Chapter Four
Anarchists against Socialists in Early Republican China

Anarchism germinated in Chinese thought in the radical culture of Chinese students studying abroad. Like other currents in Chinese radicalism, it was a product of Chinese intellectuals’ confrontation with other societies that already showed the strains of modernity and struggled with alternatives to the dominant capitalist ideology of development. Chinese students’ experiences abroad had a liberating effect on their thinking; the same experiences made them wary of what they found.

It was not until after the Revolution of 1911 that anarchism appeared within China. The literature that anarchists produced abroad found its way into the mainland before 1911, and the already visible movement of Chinese intellectuals between China and the outside world had introduced anarchism to intellectuals at home; but it was in the period of relative political freedom that followed the republican Revolution of 1911 that anarchist activity took form on Chinese soil. Over the next decade anarchism would become an integral part of the thinking of radical intellectuals and help nourish a radical culture that burst forth in full bloom with the May Fourth Movement in 1919.

Paris anarchists played a significant part in the unfolding of anarchism in the early Republic. Shortly after the revolution, they returned home to establish several societies in China. These societies, however, were ephemeral; their contribution lay more importantly in the educational programs that took Chinese intellectuals to France in increasing numbers and culminated late in the decade in the diligent-work frugal-study program (qingong jianxue), which was to play a crucial part in the radicalization of Chinese youth. These activities also served as a conduit between Europe and China, feeding into Chinese anarchism developments in anarchism in Europe.

Within China, the most important development was the appearance of anarchism in Guangzhou, which was also to have a long-term influence on the development of anarchism. Although radical in their consequences, the activities of the Paris anarchists were moderate (took the form, in fact, of cooperation with government authorities in China and France). Under the leadership of the charismatic leader Liu Sifu (Shifu, 1884–1915), the Guangzhou anarchists promoted a radical anarchism that would be responsible for important new developments in anarchist activity and would foreshadow the direction Chinese radicalism would take in the 1920s, in which the Guangzhou anarchists were to play a direct and significant part.

Most important among these developments was the establishment in the late 1910s of an alliance between intellectuals and the workers, a movement spearheaded by anarchists. Both groups of anarchists would play an important part in nurturing an awareness among intellectuals of the importance of labor and in providing social spaces within which intellectuals came into contact with laborers. But there was also a divergence between them that went back to the early Republic. The Paris anarchists, on the one hand, increasingly focused their attention on education and rendered anarchism into an abstract social philosophy—so abstract, in fact, that it did not prevent them from engaging in highly unanarchist activities and would culminate in the 1920s in their association with the Right wing in the Guomindang. Guangzhou anarchists, on the other hand, while they were also concerned with problems of culture and education, were conspicuous for their revolutionary purism and played an important part in nourishing a social radicalism that would on occasion bring the two groups into opposition.

The Guangzhou anarchists also played an important part at this time in consolidating an anarchist identity by drawing a clear line between anarchism and other socialisms, which also found their way into Chinese radicalism in the early Republic. The questions they raised concerning socialism foreshadowed the themes that in the 1920s would form the basis for anarchist criticism of Marxist communism.

The focus in this chapter is on the anarchism of Shifu and his followers and on the debates between anarchists and socialists, which were also the first debates in China within socialism. In the next chapter we will return to the activities of the Paris anarchists.

Anarchist Currents in the Early Republic

The arguments, and the literature that informed them, of the anarchists in Tokyo and Paris indicate that by the eve of the republican Revolution in 1911, Chinese radicals had a sufficient grasp of anarchist theory to determine what was and was not anarchism. Indeed, anarchist writings in the early Republic no longer associated anarchism with nihilism; and although anarchists never repudiated assassination as a method of anarchist revolution, in practice conversion to anarchism was accompanied by a renunciation of assassination activity, as in the case of Shifu. More fundamentally, these writings now portrayed anarchism as primarily a social philosophy, a current within socialism that had arisen in response to the problems created by the emergence of industrial society in the West. And anarchist activity took the form of social activity to transform society at its very base. This new orientation was accompanied, as we have seen with the Paris anarchists, by a disassociation of anarchism from anarchistic currents within premodern Chinese thought. At the same time, it presented anarchists with a new problem: how to distinguish anarchism from other currents in socialism, which was especially urgent because the several socialist groups that emerged in the early Republic overlapped in their ideas of social revolution. This was the central issue of debate between Shifu and the socialists in 1913–14. Anarchism was already a problem within socialism.

Nevertheless, within this social phraseology, anarchism retained the intense moralism of its origins, though anarchist morality possibly assumed a new visage: it was no longer just an assertion of moral authenticity against the deprivations of politics but, especially in the eyes of the Francophile Paris anarchists, a socially important means of civilizing the Chinese population. Traces of the initial reception of anarchism were also visible in the continued association of anarchist morality with Buddhism (and, to a lesser extent, with Daoism); conspicuous among the anarchists of the early Republic was the Buddhist monk Taixu, and Buddhist associations infused, at least initially, the anarchism of Shifu and his followers.

Before the republican Revolution in 1911 there was at least one instance of a Chinese intellectual who sought to put into practice the anarchist convictions he had acquired abroad. This was Jing Meijiu, later the editor of the prestigious Guofeng ribao (National customs daily), whose supplement, Xuehai (Sea of learning), was to be a major source of anarchist ideas in the 1920s.[190] Jing had been a participant in the activities of the Society for the Study of Socialism while a student in Tokyo and had been deeply impressed with the Japanese anarchist Kotoku Shusui’s lectures at the meetings of the Society, which converted him to anarchism. After his return to China, he actively sought to spread anarchism in Taiyuan, Shanxi, his native province.

In a lecture on socialism at Shanxi University in Taiyuan in 1912, Jing traced the origins of socialism to the French Revolution and French socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century, placing particular emphasis on Saint-Simon as the most famous of socialists. He clearly viewed socialism as a response to capitalist exploitation of the people, which had intensified with the industrial revolution. While in his account Marx held a place of secondary importance to Ferdinand Lassalle, he observed that Marx’s analysis of surplus value in Capital had moved the hearts of a whole generation. He presented anarchism as the most extreme of all socialisms. In his opinion, none of the socialisms surpassed anarchism in seriousness of the search for world peace and social happiness, loftiness of ideals and purity of doctrine.[191] He observed further that there was some affinity between this extreme socialism and utopian counter-traditions in Chinese philosophy. Anarchism was most relevant at that time, he averred, because government had failed to resolve the social problems of industrial society.

Jing’s account of socialism clearly bore traces of the anarchism of the Tokyo anarchists. He recalled that while listening to the lectures of the Society for the Study of Socialism, he was inspired to plan a short book that would synthesize anarchism and the theories of Laozi. He was most moved, however, by the Tokyo anarchists’ advocacy of abolishing the distinction between mental and manual labor, which he believed had become worse in the contemporary world. He was apparently also impressed by their emphasis on the equality of men and women. In 1911–12 Jing initiated what may have been the first experiment in China to combine labor and learning, focusing on women. He undertook in Taiyuan to establish a factory for women, intended to bring them economic independence. He also recruited contemporary feminists to teach the women workers in the factory. In his plan for the distribution of the factory’s income, the largest portion was to go to labor, followed by talent (caili) and capital. This, according to Jing, indicated the respect socialists accorded to labor.[192]

What became of this experiment is not clear. Jing felt that with the success of the republican Revolution and the decline of anarchism in Japan anarchism lost some of its appeal among Chinese radicals. He himself was elected to the new republican parliament (along with another anarchist associated with the Tokyo anarchists, Zhang Ji, which would draw the ire of Shifu). But as late as the 1920s his publications were a source of the agrarian anarchism that had emanated from Tokyo before 1911.

