Chapter Seven
The Revolution That Never Was:
Anarchism in the Guomindang

Anarchists made an attempt in 1927 to acquire a voice in the Guomindang, perhaps even to shape its future. Their goal was not to take over the Guomindang politically, as some opponents charged, since they rejected politics, but rather to use the possibilities the party offered to channel the Chinese revolution in a direction consistent with anarchist goals. In hindsight, the attempt was futile, a last desperate, and somewhat opportunistic, act in anarchists’ efforts to recapture the revolutionary ground they had lost over the previous three years to successful Communist inroads among the masses. Following this attempt, anarchism for all practical purposes would disappear as a significant force in Chinese radicalism. In the attempt, no less than in the suppression it invited, was inscribed the complex legacy of the history of anarchism in China.

In historical hindsight, the anarchist hope to remake the Guomindang in an anarchist image at the very moment that the party had turned against the social revolutionary movement in China appears, if not as an instance of a supreme revolutionary opportunism, then at best as another illustration of the seemingly limitless capacity of anarchists for self-delusion. This was not necessarily what a contemporary perspective yielded, however. The Guomindang, always incoherent as a political organization, was in 1927 in great disarray. True, the Northern Expedition it had launched in 1926 was in full swing and would once again reunify the country by 1928, the party was already in the process of establishing itself as the new national government, and it had just averted an internal threat by bloodily terminating its three-year-old united front with the Communist party, which had sought to direct the revolutionary movement toward Communist goals. While the suppression of Communists had compromised the Guomindang as a revolutionary force, it had not yet erased the popular image, or the self-image, of the party as the foremost force in the national revolution. Sympathy for the Communists in 1927 was by no means universal, and the full extent of the Guomindang counterrevolution would not become apparent until after the conclusion of the Northern Expedition in 1928 and the establishment of the new national government. But at its very moment of victory, the ideological future of the party seemed more uncertain than ever. It was deeply divided into factions, ranging from Marxists to hidebound reactionaries, each one of which sought to direct the party’s future in accordance with its own interests and ideological proclivities. The future seemed to be up for grabs. Anarchists were one of the groups that attempted to grab it.

The key figures in the attempt to turn the Guomindang on an anarchist course were Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui. After the party reorganization of 1924, they held formally unofficial but actually powerful positions as members of the Central Supervisory Committee, a watchdog committee intended to keep an eye on party affairs. Also on the committee were Zhang Ji and Zhang Jingjiang, two fellow anarchists from before 1911; the latter had financed anarchist activities in France before 1911, and had a close relationship with Chiang Kai-shek himself. From this position Li and Wu had criticized the Guomindang alliance with the Communist party since the reorganization of 1924 (which had allowed Communists into the Guomindang), and in 1927 were leaders in the move to purge not just the Communists but also the Marxists on the Guomindang Left. During the same period, they had been pressuring younger anarchist activists to join the Guomindang, and this bore fruit in 1927 when, in the aftermath of the first Guomindang purge of Communists in Shanghai in April, they were able to persuade several anarchists who had gained prominence in the labor movement in Shanghai to cooperate in the establishment of a Labor University (Laodong daxue), which would be the center, and the most important product, of anarchist activity in the Guomindang. So important was the part they played in the Guomindang in 1927–28 that the Guomindang Left perceived in their activities the threat of an anarchist takeover of the party.[458] In his survey of political groupings published in 1930, Sima Xiandao was to point to anarchists as one of the important political groups in China.[459]

It was precisely this relationship to the Guomindang, however, that also divided the loyalties of the foremost leaders of Chinese anarchism and doomed the undertaking they initiated and, with it, the anarchists who followed them. In the mid-twenties few anarchists looked with favor upon the political involvements of Li and Wu in the Guomindang. Indeed, if opposition to the Communists united the anarchists in the twenties and increasingly shaped their attitudes toward the revolutionary movement, the question of their relationship to the Guomindang was to be highly divisive. In 1927, when some of them followed Li and Wu into the Guomindang, they had by no means abandoned their qualms about the Guomindang, or come to share the latter’s view of the relationship between anarchism and the Guomindang, which quickly appeared in the different meanings they assigned to anarchist activity within the party. The divisions, and the threat anarchist activism presented to the Guomindang, would result quickly in the suppression of anarchism in which the Guomindang anarchists were to play an active if reluctant role. Anarchist activists of the younger generation who had hoped in 1927 to use the Guomindang to achieve anarchist goals discovered quickly that without a power base of their own, and deprived of the protection of Guomindang anarchists, their survival was contingent upon their willingness to serve as instruments in the party’s attenuation of revolution. Their criticism of the Guomindang for its suppression of revolution, and manipulation of anarchist activities, met with quick reprisals. Li and Wu would continue to play central roles in the Guomindang in later years, but the Guomindang suppression of anarchism in the party, which was complete by 1929, was to deal anarchists a blow from which they would not recover.

Anarchists and the Guomindang

When the anarchists acquired an audible voice within the Guomindang in 1927, what was remarkable was the timing, not that they had acquired such a voice. Anarchist activity in 1927–1929 was the culmination of two decades of involvement in the Guomindang. Wu Zhihui, Li Shizeng, and others who led the way in 1927 were not only China’s first anarchists, they had been early members of the Guomindang. While on occasion they had been critical of the revolutionary methods of Sun Yat-sen, they had remained Guomindang members and by the twenties were widely regarded as party elders. Their positions in the Central Supervisory Committee were indicative of the respect they commanded.

This long history of involvement with the Guomindang did not make any the less controversial the roles that Li and Wu (and other Paris anarchists) played in the Guomindang as members of that committee. In a letter he wrote to Zhang Puquan (Zhang Ji) shortly after they had assumed their new positions, the prominent anarchist Hua Lin stated unequivocally that the moment Li and Wu entered their relationship with the Guomindang, they as good as stopped being anarchists.[460] The relationship would be a divisive issue among the anarchists for the next three years and would splinter the anarchist movement after 1927.[461]

The fundamental issue was politics. The Paris anarchists, like all anarchists, viewed the overthrow of the state as a primary goal of the anarchist revolution, and had from their earliest days forsworn political involvement, not only because politics could have but one goal—access to state power—but also because they believed that politics, as the expression of partial interest in society, perpetuated social division and was, therefore, inimical to the anarchist goal of abolishing all social interest and division. The various informal societies they had established in China in the early days of the Republic all had made the renunciation of politics a condition of membership.

The political involvement of the Paris anarchists, in other words, contradicted their own professions of opposition to politics. The contradiction had been easier to ignore before 1911; the Revolutionary Alliance had been, as the name suggested, an alliance of revolutionaries against the monarchy, and anarchist membership did not signify much beyond participation in an antimonarchic movement. This contradiction was to become increasingly problematic thereafter. The Guomindang was a political party bent on acquiring political power, and involvement with it implied a tacit affirmation of politics. It will be recalled that when a member of the group, Zhang Ji, had assumed a political position in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution, he had drawn the ire of the Guangzhou anarchist Shifu, who had engaged Wu Zhihui in a debate concerning the propriety of anarchist involvement in politics. In ensuing years, the Paris anarchists had also served as intermediaries between the Chinese and French governments, first in the importation of Chinese laborers to Europe during the war and, following that, in the establishment of the work-study program. The roles they assumed in the Guomindang after 1924 merely confirmed for other anarchists their long-standing willingness to compromise anarchist principles, a sign, at best, of questionable commitment to anarchism, at worst, of political opportunism. The frontispiece to a special commemorative issue on Shifu of the important anarchist journal People’s Tocsin (Minzhong) in early 1927 stated pointedly that in China at the present, there is no one worthy of our respect other than Shifu.[462] Whether it was so intended or not, the statement had uncomplimentary implications for the anarchist elders from whom Shifu had learned his anarchism (Wu Zhihui was a contributor to the issue).

Among the Paris anarchists, Wu Zhihui seemed to be the one most prepared to defend anarchist involvement with the Guomindang and, in the 1920s, to urge fellow anarchists to do the same.[463] In his response to anarchist critics of such involvement, Wu gave two reasons why anarchists should support the Guomindang effort. First, anarchists and the Guomindang (as well as other revolutionaries, including the Communists) shared a common enemy, the warlords, whose overthrow was in the best interests of all revolutionaries. To soothe the anxieties of anarchists who were suspicious of Guomindang motives (prominent anarchists such as Mao Yibo believed that the Guomindang shared some of the counterrevolutionary characteristics of militarists and had more than its share of opportunistic politicians whose sole goal was to become rich through office, shengguan facai),[464] Wu argued that the Guomindang in the 1920s was a new Guomindang, committed to revolution. Pointing to Kropotkin’s support for the war effort during World War I, Wu argued that anarchists had always supported progressive causes, even when the cause was not their own. If the Guomindang at a later time lost its progressive character, there would be time enough for anarchists to oppose it.

