Liang Qichao, "Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World" (Penguin Classics, 2023)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Liang Qichao, "Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World" (Penguin Classics, 2023)

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Sarah Bramao Ramos
Guest: Peter Zarrow (Translator, Historian of Modern China)
Release Date: December 13, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the first major English volume of Liang Qichao’s essays, newly translated by Peter Zarrow. Liang Qichao, a towering figure in 20th-century Chinese intellectual life, grappled with the meaning of citizenship, democracy, reform, and China’s place in the modern world—against a backdrop of immense social and political upheaval. Zarrow’s selection, translation, and commentary create new opportunities for Anglophone readers to engage with Liang’s complex, evolving thought.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Zarrow's Path to Liang Qichao and Modern Chinese Intellectual History

• Early Academic Journey

  • Zarrow describes coming of age during the Vietnam War, his youthful interest in Buddhism, Daoism, and “Oriental thought,” and his dabbling in Maoism and radical politics.
  • He credits inspiring teachers, early focus on radicalism, and eventual study of anarchists in grad school for shaping his intellectual history approach.
  • Quote:

    “I was a kind of high school Maoist and carried that into college to some extent... then took both literature and history courses in Chinese.” [03:01]

• Encounter with Liang Qichao

  • Zarrow first met Liang through short translated snippets and secondary sources—there was no comprehensive English translation of Liang’s essays at the time.
  • Early on, Zarrow was more persuaded by revolutionaries but came to recognize Liang’s “deeply radical” thinking, especially his criticism of autocracy and support for republicanism.
  • He coined “Confucian radicalism” to describe Liang’s blend of tradition and revolutionary ideas.

2. The Translation Project: Goals and Challenges

• Impetus for Translation

  • The project began when Penguin approached Zarrow to contribute to the Penguin Classics series. The goal: make Liang’s fuller arguments accessible in English, not just snippets.
  • Quote:

    “Penguin Press came to me and asked... I thought it would be really worthwhile to, by translating complete essays, give readers... a better chance of seeing how his mind works.” [09:23]

• Handling Liang’s References & Rhetorical Style

  • Liang’s style is “circuitous”—he often circles back to ideas, poses rhetorical questions, and quotes a wide range of sources, especially Neo-Confucian classics and Western thinkers.
  • Zarrow addressed Liang’s dense references with strategic footnoting, providing context present-day readers would lack.
  • Challenge: balancing clarity for modern readers with faithfulness to the original.

• Essay Selection Criteria

  • Out of Liang’s extensive oeuvre (over 30 volumes!), Zarrow focused on essays related to political and social thought with broad, global relevance: nationalism, citizenship, constitutionalism, imperialism, and more.
  • What didn’t make the cut: Scholarly works focused on historical detail, or essays requiring “intense” footnoting about Western philosophers. Zarrow prioritized pieces showing Liang’s original thinking.

3. Liang Qichao: Biography and Evolution as a Thinker

• Background

  • Born in 1873, from a modest family, dazzlingly precocious.
  • Became a disciple of Kang Youwei, exposed to reformist and global ideas early, profoundly shaped by encounters with missionaries and revolutionary politics.

• Intellectual Development: Four Key Phases

  • Early Radical Reformer (1896–1898):

    • Focused on institutional reform—especially education, the exam system, and the creation of public schools for both genders.
    • Introduced social Darwinism (from Yan Fu’s translations) and argued for the need of a unified, educated population to modernize China.
      • Quote:

        “He’s a leading publicist... of Social Darwinism already in the late 1890s.” [23:26]

  • Exile in Japan (1899–1903):

    • After the failed Hundred Days’ Reform, Liang fled to Japan—an extremely productive period.
    • Engaged with Western political thought, introduced the concept of the “new citizen” (xinmin), and sharpened his critique of despotism and autocracy.
      • Quote:

        “Everything from the third century BCE to the present... he often speaks about as a kind of wrong path.” [29:19]

    • Saw “survival of the fittest” in national and racial terms—a blend of admiration for the West with a sense of existential threat from imperialism.

  • Cultural Reform and Conservative Turn (1904–1911):

    • Characterized as a “conservative” turn, but Zarrow argues the reality is nuanced—Liang shifted emphasis rather than reversing core beliefs.
    • Critiqued young revolutionaries for being reckless; called for a period of “top-down” enlightenment.
      • Quote:

        “He’s mixed. He actually says, these youngsters... are the hope of China, but they’ve gotten carried away and they’re sort of drunk on Western ideas.” [40:15]

  • Post-1911 and May Fourth Era (1912–1929):

    • As China’s intellectual climate grew more radical, Liang’s eclectic gradualism and respect for tradition seemed passé to many, though he retained influence as a respected elder and historical researcher.
    • Key themes: self-awakening of the Chinese people, education, the endurance of tradition, and caution about blind adoption of Western ways.

4. Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On Liang’s “conservatism”:

  • “It’s not 180 degrees change from what he thought before... it’s much more nuanced and gradual than that.” (Peter Zarrow, 42:00)

• On selecting essays:

  • “I’m interested in where you can see more of his original thinking... essays that sprang from his radical reformist goals.” (13:52)

• On Liang’s relevance:

  • “If you want to understand today’s China, you should have an appreciation of what Liang Qichao is doing and his role in creating it...” (56:03)

5. Thematic Highlights From Specific Essays

• On Buddhism and Social Order:
  • Liang’s Buddhist influences are deeper than many realize; he advocates Buddhism as an instrument of national strengthening, but also as a universal moral force (36:33).
• On Imperialism and Race:
  • Liang viewed imperialism as an existential, even racial threat; his analysis mingled admiration for Western modernity with anxiety about “survival of the fittest” (33:43).
• On Citizenship and Nationhood:
  • Central to Liang’s thought is the creation of citizens who actively identify with and participate in the life of the nation. Education is repeatedly stressed as the key tool (29:19, 51:56).
• On Women’s Rights and Social Change:
  • Later essays urge patience and steady reform (“step by step”), a stance both practical and increasingly seen as conservative by younger generations (50:19).

6. Relevance to Modern China and Beyond

• Zarrow underscores how Liang’s foundational role in molding modern Chinese thought persists today, especially regarding anti-imperialism, critiques of despotism, and debates about balancing state power, tradition, and modernity (56:03).
• Liang stands out, even on recent lists by contemporary Chinese scholars, as one of the few Chinese thinkers who shaped the global “structure of knowledge” (57:50).
• Liang’s questions about self-government, legitimacy, and the use of tradition remain freshly relevant.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Zarrow’s Early Intellectual Journey: [02:50–05:27]
• First Introduction to Liang Qichao: [06:02–08:46]
• Origins and Goals of the Penguin Translation: [09:23–10:58]
• Challenges of Translating Liang’s Quotations: [12:01–13:29]
• Essay Selection Process: [13:52–17:30]
• Liang’s Early Biography and Reformist Essays: [19:25–23:26]
• Exile, New Citizen Concept, and Imperialism: [29:19–35:30]
• Buddhism and Social Order: [36:33–39:03]
• Cultural Reform and Conservative Critique: [40:15–43:41]
• May Fourth Era and Perceptions of Liang: [44:41–49:24]
• Relevance Today and Final Reflections: [56:03–59:22]
• Zarrow’s Current and Future Work: [60:32–63:22]

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Conclusion: Why Read Liang Qichao Now?

Liang’s work, by Zarrow’s account, animates enduring debates: What makes government legitimate? How do states interact and modernize? How can traditions be leveraged for progress without being stifling? Liang’s complex, sometimes contradictory wrestling with these topics—his “circuitous” rhetorical style, his embrace of eclectic sources, his willingness to rethink and revise—offer a model for navigating confusion and change in any society.

“He’s dealing with critical issues we face today... And I’m not saying he has the answers, but I strongly suspect that we can learn a lot from watching how he wrestled with these questions.”
—Peter Zarrow [57:50]

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For further exploration:

• Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Classics, 2023; translated/introduced by Peter Zarrow)
• Look out for Zarrow’s forthcoming work on the history of Beijing’s Forbidden City as a museum since 1900.

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Transcript

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[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to New Books in East Asian Studies, a podcast on the New Books Network. My name is Sarah Bramau Ramos and I am one of the hosts on the channel. And I'm here today with Peter Zaro to talk about his new translation, a collection of essays written by China's preeminent public intellectual of the 20th century, Liang Qichao. This came out in 2023 with Penguin under the title Thoughts from the Ice Drinkers Essays on China and the World. So this book includes essays from different periods of Liang Qichao's life, from his early life in the late Qing, his time in exile in Japan after 1898, and then later in his life in the 1920s. So these were turbulent times for China and for this author. So in these essays, we see him grappling with questions like what does it mean to be a citize? How should China progress? How has she progressed before? What does democracy even mean? And a lot of things in between. So with that, very excited to be talking about it with its translator. Welcome, Peter, to the New Books Network.

[B]

Thank you. It's nice to be here. Great.

[A]

So I guess we'll start at the beginning with your beginning. So Peter, how did you come to work on modern Chinese history?

[B]

Okay, so at the risk of really starting at the beginning, I'm a member of the boomer generation, so that's coming of age, as it were, during the Vietnam War and becoming interested in Asia when I was in high school and sort of interested in Oriental thought and Buddhism and Daoism, but also politically the kind of non Russian versions of the New Left and Maoism and radical politics. And I think thinking back with a little bit of juvenile embarrassment, I was a kind of high school Maoist and carried that into college to some extent and was in college pursued both literature courses in Chinese, which I really loved, but also history, which I thought modern history would be kind of more relevant in the term of the day. I did my senior honors thesis on Maoism. I was already interested in anarchism, but didn't really have the Chinese abilities to work on that yet. And so here's the usual story of a particularly inspiring teacher who got me interested in intellectual history as my particular field or approach. This is Radicalism of May 4th of the Marxists of Communism, but also the late Qing, the 1911 revolution, and sort of several generations of radical thinkers not limited to Liang Qi Chao. I took that to graduate school where I was then able to work on the anarchists who were having rather understudied at the time sound marginal. But more recent scholarship has shown her they're fairly mainstream, at least within radical circles. Also, I just want to say graduate school also took me into a lot of or some amount of work on pre modern thought, particularly Neo Confucianism, which I didn't do much with for most of my career, but did prove useful. Coming back to Liang Qi Tao's translation, since he's citing and using in various ways people such aside from the classical warring state Confucians, people like Zhu Xi and Wang Yamin. So that's my, I guess, approach to the field.

