Liang Qichao (1873-1929) was a reformist intellectual, who facing brutal repression fled to Japan where he lived for fourteen years. His long exile, travels and writing - of fiction, journalism and above all essays - gave Liang a unique authority in the first years of the twentieth century. Peter Zarrow is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. He has held teaching and research positions in Australia and Taiwan, and he has published extensively in English and Chinese on the intellectual and cultural history of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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. -- Pankaj Mishra