The relationship between Maoism and anarchism reveals a profound tension that illuminates broader contradictions inherent in Chinese Communist revolutions. The collision between utopian ends and authoritarian means extends beyond the methodological divergence between centralised vanguardism and decentralised spontaneity that Dirlik argues.1 Rather, it lies in the profound reversal within Mao’s own intellectual thought and its implications for understanding revolutionary state formation in twentieth-century China. Mao’s early anarchist sympathies were not merely abandoned but actively weaponised against their former adherents once state power was consolidated.
The intellectual background of early republican China provided fertile ground for anarchist thought to flourish alongside Marxism, creating a revolutionary culture whose internal contradictions would only emerge later. Mao’s pre-Marxist writings reveal an orientation that contemporary observers would recognise as anarchistically leaning. His 1918 marginal annotations to Friedrich Paulsen’s work on ethics celebrated radical individualism that privileged personal autonomy over collective structures, declaring “the value of the individual is greater than that of the universe,” and denouncing the “four evils”: the church, capitalism, monarchy, and the state.2 Writing in the Xiang River Review in 1919 under the banner “The Great Union of the Popular Masses,” Mao articulated a vision of social transformation that owed more to Kropotkin’s mutual aid than to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, drawing particularly on the Confucian concept of Datong (Great Unity) to imagine a stateless, harmonious society that emerged from popular mobilisation rather than vanguard diktat.3
The ideological formation was not isolated. The early Chinese reception of Marxism was mediated through anarchist interpretive frameworks, a process most clearly embodied in the intellectual development of Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Working at Beijing University, Li Dazhao encountered Western anarchist texts before engaging deeply with Marxist writings, interpreting Marxism not as a blueprint for vanguard party organisation but as a theoretical vindication for anarchist praxis.4 His synthesis perceived fundamental compatibility between Marx’s vision of a classless society and Confucian utopianism, while Marx’s critique of Western imperialism resonated powerfully with anti-imperialist nationalism. Dirlik documents that there were no committed Marxists in China in 1919, with Chinese radicals displaying diffuse radicalism in which anarchist ideas were most prominent and communism was still understood by most as anarcho-communism.5 Between 1918 and 1920, Mao worked closely with Li Dazhao in Beijing, was exposed to anarchist intellectual circles, including the Work-and-Learning Mutual Aid Corps, and developed rapidly toward Marxism while retaining strong anarchist influences, particularly Kropotkin’s concept of mutual aid.
The organisational imperative that emerged from Comintern involvement fundamentally altered this intellectual landscape. When Gregory Voitinsky arrived in Beijing in early 1920, he made clear that a Communist party required the disciplined structure of a Leninist vanguard, not a loose gathering of intellectuals. The organisation of the Communist Party, with its demand for exclusive loyalty, inevitably split the social revolutionary alliance by spring 1922.6 Yet anarchist popularity peaked in 1922 to 1923, with significant influence in labour organisations, particularly in southern China, where communists could not make headway until 1925 due to anarchist strength.7
The tension here is not simply that Mao moved from anarchism to authoritarianism; rather, it is that the intellectual apparatus he constructed to justify peasant mobilisation, mass participation, and radical egalitarianism was forged in the crucible of anarchist thought, even as the organisational structure necessary to implement this vision demanded precisely the centralised state apparatus that anarchism categorically rejected. Anarchists were the first to advocate peasant-based revolution in China, a theory later championed by Mao.8 His concept of the “mass line,” developed during the Yan’an period, attempted to overcome the centralising tendencies of Marxism and Leninism by consulting the masses.9 Yet this synthesis masked a fundamental contradiction: Mao retained centralised party control throughout.
Understanding this tension requires recognising that revolutionary movements are sites of intense intellectual ferment where competing visions of social transformation exist in uneasy coalition until the exigencies of power force their resolution. The tragedy lies in this appropriation, that one of the most compelling critiques of state power in modern Chinese thought was ultimately mobilised to construct one of the twentieth century’s most totalising state apparatuses.