Academic literature on the topic 'Chinese anarchists'

SUMMARYUntil the late 1920s, anarchism was still a significant presence in Chinese radical thinking and activity, and till the middle of the decade, gave serious competition to the Communists. The essay discusses the nature of the anarchist movement in China, anarchist criticism of Bolshevik Marxism, and anarchist revolutionary strategy and activity during 1921–1927. It argues that while anarchists were quite innovative with regard to revolutionary strategy, their repudiation of organized power deprived them of the ability to coordinate revolutionary activity on a national scale, and what success they achieved remained local and short-lived. Indeed, the Communists were able to make better use of anarchist tactics than were the anarchists themselves. Anarchist critique of power rested on a denial of a center to society (and history). While this undercut the anarchists' ability to organize the revolutionary movement, it is also revealing of a basic problem of socialist revolution: the problem of democracy. In ignoring the anarchist critique of power, the successful revolutionaries deprived themselves of a critical perspective on the problem of socialist revolution, and were left at the mercy of the new structures of power that they brought into existence. Hence the importance of recalling anarchism.

In 1908, the first and second chapters of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid were first translated into Chinese by Li Shizeng, greatly influencing Chinese anarchists. Li Shizeng followed Kropotkin’s scientific argument of anarchism and strengthened the viewpoint for praising “public” and suppressing “private”. When translating Kropotkin’s thoughts, Li Shizeng focused on political revolution, glossing over the criticism of the capitalist economy, and barely referenced Kropotkin’s original anarchist communist ideology.

Communism as an ideology was first introduced to Malaya by Chinese anarchists, and not by Kuomintang Left, Indonesian communists or Chinese communists as claimed in existing scholarship.1 A handful of Chinese anarchists arrived in British Malaya during the First World War to take up positions as Chinese vernacular school teachers or journalists. These Chinese intellectuals harboured not only anarchism but also communism, commonly known then as anarcho-communism.

This essay discusses the experience of anarchism among young Chinese intellectuals based in Japan between 1907-1908. The rise of an anarchist ideal among Chinese intellectuals was firstly related to their acquaintance with Japanese radicals. In 1907 division among the Tongmenghui leadership and the conversion of Japanese intellectuals to anarchism made Chinese students and intellectuals based in Tokyo more susceptible to radical political doctrines. Anarchism emerged as a new trend out of this political turmoil. Liu Shipei, He Zhen and Zhang Ji were the central figures of the Tokyo Group and the main supporters of the anarchist propaganda in Japan. Through the acquaintance with the Kinyōkai 金矅会 (Friday Group), the radical socialist faction led by Kōtoku Shūsui, they were able to bring together the Chinese overseas communities in Japan, who were dissatisfied with the principle of Tongmenghui and its leadership. The close relations with Kōtoku and Japanese socialists, the affiliation with the Tongmenghui and the quarrels within the same Alliance concerning Sun’s leadership, the establishment of societies among Chinese students in Japan and the publication of a journal, all consent to define the contours of anarchist activities in Japan between the years 1907-1908. My goal in the following pages is to highlight the Japanese route of Chinese anarchism outlining anarchist thinking and propaganda as delineated in the pages of their official organ, the Tianyi bao (Journal of Natural Justice). Overall, I will try to answer these three questions. First, how did Chinese traditional thought become a means to sustain utopian egalitarianism? Second, how did Kōtoku Shūsui and Japanese anarchists influence the rise of an anarchist ideal among Chinese intellectuals based in Japan? And third, how did the Tianyi bao promote a racial, social and political revolution in order to create an ideal society?

This translation introduces the life trajectory of Huang Wenshan—a first-generation Chinese anthropologist who received education from Columbia University in the 1920s—and his reflections on the anarchist wing within Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang. Drawing on Huang’s semibiographical writing, published in 1983, about this anarchist network, the translated text centers on the event of the death of Wu Zhihui—another famed anarchist intellectual—which had evoked much discussion and correspondence among intellectuals in the circle. The text particularly shows Huang and his fellow anarchists’ struggle to redeem a sense of cosmopolitanism while their lives are engulfed by the turmoil of international and civil wars. Against the backdrop of war, the translation further contextualizes Huang’s historical shift from anarchist politics to his focus on developing a unique theory of “culturology” since the outbreak of the Mukden Incident in 1931. This theory considers “culture” as central to constructing a new kind of cosmopolitanism, with which a commensurability can be achieved for all nations. Given the invaluable personal letters exchanged among the anarchists, annotated by Huang, this translated text provides insights into the “culture turn” among many Chinese anarchists in the wake of the Sino-Japanese Wars.

This article discusses the various shapes, inner structures and roles given to transformative and liberative practices in the work of US Buddhist anarchist authors (1960-2010). Unlike their Chinese and Japanese predecessors, who focused more on discursive parallelisms between Buddhism and anarchism or on historical instances of antiauthoritarianism within the Buddhist tradition(s), US Buddhist anarchists seem to favour practice and experience. This emphasis, characteristic of the way Buddhism has been introduced to the West,sometimes masks the way meditative techniques were used in traditional Buddhist contexts as oppressive technologies of the self. Whereas the emphasis on the inherently revolutionary nature of Buddhist practice represents a radical departure from the way those practices have been conceptualised throughout Buddhist history, it also involves the danger of considering Buddhist practice as an ahistorical sine qua non for social transformation. This is due to the fact that most early Buddhist anarchist writers based their ideas on a highly idealised, Orientalist imagination of Zen Buddhism(s). However, recent contributions based on other traditions have offered a more nuanced, albeit still developing picture. By assessing a number of instances from different US Buddhist anarchist writers, the article traces the brief history of the idea that meditation is revolutionary praxis, while also deconstructing and complicating it through historical and textual analysis.

