Xu Zhiyuan Launches Young Reformer: He Wants One Man to Show a Whole Era

"Do you know why I wanted to write three volumes? I just wanted to prove I'm not an internet celebrity."

On the evening of May 22, Xu Zhiyuan held the launch for his new book, Young Reformer: Liang Qichao (1873–1898), five years in the writing, at Beijing's 77 Theatre. The organizers brought in Ma Yong, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the media figure Li Xiang, and Li Jing, deputy editor of Sanlian Life Week, to talk with Xu about the book for an hour.

Around the conversation, the organizers staged a rather theatrical program. The evening opened with an electronic-music improvisation by members of the band Hualun, played against a backdrop of digitally processed historical material on Liang Qichao. As they played, Liang's face flickered on the screen in time with the music.

After the music came a reading that ran nearly 45 minutes. Xu Zhiyuan opened it, joined by readers from Guangdong, Tianjin and Shanghai, who read passages about Liang Qichao's activities in their regions in their own dialects.

Xu opened the event by calling the launch a wedding held late: "Because for me, the climactic thrill and the secret joy this book gave me have already passed." But the ritual of the occasion, he said, stirred up "a lot of tender, intense feelings again — I saw another side of it and fell in love with it all over again." As for why he chose electronic music as the music for this late wedding, Xu said it was partly to insist on a contemporary point of view, and partly because he believes that if Liang Qichao were alive today, he would have loved electronic music too.

Ma Yong is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a graduate of the history department at Fudan University. He was one of the first scholars of modern Chinese history to take up the study of modernization, and his works include A Critical Biography of Liang Shuming, The Course of China's Modernization, and the "Four Books of the Late Qing" — Awakening, Reform, National Crisis and Revolution. As it happens, the publisher of the "Four Books of the Late Qing" was Xu Zhiyuan.

During the conversation, Ma Yong said you cannot simply claim that people trained in history write better and those without such training write worse. Among the people who have written biographies of Liang Qichao, only Xu Zhiyuan and Xie Xizhang have worked in journalism. "History has always been highly subjective. Only at our age do historians dare say this: history needs not just source material but imagination and feeling — otherwise you're just compiling a chronicle."

Li Xiang was a managing editor at several well-known newspapers and magazines, among them Bloomberg Businessweek (Chinese edition), Esquire and Caijing Tianxia Weekly. In 2016 he began working with Luo Zhenyu's team on a product of his own, and he is now content editor-in-chief of Li Xiang's Business Briefing, a program on Luoji Siwei's app Dedao.

Li Xiang's connection with Xu Zhiyuan goes back to his days as Xu's intern at a newspaper, and the two have stayed in touch since. In the conversation, Li recalled that when he first heard Xu was writing about Liang Qichao, he assumed the project would fizzle out — instead Xu's patience produced a book he called "arguably a masterpiece."

Li Jing was a reporter on the society desk at Sanlian Life Week and is now the magazine's deputy editor. She is the author of The Face of Memory, The Past Is Not Lonely and Living in Other People's History. Here she acted mainly as moderator; she said what she thought, and her challenges drew a great many interesting answers out of Xu Zhiyuan.

Xu Zhiyuan is a writer, the founder of One Way Space, editor-in-chief of The Oriental Historical Review and host of the talk show Thirteen Invitations. He began writing for Sanlian Life Week and other magazines in 1998, and in 2000, after Peking University's computer science department, where he majored in microelectronics, he went straight into journalism. He was chief writer at The Economic Observer and wrote columns for Yazhou Zhoukan and the Chinese-language site of the Financial Times. His books include A Stranger to My Homeland, The World of a Wanderer and This Generation's Chinese Consciousness.

"Liang Qichao was staring at me" — that is how Xu Zhiyuan, in his own preface, explains the immediate reason he decided to write Liang's biography. In 2013, at 37, Xu found he had grown tired of journalism. At City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco he came across a book whose cover put Liang Qichao alongside the Indian poet Tagore and the Afghan thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. In the photograph Liang was just past thirty, fresh from the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform, still seeking help abroad to find some way to build the China he had imagined. "Struck by that gaze," Xu set out to write Liang's life, and to use it to trace the transformation of modern China: "It would surely be broad and deep enough, and closely tied to my own experience."

