Chapter Eight
Aftermath and Afterthoughts

For more than two decades in the early part of this century, anarchism nourished Chinese radicalism. Before the May Fourth Movement in 1919, anarchists virtually monopolized the social revolutionary Left. Having reached the apogee of its popularity in the early May Fourth period, anarchism in the twenties declined before its new competitor on the Left, Marxian communism. Following the attempt to reassert an anarchist presence in the revolution through the Guomindang in the late 1920s, anarchists once again dispersed to their regional bases, and anarchism ceased to exert any significant influence on the course of the revolution. Anarchists did not vanish, but they no longer exhibited the vitality that had opened up new directions for the revolution earlier. Indeed, they had become irrelevant. Whether anarchism became irrelevant to an understanding of the course the Chinese revolution would take in later years is another matter.

The vitality of anarchism in 1905–1930 was bound up with the orientation of the Chinese revolution in these years. The Chinese revolution had its sources in a new national consciousness; but, as I have argued above, national consciousness involved a new consciousness of the world and a new conception of the relationship between state and society. Anarchism voiced the urge to a utopian cosmopolitanism and a sense of an autonomous social existence outside of the boundaries of the state, which were the dialectical counterpart to the demand in nationalist consciousness for an organic unity between state and society to ward off the world that threatened to engulf China. Anarchists, too, sought an organic society; but they believed that such a society could be created only outside the realm of politics, on the basis of free individuals who could assert their natural inclination to sociability only if they were liberated from the crippling consequences of social and political authority. Their rejection of politics was accompanied by a call for a cultural revolution that would release individuals from the hold on their consciousness of authoritarian institutions and enable them to achieve a genuine public consciousness. What gave credibility to their argument was a revolutionary situation in which social mobilization opened up the imagination to thinking of the future in new ways, and the degeneration of authority into corruption and oppression that confirmed the necessity to social survival of a total social reorganizationas well as faith in its possibility.

Anarchism was a beneficiary of this revolutionary situation, and it also provided a social imaginary that gave it conceptual if not organizational direction and a language to voice the nascent urge to social liberation. For two decades anarchists served as the source, or the most consistent exponents, of ideas and practices that were to play an important part in shaping the course of the revolution. Among these were the call for a cultural revolution against not just political authority but authority in general, most significantly the quotidian institutions and language of authority; innovations in educational practices that reflected this concern for cultural revolution; a social revolution from the bottom up, which led them to labor and rural organization as well as to the reorganization of work and to experiments in new ways of living; an early concern for the liberation of women, of which they were among the most consistent advocates; and even ideas of political reorganization. Anarchists were also responsible for introducing to China the literature of modern European radicalism in which these ideas were embedded. Their critique of Bolshevism in the 1920s rings especially true in our day when the fate of a socialism that has abandoned its democratic roots has become poignantly obvious.

Anarchism was most prevalent in China at a time when a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary discourse were assuming recognizable form. Not only did anarchists contribute to the emergence of this revolutionary movement, but anarchist language and practices infused the radical culture out of which this discourse emerged. Anarchism may have disappeared from sight by the 1930s, but it is possible that in spite of the formal repudiation of anarchist ideas, their traces survived in the revolutionary discourse, which may account for some of the peculiar features that the revolution would assume under the leadership of the Communist party—traces that may have been all the more powerful because they entered the discourse not as ideas but as cultural practices. If these practices in their consequences appear contrary to what the anarchists had intended, that too may have something important to tell us. Anarchists argued all along that a revolutionary society could be only as good as the revolutionary process that produced it. The revolutionary process in China would ultimately take a course different than the one anarchists had envisioned, which was accompanied by the repudiation (or the indefinite postponement) of the vision that had informed the anarchist conception. The Chinese revolution, for all its practical successes under the leadership of the Communist party, has had a price to pay for abandoning this vision. So has socialism.

