Anarchist Writers

I recently read Jonathan Fenby’s biography of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek. I intended to write a review but got interrupted. Returning to what I had written I've decided to salvage it as a blog post on how Chiang Kai-Shek came to power through his alliance with the Chinese communist party and in particular the events of the Northern Expedition and the crushing of the workers movement in Shanghai in 1927. Fenby's book is well worth reading, it aims to provide a post cold war account of the man who came to power on the back of the fragmentation of Chinese republicanism. This was in a manner similar to what happened in the period of retreat of republican revolutions elsewhere and at other times in history.

Outside of a few events including the Long March and the Shanghai commune the development of the Chinese revolution is relatively unknown on the western left in comparison with the revolutions in Russia in 1917, Spain in 1936 or even the Paris spring of 1968. Those sections of that left influenced by or proclaiming themselves to be Maoist haven't helped that situation much. Their histories have tended towards simple tales focusing on the role of one man and collapsed a 100-year history of revolution into the events important to him. [Italian translation]

This article is a preliminary sketch of the Chinese revolutions from an anarchist perspective. It does not set out to be a history of Chinese anarchism although it draws on some of the histories of that movement which for twenty key years dominated the formation of the left in China. A real history of that movement in English will depend not only on the translation of vast quantities of texts from the early twentieth century but also on detailed local research to uncover a history that has both been deliberately buried and forgotten.

A 60 minute recording of a talk and discussion on the Chinese revolution and the Chinese anarchist movement. It's available here as google video, mp4 and mp3 formats, the first two are preferred as the viewer will then be able to see the images referenced during the talk. 

Xinhua has reported the death of the Chinese anarchist Ba Jin after a six year battle with cancer. Ba Jin was born Li Yaotang on 1904, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province but changed his name to taking Ba Jin which combines the names of two Russian anarchists. The first syllable in Chinese is that of the surname of Mikhail Bakunin and the last syllable that of Kropotkin. He translated Kropotkin's work into Chinese.