Chapter Five
Radical Culture and Cultural Revolution:
Anarchism in the May Fourth Movement

In the early afternoon of May 4, 1919, three thousand students from three Beijing universities gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to demonstrate against the Versailles Peace Conference decision in favor of Japan on the Shandong Question. The students had originally intended to continue their demonstration in the foreign legation quarters in Beijing, but finding their way blocked by the legation police, they proceeded instead to the house of Cao Rulin, a Foreign Ministry official who had drawn the ire of the patriotic students for his pro-Japanese sentiments. The students were stymied momentarily by the police who had cordoned off the house, and by the imposing wooden gates that shut them off. Suddenly, a fourth-year Beijing Higher Normal College student from Hunan, Kuang Husheng, rushed to the house, smashed the thick wooden shutters of the gate window, climbed in, and flung open the gates to let in the rest of the students. He then set the torch to the house with the matches with which he had come prepared. Kuang was an anarchist.[263]

It was appropriate that this dramatic event, which set off the chain of events that was to become the May Fourth Movement, was carried out by an anarchist. Kuang’s action dramatized the anarchist influence on Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth period. Anarchism was soon to become anachronistic in China. The May Fourth Movement presaged a rising tide of patriotism, which would gradually render anarchism marginal in Chinese radical thinking. But the years immediately before and after the May Fourth Movement represented the apogee in the hold of anarchism upon the Chinese radical imagination. The May Fourth Movement was truly a revolutionary moment in modern Chinese history. It kindled the radical imagination and seemed to give substance to the utopian hopes of a whole generation. Kuang himself recollected that during the march to Cao’s house individuals lost their identity in the mass, everyone sang together, everyone marched together.[264] His sentiments stand as a metaphor for the revolutionary hopes the movement evoked among the young students. Anarchism expressed these hopes.

If social change was at the heart of what progressive May Fourth publications advocated and discussed by 1919, the language of anarchism was the tongue in which this advocacy found its expression.[265] By the eve of the May Fourth Movement, anarchists’ vocabulary had already become integral to the language of radicalism in China. This is not to say that Chinese intellectuals wholesale became anarchists. In an immediate sense, anarchism benefited from the turn the Chinese revolutionary movement took in about 1919; it moved into the center of mainstream radical thinking, it spread beyond a few centers to become a national phenomenon, and there was a virtual explosion in the numbers of anarchists as anarchist groups and publications proliferated throughout the country.[266] More important in the long run, however, anarchist ideas entered the language even of those who could not be described as anarchists in any strict sense of the word. Anarchism became central to revolutionary discourse.

The popularity of anarchism at this time had much to do with the reorientation of Chinese radical thinking with the so-called New Culture Movement after 1915, which brought to the fore intellectual concern—sand a radical mood—that resonated with the themes anarchists had raised over the previous decade. Ironically, the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 initially helped stimulate in China an interest, not in Bolshevism or Marxism, but in anarchism. Anarchists were not passive beneficiaries of this reorientation, however. As the only group of organized social radicals in China, they actively promoted anarchism, injected an anarchist strain into New Culture thinking, and engaged in organizational activities that helped shape the form radical activism took in the May Fourth period.

Contemporary Witnesses

In early 1920 the U.S. Department of State instructed its consular officials in China to report on Bolshevist activities. Over the next year, a stream of reports on Communistic Activities flowed into the files of the State Department. American consuls in China went combing the country in search of Bolshevists, mobilizing the help of their British colleagues on occasion, and, where possible, prevailing upon Chinese officials to put a stop to Bolshevist activities. Although they did not uncover as much activity as they might have wished, in one or two places they did discover an alarming level of Bolshevist activity. By far the largest number of dispatches issued from the American consulate in Amoy, which discovered that Bolshevist doctrines had made a considerable impression in, surprisingly, the Zhangzhou region of Fujian province. An April 10, 1920, dispatch from the Amoy consulate on the subject Bolshevist Propaganda is quoted at length for its revelations:

I have the honor to report that Bolshevist propaganda is carried on in the city of Changchow, inland from Amoy, the seat of the military government of General Chen Chiung Ming [Chen Jiongming] commanding the Southern forces.

I am informed that teachers in the Chinese government schools at Changchow have been spreading the Bolshevist doctrine, and occasionally breaking out and waving the red flag. At a recent athletic meeting, held on a large scale, at Changchow, pamphlets in Chinese advocating anarchical communism were circulated. I enclose a rough translation in English of one such pamphlet, which was handed personally by General Chen Chiung Ming to a foreign visitor to Changchow who was present at the athletic meet. General Chen Chiung Ming is reported to have made an address at a tiffin to officials and foreigners, held on the athletic grounds, and to have himself advocated some of the socialistic doctrines set out in the pamphlet. Turning to the foreign missionaries present, he is reported to have said that the Savior himself was a socialist, and what is a socialist but a Bolshevik.[267]

An April 24 dispatch forwarded to the embassy in Beijing included additional translations of Bolshevist pamphlets, as well as a proclamation issued by the magistrate of Amoy. The latter read:

The propagation of Anarchism and Bolshevism is contrary to the public peace and morals, destroying virtue and the Five Human Relationships (parents and children; husband and wife; brother and sister [sic]; sovereign and subject; friends).

Hereafter anyone may arrest persons engaged in distributing this printed matter and send them to the court or hand them over to the police, to be severely punished.[268]

The confounding of anarchism and Bolshevism in these reports, whatever it may say about the political education of American diplomats, was nevertheless typical of the confusion that prevailed at this time over the relationship of these radical ideologies. But not everyone was confused. In a service report he filed to the State Department in December 1920, John Dewey observed, with reference to the case of a student who had been arrested two months earlier in Beijing for spreading Bolshevist literature, that he investigated and found that it was truly anarchistic, advocating the abolition of government and the family, but no Bolshevist. Though there might be a few Bolsheviks around the country, Dewey continued, they had nothing to do with the general tone and temper of radical thought in the country.[269] Had American consular officials in Amoy investigated the Bolshevist literature they discovered in Zhangzhou with the same perspicacity, they might have reached a similar conclusion: this literature was clearly anarchist, produced and distributed by followers of Shifu, who had accompanied Chen Jiongming to Fujian in 1918.

Dewey was to be proven wrong concerning the prospects of Bolshevism in China. But his assessment of the situation in 191920 was accurate. In the eyes of contemporaries, anarchism was by far the most important current in Chinese radical thinking of the time.

In June 1919, Chen Duxiu wrote in the Meizhou pinglun (Weekly critic) that toward the end of the Qing dynasty, officials accused everyone who was politically suspect of being a member of the Tongmeng hui (Revolutionary Alliance). Since the Revolution of 1911 they had all learned to praise the Revolutionary Alliance. Now, he complained, everyone who was politically undesirable was called an anarchist, despite the fact that there were actually few anarchists in China.[270]

Chen’s comment suggests that it was government stereotyping of radicals, rather than the popularity of anarchism, that created the impression of widespread anarchist activity in China. This had some truth to it. An accurate estimate of the number of anarchists in China at that time may never be possible; it is unlikely, however, that there were ever more than a few hundred active and committed anarchists at any one time. Anarchist associations were loosely organized, short-lived, and diffuse in membership. Anarchist efforts to organize a coherent federation foundered before the unwillingness of anarchists to submit to organization discipline.

Nevertheless, Chinese officials made a strenuous effort to suppress anarchist activity, which itself was a major reason for the fluidity of anarchist associations. Government agents infiltrated anarchist organizations, anarchist publications were often suppressed as soon as they had come into being, and anarchists had to keep on the move to escape government detection and arrest.[271] This constant motion, necessitated by government suppression, was ironically a possible reason for government fears of a widespread anarchist conspiracy.

The Chinese government during this period identified extremism (guoji zhuyi) with anarchism, and in its constant efforts to track down extremists, gave publicity to the anarchist cause. The internal documents of the Beijing government reveal that authorities were genuinely concerned about the effects on the population—students, workers, and especially soldiers—of the seditious literature that kept popping up in post offices across the country. Concerning an appeal to soldiers, written by a Baoding anarchist named Li Desheng, an official wrote in May 1919 that if this kind of crazy talk was permitted to spread, it would disturb order and destroy the peace, which would not only threaten the existence of the state but extinguish humanity; it was a spark that would, if not extinguished, start a prairie fire. In late June 1919, Cao Kun, then military governor of Zhili province, predicted similar results if anarchist advocacy of revolution against kinship relations (sangang wuchang), for economic equality, labor organization, and freedom to achieve humanitarianism were allowed to spread among students who were just beginning to quiet down from the activities of the May Fourth mobilization. Another report from 1920 observed that extremists who advocated social anarcho-communism (shehui wuzhengfu gongchan zhuyi), while not comparable to bandits, were more dangerous to the state than bandits.[272]

Nevertheless, if the strength of anarchism at this time was more an impression created by governmental persecution than a reality, as Chen suggested, it was an impression that was shared widely. In a 1919 essay, More Talk of Problems, Less Talk of Isms, Hu Shi pointed to the anarchists (in addition to Marxists) as examples of ideological thinking.[273] Chen himself implicitly conceded the appeals of anarchism when he condemned the nihilistic tendencies of Chinese intellectuals for nourishing anarchist thinking. By 1919 Chen was an implacable foe of anarchism; his statement reflected the frustration he felt with the popularity of anarchism among Chinese intellectuals. Two years later, he was to respond to a suggestion that the various organs of the Communist party be moved from Shanghai to Guangzhou with the observation: Anarchists are all over this place, spreading slanderous rumors about us. How can we move to Guangzhou?[274] As late as 1922, the Soviet government in Moscow invited an anarchist group to visit the Soviet Union with the hope of converting them to the Bolshevik cause.[275]

Anarchists may have been weak, but they were still the most numerous among proponents of radical social revolution, they were still better organized than others in the early twenties, and there was more systematic anarchist literature available to Chinese intellectuals than was true of any other ideology of Western origin. Although anarchists proved in the long run to be unable to organize themselves into a coherent movement, they had a large number of organizations scattered all over China in the early twenties, and, at least in the major urban centers, anarchist mobility provided these organizations with some measure of loose organization. In the immediate years after the May Fourth Movement, there were anarchist societies in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Zhangzhou in Fujian, Hankou, Chengdu, and Changsha, with more than one society in some cases. Overseas, there were Chinese anarchist societies in France, Singapore, the Philippines, San Francisco, and Vancouver.[276] These societies published their own newsletters and periodicals to spread anarchist ideas. They also served as cores for mass mobilization when the political situation allowed (or instigated) such mobilization.

