Yan Fu (8 January 1854 — 27 October 1921) was one of the first Chinese scholars to study abroad, attending Greenwich Naval College in 1879. He brought back to China a conviction that “his country’s only salvation lay in learning how to compete in the new global scramble for power.” His outspoken reformist ideas became especially… Read more »
Liang moved to Hunan province and began teach pupils of his own in 1897. There Liang began to think more deeply about the adoption of Western reform in China. He edited an anthology of Wei Yuan’s work, read Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and began teaching a revolutionary curriculum combining Western thought with Chinese classics. Studying the… Read more »
In 1896, disheartened by his failures in the imperial exams, Liang joined the editorial board of a new Shanghai paper called Chinese Progress. Though he only remained at Chinese Progress a short time, Liang become convinced “that a dynamic popular press was a key to national strength.”