That experience is above all Liang Qichao's years in journalism. Xu Zhiyuan considers Liang one of the most important figures in the history of Chinese journalism, and Liang's stint as chief writer at The Chinese Progress gives Xu a sense of kinship with him. Xu started the book in 2014, just as he raised the money to start One Way Space; he was carrying all the worries that come with a new business, and he says he often fled into writing to escape the pressures of the present. It was in that process that writing Liang Qichao's life became something like a refuge.

Xu plans three volumes on Liang Qichao; Young Reformer: Liang Qichao (1873–1898) is only the first. He has put his hopes for it this way: "I hope this three-volume biography becomes a tragicomedy, an encyclopedia of modern China. I hope it can revive the details and moods of the era, and show the anguish and longing, the courage and cowardice, of several generations."

The conversation and the audience Q&A, edited for length:

Q: Questions from journalists and the audience

Li Jing: Why Liang Qichao? In the preface you describe it dramatically — you locked eyes with him and found a feeling, a kind of epiphany. What if the person in that shop window had been someone else? What if it had been Lu Xun, or Hu Shi? You wanted to write something long, something about a broad era — did you simply happen to land on Liang Qichao?

Xu Zhiyuan: I think it still has to do with my working in journalism. After I graduated I became a reporter, and in this field Liang Qichao is the most important figure — he was effectively the founder of modern journalism in China. Liang was also a chief writer, so I felt close to him from that period on. A big reason I wrote this book is a personal flaw: my obsession with scale, my longing for freedom, my love of very thick books. An obsession with scale is a mark of vulgarity, and probably of lack too. So I carry this idea of scale inside me. While writing, I did come to see what scale is good for — scale can hold a great many things. It probably has to do with my reading habits as well; I sprawl, I never had rigorous training in reading, I'm chaotic and unwieldy.

Li Jing: But don't you think that past a certain scale, your chaos and sprawl become a weakness?

Xu Zhiyuan: That's exactly why, once the scale is large enough, chaos and sprawl turn into vitality. So I think about Liang Qichao's transformation — he entered intellectual life, academic life, political life, founded institutions of every kind, and from the late-19th-century Qing empire to the founding of the Republic he designed every one of those fields. He renewed himself relentlessly.

Li Jing: This style of writing is also new for you — you use a huge number of notes, presumably so everyone can see that every passage has a strict source, very correct. I think that cost you some readability, because your long quotations conflict with the fluent, subjective voice people know you for; it goes somewhat against your own tradition. So I want to know: what kind of change is this on your part? Was it deliberate?

Xu Zhiyuan: Three reasons. First, honestly, I'm older — I can't be as reckless as I was at twenty.

Second, I really wanted readers, and myself, to enter that historical moment. If you put everything from that time into plain modern speech, you lose the feel of the setting — the way they wrote, the way they talked, their roundabout phrasing. You lose that texture, and I think the texture matters a great deal.

Third, out of a certain insecurity, honestly. I've never written an academic book. I studied microelectronics. If I was going to write a book like this, I felt it had to look like scholarship, and I'm particularly drawn to that angle. I had never written a book with notes, and I felt I had to write one. So I suppose I wanted to prove I can write footnotes. That's all it is.

Li Jing: Professor Ma, as a historian of the modern period — everyone knows the name Liang Qichao, but when you actually try to recall the details, much of it goes blurry. That includes me: after reading Xu Zhiyuan's book, many details still weren't clear to me. From a historian's point of view, is Liang Qichao a well-studied subject?

Ma Yong: Not exactly well-studied — one of the important figures of modern history, let's say. But no more than ten biographies of Liang Qichao have been written, so there is still plenty of room to work.

Li Jing: Writing about Liang Qichao as a historian, versus writing about him as an internet celebrity like Xu Zhiyuan — actually I meant to ask Xu Zhiyuan this, since he wears so many hats now: which identity do you think fits better?