The anarchist presence in the May Fourth period was even more evident in the spread of anarchist literature in the Chinese press and of anarchist publications themselves. During the two years 1922 and 1923, more than seventy anarchist publications appeared inside and outside China.[277] To be sure, like the societies that published them, these publications were short-lived; many did not last beyond one issue; all that remains of them today are announcements of publication in other anarchist journals. These publications also had limited circulation and quite possibly did not reach beyond the locality in which they were published. Still, they provide evidence for the widespread popularity anarchism enjoyed at this time. There were anarchist publications of long duration and national scope: Minzhong, published 1922-1927, first in Guangzhou and then in Shanghai; Xuehui, supplement to the Guofeng ribao in Beijing; Gongyu, published in Paris; and Chunlei (followed by Jingzhe), in Guangzhou. These periodicals, on the one hand, propagated anarchist ideas; on the other hand, they concentrated increasingly after 1921 on criticism of communism and the Soviet Union. Through these publications, Chinese had access to the most recent developments in world anarchism.

Perhaps more important for present purposes, by 1919 there was more anarchist literature available to Chinese than any other socialist literature. A survey of anarchist writings from this period shows that, through the accumulated efforts of anarchists over the previous decade, an interested Chinese reader could have gained a more comprehensive understanding of anarchism through Chinese language materials than was possible for any other Western social and political philosophy. A May 1918 list in the anarchist journal Ziyou lu (Records of freedom) included works by Kropotkin, Bakunin, Goldman, and Tolstoy. A March 1919 list in Jinhua (Evolution) cited additional works by Kropotkin, plus works by Grave, Reclus, and Louis Blanc.[278] The rejuvenated People’s Voice in 1922 published a list of works that had been published by that society between 1912 and 1920: the list included works by Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and Malatesta, among others, some of them published in editions of up to 5,000 copies.[279] Chinese could also see what their favorite anarchists had looked like, through the 50,000 postcards of Western anarchists (and of anarchist colonies such as the Colonie d’Aiglemont in France) the society had published in 1913. All this was, of course, in addition to the writings by Chinese anarchists themselves.

By 1919 anarchist works and writings appeared regularly in the mainstream press. Articles on Tolstoy’s pan-laborism appeared not only in anarchist periodicals but in the radical and liberal press in general, including influential publications such as the Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), where even conservative authors found it a directly relevant idea. Even more widespread was the interest in the anarchist idea of mutual aid and its progenitor, Kropotkin, who in 1919 may have been the most revered European radical in Chinese eyes. His Appeal to Youth was to be responsible for converting (or at least turning) numbers of young radicals to anarchism.[280] Works such as Mutual Aid, The Conquest of Bread, and Fields, Factories and Workshops, as well as his autobiography, were readily available and found their way into periodicals with a broad readership; one Sichuan anarchist recalled that these were among the most popular readings of the day in 1919.[281] In March 1919, the Light of Learning (Xuedeng, supplement to Current Affairs, Shishi xinbao, in Shanghai associated with the antirevolutionary Research Clique) began to serialize Li Shizeng’s translation of Mutual Aid. Later in the year the Weekend Review (Xingqi pinglun) in Shanghai serialized The State, the only lengthy foreign work to appear in that journal. Articles on Kropotkin, or translations of his works, were staples of the reading public. Bakunin’s God and the State was another popular anarchist work of the time.

The proliferation of anarchists during the May Fourth Movement, and the diffusion of anarchist ideas, may be taken as prima facie evidence that the New Culture Movement provided fertile ground for the efflorescence of anarchism in China. Indeed, the intellectual and social mobilization of the late 1910s, which was to become the New Culture Movement, might well have seemed to the anarchists the fulfillment of their wishes for the direction of the revolutionary movement in China. For the previous decade, anarchists had been the most persistent, and the most systematic, exponents of the ideas on social change that rose to the forefront of radical thinking after 1915. As these ideas gained currency, anarchists and the social philosophy of anarchism moved from the periphery to the center of Chinese thought—not just metaphorically, in thought, but also geographically, from Guangzhou and places abroad to Beijing.

The New Culture Movement and Anarchism

The New Culture Movement, the first unambiguous manifestation of the demand for cultural revolution in the Chinese revolutionary movement, got under way in 1915 and blended in 1919 with the May Fourth Movement, which spread the message of new culture broadly beyond the small group of intellectuals (mainly in Beijing) to which it had been restricted initially. Its ideological premises and demands are well known and do not require extensive elaboration. Here I shall only highlight its most outstanding concerns.[282]

According to historiographical convention, the movement was initiated by the prominent intellectual Chen Duxiu (later a dean at Beijing University and the first secretary-general of the Communist party) when he founded the New Youth (Xin qingnian) magazine in late 1915 and began to advocate a new culture for China. Over the next few years, Chen was able to recruit some of China’s most prominent intellectual and literary figures, and the demand for a new culture came to encompass all aspects of intellectual life, from new ideas to new writing to a new ethical basis for Chinese society. In 1917, when Cai Yuanpei was appointed chancellor of Beijing University, the movement acquired an institutional basis in China’s premiere educational institution. The atmosphere created by the cultural movement contributed to the eruption of student protest in Beijing in May 1919 against foreign claims on Chinese territory. Though primarily patriotic in its orientation, the May Fourth Movement in turn created conditions for the further spread of the demand for a new culture, which by mid-1919 had become national in scope. The merging of the two movements in 1919 represented a major turning point in the history of the Chinese revolution and has retained a paradigmatic significance since then.

The movement originated, most immediately, in the accumulation of patriotic sentiment against foreign (especially Japanese) encroachment on China. More important from the long-term perspective of the Chinese revolution is what it reveals about the ideological and social conditions of revolution. The turn to culture was a response to the failure of the political institutions created by the republican Revolution of 1911, which not only created a disgust of politics, but turned intellectuals away from the pursuit of political solutions to search for answers to China’s political problems at the more fundamental level of culture and mentality. It would be erroneous to assume that this represented a shift from public to private concerns. Indeed, advocates of a new culture had come to view polities as being in the realm of selfishness, corruption, and the pursuit of private interest, and believed that a genuine public consciousness could be created in China only outside of politics, a position reminiscent of the first generation of radicals but now reinforced by the experience of a political revolution.

This intellectual reorientation in turn drew its significance from the coming of age of a new generation of Chinese intellectuals. The New Culture Movement was not simply an intellectual movement, it was also a movement of new intellectuals who were intensely concerned with public and patriotic issues, but also sought to assert their presence in public affairs. It is possible to speak of the emergence in the late 1910s of an intelligentsia in China who no longer conceived of themselves as political servants but rather discovered an identity in opposition to politics. The new national institutions (and, to a lesser extent, professions) provided them with a social basis of their own; and the realm of culture articulated their orientation as a social group to problems of society. Their initially cultural radicalism was to be transformed by the May Fourth Movement, which brought them out of their universities into the streets. The encounter with the rest of the population would add a social dimension to their cultural concerns and transform the cultural radicalism of the New Culture Movement into the social radicalism of the twenties.

The ideology of the New Culture Movement is best viewed at a number of levels. At the most formal level was its call for science and democracy, historically regarded as the movement’s foremost characteristic. Leaders of the movement viewed the cultivation of habits of scientific thinking and democracy as the most fundamental elements in the creation of a new cultureand a new generation of Chinese. This was to lead to an unprecedented affirmation of modern Euro-American culture and to a total repudiation of the hegemonic native tradition, Confucianism, which now represented all that was backward and superstitious against the enlightenment of modernity. The attack on the past included an attack on its textual and social underpinnings. A new culture demanded a new language; New Culture leaders called for a new literature, as well as for the replacement of classical writing by a colloquial style, to overthrow the hegemony not just of the old texts but of the old elite, which derived its power from command over the texts. Socially, the attack on the past was carried over to an attack on the institutions through which the past lived on, chiefly the family, now seen as the vehicle for the transmission of Confucian social values. The overthrow of the family was crucial to the liberation of youth from the past and, therefore, to the creation of a new generation of Chinese. The affirmation of modernity was to lead to an iconoclastic (in Lin Yu-sheng’s term) repudiation of the past, which was total because the New Culture Movement ultimately challenged the very values that held the old society together.[283]

In its very preoccupation with culture, the New Culture Movement (like the May Fourth Movement in general) was itself a cultural phenomenon; in other words, the advocates of new culture, and their youthful audience, not only advocated a new culture, they tried to live it. In its concern with culture, the movement focused on education as the primary means for changing China; while formal education was central to its conception of education, it was not a limiting boundary. In bringing education closer to everyday life, the movement (intentionally or not) pushed education out of formal institutions. The result was the creation out of a movement of ideas a radical culture that sought the immediate fulfillment of those ideas in social practice. A byproduct of this culture was a profound idealism (both in the sense of a belief in the fundamentalness of ideas and in the sense of the immediate possibility of realizing their promise). As the Manifesto of New Youth (magazine) put it in late 1919:

Our ideal new era and new society are to be honest, progressive, positive, free, equal, creative, beautiful, kind, peaceful, full of universal love and mutual assistance, and pleasant labor; in short, happiness for the whole society. We hope that the hypocritical, the conservative, the negative, the bound, class divided, conventional, ugly, vicious, warring, restless, idle, pessimistic elements, happiness for the few—all these phenomena will gradually diminish and disappear.[284]

Participants in the New Culture Movement viewed it as a Chinese Renaissance. In later years, the movement—in its emphases on science and democracy—would be compared to the European Enlightenment, which still holds an important place in representations of the movement. Liberal historians have stressed the movement’s liberalism; Communist historians on the whole have agreed with this assessment, adding as a social dimension the bursting forth of a bourgeois revolution in China.[285] I think we cannot identify the New Culture Movement with any one ideology, if by ideology we understand an articulate conception of the world with an exclusive structure of social and political action. The New Culture Movement was not informed by an ideology that, having captured the consciousness of a generation, stood guard, as it were, at the gates of that consciousness to determine the flow of ideas. The New Culture Movement was a movement of ideas, a consciousness in the making with a history of its own. Anarchism was one of these ideas. Anarchist ideas were readily available to anyone who sought them; during these years more people sought them than ever before or after in Chinese thought. Anarchists proliferated, and anarchism spread in Chinese thought as the movement gained momentum.

The efflorescence of anarchism during the May Fourth period is not inconsistent with the representation of the May Fourth Movement (in its New Culture phase) as an Enlightenment. Anarchism in Europe had deep roots, April Carter has argued, in the political philosophy and outlook of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; it is possible to view an anarchism such as Kropotkin’s‘ as an uncompromising reaffirmation of the Enlightenment promise when others, including liberals, had already given up on the possibility of its realization.[286] Any such analogy, however, is of necessity imperfect and may conceal more than it reveals. The popularity of anarchism was bound up primarily with concrete problems that emerged as the Chinese revolution unfolded following the republican Revolution of 1911, problems to which anarchism seemed to offer solutions consistent with the prevailing mood of Chinese radicals. One Chinese historian has written:

Under the conditions of several thousands of years of feudal despotism, especially with the decline of government with constant warlord disaster and repeated by ineffective efforts at governmental reform, it was easy for the people at large to become disgusted with politics. On the other hand, the Chinese intelligentsia was mostly of petit-bourgeois origin; it had a personality that was subjective, superficial, evanescent, and impatient. When they began to demand revolution, what best suited their taste was not scientific socialism but empty and high-blown utopias, and anarchism which flaunted existing customs.[287]

It is questionable that when members of the Chinese intelligentsia turned to scientific socialism after 1920, they became any the less petit-bourgeois, but the statement tells us something about the mood that prevailed during the immediate May Fourth period.