In 1912 Paris anarchists also brought their activities home. While they would shift their attention almost immediately to education, a society they established in early 1912 yields insights into the basically moralistic thrust of their conception of anarchismand of education. (It would also serve to promote their anarchism, albeit in disguised form, as a similar society was revived in Beijing University a few years later.) This was the Promote Virtue Society (Jinde hui), whose informal leadership included Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Ji, as well as the Revolutionary Alliance (and later Guomindang) leader Wang Jingwei. The society had a complex structure of rules that also determined membership, which consisted of five types, in increasing order of rigorousness:

The lowest category of membership called for a person not to visit prostitutes and not to gamble; in successively more demanding levels of membership, it was stipulated that the person should not take concubines, not serve as an official or a member of an assembly, and not smoke, drink, or eat meat.

A similar but simpler society was established at about the same time by an associate of the Paris anarchists, Cai Yuanpei (who would also become the first minister of education under the new Republic), the Six No’s Society (Liubu hui). Also aimed at behavioral improvement, the society forbade its members to visit prostitutes, gamble, take concubines, eat meat, drink liquor, or smoke.[193]

It is important to stress, especially in light of later activities of the Paris anarchists, that these societies revealed their understanding of anarchism in practice that was characterized by a willingness to compromise the principles they professed. In spite of the prohibition against the participation of higher-level members in politics, one of the founders of the Promote Virtue Society, Zhang Ji, would shortly become a member of parliament; when Shifu criticized him for this, Wu Zhihui quickly came to his defense. The very complexity of the rules for membership may be seen as a function of their ideological flexibility, to enable the recruiting of members of differing levels of commitment. Both societies, moreover, revealed an ethical orientation that perceived anarchism primarily as a means of transforming behavior. While they professed opposition to politics, and an intention to overthrow the state, Paris anarchists proved quite willing to function within the context of the state so long as they could pursue this cause of ethical transformation. This willingness would come to the fore in the 1920s, when they carried out their anarchist activities under the Guomindang umbrella, in service of a party rule that in theory they repudiated.

Not so with the other two groups that were to play the most important part in propagating anarchism in the early Republic, whose ideological purism was to sustain a distinctive anarchist identity well into the 1920s: the Guangzhou anarchists who gathered around Shifu after 1912, and the pure socialists led by the revolutionary monk Taixu. The more important of these in the long run were the Guangzhou anarchists, whose publications and organizational activities would play a crucial part in the flourishing of anarchism later in the decade. The pure socialists, however, also played some part in the early Republic in spreading anarchism and would contribute to the numbers of anarchists (and to anarchist organizational activity) in the May Fourth period.

Shifu and the Guangzhou anarchists would occupy center stage in anarchist activities in the early Republic, and they will be discussed at length later. We will consider here the pure socialists and the Chinese Socialist party (Zhongguo shehui zhuyi dang) of Jiang Kanghu, of which they were an offshoot, in order to elucidate the complex relationship between socialism and anarchism in these early years. The establishment of the Chinese Socialist party preceded the organization of Shifu’s group and may have contributed to it, both because it helped create a space in Chinese politics for the dissemination of socialist ideas and because its eclectic socialism served as a source of anarchist ideas, which became evident when the pure socialists broke with the party in October or November 1912, countering the state socialism of Jiang with an anarchist socialism of their own. The confusion over anarchism created by the socialism of the Chinese Socialist party and the Social party established by the pure socialists was to be a major cause of controversy between Shifu and both groups of socialists in 1913–14.

Jiang Kanghu (1883–1945) had gained prominence early on for his advocacy of progressive causes, in particular in the areas of equality for women and of education. In the early 1900s, he did educational work under Yuan Shikai, promoted women’s schools, and taught at the Imperial University at Beijing (later Beijing University). He was exposed to socialism in 19071910, when he went abroad to study, first in Japan and then in Europe. While he was in Europe he came to know the Paris anarchists and contributed two articles to the New Era. There is considerable evidence in his later writings that he learned at least some of his socialism from this publication. Nevertheless, when he began to promote socialism, it was more along social policy lines, even though his policies differed from the similar socialism that Sun Yat-sen and the Revolutionary Alliance advocated.

Jiang returned to China from Europe in late 1910, still a relative unknown. What brought him national prominence was a lecture he gave on July 1, 1911, in Hangzhou, probably the first public lecture on socialism ever to be given in China. Entitled Socialism and Women’s Education, the lecture was more radical in its statements on women and the family than in what it said on socialism. It seemed radical enough to the governor of Zhejiang province, who thought it as dangerous as flood waters and wild beasts and petitioned the throne to punish Jiang. Jiang was able to escape punishment through the intercession of his highly placed acquaintances. But the incident brought him national fame. The same month he organized the Socialist Research Society (Shehui zhuyi yanjiu hui), which became the core for the Chinese Socialist party, China’s first socialist organization, established in November 1911, barely a month after the uprising that was to bring down the monarchy by the end of the year. The Chinese Socialist party announced an eight-point program: support the Republic; abolish racial boundaries; reform the law and respect the individual; destroy the system of inheritance; organize public organs to spread equal education; promote productive industries and stimulate laborers; abolish all taxes but the land tax; limit military spending and encourage competition other than the military (to provide an outlet for the human urge to compete). Until it was proscribed in 1913, the Chinese Socialist party propagated socialist ideas in China through lectures and publications.[194] At its height, it claimed 200 branches and 400,000 members. These figures may be too high, but Bernal has confirmed a large membership for the party in East China. What these members knew about socialism is another matter.[195] Jiang himself remarked that most were quite ignorant of socialism, and judging by his own knowledge, there is little reason to doubt his word. The party was diffuse, more a study group than a political party, and its members included anarchists as well as social democrats, which accounted for the split in late 1912.

Taixu and the radical Buddhist monks associated with him, who were from the beginning inclined to anarchism, may have joined Jiang’s party initially because of uncertainty concerning its program. Taixu had been ordained as a monk in 1904, but was quickly radicalized by the emerging revolutionary movement and began to participate in the activities of the Revolutionary Alliance. A prominent representative of what Holmes Welsh has described as the Buddhist revival in the early twentieth century, his exposure to secular radical literature had convinced him that Buddhism had to be made relevant to contemporary secular circumstances. His reading of anarchist works in 1910–11 led him to an anarchist socialism and into the Chinese Socialist party.[196]

