China’s bold program of reforms launched in the late 1970s—the move to a market economy and the opening to the outside world—ended the political chaos and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution and sparked China’s unprecedented economic boom. Yet, while the reforms made possible a rising standard of living for the majority of China’s population, they came at the cost of a weakening central government, increasing inequalities, and fragmenting society.

The essays of Barry Naughton, Joseph Fewsmith, Paul H. B. Godwin, Murray Scot Tanner, Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O’Brien, Tianjian Shi, Martin King Whyte, Thomas P. Bernstein, Dorothy J. Solinger, David S. G. Goodman, Kristen Parris, Merle Goldman, Elizabeth J. Perry, and Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko analyze the contradictory impact of China’s economic reforms on its political system and social structure. They explore the changing patterns of the relationship between state and society that may have more profound significance for China than all the revolutionary movements that have convulsed it through most of the twentieth century.

Paul Lafargue, the disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, helped to found the first French Marxist party in 1882. Over the next three decades, he served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. During these years, which ended with the dramatic suicides of Lafargue and his wife, French socialism, and the Marxist party within it, became a significant political force.

In an earlier volume, Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842-1882, Leslie Derfler emphasized family identity and the origin of French Marxism. Here, he explores Lafargue's political strategies, specifically his break with party co-founder Jules Guesde in the Boulanger and Dreyfus episodes and over the question of socialist-syndicalist relations. Derfler shows Lafargue's importance as both political activist and theorist. He describes Lafargue's role in the formulation of such strategies as the promotion of a Second Workingmen's International, the pursuit of reform within the framework of the existent state but opposition to any socialist participation in nonsocialist governments, and the subordination of trade unionism to political action. He emphasizes Lafargue's pioneering efforts to apply Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism.

Despite the crucial part they played in the social and political changes of the past century and the heritage they left, the first French Marxists are not widely known, especially in the English-speaking world. This important critical biography of Lafargue, the most audacious of their much maligned theorists, enables us to trace the options open to Marxist socialism as well as its development during a critical period of transition.

Paul Lafargue, disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, was among the most important persons giving organized political expression to Marxism in France. He helped found both the first French collectivist party and the first French Marxist party. He was the first Marxist to sit in the French legislature and for three decades served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. With his wife, Laura, he translated the Communist Manifesto and other works, introducing and applying Marxist thought in France.

Demonstrating an almost seamless web between intellectual and family history, Leslie Derfler relates ideas and family identity in this account of the first forty years of Paul Lafargue’s life. Lafargue, like his famous father-in-law, called for ideological purity and demanded total hostility to anarchists and reformists. He insisted on economic determinism, the primacy of the concept of the class struggle, and the theory of surplus value. But he made his own contributions as well, particularly in his insistence on rejecting the domination of bourgeois values. Lafargue’s most famous pamphlet, The Right To Be Lazy, showed the advantages that labor could derive by rejecting the bourgeois work ethic. An intellectual of power, he pioneered in the application of Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism.

Born in Cuba of mixed racial descent, Lafargue joined in demonstrations as a medical student in Paris in the 1860s and was forced into exile. Resuming his studies in London, he became a fixture in the Marx household until he married Laura Marx and moved to Paris. There he worked to expand the influence of the International Workingmen’s Association, but fled to Spain following the general repression after the fall of the Paris Commune. He continued his efforts on behalf of Marxism in Spain and then for ten years in London before returning to France, where he helped to found the new Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français, in 1882.

In 2009, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies convened a major conference to discuss the health and longevity of China’s ruling system and to consider a fundamental question: After three decades of internal strife and turmoil, followed by an era of reform, entrepreneurialism, and internationalization, is the PRC here for the dynastic long haul?

Bringing together scholars and students of China from around the world, the gathering witnessed an energetic exchange of views on four interrelated themes: polities, social transformations, wealth and well-being, and culture, belief, and practice. Edited and expanded from the original conference papers, the wide-ranging essays in this bilingual volume remain true to the conference’s aim: to promote open discussion of the past, present, and future of the People’s Republic of China.

Socialist doctrines had an important influence on Korean writers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century. From the 1910s through the 1940s, a veritable wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the cultural scene with differing agendas as well as shared demands for equality and social justice. In The Proletarian Wave, Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture by focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression. The book combines a general overview of the literary left with the intellectual portraits of four writers whose works exemplify the stylistic range and colonial inflection of socialist culture in a rapidly modernizing Korea. Bridging Marxist theory and postcolonial studies, Park confronts Western preconceptions about third-world socialist cultures while interrogating modern cultural history from a post–Cold War global perspective.

The Proletarian Wave provides the first historical account in English of the complex interrelations of literature and socialist ideology in colonial Korea. It details the origins, development, and influence of a movement that has shaped twentieth-century Korean politics and aesthetics alike through an analysis that simultaneously engages some of the most debated and pressing issues of literary historiography, Marxist criticism, and postcolonial cultural studies.