Podcasts, Book Talks, and Reviews of A Chinese Reformer in Exile

New Books Network Interview with Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson by Li-Ping Chen

Li-Ping Chen, a visiting scholar at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California, led a substantive interview with Robert Worden and Jane Leung Larson on the East Asian Studies channel of the New Books Network, posted on October 10, 2025. The interview explores how this book came together, from its inception as Worden's B.A. thesis in the late 1960s to its final completion as a collaborative project with four co-authors, beginning in 2011 and ending with publication in 2025. Worden and Larson take the listener through the chapters of the book, the impact of new archival collections in developing the book's narrative. Chen learned about A Chinese Reformer in Exile from Zhongping Chen, a major contributor to this book, who was interviewed on New Books Network in 2024 about his related book, Transpacific Reform and Revolution. 

MOCA TALKS – A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America 

October 30, 2025, 7 PM, Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre St., New York City

Robert Worden and Jane Leung Larson are in conversation with Evans Chan, whose films and opera on Kang Youwei brought them together to write A Chinese Reformer in Exile. A link to the YouTube podcast will be posted after the event. 

UCLA East Asian Library Book Talk with Jane Leung Larson

December 4, 2025, 1:00 to 2:30 PM, Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room 11348

Jane Leung Larson will introduce A Chinese Reformer in Exile and how the Tom Leung papers our knowledge of Kang Youwei's travels and activities in the United States. The UCLA Asian Library holds the papers, which were donated by Louise Leung Larson in the 1980s. UCLA China historian Andrea Goldman will comment on how she has used the papers as a teaching tool. 

"A Chinese Reformer in Exile" Published by Brill as Open Access Book

A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899-1911 

By Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, with Zhongping Chen, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Chen Xuezhang, and Yang Zheng 

Brill (Leiden), 2025

https://brill.com/display/title/70307

Open Access PDF:

https://brill.com/downloadpdf/display/title/70307.pdf

This complex, transnational history was made possible by . . . 

A team of scholars with different perspectives and areas of expertise.

Outside collaboration with local historians, specialists on topics as diverse as trolley lines in Mexico and Chinese currency, descendants of Kang and Baohuanghui members, and those who interacted with this blog, Baohuanghui Scholarship.

A wide variety of primary sources:

•       Government records, Chinese and foreign language newspaper coverage.

•       Personal correspondence, diaries, poems, publications by Kang and others.

•       Baohuanghui records and ephemera, from menus to membership buttons.

Selected Bibliography and Archival Collections on Kang in Exile and the Baohuanghui

This post on Baohuanghui Archives originally written in 2015 is significantly updated by the "Selected Bibliography and Archival Collections" from A Chinese Reformer in Exile, 2025. 

Expanding on the listed archives above, see also: 

Mapping the Baohuanghui

This version of Mapping the Baohuanghui is from A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899–1911, published by Brill in January 2025. This table of 232 chapters reflects our efforts to provide the most complete and verified accounting of Baohuanghui locations and activities. Baohuanghui chapters in the Americas, Asia, Australia, the Pacific, Africa, and Europe are organized geographically under the original organizational divisions if these are known, led by the headquarter city, followed by an alphabetical listing of locations and all associated businesses, schools, and newspapers.

Please leave a comment with corrections and additions. 

Also see Play the Baohuanghui Guessing Game for chapters whose Chinese names we haven't been able to link with actual towns or cities. 

Documenting the Chinese and Baohuanghui in Montana: Mark T. Johnson

• 
  

The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky

Tracking and Contextualizing Kang Youwei in Exile: A Workshop on Diversifying Primary Sources and Collaboration, Association of Asian Studies, March 2025

Wan Zhaoyuan, Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson

Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson, the primary co-authors of A Chinese Reformer in Exile (Leiden: Brill, 2025), presented a workshop at the Association of Asian Studies, Columbus, Ohio, on March 13, 2025. Kang scholar Wan Zhaoyuan, author of Science and the Confucian Religion of Kang Youwei, led discussion with the audience. 

We illustrated how opening scholarly collaboration beyond academia and incorporating a variety of textural and non-textural primary sources enriches the construction of complex, transnational histories in Asian studies. This methodology allowed our team of six scholars to document and contextualize Kang Youwei’s fifteen years’ exile from China—particularly his extended visits and political activities in North America—and the evolution of the political organization Kang founded in Canada in 1899 to transform China’s autocratic empire into a constitutional monarchy. View the two PowerPoint presentations (in PDF form) by Worden and Larson and Wan's introductory remarks at the links below:

Recent Books on Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui

A number of notable books in English about Kang Youwei and/or the Baohuanghui have been published in recent years. Given the transnational scope of Kang's life and political organization, his wide-ranging creative endeavors and intellectual output, the range of book topics is not surprising. Kang's concerns and the Baohuanghui's impact on Chinese lives and political aspirations, both in China and overseas, resonate today. 

For each book, there is a link to an Open Access excerpt, book review, or online podcast or book talk. 

The Baohuanghui

Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898−1918 by Zhongping Chen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023). Transpacific Reform and Revolution: A Conversation with Zhongping Chen is an interview article by Elisabeth Forster, Made in China Journal: "Zhongping Chen traces the networks in which reformers around Kang Youwei and revolutionaries around Sun Yat-sen operated. Chen focuses mostly on Canada and the United States. . . This is a fascinating study that shows Chinese reformers and revolutionaries of the period in an entirely new, much more pragmatic light. Chen discusses the status Kang and Sun had in their networks and the way these networks operated—from business activities and funding through membership fees, to the lawsuits they levelled against each other, and even assassinations." A recorded interview by Li-Ping Chen with Zhongping Chen is on the New Books Network. 

UCLA Tom Leung Baohuanghui Collection Online

詩手稿 題: 思羅生西湖故宅 "Thinking of My Home in Westlake Park," a poem to Tom Leung by Kang Youwei, March 9, 1906; #107 [Courtesy UCLA Digital Collections]

The full collection of documents saved by Tom Leung (1875-1931) or Tan Zhangxiao 譚張孝, founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the Baohuanghui, is online at UCLA Library Digital Collections found here.  For the first time, it is possible to examine the original documents, many of which were published by Fang Zhiqin in 1997 and 2008 in Kang Liang yu Baohuanghui:  Tan Liang Zai Meiguo Suo Cang Tsailiao Huibian 康梁與保皇會: 譚良在美國所藏資料彙編  [Hong Kong, Xianggang Yinhe Chubanshe].  Thanks to UCLA's Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library and to librarian Hong Cheng for overseeing this project to completion.