The Dispersion of Anarchism

After 1927 there was an important change in the conditions of revolution in China. For two decades the revolutionary movement had drawn its power from a social mobilization that, if not quite spontaneous, had been the product of autonomous social activity. After 1927 the revolution would take the form of organized conflict between two forces, each the product of earlier years, one of which had now established itself in government while the other had escaped into the countryside to regroup and organize a revolution: the Guomindang and the Communist party. It was social conflict still, but it was organized social conflict, in which organizational ability took priority over social vision in determining the outcome of social struggles.

In this situation anarchists, who had been much better at social activity than at social organization for political conflict, had little to contribute and quickly became irrelevant to the revolution. They did not abandon their activities; but those activities were now restricted to the barely visible social niches that remained within the structure of political power. Some in later years would join the Communist party or take refuge with it; the majority of those about whom we have information continued their activities within the Guomindang framework, some in direct service to the Guomindang, others in resignation.

Education provided the primary area of anarchist activity in the thirties. Guomindang anarchists such as Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui survived the debacle of Labor University and continued to work with educational programs similar to earlier ones; in later years they would take celebrated places in the Guomindang pantheon as party elders who had made significant contributions in education and culture to the revolution. The Guangzhou anarchists by the mid-thirties held an important place in the Guangzhou; educational establishment under Guomindang auspices. In 1936 Liu Shixin was appointed head of the Bureau of Social Affairs in Guangzhou; Huang Yibo, Huang Lingshuang, and Ou Shengbai all held educational offices under him. Anarchists elsewhere may also have engaged in educational activities, then and in later years, judging by the few memoirs that have become available recently.[527]

Anarchists had been deeply concerned all along with the problem of culture, and in the 1930s some of them turned to the pursuit of cultural problems, though now the concern with culture was less as a problem of revolution and more as an abstract problem. Hua Lin, whose approach to anarchism had always exhibited an esthetic orientation, turned to writing about art and literature. Huang Lingshuang, who had returned from the United States in the late twenties to become a university professor, became the advocate of a discipline that he described as culturology (wenhuaxue). As he explained it, a systematic elaboration of culture was crucial to national existence; the goal of his culturology was to formulate a sociology of culture that was not bound by European ideas but brought into the study of culture a Chinese sociology, in particular the ideas of Sun Yat-sen. Similarly, Li Shizeng sought to create a new field of studies, which he described through a neologism (consisting of a Chinese and a Greek component), Kiaologie, broadly conceived as a study of the emigre experience in history, whose goal was to contribute to world cooperation and greater cosmopolitanism. Li was probably the foremost voluntary emigre in modern Chinese history, and it was appropriate that he should seek to derive from his personal experiences a world outlook to guide a new way of looking at the relationship among peoples. Like Huang Lingshuang, he sought to bring a Chinese presence into the study of society. This could be viewed as a return to parochialism of the formerly cosmopolitan anarchists. Such a view would be erroneous, however; more important, in either case the urge was to create a genuinely cosmopolitan world outlook by bringing a Chinese voice into a sociology of human development that had hitherto been dominated by European conceptions. If there was anything anarchist about these undertakings, it was a continued commitment to such a cosmopolitanism.[528]

Anarchists also continued with their efforts to spread the use of Esperanto, but here too the changed situation was evident. The Esperanto school that Ou Shengbai conducted in Guangzhou under Guomindang auspices after 1930 had to teach courses in party ideology. Ou and Huang Zunsheng also undertook as part of their duties to translate into Esperanto works by Sun Yat-sen (including the Three People’s Principles) as well as important party documents.[529]

