How China’s greatest journalist helped shape its destiny
- Liang Qichao may also help us understand the historical context of modern Chinese journalism, as it is being put on trial in Hong Kong today
“The press can contain, reject, produce, and destroy everything”
Liang Qichao, Chinese journalist and reformist intellectual
Liang Sicheng, son of Liang Qichao, has been called “the father of modern Chinese architecture”. He also risked his life and career, ultimately failing, to protect the heritage buildings and traditional structures of Old Beijing from destruction by the Maoists. But before him, as one of the most important Chinese intellectuals at the start of the 20th century, his father may legitimately be called “the father of modern Chinese journalism”. Without the father’s ideological rejection of Confucianism, his son’s fate might have been very different.
As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding, it’s worth remembering that China’s rise has been so extraordinary and complex that no single narrative, however authoritative or authoritarian, can possibly account for it. But the grandeur and tragedy of father and son, the Liangs are as good a place to start as we try to understand the complexities and contradictions of contemporary China.
And, at a time when journalism itself is on trial in Hong Kong, it’s worth remembering the larger historical background from which this singular profession, at once so debased and exalted, emerged.
President Xi Jinping has popularised “the China dream” from the nation’s recent rise. But that dream began as a nightmare more than a century ago when Liang Snr first coined the phrase “sick man of Asia” who was then being awakened, he claimed, from “a 4,000-year-old dream”. Liang Snr was the first of a long line of reformists and intellectuals who called for jettisoning old Confucian ideas and tradition for a new, even violent, modernity to “save China”. Their demand would end with Mao Zedong’s call against “the Four Olds” during the Cultural Revolution.
As the “sick man” phrase indicates, though trained for a career to be a Confucian scholar-official, Liang was a master of the pithy turn of phrase, a born editor and op-ed writer who helped invent modern vernacular Chinese journalism from the last years of the Qin dynasty onwards. He was, in today’s lingo, the greatest of the Chinese influencers, the most important of the KOLs (key opinion leaders).