Cai Xiang's study of socialist literary and cultural imaginaries, originally published in 2010, is one of the most provocative books on post-1949 Chinese literature and culture appearing in Chinese since the beginning of the new century. Its English version, Revolution and Its Narrative, brilliantly edited and meticulously translated by Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong, makes a significant and timely contribution to ongoing debates about the cultural–political legacies of revolutionary China. As the two translators suggest in their Introduction, “the relationship among Chinese narratives of revolution, modernity, and socialism in the Maoist period … generally has been dismissed in English-language studies of modern Chinese literature”; Cai's book argues against this “dismissal” and “thus presents a potential map for future research” (xi). They summarize Cai's inquiry as a “theoretical mediation on the historical and aesthetic possibilities opened up by, as well as the ultimate impossibility of writing a literature adequate to, the socialist transformation of China in the 1950s and 1960s” (xii).

In his own “Introduction,” Cai begins by defining “revolutionary China” vis-à-vis other terms such as “traditional China” and “modern China,” and asserts that “revolutionary China is one of the most important [conceptual and historical] legacies of the twentieth century” (p. 8; Cai's reference to the “twentieth century” is evidently in dialogue with the radical periodization of the century as a short revolutionary century). A masterful literary analyst and a self-reflective Leftist critic, Cai focuses on the “intertextuality between literature and social politics” (p. 24) during the “seventeen years” (1949–1966), seeing the literary narratives and cultural imaginaries as being embedded in the actuality of China's socialist revolution. In contrast to the conventional understanding of the socialist literary scene as a homogeneous, centralized subsystem of the party-state power structure, one of the book's main arguments is that this Maoist system of cultural production constantly generated “antisystemic” imaginations and practices (p. 10). For Cai, “antisystemic movements originated more from the support of the system itself,” constituting “the essence and complexity of the politics of resistance in the socialist period” (p. 9). In particular, Cai constantly draws attention to the legitimacy of “antibureaucratic,” “anti-establishment” and “anti-privilege” discourses in socialist literature and culture. In a way, the whole book revolves around a literary, cultural and political interpretation of this contradiction intrinsic to Chinese socialism: on the one hand, the socialist practice ossified into a party-state structure; on the other hand, the party-state also produced its own negation, and therefore Cai interprets “Chinese socialism as a historical process filled with both tensions of self-negation and impulses for continuous revolution” (p. 14).

Chapter one, “The national/the local,” deals with literary representations of the relationship between the state and local traditions in fictional works about land reform and the agricultural cooperative movement. The topological focus is the space of the “village,” caught between the local lifeworld and socialist innovation. Following the question of how the peasantry was turned into political subjectivity and the subaltern transformed into the master of history and the state, in chapter two the book discusses the “mobilization structure.” Challenging the traditional focus on the top-down model of Party mobilization, Cai's account complicates our understanding of the relationships between the vanguard Party, subalterns and cadres, as they are represented and debated in revolutionary literature. Chapter three focuses on concepts of youth, love and sexuality in socialist discourses. According to Cai's convincing analysis, the image of youth was yet another site of tensions within the long Chinese revolution: on the one hand, youth was linked to the politicized, idealized subjectivity; but on the other hand, the young generation was also seen as the target of reeducation. Chapter four shows how popular literature in socialist China re-narrated revolutionary history into legendary heroic stories. Chapter five highlights the “narratives of labor or labor utopias,” in which manual labour was no longer a process of alienation but was reimagined as key to the “politics of dignity” and the consciousness of being a master of history. Chapter six further elaborates on the issue of the socialist anxiety about whether the technological revolution (as well as a culture of expertise) would have an alienating effect on “working-class subjectivity.” Chapter six takes the issue with the cultural politics in the 1960s, and represents, in my opinion, the author's critical insight at its most contentious. Cai argues that although there was no “consumerism” in 1960s' China, the issue of consumption (in terms of taste, lifestyle and leisure time) loomed large in socialist culture despite a strong emphasis on production and its ethics (p. 376). Through a reading of a number of 1960s' plays and films, Cai points to a long-overlooked issue of how socialist China addressed, in tension-fraught imaginative terms, the logic of desire (p. 383).

Cai not only offers re-interpretations of famous revolutionary and socialist literary works such as those by Zhao Shuli, Zhou Libo, Wang Meng and Qu Bo, but also extends his discussion to, and illuminates, other forms of textual and cultural-political productions, including films, plays, non-fiction, literary polemics, revolutionary theories and political documents. All these close readings and case studies point toward a thesis that Cai summarizes as “the crisis of socialism and efforts to overcome it,” the title of his Conclusion. Here, Cai broadens his reflection to China's post-Maoist path and contemporary ideological developments, and offers powerful final remarks. For Cai, today we must treat the literary history of Chinese socialism seriously because “we need to respond to the ideals of that history” (p. 430), such as the ideals of dignity, resistance, equality and justice. In this sense, literary scholarship on socialist legacies (a “living library,” p. 430) is a much needed defence of the political imagination that “already constitutes the literary” (p. 431).

A book of such scope poses a tremendous challenge to the translators. Karl and Zhong have handled this challenge effectively and accomplished even more, successfully bringing Cai's book into the English-language academic context (see the Translator's “Introduction”), while striving to retain the Chinese original's polemical and argumentative styles. Therefore, this book also sets a great example of creating dialogue and debate between two intellectual languages or worlds in an ever-more globalized field of China studies.