Fabio Lanza has written a subtle, engaging book about the invention of the category “student” at May Fourth Beijing University (Beida). Lanza's interest in students is at the university level and is fundamentally political; he does not discuss non-university, or non-Beida, students and is unconcerned with those who were not political or politicized. Thus when he talks about the invention of “students” Lanza means university students as self-consciously political beings. But that is not all. In approach Lanza is inspired by French philosopher Alain Badiou's assertion that there is such a thing as “true politics” and that this “can only come into existence by putting the state at a distance” (p. 5). Lanza argues that students arrived as expressers of true politics, and thus as “students,” at Beida between 1917 and 1920 because, for the first time, they embraced a politics that was not first and foremost about or in relation to the state. They were able to resist a state-imposed definition of themselves as an objective, contained sociological category expected (required) to behave and think in predictable ways and instead developed a subjective understanding of who they were and what mattered to them as full-fledged people and citizens.

According to Lanza, true politics and unfettered critical thinking, which is what “students” practice, evolved through a process of self-definition accomplished in daily, lived space. Abstract intellectual conceptions mattered but did not have the same salience in the creation of the freer, open-ended subjectivity that turned students into “students” as did experimentation with novel cultures of the quotidian in the context of a range of shaping factors: the university administration, broader society (with which students had extensive contact), and a city increasingly defined by its connections to global capitalism. Consistent with previous scholarship, Lanza credits the university's president, Cai Yuanpei, with having set the stage for the development of a new student identity through his insistence that a university is a place where research into new knowledge takes place, and the concomitant idea that intellectual freedom and autonomy from the state are essential to unimpeded academic inquiry. Lanza calls attention to an inherent tension at the center of the May Fourth Beida story: the fact that the university was at once a state entity and a place from which challenges to the self same state were mounted through a displacing student politics that ventured into new areas of concern, invented novel activist repertoires, and intruded into once forbidden geographical spaces.

This book contains textured, fascinating discussions of the ways that matters of student life, some routine others not, became politicized, revealed a politics, or led to new, subjective political positioning. These include dress style, reactions to the conventions of institutionalized education, being consumers at markets, living in dormitories, apartments, and small experimental communities, participation in study associations, leisure activities, and engagement in educational outreach activities in the city and nearby villages. Lanza's treatment of these subjects is very thought provoking, as is his discussion, interlaced throughout the book, of the ways that student politics at May Fourth Beida remade Beijing as a political space and a site of political tradition.

The advantages that Lanza gains by analyzing a narrow slice of time at a single institution, and a single demographic (students) at that institution, are to some extent offset by disadvantages that also stem from his approach. Questions seeking answers or treatment rise to the surface. If the state managed to once more limit students to their “proper” role and place as of the early 1920s, which Lanza argues was the case, where else and when else did “students” show up? In his Epilogue Lanza jumps to the Cultural Revolution and the 1980s in a very illuminating way, but what about the rest of the Republican period, after May Fourth? Was the invented category of “student” an idea or an ongoing lived reality, and if it was an idea, did it surface, become submerged and then resurface, and under what circumstances? Furthermore, was it possible to be a “student” and at the same time to be focused on, even obsessed with issues of state, nation, and political party? If not, how do we characterize student nationalism of the 1930s? Beida is presented as a special place distinct from other institutions of higher learning; to what extent can Lanza's analysis be extended beyond that university? Was Beida's May Fourth faculty unique? With a few exceptions, the professoriate, the many intellectual currents it fed into the university's bloodstream, and its relationship to the student body, is not explored in this book. Moreover, the students that emerged as “students” at May Fourth Beida constituted a small percentage of the total. What about the rest of the student body, which was largely apolitical? If most did not evolve as “students,” what shall we call them?