Intellectuals in Revolutionary China, 1921-1949: Leaders, Heroes, and Sophisticates (review)

Hung-yok Ip's stated objective in this book is to analyze the self-constructed identities of members of the top echelon of the Chinese Communist Party in the years leading up to their seizure of power in 1949. As she points out, "existing scholarship has established an important paradox of the Chinese revolution, one marked by the fact that, although consciously anti-elitist, revolutionary intellectuals remained highly elitist after all" (p. 5). Ip takes this paradox as her point of departure, and traces what she calls the "self-construction" of a group of Communist political and intellectual leaders; that is to say, she looks at the various modes in which those individuals represented themselves and narrated their own experiences as well as justified their own positions. Using their political and scholarly writings, memoirs, recollections, and literary works, Ip examines this process of self-construction from three different perspectives: functional (leaders), emotional (heroes), and aesthetic (sophisticates). The result is an elaborate portrayal, accomplished mostly through extensive quotations from documentary sources, of how the Communist leaders and intellectuals negotiated their anti-elitist impulse to empower "the people" within the framework of their own elitist enterprise as the revolutionary vanguard.

As fascinating as some of Ip's research is, this is a rather uneven volume. Its central thesis-that the self-constructed identities of the Communist elites grew out of the tension between the anti-elitist thrust of their revolutionary project and their own persistent elitism-adds little that is new to our overall understanding of the nature of the Communist leadership in revolutionary China. To be sure, the author suggests that her most important contribution is to explore that tension from the perspectives of the Communist elites themselves, but, curiously, neither does she engage the textual evidence closely by teasing out its meanings through a rigorous interrogation of its ambiguities or omissions nor does she consistently delve into some of the common issues that have become central to most students of identity formation. It is not that Ip is unaware of these questions. Early in the volume, she declares that she is going to "concentrate on the parts of the [Communist elites'] self-construction that they did not mind revealing to various kinds of audience" and that she will "refrain from probing revolutionary intellectuals' private and unclear musings about 'who I really am'" (p. 15). She then goes on to say that her "intention here is not to compare the authenticity of any individual's public and private self-construction, but rather to study the parts of self-construction which Communist intellectuals revealed" (p. 15). This seemingly allows Ip to treat her documentary sources-which she herself concedes at various points throughout the book as often problematic-as generally transparent and self-evident. Such an approach to an analysis of identity formation, along with a want of critical use of the sources, surely raises more questions than it answers. If a study makes a claim of advancing our knowledge on how Communist leaders and intellectuals constructed their own identities, the reader might understandably expect the author to address some of the very questions that Ip explicitly avoids.

For a volume that is priced at over a hundred dollars for just two hundred-odd pages of main text, it is perhaps reasonable to assume that the editors would have done a thorough job of preparation. Ip has conducted substantial research, but the text could be considerably condensed, better edited, and tightened in places. The first one-third of the book, moreover, covers mostly the political writings and activities of well-known figures such as Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Peng Pai, and Mao Zedong, which should be familiar to most students of twentieth-century Chinese history who have followed the standard monographs on the period. The often unusually lengthy endnotes, too, tell readers about the musings of the author, but much of the detail seems...