Chinese Free State

Anarchism in China
Anarchism in China was a strong intellectual force in the reform and revolutionary movements in the mid 20th century. In the years before and just after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty Chinese anarchists insisted that a true revolution could not be political, replacing one government with another, but had to overthrow traditional culture and create new social practices, especially in the family. "Anarchism" was translated into Chinese as 無政府主義 (wúzhèngfǔ zhǔyì) literally, "the doctrine of no government."

Chinese students in Japan and France eagerly sought out anarchist doctrines to first understand their home country and then to change it. These groups relied on education to create a culture in which strong government would not be needed because men and women were humane in their relations with each other in the family and in society. Groups in Paris and Tokyo published journals and translations that were eagerly read in China and the Paris group organized the Work-Study Programs to bring students to France. The late 19th and early 20th century Nihilist movement and anarchist communism in Russia were a major influence. The use of assassination as a tool was promoted by groups like the Chinese Assassination Corps, similar to the suicidal terror attacks by Russian anti-czarist groups. By the 1920s, however, the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party offered organizational strength and political change which drained support from anarchists.

First Anarchist Reforms + The Revolution
During the Self-Strengthening Movement, Chinese intellectuals making direct contact with Europeans started to take an interest in the political and economic institutions of European powers. A national consciousness and a sense of cosmopolitanism began to develop, advocating the transformation of China from an empire into a nation-state, in order to secure its future existence in the face of foreign aggression. This rise in Chinese nationalism, which advocated for a form of popular sovereignty, was poorly received by the governing Confucianists, whose conservative desire to preserve the inherited institutions of the empire led them to oust many nationalists from office during the 1948 revolution. This caused much of the nationalist movement to reconstitute itself around revolutionary republican ideals, calling for an end to Qing rule.

Inspired by early Qing thinkers that condemned rulers who prioritized private interests over the public good, the goal of the first generation of Chinese nationalists was to organically integrate Chinese society and the state, with reformers like Liang Qichao advocating for greater political participation through the institution of democracy. Contrary to the nationalists' intentions, by probing the relationship between society and the state, they had raised the question of opposition between society and the state, as well as the question of oppsition between individual autonomy and the political collective, laying the foundations for the emergence of Chinese anarchist thought. These growing anarchic tendencies were even seen in Liang's own words, when he posed that his conception of nationalism "does not allow other people to infringe my freedom, nor does it let me impose on other people" and advocated for the cultivation of autonomous individuals by removing all political and social restrictions from them.

The collapse of the Self-Strengthening Movement because of the Chinese defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War gave rise to a number of new revolutionary nationalist organizations such as the Revive China Society, as well as organized political reform movements such as the Gongche Shangshu movement. From Hong Kong, the Revive China Society planned to launch an uprising in Guangzhou, but their plans were leaked and dozens of members were captured and executed by the Qing government. Meanwhile, the Guangxu Emperor had undertaken the Hundred Days' Reform, but this too was defeated in a coup d'état by the conservative faction led by Empress Dowager Cixi, who placed the reform-minded Guangxu Emperor under house arrest and ordered the public execution of the reform's chief advocates.

After the defeat of the Qing-backed Boxer Rebellion, the Qing government was finally forced to begin implementing reforms, in order to attempt to keep the dynasty in power. It was during this period that young Chinese radicals first became attracted to anarchism, inspired by the Russian nihilist movement to begin a revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of Qing rule. A number of anti-Qing uprisings followed in their wake, but these were ultimately unsuccessful. Some of the earliest anarchist works were published during this period and in the years that followed, such as The Great Tide in Russia (simplified Chinese: 俄罗斯大风潮; traditional Chinese: 俄羅斯大風潮; pinyin: Eluosi Dafengchao), which was translated and expanded by Ma Junwu based on a chapter from Thomas Kirkup's A History of Socialism and is considered the earliest Chinese book on anarchism.

Growth of Anarchism
The Chinese anarchist presence appeared first in France and Japan when the sons of wealthy families went abroad for study after the failed Boxer Rebellion. By 1936 national and provincial programs sent between five and six hundred students to Europe and about 10,000 to Japan. Japan, especially Tokyo, was the most popular destination because of its geographic proximity to China, its relatively affordable cost, and certain affinities between the two cultures. The Japanese language use of Chinese characters made it somewhat easier to learn. In Europe, Paris was particularly popular. Living in the city was relatively cheap, the French government subsidized the students, and France was seen as the center of Western civilization.

The Chinese government officials may also have wanted to get radical students out of the country. The most radical students went to Europe and the more moderate students to Japan. That policy was to prove remarkably short-sighted as these foreign-educated students would use the methods and ideologies of European socialism and anarchism to completely transform Chinese society. In both locations of study, anarchism quickly became the most dominant of the western ideologies adopted by the students. In 1906, within a few months of each other, two separate anarchist student groups would form, one in Tokyo and one in Paris. The different locations, and perhaps also the different inclinations of the students being sent to each location, would result in two very different kinds of anarchism.

