1. Liang Qichao was a Chinese politician, social and political activist, journalist, and intellectual.
72 Facts About Liang Qichao
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Liang Qichao's thought had a significant influence on the political reformation of modern China.
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Liang Qichao inspired Chinese scholars and activists with his writings and reform movements.
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Liang Qichao became dissatisfied with Yuan Shikai and launched a movement to oppose his ambition to be emperor.
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Liang Qichao advocated the New Culture Movement and supported cultural change but not political revolution.
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Liang Qichao was born in a small village in Xinhui, Guangdong Province on February 23,1873.
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Liang Qichao's father, Liang Qichao Baoying, was a farmer and local scholar, but had a classical background that emphasized on tradition and education for ethnic rejuvenescence allowed him to be introduced to various literary works at six years old.
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Liang Qichao had two wives: Li Huixian and Wang Guiquan.
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Liang Qichao passed the Xiucai degree provincial examination at the age of 11.
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In 1890, Liang Qichao failed in his Jinshi degree national examinations in Beijing and never earned a higher degree.
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Liang Qichao took the exams along with Kang Youwei, a famous Chinese scholar and reformist.
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In 1895, Liang Qichao went to the capital Beijing again with Kang for the national examination.
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Liang Qichao helped to organize the Society for National Strengthening, where Liang served as secretary.
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Liang Qichao organized reforms with Kang Youwei by putting their ideas on paper and sending them to the Guangxu Emperor of the Qing dynasty.
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Liang Qichao thus was a major influence in the debates on democracy in China.
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In 1898, the Conservative Coup ended all reforms, and Liang Qichao fled to Japan, where he stayed for the next 14 years.
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Liang Qichao continued to emphasize the importance of individualism, and to support the concept of a constitutional monarchy as opposed to the radical republicanism supported by the Tokyo-based Tongmenghui.
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In 1899, Liang Qichao went to Canada, where he met Dr Sun Yat-Sen among others, then to Honolulu in Hawaii.
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Liang Qichao gave public lectures to both Chinese and Western audiences around the country.
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Liang Qichao felt this model of integration might be an excellent model for the diverse regions of China.
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Liang Qichao was feted by politicians, and met the first Prime Minister of Australia, Edmund Barton.
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In 1903, Liang Qichao embarked on an eight-month lecture tour throughout the United States, which included a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington, DC, before returning to Japan via Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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The first one was the ways that transformed people became citizen for modernization, and Liang Qichao thought Chinese needed to improve civic ethos to build the nation-state in the Qing dynasty, and the second one was the question of the citizenship, and Liang Qichao thought both of them were important to support the reformation in the Qing dynasty.
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In Liang Qichao's view, Chineseness was a cultural concept rather than an ethnic concept.
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Liang Qichao viewed China as weak not because of ethnic Manchu rule, but because of its cultural customs formed over millennia.
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Liang Qichao merged his renamed Democratic Party with the Republicans to form the new Progressive Party.
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Liang Qichao was very critical of Sun Yatsen's attempts to undermine President Yuan Shikai.
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Liang Qichao's thought was influenced by the West, and he learned about the new political thought and regimes of the Western countries, and he learned these from the Japanese translation books, and he learned the Western thought through Meiji Japan to analyze the knowledge of the West.
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Liang Qichao convinced his disciple Cai E, the military governor of Yunnan, to rebel.
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Besides Duan Qirui, Liang Qichao was the biggest advocate of entering World War I on the Allied side.
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Liang Qichao felt it would boost China's status and ameliorate foreign debts.
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Liang Qichao condemned his mentor, Kang Youwei, for assisting in the failed attempt to restore the Qing in July 1917.
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Liang Qichao favored nationalism that incorporated different ethnic groups of the Qing empire to oppose Western imperialists.
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Liang Qichao was the "most influential turn-of-the-century scholar-journalist," according to Levenson.
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Liang Qichao showed that newspapers and magazines could serve as an effective medium for communicating political ideas.
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Liang Qichao published his moral and political ideals in Qing Yi Bao and New Citizen.
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Liang Qichao published his articles in the magazine New Youth to expand the thought of science and democracy in the 1910s.
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Liang Qichao produced a widely read biweekly journal called New Citizen, first published in Yokohama, Japan on February 8,1902.
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Liang Qichao spread his notions about democracy as chief editor of the New Citizen Journal.
