, as potent symbolic resources, have first to be appropriated by nationalist discourse and then institutionalized by the modern nation-state. Just as the newly discovered historicity or nationalist history is expected to explain the emergence and well-being of modern nationstates, territoriality or politically constructed geography serves to define and demarcate a nation. Thus history is narrated to indicate the potential or future of the nation, whereas territoriality provides a distinct and stable image for the nation's self-conception. Territorial imagination therefore necessarily preceded Liang's explicit endorsement of nationalism, even though it later would give way to a universal, calendrical time. His early work General Discussion of Reforms, as discussed above, already exhibited a sense that China at the end of the nineteenth century had to be reconceptualized as a bounded territory. But in his reform-oriented nationalist ideology, alongside the articulation of historicity, we see at work a systematic territorialization of history that endows spatial terms and relations with political as well as historical implications. A brief text in point is Liang Qichao's well-known "Ode to Young China," written on the eve of 1900 to commemorate the dawn of the twentieth century. It is as much an invocation of a promising new age as a celebration of the global imaginary into which China as a youthful new nation is about to enter. Beginning with a rejection of the derogatory epithet "Old Great Empire" that Westerners as well as the Japanese had adopted in referring to China, Liang argued that there had never been such a thing as China the national state. "In ancient China, although there was the name of a state, no actual nation-state ever existed. It was either the state of a family, of one tribal chief, of separate feudal lords, or of one despotic emperor. . . . Furthermore, throughout the history of China, where could one find a nation-state? All there has been is nothing but dynasties, one after another."77 Ready proof lay in the lack of a proper name for the country, except for those derived from different dynasties. The absence of a nationstate, which caused a deplorable deficiency of a unifying and empowering patriotism among the people, also contributed to China's present condition of poverty and weakness. Therefore, whether China was an "Old Great Empire" had grave implications. The answer determined whether as a country China be-

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longed to the past or the future. Liang Qichao reasoned that to determine the age of China, one needed first to clarify the meaning of "nation-state." What is a nation-state? First there is land; then there are people. It is the people who, living in the land, take care of their own land and abide by the laws they themselves make. There is sovereignty as well as subordination. Everyone is sovereign, and everyone is also subordinate. Only a country like this can be called a complete and autonomous nation-state.78

In this definition, territorial identification becomes the founding principle of the nation-state. Liang's liberal notions of individuality and law, which he would develop at great length in Discourse on the New Citizen, are introduced as the cornerstones for his nationalist ideology. The nation-state as a territorial specificity is a modern phenomenon, since, according to Liang, "complete and autonomous nation-states" came into being only about a century earlier. The date is crucial because, by this standard, those European countries could be considered middle-aged, whereas China was still in the process of becoming a nation-state. Consequently, China was positively a young country, a youthful land. With this territorialized time, Liang was able to uphold the unity of history and territory as the ultimate goal of nationalism. For the same reason, he saw no conflict between his vision for China and Giuseppe Mazzini's inspiring notion of a Young Italy in the 1830's. On the contrary, Mazzini and the Italian Risorgimento were part of the success story of nationalism and an enviable example to follow.79 The nationalist unity of history and territory that Liang called for in "Ode to Young China" exhibits the defining feature of nationalist historical thinking, namely, the Janus-like attitude toward both historical and territorial continuity. Whereas in nationalist histories the dominant pattern is past glory followed by recent decline, thie "geographical logic" of nationalism is the internal/external division.80 Even though there had never been an autonomous nation-state in China, the Chinese, as a nation, could still claim a glorious past and unique achievements. With emphatic pride, Liang enumerated the great Chinese heroes and their deeds and recounted many spectacular moments in Chinese civilization. To ensure a sense of continuity, Liang suggested that the heroic past had been the work of the Chinese people as a young nation and that only in the recent past had China become what foreigners, for good reason, dismissed as the "Old Great

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Empire." The reason for this decline, naturally, was the absence of a self-conscious and powerful nation-state; this, in turn, was caused largely by the fact that the "old and senile" were in control of the country. But this miserable situation was bound to give way to a youthful Chinese nation-state that would not only illuminate the world with an irrepressible radiance but also be as eternal as heaven above. A bright future is evoked here to complete an abstract narrative of fulfillment and to add to the mobilizing power of nationalism as an ideology for change. This Utopian future or politics of the possible becomes accessible, however, only to the extent that its geographical underpinnings are reaffirmed. Young China and Young Italy may share similar aspirations, especially as far as an ideologization of the future is concerned, but their historical vision has first to reconcile itself with a territorial imagination. Therefore, when the concept of the "future" entered modern Chinese political thinking with the generation of Liang Qichao, it was always already appropriated as a nationalist category, inseparable from a collective identity reinforced by modern political geography. It is therefore not surprising that a geographical logic was built into Liang's historical thinking during this period and would be given much more consideration later in his life. Faithful to his liberal beliefs in free competition and individuality, Liang was convinced that universal harmony in the modern world had to begin with mutual respect among autonomous nations. The absence of such peers had caused China's decline: "China has for thousands of years remained in an uninterrupted isolation. When our people refer to the land, they call it the universe [tianxia] rather than a nation [guo]. With no conception of a nation, how can one talk about patriotic passions?"81 A nation-state comes into being only in the presence of equals, and patriotism does not arise until there is a challenging opposition. In Discourse on the New Citizen, Liang explained that this confusion between tianxia and guojia was due less to willful complacency than to the particularity of Chinese geography, which deprived China of any serious competition from neighboring countries.82 In a series of essays written in 1902, Liang investigated the specifics of Chinese geography and pondered the causal relation between geography and civilization. Inspired by contemporary Japanese intellectual interest in geography (which in turn owed much to the geographical determinism of the British historian Henry Thomas Buckle) and in particular by a se-

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ries of writings on Asian and European geography by Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927), the renowned proponent of nationalism and pioneering cultural geographer, Liang Qichao found much to contemplate in the impact of geography on human history. In "On the General Features of European Geography," Liang sought to explain Europe's standing as the undisputed master of the world and its control over the other continents: "Alas, how could it be like this? For their success I see no special endowments worth envying except their geography."83 In his account, geography becomes the key to the rise and fall of European nations; different environments, for instance, contribute directly to the temperamental contrast between the romantic Latins and rational Teutons. Liang further generalized this geographical determinism into a political category in his essay "On the Relationship Between Geography and Civilization," also written in 1902, in which he observed that the contents of a "spiritual civilization," like the achievements of a "material civilization," owed much to natural geographical conditions. Toward the end of the essay, however, he expressed the wish that modern technology help the ancient Asian nations overcome the unfortunate constraints nature imposes on them. With railroads and electricity, Asia might be delivered from its isolation and emerge as a future "stage for civilized competition."84 This indirect call for human intervention became more salient when Liang turned to Asian geography and its implications for world history. He began with the fact that Asia is the greatest continent in the world, in terms of both size and population. Compared to the more compact Europe, Asia does not have the same geographical "permeability" (given in English in the text), but its majestic size determines that "Asia will realize its potential not in the present, but rather in the future."85 Asia's reassuring prospects did not, however, alleviate Liang's concern with European colonialism in Afghanistan, India, and Vietnam, and its ever deeper penetration into the Asian continent. A gap seemed to open between political geography and natural geography. Despite his grim description of European aggression and encroachment, Liang did not acknowledge a direct causal connection between the present situation and geographical conditions. He could not afford to accept colonialism as a given mandated by nature. Geographical determinism, in other words, had to yield to nationalism as a historical discourse and, consequently, to the power of human will and action.

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By the time Liang wrote the much more elaborate "On the General Features of Chinese Geography," geography had come to function more as an investigative tool to chart the political and cultural development of Chinese history. Examination of Chinese history in terms of the natural as well as the human landscape offered new insights. The geographical differences between the north and the south, for instance, could explain or rather highlight two distinct lines of philosophical tradition, literary sensibilities, and artistic styles.86 Liang also predicted that the center stage of Chinese culture and economy would move from the plains between the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers, whose natural resources had nourished the great Chinese civilization but were now virtually exhausted. The next development would take place in the southern region between the Yangtze and the West River (the main stream of the Pearl River in Guangxi and Guangdong). In this approach, the nation was conceived as having much more concrete and diverse contents and did not necessarily always correspond to the nationalist abstraction. Liang opened the essay with a euphoric affirmation of the beauty of the Chinese landscape, but found its geographical specificity and historical determinations much more complicated. Geography, as much as history, could serve the cause of nationalism only insofar as it remained an abstract and essentializing representation. This in turn points to a tension embedded in nationalism as both an ideological commitment and a historical discourse The difficulty with nationalism as a modern historical discourse became even more pronounced when Liang Qichao resorted to it in order to legitimize political and social reform. On the one hand, reform as a national enterprise entails adjustment and reorganization of social institutions and power mechanisms, which can hardly be accomplished without coordinated, elitist control and administration. Nationalism as an ideology, on the other hand, demands investment in the nation as a collective agent, the sole source and the only justification of political power that will in the end determine the destiny of the nation. In his "Ode to Young China," which contains a highly abstract narrative of a great nation's imminent rejuvenation, and especially in his writings on geography, Liang was indirectly engaged in negotiating between the two forms of historical agency, elitist and popular, that nationalism acknowledged. He may have been caught in a "patriotic schizophrenia," as Levenson described Liang's impossible desire

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to be both "pragmatic and romantic,"87 but he was already probing for a realist, even postnationalist, approach to the question of political and cultural legitimacy of modernity. The nationalist unity of territory and history he envisioned was to be translated into a political hegemony that originated in an elitist disciplining, or appropriation, of the new public domain. In this sense, Liang the nationalist never really departed from the practical program he proposed in his General Discussion of Reforms in the 1890's. His radicalism, either in endorsing Western modernity or in proposing revolutionary "destructionism," would in the final analysis give way to a reform-oriented, postnationalist national politics. In an article written in 1900, Liang described a complex political and social situation in China that defied any simple or uncompromising solution: Living in today's China, one faces three unavoidable tasks: against authority from above one has to challenge the erroneous ideas and beliefs of a tradition that has lasted 2,000 years; domestically one has to fight the habits and inertia of 400 million illiterates; internationally one has to confront all other nations in the world that threaten us with either outright aggression or insidious manipulation. Without an utmost broad mind and unparalleled courage, how could one even think of breaking through in this desperate situation and leading the nation into the new world?!88

The hero that Liang called for here, "an awakener of the heavenly people," had to be a self-confident nationalist capable of enlightening the people to their own situation and mission. To ensure the leadership role of the nationalist elite, Liang had to depend on a new history to write an apology for their moral responsibility and historical insight. The new history of the nation, therefore, was ultimately an elitist project that would serve to inform and consolidate an emergent political force. At the same time, this new national history already implied a postnationalist stage in which the nation had to be engaged as more than a homogeneous political collectivity. During 1901 and 1902, Liang Qichao was constantly thinking of writing a general Chinese history. Excited with the implications of a new schema of historical periodization, he was determined to write a Chinese history that would both narrate the necessary revival of China as a historical nation and relocate China as a member of the modern world of nation-states. Such a history would contribute to a general enlightenment, which, for Liang, specifically consisted in first developing a modern national identity and culture and then institut-

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ing civic participation in the political and social life of the nation. Both aspects, he believed, were instrumental to nation-building. "For about a year, I have strained myself trying to write a general history of China so as to contribute to the development of patriotism," Liang recounted late in 1902. "But time went by rapidly, and so far I have finished less than two tenths of it."89 The small portion Liang finished was published separately, first as an introductory essay on Chinese history in 1901 and then as part of the more systematic "New Historiography" the following year. In the 1901 essay, a preliminary discussion of the basic concepts to be employed in a much longer work, Liang dealt briefly with a series of issues: the possible scope of Chinese history, the choice of "China" as its proper name by default, geography, race, the best method for designating year numbers (he proposed the birth of Confucius as the beginning of Chinese history), and the era of the Yellow Emperor as the division between prehistoric and historical ages. The last section was devoted to periodization. Acknowledging the arbitrariness of periodization in general, Liang proposed to divide Chinese history according to the accepted developmental pattern in modern Western historiographies—ancient, medieval, and modern. The obvious advantage of this division was that it overcame the traditional historiographical obsession with the fortunes of emperors rather than the nation. But these three new temporal regimes, when applied to Chinese history, had to be accompanied, if not preceded, by a progressive history of space. Only a correlation between time and space would fully account for China's past glory and inscribe a future renaissance. Ancient Chinese history, in this schema, covered the period from the legendary Yellow Emperor (2600 B.C.) to the unification of central China under the Qin dynasty (221 B.C.). "This is, then, a China in China. In other words, it was a period during which the Chinese nation evolved by itself, competed among itself, and eventually became unified as such." In this context the concept of minzu (nation) also strongly suggests "race."90 The tension driving this age was mainly that between the majority Han Chinese and other ethnic minorities such as the Miao. The medieval period, subsequently, is the history of a China in Asia and extends all the way from the Qin unification to the end of the Qianlong period (1796) of the Qing dynasty. "It was a time during which the Chinese nation established continual contacts and had intense competition with various other Asian nations." In-

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ternally, extensive centralization of political power led to despotic absolutism; externally, dynastic territory was incessantly challenged and expanded due to the intrusion of other ethnic groups and races. The Han race may have suffered losses in territory and material wealth, but it invariably scored victories in terms of culture or spiritual civilization. As for the extraordinarily long period of time this era of history included, Liang speculated that because of its enormous territory and population, China had always been slow to adapt and develop. "Over 2,000 years, China was never really exposed to any significant stimuli from nations outside Asia, and so its history remained continuous and free of major interruptions."91 Finally, there is the modern period. Starting from the end of the Qianlong age to the present, modern Chinese history is the history of a China in and of the world; it is a historical period in which the Chinese nation, together with all other Asian nations, relates itself to and competes with the Western nations. With traditional despotism drawing to a prolonged end, an unprecedented and more democratic constitutionalism will arise to replace the outmoded political system. "This period has just started arriving and has only a very brief history, but the enormous internal and external transformations brought about so far were never really seen in the past 2,000 years. So it has to be identified as a different age. In effect, the so-called modern history is no more than a prelude to a history of the future."92 In this succinct macroscopic narrative, the periodization of Chinese history remained inseparable from a punctuating territoriality, a collective and bounded experience of space defined through ethnic and national interaction and confrontation. Geography proved to be a central interpretive category in Liang's outline of Chinese history. It functioned as the embodiment of historical process. In fact, it embodied rather than produced history. Such a geographic interpretation of history both recognized the spatial dimension of human experience and transformed space into a temporal category. Space was now represented more as an extension of history rather than as history itself. In a section specifically on geography, Liang reiterated Locke's statement that the relationship between geography and history or civilization resembled that between the body and the mind.93 It would be most intriguing, he suggested, to observe developments in Chinese history against the specifics of Chinese geography. The vast and fertile inland could be the reason why the Chinese never felt the need to explore the ocean and why political despotism lasted so long. Geogra-

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phy might shed light on the cause and process of history, but it was the much more abstract concept of "space" that provided historical experience with its truth or rationality. The three stages of Chinese history, respectively characterized as China in itself, China in Asia, and China in the world, result in conjoining its latest, modern period with the ultimate historical space known to humanity. Modernity is therefore ineluctable and legitimate not simply because it is more recent, but because it corresponds to a global, cosmopolitan space and civilization. Liang Qichao's legitimation of modernity in terms of spatial experience, however, entails a totalizing vision that valorizes temporal homogeneity more than spatial differentiation. When nationalism was called upon as a political ideology for change and a means of legitimizing modernity, it had to overcome its initial territorial imagination and accept a temporalization of space. As demonstrated in the next chapter, in Liang Qichao's much more programmatic "New Historiography," the Enlightenment concept of universal and progressive time functioned as an organizing principle as well as an inspirational narrative form in his historical thinking. If history could be unified through time, space became a secondary concept relevant only when it was first located and identified in a progressive timetable. In other words, the new historiography would function primarily as a universal form through which history as specific content became accessible. Liang would not again evoke space as a principal category for making and imagining history until his serious rethinking and critique of modernity in the 1920's.

2 The Nationalist Historian and New Historiography

Liang Qichao's most systematic exposition of his nationalist historical thinking was the seminal and manifesto-like "New Historiography." By the second half of November 1902, when the sixth and last installment of "New Historiography" appeared in the twentieth issue of the biweekly New Citizen Journal (Xinmin congbao), the journal itself was enjoying tremendous success. Its circulation had steadily increased to somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000, and there were close to 100 distribution locations established in Japan, China, and overseas.1 An organ explicitly created to implement his enlightenment project, the New Citizen Journal owed its growing popularity to Liang Qichao's own massive contributions, in particular his monumental Discourse on the New Citizen, which was serialized over four years (1902-5). With its stated objectives of educating the people and promoting new cultural values so as to "make new the people first as a means to renovate the country,"2 the journal targeted a wide range of readers, especially the young Chinese student population in Japan. It offered introductory essays on new subjects and fields of knowledge and actively engaged its readership through a correspondence section in which Liang personally answered inquiries and suggestions. The encyclopedic interests of the journal are best illustrated in the 24 special columns in the first year of its publication covering such varied topics and disciplines as politics, law, economics, religion, business,

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education, geography, fiction, social theory, military events, and current domestic and international affairs. The intellectual impact of the journal had much to do with the fact that it was intended to be both popular and educational and that it published both news analyses and in-depth scholarly essays. When it was first launched, Liang expressed the modest wish that, if failing to help China make any noticeable progress, the New Citizen Journal might at least initiate a new stage in Chinese newspaper history. A year later, Liang and his colleagues noticed an encouraging change in the newspaper business: "Since the inauguration of our journal last year, there have come into being almost ten separate journals with the same style and design. . . . The vitality of the scholarly circle is evident."3 Not only did the presence of the journal help inform and guide, from afar, public opinion in China in the wake of the One Hundred Days Reform, but Liang's innovative writing style also contributed significantly to the modernization of Chinese political and social discourse in general. Liang introduced a cluster of Chinese neologisms for modern Western concepts such as "liberty," "civilization," "society," and "civic virtues," most adopted directly from their Japanese translations. The terms quickly came into wide use and prompted debate and discussion. Occasionally, as over the proper rendition of the term "political economy," Liang would repeatedly respond to readers' suggestions and considered as many as twelve different alternatives.4 But overall, by providing lucid definitions and expository applications of new terms, Liang proved to be one of the most adept and successful coiners of Chinese equivalents for modern concepts and expressions.5 After reading the first thirteen or so sections of Discourse on the New Citizen in November 1902, Liang's senior friend and comrade Huang Zunxian, then in retirement in Guangdong, wrote Liang a letter to express his excitement. He generously appraised the powerful influence of Liang's writings on contemporary public opinion in the mainland. For the past half year, all of the more than two score newspapers in China, without exception, have come out to assist you in the debate and closely followed your steps. They have adopted all the terminology and language you have newly translated and introduced. Even the officials' reports to the emperor and the essay questions at the civil service examinations have resorted to those terms and concepts. I am not sure of these people's real intention,

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but the form has definitely been modified; nor am I certain of the actual situation, but the discussion has greatly changed.6

The general enthusiasm accorded the New Citizen Journal can be taken as an index of a growing common awareness that China was moving into a new historical age. The new century was seized upon as a promising historical turning point. Late in 1901, when Liang was writing for one of the last issues of his previous publication, the Journal of Disinterested Discussion (Qingyi bao\ its original English title was The China Discussion), he contemplated what the new age would mean to the Chinese. With great confidence he concluded that, together with the United States and Russia, China, as one of the three superpowers of the twentieth century, would be more magnificent than Europe in the century just past.7 The dawning century would bring forth a new, modern China. Thus, in virtually every page of the New Citizen Journal, Liang tirelessly lauded the value of the "new" in anticipation of an imminent future as a grand historical fulfillment. By May 1902, when Van Fu, who had by then long since established himself as a modern intellectual with an authoritative knowledge of the West, read the journal in China, the Chinese translator of Spencer and Mill was greatly elated by its palpable longing for modernity. "It was very kind of you to send me three issues of your journal," he wrote to Liang to salute him for his heroic efforts. "I have read them from cover to cover repeatedly, feeling as if a strong wind were blowing and a loud tide surging toward me. They are without doubt the harbinger of a flourishing Asian civilization in the upcoming twentieth century."8 It is both essential and revealing to keep in mind this global spatiotemporal configuration of the modern age that fascinated Liang and his generation of Chinese when we read "New Historiography" as a text that crystallizes Liang's optimistic, if millenarian, historical imagination fostered by Enlightenment rationalism. It is a text that embodies all the critical impulses of a modernist reexamination and rejection of the past. It also illustrates the various ideological presuppositions and contradictions in Liang's nationalist thinking. The manifesto-like form and style he adopted give the text an aura of modernity and point to a consciousness of crisis as its own condition of possibility. Responding to this enabling historical moment of emergence is the supremely confident figure of a universal intellectual. In the new political sphere of public opinion, the expressive

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journalist—a prototypical independent social critic and commentator—assumes the role of a spokesperson for universal truth and the commonweal. Addressing a new national "public," he achieves social value and prestige by creating and defining new collective concerns and imaginings. To appreciate the significance of "New Historiography" as a key document in modern Chinese intellectual history, therefore, it is necessary to examine first the mode of discourse to which it belongs and in which it signifies. Becoming a Historian Liang Qichao's renown and intellectual authority were first established with his editorship of two pioneering newspapers, Zhongwai jiwen (Chinese and foreign news, 1895-96) and Shiwu bao (The Chinese progress, 1896-98). In 1896, under the title "Newspapers Are Beneficial to National Affairs," he compared the role of a newspaper to that of aiding the eye and voice of the people in a nation: information for the community and an expression of its views.9 In the following year, with great enthusiasm, he wrote introductions to the inaugural issues of at least five different journals, taking every opportunity to stress the vital function of a public press in a civilized society.10 As Andrew Nathan summarizes, "The quickening of late Qing political life was achieved to an extraordinary degree by the single medium whose development Liang Qichao had led, the political journal."11 His formative influence on the development of modern Chinese newspapers as a new forum for social cohesion and political discussion can hardly be overestimated. Undoubtedly "the greatest personality in the history of Chinese journalism," as Lin Yii-t'ang once called him,12 Liang Qichao was arguably the first modern Chinese intellectual, following the more limited example of Wang Tao in the 1870's,13 who achieved social recognition mostly through his public-oriented writings and his "crusading journalism." "There can scarcely be any doubt that [Liang's] magazines were the most powerful of all literary forces shaping opinion in China from 1898 to 1911."14 Since "New Historiography" was first published in the most successful of Liang's crusading political journals, the image of the journalist as a public hero significantly influenced Liang's understanding of the modern historian. The direct social efficacy expected of modern journalistic writings was, as we will see, transferred to, and given

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thematic priority in, Liang's conception of a new form of historiography. This new form demanded not only a fresh style of narration but also a radical shift in terms of general historical configuration, insofar as the audience was now projected (or imagined) to be a large reading public that, when identifiable as a nation, was also called upon to be the central political agent in history. Appearing in a journal self-consciously heralding a new era, "New Historiography" is therefore an essay that deals not so much with the possibility of historical knowledge as with the necessity and usefulness of the past in a nationalist project of rejuvenation. In fact, it begins with an investigation into the social function of the historian in modern times. For Liang Qichao, a journalist writing for the public and a historian studying the past ought to have the same moral commitment. A journalist, he exhorts, must share with the historian the same pursuit: "By examining the past and revealing the future, he will show the path of progress to the people of the nation."15 A newspaper truthfully reporting on the present is no less pivotal to the well-being of society than a history book representing its past. Both the journalist and the historian provide guidance to the nation, although their tactics may differ. The journalist, for example, may have to resort to extremist rhetoric or sensationalism to get his point across.16 Both, however, are engaged in producing a social discourse that derives its credibility and moral leadership from the writer acting as a spokesperson of social conscience and, what is perhaps more pertinent, of new knowledge. The figure of an Enlightenment philosophe, or the image of an ultimate arbitrator of truth and justice in society (perhaps best embodied in Voltaire's self-conception), dominates Liang's notion of both the historian and the journalist. Whereas the historian seeks the general laws governing human history and thereby assumes responsibility for guiding and advancing civilization (the painstaking process of bummei kaika), the journalist informs the public and creates opinion in the best interests of the nation. Both are armed with one and the same powerful weapon of modern knowledge. The newspaper, Liang had declared months before he gave historiography the same enviable role, "is the mirror of society," "the lamp for the future," and "the sustenance of the present." "How great is the force of the newspaper! And how grave is the duty of the newspaper!" Writing on the function of the newspaper in modern times, Liang Qichao explained its emergence in relation to the achievement of Enlighten-

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ment intellectuals. Modern Western civilization entered a new stage, he claimed, at the time of the French Revolution, which in turn arrived as the culmination of popular resistance against the medieval despotism of the church. "What awakened such a popular resistance? Nothing else but the flourishing of new learning and new technology. What made such a flourishing possible? Nothing else but freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press. These three freedoms are indeed the mother of all civilization."17 Admittedly, Liang's explanation sounds overstated and simplistic, but his point was to emphasize an indispensable intellectual revolution that heralded and prepared for modern civilization. By insisting on the powerful impact that knowledge or intellectual autonomy in general may have on social development, Liang charted the course of his own career and accepted the honors as well as responsibilities of a modern independent intellectual. In retrospect, it is of crucial consequence that in 1895, the year Liang decided to join Kang Youwei and started editing Chinese and Foreign News, he was unsuccessful for a second time in the civil service examinations, a traditional passage to social prestige and power. His new career of journalism would henceforth serve as the means of practicing the Confucian moral imperative of universal responsibility. More important, his failure in the examinations decidedly alienated him from the established order and turned a youthful gentry-literati candidate and would-be conformist into a determined reformer and a vociferous critic. The blocking of one career opportunity inadvertently led to the opening of another, more illustrious one. This was a new career pattern in the latter part of the nineteenth century, followed by a growing number of traditionally educated Chinese, such as Wang Tao, Van Fu, and Liang Qichao himself.18 When Liang discovered and wrote about Bacon and Descartes in 1902, therefore, he emphasized their intellectual independence. "Even though the theories of Bacon and Descartes may differ, their greatest contribution to the world is one and the same: ridding the scholarly circle of its slavishness."19 In another extremely revealing essay of 1902, Liang focused on "the dominant influence of knowledge on the world" and summarized various theories of modern European thinkers in terms of their impact on human history. He argued that the sole lasting forces in the world were "intelligence" and "knowledge." After a brief survey of personalities from Copernicus to Darwin, Liang expressed the great-

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est admiration for Voltaire, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Tolstoy. These three thinkers did not innovate new learning, wrote Liang, but all did their best, by either writing great plays and novels or by translating and explicating new ideas, to enlighten their own respective nations: the France of Louis XIV, pre-Meiji Japan, and nineteenth-century Russia. "With all due respect I have some advice for scholars in our country. Since all you gentlemen have the power to influence the world, why not use it? If you cannot become a Bacon, a Descartes, or a Darwin, why cannot you try to become a Voltaire, a Fukuzawa, or a Tolstoy? If you cannot influence the world, why cannot you try to influence one country?"20 Voltaire, as much as Fukuzawa and Tolstoy, provided Liang Qichao with the prototype of a modern intellectual and underlay his conception of the historian and the journalist. All three men of letters, notwithstanding their global aspirations, served their own nations and thereby humanity in general. They were first of all national heroes, even though Voltaire was persecuted by the ancien regime and Tolstoy advocated universal brotherhood. Masked by a universalistic rhetoric, as Liang viewed it, was the nationalist engaged in bringing change and progress to his own country. What Liang saw was less a betrayal of the universal than an enabling evocation of the particular as a site for action. Liang's appropriation of the Enlightenment figure, especially his understanding of the philosophe as a forerunner of modern nationalism, offers an insight into his own nationalist politics. It indicates his solution to or, rather, cancellation of the contradictions between the universal and the particular embedded in the ideology of nationalism. The recurring image of the Enlightenment intellectual in Liang Qichao's writings also sheds light on the historical relevance of his becoming a journalist/historian. It is not an existential accident that Liang first became a popular journalist and then a dedicated nationalist historian. A persistent urge to speak to a new national community runs through his voluminous writings and effectively unites his two separate careers. Indeed, as a leading intellectual figure, Liang Qichao the journalist was also one of the first members of the new professional intelligentsia in modern China, which, fragile as it may have been, nonetheless formed a new type of social elite." This new social elite, with its urban origins and cosmopolitan orientations, contributed as much to an emergent nationalist consciousness as the new technology of liter-

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acy and mass communications—in Liang's case the creation of a vernacular (potentially more democratic) writing. The symbiotic existence of the innovative thinker and the professional journalist, according to Anthony Smith, has proved indispensable to the formation of a domesticated nationalist discourse, for "if the intellectuals are the spearhead of the ethnic revival, the professional intelligentsia form its habitual infantry."22 In his thorough study of the intriguing relationship between nationalism in the form of ethnic revival and modern social formations, Smith notices that a newly created intelligentsia, professionally alienated from the traditional order and existentially compelled to acquire a new social identity, invariably subscribed to an ethnic consciousness and nationalist ideology. The new social elite demanded a historical narrative that legitimized its own social existence. Evolutionary historiography or historicism, therefore, formed an "attractive and necessary framework for the professional intelligentsia, because the crisis of legitimacy under which the old order was sinking demanded that they too find a viable identity and role in the emergent new order."23 The new identity and historical legitimation often turn out to be, in Smith's account, the "ethnicity solution" provided by humanist intellectuals, whose social distinction is that they "originate the basic paradigms of knowledge" and "create the images and insights which reinterpret reality." "Everywhere, it is the rising professional intelligentsia who lend to the historicist vision of the educators a broad social significance and push it towards political fulfillment. Yet it is intellectuals who supply them with ideals and definitions most appropriate to a political resolution of their social situation."24 Smith's observation may help us better recognize the worldhistorical significance of Liang Qichao at this particular juncture. We can argue that Liang's engagement in journalism led to his ever closer identification, both emotional and rational, with a new public domain or collectivity that would eventually assert itself as the modern nation-state. Yet the specific structure of this new public domain, its historical origin and political legitimation, had to be defined through a new social discourse, whose intellectual authority ultimately relied on a knowledge of global history. The nation, therefore, may have meant different things for the journalist as a member of the new professional intelligentsia and the historian as a universal intellectual. To the journalist, the nation stood for a modern collective experience as much as for a political commitment; to the histo-

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rian, too, the nation was a fundamentally modern category, but it also implied a much more complex intellectual process. Liang's dual social position is apparent in the growing conflict, in politics as well as historical views, between himself and his mentor Kang Youwei, who, as a more entrenched member of the traditional Confucian gentry-literati, would never accept the nationalist doctrine without reservations. For Liang, however, national consciousness, or the political formation of the nation, was of much more existential and political urgency. More specifically, the concept of the nation, for Liang the journalist, had much to do with the social and political implications of modern communications technology, in particular, print technology with its unprecedented capacity for mass reproduction. Print technology, as Benedict Anderson argues, was instrumental in the development of modern nationalism. The modern nation was born when it became "an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." Such an imagining took place, "first in Western Europe, later elsewhere," only with the disintegration of the traditional agrarian community when, "under the impact of economic change, 'discoveries' (social and scientific), and the development of increasingly rapid communications," a wedge was driven between cosmology and history.25 In the new scene of change and an experiential landscape permeated by a historical consciousness, print capitalism provided new cultural cohesiveness and linkages (such as books and newspapers) for a given community, which now asserted itself as a nation. The book, as "the first modernstyle mass-produced industrial commodity,"20 gave a new fixity to the vernacular language simply for technological convenience. The newspaper, on the other hand, appeared as an "extreme form" of the book, and owed its conception to the implied idea of refracting "even 'world events' into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers." "The convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language," suggests Anderson, "created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation."27 Although it would be a mistake, Anderson is quick to add, to attribute the birth of modern nation-states solely to the institution of print language, its impact on the formation of nationalist discourse should not be underestimated. Ernest Gellner has reached a similar conclusion in his studies of nationalism by gauging the relevance of

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the new mode of communication, although his focus is more on the social and cultural implications of massive industrialization and division of labor in nineteenth-century Europe. Gellner also believes that nationalism is a history-specific response to the transition from an agrarian society to the capitalist mode of production. "Nationalism is about entry to, participation in, identification with, a literate high culture which is co-extensive with an entire political unit and its total population."28 General literacy and education are among the prerequisites for industrial modernization as well as modern nationalism, because both depend on a new mode of communication (writing is the preferred form at this stage) to achieve large-scale organizational coordination and control. Modern writing technology, or the infinitely reproducible print material of the industrial age, now acts as the most accessible social glue that generates and sustains, for a growing reading public, the imaginary of a linguistic, cultural, and political community. In the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, not surprisingly, the popular press grew enormously and gradually established itself as a major cultural apparatus in the newly urbanized and democratized western Europe. It was, as Liang Qichao was keenly aware, the French Revolution that ushered in this new political presence of the newspaper. The French Revolution powerfully affirmed the principle of freedom of the press as an inalienable and democratic human right. Moreover, the stormy and spectacular events of the revolutionary period created a collective sense of the nation, which then gave the budding press an "extraordinary impetus": "From 1789 to 1800 there appeared more than 1,350 new papers, twice as many, for eleven years, as those in the previous one hundred and fifty years or so."29 From 1803 to 1870, in Paris alone, the circulation of daily newspapers increased from 50,000 to one million copies. In England, the breathtaking growth of a popular press was an integral part of the "cultural expansion" of the Victorian age, with the Daily Telegraph (founded in 1855) as its foremost symbol. Propelled by the continual improvements in printing technology, its circulation increased to about 200,000 in 1870 and 300,000 in 1890.30 The modern newspaper is a democratizing agent because of the temporal simultaneity and communal anonymity it instills in an expanding reading public. It is also a nationalist institution because it reinforces a national consciousness not only with a shared, communal language but also as part of the reflective social imaginary. In a

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memorable passage, Pierre Albert and Fernand Terrou describe the experience of newspaper reading in nineteenth-century Europe: "The industrialization of the methods of production and the extension of the realm of the press completely transformed the condition of its usage. A rare and costly product at the beginning of the century, limited to an elite that very much consisted of the favorites of fortune and culture, the newspaper witnessed its consummation when it was spreading, to all social strata, news from the milieux of the petty bourgeoisie as well as of the city dwellers."31 Between the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the beginning of World War I, the popular press in Western Europe entered its "golden age" of expansion and finally established itself as "the only means of collective information";32 moreover, with the introduction of mass advertising in the wake of the "Northcliffe Revolution," the newspaper, as Raymond Williams puts it, acquired its status as "a new kind of capitalist combine."33 Coincidentally, the same period witnessed the "Golden Age of historiography" in Europe. During this period, as Ernst Breisach observes in his comparative study of European historiography, "the discipline of history was well represented at all universities, the historical approach pervaded other disciplines, and the still largely unbroken tradition helped foster at least a rudimentary historical sense."34 The nineteenth century in Europe has been characterized as a "century of history"; it was also a century in which newspaper reading became part of daily life. Liang Qichao was extremely sensitive to the dialectics between these two developments. With great emphasis, he offered theories about the importance of both the popular press and historiography. From his personal experience in Japan, Liang was readily convinced that the newspaper was not only a historical record of modern times but also a creative force that would help shape the course of history. In his essay "On the Dominant Influence of Knowledge on the World," he mentioned the invention of printing and the discovery of the New World as the two events most instrumental to the developing of the modern world.35 In 1901, while discussing the responsibility of the press, he associated the newspaper with the formation and wellbeing of a modern nation. The press was essential to a nation because, first, it contributed to the progress of civilization by exercising intellectual freedom and guiding public opinion, and second, the newspaper spoke to the entire nation and hence helped create a national community. Liang was most enthusiastic about the ability of

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the newspaper to function as an educational program. "The newspaper gathers virtually all the thoughts and expressions of the nation and systematically introduces them to the citizenry, it being irrelevant whether they are important or not, concise or not, radical or not. The press, therefore, can contain, reject, produce, as well as destroy, everything." As a result, every single editorial and report in all the giant newspapers in Europe and America, so assessed Liang, was carefully read and listened to throughout the world. "Because the government there takes suggestions from the press when making policies and the people there respect the comments of the newspaper as spiritual guidance . . , the press is nothing less than the basis of administration and the model for education."36 He even compared the necessity of a newspaper to that of food and sex, an indispensable aspect of a healthy life. In another place he gave detailed statistics on the newspaper business in the United States in order to drive home his point. In 1850, according to Liang, there were 250 newspapers in America with a readership of 758,000, but by 1902 the number of newspapers had jumped to 11,226, and the number of readers to a staggering 15,100,000.37 These gigantic increases, as might be expected, led Liang to heave a deep sigh over the meagerness of the popular press in China. The newspaper, as much as the railway and electricity, quickly caught Liang Qichao's imagination as a wondrous sign of the new age, essential to which was always the new technology of transportation and communication. For Liang, an unfailing attraction of modernity was its apparently inexhaustible potential for continuous technological advancement. However, this fascination invariably gave rise to anxiety when he looked at the situation in China. The Chinese did not have a strong press, according to Liang, not only because of financial restrictions and traditional social prejudices but also "because the social atmosphere was not free enough to encourage more readers, and because the lack of roads and highways made it hard to distribute newspapers." But technological shortcomings were not the determining cause. Rather, those who were in this business, "with their shallow minds, outdated learning, and general incompetence," could not possibly wish to change the world or have the ability to form a political presence.38 Liang concluded this essay on the responsibility of the press, written some months before "New Historiography," by distinguishing four kinds of newspaper: the newspaper of an individual, of a party,

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of a nation, and of the world. A newspaper of the world serves the interests of all humanity. "In China there used to be papers of an individual, but no papers of a party or the nation; in Japan there are now papers of an individual, a party and the nation, but no papers of the world."39 His own Journal of Disinterested Discussion, whose hundredth issue he was celebrating, fell somewhere between the paper of a party and that of the nation. The present task, therefore, was to improve on it and develop it into a paper of the nation; the ultimate goal, however, would be to inch toward becoming a world paper. The nation, in Liang Qichao's historical vision, simply could not be the ultimate horizon and had to be viewed as a stage leading to the greatest achievement of human history—universal harmony. What Liang failed to consider in this assessment of the modern press is the capitalist mode of production that brings together the newspaper and modern technology. As Raymond Williams points out in his study of the history of the popular press in England (a country that persistently excited Liang's imagination until his tour of postwar Europe in 1919), "the newspaper was the creation of the commercial middle class, mainly in the eighteenth century. It served this class with news relevant to the conduct of business, and as such established itself as a financially independent institution."40 The expansion of the press throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, was fueled by rapid and massive industrialization (urban conglomeration and compulsory literacy) and by the steady growth of a middle class with its economic and political demands. The print capitalism that made the modern newspaper a mass-produced object capable of grouping into a nation members of a shared written language is, after all, an explosive convergence of the new printing technology and capitalism. In a telling note, Benedict Anderson stresses that behind the press is always the capitalist publisher-entrepreneur: "Although printing was invented first in China, possibly 500 years before its appearance in Europe, it had no major, let alone revolutionary impact—precisely because of the absence of capitalism there."41 Similarly and to a large extent, it was the absence of an aggressive industrial middle class in Liang's China that made the journalist-entrepreneur he advocated a missed rather than a realized possibility. The nation, too, was more an ideological projection strategically resorted to in an age of imperialist intrusion than an actual, functioning institution. In fact, Liang was highly indignant with the few commercial newspapers in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou, which to him

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seemed content to be no more than a mass commodity. With their undisguised commercial interest in social crimes and sexual scandals, complained Liang, these papers "failed to have the slightest influence upon the nation as a society."42 In other words, it was the press as an educational instrument, its explicit moralizing content and propaganda value, that first attracted Liang's attention; he simply ignored the cultural implications of the form of the modern newspaper, a commodity for mass consumption. This moralistic approach toward the press would also manifest itself in Liang's understanding of "public opinion," which for him, as Andrew Nathan points out in relating the rise of propaganda in modern China to Liang, "should not be an arena of conflict among partial views, but a stable consensus regarding the nature of common good."43 Liang's pre-capitalist mentality and cultural expectations made him at once hopeful about the Utopian potential of modern technology in general and blind to its concrete and less than ideal consequences. As a result, even as he welcomed modernity and conveniently abstracted technological progress into a revolutionary ideology, he kept intact a pervasive moralism, which in fact stood opposed to the basic principle of both the modern capitalist market and production. Moreover, he also called on moralism to serve as a powerful justification for political reform and the general project of modernization. This historically determined discrepancy between rationally accepted new values and deep-seated cultural expectations often turned out to be a source for either explosive cultural defeatism or radical utopianism. It was, however, a necessary blindness that underlay Liang Qichao's Enlightenment beliefs and his rhetoric of universalism, for only a moralizing historical vision could give him the intellectual confidence as well as convincing optimism that allowed him to speak with authority. And Liang was by no means alone in living out this implicit discrepancy. In fact, embedded in all the emancipatory discourses and social experiments in modern Chinese history, from enlightenment to democracy, from science to socialism, is invariably the tension between a revolutionary moralism and a fear that modern history is, after all, fundamentally amoral. The necessary politicization of the nation in the age of nationalism that Liang advocated, therefore, remained largely disconnected from the economic dimensions of modern nation-building. In his famous "Diagram of Reform" of 1901, Liang listed six groups of people as possible allies for the cause of political reform: officials, social out-

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casts, students, merchants, gentry-literati, and political parties. The

casts, students, merchants, gentry-literati, and political parties. The noblest motivation for reform was a moral calling, which, according to Liang, would affect only a student of the new learning or a sensitive soul. Both of them would act because they were "(1) indignant at foreign aggression and (2) angered by the corrupt government."44 This description may be read as Liang's self-portrayal. The historical situation was such that the emerging professional intelligentsia heralded by Liang was still too weak a social force to create or even demand a political identity of its own. No longer subjecting himself to the traditional order and claiming to represent no social class or interest groups, Liang therefore found in universalist rhetoric a most satisfying synthesis. The political reform he championed was prescribed by the universal law of change, and the nationalism he endorsed supposedly resulted from the natural process of evolution. Consequently, at least for his generation of Chinese, nationalism remained by and large a general discourse on political legitimation and was never systematically extended to include an economic program. The project of modernity remained an elitist enterprise, and the nation largely a political abstraction. The situation was complex, however, because the universalist rhetoric functioned to generalize as well as to historicize the present. To implement those universal laws and values—"change" and "progress"—already established as such by other viable historical precedents, was understood as a historical necessity. In this sense Chinese nationalism, as well as the project of Chinese modernity, was bound to agonize constantly over a deep suspicion of inauthenticity because the vision was valid and acceptable only to the extent that it was also viewed as a contingent repetition of others' history. Immanuel Wallerstein believes that this is an unresolvable structural problem in the modern world-system where "universalism is a 'gift' of the powerful to the weak which confronts the latter with a double bind: to refuse the gift is to lose; to accept the gift is to lose."45 Repetition, recognized as such, gives rise to a perennial sense of urgency and anxiety over authenticity, and at the same time it generates a continual vacillation between a universalist longing and a particularist self-affirmation, between a subscription to general history and an insistence on the irreducible indigenous experience, between temporally conceived epochalism and territory-oriented essentialism. As suggested above, Liang embraced nationalism out of a clear

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sense of its strategic value, yet the irony is that nationalist discourse would in the final analysis short-circuit a realistic approach to the present as a complex social and political situation. For in the nationalist narrative of history, where the tension between universalism and particularism is an inherent antinomy, the nation has to be represented as at once "natural" and "historical"—"natural" because it confirms the historical necessity of the nation, and "historical" insofar as it accepts the redeeming vision of its future fulfillment. The historical present, however, cannot be engaged critically until a postnationalist politics debunks as myth the collective will of the nation and thereby focuses on the nation as a political institution rather than a political agency. This change would occur in Liang's historical thinking as a "conservative" turn and indicate his new insight into the exacting experience of modernity. At this point, we turn to Liang Qichao's conception of history writing and see how he negotiates between nationalism as a universalist principle and nationalism as a mobilizational political ideology. His discussion of the relationship between universal or world history and national history also reflects an effort to reconcile the modern experience of time and space, which more and more expresses itself as a conflict between the form and the content of historiography. "New Historiography" of 1902, therefore, formally began a lifelong obsession with history and historical representation, through which Liang would continually search for and construct the meaning of the modern age. His concern with historical representation underlies his approach to political theory and his understanding of revolution.

The Project of a National History The deeper philosophical impulse of Liang Qichao's "New Historiography" belongs entirely to the Enlightenment tradition. Liang's understanding of the historian and the modern journalist as comparable public intellectuals offers a key to his conception of historical representation. It first of all fuels his sweeping critique and rejection of traditional historiography for its failure to engage or help develop a public, politically conscious audience. The first section of "New Historiography," entitled "Old Histories in China," opens with an assertion of the social function of history writing. Despite the fact that historiography has a long tradition in China, Liang announces, history as a "scientific discipline" is still lacking:

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History is the broadest and most vital discipline of all knowledge. It is the mirror reflecting the nation; it is also the source of patriotism. For the facts that nationalism is flourishing in today's Europe and that all the other countries are making daily progress toward civilization, history writing proudly claims a great responsibility. Therefore, one has to worry only when the discipline of history is lacking in one's country. If there is one, how cannot the nation be united, and social administration evolve? Yet, with all the abundance of historiography in our country, we still have an impoverished present. Why should that be so?46

The reason, according to Liang Qichao, is fourfold. First, traditional historians were concerned with the ruling court instead of the nation. The 24 dynastic histories, which cover more than 2,000 years, are not histories at all, but "the genealogies of 24 different families" or, worse, "a unique, comprehensive account of people beheading one another." All the histories so far were written for private purposes, to instruct either the emperor or a minister rather than to be read by the people. "Up to now the Chinese still have not developed an idea of the nation, for which historians of the past thousands of years can never be excused."47 The denunciation of past historiography for yielding no usable histories save private or imperial chronicles is always the first step taken by nationalist historians to affirm the new political function of national history. In Japan, for instance, the bummei kaika historian Fukuzawa Yukichi, whose writings directly influenced Liang Qichao, argued in 1875 that Japan's traditional historians had been concerned "not with the history of Japan, merely with the history of Japanese governments."48 About five years later, in colonial Bengal, when Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay undertook to write a modern history of Bengal, he also exclaimed that "Bengalis have no history," even though a fair number of history books were available. In the case of Bankim, as Partha Chatterjee points out, "the historical consciousness he is seeking to invoke is in no way an 'indigenous' consciousness, because the preferred discursive form of his historiography is modern European."49 The same is true of Fukuzawa and Liang. Both articulated a new historical consciousness in rejecting traditional annalistic historiography to embrace a causal historical narrative. The modernity of their historiographical method first consisted in introducing a national political history, based on the modern European nation-state, as determining all other local and native histories.

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The second reason given by Liang for the impoverishment of the historiographical tradition is the focus of past historians on the individual rather than the collective or society. Traditional histories read like "a heap of numerous, random epitaphs," from which the Chinese could hardly derive any sense of political identity or community. "Society" is sorely missing as a historiographical category. Third, and most obviously, traditional historians, because their scope of investigation was limited to the fortunes of a bygone dynasty, know how to trace the past but never have a commitment to the present. "Whereas in the West the more recent the times are, the more detailed their histories tend to be, in China a history of one dynasty can appear only after its demise or overthrow." As a result, there is not even one factual account available to study the history of the current Qing dynasty. Finally, old histories are "an instrument for wasting one's intellect rather than tools for improving the mind," because old-fashioned historians, in particular those trained in the scholastic school of textual study (kaozheng), only chronicle details without adding their own interpretation. At this point Liang Qichao the New Historian makes another attempt to define "the spirit of history." What is the spirit of history? Answer: ideas. There are different social groups within a whole society; there are various stages within a long period. In the interaction among different groups and succession of one period to another, there are changes and causes. If the historian is able to detect the phenomena, understand causality, and, by looking into the past examples, foretell the trends of the future, his writing will then be of use to the world.50

Following his critique of traditional historiography in terms of its irrelevance to the present, Liang Qichao also points out its two stylistic defects: expansive data compilation instead of selection and slavish imitation rather than creation. For all these reasons, one can hardly benefit from reading a traditional history. It is hard to read in the first place because of the vast amount of material piled together indiscriminately. The reader who takes pains to plow through the material still remains confused because no coherent story is told. As for a most refined history such as Sima Guang's Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government (Zizhi tongjian), "now read from the perspective of Western history, only about two tenths of it will be found useful."51 This lack of coherence makes past history writing ineffective for the obvious reason that it fails to provide the reading public anything to identify with, "there being nothing that would excite or

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inspire their love for their country." In the age of nationalism, on the other hand, a history of the nation simply cannot afford to turn away the public like this, for history is the only branch of knowledge that will unite and strengthen "the four hundred million compatriots in a world that observes the principle of natural selection." "Without starting a historiographical revolution," concludes Liang, "there can be no hope of redeeming our nation."52 The historiographical revolution that Liang proposes with such urgency involves a series of radical conceptual changes, the most fundamental of which is the modern historical consciousness or an ideological experience of time as a revolutionary and scarce resource. Related to it is the new notion of society as a self-conscious collectivity (qunti). The new historical narrative must be not only presentoriented but also organized around the nation or society as the central political agency. A lack of the notion of society kept the traditional historian from finding meaning in the process of history. To him the passage of time appeared as nothing more than an endless recycling of abstract moral forces or simply as an exhibition of eternal destiny. In short, most of the time the traditional historian has been a mindless recorder rather than an interpreter; he still has to emerge from among the private chronicles as a public figure, a universal intellectual. In his subsequent effort to provide a modern definition of history, Liang Qichao elaborated on the importance of society and methodically built it into his conception of a new historiography. It is here that we find a systematic and summary expression of his historical thinking as well as his general social and political theory. Indeed, history writing for the New Historian was first and foremost a political statement and intervention. It is this evocation of politically, together with an acute consciousness of time, that determines the modernity of Liang's historical thinking. Characteristic of Liang's style of argumentation, the second part of the essay starts with a metaphysical proposition on the subject of historiography: "History is that which narrates the phenomena of evolutionary changes." There are two different kinds of phenomena, according to the New Historian: those characterized by rotation (the literal meaning of "revolution"), and those characterized by evolution. Rotational phenomena, such as the succession of seasons and the movement of heavenly bodies, are the subject matter of the natural sciences; evolutionary happenings, for example, events in the biologi-

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cal or human world, should be the subject of the historical sciences.53 To further distinguish these two areas, Liang came up with a rather Hegelian classification: "Natural sciences study phenomena in space; historical sciences study phenomena in time." Moreover, because historical events take place in and through time, they are never complete at one particular moment, unlike phenomena in space. Instead, "their condition is always incomplete, and their movement is never rectilinear. They may move forward a yard first and then back up a few inches, or rise to a certain height and then fall a couple of degrees, just like the movement of a spiral. With this understanding, one may know the true face of history."54 Such spiral-like movements, however, often mislead the observer. Even a sage such as Mencius, for instance, appeared baffled by a local and partial history when he commented that the truth of history is the cyclical succession of order and chaos. He failed to have a commanding overview, Liang Qichao reasoned, "of the general tendency of human history since its inception hundreds of thousands of years ago, which would have enabled him to see the true direction of history." Here Liang briefly returned to the intriguing distinction between the "three sequences" and "three ages" and equated the former with a theory of ahistorical rotation and the latter to a theory of historical evolution.55 The difference between them is that one deflates history, and the other recognizes it as a cumulative progression. Historical evolution, however, is still much too broad a category to be useful, since, as Liang saw it, it refers to all phenomena that exist in time and often beyond the human world. In order to make history a human property and transform it into modern historicity, Liang defines the main concern of history as "the evolutionary phenomena of human society [renqun]" Through this conceptual specification, "society" finally becomes the subject of history and the organizing principle of historiography. The notion of evolution is hardly applicable to the individual because an individual life is a matter less of evolution than of a biological cycle. When the entire society is examined as a community striving for collective survival, progressive evolution is the norm and true course of human history. "The chief concern of history," as a result, "ought to be events affecting human societies."56 The idea of a communal qun was always essential to Liang's reformist program as well as his historical thinking.57 As early as 1896, when writing General Discussion of Reforms, he differentiated qun

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(grouping, society) from du (isolation, individual) and positively valorized the former. "The Way [Dao] is always improved by grouping and always weakened by isolation. Isolation leads to separation, separation to ignorance, and ignorance to weakness; grouping leads to integration, integration to intelligence, and intelligence to strength." Only with grouping and integration can people form units and communities at various scales, ascending from family to race, from race to nation, and finally to general humanity. Without grouping, on the other hand, a people would be unable to form a society for effective selfdefense and consequently would be subject to foreign intrusion and domination. "Despite the fact that the black people in Africa, the brown in India, and the red in America, the South Pacific, and Australia occupied more than half the surface of the earth," enumerated Liang with sympathetic alarm, "the Europeans were still able to cow and butcher them, just in the manner of either taming wild lions and elephants or riding camels and horses. The only reason is that they could not group together."58 Liang's concept of qun derives largely from the traditional belief in an organic community, closely modeled on the extended family, that has always been posited and incorporated into the cosmology of an essentially agrarian culture. But at the same time, qun, or "society," is stripped of any particular content or metaphysical reference and turned into a universal category that helps reveal history to be determined fundamentally by collective efforts. Less than a year later, in 1897, Liang once again wrote on the importance of understanding the social community as a political entity for self-defense and survival. He first made it clear that the notion of qun originally came to him through Kang Youwei's well-known doctrine of governance in an age of social crises: "Society [qun] as the end and change [bian] as the means." What directly inspired him to write a treatise on qun, however, was Van Fu's translation of Thomas Henry Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (Tianyan lun), which Liang read in its manuscript form, and Tan Sitong's revolutionary Study of Bev community as a polity responsible for its own destiny now drew quasi-scientific support from social Darwinism, an explanatory system that was quickly gaining popularity among reform-minded Chinese. The idea would soon be fully embraced by and incorporated into nationalist ideology. Explicating the political implications of qun as a collective force,

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Liang suggested that there was not only a general qunli (grouping as part of human nature), but also a practical qunshu (methods of social administration). Here, qun was equivalent to a modern concept of social organization, to which political equality and individual rights would later become attached as fundamental values. Therefore, Liang found it important to emphasize that qun, or "grouping," did not mean uniformity at the expense of individuality. On the contrary, the strength of society derived from a well-coordinated social life and political participation. For this reason, Liang suggested in the essay that plurality is more valuable than homogeneity and that cosmopolitan awareness is a sign of civilization. "Africans cannot compare with Europeans or Asians, rural folks with city dwellers, ancients with moderns," he wrote.60 Different societies could be classified not only according to their degree of integration but also in terms of their capacity for self-reflection. "A barbarian society cannot survive a civilized society. The more advanced the world, the greater the role of collective social power. If one is unable to accept this, only extinction will follow."61 Embedded in Liang Qichao's advocacy of grouping and social organization were cosmopolitan aspirations that viewed provincialism negatively. Also, by relating the survival of a given community to its ability to assert itself collectively as other communities had done, Liang began to articulate some basic principles of the modern worldsystem of nation-states. A modern nation would survive in this new spatiotemporal regime by participating in it and affirming its political equivalence to other nations. A nation's claim to modernity, in other words, would eventually lie in its acceptance of the global imaginary of identity. "With the concept of ch'un [qun]" Hao Chang analyzes, "Liang was moving from the Confucian cultural ideal of moral Gemeinschaft toward an incipient idea of national community."62 But qun was not so much a brand-new and alien notion "inspired by the Western example of capacity for associational organization and political cohesion."63 Rather, as a political and more specifically ethnological concept, qun can be traced back at least to Wang Fuzhi, a philosopher and political theorist who lived through the violent transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty. In response to rampant ethnic conflicts, Wang Fuzhi virtually conceived of a nation-state by expounding the political importance of differentiating and developing qun. "Since the forming of groups is inherent in human nature," according to

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Wang Fuzhi's proto-nationalism, "and the establishment of a ruler is for the purpose of protecting the group, it is logical and necessary for the group to govern itself."64 The government should take as its sole responsibility the defense of a self-integrative qun, which as an ethnic group shares not only the same territory but also the same culture.65 In the "modern scholarship" section of his expansive essay "On the General Development of Chinese Scholarship and Thought," Liang Qichao commended Wang Fuzhi and his political thinking, especially his proto-democratic ideas.66 By the time Liang Qichao wrote "New Historiography," qun as a political concept had been systematically modernized, redefined, and endorsed by leading reformist thinkers such as Huang Zunxian, Van Fu, and Zhang Binglin. It had entered into general social discourse and proved particularly attractive to the growing number of Chinese students in Japan, who were eagerly searching for an articulable political identity.67 Qun had also become a key operative concept in joining Liang's historical thinking and his nationalist ideology. When, in "New Historiography," he specifically defined the theme of history as a narrative of evolutionary development in a society, qun, or "society," was interchangeable with "the nation." (During this period, Liang generally translated, following Van Fu, "sociology" as qunxue [literally, the study of the group or society] and Saint-Simon's and Marx's "socialism," respectively, as renqun zhuyi and shehui zhuyi.68 More and more frequently, however, he would use the Japanese phrase shakai [society; Chinese shehui] in his writings and believed— correctly—that the new expression, although confusing at the time, would eventually gain currency in the Chinese language.)69 His conception of society as a necessary and increasingly integrative unit in the history of human evolution prepared the basis for two major components of Liang's historical thinking: national history as a political enterprise and the historian as an "interpreter of progress and nation."70 Having underscored the pertinence of society to history writing in "New Historiography," Liang Qichao turned to what a "true historian" ought to be. This discussion of the making of a historian concludes his proposal for a historiographical revolution and directly echoes his initial denunciation of traditional historiographers. Here Liang offered a third and continually expanding definition of history: "History is that which narrates the evolutionary phenomena of human society and therein seeks its governing laws and guidance." The

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object (keguan) of historical studies is "the facts of both the past and the present"; its subject (zhuguan) "is the philosophy in the mind of the writer as well as of the reader of history." Hence arises a separate discipline called the "philosophy of history," which focuses on the general laws underlying human history. "Although history and the philosophy of history are two independent disciplines, the important point is that without the ideas of philosophy no good history could be written."71 What Liang meant by the "subject" of history is the interpretation one needs to impart to historical facts or, rather, a political ideology in terms of which human experiences are organized and made coherent and relevant. "Having an object but no subject, a history is like a body without the soul, close to non-history." However, Liang hastened to add in brackets, "If it is too much of a subject and ignores the object, a history is no more than one point of view, notwithstanding its being a good book. It simply cannot be called a history." This belief in the continuity between historical truthfulness and intelligibility, between history as knowledge and history as meaning, is the hallmark of the Enlightenment philosophy of history. As Anthony Giddens puts it, only with the gradual disintegration of the authority of tradition and with the "encroachment of historicity" in the post-feudal West, did "hermeneutics and historiography" become closely meshed. "The conjunction was effected as a crucial part of the Enlightenment critique of tradition: for the Enlightenment philosophers did not remain at the level of the interpretation of the past, but questioned the very principle of tradition itself, the authority which the past exercises over the present."72 What the humanist hermeneutics signifies is a new attitude toward historical experience and political possibility, both now considered inalienable human property. This new historicity or ideological interpretation of history is what "New Historiography" then sets out to legitimize. Although Voltaire served as the prototype of the intellectual/ historian guiding public opinion, it was, rather, another "typical Enlightenment historian" Edward Gibbon,73 who provided Liang Qichao with a concrete example of the new mode of history writing in "New Historiography." In the section devoted to the techniques of writing a history, Liang criticized traditional historians for being unable to make independent judgments on historical personalities and events. Because they never tried to understand history in its entirety or as a socially interrelated process, all past historians, with the possible ex-

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ception of Sima Qian, focused on the victorious and the powerful. "Throughout the historical writings of the past 2,000 years," Liang asked indignantly, "is there a single word that was not written to render a faithful service to the powerful?" To renovate history writing, Liang proposed, one should either learn from Plutarch or follow the example of Gibbon. Plutarch's Parallel Lives keeps alive the great heroes of antiquity through its vivid and sympathetic narration; Gibbon's Roman history presents a bird's-eye view of a nation's decline and fall. "Great and noble ideas" run through his writing, and he accordingly commented on the nature of the nation as a whole. As a result, Gibbon was able to show "what causes one historical period to achieve prosperity and what brings another to decline."74 What Liang emphasized about Gibbon's historiography was his Enlightenment rhetoric of universalism and his humanist belief in ineluctable progress.75 Gibbon's vision of an inclusive history of civilization, however, was also shared by Voltaire, whose notion of une histoire globale directly inspired the idea of writing universal histories in the nineteenth century. Although he himself did not advance concrete methods for writing a global history, "Voltaire conceived of history as a totality, where the facts, social, political, cultural, military, diplomatic, and artistic, all should be accounted for."76 For Liang, both Gibbon and Voltaire were admirable proto-figures of the Enlightenment writer, a universal intellectual, "the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognize themselves."77 A more direct influence on Liang's conception of a meaningful and universally applicable history was the bummei shi (history of civilization; Chinese wenming shi) historiographical tradition in early Meiji Japan, itself a consequence of the impact of the European Enlightenment. Of the two most prominent bummei shi historians, Fukuzawa Yukichi and Taguchi Ukichi, Liang seemed more familiar with the latter's writings in this capacity. In his "Guidelines to Japanese Books," Liang commented that "history of civilization is the most noble in historiographical styles," partly because it demands great learning and critical insight.78 Whereas the French historian Frangois Guizot left an excellent example in his Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, Taguchi in his Short History of Chinese Civilization (Shina kaika shoshi) demonstrated an acumen not to be found among rigid traditional Chinese historians. Taguchi's brief history, wrote Liang, "is actually historical commentary. What it emphasizes is inference

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rather than facts. Therefore it records happenings only to the extent that they are related to the central thesis."79 The impact of bummei shi on Japanese historical thinking was still palpable during the controversy concerning the purpose and methodology of history that took place in the newly founded Journal of Historical Studies (Shigakkai zasshi) around 1888-89. In one article, historian Inoue Tetsujiro, who was soon to advocate a new toyoshi, insisted on the view that the collection of historical data must be "subordinate to the eventual aim of identifying laws governing historical change in general terms, i.e. laws relevant to all ages and all geographical areas."80 It is by no means easy, as Liang readily acknowledged, to seek general laws and guidance out of history, because, unlike the natural sciences, all the objective phenomena of the historical sciences are still in the process of unfolding. Traditional historians were unable to discover historical laws for two main reasons: (1) they knew a partial history but not a global history; (2) they knew historiography per se but no other related disciplines. To Liang Qichao's mind, a "true historian" of the modern times will utter the historical truth only when he represents the totality of human history through the modern form of historiography. Seeking to know the truth of the evolution of human society, one must comprehend the whole of humanity to make comparisons and overcome temporal and spatial boundaries to make observations. Internally all the legal subjects from villages to township, and externally the global situation of the five continents, up to the antiquity preserved in the fossils, and down to the news taking place yesterday—everything should become objective material [for the historian].81

As for the subjective part of historiography, which gives an animating "spirit" to the study of history and whose possession ultimately begets a true historian, Liang had another list of things with which the historian is to be familiar. Directly related to the writing of an acceptable history are disciplines like geography, geology, ethnology, linguistics, sociology, politics, religious studies, legal theory, and economics; indirectly related are ethics, psychology, logic, rhetoric, and even natural sciences such as astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. All of these, asserted Liang, should be helpful for a better understanding of the process of history. (Inoue Tetsujiro, too, had required the same broadening of knowledge of a modern historian.)82 At this point Liang did not hesitate to repeat, with no little relish, a

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rhetorical question: "Let me ask the traditional historians: how many of you are capable of this?"83 None, of course. Liang Qichao's point is that traditional historians are not so much incompetent to understand or study other disciplines and fields of knowledge as unwilling or not required to do so. Obviously, for Liang, the representation of history now calls for a new epistemic orientation and a new narrative form. The new historical discourse is superior to traditional historiography because it aspires to embrace the entirety of human history, or Voltaire's ideal of une histoire globale. Comprehensive in scope, it is able to relate events in causal terms and explain history as a progressive process. The new historiography is a much more powerful form of historical narrative because it subscribes to a dynamic vision of totality. On the theoretical level, at least, the whole is the true, and Liang found this a revolutionary idea with which both to dismantle the traditional conception of history and historical representation and to delegitimize a regional construct—whether ideological, political, or epistemological—on the basis of its incompleteness and parochialness.84 As a new form of knowledge, totalizing historical narrative opened for Liang a grand new horizon of expectation. Liang Qichao's much more immediate concern was to establish the feasibility as well as the validity of this new historiography as form. His one and only point being that the new historiography involves a new knowledge of the world and its past, Liang was never ambiguous about the enormous formative influence historical knowledge can exert on society. The present rather than the past should be the focus of historiographical representation; mere compilation of facts ought to give way to interpretive ideas. Historical laws and necessity are what the new historical discourse needs to acknowledge and legitimize. The nation-state, a modern political creation, should now replace the dynasty, and society the individual, as the central actors of history. In the final analysis, the new historical narrative should represent the nation's advent as a political agency. At this point we find a full-fledged statement of the purpose and function of new historiography: "The reason why one must seek laws and guidance [from history] is not to have some sophisticated theory, but to first put them into practice and then make future generations benefit from them. History is that which guides the evolution of the future by referring to the evolution of the past."85 History or, rather, historicity now becomes not only a discourse

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of totality but also a totalizing discourse. It presents a totalizing discourse because historicity—modern historical consciousness in the Enlightenment tradition—accepts as its principle that historical experience and relations can and should ultimately be synthesized through a temporal order. Thus the totality invoked expresses a desire for formal unity, in which time as a continuous unfolding establishes the essential relationship of identity and connects the past with the future. In fact progressive time not only assures the new historical discourse of its formal unity but often substitutes itself for the content of a global, totalizing history. This new discourse of historical totality, in other words, involves a systematic temporalization of space, by means of which historical experience is rendered much more narratable and rational. With this totalizing move that legitimizes the centrality of historical time, Liang began "The Relationship Between History and Race," the third and longest section of "New Historiography." Once again, as in the preceding sections, a general definition of history is modified and expanded: "History is but the narrative of the development of human races and the competition among them. Without human races, there would be no history." Why should this be so? In answering this question, Liang introduced political territoriality as a crucial, but secondary historiographical category. "History originates in human societies [renqun]" he declared, "and the reason that human beings may group themselves into societies is that they must be able to form a unity within themselves on the one hand and have an external force to resist on the other. From here arises the differentiation among races."86 The dominant mode of Liang's historical imagination here, compared to that implied in the previous definitions, is more explicitly spatially oriented. With the delimitation of a fortified inside versus a challenging outside, human society is conceived of essentially as a territorial construct. The space metaphor is employed effectively to explain the intelligibility as well as the dynamics of human history. In fact history as such becomes conceivable only when there is a spacing through which the tension between an inside and an outside can be instituted. This tension is never static. On the contrary, it is constantly intensified and relocated because the territory of the interior, imagined as being surrounded by aggressive hostility, exists only because of ceaseless expansion. It is this generative territorial tension, according to Liang, that moves history forward.