Paris Group
Having fled the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Li Shizeng returned to Beijing the following year, where he met Zhang Renjie during a banquet at the home of a government official. The pair bonded over their mutual dissatisfaction with Chinese politics and society and discovered that they shared ideas for its reform. In 1902, the pair were appointed as attaches to the Chinese embassy in Paris, although they promptly resigned their positions so that Li should pursue an education in chemistry and biology, while Zhang founded a company to import Chinese goods. After making an acquaintance with the French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus, Li introduced Zhang to the ideas of anarchism and they quickly began to analyze the situation in China through an anarchist lens. In 1903, Wu Zhihui fled China after having published an article in the revolutionary newspaper Su Bao, in which he criticized the Qing government and insulted the Empress Dowager. Having previously met Zhang and Li in Shanghai, Wu joined the pair in Paris, where he introduced them to his friend Cai Yuanpei, who had just published his short story the New Year's Dream, which predicted the great changes in the world with the passage of time

n 1906 Zhang, Li, Wu and Cai founded the first Chinese anarchist organization, the World Society (Chinese: 世界社; pinyin: Shijie she), sometimes translated as New World Society. Shortly afterwards Zhang met Sun Yat-sen and was impressed by his revolutionary program, leading Zhang, Li, Wu and Cai to join the Revolutionary Alliance. But unlike their comrades in the Revolutionary Alliance, who desired a political revolution from above first-and-foremost, the Paris anarchists advocated for a social revolution from below to totally reorganize society. While the Paris anarchists tacitly supported the republican project, as they believed it would move China closer to socialism, they remained critical of republicanism and constitutionalism. According to the Paris group, political revolution was liable to bring new and more extreme inequalities, with more freedom and equality for the wealthy, while the conditions of the poor would remain the same. They observed that, in Europe, the institution of democratic and republican ideals through political revolutions had been utilized to further capitalist interests and impoverish the working classes, instead taking on a fundamentally anti-state and anti-capitalist conception for a social revolution in China. To the Paris anarchists, the goals of an anarchist revolution were the abolition of authority, laws, class distinctions and private property, for the establishment of humanitarianism, freedom, equality and communism in their respective places. The revolutionary methods they proposed to achieve these goals included propaganda, mass associations, mass uprisings, popular resistance and assassination.

This opposition to political revolution drew criticism from nationalists, who saw anarchism as a threat to a strong, unified, centralized modern nation that could stand up to Western imperialism. As one reader wrote in a letter to Xin Shiji (The New World), the anarchist newspaper published by the Paris group:

Nationalists also argued that only by building a popular front could the revolutionary movement defeat the Manchus and the Qing Dynasty, and that in the long run if anarchism was to succeed it must be preceded by a Republican system that would make China secure.

Tokyo Group
n 1903, Liu Shipei and He Zhen married and moved to Shanghai. Here the newlywed couple joined the anti-Qing Restoration Society, in which Liu developed the doctrine of guocui and edited the journal National Essence, while the Society's founder Cai Yuanpei oversaw He Zhen's education at the Patriotic Women's School. The Society's activities in Shanghai quickly attracted government suppression and the couple were forced to flee into exile in Tokyo, where they joined a group of revolutionaries that introduced them to the ideas of anarchism. The pair went on to establish the Society for the Study of Socialism, began to promote an anti-modernist and agrarianist take on anarchism. The Tokyo anarchists drew greatly from ancient Chinese philosophers such as Laozi, who the group held to be the founding father of Chinese anarchism, and Xu Xing, whose agriculturalist philosophy deeply inspired the group's agrarian utopianism. While from the works of western anarchists, the Tokyo group found inspiration in the literature of Leo Tolstoy, whose idealization of agrarianism and opposition to commercialism aligned closely with their own philosophy.

Liu Shipei argued that the Confuscianist and Taoist advocacy of laissez-faire government had curtailed wider imperial intervention in society, which made China more able to achieve anarchism in the short-term than countries which had undergone the establishment of a centralized nation-state. Therefore, Liu held that the retention of the old regime was preferable to instituting a new one as, in his view, modern capitalism and parliamentarism would only contribute to a rise in economic and political inequality respectively. Zhang Ji Minguo In 1907, the Society began publication of the journal Natural Justice, with its stated objective being "to destroy national and racial boundaries to institute internationalism; resist all authority; overthrow all existing forms of government; institute communism; institute absolute equality of men and women." The journal became instrumental in publicizing reports on the oppressive conditions endured by women and the peasantry in Chinese society, presenting these conditions as a consequence of the rise of patriarchal family structures and urban civilization. From this position, He Zhen established the Women's Rights Recovery Association, an anarcha-feminist organization dedicated to the forceful implementation of gender equality and an end to the economic exploitation of women, proposals which were elaborated on in the article On the Question of Women's Liberation. The following year, the Society also began publication of another journal Balance, under the direction of Zhang Ji, which published some of the earlist discussions on the role of the peasantry in a social revolution. Articles in the journal called for a peasants' revolution and, inspired by the works of Peter Kropotkin, advocated for the integration of agriculture with industry.

