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Title: Anarchism in East Asia Author: Arif Dirlik Date: 2019 Language: en Topics: China, Chinese Anarchism, japanese anarchists, Japan, Korea, Vietnam Source: Retrieved on 2020-05-09 from https://www.britannica.com/topic/anarchism/Anarchism-in-China
During the first two decades of the 20^(th) century, anarchism was by
far the most significant current in radical thinking in East Asia.
Although East Asian anarchists did not make significant original
contributions to anarchist theory, they did introduce a number of
important ideas to the politics and culture of their countries,
including universal education, the rights of youth and women, and the
need to abolish all divisions of labour—especially those between mental
and manual labour and between agricultural and industrial labour.
Perhaps the most significant and lasting of their contributions was the
idea of “social revolution”—i.e., the idea that revolutionary political
change cannot occur without radical changes in society and culture,
specifically the elimination of social institutions that are inherently
coercive and authoritarian, such as the traditional family. Although
some anarchists in East Asia sought to create revolution through
violence, others repudiated violence in favour of peaceful means,
especially education. Nevertheless, they all believed that politics is
determined mainly by society and culture and therefore that society and
culture must be the focus of their revolutionary efforts.
The first self-described anarchist in East Asia was the Japanese writer
and activist Kotoku Shusui. In 1901 Kotoku, an early advocate of
Japanese socialism, helped to found the Social Democratic Party, which
was immediately banned by the government. Early in 1905, after the
newspaper he published, the Heimin shimbun (“Commoner’s Newspaper”),
denounced the Russo-Japanese War, the paper was closed and Kotoku was
imprisoned. While in prison he was profoundly influenced by anarchist
literature—especially Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops—and
adopted anarchism wholeheartedly. As he wrote to a friend at the time,
he had “gone [to prison] as a Marxian socialist and returned a radical
anarchist.” After five months in prison Kotoku traveled to the United
States, where he collaborated with members of the IWW, popularly known
as the “Wobblies.” His experiences in the United States led him to
abandon parliamentary politics in favour of a violent strategy of
“direct action.”
After his return to Japan in June 1906, Kotoku began organizing workers
for radical activities. He also managed to persuade the newly founded
Socialist Party of Japan to adopt his views on direct action. In 1910
Kotoku was among hundreds arrested for involvement in a conspiracy to
assassinate the Meiji emperor. Although he had withdrawn from the
conspiracy before his arrest, Kotoku was tried for treason and was
executed in 1911. His death marked the beginning of a “winter period”
for anarchism in Japan, which was to last until the end of World War I.
Although much diminished, anarchist activity in Japan did not completely
cease during this period. Osugi Sakae, the foremost figure in Japanese
anarchism in the decade after Kotoku’s death, published anarchist
newspapers and led organizing campaigns among industrial workers. His
efforts were hampered by continuous police repression, however, and he
had very little impact in Japan. Nevertheless, Osugi greatly influenced
anarchists in China and, later, Korea.
Shortly after 1900, as part of the reforms that followed the
unsuccessful Boxer Rebellion, the Qing dynasty began to send many young
Chinese to study abroad, especially in France, Japan, and the United
States. In these places and elsewhere, Chinese students established
nationalist and revolutionary organizations dedicated to overthrowing
the imperial regime. Two of the most important of these groups—the World
Association, founded in Paris in 1906, and the Society for the Study of
Socialism, founded in Tokyo in 1907—adopted explicitly anarchist
programs.
Between 1907 and 1910 the World Association published a journal, The New
Century, that was a major source of information in Chinese on anarchist
theory and the European anarchist movement. The journal promoted an
individualistic and “futuristic” anarchism and was among the first
Chinese-language publications to openly attack native traditions, in
particular Confucianism. The Society for the Study of Socialism, on the
other hand, favoured an antimodern anarchism influenced by the pacifist
radicalism of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and it stressed the affinity
between anarchism and philosophical currents in the Chinese past,
especially Daoism. Through its publications, Natural Justice and
Balance, the Society advocated Kropotkin’s programs for combining
agriculture with industry and mental with manual labour, ideas that were
to have a lasting influence on Chinese radicalism.
