Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao This page intentionally left blank Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao Xiaobing Tang Stanford University Press Stanford, California Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University CIP data appear at the end of the book Acknowledgments This book is a revision of my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. Its initial con- ception may be traced to Professor Fredric R. Jameson's graduate seminar in fall 1986 on problems of historiography. Although much of the discussion in class may have escaped me, the seminar none- theless opened up a new field of intellectual inquiry for me, a new graduate student who had arrived in the United States for the first time only weeks before school started. Needless to say, that class is but one instance of a much more general influence. I take this oppor- tunity to express my gratitude to Professor Jameson for his encour- agement and support over the years. While writing the dissertation, I benefited greatly from Professor Arif Dirlik's critical comments and challenging questions. Those usu- ally hour-long, page-by-page discussions, for which I am deeply grate- ful, helped me better formulate problems and clarify my arguments. I also owe a great deal to Professors Leo Ou-fan Lee and V. Y. Mudimbe for their unfailing enthusiasm. I am thankful to Professor Annabel Patterson, another member of my dissertation committee, for pains- takingly plowing through and correcting all the chapters in draft form. Those chapters, I now realize, were for the most part simply unreadable. Throughout the long process during which my dissertation grew vi Acknowledgments into a book, many friends and colleagues aided me in various ways, sometimes perhaps unwittingly. I take this opportunity to acknowl- edge help and support from Sandy Mills, Sandy Swanson, and Profes- sor Jing Wang at Duke; from Professors Howard C. Goldblatt, Paul W. Kroll, and Stephen Miller, my colleagues at the University of Colo- rado; and from my friends Prasenjit Duara, Paul Pecorino, Rebecca Karl, Lee Yu-cheng, Gan Yang, Benjamin Lee, Lionel Jensen, Chin Heng-wei, Yuejin Wang, Xudong Zhang, Lydia H. Liu, Maria Zellar, and Matt Carter. I greatly appreciate the opportunities that Professors Ted Huters and Chen Xiaomei created for me to present a small portion of my dissertation on different occasions. I am indebted to Hu Ying, who helped me obtain essential materials for this study and closely shared my writing experience. In the sweltering summer of 1994, Elizabeth Baker kept me focused on the rather long revising process by constantly coming up with imaginative distractions. Elizabeth also read the entire manuscript with great care and love at the last stage of its preparation. I am solely responsible, nonetheless, for all the errors and inac- curacies, as well as for the arguments, that are presented in the fol- lowing pages. My thanks are also due different institutions for their support. For the 1990-91 academic year, an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fel- lowship administered by the Graduate School at Duke allowed me to finish my dissertation. During this period of time, I carried out much of my research at the Davis Library at the University of North Caro- lina, Chapel Hill. In summer 1992, a Junior Faculty Development Award, together with a research travel grant, from the University of Colorado enabled me to begin my revision and do research at the Harvard-Yenching Library. Timothy Connor, Public Services Librarian at Harvard-Yenching, would later help me locate several important sources. I also did some research at the main library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. More immediately, I wish to thank Shen Zhi- jia and Liang Hui, librarians at the University of Colorado, for always being ready to help. In the later stages of preparing the manuscript, I appreciate Pro- fessor Prasenjit Duara's initial recommendation and the encourage- ment from Professor David Laitin, director of the Wilder House series at the University of Chicago. I am most grateful, moreover, that work- Acknowledgments vii ing with my editor, John Ziemer, at Stanford University Press has been such a pleasant and reassuring experience. Last but not least, I express my greatest gratitude to my parents and sister in China, whose absent presence in my life makes it imper- ative for me to continually contemplate the implications of space and simultaneity. They understand what I am trying to say here, even though they may never be able to read the book. On a brief and personal note, it has been a wonderful and stimu- lating experience reading Liang Qichao, imagining with him, and go- ing through the same emotional and intellectual excitements that he went through more than three quarters of a century ago. The sense of reliving and reconfronting history has been particularly sobering. I remember vividly one day in summer 1992 at the Harvard-Yenching Library when I found myself turning the brittle, yellowing pages of Liang's journal La Rekonstruo. For one moment I could not free my- self, nor can I now, of the notion that Liang Qichao and his times are indeed inextricably contemporary with our own. Those pages of La Rekonstruo also brought home the extraordinary faith and commit- ment of Liang, who throughout his life stubbornly refused to let de- spair or setbacks block an optimistic vision. About six years ago, I began my research, innocently enough, with Meng Xiangcai's biography of Liang Qichao produced in the late 1970's in mainland China. When I finished reading that ferocious lit- tle book, I simply could not reconcile the evil image of Liang found there with Liang's impassioned and inspiring essays that I was also reading. During the rest of my research and writing, I felt ever more strongly that for my generation of Chinese, an inescapable historical responsibility is, as Walter Benjamin once put it, to recapture and re- assemble images of the past as our own concerns and even identity before they disappear irretrievably. Or, as Liang Qichao himself would advise students of history in The Research Method for Chinese His- tory, "we should not carelessly wipe out what was valuable in the past but is immaterial in the present; nor should we easily let go of what was unimportant before but has become significant now." In retro- spect, I see that my duty also includes having an intelligent dialogue with one of the greatest and most imaginative thinkers of twentieth- century China, a man who bravely lived and confronted history. Over the past five years, this book has followed me about and viii Acknowledgments quietly witnessed many changes in my life—intellectual, emotional, and geographic. It has become a virtual part of my identity and often provided me with an anchor and sense of belonging in the fast- changing, if also uncannily familiar, contemporary world. For this reason, I am glad that I wrote the book. XBT Contents Abbreviations xi xi Introduction: Toward a Geography of the Discourse of Modernity 1 v in 1902 11 The Nationalist Historian and New Historiography 46 The Nation and Revolution: Narrating the Modern Event 80 Modernity as Political Discourse: Interpreting Revolution 117 The Spatial Logic of the New Culture: Modernity and Its Completion 165 Conclusion: Toward a Production of Anthropological Space 224 Notes 241 Bibliography 271 271 Index 283 28383