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Title: Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism Author: Arif Dirlik Date: 1997 Language: en Topics: interview, Chinese Anarchism, China, history, biography, bibliography Source: *Perspectives on Anarchist Theory*, fall, 1997. Retrieved on 2011-07-16 from https://web.archive.org/web/20110716144158/http://www.negations.net/dimensions-of-chinese-anarchism-an-interview-with-arif-dirlik/
From 1905 to 1930, anarchists exerted a broad influence on Chinese
culture and politics. They were at the center of the emerging social
radicalism of that period and their activities left a significant mark
on later decade’s revolutionary movements.
Arif Dirlik is among the few historians writing in English to treat the
Chinese anarchist movement, which he has chronicled and analyzed in
several works, most notably his Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution . He
has also written numerous explorations of contemporary problems in
radical politics and theory.
I spoke with Dirlik on May 19, 1997. I asked him about Chinese
anarchism, his experience as a radical social theorist in the
university, and the future of his work. ~ Chuck Morse
See Also: Arif Dirlik: A Short Biography and Selected Works
Most histories of anarchism begin by establishing the principles of
anarchism and then narrate the lives of those who embraced these
principles. You chose a different approach in Anarchism in the Chinese
Revolution. You describe the Chinese anarchists as both subjects and
objects – products and shapers – of the larger revolutionary process in
China, and your book traces the dialectic between the anarchists and
this process. Why did you choose this form of exposition? Is there
something about the Chinese anarchists that makes this necessary or does
it reflect larger methodological commitments?
It’s the latter. I believe in approaching concepts, theories, or
political orientations historically. While some kind of notion of what
one means by these concepts is necessary for analysis, establishing
first principles tends to dehistoricize the approach to them. In other
words, you establish first principles – as if they were true everywhere
at all times – and then begin to analyze people in terms of those
principles. This leads to ahistorical judgments, in my opinion, on “who
is or isn’t a true anarchist” or “who is or isn’t a true Marxist?”
It leads inevitably to unproductive questions of orthodoxy —
unproductive both intellectually and politically. This also results in
certain kinds of sectarianism, since it leads to a question of
truthfulness rather than historical variation. So, this didn’t have
anything to do with Chinese anarchism per se, but rather my approach to
intellectual history and concepts.
Unlike Peter Zarrow in Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, you
de-emphasize the role of Daoism and Buddhism in the constitution of
Chinese anarchism. Why is this?
There is a methodological problem here … There has been a long-standing
tendency – I’m tempted to call it an Orientalist tendency even – to
attribute everything new in China to Chinese tradition, which is another
way of saying that there is never anything significantly new in China,
anything that cannot be explained in terms of the past.
I have been a critic of this tradition in Chinese historiography. I
believe that Chinese society was as subject to change as any other
society, whether or not we are willing to recognize it. So, I was
hesitant, therefore, to attribute the emergence of anarchism, Marxism,
or anything for that matter, to some Chinese tradition or another.
The problem is that the Chinese tradition has been used to explain
everything, from communism and Maoism to anarchism, and these days it’s
fashionable to explain Chinese capitalism in terms of tradition. I don’t
know how valid that is as an explanation, that notion of tradition, when
it can explain so many different and contradictory things.
I came to study Chinese anarchism by tracing the origins of this notion
of social revolution, and I believe that Chinese anarchism was a
radical, new idea. There may be Taoist elements in it, there may be
Buddhist elements in it, there may even – through Tolstoy – be Christian
elements in it: nevertheless, my concern was with the new ideas that
anarchism brought into the Chinese intellectual scene, chief among them
this idea of a social revolution. So, I think this emphasis explains
some of the differences.
Also, we need to make a distinction between the past as a determinant of
the present and the past as a reservoir of ideas upon which people can
draw to deal with the present. There is no question that some of the
Chinese anarchists – Liu Shipei was the outstanding one among them, and
then Shifu – drew on Taoism and Buddhism. However, this is not just the
determination or constitution of Chinese anarchism by Daoism or
Buddhism, but rather a two way, dialectical process. In other words, the
Chinese past is being read in new ways with the help of anarchism and
conversely there is a rereading of anarchism through Taoist and Buddhist
ideas. What is important to me is the dialectic, and I stay away from
the notion that the Chinese were somehow unconsciously under the sway of
this or that tradition that then shaped their readings of anarchism.
