Daoism and Anarchism

Front matter

CONTEMPORARY ANARCHIST STUDIES

Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China

John A. Rapp

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

PART 1: DAOISM AND ANARCHISM 17 1 Daoism and anarchism reconsidered 19 2 Utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian ideas in philosophical Daoism 51 3 Daoism as utopian or accommodationist: The Guodian challenge to Daoist anarchism 71 4 Daoism as anarchism or nihilism: The

Buddhist-influenced thought of Wu Nengzi 839

Part 2: Maoism And Anarchism 123

6 Maoism and anarchism: An analysis of Mao Zedong’s response to the anarchist critique of Marxism 125

7 Denunciations of anarchism in the PRC 159 viii CONTENTS

8 Extra-Party neo-anarchist critiques of the state in the PRC 175 9 Inner Party neo-anarchist critiques of the Leninist Party-state 193

POSTLUDE 213

The continuing relevance of Daoist anarchism 215

APPENDICES 219 Works of Daoist Anarchism 221 1 Zhuangzi, Chapter 9, “Horses’ Hoofs” 221 2 Ruan Ji, “The Biography of Master Great Man” (excerpt) 223 3 Bao Jingyan 227 4 Tao Qian, “Peach Blossom Spring” 229

5 Wunengzi 231

Bibliography 263 Index 283

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since this book is the product of many years of research and writing, I have many people to thank for their help and encouragement. To the usual disclaimer that the author alone is responsible for any mistakes and shortcomings, I must add a special emphasis that due to the controversial nature of much of this book, none of the people thanked below necessarily agrees with any of the opinions or analysis expressed herein.

Thanks and appreciation go first to this author’s many teachers in subjects directly related to this book, including, at Indiana University, Judith Berling for her seminar on Daoism and for serving as advisor on my MA thesis, and the late Jerome Mintz and Alan Ritter for their seminar on anarchism. At the University of Wisconsin, I am very grateful to my two main mentors, Crawford Young as whose teaching assistant I was introduced to the literature on state autonomy, and especially Ed Friedman, who continues to impart to me much wisdom about Chinese politics and give generous and patient advice and criticism. I also owe a debt of gratitude to John Clark of Loyola University for his encouragement and support over the years.

A second round of thanks go to the students, faculty, staff, and alumni of Beloit College, first for their tolerance and inspiration in allowing me to teach classes on China, Daoism, and anarchism over the years and for sabbatical grants in 1999-2000 and 2006 and other research support, including a Sanger summer research grant in 2008 that allowed for the translation by Catrina Siu of the entire Wunengzi, work-study monies that allowed for translation assistance from Lauren Jones, and a grant from the Dean’s office to help defray costs of rights fees and other translation assistance. My faculty colleague Daniel Youd played an essential role in many of the translation projects related to this book. I owe a great debt also to Cindy Cooley and the entire staff of the Beloit College library who worked many hours locating materials for me through interlibrary loans.

I am also grateful to the Pacific Cultural Foundation of Taiwan for a research grant in 2000 that allowed me to carry out the research that led to the essays used as the basis for Chapters 2 and 6.

Another large group of people to thank includes all the professional colleagues over the years who allowed me to participate in their panels and publish essays in their edited books and journal volumes, including Joseph Cheng for permission to use material from my article in the special x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS issue of the Journal of Comparative Asian Development on Utopianism in Chinese Political Culture that was the basis for Chapter 2, Shiping Hua, the guest editor of that issue who gave me the opportunity to contribute to that volume and also fine editorial advice, and the past and current editors of Anarchist Studies, Sharif Gemie and Ruth Kinna, who also gave fine editorial suggestions and permission along with that of Lawrence & Wishart publishers to adapt material for the prelude and Chapters 1 and 6 of this book from articles published first in that journal. Ruth, along with Laurence Davis, very kindly included me in a panel on Utopianism and Anarchism at a conference of the Utopian Studies Society of Europe in Tarragona, Spain, in 2006, where I presented a paper that became the basis of material from my chapter in their book, Anarchism and Utopianism, which they and the publishers at Manchester University Press kindly gave me permission to adapt for use in Chapter 3. Besides their generous editorial suggestions, Ruth and Laurence gave much help and encouragement over the years and included me in other conferences related to the Anarchist Studies Network, whose members have given me excellent feedback and criticism as well. I am grateful to Alexandre Christoyannopoulos for taking the lead in planning a panel on anarchism and religion at the first conference of the Anarchist Studies Network of the British Political Studies Association in Loughborough, England, in 2008 and for including my essay on the Wunengzi and giving fine editorial assistance in the book he edited, Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives, whose publisher Cambridge Scholars Publishing kindly granted permission to adapt that essay as the basis for Chapter 4 of this book.

