Author: 嵩山

Confucian Fascism: The Authoritarian Appropriation of Tradition in Interwar East Asia

The selective reinterpretation of Confucian ideas by political actors in China and Japan during the 1930s reveals how traditional philosophical concepts could be mobilised to define political loyalty, justify state violence, and construct alternatives to Western ideologies. These appropriations demonstrate that Confucianism was far more than a relic of dynastic times. Looking at two similar yet different moments shows how seemingly traditional ethical systems can be transformed into tools of modern political extremism. The rise of fascist movements in China and Japan during the 1930s, along with recent support for Confucian constitutionalism, demonstrates this ideological flexibility and its profound historical impact.

The most extreme political use of Confucian ideas occurred within China’s Nationalist Party (NP) and the Japanese imperial state during the turbulent interwar period. NP factions, notably the Blue Shirts and CC Clique, pursued what historian Frederic Wakeman describes as “Confucian fascism” through a domestically rooted fascist ideology rather than mere imitation of European models1 . After Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, figures like Dai Jitao promoted native culture as essential to revolutionary nationalism. Chiang Kai-shek expressed this synthesis in 1933, asserting that Sun’s principles “inherited the morality and vital spirit of ancient China from Emperors Yao and Shun, Kings Wen and Wu, the Duke of Zhou and Confucius” to “lead the revolution and revive the nation” (Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism, 407)

This nativist turn provided ideological justification for the White Terror between 1927 and 1937, during which the Nationalist government murdered and imprisoned Communists, liberals, and critics.2 Violence was depicted as moral purification rather than political repression. The New Life Movement of 1934 represented a practical implementation of this philosophy, aiming to militarise everyday life through reinterpretations of Confucian precepts.3 Chiang mandated that in homes, factories, and offices, everyone’s activities must resemble those in the army, explicitly seeking to turn the population into components of a vast social machine.4 This mechanistic vision combined traditional hierarchical relationships with modern industrial discipline.5 The movement promoted four core Confucian virtues but interpreted them through an authoritarian lens compatible with modernisation while claiming unbroken civilizational continuity.

Nationalist Party groups distilled Confucianism into a transhistorical national spirit that abstracted it from feudal contexts, made it compatible with modernisation, while claiming unbroken civilizational continuity.6 Blue Shirts openly advocated fascism in their publications through control of party media during the 1930s.7 As historian Maggie Clinton demonstrates, these groups rendered “Confucianism compatible with a path of modernisation” by linking it to national revolutionary culture and industrial modernity.8 The CC Clique, dominated by civilian bureaucrats Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu, worked alongside the militarily focused Blue Shirts to cement a one-party ideological state through cultural production and nationalist literature. Together, these factions intensified a Janus-faced glance toward both past and future, evident in all nationalisms.9

Japanese intellectuals pursued parallel appropriations of Confucian philosophy during the same period, though with distinct ideological aims. The Shibunkai, a Confucian scholarly society, wielded influence in government policy during the 1930s, serving as “China advisors” and submitting recommendations for joint research institutes and Confucian universities in occupied territories.10 They asserted that Japan’s Confucian-Shinto synthesis represented the Kingly Way of virtuous governance practised in its highest form through its unbroken line of emperors and unparalleled unity of filial piety and loyalty.11 This provided spiritual justification for Japanese expansionism by arguing they were engaged in a paternalistic undertaking, exhorting the Chinese to restore the Confucian Way and monarchical order.12 The transformation of Confucianism into an ideological tool of totalitarianism ironically began with the Meiji Restoration’s authoritarian state suppression of Confucian institutions and religious practice during the 1870s and 1880s, followed by its resurrection within the cold frame of Western philosophy.13

Both Chinese and Japanese appropriations shared fundamental characteristics. They extracted Confucian concepts from their original contexts and deployed them as instruments of state power rather than as ethical systems that constrained authority. Traditional emphasis on hierarchy, social harmony, and cultural continuity was weaponised to justify modern totalitarian projects. The intellectual apparatus constructed to promote this vision represented a profound reversal because the historical Confucian tradition had always maintained that rulers were subject to moral constraints and that Heaven’s mandate could be withdrawn from unrighteous governments. The role that Confucian philosophy played in legitimising fascist organisations demonstrates that gender relations and political systems cannot be reduced to ideological prescription alone. This historical pattern demonstrates that traditional cultural resources can be weaponised for any political project when decoupled from their original institutional contexts and ethical commitments.

