Anarchism in China
Encyclopedia
The predominance in the late 19th century of the Nihilist movement
and anarchist communism
in Russia
, which borders China
, was a major source of anarchist influence on radical movements in China.
The use of assassination as a tool in the anti-Manchu
movement as promoted by groups like the Chinese Assassination Corps was similar to the widespread use of heroic self-sacrifice and assassination by Russian anti-czarist groups like The People's Will and pan-Slavic nationalists like The Black Hand.
Even though anarchism and nihilism are distinct and separate ideologies, at that time the popular press in Europe and China generally conflated the two. At the International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists
, anarchism was defined "as any act that used violent means to destroy the organization of society". This association with political violence promoted an early interest in anarchism among some Chinese radicals. Because of the lack of Chinese-language materials, however, this early influence was very limited.
and Japan
with the Chinese study abroad programs for the children of wealthy families that were established after the failed Boxer Rebellion
. While not accessible to the vast majority of the population, by 1906 these programs had attracted between five and six hundred students to Europe and about 10,000 to Japan. Japan, especially Tokyo
, was the most popular destination because of its geographic proximity to China, its relatively affordable cost, and certain natural affinities between the two cultures (for example, the Japanese language uses Chinese characters extensively, facilitating communication and livability). In Europe, Paris
was particularly popular because it was relatively cheap, the French government helped to subsidize the students, and because France was seen as the center of Western civilization
.
According to some accounts, there was also a conscious effort on the part of the Chinese government officials who ran the program to use it to get radical students out of the country, with the most radical students being sent to Europe and the more moderate students going to Japan. If this is the case, then that policy was to prove remarkably short-sighted as these foreign-educated students would use the methods and ideologies of European socialism
and anarchism
to completely transform Chinese society. It is interesting to note that in both locations of study, anarchism quickly became the most dominant of the western
ideologies adopted by the students. In 1906, within a few months of each other, two separate anarchist student groups would form, one in Tokyo and one in Paris. The different locations, and perhaps also the different inclinations of the students being sent to each location, would result in two very different kinds of anarchism.
and anarchism; Darwinism
and Social Darwinism
; and the classical Chinese philosophers
. While the Paris group was far more reluctant than their counterparts in Tokyo to equate the teachings of Lao Tzu or the ancient Well-field system
with the anarchist communism
they advocated, Li describes the group as consisting of young men who had received excellent educations in the Chinese classical tradition. He admits that the old thinking influenced them. The clear trend with the Paris group, however, was to dismiss and even actively oppose any association of anarchism with traditional culture.
, the Tokyo group rooted its anarchism in political traditions native to Asia
. In practical terms this meant the Paris group studied Esperanto
, advocated anarcho-syndicalism
, and drew heavily upon the works of Mikhail Bakunin
and Peter Kropotkin
. The Tokyo group advocated a peasant
-based society built around democratically run villages organized into a free federation
for mutual aid and defense. They based their ideology on a fusion of Taoism
, Buddhism
, and the Well Field System, and gave preference to Leo Tolstoy
over Kropotkin. Both groups also advocated assassination early on, perhaps an indicator of the lasting influences of nihilism, but by 1910 conversion to anarchism was typically accompanied by the renunciation of assassination as a tactic.
capitalist
democracy, it might be easier for them to make the transition to anarchism than it would be for the Europeans.
These differences, however, do not mean that the two groups did not cooperate. Because of the decentralised
political structure and emphasis on local economic and political self-determination
advocated by both groups, they were able to come to a tacit understanding that after the revolution both systems could peacefully coexist. The conflict was essentially one of values, priorities, and (by implication) methods for achieving the revolution which both advocated. In particular, the conflict over the what place, if any, traditional Chinese philosophies should play in influencing anarchist thoughts and actions. This was a major source of friction and debate between the two groups.
The tendency for the advocates of different anarchisms to disagree on issues but agree to cooperate is not unique to the Chinese anarchist experience. For this reason many political scientists describe anarchism as a movement of movements. The ideological diversity inherent in such a movement of movements has historically been one of its great strengths but has also repeatedly undermined attempts to shape it into a cohesive force for social change.
and in their advocacy of a social transformation. Although the European anarchist movement advocated social transformation, the Chinese anarchists stand out because of the primary importance they placed on the abolition of the old culture. European anarchists reserved some of their harshest critiques for Christianity
, seen as one of the three pillars of authoritarianism
, along with capitalism and the state
. Chinese anarchists declared all-out war against Confucian culture, which they saw as a form of social control roughly analogous to western Christianity in its hegemonic
penetration of society and proscription of social norms. As Chtu Min-I (one of the members of the Paris group) put it:
Over the course of the next twenty years, that emphasis on cultural transformation would be adopted by virtually all elements of the radical Chinese left. Its rhetoric, if not its substance, would eventually be used by Mao Zedong
to justify the Cultural Revolution
.
and nation-states.
that could stand up to the encroaching power of Western imperialism
. As one Nationalist reader wrote in a letter to Hsin Shih-chi, an anarchist newspaper published by the Paris group:
Nationalists also argued that only by building a popular front could the Nationalist movement defeat the Manchu
s and the Qing dynasties
, and that in the long run if anarchism was to have any chance to succeed it must necessarily be preceded by a Republican system that would make China secure.
One obvious question in hindsight is how the Chinese anarchists could expect a global spontaneous revolution to come about, and the answer is that the Paris group, as did many radicals of all stripes all over the globe at that time, believed in Revolution
as something akin to a force of nature. Within the context of their thinking, Revolution would come because it was obviously needed, and their role was simply to prepare people for it and help them see the obvious necessity of social change. This perspective provides important insight into the fundamentally evolutionary nature of the movement, and explains the movement’s focus on education instead of organization building.
The actual result of such collaboration was that the anarchists, not the Nationalists, compromised their positions since doing so allowed them to gain access to power positions in the Nationalist government that they theoretically opposed. That same year Jing Meijiu and Zhang Ji (another anarchist affiliated with the Tokyo group) would both be elected to the Republican parliament. Shifu and the Guangzhou group declared that by doing so they were traitors to the cause and proved their lack of commitment to the movement, but both men continued to call themselves anarchists and were active in promoting anarchism clear up to the late 1920s.
