Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press [distributed by Columbia University Press], 2023. US$46.00, cloth. ISBN 9789882372603.
It was Chen Hansheng (1897–2004), not Mao Zedong, who was the pioneer of Marxist sociology on rural China. In this biography, Stephen MacKinnon shows that Chen, swept up in the wave of cosmopolitan revolution and romantic nationalism that inundated China in the 1920s, re-framed agrarian China as semi-feudal and semi-colonial to show that only class revolution could save it. Yet in the 1950s Chen was appalled at how Mao’s revolution imposed communes and suppressed democracy within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This skillful and engaging biography is also an empathetic moral exploration. MacKinnon was on the 1971 Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars tour of China and shook hands with Zhou Enlai before Richard Nixon. When he returned in 1979 to lecture in the Journalism Institute, he became Chen’s confidante and edited his frank, detailed oral history, “The Life and Times of Chen Hansheng (1897–2004).” MacKinnon’s previous scholarship concerns power and legitimacy in modern China, including studies of Yuan Shikai, who created governmental institutions he could not legitimize (Power and Politics in Late Imperial China: Yuan Shi-Kai in Beijing and Tianjin, 1901-1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Agnes Smedley, Chen’s fellow romantic revolutionary (with Janice MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Chiang Kai-shek, another state-builder (Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Readers will benefit from his informed historiographical comments, capsule biographies, and references to recent Chinese language scholarship (though the index is skimpy).
Liberal America and Moscow each had a shot at winning over Chen who was at home in English and Chinese and educated at the Yale-in-China middle-school in Changsha, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Pomona College in California. He met and married his lifetime collaborator, Gu Shuxing (1897–1968) at Berkeley, then did graduate work at the University of Chicago and Harvard before leaving for the more affordable University of Berlin. As a “returned student” and “baby professor” at Peking University, Chen allied with the American faction, but the anti-imperialist fervour of the Great Revolution of 1925–1927 and the moral suasion of the Guangdong peasant movement converted him to a broad Marxist view; he then secretly joined the Comintern. Chen and Gu fled to Moscow in 1927, where Chen debated peasantry and revolution in Russian and disputed the Asiatic Mode of Production with Karl Wittfogel in German.
Chen returned to China with a lifetime supply of tools for class analysis, yet did not join the CCP and concealed his Comintern membership in order to play the role of a neutral public intellectual. He organized in Shanghai with Soong Ching-Ling (Song Qingling) against the Nationalist government but also briefly collaborated with right-wing Nationalist intellectuals. His Society for the Study of China’s Agrarian Economy trained researchers, conducted extensive surveys, and published prolifically. Chen and Gu skirted arrest and execution in 1936 by fleeing to Tokyo where they worked with Agnes Smedley and a spy-ring that gathered intelligence for the Soviet Army. However MacKinnon says that it would be wrong to call Chen a spy; despite his undercover work, he did not ferret out state secrets or report regularly to Moscow or Yan’an (129; 223–225).
The Institute of Pacific Relations, unaware of Chen’s Comintern status or even that Chen and Gu had escaped precarious Tokyo and fled to precarious Moscow, offered Chen a position in New York. For more than a decade Chen and Gu charmed international intellectual leaders left, right, and centre with their data, class analysis, charisma, and home cooking. Notably, Chen worked with Owen Lattimore, former editor of Pacific Affairs (Chen did not, as some have thought, edit the journal himself). In 1951 the couple returned to China, but witnessing Stalin’s Moscow had demonstrated the value of staying under the radar. Chen joined official research units and represented China overseas but declined Zhou Enlai’s invitation to join the Foreign Ministry, saying that someone who had become used to knives and forks could not suddenly switch to chopsticks. Privately the couple concluded that Mao’s regime represented a return to a feudal dictatorship. Prudence didn’t work; the two suffered mightily in the anti-Rightist campaigns and Gu was hounded to death during the Cultural Revolution.
MacKinnon as a sympathetic biographer accepts Chen’s dismissal of so-called bourgeois economists and reforms that would merely increase individual profit without eliminating feudal landlordism and warlordism; “especially odious” were the “Anglo-Americanists” who used the term “farmer” instead of “peasant” (106). He makes good use of Yung-chen Chiang’s Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001) to show that Chen beat Mao to the punch with his story of landlord, rich, middle, poor, and landless peasant classes. But he goes beyond Chiang to say that the story is “convincing and widely recognized as fitting reality” and that Mao’s subsequent deployment of the terms was “cadre-driven, unscientific, and very simple” (though he does not explain how Chen’s use was scientific) (108–109). Yet there is consensus that late imperial China was not feudal, but rather a national market economy first transformed by world trade and then devastated by lack of competent governmental power.
MacKinnon offers absorbing insight into Chen’s world—his intellectual achievements and moral path—showing that the revolution in power was not the one Chen had legitimized. Chen argued that only class revolution could liberate agrarian China, while the bourgeois “farmers not peasants” school said that national peace, land reform, schools, roads, and rule of law might work. Neither group knew how to create power; Mao did.
Charles W. Hayford
Independent Scholar, Evanston