In a pioneering study (focusing on Shanghai) of the political significance of Chinese students during the 20th century, Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China, Stanford University Press, 1997) highlighted an evolving “repertoire” of student protest. Fabio Lanza's thought-provoking and stimulating book usefully complements this study by revisiting the May Fourth period (ca.1917–1922) to demonstrate how the political (as opposed to sociological) category/signifier of “students” first came into being or was “invented.” In particular, Lanza argues that such a category only emerged because of, and through, the attitudes, practices and protests of Peking University (Beida) students during these years. Using the concept of “space” that is lived and continuously transformed (e.g., physical structure of classrooms and streets, the intellectual framework of curricula and courses, and the movement of students through the city), Lanza shows how student activism at this time was predicated on a separation of politics from the state through an invention of “new forms of lived experience” (p. 7) at a time when Beida's position as a state institution (and the official definition of students itself) was constantly challenged; this is what set May Fourth Beida students apart from their late Qing predecessors, Lanza notes, since the latter still existed and acted within a specific and bureaucratically defined relationship with the state.

Utilizing a wide variety of sources (memoirs, biographies, university administration archives, and contemporary newspaper reports), the book explores four different kinds of “space” (everyday life, intellectual concerns, political activity, and social interactions). In chapters dealing with everyday life, for example, Lanza illuminates how the often nonconformist and anti-communitarian attitudes of Beida students (which ranged from cutting classes and criticizing the quality of teaching on offer to shunning school ceremonials and cultivating a bohemian lifestyle that included the wearing of deliberately shabby scholars' gowns) evolved as a means to express a specifically political stance (i.e., the contestation of an imposed communitarian definition of the university and its students); in the process, the possibility opened up for each student to define himself (women were not allowed to audit classes until 1920, a topic that is not dealt with in the book) as an independent political subject.

In their pedagogical critique of the situation at Beida, students not only questioned the credentials and teaching approach of instructors but also disputed the utility of examinations (especially after 1919), perceived as producing intellectual subordination, encouraging harmful competitiveness, and inhibiting the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Lanza fails to note, however, that Beida students' critique of “modern” education and pedagogy was part of a wider and ongoing dissatisfaction amongst educators since the last years of the dynasty with the “impersonal” and elitist nature of modern schools and the increasing resort to examinations as a way of defining success. Likewise, the Beida students' condemnation of examinations as an invidious device to distinguish the “educated” from the “ignorant,” reflected in society by class differences, echoed that of modern education by Chinese Francophile anarchists such as Li Shizeng (who actually taught at Beida for a while), whose anti-elitist philosophy of work-study was premised precisely on such a critique.

Similarly, in noting the irony of these “modern” students – ostensibly the heralds of Westernization – advancing a radical critique of disciplinary educational techniques of Western (and hence “modern”) provenance, Lanza might usefully have consulted T. Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Republican China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), which, in a wider sense, argues that it was precisely during this period that the questioning of universals and deconstruction of the traditional/modern binary characteristic of late 20th-century postmodernism first appeared (in fictional narrative).

Although Beida during these years (under the chancellorship of Cai Yuanpei) sought to distance itself from state-related functions (for example, technical disciplines considered relevant for state-building were eliminated from the curriculum), Lanza emphasizes the university's growing integration with the social environment. In terms of physical space alone, the university was more “porous” than conventionally assumed and the boundaries between its three different locations and society at large not always as clear-cut. Students experimented with alternative forms of organization, creating their own associations (such as study associations dedicated to social issues), pedagogical enterprises, and even new arrangements for communal living. All these (supposedly non-political) lived experiences inside the university, Lanza argues, were inextricably linked to the more overtly political marches, public lectures and boycotts of 1919. Politics, in other words, was deployed in the very transformation of daily practice, while the effectiveness of the 1919 demonstrations owed much to the prior existence of student organizations and the associational habits they inculcated.

In describing the May Fourth marches through the carefully selected streets of Beijing as the conclusive stage of a process of politicization in which students identified themselves as “citizens” (i.e., part of the “people”), however, Lanza perhaps downplays too easily the continuing self-identification of students as different from the people (in their role as moral leaders and intellectual guides of the ordinary folk), a self-identification that would be clearly evident in the June 4 protest movement of 1989.

Overall, nevertheless, this is a well-crafted and insightful analysis of how the political signifier of “students” and a particular kind of activism were “produced” during the May Fourth period – both of which, in the author's view, were definitively and violently ended with the suppression of the 1989 movement.