Word: liang
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...search for significance for his hero, Alitto reduces both Liang and Mao to caricatures--Alitto wrote that...
Perhaps, as archetypes, such Chineseness is more important than any other consideration. But Liang and Mao do not in themselves embody two great cultural systems competing for the Chinese soul, and Liang himself lacks either the record or the lasting intellectual power to rank him as the last, best hope of the traditional order of China. Throughout the book, Alitto juxtoposes Liang and Mao, always hinting that Liang is the ghost of the Chinese past that dogged Mao until his death...
Here lies the true irony of Alitto's approach to his subject. His attempt to give this one man historical potency produces cartoon drawings of intellectual developments. Ultimately, Liang was not "the last Confucian" that could defend two millenia of Confucian tradition. His Confucianism was a tool, picked up relatively late in life, with which he sought to preserve China in the face of modernity. He could not stand for the old order; he chose only one of many intellectual responses to simultaneous demands of Chinese culturalism and nationalism; he failed to make any new synthesis that challenged...
When Alitto just tells Liang's own story, Liang is perfectly capable of holding the reader's interest as dynamic, powerful, figure. He is important then, because as he grappled with the general problem of Chinese intellectuals--the preservation of Chinese culture--Liang illustrates how Alitto's "Chinese dilemma of modernity" affected the individuals being modernized. And as Liang's life touched upon other leading figures of the day, his individual story does yield new insights into the general milieu in which both Mao and Liang worked...
...place, slapped on in a revision ordered by some editor searching for a hook to brandish in publisher's blurbs. Though sometimes obscured by the fluff, Alitto's tale of one man does emerge in the end. It is a tale worth telling, and as Alitto illuminates how Liang faced universal problems, he does, almost in spite of himself, uncover the universal import of the life of Liang Shu-ming...