| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 374 words from this article are provided below; about 711 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Pitman B. Potter. From Leninist Discipline to Socialist Legalism: Peng Zhen on Law and Political Authority in the PRC. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 259. $55.00.

In this short book, Pitman B. Potter has taken upon himself a formidable challenge: to write an interesting and compelling political and legal biography of an individual who was, for most of his life, the quintessential (but powerful) Leninist apparatchik. I'm no specialist in legal literature, but I would imagine that this is a fairly novel genre as far as legal biographies go. Unlike American legal historians who dissect their subjects' law school papers, diaries, and famous cases and decisions, Potter focuses on the public speeches and essays penned by a man who was not intellectually innovative, whose political fortunes largely depended on those of his political patron, and whose role in the legal system was mainly that of a hard-line enforcer of the party line. "A major aspect of Peng's political personae," Potter writes, "was his ruthless pursuit of party goals set for him by his superiors" (p. 14). Peng Zhen (1902–1997) was a conservative, even by the standards of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As Potter recounts in the first four chapters, Peng fulfilled many roles: he excelled in party organization; he zealously ferreted out various "enemies" within the party and outside of it before and after the Communist victory in 1949; he served as Beijing's mayor for many years prior to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), at which time he was ousted by Mao Zedong. After the Cultural Revolution, he was politically rehabilitated and served as a leader of China's legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC). With the exception of a mild critique of Mao over the disastrous Great Leap Forward and resistance to Mao's radicalization of politics in the early 1960s (feelings that were widely shared among the CCP elite), Peng did not display any characteristic that would make him a worthy subject for a full-scale biography. Even in Potter's generally positive appraisal of his life, Peng rarely established policy, set new directions, or contributed to innovative thinking in political theory or jurisprudence. So why, then, did the author devote prodigious amounts of time researching his life?

. . .

There are about 711 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.