Asia
Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, by Arif
Dirlik
Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, by Peter
Zarrow
A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan
MIA or Mythmaking in America: How and why belief in live POWs has possessed a
nation, by H. Bruce Franklin
Shenfan, by William Hinton
Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution
by Arif Dirlik
Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture
by Peter Zarrow
Reviewed by RC42
Why is it important to study the history of anarchism in China? By learning the content, progress and fate of anarchism in China - especially how anarchism compared to the later dominant and more effective Maoism - we can get a better understanding of anarchism today in North America. [See also MIM Theory 8. -ed.] The following is a summary of an essay that reviews and compares two books about anarchism in China during the first quarter of this century: Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution by Arif Dirlik, and Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture by Peter Zarrow.(1)
According to the reviewer, Zarrow's book is "dedicated to summarizing the anarchist thoughts and hundreds of years of related intellectual history in China... [with] ... historical and intellectual context for the anarchist movement ... Zarrow's are helpful services to those seriously considering anarchism." Dirlik's book depicts "the mindframe of the Chinese anarchists and the link of Chinese anarchism to recent intellectual current."
"What we learn is that far from being pure-minded, idealistic and naive, anarchists in China had an uncanny knack for finding themselves on the wrong side of history as far as socialists and progressives are concerned ... we find anarchists actively promoting programs that never had the slightest chance of creating structural change and rapidly frustrating themselves to the point of political capitulation."
Defining Anarchism
In order to understand Chinese anarchism, we need to compare the ideology and political self-definition of Chinese anarchists with their practice. Zarrow gives several descriptions of his own, and a few from some original anarchist sources. According to Zarrow,
"Anarchism can be broadly defined as the belief that individual freedom and social good can be reconciled without coercive agents. In this view, the state may be abolished or brought to a level of minimal functions ... a broad kind of antiauthoritarianism. ... Chinese anarchism broadly represented a set of beliefs about the moral basis for action. To many it seemed no less possible, no more utopian than republicanism, communism, or any other program for change."(2)
Clearly, this definition differs in basic ways from communism. By proposing that significant change can succeed without "coercive agents," one must wonder how. Will big landowners just give up their land when threatened with a "moral basis for action"? History proves otherwise, that no ruling class has ever abdicated its wealth or power, procured and maintained violently and coercively, without coercion.
Chinese anarchists held widely different opinions on questions of methods. Wu Zhihui (who was in Paris, a promoter of science and language reform, and involved with the Guomindang in the 1920s) believed that true education would lead both to true morality among the people and thence instantly to revolution. He made it clear that his political beliefs were no threat to the republic: "My anarchism cannot be realized before three thousand years."(3)
Liu Shifu, however, in spite of his insistence on individual perfection, placed revolution before morality.(4) Liu's anarchist career began in 1912; he established the Conscience Society (Xinshe). He advised a number of people to remain in China (to fight) rather than study abroad (and improve themselves). He believed that since immorality stemmed from the perversions of the social system, a social revolution would lead to a new moral standard, rather than the other way around. Since social evils stem from the existence of government, once the affliction of government is removed, human morality would in this theory immediately revert to its pure state.(5)
Liu's position gets closer to the communist view of an active overthrow. But the sculpting of a socialist morality will also be an active process, since nothing will "immediately revert to its pure state" without political struggle.
Liu Shifu's Definition of Anarcho-communism:
"[We] advocate the abolition of the capitalist system and the creation of a communist society, all without the use of governmental coercion. In sum, we seek absolute liberty on both the economic and the political planes. ... Through the true spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity we will attain our ideals: a society without the institutions of landlords, capitalists, leaders, officials, representatives, family heads, soldiers, jails, police, courts, laws, religion, or marriage. Then society will consist only of liberty, only of mutual aid and only of the joy of labor ... Anarchism is the inevitable end of evolution ... Thus, it is mistaken to say that anarchism is idealistic and impossible."(6)
Zarrow tries to answer the question: But how was this ideal to be achieved?
