“Both history and our present reality tell us that only socialism can save China—and only socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China. This is the conclusion of history, the choice of our people.”- Xi Jinping, “Some Questions on Maintaining and Developing Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, 2013
It is impossible to understand contemporary Chinese politics without first looking at the developments of the early 20th century in China, nor is it possible, as Rana Mitter points out, to pick up a newspaper and read about China without heavy references to its history. China’s politicians of today are acutely aware of the past, constantly drawing lessons from it.[1] From the rise of linear historiography during the late Qing era and the May Fourth Movement at the beginning of the 20th century in response to the exigent threats that China was facing to its survival to Xi Jinping’s 2013 speech giving the first inklings of his ideological platform, history, and various politically influential groups’ interpretation of it, is an essential tool that has been utilized as a weapon over the years and provides an exceedingly important component of the answer to the question of “Whither China?” posed by historians and social scientists.[2] An understanding of early 20th century Chinese revolutionary thought, then, is essential, with anarchism playing a key role in its development.
Witnessing the peak of its popularity between 1907-1930, anarchism reached into the various ideologies of other radical groups and became a key fixture of political discourse.[3] As tepid members of Sun Yat-Sen’s Revolutionary Alliance, a partnership born from a common struggle against the despotic Qing Dynasty in spite of distinct philosophical differences regarding their conceptions of social revolution, anarchism had an outsized impact on revolutionary discourse, with Sun remarking on one occasion that anarchism was “the ultimate goal of his Three Peopple’s Principles”, a sentiment shared by many Guomindang officials in the 1920’s.[4] It also had a distinct impact on the nascent communist movement that emerged between 1920-21. By 1920, anarchist literature available in Chinese was unmatched in both scope and comprehensiveness by any other social and political philosophy of European origin.[5] Far from being restricted to simply being of use to revolutionaries, however, conservatives also put its tenants to use in the late 1920’s, as seen in the example of the Guomindang. This contradiction is what inherently lies at the heart of the difficulties in explaining anarchism’s impact on Chinese revolutionary thought, and it is for precisely this reason Dirlik argues that anarchism’s contribution to Chinese social revolutionary thought should not be measured in terms of how consistently they were able to live up to their ideals in practice, nor in the “ideological[ly] schizophreni[c]” use of its ideas, but how consistently anarchists propagated their ideology from their bases in Paris and Tokyo.[6] The circulation of its ideas in journals such as Xin Shiji, and the opportunity that they provided for influential revolutionaries such as Liu Shifu during his time in prison, which strengthened his commitment to anarchism as a political ideology and ultimately carried him to his vision of a great human community based on the universalistic principles of science and rationalism.[7] In a similar vein, given the path that contemporary Chinese politics has taken on the Mainland, early 20th century Chinese anarchism’s impact can most saliently be observed in the legacy that it left behind on the Chinese Communist Party.
In spite of the fact that Chinese anarchism fell into a steep and uninterrupted decline in favor of Leninist Marxism, its impact on the leaders of the Communist movement in China and Maoism was profound, which has lead Dirlik to argue not only for the importance of understanding the anarchist background of many of China’s early communist leaders, but also that Chinese Marxism has retained anarchist principles in a way that European revolutionary movements have not.[8] Clear links can be made between anarchism and the events of the Cultural Revolution, and, as such, it was heavily implicated in the crisis socialism faced in China after Mao’s death in 1976, at which point Mao’s Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution failed and was thoroughly repudiated.[9] The lessons that the bureaucratic clique, lead by Deng Xiaoping, took away from the horrors of this this time period was to crack down on those who followed “Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and their ilk and rose to power through rebelling”, the anarchistic elements that had emerged during this ten year period who’d been “infected with a factional mentality”. To the leaders of China today, it is Deng’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics developed in response to this that will guide China forward in the 21st century, not any of the other ideological frameworks that were prevalent in China at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is one that Xi expects the next generation to carry forward.[10]
[1] Mitter, Rana. “Preface.” Preface. In A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World, x-xii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
[2]Luke S. K. Kwong. “The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Qing China c. 1860-1911.” Past & Present, no. 173 (2001): 157–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600843.; Greer, Tanner. “Xi Jinping in Translation: China’s Guiding Ideology.” Palladium, May 31, 2019. https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translation-chinas-guiding-ideology/.; Walton, Keith. “WHITHER CHINA?” New Zealand International Review 25, no. 6 (2000): 19–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45234974.
[3] Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. https://doi-org.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/10.1525/9780520913738
[4] Dirlik. Ibid. 80.
[5] Dirlik, Ibid. 2; 82.
[6] Dirlik, Ibid. 80-81.
[7] Krebs, Edward S. “1. ‘Daring to Die’: A Life of Shifu.” Essay. In Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism, 1–14. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998. https://www.vlebooks.com/Vleweb/Product/Index/336439?page=0.
[8] Dirlik, Ibid. 3.
[9] Dirlik, Ibid. 5.; Jisheng, Yang. “Preface: The Road, the Theory, and the System.” Essay. In World Turned Upside down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, xxi-xxxii. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021. https://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Revolution-ebook/dp/B088DQPQCN/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1635113828&sr=8-1.; Mittler, Barbara. “POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION CULTURE: THEORY, PRACTICE, AND EXPERIENCE.” In A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture, 1st ed., 343:3–32. Harvard University Asia Center, 2012. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1x07z47.5.
[10] Greer, ibid.