When Taixu and his associates broke with the Chinese Socialist party in late 1912, the reason they gave was the insufficiency of state socialism to achieve socialist goals (they also distinguished state socialism from anarchism as narrow and broad socialism).[197] The Social party (Shehui dang) that they established (to be distinguished from Jiang’s Chinese Socialist party) took as its basic principle the fundamentalness to the pursuit of human happiness of the transformation of social organization. As the party program put it, the Social party broke with the Chinese Socialist party because socialists recognized no national boundaries while the Chinese Socialist party did, socialists opposed government while the Chinese Socialist party did not. According to the program, the Social party would seek to (1) abolish class divisions created by differences in wealth (hence communism), by distinctions between high and low (hence respect for the individual), by distinctions on the basis of intelligence (hence educational equality); (2) eliminate all divisions among people on the basis of state, family, and religion (which Taixu and others identified with ancestor worship and the lineage system).[198] This, they believed, was a pure socialism, which they identified explicitly with anarchism. As one writer pointed out, anarchism was not restricted to opposition to government, as was suggested by the Chinese term wuzhengfu (literally, no government), but meant the abolition of all naked power (or, tyrannical authority, qiangquan), which was counterposed to universal principle (gongli).[199] The Buddhist elements in the Social party’s anarchism were evident above all in the insistence on abolishing all distinctions. Hua Lin, in a contribution to the party’s journal, Liangxin (Conscience), advocated no-boundaryism (wushijie zhuyi), which meant that the abolition of distinctions must be extended beyond humankind to all living creatures, hence that they should study not just world language (Esperanto) but animal languages as well to create a single language.[200]

These discussions of socialism and anarchism in the Chinese Socialist party’s journal, Humanity (Rendao), and the various journals published by the Social party, such as the World of Society (Shehui shijie) and Conscience, gave both anarchism and socialism in general a greater visibility in the politics of the early Republic than we have suspected in the past. In the long run, they help explain why interest in socialism might have flourished in the May Fourth period. In an immediate sense, they were to provoke the first efforts among Chinese radicals to come to terms with the complexities of socialism.

Shifu and Guangzhou Anarchism

Shifu was anything but typical among Chinese anarchists. Widely respected for his seriousness of purpose and deeply committed to practicing what he preached, after his death in 1915 he was to acquire the image of a paradigmatic anarchist. By the 1920s his ideas had achieved the status of ideology: Shifu zhuyi, or Shifu’ism. Wu Zhihui observed on one occasion that if all Chinese anarchists were like Shifu, anarchism could be realized in five hundred years (instead of the three thousand that he expected).[201]

Nevertheless, Shifu’s career illustrates the path that led radicals of his generation to anarchism.[202] He was born in 1884 and was radicalized while in Japan in 1904–1906. He joined the newly established Revolutionary Alliance and for the next two years engaged in assassination activities. An accidental explosion in 1907 cost him one of his hands and landed him in jail for the next two years. If the jail experience had a significant effect on him, it is not evident in his writings. Upon his release, he joined the China Assassination Corps (Zhina ansha tuan), which was to play an important part in South China in the events leading up to the revolution in 1911. While the spirit of self-sacrifice was still important in motivating those who engaged in assassination as a political tactic, Krebs has observed that the corps represented a transformation of style from individual acts of heroism toward group activity with greater coordination and discipline.[203]

Shifu was probably familiar with the anarchist ideas of Chinese radicals in the early 1900s, but there is little evidence that anarchism had any influence on his thinking beyond what was commonly understood by it in this period. His writings in jail showed a preoccupation with the moral basis of politics but owed their inspiration to contemporary debates on Chinese national essence rather than to anarchism.[204]

After his release from jail Shifu began to read the literature on socialism and anarchism that had begun to emanate from Tokyo and Paris; Zheng Peigang recalls that at this time Shifu recommended that Zheng read the material on socialism published in the People’s Journal (Minbao) of the Revolutionary Alliance, the New Era, and Natural Justice, as well as various collections on anarchism compiled by the Paris anarchists.[205] This may also be the time when he became interested in Buddhism (he had come to know Taixu during his activities in the Assassination Corps, though it is difficult to say if this had anything to do with his interest in Buddhism).

The conversion came during a trip to Shanghai and the Yangzi region in 1912 that Shifu (along with several associates) took with the possible intention of assassinating China’s new strongman, Yuan Shikai. Conversion seems an appropriate term because Shifu’s adoption of anarchism took place in religious surroundings (in a small Buddhist monastery near West Lake in Hangzhou), had all the characteristics of a religious ritual (including a name change to Shifu, literally meaning teacher, from his given name of Liu Sifu), and was accompanied by a conscious renunciation of the activities that had brought him to anarchism (assassination).[206]

The Conscience Society (Xinshe) that issued from the meeting in Hangzhou was similar to the societies Paris anarchists had organized earlier in the year, which had taken as their main focus the ethical improvement of their members. The twelve points in its covenant enjoined its members not to eat meat, drink liquor, smoke tobacco, use servants, ride in sedan chairs or rickshaws, get married, use family names, serve as officials, serve in assemblies, join political parties, serve in the military, and follow religion.[207]

It was not until after their return to Guangzhou that Shifu’s group acquired a clearly anarchist identity. The Conscience Society remained the spiritual (Krebs’s words) framework for the group. In Guangzhou, Shifu and his followers launched the Cock-crow Society (Huiming xueshe) to propagate anarchism. In 1913 the group also started a journal of its own, the Cock-crow Record, which after its second issue was changed to Minsheng (People’s voice, from Pingminzhi sheng, literally, Voice of the Common People). Anarchism in Guangzhou was on its way.[208]

When the Cock-crow Society came into existence, its membership consisted entirely of members of Shifu’s family (four sisters and two brothers) and a number of close friends with whom he had been involved in radical activities over the previous years. Members of the society shared a common household, and to all appearances, Shifu had the status of a patriarch, though a democratic and benevolent one, who inspired members of his household by the example of his commitment to anarchism.[209]

There were probably other anarchists in Guangzhou. Once it had come into existence, however, Shifu’s group served as the center of anarchist activity, which within the next two years attracted within its compass young anarchists who in later years would emerge as prominent leaders in the anarchist movement in Chinaa tribute to Shifu’s seriousness of purpose.[210] Primary among the group’s activities was the cultivation of a communal life among its members. Shifu’s household operated as a commune, though it would appear that kitchen duties were assigned to his sisters. The group also planned for a short while to acquire land outside of Guangzhou to establish an agrarian commune (datong village), though this came to naught.[211]

Three of the group’s public activities were particularly important because of their contribution to the spread of anarchism in China. First were publication activities. The group’s journal, People’s Voice, was to be the longest-lived of anarchist journals in China (from 1913 to 1922, irregularly after Shifu’s death in 1915) and an important source of anarchist theory and activity. Shifu’s group also played a crucial part in disseminating across the country the anarchist literature that had been made available in New Era and Natural Justice. Selections from the journals were compiled and published as books (in editions of five thousand copies). Thanks to these efforts, by the time of the May Fourth Movement there was more literature on anarchism (and original writings of European anarchists) available in China than for any other current in European radicalism. Shifu’s own writings were distributed by his followers and would help shape a whole generation’s understanding of anarchism.[212]

Second was the teaching of Esperanto. Shifu did not initiate the teaching of Esperanto, but he placed a great deal of emphasis on it as part of an internationalist program. Guangzhou anarchists, who learned Esperanto in the school he conducted in Guangzhou, would play an important part in spreading it to other parts of China in later years.[213]

Most important may have been the initiation of labor organization in South China, which would make anarchists the organizers of the first modern labor unions in China. While anarchists had earlier written of the need to bring together radical intellectuals and laborers, it was Shifu’s group that first undertook such activity, propagated syndicalism in China, and, until the mid-twenties when they began to lose ground to the Communist party, provided leadership in the labor movement. Members of Shifu’s group (prominent among them his brother, Liu Shixin) were responsible by the end of the decade for organizing nearly forty labor unions in Guangzhou, for the first celebration of Labor Day in China in 1918, and for the publication of the first journal (in Shanghai) devoted to labor, Labor Magazine (Laodong zazhi). Shifu apparently initiated labor organization as soon as he had established Cock-crow Society; according to one report, in 1913 he established a Jueran julobu (Resolution [?] Club), which served as the center for labor organizing. The initial effort had the greatest success, not with workers in the modern industrial sector, but among masons, shoemakers, barbers, and restaurant employes.[214] This would also be the case in later years.