[A]

Wonderful. So, you know, you mentioned there that, you know, you've worked for a while now on Chinese intellectuals and you had that early interest in Chinese intellectuals. So thinking of this particular Chinese intellectual of this book, do you remember you hinted at it a little bit there. But do you remember, remember when you first came across Liang Cichao and across his writings, what did you think of them? Did you think, ah, yes, this is what I want to work on in the future? Or how did you kind of. Yeah. Approach his writings.

[B]

So while there's sort of snippets of Liang Qichao's writings available in translation in places like the Deberry Source Book of Chinese Tradition and a few other source books, there were no complete translations of his political essays. So I learned about his ideas or his sort of main arguments in these snippets of translations. But otherwise I had to study Liang kind of through secondary sources. So I found him really interesting. And the framework for my first looking at Liang. I wasn't particularly looking at Liang. I was really interested in the debate that emerged in the very early 1900s between the Chinese reformers and people who wanted to turn China into a constitutional monarchy, such as Liang on the one hand and the revolutionaries on the other. And at that time, I was more persuaded by the revolutionaries and their arguments. But I did also read a couple of the scholarly biographies of Liang Qichao, one by Joseph Levinson, which is, in retrospect, it has some curious arguments, but it's certainly a compelling look at Liang, both his ideas and the kind of psychology behind them. And then the book by John Howe, which is a more intense but maybe more standard intellectual history, written in some ways to, or as a response to Levenson's approach, putting them together. The main thing you realize is how deeply radical Lyon's thought was. So even if he turned away from revolution as such, there's no way not to say his ideas were revolutionary in terms of their criticism of traditional Chinese autocracy and, you know, ultimately his support for what you have to call republicanism, maybe liberalism, that we might come back to the sort of vexed subject of what is liberalism. Then, much later, when I was writing my book on the conceptual transformation of the state in China, I use Liang Qishao's writings to a great extent, and I called that Confucian radicalism. So that's a kind of evolution of my thinking about Liang from the first acquaintance as an undergraduate.

[A]

So you were talking there about the snippets that exist of his work in translation. I mean, there's sections of Liang Qi Chao's writing available in English, but this is definitely a much longer devoted, focused treatment of him. Was that your impetus for undertaking this translation? The lack of a single volume focused translation of his writing, or was there something else that made you think, ah, it is my time to undertake a translation project.

[B]

So the immediate impetus is really simple. Penguin Press came to me and asked me if I would do one of their volumes for the. Whatever it's called, the Penguin Classics.

[A]

That's A good impetus.

[B]

And probably on the basis of that book after Empire Conceptual transformation of the Chinese State. And my first thought was yeah, that would be really interesting and a good thing to do. And also one reason is with the so called snippets or just reading Li Xia's essays, his arguments are always very clear. I mean, you know what he wants to be saying. But the way he gets there is maybe sometimes a little circuitous. And I thought it would be really worthwhile to, by translating complete essays, give readers and me as well a better chance of seeing how his mind works, how he's seizing on certain ideas and working through them and then coming up with what he wants to say about Chinese history. Or again, what does citizenship really consist of? What is liberalism, liberty and self government? These big ideas that he wrestled with in all sorts of different ways. And if you like the different influences that he's getting from around the world.

[A]

I think circuitous is definitely a good way of describing his style. He does have a particular rhetorical style where he comes back to ideas or he poses a rhetorical question that someone might ask and then that leads him off to another direction and then there's another rhetorical question that leads someone him off to another and he goes kind of around and around until he, as you say, gets at what he really wants to say or what he really thinks. Similarly, as you were just hinting there, he does certainly use a lot of references. I think you say in your translator's note that he never went long without quoting from something which you were hinting at there when you mentioned that, you know, your interest in the pre modern period came in useful here because in, you know, in trying to figure out what is he quoting? But how did you. Was that a particular, you know, task or challenge in translating his writing, trying to figure out what to do with all of those references of which there are many.

[B]

Adlam. Well, sometimes it was a challenge delving into usually Neo Confucian writings. I relied to the extent I could on existing translations of Huangming and Zhu Xi again for example, but in terms of translating them, wealth certificate, just trying to follow what Leon Qichao is doing and then adding the footnote which his readers at the time would not have needed. But today most readers will probably need that. And if you like, then you can pursue the original quote in its context. He misquoted slightly sometimes, or at least his quotation is different from the standard edited versions that we have now, but usually so slightly it didn't make any difference. And again, I can just note that in the footnotes. And if the quote doesn't seem to fit his argument, well, the. Then that's up to the reader to think about. Not my responsibility as a translator to.

[A]

Empower the work out thinking with that about the things that have come into this and how you've sort of made sense of his writing. I imagine that this book could have been much longer in that he wrote a lot. How did you ultimately decide what to include and what to not include?

[B]

Yeah, so Penguin comes to me and says, okay, we'll give you 90,000 words. Which in the event I managed to stretch about to 90,000 words, but it's still very, very selective. He wrote, as you know, I think the complete edition, which is even not yet complete now has something like 30 rather fat volumes. So to begin with, there's stuff I could eliminate. He wrote a great deal of basically scholarship, particularly historical scholarship, particularly in his later days. He also wrote a good deal on Western thinkers, which is interesting to Chinese historians. How did Liang write about Kant or Rousseau or Hobbes or Mills and Montesquiru and Bentham and so on. But maybe that would be less interesting to non China addicts who the book, you know, come back to that. The book is aimed at least hopefully in part to people who don't primarily work on China. And also in those essays on, for example, Rousseau, he's mostly translating from Japanese sources. And so to China historians, it's interesting to see how he might include his own Taitun Rousseau. So at some point, but mostly there, it's not so much Liang's original thinking. So yeah, I'm interested in where you can see more of his original thinking. And so that means what do I want to include? Well, these essays that sprang from his radical reformist goals. So essentially in the realm of political thought or social thought and concerns that are in some sense universal or at least central to modern global history. Nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, citizenship, constitutionalism, and therefore topics that maybe political theorists might find interesting. So this would be the first chance people who don't read Chinese have to really put Liang's writings in the context of global political theory, which is something of a growing field, I think, and.