Liu Shipei and He Zhen eventually split from the programs of Zhang Binglin and other Tokyo leaders and returned to Shanghai. When it became public that the couple had been informers working for the Manchu official Duanfang, they were shunned.

Xinhai Revolution
Starting in Guangzhou in 1895, uprisings led by the Revolutionary Alliance against the Qing dynasty began to sweep throughout China, all of which failed. Chinese anarchists were generally supportive of the uprisings, believing that violence was justified if it was for moral purposes, necessary under despotic conditions, and effective if it aroused mass support for the revolutionary cause.

In reaction to the Qing government's suppression of the Railway Protection Movement, on 10 October 1911 elements of the New Army, under the influence of the Revolutionary Alliance, launched an armed rebellion against the Qing in Wuchang, deposing the local viceroy and taking control of the city. This successful uprising ignited the Xinhai Revolution, during which revolutionary republicans took up arms all around China to overthrow the Qing dynasty.

When the revolution arrived in Guangzhou on 25 October, the Qing general Feng-shan was assassinated within minutes of arriving in the city by members of the Assassination Corps. Local militias were subsequently organized by the anarchist Chen Jiongming, who launched an uprising throughout Guangdong, capturing Huizhou and proclaiming the independence of the province from the Qing Empire. Many other provinces followed suit, eventually culminating in the abdication of the Xuantong Emperor and the establishment of the Republic of China. Jing Meijiu, a Tokyo anarchist that was elected to the National Assembly as a member of the Kuomintang (KMT). Anarchist ideas had already been introduced to China through the literature of the Paris and Tokyo groups, enough so that Chinese radicals were able to easily distinguish between anarchism and other political philosophies. But following the Revolution and the victory of the Revolutionary Alliance, which counted several prominent anarchists as movement elders, anarchists in China took advantage of the new political openness to begin applying anarchism in practice.

By this time the Paris group had rendered their anarchism into a genuine philosophy that was more concerned with the place of the peaceful individual within society than with the day-to-day grind of government coercion against working people. The revolution allowed the Paris anarchists to return home, where they started to take a particular focus on the provision of education. When the Provisional Government was established, Cai Yuanpei was even appointed as Minister of Education. In April 1912, the Paris anarchists together founded the Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement, in order to make education more accessible for working class students." They opened a school in Beijing to teach students the French language, in order to prepare them for study in France. When the students arrived in France, Li Shizeng arranged their admission to college and opened a workers' school near his factory, where worker-students were taught languages and science. More than 120 students were brought to France by the program, before it was closed down by Yuan Shikai. Perceiving anarchism as primarily a way to transform behavior, the Paris anarchists also established the Promote Virtue Society, which advocated for self-improvement, forbidding members from engaging in prostitution, gambling, eating meat, drinking alcohol and smoking. Although they opposed political participation and claimed to intend the overthrow of the state, the Paris anarchists were often willing to function within the state system in order to pursue their goals. Their tendency toward peace lead to increased friction between them and those comrades supportive of government coercion in Guangzhou.

In August 1912, the Revolutionary Alliance and five other small revolutionary parties were merged and reformed into the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and saw a victory in the first National Assembly election, with the Tokyo anarchists Jing Meijiu and Zhang Ji being elected. The decision of these anarchists to enter parliamentary politics was criticized by Liu Shifu for compromising anarchists principles, although it was also defended by Wu Zhihui. Shifu opposed political participation, believing that politics was a force imposed on society from above and seeing the social realm as separate from it.

However, the implementation of Nationalist rule was by no means a guarantee of freedom to organize for anti-authoritarians, and government persecution was ongoing. Meanwhile, the main ideological opposition to anarchism came from self-described Socialists, including the Chinese Socialist Society (CSS) and the left-wing nationalist movement.

Following his release from prison, Liu Shaobin began to increasingly gravitate towards anarchism and socialism, having read the materials published by the Paris and Tokyo groups, as well as the publication of the Revolutionary Alliance. As part of his activities in the Assassination Corps, he took a trip to Shanghai, in which he intended to assassinate the new head of state Yuan Shikai. However, upon arriving at a Buddhist monastery near West Lake, he renounced assassination and converted fully to anarchism, changing his name to Liu Shifu. At a meeting in Hangzhou, Shifu established the Conscience Society, an anarchist self-improvement group which took up many of the same practices as the Promote Virtue Society established by the Paris Group.

