Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker’s Studio
- Author Liang Qichao
- Narrator Daniel York Loh
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date 26 October 2023
- Run Time 9 hours and 12 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Asian history, Biography and non-fiction prose, Geopolitics, History, Literary essays, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Nationalism, Political structures: democracy, Politics and government, Society and Social Sciences.
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
'A country does not become corrupt and weak overnight. Rather, we are now reaping the evil harvest of what previous generations sowed.'
The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao's writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era - to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators, with the intellectual equipment to renew itself.
Liang said that he wrote from an 'ice-drinker's studio', implying that underneath his dispassionate, disabused and rational tone lay an ardour and passion which only ice could cool. China could only recover through a clear-sighted, informed understanding of its enemies - and by engaging in a thorough-going self-critique. Liang did not propose aping the West but taking only what China needed to 'renew the people' and create 'new citizens'. Then China would be able to expel its invaders, reform its society and become a great power once more.
This selection of pieces shows Liang's extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on, attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation. Blending together Confucianism, Buddhism and the Western Enlightenment, Liang's ideas about nation, democracy, and morality had a profound impact on Chinese visions of the political order, though the China that eventually emerged from the further disasters of the 1930s and 1940s would be a very different one.
©2023 LLiang Qichao (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Critics Review
China’s first iconic modern intellectual. His lucid and prolific writings, touching on all major concerns in his own time and anticipating many in the future, inspired several generations of thinkers including the much younger Mao Zedong.
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