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Therefore initially there was unification of the family in order to force out other families, then unification of the village to force out other villages, then unification of the town to force out other towns, and finally unification of the nation to force out other nations. These have indeed been the progressive stages of world history in the past thousands of years, and today it is the age of national unification and exclusion.87

The modern nation-state, in this grand historical schedule, becomes a natural growth, a logical extension of the basic principle that underlies the structure and movement of human society. This same account also renders nationalism both a historical necessity and a transhistorical principle, both a political ideology and a universal myth. When history becomes a narrative of continuous spatial and territorial reorganization and adjustment, and its engendering tension is the inside/outside, self/other dialectic, the historical consciousness arising therefrom is necessarily a keen political consciousness centered on group identity and collective interest. For Liang, "nothing is worse than a lack of internal unification due to the absence of foreign aggression. With no internal unification, a society could have no unity and therefore no hope of securing a respectable place in history."88 At this point Liang spoke less in his own voice than as a spokesman for the aggressive logic of Enlightenment rationality, or of what Nicos Poulantzas calls a "capitalist historicity": "The modern demands for national autonomy and a national State are equivalent, within capitalist historicity, to demands for a national history."89 The practical value of nationalism as a political ideology, which Liang grasped perfectly in terms of "co-ordination, mobilization, and legitimacy" for the modern nation-state,90 relies to a large extent on the spatial reorientation that nationalism prioritizes. Nationalism, as John Breuilly remarks, can be regarded largely as the single modern ideology that functions as a map and "provides people with the means to identify their own position in the world in relation to others."91 It is a map that, while imposing world space and time on human experience, also inserts the nation as the basic unit of meaning constituting the new global imaginary. Because nationalism functions as an inclusive map of the modern world in terms of political geography, it is predominantly associated with territorial experience and makes history representable insofar as it deals with both the immediacy of lived experience (place) and an imaginary relationship with others (space). Therefore, and retroactively, Liang found it helpful to

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periodize human history in terms of territorial confrontation. The progress from primitive family through tribal society to the nation, therefore, exemplifies the historical movement from a regional terrain with its localized political community to a more universal space that demands a different social organization. Spatiality, or the human experience of space, becomes at once a social construct and a historiographical concept. Each mode of spatial experience entails a separate historical consciousness that adjusts the relation between lived experience of the individual and its larger context of meaning. As a discursive practice, modern historiography in the West, Michel de Certeau theorized, "symbolizes a society capable of managing the space that it provides for itself. . . . It produces a symbol through the very relation between a space newly designated within time and a modus operandi that fabricates 'scenarios' capable of organizing practices into a currently intelligible discourse—namely, the task of 'the making of history.' "92 Modern historical thinking, therefore, has first to encounter and appropriate space, and making history becomes coterminous with a process of making space. In this sense, writing a national history must be preceded by a cognitive mapping and invariably leads to a continual negotiation between place and space, between prideful assertion and realistic compromises with others. Here arises a series of contradictions and difficulties that "New Historiography" demonstrates only too well. The explicit discursive function of "New Historiography," or that of nationalist historical knowledge, is to rationalize a new spatiotemporal regime, namely, the modern capitalist interstate world-system of nation-states. Given its ideological commitment to modernity's progressive time scheme, the new historical configuration also has to take into consideration a spatiality that cannot be incorporated or subordinated to a homogenizing temporality. The moment a new historical vision is inspired by the prospect of a universal time, it is also fragmented by the persistence of a particular spatial structure. In other words, the same moment the modern world space makes possible a universal human history, the geopolitical reality exploited by the system of nation-states also keeps that prospect at bay. For Liang Qichao, this global historical condition creates a troubling discontinuity between nationalism as a universal ideal and nationalism as a portable political ideology. In one of the long and disputatious letters exchanged between him and Kang Youwei in the spring of 1902, Liang Qichao informed

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his mentor of his deliberate political choice. "Today is a crucial time for advancing nationalism, without which no nation-state can be built. I as your student will do my best to promote nationalism and will never give it up."93 The same letter nevertheless contained some revealing comments on the rhetorical function of universalism. In defending his mild criticism of Kang's notion of a consummating universal harmony as impractical, Liang pointed out that in contemporary works by Western writers, "even though they are talking about nationalism, none of them fails to make a reference to universalism as a sort of supporting or counter-argument. The reason may be that in order to develop the thesis [of nationalism] and round it off, one has to mention it."94 For this reason, Liang raises a question about the possibility of a future "universal harmony" in his "New Historiography." "Alas, after this stage [of nationalism], will there be a perfect state where there is no boundary between races and great harmony among all countries reigns? I do not know positively."95 Liang's argument is that despite its inferiority to the ideal of a perfect world, nationalism still remains the only feasible political choice in the present. At the same time, because of the presence of that ideal, even though it may ultimately be unattainable, nationalism must be accepted as a historical necessity, one stage in the development toward that ultimate goal. But the contradiction between the practical value of nationalism and a universalist vision of history is not thereby resolved once and for all in "New Historiography." After expressing skepticism about any possible future universal harmony, Liang divided human races into two categories: those with their own history and those without. A historical race is that which can form a cohesive, integrated society and is able to impose itself upon others, for only through aggression will a race realize its historical significance. An ahistorical race, on the other hand, cannot achieve internal unity and is thereby subject to foreign intrusion. Such a society is destined to disintegrate eventually and be driven off the stage of history. Once again, the categories "historical" and "ahistorical" are conceived in spatial terms. Or, rather, access to historical meaning lies in territorial expansion and conquest. Specifically, Liang was distinguishing between races or nations that have established a modern, territorial state of their own and those that have failed to do so. "In the capitalist era, a nation without a State of its own," as Nicos Poulantzas observes in his influential study of the power and ideological mechanisms of the modern

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state, "is in the course of losing its tradition and history; for the modern nation-State also involves eradication of the traditions, histories and memories of dominated nations involved in its process."96 So far, according to Liang Qichao, only two races can qualify as historical, the whites and the yellows; all other races, such as the blacks and the reds, are not.97 Whereas Liang's classification is basically confined to a racial ethnology developed in nineteenth-century Europe, his account also reflects the social Darwinian view prevalent among contemporary Chinese nationalists and reformers.98 Within the "historical races" there is still a pivotal distinction to be made, because "history" has acquired, as we have seen, various scopes of inclusion and degrees of significance. Thus a "world-historical race" is sharply different from and preferable to a "non-world-historical race" in that the former not only establishes cultural and political unity within its boundaries but also moves beyond "to influence people all over the world by assisting them in their development and progress." Only a colonialist or imperialist state, in other words, can lay claim to world-historical significance. Following this definition, Liang admits not without chagrin that the white race alone can be regarded as world-historical. Or, rather, the Aryans within the white races, because, "it is widely agreed among the learned that the European civilization, in a narrow sense, is the origin of modern civilization in the world" and that the Aryans have been solely responsible for advancing European civilization.99 Liang's comments here are close to the historical trajectory that Hegel projected in his Philosophy of History, but perhaps in a reverse direction. For whereas Hegel directs a movement of history from East to West, Liang sees the Aryan expansion to the rest of the world as forecasting a historical revival of the East. In other words, in Liang's grand historical vision, even colonialism and imperialism, however destructive they may be, are viewed as true to historical reason and ultimately a dialectic force that helps history realize its potential. What follows, then, in "New Historiography" is an outline of world history from the European perspective and in terms of ethnic rivalry and competition. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, free city-states flourished in Italy and foretold today's nation-states. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with their national strength growing respectively, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French sailed westward to explore America, eastward to invade India, and southward to conquer the South Pacific. With roaring ferocity and speed,

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the Aryans started to expand their control over territory outside Europe. The most active of them were still Romans. But according to the principle of natural selection, an old Roman would not be able to compete with a young Teuton. Soon after, the Dutch emerged to claim a role; then the British arrived to take over. In recent times, it is the Germans who on horseback stormed and raged across the land. . . . Today, 90 percent of the earth is under the control of the white race. The whites are essentially Aryans, and the Aryans in fact Teutons. Therefore the Teutons are in reality the indisputable masters of the world.100 The presence of such an unabashedly Eurocentric and imperialist narrative in Liang Qichao's radical nationalist historiography should be duly stressed if we wish to read "New Historiography" as a historical document. It is first of all a text that is actively engaged in creating a new scenario for historical imagination and social revolution within a national boundary. It also barely conceals the ressentiment that underlies its generalizing rhetoric; it recognizes European superiority only after the principle of progress and aggression is universalized and rendered applicable to the process of history everywhere. "New Historiography" bespeaks a historical ambivalence toward the logic of modern nationalism. The trajectory, in the text, from the historian as a public hero equipped with the new knowledge of universal laws to a nationalist remapping the geography of world history outlines a fundamental contradiction between nationalism as a universal principle and nationalism as a mobilizing political ideology. "New Historiography" attempts to define at once the form and the content of national history. The form proposed is based on a universalist concept and consists in accepting causality among historical events and the progressive succession of historical time, which in themselves often surreptitiously form the ideological content of a totalizing historical discourse. The specific content of national history, on the other hand, can only be derived from a collective and political experience of space. It is a content that often embodies itself in different territories, or spatial constructions, and its conceptualizing framework is the global map of uneven and juxtaposed spaces. The content of national history, nonetheless, will not be relevant or useful until it is realized in the given narrative form; it will remain formless and unrecognizable unless it first acquires time and mobility in and through historical time. When it is rewritten in terms of this meaning-endowing time, national history becomes new and modernized. In this sense, Liang's "New Historiography" was the first and

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most systematic expression of what would become "a long-standing dream of twentieth-century intellectuals: the creation of a 'new history.' "101 This creation would be conceived largely in terms of formal innovations, and the search for a new history was essentially a quest for a new form of history. Both the form and the content of national history are modern conceptions in that they reflect an experience of time and space that became hegemonic in the wake of the Western Enlightenment. If it is possible to separate form from content in nationalist historiographical practice, as is the case with "New Historiography," the separation reflects a discontinuity between historical, progressive time and particular, uneven space. For instance, while national space or territory has functioned as a major political doctrine in modernity, adherence to national time more often than not symbolizes a conscious, if also desperate, resistance to modernity. Moreover, national space becomes accessible and tenable only when it participates in universal time. It is time as a central mode of historical experience and representation that characterizes and hierarchizes space. Time, in other words, stands for formal continuity and intelligibility in modern historical discourse. In this context, the different sections of "New Historiography," first a general definition of history and then history as territorial expansion, implicitly acknowledge the tension between the modern desire for formal unity and the irreducible difference of historical experience. Liang Qichao did not explicitly pose such questions in the text, but the project of a Chinese national history would eventually have to confront the difficulty of reconciling a spatially organized national history with universal, progressive time. It was through another, more pressing question that Liang would soon return to the central problem of national historiography. The question that he now asked, in his studies of different national revolutions in modern Europe, was how to engineer a modernizing social revolution within the nation. The concrete content of modernity began to attract Liang's attention. This, as we will see in the next two chapters, would lead Liang to reconsider national politics, for nationalism as political identification and, more directly, as mass mobilization would quickly reveal its fatal limitations when social revolution proved to be a complex agenda. We will also see that for Liang Qichao the New Historian historical writing would soon become a form of political reasoning and discourse.

3 The Nation and Revolution: Narrating the Modern Event

The grand project of inventive renovation that Liang Qichao energetically undertook with his New Citizen Journal in 1902 rests, as we have seen, largely on a modernist belief in the "new" and the mobilizational function of a nationalist ideology. Best suited to legitimizing reform, the discourse of nationalism provided Liang with a convincing historical narrative of the emergence of the modern world and, at the same time, posited national identity and well-being as the fundamental dynamic propelling historical progress. Necessarily a historicist discourse, reform-oriented nationalism involves a systematic rewriting of history that thematizes change and invariably climaxes in a future, fulfilling moment of rejuvenation of the nation, now the central agent of history. It is therefore an essential discourse of modernity. With national revival and independence as its proto-plot, it is also a narrative of liberation, assigning in general an optimistic rationality to historical experience and, above all, underscoring the formative impact of human action on the historical process.1 This emphasis on a creative human agency in nationalist historiography, however, frequently gives rise to an aporia in Liang's historical writings. The nation, as a collectivity, more often than not remains a passive abstraction in the narrative, and it is always the action of individual heroes that endows the history of a nation with a

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narratable plot and meaning. In his Discourse on the New Citizen, for example, after explicating nationalism as the legitimizing ideology of a modern nation-state, Liang in the following section urged the Chinese to cultivate an adventurous and enterprising spirit. The European nations are more powerful than China, he wrote, because they are more disposed to adventure and aggression. To illustrate this point, he cited people like Columbus, Martin Luther, Cromwell, and Mazzini as exemplary figures of heroic bravery and determination.2 Without these courageous individuals who rise to challenge and transform history, narratives of national history would be virtually impossible. Indeed, even though he called for "a history of the nation" in his programmatic "New Historiography," when Liang actually narrates a collective national history, the narrative always takes the form of heroic biography and registers singularity rather than generality. The nation can be represented only abstractly and more often than not is evoked as an ideological construct. When it does enter the narrative as a concrete agent, the nation either perfectly embodies the hero's will and vision or, conversely, amounts to an exacting challenge. In this chapter, I present close readings of three heroic biographies by Liang, which in themselves form a narrative of a perpetual tension between nationalist ideology and national history, namely, nationalism as a universal idea and national revolution as a singular historical event. This tension reflects the virtually impossible double role expected of reform-oriented liberal nationalism: a Utopian vision that appeals to a revolutionary longing for collective action, and a practical, if mundane, mission that can be fulfilled only with an administered system of rationality such as the modern nation-state. These two emancipatory drives—populist romanticism versus elitist rationalism—indeed form one of the fundamental political and intellectual dilemmas of modernity that proved inescapable to visionary thinkers such as Liang Qichao. Nonetheless, Liang's biographies established a central narrative form of modernity in twentieth-century China by presenting collective political action and purposeful individual existence as integral and inseparable. For this reason, they also participated in preparing the foundational narrative of modern China.

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The first biography Liang Qichao wrote in 1902 was that of Louis Kossuth (1802-94), the Hungarian national hero. The story was published in segments in the New Citizen Journal and overlapped with other pivotal writings of Liang's such as Discourse on the New Citizen and "New Historiography." The reasons that Kossuth should be the first foreign hero to be commended in the form of a biography, explained Liang in a brief preface, are that the Hungarian patriot set a most relevant example for Chinese nationalists and that his times and experiences closely resemble those of contemporary Chinese. Ancient Chinese heroes, for all their admirable deeds, are too removed in time and space to inspire awe; at the same time the great men of the modern West, although they deserve veneration, belong to a different historical milieu. Kossuth, in contrast, a member of the yellow race and from a similarly despotic country, went through innumerable trials and tribulations to accomplish his patriotic cause. Thus "his ideas and deeds can offer a most applicable model for members of the yellow race, for subjects of a despotic government, and for people who have suffered setbacks in their causes."3 Throughout his narrative, Liang was never ambiguous about his intent to learn from the career of this great nationalist hero. By means of this implicit comparison, Chinese nationalism, as much as the Hungarian story, acquires a world-historical significance since both represent the cause of an entire race. Liang Qichao begins his biography of Kossuth with an introduction to the times into which the hero was born. This critical attention to historical setting as a necessary part of understanding the individual, as Liang made clear in his earlier brief biography of Kang Youwei, derived from the teachings of Mencius: "To understand a person, one must examine his times."4 This would indeed be a principle in all of Liang's historical narratives, whether an individual life story or a comprehensive intellectual history, for the individual or an event invariably introduces a new force in a given historical condition. After a brief description of the origins of the Hungarian race and of the system of government instituted in Hungary when it came under Austrian rule in 1526, Liang quickly moved to the beginning of the nineteenth century when, under the reactionary Holy Alliance, Austrian chancellor Metternich imposed oppressive policies on Hungary that

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soon led to widespread discontent and misery. It is a seminal nationalist narrative that contains two crucial elements: a glorious past and a recent decline. The present, however, was a time that called for and indeed created heroes. Louis Kossuth, born to a noble family on April 27, 1802, and showing all signs of genius at an early age, was to be a hero who answered the call of his times and changed the course of history.5 According to Liang's narrative, before Kossuth arrived at the center stage of history, there had been two camps engaged in a common cause against the Austrian oppression: one was the moderate group of magnates in the Hungarian Diet represented by Count Stephen Szechenyi; the other was a more radical faction, headed by Baron Miklos Wesselenyi, which sought political and economic independence for Hungary. Here, in the moderate-radical opposition, Liang introduced a paradigm of historical change that would reappear in his other historical narratives. For the New Historian, different strategies for successfully engineering a social and political transformation, either reform or revolution, would soon become a predominant concern. Since at this point in his own political thinking Liang leaned toward revolution and a radical "destructionism," he portrayed Kossuth largely in the light of a nationalist revolutionary. Thus, in the wake of the 1832 Diet, at which the radical baron expressed a mounting nationalist sentiment and open hostility toward the Habsburgs, Wesselenyi was put in prison and as a result, "more pressure generated more opposition." "Throughout the country, cries for revolution began to resound and reverberate; the loudest and most farreaching of them came from no less a person than Kossuth."6 Kossuth, according to Liang, identified with the radical tradition of Wesselenyi. It was also at the 1832 Diet that the future governor of Hungary first made himself noticed by lithographing his reports of Diet debates. Although Austrian law forbade publishing reports on the Diet, Kossuth, already a respected honorary attorney for his home county of Zemplin at the age of twenty, reasoned that lithographing was not the same as publishing and insisted on distributing his factual reports. These lithographs attracted immediate public attention and challenged the legitimacy of the documents put out by the Austrian government. Soon after, Kossuth's work was outlawed. But the young patriot's ardor increased in the face of prohibition, and people throughout the country demanded his reports all the more because

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of the ban. Determined to inform the public of the situation within the Diet and the country, Kossuth hired a number of secretaries and had his reports handwritten. In this way they continued to reach people all over Hungary, and "overnight a young scholar from the provincial countryside turned out to be a match for Metternich, the strongman of Europe."7 Liang's impassioned description of the popularity and impact of Kossuth's reports says much about his own understanding of the public press as an indispensable instrument for mobilization. In Kossuth he saw a career similar to and foreshadowing his own. He highlighted the influential newspaper Pesti Hirlap (Pest gazette) that the Hungarian hero started in 1841, after three years of imprisonment. By means of this organ, Kossuth vociferously publicized his radical views on political and economic issues and gave pointed expression to the growing nationalist sentiments. The press is once again shown to be a most effective weapon in the service of a nationalist uprising. By 1847, when the Hungarian Diet was once again convened, all Europe was on the verge of a series of national revolutions. Through political maneuvering, Kossuth was elected to the Diet as one of two deputies from Pest. In Liang's account, three discernible political groups emerged in Hungarian politics. Szechenyi continued to head the Conservatives, whose political agenda was gradual amelioration in collaboration with the Austrian government and thus at odds with that of the Progressives. Opposed to both groups was a third party, the socialist Reformers. This third political force represented idealistic radicalism that endorsed popular insurrection as means to achieve Hungarian independence from the Habsburg empire. The Progressives, however, now under the able leadership of Kossuth, often mediated between these two competing groups and adopted a middle way. "They were going to do their utmost in proposing various pieces of legislation and forcing the government to implement them. They would try other ways if the government refused to cooperate, but unless it became entirely hopeless, they would never opt for destructive means."8 This moderate political approach proved to be what Liang himself would adopt most of the time, in particular after 1903. For a brief period after the aborted One Hundred Days Reform and his subsequent exile, Liang Qichao was militant and prompt to talk about relentless "destruction" of the existing system. He believed that only a radical transformation would pave the way for a new society.9 By

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1902, when he began putting out the New Citizen Journal and, a few months later, The New Fiction, the "destruction" was relegated to a painful last resort. As we shall see in the next chapter, in his novel The Future of New China, Liang would present a most rigorous and prophetic debate on the issue of destructive revolution versus constructive reform. In Kossuth's reformist political program, obviously, his Chinese biographer found much to ponder and sympathize with. Yet soon the political situation in Hungary intensified so much that a decisive choice had to be made. In February 1848, news of the Paris uprising reached the Hungarian Diet in session in Pressburg and inspired the opposition forces to defy the Austrian government. On March 4, Kossuth delivered what was to be called the "inaugural address of the revolution" before the Diet.10 "What we ought to ask for," to quote one version of Kossuth's impassioned speech, "is the budget of the Hungarian receipts and expenditures, which have hitherto been mixed up with those of our neighbors. We ought to ask for the constitutional administration of our finances. We ought to ask for a separate and independent financial board for Hungary." Yet in Liang's often liberal rendition, this becomes a much more nationalistic and straightforward proclamation: "The most urgent task of the present is to organize an independent Hungarian government and have a separate administration of finances. After all, Hungary belongs only to the Hungarians."11 Whatever the precise wording, this eloquent speech ignited the deputies, in Liang's words, just like "a ball of fire thrown into a pile of explosives." Everyone jumped to his feet, all conservative and cautious notions readily discarded. Revolution was now well under way, as was a romanticized heroism in Liang's narrative. Following this moment of nationalistic passion and proclamation, a rapid sequence of events and negotiations culminated in the formation of a Hungarian cabinet, with Count Louis Batthyanyi from Pest county as prime minister and Louis Kossuth as minister of finance. Largely a coalition cabinet, it also included such prominent Hungarian political figures as Conservative leader Count Szechenyi and moderate Francis Deak. On April 11, 1848, as a gesture of reconciliation, the Austrian emperor Ferdinand appeared at the Pressburg Diet and in Hungarian graciously declared the triumphant Diet closed. This effectively marked the end of the first stage of the Hungarian struggle for self-determination and a conclusion to the most illustrious years of Kossuth's political career.

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Yet the fact that the king-emperor spoke Hungarian rather than the conventional Latin at the Diet almost cynically foreshadowed the trouble that lay ahead for the new Hungarian administration. Ferdinand's "evil strategy" was to instigate racial conflicts among the various ethnic groups in Hungary. The diversity of ethnic minorities and their long-standing hostility, commented Liang (who would later distinguish strictly a social revolution from a racial one), constituted the "most severe weakness" of Hungary as a nation. The Austrian emperor took advantage of this situation and decided to undermine the Hungarian quest for independence from within. In May of the same year, with the same nationalistic rhetoric of resistance, but this time directed against a Magyar majority, ethnic tension flared in the province of Croatia, followed by more serious unrest among the Serbians, who formed a Central Committee of the Serbian Nation in defiance of the newly established Hungarian cabinet. The Austrian government was only too happy to speed the impending civil war by commissioning Baron Joseph Jellacic, a Croatian, to lead the forces guarding Hungary against the rebellious Croatians. Faced with devastating ethnic unrest and external enmity, Kossuth as minister of finance proposed to raise an army of 200,000 together with a military budget of 42 million florins. On July 5, at the first meeting of the new Hungarian Diet, Kossuth once again, "in tears and sobs," according to Liang's hyperbolic description, made an eloquent speech defending his proposals. It was a speech that Liang could not help repeating and translating into equally elegant Chinese. "And I would ask you, gentlemen, if anywhere in our country a breast sighs for liberation, or a wish waits for its fulfillment, let that breast suffer yet a while, let that wish have a little patience, until we have saved the country. This is my request! You all have risen to a man, and I bow before the nation's greatness! If your energy equals your patriotism, I will make bold to say that even the gates of Hell shall not prevail against Hungary."12 The 400 representatives, holding their breath, listened in awe, and at the end the entire assembly suddenly rose to its feet exclaiming its confirmation, some of them even shouting "Give me Liberty or give me Death." Amid fervent, patriotic cries of "Long Live Hungary!" Kossuth's motion passed unanimously. For the rest of the biography, Liang Qichao on the one hand adroitly kept track of the complex events that led first to Hungary's declaration of war upon Austria in October 1848, then to Kossuth's becoming the president-governor of Hungary, and finally to his resig-

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nation. On the other hand, he made a point of translating some of the great speeches of undoubtedly the best Hungarian orator of the nineteenth century. Liang's point is all too obvious. In those speeches he recognized, in addition to a powerful expression of nationalist ideology, an encouraging example of successful political rhetoric and persuasion. For instance, Liang's version of the Hungarian Declaration of Independence, submitted by Kossuth to the National Assembly in Debreczen on April 14, 1849, forms a climactic moment in the narrative.13 The original text of the declaration is freely condensed as well as expanded, with much emphasis now placed on the unjust ways in which the foreign House of Habsburg had enslaved and mistreated the Hungarians, the same way in which the Qing Manchus dealt with the Han Chinese. The decision to declare independence is presented as a forced reaction to unbearable racial and political oppression, and only after the Austrian emperor has left the Hungarians no other choice but to actively overthrow his tyrannical rule. In this historic speech declaring Hungarian national independence, Kossuth miraculously gave his opinions on issues that preoccupied Liang Qichao himself at the turn of the century. Or, rather, Liang spoke through Kossuth, for the strategies and methods that Liang and his contemporaries were debating and discussing with regard to China and its political future were precisely questions about a violent revolution and a problematical racial nationalism. After Kossuth's reluctant resignation in August 1849 and subsequent permanent exile, Liang briefly described events in the mid1860's that led to the dual monarchy system and drew his narrative to a rapid conclusion. In his final comments, Liang the New Historian remained confident that in an age of rising nationalism the Hungarian people will not be content to remain part of Austria. Their future will necessarily be better than the present. Yet what the Hungarians have now and may have in the future, observed Liang, resulted from Kossuth's heroic deeds. "Alas, in today's world, with numerous nations still caught in a situation as desperate and precarious as Hungary was in before, why should it be so that no Kossuth can be found anywhere? If there exists a Kossuth, whether down in the unfathomable ocean or up among the unreachable clouds, I am willing to follow him there and admire him."14 Liang made no effort to tone down his eulogy of Kossuth the hero, even though he realized that the great statesman was in the end a bitterly disappointed man. For Liang, the significance of the Hungarian patriot was that his unusual

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and yet exemplary experience made nationalism not merely a powerful ideology but also a plausible modern narrative that, in a fundamentally satisfying way, combined the life story of an individual with the destiny of a nation. For this reason, Kossuth would always remain a cherished hero. It was in the story of the dramatic Italian Risorgimento that Liang Qichao found more to cheer for and also a much more complete, if contested, paradigm for a successful national revival. By relating the spectacular accomplishments of three Italian patriots, he had the opportunity, as a historian, to examine his own politics carefully and, through his narrative, to reflect on the meaning of a national revolution.

Risorgimento: A Historical Paradigm Almost immediately after the last installment of the Kossuth biography was off the press, a longer and more ambitious biographical work began appearing in the New Citizen Journal in the summer of 1902. In this involved narrative of the lives and careers of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), and Count Camillo di Cavour (1810-61), Liang Qichao exhibited his superb ability to represent a complex historical situation graphically and to analyze all the conflicting forces at work. More unmistakable and striking than in the Kossuth biography is his constant effort to generalize, in particular from the experiences of Mazzini and Cavour, about the implications and consequences of revolution and reform. Gradually, by working through the life stories of the three makers of modern Italy separately, Liang came to a critical analysis of the politics of national regeneration that would greatly influence and modify his understanding of nationalist revolution and social change. Once again Liang stated in the introduction that the purpose of this work was twofold: to foster patriotic passions among his fellow Chinese by giving them the inspiring example of Italian national heroes, and to help his readers learn from the successful Italian experience. The Italian connection was therefore intended explicitly to shed light on the Chinese situation.15 With all their differences in talent and ideals, the three makers of modern Italy had in common the goal of rejuvenating an ancient nation. This determination was behind their respective adventures and efforts and, in the end, defined their greatness.

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According to Liang's narrative, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the once glorious nation of Italy was fragmented and partitioned by other European powers such as Napoleon's France and the Austrian empire. With only the Kingdom of Sardinia governed by Italians, "the name Italy was reduced to a geographical reference and no longer referred to a political entity." Against this depressing background, the three heroes made their entrance into modern Italian history and staged the grand comedy of Risorgimento, one that it was Liang Qichao's greatest wish to restage in twentieth-century China. By the end of the nineteenth century, observed Liang, Italy had emerged as a newly made country, with a formidable industrial and military power such as all modern nation-states had to possess. "Internally a consummate constitutional government is established and respected; externally the policy of independence is implemented with force and dignity. The shame inflicted on generations of forefathers is now removed, and the glory of a 2,000-year-long history is restored." Even Dante the poet should be proud and overjoyed at a reality far exceeding his expectations.16 To trace the emergence of a united and modernized Italian kingdom through the course of the nineteenth century, Liang Qichao decided to follow the mostly separate careers of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour to show the extent to which the destiny of a nation depends on unrelenting individual efforts and ingenuity. At the same time, contrary to his practice in the Kossuth biography, Liang frequently resorted to the notion of "destiny" not only to celebrate the arrival of the three heroes but also, conveniently, to explain away their different, in fact quite often antagonistic, politics. Because "heaven could no longer bear seeing" once magnificent Rome saddened by misery and degradation and the civilized Italians trodden upon by foreigners, it finally gave birth to a Mazzini in Genoa in 1805, the same year Napoleon crowned himself king of Italy. Not satisfied, heaven willed another hero, Garibaldi, to be born in Nice two years later and finally completed its design by producing yet another great man, Cavour, in Sardinia in 1810. As the drama unfolded, "heaven" rather than any other force determined that a constitutional monarchy instead of a republic was best for Italy. Through this complex narration Liang Qichao obviously became much more aware of the implications of different political systems and realized the necessity of coalition and compromise in modern politics. Even more directly, he had a chance to investigate the inherent difficulties of liberal nationalism in the

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guise of radical republicanism, which was the lifelong cause of Mazzim. 17 After a brief description of the three men's families and childhoods, in which Liang colorfully related the famous anecdotes of Mazzini's wearing mourning since his early school days and his meeting with a possible carbonari refugee in Genoa, and Garibaldi's unforgettable visit to Rome in 1825, the biographer moved on to present the youthful experiences and ideals of each of the three heroes. Among the three Italians, Mazzini, "the principal theorist and ideologue of patriotic movements in Europe,"18 apparently won most of his sympathy and admiration, whereas the legendary and eventful life of Garibaldi attracted him mostly as a fantastic romance. For Cavour, Liang maintained the distant respect reserved for an exceptionally shrewd statesman, and a change in attitude to this Italian hero would translate into a shift in his own politics. In a different context, Liang observed that Cavour was a hero who, created by his times, answered the needs of those times, whereas Mazzini was a prophet, a greater hero who would herald a new age. A hero like Cavour has the opportunity to achieve his goals and enjoy comfort and fame, but Mazzini and heroes of his kind are usually destined to face countless setbacks and disappointments, only to be ridiculed and even persecuted by society.19 In Discourse on the New Citizen, Liang named Mazzini rather than Cavour as the hero who, "devoted to educating young people and to awakening the national spirit, has brought his country to a state of unity and independence and set it on its way to becoming one of the most advanced nations in the world."20 The Italian nationalist's notion of giving new life to an old nation through persistent education and enlightenment, in particular his organizing Young Italy in 1831 for constructive purposes, for a long time inspired Liang. When he wrote his enthusiastic "Ode to Young China" in 1900, Liang had in mind Mazzini's Young Italy and asked the question when there would be a Chinese Mazzini to regenerate the nation.21 Young Italy, a concentrated expression of the ideological commitment to national self-determination and rejuvenation, captured the imagination of other liberal nationalist movements, first in Europe and then in other parts of the world. It was a coinage that best summarized a whole century, to which, in the words of a prophetic Mazzini, "the question of nationalities was destined to give its name."22 There was to be not only a Young Switzerland, a Young

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Spain, but also, and later, a Young Turkey and a Young India.23 Until 1903, Liang was as much fascinated with Mazzini's political vision as with his life story, which he often found parallel and similar to his own experience.24 Not only did he write, together with the triple biography under discussion, a play covering the same period of history with a focus on Mazzini, but he also translated and printed in the New Citizen Journal the "Program of Young Italy," apparently in the hope of organizing a Young China to pursue a similar, successful course.25 For Liang the biographer, Mazzini represented a perfect revolutionary who, both idealistic and practical, visionary and devoted, is able always to combine rigorous thinking with resolute action. Mazzini wanted to create Young Italy independently of the carbonari and other secret societies because he realized that the nihilistic tendencies of those radical groups led only to irresponsible destruction and equally damaging frustration. The destruction Young Italy was to engage in ought to be a positive and purposeful one, an enterprise that had to lead to a constructive end. With the founding of Young Italy, according to Denis Mack Smith, "people who had learnt from carbonari a vague passion for liberty were now presented with clearer objectives of Italian territorial unification, democracy, greater social equality and self-determination for all the peoples of Europe."26 "Revolution," Liang quoted Mazzini as saying, "must be made by the people and for the people. This is our word, it sums up our whole doctrine; it is our science, our religion; our heart's affection."27 He also translated part of Mazzini's "General Instructions for the Members of Young Italy" as a summary of the latter's political thought. "Young Italy is a brotherhood of Italians who believe in a law of Progress and Duty and are convinced that Italy is destined to become one nation. . . . They join this Association in the firm intent of consecrating both thought and action to the great aim of reconstructing Italy as one independent sovereign nation of free men and equals."28 Liang found compelling the method that Mazzini believed necessary to achieve that "great aim"—"education and insurrection to be adopted simultaneously." This appeared to be a feasible approach that recognizes as indispensable to a just cause both consciousness raising and ideologically justified violence. It is indeed a profoundly modern political program in that it carefully blends the discourse of enlightenment with revolutionary ethos, mass mobilization, and heroic vanguardism. Ultimately, however, it was Mazzini's utopianism, by which

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he "believed in national self-determination as a universal principle for the solution of all political problems,"29 that attracted and inspired Liang Qichao, who welcomed revolutionary politics not so much out of temperamental inclination as because of its engrossing vision and promises. Moreover, Mazzini's forced exile after 1830 following a doomed insurrection and his publishing of the popular La Giovine Italia in Marseilles immediately afterward also evoked a sympathetic reaction from Liang Qichao. In the persecuted Italian patriot's life he saw a reflection of his own struggles and endeavors. Besides publishing several journals since his arrival in Japan, Liang had also involved himself in plotting military insurrections in China, just as Mazzini did throughout his years of exile. He even followed the example of Mazzini, or rather the carbonari, and tried to organize a secret society. Liang narrated Mazzini's mostly unfulfilled life—his exile, his adoption of England as a second home, his poverty, and unrelenting devotion to his own cause—with great affection, often giving graphic details as if he had experienced them personally. But he paid special attention to Mazzini's adventures in journalism. "His ideas noble and dedicated, his knowledge broad and far-reaching, his writing eloquent and lucid, he most emotionally expressed himself with his pen and expounded just reason to people everywhere"—thus Liang described Mazzini's contribution to the journal La Giovine Italia. One can easily imagine saying the same about Liang's efforts in the years between 1899 and 1903.30 Both Mazzini, who was involved in twenty newspapers during his political career, and Kossuth exerted a great magic over Liang's imagination because of their accomplishments as journalists. Yet the content of Mazzini's republicanism receives little special treatment in the biography except for an obligatory summary. Instead it is Cavour's politics or rather his crafty diplomatic skills and statesmanship that occupy a central place in Liang's narrative of the Risorgimento (incidentally, originally the title of a journal that Cavour and his friends started in 1846). Different both from Mazzini's determination to create an Italian national consciousness and from Garibaldi's predilection for military adventure, Cavour chose political pragmatism and the Kingdom of Sardinia as his way of achieving Italian unification. In the wake of the second revolution in Paris in 1830, the future prime minister of Italy withdrew to the countryside and patiently spent the next sixteen years in serious farming. He ended up

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making a fortune by employing modern agricultural methods and technology. In Liang's words, Cavour proved himself a genuine hero because he devoted all his energy to the task at hand, whether fighting a tiger or a rabbit.31 During those years of seclusion, most notably, Cavour made frequent visits to England, France, and Switzerland to survey the political systems there. His experiences in England, in particular his observing the open debates in Parliament and witnessing legislative procedures, convinced him that England was the vanguard of civilization, and he became "intoxicated with the English style of politics." Once he determined that Italy should eventually adopt the same political system, however, Cavour exhibited no signs of impatience, "giving no irresponsible comments and advocating no radical changes." Rather he turned to a more comprehensive examination of England, studying its political history, literature, education, and agriculture.32 Cavour's fascination with the English political system mirrors Liang Qichao's own still largely secret longing for the path of a glorious revolution that would lead to constitutional monarchy and ensure nonviolent social changes. Liang's admiration for the AngloSaxon race in general, a race "greatly endowed with the spirit of independence and self-reliance," is systematically expressed in Discourse on the New Citizen, where he stated conclusively that in order for the Chinese to survive as a race in the world, they had to learn from the Anglo-Saxons and transform themselves accordingly.33 Furthermore, because of the obvious fact that England was a dominant force in the nineteenth century and the influence of Van Fu and Huang Zunxian, Liang developed a persistent fondness for English liberalism as well as the English parliamentary system. As Benjamin Schwartz has pointed out, at the turn of the century, Van Fu, in translating and introducing to Chinese intellectual circles works by Huxley, Mill, and Spencer, came to endorse Western liberalism and realize that "it is Great Britain's commitment to liberal values which has made that nation the most powerful state in the world."34 Liang Qichao, as we observed before, readily embraced those new concepts and values of liberalism. Without much difficulty, he would soon arrive at a similar conclusion: " 'Liberty' and a new morality patterned after Victorian England would foster the growth of energetic individuals, who would in turn assure the modernization and power of the Chinese nation."35 In addition to endorsing liberalism, Liang also showed strong

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interest in the English political system. In brief histories of Sparta and Athens written in 1902, he even traced the origin of English constitutional monarchy back to the ancient Greek city-state and underscored the resemblance between a Spartan ephor and the English prime minister.36 This interest may have more to do with his intellectual friend and comrade Huang Zunxian, whom, incidentally, Liang and his contemporaries believed to have the talent of a Cavour.37 A skillful ambassador of the Qing court to Japan, the United States, and England successively, Huang was an important thinker for the reform movement and, because of his rich experiences abroad, became one of the first Chinese intellectuals to study different political systems in order to find the best model for modern China. His History of Japan, published in 1895, for the first time systematically described and analyzed the Meiji Restoration as a political reform and provided the One Hundred Days Reform with a crucial precedent as well as concrete strategies. The Guangxu emperor, on the recommendation of Kang Youwei, read the book and was greatly elevated.38 Following his sojourns in the United States and especially in England, Huang decided a republic would not work for China. Instead, a constitutional monarchy, such as that instituted in England and to a lesser degree in Japan, would best serve China without incurring disorder or violent rupture. In May 1902, he wrote Liang to convey his belief that "the political system of China in the twentieth century must follow the English example of dividing sovereignty between the monarch and the people."39 When he read Liang's combined biography of the three Italian national heroes and, more pertinently, his play Romance of New Rome, which focused on the revolutionary romantic Mazzini at the expense of Cavour, Huang good-humoredly commented that although Liang admired the founder of Young Italy, he himself nevertheless had to revere Cavour.40 The disagreement between Liang and Huang Zunxian, obviously, was not as consequential as that between Mazzini and Cavour. For soon enough, Liang would agree with Huang and restrain the excitement that Mazzini's life story and his idea of a third Roman republic had aroused in him, whereas Mazzini and Cavour, the two great political rivals, never did concur. In Liang's account of Italy before the 1848 European revolutions, there were three major political parties among Italian nationalists. One was the group headed by Mazzini, whose goal was to create a new unified Italian nation under the principle of republicanism; the second was represented by Cavour, who

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sought reform from the Kingdom of Sardinia and believed in federalism. The third party was the so-called Neo-Guelphs. Their idea was to unify Italy under the leadership of the papacy. All three parties, despite their conflicting political beliefs and strategies, shared the same earnest love for their country and the same goal of national unity and independence. The difference between Cavour and Mazzini, however, was growing rapidly, and Liang gave a brief summary of the two arguments, most likely without sensing that he himself would soon get involved in a surprisingly similar debate. Cavour's two major points, that republicanism was impractical and would give rise to foreign intervention, would be repeated and elaborated by Liang when he argued against the total revolution called for by radical Chinese republicans in the period 1904-6. The historic incompatibility between Mazzini's republicanism and Cavour's constitutionalism or federalism remained real for Liang at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he would find himself siding with the latter, his sympathetic appreciation of the former notwithstanding. As it turned out, his initial sympathy only added urgency to his objection to radical republicanism.41 The tripartite balance of political forces in nineteenth-century Italy was already present in Liang's cursory examination of the Hungarian situation. The same triangular structure would also reappear in Liang's account of the French Revolution. In fact, Liang had already discerned a similar pattern on the Chinese political stage at the turn of the century. In his brief "Diagram of Reform," an entry in his Book of Liberal Writings in 1901, he commented sarcastically on the fact that, overnight, everyone in the country had begun talking about reform, yet often with drastically incongruous purposes and blueprints. He broke down the seemingly universal interest in reform by setting up eight categories to examine the participants and their proposals, means, and motivations. Not counting a non-party of the detached, there were three main reform groups: a party supporting the Empress Dowager, a party determined to aid the imprisoned Guangxu emperor, and a revolutionary party.42 Although for a brief moment he allied himself with the revolutionary party or rather echoed its radical revolutionary ethos, Liang would eventually remain a leading member of the party that hoped to implement reform under the emperor and institute constitutional monarchy. The antagonism between the republican revolutionary party and the constitutional monarchist party would mount greatly from 1904 on and lead to a full-scale and often

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bitter debate, which, in historical hindsight, predetermined the outbreak as well as the outcome of the 1911 Chinese revolution. Also telling is a crucial detail in The Future of New China, where Liang projected a structurally similar three-party distribution of political power among a party of national sovereignty, a party of local autonomy, and a liberal party. In this model of multiparty contention, Liang began to recognize consensus based on compromises among competing interests as defining and constituting modern politics. Although Liang would try every means, for a brief period right before and after the 1911 Revolution, to practice and institute a multiparty constitutionalism, his was to be a dream never given a chance in modern China. It was quite a different story with Garibaldi, the man of action. "If Mazzini was the prophet and Cavour the statesman," as historian J. A. R. Marriott characterized the three, "Garibaldi was the knighterrant of the Risorgimento" His overriding ambition was to make Rome the capital of a united Italy, "whether under King or Republic he cared little."43 For such a single-minded patriot eager for action, Liang Qichao entertained a fondness and adoration not shown for either Mazzini or Cavour. With an almost worshipful touch, he portrayed a legendary romantic warrior and lover who, equipped with an overwhelming and yet effortless charisma, conquered not only battlefields but also the hearts of numerous beautiful and vocal ladies, in particular the English ones. In his narrative, Liang faithfully followed the sailor from Nice through his repeated and unsuccessful attempts at insurrection all the way to South America. There Garibaldi, to no avail, fought gallantly for the Rio Grande do Sud, a rebellious Brazilian province, in its attempt to achieve independence, and in the midst of being chased and tortured he ran into the beauty Anita, who sang him lines from Homer on the beach and married him to keep him company. Upon news of the 1848 revolutions, the now most popular general in South America immediately sailed back to Europe and landed in Italy to become the chief military leader for the cause of unification. From then on, Garibaldi played a capricious but often timely part in Italian politics, now and then allying himself with either Mazzini or Cavour, and occasionally choosing to act on his own. His defense of the Roman Republic in 1849 together with Mazzini,44 followed by his exile and the death of his beloved Anita, epitomizes the romantic element of the narrative. Liang closely related Garibaldi's successful 1861

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southern expedition, which led to the virtual unification of Italy, and his subsequent bitter conflict with Cavour, intermingled with his numerous arrests and escapes. For his role in the Risorgimento, Garibaldi the general was given full credit. More often than not the biographer turned to hyperbole for dramatic effect in order to capture the hero's unusual charm. In 1864, for instance, when he was so well known and well liked throughout Europe that ladies from England traveled all the way to Caprera to read to him, Garibaldi decided to pay a visit to England. Upon his arrival he was accorded such a frenzied welcome that Liang could hardly find words for it. "Like hordes of ants, tens of thousands of English men and women gathered at the port simply to kiss and shake hands with the general. Half a day elapsed before he could move a step of an inch. His hand, so deft with wielding the sword, soon became swollen and stiff; his face, weathered by all the storms of his life, was promptly covered with dripping saliva."45 Garibaldi, after all, is represented as the fantastic in this eventually comic history of rejuvenation, and Liang, in his hyperbolic and eulogistic style, decidedly made him act on a romantic impulse that itself expresses the revolutionary and imaginative thrust of a complex social transformation. Without Garibaldi, the history of a successful Risorgimento would be structurally incomplete and not nearly as gratifying. Yet the prolonged process of the Italian Risorgimento could by no means be written merely as a romantic affair decked with comic hyperbole. On the contrary, it often involved practical schemes, political manipulation, and strategic concessions. In Liang's narrative, it is Cavour, rather than Garibaldi or even Mazzini, who contributed most to the cause of unification by masterfully deploying his talents in diplomacy and politics. Since 1846, Pope Pius IX had been implementing a reform constitution, to the delight of the entire country, republicans as well as Neo-Guelphs. But this half-hearted reform only set off an impending revolution, because, so Liang remarked, "insubstantial and partial reforms, as is customary throughout human history, always turn out to be an igniter of revolution."46 At the same time, Cavour was pushing his reform program in Sardinia and through his journal // Risorgimento advocating constitutional reform and a federal league among all Italian states. However, on the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions across Europe, one of whose climaxes was Metternich's hurried escape to England, people throughout Italy were so greatly excited and optimistic that they turned away from the

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idea of an orderly constitutionalism. First, there was an uprising in Lombardy; then, one after another, Sicily, Milan, and Venice declared themselves republics. Charles Albert, king of Sardinia, dutifully raised an army to fight the Austrians in Lombardy, only to be crushed in May 1849. On the other front, the Roman Republic, led by Mazzini as one of its three triumvirs, soon collapsed under the pressure of an invading French army claiming to help restore the pope, despite the fact that Garibaldi and his legion fought with utmost courage. At this point "Mazzini's cause came to an end and Cavour's was just starting." But Mazzini was not allowed to fade quietly into history without his Chinese biographer offering an apology on his behalf. It is undeniable that Cavour, rather than Mazzini, realized Italian unification and established a constitutional monarchy, neither of which was Mazzini's idea. But can one therefore conclude that the republican was mistaken and imprudent? Not at all, according to Liang Qichao. The first to be honored for the success of the Risorgimento, argued Liang, should be Mazzini the revolutionary. His radical ideas and writings were essential to the cause, for the simple reason that in the absence of a revolutionary discourse, constitutional monarchy could not be achieved and legitimized in the first place. Only a revolutionary age, as in the English example, would make possible a constitutional monarchy, because in such a precarious situation the monarch would not dare to slight the constitution and the people would know how to cherish it. Therefore, even constitutionalists opposed to revolution should sincerely hope that someone else is advocating revolution. Mazzini's historical function was to prepare for Cavour's achievements. He "plowed for the harvest that Cavour eventually reaped," and indeed created a stage for both Cavour and Garibaldi to enact their own heroic play.47 Once again, Liang Qichao revealed his contradictory impulses in his narrative: while in terms of ultimate vision he identified with Mazzini the revolutionary, he saw more and more the practical value of political compromise and realism. The impulse toward a radical social revolution gradually gave way to a more moderate and realistic understanding of the complexity of any given situation. As Frederick Watkins comments on the difficulties of Mazzini's "ideological unrealism," "The contrast between the divine simplicity of Mazzini's vision and the baffling complex of reality provides a true measure of

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the utopianism implicit in any comprehensive and uncompromising theory of liberal nationalism."48 The 1848-49 revolution ended in failure, and in its wake ever more political repression was dealt out in each Italian state. Since "heaven" did not will that Italian unification be achieved under Mazzini's republicanism, the historic mission of forming an Italian kingdom was now to be carried out by Cavour with the support and protection of the newly crowned Sardinian king Victor Emmanuel. In the Italian monarch Liang Qichao clearly found a most enviable model for the then imprisoned Qing emperor to emulate. The young and sage King Victor Emmanuel was to be portrayed in a most favorable light. In 1852, upon repeated recommendation by the then incumbent prime minister, the king appointed Cavour prime minister of Sardinia and, at long last, granted him a chance to launch his reform program on a full scale. Chief among the measures immediately taken were a free-trade policy, an opening of the railroad system, a military buildup, and tax increases. Civil liberties such as freedom of publishing and assembly were also guaranteed, to win the backing of public opinion. In considerable detail Liang described the purpose as well as effects of these reform measures and presented as a great success Cavour's domestic policies, which resulted in the Kingdom of Sardinia's fast-growing economic power.49 But what really distinguished the Italian statesman, in Liang's opinion, was his talent and shrewdness in handling international relations and making use of every opportunity to realize his own goals. Thus, the following sections of the biography center on the prime minister's foreign policy and diplomatic maneuvering. From the pivotal decision to enter the Crimean War in 1854, which, according to Marriott, "was the turning-point in the fortunes of Cavour, of Sardinia, and of Italy,"50 to Cavour's overwhelming success as one of the ablest statesmen and diplomats in Europe at the peace congress in Paris following the war, and finally to the secret Pact of Plombieres with Napoleon III in 1858 that eventually prepared for the Austro-Italian war in the next year, a deferential Liang narrated and dwelled on the achievements of the shrewd Italian national hero. In contrast to Mazzini's and Garibaldi's fiery passion and stubbornness, Liang Qichao characterized Cavour as always prudently calm, patient, and scheming. This temperamental difference became most obvious in the conflict between Garibaldi the general and Ca-

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vour the statesman following the unification of northern Italy in 1860, which was achieved at the costly price of ceding Savoy and Nice to France. Deeply distressed by the fact that Nice, his birthplace, now belonged to a foreign country, Garibaldi led his well-known Thousand and sped down to the south to capture Sicily and Naples and thereupon declared himself dictator. At the time Mazzini was with Garibaldi and advised him to establish a republic in southern Italy. But the general, though fond of the idea of a republic, loved Italy more and refused to see Italy divided in two by his own work. Cavour, on the other hand, panicked on learning that Mazzini was also in the south and sensed that Italy was now on the verge of falling "prey to revolution." It was a critical moment when "everything was now at stake: the lifework of Cavour; the lifework of Mazzini; the lifework of Garibaldi."51 The outcome, again a product of Cavour's careful calculation, was Garibaldi's meeting with King Victor Emmanuel and his majestic announcement: "Let Italy be one under the King Galantuomo, who is the symbol of our regeneration and of the prosperity of our country."52 On February 18, 1861, an Italian parliament met for the first time in Turin and the lifework of the three heroes was at last accomplished, the only regrettable fact being that Rome was not yet the capital of the nation. It would not be so until 1871, long after the most glorious days of all three makers of modern Italy. At the opening of a truly allItalian parliament in Rome, King Victor Emmanuel gave a memorable speech that Liang could not resist including in his narrative as the final climax of the drama. The work to which we consecrated our lives is accomplished. After long trials, Italy is restored to herself and to Rome. . . . We have arisen in the name of liberty, and in liberty and order we ought to seek the secret of strength and conciliation . . . the future opens before us rich in happy promises; it is for us to respond to the favours of Providence by showing ourselves worthy to represent amongst the great nations of the earth the glorious past of Italy and Rome.53

The moral of the story is neatly summarized in King Victor Emmanuel's speech: consecration, liberty, order, and, above all, modern nationalism. Palpable in the narrative are also Liang's own satisfaction and genuine happiness for the Italian nation and his admired heroes. He wished that he could assume a minor role in the most complex drama and be a secretary for Cavour, a foot soldier among

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Garibaldi's Red Shirts, or a member of Mazzini's radical party. By the end of his narrative, Liang all the more clearly saw the similarities between Italy in the mid-nineteenth century and China of his day. Before he came to read the history of the Italian Risorgimento, wrote Liang, he had discussed the situation of China in comparison with that of England in the seventeenth century, France and the United States in the eighteenth century, and Japan in the nineteenth century. He had believed that those nations were all favored one way or another. Now, however, the long but ultimately happy story of Italian nationalism and Risorgimento brought'him the conviction that history is always on the side of those who devote themselves to the cause of national revival. A history more involved and full-fledged than the life story of Kossuth, the combined biography of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour offered Liang Qichao a better case study of a nationalist revolution. The fact that King Victor Emmanuel's speech is the culmination of the narrative is poignantly significant, not only for the obvious reason that it rationalizes all the previous efforts and history itself, but also because there the king underlines and forcefully illustrates the principle of "liberty and order." The entire narrative, as this reading shows, is to a large extent constructed around the opposing characters of Mazzini and Cavour. Liang consistently translated them into two different voices over how, rather than why, to achieve national unity and prosperity in the modern age. Whereas in the first half of the narrative Mazzini possesses a central place and wins the author's admiration, it is Cavour who steps in to carry the story to its legitimate conclusion, often having to fend off the possible disruption of a radical republican revolution. In other words, the history of the Risorgimento becomes deeply gratifying and almost prototypical because, largely due to Cavour's intervention, it is not so much a narrative about a comprehensive social revolution as a triumphant tale of national regeneration and unification, a valid and appropriate symbol of which is the king of Sardinia. Therefore, even though Liang presented their separate careers as dedicated alike to the cause of national unification, Cavour's reform politics proved to be more compatible with and conducive to the general thematics of territorial nationalism, whereas Mazzini's revolutionary rhetoric postulated radical changes and universal progress. Cavour's Risorgimento thus could avail itself of the rich repository of symbolic resources because it claimed to be a story of return,

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of arriving at modernity through tradition. Mazzini's vision in Giovine Italia, however, carried the added dimension of a resolute departure. Theirs is eventually the difference between a realist approach to the actual process of executing law and power and radical political thinking, which always raises questions about political legitimacy and identity. As historian Hans Kohn comments, "It was intelligent diplomacy and a daring use of opportunities, not the spirit of the prophet, that brought about the unification of Italy."54 As a result, Liang the narrator, who more often than not sought meaningful details and a gratifying plot, especially when he strove to present a moving drama, found himself in more and more agreement with the statesman instead of the prophet. National independence and social revolution, even from the practical viewpoint of narration, already begin to reveal themselves as two incompatible movements that can hardly accommodate each other in the same narrative of liberation. In other words, Cavour's is a narrative of liberty and order that acknowledges a different historical vision and agents from those implied in Mazzini's revolutionary republicanism. The former's success also demonstrates a possible compromise between liberal values and nationalist aspirations. As a matter of fact, even before the combined biography was properly finished, Liang Qichao had increasingly turned his attention to the complex question of modern revolution. In October 1902, when the last part of the Italian history was still being serialized, he published a biography of Madame Roland, "the greatest heroine of the modern world," in New Citizen Journal and took a serious look at the tumultuous history of the French Revolution. Together with his reflections on the paradigmatic relevance of Mazzini and Cavour, the biography of Madame Roland indicates a change in Liang's thinking, a change that would shock and sadden him, although not without some relief and pleasure, when he finally came to acknowledge it at the end of 1903 upon his return from a less than reassuring trip to North America.

