This monograph, like most first scholarly productions, is essentially a revised doctoral dissertation. Throughout the long years of graduate study and while I was putting this work into its final form, I was asked, a surprising number of times, whether I was myself an anarchist. So far as I know, few students of Maoism, or for that matter fascism, are asked whether they are adherents of the political philosophy they are studying. It could, of course, be something about my personality that provoked the question, or it could have resulted from the belief among some sinologists and historians that anarchism was irrelevant to China and that therefore its students must be motivated by peculiar personal reasons. It is true that questions about the role of anarchism in modern Chinese history did not particularly suggest themselves from the standard sources; anarchism does not appear high on the agenda of unsolved problems that graduate students commit to memory.

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