Chapter Three
Science, Morality, and Revolution:
Anarchism and the Origins of Social Revolutionary Thought in China

Anarchism emerged as a distinctive current in Chinese revolutionary thought when, in 19067, Chinese intellectuals studying abroad launched, almost simultaneously, two openly anarchist societies in Paris and in Tokyo. Before 1907 Chinese intellectuals had little appreciation of anarchism as an integral social philosophy. Rather, anarchist themes had been assimilated to the orientation of revolutionary thinking by intellectual dispositions that had originated in the revolutionary situation created by a new national consciousness. These dispositions were to persist in anarchist thinking. With the founding of these societies, however, they were rephrased within an anarchist language of revolution. Fundamental to this language was the idea of social revolution. Anarchist advocacy of social revolution was to open up new channels of lasting import in revolutionary thinking.

What brought about this change is more difficult to say. One change was in the access to anarchist literature. Intellectuals in Paris, in particular, discovered an anarchist tradition that was not to be subsumed under Russian nihilism, but had a history of its own as part of European socialism. The European anarchists they encountered had, moreover, an orientation that was significantly different from that of the early Chinese (or, for that matter, Japanese) radicals. The very organization into anarchist clusters gave an integrity and coherence to the anarchism they advocated; unlike their predecessors, who had viewed anarchism but as one weapon among others in the struggle against despotism, the intellectuals who organized the anarchist groups in Paris and Tokyo now promoted anarchism as an integral philosophy of global social transformation.

The political context, too, had changed. After 1905 the Manchu monarchy in China had decided to proceed to a constitutional form of government, which altered the conditions of political activity in China. The revolutionary struggle was no longer a struggle against a despotic government that allowed for no political expression; it was against a government that sought to recapture political legitimacy by making room for some measure of political representation. Radicals bent on overthrowing the Manchu government found that the enemy was no longer simply despotism; they had to come to terms with a state that sought to assimilate society to its own ends.

A new departure in the Chinese revolutionary movement had been announced in 1905 with the founding of Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui), which advocated a republican revolution against the constitutional monarchy that the Manchu government and its reformist supporters preferred. Based on Sun’s own experiences in Europe, the Revolutionary Alliance had also incorporated in its political agenda a program of social revolution (the first advocacy of socialism in China), which added a social dimension to a revolution that had hitherto been conceived primarily in political terms.[99] The founders of Chinese anarchism were already members of this organization, which indeed was little more than an alliance born of the diffuse currents in the struggle against despotism. However ineffective it may have been politically, the Revolutionary Alliance did create a new space in which to think of issues of revolution in new ways. Anarchism represented one of those new ways.

Anarchism and Social Revolution

Anarchists were not the first to advocate social revolution in China, but they introduced seminal new elements into Chinese thinking on social revolution. The Revolutionary Alliance conception of social revolution was political in its orientation; it proposed to achieve social revolution through the agency of the state.[100] Anarchists, in their rejection of the state, challenged this conception and offered an alternative idea of social revolution that focused on the problem of cultural transformation and took the individual as its point of departure. The anarchist conception of social revolution was authentically social, moreover, in its focus on society (in contrast to the state) and in its insistence on popular participation in the process of revolution.

Anarchism was to make a lasting, if ambiguous, contribution to social revolutionary thought in China. As much the expression of a mood as a philosophical critique of politics, anarchism represented an antipolitical strain, a mistrust of political institutions and of politics in general, whose power was revealed in the diffusion of anarchist ideals over a broad spectrum of Chinese political thought over the next two decades. The anarchist message was a revolutionary one. Radicals intent upon the realization of a good society through an immediate revolutionary upheaval discovered a source of inspiration in the anarchist vision of community and a new humanity. In the 1920s Sun Yat-sen was inspired to remark on one occasion that anarchism was the ultimate goal of his Three People’s Principles, a sentiment echoed by other Guomindang theoreticians. Critics of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s have argued in recent years that the Cultural Revolution was inspired by anarchist ideas and attitudes that, having entered the Communist party in the early twenties, survived the long years of revolution to pervert Marxism in the party. It is possible to argue, I think, that some of the themes that emerged during the Cultural Revolution may indeed be viewed as faint echoes of themes in the Chinese revolution that had first been enunciated by anarchists.

The appeal of anarchism, however, was not restricted to revolutionaries. Conservatives who defended social and political order against the threat of revolution were also able to find in anarchism ideals on which to focus their yearning for a good society. This ambivalence, to the point of ideological schizophrenia, was reflected in the history of anarchism in China. The most radical current in Chinese socialist thought until the early twenties, anarchism was to end up in the service of Guomindang reaction in the late twenties. To be sure, anarchist relationship with the Guomindang went back to personal and political relationships that the early anarchists (many of whom were Revolutionary Alliance members) had established with later Guomindang leaders, relationships that existed independently of their ideology. Nevertheless, anarchist ideology, in its peculiar formulation of questions of interest and conflict in society, lent itself to counterrevolution almost as easily as to revolution.

The ambivalence that was to characterize Chinese anarchism was already apparent in the backgrounds of the two groups among the early anarchists and in the different anarchisms they propagated. The Paris group was organized as the New World Society (Xinshijie she) in 1906. It started publishing in 1907 a journal that lasted for a remarkable three years and over one hundred issues. This journal, the New Era (Xin shiji), was subtitled La Tempoj Novaj in Esperanto, probably after Les Temps Nouveaux, published by Jean Grave. The names of the society and its journal were indicative of the inclinations of the Paris anarchists, a group of intellectuals who had been baptized into revolutionary activity in the early 1900s. Li Shizeng, the moving spirit of the group intellectually, had been living in Paris since 1902. He had evidenced an internationalist orientation very early on, studied biology, and had become close friends in Paris with members of the family of the French anarchist-geographer Élisée Reclus, which probably launched him on the path to anarchism. Wu Zhihui, who had the major responsibility for publishing the New Era, had been involved in the early 1900s in radical patriotic activities in Japan and China. It was Li, according to Richard Wang, who persuaded Wu of the virtues of anarchism when they met in Paris in 1906. The group’s activities were financed by the enterprises of its third important member, Zhang Jingjiang, which included a dofu factory and a restaurant-tea shop. They were all from elite families and, after 1905, members of the Revolutionary Alliance. From the beginning, they seemed to have little difficulty in reconciling their anarchist philosophy with their political involvements in China and abroad. In the 1920s, as unofficial Guomindang elders, they would be involved in the Guomindang suppression, first, of the Communists and, then, of their own young anarchist followers. The importance of their ideological contribution to social revolutionary thought in China lies in the consistency of the ideology they propagated, not in the consistency with which they lived up to their own ideals.[101]

The Paris anarchists advocated a revolutionary futuristic anarchism, which introduced into Chinese socialist thought an unequivocally radical current in Western revolutionary thinking. Over the three years of its publication as a weekly, the New Era serialized long translations from European anarchists, such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, and Reclus. These translations, reprinted over and over in anarchist journals and special compendia after 1911, provided a major source of radical literature in China until the early twenties; by 1920 anarchist literature available in Chinese was unmatched in scope and comprehensiveness by any other social and political philosophy of European origin. Students of Chinese anarchism have pointed out that anarchism provided not only radical literature but a language of radicalism that facilitated the efflorescence of socialism in China in the twenties. The Paris anarchists played a major part in making this language available.

At about the same time that the New Era started publication in Paris, Chinese anarchists in Tokyo established a Society for the Study of Socialism (Shehui zhuyi jiangxihui), which published its own journals, Natural Justice (Tianyibao) and the Balance (Hengbao). Intellectually, the moving spirits behind both the society and its journal were the classical scholar Liu Shipei and his spouse, He Zhen, who was probably responsible for the more radical aspects of Tokyo anarchists’ ideology. Natural Justice and Balance were very revolutionary in tone and in their analyzes of the plight of women and the lower classes in China, which were more concrete than anything to be found in the New Era. Nevertheless, Tokyo anarchists propagated an antimodernist anarchism that stressed the virtues of agrarian society and preferred the freedom from political interference that prevailed under the imperial state in China to the despotism of the modern nation-state. Whereas New Era writers discovered the archetypal anarchist vision in Kropotkin, Tokyo anarchists gave the greatest prominence among foreign anarchists to Tolstoy.[102]

Natural Justice lasted for one year. After Liu’s return to China in 1908, he apparently served as an agent provocateur for the monarchy and was prominent after 1911 as one of China’s foremost conservatives. Although Natural Justice did not have the long-term influence of New Era, it was very influential in its time because of the large number of Chinese students in Japan and because of its proximity to China, which gave it an edge over the New Era in terms of accessibility. Liu’s antimodernist anarchism, moreover, sensitized him to certain important questions in Chinese society; some of his analyzes of the problems of modernity in China anticipated themes that were to become prominent in Chinese radical thinking in later years.

