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Title: Vision and Revolution Author: Arif Dirlik Date: April 1986 Language: en Topics: Chinese Revolution, Chinese Anarchism Source: Retrieved on 17th April 2021 from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009770048601200201 Notes: Published in Modern China, 12(2), pp. 123–165.
In the early summer of 1907, Chinese intellectuals studying abroad
launched, almost simultaneously, two openly anarchist societies, one in
Paris, the other in Tokyo. These societies marked the emergence of
anarchism as a distinctive current in Chinese social revolutionary
thought. In the journals they published, Chinese intellectuals
encountered directly for the first time major works of European
radicalism and their authors. Over the next two decades, anarchism
continued to nourish the ideology of the revolutionary movement in
China. Its influence on radical thinking was to remain unmatched by any
other radical social philosophy until the early 1920s.
Anarchism was to make a lasting, if ambiguous, contribution to social
revolutionary thought in China. Students of early twentieth-century
Chinese thought have discussed anarchism from a variety of perspectives;
what remains to be examined is anarchist thinking on the problem of
social revolution, which was the distinctive anarchist contribution to
Chinese thought but which has received, surprisingly, only sketchy
treatment from students of Chinese anarchism. The discussion below
undertakes a systematic examination of anarchist social thought before
1911 based on two important journals that the anarchists published at
this time: New Era (Xin shiji) published in Paris, and Natural Justice
(Tianyi bao) published in Tokyo.[1]
Anarchists were not the first to advocate social revolution in China.
That honor belongs to Sun Zhongshan and the Revolutionary Alliance
which, in 1905, incorporated a socialist program in its revolutionary
agenda to achieve a social revolution in China. Anarchists, however,
introduced significant new elements into Chinese thinking on social
revolution. The Revolutionary Alliance conception of social revolution
was political in its orientation: it proposed to use the state as the
agent of social transformation. Anarchists, in their rejection of the
state, challenged this conception of social revolution, and offered an
alternative idea of social revolution that focused on the problem of
cultural transformation, and took the individual as its point of
departure. The anarchist conception of social revolution was
authentically social, moreover, in its focus on society (in contrast to
the state), and in its insistence on popular participation in the
process of revolution.
Unambiguously revolutionary in its claims, the anarchist idea of social
revolution would nevertheless produce ambiguous results. As much the
expression of a mood as a philosophical critique of politics, anarchism
represented an anti-political strain,and a mistrust of political
institutions and politics in general, the power of which was revealed in
the diffusion of anarchist ideals over a broad spectrum of Chinese
political thought in the early part of the century. The anarchist
message was a revolutionary one. Radicals intent upon the realization of
good society through an immediate revolutionary upheaval discovered a
source of inspiration in the anarchist vision of community and a new
humanity. In the 1920s, Sun Zhongshan was inspired to remark on one
occasion that anarchism was the ultimate goal of his Three Peoples
Principles, a sentiment echoed by other Guomindang theoreticians.
Critics of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s have argued in recent
years that the Cultural Revolution was inspired by anarchist ideas and
attitudes which, having entered the Communist Party in its origins in
the early 1920s, survived the long years of revolution to pervert
Marxism in the Party. Although this may seem far-fetched, it is possible
to argue, I think,that some of the themes that surfaced during the
Cultural Revolution may indeed be viewed as faint echoes of themes in
the Chinese revolution that had first been enunciated by anarchists.
The appeal of anarchism, however, was not restricted to revolutionaries.
Conservatives who defended social and political order against the threat
of revolution were also able to find in anarchism ideals upon which to
focus their yearning for a good society. This ambivalence, to the point
of ideological schizophrenia, was reflected in the history of anarchism
in China. Anarchism, the most radical current in Chinese socialist
thought until the early 1920s, was to end up in the service of
Guomindang reaction in the late 1920s. To be sure, anarchist
relationship with the Guomindang went back to personal and political
relationships that the early anarchists (many of whom were also
Revolutionary Alliance members) had established with later Guomindang
leaders, relationships that existed quite independently of their
ideology.
Nevertheless, anarchist ideology, in its peculiar formulation of
questions of interest and conflict in society, lent itself to
counterrevolution almost as easily as it did to revolution. Betrayed by
the Guomindang once, they had exhausted their utility in the ideological
struggles against Marxism in the late 1920s, anarchists rapidly
disappeared as a force in the Chinese revolutionary movement.
Revolutionaries thereafter repudiated anarchism, but the dream of
humanity that had been the anarchist promise was to linger on in their
memories.
The ambivalence that was to characterize Chinese anarchism was already
apparent in the backgrounds of the two groups among the early
anarchists, and the different anarchisms that they propagated. The Paris
group was organized as the New World Society (Xin shijie she) in 1906.
It started publishing a journal in 1907 that lasted, remarkably, for
three years and over 100 issues. This journal, the New Era (Xin shiji),
was subtitled La Tempoj Novaj in Esperanto, probably after Les Temps
Nouveaux, published by Jean Grave. The names of the society, and its
journal, were indicative of the inclinations of the Paris anarchists,a
group of intellectuals who had been baptised into revolutionary activity
in the early 1900s. Li Shizeng, the moving intellectual spirit of the
group, had been living in Paris since 1902. He hadexhibited an
internationalist orientation very early on, studied biology, and had
become close friends in Paris with members of the family of the French
anarchist-geographer Elisee Reclus,which probably launched him on the
path to anarchism (Li, 1973:92; Shao, 1984). Wu Zhihui, who carried the
major responsibility for publishing the New Era, had been involved in
the early 1900s in radical patriotic activities in Japan and China.
It was Li, according to Richard Wang, who convinced Wu of the virtues of
an anarchism when they met in Paris in 1906 (Wang, 1976: 83–84). The
group’s activities were financed by the enterprises of its third
important member, Zhang Jingjiang, which included a dofu factory as well
as a restaurant-tea shop. They were all from elite families and, after
1905, members of the Revolutionary Alliance. From the beginning, they
seemed to have little difficulty in reconciling their anarchist
philosophy with their political involvements in China and abroad. In the
1920s as unofficial Guomindang “elders” they would be involved in the
orchestration of the Guomindang suppression first of the communists and,
then, of their own young anarchist followers. The importance of their
ideological contribution to social revolutionary thought in China lies
in the consistency of the ideology they propagated, not in the
consistency with which they lived up to their own ideals.
The Paris anarchists advocated a revolutionary futuristic anarchism that
introduced into Chinese socialist thought an unequivocally radical
current in Western revolutionary thinking. Over the remarkable three
years of its publication as a weekly, the New Era published long
translations from European anarchists such as Kropotkin, Bakunin,
Malatesta, and Reclus. These translations, reprinted over and over again
in anarchist journals and special compendia after 1911, provided a major
source of radical literature in China until the early 1920s; by 1920,
anarchist literature available in Chinese was unmatched in scope and
comprehensiveness by any other social and political philosophy of
European origin. Students of Chinese anarchism have pointed out that
anarchism provided not only radical literature, but a language of
radicalism that facilitated the efflorescence of social-ism in China in
the 1920s. The Paris anarchists played a major part in this.
At about the same time that the New Era started publication in Paris,
Chinese anarchists in Tokyo established a Society for the Study of
Socialism (Shehui zhuyi jiangxihui) which published its own journal,
Natural Justice (Tianyibao). Intellectually, the moving spirit behind
both the society and its journal were the conservative classical scholar
Liu Shipei and his spouse, He Zhen,who was probably responsible for the
more radical aspects of Tokyo anarchists’ ideology. Natural Justice was
quite revolutionary in tone, and in its analyses of the plight of women
and the lower classes in China, which were more concrete than anything
to be found in the New Era. Nevertheless, Natural Justice propagated an
anti-modernist anarchism that stressed the virtues of agrarian society,
and preferred the “freedom” from political interference that prevailed
under the imperial state in China to the “despotism” of the modern
nation-state. Whereas New Era writers discovered the archetypal
anarchist vision in Kropotkin, Natural Justice gave the greatest
prominence among foreign anarchists to Tolstoy.
Natural Justice lasted for one year. After Liu’s return to China in
1908, he apparently served as an agent-provocateur for the monarchy and
was prominent after 1911 as one of China’s foremost conservatives.
Although the long-term impact of Natural Justice did not equal that of
New Era, it was quite influential in its time, because of the large
number of Chinese students in Japan, and its proximity to China, which
gave it an edge over the New Era in terms of accessibility. Liu’s
backward-looking anarchism, moreover, sensitized him to certain
important questions in Chinese society; some of his analyses of problems
of modernity in China anticipated themes that were to become prominent
in Chinese radical thinking in later years.
The rise of interest in anarchism at this time has prompted Bernal to
observe that 1907 marked “the victory of anarchism over Marxism” in
China under the influence of a similar shift of interest that took place
among Japanese radicals at this same time (Bernal, 1971). There is no
question that, as with all Chinese socialism, Japanese sources and
radicals played a significant part in Chinese anarchism (the term for
anarchism, wuzhengfu zhuyi, first used in Chinese in 1903, was also of
Japanese derivation).Nevertheless, this view is misleading, and not only
because it is erroneous to describe as “Marxist” the socialism of the
Revolutionary Alliance, which is what Bernal has in mind in referring to
“Marxism.” The major center of Chinese anarchism before 1911 was Paris,
and shifts in Japan had little to do with the anarchism of the Paris
anarchists.
