Perhaps Chinese intellectuals have received what seems in some ways an inordinate amount of attention because of their importance in shaping the “real” history of China; or perhaps because of their ability to articulate questions of profound significance: not only whither China but which justice and what modernity. In a magnificent, virtually flawless single volume, Cheek traces intellectual life in China across the “long twentieth century” from 1895 to 2015. He offers a tentative narrative of what he himself says is anything but a single story, and provides useful signposts to make sense out of a plethora of persons, ideas, ideologies and debates, all while providing pictures of the larger historical context. Cheek highlights the transitions from the literati of the high Qing to the more entrepreneurial activists of the late Qing, to the “cadre intellectuals” of the Kuomintang and Communist regimes, and finally to the many establishment and non-establishment voices contending in the somewhat more pluralistic environment of today.
Cheek is not interested in passing judgment; rather, as he notes of the situation today, “[o]ur challenge is to see life in China as Chinese intellectuals experience it” (p. 315). This challenge he meets. While experts will find much of the story – or stories – familiar, few will have command of all the details that Cheek's extraordinarily wide reading allows him to bring out. Furthermore, I know of no other work that attempts to synthesize and make sense out of the intellectual life of the entire century, from the invention of the newspaper to the triumph of the internet.
This is a book impossible to summarize, especially as Cheek resists the natural temptations of reductionism and teleology. There are the usual suspects such as Hu Shi and Li Zehou but also less well-known activist-intellectuals such as Chen Bulei and Zhou Yiliang. It is inevitable that some depth is sacrificed for such breadth. Yet Cheek's analysis gains real depth through its organization by “ideological moments” or key issue of the day. Six ideological moments structure the book. Cheek does not of course mean this chronology – which does not always follow the usual political markers (such as 1912 or 1949) – to mark clearly distinct discursive eras, but is more a narrative convenience. However, this approach also lies at the core of my biggest quibble with the book. Namely, Cheek implies, at least in my reading, that the zeitgeist has some kind of force or explanatory value. But the late Qing era, which he understandably associates with reform, also marked the birth of revolutionism (as the text makes clear). At the other end of the long century Cheek associates the contemporary period with rejuvenation, but while this is one of the very strongest chapters of the book, it does not seem to me to describe an “ideological moment” at all. Indeed Cheek rightly highlights the collapse of formal ideology.
Another innovative feature of this book is Cheek's tracing of three “enduring ideas” across each of the six moments or zeitgeists. This approach is more successful, to my mind, and one of the best uses of the tools of conceptual history ever attempted in the field. These ideas were the people, Chinese identity, and democracy. The histories of these concepts – sometimes but not always reflected in changes in the Chinese terminology – are extraordinarily revealing. For example, by 1905 the notion of the people (qun or gong) was becoming that the nation. By the 1920s, the people (renmin) were objects of political mobilization. Skipping to today, intellectuals have largely given up speaking for or even to the people but rather focus on particular groups, such as urban residents, migrant workers, entrepreneurs and so forth.
Several themes run throughout the book. Cheek rightly points out that foreign ideas become Chinese over time, and does not waste much ink on the search for “origins,” pointing to the simultaneous cosmopolitan and national aspects of most ideas in action. Cheek attempts to give voice to intellectuals that scholarship has tended to neglect – provincials and women, though their voices remain relatively faint here. We mostly hear them when they reach a national stage. Intellectuals have consistently desired to serve the public good, Cheek convincingly insists, though their definitions of this changed a lot.
Cheek concludes with a kind of formula describing the contemporary situation: “Though not fully free, China's professional and intellectual worlds are rich and busy” (p. 331). This still seems true, but one wonders whether Cheek would have ended on such an optimistic note if the full extent of Xi Jinping's war against civil society was known as Cheek finished his manuscript. While noting Xi's August 2013 demand for “positive propaganda” and his attack on “universal values,” Cheek was not able to take into account the ongoing threats, arrests and even disappearances of activists and lawyers concerned with the rights of minorities, women and journalists in just the last few months. The glass is looking emptier these days; key aspects of intellectual life not so rich.
Yet a truly global intellectual history would show – as I think Cheek suggests – a major role for Chinese intellectuals in anti-colonial movements right across the entire long 20th century, in the evolution of Marxism (and post-Marxism), and in theories of state-directed development. Chinese intellectuals have spent the last century learning much from the West and, in Cheek's words, now we may hope to “see in the decades ahead more Chinese intellectuals offering back from their perspective contributions to global governance, political theory, and world literature and arts” (p. 331).
The historical perspective we have on the earlier periods is obviously – and by definition – lacking in discussions of contemporary issues, much less in predicting the future, but our understanding of the contemporary is immeasurably enriched by a grasp of history. Making deft use of such concepts as print capitalism, ideological regimes, directed public spheres, establishment intellectuals (and today dis-established intellectuals), Cheek illuminates the processes by which China's intellectuals, often under the worst conditions imaginable, have adapted to and helped construct our modern world.