Xu Zhiyuan: Do you know why I wanted to write three volumes? I just wanted to prove I'm not an internet celebrity.

Ma Yong: I've talked with him about this a few times. I had hoped he would write something very different, that he would let himself go and pour the whole thing out. He and Liang Qichao have a great deal in common in their experience, and a great deal in common in how they feel about family and country. Of the handful of Liang Qichao biographies we have so far, I think his is the one that could be entirely different — the way Liang Qichao himself wrote about Li Hongzhang.

Li Jing: Liang Qichao's book on Li Hongzhang is far too thin — it could never satisfy his appetite for heft.

Ma Yong: Liang Qichao's prose pulls readers in, and I had worried that the mass of quotation and notes in Xu's book would hurt the reading. But after hearing those few passages read aloud just now, I said to him: people whose writing can be read aloud are very rare in China today. Very few writers finish a book they would dare let someone else read aloud, or read aloud themselves. Real attention to rhythm, to breath, is rare now.

Writing with a character of your own, as against the way a purely professional historian writes, sets a different kind of example. Of course historians never chase after style — they never stack one adjective on another, break a sentence mid-course, write with that charge of feeling; that may be where history and this kind of writing part ways. But I think his Liang Qichao ought to carry feeling, ought to carry that sensation. He wrote it with his own character. There's a difference, I think, but a great deal in common too.

Li Jing: Was there material in the book you hadn't paid attention to before, or hadn't come across?

Ma Yong: I said this when it came out — you used endnotes rather than footnotes, and there are details in them I didn't even know; I had to go back and look them up. Reading it, I felt — of course, none of us can necessarily read every last thing through. But on certain details, because his angle of observation is so unlike ours, his analysis of the relations between people is very illuminating. Family relations, circles of friends — he does a great deal of analysis there. Once the web of relations among people is laid out, it may change the picture of modern history, and that is something the earlier biographies of Liang Qichao never brought out so clearly.

Li Jing: If that's what Professor Ma says, then are the footnotes and endnotes actually unnecessary for this kind of writing? Will you change much in the second volume? Have you started it?

Xu Zhiyuan: The second volume will probably have more notes! I agree with Professor Ma in part and disagree in part — I think I write better prose than Liang Qichao did!

Li Jing: Better how?

Xu Zhiyuan: Liang Qichao's writing is too airy, and he never built a real sense of narrative. He was a pioneer of the biography, but that doesn't mean he wrote them well. To say something quite irresponsible: I think I am going to establish a new tradition in biography — that readability and the reading of historical sources can be combined. I may not have done it perfectly, but it's basically pretty good! It's only that I'm not at home in classical Chinese, and everything Liang Qichao wrote is in classical Chinese. My notes are not going to shrink; in fact I hope they become a standard for writing biography. I think it's a new model. Am I going too far?

Ma Yong: I'm not objecting, and I'm not saying there are too many notes or too few. What I'm saying is — how to put it — they interrupt your flow. Once all three volumes are done, maybe then you'll write a short edition straight through. That's what I mean.

Li Jing: I want to know — Xu Zhiyuan invited you here as a good friend to give your views. From this book, do you think he has completed the change he was hoping for?

Li Xiang: I've been sitting here wondering what my role is. I suppose I should play his loyal defender, his admirer. I won't claim I was the very first, but I was at least among the first batch of readers to finish the book cover to cover! I do largely agree with him. We were colleagues — I was his intern at The Economic Observer — and I've read a great deal of what he wrote in the paper, and his books as well.

I think this book is an extended edition of Xu Zhiyuan. His patience, his method of narration, his narrative rhythm have all genuinely improved. If you want to get inside a person, inside what's behind an event, it takes a lot of patience. Isn't five years of patience on one book enough? Terrific!

Li Jing: With so much scholarship by historians to draw on, did any of it get in your way? When I write, I sometimes feel that too much material buries me. Did you ever doubt your own ability, or feel you weren't up to it? Did you ever doubt you could finish?