This argument was similar to the one that had earlier justified Paris anarchists’ membership in the Revolutionary Alliance; then, too, the anarchists had opposed the nationalist goals of the Alliance, but supported its struggle on the grounds of a prior need to overthrow the Manchu monarchy. Underlying this justification was a broader conception of the progress of revolution in history, which Wu now adduced as a second reason for anarchist support of the Guomindang. Paris anarchists had represented revolution as a long process with a number of progressive stages; the transition from monarchy to a republic was one such stage and must, therefore, be supported by anarchists without their losing sight of the anarchist goals of revolution toward which they must propel the revolution at all times.[465] Wu Zhihui still believed that anarchist revolution would take a very long time (at this time he estimated 3,000 years)[466] and urged his younger colleagues to forego revolutionary purity and support the Guomindang revolutionary effort, which, as a progressive step in the march of revolution, would bring anarchism one step closer to realization.

Wu’s argument did not prove to be sufficiently plausible to most fellow anarchists, at least not in 1924. A lengthy rebuttal by the Zhejiang anarcho-syndicalist Shen Zhongjiu, published in July 1924 in the Shanghai anarchist journal Free People (Ziyou ern), offered counterarguments that typified anarchist opposition to participation in the Guomindang in the mid-twenties. What makes Shen’s piece particularly interesting is not only that he was an articulate spokesman in these years against anarchist involvement in the Guomindang, but also that he would play an important part in anarchist activity in the party in 1927.[467]

Shen was impressed neither by the common enemy argument nor by Wu’s assurances that the Guomindang was a new Guomindang committed to the cause of revolution rather than to usurping power for itself. The common-enemy argument was fallacious, he believed, because it could be used to justify alliance with anyone, including other warlords who shared the Guomindang’s enemies. Besides, he pointed out, anarchists were not knights-errant of the type to be found in Chinese literature, ready to help whoever required their services; they had their own principles and were concerned, not just with making revolution, but with what followed the revolution. Anarchists sought to overthrow not only warlords and imperialism but also the state and capitalism. For them to help the Guomindang establish a new state power would be to help erect a more powerful obstacle to anarchism than presently existed. Besides, Wu overlooked that the Guomindang had its own ideology in Sun’s Three People’s Principles and required loyalty to them as the price of admission into the party. The Three Principles were incompatible with anarchism; anarchists could not swear loyalty to them without ceasing to be anarchists. Therefore, for anarchists to enter the Guomindang would simply be suicide because anarchists have even less reason for joining the Guomindang than the Communists. Contrary to Wu, Shen perceived in the example of Kropotkin’s cooperating with other revolutionary parties a lesson for anarchists to avoid repeating a similar mistake: Kropotkin had in the end been betrayed by the very revolutionaries he had supported.[468]

Similarly, Shen rejected Wu’s argument that the revolution progressed in necessary stages from democracy to the dictatorship of laborers to anarchism. This reasoning was a consequence, he believed, of a fallacious analogy between nature and society, which resulted in a deterministic view of revolution. Revolution ultimately depended on humankind’s striving to reach upwards and its capability to organize (renjiande xiangshang xin he zuzhi li). It might be slow or rapid according to the power of the desire for progress or the ability to organize, but it was not bound by natural law. Indeed, Wu ignored that the stages he presented as natural in the progress of revolution were also mutually contradictory. Shen presented the problem in a terse formula: Democracy—has government, has private property. Dictatorship of laborers—has government, has private property. Anarchism—no government, no private property. To go through these stages to reach anarchism, he concluded, was no different than going south in order to get north.[469]

Shen’s rebuttal barely concealed his disdain for what he took to be the opportunism of anarchists who cooperated with the Guomindang. Even if the Guomindang were to be taken seriously as a revolutionary party, which he obviously doubted, its goals were contrary to anarchist principles and did not allow for cooperation. Judging by the anarchist press in the 1920s, most anarchists shared Shen’s views. They were opposed to a limited revolution that took as its objectives the elimination of warlord and imperialist control of China (which were the stated goals of the united front presented by the Guomindang and the Communist party). While these were goals they could share, they disapproved of the limitation of the revolution by the nationalistic motivations that informed it; at the height of the nationalistic upsurge that swept China in the mid-twenties, anarchists continued to oppose nationalism, not only because it could only issue in the establishment of a stronger state than before, but also because nationalism only served to build walls around people and further separate them from one another. They supported anti-imperialism but believed that the answer to abolishing imperialism was not nationalism but the abolition of capitalism.[470] So adamant were the anarchists in their opposition to a nationalist revolution that they even came under criticism from Jean Grave, who gently rebuked them in a letter by reminding them that during World War I he and Kropotkin had supported nationalism when it was clearly in a good cause.[471]

Such pressures did not go entirely unheeded. Some anarchists who were opposed earlier to collaboration with the Guomindang were by 1926–27 urging their colleagues to view the Guomindang as a friendly party (youdang) and join in the revolutionary effort to overthrow the power of the old parties.[472] By April 1927 Shen Zhongjiu himself and others associated with him were ready for collaboration.

Not all anarchists would come around to viewing the Guomindang as a friendly party; as far as it is possible to tell, influential Guangzhou anarchists, such as Liang Bingxian and Ou Shengbai, and Sichuan anarchists, such as Li Feigan (Bajin) and Lu Jianbo, continued to oppose collaboration. But a sufficient number collaborated to give Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui the following they needed to make anarchism a serious presence in the Guomindang, especially in Shanghai. These included, in addition to Shen Zhongjiu, radical Hunanese anarchists who had been based in Shanghai since 1923, and Bi Xiushao, another Zhejiang anarchist who had gained visibility in anarchist activities in France. Most of those who collaborated with the Guomindang in 1927 had been involved in the syndicalist movement in Shanghai since 1924. Other anarchists involved in the labor movement in Guangzhou, most prominent among them Liu Shixin, would also collaborate with the Guomindang after 1927.[473]

It may not be coincidental that anarchists involved in the labor movement would play a conspicuous part in the collaboration with the Guomindang. There are not ready-made explanations for the turnabout in anarchist activists’ attitudes from opposition to collaboration with the Guomindang. One can point, however, to a conjuncture of circumstances brought about by changes in the revolutionary situation in China that inclined anarchists to collaboration, if not necessarily to the assumption of a Guomindang identity.

First was an intensifying sense of their irrelevance to the gathering momentum of the revolutionary movement, which was evident in the receding of anarchist influence not only among labor but also among educated youth who were increasingly drawn to the national struggle led by the Guomindang and the Communist party. The mid-1920s (especially following the May Thirtieth Incident in Shanghai) witnessed a virtual explosion in the influence of the Communist party, which would ultimately bring down the united front but which for the time being was most impressive for the gains the Communists had made at the expense of the anarchists, in whose eyes they were not just the foremost competitors on the social revolutionary Left but, because of their Bolshevik orientation, the foremost enemies of an anarchist revolution. The surge in mass mobilization, especially the labor movement, provided the Communist party with an opportunity for expanding its constituency; the alliance with the Guomindang formalized in 1924 facilitated the Communists’ ability to convert this opportunity to actuality. Between 1925 and 1927 Communist party membership would increase from about one thousand to about fifty thousand. Almost half the membership, moreover, consisted of urban laborers, a higher percentage than the party would ever again command throughout its history.

The expansion of Communist power meant the decline of anarchist hopes for achieving leadership of the social revolutionary movement in China, which was particularly distressing to anarchists involved in the labor movement. The popularity of anarchism had peaked in 1922–23, when anarchists could still claim that there were several thousand anarchists in China, not a particularly large number but significantly higher than what the Communist party could claim at the time. Anarchists, moreover, had initiated the modern labor movement in China and, as late as 1922, exerted significant influence among laborers both in the south, in Guangzhou, and in Hunan in central China. Driven from Hunan by warlord repression in 1922–23, Hunanese anarchists (along with anarchists from Zhejiang and Sichuan) had emerged as key figures in the Federation of Shanghai Syndicates (Shanghai gongtuan lianhe hui) that was established in 1924 (where they cooperated, at least at the ground level, with Guomindang-related labor leaders). It was also becoming increasingly evident that everywhere, including the anarchist stronghold in Guangzhou, anarchist influence over labor was on the decline, partly because the united front with the Guomindang gave the Communists much-needed prestige as national revolutionaries as well as the authority provided by the Guomindang in places like Guangzhou, and partly because of an inherent weakness of the anarchists in their inability to organize, which meant that however successful at the local level, they were unable to coordinate labor activities nationally. In 1922, when the first National Labor Congress had convened in Guangzhou, anarchist influence had frustrated Communist organizers’ efforts to politicize the labor movement. By 1925, when the Second National Labor Congress convened in Shanghai, Communists had clearly established their supremacy in their leadership of labor.[474]

Judging by anarchist appeals to youth in 1926–27, the loss of anarchist influence was not restricted to labor but extended to the idealistic youth who in the early May Fourth period had been attracted to the anarchist message in large numbers. The delusion of youth who fell into the trap of nationalism was a constant theme in these appeals, as was the problem of how to recover anarchist leadership of youth, and other social movements.[475]

At the height of the social revolutionary movement in China, of which they had been the first and the foremost advocates, anarchists watched with a sense of despair their irrelevance to the actualities of social revolution. By late 1926 they were openly self-critical about their inability to organize, which, they believed, curtailed anarchist ability to influence the course of the revolutionary movement. Ultimately, however, they traced their increasing irrelevance to a revolutionary purism, which accounted for the anarchist refusal to engage in concrete revolutionary activity so long as the revolution did not correspond to anarchist desires.

