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leftist students who try to support
workers’ strikes. Yet on the evidence o
these two books, it is unlikely that even a
regime as repressive as Xi’s can com-
pletely stiÁe Chinese intellectual life.Special Duty: A History of the Japanese
Intelligence Community
BY RICHARD J. SAMUELS. Cornell
University Press, 2019, 384 pp.In the early twentieth century, adven-
turous Japanese businessmen, diplo-
mats, and military ocers produced
on-the-ground information that helped
Japan defeat Russia and invade China.
But Japanese intelligence gathering
went into decline thereafter. Military
domination o intelligence work fos-
tered groupthink, which led to spec-
tacular mistakes, such as underestimat-
ing the U.S. response to the attack on
Pearl Harbor. After World War II,
Japan’s intelligence agencies suered
from weak public support, tur battles,
a failure to share information, and
constant leaking. With the end o the
Cold War, the rise o China, the grow-
ing threat from North Korea, and the
relative decline o U.S. power, a series
o Japanese prime ministers started
strengthening the system. They tight-
ened classiÄcation rules, invested in
cybersecurity, and established the
Defense Intelligence Headquarters and,
later, the National Security Council to
improve communication among agen-
cies. This engrossing history o Japanese
intelligence demonstrates how such
changes have made Japan a better
security partner for the United States
while preparing the country to stand on
its own i the U.S. security guarantee
loses its credibility.veneration o Mao Zedong as the avatar
o an egalitarian, anti-Western develop-
ment model. With his rich description
o personalities and issues, Blanchette
brings these sometimes windy debates to
life, revealing a little-known inner script
o Chinese politics.
During the same period, other thinkers
retreated from the ambitious theorizing
that had been fashionable in the 1980s to
focus on the concrete problems o migrant
workers, sex workers, petitioners, and
victims o Maoist persecution. Veg
thoughtfully situates these “grassroots
intellectuals” in a social history o Chinese
thinkers and delves into their personal
histories, their work, and their debates
with one another. They used Äction and
essays, newspaper reports, oral history,
documentary Älms, blogs, and lawsuits to
argue for creative freedom, expose the
crimes o the Mao years, and promote
social justice and the rule o law. Their
program converged with that o the
Maoist left in its concern for the under-
privileged, but they did not share the left’s
hatred o the West or its endorsement
o authoritarianism. The authorities for
the most part tolerated the leftists—partly
because many o them came from elite
Communist families—but subjected the
grassroots liberals to censorship, tax
investigations, closings o publications
and think tanks, detentions, and arrests.
Since he came to power in 2012, Xi
Jinping has acted on the belie o
Blanchette’s “new Red Guards” that
the state must be dominant in order to
withstand attacks from enemies at home
and abroad. He also shares their view that
any criticism o Mao is an attack on the
legitimacy o the Chinese Communist
Party. The regime clamps down hard on
liberal writers and activists and arrests