Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Part I: Lived Space 1. Through the Walls: Everyday Life in the University 2. Untrained Bodies and Frugal Habits Part II: Intellectual Space 3. The Displacement of Learning Part III: Political Space 4. Learning Politics 5. Improper Places Part IV: Social Space 6. Between Streets and Monuments 7. The Pedagogy of the City Epilogue 8. The End of Students? Notes Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Fabio Lanza's study of student activism in early-twentieth-century Beijing explodes the boundaries of our understanding of the critical intellectual revolution that we refer to as the May Fourth movement. -- Madeleine Zelin, author of The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship In Early Modern China A well-crafted and thought-provoking work. Lanza compels us to confront the historical legacy of the May Fourth movement in China-and student politics in general-in a radically new light. This is the most sophisticated attempt by a historian to reinterpret an episode that has always occupied a central place in the historiography--and in the imagination-of modern China. -- Michael Tsin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The May Fourth movement is one of the most studied events in modern Chinese history, yet Lanza has come up with a strikingly original and compelling new way to approach it. Theoretically sophisticated but written with verve, Behind the Gate places campus life and campus politics of the early 1900s into an exciting perspective that shifts our attention to issues of space, highlighting the process by which 'the student' emerged as a significant social type and political actor. This book is an important addition to the rich literature about one of the great turning points in China's recent past. -- Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine A complete reconceptualization, this book challenges us to think about many of the categories of historical analysis to which we have become accustomed. An unsettling and, for that reason, stimulating read. -- Rebecca E. Karl, New York University Lanza makes student politics come alive by presenting in vivid detail the everyday routines of going to class, taking exams, finding a place to live, buying books, socializing, and even choosing what to wear, and then explaining how these lived realities contributed to the extraordinary movements and events authored by students and in which they were swept up. To be young and modern in the old capital's avant-garde universities was a complicated business and deserves the nuanced and theoretically sophisticated methods Lanza musters to get inside the heads and habits, dreams and anxieties, of a generation of political activists and educational pioneers. -- David Strand, Dickinson University

About the Author

Fabio Lanza hails from Venice, Italy, and earned his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history at Columbia University. He is assistant professor of history at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Reviews

this book is theoretically sophisticated, prodigiously researched, and eloquently written. The China Beat Well-crafted and insightful. -- Paul J. Bailey The China Quarterly