This was the thrust of a discussion prominent Chinese anarchists undertook in late 1926 and 1927 concerning anarchist relationship to the revolutionary movement, the results of which were published in 1927 under the heading of Anarchism and the Question of Practice (Wuzhengfu zhuyi yu shiji wenti). The discussion as published included only three essays, by Feigan (Bajin), Huilin (Wei Huilin), and Jun Yi (Wu Kegang), whereas, according to Lu Jianbo, other anarchists had participated in it originally, including himself.[476] The basic issue was whether anarchists should continue to engage in an academic propagation of anarchist ideals, divorced from the masses and the concrete conditions of revolution, or participate in the revolution to guide it toward anarchist goals. The latter inevitably raised the questions of how to participate and, by implication, of anarchist relationship to the Guomindang, which, judging by the conclusions of the various essays, was foremost in the minds of the participants in the discussion.

There was agreement over the first issue, but not over the second. All agreed that the concern for revolutionary purity not only made anarchists irrelevant to the revolutionary movement, but in some ways led to the betrayal of anarchists’ ideals in the priority it gave to revolutionary abstractions over a genuine concern for the people. The error, they suggested, rested in a confusion of the revolutionary movement with the parties that led it. The revolutionary movement then in progress was not a revolution of the Guomindang or of the Communist party, but a genuine revolution of the people. It was the obligation of anarchists to participate in the popular revolution, succor the people, and guide them toward anarchism. As Bajin put it:

China has already entered a revolutionary period. The revolutionary movement at the present is not a movement of the Guomindang but a revolutionary movement of the masses. Tens of thousands of workers are on strike, countless youth are on the battleground ready to risk their lives at the hands of the white terror or end up in jail. I am completely opposed to those who say that they are mere blind followers of a few leaders, that they just desire to achieve wealth through office, that they are running dogs of the new warlords, that they are disciples of the Three People’s Principles, or that they merely wish to establish a bourgeois government. The Northern Expedition of the national armies is one thing, the Chinese revolutionary movement is still another thing. The struggle for liberation of a semi-colonial nation may not be the goal of anarchism, but anarchists cannot oppose it, they can only strive to make it go further. Similarly, we may not oppose the anti-imperialist movement just because capitalism has not yet been abolished. I hate the Soviet Union, but I hate the imperialist powers even more; I hate the Guomindang, but I hate the northern warlords even more—because the Soviet Union is nowhere near as bad as the imperialist powers, nor is the Guomindang birds of a feather with the northern warlords. If we can offer the masses something better, so much the better; but to stick one’s hands up one’s sleeves and engage in opposition from the sidelines, while perfectly all right for bourgeois scholars, is no less than a crime for revolutionaries. It is all right for an individualist to say, If it is not complete, it is better not to have it, but a revolutionary cannot say any such thing because that is not what the masses demand. If we do not have much influence in the present movement, it is our own fault. Right-wing nationalists and the Research Clique must take great pleasure in watching us stand on the sidelines and abuse the revolutionary movement as just a political struggle or a war between warlords, or make the Guomindang into birds of a feather with Zhang Zuolin.[477]

Bajin himself was opposed to collaboration, although some of his remarks might have suggested at least a contingent approval of the Guomindang. Other anarchists were more willing to participate in the Guomindang struggle so long as they retained an anarchist identity and could push the Guomindang toward the maximization of revolutionary goals. Wu Kegang, who in 1924 had opposed Wu Zhihui’s urgings for anarchists to join the Guomindang, had in the meantime assumed a more positive attitude toward collaboration. He concluded his contribution to the discussion with the words:

In my opinion, however bad the Guomindang may be, there are many in it whose goal is not to achieve wealth through office but to carry out the revolution. Moreover, the struggle they are involved in now to overthrow foreign aggression and the northern warlords is something that anarchists themselves desire and should be doing. When it succeeds the Guomindang will still be far from anarchism, but it is the height of ignorance about revolution to suggest that the common people will be worse off than they are now.[478]

Wu by then was one of the advocates of the need for anarchists to view the Guomindang as a friendly party.

Judging by the collaboration that was to follow shortly after these lines were published, it is possible to suggest that by early 1927 many if not all anarchists shared some of these sentiments. We should note two other conditions that had to be fulfilled before collaboration became a reality. First, Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui had to reassure anarchist activists that in collaborating with the Guomindang they need not abandon their anarchism to influence the future of the party. This is at best a guess, but one for which there is some circumstantial evidence. According to Bi Xiushao, who was to play an instrumental role in bringing about the collaboration and afterwards in anarchist activity in the Guomindang, the meeting in April 1927 that initiated the collaboration was preceded by more than half a year of meetings with important Guomindang anarchists, including Zhang Ji, Wu Zhihui, and finally Li Shizeng, who in 1927–28 would become the godfather of anarchist activity in the party. What went on in these meetings Bi does not say (except in the case of Zhang Ji, who bitterly complained about his popular image as a reactionary), but by the fall of 1926 the anarchists in the Central Supervisory Committee were already engaged in efforts to terminate the alliance with the Communists, and they probably at least held out to anarchist activists the promise of future leadership in the labor movement; labor, we shall see, was the first item on the agenda of the collaboration after April 1927. Furthermore, the collaboration was accompanied by a change in the public stance of the Guomindang anarchists themselves. While Li and Wu (and Zhang Ji) had made no secret of their anarchism over the years, their advocacy of anarchism as an option for the Guomindang was quite novel, especially their open advocacy that the sacrosanct Three People’s Principles could be interpreted from an anarchist perspective. We have no way of knowing if they conveyed their intention to openly promote anarchism in the party to Bi and others in order to draw them into the Guomindang, but by May 1927 they were already doing so. Finally, there is little question that anarchists who joined the Guomindang in 1927 behaved with a surprising independence, making no effort to conceal that their goal was to bring anarchism into the Guomindang. Even as they entered the collaboration in April 1927, they continued to criticize the nationalist goals of the Guomindang revolution, and they were uncompromising in their advocacy of the cause of urban and rural laborers. Indeed, reading through their protests in 1928 against the Guomindang suppression of mass movements (and subsequently of anarchist activity within the party), it is hard not to detect a sense that they felt betrayed not just by the Guomindang but by the anarchists who had brought them into the collaboration.

The second condition was the Guomindang suppression of communism. It may be no coincidence that the meeting in Shanghai at which anarchists drew up their plans for activity within the Guomindang followed shortly on the heels of Chiang Kai-shek’s suppression of communism, followed by a massacre not only of Communists but of Shanghai laborers as well. This, of course, was to taint from the beginning the willingness of the anarchists to collaborate with the Guomindang, for in their hatred for the Communists, they were willing to close their eyes to the victimization of the very laborers whose case they hoped to pursue in the Guomindang. It was this promise above all that drew them into the Guomindang, and the suppression of communism provided them with their opportunity.

Why they should have felt that they themselves would be immune to a similar suppression is difficult to say. Possibly it was assurances from Li and Wu that reassured them; or it may have been their belief that since they intended to help the laborers organize themselves rather than to use labor to their own political ends, as they believed the Communists had done, they could avoid a similar fate. Shen Zhongjiu’s prophecy that collaboration with the Guomindang would prove suicidal for anarchists would come true within the year. But in the excitement of the possibility offered by the Guomindang of once again capturing leadership of the mass movements, Shen himself was willing to overlook his qualms of three years earlier.