"O Liberte, comme on t'ajouee!" Liang Qichao's narratives of national revolution as part of modern history steadily moved him backward in time to the French Revolution. If "liberty" in the case of the Hungarian struggle for national self-determination and in the Italian experience of Risorgimento had

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been represented as a positive value and emancipatory discourse essential to the nationalist cause, its focal expression being Kossuth's notion of "lawful revolution" and King Victor Emmanuel's consummating hymn of and plea for "liberty and order," in the biography of Madame Roland (1754-93), Liang Qichao was to have a chance to develop a more complex view of the various social and political uses the ideology of liberty might lend itself to in an age of revolution. He would also begin to have a vague but troubling sense of the incompatibility between a nationalist revolution, motivated mostly by the concept or image of a self-conscious nation, and a sociopolitical revolution, whose explicit aim was to acquire for the nation a new political identity. In other words, national liberation and political freedom were in fact two separate historical operations and necessarily involved varied understandings of the present. Yet the simultaneous or, rather, conflated presence of these two emancipatory urges, liberation and freedom, constituted for Liang a historically determined contradiction, a paradox that drove a wedge between nationalism and social revolution. Thus, whereas the combined biography of the three makers of modern Italy could be read as a capsule narrative of a successful nationalist movement, the tragic life story of a devoted Girondiste allowed Liang to probe the complexity of a farreaching social revolution in pursuit of freedom. Quite appropriately, Liang Qichao opened the biography of Madame Roland with the heroine's best-known verdict on "liberty," uttered on a scaffold at the Place de la Revolution—"O Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!" Liang followed with a profusely eulogistic paragraph: Who is Madame Roland? A woman who was born for Liberty and died for Liberty. Who is Madame Roland? Liberty was born from her, and she died because of Liberty. Who is Madame Roland? Mother of Napoleon, Metternich, Mazzini, Kossuth, Bismarck, and Cavour. In short, all the great men of nineteenthcentury Europe were brought up by none other than Madame Roland. All civilization there came from none less than Madame Roland. Why was this so? Because the French Revolution was the mother of the nineteenth century, and Madame Roland was the mother of the French Revolution.55

Thus Liang began his narrative, with high-minded zeal for the French Revolution and an equally emphatic endorsement of the principle of liberty. However unrealistic his assessment of the role of Madame Roland, the sentiments expressed here about the French Revolution are largely in agreement with the "destructionism" Liang

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favored until 1902. As observed above, after his escape to Japan, Liang entered a radical period, advocating a violent sociopolitical revolution, even a racial revolution, against the Manchu government. From all the great engineers of social change in modern Europe, Liang had singled out Rousseau and believed that his notion of "social contract," powerful in Europe in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, would best suit the China of his day. In poetic language he had prayed for the age of the social contract to arrive, in all its force, in the only country in the East that, great as it had been, was left out of the march of all other nations.56 Liang also found an inspiring model for large-scale, radical social transformation in the French Revolution, even though by the time he settled in Japan, the focus of Japanese political discourse had shifted from French-style republicanism to the more conservative, state-centered German liberalism. To Liang, the French Revolution perfectly embodied a universal aspiration of modernity, namely, the collective project of determining human destiny. The same aspiration also underlay the new global imaginary of political identity, in terms of which progressive time could be legitimized and the vast and uneven world space positively overcome. Liang therefore hailed revolutionary destruction as both necessary and justifiable because it would ensure social progress and stability at the negligible price of some momentary pain. The French Revolution brought "unprecedented destruction," conceded Liang, but it also heralded a period of general prosperity in Europe, although delayed until after 1870.57 It was a modern sociopolitical revolution, he further specified in an essay written to define "revolutionary reform" (ge) as a new concept absent from the Chinese political vocabulary. Revolutionary reform was necessarily dissimilar to the traditional popular revolts in Chinese history, for it intended to replace tyranny with humanity, in perfect observance of the evolutionary law governing human society. In this sense there ought to be not only a political revolution like the French one but also a religious revolution, an epistemological revolution, a literary revolution, a cultural revolution, and an industrial revolution. Revolution does not designate something to be feared or avoided at all costs; instead, it constitutes what Liang regarded as a "modern, worthy, and noble" enterprise.58 As a direct expression of the modernist-rationalist ideology of change, revolution now is both a model for rapidly making

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contemporary, or modernizing, a historical reality and a positive value in itself. The still ardent 1902 essay "Defining ge" however, appears to have been Liang's last and most systematic defense of revolution as the preferred form for social change and progress. He was trying to demonstrate that, because of a linguistic inaccuracy, the Chinese had uncalled-for misgivings about revolution in general, mistaking it for the barbarous and futile peasant rebellions of the past. It was therefore understandable why the ruling aristocracy resented revolution, the common folk dreaded it, and even the educated elite worried about it. Here Liang was not reiterating to himself the desirability of revolution. Rather, his direct interlocutor in this essay was Kang Youwei, who earlier, in September 1902, had published a long essay in New Citizen Journal reasoning against a total and mass revolution.59 For a long time Liang held an intermittent exchange with Kang about the implications of the French Revolution. As early as the summer of 1898, right before the One Hundred Days Reform, Kang had put together a brief history of the French Revolution and submitted it to the Guangxu emperor, intending it as a warning of what would happen if no serious and systematic reforms were carried out from above. To reinforce a deep impression of the Terror on the emperor, Kang described the turbulent events in decidedly negative terms and presented a horrifying picture of rampant massacre and chaos. "All over the world nothing can compare, in terms of barbarity and disorder, to the disaster of modern revolutions to which the French first gave rise." Kang also observed, with great poignancy, that "once the masses' passion was aroused, their mood changed drastically. Dignity and prestige previously enjoyed [by the sovereigns] no longer sufficed to keep them in place. Instead, they served only to excite the masses."60 According to Kang, his was the first history of the French Revolution in Chinese. In diametrical opposition to the successful Japanese Meiji reforms, the French Revolution, he warned, provided a most undesirable precedent, which had to be forestalled with every possible effort. Kang Youwei would remain opposed for the rest of his life to a possible French-style republican revolution, but Liang Qichao, largely for what he would later claim were temperamental reasons, could never be as steadfast in any one position. With Kang stranded in Sin-

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gapore since 1898 and himself quickly settling down in Japan, Liang the now self-described "Youth of Young China" began taking issue with his mentor's anti-revolutionary doctrine. The difference in opinion first surfaced through Liang's calls for an active dismantling of the existing order, about which Kang, from afar, repeatedly expressed disapproval and vexation. Finally in April 1900, Liang wrote an unusually long and firm letter to his seriously annoyed teacher, trying to convince him of the necessity of liberty as well as revolution. In this letter, he defended his advocacy of liberty to his readers by arguing that liberty was meant as an antidote to the slave mentality that had traditionally plagued the Chinese people. He also made it clear that he had not started talking about liberty because he was in Japan and had become enamored of what the Japanese were excited about. In reality, he noted, the Japanese dreaded the French Revolution immensely and decried Rousseau whenever they could. As for the disastrous destruction unleashed by the French Revolution, of which he was perfectly aware, it should not be much of a problem in China because the Chinese, by nature, were much less prone to action than the French and "could lie there for one thousand years without lifting a finger." Whereas in France Rousseau's liberal teachings might have been the cause of tumultuous disorder, in China they would be the right medicine and the first step toward national revival. Moreover, the catastrophe of the French Revolution came about "not due to the workings of liberty per se, but because the revolutionaries committed monstrous acts in the name of liberty."61 In the same letter, Liang also presented his "radical destructionism" in a rhetoric of Utopian millenarianism. "In addition, after catastrophes that arise in the cause of liberty, one can expect to reach modern civilization at some point; with disasters that have nothing to do with liberty, they will only reproduce themselves daily without end, which has been the case in Chinese history for the past thousands of years." To support this optimistic vision, he drew on popular nineteenth-century European historiography and claimed that the French Revolution was the widely acknowledged threshold to the modern world. Liang suggested that a quick reading of Robert Mackenzie's Nineteenth Century—A History would reveal that even the 1832 Reform Bill in England was a distant response to events in France at the end of the preceding century, not to mention Napoleon's sweeping and liberating influence over the rest of Europe. "Western historians all agree that the French Revolution was the wa-

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tershed between the old and the new world. If one rejects this theory, where could one find the mother of the nineteenth century?" Liang added, in parentheses, that since the French Revolution was undoubtedly the mother, Martin Luther's Reformation should be viewed as the grandmother of the nineteenth century.62 Liang carried this confident and combative optimism into his Discourse on the New Citizen, where once again he made a connection between "liberty" as an absolute value and "revolution" as a form of radical social change. It is here that the modern Chinese term ziyou becomes problematic and is apparently stretched to cover both "liberty" and "freedom." The initial mood of the section "On Liberty" is a resolute one, in the tradition of a "Give me Liberty or give me Death" heroism. Opposite to slavery, explained Liang, liberty exists on at least two separate levels: that of the group and that of the individual, which are interdependent and mutually complementary. In the West the history of liberty can be subdivided into four categories: political, religious, national, and economic. Corresponding to these four forms of liberty have been four different kinds of revolution throughout modern Western history. First, Martin Luther rose to spearhead the struggle for religious liberty and broke the ground for a new age of freedom of conscience. Then Cromwell in England, Washington in America, and finally the French Revolution heralded political liberty in the world. At the same time, beginning with the Dutch independence from the Spanish in the sixteenth century, nationalism had been gathering force, and in the nineteenth century national revolutions resoundingly proclaimed the arrival of national liberty. Also from the nineteenth century on, economic problems became increasingly important around the world and developed into a predominant issue of the twentieth century. This would mark the ongoing pursuit for economic liberty.63 All the great events in the past several hundred years appeared to Liang to have shared the same cause, and liberty grew into a central, universal theme that made possible a coherent and comprehensive modern history. This liberty of the civilized modern world, Liang emphasized, is necessarily conditioned and guaranteed by discipline and obligation. Without discipline and obligation to the collective, he warned, unbridled and self-centered individual freedom would result only in barbarity and general unfreedom. Should such an abuse take place, the idea of liberty would "not only offer a best excuse for an authoritarian party but also pose the greatest threat to the future of China."

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Already quite sober halfway through his argument, Liang found it a compelling issue to define the boundary between political liberty as an institution and individual freedom as a metaphysical concept and ideal.64 Although individual freedom is a positive value and constitutes the premise of Liang's renovation project, it is collective liberty that is accorded priority and defined as the fundamental condition. Liang ended his discussion with the caution that liberty and freedom are delicate matters in need of much careful consideration. Liang's insight into the complexity of the issue was apparently shared by his contemporary Van Fu, who, as a deliberate believer in modern liberalism, grew increasingly suspicious of the idea of a radical revolution.65 By 1903, when Van Fu published his long-finished translation of John Stuart Mill's classic On Liberty, he insisted on changing the original title into a more complex one (On the Boundaries of the Rights of Society and of the Individual [Qunji quanjie shuo]), so as to differentiate the experience of individual freedom from liberty as a social order. In an elaborate preface, Van Fu carefully defined "liberty" as a limitation as well as an institution. His hope was apparently to disabuse its erroneous appropriations, by either "lovers of the new who think of liberty in terms of unbridled license, and recklessness," or the reactionaries who oppose it as promising no more than an anarchistic abandonment to "raging floods and ferocious beasts."GG By the end of 1902 Liang Qichao would be much more cautious and hesitant to advocate violent revolution as a means to attain liberty. In the biography of Madame Roland, we can observe this subtle shift in Liang's attitude toward and thinking on the question of liberty versus freedom. The biography would be Liang's only systematic writing about the French Revolution, and yet its impact on his entire conceptualization of that period of history and its paradigmatic significance went far beyond the year 1902. In order to represent Madame Roland as the all-important figure of the French Revolution as well as its spiritual symbol, as he promised at the outset, Liang Qichao first described the heroine's solitary childhood. This move also determines the structure of the narrative, namely, a personalized perspective on an enormous historical event. Born Jeanne Manon Phlipon, the young girl was often quiet and enjoyed reading classical literature, especially Plutarch's heroic biographies, which, Liang commented, were also the favorite reading of Napoleon and Bismarck. (In "New Historiography," Liang recommended that a new historian follow the example of Plutarch in writing histo-

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ries to inspire the reader.)67 Thus, her imagination from early on was shaped by the Roman historian, and the future Girondiste thereby cultivated a predilection for ancient Roman republicanism, crystallized in her love for equality, liberty, and justice. Still a young woman, Madame Roland went through the intellectual revolution that quietly shook France in the last years before the outbreak of the Revolution. This intellectual preparation and her growing devotion to Roman republicanism readied her for a heroic role in "the greatest tragedy in history."68 At the age of 25, Phlipon married Roland, twenty years her senior, and as "the enormous outburst of the volcano" drew near, they were prepared for anything but a public and turbulent life. For the direct causes of the French Revolution, Liang elliptically referred to "the indecisiveness on the part of the king, imprudence of the court and nobility, repeated attempts at reform without success, heavy taxation, and general misery" as a complex of forces working on and aggravating one another. The Rolands, in Liang's account, welcomed the storming of the Bastille not because they thirsted for revolution, but because they loved their country and believed that there was "no other way but revolution" to revive France and realize their long-cherished republicanism. While in Lyons, Madame Roland began writing political pamphlets for the cause of revolution and contributing them to Brissot's Le Patriote fran^ais and Champagneux's Le Courrier de Lyons.69 In 1791 the Rolands moved to Paris, and their hotel room soon became a regular meeting place for young republicanists such as Brissot, Petion, Buzot, and Robespierre in the days of mounting tension and uncertainty. This was a "radical period" for Madame Roland. In a letter to Brissot that Liang summarizes, Madame Roland urged more resolute action on the young man: "Throw your pen in the fire, generous Brutus, and go plant lettuces. . . . The Assembly is nothing but an instrument of corruption and tyranny. Civil war is no longer a disaster. It will regenerate us or it will destroy us, and since liberty is lost without it, we no longer have to fear it or avoid it."70 Then, as the revolutionary situation escalated at a speed no one really understood or expected, Louis XVI was forced to adopt some reform measures, and Monsieur Roland was appointed minister of the interior in March 1792. From then on Madame Roland was irrevocably thrown onto the "center stage of history." At the time the entire government was controlled by the Legislative Assembly, which, according to Liang, was divided, again, into a familiar triad: the Plain, the extremely radical Montagnards led by

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Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, and the Girondins gathered around Brissot and Buzot. Behind the Plutarch-reading, Rousseau-worshipping Girondins stood Madame Roland as their source of inspiration and courage.71 It is not surprising that Liang portrayed the Girondins in essentially the same terms as Kang Youwei did in his History of the Great French Revolution. For both Kang and Liang, the Girondins were worthy gentlemen, determined to change society out of noble ideals, who would eventually be crushed by the revolutionary machine they themselves were part of. According to Kang, the Girondins, mostly fair-minded intellectuals and scholars, decided to participate in the revolution simply because they were sympathetic with the oppressed common people and wished to emancipate them, but without knowing much about political realism and caring even less about power.72 In his narrative, Liang would soon arrive at the view of the French Revolution reached by Kang back in the last years of the 1890's. Briefly punctuating his narrative with the major events of the French Revolution, Liang focused on the personal fate of his heroine. With her husband now serving as a minister in the government, Madame Roland devoted her time to helping him draft all the important letters and reform proposals. Yet she was deeply suspicious of the king's motivation and once remarked that it would be impossible for an autocratic tyrant to change overnight and practice constitutionalism. By June 1792, after Madame Roland had composed the famous letter of protest from Roland, to which Louis XVI turned a deaf ear, the entire cabinet resigned. Soon the National Convention replaced the more moderate Legislative Assembly. Now that the monarchy was abolished, Madame Roland and other Girondins would have liked to think that their goal of establishing a republic was finally within reach. But, alas, "with the tiger stopped at the front door, a wolf had already sneaked in through the door in the back. The enemy above had just been cleared away, but an enemy from below was becoming full-fledged. From then on Madame Roland had to plunge herself into the deluge of revolution that she had helped to unleash. The same flood would finally wash her away and crush her."73 The flood image dominates Liang's perception of the next series of events. It becomes a core image of all the possible terror and disorder of a revolution, against the will of those who first launched and celebrated it. It also suggests the notion that a revolution, more a massive process than an intellectual exercise, may easily gather uncontrollable momentum and run a surprising, unrationalizable course of its own.

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Liang further elaborated on this formidable aspect of revolution. "Once the river wells up from under ground, how can it be stopped by a human hand? Since Madame Roland opened the cage and let loose the monster of revolution, it devoured the king and the aristocracy one after another without a pause. Now greatly excited, it hopped about to prey on the person who had opened the cage." Madame Roland had always wanted to empower the people, but intoxicated with revolution the crowd turned into a blind, destructive force. The capricious monster of revolution furiously smashed any constructive effort toward a genuine republic and completely shattered Madame Roland's dream of peaceful social progress. In a letter to a friend in May 1792, she finally expressed her deep frustration and decided that the revolution she had helped to engineer had been betrayed in a most horrible way. With the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, the Girondins immediately became the fated target of the "rebellious and dictatorial" Montagnards, and Madame Roland soon found herself in a prison.74 For the final days of Madame Roland's life, Liang reserved his most touching and impassioned description, deliberately highlighting her as a private and reflective individual in contrast to the collective, stirring action around her. In great detail, the narrator tells how the lady's love for flowers and books intensified as her end approached, and how daily she spent her quiet time reading her favorite histories and poetry, including of course Plutarch's Lives. Surrounded by bare walls and a gloomy future, she found time and the presence of mind to write her memoirs and autobiography. One day in early November 1793, Madame Roland, dressed in pure white, was brought to the Revolutionary Tribunal and faced her death sentence with characteristic calm and dignity. The same composure accompanied her when she was taken to the guillotine. At the final moment, when she saw a gentleman of the same fate shaking uncontrollably, she offered to let him have the privilege of dying first, thus saving him from further suffering at the sight of her blood. When in turn she herself knelt down, Madame Roland caught sight of a statue of Liberty and thereupon uttered her famous line: "0 Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!"75 The tragic end to Madame Roland's brilliant life gave Liang Qichao mixed feelings of sorrow and apprehension, and the conclusions he drew from it are multiple. First, to underline her greatness and heroism, Liang had to present the Revolution as historically pos-

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itive and constructive. More than a single pivotal event that helped shape modern Europe, the French Revolution was in fact unprecedented in human history. "It ended thousands of years of despotism and initiated the liberal government of the past century, its uproar resounding for more than eighty years and its influence reaching dozens of countries. Future historians generations from now will still have to view it as the monument of a new age in humanity." Obviously, up to this point, Liang remained convinced that the French Revolution should be immortalized as a turning point in human history in that it brought into existence a new form of human action. What had been modified, however, was his view of the consequences of this mass mobilization. In contrast to his previous acceptance of "radical destruction," he now began to ponder the individual and personal dimension of collective action. A hero may be able to initiate a new collective cause in his or her times and effect sweeping changes, but, in the case of Madame Roland and the French Revolution as a whole, Liang asked gravely, "Why is it that one can bring about mobility but not stability, disorder but not peace?"76 A ready answer seemed to direct Liang back to the issue of national character. As we have seen in his 1900 letter to Kang Youwei, he had already compared the exuberant French with the withdrawn Chinese and observed that whereas a social revolution may have ended in catastrophe in France, the Chinese needed a violent tremor to shake them into action. This brief and conveniently explanatory comparison nonetheless signaled Liang's interest in concretely studying the possibility of revolution on a national rather than a universal scale. In the Madame Roland biography, he further blamed the lack of discipline and self-control among the French for the prolonged chaos of the Revolution. The similarities between the French Revolution and the English Revolution of the 1660's, wrote Liang, are striking and undeniable: there was a despot before the revolution; the outbreak of the revolution was precipitated by halfhearted reforms; the direct cause came from a strained relationship between the king and Parliament or Estates General; the king went through numerous trials and came to an infamous end; and finally, the newly established republic could not last. "The only significant difference is the popular contentment achieved by the revolution. The English Revolution successfully instituted a constitutional government with the result of general prosperity and ever-growing national power; the French Revolution degenerated into the Reign of Terror, forever staining with

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blood the history of the nation."77 The main reason for the two divergent results is that the English have self-control whereas the French do not. Once again, Liang voiced his Anglophile sentiment and in fact extended it, in a note, to formulate another general comparison of the Teutons with the lesser Latins, citing the examples of a flourishing Holland versus an impoverished Belgium, a powerful Germany versus a stagnant Italy. A people capable of self-administration can accomplish the twofold task of destruction and construction in an orderly and productive fashion, but a people lacking this ability not only will enjoy no genuine peace but cannot achieve purposeful destruction either. All this, in an unexpected twist, finally made Liang give a new turn to the elliptic Confucian saying: "Government relies on the people."78 In this way Liang's contemplation on the meaning of the French Revolution is transposed back into a familiar opposition between "destruction" and "construction," about which he had written profusely on various occasions. Yet both terms now become much more concrete and lend shape to a new political strategy that Liang did not consider an effective option at the time. On the one hand, destruction, especially that by a people not endowed with a political consciousness or organizational capacity, would only serve to disintegrate the nation. On the other hand, construction could not be implemented without disturbing the old order because the reality is that human history has irreversibly reached its second stage of political evolution. This evolutionary notion of "second stage" came from Herbert Spencer, whose influence on Liang's historical vision, together with that of Darwin and Kidd, was both immediate and lasting. Although at different times Liang postulated different schedules for the evolution of human society, the then enormously popular Spencerian division of human history into a first period of despotism and order ("the militant stage") and a second period of freedom and progress ("the industrial stage") seems to be what he had in mind at this point. The arrival of this second period was first announced, wrote Liang elsewhere, by the American War of Independence and the French Revolution.79 Since the principle of this historical stage was progress and democracy, it would be futile for anyone to try to prevent it from happening. The aristocracy in nineteenth-century Europe had resisted in vain and only made it possible for the tragic chaos of the French Revolution to be repeated for most of the century.

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The lesson to be learned, therefore, is twofold: the ruling section of society must keep in mind that the people are to be neither frustrated nor offended if it does not want to end up like the hunted and slaughtered French aristocracy; the ruled, especially those radical agitators, have to understand that once the crowd is stirred up, it will be hard to calm down, and when public morality is not painstakingly maintained, it cannot be re-established without much trouble. The paradox is formidable: fundamental change or destruction of the old system is an inevitability determined by the new historical epoch of modernity, and yet it is such a capricious and dangerous process that immanent in it is total disintegration. The only way to go about it, Liang concluded his biography of Madame Roland, is for every party involved to be restrained and cautious about destruction. The painful stage of transformation has to be passed carefully and with coordinated efforts. Faced with such an exacting task, Liang finally had to evoke the spirit of Madame Roland to grant him moral support.80 By now, the spatiotemporal contradiction between universal history and nationalist commitment had transformed itself into a more immediate issue of political action. Liang Qichao had a reluctant but firm grasp of the frustrating incompatibility between the social cause of political freedom and a national liberation movement. The temptation to conflate these two pursuits is tremendous and in fact universal in modern times, as Hannah Arendt argues in her meditation on modern revolutions.81 Mazzini and his version of liberal nationalism, for instance, perfectly represent such a drive to achieve liberation and freedom at one stroke. Liang's gradual disengagement from his fascination with the Italian hero already foretells his changed perspective on the complex issue of liberation and freedom. He would subsequently embrace liberalism as a deliberate strategic choice and, with great emphasis, insist on distinguishing a political revolution from a nationalist movement, each of which should have its own agenda. The desire to obtain at once liberation and freedom, however, rages especially strong in an age of national independence and selfdetermination because the rhetoric of freedom is invariably put in the service of the nationalist cause. It becomes increasingly difficult to draw a line between liberation from either political oppression or foreign control and a state of freedom that presupposes liberation on the one hand and demands its institutional establishment on the

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other. "It is frequently very difficult to say where the mere desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom as the political way of life begins. The point of the matter is that while the former, the desire to be free from oppression, could have been fulfilled under monarchical—though not under tyrannical, let alone despotic—rulership, the latter necessitated the formation of a new, or rather rediscovered form of government; it demanded the constitution of a republic."82 The nationalist cause in a traditional monarchical society, such as China at the turn of the century, easily runs into this dilemma, because, given the inescapable precedent of thriving modern republics, the image of independent sovereignty cherished by the revolutionary movement more often than not corresponds to that of a republic. Moreover, since the discourse of nationalism is politically viable and valid only insofar as it posits as its agent a self-conscious nation, nothing gives the nation a better and more legitimate representation than a republican government. Thus the revolution is forced, by a historical condition on a global scale, to combine national liberation with political freedom, to realize national sovereignty and terminate the monarchy at the same time. This was the historical situation in which a debate between Liang Qichao and a group of radical students gathered around Min bao took place from 1904 to 1907. It was also, naturally enough, the central concern of the debate. Virtually all the bitterly contended points of that debate were uncannily forecast and discussed in great detail by Liang in his 1902 political fiction, The Future of New China, the focus of the next chapter. We can hardly overstate the significance of these three different narratives of modern national revolution, in the form of individual biography, for Liang Qichao's historical thinking. In "New Historiography" and his other writings, Liang accepted and advocated the doctrine of nationalism as universally valid, but in reconstructing specific historical experiences, he gradually ceased to take either revolution or liberty as an abstract positive value. Instead, the singularity of a historical event or process, often in the form of narratable individual experience, became irreducible and forced Liang as narrator to confront history on a different ground. The modern master-narrative of national revolution and liberation gave birth to an emancipating historical vision that allowed Liang to reconstruct as well as project a history of modernity. Yet by the same token, historicity thus discovered also brought him to recognize the necessary specificity of his-

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torical experience, especially when some universal principle seemed to be at work. The plot common to the three narratives seems to indicate that a coherent and meaningful history demands the presence, imaginary or not, of a central, charismatic hero, in particular in the case of nationalist revolution, as Garibaldi declared, "Let Italy be one under the King Galantuomo, who is the symbol of our regeneration and of the prosperity of our country." For Liang, the search for such a symbolic resource would lead him to a grave historical reconsideration, especially as far as his projection of the future of China was concerned.* *Before we examine The Future of New China, it is necessary to mention that, for an Anglophile like Liang Qichao, it would have been hard not to write a biography of Oliver Cromwell in 1903. Cromwell was truly admirable, according to Liang, not only because of all his heroic deeds but also because of all the abusive names people had hurled at him, both when he was still alive and long dead. He won Liang's respect to such a degree that, as distrustful of religion or personality cults as Liang was, he announced that he would be willing to worship the Englishman. Yet the biography was not completed. The narrative stops short at the point when the Long Parliament was in session and the quiet, religious young man from Huntington was ready for what was to be expected of him. Liang found it more pertinent to give a detailed description of the parliamentary tradition in English politics first. As a result, the hero appears pale and inconsequential. "Biography of Cromwell, the Giant of New England" is certainly not one of Liang's best biographical works, but by quoting Thomas Carlyle's remarks on the necessity of heroes and hero worship, Liang found a chance in the biography to air his belief that human history is a history of great men. An absence of heroes from a given historical moment was for Liang, as well as for Carlyle, an indication of the poverty of history. "I look at the French Revolution and see a time without any real heroes. No wonder such an earth-shaking event should have ended up in the Reign of Terror and military rule. A dragon head was continued with a snake tail." (See Liang, "Xin Yingguo juren Kelinweier zhuan," YBSHJ-ZJ 13:2.)

4T Modernity as Political Discourse: Interpreting Revolution "La Revolution ne sera close, et les peuples tranquilles, que le jour ou le monde sera une vaste Chine." —Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu "Le banquet du centenaire de 1789" (1890)

In 1890, the French political scientist Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu published an essay entitled "Le banquet du centenaire de 1789" to voice his thoughts on the French Revolution. At the imaginary international banquet at a certain Grand-Hotel in Paris, a quietly resolute and somewhat arrogant Chinese gentleman, in Leroy-Beaulieu's fairly dry account, was the next to last guest to speak on this still largely aweevoking occasion. "The Revolution will not have made its tour of the world until the day we have cut our queue, and that day is far away," he predicted. He told those present that China had long enjoyed all the things that the Revolution was trying to achieve out of a "youthful fever." Democracy, stability, discipline, and "all that human nature can allow for in the wisdom of government" had been a reality in China. He concurred with Voltaire's assessment that Chinese religion was in fact a philosophy, and that "reason and philosophy" had always been the legislators of the Chinese system. The Chinese people, according to the delegate, had no aspirations similar to those of Westerners, because there was harmony between their institutions and needs; the "disease" of the West, however, was precisely its predilection for change. "You seem to believe that change is better. The very idea of progress is what leads you astray; in Chinese, fortunately, there is no such word." He then went on to praise the tremendously successful social organization that elected to endow the old and sage with power and prestige and peacefully kept some 500 million people

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fed and clothed. In the end he urged all the countries to emulate China, for "the Revolution will not be over, nor will its peoples be peaceful, until the day the entire world becomes a vast China."1 Since that famous fictive banquet dispersed at the fiery words of a quick-tempered Russian—"Messieurs, a la Revolution prochaine!"— another century has elapsed, not without witnessing numerous turbulent revolutions around the world. The prophecy uttered by the Chinese guest has, so far, proved to be nothing but misleading and wishful. The West never for a moment seriously contemplated slowing down and patterning itself after a wise and senile China, and the French Revolution made its world tour soon enough in 1911, that is, if we agree with the criterion set up by the Chinese gentleman with his queue. With the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, change caught up with China and hurled it into a maelstrom of progress and revolution. Instead of the world becoming a tranquil and harmonious Middle Kingdom, China became an enormous and steady source of revolutionary thought and energy for the greater part of the twentieth century. Chinese history in this century, undoubtedly to the disappointment of the self-confident Chinese spokesman, has been shaped unmistakably by a constant outburst of that contagious fievre de jeunesse. Only in the postrevolutionary atmosphere of the 1990's, when economic development of the nation has finally taken hold and consolidated itself as hegemonic ideology, do Chinese intellectuals seem to agree openly that the tradition of radical political revolution needs to be reconsidered and even rejected as the inevitable form of social transformation.2 More recently, in their topical review of twentiethcentury Chinese history and culture, intended as an anticipatory intellectual exercise, leading thinkers such as Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu have openly called for a final "farewell to revolution."3 Yet the final appeal of the Chinese delegate remains unanswered and open to speculation. The world has not grown into a vast China, but is the French Revolution, with all its paradigmatic significance and stirring aspirations, really over and behind us?4 Might the Chinese delegate not argue that even if China has been absorbed by revolution, the Revolution will be over only when a new order and equilibrium emerge, after a prolonged tour of negation of negation, to realize the ideals that set off the Revolution in the first place? The real point, however, seems to remain the question of political modernity, for revolution, its prototype being the French experience at the end of the eighteenth century, is the preferred form of massive politi-

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cal movement and answers the deepest desires and frustrations, collective as well as personal, in the modern age. Through the mouth of the French-speaking Chinese, Leroy-Beaulieu, an "intelligent and worried Liberal" of his times,5 was expressing his own thoughts on the phenomenon of revolution and its relationship to political liberalism and eventually to social reintegration in the modern industrial and democratic society. Faced with the pressing task of "reestablishing the notion of duty alongside the notion of right" in a postrevolutionary age, the French essayist was carefully groping after a less turbulent way of making the transition to modernity.6 The barely disguised complacency of the fictive Chinese delegate, therefore, can be interpreted as a reaction to radical political discontinuity in the form of revolution and also as an almost desperate effort, on the part of Leroy-Beaulieu, to hold on to a world-historical vision other than that prescribed by the French Revolution. Whatever the reading, it was revolution as a disruptive and millenarian process that provoked the Chinese gentleman's strongest objection, for it defied historical continuity and upset, in his words, "social evolution" at its own pace. Leroy-Beaulieu's eloquent Chinese would definitely have met the most biting attacks from Liang Qichao in the late 1890's simply because of his conservative politics. But in the years between 1902 and 1907, Liang would have found himself increasingly persuaded by this imaginary character. Liang would probably never have been as complacent about the Chinese heritage, but it is not difficult to see him opposed to revolution for essentially the same reasons. Liang's views changed so profoundly and abruptly in the anxious years before the outbreak of the 1911 Chinese revolution that he himself was constantly amazed and caught unprepared. His change of attitude toward revolution, together with his extensive debate with a group of young radical revolutionaries, signaled his final coming to terms with some of the inescapable conflicts of modernity. In the process, Liang finally arrived at a reconceptualization of modernity as more than a political discourse, or a positively "modern, worthy, and noble" enterprise. This reconceptualization would express itself in Liang's new cultural politics in the 1920's and suggest a different end to the project of modernity. The reading in the preceding chapter of the three major historical biographies that Liang Qichao wrote in 1902 argues that these heroic tales form an overarching narrative, through which the narrator sought to negotiate and rethink the tension between nationalist

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imagination and revolutionary desire, between the longing for historical identity and the quest for political freedom and social progress. The tasks of achieving national self-determination and social transformation now appeared to Liang as mutually exclusive in theory or at best not simultaneously feasible. His final thoughts on the French Revolution in his biography of Madame Roland led him to conclude that radical and wholesale destruction merits grave precaution and ought to be viewed as the last resort. In the case of the Italian Risorgimento, despite the fact that Mazzini's revolutionary republicanism was regarded as instrumental, it was the reformist Cavour who, by means of political maneuvering and diplomacy, effected Italian unification under the House of Savoy, without causing social disorder or discontinuity. Now that Liang saw the Italian Risorgimento as a successful nationalist movement, he came to portray the French Revolution largely as a negative example of what happens when law and order are set aside and the nation is agitated in massive mobilization and social upheaval. In addition, Liang never lost sight of the fact that until the Third Republic in the 1870's, France had been mired in constant political turmoil and instability and lagged behind other European nations. In narrating these histories of national revolution through individual lives, Liang in fact made a comparative study of the modern form of social change, as concrete personal experience rather than collective enterprise. In the process, he continually reflected on the applicability of these revolutions as a model for his own country. Because a sociopolitical history of the nation now assumed the narrative form of an individual biography, he was compelled to represent national revolution as more than a revolutionary spectacle or Utopian vision. Rather, it became a complex and multifaceted process that always called for pragmatic planning, effective engineering, and able leadership. A critical examination of revolution from an individual viewpoint of experiential continuity challenged the myth of revolution as an emotionally gratifying outburst of heroism, as projected in both populist rhetoric and vanguardist politics. The closure of a revolution became much more of an issue than its momentous unfolding. The enormity of a modern revolution, especially given the paradigm of the interminable French Revolution, eventually led Liang to engage in more rigorous reflection. In his unfinished political novel, The Future of New China, at

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which Liang worked for over five long years, he gave systematic expression to his concerns about modern revolution. The conception of a grand future for China may have been indirectly inspired by another of Liang's Japanese contemporaries, Tokutomi Soho, whose widely read tract The Future Japan (Shorai no Nihon\ 1886) introduced as an intellectual concern the identity of Japan in the modern world. Different from Tokutomi's unequivocal acceptance of the modern values of industry and democracy, Liang's Future of New China consists entirely of a heated debate between its two major characters. Sustained by the tension between two competing historical visions that respectively embrace a politics for national revival and for a revolutionary Utopia, the debate reflects Liang's internal dialogue around 1902.7 It also prefigured, in almost every aspect, his unrelenting and sometimes exasperating exchange with a group of young students associated with Min bao, the official organ of the Revolutionary Alliance headed by Sun Yat-sen. The Future Is Recalled The two major characters in the first part of The Future of New China are Huang Keqiang and Li Qubing, two friends born within one year of each other who, in their early twenties, go to England to study after the Sino-Japanese War in 1895.8 Huang Keqiang, whose Chinese name could mean "The yellow race will be strong," is the hero and cast in an obviously autobiographical frame by the author. Of the same age as Liang Qichao, Huang, too, comes from Guangdong, where his father Sir Qiongshan (a direct allusion to Sir Nanhai—Kang Youwei) conducts an influential private seminary and has tutored a number of prominent political figures instrumental to the future of China. Before going abroad, Huang mastered English by consulting a dictionary, just as the Hungarian hero Kossuth did. Li Qubing grew up with Huang and later shares many great adventures with him in founding the Great Republic of China, to which Huang Keqiang himself contributes greatly as its second and pivotal president. Li Qubing is portrayed as the more hotheaded and less meticulous of the two, as is indicated by his name, which could be understood as "Striving to eradicate disease." It is tempting to characterize the difference between these two friends as stemming more from a temperamental conflict than from ideological divergence, but, as the subsequent reading will show, what is at work here is precisely two competing

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visions of arriving at modernity and ultimately two separate philosophical orientations. After a tortuous journey, the two friends finally arrive in England to attend Oxford University. Huang decides to major in politics, law, and economics, whereas Li chooses physics and philosophy as his concentration. By 1898, when news of the doomed One Hundred Days Reform reaches these two Chinese students, they have graduated and are deeply frustrated and disturbed by the political setback at home. Li expresses an eagerness to sail home and carry on the reformist cause, but Huang, revealing his prudence for the first time, sees the prospect of a prolonged confrontation and persuades his friend of the need to prepare more fully. Soon, the two friends bid each other farewell, with Huang heading for Germany to inform himself of the latest theory in Staatswissenschaft (political science) at Berlin University and Li traveling to Paris to further his interest in history. Their parting of the ways is not an innocent decision. What Liang Qichao built into his narrative here is no less than his own choice for China's political future. It is a choice between two apparently opposing historical paradigms for reaching modernity. Liang was reconsidering the French model that Li will represent in the novel, and would finally repudiate radical republicanism in his own politics. Instead, German liberalism and the possibility of a constitutional Bismarckian state offered him a more acceptable political ideology and form of government for China. Huang Keqiang's choice of Germany as his destination reflected Liang's increasing attention to what the Japanese statesman and modern Japan's first prime minister Ito Hirobumi had brought back from his trip to Europe in the 1880's. Historically, the Staatswissenschaft that Huang Keqiang is to study grew out of a concern in German liberalism about a possible French-style republican revolution. After the pan-European revolution of 1848, both the right and the left wings of German liberalism conscientiously sought a liberal Volk and Staat in order to avoid future mass movements and upheavals.9 In the Germany of the 1870's, when constitutional monarchism was further institutionalized, as James Sheehan observes, Liberals' relationship with the state continued to be shaped by two conflicting sets of pressures: on the one hand, their desire to represent the Volk and to broaden the influence of this representation; and on the other hand, their desire to ally with the state against those forces in society which they consid-

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ered dangerous. During the "liberal era," therefore, the movement's ability to oppose the state and to change the existing political system continued to be qualified—both in theory and in practice—by its willingness to grant the state a central role in German life.10

The Staatswissenschaft popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was, then, German liberalism's answer to the need to both strengthen the state as a political agency and balance its power. One of the liberal theoreticians calling for a powerful, if absolutist, state was Johann K. Bluntschli, whose eleven-volume Deutsche Staatsworterbuch (A lexicon of the German state) in the late 1850's and Die Lehre vom modernen Staat (The theory of the modern state) in 1869 were widely read and received critical attention, as far away as Japan. Although he has now largely receded into historical obscurity, Bluntschli's English translators in 1901 had no doubt that the Swiss-born jurist was attempting, with remarkable success, "to do for the European State what Aristotle accomplished for the Hellenic."11 As early as 1872, Kato Hiroyuki introduced and translated Bluntschli into Japanese, and his two introductory essays, "New Theories on the State" and "Introduction to Constitutional Government," would furnish Liang with a useful summary of Bluntschli's doctrine. On the basis of these introductory writings, Liang composed his own "Teachings of the Great Staatswissenschaftler Bluntschli" in 1903.12 In this lengthy essay, Liang did not go so far as to recant his earlier "destructionism," but he made it clear that Bluntschli was more relevant to China than Rousseau, whose republicanism might be appropriate for a small-scale society or city-state but was hardly practical for governing the nation-state. As a revolutionary doctrine, Rousseau's "social contract" may have inspired the French Revolution, but it worked more like a potent "antidote" that could both heal and hurt. Bluntschli's political theory, however, was the "grain" that would sustain and nurture the entire state. Since the overriding priority for China was to establish an independent and powerful state so as to develop a national consciousness and political platform, Bluntschli's theory was more timely and useful. "What today's China is weakest at and stands in greatest need of is an organic unity and strong order. Liberty and equality will have to come next."13 Liang's essay on Bluntschli indicated a readiness to embrace a statism that posited a centralized nation-state as the sole capable political agency to conduct social reforms and ensure political consensus. Equally noticeable is the marked departure from classical

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English liberalism, which Liang had so far celebrated and propagated, though not without considerable modification. Only a year earlier, for instance, he had based his essay "On the Limits of Authority of the Government and the People" largely on John Stuart Mill's discussion of individual liberty versus the tyranny of society.14 In The Future of New China, when Huang Keqiang decides to study at Berlin University at the turn of the century, Bluntschli was long deceased and Conrad Bornhak, a prominent professor of state and administrative law at Berlin University, who had published his Allegemeine Staatslehre (General theory of the state) in 1896, was carrying on the liberal tradition of Staatswissenschaft. By dispatching Huang to Germany, Liang could examine more closely the politics of the modern state and prescribe for China a German-style constitutionalism, embodied in an absolutist state, rather than a repetition of the French Revolution and its volatile republicanism. After a year of refining themselves in their respective intellectual homelands, Huang Keqiang and Li Qubing meet again and travel extensively in Europe. At the end of 1902, they board a train in St. Petersburg to return to China. (To augment the credibility of the narrative and underscore its relevance to the present, Liang inserted notes and asides here and there, calling the reader's attention to details. At this point, for instance, a note reads: "The two gentlemen must have by now started their journey. Let us ready ourselves for a welcome party.")15 They eventually arrive at Shanhaiguan, at the border between Qing China and Manchuria, then occupied by the Russians. There they climb the Great Wall, as if following a ritual, to look over their impoverished motherland. Thanks to a considerable amount of liquor, the two young men get quite sentimental and end up writing, as mandated of all unfulfilled scholars in old times, a despondent and nostalgic poem in the romantic ci style on the wall of the inn where they stay. After this poetic release and even more alcoholic stimulation, Li begins lamenting the division of a prostrate China by foreign powers and gives rise to a series of some twenty arguments and counterarguments that forms the greater part of the novel. In answer to his friend's exasperation, Huang confidently points out that if a situation degenerates because of human factors, it can be changed and rectified by human efforts. The task confronting them as educated youth is to awaken the majority of the 400 million Chinese still fast asleep and make them understand their responsibility for their own country. As might be expected, the impatient Li Qu-

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bing immediately challenges this arduous project of general enlightenment and narrows the discussion to the question of concrete political strategy by asking how to practice such a responsibility. Can one place one's hopes on a government that resists change and cares only to appease the foreigners? "I can no longer bear looking at those traitors of all sorts. All I wish to do is throw myself into a fight with them, with the result of either their survival or my victory." At this point Liang the narrator steps in and comments in a note: "Real hero! As great as Mazzini and Yoshida Shoin."16 Once again, as Liang makes clear, we are going to see a repetition of the Mazzini-Cavour opposition, with Li now explicitly identified as a Mazzinian revolutionary. At the outset of their discourse, therefore, two drastically different approaches are brought into view: a gradualist policy of reform through popular education, and a vanguardist strategy of insurrection. Although Mazzini's "Program for Young Italy" endorsed "education and insurrection" simultaneously as complementary options, the quick-tempered Li now finds this an impractical project because of pressing historical circumstances. Always sensing an imminent catastrophe or triumph, he opts for direct confrontation and instant resolution. So even before Huang can finish his counterargument urging him to take into account the specificity of the Chinese situation, Li asserts that China has been a country of revolution, with one dynasty invariably replaced by another through violence for the last 2,000 years. "But has it been productive, in these 2,000 years, to have a constant cycle of revolution always followed by chaos?" Huang asks curtly. Li responds that traditional revolutions in China have pitted violence against violence, but in a modern revolution humanity will replace brutality, a point evident in the history of all modern and civilized countries. Moreover, "the winds of democracy from nineteenth-century Europe have now reached China, and anyone with any common sense understands that despotism is a treacherous evil."17 Li's belief in an irreversible world trend of democracy was a crucial part of Liang's perception of the modern world. It was also at the heart of Tokutomi Soho's projection for the future of Japan. At this point the conversation between Li Qubing and Huang Keqiang switches to an investigation of the general characteristics of revolution. Huang finds no consolation in a brief examination of past revolutionary violence in imperial China and therefore broadens the scope of discussion by taking issue with Li's assessment of modern revolutions, in particular the French Revolution. "But not all ideals

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correspond to reality everywhere in the world. If you have doubts, just take a look at the history of the French Revolution. Robespierre, Danton—didn't they also first set out carrying the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity? Why then did they wind up abandoning and even slaughtering each other and bringing all of France into the Reign of Terror?" And after all, did not the French, who had once vowed to paint the earth red with the blood of all the world's despots, finally succumb to Napoleon and embrace him as emperor? Against this criticism of the French Revolution, the Francophile Li Qubing launches an equally classic and even more eloquent defense. First, he rejoins, nothing in the real world should be expected to be perfect. Even the most popular political system of representation, for instance, is flawed in more than one way. The point, however, is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Second, to judge a historical event one must examine it in concrete historical terms, for standards of good and evil cannot and should not be viewed as absolute. The French Revolution, with all the horrible deeds of Robespierre and others, is part of the ineluctable evolution of human history. As for the Reign of Terror, the nobility and the emigres were more to blame because they had solicited help from foreign reactionary forces to suppress the newly established republic. If, an impassioned Li demands, French men and women had not been so much more patriotic than we docile Chinese, and if they had not united to defend their own country, would not France have long since become another Poland, neatly partitioned by Austria and Prussia? It is true that the Revolution damaged the nation tremendously, but it also strengthened the position of France in Europe. On the other hand, if there had not been such a formidable tremor, would not the kingdom of Louis XVI have done just as much and most likely even more harm to the country in the end? Third, why should one be so critical of Napoleon? All he wanted was to unite Europe under a constitutional government, and wherever he conquered, did he not also spread aspirations for freedom and democracy? Is it not true that he perfectly embodied the French ideal of liberty and equality? Finally, "how can we evaluate a historical figure merely by the successes and failures of his own lifetime?"18 Quite taken aback by this ready and compelling speech in defense of the French Revolution, Huang Keqiang decides to ease the tension a little. "My brother, a couple of years in France have certainly converted you into her ardent admirer. Your eloquence will match

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that of any defense lawyer. If need be, you should definitely defend the cause of the French in court." But his real counterargument swerves for the moment to the question of nationalism: "At the beginning of the nineteenth century when nationalism was at its peak, Napoleon resisted the trend and attempted to force into a union all nations of different races, religions, and languages. Was this at all possible?" Li Qubing, however, gladly picks up the topic of nationalism. Nationalism, to his mind, is a universal law that prescribes revolution in China. If the prospect of a violent revolution merits prudence and hesitation, can one afford to postpone it any more in a situation where the government happens to be one imposed by a foreign race? "Can you tell," Li pounds out a sensitive question, "whether the sovereignty of today's China is in the hands of our own people or a foreign race?"19 Li's exasperated remarks point to growing ethnic and nationalist sentiments, particularly prevalent among the Chinese student community in Japan at the time, that inflamed hostility toward the Qing government on the basis that the Manchus were barbaric invaders rather than authentic Chinese. Anti-Manchuism, an essentially racist doctrine disguised as, or rather aided by, modern nationalism, proved an effective way to arouse collective resentment against the Qing regime and was to become a major point of disagreement between Liang Qichao and the revolutionaries in the years to come. Although he would mount a decisive attack on anti-Manchuism as a "narrowminded nationalism" that would lead to numerous practical problems and the eventual disintegration of the nation, Liang in his youth had himself ardently opposed the Manchus on the grounds that they were an alien race. Daring political persecution, he had preached antiManchuism as a necessary means of political reform and remained strongly committed to it for quite some time in Japan, when back in China his friends and comrades were being hunted down and executed by the reactionary Qing court.20 By 1903 Liang would argue for a "broad nationalism" that viewed the Chinese nation as a historically wrought composite of multiple ethnic groups, to which the Manchus legitimately belonged. The notion of "broad nationalism" was more than a rebuttal of the politically manipulative anti-Manchuism of the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. It also signaled Liang's first step in the direction of separating a "political revolution" aimed at social transformation from a "racial revolution" with an obvious bent toward tribalistic revenge.21 In Liang's view, the

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confusion between a political revolution and a racial revolution, or rather the displacement of the former by the latter, began to present a great danger. The choice that Liang would put before his Chinese readers, in Hao Chang's words, was this: "Did they aim to build up China as a modern state or did they prefer to be carried away by a narrow revengeful spirit against the Manchus?"22 What is significant about the discussion between Huang and Li at this point, however, is the linking of revolution and nationalism. The central question now becomes one of defining the goals of social changes and the means of implementing them: Is the program to be that of a social revolution through which to bring about modern democracy in the form of a republic, or one of political reform in order to strengthen the nation as such? Not until now does Huang have an opportunity to outline his conception of political reform. However, he has to tackle the issue of anti-Manchuism first. After 300 long years of cultural integration and assimilation, Huang reasons, the Manchus are by now inseparable from the Chinese. To be truthful, their treatment of the native Chinese has not been any worse than that of previous intruders from the north. The political despotism practiced by the Manchus derives from a long tradition in Chinese history and cannot be undone simply by bloody racial revenge. Furthermore, with no prospect of achieving genuine democracy due to various practical difficulties and general lack of preparation, it would be better to keep the throne intact for now, since it matters little who sits there as long as institutions like a parliament, a multi-party system, and democratic procedures are established. A historical precedent for a successful compromise like this can be found in either England or Japan. A constitutional monarchy, in other words, is what Huang favors for China, and in this form of political authority he sees a secure and manageable transition to a new era. "My brother, I hope you understand that in my heart I am no less patriotic than you, but I prefer peaceful liberty and orderly equity. Your radical comments always make me worry for our nation, and I must beg to differ."23 The principle of "peaceful liberty and orderly equity" best summarizes Huang's, and eventually Liang Qichao's, liberalism in terms of its gradualist social policies and repudiation of political radicalism. It expresses a deep-seated distrust of mass movements, which, however, Liang would soon realize were a key phenomenon of modern society. By negation, this overtly liberal endorsement of constitutionalism distinctly reflects the experience of

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the French Revolution, or, in fact, the series of national revolutions that shook Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. After an argument by Li about the political principle of majority rule and responsible government, Huang expounds his German-style liberalism. On the one hand, political representation or government by general will as imagined by Rousseau or Bentham, he observes, has always been a wonderful theoretical construct but a practical impossibility. Even in the most advanced constitutional countries, such as England, France, or Japan, majority rule remains a nominal process. On the other hand, installing a responsible government demands a responsibility-conscious people. In agreement with his enlightenment approach, Huang offers less than flattering comments on the nation: "But to my mind the Chinese people at present are far from able to assume such a responsibility. Even if you let the self-proclaimed public leaders organize a new government, I am afraid they will be just as untrustworthy as the current government. . . . My brother, I believe there are different stages in political evolution, and they allow no surpassing of their proper order." He ends his speech by admonishing Li that he has probably become oblivious to reality and deluded himself with dreams of importing foreign ships and trains to upgrade China effortlessly and overnight into a modern state.24 Slightly offended, Li Qubing responds by sarcastically reminding Huang of his own Germanophile tendencies. He maintains that government by majority is possible because party leaders, though small in number, already stand for their own respective political parties, which in turn represent either the majority or minority of the people. Moreover, it is simply unjustifiable to retain despotism under the pretext that the people are not ready or capable. Granted that Rousseau and Bentham are outdated in today's Europe, China nevertheless remains caught fast in a situation similar to that of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. The French philosopher's notion of social contract is therefore still a timely prescription. To overstep this stage of political democratization, or what Li calls "populism," and move ahead to emphasize Staatsrecht, itself amounts to a vain attempt to "surpass the order of evolution." Li's rebuttal causes Huang to examine the situation in China in terms of whether there is a strong national consciousness or a tradition of state intervention. Only through state intervention, as he puts it, can a nation-state in the proper sense be formed. Political authoritarianism, in the form of a monarchy, might turn out to be the most

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effective way to institute reforms from above and prepare for parliamentary politics. Anticipating an expression of impatience from his friend, Huang again cites the example of England and Japan and points out the importance of persistent endeavors by political leaders to exert pressure on the government. By this, he envisions a politics of contention that includes education, publication, the press, and public campaigns. On top of that, simultaneous efforts have to be made to cultivate bravery among the people and develop native business and industry. Brief as it is, Huang's plan outlines the essential forms and aspects of liberal politics in a modern constitutional state. In the novel at least, it will be further elaborated and become the basis for the political program of a successful coalition—the "Constitutional Party"—that Huang Keqiang establishes.25 Yet Huang's Germany-fostered liberalism and his plans for China's gradual transformation into a modern nation-state will remain what James Sheehan defines as the fate of liberalism in the nineteenth-century Germany—"Liberalism in an illiberal society"—and have little chance of developing into a hegemonic ideology in modern China. From its inception, modern Chinese liberalism fatally undercut its own political viability by having to rely on authoritarianism for its own institutionalization. Rather than offering itself, in the fashion of classic British liberalism, as an advocate either for containment of government power or for individualism and economic entrepreneurism, Chinese liberalism began with a nationalist premise and was bound to succumb to the alleged interests of the nation-state in all its critical choices. Indeed, liberalism, an ill-fated ideological choice, was introduced more as a means of securing national sovereignty and rejuvenation than as an end and value in and of itself.26 By the same token, and probably more pertinently, liberalism also proved to be a persistent political failure, not so much because of its universalistic aspirations, as because of its miserable inadequacy to contain or dissipate a pressing discourse of crisis, which inevitably arose with the nationalist ideology. Not surprisingly, Li makes no direct objection to Huang's liberal politics and planning. Rather, he nonchalantly questions its efficacy and, apparently lost in his own thoughts, agrees with an exotic assessment that China resembles the Augean stables, for which he proposes the more resolute action of a thorough Herculean cleaning. Finally narrowed down to the question of method and means, the discourse is also half through. Once more, Huang Keqiang is com-

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pelled to revert to the sensitive topic of the French Revolution. A revolution always has to mobilize the masses, even if its target is no more than a handful of reactionaries. Yet once the whole society is embroiled in revolution, it is the common people who have to endure the most, for violent social upheaval causes large-scale destruction, often with the formidable result of "the jade being scorched along with the rock." "Whenever I open the history of the French Revolution, a shudder goes down my backbone and leaves me all the more uncertain about the future of our country." Huang becomes so upset at Li's reckless radicalism and its grim consequences that he cannot help shedding a few "heroic tears." His interlocutor also grows more sober and in a sincere tone reiterates his idea of "active destruction." Having pondered the matter so intensely that, in his words, his "insides almost burst out," Li remains convinced that destruction is unavoidable, the only question being who is to conduct it—the despot, the mob, or some noble individual. The worst scenario is a "passive destruction" inflicted by intruding foreign powers together with an impotent native government. This kind of disintegration would be far more disastrous than the active destruction one finds in eighteenth-century France. On the other hand, progress and civilization, as their Oxford professor Benjamin Kidd would agree, have to be purchased with blood. This was true even in England and Japan, countries frequently mentioned and admired by constitutionalists like Huang. Finally, Li asks, "Why do you always insist on looking to the French story for a comparison? The script for revolution in this world has been staged elsewhere other than in France. Why do not you think of the successful American example, my brother, to cheer yourself up a little instead of holding on to the French precedent to scare people?"27 But mention of the American Revolution serves only to deepen Huang's pessimism about the prospects for a Chinese revolution. The United States, founded by freedom-loving Puritans, is inhabited largely by people of Teutonic origins who already enjoyed a welldeveloped political autonomy. Even before independence from England, all the states had their own legislatures and city halls through which popular political ability was regularly exercised.28 "But the Chinese have never really possessed any autonomous institutions, or political consciousness, and the country has always been caught in chaos, with no order or discipline whatsoever. With people of such a character, do you really think that full democracy could be handed

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over to them?" Huang finds more reason to deplore an obstreperous and undisciplined nation in the case of some Chinese students staying in Japan who wield the banner of "liberty and equality" only to extort a larger allowance from their parents. "I am afraid that if China ventured into destruction today, the catastrophe would be even greater than that in France. How could we even expect to emulate the United States?"29 This disparaging criticism of an entire nation, even though it comes from a die-hard nationalist like Huang Keqiang, begs another typical and ready nationalist retort from Li Qubing: Is this not a deliberate and surreptitious confusion of a particular case with a general situation? Li suggests that discrediting an entire nation for its inability to determine its own fate and administer itself and thereby implicitly admitting that the Chinese nation, perhaps uniquely, stands not among the best or most worthy in the world, ultimately leads to a self-defeating argument. Just as the blind spot in the liberal ideology is the notion of crisis and, by inference, explosive revolution, so the aporia in an emancipatory nationalist discourse is the absoluteness of the nation. What further complicates the situation is the "third party" that Huang never for a moment loses sight of, namely, the foreign powers that both impose a national identity upon their object of aggression and simultaneously challenge its sovereignty and legitimacy. In Huang's opinion, foreign forces and interests have so deeply penetrated China that once a revolutionary uprising occurs, the foreign powers will interfere and make a precarious situation much more complex. The idealistic Li Qubing finds this analysis untenable. "If everything is done according to the regulations of a civilized country, the foreigners should show nothing but respect. Would it not be much easier for them to do business with a civilized government after it has replaced a barbaric one?" This wishful argument would in fact soon be adopted wholeheartedly by the Min bao writers and stretched into a major policy in the political program of the Revolutionary Alliance.30 Huang's response reveals a much more realistic, almost cynical, understanding of the modern world: "My brother, you are mistaken there. There is no such thing as civility or incivility in the world. Only the powerful pass as the civilized. Just take a look at how England treated the Boers and the United States acted in the Philippines. Can you call that behavior civilized? Is there any country that has grown

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indignant at the situation and accused the powerful countries of being uncivilized?" In a world motivated solely by economic interests and competition, a disruptive uprising in China will jeopardize foreign business, and this can only end in military intervention. Huang's most relevant example is the recent Boxer movement in northern China, which gave rise to a united expedition of eight foreign powers and ended in more humiliating damage to Qing China. A national revolution in China, in other words, will inescapably have international implications and consequences. Li's enraged counterargument, in particular against Huang's linking of the Boxer movement with patriotism, surprises the latter somewhat. First, Li dismisses the Boxers as neither patriotic nor really antiforeign. A group of hoodlums instigated by some government officials for their own political purposes caused the unrest. Second, he returns to the French Revolution and praises the success of the French resistance against reactionary forces from hostile neighbors. Goaded by an almost chauvinistic national pride, Li declares, chanting "Give me Liberty or give me Death," that "we have 400 million Chinese. If the establishment of a new government does provoke foreign intervention, we shall fight to the death the common enemy of civilization. Even if nine-tenths of the population is sacrificed, we will still have more people than there are in France." Turning a deaf ear to Huang's cool reminder that not everyone in the country is as zealous as he, Li goes on to voice his determination to strive for success at all costs. Anything less spectacular will insult his manhood. Alarmed by such rampant emotionalism and extremist rhetoric, Huang mildly admonishes the younger man that mere agitation and tenacity will not suffice to reverse the tides of the times. The examples of Hungarian independence and the Italian Risorgimento demonstrate that any such cause demands both unrelenting devotion and strategic compromises. By rising up in arms and bringing internal conflicts and turmoil to the country, the revolutionaries will only do the nation a disservice and hasten its disintegration. A handy illustration of this danger is the partitioning of India by the British while different regional and ethnic groups were absorbed in internal strife.31 Against Li's guileless trust in all those who proclaim themselves revolutionary nationalists, Huang warns that a revolution necessarily involves more than one person and that "multitude" by definition implies differences in opinions and goals. Even the three makers of modern Italy seldom agreed. Therefore, the last thing to

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ensure effective change and a smooth transition is disorder and violence. Unity and order will come only from educating the people, for "democracy is not something to be achieved on paper or by mouth. Until the entire nation is qualified to enjoy and maintain it, democracy will not be realized."32 Huang calls this policy a constructive "blood-free destruction." In essence, he does not believe that the present state of the Chinese nation allows for a successful popular revolution. Upon hearing those biting words about the lack of preparation among the Chinese for a sensible revolution, Li lets out a few heavy sighs and finds himself forced to agree with Huang. But he immediately seeks another justification for his radicalism. Even though the conditions for an actual revolution are not present, a revolutionary discourse continues to serve a purpose. Unless people advocate revolution, there will be no pressure on the government, and as a result no one will have an incentive for changing. "No matter whether we establish a republic or a constitutional monarchy, revolutionary discussion and Tconsciousness-raising are indispensable to today's China." Without Mazzini, Cavour would not have achieved so much. Since the example of these two heroes cannot be followed simultaneously, Li decides that he is not made to be a Cavour and that the founder of Young Italy appears much more appealing. He wants to become a Chinese Mazzini, as Liang Qichao himself had for a long time wished to be. At this conciliatory gesture, Huang Keqiang ends this long discussion by concluding that considering all the methods available, preparing the nation for the future remains the priority and only definite means. "But when we are actually engaged in activity, we have to make decisions contingent on the specific situation. Unless desperately pressed, we should never lightheartedly embark on the road of revolution."33 Both young men then realize it is almost daybreak and agree to catch some sleep at the end of an exhausting night of intense intellectual exercise. The difference between Huang and Li (we can take the former to be Liang Qichao, and the latter to be a forerunner of the youthful Min bao revolutionaries) is that the German-trained Huang has achieved a realistic insight into the complexity of a historical dilemma and refuses to accept a utopianist simplification for the sake of popular agitation or emotional satisfaction. Huang is an uncompromising rationalist and critic; Li is a romantic, a willing believer in the force of human determination.34 Huang is not at all blind to their divergence.

