Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism. Oxford University Press, 1989.

Since I fled Japan to the U.S. as a research fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Political Science Department in 1995, I have tried to communicate with American scholars of Chinese anarchist history. I visited a famous Chinese American history professor of China’s (1919) May Fourth Movement study. I was disappointed to find that he had neither interest nor enough knowledge of Chinese anarchism. Rather, he was boastful of being “the last disciple of Hayek.”[1] I also sent my anarchist articles (in Chinese) to another professor after I read his book Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (Peter Zarrow, Columbia University Press, 1990). I went to the 1996 annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies in Chicago to meet him. Besides some shortcomings of the book (not dealing with the process of how the Chinese anarchism prepared the condition for Marxism to China), I also wanted to learn from the author how the legacy of anarchism be connected to current situation in China after the June Fourth tragedy (Tiananmen Massacre) in 1989. It turned out that he did not want to meet me. These similar experiences as I had in Japan confirmed me that these scholars in China, Japan and the U.S. of Chinese anarchism have no understanding or interest of anarchism; they wrote on this area study only for their academic career.

Thus, though I knew the name Arif Dirlik and his study on Chinese anarchism[2], I did not read his books until now. Surprisingly, this book is actually what I have long expected from a true Western scholar who understands both anarchism and modern Chinese history. “…between the October Revolution of 1917 and the founding of the Communist Party of China in mid-1921. It examines in detail the ideological and organizational development in these years that brought radical intellectuals from no appreciable understanding of Marxism, and even a negative appraisal, to a conclusion that only in a Marxist-inspired Communism lay the solution to China’s problems.” (Preface viii).

The book has eleven chapters, but the essence is well summarized in “Chapter 1 Perspectives and perceptions: May Fourth Socialism and the Origins of Communism in China”. It is worth to cite some relevant contents. “During the years around 1919, the May Fourth period, anarchism pervaded radical thinking on social and cultural change, and ‘communism’ was identified with ‘anarcho-communism.’ Anarchism, moreover, served as ‘midwife’ to Marxism; the majority of those who turned to Bolshevism after 1920 went through an anarchist phase in the course of their radicalization, as they acknowledged freely in later years.” (p.3) “not only that it remained influential through the May Fourth period, but even that anarchists paved the way for acceptance of Marxism by introducing the vocabulary of socialism into the language of Chinese politics.” (p.4) “Not only did anarchism pervade radical thinking during the period when Marxism was introduced (or re-introduced) into Chinese thought, but anarchists played an important part in the early organizational activities that culminated in the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1920-1921.” (p.4) “Marxism was not merely one among the competing socialisms of the immediate May Fourth period, we might add, but the weakest one, in both the number committed to it and, even more so, Chinese intellectuals’ familiarity with it; and Leninism was virtually nonexistent as ideology.” (p.10) “If ideologically the Communist party benefited from the intellectual conditions prepared by anarchism, it benefited organizationally from the existence of study societies, which had emerged with the activism generated by the New Culture and May Fourth movements, in which anarchist ideas played an important role.” (p.11) “The victory of Marxism over its socialist rivals was not ideological, the ascendancy of truth over false consciousness, as Chinese historians would have it, but organizational: by guaranteeing ideological disciplines, the Communist organization allowed effective social and political activity.” (p.14).

