John Rapp's new book is structured around three central claims: that the core principle of anarchism is opposition to the existence of the state, that this anarchist ideological orientation can be found (though often without the label) in many non-Western societies, and that certain key moments in Chinese history provide relevant examples of this orientation in radical Daoist philosophy and literature and in various radical dissident “Marxist” texts from the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Rapp also suggests to Chinese activists that the time is now ripe for similar anarchist critiques of an increasingly vulnerable and unsteady Chinese state (p. 218).
Rapp's brief “prelude” introduces readers to his main thesis, his definition of anarchism, major stated or potential objections by China scholars and proponents of anarchism, and his own basic responses to such critiques. The rest of the book elaborates on each of these, before concluding with a cursory discussion of the twentieth-century Chinese anarchist movement.
Rapp first expands on philosophical Daoism as expressed in the classical Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) and the Zhuangzi of the fourth and third centuries BCE (the Warring States period). He presents, as well, key writers in the Daoist revival centuries later in the Wei-Jin period who further elaborated upon the earlier implied anarchist orientations. Rapp focuses on Ruan Ji (210–63 CE), Bao Jingyan (ca. 300 CE), the Liezi and its Yang Zhu chapter, and the “Peach Blossom Spring” by Tao Quan (326–97 CE), all of which expressed contempt for statism and imagined the possibility of an egalitarian, harmonious society.
After presenting these central examples of the radical Daoist tradition, Rapp's first two chapters explore in greater detail their more utopian aspects, along with the anti-utopian and dystopian ideas cited by critics of his “anarchist” interpretation. He also examines a challenge to his position based on the 1993 discovery of a version of the Daodejing (the Guodian manuscripts) that predates the accepted classic. But Rapp uses these several forms of challenge to merely deepen and reinforce his views. His final chapter on radical Daoism presents “the first (surviving) piece of writing in 500 years to revive [its] anarchist side” (p. 89), a text by Wu Nengzi from the late ninth century CE.
In a transitional chapter on the influential early twentieth-century movement, a topic others explain more fully elsewhere, Rapp states that most modern Chinese anarchists saw a certain “anarchist impulse” in the Daoist classics, but dismissed this as pre-scientific philosophical escapism and broadly irrelevant for revolutionary activism.
Leaders of the new Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s, as well, saw the Daoist tradition as inherently conservative and escapist. In their view, the rival anarchist movement was incapable of either organizing and defending a successful revolution or moving China towards a modern economy. In turn, well-publicized critiques of Bolshevik dictatorship by influential international anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, helped to fuel continuing strong responses by Chinese anarchists throughout the 1920s.
Rapp next turns to a lengthy examination of the complex interplay of similarly competing critiques after the Communist victory, but especially those during the 1960s–70s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath in the 1980s. Periodic Communist attacks on “anarchists,” he says, were aimed opportunistically at rival clans within the Party alleged to follow an “anarchist line.” These attacks were answered by public political writings that were indeed essentially anarchist in orientation, though framed in Marxist language, Rapp argues, for self-protection. The strongest of these “neo-anarchist” voices was the Shengwulian group that authored the essay “Whither China?” in the 1960s.
Most of the book concerns intellectual debates, not grassroots struggles, so it is fitting that Rapp gives ample voice to his critics. Sometimes there are competing translations and interpretations of certain crucial passages in key classical Daoist texts. (The book includes forty-one pages of original translated texts.) Words such as dao (a free state of being), pu (original simplicity), ziran (natural or spontaneous), and wu-wei (non-action) are central to Rapp's position on ancient and later Daoist anarchism, so he gives considerable space to their contextual exegesis. The arguments offered for his choices are occasionally speculative, and critics of his position are sometimes accused of self-interested bias. Certain of his own interpretations might be subject to a similar charge when they infer, for example, that disputed passages reveal a truly anarchist orientation, even if it was veiled to protect writers from vengeful rulers centuries ago or in the Maoist and post-Maoist eras.
As an introduction for non-China specialists to the anarchic nature of both radical Daoism and the most radical critiques of contemporary Chinese communism, Rapp's book is especially valuable. As mentioned above, what is also at stake here more broadly is whether the social imaginary in widely different historical and regional contexts can propose (and sometimes actualize) well-functioning harmonious societies without a state, instead of merely offering negative critiques of existing states and statism itself. Here again, Rapp's new volume contributes helpfully to a growing body of studies on this issue. “Neo-anarchism” is a slippery term, but the questions behind it are clearly worthy of further investigation.
