Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker's Studio: Essays on China and the World

8vo, br,ed. 265pp. The power, anger, and fluency of Liang Qichaoís 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 eraóto 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 ìice-drinkerís studio,î implying that underneath his dispassionate, disabused, and rational tone lay an ardor and passion that only ice could cool. China could recover only through a clear-sighted, informed understanding of its enemiesóand by engaging in a thoroughgoing self-critique. Liang did not propose aping the West but taking only what China needed to ìrenew the peopleî and create ìnew citizens.î Then China would be able to expel its invaders, reform its society, and become a great power once more. This selection of pieces shows Liangís extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission that drove him on, attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation. Blending Confucianism, Buddhism, and the Western Enlightenment, Liangís 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.