Content area
Full Text
Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. By XIAOBING TANG. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1996. $39.50.
This study of Liang Qichao (1873-1929) is the fourth published English monograph on this great modern Chinese intellectual. The author does not take major issue with his predecessors and regards the late Joseph Levenson's pioneering work highly.
Basing his research on previous works on Liang, Xiaobing Tang discusses Liang's historical thinking with admirable erudition. The central theme is that as the pioneer advocate of the nationalist "New Historiography" and thanks to his experience of global space, Liang looked for a critical reconceptualization of history, in which spatiality eventually inspired "a global imaginary of difference" for Liang to map his cultural history and to redesign his plan of modernity. In the end, "this final reconciliation of anthropological space with historical time makes Liang Qichao abundantly contemporary with our own time, both inextricably modern and postmodern" (p. 238). Tang's exercise of cross-cultural comparison is impressive.
Liang's pathbreaking essay, "New Historiography" of 1902, is treated contextually in chapter 2, in which Tang judiciously illuminates the tension and ambivalence inherent to the process of the search for modernity and national history. And...