Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition by Elizabeth J. Perry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition by Elizabeth J. Perry Judd C. Kinzley (bio) Elizabeth J. Perry. Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. xvi, 392 pp. Paperback $34.95, isbn 978-0-520-27190-6. To understand the successes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the twentieth century, Elizabeth Perry suggests in her most recent book Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition that one need look no further than the coal mines at Anyuan. In these rugged highlands along the Jiangxi–Hunan border, Perry argues that the party forged a “supple” political culture that not only facilitated its revolutionary success but has also allowed for the party’s endurance in the face of the rapidly shifting ideological and economic terrain of modern China. There is no shortage of work evaluating the CCP’s long march toward victory in 1949. Scholars have dug deeply into party tactics, factional politics, [End Page 356] demographics, fiscal policy, and institutional development, among other subjects. In her work, Perry evaluates the formation of the party’s political culture, offering a neo-culturalist approach to understanding the successes of the Chinese revolution. Central to the process of mobilizing miners at Anyuan in the 1920s and indeed attracting support over the long term, Perry argues, was the “role of cultural positioning or the strategic deployment of a range of symbolic resources (religion, ritual, rhetoric, dress, drama, art and so on)” (p. 4). Throughout the early 1920s, party leaders drew upon combinations of Confucian and nationalistic rhetoric in their interaction with elites and upon the rituals and organization of secret societies and popular religion in dealing with workers. Exerting a carefully calibrated combination of cultural forms, party leaders such as Li Lisan, Liu Shaoqi, and Mao Zedong were able to insert themselves into extant systems of power without alienating workers or elites with a ham-handed reliance on Marxist terminology and concepts. The skillful use of familiar rhetoric, organizations, and institutional networks by the CCP allowed for the widespread recruitment of new party members and the spread of leftist ideals among workers laboring in the coal mines. But in Perry’s analysis, CCP efforts at Anyuan were far more than a testing ground for party policies and tactics. Rather, their efforts spread revolutionary ideals deep into the peasantry of central China. Perry compellingly argues that the crackdown on party organizations at Anyuan after the Nationalist Party’s purging of the CCP in 1927 served to spread the ideals of revolution far into the surrounding countryside, as newly politicized laborers were forced to return to their villages. It was this spread that led to a simmering tension in the rural areas of central China that year, a tension that Mao recorded in his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” and ultimately led to the creation of a novel revolutionary strategy focused not on the organization of the proletariat but on China’s vast peasantry. Perry’s placement of the seeds of Chinese revolution among workers rather than peasants stands in stark contrast to the party’s historical orthodoxy. According to the party’s historical line, the efforts by party leaders like Li Lisan to organize urban factory workers, miners, and the Chinese proletariat writ large throughout the 1920s and the first part of the 1930s were part of a failed strategy endorsed only by a faction of the party dangerously divorced from the realities of China. Far from being eggheads with their noses too deep in the works of Marx and Lenin to truly understand China’s revolutionary potential, Perry’s reexamination finds Li Lisan in particular to be a dynamic figure whose elocution, passion, and deft political touch in organizing the workers at Anyuan was the spark that lit the “prairie fire” of the Chinese revolution (p. 191). Her embrace of Li’s legacy and the tracing of the roots of the revolution to mines and laborers serves not as a simplistic rejection of the party’s orthodox narrative but rather as a reminder of George Lefebvre’s lesson drawn from the French experience—that revolution is [End Page 357] never singular but consists instead...