The Place of Anarchism in Late Qing Politics

The rise of interest in anarchism at this time has prompted Martin Bernal to observe that 1907 marked the victory of anarchism over Marxism in China under the influence of a similar shift of interest among Japanese radicals at the same time.[103] There is no question that, as with all Chinese socialism, Japanese sources and radicals played a significant part in Chinese anarchism (the term for anarchism, wuzhengfu zhuyi, first used in Chinese in 1903, was of Japanese derivation). Nevertheless, this view is misleading, and not only because it is erroneous to describe as Marxist the socialism of the Revolutionary Alliance, which is what Bernal has in mind in referring to marxism. The major center of Chinese anarchism before 1911 was Paris, and shifts in Japan had little to do with the anarchism of the Paris anarchists. While some Revolutionary Alliance members began to show interest in assassination activities after 1907, it is not correct to read this as an interest in anarchism, even though assassination was associated in some circles with anarchism. The change in revolutionary methods can be more concretely explained by the political dilemma which the Qing dynasty’s constitutional reforms presented revolutionaries, who were now faced with deflation of their revolutionary ardor. Revolutionary Alliance socialists, moreover, did not abandon the kind of socialism they had advocated in 1905–1907, for these ideas persisted in their thinking in later years. Anarchism may have added new themes to their conception of social revolution, but the best that can be said is that the proliferation of new ideas of social revolution complicated social revolutionary thinking and possibly added to ideological confusion over socialism. A clear distinction would not be drawn between anarchism and socialism until 1913–14; nor between anarchism and Marxism until the early 1920s.

It is futile, I think, to look for a single, all-encompassing explanation for the attraction anarchism had for the Chinese intellectuals who in these years engaged in anarchist activity or professed belief in anarchism. In explaining why anarchism has remained alive as a revolutionary faith in the West in spite of the failure of anarchists to achieve any important results, James Joll has observed that a basic strength of anarchism has been its offer of something for everyone; the diffuseness of anarchist ideology—its weakness as a practical radical ideology—has been its strength as a social philosophy.[104] This offers insights into the appeals of anarchism in China as well. Converts to anarchism in early-twentieth-century China ranged from disciples of revolutionary terrorism, who found in anarchism justification for their activities, to modernists attracted to anarchist scientism, to Buddhist monks, who discovered in the anarchist message of love something akin to Buddhist ideals, to esthetes, who perceived beauty in the anarchist ideal of a beautiful society. Not everyone who found something of value in anarchism upheld, therefore, a coherent philosophy of anarchism.

Such profusion of appeal militates against easy explanations, especially explanations based on vague notions of outside influence that ignore the dispositions of the influenced. Foreign sources were important for anarchism, as they were for all Chinese socialism, but it was the intellectual and emotional needs generated by a society in revolutionary crisis that ultimately endowed anarchism with meaning for Chinese intellectuals. For all their contradictoriness, the varied reasons for attraction to anarchism shared a common ground in the anarchist vision of social revolution, which, however abstract and utopian, spoke to the immediate concerns of Chinese intellectuals who, in the midst of the political and ideological crisis of Chinese society, were uncertain about their place in their society and the place of their society in the world. In its affirmation of the essential unity of human beings, anarchism provided a counterpoint to the division of humanity into nations, races, and classes, which in the early part of the century confronted Chinese intellectuals as the reality of their world. And in its affirmation of the irreducible significance of the individual, anarchism provided a counterpoint to the preoccupation with the state that sought to expand its powers at the cost of social autonomy.

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It was the anarchist view of the individual as a social being, a basic ontological premise of anarchism, that pointed to possibilities beyond social alienation.[105] Although anarchism was still associated with individual action and assassination after 1907, the social and cultural implications of the anarchist ideal of revolution would gradually move to the forefront of Chinese thinking on anarchism and leave a lasting impression on Chinese social revolutionary thought. China’s most respected anarchist, Shifu, started his career with assassination activities, then moved away from assassination as he became familiar with anarchist philosophy. After the republican Revolution of 1911, anarchists distinguished themselves in educational and social mobilization activities, including the establishment of the first modern labor unions in China. In the midst of the wave of individualism that swept Chinese youth in the late 1910s, it was the anarchists who, in their insistence on the essential sociableness of human beings, kept alive social issues and played a major part in the emergence of widespread concern with society and social revolution in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement of 1919.

These social concerns, as well as the anarchist vision of a world free of division, place anarchism at the heart of the emergent political discourse in China in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The reconsideration of the relationship between public and private, between the individual and society, society and the state, all provoked by a reconsideration of China’s place in the world, were central to this discourse. An emergent nationalism lay at the root of all these questions. Revolutionary Alliance socialism was an integral component of the search for national integration. Anarchism, likewise, may be seen as part of the utopian cosmopolitanism that emerged with, and as a counterpoint to, Chinese nationalism. On the other side of the political spectrum, as we have seen, Liang Qichao, like his teacher Kang Youwei before him, was dissatisfied with institutions that divided people, and saw in the creation of an organic society the ultimate fulfillment of the human promise. This promise was also central to anarchism, although the additional considerations anarchists brought to the quest had revolutionary implications that distinguish their views from those of Liang and others. The centrality of the concern to contemporary political discourse, nevertheless, suggests why anarchism might have seemed much less peripheral to contemporary politics than it does in hindsight.

Anarchism is ultimately a philosophy of the individual, not of individualism as an end in itself, as is assumed by those who confound anarchism with libertarianism, but of the individual in his or her relationship to society. The preoccupation with the self had already emerged by the early part of this century as a feature of Chinese thinking in the activities of young radicals who believed that in selfless activity lay the salvation of

their society. Anarchism provided a systematic philosophical explanation for the problem of the self: politics, in the anarchist view, was the realm of oppression, authority, and division; the hope of community rested with the self purged of the accumulated corruption of institutions of power. The message had a powerful appeal among intellectuals who had already become uncertain of their relationship to existing social institutions. It is not surprising that the message had the greatest influence among members of the Chinese elite who felt deeply their alienation from the institutions of power on which they had been nourished. Anarchism is by no means restricted in its appeals to the elite, but it has everywhere found its most cogent spokesmen among the elite for the simple reason that the alienation of the self from power is more an elite than a popular problem. In the years after 1911 anarchists would take the lead in popular mobilization. Nevertheless, from the beginning, anarchism’s most eloquent proponents were members of the Chinese elite who, having been alienated from existing social relations, turned to new ideas of community to redefine their relationship to society—the almost exclusive concern of the first generation of Chinese anarchists.

The lasting contribution of anarchists to Chinese social revolutionary thought would be a redefinition of the relationship between intellectuals and society, however abstractly the latter was conceived. Indeed, the significant impact of anarchist philosophy on Chinese intellectuals lay not in its justification of individual acts of violence, but in its turning them to the articulation of this relationship. Anarchism provided Chinese intellectuals with their first genuinely social conception of social revolution, which not only pointed to society as the proper realm of change but placed the responsibility for changing society upon social activity. This conception led to a reading of the problems of changing China that anticipated questions that would assume increasing importance in Chinese social thought in later years. For reasons I shall explain, the logic of the anarchist idea of social change brought to the surface early on the problem of cultural revolution, the moral and intellectual transformation of individuals. In raising questions about individual transformation, anarchists also raised questions about the social institutions that obstructed individual transformation; they were the first Chinese intellectuals to point unequivocally to problems of women and the family, which continue to be central problems of Chinese social thought. They were the first to point to the need to bridge the gap between classes, especially intellectuals and laborers, by turning intellectuals into laborers, and laborers into intellectuals. To resolve all these problems, finally, they called for a social revolution that made revolution itself a utopia, which would have dramatic consequences for the Chinese revolution in the twentieth century.

Within Chinese socialism, then, anarchism provided the counterpoint to state-oriented strategies of change. The Revolutionary Alliance argument had proposed to use the state to prevent the devastation of society by conflicting interests. That argument had addressed the prospects of capitalism for China. The anarchist argument addressed the second important issue of the day, the state. Anarchists envisaged the abolition of interest in society through a total revolutionary transformation whose basic premise was the destruction of the state. Convinced of the essential sociableness of human beings, they believed that a genuine human community could be realized if institutional obstacles to free association could be abolished. Such institutions included the family and the capitalist economy; but the state, as the mightiest of these institutions and the protector of all partial interests in its defense of the political order, was the chief enemy of human society. As interest in socialism had accompanied the initial realization that capitalism was not only a means to economic development but also a primary source of the problems of modern society, anarchism expressed a parallel apprehension that the modern nation-state not only reflected the will of the people but also served as a dehumanizing vehicle of control and oppression, an obstacle to the human liberation that revolution promised.

