In August 1924, the Chinese writer and poet Guo Moruo wrote to his friend Cheng Fangwu that “Marxism [was] the only truth of [their] times” (p. 38). In January 1923, Guo had written that he, and others “worshipped Confucius [. . .] [who] was an ever-vigorous giant with great talent and perfect character, like Kant and Goethe” (p. 93). What had happened in the intervening months? In From the May Fourth Movement to Communist Revolution, Xiaoming Chen describes the development of Guo Moruo's thinking in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Guo initially sought a synthesis of some elements of Chinese and western intellectual traditions as a solution for his own predicaments, China's national and intellectual crisis, and what he saw as an international crisis. Latterly, he advocated a synthesis of Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism. The particular relevance in studying Guo Moruo's intellectual development, the author argues, lies in the fact that unlike many of his contemporaries, Guo was not resolutely opposed to Confucianism, but strove for a synthesis of Chinese tradition and western modernity (pp. 53, 93).

The author's exploration of Guo's intellectual development is structured around four themes: Guo's personal life, his nationalism, his cosmopolitanism and his quest for a solution to what he perceived as modern China's intellectual crisis. In the first chapter, the author sets the biographical background for his later exploration of particular themes in Guo's thinking. Like many other Chinese intellectuals of his time, Guo received his university education abroad. While studying medicine in Japan, he was exposed to some of the classics of German literature, notably Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust. Guo had moved to Japan from his native Sichuan chiefly to escape the unhappiness of an arranged marriage; in Japan, he began to live with a Japanese common-law wife, with whom he also fathered a child, to the intense disapproval of his family. Given his turbulent personal life, and his unhappiness with the medical profession, what Guo saw as Goethe's advocacy of breaking social and moral norms seemed to offer a solution to his personal dilemma (p. 26). “Goetheanism”, in the author's phrase, offered temporary solace; but Guo still found that he was unable to prosper as a writer and poet while he “felt most painfully society's oppression and exploitation of him as an individual and its suppression of the development of his literary talent” (p. 37). The key moment in Guo's intellectual biography was his conversion to Marxism-Leninism through reading, in early 1924, Kawakami Hajime's Social Organization and Social Revolution, a work intended to introduce Marxism-Leninism to Japanese readers.

Marxism-Leninism, as expounded by Kawakami, seemed to solve Guo Moruo's financial problems, since, in a Communist society, he would be able to earn a living as a writer (p. 38). Marxism-Leninism was also attractive for other reasons, though. The Leninist understanding of imperialism helped Guo to make sense of the imperialist presence in China (pp. 62–63); and a Marxist-Leninist revolution in China as part of “the global Communist battle to uproot capitalism and imperialism” (p. 64) offered the perspective of ending China's national humiliation. Marxism-Leninism thus seemed a means towards national salvation to Guo, as the author argues in the second chapter. Guo was also greatly excited by what he saw as the similarities between the Confucian cosmopolitanist ideal of Great Harmony (datong) and the Marxist ideal of Communism. In the third chapter, “Toward the Liberation of Mankind”, the author argues that, under the impression of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Guo came to regard Marxism-Leninism as an effective means of realising datong in the modern world (p. 71).

In the fourth chapter, “Toward a Solution of Modern China's Intellectual Crisis”, the author argues that, as Guo Moruo matured intellectually and became an influential writer, his personal search for ideological guidance turned into a conscious pursuit of providing a solution for his country's intellectual crisis, a crisis that at its core consisted of the “intellectual tension between China's traditional ideological and value system and [. . .] modern Western thinking” (pp. 91–92). Guo initially developed a synthesis of Confucianism (without its social ethics, or lijiao), Daoism, modern western science, and “Goetheanism” (p. 97). In this synthesis, Goethean individualism compensated for the lack of individual freedom in Confucianism, and western science compensated for what Guo regarded as the absence of science in Confucianism and Taoism. On the other hand, Confucian moralism, utopianism and egalitarianism compensated for the “lack of an elaborate social ideal in Goetheanism” (p. 97). Under the influence of Kawakami Hajime's Social Organization and Social Revolution, Guo turned to Marxism-Leninism as a solution for China's intellectual crisis, arriving at a synthesis of Confucianism, western science and Marxism-Leninism, in which Confucianism provided moral guidance and Marxism-Leninism guided socioeconomic progress and reforms (p. 99).

Surprisingly, in a book that devotes so much attention to studying Goethe's influence on Guo Moruo, the author rarely quotes directly either from The Sorrows of Young Werther or Faust, the two works to which Guo most frequently refers, leaving the reader instead to rely on Guo's own rendering of Goethe's text. One cannot help but feel that a comparison of Guo's own perception of Goethe's works with the original text would have been illuminating in explaining the particular aspects of Goethe's work, romantic love and an interest in the natural sciences which Guo chose to focus on. My main criticism of Chen's book, however, is that he unreflectively reproduces Chen's perceptions of contemporary politics and society. One such example is Guo's notion of being oppressed by capitalist society (pp. 37, 48, 51, 52) – exactly how was Guo oppressed? How does a writer's inability to earn a living through his writing constitute oppression? Readers may also be surprised at how uncritically the author reproduces Guo's perception of the “patriotism and heroism” of the IRA (p. 72). Also, Chen might have stated more clearly that the kind of “western-style romance” which Guo longed for in preference to an arranged marriage (p. 13) was a fairly novel phenomenon in western society too, arranged marriage having been a common phenomenon in western societies until and including the nineteenth century, particularly in elite circles. Still, these are minor points in a carefully researched book.

In conclusion, the author argues that “Guo's conversion to [the Chinese Communist Revolution] represented the revolution's path from the May Fourth movement” (p. 111). While I am not convinced that Guo Moruo's intellectual path is representative of that taken by every other left-leaning intellectual in Republican China, the author has demonstrated with great clarity how Guo came to change his views from a synthesis of Confucianism, Daoism, western science and Goethean Romanticism to a synthesis of Confucianism, western science and Marxism-Leninism. Chen has produced a fascinating study of one Chinese intellectual's journey to Communism. Insomuch as the “overall tension between Guo's Confucian and Marxist thinking” (p. 50), the resolution of which is at the heart of the author's argument, is emblematic of the tension between acceptance and rejection of foreign examples inherent in the Chinese modernisation project, the author's description of Guo Moruo's intellectual journey towards Communism is an important contribution to our understanding of modern Chinese intellectual history.