Chapter Six
The Anarchist Alternative in Chinese Socialism, 1921–1927

The appearance and rapid ascendancy of Marxian communism (or Bolshevism) in the 1920s has long overshadowed in historians’ consciousness the role anarchism played in nourishing social revolutionary thinking and activity for the previous decade and a half, which contributed directly to the founding of the Communist party of China in 1921. Well past the establishment of communism, anarchism continued to serve as a fecund source of social revolutionary ideals that kept alive a radical alternative to Bolshevism. Anarchist thinking and activity during this period overlapped with the Communist party’s conception of revolution, but also sharply differed with it on questions of strategy and the ultimate premises of revolution.

Communist party spokesmen (then and now) have charged that anarchism was a petit-bourgeois ideology that offered no viable strategy of revolution. By the late twenties, when the decline of anarchism as a contender in the revolution had become all too apparent, anarchists themselves were willing to concede some validity to this assessment. Anarchists’ behavior showed a fickleness that belied their professions of commitment to the cause they espoused; even those, such as Ou Shengbai and Huang Lingshuang, who played leadership roles in the movement seemed to give priority to personal interest over a sustained commitment to the movement.[368] This may have been a general characteristic of radical activism in the May Fourth period. Initially, the founders of the Communist party, too, seemed uncertain in their commitment to the cause; in their case, however, the necessary submission to organizational discipline gradually brought about some regularity in behavior. Anarchists, who continued to insist on the ultimate autonomy of the individual and resisted organizational discipline, had no comparable institutional frame of reference to give direction to their activity. In the absence of organizational coherence, there were no checks on interpretive autonomy; and ideological activity, too, remained self-centered and fluid in its orientation. The proliferation of anarchist groups in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, ironically, enhanced the impression of diffuseness and transiency. About the only thing that unified the anarchists was opposition to other revolutionaries (especially the Communist party).

We must remember that the ineffectiveness of the anarchist approach to revolution was due in some measure to the anarchists’ conscious self-limitation in the choice of revolutionary strategy, as a consequence of their efforts to remain true to the revolutionary ideals embedded in the anarchist vision. In terms of specific revolutionary tactics, and at the local level, anarchists were quite creative. They took the lead in China in devising tactics of popular mobilization that, although without consequence in their hands, would be put to effective use by the Communist party in its own quest for revolution. The contrast has much to tell us about the ingredients that made for revolutionary success in the circumstances of Chinese society, and also about the price that revolutionary success was to exact in the attenuation of revolutionary ideals.

Anarchists demand our attention, not for who they were or what they accomplished, but because against a revolutionary strategy that presupposed a necessary compromise of revolutionary goals in order to confront the demands of immediate political necessity, they reaffirmed a revolutionary consciousness that provides an indispensable critical perspective from the Left on the unfolding of the Chinese revolution. Like anarchism worldwide (with one or two exceptions), anarchism in China went into a decline during the decade following the October Revolution in Russia and would disappear as a significant force in radical politics by the late twenties. The decline of anarchism was in historical hindsight not just the decline of anarchist influence, it also signaled the disappearance of a social revolutionary vision that had fashioned radical thinking for the previous two decades.

The significance of anarchism does not lie merely in the critical perspective it affords to historians and socialists. In the eyes of contemporaries, anarchism was a serious contender in the Chinese revolution, and, at least until the mid-twenties, there were more anarchists than Marxian communists in China. So long as Chinese radicalism retained the exuberant idealism that had characterized it at the turn of the decade, anarchism continued to impress radicals for the authenticity of its revolutionary vision. In the midst of the mass mobilization of the 1920s, the revolutionary movement in China appeared not as the work of revolutionaries (as it had earlier and would again after 1927) but as the outburst of a spontaneous popular revolutionary fervor that not only sought to break with the past but also promised seemingly limitless possibilities for the future. In this environment, anarchism exerted considerable appeal, and revolutionaries continued to imagine the real possibility of a China reorganized along the lines of anarchist social models.

Anarchists and Marxists: Collaboration and Split

Some anarchists expressed opposition to the Bolshevik government in Russia as early as spring 1919, and a major debate between Chen Duxiu and the anarchist Ou Shengbai in early 1921 would draw the boundary between anarchist and Marxist conceptions of revolution; but a definitive split between the two groups did not become apparent until 1922. Indeed, for nearly two years following the May Fourth Movement anarchists and Marxists collaborated in revolutionary activity, and there was considerable confusion over the relationship of anarchism to Marxism. The confusion had much to do with the context of radical activity in the immediate May Fourth period and with the circumstances of the founding of the Communist party.[369]

The May Fourth Movement in 1919 marked a shift in the attention of Chinese radicals toward an unprecedented concern with social change. Cultural change, which had preoccupied radical intellectuals for the preceding three years, appeared by summer 1919 to be part of a broader problem of social transformation. The October Revolution in Russia had already stimulated a sharper awareness of the problem of social revolution before May 1919. The participation of Chinese laborers in the May Fourth Movement from early June 1919 drew Chinese intellectuals’ attention to the cleavages in Chinese society, which they took to be a consequence of an emerging capitalist economy, and brought the question of social change to the forefront of radical consciousness. The result was an increasing concern with class relations in Chinese society, and a turn to socialism as a means of resolving the problems presented by class cleavage and conflict.

In the long run, this new concern would help the spread of Marxism among radical intellectuals. The immediate result, however, was to provoke attention, not to Marxism per se, but to a variety of socialisms that were at odds with Marxist premises of revolution, especially Marxism of the Bolshevik variety. We have noted that because of a prior association of social revolution with anarchism, the immediate effect of the Bolshevik revolution in China was to stimulate interest, not in Marxism but in anarchism. Now other varieties of socialism were added to the radical repertoire. Social revolution had become a prominent issue in Chinese radicalism, but there was considerable uncertainty over the course it should take.

In the years 1918–1920, Chinese anarchists like anarchists elsewhere were ambivalent toward Bolshevism. The initial anarchist response to the October Revolution was one of enthusiasm, which not only created a favorable impression toward the Revolution among radicals, but also suggested to some that the Bolsheviks were guided by anarchist intentions. By early 1919, as news of the Bolshevik suppression of anarchists reached the outside world, anarchist reports grew more somber. A piece in the anarchist journal Evolution accused the Bolsheviks of piratism, denying that the Bolsheviks were socialists, because to call them socialists would be to admit that socialism permitted people to eat one another. Others in 1919 objected to the Bolshevik promotion of class struggle because, they believed, it betrayed the humanitarian goals of revolution. These criticisms were sporadic, however, and other anarchists were quick to rush to the defense of Bolshevism. While Bolshevism fell short of the ideals of social revolution, they argued, under contemporary circumstances it provided the only viable model of revolution; anarchists should defend the Revolution and help move it along the path of a true social revolution. Whatever qualms anarchists may have had concerning Bolshevism, these did not stop them from propagating favorable news of the Revolution or even responding positively to the first Comintern overtures in China.[370] Their differences were as much a function of internal differences over the conception of social revolution and of the foreign sources to which they had access as they were of the conflicting evidence issuing from the Soviet Union.

A similar ambivalence characterized the attitudes of other social radicals toward the Bolshevik Revolution, issues of class conflict, and Marxism—including those radicals who in 1920–21 would establish the Communist party. I must emphasize here that until November 1920 (when an embryonic Communist organization came into existence), it is not possible to speak of Marxists, or of a clearly defined Marxist political identity, in Chinese radicalism. A Marxist ideological identity was clearly established only after the founding of the Communist party; even then, uncertainties would persist.

When the Communist party was established in 1921, it was on the basis of Marxist study groups that had come into existence during the summer and fall of 1920, which in turn drew upon the study societies of the May Fourth period that had sprouted in major urban centers with the intellectual ferment of preceding years. As we have seen, these study societies were ideologically diffuse and were animated by vague ideals and organizing principles informed by anarchism. While the Bolshevik revolution had stimulated interest in Marxism among the intellectuals in these societies, in general intellectuals shared in the prevailing suspicion of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and were committed to a peaceful social revolution through social reorganization from below. When some of them did convert to Marxism and assumed a Communist identity in late 1920, they did so as the result of a prolonged period of transformation that required them to break with their May Fourth legacy.[371]

The uncertainties of this period of transformation were the condition for anarchists’ collaboration with the radicals who were to establish the Communist party. According to the anarchist Zheng Peigang, sometime during the summer of 1919 Huang Lingshuang collaborated with his colleagues at Beijing University, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao (the two founders of the Communist party in 1920), in establishing a Socialist Alliance (Shehui zhuyizhe tongmeng), which itself was possibly a product of a clandestine meeting of East Asian radicals held in Shanghai under Comintern guidance.[372] Similar alliances were established elsewhere, though details are not available.

It is not clear whether there was a direct connection between these alliances and the Marxist study societies that came into existence in 1920, following the arrival in China of the Comintern organizer Gregory Voitinsky. These societies were to provide the immediate building blocks for Communist organization, but anarchists continued to participate in their organization and activities. In the Marxist study society in Beijing, anarchists may have outnumbered those who later became Marxists. The society in Guangzhou initially consisted exclusively of anarchists and two Soviet advisers. In other places, too, there was initial collaboration.

Anarchists, moreover, played an important part in these societies. Out of deference to its anarchist members, the Beijing society abstained from establishing organizational regulations. More important, both in Beijing and in Guangzhou, anarchists were responsible for publishing the labor journals that the study groups initiated. These journals promoted an attitude toward labor that was consistent with the syndicalist views of their anarchist editors, including the repudiation of the political involvement of laborers.[373]

While this collaboration was largely a product of the internal dynamics of Chinese radicalism, it was also encouraged by Comintern advisers in China, who were quick to recognize the importance of anarchism in Chinese radicalism and hoped to recruit anarchists to the Bolshevik cause. As late as spring 1922, well past the establishment of the Communist party, anarchists were invited to send delegates to the Congress of the Toilers of the East in Moscow.

Effective collaboration came to an end in November 1920, when an embryonic Communist organization came into existence with the reorganization of regional Marxist societies into a national organization. The Communist organization at this time announced a draft program (central to which was the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat) and organizational rules intended to enforce a uniform discipline nationally. Anarchists, who were unwilling to condone dictatorship of any sort or a regulated organizational discipline, withdrew from the new organization.

The first polemics between anarchists and Communists accompanied this split. Communist historians in general present these polemics as a defense of Marxism against its opponents. There is no doubt some truth to this, although it is only a partial truth because it misses the crucial significance of the debate for the ideological unification of the Communist party itself. According to this view, anarchists had been on the attack against Bolshevism since 1919; at this time, Communists took up the cudgel in defense of their ideology. While it is true, as we have seen, that anarchists were critical of developments in the Soviet Union and were opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat, this interpretation ignores the fact that Communists cooperated with anarchists well into the fall of 1920 and that some anarchists, as in Beijing, had even been members of the Communist nuclei initially. Besides, when the attack was launched against the anarchists, it was in the internal party organ, the Communist, which suggests that the attack was initially directed not against anarchists in general but against anarchists in the party and, even more important, non-anarchist party members who were yet to shed the anarchist ideas with which they had been tainted since the May Fourth period. This suggests that the polemics against the anarchists, which sought to expose the deficiencies of anarchism, were intended primarily as a campaign for ideological purification within the party. The tone of the discussions confirms this interpretation.

Neither the split nor these polemics ended hopes for unity between the two groups of social revolutionaries. Anarchists were invited to and attended the Congress of the Toilers of the East in early 1922. Huang Lingshuang recalled in 1923 that upon his return from the Congress, Chen Duxiu (now the secretary-general of the Communist party), suggested further collaboration on the grounds that anarchists and MarxistCommunists shared similar goals.[374] In 1923 Ou Shengbai in turn extended a similar plea to Chen Duxiu.