As a counter-point to such collaboration, however, there is evidence that many more anarchists could have joined the new Nationalist government and gained positions of power and privilege but refused to do so because doing so would have violated their principles. As Scalapino and Yu put it “there can be little doubt that many refused to play the kind of political role that was so desperately needed in a period when trained personnel were extremely scarce compared to the tasks at hand.”
argues that these problems were indicative of lingering ambiguity in the definition of anarchism. More accurately, the issue was one of strategy. These men considered themselves anarchists because they were working for the long-term abolition of capitalism, the state, and coercive authority in general. In their vision, anarchism was a very long-term goal and not something they expected to see realized in their lifetimes. Chiang, for instance, expected that it would take 3,000 years to bring about the revolution they dreamed of.
Understanding that, it becomes easier to see why anarchists would be tempted to campaign for and hold political office or collaborate with sympathetic elements in the government, since doing so would help them achieve their long term goals. This attitude is clearly distinct from the revolutionary anarchism of Kropotkin and Bakunin, or even of the Guangzhou group, which aimed for immediate revolution and the creation of an anarchist society in the immediate future.
This tendency to work for long-term revolution and focus on philosophy and theory instead of concrete organizing by some of the wealthier participants in the movement might have been rooted in class backgrounds. The split between wealthier philosophical anarchists, Marxists, or socialists, and working class revolutionaries can be a common feature of revolutionary movements.
or grass roots organizing
(the other two forms of activism which they condoned in theory).
To these ends the Paris group would set up a variety of student-run businesses, including a tofu
factory, to fund the studies of radical students from China who wanted an education abroad. The students would come to work part time and study part time, thus gaining a European education for a fraction of what it would cost otherwise; and in the process gaining first-hand experience on what it might mean to live, work, and study in an anarchist society. This study-abroad program would play a critical role in infusing anarchist language and ideas into the broader nationalist and revolutionary movements as hundreds of students participated in the program. The approach was eminently pragmatic in that it served a real need for students who wanted to study abroad but lacked the financial resources to do so, and it demonstrated that anarchist organizational models based on mutual aid and cooperation were viable alternatives to profit-driven capitalist ventures.
Despite the occasional friction, the overwhelming tendency of both the Paris and the Tokyo groups was to assist the nationalist cause. In fact, several of the Paris groups members were early members of the Kuomintang
and became close friends of Sun Yet-Sen. On at least two occasions Sun asked for and received “considerable” economic assistance from Chang Ching-Chiang, who was associated with the Paris group.
This collaboration was understandable given the emphasis by both the anarchists and the nationalists on the importance of Revolutionaries working together, and because of the extreme eclecticism of Sun Yat-Sen who stated that “the end goal of the three peoples principles [was] communism and anarchism.” It may also explain the willingness of the Paris group to accept funding from the Nationalist government to expand their programs during World War I
some years later.
.
against Asian
and Mexican
workers, and when Emma Goldman
came to speak in San Francisco in the 1890s there were several thousand Chinese workers in attendance. Additionally, from 1908 on, many thousands of Chinese workers in North America - particularly those working in California and the Pacific North-West - became members of the Industrial Union
, the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW). The Wobblies (as IWW members were called) were the first American labor union to oppose the institution of White supremacy
in an organized and deliberate fashion and to actively recruit Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and migratory workers. Their defense of Chinese immigrants who were being subjected to systematic harassment and discrimination won them a large base of membership among Chinese workers, and widespread support among the Chinese community in North America.
The influence of Chinese IWW members returning to China has gone largely unstudied, but the strong anarchist participation in the Chinese union movement and the willing reception that they met may owe something to this earlier relationship between Chinese workers and anarchist Revolutionaries.
The main source of conflict came because the CSS wanted to retain market relations but supplement them with a broad social safety net, since they felt that without any incentive mechanism people would not produce anything and the society would collapse. Other sources of friction had to do with the CSS’s focus on building the revolution in China first, and using elected office as a tool to do so – both significant deviations from classical anarchism. Jiang did not call himself an anarchist, so his party was generally perceived as being outside the movement, despite the similarities. In 1912 Jiang's party split into two factions, the pure socialists, led by the anarchist Buddhist monk Tai Xu, and the remains of the party led by Jiang.
Liu Shifu
, who would go on to be one of the most significant figures in the anarchist movement in mainland China founded a group in Guangzhou
later that same year, with an explicitly anarchist-communist platform.
The main base of anarchist activity in mainland China during this phase was in Guangzhou, and the Paris and Tokyo groups continued to have significant influence. The Pure Socialists were also strongly involved, but because they were as much Buddhists as they were anarchists, were more concerned with promoting virtue and less focused on immediate revolution. By this time the Paris group had rendered their anarchism into an extremely abstract philosophy that was more concerned with the place of the individual in society than with the day-to-day realities of working people. This is perhaps not surprising given the relatively wealthy backgrounds of most of the Paris group, but it would lead to increased friction between them and their more class-struggle oriented comrades in Guangzhou.
The Guangzhou group is usually described as being “led” by Liu Shifu, and this is generally accurate insofar as we understand it as leadership by example since he was never granted any formal position or coercive authority by the group. Their most significant contributions at this stage were the foundation of “an alliance between intellectuals and workers” and their propaganda
work which set out to differentiate anarchism from all the other socialisms that were gaining in popularity; and in so doing crystallized for the first time exactly what anarchism was.
Where the Paris group had preferred to outline their ideal in terms of negative freedoms
, i.e., freedom from coercion, freedom from tradition, etc.; the Guangzhou group used positive assertions of rights and workers, women, peasants, and other oppressed groups to outline their vision of an anarchist society. Noticeably absent was any mention of ethnic minorities, since a basic part of their platform was the elimination of ethnic, racial, and national identities in favor of an internationalist
identity that placed primary importance on loyalty to humanity as a whole, instead of to ones ethnic or racial group.
It is important to recognize that this position was formulated in response to the primacy placed on ethnicity by the Anti-Manchu movement, which sought to assert the illegitimacy of the Qing dynasty
based in part on the fact that its members were part of an ethnic minority out of touch with the Han majority, a position which anarchists of all four major groups decried as racist
and unbefitting a movement that claimed to be working for liberation. Their position, therefore, was that ethnicity-based organizing promoted Racism, and had no place in a Revolution that sought liberation for all of humanity.
While consistent with the stance of the global anarchist movement at the time, this position elicits mixed responses from modern anarchists, many of whom see revolutionary potential in the struggles of oppressed ethnic and racial groups. In terms of the Revolutionary project in China, Ward Churchill cites the declarations of support for ethnic self-determination
for China’s ethnic minorities which the communist movement made as key to winning their movement the support of those groups. This was to prove decisive during the later civil war between the Communist Party of China
and Chinese Nationalism.