Although some Revolutionary Alliance members began to show interest in
assassination activities after 1907, it is not quite correct to read
this interest as an interest in anarchism, even if assassination was
associated with anarchism among some circles;the change in revolutionary
methods is more concretely explicable in terms of the political dilemma
with which the dynastic constitutional reforms presented
revolutionaries, who were now faced with the threat of the wind being
taken out of their revolutionary sails. Revolutionary Alliance
socialists, moreover,did not abandon the kind of socialism they had
advocated in1905-1907, as is demonstrated by the persistence of these
ideas in their thinking in later years. Anarchism possibly added new
themes to their conception of social revolution, but the best that can
be said on this basis is that the proliferation of new ideas of social
revolution complicated social revolutionary thinking, and possibly added
to ideological confusion over socialism. A clear distinction between
anarchism and socialism would not be drawn until 1913–1914; between
anarchism and Marxism, not until the early 1920s.
It is futile, I think, to look for a single all-encompassing explanation
for the attraction to anarchism of the Chinese intellectuals who in
these years engaged in “anarchist” activity or professed belief in
anarchism. In explaining why anarchism has remained alive as a
revolutionary faith in the West in spite of the failure of anarchists to
achieve any results of significance, Joll has observed that a basic
strength of anarchism has been to offer something to everyone; the
diffuseness of anarchist ideology, which has been its weakness as a
practical radical ideology, in other words, has also been its strength
as a social philosophy(Joll, 1972: 248). This offers insights into the
appeals of anarchism in China as well. Converts to anarchism in early
twentieth-century China ranged from disciples of revolutionary
terrorism, who found in anarchism justification for their activities, to
modernists attracted to anarchist scientism, to Buddhist monks, who
discovered in the anarchist message of love something akin to Buddhist
ideals, to esthetes who perceived beauty in the anarchist ideal of a
beautiful society. Not surprisingly, not everyone who found something of
value in anarchism upheld, therefore, a coherent philosophy of
anarchism.
Such profusion of appeal militates against easy explanations,especially
explanations based on vague notions of outside”influence” that ignore
the dispositions of the influenced. Foreign sources were important for
anarchism, as they were for all Chinese socialism, but it was the
intellectual and emotional needs generated by a society in revolutionary
crisis that ultimately endowed anarchism with meaning for Chinese
intellectuals. For all their contradictoriness, the variegated reasons
for attraction to anarchism shared a common ground in the anarchist
vision of social revolution which, however abstract and utopian, spoke
to the immediate concerns of Chinese intellectuals; in the midst of the
political and ideological crisis of Chinese society, they found
themselves to be uncertain about their place in their society, and the
place of their society in the world. In its affirmation of the essential
unity of human beings, anarchism provided a counter-point to the
division of humanity into nations, races, and classes that in the early
part of the century confronted Chinese intellectuals as the reality of
their world. In its affirmation of the irreducible significance of the
individual, it provided a counter-point to the preoccupation with the
state that sought to expand its powers at the cost of social autonomy.
Anarchism is ultimately a philosophy of the individual, not of the
individual as an end in itself, as is erroneously assumed by those who
confound anarchism with libertarianism, but of the individual in his/her
relationship to society. The preoccupation with the self had already
emerged by the early part of this century as a feature of Chinese
thinking in the activities of young radicals who believed that in
selfless activity lay the path to the salvation of their society.
Anarchism provided a systematic philosophical explanation for the
problem of the self: politics, in the anarchist view, was the realm of
oppression, authority and division; the hope of community rested with
the self purged of the accumulated corruption of institutions of power.
The message had a powerful appeal among intellectuals who had already
become uncertain of their relationship to existing social institutions.
It is not surprising that the message exerted greatest influence among
members of the Chinese elite who felt deeply their alienation from the
institutions of power upon which they had been nourished. Anarchism is
by no means restricted in its appeals to the elite, but everywhere it
has found its most cogent spokesmen among the elite for the simple
reason that the alienation of the self from power is more an elite than
a popular problem. In the years after 1911, anarchists would take the
lead in popular mobilization. Nevertheless, from the beginning, its most
eloquent proponents were members of the Chinese elite who,having been
alienated from existing social relations, turned to new ideas of
community to redefine their relationship to society. This was almost the
exclusive concern of the first generation of Chinese anarchists.
The lasting contribution of anarchists to Chinese social revolutionary
thought would lie in this realm of redefining the relationship between
intellectuals and society, however abstractly the latter was conceived.
Indeed, the significant impact of anarchist philosophy on Chinese
intellectuals lay not in the justification it provided for individual
acts of violence, but in turning them to the articulation of this
relationship. Anarchism provided Chinese intellectuals with their first
genuinely social,conception of social revolution, one that not only
pointed to society as the proper realm of change, but rested the
responsibility for changing society upon social activity. This
conception led to a reading of the problems of changing China that
anticipated questions that would assume increasing importance in Chinese
social thought in later years.
For reasons to be explained below, the logic of the anarchist idea of
social change was such that it brought to the surface early on the
problem of cultural revolution, and the moral and intellectual
transformation of individuals. In raising questions concerning
individual transformation, anarchists also raised questions concerning
the social institutions that obstructed individual transformation; they
were the first among Chinese intellectuals to point unequivocally to
problems of women and the family, which have lasted as central problems
of Chinese social thought. They were the first to point to the need to
bridge the gap between classes, especially intellectuals and laborers,
by making intellectuals into laborers, and laborers into intellectuals.
To resolve all these problems, finally, they called for a social
revolution that made revolution itself into a utopia, which would have
dramatic consequences for the Chinese revolution in the twentieth
century.
Within Chinese socialism, then, anarchism provided the counterpoint to
state-oriented strategies of change. The Revolutionary Alliance argument
had proposed to use the state to prevent the devastation of society by
conflicting interests. That argument had addressed the prospects of
capitalism for China. The anarchist argument addressed the second
important issue of the day, the issue of the state. Anarchists envisaged
the abolition of interest in society through a total revolutionary
transformation, the basic premise of which was the destruction of the
state. Convinced of the essential sociability of human beings, they
believed that a genuine human community could be realized if only
institutional obstacles to free association could be abolished. Such
institutions included the family and the capitalist economy,but the
state, as the mightiest of those institutions and the protector of all
partial interests in its defense of the political order, constituted the
chief enemy of human society. As interest in socialism had accompanied
the initial realization that capitalism was not only a means to economic
development but also a primary source of the problems of modern
society,anarchism expressed a parallel apprehension that the modern
nation-state did not simply reflect the will of the people, but also
served as a dehumanizing vehicle of control and oppression, an obstacle
to the human liberation that revolution promised.
Both the Paris and the Tokyo anarchists subscribed to these basic
premises of anarchism. Because they differed significantly in their
vision of anarchist society in history, however, their views are best
discussed separately.
Whereas Revolutionary Alliance socialists had proposed social revolution
as a supplement to the prior task of political revolution, anarchists
made it into a substitute for the latter. In one of the earliest
statements of the Paris anarchists’ position on revolution, Wu Zhihui
drew a clear distinction between social and political revolutions:
Those of old who advocated revolution spoke only of the political aspect
of revolution but did not emphasize society. They desired to abolish
despotism to extend people’s sovereignty, sought legal freedom but not
freedom of livelihood, political but not social or economic equality.
They sought the happiness and welfare of one country or some of the
people, not the happiness and welfare of the masses of the world [Wu,
1907: 2].
“Socialist revolution” (shehui zhuyizhi geming), on the other hand,
would
seek equality, freedom, happiness and welfare for society, make justice
(gongdao) the measure of achievement, expunge whatever harms society, or
runs contrary to this goal-such as despotism and classes, the roots of
all calamity, institute scientific progress to achieve a real world
civilization and, ultimately, establish a humanitarian commonweal
(rendao datong) and a paradisiacal world (shijie jilo) [Wu, 1097: 4].
Socialist revolution, Wu believed, would rid society of all the”poison”
inherited from the past, and establish what was appropriate to social
life (Wu, 1907: 4).
The anarchist social revolutionary idea differed from that of the
Revolutionary Alliance both in goals and in method. The Revolutionary
Alliance conception of socialism had been an instrumental one: “social
revolution” as a policy tool for the state to achieve social harmony and
stability. The Anarchist conception was a total one, which called for a
total reorganization of society in all its aspects to realize an
all-encompassing vision. In his long essay, “Anarchism,” Chu Minyi
described four goals to anarchism: (a) to abolish authority (and its
backbone, the military) and establish humanitarianism, (b) to abolish
laws, thus instituting freedom, (c) to abolish all inherited class
distinctions(as embodied in the teachings of the sages) and establish
equality,(d) to abolish private property and capital to establish
communism (gongchan) (Xin shiji, No. 60: 8).
