Chapter Two
Nationalism, Utopianism, and Revolutionary Politics:
Anarchist Themes in the Early Chinese Revolutionary Movement.

Anarchism appeared in China at a moment of national crisis. In 19067 Chinese intellectuals abroad established two societies, within months of each other, devoted to the propagation of anarchism, one in Paris, the other in Tokyo. At a time when a revolutionary discourse was taking shape, with origins in a new national consciousness, the anarchism these societies promoted introduced into the discourse dissonant themes that would have a lasting effect. In spite of their basic conflict with nationalist goals, these themes would display a remarkable staying power in the revolutionary discourse fueled by the pursuit of political forms to give coherence to a nation in the making. Their echoes are audible to this day as the pursuit continues.

The receptivity to anarchism at a moment of nascent national consciousness seems anomalous. Mainstream Chinese political thinking during the first decade of the century revolved around the question of how to make China into a nation, to forge a cohesive political system out of the loosely organized power structure of a bureaucratic monarchy, and to ward off the threat to the country’s existence in a new world where the competition for power of expansive nation-states promised to consume those societies unable to emulate their example. The urgent questions of the day were what to do with the alien Manchu dynasty that continued to rule the majority Han people that constituted China and seemed to be less concerned with the nation’s welfare than with its own; how to transform the political system so as to extend political participation to larger numbers of Chinese in order to secure the people’s loyalty to the state; and how to develop the country economically to establish a material foundation for national strength—and the conditions for political sovereignty in a world where national political power seemed to be contingent upon the control of global economic resources. The pursuit of national wealth and power seemed to rule the world. The static society of China must be dynamized by this same pursuit if it was to survive—and reassert the glory to which it was entitled by a glorious past.[47] Building a nation was essential to this end.

The very presence of anarchism in Chinese thought might be taken as evidence that these concerns were not shared as widely as they first appear to bewere it not for the fact that anarchists themselves were intimately involved with the revolutionary movement nationalism spawned, and anarchist ideas first made their appearance within a new discourse that took as its point of departure China’s reconstitution as a nation. Rather, the anarchist presence suggests that this discourse is not reducible to a one-dimensional defensive or parochial search for wealth and power, that it was multidimensional in the possibilities it produced—including, ultimately, the negation of the premise that lay at its origins—which made it authentically revolutionary. It is not in the immediate political concerns of Chinese nationalism, but rather in the intellectual problematic the new national consciousness (or, consciousness of the nation) presented, that we must seek for clues to why anarchism, despite its basic contradiction of nationalist goals, acquired a significant place in intellectual discourse.

This new consciousness was to play a crucial part in the articulation, in the words of Thomas Metzger, of a modern Chinese intellectual problematique.[48] This is not to suggest that modern Chinese thought is but an account of the problems presented by national consciousness, or that all problems of Chinese thought from this point on must be referred back to a national consciousness and the political questions it raised. In his recent study of Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the century, Chang Hao has argued plausibly against the limitations of an exclusively political formulation of the problems that faced Chinese intellectuals, which were not just political, social, or even broadly cultural but ethical and existential as well.[49] Metzger shares Chang Hao’s view in his identification as a central concern of modern Chinese thought the establishment of a moral language with which to envisage the good society.[50]

At its broadest, this problematic entailed the reconstitution of both self and society in a discourse of modernity, which called forth questions not only of social and political form but, ultimately, of the meaning and ends of individual existence. The intellectual and ethical postulates of modernity, which forced themselves on the consciousness of Chinese intellectuals in the encounter with the West, were to provoke a rethinking of received traditions in their totality in the new possibilities they suggested. While Chinese intellectuals have continued over the years to draw upon these traditions as a source for an autonomous critique of Euro-American modernism, they have been able to do so only by rephrasing earlier problems in a new discourse that is unmistakably modern in its premises and sensibilities; even where the answers are old, the questions that produced them have been phrased in the problematic of a new historical situation. The problem was especially acute for the first generation of intellectuals to become conscious of this new historical situation, who, as products of a received ethos, had to remake themselves in the very process of reconstituting the problematic of Chinese thought. Anarchism, as we shall see, was a product of this situation. The answers it offered to this new problematic were not just social and political but sought to confront in novel ways its demands in their existential totality. At the same time, especially in the case of the first generation of anarchists, these answers were couched in a moral language that rephrased received ethical concepts in a new discourse of modernity.

Although this new intellectual problematique is not to be reduced to the problem of national consciousness, that problem was important in its formulation, in two ways. First, essential to the new problematic is the question of China’s place in the world and its relationship to the past, which found expression most concretely in problems created by the new national consciousness. Second, national consciousness raised questions about social relationships, ultimately at the level of the relationship between the individual and society, which were to provide the framework for, and in some ways also contained, the redefinition of even existential questions. For the universalistically oriented among Chinese intellectuals, consciousness of the nation created some discomfort, which was to serve as a source of existential problems as well as of an urge to transcend the limitations imposed by national consciousness. I will also argue that nationalism itself pointed to a new kind of universalism that pushed against the boundaries imposed by a national reorganization of society. In either case, this new consciousness provided the premise even of its own negation. This was true as well of the anarchists who took national consciousness as the greatest obstacle to the realization of the kind of society they advocated. Perhaps more important, the new discourse that emerged at the turn of the century coalesced around the problem of national consciousness, which, therefore, provided the conceptual conditions of the discourse, and delineated for those who were uncomfortable with the new national consciousness the ideological horizon they would have to transcend in order to overcome the limitations it established.

My concern is not with the alternative directions nationalism assumed in China from the very beginning, but rather with identifying the terms of the problematic it produced, which was to provide the discursive context within which consciously anarchist ideas first made their appearance in Chinese thought.

Nationalism and Revolution: Global Consciousness and the Reconceptualization of Political Space

To see Chinese nationalism only in its immediate political aspirations is to see only part of it and to ignore a new global consciousness that was its precondition and a new consciousness of political space that informed it. Nationalism as a political ideology may be most striking for its exclusionary parochialism, for the physical and ideological boundaries it seeks to establish to separate those within the nation from those without. In the face it presents to the outside, it may be no different than other forms of parochialism except in the scope of the territory it claims for itself. Nationalism, however, is also a revolutionary political ideology that is unmistakably modern in its premises concerning global organization, externally, and political space, internally. Internally, it presupposes a new conception of political space, which is reorganized to bring the state closer to the society over which it rules, for the nation-state claims legitimacy not in some external source but in its ability to represent the nation—which inexorably entitles those who constitute the nation to make claims upon the state, for they are no longer merely subjects but citizens. Externally, by its very logic if in spite of itself, nationalist consciousness extends the same entitlement to others, who are perceived no longer merely as aggregates of people but as other nations, and who are therefore entitled to their own claims upon their political fate, and a state of their own to realize that fate. As Liang Qichao wrote in 1901: Nationalism is the most promising, upright, and unbiased idea in the world. It does not allow other people to infringe my freedom, nor does it let me impose on other people.[51]

Imagined the national community may be, as Benedict Anderson has argued,[52] but it may be all the more revolutionary for being imaginary, for nationalist political ideology since its origins in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has called forth the reorganization of societies globally into nations. This in turn has provoked a revolutionary reconceptualization of political legitimacy and a reconstitution of political space internally to create nations. We need only to remember that over the last two centuries, even the most despotic states have excused their despotism by recourse to national interest, which those who have struggled against despotism have countered by asserting their rights as citizens—and alternative conceptions of national interest.