Such hopes would never completely die out, and in later years some anarchists would join the Communist party. Nevertheless, it is possible to speak of a break in 1922 between the two movements. The Second Congress of the Communist party in July 1922 brought about a more tightly regulated organization than the first Congress had done in 1921, which further discouraged the anarchists from collaboration. It is possibly more important that with the Second Congress the Communist party initiated efforts toward an alliance with the Guomindang, which in the expansion of power it promised marginalized the need for recruiting anarchists to the Communist cause. Both sides may have given up on the possibility for further collaboration, which may account for the fact that, compared with the earlier debates, the polemics after 1922 assumed a much more virulent tone. The anarchists’ turn against Bolshevism after 1922 was part of a worldwide anarchist abandonment of hope in Bolshevism as a possible means to a genuine social revolution.

Anarchism and Bolshevism: The Parting of the Ways

The Communist polemics against anarchism did not get under way until November 1920, in the newly established organ of the Communist party, the Communist (Gongchandang). Nevertheless, it was the founder of the party, Chen Duxiu, who in September fired the first salvo against the anarchists in his essay On Politics, published in New Youth magazine (which had just been made the public organ of the Communist group in Shanghai).[375] Chen’s article addressed anarchists as well as other socialist competitors. The discussion here is restricted to what he had to say about anarchism.

Chen’s discussion addressed itself, on the one hand, to those who were opposed to the discussion of politics and, on the other hand, to those who advocated political discussion. In the first group he included scholars such as Hu Shi and Zhang Dongsun, merchants of the Shanghai chamber of commerce, and the anarchists. His main concern was with the anarchists. He believed that the opposition of the first two groups to politics was temporary and relative, based upon fear of warlords; anarchist opposition to politics was fundamental, absolute, and systematic, and called for careful consideration.

Anarchists’ opposition to politics, Chen conceded, had considerable validity. Their criticism of the state and naked force (qiangquan) in politics was based on plausible evidence. The states of the past, he pointed out, citing Franz Oppenheimer, had indeed usurped people’s rights by the use of political authority. The anarchist position was also supported by Bertrand Russell, who had argued in his Principles of Social Reconstruction that while the state was in theory the concentrated expression of popular sovereignty, in reality it constituted itself as a power outside of and above society.

Chen agreed with anarchist views on past and present states. Where he disagreed with them was in their extrapolation from past states to future states. Anarchists argued that no matter how the state and its laws were reformed, they would still be based on coercion; no fundamental change was possible, therefore, that did not reject absolutely the state and its laws. Against this position, Chen offered two sets of arguments, one theoretical, the other factual. Theoretically, he argued that anyone who understands evolution theory ought not to speak of fundamental or nonfundamental, since the denial of reason to the reality of the world deprived action of any ability to penetrate it. Moreover, he argued, indiscriminating opposition to force (qiangquan) was unscientific. Human beings used force daily in their efforts to conquer nature for human purposes; there was nothing wrong with the use of force that served human ends. Whether or not force is evil depends on how it is utilized, he concluded, since evil does not inhere in force itself.[376]

Factually, Chen presented three arguments in favor of using force. First, human misery was a product of the oppression of the many by the minority bourgeoisie; since the latter would not relinquish its power voluntarily, there was no way to achieve significant change without violent class struggle against it. Second, the bourgeoisie was experienced in the manipulation of power; even after its overthrow, therefore, force would be necessary to control it. Finally, force would be necessary even to direct the people at large. Human nature had a bad as well as a good side. Whatever original human nature had been, laziness and selfishness had by now become second nature to human beings. This would not change overnight with revolution, but would require the use of coercion for some time to come. Chen’s concluding message to the anarchists was that those who were opposed to the state and the laws of the working class might as well be viewed as friends of the bourgeoisie.

Anarchists were quick to perceive the implication of Chen’s argument. The following issue of New Youth published letters from two anarchists, Zheng Xianzong and Ke Qingshe, that criticized Chen for his views on laws and politics, but especially for his implicit defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat.[377] Zheng criticized Chen for his seeming defense of a perpetual existence for the state. The state, he argued, represented only one stage in human progress and should not, therefore, be viewed as eternal. He rejected the distinction Chen had drawn between the past and the present, arguing that the state of its very nature prevented human fraternity by dividing people. It may have been necessary in the past, but now it was no more than a relic.

Zheng further criticized Chen for his assertion that anarchists rejected violence. Only some anarchists inspired by Tolstoy rejected violence, he pointed out, otherwise most anarchists agreed that violence was necessary in order to achieve liberation. But the need for violence would disappear with the success of the revolution. Capitalism would have no hope of resurrection once private property had been eliminated. If further suppression became necessary, it should be only on a temporary, transitional basis. Zheng also challenged Chen’s view that force would be necessary to overcome ingrained habits of laziness and selfishness. In his opinion, Chen confounded the evils of one historical period with the eternity of human nature. Besides, he observed, even if some people did not work, it would be very difficult to establish standards for the correct application of violence that did not violate the rights of others. Zheng, in other words, preferred to err on the side of freedom from coercion. The other respondent, Ke, agreed with Chen for the most part, adding only that there was no need to worry too much about the state, because with the abolition of property the state would disappear automatically.

What seemed to bother the two anarchists the most was Chen’s suggestion that the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, might be a permanent fixture for the future as it had been for the past. In his response to Zheng, Chen denied that he had assigned permanence to the state. The major difference between himself and his two critics lay in the time period they assigned to the transition to a stateless society. He believed that the state would have to exist for a fairly long time, since it would take a while to purge the legacy of the past. He did not share their optimism that once private property had been abolished, the evils of capitalism would disappear automatically. Private property had taken hold of people’s hearts, and it would take some time to rid them of their attachment to it. He disagreed with Zheng for his suggestion that states divided people; people were divided by many things, including their language and religion. Abolition of the state would not eliminate these other divisions. In this, as in the question of acquired habits, the weight of the past had as much power as instinctive nature. It would take effort, laws, and coercion to purge people of the hold of the past on them. As for standards, he argued, equal sharing of responsibilities and the periodic shifting of unpleasant tasks provided sufficient means for resolving the distribution of labor.

To Chen, revolution was not a single act but a continuing process, since he was not sure how long it would take for reason to conquer instinct. What ultimately distinguished him from his anarchist respondents was the greater sense of pessimism that pervaded his reply to his critics. The state and coercion would be necessary for the foreseeable future (which was the only future he was willing to speak of) because there was no reason to be overly optimistic about human nature. Neither was it meaningful to speak of fundamental transformations, since the task at hand required piecemeal resolution of problems inherited from the past. Revolution was not a single enormous effort followed by an eternity of ease; it was a task that required continuing, and arduous, work. The recognition of this, of the material constraints imposed by society and history on human action, was to Chen the characteristic that distinguished the scientific from the utopian socialist.

Chen’s answer to Ke was brief, as Ke’s letter had been brief. Many opposed proletarian dictatorship, he pointed out, because it was not democratic; how democratic was it for workers not to be free in the present society? This initial clash between Chen and his anarchist respondents was carried out in a courteous tone that would characterize Communist debates with the anarchists in 1920–21. The debate itself appeared to be a debate within the same camp of radicals who agreed on the purpose of revolution if not on the means to it.

Communists’ attack on anarchism began in earnest with the publication of the Communist in November. The Communist critique of anarchism is interesting because it was clearly an internal party affair, intended to purge the influence of anarchism among party members. If there was an immediate cause for the discussion of anarchism that got under way almost with the first issue of the Communist, it was the tightening of party organization at this time, which was to result in the exodus of anarchists. Initially, moreover, the discussion was a one-sided affair. To repeat what has been stated above, some anarchists had been attacking Bolshevism since early 1919, but it would be erroneous to view these attacks as the provocation for the discussion in the Communist. Other anarchists had been members of the Communist groups since the summer of 1920, and in the initial period of party formation, Communists and anarchists cooperated all over China. Communist criticism of anarchism now is best viewed, therefore, as an effort to clarify issues of Bolshevik versus anarchist revolution, which was still a source of considerable confusion among members of the Communist groups, most of whom had been under the sway of anarchist ideas until recently. The discussion of anarchism in the Communist, moreover, was not addressed to any group or individual, but took the form of asserting the superiority of Bolshevism over anarchism in general. Unlike the simultaneous debate with the Guild socialists, whom Communist writers freely described as the running dogs of capitalism, the tone the journal adopted in the polemics with anarchists was one of extreme friendliness, intended more to persuade the anarchists to abandon their wrongful ways than to discredit them. This tone of friendliness persisted even when the ideological differences broke out in public debate between Chen Duxiu and his former student Ou Shengbai in the spring of 1921. Communist-anarchist polemics would not assume a tone of acrimony until 1922, by which time the inevitability of the break between the two groups had become obvious. The issue raised by Ou Shengbai at this time would provide the basis for anarchist attacks on the Communists until the end of the decade, when anarchism would disappear from the Chinese scene as a significant ideological alternative.

The Communist was the first Bolshevik propaganda organ in China and the first publication to propagate systematically a revolutionary Marxist ideology. In its six issues published between November 1920 and July 1921, its readers (mostly party members) were exposed for the first time to Lenin’s ideology of revolution, mainly through translations of foreign works on Lenin and the October Revolution. It was here that sections of State and Revolution were first translated into Chinese, and Chinese Marxists first became cognizant of Comintern discussions on world revolution. Most of the journal was devoted to reports on Bolshevik-inspired movements around the world, labor movements in various countries (including long reports on the International Workers of the World), and conditions of labor in China. The journal also published discussions on the problems of revolution in China that represent the first publications in China to treat seriously the relevance of Bolshevism to the Chinese revolution. These articles, most of them written by Li Da, Zhou Fohai, and Shi Cuntong, were to lay the ground for discussions of Bolshevism in later years. At the time, however, anarchism seemed to be the most important issue.

The introduction to the journal in its first issue enunciated the political line that it would propagate as an organ of the Communist party. The editorial affirmed the priority of economic change to all other change. It presented capitalism and socialism as the only alternatives in economic organization in the contemporary world. Capitalism had developed in Europe and was already in decline. Socialism, on the other hand, was still emerging; Russia, it declared, had become a laboratory for socialism. Communist parties around the world followed the Russian example, and so should China, where the evil effects of capitalism were already beginning to be felt. Chinese laborers, the editorial asserted, filled the world; those abroad were slaves to foreign capital, those in China slaved for foreign and Chinese capitalists alike. If they were to be saved from this slavery, the example of the Russian Revolution provided the only course of action. The editorial rejected unequivocally parliamentary means to change as a lie intended to deceive laborers. The only way for laborers to liberate themselves was to wrest power from capitalists through class struggle and establish their own power. The ultimate goal was the creation of a stateless society, which would follow a guarantee that the capitalist class had no hope for revival. It ended with a call upon the anarchists to join the Communist party. Anarchists, too, opposed private property and capitalism; hence they must participate in the struggle to transfer power to the working class. To do otherwise would be to serve the capitalists whom they desired to overthrow.[378]

The agenda laid out in this editorial set the course for articles that followed in the Communist. The basic issue was social revolution, in particular, differences between an anarchist and a Bolshevik (now identified with communism) strategy of social revolution. The idea of social revolution propagated in the Communist represented the emergence in Chinese socialism of a new idea of social revolution that integrated politics and the social movement in a process of social revolution. The state corporatist solutions favored by some socialists (including Guomindang socialists, state socialists, and Jiang Kanghu socialism) had eschewed class struggle in the name of an immediate political revolution, leaving the task of social transformation to the period after the socialist political revolution had been achieved. Anarchists and the social corporatist Guild socialists, on the other hand, had rejected politics in the name of a social movement that would gradually transform society and thereby abolish politics altogether or create a new kind of politics, as the case might be. The Communist idea of revolution that now emerged in Chinese socialism represented an idea of social revolution that gave equal importance to politics and the social movement, conceiving of them in a dialectical relationship in a process of social revolution. While Communist writers in the Communist dismissed offhand the socialism of the other alternatives, they took much more seriously the anarchist idea of social revolution, with which they expressed a sense of kinship. Any differences were presented as differences within the same revolutionary camp, pertaining to the means rather than the ends of revolution.