[A]

Definitely hope, as you mentioned, you had 80,000 and then that was stretched slightly to 90. Was there anything that just didn't make the cut?

[B]

Well, there's many things that didn't make the cut that I feel bad about to this day if I go back and do a second volume. Ah, some of his early historical essays, which are really Political theory as much as history. One reason why I didn't include them require even more intense footnoting than the essays I did include was also something in the back of my head, with basically one exception. None of the essays require a whole bunch of footnotes for references that make no sense without a fairly good knowledge of the classics and Chinese history or even Westerns sometimes.

[A]

Yeah, I was thinking when you were talking about his views on rousseau and millon etc. I imagine with those you would actually need quite a substantial background in Rousseau, for example, in the Western classics or the Western tradition, Western philosophical thought, in order to then follow him. So therefore I imagine the references, the footnotes would inevitably balloon just slightly.

[B]

There's that Rousseau. I'm reminded if I change the context of something Joseph Levinson said, which is here, it would be, if you're interested in Rousseau, you probably don't need or even want to read Liang Zhichao on Rousseau. But if you're interested in how Rousseau was consumed around the world, you definitely would want to know what Liang Qichao thought. Because again, we haven't gotten to influences yet, but Liang is being read across China, Vietnam and Japan as well. So he's introducing most of these thinkers, if not literally for the first time, for the first time for most readers, in some depth that previously completely unknown.

[A]

So you've mentioned a couple times there, sort of Liang's early life. So I'll sort of bring us then into the very first part of, of your book, of your translation, which is part one, Foundations. And I'll just note here that you have arranged the essays that you include in this book chronologically, so they're grouped together according to different periods of Liang's life. So you include in this part two essays that he wrote during this earlier part of his life, so between 1896 and 1898. But just before we talk about these essays in particular, for listeners who might not be as familiar with Lyag Zhi Tao, could you just give a sense of, kind of what do we need to know about him in order to understand these essays and kind of what's going on in his life, maybe more broadly, what do we need to know about him to know about then, the essays that fit in this part of your book?

[B]

Well, born in 1873. Yeah, school teacher. His grandfather, I think had passed at least the lowest level of the exams, but they were also farmers. So he's not at all from a well off background, but he was an incredibly precocious kid. He passed the Classical exams at the provincial level for a Juran at the age of 16. And so impressed the examiner that the examiner married his younger sister to Liang almost right on the spot, which is not unimportant because she apparently played at least an important role insofar as teaching this guy from Guangzhou Province, kind of backward village in Guangzhou Province how to speak Mandarin or Guanhua. And it helped him make his career in the North. Then at that point, he discovers Kang, yeah, Wei. And becomes a disciple of Kang Y and is suddenly open to the whole world in Guangzhou, meets and talks with missionaries working there, beginning to think about not just what to memorize in order to pass the exams, but what is, you know, what is the position of China in the world. And this is just opening up to him as a. As a teenager. And then I think that plays into, while he's still essentially a disciple of Kang Yiwei, those first essays of the late 1890s and the beginning of his career in politics as well.

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[B]

So in his private speeches, sometimes to his students, he's considerably more radical than in his writings. So he's weaned out from student memoirs. To them, he's talking about constitutions and parliaments and republicanism and is more than a bit anti Manchu. That does not come out in his writings, which have more or less official approval. So there he is, as you just said, talking about institutional reforms. And the analysis is there's been reforms since the 1860s, but they haven't gone nearly far enough. We need something more structural and deeper. So when you look at those sort of series of essays, he called it the General Discussion of Institutional Reforms, Gen fa, a lot of them deal with education and the importance of a public school system abolishing the. Or at least modifying the examination system. So we're going to train up officials who can deal with actual problems, not just tell you what Confucius said about something 2,500 years ago. Maybe the talks about chambers of commerce, maybe the most newspapers. Maybe the most radical essay at the time would have been his urging that girls as well as boys be educated. But again, as a whole, the essays keep coming back to the importance of education, which he doesn't fully explain why this is needed, beyond the fact that you might think it's pretty obvious. But then his later essays come back for the importance of education for the creation of citizens. Not a term he's working with publicly at this time. What he is working with publicly is the idea of grouping social unity, a term he picks up from Yan Fu, who's been translating works regarding Social Darwinism. So again, he's a leading publicist, along with Yang Fu, of Social Darwinism already in the late 1890s is something you.

[A]

Come back to several times across this volume is the idea that there's, you know, that Liang's writing changes over time and his concerns change over time in such a way that we can, you know, what did Liang Qichel think? Well, it depends when you're kind of talking about. Right. So the Liang that we meet here might be different, and his concerns are different from the Liang that we See later. So here, at this point in his life, how would you kind of characterize him? I mean, I'm just thinking of what your answer to my last question you talked about, you know, he's radical in private, but publicly, not so much. Or. Yeah, how do you think of this version of Liang that we meet here?

