Socialism and Anarchism in Early Republican China

Abstract

Socialism has been a visible issue in Chinese ideological conflicts continuously since 1905, when socialist policies were first incorporated into the political agenda of the Revolutionary Alliance. In the early years of the Republic, the issue was kept alive by the efforts of two remarkable men, Jiang Kanghu (18831945) and Liu Sifu (1884-1915), the one a socialist, the other an anarchist. They and the groups they led were marginal in contemporary politics. But the ideas they advocated seemed dangerous enough to the authorities to warrant official persecution. Their writings and activities contributed significantly to the propagation of socialism after 1919, when socialism came into its own in China. This article seeks to elucidate differences in the socialist and anarchist conceptions of revolution in the early Republic. These differences provoked the first polemics among Chinese socialists