The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies by Fabio Lanza (review)

In what ways do the trenchant critiques generated by the 1968-founded Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) speak to our present historical moment? How did the activism of a "concerned" cohort of graduate students and junior faculty, galvanized by China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and US-wrought carnage in Vietnam, reshape the field of East Asian (especially China) studies in the United States? How did the efforts of these young activist-scholars to "take Maoism seriously" dovetail with those of their Maoist contemporaries in France, and what can the comparatively deeper French engagement with Marxism tell us about the limits of CCAS analyses? These are among the many questions raised by Fabio Lanza's provocative new book, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Lanza's thoughtful examination of the formation, dissolution, and afterlives of the CCAS and its Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars sheds vital light on an important US New Left intervention and constitutes necessary reading for scholars of modern China and the global 1960s.

The book's introduction and four chapters examine the decade-long existence of CCAS, from its 1968 founding through its 1970s demise amid the "Thermidor" of the Deng Xiaoping era and the waning of antiwar activism. To reconstruct the organization's history, Lanza carefully mined CCAS archives and publications; he also conducted interviews with former CCAS members, including John Berninghausen, Saundra Sturdevant, and Marilyn Young (Sturdevant and Young both passed away before the book was published). Each chapter illuminates a set of concerns articulated by these "concerned scholars" and relates them to the structuring conditions that rendered their articulation possible in the first place. Lanza makes clear from the start that "to both concerned scholars and French radicals, Maoism had configured itself as a theory that found expression and realization in localized practice, not as a set of rules to follow, nor as a model that could be exported and replicated" (27). He underscores that the era's Maoist sympathies should be attributed not merely to youthful naïveté or to an orientalism now dressed in revolutionary garb but to a newly shared political horizon. Maoism "traversed the sixties" as a means for reflecting on and transforming differing yet intertwined sets of historical circumstances (5). To understand the emergence and dissolution of CCAS (which was not a Maoist organization), Lanza insists that we must consider it in relation to the abrupt opening and then equally abrupt reconfiguration of this shared political horizon.

Chapter 1, "America's Asia," examines how the graduate students who founded CCAS in 1968 linked the American war in Vietnam to the "ideological blinders" of reigning authorities in the field of Asian studies, that is, to professors including John King Fairbank under whose direction they were pursuing PhDs. McCarthyist purges of the 1950s not only had drained the field of critical thought but also had facilitated the rise to prominence of scholars seemingly unconcerned about the ways in which their scholarship lent itself to anti-Communist war making. CCASers came to insist that "new intellectual production based on a humane approach to Asian people (i.e., on the political foundation of equality) required . . . the dismantling of the assumption of objectivity and neutrality behind the existing structure of learning and the unveiling of the political character of that assumption, in the name of politics" (53). Lanza explores this "humane approach" from [End Page E-27] another angle in chapter 2, highlighting how this approach was enabled by "one of the perceived, declared, and probably unrealized possibilities of the 1960s: the capacity of the oppressed to speak for themselves, denounce their oppression, and subvert the mechanisms of domination" (70). Further emboldened by the ways in which China's Cultural Revolution was upending entrenched hierarchies of knowledge and power, CCASers confronted what they perceived to be gulfs between academia and activism in their contemporary US context. Here, Lanza also illuminates the sharp...