A major essay, written by Li Shizeng and Chu Minyi,describing the
anarchist view of revolution, made even more explicit the ethical
objectives underlying anarchist goals. The eight “meanings” to
revolution, the essay stated, were: freedom, fraternity (boai),
public-mindedness, reform, equality, universal unity (datong), truth,
and progress (Li and Chu, 1907: 7). These goals were to be achieved
through the abolition of marriage, of property, of family and familial
relations, the private ownership of land, and of racial and national
boundaries (Xin shiji, No.38: 4).
For the anarchists, social revolution was different from political not
only in its goals but also, even more fundamentally,in its means.
Whereas political revolution was revolution of the”few,” social
revolution was the revolution of the many-the common people (pingmin).
Anarchists believed that “overthrowing the government must have the
recognition and the consent of the majority” (Xin shiji, No. 17: 2). To
this end, they specified five methods of revolution: propaganda (books,
magazines, lectures), mass associations, mass uprisings, popular
resistance (opposition to taxes and conscription, strikes and boycotts),
and assassination (propaganda by the deed) (Li and Chu, 1907: 8).
Anarchists themselves were not always consistent on the question of
methods; in order to appreciate their preferences, it is necessary to
keep in mind their general perception of the problems of social
revolution. Anarchists rejected not only political institutions, but
politics as well, even if an editorial in New Era referred on one
occasion to the revolution they advocated as “a political revolution of
pure socialism” (chuncuide shehui zhuyizhi zhengzhigeming) (Xin shiji,
No. 3: 1). Authentic social revolution, they believed, could not be
imposed from above, however, through inherently authoritarian
institutions (Xin shiji, No. 17: 4). Even though they were members of
the Revolutionary Alliance, their idea of social revolution was
counter-posed explicitly to the social revolutionary program of Sun
Zhongshan, both because of the reliance of the latter on the state, and
for its ambiguities on the question of the role the “many” would play in
the revolution.
Anarchists themselves conceived of social revolution as a process of
social activity, a “revolution of all the people” (quantizhi geming)
(Xin shiji, No. 34: 4). The revolutionary methods they proposed were all
intended to stimulate such social activity. Neither the Paris nor the
Tokyo anarchists engaged actively in assassination or social
mobilization, but they looked favorably upon others who engaged in such
activities. They lauded with enthusiasm the Pingxiang uprising in Hunan
in 1906,and its leader Ma Fuyi (Xin shiji congshu, 1907). They wrote
with approval of the self-sacrificing spirit demonstrated by Xu Xilin
and Qiu Jin, two revolutionaries who were executed in 1907 for their
attempted assassination of a Manchu official and their almost suicidal
refusal in the face of failure to escape the authorities (Xin shiji, No.
12, No. 14). Assassination undertaken in the spirit of self-sacrifice,
and with a clear commitment to “universal principle” (gongli), the
anarchists believed, furthered the cause of revolution and humanity (Xin
shiji, No. 18: 2). This notion that the beau geste may be more important
than living tofight another day was revealing of the ethical impulse
that underlay the anarchists idea of revolution, and distinguishes them
from the latter day revolutionaries in China to whom the success of
revolution would be far more important than gestures of personal
authenticity. “Give me liberty or give me death,” Chu Minyi was to
declaim in his defense of violence as a revolutionary method (Xin shiji,
No. 17: 3). The rebels that they lauded were not anarchists, nor were
the activities intended to achieve anarchist goals; what counted was the
act, the struggle itself, not its achievements.
This should not be taken to mean that anarchists viewed violence as an
end in itself; rather, they condoned violence only if it was informed by
a sense of moral purpose. Chu Minyi observed in connection with Xu Xilin
that violence was an expression of political desperation (Xin shiji, No.
17: 3). Wu Zhihui explained that violence was necessary because, under
despotism, it was impossible otherwise to educate people to achieve
humanitarian goals (Wu, 1907: 8). Anarchists agreed, moreover, that
violence was effective only to the extent that it “moved people’s
hearts,” and aroused mass support for the cause of revolution.
If without a clear moral and social sense violence would degenerate into
mindless terrorism, the anarchists believed,without education revolution
would turn into unconscious uprising (Xin shiji, No. 65: 11). Of all the
methods of revolution the anarchists promoted, education was the most
fundamental. Anarchists called for simultaneous destruction and
construction. Violence could achieve destruction, but construction
required education, which was the ultimate justification even for
revolutionary violence (Xin shiji, No. 16: 2). If the masses could be
gained over to the revolution, then social revolution would take a
peaceful course, and anarchist goals could be achieved gradually (Xin
shiji, No. 103: 5–6). Education to the anarchists was not simply an
instrument of revolution, it was the equivalent of revolution:
“Revolution will be effective only if, with the spread of education,
people get rid of their old customs, and achieve a new life. From the
perspective of effectiveness, this means that if there is education for
revolution before the revolution is under-taken, there will be nothing
impossible about revolution. There-fore, anarchist revolution ... is
nothing but education” (Xin shiji,No. 65: 11).
As for the nature of the education necessary for anarchist revolution,
Wu Zhihui explained that “there is no education aside from education in
morality that encompasses truth and public-mindedness, such as
reciprocal love, equality, freedom, etc.; all education is anarchist
that encompasses truth and public-mindedness, including experimental
science, etc.” (Xin shiji, No.65: 11). Chu Minyi observed that although
revolution (as an act) served a transient purpose, education lasted
forever in its effects,and transformed people endlessly. Unlike
government sponsored (youzhengfude) education, which taught militarism,
legal-mindedness, religion, or, in one word, obedience to authority,
anarchist (wuzhengfude) education taught truth and public-mindedness,
that is, freedom, equality and the ability for self-government (Xin
shiji, Nos. 40–47).
Anarchist criticism of political revolution yields further insights into
the nature of the social revolution that they advocated. Anarchists
opposed political revolution because they believed that it only served
to substitute new, and worse,inequalities for old ones. Political
revolution, Wu stated, had “diminished misery in politics but increased
economic misery” (Wu, 1907: 2). In a more comprehensive statement
criticizing proponents of democracy and the Republic, Chu Minyi
observed: “They do not know that freedom is the freedom of the
rich,equality is the equality of the wealthy. The misery of the poor is
the same as of old. What is freedom and equality to the poor? The evils
of political despotism have now been replaced by the poison of economic
monopoly” (Xin shiji, No. 6: 4). All anarchists concurred with Chu’s
view that this “poison” was the product of a bad social system in which
a few, by monopolizing wealth,managed to live off the “sweat and blood”
of the many (Xin shiji,No. 92: 5–8). In other words, the political
revolutions that had created democracies and republics had made things
worse by giving capitalists access to power, therefore increasing their
ability to exploit laborers. Under these systems, everything served the
interests of the rich. Even science was utilized not to benefit humanity
but the interests of the powerful. Capitalists, whether they were good
or bad as individuals, were motivated in their activities by the pursuit
of profit.
Although machinery had made unlimited production possible,people did not
benefit from production because capitalists used machines to suit their
search for profit. When production increased to the point at which they
could not find consumers for their products, they shut down production,
throwing laborers out of work and causing immense misery. In a statement
that was quite reminiscent of Revolutionary Alliance views on
capitalism, Chu Minyi observed that as long as such a system prevailed,
the advance of the “industrial arts” (gongyi) only served to create poor
people by decreasing the need for labor: “People do not realize that the
more advanced the industrial arts, the richer are the rich and the
poorer the poor” (Xin shiji, No. 79: 4). Those who advocated social
revolution, Chu noted, were those who understood the failure of the
capitalist system. He himself advocated “a political revolution” against
rulers (literally “a revolution for political rights,” quanli geming),
and “an economic revolution” against capitalists (literally, “a
revolution for livelihood,” shengji geming-Xin shiji, No. 92: 8).
Although such a program sounded similar to that of the Revolutionary
Alliance, its premises were quite different: Revolutionary Alliance
writers saw a Republican political revolution as a means to carrying out
the social revolution; anarchists believed that a Republican revolution
would only increase the power of the bourgeoisie, which is the class
they had in mind even though they did not use the term.
As had been the case with Sun Zhongshan, anarchists acquired these ideas
from their observations on the persistence of inequality in European
society (Xin shiji, No. 79: 4). They also believed, with Sun, that
inequality was much more serious in the west than it was in China (Xin
shiji, No. 18: 2). But, unlike Sun,they did not think that such problems
could be resolved or prevented through government action. Commenting on
a letter from a “friend” who thought that constitutional government
could take measures to forestall the emergence of inequality in China,
an editorial in the New Era observed that it was only prejudice for
government that sustained “faith in the ability of government to secure
peace, and the refusal to see that government itself obstructed the
advance of humanitarianism, that it was the source itself of all evils”
(Xin shiji, No. 17: 4).
Although they discussed economic issues, it was politics and the state
that were the focal point of the anarchist opposition to political
revolution. Their mistrust of political revolution was grounded in their
belief that political institutions in society only represented the
interests of the minority that commanded wealth and power. As with the
European anarchists whose philosophy they accepted in toto, Chinese
anarchists were opposed to all kinds of government, no matter how
different in form or in the substance of the relationship between state
and society. Their opposition to capitalism was itself encompassed
within their opposition to the state, for it was the state, with its
laws, armies and the police, they believed, that defended the interests
of the powerful in society (Xin shiji, No. 17: 2–3).
In the intellectual atmosphere that prevailed in China during the first
decade of the century, these ideas were not likely to appeal to many.