In Guangzhou anarchists also continued with labor activities. In 1927 Liu Shixin and others established a Federation of Revolutionary Workers (Geming gongren lianhehui). Guangzhou anarchists had a history of collaboration with Guomindang-related labor unions and, as we have seen, anarchist unions themselves for the most part sought to resolve the problems of labor through reeducation of both labor and capital rather than through class conflict. Like earlier anarchist unions, however, this one also sought to establish a union of workers, which brought it into conflict with the Guangdong General Labor Union (Guangdong zong gonghui), which was dominated by employers. As part of their activities, they established a Labor Movement Training Institute (Gongren yundong jiangxi suo) in June 1927. Even though they wanted to bring the federation under Guomindang auspices (with Wu Zhihui’s help), the federation was shut down following the Guangzhou insurrection (the Commune) by Communists in December. In ensuing years anarchist labor efforts remained wedded to the Guomindang.[530]

Finally, anarchists continued with publication activities in the 1930s, though in highly subdued form. As far as I can tell, of the journals the anarchists published in the 1930s, only Jingzhe (Spring festival), published in Chengdu during the war against Japan, had a clear identity and an anarchist position. Most of this journal was devoted to translations from Spanish anarchists or news on the civil war in Spain. It is interesting that anarchists for the first time supported the war against Japan as a war against oppression and advocated popular mobilization as a way of fighting it.[531]

Following the war and the victory of the Communist party in 1949, some anarchists went on to Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the United States, while others chose to stay on in China. The tone of available anarchist memoirs (from Taiwan or the People’s Republic of China) suggests that even where they confess to the errors of their youthful days, the original faith derived from anarchism has not been lost, though on occasion the faith finds expression in a highly metaphysical language that has little to do with concrete problems of social change and revolution but is reminiscent of the language of Chinese anarchism in its earliest days.[532]

Whether those anarchists who stayed on in China have had anything to do with the occasional appearance of anarchist ideas after 1949 or with the recent revival of interest in anarchism is difficult to say. It is also difficult to say whether there is a new generation of anarchists in China, or what anarchism might mean to them. During the last two decades there have been Chinese anarchists in Hong Kong, Paris, and possibly elsewhere. Also, some clandestine literature has appeared on occasion in mail received in China, advocating a social revolution that is more reminiscent of anarchist than of Marxist (at least in the Communist party version) notions of revolution.[533] I am not familiar enough with the numbers or the activities of Chinese anarchists abroad to say whether such literature emanated from them or from disgruntled radicals from within China who had escaped abroad. The content of this literature does not provide sufficient evidence to determine that it is indeed of anarchist origin, for it may owe more to an anti-Communist-party democratic Marxism (where it overlaps with anarchism) than to anarchist inspiration.

Anarchistic ideas, however, have appeared repeatedly in the People’s Republic of China, not in any open advocacy of anarchism, but in the counterposing to the existing political system of an alternative principle of revolutionary organization, namely, the principle underlying the Paris Commune of 1871.[534] The most celebrated instance may be that of the group in Hunan province that called itself the Shengwulian (an abbreviation for the Federation of the Provincial Proletariat), which appeared in fall 1967 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. While the group declared fealty to Mao’s thought and the Cultural Revolution leadership, unlike the latter it declared its commitment to the creation of a People’s Commune of China, modeled after the Paris Commune but also claiming the inspiration of the Soviet of Petrograd in 1917, in which the masses should rise to take control of the destiny of their socialist country, and to manage the cities, industry, communications, and economy.[535]

The Shengwulian was born of the struggles in 1967 between a revolution from the bottom, which would carry the Cultural Revolution to a new higher stage, and a revolution stage managed by the Communist party, which already sought to reassert its control over the revolutionary process. According to the group’s manifesto, Whither China? published in early 1968, similar groups had cropped up elsewhere in the country since the January revolution in Shanghai in 1967, which had been the first to declare a mass revolution from the bottom. Mao himself had encouraged mass revolution and communal organization, in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, but was to turn against it when the revolution seemed to be getting out of hand. By 1968 the party in its efforts to restore democratic centralism had already launched an attack on the anarchist theory of many centers, to which neither Mao nor the Cultural Revolution leadership was prepared to lend support.[536] Groups such as the Shengwulian were suppressed in the process.