The book further introduces: “Anarchist activity took the form primarily of cultural and propaganda activity, but they were also the first among Chinese radicals to engage in labor organization.” (Part I Chinese Radicals and the October Revolution in Russia, Prologue). The book’s strength can be demonstrated from its analysis of Li Dazhao, the so-called “China’s first Marxist” and the second important co-founder of the Communist Party of China besides Chen Duxiu. “Meisner has pointed out that there was nothing particularly Marxist in the way Li comprehended the Revolution at this time [to enthusiastically respond to the October Revolution]. I would like to take this a step further and suggest that not only was Li’s comprehension not Marxist, but his discussions of the Revolution at this time were infused with the vocabulary of anarchism….he expressed views that within the Chinese context were clearly of anarchist inspiration.” (Chapter 2 A Revolution Perceived: The October Revolution through Chinese Eyes, p.25) “Meisner commented on Li’s continued fascination with Kropotkin: ‘looked with great favor upon Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid; but the influence of Kropotkin was most strongly evident after Li had already declared himself a Marxist in 1919, and he then used the idea of mutual aid for the explicit purpose of reinterpreting the Marxist theory of class struggle.’”(Chapter 3 The October Revolution and Marxism in China: The Case of Li Dazhao, p.45) “Li was not in fact the first Chinese in 1918 to hail the Revolution as the harbinger of a new era of history. That honor actually belonged, ironically, to the anarchist journal Labor magazine (Laodong) (the first journal in China to use ‘labor’ in its title)” (p.26). After the book’s publication in 1989, recent documents from China show a more complicated figure of Li’s political relation to the Comintern and the Soviet Union[3].  “The two discussions of the Revolution in the second issue of Labor (April 1918) are among the most detailed reports on the meaning and the ideology of the Revolution published in China in 1918. (This issue was also the first of any Chinese journal to celebrate May Day.)” (p.27) “In early 1920, the government reported that it had confiscated eighty-three ‘extremist’ publications. The list of these indicates that they were mostly anarchist,” (p.32-33) “the American government instructed its consuls in China to root out ‘Bolshevist’ activity. Most of the ‘Bolshevists’ they discovered turned out to be anarchists” (p.33). “In March 1920, the Soviet government declared its unilateral renunciation of the Unequal Treaties with China it had inherited from the czarist government. Even the most avid pursuers of early Russian influence have conceded that this declaration invoked immediate enthusiasm in China and provoked a dramatic interest.” Xiang Qing “has suggested that the declaration eased the tensions between China and Russia, and let to a relaxing of the Chinese government’s vigilance over the border which for the first time made possible sustained contact between Chinese radicals and the Soviet Union.” (p. 41).

The book is not easy to read for American public because it was written for the narrow circle of Chinese history study. But the somewhat repetitious materials in different chapters confirm the vital role of anarchism. “If ‘social change was at the heart of what progressive May Fourth publications advocated and discussed’ in 1919, anarchism was the tongue in which this advocacy found its expression.” (Chapter 5 Radical Culture and Social Activism: Anarchism in May Fourth Radicalism, p.74) The book specifically points out that “the diffusion of anarchist ideas among Chinese youth was not the result of a spontaneous petit-bourgeois utopianism (however that may have helped to prepare a fecund ground for it) but of anarchists’ persistent efforts over the preceding decade to spread their ideas. Anarchists, the only socialists to participate actively in the New Culture movement, significantly contributed to its intellectual climate.” (p.75) “Before socialism had become a visible feature of the Chinese intellectual scene, anarchists had already introduced the issues of socialism.” (p.76) “What distinguished anarchist writings in these years was not their claim to socialism, but their advocacy of a social revolution, the hallmark of socialist ideologies in China since 1905….They introduced not just socialist ideas and vocabulary but a social vision. This not only prepared the ground for the efflorescence of socialism after the May Fourth Movement, but also helps explain why anarchism enjoyed an immense popularity among competing socialist ideologies in the early May Fourth period.” (p.76-77)

The book then traces the founding members of the Communist Party of China, including Mao Zedong, and concludes: “Almost all of the later Communists, with possibly the single exception of Chen Duxiu, in other words, were introduced to social radicalism through anarchist ideas.” “Radical intellectuals, at least those who still sustained their radical will, were all dressed up with nowhere to go. At this moment Gregory Voitinsky arrived in China.” (Chapter 8 May Fourth Radicalism at a Crossroads: Study Societies, Communes, and the Search for Social Revolution, p.179, 190) The book further describes that the Comintern missionary “Voitinsky played as architect of the Party” (Chapter 9 The Comintern and the Organization of Communism in China, p.191). The book concludes: “Anarchists may have been naïve as revolutionaries; they were not wrong in their perception of this crucial relationship between revolutionary organization and the revolutionary society of the future. To recall these origins, rather than subvert socialism, may from this perspective help put socialism in China on the right track once again. …The very act of remembering may restore to Chinese socialism its long-forgotten origin in a democratic vision that was not just political, but social and cultural as well.” (Chapter 11 Paths to the Future: Communist Organization and Marxist Ideology, p.273) Indeed, the democratic movement in 1989 (when the book was published) witnessed the rebirth of Chinese anarchism.

I don’t know how many anarchists or socialist-minded people read the book. Probably not many. The majority readers are Chinese history students, as indicated from comments of another history professor: “By far the most detailed, sophisticated, and comprehensive treatment of the origins of the Communist Party of China yet written….In particular, it provides a very sophisticated analysis of the competing socialist doctrines, especially anarchism” (Maurice Meisner). Rather than pointing out its shortcomings from the academic methodology[4], I really want someone from anarchist point to edit the book to make it a short lesson of the legacy of the Chinese anarchism as the path to the future socialism for the general public in the world.     

Jing Zhao

US-Japan-China Comparative Policy Research Institute