The issue of the day was to reorganize political institutions to create
a stronger state that could unify and defend the country, coupled in the
case of the revolutionaries with strident anti-Manchuism. Not
surprisingly, anarchist ideas drew considerable criticism, mainly from
other revolutionaries. Some-what surprisingly, however, the exchanges
between anarchists and their opponents were carried out in a relatively
mild tone,which contrasts with later controversies among socialists. The
acrimonious exchange between Wu Zhihui and Zhang Binglin in 1908 was the
exception rather than the rule. Anarchists themselves saved their most
vituperative rhetoric for the Manchu government and Liang Qichao’s
constitutionalists. In other cases,they responded to their critics with
patience, explaining their position with laborious effort, conscious not
to offend fellow revolutionaries (Xin shiji, No. 31: 2). The reasons for
this effort are not complex. In spite of their radical departure from
Republican ideology, most of the anarchists remained members of the
Revolutionary Alliance, and were tied to it through personal
relationships. The disagreement was among “friends.”
To some of the critics of the anarchists, their major weakness was their
idealism, which blinded them to the realities of Chinese society,
especially the backwardness of the people, who did not have the
educational and moral qualifications required by anarchist principles.
But the majority of the critics focused on the implications of anarchism
for China’s national struggle; especially its possible consequences in
undermining the anti-Manchu struggle, and rendering China vulnerable to
further aggression by other nations.
To the charge of idealism, anarchists responded that although they were
idealists, they were not blind. The struggle for anarchism had to be
immediate, they argued, but they did not expect to achieve their goals
for a long time to come. On the other hand, they believed that the
struggle was worth the undertaking because anarchism was the world
trend, a necessary end of human evolution that had the backing of
scientific demonstration (Xinshiji, No. 5: 1–2). They also added,
indignantly, that although the level of the people of China might be
low, it was no lower than that of the officials who governed them.
Most of the exchanges, however, revolved around the issue of
nationalism. In these exchanges, the Paris anarchists demonstrated their
ability to be flexible with their ideals, a characteristic that would
mark their careers. On the issue of anti-Manchuism, they were quite
firm. They believed that the major problem for China was to overthrow
the Emperor-not because he was Manchu, but because he was the Emperor
(Li and Chu, 1907: 1).They were unwilling to condone the racism that was
implicit in the anti-Manchu arguments of the Republicans, and spoke
reprovingly of the “revanchism” of nationalists such as Wu Yue,who had
attempted to assassinate a group of Manchu officials in 1905 (Xin shiji,
No. 6: 4). Racism, they believed, only served to reinforce boundaries
between different peoples, which obstructed evolution toward a better
society. They were willing to support patriotism only if it did not lead
to hatred or fear of other nations and races (Xin shiji, No. 6: 4).
They were more willing to go along with Republican revolution.
“Political revolution is the starting point, social revolution is the
ultimate goal,” Li Shizeng and Chu Minyi stated (Li and Chu, 1907: 1).
Republican revolution was to be supported, the Paris anarchists
believed, because it would move Chinese society a step closer to
socialism. Although their patriotism was no doubt an element in their
willingness to compromise with Republicanism, they may also have derived
their inspiration from their intellectual mentor, Elisee Reclus,who
himself had been a supporter of Republicanism in France. The Paris
anarchists viewed the state historically, and believed Republican
government to be more advanced than monarchy in its willingness to share
power with the people, at least some of the people. There were some
qualms over this problem. Chu Minyi observed on one occasion that
constitutional government, in giving citizens the illusion of sharing
power with them, caused the transfer of loyalty from the family (as
under despotism) to the state; this was the main reason for the greater
strength and resilience of constitutional governments: the people,
having an interest in the state, were more willing to serve in its
defense (Xinshiji, No. 23: 3–4).
Though Chu did not draw any conclusions from this observation, the
implication was obvious that constitutional government made the task of
achieving anarchism more difficult; this was an argument that was
commonplace at the time among nationalists who wanted a stronger China.
New Era anarchists opposed Manchu establishment of a constitution as a
deceptive measure that aimed to achieve greater power for the Manchu
throne, a feeling that they shared with other revolutionaries (Xinshiji,
No. 9: 3–4). Otherwise, they viewed constitutionalism as a step toward
anarchism, not away from it. They explained on a number of occasions
that they advocated socialism not as a substitute for Republicanism, but
because socialism included Republicanism, insisting only that the
revolution seek to go beyond Republican government (Xin shiji, No. 6:
3). One of the Paris anarchists would become involved in politics after
the establishment of the Republic in 1912; the others continued to make
efforts to advance the cause of revolution through education, and
refused to participate formally in politics. Their informal activities
would be another matter.
Anarchists also dismissed the argument that China needed nationalism
because it suffered from foreign aggression, or that their revolution
would render China vulnerable to further aggression. To the first, Li
responded that foreign aggression did not change the problem of
oppression qualitatively, it only made heavier the burden of
revolutionaries who had to struggle against foreign oppression, in
addition to their struggle against the Chinese ruling class (Xin shiji,
No. 6: 1). To the second, they responded with their faith,
characteristic of anarchist attitudes throughout, that because the
revolution was to be universal in scope, other states would be too busy
coping with pressure from their own populations to engage in aggression
against China (Xinshiji, No. 6: 1). Besides, they pointed out, the
people’s militia with which they would replace the regular army would be
more effective in defending China than a regular army, which only served
the interests of those in power.
To see the anarchist idea of social revolution only in political and
social terms would be to see only a part, and not the most fundamental
part, the premise, of the anarchist argument. Ultimately, this idea of
revolution was a moral one: it sought not just to transform institutions
but rather to transform human psychology, which to the anarchists was at
once the point of departure for and the goal of revolution. The problem
of human psychology was bound up with the question of the role of
interest in society that the anarchists, unlike Sun Zhongshan, saw not
just as an economic but also as a moral question.
To the anarchists, the test of a true revolution was whether or not it
was “public” in its orientation or, in a more literal rendering, whether
or not it pursued “the public way” (gongdao).This was also the ultimate
test of whether or not a revolution was a social revolution. As Li put
it: “What we speak of as a revolution of the many and a revolution of
the few refers to whether or not it is really public [gong] or private
[si], not to the actual number of people involved at any one time” (Xin
shiji, No. 7: 1). These ideas were crucial to Chinese political thinking
at the turn of the century, and placed the anarchists squarely in the
context of contemporary thought. The two terms, gong and si, meant
slightly different things in different contexts, but they were always
juxtaposed as opposites. Si could mean selfishness, partiality or
particularity; gong was used to denote selflessness, impartiality or
universality.[2] In all these usages, however, si implied favoring what
was of interest to the self, whereas gong meant the ability to transcend
self-interest to realize or to express the good of the many. In the
anarchist view, revolution was a process whereby particular interest was
abolished to be replaced by public concerns in human minds, society and
politics. The basic goal of revolution was, therefore, moral;
specifically, the creation of “public morality” (gongde) (Xin shiji, No.
65: 10).
Chinese anarchists believed, as do anarchists in general, that
public-mindedness, an instinctive sociability, as it were, was innate to
human beings; the task of revolution was not so much to create public
morality out of nothing, but to abolish the institutions that stood in
the way of its realization. Chu Minyi pointed to morality as the
distinctive characteristic of human-kind, and described as the goal of
the education he proposed the achievement of true morality, which
implied the abolition of all distinctions between self and others (Xin
shiji, No. 38; No. 41: 2).The ultimate goal of revolution was to achieve
unity on a universal scale, a unity that was not simply social, but also
ethical and spiritual.
Partiality, in the anarchist view, was the root-cause of all the
problems of contemporary society. To quote Chu again: “Contemporary
society is a self-seeking and self-interested society [zisi zilizhi
shehui]. A self-seeking society is not a true society, a self-interested
society is not a fair [gongping] society”(Xin shiji, No. 35: 3). The
separation of self from others was not just a social problem; it was
contrary to the very “organic structure” (jitizhi jiegou) of natural
existence (Xin shiji, No.41: 2). Anarchism, they believed, promised to
do away with this separation and, with it, considerations of interest as
a determinant of human behavior: “Anarchism means no national or racial
boundaries. Even more importantly, it means no distinction between self
and others, no notion of benefiting the self and harming others. When
this has been achieved, true freedom, true equality, true fraternity
will appear. That is why anarchism accords with public-mindedness and
truth” (Xin shiji, No. 33: 4).It was on these same grounds that
anarchists rejected competition as a determinant of existence, insisting
instead that mutual aid was the source of human evolution (Xin shiji,
No. 36: 3).
This opposition to partial interest on the grounds of its basic
immorality was not only the ethical basis for anarchist opposition to
politics and capitalism, it was also the basis for anarchist
disagreements with fellow-revolutionaries. Racism (zhongzu zhuyi) and
nationalism (guojia zhuyi) were, according to the anarchists, just such
expressions of partiality. Anarchists opposed enmity to the Manchus as
Manchus; they ought to be opposed because they selfishly held on to
political power. In the same way,nationalism was bad because it fostered
unjustified hostility to the people of other nations (Xin shiji, No. 6:
4). Selfishness declined,they believed, as the scope of human loyalties
expanded. Thus:“The advance from the selfishness of the individual to
racism and patriotism, the advance from racism and patriotism to
socialism represent the progress of universal principle (gongli) and
con-science (liangxin)”(Xin shiji, No. 3: 1). Not until all boundaries
had been abolished, could humanity achieve “universal principle. “This,
the anarchists argued, ought to be the guiding goal of the Chinese
revolution.
