Abstract
Peter Zarrow opens his After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924 by declaring ‘This is a study primarily of political thought’ (p. vii). Yet the book actually ventures far beyond the conventional scope of political thought and covers almost all aspects of political culture, in an attempt to trace the ‘conceptual transformation of the Chinese state’ during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Zarrow, a sea change in the conceptualization of political order occurred in the 1890s, when the leading elite started to envision a future without the institution of emperorship. The assumption that the emperor was dispensable to the nation’s collective life shifted the terms of debate, and ushered in China’s ‘political modernity’ (pp. 4–5).
More than two-thirds of the book deal with developments on the eve of the empire’s demise in 1911. Zarrow’s narrative starts with the reformist sage Kang Youwei and the evolution of his ‘philosophy of power’ from the 1880s to the reform movement of the 1890s. It then moves on to Kang’s disciple Liang Qichao and his formulation of a ‘citizen-state’ at the turn of the 20th century. Chapter 3 examines Liang’s turn to ‘statism’ after 1903 and situates it in relation to the influx of Western political theories since the late 19th century. The next chapter on the conservatives investigates how the moderate Zhang Zhidong and the reactionary Hunan clique responded to the reform movement and how they postulated their defence of the imperial system. The revolutionary side of the story starts from Chapter 5, which considers the roles of racial discourse, revived memory, and historicized identity in anti-Manchu politics. Chapter 6 is devoted to the revolutionaries’ political polemics, and covers their writing on a broad range of topics from republicanism to socialism. The book ends with two chapters on post-imperial history. Chapter 7 uses the civil and state rituals of the young republic to illustrate how the daily life of citizens as well as the state’s representation of itself changed in a world without the emperor. Finally, Chapter 8 discusses the irreversibility of the abolition of the imperial system by looking at the failed attempts at restoration in the early republic.
The book’s major contribution is to place political thought back in the centre of the study of late-Qing history. In the past two decades, social and cultural historians and literary scholars have been the driving force in expanding our knowledge of the period immediately before 1911. Zarrow’s book reminds us that there was an important conceptual context that informed developments in the late Qing. Political decision-making became difficult at that time exactly because the fundamental concepts underlying sovereignty, power, and politics were called into question. This emphasis on conceptual changes, however, does not mean that other aspects of history are overlooked. Rather, Zarrow demonstrates the interaction between ideas and other historical forces, and engages the findings and methodologies of social history and cultural studies. Zarrow’s discussion of the importation of Western theories in the 1870s–90s therefore includes a proper acknowledgement of the complex issues involved in translation, and his analysis of conservative politicians pays special attention to the relationship between their social milieu and their specific psychology. Overall, the book is exemplary in incorporating the most up-to-date English and Chinese secondary literature. Zarrow cites and engages with the field’s most significant research of the past 20 years and provides a very useful bibliography. The solid scholarship makes After Empire an informative and rewarding read for both scholars and students of modern Chinese history and for those who are interested in the rise of political modernity in general.