MCLC: Behind the Gate review

Tue Nov 15 14:11:45 EST 2011

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Behind the Gate review
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Source: China Beat (11/15/11): <http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=3956>

Book Review: Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing
By Ling Shiao

===============================================
Lanza, Fabio. Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing
<http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15238-9/behind-the-gate/reviews>.
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 China¹s 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 ³There were no students before 1919² (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 ³students² 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 ³students² 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 Yuanpei¹s<Beida¹s chancellor<liberal reform and
advocacy of academic freedom (28). Finally, Lanza peels away the
well-cultivated myth of Beida as China¹s most prestigious institute of
higher education and of its students as endowed with political
sensitivity, enjoying a special relationship with the state due to China¹s
unique scholar-official tradition (Weston 2004). Prior to Cai Yuanpei¹s
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 Lanza¹s 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 ³student² 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 ³produce a
space in which a new everyday can be experienced, new relationships
formed, and alternative lives can be lived² (7). This study focuses on
what Lanza refers to as the ³transformed everyday² at Beida, of which
Cai¹s reform was only the tip of the iceberg, and reveals the seamless
connection between the seemingly unrelated quotidian practices of the
Beida students and their political activism during turbulent May and June
of 1919.

Lanza expertly navigates the ³transformed everydayness² of Beida during
the May Fourth years. He begins with the porous institutional and physical
boundaries, which allowed little distinction between officially registered
students and auditors as well as freedom of its students to move between
the campus and the rest of city with ease. This uniquely open space shaped
the way in which the refashioning of a ³new life² (xinshenghuo) at Beida
took place. He then takes pains to demonstrate that seemingly small
details of life at Beida predisposed the students to be at a distance
from, and potentially in opposition to, the state. Beida students¹
celebrated image of untidy long gowns during the May Fourth years, for
example, was in fact ³their effort to unsettle the position of students
vis-à-vis the disciplining state² that endorsed and promoted modern attire
and physical fitness as part of its program to build strong citizens in
service of the modern nation-state (61). Other distancing acts in the
³lived practices² of Beida students included their resistance to school¹s
curriculum, rules, and rituals to the extent that there were calls for
abolishing anything that represented external authority. All these helped
each student to ³define one¹s self as an independent political subject²
(50). Lanza argues that Cai Yuanpei¹s reform created the parallel tensions
between Beida and the students on the one hand, and between Beida and the
state on the other. Cai¹s advocacy for academic freedom and embracing of
universal values vis-à-vis state-defined knowledge and a China-specific
curriculum helped to disconnect Beida, academic pursuits, and education
from the goals of the state and the nation.

In Lanza¹s reinterpretation, the student demonstrations of May and June
1919 were the culmination of a struggle over political boundaries. May
Fourth Beida witnessed fervent student organizational activities in the
form of study societies devoted to the discussion of politics. The very
transformation of the everyday and associational behaviors at Beida served
to redefine politics and create a space for politics beyond the sphere of
the government. Immediately before and after the 1919 protest movement,
Beida students pushed the physical and sociological boundaries of
³students² by organizing lectures and teaching programs for the
university¹s staff and Beijing¹s residents on and off campus. In a moment
of national crisis caused by news of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, it was
only natural that the students extended their action to the broader public
space with explosive force. Anticipating the argument for the presence of
pre-May Fourth student organizations and protests, Lanza points out the
fundamental difference between the late Qing and May Fourth students in
their identities and practices. While the former were preoccupied with
changing the function of the state, the latter¹s organizational activities
were removed from state-centered concerns. Furthermore, in their protests,
the former tried to appeal only to the government, while the latter not
only directly confronted the state but also claimed a new public space and
public audience. There were no students as political signifiers before
1919 precisely because the public space for student activism had not yet
been appropriated. It was only in stormy 1919 that Chinese students became
visible as a category of political activism by remapping the city with
their radical footsteps and speeches addressing the people of Beijing and
beyond.

At times extremely dense, this book is theoretically sophisticated,
prodigiously researched, and eloquently written. In bringing the theory of
urban space and the everyday to bear on our understanding of the birth of
modern students in China, Lanza makes a major breakthrough in both the
scholarship on the May Fourth Movement and the study of political
activism. His work further challenges us to move away from causal
reasoning and to think about modern political subjectivities and
categories in modern China in a brand new way.

Works Cited:

Israel, John. Student Nationalism in China 1927-1937
<http://books.google.com/books?id=l-aeAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PP2&ots=Pj-3BkDr_n&dq=jo
hn%20israel%20student%20nationalism%20in%20china&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
>. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.

Li Zehou. ³Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou.² Zouxiang weilai. 1
(1986): 18-38.

Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of
the May Fourth Movement of 1919
<http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Enlightenment-Intellectuals-Movement-Berkele
y/dp/0520068378/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320980239&sr=8-1>. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986.

Wasserstrom, Jeffrey. Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The
View from Shanghai 
<http://www.amazon.com/Student-Protests-Twentieth-Century-China-Shanghai/dp
/0804731667>. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Weston, Timothy. The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals
and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929
<http://www.amazon.com/Power-Position-University-Intellectuals-Interdiscipl
inary/dp/0520237676/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320936455&sr=1-1>.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Ling Shiao <http://smu.edu/history/faculty/shiao.shtml> is Assistant
Professor in the History Department at Southern Methodist University. She
is currently working on a manuscript on printing, culture, and politics in
Republican China.