Abstract
Anyuan in Jiangxi Province, close to the border with Hunan, was a major centre of coal mining from the late 19th to the first decades of the 20th century. After the brutal suppression of the communist labour movement in September 1925, mining never really recovered in economic terms and coal deposits are now nearly depleted. Anyuan is important because it is one of the first locations where the early Chinese communist movement successfully mobilized the grass roots, and because of its central place in the ever-changing interpretations of the movement’s history in the political battles and propaganda efforts that followed the communist victory in 1949.
Elizabeth Perry describes with great sensitivity to historical detail how the incipient communist movement discovered Anyuan’s revolutionary potential in 1921. At this time the Chinese Communist Party had just been founded and was still primarily oriented towards the mobilization of the proletariat, in line with orthodox Marxist-Leninist thinking. Mao Zedong carried out exploratory visits in late 1921 and then sent Li Lisan to start a local school, which was to serve as the basis for communist agitation. Li was soon joined by Liu Shaoqi, who was already known for his disciplined work style. Together they played a crucial role in organizing a strike in September 1922. While on strike they took care not to damage the basic structure of the mining operation, and conducted careful negotiations with a variety of local stakeholders, including elites and gangs. As a result, the strike was highly successful in improving the lot of the local miners. Communist activities among workers were quickly suppressed elsewhere in the country, but Anyuan was spared thanks to its isolated location. Li was then replaced by Liu, and Anyuan, known as Little Moscow, became the paramount centre of the communist labour movement. Following the transfer of Liu in April 1925, the local organization soon overreached itself in its ambitions, and the mine management was set on repressing the movement by any means. A bloody repression followed, bringing the local experiment to an end, and communist activities gradually took a much more violent road towards peasant-centred revolution.
And yet, the significance of Anyuan goes far beyond the events of the early 1920s. First of all, many of the workers who had been recruited by the local communist movement joined the struggle elsewhere, and the presence of Anyuan workers was still significant after 1949. Next, lessons were learned on the importance of translating communist aims and practices into local cultural forms and language. According to Perry’s analysis, this ability to translate has been crucial to making the communist revolution more palatable and more local to a Chinese audience than, for instance, similar revolutions in the Soviet Union or the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Third, after 1949 the Anyuan episode became an essential part of the communist propaganda effort. In the course of these efforts, ‘true events’ were regularly adapted to reflect the changing fortunes of the leading figures. The role of Li, one of the losers in the internal power struggles, was increasingly downplayed despite his considerable popularity among local people in Anyuan. Conversely, during the 1950s and early 1960s Liu’s role in Anyuan was given much publicity, which contributed substantially to his growing personality cult, in direct competition with Mao Zedong. When Liu fell from power during the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s role in Anyuan was correspondingly made more prominent. After the Cultural Revolution a much more nuanced picture has emerged, as a result of which the usefulness of Anyuan to the present leadership has also decreased considerably.
Elizabeth Perry has written a powerful and highly readable narrative, with the crucial aid of recent revisionist historiography from China itself. By unravelling the actual events in Anyuan in the early 1920s, Perry is able to show us just how much interpretations were adapted to the ambitions of contenders for political power in the post-1949 period. She points out that the propaganda efforts of the 1950s and 1960s had been so successful that local workers came to believe in their wonderful life under communist rule, even though this picture did not match reality at all. Her description of the disappointment of Anyuan workers with the fate of the communist revolution after the economic and political reforms from 1978 onwards reminds us of the fact that the rise of the PRC has also seen different kinds of losers, both economically and ideologically. We find a similar disappointment among the disenfranchised left behind after the dismantling of the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states.