Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio by Liang Qichao

Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio by Liang Qichao

'China's first iconic modern intellectual. His lucid and prolific writings, touching on all major concerns in his own time and anticipating many in the future, inspired several generations of thinkers' - Pankaj Mishra 'I have been waiting a very long time for a volume like this one, [it is] a real milestone [...] Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the considerable scholarly effort to translate, masterfully and lucidly, key essays from Liang Qichao' - Leigh Jenco 'A country does not become corrupt and weak overnight. Rather, we are now reaping the evil harvest of what previous generations sowed.' The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao's writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era - to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators, with the intellectual equipment to renew itself. Liang said that he wrote from an 'ice-drinker's studio', implying that underneath his dispassionate, disabused and rational tone lay an ardour and passion which only ice could cool. China could only recover through a clear-sighted, informed understanding of its enemies - and by engaging in a thorough-going self-critique. Liang did not propose aping the West but taking only what China needed to 'renew the people' and create 'new citizens'. Then China would be able to expel its invaders, reform its society and become a great power once more. This selection of pieces shows Liang's extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on, attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation. Blending together Confucianism, Buddhism and the Western Enlightenment, Liang's ideas about nation, democracy, and morality had a profound impact on Chinese visions of the political order, though the China that eventually emerged from the further disasters of the 1930s and 1940s would be a very different one.

China's first iconic modern intellectualHis lucid and prolific writings, touching on all major concerns in his own time and anticipating many in the future, inspired several generations of thinkers including the much younger Mao Zedong. -- Pankaj Mishra

Liang Qichao (1873-1929) was a reformist intellectual, who facing brutal repression fled to Japan where he lived for fourteen years. His long exile, travels and writing - of fiction, journalism and above all essays - gave Liang a unique authority in the first years of the twentieth century.

Peter Zarrow is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. He has held teaching and research positions in Australia and Taiwan, and he has published extensively in English and Chinese on the intellectual and cultural history of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780241568781
ISBN 10	0241568781
Title	Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio
Author	Liang Qichao
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	2023-10-26
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable