The transformation of modern China from an empire to a nation-state is a subject that has served many an undergraduate and graduate course, and yet the textbook version has never quite satisfied. One can go through the gamut of major events (Opium War, self-strengthening, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the late Qing reforms, revolution and Chinese Republic) and wind up with little more than the stimulus-response argument that all modern China historians proclaim they eschew. The trouble is that in seeking an explanation, the textbook presumes that those events led to revolution, but as historians, we know how suddenly the Wuchang uprising broke out, how unexpectedly the Qing government lost command, how shocked the revolutionaries were with the assassination of Song Jiaoren, and how totally inexplicable it was that Yuan Shikai should have wanted to make himself emperor. In this curious tale full of twists and turns, the history that does not capture the unexpected falls flat. What should constitute the intellectual history that accompanies that twisted tale? Should it be a description of the sedimentation of ideas into what this book refers to as “the Chinese state,” or should it reflect the fits and starts of many a train of thought reinterpreted at every junction to make the thinker appear to be in tune?

This book takes the sedimentary approach, and for that reason, resembles more the textbook. Each chapter discusses a theme, for which the author draws on one or more representative thinkers. So, Kang Youwei takes center stage in chapter 1, Liang Qichao in chapter 2, and there is not a great deal that is very novel in either chapter. Kang's reformism rested on a view of the state that revolved around a charismatic emperor modeled on the Meiji reforms. But the Guangxu emperor did not quite live up to the stature of the Meiji emperor, nor did circumstances allow him to do so. The reformers might have favored more power to “the people” but that was not “democracy” served by the recognition of individual rights and popular elections. Liang was locked in a mindset that recognized on one hand the bankruptcy of despotic monarchy and on the other that the individual had to be reined in to serve the higher ideals of the state. Those two chapters lead up to chapter 3, which provides a brilliant exposition of the introduction of Western ideas of sovereignty feeding into the late Qing intellectual conundrum of the separation of state, emperor, and people. Chinese jurists, taking their cue from Rousseau and Bluntschli, elevated the state above emperor and people, and Liang Qichao followed suit. It appears he went to the extremes of essentializing it, or, in Zarrow's words, “Liang favored a strong state but opposed autocratic rule” (p. 112).

From chapter 4 to the end of the book, the author returns to familiar ground. Against the extremism of Liang Qichao, chapter 4 introduces the conservatives into the fray. The textbook reader may claim some familiarity with the argument: it was the people's “rights” pitted against the Confucian Three Bonds, but it is far from clear if a similar division between radicals and conservatives might apply to the statist proposition. Come chapters 5 and 6, race becomes the issue as revolutionaries pitted Han against Manchu, and Zhang Binglin and Liu Shipei sought to define Hanness in terms of a history stretching back into far antiquity. Chapters 7 and 8 see the statist theorists derailed by events, with Confucians coming to terms with first Republicanism and then Yuan Shikai's monarchy, and May Fourth intellectuals finding the fall guy in Confucius. Sure enough, post-1911, theorists were caught up with when to celebrate National Day and what to make of the flag and the anthem, but either they had no political, economic, diplomatic, legal, social, or administrative agenda or the author has left out any discussion of those from his account. Perhaps when the author says “Sun Yat-sen had a strong theory of the nation but no theory of the state” (p. 287) he is acknowledging just that. The meandering conclusion ends with the centrality of the Rousseauian sentiment in the Chinese revolutionary tradition, which is fair enough as a summary of the book.

In sum, the book is a fine summary of intellectual discussions before and after 1911, but more for a reader who has read some of the protagonists than for a novice. That notwithstanding, it is hard not to find those intellectual discussions quite dull. The great revolutions in England, the United States, France, and Russia all threw up theorists who carried their weight beyond their immediate politics to the rest of the world. Why did the great 1911 revolution of China that overthrew an aging empire not nurture a single thinker of stature beyond the bounds of Beijing and Shanghai? No China intellectual historian seems to have posed that question, which perhaps would provide for more exciting thoughts.