New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, and: Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (review)

Reviews 259© 1996 by University ofHawai'i Press Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven, editors. New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution. Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1995. xxii, 414 pp. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 0-87332-428-4. Paperback $32.50, isbn 1-56324-429-2. Jiwei Ci. Dialectic ofthe Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. vii, 280 pp. Hardcover $39.50, isbn 0-8047-2354-0. Paperback $15.95, ISBN 0-8047-2373-7. While Deng Xiaoping's reforms produced new materials on the history of the Chinese Communist Party, the repression in 1989 necessitated new interpretations ofthe Chinese revolution. The European scholars Saich and van de Ven have edited a volume that uses new materials to provide additional perspectives on the history of the CCP from its founding in 1921 to the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. The Chinese scholar Ci, meanwhile, has drawn on personal experiences and several Western theorists to offer a fresh interpretation of the historical significance of the People's Republic. The conference volume is divided into three parts, each beginning with a briefbibliography that includes many important recent works by the authors themselves. These prefaces indicate what is new in the recendy available sources and provide an up-to-date syllabus for a course on the rise of the CCP. In part 1, "Early Organizational Trends," van de Ven shows how key texts and newspapers became the center ofParty life in the 1920s, resulting in a quest for ideological orthodoxy diat raised the stakes of debate while providing a touchstone that enabled the Party to survive through adversity. Christina Gilmartin describes how early male leaders ofthe Party demonstrated a sincere commitment to women's liberation, including sexual equality and access to education, but also initiated a tradition ofpatriarchy that largely restricted women to informal and managerial roles in the Party. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik explains why Li Dazhao, China's first Marxist and a founder ofthe Party, was long neglected in Chinese Communist historiography and was accorded proper attention only after the death ofMao and especially at a conference in October 1989, when he was touted as a model for intellectuals and cadres alike. Part 2, "Regional Variations," begins with a chapter by Stephen Averill on the bloody Futian Incident of1931, which was neither just a reasonable campaign against counterrevolutionaries as stated in Party historiography nor simply a Maoist purge offactional opponents as alleged in Guomindang scholarship, but rather a result ofcomplex tensions between old and new Jiangxi hill-country elites, locals, and outsiders, who staffed the GMD and die CCP, and rural and urban societies under enormous economic and military pressures. Gregor Benton 26o China Review International: Vol. 3, No. i, Spring 1996 recounts the history of the part of the Red Army that was left behind in the south in 1934, its Three Year War for survival along the borders ofeight provinces, and its near extinction prior to resurrection in the New Fourth Army, the Communists ' only concrete claim to authority in the south. Shifting the gaze north, Kathleen Hartford reviews the many Party efforts to organize uprisings in rural Hebei Province from 1921 to 1936 and argues that, despite their uniform failure, they provided a foundation for the success of the Jin-Cha-Ji base area during the Second World War, one of the keys to the eventual Communist victory in China as a whole. Lucían Bianco surveys peasant responses to CCP mobilization policies from 1937 to 1945, arguing that peasants were more concerned about defending their communities than in transforming society; that they were slow to rise and— once risen—difficult to control; and that it was the young—more than the poor— among them who acquiesced in—more than supported—the Communist victory. In part 3, "The Making ofVictory," David Apter draws on interviews with one hundred veterans of the Yan'an period (1937-1945) and a full range of critical theorists to show how the Party used "revealing texts" and "exegetical bonding" to form a "discourse community" endowed with "symbolic capital," making Yan'an communism a "moral moment" and a "simulacrum" of the revolution, in which unity triumphed over...