I am also grateful to Susan McEachern and colleagues at Rowman & Littlefield for permission to adapt for use in Chapter 6 material from the book Autocracy and China’s Rebel Founding Emperors that I cowrote with Anita Andrew. Chapter 9 includes material reprinted and adapted from John Rapp, “Editor’s Introduction,” Chinese Law and Government, 22(2) (Spring 1989), used by permission of M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Thanks go to Van Young for his translation assistance on Chinese articles on the Asiatic Mode of production debate, many of which are referred to in Chapter 9. I am indebted to Bruce Gilley and Joseph Wong, the organizers of “Backward Toward Revolution: A Festschrift to Celebrate the scholarship of Professor Edward Friedman” at the University of Toronto, Munk Centre for International Studies in 2009 for including me in the conference and allowing me to present a paper that became the basis for Chapter 7. Alex Prichard and Ruth Kinna very generously allowed me to participate in the Anarchism stream of Manchester Workshops in Political Theory in 2010 where I presented a paper that became the basis for Chapters 8 and 9. Thanks also to Alex, Laurence Davis, and the other members of the advisory and editorial boards of the Contemporary Anarchist Studies series of Continuum Press and to reviewers of the original proposal and manuscript of this book as well as the

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi editors at Continuum, especially Marie-Claire Antoine, for their generous criticism and advice. I am very grateful for Uri Gordon’s patient help and consultation on the cover art and especially to my student, (Cleo) Zhang Kun for her original calligraphy that appears on the cover of this book. I would also like to express my profound thanks to Marjorie Schafer for her help in producing the index to this book and for copy editing suggestions.

Above all I am grateful to my wife, the China historian Anita Andrew, for her constant advice, criticism, and encouragement to write this book, and to our daughters Amy Chunyi and Laura Mingyi Rapp for their patience, understanding, and inspiration.

Main Thesis of this Book

This book examines the key moments in Chinese history when different people used a basic anarchist theory to criticize the inevitable tendency of all states to rule for themselves, from radical Daoists! in pre-imperial and imperial China to members of the twentieth-century Chinese anarchist movement influenced by the West, to what we will label “neo-anarchist” dissidents in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Despite China’s long history of authoritarian rule and state autonomy from society, as well as a long line of political thinkers who in one way or another justify centralized state power, China also has a long history of anti-statist thought. This book does not attempt the impossible task of examining all Chinese dissident thought but only those people in ancient and modern times who utilized an underlying anarchist theory of the state.

Since this book is primarily aimed at helping non-China specialists to see anarchism as not just a Euro-American concept, and in order to avoid the potential problem of this author appealing from authority as a sinologist, this book will cite Chinese sources in translation wherever possible and even provide original translations in the appendices of key texts that have never before been fully translated into English. Nevertheless, this work will pay attention to scholarly debates among ancient and modern China specialists and will not hesitate to join these debates whenever it proves necessary to the book’s main thesis.

