This structure owes in no small part to Liang himself who was one of the most prolific essayists of his time and who published his opinions on a vast range of issues. Tang's approach, while drawing significantly on theoretical concepts of cognitive spatial mappings and paradigm shifts, nonetheless adheres to a certain narrative structure of 'the man and his ideas' that constitutes the norm of scholarship on Liang Qichao.
The title, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: the Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao, tellingly informs us that, once again, it is Liang's mind that is at issue.
Similarly, Xiaobing Tang's recent theoretically inflected study of Liang Qichao focusses on Liang's ideas in relation to historiography, nationhood, revolution, modernity and culture. Liang's significance is located mainly within Chinese intellectual history where he is often regarded in hypostatic terms as 'the mind of modern China', as the title of Joseph Levenson's seminal work has it. In this context, what is most interesting about Liang Qichao's sojourn in Australia is that, in order to tell this story, we must rely on a set of primary sources that differ significantly from the ones that form the bedrock of research on Liang Qichao. Even though he played only a minor role in the reform program of this time, he was widely recognized as Kang Youwei's 康有为 protégé, and thus received social and political cachet from his close association with the man who was personal adviser to the progressive Guangxu Emperor. Although Liang Qichao is the subject of a research industry that covers many different aspects and stages of his intellectual and political career, the Hundred Day Reform remains the key event that launched his career and to this day, it continues to secure the historical significance of his name. Liang Qichao is a significant name in any general account of China's modern history because of its close association with the Hundred Day Reform of 1898, a major event in the narration of modern China. We tend to assume that our 'primary sources' will yield a certain fundamental and incontrovertible truth about the past, no matter which mode of interpretation we bring to bear upon them. Very often, the form that we regard as the most intimate and authoritative, namely the 'internal' perspectives that we seek to mine from the range of published and unpublished accounts produced by actual historical individuals themselves, assumes the privileged position of historical veracity. Rather, the point is to reflect on the different forms that sense making can take. It goes without saying that the point of posing these questions is not to encourage an unreflective response that affirms one particular account over other possible acts of historical representation. Does our ability to relate the occurrence of events by providing the right kinds of textual documentation, and in adequate quantities, satisfy one or another norm of veracity acceptable to the profession? To what extent is veracity affected by the sequence according to which we order a certain set of events, the rhetorical operations we perform in the act of description, the decisions we make in either departing from or adhering to conventional and authoritative readings of a known historical topic? Thus, in the telling of any 'story' about Liang Qichao 梁启超, we are faced with the question of how we might locate historical veracity when it is contingent on one or another form of narrative structure.
INDEED SEATTLE MANDARIN TRANSLATOR PROFESSIONAL
Historians, however, will also point out that the dictum of veracity must remain irreducible if historical narration is to be distinguishable as a work of professional scholarship from mere storytelling. It is commonplace nowadays to draw attention to the narrative structure of historical accounts and to note that a certain discursive contiguity exists between this mode of scholarship and storytelling. It is reproduced here with some minor revisions.- The Editor The following article was first published in East Asian History, No.21, June (2001) pp.
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