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R. Bin Wong, Peter Zarrow. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1497–1498, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1497
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This is a book on turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history evaluating texts written in the four decades after 1885. It considers the arguments made by Chinese intellectuals, famous and otherwise, about what a government should do and how it should relate to Chinese people and their concerns. The book's subtitle alerts the reader to Peter Zarrow's focus on “the conceptual transformation of the Chinese state.” In contrast to Wang Hui's arguments about the key ways in which turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese intellectual capacities to conceive new possibilities were fashioned from their own conceptual resources (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi [2004]), Zarrow insists that new categories of foreign origin are key to discourse regarding the state. Zarrow sees a shift from a dynastic state with claims to universal rule over diverse peoples to a state without an emperor managed by intellectuals working in the public sphere to articulate a new vision of what a state should be and do.