The author who went farthest in reaffirming the essential unity of Marxism and anarchism was Shi Cuntong, who asserted in How We Must Carry Out the Social Revolution (Women zemmayang gan shehui geming) that he believed in all the goals of anarchism (free organization, free association, and the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) even though he was not an anarchist. Shi portrayed communism and anarchism as merely different stages in history, with the one serving as the means to the other: As I see it, if one wants to realize anarchism, one must first institute communism; only when communism has been fully developed can there be anarchist communism.[379] Shi, however, was not the only one to identify the two. Li Da, who may have stood at the other end of the spectrum from Shi in his suspicion of the anarchists, nevertheless stated in his important essay, The Anatomy of Anarchism (Wuzhengfu zhuyizhi jiepei), that even if the anarchists were not comrades of the Communists, they were still friends, since they shared in the goal of overthrowing capitalism. The problem with anarchists was that they had no method for overthrowing capitalism and acted out of emotion rather than reason. It was revealing that Li noted not only the popularity of anarchism, but that the number of anarchists was still on the rise. He invited them to join Communist ranks to speed up the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. Li agreed with Shi that Communists and anarchists desired to achieve the same kind of society; like Shi, he added that the achievement of that society (where the principle of from each to each would prevail) must await the realization of limitless economic abundance, which must be its material precondition.

The author who went farthest in reaffirming the essential unity of Marxism and anarchism was Shi Cuntong, who asserted in How We Must Carry Out the Social Revolution (Women zemmayang gan shehui geming) that he believed in all the goals of anarchism (free organization, free association, and the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) even though he was not an anarchist. Shi portrayed communism and anarchism as merely different stages in history, with the one serving as the means to the other: As I see it, if one wants to realize anarchism, one must first institute communism; only when communism has been fully developed can there be anarchist communism.12 Shi, however, was not the only one to identify the two. Li Da, who may have stood at the other end of the spectrum from Shi in his suspicion of the anarchists, nevertheless stated in his important essay, The Anatomy of Anarchism (Wuzhengfu zhuyizhi jiepei), that even if the anarchists were not comrades of the Communists, they were still friends, since they shared in the goal of overthrowing capitalism. The problem with anarchists was that they had no method for overthrowing capitalism and acted out of emotion rather than reason. It was revealing that Li noted not only the popularity of anarchism, but that the number of anarchists was still on the rise. He invited them to join Communist ranks to speed up the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. Li agreed with Shi that Communists and anarchists desired to achieve the same kind of society; like Shi, he added that the achievement of that society (where the principle of from each to each would prevail) must await the realization of limitless economic abundance, which must be its material precondition.[380]

Against the anarchists the Communists argued the greater realism and rationality of their method of social revolution. Their reasoning took three related directions: that communism was superior to anarchism in its plans for economic development, which was essential to revolution and was particularly important in backward China; in accepting organization, it offered a better means of carrying out the class struggle, which would have no direction without organization; and, finally, that communism was more realistic in accepting the necessity of politics.

In his Considerations on the Social Revolution (Shehui gemingde shangjue), Li Da offered the most comprehensive argument for the economic superiority of communism over anarchism. Revealing a clearly Marxist appreciation of the problem, Li stated that while anarchists were concerned mainly with the problem of distribution, Communists focused on production, which was essential to the creation of an economic basis for socialism. In advocating a centralist (jizhong) approach to production, communism promised a means to achieving this end. Anarchists, on the other hand, with the economic dispersal (fensan) they favored, offered no means to balance production against consumption or to increase the wealth of society. For a socialist society, economic development required central intervention. This should be especially obvious to anarchists who proposed a society that presupposed limitless abundance.[381]

Li argued further that communism was superior to anarchism not only in showing the way to increased production but in the realm of distribution as well. Distribution had two aspects, income and consumption. Anarchists desired to equalize the latter. Communists, the former. Anarchists desired to abolish money and to distribute goods according to need. While this might be possible in the future, it could not be instituted at present, when there were not enough goods to go around. Li did not say how income equalization would prove superior in this respect except to note that with the continued use of money, it would be possible to regulate production and consumption. What he had in mind, presumably, was the continued existence of a commodity economy where people would have a choice on how to spend their money.

Whatever problems may have been suggested by Li’s own alternative, the difference was clearly between the immediate creation of a Communist society, which stressed freedom of production and consumption, and a society that postponed its Communist goals until productive abundance had become a reality. Until then, state direction and control of the economy would be necessary to increase production. Shi Cuntong, who believed that the appropriate material conditions were essential to the creation of any society, reaffirmed this position in arguing that machine production in both agriculture and industry was the precondition for a socialist economy. In Western capitalist societies, with their advanced production, the grounds were ready for the establishment of socialism. In China this must await the development of production. People who thought that socialism would be easier to achieve in China because of the underdevelopment of capitalism, Shi argued, were misguided because they overlooked the material conditions necessary to socialism.[382]

Economic backwardness also provided a major reason for Communist arguments in favor of continued existence of the state. Especially because China was economically backward, argued Shi, the task of development must devolve upon the state. But politics was also important for the success of the revolution, as Zhou Fohai argued in two articles published in May and June 1921, respectively, Why We Advocate Communism? (Women weishemma zhuzhang gongchanzhuyi) and Seizing Political Power (Douqu zhengquan),[383] which brought Leninist arguments to bear against anarchist opposition to power (qiangquan) and the state. Recalling Chen Duxiu’s statement in On Politics that politics did not leave alone even those who wanted to leave it alone, Zhou argued that without the use of power, there would be no way to achieve revolutionary success or, if it could be achieved, to defend revolution against a bourgeois resurgence. A dictatorship of laborers was necessary not just to keep the bourgeoisie down after the revolution, but also to transform society and purge it of its past legacy. This would take a long time. Anarchists were too optimistic, he pointed out, about the good-heartedness (liangxin) of people who, they believed, would abandon all their selfish habits once the revolution had taken place. Shi Cuntong added that the free, self-governing bodies that the anarchists advocated as the basis for Communist society would be crushed right away unless there was a power to defend them.[384] Ironically, these authors conceded that organized state power was all the more important in the creation of socialist society in backward China, where it was not even clear that the majority of the population favored revolution.[385]

Finally, Communists argued that while social conditions for revolution existed in China, organization was necessary for the conversion of class consciousness into a weapon of revolution. In his Considerations on Social Revolution, Li Da argued that there were already classes in Chinese society: there had long been class division in agriculture; with industrial development, a class division had also emerged between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. While the Chinese bourgeoisie was small in numbers, it was indistinguishable from the foreign bourgeoisie, and the proletariat suffered at the hands of both. There were many possibilities for the organization of the proletariat, ranging from economistic trade unions to politically motivated organization. The possibility of these alternatives indicated that while class consciousness was a social phenomenon, it did not necessarily lead to spontaneous unity of the class in class struggle. The only way to achieve such unity was through political organization of the class. It was necessary to unify workers, peasants, soldiers, and intellectuals whenever possible, and to engage in direct action against the ruling classes and their state. While direct action was a Sorelian idea (and the Communist did publish a piece by George Sorel on Lenin) that anarchists also shared, what Li had in mind was a Bolshevikstyle direct action, such as that which had led to Bolshevik success in 1917. The spontaneous, free association in which the anarchists believed offered no means, in the Communists’ view, of unifying class consciousness into the political force necessary for revolutionary success.[386]

In the absence of debate, Communist writers did not feel it necessary to explain how the goals they professed to share with anarchists could be achieved through means that clearly stood at odds with those goals. A basic anarchist proposition throughout had been that means and ends were inseparable in the process of social revolution, that undesirable means would inevitably lead to undesirable ends, that freedom could not be achieved through dictatorship. The question of ends and means would be important in anarchist attacks on the Communists later in the decade. For the time being, they were irrelevant to the Communist advocacy of revolution in the Communist, which was concerned not with ultimate goals but with immediate revolutionary strategy, and whose primary goal was to purge within the Communist party any continuing qualms about a Bolshevik strategy of revolution. What Communist authors argued, with considerable justification and self-consciousness if not with wisdom, was that noble though the goals of anarchism were, anarchism offered no means of achieving them. Whether this required the rejection of anarchist considerations on method is a moot question, at least historically. The immediate concern in early 1921 was to draw with unambiguity a distinction between Bolshevism and anarchism. The criticism of anarchism in the Communist may have achieved this purpose; its inevitable concomitant, however, was to drive the Communists themselves into an ideological corner, which obviated the need for a critical appraisal of the revolutionary methods they advocated. Anarchism may have been impractical, as they claimed, but whether it was therefore irrelevant in the consideration of revolutionary strategy is another question. The refusal to entertain this question, which had been of central importance to Chinese radicals of the May Fourth period, was the most cogent indication of the rapidity with which Bolshevism had taken hold of the revolutionary imagination of the Communists.

When an anarchist response came in March 1921, it was not in response to arguments within the Communist (of which the anarchists were presumably unaware, since the Communist was semisecret as an internal organ of the Communist groups), but in response to Chen Duxiu’s public criticism of anarchism. The first debate between Marxists and anarchists following the establishment of the Communist nuclei erupted in March 1921, when Ou Shengbai responded in People’s Voice to statements on anarchism by Chen Duxiu in a lecture at Guangzhou in the Law and Political Science University (The Critique of Socialism). The exchange of letters to which this led (restricted to Guangzhou, as far as it is possible to tell), marked the first public debate between Communists and anarchists.

This debate, unlike the Communist polemics against anarchism, was carried out at a very abstract, hypothetical level. Neither Chen nor Ou enunciated the concrete implications of their debate until the end, when Chen finally stated outright what had been in their minds all along. Until then, they both danced around the issues with hypothetical examples to prove or disprove the viability of anarchism, with charges and countercharges of misrepresentation and mutual charges of inconsistency.