It was for these reasons that the Paris anarchists rejected China’s
heritage in uncompromising language. That certain elements of Chinese
tradition fostered private over public morality had been argued by
others, most articulately by the constitutional monarchist Liang Qichao.
With Liang, however,this criticism of China’s heritage did not lead to a
call for a wholesale attack on tradition, but rather to a plea for the
gradual nurturing of habits of public life in order to create a “new
citizenry. ”
Anarchists, sensitive to the role ideology played in perpetuating
authority, called for a revolution that would eradicate the
authoritarian ideological legacy of the past, as well as of the
institutions that sustained it. One, citing Engels for
inspiration,suggested that China’s “national essence” (which
conservatives propagated) should be consigned to the museum because it
was contrary to civilized life (Xin shiji, No. 44: 1). The Paris
anarchists concentrated their attacks on Confucianism and the ideology
of familism as the twin pillars of authority in Chinese society.
Although they were not the only ones at this time to criticize
Confucianism or the family, they did so more systematically and
vociferously than others, and they certainly stood out among their
contemporaries for presenting these issues as the primary issues of
change in China. In both respects, they anticipated issues that would
rise to the forefront of Chinese thinking during the New Culture
Movement a decade later. In this sense, they were China’s first cultural
revolutionaries.
The very first issue of New Era included a short piece on Confucius that
debunked him as a thinker of the age of barbarism whose only virtue had
been to be a little more knowledgeable than his ignorant contemporaries
(Xin shiji, No. 1 : 3). Paris anarchists saw in Confucian teachings the
source of the superstitions in Chinese society that had oppressed women
and youth, and served as an instrument of power, a counterpart in China
to religion in other societies (Xin shiji, No. 8: 1).[3] Superstition,
they believed,was the basis for authority, but even more difficult to
overthrow than authority itself, especially when religion and politics
were not clearly distinguished. In China, a “Confucius revolution” was
the prerequisite to achieving all the other goals of revolution
(Xinshiji, No. 52: 4).
The attack on Confucianism was accompanied by an attack on kinship and
pseudo-kinship relations that had for centuries been cornerstones of
Chinese social thinking. “Family revolution,revolution against the
sages, revolution in the Three Bonds and the Five Constants” would help
advance the cause of humanitarianism (Xin shiji, No. 11: 2). Paris
anarchists viewed the family as the major source of selfishness in
society: though people were born into society (that is, the public
realm), the family privatized their existence, and converted what was
public into what was private. Chu Minyi described the family as the
basis of all inequality: “Today’s society is a class society. It is like
a high tower in appearance. Marriage is its foundation. Property,family,
national and racial boundaries are all levels of the tower,with
government at the top” (Xin shiji, No. 38: 4). This is a common
anarchist view but within the context of Chinese political thought,
which had long viewed the family as a paradigm for politics, it had a
special significance. The Three Bonds (that bound ruler and minister,
father and son, husband and wife) were to the anarchists the
superstitions that perpetuated the power of the family that was based
not on principle but on authority (Xinshiji, No. 11: 1). Their power was
bolstered by the practise of ancestor worship that was contrary to
“truth,” secured the despotism of tradition, was economically wasteful
(in using up good land for graves), and bound the living to the dead
(Xin shiji, No. 3: 4). Anarchists advocated a “thought revolution” to
eliminate these superstitions, and an “economic revolution” to eradicate
the power of the family by making individuals economically independent
(Xin shiji, No. 11: 2).
These premises of anarchist thinking reveal why education held such an
important place on the anarchist agenda, or why anarchists should have
believed revolution and education to be the two sides of the same coin,
the one “negative,” the other”positive” (Xin shiji, No. 40: 2).
Revolution was to clear away material obstacles to the liberation of
human potential, but it was education that would nurture the morality
that anarchist ideals demanded. “There is no morality other than
learning,” pro-claimed the title of an article in the New Era (Xin
shiji, No. 79).This was a commonly held anarchist view: that the
morality of a people was proportionate to their learning. Education was
the means to change human psychology, which in turn would lead to
changes in behavior and morality. The relationship between education and
revolution was conceived dialectically, with the advance of one inducing
the advance of the other in the endless evolution of humanity.
This emphasis on education as revolution brought out an important
feature of the anarchist idea of social revolution: that there was no
distinction between the process and the goals of revolution, between
ends and means. Revolution was necessary to make anarchist education
possible; without such education, on the other hand, revolution could
not be attained. Although anarchists on occasion ventured to offer their
views on when the revolution might occur, these predictions were
superfluous because revolution was ultimately a continuing process with
no foreseeable end.
Perhaps most revealing in this regard was the distortion of the
etymology of the term revolution by Li and Chu in their important essay
entitled “Revolution” (Geming). Using the foreign original,
“revolution,” the authors explained that the word was composed of “re”
and “evolution,” in other words, re-evolution, which they then explained
in Chinese to mean “ever new” (gengxin). It is not possible to say for
sure if the distortion was intentional or simply out of
misunderstanding; circumstantial evidence points to the former. There
was at least one essay published in the New Era that traced the word
revolution,correctly, to its root, “to revolve” (Xin shiji, No. 17: 4).
The underlying intention of the representation of “revolution”
as”re-evolution,” moreover, was to portray revolution and evolution as
different aspects, or phases, of the process of human progress, which
was also important in the thinking on revolution of Reclus (Fleming,
1979: 77). Whatever the reasons, however,this etymological
interpretation corresponded to the anarchists’ view of revolution as a
process without end. In the words of Li Shizeng:
Progress is advance without stopping, transformation without end. There
is no affair or thing that does not progress. This is the nature of
evolution. That which does not progress or is tardy owes it to sickness
in human beings and injury in other things. That which does away with
sickness and injury is none other than revolution. Revolution is nothing
but cleansing away obstacles to progress [Xin shiji, No. 20: 1]
The Tokyo anarchists agreed with the basic premises of the Paris
anarchists, the social scope of revolution, its moral basis, its
universalistic goals, and the importance of education as a means to
achieving anarchism. There was also considerable interchange between
their two journals. The New Era contained reports on the activities of
the Tokyo anarchists, whereas the Natural Justice frequently reprinted
foreign works that had first been published in the New Era.
Nevertheless, the two groups were separated by a wide ideological gap
both in their understanding of anarchism,and in the conclusions they
drew from it concerning contemporary problems. The disagreement rose to
the surface on at least one occasion when the New Era criticized Liu
Shipei’s under-standing of anarchism.
Liu Shipei had made his fame as a classical scholar before he turned to
anarchism, and he was a prominent leader of conservatives who propagated
the idea of “national essence” of which the Paris anarchists were
critical. Liu’s commitment to China’s cultural heritage was to shape his
anarchism. In light of this, it is possible that the more radical
aspects of the anarchism that Natural Justice propagated was the work of
He Zhen, his wife,with whom he published the journal.
The general objectives of Natural Justice were stated in its first few
issues: “To destroy existing society and institute human equality is the
general objective. Aside from women’s revolution,it advocates racial,
political and economic revolution. Hence the name, Natural Justice.”
With issue number eight in October 1907,this statement was revised to
read: “To destroy national and racial boundaries to institute
internationalism; resist all authority; overthrow all existing forms of
government; institute communism; institute absolute equality of men and
women.”
Although these goals were quite close to those of the New Era,
especially in their later formulation, the two groups of anarchists
differed significantly in their anarchism as well as in the sources in
which they found inspiration for their ideals. Native sources,viewed
with contempt by the Paris anarchists, held a prominent place in the
pages of Natural Justice. This in turn reflected an even more important
difference in the way they perceived the relationship between anarchism
and native ideas and ideology.
The Tokyo anarchists, too, rejected those aspects of pre-modern Chinese
ideology that condoned hierarchy between classes and sexes. On the other
hand, on the issue of political ideology, they believed that pre-modern
Chinese thought came closer to upholding anarchist social ideals than
its counterparts elsewhere. In a speech he gave before the first meeting
of the Society for the Discussion of Socialism, Liu stated that though
the Chinese political system had been despotic in appearance, the power
of the government had been remote from the lives of the people, which
had given them considerable freedom from politics. Furthermore, he
argued, the major ideologies of China,Confucianism and Daoism, had both
advocated laissez-faire government, which had helped curtail government
intervention in society. As a result, he concluded, China had an edge
over other societies in the possibility of achieving anarchism; he
implied, in fact, that if only Chinese could be purged of their habits
of obedience, anarchism could be achieved in China in the very near
future (Xin shiji, No. 22: 4). The fifth issue of Natural Justice
carried a picture of Laozi as the father of anarchism in China. And in
the utopian scheme that he drew up, Liu acknowledged his debt to Xu
Xing, an agrarian utopianist of the third century B.C.,who had advocated
a rural life as the ideal life, and the virtues of the practise of
manual labor by all without distinction, including the Emperor. Liu
noted that he advocated cooperation whereas Xu had promoted
self-sufficiency, but otherwise he saw no essential difference between
Xu’s ideas and his own (Tianyi bao,No. 3: 34–35).
