Xu Zhiyuan Spent Five Years Writing a Biography of Liang Qichao — Volume One, Young Reformer, Is Out

Xu Zhiyuan read the historical record to feel his way into the emotional register of the era, used imagination to reconstruct the texture of life in that society, and empathized his way back into Liang Qichao's life — writing, in something like Liang's own style, prose that "always carries feeling." The result is a portrait of Liang Qichao and his age, and of a turbulent, treacherous stretch of Chinese history. — Ge Zhaoguang (Distinguished Professor, Fudan University)

About the Author

Xu Zhiyuan is a writer, founder of the bookstore-café chain One Way Space, editor-in-chief of The Oriental Historical Review, and host of the interview show Thirteen Invitations.

His books include Strangers in My Homeland and A Wanderer's World, among others; some of his work has been translated into Korean, English, and French.

Book Excerpt:

Author's Preface: A Young Reformer

I

Liang Qichao is staring at me. His nose is straight, his mouth wide, his short hair neat and glossy, parted cleanly down the middle. His stand-collared white shirt is starched stiff, a narrow necktie knotted at the throat. There's a trace of pride at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes are unmistakably resolute.

This must be him around thirty, the photograph taken in Yokohama, Melbourne, or Vancouver, perhaps. He was mobilizing Chinese merchants and laborers scattered across the world, raising money, organizing them, working to rescue an emperor held captive and build a strong, prosperous China. A few years earlier he had been a provincial-exam graduate with a long queue hanging down his back; now he had the bearing of a modern intellectual.

On a shelf at City Lights Bookstore, Liang Qichao appears on a book cover alongside the bearded Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and a frowning man in a turban. I opened the book and learned the man in the turban was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a thinker from Afghanistan. The three of them stood as representative Asian intellectuals of the early twentieth century — each watching his own empire crumble under Western pressure, each finding his own way to help his homeland recover its dignity.

It caught my interest. This was the late fall of 2013. I had just turned thirty-seven, was tired of journalism's fragments and its short shelf life, and wanted to find a way of writing that was broader and deeper. Moving from Beijing to the Bay Area was part of that search. In the free time that followed, City Lights Bookstore on Columbus Avenue became my favorite place to lose an afternoon. I loved its deep catalogue of world literature, the quiet of the poetry room upstairs, the black-and-white photograph of Kerouac in the window. The bookstore wasn't just the birthplace of the Beat writers, a monument to unruly literary freedom — it also sat at the meeting point of two worlds. Behind it, Chinatown's history reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century, when waves of migrants from Guangdong and Fujian arrived chasing the Gold Rush and became some of the city's original builders. Diagonally across the street sits Little Italy, and in the small café where Francis Ford Coppola liked to linger, the black coffee and the old jukebox had a particular pull.

That chance encounter with Liang Qichao — especially the resolve in his eyes — brought this vague search into focus. Why not write his biography, and use it to trace the transformation of modern China? It would surely be broad and deep enough, and it connected directly to my own experience.

II

When Liang Qichao was born in 1873, in an ordinary village in Guangdong, the Qing empire was living through its last calm years. When he died in Beijing in 1929, the empire had long since collapsed, and the new republic was still in turmoil, even though his old political rival, the Nationalist Party, had nominally unified the country. Social change swept every corner of life: women who had once bound their feet now sat in classrooms debating what happened to Nora after she walked out the door; reading newspapers and magazines became a daily habit, and people traded news from around the world over tea and at the dinner table; opera stars who had once owned the stage in Dingjun Mountain and The Palace of Eternal Youth now lived on in film reels and phonograph records; and with trains, steamships, and telegraphs spreading everywhere, even the most remote village could feel the pulse of the age. The shift in ideas was even more startling. Many people still knew the Four Books and Five Classics by heart and lived by the three bonds and five constants, yet now declared they would abandon the entire tradition — writing in vernacular Chinese, chasing individual freedom. The glory and arrogance of a civilization that had once seen itself as the whole world gave way to humiliation and self-doubt, and people went searching, hungrily and not always with clear judgment, for nourishment in the ideas of Japan, Britain, Germany, the United States, even India.

Liang Qichao lived through all of it, and was an active participant in the transformation. He was a man of action: at twenty-five he was swept into the maelstrom of the Hundred Days' Reform; after fleeing to Japan he helped plan the Independence Army Uprising. He stood up against both Yuan Shikai's and Zhang Xun's attempts to restore the monarchy, becoming a pivotal figure in saving the republic, and he was also the man working behind the scenes to bring China into the First World War.