The issue that provoked and dominated the debate was whether anarchism was compatible with group life. Chen had stated in his lecture that while anarchism had much of value to say with regard to the individual conduct of life, it was irrelevant where social organization was concerned because the anarchist advocacy of absolute freedom (juedui ziyou) was incompatible with group existence.[387] In his open letter to Chen, Ou took exception to this statement. He criticized Chen for blurring important distinctions among anarchists. While some anarchists such as Stirner had advocated absolute freedom for the individual, they were the exception rather than the rule. Anarcho-communists (with whom he identified himself) did not object to group life, or even to the interference of the group in individual lives; what they rejected was the despotism of the group over the individual, of the kind that was implicit in the use of abstract laws to coerce individuals. What they advocated was voluntary association (lianhe) that recognized the right of the individual not to participate in the group’s activities, and the substitution for abstract laws of a flexible public will (gongyi) that would determine the group’s functioning but, unlike laws, would be subject to change. Anarchists objected to indiscriminating interference in individual life without regard to whether the individual was good or bad. They themselves believed in the necessity of interference with individuals whose activities impinged upon the rights of others or threatened group existence. Instead of coercion, however, anarchists believed in education to change people for the better. To prove his case that anarchism was compatible with group life, Ou cited examples of voluntary association in the contemporary world. His examples, curiously, did not serve his argument; they included examples not only of temporary association such as cooperation in fire fighting, but even of associations of capital established to build railroads in Europe. They were, at any rate, rather easy for Chen to dispose of.[388]

The rest of the debate was devoted to threshing out these issues. Chen conceded that there were indeed differences among anarchists on the issue of freedom, but he insisted that all anarchists suffered from a basic contradiction over this issue; indeed, he observed, anarchists such as Stirner were preferable because they at least recognized the contradiction, whereas anarcho-communists such as Kropotkin tried to cover it up under a guise of communism. Chen was not sympathetic to Ou’s other arguments. The insistence on the freedom not to participate in group activity, he argued, would only make group life impossible and unpredictable; what would happen to production, for instance, if individuals suddenly decided not to participate? While voluntary association might be possible on a contingent basis, as Ou’s examples indicated, Chen believed that it provided no basis for sustained social existence that inevitably demanded coercion and sacrifice of individual rights to the welfare of the group. (What is the need for anarchism, he inquired sarcastically, if capitalism already provided the grounds for free association?) As for public will, Chen felt that it was unreliable because it was subject to the vagaries of mass psychology, which could lead to terror as easily as to association. Chen had considerable praise for laws as elements in human progress; international laws, he pointed out, had made possible for the first time in history the creation of a global society. Public will, on the other hand, smacked of primitive society, which had been based on the despotism of the tribe over the individual. He rejected the distinction Ou had drawn between laws and contracts between individuals, on the grounds that the one was undesirable because it was above society, while the other was desirable because it was based on individual consent; to Chen, contracts were just another form of law and would be meaningless without the backing of abstract laws.[389]

These arguments became more elaborate as the debate progressed. Two differences, however, were evident throughout. Chen believed that individual rights must be sacrificed to the interests of the group; Ou did not. It followed also that Chen believed in the inevitability and functionality of coercion in social existence; Ou did not. Chen upheld the importance of laws in social existence, while Ou believed that laws prevented people from doing what they would do naturally, associate with one another freely, since he believed as firmly as did Chen that social existence was the premise of individual freedom. Ou was hopeful that education would gradually correct antisocial behavior by purging people of their acquired habits. Chen thought the anarchist position was excessively optimistic about the goodness of human nature, and he was especially suspicious of the possibility of effective education for social ends within the context of a bad society. Perhaps nothing illustrates better how far Chen had traveled ideologically since the May Fourth period than his skepticism regarding the potential of education for social change, a belief in which he had done so much to instill in his students and followers (including Ou) as a leader of the New Culture Movement.

Ultimately, however, this debate over the relationship of the individual to the group was a debate over revolutionary strategy. In his last response to Ou, Chen finally drew out the practical implications of the debate when he drew a distinction between different kinds of coercion. He himself was opposed to coercion, he stated, where it deprived people of their humanity. Such was the case with class oppression, where one class deprived another of its humanity, or with gender oppression where the humanity of women was sacrificed to the interests of men. But these standards did not apply where the interests of the individual coincided with the interests of the group. Where interest was not private interest but public interest, there was no need to speak of coercion, since any sacrifice of the individual represented a sacrifice for the welfare of the group of which the individual was an integral part, and this merely added up to sacrifice for one’s own self. To Chen, the rights of labor unions under capitalism and communism illustrated this distinction. In capitalist society, labor unions had the right to strike in defense of their rights because that represented the self-interest of laborers against the self-interest of the capitalists. In Communist society there would be no need for the right of workers to strike, because all production would be for society, and its benefits would accrue to members of the society equally. For laborers to strike would be equivalent to striking against themselves.[390]

A double standard, perhaps, but it pointed to the dilemmas of both Communists and anarchists, who shared an organic conception of society where, once the evils of class division had been overthrown, any conflict between private and public interest would gradually disappear. As in the case of the Communist criticisms of anarchism, the difference between Chen and Ou concerned not the ends but the means of revolution. Ou believed that revolution could be achieved without coercion, through the agency of education; indeed, to introduce coercion into the process of revolution was to nip in the bud its promise of a good society. Chen Duxiu, having lost his faith in the power of education, thought that other means were necessary to bring about the seamless society whose individuals had long lost the ability to associate freely, if indeed they had ever had it. One demanded a consistency that transcended history; the other saw in consistency an obliviousness to history that would only perpetuate human oppression at the hands of the past.

The differences between Chen and Ou, as with Marxists and anarchists in general, were not simply political but philosophical as well. In his critique of anarchism in the Communist, Zhou Fohai had argued that anarchists were overly optimistic about human nature, which deeply flawed their conceptions of change. Not only did anarchist optimism lead to unduly optimistic expectations of human beings in the future, it also made it impossible to explain the emergence of social evils in history: if people were naturally good and sociable, there was no way to explain the historical emergence of social division and oppression.[391] Chen Duxiu brought similar arguments to bear against Ou Shengbai when he criticized Ou’s claim that people would be good in anarchist society because it was in their nature to be good, that their very sense of shame would prevent them from doing evil.

Their skeptical view of human capability for good, the Communists believed, made their approach to change more realistic. This was true to some extent, but the differences were relative rather than absolute. While some anarchists in China held an unqualified optimism concerning the goodness of human nature, such optimism was not shared by anarchists such as Ou Shengbai. Ou was not against interference with individual human beings, he was against coercion. What distinguished him from Chen in his debate was his insistence that education could achieve all the improvement in human behavior that was necessary for the establishment of a good society; even where education proved helpless, denial of social participation to recalcitrant individuals would do the job. What he criticized about present-day society was its immediate resort to coercion and punishment in the name of abstract laws, which left no room for individual improvement. Ou was even willing, as Chen was to recognize in the end, to consider the necessity of a transitional period of Bolshevism to prepare society for anarchism.

Communists, on the other hand, rejected the goodness of human nature only in an immediate sense, as a sufficient precondition of social revolution. They, too, shared in the belief that ultimately socialism, in its anarchist expression, was a possibility: to deny that possibility would in fact have been tantamount to denying the vision in the name of which they legitimized their own revolutionary effort. They assigned priority, however, to the achievement of appropriate material conditions that they believed were necessary to the functioning of Communist society. Once that had been achieved, they believed, communism would become a possibility. The human personality that they deemed necessary to a Communist existence did not otherwise differ significantly from its anarchist counterpart.

The difference pointed nevertheless to a fundamental philosophical and epistemological problem that has long plagued anarchists and Marxists, in China and elsewhere: how to describe postrevolutionary society in the political language of bourgeois society. Richard Saltman has argued perceptively that this was a problem for Bakunin in his confrontation with Marx and accounts for most of the inconsistencies in his anarchism.[392] Marx himself was deeply aware of the problem when he wrote that the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can produce freely in it only when he moves in it without remembering the old and forgets in it his ancestral tongue.[393] The problem for both Marxists and anarchists in this debate was how to speak in a new language without losing touch with reality. This was ultimately what divided Chen and Ou, the Marxists and the anarchists in China. Chen observed somewhere along the line that anarchists accused him of being unable to appreciate anarchism because he looked to the future through the spectacles of the present. How are we to create the future, he retorted, if we do not start with present reality?[394] His observation captured the pathos of both Marxism and anarchism in this initial confrontation.

Perhaps because of their mutual appreciation of this problem, the debate between Chen and Ou, as with the prior criticism of anarchism in the Communist, retained a certain level of courteousness and mutual respect in spite of an occasional note of acrimony. In his concluding lines to the debate, Chen had nothing but praise for his former student. Even if Shengbai was an anarchist, he noted, he recognized the necessity of class struggle and revolutionary activity, and even of a transitional stage in the revolution. He was, moreover, a follower of Kropotkin and a sincere revolutionary youth, unlike some of the low-quality Chinese-style anarchists (Zhu Qianzhi?). I only regret, he concluded, that there are few like him among Chinese anarchists.[395]

This debate was conducted in a relatively friendly tone, partly because of the close personal relationship between the two men, but also because among the anarchists, Ou Shengbai came closest to accepting a Marxist analysis of society. It is also possible that anarchists held back their criticism of Bolshevism so long as further cooperation with the Communists remained a possibility. After 1922, when the break between the two groups became evident, anarchist criticisms would assume a much harsher tone.

Anarchism Against Bolshevism and Marxism

While internal developments in revolutionary politics would play an important part in shaping anarchist attitudes toward Bolshevism, their criticism of the Soviet Union and of Marxism was almost entirely derivative of foreign anarchists’ writings on the subject. Indeed, the latter’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union may have played a significant part in the increasingly intransigent repudiation of Bolshevism by the Chinese anarchists. With the conclusion of the crisis in the Soviet Union that had been caused by foreign aggression and internal insurrection, and the end of war communism, which ushered in the New Economic Policy, it was no longer possible for anarchists to blame the shortcomings of Bolshevik socialism on external causes. Such was the case with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who left the Soviet Union in 1921 in final disillusionment. Their attacks on the Soviet Union thereafter left a deep impression upon Chinese anarchists; it may even be suggested that the writings in particular of Emma Goldman, which were broadly circulated in China, and her personal contacts with Chinese anarchists were responsible in large measure for shaping Chinese anarchists’ attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Also important was the testimonial against the Bolshevik government of Russian anarchists. Mme Kropotkin’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks provided an authoritative voice in Chinese criticisms of the Soviet Union (Kropotkin had died in early 1921, relieving the anarchists who had been concerned about his safety of the need for caution in their criticisms). Most important, however, were the writings of Varlaam Cherkezov, a Georgian anarchist who had long been a close associate of Kropotkin’s.[396] Before his death in 1925, Cherkezov wrote extensively on Marxism, to which he traced the failings of the Bolsheviks. His writings were translated into Chinese and incorporated freely into Chinese criticisms of Marxism. If Goldman shaped anarchist views on the Soviet Union, Cherkezov provided a theoretical perspective that extended the critique of Bolshevism to a criticism of its roots in Marxist theory.

Bolshevism and the Distortion of Revolution

The Chinese who led the way in the criticism of Bolshevism and Marxism after 1922 either had personal experience of the Soviet Union or were personally acquainted with foreign anarchists critical of Bolshevism: Huang Lingshuang, Qin Baopu, Bi Xiushao, and Bajin. Huang’s experiences in the Congress of the Toilers of the East in early 1922, as well as his contacts with Russian anarchists (including a visit with Mme Kropotkin), convinced him of the bankruptcy of Bolshevism; he resolved even before his return to China that the Chinese public should be informed of the true visage of Bolshevism.[397] Bi Xiushao, who was in France from 1920 to 1925, not only was acquainted with prominent French anarchists such as Jean Grave, but met Mme Kropotkin when she was in Paris in 1923.[398] Qin Baopu played an especially important part in these criticisms. Qin had been a student in the Soviet Union between 1920 and 1923, sent there with the first contingent of Chinese students to study in the Soviet Union in preparation for the founding of the Communist party. While there, he had extensive contacts with both Goldman and Mme Kropotkin as well as with other Russian anarchists. Upon his return to China in 1923, he was responsible for introducing Goldman’s writings to the Chinese public and wrote a number of articles (and a book-length account of the Soviet Union) critical of Bolshevism. He was also responsible for introducing Goldman to Bajin. Bajin, who entered into a correspondence with Goldman at this time, which would last until her death, emerged quickly in the mid-twenties as a prolific translator of foreign anarchist works into Chinese, including works by Goldman and Berkman. He was the author of a number of pieces sharply critical of Bolshevism.[399]