Both the Paris and the Tokyo anarchists subscribed to these basic premises of anarchism. Since they differed widely in their vision of anarchist society in history, their views are best discussed separately.

The Paris Anarchists

Whereas Revolutionary Alliance socialists had proposed social revolution as a supplement to the task of political revolution, anarchists made it a substitute for the latter. In one of the earliest statements of the Paris anarchists’ position on revolution, Wu Zhihui drew a clear distinction between social and political revolutions:

Those of old who advocated revolution spoke only of the political aspect of revolution but did not emphasize society. They desired to abolish despotism to extend people’s sovereignty, sought legal freedom but not freedom of livelihood, political but not social or economic equality. They sought the happiness and welfare of one country or some of the people, not the happiness and welfare of the masses of the world.

Socialist revolution (shehui zhuyizhi geming) would

seek equality, freedom, happiness and welfare for society, make justice (gongdao) the measure of achievement, expunge whatever harms society, or runs contrary to this goalsuch as despotism and classes, the roots of all calamity, institute scientific progress to achieve a real world civilization, and, ultimately, establish a humanitarian commonweal (rendao datong) and a paradisiacal world (shijie jilo).

Socialist revolution, Wu believed, would rid society of all the poison inherited from the past and establish what was appropriate to social life.[106]

The anarchist social revolutionary idea differed from that of the Revolutionary Alliance both in goals and in method. The Revolutionary Alliance conception of socialism had been an instrumental one: social revolution as a policy tool for the state to achieve social harmony and stability. The anarchist conception was a total one, which called for a total reorganization of society in all its aspects to realize an all-encompassing vision. In his long essay Anarchism, Chu Minyi described four goals of anarchism: (1) to abolish authority (and its backbone, the military) to establish humanitarianism, (2) to abolish laws to institute freedom, (3) to abolish all inherited class distinctions (as embodied in the teachings of the sages) to establish equality, (4) to abolish private property and capital to establish communism (gongchan).[107] A major essay, written by Li Shizeng and Chu Minyi, describing the anarchist view of revolution, made even more explicit the ethical objectives underlying anarchist goals. The eight meanings of revolution, the essay stated, were freedom, fraternity (boai), public-mindedness, reform, equality, universal unity (datong), truth, and progress.[108] These goals were to be achieved through the abolition of marriage, property, family and familial relations, the private ownership of land, and racial and national boundaries.[109]

For the anarchists, social revolution was different from political, not only in its goals but also, even more fundamentally, in its means. Whereas political revolution was revolution of the few, social revolution was the revolution of the many—the common people (pingmin). Anarchists believed that overthrowing the government must have the recognition and the consent of the majority.[110] To this end, they specified five methods of revolution: propaganda (books, magazines, lectures), mass associations, mass uprisings, popular resistance (opposition to taxes and conscription, strikes and boycotts), and assassination (propaganda by the deed).[111] Anarchists themselves were not always consistent on the question of methods; to appreciate their preferences, it is necessary to keep in mind their general perception of social revolution. Anarchists rejected not only political institutions but politics as well, even though an editorial in New Era referred on one occasion to the revolution they advocated as a political revolution of pure socialism (chuncuide shehui zhuyizhi zhengzhi geming).[112] They believed, however, that authentic social revolution could not be imposed from above, through inherently authoritarian institutions.[113] Even though they were members of the Revolutionary Alliance, their idea of social revolution was counterposed explicitly to the social revolutionary program of Sun Yat-sen, both because of the reliance of the latter on the state and for its ambiguities concerning the role of the many in the revolution.

Anarchists themselves conceived of social revolution as a process of social activity, a revolution of all the people (quantizhi geming).[114] The revolutionary methods they proposed were all intended to stimulate such social activity. Neither the Paris nor the Tokyo anarchists engaged actively in assassination activity or social mobilization, but they looked favorably upon others who did so. They alluded with enthusiasm to the Pingxiang uprising in Hunan in 1906 and to its leader, Ma Fuyi.[115] They wrote with approval of the self-sacrificing spirit demonstrated by Xu Xilin and Qiu Jin.[116] Assassination undertaken in the spirit of self-sacrifice and with a clear commitment to universal principle (gongli), the anarchists believed, furthered the cause of revolution and humanity.[117] This notion that the beau geste may be more important than living to fight another day revealed the ethical impulse that underlay the anarchists’ idea of revolution, and distinguished them from latter-day revolutionaries in China, to whom the success of revolution would be far more important than gestures of personal authenticity. Give me liberty or give me death, Chu Minyi was to declaim in his defense of violence as a revolutionary method.[118] The rebels they lauded were not anarchists, nor were their activities intended to achieve anarchist goals; what counted was the act, the struggle itself, not its achievements. This does not mean that anarchists viewed violence as an end in itself; rather, they condoned violence only if it had a moral purpose. Chu Minyi observed in connection with Xu Xilin that violence was an expression of political desperation.[119] Wu Zhihui explained that violence was necessary because, under despotism, it was impossible otherwise to educate people to achieve humanitarian goals.[120]Anarchists agreed, moreover, that violence was effective only to the extent that it moved people’s hearts and aroused mass support for the cause of revolution.

If violence without a clear moral and social sense would degenerate into mindless terrorism, the anarchists believed, revolution without education would turn into unconscious uprising.[121] Of all the methods of revolution the anarchists promoted, education was the most fundamental. Anarchists called for simultaneous destruction and construction. Violence could achieve destruction, but construction required education, which was the ultimate justification even for revolutionary violence.[122] If the masses could be won over to the revolution, then social revolution would take a peaceful course, and anarchist goals could be achieved gradually.[123] Education to the anarchists was not simply an instrument of revolution, it was the equivalent of revolution:

Revolution will be effective only if, with the spread of education, people get rid of their old customs and achieve a new life. From the perspective of effectiveness, this means that if there is education for revolution before the revolution is undertaken, there will be nothing impossible about revolution. Therefore, anarchist revolution—is nothing but education.[124]

As for the nature of the education necessary for anarchist revolution, Wu Zhihui explained that there is no education aside from education in morality which encompasses truth and public-mindedness, such as reciprocal love, equality, freedom; all education is anarchist that encompasses truth and public-mindedness, including experimental science, and so forth.[125] Chu Minyi observed that while revolution (as an act) served a transient purpose, education lasted forever in its effects and transformed people endlessly. Unlike government-sponsored (youzhengfude) education, which taught militarism, legal-mindedness, religion, or, in short, obedience to authority, anarchist (wuzhengfude) education taught truth and public-mindedness, that is, freedom, equality, and the ability for self-government.[126]

Criticism of political revolution by anarchists yields further insights into the nature of the social revolution they advocated. Anarchists opposed political revolution because they believed that it only served to substitute new, and worse, inequalities for old ones. Political revolution, Wu stated, had diminished misery in politics but increased economic misery.[127] In a more comprehensive statement criticizing proponents of democracy and the Republic, Chu Minyi observed:

They do not know that freedom is the freedom of the rich, equality is the equality of the wealthy. The misery of the poor is the same as of old. What is freedom and equality to the poor? The evils of political despotism have now been replaced by the poison of economic onopoly.[128]

All anarchists concurred with Chu’s view that this poison was the product of a bad social system where a few, by monopolizing wealth, managed to live off the sweat and blood of the many.[129] In other words, the political revolutions that had created democracies and republics had made things worse by giving capitalists access to power, thus increasing their ability to exploit laborers. Under these systems, everything served the interests of the rich. Even science was utilized, not for the benefit of humanity but in the interests of the powerful. Capitalists, whether they were good or bad as individuals, were motivated in their activities by the pursuit of profit. While machinery had made unlimited production possible, people did not benefit from production, because capitalists used machines in their search for profit. When production increased to the point where they could not find consumers for their products, they shut down production, throwing laborers out of work and causing immense misery. In a statement reminiscent of Revolutionary Alliance views on capitalism, Chu Minyi observed that as long as such a system prevailed, the advance of the industrial arts (gongyi) only served to create poor people by decreasing the need for labor: People do not realize that the more advanced the industrial arts, the richer are the rich and the poorer the poor.[130] Those who advocated social revolution, Chu noted, were those who understood the failure of the capitalist system. He himself advocated a political revolution against rulers (literally a revolution for political rights, quanli geming), and an economic revolution against capitalists (literally, a revolution for livelihood, shengji geming).[131] While such a program sounded similar to that of the Revolutionary Alliance, its premises were quite different: Revolutionary Alliance writers saw a republican political revolution as a means of carrying out the social revolution; anarchists believed that a republican revolution would only increase the power of the bourgeoisie, the class they had in mind, though they did not use the term.