The plans for the collaboration were drawn at a meeting in Shanghai in April in which the participants were Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Bi Xiushao, Kuang Husheng, and Lu Wenhan.[479] The cornerstone of anarchist activity was to be a Labor University to train a new kind of labor leader and a new kind of intellectual, which would transform not only the Guomindang but ultimately the whole nation. Along with Labor University, anarchists would publish a new periodical, Revolution (or Revolution Weekly, Geming zhoubao), in which they would propagate anarchist ideas in a form appropriate to the cooperation with the Guomindang. Li and Wu would attend to the official aspects of the cooperation (Li also agreed to finance the whole undertaking initially); the younger activists would tend to the operation of the new university, as well as to the publication of the journal. The guiding principle of the cooperation was to be, according to another anarchist active in Shanghai at the time, to use the Three People’s Principles as a means to achieve anarchism (literally, take the Three People’s Principles as means, anarchism as goal, yi sanmin zhuyi wei shouduan, yi wuzhengfu zhuyi wei mubiao).[480]

National Labor University

The institutional center of anarchist activity in the Guomindang (as well as its most significant product) was the Labor University (Laodong daxue) established in Shanghai in the fall of 1927. Modeled after a socialist university for laborers that had been founded in 1902 in Charleroi, Belgium, Labor University owed its inspiration and conception to anarchist ideas of education (it was a direct outgrowth of anarchist educational experiments in Shanghai and, earlier, of the labor-learning program in Europe). Its goals were encompassed in the slogan Turn schools into fields and factories, fields and factories into schools (xuexiao nongchang gongchanhua, nongchang gongchan xuexiaohua).[481] Its basic goal was to realize a longstanding anarchist dream: to combine labor and learning in education to create a new kind of individual, a laboring intellectual, or an intellectual laborer. This, the anarchists believed, would abolish a fundamental distinction between social classes, achieve a peaceful social revolution, and launch Chinese society toward an anarchist future. Labor University was the first step in the revolutionization of Chinese education, and the key to a genuine social revolution. Its immediate goal was to train labor leaders of a new kind who could show labor the way to take charge of its own future. It is possible that anarchists conceived of it as a crucial step in the federalist reorganization of China.

Preparations for the new university began in the summer of 1927, led by a committee headed by no less than Cai Yuanpei, the foremost figure in Chinese education and chair of the newly established University Council (Daxue yuan) that the Guomindang intended to supervise the restructuring of the higher-education system. Cai, who commanded immense prestige for his reform of Beijing University a decade earlier, was himself a philosophical anarchist who had long been involved in anarchist educational activities in Europe, who was a foremost advocate of combining labor and learning in education, and who was active after 1926 in the anti-Communist activities of the Central Supervisory Committee in cooperation with fellow Guomindang elders and anarchists Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, and Zhang Jingjiang.

The rapidity with which the planning committee completed its task testifies to the power and influence of the Guomindang anarchists. Yi Peiji, prominent Hunanese educator (and another associate of the group) and past principal of Hunan First Normal, was appointed president of the new university. A physical plant was purchased in Shanghai suburbs as the site for the university. Government support was secured to finance both the purchase and the improvement of the physical plant and other operating expenses. Basic to the conception of the university was the recruitment of students of laborer and peasant background, who could ill afford an education, to put an end to the monopolizing of education by the wealthier classes. To this end, it was decided that all students would be public (gongfei) students. The government would pay for their education as well.[482] The university would comprise three colleges: an Industrial Labor College (Laogong xueyuan), an Agricultural Labor College (Laonong xueyuan), and a Social Sciences College (Shehui kexue xueyuan). The choice of the third area reflected the anarchist belief that social science and social revolution were inseparable.[483] The plan also included training (xunlian) and normal (shifan) components in the university with an eye to the training of labor leaders. Eventually, elementary and middle schools were to be added to create a comprehensive educational institution.

Labor University was formally established in September 1927 and opened its doors to instruction in October with the Industrial Labor College, headed by the Zhejiang anarcho-syndicalist Shen Zhongjiu. Preparations for the Agricultural Labor College were completed the following month with the purchase of additional land, and by November that too was in operation with its own campus. Still another campus (on the site of the former Shanghai University) was established in the spring of 1928 for the Social Sciences College. By mid-1928 the other components of the university were in place and it was in full operation. As of mid-1928, the Industrial and Agricultural colleges had a total of 289 students (about half the number planned for). Two thousand laborers worked for the university in its agricultural and industrial undertakings, and the school already had a library with more than forty thousand volumes of Chinese and foreign works.

Considering the relatively small size of the student body, the investment in the university in its initial phase was highly impressive both in terms of financial resources and in terms of the educational-political attention it drew. The expenditures per student were even higher than in China’s premier educational institutions, Beijing and Qinghua universities.[484] Even more impressive was the educational personnel involved. The committee of overseers included, in addition to the president, Yi Peiji, the four Guomindang anarchist elders, Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Cai Yuanpei, and Zhang Jingjiang (in 1930 Yi was replaced as president by China’s former ambassador to Belgium, Wang Jingqi). The professors at the university included some of the most prominent figures in contemporary natural and social sciences (although many of them were part-time), and the list of speakers in 19271929 reads like a who’s who of Chinese education and politics, ranging from Dai Jitao and Shao Yuanchong of the Guomindang Right to the dean of Chinese literature, Lu Xun, on the Left.[485] What it meant to Chinese educators was spelled out by Cai Yuanpei in a speech he gave at the university in 1930 (by which time, ironically, the university had already under government pressure departed from its original mission), entitled The Meaning of Labor University and the Responsibilities of Labor University Students (Laodong daxuede yisi he Laodong xueshengde zeren). Having outlined the meaning of labor in education and society at large, Cai went on to say:

Since China began to adopt the educational systems of foreign countries, there has been many a special school of agriculture or industry, or industrial and agricultural departments in universities. Such schools were originally intended to combine learning with practice; but once in China, their nature changed. Those who attended them wanted just to read books without any practice, and quickly became learned gentlemen. The children of peasants who went to school returned home to look down on their parents; the same with workers. Hence a proposal was made to establish a labor university. Although Labor University has much in common with industrial schools, we can say that it is revolutionary because its emphasis is on practice; what goes on in the classroom is merely supplementary to this primary goal students are not restricted to workers and peasants because even those who come from moneyed backgrounds are welcome if they are willing to labor. The premise of Labor University is that students must do practical work, that labor is the only work. In the future when labor universities are founded all over the country, they will need the students here to manage them; if students here have not labored, how will they undertake such responsibility? We must strive to labor now so that there is a foundation for the future. There is another consideration. The students at Labor University enjoy special privileges of which many on the outside are envious. They say that the privileges of Labor University students are comparable to those of the nobility during the Qing dynasty. We can answer that we produce, that the school wants us to labor, so we labor, and having fulfilled our obligations enjoy the privileges; that is the answer. If on the other hand we just read books and do no practical labor, we will be no different from old-style agricultural and industrial schools, which is not right. The responsibility of Labor University students is to work; this is true not just for students in the Industrial and Agricultural Labor Colleges, but also for students in the Social Sciences College, who must strive to resolve the social problems of the world; that is the problem of the distribution of production. Our ideal is that the world in the future will consist only of peasants and workers. The problem of the peasant and the worker is the social problem. We have a Social Sciences College so that we can train individuals who have a practical understanding of the difficulties of workers and peasants, who can go among the workers and peasant masses to be one with them, and solve their problems. In conclusion, labor is the point of departure and the foundation for Labor University; all must labor regardless of college or specialization.[486]

The anarchists who were involved in the day-to-day operation of Labor University shared the feelings expressed in this speech. Bi Xiushao, who was a key figure in the inception of Labor University and held a leading position under Shen Zhongjiu in the Industrial Labor College, criticized contemporary Chinese education (at least three decades ahead of Mao Zedong) for its continued emphasis on reading dead books (du sishu) and advocated instead a living education (or an education in life, shenghuode jiaoyu); key to a living education was the practice of labor.[487] Bi recalled in later years that Shen in particular was anxious to set a good example to the students and required the staff to work longer and harder than others at less pay.[488]

It is impossible to estimate the number of anarchists involved in teaching and other work at the university. At least initially, they played a signifcant part in the Industrial Labor College under Shen Zhongjiu and Bi Xiushao. Anarchists also constituted an important group in the social sciences in China in the late twenties, and they may have played a significant role in the Social Sciences College as well.[489] Led by the Hunanese anarchist Kuang Husheng, they were also active in the elementary and middle schools in the university.[490] Also prominent in the university were foreign anarchists recruited to teach there, conspicuous among them Jacques Reclus, grand-nephew to Élisée Reclus, from whom Li Shizeng had learned his anarchism. Anarchists were also involved in the university in other than official capacities; the radical Sichuan anarchists of the People’s Vanguard Society (Minfeng she), who opposed collaboration with the Guomindang, were active among faculty and students, encouraging struggle against the Guomindang. Lu Jianbo recalls that a meeting they held to discuss this struggle was attended by several tens of individuals.[491]

There is less question concerning the curriculum which, in the initial phase of Labor University’s existence, was shaped by the anarchists’ commitment to the combination of labor and learning. Students were expected to do at least three hours of manual labor every day. Zhao Zhenpeng, who enrolled in the university in 1927, recalled that

in the morning, students attended classes. In the afternoon, they were led by the directors of practical work to fields and factories to labor; students of the Industrial Labor College to work on machinery in the machine shop or to set type in the print shop, students of the Agricultural Labor College to till the fields or work on irrigation, students in the Social Sciences College to conduct surveys in nearby villages, all of which truly combined mental and manual labor, class work and practice.[492]

There was real incentive for labor; practical work constituted forty percent of a student’s grade and was crucial to advancement from one grade to the next. Students in the Agricultural Labor College were notably successful in the cultivation of tomatoes and cauliflower. Students in the Social Sciences College made surveys of social problems and labor strikes; one particularly impressive product was a survey of living conditions in Hangzhou.[493] Nor did classroom work and manual labor interfere with social and cultural activities. The school encouraged students to establish clubs and participate in extracurricular activities; each college had its own theater group which, according to Zhao, provided much talent for the Chinese theater in the thirties.