You claim that the emergence of Chinese nationalism actually created
many of the theoretical and political preconditions for the emergence of
Chinese anarchism. This seems contradictory at first glance. How did
this happen?
This reflects a particular appreciation of nationalism on my part. While
we obviously are concerned with many of the negative manifestations of
nationalism, it is a rather radical idea at its origins. It calls for
both a new conception of state, a new conception of the relationship
between state and society, and a new conception of the political subject
as citizen. In that sense, it breaks radically with earlier forms of
political consciousness that rested legitimacy in the emperor and
rendered the subjects into passive political subjects, whereas
nationalism called for active political subjects. Aside from the
question of the citizen, nationalism’s notion of the relationship
between state and society requires a new kind of accounting for society,
both in the sense of who’s going to participate in politics, what are
the qualifications for participation in politics, and what are the
factors that militate against political participation. As I argue in my
book, in some ways these changes lead directly to questions of social
revolution.
In the case of China, there is another element. There’s at least some
kind of historical coincidence between the emergence of a nationalist
consciousness and a new kind of supra-national utopianism, if you like.
It’s as if the building of a nation becomes the first task but somehow
not the ultimate task; that once the nation has been built and society
has been reordered, there would, in the future, be a way of transcending
that nationalism.
It’s tricky … I believe I described this as a counterpoint to
nationalism. If you recall the parts in the book about Liu Shipei – and
here the differences between anarchists become really important –
there’s a feeling that nationalism opens up new questions that prepare
the ground for anarchism, if you like, but also created new kinds of
threats. For example, someone like Liu Shipei, could see correctly that
for all the theoretical despotism of the Imperial State, nationalism
promised far greater and far more intensive intrusion in society than
had been the case under the imperial state. At this point, anarchism
becomes a way of asserting the autonomy of the society against an
intrusive nationalist society.
And, while I don’t want to generalize too much, this may be a fruitful
way of thinking about other circumstances. This notion of nationalism –
representing a new kind of politics, raising new questions, calling for
new solutions, and playing some part in the emergence of socialism and
anarchism – may be relevant to more than China.
Was there something unique about circumstances in China at this time
that made Kropotkin – as opposed to other anarchist theorists – most
pertinent or influential?
There are probably two reasons. First, Kropotkin’s anarchism is
thoroughly tied to a program of social transformation and, given the
concern among Chinese radicals with the question of social revolution,
one can see why they would find Kropotkin more relevant than some of the
other anarchists. Another interesting element is the importance of
Social Darwinism in Chinese intellectual circles around the turn of the
century. Chinese Social Darwinists almost adopted the Euro-American idea
that the so-called progressive societies are progressive because they
had won in the conflict for survival, and through this there was an
element of the new world as a world of competition and conflict, where
those who didn’t succeed might in fact perish. They were very
preoccupied with the examples of the American-Indians and Africans, and
some Chinese were convinced that those two groups, the black and red
races as they called them, were doomed to extinction.
So, this called for a strengthening of China to struggle in this new
world, but the counter-part to this was a dissatisfaction with this
world view based on conflict. And, the discovery of Kropotkin under
these circumstances – with his argument that it was not conflict and
competition but rather mutual aid that served human progress – served as
a significant antidote to this and also resonated with the utopian
strain to which I referred earlier.
Kropotkin and Reclus were very important to Chinese anarchists and also
quite Eurocentric thinkers, at least in their conception of world
history. Did the Chinese anarchists take issue with this or attempt to
develop alternatives?
I don’t think so. It was really not of much concern to the Paris
anarchists. And the form in which Kropotkin and Reclus reached the Tokyo
people did not really suggest a Eurocentric interpretation of Asia or
China.
Although we are presently very sensitive to questions of Eurocentricism,
the Chinese anarchists in Paris were much more down on Chinese
traditions than anybody in Europe at the time. These are people who were
calling for a revolution against Confucius. So, if they learned any of
this in Europe, they were much more enthusiastic about the repudiation
of the Chinese past for its backwardness than Europeans themselves.
In the case of Liu Shipei, who had very high opinions of Chinese past, I
think it was somewhat different. There the influence of Tolstoy may have
been quite important. Liu Shipei’s objection was not so much to Europe
as to a new idea of politics and the idea of economic developmentalism
that came with Europeans.
