When I drink coffee in the morning and scroll through the twitter feeds of my poet friends, I see material that Marx would appreciate, from memes about the redistribution of wealth to literature about the Democratic Socialists of America. The oppression of modern economic life is partly what drives my friends toward these concepts; the racism, sexism, and bigotry that are uniquely enabled by economic inequality are also responsible. Many of my friends believe that climate change will require strong government management of industry and enterprise. Some, I think, see socialism as a tool to break down the ideologies of injustice that helped elect Donald Trump.

Eventually, I shut down Twitter and go to work as a professor of Chinese literature, where most of what I read and teach has roots in China’s communist heritage. I use the word heritage because the reception of communism in China today is more cultural than theoretical or structural, and that culture has layers. Communist heritage in China includes the flower of invention, translation, and experimentation that resulted in the party’s founding in 1921; it includes the folk propaganda and peasant literature of the 1940s and 1950s; it includes the highly mannered spectacles of 1960s model opera; and most important, perhaps, it includes the scars of silence (and silence about the scars) that Maoist (and later) communism inflicted on the population. Chinese poetry, both inside and outside the revolution, is shot through with self-protective omissions that allowed writers to survive the dangers of intellectual life during and after the tumult of the 20th century.

The socialists in my life could learn a lot from the Chinese communists I spend time with, but the latter’s habits of omission compound other challenges. Because the cultural history of the Chinese Communist Party is mostly written for imminent political purposes by the party itself, it is difficult to confront and overcome stories of essential Oriental difference that make Chinese politics seem exotic or irrelevant to outsiders. Both the Communist Party and the Euro-American chauvinist agree that China is special, unique, incomparable. Those who do think about Chinese communism often focus on material development. It’s an easy narrative: communism caused economic stagnation until Mao’s death in 1976, and the capitalism of the 1980s released all of China’s pent-up productive energy. Bicycles in China in 1970 were pretty shoddy, but they were great by 1990; today, flat-screen TVs are everywhere. Regular individuals, both inside and outside of China, only ever see a certain number of bicycles or TVs. Everything else we learn, whether one lives in China or not, comes through culture: reports, investigations, speeches, novels, and poems. These objects are the products of a century-spanning battle that rarely gets described in overt terms: the struggle between democracy and pluralism on one side, and authoritarianism and monoculture on the other.

This struggle happened inside the Chinese Communist Revolution. Democracy and pluralism lost, over and over again, and the body count of that loss goes far beyond the unknown number of Chinese citizens killed during the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen, or the multitudes who died in labor camps as the Chinese Communist Party rooted out dissent during the Cultural Revolution. The absence of distributed, people-oriented, transparent decision making has been felt in the People’s Republic at every level, from the preventable Great Famine of 1959–1961, to the pollution of the air, water, and land by industry, to the concentration camps of Xinjiang province. Little of this shows up in economic data, either because these realities are not considered economic issues or because the data, itself a product of public culture, is fake.

The voices of the Chinese revolution, though, can reveal the force lines of the internal and internecine struggle for democracy. Poets of the Chinese Revolution (2019), translated and edited by Gregor Benton, and published by Verso Press, dramatizes the conflict inherent in the early history of the Chinese Communist Party. Benton is an emeritus professor of history at Cardiff University who has researched Chinese communism for decades. The four men he collects in this volume—Chen Duxiu, Zhang Chaolin, Chen Yi, and Mao Zedong—were revolutionaries known more for their politics than for their poetry. All four wrote highly traditional verse in old, sometimes ancient, meters. The nature of their politics, as well as the reasons they wrote in archaic literary forms, show the intellectual and emotional variety that existed in the early Communist Party.

