MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Leigh Jenco’s review of Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World, by Liang Qichao, edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jenco/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio:
Essays on China and the World
By Liang Qichao
Edited and Translated by Peter Zarrow
Reviewed by Leigh Jenco
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)
Liang Qichao. Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World Edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. Penguin Classics, 2023. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780241568781 (paperback); 9781802060140 (ebook).
As a political theorist who works on Chinese thought within the notoriously Eurocentric fields of political science and philosophy, I have been waiting a very long time for a volume like this one. Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the considerable scholarly effort to translate, masterfully and lucidly, key essays from Liang Qichao 梁啟超, arguably the most influential figure of twentieth-century Chinese thought barring only Mao Zedong. We can now easily include in our introductory courses several weeks of key readings from the greatest mover-and-shaker to come out of the late Qing period—the figure who “invented political journalism, promoted democratic reforms, and introduced Western political theory to Chinese readers,” and “led China’s break from tradition” (ix). This volume is a real milestone.
Zarrow begins the volume with a brisk and accessible introduction that sketches the historical context without becoming bogged down in irrelevant detail. His translator’s note explains how he chose the essays to translate: he focuses on those that mainly deal with questions we would consider closer to political theory than to historiography or journalism (the other contributions for which Liang is known), and that are representative of Liang’s thinking at distinct junctures in his life. These junctures also organize the volume’s four parts: Early Reformist Thought (1896-1898), Radicalism (1899-1903), Cultural Reform (1904-1911), and Syncretism and Progress (1912-1929). Long known as a bit of a plagiarist, Liang’s Chinese translations of Japanese-language material published under his own name are also not included in this volume, nor are his writings on literature or history, which have been published elsewhere (and Zarrow helpfully provides a bibliographic list).
The translations of the essays themselves are clear and easy to read. They often succeed in capturing distinctive elements of Liang’s style, including his seeming breathlessness as he lists ever more historical examples or his full-throated urgency as he rushes to convince his readers of the crisis they are facing at any given moment. Zarrow’s translations convey the content of Liang’s work, but also the quite apt impression that Liang was both very widely read and in a big hurry.
Liang’s rush to get the words out does sometimes lead to muddy thinking. Some of this muddiness is tidied up a bit too neatly in Zarrow’s introduction, which admittedly speaks to a general audience less interested in the subtleties of conceptual hair-splitting. But there are certain keywords that beg further explanation. For example, it is not always clear what Zarrow means by characterizing Liang’s political leanings as “democratic,” or how Liang’s extended focus on “citizenship” links up to something democratic rather than something else (republican, liberal, or otherwise). Liang’s vision not only changed over time, but his writings are not keen on definitions. Is democracy reducible to “Constitutions! Parliaments!” (as Zarrow describes both the excitement and urgency of Liang’s early intellectual milieu) (xi)? Or is it more like a kind of participatory socialism, paired with a general (albeit vague) commitment to political equality? What emerges most from Liang’s essays is not a commitment to one or another principle or institution, but rather his seeming obsession with creating conditions for social cohesion, a practice he called “grouping” (群) but whose contours or scope he never fully explores. Zarrow notes, and I fully agree, that Liang sometimes comes across as crude or facile. Liang was not a theorist or academic (at least not in the first half of his life, before the conclusion of the first world war) but a public intellectual most interested in stirring his readers to action. When we read his essays, moreover, we come to understand that Liang did not confront a world of ready-made solutions to China’s problems. His penchant for using examples to illustrate his talking points helps us grasp a bit of the world as he saw it: a world in conflict, unevenly committed to democratic governance, and most of all subject to the predations of imperialism. Amidst this uncertainty and violence, Liang sought treasures in new thought to ameliorate China’s subordinate position and in the process crafted many of his own new ideas. What emerged was perhaps simplistic by modern standards, but it is, as Zarrow states, undeniable that “ideals of democracy, liberty and rights are today as Chinese as they are Western is due in considerable part to Liang Qichao” (xxi).
A volume of selected translations, even one as masterful as this, necessarily makes choices about how to represent its subject. Obviously, this kind of excision is necessary to any act of translation, particularly for a volume that must select a manageable and representative set of readings from a positively massive corpus (The Collected Works of the Ice-Drinker’s Studio [飲冰室合集] alone amounts to ten thick volumes, which we must remember amounts to almost double that in English translation due to the grammatical density of classical Chinese, the language in which Liang still mostly wrote). Zarrow confronts these issues directly in his introduction and translator’s note. He explains that there are many “Liangs”: Liang changed his mind and his interests throughout his life, and openly confessed that he struggled with tensions between his “conservative” and “progressive” sides.