The anarchists were by no means the only ones to engage in polemics against Bolshevism; they are singled out here because of their strategic role in introducing to China the writings and the views of foreign anarchists. As was noted above, the agenda for Chinese anarchist criticisms of Bolshevism was set in 1920–21, in Ou Shengbai’s polemics with Chen Duxiu. The major issues of debate had been the dictatorial organization of the nascent Communist party and the inclusion in its program of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an immediate goal. Ou, voicing the feelings of many anarchists, had argued, against this program, that a genuine social revolution could be achieved only through voluntary association, which would guarantee to the revolution the accomplishment of its goal of a free communist society. Key to his conception of revolution was a transformation of social consciousness in the process of revolution, which would obviate the need for coercion when the revolution finally came about. Ou believed, with other anarchists, that the goal of revolution was not to create a new class rule but to abolish classes altogether (which would also eliminate the need for the state and politics, since he believed, with Marxists, that the state was a product of class conflict); the dictatorship of the proletariat would merely reproduce the evils of old society.[400]

Anarchist criticism of Bolshevism after 1922 further developed these objections. Anarchists rejected the view of the Bolshevik revolution as a genuine social revolution and portrayed it instead as a political revolution that had merely brought a new group into the control of an oldfashioned state. Huang Lingshuang recalled Mme Kropotkin’s telling him that Bolshevik socialism was not real socialism, because real socialism could not be built upon a centralized state power (this, she said, had been Kropotkin’s view before his death).[401] The declaration against anarchist-Bolshevik cooperation of a Red Society (Hongshe) in 1923 stated that in order to achieve the goal of revolution, another revolution would be necessary to overthrow this new power structure, which merely increased the number of revolutions necessary to achieve socialism and would lead unnecessarily to further sacrifice and bloodshed: If we are to rely on Bolshevism as a transitional stage in moving from present society to anarchist society, it means that we have to go through two revolutions, one to achieve Bolshevism and another to achieve anarchism. Is this not a great sacrifice?[402]

The central anarchist objection to Bolshevism was over the issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the last installment of his polemics with Chen, Ou Shengbai had observed that what the revolution ought to abolish was not merely oppressors but oppression itself, since as long as oppression existed, it did not matter who did the oppressing.[403] Bajin described the dictatorship of the proletariat as mere revanchism, which not only did not create a better world but opened the way to further conflict: if workers became the new dictators, others would seek to overthrow them. Besides, he argued, dictatorship of the proletariat was meaningless because at the present the proletarian class constitutes the majority in society, and there has been no such thing historically as a majority oppressing a minority.[404] As early as 1921, an unattributed piece in People’s Voice observed, rather cleverly, that if the proletariat, following the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, itself climbed the political stage as the ruler, it would no longer be the proletariat (literally, common people, pingmin).[405]

In his report on the Soviet Union, Huang had observed that the dictatorship of the proletariat was nothing but a mask for a dictatorship of intellectuals in the Communist party.[406] Sanbo (Bi Xiushao?) added in his polemics with Zhou Enlai in Paris that the dictatorship was nothing but the dictatorship of a single party and, within the party, of a few leaders; it ought to be called in reality a dictatorship of the leaders of the Communist party.[407] As Lu Jianbo put it in an extensive discussion of thedictatorship of the proletariat published in Light of Learning in 1924: Facts tell us: the inner lining of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of a single partythe Leninist party. The Soviets have already been captured by bureaucratic socialists.Anarchists found ample evidence of this dictatorship, not only in the suppression by the Bolsheviks of other revolutionaries (the anarchists in particular), but also in the readiness of the Soviet government to turn its guns on the people, as in the Kronstadt rebellion of 1920.[408]

Economic dictatorship, anarchists believed, exacerbated the political dictatorship of the state; in the failure of Bolshevik socialism,political centralization (jiquan) was the other side of the coin to economic collectivism(jichan). Chinese anarchists had since the mid-1910s drawn a distinction between collectivism and communism (gongchan). Anarchism was truly communist; Marxian communism was in essence collectivist. The failure of Bolshevik socialism, they now argued, rested not only in its repudiation of democracy for dictatorship, but in its economic basis in state collectivism, which was merely capitalism in a different form,[409] since all it accomplished was the replacement of ownership by individuals with ownership by the state. This new form of ownership exacerbated the exploitation of the people, since the state now had a monopoly over employment and could set its terms as it pleased. The anarchist argument was summarized by Ou Shengbai in a cogent statement:

Marxian socialism advocates the centralization not only of political power but also of capital. The centralization of political power is dangerous enough in itself; add to that the placing of all sources of wealth in the hands of the government, and the so-called state socialism becomes merely state capitalism, with the state as the owner of the means of production and the workers as its laborers, who hand over the value produced by their labor. The bureaucrats are the masters, the workers their slaves. Even though they advocate a state of the dictatorship of workers, the rulers are bureaucrats who do not labor, while workers are the sole producers. Therefore, the suffering of workers under state socialism is no different from that under private capitalism. Besides, while the power of individual capitalists to exploit the worker is relatively limited, the state can back up its exploitation with military force; hence the wretchedness of the worker at the very least equals that under capitalism.[410]

Ironically, anarchists perceived in the relaxation of economic controls with the New Economic Policy a confirmation of their view that Bolshevism was but a transmuted capitalism. Qin Baopu, who wrote extensively on this issue, found in the Bolshevik call on foreign capital to help develop the Soviet Union evidence of collusion between Bolsheviks and foreign capitalists against the interests of the people; the Bolsheviks, he believed, were less concerned about the people and socialism than about the economic development of the state.[411] The Communist alliance with the Guomindang in China was to provide anarchists with additional evidence of the essentially capitalist nature of Marxian socialism.

The Critique of Marxism

The anarchist critique of Bolshevism, of its economic policies as well as its stance on the question of classes, implicated Marxism in the failure of Bolshevik socialism. Some continued to blame the failure of socialism in Russia on the backwardness of Russian society, which, as an agrarian society, did not fulfill the conditions upon which socialism could be built.[412] Increasingly, however, anarchists traced the failure of the revolution to its Marxist premises. Cherkezov’s analyzes of Marxism provided them with the theoretical weapons they needed. In spite of a measure of simplification, these writings presented an analysis of Marxism that was more sophisticated than any other available in China at the time, including to the Communists, whose understanding of Marxism was shaped almost exclusively by a Leninist interpretation.

As it appeared in Chinese anarchists’ writings (which for the large part consisted of rephrases of or direct quotations from Cherkezov), Marxism suffered from a fatal ambivalence, which had entered the theory at its very origins. It shared with all socialism, including anarchism, a vision of the future in which society would be managed by free associations of workers’ and peasants’ organizations (Gongnong zuzhide ziyou xieshe gongtong guanli).[413] At the same time, however, the method the theory suggested for reaching this goal compromised its vision irredeemably, since all of the key concepts that Marx had utilized to formulate his theory—hence the theory itself—were derivative of the ideas of bourgeois economists and philosophers, which meant that his methods were shaped by the premises and prejudices of bourgeois society. Marxism, in other words, suffered from a fundamental contradiction between its socialist visionary goal and a method for attaining that goal that was thoroughly infected by bourgeois ideology. The method itself, moreover, contained a contradiction: between a tendency that was social democratic but reformist and a tendency that was revolutionary but Jacobinist (hence divorced from the people). Different though they were, neither method broke with bourgeois politics.

While these writings insisted that Marx had lacked originality as a social thinker, since he had received all of his theoretical insights from others, they nevertheless recognized in him considerable complexity, drawing a distinction between a young Marx and a mature Marx in terms of his attitude toward the state. In his earlier writings, including the Communist Manifesto, Marx had privileged the state as an agent of change and seen in the socialist capture of the state the key to bringing about socialism. The Paris Commune had constituted a turning point in Marx’s thinking; it had inspired him to a new view of socialism as a federation of free associations (ziyou zuzhide lianbang). Thereafter, he had abandoned his former reliance on the state as the agent of socialism. Although in his Critique of the Gotha Program he had once again turned to the theme of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it was not clear whether he meant a dictatorship of the state, as some Marxists claimed, or a dictatorship of the people after the example of the Commune.

If there was a villain in the account, it was Engels. It was Engels who had elevated Marx to the status of a creative genius, therefore covering up Marx’s intellectual debt to bourgeois scholars. It was Engels who had sought to synthesize the irreconcilable philosophical ideas of materialism and the dialectic into a dialectical materialism, which he then presented as a science (which, Cherkezov argued, distorted Marx because it privileged the deductive method over the inductive method, which Marx had favored, and restored to Marxism the Hegelian metaphysics, which Marx had repudiated). Finally, Engels had been responsible for restoring to Marxism its pre-Paris Commune prejudice for the state by once again privileging the state as an agent of change. In the process, he had also taken revolution out of Marxism and made it into a strategy of peaceful change.

Engels, in other words, appeared as the immediate source of contemporary social democracy. Lenin had broken with Engelsian Marxism both in his insistence on violence and in his elevation of the idea of proletarian dictatorship. He, too, however, had departed from the post-Commune ideas of Marx. Rather, his approach to Marxism had revived the Jacobinist tradition, which reduced the real revolutionariesworkers and peasantsto mere appendages to the revolution. While the Bolsheviks sought to represent themselves as champions of the people by claiming the Soviets for their own, this had little basis in reality, for the Soviets had been anarchist in inspiration and origin. Lenin’s socialism, Cherkezov concluded, was but a modified state capitalism, concerned primarily with carrying out the task of economic development, which in advanced countries had been accomplished by the bourgeoisie.

This portrayal of Marxism was itself quite reductionist in some of its key conclusions; nevertheless, it raised questions concerning Marxism that retain their significance to this day and, in the context of China in the 1920s, was without parallel in sophistication. The questions it raised concerning the relationship of Marxism to its bourgeois legacy, the role Engels played in the formulation of Marxism after Marx, and especially the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the post-Commune writings of Marx were basic issues, which are debated to this day. Cherkezov, moreover, backed up his arguments with an extensive coverage of Marxist and non-Marxist literature that was very impressive for its grasp of fine details in the history of Marxism.

The issues Cherkezov raised quickly assumed nearly formulaic status in anarchist discussions of Marxism, as may be gleaned from an article by Shen Zhongjiu published in People’s Tocsin in early 1927.[414] Shen raised six objections to Marxism: (1) Marx had copied his most basic ideas from others: class struggle (Guizot, Considerant, Blanc, Proudhon); the concentration of capital (Considerant); surplus value (Sismondi, Blanqui); rate of profit (Ricardo); historical materialism (Vico, Herder). (2) Marxism is utopian, not scientific because science is based on the inductive method whereas Marxism is metaphysical; hence its errors on such questions as the concentration of capital, or its inability to account for the role consciousness plays in society because of its assumption of technological determinism, which ignores that it is human consciousness that creates technology. (3) Marxism advocates private property; the state takes over production and remunerates individuals according to their contribution, which turns everyone into a capitalist. (4) Marxism is reformist, not revolutionary. (5) Marxism advocates dictatorship of the few. (6) Marxism stresses industry and ignores agriculture; hence it is irrelevant to China. The last item, to be discussed further, was a particularly Chinese concern; the rest were merely summaries of Cherkezov’s argument (as Shen acknowledged in his essay).

