Fabio Lanza has written a subtle, engaging book about the invention of the category “student” at May Fourth Beijing University (Beida). Lanza's interest in students is at the university level and is fundamentally political; he does not discuss non-university, or non-Beida, students and is unconcerned with those who were not political or politicized. Thus when he talks about the invention of “students” Lanza means university students as self-consciously political beings. But that is not all. In approach Lanza is inspired by French philosopher Alain Badiou's assertion that there is such a thing as “true politics” and that this “can only come into existence by putting the state at a distance” (p. 5). Lanza argues that students arrived as expressers of true politics, and thus as “students,” at Beida between 1917 and 1920 because, for the first time, they embraced a politics that was not first and foremost about or in...
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