Anarchists acquired these ideas, as did Sun Yat-sen, from observations on the persistence of inequality in European society.[132] They also believed, with Sun, that inequality was much more serious in the West than it was in China.[133] But, unlike Sun, they did not think that such problems could be resolved or prevented through government action. Commenting on a letter from a friend who thought that constitutional government could take measures to forestall the emergence of inequality in China, an editorial in the New Era observed that it was only prejudice for government that sustained faith in the ability of government to secure peace, and the refusal to see that government itself obstructed the advance of humanitarianism, that it was the source itself of all evils.[134] Although anarchists discussed economic issues, politics and the state were the focal point of their opposition to political revolution. Their mistrust of political revolution was grounded in their belief that political institutions in society only represented the interests of the minority that commanded wealth and power. Like the European anarchists, whose philosophy they accepted in toto, Chinese anarchists were opposed to all kinds of government, no matter how different in form or substance of the relationship between state and society. Their opposition to capitalism was itself encompassed within their opposition to the state, for it was the state, with its laws, armies, and police, they believed, that defended the interests of the powerful in society.[135]

In the intellectual atmosphere that prevailed in China during the first decade of the century, these ideas were not likely to appeal to many. The issue of the day was the reorganization of political institutions to create a stronger state, one that could unify and defend the country; the revolutionaries added strident anti-Manchuism. It is not surprising that anarchist ideas drew considerable criticism, mainly from other revolutionaries; it is somewhat surprising, however, that the exchanges between anarchists and their opponents were carried out in a relatively mild tone, in contrast to later controversies among socialists. The acrimonious exchange between Wu Zhihui and Zhang Binglin in 1908 was the exception. Anarchists themselves saved their most vituperous rhetoric for the Manchu government and Liang Qichao’s constitutionalists. In other cases, they responded to their critics with patience, explaining their position with laborious effort, careful not to offend fellow revolutionaries.[136] The reasons for this effort are not complex. In spite of their radical departure from republican ideology, most of the anarchists remained members of the Revolutionary Alliance, tied to it through personal relationships. The disagreement was among friends.

To some of the critics of the anarchists, their major weakness was their idealism, which blinded them to the realities of Chinese society, especially the backwardness of the people, who did not have the educational and moral qualifications required by anarchist principles. But the majority of critics focused on the implications of anarchism for China’s national struggle, especially its possible consequences in undermining the anti-Manchu struggle and rendering China vulnerable to further aggression by other nations.

To the charge of idealism, anarchists responded that while they were idealists, they were not blind. The struggle for anarchism had to be immediate, they argued, but they did not expect to achieve their goals for a long time to come. They believed, however, that the struggle was worth the undertaking because anarchism was the world trend, a necessary end of human evolution that had the backing of scientific demonstration.[137] They also added, indignantly, that while the moral and educational level of the people in China might be low, it was no lower than that of the officials who governed them.

Most of the exchanges, however, revolved around the issue of nationalism. In these exchanges the Paris anarchists demonstrated their ability to be flexible about their ideals, a characteristic that would mark their careers. On the issue of anti-Manchuism they were firm. They believed that the emperor should be overthrown—not because he was Manchu, but because he was the emperor.[138] They were unwilling to condone the racism that was implicit in the anti-Manchu arguments of the republicans, and they spoke reprovingly of the revanchism of nationalists such as Wu Yue, who had attempted to assassinate a group of Manchu officials in 1905. Racism, they believed, only served to reinforce boundaries between different peoples, which obstructed evolution toward a better society. They were willing to support patriotism only if it did not lead to hatred or fear of other nations and races.[139]

They were more willing to go along with republican revolution. Political revolution is the starting point; social revolution is the ultimate goal, Li Shizeng and Chu Minyi stated.[140] Republican revolution was to be supported, the Paris anarchists believed, because it would move Chinese society a step closer to socialism. While their patriotism no doubt was an element in their willingness to compromise with republicanism, they may also have derived their inspiration from their intellectual mentor, Elisee Reclus, who himself had been a supporter of republicanism in France. The Paris anarchists viewed the state historically and believed that republican government was more advanced than monarchy in its willingness to share power with the people, at least some of the people. There were some qualms about this view. Chu Minyi observed on one occasion that constitutional government, in giving citizens the illusion of sharing power with them, caused the transfer of loyalty from the family (as under despotism) to the state; this was the main reason for the greater strength and resilience of constitutional governments: the people, having an interest in the state, were more willing to serve in its defense.[141] This argument was commonplace at the time among nationalists who wanted a stronger China. Though Chu did not draw any conclusions from this observation, the implication was obvious that constitutional government made the task of achieving anarchism more difficult; New Era anarchists opposed Manchu establishment of a constitution as a deceptive measure that aimed to achieve greater power for the Manchu throne, a feeling they shared with other revolutionaries.[142] Otherwise, they viewed constitutionalism as a step toward anarchism, not away from it. They explained on a number of occasions that they advocated socialism not as a substitute for republicanism, but because socialism included republicanism, insisting only that the revolution seek to go beyond republican government.[143] One of the Paris anarchists would become involved in politics after the establishment of the Republic in 1912; the others continued to make efforts to advance the cause of revolution through education and refused to participate formally in politics. Their informal activities would be another matter.

Anarchists also dismissed the argument that China needed nationalism because it suffered from foreign aggression, or that their revolution would render China vulnerable to further aggression. To the first, Li responded that foreign aggression did not change the problem of oppression qualitatively; it only made heavier the burden of revolutionaries who had to struggle against foreign oppression in addition to their struggle against the Chinese ruling class. To the second, they responded with their faith, characteristic of anarchist attitudes throughout, that since the revolution was to be universal in scope, other states would be too busy coping with pressure from their own populations to engage in aggression against China.[144] Besides, they pointed out, the people’s militia, which would replace the regular army, would be more effective in defending China than a regular army, which only served the interests of those in power.

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To see the anarchist idea of social revolution only in political and social terms would be to see only a part, and not the most fundamental part, the premise, of the anarchist argument. Ultimately, this idea of revolution was a moral one: it sought not just to transform institutions but rather to transform human psychology, which to the anarchists was at once the point of departure for and the goal of revolution. Human psychology was bound up with the question of the role of interest in society which the anarchists, unlike Sun Yat-sen, saw not just as an economic but also as a moral question.

To the anarchists, the test of a true revolution was whether it was public in its orientation or, in a more literal rendering, whether it pursued the public way (gongdao). This was also the ultimate test of whether a revolution was a social revolution. As Li put it: What we speak of as a revolution of the many and a revolution of the few refers to whether it is really public (gong) or private (si), not to the actual number of people involved at any one time.[145] These ideas were crucial to Chinese political thinking at the turn of the century and place the anarchists squarely in the context of contemporary thought. The terms gong and si had slightly different meanings in different contexts, but they were always juxtaposed as opposites. Si could mean selfishness, partiality, or particularity; gong denoted selflessness, impartiality, or universality. In all these usages, however, si implied favoring what was of interest to the self, while gong meant the ability to transcend self-interest and to realize or to express the good of the many. In the anarchist view, revolution was a process whereby particular interest was abolished to be replaced by public concerns in human minds, society, and politics. The basic goal of revolution was, therefore, moral; specifically, it was the creation of public morality (gongde).[146] Chinese anarchists believed, as do anarchists in general, that public-mindedness, an instinctive sociability, as it were, was innate in human beings; the task of revolution was not so much to create public morality out of nothing as to abolish the institutions that stood in the way of its realization. Chu Minyi pointed to morality as the distinctive characteristics of humankind and described as the goal of the education he proposed the achievement of true morality, which implied the abolition of all distinctions between self and others.[147] The ultimate goal of revolution was to achieve unity on a universal scale, a unity that was not simply social but also ethical and spiritual.

