Anarchism in China - Anarchism As Popular Movement

Anarchism As Popular Movement

By 1914 anarchism had become a genuine popular movement in China as increasing numbers of people from peasants and factory workers to intellectuals and students became disillusioned with the Nationalist government and its inability to realize the peace and prosperity it had promised.

A major liability that the movement had picked up along the way, however, was the extreme diffusion of anarchist idea to the point where it was becoming difficult to define exactly who was and who was not an anarchist. Liu Shifu set out to remedy that situation in a series of articles in Peoples Voice, which attacked Jiang Kanghu, Sun Yet-Sen, and the Pure Socialists.

The debates that ensued served for the first time to really crystallize what exactly was meant by anarchism in the broad sense. These articles were generally friendly in tone. The goal was to clearly differentiate between the different schools of thought that were available at that time. 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 attacks on Jiang and the CSS sought to portray their vision of revolution and socialism as too narrow because it was focused on a single country, and to oppose their retention of market relations as part of their platform. The attack on the Pure Socialists was by far the mildest, with the main criticism being 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 seems to have been the creation of an open and respectful debate among friends.

For the next five years the movement would grow slowly but steadily as each of the disparate groups continued their propaganda, education, and organizing projects. In 1915 the anarchist arguments for a Social Revolution that had originated a decade earlier with the original Paris group would find broader acceptance in the New Culture Movement which was pioneered by a small group of intellectuals in Beijing but spread to the rest of the county over the next four years, until it merged into the May Fourth movement.

The New Culture Movement was not anarchist, but in its glorification of science and extreme disdain for Confucianism and traditional culture it extended critiques that had originated with the Paris group, and the proliferation of anarchist thought during this period can be seen as a confirmation of the influence anarchists had on the movement from its foundation on. The participants saw it as a conscious attempt to create a Chinese renaissance, and consciously sought to create and live the new culture that they espoused.