The anarchists took a strong stand against the anti-Manchu racism
implicit in the Revolutionary Alliance’s arguments against the Manchu
government. Was there an attempt to develop an anarchist theory of
ethnicity?
I’m not aware of any such attempt. I think they took a stand against
anti-Manchu racism because they thought it was a distraction from the
whole issue of politics. In other words, it was not the Manchus that
were the problem, but the centralized political state system and, to the
extent that racism was raised as an issue, it distracted from this more
fundamental problem of the state.
Feminism and anarchism have had a difficult and complicated relationship
in Europe and America, yet feminism was apparently integral to Chinese
anarchism and not even a contentious issue within the anarchist
movement. Is there a reason why feminism was so easily integrated into
the anarchist movement in China?
I’m going to make a distinction between a concern for women and feminism
in answering this question. The description of the Chinese anarchists,
including people like He Zhen, as feminists may be somewhat misleading:
it fits in with current fashions, but I think the concern was more with
the oppression of women and what could be done about it than with a
specifically feminist agenda.
The anarchist involvement in the question of women, when we rephrase the
problem in that manner, followed almost automatically from their concern
with the family as an oppressive institution. They were concerned with
that throughout, and I think this brought them to the question of women,
which was also a diffuse concern in Chinese society around 1920.
You write that you wanted to facilitate the emergence or re-emergence of
a more democratic socialism by recalling and examining the history of
Chinese anarchism. Did you also intend to assist in the revitalization
or reemergence of anarchism?
When I began working on Chinese anarchism I sensed that there was a
renewal of interest in anarchism, in a very broad sense, and I hoped to
write this book as a contribution to that. And, by the 1980′s the
failure of the promise of the Chinese revolution was becoming more and
more evident, and I found that anarchism provided an interesting
critical perspective on what had gone wrong. Also, to the extent that
anarchism is laden with such valuable insights, obviously it is
important to revive it and bring it to the forefront of discussions.
You are a unambiguously radical scholar of Chinese revolutionary
movements and a full professor at a capitalist university in America,
the center of world imperialism. How could you be employed in such a
setting? Have you been pressured to de-radicalize or depoliticize your
work? If not, what does this reveal about the relationship between the
university and radical social criticism?
Contradictions (laughs) … No, I’ve never been pressured to deradicalize
or depoliticize my work. If there’s pressure it’s indirect; you know,
sometimes people say “what do you do?” and I’d say “I’m writing a book
on Chinese anarchism” and all they can say is “oh”. There’s a sense that
you are doing something marginal and playing games. That kind of
pressure doesn’t bother me.
I think I’ve been lucky. You know, I’ve had friends who have suffered
for being radicals. There have been hints of slight discrimination with
regard to salaries and things like that, but I do not know whether to
attribute that to the fact that I am a radical scholar or because I’m of
third world origin. There may be a number of explanations here.
We forget sometimes that elite uni-versities really need their radicals.
Elite universities, committed to giving their students the broadest
education possible and making them function in the world, cannot afford
to produce narrow ignoramuses who have never heard of Marxism or
anarchism. This may be why there’s probably more tolerance for radicals
in the elite universities than in smaller places. That’s what I had in
mind when I jokingly said “contradictions.”
In some ways, this is the strength of the American education system, in
comparison, let’s say, to the Chinese education system where if
something was politically un-desirable it was kept out, with the
consequence that you end up with a bunch of people who didn’t know
anything about the world other than what they’ve been fed by way of
ideology. We are much more subtle with our controls and, under current
circumstances, so long as you are not an activist, there are not serious
reprisals.
We have a very intelligent power structure here. For example, about ten
years ago somebody came to see me from the CIA. They were looking for
students to recruit and were particularly interested in my students,
because they figured they would know about Marxism, anarchism, etc., and
if you want intelligent analysts you need well informed people who know
about these issues. I think that’s where the power establishment here
differs, say, from the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet
Union, where undesirable knowledge will simply be cast aside rather than
incorporated into an understanding of the world.
You just published a book on post-colonialism, The Postcolonial Aura .
How does this work relate to your studies on Chinese anarchism? Also,
please explain your discussion of postcolonialism as post-revolutionary.
