As Zarrow has shown in some of his previous books, the intellectual weather of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China was stormy. The end of the empire was in sight, which meant the end of institutions which had forcibly united China with a small number of prominent cultures of eastern Eurasia under the rule of an autocratic emperor. Amid the tumult Zarrow is able to point repeatedly to salient and continuous themes. He begins by asking how a world without an emperor became conceivable, and increasingly credible, in the later nineteenth century.

For some writers, abandoning monarchism in any form was an invitation to chaos; the only real choices were autocratic or absolute monarchism, or constitutional monarchism of the sort already instituted in Japan with apparent success. Others were determined to set out for democracy without a monarch in tow. It is interesting that the fin de siècle intellectual world that Zarrow deftly paints has fewer options in it than the twenty-first century reader might expect. Monarchism and democracy were the common dichotomy under discussion; authoritarian republicanism as a term or a concept escaped from the pens of very few other than Liang Qichao and others who anticipated a period of state tutoring of the population to ready them for democracy. Yet Zarrow's study travels through the collapse of successive political ideals, landing in a swamp of authoritarian republicanism that virtually nobody had sought.

Zarrow makes it clear that challenges and importations from the “West” were only part of the chemistry catalyzing the new thinking that would expel the emperors from China, literally and figuratively. Indeed, as in the case of nationalism, Western models and translations of Western political theories were mostly pings and prods that prompted searches of centuries of Chinese political commentary for the real answers to the not necessarily new question of whether China needed kings or emperors, and whether democracy was not originally and deeply native to Chinese society and culture. Kang Youwei's New Text concepts of Confucius as reformer and visionary, Zhang Binglin and Liu Shipei's Old Text insistence on a unique Chinese essence, and long-standing critiques and theories of emperorship by Huang Zongxi, Lü Liuliang and others remind the reader that anti-monarchism bloomed from native seeds, and that the monarchy was not as firmly rooted in Chinese ideology as it might once have appeared.

Zarrow's scholarship on these points is exemplary (and the superb bibliography shares it with the reader). But there are passages at which the discussion becomes somewhat murky. A critical connection made by Kang and followed by a certain number of later writers suggested that kingship (which Zarrow associates with wangjiao) was essentially a value identity, not a political status. Such an insight clearly made it possible to conceive of China without a monarch, indeed to conceive of a China in which each man had the possibility of realizing the kingliness in himself. Kang himself was a constitutional monarchist, but New Text Confucianism clearly had the possibility of contributing to the foundation of theories of individualism and democracy. A parallel discourse pursued the meaning of a Chinese national identity after the culturally multi-valent Qing empire. In that case, an attempt to find a Chinese value identity stalled and was overrun by contemporary fashions in essentialist and racialist thinking.

In the middle of some of the most absorbing of these discussions regarding monarchy Zarrow slips from “kingship” to “emperorship,” without advising the reader what the difference might be. Speaking for myself, it seems clear that kingship as represented in the wang or jun of, say, the Analects is a categorically different concept from, say, the Qianlong emperorship (huangdi)—and that the two rulerships have distinct histories. Things get even murkier when we read of “traditional emperorship,” which seems to elide the rather passionate reaction of Confucianists of many periods and ideological orientations to the displacement of virtuous kingship by amoral, if universalizing, emperorship. A rather casual approach to correlations between Chinese terms—and the contexts in which they occur—and English terms such as “kingship,” “monarchy,” and “emperorship” introduces more than a little opacity into a discussion that is otherwise stimulating and credible.

This book is an important addition to Zarrow's outstanding scholarship on philosophy, ideology and political activism of the early twentieth century. Even in moments of temporary muddle, it remains an accessible and widely useful study of an irresistible question: How people who had lived in a world framed by emperorship for two millennia and by kingship for many more conceived of, and weighed the benefits of, a world without either.