Recent BooksNovember/December 2019 217in Lebanon, Iraqi militias, and the
Houthis in Yemen. With or without
nuclear weapons, Iran can project power
through much o the Arab world. What it
lacks in advanced weaponry it makes up
for in granular knowledge o the region,
experience Äghting various kinds o wars,
and superior intelligence gathering.
Although Iranians are weary o sanctions,
the government remains strong, and in
the absence o an invasion by an outside
power, regime change seems unlikely.
Spear to the West: Thought and
Recruitment in Violent Jihadism
BY STEPHEN CHAN. Hurst, 2019, 176 pp.
This small tome is packed and requires
some rereading to fully grasp the argu-
ment. Chan, the founding dean o the
University o London’s School o Orien-
tal and African Studies, dismisses the
notion that violent jihadism feeds o
poverty and marginalization. Rather,
jihadism draws from a line o reasoning
that is “modernist” and poses a stark
alternative to liberal globalization. Chan
dips in and out o brie sketches o inÁuen-
tial thinkers (including the medieval
Sunni theologian Ibn Taymiyyah and
the twentieth-century writer and activist
Sayyid Qutb); he selects them based on
the number o clicks each Ägure gets in
Internet searches. He undermines some
o his argument by conceding that
contemporary jihadis don’t always read
these thinkers. The author outlines the
12 steps that lead to the online recruit-
ment o jihadis, but he oers no evi-
dence that this method is especially
prevalent or important. Chan’s argument
can be a bit hard to follow, but it has at
least two major implications: only
those capable o speaking within the
ideological terms o jihadis can counter
their appeal, and counterterrorism
strategists must consider using the
Internet in ways they have not yet tried.Asia and PaciÄc
Andrew J. Nathan
China’s New Red Guards: The Return of
Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong
BY JUDE BLANCHETTE. Oxford
University Press, 2019, 224 pp.Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots
Intellectuals
BY SEBASTIAN VEG. Columbia
University Press, 2019, 368 pp.A
contentious struggle between
reformers and conservatives
marked Chinese politics in the
Ärst decade o Deng Xiaoping’s re-
forms. That battle seemed to have
disappeared after the 1989 Tiananmen
crackdown, but in fact it had migrated
from politics to intellectual life. As the
post-Deng leadership was busy shrink-
ing the role o state-owned enterprises
and pushing China deeper into the
global trading economy, intellectuals on
the left used academic conferences and
the Internet to mount critiques o
neoliberalism and globalization, arguing
that these policies coddled capitalists,
hurt workers, and sold out China’s
sovereignty. Although some leftists called
for a “second Cultural Revolution,” they
did not use violence, as the Red Guards
had done in an earlier era. But they
shared with the Red Guards the same