Xu Zhiyuan: When the book first came off the press I was quite surprised — I really did write it, it really got published! I rarely reread what I've written. I flipped through it and thought, I don't know how I copied out so much material with all those notes. Over the three or four years of writing I often sank into it, couldn't find my direction, and found it, for me, deeply boring. Luckily I still got to meet people like Kuroki Hitomi from time to time, which took the edge off. The sources really did cause me a lot of trouble — layer upon layer of it, when you can't fit them into any logic.

Only now and then did I feel a flash of inspiration — the passage on Liang Qichao's escape, for instance, which I wrote from ten at night until four in the morning, six hours straight. My whole brain felt like it was burning, my whole body on fire; I didn't know what to do with myself. But most of the time it was tedious and dull.

And when I finished I wasn't satisfied. Still, I'll say this: while you are writing, your editor has to be completely unprincipled and utterly irresponsible — nothing but encouragement, no other words. Only that kind of editor gets a book finished.

Li Jing: I keep thinking about this: none of us writes professionally in this field, in history. So let me ask you — since we've had no rigorous training as historians, in finding sources or in method of narration, what are the strengths of this kind of writing, as a historian sees it? And where might its problems appear?

Ma Yong: Personally I think that in recent years writing by non-professionals has had a real impact on history, and made a real contribution to it. History has always been a mountain that is a ridge from one side and a peak from another. Non-professional — he studied microelectronics, not literature, not history; well, perhaps not non-professional so much as cross-disciplinary, since history itself takes many angles. Let me put it this way: among earlier biographers of Liang Qichao, only Xu Zhiyuan and Mr. Xie Xizhang have worked in the media, and having that experience or not makes a difference in how you understand biography. You can't simply say that people trained in history write better and those without such training write worse.

Li Jing: Tell us — is there a new view of history driving the book?

Xu Zhiyuan: First, a lot of my work went into restoring things to human stories, because in much of our historical writing the person disappears — there's no account of how he grew up. And I worked hard on the story of generations. The earlier generation and the later one had very different experience; between them China changed enormously. Generation is a very prominent part of the first volume, including the passage to the next generation — generation is an important thread running through it.

The other thing I paid close attention to is that I badly wanted a global perspective in this book. It isn't obvious yet in the first volume, but from the second, once he's in exile in Japan, it becomes very clear — I have to describe Japanese society in the late Meiji years to convey what Liang Qichao felt while he was there. It will be explicit in the second and third volumes. And I wanted to bring in a sense of drama. I want readers to see that history is full of accident and possibility, full of division, questions and argument. I wanted that in the writing.

And I really do hope it is a panoramic account. An examination candidate in Beijing goes to Liulichang to buy things — where does he buy them, where does he eat, what does the city look like? Where does East differ from West? The book also takes in Tan Xinpei and many others, because they were of the same generation. I originally wanted to write about Wong Fei-hung, because while Liang Qichao and the others were petitioning the throne for reform, looking for a way to change the situation, in Taiwan Liu Yongfu and his men were trying to hold out stubbornly against the arriving Japanese — and one of Liu Yongfu's officers was Wong Fei-hung. I remember reading that in the sources and thought I'd written it into the book, but in the end I couldn't find it there. What I wanted was to lay many overlapping historical fates on top of one another.

So I hope readers can see how different each person's fate was. Weng Tonghe is a very important figure in the book too — he was once so important, and how did he fade from the stage of history? Huang Zunxian matters a great deal as well; he received Liang Qichao's letters, saw news of Liang in the papers, and watched all these changes with great sadness. I hope readers come away with many different emotions. It's like a drama, like a stage, where the light falls sometimes at the center and sometimes at the edge; sometimes you're out of the game, and once you're out you may come back again.

Li Jing: You mentioned the stage. I know your ambition is not simply to write one person — you want to use this person to write an era, a transformation. But personally I feel that because your ambition is so large, because you wanted to write about so many people, because you built such a big stage, the protagonist sometimes blurs. I forget the protagonist is Liang Qichao; there are long stretches of Kang Youwei, or long stretches of Weng Tonghe, and I forget this is a book about Liang Qichao — I think I'm reading a book about the Hundred Days' Reform. Do you feel that tension? Is it because the sources are limited?