Partiality, in the anarchist view, was the root cause of all the problems of contemporary society. To quote Chu again: Contemporary society is a self-seeking and self-interested society (zisi zilizhi shehui). A self-seeking society is not a true society, a self-interested society is not a fair (gongping) society.[148] The separation of self from others was not just a social problem; it was contrary to the very organic structure (jitizhi jiegou) of natural existence.[149] Anarchism, they believed, promised to do away with this separation and, with it, considerations of interest as a determinant of human behavior:

Anarchism means no national or racial boundaries. Even more important, it means no distinction between self and others, no notion of benefiting the self and harming others. When this has been achieved, true freedom, true equality, true fraternity will appear. That is why anarchism accords with public-mindedness and truth.[150]

On these same grounds anarchists rejected competition as a determinant of existence, insisting that mutual aid was the source of human evolution.

This opposition to partial interest on the grounds of its basic immorality was not only the ethical basis for anarchist opposition to politics and capitalism, it was also the basis for anarchist disagreements with fellow revolutionaries. Racism (zhongzu zhuyi) and nationalism (guojia zhuyi) were, according to the anarchists, just such expressions of partiality. Anarchists opposed enmity to the Manchus as Manchus, who ought to be opposed because they selfishly held on to political power. Nationalism was bad because it fostered unjustified hostility to the people of other nations.[151] Selfishness declined, they believed, as the scope of human loyalties expanded. Thus: The advance from the selfishness of the individual to racism and patriotism, the advance from racism and patriotism to socialism represent the progress of universal principle (gongli) and conscience (liangxin).[152] Not until all boundaries had been abolished could humanity achieve universal principle. This, the anarchists argued, ought to be the guiding goal of the Chinese revolution.

For these reasons the Paris anarchists rejected China’s heritage in uncompromising language. That certain elements of Chinese tradition fostered private over public morality had been argued by others, most articulately by the constitutional monarchist Liang Qichao. With Liang, however, this criticism of China’s heritage led, not to a call for a wholesale attack on tradition, but rather to a plea for the gradual nurturing of habits of public life in order to create a new citizenry. Anarchists, sensitive to the role ideology played in perpetuating authority, called for a revolution that would eradicate the authoritarian ideological legacy of the past, as well as that of the institutions that sustained it. One, citing Engels for inspiration, suggested that China’s national essence (which conservatives propagated) should be consigned to the museum because it was contrary to civilized life.[153] The Paris anarchists concentrated their attacks on Confucianism and the ideology of familism as the twin pillars of authority in Chinese society. While they were not the only ones at this time to criticize Confucianism or the family, they did so more systematically and vociferously than others, and they certainly stood out among their contemporaries for presenting these issues as the primary issues of change in China. In both respects, they anticipated issues that would rise to the forefront of Chinese thinking during the New Culture Movement a decade later. In this sense, they were China’s first cultural revolutionaries.

The first issue of New Era included a short piece on Confucius, which debunked him as a thinker of the age of barbarism whose only virtue had been to be a little more knowledgeable than his ignorant contemporaries.[154] Paris anarchists saw in Confucian teachings the source of the superstitions in Chinese society that had oppressed women and youth and served as an instrument of power, a counterpart in China to religion in other societies.[155] Superstition, they believed, was the basis for authority, but it was even more difficult to overthrow than authority itself, especially where religion and politics were not clearly distinguished. In China a Confucius revolution was the prerequisite to achieving all other goals of revolution.[156]

The attack on Confucianism was accompanied by an attack on kinship and pseudo-kinship relations that for centuries had been cornerstones of Chinese social thinking. Family revolution, revolution against the sages, revolution in the Three Bonds and the Five Constants would help advance the cause of humanitarianism.[157] Paris anarchists viewed the family as the major source of selfishness in society: though people were born into society (that is, the public realm), the family privatized their existence and converted what was public into what was private. Chu Minyi described the family as the basis of all inequality: Today’s society is a class society. It is like a high tower in appearance. Marriage is its foundation. Property, family, national and racial boundaries are all levels of the tower, with government at the top.60 This is a common anarchist view, but within the context of Chinese political thought, which had long viewed the family as a paradigm for politics, it had a special significance. The Three Bonds (that bound ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife) were to the anarchists the superstitions that perpetuated the power of the family, which was based not on principle but on authority. Family power was bolstered by the practice of ancestor worship, which was contrary to truth secured the despotism of tradition, was economically wasteful (in using up good land for graves), and bound the living to the dead. Anarchists advocated a thought revolution to eliminate these superstitions, and an economic revolution to eradicate the power of the family by making individuals economically independent. (that is, the public realm), the family privatized their existence and converted what was public into what was private. Chu Minyi described the family as the basis of all inequality: Today’s society is a class society. It is like a high tower in appearance. Marriage is its foundation. Property, family, national and racial boundaries are all levels of the tower, with government at the top.[158] This is a common anarchist view, but within the context of Chinese political thought, which had long viewed the family as a paradigm for politics, it had a special significance. The Three Bonds (that bound ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife) were to the anarchists the superstitions that perpetuated the power of the family, which was based not on principle but on authority. Family power was bolstered by the practice of ancestor worship, which was contrary to truth secured the despotism of tradition, was economically wasteful (in using up good land for graves), and bound the living to the dead. Anarchists advocated a thought revolution to eliminate these superstitions, and an economic revolution to eradicate the power of the family by making individuals economically independent.[159]

These premises of anarchist thinking reveal why education held such an important place on the anarchist agenda and why anarchists should have believed revolution and education to be the two sides of the same coin, the one negative, the other positive.[160] Revolution was to clear away material obstacles to the liberation of human potential, but it was education that would nurture the morality that anarchist ideals demanded. There is no morality other than learning, proclaimed the title of an article in the New Era.[161] This was a commonly held anarchist view: that the morality of a people was proportionate to their learning. Education would change human psychology, and this would lead to changes in behavior and morality. The relationship between education and revolution was conceived dialectically, with the advance of one inducing the advance of the other in the endless evolution of humanity.

This emphasis on education as revolution brought out an important feature of the anarchist idea of social revolution: that there was no distinction between the process and the goals of revolution, between means and ends. Revolution was necessary to make anarchist education possible; without such education revolution could not be attained. While anarchists on occasion ventured to offer their views on when the revolution might occur, these predictions were superfluous because revolution was ultimately a continuing process with no foreseeable end. Perhaps most revealing in this regard was the distortion of the etymology of the term revolution by Li and Chu in their important essay entitled Revolution (Geming). Using the foreign original, revolution, the authors explained that the word was composed of re and evolution, in other words, re-evolution, which they then explained in Chinese to mean ever new (gengxin). We cannot be certain whether the distortion was intentional or the result of misunderstanding; circumstantial evidence points to the former. There was at least one essay published in the New Era that traced the word revolution correctly to its root, to revolve.[162] The underlying intention of the representation of revolution as re-evolution, moreover, was to portray revolution and evolution as different aspects, or phases, of the process of human progress, which was also important in Reclus’s thinking on revolution.[163] Whatever the reasons, this etymological interpretation corresponded to the anarchists’ view of revolution as a process without end. In the words of Li Shizeng:

Progress is advance without stopping, transformation without end. There is no affair or thing that does not progress. This is the nature of evolution. That which does not progress or is tardy owes it to sickness in human beings and injury in other things. That which does away with sickness and injury is none other than revolution. Revolution is nothing but cleansing away obstacles to progress.[164]

The Tokyo Anarchists

The Tokyo anarchists agreed with the basic premises of the Paris anarchists: the social scope of revolution, its moral basis, its universalistic goals, and the importance of education as a means of achieving anarchism. There was also considerable interchange between their two journals. The New Era contained reports on the activities of the Tokyo anarchists, and Natural Justice frequently reprinted foreign works that had first been published in the New Era. Nevertheless, the two groups were separated by a wide ideological gap, both in their understanding of anarchism and in the conclusions they drew from it concerning contemporary problems. The disagreement rose to the surface on at least one occasion when the New Era criticized Liu Shipei’s understanding of anarchism.

Liu Shipei had made his fame as a classical scholar before he turned to anarchism, and he was a prominent leader of conservatives who propagated the idea of national essence, of which the Paris anarchists were critical. Liu’s commitment to China’s cultural heritage was to shape his anarchism. In light of this, it is possible that the more radical aspects of the anarchism that Natural Justice propagated was the work of He Zhen, his wife, with whom he published the journal.

The general objectives of Natural Justice were stated in its first few issues: To destroy existing society and institute human equality is the general objective. Aside from women’s revolution, it advocates racial, political, and economic revolution. Hence the name, Natural Justice. With issue number eight in October 1907, this statement was revised to read: To destroy national and racial boundaries to institute internationalism; resist all authority; overthrow all existing forms of government; institute communism; institute absolute equality of men and women.