[B]

Publicly, I would say I don't mean this to sound like a defense or calling him a hypocrite in any ways. Publicly, I think he is as radical as he could possibly be. I mean, the first couple just say we can change. Change is a legitimate reform, or reform is legitimate. So the standard opinion that the founders of the Qing Dynasty set down laws, rules and institutions that we have to follow, because that's what we do, we follow what the founders did. He's saying that's not how the world works, and that's not even what proper understanding of kind of orthodox thought should tell us. So I think he's pushing the boundaries as much as he can. He's working with, in effect, reformist officials. Ultimately, he's at least fairly known to Zhang Zhidong, for example, and they're engaged in a kind of contest at the court, at the imperial court, with the, with conservatives. So already, I mean, he's, you know, barely in his young, low to mid-20s, one of China's leading best known reformers.

[A]

I'm thinking, you know, the reason I asked that question is because, you know, moving ahead into part two of your book, we see a slightly different Liang Tizhao at this point, I guess he is almost even more well known, I would imagine, you know, you just said even at this early stage, he is known. We see a slightly, you know, maybe more infamous at this point, Liang Qichao. This is when he's in exile, so from 1899 to 1903 in Japan. So this is after the, the 1890800 days of reform, which ended in failure, leading Leon to have to go to Japan. And you note in your book that this is a very short period of his life, but that he was very productive. So he's writing on a scale that we could all. That we might all aspire to. You note that he's reading everything he seemed to have been able to. He's reading all the different Western political thinkers. He's rethinking different terms, different concepts. Imperialism, democracy, liberty, the state. So there's a lot going on in this very short, very productive period of his life. So I guess, you know, trying to group some of this together. What are some of the New ideas that he's thinking through and that he's most drawn to during this period of his life.

[B]

Well, still radical reform, national strengthening, seeing the world through the framework of social Darwinism. What is, I guess core is this term he now uses, the new citizen Xinmin, which he sharpens his critique of the traditional imperial order. So everything from the third century BCE to the present day of the late Qing, he often speaks about as a kind of wrong path in terms of what should have been historical Prague despotism has suppressed the citizen who would identify with the state. And so this idea of the citizen is the person who has the means to education and culture, to participate in social affairs and political affairs and the duty to do so. And when he's looking around the world and thinking about life in Europe and to some extent Japan, that's the difference he sees. He sees the west in particular as having created political cultures of participation which then makes their country strong. And it's that lack which has made China weak. Then this involves then questions that we might call democratization and his ideas about liberty, because without liberty, particularly intellectual liberty, you can't have citizens. And all of this is still within the idea of the struggle for survival. So if you come back to his analysis of this so called period of despotism or autocracy, basically the whole dynastic era, you know, he's saying actually, I mean, things weren't bad, we were, you know, at peace most of the time. There's a certain level of prosperity and China didn't have many real enemies. And then, you know, the so called conquest dynasties come in, but the life of the people doesn't change much. But that's simply no longer the case. China does now have enemies who are very strong that China can no longer resist because China lacks what they have. What they have is ultimately not the armaments industries or military institutions that previous generations of the reformers wanted. What they have is the support and identity of the population with the state.

[A]

Thinking of China's, you know, how he's viewing China's enemies here, um, does that come into how he's thinking about imperialism and how he's sort of, you know, defining, thinking through what is the threat exactly that he's sort of putting, putting down in words.

[B]

Okay, I'm sorry I lost you to the Internet ether for a few minutes there. Oh, no question.

[A]

Yeah, no, no, sure. I should also note if the you need not worry about the Internet ether part not recording things by the way, because the way that this works is it Actually records in tracks. So practically that means my house could fall down. And your audio would be great. It doesn't interfere is sort of what I'm getting at.

[B]

Good to know.

[A]

Yeah. Just like, as a side note, like my. Again, my house could be falling down. The fire alarm could go off. It could all be. And your audio unaffected.

[B]

But.

[A]

So, yeah, I'm sorry, you lost me to the ether. Okay, so you were just talking about China's new threat. So one of the things I guess I was most interested in, or at least what jumped out to me reading this section, was actually how he's thinking about imperialism and how he's sort of putting down in words, what is the threat and why is it so unique? Why is it so uniquely challenging? Is he thinking of imperialism or how would you characterize how he's thinking of imperialism here in this period of his.

[B]

Life, depending on which particular essay at which moment? I do think he comes back to the thought that there is some real threat that the Chinese people understood as some kind of continuous political cultural unit might be eliminated. Because in the struggle for survival now he's thinking in racial terms. The white race now seems to have all the cards at its disposal. And unless the yellow race or the Chinese get it together, they're facing fates such as the Jewish people, such as Poland, and might effectively disappear from the earth. So he sees a struggle which can be seen in racial terms, but also national terms. He kind of shifts back and forth. So there's the appeal of Pan Asianism to a limited extent. I'd say he's full of admiration for the west, for the institutions they built. So on the one hand, and he has fairly friendly relations with the Westerners that he knows a few of the leading missionaries. So in no way is he a bigot, but given, you know, the state of what is considered scientific knowledge in the early 20th century, he certainly accepts kind of racial analysis as a fundamental, fundamental explanation of the world. Don't know if that fully answered your question, but.

