One of the most intriguing figures of the Chinese nationalist movement was Zhang Binglin (also known as Zhang Taiyan), whose importance in the period leading up to the Xinhai Revolution was equal to that of Sun Yat-sen and Kang Youwei, and whose life has figured greatly in the literature on this period. Viren Murthy has now added an insightful study of Zhang as a political philosopher, who through his use of Buddhist and early Daoist philosophy proposed alternatives to the discourse on modernity. Murthy focuses specifically on Zhang's writings in the years just before the Revolution (1906–10), placing Zhang within a global intellectual context and suggesting a continuity of his work to the present day. Murthy succeeds admirably in presenting the intricacies of Zhang's thought, and leaves his audience with a bold argument on a genealogy of intellectual thought from Zhang to the present.
The rich literature on Zhang has...
