From Private Library and Bookstore to Communist Party: Yun Daiying's Social Engagement and Political Transformation, 1917–19211

Abstract

The early Chinese Marxist, communist leader and martyr, Yun Daiying was an avid reader and collector of books. His intellectual and political endeavors started with reading and collecting various books and magazines on current affairs and social sciences from home and abroad. Yun Daiying founded his own private library in 1917 and expanded it into a public library while he was a student of Wuchang National Normal University. Later Yun established a reading club christened the “Mutual Aid Society” under the disparate influences of Kropotkin, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, and the YMCA. Yun's founding of the Beneficent Group Bookstore in 1920 epitomized his ideal of combining reading and the book trade with the dissemination of new knowledge and the reconstruction of society from the bottom up. Yun kept his distance from the other Comintern-influenced Wuhan Marxists, and it was rather upon the organizational foundation of the Beneficent Group Bookstore that Yun Daiying co-founded a more radical “Co-Existence Society”, whose members were eventually converted to communism in 1921.