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which the decade’s newfound opportunities became available to a generation of students,

artists, and writers, whose overseas studies provided the platform for a flurry of

interaction across territorial borders.

This generation of writers and intellectuals living at home and abroad has often

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been characterized as alienated. In doing so, scholars have analyzed this era in
emotional and even psychological terms. Through a systematic study of philosophical

treatises written by renowned thinkers Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, Zhang Binglin, and Liu

Shipei, historian Chang Hao describes the gradual abandonment of Confucianism after

the 1860s, the influx of Western views, and the decline of legitimacy of Chinese

cosmology and kingship. The breakdown of such an epistemological order and the

ensuing perceived crisis resulted in intense feelings of doubt about the contemporary

existential and socio-political order. Analytical constructions such as “existential” and

“political” are interpretive tools of a scholar writing in hindsight and a focus on the

perception of crisis as the root of self-doubt paints a monochromatic psychological

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picture of the late-Qing dynastic experience. Chang Hao rightly shows how thinkers

constructed new “universalisms” by drawing on cosmological traditions, but his emphasis

is on the breakdown of order. However, not all writers experienced the waning years of

the Qing dynasty in such a psychological way. This chapter introduces the work and text

of Chen Liu in order to shed light on the historical nature of the idea of a “perception of

crisis” that has informed so much historical scholarship of the late Qing and so many

notions about the motivation for change in modern Chinese history.

I. Tao Ya: Circulation and Reception