Liang’s intention was not to predict the future, however, but to change the present. Liang’s optimism for China’s rejuvenation was vindicated, only fifty years later than he thought. This vision of a modern, technologically triumphant China would prove prescient-except for the multiparty system and peaceful world order-in 2010, when the Shanghai World Expo impressed visitors with its slick graphics, high-tech gadgets, and other emblems of modernization. By then, he imagines, China has developed a multiparty system and dominates a peaceful new world order in which Westerners study Chinese to improve their job prospects. In 1902, Liang Qichao, a reformist intellectual of the late Qing dynasty, wrote a futuristic story called “A Chronicle of the Future of New China.” In the unfinished manuscript, he depicts Shanghai hosting the World Fair in 1962 (“Confucius year 2513”), on the fiftieth anniversary of a successful reform movement.
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