"The root of the matter lay in one's learning to be independent-again, a common theme not unique to the anarchists. International social parties would then overthrow the various nations. Gradually the functions of government would be decreased as people learned to govern themselves (zizhi). Then contracts freely agreed upon would replace the legal system (an idea of great appeal at the time), until, in this view, they too could be replaced by the human Way (rendao). ... In this ultimate stage the human Way is that of 'pure reason,' and 'real liberty, real equality, and real love' mark the Datong. ... Most Chinese anarchists would later abjure this kind of blatant utopianism, even without the mystical overtones. But they still shared a faith in social evolution, a sense of the perfectibility of the individual, and a determination to rid the entire would of oppression."(7)
What are the historical similarities and differences between anarchism and communism? Why did communism prevail in China?
In the 1920s, the communists and anarchists both started in the same social groups - "primarily the workers and intellectuals -especially the 'cultural elite.' Later the communists would gain ascendancy in the largest social force - the peasantry - but in the 1920s when communism surpassed anarchism in influence in China we cannot say that a difference in where the movements recruited was the reason for the communist triumph ... [therefore] the character of the two ideologies themselves stands as an explanation for the ascendancy of the communist movement over the anarchist one."
Zarrow gives a nice summary of the difference in the ideologies that led to communism's relative importance in China.
"...the intellectual tools of the anarchists included ideas about the evolution of societies, human nature, and human potentiality for which the evidence remains ambiguous. But the Marxist intellectual analysis in China led directly to effective practice: linking communist organization with worker and then peasant movements, in order to give these movements a revolutionary thrust ... In some cases, especially in labor organization, the anarchists were there first ... But anarchist attention to means over ends and organizational weakness were probably fatal in the long run."(8)
"Zarrow goes on to accept the basic anarchist contention that anarchism is 'more pure' than communism because it sanctions no stages of coercion like the dictatorship of the proletariat that is central to Marxism ...[and that] Marxists' compromise with principles ... is the reason that Marxism appears more successful than anarchism as an ideology."
Certainly it would be nice not to need to kill anyone in the process of revolution, but those capitalists just don't seem like the types to give away their property without a fight. The violence that is currently inflicted on the world's people must stop, but purity and abstract principles won't stop it. If "Marxism appears more successful" based on historical facts, then it probably is more successful. To verify that Maoism was indeed more successful in practice, we need to examine what the Chinese anarchists actually did.
The Revolution of 1911 lead to the end of the Chinese monarchy in 1912 (9) and "no self-avowed anarchist movement existed in China itself until 1912."(10) The Guomindang (GMD) "had been created as an open, electioneering political party, out of the revolutionary T'ung Meng Hui and other groups."(11) The Chinese Communist Party was organized in 1921 in Shanghai. The Nationalist Revolution took place from 1925-1928, with Chiang Kai-shek as leader.(12) In 1927, the revolutionary government was dominated by the alliance between the left-wing of the GMD and the communists.
Anarchist Capitulation
Anarchists in China did not sustain their activist commitments like communists did. Both books provide examples of the eventual capitulation of many prominent anarchists. He Zhen, an anarchist feminist, and her husband Liu Shipei supported monarchism after 1914. He Zhen may also have helped split Sun Yatsen's "Revolutionary Alliance" (Tongmenghui). (13)
Sun Yat-sen was founder of the GMD, and may have been an anarchist himself.(14) However, the GMD was pro-capitalist while under Chiang Kai-shek, especially by the 1940s. Yet other supposedly dedicated anarchists supported the GMD even after the Liberation of China in 1949; several anarchists were on the central committee of the GMD, and many anarchists simply joined the GMD. Some anarchists in the GMD voted to expel communists from the GMD and arrest the communists in Shanghai.
"'Anarchists' joining the GMD, taking posts in the Japanese puppet regime, aiding monarchist governments or movements or accepting government positions in republican organizations would be a much more generally accurate picture of the Chinese anarchist movement than the image of the self-reliant activity of the Liu Shifu types. The anarchists joined the state or proto-state organizations all the while proclaiming their anarchism, whereas the Marxists never claimed to be able to do without seizing state power."