Among western anarchists, Liu found in Tolstoy confirmation of the
ideals that he had first discovered in native sources (Tianyibao, 11–12:
416–417). As with Tolstoy, he idealized rural life and manual labor, and
opposed a commercialized economy. He believed that a degeneration had
set in in Chinese society with the emergence of the money economy around
the turn of the Christian era. The money economy had led to the
strengthening of despotism: the commercial economy had led to the
impoverishment of many in the population, which had prompted government
efforts under Wang Mang to establish control over land. Liu almost
certainly had the contemporary Revolutionary Alliance advocacy of “the
equalization of land rights” in mind when he described this development
as one that enhanced despotic government (Tianyi bao, No. 5: 91–94). His
suspicion of commercial economy also underlay his hostility to recent
changes in Chinese society. He emphasized, on the one hand, the
destruction of the rural economy under pressure from western commerce,
and the ensuing crisis it had created for the peasantry. At the same
time, he expressed a very strong dislike for the urbanization that had
set in with recent economic changes. Shanghai, the symbol of China’s
modern economy, represented to Tokyo anarchists amoral sink in which men
degenerated into thieves, and women into prostitutes (Tianyi bao, No. 5:
95–97).
Liu, in other words, perceived anarchism only as a modern version of a
rural utopianism that had long existed in China. This was in accordance
with his view of socialism in general. In a discussion of socialism, he
traced socialism from Plato to the modern world, without assigning any
peculiar distinction to modern socialism (Tianyi bao, No. 6: 145–148).
In light of Liu’s approach to anarchism, it is not surprising that he
drew different conclusions than New Era anarchists concerning the path
China should follow in pursuit of the good society. Unlike the New Era
anarchists who perceived Republican government as a progressive
development, Liu argued that if China could not achieve anarchism
immediately, it would be better off under the old regime than under the
“new politics” (xin zheng): “Reform is inferior to preserving the old,
constitution is inferior to monarchy.” He offered three reasons to
explain his position: that the old educational system was superior to
the new,which favored the rich; that the proposed parliamentary system
would enhance the power of the elite and, therefore, contribute to
inequality; that the increased power of capital would result in the
concentration of wealth, and deprive the people of the self-sufficiency
they had hitherto enjoyed. Liu bolstered his argument with statistics on
poverty in various countries which, he believed,showed that development
increased inequality in society (Tianyibao, No. 8–10, combined issue:
193–203).
Secondly, Tokyo anarchists placed a great deal more emphasis on the
plight of the people in China than did the Paris anarchists. New Era
discussions of anarchism carried an aura of abstract intellectualism. In
its three years of publication, the journal published only two articles
wholly devoted to the question of labor, and even those were of an
abstract theoretical nature; this in spite of the fact that these years
were a high point in syndicalist activity in France. Natural Justice, on
the other hand, paid considerable attention to the problems of women and
the peasantry in China.
It seems likely that He Zhen was responsible for the attention the
journal devoted to the issue of women’s oppression. The Tokyo anarchists
derived their inspiration on this issue from Engels’s The Origins of the
Family, Private Property and the State, which, in presenting the
oppression of women as a consequence of the emergence of the patriarchal
family with the rise of urban civilization, may have struck a resonant
cord with their anti-urban bias.[4]
Although both groups of anarchists were equally critical of women’s
oppression, the Tokyo anarchists’ stance on the question of rural
society was distinctive and, from the perspective of Chinese socialist
thought, quite significant. The Hengbao in 1908anonymously published a
number of articles on the peasant question.[5] As far as I am aware of,
these were among the earliest serious discussions in Chinese socialism
of the role of the peasantry in the revolution, and the meaning of
revolution for the peasantry. One of these articles, lauding the
peasants’ tendency toward communitarian living and anarchism, called for
a”peasants’ revolution” (nongmin geming). Other articles dis-cussed
questions of economic cooperation among the peasantry. Perhaps the most
interesting among them was an article which, inspired by Kropotkin,
advocated the combination of agriculture and industry in the rural
economy. There is little need to belabor the significance of this idea
that has been an important feature of Chinese socialist thinking from
Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping. Whether or not later Communists were
familiar with these publications is impossible to say at this point. Li
Dazhao’s first writings in the early 1910s, which showed an anti-urban
bias that has led Meisner to describe Li as a populist, sounded very
much like some of Liu Shipei’s writings on the question of commercial
urban society. The works of Kropotkin that inspired these ideas in the
Hengbao, chief among them The Conquest of Bread, had first been
translated into Chinese in the New Era. By the time of the May Fourth
Movement, these works were popular readings among Chinese radicals, and
provided the inspiration for the communitarian ideals and the communal
experiments that proliferated at the time (Dirlik, 1985). It is not
possible to be certain about the influence of these ideas of the Tokyo
anarchists on later socialist thinking, but they were the first to
enunciate the ideas, and there is circumstantial evidence to suggest
that their ideas may have become in later years a component of Chinese
socialists’ thinking on the future relationship between agriculture and
industry, and the relationship of urban to rural society.
The sensitivity on these questions may have been a consequence of the
Tokyo anarchists’ proximity to China, which gave them access to the
burgeoning popular resistance movements on the eve of the 1911
Revolution. I think, however, that there were other, intellectual
reasons for the journal’s attention to these problems in the concrete.
He Zhen’s presence was possibly the most important factor in the
attention the journal devoted to problems of women. As for the
peasantry, Liu’s idealization of rural life was responsible for the
attention he devoted to the peasantry in whom he discovered the model
personality for anarchist society.
Liu’s description of utopian society offers an instructive contrast to
the one drawn up by Wu Zhihui in New Era (Xin shiji, No. 49). The most
conspicuous feature of Wu’s utopia was its fascination with mechanical
innovations. Liu’s utopia, on the other hand, described an essentially
rural society, and is most striking for its preoccupation with the
disposal of labor; basic to his utopia was the universal practise of
manual labor as a guarantee to an egalitarian existence. All anarchists
believed in the virtues of manual labor. In later years, the Paris
anarchists would take the initiative in establishing a work-study
program in France, which stressed the combination of manual and mental
labor as the key to the material and moral transformation of Chinese
society. In these early years, however, it was Liu who stated most
trenchantly a belief in the necessity of combining manual and mental
labor to eliminate social inequality, and to create an ideal anarchist
personality. Liu’s anti-modernism, in other words, was largely
responsible both for the close attention he paid to the concrete
problems of rural life in China, as well as his idealization of
attitudes associated with rural existence.
This same orientation, finally, sensitized Liu to the problem of
imperialism in China. He was, to my knowledge, the first Chinese
intellectual to see in socialism a means to liberate China from western
oppression. An essay he published in Natural Justice was remarkable for
anticipating views that would become prevalent in China after the
Chinese had been exposed to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. The essay
argued that the emergence of concepts of socialism and universalism
(datong zhuyi) promised the liberation of Asian peoples from the
imperialism of the “white race”and the Japanese. This task required, he
believed, the mobilization of the people (he even cited the Sanyuan li
incident of the First Opium War as an example of the people’s ability to
resist foreigners), cooperation with other oppressed peoples of Asia,and
the various “people’s parties” (mindang) in advanced countries. Perhaps
most interestingly, Liu observed that revolution would not succeed in
advanced societies until Asia had been liberated, because the
exploitation of the Asian peoples strengthened governments and the
ruling classes in the West (Tianyi bao, Nos. 11–12, combined issue:
345–368).
Liu’s views on anarchism were anathema to the Paris anarchists with
their commitment to science, industrial society and progress. Although
in general they were supportive of the Tokyo anarchists, they criticized
Liu for his equation of modern anarchism with native utopianism. First,
they responded, Liu had no conception of progress, which lay at the
basis of modern anarchism. It was wrong, therefore, to compare what
modern anarchists wished to achieve with the aspirations of primitive
people, or to equate anarchism with erratic efforts to achieve a more
egalitarian distribution of property, as with the “well-field”system of
ancient China.
Secondly, they criticized Liu for his suggestion that Chinese society
had been characterized in the past by political laissez-faire, which did
not fit the facts. China had been ruled for centuries by a political
despotism; what Liu claimed added, at the very least, up to an assertion
that there was no difference between a society with government and one
without it. The superstitious faith in Chinese society in hierarchy,
which accounted for the prevalence of “habits of obedience,” was itself
a product of oppression. Finally, they found humorous Liu’s claim that
China might be closer to anarchism than other societies. What was
required, they suggested, was not talk about levels of anarchy, but
effort, awareness and scientific knowledge (Xin shiji, No. 24: 4).
These disagreements were not disagreements over abstract issues but
entailed different attitudes toward the modern West, as well as toward
the problems of changing China. The Paris anarchists were Francophiles
who found much of value in the modern West but little to be proud of in
China’s past. They valued science to the point of scientism, made
industrialism into a utopia (as Bauer has observed of Wu) and, with all
their debunking of capitalism, were fascinated with the civilization
that capitalism had created (Bauer, 1976: 350–355).
