Edmund Fung's study draws on recent Chinese scholarly publications to advance an alternative understanding of modern Chinese intellectual history of the Republican period. Fung finds—in light of Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu bidding farewell to revolution (“Gaobie geming” Footnote ⁴), one might suggest—that the mainstream of Republican China's intellectual thinking did not concern itself with Marxism. The mainstream was, instead, “a mix of liberal, conservative and socialist thought that provided the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings for Chinese modernity” (p. 21). This center contained several points of consensus. First, the state stands for a positive force. Central to Chinese modernity are the rise of modern nationalism and the enterprise of state building. Second, Chinese cultural conservatism was neither against change nor modernity. It was, instead, a style of thinking in favor of Chinese cultural regeneration from within the bounds of its own resources as well as from within that of order and authority. Third, “Chinese intellectuals of all persuasions had a socialistic impulse” (p. 23), ready to embrace an eventual social democracy. With these points in place, Fung proposes a re-centering of modern Chinese intellectual history that shifts attention away from the glorification of the Maoist revolution. The result is a book that sheds light on the post-Mao reallocation of symbolic resources in support of the construction of the stability and modernity of the present day.

For a revisionist re-writing of Republican history, Fung selects his subjects of study with a somewhat conventional taste. Virtually every thinking person (all men) in this book had taken an overseas advanced degree and wrote essays for well-known periodicals published in Beijing, Shanghai, or Nanjing. Fung reads their writings with care, showing the authors to be rejecting, accepting, critiquing, challenging, responding, or conceding points in exchanges with each other over constructions of nation, liberty, democracy, culture, science, civilization, modernity, and other large subjects. The masses, the party-states, the wars, and the revolutions of China's Republican era lurk only in the background. The intellectuals, placed in Habermas's universe via Wang Hui's interpretive intervention, engaged in “cultural communicative action” with the West.

For prospective readers of Fung's book, the greater reward is not to be found in the re-reading of the texts or the learned reconsideration of the approaches. It lies, instead, in the framing of the issues from a new psychological standing, especially in contrast with the days of Joseph Levenson. Fung tells us, “The century-old quest for modernity has not come to an end in a Lyotardian sense—it is ongoing in China” (p. 263). “This leaves us with the question of whether Chinese liberal thought represented a local variant of liberalism” (p. 261). Fung concludes, drawing on Chinese experience, that “modernity is multilayered, internally complex and entails a criticism of modernity itself” (p. 256). It goes without saying that Republican Chinese intellectuals in Fung's book have moved well beyond the clichéd binaries of tradition vs. modernity, China vs. the West. They come across as the last or the least appreciated liberals engaging in a globalized discourse on modernity, whether in the context of the 20^th or the 21^st centuries.

Mainstream liberals in Fung's book remain, as in earlier scholarship, a divided and contentious collection. Fung uses labels such as “Westernized radicalism,” “Cultural conservatism,” and “Politicocultural nationalism” to capture the main strands within the liberal camp. These labels are important: they are carefully chosen in response to the established ones (such as “cultural iconoclasm”) attached to Chinese intellectuals in earlier scholarship. Neo-Confucianism, which served as a foundational framework in the works of Benjamin Schwartz and Joseph Levenson, is notably absent in Fung's book. Fung explains: “I am interested in Neo Confucianism only to the extent that it illustrates the themes that have been discussed thus far” (p. 90). Fung's new labels are useful. Still, as the author notes, this usefulness has its limits, because Republican Chinese liberal thinkers, unlike their doctrinal Marxian opponents, had a tendency to take up different questions, hold evolving viewpoints, and shift attention to various debates by the tides of the changing times. In political struggles, this intellectual elasticity undercut the persuasiveness of the liberals against their communist opponents. In historical representations, this liberal elasticity also has a tendency to reduce the usefulness of the very labels that Fung so thoughtfully designs.

Fung reminds us that, when read against changing times, modern Chinese intellectual history in the Republican era set forth issues and dilemmas that have yet to be defined. He has advanced important arguments. The time has come for the field as a whole to launch a fresh start.