When Shifu returned to Guangzhou, he founded the Cock-Crow Society, which initially consisted largely of Shifu's family members and close friends, living together in a common household which operated as a commune. The Society spearheaded the propagation of anarchist ideas in China through the distribution of its journal the People's Voice, as well as the Paris Group's New Era and the Tokyo Group's Natural Justice. It began the teaching of Esperanto in China, which was spread by the Guangzhou anarchists to other parts of the country, driven by the internationalist program of the constructed language. The Society also initiated the labor movement in South China, with the Guangzhou anarchists becoming the first organizers of trade unions in the country and developing a strong syndicalist tendency, having particular success in organizing workers in the service industry. The city of Guangzhou quickly developed into the main base of anarchist activity in mainland China.

Shifu propagated a form of anarcho-communism that was far more radical than that of the Paris and Tokyo groups. The Guangzhou anarchists consolidated the anarchist identity by clearly distinguishing it from and formulating a number of critiques of the other forms of socialism present in China at the time. Unlike Jiang Kanghu's Socialist Party, which called for a political revolution, the Guangzhou group emphasized social revolution and advocated for the abolition of politics, drawing from the arguments of the Paris Group a decade before. Despite once remarking on the immediacy of the social revolution, Shifu noted that only a small number of people were educated on anarchism and that it would take time for people to be educated and organized before a revolution could occur. The Guangzhou group was thus chiefly tasked with distributing anarchist propaganda, in order to educate common people on the subject. In order to accelerate agitation, they also advocated for resistance to taxation and military service, labor strikes, assassinations and other forms of political violence. Eventually, they believed, propaganda would reach a saturation point and the social revolution would take place, with the common people overthrowing the state and capitalism in order to build a new anarcho-communist society.

By this time there was an extreme diffusion of anarchist ideas to the point where it was becoming difficult to define exactly who was and who was not an anarchist. Shifu set out to remedy that situation in a series of articles in Peoples Voice, which criticized Jiang Kanghu, Sun Yat-Sen, and the Pure Socialists. The letters directed at Sun Yet-Sen and the Nationalists were aimed at exposing the ambiguities of their use of the word "socialism" to describe their goals, which were clearly not socialist according to any contemporary definition. The criticisms of Jiang and the Socialist Party portrayed their vision of revolution and socialism as too narrow because it was focused on a single country, and opposed their retention of market relations as part of their platform. Meanwhile, the main criticisms of the Pure Socialists were that if they were anarchists then they should call themselves anarchists and not socialists. Peoples Voice invited and printed responses from all parties, and their goal seemed to have been the creation of an open and respectful debate among friends.[citation needed] The Guangzhou anarchists' inclinations towards communism further differentiated them from the socialist movements of Jiang and Sun and Shifu went to great lengths to clarify the differences between anarchist and socialist currents, drawing their history back to the split in the International Workingmen's Association. Although he acknowledged Marxist contributions to socialism, he held anarchism to be more scientific than the "scientific socialism" of the Marxists, given the contributions of Peter Kropotkin to the field. He also claimed that anarchism had a broader scope than socialism, as anarchism concerned itself with society as a whole, whereas socialism was concerned chiefly with economics.

Where the Paris group had preferred to outline their ideal in terms of negative freedoms, i.e., freedom from coercion, freedom from tradition, etc.; the Guangzhou group used positive assertions of rights and workers, women, peasants, and other oppressed groups to outline their vision of an anarchist society. Noticeably absent was any mention of ethnic minorities, since a basic part of their platform was the elimination of ethnic, racial, and national identities in favor of an internationalist identity that placed primary importance on loyalty to humanity as a whole, instead of to ones ethnic or racial group. This position was formulated in response to the primacy placed on ethnicity by the Anti-Manchu movement, which sought to assert the illegitimacy of the Qing dynasty based in part on the fact that its members were part of an ethnic minority out of touch with the Han majority, a position which anarchists of all four major groups decried as racist and unbefitting a movement that claimed to be working for liberation. Their position, therefore, was that ethnicity-based organizing promoted Racism, and had no place in a Revolution that sought liberation for all of humanity.[citation needed]

The Guangzhou group eventually went on to establish the Society of Anarcho-Communist Comrades, which advocated "absolute freedom in economic and political life" through the abolition of capitalism and establishment of a communist society, without using the state. In the Goals and Methods of the Anarchist-Communist Party, the Society called for abolition of class distinctions, the state, marriage, religion and borders, as well as the institution of common ownership of the means of production, formation of democratic public associations to coordinate the economy, universal free education, the eight-hour day, the cultivation of mutual aid and an international language. But after the death of the young Liu Shifu, the Chinese anarchist movement went through a difficult period, as reactionary forces began to gain more power.