Anarchists abroad have claimed groups like the Shengwulian for their own.[537] The advocacy of the commune as a principle of revolutionary organization certainly points to the repudiation of the Bolshevik principle of democratic centralism that the Communist party upheld; whether it suggests prima facie that such groups were consciously anarchist is another matter. The declaration of fealty to Mao and the Cultural Revolution leadership in late 1967 and early 1968 seems peculiar if the group was indeed anarchist, since by then they had made clear their opposition to the commune form of organization;[538] at the very least it is evidence of deep political naivete. Moreover, the model of the Paris Commune may be claimed as easily for a democratic Marxism as for anarchism and does not in itself point to anarchist loyalties. The commune principle was to reappear in later years, during the Democracy Movement of 1978–79, when once again it served as an inspiration for antiparty leftists. I suggest that in either case it was the experience of the revolution, rather than any formal anarchist commitments, that played the crucial part in reviving it as a revolutionary ideal.

In light of what I have argued above, it may be a moot question whether a group such as the Shengwulian, or the Democracy Movement, was anarchist or not. Anarchist ideals, embodied in such notions as the commune, were integral to the revolutionary discourse, which they had helped structure at its origins, and were present in it as traces long after the revolutionaries had repudiated an anarchist identity. And while as traces they had no identity of their own and could not serve as the basis for an explicitly anarchist position after 1949, their disruptive presence made itself known (and served as a beacon for radical dissatisfaction with the betrayal of the revolution) every time the revolution ran into serious trouble. For the present, at least, more significant in the legacy of anarchism in China may be those elements in revolutionary discourse that may shed some light on the twists and turns of the Communist revolution after 1949.

Revolutionary Discourse and Chinese Communism

Those radicals who established the Communist party in 1921 and have dominated it since were without question products of May Fourth radicalism, in which anarchism played a central part both as an ideology and vision of social revolution and as cultural practice. Many of them also turned to Marxian communism after going through an anarchist phase, including most prominently Mao Zedong. Deng Xiaoping, the last major figure from that era, was himself a product of the work-study program in France that had been organized by anarchists.

What this means is difficult to say. Anarchism was not the only element in revolutionary discourse that might have contributed to the form Marxism would take in China (aside from nationalism, which in different guises was common to all Chinese revolutionaries). Maurice Meisner has argued plausibly for a populist strain in Chinese Marxism that may have gone a long way toward shaping the Marxism of Mao Zedong, which was to play the central part in giving direction to the Chinese revolution.[539] More important have been the material circumstances of the Chinese revolution. The communism that emerged victorious in 1949 was more directly a product of the revolutionary circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s than of the May Fourth period. The demands of a rural revolution and the guerrilla socialism it produced are sufficient prima facie to account for some of the most basic ideological and organizational features of Chinese communism: the suspicion of an organizational isolation from the people at large that characterized Mao’s thinking, a related suspicion of bureaucratism, emphasis on organic ties between intellectuals and the people, and concern for integrating rural and urban development.

May we ignore these features of Chinese communism as being central to the anarchist vision of social revolution? It is arguable that they can all be traced to Marxism and Marxist texts, but the Chinese revolution has been unique nevertheless in its urge to put them into practice. And though the Chinese revolutionary experience may have been responsible for bringing them forward in revolutionary practice, they existed as ideas in revolutionary discourse prior to the 1930s and possibly helped revolutionaries deal with the exigencies of a novel revolutionary situation.