He was a thinker: talk about the formation of modern Chinese thought — science, economics, Buddhist studies, law, political theory, the theory of the novel — and there is almost no field that escapes his influence; more often than not, he was the one who opened the field up. He was, above all, a writer. From 1896, when he became chief editor of Shiwu Bao (Current Affairs), across thirty-three years he wrote without pause — at least fourteen million characters — spanning current-affairs commentary, calls to arms, organizational charters, poetry and fiction, scholarly monographs, speeches, biographies. Generation after generation read his work hungrily; among them were the century's defining figures — Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Mao Zedong.

I am one of his readers too, living inside a tradition he helped build. Peking University, where I studied, grew out of the Imperial University of Peking, and he drafted its original charter. Once I entered journalism, he became impossible to ignore — quite possibly China's greatest journalist. No one else used a pen and a press to take part in so much change.

But it strikes me that in the way history has been written, he is essential yet blurry. His political and intellectual legacy still shapes our lives powerfully; his vision of modern China still sits at the center of public debate — "the new citizen" is still an everyday phrase, and pop idols still put "if the youth are strong, China is strong" into song lyrics. But his ideas and his character, his hopes and his defeats, his inner struggles and his arguments with his contemporaries, have rarely been fully shown or examined.

On the world stage he is even more underrated. He belongs in the company of Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Ralph Waldo Emerson — figures who lived at the hinge between old and new knowledge, who became encyclopedic presences and woke something that had been dormant. Even measured against his own era, Liang Qichao deserves a place among the sharpest minds in the world. Those figures watched a modern world take shape, driven by technology, nationalism, globalization, and swung between hope and struggle; Liang, working from a Chinese vantage point, answered many of the same universal questions, forming distinctive judgments on science, nationalism, and the individual spirit. But unlike Tagore, who wrote in English, he never became widely known to readers outside China.

That has partly to do with the upheaval and rupture of modern Chinese history, and partly with the habits of Chinese historical writing itself. Liang Qichao himself once tried to launch a tradition of modern biography, but it never truly took root in the Chinese-language world. No Chinese writer ever observed a person the way James Boswell observed Dr. Johnson, and none held, as Emerson did, that "there is properly no history, only biography." The individual tends to be treated as a product of historical currents, rather than as a world unto himself.

This also has to do with perspective. Liang Qichao is usually narrated only within China's own context, rarely placed on a world scale — yet he had, in fact, thrown himself into the previous wave of globalization, moving with total ease through the modern network built by steamships, telegraphs, railroads, and the printing press. The magazine he edited in Yokohama was smuggled back into China and showed an entire generation a new world of knowledge and ideas. He traveled through Japan, Oceania, the Americas, and Europe, and wherever he went, overseas Chinese communities welcomed him with enthusiasm; local politicians and the press flocked to him, convinced he held China's future in his hands. He met Theodore Roosevelt in Washington, called on John Pierpont Morgan in New York, invited Bertrand Russell and John Dewey to visit China, and, in postwar Europe, discussed the crisis of modernity with Henri Bergson.

III

In September 2015, after two years of being watched by that photograph of Liang Qichao on the shelf, I wrote the first line. Over the three years that followed, the writing turned into pure hard labor.

The journey was harder than I had imagined. The sheer scope and depth of Liang Qichao's writing, and of the political and social transformation he took part in, were daunting, and the relationship between the individual and the era proved hard to grasp. The warning from the British writer Philip Guedalla kept echoing in my ears: "Biography is a very clearly defined region: to the north lies history, to the south fiction, to the east obituary, and to the west, tedium."

For someone raised on Western thought and literature, the rivalry between Han Learning and Song Learning, and the rise of the Gongyang school, formed a thicket of thorns; even just reading classical Chinese gave me headaches. The Qing dynasty marked the end of traditional Chinese scholarship, and the strained, half-blind start of an embrace of new currents. I kept running into the way Chinese historical writing habitually ignores personal emotion and character, which leaves Liang Qichao — as a son, a husband, a friend — looking far too thin as a personality.

Out of sheer apprehension, the original plan split into a trilogy. This volume covers his early years, from birth to the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform — in a mere twenty-five years, he went from a boy in a provincial backwater who had memorized the Four Books and Five Classics to a young reformer grafting Confucius's institutional reforms onto the Meiji Restoration. His sharpness, his openness, his drive to remake himself and to act, are all on full display in this period. Ignoring the constraints of exam rank, he became a disciple of Kang Youwei; on Fourth Avenue in Shanghai, he rode the new wave of print capitalism and became the pioneer of a new prose style. He couldn't wait to turn ideas into action — he was one of the organizers of the "Public Carriage Petition," stirred up rebellious spirit among young students in the academies, and was then swept into the factional battles of the Hundred Days' Reform.

