Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (1873–1929), Chinese scholar and writer. A disciple of K’ang Yu-wei, the young Liang was a reformist unsympathetic to Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary activities. But after the republic was founded, he embraced the democratic ideal. He was eager to introduce ideas from the West to reform the Chinese people. But after a tour of Europe he had great reservations about Western civilization. His unfavorable impressions touched off a debate between science and metaphysics in 1923. His scholarly works include studies of Buddhism and of Chinese thought in the last three hundred years. See also CHINESE PHILOSOPHY , K’ANG YU -WEI , SUN YAT -SE. S.-h.L. liang-chih, Chinese term commonly rendered as ‘innate knowledge of the good’, although that translation is quite inadequate to the term’s range of meanings. The term first occurs in Mencius but becomes a key concept in Wang Yangming’s philosophy. A coherent explication of liang-chih must attend to the following features. (1) Mencius’s liang-chih (sense of right and wrong) is the ability to distinguish right from wrong conduct. For Wang ‘this sense of right and wrong is nothing but the love [of good] and the hate [of evil].’ (2) Wang’s liang-chih is a moral consciousness informed by a vision of jen or ‘forming one body’ with all things in the universe. (3) The exercise of liang-chih involves deliberation in coping with changing circumstances. (4) The extension of liang-chih is indispensable to the pursuit of jen. See also MENCIU. A.S.C.