 

  1. Frederick Wakeman, ‘A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade’, The China Quarterly, 1997 (150), pp.395-432 [↩]
  2. Ibid, 159 [↩]
  3. Ibid, 131 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 135 [↩]
  5. Ibid, 129 [↩]
  6. Ibid, 84 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 66 [↩]
  8. Clinton, p. 199 [↩]
  9. Ibid, 65 and 84 [↩]
  10. Paramore, ‘Japanese Confucianism’, 177-178 [↩]
  11. Ibid, 154-155 [↩]
  12. ibid, 154 [↩]
  13. Ibid, 141 [↩]

A Language for the People: Esperanto and the Defeat of ‘Worldism’ in East Asia

In the early twentieth century, the language of Esperanto found its most vibrant communities not in its European birthplace, but in East Asia. By the 1930s, China and Japan had cultivated Esperanto movements that far surpassed their Western counterparts in both ideological fervour and social reach1. Esperanto is often dismissed as a utopian failure in the face of English’s global ascendency2. However, this dismissal understates the language’s profound historical significance in specific regional contexts. In East Asia, Esperanto was not a practical failure but a potent ideological vehicle manifesting a homegrown philosophy known as ‘worldism’, which envisioned a political order transcending the nation-state system and centring on a global community of ordinary people. This movement represented a direct challenge to the ideological foundations of the Western imperial order.3

 

The appeal of Esperanto in East Asia emerged from a trenchant critique of the prevailing international system.4 As Japan and China grappled with Western imperialism and modernisation, intellectuals such as Japan’s Kōtoku Shūsui and China’s Kang Youwei articulated a powerful alternative. They argued that genuine peace was unattainable within a competitive framework of sovereign nation-states, a system they saw as inherently violent and exploitative. Instead, they envisioned a new global polity built around heimin, or common people. For these thinkers, Esperanto was not conceived as a bolstering international language for state diplomacy, but explicitly as a sōdaidō, a great way of commonality, for grassroots, transnational solidarity.5 This critical distinction framed the language not merely as a tool, but as an act of resistance. For Japanese activists, its adoption was a conscious rejection of their nation’s emulation and participation in a Western-dominated imperial system.

 

This ideological commitment manifested in concrete organisational practices that distinguished East Asian Esperanto movements from their European counterparts. Rapley documents how Japanese Esperantists deliberately targeted working-class communities, establishing study groups in factories, labour unions, and proletarian cultural associations rather than limiting themselves to middle-class intellectual circles as in the European context.6 Chinese Esperantists embedded language instruction within anarchist and socialist organising, treating fluency as both a practical skill for transnational coordination and a symbolic commitment to transcending nationalist ideology.7 This integration of linguistic practice with radical political organising demonstrates that East Asian Esperanto was not simply an educational movement but a form of politics, an attempt to create, in the present, the social relations that activists hoped would characterise a future world order.

 

The movement’s eventual decline illuminates both its achievements and limitations. As Rapley documents, the rise of militaristic nationalism in 1930s Japan systematically suppressed Esperanto organisations, viewing their transnational orientation as incompatible with wartime mobilisation8 . The historical significance extends beyond its practical failure. As Konishi argues, recovering this history challenges teleological narratives that treat the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states as an inevitable endpoint of political development.9 The Esperantists’ vision of heimin-centred global politics represented a genuinely different path, one that was historically defeated but not intellectually refuted. It reveals that the nation-state order was not an inevitable outcome but one possibility among others, consolidated through specific historical processes that included the violent suppression of alternatives.

  1. Rapley, Ian, ‘A Language for Asia? Transnational Encounters in the Japanese Esperanto Movement, 1906-28’, 2016, 167 [↩]
  2. Boli, John and Thomas, George M., Constructing World Culture: International Non-Governmental Organisations since 1875, (1999), 148 [↩]
  3. Konishi, Sho, ‘Translingual World Order: Language Without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 72: 1 (2013), 92 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 99 [↩]
  5. Ibid, 94 [↩]
  6. Rapley, 2016, 169-171 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 173-175 [↩]
  8. Ibid, 177-178 [↩]
  9. Konishi, 2013, pp. 99-100 [↩]

