In this study of revolutionary tradition in China, Elizabeth Perry successfully “brings the revolution back in” to our studies of both contemporary China and recent history. Taking the case of the famous strike and workers’ organization at the Anyuan coalmines in southeast China in the 1920s, Perry articulates mid-level theory to explain the creation and durability of revolutionary tradition in Chinese politics. She offers this as a contribution to social-science explanation of the rise and longevity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Methodologically, she argues for the centrality and usefulness of “culture” in political analysis and historical explanation. Personally, she articulates her understanding of what is legitimate, enduring, and challenging in the Chinese revolution. Throughout, Perry practices what she preaches (to younger scholars) by connecting CCP party history to social history. This is Elizabeth Perry at her best: the book achieves its aims and is a pleasure to read.

Perry tells the story of the Anyuan revolutionary tradition in two parts. The first is a political history of Communist agitation and organization in Anyuan. It offers a vivid and to some degree revisionist interpretation of the efforts of Mao Zedong (as a social movement manager), Li Lisan (as a charismatic and astonishingly effective agent provocateur), and Liu Shaoqi (as a consummate bureaucratic leader) to mobilize the thousands of lumpen proletariat digging the mines, manning the pumps, and running the railway that carried the coal to market. Told with the skill that readers of Perry's studies of North China rural rebels and Shanghai labor strikes have come to expect, the narrative offers a nuanced picture of how these young radicals succeeded in “cultural mobilization”—using cultural resources to mobilize a social movement. Perry documents the effective power of native-place linkages, the cultural authority of the literati (revolutionary leaders dressed for success in Confucian scholar robes), and the power of display. For historians of modern China, there are fun bits: Mao is the level-headed organizer; Li Lisan is the charismatic leader able to garner support from the local magistrate and gentry with his eloquent wenyan classical prose, but with an unsettling affinity for local secret societies; Mao has to replace Li with the sober Liu Shaoqi to keep the strike on track.

The second part of the story is of the subsequent use, or mining, of the Anyuan revolutionary tradition. This is told in three scenes (in one chapter each). In the 1950s, the Anyuan revolutionary tradition is systematized under the new Communist government as a source of pride and legitimacy for the CCP. Unexpectedly, in these early histories Anyuan is associated with the personality cult of Liu Shaoqi, not Mao Zedong. The Party denies the central role of Li Lisan and instead focuses on one charismatic leader: Liu. This reaches its peak in the early 1960s with monuments, a new museum, paintings, books, and films. Clearly Mao was not the only CCP leader open to playing such a role. In the mid-1960s there is the reversal we would expect: Liu is deposed and the history is rewritten to put Mao at the center of the story. Museum exhibitions and monuments are recast; books and films rescripted; paintings recommissioned. In both periods, local elites (both in Anyuan and in the Jiangxi provincial government) use the signals coming from Beijing to promote local interests. Finally, in the post-Mao period of increasing commercialization, the revolutionary tradition becomes less effective in making sense of revolution. The good news is that Li Lisan finally makes it back into histories of Anyuan, but the entire revolutionary tradition appears to be up for sale. This is nicely captured in the fate of Liu Chunhua's signature painting Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (known to all for the young Mao in scholar's robe with umbrella striding purposefully over the mountains); Perry presents the absurd 2002 court verdict on Liu's sale of his painting to the Bank of Construction as reflecting “the near impossibility of rendering a widely accepted verdict on the meaning of the Chinese revolution” (p. 261).

In order to show that culture, as an independent variable, explains revolutionary success and longevity, Perry identifies three central mechanisms of cultural policy: cultural mobilization, cultural positioning, and cultural patronage. Both in the 1920s and after 1949, CCP leaders sought to achieve “cultural mobilization” of the masses either to promote revolution or to ensure loyalty to the revolutionary state. Perry identifies two core methods by which the CCP achieved cultural mobilization, one more prominent in the 1920s, the other more so since 1949. The first half of the book explains how “the Communists [got] ordinary Chinese to understand, accept, and in some cases embrace revolutionary authority” (p. 4). They did so by “cultural positioning,” or “the strategic deployment of a range of symbolic resources (religion, ritual, rhetoric, dress, drama, art, and so on) for purposes of political persuasion” (p. 4). In this case they were clearly good at it. The second half of the book traces the role of “cultural patronage” employed by local and national officials to direct popular support to themselves (in the name of the Party) and to leverage bureaucratic resources for their interests (p. 12). These three formulations work persuasively in this case and are sufficiently robust mid-level explanatory variables (for more than this case but less than universal application) to be of use to other scholars of social movements (a literature Perry engages).

There is a meta-narrative to Perry's story. It is the nagging endurance of lost revolutionary ideals. The ideal of the revolution, according to Perry, is dignity of the individual, captured in the key slogan from the 1922 strike, “Once we were beasts of burden, now we will be men!” Chapter 4 documents the loss of this ideal. The violence of the Northern Expedition (1925–26), Perry shows, brutalized the workers of Anyuan. The Party's response was a move to Red Terror and decades of revolutionary violence. The challenge for later generations, Perry concludes, “is not to forget or falsify the past but to mine the revolutionary inheritance in ways that encourage its inspiring vision to triumph over its appalling violence” (p. 296).