In practical terms, the work of the movement at this stage was propaganda
and organizing. Guangzhou anarchists founded a newspaper called Peoples Voice and began organizing workers, while in Taiyuan (Taiwan
), Jing Meijiu - who had converted to anarchism as part of the Tokyo group - founded an explicitly anarchafeminist worker-run factory/school to serve as a tool to help women simultaneously earn a living and receive an education.
The focus of that society, in keeping with the tendencies of the Paris group, was as much on virtuous and moral personal behavior as it was on Revolutionary praxis. Their rules for membership delineated different levels of commitment and discouraged members from eating meat and visiting prostitutes; and concretely forbade them from riding in Sedan chairs, taking concubines, or holding public office.
While it may be tempting to see such rules as superfluous, the evidence suggests we should take them seriously, since most of the anarchist organizations in China in this period included similar rules for their members. The goal was to create a cadre of Revolutionaries who would lead by example and help create a model for a new revolutionary culture. There are obvious parallels here to the traditional obligation for people involved in public life to set an example and promote virtue as well.
While a small number of well-known anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin
, supported the French during World War I
because they saw France as more progressive than Germany and feared a German victory would undermine their Revolutionary activity in France, this was definitely a minority position in terms of the global movement.
The Paris group was nothing if not pragmatic, and since the Chinese workers were going to come one way or another, they took advantage of the situation and used it as an opportunity to meet their enemies short term needs while fulfilling their long-term goal of educating the workers. The fact that they were able to get government funding for an education program with the goal of training young people and workers in how to become effective revolutionaries is a vindication of their tactics.
A major liability that the movement had picked up along the way, however, was the extreme diffusion of anarchist idea to the point where it was becoming difficult to define exactly who was and who was not an anarchist. Liu Shifu set out to remedy that situation in a series of articles in Peoples Voice, which attacked Jiang Kanghu, Sun Yet-Sen, and the Pure Socialists.
The debates that ensued served for the first time to really crystallize what exactly was meant by anarchism in the broad sense. These articles were generally friendly in tone. The goal was to clearly differentiate between the different schools of thought that were available at that time. The letters directed at Sun Yet Sen and the Nationalists were aimed at exposing the ambiguities of their use of the word “socialism” to describe their goals, which were clearly not socialist according to any contemporary definition. The attacks on Jiang and the CSS sought to portray their vision of revolution and socialism as too narrow because it was focused on a single country, and to oppose their retention of market relations as part of their platform. The attack on the Pure Socialists was by far the mildest, with the main criticism being that if they were anarchists then they should call themselves anarchists and not socialists. Peoples Voice invited and printed responses from all parties, and their goal seems to have been the creation of an open and respectful debate among friends.
For the next five years the movement would grow slowly but steadily as each of the disparate groups continued their propaganda, education, and organizing projects. In 1915 the anarchist arguments for a Social Revolution that had originated a decade earlier with the original Paris group would find broader acceptance in the New Culture Movement
which was pioneered by a small group of intellectuals in Beijing
but spread to the rest of the county over the next four years, until it merged into the May Fourth movement
.
The New Culture Movement was not anarchist, but in its glorification of science and extreme disdain for Confucianism
and traditional culture it extended critiques that had originated with the Paris group, and the proliferationof anarchist thought during this period can be seen as a confirmation of the influence anarchists had on the movement from its foundation on. The participants saw it as a conscious attempt to create a Chinese renaissance
, and consciously sought to create and live the new culture that they espoused.
had consolidated their power, they immediately sought to expand their sphere of influence. Their interpretation of Karl Marx
’s prediction that the revolution would be global was that – as the vanguard – it was their role to use the resources at their disposal to instigate and support Bolshevik-style revolutions all over the world. In keeping with Vladimir Lenin
’s doctrine on imperialism
, their focus was on the undeveloped nations, because they believed that once those nations had thrown off imperialism, Western capitalism – deprived of the material support and raw materials it required – would collapse. They also specifically targeted countries with already established revolutionary movements, and China clearly qualified.
In 1919 the anarchists played a significant role in the May 4th Movement which swept the country. It was at this time that the first Bolsheviks started organising in China and began contacting anarchist groups for aid and support. The anarchists, mistaking the Bolshevicks for allies & unaware of how the Bolsheviks had subordinated the soviets to their party apparatus, helped them set up communist study groups – many of which were originally majority anarchist – and introduced the Bolsheviks into the Chinese labor and student movements.
(CPC), the anarchist movement almost immediately began to lose ground. Several reasons for this have been suggested. First, the anarchists lacked the ability to coordinate activities across regions. Second, there was a growing awareness that the Bolsheviks were Marxists, not anarchists – which caused an immediate loss of prestige for the anarchists who had previously claimed the success of the Russian Revolution
for their own. Third, and perhaps most critical, is the evolutionary nature of large sections of the movement which did not expect to see their goals met any time in the even remotely near future; this appealed less to workers who wanted immediate change. Bolshevism and the CPC platform were immediately attractive to working people because they offered the promise of change in the immediate future, or even present.
When the CPC entered into the First United Front
with the Kuomintang
against the warlord
s in 1924, they gained even broader access to the labor movement, and to mass movements in general. In a period of two years, the CPC grew from a membership of only a few hundred to over 50,000 through their support and assimilation of the various mass movements.
With increased membership, the CPC no longer felt the need to conceal their disdain for the anarchist movement and began a series of attacks against anarchism and anarchists in its internal publications. The purpose of these attacks was to discredit their opposition, and to bring the ideology of their newly-acquired mass base into line. This is particularly critical since virtually all of the CPC’s leadership for the next fifty years would be drawn from people who had started as anarchists. The fact that so many radicals left the anarchist movement and joined the CPC is indicative of the limitations of Chinese anarchism during this period.
As the influence of the CPC grew, their attacks on anarchism became more overt and less friendly. Where the first debates between Ou Shenbai and Chen Duxiu
, his former teacher, had been friendly, later debates became actively hostile. As the anarchist movement rapidly shrank into insignificance, the comrades became increasingly desperate.
A minority of anarchists, mostly from the Paris group, had been involved in the Kuomintang almost from its founding; but the majority of anarchists, in keeping with their stated principles against involvement in the exercise of coercive authority, had declined to participate in this alliance. The "Diligent Work and Frugal Study" program was one product of this collaboration of the anarchists with nationalists. When the Kuomintang purged the CPC from its ranks in 1927, the small minority of anarchists who had long participated in it urged their younger comrades to join the movement and utilize the Nationalist movement as a vehicle to defeat the Communists and realise anarchism. This drew immediate opposition from those anarchist groups that were still functioning. But even those critical of this opportunism, however, eventually joined in – if only because doing so seemed to be the only remaining chance to make their movement relevant again and reclaim its lost momentum.
