Returning to China in 1920, Liang retired from political life. He returned to journalism, editing a new publication Emancipation and Reconstruction, focused on importing new economic ideas from the West. He died of cancer in 1929, in Beijing.

Like Wei Yuan and Feng Guifen, Liang drifted back towards his traditional Confucian and Buddhist roots as he aged.

While he stands out as a great thinker, perhaps his most important legacy was a lasting influence on a young Hunanese librarian with an insatiable appetite for Liang’s dispatches from Japan, Mao Zedong. Mao took Liang’s theories about destruction to heart, with earth-shaking ramifications for China’s development.

Liang Qichao’s tomb in Beijing