Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China by Tie Xiao (review)

Numerous scholarly works on modern China explain the ideological concept of the masses, but until now no full-length monograph has focused on the more volatile, antecedent figure of the crowd. Tie Xiao's [End Page e-27] Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China provides a long-needed, rigorous examination of the crowd as an intellectual concern and dilemma of representation for thinkers and writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Astutely aware of the interpretive ambivalence that the crowd produces, Xiao approaches the crowd in its emergent state, prior to political reification as the masses. The narrative that Xiao skillfully develops over the course of the book shows how the crowd—a protean and seductive manifestation of irrationality and excess—was transformed into the subject of modern Chinese history.

In the introduction, Xiao frames the crowd as a thoroughly global and modern object of fascination. Rather than a preexisting social or cultural category, the crowd for Chinese intellectuals was "a puzzle to be solved, a meaning to be understood, and an experience to be lived" (3). As he contextualizes the discourse surrounding the crowd in the early twentieth century, Xiao notes a contradiction that is traced throughout the book: the crowd is both an enthralling manifestation of modernity, filled with potential for political reform and, simultaneously, a deeply distressing marker of social disorder and moral depravity. This dilemma compelled intellectuals not just to understand the crowd, but discover the means to channel it. The ensuing debates initiated new "vocabularies, explanations, and modes of representation that might render the crowd intelligible and practicable" (5). In these theorizations, Xiao locates tensions between abstractions of the crowd in literature and discourse, and the intervention of physical, material crowds increasingly a part of lived experience in twentieth-century China. To understand the crowd required not only new vocabularies but also new forms of knowledge, foremost among them, for Xiao, the psychological models of the crowd circulating within China and around the world.

Chapters 1 and 2 are the book's most compelling, and probably the most useful in a graduate-level course with interdisciplinary or comparative perspectives. Chapter 1 looks the emergence of crowd theory within the concomitant formalization of psychology and other social scientific disciplines in the years following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. The beginning of this chapter details the impact of Gustav Le Bon's The Crowd (1895) on this process. Le Bon remains a crucial character in Xiao's analysis throughout the book; his fin-de-siècle portrayal of the crowd as mindless and malleable created a template with which Chinese intellectual inquiry remained in dialogue for decades. Though Xiao makes clear Le Bon's enduring sway on Chinese intellectuals' perspectives of the crowd, especially after the May Fourth demonstrations in 1919, he is also sure to note that this influence was not blind appropriation, but a intensively contested and debated application: [End Page e-28] "crowd psychology provided a new vocabulary with which to make sense of history. But such retrospective analyses soon gave way to attempts to address more urgent questions of locating political agency in the present" (32–33). In other words, experiences of physical crowds within China's historical turmoil conditioned how Le Bon's ideas were being deployed.

The remainder of Chapter 1 looks specifically at the interpretation and theorization of qunzhong, the most widely circulated Chinese term for a crowd after the May Fourth protests, by a roster of Chinese intellectuals, some of whom are more familiar (Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, and Qu Qiubai) than others (such as the academic Gao Juefu and Nationalist Party officials Hu Hanmin and Zhang Jiuru). Though Xiao's analysis carefully notes the contextual differences and political implications of each, these thinkers all "appealed to the authority of sociopsychological theories" (58) and were in agreement about the crowd's basic irrationality. No matter their political affiliation, intellectuals believed collective autonomy a key to national salvation, yet...