MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Magnus Fiskesjö’s review of Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire, by Kun Qian. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fiskesjo/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire
By Kun Qian
Reviewed by Magnus Fiskesjö
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Kun Qian, Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire Leiden: Brill, 2016. xii + 368 pp. ISBN: 9789004309296 (hardback) / ISBN 9789004309302 (e-book).
It used to be, in China, that empire and imperialism were words associated with evil foreign powers—especially Western powers encroaching on Asia—and, to a lesser extent, with China’s own past empires, also characterized as unjust and oppressive.
Today, we see an increasingly explicit embrace of the idea of empire in China. In a complete reversal of Communist Party policy, there is even a renewed identification of today’s China with its own past empires, in discourse as well as in state actions both inside and outside of the modern Chinese nation-state that replaced the Qing empire after 1911.
Kun Qian’s Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire provides a very useful analysis of how this shift occurred, with particular focus on the cultural realm. Because of current developments, her remarkable and extremely rich book is gaining in timeliness every day. Grounded in a deep engagement with both Chinese and Western philosophy and literature, Imperial-Time-Order will continue to help explain the roots of the Chinese imperial imagination to readers and students for a long time to come.
The book begins, appropriately, with an introduction to the ambivalent figure of Mao, who regarded himself as a revolutionary overthrowing the old and creating something new—not just another imperial dynasty. And yet, at the same time, as many have observed, Mao took on imperial manners. Kun Qian emphasizes how deeply influenced Mao was by the history of the imperial eras that came before. She argues that Mao saw himself as part of a Chinese continuity, unfolding on a Chinese time, a “universal time” in which there always is a China. Continue reading Imperial-Time-Order review