Dirlik's book, consisting of 8 independent essays on various aspects of the Chinese anarchist movement [examples: anarchism and nationalism, anarchism in the May 4th movement], gives these forgotten idealists their due. He describes the many branches of anarchist thought and political action, the prominent figures, and their intellectual influences (Kropotkin, French and Japanese socialism, several indigenous Chinese influences). Also prominent are Dirlik's accounts of anarchists' interactions and arguments with the Nationalists and the Communists. The anarchists had both ideological and strategic overlap with both groups, but the anarchists' aversion to powerful statist structures eventually led to schisms with both.

Yet the anarchists had influences on the Communist movement they came to repudiate. This might explain why Chinese Communism had some grass roots democratic content; limited, to be sure, but nevertheless distinguishable from the pure submission required by the Russian Bolsheviks' tyrannical governance. The anarchists also influenced Mao's thought in: the importance of mutual aid, women's liberation, the idea of combining manual and mental labor, the goal of eliminating the differences between town and country, mass education as a prerequisite to true political transformation, etc.

The anarchist ideal of statelessness is likely utopian, yet their critique of Bolshevism, so eloquently recounted in this book, is highly relevant today. The anarchist leaders of the 1920s would doubtlessly say "we told you so" about the Chinese communist movement, that despite some impressive social justice achievements, brought along with it human rights abuses by the state and eventually widespread alienation.

The "New Left" intellectual movement in China today (Cui Zhiyuan is a prominent US based participant in this debate) is searching for a more democratic and just form of modernization than offered by the liberals (both inside the party and out) pushing capitalism and a narrow form of democratization. The Chinese anarchist movement of the 1920s, as Dirlik communicates, is a wonderful reservoir of intellectual thought--and should, and probably is, helpful to this New Left movement.