Anarchism and Nationalism - China

China

Anarchists formed the first labor unions and the first large-scale Peasant organizations in China. During the roughly two decades when anarchism was the dominant radical ideology in China (roughly 1900-1924), Anarchists there were active in mass movements of all kinds, including the nationalist movement.

A small group of Anarchists - mostly those associated with the early 'Paris Group', a grouping of Chinese Expatriates based in France - were deeply involved in the nationalist movement and many served as "movement elders" in the KMT right up until the defeat of the nationalists by the Maoists. A minority of Chinese Anarchists associated with the Paris Group also helped funnel large sums of money to Sun Yat-sen to help finance the Nationalist revolution of 1911.

After the 1911 Nationalist revolution, Anarchist involvement with the Kuomintang was relatively minor, not only because the majority of Anarchists opposed nationalism on principle but because the KMT government was more than willing to level repression against anarchist organizations whenever and wherever they challenged state power. Still, a few prominent anarchists, notably Jing Meijiu and Zhang Ji (both affiliated with the Tokyo Group) were elected to positions within the KMT government and continued to call themselves Anarchists while doing so. The response from the larger anarchist movement was decidedly mixed. They were roundly denounced by the Guangzhou group; but other groupings that favored an 'evolutionary' approach to social change instead of immediate Revolution, such as the 'Pure Socialists', were more sympathetic.

The "Diligent Work and Frugal Study" program in France, a series of businesses and educational programs organized along anarchist lines that allowed Chinese students from working-class backgrounds to come to France and receive a European education that had previously been only available to a tiny wealthy elite, was one product of this collaboration of the anarchists with nationalists. The program received funding from both the Chinese and French governments as well as raising its own independent funds through a series of worker-owned anarchist businesses, including a Tofu factory that catered to the needs of Chinese migrant workers in France. The program allowed poor and working-class Chinese students to receive a high-quality modern university education in France at a time when foreign education was almost exclusively limited to the children of wealthy elites, and educated thousands of Chinese workers and students - including many future communist leaders such as Deng Xiaoping.

Following the success of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution anarchism went into decline in the Chinese labour movement. In 1924 the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) allied itself with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). Originally composed of many former anarchists, it soon attracted a mass base, becoming increasingly critical of anarchism. When the Kuomintang purged the CPC from its ranks in 1927, the small group of anarchists who had long participated in the KMT urged their younger comrades to join the movement and utilize it in the same way that the Stalinists had been using it - as a vehicle to gain membership and influence.

Partly because of the growing power of the right-wing within the KMT and the repression of workers movements advocated by that right wing, the Anarchists opted not to join the KMT en masse or even work within it, instead, the result of this last collaboration was the creation of China's first Labor University. The Labor University was intended to be a domestic version of the Paris groups Diligent Work and Frugal Study educational program and sought to create a new generation of Labor Intellectuals who would finally overcome the gap between "those who work with their hands” and “those who work with their minds." The goal was to train working-class people with the skills they needed to self-organize and set up their own independent organizations and worker-owned businesses, which would form the seed of a new anarchist society within the shell of the old in a Dual Power-based evolutionary strategy reminiscent of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

The university would only function for a very few years before the Nationalist government decided that the project was too subversive to allow it too continue and pulled funding. When the KMT initiated a second wave of repression against the few remaining mass movements, anarchists left the organization en masse and were forced underground as hostilities between the KMT and CPC – both of whom were hostile towards anti-authoritarians – escalated.