[A]

No, I think. I think it did. I mean, yeah, I'm. He is, you know, as. As we've kind of alluded to, he is dealing with some really big, really interesting questions here. But I did want to ask about one of the other essays that you have in this section, and that is the essay titled the Relationship Between Buddhism and the Social Order, in which he explains how Buddhism can promote social order. And I mention this because, prior to reading your translation, if you had asked me about Liang Sichao, I probably would have mentioned citizen. I Probably would have mentioned New Citizen. I'm not sure I would have mentioned, but Buddhist Thinker, or at least, you know, someone who was promoting Buddhism as a way to, you know, keep and maintain social order. So I raise this because this essay came as something as a surprise to me. So I guess, was that what you were hoping readers might take from this or kind of. Why did you decide to include this in your collection?

[B]

So, to be entirely honest, it was a bit of a surprise to me as well. I feel better. Liang's later writings, maybe from the 1920s, are more explicitly tinged with Buddhism, but I thought this was interesting for two reasons. So there is a Buddhist revival in the late Qing, and you have got similar essays, for example, by Tsai Rampe, roughly the same period. And of course, Liang was very close to Tan Zetong, and Tan's Renshu is deeply imbued with Buddhist thought. So it's not entirely surprising Liang would throw his contribution to vile Buddhism into the public sphere. So you notice he starts with a kind of instrumentalist approach. Buddhism can help China become stronger. Look at Western countries, they have established religions. But as you read through the essay, you quickly see that, in effect, he is himself a believer and promotes the way that understanding of Buddhism isn't just going to make China stronger, it potentially makes the world a better place and kind of a wiser place. I think it certainly has not. This essay has not received much attention, but I think people should take it into account when they think about sort of the breadth of Liang's thinking.

[A]

I mean, I think it definitely adds another layer to, as you were saying, the breadth. You know, we've already touched on all of the different influences that he has. I think this is a wonderful way of sort of indicating this, too, when it comes to sort of Buddhist thought, thinking, religion, all of that in a number of places.

[B]

He says, sort of. The problem with the Chinese is that they're either thinking about their own families and their sort of private morality, or they're thinking about, you know, Tian Xia and Datu, which is a rebuke of his teacher, which the world's not ready for yet. What we need is to become a stronger nation. We should be thinking of the. Of the gojia, not the family at the one end or the world at the other. But in this essay on Buddhism, he's talking about the benefits of humanity and a global social order, not the Chinese social order.

[A]

Fascinating. You mentioned there. He's thinking about the problem with the Chinese, and this is something that we see, I guess, even more strongly in part three. So this section is Cultural Reform Exile 2, 1904-1911. And here you mentioned in your introduction about how Liang's focus has changed, how he is thinking about the role he might play in future China. And he is now criticizing young revolutionaries. And he talks about even how a journal gave him the label of admonishing people non stop. And he kind of owns up to it. He says, yes, that is me. That is what I am doing. I am indeed admonishing people non stop. So you have two essays in this focus. What kind of Liang would you say we're meeting here? You note that this period is typically labeled his conservative period. Do you think that's sort of a fair label? I guess, or how would you prefer us to think of this period?

[B]

I can never decide, really. It's a fair label up to a point. Something is going on. But it's not entirely fair to say that he's fundamentally changed his mind about the basic issues that he sees. It's more like overall, he's changing the emphasis. So, for example, when he writes about, I just call it the defects of the Chinese people after he to America, he's noted these defects before, but before he's traced them back to the imposition of despotism and the evils of the imperial system. Now he seems to be implying, well, there's just something wrong with the people, and he sort of leaves it there. When he's thinking about the revolutionaries again, he's mixed. He actually says, oh, these youngsters, like he's 30 himself. These youngsters are the hope of China, but they've gotten carried away and they're sort of drunk on Western ideas and forgetting what is useful from our past. There's an essay I was tempted to translate called Unenlightened Despotism that he writes at this point, 1905, I think, where he's going back and saying, okay, we're not ready for new citizens. We need a period of top down, strong, despotic or autocratic government first. And he puts that out there. But I have to say it stands alone. He was in a bad mood when he wrote that. And again changes back to something more reformist and again more thinking about citizenship and what he means by liberty and democracy and what those could be based on, though ultimately. So before, again, before he does say, okay, let's think about morality. What China lacks is a sense of public morality. People use the Confucian classics to sort of regulate their individual behavior, which is all well and good, but doesn't mean they're working for the community now, he says he basically writes an essay refuting what he said before to say, well, we do need private morality, because it's implying, look at the revolutionaries. They've got no conscience. They're talking about tearing things down. They're not prepared to build things up. But it's not 180 degrees change from what he thought before. It's not like an American leader of SDS in the 60s turning into a neocon in the 1980s. It's much more nuanced and gradual than that. And I would say with some justification, Leon can say, yes, of course my opinions have changed as I learn more things and as the conditions change. But my fundamental positions have not changed. And I think that would be a reasonable thing for him to say. Hmm.