This is not to suggest that Chinese communism was shaped by anarchism, or that we may describe Mao Zedong as an anarchist. While some Chinese writers in their frustration with the Cultural Revolution, or with the demands for democracy in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, have placed the blame for such deviations from Marxism on persistent anarchist influences in the party, such charges amount to little more than a vulgarized misuse of anarchism to defend a Bolshevik conception of the party. For all his deviations from Bolshevism, Mao was committed to the Communist party. The closest we have to a statement on anarchism is when in 1967, in response to the declaration in Shanghai of a Shanghai commune, he peevishly queried of Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan if China was to be turned into a federation of communes.[540]

The point here is not to capture Mao, the Communist party, or the Chinese revolution for anarchismto which, to make an informed guess, anarchists would be the first to object. Rather, the question is whether we understand better the course communism took in China if we view it as part of a broader revolutionary discourse in whose formation anarchism played an important part historically and therefore introduced dissonant elements into the Bolshevik conception of revolution. That the ideas anarchists introduced into the discourse were not exclusive to anarchism but overlapped with Marxism in later years enabled Communists to disassociate them from their anarchist origins and to claim them for communism. More precisely, the very ideas that appear petit-bourgeois when they are associated with anarchists have become part of the Communist party’s revolutionary tradition to the extent that they can be claimed for Marxism or identified with Communists, in the process of rewriting the history of the revolution around the Communist party.

The fact remains, however, that while there may be textual grounds for claiming such ideas for Marxism, historically they entered the revolutionary discourse in China through anarchist ideological activity and were initially identified with an anarchist vision of social revolution. We have no reason to assume that, because they were disassociated from their anarchist origins once they had become integral to the discourse, they were purged of all association with the anarchist vision of revolution that had initially informed them. On the contrary, it is possible that these associations lived on in revolutionary memory in spite of their formal repudiation. We must remember that the history of the Communist revolution in China coincides with the lifetime of the generation that established the Communist party and has dominated it since. This generation experienced anarchism as part of its political coming-of-agenot merely as an intellectual abstraction but as a set of cultural practices. Anarchist ideas, if they did indeed live on as integral moments of a revolutionary discourse, did so not as intellectual abstractions but as an endowment of crucial moments in the biographies of those who made the revolution. This was not the biography of a single individual, Mao Zedong, with whom we have tended to associate the peculiarities of Chinese communism. Indeed, future research may yet reveal that some of those phenomena in the Communist revolution that have been identified with Mao involved many others who had shared his experiences in the course of their radicalization; some of the foremost names in the Chinese Communist leadership, especially educational leadership, were products of the work-study program in France. The vocabulary of that program persists in China to this day.

According to Zhang Guotao, the populist strain in Chinese communism represented by the slogan Go to the people (dao minjian qu), which entered Chinese Marxism with China’s first Marxist, Li Dazhao, found its most fervent advocates in the May Fourth period among the anarchists, from whom Li originally derived the idea.[541] Most important, however, were two ideas that anarchists introduced into revolutionary discourse early on: the idea of integrating agriculture and industry in China’s future development, and the idea of labor-learning, which played a crucial part in radical culture during the May Fourth period.

The integration of agriculture and industry was in practice a product of revolutionary experience, especially during the Yan’an period, when the exigencies of rural revolution under wartime conditions forced Communists to establish basic industries to meet subsistence and military needs. It may be no accident, however, that the Communists chose mutual aid (huzhu) to describe the small agrarian collectives they established during the Yan’an period and after 1949. More significant was the structure of the people’s communes established from 1958, when there was no such need, which were to remind Colin Ward, editor of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops of Tomorrow, of Kropotkin’s industrial villages. It is also significant that when the people’s communes were established, they were part of an emerging program of development that was to constitute a distinct Chinese way of development that would differ from both capitalist and socialist alternatives that then existed. While they were idealized as organic units of development that would integrate industry and agriculture and provide a cultural (as well as a military) world of their own, it was also important that the program of modernization they articulated had an antimodernist aspect to it, which glorified the countryside at the expense of the city and was suspicious of technology (or of the fetishism of technology) as well as of the professionalism that was a byproduct of modernity.

