Previous studies help us to understand the importance of local governance in the novel in addressing the issue of national identity in the late Qing period. However, scholars often neglect the fact that it was deteriorating public security in local society, rather than the way of local governance Liu E criticized, that was Liu E’s main concern. As studies on the 19th century Chinese local history demonstrate, the deterioration of public security in Shandong, where the novel is set, was intimately tied to the frequent catastrophic floods in that era. Nevertheless, scholars tend to neglect such context when discussing the novel’s discourse of local governance, and underestimate the significance of environmental crisis in Liu E’s personal construction of national identity.

The proposed study aims to contribute to the scholarship in late Qing literature and intellectual history by: (A) understanding personal construction of national identity of late Qing intellectual in ecological context; and (B) shedding new light on studies of political thought in the late Qing by explaining the relation between the mechanism of hydraulic engineering technology and Liu E’s proposal for local governance; and (C) providing a coherent framework to combine the studies of ecological crisis, literary texts, technology, and the writer’s personal life experience.

This case study on The Travels of Lao Can aims to provide a new way of looking at late Qing intellectuals’ personal construction of national identity. By linking research on everything from river engineering technology to political discourse, the proposed study offers an ecological understanding of Liu E’s conceptions of the relation between individual and the state. It will also help to open a dialogue with literary studies in the context of ecology, science, and politics in general.