Chen Duxiu, whose work opens the volume, is a case in point. Born in 1879, he contributed repeatedly to the overthrow of China’s old social order and to the construction of a new one. He was a professor and a leader at Beijing University in the years leading up to the May Fourth Movement in 1919, a tumultuous outpouring of opposition to Japanese and Western imperialism, disdain for nonrepresentative government, and insistence on new forms of language, culture, and politics. In 1921, he co-founded the Chinese Communist Party, which remains the sole empowered political party in China today. In 1929, he was expelled from that party and became a Trotskyist—a type of communist who believes in mass democracy as a part of proletarian government, among other things. After Chen’s death in 1942, his legacy was a touchy one for authoritarian Stalinists like Mao. As Benton points out, Chen’s contemporary Hu Shi called Chen “an oppositionist for life,” and even though Chen’s home and burial site remains open to the public in Anhui province, with 民主 (democracy) and 科学 (science) written on the ceremonial arch in the garden, these words must ring hollow in a state that has suppressed citizen power and still rigorously controls scientific discoveries.

Like the other men in this volume, Chen wrote poetry in ancient styles despite advocating for a modern, vernacular language whose ethic rejected old rhymes and meters. His poetry shows the influence of what we might now call the humanist Confucianism of Tang dynasty poets such as Du Fu, a poet-bureaucrat who saw himself as a representative of the empire’s subjects. Chen’s work returns repeatedly to the plight of the poor; over the course of his career, that care for others evolves from the romantic self-aggrandizement of China’s long tradition of hero-poets to an equally deep-rooted posture of social repudiation and quietism. The 1903 poem “Inscription on a Painting of Saigō Nanshū Hunting” (named in homage to a reformist Japanese samurai) is written in the regulated style, a hallmark of high classical poetry in and around the eighth century CE: its tight rhymes and intense tonal regulation (which arranges the audible tones of the Chinese language for rhythmic purposes) don’t come through in English translation, but the adventurism of the old imperial general certainly does:

Injustice always summons forth bold deeds,
Whether rushing troops to save the throne or rising in revolt.
In life there should be nothing to regret—
Why subject freedom to the pointless goal of getting to old age?

These lines were written by the then-24-year-old Chen, who would go on to fight against both the Qing Empire and the warlords who replaced them. He was a young man who connected his own willingness to suffer with the power of his commitment to justice. “Justice” here is Benton’s interpretive rendition of Chen’s phrase ni wu xin, “that which is contrary to my heart”—understanding, perhaps, that young Chen saw justice as indistinguishable from his own feelings. After his conversion to Trotskyism and his expulsion from the party, however, Chen’s ambition, and his self-identification with the national struggle, dissipates, as is clear in these couplets from 1934:

The fall of states results from evil acts—
The rise and fall of dynasties is proof of that.
Luckily, suffering steels the bones, so I retain
My bookish ways, even as an old man with white hair.

These themes—of ambition sharpened or blunted, of the individual’s place in the group effort to change government—run through much of the poetry in this volume. Classical Chinese lyric poetry was where the imperial scholar-bureaucrat could speak outside, and about, their authority. In Chen’s verse, we see the rise and fall of the dream that he and his revolution were the same thing, along with the mounting realization of his tiny size in relation to the great forces pushing Chinese life toward an uncertain future.

The autocrat’s ambition is encompassing; the democrat leaves space for others. This is ideological, but it’s also aesthetic. When Khrushchev put authoritarian rule in the Soviet Union under pressure, thus theoretically delegitimizing Stalinist-style Chinese communism and endangering Mao Zedong’s power, Mao demonstrated his vigor by swimming across the Yangtze River. This was such a successful PR stunt that he repeated the feat in 1966 to announce the coming Cultural Revolution. His poem on the first swim starts:

Having drunk the waters of Changsha
And eaten the Wuchang fish,
Now I swim across the thousand-mile-long-Yangtze…

Mao later explained the poem by saying that a leader in the Three Kingdoms period (circa 220–265 CE) wanted to move his capital from Nanjing to Wuchang, and the people created a rhyme to oppose the move: “We’d rather drink water in Nanjing than eat fish in Wuchang; we’d rather die in Nanjing than live in Wuchang.” But the people of today, Mao said, eat the fish of Wuchang and they like it. Mao inexplicably replaces the original allusion’s location in Nanjing with his own hometown in Changsha, and instead of choosing between the two places, consumes both as a sort of associative water-themed prelude to a swim across the river. We understand how great he is, how much he has consumed; the preferences of the people are an obstacle to be overcome, if not ignored.