Liu, on the other hand, had the nativist’s suspicion of the West.
Although he admired certain Western values, he believed that the Chinese
heritage contained the equivalents of those same values,and more. He
found much of value in Chinese civilization(though not necessarily in
Confucianism) to the preservation of the “essence” of which he was to
devote his life (Bernal, 1976b).Although he was quite unmistakably a
conservative, it is necessary to note, however, that his very
conservatism sensitized him to issues that would assume enormous
significance in later years in Chinese radicalism. Such was the case
with his sensitivity to the question of imperialism to which the Paris
anarchists, with their unabashed cosmopolitanism, were completely
oblivious. His case, in fact, is interesting because it parallels the
qualms about western powers of another “conservative” of the same
period, Liang Qichao, who argued against Revolutionary Alliance
socialism at this time that would weaken China vis-a-vis the West by
undermining China’s economic development, an idea that Revolutionary
Alliance socialists derided. In the early years of this century, it was
still the more conservatively inclined Chinese who saw western intrusion
as a major problem of Chinese society. Only in the 1920s would Chinese
socialists merge their social revolutionary demands with
anti-imperialism. Liu was one of the first to do so. He was also the
first, to my knowledge, to show concern for the consequences for China
of urbanization, and to turn to rural China in response in search for
moral and material answers, a search that major Chinese socialists such
as Li Dazhao and Mao Zedong would join in later years. Finally, his
insistence on the need to combine manual and mental labor as a means to
transforming the Chinese personality would assume immense importance
among other anarchists during the New Culture Movement (though his
contribution was not acknowledged), and retain its importance all the
way to the recent Cultural Revolution launched by Mao.
In the early years of this century, anarchism was one of the two main
currents in Chinese thinking on social revolution, which had been
stimulated by the introduction to China of socialist ideas around the
turn of the century. The Revolutionary Alliance had incorporated “social
revolution” in its political program in 1905as a means of preventing in
China’s economic development the social ills that had accompanied the
rise of capitalism in Europe. Revolutionary Alliance socialism conceived
of socialism as “social policy,” the use of political intervention by
the state to curtail inequality and, therefore, control social conflict.
Anarchism introduced a new theme into Chinese social revolutionary
thinking: social revolution as cultural revolution. In contrast to
Revolutionary Alliance socialists, whose attention was focused on the
state, the anarchists, in their rejection of the state, turned to
society as the proper realm of revolution. Key to their idea of social
revolution was the transformation of the individual, because it was a
basic premise of anarchism that a society could only be as good as the
individuals who constituted it. Anarchists viewed inherited social
institutions as institutional manifestations of the principle of
authority, which distorted the individual psyche, and prevented the free
play of the instinctive sociability of human beings, the only basis upon
which a good society could be established. The abolition of existing
institutions, therefore, must be accompanied in the creation of good
society by a cultural transformation (both intellectual and ethical) of
the individual to restore to humanity, as it were, its pristine
sociability. The strongly cultural connotations of the anarchist idea of
social revolution were responsible, I think, for the immense popularity
anarchism was to enjoy in China a decade later, during the New Culture
Movement, at which time the anarchist conception of change diffused
widely in Chinese thinking.
Anarchist themes had an intriguing resemblance to issues in pre-modern
Chinese politics. The preoccupation with the moral basis of politics,
the concern with nourishing public over private interests, the
assumption that in education lay the means to moral transformation, all
point to a possible affinity between anarchism and the native
ideological legacy of Chinese anarchists. That native political
vocabulary infused the language of anarchism would seem to lend support
to such an interpretation.
This interpretation can be sustained only if we ignore the self-image
that the Chinese anarchists held of themselves, and,even more
importantly, the content of the anarchist advocacy of social revolution,
an entirely new concept in Chinese politics. The very existence of two
camps of anarchists, one of which upheld native traditions and the other
one opposed them, militates against any simplistic view of anarchists as
prisoners of a cultural or political unconscious. What determined
associations of anarchism for the Paris and Tokyo anarchists was not an
unconscious activity of inherited beliefs and dispositions, but
conscious choices made in response to a complex of problems that were
products of the material and ideological conditions of early
twentieth-century Chinese society, in particular the problems of
revolution and the relationship to contemporary world civilization, and
a host of more specific questions to which these problems had given
rise.
Anarchist writing was indeed infused with the vocabulary of
Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Earlier, Revolutionary Alliance
writers had on occasion resorted to the social vocabulary of pre-modern
Chinese society in explaining their own socialist notions of class.
Anarchists used native vocabulary, utopian or otherwise, with much
greater frequency. This practise of using a native vocabulary no doubt
made for considerable confusion concerning the relationship of anarchism
to native social and moral ideals, but once again it would be improper
to conclude from the confounding of the vocabulary that, therefore, the
ideas themselves were confounded by the anarchists. Kenneth Chen has
explained that when Buddhism was first introduced to China,Buddhists
used the vocabulary of Daoism in order to render Buddhist concepts
intelligible to the Chinese who had no native equivalents for those
concepts (Chen, 1964). This practice,described as “matching terms”
(geyi), may help explain the Chinese use of a native vocabulary to
express anarchist ideals in the early twentieth century. It does not
follow, therefore, that anarchist ideas lost their revolutionary
identity in the process, just as Buddhism did not lose its identity much
earlier for being expressed through a Daoist vocabulary. Confusion there
was, to be sure; a somewhat mysterious, and vague, association with
Buddhist ideals would characterize a great deal of Chinese anarchist
thinking in the twentieth century. But ultimately, as is evident in the
revolutionary impact of anarchism on Chinese thinking, the association
was to transform the meaning of the native vocabulary that was used
initially to express anarchist ideas.
The anarchist ideas of morality and revolution illustrate the need to go
beyond the vocabulary to its content in order to appreciate this problem
fully. Paris anarchists took morality to be the end of revolution. True
morality, they believed, could be achieved only with learning. The
learning they referred to was not just any learning, least of all the
kind of learning that Confucians had prized, but scientific learning. Li
Shizeng dismissed as”particular” (si) all learning that could not stand
up under the test of modern science (Xin shiji, No. 7: 2). Science, the
conclusions of which were independent of national or cultural
orientations,represented to him only the “universal” (gong), and
therefore true learning. He excluded from the realm of scientific
learning politics and law, “false morality,” and religion, including
within it only, in addition to the natural sciences, sociology and
anthropology (Xin shiji, No. 21: 4). Anarchist scientism, whatever one
may think of it, clearly distinguished the anarchist perceptions of the
fundamentals of learning and, therefore, of morality, from those of
their Confucian predecessors for whom true learning had been all that
the anarchists sought to abolish.
With regard to anarchist utopianism, which resonated with certain themes
in native utopian traditions, it is clear that anarchists held an
activist idea of revolution that distinguished their goals from the
eremitic escapism of the Daoists to whom they were sometimes compared.
Responding to a correspondent who compared anarchist ideals to the idea
of “non-action” (wuwei), an ideal of politics that infused most Chinese
schools of political thought, Li Shizeng observed that “anarchism
advocates radical activism. It is the diametrical opposite of quietist
non-action. Anarchism does not only advocate that imperial power does
not reach the self, it also seeks to make sure that it does not reach
anyone else” (Xin shiji, No. 3 : 2). Embedded in this statement is a
distinction between traditional political escapism and modern
revolutionary politics; the one seeking to establish a space apart from
the existing political order, the other seeking to take over and to
transform political space in its totality. That China had its
Boddhisatvas who sought to save humanity, and modern anarchism has had
its escapist eremitists does not change the fundamental differences in
the conceptualization of political space between anarchism and native
Chinese political traditions;it only points to the need for
circumspection in drawing parallels between ideas that are inherently
open to wide ranges of interpretation, and those that draw their meaning
not from abstractions but from their concrete historical context.
China’s political circumstances in the first decade of this century
encouraged receptivity to the moralistic political ideals of anarchism
among Chinese revolutionaries. Anarchism was not new in China in 1907.
Knowledge of anarchism and socialism entered China at about the same
time around the turn of the century. Before 1907, however, Chinese
knowledge of anarchism had been vague, not distinguished clearly from
Russian nihilism,and was encompassed within the term “extreme
revolutionism.“Anarchism was associated more with a technique of
political action-assassination-than with a social philosophy. In an
environment in which there were few means of political expression and
little apparent basis for revolutionary action, youthful revolutionaries
discovered in individual action a means ofexpression that caught their
imagination. Individual acts of political expression, even when their
political futility was evident,served to affirm revolutionary (and
personal) authenticity. The heroic tradition in Chinese politics
provided one source of legitimacy for this kind of political behavior;
the “extreme revolutionism” of Western revolutionaries provided another
(Price, 1974; Rankin, 1971). Anarchism provided a vague justification
for these actions. After 1907, Chinese acquired a much more
sophisticated appreciation of anarchism as a social philosophy, but
these attitudes persisted in an intellectualized guise. The
glorification of the actions of Qiu Jin and Xu Xilin for their
selflessness, the constant insistence of the anarchists that they were
not concerned with success or failure but with truth all point in this
direction. Chu Minyi went so far on one occasion as to suggest that
assassination was justified if only because it had a purifying effect on
the revolutionary (Xin shiji, No. 18: 3).