Xu Zhiyuan: In this history there is very little recorded about Liang Qichao himself, that's true. But if you don't sketch his context, his surroundings, there's a great deal you simply can't bring to life. There wasn't much material from that time, and he wasn't yet an important figure, so the record is thin.

Li Jing: I feel he's overshadowed by Kang Youwei.

Xu Zhiyuan: He is overshadowed by Kang Youwei, because the sources on him really are scarce.

Li Jing: Xu Zhiyuan's identity has changed a lot these past few years — he's been on stage and behind it, he's a bookshop owner, a well-known video host, and a writer. How do you see the state he's in now, the figure he presents?

Li Xiang: I find it rather strange, actually — why do so many people think Xu Zhiyuan only became famous in the last three years? In my memory he was most famous in 2004, 2005, 2006, when we made the newspaper together. Circulation wasn't as large then, but there was an enormous sense of accomplishment in it. And whenever we went out and met people — a big businessman, a university president, someone from an investment bank — they would all say, we've read what you write, we've read what Xu Zhiyuan writes, and they could even quote what he'd written. In my memory he was already extremely well known then.

If anything, I think the online shows of the past few years have simply helped him reach a younger audience — users, as we call them, younger users. People who may never have read his writing, but who see, through the way he asks questions, the way he talks with celebrities and idols, how he thinks — who see that there is such a person in the world, not like all the others. We've all watched plenty of interview shows. This one isn't ordinary, it's genuinely unusual!

Li Jing: Do you think the attention you get comes from your writing or from your video show? If it's the latter, doesn't that strike you as a little ironic?

Xu Zhiyuan: I do write history carrying very distinct emotions of the present. Liang Qichao and his contemporaries had a strange way of thinking about the world; their ideas were remarkably detached, and I think we've made them rigid. The most important thing I'm doing is bringing them back to life. There's a story that before he fled, Tan Sitong said to Liang Qichao: Chinese overseas all speak Cantonese, so you can rouse them for the revolution; if I speak Hunanese I wouldn't know what to do, so I have to stay. That's an extremely concrete, practical problem, and very important information.

If it weren't for the overseas Chinese — the Cantonese who went to San Francisco, Australia and North America in the gold rush — how could Sun Yat-sen and Kang Youwei have had a stage at all? If it had been Hunanese abroad, there would have been no stage: they couldn't have communicated, they had no clan ties there! So people are connected through these very specific channels, and our history books have always thrown the fine threads away and turned everything into a rigid concept. That's what I wanted to express!

Li Jing: Professor Ma, from the standpoint of history — in the preface Xu Zhiyuan says Liang Qichao is underestimated. Do you agree? Do you think the world has underestimated Liang Qichao? Does he stand at that height?

Ma Yong: That depends on how each person reads the sources. I think there are still many mysteries about Liang Qichao that haven't been opened up, and many in the first volume that remain unsolved. Take the coup described here: as we understand the sequence now, there is still much that can't be explained well. How exactly did it happen, how was it passed along? History has moved on, and it may never be untangled. But within it there may be a lot that underestimates Liang Qichao's thinking — underestimates what, exactly: Liang Qichao held that he was today's self, not yesterday's self.

Through China's modern transformation Liang Qichao was absolutely against sudden change, against violent change. Quite early on he took the same position as Yan Fu, gradual reform, so during the country's transformation he wanted slow change to bring change about; that broad line of thinking is, in a sense, conservatism. Liang Qichao belongs to that kind of conservatism. Of the many unsolved mysteries I mentioned, here's one I've been thinking about lately: why did Liang Qichao return to scholarship in his later years? Because Liang Qichao's interest was never scholarship — his interest was politics.

So why did he go back to scholarship? There's a lot of room for interpretation there.

And what was Liang Qichao's position during the 1911 Revolution? Even now much of it is hazy. People feel he wasn't quite a monarchist, wasn't quite a supporter of the Qing government; at the critical moments he acted, and afterward he pulled back and avoided the questions. Research on Liang Qichao has to keep pushing forward to open up some of the mysteries that stand to this day. History is full of mysteries, and he did not leave behind a great mass of material, though some sources do touch on aspects of that era's transformation.

Exactly how to read all this — you probably can't generalize; there's a lot of room for interpretation here as well. Of course history itself is highly subjective. Only at our age do historians dare say a few things: history needs not just source material, it needs imagination and feeling too, or else you're just compiling a chronicle!

Li Jing: The band around your book stresses that this is Xu Zhiyuan's book of transformation. So where do you want to transform into? What do you want to become? Liang Qichao turned to scholarship late in life; you've started even earlier than he did. Is that the road you're on now?

Xu Zhiyuan: I do have a plan — a plan for the second half of my life. It may sound presumptuous to say so, but it is actually happening: I have a long plan, and these three volumes on Liang Qichao may be only the start of it, the opening of a nine-volume project. Through a handful of figures I want to understand the whole transformation of China from the 19th century into the 20th — from the empire's last afterglow in the Jiaqing years, through the Opium War, down to the bottom in 1901, and then the search for China's revolution. That's how long the plan is.

For me the plan sits there like an anchor for my voyage, because I too often drift with the era, uncertain inside.

Sometimes I can feel a particular sensation: writing a book, as you near the end of it, feels like an old friend of twenty years suddenly leaving. I like that image, that feeling. So the picture of finishing the book may already be in my head. I'm waiting for the moment to arrive. Because fundamentally I have to overcome my own boredom — I'm someone who gets bored very easily, bored with everything, so I have to keep finding different things to hold it off. That's my biggest problem.

Li Jing: Let me ask a technical question. Your earlier writing, at The Economic Observer and in your columns, was built around expressing your own point of view, all of it in the service of a fluent, headlong style. This biography of Liang Qichao goes back to the text itself, trying as far as possible to restore the man and his era. So which mode of expression do you actually prefer, technically — and which one did you take up to overcome your boredom?

Xu Zhiyuan: Even though what I said just now may have sounded a bit swaggering, or presumptuous, it isn't. I think that as we exist within this society, as we're able to fold ourselves into it, I can add a small piece of fuel to it, or a small drop of water. All of us are really writing one book together. I feel I need to join everyone else in that, and in the process your own creativity, your own feelings, don't matter so much, because you're contributing a part to a larger tradition. But at the same time your individual creativity matters a lot, because you have to add a slightly different color to that great tradition, a different voice.

So for me, writing the first volume, I did find a kind of calling, and that calling made me quiet and steady, so I very much hope it lasts. I still want more readers in the future — I hope many people, through this book, through reading it, can get hold of a little history. In recent years our de-historicizing, our stripping away of humanistic thought, has gone very far; we need to rebuild a sense of history.

If everyone had that sense, we'd realize we aren't so isolated, we'd see how we're connected to each other, that we all have close ties to the world — and that would become a fuller source of strength in our lives, and we could influence others too. We don't live in isolation; we're a community, and it should be a community that encourages each other, that makes people feel warmth, and that also reminds and criticizes each other. I want an era like that to come. So it's just a small drop of water.

Q: Let me ask a very Xu-Zhiyuan question. Watching your show, people sometimes feel your questions leave the guest in an awkward spot. Meeting you in person today, you seem entirely at ease with yourself. Through the show, through the writing, do you think you've arrived at that ease? Have you settled your own anxieties about this era?

Xu Zhiyuan: Only a very foolish person would announce that he's at ease with himself. People are always contradictory. It's just that this era prizes a certain pretense. How can there be so many calm lives? Everyone is churning inside. So I've never been at ease — inside it's all kinds of struggle. On the show we lay a lot of groundwork, there's a lot of setup in the conversations, it's only that the setup gets cut. So I think in any era people are contradictory, contradictory inside — otherwise it would look too smooth, too false, too dishonest!

Li Jing: You seem to keep step with this era: when writers were what was hot, you were a writer; now that the internet is hot, you host a show. And the gossip about you has never let up either. Nothing has held you back. The book is out, you're an internet celebrity, I'll admit my envy — look how many people came for your book. By ordinary standards you're doing very well. So what are you anxious about? What's not at ease?

