Chinas first iconic modern intellectual. His lucid and prolific writings touching on all major concerns in his own time and anticipating many in the future inspired several generations of thinkers Pankaj MishraI have been waiting a very long time for a volume like this one it is a real milestone ... Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the considerable scholarly effort to translate masterfully and lucidly key essays from Liang Qichao Leigh JencoA country does not become corrupt and weak overnight. Rather we are now reaping the evil harvest of what previous generations sowed.The power anger and fluency of Liang Qichaos 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 era to 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 icedrinkers studio implying that underneath his dispassionate disabused and rational tone lay an ardour and passion which only ice could cool. China could only recover through a clearsighted informed understanding of its enemies and by engaging in a thoroughgoing selfcritique. Liang did not propose aping the West but taking only what China needed to renew the people and create new citizens. Then China would be able to expel its invaders reform its society and become a great power once more.This selection of pieces shows Liangs extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation. Blending together Confucianism Buddhism and the Western Enlightenment Liangs 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.