Abstract
In Anyuan, Elizabeth Perry, one of the leading scholars of contemporary Chinese history, tells the story of the Chinese Revolution and the Communist era from the beginnings of the Communist movement to the present—nearly a century—through the history of a single place. Anyuan, a coal mining town in southeastern China, was the site of a great strike in 1922 that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrates as its first major success in mass organizing. Perry’s motivating interest is the relationship between Communist leaders and workers, and particularly how party leaders used “cultural positioning” to mobilize workers behind its evolving agenda. The book is composed of two distinct parts: the first four chapters cover the revolutionary era before 1949, while chapters five through seven cover the post-revolutionary era. Perry’s approach in the two parts is very different.
In the first part, Perry develops a masterful narrative of the CCP’s early organizing drive in Anyuan, which was led by three men who would become top party leaders—Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan. The Communist organizers gained access to the remote mining community through elite connections and their first project was an innocuous-seeming school for workers and their children. Based on a rich variety of sources, in Chapter One, Perry describes how they built a base among the 13,000 mine and railway workers through the school and a “Workers Club,” deftly maneuvering to avoid alarming the mining company, traditional gentry elites, and leaders of the local Red Gang. She provides a particularly fascinating description of the latter, which she argues was the dominant power in Anyuan because it controlled the workforce through affiliated labor contractors; it also ran gambling operations and other criminal enterprises. Perry argues that the Communists’ success required careful and flexible cultural positioning in order to overcome the gap between foreign Marxist ideas and Chinese culture as well as the gap between intellectual party organizers and the poorly educated miners and railroad workers. This chapter also provides a detailed, insightful account of how Communist organizers initially ingratiated themselves with local elites in order to establish a foothold, before mobilizing the masses against them. This pattern would be repeated effectively in very different situations over the following decades.
The 1922 strike not only compelled the mining company to improve wages and working conditions, it allowed the CCP, along with its school and Workers Club, to replace the Red Gang as the main power in Anyuan. In Chapter Two, Perry chronicles how over the next three years the remote mining community became the central recruitment center for the party and an open training ground for Communist organizers, earning the nickname “China’s Little Moscow.” This remarkable situation, however, ended in 1925, when the leader of the mine’s parent company in Shanghai decided to smash violently the Communist organization in Anyuan, expelling most of the workforce; production was devastated and did not fully recover until after 1949.
This blow led Mao and other party leaders to turn to a rural organizing strategy. In the third chapter, Perry describes how Anyuan miners, after returning to their home villages, became the central force organizing the famed Communist-led peasant movement in Hunan and the subsequent Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927, and later helped establish the first Communist base area in the Jinggangshan mountains. The CCP’s turn toward rural-based armed struggle is usually explained as the result of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party turning on its erstwhile Communist allies, with the watershed event being the 1927 massacre of CCP activists and unionists in Shanghai. Moreover, in conventional accounts the Jinggangshan Soviet appears as an endeavor that emerged largely independent of the CCP’s previous efforts to organize workers. Perry’s Anyuan-based account shows the organic link between the old and new strategies, as expelled miners became village organizers. She also dates what she laments as a tragic turn from non-violent organizing to rural warfare to the 1925 suppression of “China’s Little Moscow.”
In the second part, which chronicles developments after the CCP took national power in 1949, the narrative is driven not so much by events in Anyuan, as by how Anyuan’s revolutionary history was refashioned in order to serve the needs of party leaders. Chapter Four, which covers the years before the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, focuses on efforts by Liu Shaoqi to retell Anyuan’s history in order to burnish his revolutionary resumé and his standing as Mao’s heir apparent. Chapter Five, which covers the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–76), focuses on how this history was again reconfigured in order to denigrate Liu and to build Mao’s personality cult. Both versions, Perry points out, largely left out Li Lisan, who was the charismatic leader of the initial organizing efforts, but who was sidelined shortly after the CCP took power because he sought a more independent role for the party-run union. Finally, Chapter Six, which covers the reform era, focuses on how post-Mao leaders have continued to use the Anyuan strike as a symbol of revolutionary legitimacy, even as the party moves farther and farther away from the ideology that inspired the movement.
Although Perry’s detailed analysis of the reframing of Anyuan’s history is fascinating, I was disappointed that she did not continue to pursue her original project—analyzing how the CCP used cultural positioning to mobilize Anyuan workers—into the post-1949 era. The consolidation of Communist power in the mine, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the smaller production campaigns and political movements that punctuated the Mao era all involved cultural positioning to make movement goals meaningful to ordinary workers. Even the market reforms of the post-Mao era, which have not involved mass mobilization, have required cultural positioning to embellish with Chinese characteristics policies largely borrowed from the West. With her considerable skills as an historian and her familiarity with the conditions of industrial workers in the Communist era, if Perry had kept her focus on how the party used culture to mobilize mine workers, she could have produced a truly epic account of the century-long relationship—intense, heroic, and tragic—between the CCP and the workers it set out to champion. As it is, the Anyuan workers tend to recede to the background after 1949. Nevertheless, they remain a part of every chapter and return with poignant power in the final chapter, as workers relate their bitter disappointment with recent policies that have eliminated permanent employment and filled the mine with casual workers recruited by a new generation of labor contractors. As Perry points out, the 1922 strike was animated not only by material demands, but by a quest for dignity, and more than anything else veteran miners today lament their loss of dignity as China has turned to the market.
Anyuan makes a substantial contribution to the historiography of the Chinese Communist Revolution and makes a strong case for understanding the role of “cultural positioning” in political mobilization. Moreover, because Perry is a great story teller, her lively and perceptive account of the Chinese Revolution from the perspective of Anyuan will make a fine text for courses about Chinese history, social movements, and labor conflict.