Daoism and Anarchism

Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China

John A. Rapp

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441127457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This volume in the Contemporary Anarchist Studies series focuses on anti-statist critiques in ancient and modern China and demonstrates that China does not have an unchallenged authoritarian political culture. Treating anarchism as a critique of centralized state power, the work first examines radical Daoist thought from the 4th century BCE to the 9th century CE and compares Daoist philosophers and poets to Western anarchist and utopian thinkers. This is followed by a survey of anarchist themes in dissident thought in the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the present. A concluding chapter discusses how Daoist anarchism can be applied to any anarchist-inspired radical critique today. This work not only challenges the usual ideas of the scope and nature of dissent in China, it also provides a unique comparison of ancient Chinese Daoist anarchism to Western anarchist. Featuring previously untranslated texts, such as the 9th century Buddhist anarchist tract, the Wunengzi, and essays from the PRC press, it will be an essential resource to anyone studying anarchism, Chinese political thought, political dissent, and political history.

PART ONE

Daoism and
Anarchism

1

Daoism and anarchism
reconsidered

Introduction

Philosophical Daoism is a term used to refer to the ideas of some people who arose at the end of China’s Zhou dynasty (1027–256 BCE), a period when China disintegrated into a long period of civil war and chaos that finally ended only in 221 BCE with the end of feudalism and the founding of the centralized, bureaucratic Qin empire (221–206 BCE). In the latter part of the Zhou period (722–481 BCE), specifically in the Spring and Autumn, and Warring States Periods (403–221 BCE), philosophers and teachers arose who tried to gain the ear of the feudal warlords to adopt their particular systems in order to reunify China. Most such thinkers offered specific advice on how to attain order, such as the idea of rule by moral virtue of the Confucians or the idea of rule by power and force of the so-called Legalist school. Those thinkers later labeled the Daoists often traced their ideas back to Lao Zi (“Old Master”), a semi-mythical figure who may have lived, if he lived at all, in the sixth century BCE and who is traditionally treated as the author or compiler of the Daodejing (Wade-Giles: Tao Te Ching, or the “Classic of the Way and Its Power,” referred to hereafter in this book as DDJ). This text dates in its received form at least from the third century BCE (in Chapter 3 we will examine a recently unearthed version of the text that dates back to as much as a century earlier). Modern scholars argue that the DDJ may have been compiled over a long period of time from the sayings of village elders, and perhaps first coalesced as a text during the Warring States period partially in response to other schools of thought.

The other great classical Daoist philosopher was Zhuang Zi (Master Zhuang), a historical individual with the given name of Zhuang Zhou who lived in the fourth century BCE and who wrote at least the seven core or “inner” chapters of the book known as the Zhuangzi, the other, “outer” chapters being added at later periods by unknown authors. Thus the core chapters of Zhuangzi are nearly as old as the received DDJ and should not be denigrated as any less important a “. . . foundational text of socio-political relevance” for Daoism, as Alex Feldt contends, so that the DDJ should not have to “clearly enjoy primacy in developing a classical Daoist political theory.”¹ Whatever their differences, both texts were unique in their advice for rulers to rule by inaction or doing nothing (wuwei) and in their opposition to law, morality, punishment, warfare, and nearly all other techniques and forms of rule. As such, many scholars have long referred to Daoism’s “anarchistic” tendencies and aspects.²

Given these many references to its anarchist tendencies, it may seem strange to question whether or not philosophical Daoism is really a doctrine of full-fledged anarchism similar to Western anarchism. In fact, however, as noted in general in the prelude there have been various objections raised to equating Daoist philosophy with anarchism, mostly focusing on the classical Daoists of the late Zhou dynasty. We will examine these objections more in detail in the first part of this chapter. In the second part of the chapter we will examine key thinkers of the Daoist revival in the Wei-Jin period (ca. 220–420 CE) and note their similarities to specific Western anarchists on key points central to the doctrine of anarchism.

Doubts about Classical Daoism as Anarchism

Doubts about the fully anarchist nature of Daoism have mostly centered on the Daoism of the late Zhou texts, the DDJ and the Zhuangzi, associated with the mythical or real figures of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi respectively. Although only some of these doubts apply to the Wei-Jin Daoists, as we will see, those who question the fully anarchist nature of the DDJ and the Zhuangzi nevertheless usually see Wei-Jin Daoist anarchism as an extension or even corruption of classical Daoism rather than a loyal exegesis of it. These doubts about classical Daoism as an anarchist doctrine then must be dealt with before examining the more obvious anarchism of the Wei-Jin thinkers. Below the questions about Warring States Daoist anarchism are broken down into five categories. Here it should be noted that many of these doubts may have to do with the distinctions among different types of anarchists that we noted in the prelude. Those sympathetic to socialism and skeptical about philosophical and individualist anarchists as genuine anarchists and those sympathetic to the nineteenth-century collectivist anarchist movement (not to say that Daoist anarchism can easily be pigeonholed as philosophical and individualist, as we will see below in the section on Warring States Daoism as individualist or socialist), are perhaps the most skeptical about Daoism as true anarchism.