Such a change of consciousness accompanied the articulation of a nationalist political ideology in China at the turn of the century. If we perceive nationalism in terms of its global revolutionary premises rather than its parochial manifestations, it is not surprising that the first Chinese to raise the question of China’s reorganization as a nation were not the conservative defenders of the Confucian political order, who continued to insist that China was a world unto itself and that the Chinese world contained all the necessary institutions for a civilized world. They were those Chinese who, having discovered other societies with their own institutions, were willing to recognize alternative claims to civilization—and even that those claims were more suitable to the age than the claims of the Confucian political order, which had been designed for circumstances when China’s civilization had no competitors.[53] Once the rude shock of military defeat by European powers had been overcome, and Chinese intellectuals had acquired some familiarity with Europeans in China, especially through direct contact with European societies in the 1870s and 1880s, some at least were willing to recognize that the Europeans’ strength resided not just in superior weapons or military power but in their political and economic institutions. They may have been interested primarily in uncovering the secret of the wealth and power of Europeans, but what is important is that they were willing to recognize the institutions they discovered as the keys to wealth and power, not as the fortuitous products of barbaric societies, but as the very endowments of an alternative civilization with its own claims to history. What impressed them most about this civilization was its dynamism, which rested upon a close relationship between rulers and ruled—which accounted for the responsiveness of the rulers to the ruled and the willingness of the ruled to make common cause with their rulers.

The new consciousness of the globe lies at the origins of the emergence of a national consciousness in China with varied responses. For those committed to the existing order, nationalism took the form of strengthening existing institutions to ward off the challenge presented by these alternative models of civilization; this response implied the closing off of the new world in a parochial reaffirmation of the superiority or sufficiency of the ideological bases of Chinese civilization, which needed little from the outside world except those techniques that might contribute to strengthening native institutions.

The radical alternative came from those who felt uncomfortable with the parochialism of a politics that took the nation as its own end. This response took the form of projecting upon the new global situation a native idealism and utopianism that now took the nation as its point of departure, but perceived in the future the realization of universal ideals, which had formerly taken Chinese society as their locus but in the new consciousness became attributes of a society conceived globally. The inscribing of native ideals (predominantly Confucian and Buddhist in origins) upon the new global situation expressed a new cosmopolitanism that would ultimately rephrase those ideals in the language of a global political discourse.

In an immediate sense, this new cosmopolitanism had two implications: (1) bringing a new sense of space and time into the discourse on ideal society, and (2) incorporating into the procedures for achieving an ideal society lessons learned from the experiences of others, with the consequence that the emerging revolutionary discourse extended to the past its cosmopolitan vision of the future and drew upon the pasts of other societies as much as on China’s past in charting a future course. The recognition of alternative claims to civilization, as Joseph Levenson has argued, meant the inevitable shrinking of Confucian claims to possession of the civilization; Chinese civilization was only one among others, and not necessarily the one best suited to survival in the contemporary world.[54] Survival, indeed, demanded reconstitution of that civilization institutionally and ideologically, which meant remaking China from a universal empire into a nation. For that is what the new models of wealth and power implied: states that derived their legitimacy not from a higher power or an abstract morality but from their representation of their constituents, and people who for the same reason were committed to national goals.

The shrinking of the Chinese world, implicit in the recognition of the historical legitimacy of other civilizations, was accompanied by a sharp awareness that, if China was to survive and flourish under such novel circumstances, Chinese politics must be reorganized in accordance with the models provided by these civilizations. Nationalism as it emerged in China was intended to ward off the threat to China’s existence; but in its very premises it presupposed the recognition of the claims of that world, not that it would be closed off. And it was revolutionary because entry into the world called for the recognition of China as a political entity that was its own end rather than an institutional complex that expressed transcendental norms. Such recognition required a shift in the tasks of politics from preserving the purity of inherited institutions to preserving the territory and the people that constituted the nation—which could be accomplished only by bringing the people into politics.[55] Those who first spoke timidly of other civilizations in the 1880s were hounded out of office by their fellow Confucians; within years, a revolutionary movement was under way that called for a republican reorganization of China, to which Manchu rule was unacceptable because one nationality must not be subject to rule by another.

National consciousness was revolutionary at the turn of the century because it compelled Chinese intellectuals, in the words of Chang Hao, to do something they probably had not done since the axial age of the late Chou, namely, to reexamine the institutional foundation of the Chinese sociopolitical order.[56] Examination of the intellectual premises of the new national consciousness reveals that the revolution in Chinese political consciousness extended beyond the reexamination of the institutional foundation of the Chinese sociopolitical order, and implied a transformation in the spatial and temporal conditions of politics. In his Autobiography at Thirty, Liang Qichao, prominent reformer and intellectual clearing-house for his generation,[57] who would do more than any of his contemporaries to articulate the new conception of the nation, wrote:

I was born January 26 of the twelfth year of Tongzhi (1873), ten years after the Taiping Kingdom was defeated in Jinling (Nanjing), one year after the Qing scholar Zeng Guofan died, three years after the Franco-Prussian War, and the year that Italy became a nation in Rome. When I was a month old, my grandmother Li died.[58]

The statement is remarkable for the new sense of space and time that informs it. Unlike earlier authors, but like his contemporaries, Liang took as the reference for his autobiography not just events in China but worldwide events. This consciousness at the personal level was paralleled at the political level by an incipient awareness that China was no longer the world, but part of a larger world. The same awareness was reflected in the transformation of historical consciousness: that Chinese history, once taken to be the history of civilization, was little more than the history of one civilization among many, and, judging by contemporary results, it was not a history of success. It was urgent to relocate Chinese history in world history and to transform China accordingly, if Chinese society was to be guaranteed a future.

Historians long have noted the crisis in Chinese consciousness created by this realization, and the contradiction that it created for Chinese intellectuals: that in order to ward off the Euro-American powers that threatened the existence of Chinese society, China must adopt the ways of the very powers that threatened it. The repeated defeat of China at the hands of these powers confirmed for Chinese the predictions of the social Darwinian ideology that entered Chinese thinking at about the same time: that only those nations would survive that could adjust to the demands of the contemporary world. Hence the Chinese revolution appears from its origins in its defensive motivations: as a means to guarantee China’s survival in a world of competition and conflict. Chinese internationalism—the willingness to adopt Western ways—appears accordingly as part of this strategy of survival.