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[A]

I mean, I suppose the our ability to evaluate him is very much skewed by what is happening at the time and other, you know, other writings that are coming out at the time. And I guess I say this in part because you Open your Part 4 section, Syncretism and Progress Teacher, 1912-1929 with kind of an explanation, and I'll just quote from it here to the May 4th generation that had taken to the streets in 1919. Liang seemed conservative and perhaps worse, not even interesting. It is as if time moved especially fast in China in the early 20th century, and what was radical in 1902 was passe by 1912 and downright reactionary by 1922. And the quote ends there. So I guess in some ways his core ideas might not have changed, but because of that sort of hypercharge speed, that rate at which everything else is Changing, I guess. I imagine it might be hard for us to evaluate him, you know, fairly, I suppose, or, you know, in, you know, in some ways, out of the context. Right. In this period of time, the context has just shifted. And I guess in that new context, his writing might look a little different. If I kind of got that a little bit right.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I think. I mean, so I guess what's it called? The Overton Window? I mean, the Overton Window had, had shifted. So even if. So that. So that ideas about liberty, about learning from the west, but not abandoning all of Chinese tradition that were, you know, by any measurement quite radical in the early 1900s, by the 1920s were not only no longer radical, but too, a good deal of a certain generation of people, mostly just a little bit younger than Liang. Those ideas seemed conservative and were associated with people opposing what they regarded as the necessary changes of the moment. You mentioned evaluating Liang, which is something as a historian, I don't really want to do. However.

[A]

I should note as a historian, I understand the desire not to evaluate, so I'm very completely in agreement with you there on the dangers thereof. But.

[B]

Some of his specific predictions can be evaluated so that coming back to the so called conservative turn after 1903, 1904, when he's criticizing the revolutionaries, he's saying, well, the problem with the revolution is that it's going to create chaos and make China weaker. And okay, I think we get him. Leon, the point for that analysis, when he says in the 1920s, what China needs is a sort of a civil based movement, a social based movement for reform, rather than more talk about revolution or bringing together the sort of new radical strains of anarchism and Marxism that are cropping up. Well, that wasn't tried, so we don't know if that would have been at all workable. It's not that much different from what Hu Shi was saying in the 1920s either. So there's a constituency for that. But at the same time, Liang is associated with people connected to the Confucian revival of the 1920s, which Hushi, among others, was extremely critical of. So again, Leung's not changed so much as the field of what counts as radical thought has moved beyond him.

[A]

You know, in the quote that I just read out there, you note that he would have seemed, or he did seem, to Those of the May 4 generation, not even interesting. Do you get. Do you. Is he. Do you think he was aware of his own relevance or irrelevance at this period when he's writing, especially in Part.

[B]

Four, That's an interesting question. I don't think he would have worried about it, let me put it that way. I mean, he has less to say about immediate political, social questions, and he's more interested in basically historical research. But he's still. He goes around and he's still highly honored he has something to say. Newspapers will print it. So is there a thought at the back of his mind, I've lost the younger generation? I don't know. I kind of doubt it. I mean, he continued to have his, you know, fans, followers, even disciples. So I don't. Yeah, I don't fully know the answer to that question.

[A]

Yeah, I guess. Why. I guess the reason I ask it was because I was thinking about, you know, the essays that you have in Part four. You have three. So one is about the Chinese people, one is about human rights, and one is about. One is about human rights and women's rights, and one is about the proletariat class and the idler class. And I guess I was thinking in some ways about the second essay about human rights and women's rights, which I think was delivered as a speech, if I'm understanding it correctly, in which he is sort of advocating for patience. He's kind of advocating for calm, sort of trust the process. In some ways, he's advocating for everyone to calm down, take things step by step. I'm grossly simplifying here, but that's at least some of the things that at least stuck out to me. And I guess, and I was just there thinking about, I wonder what his crowd might have reacted or how they may have felt into hearing that. But setting aside impossible questions that cannot be answered, setting those aside and thinking, of these three essays, is there one that you especially want to highlight or to focus on? And I guess I'm thinking here in particular about how Liang's thoughts or think thoughts have changed, or not about how he's kind of not quite of the moment at this period in time. Is there one that you think captures that best?

[B]

Well, I do think it's the longer piece on the. The self awakening of the Chinese people, which again, you see, calls for patience, as you just said. But at the same time, you know, that emphasis on the importance of education. A statement at one point, if I'm remembering correctly, you know, China's only hope is in its young people. Just, you know, don't get carried away. Learn everything you can from essentially Western Enlightenment figures. But don't forget there's certain elements of the Chinese tradition that are still adaptable. And probably necessary. And of course, what you see here is the contrast, similarities and differences with the sort of radical younger generation. So from the New Culture movement and Nicole's, you know, the famous slogan science and democracy, you have the enormous destruction of World War I and Leon goes to Europe and travels around and sees it for himself. I think you have disillusionment across the political spectrum with the west or promises of the west, left and right, or radicals and conservatives. And Liang is among those who are saying, okay, let's take a step back. I have promoted science and democracy all these many years, but look what I got. Europe, it's practically destroyed itself in and sort of in the name of science, he says, so let's be careful about what we wish for. There's still much to be learned from the west, but the west, he's meeting with people like Henri Bergson. The west is now also realizing it has things to learn from us. And so called iconoclasts in China who want to, you know, tear down the house of Confucius should, should not forget that. So that's, you know, again, as we think of modern 20th century China as becoming ever more radical, should remember there's a sort of mainstream opinion in most eras that is not nearly as radical as the people historians have focused on. And I think Liang is speaking for them much of the time. And that would include quite a few young people, might have included most of the graduating women of the women's school he's speaking to, who of course are going to put on my Marxist clothes for a minute, who of course are going to be bourgeois women not entirely interested in overthrowing the sociopolitical order of the China of the day for all kinds of problems.

