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Title: Anarchism in China Author: David Pong Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: China, Chinese Anarchism, history Source: “Anarchism.” In Encyclopedia of Modern China, edited by David Pong, 28–30. Vol. 1. Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009. Gale eBooks (accessed June 22, 2021).
China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 was a crowning blow
after repeated humiliations in earlier decades of the nineteenth
century. Even more important to many intellectuals were problems of
injustice and corruption in China’s social and political order.
Anarchism offered a systematic analysis of and response to all such
problems, and Chinese intellectuals who adopted anarchist principles did
so for some combination of this broad range of concerns.
Two major forms of anarchism developed in China, both originating in
European intellectual life of the previous several decades. The earliest
notions about anarchism came by way of Japan and drew on revolutionary
activism elsewhere, especially on Russian populism, which emphasized
assassination and other forms of “propaganda by the deed.” A number of
assassination attempts occurred in China during the first decade of the
twentieth century.
Early Chinese anarchists in Japan emphasized traditional thought and
values. The activist couple Liu Shipei and his wife He Zhen gave shape
to the anarchist ideas of the group that formed in Tokyo. Liu posited an
anarchist society based on natural communities in the Chinese
countryside, while He Zhen became the first to expound anarchist
feminism in China. Liu and He presented their views in Tianyi bao
(Heaven’s justice) and Heng bao (Natural equality). Personal and
political considerations made the anarchist careers of this radical
couple brief.
The second model for anarchism emphasized the rationality of science and
natural law. This anarchism influenced Chinese who sojourned in Europe,
especially in France, in the early 1900s. The Chinese anarchist group
that formed in Paris developed an avant-garde, science-oriented form of
anarchism. Their greatest inspiration was Peter Kropotkin, the great
Russian anarchist leader who had abandoned violence in favor of
sophisticated theory and popular organizing. His anarchism rested on
observation of history and society, and he emphasized the concept of
mutual aid (huzhu), which became a watchword for Chinese activists of
all viewpoints by the late 1910s.
The Paris group criticized superstition and backward social customs.
They urged the application of modern science in every aspect of life,
thus launching a major theme among subsequent generations of
intellectuals. Three individuals formed the nucleus of the Paris group:
Zhang Jingjiang, Li Shizeng, and Wu Zhihui. Zhang managed his family’s
business importing European goods to China. Li, who studied biology,
started an enterprise to prepare bean curd (doufu) for sale. These
activities launched the group on a practical footing and provided
outlets for their evolving anarchist ideas. Wu joined them later and
wrote eloquently in their anarchist journal Xin shiji (The new century).
Begun in 1907, this journal emphasized the scientific basis of
anarchism, ridiculed superstition in Chinese life, and challenged the
Qing government’s authority.
Liu Sifu (1884–1915), who adopted the name Shifu in 1912, became China’s
most consistent anarchist. Liu’s evolution as an anarchist reflects all
the influences described above. He went to Japan to study in 1906 and
joined the Tongmeng Hui (Revolutionary Alliance). Following a failed
assassination attempt in May 1907, Liu studied the Paris group’s Xin
shiji and other journals during three years in prison and completed his
transition to theoretical anarchism. Essays written then also show Liu’s
attraction to the Buddhist ideal of the self-sacrificing bodhisattva,
which characterized his entire career.
After the Republic was established in early 1912, Shifu used only
pacifist means to propagate anarchism. He organized family and friends
into an anarchist commune in Guangzhou. The group launched Min sheng
(Voice of the people), which commented on social movements within China
and abroad and published translations of anarchists such as Kropotkin
and Emma Goldman. The group taught Esperanto, and in Min sheng Shifu
publicized the worldwide Esperanto movement, a great idealistic
community on the eve of World War I. Yuan Shikai’s crackdown in late
1913 abruptly ended Shifu’s activities in Guangzhou, and his group
relocated in Shanghai, where they continued to publish Min sheng
regularly despite declining funds. Shifu contracted tuberculosis, but as
a strict vegetarian inspired by Leo Tolstoy, he refused to eat meat to
gain strength; he died in spring 1915.
Shifu had broken with Sun Yat-sen’s concept of a new Chinese state. He
castigated Sun as a state socialist like Marx, anticipating the enmity
of Chinese anarchists to the Chinese Communists, who organized some
years later. Shifu stood as a powerful exemplar of anarchist principles,
but his idealism was difficult for less austere individuals. Members of
his group continued their anarchist mission as ordinary laborers in
Shanghai, organizing labor there and in Guangzhou. Some in the group
carried their influence as far as Singapore.
In France, meanwhile, the old Paris group of anarchists continued the
practical aspect of their work in a work-and-study program during and
after World War I. This assisted many young Chinese with sojourns in
Lyons or Paris for study-abroad experiences. Such major figures as Zhou
Enlai and Deng Xiaoping participated. Mao Zedong himself was strongly
attracted to anarchist ideas during the late 1910s and early 1920s
during the formative stage of his development. The ultimate choice of
Marxism reflected this generation’s acceptance of discipline and
authority as essential to making revolution.
Anarchists were prominent in the May Fourth incident in 1919, which gave
shape to the Communist revolution in China after World War I. Arif
Dirlik has shown the high degree of anarchists’ involvement in this
action, regarded by Chinese Communists as the springboard of their
movement. By the early 1920s, however, anarchism weakened in the face of
the Nationalist and Communist movements, both emphasizing military means
to advance national development. By the late 1920s members of the Paris
group of anarchists became senior advisors in Chiang Kai-shek’s
Guomindang (Nationalist Party), their opposition to Marxism taking
precedence over whatever else remained of their anarchist principles.
During this later period some anarchists emphasized free thought and
individual expression. A few remained creatively faithful to anarchist
principles. Chief among these was the novelist Ba Jin (Li Feigan), who
took his pen name from the Chinese form of the names of Mikhail Bakunin
and Peter Kropotkin. Ba Jin died in 2004 at the age of 100, a revered
symbol of the positive achievements of China’s revolutionary twentieth
century. His humanism reflected his anarchist principles.
The Communist leadership recognized the anarchist movement as it
undertook to evaluate the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969). Seeking
sources of the “ultraleftism” deemed responsible for that chaotic
decade, they commissioned efforts to collect materials on the earlier
anarchist movement. The compendia published as a result of those efforts
have proved indispensable for research on Chinese anarchism. But it is
not at all clear that anarchism played any role in that tragic decade,
the causes of which would seem to lie deep in China’s history and in the
nation’s tortured transition to a workable form of modernity.
Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991.
Krebs, Edward S. Shifu: Soul of Chinese Anarchism. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1998.
MĂĽller, Gotelind. China, Kropotkin, und der Anarchismus. Wiesbaden,
Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001.
Scalapino, Robert A., and George T. Yu. The Chinese Anarchist Movement.
Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of International
Studies, University of California, 1961.
Zarrow, Peter. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990.