Intellectuals have suffered a great deal at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Who were these unfortunate souls, how were they defined, identified, employed and then dismissed, with many persecuted, and how did their tortured relationship with the Party affect the trajectory of Chinese Communism? These are the key issues treated in Eddy U's illuminating book. The author, a sociologist, argues that the intellectuals were created by the CCP as “a classification of people” based on Marxian thought, replacing the term zhishijieji (intellectual class), which had been used in the early decades of the Republican period, with the term zhishifenzi (educated persons). The Party placed the intellectuals in a new category compared with the “capitalists,” “landlords,” “rich peasants,” “poor peasants,” “workers” and others. Diverse and dispersed, they were turned into subjects, then objectified and treated by the Party as “usable but unreliable” individuals: usable because their knowledge and skills were badly needed for socialist construction; unreliable because owing to their “bourgeois” or “petty-bourgeois” backgrounds, their consecration to Chinese Communism and loyalty to the Party were not always assured. Their expertise, combined with Party distrust, underscored “the mutual constitution of the intellectual and Chinese Communism” (p. 17), with each having a profound impact on the other politically and in many other ways.

According to U, the origins of the term zhishifenzi date back to the early 1920s when the early CCP elites engaged in a robust debate about the alleged lack of political courage and moral integrity of members of the intellectual class. But it was not until the Yan'an period that intellectuals were identified in earnest as a new category of people, when educated men and women were recruited from the cities to this rural town to participate in the Communist revolution. After 1949, identification of this new classification gained fresh momentum. Individuals with varying degrees of education and training at primary, secondary or tertiary levels became intellectuals, including professors, school principals and teachers, editors, writers, journalists, accountants, engineers, artists and others. The identification was not fixed but varied spatially and from time to time, depending on the circumstances and needs of the Party. Thus, intellectuals were found in the countryside, too, contrary to the traditional view that they were naturally urban. Intellectuals were re-educated and thought reformed, with many becoming Party cadres, management staff, school principals and teachers, among others. There was no guarantee, however, that their new classification and status could not be altered. In fact, it was so changeable that some readers might find it confusing at times. It is unclear, for instance, when exactly the Party cadres and management staff in the school system were intellectuals like the teachers or just socialist revolutionaries. Perhaps it was sometimes negotiable. In any event, the intellectual individuals did not feel secure in their jobs and daily lives, knowing that they were usable but not trusted subjects.

Adopting an institutional-constructivist approach and drawing on a wide range of source materials, U examines a host of related issues, including registration of the subjects, workplace arrangements, organizations and associations, film and theatre productions, intra- and extra-Party struggles and mass surveillance. The drive to register the intellectuals and to determine their eligibility met with differing reactions from those concerned. In the end, a new pool of intellectuals was created serving the purposes of socialist construction. Many of those identified were often “unemployable” due to a lack of professional training. Yet they were capable of wreaking havoc on socialist development as the Party feared, a situation U describes as “a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 80).

The book covers the period from the May Fourth/New Culture Movement through Yan'an communism to socialist construction in the 1950s and up to 1964. For the early period of Communist rule, U focuses on thought reform, the Rectification Campaign and the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Disaffected intellectuals who criticized the Party leadership demanded re-definition of their classification and new roles in the political system and socialist development. The pushback from Mao sparked anti-intellectual sentiments, with “ugly intellectuals everywhere” (p. 135). This paved the ground for the Cultural Revolution, which is unfortunately omitted from U's analysis, despite references to it. Instead, he takes a brief look at the fate of intellectuals in the post-Mao reform era and in more recent years under Xi Jinping's leadership. He concludes that it has been a struggle to define China's intellectuals. Today they remain defined in a way markedly different from those in Western Europe and the United States. Controlled and utilized by the Party, they are still treated as useful but unreliable.

This well-researched and well-argued book makes a significant contribution to scholarship and will appeal to a wide audience in the China field, including graduate students of history, politics, sociology and comparative communist studies.