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degradation and contempt. Questions of reform or revolution, democracy or proletarian dictatorship were deeply exercising the minds of those bent on national salvation, personal power, or both.
Men seized on new ideas and later changed their attitudes under the influence of both local pressures and growing familiarity with western political theories. The moves of the major actors rarely seem to have been clear-cut or consistent.
The aim of the author here, Michael Y.L. Luk (a Senior History Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong) is to trace the thinking of leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and their attempts to develop an agreed ideology. He is also concerned to show how the outcome of these attempts would in time affect the party's whole political destiny.
This is a book for scholars and students, a dissertation not aimed at the general reader. The interplay of ideas on the part of the activists and theoreticians has its own dense vocabulary, and the writing and presentation are uncompromisingly academic.
However Luk fully achieves his purpose. The book records the varying convictions of visionaries and men of action at a crucial time in the history of China and gives a penetrating view of the way men thought and the policies they accepted in those years of warlords, Sun Yat-sen republicanism, and struggling political parties.
Two influences emerge clearly first, that of the Russian Revolution echoing round the world, and the writings of Lenin on colonialism. Secondly the indigenous thinking of left-wing Chinese intellectuals, notably Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Why did the Chinese avant-garde listen to the voice of the Russians and brush aside the teaching of a Dewey or Hu-shih? Almost until the official founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 it was the Americans who had exercised a major influence. But new universities and hospitals and the YMCA seem to have provided an insufficient answer to the frustrations of Chinese life. Revolution was in the air and it was the Russian experts who moved in to show the Chinese enthusiasts how to organise it.
Yet although Marxism-Leninism entered China as a brand-new