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The distinction between “history” and “value” is the ground of this penetrating work. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao began writing in the 1890’s, as one who was straining against his tradition intellectually, seeing value elsewhere, but still emotionally tied to it, held by his history. How history contrived such a tension, how its release in Liang went together with the release of Confucian China from life, is the grand subject. And in drawing the times out of Liang’s intellectual life, Mr. Levenson contributes much of more general interest—a new understanding of the concepts of anachronism, analogy, contemporaneity, the generation, historical relativism, historical context, cultural and national identity, personal identity, and the distinction (crucial to comprehension of why ideas ever change) between “thinking” and “thought.” “A brilliant study of the life and work of an exceptional writer who shaped the political thought of modern China...Told with a humanist understanding far removed from the dry-as-dust manner usually ascribed to front-rank historians...this detailed account of a maker of modern China will interest not only the scholar in Far Eastern affairs, but will hold enthralled all students of the human mind in its never-ending quest for adjustment in a world of change.”—Asia Major “Why was the Confucian tradition found wanting? Why was westernization rejected? Why was Nationalism not enough for China? To these and many similar questions Liang’s life and writings provide the best answer. Mr. Levenson has interpreted them with real insight into the nature of Chinese civilization.”—Times Literary Supplement “Advances enough brilliant and challenging hypotheses to invigorate studies of Chinese intellectual history for a long time to come....[Levenson’s study] shows throughout a compassionate understanding of the harsh dilemmas, the bitter tragedies that the last century has brought to all Chinese.”—Arthur F. Wright
First published in 1992, The Discourse of Race in Modern China rapidly became a classic, showing for the first time on the basis of detailed evidence how and why racial categorisation became so widespread in China. After the country's devastating defeat against Japan in 1895, leading reformers like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei turned away from the Confucian classics to seek enlightenment abroad, hoping to find the keys to wealth and power on the distant shores of Europe. Instead, they discovered the notion of 'race', and used new evolutionary theories from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to present a universe red in tooth and claw in which 'yellows' competed with 'whites' in a deadly struggle for survival. After the fall of the empire in 1911, prominent politicians and writers in republican China continued to measure, classify and rank people from around the world according to their supposed biological features, all in the name of science. Racial thinking remains popular in the People's Republic of China, as serologists, geneticists and anthropometrists continue to interpret human variation in terms of 'race'. This new edition has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter taking the reader up to the twenty-first century.