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

"Liang Qichao is somebody who really should be a household name, globally, and isn’t. He is plenty well known still in China—he’s enormously important. It’s hard to come up with a parallel figure. Not being aware of Liang Qichao is like not being aware of Nietzsche or Hegel . And there’s an imbalance—because a well-educated Chinese person would know who Nietzsche and Hegel were, even if they hadn’t read any of their works. Liang was head of a family that included other influential members. Some of his sons, grandsons and granddaughters made their marks in different fields. His granddaughter, Wu Liming, wrote a history of her grandfather and his progeny and how they shaped the country’s intellectual life. Liang Qichao himself was a wunderkind. In his 20s he became one of the leading reform figures. In 1898, late in the Qing era, along with his mentor Kang Youwei and others, he got the ear of a youthful emperor and tried to introduce sweeping reforms. And, for 100 days, it looked like China was going to go the way of the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The reformers wanted to keep the imperial exam system and keep the Qing in power, but introduce all kinds of new institutions and forms of education. Instead, they got driven into exile or were arrested or executed. Liang Qichao ended up in exile in Yokohama in Japan, where, still in his twenties and then into his thirties, he founded and edited periodicals and translated works at a dizzying pace. Most of the translations he did himself or published in his journals were of books or essays that had come out in Japanese after being written in European languages, and were then translated from Japanese into Chinese. These translations introduced ideas like evolution , different varieties of socialism, and constitutional democracy to readers in China and in the Chinese diaspora. He didn’t settle into a completely unified ideology but he remained intent on figuring out what recipes were out there that could be used by China to prevent itself from being subjugated in the way so many places outside of the West were through processes of formal colonization and other types of domination. He was an extraordinary figure and a prolific essayist. As if that wasn’t enough, Liang also wrote one of the first science fiction stories. It imagined a China in the future that would be well-respected and would host something like a World’s Fair where a descendant of Confucius would lecture dignitaries from around the world. That story got a lot of play when China was finally hosting the Olympics in 2008 and then a World Expo in 2010. Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio is a fairly slim volume, which has an insightful and clear introduction by its translator, Peter Zarrow, a specialist in Chinese intellectual history who has done a lot of work on the 1898 Reforms and the decades following them. The essays Zarrow chose showcase Liang’s omnivorous reading in Western, Chinese, and Japanese history and thought, and the way he drew on those readings to spread understanding of ideas about citizenship and promote public-mindedness in China. It’s a good sampler of his writings, particularly from the incredibly productive period he had around the turn of the century. He promoted ideas that had an impact. Nearly everybody who was significant in Chinese intellectual life at the time owed a debt to Liang. He influenced Mao early in Mao’s life—even though Liang Qichao was a Buddhist and often wanted to work with rather than try to topple rulers. He was eclectic and robustly cosmopolitan, a fascinating figure. Yes, and he not only peppers his essays with varied concepts but throws in all kinds of statistics, like how many people were speaking English at one point in the past, compared to centuries later when London was the hub of a massive empire. He’s trying to make sense of a world that was rapidly changing in that period as the great empires divided up so much of the globe."