Navigating the Grey Zone: Buddhist Adaptation and Critique in Modern East Asia

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, East Asia was reshaped by the forces of modernity. The rise of the nation-state and Social Darwinism, which framed international relations as a brutal struggle for survival, challenged traditional societies.1 Within this environment, East Asian Buddhist traditions confronted an existential crisis, widely dismissed by modernisers as “superstitious and useless for national survival”.2  In response, Buddhist thinkers adopted a pragmatic strategy of navigating a “grey zone” between outright collaboration and futile resistance.3 This was not a passive position but an active space of negotiation and critical engagement. Through this approach, they sought to ensure the survival of their tradition while safeguarding its ethical core, strategically appropriating modern ideologies and repurposing their own transcendent ideals to critique state power.

This is exemplified by the Korean monk Han Yong’un (1879–1944). Recognising that Buddhism had to prove its relevance against rivals like Protestant Christianity, Han borrowed from the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao. He used Liang’s argument that Western evolutionary theories were inherent in the Buddhist principle of cause and effect.4 However, his critical innovation was his refusal to fully surrender to Social Darwinism’s harsh logic. While acknowledging its descriptive power in the material world, he subordinated it as a provisional, lesser truth, ultimately subordinate to the higher, universal ethics of Buddhism. For Han, the “survival of the fittest” was a phase in a larger spiritual evolution whose ultimate end was a world of transcendental equality and peace.5 This philosophical framework provided a moral foundation to withstand the coercive pressures of Japanese imperialism.6

A parallel, yet distinct, strategy emerged in Japan, where secular intellectuals wielded Buddhist concepts as instruments of political critique. Here, the strategy was not to subordinate a modern ideology but to weaponise a traditional Buddhist ideal itself. The modern distinction between inner belief and outer practice allowed these thinkers to approach Buddhism as a philosophy, rather than a faith. They utilised the resources in the tradition’s transcendent visions, particularly  Pure Land. This is a transcendent realm defined not by what it possesses, but by the absence of suffering. Thinkers like Ienaga Saburō recognised in this ideal a form of “negative thinking”.7  By envisioning a perfect world defined only by what it was not (i.e., not full of suffering), the Pure Land concept provided a moral standard from which to judge and “negate” the existing political order.8  The use of Buddhist concepts by Japanese leftists thus contained a profound irony. While the institutional Buddhist establishment often aligned with the state, secular intellectuals adopted the same tradition to uncover a radical, critical philosophy. This highlights a key division in modern Buddhism where the ‘grey zone’ could be a space for state collaboration for some, and a source of state negation for others, all within the same national and religious context. Thus, a traditional Buddhist image was transformed into a philosophical foundation for challenging the Japanese state’s rising totalitarianism.9

In conclusion, East Asian Buddhism navigated the challenges of modernity by operating within a strategic “grey zone.” Whether by domesticating Social Darwinism within a Buddhist framework in Korea or by radicalising utopian ideals from within the tradition in Japan, thinkers discovered a path to ensure their tradition’s continuity. Their collective legacy is one of intellectual agility, demonstrating that strategic engagement, not isolation, was key to preserving an ancient tradition’s critical relevance in a modernising world.

  1. Tikhonov, V, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (1880s-1910s), (Leiden, 2010), p.134 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p.117 [↩]
  3. Schickentanz, Erik, ‘Forum Introduction. The Chrysanthemum, the sword, and the dharmakcakra: Buddhist Entanglements in Japan’s wartime empire (1931-1945’, Modern Asian Studies, 58: 6 (2024), pp.1460-1464 [↩]
  4. Tikhonov, V, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea, p.123 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.114 [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.135 [↩]
  7. Curley, Mellissa A.M, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination, (Honolulu, 2017), p.16 [↩]
  8. Ibid. [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.6 [↩]

Ideology vs. Practice: The Contested Terrain of Women’s Property in Song China

The Neo-Confucian movement of the Song dynasty (960-1279) articulated a vision of social order founded on a profound dismantling of the robust economic rights community exercised by women. The ambitious reforms imagined by prominent Neo-Confucian thinkers and officials pursued these goals but inadvertently exposed the resilience of the legal and social practices they sought to erase. In its attempt to forge an ideal female subject devoid of economic agency, the movement laid bare its own fundamental instabilities, revealing acute tension between ideological aspiration and social reality.

