''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'' Pankaj Mishra
''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 it
