Red Literati: Communist Educators at Anyuan, 1921-25

Abstract

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 111 RED LITERATI: COMMUNIST EDUCATORS AT ANYUAN, 1921-25 ELIZABETH J. PERRY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Despite an accumulation of excellent scholarship on the Chinese Communist revolution, we are still hard pressed to offer a compelling answer to a question that goes to the heart of explaining the revolution’s success: How did the urbane intellectuals who founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) manage to cultivate a large and loyal following among such a distant stratum of the populace—illiterate and impoverished peasants and workers? Some scholars have pointed to the appeal of nationalism whereas others have emphasized the allure of class struggle as key to the Communists’ mobilizing effort,1 yet in either case it remains unclear just how a cadre of educated, cosmopolitan students and teachers conveyed their message across the enormous cultural gulf that separated them from the downtrodden masses. One might ask a similar question of many revolutions, of course, in light of the leadership role that intellectuals have typically played in nationalist and Communist movements around the world.2 It seems especially perplexing in the case of China, however, where Confucian precepts had long fostered a stark distinction between mental and manual labor. The superior status of the educated literati, celebrated in Mencius’ dictum that “those who labor with their brains rule over those who labor with their brawn,” contributed to a huge social and political distance between the “cultured” and “uncultured.” Moreover, although the iconoclastic New Culture Movement of the early twentieth century inspired many progressive Chinese intellectuals to repudiate Confucianism in favor first of anarchism and then of Marxism-Leninism, among ordinary workers and peasants these radical new ideas had made few inroads. How, then, did the highly educated young Communists manage to communicate foreign concepts of nationalism and Communism to their uneducated—and initially unreceptive—constituency? And how did such communication , in turn, translate into revolutionary action? For helpful comments on an earlier draft, I thank Nara Dillon, Christopher A. Reed, and two anonymous reviewers. 1 On nationalism, see the classic statement by Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); and the more recent study by S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). On class struggle, see Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). 2 John H. Kautsky, Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries: Nationalism and Communism (New York: Wiley, 1962); Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). April 2007 ELIZABETH J. PERRY 112 Stephen C. Averill, before his untimely death, was on the threshold of providing an answer to this question through his meticulous scholarship linking the educational reforms of the late Qing and early Republican eras to the Communist revolution. As Averill observes in his book on the early Communist movement in Jiangxi, “it was a revolution promoted primarily by educated young scions of local elite families, who worked through activities centered on schools, study societies and other education-related institutions to introduce a radical political and social agenda into local elite political culture.”3 In making this argument, Averill departs from previous scholarly analyses. Helen Chauncey, for example, characterized the early Communists as “cautious, sometimes stymied, always uncomfortable in their approach to local school communities.”4 Although Chauncey acknowledges that schools became important centers for mobilization during the final stages of the Communist revolution, she attributes this later development to the cumulative effects of misguided Nationalist education policies, rather than to any conscious effort on the part of the CCP: “a matter of historical fortune, not party foresight.”5 This paper, which examines Communist activities at the Anyuan coal mine, supports Averill’s contention that schools and other education-related institutions were a central element in CCP strategy from the very beginning of the movement. But the impact of such institutions was not confined to elite circles. Radical intellectuals from elite families—“Red Literati” as I call them—drew creatively upon their social standing, moral authority and personal ties with local power holders to garner...