By Tai Zuo · Posted on Bohuozhe (The Fire-Bearers), October 27, 2026 

Recently, I read a letter from the German-based Maoist theorist Xiang Guanqi addressed to Liu Jiming. Although brief, the letter conveys three core points: Liu Jiming’s emphasis on the primacy of institutions is "fundamentally correct," while Taihushi’s argument is "fundamentally incorrect"; the Constitution became a dead letter because there were "no corresponding supporting institutional mechanisms"; and why such institutions were never built was, "in the final analysis," determined by the historical level of social development and human consciousness. Finally, Xiang put forward a sharp diagnosis: contemporary Maoists "somewhat resemble an Ah Q faction," and the red forums "somewhat resemble Ah Q communities." 

A structural tension exists among these three points that merits deconstruction. Xiang Guanqi endorses Liu Jiming’s insistence on institutionalization, yet he attributes the ultimate cause of institutional absence to "the level of social development" and "the limitations of human consciousness"—which amounts to arguing that institutions failed to emerge because prevailing social conditions and popular awareness were insufficient to sustain them. This mode of attribution shares an underlying structural similarity with Taihushi’s claim that "the masses had an inadequate grasp of theory": both reduce an institutional question to a question of developmental maturity. However, the crucial distinction between Xiang Guanqi and Taihushi lies in this: Xiang does not regard this shortfall in maturity as legitimate or self-justifying. While Taihushi uses "inadequate maturity" to rationalize the absence of institutions, Xiang uses it to explain that absence, subsequently demanding: if the level was inadequate, why was nothing done to raise it? What is the path toward raising it? His answer is: "first fight for democracy." 

This directly touches upon the essence of the concept of "proletarian right." Liu Jiming uses "proletarian right" to designate an institutionalized mechanism capable of constraining power—ensuring that revolutionary gains are not severed by shifts in leadership, and that the masses’ theoretical mastery does not depend entirely on movement atmospheres or individual charisma. Xiang Guanqi adopted this concept but injected it with explicit political content: democratic institutions, primarily understood as the freedom of political association and party formation. He criticized Maoists who "insist on a one-party dictatorship and oppose the freedom to form parties." The edge of this critique targets precisely the institutional blind spot of the orthodox left: they enumerate a long list of "democratic institution-building" measures (the "Four Bigs," the "three-in-one combination," and the ratio of worker-peasant-soldier delegates), yet these institutional forms share a common feature—they merely expanded participation within the existing power structure, rather than erecting systemic checks and balances between power structures. The "Four Bigs" allowed the pasting of big-character posters, but they could not prevent the political turn of October 1976; worker-peasant-soldier delegates entered the National People's Congress, yet the legislature itself was never structured to serve as an arena capable of binding supreme power at decisive moments. 

Xiang Guanqi’s conclusion is that without supporting institutional mechanisms, the Constitution remains a mere scrap of paper. This formulation is more direct than Liu Jiming’s prose and far more candid than Taihushi’s apologetics. Taihushi asserts that "institutions possess no magic; the crux lies in whose hands leadership resides"—a statement not inherently untrue, yet one that evades an essential recursive problem: whose hands leadership falls into itself requires an institutional guarantee. If the transfer of leadership follows no defined rules, then into whose hands power falls becomes a matter of historical contingency rather than an outcome determined by the balance of class forces. The "supporting institutions" Xiang Guanqi calls for represent the exit from this recursive trap: it is not a rejection of leadership, but an insistence that the accession and exercise of power follow institutionalized rules, preventing constitutional rights from being rescinded by decree. 

Yet Xiang Guanqi did not proceed further along this path. By reducing the ultimate cause of institutional absence to "the level of social development" and "human consciousness," he effectively converted a political dilemma into a developmental stage dilemma. While this reduction carries materialist validity—institutions cannot be conjured out of thin air regardless of material conditions—it harbors an intrinsic danger: if institutional absence stems from "inadequate maturity," when will that maturity be deemed sufficient? Who decides? Does an era of "inadequate maturity" imply that the task of institutional construction can be postponed indefinitely? Xiang Guanqi’s own political programmatic demand ("first fight for democracy") points toward a different resolution: precisely because consciousness is underdeveloped, democratic institutions are indispensable to furnish the conditions for raising it; underdevelopment cannot serve as an excuse to defer institutional construction until after maturity has magically arrived. This theoretical tension, though perhaps not fully unpacked by Xiang himself, remains embedded within his letter. 

The sharp diagnostic weight of the "Ah Q faction" metaphor resides precisely here. Ah Q’s defining trait is not simple ignorance, but achieving imaginary victories over real subjugations that he cannot overcome in reality. When Xiang Guanqi characterizes Maoists as an Ah Q faction, he means that while they fiercely denounce capitalism, revisionism, and capitalist-roaders in rhetoric, in practice they evade the foremost question: how to construct an institutional system that binds power and preserves ideological lines against personnel turnover. They secure victory over the enemy in the realm of "spiritual triumph," while remaining paralyzed in the domain of structural institution-building. Similarly, calling red communities Ah Q forums denotes that this paralysis is not an isolated individual defect, but a collective posture: all engage in denunciation and ideological posturing, yet none push forward the concrete realization of those necessary "supporting institutions." 

Whether this critique is entirely fair remains open to debate. Nonetheless, it addresses a genuine crisis: when "institutions" are perpetually discussed yet never constructed, the discourse itself becomes an evasive substitute. Taihushi enumerates extensive historical instances of "democratic institution-building," yet none of those forms exercised an effective check when power shifted at the top—a reality that demands an explanation far more rigorous than invoking "conspiracies of capitalist-roaders" or "inadequate theoretical grasp among the masses." Xiang Guanqi’s answer—the lack of supporting institutions—comes closer to the core of the problem than Taihushi’s rationalizations. Yet by shifting the ultimate blame back onto "the level of social development," Xiang’s explanation risks becoming unactionable: if everything must wait for maturity to rise, what can be undertaken in the present? His call to "first fight for democracy" provides one answer, but a theoretical gap remains between this demand and his framework of developmental determinism.

 Returning to the concept of "proletarian right": Liu Jiming introduced it to ask why the power won by the proletariat during mass movements could not be institutionalized into an inheritable, binding legal right. Xiang Guanqi took up the question and offered an overtly politicized reply: because the proletariat had not yet secured the foundational political conditions necessary to establish such a right—namely, freedom of association, freedom of political party formation, and authentic democratic institutions. In this light, Xiang pushed Liu Jiming’s institutional reflection toward a more radical conclusion: it was not that revolutionaries "forgot" institution-building following victory; rather, throughout the revolutionary process, democratic institutions were never pursued as goals in their own right, but assumed to be outcomes that would emerge spontaneously after triumph. When that automatic outcome failed to materialize, the constitution became a dead letter and proletarian right remained an empty phrase. 

The enduring significance of this letter lies not in providing a finalized blueprint, but in choosing a divergent path at a pivotal ideological crossroads. Taihushi claims that institutions are secondary while leadership is everything. Xiang Guanqi counters that institutions are vital, and that they were never built because revolutionaries failed to treat the preconditions for institutional construction as conscious objectives of political struggle. The former rationalizes an institutional vacuum; the latter diagnoses and critiques that vacuum. This divergence marks the true boundary dividing the "orthodox" from the "alternative": a willingness to acknowledge that the absence of institutional mechanisms was not merely the consequence of sabotage by class enemies, but a structural void within the revolutionary project’s own political practice. Xiang Guanqi stepped across that demarcation line, even if he did so with traces of developmental determinism still lingering in his stride.