Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xxi, 282 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$24.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-108-82261-9.
In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrated its hundredth anniversary. For this occasion, renowned China historians Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Hans van de Ven assembled well-known scholars to offer a view of a century of CCP history in what they call a “mosaic” (3), inspired by the “BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects” (xvi). Referring to the occasion of the CCP anniversary, the editors diagnose that there are two large grand narratives of Party history present in Chinese and international media¾one praising the Party and its history and the other focusing on its mistakes and weaknesses.
It is precisely the goal of the editors to position themselves in relation to these narratives of history of the CCP—and yet, at the same time, not to position themselves. They do not want to “offer an alternative grand narrative” of CCP history, but rather to present a “more nuanced, more human sense” (3) of what it meant and means to live with CCP rule and participate in the project of the Chinese Revolution. Additionally, they strive to demonstrate that the history of the CCP was not a centrally orchestrated, strictly top-down development that followed a single plan and dogma. Instead, the broad selection of essays in the book—such as portraits of Party intellectuals like Wang Shiwei and Wang Yuanhua, or even former General Secretary Zhao Ziyang—is supposed to show that there was a multitude of alternative voices and potential historic trajectories embedded in the Party itself.
To fulfill these self-defined goals, the book is divided into ten main chapters. Each chapter is dedicated to the story of one personality considered representative of a particular decade of CCP history. All essays are connected with short introductory texts of roughly two pages each, describing a larger historic background of the decade in question. The essays are supplemented with a collection of photographs in the middle of the book that are considered exemplary of the personalities portrayed and the time periods discussed. The volume is completed with an afterword entitled “The Party and the World” that discusses the CCP’s and China’s engagement with international actors throughout the Party’s history, up to the present day. While the intention of this chapter to complete the history and international role of the Party and China is obvious, it remains somehow detached from the rest of the book because it engineers a strong shift in subject matter away from the micro-history of the CCP that is offered throughout the volume.
This micro-history as it is told by the different contributors certainly achieves the goal the editors set out in the introduction. By portraying very diverse life stories of personalities that shaped Party history, or are representative of developments in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—like Zhang Jishun’s essay on the actress Shangguan Yunzhu or Yang Guobin’s portrayal of netizen Guo Meimei—the book provides a vivid and colourful portrait of a party that so much seeks to create and enforce a uniform understanding of its history. Some chapters in particular, like van de Ven’s depiction of Wang Ming, offer insight into how the Party attempts to narrate history and how reality is more complex than the official narrative. Others, like Elizabeth Perry’s depiction of Liu Shaoqi’s wife and former Chinese first lady Wang Guangmei, show the conflicted and detailed personalities behind simple judgments of good and evil, pointing to possible alternative visions of the Party’s development and trajectory, such as Mühlhahn’s portrayal of Zhao Ziyang or Timothy Cheek’s essay on Wang Shiwei. Therefore, the goal of providing a “more nuanced, more human sense” (3) of CCP history is well achieved and provides for an interesting piece of reading and welcome alternative to the grand narratives of CCP history that are advanced in the context of the Party’s anniversary.
However, while being a great strength of the book, this mosaic of life stories and micro-histories of the CCP is at the same time also its greatest weakness. Exactly because the goal of the book is not to provide a grand master narrative but rather to portray individuals and their stories in relation to the CCP, it is missing exactly that: a master narrative that ties the book together. Even though short intermediate texts attempt to provide background information about how the individual being portrayed fits into overall Party history and the decade in question, the chapters are only loosely connected; every chapter can be read on its own, independent of the other chapters.
This issue also raises the question of the target audience of the book. In the acknowledgments, the editors state that their addressed target group is a “broader audience” (xvi). If this broader audience is an audience generally interested in China and the history of the Party, but without any background knowledge on recent Chinese history, the volume might be too specialized and lacking exactly the grand lines that hold the individual portraits in the book together. The dilemma with this is that for an academic audience (whom the editors are not primarily addressing in the first place), the book might not be specialized enough, and the list of selected further readings could rather be the point of reference of choice. Nevertheless, for the stated and very large goal of the volume¾to introduce various shades of grey into a black and white reading of CCP history¾it offers a very welcome and very readable contribution to broader debates on the Chinese Communist Party.
Carolin Kautz
Goettingen University, Goettingen