Anarchism in Chinese Political Culture: Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (Studies of the East Asian Institute)

This monograph, like most first scholarly productions, is essentially a revised doctoral dissertation. Throughout the long years of graduate study and while I was putting this work into its final form, I was asked, a surprising number of times, whether I was myself an anarchist. So far as I know, few students of Maoism, or for that matter fascism, are asked whether they are adherents of the political philosophy they are studying. It could, of course, be something about my personality that provoked the question, or it could have resulted from the belief among some sinologists and historians that anarchism was irrelevant to China and that therefore its students must be motivated by peculiar personal reasons. It is true that questions about the role of anarchism in modern Chinese history did not particularly suggest themselves from the standard sources; anarchism does not appear high on the agenda of unsolved problems that graduate students commit to memory. On the other hand, it is my impression that many scholars understand anarchism to have had a notable if limited effect on the Chinese intelligentsia but believe that the subject has been “done.” This view perhaps stems from an older notion of sinology: since the problems are so vast and scholarly resources so scarce, these resources must be carefully husbanded and multiple analyses of most problems are a wasteful duplication of effort. In fact, Chinese anarchism has not been “done”; to the extent that it has, I hope immodestly that this study can prove the once-over approach to sinology wrong. More to the point, sinology within the various standard disciplines history, political science, sociology, anthropology—has reached such a level of sophistication that a genuine historiography has formed. Therefore secondary and tertiary analyses are not only desirable but necessary to the momentum of the discipline.

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