While the validity of this view is not to be denied, it is somewhat onesided. If Chinese nationalism did not mean merely closing out the world, but presupposed for its very emergence a new sense of time and space, it becomes possible to comprehend another phenomenon that accompanied the first stirrings of national consciousness: an internationalist utopianism. Charlotte Furth has noted the appearance of a pervasive utopianism in Chinese thinking at the turn of the century.[59] This utopianism, though expressed in a native vocabulary that owed much to Confucianism and Buddhism, was the counterpoint to the new national consciousness and expressed hopes in a new China, in Hsiao Kung-ch’uan’s felicitous words, in a new world.[60] The ideal of world unity, once encompassed within the claims to universality of Chinese civilization but no longer contained within the conception of a spatially and temporally limited Chinese nation, was now projected upon the new world of nations as a historical project in whose realization China was to be a participant. It may not be coincidental that Kang Youwei, the leader of the first serious reform movement in modern China in 1898, who in the name of national survival mounted the fatal challenge to the claim to universality of the Confucian imperial order, should also have authored a utopian treatise, The Book of Great Unity (Datong shu), which depicted the material and moral features of a future society that had once again transcended nationalism.[61] Kang’s society of Great Unity represented the final stage of human progress, following stages of familism and nationalism, in that order. The utopia drew its name and virtues from a native Chinese utopian tradition, but already its inspiration came from the future—a future, moreover, that transcended China’s own world and took as its scope the global society of which China had just become an integral part.

What is most significant here is that the very condition that necessitated the redefinition of China as a nation in a world of nations elicited as its dialectical counterpoint a new vision of a world in which nations would once again disappear and humankind would discover a world of unity. Others were to follow Kang. The urge to a new universalism was also expressed at about the turn of the century in a Buddhist revival, as well as in the universalization of Confucian values, which were alienated from their association with institutions particular to the Confucian sociopolitical order to become potential endowments of humanity as a whole.

Within the context of this utopianism that was its dialectical counterpoint, the emerging Chinese national consciousness appears not merely as a defensive parochialism, but as a step in an idealistic project whose ultimate goal was the transformation of humanity globally. China, moreover, must participate in this global project, not just as its object but as a subject that had much to contribute to its realization. The utopianism hinted at a discomfort with nationalism as an end in itself; and it was this discomfort that was revolutionary, for it looked beyond the achievement of national goals to a global transformation. Kang Youwei, whose reinterpretation of Confucianism was to establish the intellectual premises of nationalist ideology, nevertheless expressed in his utopia a profound discomfort with all institutions that divided people from one another, including nationalism, to which he traced the causes of human suffering. The discomfort was not his alone. Kang’s disciple Tan Sitong expressed it even more cogently in a statement that may well be taken as a prelude to the anarchist resolution of the problem:

The earth must be governed in such a way that there is only one world but no states. To enable everybody to enjoy freedom, people would not have to belong to any state. If there were no states, there would not be any boundaries, wars, suspicion, jealousy, power-struggles, distinction between the self and others, and equality would emerge. Even if the world exists, it would be as if there were no world at all. When rulers are all deposed, then there will be equality between the higher and lower; when universal principles are followed, then there will be equality between the rich and the poor. For thousands and thousands of miles, the entire world will be like one family, one man. Homes will be looked upon as guest houses, and people, as compatriots. There will be no need for fathers to apply their paternal love, and for sons to exercise their filial piety. Elder and younger brothers can forget about their friendly respect, and husbands and wives their mutual harmony. It would be like the man mentioned in a Western story book, who wakes up after dreaming for a hundred years, and finds that the atmosphere of One World is almost like that described in the chapter on the Evolution of Rites in the Book of Rites.[62]

Tan’s book was named after the central virtue of Confucianism, humaneness (ern), and he drew heavily on Buddhist ideals in describing his vision of the future. He also establishes an equality here between the ideal of great unity (datong) in the Book of Rites and what would appear to be a reference to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. He was one of the first martyrs of the Chinese revolution.[63]

This utopian dimension to Chinese nationalism suggests one reason why anarchism, for all its opposition to nationalism, found a receptive audience in China in the midst of a tide of nationalism. Another reason lies in the questions raised by the nationalist demand to bring state and society closer in the reorganization of Chinese politics. Here, too, the problem must be perceived in ways more complex than is allowed for in the interpretation of Chinese nationalism merely as a quest for wealth and power.

In practical terms, the most conspicuous aspect of the urge to remake China as a nation was to find ways to bring society close to the state so as to motivate the people to pursue national goals actively. Chinese thinkers at the turn of the century believed that through centuries of political rule that had denied popular political participation the people had become passive subjects who cared little for the fate of the nation as a whole. In advocating greater political participation, their immediate goal was not to make the state an instrument of social interests, or to foment conflict between state and society, but to unify the two into a whole, capable of acting as one. Liang Qichao, who enunciated this problem most clearly, conceived of the nation, in the words of Chang Hao, as a moral gemeinschaft, which in turn presupposed an organic conception of the relationship between state and society.[64]

Once again, while this view of initial nationalist aspirations (a continuing problem of Chinese politics) is valid, it is only part of a complex picture. The questions raised by nationalism also legitimized division in a political system that had hitherto refused to address as legitimate the question of social interest. Specifically, if nationalism presupposed a state that represented the interests of the nation, how was it to be determined that the state did indeed represent the nation’s interests? Even if the state could be made to represent the nation, how were those interests to be determined, since the nation itself was a composite of social relationships that articulated divergent, and conflicting, social interests? I suggest that the nationalist demand for the reorganization of political space in the first decade of the century, in giving rise to such questions, represented the emergence of politics in China by transforming a ritual conception of political order as the administration of society into a political conception where order was to be created out of the harmonizing of conflicting interests between state and society, as well as of divergent social interests. Liang Qichao’s was one solution among others, one that sought to resolve the predicament created by nationalism by asserting the priority of the nation conceived as an organic entity. In practice, however, the question of legitimacy raised by the new nationalist conception of China produced, almost immediately, social and political conflicts, which found expression in divergent conceptions of the nation. Given a situation where the ruling dynasty was ethnically different from the majority of the population, the legitimacy of the state came under attack first from those preoccupied with the fate of the nation, and quickly turned into a critique of despotism in general—in other words, an assertion of the rights of society against the state. It was accompanied almost immediately by conflicts over who was to be included in the new political arrangement and whose interests were to take priority in the definition of national interest. By 1905, against Liang Qichao’s pleas for organic national unity, the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmeng hui) under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen had already incorporated in its republican program a call for social revolution, to safeguard the interests of the majority against the minority of economic and political power holders. The following year, anarchists would propose their own version of social revolution, this time intended not as the basis for a new state but against the state and politics in general.