Anarchists publishing in small student journals in the years before the 1911 Revolution made a significant contribution to Chinese feminism. They linked feminism to their call for a complete social revolution; they understood the oppression of women in China to be linked to modern class divisions and economic exploitation as well as traditional culture. They discussed the relationships among feminism, individual rights, and political liberties. He Zhen in particular severed feminism from nationalism, proclaiming “women's liberation” not “for the sake of the nation” but out of moral necessity.

Esperanto in China and among the Chinese diaspora was for long periods closely linked with anarchism. This article looks at the history of the Chinese Esperanto movement after the repatriation of anarchism to China in the 1910s. It examines Esperanto’s political connections in the Chinese setting and the arguments used by its supporters to promote the language. In exploring the role played by Esperanto in interwar Chinese culture and politics, it helps to throw light on the complex relationship between language and politics in China in the first half of the twentieth century.

The scan of the thesis has ommitted page 1.
From the early 1900s to the late 1930s, anarchists in Japan and China formulated revolutionary social changes to the family, including issues of love, marriage and child-rearing and sexuality. A proposed "family revolution" in the late Qing period has often been quoted as representing the social impact of Chinese anarchists, but anarchist debate over fundamental family issues in both Japan and China continued into the 1930s, ranging over wider aspects, and reflecting a variety of radical approaches...

博士
國立臺灣大學
政治學研究所
99
It is known to the academic world that anarchism was widely in fashion in modern China, and literature review provides an outline of the history of Chinese anarchism. Nevertheless, only scanty researches are from the viewpoint of the intellectual structure. This study aims to fill the vacancy. Intellectual structure in this thesis refers to a theoretical basis to answer the question of how anarchism would be realized, and how anarchist discusses the core values that construct anarchism. The analytical method of this thesis is classified into the field of political thought, and would indicate distinguishing characteristics of Chinese anarchism though a comparison of the side effects of western anarchism and the vertical effects of Chinese traditional thought upon the intellectual structure and values of Chinese anarchism. For this reason, this thesis does not arrange chapters upon timelines or thinkers, but places emphasis on concepts and theoretical issues. First, chapters 1 and 2 analyze the concepts of freedom (Ziyou) and equality (Pingdeng) that construct the core values of anarchism, but contain complicated meanings, allowing us to analyze and understand how Chinese anarchist grasped the concepts through thought and a sense of values. Chapter 2 indicates that Chinese anarchism possessed two types of concepts of freedom. One was absolute freedom, which required realization through attaining a state of self-disappearing, while the other was a manner of free organization, which was introduced from theories of western anarchism. On one hand, when modern Chinese intelligentsia searched for the substance of freedom, they tended to focus on absolute freedom in the ideal state under the influence of traditional thoughts, which was accomplished through selflessness (Wuwo). On the other hand, an intense topic at the time was to discuss whether, or not, freedom disturbed social relations, and some Chinese anarchists attempted to determine the answer from the viewpoint of free organization and free contract, using the western anarchism theory. Chapter 3 inquires into the concept of equality by analyzing a series of essays about equality, by Liu Shipei, who also suggested two types of the equality concept, namely, equality beyond differences and the egalitarian equality (Junping). Although there are differences between them, the starting point of discussion was to show how to overcome selfishness, and this manner of thought was under the influence of traditional debate regarding private and public (Gongsi). Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, address ethical and labor problems in order to investigate the theoretical bases that construct anarchism. Chapter 4 concentrates attention on the politically important issue of ethical order for analyzing how Chinese anarchists plan to maintain ethical order in an ideal future society. This thesis infers that, the ethical order that Chinese anarchists imagined inevitably relied on inner morals, in spite of the fact that they intensely criticized outer normative morals. The La novaj tempoj (Xinshiji) group asserted the moral development theory which might be called “knowledge moralism”. Meanwhile, Zhu qianzhi represented an idealistic mono ethical order, which merged ethical presuppositions of diversity. Chapter 5 deals with the economic problem of the kind of role that labor would assume, and whether people would work positively in an ideal future society. This chapter examines whether Chinese anarchism expressed the view of supposed “holy work (Laodong Shensheng)” through analysis of the discourse of labor. We would find that they did not regard physical labor as a method of self-actualization and possessed no concept of holy work. Their slogan of “holy worker (Laogong Shensheng)” placed emphasis only on criticism of the exploitation of social relationships. For Chinese intelligentsia, the only path to self-actualization was “study (Xue)”; therefore they espoused the ideal of a combination of physical labor with brain work. Chapter 6 aims to clarify the reasons why Chinese anarchism and Esperanto were bound together in China, as seen from the viewpoint of intellectual structure. Ultimately, we found three key factors out of these complicated relationships. First, the characteristics of Chinese characters made Chinese intelligentsia sensitive to language problems. Second, regarding the anarchism principle, the traditional method of attachment to the people (Minben) must be converted into the democratic method, which emphasizes autonomy of the people, and language was the key factor for people to acquire autonomy in China. Third, both the cosmopolitan ideal of Chinese anarchism and the inner ideal of Esperanto have an image of unity in uniformity as a global blueprint, which was the same view of the world, making it easy to combine them. We can find through the above inquiries that, although Chinese anarchists criticized tradition and announced their ideal society of the future, their intellectual structure remained decisively under the influence of tradition, which formed the distinctive features of Chinese anarchism that differed from those of western anarchism. Furthermore, this thesis points out that, Chinese anarchism lacked systematic political theory, thus, Chinese anarchists could not successfully answer the question of how anarchism would be realized, and this point became a fatal defect of Chinese anarchism.