The DDJ and Zhuangzi as advocating laissez-faire or limited government and not full-fledged anarchism

The main limit many scholars find in Daoist anarchism of the Warring States Period is that the DDJ and for some even the Zhuangzi, if to a lesser extent, seemed to be giving advice to sage–rulers on how to govern, even if their advice was to rule by wuwei (often translated as nonaction or doing nothing). As Hsiao Kung-chuan put it about the DDJ,

. . . non-action in government need not destroy and cast aside the ruler-servitor institution, and return to the total lack of restraints that exists among birds and beasts . . . in theoretical terms, what Lao Tzu attacked was not government in and of itself, but any kind of governing which did not conform to “Taoistic” standards.³

Likewise, Frederic Bender and Roger Ames in a 1983 roundtable discussion of Daoism and politics, while finding great lessons for anarchism in “political Daoism,” conclude that the (received) DDJ is not a full-fledged anarchist text, since, as Ames notes it seems to accept the state as a natural institution,⁴ and as Bender argues, “retains, albeit in improved form, ruler, rule, and the means of rule (the state).”⁵ This is the main basis upon which Feldt argues that classical Daoism represented at best a “diluted” form of anarchism⁶ and at most a justification for the most efficacious type of limited rule within an autocratic and bureaucratic state, a type of rule akin to the “minimal, ‘night watchman’ state of Nozikean liberalism,”⁷ a contention that, besides the obvious self-contradiction between autocratic and limited rule, we will dispute on page 28 of this chapter below.

On a less literal level other scholars find similar limits to anarchism in the received DDJ and even in the Zhuangzi, the author(s) of which many scholars otherwise recognize as much more explicitly anti-statist than the DDJ. Arthur Waley, for example, while finding great similarities between the classical Daoism of the DDJ and Zhuangzi and Western anarchism, nevertheless concludes that there were important differences, since “one of the main tenets of modern anarchism is that no appeal must be made to the authority of ‘metaphysical entities’” and that “. . . [dao] is undoubtedly a ‘metaphysical entity’.”⁸ Similarly, Benjamin Schwartz claims that the language of the DDJ suggests “. . . not a spontaneously emerging ‘anarchist’ state of affairs but a state of affairs brought about by a sage-ruler.”⁹ Likewise, A. C. Graham claims that however similar Western anarchism is to the thought of later “Daoist primitivists” who probably were the real authors of some of the “outer” or later added chapters of the Zhuangzi, by contrast the more limited anti-government doctrine in the (received) DDJ and perhaps the “inner” or original chapters of the Zhuangzi if not amounting to “hierarchic anarchism” at least “amounts to a paternalistic anarchism” in its hope that the ruler will follow the practice of the “ancient Emperors, [who] it may be presumed, had no task but to keep the people ignorant of the arts and luxuries which were eventually to corrupt them . . . .”¹⁰ For Graham, as for Hsiao, the classical Daoists “[found] it difficult to imagine a society without any ruler or sages at all . . . The concept of the pure community explicitly described as without ruler and subject belongs rather to the revival of philosophical Taoism in the 3rd century A. D.”¹¹

This point of view that finds limits to Daoist anarchism and instead deems it a doctrine of laissez-faire or limited government,¹² would perhaps have as its best evidence the use of ideas in the DDJ and Zhuangzi ideas by officials in the court of the emperor Wu Di in the first century of the former Han dynasty (202 BCE–8 CE). At that time, after the official Legalist ideology of the hated Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE) was discredited (the Qin being the first, if the shortest, centralized imperial dynasty in Chinese history due to its rule by naked force with little legitimizing ideological veneer) and before official Confucianism took full form as a replacement ideology justifying the Han empire as rule by the morally virtuous for the benefit of all, some court scholars briefly adapted Daoist ideas to legitimize the Han’s supposedly more “light” rule compared to that of the Qin. This laissez-faire version of Daoism can especially be found in parts of the Huainanzi, a text of the early Han.

Likewise, during the revival of philosophical Daoism at the end of the later Han dynasty (25–220 CE) and the beginning of the long Period of Disunity (ca. 220–581 CE) before the centralized empire was finally revived in the sixth century CE, Daoism was first used as a formula to justify the rule of the upstart military dictator and posthumous founder of the failed Wei dynasty Cao Cao against the Confucian ideology of his opponents—the great families or large landlords from the end of the Han—as represented especially by the Sima clan who founded the Jin dynasty after Cao’s death, another failed attempt at revival of empire (thus this first part of the Period of Disunity is...