The philosophical core of the Neo-Confucian agenda, championed by figures like Zhu Xi (1130-1200), was the revival of a rigid patrilineal structure centred on termed the “descent line system.”1  This system demanded that “ancestral property must as a rule be divided only among sons, not given to daughters,” and that women’s control of personal assets be severely constrained to prevent them from “undermining the authority of the household head” and siphoning assets away from the patriline.2 Within this framework, a woman’s control of personal assets was perceived as profoundly subversive because property represented lineage continuity rather than individual wealth. The ideological ideal was thus a woman subjugated entirely to male relatives, legally incapable of owning property independent of her husband’s patriline.

This prescriptive vision clashed decisively with the established legal and customary landscape of the Song. Tang and Song law explicitly recognised a wife’s dowry and other personal property as “conceptually distinct from that of her husband,” granting her the right to remove this property upon divorce or widowhood.3 Furthermore, the legal principle of “bereft households” provided that orphaned daughters without brothers could inherit substantial portions of family estates, in some cases up to half their father’s share of undivided family property4 . Song judicial practice consistently protected women’s property rights in inheritance disputes and dowry claims, reflecting a legal culture that viewed female economic agency as legitimate rather than aberrant. The Song state itself had fiscal motivations to maintain these practices, as dowries facilitated marriage alliances among the elite and generated tax revenue from property transfers.

The contradiction between Neo-Confucian ideology and actual practice became particularly acute regarding widow remarriage and property retention. Zhu Xi and other prominent Neo-Confucians vigorously opposed widow remarriage, promoting instead a “cult of chastity” that idealised lifelong fidelity to deceased husbands5 . Neo-Confucians criticised the practice of women keeping their dowries and returning to their natal families after widowhood, viewing this as a dangerous assertion of female autonomy. Yet Song legal codes and social practice told a different story. Women routinely drew upon their dowries to support themselves as widows or to finance remarriages, and legal documents record widows successfully defending their property rights against male relatives who sought to appropriate their assets6 .

Lacking the immediate power to rewrite statute law during the Song, Neo-Confucian elites turned to the tools of social and moral suasion. A primary instrument was the compilation of ritual manuals, most notably Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals, which sought to “instruct and admonish the family” by embedding Neo-Confucian values into quotidian life7 . These texts prescribed elaborate patrilineal ceremonies that excluded women from positions of ritual authority, granted males exclusive control over ancestral worship, and emphasised female subordination within the household hierarchy.

Understanding this contradiction requires moving beyond simplistic narratives of inexorable patriarchal domination. Instead, we must recognise that ideological movements, even those endorsed by state orthodoxy, operate within complex social contexts where legal precedent, economic incentives, and customary practice create substantial barriers to radical transformation. The role that Song women’s property rights played in elite marriage strategies, household economics, and state fiscal policy demonstrates that gender relations cannot be reduced to ideological prescription alone. The tragedy lies not in the inevitability of patriarchal victory but in recognising how persistent ideological campaigns eventually succeeded in constructing legal disabilities that transformed women from property holders into dependents.

  1. Birge, Bettine, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960-1368), (New York, 2002), 143. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. Ibid, 41 and 52 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 52 [↩]
  5. Ibid, 146 [↩]
  6. Ibid, 147 [↩]
  7. Minzhen, ‘Song Dynasty Family Rituals and the Reconstruction of Confucian Daily Life’, Journal of Chinese Humanities, 2023 (9:3), 304 [↩]

How Male Reformers Reframed the “Woman Question” in China

The rise of feminist discourse in early twentieth-century China is typically framed as a battle between tradition and modernity. However, this is a simplified view overlooking the constraints of modernity. The modern Chinese legal and political system proved incapable of legislating genuine gender liberation. This is because the hierarchical logic of patriarchy was philologically embedded within the very textual and institutional fabric of the state.