In late 1913, in the midst of a resurgence of political oppression, Shifu’s group was forced to leave Guangzhou. After a brief sojourn in Macao, the group moved in 1914 to Shanghai. Shortly before his death from tuberculosis in March 1915, Shifu launched in Shanghai the Society of Anarcho-Communist Comrades (Wuzhengfu gongchan zhuyi tongzhi hui). A counterpart to the society and bearing the same name was established at about the same time in Guangzhou, led by Shifu’s brother, Liu Shixin. These societies would serve after Shifu’s death as the point of departure for anarchist organization during the May Fourth Movement.

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Shifu was an anarchist-communist, a self-acknowledged disciple of Kropotkin. His ideas on anarchism differed little from those of the New Era anarchists. He derived much of his knowledge of anarchism, and the arguments he used in its defense, from the earlier anarchists.

Shifu, too, called for a social revolution in China. There was little ambiguity in his concept of social revolution. Unlike Jiang, but like the earlier anarchists he used social in contradistinction to politcal. He believed that the social realm of life had little, if anything, to do with the political; he would not even entertain the idea of politics as an appendage to society. Politics, he seemed to believe, was extraneous to society, a force imposed upon society from the outside. Accordingly, he opposed all participation in politics. New Era anarchists, too, had opposed political participation and argued that true revolutionary action must be social action.[215] Unlike the latter, however, Shifu’s seriousness allowed no compromise; his criticism of Zhang Ji even brought him into conflict with WuZhihui, one of the doyens of anarchism in China. In the early Republic, Shifu came to represent opposition to political action and the defense of a social revolution that not only was distinguished from political revolution but sought to abolish politics. Political revolution is the revolution of heroes, the revolution of a minority, he observed; social revolution is the revolution of the common people (pingmin), a revolution of the great masses.[216]

Shifu did display some hesitation over the timing of revolution, however. He remarked on one occasion that the revolution could be achieved immediately; but most of the time, his statements on the timing of revolution suggested that it would be some time before a successful anarchist revolution could be launched. At the present, he believed, only a small vanguard was aware of the necessity and the principles of revolution; most of the people lacked the knowledge that would make them good anarchists. He recommended, for instance, that workers establish syndicates at once, but he believed that the immediate tasks the syndicates ought to undertake were education of the workers and the achievement of moderate economic ends such as higher wages and shorter working hours. The fundamental task of overthrowing capitalist society and establishing an anarchist one must await the diffusion of knowledge of anarchism.[217]

The immediate task of anarchists was, therefore, to spread the word. This was reflected in Shifu’s program for revolutionary action. As he said repeatedly in his writings, he regarded propaganda as the first method. Through newspapers, books and pamphlets, lectures and schools, he said, the teachings of anarchism must be taken to the common people:

[It] is essential that a majority of the people be steeped in the brilliance of our doctrines, the perfection of our theories, and the excellence of our future organization, and that labor is humankind’s natural duty and mutual aid its inherent virtue.[218]

Shifu then named secondary methods—resistance and disturbances—that could hasten the diffusion of propaganda. The former could take the form of resistance to taxation and military service; it also could include strikes by workers and general strikes. Disturbances included assassination and other forms of political violence. Once the propaganda reached saturation point, the great revolution of the common people (pingmin da geming) could take place. In this revolution the masses would overthrow the government and the capitalists and make a fresh start in building a new society.[219] The form this society would take, moreover, must be reflected in the organization for revolution, the main reason to delay the revolution until the people were ready.

Government and the capitalist system were the twin objects of revolution; Shifu described sometimes one, sometimes the other, as the greatest enemy of the people, but to him both were equally important. To those who objected that China did not have any big capitalists, he responded that small capitalists, too, were capitalist. In the Proclamation of the Society of Anarcho-Communist Comrades of July 1914 and The Goals and Methods of the Anarch-Communist Party published later in the same month, he summarized both the objects and the goals of the revolution. The proclamation stated: We advocate wiping out the capitalist system to rebuild [society] as a communist society; and, moreover, not using government to oversee it. Put simply, we advocate absolute freedom in economic and political life.[220] The proclamation went on to describe the capitalist system as the greatest enemy of the people and the source of all evil in society. All of the resources of production—land, capital, and machinery—were concentrated in the hands of a few landlords and capitalists, the people were industrial slaves, and all the benefits went to the privileged minority. The anarchists pledged death to this great evil, eradication of the right to private property, and the return of all the means of production to society. Basing their own action on the principle from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, the Society declared its intention to organize a free communist society, without distinction between male and female, with every person contributing as much as possible. The laborers could draw upon the fruits of their labor for their own needs without any limitations. Although the government claimed to maintain order for the people under the present system, the proclamation observed, in reality it transgressed against people’s freedom. Thus government, too, must be eliminated so that people could enjoy their right to a free life and exercise their ability to govern themselves. The proclamation then described the differences between present society and the society envisioned by the anarchists:

As anarchism takes opposition to authority as its essential principle, our party will completely eradicate and sweep away all the evil systems of present society which have an authoritarian nature, and, operating with the true spirit of freedom, equality, and fraternal love, we will reach our ideal society—without landlords, capitalists, leaders, officials, representatives, or heads of families; without armies, prisons, policemen, courts, or law; without religion and without the marriage system. At that time there will be in society only freedom, the great principle of mutual aid, and the prosperous happiness of labor.[221]

The Goals and Methods stated these ideas in a programmatic list that briefly called for (1) public ownership of the means of production and all the products thereof; (2) abolition of classes; (3) abolition of government and all institutions, such as laws, police, and the military, associated with government; (4) spontaneous, democratic public associations to coordinate production and distribution; (5) abolition of marriage, and the public rearing of children; (6) free public education for all; (7) labor for all mature adults (twenties to forties), after which they would retire to public retirement homes; (8) labor to be restricted to two-four hours a day and to be combined with intellectual-esthetic pursuits; (9) abolition of all religion and dogma to give free play to the morality of mutual aid; (10) an international language with the goal of abolishing all national boundaries.[222]

There was not much in this program that was original with Shifu. Some of the ideas came from Kropotkin’s writings, especially the Conquest of Bread (which had been translated in the New Era), others from writings by other anarchists. Some of the same ideas (on labor, education, family) had been incorporated a few years earlier in a description of Utopia by Liu Shipei in Natural Justice (see chapter 3).