All was not well, however. The number of students who enrolled in the university was below what its founders had originally planned, and those who enrolled were of questionable qualification, at least according to critics. It is possible, as one of the anarchists involved averred bitterly in mid-1928, that the university was undermined by the very stigma attached to labor that it was intended to overcome, which affected both the number and the quality of its students.[494] As Cai Yuanpei’s speech in 1930 intimated, the university was under attack from the outside almost from the beginning. Given the emphasis on labor, and the effort to recruit students from underprivileged backgrounds, in strict academic terms Labor University students were not on a par with their peers in regular academic institutions, which deepened envy and resentment over the resources it enjoyed.[495]

This made Labor University an easy target in the politics of education. Labor University was inspired by the French system of education (French was also the first foreign language taught); as Cai and his Francophile colleagues saw it, it was conceived as a step in reorganizing Chinese education along a French model. It was also a radical educational institution modeled after socialist education, which took education not as an end in itself but as an instrument of social reform. According to Zhao, among its chief critics were American-educated educators who did not share the anarchists’ views on the place of labor in education. So long as Cai Yuanpei and the Guomindang anarchist elders held sway in the educational system, the critics could be resisted. In 1928, however, the Guomindang decided to revamp the Chinese educational system to bring it under its own political and ideological control.[496] The decentralized, regionally based university system that Cai had spearheaded was to be replaced by a centralized system of education under the supervision of a ministry of education, which replaced the University Council. While supporters of the university retained important positions in the Guomindang, the changes in the administration of education undercut their ability to fend off critics of the university. Labor University would remain in operation until early 1932, but after 1930 (when Wang Jingqi took over the presidency) its access to funds and resources was severely curtailed.

As far as the initial anarchist mission of the university was concerned, however, more important were the intentions underlying the Guomindang conception of Labor University, which had already compromised its mission by 1928. Anarchist activists were quite open by mid-1928 in pointing to the fundamental contradiction between the anarchist premises of Labor University and its official ties to the Guomindang. The author who complained about the unwillingness of the students at the university to engage in labor complained also about the increasing bureaucrarization of the university. These developments were products, he believed, of the contradictory goals of Labor University which were implicit in its very name: a national (guoli) university with anarchist aspirations was a contradiction in terms.[497]

The contradiction was not between anarchists and an external force, the Guomindang, but was internal to the anarchists themselves with their simultaneous loyalties to anarchism and the Guomindang. As anarchist criticism of the state of Labor University intensified in 1928, it was extended not just to the Guomindang but to the Guomindang anarchists who had founded the university. The contradictions had been there from the beginning, but rose to the surface in response to Guomindang policies that took shape as the party consolidated its hold over political power. One development was the emergence of an official version of the Three People’s Principles that did not tolerate alternative interpretations of the kind anarchists proposed; the Chinese educational system, as it was revamped, was converted into an instrument for the propagation of this official ideology, which increased official pressure on the university. Another development was the official suppression of mass movements in 1928, which made clear to the anarchists the futility of efforts to organize mass movements of an anarchist nature under Guomindang auspices. The contradictions presented by these developments were articulated in the conflicts among anarchists themselves over the meaning of their participation in the Guomindang, which were to result in the suppression of anarchist activity in 1929.

Ideological Contradictions: Anarchism And The Three People’s Principles

The premise of anarchist activity in the Guomindang was using the Three People’s Principles as a means to achieve anarchism. As the editorial to the first issue of Geming explained, Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles were quite broad in scope and, therefore, flexible in meaning, which allowed different interpretations with changing circumstances. Anarchists should interpret them from an anarchist perspective and propel the Chinese revolution in a direction consonant with their goals.[498]

What distinguished the anarchists was not that they sought to interpret the Three People’s Principles in accordance with their own goals, but the frankness with which they stated their intentions. In 1927 the Three People’s Principles served as an ideological battleground on which different factions within the Guomindang sought to achieve a victory for their own particular ideological orientationsfrom the Guomindang Right, which viewed the national struggle exclusively in terms of the conquest of state power for the party, to the Marxists of the Guomindang Left, who thought that class struggle was an unavoidable component of the struggle for national unity. The Three People’s Principles, moreover, were as broad as the anarchists claimed and justified multiple interpretation. Anarchist claims on the Three People’s Principles were not as vacuous as they might seem from a perspective that emphasizes Sun’s nationalism. In his lectures on the Three Principles before his death in 1925, Sun had on occasion downplayed the differences of his revolutionary ideology from those of the social revolutionaries on the Left, as when he had stated that the ultimate goal of the Three People’s Principles was communism, and anarchism. Even the idea that the Three Principles might serve as a means to achieve anarchism was implicit in his statement that my distinction between People’s Livelihood, and communism rests upon this: communism is the ideal of People’s Livelihood, People’s Livelihood is the realization of communism; the two are distinct only in method. To clarify what he meant by method, he had added that Marxism is not real communism, real communism is what Proudhon and Bakunin advocated.[499] These statements were to provide a textual basis in the anarchist effort to appropriate the Three People’s Principles for anarchism.

What anarchists overlooked, however, was that the appropriation of the Three People’s Principles for anarchism also made possible the appropriation of anarchism by the organizational ideology of the Guomindang as that took shape with the consolidation of party power. The use of anarchist concepts to read the Three People’s Principles required adjustment of the concepts themselves to bring them to closer correspondence with the text at hand. This likelihood was reinforced by an imbalance in power; lacking institutional power of their own, indeed having incorporated themselves into the Guomindang, anarchists had to make their particular reading of the Three People’s Principles palatable to those who controlled the Guomindang. That anarchist leaders such as Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui were divided in their loyalties almost guaranteed the ultimate subjection of anarchist to Guomindang goals. This fundamental contradiction, present in the anarchist collaboration with the Guomindang from the beginning, would in the end divide the anarchists themselves and doom their undertaking even before the Guomindang actually stepped in to bring it to an end.

Li Shizeng was in many ways the guiding spirit behind anarchist collaboration with the Guomindang in 1927–28 (even though it was Wu Zhihui who by 1928 drew the fire of opponents as the symbol of an anarchist takeover of the Party). Li viewed himself at the time as a defender of the sacred term revolution.[500] An essay he published, beginning with the first issue of Geming and continuing for the next few issues, The Meaning of Present-day Revolution (Xianjin gemingzhi yiyi), which reads in retrospect like an agenda for anarchist activity in the Guomindang, provides a point of departure for a close examination of the contradictions in anarchist-Guomindang collaboration.[501]

Li’s essay was intended to provide a metahistorical justification for an anarchist interpretation of the Three People’s Principles. Since his earliest writings on revolution in the New Era (Xin shiji) in Paris, Li had perceived in revolution the key to progress, which he viewed in biological terms as a universal and natural endowment of humankind in history. He now explained that present-day revolution meant nothing more than present-day progress. Revolution, as progress, signified the evolution of humankind from bad to good, simple to complex.[502]

Such progress was manifested in history in the evolution of humankind through a number of political stages, of which Li identified four:monarchical revolution (junzhu geming, which he identified with a palace revolution, gongting geming, and a revolution of despotism, zhuanzheng geming); revolution for people’s sovereignty (minquan geming, which he identified with national revolution, guojia geming, and political revolution, zhengzhi geming); class revolution (jieji geming, which he identified with property revolution, caichan geming,and economic revolution, jingji geming); and, finally, revolution for people’s livelihood (minsheng geming, which he identified with social revolution, shehui geming, and a revolution for great unity, datong geming). These revolutions took several thousand years and followed a certain order. The establishment of the Shang and Zhou dynasties in China (the origins of the Chinese state three millennia earlier, in other words) belonged in the first type (stage) of revolution, the American and the French Revolutions as well as the 1911 Revolution in China belonged in the second type, and the Marxist revolution of Lenin in Russia belonged in the third type. In the fourth type of revolution, a revolution for world unity (shijie datong), belonged the revolution for a new era (xin shiji geming) advocated by P. J. Proudhon and the revolution for people’s livelihood advocated by Sun Yat-sen.[503]

