It is a mark of bold and scrupulous scholarship to be able to define difficult concepts clearly. Edmund Fung's new book does this skilfully with respect to the convoluted, over-used notion of “modernity.” Simply put, the author shows how critical reflection about this very concept constitutes the genuine intellectual foundation for change in 20th-century China.

Far from being a snake that bites its own tail, modernity, as defined here, is neither a wholesale acceptance nor a hasty repudiation of the legacy of Enlightenment. Instead, Fung recreates the complex discourse of Chinese intellectuals who wrestled with the challenging ideas of socialism, capitalism, freedom, democracy and nationalism in a way that remains compelling today. Although this book is firmly anchored in the historical experience of the Republican period (1911–49), the questions addressed have significance for debates going on currently in the West, in the Middle East as well as in East and South Asia. This, then, is a work of history that succeeds in illuminating both past and present and should be of interest to scholars, as well as to policy makers and thoughtful citizens in China, and beyond.

Before Edmund Fung's wide-ranging inquiry into the primary sources of 20th-century Chinese intellectual history, we had only few works that exhibited a similarly encompassing ambition: Joseph Levenson had mapped some of this terrain in his 1958 work, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, while Jerome Grieder revisited old themes around a new focus in his 1983 study Intellectuals and the State in Modern China. More recently, Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee's 2002 collection, An Intellectual History of Modern China sought to encompass a wide range of concerns by bringing together essays by different scholars working on the problem of “consciousness” from the late 19th century to the present. Fung's book builds on these works while charting an analytical framework that is novel and also more coherent.

If there is a single scholar who clearly stands as a predecessor for Edmund Fung's reach and depth, it is Benjamin Schwartz – amply acknowledged in this book for his argument that cultural radicalism was not synonymous with iconoclasm in 20th-century China. Schwartz, like Fung, had pointed out that conservatism must be understood as a cultural rather than as a political phenomenon in 20th-century China.

What truly sets this book apart from previous works on modern intellectual history is Fung's thoughtful engagement with recent Chinese scholarship from Taiwan, the mainland as well as Southeast Asia. In fact readers (especially graduate students) will find his bibliography to be an exceedingly useful map of the entire corpus of Chinese (and Western) writings about intellectuals and modernity. Historian Yu Yingshi is one of the scholars who informs Fung's work while at the same time allowing for a departure from Yu's grim view that blames cultural radicalism for the destruction enacted in Mao's China. Fung's book represents a reconsideration of the May Fourth legacy through the lens of cultural moderation that was a consistent feature of the intellectual landscape during the Republican era. Similarly, Fung engages critically the writing of Wang Hui (and many other mainland scholars) by stepping away from their obsession with the “spiritual degradation” of contemporary politics and by showing how modern Chinese history contains the seeds of a genuinely fresh start for the agenda of liberal socialism.

One key strategy that this book uses to create a new reading of intellectual history is to provide many details about the lives of well-known thinkers as well to emphasize the importance of seemingly minor thinkers and previously overlooked events. For example, the book offers fresh insights into the life and work of Shi Fuliang (Shi Cuntong 1899–1970), a May Fourth intellectual, who became an important associate of Zhang Dongsun in developing the theme of a “middle path” between the CCP and the KMT during the post-Second World War democratic debates (p. 240). Similarly, the well-known historian Yin Haiguang (1919–69) gains a new dimension as we read about his critique of Chinese liberalism that had suffered “a premature birth followed by post-natal disorders” (p.138).

Fung delves into such pivotal thinkers and ideas by building upon his own previous work, In Search of Chinese Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The current work, however, reaches beyond civil opposition to the Kuomintang to create a new chronology of modernity that includes Hu Shi's very positive visit to the USSR in 1926 as well as the 1935 “professors' declaration” in favour of cultural construction on a “Chinese basis,” and Liu Xiaobo's Charter '08.

In the end, what makes this work so broad and valuable is that if offers an internal critique of modernity using the most informed Chinese voices of the past century as well as the most sophisticated theories about socialism and nationalism from the West. Refusing to dichotomize tradition and modernity, Chinese “cultural essence” and Western notions of utilitarianism, Edmund Fung has created a well-documented argument for China's century-long quest for tiaohelun: a search for compromise and moderation that was never fully eclipsed and remains a promising approach to modernity. Borrowing from Habermas's suggestive definition of “communicative action,” this work documents how notions of mediation and harmony have prepared China for a modernity characterized by genuine “intercultural communication” (p. 258).