Rebecca E. Karl

is Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Duke UP 2017), Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Duke UP 2010), and Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke UP 2002). She is co-translator and co-editor (with Xueping Zhong) of Cai Xiang, Revolution and its Narratives (Duke UP 2016) and (with Lydia Liu and Dorothy Ko) of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia UP 2013).

Rules for Destroying Countries: China and the Colonial World in the Early 20th Century

Rules for Destroying Countries: China and the Colonial World in the Early 20th Century

At the same time that J. A. Hobson was writing Imperialism: A Study (1902), Liang Qichao, a major turn-of-the-century Chinese intellectual and journalist, wrote a magisterial essay on what he called “the new rules for destroying countries” [mieguo xinfa]. As Liang makes clear, conceptualizing modern Chinese history as dialectically part of modern global history not only helps generate new questions of and in theories of imperialism and modernity, it also helps generate new questions about Chinese history and the history of global revolutions.