Asia
note that many of these thinkers were quite familiar
with other schools of thought and were capable of
making expedient adjustments under practical conditions.
Second, as perceptive as Nylan's comments on the
values of the Confucian classical tradition are, one
wonders if they are relevant to those contemporary
Chinese intellectuals who see the Confucian teaching
of "relatedness" as a living given in their culture,
perhaps even as something that their government
relies upon to propagate a forced patriotic duty. These
people are trying instead to build a society where
individual rights are protected by liberal democracy
and the rule of law that Europeans and Americans
simply take for granted. To these intellectuals, courage
to serve as the conscience of society and to protest
against injustice is probably the most salient feature of
the Ru tradition that deserves to be revived in China's
still basically authoritarian society.
JOSEPHINE CHIU-DUKE
University of British Columbia
S. A. SMITH. Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and
Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927. (Comparative and International Working-Class History.) Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 366. Cloth $64.95,
paper $21.95.
This is a worthy addition to the seemingly endless
outpouring of new monographs on modern Shanghai.
Its subject is the development of class consciousness
among the city's proletariat in the early twentieth
century. Its author, S. A. Smith, brings to the topic a
unique perspective. He was originally a labor historian
of Russia and the author of Red Petrograd: Revolution
in the Factories, 1917-18 (1983). Since then he has
retooled as a China scholar and, in addition to this
monograph, has published a companion volume on the
early history of the Chinese Communist Party entitled
A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920-1927
(2000). Principal sources for this study include contemporary Chinese newspapers and labor journals,
documentary collections, as well as British diplomatic
dispatches and the Shanghai Municipal Police files.
The simile in the book's title refers to downtrodden
Chinese workers, whom both foreigners and native
capitalists looked upon as and treated no better than
beasts of burden. The question Smith addresses is
when and how and to what extent such workers, who by
the early twentieth century were more numerous in
Shanghai than any other place in China, developed a
class identity and emerged as a class-conscious labor
movement. This is a question that, as Smith readily
admits, Jean Chesneaux a generation ago and Emily
Honig, Elizabeth J. Perry, and others in more recent
years have also explored. Chesneaux, on the one hand,
assumed that the Chinese working-class movement was
the inevitable outcome of the industrialization that the
country began to undergo at the end of the nineteenth
century. Honig and other new labor historians, on the
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493
other hand, portray the Chinese workers as so divided
by particularistic identities (e.g. native places, brotherhoods and sisterhoods, secret societies, guilds) that
they could scarcely recognize one another as members
of a single class.
Smith offers a different answer. In his view, "insofar
as a working-class movement came into existence in
Shanghai, it did so not as the direct consequence of the
social changes induced by industrialization and urbanization ... but rather as the by-product of the growth
of nationalism" (pp. 1-2). The book therefore traces
chronologically the process by which factory laborers
of Shanghai became involved in the anti-imperialist
nationalist movement. Although Chinese nationalism
had its origins in the aftermath of China's defeat in the
Sino-Japanese war, it was not until the May Fourth
movement-particularly the six-day anti-Japanese
general strike in June 1919-that the workers of
Shanghai began to join in on a large scale. Their
growing participation in the nationalist movement
culminated in the general strike of March-April 1927,
when 300,000 workers took to the streets to welcome
the troops of the National Revolutionary Army into
Shanghai. It was thus anti-imperialist nationalism,
rather than economic grievances, that, on the one
hand, truly mobilized the workers of Shanghai and, on
the other, overcame the particularistic divisions within
their ranks and united them behind one common,
patriotic cause.
Furthermore, it was through participation in this
nationalist movement that the workers of Shanghai
acquired a rudimentary sense of class consciousness.
Smith credits the anarchist intellectuals associated
with the journal Minsheng (People's Voice) in the
mid-1910s for creating a new vocabulary of class (jie)
and the Communists in the mid-1920s for giving
anti-imperialism a "class inflection." In particular, the
Communists began "to make inroads among Shanghai's workers" only when they "broke with 'pure' class
politics" (p. 147) and instead linked "class issues to an
anti-imperialist version of nationalism" (p. 162). What
Smith calls "a class-inflected nationalism" was the
motivating force behind the massive upsurge of Communist-led labor activity in Shanghai during 19251927, and it survived, in a greatly attenuated form, the
crushing of the Communists and the labor movement
by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927.
Smith's study, in sum, analyzes the social construction of nation and class as two "imagined communities" as well as the relationship between them. In view
of the author's dual expertise, it is somewhat disappointing that he does not compare the Chinese experience with that of the Russians. Otherwise, the book
is marred by only a few errors or lacunae. A mu is 0.17,
not 0.8, of an acre (p. 16). The unbinding of women's
feet was hardly an expression of anti-Manchuism (p.
