Xīn Zhōngguó Wèilái Jì 新中國未來記
A Record of the Future of New China
by 梁啓超 (撰)
About the work
Xīn Zhōngguó Wèilái Jì 新中國未來記 is an unfinished utopian political novel in five huí 回 by Liáng Qǐchāo 梁啓超 (1873–1929), serialized in the journal Xīn Xiǎoshuō 新小說 (New Fiction) beginning in 1902. The novel employs a framing device: a future historian, writing sixty years hence (i.e., c. 1962), narrates a celebrated international conference held in Shanghai in which a reinvigorated, democratic China has become a world power. The narrative flashes back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to trace how this future came about. The work combines political tract, historical commentary, and novelistic narration in an unstable hybrid form that Liáng himself acknowledged in the preface was neither conventional fiction nor conventional essay. The novel was left unfinished after five huí, abandoning the project that Liáng had contemplated for five years before serialization began.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Prefaces
The Kanripo text preserves the full 緒言 (preface/general remarks) by Liáng Qǐchāo, consisting of four numbered items in which he explains his purpose (to advance political views and stimulate public discussion), apologizes for the hybrid form of the text, warns that it is only a “draft” (gǎoběn 稿本) to be revised later, and notes that he hopes readers will provide critical responses. He explicitly states that the novel’s appearance in the journal Xīn Xiǎoshuō was the primary motivation for its serial publication: “The founding of New Fiction was motivated entirely by this work.”
Abstract
Liáng Qǐchāo 梁啓超 (1873–1929; CBDB 691198) was a native of Xīnhuì 新會, Guǎngdōng. He was a leading disciple of Kāng Yǒuwéi 康有為 and one of the architects of the Hundred Days’ Reform (Wùxū biànfǎ 戊戌變法, 1898). After the reform’s failure, he fled to Japan, where he became an extraordinarily prolific journalist, essayist, and cultural reformer in exile. Wilkinson describes him as “an influential advocate of the European three-ages model” of historical periodization (§A.1.1), whose proposed chronology from the Yellow Thearch to the present became widely influential. CBDB records his dates as 1873–1929.
In Japan, Liáng founded the journal Xīnmín Cóngbào 新民叢報 (1902) and the fiction journal Xīn Xiǎoshuō 新小說 (New Fiction, 1902), where he published theoretical essays calling for a “revolution in fiction” (xiǎoshuō jiémìng 小說界革命) as a vehicle for national renewal. Xīn Zhōngguó Wèilái Jì was intended as the flagship work embodying this program. The novel imagines a Shanghai conference in 1962 at which China, having achieved constitutional democracy after decades of reform, takes its place as a leading world power; the characters include reform politicians (孔覺民 Kǒng Juémín, 黃毅伯 Huáng Yìbó) who debate constitutional parties, study abroad, and engage in political journalism.
The hybrid form — combining extended fictional dialogue, interpolated political speeches, and historical commentary — reflects Liáng’s theoretical ideas about the novel as a vehicle for enlightenment, but also the difficulty of putting those ideas into consistent narrative practice. The 緒言 is remarkably candid about the work’s structural incoherence: Liáng admits it is “not quite a novel, not quite a historical critique, not quite an essay,” and suspects it will frustrate readers. He published only five huí before abandoning the project.
The text has a fixed date of composition: the 緒言 is datable to 1902, and the serial publication in Xīn Xiǎoshuō (Yokohama) confirmed this. Both notBefore and notAfter are set to 1902.
Translations and research
- David Der-wei Wang. Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911. Stanford University Press, 1997. Chapter on Liáng Qǐchāo’s political fiction including this novel; essential reference.
- Chang Hao. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907. Harvard University Press, 1971. Contextualizes the novel within Liáng’s political thought.
- Tang Xiaobing. Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford University Press, 1996.
- Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldřich Král, eds. The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project. Harvard University Press, 2001. Contains relevant essays on the late-Qīng fiction reform movement.