The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties (review)

Reviews 479 that offer perhaps the greatest attraction in contemporary Chinese conditions when they are held up for comparison with the experiences ofthe more ambitious , but faltering, welfare states of the West. Vivienne Shue Cornell University Vivienne Shue, whose research and writingfocus on state and society in contemporary China, is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor ofChinese Government at Cornell. RG Marilyn A. Levine. The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties. Seattle and London: University ofWashington Press, 1993. ix, 286 pp. Hardcover $35.00, isbn 0-295-97240-8. The remarkable story ofa small group ofyoung work-study Chinese who went to France after the end ofWorld War I and helped to transform China's revolution on their return has fascinated many modern historians. Although parts ofthe storyhave been told before, Dr. Levine has avoided the common emphasis on the early history ofthe Chinese Communist Parry and has focused on that generation ofstudents born in the decade after 1894, the year the Sino-Japanese War began. And, in order to place that generation in a larger context, she has stressed the contrast with the Lost Generation ofWorld War I in Europe and called it the Found Generation. This is so far the most detailed study in a Western language ofthis group of Chinese. It traces the origins ofthe work-study movements that led to thousands ofChinese going to France during the War. It follows the hopes and disappointments ofthe young men (and a small number ofwomen) when the war ended, when their studies met with various obstacles. It describes the politicization of most ofthem, and the establishment oforganizations that expressed their ideals. Their plans and actions to save China are interspersed with their direct experience of French culture, its universal claims and its colonial strategies, and also the evolving modern lifestyle that was in such sharp contrast with that ofChina. This generation went out and found themselves. What else they found that they hoped would help to strengthen China varied a great deal from individual to individual.© 1996 fry University pQJ. mQse whose discoveries determined the course oftheir lives, it was clear that it was their patriotism that had driven them and shaped their quests. Dr. Levine has given us a meticulously researchedbook that is lively and readable . Three points are ofmore general interest. The gentry-literati background of 48o China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 those who made progress in their studies is not surprising, but most of the active anarchists and Marxists also came from similar kinds of families, if only from the more impoverished branches. And they seemed to have got on well with the hundreds of factory workers and learned with them what it was like to be members of a modern proletariat. But the two groups were equally keen to acquire new scientific knowledge, as patriotic Chinese, in order to help modernize their country. Thus the gap between them would appear to have been minimal. As Dr. Levine points out, just traveling together to a distant country and sharing encounters with a technologically superior culture every day brought about a meeting of minds that would have been impossible if Üiey had met back in China. The second point follows from the first. The common experience underlined a new combination of interests also unheard of in China's past social and political history. The urban workers of Europe as a powerfully organized and articulate group with political ambitions must have amazed all the Chinese arriving in France at the end of the war. The drama of the Bolshevik revolution confirmed the correctness of the Marxist-Leninist program for them, and pressed many of them to study the new set of classics that even the sophisticated French were taking seriously. The Chinese activists who did embark on such reading must have been struck by how closely Marx and Engels had anticipated what was happening before their eyes. They could not be blamed for believing that the same thing could happen in China. Dr. Levine makes the very interesting point that what they learned made the communist leaders so confident of their doctrinal grasp that that may have contributed to the failure...