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Liang Qichao wrote that China was weak due to blockages of communication between the rulers, ministers, the people, and between China and the outside world.
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Liang Qichao criticized the Qing dynasty for its control on information, which to Liang implied a failure of political rationality.
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Liang Qichao both praised Western freedom of the press and criticized Western media narratives of China for legitimizing colonization and conquest.
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Liang Qichao believed that newspapers and magazines should serve as an essential and effective tool in communicating political ideas.
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Press as a weapon in revolution: Liang Qichao thought that the press was an "effective weapon in the service of a nationalist uprising".
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For example, Liang Qichao wrote a well known essay during his most radical period titled "The Young China" and published it in his newspaper Qing Yi Bao on February 2,1900.
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Weak press: However, Liang Qichao thought that the press in China at that time was quite weak, not only due to lack of financial resources and to conventional social prejudices, but because "the social atmosphere was not free enough to encourage more readers and there was a lack of roads and highways that made it hard to distribute newspapers".
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Liang Qichao felt that the prevalent newspapers of the time were "no more than a mass commodity".
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Liang Qichao criticized that those newspapers "failed to have the slightest influence upon the nation as a society".
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Liang Qichao was both a traditional Confucian scholar and a reformist.
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Liang Qichao contributed to the reform in late Qing by writing various articles interpreting non-Chinese ideas of history and government, with the intent of stimulating Chinese citizens' minds to build a new China.
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Liang Qichao shaped the ideas of democracy in China, using his writings as a medium to combine Western scientific methods with traditional Chinese historical studies.
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Liang Qichao's works were strongly influenced by the Japanese political scholar Kato Hiroyuki, who used methods of social Darwinism to promote the statist ideology in Japanese society.
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Liang Qichao drew from much of his work and subsequently influenced Korean nationalists in the 1900s.
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Liang Qichao's historiographical thought represents the beginning of modern Chinese historiography and reveals some important directions of Chinese historiography in the twentieth century.
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Liang Qichao's call for new history not only pointed to a new orientation for historical writing in China, but indicated the rise of modern historical consciousness among Chinese intellectuals.
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Liang Qichao advocated the Great Man theory in his 1899 piece, "Heroes and the Times", and he wrote biographies of European state-builders such as Otto von Bismarck, Horatio Nelson, Oliver Cromwell, Lajos Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour; as well as Chinese men including Zheng He, Tan Sitong, and Wang Anshi.
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Frustrated by his failure at political reform, Liang Qichao embarked upon cultural reform.
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In 1902, while in exile in Japan, Liang Qichao wrote "The New Historiography", which called on Chinese to study world history to understand China rather than just Chinese history.
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Liang Qichao was head of the Translation Bureau and oversaw the training of students who were learning to translate Western works into Chinese.
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Liang Qichao believed that this task was "the most essential of all essential undertakings to accomplish" because he believed Westerners were successful - politically, technologically and economically.
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Philosophical Works: After escaping Beijing and the government crackdown on anti-Qing protesters, Liang Qichao studied the works of Western philosophers of the Enlightenment period, namely Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Hume and Bentham, translating them and introducing his own interpretation of their works.
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Liang Qichao's essays were published in a number of journals, drawing interest among Chinese intellectuals who had been taken aback by the dismemberment of China's formidable empire at the hands of foreign powers.
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Western Social and Political Theories: In the early 20th century, Liang Qichao played a significant role in introducing Western social and political theories into Korea such as Social Darwinism and international law.
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Liang Qichao advocated reform in both the genres of poem and novel.
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Liang Qichao gained his idea of calling his work as Collected Works of Yinbingshi from a passage of Zhuangzi.
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Liang Qichao wrote fiction and scholarly essays on fiction, which included Fleeing to Japan after failure of Hundred Days' Reform and the essay On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People.
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Liang Qichao founded the Jiangxue she and brought important intellectual figures to China, including Driesch and Rabindranath Tagore.
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Liang Qichao was impacted by a social-Darwinian perspective to researched approaches to combine western thought and Chinese learning.
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Liang Qichao thought children needed to cultivate creative thinking and improve their ability to understand, and so the "new school" was important in instructing children in new approaches in education.
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Liang Qichao reexamined the works of Mozi, and authored, amongst other works, The Political Thought of the Pre-Qing Period, and Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period.
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Liang Qichao had a strong interest in Buddhism and wrote historical and political articles on its influence in China.
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Liang Qichao influenced many of his students in producing their own literary works.