In his 1936 interview with Edgar Snow, Mao Zedong reminisced: At this time [1918-19] my mind was a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism and utopian socialism. I had somewhat vague passions about nineteenth century democracy, Utopianism and old-fashioned liberalism, and I was definitely anti-militarist and anti-imperialist.[288] Chow Tse-tsung has observed of this statement that this curious mixture of ideas was not a particular state of mind belonging to a particular young student at the time. It actually represented the main current of thought of the active and restless youth in the middle of the May Fourth Movement.[289] Chinese youth responded with enthusiasm to the flood of New Learning that inundated the intellectual world after 1915. A generation that sought liberation in ideas absorbed as the proverbial sponge every idea that promised liberation, without much regard for its ideological origin or its social and political implications. The mood that prevailed at the time was not reflective discrimination but a euphorious revolutionary eclecticism that could imagine a basic unity in diverse ideas so long as these appeared progressive, democratic, and scientific. Under the circumstances, the ideas anarchists contributed to the New Culture Movement were not easily distinguishable as anarchist ideas, especially since the anarchists did not claim them explicitly for anarchism. But the openendedness of anarchist ideas proved to be an advantage in the diffusion of anarchism among Chinese youth. The utopianism to which Mao referred was at the time largely a product of the diffusion of anarchist ideals among Chinese intellectuals. Anarchism had no monopoly over the ideas that were to become commonplaces in Chinese thinking of the May Fourth period; but anarchists had been the most consistent promoters of those ideas in the years that preceded the New Culture Movement, and now, on the left wing of New Culture thinking, they stood ready to benefit from the diffusion within the Chinese intellectual scene of ideas of which they were the most enthusiastic proponents.

Anarchist inspiration probably played some part in the thinking of New Culture leaders who were not otherwise anarchists. Liberals such as Hu Shi Shi Shi Shi disliked anarchism for obvious reasons. But others were more open to anarchist ideas. More than one biographer has suggested that Chen Duxiu, who was to turn against anarchism after 1919, was aware of anarchist ideas before 1911 and was possibly sympathetic to them.[290] There is no concrete evidence for this suggestion, even it if seems plausible. In the early part of the New Culture Movement, Chen worked closely with anarchists in Beijing University and, as editor of Xin Qingnian, seemed to be more than willing to publish anarchist contributions. An important statement he made in 1917, where he urged a shift of attention from politics to culture, was inspired by a speech given by the anarchist Li Shizeng; the intellectual authorities he called upon to support his position were all anarchists, Wu Zhihui and ZhangJi, in addition to Li.[291] In 1918 he contributed an article to the anarchist periodical Labor (Laodong).[292] Li Dazhao, who disapproved of anarchists because of their advocacy of terror, was attracted in 1913 to the socialism of Jiang Kanghu, which had overlapped anarchism. In the May Fourth period, even after he became a Marxist, he was a foremost proponent of mutual aid.[293] Yi Baisha, brother of the more famous Yi Peiji (later the head of the anarchist-inspired Labor University in Shanghai), and prolific critic of Confucianism in New Youth magazine, was, according to Chow Tse-tsung, an anarchist.[294] So were Qian Xuantong, prominent philologist and historian, and Zhou Zuoren (brother of Lu Xun and important literary figure in his own right, who would play an important part in the mass New Village Movement in 1919).[295]

The interest in anarchism was partially a product of the coincidence between the issues raised by the anarchists and the issues that became the focal points of intellectual concern during the New Culture Movement. Charlotte Furth once observed that with the exception of the advocacy of science, there was no New Culture idea that had not been taken up by Chinese intellectuals in earlier years.[296] One might argue, on the basis of anarchist literature before 1915, that all the ideas of the New Culture Movement, including science, had been anticipated by the anarchists a decade before the movement. Anarchists, moreover, had raised these ideas more systematically than had any others on the Chinese scene. It would seem natural, therefore, that anarchism should have received the attention it did during the New Culture Movement. Anarchists, obviously, were not mere observers of the New Culture Movement, they participated. They not only influenced the intellectual orientation of the movement, they provided its vocabulary.

Anarchists had consistently advocated the cause of science against tradition, religion, and superstition. They had been the first in China to call for a revolution against Confucianism. Their insistence on individual liberation, especially the liberation of women, had led them to a repudiation of the family and of the Confucian values (the Three Bonds and the Five Constants) that informed the Chinese family. They had called for an ethical revolution that would transform individuals; and while they had seen in education a key to such transformation, they had viewed education not as formal education but as education in the transformation of quotidian life. Most relevant, however, may be the logic of the anarchist argument. Anarchists had repudiated politics, not only in the name of freedom, but also because they viewed politics as inimical to a genuine public consciousness and an organic social existence. Their advocacy of social revolution, which set the social against the political, had focused on cultural revolution as a primary means to social change, not as a substitute for changing social institutions and relationships but as an indispensable moment in social transformation, with which a new generation could articulate concerns that were emerging into its consciousness. Anarchism as social philosophy lost its remoteness as social problems in China awakened youth to problems to which the anarchists had pointed a decade earlier.

We are accustomed to thinking of the New Culture Movement in terms of its intellectual leaders and the abstract ideas they injected into the Chinese intellectual scene. While these ideas were significant moments in the unfolding consciousness of the movement, their significance lay not in their abstract power but in their relevance to the practical problems of a whole new generation of Chinese intellectuals.

To appreciate the appeal of anarchism in New Culture thinking, or of any of the currents of thought that went into the making of the New Culture Movement, it is necessary to view the movement not simply as an intellectual movement or as a revolution in the reified realm of ideas, but as a movement of real living people who sought in ideas solutions to concrete practical problems. The turn to culture as the arena for significant change was itself provoked by the failure of the republican experiment in China and by the political degeneration that followed. As Chen Duxiu put it in 1917 (referring to a recent speech by Li Shizeng, which had argued for the priority of ethical change):

If we desire to consolidate the Republic today, we must first wash clean the anti-republican thinking that infuses the minds of our countrymen, for the ethical basis that underlies the state organization and the social system of a Republic is the diametrical opposite of the ethical basis that underlies the state organization and social system of monarchical despotism: one is founded upon the spirit of equality; the other on a distinction between classes of high and low. The two cannot be reconciled.[297]

What China needed, Chen concluded, was reeducation in republican ethics and literacy. Even the literary revolution, an important undertaking of New Culture leaders, was tied to this practical question: the reform of writing was not an end in itself (at least not to everyone) but rather a means to purge the hegemony of old ideas and make new ideas accessible to larger numbers of people.

The corruption of Chinese politics at this time gave to the message of a revolution in ideas a practical urgency it had not had earlier. Even more significant in this respect, I think, were the social implications of cultural revolution. If it was revulsion over existing politics that turned Chinese intellectuals to the realm of culture, the cultural revolution they sought to achieve was not simply a revolution in ideas but a revolution in the ethical basis of society that would transform not only the state but social organization as well. The message of cultural revolution was most powerful where it promised to transform existing social institutions, chiefly the family, because it licensed a struggle against the authority of the old where it impinged directly upon everyday life. Chinese youth was no doubt dissatisfied with the old-fashioned rulership over China, but it was the promise of the overthrow of authority in everyday life that drove it to the New Culture Movement and provided the movement with the social substance for its historical significance. Ultimately, the motive force of the movement was to be provided by the new generation of young intellectuals who came of age in the late 1910s, whose idealism only exacerbated the alienation they felt from a social system they had ceased, unlike their predecessors, to take for granted. Perhaps the most important contribution of the older generation of intellectuals who initiated the movement was to give Chinese youth the confidence to create a social space where it could breathe freely, and a vocabulary for its yearnings. As one New Youth reader phrased it:

This Spring I read your magazine for the first time. As if woken by a blow on the head, I suddenly realized the value of youth. We should emulate the West, and abolish the old and welcome the new. I am like somebody who is sick, and who must breathe in fresh air and exhale the old. Although at present I am not what you might describe as a new youth, I am sure that I can sweep from my mind all the old thoughts of the past. The credit for all this goes to the save-the-youth work you have been doing.[298]

The struggle against the authority of the old was not some struggle between the old and the new in the realm of abstract ideas; it was a real-life struggle in a society where the culture that intellectuals rebelled against was very much alive in the social structures of power and authority. The icons that New Culture youth sought to destroy were icons that watched over their everyday existence. The intellectual radicalism of New Culture leaders found its fulfillment in the social radicalism of a generation to whom the burden of the past was not an idea but a lived experience. This youth was to take over the leadership of the movement rapidly, and when it did, it escalated the radicalism of the movement beyond the expectations of some of its original leaders, who discovered that they no longer controlled the events they had set in motion. When the New Culture Movement is viewed from this perspective, the increasingly ineffective efforts of those participants who took it as a movement of ideas pure and simple, and tried to keep it that way, appear not as the essence of the movement but as an ideological position within it, that held forth the intellectualism of the movement to keep in check the social radicalism their ideas had unleashed.

The call for cultural revolution, though it obviously glorified the new and denigrated the old, did not necessarily reject all that was old, but focused on those aspects of the Chinese tradition that legitimized institutions that reproduced social relations of domination and subordination,[299] especially where it related to youth and women. Wu Yu, the uncompromising critic of Confucianism, attacked Confucianism not because it was old (he did not extend the same attack to Daoism and Legalism but used them rather to criticize Confucianism), but because it upheld the Chinese family system. His remark that the effect of the idea of filial piety has been to turn China into a big factory for the manufacturing of obedient subjects, is revealing of the material, because social, understanding of culture that infused the call for cultural revolution in these years.[300] It was not abstract issues of cultural or ideas, but the call for the struggle against the hegemony of the old over the young, of men over women, of the rich over the poor, of state over society, in short, against authority, that in these years fashioned a social movement out of ideas.

The New Culture idea of culture, as it had emerged by the May Fourth period, was a social idea of culture: cultural revolution, in other words, required the revolutionization of basic social institutions. There was a conjuncture between the social logic of this idea of cultural revolution and the cultural logic of the anarchist idea of social revolution. Indeed, the distinction between culture and society lost its meaning in either idea of revolution that conceived of society as the institutional embodiment of a culture of authority, and of culture as the architectonic expression of social structures of domination and oppression. In their search for cultural liberation, New Culture youth sought out social spaces where they could live in freedom. More than any other group participating in the New Culture Movement, anarchists offered to youth such spaces. Anarchists promised that their idea of New Culture was to change not ideas but life at its most basic, everyday level. The work-study institutions they promoted, perhaps even the syndicates, represented spaces in which youth could find a new life. As Wang Guangqi was to observe in 1920, work-study groups were not simply utilitarian institutions, but havens from the families youth sought to escape, where they could live in freedom and equality.[301]

The social plight of Chinese youth, as well as its hopes and the promise of the New Culture Movement, has been captured most cogently in the autobiographical novel Family by the prominent Chinese anarchist writer Bajin, who came of age at this time (and became an anarchist, adopting the name Bajin, made up of the first syllable of Bakunin’s name and the last syllable of Kropotkin’s).[302] Anarchist and New Culture concerns resonated not just at the level of ideas, but at the very social basis of the ideas and in their underlying logic.