The thesis is that what most distinguishes anarchism from other political ideologies is the idea that the state rules for itself whenever it can, not for individuals, interest groups, socioeconomic classes, or society as a whole. Furthermore, for anarchists, the very nature of the state, its hegemony on the legitimate use of coercion, to slightly modify Max Weber’s definition, not to mention its monopoly on the ability to define threats to itself as threats to society, only reinforces its inherent advantages in being able to gain autonomy from its subjects.” The basic anarchist thesis, this book argues, is not limited in time or by region. Anarchist thought can and has occurred many times and in many places in history and not just among those thinkers and activists in Europe from the early to mid-nineteenth century who consciously took on the anarchist label and who started a movement that then spread throughout the world, including to China, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the adherents of that movement were for the most part explicitly socialist or communist in orientation and favored revolutionary methods to implement their ideals, such ideas and commitments, however important and necessary they may have been, do not in themselves distinguish anarchists from other socialist revolutionaries. Instead, this book argues, it is their critique of states, whether capitalist or socialist, as, in the end, ruling for themselves that gave the anarchist movement its greatest power and coherence.

In China anarchist thought arose among what has been traditionally labeled the Daoist school of philosophy (though we will examine later in this chapter those who question the existence of such a coherent school) which, as we will see in Part 1 of this book, began during the pre-imperial era nearly 2,500 years ago and revived in the third century CE. Modern anarchist thought arose most consciously among Chinese thinkers and activists in the early twentieth century, first among Chinese students studying in Tokyo and Paris but after the 1911 revolution among many trade union activists and intellectuals in China itself. Though in the interlude chapter we will briefly examine the thought of some members of that self-conscious Chinese anarchist movement, we will look at that movement primarily for the rare times when it consciously harked back to radical Daoist political theory and also for the key moment when it most consciously used the basic anarchist theory of the state ruling for itself, namely, during the anarchists’ debates with early Chinese Marxist-Leninist thinkers. In Part 2 of this book we will examine the question of the influence of anarchism on the thought of Mao Zedong as well as denunications of anarchism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and then examine what we will label neo-anarchist critiques of Marxism-Leninism in the PRC from the Mao to Deng and contemporary eras in order to see that the deadly contest over the question of state autonomy is still very much alive in modern and contemporary China.

Definition and Typology of Anarchism

Before proceeding with the case for the anarchism of premodern and contemporary Chinese thinkers, we first need to distinguish between the various types of anarchism and to develop a working model of the term as well as to suggest the main points of the argument in later chapters. Anarchism as a term of course comes from the Greek an-archos, meaning “without a ruler,” and should refer to any doctrine that contends that any type of rule is unnecessary, harmful, and/or even counterproductive or evil. As such, this author would contend that anarchism is a generic label for all doctrines opposed to rule and should not be limited to the Western anarchist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Wei-Jin Daoist term wujun literally means “without a prince” (see Chapter 1), the Chinese characters for which appear on the cover of this book, and is nearly identical in meaning to the Greek an-archos and thus clearly fits within this broad definition of anarchism. In short, anarchism can and has appeared in many periods and places throughout history and thus this author would disagree with those who would limit the concept to a modern context. Indeed, the first part of this book argues that the Daoist anarchists’ focus on the state ruling for itself, while they noted at the same time that other political ideologies only disguise this fact, may have much to teach Western anarchists about internal consistency and may aid in a revival of anarchist themes in the contemporary world.

Within this all-inclusive generic definition there are of course many different types and strands of anarchism, all of which can be divided among three intersecting poles. First, following the historian of Western anarchism George Woodcock, anarchism may be divided into the “idea” and the “movement,”? that is between philosophical anarchism on the one hand and on the other the concept of anarchism as a “developed, articulate, and clearly identifiable trend . . ..” which Woodcock argues appeared only in “the modern [Western] era of conscious social and political revolutions.”* In this distinction, all “social or political” anarchists would also be philosophical anarchists, though of course analysts never fail to point out contradictions of particular anarchists on this score as, for example, between Bakunin’s expressed anti-statism and the perhaps inherent authoritarianism of his professed revolutionary methods. On the other hand, we could also say that not all philosophical anarchists could be labeled political or social anarchists, that is, to the extent that such philosophical anarchists declined to join much less lead movements aimed at overthrowing particular states even if they expressed doubts about the basis for all political authority. It is this distinction, this author believes, that is at the root of many doubts over the supposed anarchist nature of Daoism and probable criticism of the label of “neo-anarchist” for contemporary Chinese critics of Leninism. This distinction may have started to make less sense in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century era of “people power” than in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when many activists and intellectuals saw violence as the only way to affect true revolution. Certainly, just because Daoists may not have led overtly political movements to overthrow existing states does not mean that Daoism amounts to a “diluted” form of anarchism as Alex Feldt and others contend;> instead, as will be argued throughout Part 1 of this book, to the extent that they refused to join movements that themselves might found oppressive states, Daoists may be more consistent anarchists. This point leads us to the second, intersecting distinction among anarchists.