In raising the question of the relationship between state and society, the nationalist argument, contrary to its intentions, also raised the possibility of opposition between state and society. The state, now dependent for its legitimacy on its ability to represent the nation, could no longer identify the latter with its own will. The same argument legitimized the right of revolutionaries to speak against the state in ways that had been impossible so long as the Chinese order had refused to recognize society as an autonomous source of political legitimacy.

The problem of state and society appeared at the level of the individual as a problem of morality: public morality (gongde) versus private morality (side). The nationalist problematic was to give a new twist to this long-standing problem in Chinese political thought. The problem was how to reconcile a private morality (expressed in personal relationships and loyalties) with a public morality (expressed in obligations to a more abstract political order). Political orthodoxy in China, following the injunction in the canonical text The Great Learning, presented the relationship as a continuum: the perfection of private morality was a prerequisite to, and found its fulfillment in, the achievement of public morality. Politics did not always live up to its own ideological premises, however, and Confucian theorists were always acutely aware of the potential conflict between private and public, between particularistic loyalties and the universalistic obligations necessary to the sustenance of public order; thinkers of the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911), whose writings would deeply impress the first generation of Chinese nationalists, had been particularly explicit in their condemnation of rulers who gave priority to private over public interest and, therefore, undermined the political order.

Two aspects of this problem had appeared in Confucian thinking. First was its scope: while public obligation was incumbent upon everyone, it was truly significant only for those who carried the responsibility for public order—the ruler and those who participated in ruling functions. Second, while private interest might be tolerated to the extent that it was not inimical to the public order, ultimately it carried no legitimacy, and the web of particularistic relationships that constituted the individual were prized only to the extent that they prepared him for public responsibility in a patrimonial and patriarchal political order. It is not that the theory did not allow for individual conscience, for it did, but that the political order made no room for those whose conscience led them to radical dissent.

The nationalist problematic was to recast this problem. To put it bluntly, the reconstitution of China as a nation presupposed the reconstitution of the subjects of the Confucian order as citizens who were the ultimate source of political legitimacy and whose active participation in politics was essential to the creation of a new national order. The theoretical implications of this new assumption are obvious. Everyone, not just the ruler or the ruling class, was equally obliged under the circumstances to cultivate the public morality that was the essential condition of a cohesive national community. At the same time, however, the possibility of public morality was even more of a predicament for nationalist discourse than it had been for the Confucian, because of its recognition of, or demand for, the individual as citizen—as the autonomous source of public values. The question for nationalist discourse was not whether Chinese should be transformed from subjects into citizens, but how soon they could be expected to make the transformation. This is quite clear in Liang Qichao’s classic statement of the problem in 1902 in his On the New Citizen.[65] Liang, already fearful of the possibility of revolution and deeply committed to the national idea as a moral gemeinschaft, recognized the crucial importance of turning Chinese into autonomous citizens. He believed that because most of the people were ill-prepared to undertake the burden, a period of education in the new political system was required of them; while they were richly endowed with private morality, they were lacking in public morality, which in this case meant loyalty to the abstraction that was the nation, and had to learn to reconcile the conflicting demands of public and private obligations. Liang did not deny the autonomy of the citizen, or the legitimacy of private morality, but offered a strategy for reconciling them with the demands of the national community.

Others were to go further. While Liang sought to contain individual autonomy within his ideal of a national community, the very recognition of legitimacy to private space within a public realm also created the possibility of opposition between the two. Hence the subjection of individual to public interests and needs could appear as a perpetuation of the social and political oppression of the individual, which obstructed the creation not only of autonomous citizens but of a nation, and which could be resolved only by the lifting of political and social restrictions on the individual. In its positing of the individual as an autonomous source of national values, nationalist discourse opened the way to an opposition not only between the individual and politics but between the individual and society as well. The predicament appeared on the surface as primarily a political problem; as Chang Hao has argued, however, it was also felt by those involved as a deeply existential one. It also was revolutionary because the possibility of individual autonomy opened up the possibility of radical dissent as the legitimate prerogative of individuals.

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The adoption of Western ideas and institutions in order to ward off the West; the transformation or abandonment of native institutions and ideas in order to preserve a Chinese identity; a practical quest for national wealth and power, which results in a utopian repudiation of nationalism; demands for closer integration of state and society that open the way to the opposition of society to the state; the desire to create loyal citizens, which ends up with the affirmation of individual autonomy against both state and society—such were the contradictions embedded in the seemingly transparent and one-dimensional problematic of Chinese nationalism. In its origins the nationalist impulse was simple enough: to protect China’s integrity and to create a wealthy and powerful nation. How to create such a nation was another matter. From the moment of its articulation, the nationalist discourse revealed itself to be far more complex than the impulse that had given it birth; indeed, some of the alternatives it called forth promised to negate the very impulse that lay at its origins.

The contradictions were those of the overdetermined milieu from which Chinese nationalism sprang, which was no longer just Chinese, but a Chinese society in the process of transformation and incorporation into a broader world economically, politically, and culturally. Chinese thinkers had already begun to derive their political inspiration, and even political models, from Euro-American modernity, which not only dominated the present but seemed to hold the key to the future. At the same time, however, while Chinese nationalism as it appeared at the turn of the century set itself against the received Confucian tradition, the problems that occupied it, as well as the language in which it phrased those problems, derived from that same tradition. Nationalist discourse broke with the received political tradition, not by purging it from memory or language, but by recasting it in a new problematic, which added to the contradictions already implicit in its ambivalent relationship to its Euro-American inspiration. Central to the nationalist problematic was a new conception of China’s place in the world, which was to raise further questions concerning the basis of political legitimacy and organization, as well as the ethical obligations of the individuals who constituted the nation. While pre-nationalist traditions persisted into the new discourse, basically through the medium of a social and political language that kept alive older conceptions and associations, they were problematized, acquired new meanings, and were placed now in an intellectual context that not only opened the way to new questions that demanded new answers but also rephrased old questions so as to yield answers that had been foreclosed earlier. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, Chinese thinkers facing a novel situation in the confrontation with the West had been able to interiorize the problems presented by this situation within an inherited problematic, which, they believed, could contain these problems in the alternatives it offered. By the turn of the century, Chinese history had already been inscribed upon a history that transcended it, and the crucial question for Chinese thinkers was how to make China a sustainable component of a new world. The utopian strain in Chinese thinking, which accompanied the new national consciousness to the forefront of Chinese thought; the call for a revolutionary transformation of the political order, which grew directly out of demands to reconstitute the imperial order as a nation; and the radical culture that arose simultaneously with new conceptions of the ethical obligations of individuals as citizens—all were products of this question. The modern Chinese intellectual problematique, which appears with the nationalist reformulation of China’s place in the world, has been dynamized by successive reformulations of this same question as changes in internal and external circumstances have added to it new dimensions; but the problematic retains its vitality.

