#source [[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=5ECF180E6B48F173069ABF5B30CE1EEA][Library Genesis]], [[https://aaaaarg.fail/thing/5cc7b8f39ff37c0f41622bd7][aaarg]]

#date 1991

#lang en

*** Author’s Note

<quote>

I have the honor to report that Bolshevist propaganda is carried on in the city of Changchow, inland from Amoy, the seat of the military government of General Chen Chiung Ming [Chen Jiongming] commanding the Southern forces.

I am informed that teachers in the Chinese government schools at Changchow have been spreading the Bolshevist doctrine, and occasionally breaking out and waving the red flag. At a recent athletic meeting, held on a large scale, at Changchow, pamphlets in Chinese advocating anarchical communism were circulated. I enclose a rough translation in English of one such pamphlet, which was handed personally by General Chen Chiung Ming to a foreign visitor to Changchow who was present at the athletic meet. General Chen Chiung Ming is reported to have made an address at a tiffin to officials and foreigners, held on the athletic grounds, and to have himself advocated some of the socialistic doctrines set out in the pamphlet. Turning to the foreign missionaries present, he is reported to have said that the Savior himself was a socialist, and what is a socialist but a Bolshevik.[267]

An April 24 dispatch forwarded to the embassy in Beijing included additional translations of Bolshevist pamphlets, as well as a proclamation issued by the magistrate of Amoy. The latter read:

<quote>

The propagation of Anarchism and Bolshevism is contrary to the public peace and morals, destroying virtue and the Five Human Relationships (parents and children; husband and wife; brother and sister [<em>sic</em>]; sovereign and subject; friends).

Hereafter anyone may arrest persons engaged in distributing this printed matter and send them to the court or hand them over to the police, to be severely punished.[268]

The confounding of anarchism and Bolshevism in these reports, whatever it may say about the political education of American diplomats, was nevertheless typical of the confusion that prevailed at this time over the relationship of these radical ideologies. But not everyone was confused. In a service report he filed to the State Department in December 1920, John Dewey observed, with reference to the case of a student who had been arrested two months earlier in Beijing for spreading Bolshevist literature, that he investigated and found that it was truly anarchistic, advocating the abolition of government and the family, but no Bolshevist. Though there might be a few Bolsheviks around the country, Dewey continued, they had nothing to do with the general tone and temper of radical thought in the country.[269] Had American consular officials in Amoy investigated the Bolshevist literature they discovered in Zhangzhou with the same perspicacity, they might have reached a similar conclusion: this literature was clearly anarchist, produced and distributed by followers of Shifu, who had accompanied Chen Jiongming to Fujian in 1918.

Our ideal new era and new society are to be honest, progressive, positive, free, equal, creative, beautiful, kind, peaceful, full of universal love and mutual assistance, and pleasant labor; in short, happiness for the whole society. We hope that the hypocritical, the conservative, the negative, the bound, class divided, conventional, ugly, vicious, warring, restless, idle, pessimistic elements, happiness for the few—all these phenomena will gradually diminish and disappear.[284]

</quote>

Participants in the New Culture Movement viewed it as a Chinese Renaissance. In later years, the movement—in its emphases on science and democracy—would be compared to the European Enlightenment, which still holds an important place in representations of the movement. Liberal historians have stressed the movement’s liberalism; Communist historians on the whole have agreed with this assessment, adding as a social dimension the bursting forth of a bourgeois revolution in China.[285] I think we cannot identify the New Culture Movement with any one ideology, if by <em>ideology</em> we understand an articulate conception of the world with an exclusive structure of social and political action. The New Culture Movement was not informed by an ideology that, having captured the consciousness of a generation, stood guard, as it were, at the gates of that consciousness to determine the flow of ideas. The New Culture Movement <em>was</em> a movement of ideas, a consciousness in the making with a history of its own. Anarchism was one of these ideas. Anarchist ideas were readily available to anyone who sought them; during these years more people sought them than ever before or after in Chinese thought. Anarchists proliferated, and anarchism spread in Chinese thought as the movement gained momentum.

The efflorescence of anarchism during the May Fourth period is not inconsistent with the representation of the May Fourth Movement (in its New Culture phase) as an Enlightenment. Anarchism in Europe had deep roots, April Carter has argued, in the political philosophy and outlook of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; it is possible to view an anarchism such as Kropotkin’s‘ as an uncompromising reaffirmation of the Enlightenment promise when others, including liberals, had already given up on the possibility of its realization.[286] Any such analogy, however, is of necessity imperfect and may conceal more than it reveals. The popularity of anarchism was bound up primarily with concrete problems that emerged as the Chinese revolution unfolded following the republican Revolution of 1911, problems to which anarchism seemed to offer solutions consistent with the prevailing mood of Chinese radicals. One Chinese historian has written:

[554] Maurice Meisner, The Wrong March: China Chooses Stalin’s Way, <em>Progressive</em> (October 1986), 2630. Meisner discusses this problem more extensively in his essays in <em>Maoism, Marxism, Utopianism</em> (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), especially The Ritualization of Utopia.