Many students of anarchism draw a distinction on the one hand between those anarchists willing to use and even embrace violent methods, the archetype again being Bakunin, and on the other those such as Tolstoy who insist on a unity of means and ends, and thus who would stress methods of noncooperation and passive resistance (what Tolstoy, following the Christian gospel(s), called “non-resistance”) to all coercive authority.° Some pacifist anarchists went beyond pure philosophical anarchism to the extent that they founded movements of their own that later analysts label as social or political. In this case, Daoists of the Warring States and Wei-Jin periods should definitely be labeled pacifists, but whether or not they led conscious social or political movements we will examine later in this chapter and in the following chapter.

In the third main distinction, many scholars commonly differentiate between “individualist” anarchists including Stirner and the modern anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard who reject all political authority but accept and assume the prior existence of private property (whether or not they are willing to use violence and/or hire private armies), and “collectivist” anarchists including everyone from socialist to communist anarchists who deny the existence or right of private property prior to the state. The collectivist view is summed up in the famous phrase of Proudhon that “property is theft.”” This distinction, problematic enough when applied to Western thinkers such as William Godwin and even Proudhon (who accepted the need for private “possessions” such as tools, if not landed property) becomes even more difficult when dealing with the ancient and medieval Daoists, as we will see in the next chapter. Nevertheless, one can distinguish, as we will see, between the more individualist or “selfish” strands of thought as in the “Yang Zhu” chapter of the Liezi (a book probably written ca. 300 CE during the Daoist revival, though this chapter may have been based on the surviving ideas of the legendary proto-Daoist hermit of the earlier, classical Daoist period) and the possibly more communitarian strands of other Wei-Jin anarchists who claimed to base their thought more directly on the received versions of the classic texts known as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. There is certainly no justification for Feldt’s assumption that all anarchists must have a view of society as made up of a collection of atomized individuals and that the only job of anarchists is to protect the autonomy of the individual from the force of the state.’ Instead, this author would argue, the main similarity in all anarchists is the rejection of the conflation of state and society, even if various kinds of anarchists have different views of the nature of society.

As will be argued in Chapter 1, the Daoism of certain figures of the Wei- Jin period was indeed thoroughly anarchist, at a minimum on a philosophical level and at a maximum as an intended program to delegitimize the centralized bureaucratic rule of the late Han and the less effective but no less brutal rule of the Wei and Jin dynasties. While never advocating or propagating violent opposition to authority, so far as we know, the Wei-Jin Daoists did oppose all authority in general and did attempt to oppose the ideological hegemony of Confucianism, a form of which had become the official ideology of the imperial Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) and almost all successive imperial dynasties, if combined in practice with heavy doses of the Chinese Machiavellian doctrine of Legalism. Thus this book will argue that Wei-Jin anarchism was a doctrine of resistance to the state, albeit almost certainly pacifist and remaining at the intellectual level if no less important as a means to undermine authority. Furthermore, this work will argue that the full-fledged anarchism of the Wei-Jin thinkers was firmly based on classical Daoist texts, which the later Wei-Jin Daoists only highlighted and did not distort. In sum, Part 1 of this book contends that the Wei-Jin figures were only the most open advocates of Daoist anarchism, a movement that lasted at least from the early Han or late Warring State periods, if not before, and extended well into the Tang dynasty (617-907 CE). Daoist anarchism, we will conclude, was a movement that perhaps can still be drawn upon in any contemporary or future challenges to Chinese political authority.

