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After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 by Peter G. Zarrow (review)

prominently in more than just that one. In fact, the book offers a revised perspective on Sun, who comes to life in these pages in all the quixotic, idiosyncratic, verbally nimble, and relentlessly optimistic ways that were evident to his audiences and collaborators at the time but that have often evaded other Sun biographers. In one of the most apt historical analogies in a text that occasionally strives too hard to find suggestive parallels in British, European, and American electoral history, Strand mines Chinese literature to conclude that “Sun at times came perilously close to Lu Xun’s hapless Ah Q character who also ‘thought so well of himself’ and treated every humiliating defeat as a victory” (p. 280). Sun’s rhetorical ability in merging fact and fiction moved audiences in the early republic in ways that are now hard to capture without Strand’s insight and analysis. Combining Republican political history, Nationalist Party history, and activists’ biographies with analyses of leadership styles and modes of communication, An Unfinished Republic is a challenging but thoughtful book that can help us re-imagine the early Chinese Republic of just a century ago.