This was, in a sense, true of all of Shifu’s ideas, which were distinguished not by their originality but by his passion in propagating them. His basic premise was one that he shared with all anarchists, Chinese or foreign: that human beings had a natural morality, which was undermined by institutions that fostered immorality. Shifu believed that all human beings were naturally endowed with conscience (liangxin) and were inclined by nature to mutual aid and love, as well as labor. Authoritarian institutions blunted such innate inclinations, and the institutions of property drove humans to selfishness, with the result that the pursuit of private ends overshadowed, even obliterated, the pursuit of public goals. This was the source of all conflict and exploitation in society. If these institutions were overthrown, the natural morality of people would reassert itself, and humankind would be able to shed its beastly heritage and enter the realm of humanity, where the moral and the rational would be one and the same, where all the distinctions between self and society would disappear, and where the individual would discover freedom in spontaneous association with others.[223]

This basic premise of the natural goodness of people was not new in Chinese thought, and it is evident that some Chinese were drawn to anarchism because of an affinity they perceived between anarchism and ideals long embedded in Chinese thought, whether Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist. Liu Shipei thought that Chinese had an advantage over others in achieving anarchism because of their Confucian and Daoist heritage, which favored restricted government.[224]

A series of articles in the New Era described the statement on Utopia in the work Li Yun (Evolution of rites) as a depiction of anarchist society, even if the author read into that statement a great deal that was not justified by the original.[225]

Shifu shared these idiosyncrasies of Chinese anarchism. There is evidence of Buddhist influence on his thought. His Conscience Society was established in an atmosphere permeated by Buddhism, and the Covenant of the Society sounded more Buddhist than anarchist. Yet such analogies must not be taken too far. If some Chinese were drawn to anarchism because of its affinity with elements in native thought, others criticized such interpretations as perversions of anarchism. Shifu was one of the latter. When he defended the possibility of the selflessness of human beings, it was not on the basis of native ideas but on Kropotkinite science.[226] Like the New Era anarchists before him, he found nothing but corruption and selfishness in the ideology and institutions of the Chinese tradition. He rejected vehemently any suggestion that anarchism could be compared to anarchistic philosophies of the past, such as Daoism. Daoism, he believed, was negative; what he advocated was positive.[227] Shifu meant that whereas Daoists may have rejected government in the name of an eremitic existence, he sought to transform existing society and to revolutionize human life as a whole. Shifu rejected politics, not to escape it but to abolish it. His social revolution was informed by a social theory that had nothing in common with traditional political reasoning. And in making such analogies we must remember that most of the Chinese who shared with Shifu the same tradition were frightened by what he advocated: a revolution of the people that promised to overthrow existing society in its totality.

Anarchism Against Socialism

The purity of Shifu’s vision of revolution made it inevitable that he would not tolerate any distortion of socialist ideals. Indeed, in 1914 he launched a series of attacks in the People’s Voice on other socialists. Jiang Kanghu was his main target, but he included in his polemics Sun Yat-sen and the pure socialists (the splinter group of anarchist inclination from Jiang’s socialist party). By this time, Sun and Jiang were both out of the country. Those who engaged Shifu in discussion were mostly the pure socialists and one or two of Jiang’s followers. Jiang himself sent at least one response from the United States (where he was a professor in the Oriental Languages Department at the University of California in Berkeley), the nature of which may be gleaned from the extensive quotations in the essay Shifu wrote to refute it. To appreciate the issues involved in this first debate among Chinese socialists, a brief summary of Jiang Kanghu’s ideas on socialism, which provoked the debate, is necessary.

Jiang’s socialism often seemed contradictory and confusing, partially because of the lack of a systematic exposition of his views: he explained his socialism for the most part in public lectures, and his emphases varied with his audiences. As Shifu was to point out, however, Jiang also suffered from considerable confusion over the goals and means of socialism. Even when he presented his ideas more systematically in the 1920s, a good bit of the confusion remained. Nevertheless, his views were not without an inner logic, and most of his contradictions are traceable to his eclectic view of socialism.

Like other socialists, Jiang saw social revolution as the essence of socialism. The Chinese Socialist party declared: People’s armies have arisen. They undertake racial revolution, speak of political revolution. But politics is the expression of society. Therefore, social revolution is the basis of all affairs.[228] In a piece he published in San Francisco in 1914, after he had left China, he sounded an even more radical note:

The faith of the people is gone in republicanism. Their belief that it was the Manchus only who were oppressive is shattered. There remains but one thing. The social revolution. That and that only can bring relief to the toiling millions of China. Their only hope lies in this: the taking over of the entire mechanism of production and operation of it by the workers for the workers—the Socialist or Industrial Republic. (Italics in original)[229]

This was not all rhetoric. Jiang, of course, did not advocate political violence. In the declaration of the Socialist Research Society, he described socialism as an ideology of peace and happiness, not a radical or dangerous one; a constructive, not a destructive, ideology, and blamed the occurrence of violence in socialist history upon the persecution to which socialists were continually subjected. He also described the socialism of this society as nonextremist.[230]

While revolutionary politics was not integral to Jiang’s idea of social revolution, he did envision the revolutionization of society over the long term. In this respect, his advocacy of social revolution was not different from that of Sun Yat-sen and the Revolutionary Alliance, which was intended to forestall, not to initiate, violence in society. Like Revolutionary Alliance socialists, moreover, Jiang believed that China did not yet suffer from the deep social divisions and exploitation that characterized Western society, and could, therefore, avoid violence and achieve socialism with greater ease than Western societies. On another occasion he observed that most socialists, including social democrats, thought violence was necessary to achieve socialism, but he remained noncommittal, describing the issue as academic.[231]

Indeed, Jiang believed, much as Sun and Revolutionary Alliance socialists did, that socialism, rather than presenting a threat to the republican order, would fulfill the promise of republican government. Western societies had fallen short of the ideals of equality and democracy, he believed, because they had failed to institute socialism, and democracy could not be realized without socialism.[232] For the same reason he argued, socialism needed republicanism, for otherwise the collectivization of property would lead to despotism.[233] Specifically, for China, he argued that because of the persistence of habits left from despotism of the state and the family, and because of the existence of internal and external oppression, it was necessary to bolster republican institutions with socialist policies. In his defense of the Chinese Socialist party before the government, he argued that socialism served the cause of the state and the development of the economy, including commerce, industry, and taxation. In other words, his socialism was meant to further not just the cause of justice but the cause of the nation as well. He presented similar arguments to Shanghai merchants to induce them to support his party. Above all, Jiang bolstered his arguments with the observation that socialism represented a new tide in world politics and that China could not afford to close its doors to this thought and isolate itself from the world.[234]

Jiang’s socialism consisted of a vague humanitarianism that sought to guarantee, not equality so much as equality of opportunity by clearing away institutional and ideological obstacles to equality inherited from the past. Indeed, when he did define socialism, he defined it vaguely as humanitarianism or as the pursuit of common welfare and happiness for humankind. Socialism, he explained, is the ideology of great unity (datong), not of differentiation. [It] does not heed racial, national, or religious boundaries. [All is] for the public good, not the self; [all are] treated with equal benevolence. [All will enjoy] absolute equality, absolute freedom, absolute love.[235] Jiang’s vision of the good society may have been inspired by his readings in the New Era, for it did have anarchist overtones. He observed in one of his essays that humanity was naturally evolving toward a world socialism when there would be no state, race, family, or religion, and the only distinctions between people would be those of learning and profession. In such a society there would be no need for customs duties or military expenditure. Old views of politics, law, livelihood, and old customs would be transformed until no obstacles divided the individual from the world. Such a world would be governed without action. Jiang concluded that this was the world dreamed of by the anarchists, the world of the great unity of Confucius, the Heaven of the Christians, and the Paradise of the Buddhists.[236] As this last statement suggests, Jiang also viewed socialism as merely the latest manifestation of a longing for good society that was a common heritage of humankind, with an especially long history in China.

