Continuing my installments from the “Anarchist Current,” the Afterword to Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, here I return to anarchism in China during the 1920s and 30s, focusing on Huang Lingshuang’s critique of Marxism. In Volume One of the Anarchism anthology, I included several selections from Chinese anarchists, including He Zhen, the early Chinese anarchist feminist, Shifu, “the soul of Chinese anarchism” who helped create a Chinese anarchist communist movement, and Ba Jin (also known as Li Pei Kan or Li Feigan), the famous Chinese novelist who was active in the Chinese anarchist movement from the 1920s until the Communist Party’s seizure of power in 1949. On my blog, I have posted additional material from Lui Shipei, He Zhen’s companion who helped introduce anarchism to China in the early 1900s, and Kan San, on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Anarchism in China Before the 1949 Revolution

In Asia during the 1920s and 30s, the anarchists faced obstacles similar to those of their European comrades. The success of the Bolsheviks in Russia led to the creation of Marxist-Leninist Communist parties in various parts of Asia. The anarchists had until then been the most influential revolutionary movement in China. By the late 1920s, the anarchists had been eclipsed by the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang, who fought each other, and the Japanese, for control of China over the next twenty years.

Chinese anarchists rejected the Marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, concentrating all power “in the hands of the state,” because this would result in the “suppression of individual freedom” (Volume One, Selection 100). The Chinese anarchists did not regard Marxist state socialism as sufficiently communist, for during the alleged “transition” from socialism to communism, a wage system and some forms of private property would be retained.

Huang Lingshuang (1898-1982), one of the more noteworthy Chinese anarchist critics of Marxism, rejected the Marxist view that society must progress through successive stages of economic and technological development before communism can be achieved. Drawing on the work of European anthropologists, Huang Lingshuang was able to more clearly distinguish between cultural change and biological evolution than Kropotkin, who had largely conflated the two. Huang Lingshuang argued that, contrary to the Marxist theory of historical materialism, the “same economic and technological conditions do not necessarily result in the same culture,” cultural and economic changes do “not occur at the same rate,” and not every society goes through the same economic stages of development in the same order (Volume One, Selection 100). Rudolf Rocker made similar arguments in Nationalism and Culture (Volume One, Selection 121).

Robert Graham