Although there are many different types of anarchists, what they all share in common and what distinguishes them from other dissident thinkers and radical activists is their basic tenet that the state rules for itself whenever and wherever it can. Even those who use the basic anarchist theory of the state, both those who consciously label themselves as anarchists and those who do not, can depart from anarchism in other aspects of their thought as we will see throughout the book; thus different types of anarchists can themselves be criticized for acquiescing in one kind of state power or another. The focus of this book is on the key periods in Chinese history when the basic anarchist theory of the state was expressed most clearly within a Chinese context.

Major Objections to Main Thesis of this Book

While the basic thesis of the book may seem obvious to many readers, in fact this author has found it to be very controversial and has encountered two seemingly quite different types of objections. On the one hand, some scholars and practitioners of Daoism would argue that no clear school of Daoist thought exists and that to focus on those relatively few thinkers who brought out the anarchist themes in the classical Daoist texts risks distorting the essence of Daoism by radicalizing it. On the other hand, scholars of and/ or sympathizers with anarchism worry that universalizing anarchism may ironically de-radicalize it, emptying it of meaning. As we will argue in this chapter, both types of objections are based on shared similar unwillingness or inability of such observers to face up fully to the truly radical aspect of the anarchist theory of the state.

Objections from scholars and proponents of Daoism

The first main objection to this book will come from scholars and proponents of Daoism who would deny that Daoism has any clear coherence as a distinct school of thought. First, some such people, especially those studying Daoism as a religious practice, would argue that the traditional Chinese separation of Daoism into daojia (Daoist school, that is, philosophical Daoism) and daojiao (Daoist teaching, for example, alchemical and religious traditions) is itself only a later concept of the historian Sima Qian (165-110 BCE) of the former Han dynasty who imposed a coherence upon many disparate types of much earlier thinkers and practitioners, a coherence that did not in fact exist or that those individuals were unaware of. Even among the classic philosophers of the Eastern Zhou era (ca. 770-221 BCE), scholars of Daoism would argue, there was often no clear distinction between Daoist and Confucian schools, which again was only a later idea applied to the thought of this era. Many modern scholars argue that both so-called Daoist and Confucian thinkers called for limited governance and for rule by sages virtuous in one way or another, and the idea of opposing schools of Daoists and Confucians (the name even for the latter school given by Westerners with the Chinese term the ru only meaning the school of the scholars) is an exaggeration of later historians. Furthermore, what are often regarded as the classic Daoist texts, the Daodejing, traditionally ascribed to the probably nonexistent personage Lao Zi (old master) and the Zhuangzi were not clearly single author texts, and even the author of the seven inner chapters of the latter text, the historical individual Zhuang Zhou, was perhaps unaware of any coherent text known as the Daodejing that may have been compiled into a single text contemporaneously or slightly after Zhuang Zhou lived. Many scholars of Daoism argue that there are in fact differences between the two texts and it was not until the last years of the later Han (25-220 CE) and the Wei-Jin era (265-420 CE) that scholars who created the “Lao- Zhuang” tradition related the two texts. Many scholars of Daoism would claim further that the “Lao-Zhuang” side of Daoism is itself at best only one tendency within a tradition that developed for over 2,000 years after the classical period and which included many other traditions and aspects including spiritual and physical practices that were far from anarchist. Overall, some scholars of Daoism worry that “radicalizing” Daoism by comparing it to Western anarchism risks losing the overall picture of the real place in Chinese tradition of the holistic concept of life contained within the disparate strands of what is labeled Daoism.”

We will deal more fully below with this basic objection to the main thesis of this book. Before turning to the other main objection from scholars and proponents of anarchism it should just be noted here that the position of this book is that to ignore the clearly expressed anarchist point of view in key

Daoist texts or to minimize or excise from the Daoist tradition those thinkers who express an anarchist point of view itself distorts a key part of Daoist thought. Perhaps a useful heuristic if not identical analogy would be to the idea of a Christian anarchism. Although it is true that the anarchist interpretation of Jesus is very much a minority tradition compared to the over 2,000 years of other interpretations, from purely spiritual to avowedly statist from the apostle Paul to Augustine and beyond, scholars of and sympathizers with Christian anarchism nevertheless claim a firm basis for their interpretation in the words and practices of Jesus and his early followers.!! Likewise those later Daoist thinkers and students of Daoism, including this author, who make an anarchist interpretation of classical Daoist texts even if they are not in the mainstream of Daoist scholarship would claim clear links to some of the oldest texts in the Daoist tradition, as we will see throughout Part 1 of this book.