The fuzziness of the allusion, which Benton glosses as an “allusion to a folk song from the Three Kingdoms,” may also be a result of Mao’s weaknesses as a poet and as a reader of poetry. In his introduction, Benton asks, “Was Mao a good poet?” Instead of answering, he points out that Mao himself spoke negatively about his poetry, which was likely written or edited by committee. Benton then quotes the British scholar Arthur Waley: “If poetry were painting, I would say that Mao was better than Hitler but not as good as Churchill.” The steadiest answer to the question, perhaps, is that it doesn’t matter. Mao was at the center of a cult of personality; poetry, especially imperial-era poetry, contributed to a perception of intimacy and gravity. Poetry could both describe and increase Mao’s power. He moved the people, ate the fish, crossed the river; the details are for lesser people to quibble over. One can see this as the lone member of the vanguard forging communist verse in the heat of the revolution. Or one can see it as a poet so self-interested that he is unable to listen to anyone else, much less to himself. These attitudes are hard to distinguish. As is so often true in the lyric, the poems are deeply shaped by the relationship between the voice and its listener.

The relationship between poet and audience provoked the curious tradition of committed Chinese revolutionaries writing in traditional verse forms. As the book’s section on Chen Yi indicates, traditional poetry—especially ci poetry, a metrical form popular in the late Qing dynasty that required poets to match the meter of old songs—was a way for communists to signal their literacy and trustworthiness to the elites, whose support the communists needed in their civil war against the Nationalist Party. As the civil war ended, Mao exchanged poems with the great classical poet Liu Yazi, announcing his (temporary) engagement with, and tolerance of, the noncommunist upper class. Chen Yi, born in 1901, came from a family that grew rich serving the Qing empire. His class background made him a difficult fit for the Chinese Communist Party, but he nonetheless trained as a military officer and climbed the ranks. In 1934, he found his army tasked with staying behind while Mao and the main force of the communists fled their home base in a life-or-death evacuation later known as the Long March. Alone with his soldiers in the mountains, surrounded by nationalist forces, Chen had to make as many friends as possible, and he came to excel at forging political and intimate bonds with gentry leaders in contested areas.

In the following excerpt, he excoriates the Nationalist Party for capitulating to Japan (metaphorically surrendering the ceremonial vessel of one of China’s legendary kings), heralds the return of Mao’s Eighth Route Army, and calls on his supporters to keep fighting:

Do not complain; march steadily on.
Traitors have surrendered the Yu tripod to Japan, but our great force
has crossed the Jinsha River now.
The iron tree will bud and burst in flower.

This poem isn’t overtly democratic, but even in its romantic mode, even in battle, it is more pluralist than Mao’s poetry. It reenvisions the imperial legacy as a national possession rather than as a metaphor for the contemporary autocrat. It’s addressed to the soldier and to the ally rather than to the nation as a whole or to the annals of history. In Mao’s most soaring poetry, by contrast, he repeatedly compares himself to past emperors. Without addressing the peasants, soldiers, and workers who were his constituents, the gesture seems empty. Who is he trying to convince?

Chen Yi’s military successes, his utility to the revolution, and his ideological flexibility kept him from being purged from the Communist Party into the late 1960s, when he was publicly humiliated for perceived offenses against Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Even though Chen remained free and in power, Mao’s rise was mostly successful in silencing him. Chen continued to write poems after the foundation of the People’s Republic, but few people read them, and the poems aren’t collected in Benton’s volume. Compositions using traditional poetics remained a revolutionary requirement among communists through the 1950s and 1960s. During the Great Leap Forward, there was a drive to produce folk songs, and Communist Party members were instructed to write reams of what was essentially metrical verse. But poems during this period had to suit the dictates of the revolution; if you’ve read a few of those poems, you’ve basically read them all. This was one way the party made lots of happy noise while enforcing silence among critics, minorities, and independent thinkers.