Two of the issues that Cherkezov raised were of particular importance in Chinese discussions of Marxism: the concentration of capital, and class struggle. An essay of Cherkezov’s on the former issue appeared in anarchist publications more than once, complemented by Chinese discussions on the subject. The essay argued, based on empirical data, that Marx had been wrong in predicting a progressive concentration of capital and suggested to the contrary that the number of independent businesses had been on the rise since Marx’s time. Anarchists were impressed by Cherkezov’s idea that Marx had copied this notion from other economists. More important, however, may have been the implications of the question for the future of socialism. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin had perceived in the concentration of capital a process that would facilitate the establishment of socialism; the state needed only to take over from large corporations in order to convert an economy from capitalist to socialist. The proliferation of small enterprises would suggest, to the contrary, that state socialism could be established only by going against economic trends, which lent additional support to the anarchist critique of Bolshevism. Whether anarchists also perceived in this an argument in favor of anarchism is more difficult to say.[415]

The issue of class was more complex, if only anarchists were themselves divided over it. Some anarchists rejected it altogether because they viewed class struggle as another expression of selfishness in society, which, in the social divisions it promoted, contravened the humanitarian goals of anarchism; this view of class would provide Guomindang-related anarchists with an ideological weapon against the Communists in the late twenties. Others, while they were willing to recognize the importance of class, were nevertheless reluctant to attribute to it the centrality with which Marxists endowed it. An unattributed article in People’s Voice in 1921 argued that there was little reason to view all history as the history of class struggle, as Marxists claimed, because classes were not always distinguishable from one another in their interests; and even if class struggle at times moved to the center of history, it was not always central, since other loyalties (such as national loyalty) took precedence over class loyalty. Most interesting was the thought experiment the author suggested:

Suppose someone suggests another method of revolution on the basis of the three lines in the Communist Manifesto: (1) Women of the world, unite; (2) overthrow the present-day male political order; (3) [establish] a woman’s dictatorship. Put simply, male-female struggle, dictatorship of women. They also suggest that this is the method of social revolution, and the means to the transition to communism. Should our social revolutionary method be the former (Marx’s) or the latter (women’s)? Or should we let each follow its own way? Whatever the choice might be, we think that people have no wish to heed this kind of theory.[416]

It would be possible but erroneous to read this statement as derogatory of women; the struggle of women for liberation was after all a primary concern for anarchists and a probable reason for questioning an exclusive focus on the proletariat. Rather, the point was to challenge the Marxist assumption of a central thread to history in class struggle and the consequent centering of the struggle for liberation on the proletariat. The goal, in other words, was to further open up the possibilities available in the struggle for liberation by denying to history a center.

Even those anarchists who took class struggle for granted viewed it in terms slightly different than those of Marxism: not as a function of the production process but rather in terms of rich and poor, those who lived off the labor of others and those who labored, or even the educated versus the uneducated. For anarchist advocates of class struggle, the concept created a problem, moreover, because of the relationship that the Leninist argument established between class and the dictatorship of the proletariat; while they conceded that class struggle was a basic datum of history, they insisted that classes could not be allowed to exist after the revolution because this would mean the inevitable resurrection of the state. The revolution, in other words, must pursue a strategy that would abolish not only existing class oppression but the very existence of classes. Ou Shengbai, who may have been closest to the Communists on the issue of class, explained:

I advocate class war because I believe that classes must be extinguished; if the ruled classes do not unite to overthrow the ruling class, the class system cannot be easily abolished. But I wish to use class war to abolish classes, not to overturn them as you [the Communists] do; most anarchists pursue the syndicalist movement and advocate class war. When I speak of the working class, it is the real working class; I do not mean, as you do, organize a political party and view it as the working class, make the working class into a tool of the political party, or make the party into a dictator over the working class. Although I have refrained from criticizing the system in Russia, there is much about it that is not satisfactory. Under the present capitalist system, capitalists are our mutual enemy, and instead of attacking one another, we must give one another support. But if you try to carry the Russian system to China in its entirety, I cannot go along with it.[417]

Anarchist objections to the dictatorship of the proletariat further illustrate the ways in which anarchists found communism to be wanting in its conception of the role of classes in revolution. Suffice it to say here that where this particular issue was concerned, Chinese anarchists had already elaborated arguments that they now developed further in their criticisms of Marxism. The portrayal of Marxism by Cherkezov lent additional support to these arguments. Marx’s views on class were lacking in authenticity, Cherkezov suggested, because they had been copied from others; they were counterrevolutionary because they were rooted in bourgeois conceptions of politics. Marx’s only difference from his teachers Guizot and Lorenz von Stein, both defenders of private property and the bourgeoisie, had been that whereas they had justified the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, he had argued for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Class struggle, which to the anarchists and syndicalists meant economic struggle for liberation, meant to Marxists a political struggle, which basically differed little from bourgeois conceptions.[418]

Anarchists and Revolution in China

For all their brave talk about the bankruptcy of Bolshevism and Marxism, anarchists were well aware by the mid-twenties that they were inexorably losing ground to the Communists. The alliance with the Guomindang (formalized in early 1924) significantly increased Communist access to the mass movements. By the time of the second National Labor Congress in 1925, Communists had replaced anarchists in the leadership of the labor movement; their influence over labor would draw further force from the mass mobilization that followed the May Thirtieth Incident in 1925, as would their influence over youth and women’s movements and, starting in 1925, over the growing agrarian movement.

Anarchists themselves had the option of bringing their movement under the Guomindang umbrella. The Guomindang had its own ideology in Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles, of course, but unlike the Communist party, it was loose organizationally and accommodated disparate political positions under its ideological umbrella. As Shen Zhongjiu would write in 1927, the Three People’s Principles were quite flexible in their broadness and their emphases could change with changing circumstances.[419] Besides, the doyens of anarchism in China, such as Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui, were important members of the Guomindang; they now pressured their younger followers to join the Guomindang to compete with Communists.

After the Guomindang suppression of communism in 1927, many anarchists would collaborate with the Guomindang under the slogan Use the Three People’s Principles as a means to achieve anarchism (yi sanmin zhuyi wei shouduan, yi wuzhengfu zhuyi wei mubiao; literally, Take the Three People’s Principles as method, anarchism as goal).[420] In the early twenties, however, the more activist among the anarchists, especially those connected with the Guangzhou and Sichuan anarchists, were reluctant to enter such an alliance. While anarchists collaborated with Guomindang labor leaders in the syndicalist movement in Shanghai in 1924–25 (and possibly also in Guangzhou), because of their opposition to politics they remained wary of any alliance with a political party. In 1912 Shifu had criticized Zhang Ji and Wu Zhihui for their participation in the Guomindang. His heirs now directed similar criticism at Wu Zhihui and Li Shizeng for their political activities.

Radical anarchists were also opposed to the nationalist goals of the revolutionary movement led by the Guomindang-Communist alliance. At the height of the nationalist movement in China, anarchists continued to criticize nationalism and patriotism as obstacles to the progress of humankind, rooted in selfishness and self-aggrandizement. They bemoaned the growth of patriotic sentiment since the May Fourth Movement, for they believed that nationalism inevitably strengthened the government and built walls around people that separated them from one another.[421] When Jean Grave in a letter gently rebuked Chinese anarchists for their inflexibility on this issue, reminding them that he and Kropotkin had supported World War I as a necessary compromise, Bi Xiushao (who had known Grave in France) responded that while anarchists were opposed to imperialism because of its oppressiveness, they could not support a nationalist movement that glorified patriotism.[422]

Beyond these issues of principle, anarchists opposed the Guomindang as a bourgeois organization that was counterrevolutionary in nature. Indeed, anarchists perceived in the Communist alliance with the Guomindang confirmation of their belief that Bolshevism was essentially bourgeois in orientation. In a long essay criticizing Communist rationalizations for joining the Guomindang, Mao Yibo pointed out that the so-called revolutionary Guomindang spent much of its time suppressing real revolutionaries.[423]

Anarchist attitudes toward their competitors on the revolutionary scene were summarized in 1926 in a Manifesto of the Hunan Anarchist Alliance (Hunanqu wuzhengfu zhuyizhe tongmeng xuanyan):

We must break down the errors of other doctrines so that the masses may be led on to the correct path. The evil doctrines of the contemporary world, such as imperialism, militarism, capitalism, need not be broken down by us; the masses already oppose them. As for the others, such as Marxism (i.e., Bolshevism and Leninism), integral nationalism (guojia zhuyi), Three People’s Principles, etc., they have on the surface some truth to them, and there are those among the masses who blindly pursue them. A little examination will show, however, that they are no more than modified revanchism (baofu zhuyi), commandism (shouling zhuyi), and aggressionism (qinlue zhuyi). These doctrines not only cannot resolve humankind’s problems, they are, on the contrary, themselves obstacles to revolution in the path of human progress.[424]

Revolution and Organization

Anarchists continued to phrase their own revolutionary goals in broad humanitarian terms. The Declaration of the Anarchist Federation in 1923 described the goals of revolution as the elimination of all that was contrary to reason, and the creation of a society of mutual labor, mutual aid, and mutual love (hulao, huzhu, huai).[425] The Equality Society (Junshe) in Sichuan sought to bring about a world organized around love, not killing; a world of mutual aid, not competition.[426] In 1927 the anarchist-Guomindang periodical Revolution Weekly (Geming zhoubao) depicted the goals of anarchism as the elimination of all that was old, irrational, and harmful and, therefore, unsuited to existence; and the creation of a social organization that was new, rational, and beneficial to human existence.[427] All anarchists agreed that the goal of an authentic revolution was to transform social consciousness and life at its quotidian level, in order to create receptivity to such a conception of society; their own role was to incite the masses to action to achieve such a consciousness. Wu Zhihui estimated at one point that the anarchist revolution would take about three thousand years to achieve (though he added, a few years later, that if every anarchist was a Shifu, it might take only five hundred years).[428] It would also take many, many revolutions to achieve this goal.

Anarchists in the twenties, unlike those in earlier years, could no longer afford to be satisfied by vague statements of revolution. The Communist challenge was to compel anarchists to pay closer attention to concrete issues of revolution. While they were opposed to the Communist strategy of revolution, anarchists had to evolve a strategy of their own to prove their viability as an alternative to the Communists. This was the most important development in Chinese anarchism in the twenties. It was evident in the increasing attention devoted to three questions with which the Communists presented them: organization, revolutionary strategy, and the defense of revolution (an alternative, in other words, to the dictatorship of the proletariat).

The need to organize, and to find a suitable means of organization, were major anarchist preoccupations. Anarchists insisted that they were not opposed to organization (as the Communists charged), that they opposed only the kind of organization that was inconsistent with the revolutionary society they sought to createin other words, political organization that took as its aim not social revolution but the conquest of political power, which was hierarchical and coercive in its internal functioning.[429] Qin Baopu charged with laziness anarchists who believed that anarchism should not be organized, or that anarchist organization had no room for discipline, rules, and regulations. Organization was a necessity of revolution, he asserted; anarchist organization was distinguished from others in that it must be based on the will of the masses (qunzhong yizhi). Like other anarchists, he believed that anarchist organization must move from the bottom up. He proposed as the initial task of organization the founding of small organizations (xiao zuzhi) in localities, productive units, and schools. These organizations would associate with others in their proximity in local congresses (quhui). Except over fundamental issues that required congress decision, the small organizations would be independent in carrying out day-to-day affairs, represented by their secretaries. In this manner, he believed, whole counties and provinces could be organized for action. While other anarchists at the time called for a national congress of anarchists, Qin believed that such a congress would be premature until after localities had been organized. With the country thus organized, once revolution broke out at the centers of political power, it would spread rapidly. What was most important for the time being was to organize the masses without the use of coercion—which alienated them, as the Bolshevik example showed—and to neutralize those others who were potentially opposed to revolution. He envisaged a violent revolution, for he believed that power holders were unlikely to relinquish their power voluntarily.[430]

While Qin’s proposals represented mainstream anarchist thinking on the question of organization, others were willing to go still further. People’s Vanguard magazine, more radical than most in its advocacy of class struggle and its opposition to the Guomindang, published an article by Mao Yibo that sounded much like the Bolshevik strategy the anarchists opposed. Although revolution was class struggle and must ultimately depend for its success on the consciousness of the masses, all revolutions historically had been the work of the few whose consciousness was in advance of the masses they represented; they, therefore, must play a strategic part in arousing the consciousness of others and in leading them in revolution.[431]

Under contemporary circumstances organization from the bottom up was possibly a hopeless dream (as the Communists believed) without a larger organizational umbrella to coordinate and to protect it; but the majority of anarchists refused to entertain any such project. In 1927 Shen Zhongjiu was still pleading with fellow anarchists to overcome their qualms about participating in a national congress.[432] As we have seen, anarchist efforts to federate local anarchist organizations were in the end fruitless because they shied away from any suggestion of centralization in the movement.