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After Li gives vent to a typical frustration at having to see the current despotism last one more day and rejects Huang's proposed strategy of exerting pressure on the government as no less than "negotiating with the tiger for its skin," Huang resignedly remarks that Li is a Mazzinian type, "born to cause storms and stir up a country with dynamic force." He does not hold back his fears: "With too much robust vitality and not enough planning, you see one side of things and ignore the other. If China abounds in people as talented as you are, her future will be just as hard to tell."35 The contrast between Huang and Li, to return to Anatole LeroyBeaulieu once more, can also be construed as a restaging of the supposed temperamental difference between the prudent Germans and the impatient French. At the fictional banquet of 1889, a proud German privat-docent from the University of Konigsberg—a disciple of Kant?—gave a scathing cultural critique of the French Revolution as well as of eighteenth-century French men and women, "whom the complexity of things escaped." Not only had the Germans invented long before the Revolution all the ideas, such as universal liberty, human fraternity, tolerance, and progress, that fueled the events at the end of the eighteenth century, but the Reformation had also been so much more successful, intellectually and socially, that Martin Luther and Johannes Gutenberg, one a moral leader and the other a pioneering entrepreneur, should be viewed as "the two great emancipators of the modern world." The Germans, in the privat-docent s view, were able to "distinguish the speculative from the concrete, the rational from the real, and separate thought from action, science from life," whereas the failing of the French Revolution, "une explosion de temperament," was to have confused all these things. "The pretense of regenerating the world with the help of some speculative maxims was infantile. . . . The Revolution misunderstood history; it was clearly a negation of history. It had the ingenuousness to believe that one can suppress the past, as if a people were not the product of centuries." In the guise of this philosophical German, Leroy-Beaulieu aired his liberal views on the debate about reform versus revolution and tradition versus change. His central argument was that the horizon of historical continuity cannot be defied, let alone be swept away by revolution. "Do I dare to say it here," thus Leroy-Beaulieu lamented through a German voice, "that in breaking with the traditions of France, in condemning her to perpetual instability, in successively

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taking away from French politics all its mind, the Revolution let the hegemony of the continent pass from Versailles to Potsdam?"36 The discourse on revolution between the two young Chinese patriots comes to an inconclusive end, although Huang Keqiang apparently has the last word. In the fictional world, he will head the Constitutional Party and lead the country to a successful reform, which will eventually establish China as a cosmopolitan center in world political and cultural affairs—just what the famous Italo-centrist Mazzini would have liked to attain for Italy. During the lengthy discussion, almost all the essential issues concerning a successful transformation of Chinese society are mentioned and examined, but the predominant matter of contention is the prospects for revolution. Whether to have a revolution or not, what revolution is to be had in present-day China, and what the consequences will be—these questions constitute a decisive watershed along which Huang and Li form their own visions and foresee different answers. But Huang and Li are also representatives of two dominant European political traditions—German liberalism and French republicanism—and their debate resonates to a larger world-historical context and provides further evidence that a whole host of specific Chinese problems, aaxieties, and intellectual paradigms are irrevocably formulated and articulable only in terms of the Western experience of modernity. For both, the prototype of modern revolutions is the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The recurring references to that historic event throughout the dialogue and the often uncompromisingly opposed interpretations testify abundantly to the extent to which the French Revolution as a paradigm has shaped and dominated the historical imagination of the modern world. Also foreshadowed in the debate was a continuing struggle over the French Revolution in the years to come. With Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao on the one side and the revolutionary Min bao writers on the other, a fierce confrontation over the heritage of the French Revolution would take place on the eve of the 1911 Chinese Revolution, which, in turn, has often been likened to its French precedent, and not merely for the obvious reason that both replaced a monarchy with a republic.37 Whereas in the novel, the debate takes place between a more mature constitutionalist Huang and a more idealistic republican Li, the actual debate can be viewed as an exchange between two different political generations of Chinese. Most telling is

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probably the fact that Kang Youwei was 32 years older than Wang Dong, a sixteen-year-old dropout from Waseda University and Min bao's chief expert on French history, who attacked Kang with an emotional defense of the French Revolution, largely based on translations by Kawazu Sukeyuki and Okuda Takematsu.38 Sadly, the debate between Liang Qichao and the Min bao group was never as congenial and rigorous as the imagined discussion between Huang and Li. Dr. Kong Hongdao, who in the novel relates the dialogue supposedly from a notebook of Huang's, calls the audience's attention to an exemplary friendship between the two young men, emphasizing their mutual respect and understanding. He also underscores the historical significance of this "greatest debate" in modern China. Liang Qichao himself appeared no less pleased with this chapter of his novel. In a general commentary at the end, he recommended it to all patriotic readers and mused that this closely reasoned and persuasive discourse was not merely unprecedented in the author's own writings but also had little chance of being repeated.39 What Liang expected least was probably that this fictional debate would be closely reproduced so soon and on such a large scale. Compelled to go over most of the points already made in the novel, Liang found that the two debating parties were resolutely hostile to each other and had no hope of reaching a consensus. What was more disturbing was that, in the real-life controversy, Li Qubing the visionary Jacobin, rather than the realist Staatswissenschaftler Huang Keqiang, gained the upper hand and won over large crowds of young people with his enticing utopianism and revolutionary passion.

Toward an End to Revolution Early in 1903, before he could finish his blueprint for a new China in his political fiction, Liang Qichao sailed across the Pacific to North America, the "motherland of republicanism" that he had for years dreamed of visiting and studying.40 From February to October, he traveled extensively on behalf of the constitutionalist Protect the Emperor Society and received royal treatment wherever he set foot in Canada and the United States. His itinerary, as Jerome Grieder describes it, "was arranged to bring him into touch with as many as possible of the Chinese who had emigrated to the New World—more than 100,000 by the turn of the century, living in the congested, busy Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco—the Chinese laundry-

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men, restaurateurs, and houseboys of American legend; or those scattered in isolated railroad and mining towns, scavengers of the profligate wealth of the raw western hinterland."41 First from Vancouver to Ottawa, then back and forth between New York and Boston, southward to Washington, D.C., and as far south as New Orleans, and finally up through the Midwest to San Francisco and Portland, by train and automobile, Liang tirelessly kept up his traveling schedule and absorbed all that the fresh sights had to offer. He frequently consulted James Bryce's The American Commonwealth, a work that indelibly shaped his understanding of the American republic. To quote Grieder again, Liang "was a superb tourist: sharp-eyed, strong-legged, quick to register impressions of people and places, open to amazement but sufficiently self-assured not to be unnerved (though often appalled) by the rush and clamor of American life."42 The shock Liang received from his tour of the United States was massive and thought-provoking. As the train moved eastward from Vancouver to New York, he found himself continually excited by what he saw. Those from the inland [of China] will arrive in Hong Kong or Shanghai to find a new horizon and realize that the inland is indescribably uncivilized; arriving in Japan will bring another perspective, and Hong Kong or Shanghai becomes unspeakably primitive. But after crossing the ocean to reach the other side of the Pacific, a new sight will come in view, making Japan appear bare and plain. Yet further on across the continent the East Coast of America offers yet another new landscape, and one will see that cities along the Pacific are still so undeveloped.43

The stimulation of constant surprise and growing horizons accompanied Liang throughout his journey in America, especially when he traveled to the American capital in May 1903 to find an extremely charming city brightened by late spring blossoms. But there were also deeply distressing moments. His observations of the immigrant Chinese in the several Chinatowns he visited greatly dismayed him because they served to reinforce his already critical conception of his countrymen, either at home or abroad. To find that overseas Chinese still could not transform themselves into responsible members of a civil society made him all the more anxious and discouraged. In a concluding entry in his travel notebook, Liang summarized the weakness of the Chinese: as a people, they lived like tribesmen rather than citizens, were conscious only of their local villages but not of their country, and could survive under absolutism but were

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not able to enjoy civil liberty. "These are understandably very disparaging words, but the actual situation being so, how could one cover it up even if one wished to?" Finally, the Chinese in general lacked "a noble purpose" to their existence; conversely an "advanced spiritual civilization" gave this to Europeans and Americans. Embarrassed and disheartened, Liang the outspoken nationalist felt painfully ashamed of his people, a people he now came to consider largely ill-prepared for the modern world. Liberty, constitutionalism, republicanism: these are all terms for majority rule. But China's majority, the great, vast majority of Chinese, are as I have found them. Were we now to adopt a majority rule, it would be the same as committing national suicide. Liberty, constitutionalism, republicanism, all these would be like wearing fancy summer garb in winter, or luxurious furs in summer: beautiful, to be sure, but out of place. No more shall I be dizzy with vain imaginings; no longer shall I indulge in pretty dreams. In a word, the Chinese people have to accept authoritarian rule for now and do not merit liberty.44

Burdening himself with the disenchanting shame his nation now caused in him, Liang made pointed observations about the political system in the United States as he continued his journey. When he returned to Japan, he published his Journey to the New World as a special issue of New Citizen Journal and illustrated it with some 30 photographs collected during his trip, including pictures of the Liberty Bell, the largest hotel in New York, the White House, the Library of Congress, women students at Boston University, cave-dwelling Indians, the University of Chicago, and Chinese students at the University of California at Berkeley. The Journey was also interlaced with statistics and translations. He devoted considerable space to retracing the history of American independence and, drawing on James Bryce's book, commented on the institutional weaknesses of American democracy. He paid special attention to the two-party system and came to the conclusion that the Republicans would dominate the political stage in the twentieth century. At one point, the specter of the French Revolution reemerged to cast some intriguing questions about the mystery of liberty in the Americas. The French had sought liberty through revolution, he noted, only to have a dictatorship by the mob that led to imperial monarchy. All the South American countries, too, had trodden the same path and for the past 60-odd years had had to endure a chaotic insurrection every four years. In the United States, however, liberty

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had already taken root before independence. The revolution had worked to consolidate rather than to initiate liberty. "Therefore, there were causes for American liberty that lay outside the revolution, which one cannot afford to ignore."45 The American precedent, as Huang Keqiang had already speculated, had its own cultural traditions and was by no means easy to copy; the Chinese road to liberty and national prosperity had to lie elsewhere. By the end of his trip, Liang Qichao arrived at a harsh though long suspected conclusion: what would best serve his country was not republicanism or American-style democracy but order and unity, which would translate into authoritarian rule or benign absolutism. This for Liang was a painful concession. It meant a reversal of his own position, a repudiation of the cause to which he had devoted the past few busy years of his life. He made no attempt to gloss over his pain at finally seeing his political ideal destroyed by a sobering reality. The most famous and tearful farewell he bade to his "self of yesterday" occurred at the end of his essay on Bluntschli, finished shortly after his return to Yokohama. For years I have been drunk on republicanism; for years some determined patriots in the country have also agreed with me and been fascinated by republicanism. But today I read Bluntschli and Bornhak's theories, and I feel like icy water is running down my back. All my foundations are washed away, and I am confused as to where to go. What the two doctors describe as necessary for the citizenry of a republic, our countrymen have but none, and their inherited habits and customs run counter to those requirements. This we cannot afford not to mention as if it were a taboo. If we now insist on republicanism, no matter whether we can establish it or not, are we going to follow the steps of France, or of those South American countries? What history has revealed to us is so harsh and alarming. More than that, can we even avoid all the difficulties on a theoretical level? . . . Republicanism! Republicanism! I love thee, but not as much as I love my fatherland, nor as much as I love liberty. It should be left to destiny to decide whether my fatherland and liberty will eventually regenerate through you and no other way; but it will be due to human meddling that you should bring an end to my fatherland and liberty. Alas! Republicanism! Republicanism! I cannot bear once again to defile thy beautiful name, lest those who discuss political systems in the future should have one more reason to curse you. Some may ask: Are you then in support of constitutional monarchy? Not so, answer I. My thought has regressed incredibly, and I myself have no idea why I have had such a rapid and drastic change. I returned from America to dream of Russia.46

Liang's change of attitude was certainly not as sudden or drastic

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as he made it appear here, for he had called upon even the idea of Enlightenment, as articulated forcefully in Discourse on the New Citizen, to question republican government as an effective form of rule. The elitist approach of his reform-oriented nationalism, too, had always implicitly emphasized a strong and centralized state power. The intellectual "regression" that Liang discovered in himself was particularly painful, however, because he was still convinced that republicanism was a higher form of government. In a world that had already reached the stage of democracy, only a republic would meet the requirements of the new global imaginary of political identity. The Chinese as a nation, now Liang concluded, were not qualified for it. His dream of Russia in 1903, therefore, stood for his willingness to reconsider absolutism, supposedly an outdated form of government, as a viable political system. Once again, a new geographical orientation entailed a different path to modernity. Recognition of an uneven political landscape now served to diffuse, rather than anticipate, the once all-embracing global imaginary. However, the Chinese community in Japan, especially the students, to which a contemplative Liang Qichao returned in October 1903 seemed anything but willing to bid the same farewell to republicanism and its accompanying revolutionary vanguardism. By early 1903, some 760 Chinese students were listed in the official census undertaken by the Japanese Inspectorate of Students. This was a considerable increase from the meager number of 100 in 1899, but it was only the beginning of a flood that brought about 8,600 Chinese students by the end of 1906, in part thanks to the abolition of the civil-service examination system by the Qing court.47"So much nearer and cheaper than the United States or Europe, sharing a common script and not as culturally distant in dress or diet, Japan offered an attractive model after its defeat of the Chinese in 1894 and became even more enticing after its shattering defeat of Russian forces at Liishun in 1904."48 From 1895 to 1905, as Paula Harrell's recent study documents, 15,000 Chinese students went to Japan, the majority of them to Tokyo, then "the Chinese students' mecca of Western learning." There they would find passage to a world of new ideas, as well as a vision for a nationalist China in the modern world.49 Over half the Chinese students in Japan were from wealthy families and paid their own expenses; the rest were either supported by the Qing court or received allowances from their provincial government. Most of them were men in their early and mid-twenties (women

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in 1906 made up less than 1 percent of the student population). These adventurous and impressionable young Chinese landed in a vigorous and rapidly industrializing Japan to experience a sustained culture shock. In reaction, they easily became restless and anxious about the discouraging situation in China. Even a Qing official readily noticed the impact of a modernizing Japan on these Chinese who had grown up carefully sheltered from a metropolitan life: "Not only does their knowledge rapidly expand upon their arrival, but a love for their own country and people also originates therein." On the other side of the same sensitive nationalistic pride, however, these students suffered greatly because they were quick to react to a variety of racist insults and incidents. Some of them simply sailed back home, and others pursued sensual gratification rather than new knowledge.50 For a substantial number, however, the prevalent nationalist ideology readily provided a much-needed political identity and helped to transform their personal anxiety or identity crisis into a longing for resolute and transformative action. From the very beginning, Liang Qichao had consciously directed the New Citizen Journal toward the growing student community and created special columns to accommodate reports on or from the students. Occasionally Liang would comment on student activities and invariably urge "the masters of future China" to assume their heavenordained responsibility and ready themselves for a new country. They were expected, so Liang reminded them, not merely to lay the foundation for future politics in China but also to begin a new era in its social and moral life.51However, although up until 1902 Liang's stirring exhortations had much intellectual appeal, by 1903 an ardent political activism seemed to exercise a much greater effect on these young people, whose nationalist passion was readily channeled into a racially motivated hatred for the impotent but oppressive Qing government.52 As early as 1895, anti-Manchu republicans headed by Sun Yat-sen established their operational base in Japan, to which Sun had fled after a failed attempt to establish a republic in Guangdong. There he found himself labeled, for an illuminating first time, as "the Chinese revolutionary."53 Although up until 1900, several halfhearted negotiations were held between the reformist and revolutionary camps to join in a common cause, for various reasons, such as differences in principle, personality conflicts, and competition for influence, Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen could never strike an accord and become

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political allies.54Soon after, the growing divergence between these two political approaches no longer allowed reconciliation, and the hold of the anti-Manchu revolutionaries on the students' imagination became irreversible. More and more students enthusiastically embraced an anti-Manchu and republican revolution, which Liang himself had once advocated, as a modern and final solution to China's problems. In 1900, the first Chinese student organization in Japan was formed. The Determination Society (Lizhi hui), with much intellectual support from Liang Qichao, set as its goal promoting contact and mutual encouragement among students. It also began issuing a translation journal to introduce Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Spencer.55 By 1903, not only had various student organizations and associations (such as the openly anti-Manchu Youth Association [Qingnian hui] at Waseda University) mushroomed, but dozens of student journals had also started appearing. As students identified with the nationalist cause, their publications acquired an increasingly activist tone. It was at this time that "a more strident attack upon the Manchus began to find expression."56 Liang Qichao's New Citizen Journal had until now been esteemed as a leader in this limited but influential domain of public opinion, but radical journals like The Chinese National New Hunan, Mainland, A Tocsin for the Age, and Han Banner now competed with one another in voicing militant and nationalistic opinions to add to the revolutionary fervor. "As time went on periodicals came to resemble each other more and more in form and substance. They became primarily propaganda sheets designed to stimulate antiManchu feeling and revolutionary activity."57 Chen Tianhua's pamphlet A Tocsin for the Age, composed toward the end of 1904, made him a household name and remains exemplary of the revolutionary anti-Manchu writings at the time. Zou Rong's tract The Revolutionary Army of the same period gave focal expression to the explosive combination of political radicalism and utopianism. "Let us sweep away the absolute monarchy which has lasted for thousands of years. Let us cast off the slave nature which has lasted for thousands of years. Let us slay and exterminate more than five million of those beastlike Manchus. Let us wipe off the disgrace of this tyranny and cruelty which has been going on for 260 years."58 Against the tide of such hysterical revolutionary passion, Liang Qichao waved his thoughtful good-bye to republicanism and decided that, for the precarious present, China was to have an authoritarian

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government instead of a revolution, which in his view would end in a dictatorship. Thus with full awareness Liang plunged into a confrontation that would make him unpopular among student activists. The initial public skirmish took place early in 1904 in response to a reproachful essay by a certain Feisheng in the student periodical Tides of the Zhe River. The Enlightenment project of "making new the people" was impractical, according to Feisheng, because it took too long to reap the harvest. It would be difficult if not futile to try to change the cultural traditions of a people, whereas the administrative system was much less entrenched and more liable to rapid modifications. "To enlighten an uncivilized and enfeebled nation," proposed Feisheng, "one should resort to methods simple and direct so as to goad it forward."59 In reply, Liang found a chance to explicate the liberal politics already advanced in The Future of New China, "peaceful liberty and orderly equity." Translating this principle- into practical terms meant abating the youthful radicalism and millenarianism expressed by Feisheng. Liang focused on a trend he saw as "increasingly popular in the press of late" and argued against the "shock treatment" mentality. "It is easy to cause a shock, but the conditions for such a shock have to be complex. Feisheng understands that one cannot change society by merely writing an essay, but is it any more likely that one piece of writing will suffice to install a new government?"60 The underlying issue remained the same as that discussed by Huang Keqiang and Li Qubing repeatedly in the novel: gradual reformist social engineering versus radical and vanguardist revolution. But what had gained more attention and better expression was the problem or necessity of cultural transformation. Indeed, Liang's journey to North America, in ways different from his escape to Japan in 1898, had made him see both another cultural tradition and the peculiarity, no matter how unpleasant it might be, of his own people. He finally realized the enormous difficulty of effecting a comprehensive cultural transformation. The very notion of culture, or what he called "customs" (fengsu), now helped to better highlight the complexity and multiplicity of the task in which he had been engaged since starting the New Citizen JournalIt also endowed this engagement with a new clarity and significance and would eventually motivate Liang's ambitious project in the second half of his life of modernizing the study of traditional culture. Convinced of the need for a strategy of cultural reorientation

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(however vaguely formulated at the time), Liang Qichao could only find simplistic and ineffectual a revolutionary politics centered on the form of the government and political structure. The populist "boosterism," he warned Feisheng, rampant among Chinese students in Tokyo could only be maintained through ever more extremist rhetoric. It could bear little fruit other than obscuring the complexity of the task at hand. "To change our country in the present situation, we have to devote ourselves to cultivating popular intelligence, morality, and strength. If we do not do so, not only will it be impossible to construct the new, but even destruction will also be unattainable. If we indulge in boosterism, very likely we will bring about many devilish obstacles to the cause of public education."61 Upon the heels of this exchange a reader's letter addressed to Liang sharply questioned his about-face at the end of his American trip. It outlined the two political camps now opposing each other: the anti-Manchuist revolutionary group and the reformist party supporting an open-minded emperor. Despite their different methods, both parties claim to have the same ultimate goal, but "now among students of new knowledge, the call for revolution has given birth to an anti-Manchuism that is gathering an unstoppable momentum." The advantage of anti-Manchuism as a political slogan is twofold, according to the letter writer: "It can motivate the upper levels of society with the nationalist cause, and the lower levels with a vengeful spirit."62 Liang did not make a full-fledged response, but the manipulative nature of anti-Manchuism, the undisguised displacement of a political issue by means of ethnic tension and racial rhetoric, was sufficiently brought to his attention. In August 1905, the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui) was established in Tokyo to consummate the raging revolutionary radicalism and nationalism among the Chinese students. Under the charismatic leadership of Sun Yat-sen, this new organization united several nationalist groups and marked "an important turning point in the revolutionary movement against the Manchu government."63 At the beginning its political objectives were mostly an elaboration of the membership oath of Sun's Revive China Society (Xing Zhong hui): (1) drive out the Manchus, (2) restore China, (3) establish a republic, and later (4) equalize landownership. When Min bao (its English title is given as People Report in the third issue) made its first appearance as the official organ of the Revolutionary Alliance only months later, Sun Yat-seri had reformulated its program into his famous Three

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People's Principles, which can be roughly understood as the Chinese equivalents of nationalism, republicanism, and socialism. His ideal, as he made explicit in a brief essay commemorating the first appearance of the journal, was to carry out a political and an ethno-nationalist revolution simultaneously and rid China of her present and future problems once and for all "in a single battle."64 What distinguished this new alliance from earlier radical groups was its systematic and comprehensive program. "It was a clearly articulated program in which ousting the Manchus became not the end but the beginning of a process of change."65 From November 1905 on, the monthly Min bao devoted itself exclusively to the task of advocating and explicating Sun's Three People's Principles, mostly by immediately engaging the reformist party in a tenacious debate. Min bao attracted more than twenty contributors during the two years of its existence, and its chief writers were Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin, Zhu Zhixin, and later the widely respected scholar Zhang Binglin. Up to June 1908, even though the New Citizen Journal had ceased publication in August 1907, about 40 major articles and essays appeared in Min bao, most of them aimed at refuting arch-rival Liang Qichao, who, not at all overwhelmed, wrote some one million combative words and remained unyielding to the end. Although the debate was focused mainly on the Three People's Principles and their immediate political consequences, it often touched on various theoretical problems such as the modern state, nationalism, imperialism, democracy, and economics. It was a series of sustained, though not necessarily rigorous, exchanges between "probably the best talents the nation could offer at the time, [who] were sincerely arguing about the future of the nation."GG In general, the writings of both sides were extensive, spirited, and uncompromising. The arguments often relied heavily on references to Western thinkers, scholarly works, and ill-digested political theories. Numerous and often opposing conclusions were drawn from major worldhistorical events, primarily the Russian Revolution of 1905 and, not surprisingly, the French Revolution.67 Whereas the overriding concerns of Min bao, as is true of political radicalism in general, were fundamental questions of political legitimacy rather than the procedural aspects of governing and executing power, Liang Qichao's New Citizen Journal persistently raised thorny issues of legality and viability. The bristling charges and countercharges resembled only too

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much the heated discussion between Huang Keqiang and Li Qubing, and would go down in history as the first public and probably the most substantial and thorough, if not very productive, intellectual controversy in modern China. Neither of the parties involved was successful in convincing the other, and even though in historical hindsight the radical Min bao gained much ground through this confrontation, the lack of a resolution determined that the debate would foreshadow the subsequent political culture and return in various forms throughout modern Chinese thought.* We may grasp the ideological conflict between the republican Min bao and constitutionalist New Citizen Journal as two competing visions of modernity by taking a look at the pictures each chose to print. The first issue of the revolutionary Min bao carried pictures of "four great men": the Yellow Emperor, legendary founder of the primal Chinese empire, who was proclaimed "the First Great Nationalist of the World"; Rousseau, "the First Great Democrat in the World"; Washington, "founder of the First Great Republic in the World"; and finally the Chinese philosopher Mo Zi (Mo Tzu), "the First Great Pacifist in the World." These people were made to represent the principles that Min bao would devote many pages to explicating. The first three pictures that appeared in the New Citizen Journalin February 1902, however, were of a quite different nature. First, there was a depressingly detailed map of the spheres of influence of the foreign powers in China. Then a portrait of Napoleon was followed by one of Bismarck, two strongmen Liang always admired. Although Washington and Gladstone would also show up in Liang's journal as prominent statesmen, and Rousseau as a great philosopher was teamed up with Kant in the fifth issue, the Yellow Emperor and Mo Zi never found their way into the New Citizen Journal In general the New Citizen Journal presented itself as an educational periodical, and for that purpose it printed a large variety of pictures for its readers, including illustrations of scenic landscapes, Western philosophers (almost all of whom Liang managed to write about), national heroes (the three Italian heroes, Irish nationalists, and *Since numerous studies have been made of this debate and its relation to and impact on the 1911 Revolution, my discussion here will not introduce its entire course but will focus on more relevant issues. For more informative accounts of the debate, see Lee, pp. 72-99; Gasster, Chinese Intellectuals, pp. 65-154, Scalapino and Yu, pp. 12445, 192-211; Qi, pp. 145-234; Chang P'eng-yiian, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, pp. 20752; Chu, pp. 47-318; and Chen Mengjian.

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Japanese generals, for instance), and historical Chinese personalities. It carried two paintings of the French Revolution and once grouped Jeanne d'Arc, Madame Roland, and Charlotte Corday as three outstanding French women. Min bao, by contrast, printed basically two groups of pictures to reinforce its central messages: those of the French Revolution and those of Russian nihilists and assassins such as Sophia Perovskaia. Its second issue began by revealing to the reader a "real scene" from the First Great French Revolution, that of Parisians taking over an arsenal; it later published at least six other paintings or portraits related to the French Revolution, one of them depicting the tumultuous storming of the Bastille and another the beheading of Louis XVI. Indeed, a mere glance at the pictures inserted at the front of these two journals reveals the difference between a propagandist publication determined to herald a revolutionary movement and a pedagogical journal trying to inform the reader as much as possible of the modern world. Min bao's reprinting of images of the French Revolution vividly reflected a dawning awareness of the force of collective political action. These representations of a revolutionary spectacle both revealed the self-conception of a nascent revolutionary movement and confirmed its modernity. As a mirror-image, they powerfully suggested a concrete form of action to the Chinese cause and, when reified, would even be substituted for the content of revolutionary action. By consciously amplifying the democratic spirit of the French Revolution, Min bao writers were able to advocate modernity as a predominantly political enterprise required by the global imaginary of identity. Even Lenin, from afar and several years later, would notice the Jacobin tradition among the Chinese republicans. "In Asia," he would write to commend Sun Yat-sen in the summer of 1912, "there is still a bourgeoisie capable of championing sincere, militant, consistent democracy, a worthy comrade of France's great men of the Enlightenment and great leaders of the close of the eighteenth century." "It means that the East has definitely taken the Western path, that new hundreds of millions of people will from now on share in the struggle for the ideals which the West has already worked out for itself."08* Incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, around 1904-5, Lenin himself was engaged in a highly similar debate (similar issues, similar argument, and even similar format) with the Mensheviks about revolution in Russia. "A Revolution of the 1789 or the

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To further underscore the increasing hostilities between the two camps, the Min bao published "A General Outline of the Debate Between Min bao and the New Citizen Journal" in a supplementary issue in April 1906. It briefly summarized twelve points of disagreement between the revolutionaries and the constitutional monarchists; the Min bao writers promised to take up these arguments one by one. The promise was never kept, but the outline itself was fairly comprehensive about the major points at issue. Min bao 1. Republicanism 2. Constitutionalism by means of democracy 3. Revolution because of evil government 4. Revolution and education as means 5. Political as well as racial revolution 6. Political revolution to overthrow the monarch and racial revolution to drive out the Manchus

New Citizen Journal Absolutism "Enlightened Absolutism" from the government Absolutist government because of bad people No idea what to do Enlightened absolutism and political reform Political revolution and racial revolution are incompatible

1848 Type?" was the title of one of the many essays and articles that he published in his journal Vperyod, which had as its opponent Iskra, edited by Plekhanov and Martynov. In this essay, Lenin argued against Plekhanov's gradualist social vision and thus framed some key questions about an impending Russian revolution: "1. Will it go on to the complete overthrow of the tsarist government and the establishment of a republic! 2. Or will it limit itself to a curtailment of tsarist power, to a monarchist constitution?" (Lenin, 8: 257). Of course, the most important and systematic work by Lenin on this subject was his 1905 pamphlet "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution" (9: 17-140). To complete the picture, let us quote Plekhanov, who as early as 1883 wrote in his provocative Socialism and the Political Struggle: "To tie together two such essentially different matters as the overthrow of absolutism and a socialist revolution, to engage in revolutionary struggle in the hope that these two moments in social evolution will coincide in the history of our country, means to retard the arrival of both. But it does depend on us to shorten the interval between these two moments" (quoted in Schwarz, p. 2). It would be extremely revealing to make a comparative study of these two historic debates in pre-revolutionary China and Russia, especially in light of events toward the end of the twentieth century.

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7. Political revolution demands force 8. Force is the basis of a revolutionary cause

Political revolution needs petition Coercion comes only after petition fails

9. Other than refusal to pay taxes and assassination, revolution has its own measures 10. Nihilists are revolutionary, not mere assassins 11. Revolution for a republic 12. Socialism to solve social problems of the future

Coercion takes the form of refusing to pay taxes and of assassination Revolution is undesirable, but nihilism may be necessary Revolution begets dictatorship Socialism is only a means to agitate beggars and the homeless.69

Sweeping generalization and distorting simplification aside, this outline captured the gist of the debate and gave direction to the ensuing exchange. The pivotal issue remained the same as that of the discussion between Huang Keqiang and Li Qubing: French-style republican revolution or German-style liberal reform under the aegis of the state. For the Min bao group, like the millenarian Li Qubing, the enterprise of revolution had to be total—a political revolution to abolish monarchical despotism, a racial revolution to clear out the Manchus and other foreign intruders, and a social revolution to prevent social inequity in the future. The nobility of the cause far outweighed all the conceivable bloodshed and destruction, especially since the Manchus had mistreated the Han Chinese badly enough and for too long. This modern enterprise would definitely win the support or at least the neutrality of all powerful civilized countries. Without a revolution, the Han Chinese would forever remain the miserable slaves of the barbaric Manchus, and the nation would never enjoy democratic rights under a popular constitutional government. The current government, because it was run by an uncivilized alien race, would never allow nationalism or constitutionalism and deserved only to be overthrown. Driving out the Manchus was in fact an overriding priority: "A racial revolution

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and a political revolution are not only perfectly compatible but also interdependent."70 In historical hindsight, the presence of the Manchus was almost an "unseen blessing" to the revolutionaries because it obscured the complexity of the situation. By appealing to nationalist resentment against the Manchus, the revolutionaries conveniently "avoided the possible embarrassment of answering questions about the inadequacies of the traditional order; at the same time they neglected the grim but necessary task of deciding exactly what was wrong with the traditional order and not only with those who had lately presided over it."71 The revolutionaries certainly shunned the task of carefully examining the consequences of a racial revolution, but they were not unaware of the rhetorical advantage given them by the easy target of the Manchus. On the contrary, as Liang Qichao and other contemporaries were soon to realize, anti-Manchuism was one of many forms of political manipulation and served as a powerful ideology for mobilizing the masses. By refusing to give in to populist emotionalism, Liang Qichao soon found himself losing popularity among the student community. Yet this isolation did not prevent him from writing earnest and urgent argumentative essays. During this period, "revolution" preoccupied him as a thematic concern. In June 1904, well before the launching of the debate, he published an essay to share his thoughts after a systematic study of traditional popular revolts in China. His purpose in examining "revolutions in history," he stated, was to counterbalance the increasingly popular ardor for violent revolution, even though he realized that the nineteenth century had been a century of constant revolutions throughout the world. In comparison with their Western counterparts, traditional Chinese revolutions, observed Liang, had the following features: they were led by individuals rather than by collective groups; their motivation was self-interest rather than self-defense; the participants were either from the upper or from the lower classes rather than the middle class. In contrast to Western revolutions, with the sole exception of the French Revolution, unrest in China usually spread to large areas of the country and lasted long after the collapse of the old regime, and the revolutionaries ended up slaughtering each other, "casting a perennial shame over the history of revolutions in China." Finally, every revolution resulted in the intervention of alien

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races that in one way or another interrupted the development of Chinese society. This historical reevaluation gave Liang all the more reason to worry about an imminent revolution in China: the selfstyled revolutionary leaders as well as their reckless rhetoric, not to mention their failure to address the more troubling question about the efficacy of a full-scale revolution, disappointed him. By the end of the essay a deep uncertainty about the future of China seized Liang and led him to express concern over the risks to China's cultural tradition and the irreparable ruin certain to befall communal morals as a social cohesive.72 In the following months Liang began to pay attention to retrieving the Chinese tradition. Together with his study of historical revolutions, he also published a pioneering case study of the historical population of China. Then came two separate studies of the ancient philosopher Mo Zi and a book on a carefully reconstructed Chinese tradition of bushido, written in the hope of inspiring discipline and bravery among the Chinese. In 1905, he compiled a joint biography of eight great colonialists in Chinese history and then another on the adventurous Ming navigator Zheng He as a national hero. Right before the outbreak of the confrontation with Min bao and amid all his political activities and editorial obligations, Liang also finished transcribing an intellectual history of the Ming period by the Qing scholar Huang Zongxi. All this foreshadowed the next stage of Liang's development as a historian in which he would systematically examine and rewrite Chinese cultural history and contribute to the necessary enterprise of reinventing a native "tradition." If historicity as expressed in "New Historiography" took the form of a radical negation of tradition and a universal utopianism, the same intensified historical consciousness now focused not so much on the inadequacy of traditional historical discourse as on the persistence and paradigmatic relevance of tradition itself. Revolutionary anti-traditionalism had helped transform the past into a valid object of critical inquiry, but the prospect of revolution now mandated a serious reconfrontation of tradition. This intellectual interest in the indigenous heritage served an immediate political purpose in the days before the debate. The historical specificity of the Chinese situation would become the core element in Liang's conservative argument against the total revolution envisioned by the Min bao radicals. Whereas his anti-revolu-

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tionary writings emphasized the particularity of the Chinese tradition, the Min barfs revolutionary program had far more universalistic aspirations, even though its cardinal principle was an ethnonationalist revolution. In opposition to deploying anti-Manchuism to engineer a populist revolution, Liang Qichao now decidedly embraced the rhetoric of continuity and rejected simplistic notions of a radical break or change. Throughout the debate, he constantly brought up the specter of history and forced the revolutionaries to face it squarely. The entire debate, therefore, can be viewed as a conflict between two different attitudes toward history: a Utopian longing, on the modern revolutionary's part, to actively transform and even defy history in a giant leap forward into the future; and a maturing historian's realistic recognition that the unfolding of history is a far more intricate, even complicitous, process than a series of climactic events or resolutions might lead one to believe/3 Liang's first major essay in his anti-revolutionary argument was the systematic and closely reasoned "On Enlightened Absolutism," whose first installment appeared in the New Citizen Journal in February 1906. Its central thesis, for all its scholarly references, strict syllogisms, and historical observations, was a disarmingly simple one: at present China is ready for only enlightened absolutism as a step toward constitutionalism. Absolutism, a notion derived from Bluntschli and other German theorists of the Staatsrecht school, is essentially the principle of "rule by law" and has to be retained, according to Liang, even in the most democratic constitutional government. The opposite of "absolutism" is not democracy or republicanism, but rather an anarchistic absence of social institutions and differentiation, an absence, however, that is bound always to remain a mythical unreality. Every stage of social development exhibits law and order, in one form or another. Enlightened absolutism is a situation in which, within the framework of a monarchy, the political establishment and institutions serve the interests of an absolutist state rather than the monarch himself. Examples of such efficient absolutism as a transitional mechanism abound in both Chinese history and the Western tradition. Guan Zi from the preQin age, Zhuge Liang of the Three Kingdoms period, Caesar in ancient Rome, Peter the Great in Russia, and Friedrich I of Prussia, for instance, all practiced "enlightened absolutism" to build up their respective states. To further substantiate his thesis, Liang retraced the develop-

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ment of political theory in both the Chinese and the Western traditions, quoting Mencius and Mo Zi as endorsing "enlightened absolutism" and the Legalist school as the Chinese version of modern Staatsrecht on the one hand, and referring to Aristotle, Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and Hobbes for theoretical support on the other hand. The backbone of his argument, however, is the teachings of the liberal German jurist Bornhak, whose motto "Revolution leads to dictatorship instead of the Republic" was a theme of Liang's exposition. Constitutional monarchy would be infeasible in China, Liang summed up at the end, for two reasons: people were not ready, and political institutions were not complete. He could not help ridiculing the political impatience of the Min bao group. Its focal expression was Sun Yat-sen's insistence that China leap forward to a republic in the same way that it should import and adapt the most advanced trains and automobiles rather than their crude old models. If one ignores the concrete historical circumstances, Liang retorted, how can one talk about what is good and suitable and what is not?74 Liang's endorsement of the conservative-liberal German tradition of Staatsrecht, as we have seen, followed a most reluctant departure from the Rousseauean notion of social contract that had fascinated him until he came across Bluntschli. In bidding farewell to republicanism, he also left behind Rousseau, who, not surprisingly, was soon to be crowned as the "First Great Democrat in the World" by Min bao and was regularly quoted by revolutionary writers. Wang Jingwei even assembled and printed a Chinese version of The Social Contract75 The writings of the eloquent French philosopher were frequently used to justify revolution and counterattack the German liberal thinkers. Liang himself seldom mentioned Rousseau after his change of attitude, and when he did, it was only to question such idealist notions as "general will."76 What both sides of the dispute did not know or pretended not to know about Rousseau (an example of willful blindness that may be inevitable with any discursive reconfiguration that prioritizes immediate efficacy over accuracy) was his cautions against or even opposition to a popular revolution. Proclaiming that he had "a greater aversion for revolutions and conspirators of every kind" than anybody else, Rousseau did not hesitate to voice his worries about political upheavals that would disrupt the rule of law and institutions. In his famous letter to Mirabeau in 1767, he was even

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ready to defend the "most arbitrary despotism" against any wouldbe substitute that offered less than the most complete subordination of men to the law.77 It is striking to see how closely Rousseau's concerns about social revolution and its undesirable consequences resemble Liang Qichao's, as in the following passage from The Social Contract about the uses and disadvantages of revolution. It is true that, just as some illnesses unhinge a man's mind and take away his memory of the past, there are sometimes violent periods in the history of a state when revolutions do to the people what certain afflictions do to individuals, when horror of the past corresponds to loss of memory, and when the state, consumed by civil warfare, is reborn from its ashes, so to speak, and regains the vigor of youth in freeing itself from the embrace of death. But such events are rare; they are exceptions whose explanation is always found in the special constitution of the state involved. They cannot even happen twice to the same people, for a people can make itself free as long as it is still uncivilized, but not when its civil energies have been exhausted. It can then be destroyed by upheavals, but cannot be restored by revolutions; as soon as its chains have been broken, it disintegrates and ceases to exist. From that point onward, it needs a master, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this maxim: Freedom can be acquired, but never regained.78

The imagery of "civil energies" being exhausted by revolution and of a society thrown into disintegration was distinctly present in the lessons Kang Youwei had drawn from his readings about the French Revolution; it now finally found its way into Liang's antirevolutionary writings. Instead of quoting Rousseau, however, Liang turned to Bornhak and Bluntschli, determined to evoke a different intellectual tradition to mark this sea change. Toward the end of the essay "On Enlightened Absolutism," Liang emphasized the incompatibility of a two-front revolution and printed in boldface type his "valid and incontestable" conclusion: "Those who want to have a racial revolution ought to uphold absolutism rather than republicanism; those who wish to pursue a political revolution should insist on petition instead of insurrection."79 In the writings that followed, Liang Qichao insisted on engaging the discussion at the level of political realism rather than agitational rhetoric and posed a series of procedural and logistic questions. He refuted the argument of the anti-Manchu revolutionaries that China had been annexed when the Manchus stormed down from the northeast to displace the Ming dynasty. He critically demolished the

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view that a "single tax" like that proposed by Henry George would meet, as Sun Yat-sen proclaimed, the financial needs of the future republican government. Pointing out that a revolution would necessarily cause internal disorder, he cited the French Revolution as an example of a national revolution inviting foreign intervention and even possible partition. Finally, he relentlessly opposed Min bao's egalitarian land policy, calling it a Utopian socialist ideology designed to manipulate the masses. But he also acknowledged socialism was a noble ideal and observed that a "rational socialism," the opposite of an "emotional socialism," could and should be achieved through nonviolence.80 The wide-ranging Liang persistently challenged the revolutionaries and deplored the tendency among the writers for the Min bao to resort to sensational emotionalism in arguing about the future of the country. Liang always raised stubborn and realistic objections to the optimistic hopes of the young writers, who chose to believe that the public would be only too happy to do away with despotism and class hierarchy in order to enjoy liberty and equality, "at a speed faster than issuing an order by mail." "The essence of a republic is autonomy, order, and public morality. . . . Although the love of liberty and equality can be kindled through agitation, it takes years and hard work to cultivate a sense of order and public interest."81 In short, building a republic is an arduous and painstaking task and cannot be accomplished overnight by a group of intellectuals who regard themselves as the "foreknowing and vanguardist" members of society.82 It is necessarily a complex and prolonged process of social and cultural development, through which the public not only prepares itself for political participation but also acquires a sense of civic duty and right. If it is true that the Min bao writers embodied and expressed revolutionary energy that is fundamentally modern in the sense of its ready and unsuspicious equation of liberation with freedom, it is equally significant that Liang Qichao now came to view "revolution" as a peculiarly modern phenomenon because of its reliance on the existence of a mass society or, rather, on a democratic political culture. Increasingly alarmed by what he saw as demagoguery practiced in bad faith by the revolutionary writers, he posed a question about the authenticity of a mass movement such as a revolution. Just as Rousseau had had forebodings about revolution when dismayed by his contemporaries, Liang was extremely con-

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temptuous of a few ambitious "revolutionary heroes" who took resemble Liang Qichao's, as in the following passage from The Social Any mass action, he predicted, would only give them a chance to abuse their power and tyrannically impose their will on others. To counterbalance the populist agitation fostered by revolutionary hysteria, Liang first found it necessary to introduce a new writing style. At the beginning of "On Enlightened Absolutism," he told his readers that the entire essay was composed in "strict and forthright logical argumentation (dual application of induction and deduction), without daring a word out of subjective fancy." As a result, the essay, in addition to considerable expansion and refinement in the form of inserted notes, has a clear progressive structure and closely follows the reasoning format of a syllogism. In refuting a point made by Min bao, Liang would invariably apply his principles of demonstration and try to expose either a false presupposition or a faulty conclusion. More than an argumentative style, what Liang introduced was a new political rationality that sought to address a much mediated and differentiated society rather than a homogeneous, face-to-face community. It signaled an attitude toward the written language different from that assumed by the Min bao writers, for whom the performativity of a given text still consisted in its immediate emotional appeal. The greatest danger, Liang concluded, lay in the fact that emotionalism made accountable and rigorous thinking impossible, for "the intoxicating fountain of revolution" had inundated people's capacity to reason. He had no difficulty sympathizing with an opinion, prevalent among the predominantly conservative-liberal Japanese philosophical circles at the time, that held Rousseau culpable for initiating rampant emotionalism in the general social discourse of eighteenth-century France. The results were the discrediting of disinterested and objective investigation and the bloodbath at the end of the century. "There can be found no spirit of scientific investigation but only emotional spontaneity among the educated in our country," Liang lamented on another occasion. "In this respect it certainly resembles the France of Rousseau. The anti-Manchu sentiment has the greatest spell over those young and spirited people, and can overnight stir up an uproar in society. . . . But it should be borne in mind that to feed society with emotionalism is rather a misfortune than a fortune for it, a bad example of which is France."84 A master of literary style, Liang had full insight into the

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political and ideological implications of writing. In sharp contrast to his own passionate writings in the early days of the New Citizen resemble Liang Qichao's, as in the following passage from The Social treatises and scientific discourses. Liang Qichao had indeed moved far away from his "self of yesterday" that had once celebrated Rousseau and his democratic social vision. In questioning Rousseau's theory of "general will," Liang launched a devastating critique of revolution as a form of social change. His newly developed argumentative style, together with his despair at the agitating emotionalism among contemporary Chinese intellectuals, was only one specific expression of a much deeper anxiety over revolution as such. His concerted effort to curb a romantic revolutionary imagination through new discursive practices was often directly combined with an uncompromising anatomy of revolution in modern society. A critical analysis of the revolutionary process convinced him that revolution is never a historical real but always already a fiction, an imaginary happening that relies on almost immediate reconstruction. After passing through different phases in his understanding of revolution, from initial enthusiasm to close examination to critical reconsideration, Liang at last came to view it as an overwhelming process involving a multitude of uncontrollable factors and contingencies. A study of the pattern of traditional revolts in China showed all the difficulties a successful revolution had to overcome, and his interpretation of the French Revolution, especially the deadly end to the just and upright Girondins, helped to dissipate any lingering confidence in the outcome of a violent, massive social revolution. In addition to "On Enlightened Absolutism," Liang wrote another lengthy essay to confront the issue of revolution. He argued that China was unready for a republic and challenged the necessity of revolution by questioning the possibility of free will and the authenticity of a mass movement. In a republic, majority politics should theoretically be the norm, since the general will can only be formed through political representation, but can majority rule actually be achieved through an exercise of individual free will, as is professed? Without guaranteeing free will, a "majority" is but a false concept. However, a "free-willed majority," Liang concluded from examining history, is in fact always an illusion. During the great French Revolution, both the radical group of Marat, Danton, and Robespierre and

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the moderate Girondists seemed to enjoy popular support at one point or another. Their own respective executions, however, had the apparent approval of the Parisians. "Was it really a result of free will? But why was the transition so swift? The only reason had to be that, visibly or invisibly, free will was lost." The obvious form of a lack of freedom is the situation in which the individual is obliged to comply with an overwhelming force, whereas the more insidious form, more subtle and less resistible, takes place when confusing external stimuli affect one's emotions. As a result, one may become excited and dive into the mainstream only to give up self-control and precious freedom of will.85 Amid a thoroughgoing revolution when an entire society is thrown into enormous agitation and volatility, how can one hope to achieve a lasting consensus of the majority and legitimize a new constitution? Here Liang raised the classic question of the function of a hegemonic ideology in modern times. It is here that the liberal values of individuality and freedom resurfaced to add force to his argument. In this sense, the debate was the first major confrontation between modern liberalism and radicalism, a forerunner of the "problem versus doctrine" controversy of the late 1910's. To illustrate his point, Liang purposely took the provocative example of the 1905 Chinese student protests in Tokyo. The rhetoric of collective action, as used by various student organizations throughout the campaign against regulations imposed by the Japanese government on Chinese students,86 more often than not worked to displace or even violate the free will of each individual. "When someone wished to speak against a decision, the crowd would rise to boo at him; when some other individual wanted to vote against it, the group would threaten and coerce him." But even worse was that most students, indulging in emotional agitation and brushing aside rational judgment, were satisfied to forgo individual responsibility and blindly follow one or two leaders. The same devastating situation, Liang warned, would repeat itself with any new government that reached power through violence and emotional manipulation of the masses, only with the regrettable difference that the new regime could cause more bloodshed and destruction.87 When Wang Jingwei insisted that a revolution had to awaken the people to their duty, Liang contradicted him bluntly: "The only thing that gets stirred up is emotion. The notion of duty can never be called into being through some simple agitating and arguing."88 The hope that a military government could take

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control once the dynastic regime was overthrown by a popular revolution was, in Liang's words, "no more than a bookworm's idea and an empty vision." The most useful thing in the world has to be emotion; the most dreadful thing also has to be emotion. Once passion is set in motion, it will be like a madman suddenly gaining supernatural force. No ordinary person can predict its movement; no one will have control over its burning power. Cannot one see what happened during the French Revolution? Who among its first initiators would have planned beforehand that the guillotine would take 200,000 lives in less than a month?89

Liang finally not only touched on the crowd psychology easily generated by collective action but also engaged in a lasting philosophical debate on individual authenticity and emancipatory action. He accused the Min bao revolutionaries of bad faith because they were not really contemplating doing away with order or social institutions but only hoping to make use of revolution as a convenient means to install a new regime, preferably of Han Chinese. They were only too happy to turn a blind eye to all the consequences of revolution and to remain oblivious to a stark historical reality. The real argument, therefore, was not whether to have a revolution, for Liang also insisted on a feasible and extensive "political revolution," but what a revolution should do to history itself. In the end, Liang's concern was how to end and institutionalize the achievements of a revolution once it had served its purpose. The Min bao group, in the meanwhile, was too enrapt in the vision of a total revolution to imagine a mundane, postrevolutionary existence or social order. Not only was agitational rhetoric disguised as revolutionary ideology Liang Qichao's declared enemy, but it was a battle in which emotional excitement easily overpowered syllogistic argument and close reasoning. Early in 1906 Liang sensed that crowd psychology was to play an important role in the upcoming debate and set about writing an essay on emotion.90 But that essay never materialized, and by November he could see that he was losing the battle. He wrote to Kang Youwei to report on the situation: "The revolutionary party is now an overwhelming force in Tokyo, followed by the greater half of the 10,000 students here. . . . With people from every province gathered here, they work among them and extend their cause easily to the inland. It is indeed a fatal threat that can never be overlooked."91 To his mind the revolutionaries posed an equally hostile and destructive

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force as the intransigent Qing government, if not a more ominous one. Together the republicans and the reactionaries formed a twopronged attack on his own reformist constitutional politics. It is a generally accepted conclusion, both now and at the time, that although the debate came to an abrupt end, the exchange served to augment the influence and popularity of Min bao and the Revolutionary Alliance. "Liang's role as a nay-sayer placed him at a competitive disadvantage against the optimistic enthusiasm of his opponents, whose belief that the best outcome was not only probable but inevitable gave to their preaching a persuasive self-assurance."9' One after another, young people across the country put down the New Citizen Journal and turned to the more exciting pages of Min bao, whose circulation shot up to 12,000 by 1907, a considerable lead over all other periodicals and journals.93 Chiang Monlin, one of the many young men who witnessed and were affected by this debate, later recalled those dizzying days in Japan and made this judgment: [Liang's] style was clear, persuasive, and easy to follow and therefore very profitable reading for students. I think this great scholar did more than anyone else in his time to popularize modern knowledge among the rising generation. His was the fountain of wisdom from which every young man drew to quench his thirst for the new learning.... While we got our mental food from Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, we drew our emotional nourishment from Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his sympathizers. Generally speaking, it is emotion that leads to action when a decisive hour comes; when that hour came in China Dr. Sun, both dreamer and man of action, won a decisive victory over the new literati who stood for constitutionalism.94

In historical hindsight, whether Sun Yat-sen the "dreamer and man of action" really won "a decisive victory" is open to speculation. The undeniable fact is that the liberal-reformist program envisioned by Liang Qichao and company was not the course history took in the years following the debate. Liang did not succeed in preventing a hasty revolution and failed to implement a constitutional government, by means of petition and parliamentary politics, in the wake of the demise of the Qing dynasty. His could indeed be regarded as "one early story of the futility of the efforts of individual liberal reformers in twentieth-century China."95 Yang Du, a close friend and associate of Liang's and a very shrewd man whose political talents were never given a chance in his lifetime, offered an explanation of Liang's failure. "Not everyone can

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fully grasp all the complexities of those legal and political theories," he wrote to advise Liang in April 1907; "therefore the intricate mechanism must be made simple so that all can comprehend. The slogan of 'Anti-Manchuism and Revolution,1 because it corresponds to the level of public understanding, has almost become an irrational religion. If we want to defeat it, we should leave out all the accessories and hold on to one principle. This would not only make it easy for the simpleminded to follow the trend, but also free the fineminded from distracting hesitation and enable them to concentrate on one cause."96 This almost cynical analysis of the success of Min bao sheds light on a much larger issue that Liang confronted with exasperation, namely, the complex phenomenon of mass movements in the form of revolution in modernity. A successful revolution, in Yang Du's view, has to mobilize the masses through attractively packaged ideological doctrines. It is bound to secure collective action at the expense of intellectual reflection and integrity. Revolution is a cause that quickly acquires its own force and energy to perpetuate itself and become the justifying end rather than a means. The failure of Liang's moderate liberalism is not a particular case; on the contrary, as the revolutionary twentieth century dawns, it is a historical phenomenon of much greater significance. In October 1911, under the nominal leadership of the Revolutionary Alliance, a hasty military uprising in Wuchang ended dynastic rule. Soon the Republic of China was declared amid widespread political uncertainty and violence. Yet even the most ideologically determined apologist for the Min bao writers would have to admit that the catastrophic consequences of revolution predicted by Liang Qichao, such as warlordism, national disintegration, and further foreign encroachment, by and large came true in the early Republican era.97 The one great "single battle" that was to settle everything dragged on, and fourteen years after the revolution a frustrated and exhausted Sun Yat-sen would on his deathbed utter his final verdict on his grand vision: the revolution is not accomplished. In the meantime, the 1911 Revolution would receive its most devastating and penetrating satire in "The True Story of Ah Q," Lu Xun's 1922 novella. In this key work of modern Chinese literature, the 1911 Revolution, as the background of the narrative, is critically represented as no more than a conventional rob-and-run revolt. The story, incidentally, contains a notorious "Phony Foreign Devil," a student from a wealthy family in a village who goes to Japan to study and returns to gravely declare

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himself a revolutionary, presumably to the tolerant amazement of his rich father. Obviously a full-scale evaluation of the 1911 Revolution goes beyond the scope of the present study, but it is important to point out that the historiographical traditions in both mainland China and, after 1949, on Taiwan under Nationalist rule have to claim and vindicate the revolution for reasons of self-legitimation. Whereas the Chinese Communist Party easily identifies its ideological origins in the theories of Min bao as well as in the practices of the Revolutionary Alliance, the Nationalist Guomindang is nominally a direct descendant of that Alliance and revolution. Both traditions of representing the revolution, as Frangois Furet observes about historiographies of the French Revolution in the past 200 years, "are all histories in quest of identity." But whereas Furet has openly expressed the wish that the French Revolution be regarded as over and open to real scholarly investigation,98 the historiography of the 1911 Revolution (perhaps as well as of the French Revolution) in these two regimes continues to have an impact and is far from being a settled matter. Historians studying the 1911 Revolution still have to show their colors, still must face the task of interpreting an event whose meaning and ramifications are acutely felt and remain paradigmatic in subsequent political and cultural life. Not until the last decade of the twentieth century have there been open but scattered efforts at rethinking the revolutionary heritage, together with a critique of the radicalist tradition." But the task of meaningfully "rethinking the Chinese Revolution," as Philip Huang suggests to students of the Communist movement, cannot be accomplished without systematic methodological as well as conceptual reorientations and innovations.100 Soon after the failed Revolution of 1911, Chen Duxiu, a young student in Japan in the first years of the century and a founder of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, would declare war on the Confucian tradition and pray for a new round of intellectual and cultural revolution. In calling for a "literary revolution" in the journal New Youth in 1917, Chen sang another modernist hymn of revolution that sounded only too much like an echo of Liang Qichao's youthful enthusiasm, and definitely of the romanticizing imagination of the Min bao writers: Whence comes today's graceful and glorious Europe? The answer: a gift of revolution. What they call revolution in the European languages means to discard the old and change to the new, absolutely different in kind from dynastic

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replacements in China. Therefore since the Renaissance, there have been revolutions in politics, religion, morality, literature, and the arts. Everything has regenerated and progressed because of revolution. The history of modern European civilization can simply be titled a history of revolution.101

Almost word for word a repetition of Liang Qichao's 1902 article "Defining ge" this new outburst of revolutionary energy was also a legitimate offspring of the 1911 Revolution. As Michael Gasster observes, the Revolution and, perhaps more so, the radical Min bao revolutionaries "generated not only China's new leaders but also a mood and an attitude. Like their predecessors who concluded that the antidote to the Manchus' failure was to strike harder and deeper, the leaders of the New Culture Movement decided that the antidote to the failure of 1911 was to strike still harder and deeper. . . . The Communists may be regarded as the third wave of a radicalism that with each wave resembled more closely a radicalism of impotence, a radicalism whose intensity is inversely proportionate to its practical possibilities."102 One lasting legacy of the debate between Liang Qichao and the Min bao group, therefore, is that it at once gave birth to modern Chinese political culture and gave it its defining characteristic— utopianism, which would directly serve the purpose of creating and mobilizing the nation as a political collectivity. If, as Furet analyzes, "the problem of political representation stood at the heart of the French Revolution,"103 continuous political mobilization, the effort to insert a self-conscious nation into the global imaginary, appears to have been the predominant issue for revolutionary China in the twentieth century.