This is not to claim the New Culture Movement for anarchism, nor to reduce the anarchist advocacy of social revolution to New Culture concerns. There were many points of divergence between the general concerns of the New Culture and May Fourth movements and anarchism; not the least important of these were the patriotic frustrations and aspirations that would shortly redirect the course of the New Culture Movement. Anarchism, while integral to New Culture thinking, occupied a place in its broad spectrum somewhere on the left. Indeed, anarchist participation in the movement was to bring to it concerns that turned its preoccupation with culture in the direction of social change. Anarchists were not passive beneficiaries of the movement; through their activities, they contributed both to the radical activity of the movement and to its ideological orientation. Ironically, anarchists, for all their incapacity for organization, would make the most important contribution by providing organizational principles to the radical experiments with new forms of social life the movement produced.

Anarchists were also to benefit from the October Revolution in Russia, of which they were the first Chinese interpreters. Thanks mainly to their interpretations, the prevailing impression in China initially was that the Bolshevik revolution was not a Marxist but an anarchist revolution. Given its prestige in China, the revolution in 1918–1919 was to stimulate considerable interest in anarchism among radicals, including those radicals who shortly would turn to the establishment of a Communist party in China. In the immediate May Fourth period, communism in China was still for the most part identified with anarcho-communism, which, Chinese Communist historians have complained, delayed, in the confusion it created, the acceptance of Marxism by Chinese radicals.

Anarchist Activity After 1915

As of 1915, there were two identifiable and related groups of anarchists in China: the Paris anarchists, and the Guangzhou anarchists of the Anarchist Federation (in Shanghai and Guangzhou), which Shifu had established before his death. By the time of the New Culture Movement, Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui were among China’s most prominent intellectuals; of the same generation as the initiators of the movement, such as Chen Duxiu, they were well placed through personal connections to influence cultural life. Guangzhou anarchists were younger and more local in orientation. They were also more puritanical in their loyalty to anarchist principles. Although not so influential as the Paris anarchists, they were more active at the local level and more involved with social organization. Many of them were students and schoolteachers and provided much of the anarchist social activism during the New Culture Movement. After 1919 they would emerge as intellectual leaders in the anarchist movement as well. While on the whole they followed the lead of the older anarchists, there was also some tension between the two groups over anarchist purity in personal life, as well as the nature of anarchist activity, a tension no doubt exaggerated by regional loyalties.

The Paris anarchists were to make the most visible contributions to the New Culture Movement. This was due not so much to their ideas as to their activities in the realm of education. The work-study program they initiated after 1911 became in these years a training group for anarchists and an effective means for the propagation of anarchist ideas. Indeed, some of the ideas generated by this program were to last beyond the anarchists and have a lasting effect on revolutionary thought in China.

After the 1911 Revolution, Wu Zhihui and Li Shizeng, the two leaders of the Chinese anarchists in Paris, had returned to China to work within the context of the new republican regime. In 1912 they established the World Society (hijie she, named after the society the anarchists established in Paris in 1906) to promote education, especially education abroad, which they thought would resolve basic social problems, including class division. As the declaration of the Association put it, Farsighted men regard the fact that higher education is not yet universal as the reason why classes are born. They grieve about this and [think that] the way of remedying the situation is to make education equal [for all].[303]

Out of this goal was born the New Society Movement (xin shehui yundong), which sought to increase people’s happiness by advancing their morality. The anarchists of the World Association, who were also Francophiles, believed that France, with its libertarian and revolutionary tradition, offered the most attractive environment for Chinese students who wanted a modern education. With this goal in mind, in 1912 they established the Society for Frugal Study in France (Liufa jianxuehui). Frugality, the anarchists believed, would not only serve the practical goals of the movement, but also help build moral character.[304]

The Society for Frugal Study sent a number of students to France (and Britain) before World War I, but this activity declined with the onset of the war. During the war few Chinese students went to France for study. Anarchist activity in France, however, had a boost from another source: Chinese labor. During the war, about 200,000 Chinese laborers were imported to help with labor shortage created by the war. Some of these laborers worked as coolies in French armies, others in French factories. After the war many would stay on in France as workers.

In 1914 anarchists had established the new Society for Diligent-work and Frugal-study, whose major aim was to educate Chinese workers in France. Before 1911 the anarchists had employed Chinese labor in their printing plant and in the bean curd factory they had established to support their activities. Their educational activities with these workers provided the model for the educational activity they would undertake later.

Anarchists played a crucial role in the importation of Chinese workers into France during the war. In 1916 they established the Sino-French Educational Association in cooperation with French business and academic leaders. The major activity of the Association was to recruit Chinese workers for France. In their school for the workers they devoted their efforts to the improvement of workers’ behavior and morality. These workers were also given a rudimentary education in general subjects as well as in labor organization. Anarchists served as lecturers in the school; Cai Yuanpei was prominent among them.[305]

After the war the Society for Diligent-work and Frugal-study turned once again to students. Applying to students their experiences in educating laborers, the Society arranged for students to find work in France in order to finance their studies. By 1919 there were about ten schools in China to prepare students for study in France. By 1920 there were in France more than a thousand students in the program of the Society for Diligent-work and Frugal-study.

The work-study program was to have an important effect on radical politics in China. Not all of the Chinese students who went to France under anarchist auspices became anarchists. Among the program’s graduates were those who would become leaders of the Communist party as well as of the patriotic Chinese Youth party. Nevertheless, its immediate effect was the publicizing of the anarchist cause in China. Even those among its graduates who rejected anarchism went through an anarchist phase and were initiated into radicalism through anarchism.

Equally important were the ideological ramifications of the anarchist programs. The extended contact with Chinese workers in France expanded consciousness of labor and the laborer, first among anarchists, and then among other groups in China. The work-study program meant different things to different people. To some it was merely a practical means for providing Chinese with a Western education. It also produced ideals that would have an important influence on New Culture thinking and the generation of New Culture youth.

The anarchists connected with Shifu, or initiated into anarchism by the activities of his group, played a less visible but equally important role in spreading anarchist ideas in China at this time. Shifu’s death at an early age in 1915 had left this group without a clear leadership in these years. Nevertheless, Guangzhou anarchists were to fan out from their base in the South to major metropolitan centers, spreading the anarchist message and organizing anarchist groups that were to serve as lodes for anarchist activity.

In Guangzhou itself the most significant anarchist activity revolved around labor organization. Before 1915 the anarchists had displayed interest in syndicalism and labor education; their ideas, according to Ming Chan, had influence on labor even in these years.[306] Xie Yingbo, the influential labor leader in Guangzhou, had been associated with Shifu in the China Assassination Corps before 1911 and was himself a syndicalist; this connection possibly facilitated anarchist entry into the labor movement. Anarchists participated in the first celebration of May Day in China in 1918. In the same year they helped organize a Guangzhou Teahouse Labor Union, which drew a membership of 11,000 workers from among trade guilds and teahouse employes.307] In the next year barbers in the area were organized under anarchist influence. Through Xie Yingbo, anarchists were also influential in the Mechanics’ Union. These unions have been described as the first modern labor unions in China. Shifu’s brother, Liu Shixin, played a leading part in these activities.[308]

Anarchists were also engaged in the propagation of anarchist ideas, usually under the guise of Esperanto schools. By 1915 (after the Shifu group had been forced out of Guangzhou and moved to Shanghai), there was an anarchist school in Shanghai in addition to the one in Guangzhou. According to one source, by 1914 there were Esperanto schools in Tianjin, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, among others.[309] It is not likely that all these schools were established by anarchists, let alone anarchists of Shifu’s group. Nevertheless, there was an intimate relationship in these years between Esperanto and anarchism; and Esperanto textbooks, such as the one edited by Ou Shengbai in Guangzhou, served to spread anarchist writings in some security from the authorities.[310]

Some of the Guangzhou anarchists followed Chen Jiongming to Fujian in 1918 where, under his protection, they propagated Shifu’s anarchism. As in the case of Xie Yingbo, the labor leader, Chen’s connection to the anarchists was a personal one; he, too, had been associated with Shifu in the China Assassination Corps and after 1911 extended his protection to Shifu and his followers. The protection, however, went beyond purely personal considerations. Chen himself, ironically for a militarist, had some sympathy for anarchism; according to Winston Hsieh, at this time he was also responsible for financing the Sino-French University in Lyons.[311] One anarchist recalled that under his leadership Zhangzhou in these years became a model city. Anarchists operated freely under his protection and even published a newspaper.

Both lines of anarchist activity, the work-study program in France and the activities of Shifu’s followers in China, illustrate the ambivalent relationship of anarchists to the authorities whose overthrow they advocated. This relationship reflected a persistent tendency among Chinese anarchists to instrumentalize anarchism in the service of goals that contradicted their own professed aims. The Paris anarchists hobnobbed openly with both the political and the economic elite in China and abroad; the Sino-French Educational Association was a semiofficial organization. Shifu’s followers, much more clearly anarchist in their identity at this time, accepted protection from the authorities when they could.

This acceptance was partially due to a genuine need for protection. Discussions of radical activity in China at this time rarely stress the adverse political circumstances under which radicals operated. Wu Zhihui’s name was among those listed by the Shanghai police as dangerous Bolshevists in China. Chinese authorities, central or local, were ever ready to suppress extreme radical activities. American consuls were able to get the local authorities to intervene against the anarchists in Fujian, in spite of Chen’s protection. Radical literature was often smuggled between false covers to avoid detection, as is illustrated by the example of an anarchist manifesto published in Baodingfu, which authorities discovered within the covers of a Chinese bible.[312]

Anarchist association with authority was also a consequence of the persistence of personal relationships that often contradicted the verbal commitments of the anarchists. It also gave anarchists false hopes about the possibility of reliance on authorities that appeared favorable to their cause. Anarchists were to discover this, much to their regret, in 1928, when their flirtation with the Guomindang under Chiang Kai-shek was to result in a tragic betrayal of their cause by Chiang—and by the doyens of anarchism in China, who obviously placed their personal relationships and official influence above their long-term ideological commitments.

With the appointment of Cai Yuanpei as the chancellor of Beijing University, anarchist activity, like the New Culture Movement in general, gained a new momentum. The appointment of Cai was particularly meaningful for the anarchists, because Cai had long been involved with the Paris anarchists (most recently in the work-study program in Paris), and was himself a philosophical anarchist (see chapter 2 above).

