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  • Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing by Fabio Lanza
  • Ling Shiao (bio)
Lanza, Fabio. Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xiii, 299 pp. $50.00 (cloth).

By drawing our attention to the previously unexamined question of space for student activism, Fabio Lanza has successfully remapped the May Fourth Movement, despite the fact that it is perhaps the most well-travelled terrain in historical research of modern China. This is not a revisionist study that seeks to de-center May Fourth in China's passage from tradition to modernity by looking for pre-May Fourth modern experimentations and the continuity between the late Qing and May Fourth periods. In fact, Lanza travels back to the historical site of Beijing University (hereafter Beida) and the canonical moment of the May Fourth years (1917-1923) and locates the radical new beginning of the modern Chinese student. He provocatively claims that "There were no students before 1919" (172). By this, he means that prior to May Fourth, students were little more than a sociological designation. It was during the May Fourth years that students finally emerged as a modern subject and political signifier. Refusing to take the category of students as a given, as previous scholarship on Chinese students and student activism (Israel 1966, Wasserstrom 1991) has done, this study is an intense and fruitful interrogation of the crucial process whereby "students" were transformed from a sociological category into a political category—a category that would be re-appropriated throughout the next seven decades until 1989, when the student pro-democracy movement was crushed and the "students" as a distinctive political subject ceased to be.

Like any new research covering old ground, this book revisits many established notions about Beida, its students, and their role in the May Fourth Movement. Lanza objects to the treatment of culture and politics as separate spheres of activity. Specifically, he departs from the conventional wisdom that saw May Fourth as consisting of two distinctive and incompatible movements—an enlightenment characterized by cultural critique and affirmation of individual subjectivities on the one hand and a patriotic fervor to save China on the other, and that the latter ultimately cut short the former at a time of national crisis (Li 1986, Schwarcz 1990). More significantly, he raises issues with previous scholarship for reducing social and lived experience to a reflection of intellectual and ideological convictions. He contends that previous May Fourth scholarship is too ready to see laissez-faire and eccentric individualism exhibited on the Beida campus only as manifestations or consequence of Cai Yuanpei's—Beida's chancellor—liberal reform and advocacy of academic freedom (28). Finally, Lanza peels away the well-cultivated myth of Beida as China's most prestigious institute of higher education and of its students as endowed with political sensitivity, enjoying a special relationship with the state due to China's unique scholar-official tradition (Weston 2004). Prior to Cai Yuanpei's arrival in 1917, Beida had a tarnished reputation as a training ground for a corrupt officialdom. During the May Fourth years, Lanza observes, Beida students cultivated an image of an individualistic and eccentric genius, effectively rejecting the idea of being part of a community by steadfastly refusing to respect any external rules or rituals. In so doing, they also rejected all the elements that would typically define a conscious community. So how did Beida students become political, and where did their organizational prowess manifested during the May Fourth demonstrations come from?

Central to Lanza's project is the insight that political activism is neither caused simply by previous exposure to radical ideas nor premised on the existence of a well-defined community with a shared identity (11). Instead, Chinese students became political and communitarian precisely because the proper definition of the "student" and the position of Beida vis-à-vis the state had been intensely and continuously contested during the May Fourth years. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefevbre, Alan Badiu, and others, Lanza sees political struggles as struggles to "produce a space in which a new everyday can be experienced, new relationships formed, and alternative lives can be lived" (7). This study...

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