Benton counters the problem of silence by translating the prison poems of Zheng Chaolin. Zheng was born into a family of landlords in 1901, and in 1919 was sent by the governor of Fujian province to learn communism and science in France. He was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in 1929 for being a Trotskyist, and without the party’s protection, was quickly incarcerated by the nationalists. A short time after his release, the then-ascendant communists put him right back in jail—all told, he spent 34 years behind bars, which Benton claims is one of the longest periods of incarceration for any political prisoner in the modern era. Benton clearly has respect and affection for Zheng and his life story. Early in the introduction, he calls Zheng’s work the “centerpiece and biggest chapter” of the book, which he says was “originally conceived as an act of homage to him.” In the acknowledgments, he notes that he included Chen Duxiu, Chen Yi, and Mao Zedong at the advice of his publisher. By openly supporting Zheng Chaolin, Benton engages in one of the necessities of the internecine struggle between autocracy and democracy in communist life: he takes sides.

Communists and socialists have repeatedly negotiated with one capitalist structure or another, or they have mixed atheism and theism, but half-democracy is an anxious and unstable place that incentivizes false claims and a fog of conspiracy. In China today, as in Mao’s time, the state speaks directly of the democratic principles of the Communist Party; meanwhile, independent members of the press and legal profession are kept from their work by force, and rumors of palace intrigue and bizarre official behavior circulate by any possible channel. To remain silent about this system is to consent to it; to translate Trotskyist poetry is to do something quite different.

One can see, then, the appeal of a figure like Zheng Chaolin, who refused to change his political stance through his long incarceration, and who emerged from jail in 1979 unsullied by collaboration with Mao’s regime. Even Zheng’s use of ci poetic form feels authentic and legitimate: although denied access to most books, he nonetheless had a few from which he sourced the rhythms and allusions necessary to write traditional verse. More important, perhaps, the audible rhythms of metrical poetry helped him memorize his own work when jailers seized and destroyed written copies of his poems. Authenticity aside, the pluralist’s capacity to produce surprise, combined with a near-infinite amount of time to write, means that Zheng’s poems (while still not well-respected in Chinese verse) are much better than Chen Duxiu’s or Chen Yi’s. This is the opening of “Stamps”:

Forsaken in my prison cell
I fondle eight green postage stamps
displaying Yellow Mountain scenes.
Inside a mustard seed Mount Meru hides,
while in a heartbeat vales turn into peaks
and jagged summits from which pine trees jut,
like flags of war.

In the poem, Zheng receives a rare, prized letter from his wife, who sent a strip of early Chinese commemorative stamps featuring a mountain scene. Because he has almost no access to visual art, Zheng savors the stamps and begins to think through the paradoxical Buddhist teaching that Mount Meru (a five-mountain range said to lie at the center of the cosmos) is contained in a mustard seed, and vice versa. The greatest mountains are contained in the tiny seed; valleys transform into peaks; a stamp-sized piece of art comes to stand for all art; a minor generosity by a loved one helps a prisoner survive; the invisibly small mote of faith swells into a life’s work, an ideological foundation, a sense of the future. The allusion is expertly made, but the poem is truly revolutionary. It doesn’t brag about changes past or changes to come but takes place in a moment of change. It revels in its vertiginousness, the humility of its shape, and the hugeness of its possibility.