61), since Manchu women did not bind their feet. The
Chinese were not always anti-Japanese (p. 77); during
the post-Boxer decade, for example, they greatly admired the Japanese. Shen Xuanlu, editor of the Weekly
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494
Reviews of Books
Review in 1919-1920, is better known, from R. Keith
Schoppa's Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in
Revolutionary China (1995), as Shen Dingyi.
EDWARD RHOADS
University of Texas,
Austin
BRADLEY K. GEISERT. Radicalism and Its Demise: The
Chinese Nationalist Party, Factionalism, and Local
Elites in Jiangsu Province, 1924-1931. {Michigan
Monographs in Chinese Studies, number 90.) Ann
Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of
Michigan. 2001. Pp. ix, 357. $50.00.
Bradley K. Geisert's book aims to shed light on the
relationship between the Guomindang (GMD, or Chinese Nationalist Party) regime and local elites in
Jiangsu Province through an analysis of factionalism
within the GMD during 1924-1931. This book treats
the party as an entity separate from the government,
on the premise that the GMD regime was composed of
several constituent parts: most importantly the party,
the government, and the military. That the GMD
regime was plagued by factionalism is well known.
Geisert's contribution lies in his richly textured analysis of GMD factions and their dealings with local elites
at the provincial, county, and township levels.
In Geisert's account, factions existed within the
GMD in Jiangsu between 1924, when the party was
reorganized with Russian assistance, and 1927, when
the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek
was established. The factions {the Left and the Right)
were primarily defined by their different attitudes
toward the policy of alliance with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that Sun Yat-sen adopted. After
the 1927 anti-Communist purge, GMD factions in
Jiangsu exhibited more complex patterns. At the national level, the Organization Clique (CC Clique)
developed its control over Jiangsu. At the provincial
level, people who had connections with the Organization Clique branched into four cliques for local reasons, while facing two opposing cliques: the Reorganization Clique and the Anti-CC Clique.
An underlying theme of the book is that radical
elements within the GMD that had worked with the
CCP during 1924-1927 survived the 1927 purge and
continued to push for overthrowing "local bullies and
evil gentry." The radicals were typically young, middle
school-educated, and ambitious people drawn into the
party during 1924-1927. They regarded the local elites
that rose to dominance in the reform movement of the
late Qing and the early republic as obstacles to their
advancement toward power and positions in local
society as well as to a social revolution. The Reorganization Clique and the Anti-CC Clique were more
radical than other factions, but radicalism was not
confined to them only.
The local elites defended themselves whenever they
could. In the 1927 purge, some of them managed to
take revenge against GMD radicals as well as Commu-
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nists who had attacked them in previous years. During
1927-1929, there were instances of attack on supposed
"local bullies and evil gentry" where actually one local
elite faction co-opted a GMD branch in a struggle
against members of another elite faction.
In general, GMD government officials from the
provincial to the county levels, as opposed to party
officials and activists, were not interested in displacing
local elites-except for a few who were suspected to be
collaborating with warlords. They needed the cooperation of the local elites to carry out their administrative duties, from tax collection to bandit suppression.
As outsiders appointed to the local scene, they were
not motivated, as were local party operatives, to push
out incumbent power holders there.
Eventually, Geisert shows, it was the GMD partystate center-the Department of Organization controlled by Chen Lifu and Chen Guofu-that put an
end to the radicalism when the Reorganization Clique
Rebellion was suppressed in 1929 and a reorganization
of the Jiangsu provincial party organizations was carried out in 1930-1931. From that point on, factionalism within the GMD would be solely motivated by
scrambling for power and positions. Moreover, the
party organizations were reduced to being a propaganda arm of the government; they no longer had any
meaningful role in supervising the government, let
alone leading it. Geisert notes that Chen Lifu and
Chen Guofu were willing to emasculate the party
organization that was their power base because they
served at Chiang Kai-shek's pleasure. What they did
was conform to Chiang's vision of state and society.
Applying the macroregion model developed by G.
William Skinner, Geisert makes comparisons in terms
of ecology, elites composition, and local politics between the northern half of Jiangsu that fell within the
North China region and the southern half that belonged to the Lower Yangtzi region. This, however,
appears to be an unsustained approach that is not well
integrated into the book's thesis. Eschewing the civil
society/public sphere debate in the China field that is
said to be played out, Geisert does not attempt to
create a framework to conceptualize the relationship
between the GMD party-state and local elites as he
addresses their interactions at the provincial level and
below.
XIAOOUN Xu
Francis Marion University
DouGLAS R. HowLAND. Translating the West: Language
and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 292.
$27.95.
Japan's rapid entry into international politics in the
latter 1800s entailed a challenging intellectual struggle
with new words and ideas. As Douglas R. Howland
puts it, concepts such as liberty and people's rights
"were under construction" in these years; "both their
form and meaning were unsettled" (p. 5). While his
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