The reformulation of China’s place in the world within the nationalist discourse had one other important consequence: the incorporation into political discourse in China of other traditions external to Chinese history. I refer here, not merely to the influence on China of political discourses that had originated elsewhere, but to the discursive appropriation in Chinese politics of revolutionary traditions, which then appear as part of the process of political transformation in China. As I noted above in the case of Liang Qichao, already in the early twentieth century worldwide events appear as markers in a historical consciousness that is no longer bound in its conceptions of time and space by a specifically Chinese past. Liang’s autobiographical statement points to this new consciousness as personal and existential; and indeed as Chinese intellectuals confronted the world, either as students or as political exiles abroad, their experiences of the world opened up their consciousness to alternative ideas and values, which became part of their very intellectual and emotional constitution. The same was true on a broader political level. Nationalist discourse from the beginning called upon the experiences of others in making its case for political transformation and the political vision that informed arguments for political transformation. The English, American, French, and other revolutions were on the minds of Chinese nationalists, and the ideas that had brought about those revolutions, as well as the examples they provided, were to contribute significantly to the formation of a radical discourse in China. In later years, other examples would be added to these original ones. What is remarkable is not that Chinese radicals would continue to draw upon China’s past, but rather that the past now appeared as only part of a political discourse that was global in its inspiration and political formulations.

The two byproducts of the emerging national consciousness—a utopianism that sought to transcend the nation, and the establishment of the nation as the source of political legitimacy—produced an explosive mixture that quickly revolutionized Chinese society. In 1903, in a classic of the Chinese revolution, The Revolutionary Army, the young author, Zou Jong, combined the two in what may best be described as a utopianization of revolution itself: Ah, revolution, revolution! If you have it, you will survive; but if you don’t, you will die. Don’t retrogress; don’t be neutral; don’t hesitate; now is the time.[66]

A product of China’s plight at the turn of the century, nationalism was to produce an intellectual orientation that discovered in revolution the key to China’s survival—and the creation of a new world. It was in the context of this emerging radical culture that Chinese intellectuals first discovered anarchism. Though anarchism may have been inimical to the predominantly nationalistic orientation of Chinese politics, it owed its initial appeal in China to its resonance with themes that owed their origins to the new nationalist consciousness. For the same reason, the nationalist political discourse provided the language in which anarchism was phrased, especially in its initial phase.

Initial Reception of Anarchism

Anarchism was the first of the alternative currents in European socialism at the turn of the century to make a significant impact on Chinese radical thinking and behavior. Although a distinctively anarchist social revolutionary program was not enunciated until 19067, when with the founding of the groups in Paris and Tokyo some of the revolutionaries openly declared an anarchist identity to distinguish themselves from fellow revolutionaries, the burgeoning revolutionary movement after 1903 had already found in anarchism an outlook akin to its own and a vocabulary to express its radical concerns. There was considerable confusion concerning anarchism in these early years; Chinese had no direct access to anarchist works, and what they knew of anarchism was derived from Japanese discussions of European socialism or from translations in Japanese of general histories of socialism, which presented anarchism as an extremist (guoji) current in socialism (an extreme revolutionism), often confounding it with Russian nihilism or populism.[67] The very diffuseness in the understanding of anarchism, however, reveals the resonance of anarchist ideas with the radical orientation—as much in mood as in intellect—created by the new national consciousness.

In these earliest discussions, anarchism appears in three guises: first, as a critique of despotism, anarchism was conflated with Russian nihilism, since the struggle against despotism appeared to Chinese radicals to be the distinguishing feature of both anarchism and nihilism. Second, anarchism expressed a longing for a unified and cosmopolitan world in whose creation China would participate. Finally, anarchism appears as the expression of a mystical vision, a philosophical nihilism, as it were, that promised a cosmic unity by abolishing the very consciousness of sentient existence.

Discussions of anarchism in this early phase invariably juxtaposed it to despotism, more often than not focusing attention on Russia, where anarchism was more prevalent than elsewhere, it was believed, because of the unparalleled severity despotism had reached there. One author, in comparing Russia and China, observed: I have heard that despotism is a factory that manufactures the anarchists who promote the overthrow of despotism; the better equipped a factory is with machinery, the more it produces; the deeper the despotism, the more numerous are the anarchists it produces. China at the present, he continued, did not have as many anarchists as Russia because despotism there had not yet reached the depth it had in Russia. Against those who despaired of the increasing despotism of the Chinese government, he suggested with optimism that despotism sharpened the sensibilities of the people and was sure to create a greater number of anarchists.[68]

What most impressed this author, Ma Xulun, and some of his contemporaries was the anarchist pursuit of natural freedom (tianran ziyou). In primeval times, humankind had enjoyed a natural freedom, deriving all its needs from nature and enjoying peace and happiness. Ever since kings and governments had arisen, they had established politics and manufactured laws. Presently, religion, education, and all kinds of institutions that curtailed natural freedom had come into existence, humankind had been restricted within the confines of such institutions, and natural freedom had disappeared like tobacco burning out. Anarchists took as their general guideline the destruction of such institutions and returning humankind to this pristine state of natural freedom.[69]

According to Ma, while everyone spoke of civilization, what ruled the world was not universal principle (gongli) but force (shi). Among the chief manifestations of this was nationalism, which had reached the stage of imperialism. Anarchism sought to destroy this world of force; and while Russia did not appear as civilized as other countries, the flourishing of anarchism there promised that it would be pivotal in the struggle against force in the twentieth century:

The twentieth century has a new ideology (zhuyi); it is the anarchism of Russia. The anarchism of Russia guarantees that it will be pivotal to civilization in the twentieth century. Why? The aims of the anarchists are high, their understanding broad, their hopes are great; imperialism steps back and nationalism retreats before it.[70]

What the practical appeal of anarchism might be under China’s circumstances was enunciated in 1904 in an essay by Zhang Ji, entitled Anarchism and the Spirit of the Anarchists (Wuzhengfu zhuyi ji wuzhengfu dangzhi jingshen), which was also important for its brief history of anarchism in Europe. Zhang agreed with Ma in emphasizing the importance to the twentieth century of the anarchist pursuit of freedom:

People value self-government (zizhi) and are unwilling to be ruled by others; therefore, anarchism was born. The twentieth century is the battleground for anarchism.