However brilliant Liang Qichao was, however celebrated he would later become, at this point he was still a supporting character in history, appearing as the chief assistant to the fiery Kang Youwei. On the map of Chinese scholarship and power at the time, both men were marginal figures. But that marginality gave them a particular kind of courage, and turned them into challengers of the existing order. That's what makes history compelling: even though everyone is bound by their circumstances, free will still pushes some people to break out and become heretics and rebels. If you don't understand the political and cultural transformation of the late nineteenth century — how a scholar in the empire's final years sat for the examinations, how he made sense of outside knowledge, what opera he listened to, how friends corresponded and entertained each other, how the fear of censorship was never absent — it's hard to fully feel the value of that rebellion.

A sense of place marks a person as distinctly as the mood of an era. I walked through Chakeng, his home village, and tasted the local dishes made with dried tangerine peel; on a summer afternoon I sat in a surviving corner of the Wanmu Thatched Cottage in Guangzhou and let my mind wander; on the fading Fuzhou Road I pictured its old prime, thick with newspaper offices and pleasure houses; at the night snack stalls of Fire God Palace, I tried to guess what Liang Qichao felt on first arriving in Changsha; and outside Fayuan Temple in Beijing I sat and imagined his fervent youth with Tan Sitong and Xia Zengyou. Unfortunately, round after round of demolition and reconstruction have left these historical sites unrecognizable, and all you can do is rely on imagination, unreliable as it often is.

Writing inevitably carries the consciousness of the present. Liang Qichao had come to San Francisco too, a century before — the same city that set this book in motion. He gave speeches all over town, attended banquets, met with Chinese community leaders, and even sampled a drink called Wong Lo Kat. He sensed here a people with "strong local loyalty" and "a strong sense of chivalry," but he also saw filthy streets, rampant factionalism, and a shortage of political capacity and modern virtue. He mused that importing the ideas and institutions of "freedom, constitutionalism, republicanism" into China might be like a fur coat in summer or a hemp robe in winter — "beautiful, no doubt, but what good is beauty if it doesn't fit?" Unless China could forge a "new citizen," a new set of values, any reform would be empty. A century has passed. One descendant of Chinese immigrants became mayor of the city; another bought the San Francisco Chronicle, the very paper that once campaigned for Chinese exclusion; the city now eagerly courts Chinese investors. But walk through Chinatown today, and you can still feel some of Liang Qichao's worries and confusions stubbornly persisting, still finding an echo — even a China that has grown wealthy and strong is still searching for a kind of order, both internal and external.

Liang Qichao's generation also lived through an accelerating age of technological revolution and an explosion of knowledge, and the courage and confusion with which he met that change struck a deep chord in me. This book became a refuge; I often escaped into another time and place for comfort. Even in writing that was often exhausting, unexpected delights kept surfacing. I felt myself growing more certain, even developing a new ambition. I increasingly hope this three-volume biography can become a tragicomedy, an encyclopedia of modern China. I want it to bring back the details and emotions of an era, to show the anxiety and longing, the courage and cowardice, of several generations at once. When Liang Qichao rose to fame as chief editor, the reformer Wang Tao, forty-five years his senior, was already living out his final years — watching the ideas he had spent his life championing appear in this young man's newspaper. Also reading that same newspaper was a teenage reader in Anqing named Chen Duxiu, who twenty years later would launch the New Culture Movement. In the restless summer of Beijing in 1898, Li Hongzhang — a man who had lived through the burning of the Old Summer Palace by British and French troops, the Taiping Rebellion, and the First Sino-Japanese War — watched the overactive antics of the young Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao with a mix of contempt and, secretly, admiration. The weaknesses and the brilliance of human nature, the inevitabilities of character and the accidents of fate, are woven together throughout. Comrades who once stood shoulder to shoulder often turned on each other when history tested them, growing apart, only to cross paths again at the next turn in their lives.

As I was finishing this first volume, I came across Jorge Luis Borges's remarks on Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To Borges, reading it felt like "throwing oneself into, and being happily lost in, a vast novel crowded with characters — generation after generation of them, with the whole world as its stage, its immense duration measured out in dynasties, conquests, discoveries, and the shifting of languages and idols." I hope that when all three volumes are finished, my readers will feel something similar. If you haven't found it yet in this volume, please wait patiently for the second.

Cover image: Liang Qichao, via Wikipedia.