It may not be fortuitous that the establishment of the people’s communes coincided with a renewed demand for integrating labor and learning. Labor-learning, in its radical interpretation, had been linked in earlier years to mutual aid and communal existence; it was the cultural counterpart to the social organization represented by communes, which sought to abolish the distinctions between mental and manual labor that inevitably obstructed social unity. The official insistence on the need to combine redness and expertize is familiar and need not be elaborated here; the insistence on making professionals and intellectuals redder by demanding that they engage in manual labor, and on making laborers more expert by educating them, was to be a cornerstone of radical policy for the next two decades and to reach a crescendo with the Cultural Revolution.

Most striking about this insistence on labor-learning has been its effect on intellectuals and professionals. But it would be simplistic to view it merely as a means to the suppression of intellectual rivals to the party elite (which by the time of the Cultural Revolution would in turn find itself in fields and factories) or as a function of Maoist anti-intellectualism. A Party Work Conference in 1957 signaled a shift in educational policy by calling upon schools at all levels to apply the principle of combining work with study. The vocabulary was even more revealing. The titles of publications in 1958 on the progress of the new policy included the concept of diligent—work frugal-study (qingong jianxue).[542] It may also have been no coincidence that some of the more elaborate memoirs of the work-study program in France were published at this time, or that the party should have mobilized graduates of that program to urge youth to integrate manual and mental labor, and use both hands and brains.[543] That same year a Communist Labor University (Gongchan zhuyi laodong daxue) was established in Jiangxi to promote both a technological and a cultural revolution.[544]

While it coincided with the renewed radicalization of Chinese society with the Great Leap Forward of 1958, and was represented for the next two decades as the key to the creation of new socialist individuals (and socialism), the call for labor-learning also had a practical side: to increase the possibilities for universal education. The labor-learning ideal from the beginning had an ambiguity to it in anarchist thinking: as the means to create a new anarchist individual and as a practical means to promote education. A similar ambiguity has characterized the promotion of diligent-work frugal-study since 1958. During the Cultural Revolution years, the revolutionary promise of labor-learning overshadowed its practical aspects. Since Mao’s death the ideal of diligent-work frugal-study has appeared once again. A conference in 1982 called upon the nation to promote diligent-work frugal-study.[545] In keeping with the practical orientation of the post-Mao years (and with the personal experience of Deng Xiaoping, whose participation in the program in the 1920s had been motivated by practical considerations—he apparently did little work in Paris), the emphasis now is almost exclusively on the practical benefits to be derived from students working to support their education.

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Further research is necessary before we may state with any confidence whether consciousness of the revolutionary vision associated with these ideas of anarchist origin played any part in their application after 1949—at least for the older generation of revolutionaries. The persistence of the vocabulary provides prima facie evidence of their integration into a revolutionary discourse that transcended political ideologies and suppressed their origins in an anarchist vision as well. Recalling those origins is significant not only for remembering the important part anarchism played in the formation of the discourse: That perspective is a reminder, in turn, that those ideas were not products of peculiarities in Mao’s Marxism, or of the turn the Communist revolution would take in China in response to circumstantial contingencies, but represent ideals that are as old as the history of the Chinese revolution.

This revolutionary discourse had a radicalizing effect on the Bolshevik structure the Communist party had established after 1949, opening up the ideological closure that an organizational ideology had imposed on the discourse, returning Chinese society to the path of social revolution to fulfill the uncompleted tasks that its underlying vision demanded. The consequences, however, were to be vastly different than what the anarchists had anticipated of their revolutionary strategy, because the circumstances of the revolution were vastly different and so, therefore, was the function of the strategy.

Whether we speak of the communal reorganization of society, or of the labor-learning ideal, their purpose in the anarchist conception had been to achieve a social revolution outside of the sphere of politics and against it. They were intended, not to establish a revolutionary hegemony over society, but to abolish all hegemony. Crucial to the process was the liberation of individuals from social and cultural authority so as to reestablish society on a voluntary basis.