[A]

Interesting. I mean, yeah, I can imagine that those graduates might have been thinking about jobs and security, maybe not tearing everything down at that particular moment in their life. So, yes, going back to the impossible question, perhaps they would have been gratified by hearing about, you know, the importance of slow progress, slow change, measured responses.

[B]

And, you know, graduating from a prestigious school, thinking about, you know, finding jobs, as you say, while also continuing education in Japan or the US primarily.

[A]

So, you know, you, I feel a little bit bad because I feel like you were just answering my, the question that I have not yet asked, which is sort of zooming out and thinking of this book as a whole. You know, you were just talking about what kind of looking at Liang Qichao brings to mind when we think of this period of Chinese history. So continuing along those lines, is there anything else that you want to emphasize about Liang Qichao's writings? To listeners of this podcast and readers of the book, is there anything in particular, final words kind of on him that you want to leave listeners with?

[B]

Sure. Let me give a two pronged answer though we kind of approached them already. One is okay, if you want to understand today's China, you should have an appreciation of what Liang Qichao is doing and his role in creating it, the urgent anti imperialism which we still see every day. And also maybe our conversation hasn't emphasized enough currents that have not risen to the top, but that I associate very much with Leong Chicha, which is the critique of despotism and the vision of republicanism based on citizens rights and responsibilities and not a sort of democracy just based on occasionally voting, but active participation in public life. And if I've got a minute, I want to mention a WeChat blog I just came across coincidentally. So it's by Professor Liu Jian Jun, who's a political science at Fudan University, and it's, well, sort of a weird blog. He's bemoaning the state of his discipline and the whole social sciences, which he thinks are basically he's charging them with being overly theorized and too much hot air and we're wasting our time reading most of this stuff. Then toward the end, he made short lists of the people we really need to read. He's got three lists. One, social thinkers who shape the course of civilization. So that goes from Confucius and Jesus to John Maynard Keynes. Then second, a list of statesmen who transformed the world, and that includes Lincoln and also Mao. And thirdly, thinkers or scholars who influence what he calls or shaped what he calls the structure of knowledge. So this is Lao Tzu, Plato, Aristotle, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Rousseau, and the only other Chinese on his list of scholars who influenced the structure of knowledge is Liang Qichao. So I, you know, judging whether that's true or not is above my pay grade. But it tells you how important Liang Qiqiao is still today in China in the minds of intellectuals and scholars. So that's the China side. It's hard to make sense of China without Liang Qichao and his role in shaping it. Then more broadly, you know, he's dealing with critical issues we face today. What makes government legitimate, how states should interact, how to use tradition to foster progress. Who are we when we lose our traditions and then questions about how liberty and self government really can work. And I'm not saying he has the answers But I strongly suspect that we can learn a lot from watching how he wrestled with these questions, sometimes circuitously, sometimes with, you know, throwing different intellectual traditions into a hamper and stirring them around and coming out with a new kind of synthetic approach to these questions.

[A]

I mean, you know, someone who was reading him, reading him through your translation today in 2025, I mean, the questions he's grappling with of how to, how to create citizens and what does despotism look like, how, how does it come about? What is democracy? What should it be? How do we progress, move forward? All of those questions are deeply, depressingly relevant, I suppose, to our, to our present moment. But so thank you for articulating that so effectively and also for making a pitch for, you know, why, of course, Chinese history matters. Even if all you're interested in is today, it deeply, deeply matters. Yes, I agree. But with that, you know, now that this book, this translation is well and truly done, unless of course, you return to it in for a part two. But now that it is done and out in the world, what are you working on next? Or what is inspiring you at the moment?

[B]

Okay, well, I don't intend to leave Liang Tishao entirely behind, but there's a couple issues I want to think about more. And yeah, I think my post retirement project might be a second volume of his essays. So at the very beginning, you're sort of asking about what it hurt me to leave out, and I have a list already. However, what I'm working on now is mostly something pretty different, which is it's a history of the forbidden city since 1900. So how the Forbidden City palaces in Beijing were turned into a museum, which turns out to have been a pretty complex and highly politicized process from the turn of the century onwards through the 1911 revolution and all of the political turmoil of the 20th century. And my approach is still, I think of mostly in terms of intellectual history, which is looking at what people thought they were doing by turning it into a museum. What does that tell people about China's past? How do we use it and understand it in the present day? And there's debates about this, to say the least. And there's occasionally proposal to tear it down, because what does New China need with these old buildings? That's really a story. I'll bring it up to the present day. But the interesting part to me ends around the 1980s when the decision is clearly made. Yes, it's a museum, it's a source of pride for China, and we're basically going to professionalize it according to international standards. 1987, China joins the UNESCO World Heritage regime, and one of a small handful of heritage sites that get named as such by UNESCO is the Forbidden City.

[A]

Fascinating. I mean, it sounds like both a very specific project and both quite an extensive project, as you were just identifying sort of the time periods right. End of the Qiang all the way up through the 1980s, 1990s even. It sounds like a substantial undertaking.

[B]

It has been. I've been working on it for a while, a number of years. It's coming to the end. I can see what the manuscript is going to look like and maybe within a couple of years it will be out there, I hope.

[A]

Okay, well, congratulations for being at a stage where you can maybe see what the manuscript looks like. That is very exciting and I'm really looking forward to hearing more about that project and reading it in the future. But for now, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me about this book and this project.

[B]

Thank you very much for having me.

[A]

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