Chapter 3 is a revised version of an article that first appeared in <em>Modern China</em> 12. no. 2 (April 1986); chapter 4 is a revised version of an article (coauthored with Edward Krebs) that first appeared in <em>Modern China</em> 7, no. 2 (April 1981); chapter 5 is a revised version of an article that first appeared in <em>Modern China</em> 11, no. 3 (July 1985); chapter 6 is a revised version of an article that first appeared in <em>International Review of Social History</em> 1 (1989); chapter 7 first appeared in <em>Modern China</em> 15, no. 4 (October 1989). I am indebted to these journals and to Sage Publications.

<em>For Roxann</em>

I dedicate the study with love to my spouse, colleague, and comrade, Roxann Prazniak. Roxann’s animism has influenced the way I look at anarchism. I leave it to her, however, to delve into the question of the relationship between anarchism, Buddhism, and Saint Francis!

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 <em>(daluan)</em> 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 dialogue and historical attention.

Whereas Revolutionary Alliance socialists had proposed social revolution as a supplement to the task of political revolution, anarchists made it a substitute for the latter. In one of the earliest statements of the Paris anarchists’ position on revolution, Wu Zhihui drew a clear distinction between social and political revolutions:

Those of old who advocated revolution spoke only of the political aspect of revolution but did not emphasize society. They desired to abolish despotism to extend people’s sovereignty, sought legal freedom but not freedom of livelihood, political but not social or economic equality. They sought the happiness and welfare of one country or some of the people, not the happiness and welfare of the masses of the world.

Socialist revolution <em>(shehui zhuyizhi geming)</em> would

seek equality, freedom, happiness and welfare for society, make justice <em>(gongdao)</em> the measure of achievement, expunge whatever harms society, or runs contrary to this goalsuch as despotism and classes, the roots of all calamity, institute scientific progress to achieve a real world civilization, and, ultimately, establish a humanitarian commonweal <em>(rendao datong)</em> and a paradisiacal world <em>(shijie jilo)</em>.

Socialist revolution, Wu believed, would rid society of all the poison inherited from the past and establish what was appropriate to social life.[106]

In 1912 Paris anarchists also brought their activities home. While they would shift their attention almost immediately to education, a society they established in early 1912 yields insights into the basically moralistic thrust of their conception of anarchismand of education. (It would also serve to promote their anarchism, albeit in disguised form, as a similar society was revived in Beijing University a few years later.) This was the Promote Virtue Society <em>(Jinde hui),</em> whose informal leadership included Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Ji, as well as the Revolutionary Alliance (and later Guomindang) leader Wang Jingwei. The society had a complex structure of rules that also determined membership, which consisted of five types, in increasing order of rigorousness:

The lowest category of membership called for a person not to visit prostitutes and not to gamble; in successively more demanding levels of membership, it was stipulated that the person should not take concubines, not serve as an official or a member of an assembly, and not smoke, drink, or eat meat.

A similar but simpler society was established at about the same time by an associate of the Paris anarchists, Cai Yuanpei (who would also become the first minister of education under the new Republic), the Six No’s Society <em>(Liubu hui).</em> Also aimed at behavioral improvement, the society forbade its members to visit prostitutes, gamble, take concubines, eat meat, drink liquor, or smoke.[193]

This anarchist phase in the radicalization of later Communist leaders made for considerable confusion between Marxism and anarchism in 191920. It may also have imprinted on their minds memories of radical practises that, as practises of everyday radical culture, may have been more lasting in their implications than formal intellectual commitments.

The appearance and rapid ascendancy of Marxian communism (or Bolshevism) in the 1920s has long overshadowed in historians’ consciousness the role anarchism played in nourishing social revolutionary thinking and activity for the previous decade and a half, which contributed directly to the founding of the Communist party of China in 1921. Well past the establishment of communism, anarchism continued to serve as a fecund source of social revolutionary ideals that kept alive a radical alternative to Bolshevism. Anarchist thinking and activity during this period overlapped with the Communist party’s conception of revolution, but also sharply differed with it on questions of strategy and the ultimate premises of revolution.

The history of anarchism in China may be a history ultimately of political irrelevance, but it provides us with a vantage point from which to rethink the most fundamental problems of politics—not just Chinese or socialist, but all politics.

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