In The Postcolonial Aura I tried to raise the question of third world
intellectuals. There has been a preoccupation recently with
Eurocentricism and the Euro-American oppression of other peoples which
sort of sweeps aside the importance of capitalism in shaping the world
and how many of those rejected Euro-American values are actually
transmitted to the rest of the world through capitalism. It seemed to
me, to the extent that capitalism has globalized, it has globalized
through the complicity of third world intellectuals, professionals,
states, whatever, and, therefore, a critique of power and authority in
our day cannot be satisfied with a critique of Eurocentricism or
Euro-American domination of the world, but rather must include a
criticism of third world intellectuals, professionals, states, power
structures, etc.. That’s what I seek to do in this work.
As for the post-revolutionary aspect, this grew out of a historical
curiosity about the meaning of postcolonialism: we have been
post-colonials for some time now, why should postcolonialism gain such
currency in the late 1980′s? After all, even when we had the radical
movements of the 1960′s, most third world societies were already
post-colonial or clearly becoming postcolonial, and yet there was a
sustainable radicalism in those years, unlike the 1980′s or 1990′s. The
question became: What’s the difference? What’s happening here? Why are
we talking about postcolonialism, all of a sudden, instead of
colonialism, domination, and capitalism, etc?
The tendencies that have gained the greatest popularity, in the United
States especially, are those which tend towards an obsession with
ethnicity, inter-ethnic relations, identity politics, etc., tendencies
that question and even deny the possibility of collective identities. To
me there is no meaningful political activity, especially revolutionary
activity, without the sense of a collective identity. It is this
undermining of notions of collective identity, combined with the
circumstances I referred to earlier, that led me to assert that what we
are dealing with was really a post-revolutionary, not just postcolonial,
orientation.
How do you see your work developing in the future?
Well, I think any radical has enough reason to be depressed these days:
there doesn’t seem to be anything happening and radicalism has sort of
been highjacked by conservatives and liberals, and rendered into
identity politics.
On the other hand, some of the recent work I and others have done
indicates that there is a great deal of resistance and protest going on
which is not visible in the old ways because it isn’t happening in major
labor unions or big, visible communist parties, etc.. There are people
fighting for their livelihoods, trying to create new social forms from
the bottom up. Some of it is dangerous, some can be right wing, but much
of this has to do with people’s efforts at survival under what’s
happening with contemporary capitalism. And there is a proliferation of
these movements: women’s movements, ecological movements, social justice
movements. They are happening all over and yet contemporary radicals,
such as they are, are unwilling to see them.
These are not movements that you would associate with conventional left
(read: Marxist) politics. They are movements from the bottom up. I’m not
going to call them anarchist – some are feminist, some are ecological –
but if there were anarchist movements going on, they would be some-thing
like that. I think it is important to draw attention to these movements
and theorize them as much as possible. This is what I’m working through:
how to really conceptualize radical movements from the bottom up.
Arif Dirlik intended to be a nuclear physicist. Born in Mersin, Turkey
in 1940 (or 1941, if you ask his mother) he received his undergraduate
degree in engineering and came to America to study science at the
University of Rochester.
Shortly after arriving at Rochester, Dirlik decided to abandon the
sciences entirely and apply himself to history. He was welcomed into the
field by a group of intellectual historians there, who expressed no
surprise that he would make such a transition.
It was here that his interest in Chinese history developed, and he
completed his dissertation on the origins of Marxist historiography in
China. This work was the beginning of a larger investigation into
Chinese political thought, particularly the origins of the idea of
social revolution in Chinese radical movements. It was also the
springboard for his engagement with the Chinese anarchists, which he
began to vigorously research in the early 1980’s.
In addition to writing numerous books and articles, Dirlik has taught at
Duke University since joining their History department in 1971. He is
also the father of two sons, one of whom is a graduate student in film
and, the other, an aspiring rock musician.
When I asked Dirlik to identify the main influences on his work, he
paused for a moment and then cited Marx, Mao, and Dostoevsky. He did not
mention an engineer or a physicist.
Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991.
Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the
National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932 (with Ming Chan).
Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.
After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press, 1994.
Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China,
1919–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
The Origins of Chinese Communism. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.
Chinese Postmodernism (Editor with Xudong Zhang). Durham: Duke
University Press, forthcoming.
Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought (Editor with Paul Healy
and Nick Knight). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997.
Asia/Pacific As Space of Cultural Production (Editor with Rob Wilson).
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.
What Is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea
(Editor). Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.