Much of the discussion that followed consisted of a criticism of Bolshevism and of Marxist influence in China. Of interest here is that, as Li perceived it, what rendered Marxism undesirable was that at the present stage of revolution it was a regressive force because revolution had already moved past the third stage in which Marxism belonged (conveniently overlooking that China had not yet gone through that stage). As stages of historical development overlapped, however, the present still required a struggle to eliminate the influence of Marxism. Worldwide, the struggle was between Proudhonism and Marxism, corresponding respectively to the left wing and the right wing in prevailing ideologies of revolution. In China the corresponding struggle was between Sun’s Three People’s Principles and the Communist party.[504]

In earlier days Li’s anarchism had been derivative of P. Kropotkin. By 1927, however, he had come to view Proudhon as the last word not only in anarchism but in social theory in general. During the next two years Li would emerge in the Guomindang as the foremost advocate of a federalist reorganization of China that drew directly upon Proudhon’s Principle of Federation. The switch may have been a consequence of the greater practicality of Proudhon’s ideas, since Proudhon had directly addressed the question of a new political organization. It is also possible that as an added attraction Proudhon’s scheme was more moderate in its implications and therefore more palatable to the Guomindang, whereas Kropotkin had rejected the state and called for a total social transformation of life at the quotidian level. Proudhon’s scheme retained the state, albeit in a reorganized form that allowed for greater local autonomy and therefore liberty.[505]

Of immediate relevance here, however, is that Li established a direct correspondence between anarchism and Sun’s Three People’s Principles. As he put it in a footnote to the essay, The unification of the followers of the Three People’s Principles and of anarchists to make war upon Communists in the present stage of revolution follows from the close correspondence between the Three People’s Principles and anarchism in their fundamentals.[506] He would sound a similar theme in other essays published in Geming. In his Schools of Political Philosophy (Zhengzhi zhexuede dangpai guan), published in late 1927, he not only further stressed the affinity between anarchism and the Three People’s Principles, but also made an attempt to bring both into correspondence with premodern schools of thought in China. In this essay, he divided political philosophy into three major schools: advocates of naked force (qiangquan, which anarchists also equated with authority) who recognized no morality in politics; advocates of humane politics (renzheng) and peace who sought to combine morality and politics; and advocates of humanitarianism (rendao) and morality who repudiated politics. In China, Legalists, Confucians, and Daoists (as well as Buddhists) embodied these three schools respectively. In the contemporary world, Fascists and Communist despotism partook of the spirit of the first; Sun Yat-sen in China and Rousseau in the West partook of the spirit of the second. Chinese anarchists and Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus in the West partook of the spirit of the third. Different groups displayed some overlap in their beliefs but used the alternative arguments to their own ends (for example, Communists used the second and third to create the first). Sun’s Three People’s Principles partook of the spirit of all three but sought to achieve the third, which provided a basis for anarchist cooperation with the Guomindang.[507]

Referring in their study of Chinese anarchism to a tendency of Chinese anarchists early on to utilize the past as a reference for anarchism, Robert Scalapino and George Yu have observed: As long as Chinese traditionalism was enlisted, selectively, in the service of Western radicalism, as long as that radicalism could be buttressed by reference to the Chinese past, the political pendulum for some radicals could always swing back under certain conditions, causing them to revert to orthodoxy. The considerable staying power of Chinese traditionalism were never more clearly illustrated than under such circumstances.[508] The point is well taken but misleading in its vagueness because it does not specify the circumstances of the reference to the past. Li’s reference to the past to rationalize anarchism and demonstrate an affinity between anarchism and the Three People’s Principles ultimately had a clear ideological goal: to make anarchism palatable to the Guomindang Right (he and the other anarchists were opposed to the Left, as we shall see), which was already engaged in a traditionalistic interpretation of the Three People’s Principles to justify the suppression of social revolution. Much less than an illustration of the hold of tradition even on radical minds, it illustrated an anarchist effort to incorporate anarchism into an emerging hegemonic interpretation of the Three People’s Principles. But in its implications for anarchism, it was indeed a swing back of the pendulum.

Out of Li’s elaborate reasoning would emerge two themes that informed the contradictions in anarchist ideology in 192728. One was the advocacy of federalism through which anarchists hoped to shape the future of China under the Guomindang. The other, of which Wu Zhihui would become the most vociferous advocate, was the idea of a revolution of all the people (quanmin geming). In The Meaning of Present-day Revolution Li had criticized the Russified Wuhan government (Wuhanzhi Ihua zhengfu), referring to the still legitimate Guomindang Center under the Guomindang Left in Wuhan, which continued to cooperate with the Communists past the Shanghai suppression in April; contrasting Shanghai and Wuhan, he stated: The Party Protection Movement in Shanghai now stresses the people’s livelihood-based revolution of all the people (quanmin geming), which is a revolution that is relatively new and superior, to replace the revolution led by Wuhan.[509] At first directed against the Communists for their advocacy of class struggle, this idea would emerge by 1928 as a weapon in the attacks on the Guomindang Left. Unlike the other anarchist advocacy, a federational reorganization of China, which represented a radical anarchist input into political debate, the notion of a revolution of all the people had counterrevolutionary implications and would ultimately undercut anarchism itself.

Judging by currently available discussions of the problem, Li’s advocacy of federation was radical not because he conceived it in particularly novel ways, or because he called for an immediate anarchist reorganization of Chinese society, but because he counterposed it to the preoccupation with centralization that dominated the Guomindang (Right and Left) in the late twenties. Li spent more time defending the legitimacy of federation against its critics than in describing with any precision what he himself meant by it, but the outlines of the idea may be gleaned from his references to it as well as discussions by his supporters. Li made no secret of the anarchist origins of his advocacy of federation in Proudhon’s Principle of Federation. The particular term he used for federation, fenzhi hezuo (literally, divided-governance cooperation), he traced to a combination of (in the French original) régionalisme and fédéralisme.[510] In practice this meant a combination of local and central government: as in Proudhon’s original scheme, a hierarchy of units of government that in China would extend from villages or districts (xian) to provinces, regional councils, and finally the central government. The basic purpose was to decentralize power by distributing sovereignty to regional units, which would then associate freely in a rising hierarchy of government. Some of the anarchists acknowledged that this was a temporary compromise, a means to limit central power until the conditions were realized for the abolition of government altogether. When anarchism was achieved, federation would be worldwide, and the nation-state would become just another local unit in a worldwide hierarchy of governing units. Until that condition arrived, however, anarchists were willing to lodge considerable power in the hands of the state, including, in addition to military power, the disposition of finances and the management of heavy industries.[511] Li himself suggested that his idea of federation was quite flexible and that the exact location of governing units could vary in accordance with the demands of the three-stage (military, tutelage, and constitutional government) revolutionary program of the Guomindang.[512]

While acknowledging the anarchist inspiration and intentions of his advocacy of federation, Li spared no effort in representing it as an idea that had been consistent not only with much of the Chinese political thinking since 1911, but also, and more important, with Sun Yat-sen’s emphasis on local government and confederation (lianbang); while the terms were different, the spirit was essentially the same, since Sun too had believed in the distribution of sovereignty (junquan).[513] What had given the idea a bad name was the warlords’ manipulation of federation to perpetuate their own regional power; his idea of fenzhi hezuo, however, was very different from the warlord advocacy of provincial federation (liansheng) and very close to Sun’s idea of Junquan, because its goal was to achieve local self-government (difang zizhi). Li believed local government to be consistent not only with the inclinations of the Chinese people and the best interests of the masses, but also with the most advanced thinking in politics. In a statement that may have aroused the ire of his critics in the Guomindang, he observed that the Guomindang had been for local government since its origins, and only in recent years had turned to centralism (jiquan zhuyi) because it had been poisoned by Bolshevik centralism, which was nothing but a modified czarist despotism (a reference to the Guomindang Left, which opposed the scheme). At the same time, co-opting Sun Yat-sen for his position, he observed that Sun (the father and the mother of the Guomindang) had been well aware of the anarchist origin of his ideas but had not found them in any way objectionable.[514]

Li did not seem to notice any contradiction in an anarchist’s adopting the leader of a political party as his father and mother. Not all anarchists were happy with his confounding of the anarchist idea of federation with Sun’s and other ideas of federal government that had been current in Chinese politics especially in the early twenties. One contributor to Geming observed that fenzhi hezuo or fédéralisme (in the French original) was a revolutionary anarchist idea because it was derived from Proudhon, who had been a champion of the common people (pimgmin).[515] But on the whole, there seemed to be common agreement among the anarchists on this issue, and on the surface at least, the controversy provoked by the idea of federalism was not among anarchists but between anarchists and others in the Guomindang.

