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

This is a book about the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) and its Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS), but before addressing the issues it raises, full disclosure is warranted. I decided to throw in my lot with China studies in 1970, late in my second undergraduate year. I learned about CCAS a year or two later and was vaguely supportive of its general direction, largely due to a shared antipathy for the American war in Viet Nam and an inchoate sympathy for its inclination to give mainland China and its Chairman the benefit of the doubt. At the time I knew, no one who had ever visited Communist China, except for a classmate who was a relative of William Hinton, and she spoke of it as the secular equivalent of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The seeming lack of critical faculties intact made me suspicious, as it still does for all ideologies, but in the polarized, binary world of that time, it still managed to overcome the opposing Cold War approach. My biggest stumbling block was an admittedly self-satisfied sense on my part that the essays in BCAS were simply not that good. A few years later, I remember reading an apologetic piece on "democratic Kampuchea"—this would have been around the time of the Cambodian auto-genocide—and that was the last straw.

Lanza's book is a deeply political and, indeed, personal one (e.g., pp. 15-16). Most university presses would not publish a volume with so many personal references, but Duke University Press, a relatively new entrant in the realm of Asian studies, provides just such a niche. This has not always worked well, but it does with the tone set here—namely you don't have to agree with Lanza to appreciate the excellence of his work, and that is no mean feat in our fractious age.

Fortunately, while Lanza was at least partially moved to undertake this project by clear sympathy for the political thrust of CCAS, he did not leave his own critical faculties at the door. And, while he finds flaws in the CCAS project itself, he also sees problems with its critics. Many of us who came of age in the 1960s had our focus shifted to Asia by the war in Viet Nam just as the experiences of earlier generations were similarly affected by the Korean War and the Pacific War. Engagement with the antiwar movement in the mid-to late-1960s, however, quickly became a transnational phenomenon. And, in addition to everything else, Lanza's book is an important contribution to studies of the global sixties (which, incidentally, ended around 1972) and, in particular, to global 1968; indeed, one of the most interesting threads in his book is to link CCAS's central concern with America to the student movement in France at the time. Also touched on is the importance of Maoism to the global sixties—the Little Red Book was everywhere in every language at the time, and everyone from Huey P. Newton to Michel Foucault was reading it.

In this vein, while Lanza's breadth of reading in French genuinely enhances his central concerns, it should probably be noted, as it so rarely is, that Foucault and Deleuze, and Rancière and Badiou, to say nothing of Spivak, share close to complete ignorance of China and the Chinese language. For comparative purposes or "theoretical" insight, their work may (or may not) have some value, but for specific insight into China, I for one am much more dubious, a point on which Lanza touches.

The book is divided into four chapters, structured around important issues rather than simply chronology. These issues are certainly just as current in their significance, though not felt as pressingly so, in our own more careerist time at present than they were 50 years...