Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition

Acknowledgments

xiii The origins of this book can be traced to a conversation over dinner in the winter of 2003. Having just come across Professor Yu Jianrong’s impressive articles on peasant protest in rural Hunan, I invited him to Harvard to speak on his research. Over dinner at a Chinese restaurant after the lecture, Professor Yu asked if I knew why he had come to Harvard. “Of course,” I replied, “it’s because I invited you here!” “No,” he retorted, “it’s because I want to invite you to the Anyuan coal mine!” Yu Jianrong explained that he had been conducting fieldwork at Anyuan for some five years in preparation for a study of the plight of the Chinese working class. Having read my book on the Shanghai labor movement, he asked me to join him in a collaborative project. I politely but firmly demurred, noting that I was in the midst of a book project on workers’ militias and could not contemplate anything more. I assumed that would be the end of the story, but Professor Yu is not easily deterred. When he e-mailed from Beijing a few months later to say that all the arrangements for my “forthcoming” trip to Anyuan had already been made, I could no longer refuse. My first visit to Anyuan, in July 2004, revealed the Jiangxi coal mining town to be everything that Professor Yu had promised it would be; it was a fascinating place whose complicated history exemplifies major themes of the Chinese revolutionary tradition. For someone interested in peasants as well as workers, the past as well as the present, leaders as well as followers, Anyuan has it all. I was instantly hooked. Follow-up fieldwork with Professor Yu and other Chinese colleagues in successive summers , capped by a longer stay on my own in the fall of 2009, yielded the core documentary, archival, and interview material on which this study is based. I am deeply indebted to Professor Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for his irresistible enthusiasm, warm friendAcknowledgments xiv / Acknowledgments ship, keen sense of humor, and penetrating insight. Without him, this book never would have been written. As I embarked on a study of Anyuan, my memory was jogged of conversations enjoyed many years earlier with Professor Cai Shaoqing of Nanjing University. As a visiting scholar at Nanda in 1979–80, I had the good fortune to conduct research on the history of Chinese secret societies under the direction of Professor Cai (as well as Professor Mao Jiaqi). Among the experiences that Professor Cai related during our frequent conversations that year were accounts of his early research on the Anyuan labor movement, conducted while he was still a student at Beijing University in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His animated descriptions of interviewing the charismatic Li Lisan in Beijing and venturing down into the Anyuan coal pits to chat with the miners were both entertaining and inspiring. It was a great pleasure to seek Professor Cai’s advice yet again in connection with this study. Individuals and institutions too numerous to mention have offered invaluable aid over the course of this project. I am grateful to them all, and I apologize to those whose names I have omitted, but I would like to single out a few for special acknowledgment. A succession of former and current graduate students contributed to the research effort; the assistance of Yan Xiaojun (now at the University of Hong Kong) and Ouyang Bin was especially critical. Repeated discussions with local party historian Huang Aiguo of the Pingxiang Communist Party School in Jiangxi played an important role in improving my understanding of Anyuan history. Harvard colleague Eugene Wang, a distinguished art historian, has consistently encouraged this political scientist’s naïve efforts to trespass into unfamiliar cultural territory; he also helped obtain valuable Anyuan images, even taking a number of photographs himself. My assistant, Lindsay Strogatz, has provided a range of expert professional services, including locating obscure materials, commissioning maps, compiling the bibliography, and much more. Others who deserve special mention for key contributions to the final product include Nara Dillon, Feng Xiaocai, Cindy Fulton, Nancy Hearst, Liu Chunyang, Hannah Love, Lu Lei, Patricia Thornton, Ma Xiaohe, Reed Malcolm, Ren Jianghua, Victor Seow, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Wang Xiaojing, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Sharron Wood, and Yiching Wu. Many rare documents were supplied by the Harvard-Yenching Library, the Fairbank Center Library, Widener Library, the Anyuan Labor Movement Memorial Hall...