Numerous scholarly works on modern China explain the ideological concept of the masses, but until now no full-length monograph has focused on the more volatile, antecedent figure of the crowd. Tie Xiao's Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China provides a long-needed, rigorous examination of the crowd as an intellectual concern and dilemma of representation for thinkers and writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Astutely aware of the interpretive ambivalence that the crowd produces, Xiao approaches the crowd in its emergent state, prior to political reification as the masses. The narrative that Xiao skillfully develops over the course of the book shows how the crowd—a protean and seductive manifestation of irrationality and excess—was transformed into the subject of modern Chinese history.
In the introduction, Xiao frames the crowd as a thoroughly global and modern object of fascination. Rather than a preexisting social or cultural category, the crowd...
