An Intellectual History of Modern China (review)

The imposing title of this newly published collection of essays holds great promise—promise that leads the reader to expect an overview and penetrating analysis of the breadth of the fomenting intellectual discourse in modern China, China's most seminal and divisive period in many centuries—some would say ever. Since no comprehensive study has been undertaken to date on the intellectual history of China's modern era, such a work would make a great contribution.

What does the reader find? A collection of nine essays on intellectual developments in modern China, seven taken from four volumes of the Cambridge History of China (hereafter CHOC) published from 1983 to 1991, with the addition of two new essays including the book's brief introduction. The seven republished essays are by five eminent establishment authors named on the front of the paperback: Merle Goldman, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Charlotte Furth, Benjamin I. Schwartz, and Stuart Schram, all major contributors to the CHOC on various aspects of intellectual history. This newly published book opens with a brief introduction, by editors Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee. Another new piece, by Merle Goldman, closes the book, discussing "A New Relationship between the Intellectuals and the State in the Post-Mao Period" in the 1980s and early 1990s. The majority of the essays were based on research done some thirty years ago—a long time in a rapidly developing field—by people working with John King Fairbank at Harvard. It is all solid, influential work, but the stand-alone essays collected in this book, not integrated as a comprehensive analysis, are now, in 2003, of interest as historical pieces in themselves, representing the historiographical thinking of Euro American academic scholarship at a time when that scholarship focused its lens on the political aspect of events. The book's bibliography underscores the lack of utilization of recently available sources and secondary material.

Editors Goldman and Lee have selected from among the essays dealing with intellectual history in the four CHOC volumes on modern China seven for republication in this book. In the paperback edition Cambridge University Press has made them available to readers at a reasonable purchase price, an admirable goal as they are important essays to which both area-specialist and nonspecialist readers will want to refer. However, the editors have chosen to present the volume as An Intellectual History of Modern China—not as the collection of selected essays on modern Chinese intellectual history that it is. The reader is left to deduce from the contents what this book's view of intellectual activity in the "modern" era is and what the editors consider to be the geographical and time boundaries of modern China.

The table of contents begins with the new Introduction by Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee. Then it proceeds with: "Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920," by Charlotte Furth (from CHOC, vol. 12); "Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After," by Benjamin Schwartz (vol. 12); "Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895-1927," by Leo Ou-fan Lee (vol. 13); "Literary Trends: the Road to Revolution, 1927-1949," by Leo Ou-fan Lee (vol. 13); "Mao Tse-tung's Thought to 1949," by Stuart Schram (vol. 13); "The Party and the Intellectuals: Phase Two," by Merle Goldman (vol. 14); and "Mao Tse-tung's Thought from 1949-1976," by Stuart Schram (vol. 15). The final (and new) essay is "A New Relationship between the Intellectuals and the State in the Post-Mao Period," by Merle Goldman.

Since all of the previously published chapters were reviewed by eminent reviewers after publication in their CHOC volumes, we will look separately only at the last essay and comment briefly on the Introduction. The final piece, by Merle Goldman, "A New Relationship between...