All this, however, lay in the future. Pure or strict socialism, which he identified with communism, was not on the agenda for the present; he therefore preferred to advocate a broad socialism that was not inconsistent with contemporary political organization. One of his reasons for advocating broad rather than strict socialism was the rather academic reason that until knowledge of socialism acquired greater depth, it was impossible to say which type was the most desirable; insisting on one type or another would only create sectarianism.[237] Jiang did not believe that the workers in China were yet mature enough to create socialism; and since socialism required the participation of workers, at the present it was best to propagate, rather than try to institute, socialism.

Jiang was aware of the eclecticism of his position when he discussed his own socialism. Of all the currents in socialist thought, he believed himself to be closest to social democracy, which he viewed as being akin to communism, a transitional stage on the way to the ideal society. But even this does not adequately convey his efforts to reconcile different kinds of socialism. In a letter he wrote to the government in December 1912 to protest the proscription of the Pure Social party, he undertook a survey of socialism and divided it into the socialism of philosophers, scientists, political scientists, ecclesiastics, educationalists, laborers, the state, anarchist-communists, individualists, Esperanto, and the single-tax. He then went on to describe his own views:

What I hope for, what I advocate, is derived from the thought of philosophers, based on science, adopts the spirit of the ecclesiastics and the attitude of educationalists, and grasps the affairs of laborers. It holds on, on the one hand, to radical republicanism, and, on the other hand, to a progressive collectivist system [which he had earlier equated with communism]. [It seeks to] eliminate taxes and the military, and stresses education and industry. [It] takes the individual to be the nucleus of society and the world its realm. [It seeks to realize] self-governance for the individual and great unity for the world. This kind of hope, this kind of advocacy, could be called individual socialism; it could also be called world socialism.[238]

Given this eclecticism, Jiang’s formal statements about the goals of his socialism tell us little about the main thrust of the ideas he propagated. His immediate programs for the achievement of socialism, however, are a great deal more revealing. Jiang viewed three policies as fundamental to his socialist program: public education, freedom of occupation, and independence of wealth, or the abolition of inheritance. The two he talked about the most, the first and the third, were incorporated into the program of the Chinese Socialist party.

Public education was the cornerstone of Jiang’s socialist program. He perceived inequality in education as the source of all inequality in society: Economic inequality arises from inequality in ability; inequality in ability arises from inequality in education. In China, education was unequal because it was private, family education; in countries where public education had been instituted, inequality of wealth made for unequal access to education, with the result that the rich monopolized education and sustained economic inequality. Jiang believed that inequality in ability arose not from natural differences but from inequality in access to education. He advocated that every individual be given free education by public organs from birth to maturity. If this could be done, then each individual would gain independence of livelihood and serve himself or herself as well as society. In a few generations the inequalities inherited from family background would disappear, and all would be able to seek livelihood in equality. The only remaining inequalities would be in the professions and learning, not of class and wealth. Jiang’s emphasis on education accorded with his belief that social change must start with change in the individual.[239]

Occupational freedom would have a similar effect. If each individual sought an occupation in accordance with his or her talents, the virtuous would seek to advance and the degenerate would not dare to remain idle. Rights and obligations would be harmonized. And since each would exert himself or herself to the utmost, both society and the individual would benefit.

Finally, Jiang viewed inheritance as the greatest crime in the world, the source of all inequality, and advocated what he called independence of property (caichan duli). Inheritance not only perpetuated inequality, it had a demoralizing effect on the individual. What a person inherited did not represent his or her labor. Such wealth not only was unjustifiable, it also nurtured a parasitic dependence on the family. In Jiang’s solution all wealth acquired during the lifetime of an individual would revert to the public coffers at the individual’s death so that each generation would have to make a living for itself. This way, the inequality that attended every individual at birth would be eliminated, and greater independence would be stimulated.[240]

All three items of Jiang’s socialist program were informed by his ultimate commitment to the individual as the source and the end of socialism. Jiang even distinguished himself from other socialists by his emphasis on the individual:

From beginning to end, I have taken the individual to be the [basic] unit of the world. This is my difference from socialists in general who take society as their only premise. If society is taken as the sole premise, the result is to disdain the individual: trampled upon [in this way], the individual loses worth as the unit [of the world], which, in turn, obliterates the spirit of independence and initiative. [This] reduces the individual to the [level of the] scales of fish and dragons, or the cog in a machine.

Jiang described his individualism as the new individualism (xin geren zhuyi). The new individualism, unlike the old individualisms that consisted of self-seeking or the search for individual sovereignty, simultaneously stressed the independence and the interdependence of individuals.[241] Jiang believed in the possibility of achieving this new individualism more on utilitarian than on ethical grounds. He argued that all people by nature sought to maximize their security and happiness (anle). Since ideas on how to achieve this end differed, the search for happiness of each interfered with the search for happiness of others, so that none felt secure in his or her happiness. Therefore, they had to learn that to benefit the self, one had to benefit others: Benefiting the self is the goal of all people; benefiting others is the means to achieving that goal. To achieve the new individualism, Jiang argued, all obstacles that stood between the individual and the world ought to be abolished, in particular religion, the state, and the family.[242]

His new individualism, Jiang believed, rendered his socialism superior to others. He was opposed to the egalitarianism of communism, which he otherwise admired, on two grounds. First, the ideal of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need left no way to deal with those who did not contribute according to their ability but simply took advantage of the system. Jiang thought this consequence to be very likely, given human inclinations. Second, Jiang was a social Darwinist in outlook and saw competition as the key to progress. If absolute equality prevailed, he believed, society would stagnate.[243] He had expressed this view as early as 1909 in his defense of free enterprise in his New Era article, and he would hold it throughout his career.[244] On these two grounds, he was reluctant to abolish property (as long as it was acquired by individual effort) or unequal remuneration for different kinds and levels of labor. As long as people had incentive, he believed, they would strive to better their lot, and the whole society would benefit. What he sought in socialism, as was noted above, was independence and equality of opportunity, not egalitarianism.