Objections from scholars and proponents of anarchism

Seemingly opposite to the objections of Daoist scholars, those who study and/or sympathize with anarchism fear that “traditionalizing anarchism” risks de-radicalizing it and that assuming the universality of anarchism runs the risk of making the concept meaningless. For example, if one limits anarchism to its critique of the state, then, some might charge, one would have to include as anarchist even American libertarians and Tea Party activists who claim to hate government, which on the face of it again would seem to empty the term anarchism of all meaning as a truly radical critique given such people’s support for and by corporate and other elite interests.'2 To such students of anarchism and to anarchist sympathizers, anarchism as a concept must involve socialism, revolution, and critiques of all kinds of oppression, including that caused by, among other types of power, family, religion, property, and culture. Many students of anarchism and Communism in China would argue more specifically that ignoring important differences between ancient Daoist writings and modern Chinese anarchism risks denigrating the modern anarchist movement in China.

Preliminary Answer to Both Types of Objections

Both objections ignore the clear times in Chinese history when, whatever one labels them, Chinese thinkers did express a clear anarchist theory of the state, that is, when they did not just call for limited government but criticized states as ruling for themselves and not for the benefit of the people, and when they rejected the possibility of any type of reformed or benevolent government. So the Daoist anarchists, as we will see in the four chapters of Part 1, did not just call for a limited government to rule in a benevolent way but attacked the whole idea of humane rule, both in the chaotic Eastern Zhou and later Wei-Jin periods of competing states. That is, whether or not they called themselves Daoist or whether or not one labels them anarchist, these Chinese thinkers rejected the whole idea of government. While this book by no means argues that all Daoists are anarchists, we will see that there was in China a long tradition of people who did base themselves on ideas in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, texts that, whatever their other different emphases, did try in key chapters that were written as far back as the Warring States period of the Eastern Zhou, if not by the original authors, to undermine the whole idea of rule, as we will see in the next chapter. These Daoist anarchists, as we will call them, also attacked the application of Legalist ideas of rule by power and force and Confucian ideas of benevolent rule as different types of ideological disguises to justify the wealth and power of a few. Furthermore, the Daoist anarchists did indeed include critiques of other kinds of power besides that of the state, including especially patriarchal authority and manipulation of language, but with the basic anarchist point that it is the link to and backing by the state that makes social, family, and linguistic authority oppressive.’ As noted above, to the degree that scholars of Daoism, including Chinese scholars from the Han to the PRC eras and Western scholars from the eighteenth century to the present, ignore this basic critique it is they in fact who serve to tame and deradicalize Daoism. In short, it is they who distort Daoism to the extent that they ignore or minimize this important anarchist part of the Daoist tradition.

Against some scholars of Daoism who might agree that the radical anarchist tradition exists but was a revision of later thinkers, in the first chapter we will trace this radical anarchist streak back to the classic texts of the Warring States era, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. Indeed, in Chapter 3 we will trace this radical tendency even further back to even the oldest surviving version of the former text, the so-called Guodian manuscripts, refuting those scholars who think that earliest known version of the text does not contain anti-Confucian language and is more accommodating to state power. As we will see, beyond its critique of the state this Daoist anarchism did have communal aspects and was similar in many other ways to the thought of different Western anarchists, if without a commitment to violent revolution. Despite their similarity with Western anarchists on many other grounds, we will nevertheless see throughout Part 1 of this book that the radical Daoist argument was most powerful when it kept to the main anarchist theory of the state and weakest and most contradictory when Daoist thinkers were willing to acquiesce in state power, as we will see was especially the case with some people who revived Daoism in the late Han and Wei-Jin eras and after, including especially Wu Nengzi of the Tang dynasty whose thought we will analyze in Chapter 4.