Zhang was most impressed, however, by the anarchist affinity with terrorism (kongbudang):

Terrorists have declared openly: the end justifies the means. What this means is that whatever the means may be, if it helps achieve my goals, I may use it. If my means may bring security to the people of the nation, even if it entails killing, I may use it. The theory of the anarchists is similar to this; hence they advocate assassination.[71]

In defense of terrorism, Zhang cited Danton to the effect that violent measures are necessary to achieve the peace and security of the people. Most important about terrorism, however, was the spirit of daring it embodied, which (he quoted from Kropotkin) was more effective than thousands of periodicals and newspapers. A few people could, with such a spirit of daring, create an atmosphere of fear and awaken others to action. The spirit of daring derived its power to move others from the spirit of self-sacrifice it embodied: There is nothing more awesome than the spirit of sacrifice for humanity, which spreads with the speed of an infectious disease.[72]

Both essays were richer in content than these brief descriptions suggest; I have singled out these aspects because they dominated the two authors’ interpretations of anarchism, and because these were the aspects of anarchism that caught the imagination of early Chinese revolutionaries. Before I explain why this might have been so, I shall describe briefly the two alternative visions of anarchism that appeared at the time, the one offered in an interesting utopian fantasy by the later prominent intellectual leader and educator, Cai Yuanpei, the other tagged on to the end of Ma Xulun’s essay to provide a metaphysical context for his discussion of despotism. Though highly abstract, these alternative visions of anarchism offer some clues to the underlying mentality of Chinese radicals that rendered them receptive to the anarchist message, and also point to a connection between anarchism and pre-anarchist native utopianism that characterized the Chinese understanding of anarchism, at least initially.

There is nothing evidently anarchist about the utopian plea for cosmopolitanism that Cai Yuanpei wrote in 1904, The New Year’s Dream (Xinnian meng).[73] The word anarchism does not appear in the story, and there is little in Cai’s career then or later to suggest that he was an anarchist in any strict sense of the word. Yet he would associate with anarchists closely in later years, and in the twenties was one of the foremost promoters of educational ideals inspired by anarchism. Zhang Binglin, who was a close associate of Cai’s in the early revolutionary movement, testified on one occasion that Cai was an anarchist.[74] It is possible to suggest at least that, however abstractly, he shared some of the philosophical premises of anarchism and its vision of a cosmopolitan world. If his contemporaries did indeed view him as an anarchist, as Zhang’s statement suggests, his story would have appeared to them as of anarchist inspiration, whether or not he explicitly described it as anarchist. Most important, the content of the story provides a link between preanarchist native utopianism (some of its themes overlap with Kang Youwei’s utopia) and the explicitly anarchist utopias of the post-1907 period. There is sufficient reason to place it within the anarchist canon in China.[75]

The story begins with the words Congratulations! Congratulations! It’s the New Year, a new world has arrived. Truly joyful! Truly joyful! The words are spoken by the hero of the story to a friend. The occasion is New Year’s Day, 1904, which also signals the birth of a new world.

The hero is described merely as some Chinese (Zhongguo yiren). He had left home at the age of sixteen to travel in China and the world. By the time he was done with his travels (at the age of thirty), he had been to most countries in Europe and North America and learned all the major foreign languages. He had become a believer in cosmopolitanism (shijie zhuyi) and loved equality and freedom. He had also decided that the problems of the world, especially humankind’s continued subjection to nature, were due to its division into nations and families. In the civilized countries of Europe and North America, people expended half their energy on their families and half on their nations. In the less civilized Slavic and Chinese societies, they had families and no nation. To create a new society in China should not be difficult, if only the energies people presently expended on their families could be turned to the public cause. Once they had achieved this, then through the same process a world society could be created out of nations.[76]

The story is an account of the hero’s efforts to achieve this end. It proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, Chinese society is reorganized and China is genuinely unified into a nation. The hero in his wanderings in China comes upon a meeting of representatives from all parts of the country who are organized, not according to province, but according to location vis-à-vis the major rivers (e.g., east of the river, west of the river). He submits to the meeting a plan for reorganization, which is passed after much debate. Basic to the plan is the reorganization of the population according to age and professional groupings. Most interesting is the allocation of labor. When children reached the age of seven, they would begin their education, which would last till the age of twenty-four. Between the ages of twenty-four and forty-eight, everyone would engage in publicly valuable professional tasks of one kind or another. After forty- eight they would retire and engage in the education of youth. The plan even specified the allocation of the hours of the day: eight hours of work, eight hours of reading, talking, and other activities, and eight hours of sleep. To those who objected that such a plan would be unworkable because of people’s unwillingness to work, or that the curtailing of the pursuit of self-interest would be inimical to progress, the hero countered with an organic metaphor—that each would perform tasks in society as the five sensory organs and the four limbs did for the body—which quickly convinced everybody.[77]

With this reorganization, China would quickly become civilized and strong, revive the northeastern provinces (Manchuria), and retrieve the foreign concessions, and foreign powers would be made to realize that they should give up reliance on naked force (qiangquan) over universal principle (gongli). The country would develop rapidly, using the capital that Chinese had in abundance but were unwilling to invest under the present system (instead, they hid it). It would be built up politically from model villages (mofan cun) at the locality through a series of representative institutions all the way to the national level, so that the whole country would become as one (literally, of one heart, quanguo yixin).[78]

The hero then turns his attention to the international scene. He goes to Russia to participate in the activities of the people’s party (mindang), which quickly manages to acquire political power. China then allies with Russia and the United States (where people’s sovereignty was already strongly established) to convince other powers to abandon national aggression and create a new world government.

Cai describes the then existing society as follows:

Civilization had reached its highest point. Speaking of mores and customs, people no longer used names or surnames but were simply identified by number; there were no longer any designations of ruler or minister, and as the conduct of affairs had been rendered rational, none of the uncertainties of election or appointment; there were no longer any designations of father and son, the young were educated by the public, the old were taken care of, and the sick cured; there were no longer any designations of husband and wife; once men and women had agreed to become mates they would conclude it with a ceremony in a public park from where they would proceed to their assigned quarters, hence adultery would disappear.[79]

The congress to establish the new government is planned for New Year’s Day, 1904. It is at this point that the hero, now ninety years old, is awakened by the sound of bells, and in spite of his awareness of the darkness of the existing world (heiande shijie), utters the words Congratulations! Congratulations! It’s the New Year, a new world has arrived.[80]

In its historical premises, Cai’s fantasy was reminiscent of the idea of progress of Kang Youwei, who had earlier established as a universal principle the progression from the family through the nation to the world. In his prescriptions for China’s reorganization Cai anticipated the explicitly anarchist utopia that Liu Shipei would propose only three years later, and the themes he raised we encounter in later years in other utopias—and social experiments. Whether we are justified in describing it as anarchist, it provides us with a link to the cosmopolitan ideal that accompanied the emergence of Chinese nationalism and anarchism.

Ma Xulun provides us with a third, and the most intriguing, aspect of anarchism’s appeals in China in this early period: anarchism as a means to recovery of a natural state of affairs. Ma agreed with Cai that anarchism offered a means of unifying the globe and creating a world society, but he placed this goal within a cosmic vision of the unity of nature and humanity.

