This is an invaluable and frustrating translation of a painstaking work of scholarship first published in Japanese in 2001. The great value lies in the author's careful scholarship and clear reasoning to sort through seemingly petty details in competing accounts of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The frustration comes from the lack of Chinese characters in this translation, making many of the details impossible to follow, and from the author's reluctance to pursue the historical implications of such important findings as a distinctive discursive system of Asian Marxism.

The temporal focus of this study is narrow, from the May Fourth movement of 1919 to the 1921 First Congress of the CCP. An impressive scholarly contribution is the tracing, in excruciating detail, of the origins of the earliest Marxist and socialist texts available to Chinese between 1919 and 1922. A sixteen-page appendix lists Japanese essays by Kawakami Hajime, Sakai Toshihiko, and others, and the Chinese translations and articles derived from them. While Ishikawa properly stresses the influence of these Japanese texts on early Chinese understandings of Marxism, he also notes that the earliest Chinese Marxist accounts of the Russian revolution had their origins in the American communist publication Soviet Russia. Through this precisely documented discussion, we see the dense web of transnational connections among Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, and other communists in this early period of radical internationalism. The meticulous detective work involved is evident in the following introduction of the important early Chinese Marxist Li Hanjun: “Li was born Li Shushi and used the names Li Renjie (using two differed characters for “Ren”); Li Hanjun; and the pen names Haijing, Hanjing, Han, Jun, Renjie, and Xiangjin, among others” (p. 55). Unfortunately, any reader hoping to follow up these leads will need a library with the Japanese original or (more likely) the Chinese translation to figure out just what these names were; Columbia University Press has inexplicably failed to add a glossary to the volume. On a more substantive level, the author has provided only the sparest discussion of the content of these articles, making it impossible to discern how they constituted a distinctive form of Asian Marxism.

From this consideration of early Marxist texts, the author moves to the process whereby the early Marxist study groups were transformed into the CCP. Like most recent studies of this period, Ishikawa stresses the Soviet contribution to the founding of the CCP—including even agents coming before the founding of the Comintern. He carefully constructs a narrative of the birth of the CCP out of the wide variety of small Marxist groups, with Voitinsky and other Comintern activists working to create a unified movement, but in fact serving as the authority that determined which was the true Communist Party. As he weaves his complex narrative, Ishikawa reveals the extent to which the official version is truly a Maoist construct. Thus, for example, we see Voitinsky funding the party publication Gongchandang (共产党) in November 1920, and a plausible argument that the true founding of the party should date from this point. But the journal ceases publication when funding dries up after Voitinsky's return to Russia, so treating this as a founding point makes the dependence on the Comintern all too obvious. Furthermore, Mao was not involved in 1920, so the official founding is placed with the First Congress in 1921. Ishikawa also includes a detailed and amusing discussion of the contortions through which memoirists have gone to make the thirteen members who attended the First Congress fit the “twelve-man theory” required by Mao's use of that number with Edgar Snow in 1936. On the key issue of the exclusivist position of the First Congress toward bourgeois parties, Ishikawa presents telling evidence that the positions of the Congress were the conventional positions of all communist parties established at that time with Third International affiliations. In these and many other ways, Ishikawa's internationalist perspective on the founding of the CCP enriches our understanding of the historical process.

Above all, this study demonstrates the merits of transnational, multilingual research based as much as possible on contemporary documents to elucidate this critical moment in modern Chinese history. Yoshikawa is consistently critical, but not disrespectful, of the memoir literature, whose value he acknowledges. On every point, he seeks to establish precise dates, participants, meetings, and interactions among the many parties to this multinational process. Joshua Fogel's predictably precise translation reflects the convoluted language of the Japanese original. The combination of academic Japanese in translation, endless detail, and the lack of characters makes this challenging reading; but for anyone interested in the birth of the Chinese Communist Party, this is an essential book.