The result of this last collaboration was the creation of China's first Labor University, which was intended to be a domestic version of the Paris groups educational program and sought to create a new generation of Labor Intellectuals who would finally overcome the gap between "those who work with their hands” and “those who work with their minds." The university would only function for a very few years before the Nationalist government decided they the project was to subversive to allow it too continue and pulled funding.
It had been acceptable for the anarchists to use government funding to promote anarchism as long as they did so in France, but when they began to do so at home, their "allies" were less than pleased. When the KMT initiated a second wave of repression
against the few remaining mass movements, anarchists left the organization en masse and were forced underground as hostilities between the KMT and CPC – both of whom were hostile towards anti-authoritarians – escalated.
. However, as an underground resistance movement anarchism remains influential. Libertarian socialist
and Anarchist communist
currents have been particularly strong in the anti-dictatorship movement and in China's underground labor movement. The best known of these in the Western world
is the Autonomous Beijing group, one of several groups responsible for organizing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
.
Nihilist movement
The Nihilist movement was a Russian movement in the 1860s which rejected all authorities. It is derived from the Latin word "nihil", which means "nothing"...
and anarchist communism
Anarchist communism
Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, which borders China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, was a major source of anarchist influence on radical movements in China.
The use of assassination as a tool in the anti-Manchu
Manchu
The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which...
movement as promoted by groups like the Chinese Assassination Corps was similar to the widespread use of heroic self-sacrifice and assassination by Russian anti-czarist groups like The People's Will and pan-Slavic nationalists like The Black Hand.
Even though anarchism and nihilism are distinct and separate ideologies, at that time the popular press in Europe and China generally conflated the two. At the International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists
International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists
The International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense Against Anarchists was held between November 24 and December 21, 1898 following the assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria by Luigi Lucheni on the promenade of Lake Geneva on September 10, 1898. Fifty-four delegates attended from 21...
, anarchism was defined "as any act that used violent means to destroy the organization of society". This association with political violence promoted an early interest in anarchism among some Chinese radicals. Because of the lack of Chinese-language materials, however, this early influence was very limited.
Chinese student movements
The first explicitly and recognizably anarchist presence originated in FranceFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
with the Chinese study abroad programs for the children of wealthy families that were established after the failed Boxer Rebellion
Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion, also called the Boxer Uprising by some historians or the Righteous Harmony Society Movement in northern China, was a proto-nationalist movement by the "Righteous Harmony Society" , or "Righteous Fists of Harmony" or "Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists" , in China between...
. While not accessible to the vast majority of the population, by 1906 these programs had attracted between five and six hundred students to Europe and about 10,000 to Japan. Japan, especially Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
, was the most popular destination because of its geographic proximity to China, its relatively affordable cost, and certain natural affinities between the two cultures (for example, the Japanese language uses Chinese characters extensively, facilitating communication and livability). In Europe, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
was particularly popular because it was relatively cheap, the French government helped to subsidize the students, and because France was seen as the center of Western civilization
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
.
According to some accounts, there was also a conscious effort on the part of the Chinese government officials who ran the program to use it to get radical students out of the country, with the most radical students being sent to Europe and the more moderate students going to Japan. If this is the case, then that policy was to prove remarkably short-sighted as these foreign-educated students would use the methods and ideologies of European socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
and anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
to completely transform Chinese society. It is interesting to note that in both locations of study, anarchism quickly became the most dominant of the western
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
ideologies adopted by the students. In 1906, within a few months of each other, two separate anarchist student groups would form, one in Tokyo and one in Paris. The different locations, and perhaps also the different inclinations of the students being sent to each location, would result in two very different kinds of anarchism.
Paris group
According to Li Shih-tseng, who was a participant in the movement, the influences of the Paris group could be divided into 3 main fields: radical libertarianismLibertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
and anarchism; Darwinism
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
and Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
; and the classical Chinese philosophers
Chinese philosophy
Chinese philosophy is philosophy written in the Chinese tradition of thought. The majority of traditional Chinese philosophy originates in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States era, during a period known as the "Hundred Schools of Thought", which was characterized by significant intellectual and...
. While the Paris group was far more reluctant than their counterparts in Tokyo to equate the teachings of Lao Tzu or the ancient Well-field system
Well-field system
The well-field system was a Chinese land distribution method existing between the ninth century BCE to around the end of the Warring States Period...
with the anarchist communism
Anarchist communism
Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
they advocated, Li describes the group as consisting of young men who had received excellent educations in the Chinese classical tradition. He admits that the old thinking influenced them. The clear trend with the Paris group, however, was to dismiss and even actively oppose any association of anarchism with traditional culture.
Tokyo group
The Tokyo group drew on the same influences but in a different order of preference. While the Paris group was enamored of western science and western civilizationWestern culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
, the Tokyo group rooted its anarchism in political traditions native to Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
. In practical terms this meant the Paris group studied Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
, advocated anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism
Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. The word syndicalism comes from the French word syndicat which means trade union , from the Latin word syndicus which in turn comes from the Greek word σύνδικος which means caretaker of an issue...
, and drew heavily upon the works of Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...
and Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin
Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...
. The Tokyo group advocated a peasant
Peasant
A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...
-based society built around democratically run villages organized into a free federation
Federation
A federation , also known as a federal state, is a type of sovereign state characterized by a union of partially self-governing states or regions united by a central government...
for mutual aid and defense. They based their ideology on a fusion of Taoism
Taoism
Taoism refers to a philosophical or religious tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony with the Tao , which is the mechanism of everything that exists...
, Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
, and the Well Field System, and gave preference to Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
over Kropotkin. Both groups also advocated assassination early on, perhaps an indicator of the lasting influences of nihilism, but by 1910 conversion to anarchism was typically accompanied by the renunciation of assassination as a tactic.
Cooperation and differences
In the early 20th century the anarchist movement was largely a western movement and the Chinese students studying in Paris were enthusiastically supportive of anarchism because they saw it as the most forward-thinking of all the western ideologies, and thus the furthest removed from what they perceived as a Chinese culture moribund by tradition. This position would repeatedly place them at odds with the Tokyo group who saw much that was good in traditional culture, and even argued that because China had not embraced the illusion of liberalLiberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
democracy, it might be easier for them to make the transition to anarchism than it would be for the Europeans.
