Dilemmas of Victory is an outstanding contribution to scholarship. This well-conceived collection could indeed serve as a model of what all edited volumes should aspire to achieve. It takes a topic of growing scholarly interest (PRC history), focuses on a clearly defined period within that larger field (the early years of regime consolidation), brings together the top scholars working on this period, and produces a result that not only presents consistently strong scholarship, but leads us to analytically rethink and refine much of what we thought we knew about the foundation of the People's Republic of China.

The 15 contributors to this volume comprise a virtual “who's who” of historical scholarship on the early 1950s. Each of these scholars has his or her own particular research agenda and perspective on the history of this period, and each relies on a range of different primary and secondary sources to produce work of real depth. Archives, including those previously inaccessible to foreign scholars, memoirs, gazetteers, and interviews all figure prominently in the footnotes. As so often happens with edited volumes, the sheer diversity of subject matter could well have led to incommensurability or unevenness, but in the expert hands of Brown and Pickowicz, this very diversity becomes a strength, adding variation, range and texture to what in fact was a very complex, differently experienced historical process. The editors wisely group the contributions under the subheadings “Takeover” (Frederick Wakeman, Elizabeth Perry and Nara Dillon), “Occupying the periphery” (Jeremy Brown, Chen Jian, Christian Hess and James Gao), “The culture of accommodation” (Perry Link, Sigrid Schmaltzer, Paul Pickowicz, and Douglas Stiffler), and “Family strategies” (Joseph Esherick, Gail Hershatter, and Sherman Cochran). Thus the first two sections range from the well-trodden ground of the takeover of Shanghai to the infinitely less-researched areas of the southwest, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Dalian, and the reader gets a sense of the complexity, messiness, and sheer difficulty of regime takeover in the very different local environments of such a large and regionally varied country. Culture, education and film are all well covered, with essays that draw out the key ambiguities and ambivalences between artists, intellectuals, and the newly consolidating state through explorations of xiangsheng, the curriculum on human evolution, the chequered career of the film actor Shi Hua, and the surprising tensions involved in setting up Renmin University. Joseph Esherick and Sherman Cochran contribute illuminating and subtle pieces that explore how the individuals in two different elite families made choices, accommodated, and eventually fared within the structures of “New China.” Gail Hershatter offers a welcome view and set of voices that are doubly from “below,” from rural women, in her exploration of old and new in midwifery and birthing experiences in the early 1950s.

Irrespective of the topic, some themes resurface throughout the volume: regional variation, the difficulty of imposing a new order, tensions between different imperatives and different actors within the new officialdom of the People's Republic, and the ambivalences and difficulties faced by individuals as they attempted to negotiate a China so “new” that the rules were often in flux. Despite the wide range of subject matter included in this volume, Dilemmas of Victory presents a welcome coherence; these are all scholars in engaged dialogue with each other, and the editors have done a superb job of drawing these many threads together in an analytical and incisive introduction. This is a volume that deserves to go on many a graduate seminar syllabus for contemporary history, political science, and comparative revolution.