5 The Spatial Logic of the New Culture: Modernity and Its Completion It seems to me that humanity is indeed a strange phenomenon in the universe. Never for a moment does it cease to create a new space for itself or to change its own situation with its will, but all the time it is dominated by what it has created and altered by itself. No one knows beforehand what is being brought about until after the fact, not even those who are engaged in the actual creating and changing. When a new situation finally emerges and meets no one's expectations, people may appear at a loss momentarily but will turn around to continue their creation afresh. History is just such a course of evolution. —Liang Qichao, Impressions of Travels in Europe

Within a year of the October 1911 Wuchang Uprising, which ended the Qing dynasty and swiftly culminated in the founding of the Republic of China in January 1912, Liang Qichao boarded a ship and left Japan for good. His destination was China, a country still badly rattled by the shock waves stemming from the massive, painful political and institutional transition from empire to would-be modern nationstate. Liang's decision to return to China was a deliberate one. Long a champion and theorist of constitutional monarchy, he must have had some ambivalence toward the Republican revolution. Until the hasty outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, Liang had been preoccupied with maneuvering and coordinating efforts to put together provincial representative assemblies.1 In 1908, the recalcitrant Qing government had finally heeded Liang's and others' repeated urgings and decided to begin a nine-year, phased preparation for instituting a national constitution. As late as November 1911, Liang was still intensely spinning political and military plots to force speedier constitutional reforms on the doomed Qing court. He never seriously changed his belief that a figurehead monarchy, like the one in Japan, should be

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retained and would be of indispensable symbolic value to the Chinese polity.2 In April 1912, soon after the former Qing governor-general Yuan Shikai in the north, at the concession of Sun Yat-sen stranded in the south, was sworn into office as provisional president in Beijing, Liang composed a lengthy pamphlet outlining future policies for the new government. He began by celebrating the revolution as answering the call of history and the people, but he pointed out that what had been achieved was the destruction of the old system and that construction of the new was about to begin and had a long way to go. He called attention to the menacing signs of political chaos and national disintegration in the wake of the revolution and cautioned that it was not yet time for jubilation or optimism. To Liang's mind, the construction of a new China was an urgent political task that demanded prudence, careful planning, and a realistic approach. The revolution had caused a sudden break in the traditional political system, but this rupture did not guarantee the instantaneous or automatic arrival of a "golden world"; on the other hand, this violent transition was no call for excessive pessimism or anxiety. The enormous political "experiment" that was under way had to be conducted with the combined efforts of professionally organized political parties. In order to ensure a genuine rebirth of the nation as a modern republic, recommended Liang, a nation-state, structurally comparable to other countries in the contemporary world, had to be instituted; a policy of state intervention and protection for the purpose of fostering national industry and commerce needed to be put in place; a strong and capable central government had to be established; and a partisan cabinet quickly formed.3 By and large all these plans reflected Liang's interest in the German experience of massive, state-orchestrated modernization in the nineteenth century. At the heart of his cautious endorsement of the revolution as a fait accompli was the exciting and sobering notion of "experimenting" with systematic sociopolitical, institutional, legal, and cultural transformation. This opportunity for social engineering also directly motivated his active and massive participation in national politics and a series of cabinets in the early Republican era. The thrilling prospect of making history, after all, was an opportunity that had long enticed Liang and his contemporaries.4 On October 20, 1912, Liang Qichao arrived in Beijing as a special

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guest of Yuan Shikai, the halfhearted provisional president, and was accorded, in Joseph Levenson's words, "a series of tumultuous receptions."5 Having fled the country a capital offender hunted by the Qing court, he now triumphantly returned to a universal welcome and recognition. Speaking to a delegation of journalists, Liang, now apparently a veteran political orator, emphasized the importance of a public press in the new Republic and defended his new political orientation. What had been altered through the revolution was the form of the state, from monarchy to republic. A change in the political and administrative system still remained to be designed and carried out. Since in pre-Republican days the constitutionalists had always striven for reform of political institutions, Liang reasoned publicly, his support of the newly founded Republic did not contradict his original goals. At a reception sponsored by a miscellany of fledging political parties and organizations, Liang underscored the crucial function of party alliance in future parliamentary politics. Invited to speak at a meeting by the Beijing Society of Commerce, he declared it a matter of utmost urgency to promote native industry and free trade because the existence of the nation would now largely depend on winning a brutal worldwide "trade war." Even the Buddhist Association saluted Liang. Appropriately enough, his address to the gathering praised Buddhist restraint and abnegation of the self as much-needed antidotes to a morally corrupting individualism that threatened to become an epidemic. Upon the conclusion of this meeting, he hurried to National Peking University and preached a puritanical ethic of "discipline, austerity, and tranquillity" to a roomful of awe-struck students.6 Obliged to scurry about and deliver speeches, Liang Qichao must have finally enjoyed a comforting sense of fulfillment. Being at the center of public attention appeared the best reward for the renowned "star of public opinion." Yet a bustling public life soon took its toll on Liang, and occasionally he found it irritating to be led around to various engagements. In a letter he wrote to his daughter during this hectic twelve-day trip to Beijing, he aired his discomfort: "The misery of socializing absolutely goes beyond words. If one has to live such a life constantly, I wonder where the pleasures of life could be. ... People here in the capital welcome me as if they were crazy. Every day I have to go to some three different gatherings; in addition an average of 100 visitors always shows up where I stay."7 He even developed a nos-

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talgia for the peaceful and private autumn days in Japan, where, he knew, he could be savoring some purifying sake while surveying the now brilliantly colored leaves. Nevertheless the intense hospitality proved hard to resist. The heartwarming receptions seemed to assure him that as a widely respected reformer and political theorist he would play a leading role in national politics in the years ahead. Despite his resentment at an alienating public life, Liang certainly saw a chance to realize his lifelong ambitions, even perhaps to finally be the modern-day Cavour of China. What unfolded subsequently, after the initial zeal and euphoria had subsided with ominous rapidity, was a disappointing, sometimes cruel, reality. Postrevolutionary political instability across the nation, bloody regional conflicts among rising military warlords, aggravating poverty and economic exhaustion, and increasing foreign pressure all combined to frustrate Liang's plans for future construction. It soon became clear that the new Republican government set up in Beijing, as Lloyd Eastman analyzes, had "no true constituency: not President Yuan Shikai, who was neither a revolutionary nor a republican; not the gentry, who now realized that their local interests were actually threatened by the Republican government; and not, of course, the common people, most of whom were still essentially apolitical."8 Indeed, the now emperor-less country's quick disintegration into the devastating "warlord period" confirmed Liang's worst fears before the revolution. Although a nominal national government continued to exist in Beijing and underwent a succession of confusing shake-ups, for most purposes its "writ extended no farther than the guns of the Peking warlord."9 With expectations as great as his patience, however, Liang Qichao involved himself in a series of government cabinets, taking such key positions as minister of justice, minister of finance, and state counselor. When given a chance, he doggedly pursued his several projects for national reconstruction. His enterprises included organizing an inclusive political alliance—the moderate Progressive Party (Jinbu dang)—formalizing new political institutions, and preparing a permanent national constitution. He also pushed for a restructuring of the banking system, compulsory elementary education, and policies designed to protect native industry from aggressive foreign competition. All his plans and proposals eventually fell through in the erratic

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aftermath of the revolution. A second revolution led by an exasperated Sun Yat-sen ended in complete failure and deepened the division between the north and the south; then Japan, now an ever more formidable economic and military power, issued the notorious Twenty-One Demands in 1915 and threw the already embattled country into yet another nationalistic furor. In the midst of this upheaval, President Yuan Shikai, out of desperation rather than personal aspiration, hastily staged what Liang viewed as the "farce" of restoring the empire and enthroned himself as the emperor Hongxian, only to die, much despised, shortly thereafter. During the crisis, Liang traveled to the southwest, even to a remote Vietnamese village, to mastermind a military and political coalition to protect the now-endangered young Republic. What Liang and his allies adamantly defended was less the Republic as a form of government, which he had opposed before, than the inviolable constitutionality of the new Republic.10 (Instead of Cavour, one may say, Liang was now perforce playing the role of Cromwell the Protector.) One year later, in summer 1917, amid general confusion and political paralysis, the provincial general Zhang Xun, goaded by the wisdom of an aging Kang Youwei, marched into Beijing with his "Queue troops" and announced the return of the last emperor of the Qing. This attempted restoration lasted less than two weeks but served as a clear indication of the uncertain times. Meanwhile, World War I had broken out in the distance, and after an initial period of hedging neutrality, the Beijing government declared war against Germany. It was a move very much urged by Liang Qichao, who had made a comprehensive study of the causes of the war and concluded that it could be an opportunity for China in the Far East.11 Apparently Liang had not forgotten what the Crimean War in the 1850's did for modern Italy and Cavour's career. Finding himself inextricably caught in this exhausting commotion, however, Liang grew increasingly bewildered and disillusioned. As early as one year after his triumphant return, he had been seized by a sense of powerlessness: "It is incredible that so many drastic events should have taken place in China in the past year. One feels as if one is watching a movie or a play, with confusing scenes flashing in and out swiftly, nothing lasting more than one minute."12 Because of such restless shuffling, his blueprints for reconstruction quickly came to naught, and the Great Republic of China he once envisioned never materialized. The social and political crises and instabilities of the ensuing era

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of warlordism, however, witnessed the coming of age of a second generation of modern Chinese intellectuals in the late 1910's. As James Sheridan succinctly describes the situation: The warlord period exemplified the extremity of China's territorial disintegration. But more than that, it formed the context within which some of the most significant trends and events in modern Chinese history took place. It was during those years that young China repudiated Confucianism, that Chinese anti-imperialism entered a more intense phase, that the Literary Revolution occurred, that Marxism was introduced to China on a significant scale, that the Communist Party was established and the Kuomintang [Guomindang] reorganized, and that Chinese social disintegration accelerated.13

The failed 1911 Revolution provided the decisive historical background against which a new generation of Chinese intellectuals had to form and claim a political and social identity. Its outstanding members were as dissimilar and distinctive—both ideologically and temperamentally—as, for instance, Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Li Dazhao, and Ding Wenjiang, but this second generation nonetheless bore a striking collective resemblance to its predecessors. Both generations, that of the 1890's and the 1910's, agreed that "the task of rejuvenating a corrupt and atrophied China involved nothing less than complete transformation of the traditional Chinese world view and total reconstruction of the traditional Chinese mentality."14 Chen Duxiu's 1917 hymn for universal revolution, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, echoed not merely Liang Qichao's youthful destructionism but also the revolutionary republicans' romantic imagining of modern history. At different points, both generations were deeply fascinated with and committed to the emancipatory notion of social progress as well as the future-oriented historical vision embedded in the discourse of modernity. Similarly, they eagerly subscribed to a global imaginary of political identity, and their shared "intellectual iconoclasm" best expressed a collective anxiety to assert the present as a new beginning and positive value. For modernity was endorsed, by Liang Qichao as much as by Chen Duxiu, as an emergent, irreversible movement of history that promised both a new form and a new content to human experience. At the same time, this intense longing for modernity also afflicted these two generations of Chinese intellectuals with profound despair. Largely a new cosmopolitan urban elite, they could find little common ground between their new consciousness and the traditional cultural system. In Lu Xun's portrayal of a paranoiac madman and a

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series of displaced intellectuals, for instance, the despair was acutely represented as the impossibility of communication not only between the young and the old as two temporal categories but also between the two spatialities of the urban and the rural. In terms of its intellectual genealogy, the generation of the May Fourth period, for all its radical anti-traditionalism and ultimately nationalistic impulses, signified the domestication of a revolutionary discourse of modernity that had first flourished among Chinese students in Japan. Despite the "heavy guns of New Youth and the iconoclasts" that struck the keynote of the May Fourth movement, as Charlotte Furth suggests, "a modern theoretical approach to questions about the nature of Chinese culture, religion, and ethics had taken shape during the earlier reform period."15 The founding of a Young China Society in 1919 by a group of students at National Peking University, among many other things, best symbolizes the thematic continuity between what was now loosely called the New Culture movement and the preceding generation's desire for national renovation. The fundamental modern value of "the new" or "making new" that Liang Qichao first systematically defended at the turn of the century still caught the imagination of the younger generation and provided the content for its modern historical consciousness. With great vibrancy, the modernist spirit of Liang's New Citizen Journal was kept alive and embodied in many May Fourth publications such as New Youth, New Tide (Renaissance), New Century, New Life, New Woman, and New Epoch.16 The lasting obsession of the May Fourth period, in retrospect, remained "the new" and "making new," of which Liang Qichao had been so enamored earlier. "New" indeed became probably "the most overworked adjective of the decade."17 In their continual and sincere "search for a more scientific, more logical worldview with which to replace their compatriots' customary and debilitating Confucian outlook,"18 May Fourth intellectuals continued the Enlightenment project that Liang had heroically undertaken. An open "Call to Youth" by Chen Duxiu, published in the inaugural issue of his journal La jeunesse (1915; changed to New Youth the following year), replicated, with virtually the same vocabulary, Liang's well-known "Ode to Young China" of 1899. Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life. The function of youth in society is the same as that of a fresh and vital cell in a human

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body. . . . I merely, with tears, place my plea before the fresh and vital youth, in the hope that they will achieve self-awareness, and begin to struggle. What is this self-awareness? It is to be conscious of the value and responsibility of one's young life and vitality, to maintain one's self-respect, which should not be lowered.19

To recall their intellectual origin is not to deny May Fourth intellectuals their historical significance and singularity. May Fourth intellectuals constituted "the first Chinese generation to count among its intellectual, political, and professional elite a substantial number who knew the West first hand and were prepared to contend with it on its own terms."20 Yet until the mid-1920's the dominant concern of May Fourth intellectuals was far less political, institutional modernization than comprehensive cultural transformation. The series of fruitless experiments, in the early years of the Republic, with an array of modern political institutions and forms (such as a presidency, representative assemblies, party alliances, and a constitution) revealed the much more pertinent task to be to update the mentality and expectations fostered by a premodern native culture. National character as the underlying substance, rather than the formal aspects of institutions, seemed to be the determining criterion of a nation's entry into modernity. In fact, the grim postrevolutionary political reality quickly turned the issue of cultural heritage into a matter of bitter contention. Although conservative thinkers such as Kang Youwei attributed the failure of the revolution to a willful disregard of the native tradition, the May Fourth generation of intellectuals, being the spiritual offspring of the 1911 Revolution, was convinced of the necessity to accomplish a comparable cultural-intellectual revolution.21 The "final awareness" of his generation, pronounced Chen Duxiu, was that republicanism was positively incompatible with the Confucian code of moral conduct and valorization of the family, because both were products of the age of feudalism.22 As Chen Duxiu visualized it, the two modern wheels of "science" and "human rights" (later codified as "democracy") had to be installed in order to move the nation away from the dark age of ignorance. Science and democracy were embraced as universal cultural values to replace the Confucian tradition and to legitimize political and technological modernization. In this vision, the political identity of the modern nation-state, now directly related to the question of its viability and legitimacy, explicitly superseded the nation as a separable

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cultural entity. This new political legitimacy, furthermore, had to be secured by positively affirming a fundamental equivalence and similarity between China and the modern world. Through his profuse writings in New Youth, Chen gave powerful expression to a global imaginary of identity that sustained the May Fourth project of Enlightenment. Rejecting a gradualist program of "peaceful liberty and orderly equity," Chen, his radical cultural politics still inspired by the great French Revolution, demanded the efficient absorption of native difference into a universalist discourse of political identity and the translation of cultural value directly into politically.23 The Enlightenment mentality of May Fourth intellectuals in general, as Tu Wei-ming characterizes it, was fundamentally a nationalistic one. Its main concern was not "liberty and human rights as ends in themselves but the 'Faustian spirit' unleashed by the social Darwinian quest for superiority."24 This Enlightenment mentality also led to an escalating radicalism because it would function primarily as spiritual compensation for a generation of urban elite who had just witnessed the miserable consequences, in particular the fatal ineffectiveness, of a modern political revolution in the vast land of rural and intransigent Confucian China. Yet the collective frustration experienced by May Fourth intellectuals with republican institutions was also to inspire different historical visions and generate different political energies. A great historical divide was soon to take place. As Arif Dirlik's recent study shows, a rapidly changing social situation (concentrated urbanization and development of labor and capital in the coastal area) and new political realities (a fledging proletariat and the 1917 October Revolution in Russia) combined to provide May Fourth intellectuals with a greatly expanded horizon of possibilities. "By 1919, Chinese radicals had already begun to perceive the social problems of Chinese society as a local manifestation of a global capitalism that knew no boundaries, appearing not as a foreign intrusion but as an internal feature of Chinese society."25 A new global imaginary of solidarity would quickly take hold and eventually introduce to the Chinese political avantgarde a radically reconceptualized geopolitical formation and alliance. The nationalist preoccupations and Utopian aspirations that charged Chen Duxiu's writings, together with his urgent call for an uncompromising anti-Confucian cultural revolution, appeared increasingly alien to Liang Qichao. Once again he sensed a millenarian

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impatience and wrote to warn against political "infantilism," cautioning that after the revolution, a patient, large-scale social reconstruction was in order.26 (The divergence of their ideological commitments is striking when we realize that Chen Duxiu, a returned student from Japan and admirer of Sun Yat-sen, was only six years junior to Liang.)27 As early as 1915, before he suddenly found himself helplessly involved in intense political maneuvering to oust the renegade Yuan Shikai, Liang had already made known his intent to retire from the exhausting public domain and focus on intellectual, rather than narrowly political, activities. Totally disheartened about the other feasible alternatives, he indicated that his initial choice remained journalism.28 Yet his retreat from national politics was not realized until December 1918 when Liang, together with a group of young scholarfriends, hurriedly left Beijing and a few days later boarded a Japanese ship in Shanghai on his way to the Versailles Peace Conference. Although without official status, Liang had a self-appointed mission to make a case for China before the world community and, if possible, win international support for his embattled country, just as Cavour had done for a struggling Italy more than half a century before, also in Paris. This trip, fifteen years after his North American tour, turned out to be an opportunity to withdraw from politics and prompted just as much intellectual reflection, if indeed not more. He would come back, in March 1920, a greatly changed person, re-energized, confident, and profoundly hopeful. Recounting Modernity It took Liang Qichao and his fellow travelers well over one month to reach London. Just as during his 1903 North American trip, increasing geographical distance and changes in landscape quickly settled Liang into a reflective mind-set. While touring Singapore in the sweltering South Pacific humidity, he could not help recalling the heavy snow in Beijing. This dramatic shift gave him a critical perspective on his and others' preoccupations back at home. From afar, what his countrymen were thinking and doing appeared to him no more sensible than a fur coat in Singapore.29 In fact, his whole journey in postwar Europe would be marked by constant shifting, through which Liang had to continually adjust his sense of distance, temporal as well as spatial, from China. With this yearlong tour, Liang could fi-

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nally claim to have traveled around the world and become one of the few modern Chinese intellectuals whose thinking on global issues was based on a firsthand experience of world space. In sharp contrast to his expectations, London struck Liang as a cold and miserable city still reeling from the recently finished war. "As soon as we landed, what jumped into our view was nothing but a picture of impoverishment and desolation in the wake of war." There was no heat in the hotel room, sugar was rare and precious, and the group of visitors from East Asia had to make do with being halfstarved all the time.30 This first impression of a dismal postwar Europe proved ominous and indelible. When setting out from Shanghai, Liang had in mind two objectives for this long and ambitious trip: first, he wanted to seek some understanding and see how "the unprecedented drama of history" would play itself out; second, he wished to repeat what Cavour had done for Italy, since Liang and his comrades, in his words, "were still dreaming of bringing about justice and humaneness through diplomacy, and believed that the peace conference would really mean an overhaul of all unjust international relations and establish a solid foundation for everlasting peace."31 By late in spring 1919, however, his hopes for a diplomatic success had vanished completely when he discovered, with great bitterness, that despite China's status as one of the victorious allies, the Chinese territory previously controlled by the now-defeated Germans was to be transferred, because of a secret deal, to the Japanese. At the end of World War I, the Great Powers dealt a permanent blow to the battered pride of a generation of China's cosmopolitan intellectuals, who were trying desperately to push China into the international community. Liang's outrage therefore captured a deep-seated nationalist resentment at this further instance of victimization by an unjust West. Appropriately enough, Liang Qichao the journalist played a historic role. His telegraphed reports to China about the Japanese claim to Qingdao became stirring headline news, and his exposure of the apparent readiness of the official Chinese delegation to appease the powers sparked a student demonstration in Beijing on May 4, 1919. The incident quickly gained popular support and led to a series of protests, strikes, and arrests throughout the country. The May Fourth movement, as a historical catalyst, allowed the radical elite (with its socialist, anarchist, and Marxist orientations) to witness the political potential of the urban and industrial masses and thereby introduced

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a new stage of intensified political mobilization through the rhetoric of nationalism. More significantly, the movement marked a further alienation of China from the West and prompted Chinese intellectuals to look to neighboring Soviet Russia. The new global imaginary of solidarity, to be systematically outlined in Lenin's theory of imperialism, would soon attract the Chinese in direct proportion to their increasing disillusionment with the existing world order.32 A new geopolitical repositioning was therefore to suggest itself as part of the political and intellectual domestic agenda by the mid-1920's. While events were unfolding dramatically back home, Liang Qichao left Paris a disappointed man and made a prolonged tour first of France and then of England. Accompanied by two friendly but watchful officials from the French government, he surveyed the desolate battlefields in northern and southern France and paid a respectful visit to Rousseau's residence in Paris, where he was overjoyed to learn that his group was among the first Asian visitors to the house. Among the prominent people he met in Paris was Henri-Louis Bergson the philosopher, and Liang was duly impressed. He then returned to England, received a warm welcome everywhere he went, and delivered speeches at various gatherings. In spite of an extremely busy schedule of official activities, he managed to visit the place where Adam Smith had once lived and made a swift tour of Sir Walter Scott's house after a 400-mile ride with little to eat. Before leaving for the continent again, he made a point of visiting the house where Shakespeare was supposedly born and grew up." On July 12, 1919, Liang and company sailed across the English Channel to France to take part in the celebrations for the 130th anniversary of the French Revolution. The only thing memorable about the event, however, seemed to be the difficulty, in the midst of pouring rain, of finding a place to stay for the night. Right after the anniversary celebration, he set out for Belgium and started a four-month trip across western Europe, which included an uneventful visit to Rome. By mid-October he and his friends made it back to a suburb of Paris and felt only too happy to be stationary for a while. For the next two months, they stayed in a rather modest summer-resort house and watched the chilly autumn wind quietly sweep away the fallen leaves in the backyard. The weather had turned cold, and the group had to either huddle together around a lifeless fire or jump up and down to keep themselves warm. In the rather desolate backyard, now larger and emptier than ever, as Liang noticed, "the few cherry trees and

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beds of chrysanthemums were, needless to say, withered and crestfallen. Even the dozen aged and huge checkerberry trees could not resist the force of chilling frost and wind and shed their leaves one after another. Leaves tumbling down eventually piled up and turned our garden into desert-like ruins."14 This disconsolate picture of lifelessness did not cheer Liang. On the contrary, it put into the remote past the bustle of the first half of the year. It also provided Liang, quite appropriately, with a setting in which to contemplate, write down impressions of his journey, and organize in very lucid language his somber thoughts on human history as a whole. Just like the sweeping change of season outside, the history of humanity, to Liang's mind, was also at a turning point. The pensive observer from China was gripped by a deep sense of loss and uncertainty when he enumerated recent events. In a forceful series of sentences beginning with "Who would have expected . . . ?" Liang outlined, in terms of territorial reorganization and power redistribution, a new world configuration. The enormous empire of Russia, which used to be an oriental power, was now dismantled and even excluded from the peace conference; Belgium and Serbia, in different parts of Europe, emerged as considerable regional forces. The Poles and Jews, after either repeated foreign partition or prolonged diaspora, were actively striving to restore their nationhood. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States had finally stepped out of its self-imposed isolationist Monroe Doctrine and started interceding in European affairs. Socialist parties, regarded as a monster only 30 years before, now made their impact felt in parliaments across Europe. The radical Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, had even set up a Soviet government and continued to exist despite great enmity, both domestic and international. All these realignments and changes in the wake of the Great War demanded serious rethinking. The war itself, sensed Liang, "is not yet the whole story of a new world history. It is but a mediating passage that connects the past and the future."35 The turning point of history also became conceivable because of the precarious situation of the world, in particular Europe. Among the European nations, animosity had intensified rather than abated at the conclusion of the war. With the coming into being of numerous states in the Balkan area, the doctrine of national self-determination, advocated by American president Woodrow Wilson, was apparently respected and upheld, but potential local conflicts and Great Power intervention also seemed ever more likely. At the same time, the war

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machine had led national economies to the verge of bankruptcy, and massive destruction had drained Europe of its productive labor force. The winners as much as the losers of the war seemed to suffer from the same economic crisis, aggravated by continual labor movements and strikes. It was hard to tell, according to Liang, which was less painful, wartime misery or postwar poverty. A closer look at the internal workings of postwar Europe would only send more shudders down one's back. People had been talking about class struggle for a long time, but it was not until now that class confrontation had emerged as harsh reality. The Industrial Revolution had given birth to a new class of the wealthy and powerful but also created its nemesis in the proletariat. "With science ever advancing, industry ever growing, social division was deepening daily. The rich became richer, and the poor more impoverished." "Some knowledgeable people," meanwhile, proposed two different ways of overcoming this unjust social system. One was to nationalize the means of production but keep intact the existing political structure; the other aimed at scraping the old government or even parliament and giving power to the workers. The first alternative, Liang discovered, was the reformist approach endorsed by social-democratic parties throughout Europe; the second strategy was the choice of the "Russian radicals." At one point, Liang expressed admiration for the idealism of the Russian radicals, asserting that the historical value of the new system, even if it proved a miserable failure some day, would still be as great as the French Revolution. In fact, radicalism might even turn out to be more viable than the politics of the social democrats.36 No matter which road was taken, "social revolution most likely will be the predominant feature of twentieth-century history, and no single country will be able to dodge it. It is just a matter of time." Liang was so alarmed by the constant labor unrest and strikes in industrialized Europe during his journey that the confrontation between capitalists and workers seemed to him nothing but a fierce war. "This is not at all surprising. In today's world, all the industrialized countries, without exception, have already been bifurcated into the state of capital and the state of labor. Sooner or later there will be a face-to-face confrontation and a showdown of force. Let us be prepared for tidings of war."37 The rising "dark tide of social revolution" caused Liang Qichao to take a serious look at the various ideologies that had shaped the in-

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tellectual life of nineteenth-century Europe, for "the intellectual mainstream of a society," so he believed, "has always been the context of political events, which, in turn, are closely intertwined with private individual life. So if the intellectual mainstream is not wholesome, public affairs and private life alike are bound to be affected." This emphasis on the determining force of systems of ideas points back to Liang Qichao and his generation's conviction of the power of knowledge and their predilection for a cultural-intellectual approach to sociopolitical issues. Contrary to his previous belief in the positive influence of modern intellectual constructs, however, Liang Qichao now evaluated the major social theories and ideologies of nineteenthcentury Europe much more critically. Liberalism, as a reaction to feudalism and state absolutism, did help accelerate political reform and economic development, but it also planted "the seeds of social disaster for the future." The severe social and political polarization between the rich and the poor, in Liang's judgment, owed as much to the introduction of machinery and concentration of the means of production as to laissez-faire economic liberalism, which, as the inviolable principle of capitalism, legitimized free competition and unequal distribution of wealth. To make things worse, by the midnineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionism and individualism surfaced and, compounded by Nietzsche's theory of the "will to power," encouraged, on the individual and philosophical levels, the worship of power. As far as the state was concerned, social Darwinism made expansionist militarism and imperialism a popular political policy. "The recent international war had its origin right there; any future class wars in each and every nation will also have their origin there."38 Liang's critical reinterpretation of liberalism and other major nineteenth-century ideologies in Europe reflected the general skepticism and critical reflection among Europeans in the aftermath of the war. It also marked a break with his own previous understanding of the doctrines of evolution and liberalism. Particularly striking is the difference between the Liang exiled in Japan at the turn of the century and the Liang huddling around an insufficient winter fire in the Paris suburb of Bellevue in 1919. Back then he had most enthusiastically collected his thoughts under the celebratory title Book of Liberal Writings and with a sense of great urgency advocated nationalism, free competition, and modern science. Now he seemed to throw all these commitments into disarray by acknowledging their ideological nature. Liberalism as a social discourse, for instance, was shown to be

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a response to specific historical developments in Europe. It was first elaborated in the service of particular social groups rather than as a universal good. A sense of historical closure, largely reinforced by a critical perception of Europe as a geographical entity now embroiled in the aftereffects of war, enabled Liang to recount the causes and origins of the contemporary catastrophe. Europe and its experience of modernity became an object of critical scrutiny. The discontinuity between Liang the reformer and Liang the observer cannot be explained, as Joseph Levenson suggested, in terms of the displacement of history. According to Levenson, Liang Qichao was always haunted by "an old inner confusion: 'Which shall he cherish, history or value?'" The nationalist Liang supposedly endorsed history over value so as to maintain a cultural, mostly psychological, equivalence with the West, since the disparity between China and the West was construed as a matter of their different pace of advancement on the ladder of evolution. "From 1919 on, he brought value back to Chinese history, for the West could be revalued."39 Liang's disparaging words about Darwinian evolution and extreme individualism, in Levenson's account, are proof of a self-affirming, if ultimately self-vindicating, repudiation of the West. Darwinian theory was no longer taken as pure science, "which Liang [had] invoked to save China from embarrassment; now, when evil might conceivably be traced to it, it was a cultural exhibit, submitted by Liang to embarrass the West."40 Since essentially all the modern discourse formations in which he had been engaged up to now had Western origins, Liang's reexamination could indeed be viewed as a response, even a final farewell, to the West. But it would be misleading to read Liang at this stage as a pride-obsessed Chinese scrambling to salvage China. Indeed the familiar pattern of China versus the West in this context is an impoverished construction that fails to grasp the deeper significance of Liang's observations, which were intended more as commentary on the problematic experience of modernity than as an apologetics for a settled geographical opposition.41 Levenson's approach makes it hard to contemplate the possibility that a remapping of world space, starting from an embattled peripheral other space, already partakes of the discourse of modernity in that it reveals the contingency and incompleteness of a supposedly global project. Creatively rethinking modernity, for Liang Qichao, would mean delimiting it as the growth

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of a local, particular tradition or spatiotemporal regime and introducing a new global imaginary. In this sense, Liang's critique of European modernity is based not so much on a rhetoric of refusal or denunciation as on the perceived need to contain it and to eventually overcome its aberration through a balancing completion. Within the tradition of European modernity, Liang singled out the unqualified belief in science and its contemporary crisis as a point of departure for his critical examination. After the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, "the dream of the omnipotence of science" replaced traditional cultural norms and linkages wrought by the feudal tradition, Greek philosophy, and Christianity. With the onslaught of modernity, inherited conditions of social existence and cultural customs were shaken and subsequently subjected to systematic transformation. Although adjustments in social organization are a historical constant and should not cause much anxiety, "changes in the past hundred years have been of a different nature from those of previous times." As a result of the development of science, the organization of industrial production underwent fundamental innovation. Changes were carried out at such a fast speed, with such sudden force, and also on such a large scale, that people were always and everywhere at a loss when they tried to make their inner life agree with their outer life. The most obvious example is the drastically opposing ways in which urban life in the present and village life from before are experienced.42

To Liang, the alienating urban landscape appeared to be most symptomatic of the modern malaise for a number of reasons: commercial or industrial aggregation of a large population throws together people connected not by emotional affinity but by a mere relationship of interest; the inevitable disappearance of landed property gives rise to a sense of perpetual uncertainty and "rootlessness"; the fluctuation and complexity of social situations demand strenuous attention and lead to mental fatigue and weariness; work and diversion follow upon each other at a dizzying speed and therefore both are depleted of any pleasure; and finally, with the public's desire continuously stimulated, consumer goods keep getting more expensive and the competition for survival ever fiercer. In short, the disconnection of a fast-shifting public "outer life" and a weakened private "inner life" exacts a hefty toll and causes much anomie and anxiety. Science or scientific rationality gave rise to the Industrial Revo-

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lution and dismantled religion and even philosophy (witness the nearly simultaneous appearance of Comte's positivism and Darwin's theory of evolution), but science itself has not been able to replace religion and supply a meaning or foundation for everyday life for the urban masses. Furthermore, the emphasis placed by scientific rationality on the new and on constant change has raised the issue of political as well as cultural legitimacy. "New authority after all has difficulty establishing itself, and yet old authority is abolished beyond restoration. Consequently the entire society is thrown into skepticism, despair, and fear, just as a ship without a compass caught in a storm and enshrouded with a heavy fog at the same time. No one has any idea of what the future will be like." Liang summarized the scientific rationality that led to utter despair in modern times as an insufficient "materialistic and mechanical life view." Such an outlook accepts and institutes a separation between means and end and deprives society of any transcendental value because it reduces the purpose of human existence to a mere degrading "fight over bread." Back then those who cheered for science were hopeful of a golden age to be reached through the triumph of science. Now the triumph can be said to have been secured, for the material progress in the past 100 years is several times greater than what was achieved in the previous 3,000 years. But we human beings have attained no happiness. On the contrary, much catastrophe has been unleashed. In the same way, a lost traveler in the desert, when he sees a big shadow in the distance, would strive hard to catch up with it, hoping to obtain some guidance. But after a while the shadow unexpectedly disappears, and the traveler is left perennially miserable and despairing. What is the shadow? It is Mr. Science. The Europeans have had an enormous dream about the omnipotence of science, and now they begin to decry its bankruptcy.43

In a footnote to this impassioned passage, Liang Qichao emphatically denied that he was celebrating the demise of scientific knowledge or modern technology; rather, he was refusing to believe the myth of its supremacy. He was careful not to ally himself with traditionalists hostile to science or technological innovation and its corresponding social progress. Still, his comments were eagerly greeted by cultural reactionaries as a wholesale rejection of the modern world when his Excerpts from Impressions of Travels in Europe was first serialized in 1920. These same comments on the fallacy of a belief in the "omnipo-

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tence of science" would also be the key issue of an extensive intellectual debate, on the respective merits of scientific rationality and an organic life view, in 1923. The two main adversaries in the "science and metaphysics" controversy were Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai) and Ding Wenjiang, both of whom accompanied and translated for Liang through much of his European journey.44 When Hu Shi, now a much respected spokesman for the New Culture movement, surveyed the debate late in 1923, he blamed Liang for having introduced a confusing and false problem to China, where science was still trying desperately to legitimate itself. Ever since Liang's eloquent but premature announcement of the "bankruptcy of science," complained Hu Shi, those reclusive old scholars had made a big fuss over it, and "the dignity that science had enjoyed in China has been far from the same."45 In fact, a new cultural politics was taking shape in Liang's critical remarks about the dominance of modern science, and his distinction between an "inner life" and an "outer life" would foreshadow a model essential to the neo-conservatism of the 1920's. Side by side with Liang's analysis of the modern malaise was a reassessment of the native tradition, now understood as necessarily different from but contemporaneous with the dominant forms and expressions of the modern. As a culturally conservative and politically diverse intellectual trend, neo-conservatism insisted that "Confucian truth exists on a plane of insight separable from that governing science, and superior to it."4G With this neo-conservative insistence on native difference as constitutive of an inner, spiritual domain needed to complement modern civilization, Liang's new cultural politics was based on a reformulated principle of vast synthesization. The construction of an inalienable, authentic domain of sovereignty or spirituality in native culture, as Partha Chatterjee analyzes in his study of Indian nationalism, served the nationalist cause because it demarcated a possible terrain of contention. "The more nationalism engaged in its contest with the colonial power in the outer domain of politics, the more it insisted on displaying the marks of 'essential' cultural difference so as to keep out the colonizer from that inner domain of national life and to proclaim its sovereignty over it."47 The main thrust of Liang Qichao's cultural politics, however, was not antagonistic contention. Rather, it was based on a vision of creative and combinatory completion.

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The familiar dichotomies of spiritual/material, essence/means, inner/outer—variations of which can be found in the Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese encounters with modernity—more or less grow out of the same nationalist logic.* It offers a persuasive but debilitatingly rigid means of differentiation, for, as Chatterjee points out, this opposition remains "trapped within its framework of false essentialisms."48 Moreover, in such nationalist appropriations of native culture, tradition or the spiritual domain is still by and large conceived as a site of resistance, an abstract and stable structure of meanings insulated from history. The new cultural politics that Liang Qichao was to practice, as we shall see below, would not be content with positing the inner spiritual domain as an exclusive nationalist property. On the contrary, it would address as a universal dilemma the discontinuity between inner and outer life, between value and reason. Instead of using it as a means of defensively combating modernization, Liang called on native culture as a resource to complement and enrich the modern experience or Lebenswelt. In other words, the neo-conservatism proposed by Liang *As Guy Alitto observes in his study of the "last Confucian" Liang Shuming, the conception of an integrative and humane "culture" over a dehumanizing industrialization in fact originated in a group of German philosophers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who, acutely aware of the politically and economically backward situation of Germany at the time, "most systematically developed a concept of culture which focuses on people's interior feelings in opposition to the social and economic rationalizations that were changing Europe's exterior" (The Last Confucian, pp. 20-21). This ideological valorization of "culture" over "civilization" can also be found in the writings of Kant, the classic Aufklarung philosopher. In his programmatic "Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View," Kant made a fine distinction between "culture" as internal content and "civilization" as external form. "We are cultivated in a high degree by science and art. We are civilized, even to excess, in the way of all sorts of social forms of politeness and elegance. But there is still much to be done before we can be regarded as moralized. The ideal of morality certainly belongs to real culture; but an application of this idea which extends no farther than the likeness of morality in the sense of honor and external propriety merely constitutes civilization" (in Gardiner, p. 30). This observation by Kant is of particular interest to the present discussion because in postwar Neo-Kantianism Liang Qichao would find much resonance and support for his "new culture" conception, especially in the Weltanschauung theory of Heinrich Rickert, whom Liang read in the 1920's. For a discussion of the Indian experience and a comparison of the Japanese formulation with that of the Chinese, see, respectively, Chatterjee, The Nation; and "Chinese 'Principle' and Western 'Utility': A Reassessment," in Min, National Polity, pp. 51-88. See also Alitto, Shijie fanwei nei.

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and some of his Chinese contemporaries sought to discover the modernity of the native cultural tradition.* Pivotal to Liang Qichao's emerging neo-conservative cultural politics was the desire to create a new cultural system of global significance. Before he discussed this point, however, he found it necessary to examine European literary trends and gauge the components of a new civilization. For "to have an idea of the intellectual mainstream of one period, it is most helpful to look at its literature." Unlike the optimistic and affirmative Renaissance mentality of the two preceding centuries, the mood of nineteenthcentury European literature was in general gloomy and characterized by the inevitable boredom of a decadent civilization. Still, two distinct periods were discernible in the course of the century: romanticism (sentimentalism) and naturalism (realism). According to Liang, romanticism, arising from an exhausted classicism in the first half of the nineteenth century, "repudiated imitation to revere creation, broke down accepted formality to give a free rein to emotion, and agreed in temperament with the idealist philosophy, political and economic liberalism." Romantic literature focused on creating an imaginary world peopled with new characters so as to help the reader "leap out of reality and experience a spiritual sublimation." Yet such an idealistic imagination soon turned out to be less than tenable and bore little resemblance to reality. As a result, by the mid-nineteenth century, "literary hegemony" shifted to naturalism, which, in essence, was both a continuation of romanticism's pursuit of "newness" and a literary extension of materialism in everyday life, positivism in philosophical discourse, and scientific research. *In this sense, Levenson's statement that "anyone interested in Chinese history can profit from an account of the 1923 debate on 'Science and Metaphysics.' Anyone interested in science and metaphysics need not give it another glance" ("The Genesis of Confucian China and Its Modern Fate" in Curtis, p. 291) is both right and wrong. It is right in that the debate does show Chinese thinking in history rather than disembodied thought. Yet it has the wrong implication because it ignores the very universality of the questions that the debate was tackling, for, after all, "science" and "metaphysics," when not taken as an abstract system, are always already situated. Levenson's next move, however, seems to provide a rebuttal to the misleading implication. When he followed the preceding statement with "one's interest in Chinese history now is of a universal order," Levenson was obviously proposing an approach that would overcome what Paul Cohen has termed Levenson's own parochialism. Indeed, the central notion of Levenson's unfinished project Provincialism and Cosmopolitanism: Chinese History and the Meaning of "Modern Times" inspired some of the approaches in the present study.

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"In an age obsessed with omnipotent science, naturalist literature nearly became a scientific literature, upholding the key doctrine of Truth is beauty,' and turning society into a giant laboratory for scientific research." Rather than indulging in either an imaginary paradise or a remote past and future, naturalist writers insisted on describing the immediate present and a veritable social environment. Such unremitting realistic exposure of the mundane and bestial about human beings proved too much for Liang's sensibility. He objected to the demeaning "truth" revealed in naturalistic writings. "Since naturalist literature came into vogue, people have been made to think that human beings are indeed evolved from some lower animal, not much different from those beasts and insects. People also realize that humans enjoy no free will. All action is directed either by our physical impulse or surrounding circumstances." As Liang saw it, science used to be respected as power over nature, but with science fully developed, the force of nature became even more tyrannical and irresistible. That was why naturalism gave impetus to popular despair and a crisis in faith. "All Europe at the end of the nineteenth century was enshrouded in the disheartening atmosphere of a desolate autumn."49 Against this dismal background, Liang went on to enumerate all the intellectual and cultural predicaments that besieged the contemporary European mind. Besides the inescapable confrontation between old and new thinking, there was a group of related conflicting ideologies that defied a simple overarching solution. For instance, the contradictions between individualism and socialism, between socialism and nationalism, between nationalism and individualism, and finally between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To speak of more fundamental contradictions, one can take "liberty" and "equality" as two doctrines that form the grand outline of modern intellectual development, but absolute liberty and absolute equality themselves form an insurmountable contradiction. In further analysis, the contradiction between materialism and idealism in philosophy, that between competition and fraternity in society, politically the contradiction between autonomy and state intervention, economically the contradiction between laissez-faire and protection policy—all these different theories have their own premises and logic. In addition, these contradictions persist and develop in their own way and move at ever greater speed in opposite directions. The result is that the conflict is ever more profound and will be neither eliminated nor reconciled. This explains all the skepticism and despair.50

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The grim implications of the phrase "fin de siecle" finally sank in, and Liang Qichao felt the gravity of the situation acutely. It was a moment of history in which the "future" was no longer inspiring, and time appeared to be an exhausted resource. The historic impasse the Chinese observer diagnosed for Western civilization seemed to be total and overwhelming. He not only identified social and economic crises and international rivalry and unrest as continuing threats to postwar Europe, but also directed his attention to the intellectual and cultural dilemmas behind the contemporary fiasco. What Liang sketched here amounts to a panoramic intellectual and social history of modern Europe. Yet the narrator, writing in a chilly house in a Paris suburb, was constantly aware that what he had witnessed or described was not merely a regional European story, but had tremendous implications and repercussions for the entire modern world. The recent war constituted a "turning point in human history." The bankruptcy of an omnipotent science shattered the dream of a golden age for "us humans." "We" had boasted about mastering nature through science but had come to see ourselves dominated by natural forces. The inescapable fate of modernity, at last, seemed to manifest itself in a complete loss of coherence, a devastating experiential fragmentation, and an apparently endless groping with discontinuities and predicaments. Liang Qichao's concern with the global condition of modernity expressed itself in ways more forceful than the voice of an inclusive "we" might imply. A deeply sympathetic understanding and no less intense anxiety run through his writings. At one point he assumed the voice of an omnipresent commentator and lamented the futility and aimlessness of human endeavor.51 Yet he remained hopeful: "In my opinion, Europe will never undergo decline, despite all the difficulties in its way."52 As so human an enterprise, modernity's possibilities and promises were far from being fulfilled. The historical potential of modern technology and political democracy still needed and encouraged exploration. For all the imperfections and despair, Liang foresaw the prospect of a new civilization arising from the rums of war. The final optimistic turn in Liang's historical projection is an immensely significant gesture. Never did the two-front confrontation in which he found himself engaged recede from his view: if the history of modern Europe was not so much emblematic as metonymic of

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modernity in general—an observation that Liang had to assert to avoid collaborating with both an imperialist peripheralization of other spaces and a nativist self-seclusion—his critique of modernity then had both to acknowledge modernity as a historical necessity and to question the paradigmatic value of the Western experience of the modern. Modernity had to be reinvented, yet its reality by no means denied. This would be the historic opportunity and mission that Liang presented to the Chinese nation. An unwillingness to hear the cheerful note that consummated Liang's reading of modern Europe indicates a tendency to interpret the seminal text Impressions of Travels in Europe as a mere rejection of modernity rather than as a serious effort at critical rethinking.53 Such a reduction easily leads to a misinterpretation of Liang's subsequent cultural politics as a self-complacent retreat, a conservative turn that refused to engage history. The opposite seems to be true. Any reconsideration of the project of modernity has to involve a redirecting of historical confidence, evoking a new historical vision that redefines sources of hope and potentials for human fulfillment. Such a reorientation would underlie Liang's endeavors for a new culture throughout the 1920's. Designing the New Culture The second half of Liang's account of his trip to western Europe in fact focuses on the necessity for and construction of a "Chinese selfconsciousness." Here, Liang Qichao addressed a more specific "we," no longer assuming the voice of a universal "we" that bespeaks the human race as a whole. The central questions now are "As a member of the international community, how should China act? Which road should our nation take?"54 As he answered these questions, a genuine hopefulness greatly changes the tone of the whole piece. Liang sincerely believed that at this turning point in human history China has been given a wonderful chance to assert itself as a true "cosmopolitan nation," re-energize its cultural heritage, and fulfill a historic mission. Upon his return to China in March 1920, he publicly articulated this new hopefulness. From his brief trip to Europe, so he told a welcoming audience in Shanghai, he had brought back not so much new learning as one all-important thing, a new optimistic vision. The rea-

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son for his shedding all "senile inertia" was that he finally had an explanation for Europe's progress in the past hundred years and China's failure to emulate Europe. "Europe has reached its present stage because of its own social and political traditions. This development is not a forced result. Because China's traditions differ from those of Europe, it simply cannot follow Europe's example. Moreover, Europe in the past hundred years can be regarded as caught in an unnatural condition, or stricken by a disease. China has tried desperately to duplicate such malaise, and so of course it has been a futile endeavor."55 Liang's pronounced optimism was based on a new historical configuration, and it would be translated, when he elaborated on the need for a Chinese subjectivity in the modern world, into a new set of cultural and political strategies. This included not only intellectual enterprises to set people free from dogmatic ways of thinking and conformist habits, but also efforts to form grass-roots social organizations and implement democratic political participation. The goal was to prepare a genuine "popular campaign" that would effectively activate and maximize all the productive forces in the nation. At this point, Liang critically reviewed the failures of both the constitutionalist and the revolutionary approaches before the demise of the Qing. Whereas the elitist reformers counted on pressuring the political establishment into reform, the radical revolutionaries resorted to force and countered violence with violence. Both methods failed to establish a republic because neither engaged the populace. "It was like when you open a bottle of cold beer—the foam quickly bubbles up to the surface and appears awfully busy. But when the moment is over and the foam dissipates, it is still a cold bottle of beer."56 A new national movement, therefore, had to be one that could not be manipulated by politicians, local warlords, or clans. It should grow out of a different political culture. The true spirit of modern politics, Liang now realized, was to develop a democratic political culture that was inclusive rather than exclusive, modeled after the leveling organization of cities rather than a hierarchical agrarian community. (In his conception of a new national political platform, "citizens" of the nation were more often than not identified with "city dwellers" [shimin].) Liang discussed, in no particular order, specific components of this new political culture: intellectual independence and thoroughness, organizational capacity,

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respect for the law, and local autonomy. The goal was still to create an "ideal nation of new citizens,"57 but instead of offering an elaborate program defining the ideological content of the new citizenry, as he had done in Discourse on the New Citizen, Liang focused more on the formal aspect of political institutions and participation. The new focus nonetheless originated in Liang's earlier liberal commitment. The nation was not to be mobilized in a utilitarian fashion and for a given political cause; rather, it had first to cultivate a political consciousness in order to realize its collective historical mission. In retrospect, the greatest impact of his European journey was that it enabled Liang Qichao to envision a new form of political engagement. The patience and confidence he demonstrated in discussing the future of China had much to do with the intellectual resilience he summoned to cope with a post-catastrophic world. Both postwar Europe and postrevolutionary China demanded that Liang provide a viable plan for healing and reconstruction. Underlying his proposal for a new political culture was Liang's attention to the growing social question, a deep-seated concern that reflected his ideological aversion to further political instability and violence in the wake of the 1911 Revolution. Throughout his trip in Europe, Liang was greatly impressed by the socialist parties' acquisition of influence in all parliamentary institutions. (Liang always maintained a strong interest in theories of socialism. Before his departure for Europe, his friend Zhang Dongsun advised him to pay close attention to the socialist movement.) He was also convinced that the labor movement would become a major social issue and eventually lead either to the social democrats' coming to power or to a socialist revolution in the Russian style. He had no difficulty acknowledging that "as far as the national economy is concerned, socialism is definitely the most valuable theory in modern times," and he was pleased that the promoters of a new culture in China had begun studying it seriously. The spirit of socialism, Liang wrote, was indispensable and indeed an indigenous Chinese tradition dating back to the Confucian imperative of equity and uniformity. But socialism as a social practice needed its own historical conditions, and in Europe it had its origin in the Industrial Revolution. Because the industrial mode of social organization has grown in a perverse way and the more development the greater the damage, socialist thinkers have sought various means to correct it. Everything they have to say can serve as a cure for the symptoms. But to transplant those socialist theories to a

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country like China when there is still no industry of its own, it may be irrelevant to be concerned with their usefulness or advantages. The more troublesome fact is that they do not always address the proper issue.58

For Liang, it was ludicrous to equate gun-wielding warlords with capitalists. Also, given the glaring absence of a considerable middle class and the struggles of the few native merchants to compete with foreign capital, what was the point of organizing labor unions to aggravate an already ailing national industry and commerce? Under the present political system and realities, nationalizing the means of production would amount to "killing the lamb to feed the tiger" of the warlords. The proper issue to address, Liang suggested, was how to define the nature of Chinese society. This would lead to an extensive debate among Chinese historians in the 1920's and 1930's; the central issue for this Social History Controversy would be to which historical vision modern China and its future should subscribe.59 For Liang, it was much more advisable to prevent socialism from becoming a necessity by default than to practice it prematurely and after the European model. Rejecting the pro-capitalist argument that China should concentrate on production, he insisted that both production and the distribution of wealth were equally instrumental and deserved critical attention. Every effort should be made to forestall the possible detriments, social as well as economic, of massive industrialization. The fault of the European Industrial Revolution was that nobody thought of preventing its undesirable side effects. As a result the Europeans now had numerous woes and problems that defied easy or partial solution, even when they tried with the utmost strength. Our advantage is that ours is still a country lagging behind. We have witnessed all the wrong roads they took; we also have access to all the prescriptions they have used for treating the symptoms. As long as we avoid following the wrong road and take preventive measures, we will be able to develop our industry in a rational and healthy way from the outset. Then there is no reason why the dangerous threshold of a future social revolution cannot be surpassed.60

In his fierce debate with the Min bao radicals on the eve of the 1911 Revolution, Liang had argued with great clarity that a political revolution ought to be strictly differentiated from social or racial revolution. Now with the overthrow of the Qing court and the entire country thrown into political, economic, and social disarray, Liang looked beyond the immediate crisis of political legitimacy and real-

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ized that the social question would become a dominant issue in the new republic. To tackle the social question so as to forestall another catastrophe, people had to recognize the social question itself as an integral problem of modern society, one that defied a quick fix or revolutionary solution. It demanded a new postrevolutionary cultural politics as well. Also, because of his now much more critical assessment of modernization in Europe, Liang was able to transpose China's previously much resented backwardness into a conceivably productive historical advantage. Although he never questioned the fundamental yearning for modernization—to suppress that would only result in a continuing subordination to Western technological superiority—the given paradigm of modernity was nonetheless bracketed, and its precedence localized and shown to be far from absolute. This bracketing led directly to Liang's neo-conservative theorization of the function of Chinese culture in a new world civilization after the war. Liang Qichao's new historical vision, it is necessary to emphasize, was not premised on a vindictive discovery of the fallibility of the West. On the contrary, it registered his hope that the recent war would be an occasion for people to pause and rethink the future of the world as a whole. Even though he realized that national selfdetermination and independence, after President Woodrow Wilson's outlining of the function of the League of Nations, would gain much impetus, especially outside Europe, Liang believed that the war also drove home the importance of international cooperation and peaceful coexistence. "In short, cosmopolitanism [shijie zhuyi]will be set in motion from now on."61 This double course of world history, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, would bring about a new world order in which national aggression would not be tolerated. With this inspiring vision of contributing to world peace, Liang Qichao defined the task for the Chinese as developing a "cosmopolitan nation." Ideally the nation, as an organizational mediator between the individual and the world, would coordinate the efforts of each and every individual to contribute to a world civilization. The last section of Liang's account therefore concentrates on "the great responsibility of the Chinese for world civilization." "The ultimate goal of human life," Liang reasoned, "is to contribute to the totality of humankind. Why so? Because only this totality is the ultimate of 'self.' To realize one's 'self,' one has to move in that direction." For the Chinese, already making up one quarter of the world's popula-

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tion, the responsibility seemed inevitable: "To enrich our civilization with Western civilization on the one hand, and complement Western civilization with our own on the other, so that a new civilization will grow out of this synthesis." In more specific terms, every Chinese should respect "native culture" and at the same time gain a better understanding of it by using the "rigorous" Western method of scientific investigation. The "new cultural system," a product of synthesization and selection, should be extended widely to benefit humankind. At this point Liang issued his well-known call to the young people of China. This plea may reverberate with "evangelistic zeal,"62 but it also vividly expresses Liang's deep conviction of the coming together of a world space: "Our beloved youth! Attention! Forward march! On the other shore of the great ocean there are millions of people bewailing the bankruptcy of material civilization and crying out most piteously for help, waiting for you to come to their salvation."63 In Liang's reflections on his journey through Europe, he emphatically introduced the notion of "culture" as a synthetic, positive value. "Culture" here is not yet the functionalist anthropological description of a particular "set of symbolic devices for controlling behavior, extrasomatic sources of information,"64 nor is it completely equivalent to traditional high culture or elitist literary training. It bears a closer affinity to the conservative Arnoldian invocation of "culture" as a humanizing educational program for a philistine bourgeois society scrambling to assert itself other than economically. Such an essentially liberal-humanist conception of value led directly to an anthropological definition of "culture" by Liang that becomes much more systematic in his proposal for a comprehensive cultural history.65 At the same time, "culture" for Liang also partook of the realm of "ideal," in which, as Raymond Williams observed, "culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values . . . values which can be seen to compose a timeless order, or to have permanent reference to the universal human condition."66 For Liang, "culture" suggests an imaginative and remedial overcoming of the perceived insufficiencies of modernity, which is nevertheless an inescapable global condition. In this visionary moment lay the conceptual origin and validity of the New Culture movement that Liang Qichao would undertake upon his return. The widespread intellectual interest in "culture" during the 1920's, a high point of which was the "science and metaphysics" de-

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bate, signaled a creative critique, from a group of cosmopolitan intellectuals, of modern industrial civilization. It also predetermined the ideological complexity of the New Culture movement. The "new culture" that Liang Qichao envisaged and actively promoted had as its agenda not so much an Enlightenment project (the dominant ethos of the May Fourth era) as a restorative syncretism that aimed at rethinking modernity as such. The cultural iconoclasm of May Fourth radicalism also called for a new culture, but the "new" there still had all the underpinnings of a modernist desire for change and progress. The Enlightenment mentality embedded in the new culture vociferously advocated by Chen Duxiu and the fledging student movement marked the fourth wave of a continuous collective effort to modernize China—from technological modifications to institutional reforms to political revolution and finally to cultural transformation. The May Fourth discourse of Enlightenment, drawing on both a nationalist politics and universalist ideas of science and democracy, directly resonated with Liang's earlier vision of a new citizenry, whose central characteristic was a new collective consciousness, and the nation as a reinvented political agency. A rhetoric of national crisis was integral to the political mobilization necessary to forge this new nationalist subjectivity and to legitimize its political sovereignty. Enlightenment became a necessity when national salvation was presented as the only acceptable political choice. In other words, Enlightenment discourse was premised on a pervasive crisis-consciousness.67 As now envisioned by Liang Qichao, however, the task of cultural reconstruction differed considerably from his previous project of renovating the people. His revolutionary call for a new citizenry had been made out of a modernist-rationalist rejection of the Chinese tradition, and implicit in it had been an anxiety to transform China into a modern nation-state on the European model. His current conception of a reconstructive culture was a post-catastrophe response rather than crisis-consciousness itself. The "new culture," as a result, obtained its energy and symbolic resources from a reaffirmed spatiality rather than a universalist future-oriented temporality. Liang's rediscovery of the native tradition, in other wojds, pointed beyond a regulative "modern narrative of emancipation" (science and heroism) toward a differential and paralogical space.68 It would be misleading to call Liang an advocate of "national essence" or narodnik nationalist, for embedded in his vision was an unmistakably "cosmopolitan nation." What the new culture would suggest, eventually, may be

