The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) was a group that questioned the academic, political and financial structures of Asian studies in the United States between 1968 and 1979. Inspired by the opposition against the US war in Vietnam, the Western student movement around 1968 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, these scholars developed a sustained critique of anti-communist mainstream narratives of the Cold War. Some former members of the CCAS are well-known scholars in the field today, including Mark Selden, Philipp Huang, Edward Friedman, Orville Schell, Jonathan Unger, Paul Pickowicz and Susan Shirk. Lanza interviewed former participants and analysed the journal The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, conference documents, and private correspondence.

Lanza argues that the great significance of the CCAS is that they questioned knowledge production that separated learning from social practice and academic research from political activism. The goal of the CCAS was no less than to abolish the division of labour and the privileged role of the intellectual itself. For Lanza, what “really happened” in the Cultural Revolution is less important than how the Concerned Scholars referenced Maoist China to question Asian studies in North America. In the PRC, Mao Zedong's revolution in education attacked academic knowledge production inside an “ivory tower” that was separated from revolution, production and the everyday wisdom of the masses. This agenda had much in common with the student movements in the West. According to Lanza, the elderly generation of Asian scholars in the US like John K. Fairbanks considered China as an object that needed the advice of Americans in order to develop. Due to the Cultural Revolution and rise of global Maoism, the Concerned Scholars discovered China and its people as subjects of history from which Westerners could learn.

Lanza shows that the Sino-US rapprochement after the visit of Richard Nixon in Beijing 1972 caused great challenges for the Concerned Scholars. First, they had to make sense of the fact that Maoist China became friends with one of the major enemies of the US Left. Second, the Concerned Scholars who were invited by the Chinese government realized they were warmly welcomed as “friends of the Chinese people,” but not as scholars who could do meaningful research in their land of desire. It was even harder to react to the “thermidor” after Mao's death in 1976, when the Leftist Gang of Four was arrested. The new leadership under Deng Xiaoping finally condemned the Cultural Revolution and restored academic institutions based on the separation of intellectual and manual labour. Lanza shows that Maoist China almost disappeared as a topic from the publications of the Concerned Scholars at the end of the 1970s. The author regrets that the project of questioning the academic apparatus was given up, followed by the depoliticization of the research agenda. China became a field of study, instead of an inspiration for radical intellectual politics. Lanza shows convincingly that the CCAS was much more than a remarkable moment in the history of the field. The End of Concern can easily be recommended to every student or scholar who is interested in questioning the status quo of knowledge production in Western Asian studies.

In my assessment, Western Maoism was based on productive misunderstandings of China that helped to develop meaningful opposition to post-war societies in capitalist centres. Given the lack of information and the distrust of anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War, the naivety or ignorance of the Concerned Scholars (and many others) regarding the dark aspects of the Cultural Revolution is partly understandable. However, today, after several decades of empirical research and access to archives, we know more about the terror of the Red Guards, for example, and the bloody purges by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in 1968–69. Lanza does not fully account for this new knowledge. He counters critics of Maoist China with statements from French (post)-Maoists such as Alain Badiou or Jacques Rancière. For example, Lanza argues: “Maoism (and specifically the “high Maoism” of the Cultural Revolution) affirmed the competence of the masses to speak and subvert their dominance without – and often against – the wise guide of the philosopher/scientist/party leader” (p. 70). As a matter of fact, in the early Cultural Revolution in late 1966, masses were encouraged to rebel against local Party cadres, but never against Mao or the Cultural Revolution Leading Group. Furthermore, tens of thousands of ordinary rebels ended up in prison or worse, when order was restored by the PLA in 1968–69. In the late Cultural Revolution, such as during the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius in 1973, masses were not allowed to form their own organizations or “seize power” from local Party committees again. The principle of Party leadership over all parts of society was not to be questioned. Wishful thinking about the Cultural Revolution by the Concerned Scholars or French Maoists in the 1970s might be understandable, but in 2017 it is not.