While these goals were close to those of the New Era, especially in their later formulation, the two groups of anarchists differed significantly in their anarchism as well as in the sources of inspiration for their ideals. Native sources, viewed with contempt by the Paris anarchists, held a prominent place in the pages of Natural Justice. This reflected an important difference in the way they perceived the relationship between anarchism and native ideas and ideology.

The Tokyo anarchists, too, rejected those aspects of premodern Chinese ideology that condoned hierarchy between classes and sexes. On the issue of political ideology, however, they believed that premodern Chinese thought came closer to upholding anarchist social ideals than its counterparts elsewhere. In a speech to the first meeting of the Society for the Study of Socialism, Liu stated that though the Chinese political system had been despotic in appearance, the power of the government had been remote from the lives of the people, who thus had considerable freedom from politics. Furthermore, he argued, advocacy by the major ideologies of China, Confucianism and Daoism, of laissez-faire government had helped curtail government intervention in society. As a result, he concluded, China was more likely than other societies to achieve anarchism; he implied, in fact, that if only Chinese could be purged of their habits of obedience, anarchism could be achieved in China in the very near future.[165] The fifth issue of Natural Justice carried a picture of Laozi as the father of anarchism in China. In his utopian scheme Liu acknowledged his debt to Xu Xing, an agrarian utopianist of the third century B.C., who had advocated a rural life as the ideal life and promoted the virtues of manual labor by all without distinction, including the emperor. Liu noted that whereas he himself advocated cooperation, Xu had promoted self-sufficiency, but otherwise he saw no essential difference between Xu’s ideas and his own.[166]

Among Western anarchists, Liu found in Tolstoy confirmation of the ideals that he had first discovered in native sources.[167] Like Tolstoy, he idealized rural life and manual labor and opposed a commercialized economy. He believed that Chinese society had begun to degenerate with the emergence of the money economy at the beginning of the Christian era. The money economy had led to the strengthening of despotism; the commercial economy had led to the impoverishment of many, prompting government efforts under Wang Mang to establish control over land. Liu almost certainly had the contemporary Revolutionary Alliance advocacy of the equalization of land rights in mind when he described this development as one that enhanced despotic government. His suspicion of commercial economy also underlay his hostility to recent changes in Chinese society. He emphasized the destruction of the rural economy under pressure from Western commerce, and the ensuing crisis this had created for the peasantry. He also expressed a strong dislike for the urbanization that had set in with recent economic changes. Shanghai, the symbol of China’s modern economy, represented to Liu a moral sink where men degenerated into thieves, and women, into prostitutes.[168]

Liu, in other words, perceived anarchism only as a modern version of a rural utopianism that had long existed in China. This accorded with his view of socialism in general. He traced socialism from Plato to the modern world without assigning any peculiar distinction to modern socialism.[169]

In light of Liu’s approach to anarchism, it is not surprising that he drew conclusions different from those of New Era anarchists concerning the path China should follow in pursuit of the good society. Unlike the New Era anarchists, who perceived republican government as a progressive development, Liu argued that if China could not achieve anarchism immediately, it would be better off under the old regime than under the new politics (xin zheng): Reform is inferior to preserving the old, constitution is inferior to monarchy. He offered three reasons for his position: the old educational system was superior to the new, which favored the rich; the proposed parliamentary system would enhance the power of the elite and, therefore, contribute to inequality; the increased power of capital would result in the concentration of wealth and deprive the people of the self-sufficiency they had hitherto enjoyed. Liu bolstered his argument with statistics on poverty in various countries, which, he believed, showed that development increased inequality in society.[170]

Tokyo anarchists placed a great deal more emphasis on the plight of the people in China than did the Paris anarchists. New Era discussions of anarchism carried an aura of abstract intellectualism. In its three years of publication, the journal published only two articles wholly devoted to the question of labor, and even those were of an abstract theoretical nature—in spite of the fact that these years were a high point in syndicalist activity in France. Natural Justice, in contrast, paid considerable attention to the condition of women and the peasantry in China.

He Zhen was probably responsible for the attention the journal devoted to the issue of women’s oppression. The Tokyo anarchists derived their inspiration on this issue from Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which, in presenting the oppression of women as a consequence of the emergence of the patriarchal family with the rise of urban civilization, may have struck a resonant cord with their antiurban bias. He Zhen was deeply critical not only of the oppression of women under the old society but also of what modern urban society and factory labor did to women.[171]

While both groups of anarchists were equally critical of women’s oppression, the Tokyo anarchists’ stance on the question of rural society was distinctive and, from the perspective of Chinese socialist thought, significant. The Hengbao in 1908 published anonymously a number of articles on the peasant question.[172] By this time Liu Shipei had returned to China, and these anonymous articles may have been the work of another prominent figure among the Tokyo anarchists, Zhang Ji. As far as I know, these were among the earliest serious discussions in Chinese socialism of the role of the peasantry in the revolution and of the meaning of revolution for the peasantry. One article, lauding the peasants’ tendency toward communitarian living and anarchism, called for a peasants’ revolution (nongmin geming). Others discussed economic cooperation among the peasantry. Perhaps the most interesting was an article, inspired by Kropotkin, that advocated the combination of agriculture and industry in the rural economy. There is no need to belabor the significance of this idea, which has been an important feature of Chinese socialist thinking from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping. Whether later Communists were familiar with these publications is impossible to say. Li Dazhao’s first writings in the early 1910s, which showed an antiurban bias that led Maurice Meisner to describe Li as a populist, sounded like some of Liu Shipei’s writings on the question of commerical urban society. The works of Kropotkin that inspired these ideas in the Hengbao, chief among them The Conquest of Bread, had first been translated into Chinese in the New Era. By the time of the May Fourth Movement these works were popular readings among Chinese radicals and provided the inspiration for the communitarian ideals and the communal experiments that proliferated at the time. Although we cannot be certain about the influence of these ideas of the Tokyo anarchists on later socialist thinking, they were the first to enunciate the ideas, and there is evidence to suggest that their ideas may have become in later years a component of Chinese socialists’ thinking on the future relationship between agriculture and industry and on the relationship of urban to rural society.

The sensitivity on these questions may have been a consequence of the Tokyo anarchists’ proximity to China, which gave them access to the burgeoning popular resistance movements on the eve of the 1911 Revolution. I think, however, that there were other, intellectual, reasons for the journal’s attention to these problems. He Zhen’s presence was possibly the most important factor in the journal’s attention to problems of women. Liu’s idealization of rural life was responsible for the attention he devoted to the peasantry, in whom he discovered the modal personality for anarchist society. Liu’s description of utopian society offers an instructive contrast to the one drawn up by Wu Zhihui a few years later in New Youth (Xin Qingnian).[173] The most conspicuous feature of Wu’s utopia was its fascination with mechanical innovations, which in the future would even obviate the need for walking, since conveyor belts would connect homes and workplaces. Liu’s utopia described an essentially rural society and is striking for its preoccupation with the disposal of labor; basic to his utopia was universal manual labor as a guarantee to an egalitarian existence. All anarchists believed in the virtues of manual labor. In later years, the Paris anarchists would establish a work-study program in France, which stressed the combination of manual and mental labor as the key to the material and moral transformation of Chinese society. In these early years, however, it was Liu who stated most trenchantly a belief that combining manual and mental labor would eliminate social inequality and create an ideal anarchist personality. Liu’s anti-modernism was largely responsible both for the close attention he paid to the concrete problems of rural life in China and for his idealization of attitudes associated with rural existence.

That it was not the modernist anarchists in Paris but the antimodernist Liu Shipei and his associates in Tokyo who were the first to introduce labor as an integral component of anarchist revolution is worth emphasizing because it may explain an ambivalence toward the question of labor in education in later years, when modernists as well as antimodernists adopted it as a means of changing China.[174] The function of labor in education as a principle of an ideal social organization, as seen by the antimodernist anarchists in Tokyo, was to culminate in Mao’s Marxism during the Cultural Revolution. (It is ironic that an ideal born of anti-modernism may have given the impetus to one of the most radical efforts to reorganize Chinese society.) The idea of labor in education as a practical means to educate and civilize Chinese, implicit in the attitudes of Paris anarchists, found its way into the thinking of liberals and conservatives alike and has been revived in recent years by the post-Mao regime.