Zheng’s poems offer a surprisingly intimate look at the psychology of someone who remained committed to pluralist values even under extreme duress. In “My Tiny Cell,” written not long after the Great Famine, he reflects on the strange irony that while the nation was wracked by starvation, he had a small room, sufficient grain, and “thoughts stretching endlessly.” In “Dreamtime,” he mourns the fact that the only fellow prisoners he’s allowed to see or interact with are Trotskyists who abandoned their former beliefs and who are required to ignore Zheng or treat him like an enemy. His work also serves as a sort of shadow government—he seemed to be able to get the news of the day—that questions and opposes decisions made by the Party Center. More often than not, the difference between Zheng and Mao comes down to humility, to the limits of ambition that leave room for other actors and the unpredictabilities of the future. In “How the Mighty Fall,” he pointedly matches the form of “Snow,” a particularly hubristic poem of Mao Zedong’s, and warns of the ephemerality of power:

…Emperor Na and Kaiser Xi
attest to life’s highs and lows
as the sea yields
to mulberry fields
and the trees to seas.

Emperor Na is Napoleon, and Kaiser Xi is Hitler. One wonders—and one suspects that Benton intends us to wonder—what kind of leader Zheng Chaolin would have made for China.

Although Zheng is the centerpiece of the anthology, Poets of the Chinese Revolution ends not with his work but with that of Mao Zedong, whose individual, personal grip on power waxed and waned but did not yield until the moment he died. Reading Mao’s poetry, even through the scrim of those who likely collaborated with him to write it, reveals that he was candid about himself even while he lied about the welfare of his people. Mao’s final poem, written to menace the fully obedient communist scholar Guo Moruo, is unrepentantly thuggish, correcting Guo’s negative assessment of China’s first emperor, who was reputed to have massacred the empire’s Confucian scholars:

Regarding Qin Shi Huangdi, I advise less condemnation,
for burning books and burying men alive is subject to discussion.

At the time, Guo himself was attempting to bring out communist themes in Confucian thought; he is among those whose burial is being discussed. Imagine commanding the world’s most populous nation yet writing (and publishing) a rhyming death threat directed at the author of a book you don’t like.

Or imagine a US presidential candidate, in a speech against his opponent, leading a chant: Lock her up! Lock her up! Imagine him giving an interview in which he says he has “tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point and then it would be very, very bad.” Nothing rhymes here, but the gist is the same: because autocrats are interested largely in themselves and in expanding their own power, they announce clearly what they are willing to do. They can harness and pervert the ambitions of socialists as easily as they can the ambitions of capitalists; once they are in power, the distinctions fall away. It was easy for Kim Jong Un to ally himself with Donald Trump, because what was announced as socialism in the early days of North Korea has been transformed into juche, or “independent spirit,” an ideology that uses the trappings of state communism but is inextricable from the power of the Kim clan. Mao Zedong, a long-term critic of the United States, had no substantial ideological obstacle in meeting and dealing with Richard Nixon (and vice versa).

Today in the People’s Republic of China, what the revolution turned into—a national ideology called Socialism with Chinese Characteristics that mixes state control over key industries and banks with some integration into global market norms—specifically empowers the President and General Secretary Xi Jinping. He has repealed term limits for his own positions, placed his book of political philosophy in every bookstore, and encouraged citizens to call him “Xi Dada,” or “Papa Xi.” Meanwhile, the Uyghur people, a mostly Muslim group in China’s Northwest, are being disappeared into reeducation camps, where they are forced to break halal, chant Communist Party slogans, and do manufacturing work for the profit of others. As I write this, the young people of Hong Kong are on the streets facing tear gas and rubber bullets to protest a proposed bill that would allow them to be extradited to the People’s Republic. They don’t have any visible leaders, save for those who are in prison. It is a revolt not for power but for space, for a Chinese place separate from the ambitions of Xi Jinping. Benton’s imaginary collection of Zheng Chaolin’s verse would have ended in triumph: in 1979, with the help of Amnesty International, a pluralist Chinese state, and Benton himself, Zheng was released into a hopeful and changing China, able to write the poems he’d carried inside for so long. But one suspects that 2019 is a year in which, like Zheng, we are better off angrily reading our Mao.