These differences, however, do not mean that the two groups did not cooperate. Because of the decentralised
Décentralisation
Décentralisation is a french word for both a policy concept in French politics from 1968-1990, and a term employed to describe the results of observations of the evolution of spatial economic and institutional organization of France....
political structure and emphasis on local economic and political self-determination
Self-determination
Self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference...
advocated by both groups, they were able to come to a tacit understanding that after the revolution both systems could peacefully coexist. The conflict was essentially one of values, priorities, and (by implication) methods for achieving the revolution which both advocated. In particular, the conflict over the what place, if any, traditional Chinese philosophies should play in influencing anarchist thoughts and actions. This was a major source of friction and debate between the two groups.
The tendency for the advocates of different anarchisms to disagree on issues but agree to cooperate is not unique to the Chinese anarchist experience. For this reason many political scientists describe anarchism as a movement of movements. The ideological diversity inherent in such a movement of movements has historically been one of its great strengths but has also repeatedly undermined attempts to shape it into a cohesive force for social change.
Comparison with European anarchists
The Paris and Tokyo groups were unanimous in their condemnation of ConfucianismConfucianism
Confucianism is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius . Confucianism originated as an "ethical-sociopolitical teaching" during the Spring and Autumn Period, but later developed metaphysical and cosmological elements in the Han...
and in their advocacy of a social transformation. Although the European anarchist movement advocated social transformation, the Chinese anarchists stand out because of the primary importance they placed on the abolition of the old culture. European anarchists reserved some of their harshest critiques for Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, seen as one of the three pillars of authoritarianism
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy...
, along with capitalism and the state
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
. Chinese anarchists declared all-out war against Confucian culture, which they saw as a form of social control roughly analogous to western Christianity in its hegemonic
Hegemony
Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...
penetration of society and proscription of social norms. As Chtu Min-I (one of the members of the Paris group) put it:
The Chinese seem to be the greatest lovers of things ancient, so much so that their minds have been wholly bound by traditional customs and thus they have become enslaved by the ancients.
Over the course of the next twenty years, that emphasis on cultural transformation would be adopted by virtually all elements of the radical Chinese left. Its rhetoric, if not its substance, would eventually be used by Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
to justify the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
.
Anarchism and nationalism
In the first phase of the movement, anarchists of both schools were generally participants in the Nationalist movement, even though in theory they repudiated nationalismNationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and nation-states.
Nationalist attacks
The first attacks on the growing anarchist movement in China were to come from anti-imperalist nationalists who saw anarchism as a threat to their effort to build a strong, unified, centralized modern nationNation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
that could stand up to the encroaching power of Western imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
. As one Nationalist reader wrote in a letter to Hsin Shih-chi, an anarchist newspaper published by the Paris group:
If you people know only how to cry emptily that ‘We want no government, no soldiers, no national boundaries, and no State’ and that you are for universal harmony, justice, freedom, and equality, I fear that those who know only brute force and not justice will gather their armies to divide up our land and our people.
Nationalists also argued that only by building a popular front could the Nationalist movement defeat the Manchu
Manchu
The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which...
s and the Qing dynasties
Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....
, and that in the long run if anarchism was to have any chance to succeed it must necessarily be preceded by a Republican system that would make China secure.
Anarchist response
The response of the Hsin Shi-Chi editors, written by Li Shih-tseng, was threefold. First, the revolution that the anarchists advocated would be global, simultaneous, decentralized, and spontaneous. Thus, foreign imperialists would be too occupied with the revolutions in their home countries to bother invading or harassing China. Secondly, they argued that having a strong centralized coercive government had not prevented China's enemies from attacking her in the past anyway. Finally, there was the moral point that in the long run, tyranny is tyranny, regardless of whether it is native or foreign. Therefore, the only logical approach for people who want freedom must be to oppose all authority be it Manchu, Han, foreign, or native.One obvious question in hindsight is how the Chinese anarchists could expect a global spontaneous revolution to come about, and the answer is that the Paris group, as did many radicals of all stripes all over the globe at that time, believed in Revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
as something akin to a force of nature. Within the context of their thinking, Revolution would come because it was obviously needed, and their role was simply to prepare people for it and help them see the obvious necessity of social change. This perspective provides important insight into the fundamentally evolutionary nature of the movement, and explains the movement’s focus on education instead of organization building.
Results of collaboration
The involvement of prominent Nationalist figures indicates the role of personal relationships in the Paris groups’ organizing. The individuals who founded that group had come out of the Nationalist movement and remained strongly tied to it by a network of close personal friendships. Therefore, it was natural for them to attempt to include their friends in their organizing in the hopes of winning those friends (and the influence they possessed) over to the anarchist cause.The actual result of such collaboration was that the anarchists, not the Nationalists, compromised their positions since doing so allowed them to gain access to power positions in the Nationalist government that they theoretically opposed. That same year Jing Meijiu and Zhang Ji (another anarchist affiliated with the Tokyo group) would both be elected to the Republican parliament. Shifu and the Guangzhou group declared that by doing so they were traitors to the cause and proved their lack of commitment to the movement, but both men continued to call themselves anarchists and were active in promoting anarchism clear up to the late 1920s.
As a counter-point to such collaboration, however, there is evidence that many more anarchists could have joined the new Nationalist government and gained positions of power and privilege but refused to do so because doing so would have violated their principles. As Scalapino and Yu put it “there can be little doubt that many refused to play the kind of political role that was so desperately needed in a period when trained personnel were extremely scarce compared to the tasks at hand.”
Strategic issues
Arif DirlikArif Dirlik
Arif Dirlik is a historian most known for his works about 20th century Chinese history. Dirlik received a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in History at the University of Rochester in 1973.From 1971 until 2001 he stayed as a member of the History faculty...
argues that these problems were indicative of lingering ambiguity in the definition of anarchism. More accurately, the issue was one of strategy. These men considered themselves anarchists because they were working for the long-term abolition of capitalism, the state, and coercive authority in general. In their vision, anarchism was a very long-term goal and not something they expected to see realized in their lifetimes. Chiang, for instance, expected that it would take 3,000 years to bring about the revolution they dreamed of.
Understanding that, it becomes easier to see why anarchists would be tempted to campaign for and hold political office or collaborate with sympathetic elements in the government, since doing so would help them achieve their long term goals. This attitude is clearly distinct from the revolutionary anarchism of Kropotkin and Bakunin, or even of the Guangzhou group, which aimed for immediate revolution and the creation of an anarchist society in the immediate future.
This tendency to work for long-term revolution and focus on philosophy and theory instead of concrete organizing by some of the wealthier participants in the movement might have been rooted in class backgrounds. The split between wealthier philosophical anarchists, Marxists, or socialists, and working class revolutionaries can be a common feature of revolutionary movements.
