¹ The best general study of these Western egalitarian movements in the Middle Ages is that of N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium.

² Cf. the collective work directed by Georges Haupt and Madeleine Rebérious, La Seconde Internationale et l'Orient (Paris, 1967).

³ Mao Tse-tung, Oeuvres, vol. IV, Peking edition in French, p. 1474 ("on the dictatorship of popular democracy").

⁴ "The new European culture," Sun Yat-sen says again in his fourth lesson on nationalism, "anarchy and communism, which are talked of so much today, are old theories in our China which date back several thousand years; thus the theories of Huang-ti and Lao-tzu are anarchic, and the kingdom of Hua-hsü-shih, the inhabitants of which, according to Lieh-tzu, have no chief and no law, and which is the State of pure nature, is not that anarchy… abroad it is only communism that is discussed, but the economic system of the Tai-ping and of Hung hsü-ch'uan was real communism without the theory."

⁵ A term which Needham happily thanslates by Great Togetherness.

⁶ The ambiguity of this myth comes from what the same Chinese ideogram (kung) calls the common interest and the prince. The prince, originally, is not the master but the representative of the community.

⁷ When he visited China in 1920, Bertrand Russell's sensibility was quite naturally attracted to Taoism, in which he saw a Chinese archetype of anarchic socialism. He defined it as follows: "Production without possession, action with out any attempt to impose, development without domination" (Problem of China, p. 194).

⁸ J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. II: History of Scientific Thought, Cambridge, 1956, in particular paragraph 10 on Taoism. Cf. by the same author. "The Past in China's Present, a Cultural, Social and Philosophical Back ground for Modern China" (The Centennial Review, Chicago, Spring and Sum mer 1960).

E. Balazs, Chinese Civilisation and Bureaucracy, Yale, 1964, p. 309; and Political Theory and Administrative Reality in Traditional China, London, 1965, p. 80.

⁹ L.D. Pozdneieva, Ateisty, Materialisty, Dialektiki Drevnevo Kitaia (The Atheists, the Materialists and the Dialecticians of Ancient China). Moscow, 1967, p. 403. (Passages chosen fron Yang-Chou, Lieh-tzu and Chuang-tzu, translated and commented on.)

¹⁰ Hou Wai-lu, Zhong-guo Da-tong si-xiang zi-liao (Materials on the Idea of Utopian Community in China), Peking, 1959, p. 98.

¹¹ R. Stein, Remarques sur les mouvements du taoïsme politico-religieux au II^e siècle après J.C. (T'oung Pao, vol. 1, 1963, pp. 1-81.)

¹² Quoted by Hou Wai-lu, op. cit. Cf. also Y. Kuramatsu, "Some Themes in Chinese Rebel Ideologies," in Confucian Persuasion, edited by A. Wright, Stan ford, 1960, pp. 241-268.

¹³ Cf. J. Chesneaux, Les sociétés secrètes en Chine, 19th - 20th centuries, Paris, 1965.

¹⁴ This document is quoted in extenso in the work by J.C. Cheng, The Taiping Rebellion, Hong Kong, 1963, p. 181.

¹⁵ The article was published in the Centennial Review, as quoted earlier.

¹⁶ H.F. Schurman, "Traditional Property Concepts in China," Far Eastern Quarterly, August 1956.

¹⁷ Nguyen Khac Vien, "Confucianisme et marxisme au Vietnam," La Pensée, No. 105, October 1962, pp. 3-26.

¹⁸ For which we recommend the excellent study by E. Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Background of the Burmese Revolution. The Hague, 1965, p. 248.

¹⁹ Quoted by E. Sarkisyanz, op. cit., p. 47.

²⁰ D.D. Kosambi, Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay, 1956, p. 160.

²¹ In a Burmese text of 1930, Stalin is hailed as the builder of Lokka-Nibba.

²² E. Sarkisyanz, op. cit., p. 10.

²³ Ibid., p. 90.

²⁴ This word is the Burmese equivalent of sahib, and affirms a will to overthrow the colonial relation of subordination to the English in favor of the Burmese.

²⁵ Cf. M. Rodinson, "The Life of Muhammad and the Sociological Problem of the beginning of Islam," Diogenes, No. 20, Fall 1957.

²⁶ L. Gardet, La Cité musulmane, Paris, 1953.

²⁷ Abu Dharr al-Ghiffari has been claimed by a large number of Marxist and communist intellectuals in the Arab world as a precursor and "guarantor." In 1948, the Al-Azhar University of Cairo, a world centre of Moslem theology, gave a conference on the "communist" character of primitive Islam; young intellectuals in favor of the comparison between Islam and Marxism supported this thesis, and dwelt in particular on Abu Dharr's case. But the reply was entirely negative.

²⁸ Nazim Hikmet, Anthologie poétique, Paris, 1959, p. 54. The last remark is a reply to the accusation which is often brought against the egalitarian peasant movements in the Middle Ages by Moslem historians, namely the practice of the community of women. On this point cf. later.

²⁹ In the reign of the Sassanid King Kawadh I (488-531), Iran had been shaken by the egalitarian preaching of Mazda, who called for the division of land, property and women, and who at one time even converted the king to his ideas. Cf. A. Christensen, Le règne du roi Kawadh I^er et le communisme mazdakiste (Historisk-Filologiske Meddelelser, vol. 9, Copenhagen, 1924-1925).

³⁰ The Encyclopédie de l'Islam, under Qarmat. The movement closely followed another social egalitarian movement, namely the rising of the zendj slaves of the great latifundia of the Lower Euphrates in 869-883. It appears that they formed an ephemeral egalitarian state in the region of Bassorah, about which there is only vague documentation. Arab Marxists have hailed them as precursors and "Spartakists of Islam." In fact it was a very localised and singular movement, because the cultivation of large estates by slave-labour was not current in medieval Islam, and was not carried on in this region after the zendi revolt (the zendi were negroes brought over from Africa).

³¹ Quoted by the Encyclopédie de l'Islam, under Mahdi.

³² On Al-Farabi, cf. the work by E.I.J. Rosenthal, Political Thought of Medieval Islam, Cambridge, 1962.

³³ The idea of futuwwa, as Claude Cahen has shown in his suggestive article in the new edition of the Encyclopédie de l'Islam, has, furthermore, far more complex extensions. It is also a sermon of fraternity among young people "who come together to lead the most comfortable common life possible, in an atmosphere of solidarity, mutual devotion and comradeship (property being made common)." But the futuwwa may also consolidate the unity of "barefoot" (ayyarun) move ments, which foment urban insurrections in times of relaxed authority. These people blame the rich, "an elementary form of class recuperation which goes unreproached"; this was the case in Baghdad, for example, in the 11th and 12th centuries. The idea of solidarity at the heart of a trade association came later.

³⁴ The path of Roger Garaudy, in his lectures delivered at Algiers at the beginning of 1965 (the text of which has been published in a series of numbers of Révolution Africaine, in July 1965) is visibly the same. He insists in the in trinsically progressive character of classical Moslem society, as a whole. He likens it to the Utopian socialism in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, adding the merit of anteriority.

³⁵ Cf. M. Rodinson, Islam et capitalisme, Paris, 1966.

³⁶ As L.G. Lawrence has noted in his edition of the Utopia of K'ang Yu-wei, a Chinese reformer of the end of the 19th century who proposed a return to the political principles of primitive Confucianism (The One-world Philosophy of Kan Yu-wei, London, 1958), there are many translations of the passage in the Book of Rites on the Ta-t'ung; they differ particularly in that, because Chinese grammar does not always indicate the tense, the verbs of the text are sometimes made past, and sometimes future …