After 1917 Beida was to emerge as a center of anarchist activity in China. No one has suggested that Cai tried actively to propagate anarchist ideas at Beida, but his reforms at the university created an atmosphere in which anarchists could flourish, and he was responsible, albeit indirectly and in somewhat reified form, for publicizing ideas that had originated with the anarchists. His reforms attracted to the university anarchists who had been his close intellectual associates over the previous decade, such as Li Shizeng (who taught moral philosophy as well as biology) and Wu Zhihui (an academic adviser). Of the Guangzhou anarchists Huang Ling shuang and Yuan Zhenying were professors at the university, Ou Shengbai and others enrolled as students. According to Xu Deheng, anarchists constituted one of the three major groups in the university faculty, in addition to the New Youth group and the conservatives.[313]

Cai’s own activities could at least have been construed by the anarchists as favorable to their cause. One of the important components of his educational philosophy was the fostering of a group spirit and habits of mutual aid. To this end he encouraged students to establish groups that ranged all the way from discussion groups to cooperatives. Soon after he became chancellor he sponsored the establishment of the Promote Virtue Society (Jinde hui).[314] This society, which derived its name from the anarchist society of 1912, adopted for its guidelines the principles of another: Shifu’s Conscience Society (Xinshe). The declaration of the society referred specifically to the Jinde hui of the early Republic which, it said, had been founded by socialists such as Cai, Wu, and Li, to deal with the questions of how to achieve communism and abolish marriage.[315] The society was able to recruit about a thousand members by the May Fourth period.

The teaching of Esperanto was another area of anarchist activity. The anarchist Sun Guozhang (later associated with the radical Fendou [Struggle] magazine, which advocated a nihilistic anarchism) was in charge of the teaching of Esperanto; according to a notice in the student daily of the university in December 1917, his Esperanto class had attracted fifty-three students, although it is hard to tell whether these students were all from Beida.[316] In the same month, the paper started to serialize an article by Ou Shengbai on Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto.

There is also considerable evidence that anarchists formed a powerful group within student activities in the university. In February 1918 Sun Guozhang became the editor of the student daily, which then began to publish articles in Esperanto (Chen Duxiu was a faculty adviser).[317] In 1920 Zhu Qianzhi, later to gain fame as a proponent of nihilist anarchism, became editor of the student weekly. Under his editorship the weekly published debates on anarchism and labor; two of its issues carried the pictures of Kropotkin and Bakunin on the cover.[318] There is also indirect evidence of anarchist power in the university. In 1918 students at the university organized a society to protest Japanese activities against China. The students wanted to call the society the Patriotic Society (Aiguo hui), but, according to Xu Deheng, changed the name to Save-the-Nation Society (Jiuguo hui) under pressure from the anarchists.[319]

If anarchists were active in the various organizations in the university that were not explicitly anarchist, they also had their own organizations. In 1917 students and faculty organized the Truth Society (Shishe) to promote anarchist goals. Its members were Huang Lingshuang, Hua Lin, Ou Shengbai, and Yuan Zhenying, all leaders of the anarchist movement in the 1920s. In 1919 this society was replaced by Evolution Society (Jinhua she), which brought Beida anarchists together with anarchists from other parts of China. Other Beida anarchists, led by Zhu Qianzhi, established in 1923 the Struggle Society (Fendou she) to propagate their own version of anarchism.[320]

Anarchist activity was reflected in anarchist publication. Anarchists had participated in the New Culture Movement from the beginning through their contributions to New Youth. The names of Wu Zhihui, (Huang) Ling Shuang, (Yuan) Zhen Ying, Hua Lin, (Liang) Bingxian appeared frequently in the journal before 1919. Their contributions to New Youth, however, lacked a clear identity.[321] These contributions ranged from discussions of Nietzsche’s philosophy to translations of Tolstoy and Emma Goldman. They were almost wholly in support of that journal’s advocacy of individual liberation from social institutions. While they performed an important function in acquainting New Youth readers with the names of famous anarchists and their views on the individual, marriage, and the family, they did not impart any clear picture of anarchism as a comprehensive social and political philosophy with an identity of its own.

More important as sources for anarchism were a number of journals published by the anarchists, or guided by them. In August 1916, Chinese in France started to publish the LuOu zazhi. Ostensibly the organ of the Sino-French Educational Association, the journal publicized the views of the anarchists who dominated that organization. Its editor was Chu Minyi of the New Era anarchists. Among the most prolific contributors were Cai Yuanpei, Li Shizeng, Wang Jingwei, and Wang Shijie. This was followed in January 1917 by Huagong Zazhi (Chinese laborers’ journal), a journal addressed to Chinese workers in France. The journal published pieces to educate the workers and rid them of their undesirable habits; its mottoes were diligence, frugality, and study. Lectures by Li Shizeng and Cai Yuanpei in the workers’ school took up most of the journal’s space devoted to discussions.

In July 1917 Truth Society at Beida began to publish Ziyou lu (Records of freedom). According to Huang Lingshuang, Truth Society was one of the three legs of the tripod of anarchism in China, the others being Xinshe (Conscience Society) in Guangzhou and the Qunshe (Masses Society) in Nanjing. Records of Freedom was devoted to the search for anarchist organization in politics and advocacy of the true principle of communism in economics.[322] Its contributors included prominent members of a rising generation of anarchists. Aside from Huang Lingshuang, these were Hua Lin, Ou Shengbai, and Yuan Zhenying.

Other anarchist periodicals appeared in 1918: Renqun (Masses) published by the Masses Society in Nanjing, and the Pingshe zazhi (Peace Society journal) published by Peace Society in Shandong. These journals were short-lived because of internal difficulties and harassment by authorities. In January 1919 four anarchist societies (People’s Voice in Guangzhou, Masses in Nanjing, Peace Society in Shandong, and Truth Society in Beijing) merged to establish a new society, Jinhua she (Evolution Society), and started publication of a new journal, Jinhua zazhi (Evolution magazine) in Nanjing. The journal barely made it past the May Fourth Movement, when it was closed down by the authorities.[323]

The participants in these activities give us a clue to the rapid spread and proliferation of anarchist groups outside major urban centers during the May Fourth Movement. According to Liu Shixin, the Masses Society in Nanjing drew its membership from former members of the Socialist party (the Pure socialists of Taixu’s group).[324] Members of the Socialist parties of the early republican period, with their anarchist inclinations, may have provided a pool of potential members. It will be recalled that Jiang Kanghu himself had returned to China at this time, and was engaged once again in organizing activities among which was a three/two society (no government, no family, no religion: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need). If not anarchist, strictly speaking, it is plausible nevertheless that these groups in the provinces did play a part in the propagation of anarchism.

The most novel anarchist publications in the period before the May Fourth Movement were two journals devoted to labor, Mirror to Labor (Laodong baojian) and Labor (Laodong), both published in 1918. Of these two, by far the more important was Labor, China’s first journal devoted specifically to the promotion of the cause of laborers (and to carry labor in its title). Mirror to Labor raised labor issues mainly in passing in its discussions of general issues of anarchism, which were continuous with discussions in People’s Voice earlier. Labor, edited by Liang Bingxian, addressed questions of labor directly. The journal discussed the conflict between labor and capital and advocated social revolution to resolve it. Among its firsts were discussions of the significance of May Day and of labor activities in China. It was also the first journal in China to discuss the implications of the October Revolution in some depth, which unexpectedly would benefit the cause of spreading anarchism.

The October Revolution and Anarchism

There is some evidence that Chinese radicals initially viewed the October Revolution in Russia not as a Marxist but as an anarchist revolution—or at least a revolution that was consistent with anarchist goals. One Chinese historian has written of radicals in Guangzhou:

At the time [i.e., before the May Fourth Movement in 1919], quite a few people thought that the victory of the October Revolution in Russia was the victory of anarcho-communism. Radicals who were dissatisfied with the situation in China and wanted a revolution began, therefore, to believe in anarchism.[325]

Lest this be viewed as an idiosyncrasy of Guangzhou, where anarchism had strong roots, we may note that Shao Lizi, prominent Guomindang member and a participant in the early activities of the Communist party, recalled the same tendency in Shanghai.[326] According to Maurice Meisner, following the October Revolution the name of Kropotkin began to appear with greater frequency in the writings of Li Dazhao, later China’s first Marxist. Indeed, Li’s own writings on the October Revolution in late 1918 were infused with the language of anarchism.[327]

Much of this confounding of the October Revolution with anarchism was a consequence of worldwide confusion over the Revolution in 1918. Prominent anarchists, including Emma Goldman and Kropotkin himself, believed early on that the Revolution, if not anarchist, at least had the potential for developing into an anarchist social revolution. In China the confusion was compounded with the association of the idea of social revolution with anarchism. Until the 1920s anarchists were the only ones in China consistently to advocate a social revolution from below. The October Revolution, which quickly came to be hailed by radicals worldwide as the first genuine social revolution in history, plausibly appeared to Chinese radicals as an anarchist revolution. That opponents of the Revolution vulgarly labeled it anarchist may have confirmed the impression. Anarchists themselves, even anarchists in the Soviet Union, such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, would not renounce the association of anarchism with the Bolshevik Revolution until 1922, even if they had grown suspicious of it by early 1919. This was also when Chinese anarchists abandoned hopes in an anarchist-Bolshevik cooperation in the cause of social revolution.

Anarchists in China in 1918 actively contributed to this association of anarchism with the October Revolution. The two discussions of the October Revolution published in the second issue of Labor in April 1918 are among the most detailed reports on the meaning and ideology of the Revolution to be published in China in 1918. (This was also the issue to celebrate May Day for the first time). These reports may have shaped the views of Chinese radicals on the Revolution well into 1918 and, in their identification of anarchism with a revolution that carried considerable prestige in radical eyes, helped add to the prestigeand the propagationof anarchism as well. An article by one Yi Cun, entitled The Political Strategy of the Extremists in Russia (Iguo guojipai shixingzhi zhenglue), described the Revolution in terms of its internal and external policies. Quoting Trotsky, the author described the Revolution as a revolution in the broad sense guangyidi geming), meaning that the Revolution was not restricted to politics but extended to the economic realm as well, and also that it was not merely national but global in its aspirations, as was shown by efforts to export the Revolution. As the author put it, The revolution accomplished by the Russians is a world revolution, it is a social transformation (gaige).[328]It was a revolution, he observed, that bureaucrats and the wealthy feared but which laborers and the poor welcomed. There is little question of the sympathies of the author, who referred to the revolutionaries as brothers (xiongdi) and compatriots (tongbao).

A similar tone pervaded the second article, A Brief Account of Lenin, the Leader of the Russian Social Revolution (Iguo shehui gemingzhi xianfeng Lining shilue), which described Lenin as the most enthusiastic proponent of universalism (datong zhuyi) in the world. As in the first article, this discussion, too, stressed as the goals of the Revolution the immediate termination of the war and the redistribution of property to relieve the poor. It described the revolution in our neighbor Russia as a social revolution to make equal the rich and the poor. More significantly, the author stated that while people fear these two words, social revolution, it is nothing but a natural tendency of the world.[329] A similar statement was repeated in an essay in the third issue of the journal, An Analysis of Lenin, the Reality of the Russian Revolution (Liningzhi jiepei, Iguo gemingzhi zhenxiang). Anticipating Li Dazhao by two months, the author stated: The French Revolution gave birth to the civilization of the nineteenth century; the Russian Revolution represents the tendencies of the twentieth century.[330]

In ensuing issues (the last one was no. 5 in July 1918), Labor published other discussions of the Russian Revolution, including one on the various socialist groups in Russia and their publication organs, an article on the consequences of peasant liberation, and brief biographies of Trotsky and Breshkovskaya. I have not seen these issues and am unable, therefore, to analyze their content. Suffice it to say here that these discussions were interspersed with the many articles the journal published on labor and anarchism. Prominent among its causes was Tolstoy’s laborism (laodong zhuyi), which Li Dazhao would hail a few months later as a basic feature of the Revolution.

