It has too often been the case that the “New Democracy” period—the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC) referred to in the title of this book—has been overlooked in the historiography of twentieth-century China. The drama of the Communist victory in the civil war, culminating in Mao's proclamation of the establishment of the PRC on October 1, 1949, was almost matched by New China's entry into the Korean War. The latter was followed by a series of domestic campaigns designed to rid the new regime of threats and enemies, both real and perceived. The premise, and promise, of the New Democratic era soon faded with the announcement of the First Five-Year Plan in 1953 and the beginning of the transition to socialism. The story of those years has hitherto largely been ignored by researchers and educators. This fascinating collection of essays refocuses attention on this period, reminding readers of the uncertainty and hope, confusion and consolidation, that marked it. It is also of note for its chapter by the late Frederic Wakeman, Jr., which is fittingly the first of the essays in the volume.

As the editors write in the introductory essay, “The main aim of this volume is to depict the extraordinary diversity and complexity of how individuals, families, and social groups experienced the 1949–53 years” (p. 7), and the authors achieve this with an array of new insights in four main areas: The takeover of Shanghai by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is presented by Wakeman, Elizabeth Perry, and Nara Dillon; the Communist takeover of peripheral areas (Guizhou, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Soviet-occupied Dalian) is examined by Jeremy Brown, Chen Jian, Christian Hess, and James Z. Gao; how actors in the intellectual and cultural spheres adapted to accommodate the new system is covered by Perry Link, Sigrid Schmalzer, Paul Pickowicz, and Douglas Stiffler; and the volume ends, in a section entitled “Family Strategies,” with two case studies on the Ye and Liu families by Joseph Esherick and Sherman Cochrane, and a somewhat disparate essay by Gail Hershatter on the impact of the new regime on rural midwives in the early 1950s.

Despite the wide range of topics, the authors skillfully manage to weave threads of continuity among the ostensibly diverse chapters, with a number of reoccurring themes and personages, reminding the reader of the multilayered and simultaneous nature of the titular dilemmas. These dilemmas are shown to have existed for both the “liberators” and the “liberated” in New China, as each side sought accommodation and acceptance from the other. (The most notable exception is Brown's fascinating essay on armed resistance to the new regime in Guizhou, which continued long after the Communist People's Liberation Army had “won” the civil war.) What emerges most strongly from the book is not only the real sense of possibility shared by an unanticipated range of citizens of the new People's Republic, from the Shanghai industrialist Liu Hongsheng to the xiangsheng performers introduced to us by Link, but also the complexities of the tentative and often ad hoc strategies embraced by the Communist authorities and those it was engaging with for the first time.

While this work admirably demonstrates the importance of examining these years from a non-party-centric perspective, its main weakness is highlighted by the slightly incongruous nature of Hershatter's piece on how the CCP materially affected the lives of rural Chinese women through its promotion of “new” midwifery: There is an overwhelming urban bias in the collected stories of how Han China interacted with its new government. The other main weakness, however, is an inevitable consequence of its main strength (its micro-level focus). The reader is left wondering what these experiences of, and strategies for, the New Democracy period meant for its future and how they influenced its fairly rapid demise.

Dilemmas of Victory is a welcome addition to the field, and it will be of interest to scholars working on a wide array of China-related disciplines: social, urban, diplomatic, and gender histories, to name but a few. It not only raises questions but also points to the possibility of a tantalizing wealth of further investigation into this newly “rediscovered” period in Chinese history, and it provides illuminating signposts as to where they may lie.