Early growth of anarchism
It was for this reason that the Paris group would declare that education was the most important activity revolutionaries could be involved in, and that only through educating the people could anarchism be achieved. [See for example Wu Zhihui: "Education as Revolution," The New Era, September 1908] Accordingly, they geared their activities towards education instead of assassinationAssassination
To carry out an assassination is "to murder by a sudden and/or secret attack, often for political reasons." Alternatively, assassination may be defined as "the act of deliberately killing someone, especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons."An assassination may be...
or grass roots organizing
Grassroots democracy
Grassroots democracy is a tendency towards designing political processes where as much decision-making authority as practical is shifted to the organization's lowest geographic level of organization: principle of subsidiarity....
(the other two forms of activism which they condoned in theory).
To these ends the Paris group would set up a variety of student-run businesses, including a tofu
Tofu
is a food made by coagulating soy milk and then pressing the resulting curds into soft white blocks. It is part of East Asian and Southeast Asian cuisine such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and others. There are many different varieties of tofu, including fresh tofu and tofu...
factory, to fund the studies of radical students from China who wanted an education abroad. The students would come to work part time and study part time, thus gaining a European education for a fraction of what it would cost otherwise; and in the process gaining first-hand experience on what it might mean to live, work, and study in an anarchist society. This study-abroad program would play a critical role in infusing anarchist language and ideas into the broader nationalist and revolutionary movements as hundreds of students participated in the program. The approach was eminently pragmatic in that it served a real need for students who wanted to study abroad but lacked the financial resources to do so, and it demonstrated that anarchist organizational models based on mutual aid and cooperation were viable alternatives to profit-driven capitalist ventures.
Despite the occasional friction, the overwhelming tendency of both the Paris and the Tokyo groups was to assist the nationalist cause. In fact, several of the Paris groups members were early members of the Kuomintang
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
and became close friends of Sun Yet-Sen. On at least two occasions Sun asked for and received “considerable” economic assistance from Chang Ching-Chiang, who was associated with the Paris group.
This collaboration was understandable given the emphasis by both the anarchists and the nationalists on the importance of Revolutionaries working together, and because of the extreme eclecticism of Sun Yat-Sen who stated that “the end goal of the three peoples principles [was] communism and anarchism.” It may also explain the willingness of the Paris group to accept funding from the Nationalist government to expand their programs during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
some years later.
Anarchism as a mass movement
By 1911 anarchism had become the driving force behind popular mobilization and had moved beyond its initial association with relatively wealthy students studying abroad to become a genuine revolutionary movement among the people as a whole. There is some evidence that the grassroots workers movement which was developing at this time enjoyed a secondary influx of anarchist ideals as people who had been working in the United States were forced to return to China following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This act severely limited (but did not eliminate) the flow of Chinese workers to and from the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
Influence of U.S. anarchists
In the United States, anarchists had been almost alone in the labor movement in explicitly opposing racismRacism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
against Asian
Asian people
Asian people or Asiatic people is a term with multiple meanings that refers to people who descend from a portion of Asia's population.- Central Asia :...
and Mexican
Mexican people
Mexican people refers to all persons from Mexico, a multiethnic country in North America, and/or who identify with the Mexican cultural and/or national identity....
workers, and when Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....
came to speak in San Francisco in the 1890s there were several thousand Chinese workers in attendance. Additionally, from 1908 on, many thousands of Chinese workers in North America - particularly those working in California and the Pacific North-West - became members of the Industrial Union
Industrial unionism
Industrial unionism is a labor union organizing method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union—regardless of skill or trade—thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations...
, the Industrial Workers of the World
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
(IWW). The Wobblies (as IWW members were called) were the first American labor union to oppose the institution of White supremacy
White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...
in an organized and deliberate fashion and to actively recruit Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and migratory workers. Their defense of Chinese immigrants who were being subjected to systematic harassment and discrimination won them a large base of membership among Chinese workers, and widespread support among the Chinese community in North America.
The influence of Chinese IWW members returning to China has gone largely unstudied, but the strong anarchist participation in the Chinese union movement and the willing reception that they met may owe something to this earlier relationship between Chinese workers and anarchist Revolutionaries.
Nationalist revolution of 1911
Following the Nationalist revolution of 1911 and the victory of the Revolutionary Alliance, which counted several prominent anarchists as movement elders, anarchists throughout China had a bit more room to engage in organizing. At the same time, Nationalist rule was by no means a guarantee of freedom to organize for antiauthoritarians, and government persecution was ongoing. With Nationalist goals of overthrowing the Manchu Qing dynasty having been achieved, the main ideological opposition to anarchism came from self-described Socialists, including the Chinese Socialist Society (CSS) and the Left wing of the nationalist movement which – following Sun Yet-Sen’s lead – called itself socialist. Jiang Kanghu, who founded the Chinese Socialist Society in 1911, had been a contributor to the New Era (one of the publications of the Paris Group), and included the abolition of the state, the traditional family structure, and Confucian culture as planks of his parties’ platform.The main source of conflict came because the CSS wanted to retain market relations but supplement them with a broad social safety net, since they felt that without any incentive mechanism people would not produce anything and the society would collapse. Other sources of friction had to do with the CSS’s focus on building the revolution in China first, and using elected office as a tool to do so – both significant deviations from classical anarchism. Jiang did not call himself an anarchist, so his party was generally perceived as being outside the movement, despite the similarities. In 1912 Jiang's party split into two factions, the pure socialists, led by the anarchist Buddhist monk Tai Xu, and the remains of the party led by Jiang.
Liu Shifu
Liu Shifu
Liu Shifu was an influential figure in the Chinese revolutionary movement in the early twentieth century, and in the Chinese Anarchist movement in particular...
, who would go on to be one of the most significant figures in the anarchist movement in mainland China founded a group in Guangzhou
Guangzhou
Guangzhou , known historically as Canton or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of the Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. Located in southern China on the Pearl River, about north-northwest of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a key national transportation hub and trading port...
later that same year, with an explicitly anarchist-communist platform.
Pure Socialist
The Pure Socialists revised platform included the complete abolition of property and an anarchist-communist economic system. Shifu criticized them for retaining the name “Socialist” but their platform was clearly anarchist so the two groups generally considered each other comrades. The emphasis on the importance of the Peasant struggle, which had been pioneered earlier by the Tokyo group, would also become a major subject of discussion and organizing among Chinese anarchists from both the Pure Socialists and the Guangzhou group in this period. It was anarchists who first pointed to the crucial role that the peasants must play in any serious revolutionary attempt in China, and anarchists were the first to engage in any serious attempts to organize the Peasants.Guangzhou group
The Guangzhou group is usually described as being “led” by Liu Shifu, and this is generally accurate insofar as we understand it as leadership by example since he was never granted any formal position or coercive authority by the group. Their most significant contributions at this stage were the foundation of “an alliance between intellectuals and workers” and their propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
work which set out to differentiate anarchism from all the other socialisms that were gaining in popularity; and in so doing crystallized for the first time exactly what anarchism was.