It's understandable why the anarchists ended up without a consistent revolutionary practice: "Anarchists claim to oppose all politics which is impractical because it leaves them no real way to change the world; and leads to compromise of anarchist goals and capitulation to the status quo."
Notes:
1. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, by Arif Dirlik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), and Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) by Peter Zarrow; Reviewed by Henry Park, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 24 No. 2 (1994). Quotes from this article unless otherwise noted.
2. Zarrow, pp. 2-3.
3. Zarrow, p. 65.
4. Zarrow, p. 215.
5. Zarrow pp. 213-5.
6. Zarrow p. 214.
7. Zarrow pp. 216-17.
8. Zarrow p. 224.
9. Fairbank, John King; The United States and China, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 1983. p. 220.
10. Zarrow, p. 3.
11. Fairbank, p. 222.
12. Fairbank, p. 236.
13. Zarrow, p. 35.
14. Fairbank, p. 216.
Buy Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution
Buy Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture
Back to top of this page
Even though it was written by a reformist liberal and tells the history of the Vietnam War through the experiences of an Amerikan military commander and psy-war operative, Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" is a useful book for anti-imperialists. Sheehan analyzes both broad strategies and small case studies in order to tell how Vietnamese revolutionaries defeated the Amerikan military, despite the latter's immense advantage in technology and sheer firepower.
For example, Sheehan devotes one whole chapter to the battle of Ap Bac, where southern Vietnamese guerrillas with no heavy weapons defeated a force three times their size, shooting down several Amerikan helicopters and routing a column of armored vehicles along the way. Sheehan uses this to illustrate how the guerrillas adapted their tactics to defeat the "invincible" armored vehicles and to contrast the discipline and determination of the guerrillas against the timidity and calculated ineptitude of the south Vietnamese puppet troops - most of whom were mercenaries or conscripts and saw no point to risking their necks for the Saigon government du jour.
Because of battle accounts like this, which detail the heroism and immense sacrifices made by the Vietnamese revolutionary forces, the book is often suspenseful and inspiring.
John Paul Vann, the Amerikan whose life Sheehan follows, was disgusted with the corruption of the south Vietnamese government and the callous disregard the Amerikan military showed for the life of the civilian population. Sheehan documents the brutality of the "strategic hamlet" programs and "free fire zones," which Vann (correctly) thought would make the Vietnamese hate the united $tates. Instead of "bombing Vietnam into the stone age," Vann thought that the u.$. should back a program of land reform and democratization in the countryside, while waging "low intensity warfare" against the guerrillas. This way the people in south Vietnam would come to identify with the puppet regime in Saigon. What Vann never realized was that the revolutionaries were carrying out land reform and combating corruption -- as part of their program to fight for the will of the Vietnamese people. The people of south Vietnam already largely identified with the underground revolutionary government. Attacking the revolutionary movement meant attacking the interests of the people of Vietnam. The Vietnamese did not need Amerikan land reform imposed by military force. Vann's cynicism is demonstrated in the fact that he wanted the Amerikan military in Vietnam to push a program that the Vietnamese revolutionaries were carrying out already.
This why imperialism is bound to be defeated. Vann was right: If the Amerikans were to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, they had to solve pressing Vietnamese political and social problems and stop massacring them indiscriminately. But the imperialists had created the pressing Vietnamese problems -- directly or indirectly, beginning with imperialist opposition to a truly independent and socialist Vietnam. The imperialist mission was not to solve the problems of their own creation, instead they relied on guns and bombs to try and force the Vietnamese to accept their will.
MIM Theory no. 4: A Sprial Trajectory (available from MIM for $5) includes a detailed discussion of successful imperialist co-optation of the Communist strategy of land-reform as used in China. "The United States and East Asian capitalists jumped on the bandwagon of class struggle at a crucial point at the completion of World War II and the Korean War. ... They copied land reform [from China]. Why did they copy it? Because the communists had just kicked capitalist ass in China and were starting to do the same in Korea and Vietnam."(p. 77)
MT4 goes on to explain why imperialism can only succeed in making such reforms in a few colonies, and how the exceptional countries in which imperialist-sponsored land reform succeeds can only exist within the rule of imperialist exploitation of the majority of nations. The case of Vietnam demonstrates that imperialism is not principally interested in land reform for the interests of the people. Amerika used land reform to achieve control of south Korea and the other Asian Tigers, but spend decades working to destroy the benefits of land reform in Vietnam.