Implementation of these ideas under the Communist regime, whether during the Mao years or under Mao’s successors, has been anything but voluntary; rather, the premise has been the enhancement of the power of the Communist party—and of its hegemony over society. Liu Shipei might have recognized in the people’s communes something akin to the rural reorganization he had advocated. For all its anti-modernism, however, Mao’s revolutionary policy was guided by a commitment to rapid national development and organic political power. As a consequence, the people’s communes came to serve not as the nuclei for a new society but as a means to social control, faster economic development, and the efficient exploitation of labor that this demanded—rendered all the more ruthless for having been attached to the symbols of revolution. I have referred to the fate of the commune principle during the Cultural Revolution. Within the context of a political system dominated by the all-powerful Communist party, the model of the Paris Commune served, not the purposes of democratic revolutionary organization, but as a political imaginary that, under the guise of popular revolutionary control, perpetuated and enhanced the political penetration of society. And when it was transposed against the existing political system by those who took it seriously as a radical principle of a social democracy, it was suppressed without hesitation. It may be a tribute to the power of the revolutionary discourse, however, that the party itself is prepared to revive this political imaginary whenever it needs it, and can revive it on its own terms. Following the violent suppression of the dissident movement in 1989, the Communist party has once again revived the idea of a commune as the best means for organizing China democratically, this time because the commune’s combination of executive and legislative powers makes it the most viable socialist alternative to bourgeois democracy.[546] In the presence of an all-powerful executive, needless to say, this means, not the extension of any democratic powers to society, but the usurpation by the state of any possible assertion by society of some measure of control over its own fate.

Similarly, while Communist party leaders have continued to speak of producing fully developed human beings (now quoting Marx) as the goal of education, national and party power have been the condition of education as they have seen it. Lu Dingyi, then head of propaganda work, wrote in 1958: The combination of education with productive labor is required by our country’s socialist revolution and socialist construction, by the great goal of building a communist society and by the need to develop our education with greater, faster, better and more economical results (the latter a general slogan of the Great Leap Forward). The allround development of individuals, he also warned, must be under the leadership of the Communist Party.[547] The goal of all-round development was not the individual or a new kind of society, but the better functioning of the existing one. Such also was the intention of the conference on diligent-work frugal-study convened by Mao’s successors in 1982.[548]

A Concluding Observation

The question that has guided this study is not whether anarchists were better, or more consistent, revolutionaries than others in China (which they were not), or whether the anarchist vision is a possibility—anywhere, but particularly within the context of a society struggling for national autonomy or development. Why the anarchist vision should be viewed as more utopian than other competing social revolutionary visions, or what might be wrong with a utopian conception of society, are questions too complex to be entered into here. Suffice it to say that existing society has its own utopianism, whose promise, contrary to all evidence, continues to sustain its hegemony.

Rather, the question is this: What have been the consequences of ignoring or suppressing the anarchist presence in the history of the Chinese revolution, both in a narrow historiographical sense and in a broader political sense? One historian has written that anarchism was appealing in China initially because it provided simple answers to revolutionaries unable or unwilling to deal with the complexities of Western democracy.[549] This study has shown, I hope, that however simplistic anarchist solutions to China’s problems may seem, anarchists were probably more aware than many of their contemporaries of the complexities of democracy and responded to it with considerable complexity. Their contribution to the formation of a revolutionary discourse in China is also revealing of the complexities of that discourse which, for all the efforts to contain it, has served as a continuing source of vitality in the pursuit of a revolutionary society.

More broadly, the anarchist contribution to this discourse provides an indispensable critical perspective on the course the Chinese revolution was to take: the suppression in the name of revolutionary success of the very vision that animated the revolution and served as its raison d’être. To appreciate this, we need to rethink what anarchism was about. Aside from the distortions provided by a general cultural and political orientation toward anarchism (which, among all the threatening vocabulary of radical politics, has consistently remained the most threatening), even those sympathetic to anarchism have tended to identify it with opposition to government, which I believe is a simplification.[550] Though I hesitate to generalize about what anarchism might mean to anarchists, I suggest here that the most important aspect of anarchism is its consistent critique of hegemony—in a basic Gramscian Marxist sense, but with greater consistency and different intentions than those of Gramsci, who among all Marxists has come closest to a democratic interpretation of Marxism. Gramsci’s goal, in his analysis of hegemony, was to reveal the cultural roots of hegemony so as to show the way to the substitution of revolutionary for bourgeois hegemony.[551] Anarchists in China, as we have seen, in seeking to eliminate authority from social institutions and language, sought to abolish hegemony as a social principle in general. The coincidence of the problem of social revolution with that of cultural revolution in Chinese society may have dramatically illustrated this antihegemonic thrust of anarchism, but the critique of hegemony is common to most social anarchism. As the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta wrote on one occasion:

Someone whose legs have been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could, might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds which in fact serve only to weaken and paralyze the muscular energy of his legs.

If to the normal effects of habit is then added the kind of education offered by the master, the priest, the teachers, etc., who have a vested interest in preaching that the masters and the government are necessary; if one were to add the judge and the policeman who are at pains to reduce to silence those who might think differently and be tempted to propagate their ideas, then it will not be difficult to understand how the prejudiced view of the usefulness of, and the necessity for, the master and the government took root in the unsophisticated minds of the laboring masses.

Just imagine if the doctor were to expound to our fictional man with the bound legs a theory, cleverly illustrated with a thousand invented cases to prove that if his legs were freed he would be unable to walk and would not live, then that man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.[552]

The question here is not coercion but hegemony; and it is the thoroughgoing critique of hegemony in anarchism, I would suggest, that has enabled anarchists to think what culturally seems unthinkable, and therefore, to imagine social possibilities beyond the ideological horizons established by political ideology. This is also the reason, I think, that anarchists—in China and elsewhere—have devoted more attention than other socialists to problems of quotidian social and cultural practices in which hegemony, at its most fundamental level, is embedded.[553]

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As this manuscript was nearing completion in June 1989, tragic events occurred in China when a renewed democracy movement was brutally suppressed by the Communist party under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, a product of the work-study movement of the anarchists in the 1920s. For a decade Deng had been hailed in China but possibly more enthusiastically abroad as a champion of democracy, partially out of an urge to suppress memories of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, but also because of his policies of once again opening up China to the outside world—especially to a global capitalism. We have yet to understand the nature of this new round in the search for democracy in China; but Deng’s reasoning in suppressing it clearly revealed what some historians have known all along: that he has throughout his life been a more consistent Bolshevik than Mao Zedong, who was always uncomfortable with certain features of Bolshevik organization.[554] According to a report in Asia Week of May 12, 1989, Deng purportedly said in a party meeting in late April: The students may be acting out of line but the broad masses of workers and peasants are on our side. Even if the workers and farmers (sic) were to join the students, we can still rely on more than three million soldiers to maintain law and order. Fine sentiments to be voiced by the leader of a revolutionary party that derives its legitimacy from its claims to represent the people! In the end, only soldiers were clearly with the party leadership and were able indeed to maintain law and order. Since then, the party has re-invented the people to once again secure its hegemony.

From a long-term historical perspective, the suppression here is not only of a movement but also of a social revolutionary ideal that is embedded in the Chinese revolutionary discourse. Anarchists in the 1920s had already pointed to such an eventuality. When they disappeared from the revolutionary scene in the 1930s, this social revolutionary ideal, too, went into abeyance. Its roots were too deep in the revolutionary discourse, however, for it to disappear completely. Ironically, in using this revolutionary ideal to establish its own hegemony, the Communist party may have contributed to keeping it alive. The ideal has resurfaced repeatedly to challenge the new hegemony, to force a rethinking of the course of the socialist revolution, to pry open the ideological closure that a new political power has imposed on it, and to serve as a reminder of the unfinished tasks of revolution.

The history of anarchism in China may be a history ultimately of political irrelevance, but it provides us with a vantage point from which to rethink the most fundamental problems of politics—not just Chinese or socialist, but all politics.

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