Xu Zhiyuan: Maybe it's what I went through when I was young. Everyone I read about had a rebellious streak, because rebellion, I think, makes people more alive. And for me, everything already gained stops mattering. Maybe it does matter, but at least to me it looks as though it doesn't.

Li Jing: You've already got it, so you don't think it matters.

Xu Zhiyuan: If you've got it and still think it matters, how foolish is that? Once you have it you shouldn't think it matters. However much you get, in the end don't you just drink a couple of beers? People are free.

Q: You've said Liang Qichao's era and ours have much in common — the explosion of information, the rush of new kinds of knowledge. Why choose an era so like your own as a "refuge"?

Xu Zhiyuan: We face many of the same confusions of social transformation: a headlong entry into a new information age, a headlong entry into a society organized around the individual, bombarded by every kind of information and symbol. When so many transformations overlap, many people feel that all that is solid melts into air; anxiety about identity follows everyone around. Everyone seems to gain more freedom, and everyone also gains more constraint. The young people at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries faced many of the same shocks and transformations, and to me they are both familiar and strange.

So having that space while writing was a great comfort. You look at that era and see so many remarkable people, you see their courage, you see people making brave choices and answering with bold thinking. Nobody lives outside some frame of reference; without one we panic. I hope our own moment can have frames of reference with more dimensions, so that more people can find support in different kinds of meaning.

Q: There's a contradiction in what you say — on the one hand you treat Liang Qichao as a refuge, and on the other the man you're writing is so radical and fervent. How did his passion affect you while you were writing?

Xu Zhiyuan: If I hadn't written about him I couldn't have kept my own company going. I'd think about how hard it was for them to run those papers, and think, this is nothing. When I saw that he couldn't read a financial statement either, my mind was at ease. Many of the magazines they ran were great successes, and financial failures. Seeing them go on acting even when things were beyond their control gave me strength.

Q: If Liang Qichao were alive today and made a show like Twelve Invitations or Fourteen Invitations, who do you think he'd want to interview first?

Xu Zhiyuan: That's an interesting question — who would Liang Qichao most want to interview? Professor Ma, who do you think?

Ma Yong: Yan Fu, I'd say.

Xu Zhiyuan: If it were me, I'd go interview Empress Dowager Cixi — ma'am, what on earth were you thinking?

Q: I've met Mr. Xu before and I'm seeing you again today. A small question: you live in this era, but writing about Liang Qichao means traveling back to his, so you drift between the two. Does that ever confuse you?

Xu Zhiyuan: The two eras need to understand each other, because what this one lacks can be made up a little by that one. There's a chapter I wrote specially about the people running newspapers in Shanghai back then — how they ate Western food, how they'd call over girls from Shanghai's pleasure houses to sit and talk with them, drinking wine and eating pudding while they discussed how to reform China.

I think we're very much like that era: talking about society, talking about ideas, and everyone willing to try to understand these things — that must be the era we long for, as men of letters, as intellectuals. So I moved all these longings, these unrealized ambitions and defeats, into the writing of this book.

Q: Suppose that a hundred, several hundred years from now, a young person feels through your work that your soul is very like his, and writes a trilogy or a nine-volume life of you. How would you want him to portray you in that era? What image do you want people in the future to remember?

Xu Zhiyuan: I'll say this quite responsibly: someone will certainly write my biography! Not now, of course. It will probably be through images, through sound — not necessarily through text. As for what I'll be remembered as, I can't control that at all. If Liang Qichao knew I'd written him this way he'd probably be furious. Nobody wants to be described by someone else in some other way. We all feel that others don't understand us. In that sense, if a biography is finished and it produces no conflict, no resentment between the subject and the biographer, it is surely not a good book. I expect I'd resent this young person, and he might be baffled — how can you be like this? But what I want to say is that one generation carries on to the next not only through understanding each other but through misunderstanding each other. Misunderstanding and understanding matter equally.

The cover image and the unlabeled photographs in this article are from the launch of Young Reformer: Liang Qichao (1873–1898), provided by the event organizers.