Where the Paris group had preferred to outline their ideal in terms of negative freedoms
Negative liberty
Negative liberty is defined as freedom from interference by other people, and is set in contrast to positive liberty, which is defined as an individual's freedom from inhibitions of the social structure within the society such as classism, sexism or racism and is primarily concerned with the...
, i.e., freedom from coercion, freedom from tradition, etc.; the Guangzhou group used positive assertions of rights and workers, women, peasants, and other oppressed groups to outline their vision of an anarchist society. Noticeably absent was any mention of ethnic minorities, since a basic part of their platform was the elimination of ethnic, racial, and national identities in favor of an internationalist
Internationalism (politics)
Internationalism is a political movement which advocates a greater economic and political cooperation among nations for the theoretical benefit of all...
identity that placed primary importance on loyalty to humanity as a whole, instead of to ones ethnic or racial group.
It is important to recognize that this position was formulated in response to the primacy placed on ethnicity by the Anti-Manchu movement, which sought to assert the illegitimacy of the Qing dynasty
Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....
based in part on the fact that its members were part of an ethnic minority out of touch with the Han majority, a position which anarchists of all four major groups decried as racist
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and unbefitting a movement that claimed to be working for liberation. Their position, therefore, was that ethnicity-based organizing promoted Racism, and had no place in a Revolution that sought liberation for all of humanity.
While consistent with the stance of the global anarchist movement at the time, this position elicits mixed responses from modern anarchists, many of whom see revolutionary potential in the struggles of oppressed ethnic and racial groups. In terms of the Revolutionary project in China, Ward Churchill cites the declarations of support for ethnic self-determination
Self-determination
Self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference...
for China’s ethnic minorities which the communist movement made as key to winning their movement the support of those groups. This was to prove decisive during the later civil war between the Communist Party of China
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
and Chinese Nationalism.
In practical terms, the work of the movement at this stage was propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
and organizing. Guangzhou anarchists founded a newspaper called Peoples Voice and began organizing workers, while in Taiyuan (Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
), Jing Meijiu - who had converted to anarchism as part of the Tokyo group - founded an explicitly anarchafeminist worker-run factory/school to serve as a tool to help women simultaneously earn a living and receive an education.
Paris group influence
The similarity to the Paris groups Diligent Work and Frugal Study program is obvious. In 1912, members of the Paris group that had returned to China established the “Promote Virtue Society,” whose leadership included prominent anarchists like Li Shezeng and Nationalists like Wang Jiangwei.The focus of that society, in keeping with the tendencies of the Paris group, was as much on virtuous and moral personal behavior as it was on Revolutionary praxis. Their rules for membership delineated different levels of commitment and discouraged members from eating meat and visiting prostitutes; and concretely forbade them from riding in Sedan chairs, taking concubines, or holding public office.
While it may be tempting to see such rules as superfluous, the evidence suggests we should take them seriously, since most of the anarchist organizations in China in this period included similar rules for their members. The goal was to create a cadre of Revolutionaries who would lead by example and help create a model for a new revolutionary culture. There are obvious parallels here to the traditional obligation for people involved in public life to set an example and promote virtue as well.
French need for laborers
Only a few years later, during World War I, the Paris group would take advantage of the French Governments need for laborers to gain funding from the French and Chinese governments to expand their work-study movement to include Chinese workers. The students continued to come, but part of their program of education now included holding classes and educating the thousands of Chinese workers supplementing the French war effort. In so doing they aided one colonialist capitalist power (albeit a republic) in its self-defense against another imperialist capitalist power.While a small number of well-known anarchists, including Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin
Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, economist, geographer, author and one of the world's foremost anarcho-communists. Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between...
, supported the French during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
because they saw France as more progressive than Germany and feared a German victory would undermine their Revolutionary activity in France, this was definitely a minority position in terms of the global movement.
The Paris group was nothing if not pragmatic, and since the Chinese workers were going to come one way or another, they took advantage of the situation and used it as an opportunity to meet their enemies short term needs while fulfilling their long-term goal of educating the workers. The fact that they were able to get government funding for an education program with the goal of training young people and workers in how to become effective revolutionaries is a vindication of their tactics.
Diffusion of anarchist ideas
The practical implications of such a broad diffusion of anarchist ideas, and the setting in which it took place, are both strong indicators of the strong fusion of pragmatism and idealism that typified the Paris groups activities. In any case, the increased contact with actual flesh-and-blood workers had a profound effect on their propaganda and theory, with labor issues suddenly becoming a much more prominent part of their platform.Anarchism as popular movement
By 1914 anarchism had become a genuine popular movement in China as increasing numbers of people from peasants and factory workers to intellectuals and students became disillusioned with the Nationalist government and its inability to realize the peace and prosperity it had promised.A major liability that the movement had picked up along the way, however, was the extreme diffusion of anarchist idea to the point where it was becoming difficult to define exactly who was and who was not an anarchist. Liu Shifu set out to remedy that situation in a series of articles in Peoples Voice, which attacked Jiang Kanghu, Sun Yet-Sen, and the Pure Socialists.
The debates that ensued served for the first time to really crystallize what exactly was meant by anarchism in the broad sense. These articles were generally friendly in tone. The goal was to clearly differentiate between the different schools of thought that were available at that time. The letters directed at Sun Yet Sen and the Nationalists were aimed at exposing the ambiguities of their use of the word “socialism” to describe their goals, which were clearly not socialist according to any contemporary definition. The attacks on Jiang and the CSS sought to portray their vision of revolution and socialism as too narrow because it was focused on a single country, and to oppose their retention of market relations as part of their platform. The attack on the Pure Socialists was by far the mildest, with the main criticism being that if they were anarchists then they should call themselves anarchists and not socialists. Peoples Voice invited and printed responses from all parties, and their goal seems to have been the creation of an open and respectful debate among friends.
For the next five years the movement would grow slowly but steadily as each of the disparate groups continued their propaganda, education, and organizing projects. In 1915 the anarchist arguments for a Social Revolution that had originated a decade earlier with the original Paris group would find broader acceptance in the New Culture Movement
New Culture Movement
The New Culture Movement of the mid 1910s and 1920s sprang from the disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture following the failure of the Chinese Republic, founded in 1912 to address China’s problems. Scholars like Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, and Hu Shi, had...
which was pioneered by a small group of intellectuals in Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
but spread to the rest of the county over the next four years, until it merged into the May Fourth movement
May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially the Shandong Problem...