It is not clear what sources inspired Liu Shipei to include labor as a component of an anarchist revolution.[175] Although Chinese intellectuals in Tokyo were familiar with fragments of Marx’s works, where they may have encountered references to the need to abolish the division of mental and manual labor as a condition of Communist society, it is more likely that Tolstoy’s laborism and Xu Xing’s native agrarian utopianism directly inspired Liu, legitimized by the urgings of Tolstoy himself. (Xu Xing’s utopianism would be forgotten in later years, whereas, by the time of the May Fourth Movement, Tolstoy’s laborism or pan-laborism, fanlaodong zhuyi, was popular with Chinese intellectuals).[176] By 1908 these sources were combined with Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops of Tomorrow to yield a plan for social organization that prefigured in many of its essentials the Maoist plan for China as it took shape in the late fifties.

Liu first presented the idea in his plan for a future society, On Equalizing Human Labor (Renlei junli shuo), published in 1907 in Natural Justice. The utopia described an agrarian society in which everyone labored equally. Labor was intended to abolish inequality, as well as to guarantee everyone an independent existence as the condition of equality. Children would be raised in public residence halls, supervised by older people, who would also teach them. At age six they would begin to learn the new universal language. Starting at age ten, they would spend half the day in study, the other half in manufacturing labor. The practical skills they acquired in education would also help them produce for their own livelihood. Between the ages of twenty and fifty, everyone would engage in productive and social service activities, with jobs allocated according to age. At fifty they would enter residence halls to tend to the raising of children. For all his anti-modernism, Liu did not object to the use of laborsaving devices. Technological advance would guarantee that no one would have to work for more than two hours a day to guarantee a subsistence for himself or herself as well as for the society at large, which would be reorganized now around small districts of one thousand people each. The rest of the time would be spend in leisure and learning activities.[177]

While there is no apparent relationship between this ideal of an agrarian social organization and the 1908 Balance pieces inspired by Kropotkin, the basic message was the same. The latter argued that industrialization should take place away from urban centers because otherwise it would lead to a separation of agriculture and industry, with negative consequences for bothand for society as a whole. These essays taken together point to the conceptualization of society that underlay Tokyo anarchists’ anarchism: an agrarian society that integrated industrial and agricultural production, that was therefore directed at production for need, to which the equal practice of labor by all was central. Tokyo anarchists’ anti-modernism was opposed, not to the products of modern science and technology, but only to the social organization created by modernization; within a social context organized according to human scale and needs, the products of modernity could be made to serve human needs, instead of dehumanizing life, as they seemed to be doing in the contemporary West and Japan, as well as in the emerging modern urban centers in China.

The same orientation, finally, sensitized Liu to the problem of imperialism in China. He was, to my knowledge, the first Chinese intellectual to see in socialism a means to liberate China from Western oppression. An essay in Natural Justice was remarkable for anticipating views that would become prevalent in China after the Chinese had been exposed to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. In the essay he argued that the emergence of concepts of socialism and universalism (datong zhuyi) promised the liberation of Asian peoples from the imperialism of the white race and the Japanese. This task required, he believed, the mobilization of the people (he even cited the Sanyuan li incident of the first Opium War as an example of the people’s ability to resist foreigners), cooperation with other oppressed peoples of Asia, and the various people’s parties (mindang) in advanced countries. Most interesting was Liu’s observance that revolution would not succeed in advanced societies until Asia had been liberated, because the exploitation of the Asian peoples strengthened governments and the ruling classes in the West.[178]

Liu’s views on anarchism were anathema to the Paris anarchists, with their commitment to science, industrial society, and progress. While in general they were supportive of the Tokyo anarchists, they criticized Liu for his equation of modern anarchism with native utopianism. First, they responded, Liu had no conception of progress, which lay at the basis of modern anarchism. It was wrong, therefore, to compare what modern anarchists wished to achieve with the aspirations of primitive people, or to equate anarchism with erratic efforts to achieve a more egalitarian distribution of property, as in the well-field system of ancient China. Second, they criticized Liu for his suggestion that Chinese society had been characterized in the past by political laissez-faire, which did not fit the facts. China had been ruled for centuries by a political despotism; what Liu claimed added up to, at the very least, an assertion that there was no difference between a society with government and one without it. The superstitious faith of Chinese society in hierarchy, which accounted for the prevalence of habits of obedience, was itself a product of oppression. Finally, they found humorous Liu’s claim that China might be closer to anarchism than other societies. What was required, they suggested, was not talk about levels of anarchy, but effort, awareness, and scientific knowledge.[179]

These disagreements were not over abstract issues but entailed different attitudes toward the modern West, as well as toward the problems of changing China. The Paris anarchists were Francophiles who found much of value in the modern West but little to be proud of in China’s past. They valued science to the point of scientism, made industrialism into a utopia (as Bauer has observed of Wu), and with all their debunking of capitalism, were fascinated with the civilization that capitalism had created.[180]

Liu had the nativist’s suspicion of the West. While he admired certain Western values, he believed that the Chinese heritage contained the equivalents of those same values, and more. He found much of value in Chinese civilization (though not necessarily in Confucianism) and was to devote his life to the preservation of its essence.[181] Although he was unmistakably an antimodernist, his very anti-modernism sensitized him to issues that would assume enormous significance in later years in Chinese radicalism. Such was the case with his sensitivity to the question of imperialism, to which the Paris anarchists, with their unabashed cosmopolitanism, were completely oblivious. His case parallels the qualms about West ern powers of a conservative of the same period, Liang Qichao, who argued that Revolutionary Alliance socialism would weaken China vis-à-vis the West by undermining China’s economic development, an idea that Revolutionary Alliance socialists derided. In the early years of this century, it was still the more conservatively inclined Chinese who saw Western intrusion as a major problem of Chinese society. Only in the twenties would Chinese socialists merge their social revolutionary demands with anti-imperialism. Liu was one of the first to do so. He was also the first, to my knowledge, to show concern for the consequences for China of urbanization and to turn to rural China in a search for moral and material answers, a search in which major Chinese socialists such as Li Dazhao and Mao Zedong would join in later years. Finally, his insistence on the need to combine manual and mental labor as a means of transforming the Chinese personality would assume immense importance among other anarchists during the New Culture Movement (though his contribution was not acknowledged) and retain its importance all the way to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Vision and Revolution

Prior to the Revolution of 1911, anarchism was one of the two main currents in Chinese thinking on social revolution, which had been stimulated by the introduction to China of socialist ideas at the turn of the century. The Revolutionary Alliance had incorporated social revolution in its political program in 1905 as a means of preventing in China’s economic development the social ills that had accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe. Revolutionary Alliance socialism conceived of socialism as social policy, the use of political intervention by the state to curtail inequality and, therefore, control social conflict.

Anarchism introduced a new theme into Chinese social revolutionary thinking: social revolution as cultural revolution. In contrast to Revolutionary Alliance socialists, whose attention was focused on the state, the anarchists, in their rejection of the state, turned to society as the proper realm of revolution. Key to their idea of social revolution was the transformation of the individual, since it was a basic premise of anarchism that a society could be only as good as the individuals who constituted it. Anarchists viewed inherited social institutions as institutional manifestations of the principle of authority, which distorted the individual psyche and prevented the free play of the instinctive sociability of human beings, the only basis for a good society. The abolition of existing institutions, therefore, must be accompanied in the creation of a good society by a cultural transformation (both intellectual and ethical) of the individual to restore to humanity, as it were, its pristine sociability. The strongly cultural connotations of the anarchist idea of social revolution were responsible, I think, for the immense popularity of anarchism in China a decade later, during the New Culture Movement, when the anarchist conception of change diffused widely in Chinese thinking.

Anarchist themes continued to bear an intriguing resemblance to issues in premodern Chinese politics. The preoccupation with the moral basis of politics, the concern with nourishing public over private interests, the assumption that in education lay the means to moral transformational point to a possible affinity between anarchism and the native ideological legacy of Chinese anarchists. That native political vocabulary infused the language of anarchism would seem to lend support to such an interpretation.

This interpretation can be sustained only if we ignore the new self-image that the Chinese anarchists held and, even more important, the content of the anarchist advocacy of social revolution, an entirely new concept in Chinese politics. The very existence of two camps of anarchists, one upholding native traditions, the other opposing them, militates against any simplistic view of anarchists as prisoners of a cultural or a political unconscious. Associations of anarchism for the Paris and Tokyo anarchists were determined not by an unconscious activity of inherited beliefs and dispositions, but by conscious choices made in response to problems that were products of the material and ideological conditions of early-twentieth-century Chinese society, in particular the problems of revolution and the relationship to contemporary world civilization, and a host of more specific questions to which these problems had given rise.