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called a postnationalist global imaginary in which cultural differentiation, rather than political uniformity, was the source of meaning and self-conception. It would be a new spatiotemporal configuration that no longer sought temporal unity and accepted that modernity as a global condition was more complex and diverse than a political enterprise. In Liang Qichao's historical thinking during the 1920's, we will find much systematic theorization of this global imaginary of difference. A direct testament to the provocativeness of Liang Qichao's conception of new culture was Liang Shuming's collection of lectures entitled Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, published in 1921. Liang Shuming proposed to study "culture" as a comprehensive system covering the spiritual, social, and material aspects of human society, embodied "in the way a given nation exists."09 Each culture and its observable features are rooted in its own philosophical resolution with regard to the primal "will to life." Three distinct attitudes toward the relation between life and reality, in Liang Shuming's account, distinguish Western, Chinese, and Indian cultures from one another. Liang Shuming's emphasis on the different logics underlying Western, Indian, and Chinese cultures came partially as a critical response to Liang Qichao's Impressions of Travels in Europe. On the one hand, Liang Shuming rejected the notion that there could be a synthetic growth out of two different cultures; on the other, he derided as beside the point the May Fourth advocacy of science and democracy. Instead, as the last great Confucian, Liang Shuming believed that Western culture was the preliminary stage of world civilization and would fulfill its historical purpose in solving the problem of material scarcity. Only Chinese culture, embodied in the premature Confucian ideal of universal harmony, could provide the world with a consummating alternative. Thus "the future culture of the world will be a revived Chinese culture."70 Both Liangs shared the same confidence in the relevance of Chinese culture to the modern world. Liang Qichao would have little objection to Liang Shuming's view that this Chinese future was unobtainable without finishing the first course of positive civilization. In the first half of the 1920's, Liang Shuming's meta-narrative of world cultural systems forming a progressive continuity caused considerable intellectual excitement and laid the ground for comparative cultural studies as a systematic discipline.71 His criticism of the capi-

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talist mode of production as alienating and unnatural added much force to his advocacy of socialism, in particular guild socialism. To this general effort to relocate Chinese culture and examine its relation to modernity, Liang Qichao's major contributions were first a historical narrative, Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period, and then the much more systematic Research Method for Chinese History. Before sailing to China from Marseilles in January 1920, Liang Qichao and his fellow travelers had already started making ambitious plans for the near future. They had read about the May Fourth Incident from afar, but Liang, having by then formally announced his decision to retire from politics, was too focused on his new plans to make much of an observation. On Liang and company's agenda for a New Culture movement were initially four separate enterprises: starting a business venture to secure financial resources, creating a monthly magazine and a press, establishing a university as an institutional stronghold, and sending students abroad, in particular to Germany.72 Throughout the first hal of the 1920's, under the able leadership of Liang Qichao, this group of intellectuals, most of them educated abroad and with Jiang Fangzhen, Ding Wenjiang, Carsun Chang, Zhang Dongsun, and later Hu Shi as its core members, launched an influential educational and intellectual campaign, mostly in fast-growing urban centers such as Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. For all the financial difficulties and other hardships they encountered—for instance, Liang's plan to set up a Cultural Academy in 1923 fell through due to lack of funding— "they generated a great impact through their cultural movement organized around scholarly societies and their teaching at various universities. This impact was particularly palpable on the intellectual circles of the May Fourth period."73 The explicit goal of this group of new culture intellectuals was now to facilitate a Chinese renaissance, although they could not agree on the means to achieve it and the meaning of such a cultural revival. (As early as June 23, 1919, Liang Qichao delivered a speech on "the Chinese renaissance" to the Literary Society in London.)74 The ideal outcome of this renaissance, as Hu Shi was to theorize it years later and in a moment of apparent despair, would be a new civilization that, although it might look "suspiciously occidental," would offer a response to the challenge of modern times. It would mean "the humanistic and rationalistic China resurrected by the touch of the scientific and democratic civilization of the new world."75

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The two scholarly associations created by Liang Qichao and his friends in 1920 were the Society for Common Learning, which had as its organ La Rekonstruo (Gaizao), and the Society for Chinese Lectures. The second society, partially sponsored by the Beijing government, was dedicated solely to inviting well-known foreign scholars to China. John Dewey was its first guest and probably had the greatest influence on modern Chinese philosophy and scholarship, primarily because of his disciple Hu Shi's tireless advocacy.76 Following the American pragmatist came Bertrand Russell, Hans Driesch, and Rabindranath Tagore, among whom Liang found the Indian poet most compatible with himself. Because each visitor had different cultural and intellectual orientations, he imparted a fresh impetus to the New Culture movement and contributed considerably to the growing syncretic discourse on a new cultural system. The achievements of the Society for Common Learning were no less pertinent, if not further reaching. Under the auspices of the society and with support from the prestigious Commercial Press, translations and summaries of a great variety of Western works, in particular books on philosophy, economics, social theory, and psychology, were published over a period of three years. An incomplete list includes such titles as The Meaning of Socialism (B. Glasier), The Economic Foundations of Society (A. Loria), An Introduction to Social Psychology (W. McDougall), The World of Labour (G. D. H. Cole), Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (K. Kautsky), and literary works by Ibsen, Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Victor Hugo, and Turgenev.77 Liang, with considerable help from Ding Wenjiang, translated H. G. Wells's Outline of History, which would have a direct impact on his theorization of modern historicity.78 The grand objective of the Society for Common Learning, as Liang put it succinctly, was to "cultivate a new type of talented young people, promote new culture, and pioneer new forms of politics."79 By September 1920, in an announcement of policy for the newly reformatted journal La Rekonstruo, Liang had a chance to better define the program endorsed by this group of intellectuals, then widely referred to as the Research Clique, who more and more consciously identified themselves as the moderates in the contemporary political spectrum. In fact, the journal was restructured because Liang decided that editor-in-chief Zhang Dongsun was devoting too much space to advocating "guild socialism." In contrast to both the reactionary traditionalists clinging to a supposedly pure native culture and a motley

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group of militant radicals, the moderates were for the most part Western-educated humanist intellectuals who, in the words of Hu Shi, "knew their cultural heritage and tried to study it with the new methodology of modern historical criticism and research."80 In his statement, Liang made it clear that the journal as well as the Society for Common Learning was determined to serve a cultural and a political purpose. Its policy was "to move in the direction of being practical and systematic." For its social program, the journal, now entitled Emancipation and Reconstruction (Jiefang yu gaizao), endorsed the liberal rule-by-law doctrine, local autonomy, professionalism, and equal economic opportunity. The specific call for economic development and equitable distribution of wealth is a hallmark of Liang's moderate liberalism. The journal's cultural politics, however, had a more global concern. "We believe that Chinese civilization is an extremely valuable part of the human heritage. So we Chinese are responsible for reorganizing and enhancing our tradition in order to fulfill the expectations of our ancestors, and to the world we have the obligation to participate and make our contribution."81 Here Liang laid down the principle for what would become the influential and productive "reorganization of the national heritage" movement. From 1920 on, Liang Qichao resumed his prolific scholarly writing and, at the same time, undertook an incredibly busy schedule of lecturing at universities. His focus was to reexamine the great tradition of Chinese culture, primarily intellectual history and historiography. Alongside his plan to write a history of Chinese culture, he once again seriously considered his longtime project of composing a general history of China; this was, however, to remain unfinished, primarily because of his poor health. In many fields, such as historiography (in particular quantitative analysis), sociolinguistics, ethnography, mythology, and even archaeology, Liang's work was pathbreaking and foundational to later developments. His critical attention to methodology reflected the positive influence of modern scientific rationality and bespoke his ideological commitment to building independent and valid disciplines of knowledge that would contribute productively to the new culture. Among Liang's first major works in this period was Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period (1920). The book grew out of a preface to Jiang Fangzhen's History of the European Renaissance, and its composition took about two weeks. In writing the preface, Liang was reminded that the Renaissance was originally an emancipatory intellec-

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tual movement under the guise of studies of antiquity. He saw striking similarities between Qing intellectual development, especially its concentration on textual criticism, and the Renaissance effort to revive the ancient Greek tradition through historical rediscovery.82 From its inception, therefore, Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period was a comparative study and a narrative that followed the basic Renaissance plot. It was also a resumption of Liang's own interest in scholarship and intellectual history. As he himself recalled in the preface, in his 1902 essay "On the General Development of Chinese Scholarship and Thought," he had already likened Chinese scholarship in the past two centuries to the European Renaissance. What defined "the intellectual mainstream of the Qing period," Liang reiterated, was its reaction against Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism and its avowed purpose of "retrieving antiquity." "Its motives and contents were entirely comparable to those of the European Renaissance, and the great impact that occurred in the wake of the European Renaissance is just beginning to emerge in our country today."83 The analogy between the European Renaissance and Qing intellectual history may be "forced" and "questionable"84 and would in fact turn quite metaphysical, but the intellectual development sketched in Liang's account is also a macroscopic metaphor for cultural regeneration. At the outset, Liang celebrated the descriptive metaphor of "intellectual mainstream of the times" (literally "tides of thought" [sichao]). Only in a culturally advanced and continually thriving country are there creative thinking and wave-like cultural movements. "First the tide begins with a feeble force, almost imperceptible, but gradually it mounts—mounts—mounts, until it reaches its ultimate limit, whereupon it ebbs and slowly disappears."85 Not all ideas, however, can become part of the mainstream. To do so, ideas must have considerable merit of their own and, moreover, must meet the needs of the age. Not all times have powerful "tides of thought"; a period with its own overwhelming tide of thought must be one of great cultural vitality. The Qing school of empirical scholarship, according to Liang, was one of the few intellectual movements in Chinese history that actually grew into a tide of thought. Any intellectual mainstream, when it becomes dominant and establishes itself as a new authority, acquires a "religious cast." This inevitably leads to its decline because its original intention or raison d'etre becomes either forgotten or irrelevant. In other words, when original ideas become "popular" and "customary,"

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their revolutionary potentials are exhausted. Liang constructs this organic life-process in Buddhist terms: all transitory phenomena can be divided into four successive stages—birth, life, growth, and death. The development of an intellectual mainstream undergoes four corresponding periods: (1) initiation (birth), (2) flourishing (life), (3) transformation (growth), and (4) decline (death). To be more specific, in the period of initiation, an arising mainstream is usually preoccupied with rebelling against a dominant tradition, its major ethos being challenge and destruction. Construction of the new, at the same time, is often attempted in a fragmentary and experimental fashion, but with an irrepressible energy. After this initial confrontation, the trend becomes the intellectual mainstream by overpowering and sweeping away the opposition and reaches the stage of expansion. Its intellectual content is greatly substantiated and systematized, research methods are constantly perfected, and an institutional hierarchy is thereby steadily consolidated. "Contemporary men of talent and sagacity all consider [the flourishing mainstream] worth following and diligently urge one another on; even less than talented men commit themselves in a chorus of conformity."86 Following this period of institutional hegemony, or what Thomas Kuhn characterizes as "normal science" in his description of the structure of scientific revolutions, comes the inevitable mutation and segmentation, or "anomalies," as Kuhn calls them. All frontiers and areas have been explored to the limit, and people have either to engage themselves in "narrow and deep" studies of minute problems or to apply the accepted research methods to other fields, thereby producing various offshoots within a school. Thus tensions between new, innovative approaches and the established orthodoxy arise and foretell the beginning of the end. After it reaches its peak, a dominant school of learning encourages nothing save slavish imitation, which in turn leads to endless squabbles over trivialities and technical details. Internal strife and anomaly now combine to expose the weaknesses of orthodoxy. Furthermore, "the circumstances have already altered, and social needs have also changed their direction. So if [the dominant school] still wishes to preside with the same authority of its flourishing period, people of any determination must be unwilling to accept its hegemony and those brave ones, who know that to create the new one must overthrow the old, will consequently take it as their objective to dismantle the orthodoxy." At this moment of decline dawns the period of initiation for a new round of organic life-process.

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Liang concludes, "My observation is that the so-called 'tides of thought,' both at home and abroad, ancient and modern, have all followed this course of transformation, and that the three hundred years of the Qing period is a most apt demonstration of it."87 This organicist model of intellectual history, not unlike the Hegelian version of the growth of Spirit or even Toynbee's description of the destiny of all civilizations, seems to Liang to have the most explanatory power. It establishes a highly structural approach to intellectual evolution because it at once registers change as generated by a synchronic system and recognizes continuity as a diachronic process. While acknowledging the impact of an altered environment and external forces, this dynamic structure is able to explain change as the inner workings of a given social and historical condition. Intellectual history is treated as an autonomous system of meaning and also as a model for the intelligibility of the historical past. As Liang would eventually imply, intellectual development underlies the historical process in general. After this general theoretical speculation, Liang proceeded to read the development of Qing scholarship in light of this transformational model. The initial stage of Qing scholarship was a revolutionary "dawn movement" against the metaphysics of Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism, best epitomized in Wang Yangming's idea of "pure conversing." Outstanding among the first rebels were Gu Yanwu and Yan Ruoju, both of whom heralded the new age, the former by calling for honest empirical research to counteract baseless speculation and the latter by engaging in textual criticism and turning the reading of canonical texts into an intellectual and historical problem. The predominant achievement of the first generation of Qing scholars, Liang remarked, was a rediscovery of history or, rather, the historicity of the past. "In order to correct the late Ming error of 'no learning,' people studied ancient books, but the more they read, the more they realized the difficulty of understanding them correctly. Therefore they studied as prerequisites philology, the relationship between words and things, regulations and institutions, and so on."88 Here Liang noticed that the European Renaissance "also emphasized antiquarian studies. This indeed ought to be the inevitable procedure for the advancement of learning." Out of this initial skepticism and interest in recovering a truthful view of the past grew the school of empirical research, which would dominate Qing scholarship

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in the subsequent years of flourishing.89 During this period, empirical research became fully popularized and rapidly ascended the institutional hierarchy. In fields as diverse as textual criticism, philology, phonology, historiography, geography, astronomy, and mathematics, Qing scholars made great progress and often accomplished groundbreaking work. The movement in fact presented a new epistemic system and method, but what distinguished the Qing school of learning was its rigid self-confinement to texts and scriptures. It was a "movement of research methodology" rather than a "movement of ideology." "Is this the reason that its achievements are not as great or as rich as those of the European Renaissance?" This remains Liang's unanswered question. According to Liang, the Qing school of learning disintegrated around the mid-nineteenth century for two main reasons: internal dissension and challenges stemming from an altered environment. On the one hand, the empirical research method peaked and generated no new interests or new fields. An inherent paradox of the school grew ever more evident: it demanded simultaneous reverence for and skepticism toward antiquity. On the other hand, the Opium War with the British broke out in 1839 and brought unprecedented humiliation to China. The tumultuous Taiping Rebellion of the 1850's and 1860's, together with increasing political instability, swept away all complacency and dealt severe blows to narrow, self-absorbed academic pursuits. "The revival of the notion of practical studies for the service of the state burst forth like an uncontrollable fire." As a result, "Western learning" gradually seeped in—first in the form of industrial and military technology and then as justifications for social and institutional modernization. "Scholars hitherto had lived as if in a dark room, unaware of what was outside; now a window was suddenly opened, through which they peered out and discovered all sorts of radiant objects they had never seen before." Soon it became clear to them that to break through that wall and escape from the darkness, they first had to challenge the existing political system. "Therefore, they combined their very elementary knowledge of 'Western learning' with the so-called learning of practical statesmanship from the initiation period in the early Qing and formed an independent school of their own, openly raising the flag of rebellion against the orthodox school."90 In this historical sketch Liang worked out a persuasive narrative of transition: tradition disintegrates not only because it is no longer

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satisfactory but also because a new presence is inserted, by chance and yet forcibly. Thus he traces the emergence of modern China simultaneously on two levels: that of internal systematic breakdown and that of external intrusion at a given moment. These two movements combined to give rise to the period of transformation, which was also the period of decline. It was no accident that the transformation period was short-circuited. Liang explained it as a consequence of Western intrusion. Scholars' "yearning for knowledge from outside became stronger daily and their feelings of disgust with internal tradition grew more intense." The course of native history was violently interrupted, and the intellectual world was left to conduct an agonizing search for meaning as well as language. In Liang's account, the two prominent figures in this transformational period were Kang Youwei the "hurricane" and Liang Qichao the "vigorous propagandist" of new knowledge and historical change. Yet their generation reached maturity in what Liang called the unfavorable environment of a general "hunger for knowledge." They "plunged themselves into excessive speculation and desperate searching, in the hope of founding a new school of learning that would be 'neither Chinese nor Western but actually both Chinese and Western.' This possibility was already precluded by the times, since not only was their indigenous traditional thinking too inveterate and deep-rooted, but their understanding of foreign thought had too shallow and too meager a source." To make things worse, "a most unfortunate aspect of the late Qing drive for the study of Western thought was the almost total absence of the entire body of students returned from the West. . . . As a result, the movement went on for almost twenty years without ever establishing a solid foundation; no sooner had it arisen than it collapsed, to be slighted by society."91 The last years of the Qing (1909-11) witnessed only a prolonged period of decline and no sign of a much anticipated period of initiation to serve as a threshold to a new system of thought and a new culture. Thus, the question of whether the present in which Liang was writing could be considered a period of initiation remained an open one. The central issue, Liang believed, was the form of knowledge. This belief agreed with his new cultural politics. A new period will not arrive in the absence of a viable new system of knowledge. His narrative yields but one possible ending here—from the perspective of historical process, a new era is on the horizon and waits to be born. In Liang's projection, the new era will witness a rich and interactive

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merging of several separate cultural systems, which, coincidentally, his contemporary Liang Shuming had characterized as the Western, Chinese, and Indian philosophies of life and found essentially incompatible. First, Liang Qichao prescribed, science and the scientific spirit will flourish abundantly and turn the Chinese nation into one of the first-class "scientific peoples" of the world. Second, Buddhist philosophy, a timely remedy for an "over-developed material civilization," will be revived to alleviate "spiritual hunger." Third, the native tradition of practical statesmanship and governance, with its focus on "social economy and popular livelihood," will become relevant because it bears a close relationship to contemporary theories of "socialism." "Now this problem is common to humanity all over the world, and the minds of scholars of all nations are vexed by it. I dare say that our country's social economy will prove to be the best testing ground for the new doctrines of the future, and that scholars of our country will have first priority of opinion in this issue." Fourth, literature and art will experience a new age of flourishing and contribute to "a popular cultural movement of extremely diverse interests." Finally, Liang outlines the task of systematically modernizing knowledge and its production. As society becomes increasingly more complex and the subjects of learning to be undertaken more numerous, scholars certainly cannot limit themselves to the study of classical canons, as the Qing scholars did; on the other hand, the indigenous heritage cannot be relinquished either. Therefore, a new school of scholars must appear in the future who will employ the latest scientific methods to recatalogue and reorganize the old learning, extracting its essence and preserving its value, continuing the work left unfinished by the Qing scholars but with ever greater vigor and quality.9'

Obviously these five trends for future intellectual development were also Liang Qichao's agenda for creating a "new cultural system" throughout the 1920's. Together they formed a comprehensive postrevolutionary program for engineering a cultural renaissance in China. The failure of the political revolution made it obvious to Liang that the native tradition could not simply be undone, but rather had to be productively initiated into a new stage. Central to this program, which sought to ground the legitimacy of modernity on a productive appropriation of traditional culture, was the rationalism characteristic of the modern mode of industrial production and division of labor. The "new cultural system" or systematic reorganization of native and traditional culture, therefore, would serve not so much to resist

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as to recognize, and to prepare for, the implications of modernity. This would constitute the fundamental difference between Liang Qichao and Chen Duxiu, and between the two separate cultural politics they represented. Now that modernity is understood as a productive resumption of tradition, the new cultural politics will seek first to establish the validity of different institutions and disciplines. "Those who understand administration always speak of 'regional autonomy, and professional self-regulation.' The same is true of scholarship."93 Liang placed great emphasis on disciplinary specialization in intellectual work. His call for systematization for the sake of intellectual and cultural diversity is certainly reminiscent of his earlier liberal commitments. The modernity of Liang's cultural politics lay in this model of divided management. The transformation of society was no longer conceived as a grand rupture, as was often implied in May Fourth revolutionary ideology; nor was it still to be effected through political mobilization.94 In an age of mounting crises of political legitimacy, Liang's neoconservative cultural politics suggested that the preferable solution was to productively redistribute, rather than further concentrate, political energy. In this spirit Liang finished his systematic work Research Method for Chinese History, which formed a distant dialogue with his "New Historiography" of 1902. In this masterly work Liang developed an anthropological interest in cultural systems and, more pertinently, evoked a global imaginary of difference. For a New Global History Published in January 1922, The Research Method for Chinese History evolved from Liang's lecture notes for a history class he taught at Nankai University, Tianjin. It originated in a lifelong interest in historiography that the New Historian of 1902 had sustained over the tumultuous years that followed. The research method he systematically expounded here, as he noted in the preface, had been instrumental to his own studies of history. In the same preface, Liang argued that a new historiography is once again indispensable for two reasons: traditional historical writings are too abundant and disorganized to allow easy access, and it would be inconceivable, indeed impermissible, for us to "trash the records of our ancestors' activities as worthless and exclude them forever from the realm of human cultural products."95

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Compared to his resolute 1902 repudiation of traditional historiography as nothing more than accounts of mutual beheading or piles of epitaphs, the 1922 work apparently registers a less iconoclastic critique of traditional historiography and raises a different issue: records of the past are unreadable but at the same time have to be read. In dealing with this issue, Liang Qichao proposed an innovative research method combining Qing empirical scholarship, particularly its systematic cross-examination of textual evidence, and modern Western historicity or ideas on the function of history. History must be reorganized and made accessible through a new method: "For that reason, a new history book may be the most urgent task for scholars in our country."96 The contemporary reading of history, observed Liang, was characterized by two developments in modern historical studies that had inevitably impacted people's understanding: reorganization of objective evidence and changes in subjective concepts. The reorganizing process aimed at collecting and verifying "truthful" historical documents, whereas changes in historical concepts, such as the view of history as an ongoing process and the idea of collective social history, helped turn history into a branch of knowledge that bears a close relationship to communal life and contributes to the cultivation of a nation, if not to a cosmopolitan citizen. Modern historiography in Europe and America had grown steadily in these two directions in the past hundred years and showed no sign of slowing down. To modernize Chinese historiography, therefore, one had to begin with a new method of scientifically reorganizing the enormous amount of past records. Only a viable method would establish the validity of the new historiography, because the method itself determined the intelligibility and relevance of historical discourse. The basic knowledge system that underlay the historiographical revolution proposed in 1902 persists in The Research Method. At the beginning of the first chapter, "The Meaning and Scope of History," Liang advanced a general definition not much different from the conclusion reached in "New Historiography." It retains much of the same nationalist commitment and gives succinct expression to modern historical consciousness or historicity. What is history? It is that which records both the subjects and objects of the continuous activities of human society, assesses their general achievement, seeks the relationship of causality therein, and serves as an auxiliary mirror for the general public of modern times. That which specializes in narrating

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the activities of ancient Chinese to provide the modern Chinese nation with an auxiliary mirror is called Chinese history.97

There follows a phrase by phrase explication of this rather dense definition. The basic tenets of modern historical discourse, such as collective progress, causality, and its usefulness, are duly stressed. With the new approach, Liang suggested, historical records can be reread productively. But Liang did not dwell on this new historical discourse as an abstract, universal form. Instead, his discussion quickly narrows to Chinese history and its content. An ideal history of China should not focus only on the political aspect of governance; instead, to meet the needs of modern times, a Chinese history should include research into the complex origin of the nation and its interactions with other cultures and offer an account of its class system, legal institutions, economic conditions, religious beliefs, and fine arts. Liang summarized the main purposes of writing a Chinese history: 1. To demonstrate the formation and development of the Chinese nation so as to deduce the reason it will survive and flourish, and also to detect any signs of decline; 2. To show the number of ethnic groups active in Chinese territory, the conflicts and reconciliations between the Han Chinese and other races, and the subsequent results; 3. To explain the culture of the Chinese nation, its foundations, and its interaction with other cultures of the world; 4. To define the characteristics of the Chinese nation, the position it has in the totality of the human world, and its responsibility for the future of humanity.98

In the next chapter Liang provided a critical and comprehensive survey of traditional historiography. With sympathy and insight he traced the development of history writing in classical China in terms of different styles, various ways of organization, and the corresponding institutional background. Observing that there had been both historiography and historiographical theory in China, he pointedly acknowledged the achievements of major Chinese historians in a long and rich tradition. These historians' viewpoints and approaches may no longer be useful, but this obsolescence is due largely to the inevitable changes in times and environment: "we should not slight or criticize our predecessors from today's perspective."99 The first step in reconstructing and evaluating a past historiographical practice is to answer the question "for whom a history is written." For "the writer can only expect to achieve certain effects with regard to the audience

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intended. With a different readership, a book will accordingly have a different ethos and different organization of contents." Traditional historiography could not be free of aristocratic or elitist interests because it was intended either for the ruling class or for the educated gentry, but in modern times history should have as its largest audience the entire nation.100 The method for building a new historiography is a strategic "expansion through contraction." The "old empire of traditional historiography" has to be dismantled and reorganized by redrawing disciplinary boundaries and fields of investigation. This productionoriented strategy for consolidating the new historical discourse marks a major ideological and methodological difference between The Research Method of 1922 and the less elaborate "New Historiog raphy" of 1902. The palpable desire for formal unity expressed in the 1902 text now gives way to a critical attention to the diversity of historical experience. Although the ultimate goal of the new methodology is to achieve a macrocosmic and causal "narration," history studies are nonetheless expected first to separate and define different fields of investigation. By breaking a general history into a number of separable local histories, historical studies will only advance and produce more scientific knowledge of the past. "The more advanced scholarship is," Liang believes, "the more refined specialization ought to be."101 Distinguishing astronomy as a branch of knowledge from the history of astronomy, for instance, will institute two distinct fields of investigation and qualitatively enrich historical understanding. This new model of reorganizing historical knowledge would lead to a mushrooming of specific and academically organized histories, such as the history of music, Buddhism, literature, philosophy, warfare, and so on, all of which will contribute to a reconstituted, and greatly complicated, representation of the past as an interconnected totality. What is eclipsed by this new strategy is general narrative history. Narrative history as a universal form, as suggested above, now demands a more specific content. Moreover, narrative history as a directly intervening ideological statement (on the destiny of the nation, for example) can accomplish the epistemological revolution it introduces only when attention is shifted, as Thomas Kuhn observes of the revolution in science, "from the cognitive to the normative functions" of the new paradigm. To fully legitimize the new paradigm, theory, methods, and standards "all have to be established, usually in

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an inextricable mixture."102 The switch of interest from a general narrative of the nation to a historical method oriented toward a subject or a discipline, therefore, parallels the transformation of nationalism from a political ideology into a cultural production. In the process, Liang's Research Method also aims at turning traditional historiography into a scientific discipline with its own methodological procedures. For this reason, the most substantial part of The Research Method is the two chapters devoted to a discussion of historical evidence and its examination. What establishes history as a science, according to Liang, ought to be its exclusive dependence on evidence and data; what distinguishes it from other natural and social sciences, however, is the difficulty involved in obtaining hard historical evidence. Liang classified historical evidence into two categories: nonliterary (such as archaeological discoveries, oral tales, and artifacts) and literary (old histories, historical documents, other written texts, and the like). With his new conceptualization of history as a comprehensive cultural process, Liang expanded the scope of evidence and data to encompass historical materials ignored by conventional historiography. New historical sources may be identified and even created because the new interest in cultural history greatly broadens the historian's scope of investigation and gives rise to new subjects. Historical demography, for instance, would involve a close comparative study of official histories, local gazetteers, civil registries, tax records, and military recruiting.103 Based on this approach, Liang Qichao would propose the new discipline of historical statistics. Its purpose was to study the "equilibrium of various forces in the entire society at a given time rather than to focus on a few personalities or events."104 A structural approach, Liang now argued, is better able to reveal the true dynamics and depth of historical processes. History as the record of great events would obscure a large portion of human experience and its normal pattern. (It is significant to see, in historical hindsight, that around the same time the French Annales school was proposing a similar shift from events to la longue duree. With the publication of the Evolution and Mankind series, founded by Henri Berr in 1920, in Georg Iggers's account, "a new orientation in historical writing found expression." "In the place of the event-oriented, chronologically organized history of politics of nation states, the attempt was made here to place social and cultural history, topically approached, into a central position.")105

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The influence of Qing empirical scholarship, in particular its tradition of source criticism (kaoju), is readily observable in Liang's method of examining evidence. The critical cross-examination of all historical evidence, or the early Qing scholars' attitude of skepticism (yigu), is the first step toward a new scientific method when a conceptual reorientation is taking place. Modern Western disciplines of knowledge, such as mythology and anthropology, are incorporated into Liang's approach, although his proposed method is largely a systematization of practices developed in Qing source criticism. Empirical scholarship by itself was not necessarily a scientific body of knowledge, but its method, when integrated into the new knowledge system, was a useful resource. Liang's concern, therefore, was less to search for some legitimizing precedents in classical learning, and much less to satisfy a nationalist pride by projecting a scientific past, than to selectively reclaim what was still of methodological validity. When the modern historiographical revolution sought to institutionalize itself as a method, it found much to affirm in the tradition of Qing historical scholarship.106 Among his close intellectual associates, the geologist Ding Wenjiang, who in 1923 would announce that "the omnipotence of science, and its comprehensiveness, lies not in its subject matter, but in its method," had a great impact on Liang Qichao's interest in historical methodology.107 However, Hu Shi's pioneering book on the early history of Chinese philosophy, published in 1919, probably directly prompted Liang to reassess the methodological value of source criticism. Also in 1919, when Hu Shi outlined the objectives of a Chinese Renaissance, he defined the specific goals in order of ascending importance: to study concrete issues, to import new knowledge and methods, to reorganize the national heritage, and finally to renovate civilization.108 In Hu Shi's work, quoted as a new authority in The Research Method™9 Liang saw a convincing example of the application of source criticism in a creative and rigorous study of the Chinese tradition. It would even inspire Liang to undertake similar studies of Chinese intellectual history.110 Liang Qichao and Hu Shi, from their separate intellectual backgrounds, contributed most to the methodological revolution in historical studies at the time. Under their influence, a new generation of historians would come of age in the late 1920's and accomplish some of the most solid and original work in the new historiography, the best representative of which is the sevenvolume Critique of Ancient History edited by Gu Jiegang.111

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The research method and the epistemological model of "expansion through contraction" that Liang systematically theorized, nonetheless, were also expected to move historical studies beyond mere sectorial discoveries and localized knowledge. They should result in a reconstituted historical totality. Liang never gave up on what Francois Furet, while endorsing a problem-oriented new history, would reject as "the unreasonable ambition of 'total history.'"112 On the contrary, Liang retained it as the final cognitive possibility that helps to keep historical knowledge from being fragmented into unrelated small narratives. Even out of a very practical concern, Liang could not do away with the concept of a total history, for it bespeaks an ultimate commitment that endows the modern historian with purpose and authority. Modern historical consciousness mandates that the historian, as spokesperson for collective human efforts (what Liang described as a "heightened popular consciousness" in the modern West),113 strive for a discourse of totality that serves as the final reconciliation—a universal synthesis of meaning. Either suppressing that totalizing drive or removing the cognitive imperative would result in a crisis of modern historicity, whose function, as we have seen in the case of nationalist historiography, has been to ensure human intervention in the course of history. However, the "expansion" that Liang now postulated as ultimately commensurate with a total history is less temporal than spatial. It in fact suggests that a spatial orientation now moved his search for historical intelligibility more in the direction of a reconstructed synchronic totality. To justify this new spatial consciousness, Liang first distinguished two genres of history: specialized histories (zhuanmen shi) such as accounts of the legal system, philosophy, literature, and art, and general histories (pubian shi), which are in essence "histories of culture." "The historian of the future should on the one hand divide the old territory into separate disciplines and let them follow their own autonomous course, without interfering in their sovereignty; on the other hand he should take the position of a nerve center or central government, draw on all different activities, and discuss them accordingly."114 Without a proper understanding of all specialized histories, there will be no way to see the "true face" of a historical totality. But specialized histories, which should probably be the duty of a specialist in a given discipline rather than that of a historian, do not add up to a general history. "A historian of general history differs in that he needs to have a comprehensive knowledge that transcends

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specific matters and yet runs through them all. Only then wall the relationship between one segment and another become obvious and an understanding of the culture as a whole be obtained."115 Such an ideal general history, however, can hardly be reconstructed by an individual. It should instead be a collective enterprise, drawing on contributions from a group of historians who share the same objectives and research methods. The composition of a general history, therefore, involves more than a temporal reconstruction. It means to arrange various specialized histories into an expansive synchronic, not necessarily harmonious, structure that is also the meaningful totality. Specialized and general histories as two separate but related genres demarcate new fields of investigation and set up new criteria for historical knowledge. Liang found it of first priority to emphasize historical objectivity in research. "History for history's sake," urged Liang, needs to be upheld as a principle against a long tradition of subjugating history to extraneous purposes, such as "explicating the Way" or "serving society." Although it is doubtful whether "pure objectivity in history" is achievable, it has to be a goal to strive for. Here Cromwell's admonition "Paint me as I am," which Liang repeatedly cited, functions in the same way as Ranke's motto of "Wie es eigentlich gewesen" (as it truly was) and becomes the first criterion of the all-important historiographical objectivity. Liang regarded as particularly objectionable the tendency to eulogize or even find excuses for one's own nation. To establish its objectivity, a "truthful history" (xinshi) has to be the result of arduous collection, verification, and evaluation of historical documents and evidence. In short, "historical knowledge should be taken as the end rather than a means." Only then could there possibly be a "good history" (liangshi). "A good history is certainly that which increases the nation's self-consciousness, but true self-consciousness never allows self-deception. Those who wish to awaken others to self-consciousness have still less reason to deceive people."116 But a "real history" (zhenshi) is something else: it should be a representation of the continuity and complexity of human activities as an interconnected, synchronic process. Did I not say that history is a representation of human activities in the past? Since the activities were in the past, the agents must have long since disappeared. How can one represent them if not with a most refined technique? Therefore a real history [zhenshi] should be like a movie. It is composed of numerous single pictures, with lifelike characters and complete settings. When

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one after another these single pictures are put together in sequence to form a reel and a light is projected through it, a living situation is represented. Without the single frames there would be no reel, but once the reel is made up it becomes an organized unit, of which the individual pictures are nothing more than constitutive elements.117

The spirit that enlivens a realistic historical representation resembles the light that shines through the film and illuminates the static and individual frames of imagery. A real history cannot be achieved by the mechanical compilation of historical evidence. The essence of human activity, Liang elaborated, is that it forms an interconnected, dynamic, and purposeful whole. A historian narrating historical facts needs to grasp this totality as a living organism. On the horizontal level, he must examine the background and the light that illuminates it, for this light or historical simultaneity reveals the connection between separate events and keeps the whole from disappearing from view; on the vertical level, he needs to trace causal relationships in the diachronic succession of before and after and avoid breaking a continuous movement into isolated moments. Whereas the diachronic experience affirms historical causality as the first step in constructing historical intelligibility, totalization is an indispensable hermeneutic principle for making sense of the synchronic whole. Such a complex operation, Liang concluded, is absent from traditional historiography; "even among the great number of modern works in Europe and America, it is rare to find."118 Liang's pursuit of a "real" history finally led him to a radical reconceptualization of the structure of human experience. A synchronic system, in this view of historical totality, determines the significance of a diachronic process. The point of historical interpretation, as he expounded it in a chapter entitled "Interpretation of Historical Experience," is to follow the "horizontal and vertical axes" and reveal the necessary connection, however obscured, indirect, and discontinuous it may seem to be, that links events, individuals, and social groups. Unlike the subjects of the natural sciences, what history studies is usually transitory and incomplete rather than repetitive and definite, particular rather than universal, and situated in rather than outside time and space. To better interpret the past as a synchronic and yet causal totality, Liang proposed the concept of a nodal "regime of historical experiences" (shiji jituan) as a hermeneutic device by which to insert an artificial break in the continuum of history and circumscribe a par-

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ticular spatiotemporal construct.119 This isolated historical nodality or complex, such as the French Revolution, the world war of 1914-18, or the struggle between the world proletariat and capitalists, consists in a multitude of historical events and may possess varying degrees of temporal and spatial scope. His purpose in introducing the concept of "regime," emphasized Liang, was to recognize the synchronic, spatial dimension of the human experience of history, for the limitation of traditional "narratives" or "accounts" (benmo) lies in the fact that they connote merely a linear temporality.120 Identifying a regime of historical experiences involves breaking down the abstract totality of human history into manageable objects of study. Each regime constitutes a signifying totality, and this particular structure of meaning is both viable and intelligible insofar as it is established as a synchronic system determined by various, interacting diachronic processes. The "whole picture" of the 1911 Chinese Revolution, for instance, would remain incomplete and inaccessible without "a survey of the general intellectual and institutional developments in Europe, America, and Japan, and of the impact such developments had on the Chinese."121 Historical context, in the pursuit of a general history, is evoked not so much to explain a particular event as to become itself the proper object of historical knowledge and reconstruction. Writing a history, Liang suggested, is like creating a painting; reading a history resembles deciphering a picture. To understand the whole picture, a historian has to review history as played out on a global map. Not only one national history is a "totality," but the history of entire humankind is also a "totality." We Chinese used to believe that the territory of Yu constituted the "universe" [tianxia]. That was a narrow view. But the Europeans shared the same partiality when they thought that the countries around the Mediterranean were the world. The truth is that world history is the composite product of human achievements from each and every country of culture. If we can examine the historical past from this perspective, it will be like flying on an airplane and hovering thousands of feet above to have a panoramic view of the mountains and rivers below, as clear as examining our own hand.122

By acknowledging that all histories are necessarily an imaginative effort at totalization, Liang Qichao called attention to the key operation of an analogical mode of thinking, which the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss would later describe as intrinsic to totemic tax-

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onomies, or the timeless "savage mind" that always totalizes through classification. The historical context that Liang privileged here, insofar as it establishes rather than conceals relations and consequences among historical instances, is essentially a classificatory system. It forms a synchronic structure in which only difference produces meaning and intelligibility. Thanks to mapping as differentiation, the historical consciousness that Liang articulated is transmuted from a modernist obsession with time into a global acceptance of simultaneous difference or the discontinuous "synchrony of the nonsynchronous."123 Yet the temporal dimension of historical experience, or history primarily as events, cannot be dissolved as not pertinent once and for all. On the contrary, the global mapping that Liang perceived as a necessary conceptual framework relies on systematic research into historical processes. For Liang, historical reconstruction is the beginning of comprehensive historical knowledge. "To study one discipline of knowledge without closely examining its evolution through history is to ignore temporal relations. As a result, one will have no means by which to gain insight into the discipline as a system."124 "It is therefore far from being the case," as Levi-Strauss would concur in The Savage Mind, "that the search for intelligibility comes to an end in history as though this were its terminus. Rather, it is history that serves as the point of departure in any question of intelligibility."125 For an anthropologist in particular, reconstructing the historical stages that lead to the present is only the preliminary step toward a systematic interpretation. Indeed, we may argue that Liang Qichao in writing The Research Method for Chinese History was thinking less as a modern historian than as a cultural anthropologist. The distinction between them, again according to Levi-Strauss, is that "one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space."126 Liang's renewed attention to space, or his spatial consciousness, was also in agreement with his liberal-humanist rethinking of the project of modernity. As we have seen, even during his "New Historiography" period, when general enlightenment was his central concern, space as a historical category played a distinctive role in his historical imagination. The modernist valorization of temporality, however, better answered his ideological need to legitimize change at the time. It gave the historian and historical discourse an enormous intellectual power. But the modernist "annihilation of space," as David Harvey

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would characterize it, also threatened to cancel different spatialities and cultural traditions by subjecting them to standardization—both technological and symbolic. Against this vision of history, Liang Qichao after his European trip articulated his skepticism and promoted a revitalization of native tradition. In this effort, "tradition" was to be both historically narrated as such and reorganized so as to signify a contemporary structure of differentiation. Liang's new cultural politics was therefore premised on the logic of an anthropological space, which affirms a global imaginary of difference. For Liang, however, the structural significance of native culture in the global imaginary of difference was more relational than relativistic. Culture as a historically wrought system of meaning is not a sealed-off essence or authenticity to be collected or, as Levenson aptly put it, "museumified."127 On the contrary, it is to be reclaimed as a historical creation, and its full range of implications cannot be appreciated without a global perspective. Global space consequently becomes mobile, interactive, and dialectic, and any local assertion or modification necessarily introduces a structural and therefore global impact, even if the effects may not be immediately observable. "The form of historical movement," Liang contemplated by means of metaphor, "is like an excited body of water, in which one initial ripple is always followed by innumerable others." The morning tide in San Francisco Bay is, therefore, intimately related to the evening ebb off the mouth of the Wusong outside Shanghai.128 When historical movement is equally recognized and distributed over the entire globe, "cultural history" will be adopted as the basis for anthropological discourse because it highlights the goal of human intervention in history as that of producing meaningful difference rather than imposing uniformity. An anthropological study of Chinese culture subsequently became the focus of Liang Qichao's endeavors for the rest of his life and effectively subsumed his project for a general history of the nation. By 1925, he was in the process of putting together a multivolume History of Chinese Culture, which would incorporate his wellknown Research Method for Chinese History, History of Chinese Culture: The Social Organization Chapter, and a fragment of A Bird's-eye View of Historical Facts in the Past Five Thousand Years.129 Culture, as Liang defined it in 1922, ought to include both "material culture" (human instruments and general conditions of existence) and "spiritual culture" (language, ethics, politics, religion, aesthetics, and schol-

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arship) that constitute that "valuable accumulation created by the energy of the human mind." It was this synthetic totality that now needed to be sorted out and represented.130 With this synthetic notion of "culture" as the content of human history, by 1927 Liang Qichao, despite deteriorating health, formalized a comprehensive method for systematic historical investigation and historiography following a yearlong course of lectures at Tsing Hua University. Addressing a new generation of students and future historians, Liang began his lectures by quoting the historians Liu Zhiji and Zhang Xuecheng of the Tang and Qing dynasties, respectively, and emphasizing the four essential qualities of a historian: integrity of character, comprehensive knowledge, critical insight, and artistic talent.131 In his new system of historiography, a general history has to begin with five specialized histories, each of which demands a separate approach and method. These five histories, no longer conceived solely as political biographies of the nation, highlight different aspects of culture as both system and process. They are also based on an apparent synthesis between traditional Chinese historiography and modern historical thinking: 1. History of Individuals (very much modeled after different genres of traditional biography) 2. History of Events (Here Liang emphasizes his notion of "regime of historical experiences") 3. History of Culture ("culture" [wenwu] in the broad sense of both "material" and "spiritual" cultures) 4. History of a Given Region (in the tradition of local gazetteers) 5. History of a Given Period (based on but different from dynastic histories)13 Of these five separate subjects, however, Liang had time only to elaborate on the purpose and method of the history of individuals and the history of culture. His explications clearly reveal the incorporation of traditional historiography into his new methodology. He distinguished five genres of the history of individuals: (1) summary biography of a group of individuals; (2) chronological biography of one individual; (3) biography of one individual; (4) combined biography of two or more individuals; (5) tables of historical personalities. Liang offered a detailed discussion and concrete examples of the formal aspects of and prerequisites for each genre. He also discussed who deserved what kind of biography, focusing on literary figures,

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statesmen, and scholars. His two specific illustrations were biographies of Confucius and the Buddhist monk Tripitaka.133 The "specialized history of culture" (wenwu de zhuanshi) that Liang proposed as the "most important of the specialized histories" is undoubtedly a modern discipline, although it also has ancient equivalents in records and descriptions of institutions and customs. To write a good history of culture, suggested Liang, the rigid method of periodization is far from sufficient; rather, a productive approach is to further divide the subject and to master the whole through parts. As a result, there ought to be three subdivisions in a history of culture: 1. Political history (social organizations and institutions) 2. Economic history (material civilization, in particular living conditions) 3. Cultural history (spiritual life, including histories of language, writing, mythology, religion, scholarship and thought, philosophy, historiography, natural sciences, social sciences, literature, and the fine arts)134 The systematic method for the production of historical knowledge that Liang established through his lectures on methodology had a great impact on the development and institution of historiography as a modern discipline in twentieth-century China. Liang's contribution to the modernization of historical studies at this stage consisted in the systematization not only of the research method but, more important, of the subject matter of history. A new generation of Chinese historians received their training as either auditors or readers of Liang's lectures.135 But the year was already 1927, the beginning of the prolonged civil war between the badly embroiled Nationalists and the insurgent Communists that put a quick and bloody end to all lingering hopes for cultural reconstruction from the May Fourth era. Less than two years later, Liang Qichao's extraordinary life also came to an end amid widespread political chaos and violence. The new system that Liang developed in his Research Method for Chinese History and its extensive supplement also reflects his insight into the complexity of the issue of historical representation, in particular the modern need to represent history as a both diachronic and synchronic totality. In his 1923 speech "Some Important Issues Concerning the Study of Cultural History," he mentioned at least three problems with writing a history of culture. The speech was delivered

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as a public amendment to and a revision of some of the basic assumptions of The Research Method. In his reflections on the practice of writing a history of culture, Liang pinpointed some theoretical difficulties in modern historiography. The primary difficulty, as we understand it now, stemmed from the conceptual challenges that the new structurally oriented investigation of culture inevitably posed to the fundamental premises and principles of modern historical consciousness in general and nationalist historiography in particular. Cultural history, in other words, offered Liang Qichao an opportunity to probe the possibility of a new, postnationalist, and in fact postmodern historical discourse. The first question Liang raised in his speech was a methodological one: How efficient and helpful is the scientific method of induction in representing historical reality? "The predominant objective of induction is to seek 'similarity.' It trims away all that is distinctive about objects, extracts only what appears to be identical, and then makes classifications accordingly to define the nature and history of events." Such a method is "absolutely unacceptable to historiography" because history by definition allows for no identical experience.136 If, however, only differences and dissimilarities are underscored and examined, Liang asked bluntly, how can historical study be an organized project, and how are we to understand the saying that history is an interconnected synchronic totality? Second, is there causality in history or not? To this question Liang now had no ready and straightforward answer. Acknowledging the recent impact of Neo-Kantian thinkers such as Max Wundt and Heinrich Rickert on his thinking, Liang decided that his previous insistence on causality in The Research Method had led to much confusion, especially when he had also warned against the harmful restrictions of a direct and mechanical causality. Instead, he now proposed the Buddhist concept of "intergeneration" or "interdependence" (huyuan). Relationships of interdependence, rather than causality, between events and happenings determine the moving and rising waves of a "boundless and profound ocean of cultural history." "We historians must seek from this perspective the 'movement' and 'dissimilarity1 of history. It will be devastating if we try to force everything into a causality that presupposes 'stasis' and 'similarity.'"137 The notion of causal development is, however, still of limited value, Liang was quick to add, because it adequately explains the development of material civilization, which normally observes the laws of nature. Material

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civilization is an equivalent to nature, and both are legitimate objects of scientific knowledge. The totality of culture comprises two major parts: the seed and the fruit of culture. The seed of culture is creativity. It belongs to the realm of free will and is thus certainly not subjected to causality; the fruit of culture, on the other hand, is crystallized creativity. In other words, it is a "mental energy" of the past that has been transformed into an "environment." After it is environmentalized, it is similar to external nature and thus enters the field of causality.138

The distinction between a creative and unique "seed of culture" and its externalization in the quantifiable "fruit of culture," which can also be understood as the content and form of the human endeavor, is behind Liang's answer to a third and final question: Is history an evolutionary phenomenon? As far as "mental energy" is concerned, evolution is a misnomer, because it suggests cumulative progress at the expense of historical context. To say that Mencius and Xun Zi (Hsiin Tzu) were more evolved than their predecessor Confucius, Liang argued, would be as nonsensical and pointless as to believe that Dante had advanced further than Homer and Shakespeare further than Dante. "Evolution," however, may characterize progress in material civilization. For instance, the difference between an oil lamp and an electric bulb is irrefutable, but it is an external accumulation that remains fatally fragile and ephemeral. In a different context, when discussing the "problem of meaning of science" in an age "with its characteristic rationalization and intellectualization and above all the disenchantment of the world,"139 Max Weber made a similar point. "Scientific work is harnessed to the course of progress" observed the great critic and thinker of modernity in his famous lecture "Science as a Vocation" (1919).140 "In art, however, there is no progress in this sense. . . . A work of art which involved genuine 'fulfillment' can never be surpassed; it will never be out of date."141 "In my opinion"—here Liang more specifically distinguished the content of human life from its possible material form—"the life that people live today, who rely on electric lights and steamships, is not particularly better or more comfortable than that lived by people who used oil lamps and sailing ships."142 Equating material progress with human evolution, Liang suggested, would amount to a degradation of humanity. In the final analysis, only human experience as content could be taken as a redeeming value. If, in Liang's new conception of

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human history, there was an identifiable cultural relativism, enabled by an anthropological distancing, its purpose was to serve less as a defense of the oil lamp than as a questioning of the content of modern convenience-driven life. In fact, Liang was not ready, nor was he proposing, to do away completely with the notion of historical progress, which in the context was a synonym for "evolution." It was a belief that he had long embraced and that embodied his liberal-humanist commitment to human history as a source of meaning. Instead of reducing "progress" to either technological advancement or direct causality, Liang wished to rescue it as the articulation of a global ideal. A revised understanding of human progress ought to cover two themes of history: the movement toward equality and homogenization on the one hand, and the continuous production and appreciation of the cultural heritage of different traditions on the other.143 The ultimate concern of Liang Qichao's continually adjusted philosophy of history is not so much a secondary "dualism that relates the mind and the object, human free will and its environment,"144 as the fundamental dialectic of identity and difference embedded in the problematic experience of worldwide modernity. Liang's final evocation of a global imaginary of difference through the practice of cultural history amounted to an anticipated overcoming of modern homogenization. Cultural history, with its explicit recognition of history as both movement and dissimilarity, suggested a mode of history writing that would overcome the modernistrationalist urge for formal unity. In this sense, Liang Qichao's notion of cultural history embodied a postmodern historical outlook. Although history does move forward and progress temporally, the meaning of the historical process relies on recognizing dissimilarity, which ultimately implies a spatialized simultaneity. The truth of making history is therefore not to impose uniformity through temporalization; rather, it should be an imaginative enterprise of making space, of producing difference against the grain of history. Ever since 1902, Liang Qichao had wanted to write a general history of China. As late as 1927, when he was suffering from poor health and the country was once again embroiled in civil war, Liang still believed that, if given two or three more peaceful years, he could devote all his energy to the project and free himself of his moral obligation to China. But at his untimely death two busy years later, his general Chinese history remained an unfinished project. The postponing of a narrative history, nonetheless, owed much to changes in

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Liang Qichao's philosophy of history. He eventually found untenable and rejected a narrow political "biography of national individuality," as Paul Veyne would describe the obsession of nineteenth-century historiographical practices in Europe.145 The patient enterprise of cultural history that Liang Qichao championed in the early 1920's was nevertheless violently interrupted by sporadic civil wars, large-scale insurgencies inspired by political ideologies (in particular, nationalism), massive imperialist aggression and the resistance to it, the further disintegration of rural China and its political mobilization, and an ever more ambitious and grandiose project of political and social modernization in the new communist regime. Twentieth-century Chinese history as a perpetual pursuit of political modernity through crises never allowed Liang's new cultural politics a chance. On the contrary, historical movements continued to reinforce the nation-state as the sole accountable agency in a global imaginary of identity. In this context, the social and political conditions under which Liang first developed his theory of "cultural history" may be all the more pertinent. It was an ominously brief, if also intensely diverse, moment when China was politically divided and the nation-state was yet to be formed. In other words, the global imaginary of difference implied in the project of "cultural history" was accessible when the nation-state was momentarily suspended and nationalism still to be institutionalized. Liang's cultural politics, apparently, failed to address the immediate and emergent problems of his time. Yet, the judgment of inconsequentiality that befell his conception of history as both movement and dissimilarity does not necessarily vindicate history itself. From the late 1920's, deliberate intellectual constructs were by and large superseded in the maelstrom of collective and often spectacular action. Perhaps by its very practical impossibility, a comprehensive, spatially conceived cultural history only better confirmed its profound relevance and even antithetically revealed the limitations of other historical choices and visions. As the reading here suggests, Liang Qichao's postnationalist historical thinking was a response to the rise of nationalism, and his cultural history looked beyond nationalism as political mobilization and at a necessary postrevolutionary reintegration. From this perspective, one may argue that history has failed Liang's efforts, often in ways Liang predicted with unhappy accuracy.