Anarchist suspicion of centralization accounts also for the direction anarchist revolutionary activity would take. In their discussions of revolutionary strategy, anarchists took as their immediate goal the overthrow of the state and capitalism. In How to Resolve the Problems of Present-day Chinese Politics, Ou Shengbai, who was held in high esteem by fellow anarchists for his attention to concrete revolutionary problems, discussed the sad state of Chinese politics over the preceding ten years and outlined a program of action:

On the basis of these experiences, we deeply feel that the causes of popular misery are these: (1) Because of the present political system power is concentrated in a few hands with the result that the majority of the people do not have the opportunity for free participation. (2) Because of the capitalist system all means of production are concentrated in the hands of the capitalists with the result that the benefits that ought to accrue to laborers are usurped by capitalists.

Therefore, if we wish to pursue the happiness of the people, we must seek to reform both the political and the economic system; the principle of reform is nothing but advancing from a situation of extreme absence of freedom to relative freedom. The important points are these: (1) abolish the system of warlord and bureaucratic control nationally and provincially to institute burghers’ self-government in cities and to establish a national association of self-governing cities and villages; (2) abolish capitalism, return all means of production to public ownership by the producers, so that only the producers have the right to use and enjoy them.

From the perspective of political theory, the narrower the scope of state power, the freer are the people; therefore, before the abolition of the state, those who pursue the happiness of the people should diminish the power of the state to a minimum. Economically, the products of labor should belong to the self or those with whom the self wishes to share; so that each exerts himself or herself to the utmost in the increase of production. Therefore, burgher self-government and the socialization of production are the paths to freedom and equality.[433]

While most anarchists agreed that economic and political power holders constituted the major targets of revolution, there was some disagreement over who was to be included among the forces that would carry out the revolution. Ou Shengbai, Qin Baopu, and syndicalists such as Shen Zhongjiu and Lu Jianbo conceived of revolution in class terms and looked to urban and rural laborers as the main force of revolution. Intellectuals were more problematic; while Baopu restricted revolution to the masses, and included the petit-bourgeoisie among the forces that had to be neutralized, Mao Yibo, as we have seen, privileged intellectuals with a vanguard role for their revolutionary consciousness. Anarchists also differed over their emphases on urban and rural laborers, although they did not necessarily view rural and urban revolution as mutually exclusive. Some, however, did believe that because China was an agrarian society, the proletariat had but a small role to play in the revolution; one such anarchist pointed to peasants, women, and soldiers as the groups on which anarchists should concentrate their attention.[434]

Revolutionary Institutions of Anarchism: Labor Syndicates and Rural Communes

Anarchists had long argued that a meaningful social revolution must in the very process of revolution create the institutions on which future social organization would be based. Two institutions were foremost in anarchist discussions of revolutionary strategy at this time and also provided the main objects of anarchist revolutionary activity: syndicates for organizing urban laborers, and communes for the organization of villages. Some anarchists also believed that the people’s militia (mintuan) in the villages, an age-old institution in China, could be utilized fruitfully both in carrying out and in defending the revolution.

Chinese anarchists, starting with Shifu’s federation in Shanghai in 1915, had stressed syndicates (gongtuan, to be distinguished from labor unions, gonghui) as organizations that would serve not only as agents of revolution but as the cores for laborers of future social organization. The Declaration of the Shanghai Branch of Anarcho-Communists stated in 1924:

The society of the future not only will stamp out bureaucrats, capitalists, and their appendages, but also put an end to distinctions between intellectuals, workers, peasants, and merchants. Everyone will labor for society and become laborers who will work both with their minds and their hands. In order to meet the needs of production for necessities or luxuries, to satisfy general or particular needs, these laborers will organize themselves in a variety of groups (tuanti). These groups will federate freely with other groups, and replace present-day political organization. In order for these freely organized groups to fulfill their promise, it is absolutely necessary to overthrow the present system. But these groups cannot be established overnight; if a basis for them is not instituted presently, when the revolution comes about and the old system is overthrown without a new one to replace it, all will be chaos. It is best for the workers of the whole world or the whole country to unite (tuanjie qilai), to declare war upon capitalists and the government through such methods as the general strike (zongtongmeng bagong), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to establish a foundation for future society. It is because of this that many anarchists also advocate syndicalism.[435]

Shanghai was in the twenties the center of anarchist syndicalist activity. Anarchists had been the first to organize modern labor unions in China, first in Guangzhou and then in central China, in Hunan. Their influence in labor unions declined (though it did not disappear) in Guangzhou after the alliance with the Guomindang allowed the Communists to make inroads into labor organization in the South. In central China the bloody suppressions of labor organization in 1922–23, and once again the increase in Communist influence, drove Hunanese anarchists to Shanghai, where they quickly assumed an important role in the burgeoning syndicalist activity. The Federation of Shanghai Syndicates organized in 1924 held sway over forty to fifty labor organizations and roughly fifty thousand workers.[436] The federation (which the Communist labor organizer and historian Deng Zhongxia would describe as an organization of vagabond unions) was not an anarchist organization; Guomindang labor leaders played an important part in it, and some of its member unions were less interested in the promotion of labor interests than in reconciling labor and capitalwhich was not necessarily inconsistent with the anarchist wish to bring about a revolution that transcended class interest. Anarchists possibly played an important part in day-to-day activity, however, and the ideological slogan of the federation, Let us ask for bread only, and leave politics alone,reflected the orientation of the anarchists, who sought to spread among federation members the anarchist message: Resolve economic problems, oppose all politics, engage in direct action, do not rely upon any party,[437] as did the use of syndicate—over labor union—by the federation in describing itself.

Anarchists had also been the first among Chinese social revolutionaries to raise the question of a rural revolution. Shifu’s followers had made the first attempt to establish an agrarian commune in the mid-191Os. Under anarchist inspiration, the idea of going to the people had gained currency in Chinese radicalism during the May Fourth Movement. The New Village Movement that flourished in 1919–20 referred not to the establishment of rural communes but rather to communes that made agricultural work part of their daily activity; it nevertheless helped spread a rural orientation among urban radicals. In the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement anarchists took the lead in carrying revolution to the countryside. It is also possible that Communists who distinguished themselves in agrarian activity in the early 1920s, such as Peng Pai in Guangdong, turned to agrarian activity initially under anarchist inspiration.

Anarchists in the twenties believed that agrarian activity should go beyond the establishment of new villages, which were escapist in nature, and seek to revolutionize the existing village.[438] At least some among the anarchists took this to heart. Judging by the literature (which is sparse and sporadic), anarchists associated with Jing Meijiu in the North may have played a significant part in this regard. Jing, the editor of National Customs Daily, had been introduced to anarchism in 1907–8 while a student in Japan, and his anarchism carried the imprint of the Tokyo anarchists, who promoted an antimodernist anarchism that drew upon native ideals and Tolstoyan ideas and stressed a rural life in which mental and manual labor, agriculture and industry, would be combined. Jing himself had engaged in attempts to enterprises in his native Shanxi even before the 1911 Revolution.[439] The Sea of Learning, supplement to his National Customs Daily, often published articles on rural revolution. In June 1923 a draft program for an Alliance for an Agrarian Movement (Nongcun yundong tongmeng) appeared in the paper and stated as its goal the use by tillers of their own power to acquire for themselves profit and happiness. The Alliance program was to advance the organization of tillers, establish a federation of such organizations, help the tillers acquire land, and promote self-government.[440]

The Sea of Learning was not alone in promoting an agrarian movement. Anarchist periodicals were rife with reports on attempts to establish communes or promote rural revolution across the face of China. An anarchist objection to Marxism was that Marxism, with its preoccupation with the proletariat, had a blind spot toward the peasantry and ignored 80 percent of the world’s population. Communism was unsuitable in China, some anarchists believed, because China was still a largely agrarian society; some went so far as to criticize the Communists for their fetishism of development, which led them to overlook the virtues of agrarian society. They argued that anarchism was much more suitable in organizing a society where, owing to thousands of years of agrarian existence over which the state had little power, the population had evolved habits of self-government conducive to anarchism. Others added that revolution was easier in the village, both because of these habits and for tactical reasons; unlike the proletariat, which had to compel the bourgeoisie to turn over their property to workers, all peasants needed to do by way of struggle was to keep what they already had.[441] An anarchist society in Shaanxi in the North perceived in the self-governing village a model for anarchist reorganization of the world.[442]

Some anarchists argued that the village militia offered a particularly effective means for revolutionary reorganization of the village. As self-defense organizations for the rural population, they believed, the militia had played a revolutionary role throughout Chinese history, although most of the time the government had managed to bring them under control and turn them to counterrevolutionary purposes. The task was to render them independent and bring them around to opposition to the state. With the right training, not only the militia but even bandits could be brought around to the anarchist cause. Such training should include military training for both men and women, and education through films and public performances (plays and operas) as well as written materials on revolutionaries and revolution. Once this was accomplished, it was necessary to make sure that they were well provisioned and inclined toward union with other militia. The militia, thus re-formed, would play an important part not only in bringing about the revolution but also in defending it against counterrevolution. In the words of Li Shaoling:

The last few years, I have constantly been thinking of a short-cut to revolution without much success. Education is the most reliable method but also very slow. The new village is very difficult under conditions of warlord rule; scattered uprisings sacrifice many lives without significant consequence. After much thought, I have decided that militia offer a relatively reliable and quick method. Just speaking of instances with which I am familiar, the cases of Hunan and Guangdong, in these two provinces the militia are strong; they often chase away government and warlord forces, or render them ineffective. While there are those in them who are no good, their revolutionary spirit in opposing the government is inextinguishable. I raise this issue with the hope that comrades will examine it with care.[443]

Some comrades apparently did. In the late twenties, Fan Tianjun participated in an anarchist-led militia in Fujian, which sought to establish a base area (after the Communist model). For a brief period its success was such that it even attracted the attention of Japanese anarchists who thought that Fujian might become the base for an East Asian anarchist revolution.[444]

Social and Cultural Revolution in Anarchist Activity

Whether urban or rural, anarchist revolutionary activity followed a common pattern, one that reveals that in spite of a desire to meet the Communist challenge, it was an anarchist conception of revolution that shaped anarchists’ revolutionary strategy. The point of departure and the end of this activity was the transformation of workers’ and peasants’ social consciousness, to stimulate a self-awareness (zijue) that would enable them to take charge of their own struggles against power. While anarchists did come to play leading roles in the organizations they established, they could claim with some fairness that, unlike their Communist counterparts, they did not seek to sway the masses through a political organization; rather, they wanted to help them organize in order to pursue their own interests (which is credible if only because this was the flaw in anarchist revolutionary strategy). The cornerstone of anarchist revolutionary activity was education, not education in the ordinary sense, which they rejected, but an education for revolution that made no distinction between formal education and propaganda, that took as its primary goal the transformation of quotidian life and consciousness. The tactics were simple: establish contact with laborers (proletarian or peasant); through the help of these contacts organize workers’ clubs and part-time schools in which worker participation would be encouraged; gradually move on to the organization of a union as the confidence of laborers was secured. If these tactics do not sound very different from Communist tactics, it is because they were not very different, except in goals. Anarchists, however, had been using these tactics for nearly three years when Communists adopted them in their first overtures to labor in 1920.[445]

