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Arif Dirlik - Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution

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Book:
Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution
Author:
Arif Dirlik
Publisher:
University of California Press
Genre:
Books / Politics
Year:
1993
City:
Berkeley, China, China
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Arif Dirliks latest offering is a revisionist perspective on Chinese radicalism in the twentieth century. He argues that the history of anarchism is indispensable to understanding crucial themes in Chinese radicalism. And anarchism is particularly significant now as a source of democratic ideals within the history of the socialist movement in China.
Dirlik draws on the most recent scholarship and on materials available only in the last decade to compile the first comprehensive history of his subject available in a Western language. He emphasizes the anarchist contribution to revolutionary discourse and elucidates this theme through detailed analysis of both anarchist polemics and social practice. The changing circumstances of the Chinese revolution provide the immediate context, but throughout his writing the author views Chinese anarchism in relation to anarchism worldwide.

Review

A first rate piece of scholarship, accessible to both general readers and China specialists. . . . This book should stand for some time as the definitive study of the Chinese anarchist movement of the early twentieth century.--John A. Rapp, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

About the Author

Arif Dirlik is Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937 (California, 1978) and The Origins of Chinese Communism (1989).

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Chapter One
Introduction:
Anarchism and Revolutionary Discourse

Anarchism is not the easiest subject to think, speak, or write about within a cultural context that takes hegemony for granted as a principle of social and political integration. The most consistent and thoroughgoing of all modern radical social philosophies in its repudiation of this principle, anarchism has also for that reason suffered the greatest marginalization. Other radicalisms, too, have invoked fear and ridicule, but they have acquired respectability to the extent that they have come to share in the premises of organized power. The fear of anarchism, in contrast, is built into the word itself, whose meaning (no rule) has been suppressed in everyday language by its identification with disorder. To take a pertinent recent example, in the television coverage of the tragic events in China in 1989, what Chinese leaders spoke of as great disorder (daluan) was consistently rendered in the reporting as anarchy. (This is not to suggest that Chinese leaders themselves are incapable of the identification.) But fear may not be as effective as ridicule in the marginalization and distortion of anarchism; to dismiss anarchism as irrelevant works better, since it is thus removed from the domain of serious political dialogueand historical attention.

This study deals with a historical occasion when anarchism fared better, indeed was central to speculation on politics: China in the early part of the century, when anarchism held a place in the center of revolutionary thought. I argue not only that the revolutionary situation created by China's confrontation with the modern world gave birth to a radical culture that provided fecund grounds for anarchism, but also that anar-

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chists played an important part in the fashioning of this radical culture. The significance of anarchism, however, went beyond the roughly two decades (19051930) when anarchism was a highly visible current in the revolutionary movement. At a time when a revolutionary discourse was taking shape, anarchist ideas played a crucial part in injecting into it concerns that would leave a lasting imprint on the Chinese revolution, reaching beyond the relatively small group of anarchists into the ideologies of other revolutionaries. For the same reason, the history of anarchism offers a perspective from which to view the subsequent unfolding of the revolution and the ways in which the revolution, in order to achieve success, was to suppress the very social ideals that initially gave it meaning.

With the success of the October Revolution in Russia and the consequent diffusion of Leninist Marxism worldwide, Eric Hobsbawm has written,

It became hard to recall that in 190514, the marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism. Marxism was henceforth identified with actively revolutionary movements. Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism entered upon a dramatic and uninterrupted decline.1

This could serve equally well as a description of the situation of Chinese radicalism in the early part of the century, with two qualifications. There was no marxist left to speak of in China until 192021; non-Marxist social democratic currents that appeared in Chinese radical thought early on were not necessarily inimical to anarchism but, on the contrary, willing to recognize it as a common, if remote, ideal. While in China, too, anarchism fell into decline with the appearance of Leninist Marxism in 192021, and was repudiated by the revolutionary Left, which thereafter identified with Marxism, the relationship of Marxism to anarchism retained some ambiguity. I have argued elsewhere that most of those who were to emerge as leaders of the Communist movement in China went through an anarchist phase before they became Marxists. I will endeavor to show here that these anarchist origins may be important to an understanding of how they became Marxists, and also of some features of Chinese Marxism



1. Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York: New American Library, 1973), 61.


2. Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. chapters 3 and 8.

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(especially in its Maoist version) that diverged from the Leninist interpretation of Marxism that they espoused formally.

That anarchist ideas may have survived the decline of anarchism suggests, in turn, that anarchism had a different relationship to revolutionary discourse in China than in Europe. The fortunes of anarchism in China paralleled (indeed, were part of) the situation that Hobsbawm describes. But Chinese anarchism was bound up from the beginning with an incipient revolutionary discourse that was ultimately the product of China's confrontation with the modern world, and anarchists were to play some part in the formulation of that discourse. While anarchism in China was also the ideology of the revolutionary Left, which identified itself with what it took to be the most advanced radical ideology of the contemporary world, it was phrased (especially initially) within the language of this discourse. For the same reason, anarchist ideas entered this discourse as its constituent elements. I will argue that anarchism derives its significance in Chinese radicalism, at least in part, from the diffusion of anarchist ideas across the ideological boundaries that divided radicals.

Nevertheless, the anarchist origin of these ideas was forgotten as anarchism gradually retreated before Leninist Marxism in the 1920s. It is important to recall these origins (the subject of this study), for both historical and political reasons. Anarchism was important historically in a contextual sense: as the ideology of the radical Left in China for more than two decades at the beginning of the century. Because this was also the period when a revolutionary discourse emerged that was to shape Chinese radicalism in ensuing years, the anarchist contribution to the formulation of this discourse must be part of any account that seeks a comprehensive grasp of Chinese radicalism.

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