Liang Qichao

Early Life and the Hundred Days’ Reform

Liang Qichao, courtesy name Zhuoru, known by the sobriquets Rengong and Master of the Ice-Drinking Studio, among others, was born on 23 February 1873 in Xinhui, Guangdong. According to the Heibonsha World Encyclopedia, he passed the provincial examination at seventeen, failed the metropolitan examination the following spring and that autumn became a disciple of Kang Youwei, a fellow Cantonese; thereafter he was Kang’s chief collaborator in the reform movement, and the two were known together as “Kang–Liang.” In 1895 he helped organise Kang’s petition of the examination candidates; he then became chief writer of Shiwu Bao (Current Affairs) in Shanghai, publishing essays such as “General Discussion of Reform” that argued for reform, popular rights and constitutional monarchy. In 1897 he became head teacher at the Hunan School of Current Affairs and was attacked by conservatives for preaching popular rights to his students. During the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 he was put in charge of the translation bureau of the Imperial University; after the Empress Dowager Cixi’s coup he fled to Japan.

Exile in Japan and the Constitutional Movement

In October 1898 he founded the journal Qingyi Bao in Yokohama, advocating protection of the emperor and constitutional monarchy; in 1902 he replaced it with the fortnightly Xinmin Congbao, in which he serialised “On the New Citizen,” arguing that a change in the consciousness of the people themselves was the precondition for institutional reform, a message enthusiastically received by young intellectuals. The scholar Xia Xiaohong notes that after the failure of 1898 he leaned for a time towards revolution and discussed cooperation with Sun Yat-sen, but after travelling in the United States in 1903 he changed course again, returning to constitutional monarchy and proposing “enlightened despotism”; in 1906–07 he debated the revolutionaries’ journal Minbao in the pages of Xinmin Congbao. After the Qing announced preparations for a constitution in 1906, he set up the Political Information Society to promote constitutionalism and ghost-wrote memorials for the ministers sent abroad to study constitutional government.

He made no secret of his frequent changes of position. As early as 1899, in “Heroes Who Are Good at Changing,” he wrote that only his methods changed, never the love of country behind them. Xia Xiaohong argues that each of his shifts had its own inner logic and that his constant concern was the establishment and practice of constitutional government.

Politics in the Early Republic

In October 1912 he returned to China after fourteen years in exile and, building on the constitutionalists, organised the Progressive Party, the rival of the Nationalists in Parliament. According to Xia Xiaohong, believing that only Yuan Shikai could bring order to the early Republic, he cooperated with Yuan, serving as minister of justice in Xiong Xiling’s cabinet and then as director of the currency bureau, but soon resigned. Xia comments that the Progressive Party had no troops and could achieve little in an age of military rule, and that by entering the centre of power he lost the freedom to criticise.

Opposing the Monarchy and the National Protection War

When Yuan Shikai prepared to make himself emperor in 1915, Liang published “How Strange, This So-Called Question of the Form of State,” writing that constitutionalist commentators such as himself concerned themselves with the form of government, not the form of state, and opposing any change of the form of state at that time. Xia Xiaohong explains that in his view destroying the existing form of state would inevitably cause upheaval, and a return from republic to monarchy would be a step backwards. His former student Cai E then rose in Yunnan at the head of the National Protection Army, and Liang took part in the struggle against Yuan.

According to his own “Diary of Joining the Army,” Lu Rongting of Guangxi sent an envoy to Shanghai to invite him. The Japanese military attaché in Shanghai, General Aoki, on learning of this, undertook to arrange his journey; on 4 March 1916 Liang sailed from Shanghai on the Japanese mail steamer Yokohama Maru, and in Hong Kong transferred to a Mitsui coal ship, changing into Western clothes and passing himself off as Japanese, hiding in the hold to slip into Haiphong in French Indochina on his way to Guangxi. In the diary he marvelled at how meticulously the Japanese acted under their government’s tacit direction, while adding that the thought made him shudder.

During Zhang Xun’s restoration of 1917 he and his teacher Kang Youwei were in opposing camps. Xia Xiaohong notes that in his telegram against the restoration he denounced its instigators as either greedy soldiers or boastful scholars, a charge that took in Kang as well; the two were reconciled on Kang’s seventieth birthday.

Duan Qirui’s Cabinet and Withdrawal from Politics

After the restoration was crushed he became finance minister in Duan Qirui’s cabinet. According to Xia Xiaohong, he was the driving force behind the declaration of war on Germany and Austria, which met resistance in Parliament and criticism from the Nationalists and others; at the end of the year he resigned together with Duan, later describing his political career as the political activity of a past delusion, and withdrew from politics.

Europe, the Paris Peace Conference and the May Fourth Movement

At the end of 1918 he set out with Zhang Junmai, Ding Wenjiang and others, seven in all, on a tour of Europe lasting more than a year, which coincided with the Paris Peace Conference. Xia Xiaohong writes that, as a private citizen engaged in people’s diplomacy, he kept the public at home informed of the conference’s progress and of the details of how China’s interests were being sacrificed. In February 1919 the Citizens’ Diplomatic Association was founded in Beijing, with Liang, Xiong Xiling, Wang Daxie, Lin Changmin and others as directors. According to an article by Zhu Zhongyuan, Liang cabled Wang Daxie and Lin Changmin in March with news of the Qingdao question; Lin used his telegrams for “A Diplomatic Alarm to the Nation,” published in the Chenbao on 2 May, which said that a telegram from Liang had now confirmed the news. Zhu calls Liang the man who “lit the fuse” of the May Fourth Movement, and Xia also holds that his reports set it off. On the other hand, the Nipponica encyclopedia records that during the May Fourth period he opposed the slogan “Down with Confucius and Sons.”

After returning in March 1920 he published “Impressions of My European Travels.” Xia Xiaohong argues that the tour’s greatest effect was a change in his view of culture, from introducing Western culture as fully as possible to emphasising the development of China’s own culture, which he held should combine with other cultures, Western learning included, to form a new cultural system.

Teaching at Tsinghua and Death

From then on he devoted himself to education and scholarship, writing works such as An Outline of Qing Scholarship, Methods for the Study of Chinese History, A History of Pre-Qin Political Thought and A History of Chinese Scholarship over the Last Three Hundred Years, and served as director of the Peking Library. In 1925 he became a tutor at the Tsinghua Institute of Chinese Studies, recommending Wang Guowei as chief tutor and placing himself second; he and Wang were among the institute’s “four great tutors.”

According to an article published by Tsinghua University, he began passing blood in his urine in the winter of 1924, and in March 1926 had his right kidney removed at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital; afterwards the kidney was found to show no obvious disease and the bleeding continued, causing a public outcry. He did not sue the hospital but wrote an account of his treatment, saying that the immaturity of modern scientific knowledge was no reason to doubt science itself. The later story that the surgeons removed the wrong kidney is inaccurate: the case records exhibited by the hospital in 2006 show that his right kidney did have a small tumour, which was collectively diagnosed as malignant and found only after surgery to be benign. His health worsened in 1928 and he gave up his work at Tsinghua; in November he was readmitted to the hospital and diagnosed with bronchial candidiasis. He died in Beijing on 19 January 1929, aged fifty-six, and was buried in the family plot east of the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in the Fragrant Hills.

Opinions of him have always been divided. Before 1911 his constitutional-monarchist views were attacked by the revolutionaries; the journalist Xu Zhucheng wrote that by the 1920s his name had increasingly become a byword for conservatism among the young. After his death Chang Yansheng wrote that the appearance of a thousand Wang Guoweis could not make up for the loss of one Liang Qichao.