Jiang’s socialism contained much that was unorthodox, even unsocialist, but his arguments were not without a logic of their own. The problems of his socialism are best appreciated in terms of his earlier preoccupations with the family and women’s liberation. Jiang was involved in the problems of women’s education long before he became a socialist. In his earliest available essays, the problems that preoccupied him were the oppression of women and the means to abolish it. He blamed the family structure for the inferior role women held in society and, long before the idea was to become prevalent during the New Culture Movement, described the family as the source of all evils in society.[245] The family suppressed the individuality of women and, by denying them education, made them dependent on males. The cure, he believed, was to educate women and provide them with professions that they might gain independence and compete with males on an equal basis. When he turned to advocating socialism, Jiang generalized these problems of women and the family to the whole of humankind. This connection between his socialism and his perceptions of the problems of women might explain why August Bebel’s Women and Socialism was a favorite book of his, as Bernal has pointed out, and why the first lecture he ever gave on socialism was essentially a lecture on women’s problems. It also explains the peculiarities of his socialist program: his emphasis on the new individualism, on inheritance, on the need to seek independent livelihood—ideas he had articulated first in his discussions on women’s problems. Jiang’s socialism, one is tempted to observe, was more antifamily than anticapitalist in its program.[246]

At issue in Shifu’s polemics against the socialists was the nature of socialism. In spite of the pedantic nature of the discussion, which often presented the problem at hand as a problem of scholarship, the polemics were motivated mainly by a struggle over the intellectual leadership of the socialist movement in China. It is clear from many of Shifu’s statements that he was irked by the claims of Sun and Jiang to the leadership of socialism in China, and even more by the willingness of many to take them at their word.[247]

Nevertheless, the polemics raised issues of substance that were to divide anarchists and other socialists in ensuing years. The starting point of the discussion was the question whether Sun and Jiang were really socialists. This inevitably led to the question of what constituted socialism, and to answer this Shifu (and to a lesser extent Jiang) turned to analysis of the terminology and history of socialism. Shifu obviously desired to vindicate his views, but in the process he did much to clear away the terminological confusion that had plagued Chinese socialism for a decade. Most of his criticisms, moreover, were quite justified if not unbiased.

What brought Sun into Shifu’s polemics was a lecture Sun had given in 1912 to a gathering of the Chinese Socialist party. In his lecture Sun reiterated his commitment to socialism and elaborated on the socialist program he had advocated since Revolutionary Alliance days: the utilization of Henry George’s single-tax policy to equalize landownership, and the control of monopolies. He also embarked on a prolonged discourse on socialism, where he acknowledged Marx as the father of socialism but insisted that Marx’s ideas be complemented with George’s because George had made equally important contributions to socialism. Sun also described communism as the highest ideal of all socialism, but expressed doubt that people were morally prepared for the realization of that ideal.[248]

Shifu attacked Sun and Jiang in the same article. His arguments against the two varied with the different policies they proposed, but basically he levied the same charges against both. First, he said that neither Sun nor Jiang advocated social revolution, that both advocated social policy. They were not even socialists, since they did not propose to abolish private property, the sine qua non of all socialism. Jiang’s inheritance scheme and Sun’s single-tax policy were both characteristic of state socialism, which was quite different from socialism (as Jiang himself had stated in one of his writings). Second, he charged them with ignorance of socialism. Neither of them was clear about the differences between capitalism and socialism, and they easily blended the two. They were not even aware of the differences among socialists, as was evident in Sun’s equation of Marx and George and in Jiang’s many statements confounding anarchism, communism, social democracy, and state socialism. Socialists were one in advocating the abolition of private property, Shifu pointed out, but there was a basic difference among socialists over how this goal was to be achieved. Socialists (including Marxists) argued for collectivism, that is, control of property by public organsnamely, the state. Only anarchists advocated communism, which signified direct control of property by the people themselves. Jiang, in Shifu’s opinion, displayed utter ignorance of this fact in his contradictory statements about communism. Shifu also criticized Jiang for his belief in the necessity of competition, which ran counter to the spirit that underlay socialism.[249]

Shifu’s criticism of the pure socialists was in a different vein. The pure socialists had broken with Jiang’s party because of their anarchist inclinations, and indeed their program revealed their anarchist premises. Shifu was not entirely happy with this program, which displayed nativistic and nationalistic tendencies, but his basic criticism was of their retention of the word socialist in their party name. If they were anarchists, he stated, they should call themselves anarchists and not socialists.[250]

The controversy that followed revolved around the question of what constituted socialism, and the relationship of socialism to anarchism. To refute his opponents, Shifu drew upon his considerable knowledge of the history of socialism to clarify questions on the evolution of terminology. The details were often tedious and pedantic, but his major points were, briefly, these: (1) socialism and anarchism represented two different currents from the beginning. Jiang was wrong in his assertion that until Bakunin’s split with Marx in 1871, anarchism had been indistinct from socialism. Though Shifu was willing to acknowledge Marx’s contributions to socialism, he rejected Jiang’s suggestion that Marx was the pope of socialism. He himself viewed Marx as a state socialist who had derived most of his collectivist ideas from Saint-Simon;[251] (2) anarchism was more scientific than Marxism. Marx was a scientific socialist, but Kropotkin had given socialism a firmer scientific basis;[252] (3) anarchism was broader in compass than socialism. Socialism pertained to the economy, anarchism to politics. But while all anarchists were of necessity also socialists, socialists were not anarchists, because they were not opposed to government; anarchism, therefore, contained socialism.[253] Shifu rejected the suggestion that since the concept of society included everything within it, socialism represented the broader concept. Society, he argued, did not cover politics, which was extraneous to it; it was not correct to say, therefore, that socialism could include anarchism.[254]

In rejecting terms such as extreme socialism, pure socialism, nongoverning (wuzhi) that had been used variously to describe anarchism, Shifu was able to clarify a number of terminological and conceptual questions pertaining to anarchism and point out its autonomous content. Not least important was his clarification of the meaning of the common Chinese term for anarchism, wuzhengfu zhuyi (literally, nogovernmentalism), which many apparently took literally as only the rejection of government, nothing more. Shifu, citing the original foreign terminology, pointed out that the misunderstanding was a matter of translation, and that anarchism included opposition to all authority, not just government. Moreover, he explained, this was only the negative aspect of anarchism. On the positive side, anarchists sought to reorganize society and establish a totally new kind of society.[255]

His contribution to the discussion, however, went beyond matters of terminology. Shifu was quite justified in his critique of the confusion over socialism in the thinking of Sun and Jiang. His own terminological purity was rather vacuous; anarchists in the West did not disassociate themselves from the term socialism, and Kropotkin himself used anarchism and socialism interchangeably in his writings. In the case of Sun and Jiang, however, the confusion was basically conceptual. Both men confounded not only different currents in socialism but socialism and capitalism as well. Their ideas on socialism echoed the views of late-nineteenth-century social reformers who used socialist policies to preserve and improve, not to overthrow, the existing capitalist system. Sun, as Shifu pointed out, never quite understood capitalism, and while he was opposed to monopoly capital, he never rejected capitalism as such. That this was an accurate diagnosis is evident in the essay by Hu Hanmin published a number of years earlier in the People’s Journal to explain Sun’s policies. If Hu’s explanation reflected Sun’s views, and there is little reason to think it did not, Sun himself advocated equality of opportunity, not an egalitarian socialism.[256]

The same was true of Jiang’s socialism, as we have already noted. Shifu observed in one of his essays that Jiang peddled the ideas of Saint-Simon in China.[257] While Jiang’s own writings did not acknowledge any intellectual debt to Saint-Simon, there are intriguing resemblances between Jiang’s and Saint-Simon’s ideas, especially in Jiang’s emphasis on the abolition of inheritance, his view that learning should be the only basis for inequality, his stress on professional education, and his insistence on the creation of an industrial republic to replace the existing one.[258] Jiang’s insistence that inherited inequality should be abolished and everyone be given an equal start in life through education was quite reminiscent of Saint-Simon, who rejected hereditary inequality but not that inequality which was a product of differences in personal effort and learning. Whether Jiang owed his ideas to Saint-Simon or not, it is clear that his socialism did condone inequality. In later years, Jiang would change the details of his program but never this basic premise; if anything, he became more sympathetic to capitalists even as he continued to advocate socialism.[259]