On the basis of the articles in the earlier issues, it is possible to state that Labor portrayed the October Revolution as a revolution in perfect harmony with anarchist aspirations. An article in the first issue, which was devoted to the discussion of labor’s struggles against the war in Europe, described the ideology of the October Revolution as anarcho-communism (wuzhengfu gongchan), first, and freedom, equality, and universal love, second. The same piece described the goals of the Revolution as the establishment of anarchy, the abolition of private property and religion, and the termination of the war.[331] The articles in the following issue of the journal, which I have already discussed, echoed these views in their depiction of Bolshevik policies as efforts to get rid of laws, and of Lenin as a thoroughgoing internationalist who had no conception of national boundaries. The article in number three cited above would seem to have corrected these views by pointing to the fact that the Bolsheviks traced their lineage to Marx, who had been at odds with anarchists. But the general impression to be gained from the journal, especially considering its overall anarchist context, was that the Russian Revolution did not deviate significantly from anarchist notions of social revolution.

By early 1919 some anarchists would turn against the October Revolution and Bolshevism; others continued to view it favorably and even to regard it as basically anarchist. As late as 1920 the area of Fujian under Chen Jiongming, a hotbed of anarchist activity, was known as the Soviet Russia of Southern Fujian, and anarchists there (led by Liang Bingxian who now edited the anarchist journal in Fujian) served as a major source of information on the Soviet Union and the progress of the revolution. They were high on the list of people to contact of the Comintern agent Gregory Voitinsky when he arrived in China in March 1920 to organize communism. When the New Youth magazine became an organ of the incipient Communist party in September 1920 and added a new section on the Soviet Union, Chen Duxiu asked the anarchist Yuan Zhenying to edit it.

The Dialectics of Revolution: Social Revolution and Ethical Transformation

By the late 1910s anarchism in China had assumed a more complex visage. In addition to the social anarchists, there were anarchists for whom anarchism represented an extreme individualism of the kind that had been advocated by Max Stirner (Zhu Qianzhi), or pointed the way to the fulfillment of an esthetic conception of life (Zhou Zuoren and Hua Lin). Chinese anarchists also discovered new foreign anarchists, notably Emma Goldman, whose writings on love and the family (and later on the Soviet Union) acquired enormous popularity during the New Culture Movement; Goldman would make a profound impression on one anarchist in particular, Bajin, who would come to view her as his spiritual mother and form a lifelong devotion to her.

The increasing variety of anarchisms, and the proliferation of anarchist groups in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, makes it nearly impossible to summarize the thinking of Chinese anarchists at this time. Much of this remains to be uncovered. I will restrict the discussion here to the social anarchists and focus on those ideas that were to make a lasting impression on May Fourth radicalismand the revolutionary discourse in China.

Anarchists spread their ideas in these years not only in anarchist journals, but through contributions to publications of general interest, as well as the circulation of pamphlets (among which Shifu’s writings were very prominent), which through clandestine means found their way into even provincial localities. No less important as texts on anarchism were anarchist activities, which were particularly important in the emergence of a radical culture among May Fourth youth.

Among the ideologies that went into the making of the New Culture Movement, anarchism emerged early on as the ideology of the radical Left, which sought to steer the cultural revolution in the direction of a social revolution, saw in the cultural transformation of Chinese society a means of moving China toward socialism, and desired, at least in theory, to expand the cultural revolution beyond intellectuals to encompass the common people (pingmin).[332] Studies of the New Culture Movement, including studies by Communist scholars, leave the impression that socialism was not a significant component of the movement until after 1919 when, under the influence of the Russian Revolution, Chinese intellectuals began to show interest in it. This is misleading, and valid only if we deny the socialism of the anarchists. It is true that the word socialist does not appear very often in New Culture literature before 1919. Chinese anarchists themselves did not advertise their anarchism in their contributions to mainstream journals such as New Youth or the Renaissance; the word anarchism appears rarely in anarchist contributions to these journals, and then in the description of the political philosophy of authors such as Tolstoy and Emma Goldman, whose works the anarchists translated into Chinese. What distinguished anarchist writings in these years was not their claim to socialism, but their advocacy of a social revolution, the hallmark of socialist ideologies in China since 1905. During the New Culture Movement, anarchists were to emerge as the champions in Chinese thought of a social revolution that went beyond changes in culture or politics, and though their ideas may not be readily identifiable as constituting a socialist program, they were responsible for introducing into New Culture discourse not just socialist ideas and a socialist vocabulary, but a socialist vision as well. This not only prepared the ground for the efflorescence of socialism following the May Fourth Movement, but also helps explain why anarchism should have enjoyed the greatest popularity among competing social revolutionary ideologies in the early May Fourth period.

Anarchist ideas and activity in the May Fourth period followed along the lines established by earlier anarchists. Basic to them was the anarchist commitment to social revolution through education, whose ultimate goal was the ethical transformation of individuals to discover the natural anarchist inclinations that were a universal human endowment. Two aspects of this endowment became particularly prominent in discussions of anarchism in the May Fourth period, with lasting implications for revolutionary discourse: mutual aid and the combination of labor and learning in the creation of a new generation of youth. By 1919 these two ideas had become fundamental to the experiments in the reorganization of social life (a communal movement, so to speak) that expressed more eloquently than words the radical culture that anarchists had helped fashion.

A brief summary of the premises concerning the role of education that had earlier informed the anarchist idea of social revolution may be useful here, for these same premises shaped the ideology of May Fourth anarchists. Anarchists believed that a revolutionary society could be only as good as the revolutionary process that produced it. In the earliest phase of anarchism in China, anarchists such as Zhang Ji had believed that the ends justified the means. Anarchists continued to express a similar orientation in later years. Anarchist writing and programs well into the twenties often displayed a penchant for violence: propaganda by the deed was a regular feature of anarchist programs; and in 1925 the Manifesto of Hunan anarchists declared bravely that one bomb is better than a thousand books.[333]

Determination of the extent to which anarchists practiced the kind of violence they preached must await a different kind of research. The evidence is that the majority of anarchists (and the most influential) placed peaceful propaganda and education ahead of violence, which was consistent with the conception of revolution that underlay most anarchist writing: that violence and oppression perpetrated in the name of revolution would create a violent and oppressive society that betrayed the promise of revolution. Indeed, the distinctive feature of the anarchist program of social revolution was that revolution, in order to produce a genuinely revolutionary society, must in the very process of revolution create the institutions of the future. Basic to this program was a conception of revolution as a process rather than as a discrete historical undertaking. Anarchists by the May Fourth period refused to distinguish ends and means, the goals of revolution from the means employed to achieve those goals. Revolution must in its progress create the institutions that contained, in embryo, the society of the future. These institutions would in turn secure the further progress of revolution by providing social spaces for the transformation of individuals and their social consciousness. To the anarchists this revolutionary dialectic ruled out the utilization of any means that contradicted the ultimate goals of the revolution, since bad means would further distort the social nature of individuals and lead them away from, not toward, the cherished goal of revolution. This, we shall see, was the point of departure for anarchist critiques of Bolshevism in the twenties.

New Era anarchists a decade earlier had established the place of education in revolution: education was but the positive aspect of revolution, as violence was its negative aspect. The negative purpose of revolution was to clear away the institutional and material obstacles to the liberation of the human potential; but it was education, its positive aspect, that nurtured the morality demanded by the anarchist ideal and made possible the creation of the embryonic anarchist institutions that marked the progress of social revolution.

The anarchist revolutionary idea resolved itself ultimately into a dialectic between the individual and social institutions: the diffusion of anarchist morality among individuals would lead to the substitution of embryonic anarchist social institutions for authoritarian institutions, which would, in turn, further promote the progress of anarchist morality—until, eventually, anarchism came to encompass all aspects of life for all of humanity. Education, in other words, was revolution; revolution, education.

Anarchists viewed learning, especially scientific learning, as an important component of the education they proposed. There is no morality other than learning, Wu Zhihui had proclaimed in the New Era. The Truth Society in Beida adopted as its basic guideline the slogan of advancing morality and cultivating knowledge.[334] The Declaration of Progress Society in 1919 stated, quoting Thomas Huxley: If the present advance of learning cannot fundamentally alter the decadent condition in which the great majority of humankind lives, then I can say only one thing: let us quickly call upon that merciful comet to wipe out this globe, and us with it.[335] Anarchists commonly held that the morality of a people was proportionate to their learning. The progress in learning, in other words, was in itself a progress toward the kind of society they envisaged. As in earlier years, this underlay their call for the universalization of education, which they believed was the prerequisite to human progress.

The stress on education is a reminder of the basically reformist and evolutionary approach to revolution that characterized Chinese anarchism; in the Declaration of Evolution (Jinhua) Society in 1919, Huang Lingshuang reiterated Li Shizeng’s explanation in New Era of revolution as re-evolution, as a means of securing the inevitable advance of society.[336] Nevertheless, anarchists assigned a deeply radical function to education. The goal of education (as of revolution) was to eliminate authority (qiangquan), and thereby enable individuals to discover their true selves. Anarchists saw in authority the fundamental cause for the distortion of the natural goodness of people and believed that, once authority had been eliminated, the basic goodness of humanity would reassert itself in the formation of an anarchist society. Authority was diffused throughout present society, embodied in its various institutions. In the words of Huang Lingshuang, What we mean by authority is not merely the militarism of Germany and Austria, or the supermanism of Nietzche, but the politics, religion, law and capitalism of present society which obstruct the realization of freedom and happiness by humanity as a whole. Huang neglected to spell out one institution of authority whose repudiation by the anarchists would add enormously to their appeal during the May Fourth period: the family. Anarchists had believed all along that the family was the embodiment of authority in everyday life; it was also, as the manifesto of Hunan anarchists put it, an instrument for the production of selfishness.[337]

With the abolition of authority, the instinctive goodness (and sociability) would assert itself, and the tendency to selfishness, plunder, and oppression of individuals under present-day society would be eradicated. As a manifesto that issued from Zhangzhou (most probably one of Shifu’s essays) put it, the principle of anarchical communism was a truth hidden in every individual’s mind.[338] Moral transformation, or rather moral restitution, of the individual was key to the anarchist view of an education that would result in social revolution.