This was not so with the idea of a revolution of the whole people, which was to divide the anarchists themselves. There was little ambiguity concerning the meaning of a revolution of all the people, or quanmin geming. As the statement by Li cited above expressly put it, a revolution of all the people was the Guomindang anarchists’ answer to the advocacy of class struggle by Bolsheviks and Bolshevized members of the Guomindang, that is, the Guomindang Left, which continued to insist even after the suppression of the Communists that the Guomindang represent the interests of the oppressed classes in Chinese society (which included workers, peasants, and the petit-bourgeoisie) against capital and landlords. The term would gain currency in 1928–29 in the polemics Wu Zhihui conducted against theorists of the Guomindang Left, in particular Chen Gongbo and Shi Cuntong (who had been among the founders of the Communist party in 1921, before they changed their allegiance to the Guomindang). Its express intention was to repudiate class struggle and to unite all the people of all classes under the Guomindang umbrella to complete the tasks of the Chinese revolution. As Wu Zhihui put it, Mr. Sun Yat-sen did not agree with Marx’s class revolution; revolution is not just for one or two classes but for all the common people (pingminde quanti), including the intellectual, worker, peasant, and merchant classes. This is clearly stated in the declaration of the First Congress. It counts as a revolution of all the people (quanmin geming) if it clears away the harm to all the masses (quanti minzhong), if it unites all four hundred million people in a revolutionary army in which not even one is missing.[516]

In the polemics that ensued, Wu (and some of the anarchists who supported his position) repeatedly referred to the phrase pingminde quanti as the textual justification for his advocacy of a revolution of all the people (quanmin geming). Nevertheless, there was a significant difference between all of the common people (pingminde quanti) and all the people (quanmin), which he conveniently ignored. Ambivalent as the Guomindang revolutionary strategy after 1924 had been on the question of classes, until 1927 a revolution of the common people had justified a mass-based revolution whose foundation had been the revolutionary masses. The idea of a revolution of all the people abolished all distinctions among the four hundred million people of China and made the Guomindang the representative of all the people; a bulwark, in other words, of the existing social status quo. In the transformation of the terminology was expressed the transformation of the Guomindang in 1927 from a revolutionary party to the ruler of the Chinese state, which is what concerned theorists of the Guomindang Left who did not view the social tasks of the revolution as having been completed. Indeed, within the context of the political language of the 1920s, the term revolution of all the people (quanmin geming) not only was antirevolutionary but had a clearly counterrevolutionary signification. As Wu’s critics pointed out (and he could not possibly be unaware), quanmin geming was the term that the ultranationalist Chinese Youth party (Zhongguo qingniandang) had used to criticize the Guomindang-Communist strategy of revolution in 1924–1927.[517] In adopting the terminology of a counterrevolutionary party that had opposed Sun Yat-sen’s social program, indeed any social program, in the national revolution, Wu in effect assented to the repudiation of social transformation as part of the process of a national revolution, which, to say the least, was peculiar for an anarchist. Peculiar, yes, but not entirely unexpected, for though Wu may have carried the idea of a revolution of all the people to a counterrevolutionary extreme, he was not alone in advocating it. Li Shizeng shared the idea, as we have seen, and other anarchists would rush to Wu’s defense when he came under criticism from the Guomindang Left.

Although it would be unfair to hold anarchism responsible for the counterrevolutionary implications of a revolution of all the people, the idea itself was consistent with anarchist views on revolution. Wu carried to a logical extreme a suspicion of class struggle that had long characterized the thinking of Chinese anarchists. Not all anarchists were opposed to class struggle; indeed, radical anarchists who believed class struggle to be a necessary component of revolution had refused to join the Guomindang and continued to criticize those of their fellow anarchists who did so. But even they were suspicious of class struggle as an expression of partial interest in society (that is, the interest of a single class) and believed that the task of revolution was not to articulate class interest but to abolish classes and put an end to the class-based thinking that divided people. Such thinking had been a major source in the mid-twenties of anarchist opposition to communism.

There was a fundamental contradiction in the practical pursuit by anarchists of the cause of laborers and peasants, and their opposition to class struggle as an expression of selfish interests and an obstacle to the realization of a humane society; this was nowhere more evident in 1927–28 than in the contrasts between the work they carried out in conjunction with Labor University and the ideological struggle in the pages of Geming against Communists and the Guomindang Left for their advocacy of class struggle. As Bi Xiushao wrote in 1927, when the Labor University was still in the process of establishment:

The Labor University will be the heart of the peasant and labor movement in China in the future. Its goal, and the responsibility it has assumed, are to plan for the welfare of workers and peasants. It seeks to overthrow all thinking that aids the bourgeoisie, and to help peasants and workers appreciate the true value of labor. It seeks to eliminate the evils of capitalist society, encourage workers and peasants to overthrow all thinking that aids the bourgeoisie, and help peasants and workers appreciate the true value of labor. It seeks to eliminate the evils of capitalist society, encourage workers and peasants to overthrow it by means radical or moderate, and to replace it with a social organization that is more rational and consonant with human nature. It seeks to guide the course of the labor movement, stir up the ideals of laborers, raise their level of knowledge, train them in group life (tuanti shenghuo), and cultivate their ability for self-government.[518]

Yet the same Bi was opposed to Marxist ideas of class struggle, denied that class struggle was an important datum of history, and perceived the most basic goals of revolution to be moral and spiritual, for which he was criticized even by the more radical among the anarchists.[519] The contradiction may not have been apparent to the anarchists, who believed that, unlike the Communists, who used workers and peasants to their own political ends, their sole goal was to help workers and peasants cultivate their ability for self-government. And yet they seem to have overlooked, at least initially, that so far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, it might not make any difference that their goals were different from those of the Communists as long as these entailed the privileging of workers and peasants over other classes, or that the Guomindang under whose umbrella they worked might not appreciate the undermining of its power by peasant and worker self-government. In other words, whether or not they promoted class struggle, their promotion of the cause of workers and peasants might actually issue in class struggle.

The twist Wu Zhihui gave the idea of a revolution of all the people represented one resolution of this contradiction, one that was consonant with the goals of the Guomindang (and Guomindang anarchists), which allowed anarchist activity in the party, not to foment struggle among classes but to bring to an end the class conflict that had appeared with the revolutionary movement in 1924–1927. The Guomindang’s goal in supporting a Labor University had been to train leaders for a labor movement subservient to it, not an independent labor movement of the kind that anarchist activists had envisaged.

The contradiction was brought out into the open with the decision of the party in the spring of 1928 to terminate mass movements, which, the reasoning went, were no longer needed now that a revolutionary party was in state power. The suppression of class struggle, which the anarchists had favored so long as it had been directed against others, now became an issue for the anarchists themselves. While they continued to oppose class struggle, some of the anarchists began to complain in mid1928 about the betrayal of Labor University’s mission and quickly extended the complaint to a criticism of the Guomindang’s policies on labor and peasants. Among their targets was Wu Zhihui. A revolution of all the people may have been a logical conclusion of anarchist opposition to class struggle, but carried to its logical conclusion, it rebounded against the anarchists themselves and brought into the open the contradiction that had been implicit in the anarchist involvement with the Guomindang from the very start.