Shifu’s own views, too, contained serious flaws, not the least of which was the consistency he imposed upon socialism and anarchism. There is no question that he had a better grasp of the history of socialism in Europe than his adversaries had; nevertheless, his was a history of socialism seen through anarchist eyes. He reduced all socialists to a uniform field of collectivism, a term he equated with state socialism, in contradistinction to communism, which he identified with anarchism. He saw Marxism in terms of its contemporary manifestations, which represented various modes of accommodation of the capitalist state, and completely ignored the revolutionary vision that had informed Marx’s own writings, a vision that did not differ significantly from the anarchist one. Moreover, Shifu was himself selective in his use of history. While he pointed to their emphasis on the abolition of inheritance as proof that both Marx and Jiang were state socialists, he ignored the fact that it was Bakunin’s insistence on the abolition of inheritance (which Marx had opposed as a petit-bourgeois measure) that had divided the Basle Congress of the First International in 1869. It is possible, of course, that Shifu was unaware of this conflict, but he did display knowledge of other intricate aspects of the conflicts within the International, and it would be surprising if he did not have access to this rather conspicuous fact.[260]

Like Kropotkin himself, Shifu ignored the fact that anarchists owed much of their social theory (the analysis of classes and capitalism) to Marxism.[261] The anarchist contribution to socialist theory lay in their insistence on the need to recognize the autonomous power of the state, which Marx had encompassed (at least on the surface) within the structure of social interests. But there was little in anarchist social theory that went beyond Marx’s formulations. By ignoring this, Shifu was able, unjustifiably, to claim the whole territory of socialism for anarchism.

Finally, Shifu missed the point about socialism in his insistence that socialism pertained only to the economy and that politics existed independently of society (which contradicted his own belief that politics served class interest). He came closer to the truth with anarchists who, while they have not ignored the problem of social relations, have been most conspicuous for their preoccupation with authority, especially political authority.[262] But the distinguishing feature of socialist theory lies in its integration of various aspects of existence into a unified analysis so that it is impossible to explain one aspect in isolation. However socialists may have differed otherwise, they did not separate economic, social, and political problems: the goal of economic change was also to effect changes in social and political relations. Shifu denied any significant role to politics, of course, but this premise of the integratedness of economic, social, and political relations was implicit in the theory that he himself upheld. His efforts to restrict the scope of socialism, therefore, are best understood in terms of his urge to prove the superiority of anarchism by endowing it with an all-encompassing scope that covered what socialism purportedly did not.

If anarchism has a broader scope than socialism, Marxist or otherwise, it is in the loyalty to the vision of humanity that all socialists have shared without being equally persistent in their loyalty. And if Shifu had an edge over his adversaries in these polemics, it was due, not merely to his superior knowledge, but, equally important, to his visionary consistency. Jiang and Sun did indeed make statements about socialism that were indefensible in terms of vision or theory; but they did show some sensitivity to the realities around them. Shifu ignored almost totally the conditions within which he propagated his ideas. Like other anarchists, his views on revolution were ahistorical, based on certain universal premises about human beings and their relationship to society and politics. On the rare occasions when he did refer to China’s specific conditions, he conceded (without saying so) that Chinese were not yet ready for the revolution he advocated. In fact, he, like other anarchists, faced a dilemma that he was unwilling to acknowledge: that the revolution that would usher in anarchist society must await the education of people to prepare them for anarchism, but that such education was impossible as long as bad society persisted. His anarchism provided a vision but no way of achieving it.

Conclusion

Anarchist-socialist differences reflected a basic difference in the conceptualization of the role of self-interest in society. On the one hand, anarchists rejected the naturalness of interest and viewed it as the fabrication of a social structure warped by power and exploitation. They believed that interest could be abolished if society were reconstituted in accordance with the natural cooperative inclinations of humanity. Socialists such as Sun and Jiang, on the other hand, held a different view of interest, each for his own reason. Jiang, taking the pursuit of self-interest as a natural endowment of humanity, denied the possibility of abolishing it. Sun, while he rejected this premise, nevertheless thought that the pursuit of self-interest had accounted for the immense development of the West under capitalism and believed that, if kept within bounds, it would also contribute to China’s development.

The attitudes of Sun and Jiang toward politics were functions of these premises concerning interest. Anarchists, who saw in politics one of the basic sources for the undermining of natural morality, viewed the abolition of politics and the abolition of selfishness as part of the same process. Both Sun and Jiang saw in politics a means—the only means—to control private interest and bring it into the service of society, rather than of a privileged minority.

Socialists and anarchists were one in their belief that China required more than a political revolution, that society itself would have to undergo important changes if their goals were to be realized. But they held different views about how this was to be achieved. Anarchists advocated a spontaneous revolution that would abolish all existing institutions. Both Jiang and Sun, however, advocated a revolution whose goal was to curtail precisely that eventuality. Jiang was muddy on this issue at the time, though he would state it more explicitly at a later time. Sun was very clear all along that his policies were hygienic, designed to forestall the sharpening of class conflict to the point where only a social upheaval could resolve it. Both sought to harmonize conflicting interests in society through the intermediacy of politics.

These two modes of approach to social change and revolution represented the two basic messages socialism conveyed to Chinese revolutionaries in the years before 1919: a vision of total revolutionary transformation, and a political theory that showed the way to reorganize interest in order to achieve greater equality and minimize conflict. Regardless of the peculiarly Chinese coating these messages assumed in China, they reflected the two major currents in European socialism at the turn of the century. Sun and Jiang advocated diffuse socialisms that did not even reject basic institutions or ideas of capitalism, and they could point for support to trends in European socialism, which increasingly had come to accommodate capitalism and strove to use the power of the state to regulate interest in society. As socialism lost its revolutionary vision, anarchists remained the only ones to retain their faithfulness to the original goals of socialist revolution.

Anarchists were unable, however, to convert their vision into revolutionary reality. This was especially a problem for the Chinese anarchists, who did not even have a constituency for the social revolution they proposed. In the end, they too had to fall back upon the argument that the people were not yet ready for anarchism.

This would change in the 1920s when Chinese society experienced large-scale mass mobilization. The revolutionization of Chinese society (accompanied by a general loss of faith in politics) increased receptivity to the anarchist argument. And anarchists proved to be better prepared than most in responding to such spontaneous mobilization. Many of Shifu’s disciples resurfaced at this time to provide leadership to the anarchist movement.

This time, however, anarchists were to find a more serious competitor on the Left. After the establishment of the Communist party in 1921, anarchists had to compete with the Communists over the leadership of mass movements, and though they initially had an advantage over the Communists both in the student and in the labor movement, by 192122 they had already begun to lose ground to the latter. The Communists believed in social revolution as fervently as did the anarchists, but to them social revolution meant the basis for a new kind of politics, not a substitute for it. Anarchists, philosophically suspicious of political organization, were not able to coordinate their activities sufficiently to compete with the Communists for any length of time. The Communists shared their vision (which deprived the anarchists of their major propaganda appeal) and had the edge over them in organization as well as in consciousness of the realities of power.