Anarchism was an important political force (in intellectual circles) in the 1920s, as debates raged over what type of modernization China should pursue.

Dirlik's book, consisting of 8 independent essays on various aspects of the Chinese anarchist movement [examples: anarchism and nationalism, anarchism in the May 4th movement], gives these forgotten idealists there due. He describes the many branches of anarchist thought and political action, the prominent figures, and their intellectual influences (Kropotkin, French Socialism, several indigenous Chinese influences). Also prominent are Dirlik's accounts of anarchists' interactions and arguments with the Nationalists and the Communists. The anarchists had both ideological and strategic overlap with both groups, but the anarchists' aversion to powerful statist structures eventually led to schisms with both.

Yet the anarchists had influences on the Communist movement they came to repudiate. This might explain why Chinese Communism had some grass roots democratic content; limited, to be sure, but nevertheless distinguishable from the pure submission required by the Russian Bolsheviks' tyrannical governance. The anarchists also influenced Mao's thought in: the importance of mutual aid, women's liberation, the idea of combining manual and mental labor, the goal of eliminating the differences between town and country, mass education as a prerequisite to true political transformation, etc.

The anarchist ideal of statelessness is likely utopian, yet their critique of Bolshevism, so eloquently recounted in this book, is highly relevant today. The anarchist leaders of the 1920s would doubtlessly say "we told you so" about the Chinese communist movement, that despite some impressive social justice achievements, brought along with it human rights abuses by the state and eventually widespread alienation.

The "New Left" intellectual movement in China today (Cui Zhiyuan is a prominent US based participant in this debate) is searching for a more democratic and just form of modernization than offered by the liberals (both inside the party and out) pushing capitalism and a narrow form of democratization. The Chinese anarchist movement of the 1920s, as Dirlik communicates, is a wonderful reservoir of intellectual thought--and should, and probably is, helpful to this New Left movement.

This collection puts together various and crucial essays in cultural criticism with poems and polemics; it is a much used and innovative text in Asia/Pacific cultural studies. It calls into question any easy US assumpttion of what "Asia Pacific" means in this paradoxically transnational and local era: this collection opens up the Pacific to new approaches, and shoud be read and used, as it is, from Taipei to Los Angeles,

This is a masterful and indepth look at the emergence of Chinese Chinese communism. This book is not an easy read, but it is facinating and well written. Dirlik argues that Marxism and Communism were merely another couple of Western ideas that Chinese radicals were examining at the begining of the 20th century. Dirlik examines the influence of anarchism and other philosophies on Chinese thinking, and then tracks how Marxism and then Communism came to dominate radical thinking. He arguse that Marxist philosophy did not cause the creation of Communist groups, but rather that groups formed to study and then to propigate Bolshivism while they were still struggling to understand Marxism. If one wants to REALLY understand the how Communism sprouted in China, this is the book to read.

This book provides a timely and persuasive critique of the metropolitan (post-colonial) academism. It succseesfully links third world criticism with its long tradition while incorporating it to the contemporary global capitalism. It is a response of the critical left to "silencing past" by the post-colonials and seeking the ways to revitalize third world praxis in a new world of global wild capitalism which may not be felt properly from New York!

With caustic lucidity and splendid geopolitical care, Arif Dilik surveys taken-for-granted discursive regimes of postcolonial study and puts the history and place-based imagining back into over-extended concepts like 'hybridity,' diaspora', and 'identity.' The result is a helpful and pragmatic collection of essays full of splendid insights into the dialectics of globalization and localization and the spaces and histories 'in between.'