The massive bombing in Vietnam is another example of how the imperialists' nature gets in the way even of their own strategizing. The bombing in north and south Vietnam had little military value and was detrimental politically, but it remained a central part of Amerikan strategy throughout the war. Sheehan hints that this was because aircraft and bomb production was very profitable.
In typical liberal fashion, Sheehan occasionally slanders the Vietnamese revolutionaries. He claims that the revolutionaries ruled the city of Hue through terror and violence when they liberated it during the Tet offensive - but a French reporter in the city at the time remarked at how supportive the population was of the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries did kill a handful of corrupt local officials, but there is no evidence that they killed people on the scale Sheehan and the CIA cite (see Marilyn Young, "The Vietnam Wars").
As long as the reader keeps a critical perspective, "A Bright Shining Lie" can serve as a good introduction to the history of the Vietnam War - which is important, as more and more Amerikans only know of Vietnam through Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris movies.
Buy
This Book
Back to top of this page
In his Preface to this myth-shattering volume, Bruce Franklin writes: "When I began investigating this belief in live POWs, I intended the results to be only a chapter in a book about how American culture shaped and was reshaped by the Vietnam War. I had little sense of the depth or breadth of the faith, perhaps because it seemed so obviously irrational and related to an issue of such apparently minor significance compared with other effects of the war on both America and the nations of Indochina."(p. xi) From a chapter on Amerikan culture and the war in Vietnam Franklin's project grew into a detailed explosion of the manufactured documentation, trumped up charges of barbarism against the Vietnamese, and mass wishful support for the idea of remaining POWs fed by popular culture of the Rambo variety.
MIA or Mythmaking in America is a fast-paced account of the development and perpetuation of the myth that live u.$. soldiers remain as POWs in Vietnam. Throughout, Franklin puts the POW/MIA myth in the context of Amerika's war against Vietnam. This is not the work of a liberal who argues that the governments of Indochina have done all they can to satisfy the u.$. Franklin consistently argues that many failures of Vietnamese record-keeping (i.e., records on the state of prisoners of war) were a direct result of their country being bombed. It is difficult to retain records and keep prisoners alive when bombs and troops are attacking every day. He also notes repeatedly where Amerikan economic and military interests are served by keeping the POW/MIA myth alive as a lever against the Vietnamese government in negotiations on any topic.
MIM recommends this book highly both for people who are familiar with the war in Vietnam and those who are not. A former anti-war activist who remembers the developing logic of the POW/MIA campaign has told MIM that s/he has never believed in the tens or hundreds of POWs supposedly being held. The logic is simple: why? What could a country already brutalized by the Amerikan military possibly have to gain by hanging on to prisoners-of-war and keeping them secret? For liberals and for others familiar with the war, Mythmaking in America provides the detail to substantiate the apparent logic that the u.$. government has manufactured the POW/MIA myth to serve imperialism.
For younger readers who are new to the history of this country's war against Vietnam, Mythmaking in Amerika is a solid introduction to the war's major events. Because his subject is the united snakes' propaganda machine as it developed around the war, Franklin does a better job explaining the reactionary version of the war's history taught in school or in the movies.
