China and the Chinese revolution have been the subjects of countless books. Here we have a distinctive take on the subject by a Chinese scholar. With a bold title, this book collects several thoughtful essays originally written in Chinese over the past decade by Wang Hui, a literature critic by training, a prolific author, and a longtime coeditor of Dushu (1996–2007), probably the most popular monthly periodical read by Chinese intellectuals in the past three decades.

With a broad-brush style common among many Chinese scholars, Wang discusses and advances many provocative conceptualizations and reconceptualizations of the recent past and the current development of China. Other than presenting a reinterpretation of China's epic revolution that, according to the author, lasted until the 1980s and the profound reform since then, Wang analyzes a host of topics such as modernity, ideology, foreign influence, the role of the Chinese state, and the role of public intellectuals. The book ends with an essay on the environmental activist Xiao Lianzhong to showcase China's new public intellectuals and a synopsis of Wang's earlier work (Resisting Despair) on Lu Xun (1881–1936) to recast the most venerated writer in the People's Republic of China. (Wang's doctoral dissertation bearing that title was first published in 1990 and later became an authoritative Chinese work on Lu Xun. Recently, however, it became the target of an open allegation of plagiarism by Chinese professor Wang Binbin in his “Wang Hui ‘Fankang juewang’ de xuefeng wenti” [Academic integrity problems of Wang Hui's Resisting Despair], in Nanfang zhoumo [Southern weekend], Guangzhou, March 25, 2010.)

As the translators hoped, Wang's book presents a Chinese perspective that is of value to English readers, especially scholarly China watchers. Viewed by many as a leading writer of the active Chinese New Left school, Wang ambitiously attempts to reinterpret Chinese history, especially the Mao era (1949–76), in order to elaborate a delicate worldview of nationalism, populism, and socialism, and to opine about the status and the future of China in a way that reflects the growing self-confidence of many Chinese intellectuals today. This book, therefore, is a good way for English readers to taste the current Chinese thought in general and Chinese New Leftist thinking in particular. One thing that especially stands out is the clear ambivalence that Wang exhibits toward the ideas of the scientific method, the universality of values and rights, the Western concepts of democracy and market, and the process of globalization. Ever hazily and grudgingly, Wang's work is still, in fact, depicting a rather universal path toward modernity that even China cannot entirely avoid.

As a writer and editor whose work has been largely about sensitive political, cultural, and historical issues but who nonetheless has managed to thrive in a country renowned for its extensive censorship, Wang is often known for writing in a vague, mystifying, and selectively evasive way in his native Chinese. Perhaps compounded by translation, this book may be hard for an ordinary Anglophone reader to grasp, let alone enjoy.

Wang's peculiar phraseology and innovative assertions may be disagreeable, puzzling, even erroneous at times. Just in the first few pages, for example, we see that Wang thinks that the creation of the People's Republic in 1949 was not just the establishment of a new Chinese government, but “the founding of the nation” (p. xvii). He calls the Korean War (1950–53) “the war to resist US aggression and to aid Korea” (p. xix) and the Communist-led peasant rebellion (1927–37) an “Agrarian Revolution” (p. xxi). In a rather curious way of reframing history and reality, Wang asserts that “[t]oday all the world's nations have become party-states” (p. 8), hence the Chinese Communist Party regime is hardly out of the ordinary; the political reformer Hu Yaobang was “forced” out of office not by the conservative party elders, but by the “late-1986 student movement” (p. 22); and the demonstrations and uprisings in 1989 were “protest against the uneven distribution of power and interests” and were similar in nature to the protests against the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund in Seattle (1999) and Washington (2000)—all a consequence of globalization (pp. 34–35). Barely a fifth of the way into the book, much of Chinese history has been effectively bent beyond recognition.

Similarly, Wang's discussion of “the rise of modern Chinese thought” (pp. 105–38) and “scientific worldviews” (pp. 139–70), based on his four-volume book previously published in Chinese, is equally ambitious but nebulous and selective. Many crucially important factors and forces that have shaped modern Chinese intellectual community and thought are simply missing. The watershed event of the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” in 1957 that brutally persecuted more than half a million intellectuals and created a devastating suppression of generations of Chinese minds, for instance, is not even mentioned.

As a well-crafted voice from China conveying New Left arguments, this book hardly reports Chinese thought accurately, nor is it an adequate portrayal of the history of revolution and modernization in China.