The Suppression of Anarchism

The larger context for anarchist complaints about the management of Labor University was the apparent suppression of mass movements by the Guomindang, which deprived the Labor University of the meaning anarchists attached to it. It is not surprising that criticism of the course Labor University had taken was joined by an increasingly audible criticism of Guomindang policies toward the masses.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1928, Geming took up the question of the Guomindang’s relationship to the masses. At first the emphasis was on specific incidents, such as the killing of striking laborers in Shanghai in June 1928 where the murderers went unpunished, proof to anarchists of a collusion between capitalists and the existing political system.[520] Anarchists also observed with dismay that warlords, local despots, and the gentry, who had been the targets of the revolution, had now joined the revolution and, masquerading as revolutionaries, were busy massacring real revolutionaries who had now been labeled counterrevolutionaries.[521]

Such criticisms gradually took a more analytical turn, tracing incidents such as the above to the Guomindang’s betrayal of revolution. As anarchists saw it, the revolution had after all taken a purely political turn, abandoning its social goals. As a consequence, its success was now identified with the good of the Guomindang. When the people called for freedom and the improvement of their lives, they were labeled counterrevolutionaries by the government, which sought merely to preserve its own power and that of the bourgeoisie. The only solution, some concluded, might be for the masses to arise and take their fate in their own hands.[522]

An open letter to Geming in September 1928 by a melancholy Chen carried the criticism to Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui. Chen, who described himself as a student turned worker, observed that even as counterrevolutionaries joined the Guomindang and turned it against the revolution, Li and Wu seemed to be increasing their official positions; Wu in particular, he noted, could not seem to tear himself away from the powerful and spent his time following Chiang Kai-shek around, while militarists all around the country engaged in terror against revolutionaries. He had long idolized both Li and Wu, he stated, but was now full of doubts about their commitment to revolution. The only way they could redeem themselves in the eyes of revolutionaries was to relinquish their offices and cease their political activities.[523]

The editorial response to Chen’s letter was to blame the Guomindang Left for the rumors concerning Li and Wu, but criticisms did not stop. In 1928–29 Geming was already proscribed in certain parts of China. The journal was finally shut down in September 1929, by which time it had exhausted its usefulness and become an embarrassment to the Guomindang anarchists. Its final issue bade a touching farewell to its readership. The editorial stated with irony that while we (that is, the anarchists) had survived the Communists and the Northern Expedition, the journal finally succumbed to the Guomindang, which had promised freedom of speech to all. It gave five reasons for the journal’s closing; foremost among them was the degeneration of the revolution into a political revolution. As in all political revolutions, in this revolution, too, the leading party had made all kinds of promises to the people, which it betrayed as soon as it had achieved power for itself. It was not coincidental that Geming had been born during the period of military struggle only to perish under Guomindang tutelage. With reaction on the upsurge, not only was it no longer needed but its struggle against counterrevolution had become undesirable.

The other reasons all had to do with anarchist opposition to government. The journal had refused to bow to the government, which was despotic by its very nature. Opposition to the government’s quest for power and its handling of the people was the final straw. Anarchists who had been advocating peace were now charged with seditious activity against the government, and the journal had to close down.[524]

There was some grain of truth in the latter charge, but only a grain. As was noted above, anarchists who had refused to join the Guomindang continued to conduct radical activity in Labor University, and their declarations advocating the overthrow of the Guomindang found their way into charges of an anarchist conspiracy to take over the party.[525] Ultimately, implications by radicals of anarchist activity within the Guomindang were responsible for the proscription. Anarchists, who had been among the foremost enemies of communism for the previous two years, now found that they were labeled Communists. Bi Xiushao recalls that Li and Wu were warned by party authorities to keep their wards under control.[526] Radical anarchists had become not only a thorn in the side of the Guomindang but an embarrassment to the Guomindang anarchists themselves.

Labor University was to survive Geming by another two years even though it had lost much of its original anarchist intentions by 1928. The resurgence of student activism following the beginning of Japanese aggression against China in 1931 affected the students in Labor University as well. It was already closed down by the authorities in early 1932 when the Japanese attack on Shanghai in January 1932 dealt it the coup de grace by destroying much of its physical plant.

Epilogue

The suppression of 1929 did not end anarchist cooperation with the Guomindang completely. In the south, Liu Shixin and others continued to cooperate with Guomindang-led labor movements. Bi Xiushao, who had been the editor of Geming, continued to cooperate with the Guomindang well into the period of the war with Japan (19371945). Other anarchists followed the Guomindang to Taiwan after 1949.

Anarchist cooperation with the Guomindang, unlikely as it appears theoretically, made some sense in 1927. Shen Zhongjiu had been correct in predicting that joining the Guomindang would be suicidal for the anarchists, but within the context of anarchist desperation in 1926–27 over the increasing irrelevance of anarchism to the revolutionary movement, even he was unable to resist the promise of Guomindang anarchists that here was an unprecedented opportunity for anarchists to shape the future of the Chinese revolution.

Although the anarchist collaboration with the Guomindang was the high point in anarchists’ involvement in the party, as the cases of Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui suggest, the collaboration was not restricted to this period of despair. Li and Wu had been involved with the Guomindang all along and continued their involvement throughout their lives; and they were not the only ones.

Anarchist political involvement with the Guomindang may be traced to the important role personal relationships played in the Chinese revolution, which frequently overrode ideological differences. The personal relationships of the Paris anarchists with Sun Yat-sen and, in later years, with Chiang Kai-shek was an important factor in their involvement with the party. Nor were they the only ones among Chinese anarchists who, in spite of their formal repudiation of politics, found themselves flirting with political authorities. In 1912 Shifu had criticized Wu Zhihui and the Paris anarchists for their activities within the Guomindang. Shifu’s own anarchist group in Guangzhou, however, retained for a decade after 1912 a close relationship with the Guangzhou militarist Chen Jiongming with whom Shifu had been associated before 1911 in the China Assassination Corps.

Important though personal relationships were, they should be viewed within the context of a revolutionary environment characterized by profound ambiguities in revolutionary goals and ideology where revolutionaries, even though they made alternative ideological claims upon the revolution, also shared in a common revolutionary discourse that could serve as the basis for common activity (of which the most prominent example surely is the Communist cooperation with the Guomindang on more than one occasion). While different revolutionary groups identified themselves with different, often conflicting, ideologies, they were also bound together by this discourse of which their ideologies were at once constituents and products: constituents because the revolutionary discourse in its unfolding drew upon different, and disparate, ideological sources as it sought to define a revolutionary strategy that could meet the challenge of the multifaceted problems that faced Chinese society; and products because the revolutionary discourse as it emerged provoked redefinition and reconsideration of revolutionary priorities, which called for a less ambiguous delineation of ideological positions within it. Anarchists such as Wu Zhihui owed their radicalization to nationalist resentment against foreign encroachment on China, which ironically issued not in a parochial nationalism but in a moral utopianism, which made revolution itself a utopia and found an answer in anarchism. Sun Yat-sen, whose first loyalty had been to the revolution against the Manchu monarchy, was also the first advocate of socialism in China because he believed that the national revolution could be secured only through social revolution that would prevent the emergence of class conflict under the future republic that he envisioned. Shifu and Chen Jiongming had started their revolutionary careers (under Revolutionary Alliance auspices) as members of the China Assassination Corps, which sought to topple the Manchus through violence; the one was to end up as a militarist, the other as an anarchist. The militarist Chen also had a reputation for social progressivism. In 1919–20, when he was in control of the Zhangzhou region of Fujian province (where he had been forced to move under pressure from other militarists, accompanied by anarchists of Shifu’s group), the area under his control was known as the Soviet Russia of southern Fujian, and a hotbed of anarchist radical activity (which was confused at the time with Bolshevism). He was one of the first Chinese leaders contacted by the Comintern emissary Gregory Voitinsky when he arrived in China in the spring of 1920 to initiate a Communist movement. In all of these cases, while revolutionary experience (not to say social interest and ideological proclivity) led to identification with different ideologies, the discourse shared by the revolutionaries also provided a basis for cooperation and some blurring of boundaries between different ideological positions.

In the case of the anarchists, there may have been an additional element embedded in the anarchist philosophy of revolution (and not just for the Chinese anarchists). Ironically, the very repudiation of politics by the anarchists may have made it easier for them to collaborate with other political parties, so long as they were not called upon to subscribe exclusively to the political ideology of the party (something that precluded cooperation with the Communist party, with its Bolshevik organization and ideology). Conflicting political interests, which might have divided political parties with their own interests, were not an issue for the anarchists, who claimed that they had no political aspirations of their own and who viewed their own revolutionary goals in exclusively social terms, which in the case of Chinese anarchists appeared primarily in the guise of the education and cultural transformation of the oppressed. This, it will be remembered, had characterized anarchist activity in the early Republic. Wu Zhihui had suggested to his anarchist critics in 1924 that since anarchists had no political aims of their own, there was no reason why they could not work for the revolution under the Guomindang umbrella. And, in hindsight, it is clear that anarchists were willing and able to do so in 1927–28 so long as they could work with the Guomindang as anarchists. It was only when the Guomindang imposed its own demands upon the anarchists that the contradiction between anarchists and the Guomindang became apparent and forced upon the former a choice they had been able to avoid earlier.

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The Guomindang suppression of anarchists in 1929 did not bring the history of anarchism in China to an end. During the early part of the war with Japan, Lu Jianbo and other Sichuan anarchists were even able to publish in Sichuan (where the Guomindang government had moved in retreat from the Japanese armies) an anarchist journal that advocated a popular war to resist Japan. Other anarchists published short-lived journals, were active in the labor movement, or pursued their activities individually, mostly as teachers in colleges and universities. Anarchist ideas would live on in the Chinese revolution, but anarchism as a movement had ceased to exist.