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If, however, the human mind can only raise questions whose answer is already a historical possibility, we ought to recognize Liang's enterprise of a reconstructive cultural history as a crucial part of the Chinese experience of modernity. By viewing history as a continuous production of cultural difference, Liang both accepted modernity as a global condition and suggested its completion through cultural politics. The task of keeping in sight and alive the "boundless and profound ocean of cultural history" that Liang described should therefore be recognized as a concern of the present. "We should not," as Liang himself would say of our responsibility to historical experience, "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."146

6 Conclusion: Toward a Production of Anthropological Space Suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. —Claude Levi-Strauss "The Making of an Anthropologist," Tristes Tropiques

Through his systematic theorization of the possibility and necessity of a cultural history in the 1920's, Liang Qichao developed a comprehensive historiographical methodology and moved toward a new, postnationalist conception of history. In Liang's view, human history should be grasped as both "movement" and "dissimilarity," both diachronic process and synchronic structure, and historical knowledge ought to reveal "new meaning" in the human past, which in turn would generate "new value" for the present. A modern historian's duty is to reevaluate historical experience and recognize its pertinence. This conception of history and historical knowledge differs from his nationalist thesis in "New Historiography" largely in that it no longer subscribes to the future-oriented vision of a homogeneous flow of time. Moreover, it introduces space as an organizing principle that enables the discovery and generation, rather than the conquest and reduction, of difference in history. Instead of progressive time, a differentiated and irreducible global space now determines Liang's historical thinking. Indeed, the formation of historical discourse is now anchored on a global imaginary of difference, whose key operation is the production of anthropological space. This spatial turn, epitomized in the shift from the proposal for a uniform national history to that for a global "cultural history," marked an important dialectical stage in the development of Liang's historical thinking; it also

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signaled a new insight, on the part of the Chinese historian, into the condition of global modernity. As we have seen, the postnationalist cultural politics entailed by this new historical discourse possessed much intellectual appeal and persuasiveness because of its rhetoric of reconstructive "completion." The prevalent longing for completion, expressed in literary innovations, historical studies, and efforts to develop comprehensive cultural and political theories, was the general driving force behind the New Culture movement in the 1920's. "New culture," as promoted by Liang Qichao and his colleagues, captured an anticipatory vision of both modernity and its positive overcoming. It acknowledged the need for closure in the wake of a failed political revolution; it also indicated recognition of an opportunity, in a post-catastrophic moment, to redesign the project of modernity on a global scale. Against this intellectual background, the collective enterprise of writing a cultural history would participate in instituting a much-needed cultural normalcy at the local level and contribute to recognizing and even generating other spaces on a global scale. This dual operation, or systematic production of anthropological space, was not intended primarily to justify a selective appropriation of modernity. On the contrary, a complete new culture, instead of a completely new culture, would accept modernity as the inescapable human condition and seek to imaginatively transcend its onedimensionality. Given this global vision, cultural history, as the new model for representing historical totality, departed from Liang's earlier nationalist historiographical principles. It amounted to a critical reconsideration of a fundamentally Eurocentric historical discourse. Liang's intellectual journey, from a global imaginary of identity to one of difference, thereby acquired a deep world-historical significance in that the Chinese historian offered his creative thinking on a central problem in the modern understanding of history. The fundamental operation of modern historical thinking or representation—initially a European enterprise—can be, and to a great extent has been, understood in terms of an intensified self-conscious and rationalist appropriation of time, achieved at the expense of a concrete and uneven space. Through this historiographical operation, time assumes the qualities of a dynamic, purposeful, and assertive self/subject, whereas space gradually coalesces into a perfect symbol for that which emerges as an opaque, intransigent, and eventually

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threatening other/object. The dark continent of the unknown is always to be conquered and illuminated by agents of modern selfconsciousness. Modernity, as both an ideological appropriation of time and a historiographical periodization, gained its discursive validity and currency in Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century when, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, expressions like les temps modems, die Neuzeit, and modern times were widely used to designate an emerging political landscape and a new epoch in human history. The conviction that human history had finally moved forward and reached a radical "new age" grew out of a confidence and optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment, in particular its humanist belief in the capability of humanity to design and fashion its own history and destiny. This enormously inspiring vision of universal progress and democratic equivalence gave rise to what I have described as a revolutionary global imaginary of identity, a European invention that established a temporal order for world history. This global imaginary of identity also created its corresponding world space. Drawing inspiration from an increasingly triumphant rhetoric of scientific reason, the philosophes of the Enlightenment had already started to systematically define and catalogue the external, observable world in their project for an exhaustive encyclopedia, as well as their attempt to translate notions about human history and social formation into veritable laws of Nature. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, modern geography as a scientific discipline developed as "Europe encountered the rest of the world, and indeed itself, with the tools of the new objective science." In its formative period, "quantification, perception, social concern—all were dominant concerns of European geography."1 In the process, ever more abstract and mathematically accurate maps of the world contributed to legitimizing a new mode of relating and hierarchizing different peoples and ways of life on the surface of the globe. With the advent of a leveling world map, observes the geographer David Harvey, "the diversity of peoples could be appreciated and analyzed in the secure knowledge that their 'place' in the spatial order was unambiguously known."2 Also in the eighteenth century perspectivism in visual representation and environmental determinism combined to objectify the world space and turn it into an abstract and rational Weltbild. "The fundamental event of the modern age," as Martin Heidegger would later comment, "is the conquest of the world as a picture."3

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The new ordering of world history and space, however, would not be secured until it was assigned a deeper source of meaning. To answer this epistemological as well as ontological need, the human past acquired a new philosophical interest, and the origins of the present became an object of systematic study and ingenious speculation. The deepest aspiration behind all of Voltaire's historical writings, especially his project of composing a "universal history," was to "put the whole of the world's history at the service of the Enlightenment on behalf of the human race, and to show how the Enlightenment had its roots in history."4 For it was widely perceived that the new age or modernity could be neither constituted nor legitimized unless it acquired its own narrative of origin and was rationalized in terms of a universalizable law and norm. Not surprisingly, Voltaire coined and popularized the expression "philosophy of history," which elevated human history to the ultimate truth and meaning of human experience. At this juncture, modern historicity emerged as a powerful reflective discourse and was called upon to support a new historical vision that sought to establish its validity in history itself. Modernity, in other words, ordained its own self-grounding and demanded the institution of a new knowledge system, essential to which was a discourse of historical causality and progress. This modernist-rationalist "philosophy of history"—"modernist" here refers to the cultural logic based on the new hegemony of scientific rationality—reached its completion when Hegel, arguably "the first philosopher to develop a clear concept of modernity,"5 in his philosophy of subjectivity gave a fully systematic expression to modern historical consciousness. In Jiirgen Habermas's account, the original thrust of Hegel's philosophical elaboration of subjectivity was to legitimize modernity as a historical necessity. "As modernity awakens to consciousness of itself, a need for self-reassurance arises, which Hegel understands as a need for philosophy. He sees philosophy confronted with the task of grasping its own time—and for him that means the modern agein thought."6 The self-reassurance that Hegel furnished for modernity happens to be the principle of subjectivity, which consists of both "freedom" and "reflection." In Hegel's own words, "the greatness of our time rests in the fact that freedom, the peculiar possession of mind whereby it is at home with itself, is recognized."7 The philosophy of history, in his all-embracing system of speculative philosophy, has as its objective the investigation of Universal History, which in

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the final analysis "shows the development of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of Spirit, and of the consequent realization of that Freedom."8 Hegel's brief and highly abstract definition of the meaning of history accentuates the two precepts fundamental to modern historical consciousness: subjectivity and development. Human history is conceived as a temporal process of development through which Spirit exercises itself and accumulatively achieves its goal—"an essential union," technically a Hegelian reconciliation (Versohnung) that overcomes the unhappy division between subjective will and objective reality. Consequently, the history of the world can be organized into an essentially "rational process," which, through different stages and in the guise of an infinity of phenomena, realizes itself in the unfolding of human subjectivity or self-consciousness, the attainment of which is no less than Freedom. "The principles of successive phases of Spirit that animate the Nations in a necessitated gradation are themselves only steps in the development of the one universal Spirit, which through them elevates and completes itself to a self-comprehending totality"9 It is this teleological positing of an immanent "self-comprehending totality" that determines Hegel's understanding of history and provides him with the metaphysical basis for a unifying and progressive conception of historical time. In Hegel's philosophy of history, the modern global imaginary of identity found its best expression and justification. Although this system undoubtedly exhibits what Henri Lefebvre called an explicit "fetishization of space in the service of the state,"10 the world space, which had by Hegel's time surfaced to pose conceptual challenges, is temporalized in a totalizing narrative. According to Hegel's timetable, the four consecutive phases of World History, embodied peculiarly in a movement from East to West, are irreversible. "The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning."11 The direction of this movement is determined by the forms and gradations of the unfolding of Spirit in time. The first phase is the East and is characterized by an "unreflected consciousness," an unawakened subjective will that expresses itself in the form of unquestioning "faith, confidence, and obedience." It is the Childhood of History. The Adolescence of human history is located in the Greek world where morality, even though still an absolute principle as in Asia, has acquired some individuality, but remains no more than an "unreflecting

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observance" of what is appropriate. The third phase of the development of Spirit, or the Manhood of History, is the Roman state, a realm of abstract universality. A "purely worldly harmonization" of the antithesis between contingent particular caprice and the abstract universal principle, between individuals and the State, is achieved in the form of despotism in the Roman empire. The fourth and final stage of World History, or its Old Age, is the German world. "The Old Age of Nature is weakness; but that of Spirit is its perfect maturity and strength, in which it returns to unity with itself, but in its fully developed character as Spirit."12 In Hegel's German world, the ultimate Reason of History manifests itself, and the end of history is within sight, if not already reached and made manifest. Hegel's meta-narrative of the triumphant completion of history is, first of all, a prodigiously seminal fable about the meaning of history, a foundational discourse of history that supplied philosophical assurance for everyday, individual human life in the post-Enlightenment era and established a new cosmological order based on what Johannes Fabian calls an "allochronism."13 History as temporal unfolding first reifies and then annihilates space, and finally procures a rational human experience in time. As R. G. Collingwood pointed out, the philosophy of history is for Hegel "not a philosophical reflection on history but history itself raised to a higher power and become philosophical as distinct from merely empirical, that is, history not merely ascertained as so much fact but understood by apprehending the reasons why the facts happened as they did."14 What the process of history gains, in the form of a rationalizing meta-narrative, is an eventual transcendence that will arrive as the final comic resolution, in spite of all the misfortune and suffering that may be wreaked by the cunning of Reason. This narrativization of time and collective human experience helps modern historical discourse fulfill a self-appointed moralizing and organizing function. The imperative for a causal narrative in modern historiography, observes Hayden White, "arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary."15 Indeed, this desire for formal unity threatens to deny history as human property, because it "leaves no room for human agency, presenting an aspect of such wholeness and completeness that it intimidates rather than invites imaginative identification."16 Against such a possible disappearance of human history, thinkers as diverse as Marx, Freud, and Sartre, for instance,

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have attempted to reinstate historical time as a revolutionary, multilayered, and dialectic process. Equally pivotal to Hegel's narrativization of the history of Spirit is the anthropomorphic notion of development, upon which rest the certainty and predictability the philosophy of subjectivity purports to impart to historical experience on a global scale. Collective human experience in time appears to undergo the same stages of growth as human life. In this respect, Hegel's grand philosophy of history unabashedly builds itself on empirical observation of the everyday experience of time, of one generalizable life cycle, and reflects the pervasive influence of the Enlightenment's epistemic principle of the Law of Nature.17 The interpretation of history as organic growth also helps subordinate space to time in that the world space is now relevant or intelligible only to the extent it fits a predetermined temporal schedule. Time is singular and solidified, and space becomes accessible when it is first located in the evolutionary scale of time. In the section entitled "Geographical Basis of History" in the Philosophy of History, Hegel read the physiognomy of the world in parallel with his outlining of the course of human history. Through temporalization, world geography is systematically narrativized and hierarchized, and world history can culminate only in Europe—"the center and end of the old world"—which is coterminous with the present. In the final analysis, the centrality of progressive time in any Hegelian historical narrative is profoundly symptomatic of the modern subject's ontological need to constantly assert itself as the center, as the active master of the present moment. The humanist universality endorsed by modern historical discourse ultimately validates and affirms the "freedom" and "reflection" of the self/subject. Indeed, as suggested above, in Western modernity and its accompanying historicism, time becomes the resource and potential of the self, whereas space often signifies an objectified other. "In the epistemology that was born with the Enlightenment, the difference between the subject of knowledge and its object is the foundation of what separates the past from the present."18 Modern subjectivity is inseparable from a discourse of the other. To consolidate the modern self, an alterity must be designated and represented as such, and "intelligibility is established through a relation with the other."19 The modernist desire to conquer time as a redemptive resource has expressed itself powerfully as, and often in complicity with, the legitimizing ideology behind the maelstrom of modernization, as the sys-

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tematic justification for political emancipation, insurgence, and violence, and as the imperialist and colonialist incentive to dominate and incorporate, under the pretext of a mission civilisatrice, other nonsynchronous and distinct spatialities. The entire body of knowledge subsumed under the name Orientalism, as Edward Said demonstrates, is possible only in modernity. It grows out of a "relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony" between two temporalized spatialities: the modern, progressive Occident and the static, exotic Orient.20 "So far as Orientalism in particular and European knowledge of other societies in general have been concerned, historicism meant that one human history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe, or the West."21 When, for the first time in human history, world space is perceived as the ultimate horizon, this space is simultaneously compressed and hierarchized through a universal, historicist time. The globe becomes representable only in essentialized specificity, namely, in a comprehensive typology of ethnocentrically constructed, evaluated, and reified space. A good illustration of this essentializing specificity may be classical anthropology. Deeply indebted to the Enlightenment vision of universal history, this new discipline diligently attempted to classify human societies across the world.22 In his reveal ing analysis of the connection between classical anthropology and a "succession of attempts to secularize Judeo-Christian Time by generalizing and universalizing it," Johannes Fabian identifies an "allochronism" that effectively temporalizes the troubling experience of "coevalness" (Gleichzeitigkeit). Through a "typological time," anthropological discourse systematically placed its object of study on a hierarchized temporal schedule. "Anthropology emerged and established itself as an allochronic discourse; it is a science of other men in another Time. It is a discourse whose reference has been removed from the present of the speaking/writing subject."23 Societies that have not adopted or participated in progressive historical time are labeled "peoples without history," whereas the "hot" historical societies, in Europe and white America, are believed to be in sole possession of the future of humanity. Furthermore, according to this dominant episteme of the nineteenth century, these "hot" societies form one historical unity. The fact that the famous statement in The Communist Manifesto reads "History of all hitherto society is the history of class struggle" rather than "History of all hitherto societies" is a tell-

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ing instance. As recently pointed out, Marx and Engels "distinguish between societies in time and postulate an order of their historical succession, but ignore their contemporary relations in space with all the profound implications which may be involved for their internal constitution."24 For Marx the visionary historicist, the goal of history is to introduce all the "cold," ahistorical societies to the maelstrom of historical progress, even at the price of violence.25 Human perfectibility, through history as a rational process, is indeed the express assumption of modern historicism. The modernist subordination of space to time is also faithfully mirrored in nationalist ideology, "a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century."26 Yet the irony is that nationalism also led to a dialectical negation of this subordination and helped reassert space as a cognitive principle. This is why nationalism bears profound relevance to the present investigation of the discourse of modernity and its appropriation of history. It was German philosophers and historians such as Herder who made the first theoretical contributions to the emergence of nationalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasion. They insisted on the necessary link between historical knowledge and national consciousness, between native culture and articulable national identity, partially because German historicism at the time was more of a reaction, or anti-modernist sentiment, against the largely French Enlightenment notion of universal history or civilisation.27 The French Revolution itself, however, also contributed directly to the maturing and spread of nationalism as a modern political ideology and an effective means of mass mobilization. Both an outgrowth of and testimony to modern historicity, nationalist discourse is premised on two rationalist themes: subjectivity as the reason of history, and historical progress as the universal norm. Any given national history eventually has to validate and vindicate itself by participating in universal time, whereas subjectivity, as a collective claim to political identity, is often explicitly identified with a reified territorial space. The fundamental nationalist historiographical operation is therefore to systematically translate a reinforced spatial particularity into a temporal causality. Here arises a persistent contradiction in nationalist ideology. "Nationalist thought," as Partha Chatterjee observes, "in agreeing to become 'modern,' accepts the claim to universality of this 'modern' framework of knowledge. Yet it also asserts the autonomous identity of a national culture. It thus

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simultaneously rejects and accepts the dominance, both epistemic and moral, of an alien culture."28 Nationalism has always been caught in a painful vacillation between modernity and native tradition, between epochalism and essentialism, between universal time and reified territorial space. It is a profoundly and archaically ambivalent discourse due to, as Homi Bhabha succinctly summarizes, "its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies."29 In terms of its geographical implications, nationalism invariably contains the contradictory urge both to subscribe to Western modernity and to resist its domination. This contradiction proves to be crippling for national independence movements, not necessarily during the initial struggle when nationalism functions as a political ideology for mass mobilization but rather in the stage of postcolonial, postrevolutionary legitimation and reconstruction.30 Modern Chinese historical consciousness becomes articulable when nationalism as a political ideology is introduced and evoked to function as a major generator of fresh social and intellectual energies and imaginings. The introduction of nationalism was historically preceded by the intrusion of imperialist forces, which, inadvertently and with violence, created a new world space for the Chinese. As the first Chinese historian to call for a nationalist "new historiography," Liang Qichao was also the leading contributor to a "historiographical revolution" engineered primarily to help China develop itself into a modern nation-state. To have access to world history, or rather to earn the nation its historical representation, is tantamount to a revolutionary insurgence. Yet this insurgence concentrates on affirming the political identity of the nation-state and on claiming a democratic equivalence with other members of the modern world. The modernity of a nationalist "new historiography" consequently lies in its emphasis on history as a universalizable form, on formal principles that now surreptitiously function as the content of a master, totalizing history. The goal of the new historiography is to demonstrate that the Chinese are not only a "people with history" but, more important, a people in and of history. In this sense, as Joseph Levenson suggested, "the act of writing history can be an historic act itself,"31 but it is nonetheless a history conceived and prescribed by others. Thus almost immediately this new, modern historical consciousness turns into an unhappy consciousness, whose unfailing source of anxiety is the violent and unprecedented separation of time from space or the difficulty of completely subsuming a reified territorial

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space, now evoked as a mirror-image of national identity, under a homogeneous and progressive time. This separation can also be understood as a persistent disjunction between the new historiography as both universal form and specific content. We witness, for instance, Liang Qichao's intense interest in a typological classification of world geography, but the classification of the global space has to be continually ordered and subsumed by a historical time. For the nationalist historian, the need to make sense of modern political geography is constantly deflected or deflated into an impossible situation. On the one hand, thanks to the presence of a totalizing world map, there is the perceived need to inscribe China into the global space, to make it contemporaneous, if not ultimately identical, with other modern nations, in particular the West; on the other hand, to achieve that goal implies a cancellation of the indigenous space, which increasingly reveals itself to be not merely a political concept but also the repository of cultural values and symbols. At this point, the nationalist anxiety probably results more from the recognition of a complicity between nationalism and the imperialist aggressors. If the objective of a nationalist revolution is to produce another nation—a Young China for Liang—in the modern world space, to complete that revolution, as we have seen, nationalism has to turn to a new strategy for its legitimation, namely, the affirmation of native culture. Affirmation of native culture, in this context, has to go beyond pride in the nation's past to a different vision of history, a postnationalist cultural politics that questions the world system of nation-states. Indeed, the uneasy nationalist subscription to universal time finally leads to its undoing. The inherent tension between time and space in nationalist discourse and in the project of a nationalist modernity becomes more unavoidable when nationalism, as a persuasive ideology for political mobilization, serves its historical function and changes the political landscape of the globe. When contemplating the destiny of the whole continent of Africa on a new historical threshold, the first major postcolonial thinker, Frantz Fanon, recognized the urgent need to free nationalism from a "sterile formalism." "A bourgeoisie that provides nationalism alone as food for the masses fails in its mission and gets, caught up in a whole series of mishaps. But if nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up

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a blind alley."32 Yet this postnationalist humanism, which Fanon believed to be an essential part of developing a nation of "conscious and sovereign men," will also introduce an increasingly extensive examination of the very content of such new social and political needs and projects. Since the "entire inhabited world has been raised, like Europe, to the rank of national history," Francois Furet pointed out in the early 1970's, "space has thus become historicized, but at the cost of a fragmentation of time. As history gradually absorbs the whole of mankind and becomes less Eurocentric, it faces the ethnological challenge represented by the multiplicity of societies and cultures. This multiplicity undermines the notion of homogeneous time."33 The arrival of a postcolonial age following World War II contributed to this "fragmentation of time," and the new "ethnological challenge" would lead to what James Clifford calls "ethnographical modernity," a predicament created by increasing demographic mobility, the blurring of national boundaries, and competing and heterogeneous cultures. "What has been new," as Robert Young observed more recently, "in the years since the Second World War during which, for the most part, the decolonization of the European empires has taken place, has been the accompanying attempt to decolonize European thought and the forms of its history as well. It thus marks that fundamental shift and cultural crisis currently characterized as postmodernism."34 This ethnographical modernity or cultural crisis has in addition prompted further critical reexamination, from within the European tradition, of the philosophical foundation of Western modernity. Derrida's deconstruction of a metaphysics of "presence" or "essence," for example, derives not only from the Saussurean operation of inserting a dispersive space between the signified and the signifier but also, and perhaps more relevantly, from the anthropological encounter with a different historical locus. The central place of Claude LeviStrauss's work in poststructuralist thinking is very telling here. At one point, Derrida explicitly relates the necessary condition for his critique of Western metaphysics with the ethnographical reconsideration of the Other. "In fact one can assume that ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when a decentering had come about: at the moment when European culture—and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts—had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself

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as the culture of reference."35 The political potency of reconstruction, in the final analysis, lies in its challenge to "the concept, the authority, and assumed primacy of, the category of 'the West.' "3G In the same spirit, Michel Foucault rejected the domination of historical time by welcoming the arrival of a new "epoch of space." The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. . . . The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.37

Thus we enter a postmodern epoch of space when the modern obsession with time is recognized as Eurocentric and resulting in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as a "cognitive failure" at different levels of engaging history.38 The reconceptualization of moder history in terms of space instead of time will inspire new insights into the ambiguities and tensions of both modernity and history. It has already effected a proliferation of "geographical imaginations" committed to a careful reexamination of representations and appropriations of a constitutive alterity, which may be the historical past, the colonized and the silenced, women's experience, or space itself.39 It is in this sense that Edward Soja calls for a "reassertion of space" as a critical category to reveal relations and consequences in the postmodern condition. As he puts it, a "politicized spatial consciousness and a radical spatial praxis" need to be developed so as to overcome the modernist despatialization of history.40 Undoing the epistemic violence exercised by the modernist temporalization of space, however, does not mean endowing space with the same political authority and moral absoluteness once appropriated by modern temporality. On the contrary, the postmodernist engagement often takes the form of negotiation and productive resistance, for a postmodernist politics becomes conceivable only after the fact of epistemic violence, after one form of historical discourse establishes its hegemony. In fact, the postmodernist engagement with alterity or the "other" shares the same historical condition and epistemological strategy as both postnationalism and postcolonial thinking. The productive resistance endorsed by postnationalism becomes a necessary choice when nationalism as a unitary political discourse

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is also understood as reductive, totalitarian, and finally intrinsically Eurocentric. Postcolonial discourse, too, needs to contain both colonialism and its political negation—anti-colonialism—by further decolonizing the world-historical order that engendered these two in the first place. In this context, we see the pivotal role that culture and cultural politics come to play. Now consciously retrieved and constructed as the living embodiment of concrete and yet collective experiences of history, culture offers a new ground for negotiations and contestations with the dominant narrative of history. Cultural politics is an inevitable form of postmodernist resistance in that it makes it imperative to understand history as a multiple and heterogeneous content. A cultural geography, Peter Jackson suggests, ought to help us uncover various "maps of meaning."41 If modernity has been preoccupied with producing, in fact duplicating, things in space (such as the modern nation-state), a qualitative leap in our conceptions, as Henri Lefebvre once theorized, should lead to a "production of space."42 This reconquest of history through the production of space is the point of both arrival and departure in Liang Qichao's historical thinking. Cultural history as a discourse that enables negotiations among historical visions is the logical consummation of Liang's postnationalist political engagement in the wake of the 1911 Chinese Revolution. His cultural history is also a cultural geography, for which history furnishes only the beginnings of intelligibility. For this reason, to Liang Qichao Chinese culture was both an anthropological object of study and a living symbolic system, both historical and contemporary. It opened a vast field of representation in which a Chinese identity could be imaginatively constructed as a relational difference. At the same time, Liang's anthropological interest in and sensitivity to Chinese culture grew out of his understanding of the global space as an interconnected and yet differentiated totality. The significance of Chinese culture, as Liang saw it, lies in its contribution to the content of an enriched human experience, even as the modern time-space compression continues to shrink the world space and standardize the forms of human existence. This notion of culture as a value made it possible for him to conceive of an emerging cosmopolitan civilization that was at once more global and more self-consciously diverse. Liang's postnationalist cultural politics anticipated Fanon's famous insight: "National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension."43

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This final reconciliation of anthropological space with historical time makes Liang Qichao abundantly contemporary with our own time, both inextricably modern and postmodern. The rediscovery of space in his historical thinking, however, should be carefully distinguished from a certain postmodern "spatial historiography" in which, as Fredric Jameson critically observes, the vertical is replaced by the horizontal, time by space, and depth by system.44 For Liang, space is not an empty structural principle doggedly antithetical to historical depth. On the contrary, it demands as its content historical knowledge, and the production of anthropological space necessarily takes place through collective and conscious human intervention. In the words of Liang, history ought to be a continuous "movement" that shores up, rather than washes out, "dissimilarity." Joseph Levenson was absolutely right in claiming that "the contraction of China from a world to a nation in the world changed the Chinese historical consciousness." This modern historical consciousness, undoubtedly incurred by a violent time-space compression, found its mature and complete expression when Liang Qichao, in his notion of a differentiating cultural history, moved beyond the reified space of the nation and turned to a global imaginary of difference, which he invoked to resist a modernist-rationalist homogenization of time and space. Moreover, through his vision of a "boundless and profound ocean of cultural history," Liang transcended the nationalist discourse of modernity and made it clear that to contemplate the totality of human history in time and space was to encounter nothing short of the sublime.

Reference Matter

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Notes

For complete author names, titles, and publication data for the works cited here in short form, see the Bibliography, pp. 271-82. For the abbreviations used here, see p. xi.

Introduction 1. "Sanshi zishu" (Autobiography at thirty), YBSHJ-WJ 11:15. 2. Levenson, "The Genesis of Confucian China and Its Modern Fate" in Curtis, p. 288. For another discussion of the impact of the new worldview, see Yin Haiguang, "Tianchao moxing de shijieguan" (The worldview of the heavenly reign model), in Yin, pp. 1-26. 3. For a recent appraisal of Liang's contribution as a historian, see Xu, Xinshixue jiushinian. 4. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. vii. 5. See Franz Schurmann, "Joseph Levenson on China and the World," in Meisner and Murphey, pp. 58-75. 6. Chang P'eng-yuan, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming (1964); H. Chang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890-1907(1971); Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism (1972); see pp. 203-7 of Huang's book for a review of scholarship on Liang until the early 1970's. 7. The final version was co-edited by Ding and Zhao Fengtian. 8. See Li Guojun. 9. The clumsiest example of this denunciatory approach to Liang is perhaps Meng Xiangcai's biography of Liang Qichao (1980). Meng's book belonged to a period during which historical studies were brutally subject to serving the current ideological needs of the political establishment. It is ironical that Meng's book should have been republished in Taiwan (1990). For a subtler approach, in the same historiographical tradition, see Chen Mengjian.

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10. See, e.g., Xia; Karl; Chen Feng. 11. At the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Boston, March 24-27, 1994, there was a session entitled "New Perspectives on Liang Qichao (1873-1929)," at which Chang P'eng-yuan called for a reevaluation of Liang's legacy in light of the recent bankruptcy of the ideology of revolution. 12. Harvey, pp. 271-75. 13. Giddens, The Nation-State, p. 212. 14. Mudimbe, p. 184. Also see his "Conclusion: The Geography of a Discourse," pp. 197-200.

Chapter 1 I. It is estimated that, for this journal alone, Liang wrote more than 450,000 words in 1902, far exceeding his average of 330,000 words each year for 33 years running (Li Guojun, p. 7). 2.. See Liang, "Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi" (On the relationship between fiction and the governance of the people), YBSHJ-WJ 10: 6-10. Qunzhi here probably is better rendered "democracy." 3. Liang, Qingdai xueshu gailun (Intellectual trends in the Qing period), in Un Yi, p. 253; see the Hsu trans., p. 102. 4. Ibid. 5. "Zili shi," NPCB, p. 267. 6. Liang, "Sanshi zishu," YBSHJ-WJ 11: 16. 7. For a discussion of Xu Jiyu's 1848 book, see Drake, esp. pp. 60-68. 8. "Lun xue riwen zhi yi" (On the benefit of learning the Japanese language), YBSHJ-WJ 4: 80. 9. Bianfa tongyi, YBSHJ-WJ 1:1-3. 10. Levenson, Confucian China, 1: 100. See ibid., chap. 7 (pp. 95-116) for a succinct account of the history of the two interdependent notions of tianxia and guojia. Levenson interpreted the ideology represented by the notion of tianxia as culturalism and the ideology behind the new conception of guojia as nationalism. Both aim at achieving an equivalence between the West and China, with one emphasizing the universality of the Chinese tradition and the other depicting China as a modern nation. For a more detailed discussion of the transition from tianxia to guojia in Liang Qichao's thinking, see Levenson's Liang Ch'i-ch'aot pp. 109-22; note especially his comment (p. 115): "As a nation and not a world, China subscribes to a new world view: that history is not the story of one great society but of the conflicts between autonomous societies." II. Scalapino and Yu, pp. 116-17. 12. Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. 45. Huang's book, especially chap. 3, "The Idea of the New Citizen and the Influence of Meiji Japan," pp. 36-67, is an excellent study of Liang's experience and his subsequent transformation in Japan. 13. Ibid., pp. 54-55.

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14. See, e.g., Liang's 1899 essay "Lun Zhina dull zhi shili yu Riben dongfang zhengce" (On the strength of Chinese independence and Japanese policy toward the East), YBSHJ-WJ 4: 67-71. 15. Ziyou shu (Book of liberal writings), YBSHJ-ZJ 2:37. 16. See Scalapino and Yu, p. 121. 17. Ziyou shu, YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 1. See also Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (pp. 72, 182), for a discussion of Liang's initial learning of Mill from Japanese thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Masanao. 18. In response to readers' inquiries, Liang listed all Japanese translations of works by Mill and Spencer and commented that none of them could compare for clarity and style to Yan Fu's translation (Yinbingshi 4: 154). He gave Nakamura's first name as Keitaro. 19. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 4, 87; see also pp. 92-101. 20. See Wang Ermin, "Shijiu shiji Zhongguo shidafu dui Zhongxi guanxi zhi lijie ji ransheng zhi xin guannian" (The Chinese gentry-literati's understanding of the East-West relationship in the nineteenth century and the new ideas developed therefrom), in his Zhongguo jindai sixiang, p. 23. "New Learning," observes Wang, is a concept derived from "Western Learning," with basically the same meaning, but it came into use only after 1894. See Zhang Liwen, "Zhongguo jindai xinxue jiqi fazhan jieduan" (New learning in modern China and its stages of development), in his Zhongguo jindai xinxue, pp. 1-22, where he proposes xinxue (new learning) as a general description of the new philosophical system and social discourse that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. 21. James Legge's (p. 361) translation reads: "If you can one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation." 22. "Jingshi wen xinbian xu" (Preface to the new edition of essays on practical governance), YBSHJ-WJ 2: 46. 23. This is Michel Foucault's (Order of Things, pp. 67-71) characterization of the Classical age in Europe. 24. "Jingshi wen xinbian xu," YBSHJ-WJ 2: 47. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Wang Ermin, p. 130. 28. This period of Liang Qichao's life (1898-1902) is usually considered the most radical stage of his intellectual development. For comprehensive documentation, see chap. 4, "New Citizen, Destruction, and Revolution," of Chang P'eng-yiian, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming. 29. "Baojiao fei suoyi zun Kong lun" (Preservation of faith is not the way to exalt Confucius), YBSHJ-WJ 9: 56. 30. Ibid., p. 50. 31. Ibid., p. 51. 32. As Hayden White (Metahistory, pp. 31-42) argues, the move from one dominant trope in figurative language to another often signals a new historical consciousness and configuration.

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Notes to Pages 21 -29

33. See Liang, "Lun minzu jinzheng zhi dashi" (On the general tendency of international competition), YBSHJ-WJ 10: 11. It is revealing to compare this essay with Liang's 1899 essay "Lun jinshi guomin jinzheng zhi dashi ji Zhongguo zhi qiantu" (On the modern tendency of competition among nations and the future of China), YBSHJ-WJ 4: 56-61, where apparently nationalism was not an ideology or analytical category. 34. See Nathan, pp. 57-58, especially his comment on p. 57: "In the essays written between 1896 and 1903, Liang repeatedly performs an act of philosophical legerdemain that is bound to baffle Western readers. Into the hat go individual rights, freedoms, and autonomy, and out of the hat come group rights, freedoms, and autonomy. Even after following this trick several times, one cannot easily analyze how it is done. The answer lies in Liang's refusal to admit that individual interests might conflict in any fundamental way with those of the group." 35. H. Chang, p. 158; for a detailed, section-by-section discussion of the ideologies and arguments of Liang's Discourse on the New Citizen, see chap. 6 of Chang's book (pp. 149-219). 36. Levenson, "The Province, the Nation, and the World: The Problem of Chinese Identity," in Feuerwerker et al., p. 271. 37. Chatterjee (The Nation, p. 74) continues: "Thus, the legal-institutional forms of political authority that nationalists subscribed to were entirely in conformity with the principles of a modern regime of power and were often modeled on specific examples created by Western Europe and North America. In this public sphere created by the political processes of the colonial state, therefore, the nationalist criticism was not that colonial rule was imposing alien institutions of state on indigenous society but rather that it was restricting and even violating the true principles of modern government." 38. Xinmin shuo (Discourse on the new citizen), YBSHJ-ZJ 4: 1. 39. Ibid., p. 3. 40. "Lun fangqi ziyou zhi zui," Ziyou shu, YBSHJ-zj 2: 23. 41. "Baoquan Zhina" (Protecting China), ibid., p. 40. 42. See "Di shisi jie: lun shengli fenli" (Section fourteen: on production and distribution), Xinmin shuo, YBSHJ-ZJ 4: 87-93. 43. "Di shiba jie: lun side" (Section eighteen: on private virtues), ibid., pp. 118-43. 44. Ibid., p. 6. 45. Ibid., pp. 4-6. 46. Vattimo, p. 100. 47. "Yazhou dili dashi lun" (On the general features of Asian geography), YBSHJ-WJ 10: 72. 48. Levenson, "The Province," in Feuerwerker et al., p. 276. See also Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, esp. pp. 1-18. 49. Xin Zhongguo weilai ji (The future of new China), YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 3. For further discussion of this text, see Chapter 4 of the present study. 50. See W. G. Beasley, "Meiji Political Institutions," in Jansen, pp. 651-65.

Notes to Pages 29-36

245

51. See Japan Weekly Mail, July 28, 1900, pp. 92-94; referred to in Harrell, p. 186. 52. Hirakawa Sukehiro, "Japan's Turn to the West," in Jansen, p. 474. 53. See Liang's lengthy response to a reader's inquiry about the political systems in Germany and Japan in Yinbingshi, 4: 158-66. For a discussion of the impact of Bismarckian conservatism, see Kenneth B. Pyle, "Meiji Conservatism," in Jansen, pp. 704-10. 54. See Liang, "Li xianfa yi" (On establishing a constitution; 1900), YBSHJWJ 5: 1-7. 55. Tanaka, p. 45. See also Pyle, "Meiji Conservatism," in Jansen, pp. 67679, which discusses the themes of the Japanese enlightenment, among which are a negative view of traditional institutions and ethics and an affirmation of the "cultural example of the West." 56. In describing the historical thinking of Miyake Yonekichi of the same period, Stefan Tanaka (pp. 50-54) suggests that by turning attention to native Japanese history, Miyake was moving "beyond enlightenment." 57. "Dongji yuedan" (Guidelines to Japanese books), YBSHJ-WJ 4: 90. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 91. 60. Quoted in Tanaka, p. 48. 61. "Dongji yuedan," YBSHJ-WJ 4: 91. 62. "Zhongguo shi xulun" (Introductory essay on Chinese history), YBSHJWJ 6: 2. 63. See Tanaka, chap. 3, "Shina: The Separation of Japan from China," pp. 115-52. 64. "Dongji yuedan," YBSHJ-WJ 4: 101. 65. "Guodu shidai lun" (On the period of transition), YBSHj-wj 6: 27. 66. Smith, Ethnic Origins, p. 170. Here Smith summarizes with approbation the concept of national imaginations suggested by Benedict Anderson in his "sensitive study" of nationalism—Imagined Communities. 67. "Guodu shidai lun," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 29. 68. In Levenson's reading (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. 97), Liang became engaged in a continuous, sometimes well-nigh acrobatic, search for a principle of equivalence. "If [Liang] could bring the European tradition down to China's level of futility, it would be just as comforting as to raise Chinese tradition to Europe's level of success. Instead of comparing European vitality to Chinese stagnation and being forced to explain the latter away, he could compare European vitality to European stagnation. Then, China, away with the need to redeem the past!" 69. "Guojia sixiang bianqian yitong lun" (On the similarities and differences between changes of the notion of the state), YBSHJ-WJ 6: 20. 70. Lukacs, pp. 27-28. 71. Giddens, The Nation-State, p. 212. 72. Hsiao, A Modern China, p. 101. 73. "Dongji yuedan," YBSHJ-WJ 4: 99-100.

246

Notes to Pages 36-48

74. This same pattern of development appears to have been the case with nationalist historiography in Egypt at the turn of the century, such as the historical writings of Mustafa Kamil; see Crabbs, chap. 8, esp. p. 162. 75. "Dongji yuedan," YBSHJ-WJ 4: 99. 76. Poulantzas, p. 114. 77. "Shaonian Zhongguo shuo" (Ode to young China), YBSHJ-WJ 5: 9. 78. Ibid. 79. See ibid., p. 10. 80. See James Anderson, "Nationalist Ideology and Territory," in Johnston et al., p. 23. 81. "Zhongguo jiruo suoyuan lun" (On the causes of China's accumulated weaknesses), YBSHJ-WJ 5: 15. 82. "Di liujie: lun guojia sixiang" (Section 6: on nationalism), YBSHJ-ZJ 4: 21. 83. "Ouzhou dili dashi lun" (On the general features of European geography), YBSHJ-WJ 10: 101. 84. "Dili yu wenming zhi guanxi" (On the relationship between civilization and geography), YBSHJ-WJ 10: 116. 85. "Yazhou dili dashi lun," YBSHJ-WJ 10: 70. 86. "Zhongguo dili dashi lun" (On the general features of Chinese geography), YBSHJ-WJ 10: 84-87. 87. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. 135. 88. "Shizhong dexing xiangfan xiangcheng yi" (On the mutually complementary nature of ten virtues), YBSHJ-WJ 5:47. 89. "Sanshi zishu," YBSHJ-WJ 11: 19. 90. For a discussion and documentation of this semantic conflation that persisted in modern Chinese discourse of race, see Dikotter, pp. 108-9n41. 91. "Zhongguo shi xulun," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 11-12. 92. Ibid., p. 12. 93. Ibid., p. 5. Liang made the same reference to Locke in "Dili yu wenming zhi guanxi," YBSHJ-WJ 10: 106.

Chapter 2 1. For a summary of the circulation figures of and distribution points for Liang's journals, see Chang P'eng-yuan, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, pp. 253-321. 2. From the inaugural announcement of the New Citizen Journal quoted inNPCB, p. 272. 3. Quoted in Chang P'eng-yuan, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, pp. 299300. 4. See Liang, "Correspondence," in Yinbingshi4: 149-50, 152-53, 156-57. 5. Britton, p. 119. 6. NPCB, p. 306. See Kamachi, pp. 241-42, for a detailed account of Huang Zunxian's enthusiastic response to the New Citizen Journalwhich he was able to receive about twenty days after an issue was published in Japan.

Notes to Pages 48-52

247

7. "Shijiu shiji zhi Ouzhou yu ershi shiji zhi Zhongguo" (Nineteenthcentury Europe and twentieth-century China), in Ztyou shu, YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 58-60. 8. Quoted in Chang P'eng-ytian, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, p. 301. 9. "Lun baoguan youyi yu guoshi," YBSHJ-WJ 1: 100-103. 10. See, e.g., "Nonghui bao xu" (Introduction to Nonghui bao), "Cui bao xu" (Introduction to Cui bao), "Mengxue bao Yanyi bao hexu" (Combined introduction to Mengxue bao and Yanyi bao), "Zhixin bao xuli" (An introductory outline for Zhixin bao), YBSHJ-WJ 1: 130-31; 2: 55-56, 56-57; 3: 1-2. In a recent study, Mei Hai concludes that Liang's career as a journalist and newspaper editor lasted altogether 33 years and that he was associated with at least 29 newspapers or journals throughout his life. 11. Nathan, p. 143. 12. Lin Yu-t'ang, p. 97. 13. See Paul Cohen, "Wang T'ao's Perspective on a Changing World," in Feuerwerker et al., pp. 133-61. Early in 1870, Wang Tao returned to Hong Kong from Europe and "began a career as a professional newspaperman, using his daily editorials to advocate far-reaching reforms in Chinese society and government and to stimulate discussion of Chinese and European foreign relations. Though much of his time from 1876 on was spent in other forms of writing, Wang's associations with the world of journalism in China and Japan (which he visited in 1879) remained extensive" (ibid., p. 135). 14. Britton, p. 118. 15. "Jinggao wo tongye zhujun" (Some respectful advice for people in the business of journalism), YBSHJ-WJ 11: 38. 16. Ibid. For a discussion of the pedagogical necessity of "journalistic sensationalism," see Liang's answer to a suggestion by Feisheng in 1902 (published in 1903), "Da Feisheng" (Response to Feisheng), YBSHJ-WJ 11: 4345. See Chapter 4 for further discussion of this article. 17. "Qingyi bao yibai ce zhuci bing lun baoguan zhi zeren ji benguan zhi jingli" (Congratulations on the 100th issue of the Journal of Disinterested Discussion together with an essay on the responsibility of the press and the history of the journal), YBSHJ-WJ 6: 49. 18. See Paul Cohen, "Wang T'ao's Perspective," in Feuerwerker et al., pp. 137-38; and Schwartz, In Search, pp. 31-33. 19. "Jinshi wenming chuzu liang dajia zhi xueshuo" (Theories of the two great originators of modern civilization), YBSHJ-WJ 13:11. 20. "Lun xueshu zhi shili zuoyou shijie" (On the dominant influence of knowledge on the world), YBSHJ-WJ 6: 116. 21. In his study of the history of modern Chinese journalism, Lai Guanglin suggests that Liang not only established the form of the modern newspaper in China, but that his personality also became the model for the first generation of professional journalists. "From the moment Liang Qichao entered as an intellectual into the popular press, the columns and contents of all the existing newspapers underwent a radical change. It is at this point that modern Chinese newspapers began their reform and made progress" (Lai, p. 129).

248

Notes to Pages 53-62

22. Smith, Ethnic Revival, p. 125. See the chapter "Bureaucracy and the Intelligentsia," pp. 108-33, for a discussion of the existential crisis that nationalism and ethnic identity helped resolve for the new social elite of professional intelligentsia in modernity. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 108. 25. B. Anderson, p. 40. Anderson's argument reminds one of Joseph Levenson's "value and history" dichotomy as his basic approach to modern Chinese history (see Levenson, "Genesis of Confucian China and Its Modern Fate" in Curtis, pp. 285-86). 26. B. Anderson, p. 38. 27. Ibid., p. 49. 28. Gellner, p. 95. 29. Albert and Terrou, pp. 25-26. 30. See "The Growth of the Popular Press," in Williams, p. 194. 31. Albert and Terrou, p. 34. 32. Ibid., pp. 56-57. 33. Williams, p. 206. 34. Breisach, p. 268. 35. YBSHJ-WJ6: 111. 36. "Qingyi bao yibai ce zhuci bing lun baoguan zhi zeren ji benguan zhi jingli," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 49-50. 37. "Shibao zhi guomin" (A nation that enjoys reading newspapers), in Ziyou shut YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 88. In another entry in his Book of Liberal Writings, Liang stated that there are "three powerful instruments" for transmitting civilization: school, newspaper, and speech ("Chuanbo wenming san liqi" [Three powerful instruments for spreading civilization], YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 41-42). Liang's figures hardly seem exaggerated. In 1910, according to Albert and Terrou (p. 61), in the United States there were 2,430 daily newspapers, and the total circulation was over 24 million. 38. "Qingyi bao yibai ce zhuci bing lun baoguan zhi zeren ji benguan zhi jingli," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 53. 39. Ibid., p. 57. 40. Williams, p. 175. 41. B. Anderson, p. 47«21. 42. "Qingyi bao yibai ce zhuci bing lun baoguan zhi zeren ji benguan zhi jingli," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 52. 43. Nathan, p. 133. 44. "Weixin tushuo," Ziyou shu, YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 56-57. 45. "The Modern World-System as a Civilization," in Wallerstein, p. 217. Wallerstein continues: "The only plausible reaction of the weak is neither to refuse nor to accept, or both to refuse and to accept—in short, the path of the seemingly irrational zigzags (both cultural and political) of the weak that has characterized most of nineteenth and especially twentieth-century history." 46. Liang, "Xin shixue," in Lin Yi, p. 3. "New Historiography" is collected in YBSHJ-WJ 9: 1-32. In subsequent notes, the page reference is to the text in UnYi. 47. Ibid., p. 5.

Notes to Pages 62-68

249

48. Quoted in E. G. Pulleyblank and W. G. Beasley, "Introduction," in Beasley and Pulleyblank, p. 15. 49. Chatterjee, The Nation, p. 77. 50. "Xin shixue," pp. 6-7. 51. Ibid., p. 7. 52. Ibid., p. 9. 53. This distinction between natural sciences and history was popular in Meiji historical thinking. Inoue Tetsujiro, for example, proposed this dichotomy in his 1891-92 essay "Toyoshigaku no kachi" (The value of Oriental studies), published in Shigakkai zasshl "Science, he argued, is ahistorical, for there is no distinction between time and space. History, in contrast, always changes and never repeats itself; it is successive [sokusesushon]and continuous[keizoku]" (Tanaka, p. 56). 54. "Xin shixue," p. 10. Hegel observes that "world history in general is the development of Spirit in Time, just as nature is the development of the Idea in Space" (Reason in History, p. 87). 55. These two different interpretive schemes for historical continuity are discussed in Kang Youwei's Kongzi gaizhi kao (Confucius as a reformer). The "three sequences" (santong) theory argues that to answer the need of succeeding historical periods, three different types of institutional establishment have to be built; whereas the "three ages" (sanshi) point of view believes that history moves progressively through the age of Chaos to the age of Approaching Peace to the age of Great Peace. For a discussion of Liang's earlier appropriation of the "three ages" theory, see Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 37-42; for a general summary, see Xu, "Kang Nanhai." See also Li Zehou, "A Study of Kang Youwei's Thought," in his Zhongguo jindai sixiang shi lun, esp. pp. 139-45. 56. "Xin shixue," p. 13. 57. See Zhou Wu, pp. 135-36. 58. Bianfa tongyi, YBSHJ-WJ 1:31. 59. See Liang Qichao's "Shuoqun xu" (Preface to a treatise on society), YBSHJ-WJ 2: 3. 60. Ibid., p. 5. 61. Ibid., p. 6. 62. H. Chang, p. 100. 63. Ibid., p. 96/152. 64. Teng and Fairbank, p. 10. 65. Wang Fuzhi's ethno-nationalism is most concentratedly expressed in his Huang shu (Yellow book). For a good discussion of this subject, see Hsiao, Zhongguo zhengzhi, pp. 648-53. The concept of qun, however, goes back all the way to Xun Zi (Hsiin Tzu), a great Confucian philosopher of the Warring States period who systematically developed a political philosophy of culture in the hope of curbing what he believed to be the evil nature of humankind. 66. See Liang, "Lun Zhongguo xueshu sixiang bianqian zhi dashi," YBSHJWJ 7: 81-82. 67. See Dikotter, pp. 98-107. 68. See, e.g., "Lun xueshu zhi shili zuoyou shijie," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 115, and "Jinhua lun gemingzhe Jiede zhi xueshuo" (Theory of Benjamin Kidd the re-

250

Notes to Pages 68- 74

former of evolutionary theory), YBSHJ-WJ 12: 86. In the latter essay, Liang also mentioned, while translating Kidd, Nietzsche and his "individualism" in contrast to Marx and his socialism. 69. See Liang's discussion of a reader's inquiry about his use of the term shehui, in "Correspondence," Yinbingshi4: 156. 70. Breisach's phrase (pp. 228-67) when he discusses the essential characteristic of modern European historiography. 71. "Xin shixue," p. 13. 72. Giddens, Central Problems, p. 201. 73. Collingwood, p. 79. 74. "Xin shixue," p. 36. 75. "As an eighteenth-century historian, a historian-philosophe, he [Gibbon] knew that his function was, on the one hand, to teach by providing instructive examples and the reflections appropriate for moral lessons, and, on the other, to give a narcissistic performance as a man of taste" (Fitzsimons, p. 144). 76. Walch, p. 20. Walch (p. 11) also points out that the writer-historians of the eighteenth century are not historiographers in the traditional sense: "They are not professional historians, and they willingly sacrifice erudition for a literary effectiveness." 77. Michel Foucault's phrase; see "Truth and Power" in his Power/Knowledge, p. 128. Voltaire, according to Foucault, is in France the "prototype" of the universal intellectual. 78. "Dongji yuedan," YBSHJ-WJ 4: 100. 79. Ibid. 80. E. G. Pulleyblank and W. G. Beasley, "Introduction," in Beasley and Pulleyblank, p. 16. 81. "Xin shixue," p. 14. 82. In his article "The Value of Oriental Studies," Inoue cited "works on all of Asia, as well as on politics, law, religion, literature, military studies, commerce, and so forth" (Tanaka, p. 56). 83. "Xin shixue," p. 14. 84. Here, in order to legitimize the new historiography, Liang Qichao resorted to a technique Michel Foucault (Archaeology, p. 234) names as "the power of affirmation" and effectively created a discursive space that asserts its validity by containing the traditional forms of knowledge and surpassing them as intrinsically local and partial. 85. "Xin shixue," p. 14. 86. Ibid., p. 16. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Poulantzas, p. 113. 90. According to John Breuilly (pp. 352, 365-73), these are the primary functions and tactics of nationalism as a political ideology at the service of the modern nation-state. 91. Ibid., p. 365. This definition of ideology resembles that given by Louis Althusser in that both emphasize the necessary imaginary positioning or interpellation by means of an ideology.

Notes to Pages 75-85

251

92. De Certeau, The Writing, p. 6. 93. NPCB, p. 286. 94. Ibid. 95. "Xin shixue," p. 16. 96. Poulantzas, p. 113. In a footnote on the same page, Poulantzas points out that only against the background of a dominating world capitalism should we understand Engels's remarks about "peoples without a history" outside Europe. 97. "Xin shixue," pp. 16-17. 98. See Dikotter, pp. 75-82. 99. "Xin shixue," pp. 19-20. 100. Ibid., pp. 24-25. 101. Dirlik, History, p. 10.

Chapter 3 1. Patrick Taylor offers a fruitful study of this narrative form, which derives from the Western tradition of philosophical discourse on human freedom and the anti-colonialist and nationalist Afro-Caribbean literature. In the case of Frantz Fanon, Taylor defines liberating narratives as those that "tell the story of human actors coming to a consciousness of their creative involvement in history" (pp. 5-6). "The challenge of liberating narrative," Taylor further elaborates, "is to transform the socio-political totality so that lived history becomes open possibility" (p. 189). 2. See Xinmin shuo, YBSHJ-ZJ 4: 16-31. 3. "Xiongjiali aiguozhe Gesushi zhuan" (Biography of Kossuth the Hungarian patriot), YBSHJ-ZJ 10: 1. Prior to this biography of Kossuth, the only other biography Liang wrote is one of Kang Youwei—"Nanhai Kang xiansheng zhuan" (Biography of Sir Kang Youwei), published in Qingyi bao, no. 100 (Dec. 21, 1901) and collected in YBSHJ-WJ 6: 57-89. 4. See "Nanhai Kang xiansheng zhuan," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 58-59. 5. YBSHJ-ZJ 10: 3-4. There are at least two different dates given in the literature for Kossuth's birth date. One is September 19, 1802 (Deak, p. 9). The other date, the one Liang used, was that given in Headley's (p. 19) biography of Kossuth. Judging from the publication date of Headley's work and the information it provides, Liang most likely consulted it or its Japanese translation while writing his own narrative. 6. YBSHJ-ZJ 10: 6. 7. Ibid., pp. 7-10. There are some minor inaccuracies in Liang's account, which are not infrequent in the several biographies discussed below. As a matter of fact, Kossuth was removed from the editorial chair of Hirlap in 1844. 8. Ibid., p. 11. Both Headley (pp. 58-67) and Deak (pp. 53-62) have good descriptions and analyses of the political situation in Hungary before 1848. 9. See, e.g., Liang's entry on "Pohuai zhuyi" (Destructionism) in Ziyou shu, YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 25-26. 10. Macartney's phrase, p. 323. 11. See Headley, p. 64; for Liang's text, see YBSHJ-ZJ 10: 12.

252

Notes to Pages 86-91

12. Headley, pp. 103-4; Liang, YBSHJ-ZJ 10: 17. 13. For an excerpt of the declaration, see Headley, pp. 161-64; Liang, YBSHJ-ZJ 10: 21. 14. YBSHJ-ZJ 10: 27. 15. In discussing the influence of Italian fascism in China during the 1930's, Michael Godley (p. 109) seems to suggest, erroneously, that Liang Qichao wrote his combined biography of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour in 1907 or as late as 1911. Also, contrary to what Godley implies (p. 108), by the time Liang toured Europe in 1919, Liang was far removed from imagining himself to be China's Mazzini. 16. "Yidali jianguo sanjie zhuan" (Combined biography of the three makers of Italy), YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 3-4. According to Li Guojun (p. 46), in 1898 Liang had already written a preface to a "Biography of Makers of Italy," lithographed in Shanghai around that period. 17. For a succinct discussion of Mazzini's liberal nationalism and its theoretical as well as practical difficulties, see Watkins, pp. 39-45. 18. Mack Smith, p. 1. 19. See "Nanhai Kang xiansheng zhuan," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 58. Here Liang believed Napoleon to be a hero of his times but Rousseau a hero who created a new age. Kang Youwei is portrayed as a great man much ahead of his times. 20. YBSHJ-ZJ 4: 25.

21. YBSHJ-WJ 5: 10. For further discussion of Liang's "Ode to Young China," see Chapter 1 of this study. 22. Quoted in Kohn, p. 85. 23. See Kohn, pp. 84-85. In 1834, Mazzini was involved in organizing a Young Europe in Switzerland to resist the reactionary Holy Alliance formed after the downfall of Napoleon. It was as short-lived as Young Italy, but, as Kohn puts it, "the gospel of liberal nationalism was on its march" (p. 85). 24. See Chang P'eng-yiian, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, pp. 117-18. 25. The play Xin Luoma chuanqi (Romance of new Rome) started appearing in June 1902, during which time the "Combined Biography" was being serialized. It is collected in YBSHJ-ZJ 93: 1-27. The "Program" appeared in the 41st and 42nd issues of the journal, which, because of an accumulated delay in publication of the journal after early 1903 when Liang left for a trip to North America, most likely did not come out until 1904. 26. Mack Smith, p. 6. 27. YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 7-8. Liang found it necessary to explicate in a note the meaning of "by the people and for the people" in relation to "of the people." He added that in an absolutist monarchy, no matter how benign or repressive, it always is a matter of "to the people." The English original is quoted from Marriott, pp. 57-58. Since Marriott's book was initially published as The Makers of Modern Italy in 1889 by Macmillan and corresponds closely to the narrative of Liang's "Combined Biography," one might assume that it, or rather its Japanese translation, was one of Liang's sources.

Notes to Pages 91 -98

253

28. YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 8; Marriott, p. 58. For the complete text of the "Program," see Beales, pp. 129-31. 29. Watkins, p. 41. 30. YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 12. As a matter of fact, this passage will strike us as amazingly familiar if we read Liang's 1920 work Intellectual Trends, where he characterized his own writings in the New Citizen Journal as "having a lucid structure" and that "his pen was often full of passion, with a rare magical kind of power over the reader" (Hsu trans., p. 102 [modified]; Lin Yi, p. 253). Kohn (p. 164/14), however, claims that "Mazzini was an active though not successful editor and publisher of newspapers." 31. "Yidali jianguo sanjie zhuan," YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 10-11. In an 1899 entry in his Ziyou shu, YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 28-29, Liang made a full comparison of Cavour with Zhuge Liang, the well-nigh legendary Chinese statesman of the Three Kingdoms period (A.D. 220-80). 32. "Yidali jianguo sanjie zhuan," YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 12. 33. YBSHJ-ZJ 4:

7-11.

34. Schwartz, In Search, p.73. 35. Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. 77. See Huang, p. 62, for a discussion of the Japanese admiration for English liberalism in the nineteenth century. For Yan Fu's influence on Liang, see Schwartz, In Search, pp. 47-48, 8283; and Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 74-75. 36. "Sibada xiaozhi" (A brief note on Sparta), YBSHJ-ZJ 15: 7; "Yadian xiaoshi" (A brief history of Athens), YBSHJ-ZJ 16: 6-7. 37. See Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi shihua, pp. 104-5. 38. See Zheng, pp. 264-81. Zheng's work marks the first major achievement in the studies of Huang in mainland China. In March 1897, Liang Qichao wrote an enthusiastic preface to Huang's History of Japan in Shtwu bao (no. 21) and called the reformist group's attention to it (see "Riben guozhi xuhou" [Postface to History of Japan], YBSHJ-WJ 2: 50-51). For a discussion of the close relationship between Liang and Huang, see Wang Dezhao; and Kamachi, pp. 206-7, 242-53. 39. NPCB, p. 289. In another letter written in November of the same year, Huang expressed his agreement with Liang on modeling on the English political system; see NPCB, p. 301. Cf. Zheng, pp. 354-55, 428-30; and Kamachi, pp. 247-48. 40. Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi shihua, p. 107. 41. YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 16-18. For more on this debate, see Chapter 5 below. 42. "Weixin tushuo," YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 55-58. 43. Marriott, pp. 13-14. 44. For a full account of the Roman Republic and the role of Mazzini and Garibaldi, see Mack Smith, pp. 64-76. 45. YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 52. 46. Ibid., p. 17. 47. Ibid., pp. 24-25.

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Notes to Pages 99-107

48. Watkins, p. 44. 49. YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 26-28. According to Whyte (p. 93), "[In] 1850 the deficit was no less than seventy-seven millions with a revenue of ninety millions. In 1853 the revenue was increased by thirty-two millions and the expenses reduced by twenty millions, leaving a deficit of twenty-five millions, and he [Cavour] spoke of establishing an equilibrium in the next budget." 50. Marriott, p. 99. 51. YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 46-47. Liang has virtually the same sentences as in Marriott's book; cf. Marriott, p. 132. 52. Marriott, p. 134; YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 48. 53. Marriott, p. 155; YBSHJ-ZJ 11: 56. As always, Liang's translation is liberal and in very elegant Chinese. It is amazing, though, to think how close and accurate the Japanese translation must have been if we choose to believe that Liang was unable to read with proficiency any foreign languages other than Japanese. 54. Kohn, p. 88. 55. "Jinshi diyi niijie Luolan furen zhuan" (Biography of Madame Roland, the first heroine of the modern world), YBSHJ-ZJ 12: 1. The English version of Madame Roland's famous utterance is from C. Young, p. 312. Its French original is given as "O Liberte, comme on t'a jouee!" in Dobson, p. 61. 56. "Pohuai zhuyi," YBSHJ-ZJ 2: 25-26. 57. See, e.g., Liang's 1901 essays "Guodu shidai lun," YBSHJ-WJ 6: 28-29, "Shizhong dexing xiangfan xiangcheng yi," YBSHJ-WJ 5: 50-51, as well as his 1902 writings like the sections "On Liberty" and "On Progress" from Xinmin shuo, YBSHJ-ZJ 4: 41-43, 60-61, and "Shi ge" (Defining ge), YBSHJ-WJ 9: 40-44. 58. "Shi ge," YBSHJ-WJ 9: 42. 59. "Nanhai xiansheng bian geming shu" (Kang Youwei on revolution), New Citizen Journal no. 16. It was part of a longer essay addressing the overseas Chinese business community. Kang argued that China was ready for constitutional government but not revolution. The complete text, together with another important essay on Indian history, was published under the title Nanhai xiansheng zuijin zhengjian shu (Kang Youwei on contemporary politics) in 1902, and reprinted in Kang Youwei xiansheng yizhu huikan. 60. "Jincheng Faguo geming zhi xu" (Preface to a history of the French revolution presented to the emperor), in Kang Youwei zhenglun ji, p. 308; cf. Hsiao, A Modem China, pp. 202-3. 61. "Zhi Nanhai fuzi daren shu" (Letter to Sir Kang Youwei), NPCB, pp. 234-35. 62. Ibid., p. 237. In his analysis of Liang's understanding of the European Reformation, Levenson (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. 97) argues that by suggesting his mentor was an orthodox "captive of tradition, an obstructer of freedom of thought," Liang stigmatized Kang Youwei. "And how does he praise him? As a Martin Luther." 63. YBSHJ-ZJ 4: 40-42.

Notes to Pages 108-13

255

64. Ibid., pp. 45-47. In discussing Van Fu's introduction to the Western notion of "liberty," Schwartz (In Search, p. 256«42) points out that the term ziyou could be both "liberty" and "freedom," and that it acquires a metaphysical connotation in Mill's essays as well as in Van Fu's translations. Hao Chang (pp. 201-6) observes that Liang argued for collective freedom at the expense of individual freedom because of his nationalist ideology. Philip Huang (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 68-70) also sees a connection between Liang's liberalism and his nationalism and has a useful discussion of the term for "liberty" in Liang's writings. 65. On Van Fu's liberalism, see Li Zehou, "Lun Van Fu" (On Yan Fu) in Zhongguo jindai sixiang shi lun, pp. 295-339, esp. pp. 325-32; also Schwartz, In Search, pp. 130-48. Here Schwartz notes that "if liberty of the individual is often treated in Mill as an end in itself, in Yen Fu it becomes a means to the advancement of 'the people's virtue and intellect,' and beyond this to the purposes of the state" (p. 141). 66. Schwartz, In Search, p. 144. 67. YBSHJ-WJ 9: 29. See Chapter 2 above. 68. "Jinshi diyi niijie Luolan furen zhuan," YBSHJ-ZJ 12: 2-3. 69. Ibid., p. 4. 70. C. Young, p. 203; YBSHJ-ZJ 12: 5. See also Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, p. 146, for the reference to Brutus in this letter. The "Assembly" here is the Constituent Assembly. 71. YBSHJ-ZJ 12: 6. There is some inaccuracy here, for the opposition between the Montagnards and the Girondins was not obvious and intensified until the period of the National Convention that succeeded the Legislative Assembly in August 1792. 72. "Faguo dageming ji" (A history of the great French revolution), Kang Youwei xiansheng yizhu huikan, 16: 109-12. This text, as I mentioned above, was presented to the Guangxu emperor in 1898 and would be published in New Citizen Journal in August 1906, with a postface by Liang Qichao. By then it was intended to support Liang's argument against a large-scale social revolution in China. In his postface, Liang made it clear that he printed part of Kang's history in his journal as an "antidote for those frenzied radicals" crying for revolution in China; see "Kang Changsu Faguo geming shi lun" (On Kang Youwei's history of the French revolution), YBSHJ-WJ 44b: 2-4. 73. YBSHJ-ZJ 12: 7. 74. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 75. Ibid., pp. 9-12. 76. Ibid., p. 12. 77. Ibid., p. 13. For a systematic study of four revolutions in modern world history—the English, the American, the French, and the Russian—see Brinton, who makes some similar points about a parallel structure between the English and the French Revolution. 78. YBSHJ-ZJ 12: 13. 79. "Dili yu wenming zhi guanxi," YBSHJ-WJ 10: 115. The article originally appeared in the first issue of New Citizen Journal in February 1902. As for

256

Notes to Pages 114-18

Liang's other schedules of political evolution, see, e.g., "Li xianfa yi," YBSHJ-WJ 5: 1; and "Zhongguo zhuanzhi jinhua shi lun" (On the history of the evolution of political absolutism in China; 1902-4), YBSHJ-WJ 9: 62-63. In the former essay, he distinguished three political systems: monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and republican constitutionalism. In the latter, there are six stages for political evolution: familial, tribal, theological, and feudal hierarchy followed by monarchical and republican government. The impact of the Spencerian view of human progress on Meiji Japan's conception of history can be observed in Tokutomi Soho's influential The Future Japan (1886), in which he propounded the belief that world history was moving from "the world of might" to "the world of peace." See Tokutomi, "Introduction" by Vmh Sinh, Matsuzawa Hiroaki, and Nicholas Wickenden, esp. pp. xxii-xxxi. 80. YBSHJ-ZJ 12: 14.

