It is now increasingly acknowledged that the last years of the Qing dynasty and early years of the Republic constituted a crucial phase in the evolution of Chinese political, social and cultural modernity, after a long period of time when these years have been uniformly characterized as one of marginal or superficial change on the one hand, and political failure on the other. Peter Zarrow's book contributes to this on-going scholarship by analysing how attitudes towards monarchy and the nature of the state amongst intellectual elites underwent a fundamental transformation in the last years of the 19th and early years of the 20th century. In the process the monarchy became “desacralized” (and, ultimately, irrelevant), and the locus of sovereignty was increasingly perceived to be rooted in an organic state that, while representing the people (or the “people's will”), also stood above society, was self-legitimating and accepted as the highest source of good – what Zarrow describes as “statism.” For this reason, Zarrow argues, the 1911 revolution that overthrew the monarchy, although incomplete, was irreversible (further demonstrated by the risible failures of monarchical restoration in 1916 and 1917). Thus the 1911 revolution was not just a way-station on the road to 1949 but rather, in Zarrow's words, marked “the establishment of modern Chinese national identity” (p. 272) by means of which society was remade on the basis of horizontal ties amongst its members and a direct relationship posited between the individual and the state.

Individual chapters deal with the political thought of the 1890s reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, and its contribution to the undermining of the “sacred” monarchy while suggesting alternative state forms (drawing on Western theories of the state initially via missionary translations and then via Japanese translations of Western works); the conservative reaction to reformist ideas on constitutionalism and the state before 1911, which were perceived as a dangerous threat to cosmically ordained hierarchy (characterizing both political and family rule); the role of anti-Manchuism in the creation of a new Han Chinese identity, as well as different attitudes towards republicanism before 1911; the significance of new and very public political rituals in the wake of the 1911 revolution and how they were used or manipulated to create a new Republican identity (pertaining to both the state and its “citizens”); and competing conceptions of the state in the 1910s amongst monarchists, Confucians and New Culture radicals (although discussion of this latter group is disappointingly thin). The book concludes with the 1924 expulsion of Puyi from the Forbidden City (in which he had been allowed to reside by the Articles of Favourable Treatment sanctioned by the provisional Republican government in early 1912) and his demotion to the rank of private citizen (along with confiscation of dynastic property). In a sense this terminated the legal status of the Qing dynasty, soon to be even more “museumified” (in 1913 the Outer Court of the Forbidden City had been opened to the public, a fact ignored, incidentally, by Bertolucci's 1986 film The Last Emperor) with the opening in 1925 of the Palace Museum within the precincts of the Forbidden City.

Much of Zarrow's book, it has to be said, does not provide anything strikingly new to existing scholarship. Discussion of the pre-1911 debate between anti-Manchu republicans and constitutional monarchists, for example, as well as of the influence of Western theories of the state (such as those of Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, 1808–1891) on late Qing intellectuals and political activists adds nothing substantial to Michael Gasster's study of reformist and revolutionary thought (Chinese Intellectuals and the Revolution of 1911, University of Washington Press, 1969); similarly, the role of anti-Manchuism in the making of a modern Han Chinese identity (the topic of chapter five) has now been well covered (see, for example, Kai-wing Chow, “Narrating nation, race and national culture: imagining the Hanzu identity in modern China', in Kai-wing Chow [ed.], Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, University of Michigan Press, 2001, surprisingly not referenced in Zarrow's book). Furthermore, although Zarrow usefully analyses the impact of late-Qing discourse on kingship as a contributing factor in the gradual desacralization of the monarchy, the book does not address how constitutionalism promoted by the Qing establishment itself unwittingly contributed to this outcome – a phenomenon analysed in a pioneering chapter by Marianne Bastid listed in Zarrow's bibliography (“Official conceptions of imperial authority at the end of the Qing dynasty', in S. Schram [ed.], Foundations and Limits of State Power in China, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1987) but not referenced at all in the text or footnotes.

Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book is chapter seven, which analyses the contested meanings of political and civic rituals during the first years of the Republic (such as saluting the new Republican flag or remembering national martyrs), all of which were now open and public in contrast to Qing state rituals. In particular, Zarrow provides fascinating details on the emergence of public commemorations such as National Day (or Double Ten) celebrating the outbreak of the revolution, and the tortuous quest to choose a national anthem for the new Republic. Overall, Zarrow's thesis that something “deep in the political culture” had changed forever in 1911 (p. 3) is a convincing one. However, as he himself observes, the new political discourse first begun in the late Qing on the relationship between the state and the individual citizen kick-started a project that remains unfinished today.