This morality was ultimately a social morality. Anarchists desired to abolish institutions that embodied authority, institutions that divided people from one another and obstructed the creation of an organic society that derived its cohesiveness not from coercion but from the natural tendency of humankind to voluntary association. The anarchist conviction in the possibility of realizing such a society was grounded in a vision of humanity that was at once natural, esthetic, and rational. Anarchism is the means to (achieving) beauty, Communism is the way to (achieving) goodness, Huang Lingshuang wrote in his prefatory essay to Records of Freedom in 1917. At the heart of this vision was a conviction in the instinctive goodness of human beings. A letter in the same issue of the journal stated: The morality of anarchism is equality, universal love (boai) and freedom; there is not one among these that is not in accord with the spontaneous growth of human natural endowments.[339]

The principle of anarchical communismis a truth hidden in every individual’s mind, the Zhangzhou manifesto had declared, and explained that this truth (anarchical morality) was nothing but labor and cooperation, both of which are natural gifts to human beings and are not derived from the outside. (Cooperation presumably was huzhu, mutual aid, in the original.) By 1918 the creation of institutional spaces that would permit the practice of mutual aid and the combination of labor and learning appeared as the most prominent aspects of the anarchist conception of the process of social revolution, and for all the reformism implicit in the insistence on education as the means to revolution, these goals were quite radical in their cultural implications. Mutual aid was to the anarchists the cornerstone of anarchist morality, as it had been to Kropotkin. In his Anarchist Morality, Kropotkin had written:

The ant, the bird, the marmot, the savage have read neither Kant nor the fathers of the church nor even Moses. And yet all have the same idea of good and evil. And if you reflect for a moment on what lies at the bottom of this idea, you will see directly that what is considered as good among ants, marmots, and Christians or atheist moralists is that which is useful for the preservation of the race; and that which is considered evil is that which is hurtful for race preservation. (Italics in original)

Kropotkin viewed solidarity, therefore, as a natural law of far greater importance than that struggle for existence, and concluded that the law of mutual aid, not competition, was the law of progress.[340]

Chinese anarchists, following Kropotkin, took this natural tendency to mutual aid as the essential content of human goodness (liangxin). They endowed this tendency with the status of a universal scientific principle (gongli) and set it against Darwinian notions of conflict, which, they believed, encouraged men to eat men. Hua Lin argued that nineteenth-century science had proven that man was a social animal.[341] Cai Yuanpei lectured to Chinese workers in Paris that division of labor and social interdependence were fundamental characteristics of human society.[342] Mutual aid was rational, not only because it was natural to humankind (and the rational operation of the cosmos), but because it had the blessings, the anarchists believed, of modern science.

If mutual aid was one instinctive endowment of humanity, labor was the other. Anarchist morality, Shifu wrote in 1914, was nothing but mutual aid and labor: the two are instinctive to humanity. He went on to explain that labor is humankind’s natural duty and mutual aid its inherent virtue.[343] In the anarchist conception labor was not simply utilitarian, a necessity for the sustenance of life, but was a moral imperative of human existence. What made labor unpleasant was its coercive nature; with the liberation of humankind, labor would realize its true nature as a fundamental human endowment.

The stress on mutual aid as an instinctive endowment of humanity was present in Chinese anarchism from its origins in Paris before 1911, spread through the writings and translations of Li Shizeng, who himself had been trained as a biologist, and was responsible for introducing to China Kropotkin’s ideas on mutual aid as the motive force of progress in nature and society alike. Labor received scant attention in Chinese anarchist writings before 1911. In the hundred some issues of New Era published before 1911, only two articles dealt with labor, and those in the most general terms. Labor as a necessity of anarchist society had received greater attention from Liu Shipei, the leading light of the Tokyo anarchists, who had incorporated into his anarchist utopia the performance of manual labor by each individual. The anarchist federation of Shifu in 1915 had also stressed the importance of universal labor.

The increasing attention Chinese anarchists devoted to labor in the late 1910s was possibly a consequence of their intensifying relationship with laborers, both in China, in the syndicalist activities of the Guangzhou anarchists, and in Paris, where anarchists were involved in the education of the laborers they had imported into France. There was also a subtle but significant change in these years in attitudes toward labor. Even in the Declaration of Anarcho-Communist Comrades, cited in chapter 4, Shifu displayed an ambiguity on the question of labor. He presented labor as an instinctive human endowment, but went on to explain that labor would become more pleasant in the future with help from technology. By the time of the New Culture Movement, however, anarchists presented labor, not as a necessary evil, but as a manifestation of the essential beauty of anarchist morality and human instinct. This was possibly due to greater familiarity with those writings of Kropotkin that extolled the virtues of labor, The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, both widely read in China in the late 1910s. All that is possible to say with certainty, however, is that the stress on labor as one of the two natural endowments of humanity, and a moral imperative that was an expression of the natural goodness and beauty of the human spirit, appeared more and more frequently in anarchist writings as the anarchist involvement with labor gained in momentum in the years after 1915. By 1919 mutual aid and labor appeared to many as cornerstones of anarchist philosophy and the means to achieve the good society of the anarchist vision.

The anarchist argument for universal labor sheds light on anarchists’ approach to the question of class and class conflict. Anarchists called for the abolition of class oppression, or the authority exerted by one class over another, which they viewed as another manifestation of the selfishness created by a social order based on the principle of authority. The anarchist position on the question of class, however, was problematic. While their analysis of class oppression overlapped with Marxist explanations of this problem, they differed from Marxists (at least mainstream Marxists of the day) in the causes to which they attributed class oppression and, therefore, in the solutions they offered. Anarchists took account of the economic basis of class oppression and placed the abolition of private property and production for profit high on their agenda of social revolution. Shifu, who was more radical than the Paris anarchists in this respect, pointed to capitalism as one of the twin evils of contemporary society, the other being the state. Nevertheless, anarchists in general exhibited a more moralistic appreciation of class oppression than the materialist Marxist understanding of class division and conflict in terms of the process of production. While anarchist analyzes often referred to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, their descriptions of classes, more often than not, juxtaposed the rich against the poor, those who did not labor against those who did, and mental against manual labor. This was consistent with the anarchist view that, ultimately, power and authority, and the selfishness they generated, were the cause rather than the effect of economic inequality.

Beneath their radical class rhetoric, anarchists rejected class conflict as a means of resolving class oppression. This was to be articulated fully after the May Fourth Movement in the course of anarchist critiques of communism, but it was already expressed in anarchist writings in the 1910s. Anarchists believed that class conflict was just another expression of selfishness in society and, instead of resolving social questions, merely perpetuated them in another guise. Anarchism offered a means to resolving this problem peacefully. As Wu Zhihui stated in Laodong in Laodong in 1918: So the Labor magazine wishes to make clear the principles of class war and to research methods of pacifying it, so that along with the laboring people of the whole world, we can resolve this problem and seek a correct life.[344] Classes, the anarchists believed, could be abolished only with the abolition of authority as the architectonic principles of society.[345]

To summarize, then, anarchists perceived two interrelated functions in education. First was the accumulation of learning necessary to purge individuals of their superstitions, which encompassed all the ideological convictions that undergirded authoritarian society. More important, education must create those spaces where, free from the authority of existing institutions, individuals would be able to realize their natural propensity to social existence. Especially important in this regard were institutions that promoted mutual aid and the free exercise of labor. The one prepared the ground for the other in a dialectical interplay between consciousness and social institutions, which the anarchists viewed as the essential content of the social revolution they espoused.

Anarchist activity during the New Culture Movement was a direct expression of this idea of social revolution. Anarchist writings in these years promoted these ideas; but much more eloquent in conveying anarchist philosophy, and much more effective in the propagation of anarchist ideas were the efforts of anarchists to translate their vision into the beginnings of an anarchist reality in the womb of contemporary society. Anarchist social activity not only provides us with an ideological text in which the utopian vision of the anarchists assumes concrete form, it also enabled the anarchists themselves to articulate the practical constitution of their vision of humanity.

These activities ranged from the diligent-work frugal-study program in France to the syndicalist activities of the anarchists in China, from the Jinde hui at Beida to the New Village Movement (xincun yundong), of which Zhou Zuoren was the major proponent, but especially the work-study movement, which, around the May Fourth Movement, assumed the proportions of a thought tide in the Chinese student world. While these activities differed widely in scope and constituency, they had one purpose in common: to provide youth with an institutional environment in which to cultivate habits of mutual aid and labor. For some anarchists they also represented small organizations that were the starting point of anarchist reorganization of society as a large association of small-scale organizations.

Of these activities, the syndicalist movement and the work-study movement in France were most significant. The anarchist syndicalist movement represented the emergence of the modern labor movement in China. Anarchists spearheaded the labor movement in Guangzhou and Hunan and possibly in Shanghai. With the exception of Guangzhou, these anarchist origins would be short-lived; anarchists began to lose ground to the Communists almost immediately after the establishment of the Communist party in 1921.[346] Nevertheless, anarchists showed a consciousness of Chinese labor before any other radical groups and contributed to the diffusion of this consciousness during the New Culture Movement.

Moreover, the tactics the anarchists employed in the organization of labor were to become common tactics of labor organization in China: establishment of workers’ schools and clubs to educate labor in the process of organization. These tactics were partially a consequence of anarchist belief that Chinese labor was too backward culturally to permit immediate labor organization. As late as 1918, Wu Zhihui wrote in Labor that the establishment of a labor party (gongdang) in China must await the education of the working class.[347] Anarchists believed that if labor organization was to be effective, and in accordance with anarchist principles, laborers had to do their own organizing. The education of laborers must accompany any efforts at labor organization in order to enable laborers to take charge of their own organizations.

These tactics also reflected, however, the deep-seated anarchist belief in social revolution as a process of education. To the anarchists, syndicates were not merely organs for representing labor interests but new social institutions in which to promote anarchist morality. When the time arrived for the final social revolution, these institutions would serve as the units of anarchist social organization.[348] This goal was possibly more important to some anarchists than the promotion of labor interests, which may have been a reason that anarchists found themselves unable to compete with the Communists in the twenties.

Whatever the reasons may be for the success or failure of anarchist syndicalist activities, it was important that these activities brought Chinese labor and students together for the first time. It is difficult to say what effect this may have had on the consciousness of Chinese laborers: it certainly left its imprint on the consciousness of students. The encounter would ultimately result in the explosive mixture that burst forth in the 1920s in urban social revolution.