More than any other radical philosophy of politics, anarchism expresses
a “politics of authenticity.” Although anarchists perceived the
preoccupation with the self as a social and political evil, most of
their writings were directed at the liberation of the self, the self
purged of the ideological and social encrustation that hid its authentic
nature. In this sense, anarchist ideals found a responsive chord among
radical youth alienated from existing social norms but without an
alternative social direction.
At the same time, however, it was precisely the anarchist view of the
individual as a social being, a basic ontological premise of anarchism,
that pointed to possibilities beyond social alienation (Saltman, 1983:
chaps. 1, 2). Although anarchism was still associated with individual
action and assassination after 1907, it was the social and cultural
implications of the anarchist ideal of revolution that would gradually
move to the forefront of Chinese thinking on anarchism, and leave a
lasting impression on Chinese social revolutionary thought. China’s most
respected anarchist, Shifu, started his career with assassination
activities, but moved away from assassination as he became familiar with
anarchist philosophy (Krebs, 1977). After the Republican Revolution
of1911, anarchists distinguished themselves in educational and social
mobilization activities, including the establishment of the first modern
labor unions in China. In the midst of the wave of individualism that
swept Chinese youth in the late 1910s, it was the anarchists who, in
their insistence on the essential sociability of human beings, kept
alive social issues, and played a major part in the emergence of
widespread concern with society and social revolution in the aftermath
of the May Fourth Movement of 1919.
Anarchism expressed a utopian universalism and a humanitarian vision
that was in many ways far removed from the immediate concerns of
contemporary Chinese society. But it was not, for this reason,
irrelevant; for the first two decades of this century, anarchist ideas
played a central role in ideological debate. During the period covered
here, anarchism provided a perspective for the critique of the
ideologies of reform and revolution. The Paris anarchists, in their
futurism, were critical of the limitations in the ideology of the
nationalist revolutionaries who rested their hopes with the state. Even
more evident was the case of Liu Shipei who, with the aid of his
anti-modernist anarchism, was able to see that the “new policies” were
not the harbingers of political openness and social welfare that many
thought them to be. It is also possible to state that their
contemporaries, themselves intrigued by these questions, took the
anarchists more seriously than have historians.
Anarchists were utopian, to be sure, but it was their very utopianism
that accounts for their ability to express concerns among Chinese
intellectuals that were no less real for being politically irrelevant,
at least in an immediate sense. Anarchist utopianism was itself the
expression of a universalistic urge in Chinese thinking that gained in
meaning as the Chinese conception of China was particularized with the
emergence of nationalism. Against a world torn apart by national
interest and conflict, anarchism held up the possibility of a humane
civilization of which China could be a part. This utopianism on occasion
took a comical form; as with a “Mr. Humanity” (Rendao shi) from England
who, in an open letter to the Chinese ambassador in England, charged
that the latter, in tampering with student mail, broke “the law of
humanity,” and exposed “to the civilized world that Chinaman are [sic]
savages.” There was nothing comical, however, about the many anarchists
who over the years risked government wrath for their pursuit of
“humanity,” which authorities deemed to be subversive of public morality
and order.
Utopianism, moreover, is a relative concept. If we take them seriously
enough, ideas such as democracy and freedom, which we bandy about as a
matter of course, are as utopian as anything to which the anarchists
aspired; indeed, anarchism appears utopian because anarchists have shown
a tendency to take these ideas seriously. Those who criticized the
anarchists for being too”idealistic” were not always cognizant that the
Republic or socialism that they advocated were themselves quite
“utopian”when viewed from the perspective of those conservatives who had
an even more pessimistic view than they did of the Chinese ability for
self-government. Utopia has been a force in history because one person’s
utopia has been another’s reality.
The Chinese anarchists, moreover, were idealists but they were not,
therefore, “blind,” as the Paris anarchists said of themselves. Though
anarchists promoted anarchism as a total revolutionary philosophy, they
relegated their vision far into the future, and were quite prepared
themselves to compromise their ideals to meet immediate needs. Indeed,
anarchists would make a very real contribution in the new ideals they
introduced into education,something they believed was the only reliable
means to achieve anarchist society. Anarchist ideals could even become
“functional” to the ends of political power, as they did when anarchists
in the 1920s held up their ideal of unity and universality against
Communists who, in promoting class struggle, seemed to be bent on
prolonging social divisions. Aside from personal relations, this was an
important element in the Guomindang flirtation with anarchists in the
1920s.
Anarchists were not the only utopians in early twentieth century China
which, as a period of political and ideological transformation, provided
fertile grounds for utopian thinking. Kang Youwei the reformer had
produced the first utopian work of this period; although Kang’s Datong
shu was not yet published when Anarchism emerged in Chinese thought,
Kang’s utopian thinking may have influenced at least one of the
anarchists, Wu Zhihui, who apparently visited with Kang before he left
for Europe. Nevertheless, anarchist utopianism differed from that of
Kang Youwei. Kang’s utopia was a utopia of the future, which reflected
in content his thinking on the present but did not,therefore, shape his
present concerns. Anarchist utopianism was a revolutionary utopianism
because it was an immanent utopian-ism, which presupposed that the
present provided the point of departure for the path to utopia. It
derived its inspiration, at least for the Paris anarchists, from the
“scientism” of Kropotkin which, however rationalist and a historical it
may be, portrayed anarchism nevertheless not as a future dream but as a
necessity of human evolution. Although Kang Youwei was quite satisfied
(if not entirely happy) to live with the present world of nations and
families, competition and conflict, anarchist utopianism by its very
nature called forth immediate criticism of the contemporary world, and
efforts to change it.
It was in this regard that anarchism may have made its most important
contribution to Chinese social revolutionary thought. China has been a
revolutionary society in the twentieth century not just because of the
revolutionizing of its society and politics,which nourished the
revolutionary faith, but also because of a faith in revolution as an
ultimate value, a means to a better world. Lasky has observed (1976)
that Marxism blended utopia and revolution to make the process of
revolution itself into a utopia. This, I think, applies much more to
anarchism than to Marxism. In China, moreover, anarchists were the first
to articulate a faith in revolution as an endless process of change that
was not only important in revolutionary thinking in general, but left
its imprint on some currents in Marxist thinking as well. A notion of
revolution as utopia was perhaps implicit in the 1903 statement by Zou
Rong in a classic of Chinese revolutionary thought, the Revolutionary
Army: “Ah, revolution, revolution! If you have it you will survive, but
if you don’t you will die. Don’t retrogress;don’t be neutral; don’t
hesitate; now is the time” (Zou, 1974: 19).
Whether Zou’s statement was inspired in any way by the anarchist ideas
that were already finding their way into China is difficult to say;
Social Darwinism was very much in evidence inhis essay. But the idea was
one that the Paris anarchists echoed,now clearly inspired by “mutual
aid,” but expressed in the vocabulary of Buddhism: “Revolution!
Revolution! Revolution!!! Since the beginning of the world, there has
not been a year,a month, a day, and hour, a minute, a second, without
revolution. Revolution moves forward without rest, tireless in its
intrepidity. It is the key to the progress of the myriad worlds [daqian
shijie]” (Xin shiji, No. 3: 3). As it was to Michael Walzer’s
“revolutionary saints” in Europe, revolution was to society as the
propeller was to the ship, constantly moving it forward under the
guidance of universal principle as the propeller moved the ship forward
in accordance with the compass. Revolution was not simply a solution to
practical problems, it was the destiny of humanity.
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[1] In 1908, the anarchists in Tokyo published another journal called
The Balance (Hengbao). The journal was similar in tone to Natural
Justice, even though Kropotkin’s ideas on social organization were more
plainly visible now. Most of the pieces in this journal were published
anonymously. It contained very interesting articles on the question of
the peasantry and rural economy that have been included in a recent
collection on anarchism published in China (Ge, 1984). For the citations
in this discussion, the majority of which are from Xin shiji and Tianyi
bao, I will simply give the issue number and not the author, as I refer
to the authors by name in the text. For page references, I use the
pagination for individual issues for Xin shiji and the cumulative Daian
pagination for Tianyi bao. Anarchists used pseudonyms in these
publications. For purposes of reference,the most commonly used
pseudonyms and the authors that they represented were: Ran, Liao: Wu
Zhihui; Zhen: Li Shizeng; Min: Chu Minyi; Shen Shu: Liu Shipei. In my
translations from the Chinese, I have stressed intelligibility in
English over literalness.
[2] For these various usages, see, respectively, Min, “Gemingzhi liuxie”
(Bloodshed in Revolution), Xin shiji No. 103; Min, “Minzu minquan
shehui” (National and Sovereign Society), Xin shiji No. 6 ; Zhen, “Tan
xue” (Discussions of Learning), Xin shiji No. 7.
[3] This article was entitled “Nannu geming” (Revolution in Relations
Between Men and Women). As the titles of various articles in this
context reveal, anarchists desired to revolutionize all that was basic
to Confucian society.
[4] It is noteworthy that Tianyi bao also published brief selections
from the Communist Manifesto. These were among the earliest publications
of the works of Marx and Engels in Chinese.
[5] For these essays, see Ge (1984).