Indeed, late Qing and Republican-era figures, such as Liang and his colleagues, are legendary for their intransigence to ideological category-slotting; they seemed to collect ideas and isms from around the world the way magpies collect shiny objects. Some scholars and political thinkers see their approach as a new way of thinking about intellectual allegiance and genealogy (Jenco 2015), but most see it as deeply inconvenient—particularly when trying to figure one or another of these guys (they are almost all men) as the “father” of some ideological fashion we currently take to be important. After Liang, the most problematic figure to pin down may be Li Dazhao 李大釗, the so-called “father of Chinese Communism” who was not actually all that communist—as Suzanne Weigelin-Schwiedrick explains in her brilliant essay “What Is Wrong with Li Dazhao”? (Weigelin-Schwiedrzik 1995). Zarrow therefore has his work cut out for him, but he handles it with his characteristic sensitivity and nuance. He explains that “the Liang in these pages is the political thinker and public intellectual” (xxvi) whose work is best understood as initiating new ways of thinking at the dawn of a new age, rather than promoting a particular “ism.”
Zarrow’s decisions about what to include and exclude are thus both apt and necessary. But omitting certain well-known aspects of Liang’s corpus does have a consequence that goes beyond concerns with representativeness. Namely, one of the main reasons we in the Anglophone world might be interested in reading translations from the Chinese would be to challenge our worldview, and that may involve subverting expectations of what we take to be “political” or not. Political debate does not only play out over well-worn themes of citizenship or state institutions; it ranges widely to include issues not prima facie meaningful to outsiders. In Liang’s case, the burning issue is the role he played in the construction, and intellectual legitimation, of a Sinocentric worldview and historiography. Although not as ostensibly “political” as his essays on “grouping” or citizenship, Liang’s work in how to write an Asian history centered on Han-majority China in essays such as his “Introduction to Chinese History” (中國史敍論, also in the Chinese-language version of the Ice-Drinker collection, and originally published in 1901 in Qingyi bao [清議報]), continues to inform Chinese leaders and policymakers today. Zarrow is more than intimately familiar with these debates—among his many other scholarly contributions, he co-edited a volume on the formation of Chinese historiography and the historical discipline in twentieth-century China, in which Liang figures prominently (Moloughney/Zarrow 2011). Zarrow is to be commended further for taking on the necessary footnoting for Liang’s complex essay “Personal Morality” (論私德), making its extensive allusions to late imperial Chinese history and philosophy more relatable to a contemporary reader. But how these allusions lead into the bigger themes of Liang’s work are sometimes lost in the shuffle.
My observation about such omissions, it is important to note, pertains less to this volume specifically, and more to how translated work from the Chinese must be packaged for English-speaking readers—removing debates seen as “internal” to Chinese academic audiences, and avoiding material too difficult to explain in a simple footnote. But seen from another point of view, perhaps it doesn’t matter. The facet of Liang’s vast corpus presented by Zarrow here in this volume is sufficiently rich and competes favorably with the political writings of other major thinkers in the canon of Western political thought. Zarrow’s choice to read Liang as a political thinker, rather than as a historian or cultural broker, is thus not only unavoidable but appropriate for how major historical figures are treated in political science and philosophy departments. For example, most political theorists are intimately familiar, and routinely teach, Rousseau’s Du Contract Social to first-year students but almost none of them read his work on botany (Emma Planinc’s [2024] recent work is one, very notable, exception). The problem with this approach, of course, is that what is taken to be “political” may differ across time and space; issues seen as comfortably penned into one scholarly field in one era erupt into divisive political debates in another. But until we scholars of political thought have figured out how to square this circle—and reimagine our entire field of study as aggressively interdisciplinary and transhistorical—we would do well to read as widely as we can beyond our own field of expertise, particularly as our sources for political thinking are finally becoming more global in scope. Zarrow’s volume contributes massively to this undertaking and should be read by all serious students of modern politics.
Leigh Jenco
London School of Economics
WORKS CITED:
Jenco, Leigh. 2015. “New Pasts for New Futures: A Temporal Reading of Global Thought.” Constellations 23 (3): 436–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12175.
Moloughney, Brian, and Peter Zarrow, eds. 2011. Transforming History: The Making of a Modern Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.
Planinc, Emma. 2024. Regenerative Politics. New. York: Columbia University Press.
Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne. 1995. “What Is Wrong with Li Dazhao?” In Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven, eds., New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 56-74.