China's Grandmothers: Gender, Family, and Ageing from Late Qing to Twenty-First Century Diana Lary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 261 pp. £22.99 (pbk). ISBN 9781009073622

how they are shaped by censorship, the author examines how both works highlight the displacement of participatory publics in a post-Tiananmen era. Chen’s book does an admirable job at remembering and examining works related to the Movement, though its argument on censorship as productive is not necessarily as novel as it claims to be. The theorization could benefit from a more rigorous engagement with the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, including the latter’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997, Routledge), and Geremie Barmé’s chapter “History for the masses,” which suggests that “every policy shift in recent [Chinese] history has involved the rehabilitation, re-evaluation and revision of history and historical figures” (in Jonathan Unger (ed.) Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China, Routledge, 1993, p. 260). It is also unfortunate for the book to have overlooked Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, the discursive roots of which continue to fuel the censorious practice of denunciating objectionable works while establishing exemplary ones for writers to model in post-socialist China today. Chen is impassioned in his commitment to calling out “the banning of books and films,” “the tailoring of memory” and the “molding of the public.” (p. 175) However, the writing style tends towards the lyrical and, at times, the hyperbolic. These rhetorical flourishes often dilute the cogency of ideas in the book. Just one of the numerous examples is, “TV programming glorified soldiers and their selfless sacrifice and (re)called the audience to the republic forged in the flames of war and to the canonical tradition of obedience to organization” (p. 71). Concluding with the notion that the “public-making of censorship is always a work in progress” (p. 173), the book judiciously links the state discourse of “prohibition and proselytization” (p. 11) on Tiananmen to COVID-19 in the conclusion chapter. For scholars, university tutors, students and China observers who work on Chinese literature, cinema, history and politics related to the Movement, this book will be of interest and relevance.