Franklin explains how the myth began, when Richard Nixon's administration collapsed the categories of POW and MIA into one as the war was going badly and protests against the war became larger. Nixon's public relations tactics amounted to lying to the families of Amerikan soldiers. Franklin describes how a soldier who is lost in action can only be found to be presumptively dead after "investigation over a lengthy period of time" and "a complex administrative and legal process."(pp. 16-7) The u.$. government further decided to hold both the Viet Minh and National Liberation Front responsible for a list of individuals who had been lost in the war even if they were known to be dead. The administration complicated this demand by excluding CIA employees from the list (while reserving the right to demand their return), and reporting all on the list as having been lost in Vietnam (even if they were in Laos, Cambodia, or the South China Sea).(pp. 68-9)
The MIA/POW category eventually included more than 1,000 soldiers who were originally designated as Killed in Action/Body not Recovered (KIA/BNR). This was because in spite of direct military witness accounting that these soldiers had been killed, the military changed their classification using the excuse that if the bodies were not in the care of the government or the families they could not be sure.(pp. 11-13) Franklin writes: "Even without subjective elements coming into play, these rigorous definitions lead unavoidably to creating more MIAs than actually exist."(p. 17) There are some rational reasons to expand the MIA classification. Some soldiers whose deaths really are unconfirmed will initially be called MIA. The more difficult it is to find identifiable remains, the longer their MIA status will persist. By turning so many people who were clearly KIA/BNR into MIAs, and the into potential POWs by combining the categories, Nixon's spin doctors purposely gave false hope to soldiers' families in the name of creating a reason to stay in this increasingly questionable war.
Out of Nixon's P.R. machine grew a number of families' and support organizations that were dedicated to the task of spreading a very emotional brand of propaganda about the existence of live POWs. The "You Are Not Forgotten" slogan we still see on bumper stickers shows how bent this movement was on sustaining the belief that Amerikans in Vietnam are only waiting to be rescued. To "forget" these men has become synonymous with telling these families that their 30 years of waiting for the return of their loved ones has been nothing but a service to the Amerikan government's desire to keep an enemy in Vietnam. Nixon could never have developed such a fierce following for his war effort through the state alone.
The POW/MIA Fact Book, first issued in 1982 by the Reagan Administration,(p. 5) has done much to confuse the issue and the facts. Franklin takes a handful of cases from the factbooks of the 1980s and early 1990s and compares the stories of the same supposed POWs from year to year. The Fact Books commit such butchery of history as to count one individual of a crew of six as a POW -- although his five crew members were openly released to the Amerikan government. The Fact Books of later years have resurrected soldiers and spies who had been reported as dead in years past, without explanation of how the prior reporting was incorrect. Yet another Amerikan soldier who died (and whose death was substantiated in writing by a fellow solder) remained in the Fact Books because the government of Vietnam had not reported on his death to the Amerikan government.(pp. 28-32)
Franklin takes time to elaborate the responsibility borne by the Amerikan press and movie industry. He refers to the Pentagon as "using ink as an octopus does, clouding the waters to obscure its own activities."(p. 88) In this effort, the newspapers were complicit -- printing the stories as they came out of the Defense Department rather than doing some basic math to figure out that the day to day reports didn't add up. Cataloging the Hollywood movies that provided explicit imagery for the POW/MIA myth, Franklin details historical falsehoods in The Deer Hunter, POW: The Escape, Uncommon Valor, The Rambo Series and many more. He writes that The Deer Hunter took "images of the war that had become deeply embedded in America's consciousness and transform[ed] them into their opposite."(p. 133) So a scene that could have been the massacre by Amerikan troops at My Lai features Vietnamese soldiers brutalizing a village and an Amerikan stepping in to stop the bloodshed.
Buy This Book
Back to top of this page
This is the sequel to Fanshen which was about the liberation of China from landlord and Japanese imperialist rule. Shenfan is primarily about the Great Leap through the Cultural Revolution. There is a sprinkling of material both before and after this time period. William Hinton stands out above other China scholars for the length of time he has spent in China. He has lived in one village called Long Bow at various time periods for years at a time.
The work is dense with empirical detail and insights into everyday concerns of Chinese peasants. Aside from his descriptions, Hinton's interviews and reporting of conversation is excellent. He reports what the peasants say, what the Communist Party says and what the highest government officials say. By asking his questions at different time periods, he manages to obtain different answers from different people for each question. Even within each time period, he shows the lines of controversy.
Hinton is of Marxist inspiration and has some strong words for the current regime. On the other hand, he spends several hundred pages detailing the Cultural Revolution as a merely opportunist power struggle among individuals and ultimately factions of millions of people. This book is not appropriate for special distribution efforts. His analysis of power struggle is rather too simple and does not offer an alternative. Still, Shenfan is very valuable for the reader interested in China.