Peter Zarrow, 2012, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924, 395 pages, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 begins with the following question: How was it that Chinese people stopped believing in the emperor and imagined a radically new political system? From 1885 to 1924 China underwent a period of acute political struggle and cultural change. After two thousand years of monarchical rule, Confucian political orthodoxy collapsed, with the modern Chinese idea of the state forged in four decades of struggle among competing definitions of citizenship, national identity, and republicanism. Chinese elites and commoners moved from a belief in the cosmic and charismatic role of the emperor to deep-seated skepticism while the cultural edifice of the imperial system declined, including the coercive powers of the court vis-à-vis local society, the civil service examination system, and the immense system of classical learning upon which the exams were based. Kang Youwei’s essays of the mid-1880s were the first writings to fundamentally challenge the traditional monarchical system by making a case for statism and offering a new vision of citizenship. In the end, the 1911 Revolution proved irreversible, and in 1924 the last Qing emperor was expelled from the Forbidden City.