Progressive male reformers appropriated the radical language of female “slavery” and “property” to articulate their own economic and psychological anxieties. In doing so, they minimised women’s constitutive historical oppression, recasting it as a mere symptom of male frustration. Part of the  “enlightenment and national self-strengthening, coded either “male” or “patriarchal”.1 This is a continuity that anarcho-feminist theorist He-Yin Zhen rejected as a “metaphysical-political principle” woven into the fabric of history.2 She demonstrated that this oppression was intrinsically economic, arguing that the “beginning of the system of women as private property is also the beginning of the system of slavery.”3

He-Yin Zhen grounded this theory in philological and historical evidence:

      • The character for “slave” incorporates the radical for “woman”
      • The character for “treasure” or “stored wealth”  had an alternative form meaning “women and children”, explicitly equating them with property.4

He-Yin Zhen concluded that the figure of “woman” embodied the “combined humiliation of being both prisoner and slave.”5 This was a continuous  feature of the Chinese social order and thus the the state was the defender of this property system, making its abolition a prerequisite for women’s liberation.6  Female slavery was a concrete, historical condition from which all subsequent social ills flowed.

Similarly, when male intellectuals addressed the “woman question,” they used the same vocabulary of subjugation but fundamentally reframed its meaning. For them, it was not a problem of systemic female enslavement, but one of national productivity and male identity. The liberal thinker Liang Qichao argued that because women could not support themselves, men were forced to “raise women as livestock or slaves.”7 This framed subjugation as a consequence of women’s economic uselessness, not its cause. Women were recast as consumers who impeded national self-strengthening.

This focus on male economic anxiety intensified during the New Culture Movement. Male reformers like Yi Jiayue and Luo Dunwei articulated their frustrations in journals like Family Research, placing immense faith in the state and its ability to legislate a new, rational xiao jiating (conjugal family).8  They linked the oppressive patriarch to forces of “power” and “class” that stifled China. Their fight for family reform was driven by a “search for a new identity” and the goal of “economic self-mastery.”9 They argued that patriarchal control over finances was not just shameful, but that it “restricted productivity and stunted the potential of China’s youth.”10. As this was deeply woven into the fabric of authority, law, and language, this validated He-Yin Zhen’s uncompromising view that the only solution was to “abolish all governments” and overturn the category of distinction itself.11 

For example, as Yi Jiayue noted, the patriarch could evade his duty to support children for education by simply claiming insufficient resources, a claim the “court’s investigations are unreliable”.12  Furthermore, one man lamented that divorce was “extremely difficult” and remarriage “against the law”.13 They even required state intervention to “prohibit parents from deciding their sons’ marriages”. demonstrating the practical limits of their individualistic approach. 14 

The central contradiction emerges when these male anxieties merged with the rhetoric of female dehumanization. Their ideal of modern manhood, built on “moral autonomy” and “economic self-mastery,” required educated wives who could provide “enlightened companionship.”15  Confronted with the reality of uneducated, parent-chosen brides, the reformers inverted He-Yin Zhen’s logic. In extreme fictional accounts, the traditional woman was depicted not as a victim, but as a parasitic “ghostly fire” or a “corpse that gets smellier day by day.”16

Thus, the concept of woman-as-property was co-opted and flipped. The male reformers, despite their progressive aims, ultimately recentered their own plight. In reframing female oppression as a barrier to male self-realization and national progress, young men remodelled and “joined” the patriarchy.17 The profound, systemic critique articulated by He-Yin Zhen was thus contained, demonstrating how the language of emancipation can be harnessed not to abolish hierarchy, but to renegotiate the terms of power within it.

  1. Dorothy Ko, Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl [ed.], The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York, 2013), p.7 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p.21 [↩]
  3. Ibid, p.22 [↩]
  4. Ibid.114-115 [↩]
  5. Ibid, p.118 [↩]
  6. Ibid, p.70 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 24 [↩]
  8. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953, (Berkeley, 2003), p.44 [↩]
  9. Ibid, p.36 [↩]
  10. Ibid, p.34 [↩]
  11. Ko, Liu and Karl, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p.107 [↩]
  12. Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, p.43 [↩]
  13. Ibid, p.51 [↩]
  14. Ibid, p.79 [↩]
  15. Ibid, p.52 [↩]
  16. Ibid, p.55 [↩]
  17. Ko, Liu and Karl, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p.159 [↩]

Anarchist Roots vs Authoritarian Reality of Maoism

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.

  1. Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, 176 [↩]
  2. Schram, Mao’s Road to Power, Vol. 1, 1918 [↩]
  3. Schram, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, 1919 [↩]
  4. Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, 72 [↩]
  5. Ibid, 15 [↩]
  6. Ibid, 203 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 220 [↩]
  8. Ibid, 89 [↩]
  9. Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, 1971 [↩]