We have glimpses of these activities from two reports published in the Anarchist Federation journal, Spring Thunder, one on urban, the other on rural activities. The former was a report on anarchist activities in Shanghai published in early 1924. According to the report, anarchists of the Free People Society (led by Shen Zhongjiu, who cooperated closely with Hunanese anarchists in Shanghai) had been active in the establishment of the Federation of Shanghai Syndicates, as well as a complementary organization, Union of Young Laborers (Laogong qingnianhui). They published their own periodical, Free People, as well as two labor journals associated with these organizations. Labor Ten-daily (Laodong xunkan) and Young Laborers Ten-daily (Laogong qingnian xunkan). They conducted educational activity in factories with unions associated with the federation, spreading the message resolve economic problems, oppose all politics, engage in direct action, do not rely upon any political party. In conjunction with these educational activities, they were planning for a labor university (laodong daxue).[446]

Anarchists would not achieve their dream of establishing a labor university until 1927 when, under the auspices of Guomindang anarchists, they were able to establish the National Labor University (Guoli laodong daxue), which for a brief period promised to fulfill their goal of training a new kind of labor leader, drawn from among the ranks of laborers, who would be at once a laborer and an intellectual, overcoming a distinction that had long divided society into classes. The plans for such a university were laid as early as 1924. The statement of intention anarchists drew up at the time is revealing of their approach to labor and, therefore, of the ultimate intention underlying their revolutionary activities:

What is laborer education? It is the kind of education to advance the self-awareness of laborers; it is the kind of education that will help laborers advance from the status of slave to that of human being (ern); it is the kind of education that will help laborers’ abilities and show them how to pursue a labor movement. Simply put, laborers’ education is the education of laborers to become human beings; it is an education in revolution because for laborers revolution and becoming human beings are inseparable. If they want to become human beings, to be independent and free, to sustain life, to satisfy their spiritual needs and not be exploited, controlled or oppressed, is there any way other than revolution?[447]

The report on agrarian activity (published December 1923) concerned an unnamed village in Guangdong where anarchists had been active for the previous two years. According to the author, Daneng (a pen name), the village school had played an axial role in these activities. Recalling the experiences in establishing a peasants’ association, he related that they had started off with a night school where, in addition to teaching the villagers basic reading and arithmetic, they had told their pupils stories of world revolution and revolutionaries, which gradually made the villagers feel that revolution might bring about an improvement in their lives. On May Day they distributed pamphlets among the villagers, held a lantern parade, and concluded the festivities with a revolutionary opera. Soon after, the villagers came to them with a request for organization.[448] Similarly, anarchists in northern Shaanxi combined general and revolutionary education to gradually mobilize villagers; in their case a general education to stimulate self-awareness combined with technical education to improve productive methods.[449]

Education remained for the anarchists the most reliable method of revolution. Nevertheless, the experience of failure in the face of oppression, and the challenge of the Communist advocacy of proletarian dictatorship, taught at least some of the anarchists that the creation of revolutionary institutions was not sufficient to make revolution, that they must also find ways to defend revolution against its enemies. This was a major reason in Li Shaoling’s consideration of people’s militia as an instrument of revolution. A similar idea was proposed in 1924 by the prominent Guangzhou anarchist Liang Bingxian, this time for urban areas. Liang argued that inasmuch as education was crucial to revolution, revolution entailed questions of power and would certainly end up in failure if it could not defend itself. He, therefore, proposed the establishment of revolutionary corps (geming tuanti) to supplement syndicates. Ultimately, the syndicates would provide the basis for social and economic reorganization, but in the period of transition the revolutionary corps would play a crucial role in overthrowing the power of the state and the bourgeoisie and defending the revolution against them. Liang’s proposal emphasized urban areas but was not restricted to them. Revolution, he believed, could not be successful unless it encompassed rural areas.[450]

These schemes represented an anarchist answer to a transitional period in the revolution that for the Communists was encapsulated in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Anarchists had earlier believed that once the revolution broke out, the natural inclination to anarchism in all human beings would quickly usher in anarchist society. That the revolution would involve power and require a period of armed preparation, warfare, and defense before achieving its social goals revealed a new soberness toward questions of revolution that anarchists owed to the Communist challenge.[451] They repudiated the dictatorship of the proletariat unconditionally, but they could not ignore the very real questions that it raised. Unlike their Communist opponents, who justified dictatorship by necessity but also learned quickly to celebrate it in endless affirmations of the indispensable vanguard role of the Communist party, anarchists remained disinclined to break with the commitment to popular initiative that informed their revolutionary vision. Their methods were at best reluctant compromises with the realities of power, but not compromise enough for any significant gains in the contest for revolutionary leadership.

In Retrospect

Heaven helps those who help themselves, an anarchist wrote in People’s Tocsin in 1927, and went on to complain that for lack of an organization, anarchists were busy cultivating others’ gardens instead of their own.[452] The reference was to anarchists’ cooperation with the Guomindang. Such cooperation was not new, but when the Guomindang broke with the Communists in 1927, anarchists saw an opportunity to pursue their cause within the Guomindang. While some anarchists remained adamantly opposed to such cooperation (among them Ou Shengbai and the Sichuan anarchists Bajin and Lu Jianbo), others formerly opposed to it (such as Shen Zhongjiu) could not resist the temptation. The most visible manifestation of the cooperation was the Labor University and the journal Revolution Weekly associated with it, in which Shen Zhongjiu, Bi Xiushao, and Hunanese anarchists, as well as foreign anarchists such as Jacques Reclus (grand-nephew of Élisée Reclus who had first inspired Li Shizeng to anarchism in Paris) played important parts, under the sponsorship of the Guomindang anarchists Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui.[453] Other important anarchists, including Shifu’s brother Liu Shixin, remained active in the labor movement in Guangzhou under Guomindang auspices.[454] Ironically, the anarchist rejection of politics seems to have made for some willingness to work with other political groups so long as anarchists were not compelled to abandon anarchism for another ideology.

For some the cooperation continued to the period of the war with Japan after 1937. Other anarchists would end up joining the Communist party. Through it all, the anarchists did make an effort to retain their identity as anarchists. The anarchists in Labor University turned to the criticism of Chiang Kai-shek and Wu Zhihui when in 1928 the Guomindang suppressed the mass movements they had hoped to lead. Revolution Weekly was shut down in 1929, and though the Labor University stayed open until 1932, by 1928 it had already lost the revolutionary mission it had initially assumed in anarchist eyes. Although anarchist plans for revolution may not have disappeared, they had evaporated.

These plans appear at first sight not as products of a serious pursuit of revolution but as the fanciful game-plans of young radicals playing at revolution (most of the anarchists were indeed quite young). I hope the evidence presented above will clear away such an impression. The anarchists may have been idealistic in their efforts to remain true to their vision, but they were deadly serious as revolutionaries. Their revolutionary activities overlapped those of the Communists; in their approaches to strategies of both urban and rural revolution, they were the first to utilize methods that would also become the methods of Communists and carry the latter to success when the political environment was hospitable. They were also willing to learn from the Communists and to risk some measure of compromise to meet the challenge of the Bolshevik strategy of revolution.

But they were unwilling to postpone their revolutionary aspirations indefinitely in order to achieve immediate success. This is not to suggest that anarchists were the only revolutionary purists on the scene or that they did not make serious errors. Their effort to discredit Marxism rather than to listen carefully to what Marxist theory had to say about society blinded them to concrete problems of revolution as much as the Communist disdain for anarchism blinded Communists to what they had to say about the relationship between revolutionary vision and practice. The vagueness of their social analysis deprived them (as the Communists charged and they were willing to concede in the end) of a viable method of revolution.

The Communists themselves were vague on social analysis on occasion and believed in the possibility of alliances that transcended classes. But they had what the anarchists did not have: a political organization that ultimately stood as a point of reference for all revolutionary activity, coordinated and gave it direction, and was able, once it had realized the necessity, to protect such activity with power. Theory and vision, once they were embodied in the Communist party, acquired a concreteness and a purpose, which gave direction in Communist hands to the same methods of revolution that the anarchists had pursued. Anarchist revolutionary activities do indeed resemble purposeless revolutionary play in the absence of a comparable organization. Nevertheless, what endowed them with revolutionary seriousness was their realization that the organizational capture of revolution would irretrievably divert revolution from the intention that gave it meaning.

The opposition to organizational centralization per se does not reveal the full distinctiveness of the anarchist argument or its thoroughgoing radicalism. There is another, deeper aspect to the problem that brings into relief anarchist differences not just with Bolshevism but with Marxism, what we might call the deep structure of anarchism, which may in the long run be more significant than any specific contributions anarchism may have made to revolutionary strategy in China. I described this earlier as the denial of a center to revolution, which was an implicit determinant of anarchist revolutionary activity, not only in their rejection of an organizational center to revolution but also in their suspicion of any conceptualization of society that presupposed a center to society and history, be it the proletariat or even the very idea of class. Indeed, it may be suggested that the anarchist idea of freedom and democracy was inextricably linked with a desire to abolish a prevalent tendency to view society in terms of a center. The editorial in the first issue of Spring Thunder, the journal of the Anarchist Federation, argued just such a case. The author, Wang Siweng (who was also the editor), based his case for anarchism on the assumption of the naturalness of division of labor and cooperation in society (fengong hezuode shehui shenghuo). What made this natural was that it was a reflection in society of the functioning of the cosmos as modern science understood it. Since the sixteenth century, when people still believed that human beings were the center of the universe, science had discovered that there was no power that was almighty and, therefore, the center of the universe. From the solar system to the minutest particles of life, from the solar system to all the solar systems in the universe, there was no single unit that controlled the universe or even the immediate space around it. Everything depended rather on relationships, which shaped the large as well as the small (the sun as much as the planets), made them equally independent and equally dependent on one another. Human organization must be egalitarian, because the organization of the cosmos was egalitarian (yuzhoude zuzhi, gewei pingheng). Likewise, human organization must strive to achieve freedom for all regardless of place, gender, class, or race because there was no such thing in the cosmos as one ruling entity.[455]

Wang did not acknowledge any debt to others in his essay, but textual similarities suggest that his discussion was mostly derivative of Kropotkin’s Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal, where Kropotkin had initially made the case for decentering society and history so that humankind could reconstitute itself on the basis of freedom and equality, the preconditions for a social existence of mutual aid. Speaking of recent developments in astronomy, he wrote, cogently: Thus the center, the origin of force, formerly transferred from the earth to the sun, now turns out to be scattered and disseminated. His survey of the modern sciences confirmed this fundamental finding of astronomy.[456]

It may be that in a world without center, politics, including revolutionary politics, has no point of departure. In this, however, anarchists saw not the threat of chaos but the possibility of a new beginning for humanity, this time on the basis of free and equal association. In this particular sense anarchists were also correct in arguing that Marxism shared much in common with the philosophies it rejected, because the pursuit of a center to replace the centers of old society would seem to be characteristic of all varieties of Marxism and of Marx’s own location of a center to history in class struggle, which, as the anarchists pointed out, has led to a Marxist neglect of other struggles in history—and other possibilities of liberation.

In 1921 participants in the May Day parade in Guangzhou arrived at a crossroads where they were greeted by two portraits hanging on opposite sides of the street, one of Marx, the other of Kropotkin.[457] This may have been the last occasion for such an encounter. In ensuing years, Marx and Kropotkin inexorably moved farther and farther apart in the thinking of Chinese radicals. Anarchists were to lose by their rejection of Marx. Communists would win the revolution, but the repudiation of anarchism once the Communist party had been established would also exact a price from their revolutionary vision, if in less visible ways.