81. See Arendt, particularly chap. 1: "The Meaning of Revolution," pp. 2158. On p. 29, she writes, "It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom. Yet if these truisms are frequently forgotten, it is because liberation has always loomed large and the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain, if not altogether futile." 82. Ibid., p. 33.

Chapter 4 1. Leroy-Beaulieu, pp. 78-81. 2. A document that best expresses this sentiment is provided by Li Zehou, the leading philosopher in contemporary China. His essay "The Revival of China Through Peaceful Evolution: On 'Reform Rather Than Revolution'" was published in May 1992, three years after the June Fourth incident of 1989. At the beginning of this essay, which he finished right after he was allowed to leave China for the United States, Li Zehou describes his own surprise that after nearly 40 years of studying modem Chinese intellectual history he should have come to such an "anti-revolutionary" conclusion. The same pleasurably painful rethinking, as we will see in the present chapter, was also experienced by Liang Qichao when he, after long years of endorsing a republic, decided that constitutional monarchy might be the best political alternative for China. More and more social scientists, some of them trained in the United States, have also echoed this pervasive postrevolutionary mentality by focusing on more empirical and problem-oriented studies of contemporary society. See, e.g., Sheng Hua and the journal Modern China Studies (originally called Papers of the Center for Modern China) published by the Center for Modern China established at Princeton University in 1990. The center promotes, according to its self-definition, "not only theoretical research that may enrich the literature of China studies, but also practical, strategic, and policy research that may contribute to China's course toward democracy and a free economy."

Notes to Pages 118-29

257

3. See Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu. 4. In France itself, the debate over the significance of the Great Revolution continues to the present and has served to define various political ideologies; see, e.g., Khilnani. 5. E. J. Hobsbawm's (p. 72) phrase. 6. See Leroy-Beaulieu, "Avant-propos," pp. vii-xv. 7. Philip Huang (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 88, 163) makes a similar point. See also H. Chang, pp. 222-24. Scalapino and Yu (p. 126n), however, suggest that Liang identified himself with Huang Keqiang, which seems to be a reading too much confined to the specific arguments in the text. Clearly Liang agreed with Huang but also sympathized with Li, and that is what makes the debate here intriguing and necessary. 8. Xin Zhongguo weilai ji (The future of new China), YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 14-15. 9. See Sheehan's excellent study of this subject, German Liberalism; directly related is pt. Ill, "Old Problems and New Realities, 1850-66," pp. 77122. Another useful book on German Staatswissenschaft is Emerson's classic State and Sovereignty. 10. Sheehan, p. 134. 11. Bluntschli, "Translators' Preface," p. v. 12. "Zhengzhixue dajia Bolunzhili zhi xueshuo," YBSHJ-WJ 13: 67-89. See Machetzki, Appendix I: "Bluntschlitext," p. i. 13. YBSHJ-WJ 13: 69. See the next section for more discussion of this document. 14. "Lun zhengfu yu renmin zhi quanxian," YBSHJ-WJ 10: 1-5. See Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 84, 162. 15. Xin Zhongguo weilaiji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 17. 16. Ibid., p. 19. 17. Ibid., p. 20. Li's definition of modern revolution is echoed closely by Liang Qichao in his essay "Defining ge." 18. Xin Zhongguo weilaiji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 20-22. 19. Ibid., p. 23. 20. In fall 1897 Liang went to Changsha, provincial capital of Hunan, to be the chief lecturer at the Academy of Current Events (Shiwu xuetang) at the invitation of Tan Sitong and Huang Zunxian. There he presented himself as a radical reformer, calling not only for a republican revolution but also for a racial revenge against the invading and barbarous Manchus. For documents and descriptions of this period, see NPCB, pp. 82-94; Levenson, Liang Ch'ich'ao, pp. 24-26; and Chang P'eng-yiian, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, pp. 47-80. 21. "Zhengzhixue dajia Bolunzhili zhi xueshuo," YBSHJ-WJ 13: 71-77. 22. H. Chang, p. 261. 23. Xin Zhongguo weilaiji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 23. 24. Ibid., pp. 24-25. Not incidentally, Liang used exactly the same metaphor against wholesale technological importation in refuting Sun Yat-sen, who, in the vein of his political millenarianism, had compared the difference

258

Notes to Pages 130-34

between a republic and a constitutional monarchy to that between a refined automobile and a crude one. Sun argued that China should of course skip the developmental process and adopt the much more advanced system. See Liang, "Kaiming zhuanzhi lun" (On enlightened absolutism), YBSHJ-WJ 17: 66-67. 25. See Xin Zhongguo weilai ji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 9-11. The full name of this imagined political organization is the cumbersome "Party of Alliance for the Success of Constitutionalism" (Lixian qicheng tongmeng dang). 26. See Schwartz's discussion of Van Fu's "overwhelming anxiety concerning the survival of the state" in his endorsement of liberal values such as science, freedom, equality, and democracy. "These principles might possess an abstract, intrinsic value of their own, but it is their immediate value as means to wealth and power which arouses his most fervent response" (In Search, p. 68). Philip Huang (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao) also points out that Liang Qichao's liberal ideas are a creative confusion of classical Western liberalism and Confucian precepts. The cornerstone of Mill's liberalism, for instance, is "the individual" or "individuality," whereas "the very category of 'individual' was new to Liang and hardly an absolute that he could take for granted" (p. 73). 27. Xin Zhongguo weilai ji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 30. 28. Huang Zunxian made a similar comparison of the American and French revolutions in his correspondence with Liang; see Chang P'eng-yuan, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, pp. 164, 173-74. 29. Xin Zhongguo weilai ji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 29-31. The Mm bao writers would use the same argument and complained that the constitutionalists dwelt on the French Revolution only to spread unnecessary fear. They also believed that the successful American Revolution should be kept in mind when considering a revolution in China. To this line of argument, Liang would repeat essentially what Huang Keqiang says here. See, e.g., Liang, "Shenlun zhongzu geming yu zhengzhi geming zhi deshi" (Further essay on the pros and cons of a racial revolution and a political revolution), YBSHJ-WJ 19: 15-16. 30. For representative expressions of such optimism concerning foreign intervention, see Hu Hanmin's lengthy article "Paiwai yu guojifa" (Antiforeignism and international law), Meng Sheng's "Gemingjun yu zhanshi guojifa" (Revolutionary army and wartime international law), and Ji Sheng's [Wang Dong] "Da Xinmin nan" (Answer to New Citizen's challenge), published intermittently in Min bao, nos. 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, in 1906-7. 31. Huang's reference to the Indian experience apparently reflects the influence of Kang Youwei, who in 1902 wrote two books to argue against revolution in China, one of them based exclusively on the British annexation of India following premature provincial autonomy; see Kang Youwei, Kang Youwei xiansheng yizhu huikan, 14: 9-49. 32. Xin Zhongguo weilaiji YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 38. 33. Ibid., pp. 38-39. 34. In 1905, while in England, Yan Fu had a strikingly similar conversation with Sun Yat-sen. The translator of Mill's On Liberty is reported as saying that "the quality of our people is inferior, their knowledge (min chih) is at a

Notes to Pages 135-42

259

low state.... What is most urgent in our present situation is that we turn our efforts to education. Perhaps we shall then make some progress." "Sun is alleged to have replied, 'How long can a man wait for the river to clear? You, sir, are a thinker, I am a man of action1" (see Schwartz, In Search, pp. 146-47). 35. Xin Zhongguo weilaiji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 33. 36. Leroy-Beaulieu, pp. 17-29. 37. For an informative analysis of the French Revolution as a model for the Chinese Revolution of 1911, see Bastid. Lenin, who always showed strong interest in the Chinese Revolution, once made the connection as well. "The objective problems of Russia's historical development—problems which have always and everywhere, from France in 1789 to China in 1911, formed the content of democratic change and democratic revolutions—have as yet not been solved" ("Political Parties in the Five Years of the Third Duma," in Lenin, 17: 501). According to James Hong-Yuan Chu (p. 374), at least 10 articles in issues of Min bao from 1905 to 1907 deal with the French Revolution, 22 treat the 1905 Russian Revolution, and 15 are about the Indian independence movement. 38. Wang Dong's rebuttal of Ming Yi's (Kang Youwei's) history of the French Revolution and his own history of the French Revolution were published in Min bao, nos. 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, from Jan. 1907 to Feb. 1908. 39. Xin Zhongguo weilai ji, YBSHJ-ZJ 89: 40-41. Liang's friend Huang Zunxian regarded this political novel as even better than Liang's writings in New Citizen Journal and agreed with the greater part of its argument. See NPCB, p. 300. 40. Xin dalu youjijielu (Excerpts from Journey to the New World), YBSHJ-ZJ 22: 1. For a new edition of this document, see "Xin dalu youjiji qita" (Journey to the New World and other notes), in Zhong, pp. 367-653. 41. Grieder, Intellectuals, p. 165. Grieder's account of the intellectual scene before the 1911 Chinese Revolution is masterfully concise and lucid. His presentation of Liang's American trip and his change of attitude is particularly helpful; see pp. 160-70. 42. Ibid., p. 166. 43. Xin dalu youjijielu,YBSHJ-ZJ 22: 36. 44. Ibid., p. 124. 45. Ibid., p. 134. 46. "Zhengzhixue dajia Bolunzhili zhi xueshuo," YBSHJ-WJ 13: 85-86. 47. For figures on Chinese students in Japan at the time and an analysis of their composition, see Chang Yu-fa, pp. 251-56; Huang Fu-ch'ing, pp. 1, 24; Qi, pp. 154-57; Grieder, Intellectuals, pp. 142-44; Bays, p. 132. 48. Spence, p. 239. 49. See Harrell, pp. 183-89, 208-17. 50. See Huang Fu-ch'ing, pp. 107-14. The Qing official was Li Zongtang, quoted in ibid., p. 107. In Huang's study, the number of female Chinese students in Japan is given as 62 (pp. 60-61). 51. See, e.g., Liang's "Jinggao liuxuesheng zhujun" (Respectful advice to overseas students), YBSHJ-WJ 11: 21-26. 52. See Bays, p. 158. Here Bays also discusses a political ambiguity shared

260

Notes to Pages 142-50

by the same group of students—their membership in "the traditional political and social elite class." 53. As recalled by one participant, Chen Shaobai; see Qi, p. 34. 54. For a comprehensive account of this episode, see Chang P'eng-yuan, Liang Qichao yu Qingji geming, pp. 119-39. See also Schiffrin, pp. 163-65, 184-89. 55. See Harrell, pp. 95-98. 56. Gasster, "Reform and Revolution," p. 72. 57. Gasster, Chinese Intellectuals, pp. 34-35; see chap. 2, "The Swing Toward Revolution" (pp. 27-62), for a general picture of the emerging political radicalism among Chinese students in Japan. 58. Quoted in Harrell, p. 148. 59. Feisheng, "Jinshi er da xueshuo zhi pinglun" (Comments on two recent major doctrines), Zhejiang chao (Tides of the Zhe River), no. 8 (1903); quoted in Liang, "Da Feisheng" (Response to Feisheng), YBSHJ-WJ 11: 40-41. Liang's response came out in 1904, although by then Zhejiang chao had ceased publication due to the crackdown by the Qing government on a rising opposition press among Chinese students in Japan (see Harrell, pp. 104-6). In YBSHJ-WJ, however, Liang's article is dated as written in 1902, which seems to be an editorial error. 60. "Da Feisheng," YBSHJ-WJ 11: 44. 61. Ibid. 62. Quoted in Liang, "Da heshi ren" (Response to a peacemaker), YBSHJ-WJ 11:45-46. 63. Lee, p. 25.

64. Min bao, no. 1, p. 1. The text is reprinted in Qi, pp. 159-60; for a better English translation, see Sun, pp. 194-98. 65. Harrell, p. 163. 66. Lee, p. 73. 67. For a description of the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1905 on China, see Spector, pp. 77-93. "The issues of Min-pao provide the best proof of the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1905 on Sun Yat-sen and his followers. . . . Many Chinese revolutionaries had a very foggy concept of the real nature and composition of Russian political parties at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Since they appear to have had little or no access to primary source material, the members of the T'ung-meng Hui depended largely on the 'muddy sources' of the Japanese newspapers and journals for their knowledge and interpretation of events in Russia" (pp. 86-88). 68. "Democracy and Narodism in China," in Lenin, 18: 165. 69. This is not a literal translation. The original text is reprinted in Qi, pp. 152-53; a less than adequate English translation can be found in Lee, pp. 83-84. Liang's concept of kaiming zhuanzhi has been variously translated as "enlightened despotism," "autocracy," or even "dictatorship." Here I choose to render it as "enlightened absolutism" because Machetzki traces it back to

Notes to Pages 151-56

261

Bluntschli's writings. When Liang spoke of kaiming zhuanzhi at this time, it designated a political system different from the destructive despotism he had earlier denounced. 70. Wang Jingwei, "Bo Xinmin congbao zuijin zhi fei geming km" (Rebuttal of the recent anti-revolutionary argument of New Citizen Journal), Min bao, no. 4, p. 34. 71. Gasster, Chinese Intellectuals, p. 105. 72. "Zhongguo lishi shang geming zhi yanjiu" (A study of revolutions in Chinese history), YBSHJ-WJ 15: 31-40. For a full translation and discussion, see Scalapino and Yu, pp. 126-27. 73. Francois Furet (Interpreting,p. 25), in his reevaluation of the paradigmatic significance of the French Revolution, offers the following definition: "The Revolution was the historical space that separated two powers, the embodiment of the idea that history is shaped by human action rather than by the combination of existing institutions and forces." 74. "Kaiming zhuanzhi lun," YBSHJ-WJ 17: 13-83. In Sun Yat-sen's notion of "one single battle," we see the intellectual forerunner of the "Great Leap Forward" mentality that would flourish in mid-twentieth-century Chinese history. In discussing the same essay, Scalapino and Yu (pp. 136-39) think that Liang "advanced an intriguing case for political relativism" (p. 136), when in fact their summary of Liang's argument suggests more a rejection of dogmatism. 75. See Chu, pp. 359-70, for a list of all Western thinkers and persons of action that appeared in Min bao publications. At least seven major contributors referred to Rousseau. 76. See, e.g., his "Shenlun zhongzu geming yu zhengzhi geming zhi deshi," YBSHJ-WJ 19: 5-14. 77. Quoted in Yack, pp. 81-82. In a footnote, Yack remarks that this statement, "exaggeration though it may be, indicates that Rousseau, for one, had not forgotten the reasons sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers inclined toward absolutism." 78. Rousseau, book II, chap. 8, "The People," p. 39. 79. "Kaiming zhuanzhi lun," YBSHJ-WJ 17: 75. The bold type was used in New Citizen Journal, no. 77. It is interesting to see that both parties in the debate use the same device to highlight their crucial arguments and achieve a more striking visual effect. 80. "Da mobao disihao dui Xinmin congbao zhi bolun" (Response to attacks on the New Citizen Journal in number four of a certain journal), YBSHJ-WJ 18: 98. For these major points Liang made, see, respectively, "Zada mobao" (Miscellaneous responses to a certain journal), Xinmin congbao, nos. 84-86; "Zhongguo buwang lun" (On China not being annexed), Xinmin congbao, no. 86; "Baodong yu waiguo ganshe" (Insurrection and foreign intervention), YBSHJ-WJ 19: 52-67; and "Shenlun zhongzu geming yu zhengzhi geming zhi deshi," YBSHJ-WJ 19: 1-45. For an exhaustive list of essays from both sides and

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Notes to Pages 156-62

a diagram of the major arguments, see Chen Mengjian, 2: 379-92, 406-27. For a good discussion of the debate centered around "socialism," see Bernal; and Dirlik, "Socialism." 81. "Da mobao disihao dui Xinmin congbao zhi bolun,'.' YBSHJ-WJ 18: 78. 82. Sun Yat-sen seriously urged the Min bao writers to be such heroic vanguardist figures in his essay commemorating the first issue of the journal. 83. See, e.g., Liang Qichao's criticism of the revolutionaries in his "Zhongguo lishi shang geming zhi yanjiu," YBSHJ-WJ 15: 40-41. "Given Rousseau's evaluation of his contemporaries," observes Yack (p. 82), "the reasons for his fear of political revolution are not hard to fathom. The overthrow of laws and institutions, no matter how imperfect they may be, by individuals who have not been educated to subordinate their inclinations to the general will, only expands the opportunities for imposing the particular ends of some individuals upon others." 84. "Da mobao disihao dui Xinmin congbao zhi bolun," YBSHJ-WJ 18: 81. 85. "Shenlun zhongzu geming yu zhengzhi geming zhi deshi," YBSHJ-WJ 19: 7. 86. See Huang Fu-ch'ing, pp. 276-304; and Harrell, pp. 164-82, for a detailed account and critical analysis of the 1905 student protest; see also Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 100-103. According to Philip Huang (Liang Ch'ich'ao, p. 102), "Liang was no longer in tune with the sentiments of the young. On December 26, the Journal of the New Citizen carried a lengthy article by him on the issues of the strike; the tone of the article was didactic, legalistic, and defensive" (p. 102). 87. "Shenlun zhongzu geming yu zhengzhi geming zhi deshi," YBSHJ-WJ 19: 11-12. 88. "Baodong yu waiguo ganshe," YBSHJ-WJ 19: 54. 89. Ibid., p. 55. 90. Liang expressed this idea in a letter to Xu Fosu, one of his close friends at the time and apparently a specialist in psychology; see NPCB, p. 358. 91. NPCB, p. 373. 92. Grieder, Intellectuals, p. 194. Chen Mengjian (2: 486-519), who is rather heavy-handed and defensive of the Revolutionary Alliance, cites testimony by the participants and numerous contemporary witnesses to show the increased influence of Min bao. Also, from the viewpoint of modern media techniques and mass communication, Chen (1: 567, 2: 538-42, 823-24) observes that the dominant characteristic of Min bao writings is its direct and successful "emotional appeals." 93. Sales and circulation figures for Min bao are hard to ascertain due to its method of circulation and unavailability of original records. The contemporary journal Fu bao gave its circulation as 17,000 in 1906 (Fang, 2: 388). According to Chen Mengjian (2: 61-80), a conservative estimate would be 12,000. 94. Chiang, pp. 51-53. 95. Philip Huang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. 140. 96. NPCB, p. 398.

Notes to Pages 162-68

263

97. Qi, pp. 171, 182, 224. See also Sheridan for a historical narrative. 98. For Furet's observations about histories as "quests of identity," see pt. I, "The French Revolution Is Over," in Interpreting, pp. 1-17. For a good analysis of Furet's contribution, see Khilnani, pp. 155-78. 99. This development can be best observed in the Hong Kong-based journal Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-first century), where a serious effort is made to reexamine this tradition from various perspectives; see, e.g., Jin; Wong, "Ziyou"; and Lin Gang. 100. Philip Huang, "Rethinking," p. 7. The same issue of Modem China (21, no. 1, Jan. 1995) features the symposium "Rethinking the Chinese Revolution," which includes Huang's article and an essay by French historian Edward Berenson on current historiographical representations of the French Revolution (see Berenson, "A Permanent Revolution"). 101. ChenDuxiu, 1: 135. 102. Gasster, Chinese Intellectuals, pp. 242-43. 103. Quoted in Khilnani, p. 176.

Chapter 5 1. See Chang P'eng-yiian, Lixian pai, pp. 41-51. For a discussion of the provincial assemblies as a creative political move on the part of local gentry, see "The Late-Ch'ing Provincial Assemblies," in Min, pp. 137-79. 2. For an account of Liang's political maneuvering during this period, see Ernest P. Young, "The Reformer as a Conspirator: Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the 1911 Revolution," in Feuerwerker et al., pp. 238-67. In November 1911, Liang wrote a lengthy essay "Xin Zhongguo jianshe wenti" (Issues concerning the construction of new China), YBSHJ-WJ 27: 27-46, in which he discussed issues such as whether to maintain a nominal emperor and whether to create an official religion for the nation. 3. "Zhongguo liguo da fangzheng" (The cardinal principle for rebuilding China), YBSHJ-WJ 28: 39-78. 4. The word "experiment" appears repeatedly in "Zhongguo liguo da fangzheng," YBSHJ-WJ 28: 41, 45, 77. Later on, in 1913, Liang wrote a critical essay "Duoshu zhengzhi zhi shiyan" (Experiment with majority politics), YBSHJ-WJ 33: 33-39. In "Xu guiguo hou yinian lai suogan" (My impressions of the one year since I returned to the country; YBSHJ-WJ 31: 24-28), he expressed his disappointment with the slow pace of political experimentation. 5. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, p. 175. Also see Philip Huang, Liang Ch'ich'ao, pp. 112-40. 6. See, collectively, "Chu guiguo yanshuo ci" (Public speeches given when first returning to the country), YBSHJ-WJ 29: 1-51. 7. NPCB, pp. 654, 656.

130.

8. Lloyd Eastman, "May Fourth as a Turning Point," in Lieberthal et al., p. 9. Sheridan, p. 58.

264

Notes to Pages 169-74

10. See Liang, "Yizai suiwei guoti wenti zhe" (On the strange issue about the form of national government), in his Dunbi ji (Writings during the Yuan Shikai restoration crisis), YBSHJ-ZJ 33: 85-98. 11. See Liang Qichao, "Ouzhou zhanyi shi lun" (On the history of the war in Europe), YBSHJ-ZJ 30: 1-76. 12. "Xu guiguo hou yinian lai suogan," YBSHJ-WJ 31: 24. 13. Sheridan, p. 59. 14. Lin Yii-sheng, p. 26. Lin (p. 37) observes that their shared recognition was "the need to establish a cultural foundation, based on a changed world view, for socio-political change." 15. Furth, "Culture and Politics in Modern Chinese Conservatism," in idem, The Limits, p. 46. 16. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth Movement," in Lieberthal et al., pp. 159-60. 17. Furth, Ting Wen-chiang, p. 69. Furth (pp. 69-70) continues her critical description of the May Fourth discourse of democracy and science: "Mr. Democracy often appeared simply as the embodiment of a new way of life dedicated to individual self-expression rather than family obligation, or of a Utopian vision of social harmony and cooperation in a purified future society. Often science and rationalism were only slogans in an anticlerical war against superstition and authority; appeals to the rule of reason were made in the language of rhetoric, and invocations of a scientific world view were reminiscent of a philosophical syncretism familiar in the Chinese past." 18. This is Vera Schwarcz's (p. 97) characterization of the New Tide group at Peking University. 19. Translated and quoted in Chow, pp. 45-46. Chow's monumental history of the May Fourth period provides an essential background study for the present chapter. 20. Grieder, Intellectuals, p. 210. 21. The May Fourth attack on Confucianism, argues Dong Shiwei (see esp. pp. 164-65), helped to focus intellectual attention on cultural modernization. 22. See Chen Duxiu, "Wuren zuihou zhi juewu" (Our final awareness), quoted in Cao, pp. 319-20. 23. A confusion between value rationality and instrumental rationality, according to Chen Lai's (pp. 155-58) Weberian analysis, lies at the heart of Chen Duxiu's "radical utilitarianism." 24. Tu Wei-ming, "The Enlightenment Mentality and the Chinese Intellectual Dilemma," in Lieberthal et al., p. 105. 25. Dirlik, Origins, p. 71. See pt. II, pp. 57-145, of Dirlik's study for a comprehensive description and analysis of the political, ideological, and organizational dimensions of May Fourth radicalism that prepared the way for Chinese communism. 26. "Shuo youzhi" (On infantilism), YBSHJ-WJ 30: 45-51. In Schwarcz's (p. 13) account, Liang even became a worried "traditional scholar" no longer enjoying respect from the younger generation of intellectuals.

Notes to Pages 174-87

265

27. For a comparison of Chen and Liang as intellectual leaders, see Kuo, pp. 360-67. 28. "Wu jinhou suoyi baoguo zhe" (What I will do to serve the country in the future), YBSHJ-WJ 33: 51-54. Liang started and contributed to about six major journals in the late 1910's and 1920's (see Chang P'eng-yiian, Liang Qichao yu minguo zhengzhi, pp. 277-98). 29. Ouyou xinying lu jielu (Excerpts from the impressions of travels in Europe), YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 40. The same metaphor of wearing an unseasonable fur coat in the summer appeared in Liang's 1905 Xin dalu youji jielu (see Chapter 4 above). 30. Ouyou xinying lu jielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 47-48. 31. Ibid., p. 38. 32. See Dirlik's (Origins, pp. 23-42) discussion of the Chinese perception of the October Revolution. 33. See Liang Qichao's letters to his daughter and his brother Liang Zhongce, NPCB, pp. 881-82, 885-86; and Ouyou xinying lu jielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 47-63, 85-98. 34. Ouyou xinying lu jielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 1. There is a cursory examination of Liang's travel impressions, especially this part, in Grieder, Hu Shin, pp. 129-35. 35. Ouyou xinying lu jielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 3-4. 36. Ibid., p. 20. 37. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 38. Ibid., p. 9. 39. Levenson, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, pp. 196-98. 40. Ibid., p. 202. 41. Paul Cohen (pp. 67-79) also points out a parochialism in Levenson's basic impact-response approach to modern Chinese history, charging the latter with ignoring the inner dynamism existing before the arrival of Westerners. 42. Ouyou xinying lu jielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 10. 43. Ibid., pp. 11-12. 44. For the relation between Carsun Chang and Ding Wenjiang and a summary of their arguments, see Furth, Ting Wen-chiang, pp. 94-135. 45. Hu Shi, "Kexue yu rensheng guan xu" (Preface to Science and Life View), in Hu Shi wenxuan, p. 54. 46. Furth, "Culture and Politics in Modern Chinese Conservatism," in idem, The Limits, p. 39. Furth offers a good description of two styles of cultural conservatism in Republican China, the nativist approach and the neotraditionalist approach. 47. Chatterjee, The Nation, p. 26. 48. Ibid., p. 134. 49. Ouyou xinying lu jielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 13-14. 50. Ibid., p. 15. 51. Ibid., p. 2. See the epigraph at the head of this chapter.

266

Notes to Pages 187-95

52. Ibid., p. 19. 53. An example of such a reading may be found in Levenson, Liang Ch'ich'ao, pp. 193-204. 54. Ouyou xinying lujielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 20. 55. Shen Pao, Mar. 15, 1920; quoted in NPCB, p. 900. 56. Ouyou xinying lujielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 23. 57. Ibid., p. 35. 58. Ibid., pp. 32-33. 59. For a sympathetic analysis of this period, see Dirlik, History, pp. 57136. Recent historical thinking in mainland China seems to suggest a return to the controversy of the 1930's and attempts to redefine the specificity of Chinese history; see, e.g., Hu Cheng. 60. Ouyou xinying lujielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 33. In January 1921, Liang Qichao wrote a fairly long letter to Zhang Dongsun discussing the issue of socialism in China. See "Fu Zhang Dongsun shu lun shehui zhuyi yundong" (A letter in response to Zhang Dongsun on the socialist movement), YBSHJ-WJ 35: 1-12. In this letter Liang reiterated and formulated in a more concise way his argument here. He proposed that the general policy should be "to strive for equal distribution under the precondition of developing production." This letter is one of the most important documents in the development of socialist theory in China. 61. Ouyou xinying lujielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 19 62. See Grieder, Hu Shin, pp. 134-35. 63. Ouyou xinying lujielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 38. 64. See Geertz, p. 52. Recently anthropologist Richard G. Fox (p. 10) offered another definition of culture in terms of nationalist ideology: "Culture is a set of understandings and a consciousness under active construction by which individuals interpret the world around them. Or, in a more behavioral view, it is a tool kit or set of scenarios that individuals use to implement or to stage their daily life." 65. For a discussion of the interrelations of the humanist idea and the emerging anthropological study of other cultures, see Stocking. See also Clifford, pp. 234-35. 66. "The Analysis of Culture," in Williams, p. 41. 67. Li Zehou's observation that variations on the two themes of Enlightenment and Salvation have constituted the central dilemma in modern Chinese history, it seems to me, does not sufficiently emphasize the intrinsic connection between these two modern forms of political mobilization; see "Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou" (Dual variations on enlightenment and salvation), in Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shi lun, pp. 1-54. 68. See Lyotard, pp. 65-66. 69. Dongxi wenhuaji qi zhexue, in Liang Shuming, p. 10. 70. Ibid., p. 64. For a discussion of Liang Shuming's cultural philosophy, see Alitto, Last Confucian, pp. 82-134. 71. See Chow, pp. 327-37.

Notes to Pages 196-210

267

72. See Carsun Chang's letter to Huang Suochu on Jan. 12, 1920; quoted in NPCB, pp. 896-97. 73. Chang P'eng-yiian, Liang Qichao yu minguo zhengzhi, p. 155. 74. NPCB, p. 885. No text of this speech is available. 75. Preface to Hu Shi, The Chinese Renaissance, p. viii, 76. See Chow, esp. pp. 293-99; and Grieder, Hu Shih, pp. 111-21. 77. Chang P'eng-yiian, Liang Qichao yu minguo zhengzhi, pp. 162-69. 78. See Furth, Ting Wen-chiang, p. 81. Liang would quote H. G. Wells in his Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa (The research method for Chinese history; see Lin Yi, pp. 47, 51). 79. NPCB, p. 909. 80. Hu Shi, The Chinese Renaissance, p. 44. 81. "Jiefang yu gaizao fakan ci" (Statement of policy for the journal Emancipation and Reconstruction), YBSHJ-WJ 35: 19-22. 82. "Ouzhou wenyi fuxing shi xu" (Preface to History of the European Renaissance), YBSHJ-WJ 35: 43-44. 83. Qingdai xueshu gailun (Intellectual trends in the Qing period), in Lin Yi, p. 188. See Hsu's trans., pp. 21-22. Hsu's translation, which I consult and occasionally modify here, is often literal and faithful to the original. 84. See Benjamin Schwartz's "Foreword" to Hsu's translation, p. xiii. 85. Intellectual Trends, p. 186; see Hsu's trans., p. 19. 86. Ibid., p. 187; see Hsu's trans., p. 20. 87. Ibid., p. 188; see Hsu's trans., p. 21. 88. Ibid., p. 207; see Hsu's trans., p. 46. 89. Ibid., pp. 207-9; see Hsu's trans., pp. 46-48. 90. Ibid., p. 242; see Hsu's trans., p. 85. 91. Ibid., pp. 262-63; see Hsu's trans., pp. 113-14. 92. Ibid., pp. 270-71; see Hsu's trans., pp. 123-25. 93. Ibid., p. 272; see Hsu's trans., p. 125. 94. On his return from Europe, Liang had consciously parted with an elitist approach to politics, which he believed to be engraved in the traditional literati's sense of obligation to the empire and the universe; see Ouyou xinying lujielu, YBSHJ-ZJ 23: 23. Liang named Du Fu and his poetry as an embodiment of this traditional political consciousness. 95. Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa, in Lin Yi, p. 43. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., p. 44. 98. Ibid., p. 50. 99. Ibid., p. 69. 100. Ibid., pp. 74-76. 101. Ibid., p. 76. 102. Kuhn, p. 109. 103. See Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa, in Lin Yi, p. 115. 104. See "Lishi tongji xue" (Historical statistics), YBSHJ-WJ 39: 68-81. 105. Iggers, New Directions, p. 52; see pp. 52-65 for a historical account of the development of the Annales school. 106. This was also the point made by the Japanese historian Shigeno Yasutsugu, whose 1890 article "The Method of Historical Research" was a re-

268

Notes to Pages 210-18

sponse to the introduction of Western conceptions of history in early Meiji Japan (Numata, pp. 281-82). 107. See Furth's (Ting Wen-chiang, pp. 90-92) analysis of Ding Wenjiang's role as a scientist in the "reorganization of national heritage" movement. The quote, which may be found in Ding's essay "Xuanxue yu kexue" (Metaphysics and science), is from ibid., p. 111. 108. See Hu Shi, "Xin sichao de yiyi" (The meaning of renaissance), in Hu Shi wenxuan, pp. 41-50. 109. See Zhongguo lishiyanjiu fa, in Lin Yi, p. 148n9. 110. See Yii Ying-shi, p. 52. 111. "Ku Chieh-kang's concern with the actual application of the genetic attitudes of National Studies was based on his own experiences before meeting Hu Shih, as well as on Hu's guidance, and on a variety of Chinese thought, the most outstanding of which was carried on by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao" (Schneider, p. 64). 112. See "From Narrative History to Problem-Oriented History," in Furet, 124. Zhongguo lishiyanjiu fa, i 113. Zhongguo lishiyanjiu fa, in Lin Yi, p. 165. 114. Ibid., p. 77. 115. Ibid., p. 82. 116. Ibid., p. 79. 117. Ibid., p. 81. 118. Ibid., p. 82. 119. Ibid., p. 168. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., p. 169. 122. Ibid., p. 154. 123. This phrase is from Ernst Bloch. 124. Zhongguo lishiyanjiu fa, in Lin Yi, p. 82. 125. Levi-Strauss, p. 262. 126. Ibid., p. 256.

127. See Levenson, Confucian China, 3: 76-82; and idem, "The Province," in Feuerwerker et al., p. 278, where he comments on the Chinese Communist practice of "collection, in every sense of the word" as a strategy of containing the idiosyncratic provincial traditions in opera, lore, and legend. For a discussion of the modern Western practice of "culture collecting," see "On Collecting Art and Culture," in Clifford, esp. pp. 230-36. 128. Zhongguo lishiyanjiu fa, in Lin Yi, p. 150. 129. See Li Guojun, p. 244. 130. "Shenmo shi wenhua?" (What is culture?), YBSHJ-WJ 39: 97-104. 131. Zhongguo lishi yanjiu fa (bubian) (Research method for Chinese history [supplement]), YBSHJ-ZJ 99: 13-28. 132. See ibid., pp. 28-36. 133. See ibid., pp. 37-121. 134. See ibid., pp. 123-68. 135. See, e.g., Zhou Gucheng, "Lishi wanxing lun" (On the completeness of history), in idem, pp. 305-41, which was first published as the "Introduction" to his Zhongguo tongshi (General history of China) (Shanghai: Kaiming, 1939); and Zhou Gucheng, "Zhongguo shixue shi tigang" (Outline for a history of Chinese historiography), in idem, pp. 263-304, first published as

Notes to Pages 219-31

269

"Zhongguo shixue zhi jinhua" (The evolution of Chinese historiography) in 1944. Both texts show the paradigmatic influence of Liang's historical thinking. 136. "Yanjiu wenhua shi de jige zhongyao wenti," YBSHJ-WJ 40: 1. 137. Ibid., p. 5. 138. Ibid. 139. Weber, p. 30. 140. Ibid., p. 12. 141. Ibid. 142. "Yanjiu wenhua shi de jige zhongyao wenti," YBSHJ-WJ 40: 7. 143. Ibid. 144. See Soong, p. 44. 145. See Veyne, pp. 283-84.

146. Zhongguo lishiyanjiu fa (bubian), YBSHJ-ZJ 99: 10.

Chapter 6 1. Stoddart, p. 39. 2. Harvey, p. 250. 3. Quoted in Ferry, p. 6. See Ferry's discussion of Heidegger's critique of modernity, pp. 4-19. 4. Meinecke, p. 62. 5. Habermas, p. 4. See also Habermas's discussions "Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance" and "Hegel's Concept of Modernity," pp. 1-44. 6. Ibid., p. 16. 7. Quoted in ibid. 8. Hegel, The Philosophy, p. 63. 9. Ibid., 78. 10. Lefebvre, p. 21. 11. Hegel, The Philosophy, p. 103. 12. See ibid., pp. 103-10. 13. See Fabian, esp. chap. 1, "Time and the Emerging Other," pp. 1-35. 14. Collingwood, pp. 113-14. See also Carr for a discussion of the modern narrativization of time. 15. White, The Content, p. 24. 16. Ibid., p. 21. See also "Ahasuerus, or the Riddle of Time" in Kracauer, pp. 139-63, where he writes, "Uncritical acceptance of the conception of flowing time kindles a desire to translate the formal property of an irreversible flow into content—to conceive, that is, of the historical process as a whole and to assign to that whole certain qualities" (p. 142). 17. Louis Althusser comments, "The Hegelian idea of time is borrowed from the most vulgar empiricism, the empiricism of the false obviousness of everyday practice which we find in a naive form in most of the historians themselves, at any rate in all the historians known to Hegel, who did not pose any questions as to the specific structure of historical time" (Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 96). 18. "History: Science and Fiction," in De Certeau, Heterologies, p. 216. 19. De Certeau, The Writing, p. 3. 20. Said, p. 3.

2 70

Notes to Pages 231 -38

21. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Barker et al., 1: 22. The connection between modern historicism and imperialism is most directly and forcibly made by Edward Said in his critique of Orientalism. See "Historicism and Imperialism," in R. Young, pp. 7-12. 22. See "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," in Geertz, esp. p. 51. 23. Fabian, p. 143. 24. Blackburn, p. 5. Blackburn holds that his geopolitical argument about history is intended not to be anti-Marxist but rather a counterargument to historical materialism. 25. "Marx accepts and welcomes the European intrusion and impact on Asia as a progressive step in the history of mankind. Referring to the level of social, economic and political organization and using the vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxon ethnology of his days, he speaks in positive terms about the impact of (Western) civilization upon barbarian, uncivilized society" (Wielenga, p. 7). For a discussion of the distinction between "cold" and "hot" societies, see Levi-Strauss, pp. 233-34. 26. Kedourie, p. 9. 27. As Georg Iggers (The German Conception, p. 39) points out, Herder's historical thinking has the indelible mark of Antinormativitat disposition prevalent in German idealist philosophy: "If the Enlightenment stresses the common characteristics of man and his rationality, his Humanitatsideal stresses the diversity of man and the interrelation of all aspects of his personality, of rationality and irrationality, into a harmonious whole." 28. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 11. 29. Bhabha, "Introduction: Narrating the Nation," in idem, p. 2. On the topic of "ambivalence," see also Homi Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817, "in Gates, pp. 163-84. 30. See, e.g., "After the Revolution," in Geertz, pp. 234-54. 31. Levenson, "The Genesis of Confucian China and Its Modern Fate" in Curtis, p. 284. 32. Fanon, p. 204. 33. "History and Ethnology," in Furet, In the Workshop, pp. 70-71. 34. R. Young, p. 119. 35. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Derrida, p. 282. 36. R. Young, p. 19. 37. Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," p. 22. See also Flynn. 38. See "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," in Spivak, pp. 199-207. 39. See Gregory. 40. Soja, p. 75. 41. See Jackson. 42. Lefebvre, p. 357. 43. Fanon, p. 247. 44. See "Spatial Historiographies," in Jameson, pp. 364-76.

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Index

In this index an "f" after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an "ff" indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., "57-59." Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive sequence. Absolutism, 8, 138, 140f, 149, 153, 155, 260M69 Activism, 142f Africa, 66f, 234 Agency, 36, 41, 50, 61ff, 64, 72, 80, 115, 123, 194 Alitto, Guy, 184n America, 8, 27, 48, 57, 66, 94, lOlf, 131f, 139, 141, 177, 214; Liang Qichao's travels in, 137f, 144f. See also American Revolution American Revolution, 113, 131, 258wi28-29 Anderson, Benedict, 54, 58 Annales School, 209 Anthropology, 215f, 231. See also underSpace Anti-Manchuism, 127f, 142f, 145, 151-57 passim, 162, 257r?20

Anti-revolutionary argument, 15255. See also Kang Youwei; Min bao; Revolution Anti-traditionalism, 152 Arendt, Hannah, 114, 256»81 Aristotle, 11,31, 123, 154 Asia, 40, 48 Australia, 27, 66 Austria, 83-87, 89, 98 Bacon, Francis, 18, 5If Belgium, 113, 176f Bismarck, 103, 108, 147 Bluntschli, Johann K., 123, 140, 153ff, 261 n69 Bornhak, Conrad, 124, 140, 154f Bryce, James, 138f Buckle, Henry Thomas, 39 Bummeishi, 70f

284

Carlyle, Thomas, 116n Causality, 35f, 39, 62, 207, 219, 221, 227-32 passim Cavour, Camillo di, 88-103, 120, 125, 133f, 147, 168f, 174f, 253M31 Chang, Carsun, 183, 196 Chang, Hao, 22, 67, 128, 255n64 Chatterjee, Partha, 22, 62, 183f, 184H, 232 ChenDuxiu, 163, 170-74, 194, 205, 264M23 ChenTianhua, 143 Chiang, Monlin, 161 Chinese Communist Party, 163, 170, 218. See also Chen Du- xiu Chinese Revolution of 1911, 4, 6, 118f, 136, 147n, 162-72 passim, 190f, 214, 237, 259n37 Citizen, 21-27 passim, 190, 194 Clifford, James, 235 Cohen, Paul, 185n, 265tt41 Colonialism, 40, 66, 77, 237 Confucianism, 16-21 passim, 27, 35, 67, 163, I/Off, 173, 183, 190, 195,264^21 Conservatism, 19, 25 Constitutionalism, 44, 128f, 153, 254n59, 258«24. See also Constitutional monarchy Constitutional monarchy, 4, 30, 89, 93-98 passim, 112, 122, 134-49 passim, 149, 154, 165,25556«79, 256n2. See also Constitutionalism Cosmopolitanism, 12, 17, 27, 67, 186, 192; cosmopolitan elite, 52f, 170-75 passim Crisis, 48, 130, 132 Cromwell, Oliver, 81, 107, 116n, 169,212 Cultural history, 5, 9, 152, 217-25 passim, 237 Cultural politics, 9, 119, 183-92 passim, 198,203,205,216,

Index 222ff, 225, 237. See also New Culture Culture, 172, 184n, 193, 195, 209, 216f, 266M64 Danton, Georges Jacques, 110,126, 158 Darwin, Charles, 11, 5 If, 113 Darwinism, social, 66, 77, 173, 179ff, 182 Democracy, 59, 146, 149 Descartes, Rene, 11, 5If Destructionism, 20, 30, 42, 83ff, 103ff, 106, 112, 123, 170, 251n9; destruction vs. construction, 105, 112-14, 120, 131, 134, 145, 159, 165, 200 Dewey, John, 197 Ding Wenjiang, 6, 170, 183, 196f, 210, 265n44, 268H107 Dirlik, Arif, 173, 265w32 Emotionalism, 133, 151, 156-60 passim England, 34, 55, 58, 92ff, 101, 106f, 112, 121f, 132f, 258n34; political system of, 4, 93ff, 98, 128-31, 253/139; Liang Qichao's travels in, 175f Enlightenment, 8, 48, 59, 69f, 74, 129, 141, 173, 229; philosophe, 3, 50, 52, 70, 148, 226; Chinese project of, 13,31,42,46,91, 125, 144, 171, 173, 194; vision of history, 35, 61,69, 73, 79, 226f, 230ff Epochalism, 60, 233 Essentialism, 60, 184, 233 Europe, 25, 40, 48, 55f, 67, 77, 12426, 141, 179, 214; Liang Qichao's travels in, 4, 8, 58, 174-88, 190; social and political philosophies of, 15,35,62,81, 186,235; modern, 33f, 104, 112, 163, 18082, 187-92 passim; national revolutions in, 79, 84-116

Index Evolution, 64-72 passim, 119, 179ff, 182, 180, 182, 201, 220. See also Darwin, Charles; Darwinism, social Fabian, Johannes, 229, 231 Fanon, Frantz, 234f, 237, 251nl Foucault, Michel, 236, 243/123, 250/177, 250/184 France, 30, 34, 52, 93, lOOf, 120-22, 126-31 passim, 157, 176, 257/14. See also Franco- Prussian War; French Revolu-tion Franco-Prussian War, 1, 56 Freedom, 16, 23f, 55f, 103, 108, 113f, 156, 159, 228, 256/iSl. See also Liberty French Revolution, 4, 9, 35, 95, 133-39 passim, 146-51 passim, 163f, 181, 226, 258/128, 259/737; as positive precedent, 51, 55, 102-10 passim, 173; as negative precedent, 105, 110-30 passim, 140, 155-60 passim Fukuzawa Yukichi, 15, 52, 62, 70, 243/717 Furet, Francois, 163f, 211, 235, 261H73, 263/198 Furth, Charlotte, 171, 264/717, 268nl07 Future, 12, 39, 44, 187 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 88ff, 92, 96101, 116, 133, 147 Gasster, Michael, 164 Geography, 29, 39-44 passim, 74 Germany, 4, 29f, 113, 122, 169, 175, 184/1, 196, 245/153 Gibbon, Edward, 69f Giddens, Anthony, 35, 69 Girondism, 108ff, 111, 159 Global imaginary, 37, 74, 141, 164, 181, 195; of difference, 7-9, 195, 205, 216, 221-25 passim, 238; of identity, 7, 13, 22, 28, 67, 104,

285

141, 148, 170ff, 173,22511,228; of solidarity, 173ff, 176 Gujiegang, 210, 268nlll Guangxu emperor, 94f, 99, 105, 255/172 Guojia: vs. tianxia, 14, 39, 214, 242nlO. See also Nation-state Guomindang, 163, 170, 218 Habermas, Jiirgen, 227 Harvey, David, 7, 215f, 226 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 65, 77, 201, 227-30, 249n54 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 232, 270/127 Historical discourse, 7f, 29, 53, 72, 78f, 206-8, 224f, 229, 230-32, 270/121; historical consciousness, 2, 6, 23, 26, 28, 64, 211, 219, 227f, 233, 238. See also Historicity Historicity, 18, 35f, 59, 65, 72f, 115, 152, 201, 206-11 passim. See also Historical discourse Historiography, 29, 32, 56f, 61, 63, 75, 106, 206, 226, 246/724; periodization, 33ff, 42ff, 75; traditional, 35f, 61-64, 72; new, 45, 64, 205-25, 232ff, 238; regime of historical experiences, 213f, 217 History, 8, 33, 42, 62, 69, 78ff, 221 Hu Shi (Shih), 170, 183, 196ff, 210 Huang, Philip, 15, 163, 243/117, 255n64, 258/126 Huang Zunxian, 47, 68, 93f, 246/76, 253/138, 257/120, 258/128, 259/139 Hungary, 9, 82-87, 95, 102, 133; independence movement, 81-88. See also Kossuth, Louis Huxley, Thomas Henry, 66, 93 Iggers, Georg, 209, 270n27 Imperialism, 21, 25f, 77, 146, 176, 179, 233f, 270/121

286

India, 62, 66, 133, 183,254^59, 258H31, 259n37 Industrial Revolution, 178, 18If, 190f Inoue Tetsujiro, 71, 249n53, 250n82

Intelligentsia, 52-53, 60 Italy, 1, 34, 88f, lOlf, 113,169, 174ff; Risorgimento, 9, 38, 88102, 120, 133 Ito Hirobumi, 29f, 122 Japan, 68, 94, 101, 106, 127, 132, 138, 141, 169, 175, 214; as constitutional monarchy, 4, 12831, 165, 245n53; Chinese students in, 141-45 passim, 159, 171, 260H57. See flfroMeiji Restoration Jiang Fangzhen, 196, 198 Journalism: role of, 49-56, 92, 130, 167, 247/?21; responsibility of, 57, 59, 84, 248n37 Kang Youwei, 6, 19, 35, 82, 136f, 160, 169, 172, 203, 254n59, 258n31; influence on Liang Qichao, 3, 13,66, 121,252, 249/755; debate with Liang Qichao, 54, 75f, 105, 112; and the French Revolution, 105f, 110, 155,255^72 Kant, Immanuel, 31, 135, 147, 184n Kato Hiroyuki, 15, 123 Kidd, Benjamin, 11, 113, 131, 250/768 Knowledge, 8, 12-18 passim, 29f, 50ff, 53, 72, 78, 179, 182f, 203W passim, 220, 227, 243n20; historical, 32, 75, 212-18 passim, 224 Kossuth, Louis, 11, 82-89, 92, 101, 103, 121 Learning, see Knowledge Lefebvre, Henri, 228, 237

Index Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 148f, 176f, 2597737 Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole, 117ff, 135f Levenson, Joseph, 2, 14, 22, 27f, 18577, 216, 233, 238, 248n25; Liang Qichao and the Mind of Modern China, 5, 16f, 34, 41f, 180, 242/710 (Chap. 1) Levi-Strauss, Claude, 214f, 224, 235 Li Zehou, 118, 256n2, 266/767 Liang Qichao: in Japan, 3, 7, 11-19 passim, 56, 104, 127, 165, 168, 179; writing style of, 12, 21, 47, 53, 157f; and liberalism, 21-26 passim, 30, 114, 128, 180, 190, 198, 205, 221; and translation, 47, 68, 85f, 91, 254n53; and journalism, 49-56 passim, 174f, 265«28; the New Historian, 64, 68,71,78,83,108,205 —editor of: New Citizen Journal, 3, llf, 46-48, 80-91 passim, 102, 105, 139-48 passim, 153,158, 161, 171, 255n72, 259n39, 261/779; New Fiction, 12, 85; Journal of Disinterested Discussion, 15, 48, 58; Emancipation and Reconstruction, 198 —writings: General Discussion of Reforms, 3, 14, 37, 42, 65; The Future of New China, 4, 12, 28, 30,85,96,115,116n,120-37, 144, 257/77; New Historiography, 8, 36, 43-50 passim, 57, 61, 68f, 75-82, 108,115, 152, 205ff, 208, 215, 224; Research Method for Chinese History, 9, 196, 205-23; Discourse on the New Citizen, 11, 16-26 passim, 38f, 46f, 81f, 90, 93, 107, 141, 199; Poetic Commentary from the IceDrinker's Studio, 11; Book of Liberal Writings, 15, 24, 95, 179; "Preservation of Faith Is Not the

Index Way to Exalt Confucius," 20-21; "Guidelines to Japanese Books," 30-32, 35, 70; "Ode to Young China," 37-41 passim, 90, 171; "On the General Features of European Geography," 40; "On the Relationship Between Geography and Civilization," 40; "On the General Features of Chinese Geography," 41; "Defining Revolutionary Reform," 105, 164; "Teachings of the Great Staatswissenschaftler Bluntschli," 123, 140; Journey to the New World, 138ff; "On Enlightened Absolutism," 153-58 passim; Impressions of Travels in Europe, 165, 182, 188, 195; Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period, 196205,253^30 Liang Shuming, lS4n, 195, 204 Liberalism, 3, 102, 108, 119, 130, 132, 159, 162, 185; German, 4, 9, 104, 122f, 129f, 136, 150, 154; Western, 21,93, 179,258^26; English, 93, 124, 130, 253n35 Liberty, 16, 80, 93, 106-11 passim, 123, 139f, 156, 173, 186, 256H81; and order, 100-103, 128, 144. See also Freedom Lin Yii-sheng, 264^14 LuXun(Hstin), 162, 170 Lukacs, Georg, 35 Luther, Martin, 81, 107, 135 Mai Zhonghua, 17 Manchus, see Anti-Manchuism; Qing dynasty Map, world, 1, 13, 23 Mapping, 75,215 Marx, Karl, 229ff, 232, 250n68, 270n25 Marxism, 170 May Fourth period, 13, 194-96, 205, 218, 264M17; intellectuals of,

287

171-75 passim, 196. See also Enlightenment Mazzini, Giuseppe, 11, 81, 88-103, 114, 120, 125, 133-36, 147, 252r?15, 252nl7, 252n23. See also Young Italy Meiji Restoration, 15, 29ff, 52, 70, 94, 105. See also Japan Mencius, 65, 82, 154,220 Metternich, Klemens von, 83f, 97, 103 Mill, John Stuart, 16, 48, 93, 124, 243r?rtl7-18, 255n64, 258n26, 258n34 Millenarianism, 106, 119, 144, 174, 257n24 Min bao (Min pad), 258m?29-30, 262MH92-93; Liang Qichao's debate with writers of, 9, 30, 115, 119, 121, 132-37 passim, 143-64, 191. See also Republicanism Mo Zi (Mo Tzu), 147, 152, 154 Mobilization, 26, 91, 112, 120, 15 156-58, 162-64, 190, 194,205, 222. See also Nationalism Modernity, discourse of, 2, 6, 45, 60, 79f, 102, 104, 118-22 passim, 141, 148, 170f, 187,232,238; modernization, 59, 166, 172, 222f; Western, 180-82, 188, 221, 226-35 passim Nakamura Masanao, 16, 243nnl718 Napoleon, 89, 103-8 passim, 126f, 147, 232,252nl9, 252n23 Nathan, Andrew, 49, 59 Nation, 58-61 passim. See also Guojia; Nation-state Nationalism, 22, 34, 4If, 52, 74, 89, 107, 114, 127, 146; function of, 3, 7, 30, 34, 39, 45, 52; modern, 7, 11, 13,38, 53, 61,80ff, 115, 132, 142, 186, 192, 222, 232ff; Liang Qichao and, 8, 16, 21-28 passim, 36f, 48, 60, 66, 68, 74-79

288

Index

passim, 88, 150, 179; modern, 23, 34f, 41, 52-55,78, 100, 127 Nation-state, 53, 62, 74, 81, 172; Chinese need for, 37-42 passim,

141, 143-46, 159, 163f, 173, 178, 260M57

Qing dynasty, 3, 13f, 30, 49, 94, 124, 133, 141f, 167,202, 260n59; intellectual history of, 19, 196-2 lOpflSS/m, 217; government of, 87, 104, 127, 146, 150f, 155; fall of, 118, 161, 165, 189, 191

Rationalism, 81, 134, 182f, 198, 204 Reform, 59f, 104, 128, 130, 141, 189. See also Revolution Reformation, German, 135. See also Luther, Martin Renovation, 12f, 16-28 passim, 48, 80, 171, 200, 210; of the people, 19-28 passim, 46, 144, 194 Republicanism, 4, 6, 30, 90, 109, 115, 122, 139-43 passim, 153ff, 172, 256n79, 258n24; American, 8, 137; French, 9, 104, 123f, 136, 150; Italian, 89, 92, 95, 99, 102, 120; Chinese, 94f, 134; in Min bao, 146ff, 149 Republic of China, 165-72 passim Revolution, 8f, 25, 61, 78f, 98-106 passim, 120f, 156-60, 163f, 178, 191, 255H72; vs. reform, 85f, 112, 125ff, 128, 134ff, 143-52 passim. See also Anti-revolutionary argument; French Revolution; Hungary; Italy Revolutionary Alliance, 4, 121, 132, 145ff, 161ff, 262n92 Revolution of 1911, see Chinese Revolution of 1911 Rickert, Heinrich, 184n, 219 Robespierre, 109f, 126, 158 Roland, Madame Jeanne Manon, 9, 102f, 108-12, 114, 120, 148 Romanticism, 81, 185 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30, 104, 106,110, 123,129,143, 147, 154-58, 176.252H19 Russia, 8, 34, 48, 52, 140f, 177; Revolution of 1905, 146, 148n, 259n37, 260n67; October Revolution of 1917, 173, 190, 265n32; Soviet, 176f

Radicalism, 24, 102, 128-34 passim,

Said, Edward, 231,2 70M21

72, 222

Naturalism, 185f Neo-Confucianism, 199-201 Neo-conservatism, 183-85, 192, 205 New, see Renovation New Culture, 5, 27, 46, 144f, 16874, 189, 193f, 199, 204. See also Cultural politics New Culture movement, 164, 171f, 183, 193-97 passim, 225. See also May Fourth period Newspapers, see Journalism New Youth, 163, 171, 173. See also Chen Duxiu North America, 4, 8, 102, 137, 174, 252n25 October Revolution, see under Russia One Hundred Days Reform, 3, 13f, 19,47, 84, 94, 105, 122 Plutarch, 70, 108, 11 Of Postcolonialism, 233-37 passim Postmodernism, 235ff, 238 Postnationalism, 7, 42, 61, 219, 222, 224, 234ff, 237 Postrevolutionary age, 118-19, 160, 172, 190,233,256^2 Poulantzas, Nicos, 36, 74, 76 Press, see Journalism Provincialism, 27, 67

Index Schwartz, Benjamin, 93, 255nn6465, 258n26, 259n34 Science, 172, 179-83, 186f, 194f, 204, 220 "Science and metaphysics" controversy, 183, 185w, 193 Shiratori Kurakichi, 32 Sino-Japanese War, 121 Social contract, 123, 129, 154f Socialism, 59, 146, 150, 156, 186, 190f, 196f, 204, 262M80, 266n60 Society, 63-68 passim, 73 Society for Common Learning, 197f South America, 139f Space, 6, 10, 23, 45, 61, 65, 73-78 passim, 194,211,215,235,237; world, 2, 13, 27f, 34, 45, 216, 224, 231ff, 234, 237; national, 2, 28, 79, 232ff; temporalized, 7, 34, 44f, 73, 75, 194, 232, 236;

anthropological, 8, 10, 216, 224f, 230,238 Spectacle, historical, 27f Spencer, Herbert, 48, 93, 113, 143, 243^18, 256«79 Staatsrecht, see Statism Staatswissenschaft, 122-24, 137, 257r?9

Statism, 123, 153f Sun Yat-sen, 4, 127, 142-46 passim, 169, 174, 257M24, 258tt34, 260M67, 261M74, 262n82; and Min bao, 121, 154, 156, 161f

Taguchi Ukichi, 31, 70 Taiping Kingdom, 1, 202 TanSitong, 66, 257«20 Technology, 57, 59 Territory, 37f, 73 Tianxia, see Guojia Time: modern experience of, 2, 7, 26, 45, 61, 64, 73-78 passim, 187, 215, 232-36 passim, universal, 2, 28, 34, 75, 78, 23Iff; and historical sciences, 65, 225, 230, 238 Tokutomi Soho, 121, 125, 256n79

289

Tongmeng hui, see Revolutionary Alliance Totality, 2, 27, 71ff, 208-14 passim, 217ff, 220, 225, 228, 237f Toyoshi, 30ff, 33, 71 Tradition, 102, 152f, 184 United States, see America Universal intellectual, 48, 50, 53, 64, 70. See also Enlighten- ment Universalism, 60f, 70, 76 Utopianism, 59, 91, 99, 120, 134, 137, 143, 152, 164 Vanguardism, see Radicalism Victor Emmanuel, King, 99ff, 103 Voltaire, 52, 69f, 72, 117,227 Wang Dong, 137, 259n38 Wang Fuzhi 67f, 249n65 Wangjingwei, 146, 154, 159 WangTao, 49, 51, 247nl3 Weber, Max, 220 Wells, H. G., 197, 267n78 West, 18f, 25, 69, 82, 117f, 151, 180, 234, 236. See also Europe; and individual countries by name White, Hayden, 229, 243n32 Williams, Raymond, 56, 58, 193 Wilson, Woodrow, 177, 192 World War I, 56, 169, 192, 214 Writing, new-style, 12, 47, 53f, 157 Xujiyu, 13 Xun Zi, 220, 249n65

Van Fu, 48, 66, 68, 93, 108, 243wl8, 255nn64-65, 258^26, 258n34 YangDu, 16 If Young Italy, 38f, 90-94 passim, 102, 125, 134, 252n23 Yuan Shikai, 166-69, 174, 264«10 Zhang Binglin, 68, 146 Zhang Dongsun, 190, 196f, 266n60 Zhang Junmai, see Chang, Carsun Zhou Gucheng, 268nl35

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tang, Xiaobing. 1964Global space and the nationalist discourse of modernity : the historical thinking of Liang Qichao / Xiaobing Tang p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 0-8047-2583-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Liang, Ch'i-ch'ao, 1873-1929-Contributions in historiography. 2. Historiography. I. Title. DS764.23.L52T36 1996 95r.035'092-dc20 95-18540 CIP ® This book is printed on acid-free paper Original printing 1996