In Ma’s view, government (and other state institutions) had curtailed the natural freedoms enjoyed by humanity in its primeval condition. In the concluding section of his essay, he turned this to a critique of the Chinese political legacy, focusing on a distinction Confucian thought had drawn between humane government (renzheng) and tyranny (baozheng), associated respectively with the government of Confucian sages and the despotic government proposed by the Legalists and practiced by the likes of the First Emperor of Qin. He saw no significant difference between humane government and tyranny, between the sage-rulers and the despots:

I say that Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen and Wu [the sage rulers] are the ancestors of the First Emperor of Qin, emperor Wu of Han and Tai Zu of Ming. Had there been no Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen and Wu, there would have been no First Emperor, no emperor Wu of Han, no Tai Zu of Ming. Conversely, if the First Emperor, Wu of Han, Tai Zu of Ming had been born first, and Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen and Wu later, the world would have sung the praises of the former and cursed the latter. The terms humane government and tyranny persist out of habit, not because they are natural (xiguan er ran, fei ziran er ran). I wish to get rid of these terms—and restore nature. To restore its way, we must start with what the anarchists promote.[81]

The problem of politics, in other words, appeared to Ma as a problem of culture (i.e., habit), and the problem of culture resided in the very language of politics, which must be abolished if one was to discover what was natural to humanity.

Ma went even further. Anarchism to him ultimately represented a negation, as in the Chinese word wu, not just of government, as in wuzhengfu, but of the sentient world in general. In a phraseology reminiscent of the first lines of the Daoist classic Daode jing, he continued:

That which exists (you) is the beginning of all things; that which does not exist (wu) is the mother of existence. The nonexistent is born of nature, what exists ends up in nonexistence, hence nature. Nature cannot be described, cannot be pictured, cannot be named; if it can be described, it is not nature; if it can be pictured, it is not nature. To name nature the nature that cannot be named is to force a name on it. Can the minds of humanity be liberated from their predicament? Anarchism offers a precious raft to find the correct ford to cross the stream. I want to present it to humanity so that it can return to its mother.[82]

Whether the philosophical nihilism implicit in these lines, which owed much to the vocabulary of Daoism and Buddhism, had anything to do with the association of anarchism with the Russian nihilists (Xuwu dang, in Chinese) in practice is difficult to say. It does suggest a connection between anarchism and a basic premise of Chinese utopianism at the turn of the century that, because distinctions between people were the ultimate cause of suffering in the world, the abolition of all distinctions was key to the creation of a new world.[83] It was on those grounds that anarchism, in the interpretation of someone like Ma, was conjoined with the Buddhist ideals that enjoyed a revival at about the same time. The connection would persist into the early Republic.

Although the Chinese access to materials on anarchism may have been limited, there was enough in available writings to indicate that anarchism was not reducible to Russian nihilism. In the preface to his translation of Thomas Kirkup’s A History of Socialism, Ma Junwu wrote:

The French have the highest intellect of any people in the world. Saint-Simon’s disciples have spread socialism [i.e., communism] all over the world; its power increases daily. In the nineteenth century, in England Darwin and Spencer invented [sic] the principle of evolution. Out of these two theories arose a new ideology (zhuyi). This new ideology is called anarchism.[84]

Similarly, Zhang Ji’s discussion of anarchism traced it to the history of European socialism, whose origins he located in the French Revolution.[85] Chinese intellectuals were also already well aware that anarchism was not simply a critique of despotism (as with nihilism), but sought to abolish government and all the institutions connected with it; as Ma Xulun’s essay indicates, they were also cognizant of the antinationalist thrust of anarchism.[86] Above all, however, scattered throughout these discussions are references to anarchism as a philosophy of social transformation, one that sought to put an end to the inequality of rich and poor, noble and mean, young and old, and men and women; Zhang Ji’s discussion in particular emphasized the role anarchism played in Europe in the struggles of labor against capital.[87]

These fundamental aspects of anarchism would come to the fore when anarchism acquired an identity of its own after 1906. The reception of anarchism in this early period suggests, however, that what most impressed Chinese intellectuals initially were those aspects which anarchism seemed to share with Russian nihilism. In his study of the Russian influence on Chinese intellectuals at this time, Don Price has suggested that the identification of anarchism with nihilism went beyond what was justifiable in the sources available to Chinese intellectuals.[88] Young Chinese radicals who were attracted to anarchism in the years 1902–1907 read anarchism through nihilist political practice: the struggle against despotism whose most prominent feature was individual political action, especially assassination.

This reading of anarchism was possibly facilitated by the commonly held image of anarchism (in Europe itself) at the turn of the century as a source of terrorism. In Price’s words, nihilism and anarchism were linked in the public eye—by connotations of violence, a fanatical hostility to the existing order, and ruthless idealism.[89] After 1906 Chinese anarchists would draw a clear distinction between anarchism and other seemingly anarchist approaches to politics, and would also downplay (even renounce) the use of terrorism in favor of long-term strategies of social transformation. Though Chinese intellectuals were aware early on of the social dimension of anarchism, the awareness was at best marginal in their appreciation of anarchism, which they understood as an extreme revolutionism, the use of violent methods to overthrow despotism. The association with nihilism, furthermore, would persist in later years; in the 1920s the anarchist writer Bajin (Ba Jin) still would include the Russian nihilists within the heroic tradition of anarchism.[90]

The confounding of anarchism and nihilism among early Chinese revolutionaries was not fortuitous, nor may it be ascribed simply to the confusion created by the literature to which they had access. And it was not a simple matter of a superficial resemblance between anarchist and nihilist political tactics. Anarchism may not be reducible to nihilism; on the other hand, it shared with nihilism a conception of politics that was deeply moralistic, that allowed a perception of political action as the assertion of individual moral authenticity. Chinese radicals of the early part of the century, who made high moral purpose the measure of revolutionary authenticity, discovered in anarchism a kindred political philosophy, and in the nihilists the most striking models of its practice.

The radical movement that emerged in China in 1902–3 took as its main object the overthrow of the Manchu despotism, which, in its resistance to the inclusion of the people in politics in a common struggle against the forces that threatened the country, promised national extinction. As Mary Rankin and Don Price have demonstrated in their separate studies of this radicalism, although its origins lay in a sharp sense of national crisis, once it came into existence the movement acquired a life of its own in generating an opposition to despotism beyond immediate nationalistic considerations: despotism must be opposed, not only because Manchu despotism sapped the strength of the nation but, more important, because it was contrary to universal principle and confined the natural freedom to which humanity was entitled.[91] Chinese radicals identified with the Russian nihilists, not because of a commonality between China’s situation in the early twentieth century and the Russia of the 1860s, but because they shared the common goal, embedded in universal principle, of overthrowing despotism. If assassination appeared in either case to be the most effective weapon in the struggle against despotism, we must remember that in both cases political despotism was very real and permitted few alternatives of political expression.