More immediately significant was the work-study movement in France, of which the anarchists were the architects and which was basically a product of anarchists’ experiences in educating the laborers they had imported to work in their dofu factory before 1911, and then the large numbers of Chinese laborers who, through their agency, had gone to work in French factories during the war. These experiences had inspired in them the idea of laboring intellectuals that was the basis of the work-study program. Indeed, it was in such journals as the Journal of Chinese Students in Europe (LuOu zazhi), which began in 1916, and Chinese Laborers’ Journal (Huagong zazhi), which began in 1917, both in Paris, that anarchists first started propagating the idea of combining labor and study.[349]

The reasoning underlying the work-study movement was quite practical. As in the case of the laborers whose education the anarchists had conducted as spare-time education in night schools, students who went to France on the program would work part of the time to finance their education, and would also study part-time. To many in China, including participants in the program, the appeal of the work-study program lay in its practical aspects: it provided the means to acquiring an education that might otherwise have been financially difficult or impossible. To some, such as Hu Shi and Wang Jingwei (who was himself involved in the program and was, for a while, editor of Luou zazhi), this practical aspect was the most important aspect of the program. Hu Shi saw in it a parallel to the part-time work part-time study programs he had encountered in the United States; but he objected to the more idealistic aspects of the program as obstacles to its success.[350] Many of the Chinese students who participated in the program seem not to have shared the idealistic zeal of its sponsors, who often complained that students cared little about labor and were concerned mainly with making it by acquiring an education.[351]

To the anarchists who had initiated the program, the idea of combining labor with learning had a much more ambitious significance. Hua Lin remarked that if China was to change, the change would be accomplished by those who participated in work-study.[352] An article in Labor stated: With work and study combined, workers will become scholars, scholars will become workers, to create a new society that will realize the goal of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.[353] Possibly the most eloquent advocate of work-study was Cai Yuanpei, who saw in this combination the solution not only to the problem of youth acquiring an education, but to the weightiest problems of China and the world.[354]

As the work-study movement gained momentum there was a noticeable change in anarchist writings toward the glorification of labor. Laodong magazine in 1918 adopted as its guidelines reverence for labor and the promotion of laborism (laodong zhuyi).[355] Labor was to be valued beyond its contribution to production. Ethically, labor was the greatest obligation of human life, and the source of civilization. Morally, labor was the means to avoid moral degeneration and help moral growth, it was a means to forging spiritual willpower. Work, the guidelines stated, helped not only the individual but society as a whole. Laborism was to become a common term of New Culture vocabulary during the May Fourth period, comparable in its popularity to mutual aid.

Anarchism and Cultural Radicalism in the May Fourth Period

By late 1918 anarchist writing and activity had brought anarchist ideas of social revolution through education into the language of the New Culture Movement. Two leaders of the movement were particularly important in publicizing these ideas. One was Cai Yuanpei, the chancellor of Beijing University, who himself had long been an associate of the Paris anarchists and participated in their activities in Paris. Starting at this time and for the rest of the decade, Cai would be one of the foremost advocates of combining labor with learning in education. In the late twenties he was to play a leading part in the founding of the anarchist-inspired Labor University in Shanghai.

The other was Wang Guangqi who, though not of equal prominence, had a strong influence on Chinese youth as head of the Young China Association (Shaonian Zhongguo xuehui), possibly the most important student organization of the immediate May Fourth period, which included in its membership some of the most important figures in the founding of the Communist party in 192021 (including Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Yun Daiying, and Deng Zhongxia), as well as young radicals who would later found the Chinese Youth party (Zhongguo qingnian dang). Under the leadership of Wang, who showed an unmistakable inclination to anarchism in 1919, the Young China Association would emerge in 1919 as the foremost exponent of reorganizing China from the bottom up through the agency of small groups (xiao zuzhi), an idea that figured prominently in socialist thinking in 1919. Wang himself became a major promoter of the communal experiments in 1919 that went under the name New Life Movement (Xin shenghuo yundong) that displayed a clear anarchist inspiration and orientation.

The anarchist advocacy of labor caught the popular imagination in a phrase used by Cai Yuanpei in a speech late in 1918. Cai proclaimed:

The world of the future is the world of labor! The labor we speak of is not the labor of metal workers, of carpenters, and so forth. The undertaking of all those who use their own labor power to benefit others is labor regardless of whether it is mental or manual. Farmers do the labor of cultivating, merchants do the labor of transporting, writers and inventors do educational labor. We are all laborers. We must all recognize the value of labor. Labor is sacred (laodong shensheng).[356]

Labor to the anarchists was the great equalizer. Anarchists differed from Marxists in their class analysis in the emphasis they placed on those who labored and those who did not. The economic problems of contemporary society, they believed, arose largely from the exploitation of laborers by a parasitic class. The major distinction, as Cai’s statement implies, was not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but between those who labored and those who did not. The distinction had a special relevance in China, where Confucian tradition had for two thousand years drawn a distinction between mental and manual labor as the justification for distinguishing the governors and the governed. The combination of manual and mental labor was, to the anarchists, a means of overcoming economic exploitation in society. Cai’s views on this question are relevant to an understanding of anarchist views on labor and its significance for achieving social equality:

In our ideal society, all people will live according to the principle from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. According to his ability points to labor; whether it is manual or mental, all is labor that contributes to the existence of humankind and the advance of culture. Needs are of two kinds: physical needs such as clothing, food, and shelter, and spiritual needs such as learning. Now there are some people who do not do any work, or do work that is not real work. Those who do real work cannot but work bitterly and work long hours. Aside from them, the rest use special privileges to take and waste in huge quantities what humankind needs. Consequently, the real workers do not get enough of what they need. Perhaps they get some of what they need physically, but they are totally deprived of what they need spiritually. Is this not a great obstacle to the advance of culture? If we want to eradicate this obstacle, we must first realize a life where labor and learning proceed together.[357]

This, the anarchists believed, would be a revolution from below and would avoid all the bloodshed of a violent upheaval, which must follow if the human condition is not ameliorated.

The work-study program in France, and the ideas it generated, served as the inspiration for communal experiments around the idea of work-study that assumed the proportions of a tide in 191920. These experiments went by different names. The most famous was the Labor-Learning Mutual-Aid Group (Gongdu huzhu tuan), established in Beijing at the end of 1919 and sponsored by Wang Guangqi, who himself had participated in the work-study program in France and who went through an anarchist phase at that time. Almost equally famous was the Work-Study Association (Gongxue hut), established on May 3, 1919, by students at Beijing Higher Normal College. The following day a member of this group, Kuang Husheng, was to lead the attack on Cao Rulin’s house. Also part of this tide was the New Village Movement, in which Zhou Zuoren played a leading part. These experiments in turn inspired similar experiments in other major urban centers, such as Tianjin, Shanghai, Wuchan, Nanjing, and Guangzhou.

Although these work-study groups were not identical, they shared certain characteristics that point to their anarchist inspiration. Mutual aid and labor were essential to their functioning. Work-study groups were supposed to finance the educational activities of their members through income from group enterprises or individual labor. In either case, the income of the group would be pooled as the basis for a communal (gongtong) life. Division of labor within the group was to be organized to enhance interdependence among the members. The guiding principle in most cases was from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.[358]

The New Village Movement is interesting because of its peculiarities. Unlike the other work-study groups, the major goal of new villages as conceived by Zhou Zuoren was not study, but the promotion of labor (except for those with special talents). What makes the New Village idea most interesting, however, was an agrarian impulse that lay at its origins: new villages were conceived as agrarian communes that would carry the anarchist message into the countryside. The New Village Movement of the May Fourth period was inspired by a similar movement in Japan, in particular the movement initiated by Mushakoji Saneatsu, which itself had taken its inspiration from Tolstoy and Kropotkin. Nevertheless, before the May Fourth period, both the socialists of Jiang Kanghu and the anarchists of Shifu had experimented with new villages of their own. The New Village Movement was not comparable in its influence to the work-study experiments, but it did have some influence in Beijing where, in a number of schools students organized their own new villages and engaged in some agricultural cultivation to meet their own subsistence needs.[359]

All these experiments were quick failures. The Beijing Labor-Learning Mutual-Aid Group lasted only about four months before it foundered upon the economic difficulties it encountered. This was to be the common fate of all May Fourth communal experiments. In a situation that made economic enterprise and employment difficult, the groups rapidly fell victim to financial difficulties. Some were to conclude, as Dai Jitao did, that the work-study groups did not offer a solution to problems that went deep into the economic structure of the society in which they had hoped to achieve their utopian aspirations.[360]

As long as they lasted, however, the work-study groups seemed to offer a glimpse of Chinese intellectuals of the good society. One author, writing in Liberation and Reform (Jiefang yu gaizao), saw in labor-learning the beginning of a new era in human history: The principle of labor-learning (gongdu zhuyi) is a new stage in the evolution of human life, [it] is a beautiful product nurtured by the new thought tide of the twentieth century, and the foundation for the new society of the future.[361] Wang Guangqi, the sponsor of the Labor-Learning Mutual-Aid Group in Beijing, was even more ecstatic about the possibilities offered by work-study:

Labor-learning mutual-aid groups are the embryo of a new society, the first step to the fulfillment of our ideas. If the labor-learning mutual-aid groups succeed, the ideal of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need will be gradually realized. The present labor-learning mutual-aid movement may well be described as a peaceful economic revolution.[362]

Neither, however, equaled in ecstasy the contributor to Gongxue (Work-study) magazine of the Work-study Association, who saw in labor and learning the two tracks of the railroad to Heaven.[363]

In terms of the long-term significance of anarchist ideas in revolutionary discourse, most important may have been the initial attraction to anarchism at this time of the radical activists who would later emerge as the leaders of the Communist party. Li Dazhao’s attraction to anarchism in the aftermath of the October Revolution was replicated by other founders of the Communist party who, with the possible exception of Chen Duxiu, all went through an anarchist phase before turning to Marxism in 192021. According to Liang Bingxian, both Mao Zedong and Qu Qiubai were correspondents with the People’s Voice Society.[364] Yun Daiying acknowledged in his diaries that he was an anarchist in the late 1910s; Zheng Peigang recalls that he was also a contributor to Labor in 1918.[365] In 1917 Yun established a Mutual Aid Society (Huzhu she) in Wuhan. Many other later Communist leaders were participants in the work-study program in France, among them Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and lesser-known names such as Xu Teli who would later play important parts in the Communist educational establishment.

The Communist party, when it was established in 192021, was founded on student associations that arose during the radical movement and culture of the early May Fourth period.[366] As with other societies of the time, anarchist principles played an important part in their organization in providing guiding principles of social life; mutual aid and the practice of labor to sustain the societies appeared in this context not as remote ideals but as functional principles in the organization of new styles of collective living. Before they were recruited into the incipient Communist party organization in 1920, these societies in their ideological orientation were inclined to anarchism rather than to Marxism, as their members have acknowledged in their recollections.

It was also through anarchist inspiration that many of the later Communists were introduced into social activism. Mao Zedong became involved in labor activity in Hunan through his association with anarchist labor leaders, as did Deng Zhongxia and Zhang Guotao in Beijing, who were among the foremost labor organizers of the Communist party in the 1920s. The work-study program in France, which brought students and laborers together, produced some of the most effective labor leaders in the Communist movement.

Anarchists, who were among the first radicals to turn to agrarian organization, may have provided the inspiration for the first Communist agrarian organizers. Peng Pai, the most prominent Communist agrarian organizer of the twenties, was inclined to anarchism when he made his first forays into the countryside. So was Shen Xuanlu, Zhejiang radical and coeditor with Dai Jitao of the Guomindang Marxist publication, Xingqi pinglun (The weekend critic). Shen, a Guomindang member and a member of the Zhejiang provincial assembly, had a background as a landlord but found inspiration in Tolstoy. His activities in Zhejiang would lead to one of the first major rural movements to emerge out of May Fourth radicalism.[367]

This anarchist phase in the radicalization of later Communist leaders made for considerable confusion between Marxism and anarchism in 191920. It may also have imprinted on their minds memories of radical practices that, as practices of everyday radical culture, may have been more lasting in their implications than formal intellectual commitments.