Significant anarchist activity in China itself did not begin until after
the Chinese Revolution (1911–12). Chinese anarchists educated in Paris
(the so-called “Paris anarchists”) returned to Beijing and immediately
became involved in the reform of education and culture. Convinced of the
need for social revolution, the Paris anarchists argued in favour of
Western science against religion and superstition, called for the
emancipation of women and youth, rejected the traditional family and the
Confucian values on which it was based, and organized experimental
work-study communities as alternatives to traditional forms of family
and working life. These ideas and practices were extremely influential
in the New Culture movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s. Led by
the generation of intellectuals sent to study abroad, the movement was
critical of all aspects of traditional Chinese culture and ethics and
called for sweeping reforms in existing political and social
institutions.
Anarchists were also active in South China. In Canton, a native school
of anarchism emerged around the charismatic revolutionary Liu Shifu,
better known by his adopted name Shifu. In 1912 Shifu founded the
Cock-Crow Society, whose journal, People’s Voice, was the leading organ
of Chinese anarchism in the 1910s. Although not a particularly original
thinker, Shifu was a skilled expositor of anarchist doctrine. His
polemical exchanges with the socialist leader Jiang Khangu helped to
popularize anarchism as a “pure socialism” and to distinguish it from
other currents in socialist thought.
Anarchist ideas entered Vietnam through the activities of the early
Vietnamese nationalist leader Phan Boi Chau. Phan, who led the struggle
against French colonial rule during the first two decades of the 20^(th)
century, was introduced to anarchism by Chinese intellectuals in Tokyo
in 1905–09. Although Phan was not an anarchist himself, his thinking
reflected certain distinctly anarchist themes, notably anti-imperialism
and “direct action.” After the Chinese Revolution in 1911, Phan moved to
South China, where he joined a number of organizations that espoused or
were influenced by anarchism, including the Worldwide League for
Humanity. He also received advice and financial support from Shifu. In
1912, with Shifu’s help, he founded the League of the Restoration of
Vietnam and the League for the Prosperity of China and Asia, which aimed
to build links between revolutionary movements in China and those in
colonized countries such as Vietnam, Burma (Myanmar), India, and Korea.
In the early 1920s Korean radicals established anarchist societies in
Tokyo and in various locations in China. Like their counterparts in
Vietnam, they were drawn to anarchism mostly for its anti-imperialism
and its emphasis on direct action, which offered a justification for
violent resistance to the Japanese colonial government. For leaders such
as Shin Chae-Ho, anarchism was an attractive democratic alternative to
Bolshevik communism, which by this time was threatening to take control
of the radical movement in Korea.
By the early 1920s anarchism in most parts of East Asia had entered a
decline from which it would not recover. After the Russian Revolution of
1917, Bolshevik communists in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea
established their own revolutionary societies, which were eventually
transformed into clandestine political parties, and began to compete
with anarchists for influence in the labour movements. Faced with the
Bolsheviks’ superior organizational abilities and the financial support
they received from the newly constituted Soviet Union, the anarchists
could offer only weak resistance and were soon eclipsed. By 1927,
Chinese anarchists were devoting most of their energies to this losing
struggle, sometimes in collusion with reactionary elements in the
loosely structured Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). In Japan anarchist
activity enjoyed a brief resurgence in the mid-1920s under Hatta Shuzo,
who formulated a doctrine of “pure” anarchism in opposition to Marxist
influences. A period of conflict between such pure and Marxist-oriented
anarchists ended in the early 1930s, when all forms of radicalism were
crushed by the military government.
Although politically irrelevant after the early 1920s, anarchists in
China continued to work toward social revolution in education and
culture. The author Ba Jin wrote novels and short stories on anarchist
themes that were widely popular in China in the 1930s and ’40s, and Ba
was elected to important literary and cultural organizations after the
communist victory in the Chinese Civil War (1945–49). In 1927 a group of
Paris anarchists helped to establish a short-lived Labour University in
Shanghai, which put into practice the anarchist belief in combining
mental and manual labour. This belief lingered long after the anarchist
movement itself was gone, influencing debates on economic policy in the
communist government in the decades after 1949.