.
The New Culture Movement was not anarchist, but in its glorification of science and extreme disdain for Confucianism
Confucianism
Confucianism is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius . Confucianism originated as an "ethical-sociopolitical teaching" during the Spring and Autumn Period, but later developed metaphysical and cosmological elements in the Han...
and traditional culture it extended critiques that had originated with the Paris group, and the proliferationof anarchist thought during this period can be seen as a confirmation of the influence anarchists had on the movement from its foundation on. The participants saw it as a conscious attempt to create a Chinese renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, and consciously sought to create and live the new culture that they espoused.
Decline in influence and the rise of Maoism
Once the Bolsheviks in RussiaRussia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
had consolidated their power, they immediately sought to expand their sphere of influence. Their interpretation of Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
’s prediction that the revolution would be global was that – as the vanguard – it was their role to use the resources at their disposal to instigate and support Bolshevik-style revolutions all over the world. In keeping with Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
’s doctrine on imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
, their focus was on the undeveloped nations, because they believed that once those nations had thrown off imperialism, Western capitalism – deprived of the material support and raw materials it required – would collapse. They also specifically targeted countries with already established revolutionary movements, and China clearly qualified.
In 1919 the anarchists played a significant role in the May 4th Movement which swept the country. It was at this time that the first Bolsheviks started organising in China and began contacting anarchist groups for aid and support. The anarchists, mistaking the Bolshevicks for allies & unaware of how the Bolsheviks had subordinated the soviets to their party apparatus, helped them set up communist study groups – many of which were originally majority anarchist – and introduced the Bolsheviks into the Chinese labor and student movements.
Establishment of Communist Party
In 1921, with the establishing of the Communist Party of ChinaCommunist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
(CPC), the anarchist movement almost immediately began to lose ground. Several reasons for this have been suggested. First, the anarchists lacked the ability to coordinate activities across regions. Second, there was a growing awareness that the Bolsheviks were Marxists, not anarchists – which caused an immediate loss of prestige for the anarchists who had previously claimed the success of the Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...
for their own. Third, and perhaps most critical, is the evolutionary nature of large sections of the movement which did not expect to see their goals met any time in the even remotely near future; this appealed less to workers who wanted immediate change. Bolshevism and the CPC platform were immediately attractive to working people because they offered the promise of change in the immediate future, or even present.
When the CPC entered into the First United Front
First United Front (China)
The First United Front of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China was formed in 1922 as an alliance to end warlordism in China. Together, they formed the National Revolutionary Army and set out in 1926 on the Northern Expedition...
with the Kuomintang
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
against the warlord
Warlord
A warlord is a person with power who has both military and civil control over a subnational area due to armed forces loyal to the warlord and not to a central authority. The term can also mean one who espouses the ideal that war is necessary, and has the means and authority to engage in war...
s in 1924, they gained even broader access to the labor movement, and to mass movements in general. In a period of two years, the CPC grew from a membership of only a few hundred to over 50,000 through their support and assimilation of the various mass movements.
Attacks on anarchism
As the influence of the CPC grew, their attacks on anarchism became more overt and less friendly. Where the first debates between Ou Shenbai and Chen Duxiu
Chen Duxiu
Chen Duxiu played many different roles in Chinese history. He was a leading figure in the anti-imperial Xinhai Revolution and the May Fourth Movement for Science and Democracy. Along with Li Dazhao, Chen was a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He was its first General Secretary....
, his former teacher, had been friendly, later debates became actively hostile. As the anarchist movement rapidly shrank into insignificance, the comrades became increasingly desperate.
A minority of anarchists, mostly from the Paris group, had been involved in the Kuomintang almost from its founding; but the majority of anarchists, in keeping with their stated principles against involvement in the exercise of coercive authority, had declined to participate in this alliance. The "Diligent Work and Frugal Study" program was one product of this collaboration of the anarchists with nationalists. When the Kuomintang purged the CPC from its ranks in 1927, the small minority of anarchists who had long participated in it urged their younger comrades to join the movement and utilize the Nationalist movement as a vehicle to defeat the Communists and realise anarchism. This drew immediate opposition from those anarchist groups that were still functioning. But even those critical of this opportunism, however, eventually joined in – if only because doing so seemed to be the only remaining chance to make their movement relevant again and reclaim its lost momentum.
The result of this last collaboration was the creation of China's first Labor University, which was intended to be a domestic version of the Paris groups educational program and sought to create a new generation of Labor Intellectuals who would finally overcome the gap between "those who work with their hands” and “those who work with their minds." The university would only function for a very few years before the Nationalist government decided they the project was to subversive to allow it too continue and pulled funding.
It had been acceptable for the anarchists to use government funding to promote anarchism as long as they did so in France, but when they began to do so at home, their "allies" were less than pleased. When the KMT initiated a second wave of repression
Political repression
Political repression is the persecution of an individual or group for political reasons, particularly for the purpose of restricting or preventing their ability to take political life of society....
against the few remaining mass movements, anarchists left the organization en masse and were forced underground as hostilities between the KMT and CPC – both of whom were hostile towards anti-authoritarians – escalated.
Status today
Overtly anarchist organizing has ceased to be a factor in modern Chinese politics due to the heavy repression levied against anti-authoritarians by the Maoist state since the time of the Cultural RevolutionCultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
. However, as an underground resistance movement anarchism remains influential. Libertarian socialist
Libertarian socialism
Libertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production...
and Anarchist communist
Anarchist communism
Anarchist communism is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, markets, money, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with...
currents have been particularly strong in the anti-dictatorship movement and in China's underground labor movement. The best known of these in the Western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
is the Autonomous Beijing group, one of several groups responsible for organizing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...
.
Further reading
- Taoism as early Chinese anarchism by Murray RothbardMurray RothbardMurray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
in his Histories of Economic ThoughtAn Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic ThoughtAn Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought is a work of economic history written by Murray N. Rothbard. Rothbard notes in the introduction that the book was originally conceived as a "standard Adam Smith-to-the-present moderately sized book"; however, in the process of writing it,...
. - Leanings toward anarchism in early Confucianism (PDF format) by philosopher Roderick LongRoderick LongRoderick Tracy Long is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University and libertarian anarchist blogger. He also serves as a senior scholar for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, director and president of the Molinari Institute, and an advisory panel...
. - He Zhen and Anarco-Feminism in China by Peter Zarrow