Recreating China in Tokyo

This book is one of the "Yijia - Dudaoshuxi" series.

In Tokyo in 1905, Chinese students numbered 8,000. On August 20th of that year, the "Tongmenghui" (Chinese Revolutionary Alliance) was officially established. While the Japanese were reveling in the joy of their victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Chinese people gathered under the banner of the "Tongmenghui" quietly began the great undertaking of establishing a republic in Tokyo. "New terms and concepts, imbued with new ideas, new perspectives, and new knowledge, came like a tempest, overwhelming everything, ubiquitous, stirring up the publishing, education, journalism, and academic fields, transforming their appearance..."

One hundred and twenty years have passed, and the cherry blossoms in Ueno still bloom and wither year after year. Rebuilding China in Tokyo was the dream of some Chinese people in that era, a process that began in 1895 when Sun Yat-sen, a proponent of revolution, first fled to Japan. Three years later, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao went into exile in Japan after the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform. There were intersections and divergences between the two different paths: what kind of China to rebuild? How to rebuild it? The young people who wandered the streets of Tokyo at that time each found different directions, not just politically; some chose literature, some chose art, some chose journalism...

Fu Guoyong, a renowned independent historian, chose to trace the distant silhouettes of that generation of figures from the Republican era from a "Tokyo perspective," documenting their vibrant life journeys, as beautiful as cherry blossoms. Tokyo once gave them the inspiration to rebuild China. Looking back across 120 years, observing time and people from a spatial perspective, and focusing on individual people and their mental journeys, can better resonate with contemporary readers and address some of the questions of our time.

1 Plus Books

9781966814221