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Deng's Revolution: Young Intellectuals in 1980s China. By Ruth Cherrington. [Great Britain: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. viii + 232 pp. £45.00. ISBN 0-333-67099-X.]

Deng's Revolution is a generational portrait of intellectual youth who came of age during the 1980s, the decade when China began to move to the market and open up to the outside world. Ruth Cherrington describes this generation's defining characteristics, their differences from their predecessors, and the characteristics of succeeding post-reform generations. The 1980s generation starts with those who took the first entrance exams for the universities in 1977 and ends with the 4 June 1989 crackdown on student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Her study is based on primary data collected in China, secondary sources and interviews. The interviews are not a scientific sample: they were conducted with a few dozen students from elite Chinese universities. In the 1950s China's intellectual youth were shaped by idealism and in the 1960s and early 1970s by Cultural Revolution political activism that resulted in political disillusionment. Cherrington characterizes the 1980s generation as shaped by a growing disaffection. Although entering college with high intellectual aspirations, these aspirations gradually turned to feelings of cynicism as they discovered that success was increasingly measured by economic attainment. And the new rich, the getihu, were becoming rich without any education. Consequently, in the course of the decade, improvement in economic status displaced academic achievement as this generation's goal. At the same time, Cherrington describes the variety of "crazes" that consumed this generation, such as cultural re-examination, roots-seeking, Westernization, going abroad and an unofficial youth subculture influenced by Taiwan and Hong Kong popular culture. As economic success brought more individual autonomy, members of this generation tended to do what they wanted rather than what they were told to do, whether in their personal relationships or in their choice of reading. Although the majority of Cherrington's subjects became concerned with making money and were unconcerned with politics, they did not accept the dominant political orthodoxy. Cherrington depicts them as "ambivalent or alienated conformists." Around the mid 1980s they began to develop an antagonistic generational style. They were without legitimate avenues for exercising their feelings until the demonstrations in Spring 1989 gave them the opportunity to play a part as critics of government. Their participation revealed one continuity with their literati tradition their perception of themselves as a vanguard with an historic role to play. While the 1989 demonstrations shocked them out of their complacency, their suppression on 4 June dashed a brief period of