Effort post from a comment I made buried in a thread.

So despite some major disagreements there are more anarchist influenced elements within the revolutionary Chinese movement than we see in other Marxist tendencies / projects. This is not to suggest that the Chinese Revolution was anarchistic, it was very party driven, it was not at all an anarchist revolution, only that certain components of the revolution incorporated anarchist concepts and anarchist visions of daily life.

Some like Colin Ward suggested that the original communes looked similar to the models proposed by Kropotkin in Fields, Factories and Workshops of Tomorrow.

From "Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution," (some formatting edits for clarity):

According to Zhang Guotao, the populist strain in Chinese communism represented by the slogan “Go to the people (dao minjian qu)”, which entered Chinese Marxism from the Chinese Marxist, Li Dazhao, found its most fervent advocates in the May Fourth period among the anarchists, from whom Li originally derived the idea.  Most important, however, were two ideas that anarchists introduced into revolutionary discourse early on:

-idea 1: the concept of integrating agriculture and industry in China’s future development

-idea 2: the concept of labor-learning, which played a crucial part in radical culture during the May Fourth period.

The integration of agriculture and industry was in practise a product of revolutionary experience, especially during the Yan’an period, when the exigencies of rural revolution under wartime conditions forced Communists to establish basic industries to meet subsistence and military needs. It may be no accident, however, that the Communists chose "mutual aid" (huzhu) to describe the small agrarian collectives they established during the Yan’an period and after 1949.

More significant was the structure of the people’s communes established from 1958, when there was no such need, which were to remind Colin Ward, editor of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops of Tomorrow, of Kropotkin’s industrial villages. It is also significant that when the people’s communes were established, they were part of an emerging program of development that was to constitute a distinct Chinese way of development that would differ from both capitalist and socialist alternatives that then existed. While they were idealized as organic units of development that would integrate industry and agriculture and provide a cultural (as well as a military) world of their own, it was also important that the program of modernization they articulated had an anti-modernist aspect to it, which glorified the countryside at the expense of the city and was suspicious of technology (or of the fetishism of technology) as well as of the professionalism that was a by-product of modernity.

So there's a clear anarchist influence, but we shouldn’t be reductive and claim Maoism as anarchistic. We know that Mao extensively read anarchists such as Kropotkin, Bakunin and others. We know that Mao was even an anarchist in his youth, but by 1920 or so he had become a committed Marxist.

The people’s communes were suggested by the left-wing of the party and harkened directly back to the Paris Commune. They suggested a sort of federated system of governance; these never quite took off and by the late 60s had become largely integrated with the PLA and larger government. The communes shifted into more of committees. For reference, The Shanghai Peoples Commune lasted only a matter of months.

A number of anarchists did oppose this integration, since they were strongly in favor of federated governance for obvious reasons. Some of those anarchists wound up resisting the wider socialist project, particularly during the cultural revolution. This resulted in tragedies such as the “January Storm”.

Mao had this quote on people splitting hairs on both obsessing over titles and demanding further federation. I actually agree with this:

The Shanghai People’s Committee demanded that the Premier of the State Council should do away with all heads. This is extreme anarchism, it is most reactionary. If instead of calling someone the “head” of something we call him “orderly” or “assistant”, this would really be only a formal change. In reality there will still always be “heads”. It is the content which matters.

Now I could write much more on the extent to which the wider Maoist movement rejected Anarchism, because it did and quite literally said as much at times. Or on the number of conflicts that occurred when subsuming / integrating the peoples communes into components of the party and socialist transitionary state.

The extent to which conflicts can be blamed on who or what segment of the party can be argued--it wouldn't be the first time that revolutionary parties were derailed by locals who assumed their role of power and moved beyond the direction of state-actors. An example being the anarchists in the Spanish revolution that had campaign killings of priests with some regions exceeding 70+% of priests murdered; my point is not comparing ideologies, only that the problem extends throughout the leftist spectrum historically.

For a lot more on this I suggest "Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution" by Arif Dirlik. I don't agree with all of the takes in there, but it is very informative.