Nevertheless, there were alternatives (as was exemplified by the reformist movement of the constitutional monarchists and by Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary movement); and the political condition of despotism does not explain the attraction to assassination among young radicals or their sense of kinship with the Russian nihilists. The radical movement also generated a morality of its own, to which self-sacrifice in the struggle against despotism represented the highest embodiment of revolutionary authenticity. The heroic daring necessary in risking one’s life in assassination attempts appears among this first generation of radicals to go hand in hand with a will to self-extinction apparent in the resort to suicide as a form of expression; the most celebrated example may be that of the woman revolutionary Qiu Jin who, following the assassination of a provincial governor in which she was implicated, refused to listen to those who urged her to flee, but stayed to be arrested and executed.[92] Wu Zhihui, who after 1907 would emerge as one of the most prominent of Chinese anarchists, in the early 1900s attempted suicide to protest against the government.[93] What assassination and suicide shared in common was what Zhang Ji in his essay described as the spirit of self-sacrifice.

Beyond offering one of the few options of effective political expression in an environment that did not allow for politics, assassination represented to Chinese radicals not merely a practical means of political action but, in the suicidal risks that it entailed, an affirmation of individual moral commitment and revolutionary authenticity; or, as Price has noted, proof of purity of motive in political activity: Since the revolutionary effort was one which imposed an obligation of self-sacrifice and which could not succeed without it, he [Ch’in Li-shan] felt it extremely important that revolutionaries eliminate the self-seeking considerations that produced timidity and dissension. Individual acts of political expression, even when their political futility was evident, served to affirm just such purity of motive. The heroic tradition in Chinese politics provided one model for this kind of behavior; the Japanese samurai on the eve of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 (the shishi, or men of will) provided another. This was also the source of the affinity Chinese radicals felt for the extreme revolutionism of Western revolutionaries, in particular in Russia where

hundreds of educated and privileged youth sacrificed their ease and status to propagandize the benighted peasantry and workingmen. And when this failed, there was the grim turn to violence—the blood-and-iron tactic of assassination but still in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Sofia Perovskaya almost epitomized the history and character of the revolutionary movement. She had gone to the people, suffering all the hardships of a village schoolteacher and then conspired in the plots which ultimately killed Alexander II. At her trial she was particularly impressive, demanding that she be shown no clemency on the grounds of her sex; and she mounted the scaffold as calmly as any of her comrades.[94]

This moralistic dedication to self-sacrifice in the cause of revolution deeply impressed Chinese revolutionaries, whose own approach to revolution made a suicidal resignation to self-extinction preferable to living to fight another day. Anarchism, with its own preoccupation with authenticity, resonated with their politics of authenticity at a deep moral level. This attitude toward revolution, which left its imprint on Chinese anarchism at its very origins, would persist in later years, after Chinese radicals acquired a more sophisticated grasp of anarchism as a social philosophy and came to view terrorism as only a marginal tool of an anarchist revolution. Paris anarchists in 1907 glorified the actions of Qiu Jin (and her associate, Xu Xilin) for their selflessness. They themselves continued to insist that they were not concerned with success or failure but with truth. One of their number, Chu Minyi, went so far on one occasion as to suggest that assassination was justified if only because it had a purifying effect on the revolutionary.[95] This may not be very surprising; the first generation of anarchists in China, including Wu Zhihui, Zhang Ji, and Shifu, were all graduates of the radical movement during the last decade of the Qing dynasty.

Ironically, this same spirit of self-sacrifice may provide a clue to understanding the association of anarchism with Buddhism. Disassociated from terror and violence, the spirit of self-sacrifice resonated with the Bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism. As we shall see, Buddhism provided an emotional space (as well as a literal one in the form of a Buddhist monastery) for the conversion to anarchism of the famous anarchist Shifu and his followers; and the Bodhisattva ideal was very much in their consciousness in their daily practices.[96] Buddhist monks were also visible among China’s first anarchists; others preferred adopted names with Buddhist connotations.

Anarchist Themes in the Early Revolutionary Movement

The sparse literature available to Chinese radicals in the early part of the century was sufficient to indicate that anarchism was an integral current in the socialist tradition in Europe and, as such, encompassed much more than the antidespotism struggles of the nihilists in Russia, with their conspiratorial style of political action. Anarchism included an essential social dimension; as Zhang Ji put it in his essay, anarchists trace all matters back to society.[97] This might have suggested, however abstractly, that the individualized mode of politics that characterized anarchist activity should be placed within the context of a broader social philosophy.

There is little evidence that an awareness of the broader social goals of anarchism had any significant immediate effect on revolutionary activity in this early phase. Rather, Chinese radicals read anarchism through the interpretation suggested by Russian nihilism. And where they associated it with broad goals, they perceived it through a moral utopianism, more often than not assimilating it to a native utopianism in which recognition of the new world situation of China was blended inperceptibly into a metaphysical cosmic vision. If the two readings of anarchism coincided, it was on the ground of a moralistic conception of politics that focused on the individual as the harbinger of new values. In Cai Yuanpei’s utopian fantasy, no less than in the activities of the bomb-throwing activists, it was the committed individual armed with a new vision who brought about political change.

This was consistent with the image of anarchism that prevailed at the turn of the centuryin the West no less than in China. It was an image in whose propagation governments played a crucial role in representing anarchists as dangerous extreme revolutionists. Yet it was not the only available image. Japanese radicals, from whom Chinese learned much of their radicalism at the time, already spoke of the social dimension of politics, and there were those in China who drew attention to the social problem in politics.

Ultimately, the social dimension in anarchism was irrelevant at this time because anarchism exerted the greatest appeal among radicals whose own conception of politics was highly moralistic and who rejected politics as the realm of selfishness against which they sought to establish their own public commitment in acts of selfless, or self-sacrificing, revolutionary endeavor. It is true that the impossibility of political action under the conditions of government despotism left them few choices. And at this time, society in a concrete sense was largely absent from politics, even from the politics of those who spoke of social change and social revolution. But there was an additional element in their case, a reaction to the emergence of politics that found its expression in the disassociation of the conception of the public from that of the political, and a tendency to view them as being antithetical to one another. The separation was one that would nourish anarchism over the years; for anarchism suggested that an authentically public existence could be achieved only outside of, and in opposition to, politics.

The new situation created by nationalist ideology provides the context for an understanding of the appeals of the politics of authenticity of anarchism to early Chinese revolutionaries. Not that nationalism fed anarchism, for it did not; but nationalism raised questions about politics, and about China’s place in the world, that made for a receptivity to anarchism. The utopianism that appeared as the counterpoint to nationalist parochialism provided fecund grounds for anarchist cosmopolitanism. Ma Xulun’s statement on the origin of anarchism also offers some support for James Pusey’s suggestion that an appeal of anarchism at this time was the argument it provided against the Darwinian notions of conflict underlying nationalist fears; this would become more evident after 1906 when Chinese anarchists became familiar with Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid against the survival of the fittest.[98]