Anarchist writing was indeed infused with the vocabulary of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Earlier, Revolutionary Alliance writers had on occasion resorted to the social vocabulary of premodern Chinese society in explaining their own socialist notions of class. Anarchists used native vocabulary, utopian or otherwise, with much greater frequency. This practice of using a native vocabulary no doubt made for considerable confusion concerning the relationship of anarchism to native social and moral ideals, but it would be improper to conclude from the confounding of the vocabulary that the ideas themselves were confounded by the anarchists. Kenneth Chen has explained that when Buddhism was first introduced to China, Buddhists used the vocabulary of Daoism to render Buddhist concepts intelligible to the Chinese, who had no native equivalents for those concepts. This practice, described as matching terms (geyi), may help explain the Chinese use of a native vocabulary to express anarchist ideals in the early twentieth century.[182] It does not follow that anarchist ideas lost their revolutionary identity in the process, just as Buddhism did not lose its identity much earlier for being expressed through a Daoist vocabulary. There was confusion, to be sure; a somewhat mysterious and vague association with Buddhist ideals would characterize a great deal of Chinese anarchist thinking in the twentieth century. But ultimately, as is evident in the revolutionary impact of anarchism on Chinese thinking, the association was to transform the meaning of the native vocabulary that was used initially to express anarchist ideas.

The anarchist ideas of morality and revolution illustrate the need to go beyond the vocabulary to its content in order to appreciate this problem fully. Paris anarchists took morality to be the end of revolution. True morality, they believed, could be achieved only with learningnot just any learning, least of all the kind of learning that Confucians had prized, but scientific learning. Li Shizeng dismissed as particular (si) learning all learning that could not stand the test of modern science.[183] Science, whose conclusions were independent of national or cultural orientations, represented to him the only universal (gong) and therefore true learning. He excluded from the realm of scientific learning politics and law, false morality, and religion, including within it only, in addition to the natural sciences, sociology and anthropology.[184] Anarchist scientism clearly distinguished the anarchist perceptions of the fundamentals of learning and, therefore, of morality, from those of their Confucian predecessors, for whom true learning had been all that the anarchists sought to abolish.

With regard to anarchist utopianism, which resonated with certain themes in native utopian traditions, it is clear that anarchists held an activist idea of revolution that distinguished their goals from the eremitic escapism of the Daoists, to whom they were sometimes compared. Responding to a correspondent who compared anarchist ideals to the idea of nonaction (wuwei), an ideal of politics that infused most Chinese schools of political thought, Li Shizeng observed: Anarchism advocates radical activism. It is the diametrical opposition of quietist nonaction. Anarchism does not only advocate that imperial power does not reach the self, it also seeks to make sure that it does not reach anyone else.[185] Embedded in this statement is a distinction between traditional political escapism and modern revolutionary politics: the one seeking to establish a space apart from the existing political order, the other seeking to take over and to transform political space in its totality. That China had its Bodhisattvas who sought to save humanity and that modern anarchism has had its escapist extremists does not change the fundamental differences in the conceptualization of political space between anarchism and native Chinese political traditions; it only points to the need for circumspection in drawing parallels between ideas that are inherently open to wide ranges of interpretation and draw their meaning not from abstractions but from their concrete historical context.

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Anarchism expressed a utopian universalism and a humanitarian vision that was in many ways far removed from the immediate concerns of contemporary Chinese society. But it was not irrelevant. For the first two decades of this century, anarchist ideas played a central role in ideological debate. During the period 19071910 anarchism provided a perspective for the critique of ideologies of reform and revolution. The Paris anarchists, in their futurism, were critical of the limitations in the ideology of nationalist revolutionaries, who rested their hopes on the state. Liu Shipei, with his antimodernist anarchism, was able to see that the new policies of the Qing government were not the harbingers of political openness and social welfare that many thought them to be. I think we can say that their contemporaries, intrigued by these questions, took the anarchists more seriously than historians have taken them.

Anarchists were utopian, to be sure, but their very utopianism accounts for their ability to express concerns among Chinese intellectuals that were no less real for being politically irrelevant, at least in an immediate sense. Anarchist utopianism was itself the expression of a universalistic urge in Chinese thinking that gained in meaning as the Chinese conception of China was particularized with the emergence of nationalism. Against a world torn apart by national interest and conflict, anarchism held up the possibility of a humane civilization in which China could participate. This utopianism on occasion took a comical form: a Mr. Humanity (Rendao shi) from England, in an open letter to the Chinese ambassador in England, charged that the latter, in tampering with student mail, broke the law of humanity, and exposed to the civilized world that Chinaman are [sic] savages.[186] There was nothing comical, however, about the many anarchists who over the years risked government wrath for their pursuit of humanity, which authorities deemed to be subversive of public morality and order.

Utopianism is a relative concept. If we take them seriously enough, ideas such as democracy and freedom, which we bandy about as a matter of course, are as utopian as anything to which the anarchists aspired; indeed, anarchism appears utopian because anarchists have shown a tendency to take these ideas seriously. Those who criticized the anarchists for being too idealistic were not always aware that the Republic or the socialism that they advocated were quite utopian when viewed from the perspective of those conservatives who had an even more pessimistic view than they had of the Chinese ability for self-government. Utopia has been a force in history because one person’s utopia has been another’s reality.

The Chinese anarchists were idealists but they were not blind, as the Paris anarchists said of themselves. Though anarchists promoted anarchism as a total revolutionary philosophy, they projected their vision far into the future and were prepared to compromise their ideals to meet immediate needs. Indeed, anarchists would make a very real contribution in the new ideals they introduced into education, which they believed was the only reliable means to achieve anarchist society. Anarchists’ ideals could even become functional to the ends of political power, as they did when anarchists in the twenties held up their ideal of unity and universality against Communists who, in promoting class struggle, seemed to be bent on prolonging social divisions. Aside from personal relations, this was an important element in the Guomindang flirtation with anarchists in the 1920s.

Anarchists were not the only Utopians in early-twentieth-century China, which, as a period of political and ideological transformation, provided fertile grounds for Utopian thinking. Kang Youwei the reformer had produced the first Utopian work of this period; although Kang’s Datongshu was not yet published when anarchism emerged in Chinese thought, Kang’s Utopian thinking may have influenced at least one of the anarchists, Wu Zhihui, who apparently visited with Kang before leaving for Europe. Nevertheless, anarchist utopianism differed from that of Kang Youwei. Kang’s Utopia was a Utopia of the future, which reflected in content his thinking on the present but did not shape his present concerns. Anarchist utopianism was a revolutionary utopianism because it was an immanent utopianism, which presupposed that the present provided the point of departure for the path to Utopia. It derived its inspiration, at least for the Paris anarchists, from the scientism of Kropotkin, which, however rationalist and ahistorical it may be, portrayed anarchism not as a future dream but as a necessity of human evolution. While Kang Youwei was satisfied (if not entirely happy) to live with the present world of nations and families, of competition and conflict, anarchist utopianism by its very nature called forth immediate criticism of the contemporary world and of efforts to change it. As James Pusey has argued, the anarchist (especially Kropotkinite) challenge to Darwinian assumptions—which set mutual aid against competition—was a major source of attraction to the anarchists.[187]

Anarchism may have made its most important contribution to Chinese social revolutionary thought in the revolutionary utopianism it promoted. China has been a revolutionary society in the twentieth century, not just because of the revolutionization of its society and politics, which nourished the revolutionary faith, but also because of a faith in revolution as an ultimate value, a means to a better world. Laski has observed that Marxism blended utopia and revolution to turn the process of revolution itself into a utopia.[188] This, I think, applies more to anarchism than to Marxism. In China anarchists were the first to articulate a faith in revolution as an endless process of change; this idea not only was important in revolutionary thinking in general but left its imprint on some currents in Marxist thinking as well. A notion of revolution as utopia was implicit in the 1903 statement by Zou Rong in a classic of Chinese revolutionary thought, The Revolutionary Army: Ah, revolution, revolution! If you have it you will survive, but if you don’t you will die. Don’t retrogress; don’t be neutral; don’t hesitate; now is the time. Whether Zou’s statement was inspired in any way by the anarchist ideas that were already finding their way into China is difficult to say; social Darwinism was much in evidence in his essay. But the idea was one that the Paris anarchists echoed, now clearly inspired by mutual aid, but expressed in the vocabulary of Buddhism: Revolution! Revolution!! Revolution!!! Since the beginning of the world, there has not been a year, a month, a day, an hour, a minute, a second, without revolution. Revolution moves forward without rest, tireless in its intrepidity. It is the key to the progress of the myriad worlds (daqian shijie).[189] Revolution was to society as the propeller to the ship, constantly moving it forward under the guidance of universal principle, as the propeller moved the ship forward in accordance with the compass. Revolution was not simply a solution to practical problems, it was the destiny of humanity.